The problem is that "critique scientific explanations" means different things to different people. To a good science teacher, it means valid scientific critiques, and yes, that's very good. To a bad science teacher though, that means critiques that sound like science to the uneducated ear, but are really nothing of the sort. Surf some of the anti-evolution videos on YouTube for a few minutes to see just how good some people can be at blurring the line between science and hogwash.
They are required to reach a verdict based on only the facts the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial.... the rules of evidence, developed over hundreds of years of jurisprudence, are there to ensure that the facts that go before a jury have been subjected to scrutiny and challenge from both sides
Honestly, this is another "information wants to be free" issue. I can understand asking jurors to not Google about the specific people involved in the case, but to prevent them from looking up general information is absurd. If I was in a jury, I'd be very interested in the relevant case law.
It's the age of the Internet, you can't block people off from information any longer.
I initially thought nothing would come of this ridiculous filter idea because it was just so plain stupid and so many people
Just wait. In the end, it will certainly be scrapped *, but in the meantime, there will be many lulz.
When people implement ridiculous ideas, the only thing they accomplish is to provide fodder that helps prevent the idea from being implemented again. And they get their 15 minutes of fame, even if they wish they could take it all back.
(* okay, there's a miniscule possibility that Australia will march firmly in the direction of fascism, with new layers of secrecy being created just to hide existing layers of secrecy, but the likelihood that this pulls down all of democracy in Australia, all by itself, still seems miniscule)
It's fundamentally a physics issue. Light decreases at the square of the distance. The further away you are, the more light you need to gather, and so the larger your lens has to be. Sensor size doesn't matter.
If you don't collect enough light, the only way to make pictures bright is to take looooong exposures, which means you can't capture motion. (and many things you want to capture at a distance — sports shots, skittish animals — are in motion)
When the market desires a solution so strongly, sometimes engineering companies figure out a clever solution, physics constraints be damned. (fit thousands of phonograph records in your pocket, no way!)
Is there any equivalent to retinal displays that could be used to create a sort of "projected lens"? Maybe heat up the air with a laser in a careful way to create a temporary optic? No, that's probably too far out.
Perhaps, like the retinal display, the military will have the incentive to eventually research this, and find some far-out solution that industry can then produce?
What about the Red Epic 617 that will deliver 261.4 megapixels at 30fps, that's supposed to be available for $53k next spring?
I had thought that Japan's 4320p HDTV (33 megapixels) cameras were nuts, but Red's sensors are pushing far far past that.
Cameras and displays are getting to the point that they push more data than any network we've built (and so are obviously many orders of magnitude faster than the human optic nerve).
this polymer system still needs some work before it can be released commercially. For example, the authors must figure out what happens if a second scratch occurs directly where a previous scratch was mended
It's a bit hard to believe they've never tried this though, just to see what happens. So, this comes down to "more funding plz"?
Right, I agree with the broader perspective. I was just responding to the one assertion that "citizens can violate the 1st Amend, government can't violate the 1st Amend, but it's government that enforces on behalf of citizens, so effectively citizens can never violate the 1st Amendment". That proposed interpretation of the law, regardless of the broader context, is always wrong.
So NDAs and other trade secrets are unenforceable all of a sudden?
No. It doesn't matter who does the enforcing, it matters who the enforcing is being done on behalf of.
That's like saying "it's wrong for Citizen A to jail Citizen B in their home, so it's also wrong for the state to jail Citizen B for committing a crime against Citizen A". The state and the defendant are totally different parties, you can't do transitive math on them.
This guy suggests that it's pretty simple to get around, though if it were that easy, you'd think there'd be a tool out there that would implement that already. And I don't see any tools available.
Bigwigs can talk all they want. Once a product is free, the grunts don't have to involve the bigwigs in the decision-making process. And grunts choose products based on merit.
I suppose there are support contracts, but 1) that only applies to the largest businesses, and once medium and small businesses move to another product en masse, then bigwigs will start hearing about that other product ("what's this Firefox I've been hearing about so much lately?). And 2) when the answer to "do we need a big support contract for product X" is "not so much... all our people already know product Y inside and out, it's free, it's what they use in their own projects at home, so it's easier to get internal support for that", then the bigwigs will start paying attention to product Y too.
That's the way office politics works. If the guys white white labcoats and clipboards show up, they all of a sudden start behaving nicely. It's only through years of personal experience, and comparing notes with other people, that one gains insight into the proper way to handle people who are clearly going to backstab you when given the chance.
Wifi uses a shared-communications medium, so various attacks like DNS spoofing, TCP hijacking, etc. that people have stopped studying because they "went away" once everyone replaced their hubs with switches... Surprise! They're back. It's trivial to spoof DNS over wifi, which means it's trivial to do HTTPS man-in-the-middle attacks. This is the very reason that Firefox tightened up their self-signed SSL certificate behavior recently.
Most home gateways have a layer2 bridge between the wifi and LAN networks, which means it's possible to do an ARP spoofing attack on the wired segment, which means that it's possible for someone on the wireless side to sniff traffic on the wired side.
Both of these issues have solutions (DNSSEC + IPSEC for the first, turning off bridging for the second), but the first is onerous enough that 99% of users won't do it, so having a "must use WPA encryption" policy is actually a good idea for in most cases.
The report also suggests that when GoogleBot crawls a site, Google should be 100% responsible for paying for the bandwidth. That's a bizarre suggestion, since the sites being crawled already pay for most of the bandwidth, and a website can always use robots.txt to tell GoogleBot to stop using its bandwidth, if they don't want to pay.
The argument that "this guy at one end of the pipe isn't paying for all of the bandwidth going through the pipe" is just a way to get both parties to pay for the other side's bandwidth. They've done an impressive job at trying to make this sound like the reasonable obvious way things should be done, but it's still ludicrous.
Even monpolies care when the amount of complaints effectively cripples their business.
Tell that to the cellphone companies, they don't care how much people complain about overage fees and contracts. If people don't have real choices, it doesn't matter how many people complain.
Only put the master password in your will. Use the master password to encrypt a TrueCrypt or KeePass file that you frequently update and email the latest copy to executors.
The fact that "physical alterations" are required places a reasonable limit on what can be altered. (e.g. you won't see her hovering near the constellation Virgo) If, on the other hand, the DoD is in the habit of regular photoshopping, the only limit is what the "artist" is willing to stoop to.
Granted, physical fakes can go pretty far. For instance, this women could be shown arresting Osama bin Laden, using an actor to play Osama. But that would require a little set work, a decent makeup artist, etc. That is, it requires a concerted team effort, whereas a misleading photoshopping can be done by a single rogue employee who gets a "bright idea".
Slashdot Mirror
"Big iron" hardware is still used for modern supercomputers, but the software is increasingly becoming Linux. Even on the hardware front though, commodity hardware with software failover is increasingly being used.
The problem is that "critique scientific explanations" means different things to different people. To a good science teacher, it means valid scientific critiques, and yes, that's very good. To a bad science teacher though, that means critiques that sound like science to the uneducated ear, but are really nothing of the sort. Surf some of the anti-evolution videos on YouTube for a few minutes to see just how good some people can be at blurring the line between science and hogwash.
The article mentions it does fuzz testing, so it'd be the former.
Honestly, this is another "information wants to be free" issue. I can understand asking jurors to not Google about the specific people involved in the case, but to prevent them from looking up general information is absurd. If I was in a jury, I'd be very interested in the relevant case law.
It's the age of the Internet, you can't block people off from information any longer.
Just wait. In the end, it will certainly be scrapped *, but in the meantime, there will be many lulz.
When people implement ridiculous ideas, the only thing they accomplish is to provide fodder that helps prevent the idea from being implemented again. And they get their 15 minutes of fame, even if they wish they could take it all back.
It's fundamentally a physics issue. Light decreases at the square of the distance. The further away you are, the more light you need to gather, and so the larger your lens has to be. Sensor size doesn't matter.
If you don't collect enough light, the only way to make pictures bright is to take looooong exposures, which means you can't capture motion. (and many things you want to capture at a distance — sports shots, skittish animals — are in motion)
When the market desires a solution so strongly, sometimes engineering companies figure out a clever solution, physics constraints be damned. (fit thousands of phonograph records in your pocket, no way!)
Is there any equivalent to retinal displays that could be used to create a sort of "projected lens"? Maybe heat up the air with a laser in a careful way to create a temporary optic? No, that's probably too far out.
Perhaps, like the retinal display, the military will have the incentive to eventually research this, and find some far-out solution that industry can then produce?
What about the Red Epic 617 that will deliver 261.4 megapixels at 30fps, that's supposed to be available for $53k next spring?
I had thought that Japan's 4320p HDTV (33 megapixels) cameras were nuts, but Red's sensors are pushing far far past that.
Cameras and displays are getting to the point that they push more data than any network we've built (and so are obviously many orders of magnitude faster than the human optic nerve).
It's a bit hard to believe they've never tried this though, just to see what happens. So, this comes down to "more funding plz"?
Well, two for four isn't bad, right?
Right, I agree with the broader perspective. I was just responding to the one assertion that "citizens can violate the 1st Amend, government can't violate the 1st Amend, but it's government that enforces on behalf of citizens, so effectively citizens can never violate the 1st Amendment". That proposed interpretation of the law, regardless of the broader context, is always wrong.
So NDAs and other trade secrets are unenforceable all of a sudden?
No. It doesn't matter who does the enforcing, it matters who the enforcing is being done on behalf of.
That's like saying "it's wrong for Citizen A to jail Citizen B in their home, so it's also wrong for the state to jail Citizen B for committing a crime against Citizen A". The state and the defendant are totally different parties, you can't do transitive math on them.
(yes, there's a ton of good PDF freeware available now)
Benevolent worms are a perennial suggestion in computer security, and the conclusion is always no no no no.
Right, so you've established that copyright protects things that are less useful. So why do copyrights deserve more incentives than patents again?
Obligatory YouTube video.
Also, you can't mention Indian traffic without mentioning farm animals.
Yitzhak Rabin? JFK? MLK Jr? Clinton?
This guy suggests that it's pretty simple to get around, though if it were that easy, you'd think there'd be a tool out there that would implement that already. And I don't see any tools available.
Does Hulu use RTMPE and/or SWF-Verification? If so, apparently the only way is to use ye olde screen-grabbing trick, suck as it may.
Bigwigs can talk all they want. Once a product is free, the grunts don't have to involve the bigwigs in the decision-making process. And grunts choose products based on merit.
I suppose there are support contracts, but 1) that only applies to the largest businesses, and once medium and small businesses move to another product en masse, then bigwigs will start hearing about that other product ("what's this Firefox I've been hearing about so much lately?). And 2) when the answer to "do we need a big support contract for product X" is "not so much... all our people already know product Y inside and out, it's free, it's what they use in their own projects at home, so it's easier to get internal support for that", then the bigwigs will start paying attention to product Y too.
That's the way office politics works. If the guys white white labcoats and clipboards show up, they all of a sudden start behaving nicely. It's only through years of personal experience, and comparing notes with other people, that one gains insight into the proper way to handle people who are clearly going to backstab you when given the chance.
Both of these issues have solutions (DNSSEC + IPSEC for the first, turning off bridging for the second), but the first is onerous enough that 99% of users won't do it, so having a "must use WPA encryption" policy is actually a good idea for in most cases.
The report also suggests that when GoogleBot crawls a site, Google should be 100% responsible for paying for the bandwidth. That's a bizarre suggestion, since the sites being crawled already pay for most of the bandwidth, and a website can always use robots.txt to tell GoogleBot to stop using its bandwidth, if they don't want to pay.
The argument that "this guy at one end of the pipe isn't paying for all of the bandwidth going through the pipe" is just a way to get both parties to pay for the other side's bandwidth. They've done an impressive job at trying to make this sound like the reasonable obvious way things should be done, but it's still ludicrous.
Tell that to the cellphone companies, they don't care how much people complain about overage fees and contracts. If people don't have real choices, it doesn't matter how many people complain.
Only put the master password in your will. Use the master password to encrypt a TrueCrypt or KeePass file that you frequently update and email the latest copy to executors.
The fact that "physical alterations" are required places a reasonable limit on what can be altered. (e.g. you won't see her hovering near the constellation Virgo) If, on the other hand, the DoD is in the habit of regular photoshopping, the only limit is what the "artist" is willing to stoop to.
Granted, physical fakes can go pretty far. For instance, this women could be shown arresting Osama bin Laden, using an actor to play Osama. But that would require a little set work, a decent makeup artist, etc. That is, it requires a concerted team effort, whereas a misleading photoshopping can be done by a single rogue employee who gets a "bright idea".