FISA allows them to do the wiretapping, and then get permission up to 72 hours later. How frivolous are their reasons that they can't even be arsed to get a retroactive warrant?
If there were demand for it, one could imagine that something like the Sea Dragon (which would have lift capacity of ~550 metric tons to LEO compared to ~25 metric tons for a Delta 4 Heavy) could be mass-produced.
Oh, don't be a wimp. How about this puppy which can lift 1,000 tons to orbit, is fully reusable, and has totally non-polluting exhaust! (Unless you're allergic to helium or something...)
No one makes us give away billions upon billions of dollars a year. NO ONE.
The average American voter, when asked, guesses that about 15% of our budget goes to non-military foreign aid, and thinks it should be closer to 5%. In reality, it's 0.01% percent. Just, y'know, to put things in perspective.
Of course, for every anecdote, there's an equal and opposite anecdote. I have a USB joystick. I have to plug it into a specific USB port on my Windows XP machine. If I plug it into any other port, it wants to reinstall the drivers. I've had the same behaviour with USB printers, too.
In your case, Ubuntu fails to properly handle a case where hardware is moved between boots. In my case, Windows fails to handle hotplug on an interface specifically designed for hotplug. Nyahh, nyaah.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". So far as I can see, every operating system runs into situations that require a 'guru'. My parents are running Ubuntu pretty happily, and while I have to do their tech support... well, I was doing that with Windows, too, and now I don't have to fret so much about malware. My wife got me a t-shirt for my birthday that says "No, I will not fix your computer." because of all the 'tech support' requests I get from family and friends. Of course, the vast majority of those were Windows. I'll still do Linux support, but Windows-using people are SOL unless they are immediate family members. I just don't have time for the rest.
It's funny how people claim that 'things are so different after 9/11, we can't afford all these civil rights.'
The Founding Fathers thought those rights were vital for a functioning democracy... and they had been through an actual war on U.S. soil. I'm inclined to trust their judgement on what we can 'afford'.
Yes, eventually, but not as the OP claimed with This might have been discovered earlier.
Actually, 'chmod' calls do tend to stand out. Anyone doing a security review of source code (and drivers do get that kind of attention) would note them.
I think one of the reasons this took a while to find is that it's so monumentally moronic no one would have believed anyone would actually try that. I'm still a bit dumbfounded, myself.
There can be such a thing as an honest and useful lawyer. A lawyer should take pride in creating a contract that clearly lays out the rights and responsibilities of both parties. There should be no vague language, and no grey areas left over.
Computer programmers have a hard enough time correctly and unambiguously specifying things (in languages designed not be ambiguous) to an interpreter that is merely indifferent and literal - a computer. It's possible that TeX is (now) bug-free, but I'm not aware of any significant program that hasn't had its share of bugs.
Lawyers have an even more difficult job. They have to specify things in inherently ambiguous natural languages[1] and the interpreters of their specifications can be, and frequently are, actively hostile to their intent.
I'm not saying that the general legal code couldn't be (heavily) cleaned up. (How about, for example, that for any law, ten randomly-selected people have to read it and summarize its effect in their own words? If at least 60% can't agree on what the law means, the law has to be rewritten to be less confusing.) But holding lawyers to a higher standard than programmers isn't helpful.
[1] One reason why legalese is so confusing to the layperson is that it has evolved away from normal language, and words have taken on different meanings. This helps to limit the ambiguity, at the cost of making much legalese unintelligible to people untrained in the lingo.
Single-sided, POSIX comes out to less than 16 feet,.NET System to 40 feet.
Actually, I checked today. It's double-sided, but the binders themselves add thickness. An unbound set comes out to ~8 inches, and that works out to (8.5*11)/(3*5)*(2*8 inches/12 inches per foot) or ~8.3 feet of 3.5 cards, or about 1/5 of.NET. (And about three feet of POSIX would be devoted to the introduction, definitions, utilities (like tar, compress, vi, and such), and rationales.)
And.NET System contains System.Windows.Forms (i.e. pretty much everything you need for a GUI app in Windows), it includes an XML parser, it includes all kinds of web libraries.
As I've pointed out, the POSIX spec covers pretty much an entire operating system and environment with attendant utilities sufficient to run a business on. But you're right, I wasn't correct regarding what.NET "System" contained, so the comparison is not entirely fair.
So, let's even it up. Add another 6 feet to POSIX for the GUI stuff. Now POSIX+GTK (thoroughly documented) comes out to ~14.5 feet, or just over 1/3 of a sketchily-documented.NET.
Of course the metric here isn't totally scientific. But we know that Windows is just more complex than Linux or other POSIX-style systems. My overarching point was... let's see, what was it again... ah, yes, here it is:
"The Windows API is huge, complex, only occasionally and accidentally orthogonal, and in my experience mostly very poorly documented. I'm not the only one who thinks so... The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone all of them."
The comparison was also between the.NET api printed on 3x5 note cards, and between POSIX printed 8.5x11 paper (double or single sided?)
Single-sided, POSIX comes out to less than 16 feet,.NET System to 40 feet. (Check my math.) And, again, the POSIX spec contains a lot more than just the kernel interface, and includes commentary and design rationales.
Oh, and the programming paradigms are vastly different as well.
I think we're in violent agreement there. And I didn't say POSIX was perfect, just much easier to develop for. For example of the problems, see here.
Gee, I didn't think I was that unclear. You're the second person to miss that I wasn't comparing all of POSIX to all of the Windows API. I was comparing all of POSIX to just the operating system part of the Windows.NET API. Again: "Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System..." I mean, don't you realize that.NET contains way more than that?
Try writing a significant program using ONLY POSIX APIs. Once you are done writing all the libraries you need to do any real work for a project of any significance, then tell me what the documentation story looks like.
Um, the comparison was more than fair. It compared the.NET SYSTEM stuff to the POSIX spec. To re-quote: "Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System..." I mean, doesn't.NET consist of more than an interface to the operating system?
So, are you going to write a significant Windows app with only MSCORLIB.DLL and the "assemblies that begin with the word System"? I'll quote someone else: "Once you are done writing all the libraries you need to do any real work for a project of any significance, then tell me what the documentation story looks like."
One of the reasons that Windows has the kind of IDE and debugger
support that it 'enjoys' is because it needs it. Developing for
Windows is nearly unmanageable without that kind of support. The
Windows API is huge, complex, only occasionally and accidentally
orthogonal, and in my experience mostly very poorly documented.
I'm not the only one who thinks so:
"Today we are ready for the official release of the.NET Framework 2.0.
Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word
System, we have over 5,000 public classes that include over 45,000
public methods and 15,000 public properties, not counting those methods
and properties that are inherited and not overridden. A book that simply
listed the names, return values, and arguments of these methods and
properties, one per line, would be about a thousand pages long.
If you wrote each of those 60,000 properties and methods on a 3-by-5
index card with a little description of what it did, you'd have a stack
that totaled 40 feet."
Meanwhile, the entire POSIX spec, suitable for fully implementing a
POSIX system including the utility apps, with commentary and
rationales for design decisions, fits in about two and a half feet of
binders.
Intellisense is practically mandated if you want to work with an
interface as baroque as Win32. And it's nice even when you're working
with your own defined classes and structures. But it has its own
drawbacks, as Petzold notes:
"For example, suppose you're typing some code and you decide you need a
variable named id, and instead of defining it first, you start typing a
statement that begins with id and a space. I always type a space between
my variable and the equals sign. Because id is not defined anywhere,
IntelliSense will find something that begins with those two letters that
is syntactically correct in accordance with the references, namespaces,
and context of your code. In my particular case, IntelliSense decided
that I really wanted to define a variable of interface type
IDataGridColumnStyleEditingNotificationService, an interface I've never
had occasion to use."
I develop for many platforms at work. It's a core part of my job. I
mostly enjoy writing code for Unixish platforms, and tolerate the
Windows stuff. The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if
any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few
interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone
all of them.
I've rarely felt the need for more debugging support than Linux comes
with. The problems tend to be simpler and more easily uncovered. Eclipse
is nice, and appears to take many of the good things about Visual Studio
and leave much of the bad behind. For some projects, it's very useful.
For others, it's overkill.
Another item worth reading - the whole book, really - is The Art Of Unix Programming. For a Windows developer's perspective on the book, see here. Needless to say, I don't agree with everything he writes there, but you might find it interesting.
'd go so far as to say that the original Star Wars series (4-6) will stand up better than the newer series because the limitations of the day forced them to use more "real" models, rather than quickly dated CG.
John Carpenter's "The Thing" holds up surprisingly well today, too, because it used models and makeup for nearly everything. The few short bits of stop-motion or reverse-motion stand out very clearly, especially to modern eyes used to CG stuff, but the rest looks much more realistic.
Still not what I wrote. I'm not at all convinced by your link that these weren't under FISA's jurisdiction (and neither are they, given that they are literally claiming that the president can violate laws at his discretion) (and even beyond that, let's face it, how ridiculously frivolous do these taps have to be that they can't be arsed to get retroactive permission three days later?), but that's irrelevant to the point I was making.
There is a big political controversy over this program.
This administration has shown no reluctance to leak information to score political points.
But there have been no leaks of successful uses of this program to thwart actual terrorist plots.
Well, Science is claiming that a fire in some building corrupted the accuracy of the shroud of torine and it isn't as old as once thought.
Um... no. Actually, the opposite. Carbon dating showed that the 'shroud' dated to the 14th century. Some people (not scientists) argued that a fire in the 16th century infused the shroud with carbon soot that confused the date. However, "Science" sure as hell doesn't say that:
(BTW, you claimed that some oil field or another was found with "young earth theories". I'm very interested in actual documentation about this - do you have any?)
Our knowledge is vast, but compared to the infinity of space, insignificant.
The essential thing, the key differentiator between religion and science, is the postulation of the supernatural, something fundamentally and forever beyond human ken.
My favorite quote about this, from Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light": "It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy - it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."
Are there a lot of things we don't know? Of course. Does that mean there's any reason to assume that there are things we cannot know? Certainly not. Look at things like lightning, or healing and reproduction. Knowledge of electricity cleared up the former, and the latter is now comprehensible thanks to molecular biology. But both were confidently asserted to be 'supernatural' and forever inexplicable...
There are people finding and using young earth theories and making some significant geological finds. The last oil field we found was done so using the same.
Cites, please. Who's "we" and what was found and why did "young earth theories" predict it would be there (and for bonus points, why wouldn't 'mainstream' geology have predicted the same thing)?
In my opinion if no one has seen it happen it takes just as much faith to believe one or the other.
Here's some evidence for evolution you can check on your very own body. Lay your
fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the
very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear
canal.
Now, inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus,
incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound
energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How
could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been
cited, even, as evidence for 'design' by "yokels" - just Google around
a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids
had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent
lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a
basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of
those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Note that
intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or
optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but
didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with
that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating
celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
The whitehouse did not leak the wiretapping, it was Democrats in congress who were briefed about it.
Not what I wrote. Now that it's out, the "whitehouse" would want to justify it, and they've shown no hesitation about trumpeting even highly questionable 'thwarted plots' in the past (e.g. Padilla's alleged 'dirty bomb' plots?), but (again, as I wrote) standard police work broke all of the recent 'terrorist plots'.
And besides, they are no dumb enough to think that lefties are going to give them any credit...
Um... again, you misunderstand. Such a leak wouldn't be meant to convince committed civil libertarians (and note that there's plenty of those on the right, too; even Orrin Hatch has real problems with the suspension of Habeas Corpus, etc.) but instead the public at large.
Besides, remember what's actually going on here. The FISA court has only denied maybe six out of tens of thousands of warrants. And the rules allow up to 72 hours of monitoring before getting a retroactive warrant. That's the scheme that's too bogged down in red tape to get work done?
The more I think we seriously need to consider "weeding out the population" of all the dumb shits too stupid to accept fact...
Would that it were that simple. It's not. Humans don't naturally think in a scientific way. Doing it is hard. Even scientists who train for years have a hard time at at, and usually can only do it within the specific field they've trained in.
Of course, we can dream. And once it was thought that universal literacy was an impossible pipe dream... I can hope for universal scientific literacy.
Slashdot Mirror
FISA allows them to do the wiretapping, and then get permission up to 72 hours later. How frivolous are their reasons that they can't even be arsed to get a retroactive warrant?
Oh, don't be a wimp. How about this puppy which can lift 1,000 tons to orbit, is fully reusable, and has totally non-polluting exhaust! (Unless you're allergic to helium or something...)
The average American voter, when asked, guesses that about 15% of our budget goes to non-military foreign aid, and thinks it should be closer to 5%. In reality, it's 0.01% percent. Just, y'know, to put things in perspective.
It becomes a lot less expensive if there's a cheaper way to get stuff to orbit. Something like this.
In your case, Ubuntu fails to properly handle a case where hardware is moved between boots. In my case, Windows fails to handle hotplug on an interface specifically designed for hotplug. Nyahh, nyaah.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". So far as I can see, every operating system runs into situations that require a 'guru'. My parents are running Ubuntu pretty happily, and while I have to do their tech support... well, I was doing that with Windows, too, and now I don't have to fret so much about malware. My wife got me a t-shirt for my birthday that says "No, I will not fix your computer." because of all the 'tech support' requests I get from family and friends. Of course, the vast majority of those were Windows. I'll still do Linux support, but Windows-using people are SOL unless they are immediate family members. I just don't have time for the rest.
Which 'emergency' did Bush cite in this order again?
The Founding Fathers thought those rights were vital for a functioning democracy... and they had been through an actual war on U.S. soil. I'm inclined to trust their judgement on what we can 'afford'.
Actually, 'chmod' calls do tend to stand out. Anyone doing a security review of source code (and drivers do get that kind of attention) would note them.
I think one of the reasons this took a while to find is that it's so monumentally moronic no one would have believed anyone would actually try that. I'm still a bit dumbfounded, myself.
Apparently someone did... else we would not be reading this story.
Computer programmers have a hard enough time correctly and unambiguously specifying things (in languages designed not be ambiguous) to an interpreter that is merely indifferent and literal - a computer. It's possible that TeX is (now) bug-free, but I'm not aware of any significant program that hasn't had its share of bugs.
Lawyers have an even more difficult job. They have to specify things in inherently ambiguous natural languages[1] and the interpreters of their specifications can be, and frequently are, actively hostile to their intent.
I'm not saying that the general legal code couldn't be (heavily) cleaned up. (How about, for example, that for any law, ten randomly-selected people have to read it and summarize its effect in their own words? If at least 60% can't agree on what the law means, the law has to be rewritten to be less confusing.) But holding lawyers to a higher standard than programmers isn't helpful.
[1] One reason why legalese is so confusing to the layperson is that it has evolved away from normal language, and words have taken on different meanings. This helps to limit the ambiguity, at the cost of making much legalese unintelligible to people untrained in the lingo.
Actually, I checked today. It's double-sided, but the binders themselves add thickness. An unbound set comes out to ~8 inches, and that works out to (8.5*11)/(3*5)*(2*8 inches/12 inches per foot) or ~8.3 feet of 3.5 cards, or about 1/5 of .NET. (And about three feet of POSIX would be devoted to the introduction, definitions, utilities (like tar, compress, vi, and such), and rationales.)
As I've pointed out, the POSIX spec covers pretty much an entire operating system and environment with attendant utilities sufficient to run a business on. But you're right, I wasn't correct regarding what .NET "System" contained, so the comparison is not entirely fair.
So, let's even it up. Add another 6 feet to POSIX for the GUI stuff. Now POSIX+GTK (thoroughly documented) comes out to ~14.5 feet, or just over 1/3 of a sketchily-documented .NET.
Of course the metric here isn't totally scientific. But we know that Windows is just more complex than Linux or other POSIX-style systems. My overarching point was... let's see, what was it again... ah, yes, here it is:
"The Windows API is huge, complex, only occasionally and accidentally orthogonal, and in my experience mostly very poorly documented. I'm not the only one who thinks so... The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone all of them."
Single-sided, POSIX comes out to less than 16 feet, .NET System to 40 feet. (Check my math.) And, again, the POSIX spec contains a lot more than just the kernel interface, and includes commentary and design rationales.
I think we're in violent agreement there. And I didn't say POSIX was perfect, just much easier to develop for. For example of the problems, see here.
Gee, I didn't think I was that unclear. You're the second person to miss that I wasn't comparing all of POSIX to all of the Windows API. I was comparing all of POSIX to just the operating system part of the Windows .NET API. Again: "Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System..." I mean, don't you realize that .NET contains way more than that?
You really do need to read The Art Of Unix Programming, don't you?
Um, the comparison was more than fair. It compared the .NET SYSTEM stuff to the POSIX spec. To re-quote: "Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System..." I mean, doesn't .NET consist of more than an interface to the operating system?
So, are you going to write a significant Windows app with only MSCORLIB.DLL and the "assemblies that begin with the word System"? I'll quote someone else: "Once you are done writing all the libraries you need to do any real work for a project of any significance, then tell me what the documentation story looks like."
Meanwhile, the entire POSIX spec, suitable for fully implementing a POSIX system including the utility apps, with commentary and rationales for design decisions, fits in about two and a half feet of binders.
Intellisense is practically mandated if you want to work with an interface as baroque as Win32. And it's nice even when you're working with your own defined classes and structures. But it has its own drawbacks, as Petzold notes:
I develop for many platforms at work. It's a core part of my job. I mostly enjoy writing code for Unixish platforms, and tolerate the Windows stuff. The APIs on Unix are small, well-thought-out, have few if any side effects, and tend to be thoroughly documented. I find very few interfaces on Windows have even a majority of these traits, let alone all of them.
I've rarely felt the need for more debugging support than Linux comes with. The problems tend to be simpler and more easily uncovered. Eclipse is nice, and appears to take many of the good things about Visual Studio and leave much of the bad behind. For some projects, it's very useful. For others, it's overkill.
Another item worth reading - the whole book, really - is The Art Of Unix Programming. For a Windows developer's perspective on the book, see here. Needless to say, I don't agree with everything he writes there, but you might find it interesting.
John Carpenter's "The Thing" holds up surprisingly well today, too, because it used models and makeup for nearly everything. The few short bits of stop-motion or reverse-motion stand out very clearly, especially to modern eyes used to CG stuff, but the rest looks much more realistic.
Still not what I wrote. I'm not at all convinced by your link that these weren't under FISA's jurisdiction (and neither are they, given that they are literally claiming that the president can violate laws at his discretion) (and even beyond that, let's face it, how ridiculously frivolous do these taps have to be that they can't be arsed to get retroactive permission three days later?), but that's irrelevant to the point I was making.
- There is a big political controversy over this program.
- This administration has shown no reluctance to leak information to score political points.
- But there have been no leaks of successful uses of this program to thwart actual terrorist plots.
What can we reasonably conclude from this?Um... no. Actually, the opposite. Carbon dating showed that the 'shroud' dated to the 14th century. Some people (not scientists) argued that a fire in the 16th century infused the shroud with carbon soot that confused the date. However, "Science" sure as hell doesn't say that:
A weight of 20th century carbon equaling nearly two times the weight of the Shroud carbon itself would be required to change a 1st century date to the 14th century (see Carbon 14 graph). Besides this, the linen cloth samples were very carefully cleaned before analysis at each of the C-dating laboratories."
(BTW, you claimed that some oil field or another was found with "young earth theories". I'm very interested in actual documentation about this - do you have any?)
The essential thing, the key differentiator between religion and science, is the postulation of the supernatural, something fundamentally and forever beyond human ken.
My favorite quote about this, from Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light": "It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy - it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."
Are there a lot of things we don't know? Of course. Does that mean there's any reason to assume that there are things we cannot know? Certainly not. Look at things like lightning, or healing and reproduction. Knowledge of electricity cleared up the former, and the latter is now comprehensible thanks to molecular biology. But both were confidently asserted to be 'supernatural' and forever inexplicable...
Cites, please. Who's "we" and what was found and why did "young earth theories" predict it would be there (and for bonus points, why wouldn't 'mainstream' geology have predicted the same thing)?
Here's some evidence for evolution you can check on your very own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal.
Now, inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as evidence for 'design' by "yokels" - just Google around a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
Seriously, try to hip yourself as to why scientists in the 1800s (commited young-Earth types, every one) were forced by the evidence to believe in an old Earth and species changing.
And in case anyone's wondering, here's why that's flatout wrong.
Not what I wrote. Now that it's out, the "whitehouse" would want to justify it, and they've shown no hesitation about trumpeting even highly questionable 'thwarted plots' in the past (e.g. Padilla's alleged 'dirty bomb' plots?), but (again, as I wrote) standard police work broke all of the recent 'terrorist plots'.
Um... again, you misunderstand. Such a leak wouldn't be meant to convince committed civil libertarians (and note that there's plenty of those on the right, too; even Orrin Hatch has real problems with the suspension of Habeas Corpus, etc.) but instead the public at large.
Besides, remember what's actually going on here. The FISA court has only denied maybe six out of tens of thousands of warrants. And the rules allow up to 72 hours of monitoring before getting a retroactive warrant. That's the scheme that's too bogged down in red tape to get work done?
Would that it were that simple. It's not. Humans don't naturally think in a scientific way. Doing it is hard. Even scientists who train for years have a hard time at at, and usually can only do it within the specific field they've trained in.
Of course, we can dream. And once it was thought that universal literacy was an impossible pipe dream... I can hope for universal scientific literacy.