A law no matter how blatantly unconstitutional is still a real law, as meaningful as any other, until someone with standing (someone already hurt by that law) gets a case in front of the SCOTUS
The source from which the Supreme Court derives its authority, and ultimately the final arbiter of constitutionality is the people.
The legal encyclopedia American Jurisprudence says the following in regard to constitutionality:
The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and the name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void and ineffective for any purpose since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it; an unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed... An unconstitutional law is void. (16 Am. Jur. 2d, Sec. 178)
I understand that you're saying, in reality, the system doesn't operate like this. The problem is that the decision to operate in this manner is a legally inconsistent farce. They are undermining their own legitimacy and it can't end well.
Undermining the Constitution undermines the only source of authority by which this government operates. If the Constitution is nothing more than a goddamn piece of paper to them, then the government is ultimately not legitimate at all.
That said, you usually don't get blocked from websites for hosting a relay node, though you certainly do get blocked from many sites (this one included!) for hosting an exit node.
That's what the person you're replying to just said. Although, from the article, they apparently aren't running enough nodes to quite pull this off.
They can't just run all of these nodes from their own block of addresses, so I assume distributing enough nodes across the world is limiting their ability to properly analyze the network. There are only 4000 relay nodes and fewer than 1000 exit nodes, so there must be some operational limitation on their ability to outnumber the other nodes and own the network.
As much as I hate to encourage ISPs coaxing people to business accounts in this way, I really recommend you check it out.
When I got sick of random ports being blocked (the last straw was blocking inbound 25/TCP (which has nothing to do with stopping spammers)), I changed my account to a business account and it ended up only costing ~10% more for the same speed. In addition to helpful cooperation with things like setting up reverse DNS and an actual SLA (it's not fantastic, but they are now extremely quick about fixing outages that involve me), speaking to the customer service is not horrible at all. They are all native speakers who know what they're talking about and the first line techs will actually listen to you and fix your problem.
It sounds like Stockholm Syndrome now that I type it out, but this is really what dealing with an ISP should be like. It's nice to not be treated as an enemy of the company I'm paying for service.
Look at human history, though. We seem to pick the latter option every single time.
Most people are hopelessly confused and have no idea what's happening or how to properly address it.
Some people know that we need to do something, but lack the knowledge or means to effectively do that something.
A tiny group of people see the problem, know how to solve it, and have the means to effect that solution, but are profiting wildly from the current situation and so allow it to continue unaddressed.
I think that this properly addresses just about every problem that groups of humans encounter. In some ways, we kind of suck as a species.
The Internet itself, as well as the term "internet", predate the WWW and have always been US-centric. The "inter" in internet is referring to the interconnection of otherwise local networks (internetworking). It was called the Internet long before it was ever even international.
The WWW is great, and I appreciate the international network that we have now, but your terminology is wrong.
There's likely at least one atomic clock at each physical facility and the time is synchronized at that facility using NTP. NTP has a resolution of 233 ps and network delays can be very well characterized over time. If you really care about proper time, as these folks likely would, you can have a separate physical network that does nothing but sync time and has no unpredictable traffic on it.
This stuff is all (relatively) cheap, too. My time server at home uses oven-controlled crystal oscillators disciplined to multiple time sources and it keeps time accurate to ~15 ns (even for the clients on my crazy wild uncontrolled wifi network, the jitter is measured in microseconds). And the whole setup only cost a couple of hundred bucks. Even atomic clocks aren't these big crazy lab instruments anymore (nor have they been for decades). You can buy nice little rackmount cesium clocks easily.
If you're the sort of "investor" that needs liquidity on that timescale, then you're in the same boat as the HFT bots. Even day traders, which take a massive stretch of the imagination to call "investors", won't suffer from that loss of liquidity.
Is it a useful database? The database doesn't appear to have many uses beyond the prohibition-oriented ones. The claimed uses don't necessitate a state run database.
It seems like law enforcement involvement was the whole point of it. Maybe Oregon just didn't want to share with the DEA.
The point of scientific journals is not so much the publication as it is the peer review process. Peer review is important to establish that the experimental methodology and conclusions drawn are well controlled and sound. That's something you don't get with non-peer reviewed self-published papers (and if you've read many of them, it really shows sometimes).
Of course, the publishers of these journals, as demonstrated in the article, seem to think that the publication is the important part and obviously care less about good peer reviewing. There's still a place in modern science for this whole process, but clearly the journals want to ensure that they aren't a part of whatever better solution we find.
Your post is a clear illustration of that not being the case. Frankly, the easiest way to get modded up on Slashdot is to make shallow and hateful generalizations about the US or Americans.
I'm annoyed with the over-politicization of stuff on Slashdot. Talking about science and tech is fun and talking about politics is rarely fun. From my time on Slashdot, it's not always the Americans that are incessantly bringing politics into everything. It's very in vogue to hate on the US in Europe and much of the world, and the need to publicly participate in such hate keeps polluting otherwise non-political conversations here.
Absolutely. I realized shortly after my original post that blackmail seems just like Danegeld because it is (originally) literally the exact same thing as Danegeld!
As to your first point, I realize that the mere accusation of some things can be ridiculously damaging, but by the time you're being extorted you're already in damage control mode. If someone's threatening to release damaging misinformation about you, there's no legal way to keep them quiet without also risking their message getting out. Any extralegal attempt to silence them only risks forcing their hand and in the end paints just as poor a picture of you as paying them off does.
This only really works if the people who are extorting you are the authorities, though. Extortion is illegal and the only thing that keeps the victim from involving the police is their secret coming out. If the secret isn't true then there isn't any leverage to use against the victim. The revealed misinformation can still be damaging, but there is great incentive to out the blackmailer and clear your name. Giving in to them only lends credence to the misinformation and gives them leverage.
[From your example, if some guys threatens to expose your (non-existent) child porn studio if you don't pay him, paying him is the last thing you want to do. There's no assurance that paying will shut him up and if he goes to the press after you've paid him off (maybe more than once), the story is now that you've payed someone to keep quiet about your child porn studio. On the other hand, if you go to the cops, the story is that you were being blackmailed over a child porn studio that the cops verified wasn't real and the blackmailer is being hunted down by law enforcement. True, "child porn studio" and your name still show up together in the news, but this is the best realistic (and controllable) outcome.]
Of course, in your situation, the law is the blackmailer and so it doesn't matter if the "secret" is true or not. There will be no justice.
Unless they're perfect dice (and they certainly won't be after generating gigabytes of material), there may still be a bias in the pad you generate with them.
Blackmail only works on criminals and sleazebags. If you're doing shit so bad that you're willing to sell out your entire country to keep it quiet you deserve to be strung up by an angry mob.
Ordinary people do stupid and embarrassing stuff, but most people don't have histories that they couldn't come clean about if forced to. Only sociopathic assholes whose lives are entirely built on deception (eg politicians) are susceptible to this sort of treatment.
Blackmail is like Danegeld. Only an idiot would choose to play that game and only a criminal would need to.
If the data are important to you, you host them in house. Hopefully the practical lesson that everybody learned from this isn't just, "US bad, everywhere else good". That's such a ridiculously superficial and overly specific interpretation of all of this.
There's no such thing as perfect security, but trusting crucial data with opaque third-parties is about as far from perfect security as you can get.
They likely aren't searching for nefarious reasons, but are just curious about something or other. That's not to say that it's appropriate, though.
As for the confidentiality, I think we've really hit on one of the scarier aspects of social media. I doubt that they know or would ever really understand that searching for something leaks so much information. It seems innocuous, like flipping through a phone book, but it's closer to calling up your local spy agency and asking if they have a file on someone. The fact that you're interested in this person's file is certainly going into your file.
The answer is likely "the other people". You know how Facebook knows everything about you despite not having an account? Other people search for you (establishing that they know you), tag you in pictures (establishing what you look like), helpfully give up your phone number and, so on...
These doctors, lawyers, and business associates have likely searched for you on LinkedIn and that's how they know. (Or they volunteered their address book and you're listed in it.) Good security practices and social networking don't go hand in hand.
A surplus or camping pot, a soda can alcohol stove, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol will set you back the cost of one energy drink and the fuel will last for weeks. An energy drink is only going to make you less hungry for an hour or two at best, but a bowl of beans and rice will hold you over much longer. I've used this setup for backpacking over weeks and it's small, light, cheap, and easy to use. Cooking without a house is easy enough if you keep it simple.
You can keep most cooked food for a few days without it spoiling, though you're right that buying raw meat or eggs in bulk is not a great idea.
And of course, like all other mental illnesses, if being autistic isn't causing you distress or affecting your ability to function then there's no "illness" label or imperative to be treated. On the other hand, if autism (or any other mental illness) is crippling someone's life and can be eased with some kind of treatment, it's not fair to them to deny that their condition is an illness when it clearly is.
I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.
I'd like to jump in and recommend trying out the Beaglebone Black. At $45, it's not much more than the Pi, and feels like what the Raspberry Pi should have been. It's much more stable (and uses less power!), has on-chip ethernet (avoiding horrible USB related problems that the Pi has), isn't plagued with USB issues and generally has better specs. Interfacing stuff to the Beaglebone is a dream, compared to the Pi, with more hardware supported modes and real analog pins.
Since finding the Beaglebone and the Black, my flaky old Pis get used much less often. Admittedly, I'm using these as embedded controllers for instruments and not as a media center. I'm not sure how the Black does in that area.
This model of atomic structure hasn't been valid for almost a century.
That's a sugar-coated way of saying that this model was wrong, and scientists had been believing the wrong thing up until less than a century ago.
You scientists sure know your way around words.
I think this comment succinctly sums up the differing frame of mind between faith and science.
With faith, the most fundamentally important thing that you can do it not change your mind. If new evidence arises that challenges your worldview, you are obligated to ignore it or discredit it or... anything but let it shake your worldview. Changing your mind is acceptance of having been wrong, which is the ultimate admission of failure.
Science, on the other hand, represents a dedication to discovering the truth. Being closer to correct now is more important than pretending that you knew the correct answer all along. If you find evidence that your previous model was wrong, you are obligated to change your model to fit all available data and be correct now. There's no shame in having been wrong in the past. There is shame in deliberately being wrong now.
The troll AC bring up science's greatest strength as a failure is a strong sign that there will not be a reconciling between people who are ruled by one mindset or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
A law no matter how blatantly unconstitutional is still a real law, as meaningful as any other, until someone with standing (someone already hurt by that law) gets a case in front of the SCOTUS
The source from which the Supreme Court derives its authority, and ultimately the final arbiter of constitutionality is the people.
The legal encyclopedia American Jurisprudence says the following in regard to constitutionality:
I understand that you're saying, in reality, the system doesn't operate like this. The problem is that the decision to operate in this manner is a legally inconsistent farce. They are undermining their own legitimacy and it can't end well.
Undermining the Constitution undermines the only source of authority by which this government operates. If the Constitution is nothing more than a goddamn piece of paper to them, then the government is ultimately not legitimate at all.
It's not a secret where the exit nodes are. In fact, none of the nodes are kept secret.
That said, you usually don't get blocked from websites for hosting a relay node, though you certainly do get blocked from many sites (this one included!) for hosting an exit node.
That's what the person you're replying to just said. Although, from the article, they apparently aren't running enough nodes to quite pull this off.
They can't just run all of these nodes from their own block of addresses, so I assume distributing enough nodes across the world is limiting their ability to properly analyze the network. There are only 4000 relay nodes and fewer than 1000 exit nodes, so there must be some operational limitation on their ability to outnumber the other nodes and own the network.
We had debtor's prisons in the US until the mid 1800s.
A fertilized zygote, on the other hand, usually will.
Back in reality, "Around half of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant."
As much as I hate to encourage ISPs coaxing people to business accounts in this way, I really recommend you check it out.
When I got sick of random ports being blocked (the last straw was blocking inbound 25/TCP (which has nothing to do with stopping spammers)), I changed my account to a business account and it ended up only costing ~10% more for the same speed. In addition to helpful cooperation with things like setting up reverse DNS and an actual SLA (it's not fantastic, but they are now extremely quick about fixing outages that involve me), speaking to the customer service is not horrible at all. They are all native speakers who know what they're talking about and the first line techs will actually listen to you and fix your problem.
It sounds like Stockholm Syndrome now that I type it out, but this is really what dealing with an ISP should be like. It's nice to not be treated as an enemy of the company I'm paying for service.
And here you are posting on Slashdot. Your corporation's efficiency has dropped 100%. Get back to work!
Look at human history, though. We seem to pick the latter option every single time.
I think that this properly addresses just about every problem that groups of humans encounter. In some ways, we kind of suck as a species.
The Internet itself, as well as the term "internet", predate the WWW and have always been US-centric. The "inter" in internet is referring to the interconnection of otherwise local networks (internetworking). It was called the Internet long before it was ever even international.
The WWW is great, and I appreciate the international network that we have now, but your terminology is wrong.
There's likely at least one atomic clock at each physical facility and the time is synchronized at that facility using NTP. NTP has a resolution of 233 ps and network delays can be very well characterized over time. If you really care about proper time, as these folks likely would, you can have a separate physical network that does nothing but sync time and has no unpredictable traffic on it.
This stuff is all (relatively) cheap, too. My time server at home uses oven-controlled crystal oscillators disciplined to multiple time sources and it keeps time accurate to ~15 ns (even for the clients on my crazy wild uncontrolled wifi network, the jitter is measured in microseconds). And the whole setup only cost a couple of hundred bucks. Even atomic clocks aren't these big crazy lab instruments anymore (nor have they been for decades). You can buy nice little rackmount cesium clocks easily.
If you're the sort of "investor" that needs liquidity on that timescale, then you're in the same boat as the HFT bots. Even day traders, which take a massive stretch of the imagination to call "investors", won't suffer from that loss of liquidity.
Is it a useful database? The database doesn't appear to have many uses beyond the prohibition-oriented ones. The claimed uses don't necessitate a state run database.
It seems like law enforcement involvement was the whole point of it. Maybe Oregon just didn't want to share with the DEA.
The point of scientific journals is not so much the publication as it is the peer review process. Peer review is important to establish that the experimental methodology and conclusions drawn are well controlled and sound. That's something you don't get with non-peer reviewed self-published papers (and if you've read many of them, it really shows sometimes).
Of course, the publishers of these journals, as demonstrated in the article, seem to think that the publication is the important part and obviously care less about good peer reviewing. There's still a place in modern science for this whole process, but clearly the journals want to ensure that they aren't a part of whatever better solution we find.
Your post is a clear illustration of that not being the case. Frankly, the easiest way to get modded up on Slashdot is to make shallow and hateful generalizations about the US or Americans.
I'm annoyed with the over-politicization of stuff on Slashdot. Talking about science and tech is fun and talking about politics is rarely fun. From my time on Slashdot, it's not always the Americans that are incessantly bringing politics into everything. It's very in vogue to hate on the US in Europe and much of the world, and the need to publicly participate in such hate keeps polluting otherwise non-political conversations here.
Absolutely. I realized shortly after my original post that blackmail seems just like Danegeld because it is (originally) literally the exact same thing as Danegeld!
As to your first point, I realize that the mere accusation of some things can be ridiculously damaging, but by the time you're being extorted you're already in damage control mode. If someone's threatening to release damaging misinformation about you, there's no legal way to keep them quiet without also risking their message getting out. Any extralegal attempt to silence them only risks forcing their hand and in the end paints just as poor a picture of you as paying them off does.
This only really works if the people who are extorting you are the authorities, though. Extortion is illegal and the only thing that keeps the victim from involving the police is their secret coming out. If the secret isn't true then there isn't any leverage to use against the victim. The revealed misinformation can still be damaging, but there is great incentive to out the blackmailer and clear your name. Giving in to them only lends credence to the misinformation and gives them leverage.
[From your example, if some guys threatens to expose your (non-existent) child porn studio if you don't pay him, paying him is the last thing you want to do. There's no assurance that paying will shut him up and if he goes to the press after you've paid him off (maybe more than once), the story is now that you've payed someone to keep quiet about your child porn studio. On the other hand, if you go to the cops, the story is that you were being blackmailed over a child porn studio that the cops verified wasn't real and the blackmailer is being hunted down by law enforcement. True, "child porn studio" and your name still show up together in the news, but this is the best realistic (and controllable) outcome.]
Of course, in your situation, the law is the blackmailer and so it doesn't matter if the "secret" is true or not. There will be no justice.
Unless they're perfect dice (and they certainly won't be after generating gigabytes of material), there may still be a bias in the pad you generate with them.
Blackmail only works on criminals and sleazebags. If you're doing shit so bad that you're willing to sell out your entire country to keep it quiet you deserve to be strung up by an angry mob.
Ordinary people do stupid and embarrassing stuff, but most people don't have histories that they couldn't come clean about if forced to. Only sociopathic assholes whose lives are entirely built on deception (eg politicians) are susceptible to this sort of treatment.
Blackmail is like Danegeld. Only an idiot would choose to play that game and only a criminal would need to.
If the data are important to you, you host them in house. Hopefully the practical lesson that everybody learned from this isn't just, "US bad, everywhere else good". That's such a ridiculously superficial and overly specific interpretation of all of this.
There's no such thing as perfect security, but trusting crucial data with opaque third-parties is about as far from perfect security as you can get.
They likely aren't searching for nefarious reasons, but are just curious about something or other. That's not to say that it's appropriate, though.
As for the confidentiality, I think we've really hit on one of the scarier aspects of social media. I doubt that they know or would ever really understand that searching for something leaks so much information. It seems innocuous, like flipping through a phone book, but it's closer to calling up your local spy agency and asking if they have a file on someone. The fact that you're interested in this person's file is certainly going into your file.
The answer is likely "the other people". You know how Facebook knows everything about you despite not having an account? Other people search for you (establishing that they know you), tag you in pictures (establishing what you look like), helpfully give up your phone number and, so on...
These doctors, lawyers, and business associates have likely searched for you on LinkedIn and that's how they know. (Or they volunteered their address book and you're listed in it.) Good security practices and social networking don't go hand in hand.
A surplus or camping pot, a soda can alcohol stove, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol will set you back the cost of one energy drink and the fuel will last for weeks. An energy drink is only going to make you less hungry for an hour or two at best, but a bowl of beans and rice will hold you over much longer. I've used this setup for backpacking over weeks and it's small, light, cheap, and easy to use. Cooking without a house is easy enough if you keep it simple.
You can keep most cooked food for a few days without it spoiling, though you're right that buying raw meat or eggs in bulk is not a great idea.
And of course, like all other mental illnesses, if being autistic isn't causing you distress or affecting your ability to function then there's no "illness" label or imperative to be treated. On the other hand, if autism (or any other mental illness) is crippling someone's life and can be eased with some kind of treatment, it's not fair to them to deny that their condition is an illness when it clearly is.
I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.
I'd like to jump in and recommend trying out the Beaglebone Black. At $45, it's not much more than the Pi, and feels like what the Raspberry Pi should have been. It's much more stable (and uses less power!), has on-chip ethernet (avoiding horrible USB related problems that the Pi has), isn't plagued with USB issues and generally has better specs. Interfacing stuff to the Beaglebone is a dream, compared to the Pi, with more hardware supported modes and real analog pins.
Since finding the Beaglebone and the Black, my flaky old Pis get used much less often. Admittedly, I'm using these as embedded controllers for instruments and not as a media center. I'm not sure how the Black does in that area.
This model of atomic structure hasn't been valid for almost a century.
That's a sugar-coated way of saying that this model was wrong, and scientists had been believing the wrong thing up until less than a century ago.
You scientists sure know your way around words.
I think this comment succinctly sums up the differing frame of mind between faith and science.
With faith, the most fundamentally important thing that you can do it not change your mind. If new evidence arises that challenges your worldview, you are obligated to ignore it or discredit it or... anything but let it shake your worldview. Changing your mind is acceptance of having been wrong, which is the ultimate admission of failure.
Science, on the other hand, represents a dedication to discovering the truth. Being closer to correct now is more important than pretending that you knew the correct answer all along. If you find evidence that your previous model was wrong, you are obligated to change your model to fit all available data and be correct now. There's no shame in having been wrong in the past. There is shame in deliberately being wrong now.
The troll AC bring up science's greatest strength as a failure is a strong sign that there will not be a reconciling between people who are ruled by one mindset or the other.