What? You mean like how Qihoo 360's 'Secure Browser' turned out to have a backdoor built in? Or that a couple of reports indicate false flag operations using email accounts and passwords through Opera... *only*... (since the acquisition) have been used by hackers? Or that Google, Mozilla, etc no longer accept certificates from StartCom, which was also acquired (indirectly) by Qihoo?
I know of a case, a few decades back, where the ATM network for a large bank started crashing due to growth; the temporary fix was to duplicate the master database, and have each ATM randomly chose which one a transaction (actually, the entire session) would go against. And the two databases were synched every half hour. After some individuals discovered this, a lot of new accounts were created (false IDs), and a couple of hundred dollars deposited, often in cash... after all, how 'fake' can the person opening an account be if they are depositing cash? And then... withdraw the money, bringing the balance to zero. Stick your card in again, read the account balance... if zero, try again; if it still showed the previous balance, withdraw the cash again. Once the bank recognized the problem, it stopped opening new accounts, for about a week, until the original issue was fixed.
As it turns out, cops are people. Like all other people, most are good, some are awesome, and some are assholes.
Yeah, except their average tends to be significantly less intelligent than the citizenry they are allegedly protecting. Most estimates put the current average IQ of US LE officers at around 93. Why? Because of various boneheaded court decisions. Jordan v New London sided with the police, in that they could set a maximum IQ for hiring. Doesn't matter that their reason for it - a belief that smarter people left the force more quickly - turned out to be wrong. That precedent led to most departments adopting the same standards - basically, people over scoring over 110 need not apply.
The second is the still controversial concept of 'qualified immunity', as set in Harlow v Fitzgerald. Which has been leveraged, hammered, and beaten into the current unrecognizable form. Ignorantia juris non excusat - ignorance of the law is no excuse... EXCEPT if you are a cop! Cases like Pauly v White are now the norm - if the cop thought they were enforcing the law, then they are excused from all wrongdoing, including killing innocent people. This has led to most cops going out of their way to remain ignorant of the actual law. Because - obviously - if you actually knew the law, then you could be held liable for violating it.
Sure, there are a lot of good cops... the problem is that the trend is going the other way
Meh... modern fencing (foil, épée) is 99% pistol grip, which simply doesn't translate into a broom, stick, or 'real' sword. As for the Bat'leth, you're absolutely right, they would do some damage... to themselves. The thing is fundamentally unbalanced, and nigh on useless in combat (as choreographed in the shows).
HEMA would be a better place to start... but even there, weapons are changing to take advantage of the rules (e.g. longswords are becoming slightly longer than historical records suggest)
Just to give one example to shoot your BS down, look at aluminum. A lot of research has been done on how to improve it, especially with respect to the distribution of impurities/bubbles. Doping helps a lot, as does the application of ultrasonics, both in reducing the size of impurity clusters, and making the final product more homogenous. That said, experiments in space have shown that metals have more even distribution of impurities than on earth. And - consequently - substantially stronger than their formed-in-a-gravity-well counterparts.
no one is going to the moon or mars in a privately funded tourist trip in the next thirty years, or ever really
space is a dead-end fantasy for powerless nerds who gobbled up sci-fi when they were 12 and never outgrew it
Every year, there are incremental improvements in both the tensile strength and maximum length of carbon nanotubes (and the related boron version, BNNTs). At some point, a space elevator will become economically practical.
Space isn't a dead-end fantasy... zero-g offers a lot of advantages for manufacturing, and reduced-g offers longer life spans. There are many people interested in both.
Theoretically, yes... practically, nope. You're making a couple of assumptions, regarding civil v criminal, and prosecution v defense. Any competent lawyer can, even if the recording is inadmissible, ask questions which will elicit the same information. Objecting to a question would also bring the subject of the recording to the record. Explicitly lying - when evidence exists to the contrary, even when that evidence is not allowed - opens up a number of legal doors: contempt, hostile witness status, and, of course, the chance to introduce the recording as proof the witness is lying under oath. And, in a large number of cases, the judge has listened to a recording before deciding on its admissibility, so lying on the stand could get you the contempt conviction on the spot.
"Wrong. Quantum communication solves this problem. A quantum comm channel cannot be spied upon, because the very act of receiving any of the signal will destroy/mark it so the intended recipient notices. Re-generating the quantum signal also fails, at the very least there will be noticeable delay."
Theoretically, yes, practically, no. Quantum communication has already been hacked. The implementation allows for a certain error rate. The hack - using a very low level sampling - kept the error rate below the defined threshold.
I can see that statistic changing quickly: over 90% of people pulled over (at gunpoint, goes without saying) for having a flashing 'Amber Alert' digital plate were on the wrong side of a dispute... with a hacker.
Could they also, at the push of a button, be set to display another number for a minute, say while you drive past the toll cameras? *That* would justify the outrageous price tag:)
Are you really as ignorant as you seem, or just being sarcastic? Hard to tell...
Hundreds of people get denied boarding every month, because they objected to some part of the process... a high school dropout with three months mall-cop experience getting just a bit too friendly when doing a pat-down... and a number are detained and arrested for protesting. And the list of petty and illegal things the TSA do is staggering. e.g. a delay that is going to make them miss their flight.
And people who actually have a laptop stolen as it goes through the x-ray machine, while they are being frisked? Yep, a number of those end up in cuffs, and escorted by police out of the airport, for the crime of getting upset their property was stolen.
Except that - generally - trees die, and the bacteria that decompose them return most of the carbon back into the atmosphere. Ocean algae also suck carbon dioxide out of the water, but when they die, they sink, and either get embedded in sediment, or digested by (mostly) non-oxygen utilizing processes.
Bingo! At a former employer, they went out of their way to increase the diversity of the recruiting pool... to no effect. Mostly because while the Fed regulator was screaming about the 10% of the local population that was a 'minority ethnic group', they were ignoring the detail that group was less than 1% of the graduates from computing courses at the local colleges... a number that was reflected in the makeup of the IT department.
To be fair to the company, they broke 0.5% minority hiring, while the graduation rate for that group was ~0.2%. Skin color wasn't the determining factor, economic status was.
Yep, kinda like the NSA hacking into Petrobras, and the data somehow finding its way to Halliburton, while the former CEO was veep... Pretty sure the official response, when the Snowden papers came out, was along the lines of 'Oh noes, we would *nevah* do industrial spying, is only fer NATIONAL SECURITY! hehehehe '
"What about recent law enforcement activities have given you any reason for this hope?"
None. None whatsoever. A female acquaintance at the courthouse for a traffic ticket was arrested, and put behind bars overnight. There was a warrant out for someone with the same first and last name. Of course, the detail she is a petite Caucasian female and the suspect was a large black male might have tipped the LE officer off that her protests had some validity... but as there is zero repercussions to LE pulling cr4p like this, it is going to continue.
Personally, I'm getting really sick of hearing lawyers state 'He reacted in the way he was trained.' As though the police department training is to blame for lack of common sense, lack of knowledge of the law, and general lack of humanity.
"Strategy - how you will get there in broad terms - drive the enemy back to its borders"
CEO - Do whatever is necessary to maximize stock value.
"Tactics - what you will do in specific terms - bomb the *^&$ out of them"
CEO - Any decision, no matter how boneheaded, idiotic, and counter to the continued success of the company, that increases stock value, is a good decision. e.g. Downsizing, selling off entire divisions, outsourcing, spending a pittance on security. The stock market punishes outliers: if your peers are doing something, you had better do it too. Downsizing and selling off divisions always hurts a company in the long run, but generally results in a cash infusion (read "stock returns"), and increase in stock value. Outsourcing invariably leads to inferior products, but reduces expenses. If one company does it, and another doesn't, the stock value of the one who didn't goes down. Security? The stock market doesn't care if there's a security breach. No-one gives more than lip-service to it.
Minor correction: Lawyers are #2 on the list of 'Careers with highest percentage of psychopaths' (per Dr. Dutton's extensive studies), after CEOs, but politicians don't even make the list. Really disturbing are the others one are likely to come into contact with: Sales weasels (#4), Police (#7), and Clergy (#8).
"In other words (and to quote the parent), they can get rid of anyone they feel like."
I once had an internal transfer held up for weeks, because it meant moving from an 'Right-to-work' state (i.e. workers have no rights) to one in which they couldn't fire me on a whim. (That said really bad things about the attitude of management of HR there).
And SJW should not be considered a bad term... someone fighting for social justice. I kinda like SJZ - Social Justice Zealot - for those who go way beyond 'fair' and 'equal', and still try to hide behind the term 'Social Justice'
I used to operate under the naive assumption that language was used for communication. Slowly clued in that, for a lot of people, it's all about framing the argument or ideological battlefield in their favour.
'Dead names' is one I find pathetic, since most of the time, the person is trying to conceal all the crap they did under their former (birth) name. Kinda like 'Actress' implies both the profession and gender, but by removing that word from the lexicon of acceptable usage, the people behind it somehow believe the negative connotations will go away. Similar to the constantly changing words/phrase for 'disabled'. 'Retarded' - implying mental disability - and 'Gimp' - implying physical disability - have been replaced by the less-specific term. (And please, put 'handi-capable' in a manual of made-up words that show some people should not be allowed out in public)
Individuals generally should be allowed to define how they wish to be called... with caveats. e.g. 'Lord Greg' when the person is not a Lord. Some of the gender naming seems benign, while others cross the lines regarding loss-of-specificity, and with trying to imply something they are not entitled to. Slippery slope. Gender isn't binary... although for 98%+ of the population it is. And there are questions regarding whether we should use any identifiers when gender isn't - or shouldn't - be part of how they are treated.
Then again, you do not have the right to not be offended. This new charter is attempting to make a utopia without any consideration for just how stupid it is.
Not quite: one of the implications of Net Neutrality is that ISPs are scanning packets, to determine their priority. That violates the Common Carrier laws, which grant immunity to entities such as the Post Office, for unknowingly transferring illegal items. The second a service starts opening any number - no matter how small - of the items it is transferring, then it becomes liable for any illegal items.
I'm sure there could be a clever legal argument somehow claiming they were not liable, but that is dancing on a very fine edge. All it would take is one precedent setting case against a small ISP - one engaged in Paid Prioritization - for something like "My husband is in jail, and it's all the ISPs fault for delivering what they KNEW was kiddie pr0n! They must pay!!!" Comcast et al would certainly pay attention, then.
And yes, this has been discussed behind closed doors in the legal departments there, and their conclusion is that the extra money reaped would more than allow them to lobby themselves immunity to such a scenario. Which also - tacitly - implies that they recognize Paid Prioritization removes their immunity. It isn't exactly the same as the Safe Harbor provisions, but darn close... which the big guys are willing to toss, in the name of profit.
Slashdot Mirror
The single best thing that can protect you from US cops is not living in the US.
What? You mean like how Qihoo 360's 'Secure Browser' turned out to have a backdoor built in? Or that a couple of reports indicate false flag operations using email accounts and passwords through Opera ... *only* ... (since the acquisition) have been used by hackers? Or that Google, Mozilla, etc no longer accept certificates from StartCom, which was also acquired (indirectly) by Qihoo?
I know of a case, a few decades back, where the ATM network for a large bank started crashing due to growth; the temporary fix was to duplicate the master database, and have each ATM randomly chose which one a transaction (actually, the entire session) would go against. And the two databases were synched every half hour. After some individuals discovered this, a lot of new accounts were created (false IDs), and a couple of hundred dollars deposited, often in cash ... after all, how 'fake' can the person opening an account be if they are depositing cash? And then ... withdraw the money, bringing the balance to zero. Stick your card in again, read the account balance ... if zero, try again; if it still showed the previous balance, withdraw the cash again. Once the bank recognized the problem, it stopped opening new accounts, for about a week, until the original issue was fixed.
"The US said rules governing armed robots still stood and humans would retain the power to veto their actions."
Uh, say WHAT? That line says something completely different from 'requiring human finger on every trigger'.
"Yeah, I coulda - probably shoulda - vetoed that Predator bombing on the wedding, but I was in the can at the time."
As it turns out, cops are people. Like all other people, most are good, some are awesome, and some are assholes.
Yeah, except their average tends to be significantly less intelligent than the citizenry they are allegedly protecting. Most estimates put the current average IQ of US LE officers at around 93. Why? Because of various boneheaded court decisions. Jordan v New London sided with the police, in that they could set a maximum IQ for hiring. Doesn't matter that their reason for it - a belief that smarter people left the force more quickly - turned out to be wrong. That precedent led to most departments adopting the same standards - basically, people over scoring over 110 need not apply.
The second is the still controversial concept of 'qualified immunity', as set in Harlow v Fitzgerald. Which has been leveraged, hammered, and beaten into the current unrecognizable form. Ignorantia juris non excusat - ignorance of the law is no excuse ... EXCEPT if you are a cop! Cases like Pauly v White are now the norm - if the cop thought they were enforcing the law, then they are excused from all wrongdoing, including killing innocent people. This has led to most cops going out of their way to remain ignorant of the actual law. Because - obviously - if you actually knew the law, then you could be held liable for violating it.
Sure, there are a lot of good cops ... the problem is that the trend is going the other way
Meh ... modern fencing (foil, épée) is 99% pistol grip, which simply doesn't translate into a broom, stick, or 'real' sword. As for the Bat'leth, you're absolutely right, they would do some damage ... to themselves. The thing is fundamentally unbalanced, and nigh on useless in combat (as choreographed in the shows).
HEMA would be a better place to start ... but even there, weapons are changing to take advantage of the rules (e.g. longswords are becoming slightly longer than historical records suggest)
Just to give one example to shoot your BS down, look at aluminum. A lot of research has been done on how to improve it, especially with respect to the distribution of impurities/bubbles. Doping helps a lot, as does the application of ultrasonics, both in reducing the size of impurity clusters, and making the final product more homogenous. That said, experiments in space have shown that metals have more even distribution of impurities than on earth. And - consequently - substantially stronger than their formed-in-a-gravity-well counterparts.
no one is going to the moon or mars in a privately funded tourist trip in the next thirty years, or ever really
space is a dead-end fantasy for powerless nerds who gobbled up sci-fi when they were 12 and never outgrew it
Every year, there are incremental improvements in both the tensile strength and maximum length of carbon nanotubes (and the related boron version, BNNTs). At some point, a space elevator will become economically practical.
Space isn't a dead-end fantasy ... zero-g offers a lot of advantages for manufacturing, and reduced-g offers longer life spans. There are many people interested in both.
Theoretically, yes ... practically, nope. You're making a couple of assumptions, regarding civil v criminal, and prosecution v defense. Any competent lawyer can, even if the recording is inadmissible, ask questions which will elicit the same information. Objecting to a question would also bring the subject of the recording to the record. Explicitly lying - when evidence exists to the contrary, even when that evidence is not allowed - opens up a number of legal doors: contempt, hostile witness status, and, of course, the chance to introduce the recording as proof the witness is lying under oath. And, in a large number of cases, the judge has listened to a recording before deciding on its admissibility, so lying on the stand could get you the contempt conviction on the spot.
"Wrong. Quantum communication solves this problem. A quantum comm channel cannot be spied upon, because the very act of receiving any of the signal will destroy/mark it so the intended recipient notices. Re-generating the quantum signal also fails, at the very least there will be noticeable delay."
Theoretically, yes, practically, no. Quantum communication has already been hacked. The implementation allows for a certain error rate. The hack - using a very low level sampling - kept the error rate below the defined threshold.
I can see that statistic changing quickly: over 90% of people pulled over (at gunpoint, goes without saying) for having a flashing 'Amber Alert' digital plate were on the wrong side of a dispute ... with a hacker.
Could they also, at the push of a button, be set to display another number for a minute, say while you drive past the toll cameras? *That* would justify the outrageous price tag :)
Are you really as ignorant as you seem, or just being sarcastic? Hard to tell ...
Hundreds of people get denied boarding every month, because they objected to some part of the process ... a high school dropout with three months mall-cop experience getting just a bit too friendly when doing a pat-down... and a number are detained and arrested for protesting. And the list of petty and illegal things the TSA do is staggering. e.g. a delay that is going to make them miss their flight.
And people who actually have a laptop stolen as it goes through the x-ray machine, while they are being frisked? Yep, a number of those end up in cuffs, and escorted by police out of the airport, for the crime of getting upset their property was stolen.
Except that - generally - trees die, and the bacteria that decompose them return most of the carbon back into the atmosphere. Ocean algae also suck carbon dioxide out of the water, but when they die, they sink, and either get embedded in sediment, or digested by (mostly) non-oxygen utilizing processes.
Bingo! At a former employer, they went out of their way to increase the diversity of the recruiting pool ... to no effect. Mostly because while the Fed regulator was screaming about the 10% of the local population that was a 'minority ethnic group', they were ignoring the detail that group was less than 1% of the graduates from computing courses at the local colleges ... a number that was reflected in the makeup of the IT department.
To be fair to the company, they broke 0.5% minority hiring, while the graduation rate for that group was ~0.2%. Skin color wasn't the determining factor, economic status was.
You would never know if from the hype Law Enforcement put out, but they aren't even in the top ten most dangerous occupations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality#/media/File:Selected_occupations_with_high_fatality_rate.png
Google isn't anti-conservative. For 99.999999% of search results, their algorithms work simply on the facts presented.
"And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Yep, kinda like the NSA hacking into Petrobras, and the data somehow finding its way to Halliburton, while the former CEO was veep ... Pretty sure the official response, when the Snowden papers came out, was along the lines of 'Oh noes, we would *nevah* do industrial spying, is only fer NATIONAL SECURITY! hehehehe '
"What about recent law enforcement activities have given you any reason for this hope?"
None. None whatsoever. A female acquaintance at the courthouse for a traffic ticket was arrested, and put behind bars overnight. There was a warrant out for someone with the same first and last name. Of course, the detail she is a petite Caucasian female and the suspect was a large black male might have tipped the LE officer off that her protests had some validity ... but as there is zero repercussions to LE pulling cr4p like this, it is going to continue.
Personally, I'm getting really sick of hearing lawyers state 'He reacted in the way he was trained.' As though the police department training is to blame for lack of common sense, lack of knowledge of the law, and general lack of humanity.
"No person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property..."
'Should you choose to exercise this right, you will be held in contempt of court, and deprived of liberty.'
-De facto amendment to the Fifth Amendment.
"Objective - goal - win the war"
CEO - make as much money as possible.
"Strategy - how you will get there in broad terms - drive the enemy back to its borders"
CEO - Do whatever is necessary to maximize stock value.
"Tactics - what you will do in specific terms - bomb the *^&$ out of them"
CEO - Any decision, no matter how boneheaded, idiotic, and counter to the continued success of the company, that increases stock value, is a good decision. e.g. Downsizing, selling off entire divisions, outsourcing, spending a pittance on security. The stock market punishes outliers: if your peers are doing something, you had better do it too. Downsizing and selling off divisions always hurts a company in the long run, but generally results in a cash infusion (read "stock returns"), and increase in stock value. Outsourcing invariably leads to inferior products, but reduces expenses. If one company does it, and another doesn't, the stock value of the one who didn't goes down. Security? The stock market doesn't care if there's a security breach. No-one gives more than lip-service to it.
Minor correction: Lawyers are #2 on the list of 'Careers with highest percentage of psychopaths' (per Dr. Dutton's extensive studies), after CEOs, but politicians don't even make the list. Really disturbing are the others one are likely to come into contact with: Sales weasels (#4), Police (#7), and Clergy (#8).
"In other words (and to quote the parent), they can get rid of anyone they feel like."
I once had an internal transfer held up for weeks, because it meant moving from an 'Right-to-work' state (i.e. workers have no rights) to one in which they couldn't fire me on a whim. (That said really bad things about the attitude of management of HR there).
And SJW should not be considered a bad term ... someone fighting for social justice. I kinda like SJZ - Social Justice Zealot - for those who go way beyond 'fair' and 'equal', and still try to hide behind the term 'Social Justice'
I used to operate under the naive assumption that language was used for communication. Slowly clued in that, for a lot of people, it's all about framing the argument or ideological battlefield in their favour.
'Dead names' is one I find pathetic, since most of the time, the person is trying to conceal all the crap they did under their former (birth) name. Kinda like 'Actress' implies both the profession and gender, but by removing that word from the lexicon of acceptable usage, the people behind it somehow believe the negative connotations will go away. Similar to the constantly changing words/phrase for 'disabled'. 'Retarded' - implying mental disability - and 'Gimp' - implying physical disability - have been replaced by the less-specific term. (And please, put 'handi-capable' in a manual of made-up words that show some people should not be allowed out in public)
Individuals generally should be allowed to define how they wish to be called ... with caveats. e.g. 'Lord Greg' when the person is not a Lord. Some of the gender naming seems benign, while others cross the lines regarding loss-of-specificity, and with trying to imply something they are not entitled to. Slippery slope. Gender isn't binary ... although for 98%+ of the population it is. And there are questions regarding whether we should use any identifiers when gender isn't - or shouldn't - be part of how they are treated.
Then again, you do not have the right to not be offended. This new charter is attempting to make a utopia without any consideration for just how stupid it is.
Not quite: one of the implications of Net Neutrality is that ISPs are scanning packets, to determine their priority. That violates the Common Carrier laws, which grant immunity to entities such as the Post Office, for unknowingly transferring illegal items. The second a service starts opening any number - no matter how small - of the items it is transferring, then it becomes liable for any illegal items.
I'm sure there could be a clever legal argument somehow claiming they were not liable, but that is dancing on a very fine edge. All it would take is one precedent setting case against a small ISP - one engaged in Paid Prioritization - for something like "My husband is in jail, and it's all the ISPs fault for delivering what they KNEW was kiddie pr0n! They must pay!!!" Comcast et al would certainly pay attention, then.
And yes, this has been discussed behind closed doors in the legal departments there, and their conclusion is that the extra money reaped would more than allow them to lobby themselves immunity to such a scenario. Which also - tacitly - implies that they recognize Paid Prioritization removes their immunity. It isn't exactly the same as the Safe Harbor provisions, but darn close ... which the big guys are willing to toss, in the name of profit.