Actually it can answer it. The study looked at two groups: fresh recruits and vets. We can assume an age difference of at least a few years between them, and the recruits are likely to be young enough that they've only been smoking for a couple of years on average.
How long does addiction typically take?
Therefore if the smoking were causing damage, we'd expect the recruits to show a less pronounced effect than the vets.
Only if this issue is "damage" as opposed to effects of the drug on brain function including addiction
As the article mentions no difference between the two groups, we can assume no significant such difference exists, and therefore (at least) no evidence for the latter proposition, and potentially evidence against it.
What might show something interesting is comparing the results for people who have either started or stopped smoking...
One question that the article does not pose (and can't answer due to its nature) is which is cause and which is effect. Is the reason that smokers have a lower IQ that the people that start smoking have a lower IQ, or does smoking damage your ability to reason logically?
You'd need to find somewhere where several highly addictive drugs are legal to do such research.
And nuclear reactors are not prohibited: they're just deemed to risky to launch (and need to be parked in a long term high orbit, or risk raining down reactor bit that don't burn up)
If such a reactor does "burn up" all you've done is to distribute pollution throughout the atmosphere.
Well, once you leave your country to live abroad (which I highly recommend; it widens the horizon), you will learn that as a US citizen, although living abroad, you are still taxed by the US.
So why shouldn't the same thing apply to a "corporate person"?
Law Enforcement's "chain of custody" is a tremendously important concept. The "evidence" the police received is horribly tainted, and shouldn't have merited more than a knock on the door and a conversation with the man being joe-jobbed.
Especially if this was before they were aware of the rather strange burglary.
Also, note how the guy he was trying to frame was still arrested, and still barred from seeing his children, after someone sent the police a hard drive they claimed belonged to the guy. Of all the obvious frame jobs, this was dead sloppy, and yet the victim was STILL victimized by the authorities.
Quite likely the innocent victim still has a record of his arrest and biometric samples held by the police. Such records being very likely to misinterpretation by CRB/ISA. There's also a rather obvious piece of sexism in the Times report, which refers only to the victim's wife as "the victim"...
And don't get me started on buying DVDs. There's these stupid long ads I have to sit through telling me how bad piracy is. I bought your stupid friggin DVD, ok, so yes, I'm bloody supporting you. Then there's all this ridiculousness with new budget DVDs not having subtitles - I'm hearing impaired, how bloody hard is it to put stupid English subtitles on your film? That's half the reason I like to buy DVDs. Instead, other people who download the MKV get a nice film experience, with no unskippable ads, they can watch it on anything they like, and guess what - some nice fellow transcripted subtitles for that "pirated" movie. I mean...seriously...the frigging pirates get a better experience than me, who just forked out $30 for your stupid DVD.
In addition the "pirate source" dosn't come with any form of region coding and is available to everyone, everywhere, at the same time.
Based on Lovelock's work, I would say his theory is that a global totalitarian government devoted to attempting to prevent a mass extinction event would be the best option for preventing a global mass extinction event.
How good is the record when it comes to totalitarian governments doing what they claim to be doing in the first place? In other words how soon before any such government would just end up serving the interests of its members? That's before you even consider that mechanisms for "mass extension events" are poorly understood and in many cases pure guesswork.
Microsoft is a corrupt company catering to corrupt politicians.
"Corrupt" is a rather redundant adjective when it comes to politicians. Given that this appears to be the most common kind of politician you find in many places, especially where "career politicians" are vastly overrepresented.
Haven't read it for a while, but I remember there being a mention in Rousseau's "Social Contract" about the corrosive effect of impossible to enforce legislation. He makes the point that having laws on the books that the executive has no possibility of actually enforcing broadly (and people knowing this) eliminates the respect for the remaining laws and therefore the consent of the populace to abide by them.
This dosn't stop the likes of "the war on (some) drugs" Another thing which weakens the "rule of law" is where you have groups of people against whom laws are rarely (if ever enforced). Whilst the movie, music and software industries make a big fuss about copyright infringement when they are the "victims" they want it to be quietly ignored when they are the "perpetrators".
But even if you could freely use it, there still is no such thing as ownership of information. Because ownership is defined as having certain abilities, like control over it.
Thing is that there are quite a few advertisments for DVDs which include the words "own it".
In the movie file, show one add for an upcoming movie, then show the credit card details and user account information for about 5 seconds. "this copy of $movie is licenced to $name $address $credit_card_number" . The customer will protect your movies with the same level of care as their card information, and will share it at their own risk or have to go to the hassle of editing the information out before putting it on p2p.
Considering that people already edit files of TV broadcasts which can contain in excess of 20% ads intermingled with the content such editing probably wouldn't be that much trouble.
Encrypt a unique customer identifier into pixels in the film, the time and placement of which are determined by a secret algorithm that the company only runs under court seal in the investigation / litigation of a leak. With enough randomness and slight enough changes in pixel intensities / luminosities thrown in, determining the steganography algorithm used (and thus where the information was stored) would be very difficult.
You don't need to determine the algorithm to detect the steganography. All you need to do is get your hands on several copies of the file and look for variations. From these you can create a copy which has a random "watermark" or even one which is completely clean.
I like the way OpenSSH does it -- Trust On First Use (TOFU). First time you visit a server you're warned of possible MITM and given a fingerprint (which you could have, say, confirmed in person). After that you never see a warning again unless the server's key unexpectedly changes. No forcing you to automatically trust CAs, and no overstated warnings about self-signed certs.
Whereas the way web browsers typically do things you could be communicating with several hundred different entities and not know it.
The terrifying conclusion of this research is that when you randomly assign normal people to positions of power, they become psychopaths.
Except that there don't appear to be that many actual cases of people being randomly assigned to positions of power. Even juries which are specifically intended to be random frequently are not.
think anytime a product is based on the arbitrary opinion of "experts" then there's going to be this sort of price inflation. It's like calling out that the Emperor has no clothes. No one wants to run contrary to the expert and be considered rude or undiscriminating.
Especially when the "experts" have their own jargon.
It's sort of like music or art or diamonds or bottled water. The actual product is quite plentiful. There are many unsigned bands that have better talent than the biggest pop stars. A top rated diamond is only valuable because some company decided to assign a rating to what is essentially a piece of rock.
The slogan "A diamond is forever" is intended to discourage resale of gem diamonds which would cause the bottom to drop out of the marker.
One bottle of bottled water is almost certainly no better than another, and in the US, it's no better than tap water.
In some cases it can actually be "tap water". It can also be of worst quality due to the lack of regulation of what can be in it.
Penn & Teller did a show about bottled water and how a "water expert" opinion influenced how people perceived a bottle of water. I suspect that some of the subjects were just playing along, but many actually believed that garden hose water was more delicate and refreshing than others because of the expert opinion.
The best part was the several differently described waters all from the same hose:)
When two police officers are giving contradictory orders, as in this case, and the result is a charge of "failure to comply," it's entrapment, pure and simple.
It might better be described as a "Kobayashi Maru senario".
As the juror said, two wrongs don't make a right. If you want to screw the cops, you behave like a model citizen and then sue the shit out of them when they abuse their position.
Which is itself utterly daft. In what other situation would it be acceptable to sue the employer of someone who committed a criminal act?
It's irrelevant what operating system the malware operates on. The fact that malware came pre-loaded is troubling.
Especially given that there's no good reason for memory cards to come "pre-loaded" with anything at all and the phone's firmware has the ability to format memory cards.
Moral of the story: if you have long hair, secure it much better if you're going to spend a significant time with machinery...
If not you might spend the rest of your life with machinery.
Don't wear stuff like rings, or wear the sort of clothes that can easily get caught and pulled.
Don't they teach people this in schools any more? What next someone sues because a lathe dosn't come with something to prevent them wearing a tie!
Slashdot Mirror
The oxygen in our atmosphere had to be generated by plants.
Or more likely something similar to cyanobacteria. Especially given that chloroplasts appear to be derived from such organisms.
Actually it can answer it. The study looked at two groups: fresh recruits and vets. We can assume an age difference of at least a few years between them, and the recruits are likely to be young enough that they've only been smoking for a couple of years on average.
How long does addiction typically take?
Therefore if the smoking were causing damage, we'd expect the recruits to show a less pronounced effect than the vets.
Only if this issue is "damage" as opposed to effects of the drug on brain function including addiction
As the article mentions no difference between the two groups, we can assume no significant such difference exists, and therefore (at least) no evidence for the latter proposition, and potentially evidence against it.
What might show something interesting is comparing the results for people who have either started or stopped smoking...
One question that the article does not pose (and can't answer due to its nature) is which is cause and which is effect. Is the reason that smokers have a lower IQ that the people that start smoking have a lower IQ, or does smoking damage your ability to reason logically?
You'd need to find somewhere where several highly addictive drugs are legal to do such research.
What are the chances that the detonators and HE charge are still intact?
Some explosives become more unstable with time. Munitions dating from the First World War can still be dangerous.
And nuclear reactors are not prohibited: they're just deemed to risky to launch (and need to be parked in a long term high orbit, or risk raining down reactor bit that don't burn up)
If such a reactor does "burn up" all you've done is to distribute pollution throughout the atmosphere.
Well, once you leave your country to live abroad (which I highly recommend; it widens the horizon), you will learn that as a US citizen, although living abroad, you are still taxed by the US.
So why shouldn't the same thing apply to a "corporate person"?
Law Enforcement's "chain of custody" is a tremendously important concept. The "evidence" the police received is horribly tainted, and shouldn't have merited more than a knock on the door and a conversation with the man being joe-jobbed.
Especially if this was before they were aware of the rather strange burglary.
It is a difficult situation for the police. On the one hand, it has "frame job" written all over it, on the other hand, what if it isn't?
Is being a police officer, especially a detective, ment to be easy in the first place?
The police clearly made more than a usual effort investigate at least, but still. I dunno what you'd call the "right" answer is here.
Sounds like the problem here is with the "more than a usual effort" part. Which implies that the police typically don't do their job properly.
Also, note how the guy he was trying to frame was still arrested, and still barred from seeing his children, after someone sent the police a hard drive they claimed belonged to the guy. Of all the obvious frame jobs, this was dead sloppy, and yet the victim was STILL victimized by the authorities.
Quite likely the innocent victim still has a record of his arrest and biometric samples held by the police. Such records being very likely to misinterpretation by CRB/ISA.
There's also a rather obvious piece of sexism in the Times report, which refers only to the victim's wife as "the victim"...
And don't get me started on buying DVDs. There's these stupid long ads I have to sit through telling me how bad piracy is. I bought your stupid friggin DVD, ok, so yes, I'm bloody supporting you. Then there's all this ridiculousness with new budget DVDs not having subtitles - I'm hearing impaired, how bloody hard is it to put stupid English subtitles on your film? That's half the reason I like to buy DVDs. Instead, other people who download the MKV get a nice film experience, with no unskippable ads, they can watch it on anything they like, and guess what - some nice fellow transcripted subtitles for that "pirated" movie. I mean...seriously...the frigging pirates get a better experience than me, who just forked out $30 for your stupid DVD.
In addition the "pirate source" dosn't come with any form of region coding and is available to everyone, everywhere, at the same time.
Based on Lovelock's work, I would say his theory is that a global totalitarian government devoted to attempting to prevent a mass extinction event would be the best option for preventing a global mass extinction event.
How good is the record when it comes to totalitarian governments doing what they claim to be doing in the first place? In other words how soon before any such government would just end up serving the interests of its members?
That's before you even consider that mechanisms for "mass extension events" are poorly understood and in many cases pure guesswork.
Microsoft is a corrupt company catering to corrupt politicians.
"Corrupt" is a rather redundant adjective when it comes to politicians. Given that this appears to be the most common kind of politician you find in many places, especially where "career politicians" are vastly overrepresented.
If the movie studiosmade unbreakable DRM, you would not have able to bypass any messages (or do anything really) without their explicit permission,
The only place you will find unbreakable DRM is in fiction. Even then it's often only a matter of a better wizard turning up.
Haven't read it for a while, but I remember there being a mention in Rousseau's "Social Contract" about the corrosive effect of impossible to enforce legislation. He makes the point that having laws on the books that the executive has no possibility of actually enforcing broadly (and people knowing this) eliminates the respect for the remaining laws and therefore the consent of the populace to abide by them.
This dosn't stop the likes of "the war on (some) drugs"
Another thing which weakens the "rule of law" is where you have groups of people against whom laws are rarely (if ever enforced). Whilst the movie, music and software industries make a big fuss about copyright infringement when they are the "victims" they want it to be quietly ignored when they are the "perpetrators".
But even if you could freely use it, there still is no such thing as ownership of information. Because ownership is defined as having certain abilities, like control over it.
Thing is that there are quite a few advertisments for DVDs which include the words "own it".
In the movie file, show one add for an upcoming movie, then show the credit card details and user account information for about 5 seconds. "this copy of $movie is licenced to $name $address $credit_card_number" . The customer will protect your movies with the same level of care as their card information, and will share it at their own risk or have to go to the hassle of editing the information out before putting it on p2p.
Considering that people already edit files of TV broadcasts which can contain in excess of 20% ads intermingled with the content such editing probably wouldn't be that much trouble.
Encrypt a unique customer identifier into pixels in the film, the time and placement of which are determined by a secret algorithm that the company only runs under court seal in the investigation / litigation of a leak. With enough randomness and slight enough changes in pixel intensities / luminosities thrown in, determining the steganography algorithm used (and thus where the information was stored) would be very difficult.
You don't need to determine the algorithm to detect the steganography. All you need to do is get your hands on several copies of the file and look for variations. From these you can create a copy which has a random "watermark" or even one which is completely clean.
I like the way OpenSSH does it -- Trust On First Use (TOFU). First time you visit a server you're warned of possible MITM and given a fingerprint (which you could have, say, confirmed in person). After that you never see a warning again unless the server's key unexpectedly changes. No forcing you to automatically trust CAs, and no overstated warnings about self-signed certs.
Whereas the way web browsers typically do things you could be communicating with several hundred different entities and not know it.
The terrifying conclusion of this research is that when you randomly assign normal people to positions of power, they become psychopaths.
Except that there don't appear to be that many actual cases of people being randomly assigned to positions of power. Even juries which are specifically intended to be random frequently are not.
Projects like Ubuntu and Windows are not democracies, in the sense that I have no "vote" on decisions they have to make.
Plenty of non democracies have voting. The people who actually invented the concept didn't actually have much "voting" anyway.
Wikipedia is closer to being a democracy - more like a Democratic Republic (of course this is debatable).
Thing is that any entity calling itself a "Democratic Republic" is more likely to be an oligarchy or tyrany.
think anytime a product is based on the arbitrary opinion of "experts" then there's going to be this sort of price inflation. It's like calling out that the Emperor has no clothes. No one wants to run contrary to the expert and be considered rude or undiscriminating.
:)
Especially when the "experts" have their own jargon.
It's sort of like music or art or diamonds or bottled water. The actual product is quite plentiful. There are many unsigned bands that have better talent than the biggest pop stars. A top rated diamond is only valuable because some company decided to assign a rating to what is essentially a piece of rock.
The slogan "A diamond is forever" is intended to discourage resale of gem diamonds which would cause the bottom to drop out of the marker.
One bottle of bottled water is almost certainly no better than another, and in the US, it's no better than tap water.
In some cases it can actually be "tap water". It can also be of worst quality due to the lack of regulation of what can be in it.
Penn & Teller did a show about bottled water and how a "water expert" opinion influenced how people perceived a bottle of water. I suspect that some of the subjects were just playing along, but many actually believed that garden hose water was more delicate and refreshing than others because of the expert opinion.
The best part was the several differently described waters all from the same hose
When two police officers are giving contradictory orders, as in this case, and the result is a charge of "failure to comply," it's entrapment, pure and simple.
It might better be described as a "Kobayashi Maru senario".
As the juror said, two wrongs don't make a right. If you want to screw the cops, you behave like a model citizen and then sue the shit out of them when they abuse their position.
Which is itself utterly daft. In what other situation would it be acceptable to sue the employer of someone who committed a criminal act?
It's irrelevant what operating system the malware operates on. The fact that malware came pre-loaded is troubling.
Especially given that there's no good reason for memory cards to come "pre-loaded" with anything at all and the phone's firmware has the ability to format memory cards.
Moral of the story: if you have long hair, secure it much better if you're going to spend a significant time with machinery...
If not you might spend the rest of your life with machinery.
Don't wear stuff like rings, or wear the sort of clothes that can easily get caught and pulled.
Don't they teach people this in schools any more? What next someone sues because a lathe dosn't come with something to prevent them wearing a tie!