That said, I think the medical safety of vaccines is far from clear.
There is overwhelming evidence that vaccines improve public health. Given that science can only ever disprove a theory, the "far from clear" phrasing tends to be convenient if you don't want to believe something. It's a phrase that can be applied to just about any scientific theory, regardless of how successful it is.
Last year, a friend of mine's kid got a series of vaccines, and that night went into seizures and nearly died. The hospital treated it as a mysterious brain problem unrelated to the vaccines.
Maybe it was a brain problem unrelated to the vaccines.
(While I have a newborn myself and can imagine the stress such a situation would cause, your story is an example of availability bias.)
SSL isn't meant just for encrypting pages, it's meant for verifying identity also.
As the article says. SSL does both. FF3 in particular makes the first completely unusable for no good reason. The web would unquestionably be more secure if all http servers switched to using self-signed SSL certificates in place of unencrypted connections.
And this is where you're wrong. There's no point to encryption, unless you know who you're talking to.
Anyone sophisticated enough to sniff your traffic can also hijack it without much trouble. If they can hijack it, then you don't know if you're talking to the intended recipient or a hijacker (who in turn is talking to the intended recipient). This is the definition of a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.
The very design of SSL and its use of certificates with a chain-of-trust assumes this. Without this assumption, Diffie-Hellman key-exchange is simpler and sufficient. None of the RSA/DSA stuff with certificates would be necessary.
If I understand multicast (in particular IGMP) correctly, it is one of the few IP-related protocols where NAT is irrelevant.
The real problem is that multicast requires routers to support it, and the vast majority don't. This includes both your ISP and most consumer modem/router devices. The main reason for this these days is due to what economists call network-effects. No pun intended.
Actually, a bit of googling reveals that the Kettle thing is called "pleading the alternative". It seems to often be allowed, but differs from what the RIAA/SafeNet are doing.
This article discusses the distinction. In particular, paragraphs 2 and 3 provide a good summary:
"Judicial estoppel is an equitable doctrine that protects the integrity of the judicial process. Cummings v. Bahr, 295 N.J. Super. 374, 387 (App. Div. 1996). It "preclud[es] a party from asserting a position in a case that contradicts or is inconsistent with a position previously asserted by the party in the case or a related legal proceeding." Tamburelli Prop. Ass'n v. Borough of Cresskill, 308 N.J. Super. 326, 335 (App. Div. 1998) (citation omitted).
Judicial estoppel does not prevent litigants from pleading alternative positions; rather, it "is designed to prevent litigants from playing fast and loose with the courts." Newell v. Hudson, 376 N.J. Super. 29, 38 (App. Div. 2005) (citation omitted). "[A] party must successfully assert a position in order to be estopped from asserting a contrary position in future proceedings." Cummings, supra, 295 N.J. Super. at 386. Prior success does not necessarily mean that the party benefited from the position taken, but only that a court allowed them to maintain that position and relied on it to make a judicial determination. Id. at 387.
IANAL, but what the RIAA/SafeNet are arguing would appear (to me, a layman) to come under the umbrella of estoppel. But then again, so would the pleadings in the precedent (Greer v Kettle?) that you cite.
My understanding of estoppel is that it prevents (estops) a party from taking one position and then taking a contradictory one later on to disadvantage someone. (Maybe the time-line is important, and the difference between the situations? Maybe the earlier position must have been known, and thus create an expectation?)
The Data Protection Act creates rights for those who have their data stored, and responsibilities for those who store or collect personal data.
The person who has their data processed has the right to
View the data an organisation holds on them, for a small fee, known as 'subject access'
Request that incorrect information be corrected. If the company ignores the request, a court can order the data to be corrected or destroyed, and in some cases compensation can be awarded.
Require that data is not used in a way which causes damage or distress.
Require that their data is not used for direct marketing.
So they may have tried to use the 'subject access' thing. Wikipedia also mentions that costs cannot exceed £10.
Firstly, although PayPal may have a banking license in switzerland, it is not a bank per se and the Australian Reserve Bank will not guarantee my money with paypal if any. The Australian Reserve Bank doesn't appear to guarantee money with any banks. To quote a recent new article:
There is a widespread perception in Australia that bank deposits are government-guaranteed, but the system instead relies on rigorous oversight of banks and other deposit-taking institutions.
So, um, what's with the link to the article bouncing off pheedo.com? I'd assume the submitter was trying to make a few bucks from referrals, but no-one is attributed. (Maybe that means ScuttleMonkey is?)
A lot of people are questioning the results claimed by Rasterman; however try downloading the thing and running it for yourself. I see the same trend that Rasterman claims when I do it.
The benchmark consists of rendering an alphablended bitmap to the screen repeatedly using Render extension (on- and off-screen) and imlib2. Various scaling modes are also tried.
When there's no scaling involved, the hardware Render extension wins; it's over twice as fast. That's only the first round of tests though. The rest of the rounds all involve scaling (half- and double-size, various antialiasing modes). For these, imlib2 walks all over the Render extension; we're talking three and a half minutes versus 6 seconds in one of the rounds; the rest are similar.
I'm not posting the exact figures since the benchmark isn't scientific and worrying about exact numbers isn't the point; the trend is undeniable. Things like agpgart versus nVidia's internal AGP driver should not account for the wide gap.
Given that at least one of the rounds in the benchmark shows the Render extension winning, I'm going to take a stab at explaining the results by suggesting that the hardware is probably performing the scaling operations each and every time, while imlib2 caches the results (or something). The results seem to suggest that scaling the thing once and then reverting to non-scaling blitting would improve at least some of the rounds; this is too easy, however, since while it helps the application that knows it's going to repeatedly blit the same scaled bitmap, not all applications know this a priori.
He also wasn't very good. He sang some song in the pre-domino entertainment. And it sucked. Enough for me to walk around the room to find the remote and change the channel.
Last year they had Kylie do it. I think she was bemused at the time... the look on her face said that she'd never seen anything like this in her life, but she wasn't yet sure if this was a good or a bad thing.
In The Netherlands, it was broadcast live on one of the 'standard' cable channels (SBS-6).
Ok, so here we pay for the cable but so does everyone. It's almost like a BBC 'subscription' in the UK.:)
My only gripe was that I was banned from watching it. I watched it last year (when they failed to make the record.. DOH) but my girlfriend (Dutch) has had to endure it every year since she was a kid.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I think the medical safety of vaccines is far from clear.
There is overwhelming evidence that vaccines improve public health. Given that science can only ever disprove a theory, the "far from clear" phrasing tends to be convenient if you don't want to believe something. It's a phrase that can be applied to just about any scientific theory, regardless of how successful it is.
Last year, a friend of mine's kid got a series of vaccines, and that night went into seizures and nearly died. The hospital treated it as a mysterious brain problem unrelated to the vaccines.
Maybe it was a brain problem unrelated to the vaccines.
(While I have a newborn myself and can imagine the stress such a situation would cause, your story is an example of availability bias.)
Luckily, BBC News is run on the British TV Licence and can't - by power of it's charter - put adverts or start charging for anything.
As the article says. SSL does both. FF3 in particular makes the first completely unusable for no good reason. The web would unquestionably be more secure if all http servers switched to using self-signed SSL certificates in place of unencrypted connections.
And this is where you're wrong. There's no point to encryption, unless you know who you're talking to.
Anyone sophisticated enough to sniff your traffic can also hijack it without much trouble. If they can hijack it, then you don't know if you're talking to the intended recipient or a hijacker (who in turn is talking to the intended recipient). This is the definition of a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.
The very design of SSL and its use of certificates with a chain-of-trust assumes this. Without this assumption, Diffie-Hellman key-exchange is simpler and sufficient. None of the RSA/DSA stuff with certificates would be necessary.
If I understand multicast (in particular IGMP) correctly, it is one of the few IP-related protocols where NAT is irrelevant.
The real problem is that multicast requires routers to support it, and the vast majority don't. This includes both your ISP and most consumer modem/router devices. The main reason for this these days is due to what economists call network-effects. No pun intended.
Actually, a bit of googling reveals that the Kettle thing is called "pleading the alternative". It seems to often be allowed, but differs from what the RIAA/SafeNet are doing.
This article discusses the distinction. In particular, paragraphs 2 and 3 provide a good summary:
"Judicial estoppel is an equitable doctrine that protects the integrity of the judicial process. Cummings v. Bahr, 295 N.J. Super. 374, 387 (App. Div. 1996). It "preclud[es] a party from asserting a position in a case that contradicts or is inconsistent with a position previously asserted by the party in the case or a related legal proceeding." Tamburelli Prop. Ass'n v. Borough of Cresskill, 308 N.J. Super. 326, 335 (App. Div. 1998) (citation omitted).
Judicial estoppel does not prevent litigants from pleading alternative positions; rather, it "is designed to prevent litigants from playing fast and loose with the courts." Newell v. Hudson, 376 N.J. Super. 29, 38 (App. Div. 2005) (citation omitted). "[A] party must successfully assert a position in order to be estopped from asserting a contrary position in future proceedings." Cummings, supra, 295 N.J. Super. at 386. Prior success does not necessarily mean that the party benefited from the position taken, but only that a court allowed them to maintain that position and relied on it to make a judicial determination. Id. at 387.
IANAL, but what the RIAA/SafeNet are arguing would appear (to me, a layman) to come under the umbrella of estoppel. But then again, so would the pleadings in the precedent (Greer v Kettle?) that you cite.
My understanding of estoppel is that it prevents (estops) a party from taking one position and then taking a contradictory one later on to disadvantage someone. (Maybe the time-line is important, and the difference between the situations? Maybe the earlier position must have been known, and thus create an expectation?)
Is anyone able to shed any light on this?
I get the feeling that the latter is normally the main goal here, but the former is required for that to be tenable.
Specifically in the UK, according to Wikipedia's entry on the Data Protection Act:
The Data Protection Act creates rights for those who have their data stored, and responsibilities for those who store or collect personal data.The person who has their data processed has the right to
So they may have tried to use the 'subject access' thing. Wikipedia also mentions that costs cannot exceed £10.
Weird...
- Andrew
A lot of people are questioning the results claimed by Rasterman; however try downloading the thing and running it for yourself. I see the same trend that Rasterman claims when I do it.
My system: Athlon 800, nVidia 2-GTS.
Drivers: nVidia driver, 1.0.4363 (Gentoo)
Kernel: 2.4.20-r6 (Gentoo)
X11: XFree86 4.3.0
I've checked and:
The benchmark consists of rendering an alphablended bitmap to the screen repeatedly using Render extension (on- and off-screen) and imlib2. Various scaling modes are also tried.
When there's no scaling involved, the hardware Render extension wins; it's over twice as fast. That's only the first round of tests though. The rest of the rounds all involve scaling (half- and double-size, various antialiasing modes). For these, imlib2 walks all over the Render extension; we're talking three and a half minutes versus 6 seconds in one of the rounds; the rest are similar.
I'm not posting the exact figures since the benchmark isn't scientific and worrying about exact numbers isn't the point; the trend is undeniable. Things like agpgart versus nVidia's internal AGP driver should not account for the wide gap.
Given that at least one of the rounds in the benchmark shows the Render extension winning, I'm going to take a stab at explaining the results by suggesting that the hardware is probably performing the scaling operations each and every time, while imlib2 caches the results (or something). The results seem to suggest that scaling the thing once and then reverting to non-scaling blitting would improve at least some of the rounds; this is too easy, however, since while it helps the application that knows it's going to repeatedly blit the same scaled bitmap, not all applications know this a priori.
- Andrew
That sounds very close to what we would call a smoothie (except you added cream instead of yoghurt).
- Andrew
Last year they had Kylie do it. I think she was bemused at the time... the look on her face said that she'd never seen anything like this in her life, but she wasn't yet sure if this was a good or a bad thing.
In The Netherlands, it was broadcast live on one of the 'standard' cable channels (SBS-6).
:)
Ok, so here we pay for the cable but so does everyone. It's almost like a BBC 'subscription' in the UK.
My only gripe was that I was banned from watching it. I watched it last year (when they failed to make the record.. DOH) but my girlfriend (Dutch) has had to endure it every year since she was a kid.