So in essence, you can have varying levels of compliance and only Microsoft will ever be able to produce a piece of software which is 100%, no questions asked compliant with every last nuance of the specification, even the optional parts.
In practice it appears that even Microsoft have trouble actually doing this:)
If we could trust that power wouldn't be abused, we wouldn't have to worry about civil rights.
In reality we can trust that power will be abused. Power both corrupts and attracts the corrupt. Two obvious ways to protect against this are to make it very difficult for individuals and groups to gain lots of power or to grant power to people who do not seek it.
In short, the issue with the PATRIOT Act isn't whether it's effective against terrorists. It's a matter of whether it has the right checks-and-balance to ensure that it is both effective as well as resistant to abuse. History is proving abuse is widespread.
Wrong tense! History has proven that if such abuse can happen it will happen. It dosn't matter if you look back tens, hundreds or thousands of years. Whilst the details might be different basic human behaviour hasn't substantially changed.
They already had all the power needed to reduce the risk of terrorist attackes.
Assuming they were so motivated. Law enforcement activities against terrorists tend to depend more on politics than potential danger. (That's even before considering the possibility of law enforcement providing actual aid to terrorists.)
Yes, I said "reduce the risk", as the risk can't be eliminated even in a police state run by a military dictator.
In such a situation the majority of terrorists are likely to join the police force...
What have you been smoking? That was during the 1980's when the US government (then president / 'actor' Ronald "Ray Gun" Reagan) was supplying Iraq with the WMD to use against Iran. Further background is that the Iranians had just booted out a US backed tyrant (who was given asylum by the US). The Iraqi government (egged on by the US no doubt) decided to invade Iran over a preexisting border dispute. (Which IIRC was actually started by said US backed tyrant.
Not to mention --> After the Gulf War they were destroyed which is why none were found during or after the 'latest' invasion.
If such weapons actually existed you'd expect them to be used against an invading army.
according to many sources, Saddam did have chemical and biological weapons in 2002, and early 2003. He moved them through conveys into Syria after a dam burst and most of the countries in the region sent "aid". There are some interesting stories about it available in the main stream, should anyone choose to do the research.
Just because conspiracy theories are "main stream" dosn't make them anything other than theories. When looked at rationally such theories stand or fall based on actual evidence, there dosn't appear to be much of this.
As a citizen, I don't want my government thinking it is in some egalitarian relationship with me and my fellow citizens. The government ought to consider itself subordinate to its citizens.
All too often you find government thinking that it's privacy rights are more important than those of the public. e.g. consider the recent cases of police officers objecting to members of the public filiming them...
That was in the 18th century when sailing ships and horses were the fastest transport available. Thus it might well have taken months to years to actually get copies to all your potential market.
If it was still the case then maybe just maybe people would respect it more.
Or something equivalent for the 21st century.
Now its been expanded to Life + 70 years and in the case of companies possibly indefinately/forever.
The "life + 70 years" is effectivly infinite, unless you are very young when the author dies.
the amount of "Hard work" is rightly irrelevant in a capitalist society. Karl Marx believed in the now-long-discredited labor theory of value - that something is somehow "worth" the amount of effort it took to produce - trivially stupid, once you stop think about it:
Plenty of advocates of this position probably wouldn't believe it is "Marxist"...
If I work for years to make a car out of toothpicks or something similarly pointless, I've just wasted a big chunk of my life producing something of very low value to the world.
Or you might have produced a "work of art" which somone is prepared to pay a huge sum on money for. Thing is that "the market" can be very fickle when it comes to deciding if something is "art" or not.
Since he is hosting the torrent, couldn't he just email the tracker to all the people who he wants to send the file to, or simply send them a URL to some password protected web directory so they could download the torrent file? Seems like a lot of extra risk to take, putting something like that up on a public site, when you just want to share it within a small group.
Even if the child porn/terrorist plans/illegal drugs shipping/etc have a boring code name (and/or) the actual information is encrypted it's still possible for third parties to find out useful information, like the IPs of the clients, if you use a public bittorrent site.
I would imagine it's actually rather difficult to infiltrate a group of individuals which does not meet in a public place, nor communicate using conventional methods. It's also difficult to form such a group without ever having communicated somewhere in public - but they'd do it if they were forced to.
If a group can form (and add members) then it can be infiltrated. It's simply a matter of law enforcement understanding how to do so.
Does it really matter? They know that the specimen has all the genetic traits it needs to be a successful drug sniffing dog. Why take the chance of breeding that out?
You still have to train the dogs.
Once the production line gets ramped up, I'm sure that this place will be making discoveries left and right which improve the science behind cloning and improve humanity's knowledge about biology in general.
If these were robots then the term "production line" would make sense. Even without genetic variation you make not end up with identical dogs, especially when it comes to factors such as wiring of the brain...
What if the cloning produces perfectly healthy puppies that can't sniff worth shit?
IIRC the sucess rate (which in this case would equate to live puppies) isn't that high for mammalian cloning in the first place. What's wrong with regular selective breeding?
sometime, some day people are going to realize that trading freedom for security gets neither.
This isn't a "trade" so much as a false dichotomy.
it is no longer the case where there is a potential for abuse, it IS being abused. your house can be searched without warrent, your calls logged and now an overabundance of security cameras.
All of which may well make law enforcement less able to catch and deter criminals which are of a danger to the public. In addition to adding a few new classes of high criminals.
all of this because some batshit terrorists decided the WTC had to go and now we all pay for it with our freedoms.
Yet the actual criminal investigation of that incident is rather pathetic. Things which should have been done as a matter of routine simply did not happen.
I am sorry but to me it is plain stupid to sacrifice what made america great just to feel safe against something that has a lower probability of killing people than chocking on food.
It dosn't even appear to be that effective against terrorists anyway. When was the last time you heard to "animal rights" or anti-abortionists being arrested (or subject to curfew) under anti-terrorism laws. (Even those who follow some perverted version of Christianity, which can't be that different from a perverted version of Islam.)
Just to take one example: if a system of license plate readers can detect a plate that has been flagged by some agency and prevents one, e.g., car bombing, why is that not a valid mechanism to use?
There are two problems. The first is that it can be difficult to tell if this mass snooping did actually prevent any crime at all. It is hardly unknown for the "authorities" to stage incidents to justify the large (financial) costs involved. The second problem is that "abuse" (i.e. high crimes) tends to mean that it is difficult to trust the judgement of law enforcement when it comes to recognising any crimes...
Want to pass completely encrypted, unbreakable information?
Use public-private key encryption to encrypt a message. An 8192 bit cypher should do the trick.
Post it on USENET. Under any topic - alt.startrek.wesley.crusher.die.die.die - post an encrypted block of text.
Actually you'd be better off making sure that your message looked like spam. The only way you would want to use encryption would be if you could arrange for the typical spam in several newsgroups to be encrypted terrorist plans... The vast majority being pieces of fiction encrypted with random keys.
As long as you've had some contact with the person you're telling ahead of time, and they know what newsgroup to watch... If you want to be more secure, use PCMCIA ethernet cards as one-use while driving around an apartment complex or a city street looking for open WAP's and using ubuntu on CD. This is pretty much foolproof.
Or you could use low tech methods, which could well be "off the radar", to spy agencies too busy with high tech mass surveillance.
If people know they are being spied on an tapped, they'll take fewer risks and give less away.
Or they'll give away a lot of information, just that happens to be mostly nonsense and misleading.
Likewise, if they know they/aren't/ they'll be more agressive in their interactions and get things done faster, with possibly better organization.
The only way "they" can actually know is by having infiltrated whoever is doing the spying. Any real global terrorist conspiracy would probably need to operate under the assumption that they were being spied upon...
Running planes into the WTC is a threat from a malicious foreign party.
Actually it's a malicious unidentified party. Just because some conspiracy theorist claims to know the identity of those involved does not make it true. Even if that conspriacy theorist is a government which can count on the mass media to portray a crackpot theory as fact.
Slashdot probably needs a rating of "ironic". Putting TPB on a list of "Child Porn" websites, for political reasons. Somewhat defeats the object of having such a list. People might well wonder what else has been deliberatly misclassified. This is a fairly common issue with commercial censorware. Do the Swedish police really want to be associated with "cowboy" software companies?
It sounds like this politician is unbalanced and needs a reality check.
IMHO this is most likely to happen with "career politicians"....
Porn doesn't encourage any stable person to go out and rape any more than Die Hard makes stable people go out and shoot people.
On the other hand there might be an argument for banning phone lines which keep people on hold, playing bad music for half an hour, them connect to someone in India... Especially if they cost the caller money.
I love how politicians raise unsupported theories of criminal etiology to the level of fact simply because they sound reasonable to them or support their pre-existing misconceptions.
I would point out that in aviation, especially military, navel, and commercial aviation, you never hear talk of gallons of fuel, but rather pounds, or kilos of fuel. This is precisely because the proper metric for the determination of the energy content of a fuel payload is the mass of the fuel rather than the volume of the fuel.
Mechanics is probably more a factor here than chemistry. In order to fly an aircraft needs to generate a lift force with its greater than its weight. For a fixed wing aircraft lift is a function of airspeed, thus the greater the mass of the aircraft the faster it needs to be moving in order to take off. (Which is also why it's preferably to have the aircraft pointing directly into the wind, where the airspeed is ground speed plus wind speed. As opposed to a tailwind where the airspeed can is ground speed minus wind speed.) Then there is Newton's Second law which states that acceleration due to a force is inversely proportional to the mass of the object being accelerated. The practical effect is that the more mass in a plane the longer a runway it needs. It's not unknown for carrier based aircraft to have to hook up with a tanker soon after takeoff. (Warplanes can be refuelled in flight, but they cannot be rearmed in flight.)
Gallons, litres etc, are entirely independent of density. If you wanted to assure an amount of energy transfer in a fuel sale, you'd sell fuel by mass.
Which is how it works in aviation. Of course in a flying machine the mass (and hence weight) does tend to be more of an issue than other vehicles.
Yeah, it's stored in pressurized, insulated tanks underground, which will buffer the gas from temperature fluctuations.
I can't see the point of a pressurization system for such tanks, this would complicate refilling them. Simple valves are much easier from the engineering POV.
What we need is a serious penalty for any applicant that ignores prior art in the application.
How about something like both this patent, all pending patent applications and any patents issued within the past 5 years owned by the same entity are voided and entered on a permenent record of "prior art". Repeat offenders are placed on a blacklist of people and corporations who cannot hold patents...
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand.
It's even simpler than that people don't tend to document the "obvious" simply becuase it is obvious. Or at least it is obvious to someone with the appropriate education and skillset. You only tend to find obvious things documented if the intended audience is of non peers.
Slashdot Mirror
So in essence, you can have varying levels of compliance and only Microsoft will ever be able to produce a piece of software which is 100%, no questions asked compliant with every last nuance of the specification, even the optional parts.
:)
In practice it appears that even Microsoft have trouble actually doing this
If we could trust that power wouldn't be abused, we wouldn't have to worry about civil rights.
In reality we can trust that power will be abused. Power both corrupts and attracts the corrupt.
Two obvious ways to protect against this are to make it very difficult for individuals and groups to gain lots of power or to grant power to people who do not seek it.
In short, the issue with the PATRIOT Act isn't whether it's effective against terrorists. It's a matter of whether it has the right checks-and-balance to ensure that it is both effective as well as resistant to abuse. History is proving abuse is widespread.
Wrong tense! History has proven that if such abuse can happen it will happen. It dosn't matter if you look back tens, hundreds or thousands of years. Whilst the details might be different basic human behaviour hasn't substantially changed.
They already had all the power needed to reduce the risk of terrorist attackes.
Assuming they were so motivated. Law enforcement activities against terrorists tend to depend more on politics than potential danger. (That's even before considering the possibility of law enforcement providing actual aid to terrorists.)
Yes, I said "reduce the risk", as the risk can't be eliminated even in a police state run by a military dictator.
In such a situation the majority of terrorists are likely to join the police force...
What have you been smoking? That was during the 1980's when the US government (then president / 'actor' Ronald "Ray Gun" Reagan) was supplying Iraq with the WMD to use against Iran.
Further background is that the Iranians had just booted out a US backed tyrant (who was given asylum by the US). The Iraqi government (egged on by the US no doubt) decided to invade Iran over a preexisting border dispute. (Which IIRC was actually started by said US backed tyrant.
Not to mention --> After the Gulf War they were destroyed which is why none were found during or after the 'latest' invasion.
If such weapons actually existed you'd expect them to be used against an invading army.
according to many sources, Saddam did have chemical and biological weapons in 2002, and early 2003. He moved them through conveys into Syria after a dam burst and most of the countries in the region sent "aid". There are some interesting stories about it available in the main stream, should anyone choose to do the research.
Just because conspiracy theories are "main stream" dosn't make them anything other than theories. When looked at rationally such theories stand or fall based on actual evidence, there dosn't appear to be much of this.
As a citizen, I don't want my government thinking it is in some egalitarian relationship with me and my fellow citizens. The government ought to consider itself subordinate to its citizens.
All too often you find government thinking that it's privacy rights are more important than those of the public. e.g. consider the recent cases of police officers objecting to members of the public filiming them...
14 Years was the original duration of Copyright.
That was in the 18th century when sailing ships and horses were the fastest transport available. Thus it might well have taken months to years to actually get copies to all your potential market.
If it was still the case then maybe just maybe people would respect it more.
Or something equivalent for the 21st century.
Now its been expanded to Life + 70 years and in the case of companies possibly indefinately/forever.
The "life + 70 years" is effectivly infinite, unless you are very young when the author dies.
the amount of "Hard work" is rightly irrelevant in a capitalist society. Karl Marx believed in the now-long-discredited labor theory of value - that something is somehow "worth" the amount of effort it took to produce - trivially stupid, once you stop think about it:
Plenty of advocates of this position probably wouldn't believe it is "Marxist"...
If I work for years to make a car out of toothpicks or something similarly pointless, I've just wasted a big chunk of my life producing something of very low value to the world.
Or you might have produced a "work of art" which somone is prepared to pay a huge sum on money for. Thing is that "the market" can be very fickle when it comes to deciding if something is "art" or not.
Since he is hosting the torrent, couldn't he just email the tracker to all the people who he wants to send the file to, or simply send them a URL to some password protected web directory so they could download the torrent file? Seems like a lot of extra risk to take, putting something like that up on a public site, when you just want to share it within a small group.
Even if the child porn/terrorist plans/illegal drugs shipping/etc have a boring code name (and/or) the actual information is encrypted it's still possible for third parties to find out useful information, like the IPs of the clients, if you use a public bittorrent site.
I would imagine it's actually rather difficult to infiltrate a group of individuals which does not meet in a public place, nor communicate using conventional methods. It's also difficult to form such a group without ever having communicated somewhere in public - but they'd do it if they were forced to.
If a group can form (and add members) then it can be infiltrated. It's simply a matter of law enforcement understanding how to do so.
Does it really matter? They know that the specimen has all the genetic traits it needs to be a successful drug sniffing dog. Why take the chance of breeding that out?
You still have to train the dogs.
Once the production line gets ramped up, I'm sure that this place will be making discoveries left and right which improve the science behind cloning and improve humanity's knowledge about biology in general.
If these were robots then the term "production line" would make sense. Even without genetic variation you make not end up with identical dogs, especially when it comes to factors such as wiring of the brain...
What if the cloning produces perfectly healthy puppies that can't sniff worth shit?
IIRC the sucess rate (which in this case would equate to live puppies) isn't that high for mammalian cloning in the first place.
What's wrong with regular selective breeding?
sometime, some day people are going to realize that trading freedom for security gets neither.
This isn't a "trade" so much as a false dichotomy.
it is no longer the case where there is a potential for abuse, it IS being abused. your house can be searched without warrent, your calls logged and now an overabundance of security cameras.
All of which may well make law enforcement less able to catch and deter criminals which are of a danger to the public. In addition to adding a few new classes of high criminals.
all of this because some batshit terrorists decided the WTC had to go and now we all pay for it with our freedoms.
Yet the actual criminal investigation of that incident is rather pathetic. Things which should have been done as a matter of routine simply did not happen.
I am sorry but to me it is plain stupid to sacrifice what made america great just to feel safe against something that has a lower probability of killing people than chocking on food.
It dosn't even appear to be that effective against terrorists anyway. When was the last time you heard to "animal rights" or anti-abortionists being arrested (or subject to curfew) under anti-terrorism laws. (Even those who follow some perverted version of Christianity, which can't be that different from a perverted version of Islam.)
Just to take one example: if a system of license plate readers can detect a plate that has been flagged by some agency and prevents one, e.g., car bombing, why is that not a valid mechanism to use?
There are two problems. The first is that it can be difficult to tell if this mass snooping did actually prevent any crime at all. It is hardly unknown for the "authorities" to stage incidents to justify the large (financial) costs involved. The second problem is that "abuse" (i.e. high crimes) tends to mean that it is difficult to trust the judgement of law enforcement when it comes to recognising any crimes...
Want to pass completely encrypted, unbreakable information? Use public-private key encryption to encrypt a message. An 8192 bit cypher should do the trick. Post it on USENET. Under any topic - alt.startrek.wesley.crusher.die.die.die - post an encrypted block of text.
Actually you'd be better off making sure that your message looked like spam. The only way you would want to use encryption would be if you could arrange for the typical spam in several newsgroups to be encrypted terrorist plans... The vast majority being pieces of fiction encrypted with random keys.
As long as you've had some contact with the person you're telling ahead of time, and they know what newsgroup to watch... If you want to be more secure, use PCMCIA ethernet cards as one-use while driving around an apartment complex or a city street looking for open WAP's and using ubuntu on CD. This is pretty much foolproof.
Or you could use low tech methods, which could well be "off the radar", to spy agencies too busy with high tech mass surveillance.
If people know they are being spied on an tapped, they'll take fewer risks and give less away.
/aren't/ they'll be more agressive in their interactions and get things done faster, with possibly better organization.
Or they'll give away a lot of information, just that happens to be mostly nonsense and misleading.
Likewise, if they know they
The only way "they" can actually know is by having infiltrated whoever is doing the spying.
Any real global terrorist conspiracy would probably need to operate under the assumption that they were being spied upon...
Running planes into the WTC is a threat from a malicious foreign party.
Actually it's a malicious unidentified party. Just because some conspiracy theorist claims to know the identity of those involved does not make it true. Even if that conspriacy theorist is a government which can count on the mass media to portray a crackpot theory as fact.
Won't someone please think of the children!?
Slashdot probably needs a rating of "ironic". Putting TPB on a list of "Child Porn" websites, for political reasons. Somewhat defeats the object of having such a list. People might well wonder what else has been deliberatly misclassified.
This is a fairly common issue with commercial censorware. Do the Swedish police really want to be associated with "cowboy" software companies?
It sounds like this politician is unbalanced and needs a reality check.
IMHO this is most likely to happen with "career politicians"....
Porn doesn't encourage any stable person to go out and rape any more than Die Hard makes stable people go out and shoot people.
On the other hand there might be an argument for banning phone lines which keep people on hold, playing bad music for half an hour, them connect to someone in India... Especially if they cost the caller money.
I love how politicians raise unsupported theories of criminal etiology to the level of fact simply because they sound reasonable to them or support their pre-existing misconceptions.
Or the political adgenda of various lobbiests.
I would point out that in aviation, especially military, navel, and commercial aviation, you never hear talk of gallons of fuel, but rather pounds, or kilos of fuel. This is precisely because the proper metric for the determination of the energy content of a fuel payload is the mass of the fuel rather than the volume of the fuel.
Mechanics is probably more a factor here than chemistry. In order to fly an aircraft needs to generate a lift force with its greater than its weight. For a fixed wing aircraft lift is a function of airspeed, thus the greater the mass of the aircraft the faster it needs to be moving in order to take off. (Which is also why it's preferably to have the aircraft pointing directly into the wind, where the airspeed is ground speed plus wind speed. As opposed to a tailwind where the airspeed can is ground speed minus wind speed.) Then there is Newton's Second law which states that acceleration due to a force is inversely proportional to the mass of the object being accelerated.
The practical effect is that the more mass in a plane the longer a runway it needs. It's not unknown for carrier based aircraft to have to hook up with a tanker soon after takeoff. (Warplanes can be refuelled in flight, but they cannot be rearmed in flight.)
Gallons, litres etc, are entirely independent of density. If you wanted to assure an amount of energy transfer in a fuel sale, you'd sell fuel by mass.
Which is how it works in aviation. Of course in a flying machine the mass (and hence weight) does tend to be more of an issue than other vehicles.
Yeah, it's stored in pressurized, insulated tanks underground, which will buffer the gas from temperature fluctuations.
I can't see the point of a pressurization system for such tanks, this would complicate refilling them. Simple valves are much easier from the engineering POV.
What we need is a serious penalty for any applicant that ignores prior art in the application.
How about something like both this patent, all pending patent applications and any patents issued within the past 5 years owned by the same entity are voided and entered on a permenent record of "prior art".
Repeat offenders are placed on a blacklist of people and corporations who cannot hold patents...
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand.
It's even simpler than that people don't tend to document the "obvious" simply becuase it is obvious. Or at least it is obvious to someone with the appropriate education and skillset.
You only tend to find obvious things documented if the intended audience is of non peers.