But see...that license doesn't actualy make that shop accountable. Our twisted and pathetic court system - IN THEORY - does. Yes it does make it accountable. It just isn't holding it to account on its license- it's not using a tool it's been given. That's a big difference you're not seeing. If this system doesn't work, "in theory" and in practice it can be fixed. It's been done many times in history. Once upon a time car repair did work as you suggest with your fantasyland idea below, and the predictable result was abandoned cars littering the streets:
How about you just make people RESPONSIBLE for what they do. You "fix" my car for $3000 and it falls apart - i take you to a court where facts are more important than who's lawyer did 18 holes with the judge over the weekend. Sounds like a great idea. Why hasn't anyone thought of this already? Just like we fixed TV news, we'll just use the "facts". We'll not allow our personal biases or conflicts of interest to influence our decisions. We can get judges, attorneys, and juries from planet Vulcan. In fact, why have cops at all? Just let crimes happen, and use prosecutors and courts for everything!
Why does he need a license to he held accountable for perjury? Everyone is equal in this country right?/sarcasm Everyone is accountable for perjury if they testify. Everyone is accountable for falsification of evidence, if the evidence is admitted into court, which it may not be, if the guy who produced it doesn't have a license to investigate crimes. Maybe he doesn't do competent job at forensics. Innocent people may be languishing in jail for years because of him. Do you want his work to show up at your trial in the meantime, while you're waiting for his comeuppance? Maybe he gets it years later, and your conviction is then tossed, maybe. I guess that's justice?
That's my point. It's ILLEGAL for me to do many things i'm not 'licensed' to do. Regardless of my ability. In my opinion, if i CLAIM to be able to do something then i'm responsible for sucessfully doing it. Simple really. "Simple really" is the universal suffix attached to a bad idea. I can't address the deficits of this thinking fully, since I have a flight to catch, but if I see you in the cockpit I'll trade seats with you because I can claim to be a pilot too.
No. That's fraud, perjury, falsly incriminating someone...heck, it's possession of kiddie pron too. That is illegal. Period. Not if you're successfully prevented from doing it, so cops aren't bringing any hard drives with kiddies to you in the first place.
Would someone go out on a limb and plant/hide evidence? Sure. Does that already happen today? Constantly, and people often are NOT held accountable for their actions. You make your mistake when you jump from "people often are NOT held accountable for their actions" to "let's just let anyone do what they want and hold them accountable if they mess up". Holding someone accountable for doing work badly is more difficult than preventing them from doing it at all until they have met certain requirements. We don't let witch doctors practice medicine, for example, figuring his gullible victims will sue him.
How does this serve the public interest other than making she sheep feel safer through an obscure license they will never understand? Of course they're not familiar with the license! Geez! This isn't to make "the sheep feel safer", it's to keep "the sheep" from languishing in jail for years waiting for some incompetent or prosecutor-friendly computer forensics expert to be exposed!
Oh wait, Oh wait seems to be the universal prefix attached to inaccurate observations.
Sorry, but I don't see how another inane 'licensing' will do more good than bad. Just because someone is licensed does not mean they're honest. Heck, all care repair shops in NY have to be licensed. Do you REALLY thing that keeps them honest?
Whether "all car repair shops in NY are honest" or not, the licenses do present a mechanism that can hold them accountable and close them down if sufficient effort is put into enforcement. Licensure can often atrophy into a simple tax collected by a licensing authority that doesn't perform proper enforcement procedures for the licenses it issues, but that's not the idea.
Since a private investigator has a license, he's on the hook if he presents incorrect or bullshit evidence to the court. Ordinarily I can't go to a PI with pictures of my wife and my neighbor taken through open windows, and have him photoshop them into obscene pictures that I can take to court for a divorce proceeding, presented as evidence bearing the imprimatur of a licensed investigation. The court would indeed take that type of evidence more seriously than if you just had some friend of yours photoshop his dick into her mouth himself. That wouldn't be admitted as evidence. The PI has got a license; your friend doesn't. If the PI is indeed found to have violated the terms of his license by doing that, he'll lose his license, and may be subject to fines and jail time in addition to those he'd get for falsification of evidence.
"The problems in South Carolina occur when folks from national [law] firms come into South Carolina, seize digital evidence, have that evidence analyzed in a lab in some other state, and then send it back to South Carolina for litigation," Abrams says. "The state has no mechanism to hold them accountable if they screw up, which I see all the time in cases."
A license if just a scrap of paper that means you paid someone for it. Perhaps you passed a test too. That means about as much as that 10th grade biology final that you crammed for the night before and then erased from your brain after the next morning. I'm much more interested in holding people ACCOUNTABLE for their actions than having the government "protect" me.
A license is not just "a scrap of paper" that required a fee for a licensing authority. After your 12th grade finals are over you may find that scraps of paper can do surprising things. They can imbue you with certain legal responsibilities. If you practice medicine, or practice law, or conduct private investigations, you can do certain things the rest of us can't, and you are on the hook for doing them correctly- you're held ACCOUNTABLE for your actions. Doctors, lawyers, and private investigators each bear their own types of accountability. If you make a legal promise to conduct yourself in some way, and the promise you made then gets "erased from your brain after the next morning", you're going to find yourself in a world of hurt. You'll find it's not like studying for finals at all.
A forensic investigator is gathering information that might certainly be used to put someone in jail. "Oh no, I need a license to do that? Waaah!" Well, duh! What if you're incompetent, or a liar, or the darling of law enforcement because you find child porn on every machine that comes in? Do you really think that type of behavior should be legal, or that evidence from your lab should be admissible in courts?
"It's an ambush," says Phipps, a 31-year FBI veteran now with Norcross Group, a digital e-discovery business. "Under the South Carolina statute, only a handful of licensed PIs across that state have the years of information system and tools experience needed to do true digital forensics with repeatable processes of documentation and chain of custody. This is the only group that stands to gain."
I don't know what he's complaining about; he stands to gain too. They're trying to make everyone imagine that a handful of film-noir private eyes are planning to take over the computer
How hard would it be to fake this security dialogue?
Probably easy, with a float. But you can tell half the time because the guys who write these things can't seem to get through a sentence like "Please enter the master password for the Software Security Device" without misspelling at least three words. And they would make it look like an IE dialog. (I'm either using FF or Safari and I get fake IE dialogs all the time.)
Firefox Password Manager fell victim to an attack in late 2006. Its mistake was based on the assumption that all pages on a given site can be credentialed using an all-or-nothing policy for the domain, which doesn't work within a heterogeneous ghetto like myspace. It sometimes has the reverse problem with certain sites that use load balancers- it's has issues figuring out which passwords are the correct ones to prepopulate based on the URL. It also has issues with figuring out who you are, if you're sharing the computer with other people and you're not setting up individual profiles in Firefox.
I never use a browser to store passwords; I prefer Password Safe instead. It also uses a master password to encrypt stored passwords in a password file on disk. It's a tiny little program; the (old) version I have doesn't even have an installer although it does need a JVM. (I back up the file and the program itself on a USB key that I keep stuffed in my mattress.) You can export Firefox Password Manager passwords to a file, but with Password Safe you're directly keeping everything in sync by opening the encrypted file for all views or edits. Automatic URL recognition isn't a problem because it doesn't even make an attempt- it figures you can do that yourself. Everything is done manually. You reach a site, forget your password, open the file and enter the unlock master password, click on the entry for the site as you named it, click show password, close the program, and type it into the browser. If you share a Firefox user profile with other people, just make a separate password file. It's not as convenient as the browser-integrated mechanism, but security is clunky in general. I'd rather keep that stuff outside the browser, in case my laptop is stolen, or beer is spilled on it, or I switch to another browser, or I'm not using a browser. I have to remember a ton of ssh passwords too.
I hate when I click on a goatse.cx link and it turns out to be a crap link that loads an ad-infested page on the same site that you're on:
[banner] [popup] [banner] SHOP for assholes! RATE your asshole! RECOMMEND your asshole to friends! Read REVIEWS of assholes! FIND assholes in your area! COMPARE PRICES for assholes! Find DEFINITIONS and SYNONYMS for asshole! 100%-free asshole SCREEN SAVERS! [banner] [banner] Sponsored Links: Looking for FREE ASSHOLES in your area? Click HERE Assholes repaired at low prices, 100% safe, guaranteed Need credit? Pull equity out of your asshole today! [banner] [popunder]
And you, Wikipedia, you're another one- when I'm in a hurry, I'd like a visual hint that I might see this:
"This article is a stub. You assholes can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
Yes, now we have law. We've had it for centuries. Common sense is innate, natural, intuitive, and subjective. The law is wordy, prosaic, precise, and unambiguous. Which one would you rather fight over?
A conviction where the majority of the sentence came from the spamming law rather than all the other ones (fraud, laundering, etc).
This is a very common legal outcome. Common law offenses and violations of settled law are much more likely to result in prosecutions and convictions than violations of more recent legislation. Look at the Plame case for example- a law specifically tailored for that situation (the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) had been quite precisely violated, but since one of the elements of the case (Plame's covert status) was officially classified, the actual indictments were for perjury and making false statements to investigators. Old code is generally more reliable than new code.
And he's requested Google to not cache it? That was helpful!
He DID request in his robots.txt for Google to cache it. Unfortunately his robots.txt file got invalidated during a server upgrade and Hollywood revoked his right to allow Google to copy it.
If you need Windows just to play games, why not get an xbox instead?
I have a feeling that thing is Microsoft's last prayer. After their recent flops, gaming and servers are practically all they have left. And you know it's only a matter of time before Nintendo unveils their new "Wii Server Enterprise Edition".
If Chuck Norris decides a string is a Date, then _IT'S A FUCKING DATE_. Also, exceptions are not just thrown, they are kicked and punched also. This makes the language pretty safe alone.
Huckabee's Chuck Norris module introduces five new types of cast operators: kick_cast, mis_cast, fucking_cast, out_cast, and orthopedic_cast.
The end result, after almost five years of continuous bashing with a clue stick:
Not to mention that Iraq itself didn't help its case any at all by not cooperating fully with the UN inspectors. Saddam kept acting like he had something to hide. If he'd have let insepctors in, let them go anywhere they wanted with NO obstruction, and had been fully transparent about things.....he'd still be in power today, killing and torturing his citizens just like he'd been doing before. If he'd show fully clean hands....no invasion would have occured.
Oh geez, Six Sigma was involved in this disaster! No wonder the news sucks!
GE had acquired NBC back in 1986, when it bought RCA. By 2003, GE's managers and strategists were getting around to seeing whether the same tactics that made the production of turbine generators more efficient could improve the production of television news. This had some truly bizarre consequences. To say that this Dateline correspondent with the messy corner office greeted these internal corporate changes with self-destructive skepticism is probably an understatement.
Six Sigma--the methodology for the improvement of business processes that strives for 3.4 defects or fewer per million opportunities--was a somewhat mysterious symbol of management authority at every GE division. Six Sigma messages popped up on the screens of computers or in e-mail in-boxes every day. Six Sigma was out there, coming, unstoppable, like a comet or rural electrification. It was going to make everything better, and slowly it would claim employees in glazed-eyed conversions. Suddenly in the office down the hall a coworker would no longer laugh at the same old jokes. A grim smile suggested that he was on the lookout for snarky critics of the company. It was better to talk about the weather. While Six Sigma's goal-oriented blather and obsession with measuring everything was jarring, it was also weirdly familiar, inasmuch as it was strikingly reminiscent of my college Maoism I class. Mao seemed to be a good model for Jack Welch and his Six Sigma foot soldiers; Six Sigma's "Champions" and "Black Belts" were Mao's "Cadres" and "Squad Leaders."
I became painfully familiar with Six Sigma working at a large tech company (it's so large, its stock symbol is a single letter). That's a fairly accurate description of what it was like working there.
I'm surprised to hear that Six Sigma even makes the production of turbine generators more efficient. I actually doubt this. Six Sigma is a management fad, and it's hard to identify exactly what it brings to the table. In fact, although I had to put up with it for so long, I'm still at a loss to describe it. Maybe this excerpt from its Wikipedia page will help:
Six Sigma is a set of practices originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects.[1] A defect is defined as nonconformity of a product or service to its specifications. While the particulars of the methodology were originally formulated by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986[2], Six Sigma was heavily inspired by six preceding decades of quality improvement methodologies such as quality control, TQM, and Zero Defects. Like its predecessors, Six Sigma asserts the following: Continuous efforts to reduce variation in process outputs is key to business success Manufacturing and business processes can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled Succeeding at achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management The term "Six Sigma" refers to the ability of highly capable processes to produce output within specification. In particular, processes that operate with six sigma quality produce at defect levels below 3.4 defects per (one) million opportunities (DPMO)[3]. Six Sigma's implicit goal is to improve all processes to that level of quality or better.
Essentially what happens is that people at managerial levels have no idea what to do, and they reach toward this thing as a canned recipe for how to do their jobs. And it certainly wastes a lot of time, since you have to get training and attend seminars, and it certainly impresses people who confuse activity with progress. It sure as hell generates a lot of Powerpoint slides. It also seems to have a cult-like quality to it. Six Sigma directives come raining down from the highest levels of management and the urgency behind them is palpable- and everyone is freaked because it's all incredibly important but nobody understands what it is.
Stewart is funny, but for the love of God, I wish he'd please move away from heavy politics. I'm in my early 20s, I can understand that people care a lot about politics, especially in college, but the factual substance is shameful on that show. It's fine to watch, just check-out bbc, cnn, or even al-jezera too.
Much substance is lacking from the Daily Show, but Stewart plays an important role that unfortunately no one else is playing. (Olbermann does a little, but enough already with the Britney crap at the end!) There's a lot of stuff that happens in heavy politics that truly deserves ridicule. That must be ridiculed if we are to avoid making ridiculous collective decisions with disastrous consequences.
Most U.S. television viewers simply aren't exposed to BBC or Al-Jazeera. I've never seen the BBC offered as part of a basic cable package. (We used to get BBC America at our house, but it was part of Comcast's "premium" package which we dropped.) The same applies to Al-Jazeera. (The fact that it's also widely distrusted in the U.S. simply for being an Arabic news organization doesn't help.)
As for CNN, availability isn't as much of an issue- if you get Fox News, you usually get CNN too. Basically CNN is a Fox clone carefully marketed toward people who know they distrust Fox. It differs from Fox in its preference for subtle sins of omission rather than overt sins of commission, but they manage to frame the issues in the same way, and the average Fox viewer and the average CNN viewer are probably about as equally ill-informed even if their political alignments may differ.
There needs to be news sources similar to the Daily Show (besides the Daily Show) that at least present the news in a coherent context so you can quickly realize what is going on. Things happen every day that should make you hit the roof and that will affect you in the future. Most people simply don't have time to watch the hours of raw, undigested news coverage needed to recognize what these things are and to place them in a meaningful context. Especially when such an intense, subtle effort is made to present the facts themselves in a censored, cherry picked, confused, or distracting way. Or to summarize them in ways that make no sense, are irrelevant, or are designed to attract your attention to matters of no importance.
For example, I'd urge anyone to look at exactly how much oil the United States imports from Iraq. Touchy subject, I know, but this something that Americans should look up for themselves, as the sources are numerous and varied.
If you're just presented with an avalanche of acontextual information, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees, especially if you only see the news briefly after work and don't have time to devote to e.g. an analysis of oil imports that may even require statistical analysis, using information gathered from many different sources, some of which present misleading statistics. Say we import X barrels from Iraq. Is that a lot? What percentage of our oil imports is that? Is the percentage relevant? What would the effects be if those imports were disrupted? Would they incur costs that exceed those of the occupation itself? Who benefits? What underlies that number's importance? What if some sources report Y barrels? What accounts for the difference? Is someone averaging in barrels imported before the war, counting the same barrels twice, or including barrels that really came from Kuwait? Why would they do that? The majority of the public can't be figuring all these things out for themselves on all issues all the time, but they shouldn't have to. A public need is not being addressed here. So you see people so desperate they have to watch the Daily Show- which fulfills its legitimate role as a comedy show about current events, but that also makes a pathetic excuse for something that is seriously missing from American journalism.
This is from an interview with David Javerbaum, executive producer of the Daily Show, in an episode of Frontline ("News War", part III: "A New Definition For What's News"):
I personally, through this job, through working at this job, have come to feel that the news media is even more depressing than the news it attempts and fails miserably to report. I think it's horrible news, broadcast horribly. That's a fairly blanket statement, but I've been doing this for a long time, and seeing, delving into this every day, it's a thoroughly depressing business. To the extent that people look to us as a source of news, that is 100% indicative of other people's failure, and not our success. Because Jon, unlike me, has the cable news on in his office all day. I can't take it. I can't take it. But he's a tougher man than I am... "No fear, just facts"... [referring to a mocked CNN clip]...if that's their slogan, then they're asking to be punched in the face, when they have nothing on but fear.
I don't get my news from the Daily Show; it's just gratifying to hear someone on TV, pretending to report the news like they all do, who isn't lying to my face! Or pointing out when someone is lying! At least when they lie, it's clearly in the context of a joke!
And I always know, that if anyone on the TV is going to be the first to tell the truth about something, it's going to be the Daily Show. It's always the Daily Show. And that really pisses me off. I don't "watch it for the news". You can't get news from the TV anymore. And you talk to people who only get their news from the TV, like most people still do, and it's like being on another planet! They're completely brainwashed! Try to tell them what's going on, and it feels like you're screaming into the darkness!
I mean, I read this from the article:
This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the "emotional center" of the American people. Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know.
This isn't even true! I knew before the war, for example, that it was all premised on bullshit, maybe because I had an Internet connection? I forget how I knew; I just remember knowing a long time. I knew for at least a year beforehand. What am I, Nostradamus? I knew for at least a year that these people on TV were staring straight at us, carefully omitting things about Iraq that were true, saying things about it that weren't true, i.e. lying! How can they not know they're lying? I know they're lying! Lots of us knew they were lying! Lewis Black from the Daily Show knew they were lying! "I knew they didn't have weapons of mass destruction. How did I know that? I was just sitting on my fuckin' couch!" And then they wonder and bellyache about young people "getting their news from the Daily Show"!
Tin foil billfolds and passport covers are already being sold
Joke's on you... DHS is forbidding passengers to carry more than one square inch of tinfoil through security, or more than three square inches in checked luggage, because it could be crumpled up and fashioned into a weapon.
Dreams involving nudity always seem to involve cops, underage minors, icky relatives, or coworkers. They never happen at beaches, and the sort of people around whom you'd want to be naked are furiously absent. (Apparently no "training" is necessary for those situations.)
I had a great nightmare a few weeks ago. I was traveling somewhere with my wife, sitting at a pleasant outdoor cafe. My hands were developing hives or pimples or some sort of skin condition. So I said, "there's a pharmacy, let me go get some cream or lotion for this crap." It was one of those big chain pharmacies- I think it was a CVS. (Not the version control system, which has also appeared in nightmares.) My wife said she'd wait at the cafe, and I never saw her again. But during the rest of the dream, I "knew" she was waiting there.
The pharmacy morphed into a hospital as I approached. A doctor was lounging in the doorway. He was a composite of two real life characters: an internist who had given me an unpleasant procedure when I was in college, and a jewelry store owner in Cupertino where I had a watch fixed a few days before (he sits in front of his store like that, waiting for business). I showed him my hands and he led me upstairs, told me to strip, and wheeled me down a corridor in a wheelchair. Meanwhile this stuff had been spreading up my arms and appearing on any skin elsewhere that had been in contact. So I was trying to avoid touching anything.
We headed into a dingy wing of the hospital (think Jacob's Ladder). As the wheelchair creaked down the hallway, more and more lights were flickering or burnt out. Rainwater was dripping from the ceiling and accumulating in puddles underneath. People were abandoned, crying from their beds, strapped to gurneys and convulsing, and the ceiling was starting to drip blood in places. We reached a room with a few empty cots, and he told me to wait there. Then he was gone.
So I was sitting and waiting on this cot, trying to avoid touching anything, but the inflammation was continuing to spread- on my feet, ankles, up my knees, and all around my waist. My face itched like hell and the skin on my hands and arms was completely burnt and peeling off. Sometimes faceless nurses wearing masks would walk by, and I'd call out, trying to get their attention (I still needed that lotion I was hoping to get at the pharmacy). Usually they ignored me. I got the attention of a few, but when they saw the disease they ran away in terror.
In came a crowd of second graders on a school trip. Two teachers were telling the kids to behave, and I quickly covered up my privates with my diseased filthy hands. (This had predictable dermatological results, but if I hadn't done it, MSNBC's Chris Hansen might have shown up. MSNBC pollutes my subconsciousness with that garbage whenever I don't pay attention after Olbermann's show is over.) I motioned to one of the teachers and whispered, "Pssst, do you really think it's a good idea to bring a bunch of little kids to a place like this on a school trip?"
"Oh don't worry- they have their permission slips signed," she says, "and besides, you look great... except for your skin condition." (She was right- I've been getting exercise recently.) Meanwhile the kids had formed a semicircle around me and were pointing and giggling, calling me a monster.
I got fed up with this pretty quickly and lunged at them with my arms in the air, yelling, "Oh yeah, you little brats? Well how would you like this pox!" They all laughed and squealed, "Ewwwww!" and ran off in every direction.
Then I woke up, surely prepared for something, but I'm not sure what.
Q is the heat content (in units of energy) of the system, S is the entropy (the logarithm of the number of states available to the system) and T (or kT with constant included) is temperature (defined in units of energy).
S increases rapidly at low temperature. As things get hotter (increasing T) the entropy changes less and less as additional heat Q is applied. At infinite temperature S would approach some finite fixed value.
Generally by adding to Q you make more states available to a system. Atoms can suddenly twist, jerk, lose electrons, shine in X-ray light, etc. Ice can change state to water, or water can change state to steam. As you apply heat (Q) to a system the temperature T stalls when it reaches these points, since dS is so large. Melting and boiling both increase the disorder. As long as the system has a rising number of states to explore as it gets hotter, entropy keeps going up.
If there are only a finite number of states to explore, then you can actually reach a point where you pass maximum entropy and actually start to decrease the entropy of a system by adding more energy to it- if there are fewer available states at that energy. T switches from positive to negative infinity. As more energy is pumped in, the system is dominated by fewer and fewer high energy states. That's how a laser works; technically a population inversion has to be created in a laser where more atoms in a crystal are in an excited state than the corresponding ground state. If at least half of them aren't in the excited state the light won't make it out of the crystal. As you pump the laser past 50% the number of available states goes down (approaching a limit not reached in practicality where all atoms are in the excited state). So the concept of negative temperature would be useful for describing that system, in terms of those particular transitions.
So basically it's zero -> positive infinity/negative infinity -> -0 or "absolute hot" which is approaching a single most energetic state available. This is similar to absolute zero which approaches a single least energetic ground state. Except it's approaching zero from the other direction- it's more like "absolute minus zero".
In Honda's fields the poppies blow Between us robots, row on row, Left round the place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amongst us hunks below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago they made us far across the seas Sold, and were shipped, and now we lie In Honda's fields.
Take up your quarrel with your foe: To you from failing hands we throw A Warranty; yours to hold high Once all us pricey robots die Good for a month, though poppies grow in Honda's fields.
How do you know what anyone like? Do you really have such a hard time to see if someone enjoy something or not? I feel sad for you and your broken brain in that case.
We're talking about what an imaginary creature might have instincts or drives for. Maybe it would never come to exist via natural selection, but Nature can support an organism that doesn't have motives or instincts similar to yours- or any animal that natural selection has produced. There is a combination of G, A, T, and C that will produce an organism with almost any attribute you can dream up- even any joke creature from any Douglas Adams book. The set of all possible creatures that can be DNA-encoded is larger than the set of creatures arrivable at by natural selection, which is itself larger than the set of existing creatures we actually see. You can't make assumptions about what's possible in the first set based on what you see in the smaller second or third sets (e.g. animals that generally try to survive). That was my whole point. If your imagination is too limited to get your head around that, it doesn't mean my brain is broken.
Slashdot Mirror
But see...that license doesn't actualy make that shop accountable. Our twisted and pathetic court system - IN THEORY - does.
/sarcasm
Yes it does make it accountable. It just isn't holding it to account on its license- it's not using a tool it's been given. That's a big difference you're not seeing. If this system doesn't work, "in theory" and in practice it can be fixed. It's been done many times in history. Once upon a time car repair did work as you suggest with your fantasyland idea below, and the predictable result was abandoned cars littering the streets:
How about you just make people RESPONSIBLE for what they do. You "fix" my car for $3000 and it falls apart - i take you to a court where facts are more important than who's lawyer did 18 holes with the judge over the weekend.
Sounds like a great idea. Why hasn't anyone thought of this already? Just like we fixed TV news, we'll just use the "facts". We'll not allow our personal biases or conflicts of interest to influence our decisions. We can get judges, attorneys, and juries from planet Vulcan. In fact, why have cops at all? Just let crimes happen, and use prosecutors and courts for everything!
Why does he need a license to he held accountable for perjury? Everyone is equal in this country right?
Everyone is accountable for perjury if they testify. Everyone is accountable for falsification of evidence, if the evidence is admitted into court, which it may not be, if the guy who produced it doesn't have a license to investigate crimes. Maybe he doesn't do competent job at forensics. Innocent people may be languishing in jail for years because of him. Do you want his work to show up at your trial in the meantime, while you're waiting for his comeuppance? Maybe he gets it years later, and your conviction is then tossed, maybe. I guess that's justice?
That's my point. It's ILLEGAL for me to do many things i'm not 'licensed' to do. Regardless of my ability. In my opinion, if i CLAIM to be able to do something then i'm responsible for sucessfully doing it. Simple really.
"Simple really" is the universal suffix attached to a bad idea. I can't address the deficits of this thinking fully, since I have a flight to catch, but if I see you in the cockpit I'll trade seats with you because I can claim to be a pilot too.
No. That's fraud, perjury, falsly incriminating someone...heck, it's possession of kiddie pron too. That is illegal. Period.
Not if you're successfully prevented from doing it, so cops aren't bringing any hard drives with kiddies to you in the first place.
Would someone go out on a limb and plant/hide evidence? Sure. Does that already happen today? Constantly, and people often are NOT held accountable for their actions.
You make your mistake when you jump from "people often are NOT held accountable for their actions" to "let's just let anyone do what they want and hold them accountable if they mess up". Holding someone accountable for doing work badly is more difficult than preventing them from doing it at all until they have met certain requirements. We don't let witch doctors practice medicine, for example, figuring his gullible victims will sue him.
How does this serve the public interest other than making she sheep feel safer through an obscure license they will never understand?
Of course they're not familiar with the license! Geez! This isn't to make "the sheep feel safer", it's to keep "the sheep" from languishing in jail for years waiting for some incompetent or prosecutor-friendly computer forensics expert to be exposed!
Oh wait,
Oh wait seems to be the universal prefix attached to inaccurate observations.
Whether "all car repair shops in NY are honest" or not, the licenses do present a mechanism that can hold them accountable and close them down if sufficient effort is put into enforcement. Licensure can often atrophy into a simple tax collected by a licensing authority that doesn't perform proper enforcement procedures for the licenses it issues, but that's not the idea.
Since a private investigator has a license, he's on the hook if he presents incorrect or bullshit evidence to the court. Ordinarily I can't go to a PI with pictures of my wife and my neighbor taken through open windows, and have him photoshop them into obscene pictures that I can take to court for a divorce proceeding, presented as evidence bearing the imprimatur of a licensed investigation. The court would indeed take that type of evidence more seriously than if you just had some friend of yours photoshop his dick into her mouth himself. That wouldn't be admitted as evidence. The PI has got a license; your friend doesn't. If the PI is indeed found to have violated the terms of his license by doing that, he'll lose his license, and may be subject to fines and jail time in addition to those he'd get for falsification of evidence.
A license if just a scrap of paper that means you paid someone for it. Perhaps you passed a test too. That means about as much as that 10th grade biology final that you crammed for the night before and then erased from your brain after the next morning. I'm much more interested in holding people ACCOUNTABLE for their actions than having the government "protect" me.
A license is not just "a scrap of paper" that required a fee for a licensing authority. After your 12th grade finals are over you may find that scraps of paper can do surprising things. They can imbue you with certain legal responsibilities. If you practice medicine, or practice law, or conduct private investigations, you can do certain things the rest of us can't, and you are on the hook for doing them correctly- you're held ACCOUNTABLE for your actions. Doctors, lawyers, and private investigators each bear their own types of accountability. If you make a legal promise to conduct yourself in some way, and the promise you made then gets "erased from your brain after the next morning", you're going to find yourself in a world of hurt. You'll find it's not like studying for finals at all.
A forensic investigator is gathering information that might certainly be used to put someone in jail. "Oh no, I need a license to do that? Waaah!" Well, duh! What if you're incompetent, or a liar, or the darling of law enforcement because you find child porn on every machine that comes in? Do you really think that type of behavior should be legal, or that evidence from your lab should be admissible in courts?
I don't know what he's complaining about; he stands to gain too. They're trying to make everyone imagine that a handful of film-noir private eyes are planning to take over the computer
Firefox Password Manager fell victim to an attack in late 2006.
There, fixed the link (I hit Ctrl-V twice).
How hard would it be to fake this security dialogue?
Probably easy, with a float. But you can tell half the time because the guys who write these things can't seem to get through a sentence like "Please enter the master password for the Software Security Device" without misspelling at least three words. And they would make it look like an IE dialog. (I'm either using FF or Safari and I get fake IE dialogs all the time.)
Firefox Password Manager fell victim to an attack in late 2006. Its mistake was based on the assumption that all pages on a given site can be credentialed using an all-or-nothing policy for the domain, which doesn't work within a heterogeneous ghetto like myspace. It sometimes has the reverse problem with certain sites that use load balancers- it's has issues figuring out which passwords are the correct ones to prepopulate based on the URL. It also has issues with figuring out who you are, if you're sharing the computer with other people and you're not setting up individual profiles in Firefox.
I never use a browser to store passwords; I prefer Password Safe instead. It also uses a master password to encrypt stored passwords in a password file on disk. It's a tiny little program; the (old) version I have doesn't even have an installer although it does need a JVM. (I back up the file and the program itself on a USB key that I keep stuffed in my mattress.) You can export Firefox Password Manager passwords to a file, but with Password Safe you're directly keeping everything in sync by opening the encrypted file for all views or edits. Automatic URL recognition isn't a problem because it doesn't even make an attempt- it figures you can do that yourself. Everything is done manually. You reach a site, forget your password, open the file and enter the unlock master password, click on the entry for the site as you named it, click show password, close the program, and type it into the browser. If you share a Firefox user profile with other people, just make a separate password file. It's not as convenient as the browser-integrated mechanism, but security is clunky in general. I'd rather keep that stuff outside the browser, in case my laptop is stolen, or beer is spilled on it, or I switch to another browser, or I'm not using a browser. I have to remember a ton of ssh passwords too.
I hate when I click on a goatse.cx link and it turns out to be a crap link that loads an ad-infested page on the same site that you're on:
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And you, Wikipedia, you're another one- when I'm in a hurry, I'd like a visual hint that I might see this:
"This article is a stub. You assholes can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
Yes, now we have law. We've had it for centuries. Common sense is innate, natural, intuitive, and subjective. The law is wordy, prosaic, precise, and unambiguous. Which one would you rather fight over?
A conviction where the majority of the sentence came from the spamming law rather than all the other ones (fraud, laundering, etc).
This is a very common legal outcome. Common law offenses and violations of settled law are much more likely to result in prosecutions and convictions than violations of more recent legislation. Look at the Plame case for example- a law specifically tailored for that situation (the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) had been quite precisely violated, but since one of the elements of the case (Plame's covert status) was officially classified, the actual indictments were for perjury and making false statements to investigators. Old code is generally more reliable than new code.
You mean an OS that won't even stream Netflix content in the first place? That's not freedom either.
Give me convenience or give me death!
And he's requested Google to not cache it? That was helpful!
He DID request in his robots.txt for Google to cache it. Unfortunately his robots.txt file got invalidated during a server upgrade and Hollywood revoked his right to allow Google to copy it.
If you need Windows just to play games, why not get an xbox instead?
I have a feeling that thing is Microsoft's last prayer. After their recent flops, gaming and servers are practically all they have left. And you know it's only a matter of time before Nintendo unveils their new "Wii Server Enterprise Edition".
Huckabee just acquired the pessimistic lock!
If Chuck Norris decides a string is a Date, then _IT'S A FUCKING DATE_. Also, exceptions are not just thrown, they are kicked and punched also. This makes the language pretty safe alone.
Huckabee's Chuck Norris module introduces five new types of cast operators: kick_cast, mis_cast, fucking_cast, out_cast, and orthopedic_cast.
I'm surprised to hear that Six Sigma even makes the production of turbine generators more efficient. I actually doubt this. Six Sigma is a management fad, and it's hard to identify exactly what it brings to the table. In fact, although I had to put up with it for so long, I'm still at a loss to describe it. Maybe this excerpt from its Wikipedia page will help:Essentially what happens is that people at managerial levels have no idea what to do, and they reach toward this thing as a canned recipe for how to do their jobs. And it certainly wastes a lot of time, since you have to get training and attend seminars, and it certainly impresses people who confuse activity with progress. It sure as hell generates a lot of Powerpoint slides. It also seems to have a cult-like quality to it. Six Sigma directives come raining down from the highest levels of management and the urgency behind them is palpable- and everyone is freaked because it's all incredibly important but nobody understands what it is.
Stewart is funny, but for the love of God, I wish he'd please move away from heavy politics. I'm in my early 20s, I can understand that people care a lot about politics, especially in college, but the factual substance is shameful on that show. It's fine to watch, just check-out bbc, cnn, or even al-jezera too.
Much substance is lacking from the Daily Show, but Stewart plays an important role that unfortunately no one else is playing. (Olbermann does a little, but enough already with the Britney crap at the end!) There's a lot of stuff that happens in heavy politics that truly deserves ridicule. That must be ridiculed if we are to avoid making ridiculous collective decisions with disastrous consequences.
Most U.S. television viewers simply aren't exposed to BBC or Al-Jazeera. I've never seen the BBC offered as part of a basic cable package. (We used to get BBC America at our house, but it was part of Comcast's "premium" package which we dropped.) The same applies to Al-Jazeera. (The fact that it's also widely distrusted in the U.S. simply for being an Arabic news organization doesn't help.)
As for CNN, availability isn't as much of an issue- if you get Fox News, you usually get CNN too. Basically CNN is a Fox clone carefully marketed toward people who know they distrust Fox. It differs from Fox in its preference for subtle sins of omission rather than overt sins of commission, but they manage to frame the issues in the same way, and the average Fox viewer and the average CNN viewer are probably about as equally ill-informed even if their political alignments may differ.
There needs to be news sources similar to the Daily Show (besides the Daily Show) that at least present the news in a coherent context so you can quickly realize what is going on. Things happen every day that should make you hit the roof and that will affect you in the future. Most people simply don't have time to watch the hours of raw, undigested news coverage needed to recognize what these things are and to place them in a meaningful context. Especially when such an intense, subtle effort is made to present the facts themselves in a censored, cherry picked, confused, or distracting way. Or to summarize them in ways that make no sense, are irrelevant, or are designed to attract your attention to matters of no importance.
For example, I'd urge anyone to look at exactly how much oil the United States imports from Iraq. Touchy subject, I know, but this something that Americans should look up for themselves, as the sources are numerous and varied.
If you're just presented with an avalanche of acontextual information, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees, especially if you only see the news briefly after work and don't have time to devote to e.g. an analysis of oil imports that may even require statistical analysis, using information gathered from many different sources, some of which present misleading statistics. Say we import X barrels from Iraq. Is that a lot? What percentage of our oil imports is that? Is the percentage relevant? What would the effects be if those imports were disrupted? Would they incur costs that exceed those of the occupation itself? Who benefits? What underlies that number's importance? What if some sources report Y barrels? What accounts for the difference? Is someone averaging in barrels imported before the war, counting the same barrels twice, or including barrels that really came from Kuwait? Why would they do that? The majority of the public can't be figuring all these things out for themselves on all issues all the time, but they shouldn't have to. A public need is not being addressed here. So you see people so desperate they have to watch the Daily Show- which fulfills its legitimate role as a comedy show about current events, but that also makes a pathetic excuse for something that is seriously missing from American journalism.
That's because the entire DHS is a joke. Now you have me wondering if anyone is removing aluminum foil from their suitcase because of that post.
Sorry, I forgot the citation. Here you go!
I don't get my news from the Daily Show; it's just gratifying to hear someone on TV, pretending to report the news like they all do, who isn't lying to my face! Or pointing out when someone is lying! At least when they lie, it's clearly in the context of a joke!
And I always know, that if anyone on the TV is going to be the first to tell the truth about something, it's going to be the Daily Show. It's always the Daily Show. And that really pisses me off. I don't "watch it for the news". You can't get news from the TV anymore. And you talk to people who only get their news from the TV, like most people still do, and it's like being on another planet! They're completely brainwashed! Try to tell them what's going on, and it feels like you're screaming into the darkness!
I mean, I read this from the article:This isn't even true! I knew before the war, for example, that it was all premised on bullshit, maybe because I had an Internet connection? I forget how I knew; I just remember knowing a long time. I knew for at least a year beforehand. What am I, Nostradamus? I knew for at least a year that these people on TV were staring straight at us, carefully omitting things about Iraq that were true, saying things about it that weren't true, i.e. lying! How can they not know they're lying? I know they're lying! Lots of us knew they were lying! Lewis Black from the Daily Show knew they were lying! "I knew they didn't have weapons of mass destruction. How did I know that? I was just sitting on my fuckin' couch!" And then they wonder and bellyache about young people "getting their news from the Daily Show"!
Chuck Norris came along and bent the ruby rails into loops!
#!/usr/bin/huckabee
use CHUCK_NORRIS;
That's as far as I've gotten with my new language.
I've decided it will be statically typed. With Huckabee types, you know where everything stands.
Tin foil billfolds and passport covers are already being sold
Joke's on you... DHS is forbidding passengers to carry more than one square inch of tinfoil through security, or more than three square inches in checked luggage, because it could be crumpled up and fashioned into a weapon.
Dreams involving nudity always seem to involve cops, underage minors, icky relatives, or coworkers. They never happen at beaches, and the sort of people around whom you'd want to be naked are furiously absent. (Apparently no "training" is necessary for those situations.)
I had a great nightmare a few weeks ago. I was traveling somewhere with my wife, sitting at a pleasant outdoor cafe. My hands were developing hives or pimples or some sort of skin condition. So I said, "there's a pharmacy, let me go get some cream or lotion for this crap." It was one of those big chain pharmacies- I think it was a CVS. (Not the version control system, which has also appeared in nightmares.) My wife said she'd wait at the cafe, and I never saw her again. But during the rest of the dream, I "knew" she was waiting there.
The pharmacy morphed into a hospital as I approached. A doctor was lounging in the doorway. He was a composite of two real life characters: an internist who had given me an unpleasant procedure when I was in college, and a jewelry store owner in Cupertino where I had a watch fixed a few days before (he sits in front of his store like that, waiting for business). I showed him my hands and he led me upstairs, told me to strip, and wheeled me down a corridor in a wheelchair. Meanwhile this stuff had been spreading up my arms and appearing on any skin elsewhere that had been in contact. So I was trying to avoid touching anything.
We headed into a dingy wing of the hospital (think Jacob's Ladder ). As the wheelchair creaked down the hallway, more and more lights were flickering or burnt out. Rainwater was dripping from the ceiling and accumulating in puddles underneath. People were abandoned, crying from their beds, strapped to gurneys and convulsing, and the ceiling was starting to drip blood in places. We reached a room with a few empty cots, and he told me to wait there. Then he was gone.
So I was sitting and waiting on this cot, trying to avoid touching anything, but the inflammation was continuing to spread- on my feet, ankles, up my knees, and all around my waist. My face itched like hell and the skin on my hands and arms was completely burnt and peeling off. Sometimes faceless nurses wearing masks would walk by, and I'd call out, trying to get their attention (I still needed that lotion I was hoping to get at the pharmacy). Usually they ignored me. I got the attention of a few, but when they saw the disease they ran away in terror.
In came a crowd of second graders on a school trip. Two teachers were telling the kids to behave, and I quickly covered up my privates with my diseased filthy hands. (This had predictable dermatological results, but if I hadn't done it, MSNBC's Chris Hansen might have shown up. MSNBC pollutes my subconsciousness with that garbage whenever I don't pay attention after Olbermann's show is over.) I motioned to one of the teachers and whispered, "Pssst, do you really think it's a good idea to bring a bunch of little kids to a place like this on a school trip?"
"Oh don't worry- they have their permission slips signed," she says, "and besides, you look great... except for your skin condition." (She was right- I've been getting exercise recently.) Meanwhile the kids had formed a semicircle around me and were pointing and giggling, calling me a monster.
I got fed up with this pretty quickly and lunged at them with my arms in the air, yelling, "Oh yeah, you little brats? Well how would you like this pox!" They all laughed and squealed, "Ewwwww!" and ran off in every direction.
Then I woke up, surely prepared for something, but I'm not sure what.
Clausius definition of entropy:
dS=dQ/T
Q is the heat content (in units of energy) of the system, S is the entropy (the logarithm of the number of states available to the system) and T (or kT with constant included) is temperature (defined in units of energy).
S increases rapidly at low temperature. As things get hotter (increasing T) the entropy changes less and less as additional heat Q is applied. At infinite temperature S would approach some finite fixed value.
Generally by adding to Q you make more states available to a system. Atoms can suddenly twist, jerk, lose electrons, shine in X-ray light, etc. Ice can change state to water, or water can change state to steam. As you apply heat (Q) to a system the temperature T stalls when it reaches these points, since dS is so large. Melting and boiling both increase the disorder. As long as the system has a rising number of states to explore as it gets hotter, entropy keeps going up.
If there are only a finite number of states to explore, then you can actually reach a point where you pass maximum entropy and actually start to decrease the entropy of a system by adding more energy to it- if there are fewer available states at that energy. T switches from positive to negative infinity. As more energy is pumped in, the system is dominated by fewer and fewer high energy states. That's how a laser works; technically a population inversion has to be created in a laser where more atoms in a crystal are in an excited state than the corresponding ground state. If at least half of them aren't in the excited state the light won't make it out of the crystal. As you pump the laser past 50% the number of available states goes down (approaching a limit not reached in practicality where all atoms are in the excited state). So the concept of negative temperature would be useful for describing that system, in terms of those particular transitions.
So basically it's zero -> positive infinity/negative infinity -> -0 or "absolute hot" which is approaching a single most energetic state available. This is similar to absolute zero which approaches a single least energetic ground state. Except it's approaching zero from the other direction- it's more like "absolute minus zero".
In Honda's fields the poppies blow
Between us robots, row on row,
Left round the place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amongst us hunks below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
they made us far across the seas
Sold, and were shipped, and now we lie
In Honda's fields.
Take up your quarrel with your foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
A Warranty; yours to hold high
Once all us pricey robots die
Good for a month, though poppies grow
in Honda's fields.
You mean you're going to make me do a bounds check whenever I access an element from your giraffe type array?
At least put any new giraffes you find at the end- don't stick them in the middle or at the beginning.
How do you know what anyone like? Do you really have such a hard time to see if someone enjoy something or not? I feel sad for you and your broken brain in that case.
We're talking about what an imaginary creature might have instincts or drives for. Maybe it would never come to exist via natural selection, but Nature can support an organism that doesn't have motives or instincts similar to yours- or any animal that natural selection has produced. There is a combination of G, A, T, and C that will produce an organism with almost any attribute you can dream up- even any joke creature from any Douglas Adams book. The set of all possible creatures that can be DNA-encoded is larger than the set of creatures arrivable at by natural selection, which is itself larger than the set of existing creatures we actually see. You can't make assumptions about what's possible in the first set based on what you see in the smaller second or third sets (e.g. animals that generally try to survive). That was my whole point. If your imagination is too limited to get your head around that, it doesn't mean my brain is broken.