The reason for that is likely that 'billion' means quite different things in the American and English systems. In American, billion is 1000 million. In English, billion is one million million. I'm actually not sure what comes after that, I don't know whether an English trilion is 10^18 or 10^24 though.
Saves publishing two versions of the book, and risk screwing up the number conversions in the middle!
It will of course still be possible to duplicate existing ones...
Presumably the encrypted image will be hashed with the passport number or something like that. Otherwise it would be trivial for anyone who has has an old passport (well, I'm thinking in the future, when these things are old-hat) to simply copy the data to a new, faked passport.
How? How would a fingerprint scanner, for example, determine whether the finger is attached to a body or not? There have been plenty of articles on slashdot about exploits of biometric scanners. It seems that you can fool most fingerprint scanners, for example, with a gelatin replica, never mind detecting if the subject is alive or not!
Yeah, apart from screwing up the maths, you are right. Looking at the IP address assignments, there are many, many as-yet unallocated addresses. Everything from 83/8 to 126/8, for example.
What I suspect is happening is that IANA have basically stopped giving out addresses (or are doing so at a very slow rate), not because there is any immediate risk of running out, but because giving out addresses would give the impression that IPv6 will not actually be needed. The more IPv4 addresses that are issued, the more network infrastructure depends explicitly on IPv4, the harder it is to change it later.
In reality, the 'crisis' of actually running out of IP addresses is completely fictitous. Even when the last IPv4 host on the net is finally turned off, IANA will probably still have millions of IPv4 addresses that were never assigned. But that doesn't change the underlying problem, that NAT is a poorly functioning hack and no matter what other hacks are layered on top, IPv4 just isn't good enough to use as the primary communications protocol for the whole of humanity. There is a good reason for that: the designers of IPv4 thankfully wern't arrogant enough to even begin to assume that the net would become as ubiquitous as it has.
Is your sig supposed to be some kind of weird joke?
Boromir and Faramir were brothers, both sons of Denethor (son of Ecthelion). Denethor was steward of Gondor, since the line of Kings was (apparantly) broken when Isildur was killed.
But the line of Kings lived on, in the Rangers from the north. The purest line was Aragorn, direct male-line descendent of Isildur himself, who ultimately reclaimed the crown of Gondor.
Why don't you make another username? I reckon a significant fraction of Slashdot readers visibly wince whenever they look at it....
The code could not 'stay' under the GPL, because it never was in the first place. In your hypothetical, you merely fraudulently claimed that it was.
Even so, MS would have no possibility to sue people whom you distributed the code to. The most they could do is notify them that the code was misappropriated and illegal to distribute. They could certainly request that people delete the offending code, but I'm not sure whether they could force that.
You would need to be very very careful with this scheme. In some cases, company directors can be held personally liable in these matters. Revealing exploits that compromise the security of national infrastructure might cause you to end up in a prison camp in Cuba.
True, but won't pictures perhaps "inspire" other paedophiles to commit such acts?
Possibly. It is the only justification/excuse that I can come up with to justify banning computer generated/anime/fantasy child porn. But I doubt its true, or if so, only in a tiny minority of cases. Does seeing a picture of a naked woman inspire you to go out and rape someone? For most people, the answer is a resounding "no". Maybe paedophilia is different in this respect? Maybe not?
How about the victims? I wouldn't like to be a teenager who has pictures of him/herself being abused as a child circulating the net.
Of course. There is very good justification for banning real photographs of child abuse. Photographs of rapes are illegal for a similar reason (most likely covered by 'obscenity' statutes). At its most fundamental level, it is a further human rights abuse of the victim, to propogate photos of the crime.
The problem is, paedophilia is quite distinct from child abuse. I don't have any evidence here but I suspect most pedophiles could, if they were allowed (and possibly most do?), happily live out their lives without ever harming a child, in much the same way that the vast majority of heterosexuals can live out their life without raping someone.
The real crime is child molestation. Paedophilia (without child molestation) is essentially a thought-crime. In the USA, the opinion of the majority of law makers and judges seems to be that fantasy pictures (paintings, drawings, computer 'art' etc) of child porn are equivalent to and just as bad as real photographs of someone actually being abused. The attitude in most other countries is probably the same. Possession of an image of a child in any kind of sexual or erotic pose is illegal, the origin of the picture is irrelevant.
I vaguely remember something about a person in California (I think) who was convicted on peadophilia charges for the sole reason of having a private diary (that was accidentally read by someone else) containing fantasy stories involving paedophilia. But I can't find a link to it, and I'm not really keen on doing too many more google searches with 'child pornography' or 'paedophilia' in it - for obvious but unfortunate reasons.
In the USA, the CPPA was overturned, but not because the judges were uneasy about the idea of 'virtual crime', but the law as drafted was too broad and might cover things that were not, in fact, virtual child porn.
"The aim of ensuring the enforceability of our nation's child pornography laws is a compelling one," Rehnquist wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Scalia. "The CPPA is targeted to this aim by extending the definition of child pornography to reach computer-generated images that are virtually indistinguishable from real children engaged in sexually explicit conduct."
Are there any psycologists reading Slashot? I would be interested in their opinion on this quote:
"This decision has set back years of work on behalf of the most innocent Americans," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. "Whether in movies or photographs, it doesn't make a difference whether or not the person engaged in sex is actually a child. If it looks like a child and is said to be a child, pedophiles have found their fix -- and their search for true child pornography will only be enhanced."
Is this actually true? If you do some substitutions s/person/animal/; s/child/horse/; s/pedophiles/hippophiles/ (I got that last definition from here:-), then that paragraph sounds simply ridiculous. But what then is it about virtual paedophilia that makes it fundamentally different from any other sexual fetish - or even heterosexuality? Maybe there is a difference, and all paedophiles genuinely are dangerous and likely to molest someone at the drop of a hat. But it is not obvious to me why it should be so and I want to see some serious research before our laws are structured around this apparent dogma.
So what is the big deal here? I thought 'email' was already a real word in French anyway (with nothing to do with computers, incidentally). Why shouldn't the French come up with their own word rather than just absorb the English version? And 'email' isn't a silly word anyway, the pronounciation is not regular with the rest of the English language.
The 'ban' only applies in official Government comminications, there is no compulsion to use the new word outside that arena.
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 1
Well, you are probably right (actually, I am too drunk to tell), but fore sure plutonium (metal) is much more radioactive than uranium (metal). Of course, the metal form is not the most dangerous.
Some links I found trying (unsucessfully) to argue the case:
My guess is, plutonium in its solid form is not too bad, and will pass through the body without too much damage (as long as you have not ingested too much). Oxides on the other hand, even if I were an alcoholic base-jumping smoker, I would avoid.
Yes, I remember the story. It is interesting as a physical device; as an engineering task it is completely impossible. No one in their right mind would want that much Polonium-210 that close to their brain. The environmental damage alone from a dead soldier would be enough for an emergency session of the Geneva Convention to be convened, the first time one was fired:-)
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
Are you confusing uranium with plutonium? I have done a bit of reading of the textbooks in the last hour; I agree uranium is (probably) moderately ingested in small quantities, but plutonium is a quite different matter. Can you provide any links to the workers inhaling plutonium oxides and surviving? I worked at Los Alamos for a while (only in non-classified areas), but I did get the distinct impression that they did absolutely everything possible to avoid inhaling any plutonium oxides - and because of the alpha radiation, never mind the heavy-metal toxicity.
True. The only long-term danger with handgun technologies (and I use the word 'danger' quite deliberately) is directed energy weapons. They are completely impractical nowdays because there exists no such compact energy source. Now, IAATP (I am a theoretical physicist) and I know of no 'emerging' ideas that would permit such a weapon; but there are no laws of nature that forbit it either; therefore it is probably only a matter of time (if we are very lucky, hundreds of years or so).
Of course, if the USA get a large enough laser in space, or on a 747, then all these arguments are moot.
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 1
Interesting. I know for sure (well, 99% sure) that plutonium is not particularly dangerous outside the body (Alpha particles are so strongly interacting they skin blocks most of them, so not many get through to damage internal organs). But inside the body, well, a dose measuring in micrograms is fatal. A kilogram of plutonium in a water supply would kill far more people than a bomb would.
Any physicists here care to comment on what the difference is? I thought uranium emitted alphas too? Is the parent post & link incorrect?
Answer: Memory & disk bandwidth is more important than you realize. In typical desktop applications, you never notice it. In a heavy I/O bound (or memory bound - same thing nowdays) job, you notice it a lot.
If all you care about is CPU core performance, then sure buy as many of the cheapest core as you can get. If you need to deal with large data sets, CPU performance is limited by the memory or disk bandwidth; go for the best IO system you can afford (banked RAM, mirrored disks etc).
Was he murdered or did he kill himself? I havn't seen an article that says one way or the other (which is weird in itself), but I got the feeling he was hounded to his death (ie, provoked suicide).
I'm reminded of the situation with the German Verfassungsschuts, i.e. the counter espionage. Since the Germans have (very) bad experiences with the "Secret State Police" (GeStaPo) breaking down doors in the middle of the night, hauling away people in their pyamases never to be heard from again, the Verfassungsschuts is forbidden by law to have any law enforcement powers. If they need a spie arrested they have to collect the evidence and go to the police like any other citizen would have to.
I believe this is the situation in most places (well, not the Gestapo bit, but the bit about counter-espionage being hands-length from law enforcement).
This suits the Verfassungsschuts just fine, since they reason: "If we're not allowed to thwart crime we cannot be required to report crime whenever we see it, like the police must." Thus enabling them to look the other way when the police wouldn't have been able to.
I'm sure it suits them very well. If you are looking for a spy the last thing you want to do is alert them by hauling their colleagues off for stealing the office paperclips.
Of course in the US much of this is moot anyway, since the police there is allowed to commit crimes to investigate crimes (such as posing as a buyer of narcotics) to a much greater degree than is the norm in Europe. (And plea bargains and turning states evidence and whatnot).
Yeah, I think most people in the world agree that capitalism works fairly well for running an economy. The USA is the only country I know though where laissez-faire capitalism extends to the legal system!
Was Apollo 1 the case where there was a fire in the capsule on the launchpad, during a training excercise? If so, it doesn't really count as a 'space mission' as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Saves publishing two versions of the book, and risk screwing up the number conversions in the middle!
Presumably the encrypted image will be hashed with the passport number or something like that. Otherwise it would be trivial for anyone who has has an old passport (well, I'm thinking in the future, when these things are old-hat) to simply copy the data to a new, faked passport.
How? How would a fingerprint scanner, for example, determine whether the finger is attached to a body or not? There have been plenty of articles on slashdot about exploits of biometric scanners. It seems that you can fool most fingerprint scanners, for example, with a gelatin replica, never mind detecting if the subject is alive or not!
Can I buy music from outside the United States?
No. Due to licensing restrictions, BuyMusic.com content is available only to residents of the United States.
Hmmm. I wonder how they are enforcing that?
What I suspect is happening is that IANA have basically stopped giving out addresses (or are doing so at a very slow rate), not because there is any immediate risk of running out, but because giving out addresses would give the impression that IPv6 will not actually be needed. The more IPv4 addresses that are issued, the more network infrastructure depends explicitly on IPv4, the harder it is to change it later.
In reality, the 'crisis' of actually running out of IP addresses is completely fictitous. Even when the last IPv4 host on the net is finally turned off, IANA will probably still have millions of IPv4 addresses that were never assigned. But that doesn't change the underlying problem, that NAT is a poorly functioning hack and no matter what other hacks are layered on top, IPv4 just isn't good enough to use as the primary communications protocol for the whole of humanity. There is a good reason for that: the designers of IPv4 thankfully wern't arrogant enough to even begin to assume that the net would become as ubiquitous as it has.
OK, but its hard to take such a guy seriously!
Boromir and Faramir were brothers, both sons of Denethor (son of Ecthelion). Denethor was steward of Gondor, since the line of Kings was (apparantly) broken when Isildur was killed.
But the line of Kings lived on, in the Rangers from the north. The purest line was Aragorn, direct male-line descendent of Isildur himself, who ultimately reclaimed the crown of Gondor.
Why don't you make another username? I reckon a significant fraction of Slashdot readers visibly wince whenever they look at it....
Even so, MS would have no possibility to sue people whom you distributed the code to. The most they could do is notify them that the code was misappropriated and illegal to distribute. They could certainly request that people delete the offending code, but I'm not sure whether they could force that.
You would need to be very very careful with this scheme. In some cases, company directors can be held personally liable in these matters. Revealing exploits that compromise the security of national infrastructure might cause you to end up in a prison camp in Cuba.
Possibly. It is the only justification/excuse that I can come up with to justify banning computer generated/anime/fantasy child porn. But I doubt its true, or if so, only in a tiny minority of cases. Does seeing a picture of a naked woman inspire you to go out and rape someone? For most people, the answer is a resounding "no". Maybe paedophilia is different in this respect? Maybe not?
How about the victims? I wouldn't like to be a teenager who has pictures of him/herself being abused as a child circulating the net.
Of course. There is very good justification for banning real photographs of child abuse. Photographs of rapes are illegal for a similar reason (most likely covered by 'obscenity' statutes). At its most fundamental level, it is a further human rights abuse of the victim, to propogate photos of the crime.
The real crime is child molestation. Paedophilia (without child molestation) is essentially a thought-crime. In the USA, the opinion of the majority of law makers and judges seems to be that fantasy pictures (paintings, drawings, computer 'art' etc) of child porn are equivalent to and just as bad as real photographs of someone actually being abused. The attitude in most other countries is probably the same. Possession of an image of a child in any kind of sexual or erotic pose is illegal, the origin of the picture is irrelevant.
I vaguely remember something about a person in California (I think) who was convicted on peadophilia charges for the sole reason of having a private diary (that was accidentally read by someone else) containing fantasy stories involving paedophilia. But I can't find a link to it, and I'm not really keen on doing too many more google searches with 'child pornography' or 'paedophilia' in it - for obvious but unfortunate reasons.
In the USA, the CPPA was overturned, but not because the judges were uneasy about the idea of 'virtual crime', but the law as drafted was too broad and might cover things that were not, in fact, virtual child porn.
"The aim of ensuring the enforceability of our nation's child pornography laws is a compelling one," Rehnquist wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Scalia. "The CPPA is targeted to this aim by extending the definition of child pornography to reach computer-generated images that are virtually indistinguishable from real children engaged in sexually explicit conduct."
Are there any psycologists reading Slashot? I would be interested in their opinion on this quote:
"This decision has set back years of work on behalf of the most innocent Americans," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. "Whether in movies or photographs, it doesn't make a difference whether or not the person engaged in sex is actually a child. If it looks like a child and is said to be a child, pedophiles have found their fix -- and their search for true child pornography will only be enhanced."
Is this actually true? If you do some substitutions s/person/animal/; s/child/horse/; s/pedophiles/hippophiles/ (I got that last definition from here :-), then that paragraph sounds simply ridiculous. But what then is it about virtual paedophilia that makes it fundamentally different from any other sexual fetish - or even heterosexuality? Maybe there is a difference, and all paedophiles genuinely are dangerous and likely to molest someone at the drop of a hat. But it is not obvious to me why it should be so and I want to see some serious research before our laws are structured around this apparent dogma.
The 'ban' only applies in official Government comminications, there is no compulsion to use the new word outside that arena.
Some links I found trying (unsucessfully) to argue the case:
A discussion guide on uranium
Alpha radiation fact-sheet (The link to the pdf on plutonium is especially interesting)
and pu.org ought to be the authoratitive site?
My guess is, plutonium in its solid form is not too bad, and will pass through the body without too much damage (as long as you have not ingested too much). Oxides on the other hand, even if I were an alcoholic base-jumping smoker, I would avoid.
Yes, I remember the story. It is interesting as a physical device; as an engineering task it is completely impossible. No one in their right mind would want that much Polonium-210 that close to their brain. The environmental damage alone from a dead soldier would be enough for an emergency session of the Geneva Convention to be convened, the first time one was fired :-)
Are you confusing uranium with plutonium? I have done a bit of reading of the textbooks in the last hour; I agree uranium is (probably) moderately ingested in small quantities, but plutonium is a quite different matter. Can you provide any links to the workers inhaling plutonium oxides and surviving? I worked at Los Alamos for a while (only in non-classified areas), but I did get the distinct impression that they did absolutely everything possible to avoid inhaling any plutonium oxides - and because of the alpha radiation, never mind the heavy-metal toxicity.
I agree completely. The web has been around for a long time now, why is it still possible to make unsubstantiated claims with no links???
I admit: I havn't read the article. How do you get a cylindrically symetric object to rotate using only magnetic fields?
Of course, if the USA get a large enough laser in space, or on a 747, then all these arguments are moot.
Any physicists here care to comment on what the difference is? I thought uranium emitted alphas too? Is the parent post & link incorrect?
banked RAM, mirrored disks etc
Why the fuck did I say that? of course, I meant "striped disks"!
(Of course I'm only trolling ;)
If all you care about is CPU core performance, then sure buy as many of the cheapest core as you can get. If you need to deal with large data sets, CPU performance is limited by the memory or disk bandwidth; go for the best IO system you can afford (banked RAM, mirrored disks etc).
Do you have any other links?
I believe this is the situation in most places (well, not the Gestapo bit, but the bit about counter-espionage being hands-length from law enforcement).
This suits the Verfassungsschuts just fine, since they reason: "If we're not allowed to thwart crime we cannot be required to report crime whenever we see it, like the police must." Thus enabling them to look the other way when the police wouldn't have been able to.
I'm sure it suits them very well. If you are looking for a spy the last thing you want to do is alert them by hauling their colleagues off for stealing the office paperclips.
Of course in the US much of this is moot anyway, since the police there is allowed to commit crimes to investigate crimes (such as posing as a buyer of narcotics) to a much greater degree than is the norm in Europe. (And plea bargains and turning states evidence and whatnot).
Yeah, I think most people in the world agree that capitalism works fairly well for running an economy. The USA is the only country I know though where laissez-faire capitalism extends to the legal system!
Was Apollo 1 the case where there was a fire in the capsule on the launchpad, during a training excercise? If so, it doesn't really count as a 'space mission' as such.
I hadn't noticed it yet, but I am not from the USA. As usual, the rest of the world is lagging behind ;)