I'm glad you've got the theory down straight. We agree that secret courts are not going to cut it. However -- and this is a big however, that's not happenng. No American is being arrested in his country on secret charges without recourse to the court system. So your argument is more of a hypothetical than a real-world one.
No one is personally subject to secret courts yet, but warrents (if they're even required) can be obtained in secret courts. Presumably, this means that when you're arrested with a secret warrant, the feds won't show it to you when you're raided. After all, it's secret and may include information you could pass on to your terrorist buddies. I'm not so much worried about myself, I'm worried about married gay people (that anti-gay marriage amendment crap is always on the horizon), abortion doctors/protestors (both could easily fall suddenly under some new law making their activities illegal), and some doctors (medical marijuana, euthanasia). There are plenty of ways even secret surveillance and warrants could be abused to harass people. Even worse, the MAFIAA seems to be getting pretty cuddly with both major parties, and they always try to tie piracy to terrorism or drug trafficking somehow. How long before secret surveillance is used to enforce the RIAA's goals? Basically, the infrastructure is being set up for wanton abuse. The FBI has already documented failures in following even the less restrictive laws they have now.
I'm glad you're so fired up about individual freedoms. I really am. The next time the environmental groups want to take away private property rights for wetlands I hope I can count you on the side of personal liberty. The next time the KKK or some other you find heinous wants to march through an ethnic neighborhood I hope you're there for them. The next time the government wants to use force to take money from people (taxes) for some kind of do-good cause like national healthcare, I hope you're on the ball. But I'm really tired of people who got their libertarianism from a comic book coming in and trying their hand at explaining how or why the government works the way it does. Abe Lincoln disbanded the Maryland legislature when he thought they might vote to succeed. He imprisoned Congressmen that he said were just "stirring up trouble" Adams signed the Sedition Act, which prevented criticism of the government. If you want a real-world view of how it works, look at the real world. Don't just spout off the theory without having any kind of historical depth to know why the theory works (and when there are exceptions)
I'm fine with the KKK as long as they run funny looking websites and march in bedsheets. They can even burn crosses on their own lawns if they want, as long as they get an appropriate burn permit and don't start forest fires. I'm also perfectly free to shout insults at them if I see them, since it's free speech. As long as it's not harassment, it's perfectly legal to hate the guts out of people who are in the KKK and let them know how you feel.
Wetland protection is like any natural resource protection, it can go overboard or it can be inadequate. What sort of framework would you suggest for managing resources that are shared not only by everyone in a country, but by all of their descendants and other countries as well? It requires consistent, unbiased planning otherwise it will be exploited to benefit only a few people at the expense of everyone else. National health is somewhat of a natural resource. Unhealthy people are less likely to have healthy children, and more likely to take sick time. Not to mention the fact that with increasing health and lifespan, retirement age is pushed back further, allowing for more productive years. If anything though, I would rather see more government funding of health care research than actual health care provision. Advances in medicine, in my opinion, truly belong to everyone in a country, if not the world.
My take on government is that it should account for the needs that citi
2. It defeats the purpose of voting: to cast your ballot for what you believe in. There's an argument that vote-swapping could bring you closer to what you want in the long run, but picture trying to swap votes in different races with different people in assorted districts in your state -- the calculations get out of hand very quickly.
I thought the idea was to vote exactly as you wanted to, by having a guarantee that by doing so you weren't enabling a worse evil to occur. E.g. most people vote Republican or Democrat, but at least 50% would rather vote for someone other than the front runner of either party (some poll last year said that). So vote trading is simply that 50% of the people getting together and saying "My candidate is an anti-republican. I'll vote for him/her if you vote for your anti-democrat favorite". That way the third parties have an overall larger percentage of the vote, and voting for a third party will (in theory) not allow the republocrat to benefit from your vote against them.
The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages
Everyone would have 2^n ancestors if no one ever interbred, but obviously that's not the case. My guess is that what really happened is enough people married across class, in combination with people choosing important sounding surnames for themselves, to make it appear as if a majority of English have upper class ancestors. A whole lot of people can be descended from royalty; all it takes is one or two horny princes or princesses to spread the royal genes far and wide. The poor people's genes are spread far and wide too, it's just that no one made up any fancy genealogical charts saying they were directly descended from Bob Shaftoe, mud worker in 1329. So all the evidence is selectively chosen to point to the most well known ancestors.
I could be wrong, and maybe they somehow found all the original upper class DNA in a vault somewhere and did a conclusive study to show that most people in England share some of it, but my guess is that their result is just an improper interpretation of the fact that almost everyone is descended from almost everyone else's ancestors if you go back far enough.
When a Republican voter dislikes a Democrat candidate, they say "He's stupid because [assorted reasons]". The reasons may or may not be valid, but at least they HAVE 'em.
I think it's because they all listen to Rush Limbaugh and get a good list thrown at them at every opportunity. On the other hand, I can explain why Don Rumsfeld is a fucking idiot that even Republicans can understand: He ignored sound military advice and sent a teensy force to Iraq. The Army Times gave him a vote of no confidence. What does that tell you?
It's obvious why the Republicrats agree that exposing state secrets are bad; they both keep a lot of secrets. I'm sure the judge would have exposed Democrats authorizing the NSA to spy on American citizens. In fact, I'm sure there's a list of Democratic congress-people who knew about it beforehand and agreed to it. Harmful information to both parties.
It does not mean they do not have to answer for breaking the law. Classified material is classified material, it's not up to one man to decide what should not be classified.
The president is one man who can effectively classify or unclassify material. The entire problem here is that the person to whom we entrusted the executive branch decided to classify illegal activities that he ordered. That's a little bit of a conflict of interest, don't you think?
I'd rather have illegal acts by a country that has dedicated public servants, than each servant deciding on his own whether he likes a program or not.
All it takes is a secret argument for why you should be disappeared, and *poof*, you're gone. Or your family, or your friends. Are we going to start having to make "In Soviet America" jokes on slashdot in a few years? Or will that just get one disappeared? So far, we've only seen a few American citizens go to Guantanamo. Do you know of any reason the government will reverse that trend it if it's allowed to secretly spy on and prosecute people? After all, everyone involved in the Guantanamo disaster is just following orders like dedicated public servants. Sometimes I think people forget that the purpose of government is to serve people, not the other way around.
Islam is about peace?? Give me a F@#$ing break! Iraq should tell you somthing there. You have Suni's and Sheite's killing each other with the kurds on the side. In Afganastan you have the Taliban and all the other muslim tribes fighting each other. But Islam is about peace....
Informative? Stupid crack-smoking mods. Islam has *nothing* to do with terrorism or civil war or tribal conflicts. People are killing each other in the name of Islam to obscure the fact that they're killing each other for power and money. It's the same reason U.S. fascist dictators are acting under the guise of the "War on Terror". Calling things what they really are would expose the power struggles and complete absence of morality.
My thought has been lets just turn the whole middle east into a giant glass factory. It would solve a lot of their problems and ours faster than wasting time on "middle east peace". At least it would be realistic.
Funny, I think you have more in common with the terrorists than you think. From their perspective, turning the U.S. into a giant glass parking lot would fix most of our problems, too.
Unfortunately for you, it is definitely not in the best interest of the current U.S. government to nuke the middle east. A long, festering war is much more useful for their goals.
if even ONE enemy did not think of it but was clued-in by the leak then harm was done.
Innocent until proven guilty? Rule of law? Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure? Separation of powers? Damn them all if we can catch one minor "terrorist" and throw him in Gauntanamo to rot without trial!
I say if even one agent or government official misused their power, it's worse than letting 10 terrorists go free. Look at it statistically: There are at best a few thousand true terrorists in the world who would actually target the U.S. Even if the U.S. has a 99.999% success rate in identifying terrorists, that means there will be very very few false negatives, but thousands of false positives in the U.S. alone, meaning that the harm done by a 99.999% successful program could impact as many people as Al Queda did on 2001/09/11. How much does anyone want to bet that *any* U.S. program approaches a 99.999% success rate, much less one as subjective as criminal investigation?
There are plenty of options within the system he could have used to object. Instead he decided to betray national security. Traitor.
Yes, I suppose he could have gone to the FBI and reported a crime. The FBI, who are already involved in running things like Carnivore and Echelon, would laugh in his face. He could go to some local police department who can't investigate Federal crimes, or he could go to the NSA or the President and politely ask them to stop. Doing that would make it easier for him to simply disappear or have a tragic accident without anyone ever discovering what he knew. Public exposure of state crimes is the only way to go.
The real traitors are in the executive branch (NSA, Congress, and the Presidency), happily breaking the constitutional law they swore to uphold. If you truly believe that the U.S. constitution is not sufficient to protect the country, then you are implicitly claiming that the U.S. has failed, the terrorists have won, and that it's time to replace the U.S. with a petty dictatorship.
My mayor ran on the promising of "fixing any pothole within 24 hours of discovery." Of course the roads are still filled with potholes. Turns out, it was 24 hours of any confirmed pothole, which is trivially easy as the pothole confirmation team is as slow/backed up as the pothole filling team.
My guess is he'll be reelected by all his loyal supporters who wait an extra day or two before voting...
Computer programming isn't rocket science, it's bridge building. You have planners and you have builders. Builders pour cement and put rivets in place, and there are processes in place to identify, rectify, and robustly handle individual builder error. Bridges do not arbitrarily drop cars off into the river below due to individual builder error, and neither should software programs crash due to individual programmer error.
When you separate the planners from the builders like that, you get the Twin Cities bridge that was a load of under-engineered shit because planners built it to look good on paper, and the builders made it work, but overall it was a disaster waiting to happen.
I mean honestly, you shouldn't have overall architects who haven't actually written code before. They will absolutely fudge the software requirements because they really don't know what they need to get the job done. Likewise you can't get an infinite number of stupid programmers to implement a perfect specification because it takes too long and is too error prone.
Ultimately the question is where do you get your perfect software architects, and why can't you just get programmers from the same place? Without good programmers, how do you know that your software architects aren't full of shit?
Your post is dripping with contempt for the people who actually make stuff. 'so-called inventors' is a great example. Who did invent the mentioned nintendo games console then? you? your mates? How much of the R&D budget for the device did you contribute?
The entire point of a market (free or otherwise) is that goods are commodities, which means in general that there is no difference between a good created at Nintendo and one created by me. That implies that the same rights apply to a bought game station as one that is home made. Obviously copyright, patent, and trademark laws put some restrictions on this idea, but I don't think that playing games you wrote yourself is a violation of any of those rights, or should be in any possible case.
If you want to be realistic, everyone who has ever bought anything from Nintendo has personally funded their R&D budget. Money doesn't grow on trees, and even investors expect the revenue from customers to pay their dividends.
If you can't figure out the distinction, let me give you an analogy. Pretend you are a stripper. Someone pays you $40 to give them a lap dance. Do they own you while you are giving them the lap dance? Or are they simply borrowing your time?
Does the stripper own the right to performance of that particular striptease? Is it illegal for another stripper to perform the exact same striptease? You're paying for hardware when you get a lap dance, not software.
Now, replace "borrowing your time" with "license to use in a particular manner" and you have your answer. If you owned the software, you could change the license. Who owns World of Warcraft? Not you...Blizzard does. You merely have a license to use, in a particular way. I can't fathom why that is such a difficult concept for so many people.
Blizzard owns a detailed set of instructions that they call World of Warcraft. You own a computer that can follow instructions, and if your computer happens to have a copy of the instructions that Blizzard wrote then you can say that your computer is playing World of Warcraft. There are two reasons copyright applies to this situation, one ancient and one recent. In the ancient sense, (really no older than the 60's or 70's) software was found to have copyright protection despite the fact that lists of instructions generally do not have copyright protection in and of themselves. E.g. a recipe can be copyrighted only as an instantiation in a physical work, not as the abstract idea of the ratios of ingredients that can be mixed together. Software is special in this case, because ultimately there can be no copyright on abstract ideas, only their implementation. The courts found that there was enough creativity in the fixing of abstract ideas in a particular manner that qualified for copyright protection, so software in general can be copyrighted. That was perfectly reasonable, and without software patents such a situation would be almost ideal in fairness to software writers and users.
The problem occurred when some evil lawyers (and here I do mean evil, as in the freedom-stealing oppressive sort of evil) noticed that computers have hard disks and RAM and cache, and that they were making copies of software in order to follow the instructions in it. Some software even relied on this and purposefully instructed the computer to make copies of itself, commonly known as "installing" the software to a hard disk. Even some of the processes in advanced operating systems had to create derivative works of these copies of instructions by a process called "relocation", which allowed software to run at any base address in memory, and thus allow dynamic shared sets of instructions (libraries) and early multiprocessing before paging could work around the requirement that different groups of instructions (programs) must be present at different memory addresses. This is nothing compared with the fact that to run a list of instructions a computer must copy at least some small part of the instructions into itself in order to run them, due to the unfortunate consequence of physics that entropy must never decrease, requiring that the computer must have the same information as contained in the instructions in order to act on them. Since individual instructions can not be physically removed from the program and executed, they must be copied. Technically, this is not true. A computer could, in theory, chop a CD into tiny pieces and move them about inside the processor to run the program. Even better, a computer could store only references to the bits on the CD, and work only with the references, always returning to the CD when an instruction relied on the value of a bit at a given reference. In this case, references could be copied infinitely without violating copyright. To further optimize this computer, of course, references could be simplified so that a reference to a bit on the CD containing a "1" was labeled 'one', and a reference to a bit on the CD containing a "0" was labeled 'zero'. At what point does th
They spent a log of money on that. Sounds to me like it was actually a "test run" to make sure things work as expected. And now that they know it will work...
Actually, it works much better than locking someone up for life. 90 days detention is *far* cheaper than 1 year, or 20. The cost of an investigation and court case is probably dwarfed by incarceration costs after just 5 or 10 years.
You've heard that adage that crime doesn't pay, right? Well, neither does justice. It's horribly expensive. In economic terms, I'm certain that vigilante justice comes out ahead, which is why the RIAA's antics, private prisons, and police states are becoming more popular.
Some of that history is at Downside's Deathwatch. ("Chart is not available for this symbol" means the company is so dead their ticker symbol is ancient history.)
I think you need to update Verisign and Amazon. Did you automate your search for dying companies or do manual analysis when you picked them?
It's more like the difference between a rotary saw, a hack saw and a chain saw. All three cut wood, but do it in different ways. Which one is most effective for a given task is left to the judgement of the craftsman.
Some OS's are more of a clumsy blunt instrument than a woodworking tool...
I can either waste my life pretending to be good at something I'm not, or actually work on something I'm good at and hopefully usher in strong AI or usable nanotech. Does anyone honestly think that the rich, famous socialites will have anything at all to do with the future once AI gets smart enough to schedule work flow and resource allocation? They might retain their status for a while, but ultimately AI and nanotech spells the end of the industrial age, and probably the end of the neo-feudal corporate sponsored governments as well.
After the singularity, the socialites will be able to go to their little parties and have all the sex they want while the nerds get to re-engineer the parts of the universe we can reach. Totally different goals and mindsets, and it doesn't make sense to try to play the social power game just to end up with a bunch of useless money and property after nanotechnology replicators become commonplace. I don't want social skills, I want omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality.
As far as I know, using the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, 3D games are mostly independent from the X server process. LibGL ends up doing most of the work directly with the hardware via memory mapping within the game's process. I don't know how many of the calls need to go back to the X server, but my guess is only the ones dealing with windowing and user input.
Do I think we are safer then if there was NO search... YES
Just a reminder that the original hijackers had no bombs, no explosive shoes or Gatorade, just box-cutters that could easily be replaced by the scissors that TSA allows now. The only effective impediment, locking the cabin door, could have been implemented without all the searching. How many terrorist attacks on planes have actually been foiled by searching passengers? Zero that I've heard of. Perhaps some hypothetical attacks were never implemented because of the search policies, but if there were terrorists serious enough to go Jihad another plane, do you think taking their shoes off at the airport and having to learn a martial art to overcome the pilots/passengers would have been too much work for them? I think the basic problem is logistics. A cell based group trying to get a dozen people to secretly coordinate an attack plan with high risk and no (earthly) rewards must be a logistical nightmare. You have to find dedicated, fundamentalist people who are not quite smart enough to give up on the plan, but not stupid/crazy enough to fail or be detected, all while consuming easy to trace funds and resources.
Hmm, I need some help with this one, since my networking kungfu sucks... When I login to Gmail, I am in a https mode, and this persists through my whole session. I was under the impression, perhaps naively, that this meant my session to Gmail was encrypted and that only I and the Gmail server could decipher the contents of my mail, that is until I click send, and it goes from the Gmail server to wherever I send to. So if this is true, how would someone be able to reassemble my email as I type?
What about before your email gets to Google? Carnivore/Eschelon doesn't care where the email is sent from, it will see it when it goes through AT&T's secretrooms. Use gpg if you actually care about secure email.
Can they peek inside SMTP sessions too? My internets aren't secure when my interns send them over a 20 hop route to some smtp server in the hope that I will get them next week?
If you're worried about packet inspection, use port 443 or 22 for all your real time traffic, and gpg (OpenPGP) for email.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad you've got the theory down straight. We agree that secret courts are not going to cut it. However -- and this is a big however, that's not happenng. No American is being arrested in his country on secret charges without recourse to the court system. So your argument is more of a hypothetical than a real-world one.
No one is personally subject to secret courts yet, but warrents (if they're even required) can be obtained in secret courts. Presumably, this means that when you're arrested with a secret warrant, the feds won't show it to you when you're raided. After all, it's secret and may include information you could pass on to your terrorist buddies. I'm not so much worried about myself, I'm worried about married gay people (that anti-gay marriage amendment crap is always on the horizon), abortion doctors/protestors (both could easily fall suddenly under some new law making their activities illegal), and some doctors (medical marijuana, euthanasia). There are plenty of ways even secret surveillance and warrants could be abused to harass people. Even worse, the MAFIAA seems to be getting pretty cuddly with both major parties, and they always try to tie piracy to terrorism or drug trafficking somehow. How long before secret surveillance is used to enforce the RIAA's goals? Basically, the infrastructure is being set up for wanton abuse. The FBI has already documented failures in following even the less restrictive laws they have now.
I'm glad you're so fired up about individual freedoms. I really am. The next time the environmental groups want to take away private property rights for wetlands I hope I can count you on the side of personal liberty. The next time the KKK or some other you find heinous wants to march through an ethnic neighborhood I hope you're there for them. The next time the government wants to use force to take money from people (taxes) for some kind of do-good cause like national healthcare, I hope you're on the ball. But I'm really tired of people who got their libertarianism from a comic book coming in and trying their hand at explaining how or why the government works the way it does. Abe Lincoln disbanded the Maryland legislature when he thought they might vote to succeed. He imprisoned Congressmen that he said were just "stirring up trouble" Adams signed the Sedition Act, which prevented criticism of the government. If you want a real-world view of how it works, look at the real world. Don't just spout off the theory without having any kind of historical depth to know why the theory works (and when there are exceptions)
I'm fine with the KKK as long as they run funny looking websites and march in bedsheets. They can even burn crosses on their own lawns if they want, as long as they get an appropriate burn permit and don't start forest fires. I'm also perfectly free to shout insults at them if I see them, since it's free speech. As long as it's not harassment, it's perfectly legal to hate the guts out of people who are in the KKK and let them know how you feel.
Wetland protection is like any natural resource protection, it can go overboard or it can be inadequate. What sort of framework would you suggest for managing resources that are shared not only by everyone in a country, but by all of their descendants and other countries as well? It requires consistent, unbiased planning otherwise it will be exploited to benefit only a few people at the expense of everyone else. National health is somewhat of a natural resource. Unhealthy people are less likely to have healthy children, and more likely to take sick time. Not to mention the fact that with increasing health and lifespan, retirement age is pushed back further, allowing for more productive years. If anything though, I would rather see more government funding of health care research than actual health care provision. Advances in medicine, in my opinion, truly belong to everyone in a country, if not the world.
My take on government is that it should account for the needs that citi
2. It defeats the purpose of voting: to cast your ballot for what you believe in. There's an argument that vote-swapping could bring you closer to what you want in the long run, but picture trying to swap votes in different races with different people in assorted districts in your state -- the calculations get out of hand very quickly.
I thought the idea was to vote exactly as you wanted to, by having a guarantee that by doing so you weren't enabling a worse evil to occur. E.g. most people vote Republican or Democrat, but at least 50% would rather vote for someone other than the front runner of either party (some poll last year said that). So vote trading is simply that 50% of the people getting together and saying "My candidate is an anti-republican. I'll vote for him/her if you vote for your anti-democrat favorite". That way the third parties have an overall larger percentage of the vote, and voting for a third party will (in theory) not allow the republocrat to benefit from your vote against them.
The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages
Everyone would have 2^n ancestors if no one ever interbred, but obviously that's not the case. My guess is that what really happened is enough people married across class, in combination with people choosing important sounding surnames for themselves, to make it appear as if a majority of English have upper class ancestors. A whole lot of people can be descended from royalty; all it takes is one or two horny princes or princesses to spread the royal genes far and wide. The poor people's genes are spread far and wide too, it's just that no one made up any fancy genealogical charts saying they were directly descended from Bob Shaftoe, mud worker in 1329. So all the evidence is selectively chosen to point to the most well known ancestors.
I could be wrong, and maybe they somehow found all the original upper class DNA in a vault somewhere and did a conclusive study to show that most people in England share some of it, but my guess is that their result is just an improper interpretation of the fact that almost everyone is descended from almost everyone else's ancestors if you go back far enough.
When a Republican voter dislikes a Democrat candidate, they say "He's stupid because [assorted reasons]". The reasons may or may not be valid, but at least they HAVE 'em.
I think it's because they all listen to Rush Limbaugh and get a good list thrown at them at every opportunity. On the other hand, I can explain why Don Rumsfeld is a fucking idiot that even Republicans can understand: He ignored sound military advice and sent a teensy force to Iraq. The Army Times gave him a vote of no confidence. What does that tell you?
It's obvious why the Republicrats agree that exposing state secrets are bad; they both keep a lot of secrets. I'm sure the judge would have exposed Democrats authorizing the NSA to spy on American citizens. In fact, I'm sure there's a list of Democratic congress-people who knew about it beforehand and agreed to it. Harmful information to both parties.
It does not mean they do not have to answer for breaking the law. Classified material is classified material, it's not up to one man to decide what should not be classified.
The president is one man who can effectively classify or unclassify material. The entire problem here is that the person to whom we entrusted the executive branch decided to classify illegal activities that he ordered. That's a little bit of a conflict of interest, don't you think?
I'd rather have illegal acts by a country that has dedicated public servants, than each servant deciding on his own whether he likes a program or not.
All it takes is a secret argument for why you should be disappeared, and *poof*, you're gone. Or your family, or your friends. Are we going to start having to make "In Soviet America" jokes on slashdot in a few years? Or will that just get one disappeared? So far, we've only seen a few American citizens go to Guantanamo. Do you know of any reason the government will reverse that trend it if it's allowed to secretly spy on and prosecute people? After all, everyone involved in the Guantanamo disaster is just following orders like dedicated public servants. Sometimes I think people forget that the purpose of government is to serve people, not the other way around.
Islam is about peace?? Give me a F@#$ing break! Iraq should tell you somthing there. You have Suni's and Sheite's killing each other with the kurds on the side. In Afganastan you have the Taliban and all the other muslim tribes fighting each other. But Islam is about peace....
Informative? Stupid crack-smoking mods. Islam has *nothing* to do with terrorism or civil war or tribal conflicts. People are killing each other in the name of Islam to obscure the fact that they're killing each other for power and money. It's the same reason U.S. fascist dictators are acting under the guise of the "War on Terror". Calling things what they really are would expose the power struggles and complete absence of morality.
My thought has been lets just turn the whole middle east into a giant glass factory. It would solve a lot of their problems and ours faster than wasting time on "middle east peace". At least it would be realistic.
Funny, I think you have more in common with the terrorists than you think. From their perspective, turning the U.S. into a giant glass parking lot would fix most of our problems, too.
Unfortunately for you, it is definitely not in the best interest of the current U.S. government to nuke the middle east. A long, festering war is much more useful for their goals.
if even ONE enemy did not think of it but was clued-in by the leak then harm was done.
Innocent until proven guilty? Rule of law? Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure? Separation of powers? Damn them all if we can catch one minor "terrorist" and throw him in Gauntanamo to rot without trial!
I say if even one agent or government official misused their power, it's worse than letting 10 terrorists go free. Look at it statistically: There are at best a few thousand true terrorists in the world who would actually target the U.S. Even if the U.S. has a 99.999% success rate in identifying terrorists, that means there will be very very few false negatives, but thousands of false positives in the U.S. alone, meaning that the harm done by a 99.999% successful program could impact as many people as Al Queda did on 2001/09/11. How much does anyone want to bet that *any* U.S. program approaches a 99.999% success rate, much less one as subjective as criminal investigation?
There are plenty of options within the system he could have used to object. Instead he decided to betray national security. Traitor.
Yes, I suppose he could have gone to the FBI and reported a crime. The FBI, who are already involved in running things like Carnivore and Echelon, would laugh in his face. He could go to some local police department who can't investigate Federal crimes, or he could go to the NSA or the President and politely ask them to stop. Doing that would make it easier for him to simply disappear or have a tragic accident without anyone ever discovering what he knew. Public exposure of state crimes is the only way to go.
The real traitors are in the executive branch (NSA, Congress, and the Presidency), happily breaking the constitutional law they swore to uphold. If you truly believe that the U.S. constitution is not sufficient to protect the country, then you are implicitly claiming that the U.S. has failed, the terrorists have won, and that it's time to replace the U.S. with a petty dictatorship.
My mayor ran on the promising of "fixing any pothole within 24 hours of discovery." Of course the roads are still filled with potholes. Turns out, it was 24 hours of any confirmed pothole, which is trivially easy as the pothole confirmation team is as slow/backed up as the pothole filling team.
My guess is he'll be reelected by all his loyal supporters who wait an extra day or two before voting...
Computer programming isn't rocket science, it's bridge building. You have planners and you have builders. Builders pour cement and put rivets in place, and there are processes in place to identify, rectify, and robustly handle individual builder error. Bridges do not arbitrarily drop cars off into the river below due to individual builder error, and neither should software programs crash due to individual programmer error.
When you separate the planners from the builders like that, you get the Twin Cities bridge that was a load of under-engineered shit because planners built it to look good on paper, and the builders made it work, but overall it was a disaster waiting to happen.
I mean honestly, you shouldn't have overall architects who haven't actually written code before. They will absolutely fudge the software requirements because they really don't know what they need to get the job done. Likewise you can't get an infinite number of stupid programmers to implement a perfect specification because it takes too long and is too error prone.
Ultimately the question is where do you get your perfect software architects, and why can't you just get programmers from the same place? Without good programmers, how do you know that your software architects aren't full of shit?
But is it NP-hard?
Worse! It's either inconsistent or incomplete, and no one knows which!
Your post is dripping with contempt for the people who actually make stuff. 'so-called inventors' is a great example. Who did invent the mentioned nintendo games console then? you? your mates? How much of the R&D budget for the device did you contribute?
The entire point of a market (free or otherwise) is that goods are commodities, which means in general that there is no difference between a good created at Nintendo and one created by me. That implies that the same rights apply to a bought game station as one that is home made. Obviously copyright, patent, and trademark laws put some restrictions on this idea, but I don't think that playing games you wrote yourself is a violation of any of those rights, or should be in any possible case.
If you want to be realistic, everyone who has ever bought anything from Nintendo has personally funded their R&D budget. Money doesn't grow on trees, and even investors expect the revenue from customers to pay their dividends.
If you can't figure out the distinction, let me give you an analogy. Pretend you are a stripper. Someone pays you $40 to give them a lap dance. Do they own you while you are giving them the lap dance? Or are they simply borrowing your time?
Does the stripper own the right to performance of that particular striptease? Is it illegal for another stripper to perform the exact same striptease? You're paying for hardware when you get a lap dance, not software.
Now, replace "borrowing your time" with "license to use in a particular manner" and you have your answer. If you owned the software, you could change the license. Who owns World of Warcraft? Not you...Blizzard does. You merely have a license to use, in a particular way. I can't fathom why that is such a difficult concept for so many people.
Blizzard owns a detailed set of instructions that they call World of Warcraft. You own a computer that can follow instructions, and if your computer happens to have a copy of the instructions that Blizzard wrote then you can say that your computer is playing World of Warcraft. There are two reasons copyright applies to this situation, one ancient and one recent. In the ancient sense, (really no older than the 60's or 70's) software was found to have copyright protection despite the fact that lists of instructions generally do not have copyright protection in and of themselves. E.g. a recipe can be copyrighted only as an instantiation in a physical work, not as the abstract idea of the ratios of ingredients that can be mixed together. Software is special in this case, because ultimately there can be no copyright on abstract ideas, only their implementation. The courts found that there was enough creativity in the fixing of abstract ideas in a particular manner that qualified for copyright protection, so software in general can be copyrighted. That was perfectly reasonable, and without software patents such a situation would be almost ideal in fairness to software writers and users.
The problem occurred when some evil lawyers (and here I do mean evil, as in the freedom-stealing oppressive sort of evil) noticed that computers have hard disks and RAM and cache, and that they were making copies of software in order to follow the instructions in it. Some software even relied on this and purposefully instructed the computer to make copies of itself, commonly known as "installing" the software to a hard disk. Even some of the processes in advanced operating systems had to create derivative works of these copies of instructions by a process called "relocation", which allowed software to run at any base address in memory, and thus allow dynamic shared sets of instructions (libraries) and early multiprocessing before paging could work around the requirement that different groups of instructions (programs) must be present at different memory addresses. This is nothing compared with the fact that to run a list of instructions a computer must copy at least some small part of the instructions into itself in order to run them, due to the unfortunate consequence of physics that entropy must never decrease, requiring that the computer must have the same information as contained in the instructions in order to act on them. Since individual instructions can not be physically removed from the program and executed, they must be copied. Technically, this is not true. A computer could, in theory, chop a CD into tiny pieces and move them about inside the processor to run the program. Even better, a computer could store only references to the bits on the CD, and work only with the references, always returning to the CD when an instruction relied on the value of a bit at a given reference. In this case, references could be copied infinitely without violating copyright. To further optimize this computer, of course, references could be simplified so that a reference to a bit on the CD containing a "1" was labeled 'one', and a reference to a bit on the CD containing a "0" was labeled 'zero'. At what point does th
They spent a log of money on that. Sounds to me like it was actually a "test run" to make sure things work as expected. And now that they know it will work...
Actually, it works much better than locking someone up for life. 90 days detention is *far* cheaper than 1 year, or 20. The cost of an investigation and court case is probably dwarfed by incarceration costs after just 5 or 10 years.
You've heard that adage that crime doesn't pay, right? Well, neither does justice. It's horribly expensive. In economic terms, I'm certain that vigilante justice comes out ahead, which is why the RIAA's antics, private prisons, and police states are becoming more popular.
Some of that history is at Downside's Deathwatch. ("Chart is not available for this symbol" means the company is so dead their ticker symbol is ancient history.)
I think you need to update Verisign and Amazon. Did you automate your search for dying companies or do manual analysis when you picked them?
It's more like the difference between a rotary saw, a hack saw and a chain saw. All three cut wood, but do it in different ways. Which one is most effective for a given task is left to the judgement of the craftsman.
Some OS's are more of a clumsy blunt instrument than a woodworking tool...
I can either waste my life pretending to be good at something I'm not, or actually work on something I'm good at and hopefully usher in strong AI or usable nanotech. Does anyone honestly think that the rich, famous socialites will have anything at all to do with the future once AI gets smart enough to schedule work flow and resource allocation? They might retain their status for a while, but ultimately AI and nanotech spells the end of the industrial age, and probably the end of the neo-feudal corporate sponsored governments as well.
After the singularity, the socialites will be able to go to their little parties and have all the sex they want while the nerds get to re-engineer the parts of the universe we can reach. Totally different goals and mindsets, and it doesn't make sense to try to play the social power game just to end up with a bunch of useless money and property after nanotechnology replicators become commonplace. I don't want social skills, I want omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality.
Man, I wish I was born in the Victorian era. Sigh.
You were. You died of influenza at an early age, and this is just another one of your incarnations.
Oh, wait, you mean you want the ideals of the Victorian era with the modern medicine and technology? Go read Diamond Age or something.
As far as I know, using the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, 3D games are mostly independent from the X server process. LibGL ends up doing most of the work directly with the hardware via memory mapping within the game's process. I don't know how many of the calls need to go back to the X server, but my guess is only the ones dealing with windowing and user input.
Do I think we are safer then if there was NO search... YES
Just a reminder that the original hijackers had no bombs, no explosive shoes or Gatorade, just box-cutters that could easily be replaced by the scissors that TSA allows now. The only effective impediment, locking the cabin door, could have been implemented without all the searching. How many terrorist attacks on planes have actually been foiled by searching passengers? Zero that I've heard of. Perhaps some hypothetical attacks were never implemented because of the search policies, but if there were terrorists serious enough to go Jihad another plane, do you think taking their shoes off at the airport and having to learn a martial art to overcome the pilots/passengers would have been too much work for them? I think the basic problem is logistics. A cell based group trying to get a dozen people to secretly coordinate an attack plan with high risk and no (earthly) rewards must be a logistical nightmare. You have to find dedicated, fundamentalist people who are not quite smart enough to give up on the plan, but not stupid/crazy enough to fail or be detected, all while consuming easy to trace funds and resources.
Really now, does every profession need it's own appreciation day?
Yes. I call mine Pay Day. It comes 26 times a year.
Hmm, I need some help with this one, since my networking kungfu sucks... When I login to Gmail, I am in a https mode, and this persists through my whole session. I was under the impression, perhaps naively, that this meant my session to Gmail was encrypted and that only I and the Gmail server could decipher the contents of my mail, that is until I click send, and it goes from the Gmail server to wherever I send to. So if this is true, how would someone be able to reassemble my email as I type?
What about before your email gets to Google? Carnivore/Eschelon doesn't care where the email is sent from, it will see it when it goes through AT&T's secret rooms. Use gpg if you actually care about secure email.
Can they peek inside SMTP sessions too? My internets aren't secure when my interns send them over a 20 hop route to some smtp server in the hope that I will get them next week?
If you're worried about packet inspection, use port 443 or 22 for all your real time traffic, and gpg (OpenPGP) for email.