Unfortunately, that's exactly what they do. They find fingerprints and hair at a scene, and then run them through "the system" to see if they can find a match. Any matches are immediately suspects.
For certain crime scenes (like a single woman's bathroom) random bits of hair and skin from a stranger is a decent indicator that the stranger was involved with the victim in the recent past. For others, like the aforementioned convenience store, all it means is that you're a person who lives on this planet.
I would be ok with these national database if there were rules as to who could access them and for what purpose. Like you said, they need to be locked down so that only a detective who has convinced a judge that the hair or blood found at the scene of the crime is likely to belong to the suspect can push the DNA through the database and proceed to harass the 300,000 Americans that DNA will "match."
By allowing law enforcement to have a global databank of the DNA of anyone arrested for any reason (even falsely) you're allowing innocent people to be linked to crime scenes that they simply passed through. Do you know what the odds are of leaving your DNA in a place where a crime would be committed? Have you ever scratched your head in a motel room or a convenience store? Have you ever used a public toilet (or a tree on the side of the road)?
The situation where the police take DNA from anyone arrested for any reason and keep it indefinitely (which, I agree with Jason, is the eventual end-game for this law) means that any shoplifter, speeder, or protester can be linked to much more serious crimes they had nothing to do with, arrested and held for the extent of the investigation, or even convicted. That's where your liberty goes.
Though, as stated by other posters, that's the declaration of independence and non-binding.
No one is saying that spying on Joe the Plumber is right, or it's good to do. All security violations, especially when it reveals private details, are wrong. Palin's email break-in was wrong (though it turned up evidence of wrongdoing), Joe the Plumber's driving and tax record violation was wrong, and breaking into Obama's cell phone records was wrong. Don't hijack the thread with a "liberals are evil hypocrites" discussion.
Though if you must, Joe the Plumber wasn't destroyed for "having the audacity to ask hard, serious economic questions", he was destroyed because he's not a licensed plumber, will never buy a plumbing business, and doesn't actually pay his taxes.
I'm interested in your experiences in this topic. As a graduate of RPI and a former student of Selmer's (the researcher running this project) I believe that their goal is not only attainable, but if anyone can do it, this group can. I agree that creating a true, universal AI is enormously complex, but the hardware and methods they're using are up to the task.
Also:
"just the data recorded by said organism in even quite a small experience or skillset is so phenomenally huge that we probably couldn't store it unless Google helped, into something that a research student can do in six months on a small mainframe."
RTFA, please:
"Bringsjord's synthetic-character software runs on the supercomputers at CCNI, which together provide more than 100 teraflops, including a massively parallel IBM Blue Gene supercomputer (the title-holder to world's fastest supercomputer), a Linux cluster-supercomputer, and an Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processor-based cluster supercomputer."
This is a real AI project run and funded by the cognitive science department of one of the most advanced computer research universities in the world. This isn't an after-school project.
Also, I find your lack of faith disturbing.
DISCLAIMER: Not all women are bad and evil, I'm making generalizations that only apply to a small subset of women and merely illustrating situations where things can go wrong. I'm not trying to start a sex-based flame war./DISCLAIMER
I agree with the AC who also responded to this post. Companies, especially in America, are overly concerned with sexual harassment. And all it takes is one accusation to blacklist you, sometimes forever.
Everyone knows that one woman who thinks that every time a man makes eye contact it's a come-on. There are women who think that merely approaching them is akin to demanding sexual favors. Approaching a woman like this and casually asking her to join your group for any non-business reason is enough to send her off to the HR department. It's not a risk I want to take, even if it would be nice to have her in the group. It's a shame, and the only real solution is for the woman to do the approaching.
Blogger Users Have Had This
on
Gmail Gets RSS
·
· Score: 1
My girlfriend was a long time Blogger user, and she had a GMail account before I even read about it on Slashdot. She's had these RSS feeds for at least 2 months on her account. She was also the first to get the rich text formatting, mail forwarding, and other things. I guess they implement the new features in the order in which the accounts were created.
She still only has 4 invites though, when everyone else has 50, she's not pleased about that.
Another thing we can thank Sony for is for providing another item contributing to the plausible deniability of virus/worm writers. "I'm sorry your honor, but ever since I bought that Celine Dion CD, world-destroying viruses have been shooting out of my computer."
I hope someone writes a virus that damages sony in some way, and the rootkit is used as a part of his successful defense.
America isn't the pro-society utopia that certain people would like you to believe it is. All entities in America follow the Adam Smith version of economics, in which every entity fights for their own economic dominance without care for the well being of others. In theory, this results in the strongest surviving to provide the best products and services to the most people. The motivation is personal wealth. This idea is so ingrained in American consciousness that it's very difficult for Americans to care about the general well being of the society as a whole. For an example, look at the state of charitable donations in America. Most donations are given to the Red Cross or WHO or other organizations who mainly focus their efforts on the Third World. America has a large amount of homeless, unemployed, orphans, etc. However they have obviously failed in their task of making themselves wealthy by being the best, so they are left out in the cold.
Now, to answer your question, no matter what, American companies care about themselves first and only. The only reason you see an American company "doing good" is in response to bleeding heart shareholders or politicians. In this scenario, the company is only doing their good deeds in order to get people off their back so they can return to squeezing their employees and customers out of every cent. In the specific case of the NO WiFi, the phone companies are not going to cooperate with any effort that removes such a large chunk of potential customers.
The communications companies are terrified of the new developments in free municipal internet. All they see is red lines on a chart, they don't see how good this could be for NO. Free internet, coupled with cheap computers and a new school district centered around internet learning would (hopefully) transform NO from a near-slum into a center for high tech learning. Even if it didn't perform to that degree, it would still help the previously underprivileged gain a foothold which they can use to make a better life for themselves, because no one here will help them.
Where do you see that they are both run by the same group? Wikipedia is for valid information that can be backed up by even more valid references. Uncyclopedia is meant to be a humorous source of false or useless information. They both use a free piece of software called a Wiki, but so do lots of sites these days. It's ridiculous to lump all of them together into a single category. PHP.org, Wikipedia, Uncyclopedia, xisc.org, and hundreds, if not thousands, of other sites use a Wiki powered online documentation feature. This doesn't mean taht these sites have anything to do with each other, and the content validity of one site does not reflect on the content validity of any other.
Your arguments are akin to saying "The Onion uses HTML, and so does CNN.com, so obviously CNN.com is not a valid news source."
Just because they're both Wiki powered doesn't mean they're the same, or even related. The format similarity that you all are so annoyed at is simply the Wiki default template.
I don't think there's anywhere "safe" to locate research labs. Major cities are located on areas of instability and danger, that's just the way is has to work. Lowlands, flood zones, fault lines, river deltas, old mountain ranges and fertile plains are all prime places for cities to be located, and also prime places for natural disasters to strike. New York City is located on a relatively small island at the mouth of a large river, unprotected by barrier islands on the sea side, and unprotected by dams and floodgates on the river side. If a hurricane in the Atlantic or flooding in the Adirondacks is serious enough to endanger New York, no one is going to be saying "well we shouldn't have located such a major city in such a dangerous area," that would be stupid.
The same goes for cities far from the coast. Dallas and Salt Lake City are both hundreds of miles from the nearest water-based natural disaster threat, but they can still be hit by tornadoes. Even cities like Oneonta NY, free from tornadoes, far from the coast, and bordered by a small river almost incapable of flooding, is at risk. A small earthquake during a period of heavy rains could trigger mudslides.
Basically, what I'm trying to say here is, there is no guarantee that city X won't be hit by a natural disaster. The worst part about it is, prime city locations are generally defined by proximity to sources of water or easy transportation, and sources of water and easy transportation are incredibly conducive to natural disasters. Only when we start building cities for no other reason than being safe from natural disasters will our research be completely safe. And even then, the sheer expense of mountaintop cities, with power, communication, and water lines, plus the added cost of mountain-safe construction and engineering, would be immense.
After spending more than 2 hours in the board game store in my mall, I came across a game called Nautilus. Roughly an hour and a half to play through, it involves a number of different levels of strategy. The concept is simple: All players take turns laying down tiles which make up an undersea base, complete with living and 5 different kinds of work "modules." Then launch your submarines and explore the ocean floor, attempting to not only collect the most items, but also to have the most researchers in the research modules. With a fixed number of researchers, and the number of researchers in each module type influencing the way your sub can act, the game gets rather strategic. Plus the game looks damn impossible to understand to people who walk in on you playing it, which is always a plus.
Incidentially, if there's a "game shop" near you that specializes in tabletop or board games, talk to the guys there, at the game store near me, they get a customer every 6 hours or so, and spend the rest of their time gaming against each other.
Game testing really is work. Imagine if you were a professional baseball tester, and your job was th take each baseball off the assembly line and throw it to a guy across the room, and he would catch it and put it in the "accepted" pile. If he missed the ball or it wwasn't flying straight, it would go behind him to the "reject" pile. As much as I love playing catch, after a couple days of that I'd want out of there real quick. To get a good perspective on what it's like to be a game tester, read Porkfry's game tester diary on Penny-Arcade
I bought one of these things like 6 months ago, and after 2 weeks the primary firing trigger broke. I emaled thinkgeek twice, and no one ever responded. This is why the only thing I buy from thinkgeek is shirts, everything else I can find elsewhere. The gun was really awesome while it worked though.
You can't draw parallels between this and an open office door. This is more like leaving the information on the ground at a public theme park. The theme park allows people inside no matter what, and the information is there but difficult to find. The same thing is true for this situation. The network was being broadcast over public airwaves and was accessible to the public, and the files were non-protected on the network. These files were in a public place. The nature of them infers that they are supposed to be private, but there is no certain way to tell with information that literally is left wide open in public.
I agree with you that it was immoral to access the information, but we're talking illegal here. Laws need to be edited to include situations such as this. Also, "authorization" is a crazy term to use in the computer world. Computers are automated. It can be argued that since they got an IP address from the AP, they were authorized. They submitted a request to join the network, and that request was honored, and they had access to the files. Sounds like authorization to me. The intent of the parties that accessed the information is important for the individual case, but the laws need to reflect the fact that they were indeed authorized to use the network. If they weren't, they couldn't have gotten in.
I actually just got this virus and was coming onto/. to post about it when I saw that it had already made the front page./. keeps up its tradition of reporting news before it happens. Anyway, I got this virus as an attachcment (didn't open it of course), and I noticed that it had spoofed its return address. Something else to think about.
There are ways to set up windows shares so that they do not reuire a password of any kind. In this case, the data is still publicly accessible. If the reporters were guessing passwords until they got access to the data, this tells us two things:
1) The school needs to require high-level passwords.
2) this reporters was seriously breaking and entering and should go to jail.
Either way, this is serious. If a regular reporter can wardrive around finding out school records (including psychological workups and SS#), then anyone can do it, regardless if he guessed passwords or not. The school should be required to beef up their security, or stop using wireless, which is ridiculous for a school anyway. Wire the buildings.
I disagree. Companies should be held liable for their own insecurities. If they left their accounting books on the floor behind the toilet at the local gas station, and a competitor read them all, the competitor could not be sued for accessing that information. The same is true of the internet, or computer networks of any form. That network was being broadcasted over public airwaves, and therefore is public property. If it were secured in any way, then it would be illegal to circumvent the security devices. Unfortunately for the school, it was not.
I was going to reply that you were wrong, but AC already did that for me. I really need to change my sig to my instructions for people posting on Slashdot:
Slashdot Mirror
For certain crime scenes (like a single woman's bathroom) random bits of hair and skin from a stranger is a decent indicator that the stranger was involved with the victim in the recent past. For others, like the aforementioned convenience store, all it means is that you're a person who lives on this planet.
I would be ok with these national database if there were rules as to who could access them and for what purpose. Like you said, they need to be locked down so that only a detective who has convinced a judge that the hair or blood found at the scene of the crime is likely to belong to the suspect can push the DNA through the database and proceed to harass the 300,000 Americans that DNA will "match."
By allowing law enforcement to have a global databank of the DNA of anyone arrested for any reason (even falsely) you're allowing innocent people to be linked to crime scenes that they simply passed through. Do you know what the odds are of leaving your DNA in a place where a crime would be committed? Have you ever scratched your head in a motel room or a convenience store? Have you ever used a public toilet (or a tree on the side of the road)? The situation where the police take DNA from anyone arrested for any reason and keep it indefinitely (which, I agree with Jason, is the eventual end-game for this law) means that any shoplifter, speeder, or protester can be linked to much more serious crimes they had nothing to do with, arrested and held for the extent of the investigation, or even convicted. That's where your liberty goes. Though, as stated by other posters, that's the declaration of independence and non-binding.
No one is saying that spying on Joe the Plumber is right, or it's good to do. All security violations, especially when it reveals private details, are wrong. Palin's email break-in was wrong (though it turned up evidence of wrongdoing), Joe the Plumber's driving and tax record violation was wrong, and breaking into Obama's cell phone records was wrong. Don't hijack the thread with a "liberals are evil hypocrites" discussion. Though if you must, Joe the Plumber wasn't destroyed for "having the audacity to ask hard, serious economic questions", he was destroyed because he's not a licensed plumber, will never buy a plumbing business, and doesn't actually pay his taxes.
I'm interested in your experiences in this topic. As a graduate of RPI and a former student of Selmer's (the researcher running this project) I believe that their goal is not only attainable, but if anyone can do it, this group can. I agree that creating a true, universal AI is enormously complex, but the hardware and methods they're using are up to the task. Also: "just the data recorded by said organism in even quite a small experience or skillset is so phenomenally huge that we probably couldn't store it unless Google helped, into something that a research student can do in six months on a small mainframe." RTFA, please: "Bringsjord's synthetic-character software runs on the supercomputers at CCNI, which together provide more than 100 teraflops, including a massively parallel IBM Blue Gene supercomputer (the title-holder to world's fastest supercomputer), a Linux cluster-supercomputer, and an Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processor-based cluster supercomputer." This is a real AI project run and funded by the cognitive science department of one of the most advanced computer research universities in the world. This isn't an after-school project. Also, I find your lack of faith disturbing.
DISCLAIMER: Not all women are bad and evil, I'm making generalizations that only apply to a small subset of women and merely illustrating situations where things can go wrong. I'm not trying to start a sex-based flame war. /DISCLAIMER
I agree with the AC who also responded to this post. Companies, especially in America, are overly concerned with sexual harassment. And all it takes is one accusation to blacklist you, sometimes forever.
Everyone knows that one woman who thinks that every time a man makes eye contact it's a come-on. There are women who think that merely approaching them is akin to demanding sexual favors. Approaching a woman like this and casually asking her to join your group for any non-business reason is enough to send her off to the HR department. It's not a risk I want to take, even if it would be nice to have her in the group. It's a shame, and the only real solution is for the woman to do the approaching.
She still only has 4 invites though, when everyone else has 50, she's not pleased about that.
I hope someone writes a virus that damages sony in some way, and the rootkit is used as a part of his successful defense.
Not that I'm advocating virus writing.
Now, to answer your question, no matter what, American companies care about themselves first and only. The only reason you see an American company "doing good" is in response to bleeding heart shareholders or politicians. In this scenario, the company is only doing their good deeds in order to get people off their back so they can return to squeezing their employees and customers out of every cent. In the specific case of the NO WiFi, the phone companies are not going to cooperate with any effort that removes such a large chunk of potential customers.
The communications companies are terrified of the new developments in free municipal internet. All they see is red lines on a chart, they don't see how good this could be for NO. Free internet, coupled with cheap computers and a new school district centered around internet learning would (hopefully) transform NO from a near-slum into a center for high tech learning. Even if it didn't perform to that degree, it would still help the previously underprivileged gain a foothold which they can use to make a better life for themselves, because no one here will help them.
Your arguments are akin to saying "The Onion uses HTML, and so does CNN.com, so obviously CNN.com is not a valid news source."
Just because they're both Wiki powered doesn't mean they're the same, or even related. The format similarity that you all are so annoyed at is simply the Wiki default template.
Damn. I guess we'll never be safe then.
The same goes for cities far from the coast. Dallas and Salt Lake City are both hundreds of miles from the nearest water-based natural disaster threat, but they can still be hit by tornadoes. Even cities like Oneonta NY, free from tornadoes, far from the coast, and bordered by a small river almost incapable of flooding, is at risk. A small earthquake during a period of heavy rains could trigger mudslides.
Basically, what I'm trying to say here is, there is no guarantee that city X won't be hit by a natural disaster. The worst part about it is, prime city locations are generally defined by proximity to sources of water or easy transportation, and sources of water and easy transportation are incredibly conducive to natural disasters. Only when we start building cities for no other reason than being safe from natural disasters will our research be completely safe. And even then, the sheer expense of mountaintop cities, with power, communication, and water lines, plus the added cost of mountain-safe construction and engineering, would be immense.
After spending more than 2 hours in the board game store in my mall, I came across a game called Nautilus. Roughly an hour and a half to play through, it involves a number of different levels of strategy. The concept is simple: All players take turns laying down tiles which make up an undersea base, complete with living and 5 different kinds of work "modules." Then launch your submarines and explore the ocean floor, attempting to not only collect the most items, but also to have the most researchers in the research modules. With a fixed number of researchers, and the number of researchers in each module type influencing the way your sub can act, the game gets rather strategic. Plus the game looks damn impossible to understand to people who walk in on you playing it, which is always a plus. Incidentially, if there's a "game shop" near you that specializes in tabletop or board games, talk to the guys there, at the game store near me, they get a customer every 6 hours or so, and spend the rest of their time gaming against each other.
Game testing really is work. Imagine if you were a professional baseball tester, and your job was th take each baseball off the assembly line and throw it to a guy across the room, and he would catch it and put it in the "accepted" pile. If he missed the ball or it wwasn't flying straight, it would go behind him to the "reject" pile. As much as I love playing catch, after a couple days of that I'd want out of there real quick. To get a good perspective on what it's like to be a game tester, read Porkfry's game tester diary on Penny-Arcade
Personally, I use VNCThing. I found Chicken of the VNC, and it crapped out on me so many times that I got rid of it. Link to VNCThing
If your scooter runs out of batteries, it won't work anymore. Fucking retards
I bought one of these things like 6 months ago, and after 2 weeks the primary firing trigger broke. I emaled thinkgeek twice, and no one ever responded. This is why the only thing I buy from thinkgeek is shirts, everything else I can find elsewhere. The gun was really awesome while it worked though.
You can't draw parallels between this and an open office door. This is more like leaving the information on the ground at a public theme park. The theme park allows people inside no matter what, and the information is there but difficult to find. The same thing is true for this situation. The network was being broadcast over public airwaves and was accessible to the public, and the files were non-protected on the network. These files were in a public place. The nature of them infers that they are supposed to be private, but there is no certain way to tell with information that literally is left wide open in public.
I agree with you that it was immoral to access the information, but we're talking illegal here. Laws need to be edited to include situations such as this. Also, "authorization" is a crazy term to use in the computer world. Computers are automated. It can be argued that since they got an IP address from the AP, they were authorized. They submitted a request to join the network, and that request was honored, and they had access to the files. Sounds like authorization to me. The intent of the parties that accessed the information is important for the individual case, but the laws need to reflect the fact that they were indeed authorized to use the network. If they weren't, they couldn't have gotten in.
I actually just got this virus and was coming onto /. to post about it when I saw that it had already made the front page. /. keeps up its tradition of reporting news before it happens. Anyway, I got this virus as an attachcment (didn't open it of course), and I noticed that it had spoofed its return address. Something else to think about.
Well Jesse doesn't go the A&M Galveston, he goes to RPI, which is ridiculously expensive.
There are ways to set up windows shares so that they do not reuire a password of any kind. In this case, the data is still publicly accessible. If the reporters were guessing passwords until they got access to the data, this tells us two things:
1) The school needs to require high-level passwords. 2) this reporters was seriously breaking and entering and should go to jail.
Either way, this is serious. If a regular reporter can wardrive around finding out school records (including psychological workups and SS#), then anyone can do it, regardless if he guessed passwords or not. The school should be required to beef up their security, or stop using wireless, which is ridiculous for a school anyway. Wire the buildings.
I disagree. Companies should be held liable for their own insecurities. If they left their accounting books on the floor behind the toilet at the local gas station, and a competitor read them all, the competitor could not be sued for accessing that information. The same is true of the internet, or computer networks of any form. That network was being broadcasted over public airwaves, and therefore is public property. If it were secured in any way, then it would be illegal to circumvent the security devices. Unfortunately for the school, it was not.
read, think, post.
Ok then, we'll just count tuition, which is $17,000 a semester, or $34,000 a year.
Um....yeah....the men in the white coats are coming pal, just sit tight and wait for them.