No, in the same way watching a DVD disc that someone shoplifted is not the same as actually shoplifting the DVD in the first place.
The judgement seems to be along the lines of "the crack is so widely available, that it's not really even definable as an encryption system anymore". It's like if you leave your front door key under the mat (or in some other insanely obvious place) and then a buglar uses it to open the front door to your house and burgle it. Your insurance company won't normally pay out because effectively, you didn't really lock your door at all.
You obviously cannot think very hard then. Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture), finding lost patients (apparently a common problem, especially with mentally unstable patients), Student security, efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room), computer account security and log-on convenience.
There are probably many more, but they're the ones I've come up with in under a minute. They would also help in fire/emergency situations; just because a fire breaks out doesn't automatically mean all computer systems around the entire campus instantly stop working. Not that fire is a particular problem at any university I know of, but in the event of fire they could undoubtedly save lives.
Sure the technology could be abused, but privacy can easily be abused without such technology anyway. Respecting student/patient privacy is a policy issue, not a technology issue.
Jee's that makes it nice and convenient for Apple doesn't it, "It's all the big, bad music industry's fault, we don't want to have to charge you again for music you already bought on CD, honest"...yea right.
And don't you realise that the only reason Apple would like to offer DRM-free music is so they can use it as an excuse to increase prices and hence their profit margin. As always though, Steve Jobs will constantly blame the music industry for a situation which Apple profits from.
...not that Apple are really much better when it comes to the whole DRM issue. Not to mention the whole iTunes lock-in issue which I really don't understand how they are still getting past the competition regulators with. Particularly here in Europe where regulators are normally quite strict about that sort of thing (as Microsoft can vouch for!).
Mine's the Windows bug where bookmarks can occasionally be blanked and all lost for seemingly no reason. Various reportings of this bug have been ignored for years also.
I think I remember someone telling me once that during the initial start-up is the most dangerous time to plug in a PS/2 adapter. No idea if this is true or not, but it would make some sense.
Such ability statistics are only observed under certain conditions and this one isn't one of them. Also, positive discrimination and other such factors must also be taken into account. People don't ever want to enter a profession which they don't think their peers would consider suitable for their sociological group (can't remember what theory is called). In the same way you don't get many straight male flight attendants or mid-wives or many field ploughing aristocrats (maybe you do these days, I don't know).
University applications don't really mean much (especially over such a short timespan), graduation and employment figures are much more relevant although these too must be interpreted (e.g. a routine office task carried out by a modern point-and-click application may have - in decades past - required a fair amount of programming, thereby greatly confusing occupational statistics).
Most motherboards these days are pretty resilient to it, but it is still supposedly possible. The main risk is if the connector's pins bend and touch each other (and even then has to be certain ones) as you plug it in, this can cause a short circuit and can completely fry a motherboard (actually it would only fry a tiny 1 cent micro-controller but in today's throw-away-society that of course means the entire board is as good as bust). Never actually seen it happen in front of me, it always seems to be one of those "it happened to a friend of a friend" type stories.
"Men will take the dangerous, filthy, and more time-intensive jobs because of the extra pay associated with them"
No, they take those manual, high-death rate jobs (e.g. construction work, mining, oil rig work etc.) because they are traditionally "male" jobs. No-one thinks anything strange of a guy who embarks on a career as a construction worker, but for a woman, most people's first thought would be: "strange job for a woman".
The situation with woman in such jobs (as with in I.T.) is similar to that of the situation facing black people (sorry, African Americans or whatever) 50 years ago. Back then, they had certain professions which they were "meant" to work in and ones which they weren't "meant" to work in. Just as is the situation facing with woman now, a black person 50 (or so) years ago could officially be employed as say a banker, but I doubt you would have seen many because of the stigma attached. Today, thankfully, racial stereotyping of jobs has/is being pretty much eliminated. Sexual stereotyping however is still extremely common, particularly in countries where religious or cultural ideals support it (e.g. Japan and the USA, to name but a couple).
It is this that causes the current situation - like that facing black people 50 years ago, albeit with different jobs - where a woman "can" officially be a construction worker, but would have to put up with years of "psst, apparently she's a construction worker" stigma. Eventually, the sexual job stereotyping will evaporate as has/is occurring with racial job stereotyping. Making wide-sweeping generalizations about what jobs each sex supposedly wants, then backing them up with totally bullsh*t reasons, just reinforces the pointless stereotyping which is no more valid than the now (almost) extinct racial stereotyping.
It's like your typical parent company shareholder override situation:
The Smithsonian institute are funded by the government of the United States. Most of the current Congressmen / Senators / President which make up the government of the United States are funded by the big Oil companies.
The big Oil companies obviously don't want to see pictures of Climate Change or pictures of the national parks they are in the process of trashing and so get what they see as their subsidiary company to "make the changes".
I agree, but the various MMR Vaccine scare programs were far more sensationalist than the recent Panorama Wi-Fi one, they were almost bordering on criminal misrepresentation / fraud imho. They were presented more along the lines of "This child has Autism, he started developing symptoms in the months after receiving MMR and his mother - despite having absolutely no medical background or valid reason - blames MMR!". You show parents of babies a bunch of disabled teenagers and you can have them believing anything, regardless of the actual science and statistics.
I don't think the recent Panorama program on Wi-Fi will have quite the same negative effect because it focused more on the science rather than anecdotal cases. I think if it had presented the program as "All these children are disabled and they attended schools with Wi-Fi networks" then a similar effect to what occurred with MMR is more likely. I think it's mainly the "I don't want my young child turning out like that one" paranoia which sparks the irrational responses.
Panorama isn't a "news" program, it's an investigative reporting program, which is quite different.
Towards the end of the program in question, they did start to admit more and more that there is absolutely no evidence or even much likelihood of harm from Wi-Fi, which was good although it was maybe too little, too late. My (and I think many others') main issue with the program was their over-use of the scare word "radiation" in a way that implied every Wi-Fi router is a mini unshielded nuclear reactor.
But, I've seen many far worse "this common piece of technology is going to kill us all" programs on TV and was really expecting it to be far more "scare story" like than it actually was.
"certainly into a state where the mechanisms for some real Big Brother-esque monitoring are all in place and just awaiting the right kind of government"
I think the trick is not to have that "kind of government". Neither Hitler or Stalin had CCTV, National Register, spydrones or anything like that but they were still able to create an Orwellian state. It's not the technology that needs to be stopped - it has perfectly good uses (like catching the bastard who nicked my girlfriend's handbag a few months back) - it is those who would act maliciously with it who need to be stopped.
Right now in the U.K., if you got caught on a spydrone - or more realistically by a 'nosey' (get it) police officer - smoking a joint, you'd be unlucky to even get a caution, let alone a fine. Certainly, unless your under 18 you won't get arrested unless they suspect you of additional crimes.
It is good laws (like the U.K.'s recent relaxation on a certain harmless recreational drug) that prevent Orwellian states, not the availability of technology which could potentially be mis-used. Because if a authoritarian government wants to f*&k over their citizens, they really don't need such technologies, and they can just go and develop them there and then anyway.
"It seems that crime rates haven't dropped as much as one might expect if every technological advance really increased the efficiency of the police that much."
The flaw with this very commonly held view is that crimes are far more widely reported now than previously, especially violent and sexual crimes which use to often go unreported. Most studies which have tried to normalize the differences in reporting rates from today and yesteryear (although this is difficult and subjective task) have shown pretty much all major crimes that existed say 50 years ago have decreased dramatically, per capita. Increased population makes the total figures higher though.
You are for example far less likely to be robbed or murdered now than 50 years ago in the vast majority of Western countries. Of course it has also been empirically proven that news programmes can attract far larger audiences when they "scare" people on the "dangers of modern life", so such statistics are often covered up.
Considering the increased amount of wealth disparity these days (particularly in the USA) then it becomes obvious that if it weren't for the technological advances (or some other as yet unidentified factor) then crime rates would be significantly higher.
"Who claimed that these technologies have made the police better at their jobs?"
That depends which "technologies" you are talking about. Radar (anotehr ex-military technology) has certainly helped the police enforce speed limits more effectively (god darn it!). DNA / Fingerprints have certainly been used in A LOT of criminal prosecutions, as have CCTV cameras. So yes I think most people would claim they have made the police better at their jobs.
Now, doughnut shops on the other hand...
"And who claimed that "the public" tells the police what to do?"
Umm, most people do, with the possible exception of Will Smith and those nutters who wear tin-foil hats. The government, i.e. the "public authority" employ and therefore command the police. At least that is the way every western democracy works, if however you are in fact Chinese or posting through a inter dimensional time-portal from 1950's USSR then your question is probably valid.
England actually has amongst the cheapest home broadband deals in the world, especially as most of them now include free telephone call deals. It's everything else which is expensive here.
Unfortunately, I've seen far younger judges who wouldn't know what a website is.
Most Chambers here in Britain (the offices where collections of Barristers work - self-employed lawyers who speak in court but not to clients) and even some solicitors firms (like U.S. lawyers but they can't speak in court) require applicants to submit pen written application forms. Compared to the usual cut & paste exercise which accompanies applying for jobs, this becomes an extremely annoying process after writing a few.
The point is the judiciary in Britain is an extremely old fashioned institution, few solicitors and barristers, let alone judges even have computers on their desks!
It will be a long, long time before they start blogging and such.
"Scientists did predict global cooling in the early seventies" "The fact that someone disagreed near the end of the seventies doesn't eliminate the fact that they did believe it would happen in the early seventies."
You refer to "Scientists" and "they" as if all science is done by a single organisation. In reality, one group of scientists may theorise something, while others may theorise another thing. As the article discusses, although there were a handful of papers which theorised that global cooling may occur, there was never any sort of scientific consensus on the matter at all. It was just another theory that is now thought highly improbable, just like the "there may be canals on mars" and "light may travel through ether" etc.
The vast majority of scientists throughout the seventies were either indifferent to the idea of global cooling (based upon its speculative nature) or disagreed with it.
I think this is an extremely important point. In the rush to limit the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, it seems the environmental risks of some of the alternative fuel sources are being almost completely ignored. The potential environmental damage which widespread biofuel usage could cause is particularly scary.
Every single study has shown that the astronomical land requirements needed to produce biofuel crops on a scale for it to replace gas in the USA would require near enough all the existing farmland along with all the worlds remaining forests, rainforests and protected areas of nature (e.g. national parks) to be cleared and replaced with biofuel crops. The thought that this could be done in the name of the "saving the environment" is pretty baffling!
Slashdot Mirror
"Does that seem a bit wrong to anyone else?"
No, in the same way watching a DVD disc that someone shoplifted is not the same as actually shoplifting the DVD in the first place.
The judgement seems to be along the lines of "the crack is so widely available, that it's not really even definable as an encryption system anymore". It's like if you leave your front door key under the mat (or in some other insanely obvious place) and then a buglar uses it to open the front door to your house and burgle it. Your insurance company won't normally pay out because effectively, you didn't really lock your door at all.
"I cannot think of any legitimate use for this."
You obviously cannot think very hard then. Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture), finding lost patients (apparently a common problem, especially with mentally unstable patients), Student security, efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room), computer account security and log-on convenience.
There are probably many more, but they're the ones I've come up with in under a minute. They would also help in fire/emergency situations; just because a fire breaks out doesn't automatically mean all computer systems around the entire campus instantly stop working. Not that fire is a particular problem at any university I know of, but in the event of fire they could undoubtedly save lives.
Sure the technology could be abused, but privacy can easily be abused without such technology anyway. Respecting student/patient privacy is a policy issue, not a technology issue.
Jee's that makes it nice and convenient for Apple doesn't it, "It's all the big, bad music industry's fault, we don't want to have to charge you again for music you already bought on CD, honest" ...yea right.
And don't you realise that the only reason Apple would like to offer DRM-free music is so they can use it as an excuse to increase prices and hence their profit margin. As always though, Steve Jobs will constantly blame the music industry for a situation which Apple profits from.
...not that Apple are really much better when it comes to the whole DRM issue. Not to mention the whole iTunes lock-in issue which I really don't understand how they are still getting past the competition regulators with. Particularly here in Europe where regulators are normally quite strict about that sort of thing (as Microsoft can vouch for!).
Mine's the Windows bug where bookmarks can occasionally be blanked and all lost for seemingly no reason. Various reportings of this bug have been ignored for years also.
Ouch, must have been annoying.
I think I remember someone telling me once that during the initial start-up is the most dangerous time to plug in a PS/2 adapter. No idea if this is true or not, but it would make some sense.
Eeek, I remember doing such once. I left the computer on for about a week.
"Is IPv6 so unappealing that they've gotta bribe people with pr0n to use it?"
It worked with IPv4.
Although I shudder to think back to the days of downloading pr0n on a 14.4k modem!
Such ability statistics are only observed under certain conditions and this one isn't one of them. Also, positive discrimination and other such factors must also be taken into account. People don't ever want to enter a profession which they don't think their peers would consider suitable for their sociological group (can't remember what theory is called). In the same way you don't get many straight male flight attendants or mid-wives or many field ploughing aristocrats (maybe you do these days, I don't know).
University applications don't really mean much (especially over such a short timespan), graduation and employment figures are much more relevant although these too must be interpreted (e.g. a routine office task carried out by a modern point-and-click application may have - in decades past - required a fair amount of programming, thereby greatly confusing occupational statistics).
Most motherboards these days are pretty resilient to it, but it is still supposedly possible. The main risk is if the connector's pins bend and touch each other (and even then has to be certain ones) as you plug it in, this can cause a short circuit and can completely fry a motherboard (actually it would only fry a tiny 1 cent micro-controller but in today's throw-away-society that of course means the entire board is as good as bust). Never actually seen it happen in front of me, it always seems to be one of those "it happened to a friend of a friend" type stories.
"Men will take the dangerous, filthy, and more time-intensive jobs because of the extra pay associated with them"
No, they take those manual, high-death rate jobs (e.g. construction work, mining, oil rig work etc.) because they are traditionally "male" jobs. No-one thinks anything strange of a guy who embarks on a career as a construction worker, but for a woman, most people's first thought would be: "strange job for a woman".
The situation with woman in such jobs (as with in I.T.) is similar to that of the situation facing black people (sorry, African Americans or whatever) 50 years ago. Back then, they had certain professions which they were "meant" to work in and ones which they weren't "meant" to work in. Just as is the situation facing with woman now, a black person 50 (or so) years ago could officially be employed as say a banker, but I doubt you would have seen many because of the stigma attached. Today, thankfully, racial stereotyping of jobs has/is being pretty much eliminated. Sexual stereotyping however is still extremely common, particularly in countries where religious or cultural ideals support it (e.g. Japan and the USA, to name but a couple).
It is this that causes the current situation - like that facing black people 50 years ago, albeit with different jobs - where a woman "can" officially be a construction worker, but would have to put up with years of "psst, apparently she's a construction worker" stigma. Eventually, the sexual job stereotyping will evaporate as has/is occurring with racial job stereotyping. Making wide-sweeping generalizations about what jobs each sex supposedly wants, then backing them up with totally bullsh*t reasons, just reinforces the pointless stereotyping which is no more valid than the now (almost) extinct racial stereotyping.
It's like your typical parent company shareholder override situation:
The Smithsonian institute are funded by the government of the United States.
Most of the current Congressmen / Senators / President which make up the government of the United States are funded by the big Oil companies.
The big Oil companies obviously don't want to see pictures of Climate Change or pictures of the national parks they are in the process of trashing and so get what they see as their subsidiary company to "make the changes".
Courtesy of United States Inc.
I agree, but the various MMR Vaccine scare programs were far more sensationalist than the recent Panorama Wi-Fi one, they were almost bordering on criminal misrepresentation / fraud imho. They were presented more along the lines of "This child has Autism, he started developing symptoms in the months after receiving MMR and his mother - despite having absolutely no medical background or valid reason - blames MMR!". You show parents of babies a bunch of disabled teenagers and you can have them believing anything, regardless of the actual science and statistics.
I don't think the recent Panorama program on Wi-Fi will have quite the same negative effect because it focused more on the science rather than anecdotal cases. I think if it had presented the program as "All these children are disabled and they attended schools with Wi-Fi networks" then a similar effect to what occurred with MMR is more likely. I think it's mainly the "I don't want my young child turning out like that one" paranoia which sparks the irrational responses.
Panorama isn't a "news" program, it's an investigative reporting program, which is quite different.
Towards the end of the program in question, they did start to admit more and more that there is absolutely no evidence or even much likelihood of harm from Wi-Fi, which was good although it was maybe too little, too late. My (and I think many others') main issue with the program was their over-use of the scare word "radiation" in a way that implied every Wi-Fi router is a mini unshielded nuclear reactor.
But, I've seen many far worse "this common piece of technology is going to kill us all" programs on TV and was really expecting it to be far more "scare story" like than it actually was.
"certainly into a state where the mechanisms for some real Big Brother-esque monitoring are all in place and just awaiting the right kind of government"
I think the trick is not to have that "kind of government". Neither Hitler or Stalin had CCTV, National Register, spydrones or anything like that but they were still able to create an Orwellian state. It's not the technology that needs to be stopped - it has perfectly good uses (like catching the bastard who nicked my girlfriend's handbag a few months back) - it is those who would act maliciously with it who need to be stopped.
Right now in the U.K., if you got caught on a spydrone - or more realistically by a 'nosey' (get it) police officer - smoking a joint, you'd be unlucky to even get a caution, let alone a fine. Certainly, unless your under 18 you won't get arrested unless they suspect you of additional crimes.
It is good laws (like the U.K.'s recent relaxation on a certain harmless recreational drug) that prevent Orwellian states, not the availability of technology which could potentially be mis-used. Because if a authoritarian government wants to f*&k over their citizens, they really don't need such technologies, and they can just go and develop them there and then anyway.
It's all the racing around that goes on these days which is to blame for the recent blackouts.
It seems if you know the right people you can get public funds in the name of "anti-terrorism" for anything these days!
"It seems that crime rates haven't dropped as much as one might expect if every technological advance really increased the efficiency of the police that much."
The flaw with this very commonly held view is that crimes are far more widely reported now than previously, especially violent and sexual crimes which use to often go unreported. Most studies which have tried to normalize the differences in reporting rates from today and yesteryear (although this is difficult and subjective task) have shown pretty much all major crimes that existed say 50 years ago have decreased dramatically, per capita. Increased population makes the total figures higher though.
You are for example far less likely to be robbed or murdered now than 50 years ago in the vast majority of Western countries. Of course it has also been empirically proven that news programmes can attract far larger audiences when they "scare" people on the "dangers of modern life", so such statistics are often covered up.
Considering the increased amount of wealth disparity these days (particularly in the USA) then it becomes obvious that if it weren't for the technological advances (or some other as yet unidentified factor) then crime rates would be significantly higher.
"Who claimed that these technologies have made the police better at their jobs?"
That depends which "technologies" you are talking about. Radar (anotehr ex-military technology) has certainly helped the police enforce speed limits more effectively (god darn it!). DNA / Fingerprints have certainly been used in A LOT of criminal prosecutions, as have CCTV cameras. So yes I think most people would claim they have made the police better at their jobs.
Now, doughnut shops on the other hand...
"And who claimed that "the public" tells the police what to do?"
Umm, most people do, with the possible exception of Will Smith and those nutters who wear tin-foil hats. The government, i.e. the "public authority" employ and therefore command the police. At least that is the way every western democracy works, if however you are in fact Chinese or posting through a inter dimensional time-portal from 1950's USSR then your question is probably valid.
England actually has amongst the cheapest home broadband deals in the world, especially as most of them now include free telephone call deals. It's everything else which is expensive here.
Unfortunately, I've seen far younger judges who wouldn't know what a website is.
Most Chambers here in Britain (the offices where collections of Barristers work - self-employed lawyers who speak in court but not to clients) and even some solicitors firms (like U.S. lawyers but they can't speak in court) require applicants to submit pen written application forms. Compared to the usual cut & paste exercise which accompanies applying for jobs, this becomes an extremely annoying process after writing a few.
The point is the judiciary in Britain is an extremely old fashioned institution, few solicitors and barristers, let alone judges even have computers on their desks!
It will be a long, long time before they start blogging and such.
"Scientists did predict global cooling in the early seventies"
"The fact that someone disagreed near the end of the seventies doesn't eliminate the fact that they did believe it would happen in the early seventies."
You refer to "Scientists" and "they" as if all science is done by a single organisation. In reality, one group of scientists may theorise something, while others may theorise another thing. As the article discusses, although there were a handful of papers which theorised that global cooling may occur, there was never any sort of scientific consensus on the matter at all. It was just another theory that is now thought highly improbable, just like the "there may be canals on mars" and "light may travel through ether" etc.
The vast majority of scientists throughout the seventies were either indifferent to the idea of global cooling (based upon its speculative nature) or disagreed with it.
Not to mention the obligatory "In soviet Russia, Flickr censors you!" jokes...
Oh wait, that's what the story is about.
"Additionally, alternative fuels are not benign."
I think this is an extremely important point. In the rush to limit the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, it seems the environmental risks of some of the alternative fuel sources are being almost completely ignored. The potential environmental damage which widespread biofuel usage could cause is particularly scary.
Every single study has shown that the astronomical land requirements needed to produce biofuel crops on a scale for it to replace gas in the USA would require near enough all the existing farmland along with all the worlds remaining forests, rainforests and protected areas of nature (e.g. national parks) to be cleared and replaced with biofuel crops. The thought that this could be done in the name of the "saving the environment" is pretty baffling!
I think you've uncovered one of the primary causes of software delays and usability stoppers of today.
The "free" market isn't completely faultless.