DNA fingerprints are not as random as many think. The markers used were not designed for a nation wide database situation. Hence collisions could be a big problem. That is two people with the same fingerprint (at least at the very small parts of DNA we look at) can in fact be very likely with a database this size.
I'm not saying he is innocent, but i don't think we should jump to the conclusion that he is guilty either.
Actually, the familial DNA was used only to zero in on a suspect. Once they had a suspect, they tested his DNA (that's where the pizza came in) and found an exact match. That test was much more rigorous than simply sifting through a large database: they were comparing his DNA to that found at the crime scene, so there were only two sets of DNA involved in that test.
Yes, in exactly the same way that people who buy heavy mining equipment and land in mineral rich areas are disproportionately wealthy. Supercomputers don't just magically appear, and nobody gets them on accident. They can invest in supercomputers and "mine" virtual currency and hope that the payoff is enough to justify buying the supercomputer.
But then supercomputers would be used primarily to generate currency rather than do research. This scheme would then artificially raise the cost of computations to the point where many scientists wouldn't be able to do their research.
My computer is running SP3 as it was upgraded as part of the update process, but my installation DVD is still SP2. If I need to re-install Windows, can I still upgrade back to SP3 or will I be stuck with an unpatched SP2 forever?
So this system requires CPUs to burn scarce, real electricity in order to generate virtual electronic tokens whose only purpose is to simulate the scarcity of rare metals, so that we can continue to use the old 'exchange value' economic model in the realm of information where by definition, it does not apply.
Not to mention that Moore's Law would cause runaway inflation. And wouldn't people with access to supercomputers (University profs and students) become disproportionately wealthy?
Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
Good heavens, why was this modded Insightful? I think the poster was going for Funny. Anyhow, a quick Wikipedia search reveals that Richard Wagner lived from 1813-1883, making him a 19th century composer.
Read that sentence again. They have an ethical responsibility to ensure that graduates have the skills/knowledge that the degree implies.
I read it the first time and I still disagree. If a student chooses to waste their time and money by cheating their way through school, that's their problem, not the university's.
Schools also have an ethical responsibility to ensure that graduates actually have the skills/knowledge that the degree implies.
Wrong. They have an ethical obligation to provide the students (who are their paying customers) with the opportunity to learn as best as they can provide. The student has to meet them halfway. If a student wants to squander their learning opportunity by cheating their way through, that's their problem. This is university, not grade school.
Is the system perfect? No. Because it was never intended to be. A proxy or an https tunnel or any number of other things will subvert it. The effect is more straight-forward: it removes the ``oh, I stumbled over it accidentally'' defence, and prevents pressure to impose filtering for anything other than illegality.
Does anyone else besides me think that the laws are pretty f***ed up when you need a "I stumbled on it accidently" defense?
I second that. I used their sticks with both my Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. I seem to have lost both of them, unfortunately. They'd be ideal for retro gaming with MAME on my PC.
Sorry for shooting for the obvious, but the old trope about correlation and causation seems exactly in order here.
You make an excellent point. If the company that makes the World Cup trophies has a serious cat infestation, then winners will be more likely to be exposed to the parasite than losers.
The problem rather is that servers for what are effectively international TLDs are on US soil (and don't have any special arrangements for exterritoriality, the way e.g. foreign embassies do).
This is a problem how? What country should they be in?
Grandma should be allowed put a different name on the ticket than the one on her credit card. All the grandchild needs is some ID with a matching name on it. Problem solved.
Can I patent this process please?
Exactly. Just like you can do with airline tickets. My mother runs a literary festival and buys plane tickets for authors all the time. No problems.
IAAL. When SCOTUS takes a patent case, they're like a bull in a china shop. They're not engineers or patent lawyers, so they undo a lot of stuff that has been carefully worked out by the Patent Office and special patent courts.
Just because that "stuff" has been carefully worked out by the Patent Office and Patent courts doesn't mean the results are in the best interests of the population as a whole. Remember, that the Patent Office's "customers" are the people applying for patents, but patent law should strike a balance between those interests and the rest of the population (including others who want to innovate). Some patent protection is necessary to promote potentially costly research and development, but too much can stifle innovation.
I also disagree with your assessment of SCOTUS's role in this. The lower courts had decided Bilski in a more radical way, one which would have, in effect, eliminated software patents. While SCOTUS upheld the result in Bilski, it did so in a much more careful way, leaving the door still open on software patents. (I actually wish SCOTUS had upheld the reasoning of the lower courts, as I think on balance, software patents are not a good thing.)
You mention you want to include some of Maxwell's equations. In that case, you need to decide on their form. There is the elementary vector calculus form, in which there are four Maxwell equations. The cooler and more elite might use tensor or differential form notation, in which there are only two equations. But the coolest people use the Clifford algebra or biquaternion formulation in which all of Maxwell's equations are contained in one simple equation! It has the advantage of being compact (a good thing in a tattoo), succinct, and only understandable by the elite.
The owner is forbidden to know or control the key locking and controlling his devices.
Do you have a credit card? One of the newer ones with a chip inside? If so, you own a device with private keys locked inside which you don't have access to. This is just an extension of that idea to identity management on a computer. It's not nearly as scary as you make it out to be.
If someone's choking to death, only an asshole would stand in the way of trained paramedics and claim that they have just as much right to stand there as the paramedic.
That analogy would perfectly explain why police and other rescue workers should have more right to chase tornadoes than the average citizen, but it does nothing to explain why scientists should have special rights to use the roads. If someone is choking to death, should you stand out of the way so a scientist studying the science of choking can have a closer look?
While all those points may be valid, don't forget that we're talking about civil law here, not criminal. The standard is preponderance of the evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
So when an IP shows up as having downloaded a file, and the ISP provides the logs which map the IP address to a person, the question before the jury isn't "Does that prove conclusively that that person downloaded a file?" but rather "Given the evidence, is it more likely than not that they did?". The plaintiffs really only have to prove there's a 51% chance you downloaded the file. It's not a very high burden.
"Parents can pay for the computers upfront or lease them from the district, with the option to buy after three years. The payments should work out to about $20 to $25 per month, Hayes said. The cost also includes free tech support.
"We realize for some families that will be a stretch," he said. In those cases, the district will provide financial assistance.
Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said."
---
IMO, $20-25/mo is a fair plan. That should be well within the finances of most families, and as they noted, they will provide financial assistance.
That said, using a unified platform is not a bad idea, but why make students buy heavily marked up hardware? Why not Netbooks with Linux?
Why is a unified platform necessary at all? My objection to this whole plan is that they require MacBooks. Yes, they may be offering them to families at a reasonable price, but what about parents who just purchased their kid a Windows or Linux laptop? All three platforms run office suites with enough compatibility that students can do essays, spreadsheets with charts, and PowerPoint-like presentations. And all three support all the major programming languages, so that students can learn comp sci, which should probably be taught using a platform neutral language like Java or Ruby anyway. And most learning management systems are web based and should be accessible to Windows, Linux, or MacOS. So my question is: why the need to standardize on any one platform at all? Why should kids have to stay after school to finish an assignment because their parents don't want or can't afford to buy a Mac, when Word for Windows, or OpenOffice for Linux will do just as well for 99% of the work? If I were a parent, I'd be complaining very loudly about this.
it is due to sql... if the databases and website frameworks forced a different query language that forced variable parametrization, there wouldn't be any injection risk.
Mod parent up. According to the GP "it is wrong to picture this as a lack or shortcoming of sql. sql is doing what query it is given to it. nothing else." That's precisely the problem! Most security vulnerabilities are the result of software doing exactly what it is told to do!
I have an impairment called "empathy". That video made me sad, because I could imagine the position that kid was in.
Sucks to be me, I guess.
How long have you been on the Internet? I see people doing far, far more embarrassing and stranger things on YouTube and Chatroulette all the time. People with as thin a skin as the Star Wars kid shouldn't be making embarrassing videos in the first place. Sorry if I sound cold, but just browse YouTube for about five minutes if you don't believe me.
And please don't add that the comparison is invalid because people post their YouTube videos voluntarily. Many such videos feature parties with people doing silly things in the background all the time. I'm sure they didn't all give their consent to have the video posted!
What's the age of [whateveritscalled] in China? i.e. Why do over 16/18 (?) year olds need to "escape"? Pressure from the government, or parents, or honour, or something else?
There are adults in rehab facilities in America. Not for Internet addiction, but drugs, alcohol, sex, and other things. In many cases, it's an involuntary commitment.
Slashdot Mirror
DNA fingerprints are not as random as many think. The markers used were not designed for a nation wide database situation. Hence collisions could be a big problem. That is two people with the same fingerprint (at least at the very small parts of DNA we look at) can in fact be very likely with a database this size. I'm not saying he is innocent, but i don't think we should jump to the conclusion that he is guilty either.
Actually, the familial DNA was used only to zero in on a suspect. Once they had a suspect, they tested his DNA (that's where the pizza came in) and found an exact match. That test was much more rigorous than simply sifting through a large database: they were comparing his DNA to that found at the crime scene, so there were only two sets of DNA involved in that test.
Yes, in exactly the same way that people who buy heavy mining equipment and land in mineral rich areas are disproportionately wealthy. Supercomputers don't just magically appear, and nobody gets them on accident. They can invest in supercomputers and "mine" virtual currency and hope that the payoff is enough to justify buying the supercomputer.
But then supercomputers would be used primarily to generate currency rather than do research. This scheme would then artificially raise the cost of computations to the point where many scientists wouldn't be able to do their research.
My computer is running SP3 as it was upgraded as part of the update process, but my installation DVD is still SP2. If I need to re-install Windows, can I still upgrade back to SP3 or will I be stuck with an unpatched SP2 forever?
So this system requires CPUs to burn scarce, real electricity in order to generate virtual electronic tokens whose only purpose is to simulate the scarcity of rare metals, so that we can continue to use the old 'exchange value' economic model in the realm of information where by definition, it does not apply.
Not to mention that Moore's Law would cause runaway inflation. And wouldn't people with access to supercomputers (University profs and students) become disproportionately wealthy?
Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
Good heavens, why was this modded Insightful? I think the poster was going for Funny. Anyhow, a quick Wikipedia search reveals that Richard Wagner lived from 1813-1883, making him a 19th century composer.
Read that sentence again. They have an ethical responsibility to ensure that graduates have the skills/knowledge that the degree implies.
I read it the first time and I still disagree. If a student chooses to waste their time and money by cheating their way through school, that's their problem, not the university's.
Schools also have an ethical responsibility to ensure that graduates actually have the skills/knowledge that the degree implies.
Wrong. They have an ethical obligation to provide the students (who are their paying customers) with the opportunity to learn as best as they can provide. The student has to meet them halfway. If a student wants to squander their learning opportunity by cheating their way through, that's their problem. This is university, not grade school.
Is the system perfect? No. Because it was never intended to be. A proxy or an https tunnel or any number of other things will subvert it. The effect is more straight-forward: it removes the ``oh, I stumbled over it accidentally'' defence, and prevents pressure to impose filtering for anything other than illegality.
Does anyone else besides me think that the laws are pretty f***ed up when you need a "I stumbled on it accidently" defense?
I second that. I used their sticks with both my Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. I seem to have lost both of them, unfortunately. They'd be ideal for retro gaming with MAME on my PC.
And women with this parasite are supposedly more promiscuous.
Hmmm. Is this parasite available in pill form?
Sorry for shooting for the obvious, but the old trope about correlation and causation seems exactly in order here.
You make an excellent point. If the company that makes the World Cup trophies has a serious cat infestation, then winners will be more likely to be exposed to the parasite than losers.
The problem rather is that servers for what are effectively international TLDs are on US soil (and don't have any special arrangements for exterritoriality, the way e.g. foreign embassies do).
This is a problem how? What country should they be in?
Grandma should be allowed put a different name on the ticket than the one on her credit card. All the grandchild needs is some ID with a matching name on it. Problem solved.
Can I patent this process please?
Exactly. Just like you can do with airline tickets. My mother runs a literary festival and buys plane tickets for authors all the time. No problems.
IAAL. When SCOTUS takes a patent case, they're like a bull in a china shop. They're not engineers or patent lawyers, so they undo a lot of stuff that has been carefully worked out by the Patent Office and special patent courts.
Just because that "stuff" has been carefully worked out by the Patent Office and Patent courts doesn't mean the results are in the best interests of the population as a whole. Remember, that the Patent Office's "customers" are the people applying for patents, but patent law should strike a balance between those interests and the rest of the population (including others who want to innovate). Some patent protection is necessary to promote potentially costly research and development, but too much can stifle innovation.
I also disagree with your assessment of SCOTUS's role in this. The lower courts had decided Bilski in a more radical way, one which would have, in effect, eliminated software patents. While SCOTUS upheld the result in Bilski, it did so in a much more careful way, leaving the door still open on software patents. (I actually wish SCOTUS had upheld the reasoning of the lower courts, as I think on balance, software patents are not a good thing.)
You mention you want to include some of Maxwell's equations. In that case, you need to decide on their form. There is the elementary vector calculus form, in which there are four Maxwell equations. The cooler and more elite might use tensor or differential form notation, in which there are only two equations. But the coolest people use the Clifford algebra or biquaternion formulation in which all of Maxwell's equations are contained in one simple equation! It has the advantage of being compact (a good thing in a tattoo), succinct, and only understandable by the elite.
The owner is forbidden to know or control the key locking and controlling his devices.
Do you have a credit card? One of the newer ones with a chip inside? If so, you own a device with private keys locked inside which you don't have access to. This is just an extension of that idea to identity management on a computer. It's not nearly as scary as you make it out to be.
I'm in Windsor and I didn't feel a thing. I was in a car at the time though, so it's no surprise.
If someone's choking to death, only an asshole would stand in the way of trained paramedics and claim that they have just as much right to stand there as the paramedic.
That analogy would perfectly explain why police and other rescue workers should have more right to chase tornadoes than the average citizen, but it does nothing to explain why scientists should have special rights to use the roads. If someone is choking to death, should you stand out of the way so a scientist studying the science of choking can have a closer look?
While all those points may be valid, don't forget that we're talking about civil law here, not criminal. The standard is preponderance of the evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
So when an IP shows up as having downloaded a file, and the ISP provides the logs which map the IP address to a person, the question before the jury isn't "Does that prove conclusively that that person downloaded a file?" but rather "Given the evidence, is it more likely than not that they did?". The plaintiffs really only have to prove there's a 51% chance you downloaded the file. It's not a very high burden.
FTFA:
"Parents can pay for the computers upfront or lease them from the district, with the option to buy after three years. The payments should work out to about $20 to $25 per month, Hayes said. The cost also includes free tech support.
"We realize for some families that will be a stretch," he said. In those cases, the district will provide financial assistance.
Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said."
---
IMO, $20-25/mo is a fair plan. That should be well within the finances of most families, and as they noted, they will provide financial assistance.
That said, using a unified platform is not a bad idea, but why make students buy heavily marked up hardware? Why not Netbooks with Linux?
Why is a unified platform necessary at all? My objection to this whole plan is that they require MacBooks. Yes, they may be offering them to families at a reasonable price, but what about parents who just purchased their kid a Windows or Linux laptop? All three platforms run office suites with enough compatibility that students can do essays, spreadsheets with charts, and PowerPoint-like presentations. And all three support all the major programming languages, so that students can learn comp sci, which should probably be taught using a platform neutral language like Java or Ruby anyway. And most learning management systems are web based and should be accessible to Windows, Linux, or MacOS. So my question is: why the need to standardize on any one platform at all? Why should kids have to stay after school to finish an assignment because their parents don't want or can't afford to buy a Mac, when Word for Windows, or OpenOffice for Linux will do just as well for 99% of the work? If I were a parent, I'd be complaining very loudly about this.
it is due to sql... if the databases and website frameworks forced a different query language that forced variable parametrization, there wouldn't be any injection risk.
Mod parent up. According to the GP "it is wrong to picture this as a lack or shortcoming of sql. sql is doing what query it is given to it. nothing else." That's precisely the problem! Most security vulnerabilities are the result of software doing exactly what it is told to do!
I have an impairment called "empathy". That video made me sad, because I could imagine the position that kid was in.
Sucks to be me, I guess.
How long have you been on the Internet? I see people doing far, far more embarrassing and stranger things on YouTube and Chatroulette all the time. People with as thin a skin as the Star Wars kid shouldn't be making embarrassing videos in the first place. Sorry if I sound cold, but just browse YouTube for about five minutes if you don't believe me.
And please don't add that the comparison is invalid because people post their YouTube videos voluntarily. Many such videos feature parties with people doing silly things in the background all the time. I'm sure they didn't all give their consent to have the video posted!
What's the age of [whateveritscalled] in China? i.e. Why do over 16/18 (?) year olds need to "escape"? Pressure from the government, or parents, or honour, or something else?
There are adults in rehab facilities in America. Not for Internet addiction, but drugs, alcohol, sex, and other things. In many cases, it's an involuntary commitment.
What type of crimes to they believe happen (often) on Facebook?
Privacy violations!
How do you think police issued tickets before radar guns were invented?