I think there is also a danger in relying on the precedent that petty crimes did not involve juries in the common law era.
Back when the constitution was penned the court was the building in the middle of town, and minor cases were heard by the local magistrate who chances are knew every person in the town. If the guy just rubber-stamped every silly little money maker like the modern speeding ticket then he would probably end up being tarred and feathered. The whole culture around the judicial system for minor offenses was likely quite different than it is today.
Then again, I'm not a legal historian, so maybe it wasn't all that different.
I'm not sure the world would be a worse place if you could ask for a jury trial for a parking ticket - I can only imagine that a lot of dumb little laws would get rethought. However, when you can charge somebody with 300 counts of an offense that gets a one month sentence and argue that no jury trial is allowed, that is an injustice.
Been very happy with T-Mobile, especially with the new value bring-your-own-phone plans (you can buy them from TMo, but at not terribly attractive prices). I'm paying $100/mo for four lines, two with 2GB data (and it just goes to 2G over that - no overage fees), two with unlimited voice, two with 500min voice each, all with unlimited SMS.
Sure, you have to pay retail for the phones, but if you do the math you're at least breaking even if you buy flagship phones on all four lines every two years, and you can spend more/less without penalty, and you can buy any unlocked GSM phone you want without penalty.
The only catch is that if you have to watch out for the bands if you want 3G+, but that is true of any of the carriers.
I do agree with some of your comments, though the one thing I really like is the value plans with bring-your-own-device. I can still buy them from T-Mo, or from wherever I care to (and hopefully with stuff moving to LTE that will involve fewer compromises).
Not sure I'm excited by the merger though - I don't really see much gain for T-Mo customers.
True, but the fact that T-Mo now lets you bring your own device at a much lower rate mitigates some of their lockdown issues. I hope that is not a feature that goes away, because it has really worked well for me.
You don't even have to emulate the hardware. You just tell the OS that when the piece of software runs the check_authentication() function it instead runs the return_true() function instead. Or you do it in the VM layer, or whatever.
It is just software - you don't HAVE to run what they want you to run.
You don't need to control what boots - you merely need to KNOW what boots. Remote attestation works just as well, it is already implemented on the computer you're using now (in hardware - likely not in the OS unless you're using Linux and Trusted GRUB). Yes, Linux is actually ahead of Windows in being a tool for big brother as all the stuff that Microsoft threatened to do the FOSS community actually went ahead with.
The Supreme Court held that you can only demand a jury trial if you face at least six months in prison on a single charge regardless of how they add up in the aggregate.
Your suggesting that the value they're adding is that if you pay them they'll actually obey the law without you having to sue them? How customer-focused of them.
Unless something has changed, this is not how Tor works. It is a closer description to how Freenet works.
A Tor relay does nothing more than pass along packets. Tor exit nodes allow the Tor network to connect to sites on the internet. Anybody can also run a Tor hidden service, which is just a webserver that talks to a Tor node. These do not require exit nodes to operate and should be more secure as a result.
However, I'd be concerned about running something like this on Tor. The fact is that there aren't all that many nodes on Tor. I would think that an adversary could contribute a large number of nodes to the network as a result and get a pretty good idea of what is going on. If they could manage to get a message to pass from a client they control through a set of relays they control to the site hosting the hidden service then they'd be able to identify where it is hosted. Tor also is a low-latency network making network analysis possible.
The sorts of things that make Tor more tolerable from a usability standpoint make it much less anonymous.
Yup. Actually, the way the right to trial by jury is applied to day is rather astonishing.
If I sue you for $21 the courts will make the lives of 12 people miserable to weigh the outcome of a case which clearly will have a trivial outcome.
If the DA charges me with a crime whose maximum sentence is 5 months in prison, I'll be told I can't have a jury decide on the case. The same applies if I am to be fined $100 with the likelyhood of my auto insurance company raising my rates by $500/yr. And, more recently I could be charged with 300 consecutive 1 month sentences without being entitled to a jury trial.
The effect is that disputes over money get a more rigorous treatment in the courts than criminal matters where what is at stake is personal freedom. It really seems backwards, especially since the amount that needs to be at issue for civil cases has been made completely trivial by inflation.
Ah, proper diet and lifestyle, as in blame the victim. Never mind the fact that you can't find two clinical studies that agree on anything in this area.
I'm all for prevention, but I doubt that the reason that so many people have so many diseases is that they all want to get sick.
Uh, what does the post you linked to have to do with Samuel Epstein? It just talks about some purported cure for cancer that apparently was rejected by the FDA and every other first world government on the planet. If you have a link to clinical trial data that suggests that it actually works by all means post that.
Unfortunately he already chose to commit fraud, so he didn't have access to the same choices as someone who was not a convicted felon.
Yes, but we're all the worse off for he and others like him not having access to the choice of free expression on the internet. The selective enforcement of the parole conditions is going to lead to a chilling effect on free speech. For those who would like to become productive members of society, not being allowed to use the internet certainly isn't going to help. Since this condition tends to be most imposed on those who commit computer-based crimes it basically prevents gainful employment in the area of life where they are most likely to be able to obtain it.
2) Regardless of what court you brought suit in, it was always going to be a judge who resolved legal questions like, say, whether TSA's procedures were unconstitutional. A jury would only be tasked with factual questions like figuring out, if it were disputed, what TSA's procedures actually were.
Interesting. Mind pointing to where in the US Constitution that is written down? I just see that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed."
Granted to really benefit from the letter of the Constitution he would need to actually commit a crime and be charged with it, and that wouldn't be advisable since courts have been ignoring the letter of that amendment for ages.
Re:Still no TRIM on software RAID (md)
on
Linux 3.6 Released
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· Score: 1
How often does an entire stripe become empty? And the software RAID layer would need to keep track of cumulative TRIMS on all the blocks in the stripe so that it could issue the TRIM when the whole thing becomes empty. Then you need someplace to store that metadata, and will doing that cause more problems than the TRIM fixes?
That said, might be nice if it worked since a rebuild could skip known-empty areas.
Of course, eventually btrfs is likely to make many md applications obsolete. Obviously it isn't there yet.
Sure, if you don't mind it being a pain to dynamically reallocate space between all your filesystems.
Oh, can you copy a 300GB file full of data in a few milliseconds and have the copy only occupy the space necessary to capture the differences between them? No, I don't want a hard link - I want changes to either file to not affect the other.
You can also instantly snapshot files, directories, or the entire filesystem, and the snapshots are first-class citizens (they can be modified, be used in place of the originals, etc).
Oh, and if the power dies in the middle of writing a RAID stripe you don't lose anything beyond the changes to the files you were intending to modify.
Btrfs will be the standard filesystem on linux in a few years - nobody really doubts that. Its main issue now is that it is still fairly immature.
Simple - in 15 years you won't be able to sell the treatment any longer (or you won't make any money from it since it is no longer patented). However, you could easily sell the cure since anybody would buy that over a treatment. Or, if you don't sell the cure then the risk is that somebody else will sell it and you'll still lose all your sales of the treatment without making a dime on the cure.
That said, I can see why people wouldn't bother to research the cures. It isn't a conspiracy so much as no incentive. If the cure costs more to develop than it will ever make, then no company will bother to research it.
However, I think insurance companies have demonstrated they're willing to pay a lot of money if the outcomes are demonstrated. There are drugs that cost $10k/dose, and insurers pay for them because they're cheaper than the alternatives (which usually involve surgery, if there are alternatives at all). The risk is that if you come up with a cure for high cholesterol and need to charge $10k/treatment to recover your costs, and then Medicare comes along and tells you that they'll give you $200 for it. Then your choices are to not sell it at all (and still be out the research costs), or sell it and recover a small part of your initial outlay.
I won't claim the patent system doesn't have some real flaws. I don't think they're conspiracies so much as the effect of the way the incentives work. Also, in the present political climate there is uncertainty about what will and won't be paid for down the road. Companies don't want to develop a product nobody is willing to pay the full costs for.
Personally I'm all for having the NIH or whatever fund end-to-end drug development with the resulting drugs being freely licensed within the US, within countries that make similar investments and reciprocate, and within the third world. Private enterprise can continue to patent anything it comes up with, and then you have competition between the public and private systems. If the public system is a slam dunk success then the private system will just fade away on its own, or work as contractors for the public system (making less money, but also getting rid of the risk since they'd be fee-for-service). The public drugs would be dirt cheap, getting rid of the regressive pricing model drugs currently have. And, if the naysayers are right and the public system doesn't work out, well, we'll still have the status quo.
Uh, care to paste in a link to something in a reputable source, like a mainstream newspaper or peer-reviewed journal.
You're basically arguing that all kinds of cures are just out there and ready to go, but every single medical researcher on the planet is part of this big conspiracy to keep them all secret. Why would some guy working in a Chinese university want to keep some cure for disease secret? Or are they all on the take too?
So, think about it this way - why the heck would we let a person we thought was likely to hurt people out of prison? The answer is simple - we wouldn't.
So, if he isn't likely to hurt people, why ban him from using the internet? Actually, even if he is likely to hurt people, why do that? If the guy commits bank fraud wouldn't it make more sense to ban him from having a bank account, or writing checks, or engaging in trade?
Suppose I charge you with murder, and then offer to let you plead guilty for 60 days in prison, otherwise if a jury convicts you then you'll serve the rest of your life in jail. Your lawyer advises you that even though you profess innocence you're moderately likely to get convicted and given the stakes you're way better off pleading guilty. So, which is it, are you being forced to stay in prison, or did you simply agree to rot in jail for 2 months to avoid rotting there for your whole life?
The fact that he consented doesn't matter, because he wasn't really given any real choice in the matter.
You're missing a few things. The fact is that the NIH doesn't pay for clinical trials and development, and this is where most of the costs of drug development come from. The NIH might pay for the underlying idea, and that idea might even be the most important part of the whole thing, but the fact is that the other stuff still costs a lot of money.
Then there is the issue that most of the NIH leads don't pan out - but they still cost a lot of money. So, companies plow a lot of money into duds that have to be made back on successes.
If you made NIH funding contingent on royalty-free results then nobody would make use of anything the NIH produces, unless the NIH funded the trials as well. Now, I think that is actually a perfectly valid model, but don't be under any illusions that drugs would be cheaper if that were done. The only thing that might change is how those costs are recovered (maybe the pills would be cheap or free, but the taxpayers would bear the difference).
People talk about the costs of drugs, but I think what really bothers people is the regressive way that those costs are recovered. There isn't much you can do about the total cost (that isn't to say that we can't continue to research ways to reduce it), but there is a lot that can be done to change how it is paid for.
On the one hand, they expend relatively little to no effort researching the actual causes of those symptoms; on the other hand, they are actively engaging a very well-funded campaign intended to stifle awareness of disease prevention.
Well, they obviously have no incentive to research prevention, but I don't think there is some big conspiracy to block it or actual cures. I think the much simpler solution is that curing most diseases is much harder than curing it. And drug companies do come out with things like antibiotics that do in fact cure disease. Now, antibiotics are a bit of a tricky area - not because they cure disease, but because new ones simply aren't needed for 99% of those who get sick. Most people aren't going to take a $200 course of some state-of-the-art antibiotic if a $10 bottle of penicillin will do the job. The problem is that because of this we don't have many state-of-the-art antibiotics when the rare person gets MRSA/etc and the $10 bottle won't work.
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I think there is also a danger in relying on the precedent that petty crimes did not involve juries in the common law era.
Back when the constitution was penned the court was the building in the middle of town, and minor cases were heard by the local magistrate who chances are knew every person in the town. If the guy just rubber-stamped every silly little money maker like the modern speeding ticket then he would probably end up being tarred and feathered. The whole culture around the judicial system for minor offenses was likely quite different than it is today.
Then again, I'm not a legal historian, so maybe it wasn't all that different.
I'm not sure the world would be a worse place if you could ask for a jury trial for a parking ticket - I can only imagine that a lot of dumb little laws would get rethought. However, when you can charge somebody with 300 counts of an offense that gets a one month sentence and argue that no jury trial is allowed, that is an injustice.
Been very happy with T-Mobile, especially with the new value bring-your-own-phone plans (you can buy them from TMo, but at not terribly attractive prices). I'm paying $100/mo for four lines, two with 2GB data (and it just goes to 2G over that - no overage fees), two with unlimited voice, two with 500min voice each, all with unlimited SMS.
Sure, you have to pay retail for the phones, but if you do the math you're at least breaking even if you buy flagship phones on all four lines every two years, and you can spend more/less without penalty, and you can buy any unlocked GSM phone you want without penalty.
The only catch is that if you have to watch out for the bands if you want 3G+, but that is true of any of the carriers.
Yup. I just bought a Konica Minota 1650EN. For Windows the drivers were auto-installed. For Linux I downloaded a few kb PPD file.
The irony is that the same PPD file would probably have enabled printing on the thing on a VAX, or on Windows 3.1, or on Wordperfect v5 for DOS.
Why is it that the universal printer driver was figured out 30 years ago, and we're still inventing bloatware that fills a DVD to do the same thing?
I do agree with some of your comments, though the one thing I really like is the value plans with bring-your-own-device. I can still buy them from T-Mo, or from wherever I care to (and hopefully with stuff moving to LTE that will involve fewer compromises).
Not sure I'm excited by the merger though - I don't really see much gain for T-Mo customers.
True, but the fact that T-Mo now lets you bring your own device at a much lower rate mitigates some of their lockdown issues. I hope that is not a feature that goes away, because it has really worked well for me.
Nah, the obvious mistake is buying games that use online authentication and then not patching them to not use online authentication.
For all we know our brains are programs running in some VM somewhere. There is no way for software to do any better.
You don't even have to emulate the hardware. You just tell the OS that when the piece of software runs the check_authentication() function it instead runs the return_true() function instead. Or you do it in the VM layer, or whatever.
It is just software - you don't HAVE to run what they want you to run.
You don't need to control what boots - you merely need to KNOW what boots. Remote attestation works just as well, it is already implemented on the computer you're using now (in hardware - likely not in the OS unless you're using Linux and Trusted GRUB). Yes, Linux is actually ahead of Windows in being a tool for big brother as all the stuff that Microsoft threatened to do the FOSS community actually went ahead with.
Well, sure, but that's the problem with DRM. They want it to be something you have, but the reality is that it can be defeated by something you know.
And you don't have to steal anybody's computer - you just buy it once and copy it a bazillion times.
Or, if it isn't a purely online service you just patch out the need to authenticate at all.
Lewis v. United States, 518 US 322 (1996)
The Supreme Court held that you can only demand a jury trial if you face at least six months in prison on a single charge regardless of how they add up in the aggregate.
Your suggesting that the value they're adding is that if you pay them they'll actually obey the law without you having to sue them? How customer-focused of them.
Unless something has changed, this is not how Tor works. It is a closer description to how Freenet works.
A Tor relay does nothing more than pass along packets. Tor exit nodes allow the Tor network to connect to sites on the internet. Anybody can also run a Tor hidden service, which is just a webserver that talks to a Tor node. These do not require exit nodes to operate and should be more secure as a result.
However, I'd be concerned about running something like this on Tor. The fact is that there aren't all that many nodes on Tor. I would think that an adversary could contribute a large number of nodes to the network as a result and get a pretty good idea of what is going on. If they could manage to get a message to pass from a client they control through a set of relays they control to the site hosting the hidden service then they'd be able to identify where it is hosted. Tor also is a low-latency network making network analysis possible.
The sorts of things that make Tor more tolerable from a usability standpoint make it much less anonymous.
Yup. Actually, the way the right to trial by jury is applied to day is rather astonishing.
If I sue you for $21 the courts will make the lives of 12 people miserable to weigh the outcome of a case which clearly will have a trivial outcome.
If the DA charges me with a crime whose maximum sentence is 5 months in prison, I'll be told I can't have a jury decide on the case. The same applies if I am to be fined $100 with the likelyhood of my auto insurance company raising my rates by $500/yr. And, more recently I could be charged with 300 consecutive 1 month sentences without being entitled to a jury trial.
The effect is that disputes over money get a more rigorous treatment in the courts than criminal matters where what is at stake is personal freedom. It really seems backwards, especially since the amount that needs to be at issue for civil cases has been made completely trivial by inflation.
Ah, proper diet and lifestyle, as in blame the victim. Never mind the fact that you can't find two clinical studies that agree on anything in this area.
I'm all for prevention, but I doubt that the reason that so many people have so many diseases is that they all want to get sick.
Uh, what does the post you linked to have to do with Samuel Epstein? It just talks about some purported cure for cancer that apparently was rejected by the FDA and every other first world government on the planet. If you have a link to clinical trial data that suggests that it actually works by all means post that.
Unfortunately he already chose to commit fraud, so he didn't have access to the same choices as someone who was not a convicted felon.
Yes, but we're all the worse off for he and others like him not having access to the choice of free expression on the internet. The selective enforcement of the parole conditions is going to lead to a chilling effect on free speech. For those who would like to become productive members of society, not being allowed to use the internet certainly isn't going to help. Since this condition tends to be most imposed on those who commit computer-based crimes it basically prevents gainful employment in the area of life where they are most likely to be able to obtain it.
2) Regardless of what court you brought suit in, it was always going to be a judge who resolved legal questions like, say, whether TSA's procedures were unconstitutional. A jury would only be tasked with factual questions like figuring out, if it were disputed, what TSA's procedures actually were.
Interesting. Mind pointing to where in the US Constitution that is written down? I just see that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed."
Granted to really benefit from the letter of the Constitution he would need to actually commit a crime and be charged with it, and that wouldn't be advisable since courts have been ignoring the letter of that amendment for ages.
How often does an entire stripe become empty? And the software RAID layer would need to keep track of cumulative TRIMS on all the blocks in the stripe so that it could issue the TRIM when the whole thing becomes empty. Then you need someplace to store that metadata, and will doing that cause more problems than the TRIM fixes?
That said, might be nice if it worked since a rebuild could skip known-empty areas.
Of course, eventually btrfs is likely to make many md applications obsolete. Obviously it isn't there yet.
Still waiting for more stability and raid5 support, but I agree, it definitely is going to be the way to go at some point.
Sure, if you don't mind it being a pain to dynamically reallocate space between all your filesystems.
Oh, can you copy a 300GB file full of data in a few milliseconds and have the copy only occupy the space necessary to capture the differences between them? No, I don't want a hard link - I want changes to either file to not affect the other.
You can also instantly snapshot files, directories, or the entire filesystem, and the snapshots are first-class citizens (they can be modified, be used in place of the originals, etc).
Oh, and if the power dies in the middle of writing a RAID stripe you don't lose anything beyond the changes to the files you were intending to modify.
Btrfs will be the standard filesystem on linux in a few years - nobody really doubts that. Its main issue now is that it is still fairly immature.
Simple - in 15 years you won't be able to sell the treatment any longer (or you won't make any money from it since it is no longer patented). However, you could easily sell the cure since anybody would buy that over a treatment. Or, if you don't sell the cure then the risk is that somebody else will sell it and you'll still lose all your sales of the treatment without making a dime on the cure.
That said, I can see why people wouldn't bother to research the cures. It isn't a conspiracy so much as no incentive. If the cure costs more to develop than it will ever make, then no company will bother to research it.
However, I think insurance companies have demonstrated they're willing to pay a lot of money if the outcomes are demonstrated. There are drugs that cost $10k/dose, and insurers pay for them because they're cheaper than the alternatives (which usually involve surgery, if there are alternatives at all). The risk is that if you come up with a cure for high cholesterol and need to charge $10k/treatment to recover your costs, and then Medicare comes along and tells you that they'll give you $200 for it. Then your choices are to not sell it at all (and still be out the research costs), or sell it and recover a small part of your initial outlay.
I won't claim the patent system doesn't have some real flaws. I don't think they're conspiracies so much as the effect of the way the incentives work. Also, in the present political climate there is uncertainty about what will and won't be paid for down the road. Companies don't want to develop a product nobody is willing to pay the full costs for.
Personally I'm all for having the NIH or whatever fund end-to-end drug development with the resulting drugs being freely licensed within the US, within countries that make similar investments and reciprocate, and within the third world. Private enterprise can continue to patent anything it comes up with, and then you have competition between the public and private systems. If the public system is a slam dunk success then the private system will just fade away on its own, or work as contractors for the public system (making less money, but also getting rid of the risk since they'd be fee-for-service). The public drugs would be dirt cheap, getting rid of the regressive pricing model drugs currently have. And, if the naysayers are right and the public system doesn't work out, well, we'll still have the status quo.
Uh, care to paste in a link to something in a reputable source, like a mainstream newspaper or peer-reviewed journal.
You're basically arguing that all kinds of cures are just out there and ready to go, but every single medical researcher on the planet is part of this big conspiracy to keep them all secret. Why would some guy working in a Chinese university want to keep some cure for disease secret? Or are they all on the take too?
So, think about it this way - why the heck would we let a person we thought was likely to hurt people out of prison? The answer is simple - we wouldn't.
So, if he isn't likely to hurt people, why ban him from using the internet? Actually, even if he is likely to hurt people, why do that? If the guy commits bank fraud wouldn't it make more sense to ban him from having a bank account, or writing checks, or engaging in trade?
Suppose I charge you with murder, and then offer to let you plead guilty for 60 days in prison, otherwise if a jury convicts you then you'll serve the rest of your life in jail. Your lawyer advises you that even though you profess innocence you're moderately likely to get convicted and given the stakes you're way better off pleading guilty. So, which is it, are you being forced to stay in prison, or did you simply agree to rot in jail for 2 months to avoid rotting there for your whole life?
The fact that he consented doesn't matter, because he wasn't really given any real choice in the matter.
You're missing a few things. The fact is that the NIH doesn't pay for clinical trials and development, and this is where most of the costs of drug development come from. The NIH might pay for the underlying idea, and that idea might even be the most important part of the whole thing, but the fact is that the other stuff still costs a lot of money.
Then there is the issue that most of the NIH leads don't pan out - but they still cost a lot of money. So, companies plow a lot of money into duds that have to be made back on successes.
If you made NIH funding contingent on royalty-free results then nobody would make use of anything the NIH produces, unless the NIH funded the trials as well. Now, I think that is actually a perfectly valid model, but don't be under any illusions that drugs would be cheaper if that were done. The only thing that might change is how those costs are recovered (maybe the pills would be cheap or free, but the taxpayers would bear the difference).
People talk about the costs of drugs, but I think what really bothers people is the regressive way that those costs are recovered. There isn't much you can do about the total cost (that isn't to say that we can't continue to research ways to reduce it), but there is a lot that can be done to change how it is paid for.
On the one hand, they expend relatively little to no effort researching the actual causes of those symptoms; on the other hand, they are actively engaging a very well-funded campaign intended to stifle awareness of disease prevention.
Well, they obviously have no incentive to research prevention, but I don't think there is some big conspiracy to block it or actual cures. I think the much simpler solution is that curing most diseases is much harder than curing it. And drug companies do come out with things like antibiotics that do in fact cure disease. Now, antibiotics are a bit of a tricky area - not because they cure disease, but because new ones simply aren't needed for 99% of those who get sick. Most people aren't going to take a $200 course of some state-of-the-art antibiotic if a $10 bottle of penicillin will do the job. The problem is that because of this we don't have many state-of-the-art antibiotics when the rare person gets MRSA/etc and the $10 bottle won't work.