The distance does matter. At 1 AU the planet's orbit has to be within about 1/2 degree of the viewing angle for it to be seen. At.5 AU that doubles and at 2 AU it is cut in half.
Given that we only know of one planet that contains life, you can't possibly draw the conclusion (that aliens are statistically likely to exist). You're assuming the only requirement is that a planet be in a star's habitable zone - but you have nothing to base that assumption on.
You can't extrapolate a line from one point.
From what we know, liquid water is required to sustain life. For observational purposes we have a sample size of (1) planet which resides in the habitable zone for life to exist, and that one planet contains life. The sample size is small, but it is at least as good a bet that life exists on one of the millions of other planets in the same situation as ours that exist in our galaxy as it is to bet against it.
The oldest undisputed evidence for bacterial life on Earth is 3 billion years ago, but other evidence points to life existing 3.5 or 3.8 billion years ago, not long after the Earth cooled enough for liquid water to exist on the surface. We've found water on Mars, the moon, in the atmosphere of Venus and on other moons in our solar system as well as in comets that visit the inner solar system from the Oort cloud. Since water is made up of two of the three most abundant elements in the universe that is hardly surprising. I think it would be a very safe bet that some of the 80+ million Earth-sized planets in the right orbits for water to exist as a liquid would have it on their surface.
As far as life coming into being, we don't know. But again, we have a sample size of 1 and 1 positive result. We have 80 million candidates to choose from in our galaxy and 100 billion other galaxies to look at. To assume that life wouldn't exist anywhere else would be a much less tenable position than the reverse.
What we need to to is find a way to take the spectrum of those planets' atmospheres as they pass in front of their star. If we can do that, and we find that their atmospheres contain a lot of Oxygen, that would be almost certain proof of life.
The Sun won't extinguish life on Earth for billions of years. 6 million years ago we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. If you think the dominant life form on Earth in 2 billion years will be "human", you are mistaken.
Kepler is only looking at Sun-like stars, which only account for 13% of the stars in our galaxy. Also the mission has only been going on for two years and they need at least two transits to say they might have found a planet, so this wouldn't count planets much further away from their star than Earth is from Sol.
Using the figures here I come up with 78 million in our galaxy:
Kepler found 5 Earth sized planets in the habitable zone. They searched 156000 Sun-like stars. 13% of the stars in our galaxy are sun-like. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Kepler would only find Earth if the axis of rotation of the system was within about 1/2 degree of the viewing angle. The relative angles are random.
Sorry I only came up with 78 million, but if you take into account that there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, that means there are about as many Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone around sun-like stars in the observable universe as there are grains of sand in ALL the beaches on Earth...
The InputStream is the one being read from and the OutputStream is the one bing written to. The same stream will be called both depending on which side you're looking at.
What do governments usually do when they decide that a substance corrupts the society and influences people to commit crime? They ban that substance and device laws that give harsh punishments to the sellers of that substance.
Aren't the songs themselves the addictive substance that is getting abused? Maybe the government should put forth the idea of banning the sale of music entirely to wake up these morally bankrupt money-grubbers.
$62,500 per song. I saw somewhere that the artist gets less than 60% on iTunes, so let's say 60 cents per song. let's say 5mb per song. She would have had to upload the song 104,000 times which would be 520 gb. For 24 songs that is 12.5 terabytes. My upload speed is capped at 1mbit. That would cap my upload limit for over 3 years with 2.5 million uploads. Statutory damages are supposed to be so that the copyright holder won't have to go through the trouble of calculating actual damages if it is difficult, not to onerously punish someone far outside the bounds of the actual damages. This is unjust. If there is ever a intellectual freedom party, sign me up.
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Even one time pads are susceptible to brute force attacks.
The only way you can make the assertion that they are not is to assume the original message was simply random characters, with no obvious language.
If the original was normal human readable text it becomes immediately obvious when your brute force succeeds and a subsequent dictionary comparison of each word yields a hit.
Actually you can substitute random bytes for the message and your brute force will be equally successful. How does that help you tell what the message actually said?
The problem was you would be handing that 5th grader every single possible message. Look at it this way. Let's say you KNOW that the message says "Your PIN number is XXXX" with XXXX replaced by the actual PIN number. In most crypto systems you could brute-force the key used to encrypt the data by trying each one and testing the results against this string to see if it matches the correct format. If you go through every possible key, then one of the resulting strings contains the correct PIN number.
In a one-time pad you can immediately figure out the first 19 bytes of the pad because you know what the start of the message is. That doesn't do you any good however because you have absolutely no idea what the remaining 4 bytes of the pad are. And those first 19 bytes of the pad will never be used again in the current message or in any other (hence the one-time pad). The last four bytes of the pad are equally likely to be anything that would result in four digits given the encrypted text you received. The result of your "brute-force" attack would be 10,000 possible keys yielding 10,000 possible PIN numbers that all would match the encrypted message you received.
Congratulations, you used your knowledge of what the message must contain to tell you exactly what you already knew with no way to find out anything you don't already know.
Put another way, you can use whatever rules you would use to test that the resulting decrypted message was valid and generate the possibilities without ever looking at the message. In an example below let's say that you have three characters and you know they form a three letter word. You can either:
1) Try every random possible value for the one-time pad to decrypt the message and check each result against a dictionary to find the possible words
2) Ignore the message and generate three random bytes, then try every random possible value for the one-time pad to decrypt the message and check each result against a dictionary to find the possible words (will give the same result as #1)
3) Ignore the pad and the encrypted message and just look through your dictionary to find all possible three letter words
All produce the same results and are just as likely to be the correct text of the message. Trying to brute-force the actual message is no better than trying to brute-force random bytes.
The US did not acquire Texas from Mexico. Texas won its independence from Mexico and then joined the US many years later as an independent nation.
Does it matter how we got them? Mexico used to have them, now we do. To me "Giving them back" means giving them something they used to have. If A steal's B's bicycle and B gives it to C, wouldn't you say C gave the bicycle back to A if they did that even though B took it?
The article I read stated that he changed the passwords himself and then wouldn't tell anyone the new passwords. From what I've ready the network was apparently unusable for days. Apparently disrupting access to a city-wide network is illegal?
So if a bank hired a guy to build their vault and kept the guy on to open it every morning, would he have to give them the combination if they fired him? The network and passwords to the routers are the city's property and he should have handed them over.
The flowchart has deplorable tactics such as telling people to cite their sources and disclose their connection to the Air Force if they decide to respond to an online post about the Air Force. If only the people that really assassinated JFK would have had this flow chart to go by...
Held: Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment "search," and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant. Pp. 31-41.
It does not say specifically that a devide that was in general public use would be allowed, but it did narrow this particular decision.
(c) Based on this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search. The Court rejects the Government's argument that the thermal imaging must be upheld because it detected only heat radiating from the home's external surface. Such a mechanical interpretation of the Fourth Amendment was rejected in Katz, where the eavesdropping device in question picked up only sound waves that reached the exterior of the phone booth to which it was attached. Reversing that approach would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology-including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home. Also rejected is the Government's contention that the thermal imaging was constitutional because it did not detect "intimate details." Such an approach would be wrong in principle because, in the sanctity of the home, all details are intimate details. See, e. g., United States v. Karo, 468 U. S. 705; Dow Chemical, supra, at 238, distinguished. It would also be impractical in application, failing to provide a workable accommodation between law enforcement needs and Fourth Amendment interests. See Oliver v. United States, 466 U. S. 170, 181. Pp. 35-40.
The court also drew a strict line at the barrier to the home. The three dissenters even said that in this case the product just measured the temperature of the exterior of the home, and that other factors such as melting snow in one area could be used to determine the same facts. The 6 member majority took the long view in calling it a search in the hopes of curtailing the use of future technology that would be able to "see inside" the home.
I would like to point out part of Stevens' dissent:
It would be far wiser to give legislators an unimpeded opportunity to grapple with these emerging issues rather than to shackle them with prematurely devised constitutional constraints.
It should be obvious that legislators do not do this, and also that law enforcement will use every tool at their disposal whether it invades privacy or not. We wouldn't have court cases like this, like the one about listening in with a hyper-sensitive microphone on a conversation in a phone booth or like tracking cars with GPS without a warrant if that weren't the case.
What could be discerned from just checking the temperature of the outside of the house? For one, couldn't you tell when someone was taking a hot shower or bath by how hot the outside of the bathroom wall was? It seems like the frequency and duration of bathing in ones own home would be something that normally couldn't be discerned without entry into the home. The protections aren't there for the protection of criminals, but to protect the entire public's privacy. It's not just about whether the evidence can be used in a court case, but whether the police should be performing the surveillance at all.
For another thing, I hope that it took a whole lot more evidence than the thermal tapes to get the warrant to search the house. My dad had a beautiful garden and use to raise plants indoors also. I would hate to think that the police would come knocking down our door for that reason, or because we had a tanning bed or heat lamp.
Scientology uses quackery, the 'e-meter'. They use brainwashing techniques to extort money from their members. Their lies about psychology and psychiatry lead to harm. They are the only religion I know of that makes their teachings a secret. Xenu is purportedly kept secret because learning too early (i.e. before a significant amount of brainwashing has been accomplished) would cause immediate death. In reality, I doubt anyone would become a scientologist if they knew the ridiculousness of it prior to joining.
Of course some people are afraid because they are guilty of something, and they don't want others to find out about it and try to shift attention to others.
You have just perfectly described the "technology" used by scientologists when confronted by critics. Watch videos of them on youtube, they simply call the person immoral, say they committed crimes or simply denigrate their appearance or something in their life. It is their policy to attack people that disagree with them. Look at the organized harassment of their critics. Why would someone want to belong to a group so filled with hatred?
Countries adopting Scientology to rehabilitate criminals, drug users, and it seems to go on and on.
as the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia, and a handful of other countries
At least we know the difference between continent and a country...
Is this really improper? Five countries and one continent (group of countries) are listed. The "handful of other countries" specifies that there are more countries to be added to the list. If it just said "a handful of others" then you wouldn't know for sure if it were referring to more countries or continents, but I take it as a list of political entities including the European Union, five named countries and several other unspecified countries which is entirely proper.
To me this ruling seems to come more from theism than atheism. We are a product of our genes and our upbringing. The argument that someone cannot control their actions due to some genetic trait or because they were mistreated when they were young implies that there is some outside thing, the soul or wherever free will comes from, that has been abused by heritage or upbringing and is not responsible for its actions and should not be punished. Laws are created to bind members of a society to a code of conduct, and people that breach that code should be held equally responsible for their actions. It may be more difficult for this man to refrain from killing people than it is for you or I, but we should all obey the same rules or face the same punishments.
I would never blame a computer for a programmer's error. How do we blame a person for its hardware and programming?
Would you also keep using the same program and let it run even though it continually crashes or produces erroneous results?
As soon as this case hit the news, the legislators should have been passing laws or constitutional amendments that stated, "The People's movements shall not be tracked except when a warrant is issued by a judge."
That would severely restrict investigations by the police. Police can currently stake out or follow someone to find out where they're going, they just can't use an automated device without a warrant. Written like you say, the police couldn't even ask someone at the crime scene who was there because that would be 'tracking' them.
The privacy concerns if police were allowed to track anyone without warrant or even reason are astounding. I'm sure they would love it if they could stick cheap RFID tags on vehicles without people knowing and install monitors on all traffic lights. They could gather all the data and issue automatic speeding tickets based solely on how much time it took your RFID tag to go between two detectors. They could bring anyone that drove by a store that was robbed in for questioning even though they didn't do anything...
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The distance does matter. At 1 AU the planet's orbit has to be within about 1/2 degree of the viewing angle for it to be seen. At .5 AU that doubles and at 2 AU it is cut in half.
Yes, lets let Microsoft compete in a spreadsheet disign competition using Excel as a base against other "frameworks".
Given that we only know of one planet that contains life, you can't possibly draw the conclusion (that aliens are statistically likely to exist). You're assuming the only requirement is that a planet be in a star's habitable zone - but you have nothing to base that assumption on.
You can't extrapolate a line from one point.
From what we know, liquid water is required to sustain life. For observational purposes we have a sample size of (1) planet which resides in the habitable zone for life to exist, and that one planet contains life. The sample size is small, but it is at least as good a bet that life exists on one of the millions of other planets in the same situation as ours that exist in our galaxy as it is to bet against it.
The oldest undisputed evidence for bacterial life on Earth is 3 billion years ago, but other evidence points to life existing 3.5 or 3.8 billion years ago, not long after the Earth cooled enough for liquid water to exist on the surface. We've found water on Mars, the moon, in the atmosphere of Venus and on other moons in our solar system as well as in comets that visit the inner solar system from the Oort cloud. Since water is made up of two of the three most abundant elements in the universe that is hardly surprising. I think it would be a very safe bet that some of the 80+ million Earth-sized planets in the right orbits for water to exist as a liquid would have it on their surface.
As far as life coming into being, we don't know. But again, we have a sample size of 1 and 1 positive result. We have 80 million candidates to choose from in our galaxy and 100 billion other galaxies to look at. To assume that life wouldn't exist anywhere else would be a much less tenable position than the reverse.
What we need to to is find a way to take the spectrum of those planets' atmospheres as they pass in front of their star. If we can do that, and we find that their atmospheres contain a lot of Oxygen, that would be almost certain proof of life.
The Sun won't extinguish life on Earth for billions of years. 6 million years ago we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. If you think the dominant life form on Earth in 2 billion years will be "human", you are mistaken.
Kepler is only looking at Sun-like stars, which only account for 13% of the stars in our galaxy. Also the mission has only been going on for two years and they need at least two transits to say they might have found a planet, so this wouldn't count planets much further away from their star than Earth is from Sol.
Using the figures here I come up with 78 million in our galaxy: Kepler found 5 Earth sized planets in the habitable zone. They searched 156000 Sun-like stars. 13% of the stars in our galaxy are sun-like. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Kepler would only find Earth if the axis of rotation of the system was within about 1/2 degree of the viewing angle. The relative angles are random. Sorry I only came up with 78 million, but if you take into account that there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, that means there are about as many Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone around sun-like stars in the observable universe as there are grains of sand in ALL the beaches on Earth...
The InputStream is the one being read from and the OutputStream is the one bing written to. The same stream will be called both depending on which side you're looking at.
What do governments usually do when they decide that a substance corrupts the society and influences people to commit crime? They ban that substance and device laws that give harsh punishments to the sellers of that substance.
Aren't the songs themselves the addictive substance that is getting abused? Maybe the government should put forth the idea of banning the sale of music entirely to wake up these morally bankrupt money-grubbers.
$62,500 per song. I saw somewhere that the artist gets less than 60% on iTunes, so let's say 60 cents per song. let's say 5mb per song. She would have had to upload the song 104,000 times which would be 520 gb. For 24 songs that is 12.5 terabytes. My upload speed is capped at 1mbit. That would cap my upload limit for over 3 years with 2.5 million uploads. Statutory damages are supposed to be so that the copyright holder won't have to go through the trouble of calculating actual damages if it is difficult, not to onerously punish someone far outside the bounds of the actual damages. This is unjust. If there is ever a intellectual freedom party, sign me up.
They are relying on the fact that once a bit goes bad it will never fix itself, so it doesn't matter much if a few more errors creep in. Let's say
I fail to see the utililty... If the OS can be compromised, this doesn't help at all. If it can't, then why bother?
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Are those even proper sentences?
Even one time pads are susceptible to brute force attacks.
The only way you can make the assertion that they are not is to assume the original message was simply random characters, with no obvious language.
If the original was normal human readable text it becomes immediately obvious when your brute force succeeds and a subsequent dictionary comparison of each word yields a hit.
Actually you can substitute random bytes for the message and your brute force will be equally successful. How does that help you tell what the message actually said?
If I handed you two messages:
1) The account numbers to the secret Swiss Bank account are 3432376482 and 367282345. Please do not access the accounts more than once a month.
--and 2) aljkhwerh;lkjerja;ke ;werj ;kljr;qijaof; ;ileurie;oir;iw;; ;lekjeri ;wkrie9jg; ;'keroje;kj ;wljejrei ioj;akjie;titj ww';ler;lj e;kerjw
Which one of those would your 5th grader choose?
The problem was you would be handing that 5th grader every single possible message. Look at it this way. Let's say you KNOW that the message says "Your PIN number is XXXX" with XXXX replaced by the actual PIN number. In most crypto systems you could brute-force the key used to encrypt the data by trying each one and testing the results against this string to see if it matches the correct format. If you go through every possible key, then one of the resulting strings contains the correct PIN number.
In a one-time pad you can immediately figure out the first 19 bytes of the pad because you know what the start of the message is. That doesn't do you any good however because you have absolutely no idea what the remaining 4 bytes of the pad are. And those first 19 bytes of the pad will never be used again in the current message or in any other (hence the one-time pad). The last four bytes of the pad are equally likely to be anything that would result in four digits given the encrypted text you received. The result of your "brute-force" attack would be 10,000 possible keys yielding 10,000 possible PIN numbers that all would match the encrypted message you received.
Congratulations, you used your knowledge of what the message must contain to tell you exactly what you already knew with no way to find out anything you don't already know.
Put another way, you can use whatever rules you would use to test that the resulting decrypted message was valid and generate the possibilities without ever looking at the message. In an example below let's say that you have three characters and you know they form a three letter word. You can either:
All produce the same results and are just as likely to be the correct text of the message. Trying to brute-force the actual message is no better than trying to brute-force random bytes.
Does it matter how we got them? Mexico used to have them, now we do. To me "Giving them back" means giving them something they used to have. If A steal's B's bicycle and B gives it to C, wouldn't you say C gave the bicycle back to A if they did that even though B took it?
The article I read stated that he changed the passwords himself and then wouldn't tell anyone the new passwords. From what I've ready the network was apparently unusable for days. Apparently disrupting access to a city-wide network is illegal?
So if a bank hired a guy to build their vault and kept the guy on to open it every morning, would he have to give them the combination if they fired him? The network and passwords to the routers are the city's property and he should have handed them over.
How did you get my /. password?!?!
I want to see them remove the Safari app now...
The flowchart has deplorable tactics such as telling people to cite their sources and disclose their connection to the Air Force if they decide to respond to an online post about the Air Force. If only the people that really assassinated JFK would have had this flow chart to go by...
From the ruling.
It does not say specifically that a devide that was in general public use would be allowed, but it did narrow this particular decision.
The court also drew a strict line at the barrier to the home. The three dissenters even said that in this case the product just measured the temperature of the exterior of the home, and that other factors such as melting snow in one area could be used to determine the same facts. The 6 member majority took the long view in calling it a search in the hopes of curtailing the use of future technology that would be able to "see inside" the home.
I would like to point out part of Stevens' dissent:
It should be obvious that legislators do not do this, and also that law enforcement will use every tool at their disposal whether it invades privacy or not. We wouldn't have court cases like this, like the one about listening in with a hyper-sensitive microphone on a conversation in a phone booth or like tracking cars with GPS without a warrant if that weren't the case.
What could be discerned from just checking the temperature of the outside of the house? For one, couldn't you tell when someone was taking a hot shower or bath by how hot the outside of the bathroom wall was? It seems like the frequency and duration of bathing in ones own home would be something that normally couldn't be discerned without entry into the home. The protections aren't there for the protection of criminals, but to protect the entire public's privacy. It's not just about whether the evidence can be used in a court case, but whether the police should be performing the surveillance at all.
For another thing, I hope that it took a whole lot more evidence than the thermal tapes to get the warrant to search the house. My dad had a beautiful garden and use to raise plants indoors also. I would hate to think that the police would come knocking down our door for that reason, or because we had a tanning bed or heat lamp.
Scientology uses quackery, the 'e-meter'. They use brainwashing techniques to extort money from their members. Their lies about psychology and psychiatry lead to harm. They are the only religion I know of that makes their teachings a secret. Xenu is purportedly kept secret because learning too early (i.e. before a significant amount of brainwashing has been accomplished) would cause immediate death. In reality, I doubt anyone would become a scientologist if they knew the ridiculousness of it prior to joining.
You have just perfectly described the "technology" used by scientologists when confronted by critics. Watch videos of them on youtube, they simply call the person immoral, say they committed crimes or simply denigrate their appearance or something in their life. It is their policy to attack people that disagree with them. Look at the organized harassment of their critics. Why would someone want to belong to a group so filled with hatred?
What about countries considering them a cult and putting them on trial for fraud?
Is this really improper? Five countries and one continent (group of countries) are listed. The "handful of other countries" specifies that there are more countries to be added to the list. If it just said "a handful of others" then you wouldn't know for sure if it were referring to more countries or continents, but I take it as a list of political entities including the European Union, five named countries and several other unspecified countries which is entirely proper.
To me this ruling seems to come more from theism than atheism. We are a product of our genes and our upbringing. The argument that someone cannot control their actions due to some genetic trait or because they were mistreated when they were young implies that there is some outside thing, the soul or wherever free will comes from, that has been abused by heritage or upbringing and is not responsible for its actions and should not be punished. Laws are created to bind members of a society to a code of conduct, and people that breach that code should be held equally responsible for their actions. It may be more difficult for this man to refrain from killing people than it is for you or I, but we should all obey the same rules or face the same punishments.
Would you also keep using the same program and let it run even though it continually crashes or produces erroneous results?
That would severely restrict investigations by the police. Police can currently stake out or follow someone to find out where they're going, they just can't use an automated device without a warrant. Written like you say, the police couldn't even ask someone at the crime scene who was there because that would be 'tracking' them.
The privacy concerns if police were allowed to track anyone without warrant or even reason are astounding. I'm sure they would love it if they could stick cheap RFID tags on vehicles without people knowing and install monitors on all traffic lights. They could gather all the data and issue automatic speeding tickets based solely on how much time it took your RFID tag to go between two detectors. They could bring anyone that drove by a store that was robbed in for questioning even though they didn't do anything...