Look at the god that the people pushing for ID in schools are worshiping, though. This isn't the caring and comforting God, this is the tantrum-throwing infant God that burns unbelievers in hell and tells its followers to make war on foreigners. This is the God of intolerance and gay lynching and burning crosses.
These people aren't looking for a caring God, they have Stockholm Syndrome.
Not to argue with your main point, but the appendix may serve a useful, if not essential, function. Many of the organs previously thought to be vestigial are involved in proper immune function, like tonsils, the spleen, lymph nodes, the thymus, and so on.
He was comparing US states to small countries, which is quite appropriate.
But anyway, why can't you get affordable gigabit FTTP in NYC or Boston or any major city in the US? The idea that a fast municipal ISP would need to cover the salt flats to cover LA is silly. Or if we'd rather stick with our abusive duopolies, they can choose to roll out fiber in select cities and not everywhere.
FTTP not being available in Bumfuck, WY may have to do with the prohibitive cost of deploying the technology, but that argument doesn't work for the actual high density population centers.
I live in one of the larger cities in the US and my options for internet are 1.5 Mbps DSL or 50 Mbps cable. WTF? The lack of competition between the entrenched players and the lack of a government mandate (the only way to make the established mono/duopolies do anything but collect rent) is why we've stagnated like we have.
Well, "etch it onto a conductive substrate" sounds like a lot of effort right now, but we'll likely find out in the next article that gummy bears have the exact same conduction as the dermis and that the etching just involves licking the gummy bear before you press it on the fingerprint.
Personally, I don't care about the security of iPhones. I'm just annoyed at the over-the-top portrayal of this fingerprint reader as some sort of magical "doesn't read your fingerprint, but reads, like the inside of your finger, man" bullshit, when "inside of your finger" means tens of micrometers below the surface (ie, smaller than the ridges).
That's not an extensive explanation of how the technology works. The only description of how the sensor works from that article is this:
A capacitance fingerprint reader leverages a handy property of your skin: The outer layer of your skin (your dermis), where your fingerprint is, is non-conductive, while the subdermal layer behind it is conductive. When you touch the iPhone’s fingerprint sensor, it measures the minuscule differences in conductivity caused by the raised parts of your fingerprint, and it uses those measurements to form an image..
So it's still measuring your fingerprint as made up of ridges and troughs, just using conduction instead of optics. So you lift a fingerprint from a glass, etch it onto a conductive substrate (that matches the dermis roughly) and put it on the sensor.
The sensor is likely looking at a fairly wide range of relative conduction between the ridges and troughs, so that it will work if your fingers are oily or sweaty or cold, so you wouldn't need to perfectly match the conduction of the user's actual finger.
How has this assertion been demonstrated empirically?
How can you empirically demonstrate something if you don't collect data to test the assertion? Science is fun and there's no reason to avoid amateur science, especially if there's no expensive equipment to buy!
Reading tea leaves may be bunk, but dreams often/sometimes appear to deal with a lot of personally important information. If analysis of them doesn't prove informative, it's at least entertaining. You understand the benefits of entertainment, right?
Which leads me to lucid dreaming. Holy shit is that fun! You should seriously give it a try before you discount it entirely. The easiest way to controllably lucidly dream is to recall your normal dreams. If you can't reliably recall your dreams, you can't reliably recall you lucid dreams, which diminishes their utility.
I have no reason to believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, but the idea of false flag operations (even against one's own country) is not exactly unheard of.
Hell, depending on where we (the US) go from here, there's great historical precedence in the Reichstag fire as a domestic false flag operation catalyzing terrible political change. After all that we have learned, do you really trust that those who are benefiting the most from all of this are above killing a couple thousand Americans to further their cause? More people die in car accidents every day than that and look what political wonders their sacrifice has enabled.
Unless the actions are grossly negligent or deliberately malicious, there's no liability assumed by failing to make as much profit in the short term as possible. The practice of prioritizing short term gains over long term viability doesn't come from any legal obligation.
Public knowledge of this whole thing, and the fallout and lost business from that, will likely end up costing more than the legal fees involved in fighting this.
Is her ilk "Democrats" or is it "autocratic authoritarians"? There are plenty of the latter in both parties. Blindly bashing the other party, whatever your tribal affiliation, doesn't clean them out of your party.
Human sound localization doesn't depend on response time as much as it depends on predictable timing between the two auditory inputs.The two inputs are compared to each other and the processing isn't especially fast (like the burned finger is fast). Sound localization mostly depends on a massive amount of differential spectral analysis, though. You can get a huge amount of information by the resonance of outer ear structures and the attenuation of certain frequencies by body parts.
Some of the most interesting spiders to interact with are the jumping spiders. They'll spot you across the room and track you as you move toward them, turning their body to face you the entire time. They seem to keep a 3D map of the world around them, as well, as evidenced by their resistance to being herded into a jar behind them if they saw you put it there. Fascinating stuff!
Perspectives is just shifting the Trusted Third Party from the CAs to the notaries... a few weaknesses:
While it's true that anyone can be a notary, there are fewer than two dozen of them listed and most of them are run by the same people (who you don't know... why would you trust them?)
The system of distributing the notary keys is subject to MitM, which means the whole system is subject to MitM attacks (which is what its intended to protect against).
The whole system only works if contact with the servers is maintained, which allows for a DoS attack or suppression of non-compromised servers (or servers from non-compromised regions). [this depends on your quorum settings, but when I tried it out various servers were offline for various periods of time so I had to decrease the quorum percentage for any site to validate]
Perspectives also has the side effect of sending the sites you visit to a third party. Even the CAs don't include this "feature". You can stop that by only having Perspectives check sites that generate certificate errors, but then you're back to trusting the CAs again.
I don't mean to totally poo-poo this interesting take on certificate trust, but there are serious flaws with it and some of them won't be going away.
Except Request Policy is funded by the ad networks themselves. Giving the benefit of the doubt, there might be noble intentions behind it...lol, nevermind, I didn't just say that.
Do you have any evidence for that? It seems like RequestPolicy is just some guy and searching doesn't find any clear documentation of nefarious funding.
Are you thinking of Ghostery, by chance? (Even Ghostery claim that their tracking is opt-in and sold anonymized, though I understand some skepticism there.)
I mean, why the fuck should belgium honor american intellectual property rights for example if america doesn't honor even basic property rights?
And yet they do, and will continue to do so even in light of this discovery. How do they expect the US to respect their rights and sovereignty if they don't respect it themselves?
As an American, I'm ashamed of this sort of behavior, but I still don't understand why reasonably prosperous countries continue to take this shit from the US and still adopt US friendly laws domestically. The US is not going to invade Belgium, so why does Belgium enact policies that benefit the US interests over the interests of actual Belgian citizens? Complicity like this just facilitates US malfeasance.
Plan 1 would certainly have a better outcome than plan 2, but plan 1 would still involve looting and killing (just less of it, hopefully). In addition to lawless looting and killing, which would be largely controlled by governments being intact, you would have unfair distribution and redirection of supplies and murders carried out by the government agents themselves. This would be a situation where every tin star sheriff becomes the baron of his little fiefdom with little oversight or accountability (at least during the outbreak). While there would likely be justice for them after the event, some of them would be likely to rule their little town with an iron (and extremely corrupt) fist.
I poured on the vitriol a little thick because I was in a sour mood when I wrote that, but I really do believe that it's true. The bad people of the world are allowed to win because the "good" people don't care to hold them back. Defeatist attitudes like yours, combined with the apathy of the moronic great silent majority, are why the world is as bad as it is today (at least socially and politically).
You're right that the people in the countries that the US actually bombs on a regular basis can't do much to fight back against us, but the people in the the more affluent countries sure can. Do you really think that the US would start bombing France if they didn't adopt our ridiculous copyright laws, or the UK if they didn't give all of their spying data to the NSA?
And money only works to buy oppression in other countries if their governments are on the take. That may be excusable in sub-Saharan Africa where the government is just a collection of warlords, but why do Europeans keep electing such easily corrupted and bought representatives? Surely you can't put the blame for that on the US. After all, your house that needs to be cleaned too.
Don't take my posts as agreement with the abusive aspects of the US. I know that the US is in a sorry state and that we need to fix our country. All of the problems in your specific G8 country are yours to own, though. The US may be very powerful, but any effects you personally feel are entirely the fault of your country. Any US culture you are annoyed by is imported (and purchased) by your countrymen. Any US-inspired policies that are enacted in your country are pushed by your corrupt politicians. Blaming the US for this is ignoring the beam in your own eye.
I don't like the military imperialistic aspects of my country, but the economic imperialistic aspects (which I don't like either) take the cooperation of other countries to work. This is something that you can fix if you take your own government to task. Without the complicity of your countries, the US loses much of its ability to push around the countries that can't fight back.
The US population constitutes around 5% of the world population. That 95% of the world's population feels as if they are powerless against such a tiny minority speaks more about the pathetic majority than the minority. That the world population needs such tiny groups of people to "spearhead... civil liberties" speaks poorly of the majority of humanity. That the majority of the world's population will roll over and let a government that they see as corrupt dictate their own domestic policies says the most about the sycophantic representatives of other countries that refuse to represent their own citizens. That you can defend the pathetic fawning of the rest of the world's governments as inevitable and mature only demonstrates how unwilling you are to take control of your own fate.
I'm sure it's fun for you to make snide and belittling comments like your opening statement, but look at the US's modern history. The US only uses its military to attack weak countries. If the rest of the world stood up to the US, the US wouldn't actually wage war on everybody else. Why don't you stop being so pathetic and stand by your convictions instead of folding when the US tells you to?
Claiming that foreigners outside of US borders have standing under the US Constitution is an implicit acceptance of American Imperialism. You don't want that.
Strangely, the USA is one of the few countries of the world that claim extraterritorial jurisprudence, so it can claim that the laws of the United States applies to citizens even if they are not in the United States.
Seems like an odd double standard, don't you think?
Not really. People can claim whatever they want, but it takes the cooperation of others to actually do whatever they want. The US doesn't allow the agents of other countries to freely operate within its borders, so why do other countries allow the US to do so?
It bothers me that everyone here just takes it as a given that the US can do whatever it feels like doing in other sovereign nations. Stop asking the US to be more considerate when they trample your garden and start telling them to get off your lawn. You have your own governments that are supposed to be looking out for you. What are they doing about all of this? Why don't you take this up with them?
From the responses, I think I must have made my point very poorly. The US isn't supposed to be able to ban free speech in China because China is out of US jurisdiction. The Constitution has nothing to do with the situation.
The solution to this mess is not for citizens of other countries to try to directly tweak the behavior of the US government to be less offensive to them. The solution is to petition their own governments to stop letting the US exercise so much power inside of their borders.
If the US is banning free speech in China the problem is less the US (though it would certainly be part of the problem) and more that China is letting a foreign power dictate their domestic policies.
The way to deal with a bully is not to appeal to their integrity and moral constitution, but to stop allowing yourself to be bullied. If your representatives in government stopped rolling over for the US, your fellow citizens wouldn't be the victims of these US actions.
TL;DR: Stop whinging on the internet, grow a pair, and hold your own governments accountable for their complicity (and hopefully we'll do the same here in the US). If your governments weren't such sniveling US toadies, you (and indeed, all of us) wouldn't be in this situation.
While the Constitution doesn't often use the term citizen instead of person, the US Government has no obligations or responsibilities (aside from those agreed upon by international treaty) to anybody but US citizens or people within the US borders. This is a good thing, for both US citizens and foreigners. Claiming that foreigners outside of US borders have standing under the US Constitution is an implicit acceptance of American Imperialism. You don't want that.
This whole thing is best approached through international treaty, where countries at least pretend to have equal footing and negotiate a decrease in international spying. Non-citizens petitioning an increasingly imperialistic government for consideration is not a path anyone should want to start down. Talk to your own country's representatives about a solution; this is what international treaties are for!
I noticed that as I was reading it, too. I wish there was a way to personally downrate certain people's comments so that you didn't have to see them anymore. Most of her comments seem to be quickly put together from a couple of google searches and wikipedia pages. They are typically fairly uninformed and very lacking in actual comprehension, but written with confidence. I can't believe that they're modded up so much. It really doesn't speak well for the intelligence of everyone else here.
The rise of people like girlintraining is a big demonstration of the downfall of Slashdot. This place is like an echo chamber where idiots spout stuff they don't understand to other idiots who repeat it. She's actually using Slashdot as a medium to make the general population more ignorant.
Well, according to this, it would take a small compute cluster and 2-3 days to crack after capturing 65 minutes of solid transmissions. So, not terribly secure, but good enough for a medium with such a low transmission rate. The thief would need physical access to the transmitter (and a fresh set of batteries for it) and couldn't rely on incidental intercepts.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the god that the people pushing for ID in schools are worshiping, though. This isn't the caring and comforting God, this is the tantrum-throwing infant God that burns unbelievers in hell and tells its followers to make war on foreigners. This is the God of intolerance and gay lynching and burning crosses.
These people aren't looking for a caring God, they have Stockholm Syndrome.
Not to argue with your main point, but the appendix may serve a useful, if not essential, function. Many of the organs previously thought to be vestigial are involved in proper immune function, like tonsils, the spleen, lymph nodes, the thymus, and so on.
He was comparing US states to small countries, which is quite appropriate.
But anyway, why can't you get affordable gigabit FTTP in NYC or Boston or any major city in the US? The idea that a fast municipal ISP would need to cover the salt flats to cover LA is silly. Or if we'd rather stick with our abusive duopolies, they can choose to roll out fiber in select cities and not everywhere.
FTTP not being available in Bumfuck, WY may have to do with the prohibitive cost of deploying the technology, but that argument doesn't work for the actual high density population centers.
I live in one of the larger cities in the US and my options for internet are 1.5 Mbps DSL or 50 Mbps cable. WTF? The lack of competition between the entrenched players and the lack of a government mandate (the only way to make the established mono/duopolies do anything but collect rent) is why we've stagnated like we have.
Here's your reference. It's reading a plain old fingerprint.
Well, "etch it onto a conductive substrate" sounds like a lot of effort right now, but we'll likely find out in the next article that gummy bears have the exact same conduction as the dermis and that the etching just involves licking the gummy bear before you press it on the fingerprint.
Personally, I don't care about the security of iPhones. I'm just annoyed at the over-the-top portrayal of this fingerprint reader as some sort of magical "doesn't read your fingerprint, but reads, like the inside of your finger, man" bullshit, when "inside of your finger" means tens of micrometers below the surface (ie, smaller than the ridges).
That's not an extensive explanation of how the technology works. The only description of how the sensor works from that article is this:
A capacitance fingerprint reader leverages a handy property of your skin: The outer layer of your skin (your dermis), where your fingerprint is, is non-conductive, while the subdermal layer behind it is conductive. When you touch the iPhone’s fingerprint sensor, it measures the minuscule differences in conductivity caused by the raised parts of your fingerprint, and it uses those measurements to form an image..
So it's still measuring your fingerprint as made up of ridges and troughs, just using conduction instead of optics. So you lift a fingerprint from a glass, etch it onto a conductive substrate (that matches the dermis roughly) and put it on the sensor.
The sensor is likely looking at a fairly wide range of relative conduction between the ridges and troughs, so that it will work if your fingers are oily or sweaty or cold, so you wouldn't need to perfectly match the conduction of the user's actual finger.
How has this assertion been demonstrated empirically?
How can you empirically demonstrate something if you don't collect data to test the assertion? Science is fun and there's no reason to avoid amateur science, especially if there's no expensive equipment to buy!
Reading tea leaves may be bunk, but dreams often/sometimes appear to deal with a lot of personally important information. If analysis of them doesn't prove informative, it's at least entertaining. You understand the benefits of entertainment, right?
Which leads me to lucid dreaming. Holy shit is that fun! You should seriously give it a try before you discount it entirely. The easiest way to controllably lucidly dream is to recall your normal dreams. If you can't reliably recall your dreams, you can't reliably recall you lucid dreams, which diminishes their utility.
I'm sorry, but that sentiment is not supported in your region.
I have no reason to believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, but the idea of false flag operations (even against one's own country) is not exactly unheard of.
Here's a tidy list of actual or discussed false flag operations as pretexts for war. Some were planned or carried out by the US government and one was intended to target US citizens.
Hell, depending on where we (the US) go from here, there's great historical precedence in the Reichstag fire as a domestic false flag operation catalyzing terrible political change. After all that we have learned, do you really trust that those who are benefiting the most from all of this are above killing a couple thousand Americans to further their cause? More people die in car accidents every day than that and look what political wonders their sacrifice has enabled.
Unless the actions are grossly negligent or deliberately malicious, there's no liability assumed by failing to make as much profit in the short term as possible. The practice of prioritizing short term gains over long term viability doesn't come from any legal obligation.
Public knowledge of this whole thing, and the fallout and lost business from that, will likely end up costing more than the legal fees involved in fighting this.
Is her ilk "Democrats" or is it "autocratic authoritarians"? There are plenty of the latter in both parties. Blindly bashing the other party, whatever your tribal affiliation, doesn't clean them out of your party.
Human sound localization doesn't depend on response time as much as it depends on predictable timing between the two auditory inputs.The two inputs are compared to each other and the processing isn't especially fast (like the burned finger is fast). Sound localization mostly depends on a massive amount of differential spectral analysis, though. You can get a huge amount of information by the resonance of outer ear structures and the attenuation of certain frequencies by body parts.
Some of the most interesting spiders to interact with are the jumping spiders. They'll spot you across the room and track you as you move toward them, turning their body to face you the entire time. They seem to keep a 3D map of the world around them, as well, as evidenced by their resistance to being herded into a jar behind them if they saw you put it there. Fascinating stuff!
Perspectives is just shifting the Trusted Third Party from the CAs to the notaries... a few weaknesses:
I don't mean to totally poo-poo this interesting take on certificate trust, but there are serious flaws with it and some of them won't be going away.
Except Request Policy is funded by the ad networks themselves. Giving the benefit of the doubt, there might be noble intentions behind it...lol, nevermind, I didn't just say that.
Do you have any evidence for that? It seems like RequestPolicy is just some guy and searching doesn't find any clear documentation of nefarious funding.
Are you thinking of Ghostery, by chance? (Even Ghostery claim that their tracking is opt-in and sold anonymized, though I understand some skepticism there.)
I mean, why the fuck should belgium honor american intellectual property rights for example if america doesn't honor even basic property rights?
And yet they do, and will continue to do so even in light of this discovery. How do they expect the US to respect their rights and sovereignty if they don't respect it themselves?
As an American, I'm ashamed of this sort of behavior, but I still don't understand why reasonably prosperous countries continue to take this shit from the US and still adopt US friendly laws domestically. The US is not going to invade Belgium, so why does Belgium enact policies that benefit the US interests over the interests of actual Belgian citizens? Complicity like this just facilitates US malfeasance.
Plan 1 would certainly have a better outcome than plan 2, but plan 1 would still involve looting and killing (just less of it, hopefully). In addition to lawless looting and killing, which would be largely controlled by governments being intact, you would have unfair distribution and redirection of supplies and murders carried out by the government agents themselves. This would be a situation where every tin star sheriff becomes the baron of his little fiefdom with little oversight or accountability (at least during the outbreak). While there would likely be justice for them after the event, some of them would be likely to rule their little town with an iron (and extremely corrupt) fist.
I poured on the vitriol a little thick because I was in a sour mood when I wrote that, but I really do believe that it's true. The bad people of the world are allowed to win because the "good" people don't care to hold them back. Defeatist attitudes like yours, combined with the apathy of the moronic great silent majority, are why the world is as bad as it is today (at least socially and politically).
You're right that the people in the countries that the US actually bombs on a regular basis can't do much to fight back against us, but the people in the the more affluent countries sure can. Do you really think that the US would start bombing France if they didn't adopt our ridiculous copyright laws, or the UK if they didn't give all of their spying data to the NSA?
And money only works to buy oppression in other countries if their governments are on the take. That may be excusable in sub-Saharan Africa where the government is just a collection of warlords, but why do Europeans keep electing such easily corrupted and bought representatives? Surely you can't put the blame for that on the US. After all, your house that needs to be cleaned too.
Don't take my posts as agreement with the abusive aspects of the US. I know that the US is in a sorry state and that we need to fix our country. All of the problems in your specific G8 country are yours to own, though. The US may be very powerful, but any effects you personally feel are entirely the fault of your country. Any US culture you are annoyed by is imported (and purchased) by your countrymen. Any US-inspired policies that are enacted in your country are pushed by your corrupt politicians. Blaming the US for this is ignoring the beam in your own eye.
I don't like the military imperialistic aspects of my country, but the economic imperialistic aspects (which I don't like either) take the cooperation of other countries to work. This is something that you can fix if you take your own government to task. Without the complicity of your countries, the US loses much of its ability to push around the countries that can't fight back.
The US population constitutes around 5% of the world population. That 95% of the world's population feels as if they are powerless against such a tiny minority speaks more about the pathetic majority than the minority. That the world population needs such tiny groups of people to "spearhead... civil liberties" speaks poorly of the majority of humanity. That the majority of the world's population will roll over and let a government that they see as corrupt dictate their own domestic policies says the most about the sycophantic representatives of other countries that refuse to represent their own citizens. That you can defend the pathetic fawning of the rest of the world's governments as inevitable and mature only demonstrates how unwilling you are to take control of your own fate.
I'm sure it's fun for you to make snide and belittling comments like your opening statement, but look at the US's modern history. The US only uses its military to attack weak countries. If the rest of the world stood up to the US, the US wouldn't actually wage war on everybody else. Why don't you stop being so pathetic and stand by your convictions instead of folding when the US tells you to?
Strangely, the USA is one of the few countries of the world that claim extraterritorial jurisprudence, so it can claim that the laws of the United States applies to citizens even if they are not in the United States.
Seems like an odd double standard, don't you think?
Not really. People can claim whatever they want, but it takes the cooperation of others to actually do whatever they want. The US doesn't allow the agents of other countries to freely operate within its borders, so why do other countries allow the US to do so?
It bothers me that everyone here just takes it as a given that the US can do whatever it feels like doing in other sovereign nations. Stop asking the US to be more considerate when they trample your garden and start telling them to get off your lawn. You have your own governments that are supposed to be looking out for you. What are they doing about all of this? Why don't you take this up with them?
From the responses, I think I must have made my point very poorly. The US isn't supposed to be able to ban free speech in China because China is out of US jurisdiction. The Constitution has nothing to do with the situation.
The solution to this mess is not for citizens of other countries to try to directly tweak the behavior of the US government to be less offensive to them. The solution is to petition their own governments to stop letting the US exercise so much power inside of their borders.
If the US is banning free speech in China the problem is less the US (though it would certainly be part of the problem) and more that China is letting a foreign power dictate their domestic policies.
The way to deal with a bully is not to appeal to their integrity and moral constitution, but to stop allowing yourself to be bullied. If your representatives in government stopped rolling over for the US, your fellow citizens wouldn't be the victims of these US actions.
TL;DR: Stop whinging on the internet, grow a pair, and hold your own governments accountable for their complicity (and hopefully we'll do the same here in the US). If your governments weren't such sniveling US toadies, you (and indeed, all of us) wouldn't be in this situation.
While the Constitution doesn't often use the term citizen instead of person, the US Government has no obligations or responsibilities (aside from those agreed upon by international treaty) to anybody but US citizens or people within the US borders. This is a good thing, for both US citizens and foreigners. Claiming that foreigners outside of US borders have standing under the US Constitution is an implicit acceptance of American Imperialism. You don't want that.
This whole thing is best approached through international treaty, where countries at least pretend to have equal footing and negotiate a decrease in international spying. Non-citizens petitioning an increasingly imperialistic government for consideration is not a path anyone should want to start down. Talk to your own country's representatives about a solution; this is what international treaties are for!
I noticed that as I was reading it, too. I wish there was a way to personally downrate certain people's comments so that you didn't have to see them anymore. Most of her comments seem to be quickly put together from a couple of google searches and wikipedia pages. They are typically fairly uninformed and very lacking in actual comprehension, but written with confidence. I can't believe that they're modded up so much. It really doesn't speak well for the intelligence of everyone else here.
The rise of people like girlintraining is a big demonstration of the downfall of Slashdot. This place is like an echo chamber where idiots spout stuff they don't understand to other idiots who repeat it. She's actually using Slashdot as a medium to make the general population more ignorant.
It sucks. Kindof a lot.
So you're saying that one day, maybe even accidentally, this kid could have loaded real bullets into his phone and actually shot people with it?
Well, according to this, it would take a small compute cluster and 2-3 days to crack after capturing 65 minutes of solid transmissions. So, not terribly secure, but good enough for a medium with such a low transmission rate. The thief would need physical access to the transmitter (and a fresh set of batteries for it) and couldn't rely on incidental intercepts.