The Inquirer are a bunch of FUDmongers. I completely debunked the Caballes myth yesterday. And it still remains to be seen whether the IP addresses the MPAA obtained from Loki can be used.
Also, for those who missed it, here is a link to the 'ad' the MPAA put up.
Disclaimer: I am a law student. This is not legal advice.
This case has nothing at all to do with the Internet or e-mail. But don't take my word for it, listen to Justice Stevens. "The question on which we granted certiorari is narrow: 'Whether the Fourth Amendment requires reasonable, articulable suspicion to justify using a drug-detection dog to sniff a vehicle during a legitimate traffic stop.'" Illinois v. Roy I. Caballes, No. 03-923, slip op. at 2 (U.S. Jan. 24, 2005) (citation omitted). The Court says that official conduct that does not compromise any legitimate privacy interest is not a 'search' for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, and that possession of contraband is not a legitimate interest. Id.
The Supreme Court is specifically talking about drugs when they say 'contraband'. The Court cites U.S. v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109 (1984), which involved someone who mailed cocaine via private courier. The package was damaged en route, and the supervisor and office manager opened it up as part of the routine insurance process. Id. at 111. They found white powder inside, and called the Feds who determined it was coke. Id. at 111-12. They looked at the address on the package, went there, and arrested the people waiting for their drugs. Id. at 112.
The discussion is nowhere near the Internet or email. Now that we're not panicked, the Court points out that even some searches of contraband are illegal. It cites another case in which it held that using infrared imaging to search a house for pot plants is unlawful. Kyllo v. U.S., 533 U.S. 27 (2001).
The entire opinion is less than five pages long, and really quite straightforward. Justice Souter, on the other hand, spends eight pages to say that even the accidental detection of drugs by dogs should be an unlawful search. Caballes, slip op. at 1 (Souter, J., dissenting). His main reason, stated right up front: drug-sniffing dogs are fallible. Id. In a footnote, he cites Kyllo to explain that the government can't use a tool to get information on things for which they would otherwise require physical intrusion. Id. at 4 (footnote 3).
Justice Ginsburg's dissent, which Justice Souter joins, is nine pages. She worries about, among other things, police walking through parking lots and down sidewalks with drug-sniffing dogs, conducting sweeps without prior suspicion of guilt. Caballes, slip op. at 6 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).
While the opinion is a fascinating study on the balance between our desire to catch crooks and our desire for personal privacy, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet or email.
And here are the glibc bindings. For local machines, msgsnd(2) goes back to SVr1, which was released in 1981. That's right, message queueing is pushing 25 years old. You only need to actually queue header files containing socket, timing, and/or versioning information, not the 100MB data blocks. Slap on a slow but reliable network stack (TCP) for the control messages and an unreliable but high-bandwidth network stack (UDP) for the actual data, and you've got yourself a distributed system. Yes yes, it's not quite that simple, but I don't see what all the fuss is over.
Doesn't matter if people know what a candidate really stands for.
Want to know the real reason Bush won? Kerry was not decisively better, and people already knew what they were getting with Bush.
Applying the same logic to the California election, people only knew that they needed Davis out. Arnie was not decisively worse, and he was a familiar, and by extension sympathetic, face. You could have run Homer Simpson against Davis, and he would have won. Lest you think this is a smear, notice carefully that none of this argument says anything about the Governator's actual political qualifications. Nothing about what he stands for is necessary to reach the conclusion. I absolutely agree that he was voted in on name recognition, but I'm not willing to go farther than that.
You won't be secure until you educate end users, and get them to buy in to the idea of security. The weak link is rarely the hashing algorithm or the PRNG, it's the people. If you've got a bank vault with a huge steel door and a glass window, you find a rock. As long as people keep leaving passwords written down on stickies attached to the monitor, passwords won't be worth crap.
Instituting monitoring of accounts may or may not be a good idea, depending on your particular circumstances. But calling a security mechanism useless because some people don't know how to use it right is shortsighted.
Legislate so that merhandise sold using spam cannot legally demand payment
Even if a merchant wanted to comply, a law would require them to know ahead of time that their email wasn't spam. That's impossible, because everyone has a different definition of spam. Besides, any attempt to tell merchants that they can't collect money from willing customers will be shot down by Congress as being Un-American.
If we made it so that a decent percentage of the replies were time wasters, the average company would suddenly have to employ lots of resources to deal with false responses.
Are you suggesting a government-funded campaign to make it incredibly expensive for free-market businesses to close sales with willing customers? If we took all of the junk mail-order catalogs and made up a bunch of fake responses, it would be pretty much the same thing. That hardly seems fair. And I don't want to spend my tax money on it.
Who is accountable for the security of the Linux kernel?
The simple truth is that for the price of hiring a kernel hacker, you are accountable. Not some third party vendor, with gawdawful rates and hours. You.
If you don't like a security feature, you can implement a new one. If a heap overflow is discovered, you can fix it. Not only that, but you can fix it now.
Evidence: Software products that do not compete with Microsoft's products fell in price by 12 percent from 1988 to 1995, but by 60 percent where there was competition from Microsoft.
Explanation: Microsoft discovered the popular application markets. So did a lot of other companies, quite independantly. There would have been price competition between everyone else, even had MS not entered those markets. The markets in which MS did not invest money aren't as lucrative (being more niche markets). There are fewer players in side markets, and as a result there hasn't been as much competition in those areas of software development.
Lesson: correlation != causation. If you're claiming causation, you better have damn good evidence. Would there not have been drastic price reductions in the spreadsheet market without Excel? Put it another way, what would the market look like without MS ever being involved? I have no reason to believe it would look any different than it does now.
Mark the article (-1, Troll).
Decrypted message just released
on
Decrypting Kryptos
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
Private sector companies don't want long-lasting employees, because they're expensive. As long as there are college grads who undervalue themselves and are not looking for a long-haul job, short term employees are cheaper.
You want government work. You get a pension, decent benefits (especially family benefits), and they're looking to keep you for a long time since they've spent so much on the background check. The job security is unreal, since unless you really fsck up or the government runs out of money, you'll keep your job forever. You can be proud because your software is helping to run the civilized world. Government systems don't run the latest and greatest COTS (depending on the department), so they're looking for people with older skillsets. You might look into local or state government offices who need programmers, or you could make the big leap to DC. The down side is obviously the pay. It's not Mad Corporate Greed money, but it's a decent living.
Release your movies globally, instead of fucking with people in market B by making them wait six months longer than people in market A.
I don't work for the movie industry, but I bet it's a pain in the ass to subtitle and/or dub a movie professionally for theatrical release. Over and over again, once for each language. And sitting in political discussions using interpreters to figure out which scenes to cut to fit local ratings systems and decency requirements, to get the widest possible market. And producing the final product in enough quantity, and shipping it to the right country. Not to mention the eventual (or even pre-release!) copyright infringement. I think it's gotta be hard as hell to do a worldwide, simultaneous theatrical release.
Disclaimer: I don't work for the MPAA. I just think that this particular suggestion, while having moral merit, is very difficult and expensive to implement.
They should've called it "Escape from the Internet".
Ob physics: Spacetime is a closed, connected 4-manifold, meaning two things. Closed means it's going to end. Connected means anywhere you could get from here would still be in our universe. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there it is. Until we locate an alternate universe (!) and figure out how to get there, we're going nowhere. The first is especially hard, since by definition, if we can see or somehow detect it, it's in our universe (because our universe is connected). I suppose we could randomly spend enormous amounts of energy altering spacetime in a blind search of the 'outside' of the universe's present boundaries, but to hit another 'pocket of reality' would require another universe bordering on our own in 'close proximity' under whatever metric you want to put on the ambient embedding space. Unless that ambient space looks like 'soap bubble universes' with a thin film of nothingness between, bridging such a gap (if one exists) seems unlikely.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, but I pretend to be one on/.
Translation: Our guys are smart. They make software. For the Interweb. It sells your crap to the sheeple. It also makes your enemies smell bad. Stinky enemies.
Lawyers don't want to control you, they just want to take your money. Like every other service worker. Don't confuse reality with paranoid conspiracy theories.
BTW, I'm posting this under my user account, not anonymously, and I'm assuming you're a coward until you prove otherwise.
I stand corrected. Here are some interesting figures I dug up:
In the United States, hydropower has grown steadily, from 56,000 MW in 1970 to over 90,000 MW today. As a portion of the electricity supply, it has fallen to 10 percent, down from 14 percent 20 years ago -- but it still accounts for a greater share than petroleum. In fact, US hydropower plants produce the energy equivalent of 500 million barrels of oil per year.
Source: The Union of Concerned Scientists.
The United States in 2003 consumed just a hair over 42 billion gallons of distillate fuel oil, most of which (37 billion gallons) went to diesel vehicles. At 42 gallons per barrel, that's one billion barrels of oil per year.
In order for hydro to maintain its current customers, and take on the automobile industry, it will have to triple its power output. Two more Hoover Dams for the left coast. Is there that much water out there?
Where does the Hydrogen come from? Electrolysis. Where does the power to do that come from? In Iceland, it's geothermal. The US doesn't have nearly enough geothermal / solar / wind / whatever deployed to have similar results. Good for Iceland, but don't get your hopes up in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
So how did they add all the IIS exploits to Apache? mod_iis_root_me.c?
Stay tuned to MGM v. Grokster to see if the Sony-Betamax rule still holds. The Supreme Court hears oral arguments on March 29. Mark your calendar.
Also, for those who missed it, here is a link to the 'ad' the MPAA put up.
This case has nothing at all to do with the Internet or e-mail. But don't take my word for it, listen to Justice Stevens. "The question on which we granted certiorari is narrow: 'Whether the Fourth Amendment requires reasonable, articulable suspicion to justify using a drug-detection dog to sniff a vehicle during a legitimate traffic stop.'" Illinois v. Roy I. Caballes, No. 03-923, slip op. at 2 (U.S. Jan. 24, 2005) (citation omitted). The Court says that official conduct that does not compromise any legitimate privacy interest is not a 'search' for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, and that possession of contraband is not a legitimate interest. Id.
The Supreme Court is specifically talking about drugs when they say 'contraband'. The Court cites U.S. v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109 (1984), which involved someone who mailed cocaine via private courier. The package was damaged en route, and the supervisor and office manager opened it up as part of the routine insurance process. Id. at 111. They found white powder inside, and called the Feds who determined it was coke. Id. at 111-12. They looked at the address on the package, went there, and arrested the people waiting for their drugs. Id. at 112.
The discussion is nowhere near the Internet or email. Now that we're not panicked, the Court points out that even some searches of contraband are illegal. It cites another case in which it held that using infrared imaging to search a house for pot plants is unlawful. Kyllo v. U.S., 533 U.S. 27 (2001).
The entire opinion is less than five pages long, and really quite straightforward. Justice Souter, on the other hand, spends eight pages to say that even the accidental detection of drugs by dogs should be an unlawful search. Caballes, slip op. at 1 (Souter, J., dissenting). His main reason, stated right up front: drug-sniffing dogs are fallible. Id. In a footnote, he cites Kyllo to explain that the government can't use a tool to get information on things for which they would otherwise require physical intrusion. Id. at 4 (footnote 3).
Justice Ginsburg's dissent, which Justice Souter joins, is nine pages. She worries about, among other things, police walking through parking lots and down sidewalks with drug-sniffing dogs, conducting sweeps without prior suspicion of guilt. Caballes, slip op. at 6 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).
While the opinion is a fascinating study on the balance between our desire to catch crooks and our desire for personal privacy, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet or email.
[/reinvent-wheel]
Want to know the real reason Bush won? Kerry was not decisively better, and people already knew what they were getting with Bush.
Applying the same logic to the California election, people only knew that they needed Davis out. Arnie was not decisively worse, and he was a familiar, and by extension sympathetic, face. You could have run Homer Simpson against Davis, and he would have won. Lest you think this is a smear, notice carefully that none of this argument says anything about the Governator's actual political qualifications. Nothing about what he stands for is necessary to reach the conclusion. I absolutely agree that he was voted in on name recognition, but I'm not willing to go farther than that.
You won't be secure until you educate end users, and get them to buy in to the idea of security. The weak link is rarely the hashing algorithm or the PRNG, it's the people. If you've got a bank vault with a huge steel door and a glass window, you find a rock. As long as people keep leaving passwords written down on stickies attached to the monitor, passwords won't be worth crap.
Instituting monitoring of accounts may or may not be a good idea, depending on your particular circumstances. But calling a security mechanism useless because some people don't know how to use it right is shortsighted.
Even if a merchant wanted to comply, a law would require them to know ahead of time that their email wasn't spam. That's impossible, because everyone has a different definition of spam. Besides, any attempt to tell merchants that they can't collect money from willing customers will be shot down by Congress as being Un-American.
If we made it so that a decent percentage of the replies were time wasters, the average company would suddenly have to employ lots of resources to deal with false responses.
Are you suggesting a government-funded campaign to make it incredibly expensive for free-market businesses to close sales with willing customers? If we took all of the junk mail-order catalogs and made up a bunch of fake responses, it would be pretty much the same thing. That hardly seems fair. And I don't want to spend my tax money on it.
The simple truth is that for the price of hiring a kernel hacker, you are accountable. Not some third party vendor, with gawdawful rates and hours. You.
If you don't like a security feature, you can implement a new one. If a heap overflow is discovered, you can fix it. Not only that, but you can fix it now.
Microsoft will never be able to touch that.
Have you ever seen Stephen King?
News Flash: it's too late. If you see this man, do not approach. Consider him armed and dangerous.
You don't have freedom to build an MP3 player (legally) without a license right now. What freedom, exactly, is this giving up?
Explanation: Microsoft discovered the popular application markets. So did a lot of other companies, quite independantly. There would have been price competition between everyone else, even had MS not entered those markets. The markets in which MS did not invest money aren't as lucrative (being more niche markets). There are fewer players in side markets, and as a result there hasn't been as much competition in those areas of software development.
Lesson: correlation != causation. If you're claiming causation, you better have damn good evidence. Would there not have been drastic price reductions in the spreadsheet market without Excel? Put it another way, what would the market look like without MS ever being involved? I have no reason to believe it would look any different than it does now.
Mark the article (-1, Troll).
In Soviet Russia, outdoor artwork owns you!
You want government work. You get a pension, decent benefits (especially family benefits), and they're looking to keep you for a long time since they've spent so much on the background check. The job security is unreal, since unless you really fsck up or the government runs out of money, you'll keep your job forever. You can be proud because your software is helping to run the civilized world. Government systems don't run the latest and greatest COTS (depending on the department), so they're looking for people with older skillsets. You might look into local or state government offices who need programmers, or you could make the big leap to DC. The down side is obviously the pay. It's not Mad Corporate Greed money, but it's a decent living.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Signed, the BBC.
What sane person would loot a 20 year old D&D set and some sweat-stained fat-man pants?
I don't work for the movie industry, but I bet it's a pain in the ass to subtitle and/or dub a movie professionally for theatrical release. Over and over again, once for each language. And sitting in political discussions using interpreters to figure out which scenes to cut to fit local ratings systems and decency requirements, to get the widest possible market. And producing the final product in enough quantity, and shipping it to the right country. Not to mention the eventual (or even pre-release!) copyright infringement. I think it's gotta be hard as hell to do a worldwide, simultaneous theatrical release.
Disclaimer: I don't work for the MPAA. I just think that this particular suggestion, while having moral merit, is very difficult and expensive to implement.
Ob physics: Spacetime is a closed, connected 4-manifold, meaning two things. Closed means it's going to end. Connected means anywhere you could get from here would still be in our universe. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there it is. Until we locate an alternate universe (!) and figure out how to get there, we're going nowhere. The first is especially hard, since by definition, if we can see or somehow detect it, it's in our universe (because our universe is connected). I suppose we could randomly spend enormous amounts of energy altering spacetime in a blind search of the 'outside' of the universe's present boundaries, but to hit another 'pocket of reality' would require another universe bordering on our own in 'close proximity' under whatever metric you want to put on the ambient embedding space. Unless that ambient space looks like 'soap bubble universes' with a thin film of nothingness between, bridging such a gap (if one exists) seems unlikely.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, but I pretend to be one on /.
Now, was that so hard?
Or better yet, why can't they engineer a seed which is already sterile (like a mule)? That solves the replanting problem for good.
BTW, I'm posting this under my user account, not anonymously, and I'm assuming you're a coward until you prove otherwise.
In order for hydro to maintain its current customers, and take on the automobile industry, it will have to triple its power output. Two more Hoover Dams for the left coast. Is there that much water out there?
Where does the Hydrogen come from? Electrolysis. Where does the power to do that come from? In Iceland, it's geothermal. The US doesn't have nearly enough geothermal / solar / wind / whatever deployed to have similar results. Good for Iceland, but don't get your hopes up in the US.
I prefer Go. I get to plop my butt on the couch and wait until I'm captured. I'm such a good player that it hasn't happened yet.