We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense. People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job. If money is spent to help increase someone's earning potential, it makes sense for that person to pay at least some of it back.
Prisons, however, decrease people's earning potential. You can't work or get job experience while in prison. (You might be able to take college courses in some prisons, but a criminal record may still make it difficult to be employed in a high income job.) Since people aren't employed while behind bars, it would be unreasonable to expect them to pay rent. This means the government has to foot the bill. So it actually makes sense that the government spends more on prisons than education. It would, in fact, be quite strange if it were the other way around.
Righthaven still has the right to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court can then decide whether or not to hear the appeal. If they choose not to, then it's over for Righthaven.
More to the point of challenging forensics is the lack of any rifling leaving marks on a slug to match it to its source weapon.
I imagine that as printable gun technology improves, 3-D printed guns will have rifling. Otherwise you'd have to shoot someone at extremely close range to do any real damage. Rifling on virtually any gun used for defense or combat is essential in order for bullets to maintain their speed and trajectory for all but the closest range shots.
I doubt the melting-down of a weapon would befuddle investigators any more than when traditional guns are thrown into rivers, lakes, and oceans. When it's gone, it's gone, be it plastic or steel.
But guns aren't cheap. People will be reluctant to dispose of guns that way unless they were involved in an unusually "hot" situation. And things thrown in the river have a way of turning up. A melted plastic gun could simply be reprinted as a dildo.
Level of entry - the 3D printed version is likely easier to make (requiring less skill in some areas)
That's one reason. Another is that plastic guns could pass through metal detectors. And 3-D printed objects can be melted down and the plastic re-used for other things. I.e. disposable guns. Disposable guns would be a nightmare for forensic investigators.
They will likely also ask if your algorithm is patented, and if not, what is going to stop someone else from using your idea.
Even if it gets patented, it's probably not going to stop anyone from using his idea. Math sort of works for everyone the same way.
It's not going to stop open source and homebrew people from using it, but that's not where the money is to be made anyway. It's licenses sold to commercial software companies like Adobe, or hardware companies like Apple, where the money will be made. In fact, if the algorithms are as good as you claim, I wouldn't be surprised if a large company offered to buy the entire patent portfolio outright.
You know malware is effective when you see retards posting things like this. Absolutely nothing wrong with the real Firefox and yet he wants to avoid using it for no good reason.
Actually, there's a very good reason. As you say, there's nothing wrong with the REAL Firefox, but there's a piece of Malware disguising itself as Firefox. How can you be sure you have the real one? Since this product is in use by governments, they probably have the ability to redirect connections to mozzila.org to their own server. So how can you be sure you're using the real Firefox? (Actually, that is a serious questions. As a "Firefox" user, I'd be interested to know if there's a utility I can run that will let me know if my Firefox is legit or not.)
Inertial mass and gravitational mass are observed - for normal matter - to be exactly equivalent. There's no actual reason they should be though, since they're the product of very different interactions
Well, if you believe General Relativity, they darn well better be equivalent. In fact, Einstein took the Equivalence Principle as one if his starting points when developing GR. If the Equivalence Principle fails (which it must if anti-matter falls up), then they will have disproven Einstein's theory, which would be very big news, indeed.
Why do they need a court order anyway? I thought the NSA was tcpdumping (or flushing) the entire flow of data on the Internet into their multi-bazzillion dollar datacenter. This is what happens when peoples jobs depend on the lawmaking industry.
Problem is, companies like Facebook and Google (the two mentioned in the summary) have been migrating to SSL over that past few years. https is the default means for connecting to Facebook now, and it has been an option for Google now for a couple of years. The more people use SSL, the less these "tcpdumps" are effective. This is why the feds need to go to Google or Facebook to get this information. Interesting that Skype wasn't mentioned.
We know this isn't true. Look at the music industry, now look at your post, now look back at the music industry.
Is it dead? No. It's still a multi-billion dollar industry. But I can legally buy any song I want without drm. Hasn't killed them.
Exactly. Keep in mind that CDs (Compact Discs) have never had DRM (except for a few abortive attempts) and DVDs have DRM that is trivially broken (and Blu-Rays have DRM that is not so trivially broken) and the music and movie industries are doing just fine.
Actually the GP (AC) is absolutely right, and GGP (hajus) has it wrong.
CP violation in a strong decay would be really big news. Strong decays aren't even believed to exhibit P or C violation separately. What this experiment observed was CP violation in decays of the B^0_s (B superscript 0 subscript s) meson, a weakly decaying particle. (This meson consists of a bottom quark together with an anti-strange quark). This is the fourth particle for which CP violation has been observed, the first seen by Fitch and Cronin in decays of the neutral K meson. This is exciting news, but it has nothing at all to do with QCD.
While I commend this action, I am afraid that share holders may be upset with twitter taking a $50 million hit for their morals.
$50 million is nothing compared to the revenue they may lose if people no longer trust it as a place where they can post things without repercussions from foreign powers. (Although, to be honest, I don't really know what their revenues are or where they come from.)
Is an internet company responsible to the country that it operates from, or is it responsible to every country that they can be reached from?
Wouldn't that depend on if the country they are operating from is willing/able to comply with the country that was offended?
I think in the past, US courts have been reluctant to enforce foreign judgments against US companies where such judgments would offend the First Amendment, so I think it would depend more on whether or not Twitter has a business presence in France or makes significant revenue from French sources. Since Twitter doesn't have ads, they may be okay.
How long until posting anonymously on sites like Slashdot is forbidden? (I can see an upside to this)
Some of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot have been posted by Anonymous Cowards, and I've seen some absolute drivel posted by people with usernames, so what's your point?
The problem is just that programming a Raspberry Pi is very easy, while programming a printer is pretty hard.
But all it takes is one very smart programmer to do that programming, then the exploit code can be distributed or sold to whoever wants to launch an attack.
As Mr. Schneier points out, this doesn't scale. There is no way you could do a US Presidential election this way.
Actually, that is close to how the US Presidential election really does work. The President isn't elected by the people, but rather by the Electoral College, a group more similar in size to the College of Cardinals than to the entire US population. They have very well defined rules as to how to vote, just as the papal conclave does. And so far, it seems to have worked pretty well. Many have proposed abandoning the electoral college system, but this article provides some good reasons why it should be retained.
The issue of a warrant is irrelevant. If my cell phone is encrypted, they can search it all they want, warrant or no warrant, and they won't get anything because it's all encrypted.
Presumably, if a warrant were presented, you'd be compelled to provide the password, or unlock the phone yourself. Otherwise the ruling would make no sense.
I have privacy. If I used Facebook, they wouldn't know my real name, ip, or even what browser I really use. Well, I'm not an idiot, so I don't use Facebook, but still.
Wrong! You THINK they wouldn't know your real name, ip, etc. I think that was the main point OP was trying to make.
Personally I don't see why it shouldn't, if you're going to make use of a service, the person offering it should be allowed to know who it is they're offering the service to. So long as it's made clear what's being done with the information at hand there doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason to disallow it.
I agree. Especially when it's a completely FREE service! No one is forcing anyone to be on Facebook. I'm not on Facebook and I don't wish I was.
GPS signals are poor in urban environments. But I suppose you'd only need to see one satellite.
You'd still need at least 3 satellites, but unlike for navigation, you don't need anything like a continuous signal. If the watch sets itself once or twice a day, that should be good enough for most purposes, as long as it has a quartz timepiece like a conventional watch. In fact, if the watch were designed cleverly, it could calibrate for the accuracy of the quartz crystal by comparing multiple GPS readings at different times and then it should keep very good time even if it set only once or twice a week.
GPS would probably be a more practical way to set the time on a wristwatch than NTP. NTP requires an Internet connection which, in areas with no wifi would have to be part of a data plan that you pay for. GPS signals are free.
by using a handle (pseudonym) and never your real name.
It's a lot easier to connect the dots than you might think...
Yep. Sometimes it's something as simple as an IP address, cookie, or Flash cookie that will do it. Or something more subtle, like unique web browser signatures (eg. the collection of fonts installed on your system is reported by some browsers and and can serve as a unique fingerprint.). And keep in mind, as far as I know there are no privacy laws that prevent an ISP from reporting the real name of a subscriber given their IP address, and many give that information out to police without warrants.
I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but I have to shake my head when I read a Professor, presumably with a Ph.D. who is teaching in an institute of higher learning say the following: "What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any." If a university professor doesn't understand the difference between singular and plural verbs, the English language is pretty much doomed.
We want free, unfettered, networking ability. The internets dieing a slow death of a thousand DMCA request paper cuts. Give me a free alternative any day.
What makes you think the DMCA wouldn't apply to your alternate "internet" as well? If you read the language of the DMCA, or other copyright laws which pertain to sharing of files on a network, you won't see the term "Internet" anywhere. The laws are all crafted generically, referring to networks and the like, but no specific reference to THE Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
The only downside: the food is not very good. And the prison uniforms are sooo not fashionable.
Yeah, but the food is a REAL downside. A deal breaker for me, in fact.
I read somewhere...
We spend more per capita on prisons than we do on school. Something it really messed up with our priorities.
I hear this statistic a lot as some kind of indictment of our education system, but if you think about it, it makes sense. People are expected to pay for or at least contribute to their (post-secondary) education because the purpose of that education is to benefit them, at least in the sense of given them a better chance at a higher paying job. If money is spent to help increase someone's earning potential, it makes sense for that person to pay at least some of it back.
Prisons, however, decrease people's earning potential. You can't work or get job experience while in prison. (You might be able to take college courses in some prisons, but a criminal record may still make it difficult to be employed in a high income job.) Since people aren't employed while behind bars, it would be unreasonable to expect them to pay rent. This means the government has to foot the bill. So it actually makes sense that the government spends more on prisons than education. It would, in fact, be quite strange if it were the other way around.
Righthaven still has the right to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court can then decide whether or not to hear the appeal. If they choose not to, then it's over for Righthaven.
More to the point of challenging forensics is the lack of any rifling leaving marks on a slug to match it to its source weapon.
I imagine that as printable gun technology improves, 3-D printed guns will have rifling. Otherwise you'd have to shoot someone at extremely close range to do any real damage. Rifling on virtually any gun used for defense or combat is essential in order for bullets to maintain their speed and trajectory for all but the closest range shots.
I doubt the melting-down of a weapon would befuddle investigators any more than when traditional guns are thrown into rivers, lakes, and oceans. When it's gone, it's gone, be it plastic or steel.
But guns aren't cheap. People will be reluctant to dispose of guns that way unless they were involved in an unusually "hot" situation. And things thrown in the river have a way of turning up. A melted plastic gun could simply be reprinted as a dildo.
Level of entry - the 3D printed version is likely easier to make (requiring less skill in some areas)
That's one reason. Another is that plastic guns could pass through metal detectors. And 3-D printed objects can be melted down and the plastic re-used for other things. I.e. disposable guns. Disposable guns would be a nightmare for forensic investigators.
We didn't capture anything that wasn't ordered by a court order, and even then, only the bare minumum to meet the court order.
You didn't need to capture anything. According to him, the government was doing it for you. (Or rather, for them.)
They will likely also ask if your algorithm is patented, and if not, what is going to stop someone else from using your idea.
Even if it gets patented, it's probably not going to stop anyone from using his idea. Math sort of works for everyone the same way.
It's not going to stop open source and homebrew people from using it, but that's not where the money is to be made anyway. It's licenses sold to commercial software companies like Adobe, or hardware companies like Apple, where the money will be made. In fact, if the algorithms are as good as you claim, I wouldn't be surprised if a large company offered to buy the entire patent portfolio outright.
You know malware is effective when you see retards posting things like this. Absolutely nothing wrong with the real Firefox and yet he wants to avoid using it for no good reason.
Actually, there's a very good reason. As you say, there's nothing wrong with the REAL Firefox, but there's a piece of Malware disguising itself as Firefox. How can you be sure you have the real one? Since this product is in use by governments, they probably have the ability to redirect connections to mozzila.org to their own server. So how can you be sure you're using the real Firefox? (Actually, that is a serious questions. As a "Firefox" user, I'd be interested to know if there's a utility I can run that will let me know if my Firefox is legit or not.)
Inertial mass and gravitational mass are observed - for normal matter - to be exactly equivalent. There's no actual reason they should be though, since they're the product of very different interactions
Well, if you believe General Relativity, they darn well better be equivalent. In fact, Einstein took the Equivalence Principle as one if his starting points when developing GR. If the Equivalence Principle fails (which it must if anti-matter falls up), then they will have disproven Einstein's theory, which would be very big news, indeed.
Why do they need a court order anyway? I thought the NSA was tcpdumping (or flushing) the entire flow of data on the Internet into their multi-bazzillion dollar datacenter. This is what happens when peoples jobs depend on the lawmaking industry.
Problem is, companies like Facebook and Google (the two mentioned in the summary) have been migrating to SSL over that past few years. https is the default means for connecting to Facebook now, and it has been an option for Google now for a couple of years. The more people use SSL, the less these "tcpdumps" are effective. This is why the feds need to go to Google or Facebook to get this information. Interesting that Skype wasn't mentioned.
No DRM means no income for the artist.
We know this isn't true. Look at the music industry, now look at your post, now look back at the music industry.
Is it dead? No. It's still a multi-billion dollar industry. But I can legally buy any song I want without drm. Hasn't killed them.
Exactly. Keep in mind that CDs (Compact Discs) have never had DRM (except for a few abortive attempts) and DVDs have DRM that is trivially broken (and Blu-Rays have DRM that is not so trivially broken) and the music and movie industries are doing just fine.
Actually the GP (AC) is absolutely right, and GGP (hajus) has it wrong. CP violation in a strong decay would be really big news. Strong decays aren't even believed to exhibit P or C violation separately. What this experiment observed was CP violation in decays of the B^0_s (B superscript 0 subscript s) meson, a weakly decaying particle. (This meson consists of a bottom quark together with an anti-strange quark). This is the fourth particle for which CP violation has been observed, the first seen by Fitch and Cronin in decays of the neutral K meson. This is exciting news, but it has nothing at all to do with QCD.
While I commend this action, I am afraid that share holders may be upset with twitter taking a $50 million hit for their morals.
$50 million is nothing compared to the revenue they may lose if people no longer trust it as a place where they can post things without repercussions from foreign powers. (Although, to be honest, I don't really know what their revenues are or where they come from.)
Is an internet company responsible to the country that it operates from, or is it responsible to every country that they can be reached from?
Wouldn't that depend on if the country they are operating from is willing/able to comply with the country that was offended?
I think in the past, US courts have been reluctant to enforce foreign judgments against US companies where such judgments would offend the First Amendment, so I think it would depend more on whether or not Twitter has a business presence in France or makes significant revenue from French sources. Since Twitter doesn't have ads, they may be okay.
How long until posting anonymously on sites like Slashdot is forbidden? (I can see an upside to this)
Some of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot have been posted by Anonymous Cowards, and I've seen some absolute drivel posted by people with usernames, so what's your point?
The problem is just that programming a Raspberry Pi is very easy, while programming a printer is pretty hard.
But all it takes is one very smart programmer to do that programming, then the exploit code can be distributed or sold to whoever wants to launch an attack.
As Mr. Schneier points out, this doesn't scale. There is no way you could do a US Presidential election this way.
Actually, that is close to how the US Presidential election really does work. The President isn't elected by the people, but rather by the Electoral College, a group more similar in size to the College of Cardinals than to the entire US population. They have very well defined rules as to how to vote, just as the papal conclave does. And so far, it seems to have worked pretty well. Many have proposed abandoning the electoral college system, but this article provides some good reasons why it should be retained.
The issue of a warrant is irrelevant. If my cell phone is encrypted, they can search it all they want, warrant or no warrant, and they won't get anything because it's all encrypted.
Presumably, if a warrant were presented, you'd be compelled to provide the password, or unlock the phone yourself. Otherwise the ruling would make no sense.
I have privacy. If I used Facebook, they wouldn't know my real name, ip, or even what browser I really use. Well, I'm not an idiot, so I don't use Facebook, but still.
Wrong! You THINK they wouldn't know your real name, ip, etc. I think that was the main point OP was trying to make.
Personally I don't see why it shouldn't, if you're going to make use of a service, the person offering it should be allowed to know who it is they're offering the service to. So long as it's made clear what's being done with the information at hand there doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason to disallow it.
I agree. Especially when it's a completely FREE service! No one is forcing anyone to be on Facebook. I'm not on Facebook and I don't wish I was.
GPS signals are poor in urban environments. But I suppose you'd only need to see one satellite.
You'd still need at least 3 satellites, but unlike for navigation, you don't need anything like a continuous signal. If the watch sets itself once or twice a day, that should be good enough for most purposes, as long as it has a quartz timepiece like a conventional watch. In fact, if the watch were designed cleverly, it could calibrate for the accuracy of the quartz crystal by comparing multiple GPS readings at different times and then it should keep very good time even if it set only once or twice a week.
GPS would probably be a more practical way to set the time on a wristwatch than NTP. NTP requires an Internet connection which, in areas with no wifi would have to be part of a data plan that you pay for. GPS signals are free.
by using a handle (pseudonym) and never your real name.
It's a lot easier to connect the dots than you might think...
Yep. Sometimes it's something as simple as an IP address, cookie, or Flash cookie that will do it. Or something more subtle, like unique web browser signatures (eg. the collection of fonts installed on your system is reported by some browsers and and can serve as a unique fingerprint.). And keep in mind, as far as I know there are no privacy laws that prevent an ISP from reporting the real name of a subscriber given their IP address, and many give that information out to police without warrants.
I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but I have to shake my head when I read a Professor, presumably with a Ph.D. who is teaching in an institute of higher learning say the following: "What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any." If a university professor doesn't understand the difference between singular and plural verbs, the English language is pretty much doomed.
We want free, unfettered, networking ability. The internets dieing a slow death of a thousand DMCA request paper cuts. Give me a free alternative any day.
What makes you think the DMCA wouldn't apply to your alternate "internet" as well? If you read the language of the DMCA, or other copyright laws which pertain to sharing of files on a network, you won't see the term "Internet" anywhere. The laws are all crafted generically, referring to networks and the like, but no specific reference to THE Internet.