What is *really* the bigger problem right now - a few (even a few thousand), bad yes, abuses of the DMCA or the completely out of control wanton disregard for copyright law that exists in many internet corners?
There's only about a million thing wrong with this line of thinking. One REALLY, REALLY obvious one being that there are internet site outside of the US.
The defenders of P2P for LEGITIMATE use lose their credibility if they are not equally realistic and aggressive in condemning and thinking of ways to stop illegitimate use.
That's silly. They maybe related but they certainly aren't the same issue, as you're making them out to be.
For example, I believe in both legitimate use of p2p AND I believe that a lot of the shit that's illegal right now shouldn't be.
So basically I'm saying that we ALREADY have too many bullshit laws, AND we shouldn't be passing new bullshit laws. I think that's a pretty freeakin consistent viewpoint. You might not agree with it, but that does not automatically made it not credible.
Revolutionaries at Sony indicates that the Playstation 1 was sold at a loss initially, as well. I'd consider it to be a source that should know about such things. Actually, many consoles have, I believe, sold at a loss initially, but I think the plan is usually to have them profitable within 6-12 months.
Which is different than the Xbox division, which is still losing money, and has never made money.
This isn't "give away the razor and sell the blades", it's "give away the razor and the blades to drive all our competitors out of the market so we can expand our monopoly control into the razor industry."
They have nowhere near a monopoly in the game market. So no, there is no oversight, nor should there be.
This is bullshit. Antitrust laws exist not just to control how monopolies operate in the markets they already control, but to prevent them from using their monopoly position to monopolize other markets as well.
This prevents us from becoming all employees of Unicorp, which runs all businesses, owns all properties and charges exorbitant prices.
If this is "dumping" then you should jump up and down about gas stations (gas is often sold at or near cost), Coke and Pepsi (with a true monopoly, fountain drinks are sold at or below cost), all cell phone companies (my cell phones were all free), etc.
These companies operate at an overall profit. They make loose money on the phone, but the make it up on the service. The Xbox division is losing money period.
They're buying their way into the market with their gaint wad of cash. This is very different than giving away the razor and selling the blades.
Considering that the XBox 360 is the most expensive console out there right now, there is absolutely no dumping going on.
This is meaningless and you know it. It's possible to make a really expensive product, sell it at a loss and still be more expensive that your competitors, who made their product cheaply.
Idiot.
You shouldn't go around calling people idiots when your arguments don't even make sense, especially that last one. Anyone with even a tiny brain can understand that it is possible to be the most expensive product and still lose money.
No you're not. You could just as well exist if the hypnotist had had absolutely no effect.
Our mother said she felt no pain but had no drugs during any of the three deliveries. He had worked with her during preganecies, implanting the suggestion that she would feel no pain and that "it would be a beautiful experience".
There are tons of problems here.
Are you familiar with the idea of "cognitive dissonance"?
Did you even think that maybe the level of pain might have been the same WITHOUT a hypnotist at all?
You're talking about an experience which varies greatly and saying that because a given result was supposedly observed (with a measly sample group of one), hypnotism must have caused it.
Plus, I feel that.par files are better than making 2 copies of the same data. For example, if you're only backing up a few large files, the odds of having both copies of the file get a few bad sectors is relatively high.
Why is the liklihood any higher than with.par files?
Seems to me,.par files are rather silly on a CD format, since CDs already include multiple layers of forward error correction as part of the standard itself. If the damage is so extensize as to defeat the parity that's already always on the disc, then you have a far chance of losing something like your filesystem information.
I think you're better of in all respects by buring two cds of the same data and placeing them in different locations. With.par files you get 2 cds, each one holding half the data, in the same location.
as if file-sharing was something people did back in the Bronze Age.
Actually it was.
If you could get your hands on a book, by all means, go ahead and copy it. There was no such thing as copyright back then.
People seem to forget that copyright is an arbitrary legal construction. There's nothing fundamentally necessary about telling people what they can't do behind closed doors in their own home. Many would argue that this is antitheical to a "free" society.
I disagree with many things, but I only get upset by one-sided debates and conclusions made without reason. So as long as it's said "in a fair way" I respect their opinions. I may debate their opinions which is enjoyable for both parties if thought has gone into the respective conclusions for both sides (who doesn't want to get another person on 'their side'); but debate does not indicate disrespect of their right to have an opinion.
On the other hand...
"I cannot believe there are two equally valid sides to every single story."(Good Night and Good Luck)
If they can store terabytes upon terabytes of email, I'm sure they keep track of the last several IPs that the user logged in with.
Which is all but useless if he's using a proxy.
The trick is to get him to connect to something without using a proxy or to do something traceable by other means. (Like ordering a pizza to his house with your credit card number.)
That'll teach him. Filing an incident report with the authorities to MAYBE get him caught (so he cannot compromise other people's computers) would have had a bit more long term vision.
Real vision would have been to send him what looked like a normal batch of keylogged information, but that was actually a trap.
There are all sorts of options that come to mind:
A "web bug" (transparent gif) to find his ip address.
Opening up a bank/CC/paypal account with a couple hundred dollars (whatever you need for felony charges) and conveniently leaking the info to him. (After notifying the authorites that anybody withdrawing money from that account should be arrested immediately.)
Doing the above but with a phonecard or other prepaid service to find more personal info.
Playing mind games by making it look like you actually have managed to get the FBI to do something... "Yes, I'm sure that his email address. You'll be busting down his door this Tuesday, that's great!"
Leaking URLs to something like BO2K and calling it you company's hot new, pre-release software product.
Pulling a 419-style scam
Make him think he's uncovered a plot to commit murder/terroism (get him to show up at the police station for you)
Setting up a bogus web anonymizer/IRC server/warez server/etc and leaking him the access information. (Something where he'll want lots of data so he won't use a proxy in Russia.)
If this happened to me, I would spend a few days mulling over how to best nail this guy in a way that would be both legal and effective. You want to be able to go to the autorities with more than just a Hotmail address that was probably set up with false information and accessed via proxy.
When you are telling a lie, your brain is executing a different set of tasks than when you are telling the truth.
Correction:
When you lie, YOU think your brain is executing a different set of tasks. YOU propose that a brain is analogous to a set of gears or transistors. A specfic part does a specfic thing, etc.
This may or may not be the case but WE DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW YET. If you actually have scientific evidence conclusively proving the above, expect to win a Nobel prize real soon now.
The reality is that we have nowhere near as good a concept of how the brain works as you are thinking. We have vaugue ideas about "this general region having something to do with short term memory", but it's all EXTREMELY fuzzy. IMO. it's like expecting the nucleus of a cell to be in the exact same spot on every cell of that type. It's not going to happen. You might use the part of my brain I use for linear algerba to remeber guitar chords. At a high level, someone can wave their hands and say, that part of the brain must have something to do with "patterns", but that doesn't mean we actually know how it works or will be able to tell what a third person is thinking about he "uses" that part of his brain.
I have no doubt that an MRI has "detected" lies. But what it did was detect physiological changes that accompany the stress of lying. (Probably is somebody that both wasn't used to lying and hadn't made up their story ahead of time.) Now if you were to get a bunch of either lawyers and marketers in there instead of average joes, you'd have a lot harder time because the people wouldn't give a shit about lying... especially the people in marketing:)
To actually detect lies you would need:
An accurate model of how a brain works, with predictive capability.
A machine capable or obtaining all the data necessary for this model.
We don't have #1, and an MRI isn't #2.
If somebody were to provide either #1 or #2, they could expect their name to be held in the same regard as Newton. We're talking a collosal breakthrough here. Accomplishing #1 would make modern cognitive studies look like bloodletting and astrology. Accomplishing #2 would probably require breaking the uncertainty priciple... and that doesn't even account for somehow also managing not to kill the subject.
Of course not -- since you didn't tell a lie, only a malfunctioning lie-detector would detect one. That's not a problem with the lie detector, that's a problem with the interrogator asking the wrong questions.
You're missing the key point that it's all a matter or perspective. People have been convincing themselves or things that are provably false since the dawn of man. What makes you think that it's impossible for a person to:
A) Convince themself of something that's not true.
B) Forget that they've done so.
?
The concept of a "lie detector" is deeply flawed on many levels.
If by "lie detector" you mean polygraph tests, then you're right -- they are bunk. A machine that detects lies by some other means is not impossible though -- you can detect lies with an MRI machine, for example. How you would integrate that into an airport, I don't know.
It's all the same shit!
You're missing the point of the post you're repling too.
All these machines can test is for signs of nervousness, even an MRI machine. It's not some sort of magical probe where you can read what a person is thinking.
They're basically worthless, which is why all of that nonsense is inadmissable in court. Things just don't work like they do on TV.
A machine that actually detected lies would basically be a machine that could read human thoughts. I don't think we're going to see that any time soon... perhaps ever. Even if you somehow were to accomplish it, you would only be able to tell if the subject believed he was lying, not that actual truth or non-truth of his statements.
Say you think I'm a terrorist, but I think I'm a freedom fighter. You ask me if I'm a terrorist. I say no. The machine doesn't flag it because I don't believe I was lying.
To me, the thing that really sucks about legal insurance policies is that... what if they decide not to cover you?
You were counting on them to provide you with a lawyer and they know it. So even if by the letter of the contract they should cover you, you don't have a lawyer to take them to court and make them do it.
It's not like the judge is going to delay your case while you take the insurance company to court. And you can bet the fine print is going to leave tons of wiggle room as far as what they actually need to pay for.
Remember - the law is a neutral weapon - much like a landmind. It can be used against friend and foe alike. The key is to see how a law can help your cause - even if taht was not the original intent.
This makes the very poor assumpotion that all laws can bent bent in your direction and at least as much so as the other direction.
This is obviously silly. For example, a law that says "black people can't vote" simply fucks over black people.
You could either admit that the law is obviously biased towards the people who have monopolized 100 years of our american cultural history, or you can desperately seach for a hypothetical situation where it might help your side.
The FOSS angle is interesting, but it pales in comparison to throwing someone in jail for copying "Steamboat Willie". The damage to society is much greater than the benefit.
I wouldn't use water but something that if a leak occurs nothing bad happens. Anti-freeze is pretty much inert and transfers heat well.
Water (non-pure... which it will be as soon as it hits your computer) conducts electricity.
Antifreeze is not better and conducts electricity.
The liquid you're looking for is fluorinert, but the price is one the order of hundreds of dollars per gallon.
When you consider the price, you'll see why many people just use water and high-quality plumbing. Why use $500 of flourinert to protect a $500 computer? If your plumbing fails it's still going to overheat, so the tradeoff is really between the cost of the computer times the likelihood of the pipes failing vs the cost of the flourinert and the likelihood of the pipes not failing.
Since your pipes are more likely to not fail than fail (unless you just totally suck at life), and the flourinert is going to cost more than your computer, it just doesn't make sense.
We DON'T have long running experience putting RF transmitters RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR BRAIN for LONG duration exposures. There is some with UHF radio but they only transmit when you key mikes. Cell phones transmit all the time. There have been a lot of experience in cars but then the antennas are outside a metal box.
Why exactly is it that you think you're an authority on what we have and have not studied about the effects of microwave radiation?
All you have are vague and misleading or incorrect statements on this subject.
For example, I hate to be to one to break it you, but your cellphone does not transmit continuously, 24/7. It probably doesn't even transmit continuously during a typical conversation. It's also important to note that those walkie talkies you're in such a hurry to dismiss are an order of magnitude higher power and have been in use for quite some time.
The bottom line here is that you're not an expert on this subject. You're not willing to look at the scientific studies done by actual experts, and you've made up your mind that we need to be afraid regardless of whether there's any data to support your fears.
Those press releases were backed by "scientific studies" and experimental data. Unfortunately you can get the results from those studies you want as long as you throw the right amount of money at the right people.
This is really a silly argument. There's almost always somebody out there who claims to be an expert and is flat out wrong about what they're talking about. That doesn't mean all of scientific reseach is corrupt nonsense.
You should read about the whole EMF scare. One study found that houses near power lines showed a higher risk of cancer. There was no corraboration of this study and it was shown to be false.
To this day there are still people who are worried by this nonsense. They'll claim it's a big conspiracy by the power company to cover it up. They don't have a clue regarding the actual science involved and aren't interested in changing their views.
You are completely missing the point. The point is we know radio waves at certainly energy levels and frequencies are dangerous to living organisms. We don't know precisely what power levels at each frequency are certain to be harmless especially with long exposure. All we have are guesses.
Bull-frickin-shit. This is simply not true. Do you honestly believe that there's not one single bit of experimental data out there?
That's what you're saying and it's 100% wrong. We have a LOT more than "just guesses". We have both theoretical models and hard experimental data. That's where things like the FCC's SAR levels come from in the first place. That comment is both highly ignorant and an offense to the people who have actually taken the time to scientifically study these things.
It is a certainty the lower the power, the lower the frequency and the further you are away from a transmitter the less the risk, but you simply don't know what the consequences would be to sitting a WIMAX, 802.11 or cell phone transmitter right next to your tissue and running it for 20 years is, so don't pretend like you do know, it is naive.
I'm trying to get you to go read something on a topic you clearly know little about. Do you really think no one had ever transmitted RF energy in the 2 GHz frequency range before cellphones and wifi? That's what you're impling.
In closing all I have to say is it was not so long ago that the power that be were assuring us nicotine wasn't addictive and smoking didn't cause lung cancer.
You should not be comparing legitmate science to corporate press releases. You obviously need to work on where you get your information.
You keep making these totaly ridiculous comparisons and analogies. They make me think you aren't interested in the truth in the first place. Sure we don't know everything there is to know about the effects of exposure to microwave radiation, but the implication you're making about our lack of knowedge is provably untrue.
Regardless of your political views, the challenge faced by the engineers implementing the system is an inviting one.
I don't find the challenge any more inviting than many other basically evil endervors one could get involved in. It sure would be impressive if I could make an H-bomb for some pissant country with an axe to grind, but I also think it would be unconscienable.
I guess I think the whole violating humans rights thing is a bigger issue than "ensuring innovation in filtering and firewalling techologies". I would say a great man is made great not just by the skill with which he does his work, but by the benefit it has to society.
Uh dude, I think you might want to retract your absurd blanket statement. I assure large bands of the electromagnetic spectrum are extremely dangerous to your health, in particular ionizing radio frequency.
Dude, you're being to alarmist and misleading here.
Comparing a cellphone to high power radar with MEGAWATTS of power in a higly focused beam is deliberately misleading.
Being cooked from the inside and a possible slight increase in cancer risk are NOT the same thing. Treating them as if they are is misleading and ignorant. It's like comparing getting hit with a hackey-sack and a 50-cal sniper round.
There are FCC standards for cell phone radiation for a reason too, because higher energy levels are still considered dangerous especially with prolonged exposure.
The FCC does limit exposure, to 1.6 watts per kilogram. Do you understand how much power that is?
Its just hard to definitely prove that cell phones are a risk
Which means that if they are it's a small risk, on the level of being exposed to direct sunlight.
I suggest you obtain a copy of the "RF and Microwave Handbook", Golio 2001 and check out the section entitled "Safety and Environmental Issues". Contrary to popular belief, radio communication was not invented in the last 20 years. There are people out there who actually know what they're talking about are have studied these types of things.
That text will also introduce you to the whole EMF controversy, which is what the grandparent poster was referring to and which has been thoroughly debunked.
Then you're a bit silly. But as long as you're a harmless silly, I don't give a shit.
I guess what it comes down to is that I prefer the people around me to have decent critical thinking skills. Even if they're not doing any harm to me at the moment, gullible god-says-so types are a lot easier to subvert than people who actually think about what they're being told to believe.
Especially when you think about that psychological gaps the religion is being used to fill. Religion isn't necessarily a static set of beliefs, it can also be a collection of conflicting arguments providing convenient justification for nearly any action. Which brings us to...
I'm not a big fan of Christianity, but I'm not sure that's true.
You can't. ID isn't a valid scientific theory as it cannot be proven or disproven just like my Nerf ball theory, which you clearly missed the point of.
I gave an example of a way it could be tested.
You have not and you're missing the difference between FUNDAMENTALLY UNTESTABLE, BY DEFINITION (intelligent design and Nerf ball theories) and theoretically testable, but difficult to do in a weekend out in your garage (time travel, etc).
ID and and Nerf ball theory are simply not testable. It's not a matter of us not being able to figure out a way to implement a test. The problem is that the way these "theories" are defined is such that proof or disproof is impossible, by definition.
I agree that ID is a "weak" theory/conjecture, but it is as "scientific" as other speculative hard-to-test concepts considered scientific ideas such as String Theory, Multiple Universes (Anthropic Principle), time travel, etc. The latter are often considered "scientific ideas", and ID should be included in these.
No, it really isn't.
ID is as much a theory as:
I have an undectable nerf ball that floats above my head and follows me wherever I go.
THERE'S NO SCIENTIFIC CLAIM.
Time travel could be tested by sending a clock forwards or back wards through time and observing the result, ID is impossible to disprove as it doesn't actually say anything that could ever be tested or observed.
As with all other so-called "security" schemes, it comes down to trusting the luser. Unfortunately in today's climate, this seems to be a losing proposition. "Something you have, and something you know" becomes "Something you can lose, and something you can forget."
I'd say this is why a great many security schemes fail: contempt for the user
Contrary to what many believe the computer is there to help someone do a job, not to be an impenatrable vault for information. Anything you do that makes things obnoxiously difficult fot the people who actually need to get work done will be circumvented by the "lusers".
This is because security incurrs a cost. The goal should be to minimize that cost while providing decent security, not to provide security with total contempt for those who will have to put up with it.
A decsision to implement "two-factor" authentication should weigh the costs assoscited with it's implementation, versus the additional security benefit. Once you start looking at what the actual security benefits are, you may decide to forget about it all together. In the end you only get two major things from adding a physical token:
-difficulty duplicating it
-obviousness of its theft
In the end, I recommend startcards. They're pretty cheap, very secure and they aren't tied to one specfic vendor.
They'll probably go with fingerprints though, as they probably don't actually need the level of security they're asking about, so they'll go for the whiz-bang factor.
You can tell by how he says: We are open to biometric tokens as well, because they may be used for digital certificate signing for e-mails.
A smartcard could be used for the same thing and it would be more secure. Sadly, this is probably just going to be another episode of "security theatre".
There's nothing inherently bad about believing in ID.
Yeah there is.
ID is a means of justifying your "feelings" about something with a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense.
Believeing is this sort of shit is antitheical to being a REASONable person.
Let me introduce you to another theory:
"I have an undetecatble Nerf ball that floats above my head and follows me whereever I go."
This is a terrible theory. It's really no theory at all. There's no real claim and no way to disprove it.
Now here's the scary part, what if I start using it to justify my actions?
If you want to think God did some stuff, go for it. Knock yourself out, man. Maybe you're right.
You're neglecting a pretty important issue:
More people have died in that name of Christ than any other cause in history.
These people ARE hurting other people. There aren't just keeping their stupid ideas to themselve, they're trying to force them on other people. They' especially like to get their hand on impressionable kids.
It doesn't really matter if Joe Shmoe on the street thinks that green fairys made the universe 10 minutes ago and implanted all the memories we have.
It DOES matter because these shmoes vote and affect both school curriculums and public science funding.
If things like this go unchecked, we could end up in a sort of downward spiral. You need to see this for what it is:
A battle between religious fundamentalism and reason.
This media strawman science is really damaging to real science.
The media aren't the ones putting stickers in textbooks and forcing teachers to teach intelligent design as an alternative "theory" to evoulution.
Slashdot Mirror
What is *really* the bigger problem right now - a few (even a few thousand), bad yes, abuses of the DMCA or the completely out of control wanton disregard for copyright law that exists in many internet corners?
There's only about a million thing wrong with this line of thinking. One REALLY, REALLY obvious one being that there are internet site outside of the US.
The defenders of P2P for LEGITIMATE use lose their credibility if they are not equally realistic and aggressive in condemning and thinking of ways to stop illegitimate use.
That's silly. They maybe related but they certainly aren't the same issue, as you're making them out to be.
For example, I believe in both legitimate use of p2p AND I believe that a lot of the shit that's illegal right now shouldn't be.
So basically I'm saying that we ALREADY have too many bullshit laws, AND we shouldn't be passing new bullshit laws. I think that's a pretty freeakin consistent viewpoint. You might not agree with it, but that does not automatically made it not credible.
Revolutionaries at Sony indicates that the Playstation 1 was sold at a loss initially, as well. I'd consider it to be a source that should know about such things. Actually, many consoles have, I believe, sold at a loss initially, but I think the plan is usually to have them profitable within 6-12 months.
Which is different than the Xbox division, which is still losing money, and has never made money.
This isn't "give away the razor and sell the blades", it's "give away the razor and the blades to drive all our competitors out of the market so we can expand our monopoly control into the razor industry."
They have nowhere near a monopoly in the game market. So no, there is no oversight, nor should there be.
This is bullshit.
Antitrust laws exist not just to control how monopolies operate in the markets they already control, but to prevent them from using their monopoly position to monopolize other markets as well.
This prevents us from becoming all employees of Unicorp, which runs all businesses, owns all properties and charges exorbitant prices.
If this is "dumping" then you should jump up and down about gas stations (gas is often sold at or near cost), Coke and Pepsi (with a true monopoly, fountain drinks are sold at or below cost), all cell phone companies (my cell phones were all free), etc.
These companies operate at an overall profit. They make loose money on the phone, but the make it up on the service. The Xbox division is losing money period.
They're buying their way into the market with their gaint wad of cash. This is very different than giving away the razor and selling the blades.
Considering that the XBox 360 is the most expensive console out there right now, there is absolutely no dumping going on.
This is meaningless and you know it. It's possible to make a really expensive product, sell it at a loss and still be more expensive that your competitors, who made their product cheaply.
Idiot.
You shouldn't go around calling people idiots when your arguments don't even make sense, especially that last one. Anyone with even a tiny brain can understand that it is possible to be the most expensive product and still lose money.
I'm proof it works
No you're not. You could just as well exist if the hypnotist had had absolutely no effect.
Our mother said she felt no pain but had no drugs during any of the three deliveries. He had worked with her during preganecies, implanting the suggestion that she would feel no pain and that "it would be a beautiful experience".
There are tons of problems here.
Are you familiar with the idea of "cognitive dissonance"?
Did you even think that maybe the level of pain might have been the same WITHOUT a hypnotist at all?
You're talking about an experience which varies greatly and saying that because a given result was supposedly observed (with a measly sample group of one), hypnotism must have caused it.
Plus, I feel that .par files are better than making 2 copies of the same data. For example, if you're only backing up a few large files, the odds of having both copies of the file get a few bad sectors is relatively high.
.par files?
.par files are rather silly on a CD format, since CDs already include multiple layers of forward error correction as part of the standard itself. If the damage is so extensize as to defeat the parity that's already always on the disc, then you have a far chance of losing something like your filesystem information.
.par files you get 2 cds, each one holding half the data, in the same location.
Why is the liklihood any higher than with
Seems to me,
I think you're better of in all respects by buring two cds of the same data and placeing them in different locations. With
If you'd read the study... then you'd know that the test was done using SUSE, and GLIBC was hand-compiled because SUSE's RPM manager was broken.
This is nonsense.
SUSE's RPM manager broke because the sysadmins broke them.
See this other guy's comment for a more reasonable interpretation.
Why do you feel it necessary to post this incorrect information multiple times?
as if file-sharing was something people did back in the Bronze Age.
Actually it was.
If you could get your hands on a book, by all means, go ahead and copy it. There was no such thing as copyright back then.
People seem to forget that copyright is an arbitrary legal construction. There's nothing fundamentally necessary about telling people what they can't do behind closed doors in their own home. Many would argue that this is antitheical to a "free" society.
I disagree with many things, but I only get upset by one-sided debates and conclusions made without reason. So as long as it's said "in a fair way" I respect their opinions. I may debate their opinions which is enjoyable for both parties if thought has gone into the respective conclusions for both sides (who doesn't want to get another person on 'their side'); but debate does not indicate disrespect of their right to have an opinion.
On the other hand...
"I cannot believe there are two equally valid sides to every single story." (Good Night and Good Luck)
If they can store terabytes upon terabytes of email, I'm sure they keep track of the last several IPs that the user logged in with.
Which is all but useless if he's using a proxy.
The trick is to get him to connect to something without using a proxy or to do something traceable by other means. (Like ordering a pizza to his house with your credit card number.)
Real vision would have been to send him what looked like a normal batch of keylogged information, but that was actually a trap.
There are all sorts of options that come to mind:
If this happened to me, I would spend a few days mulling over how to best nail this guy in a way that would be both legal and effective. You want to be able to go to the autorities with more than just a Hotmail address that was probably set up with false information and accessed via proxy.
Correction:
When you lie, YOU think your brain is executing a different set of tasks. YOU propose that a brain is analogous to a set of gears or transistors. A specfic part does a specfic thing, etc.
This may or may not be the case but WE DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW YET. If you actually have scientific evidence conclusively proving the above, expect to win a Nobel prize real soon now.
The reality is that we have nowhere near as good a concept of how the brain works as you are thinking. We have vaugue ideas about "this general region having something to do with short term memory", but it's all EXTREMELY fuzzy. IMO. it's like expecting the nucleus of a cell to be in the exact same spot on every cell of that type. It's not going to happen. You might use the part of my brain I use for linear algerba to remeber guitar chords. At a high level, someone can wave their hands and say, that part of the brain must have something to do with "patterns", but that doesn't mean we actually know how it works or will be able to tell what a third person is thinking about he "uses" that part of his brain.
I have no doubt that an MRI has "detected" lies. But what it did was detect physiological changes that accompany the stress of lying. (Probably is somebody that both wasn't used to lying and hadn't made up their story ahead of time.) Now if you were to get a bunch of either lawyers and marketers in there instead of average joes, you'd have a lot harder time because the people wouldn't give a shit about lying... especially the people in marketing
To actually detect lies you would need:
We don't have #1, and an MRI isn't #2.
If somebody were to provide either #1 or #2, they could expect their name to be held in the same regard as Newton. We're talking a collosal breakthrough here. Accomplishing #1 would make modern cognitive studies look like bloodletting and astrology. Accomplishing #2 would probably require breaking the uncertainty priciple... and that doesn't even account for somehow also managing not to kill the subject.
Of course not -- since you didn't tell a lie, only a malfunctioning lie-detector would detect one. That's not a problem with the lie detector, that's a problem with the interrogator asking the wrong questions.
You're missing the key point that it's all a matter or perspective. People have been convincing themselves or things that are provably false since the dawn of man. What makes you think that it's impossible for a person to:
A) Convince themself of something that's not true.
B) Forget that they've done so.
?
The concept of a "lie detector" is deeply flawed on many levels.
If by "lie detector" you mean polygraph tests, then you're right -- they are bunk. A machine that detects lies by some other means is not impossible though -- you can detect lies with an MRI machine, for example. How you would integrate that into an airport, I don't know.
It's all the same shit!
You're missing the point of the post you're repling too.
All these machines can test is for signs of nervousness, even an MRI machine. It's not some sort of magical probe where you can read what a person is thinking.
They're basically worthless, which is why all of that nonsense is inadmissable in court. Things just don't work like they do on TV.
A machine that actually detected lies would basically be a machine that could read human thoughts. I don't think we're going to see that any time soon... perhaps ever. Even if you somehow were to accomplish it, you would only be able to tell if the subject believed he was lying, not that actual truth or non-truth of his statements.
Say you think I'm a terrorist, but I think I'm a freedom fighter. You ask me if I'm a terrorist. I say no. The machine doesn't flag it because I don't believe I was lying.
The whole idea is freakin retarded. What we need to do is stop supporting people like Osama and stop giving people like Saddam the keys to major american cities.
Of course that would place the blame where it should be, at the top, and we can't have that now can we?
To me, the thing that really sucks about legal insurance policies is that... what if they decide not to cover you?
You were counting on them to provide you with a lawyer and they know it. So even if by the letter of the contract they should cover you, you don't have a lawyer to take them to court and make them do it.
It's not like the judge is going to delay your case while you take the insurance company to court. And you can bet the fine print is going to leave tons of wiggle room as far as what they actually need to pay for.
Remember - the law is a neutral weapon - much like a landmind. It can be used against friend and foe alike. The key is to see how a law can help your cause - even if taht was not the original intent.
This makes the very poor assumpotion that all laws can bent bent in your direction and at least as much so as the other direction.
This is obviously silly. For example, a law that says "black people can't vote" simply fucks over black people.
You could either admit that the law is obviously biased towards the people who have monopolized 100 years of our american cultural history, or you can desperately seach for a hypothetical situation where it might help your side.
The FOSS angle is interesting, but it pales in comparison to throwing someone in jail for copying "Steamboat Willie". The damage to society is much greater than the benefit.
I wouldn't use water but something that if a leak occurs nothing bad happens. Anti-freeze is pretty much inert and transfers heat well.
Water (non-pure... which it will be as soon as it hits your computer) conducts electricity.
Antifreeze is not better and conducts electricity.
The liquid you're looking for is fluorinert, but the price is one the order of hundreds of dollars per gallon.
When you consider the price, you'll see why many people just use water and high-quality plumbing. Why use $500 of flourinert to protect a $500 computer? If your plumbing fails it's still going to overheat, so the tradeoff is really between the cost of the computer times the likelihood of the pipes failing vs the cost of the flourinert and the likelihood of the pipes not failing.
Since your pipes are more likely to not fail than fail (unless you just totally suck at life), and the flourinert is going to cost more than your computer, it just doesn't make sense.
We DON'T have long running experience putting RF transmitters RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR BRAIN for LONG duration exposures. There is some with UHF radio but they only transmit when you key mikes. Cell phones transmit all the time. There have been a lot of experience in cars but then the antennas are outside a metal box.
Why exactly is it that you think you're an authority on what we have and have not studied about the effects of microwave radiation?
All you have are vague and misleading or incorrect statements on this subject.
For example, I hate to be to one to break it you, but your cellphone does not transmit continuously, 24/7. It probably doesn't even transmit continuously during a typical conversation. It's also important to note that those walkie talkies you're in such a hurry to dismiss are an order of magnitude higher power and have been in use for quite some time.
The bottom line here is that you're not an expert on this subject. You're not willing to look at the scientific studies done by actual experts, and you've made up your mind that we need to be afraid regardless of whether there's any data to support your fears.
Those press releases were backed by "scientific studies" and experimental data. Unfortunately you can get the results from those studies you want as long as you throw the right amount of money at the right people.
This is really a silly argument. There's almost always somebody out there who claims to be an expert and is flat out wrong about what they're talking about. That doesn't mean all of scientific reseach is corrupt nonsense.
You should read about the whole EMF scare. One study found that houses near power lines showed a higher risk of cancer. There was no corraboration of this study and it was shown to be false.
To this day there are still people who are worried by this nonsense. They'll claim it's a big conspiracy by the power company to cover it up. They don't have a clue regarding the actual science involved and aren't interested in changing their views.
You are completely missing the point. The point is we know radio waves at certainly energy levels and frequencies are dangerous to living organisms. We don't know precisely what power levels at each frequency are certain to be harmless especially with long exposure. All we have are guesses.
Bull-frickin-shit. This is simply not true. Do you honestly believe that there's not one single bit of experimental data out there?
That's what you're saying and it's 100% wrong. We have a LOT more than "just guesses". We have both theoretical models and hard experimental data. That's where things like the FCC's SAR levels come from in the first place. That comment is both highly ignorant and an offense to the people who have actually taken the time to scientifically study these things.
It is a certainty the lower the power, the lower the frequency and the further you are away from a transmitter the less the risk, but you simply don't know what the consequences would be to sitting a WIMAX, 802.11 or cell phone transmitter right next to your tissue and running it for 20 years is, so don't pretend like you do know, it is naive.
I'm trying to get you to go read something on a topic you clearly know little about. Do you really think no one had ever transmitted RF energy in the 2 GHz frequency range before cellphones and wifi? That's what you're impling.
In closing all I have to say is it was not so long ago that the power that be were assuring us nicotine wasn't addictive and smoking didn't cause lung cancer.
You should not be comparing legitmate science to corporate press releases. You obviously need to work on where you get your information.
You keep making these totaly ridiculous comparisons and analogies. They make me think you aren't interested in the truth in the first place. Sure we don't know everything there is to know about the effects of exposure to microwave radiation, but the implication you're making about our lack of knowedge is provably untrue.
Here's a link to 127 PAGES of references to data on this subject. I repeat, that's not 127 references that's 127 pages of refernces.
Regardless of your political views, the challenge faced by the engineers implementing the system is an inviting one.
I don't find the challenge any more inviting than many other basically evil endervors one could get involved in. It sure would be impressive if I could make an H-bomb for some pissant country with an axe to grind, but I also think it would be unconscienable.
I guess I think the whole violating humans rights thing is a bigger issue than "ensuring innovation in filtering and firewalling techologies". I would say a great man is made great not just by the skill with which he does his work, but by the benefit it has to society.
Uh dude, I think you might want to retract your absurd blanket statement. I assure large bands of the electromagnetic spectrum are extremely dangerous to your health, in particular ionizing radio frequency.
Dude, you're being to alarmist and misleading here.
Comparing a cellphone to high power radar with MEGAWATTS of power in a higly focused beam is deliberately misleading.
Being cooked from the inside and a possible slight increase in cancer risk are NOT the same thing. Treating them as if they are is misleading and ignorant. It's like comparing getting hit with a hackey-sack and a 50-cal sniper round.
There are FCC standards for cell phone radiation for a reason too, because higher energy levels are still considered dangerous especially with prolonged exposure.
The FCC does limit exposure, to 1.6 watts per kilogram. Do you understand how much power that is?
Its just hard to definitely prove that cell phones are a risk
Which means that if they are it's a small risk, on the level of being exposed to direct sunlight.
I suggest you obtain a copy of the "RF and Microwave Handbook", Golio 2001 and check out the section entitled "Safety and Environmental Issues". Contrary to popular belief, radio communication was not invented in the last 20 years. There are people out there who actually know what they're talking about are have studied these types of things.
That text will also introduce you to the whole EMF controversy, which is what the grandparent poster was referring to and which has been thoroughly debunked.
Then you're a bit silly. But as long as you're a harmless silly, I don't give a shit.
I guess what it comes down to is that I prefer the people around me to have decent critical thinking skills. Even if they're not doing any harm to me at the moment, gullible god-says-so types are a lot easier to subvert than people who actually think about what they're being told to believe.
Especially when you think about that psychological gaps the religion is being used to fill. Religion isn't necessarily a static set of beliefs, it can also be a collection of conflicting arguments providing convenient justification for nearly any action. Which brings us to...
I'm not a big fan of Christianity, but I'm not sure that's true.
Between the 9+ crusades, and the slaughter of native Africans and Americans I think it's pretty safe to say I'm right. As of 1897, M. D. Aletheia put the total at about 56 million.
So that number doesn't include any complicity in the holocaust, nor a host of other atrocities in Rwanda, Ireland,Vietnam (I assume you've seen this Pulitzer prize winning picture of Thich Quang Duc.)
ID creates something: life, that can be observed.
Prove it.
You can't. ID isn't a valid scientific theory as it cannot be proven or disproven just like my Nerf ball theory, which you clearly missed the point of.
I gave an example of a way it could be tested.
You have not and you're missing the difference between FUNDAMENTALLY UNTESTABLE, BY DEFINITION (intelligent design and Nerf ball theories) and theoretically testable, but difficult to do in a weekend out in your garage (time travel, etc).
ID and and Nerf ball theory are simply not testable. It's not a matter of us not being able to figure out a way to implement a test. The problem is that the way these "theories" are defined is such that proof or disproof is impossible, by definition.
I agree that ID is a "weak" theory/conjecture, but it is as "scientific" as other speculative hard-to-test concepts considered scientific ideas such as String Theory, Multiple Universes (Anthropic Principle), time travel, etc. The latter are often considered "scientific ideas", and ID should be included in these.
No, it really isn't.
ID is as much a theory as:
I have an undectable nerf ball that floats above my head and follows me wherever I go.
THERE'S NO SCIENTIFIC CLAIM.
Time travel could be tested by sending a clock forwards or back wards through time and observing the result, ID is impossible to disprove as it doesn't actually say anything that could ever be tested or observed.
As with all other so-called "security" schemes, it comes down to trusting the luser. Unfortunately in today's climate, this seems to be a losing proposition. "Something you have, and something you know" becomes "Something you can lose, and something you can forget."
I'd say this is why a great many security schemes fail: contempt for the user
Contrary to what many believe the computer is there to help someone do a job, not to be an impenatrable vault for information. Anything you do that makes things obnoxiously difficult fot the people who actually need to get work done will be circumvented by the "lusers".
This is because security incurrs a cost. The goal should be to minimize that cost while providing decent security, not to provide security with total contempt for those who will have to put up with it.
A decsision to implement "two-factor" authentication should weigh the costs assoscited with it's implementation, versus the additional security benefit. Once you start looking at what the actual security benefits are, you may decide to forget about it all together. In the end you only get two major things from adding a physical token:
-difficulty duplicating it
-obviousness of its theft
In the end, I recommend startcards. They're pretty cheap, very secure and they aren't tied to one specfic vendor.
They'll probably go with fingerprints though, as they probably don't actually need the level of security they're asking about, so they'll go for the whiz-bang factor.
You can tell by how he says:
We are open to biometric tokens as well, because they may be used for digital certificate signing for e-mails.
A smartcard could be used for the same thing and it would be more secure. Sadly, this is probably just going to be another episode of "security theatre".
There's nothing inherently bad about believing in ID.
Yeah there is.
ID is a means of justifying your "feelings" about something with a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense.
Believeing is this sort of shit is antitheical to being a REASONable person.
Let me introduce you to another theory:
"I have an undetecatble Nerf ball that floats above my head and follows me whereever I go."
This is a terrible theory. It's really no theory at all. There's no real claim and no way to disprove it.
Now here's the scary part, what if I start using it to justify my actions?
If you want to think God did some stuff, go for it. Knock yourself out, man. Maybe you're right.
You're neglecting a pretty important issue:
More people have died in that name of Christ than any other cause in history.
These people ARE hurting other people. There aren't just keeping their stupid ideas to themselve, they're trying to force them on other people. They' especially like to get their hand on impressionable kids.
It doesn't really matter if Joe Shmoe on the street thinks that green fairys made the universe 10 minutes ago and implanted all the memories we have.
It DOES matter because these shmoes vote and affect both school curriculums and public science funding.
If things like this go unchecked, we could end up in a sort of downward spiral. You need to see this for what it is:
A battle between religious fundamentalism and reason.
This media strawman science is really damaging to real science.
The media aren't the ones putting stickers in textbooks and forcing teachers to teach intelligent design as an alternative "theory" to evoulution.