Defense=stop taking every bomb threat as a credible threat.
I'm not sure why this isn't modded higher since this is essentially the only tactic (besides actually catching the guy) that has ever successfully shut down bomb threats campaigns. It's not exactly that you need to stop treating the threats as credible, but you need to stop allowing your response to the threat to disrupt things and therefore remove the payoff for the person/people doing it.
For example, they can tell everyone in the building "There is a bomb threat and the police will be coming through. If you see any suspicious packages, speak up now. You can leave if you want and have a no-penalty retake for any tests or whatever, but class will go on."
The fact that they didn't implement something like this after 10-15 threats and are still forcing people out of their dorms into the cold night is actually infuriating to me. Maybe this is just nostalgia speaking, but it sure seems to me like we've collectively lost our backbone in the last 20 years or so. So what if the school administration might get sued or slammed with some bad PR headlines if something actually happened? They can stand up and defend themselves with logic and reason and WIN. If the only people in the world condemning you are stupid and irrational, that should just make you look better to everybody else.
Racial profiling makes absolutely no sense as a method of guarding a secure area. Then all you need to do is find somebody in a non-reviewed ethnic group to mule your box cutters through security (pretty much any junkie will do it for their drug of choice, to name one possibility) and have your Arab hijackers walk through their extended security completely clean and pick up the gear on the other side.
Of course the entire TSA process is just a combination jobs program for petty tyrants and security theater for the sheeple. "Let me take away your dangerous toothpaste tube... and toss it in this completely unsecured bin over here."
I think it's great that Rand Paul is willing to take a stand on this issue. Sure it's a stunt to boost both his dad and his own ambitions, but it's still making an important point on the side of freedom. If the Republicans start making moves like this on a regular basis and manage to contrast that against Harry Reid regurgitating phony MPAA statistics as press releases in support of SOPA/PIPA, the Democrats will soon be in real trouble.
Your only option for keeping data secret for 100 years is use one-time pad of really good, truly random data and keep it secure until the instant you no longer need to retrieve the data, then completely destroy it. Once it's completely destroyed, then it's even safe from two guys with blowtorches going to work on your knees. On the other hand, now you don't have anything you can say to save your knees! So it may be a matter of defining priorities for you.
If somebody with massive resources is seriously committed to getting a particular piece of data, they are probably going to be able to get it. Yes, I could save network captures of SSL traffic and decrypt it someday to get some credit card numbers, but it's a whole lot easier just to steal your wallet and it's a whole lot more efficient to run a social engineering scheme some credit card processor and steal 100,000+ at once.
I was able to pick up an advanced reader copy and I've already read it cover to cover 3 times. I was asked not to relate any spoilers, so I'll stay away from any specifics. However if you're holding out for a return of Reason or hoping to find thugs with implanted skull guns... I'm afraid you'll be a little disappointed.
There is a definite break from the action style of the Baroque cycle (which I also enjoyed). While Anathem is quite heavy compared to Stephenson's early works, the areas of hard theory transition smoothly into action and character development (rather than, say, having a chapter break and switching off Waterhouse with Half-@%^* Jack;))
If I was going to compare it to any of his other books, I think it's the closest a rewrite of the Cryptonomicon with a focus on linguistics and philosophy rather than cryptography. Instead of a dissertation on quantom physics, you may simply find that Raz is both alive and dead...
Oops, I may have said too much!;)
So if you are into philosophy or linguistics or you liked Cryptonomicon without being a cryptography geek, you will definitely enjoy Anathem. Oh and don't forget the CD full of monk chants... I highly recommend having them ripped and ready to queue up for the appropriate spots of the story because you won't want to leave your chair to go find them.
Your own quote shows that they have the wrong year as the highest on record, so chances are their calculations are wrong as well. Changing the United States surface temperature anomoly from 1.24 to 1.23 is extremely trivial in terms of how much it changes the global average, which is the interesting number to talk about when you're discussing global warming.
How is this news? This isn't even a serious debate. Global warming deniers ALWAYS want to pick out some little selection of data (like the surface air temperature of in the United States ONLY) and pretend that it somehow disproves everything. Then they claim to be persecuted when someone points out how stupid this is!
Let me quote from the article here:
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. And let's google "hottest year on record" and quote some of the "trumpetting media":
The WMO says that 2005 is currently the second warmest year on record, after 1998. Averaged separately for both hemispheres, 2005 surface temperatures for the northern hemisphere (0.65 C above 30-year mean) are likely to be the warmest and for the southern hemisphere (0.32 C above 30-year mean), the fourth warmest in the instrumental record from 1861 to the present. WMO is, of course, the World Meteorological Organization which looks at global temperatures, for which the US is just one single data point which was incorrect by 0.01 in 1998. That totally changes everything!!!/sarcasm
Which would require the date to be locked on the machines so I cannot defeat it by simply moving the date ahead 100 years. Nobody is proposing to do DRM that depends on machine clocks. Simply releasing the decryption key after a period of time is quite easy.
Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman admitted that he was fairly certain that one or more of his children had downloaded music illegally, but despite this direct admission of guilt, no lawsuits are pending. Surprised?
Actually I do recall the RIAA has attempted verious "amnesty" proposals to downloaders. All of them have boiled down to something like: send us some personal information, admit guilt and promise to stop. Of course after you're already being sued is always "too late."
This shouldn't imply that they aren't all a bunch of stinking weasels, but that doesn't mean we should jump on them for any old thing. There's plenty of good issues to take them to task on. This just isn't one of them.
Most of this article is absolute trash (as I'm sure anyone who reads it can immediately see). The tired old call it "GNU/Linux" tirade is a good example. While I personally find it silly that rms has spent years essentially being 'that guy who's always trying to change his nickname on campus', implying that such a campaign is inherently "Orwellian doublespeak" or attempting to "control how people think" is plainly retarded. He's free to NOT talk to some people as he chooses. His campaign may be doomed at the start to failure, but the way he's going about it is perfectly consistent with the ideals of freedom.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one question to ask: will GPLv3 be compatible with GPLv2? A highly related corollary is: will the GPLv3 be compatible with the large body of Open Source and Free Software licenses that are currently supported by GPLv2.
If the answer to that question is "NO" then the author, despite his vitriol, is essentially correct. The mere fact that rms and the FSF cannot immediately and unambiguously answer "YES" to that question is doing more damage to Linux than 100 years of Microsoft FUD. Do we really want to restart the license compatibility wars of the 90's?
Does rms really want BSD vs GPL round two, now with 20+ competing licenses, billions of dollars, and millions of users at stake? Are we truely doomed to repeat every stupid mistake we've ever made over and over? It was bad enough when you could characterize the whole thing as some geeks in Cali spitting on each other's lawns!
My personal favorite part of that demagogic tripe was:
Note that while most scientists... believe that the LHC program will be harmless, there is a reason that they call the actions done by the LHC "experiments".If the outcome of an experiment was known beforehand, it would not be called an experiment!
Sounds like a whole heap of self-referential justification. Can I use this to call in sick to work? I can't prove that getting out of bed in the morning won't CAUSE THE END OF THE WORLD(tm)! In fact, every morning when I get up, I don't know what will happen that day!
We think (with a very high chance of being correct) there are massive black holes in the universe (if you got the right people in this thread, you could go in circles for days trying to define exactly what that means). We also think (again with a high chance) that black holes act based on gravity, and we have some fairly reliable formulas for that.
We may not have known exactly how much energy was going to be released when we split the atom, but we do know how much graviational force can be exerted by a given mass. In terms of "dangerous things Humankind has tried" this ranks pretty low.
A) They had a "Are you over 13" check box B) They had a entered birthdate
They only checked A, but not B, to determine if a user could register. If they hadn't asked for B, then A would have been sufficient as a "legal" check under this law. Also, if they had checked B, the users would have very likely gone back and lied about it, but they still would have been legal.
The fact that these checks are easily bypassed is not the issue at hand. Instead it is much like the issue with saved search data or saved email. Any piece of data, especially "people" data, that you save can potentially bring liability for you down the road. Both Xanga and Google in Brazil are examples of this principle.
In the past we've seen the manta "Storage is Cheap." Any time there's data, why not just hang onto it? You might be able to use it for something, someday. That has already proven to be a bad idea in many circumstanes (and it sure to get worse as more and more politicians start to realize how powerful all that aggregate data can be). A better rule is any time there is data that anyone might want for purposes other than immediate application, get rid of it as soon as reasonably possible!
Courts do not expect you to check data that you didn't collect because you didn't need it. Brazil cannot order you to turn over data that you don't have. You can still get in trouble, but they will need to establish that you're committing some kind of crime by keeping less personal data on people. That's a much harder standard to argue!
In short, ignorance is bliss, a principle for the digital millenium.
When I decide to release software under the GPL, it is a statement of freedom. It is a gift with a very light obligation. In fact, for 99.9% of use cases, following the rules of the GPLv2 is a benefit to everyone who uses my code. Instead of carrying around some proprietary patch set from version to version, their improvements are going to get updated, maintained, regression tested, etc, by me (or whoever ends up maintaining the code base).
GPLv3 is a betrayal of the principle that myself and many other developers agreed to when we released our code under the GPLv2 "and future versions." We trusted the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to do exactly what they said they would, which was keep the license up to date with the latest legal mumbojumbo and keep the bother of thinking about that stuff off my back.
I'm a coder, not a lawyer. I don't want to worry about intellectual property issues, I want to write code. I want to see my code getting used by other people, and if someone fixes bugs or adds universally valuable features to my code, I don't want to bother duplicating or reverse engineering that work.
What I didn't expect, and what I never should have to expect, is the FSF to turn around and start making my code less free. The day GPLv3 comes out in the current version, I no longer have the freedom to do things with the software that I originally wrote and maintained without getting permission from 50+ contributors (some of which have completely outdated contact info). This is exactly the headache I went to FSF to avoid.
As far as I'm concerned, having a software license impact hardware because FSF cares about hardware makes as much sense as having it require me to be a vegitarian because FSF cares about little fuzzy animals. Worrying about open source software on locked hardware is a fantasy problem.
If there wasn't available hardware that ran it for free:
It would have never got released for free in the first place
It wouldn't be being maintained as a free package
Nobody would be contributing to it
Or nobody would care, it's just a proprietary program with GPL salad dressing
It just makes no sense, except as an annoyance to people who are trying to use open source software. There's plenty of legitimate reasons for people to have locked in hardware. Every single reasonable person knows why Tivo (to use a concrete example) does what they do: to make it harder for Hollywood to sue them. To make it harder for someone to stand in front of a joint House and Senate subcommittee and say "Look, this is how Tivo is enabling piracy." To be able to keep providing a valuable service without getting shutdown.
Tell you what, if manufactures are every so stupid that they try to eliminate any possiblity of free and open platforms through hardware, I'll start my own company and make a zillion dollars selling free and open platforms. It's that simple and that's why it will never happen. Capitalism trumpts fantasy distopia in every instance. In the meantime, FSF needs to stop trying to restrict the freedom of well-meaning coders who've trusted them.
For the last 20 years, people have one bought new magazines because of crisper pages and glossier photos. We've seen very little inovation in the magazine industry since the invention of double sided pages.
Sometimes one of my hip friends will bring me a magazine and show me an article which they claim is new and different, but I just see the same old thing. For example this article by that Dvorak fellow... it make have new fancy sidebars, but really it is simply a recycled "doom of the gaming industry" prediction, in no way more inovative than the article where Confucious claimed the end of weichi and lupui many centuries ago.
Do you really believe that, counter to the example provided by all of human history, people will someday stop buying the same old thing in a new package?
Slashdot Mirror
Defense=stop taking every bomb threat as a credible threat.
I'm not sure why this isn't modded higher since this is essentially the only tactic (besides actually catching the guy) that has ever successfully shut down bomb threats campaigns. It's not exactly that you need to stop treating the threats as credible, but you need to stop allowing your response to the threat to disrupt things and therefore remove the payoff for the person/people doing it.
For example, they can tell everyone in the building "There is a bomb threat and the police will be coming through. If you see any suspicious packages, speak up now. You can leave if you want and have a no-penalty retake for any tests or whatever, but class will go on."
The fact that they didn't implement something like this after 10-15 threats and are still forcing people out of their dorms into the cold night is actually infuriating to me. Maybe this is just nostalgia speaking, but it sure seems to me like we've collectively lost our backbone in the last 20 years or so. So what if the school administration might get sued or slammed with some bad PR headlines if something actually happened? They can stand up and defend themselves with logic and reason and WIN. If the only people in the world condemning you are stupid and irrational, that should just make you look better to everybody else.
Racial profiling makes absolutely no sense as a method of guarding a secure area. Then all you need to do is find somebody in a non-reviewed ethnic group to mule your box cutters through security (pretty much any junkie will do it for their drug of choice, to name one possibility) and have your Arab hijackers walk through their extended security completely clean and pick up the gear on the other side.
Of course the entire TSA process is just a combination jobs program for petty tyrants and security theater for the sheeple. "Let me take away your dangerous toothpaste tube ... and toss it in this completely unsecured bin over here."
I think it's great that Rand Paul is willing to take a stand on this issue. Sure it's a stunt to boost both his dad and his own ambitions, but it's still making an important point on the side of freedom. If the Republicans start making moves like this on a regular basis and manage to contrast that against Harry Reid regurgitating phony MPAA statistics as press releases in support of SOPA/PIPA, the Democrats will soon be in real trouble.
Your only option for keeping data secret for 100 years is use one-time pad of really good, truly random data and keep it secure until the instant you no longer need to retrieve the data, then completely destroy it. Once it's completely destroyed, then it's even safe from two guys with blowtorches going to work on your knees. On the other hand, now you don't have anything you can say to save your knees! So it may be a matter of defining priorities for you.
If somebody with massive resources is seriously committed to getting a particular piece of data, they are probably going to be able to get it. Yes, I could save network captures of SSL traffic and decrypt it someday to get some credit card numbers, but it's a whole lot easier just to steal your wallet and it's a whole lot more efficient to run a social engineering scheme some credit card processor and steal 100,000+ at once.
I was able to pick up an advanced reader copy and I've already read it cover to cover 3 times. I was asked not to relate any spoilers, so I'll stay away from any specifics. However if you're holding out for a return of Reason or hoping to find thugs with implanted skull guns ... I'm afraid you'll be a little disappointed.
There is a definite break from the action style of the Baroque cycle (which I also enjoyed). While Anathem is quite heavy compared to Stephenson's early works, the areas of hard theory transition smoothly into action and character development (rather than, say, having a chapter break and switching off Waterhouse with Half-@%^* Jack ;))
If I was going to compare it to any of his other books, I think it's the closest a rewrite of the Cryptonomicon with a focus on linguistics and philosophy rather than cryptography. Instead of a dissertation on quantom physics, you may simply find that Raz is both alive and dead ...
Oops, I may have said too much! ;)
So if you are into philosophy or linguistics or you liked Cryptonomicon without being a cryptography geek, you will definitely enjoy Anathem. Oh and don't forget the CD full of monk chants ... I highly recommend having them ripped and ready to queue up for the appropriate spots of the story because you won't want to leave your chair to go find them.
Let me quote from the article here: NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. And let's google "hottest year on record" and quote some of the "trumpetting media": The WMO says that 2005 is currently the second warmest year on record, after 1998. Averaged separately for both hemispheres, 2005 surface temperatures for the northern hemisphere (0.65 C above 30-year mean) are likely to be the warmest and for the southern hemisphere (0.32 C above 30-year mean), the fourth warmest in the instrumental record from 1861 to the present. WMO is, of course, the World Meteorological Organization which looks at global temperatures, for which the US is just one single data point which was incorrect by 0.01 in 1998. That totally changes everything!!!
Actually I do recall the RIAA has attempted verious "amnesty" proposals to downloaders. All of them have boiled down to something like: send us some personal information, admit guilt and promise to stop. Of course after you're already being sued is always "too late."
The EFF has a statement on it: http://www.eff.org/share/amnesty.php
This shouldn't imply that they aren't all a bunch of stinking weasels, but that doesn't mean we should jump on them for any old thing. There's plenty of good issues to take them to task on. This just isn't one of them.
Most of this article is absolute trash (as I'm sure anyone who reads it can immediately see). The tired old call it "GNU/Linux" tirade is a good example. While I personally find it silly that rms has spent years essentially being 'that guy who's always trying to change his nickname on campus', implying that such a campaign is inherently "Orwellian doublespeak" or attempting to "control how people think" is plainly retarded. He's free to NOT talk to some people as he chooses. His campaign may be doomed at the start to failure, but the way he's going about it is perfectly consistent with the ideals of freedom.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one question to ask: will GPLv3 be compatible with GPLv2? A highly related corollary is: will the GPLv3 be compatible with the large body of Open Source and Free Software licenses that are currently supported by GPLv2.
If the answer to that question is "NO" then the author, despite his vitriol, is essentially correct. The mere fact that rms and the FSF cannot immediately and unambiguously answer "YES" to that question is doing more damage to Linux than 100 years of Microsoft FUD. Do we really want to restart the license compatibility wars of the 90's?
Does rms really want BSD vs GPL round two, now with 20+ competing licenses, billions of dollars, and millions of users at stake? Are we truely doomed to repeat every stupid mistake we've ever made over and over? It was bad enough when you could characterize the whole thing as some geeks in Cali spitting on each other's lawns!
Sounds like a whole heap of self-referential justification. Can I use this to call in sick to work? I can't prove that getting out of bed in the morning won't CAUSE THE END OF THE WORLD(tm)! In fact, every morning when I get up, I don't know what will happen that day!
We think (with a very high chance of being correct) there are massive black holes in the universe (if you got the right people in this thread, you could go in circles for days trying to define exactly what that means). We also think (again with a high chance) that black holes act based on gravity, and we have some fairly reliable formulas for that.
We may not have known exactly how much energy was going to be released when we split the atom, but we do know how much graviational force can be exerted by a given mass. In terms of "dangerous things Humankind has tried" this ranks pretty low.
A quick summary of this situation:
A) They had a "Are you over 13" check box
B) They had a entered birthdate
They only checked A, but not B, to determine if a user could register. If they hadn't asked for B, then A would have been sufficient as a "legal" check under this law. Also, if they had checked B, the users would have very likely gone back and lied about it, but they still would have been legal.
The fact that these checks are easily bypassed is not the issue at hand. Instead it is much like the issue with saved search data or saved email. Any piece of data, especially "people" data, that you save can potentially bring liability for you down the road. Both Xanga and Google in Brazil are examples of this principle.
In the past we've seen the manta "Storage is Cheap." Any time there's data, why not just hang onto it? You might be able to use it for something, someday. That has already proven to be a bad idea in many circumstanes (and it sure to get worse as more and more politicians start to realize how powerful all that aggregate data can be). A better rule is any time there is data that anyone might want for purposes other than immediate application, get rid of it as soon as reasonably possible!
Courts do not expect you to check data that you didn't collect because you didn't need it. Brazil cannot order you to turn over data that you don't have. You can still get in trouble, but they will need to establish that you're committing some kind of crime by keeping less personal data on people. That's a much harder standard to argue!
In short, ignorance is bliss, a principle for the digital millenium.
GPLv3 is a betrayal of the principle that myself and many other developers agreed to when we released our code under the GPLv2 "and future versions." We trusted the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to do exactly what they said they would, which was keep the license up to date with the latest legal mumbojumbo and keep the bother of thinking about that stuff off my back.
I'm a coder, not a lawyer. I don't want to worry about intellectual property issues, I want to write code. I want to see my code getting used by other people, and if someone fixes bugs or adds universally valuable features to my code, I don't want to bother duplicating or reverse engineering that work.
What I didn't expect, and what I never should have to expect, is the FSF to turn around and start making my code less free. The day GPLv3 comes out in the current version, I no longer have the freedom to do things with the software that I originally wrote and maintained without getting permission from 50+ contributors (some of which have completely outdated contact info). This is exactly the headache I went to FSF to avoid.
As far as I'm concerned, having a software license impact hardware because FSF cares about hardware makes as much sense as having it require me to be a vegitarian because FSF cares about little fuzzy animals. Worrying about open source software on locked hardware is a fantasy problem.
If there wasn't available hardware that ran it for free:
It just makes no sense, except as an annoyance to people who are trying to use open source software. There's plenty of legitimate reasons for people to have locked in hardware. Every single reasonable person knows why Tivo (to use a concrete example) does what they do: to make it harder for Hollywood to sue them. To make it harder for someone to stand in front of a joint House and Senate subcommittee and say "Look, this is how Tivo is enabling piracy." To be able to keep providing a valuable service without getting shutdown.
Tell you what, if manufactures are every so stupid that they try to eliminate any possiblity of free and open platforms through hardware, I'll start my own company and make a zillion dollars selling free and open platforms. It's that simple and that's why it will never happen. Capitalism trumpts fantasy distopia in every instance. In the meantime, FSF needs to stop trying to restrict the freedom of well-meaning coders who've trusted them.
For the last 20 years, people have one bought new magazines because of crisper pages and glossier photos. We've seen very little inovation in the magazine industry since the invention of double sided pages.
... it make have new fancy sidebars, but really it is simply a recycled "doom of the gaming industry" prediction, in no way more inovative than the article where Confucious claimed the end of weichi and lupui many centuries ago.
Sometimes one of my hip friends will bring me a magazine and show me an article which they claim is new and different, but I just see the same old thing. For example this article by that Dvorak fellow
Do you really believe that, counter to the example provided by all of human history, people will someday stop buying the same old thing in a new package?