Best advice in Aeons!
Write your congress critters the most thoughtful and well phrased letter you can. If he or she honestly gives a damn about doing the right thing, they might just listen to you. They might just become more educated, and even if they end up disagreeing with you on issue A, they are likely to modify their over-all position. Then write the same sort of letters to the editors of local papers, or do an informative 1 page writeup and ask to post it on your local library's kiosk or other public places.
If, on the other hand, your congrss critter is crooked as a dog's hind leg, the letters and public opinion polls will be used to drive the price of bribery up. The RIAA will lose out in the long run, as other companies will be able to bribe congress cheaper over less 'controversial' issues, and the greedier the congress critters become, the less likely they are to stay bribed to the customer's satisfaction.
they don't owe you anything, if you don't like it don't buy it.
If they enjoyed the protection copyright law grants, they do owe me something. They owe me the same respect for my fair use rights as I have for their right to be protected from others distributing their content.
While we are at it, the constitution says they got their copyright, for a limited time, so that more works would eventually enrich the public domain, so they owe me at least a reasonable effort to preserve their works until that time comes. Oh wait, as long as copyright has become, I guess they don't owe me that, they owe my great grand-kids.
Tom Clancy gave away more information than this in his book, "The Sum of All Fears", published in 1991. He at least mentioned how the Berylium shell involves a topologically complex construction of helically nested tubes, and a few other significant details. He also went into the health hazards of being a Pu 239 machinist, and several other salient points, all public knowledge and unclassified.
When Union Carbide sponsored "The 20th Century", most of the information in the BBC article was broadcast in the mid 1960's, along with a design for a nuclear powered family automobile, the Ford "Nucleon" (20,000 miles to a tank of U 235).
Just after Hiroshima/Nagasaki (about 1948 or 9), John Campbell and several SF authors of the day collaborated on publishing a design for an A-Bomb that did not require high explosive initiators. It was to be built, presumably by spys or infiltrators, inside an abandoned apartment block or similar building. The core was a sphere with a conical section missing. The missing piece was dropped four stories down a vacuum filled guide tube to get the boom part. Campbell, Isaac Asimov and others published pages and pages of calculations debating whether gravity could bring the material together fast enough to get more than a fizzle and such things, over several months, all without giving away any information that was actually classified. They named specific explosives used in real devices and discussed whether this technique could let saboteurs build a bomb that would be undetectable by chemical explosive sensors of the day. All this came out in "Astounding Science Fiction".
This looks like it will broaden the volume of useful searches. Right now, there are at least two limits that show up when searching:
1. For really popular subjects, the useful links are swamped in the noise of sites trying to make a buck off of getting you to look at their ads before directing you to somewhere else, that might have the actual content or might not.
2. For many less popular subjects, there is some oddity, like an unusual term being borrowed by some other field, so that it is something most people have never heard of, but people in two or more specialties use it frequently, in very different ways. resulting in strangeness. (i.e. the search engine throws up 23,003 links for a search on "Sator Resartus". 30% are esoteric literary criticism, 20% relate to apoptosis (cell biology), 20% relate to building moral inhibitions into A.I., 10% to Keith Laumer novels, and the rest are probably noise).
(I'm sure there are more than these two limits. Someone else may want to comment on some others).
This is likely to help with the second case, oddities in the data set grouping. (it could sort links into the larger sub-categories, query the user which one(s) seemed most applicable, and maybe even sort out a small set of links that explain, for the previous example, how a high brow literary term got borrowed by the other fields).
It's not as likely it would help with the first case, though, as sites that don't have actual content are actively duplicitous. Something that is actively trying to fool humans is still likely to be very successful at fooling our tools.
You're absolutely right. Judges have often given what's called blanket immunity for evidence that might point to another crime but help prove the person is innocent of the one actually charged. There are also some cases where the potential immunity doesn't extend to some more serious charges. In a case like this, that would probably be limited to manslaughter 1 through murder, or something along those lines.
While we are at it, if you could get out of a 10 year sentence for child molestation only by taking a 10 year sentence for something like bank fraud instead, wouldn't you? You'd have a good chance of getting a country club prison instead of harder time, and even if you still went to the same joint, your new associates wouldn't be nearly so tempted to get medieval on your hinie.
So if you answered that way in court, don't you think a jury is going to be smart enough to believe you? Do you really, honestly think the average person on a jury is that stupid, or worse, that all 12 of them are?
What part of "It comes standard with Windows XP. I didn't have to do anything special to put it there." would give the average jury trouble? Just because this case involves those mysterious "compooter thingees" doesn't mean the issues are too complex for a jury to decide fairly.
This case had at least one victim's testimony, and evidence of what sites the defendant visited on the web, to prove actual guilt. The jury decided this evidence proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe there was some evidence the article didn't mention. Maybe not. In that case, the jury must have either found that witness very trustworthy for her age, or the browser evidence included a lot of details about search terms, URLs and such, or something along those lines happened.
In this process, the jury was also told at least one reason why some other evidence wasn't provided. The state's side of the story was that there were no copies of the pictures actually on the local hard drive because there was software capable of encrypting the files, or for that matter, wiping the surface.
The defense had a right to present counter arguements, i.e. the pictures weren't there because they never existed, the software was used for perfectly legitimate reasons, or the software was installed during set up and never used.
The jury gets to decide which explanation seems to better fit the facts. Take away the state's right to offer speculation about why some evidence is not also present, and any criminal conviction becomes impossible, because there is never an infinite amount of evidence.
The state has three eye witnesses. Defense asks the investigating officer, "Doesn't it seem odd, that at that time of the evening, there weren't more eye witnesses present?" Prosecution replies (probably by raising the possibilty during cross examination) "Perhaps there were more who didn't come forward?" Ooops, that's mere speculation.
The state found a gun previously registerd to the plaintiff, in a quarry. Defense: "It was stolen, my client merely failed to report the theft.". Prosecution: "The accused dropped the gun there. Now he's making up a story." Ooops, that's mere speculation.
The use of encryption software was a speculative explanation to account for one known fact, and was offered to the jury as such. The defense was free to offer alternative explanations. If they didn't, either there was an inadequate legal defense, or just possibly those alternatives would have somehow gotten the plantiff into more trouble than he already was in.
The plantiff wasn't appealing on the grounds of inadequate legal defense. Appeal argued that this whole matter was irrelevant to the case. Court ruled that it fit a relevance test. Suprise! The prosecution's being able to explain to the jury why they have enough evidence to seek a conviction but not all theoretically possible evidence is relevant!
IANALE* A similar analogy would be buying a 55 gallon drum of concentrated H2SO4. It's not illegal (most places), but If there were other reasons to suspect you of a murder, and your defense included demanding the state produce the body to show the victim was actually dead, it would certainly become relevant. You could still defend yourself by producing the unused drum, or showing what legitimate process it had been used for instead to account for any missing volume.
In this case, a legitimate user of encryption could open the resulting files, perhaps in chambers if they were legal but business or personal type sensitive. If they are government type sensitive, it's way past time to get a judge who is recognized as able to review such evidence and let him pass a statement to the trial judge. If you were using encryption for some illegal purpose, but not child porn, you could refuse to open them, but would have to plead the 5th and take the resulting risks.
In this case, there's the software, but apparently no files. Possible defenses still abound. Why hasn't the state found the actual files? Why hasn't the state found extra-strength erasing software to go with the encryption software? Is the state really claiming that the plantiff is simultaniously a highly proficient expert at using encryption software and a clueless newbie at using browser software (so as to leave the lolita references)? Which is it, Mr. DA, which is it? By the FBI profiles, don't most pedophiles collect, and aren't they typically very reluctant to destroy their collections?
If such questions weren't raised, the defendant had an incompetent attourney. Alternately, they weren't brought up because the state had unpleasantly good answers. Or they were raised as needed, form part of the total decision the Jury made, and we are simply not hearing about it in this article.
Stop, Drop and Roll doesn't work very well with Napalm. It has a strong tendency to reignite on the side you've just smothered as soon as air hits it again. So long as any patches are still burning, they will reignite the rest, and residual heat will also until the hottest spots are somehow cooled to not all that much more than room temperature.
Slightly Offtopic Answer (with save at the end): Lucas and his daughter supposedly appear in the background in Episode 3, in a scene involving a staircase. If this guy is in there, it's probably in the same scene. Reminds me of the fans that had kept Star Trek alive during the lean years - Paramount got a number of them together, dressed them as crew, and put them in a scene set in the shuttlecraft bay in the first Trek movie.
I messed around with making my own Napalm (styrene-gasoline type), Thermite, and Hydrogen filled weather balloon type stuff a few times when I was a kid. I usually had better sense than these two, even at 12, but I did get the Air Force reserve scrambled once, and all I can say is thank God for the statute of limitations. (Weather balloon, Aluminum foil covered cardboard radar beacon dangling from it, night launch, and it was the 60's, when people still took UFOs seriously. The pilot later told me it went something like this: "Tower, I don't see a damned thing up here." "Cpt Smith, the (bleeping) thing's as big as a football field, and you're right on top of it - Do another (bleeping) fly-by.").
If it will hold a human mind, it will hold an AI. If rich people will benefit from still being regarded as legally human when stored, then they will push for the kind of laws that will most likely solve the potential AI civil rights problem in the process.
We not so rich people will still have to worry about whether they really are still human. Nobody will have to worry about the legal status of Transhumans, since nothing we can anticipate there matters. What I can't figure out is why there seems to be more fear of HAL-9000 type AIs than really rich guys who have figured out how to stay in control forever.
I'd agree that AN issue here is whether there's a vulnerability. Actually, I'd agree with much of what you said beyond that.
Where we disagree is apparently, I do care about whether one or both sides of the original debate are being obsessive, flippant, or dismissive. I say care, in the sense that I'm lazy, and it's shorter than parsing all the code required to verify every claim to be able to dismiss some claims quickly from their authorship alone and focus on others that are competing for my time and attention. Insisting on only formal logic here amounts to a requirement that we individaully crunch all the code in each and every case.
Now what I called Gestalt logic is what the first poster was using. He came to a different conclusion than I did, and my actual opinion is much more similar to your opinion than his. To me, some indicators that Colin could just possibly be overstating the risks or rating the severity without regard to other competing threats weren't nearly enough to say "Ignore this one entirely". BUT, the reasoning process he used is still valid as a method, even if the end result differs.
You can point to countervailing evidence, i.e. Colin's previously demonstrated competence, or the "err on the side of caution" principle, as evidence for your position. Maybe the first poster should have included these in his own evaluation. I'm simply argueing that's different from rejecting his method itself.
Once SCO actually sent legal complaints to IBM customers, they crossed a very big line. At that point, IBM went from wanting to win a case, to wanting to find out who was really behind the whole scam, and (metaphorically) stuff them in an agonizer booth for a year or so, then put their head on a pike, sew 100 year half-life radioactives over their once fertile croplands, pimp all their remaining family members, and recall the 1 dollar bill, so they could print up new ones with the idiot's picture on them, captiioned "Biggest loooozar evah in the whole history of the world". IBM doesn't want SCO, they want the whole Canopy group, and beyond.
The SEC will become involved at whatever time IBM thinks it is most efficient for them to become involved, and the first thing they will get to help them is copious evidence gathered by IBM's private investigators. Apparently, IBM has decided they have enough.
Without the trivial exaggeration of the first paragraph, and in all seriousness. This will end only after a dozen "mysterious suicides" and "accidents". Yes, real deaths. Some of the people who banked on SCO's claims got their start busting real people's real kneecaps over trivial 1,000 dollar loans. They are looking at financial losses, criminal prosecution, and in some cases this will be RICO based. Every single thing you have read here on Slashdot will look trivial as this ends up hitting the national press - Just be sure to read down, as by then the mentions of Darl, Canopy or SCO may be buried in the fourth paragraph or so.
Good Plot, but I wasn't totally convinced why Anakim turned to the Dark side - I mean, he could be in a somewhat "gray" side, but this is just me, watch and draw your conclusions.
This whole issue is why I say the Star Wars fans are unsatisfiable (not you, who are discussing it quite reasonably mind you, but those other fans, you know, them). A shades of gray Vader tends to fit with a scientific explanation for the force (Midiclorians!). A black as the devil's instep, total conversion Vader fits the supernaturalist explanation better. Of course, if the Jedi can't really claim their power comes from moral roots, and they are faking that part, they shift very much towards being as gray as the empire, but this also allows a more pragmatic, 'grayer' Vader, who could have eviled up very gradually, taking nearly until "A New Hope" to commit any real atrocities.
How many people wanted some more depth and character complexity, but rejected the ambiguity of not knowing for sure how much of Jedi-dom was moral and spiritual, and how much was Midiclorians?
It's not valid in classical logic. It's valid in a gestalt sense, but in that sense, it's not enough by itself to count for much.
This is a situation we all have to evaluate chiefly by gestalt thinking. The parameters aren't clearly defined enough, and we don't know enough of them to use classical logic effectively. Most of us are not as familiar with the issue as either Linus or Colin, and we are seeing only a tightly limited and selected view of the end products of their total thoughts on the subject and not the processes that led to them.
By gestalt, we know that Colin has been tightly focused on this issue and has put a lot of time into it, even though he could presumably be concentrating more on some other matters like employment. That could show anything from obsession to some very praiseworthy charitable motivations. But, we also have the word "all" being used (with respect to cryptographers). Strong words like dictator (without strong situations to make them more than hyperbolic), and heavy use of 'nevers', 'alls' or 'everybodies', are both signs that would make me tend towards the obsession interpretation.
Does it 'prove' anything, in a rigorous sense? No. It requires me to remain open to new evidence either way. Does it mean that, if I have to decide right now whether to use the kernal in a certain application or wait for a patch, I'm more likely to go ahead and trust the existing kernal? Yes.
Crinminal penalties are generally paid to the GOVERNMENT, not the victim of the crime. The most a victim is normally likely to see comes from a civil suit (like the RIAA suits), and may be as much as 3x actual damages IF a standard, like criminal negligence, is met. So why is the RIAA getting these much larger than 3x multiple penalties? Why do they have to prove a special standard, (Simple willfulness) to get them?
The sad truth is, the RIAA are first class citizens, and you and I are second class citizens at best. Did you know that the cruel and unusual test in the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply to civil suits?
The original 12 episode PBS version of Cosmos had a visualization of what it would be like moving around a small town in Europe if the speed of light was 30 Km an hour (or something like that). You got to see things like a near collision between a bike and a pedestrian, at relativistic speeds, and see how the events in that near accident didn't look at all simultaneous from two different points of view.
All this was taken out for the 6 hour version of Cosmos reshown on Turner broadcasting. If you look for this on tape, make sure you get the PBS version.
What's the evolutionary advantage of recognizing certanty? Why do humans generally think of some things as being innately 100% true? After all, if your brain decided that it was overwhelmingly probable that 2+2=4, and it didn't really matter if it was absolutely true, wouldn't all your practical behaviors be the same with regard to your actual chance of reproductive survival?
What's the evolutionary advantage of being able to distinguish between events that have a probability less than 1 in the lifetime of the whole universe, even rarer events, and events that have absolutely no chance of happening? Why is your brain capable of making such distinctions? For that matter, why bother to distinguish the odds of any event that is unlikely to happen often enough to affect your personal chance of reproduction?
Why do concepts like truth, justice, decency, or honor matter to humans enough that they are sometimes classed as absolutes? Is this a defect?
What's the evolutionary advantage of poetry, or art? Why doesn't the brain descretize language to the point that there are no synonyms and no metaphors, and why don't we invent new words only when new concrete nouns are needed.
Why hasn't evolutionary pressure militantly selected against all non-reproductive sexual practices, particularly that ultra-deviant one least likely to result in offspring, abstenance?
Why do most people seem to behave like death will never come for them personally? After all, surely a healthy awareness of the time limit for reproduction would be a profound motivator, resulting in maximual reproductive success, and thus the genes for it would spread rapidly through the population. Why don't morbid people have more kids?
There were at least two separate attempts on Ford, one of them comeing from some of Charles Manson's desciples, including Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme. Technically, both the Ford attacks were from people who really didn't like Nixon, and could be blamed on them not getting it together until he was out of office, and so all that was left was his last Veep.
The Mansonites had some weird theory that they could force the court to let Charlie testify at their trial, and this would somehow get him freed when America heard what he had to say.
With Carter, I recall there was a very nasty rabbit attack on Coast Guard 1, but I don't know if the bunny was actually homocidal. Did anyone else try to get Jimmy Carter?
On the other hand, your chance of an assassination attempt rises to about 350% if you were a Beatle:
1966. In the wake of John Lennon's interview comment about the Beatles being "bigger than Christ" members of the Georgia KKK begin a plot to kill all the Beatles. Several other groups of fundamentalist types are believed to have developed similar plans to some extent or other, but the Georgia group is the only one known to have purchased weapons and ammunition.
The Beatles come under criticism in Japan for their choice of venue, playing at a temple complex previously reserved for Japanese traditional sporting events. A number of threats are made, and the Japanese police arrest several persons found carrying guns in the audience, an extremely uncommon situation in Japan at that time.
The Beatles play Manila in the Phillipines under heavy armed guard due to known death threats. Unknown elements start a baseless rumor that the Beatles snubbed a party invitation from Imelda Marcos in an apparent attempt to start a riot that will overwhelm their security.
1999. Former Beatle George Harrison is stabbed by an intruder in his mansion near London. Though seriously injured, Harrison was able to detain the assailant with help from his wife until authorities arrive.
Add to this John's death, and the odds for Beatles are at least as bad, and maybe much worse, than for Presidents (and that's without the "Paul is dead" stuff).
Just picture a property crime that indirectly causes physical harm. Knock down enough power lines at the right time, and you have a bunch of people freezing or broiling, trapped in tall buildings with no elevators for emergency services to get to them, and so on. Blow up a few completely empty buildings, and it starts a panic, and people die fighting over the gas pumps, or racing to get out of the city. In such cases, the terrorists haven't directly killed anyone, but indirectly, they've killed hundreds or thousands.
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Best advice in Aeons!
Write your congress critters the most thoughtful and well phrased letter you can. If he or she honestly gives a damn about doing the right thing, they might just listen to you. They might just become more educated, and even if they end up disagreeing with you on issue A, they are likely to modify their over-all position. Then write the same sort of letters to the editors of local papers, or do an informative 1 page writeup and ask to post it on your local library's kiosk or other public places.
If, on the other hand, your congrss critter is crooked as a dog's hind leg, the letters and public opinion polls will be used to drive the price of bribery up. The RIAA will lose out in the long run, as other companies will be able to bribe congress cheaper over less 'controversial' issues, and the greedier the congress critters become, the less likely they are to stay bribed to the customer's satisfaction.
they don't owe you anything, if you don't like it don't buy it.
If they enjoyed the protection copyright law grants, they do owe me something. They owe me the same respect for my fair use rights as I have for their right to be protected from others distributing their content.
While we are at it, the constitution says they got their copyright, for a limited time, so that more works would eventually enrich the public domain, so they owe me at least a reasonable effort to preserve their works until that time comes. Oh wait, as long as copyright has become, I guess they don't owe me that, they owe my great grand-kids.
Tom Clancy gave away more information than this in his book, "The Sum of All Fears", published in 1991. He at least mentioned how the Berylium shell involves a topologically complex construction of helically nested tubes, and a few other significant details. He also went into the health hazards of being a Pu 239 machinist, and several other salient points, all public knowledge and unclassified.
When Union Carbide sponsored "The 20th Century", most of the information in the BBC article was broadcast in the mid 1960's, along with a design for a nuclear powered family automobile, the Ford "Nucleon" (20,000 miles to a tank of U 235).
Just after Hiroshima/Nagasaki (about 1948 or 9), John Campbell and several SF authors of the day collaborated on publishing a design for an A-Bomb that did not require high explosive initiators. It was to be built, presumably by spys or infiltrators, inside an abandoned apartment block or similar building. The core was a sphere with a conical section missing. The missing piece was dropped four stories down a vacuum filled guide tube to get the boom part. Campbell, Isaac Asimov and others published pages and pages of calculations debating whether gravity could bring the material together fast enough to get more than a fizzle and such things, over several months, all without giving away any information that was actually classified. They named specific explosives used in real devices and discussed whether this technique could let saboteurs build a bomb that would be undetectable by chemical explosive sensors of the day. All this came out in "Astounding Science Fiction".
This looks like it will broaden the volume of useful searches. Right now, there are at least two limits that show up when searching:
1. For really popular subjects, the useful links are swamped in the noise of sites trying to make a buck off of getting you to look at their ads before directing you to somewhere else, that might have the actual content or might not.
2. For many less popular subjects, there is some oddity, like an unusual term being borrowed by some other field, so that it is something most people have never heard of, but people in two or more specialties use it frequently, in very different ways. resulting in strangeness. (i.e. the search engine throws up 23,003 links for a search on "Sator Resartus". 30% are esoteric literary criticism, 20% relate to apoptosis (cell biology), 20% relate to building moral inhibitions into A.I., 10% to Keith Laumer novels, and the rest are probably noise).
(I'm sure there are more than these two limits. Someone else may want to comment on some others).
This is likely to help with the second case, oddities in the data set grouping. (it could sort links into the larger sub-categories, query the user which one(s) seemed most applicable, and maybe even sort out a small set of links that explain, for the previous example, how a high brow literary term got borrowed by the other fields).
It's not as likely it would help with the first case, though, as sites that don't have actual content are actively duplicitous. Something that is actively trying to fool humans is still likely to be very successful at fooling our tools.
You're absolutely right. Judges have often given what's called blanket immunity for evidence that might point to another crime but help prove the person is innocent of the one actually charged. There are also some cases where the potential immunity doesn't extend to some more serious charges. In a case like this, that would probably be limited to manslaughter 1 through murder, or something along those lines.
While we are at it, if you could get out of a 10 year sentence for child molestation only by taking a 10 year sentence for something like bank fraud instead, wouldn't you? You'd have a good chance of getting a country club prison instead of harder time, and even if you still went to the same joint, your new associates wouldn't be nearly so tempted to get medieval on your hinie.
If you found my Leeloo, give her back, we need to go find the four elemental keys or a huge meteor is gonna give Earth a real smackdown.
So if you answered that way in court, don't you think a jury is going to be smart enough to believe you? Do you really, honestly think the average person on a jury is that stupid, or worse, that all 12 of them are?
What part of "It comes standard with Windows XP. I didn't have to do anything special to put it there." would give the average jury trouble? Just because this case involves those mysterious "compooter thingees" doesn't mean the issues are too complex for a jury to decide fairly.
This case had at least one victim's testimony, and evidence of what sites the defendant visited on the web, to prove actual guilt. The jury decided this evidence proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe there was some evidence the article didn't mention. Maybe not. In that case, the jury must have either found that witness very trustworthy for her age, or the browser evidence included a lot of details about search terms, URLs and such, or something along those lines happened.
In this process, the jury was also told at least one reason why some other evidence wasn't provided. The state's side of the story was that there were no copies of the pictures actually on the local hard drive because there was software capable of encrypting the files, or for that matter, wiping the surface.
The defense had a right to present counter arguements, i.e. the pictures weren't there because they never existed, the software was used for perfectly legitimate reasons, or the software was installed during set up and never used.
The jury gets to decide which explanation seems to better fit the facts. Take away the state's right to offer speculation about why some evidence is not also present, and any criminal conviction becomes impossible, because there is never an infinite amount of evidence.
The state has three eye witnesses. Defense asks the investigating officer, "Doesn't it seem odd, that at that time of the evening, there weren't more eye witnesses present?" Prosecution replies (probably by raising the possibilty during cross examination) "Perhaps there were more who didn't come forward?" Ooops, that's mere speculation.
The state found a gun previously registerd to the plaintiff, in a quarry. Defense: "It was stolen, my client merely failed to report the theft.". Prosecution: "The accused dropped the gun there. Now he's making up a story." Ooops, that's mere speculation.
The use of encryption software was a speculative explanation to account for one known fact, and was offered to the jury as such. The defense was free to offer alternative explanations. If they didn't, either there was an inadequate legal defense, or just possibly those alternatives would have somehow gotten the plantiff into more trouble than he already was in.
The plantiff wasn't appealing on the grounds of inadequate legal defense. Appeal argued that this whole matter was irrelevant to the case. Court ruled that it fit a relevance test. Suprise! The prosecution's being able to explain to the jury why they have enough evidence to seek a conviction but not all theoretically possible evidence is relevant!
IANALE*
A similar analogy would be buying a 55 gallon drum of concentrated H2SO4. It's not illegal (most places), but If there were other reasons to suspect you of a murder, and your defense included demanding the state produce the body to show the victim was actually dead, it would certainly become relevant. You could still defend yourself by producing the unused drum, or showing what legitimate process it had been used for instead to account for any missing volume.
In this case, a legitimate user of encryption could open the resulting files, perhaps in chambers if they were legal but business or personal type sensitive. If they are government type sensitive, it's way past time to get a judge who is recognized as able to review such evidence and let him pass a statement to the trial judge. If you were using encryption for some illegal purpose, but not child porn, you could refuse to open them, but would have to plead the 5th and take the resulting risks.
In this case, there's the software, but apparently no files. Possible defenses still abound. Why hasn't the state found the actual files? Why hasn't the state found extra-strength erasing software to go with the encryption software? Is the state really claiming that the plantiff is simultaniously a highly proficient expert at using encryption software and a clueless newbie at using browser software (so as to leave the lolita references)? Which is it, Mr. DA, which is it? By the FBI profiles, don't most pedophiles collect, and aren't they typically very reluctant to destroy their collections?
If such questions weren't raised, the defendant had an incompetent attourney. Alternately, they weren't brought up because the state had unpleasantly good answers. Or they were raised as needed, form part of the total decision the Jury made, and we are simply not hearing about it in this article.
*I am not a lawyer , either!
Stop, Drop and Roll doesn't work very well with Napalm. It has a strong tendency to reignite on the side you've just smothered as soon as air hits it again. So long as any patches are still burning, they will reignite the rest, and residual heat will also until the hottest spots are somehow cooled to not all that much more than room temperature.
Slightly Offtopic Answer (with save at the end):
Lucas and his daughter supposedly appear in the background in Episode 3, in a scene involving a staircase. If this guy is in there, it's probably in the same scene. Reminds me of the fans that had kept Star Trek alive during the lean years - Paramount got a number of them together, dressed them as crew, and put them in a scene set in the shuttlecraft bay in the first Trek movie.
I messed around with making my own Napalm (styrene-gasoline type), Thermite, and Hydrogen filled weather balloon type stuff a few times when I was a kid. I usually had better sense than these two, even at 12, but I did get the Air Force reserve scrambled once, and all I can say is thank God for the statute of limitations. (Weather balloon, Aluminum foil covered cardboard radar beacon dangling from it, night launch, and it was the 60's, when people still took UFOs seriously. The pilot later told me it went something like this: "Tower, I don't see a damned thing up here." "Cpt Smith, the (bleeping) thing's as big as a football field, and you're right on top of it - Do another (bleeping) fly-by.").
If it will hold a human mind, it will hold an AI. If rich people will benefit from still being regarded as legally human when stored, then they will push for the kind of laws that will most likely solve the potential AI civil rights problem in the process.
We not so rich people will still have to worry about whether they really are still human. Nobody will have to worry about the legal status of Transhumans, since nothing we can anticipate there matters. What I can't figure out is why there seems to be more fear of HAL-9000 type AIs than really rich guys who have figured out how to stay in control forever.
I'd agree that AN issue here is whether there's a vulnerability. Actually, I'd agree with much of what you said beyond that.
Where we disagree is apparently, I do care about whether one or both sides of the original debate are being obsessive, flippant, or dismissive. I say care, in the sense that I'm lazy, and it's shorter than parsing all the code required to verify every claim to be able to dismiss some claims quickly from their authorship alone and focus on others that are competing for my time and attention. Insisting on only formal logic here amounts to a requirement that we individaully crunch all the code in each and every case.
Now what I called Gestalt logic is what the first poster was using. He came to a different conclusion than I did, and my actual opinion is much more similar to your opinion than his. To me, some indicators that Colin could just possibly be overstating the risks or rating the severity without regard to other competing threats weren't nearly enough to say "Ignore this one entirely". BUT, the reasoning process he used is still valid as a method, even if the end result differs.
You can point to countervailing evidence, i.e. Colin's previously demonstrated competence, or the "err on the side of caution" principle, as evidence for your position. Maybe the first poster should have included these in his own evaluation. I'm simply argueing that's different from rejecting his method itself.
Once SCO actually sent legal complaints to IBM customers, they crossed a very big line. At that point, IBM went from wanting to win a case, to wanting to find out who was really behind the whole scam, and (metaphorically) stuff them in an agonizer booth for a year or so, then put their head on a pike, sew 100 year half-life radioactives over their once fertile croplands, pimp all their remaining family members, and recall the 1 dollar bill, so they could print up new ones with the idiot's picture on them, captiioned "Biggest loooozar evah in the whole history of the world". IBM doesn't want SCO, they want the whole Canopy group, and beyond.
The SEC will become involved at whatever time IBM thinks it is most efficient for them to become involved, and the first thing they will get to help them is copious evidence gathered by IBM's private investigators. Apparently, IBM has decided they have enough.
Without the trivial exaggeration of the first paragraph, and in all seriousness. This will end only after a dozen "mysterious suicides" and "accidents". Yes, real deaths. Some of the people who banked on SCO's claims got their start busting real people's real kneecaps over trivial 1,000 dollar loans. They are looking at financial losses, criminal prosecution, and in some cases this will be RICO based. Every single thing you have read here on Slashdot will look trivial as this ends up hitting the national press - Just be sure to read down, as by then the mentions of Darl, Canopy or SCO may be buried in the fourth paragraph or so.
Good Plot, but I wasn't totally convinced why Anakim turned to the Dark side - I mean, he could be in a somewhat "gray" side, but this is just me, watch and draw your conclusions.
This whole issue is why I say the Star Wars fans are unsatisfiable (not you, who are discussing it quite reasonably mind you, but those other fans, you know, them).
A shades of gray Vader tends to fit with a scientific explanation for the force (Midiclorians!). A black as the devil's instep, total conversion Vader fits the supernaturalist explanation better. Of course, if the Jedi can't really claim their power comes from moral roots, and they are faking that part, they shift very much towards being as gray as the empire, but this also allows a more pragmatic, 'grayer' Vader, who could have eviled up very gradually, taking nearly until "A New Hope" to commit any real atrocities.
How many people wanted some more depth and character complexity, but rejected the ambiguity of not knowing for sure how much of Jedi-dom was moral and spiritual, and how much was Midiclorians?
It's not valid in classical logic. It's valid in a gestalt sense, but in that sense, it's not enough by itself to count for much.
This is a situation we all have to evaluate chiefly by gestalt thinking. The parameters aren't clearly defined enough, and we don't know enough of them to use classical logic effectively. Most of us are not as familiar with the issue as either Linus or Colin, and we are seeing only a tightly limited and selected view of the end products of their total thoughts on the subject and not the processes that led to them.
By gestalt, we know that Colin has been tightly focused on this issue and has put a lot of time into it, even though he could presumably be concentrating more on some other matters like employment. That could show anything from obsession to some very praiseworthy charitable motivations. But, we also have the word "all" being used (with respect to cryptographers). Strong words like dictator (without strong situations to make them more than hyperbolic), and heavy use of 'nevers', 'alls' or 'everybodies', are both signs that would make me tend towards the obsession interpretation.
Does it 'prove' anything, in a rigorous sense? No. It requires me to remain open to new evidence either way. Does it mean that, if I have to decide right now whether to use the kernal in a certain application or wait for a patch, I'm more likely to go ahead and trust the existing kernal? Yes.
I tuck all mine onto a nice comfy couch and let them watch "Brave Little Toaster" every 6 months or so.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092695/
Crinminal penalties are generally paid to the GOVERNMENT, not the victim of the crime. The most a victim is normally likely to see comes from a civil suit (like the RIAA suits), and may be as much as 3x actual damages IF a standard, like criminal negligence, is met. So why is the RIAA getting these much larger than 3x multiple penalties? Why do they have to prove a special standard, (Simple willfulness) to get them?
The sad truth is, the RIAA are first class citizens, and you and I are second class citizens at best. Did you know that the cruel and unusual test in the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply to civil suits?
The original 12 episode PBS version of Cosmos had a visualization of what it would be like moving around a small town in Europe if the speed of light was 30 Km an hour (or something like that). You got to see things like a near collision between a bike and a pedestrian, at relativistic speeds, and see how the events in that near accident didn't look at all simultaneous from two different points of view.
All this was taken out for the 6 hour version of Cosmos reshown on Turner broadcasting. If you look for this on tape, make sure you get the PBS version.
What's the evolutionary advantage of recognizing certanty? Why do humans generally think of some things as being innately 100% true? After all, if your brain decided that it was overwhelmingly probable that 2+2=4, and it didn't really matter if it was absolutely true, wouldn't all your practical behaviors be the same with regard to your actual chance of reproductive survival?
What's the evolutionary advantage of being able to distinguish between events that have a probability less than 1 in the lifetime of the whole universe, even rarer events, and events that have absolutely no chance of happening? Why is your brain capable of making such distinctions? For that matter, why bother to distinguish the odds of any event that is unlikely to happen often enough to affect your personal chance of reproduction?
Why do concepts like truth, justice, decency, or honor matter to humans enough that they are sometimes classed as absolutes? Is this a defect?
What's the evolutionary advantage of poetry, or art? Why doesn't the brain descretize language to the point that there are no synonyms and no metaphors, and why don't we invent new words only when new concrete nouns are needed.
Why hasn't evolutionary pressure militantly selected against all non-reproductive sexual practices, particularly that ultra-deviant one least likely to result in offspring, abstenance?
Why do most people seem to behave like death will never come for them personally? After all, surely a healthy awareness of the time limit for reproduction would be a profound motivator, resulting in maximual reproductive success, and thus the genes for it would spread rapidly through the population. Why don't morbid people have more kids?
Actually, it's usually the hyper intelligent types that watch NASCAR and shout "DEFENSE", just to bug everyone else.
Of course. This is slashdot - all talk of girlfriends is hypothetical.
But there's no black cats around. Don't you have to have black cats before its a deja-vu?
And how can you be in front of a computer too long?
There were at least two separate attempts on Ford, one of them comeing from some of Charles Manson's desciples, including Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme. Technically, both the Ford attacks were from people who really didn't like Nixon, and could be blamed on them not getting it together until he was out of office, and so all that was left was his last Veep.
The Mansonites had some weird theory that they could force the court to let Charlie testify at their trial, and this would somehow get him freed when America heard what he had to say.
With Carter, I recall there was a very nasty rabbit attack on Coast Guard 1, but I don't know if the bunny was actually homocidal. Did anyone else try to get Jimmy Carter?
On the other hand, your chance of an assassination attempt rises to about 350% if you were a Beatle:
1966. In the wake of John Lennon's interview comment about the Beatles being "bigger than Christ" members of the Georgia KKK begin a plot to kill all the Beatles. Several other groups of fundamentalist types are believed to have developed similar plans to some extent or other, but the Georgia group is the only one known to have purchased weapons and ammunition.
The Beatles come under criticism in Japan for their choice of venue, playing at a temple complex previously reserved for Japanese traditional sporting events. A number of threats are made, and the Japanese police arrest several persons found carrying guns in the audience, an extremely uncommon situation in Japan at that time.
The Beatles play Manila in the Phillipines under heavy armed guard due to known death threats. Unknown elements start a baseless rumor that the Beatles snubbed a party invitation from Imelda Marcos in an apparent attempt to start a riot that will overwhelm their security.
1999. Former Beatle George Harrison is stabbed by an intruder in his mansion near London. Though seriously injured, Harrison was able to detain the assailant with help from his wife until authorities arrive.
Add to this John's death, and the odds for Beatles are at least as bad, and maybe much worse, than for Presidents (and that's without the "Paul is dead" stuff).
Just picture a property crime that indirectly causes physical harm. Knock down enough power lines at the right time, and you have a bunch of people freezing or broiling, trapped in tall buildings with no elevators for emergency services to get to them, and so on. Blow up a few completely empty buildings, and it starts a panic, and people die fighting over the gas pumps, or racing to get out of the city. In such cases, the terrorists haven't directly killed anyone, but indirectly, they've killed hundreds or thousands.
The best bit is that "the old days" can be anywhere from "1997" to "last week".
The time period is actually quite well defined, as 1 femtosecond after the user got his Slashdot ID number.