If you were to simply remove yourself from the flow of time for a moment, the rest of the universe would keep chugging along. It would leave you behind. The Earth would spin away from you, as well as orbit away from you. When you re-entered the flow of time you'd be in a different place than where you started from.
I recall a novel where this was the idea behind a starship. It would jump through time maintaining the same position which resulted in it reappearing in a different part of the universe.
Given the (literally) astronomical distance that everyone moves over the span of a few years... Any machine that was capable of traveling through time would also have to be able to travel great distances in space. Otherwise you wouldn't pop back in to the same geographic location you left from.
Even more of an issue with something like Terminator where only the traveller is being sent. Even a T888 is going to have problems in interstellar space.
Yes, Sony created a fake movie reviewer named David Manning. Its actually an incredible tale of corporate craziness and dishonesty. This Manning character would give glowing reviews to all of Sony's terrible movies like a Knight's Tale or a Rob Schneider movie.
With Mr Manning probably being a better piece of fiction than some of the movies in question.
Yeah, Windows does that for all USB devices. Linux does something similar. It loads and unloads the driver for the USB port, but uses the driver that's already on the system, so it doesn't have to install every time.
The problem with Windows is that sometimes it will realise it already has a driver for the device and "install" it for the "new" USB port. In other cases it will request a driver disk, in which case it is generally possible to manually tell it to look at the drivers which it already has. The other difference between Windows and Linux is that with Linux a suitable driver is likely to already be there unless it is a very unusual USB device.
And I remember the Mandrake CD-drive killer sequence. Samne damn problem: unguarded firmware update commands. Instead, these commands are legit commands, but were re-used as a firmware update.
Wonder if the drive suppliers bothered to document what they were doing in this case...
Now, how much of these drive killer and card killer commands are also on Windows, but we suspect them as other occurrences, like ESD, lightning, or power surges?
Since Windows drivers are often supplied with the hardware the writers presumably knew enough about any "Halt Catch Fire" instructions to avoid them.
I think that one of the main problems of windows and one of its main infection vector was (I heard they made progress) its tendency to open ports and services that less than 1% of users will use or are even aware of.
It even appears to be the case that the major use of some Windows "features" is the distribution of malware. The 1% being more less than one in a thousand to one in a million:)
But this *is* a critical system. If you know your opponent's logistics capabilities, you can very effectively plan around his resupply requirements (or worse, pin him down and play the attrition card.)
Or even worse work out how to disrupt your opponent's supply lines using the minimum of your own forces.
I'm shocked to find that Windows based computers are subject to virus infections! SHOCKED!
It would probably be bad judgement for the US military to use Windows computers for anything other than the most trivial of tasks. For the military of any other country to touch the stuff with a bargepole is utterly daft.
As for holocaust denial... I find it tragically funny. Some of my friends grandparents have tattoos on their arms. Hell my grandfather was among the first US troops to arrive at Auschwitz, he didn't talk about it much, but he was there. How can you deny something that people who are still alive lived through? Ignoring that, if you want to claim that their are "lying Jews" about, there is actual Nazi paper work, and forensic evidence.
If would be funny if it were not for the fact that the term often isn't applied to people who say "nothing happened". But also to those who wish to investigate the evidence. As well as those seek an explanations for such things as there appearing to be more "holocaust survivors" now than there were 60 odd years.
I'm not sure whether the "RM SafetyNet Plus" filtering offered uses IWF lists or not. Based on a quick reading of RM's web site, it seems they have their own list, but they could just be rebranding IWF's.
It's actually a combination of several lists, one if which is the secret IWF list.
If we knew why it was blacklisted, we could(and probably would) find fault with it and then publicly ridicule the blacklist, holding this to be yet another reason why blacklists are made of failure.
There was the Finnish "child porn" blacklist where it turned out that something like 99% of the entries could by no stretch of the imagination be considered "child porn".
What I don't get is this: are there really people out there that end up on a site, don't like what they see/read and think "someone should ban these guys!"?
Especially where they deliberatly go looking for material which offended them. Probably a similar mentality to those who "watch" a movie to compile a list of how many objectional actions/words are it it.
I mean I end up on some eye-soring sites but it's not like I can't just close the damn tab/window. I think most of those "OMG that site should be banned" guys are just trying to make excuses for not taking care of their children right or visiting sites they shouldn't visit (at work or not), and so on.
Or they just don't like whatever and can't come up with a rational argument against it.
The people that don't want censoring should be as loud as those idiots otherwise we will never stop censoring.
People who want censorship will always get the first world in. That's just the way people behave.
This is the problem that I have with laws like this. No one can really object to "protecting children", which is why it is such a persuasive argument, but the whole thing starts to verge on evil when it becomes legislating what people are allowed to say, do, or create.
You can also end up with the likes of laws against "child pornography" being used against horny teenagers with camera phones.
This is problematic on two levels. The more obvious one is that we all have different standards of what is acceptable for our children. A lot of the things governments try to ban "for the children" I have no problem with, like sexuality, or alternative lifestyles.
On the other hand you may be concerned about things which are not an issue to governments or the advocates they often listen to.
The second reason is the more we protect our children, the more juvenile they will remain throughout life. Children are not eternal, they, like the rest of us, must spend 4/5ths of their lives as adults. The more we block them off from the world, the more we stunt their emotional growth, and ability to cope with foreign (if distasteful) concepts.
A complication is that in recent history in the "developed world" the average age of physical adulthood has been falling whilst legal adulthood has been rising. Thus we now have a population of young men and women who are considered to be children in law. This is something which simply wasn't the case until recently.
Remember college? Remember the freshman experience, the first time away from home? The alcohol poisoning, the bad sexual encounters, the drug use?
A part of human behaviour is that people have an acceptable level of risk. Which varies between individials. When people are in a position of feeling "too safe", they will attempt to compensate for it.
Actually it was in Athens, what we now call "Greece" being a collection of city states. Also the way things were cond in classical Athens was radically different from anything we now call "democracy".
Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries.
You'd think the same for gas pipelines:) When it comes to "non-cooperative countries" things start getting complex.
Internet is still a dangerous place for kids, it's just not as dangerous as what others might have put it.
How exactly is it dangerous?
I certainly don't want my kids to use this report to tell me it's more dangerous for them to play in the playground across the road than letting them surf net all day.
Regardless of whatever risks said playground contains they have to cross the road. This comes with a risk of serious injury or death.
So? Lie on the supermarket form. Or pick a name & address out of the phone book. It's more fun to pollute their marketing database with incorrect data.
In this case there isn't that much the supermarket can do to to. Whereas a government can toss you in jail.
As far as reasonableness? Your scenarios sound pretty darn unlikely. Almost as unlikely as someone stealing my iPod with my contact info in it, then deliberately leaving it at the scene of a murder in order to frame me.
They wouldn't need to steal your iPod they could just leave one with your details on it. They could also steal your iPod and upload your files. Which the likes if the RIAA probably regard as worst that murder,
Next step was talking in "code". Cryptography in a very crude fashion.
Codes are not "crude cryptography". Codes are a part of "natural language". Even "slang" and "jargon" can have the effect of rendering a conversation subject to being misinterpreted or impossible to understand by a third party even without that being a specific intention. It isn't exactly hard to come up with a code which is deliberatly misleading to evesdroppers. Assuming they even have to. e.g. The Brazilian police would probably have difficulty dealing with a a gang of Welsh speaking criminals.
Not really. The U.S. has a Constitution which protects the People's rights from stupid Legislators passing anti-liberty laws.
Except that anything which makes it through the legislative process is considered to be "Constitutional" unless the US Supreme court says otherwise. One of the most obvious pieces of anti-consitutional legislation having been drafted by Joe Biden.
The law is supposed to catch "scary terrorists"
Given that there are dozens of ways to side-step your ISP's E-mail, do they only plan on catching the sort of terrorist that is computer illiterate?
And of course the only communication mechanism terrorists can possibly use is email in plain English (or Arabic). They'd never use codes, letters, telephones, dead drops (in either the physical world or "cyberspace"), face to face meetings, etc. Of course if you are not "Islamic" you'd probably be able to operate a terrorist group quite openly in the UK. Even if you didn't have the support of the British Government (or another government Whitehall considers "friendly").
If a nice leaflet/broadcast/website from the government explains "it's to catch terrorists" and "it's to catch really super big evil criminals" - most people will say "well I am not one of those so I don't care".
In practice it would be huge surprise if this wasn't used for everything except terrorism and organised crime. Given that so called "anti terrorist laws" have been used for all sorts of things which have nothing to do with terrorism whilst actual terrorists (such as SHAC) arn't even even prosecuted under such laws. That's if they even get prosecuted at all.
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If you were to simply remove yourself from the flow of time for a moment, the rest of the universe would keep chugging along. It would leave you behind. The Earth would spin away from you, as well as orbit away from you. When you re-entered the flow of time you'd be in a different place than where you started from.
I recall a novel where this was the idea behind a starship. It would jump through time maintaining the same position which resulted in it reappearing in a different part of the universe.
Given the (literally) astronomical distance that everyone moves over the span of a few years... Any machine that was capable of traveling through time would also have to be able to travel great distances in space. Otherwise you wouldn't pop back in to the same geographic location you left from.
Even more of an issue with something like Terminator where only the traveller is being sent. Even a T888 is going to have problems in interstellar space.
Yes, Sony created a fake movie reviewer named David Manning. Its actually an incredible tale of corporate craziness and dishonesty. This Manning character would give glowing reviews to all of Sony's terrible movies like a Knight's Tale or a Rob Schneider movie.
:)
With Mr Manning probably being a better piece of fiction than some of the movies in question.
Sony quitely retired Mr Manning.
Wonder in "The Onion" could offer him a job
I suspect the two people who paid up are now wishing that they hadn't.
Yeah, Windows does that for all USB devices. Linux does something similar. It loads and unloads the driver for the USB port, but uses the driver that's already on the system, so it doesn't have to install every time.
The problem with Windows is that sometimes it will realise it already has a driver for the device and "install" it for the "new" USB port. In other cases it will request a driver disk, in which case it is generally possible to manually tell it to look at the drivers which it already has. The other difference between Windows and Linux is that with Linux a suitable driver is likely to already be there unless it is a very unusual USB device.
And I remember the Mandrake CD-drive killer sequence. Samne damn problem: unguarded firmware update commands. Instead, these commands are legit commands, but were re-used as a firmware update.
Wonder if the drive suppliers bothered to document what they were doing in this case...
Now, how much of these drive killer and card killer commands are also on Windows, but we suspect them as other occurrences, like ESD, lightning, or power surges?
Since Windows drivers are often supplied with the hardware the writers presumably knew enough about any "Halt Catch Fire" instructions to avoid them.
I think that one of the main problems of windows and one of its main infection vector was (I heard they made progress) its tendency to open ports and services that less than 1% of users will use or are even aware of.
:)
It even appears to be the case that the major use of some Windows "features" is the distribution of malware. The 1% being more less than one in a thousand to one in a million
But this *is* a critical system. If you know your opponent's logistics capabilities, you can very effectively plan around his resupply requirements (or worse, pin him down and play the attrition card.)
Or even worse work out how to disrupt your opponent's supply lines using the minimum of your own forces.
I'm shocked to find that Windows based computers are subject to virus infections! SHOCKED!
It would probably be bad judgement for the US military to use Windows computers for anything other than the most trivial of tasks. For the military of any other country to touch the stuff with a bargepole is utterly daft.
The best way of preventing another holocaust is to remember the last one.
When was the "last one"? Cambodia 1975-78, Rwanda 1994 or Darfur, Gaza & Zimbabwe right now...
As for holocaust denial... I find it tragically funny. Some of my friends grandparents have tattoos on their arms. Hell my grandfather was among the first US troops to arrive at Auschwitz, he didn't talk about it much, but he was there. How can you deny something that people who are still alive lived through? Ignoring that, if you want to claim that their are "lying Jews" about, there is actual Nazi paper work, and forensic evidence.
If would be funny if it were not for the fact that the term often isn't applied to people who say "nothing happened". But also to those who wish to investigate the evidence. As well as those seek an explanations for such things as there appearing to be more "holocaust survivors" now than there were 60 odd years.
I'm not sure whether the "RM SafetyNet Plus" filtering offered uses IWF lists or not. Based on a quick reading of RM's web site, it seems they have their own list, but they could just be rebranding IWF's.
It's actually a combination of several lists, one if which is the secret IWF list.
If we knew why it was blacklisted, we could(and probably would) find fault with it and then publicly ridicule the blacklist, holding this to be yet another reason why blacklists are made of failure.
There was the Finnish "child porn" blacklist where it turned out that something like 99% of the entries could by no stretch of the imagination be considered "child porn".
What I don't get is this: are there really people out there that end up on a site, don't like what they see/read and think "someone should ban these guys!"?
Especially where they deliberatly go looking for material which offended them. Probably a similar mentality to those who "watch" a movie to compile a list of how many objectional actions/words are it it.
I mean I end up on some eye-soring sites but it's not like I can't just close the damn tab/window. I think most of those "OMG that site should be banned" guys are just trying to make excuses for not taking care of their children right or visiting sites they shouldn't visit (at work or not), and so on.
Or they just don't like whatever and can't come up with a rational argument against it.
The people that don't want censoring should be as loud as those idiots otherwise we will never stop censoring.
People who want censorship will always get the first world in. That's just the way people behave.
This is the problem that I have with laws like this. No one can really object to "protecting children", which is why it is such a persuasive argument, but the whole thing starts to verge on evil when it becomes legislating what people are allowed to say, do, or create.
You can also end up with the likes of laws against "child pornography" being used against horny teenagers with camera phones.
This is problematic on two levels. The more obvious one is that we all have different standards of what is acceptable for our children. A lot of the things governments try to ban "for the children" I have no problem with, like sexuality, or alternative lifestyles.
On the other hand you may be concerned about things which are not an issue to governments or the advocates they often listen to.
The second reason is the more we protect our children, the more juvenile they will remain throughout life. Children are not eternal, they, like the rest of us, must spend 4/5ths of their lives as adults. The more we block them off from the world, the more we stunt their emotional growth, and ability to cope with foreign (if distasteful) concepts.
A complication is that in recent history in the "developed world" the average age of physical adulthood has been falling whilst legal adulthood has been rising. Thus we now have a population of young men and women who are considered to be children in law. This is something which simply wasn't the case until recently.
Remember college? Remember the freshman experience, the first time away from home? The alcohol poisoning, the bad sexual encounters, the drug use?
A part of human behaviour is that people have an acceptable level of risk. Which varies between individials. When people are in a position of feeling "too safe", they will attempt to compensate for it.
Democracy was in Greece millennia ago, not here.
Actually it was in Athens, what we now call "Greece" being a collection of city states. Also the way things were cond in classical Athens was radically different from anything we now call "democracy".
Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries.
:) When it comes to "non-cooperative countries" things start getting complex.
You'd think the same for gas pipelines
Internet is still a dangerous place for kids, it's just not as dangerous as what others might have put it.
How exactly is it dangerous?
I certainly don't want my kids to use this report to tell me it's more dangerous for them to play in the playground across the road than letting them surf net all day.
Regardless of whatever risks said playground contains they have to cross the road. This comes with a risk of serious injury or death.
But.. who are we going to have to think of now?
As the article indicates so called "experts" are likely to dismiss this study since it dosn't come to the "right" conclusion.
So? Lie on the supermarket form. Or pick a name & address out of the phone book.
It's more fun to pollute their marketing database with incorrect data.
In this case there isn't that much the supermarket can do to to. Whereas a government can toss you in jail.
As far as reasonableness? Your scenarios sound pretty darn unlikely. Almost as unlikely as someone stealing my iPod with my contact info in it, then deliberately leaving it at the scene of a murder in order to frame me.
They wouldn't need to steal your iPod they could just leave one with your details on it. They could also steal your iPod and upload your files. Which the likes if the RIAA probably regard as worst that murder,
I want warning labels for politicians.
Something like "Voting for the wrong person could damage your health, wealth and privacy."
Next step was talking in "code". Cryptography in a very crude fashion.
Codes are not "crude cryptography". Codes are a part of "natural language". Even "slang" and "jargon" can have the effect of rendering a conversation subject to being misinterpreted or impossible to understand by a third party even without that being a specific intention. It isn't exactly hard to come up with a code which is deliberatly misleading to evesdroppers. Assuming they even have to. e.g. The Brazilian police would probably have difficulty dealing with a a gang of Welsh speaking criminals.
Not really. The U.S. has a Constitution which protects the People's rights from stupid Legislators passing anti-liberty laws.
Except that anything which makes it through the legislative process is considered to be "Constitutional" unless the US Supreme court says otherwise. One of the most obvious pieces of anti-consitutional legislation having been drafted by Joe Biden.
The law is supposed to catch "scary terrorists"
Given that there are dozens of ways to side-step your ISP's E-mail, do they only plan on catching the sort of terrorist that is computer illiterate?
And of course the only communication mechanism terrorists can possibly use is email in plain English (or Arabic). They'd never use codes, letters, telephones, dead drops (in either the physical world or "cyberspace"), face to face meetings, etc.
Of course if you are not "Islamic" you'd probably be able to operate a terrorist group quite openly in the UK. Even if you didn't have the support of the British Government (or another government Whitehall considers "friendly").
If a nice leaflet/broadcast/website from the government explains "it's to catch terrorists" and "it's to catch really super big evil criminals" - most people will say "well I am not one of those so I don't care".
In practice it would be huge surprise if this wasn't used for everything except terrorism and organised crime. Given that so called "anti terrorist laws" have been used for all sorts of things which have nothing to do with terrorism whilst actual terrorists (such as SHAC) arn't even even prosecuted under such laws. That's if they even get prosecuted at all.