Sure, if you can afford to pay thousands of dollars to bring in your own qualified expert witness to testify that the police's forensic analysis was flawed. People with advanced degrees in forensics and/or analytical chemistry usually don't donate their time for free. If you're poor, good luck trying to concince someone to help you out of the goodness of their heart.
As a jurror, how the hell am I supposed to not have "reasonable doubt" about anything that's introduced as evidence in a trial? It's already very well-established that eye-witness identification has horrible reliability. Now apparently I shouldn't even take the reliability of forensic evidence forgranted. What's left? If the prosecution presents damning forensic evidence and the defense lawyer simply says "Yeah, but since it's been proven that even established forensic tests aren't necessarily reliable, why should anyone believe you?" how am I supposed to not have reasonable doubt about the forensic evidence now?
Your steganography software doesn't have to be very good, it just has to be good enough to frustrate the police. Yeah, if the government thinks that you have the plans for China's new invisible tank somewhere on your computer, they might give the contents of your hard drive to a bunch of smart programmers and statisticians who will be able to find whatever you tried to hide. But if you're using it to hide the records of your pot deals, or a few thousand credit card numbers that you stole in an email fishing scam, the police probably aren't going to bother.
Large polls very consistently show that about 40-45% of the adult U.S. population believes that humans didn't evolve, but rather were created by god about 10000 year ago. Just google "gallop pole creationism".
The fact that such things make headlines in the west is proof that it's aberrant behavior. There seem to be entire countries in the middle east where irrational violence in the name of religion is considered standard procedure, and widely condoned by the majority of society.
If you want to propose that anyone who uses religion to explain nature is "missing the point of religion," then the vast majority of people throughout history from every religion around the world were "missing the point". In fact, it's arguable that the original purpose of religion was to provide explanations for natural phenomena that were unexplainable at the time. The idea that religion isn't supposed to provide explanations for natural phenomena is a relatively new one. If you want to try to re-invent religion as something that has nothing to do with empirical fact, then I wish you luck; but realize that you are trying to reinvent it.
"this in fact is not a call to abandon religion to embrace science, nor is it an assertion that there is a conflict between religion and science. they merely have nothing to do with each other. there can be no conflict between two systems that don't speak the same language or investigate the same phenomena. one has to do with fact based inquiries, the other has to do with transcendental thought."
Regardless of what you think religion should or shouldn't be used for, a huge chunk of the world's population does use religion to explain physical phenomena. You can say "science and religion address different domains!" as much as you like, but it won't make it true.
That's the problem - forgetting the password is not a defence. This is simply false. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of the law from U.K. law enforcement is that it's almost impossible to enforce in most cases because the burden is on the police to prove that the suspect does actually have the keys and has not simply lost/forgotten them. The law quite explicitly states that the police must demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the person actually has a key before any violation of this law can occur.
People use "key" as a metaphor for "the information that you need to decrypt the data," but it's not clear that a cryptographic key is really analogous to a physical key. Suppose I try to keep my information private by writing in some obscure language that almost no one knows and that the police can't find a translator for. Would forcing me to explain the language so that the police can read my diary really be analogous to forcing me to hand over the key to my shed?
By the time they've finished four years of University, they have between $60,000.00 and $100,000.00 in debt. They look around and realize that if they go to graduate school, they will probably double that debt. I'll take the fact that this got +5 insightful as proof that slashdot's moderators never went to grad school, or even seriously looked into grad school. You don't pay to go to grad school in the United States. Or at least, you don't pay if you go to any sort of science or engineering grad school. The school pays you. Most hard science or engineering programs pay grad students around $20k-$30k/year to attend grad school, and wave your tuition.
Same goes for science (in fact, often science departments don't admit if they don't have funding).
This is true. Most science departments determine how many grad students they accept in a given year by figuring out how many they can afford to pay. You generally wouldn't be allowed to attend science grad school on your own dime even if you wanted to.
Uh...what would be wrong with deflation, exactly? You can have things cost less, or you can have things cost the same but increase the money supply so that you pay everyone more. Why is one better than the other?
If we are so scared of a terrorist attack that we must suspend citizen rights in order to feel safer (regardless of how much real security is actually bought at that expense) then the terrorists have ALREADY won.
Only if you subscribe to the ridiculous "the terrorists bomb us because they hate our freedom!" rhetoric that the Bush administration likes to spew. Let's be honest for a minute here; the terrorists don't really give a damn about whether or not the government is eavesdropping on us, or anything else related to our rights and freedoms in the US. The terrorists want us to get our troops out of the Middle East, stop propping up the Saudi government, and stop supporting Israel. When we start doing any of those three things, then the terrorists will be winning.
No, contrary to what the article says, the iPhone will [i]not[/i] check your email when it is turned off. This must have simply put his phone in sleep mode (which maybe he mistook for "off"). It's all very clearly explained in phone's instruction booklet. I don't really have much sympathy for him.
And as I recall, the judge in that particular case only ruled against using OnStar to eavesdrop because it interfered with the proper operation of the OnStar communicator, so that if the drivers had experienced some sort of emergency they wouldn't have been able to use it to call for help - much like the police bugging your phone in a way that prevents you from being able to call 911. It didn't have anything to do with the eavesdropping being objectionable to the courts in principle.
What makes you think they didn't have a warrant? The fact that the police didn't tell the guy that they had installed the tracking devices when he asked? So far as I know, the police aren't required to answer honestly when you ask them whether or not they're spying on you.
If your "data security course" was worth a damn, they should have taught you that with modern hard drives it's basically impossible to recover anything that has been overwritten even a single time. There is absolutely no need to physically destroy a hard drive to protect old data. Let me guess, your course was sponsored by Western Digital? I'm sure they would love the idea of people grinding up their perfectly good hard drives.
Perhaps even more importantly, to my knowledge there are no standard procedures for recovering overwritten data that are currently accepted in U.S. criminal courts. There are pretty strict standards for gathering forensic evidence. The evidence has to be gathered and processed according to "standard procedures" that are pear-reviewed and approved by experts in the field. A forensics examiner can't just make up the procedure as they go along, even if they have such expertise in their field that they are qualified to do so. For example, if you find someone with a suspicious white powder and you think it might be narcotics, there is a list of standard tests that can performed in order to determine the nature of the powder, and each test has to be performed according to a specific procedure. Since no such standard procedures exist for recovering data that has been over-written, it's unlikely that any evidence that was recovered from an over-written disk could be introduced in a criminal trial.
It might have something to do with the fact that whenever a libertarian candidate manages to actually get time in the media, they usually come off as a total nut. There are many people who would be interested in a candidate who talked about protecting our civil liberties from undue government intrusion, legalizing pot, protecting the rights of gun owners, lowering taxes, allowing people to do whatever they want with other consenting adults, ending government censorship of the media, and reducing government welfare programs. Those are all perfectly valid libertarian issues, but for some reason that's not what libertarian candidates talk about. Instead, they explain how they want to abolish the FDA, eliminate free public education, privatize the police force, or any number of other schemes that - to put it as politely as possible - very few voters are likely to take seriously.
In a way I actually respect most libertarian candidates, since they don't seem to have any reluctance to tell you what they really believe in and what sort of policy they would like to pursue. That puts them a step ahead of the right-wing politicians who pay lip service to equal rights and free speech, but who you know would secretly love nothing better than to outlaw homosexuality, nudity, or criticism of the Christian god. Or the left-wing politicians who you know would secretly love to ban all gun ownership, raises taxes on the rich to stratospheric level, and outlaw any form of speech that offends anyone. But it also ensures that they aren't likely to get elected, or even taken seriously.
So if you ran a country like that.. yes, it would be poor. OF course it would. Tibet may not be the example everyone wants, but the example of a country run according to peaceful, enlightened ideals would be unlikely to be terribly advanced technologically, because to push technology the way we do, you have to live way, way out of balance. Are you f***ings kidding me? Before the Dalai Lama was kicked out by the Chinese, over half of the population of Tibet were slaves. "example of a country run according to peaceful, enlightened ideals"? Are we talking about the same country where having an eye gouged out was a standard punishment for trying to run away from the estate where you were forced to work for no pay? The same country where the wealthy, ruling monks taught their massive slave population that their suffering was their own fault (and fully deserved) due to unknowable "sins" that they had committed in past lives? Your "example of a country run according to peaceful, enlightened ideals" was a hellish combination of medieval feudalism, pre-civil war American southern slavery, and a religion that turned Social Darwinism into a divine ethics system where any suffering that the ruling elite inflicted on the poor was by default deserved. After all, if you weren't meant to be a slave, why would you have been reincarnated as a slave?
I can only suspect that you have bought into the badly over-romanticized version of pre-China Tibet that has become so popular in the United States over the last few decades. Note that none of this in any way excuses China's current occupation of Tibet, or their continued oppression of the native Tibetan people. But you would do well to remember that before the Dalai Lama was forced into exile, he ruled over one of the most brutally oppressive societies of the 20th century.
I am not defending the unequal treatment of Tibetans under Chinese rule; like I said, there is no question that the Chinese are oppressing the Tibetans. I am simply pointing out that, although the Chinese treatment of the Tibetans is deplorable, the vast majority of Tibetans are infinitely better off under Chinese rule than they were under Tibet's pre-1959 system of religious feudalism and slavery. Of course that doesn't mean that China was acting nobly when they took over Tibet, or that their ongoing mistreatment of the Tibetans is justified. I just wish more people who realize that pre-China Tibet was a pretty hellish place. People look at the Dalai Lama as a figure of enlightenment, but they forget that up until they were thrown out by the Chinese, the monks who ruled in Tibet -and the Dalai Lama was at the top - literally taught people that they deserved to be slaves because of unknowable "sins" in their previous life. After all, if they didn't deserve to be a slave, why would they have been reincarnated as a slave?
"Huh? Tibet has been occupied since the 1950's which if you compare it to the current world situation of the times, we Americans were still highly geared up for segregation and discrimination of African Americans in the South and only a handful of people were fighting to change it until the 1960's equal rights movement."
Read a history book. Prior to Chinese reforms in 1959, over half of Tibet's population were basically slaves. They were serfs who were obligated to work for no pay on the estates of the ruling monks and elite merchants, legally forbidden to leave, and could be summarily killed at their liege-lord's whim. They were traded or sold from one liege-lord to another, often breaking up families. Forget the segregation of 1950s-era America - you would have to go back to the slavery of the pre-civil war american south to find any analogous set of social circumstances. The wealthy ruling monks, of course, taught their serfs that they were responsible for their own suffering due to transgressions in past lives. The Chinese are a bunch of jerks, and they are certainly oppressing the Tibetans, but Chinese rule is nothing compared to the slavery that most of Tibet lived under prior to 1959.
You don't seem to appreciate the distinction between fact and opinion that's an integral part of U.S. libel laws. According to U.S. law, statement of pure opinion cannot be libelous. You can print something like "John is a scumbag" without fear of libel laws, because that is simply an expression of opinion. In order for libel to occur you need to print a statement of fact, like "John is a ciminal." Calling someone a crackpot isn't a statement of fact - it's a statement of opinion, just like calling someone a "scumbag" or "oaf".
I suspect that a child is vastly more likely to be hurt or killed traveling to a real-world library to get books for their homework than they are to run into any sort of "danger" online.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, if you can afford to pay thousands of dollars to bring in your own qualified expert witness to testify that the police's forensic analysis was flawed. People with advanced degrees in forensics and/or analytical chemistry usually don't donate their time for free. If you're poor, good luck trying to concince someone to help you out of the goodness of their heart.
As a jurror, how the hell am I supposed to not have "reasonable doubt" about anything that's introduced as evidence in a trial? It's already very well-established that eye-witness identification has horrible reliability. Now apparently I shouldn't even take the reliability of forensic evidence forgranted. What's left? If the prosecution presents damning forensic evidence and the defense lawyer simply says "Yeah, but since it's been proven that even established forensic tests aren't necessarily reliable, why should anyone believe you?" how am I supposed to not have reasonable doubt about the forensic evidence now?
Your steganography software doesn't have to be very good, it just has to be good enough to frustrate the police. Yeah, if the government thinks that you have the plans for China's new invisible tank somewhere on your computer, they might give the contents of your hard drive to a bunch of smart programmers and statisticians who will be able to find whatever you tried to hide. But if you're using it to hide the records of your pot deals, or a few thousand credit card numbers that you stole in an email fishing scam, the police probably aren't going to bother.
Large polls very consistently show that about 40-45% of the adult U.S. population believes that humans didn't evolve, but rather were created by god about 10000 year ago. Just google "gallop pole creationism".
The fact that such things make headlines in the west is proof that it's aberrant behavior. There seem to be entire countries in the middle east where irrational violence in the name of religion is considered standard procedure, and widely condoned by the majority of society.
If you want to propose that anyone who uses religion to explain nature is "missing the point of religion," then the vast majority of people throughout history from every religion around the world were "missing the point". In fact, it's arguable that the original purpose of religion was to provide explanations for natural phenomena that were unexplainable at the time. The idea that religion isn't supposed to provide explanations for natural phenomena is a relatively new one. If you want to try to re-invent religion as something that has nothing to do with empirical fact, then I wish you luck; but realize that you are trying to reinvent it.
"this in fact is not a call to abandon religion to embrace science, nor is it an assertion that there is a conflict between religion and science. they merely have nothing to do with each other. there can be no conflict between two systems that don't speak the same language or investigate the same phenomena. one has to do with fact based inquiries, the other has to do with transcendental thought."
Regardless of what you think religion should or shouldn't be used for, a huge chunk of the world's population does use religion to explain physical phenomena. You can say "science and religion address different domains!" as much as you like, but it won't make it true.
People use "key" as a metaphor for "the information that you need to decrypt the data," but it's not clear that a cryptographic key is really analogous to a physical key. Suppose I try to keep my information private by writing in some obscure language that almost no one knows and that the police can't find a translator for. Would forcing me to explain the language so that the police can read my diary really be analogous to forcing me to hand over the key to my shed?
This is true. Most science departments determine how many grad students they accept in a given year by figuring out how many they can afford to pay. You generally wouldn't be allowed to attend science grad school on your own dime even if you wanted to.
Uh...what would be wrong with deflation, exactly? You can have things cost less, or you can have things cost the same but increase the money supply so that you pay everyone more. Why is one better than the other?
Only if you subscribe to the ridiculous "the terrorists bomb us because they hate our freedom!" rhetoric that the Bush administration likes to spew. Let's be honest for a minute here; the terrorists don't really give a damn about whether or not the government is eavesdropping on us, or anything else related to our rights and freedoms in the US. The terrorists want us to get our troops out of the Middle East, stop propping up the Saudi government, and stop supporting Israel. When we start doing any of those three things, then the terrorists will be winning.
No, contrary to what the article says, the iPhone will [i]not[/i] check your email when it is turned off. This must have simply put his phone in sleep mode (which maybe he mistook for "off"). It's all very clearly explained in phone's instruction booklet. I don't really have much sympathy for him.
And as I recall, the judge in that particular case only ruled against using OnStar to eavesdrop because it interfered with the proper operation of the OnStar communicator, so that if the drivers had experienced some sort of emergency they wouldn't have been able to use it to call for help - much like the police bugging your phone in a way that prevents you from being able to call 911. It didn't have anything to do with the eavesdropping being objectionable to the courts in principle.
What makes you think they didn't have a warrant? The fact that the police didn't tell the guy that they had installed the tracking devices when he asked? So far as I know, the police aren't required to answer honestly when you ask them whether or not they're spying on you.
Does anyone know the legality in the U.S. of selling, destroying, etc. police devices that have been deliberately left on your property like this?
If your "data security course" was worth a damn, they should have taught you that with modern hard drives it's basically impossible to recover anything that has been overwritten even a single time. There is absolutely no need to physically destroy a hard drive to protect old data. Let me guess, your course was sponsored by Western Digital? I'm sure they would love the idea of people grinding up their perfectly good hard drives.
Perhaps even more importantly, to my knowledge there are no standard procedures for recovering overwritten data that are currently accepted in U.S. criminal courts. There are pretty strict standards for gathering forensic evidence. The evidence has to be gathered and processed according to "standard procedures" that are pear-reviewed and approved by experts in the field. A forensics examiner can't just make up the procedure as they go along, even if they have such expertise in their field that they are qualified to do so. For example, if you find someone with a suspicious white powder and you think it might be narcotics, there is a list of standard tests that can performed in order to determine the nature of the powder, and each test has to be performed according to a specific procedure. Since no such standard procedures exist for recovering data that has been over-written, it's unlikely that any evidence that was recovered from an over-written disk could be introduced in a criminal trial.
It might have something to do with the fact that whenever a libertarian candidate manages to actually get time in the media, they usually come off as a total nut. There are many people who would be interested in a candidate who talked about protecting our civil liberties from undue government intrusion, legalizing pot, protecting the rights of gun owners, lowering taxes, allowing people to do whatever they want with other consenting adults, ending government censorship of the media, and reducing government welfare programs. Those are all perfectly valid libertarian issues, but for some reason that's not what libertarian candidates talk about. Instead, they explain how they want to abolish the FDA, eliminate free public education, privatize the police force, or any number of other schemes that - to put it as politely as possible - very few voters are likely to take seriously.
In a way I actually respect most libertarian candidates, since they don't seem to have any reluctance to tell you what they really believe in and what sort of policy they would like to pursue. That puts them a step ahead of the right-wing politicians who pay lip service to equal rights and free speech, but who you know would secretly love nothing better than to outlaw homosexuality, nudity, or criticism of the Christian god. Or the left-wing politicians who you know would secretly love to ban all gun ownership, raises taxes on the rich to stratospheric level, and outlaw any form of speech that offends anyone. But it also ensures that they aren't likely to get elected, or even taken seriously.
I am not defending the unequal treatment of Tibetans under Chinese rule; like I said, there is no question that the Chinese are oppressing the Tibetans. I am simply pointing out that, although the Chinese treatment of the Tibetans is deplorable, the vast majority of Tibetans are infinitely better off under Chinese rule than they were under Tibet's pre-1959 system of religious feudalism and slavery. Of course that doesn't mean that China was acting nobly when they took over Tibet, or that their ongoing mistreatment of the Tibetans is justified. I just wish more people who realize that pre-China Tibet was a pretty hellish place. People look at the Dalai Lama as a figure of enlightenment, but they forget that up until they were thrown out by the Chinese, the monks who ruled in Tibet -and the Dalai Lama was at the top - literally taught people that they deserved to be slaves because of unknowable "sins" in their previous life. After all, if they didn't deserve to be a slave, why would they have been reincarnated as a slave?
"Huh? Tibet has been occupied since the 1950's which if you compare it to the current world situation of the times, we Americans were still highly geared up for segregation and discrimination of African Americans in the South and only a handful of people were fighting to change it until the 1960's equal rights movement."
Read a history book. Prior to Chinese reforms in 1959, over half of Tibet's population were basically slaves. They were serfs who were obligated to work for no pay on the estates of the ruling monks and elite merchants, legally forbidden to leave, and could be summarily killed at their liege-lord's whim. They were traded or sold from one liege-lord to another, often breaking up families. Forget the segregation of 1950s-era America - you would have to go back to the slavery of the pre-civil war american south to find any analogous set of social circumstances. The wealthy ruling monks, of course, taught their serfs that they were responsible for their own suffering due to transgressions in past lives. The Chinese are a bunch of jerks, and they are certainly oppressing the Tibetans, but Chinese rule is nothing compared to the slavery that most of Tibet lived under prior to 1959.
You don't seem to appreciate the distinction between fact and opinion that's an integral part of U.S. libel laws. According to U.S. law, statement of pure opinion cannot be libelous. You can print something like "John is a scumbag" without fear of libel laws, because that is simply an expression of opinion. In order for libel to occur you need to print a statement of fact, like "John is a ciminal." Calling someone a crackpot isn't a statement of fact - it's a statement of opinion, just like calling someone a "scumbag" or "oaf".
I suspect that a child is vastly more likely to be hurt or killed traveling to a real-world library to get books for their homework than they are to run into any sort of "danger" online.