Are such measures feasible (legally and technologically)?
Nope. Both of them are utter pipe dreams. The "transparent tag showing origin and history" already exists today, except it has a much shorter name and a much more spotty record. They're called "watermarks", and they're pretty much a joke. Just look at SDMI, which has had some brilliant minds tackling the watermark problem and, even after millions of dollars in research, they still haven't managed to come up with a way to stop a really determined 15-year-old.
Translated into modern idiom,
I propose a law requiring watermarks on every file on every server, and that the files be immediately accessible on request.
Problem number one: watermarks don't work.
Problem number two: if the law is going to require that every file on every server be immediately accessible on request, that's going to play hob with e-commerce. Do you really want to place that order for Naked Amazon Women In Bondage from Amazon.com, knowing that anyone can send an email to Amazon saying, "Hi! Pursuant to the new Federal laws, I want to investigate your site to make sure you're not using any of my IP. Please send me all of your customer purchase records."
The alternative to this, which Stirling probably means, is that the watermark be kept available, although the file may not necessarily be. That defeats the purpose of a good watermark; one of the principles of good watermarks is they can't be removed.
The authorities should develop and send out a `sniffer' intelligent agent program to detect files not meeting these criteria.
Stirling, meet the First Amendment. If I don't want to include watermarks in my original works, neither you nor the government get to say whoopty-doo about it.:)
On a technological note, I've got some experience with smart agents. At the present time, they're really not very smart. Remember that there exist such things as countermeasures; once people figure out what ruleset the expert system behind the agent is using, they'll figure out ways to avoid triggering the agent.
Immediately shut down any server/node that doesn't reply properly
Violates due process of law. Shutting down a server does Nasty Stuff to online businesses, and would require that a court hearing be held. Remember, nobody can be deprived of life, liberty or property without the due process of law.
This is the only proposal which is feasible technologically, BTW. After all, to take down a server all you need is a fire axe and strong arms.
With really severe penalties for anyone owning hardware harboring pirate files
Violates the legal principle of mens rea, which basically means--"if you had no criminal intent, then you didn't commit a crime". If I'm an ISP and someone is running warez off their shell account, I'm not liable until I'm notified of the illegal copying and I have time to verify the allegations myself.
Technologically unfeasible, too, given that many systems will be harbored in foreign countries which are not signatory to any such ludicrous treaty as Stirling is suggesting. To penalize the owners of those servers would require... well, a small Special Forces team could probably convey the US's displeasure, but that seems like overkill, doesn't it?
Stirling claims that he talked to the FBI, who told him that they have the ability to penetrate Freenet's anonymity
Maybe true, maybe false. Sounds more like happy smoke to me. Think about this: if the FBI does have this capability, why in God's name would they tell anyone about it?
Stirling needs to talk to his dealer about the purity of his rock.
Eyewitness testimony has two problems: it's unreliable and it's easily corruptable. Just something as simple as telling a witness, "You didn't really see that, did you?" is enough, sometimes, to plant a kernel of doubt in the witness' mind... and that doubt shows through on the witness stand... and the jury sees it... and decides "why is this person so doubtful, unless they really didn't see it?"
Circumstantial evidence has the advantage of being reliable. It's still easily corruptable; improper handling of evidence can get the entire thing thrown out, and lawyers often have considerable success demonstrating improper handling (as they did in the OJ Simpson case, with the DNA samples at the crime scene). And, given sketchy evidence, you can make it say whatever you want it to--which is why judges rarely let sketchy evidence be admitted.
Circumstantial evidence is far from perfect, but it's a damn sight better than eyewitnesses.
Regrettably, it's all too true--there's nothing in there I'd really disagree with, but I would like to take a moment to plug the Japanese classic film, Rashomon, which tells the same sequence of events from many different perspectives--all of them true and accurate, even though they show many different things and sequences of events.
It's been imitated in Courage Under Fire and to a lesser extent in Run, Lola, Run, but the original has never been exceeded.
If you want to see how uncertain eyewitness testimony can be, and see some great cinema in the process, watch Rashomon.
3)You said it yourself, ssh clients are not yet standard.
They come standard with the RH 7.0 distro. They come standard with several other distros as well. In fact, the only OS I'm aware of which don't ship with ssh are the Microsoft OSes--and Microsoft's reputation on security is so laughable that I can just write off their exclusion of SSH as more-of-the-same.
4) I've been lots of places without access to an ssh client.
Ugh. Write emails to the sysadmins. Not including ssh on a system borders on blatant negligience nowadays, and there's no two ways about that. No system, especially no UNIX, should be without OpenPGP-compliant and SSH-compatible software.
Don't blame SSH for brain-damaged sysadmins, in other words.
And still. SSH is a commercial product with a long history. OpenSSH is something fairly new, with a severe vulnerability as late as last week.
First, I haven't heard a thing about this "vulnerability", so I can't comment on it. I'm speculating that either it was an extremely esoteric vulnerability, or else not a very serious vulnerability--news tends to travel fast about inferior crypto where I work.:)
Second, what makes you think commercial SSH is without flaws? Just because you can't see the bugs (because you can't see the source) doesn't mean there aren't any. In the long run, open source--with withering peer review and brutal accountability--will always be better than any closed-source offering.
Right--the original poster was asking if the sat could be shut down, and the answer is that the sat is pretty much outside of all governmental control once it's in orbit, short of overt acts of war.:) I'm not disputing that parties involved in maritime traffic who are within national borders or territorial waters can't be held accountable under the law.
Of course, I could be misremembering what the original question was.
While it did take SJ quite some time to get their equipment back, it wasn't the FBI who held their equipment in legal limbo. That infamy belongs to the United States Secret Service.
While I'm as suspicious of the FBI as I am the USSS, let's make sure to hand out criticism fairly, okay?:)
Space falls under maritime law; any assignment of geosynch orbits to countries is purely voluntary on the part of the countries who agree to it. For an analogue, consider sea lanes; certain sea lanes have been traditionally used by one power or another, and other powers avoid those sea lanes (fishing areas, etc.) to prevent conflict. But if you want to sail those lanes, there's nothing in maritime law which says you can't.
Warning: I'm not an international law expert. (In fact, I've got doubts that international law even exists in a practical sense; if I'm right, then the entire argument is very moot.)
Short answer: nobody knows for sure. It'd probably fall under the same laws as marine vessels (maritime law). The sat would be considered the property of its owner, but the nation wouldn't be able to enforce its laws on the satellite, since the satellite is in international "waters" (well, international LEO).
It's a well-established principle that nation-states can't enforce their laws on ships of foreign registry when those ships are in international waters. Doing so is considered an act of war (and was the cause of the War of 1812, if I recall).
So, if you don't mind a really expensive porn server... talk to Seahaven and incorporate a business there. Then buy a sat server and have the Russians put it in orbit. Once it's in orbit, upload all the pr0n and MP3s you want and let the world download freely.
Since Seahaven isn't signatory to any international conventions, Seahaven doesn't even recognize the existence of copyright (no copyright law + no signatory to the Berne Convention = no copyright). Any nation that wanted to put you on trial for making DeCSS available in defiance of court order would first have to declare war on Seahaven in order to do it.:)
First, most of the legal problems with ssh are nonexistent. The RSA patent has expired (yay!) and that means it's legal to use RSA left and right, up and down, this and that way if you want to.
Second, OpenSSH is a pretty damn good solution. I'm using OpenSSH-2.1.1p4, and I've yet to have any complaints with it or the way it handles the SSH protocol. (That's not to say I wouldn't have done things differently, but that's to be expected.) If you want me to take your "OpenSSH may be free, but is not yet as good as SSH" comment seriously, first you'll need to explain to me exactly where you see it lacking.
Third, "SSH needs a client which is not the same as the telnet client." Big deal. Telnet requires a client which is not the same as the ssh client. Both of them require the servers to be running the appropriate daemons in order to support connections. Telnet is a standard service and ssh is quickly becoming one.
My ISP supports ssh for shell accounts, which is nice, because I make it a point to never telnet into my account. If a Mom-and-Pop ISP in the Left Armpit of Nowhere (also known as North Liberty, Iowa) can run the ssh daemons, then there's no excuse for any sysadmin to not be able to run the ssh daemons.
Telnet can, in fact, be replaced with ssh. More than that, I think it should and must be replaced with ssh.
Yes, but they were underestimated. But I think perhaps that the estimates were based on support that they didn't have. They wanted, and should have had, close air support and tanks on standby.
Task Force Ranger had helicopter gunships overhead during the entire engagement; in fact, two of the gunships (Black Hawks) were shot down. Insofar as armor support, that's very dicey in urban environments--many city streets, particularly in Third World countries, won't take the weight of an AFV.
Insofar as the underestimation of casualties, that's probably only marginally right. Twenty casualties is probably within the spread which was predicted, and far closer to the worst-case than the best-case. The Army never says "we expect to lose five troops in this op"; they say "we expect casualties to run up to X percent".
Now, whether or not politicians really understand that X percent casualties means X percent dead American boys, that's a far different question. With President Clinton, the answer was no--he didn't understand. It's been reported that he felt deeply betrayed by his advisors for not making him understand just how serious an issue war is. (Ref: Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down).
Furthermore, an earlier plan involving the use of Delta Force resulted in the evaluation that they could just go in and pick up whoever they wanted off the streets.
In fact, that was the plan, and Delta Force was the unit tasked with the snatch and grab. There was also a Navy SEAL with Task Force Ranger, if I recall correctly. The Rangers were there only to support the D-boys, not to achieve the objective on their own. However, since officially the D-boys don't exist, credit for the collar went to the Rangers.
Things began to go wrong as soon as the first Ranger abseiled out of the helicopter. Something went wrong (nobody's sure what) and he fell six stories to the street. (He survived, BTW, but with major brain damage.) Then the Somalis started engaging the air support, which was expected; the RPG-7s they were engaging them with wasn't. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and that's when the mission went from SNAFU to TARFU.
At least one Ranger bled to death
His name was Jamie Smith. His injuries came when the helicopter he was in crashed. Post-incident investigation shows that, even if medevac had been available, he'd still have died from his injuries--they were simply irreparable.
Jamie's father has never accepted this version of events, though, and loudly condemns the military for not having the 10th Mountain on standby.
while their commander took 6 hours to beg in non-US UN armor, and another 6 for them to get there
It took several hours for armor to be mobilized, but once it arrived, it didn't take six hours for them to relieve the Rangers--only that long to group up with the Rangers. They were taking heat off the Rangers the instant they arrived in Mogadishu.
-- Please note that I'm not disagreeing with you re: the political stupidity of Somalia--the abject, utter, addle-brained stupidity of it all. But there is a lot of rumor and misinformation going on about Somalia, and it really annoys me.
A friend of mine, Dan, was murdered a few days later in Mogadishu. He was a journalist reporting for Reuters', and one of the nicest people I ever knew. Kind of erratic at times, though--he was driven, genuinely driven to report on the Third World, and he had great empathy for people in developing countries. It tended to color his view of the world, and he was pretty fed up with American luxury when he left for Somalia.
It's hypothesized that his attackers were so outraged over their losses to the Rangers that they decided to lynch any Americans they could find.
It's deeply ironic they'd lynch the one American who could, and did, understand their anger and rage.
-- That's my personal interest in Mogadishu. That's why I'm so anal-retentive about making sure people understand what really happened and what didn't. I figure, Dan would at least want me to get his story straight.
they failed in... retaining their capability to continue to act in the area
Again false. Task Force Ranger was good to go within minutes after the original force returned home. Not all of Task Force Ranger ventured out that day; a lot of guys were still fresh and ready to fight.
If the military high command had adequately predicted the casualties that the operation would cost for the politicians, the order would surely not have been given.
In fact, casualties were predicted. The order was given anyway.
They still lost the war, because they didn't know what the hell their objectives really were.
US soldiers didn't lose Vietnam. US politicians lost Vietnam. But, given that "I do not agree with your separation of the US military and the US political system", I'll grant that.
The distinction between the two really is fundamental, BTW. The President of the United States may be Commander-in-Chief, but he's a civilian--were he to be a military officer, he'd have had to face a court-martial over Monica Lewinsky. The President is an elected official, answerable to the people; the military is answerable only to the government.
I agree with you heartily regarding the failure of US politics in the region. However, since the politicians failed, that's where the blame ought to go--not on the military, which did its job admirably and without complaint, despite impossible resistance.
Absolutely false. The mission objective was achieved despite overwhelming resistance.
Put in boldface for a reason. The mission objective was the snatch-and-grab of one of Aidid's lieutenants, and they successfully achieved their objective.
Further missions were scrubbed by White House order. The theater commanders disagreed vehemently with the President's abandonment of the Somalia operation; they had Aidid's entire gang on the ropes after that battle in downtown Mogadishu, and Task Force Ranger wanted to finish the job--with sufficient force and vehemence to send a strong message that you don't desecrate the bodies of American troopers.
The theater commanders were overridden by the President.
The failure of the US military to achieve its objectives in the Somalia operation is really a failure of the US political system. The military did everything we asked them to, and more. But, as is usual, US politicians lost their will to fight long before the military did.
The M-16 was not designed to maim, as you say. Rather, it grew out of the armed services' dissatisfaction with the M-14 rifle. The main problem with the M-14 was its weight; it's a big pig of a weapon and ammunition for it weighs a ton.
By moving from 7.62mm ammunition to 5.56mm ammunition, the weight of the ammo was reduced by a factor of almost a third. The heavy use of plastics and minimized use of heavy metal components cut several pounds off the M-16, when compared to its predecessor.
The smaller bullet possesses less lethality, correct. However, it's not a tumbler round and it wasn't meant to maim people. In Mogadishu, Somali gang members were shot at point-blank range with M-16 fire and weren't incapacitated; the bullet tended to penetrate clean through, without causing significant wound trauma. If the 5.56mm cartridge was designed to maim, then it was pretty badly designed, because it doesn't incapacitate reliably. (The Israelis and British have reported similar problems with the 5.56mm round. The Soviets have the same problem with their 5.45mm AK-74s in Chechnya; the 5.45mm round is so inadequate that the Sovs have started fielding a 9mm assault rifle with their troops, just to get some stopping power again.)
To recap: the reason for moving to 5.56mm was to minimize weight, so that soldiers could carry more ammunition and fight longer engagements. A soldier already goes into combat lugging around over 100 pounds in his pack; every ounce of saved weight helps.
This kind of thinking is the reason why the U.S. military can't beat a truly committed enemy.
On the contrary:the US military has a long track record of beating hell out of truly committed enemies. The most recent such incident I can think of occurred in Mogadishu, Somalia back in 1993, when a simple snatch-and-grab on a Somali warlord turned into the largest US ground engagement since Vietnam.
The fight lasted for the day, throughout the night, and then some. The Rangers were short on water (very important for long engagements in desert climates), ammunition, night-vision equipment, and were outnumbered at least ten to one by insurgents on the ground.
Something on the order of twenty American troops were killed. Over one thousand armed Somalis were killed and another five hundred wounded. (These estimates come from Somali medical sources, not US military sources. Estimates of civilian casualties are highly speculative, and deeply tragic. Urban combat is hell on everyone, especially the poor schmucks who've got the bad luck to live there.)
The Somali warlords, in an attempt to bolster morale of their decimated troops, dragged the body of a US serviceman through the streets (a soldier named Shugart, I think). That went on the international wire and the video was seen in the United States, which shocked and appalled US sensibilities so much that the Somali operation was aborted.
The public sentiment is that we were beaten in Mogadishu. The reality is that the Rangers acquitted themselves very well against a ferociously committed adversary, and against incredible odds.
TMBG is a great band. But, they have publically decried Napster and P2P in general. Why should we help them with something that is run 1980's technology?
1. They aren't anti-Napster, nor anti-P2P. What they are against is the dilution of their own online community. When people download TMBG MP3s from Napster, they miss out on the large online community of TMBG fans, which TMBG has put a lot of effort into building. TMBG has little problem with fans sharing songs; TMBG has a big problem with Napster building their online community at the cost of TMBG's online community.
2. Why should we help them out? Because we're geeks. Because we like fixing problems. Because we think that maybe, just maybe, the world would be a better place if things worked right. There's an old axiom about courtesy--you aren't courteous to other people because they're superior people, but because you are. The same applies to helping others.
Military technology is not the same thing as civilian technology.
Bzzt, sorry, thanks for playing. While this was true in the very early days of computing, it hasn't been true for some years. Nowadays, the military wants COTS (Cheap Off The Shelf). If Intel has an entire fab line pouring Pentium IIIs onto the market, it's far cheaper for the military to buy P3s than to pay Intel to abandon their current fab line and make new chips custom to military spec.
Military technology is almost always superior and classified.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. The on-board computer on an F-15C Falcon is the rough equivalent of an Intel 80286. I think the entire avionics fits in 4mb, but I'm not sure.
On the F-22 (Raptor? Lightning II? What the heck is its name this week, anyway?), all the on-board avionics are controlled by a chip roughly equivalent to an 80486/33.
Military computer hardware tends to be old, like ten years or so out of date. The reason for this is the military doesn't want to get a Pentium division bug. If your brand-spanking-new-in-1990 Pentium chip has a hardware error on long division, okay, great, your Quicken software shows you the wrong result. If that chip is controlling an aircraft or weaponry, someone dies.
Because of this, the DoD has standards for reliability which very few chips can live up to--and they very rarely buy anything which hasn't been proven by years in the marketplace.
There's also the problem of chip design. Put bluntly, the military has nobody capable of pushing the state of the art in chip design. All the expert chip designers are working in private industry, making money hand over fist. So how could the military have all these brilliant designs, when they don't have any chip designers?
There's a myth out there that says military hardware is new and bleeding-edge. It's not, and the military likes it that way.
Re:Rich? Give me a friggin break
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By wasting money on frivolious expenses, the rich also judge who can live and who can die.
Yep. Life is tough. Wear a helmet.
That sounds callous, doesn't it? It's only because it's true. A friend of mine says that she would be a Wiccan, if only she felt that the Wiccan Rede was anything more than a pipe dream--"if it doesn't harm anyone, do what you want to do" is, in some ways, a very narrow view of the world.
Anything you do, anything you do, will condemn some and redeem others. The trick is doing what you can to make sure that, on balance, you help more than you hurt. But it's a given that anything you do will adversely affect another person.
Did you buy popcorn the last time you went to the movies? Couldn't that $6.00 have bought an entire week's food for a starving civilian in Chechnya? How dare you, indulge in a six-dollar bucket of popcorn while people are starving to death.
But if you don't buy that popcorn, and nobody else does, either (instead contributing to the Red Cross to help starving Chechens), then you put the guy behind the counter out of a job--and what if he's the breadwinner for the family, earning $7.00 an hour in a crappy job because that's the only thing he can get?
You see? Every choice you make will have positive and negative repercussions, repercussions far beyond the simple cause-and-effect that you think about.
In other words, your hatred is seriously misplaced, and not at all logical.
How about a self-loathing teenager who has plans on HELPING society. I am working my ass off to learn everything that I can so that I might contribute to society. Are you saying that my work deservers no more credit that the waste of a druggie?
Get over your self-hatred first before you go about trying to help anyone. Everyone wants peace on earth, but so few people ever try to find peace with themselves first.
Insofar as your plans to help others--big whup. When I was in high school I wasn't "planning" to help others; I was building homes with Habitat for Humanity. Just because you're in high school doesn't mean you can't do anything.
There are lots of people who say "'ere but for the vile guns of war, I'd been a soldier". The credit doesn't go to those people. The credit goes to those people who do it, not people who talk about how they plan to someday do it.
But first, get over your self-hatred.
Love is an animal instinct that is designed to force otherwise sapient beings to act like wild creatures. I do not believe if [sic] love, instead I prefer the path of logic and a life of discipline and rigorous study. Just as you oppose anything that stands in the way of you acquiring physical wealth and happiness (love, sex, money, power, etc.) I oppose anything that interferes with my acquisition of mental knowledge.
First--you have no idea what I want out of life.
We clear on that?:) Good. You don't know me from the wind, brother, and if you think you do, you are mistaken.
Second--I used to think like that. Then a 6'2", slim, attractive, long-legged German blonde came along and turned my world square on its head. (Gave me a permanent liking for tall women in the process, too...) Best thing that ever happened in my life, I tell you, was when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and learned how to let go a little bit. Most liberating thing in my life.
I've found that people who espouse cold and bitter pessimism are people who've never found anything better in life. Trust me; there are, if you only look for them.
Book learning is great, but--as Yogi Berra noted--while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is. Practice is better.
People fear apathy, because through apathy comes true objectivity,
No. Bzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. With apathy comes brutality, bitterness and evil. Objectivity coexists quite well with passion and ardor; it's what this wonderful thing called Science is built upon. The best scientists in the world are carefully and studiously objective, yes--but they are also some of the most deeply and fervently passionate men and women you'll ever hear of.
Read Dick Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! for brilliant examples. If you think your objectivity comes anywhere close to Dick Feynman's, all I can say is--where's your Nobel Prize?
Read biographies of Niels Bohr. In addition to a Nobel, he also held an Olympic medal or two. He was passionate and fiery, and one of the sharpest minds of this century.
Look at Einstein's private letters to his wife; you'll see a Nobel prizewinner overcome with all sorts of dark passions.
Read Peter Duesenberg's theories on AIDS--keeping in mind that he's a seven-time CDC Exceptional Investigator--and the passionate firestorms that erupt from his critics.
Read about John Bardeen (two Nobels). Read about Linus Pauling (another two-time winner, in different fields). Read about Archimedes, the great grand-daddy of 'em all, who was killed by a Roman legionnaire after he screamed at the legionnaire to get out of his way, he was blocking the light he needed to see his equations.
Passion is alive and well in science, and not one single scientist I know--and I know a lot of them, from Paul C.W. Chu (a leading superconductivity researcher) to Bruce McCandless (astronaut) to Bruce Schneier (cryptographer)--would ever say that apathy leads to objectivity.
Love encourages us to only look at ourselves
No, that's lust. Love encourages us to look at the beloved, not ourselves. Love is the state where someone else's happiness becomes a major factor in your own happiness. Love is where you'll do anything to make her smile, because her smile puts a leap in your heart that nothing else approaches. Love is selfless; if you find yourself thinking about you, then whatever you feel isn't love.
And if you'd ever been in love, you'd know this already without being told.
My suggestion: don't condemn it until you've fallen in it. It really is a pretty cool thing, except when it all falls apart, and especially when it's nobody's fault.
Lawrence Block has a book out, Ticket to the Boneyard, in which the protagonist tells Sara "I didn't think it'd end like this--I always thought it'd work out, somehow." Sara has to break the news to him that it did work out, and this is how it worked out.
That sucks. That hurts. I almost blew my head off with a.45 when it happened to me. But lo and behold, two years later, all the good parts are happening all over again.
These things really do work out.
Honestly, the chances of the human race dying out from under population are none
My NASA astrophysicist friends disagree with you. They're fairly of one mind that we need more population, orders of magnitude more population (on orders of magnitude more planets than we have now). At six billion people, we're not even a drop in the galactic bucket.
We're only overpopulated if you're willing to accept that we'll never leave Earth.;) Set your sights higher.
Don't talk to me about emotional states, I can switch emotional states at will, faster then most people can speak a syllable.
If that's the case, then you need professional help. Now. Because what you're talking about is called sociopathy, and brother, it ain't good. The only people who can turn their emotions on and off at will are sociopaths, and I don't want any of them in my neighborhood.
Anyways, he happens to be a resonably nice guy who has royaly [sic] screwed up [Texas's] education. I know, I have spoken with students from [Texas], they say that the schools down there are horrific [sic].
Strange. I graduated from high school with a four-year full-ride National Merit Scholarship to the University of Houston, where my tuition was fully paid for by the State of Texas. Apparently they did a pretty good job of educating me, because I've got a good job today, the respect of my professional peers, and my future's so bright I've got to wear shades.
-- At any rate. I really don't have the time to go against you point by point by point. I would suggest you think about professional help. You sound like you've got a real problem with self-hatred and self-loathing, and God knows that isn't healthy.
You sound reasonably intelligent, and your presence on Slashdot suggests you've got a degree of technical expertise. That means the world is your oyster, same as it is mine. You can either amass all the wealth and power you want, or you can use that wealth and power to change things, things that need changing before we all go off the deep end.
But you can just as easily choose to spurn all that, and all the good you could do with that.
It's your call. For your sake, I hope you make the right one.
Because if you don't, you're going to kill yourself before you're 30, and I really don't want that to happen.
Re:Rich? Give me a friggin break
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They used up their opportunities by wasting their minds away on drugs.
So now you're God, able to pass judgment on who's worthy and who's not? God at least has the common decency not to judge anyone until the Last Day.
(For the record, my references to religion are meant to be metaphorical; introducing issues of religious belief here would just make an incendiary discussion worse.)
There are not enough natural resources to go around to waste on the drug users in society.
And they might say there aren't enough natural resources in society to go around to waste on self-loathing teenagers. Who gets to decide who's right?
The answer is: the economy. Economics is the study of choice and resource allocation. If you have money, you get to decide how resources are allocated. If you don't, then you still get to decide how resources are allocated--you just decide fewer resources.
It's not a very fair system, I'll admit. Still, it's the best one we've got. As Winston Churchill said, "The inherent vice of capitalism is its unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is its equal sharing of miseries."
Hmm, thats an intresting [sic] logic. If A is True [sic] then B is True [sic]. Also [the] opposite of B is true. Applying your magical theory of logic; Because not murdering is good, murdering is also good.
Not quite. Murder isn't an emotional state. Most extreme emotional states are really just two sides of the same coin. If you can't love someone, then at least hate them, because that shows they still mean something to you. That's why I still hold out some hope for you; okay, sure, you hate the rich and want to kill them. By extension, you hate me and want to kill me, since I'm an engineer working on wickedly-cool software and get paid somewhere between insanely and ludicrously. That's okay; I hope you'll come around and realize your hatred's misplaced, and pretty foolish.
Far better you hate than you feel nothing, though.
"The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy. The opposite of good is not evil, it is apathy." (Elie Wiesel)
Anybody who interupts [sic] are [sic] otherwise interfears [sic] with education deservers [sic] to die. This includes [Republicans], middle mangement, [sic] and bean counters.
Hmm. I'm a Republican who voted for Bush, who a few months ago made a large donation to a school district so that poor kids could have notebooks and pencils for the upcoming school year. I volunteer at the local school as an assistant coach with the Academic Decathlon program, and mentor a couple of young geeks who are looking to grow Strong in the Ways of the Code. You also can't say I'm an exception--because the instant you do, I'll rattle off a list of my Republican friends and co-workers who do the exact same or similar things.
Strangely, this is more than many Democrats have done. Yet you don't see me harping that Republicans favor education and Democrats are do-nothings. What you're railing against here is your perception of the human condition, which is something which knows no political party. You'll find heroes and villains in any party at any time.
Oddly enough, all three of [these] tend to be either middle or upper class, what a coincidence.
Upper-class, Republican, voted for Bush. Also a reasonably nice guy, I think, given that I'm talking in a friendly fashion to a kid who says, over and over again, how much he hates me and wants to kill me.:)
Of course the fact that the middle and upper clase [sic] are some of the most hard heading [sic] stubborn short sited, [sic] addle minded people in existence also doesn't speak well for their existence.
Who's the addle-brained, hard-headed, stubborn person here--the Republican who volunteers his time at the local schools, donated to John McCain's political campaign, mentors young geeks... or the kid who hates people he doesn't even know, for offenses they've never even committed?
Re:Rich? Give me a friggin break
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Hacking The City
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Now shooting those morons on site [sic] WOULD be benifictial [sic] to society. Opening another place for them to get drugs, is not.
Hmm. They smoke dope. You're endorsing the outright murder of people without giving them any benefit of fair trial, any chance at rehab, any... etcetera.
For someone whose lament seems to be "I don't have an opportunity", you sure seem pretty keen on denying other people opportunities.
I cannot stand people with money...
According to St. Paul, love of money is the root of all evil. By extension, so is the hatred.
I HATE the middle and upper-class...
See the above.
its [sic] quite ironic that my hope is to become one of them
For your own sake, I hope you never do. It's a bad thing to turn into someone you hate. Take it from an expert in the self-loathing department (since recovered): it sucks.
What will *I* spend my money on? Simple, I will FINALY [sic] be able to AFFORD to read books.
Funny, I wasn't aware that it cost a lot of money to go down to the public library. If the library doesn't have books that you want, ask it to buy them--that's why libraries have funds for acquisitions.
Sad isn't it, all this money going around, and I can barly [sic] afford books to read, while this guy goes and blows millions on a club to play music about sex, drugs, and violence.
Two things:
1. His success is not your problem. Stop thinking that it is.
2. He's not "blowing millions". Even people who have a million dollars don't have a million dollars to throw away. JWZ is doing this because he thinks he can make money off it. He invests a million, he gets a million and a quarter back--that's how business works. Or he'll lose his shirt. Doesn't matter to me either way.
Relax. Calm down. The world's not out to get you. And you might want to stop hating people with money before you turn into one of them, because otherwise you're going to air-condition your skull before you turn 30.
First, your digital signature doesn't prove anything about who you are. Rather, the people you communicate with trust that it identifies you, and trust is antithetical to proof.
As a for-instance, I've been doing a lot of transatlantic communications lately with a fellow named Roger [last name deleted]. At least, he says his name is Roger... but since I've never met him, I haven't been able to verify his identity by examining his passport, his driver's license, etc. So I just have a voice to identify, and that voice is self-identified as Roger, which is no identification at all.
Roger and I exchanged OpenPGP keys. His OpenPGP key identifies him as "Roger John Laurence [last name deleted]". But I still didn't know if this was really him or not, so we talked voice. After verifying that it was the same voice I'd talked to earlier, and he doing the same (a process no more complex than "Hey, Roger?" "Yeah, mate?"), we exchanged SHA-1 hashes of our OpenPGP keys and verified we'd received each other's keys successfully.
We still haven't verified anything.
For all I know, Roger has given a copy of his OpenPGP key and passphrase to another person, and all of my email is coming from this third person who's not Roger. And for all Roger knows, I've done the exact same thing.
Signatures can only verify identity in the case of two parties who trust each other. Trust is antithetical to proof; therefore, it's hard to say "digital signatures prove identities". They don't. They make it easier to trust, but that's not the same as proof.
Insofar as this GPS verification scheme--good luck. The likelihood of a system being subverted increases with the square of the number of people involved. How does the trusted third party ensure that both parties are reporting their location honestly? If I'm really in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (42N 42W--Cedar Rapids is the closest city I could find to the Magical Location of Life, the Universe and Everything), I can have a conspirator in Quito, Ecuador (0N, approx 55W). When the third party tells me, "Okay, verify your location according to this protocol," I can have my conspirator in Quito perform the protocol and send the result back to me; then I send the result on to Trent, the trusted arbitrator.
How is Trent to know that I've done a man-in-the-middle attack against his system? Well, it's possible that this system can be patched up to solve the man-in-the-middle problem. But those patches will themselves have attacks against them, and the entire situation quickly devolves from there.
Crypto works well with communicants who (a) want to talk to each other and (b) trust each other to apply a protocol properly. Once you take away either assumption, most crypto falls flat on its face.
England is a subset of Britain, just as Wales and Northern Ireland are. Therefore, it's as fair to say the Imperial system is Scottish as it is to say it's English.
Any attribute of a set belongs equally to all elements of the subset.:)
First: all systems are arbitrary. As long as you're clear on the conversion units, everything's kosher. 5280 feet in a mile is no more inherently bizarre than 1000 meters in a kilometer.
The original mile was defined by the Roman Legions. A thousand Legionnaire paces became a mile. This makes perfect sense in an era where most people traveled by walking from place to place. The original foot was defined by the length of an English monarch's foot--okay, that one's silly.
Insofar as why water freezes at 32 and boils at 212, you can thank Fahrenheit. His temperature scale was originally conceived of for medical purposes, not scientific ones. He defined the nominal body temperature as 96 degrees (both to allow high fevers to be an even 100, and because 96 was evenly divisible by a lot of numbers). For the zero point, he decided the freezing temperature of salt water would be the coldest anyone would need to measure, so that became the 0.
Today, better thermometers than Fahrenheit had tell us the body temperature is 98.6 degrees. Salt water still freezes at zero, though.
Imperial is only "clear and consistent" if you don't mind a bushell [sic]... of random, meaningless, individual relationships between all of your measurements.
As it turns out, the relationships are not random nor meaningless. As I said earlier, as long as you've got a decent memory for constants, conversion between the two is very straightforward.
1 mi = 1.609344 km
1 in = 2.54 cm
c = 186,282.3979 miles per second
1 pound = 454 grams
1 kilo = 2.205 pounds
1 quart approx eq. 1 liter, to 3% accuracy
1 calorie = 4.1868 joules
1 degree F =.555 degrees C
Why not? Because it's a complete nonissue. If you talk to a scientist, they're going to be comfortable with the metric system. Whether it's 20mi or 32km, I don't care; it's all the same to me.
That leaves the conventional world as the last holdout, and even there it doesn't matter very much. What matters is that the people understand what the measurements are. If I were to tell someone asking for directions, "Sure, just go a klick down the road, take a right, and it's a half-klick on your left" it would make no sense at all to them--but if I were to say "sure, it's about six-tenths of a mile down the road, turn right, and about a third of a mile on your left", it'd make perfect sense.
Why should they change? They've got measurements they're happy with. Now, admittedly, if they're going to travel in foreign countries they'd better learn the metric system--but since you can get by perfectly fine in America without knowing the metric system, the conventional wisdom seems to be "why bother?"
As for me, I'm happy with either system. Doesn't matter to me which system of measurements you use, as long as you're clear and consistent.
#s 1 and 4 are desirable; the others are catastrophically bad ideas. Licensed ISPs aren't much different from a licensed press--and as any First Amendment lawyer can tell you, a licensed system of presses is illegal in the United States, as no government agency has that authority.
Spoofed packets being criminalized is tempting only on its face. While Congress could very well make interstate transport of a ham sandwich illegal, this law would be impossible to enforce. Criminalization of spoofed packets would be in the same boat.
Criminalizing all scanning is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Suppose that I own two machines, A and Z, and I traffic between the two is vanishing into the ether. Do I have the right to make a nonintrusive investigation into the cause of the outage? My instincts tell me yes, that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments cover legitimate inquiry into the world in which we live. Therefore, my use of traceroute and ping to locate the network outage is perfectly legal--after all, lacking mens rea, no crime can be committed.
Securing all servers is an extremely good idea, as is authentication and verification of data. Unfortunately, 90% of the programmers I know can't be bothered to worry about anything as trivial as making sure it's Done Right, instead of Done Fast.
The [I]nternet is fundamentally structurally vulnerable to DoS attacks.
Agreed, but I like to approach things from a slightly different perspective. The Net was designed to be immune to a huge array of meatspace problems. The Net was not designed, nor could it have been designed, to be immune to netspace problems; after all, netspace didn't exist at the time the fundamental protocols of the Net were being developed.
As the English techno band Shriekback noted, "[e]very force evolves a form." DoS attacks are just the form which force has evolved into on the Net.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Both of them are utter pipe dreams. The "transparent tag showing origin and history" already exists today, except it has a much shorter name and a much more spotty record. They're called "watermarks", and they're pretty much a joke. Just look at SDMI, which has had some brilliant minds tackling the watermark problem and, even after millions of dollars in research, they still haven't managed to come up with a way to stop a really determined 15-year-old.
Translated into modern idiom,
- I propose a law requiring watermarks on every file on every server, and that the files be immediately accessible on request.
Problem number one: watermarks don't work.Problem number two: if the law is going to require that every file on every server be immediately accessible on request, that's going to play hob with e-commerce. Do you really want to place that order for Naked Amazon Women In Bondage from Amazon.com, knowing that anyone can send an email to Amazon saying, "Hi! Pursuant to the new Federal laws, I want to investigate your site to make sure you're not using any of my IP. Please send me all of your customer purchase records."
The alternative to this, which Stirling probably means, is that the watermark be kept available, although the file may not necessarily be. That defeats the purpose of a good watermark; one of the principles of good watermarks is they can't be removed.
- The authorities should develop and send out a `sniffer' intelligent agent program to detect files not meeting these criteria.
Stirling, meet the First Amendment. If I don't want to include watermarks in my original works, neither you nor the government get to say whoopty-doo about it.On a technological note, I've got some experience with smart agents. At the present time, they're really not very smart. Remember that there exist such things as countermeasures; once people figure out what ruleset the expert system behind the agent is using, they'll figure out ways to avoid triggering the agent.
- Immediately shut down any server/node that doesn't reply properly
Violates due process of law. Shutting down a server does Nasty Stuff to online businesses, and would require that a court hearing be held. Remember, nobody can be deprived of life, liberty or property without the due process of law.This is the only proposal which is feasible technologically, BTW. After all, to take down a server all you need is a fire axe and strong arms.
- With really severe penalties for anyone owning hardware harboring pirate files
Violates the legal principle of mens rea, which basically means--"if you had no criminal intent, then you didn't commit a crime". If I'm an ISP and someone is running warez off their shell account, I'm not liable until I'm notified of the illegal copying and I have time to verify the allegations myself.Technologically unfeasible, too, given that many systems will be harbored in foreign countries which are not signatory to any such ludicrous treaty as Stirling is suggesting. To penalize the owners of those servers would require... well, a small Special Forces team could probably convey the US's displeasure, but that seems like overkill, doesn't it?
- Stirling claims that he talked to the FBI, who told him that they have the ability to penetrate Freenet's anonymity
Maybe true, maybe false. Sounds more like happy smoke to me. Think about this: if the FBI does have this capability, why in God's name would they tell anyone about it?Stirling needs to talk to his dealer about the purity of his rock.
Eyewitness testimony has two problems: it's unreliable and it's easily corruptable. Just something as simple as telling a witness, "You didn't really see that, did you?" is enough, sometimes, to plant a kernel of doubt in the witness' mind... and that doubt shows through on the witness stand... and the jury sees it... and decides "why is this person so doubtful, unless they really didn't see it?"
Circumstantial evidence has the advantage of being reliable. It's still easily corruptable; improper handling of evidence can get the entire thing thrown out, and lawyers often have considerable success demonstrating improper handling (as they did in the OJ Simpson case, with the DNA samples at the crime scene). And, given sketchy evidence, you can make it say whatever you want it to--which is why judges rarely let sketchy evidence be admitted.
Circumstantial evidence is far from perfect, but it's a damn sight better than eyewitnesses.
Regrettably, it's all too true--there's nothing in there I'd really disagree with, but I would like to take a moment to plug the Japanese classic film, Rashomon, which tells the same sequence of events from many different perspectives--all of them true and accurate, even though they show many different things and sequences of events.
It's been imitated in Courage Under Fire and to a lesser extent in Run, Lola, Run, but the original has never been exceeded.
If you want to see how uncertain eyewitness testimony can be, and see some great cinema in the process, watch Rashomon.
3)You said it yourself, ssh clients are not yet standard.
:)
They come standard with the RH 7.0 distro. They come standard with several other distros as well. In fact, the only OS I'm aware of which don't ship with ssh are the Microsoft OSes--and Microsoft's reputation on security is so laughable that I can just write off their exclusion of SSH as more-of-the-same.
4) I've been lots of places without access to an ssh client.
Ugh. Write emails to the sysadmins. Not including ssh on a system borders on blatant negligience nowadays, and there's no two ways about that. No system, especially no UNIX, should be without OpenPGP-compliant and SSH-compatible software.
Don't blame SSH for brain-damaged sysadmins, in other words.
And still. SSH is a commercial product with a long history. OpenSSH is something fairly new, with a severe vulnerability as late as last week.
First, I haven't heard a thing about this "vulnerability", so I can't comment on it. I'm speculating that either it was an extremely esoteric vulnerability, or else not a very serious vulnerability--news tends to travel fast about inferior crypto where I work.
Second, what makes you think commercial SSH is without flaws? Just because you can't see the bugs (because you can't see the source) doesn't mean there aren't any. In the long run, open source--with withering peer review and brutal accountability--will always be better than any closed-source offering.
Right--the original poster was asking if the sat could be shut down, and the answer is that the sat is pretty much outside of all governmental control once it's in orbit, short of overt acts of war. :) I'm not disputing that parties involved in maritime traffic who are within national borders or territorial waters can't be held accountable under the law.
Of course, I could be misremembering what the original question was.
While it did take SJ quite some time to get their equipment back, it wasn't the FBI who held their equipment in legal limbo. That infamy belongs to the United States Secret Service.
:)
While I'm as suspicious of the FBI as I am the USSS, let's make sure to hand out criticism fairly, okay?
Space falls under maritime law; any assignment of geosynch orbits to countries is purely voluntary on the part of the countries who agree to it. For an analogue, consider sea lanes; certain sea lanes have been traditionally used by one power or another, and other powers avoid those sea lanes (fishing areas, etc.) to prevent conflict. But if you want to sail those lanes, there's nothing in maritime law which says you can't.
Warning: I'm not an international law expert. (In fact, I've got doubts that international law even exists in a practical sense; if I'm right, then the entire argument is very moot.)
Short answer: nobody knows for sure. It'd probably fall under the same laws as marine vessels (maritime law). The sat would be considered the property of its owner, but the nation wouldn't be able to enforce its laws on the satellite, since the satellite is in international "waters" (well, international LEO).
:)
It's a well-established principle that nation-states can't enforce their laws on ships of foreign registry when those ships are in international waters. Doing so is considered an act of war (and was the cause of the War of 1812, if I recall).
So, if you don't mind a really expensive porn server... talk to Seahaven and incorporate a business there. Then buy a sat server and have the Russians put it in orbit. Once it's in orbit, upload all the pr0n and MP3s you want and let the world download freely.
Since Seahaven isn't signatory to any international conventions, Seahaven doesn't even recognize the existence of copyright (no copyright law + no signatory to the Berne Convention = no copyright). Any nation that wanted to put you on trial for making DeCSS available in defiance of court order would first have to declare war on Seahaven in order to do it.
First, most of the legal problems with ssh are nonexistent. The RSA patent has expired (yay!) and that means it's legal to use RSA left and right, up and down, this and that way if you want to.
Second, OpenSSH is a pretty damn good solution. I'm using OpenSSH-2.1.1p4, and I've yet to have any complaints with it or the way it handles the SSH protocol. (That's not to say I wouldn't have done things differently, but that's to be expected.) If you want me to take your "OpenSSH may be free, but is not yet as good as SSH" comment seriously, first you'll need to explain to me exactly where you see it lacking.
Third, "SSH needs a client which is not the same as the telnet client." Big deal. Telnet requires a client which is not the same as the ssh client. Both of them require the servers to be running the appropriate daemons in order to support connections. Telnet is a standard service and ssh is quickly becoming one.
My ISP supports ssh for shell accounts, which is nice, because I make it a point to never telnet into my account. If a Mom-and-Pop ISP in the Left Armpit of Nowhere (also known as North Liberty, Iowa) can run the ssh daemons, then there's no excuse for any sysadmin to not be able to run the ssh daemons.
Telnet can, in fact, be replaced with ssh. More than that, I think it should and must be replaced with ssh.
Yes, but they were underestimated. But I think perhaps that the estimates were based on support that they didn't have. They wanted, and should have had, close air support and tanks on standby.
Task Force Ranger had helicopter gunships overhead during the entire engagement; in fact, two of the gunships (Black Hawks) were shot down. Insofar as armor support, that's very dicey in urban environments--many city streets, particularly in Third World countries, won't take the weight of an AFV.
Insofar as the underestimation of casualties, that's probably only marginally right. Twenty casualties is probably within the spread which was predicted, and far closer to the worst-case than the best-case. The Army never says "we expect to lose five troops in this op"; they say "we expect casualties to run up to X percent".
Now, whether or not politicians really understand that X percent casualties means X percent dead American boys, that's a far different question. With President Clinton, the answer was no--he didn't understand. It's been reported that he felt deeply betrayed by his advisors for not making him understand just how serious an issue war is. (Ref: Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down).
Furthermore, an earlier plan involving the use of Delta Force resulted in the evaluation that they could just go in and pick up whoever they wanted off the streets.
In fact, that was the plan, and Delta Force was the unit tasked with the snatch and grab. There was also a Navy SEAL with Task Force Ranger, if I recall correctly. The Rangers were there only to support the D-boys, not to achieve the objective on their own. However, since officially the D-boys don't exist, credit for the collar went to the Rangers.
Things began to go wrong as soon as the first Ranger abseiled out of the helicopter. Something went wrong (nobody's sure what) and he fell six stories to the street. (He survived, BTW, but with major brain damage.) Then the Somalis started engaging the air support, which was expected; the RPG-7s they were engaging them with wasn't. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and that's when the mission went from SNAFU to TARFU.
At least one Ranger bled to death
His name was Jamie Smith. His injuries came when the helicopter he was in crashed. Post-incident investigation shows that, even if medevac had been available, he'd still have died from his injuries--they were simply irreparable.
Jamie's father has never accepted this version of events, though, and loudly condemns the military for not having the 10th Mountain on standby.
while their commander took 6 hours to beg in non-US UN armor, and another 6 for them to get there
It took several hours for armor to be mobilized, but once it arrived, it didn't take six hours for them to relieve the Rangers--only that long to group up with the Rangers. They were taking heat off the Rangers the instant they arrived in Mogadishu.
-- Please note that I'm not disagreeing with you re: the political stupidity of Somalia--the abject, utter, addle-brained stupidity of it all. But there is a lot of rumor and misinformation going on about Somalia, and it really annoys me.
A friend of mine, Dan, was murdered a few days later in Mogadishu. He was a journalist reporting for Reuters', and one of the nicest people I ever knew. Kind of erratic at times, though--he was driven, genuinely driven to report on the Third World, and he had great empathy for people in developing countries. It tended to color his view of the world, and he was pretty fed up with American luxury when he left for Somalia.
It's hypothesized that his attackers were so outraged over their losses to the Rangers that they decided to lynch any Americans they could find.
It's deeply ironic they'd lynch the one American who could, and did, understand their anger and rage.
-- That's my personal interest in Mogadishu. That's why I'm so anal-retentive about making sure people understand what really happened and what didn't. I figure, Dan would at least want me to get his story straight.
they failed in ... retaining their capability to continue to act in the area
Again false. Task Force Ranger was good to go within minutes after the original force returned home. Not all of Task Force Ranger ventured out that day; a lot of guys were still fresh and ready to fight.
If the military high command had adequately predicted the casualties that the operation would cost for the politicians, the order would surely not have been given.
In fact, casualties were predicted. The order was given anyway.
They still lost the war, because they didn't know what the hell their objectives really were.
US soldiers didn't lose Vietnam. US politicians lost Vietnam. But, given that "I do not agree with your separation of the US military and the US political system", I'll grant that.
The distinction between the two really is fundamental, BTW. The President of the United States may be Commander-in-Chief, but he's a civilian--were he to be a military officer, he'd have had to face a court-martial over Monica Lewinsky. The President is an elected official, answerable to the people; the military is answerable only to the government.
I agree with you heartily regarding the failure of US politics in the region. However, since the politicians failed, that's where the blame ought to go--not on the military, which did its job admirably and without complaint, despite impossible resistance.
Only... They aborted the mission.
Absolutely false. The mission objective was achieved despite overwhelming resistance.
Put in boldface for a reason. The mission objective was the snatch-and-grab of one of Aidid's lieutenants, and they successfully achieved their objective.
Further missions were scrubbed by White House order. The theater commanders disagreed vehemently with the President's abandonment of the Somalia operation; they had Aidid's entire gang on the ropes after that battle in downtown Mogadishu, and Task Force Ranger wanted to finish the job--with sufficient force and vehemence to send a strong message that you don't desecrate the bodies of American troopers.
The theater commanders were overridden by the President.
The failure of the US military to achieve its objectives in the Somalia operation is really a failure of the US political system. The military did everything we asked them to, and more. But, as is usual, US politicians lost their will to fight long before the military did.
The M-16 was not designed to maim, as you say. Rather, it grew out of the armed services' dissatisfaction with the M-14 rifle. The main problem with the M-14 was its weight; it's a big pig of a weapon and ammunition for it weighs a ton.
By moving from 7.62mm ammunition to 5.56mm ammunition, the weight of the ammo was reduced by a factor of almost a third. The heavy use of plastics and minimized use of heavy metal components cut several pounds off the M-16, when compared to its predecessor.
The smaller bullet possesses less lethality, correct. However, it's not a tumbler round and it wasn't meant to maim people. In Mogadishu, Somali gang members were shot at point-blank range with M-16 fire and weren't incapacitated; the bullet tended to penetrate clean through, without causing significant wound trauma. If the 5.56mm cartridge was designed to maim, then it was pretty badly designed, because it doesn't incapacitate reliably. (The Israelis and British have reported similar problems with the 5.56mm round. The Soviets have the same problem with their 5.45mm AK-74s in Chechnya; the 5.45mm round is so inadequate that the Sovs have started fielding a 9mm assault rifle with their troops, just to get some stopping power again.)
To recap: the reason for moving to 5.56mm was to minimize weight, so that soldiers could carry more ammunition and fight longer engagements. A soldier already goes into combat lugging around over 100 pounds in his pack; every ounce of saved weight helps.
This kind of thinking is the reason why the U.S. military can't beat a truly committed enemy.
On the contrary:the US military has a long track record of beating hell out of truly committed enemies. The most recent such incident I can think of occurred in Mogadishu, Somalia back in 1993, when a simple snatch-and-grab on a Somali warlord turned into the largest US ground engagement since Vietnam.
The fight lasted for the day, throughout the night, and then some. The Rangers were short on water (very important for long engagements in desert climates), ammunition, night-vision equipment, and were outnumbered at least ten to one by insurgents on the ground.
Something on the order of twenty American troops were killed. Over one thousand armed Somalis were killed and another five hundred wounded. (These estimates come from Somali medical sources, not US military sources. Estimates of civilian casualties are highly speculative, and deeply tragic. Urban combat is hell on everyone, especially the poor schmucks who've got the bad luck to live there.)
The Somali warlords, in an attempt to bolster morale of their decimated troops, dragged the body of a US serviceman through the streets (a soldier named Shugart, I think). That went on the international wire and the video was seen in the United States, which shocked and appalled US sensibilities so much that the Somali operation was aborted.
The public sentiment is that we were beaten in Mogadishu. The reality is that the Rangers acquitted themselves very well against a ferociously committed adversary, and against incredible odds.
TMBG is a great band. But, they have publically decried Napster and P2P in general. Why should we help them with something that is run 1980's technology?
1. They aren't anti-Napster, nor anti-P2P. What they are against is the dilution of their own online community. When people download TMBG MP3s from Napster, they miss out on the large online community of TMBG fans, which TMBG has put a lot of effort into building. TMBG has little problem with fans sharing songs; TMBG has a big problem with Napster building their online community at the cost of TMBG's online community.
2. Why should we help them out? Because we're geeks. Because we like fixing problems. Because we think that maybe, just maybe, the world would be a better place if things worked right. There's an old axiom about courtesy--you aren't courteous to other people because they're superior people, but because you are. The same applies to helping others.
D'oh! I knew that. Thanks for the boot to the head. :)
Military technology is not the same thing as civilian technology.
Bzzt, sorry, thanks for playing. While this was true in the very early days of computing, it hasn't been true for some years. Nowadays, the military wants COTS (Cheap Off The Shelf). If Intel has an entire fab line pouring Pentium IIIs onto the market, it's far cheaper for the military to buy P3s than to pay Intel to abandon their current fab line and make new chips custom to military spec.
Military technology is almost always superior and classified.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. The on-board computer on an F-15C Falcon is the rough equivalent of an Intel 80286. I think the entire avionics fits in 4mb, but I'm not sure.
On the F-22 (Raptor? Lightning II? What the heck is its name this week, anyway?), all the on-board avionics are controlled by a chip roughly equivalent to an 80486/33.
Military computer hardware tends to be old, like ten years or so out of date. The reason for this is the military doesn't want to get a Pentium division bug. If your brand-spanking-new-in-1990 Pentium chip has a hardware error on long division, okay, great, your Quicken software shows you the wrong result. If that chip is controlling an aircraft or weaponry, someone dies.
Because of this, the DoD has standards for reliability which very few chips can live up to--and they very rarely buy anything which hasn't been proven by years in the marketplace.
There's also the problem of chip design. Put bluntly, the military has nobody capable of pushing the state of the art in chip design. All the expert chip designers are working in private industry, making money hand over fist. So how could the military have all these brilliant designs, when they don't have any chip designers?
There's a myth out there that says military hardware is new and bleeding-edge. It's not, and the military likes it that way.
By wasting money on frivolious expenses, the rich also judge who can live and who can die.
:) Good. You don't know me from the wind, brother, and if you think you do, you are mistaken.
.45 when it happened to me. But lo and behold, two years later, all the good parts are happening all over again.
;) Set your sights higher.
Yep. Life is tough. Wear a helmet.
That sounds callous, doesn't it? It's only because it's true. A friend of mine says that she would be a Wiccan, if only she felt that the Wiccan Rede was anything more than a pipe dream--"if it doesn't harm anyone, do what you want to do" is, in some ways, a very narrow view of the world.
Anything you do, anything you do, will condemn some and redeem others. The trick is doing what you can to make sure that, on balance, you help more than you hurt. But it's a given that anything you do will adversely affect another person.
Did you buy popcorn the last time you went to the movies? Couldn't that $6.00 have bought an entire week's food for a starving civilian in Chechnya? How dare you, indulge in a six-dollar bucket of popcorn while people are starving to death.
But if you don't buy that popcorn, and nobody else does, either (instead contributing to the Red Cross to help starving Chechens), then you put the guy behind the counter out of a job--and what if he's the breadwinner for the family, earning $7.00 an hour in a crappy job because that's the only thing he can get?
You see? Every choice you make will have positive and negative repercussions, repercussions far beyond the simple cause-and-effect that you think about.
In other words, your hatred is seriously misplaced, and not at all logical.
How about a self-loathing teenager who has plans on HELPING society. I am working my ass off to learn everything that I can so that I might contribute to society. Are you saying that my work deservers no more credit that the waste of a druggie?
Get over your self-hatred first before you go about trying to help anyone. Everyone wants peace on earth, but so few people ever try to find peace with themselves first.
Insofar as your plans to help others--big whup. When I was in high school I wasn't "planning" to help others; I was building homes with Habitat for Humanity. Just because you're in high school doesn't mean you can't do anything.
There are lots of people who say "'ere but for the vile guns of war, I'd been a soldier". The credit doesn't go to those people. The credit goes to those people who do it, not people who talk about how they plan to someday do it.
But first, get over your self-hatred.
Love is an animal instinct that is designed to force otherwise sapient beings to act like wild creatures. I do not believe if [sic] love, instead I prefer the path of logic and a life of discipline and rigorous study. Just as you oppose anything that stands in the way of you acquiring physical wealth and happiness (love, sex, money, power, etc.) I oppose anything that interferes with my acquisition of mental knowledge.
First--you have no idea what I want out of life.
We clear on that?
Second--I used to think like that. Then a 6'2", slim, attractive, long-legged German blonde came along and turned my world square on its head. (Gave me a permanent liking for tall women in the process, too...) Best thing that ever happened in my life, I tell you, was when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and learned how to let go a little bit. Most liberating thing in my life.
I've found that people who espouse cold and bitter pessimism are people who've never found anything better in life. Trust me; there are, if you only look for them.
Book learning is great, but--as Yogi Berra noted--while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is. Practice is better.
People fear apathy, because through apathy comes true objectivity,
No. Bzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. With apathy comes brutality, bitterness and evil. Objectivity coexists quite well with passion and ardor; it's what this wonderful thing called Science is built upon. The best scientists in the world are carefully and studiously objective, yes--but they are also some of the most deeply and fervently passionate men and women you'll ever hear of.
Read Dick Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! for brilliant examples. If you think your objectivity comes anywhere close to Dick Feynman's, all I can say is--where's your Nobel Prize?
Read biographies of Niels Bohr. In addition to a Nobel, he also held an Olympic medal or two. He was passionate and fiery, and one of the sharpest minds of this century.
Look at Einstein's private letters to his wife; you'll see a Nobel prizewinner overcome with all sorts of dark passions.
Read Peter Duesenberg's theories on AIDS--keeping in mind that he's a seven-time CDC Exceptional Investigator--and the passionate firestorms that erupt from his critics.
Read about John Bardeen (two Nobels). Read about Linus Pauling (another two-time winner, in different fields). Read about Archimedes, the great grand-daddy of 'em all, who was killed by a Roman legionnaire after he screamed at the legionnaire to get out of his way, he was blocking the light he needed to see his equations.
Passion is alive and well in science, and not one single scientist I know--and I know a lot of them, from Paul C.W. Chu (a leading superconductivity researcher) to Bruce McCandless (astronaut) to Bruce Schneier (cryptographer)--would ever say that apathy leads to objectivity.
Love encourages us to only look at ourselves
No, that's lust. Love encourages us to look at the beloved, not ourselves. Love is the state where someone else's happiness becomes a major factor in your own happiness. Love is where you'll do anything to make her smile, because her smile puts a leap in your heart that nothing else approaches. Love is selfless; if you find yourself thinking about you, then whatever you feel isn't love.
And if you'd ever been in love, you'd know this already without being told.
My suggestion: don't condemn it until you've fallen in it. It really is a pretty cool thing, except when it all falls apart, and especially when it's nobody's fault.
Lawrence Block has a book out, Ticket to the Boneyard, in which the protagonist tells Sara "I didn't think it'd end like this--I always thought it'd work out, somehow." Sara has to break the news to him that it did work out, and this is how it worked out.
That sucks. That hurts. I almost blew my head off with a
These things really do work out.
Honestly, the chances of the human race dying out from under population are none
My NASA astrophysicist friends disagree with you. They're fairly of one mind that we need more population, orders of magnitude more population (on orders of magnitude more planets than we have now). At six billion people, we're not even a drop in the galactic bucket.
We're only overpopulated if you're willing to accept that we'll never leave Earth.
Don't talk to me about emotional states, I can switch emotional states at will, faster then most people can speak a syllable.
If that's the case, then you need professional help. Now. Because what you're talking about is called sociopathy, and brother, it ain't good. The only people who can turn their emotions on and off at will are sociopaths, and I don't want any of them in my neighborhood.
Anyways, he happens to be a resonably nice guy who has royaly [sic] screwed up [Texas's] education. I know, I have spoken with students from [Texas], they say that the schools down there are horrific [sic].
Strange. I graduated from high school with a four-year full-ride National Merit Scholarship to the University of Houston, where my tuition was fully paid for by the State of Texas. Apparently they did a pretty good job of educating me, because I've got a good job today, the respect of my professional peers, and my future's so bright I've got to wear shades.
-- At any rate. I really don't have the time to go against you point by point by point. I would suggest you think about professional help. You sound like you've got a real problem with self-hatred and self-loathing, and God knows that isn't healthy.
You sound reasonably intelligent, and your presence on Slashdot suggests you've got a degree of technical expertise. That means the world is your oyster, same as it is mine. You can either amass all the wealth and power you want, or you can use that wealth and power to change things, things that need changing before we all go off the deep end.
But you can just as easily choose to spurn all that, and all the good you could do with that.
It's your call. For your sake, I hope you make the right one.
Because if you don't, you're going to kill yourself before you're 30, and I really don't want that to happen.
They used up their opportunities by wasting their minds away on drugs.
:)
So now you're God, able to pass judgment on who's worthy and who's not? God at least has the common decency not to judge anyone until the Last Day.
(For the record, my references to religion are meant to be metaphorical; introducing issues of religious belief here would just make an incendiary discussion worse.)
There are not enough natural resources to go around to waste on the drug users in society.
And they might say there aren't enough natural resources in society to go around to waste on self-loathing teenagers. Who gets to decide who's right?
The answer is: the economy. Economics is the study of choice and resource allocation. If you have money, you get to decide how resources are allocated. If you don't, then you still get to decide how resources are allocated--you just decide fewer resources.
It's not a very fair system, I'll admit. Still, it's the best one we've got. As Winston Churchill said, "The inherent vice of capitalism is its unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is its equal sharing of miseries."
Hmm, thats an intresting [sic] logic. If A is True [sic] then B is True [sic]. Also [the] opposite of B is true. Applying your magical theory of logic; Because not murdering is good, murdering is also good.
Not quite. Murder isn't an emotional state. Most extreme emotional states are really just two sides of the same coin. If you can't love someone, then at least hate them, because that shows they still mean something to you. That's why I still hold out some hope for you; okay, sure, you hate the rich and want to kill them. By extension, you hate me and want to kill me, since I'm an engineer working on wickedly-cool software and get paid somewhere between insanely and ludicrously. That's okay; I hope you'll come around and realize your hatred's misplaced, and pretty foolish.
Far better you hate than you feel nothing, though.
"The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy. The opposite of good is not evil, it is apathy." (Elie Wiesel)
Anybody who interupts [sic] are [sic] otherwise interfears [sic] with education deservers [sic] to die. This includes [Republicans], middle mangement, [sic] and bean counters.
Hmm. I'm a Republican who voted for Bush, who a few months ago made a large donation to a school district so that poor kids could have notebooks and pencils for the upcoming school year. I volunteer at the local school as an assistant coach with the Academic Decathlon program, and mentor a couple of young geeks who are looking to grow Strong in the Ways of the Code. You also can't say I'm an exception--because the instant you do, I'll rattle off a list of my Republican friends and co-workers who do the exact same or similar things.
Strangely, this is more than many Democrats have done. Yet you don't see me harping that Republicans favor education and Democrats are do-nothings. What you're railing against here is your perception of the human condition, which is something which knows no political party. You'll find heroes and villains in any party at any time.
Oddly enough, all three of [these] tend to be either middle or upper class, what a coincidence.
Upper-class, Republican, voted for Bush. Also a reasonably nice guy, I think, given that I'm talking in a friendly fashion to a kid who says, over and over again, how much he hates me and wants to kill me.
Of course the fact that the middle and upper clase [sic] are some of the most hard heading [sic] stubborn short sited, [sic] addle minded people in existence also doesn't speak well for their existence.
Who's the addle-brained, hard-headed, stubborn person here--the Republican who volunteers his time at the local schools, donated to John McCain's political campaign, mentors young geeks... or the kid who hates people he doesn't even know, for offenses they've never even committed?
Now shooting those morons on site [sic] WOULD be benifictial [sic] to society. Opening another place for them to get drugs, is not.
Hmm. They smoke dope. You're endorsing the outright murder of people without giving them any benefit of fair trial, any chance at rehab, any... etcetera.
For someone whose lament seems to be "I don't have an opportunity", you sure seem pretty keen on denying other people opportunities.
I cannot stand people with money...
According to St. Paul, love of money is the root of all evil. By extension, so is the hatred.
I HATE the middle and upper-class...
See the above.
its [sic] quite ironic that my hope is to become one of them
For your own sake, I hope you never do. It's a bad thing to turn into someone you hate. Take it from an expert in the self-loathing department (since recovered): it sucks.
What will *I* spend my money on? Simple, I will FINALY [sic] be able to AFFORD to read books.
Funny, I wasn't aware that it cost a lot of money to go down to the public library. If the library doesn't have books that you want, ask it to buy them--that's why libraries have funds for acquisitions.
Sad isn't it, all this money going around, and I can barly [sic] afford books to read, while this guy goes and blows millions on a club to play music about sex, drugs, and violence.
Two things:
1. His success is not your problem. Stop thinking that it is.
2. He's not "blowing millions". Even people who have a million dollars don't have a million dollars to throw away. JWZ is doing this because he thinks he can make money off it. He invests a million, he gets a million and a quarter back--that's how business works. Or he'll lose his shirt. Doesn't matter to me either way.
Relax. Calm down. The world's not out to get you. And you might want to stop hating people with money before you turn into one of them, because otherwise you're going to air-condition your skull before you turn 30.
First, your digital signature doesn't prove anything about who you are. Rather, the people you communicate with trust that it identifies you, and trust is antithetical to proof.
As a for-instance, I've been doing a lot of transatlantic communications lately with a fellow named Roger [last name deleted]. At least, he says his name is Roger... but since I've never met him, I haven't been able to verify his identity by examining his passport, his driver's license, etc. So I just have a voice to identify, and that voice is self-identified as Roger, which is no identification at all.
Roger and I exchanged OpenPGP keys. His OpenPGP key identifies him as "Roger John Laurence [last name deleted]". But I still didn't know if this was really him or not, so we talked voice. After verifying that it was the same voice I'd talked to earlier, and he doing the same (a process no more complex than "Hey, Roger?" "Yeah, mate?"), we exchanged SHA-1 hashes of our OpenPGP keys and verified we'd received each other's keys successfully.
We still haven't verified anything.
For all I know, Roger has given a copy of his OpenPGP key and passphrase to another person, and all of my email is coming from this third person who's not Roger. And for all Roger knows, I've done the exact same thing.
Signatures can only verify identity in the case of two parties who trust each other. Trust is antithetical to proof; therefore, it's hard to say "digital signatures prove identities". They don't. They make it easier to trust, but that's not the same as proof.
Insofar as this GPS verification scheme--good luck. The likelihood of a system being subverted increases with the square of the number of people involved. How does the trusted third party ensure that both parties are reporting their location honestly? If I'm really in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (42N 42W--Cedar Rapids is the closest city I could find to the Magical Location of Life, the Universe and Everything), I can have a conspirator in Quito, Ecuador (0N, approx 55W). When the third party tells me, "Okay, verify your location according to this protocol," I can have my conspirator in Quito perform the protocol and send the result back to me; then I send the result on to Trent, the trusted arbitrator.
How is Trent to know that I've done a man-in-the-middle attack against his system? Well, it's possible that this system can be patched up to solve the man-in-the-middle problem. But those patches will themselves have attacks against them, and the entire situation quickly devolves from there.
Crypto works well with communicants who (a) want to talk to each other and (b) trust each other to apply a protocol properly. Once you take away either assumption, most crypto falls flat on its face.
England is a subset of Britain, just as Wales and Northern Ireland are. Therefore, it's as fair to say the Imperial system is Scottish as it is to say it's English.
:)
Any attribute of a set belongs equally to all elements of the subset.
First: all systems are arbitrary. As long as you're clear on the conversion units, everything's kosher. 5280 feet in a mile is no more inherently bizarre than 1000 meters in a kilometer.
... of random, meaningless, individual relationships between all of your measurements.
.555 degrees C
The original mile was defined by the Roman Legions. A thousand Legionnaire paces became a mile. This makes perfect sense in an era where most people traveled by walking from place to place. The original foot was defined by the length of an English monarch's foot--okay, that one's silly.
Insofar as why water freezes at 32 and boils at 212, you can thank Fahrenheit. His temperature scale was originally conceived of for medical purposes, not scientific ones. He defined the nominal body temperature as 96 degrees (both to allow high fevers to be an even 100, and because 96 was evenly divisible by a lot of numbers). For the zero point, he decided the freezing temperature of salt water would be the coldest anyone would need to measure, so that became the 0.
Today, better thermometers than Fahrenheit had tell us the body temperature is 98.6 degrees. Salt water still freezes at zero, though.
Imperial is only "clear and consistent" if you don't mind a bushell [sic]
As it turns out, the relationships are not random nor meaningless. As I said earlier, as long as you've got a decent memory for constants, conversion between the two is very straightforward.
1 mi = 1.609344 km
1 in = 2.54 cm
c = 186,282.3979 miles per second
1 pound = 454 grams
1 kilo = 2.205 pounds
1 quart approx eq. 1 liter, to 3% accuracy
1 calorie = 4.1868 joules
1 degree F =
Why not? Because it's a complete nonissue. If you talk to a scientist, they're going to be comfortable with the metric system. Whether it's 20mi or 32km, I don't care; it's all the same to me.
That leaves the conventional world as the last holdout, and even there it doesn't matter very much. What matters is that the people understand what the measurements are. If I were to tell someone asking for directions, "Sure, just go a klick down the road, take a right, and it's a half-klick on your left" it would make no sense at all to them--but if I were to say "sure, it's about six-tenths of a mile down the road, turn right, and about a third of a mile on your left", it'd make perfect sense.
Why should they change? They've got measurements they're happy with. Now, admittedly, if they're going to travel in foreign countries they'd better learn the metric system--but since you can get by perfectly fine in America without knowing the metric system, the conventional wisdom seems to be "why bother?"
As for me, I'm happy with either system. Doesn't matter to me which system of measurements you use, as long as you're clear and consistent.
#s 1 and 4 are desirable; the others are catastrophically bad ideas. Licensed ISPs aren't much different from a licensed press--and as any First Amendment lawyer can tell you, a licensed system of presses is illegal in the United States, as no government agency has that authority.
Spoofed packets being criminalized is tempting only on its face. While Congress could very well make interstate transport of a ham sandwich illegal, this law would be impossible to enforce. Criminalization of spoofed packets would be in the same boat.
Criminalizing all scanning is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Suppose that I own two machines, A and Z, and I traffic between the two is vanishing into the ether. Do I have the right to make a nonintrusive investigation into the cause of the outage? My instincts tell me yes, that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments cover legitimate inquiry into the world in which we live. Therefore, my use of traceroute and ping to locate the network outage is perfectly legal--after all, lacking mens rea, no crime can be committed.
Securing all servers is an extremely good idea, as is authentication and verification of data. Unfortunately, 90% of the programmers I know can't be bothered to worry about anything as trivial as making sure it's Done Right, instead of Done Fast.
The [I]nternet is fundamentally structurally vulnerable to DoS attacks.
Agreed, but I like to approach things from a slightly different perspective. The Net was designed to be immune to a huge array of meatspace problems. The Net was not designed, nor could it have been designed, to be immune to netspace problems; after all, netspace didn't exist at the time the fundamental protocols of the Net were being developed.
As the English techno band Shriekback noted, "[e]very force evolves a form." DoS attacks are just the form which force has evolved into on the Net.