Try to keep up with the conversation. We were talking about his ability to avoid recapture in the long term. In a few weeks this guy will be out of the news and the percentage of drugstore clerks who would recognize him will be approximately zero.
Even in some place like Mexico he would be quite a stand out if he flashed cash, and in the US you'd ultimately fall temptation to going to the local drugstore and risk being nabbed on camera.
Do you really think that the police go over drugstore security camera footage looking for guys like this?
I'll stuff it full of crap that they don't like, and the people who own the big factory peddling the crap can support me. That's a great model, right?
It depends on how well the adds are targeted. There are certainly many irrelevant, annoying adds. But about 20 minutes ago I was reading an article about failed spacecraft designs that NASA tried to build but that didn't work out. The adds on the page included model rocketry kits, space news websites, astronomy books, and Kennedy Space Center vacation packages. I actually clicked on some of the add links for space news websites, and found some other interesting stuff that I probably would not have found otherwise.
My point here is that it IS possible to have targeted adds that your audience actually thinks are interesting/useful - you just have to be willing to go through the trouble of making sure they're appropriate.
Even more likely is the possibility that he simply went back to a room with some woman who decided to steal his BlackBerry. Sure, it *might* have been espionage, but it seems vastly more likely that it was simple theft.
As a juror it's not clear to me how I'm *ever* supposed to avoid having reasonable doubt. It's very well-established that the reliability of eye witness testimony is terrible. As a chemist, I've always been partial to forensic evidence. But now apparently there's a substantial chance that even quantitative forensics tests like DNA analysis, bullet lead analysis, or fingerprints are bullshit. So what's left? Even with an advanced degree in chemistry, I'm not likely to be able to research and evaluate a forensic procedure well enough to know if the prosecutor and/or lab technicians aren't pulling some sort of shenanigans. In the past I would have been inclined to simply assume that an established forensic procedure was trustworthy, but now that clearly isn't the case.
Failure to understand conditional probability and the statistics of multiple testing is a HUGE, ongoing problem with justice systems throughout the western world. There are plenty of specific examples of people being wrongly convicted simply because the prosecutors and/or jurors didn't understand statistics. In 1998, for example, a British woman named Sally Clark was convicted of murdering her newborn child. She had had two children, both of which died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome very early in life. The police and prosecutor reasoned that since the odds of a baby dying of SIDS was about 1 in 8500, the odds of the same person having TWO babies in a row die of SIDS was 1 in 8500^2, or about 1 in 72 million. They thus concluded that she must have killed the child. The jury bought the argument that there was only a 1 in 72 million chance that she was innocent, and convicted her. The problem, of course, is that although the odds of any specific person having two children die of SIDS is very very low, when you have a population with tens of millions of people the odds of *someone* having such a tragedy strike are actually pretty high. Fortunately Sally Clark was eventually freed, but she spent three years in prison.
That's true for the gaming industry in general, but it's doubly true for Ubi; it seems like every time they release a new patch it breaks the "copy protection" for the game on many people's systems, making the game unplayable. The Ubi forums are promptly flooded with people asking how they can get their game to start working again. Invariably the answer is "get a no-cd crack." Frustratingly, Ubi vigorously suppresses any mention of no-cd cracks in their forums; apparently they would rather have their paying customers not able to play their games at all than have them download a third-party no-cd crack that fixes the problems Ubi creates with their own patches.
The irony is that the copy protection software is supposed to protect their revenue from piracy, when in fact all it does is make the pirated versions of the game more attractive to consumers than the "legitimate" version game. Why should anyone pay money for a game when the free version is _less_ buggy?
While I tend to agree with you, you should remember that the majority of BOTH parties voted for the PATRIOT act and BOTH voted to go to war in Iraq. If you think that the Democrats are a bastion of respect for the Constitution, you should recall that it was the Democrats who brought us such gems as the Clipper Chip, the DMCA, and the Civil Asset Forfeiture Act. They were also the first to set up a "free speech zone" at their convention in 1988, long before it was trendy with Republicans. The Republicans only seem evil because they are the ones who have been in power lately.
It doesn't help that whenever a libertarian manages to get time in the media, rather than talking about things that many people would support like lowering taxes, legalizing marijuana, the defending civil liberties from undue government intrusion, they always seem to go into an explanation of why we should privatize the police force, abolish the FDA, end free public education, or some other thing that (to put it as politely as possible) very few voters are likely to agree with them on. While I respect the honesty of the libertarian party for actually saying what they believe rather than what they calculate would get the most votes, the party appears to have been hijacked by the extremists. The relatively large block of voters who might want to be able to own guns and smoke pot without having the government tap their phone for no reason but who ALSO like the idea of a government that ensures your drugs are likely to work and your meet isn't contaminated aren't very likely to vote libertarian because of the extremists.
Actually the massive cuts to men's athletics that occurred under Title IX were mainly caused by lack of women's interest in sports. Schools weren't allowed to fund men's athletics more than women's. The first thing that schools did, obviously, was create more women's sports teams and try to recruit women into them. But that only increased women's participation so much; since at many schools there were more men than women who wanted to participate in sports, even once all the interested women were on well-funded teams there was often still an excess of men. Once all the interested women had been recruited, the only remaining way to create "equality" was to eliminate men's teams. That's the really terrible thing about Title IX: it simply assumed that women would be just as interested as men in sports.
The whole point of their proposal is that since they are basically re-using existing shuttle tech, most of the infrastructure is already present at NASA, the NASA engineers already have expertise with it, and companies are already experienced at making it. If you took the design to another country/agency that didn't already have all that infrastructure, expertise, etc. it would lose much of its usefulness.
The thing about using shuttle engines (instead of the RS-68 engines that NASA is planning to use on Ares) is that they are very expensive because they were designed to be reused. The RS-68 engine provides about 50% more thrust than a shuttle engine, but only about costs $14 million/unit vs. $50 million/unit for a shuttle engine. If your goal is to get into space ASAP, then there's something to be said for using the shuttle engine because it is already man-rated. But if you are designing something that you plan to use for a long time, the RS-68 seems like a *much* better choice, even if you have to do some work initially to get it ready for manned use. And it's not like the RS-68 is untested; it has already been used on the Delta-IV family of rockets.
Any maybe more to the point, I can buy a cheap sedan for around $11-12k. The $19k or so in savings would be more than enough to pay for gas over the likely lifetime of the vehicle, with plenty left over.
True, but how often does anyone actually have to do this? There is really no reason for anyone to ever run out of gas. If someone really is stupid enough to run out of charge, you can always just have it towed.
But is anyone actually doing that anyway? So far as I know, they catch people by actually joining a torrent and seeing who sends them pieces of the copyrighted file. It seems like trying to protect against man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping, etc. is trying to address a problem that doesn't really exist in this particular case (torrents). It's like trying to build an ultra-secure building that no one can spy into from the outside, but them letting anyone who wants to come inside and look around.
To be clear here, it's not like the inside of his car was splattered with blood. The blood found in the car was described as "trace amounts". A while ago I cut my hand in my car while trying to open one of those ridiculously tough plastic bubble containers. It was a trivial thing, and I didn't bleed much - I just put a Band-Aid on it and was fine - but I'm sure that a forensics team could find "traces" of my blood in the car if they looked closely enough. Although clearly this guy was guilty, finding traces a wife's blood in her husband's car is not at all suspicious.
Now, the very first thing I did after the horror trip was to clean out the blood.
Yes, it always stuck me as especially bizarre that people always talked about the fact that he tried to (gasp!) clean the blood up as if it somehow pointed to his guilt. When I carelessly sliced my hand in my car while trying to open something that was packaged in one of those ridiculously tough plastic "clamshell" containers, the first thing that I did when I got home was try to scrub the blood off the seat. Obviously anyone who gets blood in their car will try to clean it up.
Yeah, but Truecrypt has a defence against that. It is called "hidden volumes".
This only gives certain people an incentive to keep beating you for more passwords on the (perfectly reasonable) chance that you might have more data hidden.
The problem is with the school administrators and professors, not the textbook companies. The textbook companies will sell the school anything that the school wants. And the schools invariably want the newest edition, regardless of whether or not it's actually any better than the previous edition. Most of the major textbook publishers have tried to sell lower-cost textbooks that weren't updated as often, were printed in paperback, didn't have lot of color photos on each page, etc. The schools generally aren't interested, because they aren't actually impacted by the choice. It's the students who have to pay for the book, so why not get the newest, shiniest book around? If universities actually started telling textbooks publishers "Sorry, this book is too expensive. We're going with a cheaper book made by another company," the textbook publishers would fall all over themselves trying to meet the new demand. But so long as the schools insist on textbooks that aren't more than 20 minutes old, the publishers will continue to give the schools exactly what they want.
Yes, there are some rare examples of professors, or even entire departments/schools that make an effort to provide the students with reasonably-priced books, but they are rare.
Exactly. If 90% of women preferred "nice guys" and 10% preferred "bad boys," so the 90% all found a nice guy and stuck with him while the 10% constantly switched from one bad boy to another, the bad boys end up with more sexual partners, which this article apparently equates to being more desired. But it doesn't mean that the majority of women actually prefer bad boys.
And speaking of crazy mass limits, what are you going to build for 20 grams that can be detected in orbit? I doubt you could make a transmitter that could send signals to the ground for 20 grams. Maybe a 20 gram piece of metal foil that could be seen on a radar or something?
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Try to keep up with the conversation. We were talking about his ability to avoid recapture in the long term. In a few weeks this guy will be out of the news and the percentage of drugstore clerks who would recognize him will be approximately zero.
Or use a rocket that's both really big and really cheap.
Even in some place like Mexico he would be quite a stand out if he flashed cash, and in the US you'd ultimately fall temptation to going to the local drugstore and risk being nabbed on camera.
Do you really think that the police go over drugstore security camera footage looking for guys like this?
I'll stuff it full of crap that they don't like, and the people who own the big factory peddling the crap can support me. That's a great model, right?
It depends on how well the adds are targeted. There are certainly many irrelevant, annoying adds. But about 20 minutes ago I was reading an article about failed spacecraft designs that NASA tried to build but that didn't work out. The adds on the page included model rocketry kits, space news websites, astronomy books, and Kennedy Space Center vacation packages. I actually clicked on some of the add links for space news websites, and found some other interesting stuff that I probably would not have found otherwise. My point here is that it IS possible to have targeted adds that your audience actually thinks are interesting/useful - you just have to be willing to go through the trouble of making sure they're appropriate.
Uh...the linked article is on a purdue.edu page and has zero adds. Am I missing something?
Even more likely is the possibility that he simply went back to a room with some woman who decided to steal his BlackBerry. Sure, it *might* have been espionage, but it seems vastly more likely that it was simple theft.
As a juror it's not clear to me how I'm *ever* supposed to avoid having reasonable doubt. It's very well-established that the reliability of eye witness testimony is terrible. As a chemist, I've always been partial to forensic evidence. But now apparently there's a substantial chance that even quantitative forensics tests like DNA analysis, bullet lead analysis, or fingerprints are bullshit. So what's left? Even with an advanced degree in chemistry, I'm not likely to be able to research and evaluate a forensic procedure well enough to know if the prosecutor and/or lab technicians aren't pulling some sort of shenanigans. In the past I would have been inclined to simply assume that an established forensic procedure was trustworthy, but now that clearly isn't the case.
Failure to understand conditional probability and the statistics of multiple testing is a HUGE, ongoing problem with justice systems throughout the western world. There are plenty of specific examples of people being wrongly convicted simply because the prosecutors and/or jurors didn't understand statistics. In 1998, for example, a British woman named Sally Clark was convicted of murdering her newborn child. She had had two children, both of which died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome very early in life. The police and prosecutor reasoned that since the odds of a baby dying of SIDS was about 1 in 8500, the odds of the same person having TWO babies in a row die of SIDS was 1 in 8500^2, or about 1 in 72 million. They thus concluded that she must have killed the child. The jury bought the argument that there was only a 1 in 72 million chance that she was innocent, and convicted her. The problem, of course, is that although the odds of any specific person having two children die of SIDS is very very low, when you have a population with tens of millions of people the odds of *someone* having such a tragedy strike are actually pretty high. Fortunately Sally Clark was eventually freed, but she spent three years in prison.
That's true for the gaming industry in general, but it's doubly true for Ubi; it seems like every time they release a new patch it breaks the "copy protection" for the game on many people's systems, making the game unplayable. The Ubi forums are promptly flooded with people asking how they can get their game to start working again. Invariably the answer is "get a no-cd crack." Frustratingly, Ubi vigorously suppresses any mention of no-cd cracks in their forums; apparently they would rather have their paying customers not able to play their games at all than have them download a third-party no-cd crack that fixes the problems Ubi creates with their own patches.
The irony is that the copy protection software is supposed to protect their revenue from piracy, when in fact all it does is make the pirated versions of the game more attractive to consumers than the "legitimate" version game. Why should anyone pay money for a game when the free version is _less_ buggy?
While I tend to agree with you, you should remember that the majority of BOTH parties voted for the PATRIOT act and BOTH voted to go to war in Iraq. If you think that the Democrats are a bastion of respect for the Constitution, you should recall that it was the Democrats who brought us such gems as the Clipper Chip, the DMCA, and the Civil Asset Forfeiture Act. They were also the first to set up a "free speech zone" at their convention in 1988, long before it was trendy with Republicans. The Republicans only seem evil because they are the ones who have been in power lately.
It doesn't help that whenever a libertarian manages to get time in the media, rather than talking about things that many people would support like lowering taxes, legalizing marijuana, the defending civil liberties from undue government intrusion, they always seem to go into an explanation of why we should privatize the police force, abolish the FDA, end free public education, or some other thing that (to put it as politely as possible) very few voters are likely to agree with them on. While I respect the honesty of the libertarian party for actually saying what they believe rather than what they calculate would get the most votes, the party appears to have been hijacked by the extremists. The relatively large block of voters who might want to be able to own guns and smoke pot without having the government tap their phone for no reason but who ALSO like the idea of a government that ensures your drugs are likely to work and your meet isn't contaminated aren't very likely to vote libertarian because of the extremists.
Actually the massive cuts to men's athletics that occurred under Title IX were mainly caused by lack of women's interest in sports. Schools weren't allowed to fund men's athletics more than women's. The first thing that schools did, obviously, was create more women's sports teams and try to recruit women into them. But that only increased women's participation so much; since at many schools there were more men than women who wanted to participate in sports, even once all the interested women were on well-funded teams there was often still an excess of men. Once all the interested women had been recruited, the only remaining way to create "equality" was to eliminate men's teams. That's the really terrible thing about Title IX: it simply assumed that women would be just as interested as men in sports.
The whole point of their proposal is that since they are basically re-using existing shuttle tech, most of the infrastructure is already present at NASA, the NASA engineers already have expertise with it, and companies are already experienced at making it. If you took the design to another country/agency that didn't already have all that infrastructure, expertise, etc. it would lose much of its usefulness.
Right - NASA is planning to use the RS-68. These guys from the article, on the other hand, want to use the SSMEs.
The thing about using shuttle engines (instead of the RS-68 engines that NASA is planning to use on Ares) is that they are very expensive because they were designed to be reused. The RS-68 engine provides about 50% more thrust than a shuttle engine, but only about costs $14 million/unit vs. $50 million/unit for a shuttle engine. If your goal is to get into space ASAP, then there's something to be said for using the shuttle engine because it is already man-rated. But if you are designing something that you plan to use for a long time, the RS-68 seems like a *much* better choice, even if you have to do some work initially to get it ready for manned use. And it's not like the RS-68 is untested; it has already been used on the Delta-IV family of rockets.
In that case simply going to a gas station to get more gas is out of the question anyway. Try to keep up with the conversation...
Any maybe more to the point, I can buy a cheap sedan for around $11-12k. The $19k or so in savings would be more than enough to pay for gas over the likely lifetime of the vehicle, with plenty left over.
True, but how often does anyone actually have to do this? There is really no reason for anyone to ever run out of gas. If someone really is stupid enough to run out of charge, you can always just have it towed.
But is anyone actually doing that anyway? So far as I know, they catch people by actually joining a torrent and seeing who sends them pieces of the copyrighted file. It seems like trying to protect against man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping, etc. is trying to address a problem that doesn't really exist in this particular case (torrents). It's like trying to build an ultra-secure building that no one can spy into from the outside, but them letting anyone who wants to come inside and look around.
To be clear here, it's not like the inside of his car was splattered with blood. The blood found in the car was described as "trace amounts". A while ago I cut my hand in my car while trying to open one of those ridiculously tough plastic bubble containers. It was a trivial thing, and I didn't bleed much - I just put a Band-Aid on it and was fine - but I'm sure that a forensics team could find "traces" of my blood in the car if they looked closely enough. Although clearly this guy was guilty, finding traces a wife's blood in her husband's car is not at all suspicious.
Now, the very first thing I did after the horror trip was to clean out the blood.
Yes, it always stuck me as especially bizarre that people always talked about the fact that he tried to (gasp!) clean the blood up as if it somehow pointed to his guilt. When I carelessly sliced my hand in my car while trying to open something that was packaged in one of those ridiculously tough plastic "clamshell" containers, the first thing that I did when I got home was try to scrub the blood off the seat. Obviously anyone who gets blood in their car will try to clean it up.
Yeah, but Truecrypt has a defence against that. It is called "hidden volumes".
This only gives certain people an incentive to keep beating you for more passwords on the (perfectly reasonable) chance that you might have more data hidden.
The problem is with the school administrators and professors, not the textbook companies. The textbook companies will sell the school anything that the school wants. And the schools invariably want the newest edition, regardless of whether or not it's actually any better than the previous edition. Most of the major textbook publishers have tried to sell lower-cost textbooks that weren't updated as often, were printed in paperback, didn't have lot of color photos on each page, etc. The schools generally aren't interested, because they aren't actually impacted by the choice. It's the students who have to pay for the book, so why not get the newest, shiniest book around? If universities actually started telling textbooks publishers "Sorry, this book is too expensive. We're going with a cheaper book made by another company," the textbook publishers would fall all over themselves trying to meet the new demand. But so long as the schools insist on textbooks that aren't more than 20 minutes old, the publishers will continue to give the schools exactly what they want.
Yes, there are some rare examples of professors, or even entire departments/schools that make an effort to provide the students with reasonably-priced books, but they are rare.
Exactly. If 90% of women preferred "nice guys" and 10% preferred "bad boys," so the 90% all found a nice guy and stuck with him while the 10% constantly switched from one bad boy to another, the bad boys end up with more sexual partners, which this article apparently equates to being more desired. But it doesn't mean that the majority of women actually prefer bad boys.
And speaking of crazy mass limits, what are you going to build for 20 grams that can be detected in orbit? I doubt you could make a transmitter that could send signals to the ground for 20 grams. Maybe a 20 gram piece of metal foil that could be seen on a radar or something?