University of Texas has eleven separate libraries. All of the books from this library were distributed around to the other libraries (of which there are still more than enough). None of the books are actually gone.
Actually, scientists knew that nuclear fission could result in a large release of energy and that it had weapons potential long before Einstein came up with relativity. Although he provided a theoretical underpinning that helped to explain why nuclear weapons are able to produce so much energy, it didn't really have much to do with the atomic bomb's development. Much like they didn't know much about chemistry when they invented gunpowder.
No, selling virtual good does not violate the terms of service for Lineage II. A simple google for "Lineage II terms of service" would have been enough for you to check this. Please make at least a basic effort the check your facts before you post.
Your analysis ignores the fact that he was using a bot to rob the other characters, which is against the terms of service for the game. No one would care if he had actually gone around beating up other players through superior skill, but that's not what happened. He cheated. The situation is almost exactly analogous to winning money by cheating in a poker game. Yes, winning and losing money is part of poker, just like mugging people is part of Lineage II. However in both cases it's only acceptable (ethically or legally) to win money/loot if you play by the rules. Once you cheat, you're committing a crime.
It is essentially zero. As the parent said, about 700,000 Americans die from heart disease each year. 3000 people died in the September 11 terrorist attacks. So, even if terrorists were to conduct an attack on the scale of September 11th each year, terrorism would kill about 0.4% as many people as heart disease.
This study concludes that normal DST reduces total energy use in california by around 0.21% annually, and that adding in a summer "double daylight saving time" would result in a total annual reduction of 0.33%. I have to question whether such a trivial reduction is worth the hassle.
The web page that you linked to has some pretty serious flaws in its argument for daylight saving time saving energy. First of all, it says:
"In the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. "
Why not just list the percent of electricity that's used for lighting? Why lump in other appliances when there is no clear reason why people would use TV, microwaves, or curling irons less during daylight saving time? Also, what percentage of TOTAL electricity consumption do houses account for? The 25% statistic is meaningless without knowing that.
The article goes on to say:
"Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time. "
This is just wacky. How could we reduce the country's electricity use by 1% each day with daylight saving time? There are 365 days in a year, so even if electricity consumption were to drop to zero for a day it would only mean a 0.27% decrease in electricity usage. At first when I read this I thought they meant that electricity consumption drops by 1% when daylight saving time is in effect, but if that's what they meant then why would they use the "EACH DAY" language?
Wouldn't people use more airconditioning if they're awake during the hot daylight hours?
How about if any article that needlessly breaks up the contents over several pages gets summarily rejected? This seems to be increasingly common, and (interestingly enough) usually only happens with fluff articles that aren't worth reading anyway.
"you are assuming that the security professional is the first one to discover it. "
No, I'm not. That's why I explicitly stated twice in my original post that it's possible malicious hackers could uncover the flaw. Good lord.
My point was that although there is a certain level of risk that some malicious people also know about the security flaw, there is also a level of risk associated with announcing the flaw to the entire world. The two should be weighed against each other. Even if some criminal already knows about the flaw, perhaps it's better to have a few criminals know about the flaw for a month while a patch is worked out rather than have 10,000 criminals know about it for a week while the company scrambles to make a patch.
You often hear that, but I wonder if it's always a valid line of reasoning. Do you think it's more of a risk for a few malicious people to possibly know about an exploit while the company takes its time fixing the problem, or for the entire world to definitely know about it while the company scrambles to cobble together a quick fix?
Some security flaws require such detailed technical understanding of the systems involved that not many people are really likely to uncover them. If a professional security researcher with very specialized knowledge who works full time trying to uncover new exploits succeeds in finding something, it doesn't n necessarily follow that many other people will, or even that anyone else will. It's certainly possible that someone else will find it, but I think people should try to balance the possibility of some malicious people knowing about the flaw for a long time against the certainty of everyone knowing about the flaw for a shorter time.
I ran on my high school's cross country team. Since the cross country season overlapped with the football season and our practices were at the same time, we got to see a lot of what went on in football practice. Most of what went on seemed to be aimed at instilling a willingness in the players to fearlessly commit acts of violence. There was a lot of practicing slamming as hard as possible into human-shaped pads, throwing yourself chest-first on the ground, and running into other players. There were also things that were obviously meant to increase endurance and practice various plays, but it was clear that a lot of it was meant to get players over their natural reluctance to engage in violent conflict with others.
Your points about the good aspects of football are probably true, but all that applies to virtually any team sport, and even many non-athletic group activities and clubs. Football seems to be unique in that players are actually supposed to get into violent physical conflicts with each other. There's also a significant emphasis on instilling fearless aggressiveness in the players during practices that you don't have in other sports.
You very commonly see a "hierarchy of confidence" in American high school and even sometimes low-level college textbooks that claims law>theory>hypothesis. I have no idea where this came from, because it's a gross mischaracterization of what theories and laws are supposed to be about. Laws are statements of fact about the natural world. Theories are explanations for why things happen. Laws simply point out the way things are. Theories try to provide a reason for why things are the way they are. A theory does not get "promoted" to being a law once there is a great deal of evidence to support it.
Perhaps even more importantly, even if the NSA (or some equivalent in another country) could break strong encryption algorithms like AES, they probably wouldn't be willing to admit it in court. It would be far too valuable a secret for them to expose their abilities by helping the government present evidence in a trial.
The traditional periodic table is arranged the way it is for a reason. With an ordinary periodic table, simply looking at an element's position on the table will give you information about its
-electronegativity/electron affinity
-the radius of its electron cloud
-ionization energy
-lattice energy
-valence electron configuration
Maybe there's a way to deduce all that from this new "galaxy" aragnement, but the article doesn't mention it and it's not readily apparent to me.
If you knowingly and deliberately facilitate the commission of a crime, you can be held legally responsibly for it. Why is that difficult for slashdotters to understand?
You could be arrested for telling someone that "the guy over there is a drug dealer" if the police thought that you were aiding and abetting the drug dealer. In this case, the guy made a huge list of links to pirated music and stuck adds all over the web page. It seems pretty clear that he was trying to help people commit the crime of copyright infringement, and was profiting in the process.
Yes, believe it or not, the context and intent of an action can affect its legality. If you give a detailed plan on how to get away with a bank robbery to a bank's security officers with the intent to help them improve security, it would be legal. If you gave the same plan to a gang of bank robbers with the intent of helping them rob a bank, it would be illegal.
"Maybe it isn't unreasonable to attach a universal right to not have your every moment watched and logged. Maybe the fundamental right to privacy should, assuming you aren't breaking a law, be the right that trumps the ownership issue."
An employer monitoring what an employee does with a company-owned computer does not equal "having your every moment watched and logged". You still have plenty of privacy when using YOUR computer.
"If I own an ATM, should I be able to keylog your ATM password?"
No - because ATM users have a right to keep their personal financial information secret (or at least keep it between themselves and the bank). In this case, however, it appears that the government is asserting a right for employees to keep their actions secret from their employers while at work. That seems like a rather strange assertion.
I despise analyzing situations with analogies, but this seems almost exactly akin to telling UPS that they can't put GPS trackers in their delivery trucks to ensure that their employees aren't stopping over at their friend's house for a few hours while on the clock.
"Ownership doesn't have a fucking single thing to do with it. I assume that where you work, the land is privately owned. Is the owner of that property allowed to do things to you that are against the law? No.
This ownership bullshit is such a weak argument, especially since it appears that the extension of the argument is that the government apparently shouldn't be able to create laws that dictate the way people treat folks who use their private property. The law supercededs ownership rights, and thank for that, otherwise we'd have a tough time going after child pornographers, drug labs, etc on private property."
In general, you should be able to do whatever you want with your own property UNLESS it collides with someone else's rights. Although you have a general right to do whatever you want with your baseball bat, you don't have a right to beat someone senseless with it because it would violate the rights of the other guy. It is difficult, however, to figure out what rights are being violated if you use a key logger to monitor what employees are doing with their work computers. Most people would agree that an employer has the right to monitor what their employees are doing while on the clock. That could include something as simple as a supervisor walking around to make sure no one is loafing or something more sophisticated like a casino using a network of surveillance cameras to ensure that their employees aren't stealing money or helping people cheat. I think the only counter-example that someone might be able to come up with would be that employers probably shouldn't be able to install surveillance cameras in bathrooms, but that's something of a special case; everyone has to go to the bathroom from time to time, but it's seldom necessary for someone to use their work computer for personal purposes. Also, it's universally accepted that you have a right to privacy while in the bathroom - I'm not sure why someone would expect to have a right to privacy regarding what they do with a computer at work.
That's hilarious. You really consider "around your neck" to be a secure location? What if someone just puts a gun in your face and demands the drive? There's a reason why people usually leave valuable things in places like safes, rather than simply carrying them around...
I find it somewhat difficult to believe that you have been a professional chemist for many years without ever having been impacted by the ACS. The ACS publishes virtually every major chemistry journal in the United States and maintains the CAS and SciFinder databases. If you have worked as a chemist "for many years" without ever publishing a journal article in an ACS journal, reading an article in an ACS journal, or looking something up in CAS or SciFinder, I have to wonder what you've been doing. You certainly couldn't have been doing research.
Re:I'm all for science/technology/astronomy but...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
It's true that escape velocity on the moon is only a fraction of what it is on earth, so in theory you could launch much larger/more massive spacecraft from the moon than from earth. That being said, whenever I hear someone suggest that we should build a moon base in order to build and launch larger space ships and expand further into the solar system, I immediately wonder if they really appreciate the colossal industrial infrastructure that's necessary to fabricate a working spaceship. To put it bluntly, if we could launch everything that we would need to build spaceships on the moon then we probably wouldn't need to worry much about the advantage of the moon's lower escape velocity. It's hard to conceive of a spaceship that would mass even a small fraction of what the industrial equipment needed to create a space ship would mass.
If the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons went into the public domain, the character itself would also become public domain. Although more recent Mickey cartoons would still be copyrighted, anyone could start making their own new Mickey Mouse cartoons. Or t-shirts, or watches, or lunch boxes...
One would only need to be careful to derive their Mickey drawings etc. from the public domain works, rather than later versions.
As someone who does scientific research for a living, I have to point out that changing a study because of pressure from a funding source is not necessarily unethical. It's very common for a scientist to say "I want money to study X, Y, and Z" and have a funding source respond "We only really care about X, Y and Q. How about studying those? We'll pay for that." Our the source might say half-way through the study "We've heard that one of our competitors is researching W. Will you look into that instead of Y?" Remember, 'changing a study' is not necessarily unethical. Studies change all the time even without pressure from a funding source, often simply because the researcher comes up with a more interesting or effective way to conduct the study.
Slashdot Mirror
University of Texas has eleven separate libraries. All of the books from this library were distributed around to the other libraries (of which there are still more than enough). None of the books are actually gone.
Actually, scientists knew that nuclear fission could result in a large release of energy and that it had weapons potential long before Einstein came up with relativity. Although he provided a theoretical underpinning that helped to explain why nuclear weapons are able to produce so much energy, it didn't really have much to do with the atomic bomb's development. Much like they didn't know much about chemistry when they invented gunpowder.
No, selling virtual good does not violate the terms of service for Lineage II. A simple google for "Lineage II terms of service" would have been enough for you to check this. Please make at least a basic effort the check your facts before you post.
Your analysis ignores the fact that he was using a bot to rob the other characters, which is against the terms of service for the game. No one would care if he had actually gone around beating up other players through superior skill, but that's not what happened. He cheated. The situation is almost exactly analogous to winning money by cheating in a poker game. Yes, winning and losing money is part of poker, just like mugging people is part of Lineage II. However in both cases it's only acceptable (ethically or legally) to win money/loot if you play by the rules. Once you cheat, you're committing a crime.
It is essentially zero. As the parent said, about 700,000 Americans die from heart disease each year. 3000 people died in the September 11 terrorist attacks. So, even if terrorists were to conduct an attack on the scale of September 11th each year, terrorism would kill about 0.4% as many people as heart disease.
This study concludes that normal DST reduces total energy use in california by around 0.21% annually, and that adding in a summer "double daylight saving time" would result in a total annual reduction of 0.33%. I have to question whether such a trivial reduction is worth the hassle.
The web page that you linked to has some pretty serious flaws in its argument for daylight saving time saving energy. First of all, it says:
"In the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. "
Why not just list the percent of electricity that's used for lighting? Why lump in other appliances when there is no clear reason why people would use TV, microwaves, or curling irons less during daylight saving time? Also, what percentage of TOTAL electricity consumption do houses account for? The 25% statistic is meaningless without knowing that. The article goes on to say:
"Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time. "
This is just wacky. How could we reduce the country's electricity use by 1% each day with daylight saving time? There are 365 days in a year, so even if electricity consumption were to drop to zero for a day it would only mean a 0.27% decrease in electricity usage. At first when I read this I thought they meant that electricity consumption drops by 1% when daylight saving time is in effect, but if that's what they meant then why would they use the "EACH DAY" language?
Wouldn't people use more airconditioning if they're awake during the hot daylight hours?
How about if any article that needlessly breaks up the contents over several pages gets summarily rejected? This seems to be increasingly common, and (interestingly enough) usually only happens with fluff articles that aren't worth reading anyway.
"you are assuming that the security professional is the first one to discover it. "
No, I'm not. That's why I explicitly stated twice in my original post that it's possible malicious hackers could uncover the flaw. Good lord.
My point was that although there is a certain level of risk that some malicious people also know about the security flaw, there is also a level of risk associated with announcing the flaw to the entire world. The two should be weighed against each other. Even if some criminal already knows about the flaw, perhaps it's better to have a few criminals know about the flaw for a month while a patch is worked out rather than have 10,000 criminals know about it for a week while the company scrambles to make a patch.
You often hear that, but I wonder if it's always a valid line of reasoning. Do you think it's more of a risk for a few malicious people to possibly know about an exploit while the company takes its time fixing the problem, or for the entire world to definitely know about it while the company scrambles to cobble together a quick fix?
Some security flaws require such detailed technical understanding of the systems involved that not many people are really likely to uncover them. If a professional security researcher with very specialized knowledge who works full time trying to uncover new exploits succeeds in finding something, it doesn't n necessarily follow that many other people will, or even that anyone else will. It's certainly possible that someone else will find it, but I think people should try to balance the possibility of some malicious people knowing about the flaw for a long time against the certainty of everyone knowing about the flaw for a shorter time.
I ran on my high school's cross country team. Since the cross country season overlapped with the football season and our practices were at the same time, we got to see a lot of what went on in football practice. Most of what went on seemed to be aimed at instilling a willingness in the players to fearlessly commit acts of violence. There was a lot of practicing slamming as hard as possible into human-shaped pads, throwing yourself chest-first on the ground, and running into other players. There were also things that were obviously meant to increase endurance and practice various plays, but it was clear that a lot of it was meant to get players over their natural reluctance to engage in violent conflict with others.
Your points about the good aspects of football are probably true, but all that applies to virtually any team sport, and even many non-athletic group activities and clubs. Football seems to be unique in that players are actually supposed to get into violent physical conflicts with each other. There's also a significant emphasis on instilling fearless aggressiveness in the players during practices that you don't have in other sports.
You very commonly see a "hierarchy of confidence" in American high school and even sometimes low-level college textbooks that claims law>theory>hypothesis. I have no idea where this came from, because it's a gross mischaracterization of what theories and laws are supposed to be about. Laws are statements of fact about the natural world. Theories are explanations for why things happen. Laws simply point out the way things are. Theories try to provide a reason for why things are the way they are. A theory does not get "promoted" to being a law once there is a great deal of evidence to support it.
Perhaps even more importantly, even if the NSA (or some equivalent in another country) could break strong encryption algorithms like AES, they probably wouldn't be willing to admit it in court. It would be far too valuable a secret for them to expose their abilities by helping the government present evidence in a trial.
The traditional periodic table is arranged the way it is for a reason. With an ordinary periodic table, simply looking at an element's position on the table will give you information about its
-electronegativity/electron affinity
-the radius of its electron cloud
-ionization energy
-lattice energy
-valence electron configuration
Maybe there's a way to deduce all that from this new "galaxy" aragnement, but the article doesn't mention it and it's not readily apparent to me.
If you knowingly and deliberately facilitate the commission of a crime, you can be held legally responsibly for it. Why is that difficult for slashdotters to understand?
You could be arrested for telling someone that "the guy over there is a drug dealer" if the police thought that you were aiding and abetting the drug dealer. In this case, the guy made a huge list of links to pirated music and stuck adds all over the web page. It seems pretty clear that he was trying to help people commit the crime of copyright infringement, and was profiting in the process.
Yes, believe it or not, the context and intent of an action can affect its legality. If you give a detailed plan on how to get away with a bank robbery to a bank's security officers with the intent to help them improve security, it would be legal. If you gave the same plan to a gang of bank robbers with the intent of helping them rob a bank, it would be illegal.
"Maybe it isn't unreasonable to attach a universal right to not have your every moment watched and logged. Maybe the fundamental right to privacy should, assuming you aren't breaking a law, be the right that trumps the ownership issue."
An employer monitoring what an employee does with a company-owned computer does not equal "having your every moment watched and logged". You still have plenty of privacy when using YOUR computer.
For that matter, would it be illegal for you to simply walk up behind someone who was using your computer and watch what they do?
"If I own an ATM, should I be able to keylog your ATM password?"
No - because ATM users have a right to keep their personal financial information secret (or at least keep it between themselves and the bank). In this case, however, it appears that the government is asserting a right for employees to keep their actions secret from their employers while at work. That seems like a rather strange assertion. I despise analyzing situations with analogies, but this seems almost exactly akin to telling UPS that they can't put GPS trackers in their delivery trucks to ensure that their employees aren't stopping over at their friend's house for a few hours while on the clock.
"Ownership doesn't have a fucking single thing to do with it. I assume that where you work, the land is privately owned. Is the owner of that property allowed to do things to you that are against the law? No.
This ownership bullshit is such a weak argument, especially since it appears that the extension of the argument is that the government apparently shouldn't be able to create laws that dictate the way people treat folks who use their private property. The law supercededs ownership rights, and thank for that, otherwise we'd have a tough time going after child pornographers, drug labs, etc on private property."
In general, you should be able to do whatever you want with your own property UNLESS it collides with someone else's rights. Although you have a general right to do whatever you want with your baseball bat, you don't have a right to beat someone senseless with it because it would violate the rights of the other guy. It is difficult, however, to figure out what rights are being violated if you use a key logger to monitor what employees are doing with their work computers. Most people would agree that an employer has the right to monitor what their employees are doing while on the clock. That could include something as simple as a supervisor walking around to make sure no one is loafing or something more sophisticated like a casino using a network of surveillance cameras to ensure that their employees aren't stealing money or helping people cheat. I think the only counter-example that someone might be able to come up with would be that employers probably shouldn't be able to install surveillance cameras in bathrooms, but that's something of a special case; everyone has to go to the bathroom from time to time, but it's seldom necessary for someone to use their work computer for personal purposes. Also, it's universally accepted that you have a right to privacy while in the bathroom - I'm not sure why someone would expect to have a right to privacy regarding what they do with a computer at work.
That's hilarious. You really consider "around your neck" to be a secure location? What if someone just puts a gun in your face and demands the drive? There's a reason why people usually leave valuable things in places like safes, rather than simply carrying them around...
Hiring even a single employee to repair/manage things could easily eat up $1800/month.
I find it somewhat difficult to believe that you have been a professional chemist for many years without ever having been impacted by the ACS. The ACS publishes virtually every major chemistry journal in the United States and maintains the CAS and SciFinder databases. If you have worked as a chemist "for many years" without ever publishing a journal article in an ACS journal, reading an article in an ACS journal, or looking something up in CAS or SciFinder, I have to wonder what you've been doing. You certainly couldn't have been doing research.
It's true that escape velocity on the moon is only a fraction of what it is on earth, so in theory you could launch much larger/more massive spacecraft from the moon than from earth. That being said, whenever I hear someone suggest that we should build a moon base in order to build and launch larger space ships and expand further into the solar system, I immediately wonder if they really appreciate the colossal industrial infrastructure that's necessary to fabricate a working spaceship. To put it bluntly, if we could launch everything that we would need to build spaceships on the moon then we probably wouldn't need to worry much about the advantage of the moon's lower escape velocity. It's hard to conceive of a spaceship that would mass even a small fraction of what the industrial equipment needed to create a space ship would mass.
If the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons went into the public domain, the character itself would also become public domain. Although more recent Mickey cartoons would still be copyrighted, anyone could start making their own new Mickey Mouse cartoons. Or t-shirts, or watches, or lunch boxes... One would only need to be careful to derive their Mickey drawings etc. from the public domain works, rather than later versions.
As someone who does scientific research for a living, I have to point out that changing a study because of pressure from a funding source is not necessarily unethical. It's very common for a scientist to say "I want money to study X, Y, and Z" and have a funding source respond "We only really care about X, Y and Q. How about studying those? We'll pay for that." Our the source might say half-way through the study "We've heard that one of our competitors is researching W. Will you look into that instead of Y?" Remember, 'changing a study' is not necessarily unethical. Studies change all the time even without pressure from a funding source, often simply because the researcher comes up with a more interesting or effective way to conduct the study.