Again, your extension of this case to mean that the Supreme Court is incapable of giving an order of any kind to the Executive branch is unfounded. Innumerable precedent have established that the Supreme Court in fact can. The decision itself explicitly states the Court's opinion that they do have the ability to require compliance with the law. Madison vs Marbury was an issue of jurisdiction and the extension thereof. In the case under discussion, the jurisdiction of the courts have already been established and therefore the court is amply empowered to issue binding orders to the Executive Branch.
Your theories on Constitutional Law are crazy and unfounded, and basically imply that the Executive branch is above the law. This is clearly not so, as the Courts have even in this administrative term issued binding orders to the Executive branch.
At least according to the Founders, we have 3 equal and separate branches. The Executive can't order the courts to do something. Or they can, but the Executive should have the right to tell them to pound sand. The courts shouldn't be able to order the Executive Branch to do something either. They are not, or at least should not, be the super-branch.
No, no, you have Separation of Powers exactly backwards.
"Separation of Powers" does not mean that each branch holds absolute power within its domain, and none of the other branches can tell it what to do.
"Separation of Powers" means that, of those powers enjoyed by the government, each branch wields a separate set of powers, that often oppose each other so as to create a balance. It does not mean all branches are "equal" in the sense that you meant. "Balanced" would be more appropriate.
The Legislative branch creates the legal code that define not just what is legal and illegal but also allowed government behavior. They define what the government looks like, including the executive branch. President Bush couldn't just go and create the Department of Homeland Security because he felt like it, he had to ask Congress to authorize this and more importantly to allocate government funds.
Maybe you noticed how President Bush had to get his own choice for Attorney General approved by Congress? That's because the law that establishes the Department of Justice says so. This is case of one branch wielding direct power over another.
The Executive branch enforces the law and directs the government within the laws (including funding and organization laws) defined by Congress. It also wields the power to veto laws passed by Congress as a way to curb Congress' power over the Executive, and the ability to appoint Justices as a way to influence the Judicial Branch.
The Judicial Branch rules on the law, and issues orders and punishments regarding compliance with the law. They are the only branch with this power -- any claim by Bush or the AG or anyone else that something is or is not legal is merely an opinion with zero weight until the court rules on it. And when someone -- including a member of another branch in government -- is seen not to be in compliance with the law, the court absolutely has the power to order them to cease. Since "obstruction of justice" is defined in a law passed by Congress, the Judiciary also has the power to order someone to cease destroying evidence.
That's what Separation of Powers means. It's three branches with different powers, and each branch absolutely Constitutionally does have the right to exercise those powers over other branches as appropriate.
So yes, the Courts can tell the Executive branch what to do when it involves compliance with the laws passed by Congress. Anything else would not just be un-Constitutional, it would also be a blanket statement that the Executive Branch was summarily above the law. Please don't tell me you think the Founders would have agreed with that.
You are deeply confused. In that case the Supreme Court ruled that they did have the power issue such orders to the executive branch and its officers when the order respected actions specified by law. They ruled that they do not have such power when the actions are merely those actions dictated to the officers by the President and are not dictated by law.
The White House data retention policies are dictated by law. The court absolutely has the power to order the executive branch to comply with the law.
What's the point of this lawsuit anyway. If there's a conviction, then there'll be a pardon shortly after. No one's going to get punished, so there's no reason to stop breaking the law.
Getting the facts out into the open. Yes it would be nice if lawbreakers were punished for breaking the law but as we've seen sometimes that's practically impossible. In lieu of that, we can look for a conviction in the court of public opinion, a decision no pardon can reverse -- see Nixon. Or Scooter Libby for that matter. Scooter's conviction was damaging to the administration and the Republican party. If we can score even more solid dirt on someone as high or higher up than Scooter was, that would be even more damaging.
That's a reason for them to stop breaking the law -- getting people to believe that these are lawbreakers and can't be trusted in office. Irreparable damage to political careers may not be as satisfying as jail time, but it is something. The fear of losing elections should help keep the rest of them in line. For a while anyway. I know how this goes. But if you don't do anything, just throw up your hands and say there's no point, then you've done worse than a token gesture of dissatisfaction, you've given tacit permission.
I can't remember any specifics, but I thought I remembered a company with a similar plan getting in trouble with the judge for doing exactly that. Once the lawsuit was filed and discovery began, they continued with their policy and deleted email including evidence. The judge said that once the lawsuit began, it couldn't be SOP anymore and they couldn't start deleting emails no matter what their existing policy was. I don't remember if this resulted in obstruction of justice charges or anything of that nature.
Anyway I'm just saying that might not be as great of a CYA plan as it seems. But it definitely beats waiting until the lawsuit is filed then going on a delete binge.
Question: Which editors would Spock and Data prefer, and how does this reflect on the eternal battle of the editors and of the science officers?
Spock would be a vi user. He would admire it's elegance and simplicity and the emergent power. Spock preferred tools that were robust, reliable, and efficient, rather than heavily feature-laden. He'd appreciate vi's efficient and organized key commands and the single insert/command duality, while he'd consider emacs key bindings to be illogical and inefficient for beings with only ten digits. Same goes for the insert/command mode duality versus emacs cascading and overlapping sets of major and minor modes. Spock was also a man of action, who would go from a basic theory about the alien to a working prototype of a weapon to actually testing the weapon on the alien at close range as quickly as possible, and gladly revise his theory if the test should fail. A science officer like this needs to know the tools he has at his fingertips, and doesn't have time to go digging through endless help pages trying to figure out how to get his block indentation to work right.
Data would be an emacs user. He himself is an incredibly complicated and difficult to understand machine, giving him a different aesthetic view than Spock. The complexity of emacs' key bindings would mean nothing due to his super-human dexterity, not to mention he could probably run emacs natively on his positronic net with only a few percent of his resources used. While Spock frequently fell back on basic scientific principles, Data liked to use physics so advanced nobody had ever heard of it before he just created the theory in his head. This is part of why Data was a more contemplative science officer who would take the time to work out the ramifications of his theories. Multiply his apparent time spent thinking by how fast they imply that he can actually think, and it's not hard to imagine him spending what would be for us endless hours using M-x help to find features he didn't know existed -- just like a real emacs user.
So what does this mean? Well first, notice how most of Spock's problems with emacs are due to knowing his own limitations -- he doesn't have android-fast fingers or a brain that can run and interface with the editor directly. He requires simple and robust solutions because he can't carry a computer as powerful as his ships down with him on every mission. Data, a machine of complexity to match that of emacs, has none of these problems. While each science officer has their strengths as does each editor, it comes down to this: The more sophisticated scientist uses the more sophisticated editor. Thus do Data and Emacs combine to win out over all other science officer/editor combinations (as if there are any not mentioned that are worth mentioning).
Cute quote. Way to fire up the hordes. Your evidence is, exactly, what?
I think the evidence made public during the anti-trust trial and conviction should be enough for anyone to have a healthy distrust of everything Redmond does, especially anything regarding openness or interoperability or anything else that threatens Microsoft's OS and office suite lock-in and thus their entire business model.
Well really I pretty much knew what you meant, my first line was badly worded and I should have said that it's the absence of the first part (off-line verification) that makes the other parts not follow.
The insufficiency of analogy to more traditional means of communication (postal service in sealed envelopes, telegraph, town crier, word of mouth, whatever) is sufficient demonstration that the constitution is unclear on these matters.
Why do you think it matters if the new communication method is analogous to an old one? Telegraph didn't exist when the Constitution was written, but it is protected just the same, simply by virtue of being a private communication medium. Same with the phone. Why should the internet be any different? Why do you even need to compare e-mail to postal mail?
The 4th Amendment didn't try to be that ultra specific about exactly what kind of "papers and effects" it meant, exactly so that you wouldn't have to make these silly arguments about what degree an e-mail is like a post card or a sealed envelope. This is why the courts have established the "reasonable expectation of privacy" metric, and applied it quickly and unambiguously to first the telegraph, then the telephone, and more recently to e-mail.
I think you're probably right, but it's important that it be made very clear that you cannot verify the authenticity of anything solely using the internet.
I'm afraid you do not understand how public key crypto works. If Alice has Bob's key and has personally verified that the signature of the key, communication between Alice and Bob is secure so long as the "hard problem" that the cryptosystem depends on (e.g. discrete log for RSA) is not broken. There is no proxying which can take place; Alice encrypts her traffic with Bob's public key before sending it to him.
The first bold part is what commonly makes the second bold part untrue.
Unless Alice has personally verified that the key she has is in fact Bob's key and vice versa, then she doesn't know for sure that it's Bob's public key that she's using. If Alice just get Bob's public key off the internet itself, then Alice doesn't know that it was Bob Alice was talking too and it may actually be Charlie's public key that she received. If it is in fact Charlie's public key, then Charlie can act as a man-in-the-middle. Alice unknowingly sends a message to Charlie with Charlie's public key, he decrypts it, re-encrypts it with Bob's public key, then sends it on to Bob. Neither will ever know.
People get around this by using certificates which come from a Certificate Authority whom they trust and who verifies that the keys you received are really Bob's keys and not Charlie's. The same problem shows up here, though, since at the point where Alice is communicating with the certificate authority over the internet, the CA is basically Bob and she's in the same boat.
People get around this part of the problem by having the Certificate Authority's keys hard-coded inside their browsers and OSes. There are two problems with this, one general and the other specific. The general problem is that if you get your browser over the internet, once again you can't be sure that the CA's key is really the right key and that the MD5 hash is really the MD5 hash of the unmodified browser. The specific problem is that this whole article is about the government getting telecom companies to cooperate with their spying programs. The Certificate Authority's usually fall into that category, and it would be naive to assume that they haven't handed over to the government their private keys, in which case NSA-Charlie doesn't even need to feed you a fake CA key somehow, he can just flat out pose as CA-Bob.
It is fundamentally impossible to share cryptographic keys securely over an insecure communication network. This is known as "the key exchange problem", and it's really, literally, impossible to fix. The only way to truly be secure when exchanging keys is for Alice and Bob to step outside the insecure network and physically meet in person, and exchange keys and verify that the other person has the correct key.
So if you're really so paranoid that you feel you must encrypt all your communications to keep the government from spying on you, just remember this, and find an off-line way to exchange public keys with everyone you wish to talk to.
Just like many other conspiracy theories, this one fails the Occam's Razor test.
Like most premature and inappropriate applications of Occam's Razor, this one fails the Thought For Seven Seconds test.
So they can't the whole internet. They sure as hell can have it split to go through their secret rooms in the telco's offices, where they can do whatever keyword searching or other simple analysis they want and then save off the portion that may be considered interesting.
The whole point is that he doesn't know what the NSA is doing with the data, he only knows that he set up the splitters to route a copy of all the data into the secret room.
The "and they're saving everything to disk" part is something that someone here made up and now has apparently become an official part of the "conspiracy theory". So if that part doesn't make sense, the whole thing must be a lie! Except no, it doesn't work that way.
True enough. After all, was it not Archimedes who said "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall accidentally push the world into the sun."
I think the big problem is that all of the "easy" drugs have been taken. Drug development used to consist of running huge libraries of compounds against targets and finding hits. To some degree this is still the case, but all the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Yes, this is clearly true.
Also - your new drug has to be better than existing drugs to be of any use. Existing drugs work pretty well - raising the bar significantly.
This is clearly not true. Did you miss the story in the GP about Prilosec and Nexium?
A lot of the anti-depressants on the market, ones making the news due to unintended side effects, aren't in fact much more effective clinically than older ones like Prozac. They mostly just come with a different -- and less well understood -- set of side effects. "Better" isn't a simple ratchet, it's a multidimensional thing that can be hard to pin down. And when something is hard to pin down, that's where marketing comes in to try to pin it down for you in a way favorable to the company selling the "better" product.
This shouldn't be that surprising if you believe the first point you made. Finding new, better drugs is increasingly difficult, but yet new drugs are coming out regularly. The odds that all of these represent significant improvements rather than side-steps that do little more than allow them to get a new patent is very low.
Don't get me wrong - I think a lot of drug executives spent too much time enjoying their $5/pill margins and forgot that those pills are only patented for a decade (effectively).
No, no, the problem is that they have been all too painfully aware of the time limits on patents. Their entire strategy revolves around making sure that once the patent on one drug expires, there's another patented drug lined up to replace it. Yet as you observed, finding new drugs which are actual improvements over old drugs is growing ever more difficult. So when they can't do that they find one that is different enough that it can be patented, then just play up whatever minor advantages it may have (while downplaying the disadvantages) via advertising.
With this strategy, advertising is actually more important than the drug research itself, which is why they spend more on advertising than they do on research.
Well, gee, I think the first step towards proving that you can be trusted with the burden of choosing when to stop playing video games would be to not somehow accidentally turn on the parental controls then forget how to turn them off.
But hey, it's still a damn good average, considering it's all going straight to the band.
Yeah, exactly. More than a breakdown of how many downloads came with what payment*, I'd like to see an actual breakdown of their cost structure. How much did they spend on advertising? What were their studio costs? I find it hard to imagine given what I know of record company contracts (where they give you a pittance of each sale and make you pay for the studio and other costs anyway), that they didn't end up making way more money off this album than they have off previous ones. I'm just speculating, but in the end, isn't that what we ultimately want to know?
* It really is bothering me how everyone commenting on this in blogs or in news articles is just blithely assuming that 1 download = 1 fan. Didn't everyone learn the difference between a "hit" and a "unique visitor" and how hard it is to go from the former to the latter in the 90s? And just like early websites that didn't know the difference, all these commentators are drawing screwy conclusions as a result.
I like the observation that court precedent says you can't be sued for libeling the government, so instead they decide they're going to sue on behalf of the individuals in their official capacities (because the alleged libel wasn't about them in their private life, it was about their performance in their official capacities).
Their "official capacities" are being members of the government. So what good is the precedent if it only protects you from suit for libeling the government, if they can just sue on behalf of the individuals that make up the government being criticized? Does it matter if I name names? Can I say "Katrina proved that FEMA was a mismanaged clusterfuck of cronyism and incompetence all the way up to the director" but not "Katrina proved that former FEMA director Michael Brown was an incompetent crony"? Or does the former imply the latter such that Michael Brown could still sue me?
We'll see what happens, but I kinda hope the case gets dismissed on the grounds that there is no difference between the government and "administrators in their official capacities" in the government.
I was going by the total estimate in the summary (which I think was based on a $6 average for -all- downloads, not just paying). Going by the breakdown in linked article, total average price per download was $2.26 which yields about the same as your number, 2.7 million overall.
No, you absolutely must look at the total, because that's what ultimately matters: the bottom line.
You can't go by the percentage because you don't know what they would mean in other contexts. All this says is that 12% of the total downloads came with a payment competitive with download services given the option of not paying at all. This says nothing about the number of downloads that would have been made at typical download service prices if there was no choice but to pay that price.
How many fewer downloads would there have been if it was a mandatory payment? How many of these downloads were from people who would have never downloaded the album at typical prices? How many of these downloads were from people who were not willing to pay for an album they had never heard, but after downloading it for free decided it was worth their money and paid for it? How many were people who had already paid but were now downloading a second or third copy for work? How many were from people who would have paid typical prices for the album, but instead happily downloaded it for free?
We don't know, and we can't know, because we have no way of converting the figures about downloads into figures about individuals. So how do you figure out how all these various factors turn out? If we can't put a number on each individual factor, can we at least find out how the add up together to give an overall picture? Yes. Yes we can. With total income.
The most definite fact we have about this is that Radiohead pulled in a high-seven-figure gross in a short period of time.
So however all these factors we're discussing about human behavior shook out, it resulted in a hefty pile of cash for Radiohead.
Hard to say that doesn't look good. It would be nice to compare this to Radiohead's (not the record company's, but the band's) income from previous albums.
You do not know the ratio of downloads to fans. It is not 1:1 simply by virtue of at least one person having downloaded it twice. It is possible that many people were unwilling to pay without listening to the album first, and then when they liked it they payed, so they were counted twice. How many people did this? I don't know. I'm not trying to spin the numbers. You are, so you make a baseless assumption.
Here's an un-spun number: Radiohead pulled in a gross of at least $6 million.
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Again, your extension of this case to mean that the Supreme Court is incapable of giving an order of any kind to the Executive branch is unfounded. Innumerable precedent have established that the Supreme Court in fact can. The decision itself explicitly states the Court's opinion that they do have the ability to require compliance with the law. Madison vs Marbury was an issue of jurisdiction and the extension thereof. In the case under discussion, the jurisdiction of the courts have already been established and therefore the court is amply empowered to issue binding orders to the Executive Branch.
Your theories on Constitutional Law are crazy and unfounded, and basically imply that the Executive branch is above the law. This is clearly not so, as the Courts have even in this administrative term issued binding orders to the Executive branch.
At least according to the Founders, we have 3 equal and separate branches. The Executive can't order the courts to do something. Or they can, but the Executive should have the right to tell them to pound sand. The courts shouldn't be able to order the Executive Branch to do something either. They are not, or at least should not, be the super-branch.
No, no, you have Separation of Powers exactly backwards.
"Separation of Powers" does not mean that each branch holds absolute power within its domain, and none of the other branches can tell it what to do.
"Separation of Powers" means that, of those powers enjoyed by the government, each branch wields a separate set of powers, that often oppose each other so as to create a balance. It does not mean all branches are "equal" in the sense that you meant. "Balanced" would be more appropriate.
The Legislative branch creates the legal code that define not just what is legal and illegal but also allowed government behavior. They define what the government looks like, including the executive branch. President Bush couldn't just go and create the Department of Homeland Security because he felt like it, he had to ask Congress to authorize this and more importantly to allocate government funds.
Maybe you noticed how President Bush had to get his own choice for Attorney General approved by Congress? That's because the law that establishes the Department of Justice says so. This is case of one branch wielding direct power over another.
The Executive branch enforces the law and directs the government within the laws (including funding and organization laws) defined by Congress. It also wields the power to veto laws passed by Congress as a way to curb Congress' power over the Executive, and the ability to appoint Justices as a way to influence the Judicial Branch.
The Judicial Branch rules on the law, and issues orders and punishments regarding compliance with the law. They are the only branch with this power -- any claim by Bush or the AG or anyone else that something is or is not legal is merely an opinion with zero weight until the court rules on it. And when someone -- including a member of another branch in government -- is seen not to be in compliance with the law, the court absolutely has the power to order them to cease. Since "obstruction of justice" is defined in a law passed by Congress, the Judiciary also has the power to order someone to cease destroying evidence.
That's what Separation of Powers means. It's three branches with different powers, and each branch absolutely Constitutionally does have the right to exercise those powers over other branches as appropriate.
So yes, the Courts can tell the Executive branch what to do when it involves compliance with the laws passed by Congress. Anything else would not just be un-Constitutional, it would also be a blanket statement that the Executive Branch was summarily above the law. Please don't tell me you think the Founders would have agreed with that.
You are deeply confused. In that case the Supreme Court ruled that they did have the power issue such orders to the executive branch and its officers when the order respected actions specified by law. They ruled that they do not have such power when the actions are merely those actions dictated to the officers by the President and are not dictated by law.
The White House data retention policies are dictated by law. The court absolutely has the power to order the executive branch to comply with the law.
What's the point of this lawsuit anyway. If there's a conviction, then there'll be a pardon shortly after. No one's going to get punished, so there's no reason to stop breaking the law.
Getting the facts out into the open. Yes it would be nice if lawbreakers were punished for breaking the law but as we've seen sometimes that's practically impossible. In lieu of that, we can look for a conviction in the court of public opinion, a decision no pardon can reverse -- see Nixon. Or Scooter Libby for that matter. Scooter's conviction was damaging to the administration and the Republican party. If we can score even more solid dirt on someone as high or higher up than Scooter was, that would be even more damaging.
That's a reason for them to stop breaking the law -- getting people to believe that these are lawbreakers and can't be trusted in office. Irreparable damage to political careers may not be as satisfying as jail time, but it is something. The fear of losing elections should help keep the rest of them in line. For a while anyway. I know how this goes. But if you don't do anything, just throw up your hands and say there's no point, then you've done worse than a token gesture of dissatisfaction, you've given tacit permission.
I can't remember any specifics, but I thought I remembered a company with a similar plan getting in trouble with the judge for doing exactly that. Once the lawsuit was filed and discovery began, they continued with their policy and deleted email including evidence. The judge said that once the lawsuit began, it couldn't be SOP anymore and they couldn't start deleting emails no matter what their existing policy was. I don't remember if this resulted in obstruction of justice charges or anything of that nature.
Anyway I'm just saying that might not be as great of a CYA plan as it seems. But it definitely beats waiting until the lawsuit is filed then going on a delete binge.
Question: Which editors would Spock and Data prefer, and how does this reflect on the eternal battle of the editors and of the science officers?
Spock would be a vi user. He would admire it's elegance and simplicity and the emergent power. Spock preferred tools that were robust, reliable, and efficient, rather than heavily feature-laden. He'd appreciate vi's efficient and organized key commands and the single insert/command duality, while he'd consider emacs key bindings to be illogical and inefficient for beings with only ten digits. Same goes for the insert/command mode duality versus emacs cascading and overlapping sets of major and minor modes. Spock was also a man of action, who would go from a basic theory about the alien to a working prototype of a weapon to actually testing the weapon on the alien at close range as quickly as possible, and gladly revise his theory if the test should fail. A science officer like this needs to know the tools he has at his fingertips, and doesn't have time to go digging through endless help pages trying to figure out how to get his block indentation to work right.
Data would be an emacs user. He himself is an incredibly complicated and difficult to understand machine, giving him a different aesthetic view than Spock. The complexity of emacs' key bindings would mean nothing due to his super-human dexterity, not to mention he could probably run emacs natively on his positronic net with only a few percent of his resources used. While Spock frequently fell back on basic scientific principles, Data liked to use physics so advanced nobody had ever heard of it before he just created the theory in his head. This is part of why Data was a more contemplative science officer who would take the time to work out the ramifications of his theories. Multiply his apparent time spent thinking by how fast they imply that he can actually think, and it's not hard to imagine him spending what would be for us endless hours using M-x help to find features he didn't know existed -- just like a real emacs user.
So what does this mean? Well first, notice how most of Spock's problems with emacs are due to knowing his own limitations -- he doesn't have android-fast fingers or a brain that can run and interface with the editor directly. He requires simple and robust solutions because he can't carry a computer as powerful as his ships down with him on every mission. Data, a machine of complexity to match that of emacs, has none of these problems. While each science officer has their strengths as does each editor, it comes down to this: The more sophisticated scientist uses the more sophisticated editor. Thus do Data and Emacs combine to win out over all other science officer/editor combinations (as if there are any not mentioned that are worth mentioning).
You're welcome!
Cute quote. Way to fire up the hordes. Your evidence is, exactly, what?
I think the evidence made public during the anti-trust trial and conviction should be enough for anyone to have a healthy distrust of everything Redmond does, especially anything regarding openness or interoperability or anything else that threatens Microsoft's OS and office suite lock-in and thus their entire business model.
What and I'm supposed to believe someone claiming to be "The" International Standards Organization?
Well actually, do you want to come to my conference?
Well she does say that she got lucky. ;)
Well really I pretty much knew what you meant, my first line was badly worded and I should have said that it's the absence of the first part (off-line verification) that makes the other parts not follow.
The insufficiency of analogy to more traditional means of communication (postal service in sealed envelopes, telegraph, town crier, word of mouth, whatever) is sufficient demonstration that the constitution is unclear on these matters.
Why do you think it matters if the new communication method is analogous to an old one? Telegraph didn't exist when the Constitution was written, but it is protected just the same, simply by virtue of being a private communication medium. Same with the phone. Why should the internet be any different? Why do you even need to compare e-mail to postal mail?
The 4th Amendment didn't try to be that ultra specific about exactly what kind of "papers and effects" it meant, exactly so that you wouldn't have to make these silly arguments about what degree an e-mail is like a post card or a sealed envelope. This is why the courts have established the "reasonable expectation of privacy" metric, and applied it quickly and unambiguously to first the telegraph, then the telephone, and more recently to e-mail.
I think you're probably right, but it's important that it be made very clear that you cannot verify the authenticity of anything solely using the internet.
Sorry, I thought you were dismissing the entire article as "the conspiracy theory".
I'm afraid you do not understand how public key crypto works. If Alice has Bob's key and has personally verified that the signature of the key, communication between Alice and Bob is secure so long as the "hard problem" that the cryptosystem depends on (e.g. discrete log for RSA) is not broken. There is no proxying which can take place; Alice encrypts her traffic with Bob's public key before sending it to him.
The first bold part is what commonly makes the second bold part untrue.
Unless Alice has personally verified that the key she has is in fact Bob's key and vice versa, then she doesn't know for sure that it's Bob's public key that she's using. If Alice just get Bob's public key off the internet itself, then Alice doesn't know that it was Bob Alice was talking too and it may actually be Charlie's public key that she received. If it is in fact Charlie's public key, then Charlie can act as a man-in-the-middle. Alice unknowingly sends a message to Charlie with Charlie's public key, he decrypts it, re-encrypts it with Bob's public key, then sends it on to Bob. Neither will ever know.
People get around this by using certificates which come from a Certificate Authority whom they trust and who verifies that the keys you received are really Bob's keys and not Charlie's. The same problem shows up here, though, since at the point where Alice is communicating with the certificate authority over the internet, the CA is basically Bob and she's in the same boat.
People get around this part of the problem by having the Certificate Authority's keys hard-coded inside their browsers and OSes. There are two problems with this, one general and the other specific. The general problem is that if you get your browser over the internet, once again you can't be sure that the CA's key is really the right key and that the MD5 hash is really the MD5 hash of the unmodified browser. The specific problem is that this whole article is about the government getting telecom companies to cooperate with their spying programs. The Certificate Authority's usually fall into that category, and it would be naive to assume that they haven't handed over to the government their private keys, in which case NSA-Charlie doesn't even need to feed you a fake CA key somehow, he can just flat out pose as CA-Bob.
It is fundamentally impossible to share cryptographic keys securely over an insecure communication network. This is known as "the key exchange problem", and it's really, literally, impossible to fix. The only way to truly be secure when exchanging keys is for Alice and Bob to step outside the insecure network and physically meet in person, and exchange keys and verify that the other person has the correct key.
So if you're really so paranoid that you feel you must encrypt all your communications to keep the government from spying on you, just remember this, and find an off-line way to exchange public keys with everyone you wish to talk to.
Just like many other conspiracy theories, this one fails the Occam's Razor test.
Like most premature and inappropriate applications of Occam's Razor, this one fails the Thought For Seven Seconds test.
So they can't the whole internet. They sure as hell can have it split to go through their secret rooms in the telco's offices, where they can do whatever keyword searching or other simple analysis they want and then save off the portion that may be considered interesting.
The whole point is that he doesn't know what the NSA is doing with the data, he only knows that he set up the splitters to route a copy of all the data into the secret room.
The "and they're saving everything to disk" part is something that someone here made up and now has apparently become an official part of the "conspiracy theory". So if that part doesn't make sense, the whole thing must be a lie! Except no, it doesn't work that way.
True enough. After all, was it not Archimedes who said "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall accidentally push the world into the sun."
I think the big problem is that all of the "easy" drugs have been taken. Drug development used to consist of running huge libraries of compounds against targets and finding hits. To some degree this is still the case, but all the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Yes, this is clearly true.
Also - your new drug has to be better than existing drugs to be of any use. Existing drugs work pretty well - raising the bar significantly.
This is clearly not true. Did you miss the story in the GP about Prilosec and Nexium?
A lot of the anti-depressants on the market, ones making the news due to unintended side effects, aren't in fact much more effective clinically than older ones like Prozac. They mostly just come with a different -- and less well understood -- set of side effects. "Better" isn't a simple ratchet, it's a multidimensional thing that can be hard to pin down. And when something is hard to pin down, that's where marketing comes in to try to pin it down for you in a way favorable to the company selling the "better" product.
This shouldn't be that surprising if you believe the first point you made. Finding new, better drugs is increasingly difficult, but yet new drugs are coming out regularly. The odds that all of these represent significant improvements rather than side-steps that do little more than allow them to get a new patent is very low.
Don't get me wrong - I think a lot of drug executives spent too much time enjoying their $5/pill margins and forgot that those pills are only patented for a decade (effectively).
No, no, the problem is that they have been all too painfully aware of the time limits on patents. Their entire strategy revolves around making sure that once the patent on one drug expires, there's another patented drug lined up to replace it. Yet as you observed, finding new drugs which are actual improvements over old drugs is growing ever more difficult. So when they can't do that they find one that is different enough that it can be patented, then just play up whatever minor advantages it may have (while downplaying the disadvantages) via advertising.
With this strategy, advertising is actually more important than the drug research itself, which is why they spend more on advertising than they do on research.
No, he's a robot from the past.
Don't ask, it's complicated.
Well, gee, I think the first step towards proving that you can be trusted with the burden of choosing when to stop playing video games would be to not somehow accidentally turn on the parental controls then forget how to turn them off.
But hey, it's still a damn good average, considering it's all going straight to the band.
Yeah, exactly. More than a breakdown of how many downloads came with what payment*, I'd like to see an actual breakdown of their cost structure. How much did they spend on advertising? What were their studio costs? I find it hard to imagine given what I know of record company contracts (where they give you a pittance of each sale and make you pay for the studio and other costs anyway), that they didn't end up making way more money off this album than they have off previous ones. I'm just speculating, but in the end, isn't that what we ultimately want to know?
* It really is bothering me how everyone commenting on this in blogs or in news articles is just blithely assuming that 1 download = 1 fan. Didn't everyone learn the difference between a "hit" and a "unique visitor" and how hard it is to go from the former to the latter in the 90s? And just like early websites that didn't know the difference, all these commentators are drawing screwy conclusions as a result.
Yeah, but what's the data rate?
The fastest interplanetary radio link 1977 had to offer!
I like the observation that court precedent says you can't be sued for libeling the government, so instead they decide they're going to sue on behalf of the individuals in their official capacities (because the alleged libel wasn't about them in their private life, it was about their performance in their official capacities).
Their "official capacities" are being members of the government. So what good is the precedent if it only protects you from suit for libeling the government, if they can just sue on behalf of the individuals that make up the government being criticized? Does it matter if I name names? Can I say "Katrina proved that FEMA was a mismanaged clusterfuck of cronyism and incompetence all the way up to the director" but not "Katrina proved that former FEMA director Michael Brown was an incompetent crony"? Or does the former imply the latter such that Michael Brown could still sue me?
We'll see what happens, but I kinda hope the case gets dismissed on the grounds that there is no difference between the government and "administrators in their official capacities" in the government.
I was going by the total estimate in the summary (which I think was based on a $6 average for -all- downloads, not just paying). Going by the breakdown in linked article, total average price per download was $2.26 which yields about the same as your number, 2.7 million overall.
Still a hefty chunk of change.
No, you absolutely must look at the total, because that's what ultimately matters: the bottom line.
You can't go by the percentage because you don't know what they would mean in other contexts. All this says is that 12% of the total downloads came with a payment competitive with download services given the option of not paying at all. This says nothing about the number of downloads that would have been made at typical download service prices if there was no choice but to pay that price.
How many fewer downloads would there have been if it was a mandatory payment? How many of these downloads were from people who would have never downloaded the album at typical prices? How many of these downloads were from people who were not willing to pay for an album they had never heard, but after downloading it for free decided it was worth their money and paid for it? How many were people who had already paid but were now downloading a second or third copy for work? How many were from people who would have paid typical prices for the album, but instead happily downloaded it for free?
We don't know, and we can't know, because we have no way of converting the figures about downloads into figures about individuals. So how do you figure out how all these various factors turn out? If we can't put a number on each individual factor, can we at least find out how the add up together to give an overall picture? Yes. Yes we can. With total income.
The most definite fact we have about this is that Radiohead pulled in a high-seven-figure gross in a short period of time.
So however all these factors we're discussing about human behavior shook out, it resulted in a hefty pile of cash for Radiohead.
Hard to say that doesn't look good. It would be nice to compare this to Radiohead's (not the record company's, but the band's) income from previous albums.
and yet..... most fans paid $0 for the download.
No, most downloads did not result in payment.
You do not know the ratio of downloads to fans. It is not 1:1 simply by virtue of at least one person having downloaded it twice. It is possible that many people were unwilling to pay without listening to the album first, and then when they liked it they payed, so they were counted twice. How many people did this? I don't know. I'm not trying to spin the numbers. You are, so you make a baseless assumption.
Here's an un-spun number: Radiohead pulled in a gross of at least $6 million.
Go ahead, try to spin that one as a negative.