No, it doesn't work like that. If you were ordered to hand over your data and only provided encrypted data and then refused to give them the key, it would be treated the same as if you had refused to give them the data in the first place. Because, of course, that's basically what you are doing. Most likely the judge would simply rule against you immediatly.
The company seems to be making a medical claim here. Can't the FDA nail them for lying about this? Or is it considered acceptable to lie about fake positive effects as long as the product is safe?
This actually isn't too surprising; physchological studies have repeatedly shown that the better people are at something, the more they tend to underestimate their abilities. Similarly, the worse people are at something the more they tend to over-estimate their abilities. This has been shown to be true for an incredibly broad range of areas, from driving to using proper English grammar to tennis to solving physics problems to telling jokes. People tend to evaluate themselves by focusing on what they can't do or don't know rather than what they can do or know. The better you are at something, the more aware you are of what you don't understand. Less competent people are less aware of what they don't understand, so when they evaluate their own competence they tend to over-estimate. Surprisingly, if you improve a person's skill to raise their competency it will usually cause them to lower their own estimate of their competency.
The Halifax explosion was only around 2 kt, two orders of magnitude less than the 200 kt figure that you claim.
Instead of very large accidental explosions, it might be a bit more topical to talk about known instances in the past where nations have deliberately simulated nuclear bombs with conventional explosives, like the 4 kt Minor Scale experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Scale_(explosio n)
You're not quite correct. What you should have said is "This wouldn't even cut it in undergrad in a hard science." If he is writing a thesis about divorce and IT, it's probably for some sort of "soft" social science. Based on what I've seen of high-level academic research in areas like sociology or anthropology, it's unfortunately common for people to collect a lot of anecdotal evidence with a series of interviews or a few poorly-thought-out surveys, then successfully pass it off as "data" for their "research" without worrying about things like statistical analysis, selection bias, etc.
I'm sure some social science fan who is bad at critical thinking will come along and point out that I am committing exactly such an error myself by judging the entire field based on my own biased anecdotal experiences, so I'll preemptively reply by pointing out that I'm making a post to slashdot rather than writing an academic journal article or thesis.
Are you serious?
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Are you seriously planning to use responses here as "data" for a graduate-level academic thesis?
You are confused about this. A pilot's G-suit works because it applies uneven pressure on a pilot's body. As a pilot experiences high g forces during a turn, his blood begins to pool in his legs and lower abdomen. Eventually there's not enough blood getting to the brain and he blacks out. The G-suit works by squeezing the pilot's lower body but not his upper body, which helps force the blood back toward his brain. If the suit squeezed the pilot's upper and lower body equally, it wouldn't work.
The problem is the angular acceleration that results from the fact that you're going in a circle, not the acceleration that brings you up to orbital velocity.
I really, really hate it when people refer to it as "identity theft," as if something has somehow been stolen from the person who was impersonated. They should simply call it called it what it really is - credit card fraud. Instead of making any sort of rudimentary effort to verify that the people they hand thousands of dollars over to are actually who they claim to be, credit companies shift the burden onto everyone else by insisting that we should treat our personal information like secret nuclear launch codes.
Why should I have to worry about keeping my social security number or other personal information secret? If the credit card companies are stupid enough to issue a huge line of credit to someone simply because they know my social security number, well, their idiotic business model really shouldn't be my problem. I would love to see a law mandating something like an automatic $500 penalty for the credit card companies any time they put a false black mark on a consumer's credit report; maybe that would help shift the burden back onto the companies who are allowing themselves to be so easily defrauded, rather than "identity theft victims" who don't really have anything to do with the situation.
" If I built a spy satellite and orbitted it over the united states I would be a terrorist and bombed in seconds."
I am astounded that so many people on this thread are expressing this sort of sentiment. Apparently people aren't aware of the fact that the U.S. has allowed other nations to orbit spy satellites over us unmolested for [b]over 40 years[/b].
But if it can charge in 5 minutes, it can also discharge in 5 minutes - unless there's some sort of system where the fuse is removed during charging and then replaced.
"There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill."
This claim is absurd on its face. Who told him that? The guy who sold him the fish? He's obviously not an analytical chemist. Things like high-resolution mass spectrometry can detect cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides at parts-per-trillion levels, far lower than anything that could ever possibly have any sort of detectible biological effect on a fish. There is no way that a fish is going to be effected by a nanogram/liter concentration of mercury, but a good mass spec would be able to see it.
You mean there actually are legitimate mortgage companies behind those spams?!? I assumed that they would just take all your information and use it in identity theft scams.
"But yeah, al-q is real, and so were the London, India, USS Cole (sp?), etc. bombings - so not taking threats seriously - and personally - is pretty damned stupid."
No, worrying about things with no regard to how likely they are to actually harm you is stupid. The odds of an american being killed by terrorism are so close to zero that it's difficult to even meaningfully calculate, but if you tried you would probably come up with something on the order of one in a million. Yet people are eager to give up civil rights to be "protected" from a threat that's so unlikely to kill you that you would probably be better off worrying about being hit by lightening.
"As others also pointed out, there is nothing in the Eve Online EULA or in the game mechanics that forbids what this guy has done."
Actually, it goes a bit further than that. Unlike most other MMORPGs, the user agreement for EVE Online explicitly permits players to scam each other out of "isk" as part of the game. Scams in EVE Online are only forbidden if the scammer takes advantage of some sort of game bug or software exploit.
"but wouldn't tying teacher's rate of pay to standardized testing encourage the teachers to teach just the exam and not how to learn and explore? It doesn't matter if the students learn as long as they do well in the test right?"
If the standardized test is designed to test what the students are supposed to be learning, then what's the problem? People like to go on about the dangers of "teaching to the test," but if the test measures the student's ability to read, write, and do math then wouldn't "teaching to the test" simply mean "teaching the kids to read, write, and do math"?
If you have a problem with teachers only "teaching for the test," it implies that your test isn't designed properly. Just design the test to measure whether or not students are learning what you want them to learn, so that the teacher can't teach them to pass the test without actually teaching them whatever the curriculum is supposed to be.
"Nowadays, the cost of typesetting and printing (or composition, arrangement, recording etc.) is borne by the artists, and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do. So there is no further need of copyright to protect the printing investment. Anyone can record, print and distribute for essentially nothing."
This is only true of creative works that can be made by a small number of people for a very low cost. True, it costs almost nothing for an author to write a book or a musician to record a song, but what about things like movies, videogames, or television shows?
"if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. "
Yeah, I guess it sounds a lot better to put it that way than to say "A 0.5% reduction in electricity usage".
Suppose I regularly use a high-security file erasing utility to delete files that contain sensitive information - say, the personal account information of former customers who no longer do business with me. My harddrive contains many areas where files have been blatantly overwritten with zeros. Am I automatically liable if the RIAA sues me?
Wouldn't it be much easier to just do all your illegal stuff on the second drive, then pretend that it never existed if the RIAA asks for evidence? There wouldn't be any complicated copying/re-dating of files, etc.
"Stealing is taking something without permission."
But you aren't taking anything. You are creating a copy. There is an obvious and clear difference. If I examine your car and then build an exact copy of your car, would you consider me to have "stolen" your car?
This is just silly. Suppose a neurologist treats a patient who was beaten by a baseball bat and has sustained brain damage. After a year of treatment, the neurologist finds that the patient's brain functions have changed to work around the damaged areas. Would you propose that the neurologist shouldn't write a paper about this because he doesn't approve of beating people with baseball bats?
You have good points about the neutron-free nature of He3 fusion, but I don't think that increased plant costs etc. from deuterium fusion would come anywhere near the costs of mining He3 on the moon.
"I believe that the real "treasure" on the moon is helium-3 isotope. Just isn't present in sufficient quantities on Earth, and it could be the next big power source."
You hear this sort of talk a lot among space enthusiasts, but unfortunately it is very unlikely that anyone will ever want to build a reactor that runs off of helium-3. Yes, you can make a reactor that burns helium-3, but it is much less technically challenging to build a reactor that runs off hydrogen and deuterium. Since there is an essentially unlimited supply of deuterium in the earth's oceans, it seems unlikely that anyone would want to build a reactor that's both more difficult to construct and requires fuel from the moon.
It should also be pointed out that you can make helium-3 in a conventional fusion reactor. Since building a helium-3 reactor is far more difficult than a deuterium or tritium fueled reactor, by the time you actually need helium-3 you will by necessity already have the technology to make it yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't work like that. If you were ordered to hand over your data and only provided encrypted data and then refused to give them the key, it would be treated the same as if you had refused to give them the data in the first place. Because, of course, that's basically what you are doing. Most likely the judge would simply rule against you immediatly.
The company seems to be making a medical claim here. Can't the FDA nail them for lying about this? Or is it considered acceptable to lie about fake positive effects as long as the product is safe?
This actually isn't too surprising; physchological studies have repeatedly shown that the better people are at something, the more they tend to underestimate their abilities. Similarly, the worse people are at something the more they tend to over-estimate their abilities. This has been shown to be true for an incredibly broad range of areas, from driving to using proper English grammar to tennis to solving physics problems to telling jokes. People tend to evaluate themselves by focusing on what they can't do or don't know rather than what they can do or know. The better you are at something, the more aware you are of what you don't understand. Less competent people are less aware of what they don't understand, so when they evaluate their own competence they tend to over-estimate. Surprisingly, if you improve a person's skill to raise their competency it will usually cause them to lower their own estimate of their competency.
The Halifax explosion was only around 2 kt, two orders of magnitude less than the 200 kt figure that you claim.
o n)
Instead of very large accidental explosions, it might be a bit more topical to talk about known instances in the past where nations have deliberately simulated nuclear bombs with conventional explosives, like the 4 kt Minor Scale experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Scale_(explosi
You're not quite correct. What you should have said is "This wouldn't even cut it in undergrad in a hard science." If he is writing a thesis about divorce and IT, it's probably for some sort of "soft" social science. Based on what I've seen of high-level academic research in areas like sociology or anthropology, it's unfortunately common for people to collect a lot of anecdotal evidence with a series of interviews or a few poorly-thought-out surveys, then successfully pass it off as "data" for their "research" without worrying about things like statistical analysis, selection bias, etc.
I'm sure some social science fan who is bad at critical thinking will come along and point out that I am committing exactly such an error myself by judging the entire field based on my own biased anecdotal experiences, so I'll preemptively reply by pointing out that I'm making a post to slashdot rather than writing an academic journal article or thesis.
Are you seriously planning to use responses here as "data" for a graduate-level academic thesis?
You are confused about this. A pilot's G-suit works because it applies uneven pressure on a pilot's body. As a pilot experiences high g forces during a turn, his blood begins to pool in his legs and lower abdomen. Eventually there's not enough blood getting to the brain and he blacks out. The G-suit works by squeezing the pilot's lower body but not his upper body, which helps force the blood back toward his brain. If the suit squeezed the pilot's upper and lower body equally, it wouldn't work.
The problem is the angular acceleration that results from the fact that you're going in a circle, not the acceleration that brings you up to orbital velocity.
I really, really hate it when people refer to it as "identity theft," as if something has somehow been stolen from the person who was impersonated. They should simply call it called it what it really is - credit card fraud. Instead of making any sort of rudimentary effort to verify that the people they hand thousands of dollars over to are actually who they claim to be, credit companies shift the burden onto everyone else by insisting that we should treat our personal information like secret nuclear launch codes. Why should I have to worry about keeping my social security number or other personal information secret? If the credit card companies are stupid enough to issue a huge line of credit to someone simply because they know my social security number, well, their idiotic business model really shouldn't be my problem. I would love to see a law mandating something like an automatic $500 penalty for the credit card companies any time they put a false black mark on a consumer's credit report; maybe that would help shift the burden back onto the companies who are allowing themselves to be so easily defrauded, rather than "identity theft victims" who don't really have anything to do with the situation.
Are you kidding? You can't even get people to stop voting for the leaders who do this, and you expect people to engage in some sort of armed uprising?
" If I built a spy satellite and orbitted it over the united states I would be a terrorist and bombed in seconds."
I am astounded that so many people on this thread are expressing this sort of sentiment. Apparently people aren't aware of the fact that the U.S. has allowed other nations to orbit spy satellites over us unmolested for [b]over 40 years[/b].
But if it can charge in 5 minutes, it can also discharge in 5 minutes - unless there's some sort of system where the fuse is removed during charging and then replaced.
"There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill."
This claim is absurd on its face. Who told him that? The guy who sold him the fish? He's obviously not an analytical chemist. Things like high-resolution mass spectrometry can detect cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides at parts-per-trillion levels, far lower than anything that could ever possibly have any sort of detectible biological effect on a fish. There is no way that a fish is going to be effected by a nanogram/liter concentration of mercury, but a good mass spec would be able to see it.
You mean there actually are legitimate mortgage companies behind those spams?!? I assumed that they would just take all your information and use it in identity theft scams.
"But yeah, al-q is real, and so were the London, India, USS Cole (sp?), etc. bombings - so not taking threats seriously - and personally - is pretty damned stupid."
No, worrying about things with no regard to how likely they are to actually harm you is stupid. The odds of an american being killed by terrorism are so close to zero that it's difficult to even meaningfully calculate, but if you tried you would probably come up with something on the order of one in a million. Yet people are eager to give up civil rights to be "protected" from a threat that's so unlikely to kill you that you would probably be better off worrying about being hit by lightening.
"As others also pointed out, there is nothing in the Eve Online EULA or in the game mechanics that forbids what this guy has done."
Actually, it goes a bit further than that. Unlike most other MMORPGs, the user agreement for EVE Online explicitly permits players to scam each other out of "isk" as part of the game. Scams in EVE Online are only forbidden if the scammer takes advantage of some sort of game bug or software exploit.
"but wouldn't tying teacher's rate of pay to standardized testing encourage the teachers to teach just the exam and not how to learn and explore? It doesn't matter if the students learn as long as they do well in the test right?"
If the standardized test is designed to test what the students are supposed to be learning, then what's the problem? People like to go on about the dangers of "teaching to the test," but if the test measures the student's ability to read, write, and do math then wouldn't "teaching to the test" simply mean "teaching the kids to read, write, and do math"?
If you have a problem with teachers only "teaching for the test," it implies that your test isn't designed properly. Just design the test to measure whether or not students are learning what you want them to learn, so that the teacher can't teach them to pass the test without actually teaching them whatever the curriculum is supposed to be.
"Nowadays, the cost of typesetting and printing (or composition, arrangement, recording etc.) is borne by the artists, and the publishers do nothing of value that a kid in a garage can't do. So there is no further need of copyright to protect the printing investment. Anyone can record, print and distribute for essentially nothing."
This is only true of creative works that can be made by a small number of people for a very low cost. True, it costs almost nothing for an author to write a book or a musician to record a song, but what about things like movies, videogames, or television shows?
"if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. "
Yeah, I guess it sounds a lot better to put it that way than to say "A 0.5% reduction in electricity usage".
Suppose I regularly use a high-security file erasing utility to delete files that contain sensitive information - say, the personal account information of former customers who no longer do business with me. My harddrive contains many areas where files have been blatantly overwritten with zeros. Am I automatically liable if the RIAA sues me?
Wouldn't it be much easier to just do all your illegal stuff on the second drive, then pretend that it never existed if the RIAA asks for evidence? There wouldn't be any complicated copying/re-dating of files, etc.
"Stealing is taking something without permission."
But you aren't taking anything. You are creating a copy. There is an obvious and clear difference. If I examine your car and then build an exact copy of your car, would you consider me to have "stolen" your car?
This is just silly. Suppose a neurologist treats a patient who was beaten by a baseball bat and has sustained brain damage. After a year of treatment, the neurologist finds that the patient's brain functions have changed to work around the damaged areas. Would you propose that the neurologist shouldn't write a paper about this because he doesn't approve of beating people with baseball bats?
You have good points about the neutron-free nature of He3 fusion, but I don't think that increased plant costs etc. from deuterium fusion would come anywhere near the costs of mining He3 on the moon.
"I believe that the real "treasure" on the moon is helium-3 isotope. Just isn't present in sufficient quantities on Earth, and it could be the next big power source."
You hear this sort of talk a lot among space enthusiasts, but unfortunately it is very unlikely that anyone will ever want to build a reactor that runs off of helium-3. Yes, you can make a reactor that burns helium-3, but it is much less technically challenging to build a reactor that runs off hydrogen and deuterium. Since there is an essentially unlimited supply of deuterium in the earth's oceans, it seems unlikely that anyone would want to build a reactor that's both more difficult to construct and requires fuel from the moon.
It should also be pointed out that you can make helium-3 in a conventional fusion reactor. Since building a helium-3 reactor is far more difficult than a deuterium or tritium fueled reactor, by the time you actually need helium-3 you will by necessity already have the technology to make it yourself.