But once the police have a sample of your DNA, what's to stop them doing the sequencing? Only cost and time and those are reducing dramatically as the technology progresses.
Legally speaking, what stopped them from doing it last year?
There are no court decisions (on any level) that says "It (is/isn't) a Fourth Amendment violation to do a full sequencing of DNA from an arrestee". That was true last year and that is true again now -- the decision in this case only covered the specific facts present in this case -- and the Court explicitly cited the non-coding nature of the CODIS loci as being a factual premise underlying their decision (it's even in the holding section).
So if some future agency performs such a search, it will not fall under this decision (in either direction -- this decision will neither automatically allow or forbid it) but will have to be taken as a novel case.
Actually the world steadily gets much better every century and even every decade (well, decade is a bit short because of natural variation, but it's the overall trend line).
The point is police can speak to a doctor about my medical HISTORY, not my medical FUTURE. They cannot read my medical records, nor should they able to sequence my genome and find potential for FUTURE MEDICAL, or if we're looking into future here, risk of FUTURE CRIME (ie propensity for crime, certain damaged genes/code, high likelihood of quantifiable low intelligence.).
The point is you can tell a lot of about a person which is "none of your damn business" so to apeak from their genome, which you cannot tell from a finger print of iris scan.
It's a good thing then that the decision is predicated on the finding that CODIS scans for 13 non-coding segments of DNA that are not medically relevant.
If you were doing a full genome sequencing of the arrestee's DNA (which would definitely fall into the "none of your business" category), this decision would no longer apply.
They can't solve a case but have DNA and a vague description, they will simply "arrest" anyone and everyone who is a close match to the description on trumped up charges that will be dropped after they get their DNA.
Actually, the opinion requires the arrest to be for a serious offense. So littering or seatbelt violations are not going to cut it.
For comparison, the Maryland law at issue here essentially limits the DNA testing to arrests for crimes of violence: murder, rape, robbery, assault. These are not victimless crimes and so are much harder to trump up -- you need to find putative victims in order to be credible.
The difference is, a finger print does not contain medically private data.
Neither does CODIS, which is a loci of STRs that are not medically relevant. It might be different if the police were actually sequencing the entire genome, but they are specifically looking for irrelevant areas because those necessary have the most variance between people and hence the most specificity.
To put it another way, heritable traits are much less likely to be different between potential matches and so are a bad choice for genetic fingerprinting.
There is no Constitutional right to have a lawyer during questioning, only a Constitutional right not to have any statements you make during such questioning introduced at trial. Since they have ample other evidence by which to convict Tsarnaev without using any such statements, there is no particular reason to Mirandize him. We can just accept that the statements made without advising him of his rights are not admissible in court.
That's all well and good, but why would you buy a house in Boston with that attitude? Move out to Newton and you'll have all the quiet space you need. They actually have a functioning school district too!
I mean, effectively this is just a problem of sortation -- the idiot 30-somethings need to be sorted out and kept separate from the responsible 40-somethings. I don't think you get any particular joy from shutting them down, so don't assume that they get any kick out of waking your ass up at all hours of the night.
Seems easy enough to imagine that we could all get along a lot better if we let each neighborhood vote on whether they want to impose a quiet-time ordinance or not, instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all solution on the entire city. Everyone could then chose which area suits their own preferences -- amazing how much work the concept of free choice does!
Whether something is illegal or not has no bearing on whether it is ethical or moral. And there are also shades of illegality. It is, for example, illegal to be publicly intoxicated, and yet if you go downtown you are sure to spot drunk people parading about, along with many police officers watching them do so. There's a reason why public intoxication is illegal, just as there are equally compelling reasons why the officers don't give a damn. Morality and ethics is the short answer.
And whether it is ethical or moral has nothing to do with the Executive's job, who have sworn to faithfully execute the laws, not to faithfully execute their own ethical and moral judgment.
I am far more terrified of an Attorney General that decides to start pursuing their own internal sense of justice than one who tries to reliably and impartially implement the Constitution and the law. In the former case, he would be essentially unbounded -- free to do anything he though was right and proper. In the latter, he might do (admittedly stupid) things like imposing penalties based on the (idiotically drafted) CFAA but at there exists some limiting principle to his actions (the law) and some balancing branch (Congress) to his power.
What they are doing is assuming that their light source is broadly uniform and averaging over the double-measurement (which is clever, no doubt). So we still haven't learned anything about a particular photon that violates the uncertainty principle, only something about the entire population. If we assume that the population is uniformly polarized (which is reasonable in this case) then we can conclude that the average reflects the properties of the individual photons. If the population was not uniform, however, then the average tells us very little about the properties of the individual photons.
And before someone too clever tries to argue that you can take a single input photon and make multiple copes and send them through this process to get results about that one photon, there is the No Clone Theorem to here to prevent that maneuver.
So really they haven't gone around Heisenberg (which talked only about individual wave-functions) but used multiple compound measurements and an assumption about the properties of the group to infer something that Heisinberg says they can't measure directly -- which is quite clever but Herr Doctor's principle still stands quite strong.
I'm 100% certain that my connection to Gmail is protected by SSL/TLS, so I think you have to troll harder than merely saying that it is "unsuitable for email protection".
From our point of view you should be trying to figure out how to change your society so that you don't need guns, rather than trying to advocate more of them. You are treating the symptom, not the cause.
Isn't banning guns also just treating the symptom? Couldn't we just as well work to improve society until we can all possess guns and use them responsibly only as a last resort to safe life or limb?
Since, as SSL certification authority break-ins have shown, centralized trust systems are prone to abuse and offer dubious security benefits
Since, as recent hospital deaths due to MRSA and medical errors have shown, centralized medicine offers dubious health benefits?
Just because there have been failures doesn't make the system dubious at all. Even with all the failures accounted, SSL is a phenomenal success -- effectively protecting billions in eCommerce revenue, trillions of emails and untold other secrets. The fact that any Joe can sit down and go to ${site} and be nearly certain that their communication is authenticated and encrypted without the need to understand anything is a remarkable feat of engineering.
Obama already leads the way in robot drone murders and you morons think he will sign something? Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner that has killed the most innocent women and children yet!
(1) The drones aren't robots, they are controlled by a live operator and wouldn't even be covered by this proposal.
(2) It's really quite a stretch to believe that drone attacks have killed more innocents than Kissinger's wholesale bombing of Cambodia or Arafat's indiscriminate suicide bombing attacks.
But yeah, don't let facts get in the way of a good flame...
Facebook is a good idea taken way too far and a userbase that refuses to acknowledge that fact. If we've learned anything from history, people are more than willing to go along with anything that even includes physical assault for the sake of recognition. A little violation of privacy is no sweat.
Sorry dude, but this is not physical assault unless the person is taking the photo of you in a private place (e.g. dressing room, shower) or from a place where he doesn't have the right to be (e.g. trespassing). At least in the States, it is well within photographers' First Amendment rights to take and disseminate photos, including by attaching meta-data such as face-tagging and publishing them online.
From such a finding it would also follow that the taking was a taking of Lambert's property without due process of law and that it also clearly violated his First Amendment right to display the tape and disseminate it in any way he wishes. (It is not just news organizations, such as WHO-TV, who have First Amendment rights to make and display videotapes of eventsâ"all of us, including Lambert, have that right.)
Probably one of the most important divides in engineers (the world?) is the ability to read the data, acknowledge your mistakes and fix it. It seems like most companies spend more time doing damage control than damage remediation. Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Slashdot cannot be fooled (with apologies to Richard Feynman).
Interestingly enough, on a general-purpose PC you can often configure alternative input devices -- something you can't do on the consoles. For a game like oblivion, you can use any number of controllers (including the 360/ps3 controllers, if either suits your fancy) that you feel are best. For Civilization or WoW, keyboard & mouse might be preferable.
This alone is a good reason to chose the PC as a platform.
Here's the vote of each Senator [govtrack.us] on this bill. Only 23 voted Nay, only 3 of those Nays were Republicans, and 4 Senators didn't even show up to vote. And President Obama is quite ready to sign it into law.
This country is broken.
Broken relative to what? Those bills tend to be pretty popular, I doubt 23/100 Americans would vote against it if it were put to a referendum. Heck, a small plurality support warrantless wiretapping even in the US, which makes me severely doubt that you could find much opposition to wiretapping international calls where one end is not a US citizen.
Now, I don't like it (I'm definitely in the 23/100) but willful blindess to uncomfortable facts does not seem to me like a valid (or effective) political strategy. Nor does complaining about "broken" or "treasonous" politicians that are implementing the will of the voters.
The human component is just there in case something unexpected happen on the road that self-driving cars may not be able to react to in time. While such disaster scenario may be rare, the possibility isn't 0%, which is why you need someone who is able to drive.
It's also possible that relieving the driver of the drudgery of driving during the vast majority of uneventful rides will actually deprive him of the instinctual familiarity that would allow him to react correctly in those marginal cases. That is, the purpose of keeping a human being in the loop just for disaster scenarios might be self-defeating if the driver does not possess the experience to best resolve the situation.
Keep all your AES keys in registers -- no affiliation, except that I'm a user and I would much prefer that it be mainlined to streamline my rebuild process. Given that there's such little performance penalty on x64/AES-NI, this should be the defacto standard.
Sounds like someone that has a complete lack of respect for the law in general. "We don't agree with the law, we don't want you trying to enforce the law on us, and we're going to fight it even though it's law."
I do hope the German court decides to haul them out back behind the woodshed and explain how legislature, laws, and law enforcement work.
What? That's not what they said, they said that the order is not grounded in the law and that the legislature never passed anything requiring that. Part of the way that "legislature, laws, and law enforcement" works is that when an order exceeds the authority of the person making the order or is based on a mistaken interpretation, it can be challenged and the court will figure out who is correct. Lots of good caselaw (at least here in the US) was made that way -- not by claiming that the law is wrong, but that the government isn't following it or has gone beyond its limits.
Of course, I'm not a German lawyer, and so I'm not asserting that the claim is right, only that their claim ("the order is without merit") is perfectly consistent with respect for the law and the legislature in general.
I can understand and appreciate your frustration; I share it. But let's be honest: The average person doesn't understand sigma, standard deviation, margin of error, or any of those other statistical concepts. They do like "Top 10" lists though and rankings. And for these things, averages are usually the best metric, even if they don't tell the whole story, or even a particularly accurate one.
No, averages aren't the best metric because they don't capture the difference between a wildly bimodal distribution that sometimes frustrates the *!(#*& out of you and one with a slightly slower average that is quite consistent. It's the statistician's job (if she wants to be relevant) to figure out a more meaningful way to measure it and then provide the Top 10 Actually Usable ISP such that the public doesn't need to understand what's under the hood to read the chart and make an informed decision. If someone asks, she can talk their ear off about how she uses a nonlinear filter to more heavily weight intermittent poor performance in a way that broadly tracks user's perception -- triple bonus points if she actually sets up some computers with difference speed profiles and has people^H^H^H^H^H^H undergrads rate them perceptually in order to fine tune her metric.
Statistics isn't all hard crunching and regression (a lot, oh yeah), some of it is using that knowledge to best illuminate the data.
I've gotten to prefer using runtime exceptions with a general policy of "Throw as early as possible, catch as late as possible". Only catch if you can do something about it. It works very well, and keeps the code very clean.
This. In some modern languages where you can reraise/chain exceptions, this can be very slightly modified so that "catch if you can do something about it" becomes "catch if you can add any useful information to the chain and then pass along to someone that can do something about it". It doesn't make for aesthetically nice code, since we're mixing functionality, error logging, error handling and resource management -- but it's very nice to debug issues that aren't easily reproducible interactively and you need to put things together from the logs.
In Python, the copypasta pattern is:
def FooTheBar(yarr, flags = None):
if flags is None:
flags = GetDefaultFlags()
try:
fooer = GetFooer()
bar = fooer(yarr, flags)
except Exception, e:
LOG_ERROR( "Exception in FooInner, my state is %s" % locals() )
LOG_ERROR( "I'd also like to note some relevant facts like %s %d %s" % (.....) )
raise # Reraise for the caller to handle this exception
raise MyException( parent = e, msg = "holy balls" ) # raise a new exception with the e chained on
finally:
fooer.dispose_nicely()
Slashdot Mirror
Legally speaking, what stopped them from doing it last year?
There are no court decisions (on any level) that says "It (is/isn't) a Fourth Amendment violation to do a full sequencing of DNA from an arrestee". That was true last year and that is true again now -- the decision in this case only covered the specific facts present in this case -- and the Court explicitly cited the non-coding nature of the CODIS loci as being a factual premise underlying their decision (it's even in the holding section).
So if some future agency performs such a search, it will not fall under this decision (in either direction -- this decision will neither automatically allow or forbid it) but will have to be taken as a novel case.
Actually the world steadily gets much better every century and even every decade (well, decade is a bit short because of natural variation, but it's the overall trend line).
It's a good thing then that the decision is predicated on the finding that CODIS scans for 13 non-coding segments of DNA that are not medically relevant.
If you were doing a full genome sequencing of the arrestee's DNA (which would definitely fall into the "none of your business" category), this decision would no longer apply.
They can't solve a case but have DNA and a vague description, they will simply "arrest" anyone and everyone who is a close match to the description on trumped up charges that will be dropped after they get their DNA.
Actually, the opinion requires the arrest to be for a serious offense. So littering or seatbelt violations are not going to cut it.
For comparison, the Maryland law at issue here essentially limits the DNA testing to arrests for crimes of violence: murder, rape, robbery, assault. These are not victimless crimes and so are much harder to trump up -- you need to find putative victims in order to be credible.
The difference is, a finger print does not contain medically private data.
Neither does CODIS, which is a loci of STRs that are not medically relevant. It might be different if the police were actually sequencing the entire genome, but they are specifically looking for irrelevant areas because those necessary have the most variance between people and hence the most specificity.
To put it another way, heritable traits are much less likely to be different between potential matches and so are a bad choice for genetic fingerprinting.
There is no Constitutional right to have a lawyer during questioning, only a Constitutional right not to have any statements you make during such questioning introduced at trial. Since they have ample other evidence by which to convict Tsarnaev without using any such statements, there is no particular reason to Mirandize him. We can just accept that the statements made without advising him of his rights are not admissible in court.
See this excellent summary by Orin Kerr for a bit of explanation of how it actually works (as distinct from how you or I or him believe it ought to work). You can also read the Supreme Court's decision in Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760 (2003) directly, if you prefer,
That's all well and good, but why would you buy a house in Boston with that attitude? Move out to Newton and you'll have all the quiet space you need. They actually have a functioning school district too!
I mean, effectively this is just a problem of sortation -- the idiot 30-somethings need to be sorted out and kept separate from the responsible 40-somethings. I don't think you get any particular joy from shutting them down, so don't assume that they get any kick out of waking your ass up at all hours of the night.
Seems easy enough to imagine that we could all get along a lot better if we let each neighborhood vote on whether they want to impose a quiet-time ordinance or not, instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all solution on the entire city. Everyone could then chose which area suits their own preferences -- amazing how much work the concept of free choice does!
And whether it is ethical or moral has nothing to do with the Executive's job, who have sworn to faithfully execute the laws, not to faithfully execute their own ethical and moral judgment.
I am far more terrified of an Attorney General that decides to start pursuing their own internal sense of justice than one who tries to reliably and impartially implement the Constitution and the law. In the former case, he would be essentially unbounded -- free to do anything he though was right and proper. In the latter, he might do (admittedly stupid) things like imposing penalties based on the (idiotically drafted) CFAA but at there exists some limiting principle to his actions (the law) and some balancing branch (Congress) to his power.
What they are doing is assuming that their light source is broadly uniform and averaging over the double-measurement (which is clever, no doubt). So we still haven't learned anything about a particular photon that violates the uncertainty principle, only something about the entire population. If we assume that the population is uniformly polarized (which is reasonable in this case) then we can conclude that the average reflects the properties of the individual photons. If the population was not uniform, however, then the average tells us very little about the properties of the individual photons.
And before someone too clever tries to argue that you can take a single input photon and make multiple copes and send them through this process to get results about that one photon, there is the No Clone Theorem to here to prevent that maneuver.
So really they haven't gone around Heisenberg (which talked only about individual wave-functions) but used multiple compound measurements and an assumption about the properties of the group to infer something that Heisinberg says they can't measure directly -- which is quite clever but Herr Doctor's principle still stands quite strong.
I'm 100% certain that my connection to Gmail is protected by SSL/TLS, so I think you have to troll harder than merely saying that it is "unsuitable for email protection".
Isn't banning guns also just treating the symptom? Couldn't we just as well work to improve society until we can all possess guns and use them responsibly only as a last resort to safe life or limb?
Since, as recent hospital deaths due to MRSA and medical errors have shown, centralized medicine offers dubious health benefits?
Just because there have been failures doesn't make the system dubious at all. Even with all the failures accounted, SSL is a phenomenal success -- effectively protecting billions in eCommerce revenue, trillions of emails and untold other secrets. The fact that any Joe can sit down and go to ${site} and be nearly certain that their communication is authenticated and encrypted without the need to understand anything is a remarkable feat of engineering.
Obama already leads the way in robot drone murders and you morons think he will sign something? Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner that has killed the most innocent women and children yet!
(1) The drones aren't robots, they are controlled by a live operator and wouldn't even be covered by this proposal.
(2) It's really quite a stretch to believe that drone attacks have killed more innocents than Kissinger's wholesale bombing of Cambodia or Arafat's indiscriminate suicide bombing attacks.
But yeah, don't let facts get in the way of a good flame ...
... is a favorite pastime of the larger wrongdoers. Does anyone think that the PRC power structure really cares about some po-dunk municipal pervert?
Facebook is a good idea taken way too far and a userbase that refuses to acknowledge that fact. If we've learned anything from history, people are more than willing to go along with anything that even includes physical assault for the sake of recognition. A little violation of privacy is no sweat.
Sorry dude, but this is not physical assault unless the person is taking the photo of you in a private place (e.g. dressing room, shower) or from a place where he doesn't have the right to be (e.g. trespassing). At least in the States, it is well within photographers' First Amendment rights to take and disseminate photos, including by attaching meta-data such as face-tagging and publishing them online.
See, e.g. Lambert v. Polk County (1989)
Probably one of the most important divides in engineers (the world?) is the ability to read the data, acknowledge your mistakes and fix it. It seems like most companies spend more time doing damage control than damage remediation. Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Slashdot cannot be fooled (with apologies to Richard Feynman).
But there are also well-documented CSS vulnerabilities, XUL exploits and even one in a JPG parser.
Should we disable those as well? Are you part of some guerrilla marketing campaign to bring back Lynx?
Interestingly enough, on a general-purpose PC you can often configure alternative input devices -- something you can't do on the consoles. For a game like oblivion, you can use any number of controllers (including the 360/ps3 controllers, if either suits your fancy) that you feel are best. For Civilization or WoW, keyboard & mouse might be preferable.
This alone is a good reason to chose the PC as a platform.
Here's the vote of each Senator [govtrack.us] on this bill. Only 23 voted Nay, only 3 of those Nays were Republicans, and 4 Senators didn't even show up to vote. And President Obama is quite ready to sign it into law.
This country is broken.
Broken relative to what? Those bills tend to be pretty popular, I doubt 23/100 Americans would vote against it if it were put to a referendum. Heck, a small plurality support warrantless wiretapping even in the US, which makes me severely doubt that you could find much opposition to wiretapping international calls where one end is not a US citizen.
Now, I don't like it (I'm definitely in the 23/100) but willful blindess to uncomfortable facts does not seem to me like a valid (or effective) political strategy. Nor does complaining about "broken" or "treasonous" politicians that are implementing the will of the voters.
The human component is just there in case something unexpected happen on the road that self-driving cars may not be able to react to in time. While such disaster scenario may be rare, the possibility isn't 0%, which is why you need someone who is able to drive.
It's also possible that relieving the driver of the drudgery of driving during the vast majority of uneventful rides will actually deprive him of the instinctual familiarity that would allow him to react correctly in those marginal cases. That is, the purpose of keeping a human being in the loop just for disaster scenarios might be self-defeating if the driver does not possess the experience to best resolve the situation.
Keep all your AES keys in registers -- no affiliation, except that I'm a user and I would much prefer that it be mainlined to streamline my rebuild process. Given that there's such little performance penalty on x64/AES-NI, this should be the defacto standard.
Sounds like someone that has a complete lack of respect for the law in general. "We don't agree with the law, we don't want you trying to enforce the law on us, and we're going to fight it even though it's law."
I do hope the German court decides to haul them out back behind the woodshed and explain how legislature, laws, and law enforcement work.
What? That's not what they said, they said that the order is not grounded in the law and that the legislature never passed anything requiring that. Part of the way that "legislature, laws, and law enforcement" works is that when an order exceeds the authority of the person making the order or is based on a mistaken interpretation, it can be challenged and the court will figure out who is correct. Lots of good caselaw (at least here in the US) was made that way -- not by claiming that the law is wrong, but that the government isn't following it or has gone beyond its limits.
Of course, I'm not a German lawyer, and so I'm not asserting that the claim is right, only that their claim ("the order is without merit") is perfectly consistent with respect for the law and the legislature in general.
I can understand and appreciate your frustration; I share it. But let's be honest: The average person doesn't understand sigma, standard deviation, margin of error, or any of those other statistical concepts. They do like "Top 10" lists though and rankings. And for these things, averages are usually the best metric, even if they don't tell the whole story, or even a particularly accurate one.
No, averages aren't the best metric because they don't capture the difference between a wildly bimodal distribution that sometimes frustrates the *!(#*& out of you and one with a slightly slower average that is quite consistent. It's the statistician's job (if she wants to be relevant) to figure out a more meaningful way to measure it and then provide the Top 10 Actually Usable ISP such that the public doesn't need to understand what's under the hood to read the chart and make an informed decision. If someone asks, she can talk their ear off about how she uses a nonlinear filter to more heavily weight intermittent poor performance in a way that broadly tracks user's perception -- triple bonus points if she actually sets up some computers with difference speed profiles and has people^H^H^H^H^H^H undergrads rate them perceptually in order to fine tune her metric.
Statistics isn't all hard crunching and regression (a lot, oh yeah), some of it is using that knowledge to best illuminate the data.
Maybe you should look at the map of operators. We've sold them to half the world at this point, and for good reason: the F16 is a quality plane.
I've gotten to prefer using runtime exceptions with a general policy of "Throw as early as possible, catch as late as possible". Only catch if you can do something about it. It works very well, and keeps the code very clean.
This. In some modern languages where you can reraise/chain exceptions, this can be very slightly modified so that "catch if you can do something about it" becomes "catch if you can add any useful information to the chain and then pass along to someone that can do something about it". It doesn't make for aesthetically nice code, since we're mixing functionality, error logging, error handling and resource management -- but it's very nice to debug issues that aren't easily reproducible interactively and you need to put things together from the logs.
In Python, the copypasta pattern is: