The primary this year has been utterly fascinating because, on the one had, all the Serious People in politics--Dem and GOP--had all but written Obama off as a one-termer a little over a year ago. But the economy started to "recover" and, importantly, unemployment numbers began falling. Then all these completely insane right-wing laws that were passed at the state level by the 2010 Tea Party Wave started making national news, the Supreme Court stooped to petty politics, and the divide between the conservative movement and the republican party became clear. Meanwhile No Drama Obama just keep letting out more rope for the other party to hang themselves with. Suddenly anyone who valued their future in politics ran away from the presidential race as fast as they could and, as you correctly point out, Obama stopped sweating because the only people willing to run were either there to soak up some limelight (Gingrich, Santorum); as entertainment for bored billionaires (Cain and later, Gingrich); too stupid to realize what they were doing (Perry); had nothing to lose (Romney); true believers (Bachman, Paul); or boring mainstream republicans that apparently don't watch the news (Pawlenty, Huntsman). And look what happened. The race came down to Romney, who despite all his money and influence with the establishment, couldn't lock it up against Santorum; classic Republican Party vs. Conservative Moment.
I think you're right to compare today's GOP to the Goldwater era, because he marked the dawn of the conservative movement, which later embraced the christian right and ultimately forced everyone but the super-rich and the true believers out of the party through years of purification in the form of primaries and state/local elections. But I'm doubtful that they will resolve this mess in a mere four years. Barring something like another 9/11 or huge market crash, I think we're just seeing the beginnings of the Return of the Democrats. No popular, mainstream, electable republican can survive a GOP primary--not even four years from now--and beat someone like Hilary Clinton (unless you think Biden will run in 2016...) on an even playing field.
The latest CBS polling shows that Romney will lose to Obama by 4 percent, whereas Ron Paul would defeat the current president by 5. Maybe YOU hate him but Paul has crossover appeal to independents and Democrats that Romney lacks.
The only CBS polling that Google seems to know about (and that is reported on Paul's own website) is one that shows Paul beating Obama amongst independent voters. And Romney's slide in the polls has a lot to do with his massive loss of support from women (he still beats or ties Obama amongst men) after supporting all the right-wing insanity over birth control, forced ultrasounds, and the general assault on Women's rights. If the economy takes another dip, if republicans can successfully blame rising gas prices on Obama (who apparently controls gas prices world-wide; they are skyrocketing in Europe, too), or if Romney can dig up an effective October Surprise, then low-information voters (read: morons) will swing back to "the other guy," who is going to be Romney.
Don't get me wrong; I love Ron Paul, and I think that it is incredibly important to have his voice out there as a counterweight to the entrenched, inbred beltway thinking. In fact, I wish there was a Ron Paul on the left, so that people could see what the left--and not the center-right that FOX News calls the Far Left--actually looks like. But let's not delude ourselves; the GOP establishment will never take Ron Paul seriously, the media view him as an eccentric crackpot, and the delegate system is heavily rigged in favor of Romney (yet he still has to outspend his opponents by an order of magnitude because he's such an unlikable douche). Ron Paul has embraced his role as a foil and says crazy stuff that renders him completely unelectable nationally and Ron Paul supporters just have to accept that, just like Nader supporters did when Bush was sworn in as POTUS.
What really irks me about geographical restrictions is their totalitarian approach. I keep a permanent address in the US along with a few bank accounts and whatnot. But if I subscribe to a US-based service with my American address and bank account, I'm only allowed to use it while I'm physically within the US. I understand the reasoning--that stuff airs abroad at different times and with different distribution/carrier agreements--but as far as Hulu or Netflix is concerned, I live in the US and just travel 99% of the time... I mean, I still have to file US taxes (because taxes are based on citizenship and residence, so I get to file taxes in two countries) but PayPal/Hulu/Netflix/etc. throw a temper tantrum unless I log in through a US-based VPN... Anyway, it seems unlikely that a citizen living abroad who pays for a streaming service in their own country would be extradited for violating the TOS; more likely to happen to someone re-selling access or broadcasting it in a pub or something.
A friendly warning from experience: I have lived in Europe for about as long as Hulu has existed and have found them to be incredibly aggressive at blocking free and pay-for proxies/VPNs. I tried all sorts different services and eventually each was blocked by Hulu, usually within 3-6 months. None of the others, mind you--Netflix, and and all the networks and studios continue to work. (And most use some sort of region-checking URL as a gateway, meaning you can direct just that one connection through the proxy, and then stream at full-speed.) I certainly hope unblock-us continues to evade Hulu (and I like the DNS approach), but if you use Hulu a lot, I would start looking for Plan B now, just to be safe.
I live in socialist Continental Europe where a friend of mine was arrested after beating the stuffing out of someone who refused to leave his house. The police took him to the station, offered him coffee, and politely interviewed him. He then spend the weekend in jail, where he had regular smoke breaks, cable TV, and three squares. No strip searches, pepper spray, zip ties, or mancho police BS. Can you guess how often people are stabbed in jail here? Or how often guards are attacked?
This argument that having someone fondle your ballsack is for your own protection is exactly the kind of nonsensical, fear-based thinking that allowed a whole country to blithely accept penning protesters in "free speech zones," indefinite detentions without evidence or trial, and submitting to having naked photos taken in order to board an airplane. Police are supposed to protect the peace--they are public servants--and in many parts of the world, they reciprocate respect, instead of demanding it through dehumanizing displays of power.
This case has nothing to do with protecting guards, or keeping people from running with scissors in a jail cell--that is what eyeballs, ears, and cameras are for. What the SCOTUS said was that your fourth amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure ends when a police officer decides to arrest you. The guy in TFA was arrested because the cop thought that he hadn't paid a fine--despite having documentation that stated otherwise. He was then strip searched not once, but twice, before spending a week in jail. For allegedly not paying a fine. That he had in fact paid.
This decision is a further erosion of the Bill of Rights, plain and simple. The government needs a court order to obtain a search warrant before entering your house, but can enter your anus for loitering--or damn near anything because a copy can always find an excuse to arrest someone. Worse, it has a chilling effect, because now protestors know that, after being pepper-sprayed and zip-tied, they will be strip-searched multiple times.
Let's see what the amendement says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The SCOTUS has decreed that the whim of a single police officer, for any reason he or she deems worthy of arresting you, rises to the level of probable cause sufficient to violate the security of your person against unreasonable searches--unless your consider peeking inside someone's vagina or under their penis for participating in a peaceful protest reasonable. And, as anyone from a small town can attest to, cops can find any excuse to arrest you at any time, and face zero repercussions for flagrantly abusing that power; they don't even have to charge you with a crime. Slippery slope? Try free-fall.
Humor me for a second. Imagine a cop in a foul mood and who needs to fill quotas for traffic tickets, so he's pulling people over for just about anything. Now imagine that your wife is driving you home and she is pulled over by this cop. He runs her license, and asks for your ID--which you're not obliged to provide, but you don't want to start any trouble. He runs your ID and finds out that you have an unpaid parking ticket and that there is a warrant out for your arrest. Fortunately you have a receipt showing that you paid the fine, but the cop isn't buying it because the computer says otherwise. And you're black, so that probably isn't helping. The next thing you know, you're naked in a room full of strangers, spreading your ass cheeks apart while a stranger with a badge takes a good long look at your taint. Now imagine that this happens a second time, because they decide to move you from one jail to another during the entire week that you spend in jail. You're already in custody, but hey, "they've been doing it for decades now," and it's better safe than sorry.
I work in a socialist European system in a field in which people in American institutions typically work 60+ hours a week. I get paid less and my career progresses more slowly than my counterparts in the US, but it's nice that we don't have to work weekends, that no one looks at me funny if I go home at 6, etc. But they are also obsessed with metrics, evaluations, key performance indicators, etc so-on and so-forth. What you wind up doing is spending so much time dealing with piles of paperwork and meaningless tasks for which you will be evaluated, that you have to work extra hours just to get your actual work done. You can pull of an enormous accomplishment both for yourself and the organization, but if some idiot in administration can't find a check box for it, it won't count towards your evaluation... Some people game the system by finding all the right check boxes without doing and actual work. It's frustrating. Fortunately I get six (or eight--I lose track) weeks of vacation a year to relax and forget about it.
Laser printers don't use lasers to charge paper, they use them to selectively discharge an image transfer drum, which is then covered in toner and pressed against a piece of paper. The toner and paper are on opposite ends of the triboelectric series and spontaneously develop opposite charges when brought into contact with each other.
As for the toxicity of the toner vapor, the composition is of course proprietary, but black toner historically has comprised mainly oxides of selenium. In small quantities it's probably harmless, but long-term exposure is almost certainly bad for you.
I ran a TOR exit node on my laptop at work (at a university laboratory). After only about two weeks, the IT guy came downstairs with an official looking letter saying that my IP address had been named in a slander lawsuit. Apparently some business guy was trying to tarnish the name of some other business guy, and he was using TOR to do it. He had written a bunch of nasty stuff to blogs and send some angry emails or something. Anyway, the letter insisted that I appear in court in Los Angeles (I lived in Boston), but we sorted it out by explaining how TOR works--lucky for me, too, because there allegations of CP in the lawsuit.
Think about a presidential election. Of likely voters, about 98% have made up their mind before a candidate is even nominated, either because of a single issue or a general ideological disdain/coherence (or nutty stuff like Bush planned 9/11 or Obama is secretly Muslim). In the polarized political climate of the last few decades, that 98% is split almost evening and therefore what you are left with is about 2% (maybe more, but probably not much) of swing voters that decide elections, based almost entirely on who spent more money on TV ads. There are a handful of people for whom their single issue is that unicorn of politics; a non-partisan, non-wedge issue. But most are people who cannot see any daylight between the political platform of, say, George W. Bush and Al Gore, or Barack Obama and John McCain. (Personally I have more trouble differentiating the personalities of John Kerry and Mitt Romney.) And that is after these men spend the preceding year taking every available opportunity to explicitly draw contrast between each other.
Now, in principle, you have two people running for president that are sane, competent, and potentially very good leaders (never mind their VP picks) because the primaries are governed by exactly the opposite type of people mentioned in TFA. That is, primary voters should be more informed and generally more competent than the entire electorate. Except when they aren't. The GOP primaries have been demonstrably taken over by religious extremists and cult-like followers of "conservatism." Now, even though Romney has made himself completely unelectable by endorsing insanity like banning birth control (e.g., via "person-hood" amendments) and taking both sides of every issue, he still has ~50/50 odds of wining--particularly if the economy sours before November. But let's up the scary; what if the GOP pulls another Goldwater (i.e., f-it, we've lost thing thing already--let's put a true believer up there to get the message out) and Santorum manages to get nominated? Then, as the thesis of TFA states, he will also have ~50/50 odds of winning simply because people are not competent enough to recognize incompetence (or crazy). And unlike Romney, who would probably make a decent president, Santorum would likely put the country in deep santorum.
I'm pretty sure Mike Judge is from the future--or at least he has visited it. How else could Idiocracy be so prophetic?
I don't disagree; but I think it is fair to say that without the complete and utter lack of accountability or perceived risk on the part of investors, things could/would not have gotten so far out of hand. I do, however, think that you are giving the government too much credit (no pun intended). The Fed controls interest rates, not Treasury, and the Fed is designed to act independently of the federal government. In fact, if it weren't for Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders we wouldn't even know about the ~$14 trillion the Fed loaned to the banks at ~0%, the numbers behind "quantitative easing," or nonsense like this. One could even argue that the Fed lowered interest rates at the behest of the banks to juice the mortgage market after Clinton (and Rubin) eliminated the last remaining vestiges of post-depression regulations.
He didn't care, they were just going to sell the loan to some other company, they would make their money, he'd get his commission.
You nicely summarized the root cause of the collapse of housing markets across the US. The banks thought that, by chopping up mortgages and combining them with other securities, the resulting CDOs had less risk because it was spread around and since the cost of each tranche was proportional to the risk, and therefore the yield, everyone understood the risks involved. Of course that created a profit motive to create as many mortgages as possible--and the riskier the better because the risk magically disappeared once sliced up and repackaged. Opportunists climbed into cheap suits and starting fly-by-night mortgage brokerages, assembling teams of sleazy salespeople to push bad loans. By the time the mortgages went sour, everyone involved in the transaction had taken their profit but, thanks to deregulated banking, those profits were basically paid out of the savings accounts of the very same people getting the bad mortgages. And since all the banks merged into giant mega-banks that snatched up bad debt with your money, they were "too big to fail." But don't worry, they bought "insurance" against it in the form of credit default swaps so that the government wouldn't have to bail them out. Except that the "insurance companies" were also banks and didn't have nearly enough cash to pay out, so the government bailed them out, including the third parties that were buying credit default swaps on CDOs that they didn't even own.
So everyone made money--from the mortgage bundlers all the way up to the CEOs of the giant banks--no matter if they succeeded, failed, or wrecked the global economy in the process. And to get the economy going again, the Fed started loaning out money at %0.01 interest so the banks could turn around and lend it back to Treasury at 3% (and pay back the bailout after dumping their bad assets); it's socialism for banks, and "free markets" and personal responsibility for the rest of us. Now we have a mountain of government debt and a generation of college-educated young people entering a stagnated economy with student loans accrued during the boom-times. I guess that is what happens when you create a system in which you can flip someone's livelihood for a profit without taking on any risk or responsibility.
...but this guy goes to jail for 20 years for scamming cable companies.
There has never yet been (although we're getting closer and closer) a visual medium that captures the contrast range, the color gamut, or detail quite like motion picture film.
Yeeeeesss! Sometimes I think that people forget what real, quality film looks like. Watch a Kubrick film on VHS, DVD, and blu-ray--it's like watching a movie while the photogrey fades on your glasses. The difference in dynamic range alone is unmistakable. A big part of the "magic" of analog film is shouldering, which is when highlights blow out gradually in over-exposed regions. Anyone that has shot with 35 mm camera film and then gone digital has seen this phenomenon at work--particularly with BW photography. With digital, the highlights clip; the information is lost, and appears white (some amount of shouldering can be faked using "highlight recovery" algorithms, but the effect is incomparable to the effect on genuine film.) Analog tape transfers have finite bandwidth and clip even worse than digital, leaving you with light shadows and blown-out highlights. It is the visual equivalent of the perceived "warmth" of (quality) analog audio recordings; the dynamic range is centered at the mid-tones, at the expense of the tinny highs and deep lows.
I bought a Prime as soon as they were available where I live. The first time I switched it on, it updated to ICS--great. I headed over to XDA-developers to see how to root it, and found stickies dedicated to the various problems that the devices have--random reboots, lockups, terrible WiFi performance, and so on. It seems that these problems are related to the serial numbers, too. ASUS even has an "official" support thread on XDA in which (what I presume is) an engineer fields questions about said random problems. The long and short is that there appears to be some serious quality control issues, not just with the aluminum cases (and the antennas not making contact internally) but with the chipset.
I am by no means saying that there is something wrong with Tegra 3, but it would explain the seemingly-binary mix of "my Prime works great" and "well, it hasn't rebooted in three hours since the update--damn, there it goes again," the frequent (twice just last week) OTA updates, and the apparent correlation to serial numbers; and now ASUS dropping it altogether. I've been lucky in that my Prime only suffers from terrible WiFi and nonexistent GPS reception (but, really, GPS in a tablet?), but the WiFi is getting better with each update (even though ASUS claims the cause is the aluminum case.)
Whatever--two cores, five cores, 11 cores--my Prime is faster than greased lighting, doesn't eat the battery, and multitasks like a boss. I can't imagine ASUS would release an improved version that wasn't even faster.
Maybe it depends on context too. Ie, in the US if you're really rich a traffic ticket means nothing to you. There's no punitive value to it. So if you're rich and slightly immoral you don't worry about tickets (especially petty stuff like parking tickets), but if you're poor and slightly immoral you still don't want that ticket.
A few years ago, they introduced a compulsory on-line course in addition to the financial penalty in California (maybe just Los Angeles Country). The total time of the course varied with how many strikes you had acquired. The stated purpose was to punish people whose attitude had become "I'll just speed and pay the fines" because the ever-increasing fines were disproportionately harsh for poor and middle-income people. I'm not sure what the ultimate fate of this new punishment was, but the torrent of editorials from rich assholes whining about how much more valuable there time was than ordinary people was just terrific. After a few months, it became clear that people were just paying other people to take the online course for them, so they included some very harsh penalties for that practice as well, which was followed by another volley of whining about how draconian it was to force someone to waste 3-8 hours of their valuable, valuable time just because they thought themselves too important for traffic laws.
When I lived in LA, I drove an enormous Chevy 4x4 pickup which I had to drive through Brentwood, Malibu, and Bel Air on a regular basis. When stopped in a long line of cars--particularly at a stop sign, as opposed to a light--you could predict with almost complete certainty which car would pull out of line, drive against traffic, and cut off the person at the head of the line; the one with the highest price tag, bonus points for a convertible. After years of this type of behavior, I developed a reflex of being very polite to ordinary cars--old Toyotas and other pickups, for example--but using the size of my truck (which would easily drive over the hood of a Mercedes convertible) to block rich assholes that don't think the laws apply to them. And I was by no means the only one. The correlation between income and asshatery behind the wheel is undeniable in Southern California... The attitude seems to be that traffic laws are just to keep the riffraff from getting in the way of important (read: rich) people.
You would give someone co-authorship credit for getting the grant for the study and getting you a lab? You *can't* be serious.
Perhaps you are not aware--or that was meant as sarcasm--but in many fields the PI spends all of their time writing proposals, teaching, and supervising their students/postdocs. So, yes, their name goes on each and every paper that was funded by a grant proposal that they wrote, and in fact, that is the *only* way for them to continue to be employed as a professor. Your reward for doing the work, contributing your ideas, and doing some/most of the writing is first author; your PI is last and is the corresponding author.
...or the only money in your pocket; many (most?) universities in the US don't pay a summer salary--you have to cover it from your grants (which you get by publishing papers, of course!). And I'd like a show of hands of assistant professors that consider their teaching loads "part-time."
Chemistry has the opposite problem because most of the research involves cramming atoms together in new and unknown configurations as opposed to measuring that which already exists. Thus, negative results are vital, which is why there are a zillion "more specialized journals." For example, if I have an idea for a fancy new polymer that will revolutionize OLEDs, the first step is to comb the literature to make sure that no one has synthesized it before. The second step is to find related compounds to maximize the chance that my planned synthesis is viable. If the polymer works as intended, then I get to publish in a top tier journal, and write few ancillary papers about the synthesis/characterization and some tweaks to make it better. If the polymer is a complete failure, then I dutifully publish the synthesis and the poor results in a lower-tier journal and either tweak it or start over from scratch. Without that last step, chemists would spend most of their time re-hashing failed experiments. This pattern holds true in almost every area of Chemistry from materials to med chem.
The larger problem with Chemistry is that the rate of publication varies widely between sub-disciplines. Computational chemists crank out papers at a mind-boggling rate compared to synthetic chemists, for example, simply because synthesis is time consuming, but computing power is ever-expanding; the example above could easily consume an entire PhD thesis. The "mindset of targets" mentioned in TFA is then forced to consider other metrics, like H-index, or the average impact factor of the journals in which you publish. In any case, the result is the same--publish or perish--which for-profit publishers love.
The Chinese government, or American Airlines. And this problem is by no means limited to the United States. Just last week I got in a huge fight with a ticketing agent in Athens. She asked for my "ID or passport," so I produced my residence permit (I live in the Schengen Zone). She refused my government-issued ID (with the words "IDENTIFICATION" written across the top) because, according to her, it was a "residence permit, and not an ID." And there was no convincing her that it could be both. Despite being well within my legal rights and obeying all Greek and EU laws and regulations, I was denied a boarding pass by the ticketing agent. In my case, I had already left my country of residence (using my ID) and was thus effectively being barred re-entry by an airline employee.
Incidentally, this problem can be solved by checking in on-line (even after getting in a fight with a ticketing agent), provided your airport offers a special line for passengers with boarding passes to check luggage. For international flights they require that you enter your passport number, after which you can print your boarding pass out, thus bypassing the ticketing agent altogether. After that, the first person to look at your passport will be in the security line, and they are typically much more aware of the actual laws and regulations, and not the make-believe ones by airline employees that watch too much 24.
I have been traveling internationally for a long time and, back in the day, I flew all over the world with a passport that had become so worn it was de-laminating. The photo (which back then was a photo, and not actually printed on the plastic) was starting to pop out, so I fixed it with some scotch tape. During the entire ten-year lifetime of that passport, the only comment I ever received was when trying to leave the country; a security agent said I might have some trouble trying to re-enter and suggested that I get a new passport. Not once did I get so much as a funny look from a border control agent either coming or going.
Not for long. The Dutch government has apparently decided to slash funding for basic research and replace it with "public-private partnerships" because, lacking any evidence to support this theory, they feel that scientific research should be guided by commercial applications and business opportunities. This philosophy nearly ruined research in the UK. At least in the US (which does a decent, though worsening job of supporting basic research) philanthropic giving is common enough that even non-life-sciences can find rich people to give them money, if for no other reason than all the "centers for curing $DISEASE" are already named after someone.
I call Bullshit.
The over-reaction to the incident is what did far, far more damage.
And what the hell do you mean it's nto clear who "won" ?
Clearly the terrorists "Won", they changed our way of life. Or do you have "patriot amnesia" too ?
Slashdot is probably not the best place to re-litigate 9/11, but I feel compelled to point out two things; 1) Yes, the over-reaction did do a lot of damage, but it was still an over-reaction to the actions of less than two dozen people and 2) I don't know what patriot amnesia is, but saying that the terrorists "won" because they changed our way of life is a bit americocentric. I would argue that the day-to-day life of ordinary Iraqis has changed much more dramatically. If it has improved, then maybe the terrorists won--I don't really know what Bin Laden's goals were, outside of the flinsy pretext of getting US military bases out of Yemen and Saudi Arabia--or maybe the Coalition of the Willing Won (was their goal to help Iraqis, again I don't know...) If their university system is any indication, then things have gotten worse. 9/11 has not had quite the same impact here in Europe as it has in the US, but the impact is still negative. So if life for Americans, Europeans, Afghans, and Iraqis is worse, then no-one "won." But the fact that so many people are now stake holders is illustrative of the original point; you really can't use numbers of things or people to predict the outcome or magnitude of a conflict.
So, the police have a legitimate reason for securing their network, and have discussed options accommodating other stake-holders who might be inconvenienced by improving their system's security. It sounds to me like the police are handling this sanely and fairly. What's the problem here?
If digital radio encryption is actually secure, then nothing--provided they adhere to their promise of keeping "chatter" open and loaning the media (i.e., the fourth branch of government) secure scanners to maintain accountability. However, they may run into the false sense of security problem; if criminals break the encryption and start listening in to conversations that the police think are secure, then they have only succeeded in making police scanners useless for civilians, but far more useful for criminals. Currently, as they know that their communications are being listened to, they can use codes and give false and misleading information over the radio. For example, even something as simple as radioing to the helicopter telling them where officers are and then sending a text message to the pilot's cell phone with the real positions. And to keep the communications secure, they will have to rotate keys, which adds complexity, and increases the risk of the sort of total chaos of radio communication that ensued after 9/11, when suddenly no one could talk to each other due to incompatible hardware and whatnot.
Remember when the US military found out that their drones were broadcasting unencrypted video feeds, allowing anyone with a laptop and a TV tuner to see the feeds? (And the CIA had to have had the same problem, though the media didn't report on it.) Because they thought those video feeds were secure, they were inadvertently handing out valuable information such as location, timing, potential targets, tactics, etc. They would have been better off knowing that people were watching those feeds, and even using it to their advantage.
The Man can trample all over your rights so long as the judicial branch agrees that the executive is following the intention of the legislative.
Up to a point. After all, even the Soviet Union collapsed once their people decided to quit obeying the party bosses.
-jcr
Yah, but only after the economy imploded under the shortsightedness of the plutocrats that controlled the party bosses. Good thing that can never happen in a democracy...
Fine, then encryption is tied to some physical object--like a smart chip that self-destructs. I wasn't proposing an idea, just curious to what extent the law is capable of dealing with the notion of encryption vis-a-vis the analogy to a physical safe.
Unfortunately The Man can trample all over your rights so long as the judicial branch agrees that the executive is following the intention of the legislative. I am curious, though, about the "smart chip" in my bank card. If I enter my PIN incorrectly three times it locks itself permanently and requires that I get a new card and a new PIN--a security feature (that prevents the banks from losing money). Assuming that The Man says I have to fork over my password--Bill of Rights be damned--if my hard drive encryption has the same "security feature" e.g., after three incorrect tries it eats the private key and renders the drive non-decryptable, can I then be charged with a crime for accidentally (which of course I can't prove) entering the wrong password three times? What if the Feds try a dictionary attack and trigger the three tries before even asking for the password? The information on the drive is completely lost, so holding me in contempt accomplishes nothing, but in the first case I "destroyed evidence" and in the second I basically conspired to destroy evidence, right? Without the evidence, they cannot convict me of the original crime, but would the sentence for destroying evidence (or obstructing justice or whatever) scale with the severity of the alleged crime?
Nineteen hijackers and a couple of middle-aged rich kids with daddy issues managed to drag hundreds of thousands of highly-trained military personnel and a couple trillions dollars into a ten-year conflict that killed thousands of people, sent one country back to the stone age, destabilized another, and undermined the basic constitutional underpinnings of the most powerful country on Earth. And it still isn't even clear who "won." I don't think you can predict these sort of things based purely on the number of things or people on each side.
Slashdot Mirror
The primary this year has been utterly fascinating because, on the one had, all the Serious People in politics--Dem and GOP--had all but written Obama off as a one-termer a little over a year ago. But the economy started to "recover" and, importantly, unemployment numbers began falling. Then all these completely insane right-wing laws that were passed at the state level by the 2010 Tea Party Wave started making national news, the Supreme Court stooped to petty politics, and the divide between the conservative movement and the republican party became clear. Meanwhile No Drama Obama just keep letting out more rope for the other party to hang themselves with. Suddenly anyone who valued their future in politics ran away from the presidential race as fast as they could and, as you correctly point out, Obama stopped sweating because the only people willing to run were either there to soak up some limelight (Gingrich, Santorum); as entertainment for bored billionaires (Cain and later, Gingrich); too stupid to realize what they were doing (Perry); had nothing to lose (Romney); true believers (Bachman, Paul); or boring mainstream republicans that apparently don't watch the news (Pawlenty, Huntsman). And look what happened. The race came down to Romney, who despite all his money and influence with the establishment, couldn't lock it up against Santorum; classic Republican Party vs. Conservative Moment.
I think you're right to compare today's GOP to the Goldwater era, because he marked the dawn of the conservative movement, which later embraced the christian right and ultimately forced everyone but the super-rich and the true believers out of the party through years of purification in the form of primaries and state/local elections. But I'm doubtful that they will resolve this mess in a mere four years. Barring something like another 9/11 or huge market crash, I think we're just seeing the beginnings of the Return of the Democrats. No popular, mainstream, electable republican can survive a GOP primary--not even four years from now--and beat someone like Hilary Clinton (unless you think Biden will run in 2016...) on an even playing field.
The latest CBS polling shows that Romney will lose to Obama by 4 percent, whereas Ron Paul would defeat the current president by 5. Maybe YOU hate him but Paul has crossover appeal to independents and Democrats that Romney lacks.
The only CBS polling that Google seems to know about (and that is reported on Paul's own website) is one that shows Paul beating Obama amongst independent voters. And Romney's slide in the polls has a lot to do with his massive loss of support from women (he still beats or ties Obama amongst men) after supporting all the right-wing insanity over birth control, forced ultrasounds, and the general assault on Women's rights. If the economy takes another dip, if republicans can successfully blame rising gas prices on Obama (who apparently controls gas prices world-wide; they are skyrocketing in Europe, too), or if Romney can dig up an effective October Surprise, then low-information voters (read: morons) will swing back to "the other guy," who is going to be Romney.
Don't get me wrong; I love Ron Paul, and I think that it is incredibly important to have his voice out there as a counterweight to the entrenched, inbred beltway thinking. In fact, I wish there was a Ron Paul on the left, so that people could see what the left--and not the center-right that FOX News calls the Far Left--actually looks like. But let's not delude ourselves; the GOP establishment will never take Ron Paul seriously, the media view him as an eccentric crackpot, and the delegate system is heavily rigged in favor of Romney (yet he still has to outspend his opponents by an order of magnitude because he's such an unlikable douche). Ron Paul has embraced his role as a foil and says crazy stuff that renders him completely unelectable nationally and Ron Paul supporters just have to accept that, just like Nader supporters did when Bush was sworn in as POTUS.
What really irks me about geographical restrictions is their totalitarian approach. I keep a permanent address in the US along with a few bank accounts and whatnot. But if I subscribe to a US-based service with my American address and bank account, I'm only allowed to use it while I'm physically within the US. I understand the reasoning--that stuff airs abroad at different times and with different distribution/carrier agreements--but as far as Hulu or Netflix is concerned, I live in the US and just travel 99% of the time... I mean, I still have to file US taxes (because taxes are based on citizenship and residence, so I get to file taxes in two countries) but PayPal/Hulu/Netflix/etc. throw a temper tantrum unless I log in through a US-based VPN... Anyway, it seems unlikely that a citizen living abroad who pays for a streaming service in their own country would be extradited for violating the TOS; more likely to happen to someone re-selling access or broadcasting it in a pub or something.
A friendly warning from experience: I have lived in Europe for about as long as Hulu has existed and have found them to be incredibly aggressive at blocking free and pay-for proxies/VPNs. I tried all sorts different services and eventually each was blocked by Hulu, usually within 3-6 months. None of the others, mind you--Netflix, and and all the networks and studios continue to work. (And most use some sort of region-checking URL as a gateway, meaning you can direct just that one connection through the proxy, and then stream at full-speed.) I certainly hope unblock-us continues to evade Hulu (and I like the DNS approach), but if you use Hulu a lot, I would start looking for Plan B now, just to be safe.
I live in socialist Continental Europe where a friend of mine was arrested after beating the stuffing out of someone who refused to leave his house. The police took him to the station, offered him coffee, and politely interviewed him. He then spend the weekend in jail, where he had regular smoke breaks, cable TV, and three squares. No strip searches, pepper spray, zip ties, or mancho police BS. Can you guess how often people are stabbed in jail here? Or how often guards are attacked?
This argument that having someone fondle your ballsack is for your own protection is exactly the kind of nonsensical, fear-based thinking that allowed a whole country to blithely accept penning protesters in "free speech zones," indefinite detentions without evidence or trial, and submitting to having naked photos taken in order to board an airplane. Police are supposed to protect the peace--they are public servants--and in many parts of the world, they reciprocate respect, instead of demanding it through dehumanizing displays of power.
This case has nothing to do with protecting guards, or keeping people from running with scissors in a jail cell--that is what eyeballs, ears, and cameras are for. What the SCOTUS said was that your fourth amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure ends when a police officer decides to arrest you. The guy in TFA was arrested because the cop thought that he hadn't paid a fine--despite having documentation that stated otherwise. He was then strip searched not once, but twice, before spending a week in jail. For allegedly not paying a fine. That he had in fact paid.
This decision is a further erosion of the Bill of Rights, plain and simple. The government needs a court order to obtain a search warrant before entering your house, but can enter your anus for loitering--or damn near anything because a copy can always find an excuse to arrest someone. Worse, it has a chilling effect, because now protestors know that, after being pepper-sprayed and zip-tied, they will be strip-searched multiple times.
Let's see what the amendement says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The SCOTUS has decreed that the whim of a single police officer, for any reason he or she deems worthy of arresting you, rises to the level of probable cause sufficient to violate the security of your person against unreasonable searches--unless your consider peeking inside someone's vagina or under their penis for participating in a peaceful protest reasonable. And, as anyone from a small town can attest to, cops can find any excuse to arrest you at any time, and face zero repercussions for flagrantly abusing that power; they don't even have to charge you with a crime. Slippery slope? Try free-fall.
Humor me for a second. Imagine a cop in a foul mood and who needs to fill quotas for traffic tickets, so he's pulling people over for just about anything. Now imagine that your wife is driving you home and she is pulled over by this cop. He runs her license, and asks for your ID--which you're not obliged to provide, but you don't want to start any trouble. He runs your ID and finds out that you have an unpaid parking ticket and that there is a warrant out for your arrest. Fortunately you have a receipt showing that you paid the fine, but the cop isn't buying it because the computer says otherwise. And you're black, so that probably isn't helping. The next thing you know, you're naked in a room full of strangers, spreading your ass cheeks apart while a stranger with a badge takes a good long look at your taint. Now imagine that this happens a second time, because they decide to move you from one jail to another during the entire week that you spend in jail. You're already in custody, but hey, "they've been doing it for decades now," and it's better safe than sorry.
I work in a socialist European system in a field in which people in American institutions typically work 60+ hours a week. I get paid less and my career progresses more slowly than my counterparts in the US, but it's nice that we don't have to work weekends, that no one looks at me funny if I go home at 6, etc. But they are also obsessed with metrics, evaluations, key performance indicators, etc so-on and so-forth. What you wind up doing is spending so much time dealing with piles of paperwork and meaningless tasks for which you will be evaluated, that you have to work extra hours just to get your actual work done. You can pull of an enormous accomplishment both for yourself and the organization, but if some idiot in administration can't find a check box for it, it won't count towards your evaluation... Some people game the system by finding all the right check boxes without doing and actual work. It's frustrating. Fortunately I get six (or eight--I lose track) weeks of vacation a year to relax and forget about it.
Laser printers don't use lasers to charge paper, they use them to selectively discharge an image transfer drum, which is then covered in toner and pressed against a piece of paper. The toner and paper are on opposite ends of the triboelectric series and spontaneously develop opposite charges when brought into contact with each other.
As for the toxicity of the toner vapor, the composition is of course proprietary, but black toner historically has comprised mainly oxides of selenium. In small quantities it's probably harmless, but long-term exposure is almost certainly bad for you.
I ran a TOR exit node on my laptop at work (at a university laboratory). After only about two weeks, the IT guy came downstairs with an official looking letter saying that my IP address had been named in a slander lawsuit. Apparently some business guy was trying to tarnish the name of some other business guy, and he was using TOR to do it. He had written a bunch of nasty stuff to blogs and send some angry emails or something. Anyway, the letter insisted that I appear in court in Los Angeles (I lived in Boston), but we sorted it out by explaining how TOR works--lucky for me, too, because there allegations of CP in the lawsuit.
Think about a presidential election. Of likely voters, about 98% have made up their mind before a candidate is even nominated, either because of a single issue or a general ideological disdain/coherence (or nutty stuff like Bush planned 9/11 or Obama is secretly Muslim). In the polarized political climate of the last few decades, that 98% is split almost evening and therefore what you are left with is about 2% (maybe more, but probably not much) of swing voters that decide elections, based almost entirely on who spent more money on TV ads. There are a handful of people for whom their single issue is that unicorn of politics; a non-partisan, non-wedge issue. But most are people who cannot see any daylight between the political platform of, say, George W. Bush and Al Gore, or Barack Obama and John McCain. (Personally I have more trouble differentiating the personalities of John Kerry and Mitt Romney.) And that is after these men spend the preceding year taking every available opportunity to explicitly draw contrast between each other.
Now, in principle, you have two people running for president that are sane, competent, and potentially very good leaders (never mind their VP picks) because the primaries are governed by exactly the opposite type of people mentioned in TFA. That is, primary voters should be more informed and generally more competent than the entire electorate. Except when they aren't. The GOP primaries have been demonstrably taken over by religious extremists and cult-like followers of "conservatism." Now, even though Romney has made himself completely unelectable by endorsing insanity like banning birth control (e.g., via "person-hood" amendments) and taking both sides of every issue, he still has ~50/50 odds of wining--particularly if the economy sours before November. But let's up the scary; what if the GOP pulls another Goldwater (i.e., f-it, we've lost thing thing already--let's put a true believer up there to get the message out) and Santorum manages to get nominated? Then, as the thesis of TFA states, he will also have ~50/50 odds of winning simply because people are not competent enough to recognize incompetence (or crazy). And unlike Romney, who would probably make a decent president, Santorum would likely put the country in deep santorum.
I'm pretty sure Mike Judge is from the future--or at least he has visited it. How else could Idiocracy be so prophetic?
I don't disagree; but I think it is fair to say that without the complete and utter lack of accountability or perceived risk on the part of investors, things could/would not have gotten so far out of hand. I do, however, think that you are giving the government too much credit (no pun intended). The Fed controls interest rates, not Treasury, and the Fed is designed to act independently of the federal government. In fact, if it weren't for Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders we wouldn't even know about the ~$14 trillion the Fed loaned to the banks at ~0%, the numbers behind "quantitative easing," or nonsense like this. One could even argue that the Fed lowered interest rates at the behest of the banks to juice the mortgage market after Clinton (and Rubin) eliminated the last remaining vestiges of post-depression regulations.
He didn't care, they were just going to sell the loan to some other company, they would make their money, he'd get his commission.
You nicely summarized the root cause of the collapse of housing markets across the US. The banks thought that, by chopping up mortgages and combining them with other securities, the resulting CDOs had less risk because it was spread around and since the cost of each tranche was proportional to the risk, and therefore the yield, everyone understood the risks involved. Of course that created a profit motive to create as many mortgages as possible--and the riskier the better because the risk magically disappeared once sliced up and repackaged. Opportunists climbed into cheap suits and starting fly-by-night mortgage brokerages, assembling teams of sleazy salespeople to push bad loans. By the time the mortgages went sour, everyone involved in the transaction had taken their profit but, thanks to deregulated banking, those profits were basically paid out of the savings accounts of the very same people getting the bad mortgages. And since all the banks merged into giant mega-banks that snatched up bad debt with your money, they were "too big to fail." But don't worry, they bought "insurance" against it in the form of credit default swaps so that the government wouldn't have to bail them out. Except that the "insurance companies" were also banks and didn't have nearly enough cash to pay out, so the government bailed them out, including the third parties that were buying credit default swaps on CDOs that they didn't even own.
So everyone made money--from the mortgage bundlers all the way up to the CEOs of the giant banks--no matter if they succeeded, failed, or wrecked the global economy in the process. And to get the economy going again, the Fed started loaning out money at %0.01 interest so the banks could turn around and lend it back to Treasury at 3% (and pay back the bailout after dumping their bad assets); it's socialism for banks, and "free markets" and personal responsibility for the rest of us. Now we have a mountain of government debt and a generation of college-educated young people entering a stagnated economy with student loans accrued during the boom-times. I guess that is what happens when you create a system in which you can flip someone's livelihood for a profit without taking on any risk or responsibility.
...but this guy goes to jail for 20 years for scamming cable companies.
There has never yet been (although we're getting closer and closer) a visual medium that captures the contrast range, the color gamut, or detail quite like motion picture film.
Yeeeeesss! Sometimes I think that people forget what real, quality film looks like. Watch a Kubrick film on VHS, DVD, and blu-ray--it's like watching a movie while the photogrey fades on your glasses. The difference in dynamic range alone is unmistakable. A big part of the "magic" of analog film is shouldering, which is when highlights blow out gradually in over-exposed regions. Anyone that has shot with 35 mm camera film and then gone digital has seen this phenomenon at work--particularly with BW photography. With digital, the highlights clip; the information is lost, and appears white (some amount of shouldering can be faked using "highlight recovery" algorithms, but the effect is incomparable to the effect on genuine film.) Analog tape transfers have finite bandwidth and clip even worse than digital, leaving you with light shadows and blown-out highlights. It is the visual equivalent of the perceived "warmth" of (quality) analog audio recordings; the dynamic range is centered at the mid-tones, at the expense of the tinny highs and deep lows.
I bought a Prime as soon as they were available where I live. The first time I switched it on, it updated to ICS--great. I headed over to XDA-developers to see how to root it, and found stickies dedicated to the various problems that the devices have--random reboots, lockups, terrible WiFi performance, and so on. It seems that these problems are related to the serial numbers, too. ASUS even has an "official" support thread on XDA in which (what I presume is) an engineer fields questions about said random problems. The long and short is that there appears to be some serious quality control issues, not just with the aluminum cases (and the antennas not making contact internally) but with the chipset.
I am by no means saying that there is something wrong with Tegra 3, but it would explain the seemingly-binary mix of "my Prime works great" and "well, it hasn't rebooted in three hours since the update--damn, there it goes again," the frequent (twice just last week) OTA updates, and the apparent correlation to serial numbers; and now ASUS dropping it altogether. I've been lucky in that my Prime only suffers from terrible WiFi and nonexistent GPS reception (but, really, GPS in a tablet?), but the WiFi is getting better with each update (even though ASUS claims the cause is the aluminum case.)
Whatever--two cores, five cores, 11 cores--my Prime is faster than greased lighting, doesn't eat the battery, and multitasks like a boss. I can't imagine ASUS would release an improved version that wasn't even faster.
Maybe it depends on context too. Ie, in the US if you're really rich a traffic ticket means nothing to you. There's no punitive value to it. So if you're rich and slightly immoral you don't worry about tickets (especially petty stuff like parking tickets), but if you're poor and slightly immoral you still don't want that ticket.
A few years ago, they introduced a compulsory on-line course in addition to the financial penalty in California (maybe just Los Angeles Country). The total time of the course varied with how many strikes you had acquired. The stated purpose was to punish people whose attitude had become "I'll just speed and pay the fines" because the ever-increasing fines were disproportionately harsh for poor and middle-income people. I'm not sure what the ultimate fate of this new punishment was, but the torrent of editorials from rich assholes whining about how much more valuable there time was than ordinary people was just terrific. After a few months, it became clear that people were just paying other people to take the online course for them, so they included some very harsh penalties for that practice as well, which was followed by another volley of whining about how draconian it was to force someone to waste 3-8 hours of their valuable, valuable time just because they thought themselves too important for traffic laws.
When I lived in LA, I drove an enormous Chevy 4x4 pickup which I had to drive through Brentwood, Malibu, and Bel Air on a regular basis. When stopped in a long line of cars--particularly at a stop sign, as opposed to a light--you could predict with almost complete certainty which car would pull out of line, drive against traffic, and cut off the person at the head of the line; the one with the highest price tag, bonus points for a convertible. After years of this type of behavior, I developed a reflex of being very polite to ordinary cars--old Toyotas and other pickups, for example--but using the size of my truck (which would easily drive over the hood of a Mercedes convertible) to block rich assholes that don't think the laws apply to them. And I was by no means the only one. The correlation between income and asshatery behind the wheel is undeniable in Southern California... The attitude seems to be that traffic laws are just to keep the riffraff from getting in the way of important (read: rich) people.
You would give someone co-authorship credit for getting the grant for the study and getting you a lab? You *can't* be serious.
Perhaps you are not aware--or that was meant as sarcasm--but in many fields the PI spends all of their time writing proposals, teaching, and supervising their students/postdocs. So, yes, their name goes on each and every paper that was funded by a grant proposal that they wrote, and in fact, that is the *only* way for them to continue to be employed as a professor. Your reward for doing the work, contributing your ideas, and doing some/most of the writing is first author; your PI is last and is the corresponding author.
summer courses being extra money in your pocket
...or the only money in your pocket; many (most?) universities in the US don't pay a summer salary--you have to cover it from your grants (which you get by publishing papers, of course!). And I'd like a show of hands of assistant professors that consider their teaching loads "part-time."
Chemistry has the opposite problem because most of the research involves cramming atoms together in new and unknown configurations as opposed to measuring that which already exists. Thus, negative results are vital, which is why there are a zillion "more specialized journals." For example, if I have an idea for a fancy new polymer that will revolutionize OLEDs, the first step is to comb the literature to make sure that no one has synthesized it before. The second step is to find related compounds to maximize the chance that my planned synthesis is viable. If the polymer works as intended, then I get to publish in a top tier journal, and write few ancillary papers about the synthesis/characterization and some tweaks to make it better. If the polymer is a complete failure, then I dutifully publish the synthesis and the poor results in a lower-tier journal and either tweak it or start over from scratch. Without that last step, chemists would spend most of their time re-hashing failed experiments. This pattern holds true in almost every area of Chemistry from materials to med chem.
The larger problem with Chemistry is that the rate of publication varies widely between sub-disciplines. Computational chemists crank out papers at a mind-boggling rate compared to synthetic chemists, for example, simply because synthesis is time consuming, but computing power is ever-expanding; the example above could easily consume an entire PhD thesis. The "mindset of targets" mentioned in TFA is then forced to consider other metrics, like H-index, or the average impact factor of the journals in which you publish. In any case, the result is the same--publish or perish--which for-profit publishers love.
The Chinese government, or American Airlines. And this problem is by no means limited to the United States. Just last week I got in a huge fight with a ticketing agent in Athens. She asked for my "ID or passport," so I produced my residence permit (I live in the Schengen Zone). She refused my government-issued ID (with the words "IDENTIFICATION" written across the top) because, according to her, it was a "residence permit, and not an ID." And there was no convincing her that it could be both. Despite being well within my legal rights and obeying all Greek and EU laws and regulations, I was denied a boarding pass by the ticketing agent. In my case, I had already left my country of residence (using my ID) and was thus effectively being barred re-entry by an airline employee.
Incidentally, this problem can be solved by checking in on-line (even after getting in a fight with a ticketing agent), provided your airport offers a special line for passengers with boarding passes to check luggage. For international flights they require that you enter your passport number, after which you can print your boarding pass out, thus bypassing the ticketing agent altogether. After that, the first person to look at your passport will be in the security line, and they are typically much more aware of the actual laws and regulations, and not the make-believe ones by airline employees that watch too much 24.
I have been traveling internationally for a long time and, back in the day, I flew all over the world with a passport that had become so worn it was de-laminating. The photo (which back then was a photo, and not actually printed on the plastic) was starting to pop out, so I fixed it with some scotch tape. During the entire ten-year lifetime of that passport, the only comment I ever received was when trying to leave the country; a security agent said I might have some trouble trying to re-enter and suggested that I get a new passport. Not once did I get so much as a funny look from a border control agent either coming or going.
Ocasionally companies sponsor research
Not for long. The Dutch government has apparently decided to slash funding for basic research and replace it with "public-private partnerships" because, lacking any evidence to support this theory, they feel that scientific research should be guided by commercial applications and business opportunities. This philosophy nearly ruined research in the UK. At least in the US (which does a decent, though worsening job of supporting basic research) philanthropic giving is common enough that even non-life-sciences can find rich people to give them money, if for no other reason than all the "centers for curing $DISEASE" are already named after someone.
I call Bullshit. The over-reaction to the incident is what did far, far more damage. And what the hell do you mean it's nto clear who "won" ? Clearly the terrorists "Won", they changed our way of life. Or do you have "patriot amnesia" too ?
Slashdot is probably not the best place to re-litigate 9/11, but I feel compelled to point out two things; 1) Yes, the over-reaction did do a lot of damage, but it was still an over-reaction to the actions of less than two dozen people and 2) I don't know what patriot amnesia is, but saying that the terrorists "won" because they changed our way of life is a bit americocentric. I would argue that the day-to-day life of ordinary Iraqis has changed much more dramatically. If it has improved, then maybe the terrorists won--I don't really know what Bin Laden's goals were, outside of the flinsy pretext of getting US military bases out of Yemen and Saudi Arabia--or maybe the Coalition of the Willing Won (was their goal to help Iraqis, again I don't know...) If their university system is any indication, then things have gotten worse. 9/11 has not had quite the same impact here in Europe as it has in the US, but the impact is still negative. So if life for Americans, Europeans, Afghans, and Iraqis is worse, then no-one "won." But the fact that so many people are now stake holders is illustrative of the original point; you really can't use numbers of things or people to predict the outcome or magnitude of a conflict.
So, the police have a legitimate reason for securing their network, and have discussed options accommodating other stake-holders who might be inconvenienced by improving their system's security. It sounds to me like the police are handling this sanely and fairly. What's the problem here?
If digital radio encryption is actually secure, then nothing--provided they adhere to their promise of keeping "chatter" open and loaning the media (i.e., the fourth branch of government) secure scanners to maintain accountability. However, they may run into the false sense of security problem; if criminals break the encryption and start listening in to conversations that the police think are secure, then they have only succeeded in making police scanners useless for civilians, but far more useful for criminals. Currently, as they know that their communications are being listened to, they can use codes and give false and misleading information over the radio. For example, even something as simple as radioing to the helicopter telling them where officers are and then sending a text message to the pilot's cell phone with the real positions. And to keep the communications secure, they will have to rotate keys, which adds complexity, and increases the risk of the sort of total chaos of radio communication that ensued after 9/11, when suddenly no one could talk to each other due to incompatible hardware and whatnot.
Remember when the US military found out that their drones were broadcasting unencrypted video feeds, allowing anyone with a laptop and a TV tuner to see the feeds? (And the CIA had to have had the same problem, though the media didn't report on it.) Because they thought those video feeds were secure, they were inadvertently handing out valuable information such as location, timing, potential targets, tactics, etc. They would have been better off knowing that people were watching those feeds, and even using it to their advantage.
The Man can trample all over your rights so long as the judicial branch agrees that the executive is following the intention of the legislative.
Up to a point. After all, even the Soviet Union collapsed once their people decided to quit obeying the party bosses.
-jcr
Yah, but only after the economy imploded under the shortsightedness of the plutocrats that controlled the party bosses. Good thing that can never happen in a democracy...
Fine, then encryption is tied to some physical object--like a smart chip that self-destructs. I wasn't proposing an idea, just curious to what extent the law is capable of dealing with the notion of encryption vis-a-vis the analogy to a physical safe.
Unfortunately The Man can trample all over your rights so long as the judicial branch agrees that the executive is following the intention of the legislative. I am curious, though, about the "smart chip" in my bank card. If I enter my PIN incorrectly three times it locks itself permanently and requires that I get a new card and a new PIN--a security feature (that prevents the banks from losing money). Assuming that The Man says I have to fork over my password--Bill of Rights be damned--if my hard drive encryption has the same "security feature" e.g., after three incorrect tries it eats the private key and renders the drive non-decryptable, can I then be charged with a crime for accidentally (which of course I can't prove) entering the wrong password three times? What if the Feds try a dictionary attack and trigger the three tries before even asking for the password? The information on the drive is completely lost, so holding me in contempt accomplishes nothing, but in the first case I "destroyed evidence" and in the second I basically conspired to destroy evidence, right? Without the evidence, they cannot convict me of the original crime, but would the sentence for destroying evidence (or obstructing justice or whatever) scale with the severity of the alleged crime?
Nineteen hijackers and a couple of middle-aged rich kids with daddy issues managed to drag hundreds of thousands of highly-trained military personnel and a couple trillions dollars into a ten-year conflict that killed thousands of people, sent one country back to the stone age, destabilized another, and undermined the basic constitutional underpinnings of the most powerful country on Earth. And it still isn't even clear who "won." I don't think you can predict these sort of things based purely on the number of things or people on each side.