Yeah, but we shouldn't be passing a bill just to pass one. This bill will actually make things worse by explicitly or implicitly allowing many of the problems to remain, while simultaneously removing the ability of the states to make the systems better on their own, and increasing costs all around just for good measure. If they can't do it right, then they should stay the hell away from the issue and at least let the states have a shot at it on their own.
By adding a voter-verifiable paper trail, it addresses by far the most serious problem with DRE voting machines. Using the rationale that we shouldn't pass it because it leaves some problems unsolved is making the perfect the enemy of the good. This is the way many activist communities shoot themselves in the foot. As for limiting the states, as I understand it this doesn't. From the EFF:
The higher standards required by HR 811 would provide the beginning, not the end, of serious election reform. States wishing to, say, ban all electronic voting machines, impose stricter audit requirements, or force vendors to publicly disclose all of their source code will remain free to do so, as they are today. If HR 811 becomes law, however, states would not be permitted to lag behind in many important areas as so many do today.
Some of the objections given at the beginning of the article seem to be worth considering. The straw man debate that follows is just idiotic, however. It might be useful to look at what some actual supporters have to say, supporters like the EFF, Prof. Ed Felten, Ars Technica, the Brennan Center for Justice, People of the American Way, TrueVoteMD, and Prof. Avi Rubin to name a few.
Currently, if you use a DRE your vote goes into what is essentially a black box and you have no idea whether it actually recorded the vote the way you cast it. Moreover, no one can meaningfully audit it after the fact. I find it hard to fathom how this bill can create problems worse than that.
Remember, the point of this bill is to add auditing requirements and voter verifiability. For whatever flaws it might have, those are laudible goals that are designed to fight corruption.
Offhand, I am guessing that this has MS written ALL over it.
Offhand, I'd say you're wrong. Originally, this bill required the voting machine software to be open source. I think that was weakened in a compromise to actually get the thing passed, but it still requires some outside review of the source, as I understand it. AFAIK, MS has been against this bill from the start because it required such openness.
Rush Holt, the author of H.R. 811, has a Ph.D. in Physics. Also note that a bill does not always represent what the law maker thinks is best, but rather it's the best thing they think can actually pass.
Your argument is reasonable, but it rests on the assumption that the events (XBox 360 failures) are uncorrelated. When you send back a defective unit, does MS send you a brand new one drawn from the same pool as the ones that get sold in the store, or do they send you a refurbished one? If it's the latter and the failure rate for refurbished units is higher than for new units (which seems at least plausible), then effectively the failure of the subsequent devices is correlated with the failure of the first and your calculation is not accurate.
Still, either the failure rate is quite high for refurbished models, it's pretty high for new models, or there's some environmental factor causing the failure (introducing additional correlation) in this particular case.
Puppy mills are a large problem, but at least at the PetSmart locations in the D.C. area they don't sell cats or dogs. They do have cats from local shelters there for adoption, though. There's a fee, but AFAIK this goes to the group running the shelter not anyone who bred the dogs.
There are, however, many other pet stores that do sell dogs from puppy mills. Also, I've gotten fish from PetSmart that had ick, so I'm hardly saying that all their animals are healthy or well taken care of.
The fundamental point, which you seem to be missing, is that Earth and Eta C are both in the same inertial frame, and within an inertial frame simultaneity is well defined.
I'm certainly not missing that. I never claimed otherwise. I only said that in the coordinate time of another frame the time ordering would be different. The rest frame of Earth and Eta C is, according to relativity, in no way special and the time ordering in that frame is no more the "correct" time ordering than is that observed in my hypothetical rocket ship's frame. That is certainly the way relativity is understood among physicists, which you can verify by looking at basically any book on relativity. But anyway, this now becomes a semantic point that's not worth debating. Finally, I'll point out that, like most celestial objects, Earth and Eta C actually have some nonzero velocity relative to one another, so there actually exits no mutual rest frame (however, if one were intent on trying to pick some "special" frame of reference, one could, I suppose, pick the center of mass rest frame).
Right, but you are talking about models. Models are great because you can actually calculate things using them. But a model is not going to correspond to reality in every possible detail (otherwise it wouldn't be a model - it would be a theorem!). I don't care whether it is convenient to model the universe as an infinite (nearly) flat plane or not, I'm asking whether it is an infinite (nearly) flat plane.
Models, theories, are what science deals in. In reality we can never say exactly what nature is like, we can only offer the model that best corresponds to the data we have and entails the fewest or simplest assumptions. Our cosmological models are based on General Relativity and the assumptions that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic if you look at it on a large enough scale. Our models for the Universe do not have edges because GR doesn't really provide for the existence of edges, we don't really have any idea what that would mean or how it would behave, and we have never observed any such thing. Therefore, Occam's razor mandates that our models have no edges. It require additional, unnecessary assumptions.
You seem to be confusing the case of an infinite universe with that of a finite and closed curved universe, or maybe your terminology is just confusing me. If the universe is positively curved, then it is surely also finite.
I'm not sure exactly what part of my earlier post confused you, so let me restate as clearly as I can. The Friedman-Robertson-Walker model of the Universe (which proceeds from GR and the assumptions mentioned above) says that at any instant the spacial extent of the universe is a 3D hypersurface of constant curvature (and no edges). If it has positive curvature, then it must be a hypersphere, which certainly does have a finite size. If it has negative curvature, then it is infinite in extent (it is the 3D analog of the pseudosphere). If it is flat, then the Universe is simple a Euclidean plane (hyperplane, if you like) which is, again, infinite. One can also think of this as the limiting case of the spherical universe where the radius of the sphere is taken to infinity.
And as I said before, there is no unique center to the Universe or center to its expansion in the FRW model, regardless of the spacial curvature.
Are you confusing observation of events (which in general different observers will disagree on which happens first), with proper time in an inertial frame?
I am talking about when things actually happened according to observes in different inertial frames. I'm not talking at all about when they were observed. Note that we're talking about coordinate time in a particular reference frame not the proper time (which means something particular in SR), so let's not get further confused there.
...on Earth we have not yet observed the supernova explosion, so I'm not sure what the disagreement is supposed to be. Secondly, an observer wouldn't have to be moving relative to us in order for him to observe the explosion before observing this slashdot story...
Again, I'm not talking at all about when things are observed. I'm talking about when they actually happened according to various observers (which they would deduce from when they observe something, how far away it is, and the speed of light).
But in all cases, any observer would be able to say with certainty that in the inertial frame of the Earth and Eta C, the supernova happened before the Slashdot story, even if they observe them in a different order.
Everyone will certainly agree on what the time ordering is in a specific frame of reference. What I said is that someone in a different frame of reference will say that, according to his own time keeping, the Slashdot story was published before Eta C went supernova. It is not just that he will observe them in this order, he will say (according to the time in his frame of reference) that they actually happened in this order. One such observer would be someone in a space ship passing by Earth at the instant the story was published moving at 0.99c away from Eta C. You can verify this using the Lorentz transformations.
Relative simultaneity and these related concepts are highly unintuitive and often difficult to understand at first. A common misconception when learning about SR is that it's all just about when things were observed not about when they actually happened. Like I said in the GP post, I wrote some articles that I hope might clear this up a little, or you can read a physics book that treats SR (some are listed at the end of those articles).
First, let me say that there's really no problem with the statement that the star has probably already gone supernova and we just haven't seen it yet. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say that refers to things according to the time and space coordinates of our frame of reference here on Earth.
However, it is true that according to special relativity, this is a subjective statement. An observer moving relative to us in the right way would disagree. In his frame of reference the supernova explosion has not happened yet by the time this story went up on Slashdot. This is because the two events, the story being posted on Slashdot and the star going supernova, are space-like separated, which is to say that you'd have to go faster than light to be present at both events and one cannot directly influence the other. When two events in spacetime have space-like separation, they don't have an objective ordering in time, observers in different reference frames may disagree about which happened first. Any statement about the timing of such events is a subjective statement that depends on the observer's frame of reference. If the events had a time-like separation (like any two events that affect one another) then their time ordering would be an objective fact that all observers could agree on.
For more detail on this topic, please see my articles on relative simultaneity and the light cone of an event (where I try to explain this clearly) or consult a book on Special Relativity. General relativity probably isn't very relevant here.
In the standard cosmological model, the Friedman-Robertson-Walker model, the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous (on large scales). In this model the Universe has no edges and nothing that can meaningfully be called a center. If we take the case where the Universe has a constant, positive spacial curvature, in that model at any instant in time the universe is a hypersphere. If we ignore one of the spacial dimensions (so that things are easier to visualize), then at each instant in time the space that makes up the Universe has the geometry of the surface of a sphere. So, if you imagine that our Universe is the surface of this sphere, the expansion of the Universe is exactly analogous to inflating the sphere like it's a balloon. No point in space (meaning, on the surface of the sphere) is the center of this expansion. In fact, if you are at any point on the sphere, it appears as though everything is moving away from you as though you're at the center.
Our Universe is very close to being flat, and is most likely slightly negatively curved. This is a lot harder to visualize, since we can't model them with a nice closed 2D-surface sitting in 3D space. In any case, taking the case of flat space, the Freedman-Robertson-Walker model tells us that space is basically an infinite plane (again, no edges and nothing you can meaningfully call a center). In this case, the best way to imagine the expansion of space is to imagine letting raisin bread rise. The raisins are like the galaxies in space. When the bread rises, each piece of dough expands, so the distances between all the raisins expand uniformly (ideally). For any particular raisin, it appears that all raisins are moving away from it and it is the center of the expansion. If the bread had no edges, like space, there'd be no meaningful way to say the expansion had a center.
If we imagine videotaping this expansion in either case, then when we run the recording backward things will get closer and closer together until eventually they're right on top of one another. That instant is called the big bang. Just as the expansion looks the same at every point in space, this instant looks the same at every point in space. In the case of the spherical universe, this happens when the radius of the sphere has decreased to zero. Thus, the big bang didn't happen at any particular point in space. It happened everywhere in space simultaneously. Or, if you like, you could say that at the instant of the big bang all points in space were right on top of one another, so talking about different points in space doesn't even make any sense in that context.
Having had a minute more to think about it, the AHRA protects companies distributing recording media and consumers making digital copies of copyrited works. If they had legally acquired the music in the first place, making the copy wouldn't really be is the issue, as this would be fair use (though it's still an interesting question of whether it's technically legal). The problem would be that they then distributed the music to someone else, namely their father. As far as I can see, the AHRA doesn't offer any protection for people distibuting copies of music they made (rather than just blank media). So the AHRA is probably completely irrelevant to the crux of the issue here.
Serves me right for posting too quickly I guess. I'd be really interested to see what actual (unbiased) lawyers had to say about the question.
Er, I meant to say that it looks like a mix CD would not be covered if it were burned on a computer CD-R drive. It sounds like it could be burned on a dedicated audio CD burner that implements SCMS and everything would be legal. Again, IANAL so I'm by no means certain that's correct.
I was also curious about the comment mentioning the Audio Home Recording Act. It looks like that would still probably not make this mix CD legal (but then IANAL). The text of the relevant portion of the U.S.C. is here. The apparently revelant portion of the statue (Sect 1008) says:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
An analysis from what looks to be a University law journal is available here. From that piece (under the section on the Audio Home Recording Act):
In 1992, Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act ("AHRA"), an amendment to the federal copyright law. Under the AHRA, all digital recording devices must incorporate a Serial Copy Management System ("SCMS"). This system allows digital recorders to make a first-generation copy of a digitally recorded work, but does not allow a second-generation copy to be made from the first copy... The AHRA also provides for a royalty tax...This tax is paid by the manufacturers of digital media devices...The SCMS and royalty requirements apply only to digital audio recording devices. Because computers are not digital audio recording devices, they are not required to comply with Serial Copy Management System requirement.
So apparently, at least in that author's opinion, PCs don't qualify as digital audio devices (and if you read Sect. 1001 of the statue you'll see that indeed seems to be the case) and hence are not covered on the exemption given by the AHRA. I'm not offering an opinion on the law, because I don't know enough about copyright law (especially case law), but it looks like based on this other source that commentor's assertion that the AHRA protects the mix CD is questionable at best.
While this bill may improve the current state of affairs, the current state of affairs is so abominable that may not mean much.
One should not equivocate here. It either improves the situation or it doesn't. If it does (as I and the people/organizations I listed think) then it's better that it pass. If does not, then it's better that it does not pass. This bill mandates an actual paper record of each vote and a number of audits to check that electronic tallies correspond to the paper record (statistically). Regardless of any other arguments, I cannot see how one can claim this is not an improvement over a system in which machines record and tally the votes with software that could be recording anything and store your vote in a rewritable form which can easily be altered on a massive scale.
Anything that further legitimizes the use of DREs in elections is a mistake in my opinion. A very likely outcome is that this flawed bill passes and come next session, you hear something akin to "you already got your reform bill, now shut up and vote on the machine we're giving you"...
DREs are already in widespread use. What more legitimization do they need? I think it is unwise to pass up the chance meaningful (but, perhaps, incomplete) reform now based on the hypothetical scenario that it will make congress members more resistent to a hypothetical future bill pushing an idea with no demonsterable wide-spread support (even among the subset of people concerned with voting reform) and with little way to predict whether the politcal climate at the time this hypothetical future bill would be considered would be conducive to it's passage. That is a very bad bargain.
I agree that insistence on the basic right to vote is something we should not compromise. But what we're talking about here is a disagreement on what implementation will best ensure that right under practical circumstances among a group of people (those concerned with voting reform) who all believe in ensuring that people can be confident their vote was tallied as intended when the vote was cast.
While I think this issue is important, I personally haven't had the time to devote to really look at all the angles. I do know that this bill is supported by the EFF, computer scientist and e-voting critic Prof. Ed Felten and Ars Technica among a vast number of others. While the bill is by many accounts imperfect, the provisions for auditing and verification are a vast improvement on the current state of affairs, where we use black box machines and can have no confidence that our votes are tallied as they were cast. So I support the bill.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be had about whether we aren't better off just using paper (for reasons of transparency), but the point is that that argument can be had completely independantly of this bill. This bill clearly improves the current situation with electronic voting machines (DREs), and has no effect on whether or not you have to use DREs. From the EFF pages in support of H.R. 811:
An outright ban on DREs may or may not be possible with this Congress, but it is irrelevant to whether or not this bill should pass. Rep. Holt's strategy -- to convince Congress of the need to improve transparency in U.S. elections, regardless of technology -- is a sound one, one that many volunteers have expended extraordinary efforts to bring to fruition and one that could be on the verge of succeeding. Nothing has prevented or currently prevents now-vocal critics who are calling for an outright DRE ban from going through the process of drafting the appropriate legislative proposal and then soliciting the necessary support for it. But attempting to derail or hijack HR 811 as a vehicle to ram through an unlikely-to-pass DRE ban unnecessarily risks the passage of other important substantive requirements. And once again, nothing in HR 811 prohibits states from limiting the use of DREs of any kind or banning them altogether.
Moving to defeat this bill because you oppose electronic voting is foolish. It is a situation the perfect being the enemy of the good. This is something activists on many issues fall prey to that keeps them from being effective.
One of the congresscritters in question is Rep. Rush Holt. Holt holds a Ph. D. in Physics and is, from what little I know, one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and honest members of congress. He's exactly the sort of person the/. audience should want in congress: a smart guy with technical expertise who likes to get the facts and apply them rationally.
And I can state for a fact that at least some of his staff are aware of and occasionally read Slashdot. BTW: I'm not personally affiliated with Holt in any way. I'm just a fan.
Yes, I think you're correct about the use of the term "defense" in the strict legal sense. As another response to my previous post pointed out, of course the correct standard would be whether one should reasonably have known. Under that standard, one would not have to worry about rapists and murderers going free. So yes, I think the reason that this is not accepted as a defense is the practical issue that it would be an absurd point to have to argue over and would be too likely to allow guilty parties to go free, unless you have some evidence of an alternate rationale.
As I understand it, the notion dates back to the Romans and was, unfortunately, much more reasonable in their time, when all the laws could be posted publicly on a set of tablets (at least at the time of the republic). Anyone who has attempted to read the U.S. code will quickly realize that remembering (let alone understanding) all the laws to which one is subject would be difficult at best and surely beyond the capacity of anyone without a pretty good memory. So in some ways the principle is somewhat unreasonably in our situation.
Of course, if people charged with enforcing the law do so in a judicious (but fair) way where they only give warnings when no harm was meant or done, then this isn't as much of an issue. That's what should have happened in this case.
This is true if and only if his router speaks for him. Legally, since you can't transfer power of attorney to an inanimate object, this is legally dubious. It makes perfect sense that his router speaks for him if you are not a lawyer, not trained as one, and have basically no knowledge of the law.
So the question is, if a building has a sign by the entrence that says "Open. Please come in!", is it tresspassing (or "entry" or some other crime) to enter? This would seem to be closely analogous to the case where a wireless AP is unencrypted, broadcasting an ID, and gives you an IP address when you send a DHCP request. Presumably the sign cannot speak for one legally either.
This situation is exactly equivalent to arresting someone for entering a store with an "Open" sign becuase he did not get explicit permission to enter from a human. After all, the wireless network in question had the digital equivalent of an open sign (and the DHCP server said "come right in", effectively) and was designed for the public in the same sense that the store is.
The problem here is not an ignorance of law by computer users but an ignorace of computers by lawmakers.
Umm, sorry, ignorance is not an acceptable excuse for breaking the law. He either did or didn't.
I think that you, like many other people, misunderstand this precept. The idea is that ignorance of the law cannot be considered a valid legal defense, basically because it would be absurd to have to prove that someone knew the law in question.
The justice system is supposed to be about justice, however, and while a person's ignorance is not a legal defense, it is something that should be taken into consideration when deciding whether it is just to punish them. If someone does not know the law, it is reasonable for them to think their action is legal, and no significant harm is done, then justice is NOT served by prosecuting them. They intended no harm. They are not a threat to society. Society will be harmed more by using the resources to prosecute them than it will be aided by the prosecution. It is completely foolish to prosecute someone when simply telling them not to do it will be just as effective, and such needless prosecution is befitting of a police state not a free society.
People who enforce the law are supposed to do so judiciously. They are not supposed to blindly apply the letter of the law but rather they are supposed to use their human judgement to decide what is the just application of the law. And people in law enforcement and the justice system do this all the time. Cops let people off with a written warning (or sometimes just a verbal warning). DAs elect not to prosecute a person (or to give them a generous plea deal) if prosecution under the stautory penalty would be unjust. This is a vital part of their job. Both the cop and the county attorneys failed in doing their job in this case.
I'm not really sure how that solves the problem I was talking about. My complaint is when a bank has the login prompt on a page served up with http, not https. The SSL connection isn't made until you hit the button to submit your password, at which point it's a little late for authentication.
What you seem to be talking about is a mechanism by which the browser makes obvious changes in appearance when it connects to certain sites via https. If they're not using SSL in the first place, I don't think this will help. If they are using SSL, then most browsers (AFAIK) have a way of visually notifying you (a yellow address bar or a lock appears in a certain spot in the browser, not as an image on the page). I do think it's a good idea, though, to make it more obvious to the end user when the connection is actually secure.
Sure, that's a reasonable thing to say. But while we're being pedantic, we could also point out that it's all relative. Since the event of the explosion has a space-like separation from the events occurring on Earth now (e.g. the post), the time ordering of the events is different in different inertial frames of reference. Thus, it may not have happened yet, or it may already have happened, depending on whom you ask (specifically, what reference frame they're in). Still, I'll grant you that in the instantaneously co-moving rest frame of anybody on Earth right now, it would be correct to say it has probably already happened.
While the article may be older than dirt, I'm glad the issue has been brought up, because many financial sites still haven't done anything about the problem. It always pisses me off when I go to my bank's or credit card companies' site and am confronted with a login prompt on an insecure page. To add insult to injury, they generally have put some sort of little lock icon next to the login fields. Oh, well great! That must mean it's secure!. I mean, surely no phishing site will think to put a lock icon next to the login prompt. Of course, you don't really know that it's secure or who it'll be sending your password to until after you hit the button to send your password.
Now, obviously, there are ways of dealing with this (as the blurb notes), but it's a pain in the ass. The bigger issue is that most people probably don't know it's a problem and don't know how to deal with it, and it gets people in the habit of really bad behavior, submitting a password on an insecure connection. This all seems especially crazy in view of the fact that bank sites will implement things like Sitekey and yet still use these insecure login pages. It seems that the fix is easy, why do they do this? Does it save them a lot of money to cut down on the SSL connections?
Slashdot Mirror
By adding a voter-verifiable paper trail, it addresses by far the most serious problem with DRE voting machines. Using the rationale that we shouldn't pass it because it leaves some problems unsolved is making the perfect the enemy of the good. This is the way many activist communities shoot themselves in the foot. As for limiting the states, as I understand it this doesn't. From the EFF:
Some of the objections given at the beginning of the article seem to be worth considering. The straw man debate that follows is just idiotic, however. It might be useful to look at what some actual supporters have to say, supporters like the EFF, Prof. Ed Felten, Ars Technica, the Brennan Center for Justice, People of the American Way, TrueVoteMD, and Prof. Avi Rubin to name a few.
Currently, if you use a DRE your vote goes into what is essentially a black box and you have no idea whether it actually recorded the vote the way you cast it. Moreover, no one can meaningfully audit it after the fact. I find it hard to fathom how this bill can create problems worse than that.
Remember, the point of this bill is to add auditing requirements and voter verifiability. For whatever flaws it might have, those are laudible goals that are designed to fight corruption.
Offhand, I'd say you're wrong. Originally, this bill required the voting machine software to be open source. I think that was weakened in a compromise to actually get the thing passed, but it still requires some outside review of the source, as I understand it. AFAIK, MS has been against this bill from the start because it required such openness.
Rush Holt, the author of H.R. 811, has a Ph.D. in Physics. Also note that a bill does not always represent what the law maker thinks is best, but rather it's the best thing they think can actually pass.
Your argument is reasonable, but it rests on the assumption that the events (XBox 360 failures) are uncorrelated. When you send back a defective unit, does MS send you a brand new one drawn from the same pool as the ones that get sold in the store, or do they send you a refurbished one? If it's the latter and the failure rate for refurbished units is higher than for new units (which seems at least plausible), then effectively the failure of the subsequent devices is correlated with the failure of the first and your calculation is not accurate.
Still, either the failure rate is quite high for refurbished models, it's pretty high for new models, or there's some environmental factor causing the failure (introducing additional correlation) in this particular case.
Puppy mills are a large problem, but at least at the PetSmart locations in the D.C. area they don't sell cats or dogs. They do have cats from local shelters there for adoption, though. There's a fee, but AFAIK this goes to the group running the shelter not anyone who bred the dogs.
There are, however, many other pet stores that do sell dogs from puppy mills. Also, I've gotten fish from PetSmart that had ick, so I'm hardly saying that all their animals are healthy or well taken care of.
I'm certainly not missing that. I never claimed otherwise. I only said that in the coordinate time of another frame the time ordering would be different. The rest frame of Earth and Eta C is, according to relativity, in no way special and the time ordering in that frame is no more the "correct" time ordering than is that observed in my hypothetical rocket ship's frame. That is certainly the way relativity is understood among physicists, which you can verify by looking at basically any book on relativity. But anyway, this now becomes a semantic point that's not worth debating. Finally, I'll point out that, like most celestial objects, Earth and Eta C actually have some nonzero velocity relative to one another, so there actually exits no mutual rest frame (however, if one were intent on trying to pick some "special" frame of reference, one could, I suppose, pick the center of mass rest frame).
Models, theories, are what science deals in. In reality we can never say exactly what nature is like, we can only offer the model that best corresponds to the data we have and entails the fewest or simplest assumptions. Our cosmological models are based on General Relativity and the assumptions that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic if you look at it on a large enough scale. Our models for the Universe do not have edges because GR doesn't really provide for the existence of edges, we don't really have any idea what that would mean or how it would behave, and we have never observed any such thing. Therefore, Occam's razor mandates that our models have no edges. It require additional, unnecessary assumptions.
I'm not sure exactly what part of my earlier post confused you, so let me restate as clearly as I can. The Friedman-Robertson-Walker model of the Universe (which proceeds from GR and the assumptions mentioned above) says that at any instant the spacial extent of the universe is a 3D hypersurface of constant curvature (and no edges). If it has positive curvature, then it must be a hypersphere, which certainly does have a finite size. If it has negative curvature, then it is infinite in extent (it is the 3D analog of the pseudosphere). If it is flat, then the Universe is simple a Euclidean plane (hyperplane, if you like) which is, again, infinite. One can also think of this as the limiting case of the spherical universe where the radius of the sphere is taken to infinity.
And as I said before, there is no unique center to the Universe or center to its expansion in the FRW model, regardless of the spacial curvature.
I am talking about when things actually happened according to observes in different inertial frames. I'm not talking at all about when they were observed. Note that we're talking about coordinate time in a particular reference frame not the proper time (which means something particular in SR), so let's not get further confused there.
Again, I'm not talking at all about when things are observed. I'm talking about when they actually happened according to various observers (which they would deduce from when they observe something, how far away it is, and the speed of light).
Everyone will certainly agree on what the time ordering is in a specific frame of reference. What I said is that someone in a different frame of reference will say that, according to his own time keeping, the Slashdot story was published before Eta C went supernova. It is not just that he will observe them in this order, he will say (according to the time in his frame of reference) that they actually happened in this order. One such observer would be someone in a space ship passing by Earth at the instant the story was published moving at 0.99c away from Eta C. You can verify this using the Lorentz transformations.
Relative simultaneity and these related concepts are highly unintuitive and often difficult to understand at first. A common misconception when learning about SR is that it's all just about when things were observed not about when they actually happened. Like I said in the GP post, I wrote some articles that I hope might clear this up a little, or you can read a physics book that treats SR (some are listed at the end of those articles).
First, let me say that there's really no problem with the statement that the star has probably already gone supernova and we just haven't seen it yet. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to say that refers to things according to the time and space coordinates of our frame of reference here on Earth.
However, it is true that according to special relativity, this is a subjective statement. An observer moving relative to us in the right way would disagree. In his frame of reference the supernova explosion has not happened yet by the time this story went up on Slashdot. This is because the two events, the story being posted on Slashdot and the star going supernova, are space-like separated, which is to say that you'd have to go faster than light to be present at both events and one cannot directly influence the other. When two events in spacetime have space-like separation, they don't have an objective ordering in time, observers in different reference frames may disagree about which happened first. Any statement about the timing of such events is a subjective statement that depends on the observer's frame of reference. If the events had a time-like separation (like any two events that affect one another) then their time ordering would be an objective fact that all observers could agree on.
For more detail on this topic, please see my articles on relative simultaneity and the light cone of an event (where I try to explain this clearly) or consult a book on Special Relativity. General relativity probably isn't very relevant here.
In the standard cosmological model, the Friedman-Robertson-Walker model, the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous (on large scales). In this model the Universe has no edges and nothing that can meaningfully be called a center. If we take the case where the Universe has a constant, positive spacial curvature, in that model at any instant in time the universe is a hypersphere. If we ignore one of the spacial dimensions (so that things are easier to visualize), then at each instant in time the space that makes up the Universe has the geometry of the surface of a sphere. So, if you imagine that our Universe is the surface of this sphere, the expansion of the Universe is exactly analogous to inflating the sphere like it's a balloon. No point in space (meaning, on the surface of the sphere) is the center of this expansion. In fact, if you are at any point on the sphere, it appears as though everything is moving away from you as though you're at the center.
Our Universe is very close to being flat, and is most likely slightly negatively curved. This is a lot harder to visualize, since we can't model them with a nice closed 2D-surface sitting in 3D space. In any case, taking the case of flat space, the Freedman-Robertson-Walker model tells us that space is basically an infinite plane (again, no edges and nothing you can meaningfully call a center). In this case, the best way to imagine the expansion of space is to imagine letting raisin bread rise. The raisins are like the galaxies in space. When the bread rises, each piece of dough expands, so the distances between all the raisins expand uniformly (ideally). For any particular raisin, it appears that all raisins are moving away from it and it is the center of the expansion. If the bread had no edges, like space, there'd be no meaningful way to say the expansion had a center.
If we imagine videotaping this expansion in either case, then when we run the recording backward things will get closer and closer together until eventually they're right on top of one another. That instant is called the big bang. Just as the expansion looks the same at every point in space, this instant looks the same at every point in space. In the case of the spherical universe, this happens when the radius of the sphere has decreased to zero. Thus, the big bang didn't happen at any particular point in space. It happened everywhere in space simultaneously. Or, if you like, you could say that at the instant of the big bang all points in space were right on top of one another, so talking about different points in space doesn't even make any sense in that context.
Where'd you find that? I didn't notice anything like that in the AHRA, but perhaps you found that somewhere else.
Having had a minute more to think about it, the AHRA protects companies distributing recording media and consumers making digital copies of copyrited works. If they had legally acquired the music in the first place, making the copy wouldn't really be is the issue, as this would be fair use (though it's still an interesting question of whether it's technically legal). The problem would be that they then distributed the music to someone else, namely their father. As far as I can see, the AHRA doesn't offer any protection for people distibuting copies of music they made (rather than just blank media). So the AHRA is probably completely irrelevant to the crux of the issue here.
Serves me right for posting too quickly I guess. I'd be really interested to see what actual (unbiased) lawyers had to say about the question.
Er, I meant to say that it looks like a mix CD would not be covered if it were burned on a computer CD-R drive. It sounds like it could be burned on a dedicated audio CD burner that implements SCMS and everything would be legal. Again, IANAL so I'm by no means certain that's correct.
I was also curious about the comment mentioning the Audio Home Recording Act. It looks like that would still probably not make this mix CD legal (but then IANAL). The text of the relevant portion of the U.S.C. is here. The apparently revelant portion of the statue (Sect 1008) says:
An analysis from what looks to be a University law journal is available here. From that piece (under the section on the Audio Home Recording Act):
So apparently, at least in that author's opinion, PCs don't qualify as digital audio devices (and if you read Sect. 1001 of the statue you'll see that indeed seems to be the case) and hence are not covered on the exemption given by the AHRA. I'm not offering an opinion on the law, because I don't know enough about copyright law (especially case law), but it looks like based on this other source that commentor's assertion that the AHRA protects the mix CD is questionable at best.
One should not equivocate here. It either improves the situation or it doesn't. If it does (as I and the people/organizations I listed think) then it's better that it pass. If does not, then it's better that it does not pass. This bill mandates an actual paper record of each vote and a number of audits to check that electronic tallies correspond to the paper record (statistically). Regardless of any other arguments, I cannot see how one can claim this is not an improvement over a system in which machines record and tally the votes with software that could be recording anything and store your vote in a rewritable form which can easily be altered on a massive scale.
DREs are already in widespread use. What more legitimization do they need? I think it is unwise to pass up the chance meaningful (but, perhaps, incomplete) reform now based on the hypothetical scenario that it will make congress members more resistent to a hypothetical future bill pushing an idea with no demonsterable wide-spread support (even among the subset of people concerned with voting reform) and with little way to predict whether the politcal climate at the time this hypothetical future bill would be considered would be conducive to it's passage. That is a very bad bargain.
I agree that insistence on the basic right to vote is something we should not compromise. But what we're talking about here is a disagreement on what implementation will best ensure that right under practical circumstances among a group of people (those concerned with voting reform) who all believe in ensuring that people can be confident their vote was tallied as intended when the vote was cast.
While I think this issue is important, I personally haven't had the time to devote to really look at all the angles. I do know that this bill is supported by the EFF, computer scientist and e-voting critic Prof. Ed Felten and Ars Technica among a vast number of others. While the bill is by many accounts imperfect, the provisions for auditing and verification are a vast improvement on the current state of affairs, where we use black box machines and can have no confidence that our votes are tallied as they were cast. So I support the bill.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be had about whether we aren't better off just using paper (for reasons of transparency), but the point is that that argument can be had completely independantly of this bill. This bill clearly improves the current situation with electronic voting machines (DREs), and has no effect on whether or not you have to use DREs. From the EFF pages in support of H.R. 811:
Moving to defeat this bill because you oppose electronic voting is foolish. It is a situation the perfect being the enemy of the good. This is something activists on many issues fall prey to that keeps them from being effective.
One of the congresscritters in question is Rep. Rush Holt. Holt holds a Ph. D. in Physics and is, from what little I know, one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and honest members of congress. He's exactly the sort of person the /. audience should want in congress: a smart guy with technical expertise who likes to get the facts and apply them rationally.
And I can state for a fact that at least some of his staff are aware of and occasionally read Slashdot. BTW: I'm not personally affiliated with Holt in any way. I'm just a fan.
Yes, I think you're correct about the use of the term "defense" in the strict legal sense. As another response to my previous post pointed out, of course the correct standard would be whether one should reasonably have known. Under that standard, one would not have to worry about rapists and murderers going free. So yes, I think the reason that this is not accepted as a defense is the practical issue that it would be an absurd point to have to argue over and would be too likely to allow guilty parties to go free, unless you have some evidence of an alternate rationale.
As I understand it, the notion dates back to the Romans and was, unfortunately, much more reasonable in their time, when all the laws could be posted publicly on a set of tablets (at least at the time of the republic). Anyone who has attempted to read the U.S. code will quickly realize that remembering (let alone understanding) all the laws to which one is subject would be difficult at best and surely beyond the capacity of anyone without a pretty good memory. So in some ways the principle is somewhat unreasonably in our situation.
Of course, if people charged with enforcing the law do so in a judicious (but fair) way where they only give warnings when no harm was meant or done, then this isn't as much of an issue. That's what should have happened in this case.
So the question is, if a building has a sign by the entrence that says "Open. Please come in!", is it tresspassing (or "entry" or some other crime) to enter? This would seem to be closely analogous to the case where a wireless AP is unencrypted, broadcasting an ID, and gives you an IP address when you send a DHCP request. Presumably the sign cannot speak for one legally either.
This situation is exactly equivalent to arresting someone for entering a store with an "Open" sign becuase he did not get explicit permission to enter from a human. After all, the wireless network in question had the digital equivalent of an open sign (and the DHCP server said "come right in", effectively) and was designed for the public in the same sense that the store is.
The problem here is not an ignorance of law by computer users but an ignorace of computers by lawmakers.
I think that you, like many other people, misunderstand this precept. The idea is that ignorance of the law cannot be considered a valid legal defense, basically because it would be absurd to have to prove that someone knew the law in question.
The justice system is supposed to be about justice, however, and while a person's ignorance is not a legal defense, it is something that should be taken into consideration when deciding whether it is just to punish them. If someone does not know the law, it is reasonable for them to think their action is legal, and no significant harm is done, then justice is NOT served by prosecuting them. They intended no harm. They are not a threat to society. Society will be harmed more by using the resources to prosecute them than it will be aided by the prosecution. It is completely foolish to prosecute someone when simply telling them not to do it will be just as effective, and such needless prosecution is befitting of a police state not a free society.
People who enforce the law are supposed to do so judiciously. They are not supposed to blindly apply the letter of the law but rather they are supposed to use their human judgement to decide what is the just application of the law. And people in law enforcement and the justice system do this all the time. Cops let people off with a written warning (or sometimes just a verbal warning). DAs elect not to prosecute a person (or to give them a generous plea deal) if prosecution under the stautory penalty would be unjust. This is a vital part of their job. Both the cop and the county attorneys failed in doing their job in this case.
I'm not really sure how that solves the problem I was talking about. My complaint is when a bank has the login prompt on a page served up with http, not https. The SSL connection isn't made until you hit the button to submit your password, at which point it's a little late for authentication.
What you seem to be talking about is a mechanism by which the browser makes obvious changes in appearance when it connects to certain sites via https. If they're not using SSL in the first place, I don't think this will help. If they are using SSL, then most browsers (AFAIK) have a way of visually notifying you (a yellow address bar or a lock appears in a certain spot in the browser, not as an image on the page). I do think it's a good idea, though, to make it more obvious to the end user when the connection is actually secure.
Sure, that's a reasonable thing to say. But while we're being pedantic, we could also point out that it's all relative. Since the event of the explosion has a space-like separation from the events occurring on Earth now (e.g. the post), the time ordering of the events is different in different inertial frames of reference. Thus, it may not have happened yet, or it may already have happened, depending on whom you ask (specifically, what reference frame they're in). Still, I'll grant you that in the instantaneously co-moving rest frame of anybody on Earth right now, it would be correct to say it has probably already happened.
Have we got that all out of our systems now?
While the article may be older than dirt, I'm glad the issue has been brought up, because many financial sites still haven't done anything about the problem. It always pisses me off when I go to my bank's or credit card companies' site and am confronted with a login prompt on an insecure page. To add insult to injury, they generally have put some sort of little lock icon next to the login fields. Oh, well great! That must mean it's secure!. I mean, surely no phishing site will think to put a lock icon next to the login prompt. Of course, you don't really know that it's secure or who it'll be sending your password to until after you hit the button to send your password.
Now, obviously, there are ways of dealing with this (as the blurb notes), but it's a pain in the ass. The bigger issue is that most people probably don't know it's a problem and don't know how to deal with it, and it gets people in the habit of really bad behavior, submitting a password on an insecure connection. This all seems especially crazy in view of the fact that bank sites will implement things like Sitekey and yet still use these insecure login pages. It seems that the fix is easy, why do they do this? Does it save them a lot of money to cut down on the SSL connections?