A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up--absent any trace of who was behind them--viciously attacking See and his family.
Yup, anonymously attack his own client, so that people assume the opponents are doing it, making them look bad. This actually happens.
wouldn't the detection scheme described in the article... be easy to fool by masking the explosive with another substance that also photoluminesces at 705-nm?
Very good point. Throwing more CPU at the problem, and analyzing the spectra in greater detail might be able to get around that. (For example, perhaps the peak at 705nm would be higher than the other wavelengths near it.)
From TFA:"Our initial results tell us that ours is an evolutionarily stable strategy -- if we start off with a reasonable number of our colluders in the system, in the end everyone will be a colluder like ours," he said.
It's not clear to me how the entries determined who would be the 'master' and who would be the 'slave'. It seems that if you had lots of 'colluders' around who could be induced to 'suicide' for another's benefit, you'd very quickly get cheaters who worked to be the 'master' in all situations.
This strikes me as a lot more reminiscient of the Hawk/Dove situation.
And if you don't believe in souls the entire question is moot.
It's precisely because I don't believe in magic, unknowable 'souls' that I think that a functioning brain is a necessary hallmark of, for want of a better word, 'personhood'.
Consciousness, self-awareness, depends critically on the brain. Damage to the brain damages consciousnes (go read an Oliver Sacks book to learn about some of the truly bizzarre consequences of brain damage). If there is such a thing as a soul, I don't know what it could possibly do of any importance.
We don't know how the brain gives rise to consciousness, but we do know it does. (A caveman might not understand a car, but he could see that removing the engine made it stop moving.) Until a brain is formed, I don't think an embryo is a person.
How much brain is needed before it's conscious? I dunno. One brain cell isn't enough, by nine months it's definitely enough. I'm squeamish, though, and I'd put the limit at about one month, until someone can prove that that's below the (doubtless fuzzy) line. Before that time, I think only the mother's rights are involved. After that point, I think you need to take under serious consideration the rights of the person inside her.
(You don't force someone to risk their lives for another. When there's a risk to the life of the mother, I think it should be up to her.)
(I don't think a brain is a necessary condition for consciousness; I think we'll build self-aware computers someday. But it's certainly a sufficient condition.)
There is enough and more space in the world. It's just our cities which are crowded. Next time, take a drive around to the wilderness and outlands a few miles off your city and you'd notice how much free space is out there.
Well, people take up more space than just where they live. There's all the land you need to feed them, for one. With current technology, you'd need about four or five Earths to let the current six billion people all live like Americans.
Now, I do want long long life. But I see no reason to restrict our population to just the surface of the Earth...
Add in the ability to link different pieces of data (so if I have an appointment with somebody I can tap that person's name to bring up their contact info...
It doesn't work on PalmOS 5 or above, but there's this hack called MegaWiki that does all that linking. Very neat, though it's not as seamless as if it were built into the OS.
In addition to all the other uses listed (calendar, reference info, passwords, games, music, GPS, web & mail, etc.) there are two other uses I haven't seen mentioned.
First, I keep a diary on mine. I'd been keeping a diary for several years on little pads of paper, but a paper diary is rather inconvenient for searching. If I want to remember what the name of that bed and breakfast we stayed at a couple years back was, I can find it in seconds. Paper diaries are also much harder to encrypt, if you're worried about snoopers.
Second, a real geek use - I like to program. I have three languages on my PDA - C, Scheme, and Forth. I can write small apps, test out algorithms, and even learn new languages, no matter where I am. I have the full ANSI C spec, as well as tutorials for both Scheme and Forth on an expansion card and can study them at my leisure.
Look up something like Tierra and actually play with it. (I wrote a simpler variant that displays the same behavior). Open-ended evolution that develops new behavior. The 'organisms' I evolved quickly developed ways of using the opcodes I provided that never occurred to me.
OpenSSH is da bomb, and no mistake. The people who work on it are very, very good, and its marketshare is deserved.
But even they have made mistakes once in a while. An exploitable hole in ssh is a worm-writer's dream. There aren't many sshds that aren't running as root...
I'm kinda glad there are things like lsh out there. Diversity makes the bad guys' job harder.
A few dacades back, some paelontologists thought the dinosaurs were killed by plagues that the little mammals were fortuitously immune from. That theory has fallen into disfavor, but I wonder these days if that pattern might actually play out with Windows vs. Linux/Mac/etc.
Now that there's (at least apparently) a viable business model for cracking machines, I think maybe Windows, which is fundamentally unsecurable partly by design and partly by historical practice Microsoft can't/won't break from, will just get overwhelmed. Certainly most of the home Widnows computers I run into have at least one spyware infection, and some are so infested as to be unusable.
Of course, in nature the really virulent pathogens tend to evolve into less nasty forms - killing off all your hosts is not a good long-term strategy. The spyware and zombie bots might become less overtly intrusive and more 'asymptomatic'. Imagine the future of computing... most computers carry some 'viral load' more or less constantly... [shudder].
I don't think anyone is arguing that consciousness exists that early. Why is consciousness the arbiter of life, though?
It's not the arbiter of life, it's the arbiter of personhood. A bacterium is alive, but is not a person and doesn't get the same rights (and responsibilities).
Are you not alive when you sleep? Perhaps you argue that a sleeping man will wake up--but a man in a coma may not; is he not alive? Perhaps you argue that the man in the coma was once conscious--I don't see that there is any mystical life-endowing property to having once been awake.
I'd say that someone in a permanent vegetative state is, indeed, a living organism, but not a person. I don't see any contradiction there.
Now, as to embryos and such - as I've posted before: no brain, no consciousness. I don't know how much brain is needed before one becomes a conscious person, and as you note I doubt a hard and fast rule can exist, but zero brain is definitely not enough to support consciousness. Hence I'm not terribly troubled by abortions before about the fourth week.
After that... I dunno. We don't know enough to say what the minimum amount of brain matter is to be conscious. (At a guess, I'd say probably not before the third month, but that's just a hunch.) I'd err on the side of caution there.
[N]o argument I know of which justifies treating an embryo as less alive than a foetus, or a foetus less alive than an infant, cannot also be used to justify treating an infant as less alive than a child, or a child as less alive than an adult.
I just gave you one. Infants and children (and fetuses, based on what I guess your definition is) have brains; embryos (again using probably-not-fully-medically-accurate definitions) don't.
Here's a test for you - let's say I replace all of your wife's body with a mechanical support system, but keep her brain alive and functioning. Is she still alive? What if I do the inverse - leave all her body intact, and just replace the brain with a hypothetical computer that can exactly mimic her behavior. Is she still alive? I think you can guess my answers to those questions...
D. Gareth Jones... asks what neurological reasons there might be for concluding that an incapacity for consciousness becomes a capacity for consciousness once this point is passed... it has yet to be provided with a firm biological base.
Ummm... damage to the brain damages consciousness. Do a google search on hemisphere inattention("hemisphere neglect"). Or "Wernicke's aphasia". Or just go read an Oliver Sacks book like "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" or "An Anthropologist On Mars". Whatever consciousness is (in humans at least), it needs a brain to exist. If you can show me a conscious individual that does not possess a brain, then I'll change my tune.
Now, the brain doesn't even start to form in an embryo before about four weeks. I don't know when there's "enough" brain to be conscious, but I feel confident in saying that there's no consciousness when there's no brain. And if there's no consciousness, then there's no person. In the case of an embryo there's a potential person, but not an actual person.
I'd actually go farther in many cases; for example, I think it's perfectly justified to take an anencephalic baby and harvest its organs for transplantation. Tragic but perfectly justifiable. (I'd also understand if the parents chose not to do so.)
As for the war, we were attacked... And no, I do not in any way believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11...
I take it I'm the only one who sees the inconsistency here.
But I do believe [Saddam Hussein] was a force of instability in a dangerously unstable region... For a very long time, the U.S. did not respond in any significant and effective way to any of this.
I'm getting tired of writing this over and over again.
...it would leave us in that part of the region as having done a lot of damage and then cut and run before repairing it.
I was in Ireland a couple months ago; the campaign commercials were much longer, and clearly subsidized. I'm not sure I'd want a BBC-style organization for the airwaves in the US, but I acknowledge that there is a tradeoff.
How muc[sic] WMD must be found to convice[sic] a Bush-hating liberal? I bet you could never find enough.
That's actually sort of true. I wasn't terribly worried about Saddam having non-nuclear WMDs.
Here's why.
The US military also deposed one of the world's terrible dictators. That alone should have been reason enough to justify military action.
Okay, which thugocracy should we go after next? Can you even name one of the ones in the Middle East, or Africa, or even South America? Personally, I think we should have stuck to rebuilding Afghanistan from the thugocracy we'd already overthrown, but nobody even remembers them anymore.
Would you rather fight the war in NYC?
The whole point is that Saddam wasn't going to invade the US. Please, please, come up with any kind of scenario (I won't even ask you to come up with a plausible one) that has Iraqi tanks rolling down Wall Street.
And if you read enough about Iraq trying to get nuclear weapons, there is a substantial back story that may indicate they were looking into African uranium. I really don't know.
Re:Things a 'portable' should be able to do:
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
Mine meets everything on your list except 3, 6, and 7 (but see below on 6&7). Unfortunately, it's discontinued so the only option is something like eBay. My Handera 330 has two expansion slots (CF and SD), so I can have a CF wifi card in at the same time as I'm running apps off of an SD card.
Greyscale screen, 33MHz 68k processor, 8MB RAM. But Palm apps are tiny; I haven't even begun to fill my 128MB SD card. SSH is slow to start up, but acceptable. VNC takes some work but is usable over wifi.
Add in a portable folding keyboard (no PS/2 socket, but good enough), a clip-on GPS, and an IRDA link to my cell phone, and it's quite a usable little machine. The screen and CPU aren't as sexy as the new models (no chance for running Quake on this baby) but mine goes a month between battery changes, and I use it a lot.
Exchange is kinda tough, I admit. MS hasn't been exactly forthcoming with all the specs on that one, and the protocols are baroque enough that even they haven't been able to fully set it up with WinCE.
If possible, use a different httpd
on
Hardening Apache
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Apache is nice, and Apache is popular, but the simple fact that it's popular means that it attracts attention. If you don't need a module that's specifically for Apache, you can use a different webserver package (take a look at Freshmeat, there's a bunch) and you gain some security through obscurity.
Now, you still have to learn how to set up that package right, and keep up on updates, but diversity is a nice thing. Even if you just move some files (e.g. static content like images) off onto a side server, there's less to secure on the Apache box, so it's usually simpler.
The most I can see that he might conceivably have done is intentionally access[ed] a computer without authorization or exceed[ed] authorized access, and thereby obtain[ed]... information from any department or agency of the United States; or
information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication.
If he wasn't actually hacking a bank, though, it doesn't seem like he could violate a "protected computer". It seems doubtful that he "exceeded his authorized access" (a librarian would presumably be the authority on that, not a police officer). Perhaps he could have asked the librarians at that point.
And even so, unless he visited the DMV website or something he didn't "obtain information from a government agency" anyway.
There's no way sitting outside the library while in possession of an operational laptop could violate this law.
Emacs, as compared to word, is an example where the availability of a large number of features does not make the programming task extra-complex.
Exactly! Making things modular, and limited to single operations with no side effects, allows you think about how they interact far more easily, in no small part because it makes the actual interactions fewer.
You condemn Kerry, too, right? He voted for the Patriot Act...
He earns some contempt for going along with all the other sheep in Congress (with the sole exception of Russell Feingold) voting for it when the administration rammed it through in the wake of 9/11, sure.
Not nearly as much as Ashcroft gets for drafting the damned thing, much less pushing PATRIOT II. And, of course, Bush appointed the schmuck and pushed for the act, so on this one Kerry's less wrong, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what's wrong with that.
(First movie I remember that had every special effect except one in the trailer. Not the last, of course...)
My favorite:
Yup, anonymously attack his own client, so that people assume the opponents are doing it, making them look bad. This actually happens.
Very good point. Throwing more CPU at the problem, and analyzing the spectra in greater detail might be able to get around that. (For example, perhaps the peak at 705nm would be higher than the other wavelengths near it.)
They already have the night-vision goggles. Might only work for detection at night, but that's better than the current status quo...
It's not clear to me how the entries determined who would be the 'master' and who would be the 'slave'. It seems that if you had lots of 'colluders' around who could be induced to 'suicide' for another's benefit, you'd very quickly get cheaters who worked to be the 'master' in all situations.
This strikes me as a lot more reminiscient of the Hawk/Dove situation.
It's precisely because I don't believe in magic, unknowable 'souls' that I think that a functioning brain is a necessary hallmark of, for want of a better word, 'personhood'.
Consciousness, self-awareness, depends critically on the brain. Damage to the brain damages consciousnes (go read an Oliver Sacks book to learn about some of the truly bizzarre consequences of brain damage). If there is such a thing as a soul, I don't know what it could possibly do of any importance.
We don't know how the brain gives rise to consciousness, but we do know it does. (A caveman might not understand a car, but he could see that removing the engine made it stop moving.) Until a brain is formed, I don't think an embryo is a person.
How much brain is needed before it's conscious? I dunno. One brain cell isn't enough, by nine months it's definitely enough. I'm squeamish, though, and I'd put the limit at about one month, until someone can prove that that's below the (doubtless fuzzy) line. Before that time, I think only the mother's rights are involved. After that point, I think you need to take under serious consideration the rights of the person inside her.
(You don't force someone to risk their lives for another. When there's a risk to the life of the mother, I think it should be up to her.)
(I don't think a brain is a necessary condition for consciousness; I think we'll build self-aware computers someday. But it's certainly a sufficient condition.)
Well, people take up more space than just where they live. There's all the land you need to feed them, for one. With current technology, you'd need about four or five Earths to let the current six billion people all live like Americans.
Now, I do want long long life. But I see no reason to restrict our population to just the surface of the Earth...
It doesn't work on PalmOS 5 or above, but there's this hack called MegaWiki that does all that linking. Very neat, though it's not as seamless as if it were built into the OS.
First, I keep a diary on mine. I'd been keeping a diary for several years on little pads of paper, but a paper diary is rather inconvenient for searching. If I want to remember what the name of that bed and breakfast we stayed at a couple years back was, I can find it in seconds. Paper diaries are also much harder to encrypt, if you're worried about snoopers.
Second, a real geek use - I like to program. I have three languages on my PDA - C, Scheme, and Forth. I can write small apps, test out algorithms, and even learn new languages, no matter where I am. I have the full ANSI C spec, as well as tutorials for both Scheme and Forth on an expansion card and can study them at my leisure.
Look up something like Tierra and actually play with it. (I wrote a simpler variant that displays the same behavior). Open-ended evolution that develops new behavior. The 'organisms' I evolved quickly developed ways of using the opcodes I provided that never occurred to me.
But even they have made mistakes once in a while. An exploitable hole in ssh is a worm-writer's dream. There aren't many sshds that aren't running as root...
I'm kinda glad there are things like lsh out there. Diversity makes the bad guys' job harder.
I lost my faith when I heard they were making "Mannequin 2".
Now that there's (at least apparently) a viable business model for cracking machines, I think maybe Windows, which is fundamentally unsecurable partly by design and partly by historical practice Microsoft can't/won't break from, will just get overwhelmed. Certainly most of the home Widnows computers I run into have at least one spyware infection, and some are so infested as to be unusable.
Of course, in nature the really virulent pathogens tend to evolve into less nasty forms - killing off all your hosts is not a good long-term strategy. The spyware and zombie bots might become less overtly intrusive and more 'asymptomatic'. Imagine the future of computing... most computers carry some 'viral load' more or less constantly... [shudder].
Now, as to embryos and such - as I've posted before: no brain, no consciousness. I don't know how much brain is needed before one becomes a conscious person, and as you note I doubt a hard and fast rule can exist, but zero brain is definitely not enough to support consciousness. Hence I'm not terribly troubled by abortions before about the fourth week.
After that... I dunno. We don't know enough to say what the minimum amount of brain matter is to be conscious. (At a guess, I'd say probably not before the third month, but that's just a hunch.) I'd err on the side of caution there.
I just gave you one. Infants and children (and fetuses, based on what I guess your definition is) have brains; embryos (again using probably-not-fully-medically-accurate definitions) don't.
Here's a test for you - let's say I replace all of your wife's body with a mechanical support system, but keep her brain alive and functioning. Is she still alive? What if I do the inverse - leave all her body intact, and just replace the brain with a hypothetical computer that can exactly mimic her behavior. Is she still alive? I think you can guess my answers to those questions...
Ummm... damage to the brain damages consciousness. Do a google search on hemisphere inattention("hemisphere neglect"). Or "Wernicke's aphasia". Or just go read an Oliver Sacks book like "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" or "An Anthropologist On Mars". Whatever consciousness is (in humans at least), it needs a brain to exist. If you can show me a conscious individual that does not possess a brain, then I'll change my tune.
Now, the brain doesn't even start to form in an embryo before about four weeks. I don't know when there's "enough" brain to be conscious, but I feel confident in saying that there's no consciousness when there's no brain. And if there's no consciousness, then there's no person. In the case of an embryo there's a potential person, but not an actual person.
I'd actually go farther in many cases; for example, I think it's perfectly justified to take an anencephalic baby and harvest its organs for transplantation. Tragic but perfectly justifiable. (I'd also understand if the parents chose not to do so.)
I take it I'm the only one who sees the inconsistency here.
But I do believe [Saddam Hussein] was a force of instability in a dangerously unstable region... For a very long time, the U.S. did not respond in any significant and effective way to any of this.
I'm getting tired of writing this over and over again.
Unlike Afghanistan, right?
I was in Ireland a couple months ago; the campaign commercials were much longer, and clearly subsidized. I'm not sure I'd want a BBC-style organization for the airwaves in the US, but I acknowledge that there is a tradeoff.
That's actually sort of true. I wasn't terribly worried about Saddam having non-nuclear WMDs. Here's why.
The US military also deposed one of the world's terrible dictators. That alone should have been reason enough to justify military action.
Okay, which thugocracy should we go after next? Can you even name one of the ones in the Middle East, or Africa, or even South America? Personally, I think we should have stuck to rebuilding Afghanistan from the thugocracy we'd already overthrown, but nobody even remembers them anymore.
Would you rather fight the war in NYC?
The whole point is that Saddam wasn't going to invade the US. Please, please, come up with any kind of scenario (I won't even ask you to come up with a plausible one) that has Iraqi tanks rolling down Wall Street.
And if you read enough about Iraq trying to get nuclear weapons, there is a substantial back story that may indicate they were looking into African uranium. I really don't know.
No, you really don't.
Greyscale screen, 33MHz 68k processor, 8MB RAM. But Palm apps are tiny; I haven't even begun to fill my 128MB SD card. SSH is slow to start up, but acceptable. VNC takes some work but is usable over wifi.
Add in a portable folding keyboard (no PS/2 socket, but good enough), a clip-on GPS, and an IRDA link to my cell phone, and it's quite a usable little machine. The screen and CPU aren't as sexy as the new models (no chance for running Quake on this baby) but mine goes a month between battery changes, and I use it a lot.
Exchange is kinda tough, I admit. MS hasn't been exactly forthcoming with all the specs on that one, and the protocols are baroque enough that even they haven't been able to fully set it up with WinCE.
Now, you still have to learn how to set up that package right, and keep up on updates, but diversity is a nice thing. Even if you just move some files (e.g. static content like images) off onto a side server, there's less to secure on the Apache box, so it's usually simpler.
If he wasn't actually hacking a bank, though, it doesn't seem like he could violate a "protected computer". It seems doubtful that he "exceeded his authorized access" (a librarian would presumably be the authority on that, not a police officer). Perhaps he could have asked the librarians at that point.
And even so, unless he visited the DMV website or something he didn't "obtain information from a government agency" anyway.
There's no way sitting outside the library while in possession of an operational laptop could violate this law.
IANAL, of course, etc. etc.
...or just set your Slashdot preferences to "Light". As a bonus things will load much faster.
Exactly! Making things modular, and limited to single operations with no side effects, allows you think about how they interact far more easily, in no small part because it makes the actual interactions fewer.
Read The Art Of Unix Programming, particularly the chapter on compactness and orthogonality, to fully understand this.
In any case, I pretty much agree with what the "Critics" say in that article which you conveniently didn't link to.
He earns some contempt for going along with all the other sheep in Congress (with the sole exception of Russell Feingold) voting for it when the administration rammed it through in the wake of 9/11, sure.
Not nearly as much as Ashcroft gets for drafting the damned thing, much less pushing PATRIOT II. And, of course, Bush appointed the schmuck and pushed for the act, so on this one Kerry's less wrong, at least.