Very interesting. It still seems to me it should be required that a human witness corroborate the physical evidence. Apparently that's not the case, but it should be.
I repeat: IAmNotALawyer. Ask one if you care.
Now, if you really want to be anal, you can probably subpoena in those responsible for collecting the photo and bringing it to court ("chain of evidence" challenge for admissibility sometimes works), or question the people responsible for certifying the measurements are accurate. As for your concern about non-human evidence, you'd look a fool trying to avoid arson charges if there was a movie of you setting the courthouse on fire.
You are supposed maintain appropriate distance to the vehicle in front of you regardless of what his lights are doing. Downshifting, letting off the gas, pulling the emergency brake, and hitting a deer will all slow down his car without engaging his brake lights.
Agreed. However, I'll give two more cases for you where it might not be "at fault".
First: My dad was stopped at a stop light, one car six feet in front of him. Idiot driver on a cell phone (no law yet) PLOWED into him from behind at full speed, and yes, was considered at-fault. As a result, however, dad's foot slipped off the brake... ramming him into the back of the NEXT car. Should my dad be considered at fault for ramming into the next car? (He now puts his car in "park", and puts on the parking break, at all red lights.)
Second: a co-worker was in busy traffic, but had about 4-5 car lengths to the next car. Idiot one lane right shifts in just barely ahead of her... and just two seconds before the car previously in front of her hits his brakes hard to avoid hitting the car ahead of him. (BAM!)(BAM!)(BAM!) and a four car collision was kept from being a five car only because the guy almost too-close behind her spun his car a quarter-turn while stopping it. Captain Idiot shortly after tries to claim screaming that she was at fault for hitting him. The nice cop on the scene, just having interviewed the other drivers three handy witnesses, made a note of this (which was fortunate later dealing with insurance) and decided that this guy was now enough of a nuisance to pull out the cuffs for and haul downtown, rather than merely writing up a standard ticket.
I'd draw the line a little more exactingly. As long as they're using the cop light bar, it shouldn't be a criminal traffic violation; they're giving other drivers the critically needed safety warning. However, if they're using the lights to avoid traffic rules beyond what police regulations permit, that should be handled as with other police disciplinary violations.
Of course, having to explain one's habit of running lights improperly to an internal review board may not make them any happier. They might even prefer just paying a few damn tickets.
If I go to court over one of these tickets, aren't I entitled to face my accuser?
IAmNotALawyer, but from what I read, not exactly, no. Exactly, you have the right:
to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law
to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation
to be confronted with the witnesses against you
to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in your favor
to have the Assistance of Counsel for defense.
In the broadest sense, "witnesses" includes "physical evidence".
On the one hand, I'm glad that cops will be forced to obey the law, and not think they are above it. There are cops in my town who park in the fire lane all day.
A volunteer fire department friend has made no bones about what they do with ANY car like that in the event of an emergency: grab the sand bucket, then shift the big truck into lowest gear. Anything less massive or less well planted than a 500 year old oak, moves. Whether the offending vehicle can drive afterwards is not their concern.
Local cops do not seem to park in the fire lane hereabouts.
I've heard of similar favors, but usually something a hair more subtle than that. When someone sufficiently close to a cop gets a ticket, the officer who wrote the ticket may somehow fail to make the court date; if the driver makes the court date and the officer doesn't, charges are usually dropped. Most officers are only willing to do it for minor offenses (low grade speeding and the like), and even then it's considered a major favor to the officer who asks. Most officers have multiple cases for any given court date, so missing it gives all that day's violators the get-out-of-jail-free card (unless there's an accident and the DA has other witnesses to call), and results in the senior DA and the chief each spending some quality time gnawing the cop's ass. Plus, if it happens too often, IA may get called in, and in that case both cops get handled as with any other kind of suspected internal corruption.
I learned about this trick when I got my first speeding ticket. My sister mentioned the ticket to a close friend that had married a cop, and told she later that the wife had mentioned this option and asked if it should be checked on. (Mind you, this sort of favor does NOT normally stretch as far as Brother-of-wife's-friend for most cops, but she said she could ask.) The answer was (a) no, baby brother deserves at least a slap on the wrist for being such an ignoramus, and (b) the ticket was in a different state anyway. Instead, some (good) general advice on court appearances from a cops perspective was passed my way.
I swear to God I think people would actually do that.
Then it would seem spreading such a virus hoax might help this sort of problem. Users stupid enough to fall for it would immediately lose their internet access.
85 Megabucks to get Three Golden Raspberries. Kudos to Halle Berry for accepting hers with style, not to mention graciously thanking everyone who had helped her get there.
I suspect some more comparing via the BoxOfficeProphets.com database with the list of Razzie winners and nominees could turn up a few other coprolites.
But getting back on topic, it's the social engineers that we should all be afraid of. These guys may not be really hackers (at least not in traditional sense), they're really just con artists.
At least, that's the traditional geek usage of "social engineering". The other possible meaning is the one you should really be terrified of — people on the lines of Karl Marx, who think they understand how society works well enough to redesign it. History has yielded nothing more potentially lethal to humanity than the plausible-sounding idea.
We all need to cease using the term "hacker" despite what it originally meant once upon a time long ago. The term has been successfully hijacked by the media and now is associated with evil by virtually the entire non-techie public.
Seriously, though, is the decreased diversity in bot "heritage" a good thing -- does it mean that bot infections are easier to detect and treat? Or does it not make any bit of difference until the typical user learns to protect their PC?
The limited heritage diversity suggests that one might make a dramatic impact on the non-technical aspects of the problem with a carefully applied useofhardware. Unfortunately, that's a very short-term solution most likely to only result in rediversification and speciation, rather than any broader environmental shift in the culture leading to permanent extinction.
XP offered many REAL improvements for the user over windows98, not the least of which being real user logins and security.
Actually, most of that was from 2Kpro; XPpro carried them over and added a slightly more user-friendly UI to them, while XPhome partially crippled that security. However, there were some major improvements in system stability; the main downside was a lobotomy in the networking support (Bastards), which most home users didn't notice since home networking didn't get serious until DSL became much more widespread.
(You also skipped WinME, but that didn't have many major changes from Win98. Better USB support and perhaps a crude system restore?)
to swarm in and claim that any culture that doesn't share their own values of "First Amendment" and "Freedom of Expression" must be evil and bad. Newsflash: The "total freedom or none at all" attitude only applies to western culture. Asian cultures have more than a thousand years of experience in moderation and non-binary thinking.
I won't go that far. However, those couple thousand years may or may not be representative of future conditions. Restraints on freedom of expression tend to reduce opportunities for widespread development, evaluation, and exploration of new ideas, which in turn seems likely to make the culture less adaptable to dynamic conditions — a comparative weakness. In relatively isolated social and static environmental conditions, the increase in internal social stability may offset the reduced adaptability; however, the present age makes such isolation more difficult, and recent evidence suggests the environmental stability may no longer be a realistic expectation either. More adaptable societies are less likely to die out. If (as most ethics systems hold), survival is generally preferable to extinction, and traits "good" or "bad" to the extent they contribute to the former and latter respectively, this seems a "bad" trait.
Which is a very long way to say: nowadays, going apeshit over a purely symbolic attack on the King is a dumbass bad idea.
All excellent points. And if the good points were all that was added, this would be heavenly. Unfortunately, it seems (as noted earlier this week) their efforts at Content Protection have created drawbacks with a detriment to outweigh the many excellent features you mention. This reminds me of the networking lobotomy done on XP — only of value to Microsoft. Thanks Bill! Now I have more people planning to switch to Macs!
Try going in into a bar at night in a small American town, standing on the counter and burning an American flag, I doubt you will come out alive.
Not for the reason you'd think, though; I doubt it would matter what flag you tried to burn that way. Bartenders everywhere get VERY antsy about anyone intruding on "their" space, especially when they're surrounded by accelerants and you're trying to play with fire, and in a small town, the bartender is a lot more likely to have a firearm as their hidden "equalizer". Lethal force is usually allowed for self defense for imminent risk of your own life and limb, and the hazard of an arson accident would probably make that defense work if it ever got to court.
The Thais hold him in at least much esteem as devout Catholics hold the Pope.
I think you want to specify "devout conservative Catholics". To quote my father (an Irish boy and lifelong devout Roman Catholic) from one debate with a conservative, "Yes, the pope is a good and holy man, but that doesn't mean that what he said isn't stupid." And that was about JP II; he's less partial to the current one.
The problem of course is USB keys that autorun on insertion (which shoudn't even be an option on a modern OS) and people clicking on "virus.exe". Unfortunately, neither one of these is something that can be changed.
Actually, it's any OS that allows for USB autorun on insertion, which the sensibly paranoid disable in the modern OS stupid enough to still have it. This is correctable by avoiding such stupid OSes (is there more than one?) or disabling this option out of the aforementioned sensible paranoia.
People who click on "virus.exe" fall in (at most) three categories: the ignorant, the uncaring, and the stupid. Attempts at education are the first step in solving all three. The best way to get the undivided attention of any organism is to make it feel pain, but this (unfortunately) is frowned upon these days. However, fear is perhaps the second most effective (all IT staff should read Machiavelli's The Prince). Thus, explain at the beginning of the educational presentations that people need to pay attention and ask whatever questions they need to so that they may learn the basic security material, because any cleanup costs or opportunity costs from their not following it will be explicitly laid at their doorstep at their annual reviews. Note the possible range of such costs as multiples of the average salary. This helps you reduce all the uncaring into the one or the other of the two alternate groups... and ignorance is a changeable state. Those who are ignorant will usually work to fix it at that point; help them.
Those who are stupid will not; carry out the threat and submit the information to be saved for their annual review, and insisting that those responsible for the review send confirmation that the problem was addressed during the review. If confirmation is not received, send that for the reviewers' reviews. Repeat. If employee turnover can be kept down to sane levels, you can help (almost) stamp out ignorance and stupidity within the organization. Of course, then you're only left with users who all have at least a little learning, which presents new and interesting IT challenges.
Never buy anything from Apple that you can't install yourself.
I think you meant "Never buy anything from Apple that you can install yourself".
However, do be sure you to check part specs; random Yum-Cha RAM often won't meet the tight tolerances required for Macs, and may outright fail to boot. I ended up with some perfectly good PC-133 for my Windows machines when first learning this. I'll agree with you about buying the hard drives elsewhere, and add that while the warranty from Apple or whoever covers the drive, it doesn't cover the data; for every hard drive I put in, I get another to back the data up to it. (Yes, I am paranoid. I also haven't lost more than three hours of data since 2002, despite 16 different hard drive crashes and three careless "I didn't really want to delete that!!!" users on the mix of Windows and Mac computers I take care of.)
Of course, if the patent is about how to make it a revenue-centered business process, it may be valid as a business-method patent. IAmNotALawyer, so don't ask me.
Robert Heinlein published a story titled "Jerry Was a Man" with much this plot (legal rights for chimps, although the tribunal I believe was Martian) in 1947. It's included in the Assignment in Eternity collection; the four stories in it are some of his weakest, but still present some interesting ideas.
"Jerry" is still one of the better pieces of SF in the discussion of non-human rights, although Roddenberry's "The Measure of A Man" from ST:TNG is probably the best; "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" is also worth looking at. (I can think of more discussion of Machine Rights SF than Alien/Animal rights; Heinlein's "Star Beast" is the only one that comes to mind. Probably a residual of the "hard" science bias to SF.)
if you do things right, you'll end up with many millions of years to find another technology
Not millions, until you develop fusion (which is not yet economically useful). Fission only gives you thousands of years at best, and that will require oceanic extraction of uranium at more than forty times the price. Without that, you still need a reprocessing and breeder fuel cycle to make it past 100 years. At present demand for energy and using the current once-through fuel cycle predominant, there would be less than a 30 year supply of uranium available if it completely supplanted fossil fuels. Of course, that switch presupposes you can get around the essential NIMBY problem of such deployment....
Disclaimer: I dropped out of Nuclear Engineering over a decade ago, but I've heard nothing that would indicate a qualitative change from what I remember from my Intro Fuel Cycle course.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any age distribution in TFA
The traditional form of the poll question is "A/S/L?", correct?
Percentage of female internet population on myspace.com: 99%
Percentage of MySpace.com "female" profiles that are merely poorly concealed spam ads: 14%.
Very interesting. It still seems to me it should be required that a human witness corroborate the physical evidence. Apparently that's not the case, but it should be.
I repeat: IAmNotALawyer. Ask one if you care.
Now, if you really want to be anal, you can probably subpoena in those responsible for collecting the photo and bringing it to court ("chain of evidence" challenge for admissibility sometimes works), or question the people responsible for certifying the measurements are accurate. As for your concern about non-human evidence, you'd look a fool trying to avoid arson charges if there was a movie of you setting the courthouse on fire.
You are supposed maintain appropriate distance to the vehicle in front of you regardless of what his lights are doing. Downshifting, letting off the gas, pulling the emergency brake, and hitting a deer will all slow down his car without engaging his brake lights.
Agreed. However, I'll give two more cases for you where it might not be "at fault".
First: My dad was stopped at a stop light, one car six feet in front of him. Idiot driver on a cell phone (no law yet) PLOWED into him from behind at full speed, and yes, was considered at-fault. As a result, however, dad's foot slipped off the brake... ramming him into the back of the NEXT car. Should my dad be considered at fault for ramming into the next car? (He now puts his car in "park", and puts on the parking break, at all red lights.)
Second: a co-worker was in busy traffic, but had about 4-5 car lengths to the next car. Idiot one lane right shifts in just barely ahead of her... and just two seconds before the car previously in front of her hits his brakes hard to avoid hitting the car ahead of him. (BAM!)(BAM!)(BAM!) and a four car collision was kept from being a five car only because the guy almost too-close behind her spun his car a quarter-turn while stopping it. Captain Idiot shortly after tries to claim screaming that she was at fault for hitting him. The nice cop on the scene, just having interviewed the other drivers three handy witnesses, made a note of this (which was fortunate later dealing with insurance) and decided that this guy was now enough of a nuisance to pull out the cuffs for and haul downtown, rather than merely writing up a standard ticket.
I'd draw the line a little more exactingly. As long as they're using the cop light bar, it shouldn't be a criminal traffic violation; they're giving other drivers the critically needed safety warning. However, if they're using the lights to avoid traffic rules beyond what police regulations permit, that should be handled as with other police disciplinary violations.
Of course, having to explain one's habit of running lights improperly to an internal review board may not make them any happier. They might even prefer just paying a few damn tickets.
If I go to court over one of these tickets, aren't I entitled to face my accuser?
IAmNotALawyer, but from what I read, not exactly, no. Exactly, you have the right:
In the broadest sense, "witnesses" includes "physical evidence".
On the one hand, I'm glad that cops will be forced to obey the law, and not think they are above it. There are cops in my town who park in the fire lane all day.
A volunteer fire department friend has made no bones about what they do with ANY car like that in the event of an emergency: grab the sand bucket, then shift the big truck into lowest gear. Anything less massive or less well planted than a 500 year old oak, moves. Whether the offending vehicle can drive afterwards is not their concern.
Local cops do not seem to park in the fire lane hereabouts.
I've heard of similar favors, but usually something a hair more subtle than that. When someone sufficiently close to a cop gets a ticket, the officer who wrote the ticket may somehow fail to make the court date; if the driver makes the court date and the officer doesn't, charges are usually dropped. Most officers are only willing to do it for minor offenses (low grade speeding and the like), and even then it's considered a major favor to the officer who asks. Most officers have multiple cases for any given court date, so missing it gives all that day's violators the get-out-of-jail-free card (unless there's an accident and the DA has other witnesses to call), and results in the senior DA and the chief each spending some quality time gnawing the cop's ass. Plus, if it happens too often, IA may get called in, and in that case both cops get handled as with any other kind of suspected internal corruption.
I learned about this trick when I got my first speeding ticket. My sister mentioned the ticket to a close friend that had married a cop, and told she later that the wife had mentioned this option and asked if it should be checked on. (Mind you, this sort of favor does NOT normally stretch as far as Brother-of-wife's-friend for most cops, but she said she could ask.) The answer was (a) no, baby brother deserves at least a slap on the wrist for being such an ignoramus, and (b) the ticket was in a different state anyway. Instead, some (good) general advice on court appearances from a cops perspective was passed my way.
I swear to God I think people would actually do that.
Then it would seem spreading such a virus hoax might help this sort of problem. Users stupid enough to fall for it would immediately lose their internet access.
85 Megabucks to get Three Golden Raspberries. Kudos to Halle Berry for accepting hers with style, not to mention graciously thanking everyone who had helped her get there.
I suspect some more comparing via the BoxOfficeProphets.com database with the list of Razzie winners and nominees could turn up a few other coprolites.
But getting back on topic, it's the social engineers that we should all be afraid of. These guys may not be really hackers (at least not in traditional sense), they're really just con artists.
At least, that's the traditional geek usage of "social engineering". The other possible meaning is the one you should really be terrified of — people on the lines of Karl Marx, who think they understand how society works well enough to redesign it. History has yielded nothing more potentially lethal to humanity than the plausible-sounding idea.
We all need to cease using the term "hacker" despite what it originally meant once upon a time long ago. The term has been successfully hijacked by the media and now is associated with evil by virtually the entire non-techie public.
Judges 12:4-6.
Seriously, though, is the decreased diversity in bot "heritage" a good thing -- does it mean that bot infections are easier to detect and treat? Or does it not make any bit of difference until the typical user learns to protect their PC?
The limited heritage diversity suggests that one might make a dramatic impact on the non-technical aspects of the problem with a carefully applied use of hardware. Unfortunately, that's a very short-term solution most likely to only result in rediversification and speciation, rather than any broader environmental shift in the culture leading to permanent extinction.
Would he stand for somebody vandalising a picture of the Pope in a public place?
No more than he would any other form of vandalism.... but he also wouldn't be any more upset over it than by any other form of vandalism.
XP offered many REAL improvements for the user over windows98, not the least of which being real user logins and security.
Actually, most of that was from 2Kpro; XPpro carried them over and added a slightly more user-friendly UI to them, while XPhome partially crippled that security. However, there were some major improvements in system stability; the main downside was a lobotomy in the networking support (Bastards), which most home users didn't notice since home networking didn't get serious until DSL became much more widespread.
(You also skipped WinME, but that didn't have many major changes from Win98. Better USB support and perhaps a crude system restore?)
Now let's wait for the trolls
(...pot, kettle; kettle, pot...)
to swarm in and claim that any culture that doesn't share their own values of "First Amendment" and "Freedom of Expression" must be evil and bad. Newsflash: The "total freedom or none at all" attitude only applies to western culture. Asian cultures have more than a thousand years of experience in moderation and non-binary thinking.
I won't go that far. However, those couple thousand years may or may not be representative of future conditions. Restraints on freedom of expression tend to reduce opportunities for widespread development, evaluation, and exploration of new ideas, which in turn seems likely to make the culture less adaptable to dynamic conditions — a comparative weakness. In relatively isolated social and static environmental conditions, the increase in internal social stability may offset the reduced adaptability; however, the present age makes such isolation more difficult, and recent evidence suggests the environmental stability may no longer be a realistic expectation either. More adaptable societies are less likely to die out. If (as most ethics systems hold), survival is generally preferable to extinction, and traits "good" or "bad" to the extent they contribute to the former and latter respectively, this seems a "bad" trait.
Which is a very long way to say: nowadays, going apeshit over a purely symbolic attack on the King is a dumbass bad idea.
All excellent points. And if the good points were all that was added, this would be heavenly. Unfortunately, it seems (as noted earlier this week) their efforts at Content Protection have created drawbacks with a detriment to outweigh the many excellent features you mention. This reminds me of the networking lobotomy done on XP — only of value to Microsoft. Thanks Bill! Now I have more people planning to switch to Macs!
Try going in into a bar at night in a small American town, standing on the counter and burning an American flag, I doubt you will come out alive.
Not for the reason you'd think, though; I doubt it would matter what flag you tried to burn that way. Bartenders everywhere get VERY antsy about anyone intruding on "their" space, especially when they're surrounded by accelerants and you're trying to play with fire, and in a small town, the bartender is a lot more likely to have a firearm as their hidden "equalizer". Lethal force is usually allowed for self defense for imminent risk of your own life and limb, and the hazard of an arson accident would probably make that defense work if it ever got to court.
The Thais hold him in at least much esteem as devout Catholics hold the Pope.
I think you want to specify "devout conservative Catholics". To quote my father (an Irish boy and lifelong devout Roman Catholic) from one debate with a conservative, "Yes, the pope is a good and holy man, but that doesn't mean that what he said isn't stupid." And that was about JP II; he's less partial to the current one.
The problem of course is USB keys that autorun on insertion (which shoudn't even be an option on a modern OS) and people clicking on "virus.exe". Unfortunately, neither one of these is something that can be changed.
Actually, it's any OS that allows for USB autorun on insertion, which the sensibly paranoid disable in the modern OS stupid enough to still have it. This is correctable by avoiding such stupid OSes (is there more than one?) or disabling this option out of the aforementioned sensible paranoia.
People who click on "virus.exe" fall in (at most) three categories: the ignorant, the uncaring, and the stupid. Attempts at education are the first step in solving all three. The best way to get the undivided attention of any organism is to make it feel pain, but this (unfortunately) is frowned upon these days. However, fear is perhaps the second most effective (all IT staff should read Machiavelli's The Prince). Thus, explain at the beginning of the educational presentations that people need to pay attention and ask whatever questions they need to so that they may learn the basic security material, because any cleanup costs or opportunity costs from their not following it will be explicitly laid at their doorstep at their annual reviews. Note the possible range of such costs as multiples of the average salary. This helps you reduce all the uncaring into the one or the other of the two alternate groups... and ignorance is a changeable state. Those who are ignorant will usually work to fix it at that point; help them.
Those who are stupid will not; carry out the threat and submit the information to be saved for their annual review, and insisting that those responsible for the review send confirmation that the problem was addressed during the review. If confirmation is not received, send that for the reviewers' reviews. Repeat. If employee turnover can be kept down to sane levels, you can help (almost) stamp out ignorance and stupidity within the organization. Of course, then you're only left with users who all have at least a little learning , which presents new and interesting IT challenges.
Never buy anything from Apple that you can't install yourself.
I think you meant "Never buy anything from Apple that you can install yourself".
However, do be sure you to check part specs; random Yum-Cha RAM often won't meet the tight tolerances required for Macs, and may outright fail to boot. I ended up with some perfectly good PC-133 for my Windows machines when first learning this. I'll agree with you about buying the hard drives elsewhere, and add that while the warranty from Apple or whoever covers the drive, it doesn't cover the data; for every hard drive I put in, I get another to back the data up to it. (Yes, I am paranoid. I also haven't lost more than three hours of data since 2002, despite 16 different hard drive crashes and three careless "I didn't really want to delete that!!!" users on the mix of Windows and Mac computers I take care of.)
Prior art: see Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky for a semi-sinister example; A Fire Upon the Deep hinted at it before that.
Of course, if the patent is about how to make it a revenue-centered business process, it may be valid as a business-method patent. IAmNotALawyer, so don't ask me.
Robert Heinlein published a story titled "Jerry Was a Man" with much this plot (legal rights for chimps, although the tribunal I believe was Martian) in 1947. It's included in the Assignment in Eternity collection; the four stories in it are some of his weakest, but still present some interesting ideas.
"Jerry" is still one of the better pieces of SF in the discussion of non-human rights, although Roddenberry's "The Measure of A Man" from ST:TNG is probably the best; "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" is also worth looking at. (I can think of more discussion of Machine Rights SF than Alien/Animal rights; Heinlein's "Star Beast" is the only one that comes to mind. Probably a residual of the "hard" science bias to SF.)
if you do things right, you'll end up with many millions of years to find another technology
Not millions, until you develop fusion (which is not yet economically useful). Fission only gives you thousands of years at best, and that will require oceanic extraction of uranium at more than forty times the price. Without that, you still need a reprocessing and breeder fuel cycle to make it past 100 years. At present demand for energy and using the current once-through fuel cycle predominant, there would be less than a 30 year supply of uranium available if it completely supplanted fossil fuels. Of course, that switch presupposes you can get around the essential NIMBY problem of such deployment....
Disclaimer: I dropped out of Nuclear Engineering over a decade ago, but I've heard nothing that would indicate a qualitative change from what I remember from my Intro Fuel Cycle course.
The RIAA doesn't care if a few individuals keep them in court for whatever liability they open themselves up to.
Can you say "precedent," childen? Any first year law student can....