A computer program is a tool. If I toss a hammer off a scaffold and it hits someone, I'm responsible. I can't just say "the hammer did it, not me." The crime or non-crime I'm responsible for may vary depending on the circumstances. If I threw the hammer on purpose or accidentally kicked it off, whether I took sufficient safety precautions, etc.
These artists are clearly responsible for whatever their program did, and it purchased illegal drugs from a website. If Switzerland doesn't have a legal distinction between purchasing drugs and possession or use then hopefully smart cops, district attorneys, judges will take the mitigating circumstances into account. But it doesn't absolve the artists of responsibility.
Incidentally, where I live (and I believe in the US, probably in Europe as well) you can absolutely be held responsible for the actions of your children, until they reach an age where they are legally determined to be responsible themselves.
That would require crypto locker to be specifically targeted to OS X. I highly doubt it does this. There are so many people who don't have adequate backups, or any backups, that it's probably not worth the effort to go after the ones who do, unless you're running a targeted attack.
Absolutely, an offline backup system is necessary for complete security. But for a home user protecting against non-targetted attacks, obscurity offers very good security, with minimal effort.
You don't pay cash, you pay in information. For some services that's a reasonable exchange. Fitbit might be one of them for many people - having your data backed up for you and accessible wherever you go might be important for you. An Internet connected thermostat has value, but it's hard to see what extra value a cloudified one has.
Do you really want to spend eternity cooped up in a castle with a supreme being who would send you to eternal torment because you didn't believe in him, after being presented with no evidence?
Pascal's wager assumes belief gets you infinite gain. That seems highly unlikely.
Seems like a sensible approach not to use the same OS as all those lucrative targets then.
I know macs do one thing that would have helped. Time machine is built into the OS and makes regular backups. If you plug an external drive into an airport, the backup volume isn't mounted except when the backup is happening.
I believe the "capitalist" comment refers to the criminals testing the market and determining the ideal price-point for their "product." Pricing your product to maximize return (optimal points on supply and demand curves and all that) is something that happens in free markets, and is generally associated with capitalist systems.
The crime isn't capitalist. The approach to determining the optimal price is.
Sure, no problem. My work email server discards incoming and outgoing exe email attachments. And zip files. And MS Office documents. It's an irritation for those of us who can tar.gz things. Must be a royal PITA for the Windows folk.
Horrors, some lumps of highly organized sand aren't user serviceable. My grandfather tossed rusty nails rather than smelting and recasting them.
Toasted discrete components can absolutely be replaced, although you might have to spend an hour learning to solder surface mount. Traces can be repaired. Fixing chips? The reason we use chips is because they're essentially free, unlike the discrete semiconductors they replace. To say nothing of the vacuum tubes. I haven't heard of many people repairing their vacuum tubes either.
Ha ha, seriously? I once replaced an iPhone battery with no tools other than a sharp kitchen knife because I was travelling, had no tools, and a buddy was in a bind. With an appropriate screwdriver it's a five minute job.
Replacing a SIM is a five second job using the tool provided with every phone or, more practically, with a paperclip. Those of us who actually leave our home countries once in a while and bought our phones instead of leasing them from the phone company do it quite successfully.
Interesting article. I notice that the author's examples all involve multiple people (everyone, everybody) even if they are technically singular. The GP's examples are explicitly singular - a person walks into a bar. "They" sounds more jarring in that context.
Personally, I see no problem just accepting that the masculine doubles as the designated sex-indeterminate pronoun in many languages including English. On the other hand it's not really important enough to fight the use of "they" either.
I did enjoy, when I was in undergrad, writing an essay as an ethics assignment about a hypothetical professor who abused *their* position of authority to push a political agenda in an unrelated class. This was a replacement assignment I was forced to write after my professor objected to my referring to the hypothetical character in my original essay as "he."
Me too. If I'm going to be cooking somewhere I usually bring a knife with me. Sometimes it gets a weird look form people but then I make them chop something.
If everybody did that we'd soon realize that only about 20% of us actually do useful work. Then people might start doing things like working less. So they'd start enjoying their lives and having time to do stuff for themselves. THEN where would we be?
Sewing isn't entirely useless. My mother taught me to sew, and we had mandatory home ec in high school (I'm male). I occasionally hem pants, have made emergency repairs to sails, tents, etc. I don't generally patch clothes, but if there's a shoddy seam in something (which seems to happen a lot now) it's nice to be able to spent two minutes to fix it instead of going out to replace it. It also impresses girls to no end when you can do something like replace a button of theirs that just fell off.
So when you fixed those radios did you wind your own coils (or make the wire), blow your own tubes or fabricate your own transistors (depending on just how old you are and what kind of radios they were)?
There's always some level where it becomes silly to repair a broken part instead of just buying a replacement. The capability of the smallest reasonable part (especially electronic parts) has grown, but that's mostly because those things have become so ridiculously cheap.
I can remember checking individual cells in a cell phone battery once, when cell phones were gigantic and the batteries cost a fortune. Now you can get one for $20 and it's not worth the trouble.
You know, the complaints about fixing apple stuff make me think there might be something to this.
You can change the battery in an iPhone in about five minutes if you already know which end of the screw driver goes in which direction. More like five if you've done it before. I once did one with no tool except a sharp kitchen knife because I was travelling and the screwdriver my friend got with the replacement battery was the wrong size. They've actually gotten easier to fix - the 3GS and prior had plastic cases with those annoying plastic clips. The replacement batteries are about $20. A spare battery for my Nokia cost about eighty dollars fifteen years ago.
Two of my cousins got notebooks for university. They're old now and frequently need something done. The windows one comes apart reasonably easily but again, plastic clips you can break if you don't know where they are. The apple one is all screws, and and only three easily differentiated sizes at that.
Because most people's leisure time has essentially zero cash value, particularly In small increments. Personal value can vary wildly on both sides of zero depending on how much you like/hate doing things to be self reliant and how much the bragging rights are worth to you.
Gravity assists would likely be used for a trip to a nearby star as well. You certainly wouldn't use chemical rockets though. You'd use some kind of ion or plasma drive. We could get one going much faster than voyager with today's technology and solar panels or a fission reactor, or even faster with things we think we'll be able to build in the future, such as fusion reactors.
Your original post appears to be calculating the amount of material based on a dyson shell 5 cm thick. You'll find a swarm of independently orbiting 5 cm thick objects kind of challenging for habitation.
The AC has given you a couple of good references. One of the associated papers is particularly good:
http://www.pnas.org/content/11... - this is freely available from PNAS. They looked at genetic variations in European and Roma populations. The Roma are a genetically distinct group originating in India who migrated to Europe but have not mixed extensively with Europeans. The authors found several examples of apparent convergent evolution, including several immune modulating genes. Some of these turned out to provide resistance to Y. pestis and related infection.
The evolution of completely new traits is generally believed to take many generations, but changes in the environment, particularly ones that kill 40% of the population, can very rapidly change the balance of existing traits in a population. Europeans and the Roma almost certainly didn't evolve protective genes from scratch in response to the plague, but it's quite plausible (and indicated by the evidence) that those genes evolved in response to a long history of Y. pestis and related infection (see the AC's second link) and were present in the general population. The particularly virulent strain that caused the black death certainly caused a shift in the population in favour of people who had the resistance genes simply because it killed more of the people who didn't have them. The data in the paper I linked (summarized in both the AC's links) suggests that shift was not only significant, but also persists to today.
There would be if people wanted to see the movies they played. The local independent theatre is always struggling because the vast majority of people want to go to a blockbuster film that's not too intellectually challenging.
I can't really blame them. Several of us at work take turns hosting movie nights. Old, independent, art and foreign films seem to work better at home with a dinner party and drinks. The last advantages of theatres are a big audience, big sound (us apartment dwellers can't crank it up to building shaking) and a big screen. Blockbusters with lots of effects play to those strengths.
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A computer program is a tool. If I toss a hammer off a scaffold and it hits someone, I'm responsible. I can't just say "the hammer did it, not me." The crime or non-crime I'm responsible for may vary depending on the circumstances. If I threw the hammer on purpose or accidentally kicked it off, whether I took sufficient safety precautions, etc.
These artists are clearly responsible for whatever their program did, and it purchased illegal drugs from a website. If Switzerland doesn't have a legal distinction between purchasing drugs and possession or use then hopefully smart cops, district attorneys, judges will take the mitigating circumstances into account. But it doesn't absolve the artists of responsibility.
Incidentally, where I live (and I believe in the US, probably in Europe as well) you can absolutely be held responsible for the actions of your children, until they reach an age where they are legally determined to be responsible themselves.
That would require crypto locker to be specifically targeted to OS X. I highly doubt it does this. There are so many people who don't have adequate backups, or any backups, that it's probably not worth the effort to go after the ones who do, unless you're running a targeted attack.
Absolutely, an offline backup system is necessary for complete security. But for a home user protecting against non-targetted attacks, obscurity offers very good security, with minimal effort.
You don't pay cash, you pay in information. For some services that's a reasonable exchange. Fitbit might be one of them for many people - having your data backed up for you and accessible wherever you go might be important for you. An Internet connected thermostat has value, but it's hard to see what extra value a cloudified one has.
Do you really want to spend eternity cooped up in a castle with a supreme being who would send you to eternal torment because you didn't believe in him, after being presented with no evidence?
Pascal's wager assumes belief gets you infinite gain. That seems highly unlikely.
Read the article. He's not.
Seems like a sensible approach not to use the same OS as all those lucrative targets then.
I know macs do one thing that would have helped. Time machine is built into the OS and makes regular backups. If you plug an external drive into an airport, the backup volume isn't mounted except when the backup is happening.
I believe the "capitalist" comment refers to the criminals testing the market and determining the ideal price-point for their "product." Pricing your product to maximize return (optimal points on supply and demand curves and all that) is something that happens in free markets, and is generally associated with capitalist systems.
The crime isn't capitalist. The approach to determining the optimal price is.
Sure, no problem. My work email server discards incoming and outgoing exe email attachments. And zip files. And MS Office documents. It's an irritation for those of us who can tar.gz things. Must be a royal PITA for the Windows folk.
Horrors, some lumps of highly organized sand aren't user serviceable. My grandfather tossed rusty nails rather than smelting and recasting them.
Toasted discrete components can absolutely be replaced, although you might have to spend an hour learning to solder surface mount. Traces can be repaired. Fixing chips? The reason we use chips is because they're essentially free, unlike the discrete semiconductors they replace. To say nothing of the vacuum tubes. I haven't heard of many people repairing their vacuum tubes either.
Ha ha, seriously? I once replaced an iPhone battery with no tools other than a sharp kitchen knife because I was travelling, had no tools, and a buddy was in a bind. With an appropriate screwdriver it's a five minute job.
Replacing a SIM is a five second job using the tool provided with every phone or, more practically, with a paperclip. Those of us who actually leave our home countries once in a while and bought our phones instead of leasing them from the phone company do it quite successfully.
Interesting article. I notice that the author's examples all involve multiple people (everyone, everybody) even if they are technically singular. The GP's examples are explicitly singular - a person walks into a bar. "They" sounds more jarring in that context.
Personally, I see no problem just accepting that the masculine doubles as the designated sex-indeterminate pronoun in many languages including English. On the other hand it's not really important enough to fight the use of "they" either.
I did enjoy, when I was in undergrad, writing an essay as an ethics assignment about a hypothetical professor who abused *their* position of authority to push a political agenda in an unrelated class. This was a replacement assignment I was forced to write after my professor objected to my referring to the hypothetical character in my original essay as "he."
Desoldering them isn't too bad. Soldering the replacement back on though....
Me too. If I'm going to be cooking somewhere I usually bring a knife with me. Sometimes it gets a weird look form people but then I make them chop something.
Some model cement might have done it too.
If everybody did that we'd soon realize that only about 20% of us actually do useful work. Then people might start doing things like working less. So they'd start enjoying their lives and having time to do stuff for themselves. THEN where would we be?
Sewing isn't entirely useless. My mother taught me to sew, and we had mandatory home ec in high school (I'm male). I occasionally hem pants, have made emergency repairs to sails, tents, etc. I don't generally patch clothes, but if there's a shoddy seam in something (which seems to happen a lot now) it's nice to be able to spent two minutes to fix it instead of going out to replace it. It also impresses girls to no end when you can do something like replace a button of theirs that just fell off.
So when you fixed those radios did you wind your own coils (or make the wire), blow your own tubes or fabricate your own transistors (depending on just how old you are and what kind of radios they were)?
There's always some level where it becomes silly to repair a broken part instead of just buying a replacement. The capability of the smallest reasonable part (especially electronic parts) has grown, but that's mostly because those things have become so ridiculously cheap.
I can remember checking individual cells in a cell phone battery once, when cell phones were gigantic and the batteries cost a fortune. Now you can get one for $20 and it's not worth the trouble.
You know, the complaints about fixing apple stuff make me think there might be something to this.
You can change the battery in an iPhone in about five minutes if you already know which end of the screw driver goes in which direction. More like five if you've done it before. I once did one with no tool except a sharp kitchen knife because I was travelling and the screwdriver my friend got with the replacement battery was the wrong size. They've actually gotten easier to fix - the 3GS and prior had plastic cases with those annoying plastic clips. The replacement batteries are about $20. A spare battery for my Nokia cost about eighty dollars fifteen years ago.
Two of my cousins got notebooks for university. They're old now and frequently need something done. The windows one comes apart reasonably easily but again, plastic clips you can break if you don't know where they are. The apple one is all screws, and and only three easily differentiated sizes at that.
Because most people's leisure time has essentially zero cash value, particularly In small increments. Personal value can vary wildly on both sides of zero depending on how much you like/hate doing things to be self reliant and how much the bragging rights are worth to you.
Gravity assists would likely be used for a trip to a nearby star as well. You certainly wouldn't use chemical rockets though. You'd use some kind of ion or plasma drive. We could get one going much faster than voyager with today's technology and solar panels or a fission reactor, or even faster with things we think we'll be able to build in the future, such as fusion reactors.
Your original post appears to be calculating the amount of material based on a dyson shell 5 cm thick. You'll find a swarm of independently orbiting 5 cm thick objects kind of challenging for habitation.
The AC has given you a couple of good references. One of the associated papers is particularly good:
http://www.pnas.org/content/11... - this is freely available from PNAS. They looked at genetic variations in European and Roma populations. The Roma are a genetically distinct group originating in India who migrated to Europe but have not mixed extensively with Europeans. The authors found several examples of apparent convergent evolution, including several immune modulating genes. Some of these turned out to provide resistance to Y. pestis and related infection.
The evolution of completely new traits is generally believed to take many generations, but changes in the environment, particularly ones that kill 40% of the population, can very rapidly change the balance of existing traits in a population. Europeans and the Roma almost certainly didn't evolve protective genes from scratch in response to the plague, but it's quite plausible (and indicated by the evidence) that those genes evolved in response to a long history of Y. pestis and related infection (see the AC's second link) and were present in the general population. The particularly virulent strain that caused the black death certainly caused a shift in the population in favour of people who had the resistance genes simply because it killed more of the people who didn't have them. The data in the paper I linked (summarized in both the AC's links) suggests that shift was not only significant, but also persists to today.
You can fix one of those by skipping the coke. Your pancreas will thank you too.
There would be if people wanted to see the movies they played. The local independent theatre is always struggling because the vast majority of people want to go to a blockbuster film that's not too intellectually challenging.
I can't really blame them. Several of us at work take turns hosting movie nights. Old, independent, art and foreign films seem to work better at home with a dinner party and drinks. The last advantages of theatres are a big audience, big sound (us apartment dwellers can't crank it up to building shaking) and a big screen. Blockbusters with lots of effects play to those strengths.
Yes, it does.
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Slashdot is acting as a publisher of your comment. By hitting post you are using that publication service, asking Slashdot to distribute your copyrighted comment in a particular way. Slashdot can't use your comment in other ways, such as making TV commercials featuring it, without your permission. Also, I can't take your comment and reproduce it without your permission, except in ways that fall under fair use/dealing exceptions.