"Your sensitive genetic information would be safe." It won't be safe for long with databases like these around.
It's simply naïve to hope that all those in political power will follow a course of action other than acting to get more power and more control. Most people will follow the rules and take sincere interest in their fellow man, but the few who don't are those you have ward against.
Imagine the next argument about how much better the government could make life for people if "Your sensitive genetic information" were also collected. This data would help medicine a lot. As we move toward more genetic basis for defining diseases, and defining the interaction of drugs within different people based on their genetics, there is a very strong argument that scientists could make health care better with broad access to the exact genetic information of all patients. Genetics coupled with disease phenotypes, frequencies, and drug interactions with quantitative metrics of effectiveness leads to revolutionary breakthroughs in drug development.
But to get this data would eliminate all aspects of personal privacy regarding your health.
If you believe in property at any level, your own body is unequivocally the one thing you own without exception. Unless there are overriding and unequivocal public health reasons to give someone else control over your body, the only answer is simply "No."
Medical treatments have risks. As a culture, we want everyone to be vaccinated to prevent communicable diseases.
More explanation from the article:
The families sought payment under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system that has a $2.5 billion fund built up from a 75-cent-per-dose tax on vaccines.... More than 5,300 cases were filed by parents who believed vaccines may have caused autism in their children. The no-fault payout system is meant to protect vaccine makers from costly lawsuits that drove many out of the vaccine-making business.
In my opinion, for any family that loses a loved one or experiences significant morbidity from a vaccine, money is a reasonable social method of reimbursement for them.
The use of vaccines is a public health necessity; vaccines are by far the most cost effective tool we have for preventing the spread of communicable diseases.
There have always been controversies about vaccines: there is non-zero risk to individuals from any medical treatment, and significant benefit to the population as a whole. As a single individual, you remove the (very small) risk by not having the vaccine, and you gain most all of the benefits if most everyone else around you has been vaccinated.
Spreading fear and misinformation about the safety of vaccines can cause direct, measurable and irreversible harm. Measuring the connection between a medical treatment and possible harmful effects is something drug companies can do very well, and the FDA approvals process (when it works) keeps the companies honest. We have solid, irrefutable and repeatable scientific evidence that shows vaccines do not cause these diseases, like autism.
I have a difficult time understanding how Zeus is *still* around; it started in mid 2007! According to WP, it has more than 3.6 Million infected PCs.
There is no reasonable stance that defends the existence or the activities of botnets either legally or morally. How is it that we know there are 150 other command nodes, presumably that we can also discover their IP addresses, but law enforcement has been unable to bring them down?
While I understand there are differences in laws, and with what is legal and what is accepted in different jurisdictions, but this seems patently absurd. If an ISP provides service to a verified botnet control node, and refuses to quickly turn them off, I would expect immediate upstream action like this. Why hasn't this happened even more?
I'm bullish on these techniques, and feel strongly that they will usher a new wave of medical breakthroughs, redefinitions of disease states, and significant increases in longevity.
However, there are real concerns about neoplastic growth from stem cells - that older cell used to create "autologous" transplants (cell lines that start from the given subject and are re-injected back into that subject) may have damage that leads to uncontrolled growth. Real safety testing is very, very difficult to do in a controlled way.
what ads?
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 4, Informative
More ridiculous terrorism scare tactics used for attention.
"If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer..." No, I don't. Most likely you'll find a bunch of harmless pot growers and housewives trying to grow pretty flowers. People smart enough to really harm a well run society aren't posting details on the Internet. For the rest of us, these people will just take all the money you can from selling other people's (previously) private data.
No matter how hard we try, we will not stop determined individuals from attacking any society unless we effectively remove all freedoms from the citizens. I choose freedom over safety every time. The solutions to terrorism are NOT more or better surveillance, better technology, or more war. Real solutions include primarily the creation of a society that people don't WANT to attack. The reasons people have for suicide bombing and terrorism are usually pretty damn clear: they have nothing left to lose, and someone took advantage of them to direct their hate toward the easiest, most hated target.
Well, you want to fix terrorism, then address the real reasons for hating your society; it's pretty simple, and the only thing that really works.
Stories like this, about "scary" technology advances, remind me that as technology moves forward, the essential nature of the rights and freedoms that the US used to stand for and defend are more important now than ever before.
Here's what I'd like to find: A non-tax-cheat who is also a congress member. Oh, oh, how about a politician that still has a moral compass at all? A single honest politician? Even one? Let's find non-doctors charging Medicare. Corrupt cops. Meth distributors. Human traffickers. Murderers. People who built technology just to make money using other people's personal data, and try and frame it using terrorism scare tactics. Oh wait...
As I understand it, all modern audio encoders encode in the frequency domain. The graph and description don't mention this, but imply amplitude quantification/digitization, then damage, and reconstruction only in audio amplitude. Not an expert though...
"The signal is converted from time-domain to frequency-domain using forward modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT). This is done by using filter banks that take an appropriate number of time samples and convert them to frequency samples." THEN... "The frequency domain signal is quantized based..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#How_AAC_works
does anyone else find it comic and rather ironic that almost exclusively because the countries involved have tried to keep this a secret, that ACTA negotiations now get far more attention than they would otherwise?
I feel this needs even more attention, and more clearly explained and broadly disseminated explanation of what is at stake both for individuals and for emerging cultures as they join the ranks of "western" strong-copyright regimes.
DMCA takedowns follow a very clear an explicit process on what providers have to do and how... as I understand it, "locking out" the domain at the registrar level is far beyond both the spirit and the letter of the law.
we are generating data far, far faster than we can save. We have for some time, and while trends for storage are catching up, we will always be able to generate more than we store, as a function of how computing and communications work.
So what to save? The Director of the NLM had a unique insight on this exact question: [paraphrasing] "What is used, is saved." Basically, its the utility of information, that information that people find useful and actually use is the best proxy for long term value. The good thing is that all people are motivated to store and maintain the data they find useful, or their constituents or customers desire. As long as people keep wanting data, it will be stored and available.
This is a very different situation to real-world archeology. In the digital, connected world we can access data today once it's publicly available, evaluate it and use it if we want. There is no dust that covers old data, it does not get buried...
I think that for the long term survival of the species, it would be safer to keep companies working on AGI completely separate from the ones who generate or maintain energy sources.
It appears Google is only a consumer of energy at this time, and there is lots of talk about better procurement and trading... +the pdf makes explicit: they have no generation nor transmission capability at this time.
I sincerely hope there are real teeth and that people take notice of clause 20: "Google Energy must timely report to the Commission any change in status that would reflect a departure from the circumstances the Commission relied upon in granting..." because to me, there are difficult issues to consider if Google wants to start producing their own energy in the foreseeable future.
Helene Hegemann's first book has been moving up the best-seller list in Germany and is a finalist for a major book prize. While originally this was notable because Hegemann is only 17 and this is her first book, and so earned praise as a prodigy, what's interesting now about this story is that she has been caught plagiarizing many passages in the book. Amazingly, she has not denied it, but instead claims there is nothing wrong with it. She claims that she is part of a new generation that has grown up with mixing and sampling in all media, including music and art, and this is legitimate in modern culture. Have we entered a new era where plagiarism is not just tolerated, but seen as normal? Is this the ultimate in cynicism, or is it simply a brash attempt to get away with something now that she's been caught? Is her claim to legitimacy compromised by the fact that she only admitted it after it was discovered by someone else? And finally, if 'sampling' is not acceptable in literature, is this reason to rethink the legitimacy of musical sampling?
This argument, while never voiced due to its absurdity seems the most common rationale for removing privacy protections.
The comment not a joke at all. It was satire of the recent Google CEO comment: If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, said Schmidt. You know, kind of like calling a failed politician, "Fucking Retarded" (you're brilliant, Stephen). See? Satire.
Stopping money flow and financial services innovation is, like Internet censorship, a symptom of the fundamental conflict between the traditional role the state has expanded to cover (ie governments) and the transparent, open and global nature of the Internet.
When everyone on the planet can communicate directly and immediately, through fully automated translators, to any other connected person or to large groups - why exactly do we need massive percentages (10-50%) of our resources funneled to maintain the state and state-run defense and services? To preserve the old lines on maps and control the access to major geographic regions? In almost every single case, Internet connected people and services will do a better job.
The necessary reasons for countries as they exist today mostly go away when the Internet fully connects individuals.* Obsolescence is a terrible thing for bureaucracy, but can be framed as the primary driver of most "issues" governments have with the Internet.
* physical defense and security being the only notable exception.
I've tried it this afternoon too. Not really interested in sharing more with yet another invasive, free "service" that I don't own or control, but I can not find any way to "switch it off". It appears Buzz will be a new fixture in the gmail interface. After looking at the help links, it does not appear possible to remove it. If anyone has a way to remove it, disable it - please reply.
but France and Germany are mandating switching as though it's some sort of panacea.
I'm not missing this argument. I disagree. Removing IE is not a panacea, nor is this what the announcement means.
Equating a logical, correct step for a more secure computer (removing IE) as a false panacea is the position in the PCWorld article only, and one that misses the more basic point. IE6,7 and 8, including on Win 7 all have this flaw, and there is no fix yet.
While research indicates that the Internet Explorer zero-day used in the attacks could be used on any version of Internet Explorer, even on Windows 7...
"Don't Kill the Messenger: Blaming IE for Attacks is Dangerous"
Actually, IE is not the messenger, its the source of at least one know security hole that participated in this problem.
The article fails to explain how blaming the software with a known exploit is dangerous.
They assert it will create a "false sense of security" because there exist other methods of attack (other software with security flaws). Even if they did have support for other security holes, this reasoning is an absurd logical fallacy. Amazingly, the author doesn't even have support for the premise of the illogic it's based on an *implication* from a quote by McAfee CTO George Kurtz.
FTA:
The main thing to keep in mind is that these attacks go beyond Internet Explorer and that simply switching browsers is not an adequate defense.
This is completely absurd FUD. IE *was used*, it is insecure, and there is no fix (yet). These conclusions come right from this article and others.
Obvious conclusion: use different software. This conclusion is also supported by the long and consistent history of security issues with IE. I think, after reading this and other articles, it is more dangerous to continue to assert that IE is secure.
The article focuses on how this is a more "peaceful use" for the EMP. I disagree: when the robot apocalypse finally arrives, and a rogue T800 drives after you in into a steel mill, it will be damn useful to have an EMP device used for shaping steel rings handy to stop the cybernetic killing machine. As an added benefit, an EMP would destroy the cpu, meaning no Cyberdyne Systems, and I get my 5 hours back wasted on T3 and Terminator Salvation!
Slashdot Mirror
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadcast-yourself.html
"Pirating" is such a slanted, unhelpful framing of using and sharing digital material without permission.
"Your sensitive genetic information would be safe." It won't be safe for long with databases like these around.
It's simply naïve to hope that all those in political power will follow a course of action other than acting to get more power and more control. Most people will follow the rules and take sincere interest in their fellow man, but the few who don't are those you have ward against.
Imagine the next argument about how much better the government could make life for people if "Your sensitive genetic information" were also collected. This data would help medicine a lot. As we move toward more genetic basis for defining diseases, and defining the interaction of drugs within different people based on their genetics, there is a very strong argument that scientists could make health care better with broad access to the exact genetic information of all patients. Genetics coupled with disease phenotypes, frequencies, and drug interactions with quantitative metrics of effectiveness leads to revolutionary breakthroughs in drug development.
But to get this data would eliminate all aspects of personal privacy regarding your health.
If you believe in property at any level, your own body is unequivocally the one thing you own without exception. Unless there are overriding and unequivocal public health reasons to give someone else control over your body, the only answer is simply "No."
Medical treatments have risks. As a culture, we want everyone to be vaccinated to prevent communicable diseases.
More explanation from the article:
The families sought payment under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system that has a $2.5 billion fund built up from a 75-cent-per-dose tax on vaccines. ...
More than 5,300 cases were filed by parents who believed vaccines may have caused autism in their children. The no-fault payout system is meant to protect vaccine makers from costly lawsuits that drove many out of the vaccine-making business.
more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court
In my opinion, for any family that loses a loved one or experiences significant morbidity from a vaccine, money is a reasonable social method of reimbursement for them.
The use of vaccines is a public health necessity; vaccines are by far the most cost effective tool we have for preventing the spread of communicable diseases.
There have always been controversies about vaccines: there is non-zero risk to individuals from any medical treatment, and significant benefit to the population as a whole. As a single individual, you remove the (very small) risk by not having the vaccine, and you gain most all of the benefits if most everyone else around you has been vaccinated.
Spreading fear and misinformation about the safety of vaccines can cause direct, measurable and irreversible harm. Measuring the connection between a medical treatment and possible harmful effects is something drug companies can do very well, and the FDA approvals process (when it works) keeps the companies honest. We have solid, irrefutable and repeatable scientific evidence that shows vaccines do not cause these diseases, like autism.
The best article covering this was in the Bad Astronomy blog from Discover, aptly titled Antivax Kills.
What about the other 150?
I have a difficult time understanding how Zeus is *still* around; it started in mid 2007! According to WP, it has more than 3.6 Million infected PCs.
There is no reasonable stance that defends the existence or the activities of botnets either legally or morally. How is it that we know there are 150 other command nodes, presumably that we can also discover their IP addresses, but law enforcement has been unable to bring them down?
While I understand there are differences in laws, and with what is legal and what is accepted in different jurisdictions, but this seems patently absurd. If an ISP provides service to a verified botnet control node, and refuses to quickly turn them off, I would expect immediate upstream action like this. Why hasn't this happened even more?
I'm bullish on these techniques, and feel strongly that they will usher a new wave of medical breakthroughs, redefinitions of disease states, and significant increases in longevity.
However, there are real concerns about neoplastic growth from stem cells - that older cell used to create "autologous" transplants (cell lines that start from the given subject and are re-injected back into that subject) may have damage that leads to uncontrolled growth. Real safety testing is very, very difficult to do in a controlled way.
What ads?
> head -5 /etc/hosts
##
# Host Database
#
# This MVPS HOSTS file is a free download from:
# http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/
More ridiculous terrorism scare tactics used for attention.
"If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer..." No, I don't. Most likely you'll find a bunch of harmless pot growers and housewives trying to grow pretty flowers. People smart enough to really harm a well run society aren't posting details on the Internet. For the rest of us, these people will just take all the money you can from selling other people's (previously) private data.
No matter how hard we try, we will not stop determined individuals from attacking any society unless we effectively remove all freedoms from the citizens. I choose freedom over safety every time. The solutions to terrorism are NOT more or better surveillance, better technology, or more war. Real solutions include primarily the creation of a society that people don't WANT to attack. The reasons people have for suicide bombing and terrorism are usually pretty damn clear: they have nothing left to lose, and someone took advantage of them to direct their hate toward the easiest, most hated target.
Well, you want to fix terrorism, then address the real reasons for hating your society; it's pretty simple, and the only thing that really works.
Stories like this, about "scary" technology advances, remind me that as technology moves forward, the essential nature of the rights and freedoms that the US used to stand for and defend are more important now than ever before.
Here's what I'd like to find: A non-tax-cheat who is also a congress member. Oh, oh, how about a politician that still has a moral compass at all? A single honest politician? Even one? Let's find non-doctors charging Medicare. Corrupt cops. Meth distributors. Human traffickers. Murderers. People who built technology just to make money using other people's personal data, and try and frame it using terrorism scare tactics. Oh wait...
As I understand it, all modern audio encoders encode in the frequency domain. The graph and description
don't mention this, but imply amplitude quantification/digitization, then damage, and reconstruction only
in audio amplitude. Not an expert though...
"During encoding, 576 time-domain samples are taken and are transformed to 576 frequency-domain samples."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Encoding_audio
"The signal is converted from time-domain to frequency-domain using forward modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT). This is done by using filter banks that take an appropriate number of time samples and convert them to frequency samples."
THEN... "The frequency domain signal is quantized based..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#How_AAC_works
does anyone else find it comic and rather ironic that almost exclusively
because the countries involved have tried to keep this a secret, that ACTA
negotiations now get far more attention than they would otherwise?
I feel this needs even more attention, and more clearly explained and broadly
disseminated explanation of what is at stake both for individuals and for
emerging cultures as they join the ranks of "western" strong-copyright regimes.
7 years of constant, daily use and abuse. Still runs awesome.
Image: http://208.69.42.194/scpfiles/6310i.jpg
I've been actively looking at replacement phones for over 2 years now and
cannot find a phone with the quality and battery life that come even close.
DMCA takedowns follow a very clear an explicit process on what providers have
to do and how... as I understand it, "locking out" the domain at the registrar
level is far beyond both the spirit and the letter of the law.
This is what counts for science nowadays?
http://www.americanscientist.org/include/popup_fullImage.aspx?key=vo50G9YwnF6SwlOk2usL5R9EyqRLsNX+YiPzweX/0ZsH0IeSOOXIBip7qwN2/ZRY
Look carefully at the 'digital encoding' of the "simple tone" sine wave. ??? Really? What encoder is that?
cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_Transform
we are generating data far, far faster than we can save. We have for some time, and while trends for storage are catching up, we will always be able to generate more than we store, as a function of how computing and communications work.
So what to save? The Director of the NLM had a unique insight on this exact question: [paraphrasing] "What is used, is saved." Basically, its the utility of information, that information that people find useful and actually use is the best proxy for long term value. The good thing is that all people are motivated to store and maintain the data they find useful, or their constituents or customers desire. As long as people keep wanting data, it will be stored and available.
This is a very different situation to real-world archeology. In the digital, connected world we can access data today once it's publicly available, evaluate it and use it if we want. There is no dust that covers old data, it does not get buried...
I'm surprised it was approved by Apple.
I think that for the long term survival of the species, it would be safer to keep companies working on AGI completely separate from the ones who generate or maintain energy sources.
It appears Google is only a consumer of energy at this time, and there is lots of talk about better procurement and trading... +the pdf makes explicit: they have no generation nor transmission capability at this time.
I sincerely hope there are real teeth and that people take notice of clause 20: "Google Energy must timely report to the Commission any change in status that would reflect a departure from the circumstances the Commission relied upon in granting..." because to me, there are difficult issues to consider if Google wants to start producing their own energy in the foreseeable future.
Helene Hegemann's first book has been moving up the best-seller list in
Germany and is a finalist for a major book prize. While originally this
was notable because Hegemann is only 17 and this is her first book, and
so earned praise as a prodigy, what's interesting now about this story
is that she has been caught plagiarizing many passages in the book.
Amazingly, she has not denied it, but instead claims there is nothing
wrong with it. She claims that she is part of a new generation that has
grown up with mixing and sampling in all media, including music and art,
and this is legitimate in modern culture. Have we entered a new era where
plagiarism is not just tolerated, but seen as normal? Is this the
ultimate in cynicism, or is it simply a brash attempt to get away with
something now that she's been caught? Is her claim to legitimacy
compromised by the fact that she only admitted it after it was
discovered by someone else? And finally, if 'sampling' is not acceptable
in literature, is this reason to rethink the legitimacy of musical
sampling?
This argument, while never voiced due to its absurdity seems the most common rationale for removing privacy protections.
The comment not a joke at all. It was satire of the recent Google CEO comment: If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, said Schmidt. You know, kind of like calling a failed politician, "Fucking Retarded" (you're brilliant, Stephen). See? Satire.
If you don't want anyone to know where you are, you shouldn't go there.
[[/TROLL]]
Stopping money flow and financial services innovation is, like Internet censorship,
a symptom of the fundamental conflict between the traditional role the state has expanded
to cover (ie governments) and the transparent, open and global nature of the Internet.
When everyone on the planet can communicate directly and immediately, through
fully automated translators, to any other connected person or to large groups
- why exactly do we need massive percentages (10-50%) of our resources funneled
to maintain the state and state-run defense and services? To preserve the old lines
on maps and control the access to major geographic regions? In almost every single
case, Internet connected people and services will do a better job.
The necessary reasons for countries as they exist today mostly go away when the
Internet fully connects individuals.* Obsolescence is a terrible thing for
bureaucracy, but can be framed as the primary driver of most "issues" governments
have with the Internet.
* physical defense and security being the only notable exception.
but will probably switch it off.
I've tried it this afternoon too. Not really interested in sharing more with yet another invasive, free "service" that I don't own or control, but I can not find any way to "switch it off". It appears Buzz will be a new fixture in the gmail interface. After looking at the help links, it does not appear possible to remove it. If anyone has a way to remove it, disable it - please reply.
but France and Germany are mandating switching as though it's some sort of panacea.
I'm not missing this argument. I disagree. Removing IE is not a panacea, nor is this what the announcement means.
Equating a logical, correct step for a more secure computer (removing IE) as a false panacea is the position in the PCWorld article only, and one that misses the more basic point. IE6,7 and 8, including on Win 7 all have this flaw, and there is no fix yet.
From the article referenced.
While research indicates that the Internet Explorer zero-day used in the attacks could be used on any version of Internet Explorer, even on Windows 7...
"Don't Kill the Messenger: Blaming IE for Attacks is Dangerous"
Actually, IE is not the messenger, its the source of at least one know security hole that participated in this problem.
The article fails to explain how blaming the software with a known exploit is dangerous.
They assert it will create a "false sense of security" because there exist other methods of attack (other software with security flaws). Even if they did have support for other security holes, this reasoning is an absurd logical fallacy. Amazingly, the author doesn't even have support for the premise of the illogic it's based on an *implication* from a quote by McAfee CTO George Kurtz.
FTA:
The main thing to keep in mind is that these attacks go beyond Internet Explorer and that simply switching browsers is not an adequate defense.
This is completely absurd FUD. IE *was used*, it is insecure, and there is no fix (yet). These conclusions come right from this article and others.
Obvious conclusion: use different software. This conclusion is also supported by the long and consistent history of security issues with IE. I think, after reading this and other articles, it is more dangerous to continue to assert that IE is secure.
The article focuses on how this is a more "peaceful use" for the EMP. I disagree: when the robot apocalypse finally arrives, and a rogue T800 drives after you in into a steel mill, it will be damn useful to have an EMP device used for shaping steel rings handy to stop the cybernetic killing machine. As an added benefit, an EMP would destroy the cpu, meaning no Cyberdyne Systems, and I get my 5 hours back wasted on T3 and Terminator Salvation!
The mechanical press was, like, so 1984.