That scheme falls apart when the investigators know what TrueCrypt does.
"Give me your password. No, the one for the hidden volume."
Any TrueCrypt volume can contain a hidden volume. Even if that volume is itself a hidden volume. Think Russian dolls: it's hidden volumes all the way down.
So: in the first layer, it's your accounts. Financial spreadsheets. Reasonable stuff to keep encrypted. Second layer, lawful but exotically kinky and very embarrassing porn. Reasonable stuff to keep both encrypted and hidden. Third layer, terrorism plans.
As long as the existence of a hidden volume is truly impossible to prove, then you're safe. The police might insist that there must be a hidden volume because it's the unique selling point of TrueCrypt - and so you give them one. But you can deny them the third layer, and 'We didn't find the evidence we wanted, so he MUST be hiding it somewhere, so find him guilty' doesn't usually work very well in court.
A lot of crime seems very inefficient. $200 for a new car window, $200 for a new stereo, $200 for the dashboard repairs, and the thief got $20.
Ultimately, that's why it's crime in the first place. The thief does $600 of damage to profit himself by $20 - net loss to the economy, $580. And even if the thief is skilled in his art and does no damage, he steals a stereo that costs $200 to replace and gets $20 for it from the fence. Not exactly a Pareto optimum here, is it?
If the thief could get more for the stereo than it would cost his victim to replace it, he wouldn't bother being a thief in the first place. He'd buy the stereo fairly and sell it on for a profit. Then he'd do it again, and again, and he and his sometime 'victim' profit handsomely together, and after a while find that they're running a small business in the car stereo wholesale trade.
Space X was founded in june of 2002. Just six years later, starting from a clean sheet of paper and producing most all of the rocket themselves; structures, engines, avionics, falcon 1 successfully reached orbit. The falcon 9 is being prepared to fly next year, as is the dragon seven crew/cargo spacecraft. Could NASA or any of it's contractors do the same in as short a time?
NASA was founded in July 1958. John Glenn orbited the Earth in February 1962. Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in July 1969.
Do they really expect me to believe that it takes 120 years to build a library?
Maybe not. But how long does it take to write all the books that go into it? The building 'library' is a token representing the development in that city of an intellectual elite that considers ideas to be things worth writing down, storing safely and making available to others.
And anyway, if you want a building and don't want to wait for it, you're an ancient-world ruler. Get out your whip! Cities with a granary and decent food production will replace their populations quickly enough, so discover Bronze Working, implement Slavery and have yourself a construction boom.
They do not apply to enemy military personnel, especially enemy personnel wh fail to uphold their Geneva Convention responsibilities to dress in military uniform and carry their weapons openly (so as not to cause problems in telling military and civilians apart) who are picked up either (a) in the act of sabotage or (b) on the battlefield itself.
This is a strange meme - the notion that to be an unlawful combatant, you have to have carried weapons on a battlefield. American government lawyers disagree.
Could a "little old lady in Switzerland" who sent a check to an orphanage in Afghanistan be taken into custody if unbeknownst to her some of her donation was passed to al-Qaida terrorists? asked U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green.
"She could," replied Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle. "Someone's intention is clearly not a factor that would disable detention." It would be up to a newly established military review panel to decide whether to believe her and release her.
So you don't need to carry a gun. You don't even need to have any intention of supporting terrorism. Team America will have you away to Cuba post haste anyway.
Now, how about this 'battlefield'? Where is it?
Noting the Supreme Court said detention was to keep combatants from returning to the battlefield, Green asked, "What and where is the battlefield the U.S.military is trying to detain the prisoners from returning to? Africa? London?"
Boyle: "The conflict with al-Qaida has a global reach."
So I suppose it's technically true that all the Guantanamo prisoners were captured on the battlefield. America defines the battlefield as the whole of Planet Earth.
Wouldn't the fact that the material is by Dickens and Austen be enough to stop copying? I, for one, wouldn't pirate it if you paid me.
As a matter of fact Dickens faced enormous problems with piracy at the time. It seems that certain rogue countries in that pre-Berne Convention era saw fit to disregard Dickens's copyrights and allowed pirate printers to profit by his works without paying the author so much as a penny.
158 thousand, million, million miles from the Earth. Is that a real number?
'Billion' is ambiguous - in some countries it's one thousand million, in others one million million. 'Trillion' is only a household word if you're in Zimbabwe. This number requires 'quadrillion', at which point the average reader's brain shuts down.
That's the nature of an unobservable object. All you can do is infer its existence through its effects on other objects, in this case through the gravitational effects on stars. But then all you've *proven* is that something is causing those effects. The simplest explanation is a black hole, but it could be something else, and that's why black holes are still considered theoretical.
That's the nature of an unobservable object. All you can do is infer its existence through its effects on other objects, in this case through the reflective effects on sunlight. But then all you've *proven* is that something is causing those effects. The simplest explanation is the moon, but it could be something else, and that's why the moon is still considered theoretical.
I was more surprised that no one jumped on the statement: "four million times heavier than our sun".
Didn't much bother me. If they'd said 'weighs four million times as much as the Sun' I'd complain - but 'heavy' to my mind doesn't specifically refer to weight as opposed to mass. If I find that a bag full of shopping is difficult to lift, I'll call it heavy. If I find that a trolley full of shopping is difficult to stop or to steer, I'll call that heavy too. One is weight, the other inertia, both called 'heavy'.
And even if a bit of infrastructure and "pockets" of advanced civilization remain, what is the chance that they will be even remotely like our civilization, even if only by their approach to "science" and "progress".
Their approach to science and progress might well be different, but the people of the post-nuclear wasteland will be like us in one important respect: war. War never changes.
Religion and science are two different fields with two different goals. Science asks "HOW" and religion asks "WHY".
Eh... depends what you mean by 'why', since religion's answer is often 'Because God wanted it that way' - not really satisfying. It might be better to say that science makes testable statements and religion makes untestable statements - that's where faith comes in, and was the whole point of the Doubting Thomas scene. You shouldn't need to test a religious statement. And of course if your religion is making testable statements, it's setting itself up for trouble when people actually do test them. Sooner or later there's always someone who climbs Mount Olympus.
You know what would actually be surprising? Opening a treasure chest in the next Zelda game and not having it pause to play the "da da da da da da da da" soundbyte.
That's the one that plays when you discover a secret. Opening a treasure chest is 'da da da daaaaaaaah'.
This is a really weird analogy, but this reminds me of snow crash - individual areas secured by their owners, and huge unprotected wastes and everything in between. Too far fetched a nerd reference?
Not at all. This is central to the cyberpunk aesthetic, which views society from a hacker's perspective.
Consider the changes in the network, from the days of ruinously expensive proprietary UNIX available only on mainframes at large corporate and academic sites, to the modern age in which any individual's cheap home computer can provide all manner of network services, given only sufficient bandwidth and a distribution of free open-source software, are tremendous. The internet is rich with self-organising tribal societies clustering around memes rather than geography.
Now extend that to civilisation as a whole, which is only a larger network. What does it matter if my network address ends in.uk and not, say,.ie? Not a whole lot. This way lies the distributed, post-nation-state world of Snow Crash, in which people group together according to ideology, tribalism, or sheer common commercial interest. Cyberpunk is a world run by whatever corporations or other collectives can keep up with the rate of change, with hackers as an elite intellectual class of individualists hired on ad hoc by the rulers, and Anonymous as the proletariat. Snow Crash might not be too far off, but if I were to come back in a hundred years, I wouldn't be too surprised to find a society looking more like Transmetropolitan.
Her name is not used, for fear of losing her favour - nobody's willing to chance it. She is the goddess in opposition to Fate, capricious, unpredictable and definitively dangerous, the subject of every superstition. Never worshipped, but often trusted to, always needed, and almost universally believed in by all, whether for good or bad. Strongly associated with chaotic systems - such as dice, whose devotees she will sometimes favour, but rarely if ever will it be often enough.
Can you imagine the courage it would take today, to defy Congress, the President and the Supreme Court, (the entire government of their day) all at once, openly, to their face, for a fable or a lie?
Speeding = being judged to be travelling faster than an artificial and arbitrary limit which does not take account of vehicle or driving conditions
Read your Highway Code. The speed limits are a maximum for a car in a good state of maintenance, with clear visibility and a dry road. If conditions of car or road or weather or traffic are poor, you're supposed to SLOW DOWN.
Look, if you're not prepared to spend four years slaughtering an entire generation across a whole continent from time to time, what will become of civilisation? Why, anarchists will be shooting archdukes with total impunity!
In particular, the conflict resolution skills of Vasiliy Arkhipov, who, on 27th October 1962, resolved a conflict aboard the submarine B-59 over whether to launch a nuclear torpedo against the USS Randolph battle group, which was dropping depth charges at the time. Had that debate gone the other way a Soviet nuclear weapon would have detonated off the Cuban coast, destroying a dozen American warships, at the very height of Cold War paranoia and tension. The outcome would not have been pleasant.
The holocaust wasn't about killing off a race. It was about attacking and marginalizing a minority. And it is happening today, on a smaller scale; Guantanamo Bay.
Oh, fuck off. Guantanamo Bay is an atrocity that blackens the good name of the United States and for which I hope the name of George W. Bush will be remembered with greater loathing even than Nixon. But it is nothing remotely like the Holocaust - it's similar only insofar as it's a prison camp. Call me when they install gas chambers there.
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Occasionally, pouring alcohol into a computer really can work. Just how far can you overclock a 486SX/25?
(It's quite a long file. Begin at line 317.)
Any TrueCrypt volume can contain a hidden volume. Even if that volume is itself a hidden volume. Think Russian dolls: it's hidden volumes all the way down.
So: in the first layer, it's your accounts. Financial spreadsheets. Reasonable stuff to keep encrypted. Second layer, lawful but exotically kinky and very embarrassing porn. Reasonable stuff to keep both encrypted and hidden. Third layer, terrorism plans.
As long as the existence of a hidden volume is truly impossible to prove, then you're safe. The police might insist that there must be a hidden volume because it's the unique selling point of TrueCrypt - and so you give them one. But you can deny them the third layer, and 'We didn't find the evidence we wanted, so he MUST be hiding it somewhere, so find him guilty' doesn't usually work very well in court.
Ultimately, that's why it's crime in the first place. The thief does $600 of damage to profit himself by $20 - net loss to the economy, $580. And even if the thief is skilled in his art and does no damage, he steals a stereo that costs $200 to replace and gets $20 for it from the fence. Not exactly a Pareto optimum here, is it?
If the thief could get more for the stereo than it would cost his victim to replace it, he wouldn't bother being a thief in the first place. He'd buy the stereo fairly and sell it on for a profit. Then he'd do it again, and again, and he and his sometime 'victim' profit handsomely together, and after a while find that they're running a small business in the car stereo wholesale trade.
NASA was founded in July 1958. John Glenn orbited the Earth in February 1962. Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in July 1969.
Maybe not. But how long does it take to write all the books that go into it? The building 'library' is a token representing the development in that city of an intellectual elite that considers ideas to be things worth writing down, storing safely and making available to others.
And anyway, if you want a building and don't want to wait for it, you're an ancient-world ruler. Get out your whip! Cities with a granary and decent food production will replace their populations quickly enough, so discover Bronze Working, implement Slavery and have yourself a construction boom.
This is a strange meme - the notion that to be an unlawful combatant, you have to have carried weapons on a battlefield. American government lawyers disagree.
Could a "little old lady in Switzerland" who sent a check to an orphanage in Afghanistan be taken into custody if unbeknownst to her some of her donation was passed to al-Qaida terrorists? asked U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green.
"She could," replied Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle. "Someone's intention is clearly not a factor that would disable detention." It would be up to a newly established military review panel to decide whether to believe her and release her.
So you don't need to carry a gun. You don't even need to have any intention of supporting terrorism. Team America will have you away to Cuba post haste anyway.
Now, how about this 'battlefield'? Where is it?
Noting the Supreme Court said detention was to keep combatants from returning to the battlefield, Green asked, "What and where is the battlefield the U.S.military is trying to detain the prisoners from returning to? Africa? London?"
Boyle: "The conflict with al-Qaida has a global reach."
So I suppose it's technically true that all the Guantanamo prisoners were captured on the battlefield. America defines the battlefield as the whole of Planet Earth.
As a matter of fact Dickens faced enormous problems with piracy at the time. It seems that certain rogue countries in that pre-Berne Convention era saw fit to disregard Dickens's copyrights and allowed pirate printers to profit by his works without paying the author so much as a penny.
'Billion' is ambiguous - in some countries it's one thousand million, in others one million million. 'Trillion' is only a household word if you're in Zimbabwe. This number requires 'quadrillion', at which point the average reader's brain shuts down.
That's the nature of an unobservable object. All you can do is infer its existence through its effects on other objects, in this case through the reflective effects on sunlight. But then all you've *proven* is that something is causing those effects. The simplest explanation is the moon, but it could be something else, and that's why the moon is still considered theoretical.
Didn't much bother me. If they'd said 'weighs four million times as much as the Sun' I'd complain - but 'heavy' to my mind doesn't specifically refer to weight as opposed to mass. If I find that a bag full of shopping is difficult to lift, I'll call it heavy. If I find that a trolley full of shopping is difficult to stop or to steer, I'll call that heavy too. One is weight, the other inertia, both called 'heavy'.
Yes. For instance, one imprisoned innocents and forced them to work all their lives as slave labour, while the other... er...
Their approach to science and progress might well be different, but the people of the post-nuclear wasteland will be like us in one important respect: war. War never changes.
Eh... depends what you mean by 'why', since religion's answer is often 'Because God wanted it that way' - not really satisfying. It might be better to say that science makes testable statements and religion makes untestable statements - that's where faith comes in, and was the whole point of the Doubting Thomas scene. You shouldn't need to test a religious statement. And of course if your religion is making testable statements, it's setting itself up for trouble when people actually do test them. Sooner or later there's always someone who climbs Mount Olympus.
That's the one that plays when you discover a secret. Opening a treasure chest is 'da da da daaaaaaaah'.
Not at all. This is central to the cyberpunk aesthetic, which views society from a hacker's perspective.
Consider the changes in the network, from the days of ruinously expensive proprietary UNIX available only on mainframes at large corporate and academic sites, to the modern age in which any individual's cheap home computer can provide all manner of network services, given only sufficient bandwidth and a distribution of free open-source software, are tremendous. The internet is rich with self-organising tribal societies clustering around memes rather than geography.
Now extend that to civilisation as a whole, which is only a larger network. What does it matter if my network address ends in .uk and not, say, .ie? Not a whole lot. This way lies the distributed, post-nation-state world of Snow Crash, in which people group together according to ideology, tribalism, or sheer common commercial interest. Cyberpunk is a world run by whatever corporations or other collectives can keep up with the rate of change, with hackers as an elite intellectual class of individualists hired on ad hoc by the rulers, and Anonymous as the proletariat. Snow Crash might not be too far off, but if I were to come back in a hundred years, I wouldn't be too surprised to find a society looking more like Transmetropolitan.
Her name is not used, for fear of losing her favour - nobody's willing to chance it. She is the goddess in opposition to Fate, capricious, unpredictable and definitively dangerous, the subject of every superstition. Never worshipped, but often trusted to, always needed, and almost universally believed in by all, whether for good or bad. Strongly associated with chaotic systems - such as dice, whose devotees she will sometimes favour, but rarely if ever will it be often enough.
Like David Koresh and his followers did?
Read your Highway Code. The speed limits are a maximum for a car in a good state of maintenance, with clear visibility and a dry road. If conditions of car or road or weather or traffic are poor, you're supposed to SLOW DOWN.
Look, if you're not prepared to spend four years slaughtering an entire generation across a whole continent from time to time, what will become of civilisation? Why, anarchists will be shooting archdukes with total impunity!
My passphrase is 'Hello, Hello, It's Good To Be Back'.
It's just misspelled. 'Hurd Immunity': a system gets no viruses because it has no users.
In particular, the conflict resolution skills of Vasiliy Arkhipov, who, on 27th October 1962, resolved a conflict aboard the submarine B-59 over whether to launch a nuclear torpedo against the USS Randolph battle group, which was dropping depth charges at the time. Had that debate gone the other way a Soviet nuclear weapon would have detonated off the Cuban coast, destroying a dozen American warships, at the very height of Cold War paranoia and tension. The outcome would not have been pleasant.
Stanislav Petrov saved your life in 1983.
Oh, fuck off. Guantanamo Bay is an atrocity that blackens the good name of the United States and for which I hope the name of George W. Bush will be remembered with greater loathing even than Nixon. But it is nothing remotely like the Holocaust - it's similar only insofar as it's a prison camp. Call me when they install gas chambers there.