The problem I have here is I would think that this would come under reasonable cause. Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.
It seems that way to me as well, and had they tried to get a warrant based on probable cause, it probably would have succeeded.
Conducting the search without a warrant, however, isn't going to fly unless their are also "exigent circumstances". Which in this case would mean the police have reason to believe that any potential evidence on the laptop would vanish before they could acquire a warrant. Since the laptop was in the possession of the 3rd party who called the police to report the crime, that seems unlikely.
So not getting the warrant was a big mistake, and it's likely a criminal will walk as a result. Even though it's sad, this has to happen. Failing to get a conviction and having the perp walk free is the only thing that motivates police to follow all the correct procedures and guarantee all the suspect's rights. Now the police know that a warrant is not optional when searching a laptop. So in the future the cops won't make this mistake, perps will be caught using proper rules of evidence, and our rights will be more secure.
Team Fortress was an early mod, but it came after Three Wave CTF which added the whole concept of Capture the Flag as a game type to the FPS dictionary, and was probably the most-played mod at least in the pre-Quakeworld era. TF owes a lot to the existence of TWCTF, though on the other hand TWCTF was a partial mod and TF was a "full conversion" mod, maybe the first truly popular one. Mentioning at least one of these would seem appropriate.
Will this lead to a wave of new sticky-tape-related superheroes?
Yes!
First up, The Great Scotch. He's Scottish, wears traditional Scottish garb including the plaid kilt, is constantly drunk off X-ray enriched Scotch from his secret distillery(some say it is the source of his powers), and fights crime with super-strong and seemingly endless strips of sticky tape that he pulls from underneath his kilt. He won't say where it comes from, which is good because nobody asks. His arch-nemesis is 3M corporation, who are constantly trying to sue him for trademark infringement. No relationship to The Great Scott, who is a transsexual from Transylvania who uses toilet paper as a weapon...
Next up, for 'urban' markets, The Gift Rapper! He swings around the city on lines of sticky tape that he shoots from his wrists. He disguises himself by covering his entire body in wrapping paper which he changes regularly, to match any nearby holidays for example. The Gift Rapper robs riches from crooked developers, organized criminals, drug lords, and cops on the take. He then delivers the riches to the poor children, gift-wrapped of course, and then performs a free-style rap that combines horrible puns and trite moral lessons about not being greedy, listening to parents, and staying in school for the decreasingly-grateful youngsters. Speculation abounds as to which no-name underground rapper-no-really-see-I-have-a-demo-tape is his secret identity.
And at this point one part of my brain is threatening the other part with an aneurysm if I don't stop, so I will.
The fact that TFA used "Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com" as an example shows just how right you are and how out of touch he is.
Wow, I actually had to give the douche a page hit just to see if he really said that. What kind of idiot is he?
The one thing that people will NEVER stop doing "for free" regardless of the economic situation is fucking.
Or any other situation! There could be a freaking alien invasion right now, and people would be humping away, filming it, and putting it on the internet.
I am squeeing in fanboyish delight. Hopefully I can stop before I have to catch the train; this is probably a disturbing thing for a 30 year old software developer to be doing on public transport.
Naw, I'm sure it just makes everyone else on the train feel better about themselves because they aren't as crazy as you are. According to Lewis Black, instead of going to therapy New Yorkers just hop on the subway. So you're doing a public service!
This guy is under the assumption everyone who works on open source technology is after financial gain. Very short sighted
And the ones who are after financial gain have jobs (see Red Hat, Suse, etc). They aren't trying to make Phat Lewt on Google Adwords on their free software blog.:P
Nuclear plants are a stop gap. If managed correctly it is a 100 to 200 year stop gap. By then we better have fusion down pat. Also I do wonder about the environmental impact of extracting many thousands of mega watts out of the wind system. It may be nothing but then I remember when hydroelectric dams where totally "clean".
It's always wise to view conservation and energy efficiency as a goal. Even with fusing hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe and an essentially limitless source of fuel, you have to consider the environmental effects of all the waste heat that is the ultimate byproduct of energy usage.
Thousands of mega watts extracted from the wind is most likely not even close to compensating for the reduction in wind drag caused by massive deforestation, not that wind farms are necessarily placed in the same spots we cut down trees. My point is that yes it must be considered, we can't say that wind power gives us carte blanch to ignore the environmental effects of energy consumption. It's just that it'll be quite some time before it's even conceivable that wind power is causing more harm than it is doing good by replacing our vastly dirtier forms of power production.
Hopefully in that time we've perfected fusion and we're only concerned about the ultimate pollutant, heat.:P
In fact, North Korea probably doesn't even have any nuclear weapons. They claim to, but their single nuclear test was a dud, if in fact it was a test at all.
Given all the independent seismic centers that verified a nuclear explosion, I'm going to say it was in fact a test. You can't really hide a nuclear explosion, and you can't really fake one with conventional explosives either (a previous explosion in NK that was similar in size to an atomic bomb was similarly verified to be conventional due to the seismic signature). So what that means is that given the 0.5kT blast that was measured, they either perfected building much more difficult small-yield bombs without first testing a larger one, or it was in fact a dud.
That's okay, either way it did the trick: Scare (or at least raise the eyebrows of) the West into giving them money in exchange for promises to disarm their scary nuclear arsenal. It's pretty sad how their entire political strategy for decades has essentially been Dr. Evil-style blackmail.
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
One of the brightest moments for McCain in the debates (for me obviously) was when he said he supported nuclear fuel reprocessing. Obama isn't against nuclear in principle; I hope he will be open to the idea of reprocessing instead of letting the red herring issue of nuclear proliferation that caused Carter (a nuclear physicist!) to ban breeder reactors.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
That's because of tremendous ignorance about even the basics of radiation, such as the longer the half life, the lower the radioactivity. And that while high levels of radiation are of course very bad, something with a half life of ten thousand years isn't necessarily more poisonous than something that isn't radioactive at all. Oh and of course there's the general fear-mongering of all things radioactive since the dawn of the atomic age, perpetuated by Hollywood myths where even in the distant future any nuclear reactor is a single leaky coolant pipe away from nuclear detonation.
Whereas inhaling the byproducts of coal power plants has been an American tradition for over a century. So nobody thinks about how bad it really is.
The "consensus truth" (a term I doubt they had heard of back then, it is so politically correct sounding) was that the Germans could NEVER break through such a heavily defended line.
That was the French "truth". The German "truth" was that they walked past the Maginot Line (because it was fixed and could not adapt to changes in attack plans) and into Paris.
Well, and the French were right! The Germans didn't break through the line until after they had already cut off supply lines from the rear*. In fact the whole reason the Germans decided to go around the Maginot Line was that they, too, believed that they couldn't break through directly. So the problem wasn't that the "consensus truth" wasn't true. It was, more or less. No, the problem was deeper and more insidious. It was that they failed to fully realize what that truth was telling them, and what it wasn't. "The Maginot Line is impregnable", taken as truth, should immediately raise the question "Well what about the rest of the French border?" But they didn't want to think about that truth, so suddenly France was safe against any German invasion, a decided non-truth.
It's kinda like if you visit some witches who tell you that "None of woman born shall harm you", you shouldn't go "Woo-hoo, I'm invincible!", because that's not what the witches just said. You should instead go "Wait a minute, what was that bit about 'of woman born'? Were you just saying that to be poetic? I mean I know this is Shakespeare, but that just seems like a weird thing to say. Would, say, a C-section count as not being 'of woman born'? Cus I know a guy who was born that way and he'd be one of the first in line to try to harm me."
So anyway, I agree, I just think there's a lesson here too about being careful about what truth is actually telling you.
* This may not be 100% accurate. I know there were early battles where the Germans did attack the line, and that it by and large did its job as advertised and held them off, though Germany may have broken through at some spots. Maybe I should look it up on Wikipedia?
You are the last person they're trying to sell to. No one who needs 3x top of the line videocards running in parallel is asking about price. This is $4000 for the base line hardware!
True, but this didn't work out too well for Kryotech in the end, and it's likely to not work too well for these folks either. Price may not be a consideration, but how long the bragging rights will last is. Even the most cost-immune geek figured out that instead of buying a Kryotech system and feel awesome for six months but then it becomes a ridiculous refrigerating paper weight, they could buy a top of the line Alienware system, and once the hardware was obsolete they could go buy a new slew of top-of-the-line hardware and still brag about their awesome case.
So my first worry is upgrade path. Which my scanning of the article's many usages of the words "custom" and "proprietary" leads me to believe there really isn't one.
Kryo's problem was that while you could buy a bad-ass refrigerated system for a mere 2x the cost of a top-end system that got a good 30% more performance -- they broke the 1 GHz barrier when air-cooled athlons were still running at around 600-700 MHz -- but then six months to a year later that system was merely "top of the line", and then of course soon after that "sub-optimal". Air-cooled athlons hit 1 GHz, and of course Kryotech came out with even faster systems, but it was obvious that the advantage you were getting was temporally speaking not worth the price.
Now with a slide-out motherboard and all it seems that upgrading this thing is at least -possible-, so perhaps if the company stays in business, you could at least purchase a compatible upgrade from them. Assuming there isn't a huge premium for the upgrade parts, that could be reasonable. The main thing is to have the re-usable oil cooling system. If they could make it so it can use off-the-shelf parts, and just sold the case itself, then that would be the ultimate to me.
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The problem I have here is I would think that this would come under reasonable cause.
Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.
It seems that way to me as well, and had they tried to get a warrant based on probable cause, it probably would have succeeded.
Conducting the search without a warrant, however, isn't going to fly unless their are also "exigent circumstances". Which in this case would mean the police have reason to believe that any potential evidence on the laptop would vanish before they could acquire a warrant. Since the laptop was in the possession of the 3rd party who called the police to report the crime, that seems unlikely.
So not getting the warrant was a big mistake, and it's likely a criminal will walk as a result. Even though it's sad, this has to happen. Failing to get a conviction and having the perp walk free is the only thing that motivates police to follow all the correct procedures and guarantee all the suspect's rights. Now the police know that a warrant is not optional when searching a laptop. So in the future the cops won't make this mistake, perps will be caught using proper rules of evidence, and our rights will be more secure.
Now gimme mah memristors!
Team Fortress was an early mod, but it came after Three Wave CTF which added the whole concept of Capture the Flag as a game type to the FPS dictionary, and was probably the most-played mod at least in the pre-Quakeworld era. TF owes a lot to the existence of TWCTF, though on the other hand TWCTF was a partial mod and TF was a "full conversion" mod, maybe the first truly popular one. Mentioning at least one of these would seem appropriate.
All personnel corrections are handled by the Ministry of Love.
I'm sorry, but you must now report to the Ministry of Shut Up.
Will this lead to a wave of new sticky-tape-related superheroes?
Yes!
First up, The Great Scotch. He's Scottish, wears traditional Scottish garb including the plaid kilt, is constantly drunk off X-ray enriched Scotch from his secret distillery(some say it is the source of his powers), and fights crime with super-strong and seemingly endless strips of sticky tape that he pulls from underneath his kilt. He won't say where it comes from, which is good because nobody asks. His arch-nemesis is 3M corporation, who are constantly trying to sue him for trademark infringement. No relationship to The Great Scott, who is a transsexual from Transylvania who uses toilet paper as a weapon...
Next up, for 'urban' markets, The Gift Rapper! He swings around the city on lines of sticky tape that he shoots from his wrists. He disguises himself by covering his entire body in wrapping paper which he changes regularly, to match any nearby holidays for example. The Gift Rapper robs riches from crooked developers, organized criminals, drug lords, and cops on the take. He then delivers the riches to the poor children, gift-wrapped of course, and then performs a free-style rap that combines horrible puns and trite moral lessons about not being greedy, listening to parents, and staying in school for the decreasingly-grateful youngsters. Speculation abounds as to which no-name underground rapper-no-really-see-I-have-a-demo-tape is his secret identity.
And at this point one part of my brain is threatening the other part with an aneurysm if I don't stop, so I will.
There was an old lady who swallowed a horse -
She's dead, of course.
A horse is a horse
of course, of course
And no one can swallow a horse, of course
That is, of course, unless the horse
is the famous Mr. Ed!
Go right to the source
and eat the horse
you'll have bad indigestion in due course
He flows down your digestive course
Swallow Mr. Ed!
There's a lesson in there regarding geoengineering, I swear.
Yeah, Sri Lanka.
And when they get tired they can sit and make products that I'll sell over the internet.
Uh... what kind of product? Fertilizer?
The fact that TFA used "Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com" as an example shows just how right you are and how out of touch he is.
Wow, I actually had to give the douche a page hit just to see if he really said that. What kind of idiot is he?
The one thing that people will NEVER stop doing "for free" regardless of the economic situation is fucking.
Or any other situation! There could be a freaking alien invasion right now, and people would be humping away, filming it, and putting it on the internet.
No, that never happened, and you must now report to the Ministry of Corporate Truth to correct your obvious insanity.
I am squeeing in fanboyish delight. Hopefully I can stop before I have to catch the train; this is probably a disturbing thing for a 30 year old software developer to be doing on public transport.
Naw, I'm sure it just makes everyone else on the train feel better about themselves because they aren't as crazy as you are. According to Lewis Black, instead of going to therapy New Yorkers just hop on the subway. So you're doing a public service!
This guy is under the assumption everyone who works on open source technology is after financial gain. Very short sighted
And the ones who are after financial gain have jobs (see Red Hat, Suse, etc). They aren't trying to make Phat Lewt on Google Adwords on their free software blog. :P
Oh don't worry I'm on board 110% with building more fission reactors and fuel reprocessing.
To hear NObama
*singing*
Oh, there's no Bama like Obama. Like no Bama I know!
Though on second thought, Macbeth being torn apart by wolves would have been pretty awesome. =D
Wouldn't being killed by an animal or disease be a more plausible alternate interpretation of that prognostication than the weird c-section stuff? ;)
Occam's Razor doesn't apply to Shakespeare. ;)
Nuclear plants are a stop gap. If managed correctly it is a 100 to 200 year stop gap. By then we better have fusion down pat.
Also I do wonder about the environmental impact of extracting many thousands of mega watts out of the wind system. It may be nothing but then I remember when hydroelectric dams where totally "clean".
It's always wise to view conservation and energy efficiency as a goal. Even with fusing hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe and an essentially limitless source of fuel, you have to consider the environmental effects of all the waste heat that is the ultimate byproduct of energy usage.
Thousands of mega watts extracted from the wind is most likely not even close to compensating for the reduction in wind drag caused by massive deforestation, not that wind farms are necessarily placed in the same spots we cut down trees. My point is that yes it must be considered, we can't say that wind power gives us carte blanch to ignore the environmental effects of energy consumption. It's just that it'll be quite some time before it's even conceivable that wind power is causing more harm than it is doing good by replacing our vastly dirtier forms of power production.
Hopefully in that time we've perfected fusion and we're only concerned about the ultimate pollutant, heat. :P
In fact, North Korea probably doesn't even have any nuclear weapons. They claim to, but their single nuclear test was a dud, if in fact it was a test at all.
Given all the independent seismic centers that verified a nuclear explosion, I'm going to say it was in fact a test. You can't really hide a nuclear explosion, and you can't really fake one with conventional explosives either (a previous explosion in NK that was similar in size to an atomic bomb was similarly verified to be conventional due to the seismic signature). So what that means is that given the 0.5kT blast that was measured, they either perfected building much more difficult small-yield bombs without first testing a larger one, or it was in fact a dud.
That's okay, either way it did the trick: Scare (or at least raise the eyebrows of) the West into giving them money in exchange for promises to disarm their scary nuclear arsenal. It's pretty sad how their entire political strategy for decades has essentially been Dr. Evil-style blackmail.
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
One of the brightest moments for McCain in the debates (for me obviously) was when he said he supported nuclear fuel reprocessing. Obama isn't against nuclear in principle; I hope he will be open to the idea of reprocessing instead of letting the red herring issue of nuclear proliferation that caused Carter (a nuclear physicist!) to ban breeder reactors.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
That's because of tremendous ignorance about even the basics of radiation, such as the longer the half life, the lower the radioactivity. And that while high levels of radiation are of course very bad, something with a half life of ten thousand years isn't necessarily more poisonous than something that isn't radioactive at all. Oh and of course there's the general fear-mongering of all things radioactive since the dawn of the atomic age, perpetuated by Hollywood myths where even in the distant future any nuclear reactor is a single leaky coolant pipe away from nuclear detonation.
Whereas inhaling the byproducts of coal power plants has been an American tradition for over a century. So nobody thinks about how bad it really is.
2. ???
Never knew those were supposed to be ASCII mushroom clouds!
The "consensus truth" (a term I doubt they had heard of back then, it is so politically correct sounding) was that the Germans could NEVER break through such a heavily defended line.
That was the French "truth". The German "truth" was that they walked past the Maginot Line (because it was fixed and could not adapt to changes in attack plans) and into Paris.
Well, and the French were right! The Germans didn't break through the line until after they had already cut off supply lines from the rear*. In fact the whole reason the Germans decided to go around the Maginot Line was that they, too, believed that they couldn't break through directly. So the problem wasn't that the "consensus truth" wasn't true. It was, more or less. No, the problem was deeper and more insidious. It was that they failed to fully realize what that truth was telling them, and what it wasn't. "The Maginot Line is impregnable", taken as truth, should immediately raise the question "Well what about the rest of the French border?" But they didn't want to think about that truth, so suddenly France was safe against any German invasion, a decided non-truth.
It's kinda like if you visit some witches who tell you that "None of woman born shall harm you", you shouldn't go "Woo-hoo, I'm invincible!", because that's not what the witches just said. You should instead go "Wait a minute, what was that bit about 'of woman born'? Were you just saying that to be poetic? I mean I know this is Shakespeare, but that just seems like a weird thing to say. Would, say, a C-section count as not being 'of woman born'? Cus I know a guy who was born that way and he'd be one of the first in line to try to harm me."
So anyway, I agree, I just think there's a lesson here too about being careful about what truth is actually telling you.
* This may not be 100% accurate. I know there were early battles where the Germans did attack the line, and that it by and large did its job as advertised and held them off, though Germany may have broken through at some spots. Maybe I should look it up on Wikipedia?
You are the last person they're trying to sell to. No one who needs 3x top of the line videocards running in parallel is asking about price. This is $4000 for the base line hardware!
True, but this didn't work out too well for Kryotech in the end, and it's likely to not work too well for these folks either. Price may not be a consideration, but how long the bragging rights will last is. Even the most cost-immune geek figured out that instead of buying a Kryotech system and feel awesome for six months but then it becomes a ridiculous refrigerating paper weight, they could buy a top of the line Alienware system, and once the hardware was obsolete they could go buy a new slew of top-of-the-line hardware and still brag about their awesome case.
So my first worry is upgrade path. Which my scanning of the article's many usages of the words "custom" and "proprietary" leads me to believe there really isn't one.
Kryo's problem was that while you could buy a bad-ass refrigerated system for a mere 2x the cost of a top-end system that got a good 30% more performance -- they broke the 1 GHz barrier when air-cooled athlons were still running at around 600-700 MHz -- but then six months to a year later that system was merely "top of the line", and then of course soon after that "sub-optimal". Air-cooled athlons hit 1 GHz, and of course Kryotech came out with even faster systems, but it was obvious that the advantage you were getting was temporally speaking not worth the price.
Now with a slide-out motherboard and all it seems that upgrading this thing is at least -possible-, so perhaps if the company stays in business, you could at least purchase a compatible upgrade from them. Assuming there isn't a huge premium for the upgrade parts, that could be reasonable. The main thing is to have the re-usable oil cooling system. If they could make it so it can use off-the-shelf parts, and just sold the case itself, then that would be the ultimate to me.
Damn, that explains why I never get any good ideas/dates!
"The reality is that security is not something you can buy; it is something you must get."
*sigh* Fine, make me do things the hard way. Who do I get security from, and how much will they charge me?
What do you mean I don't get it? Is my money not good around here?