Kyoto, as finalized, was very seriously flawed, simply because it treated nations such as China and India, both nuclear powers, as entitled to claim special impoverished 3rd world nation status. These latest poliution study results show why that was a really bad idea. There are good reasons why Kyoto needed rejected in that form.
However, President Bush, and a number of White House and Senate Republicans have cited a large number of other 'flaws' that were ALL deal breakers to them. Many of these look like conditions we could have lived with, fair trade offs, or minor points we should have stayed at the table and negotiated over. Various Washington insider writers and gossippers may be deservedly unpopular in general, but in their opinions they have mentioned two big problems worth looking at.
1. Some of the people negotiating for us were very unprofessional - in particular, they didn't seem to grasp which pollution problems were the most major and which were relatively trivial, which issues could potentially cost the U.S. Billions and which 'mere' Millions, and which nations wanting exemptions were major polluters in that area and which ones so trivial it didn't really matter.
2. Some of the U.S. people appeared to be determined to set conditions that were obviously going to leave us with a treaty the U. S. Senate wouldn't ratify, or that all of the other signees would back out on. The core of this arguement is a claim that those people joined the negotiating team with ulterior motives, and weren't really there to get a treaty that would actually help with real environmental problems.
Some (not necessarily all, or even more than the general political mix) of these 'problem' people on our negotiating team were alledgedly financially connected to energy companies supporting the Republican party, or were sponsored by Republican congress-persons. The arguement goes that Bush did more than react to a badly flawed treaty, he had strong connections to the people who made sure that treaty was so badly flawed, and also treated minor flaws as additional reasons sufficient in themselves to justify his decision, so now nobody else wants to open a new round of negotiations. I would not be surprised if the same situation exists with regard some Democrat sponsored negotiators and corporate connections.
How much should Bush be held responsible? That depends on what else he does about the environment, whether Kyoto was really screwed up by a particular group of neo-conservatives or by more general veniality and incompetence that crosses party lines, and lots of other such factors. I'm perfectly fine myself with blameing a good part of it on President Clinton, and part on lots of other people who aren't Republicans, but I also think blame here couples to such related issues as how this administration has handled scientific disagreements over environmental methodology.
Of course some of the people blameing Bush think we should have taken Kyoto even in that final form. Why THEY blame Bush is a good question, as I think they are already mistaken in including that factor in their reasoning. Plenty of people who are strongly committed to one party or the other have picked out only those details of the Kyoto mess that fit their worldview, which I gather was one of your points.
Climate=!Weather
What you are argueing is basically equivalent to saying, "My insurance company can't predict the exact date of my death, so why should I believe those actuarial tables that show smoking reduces life expectancy?"
Some climateologists have predicted an increase in tornados in the midwest US as the average water table levels in the west drop, along with a shift in the distribution of those tornados. We've seen that, with 2002 being a very high year for numbers of tornados, 2003 setting a new hundred+ year record, and 2004 also running way above the old averages.
What happened with Hurricanes this year may not prove much by itself, but it's a suspicious case. In addition to the effects most US'ians have noted, the Pacific Monsoon season has been unusually tough, particularly on Japan and the Phillippines. I'd prefer to see if this pattern continues before making too much of what, granted, could still be a fluke, but the alternate theory of the 30 year natural hurricane cycle would have to be extended to cover Pacific storms as well if it's to make any sense.
In my region of the country, the deciduous tree line is rising higher on the mountaintops. Trees don't walk - for the line to rise, conditions have to favor deciduous seedling growth higher up the mountainsides, and they have to stay that way long enough for new generations to continue the process. Measurable increases in tree species altitude take a minimum of 10 years, requiring a change that has been consistent over at least that much time. For some slower growing species whose seeds don't usually travel far, the numbers are much higher than that. We can look at which species have migrated the most, and which are becoming rare or locally extinct instead of moving, and get some pretty interesting estimates of when the climate zigs and zags.
The people who have been rejecting any arguements for serious climate shift locally keep referring to each year's data as an individual case, and refusing to admit that those individual cases have to be part of a larger pattern for the observed changes to have taken place.
Local weather shows an abrupt shift, now about 5 years old, towards a major increase in rainfall. Before that time, the average August might go a whole month without rain, and could be expected to have at least 1 two week dry period. "Indian" Summers were standard (we had one 80-90% of the time), and periods when the reservoirs were very low in both the late summer and the late winter. We've seen a local average of 14" increase in yearly rainfall in these last five years. There has not been a single July or August where rains have been more than 5 days apart (And for the rest of the year, usually wetter, that number is more like 3 days).
The way this gets reported is the new years get averaged in with the older ones, so the amount we are above average keeps decreasing, and so technically each year is not as much over the hundred year average as the last. Actually graphing the numbers by week or month shows an old average and a new average, with a spectacularly sharp contrast over a few years where the graph really ramps up and then becomes a still gradually rising plateau.
The Chaos theory arguement makes a certain amount of sense, and certainly ought to be taken into account in explaining why some specific, short term predictions are a waste of time, but... Some variables are more important than others. A Hurricane is basically an enormous energy sink. The rates for heat exchange and such can vary, but still, the 2nd law overides many possibilities, and a hurricane always lasts until enough energy has poured into the low energy zone to balance out. When the energy differential is great, the flow is rapid, and when it becomes smaller, the flow is less, and Chaos effects don't overide those general trends. If the planet really is retaining more energy due to the greenhouse effect, then I don't expect any 0.01% changes in any other variables to over-ride the 2nd law, just because it's a larger scale.
Compromised is Compromised. Once you think an undercover operative has any serious chance of being recognized, they are totally useless in that job. Further publicity doesn't make them more compromised, or mean you rotate them to a desk job quicker.
Some american shotgun makers used to make 8 gauge single barrel shotguns, up until 1938, when the gun was banned for waterfoul hunting. It was such a heavy design, that almost no one wanted one anyway, so there was little protest. After that about half a dozen 8 gauge shotguns were made under special liscence, each year, until the 1950's, and sold to steel foundrys. They were used for shooting open stuck doors on pouring aparatus, in mills that still used old fashioned fire clay channels to direct molten steel. For this reason, the shells manufactured for 8 gauges after 1938 started at 000 shot, and sometimes went to Quint-0.
(Either that, or its all a cover up for the Time-Gate project's obvious need for a gun for T-Rex.)
We've got a lot of problems right here on earth, folks- and I'd much rather you all put that brainpower to them.
There are lots of down to earth problems involving high loads and other stressors on cables. How do you make the SF bay area bridge safer against earthquakes? (or against sabotage?). How do we scale up the design of that suspension bridge to get multi-mile spans in the Florida keys or elsewhere? Is it possible to build such a bridge across the Gibraltar istmus?
Can we make a cable that's strong and waterproof enough to safety retrofit earthenware dams all around the mouth of the Mississippi region, and do it cheaply? Is there something that could help stabilize really tall free standing radio masts in central Russia, and is thermally less expansive than steel cable, or better yet electrically non-conductive? What design changes could have kept the WTC standing for at least a few additional hours, and what sort of materials would they require?
The thing is, if we get good answers to even some of these questions, they are likely in this case to point us towards towards space program uses as well. The problems you cite will apply to every use, not just a space elevator. Someone will be looking into using these fibers for zeppelin fabric to build really large gasbags and set up a major freight hauling system across the Mediterranian sea, and someone else will raise the issues of safety, location or insurance just like you have here.
Half the reason so many engineers want to build really big projects like space elevators is to show all the people who toss out bullet comments just like yours for every new project, space or earth, military or peaceful, that big things can still be done. You're doing it about space. Someone else will do it about any new idea that could alleviate poverty, or clean up the environment, or somehow improve someone's quality of life. So nothing will change. Thank goodness its all perfect now.
"This is another arrow in the quivver of those who would do harm, I'd agree, but the quivver exists already."
Most definitely. I can see how this DRM method might be of some interst to a blackhat wishing to modify an existing plan, or be a sort of add on, but it really can't be counted as a serious exploit by itself. It's just not damaging enough to stop a site cold without becoming extremely obvious, and can only be used subtly if the intent is to just slow down the spread of some piece of content/a message. In many circumstances, it would be self defeating, as the news that a site had been hacked with it would probably get that site's message spread more widely later as a colateral effect.
At least, it looks that way for now, and while I really hope with every exploit that it doesn't turn into a bigger vulnerability than it first appears, I'd be willing to bet that this particular one won't turn out to be all that dangerous.
Of course, I just last night had to show my wife the effects of the "print scr" key on her Xp box's keyboard. 3 years with that particular board, She'd never wondered what any of those keys did, (and yet she is now quite disappointed that "Scrl lok" is useless to her). I can see what kind of user behavior this will be effective against. It works pretty well as a DRM method, and probably does assure some content holders they can minimize their risks enough to take part.
I still think it's paranoia to worry about preventing copying for a partial excerpt from a larger work, but I don't know of a way to get the content owners to take a magic anti-paranoia pill and Google evidently does know how to give them some reassurance that helps them over the hump and into the 21st century.
It's not necessarily possible this can be used to spread some other package, like an attached trojan. How about viewing it as the possible warhead, not the delivery system. I.e., a modifed existing virus or trojan exploits this vulnerability to turn off features like save, copy, (or maybe print) in your browser. You're trying to copy or print legally distributed content, such as instructions for removing the virus, and this slows you down. For that percentage of viruses written to be annoying, this feature looks like a great one to add to printing stupid Leet'speak on the screen, making the mouse pointer jump around, and such tricks.
Or it can be viewed as an element of a DoS. Imagine a political website that has content they want to freely distribute. Infecting a number of site visitors with something, that as one of its effects, screws up copying or saving that content, is likely to be taken by most of the site's visitors as just a case of the site not having its HTML up to par. The site is effectively under an attack which it may never know happened, unless it gets enough visitor complaints.
1. Start off as a person not using credit. 2. Apply for a moderately difficult to get account, such as a 9.5% preferred visa card, and not a simple card to get (i.e. a 21% Sears card). 3. On the application, list a low income, a job like "writer", and stipulate your income is irregular. 4. You now have been rejected for credit, and this will stay on your credit score for at least 2 years. At this point, the companies that would have issued you a small limit - high interest card won't see the reasons you were rejected, just that you were. 5. If you want to make really sure, repeat steps 2-4 a few times.
If you ever need to reverse this, complete a new application with a (hopefully true) higher listed income from a steadier paying job, voluntarily requesting a smaller line of credit that the maximum they will offer that income bracket.
At the worst, you may have to write a letter to one of the credit review agencies to make sure your record is properly updated, but no one in the more responsible side of the credit industry is going to blacklist you, and the less responsible side of the industry just looks at the highlights of the records Providian and the other review services provide.
This will not stop real fools from sending you letters that say you have been pre-approved for a line of credit based on your home ownership, even though you don't own a home. There are companies that have sent tens of thousands of offers out to minor children, and even one that sent several thousands of credit offers out to a list of people's pets some scammer had sold them after obtaining it from veterinary records.
These companies typically charge high rates and have lots of hidden penalties, have a lot of fraud committed against them, and in return play dirty in trying to collect from most of their clients. They work with collection agencies that will violate state laws whenever they think they can get away with it. They often fall afoul of the law themselves, and actually have a poor return on investment. Nothing short of finally going out of business will stop such fools from being scammed and wasting your time in return if someone commits a fraud agaisnt them using your identity.
There's two reasons. 1. The bill may turn out to be a bad law in practice. (The 'patriot' act has an expiration date. Some of the proponents haggled over just how long the law should apply, and picked a time when we should have had opportunity to cool down a bit and think about it.). 2. If it's a pretty good law, congress will still have to renew it when the time comes. It's easier to tweak the law in the new version with automatic expiration. If it's a good law with a few flaws, it's going to have to be re-examined automatically anyway.
The biggest advantage for the non technical user is that they can take the finished list it produces and submit it for inspection by others, via the website. A user could probably make notes of what lines MSCONFIG shows and google for each one they had doubts about, but that's likely to be more time consuming than the single list, and depending on the user, less productive.
Also, clicking on the "Info on Selected item..." button in HijackThis gets a pop-up explanation of the selected line in the list. In some cases, this may be all the user needs. For example, asking for "info on selected item" over an entry like "extra button: Messenger" will give the explanation "that such items are "...usually present after system updates (MSN messenger button) and rarely used by hijackers...". The info often lists most of the most common legitmate uses.
It's not a panacea. At its worst, it gives exactly the sort of information a user can see from running MSCONFIG. For example the info the user will see on the Browser Helper Object (BHO) emplaced by Acrobat Reader won't tell them anything useful if they don't know why they have Adobe Acrobat Reader on their system. That's probably the sort of entry you tried, hence your comparison is fair enough, but it's going to depend a lot on whether what you have on your machine falls into certain classes that have gotten special attention, or not.
Well, 110 Miles/hour isn't quite optimal for me, but it's getting pretty close... Oh, you mean 110 miles on a full charge, at say 45 to 55 MPH... Uhm, nevermind.
Whooooosh! Viewed at the whole organism level, recursive use of code would describe parent-child incest. Someone will be along to explain what the Whoooooshing noise was.
"The right way to fight this is to fight it on grounds that the FCC doesn't have the authority to alter the fundamental nature copyright law through their rulemaking"
I'm very glad you got mod points for this, as it seems both accurate and informative, but it raised another question in my mind.
A while back, there was a legal decision usually referred to as the "Thor Power Tool" case, that involved the IRS and company accounting/amortization methods. The case had a huge impact on the publishing industry, and is effectively the reason why now, even a popular author such as Tom Clancy or Steven King has works that cycle in and out of print instead of being reprinted constantly in anticipation of eventual demand.
For those people who have considered copying an out of print work and claiming that the fact it is long out of print means there's no economic loss, 'Thor Power Tool' is ultimately the root law that negates that defense, as 'long out of print' is no longer something the court dares consider or define more precisely, unless they want to risk screwing up tax law over a copyright case. Note that author's associations and such have frequently claimed 'Thor Power Tool' hurts the authors and publishers, and in particular new authors just starting out, and not just those persons wanting to distribute out of print works.
I'm wondering if it could be argued on the same basis as you mention, that the IRS doesn't have the authority to make 'Thor Power Tool' apply to the publishing industry, because it has more than its intended effects, limited to tax law, and instead, also alters the nature of copyright law (if it makes it harder for new authors to get started, it's doing the opposite of "promoting progress in the useful arts", as the U.S. Constitution says).
It looks like it might actually be in the publishing industry's favor to recognize a right to copy works long lapsed from print, if in return they would regain the right to make 'out of print' mean what it originally meant to them financially.
(The necessity for my signature is shown by the fact that I am actually discussing the possibilty that the courts decide an issue by reference to the constitution, rather than just precedent. It'll happen right after Monkees fly out of Rhenquist's butt.).
(Assuming you have an old laptop that most of the parts are working.)
Get copies of: 1. all the hardware manuals for all your more modern systems. Particularly, get your mainboard manual, schematics for jumpering and cabling your hard drives and CD/DVD drives, and info on your network, video and sound cards. 2. lists of your bios beep codes, and other startup info if needed. 3. selected software documentation. (mostly for essential parts, such as the OS). 4. If you have any windows boxen, copies of system configuration info, particularly how Windows has assigned IRQs and DMAs, particularly on older systems, and a known good backup or two of the registry. 5. a list of URLs for your hardware and software manufacturers (optional - only really useful if you can get to the internet by some other means without having to lug this laptop to the public library or something just to connect)
These files, with an older OS, will typically come to a few hundred Mb or less. Set up the laptop with the aprropriate software to read them all (you'll probably just need a general text reader and maybe Adobe Acrobat reader for PDFs, not usually much else). Voila! Now when you lose LAN or internet connectivity, or the machine won't even boot right, you have a portable tech support library.
There ARE a few things Joe Average can do that will make this less easy for them...
As just one example...
One small step every person with a debit card can do is encourage businesses to get the tech to process it as debit, rather than running it as a credit transaction at their end. That little PIN is a bit of extra account security for the customer, which is lost when the business can't handle it at their end, and the business loses as well when they pay the credit card company about 2%/transaction for the privledge of handling credit cards.
Many businesses still don't realize this is a potential savings for them and a win for customers. Tell managers and small business owners it's something you want, and you tend to give your business to companies that have it.
If you are actually a loan officer for a bank, not having a plan to add debit processing capability should be a black mark in considering small business start-up plans for loans, for the same reasons. If you invest, it's one of the things you should check before investing in a retail business.
If you don't have a debit card, but use credit cards, you can't help with this, but you might want to consider how in-frackin'-credibly vulnerable you are to being the hardest hit person by an information warefare era attack.
Fascism can develop without a racial extermination angle. The current government of mainland China, for example, has survived for 3 generations, and is probably much closer to fascism than communism, while its fascist traits are generally unrecognized as such - for example their semi-official policy that ethnic Chinese that are citizens of other nations are still really subject to PRC law, and those people have an obligation not to speak ill of the Chinese government or they are betraying their entire race, etc.
Fascism tends to need scapegoats for its failures, but those don't have to be chosen along racial lines. Americans who are "soft on terror" would make a lovely scapegoat. The way the word 'Liberal' is used in some circles is well along towards scapegoat status. There don't have to be mass exterminations at all, unless the fascist government screws up the economy enough that slave labor starts looking really effective. A few lynchings here and there are often enough to keep the powers that be in power.
Let's not wait for mass exterminations this time. Protecting some big, long established businesses that have close ties to government from public scrutiny is an early sign, not just in regimes such as Nazi Germany, where the end result was genocide, but in Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, which had plenty of their own share of evil without necessarily being big on killing jews.
It's not just that the body processes synthetic sugar differently than a natural sugar such as fructose that should give people pause.
This is a general tendency for serious drugs - The opiates are all similar to natural endorphins, with just a few OH radical's here and there for differences. When the body breaks down a synthetic opiate, several reactions proceed at the same speed as for natural endorphins, then a step occurs where the reaction chokes, as the enzymes responsible for that stage of metabolism don't fit the synthetic. Brain chemestry gets thrown off by this.
LSD and the various Mescalineoids have the same property in mimicing serotonin, again a natural brain chemical. They get a certain part of the way through the normal metabolic processes, then chemical breakdown slows, and again, brain chemistry fluctuates as a result.
There are some other drugs that the pattern isn't this clear. Psilocyben may or may not have a particular choke point in its metabolic path, although it does partially mimic some natural brain chemistry compounds. THC may or may not resemble a particular estrogen compound occuring naturally enough to go through some of the same metabolic pathways, the results are mixed. Partly, that's because these are both produced by plants and many of the tests use a mixture of several related chemical forms as those plants naturally don't make 100% pure anything.
Processed sugar metabolism involves splitting a double sugar molecule into two natural sugars right at the start of the process. The body doesn't seem to do this at a properly controlled speed, witness the fluctuations in the levels of those natural sugars as normally measured in the bloodstream.
Even in people with good tolerance for sugar (non-diabetics), those levels routinely vary by 200% or more (i.e. a typical fasting reading of 80, and a reading 15 minutes after eating sweets of 240, is not uncommon). That's an amplitude variation similar to what we see with the halucinogens for serotonin, and only moderately less than the fluctuation in natural endorphin levels of heavy opiate abusers.
I doubt that there is a single district or city that could cut their case load by enough if they stopped prosecuting drug offenses that they would need to lay off an assistant DA. Even if there was a long term effect, the existing prosecutors could stay employed for 10 years just reducing the case load to where the average case was finished in under a year again, and could probably be useful for another 10 years reviewing cold cases, doing pro-bono work, reviewing existing convict's appeals, parole hearings, and other such tasks.
Most of the people doing public service announcements got caught with something, and this is their way of working it off, not a means to profit.
That leaves the politicians. Their job security doesn't depend on scareing us witless, unless we let it. Whenever possible, vote for the candidates who don't stoop to scare tactics, (and not just drug related ones).
Biologicals are one of the few reasons it might make sense to use Nukes. A high end biological weapon (say an open air vectorable Ebola Zaire strain), can theoretically be a literal billion killer. If used, we stop counting Megadeaths and start figuring in Gigadeaths instead.
Worse, if it is used on the US, the vast majority of deaths happen to the citizens of various tropical nations, who are all innocent bystanders, likely not even involved in the war until then. We, and much of Europe, would probably manage a mortality rate of less than 30%, thanks to modern medicine and cool climates, but much of the world wouldn't.
A modest, sane, and rational response to such a weapon if it was known to still be confined to a lab in some area would be the simultanious detonation of two nuclear devices, one fused for ground and the other airbursting at about 5,000 meters, both with the dial-a-yield cranked all the way up. Sadly, to have even a chance of success at staving off Armagheddon, no warning or ultimatum could be given, let alone a two week grace period.
Unfortunately, the only time we have suspected anyone was possibly running such a Bio-weapons program, the suspected lab was within 3 miles of a major city. Despite that, killing a million to save a billion, or more, argueably isn't crazy. But we had damned well better be right, and our record on finding WMD labs isn't looking too good right now.
1. there are only a dozen or so countries that have any space capability of their own. When you get past a few European nations and China, everyone else puts up their sattelites with the aid of the US or one of those two, so of course in many cases, we know whether the widgets have cameras and such on board - we helped launch them. One of the reasons we like the European Space Agancy is they are very far from covert about launch verification. If the ESA is putting up a bird for some African nation, for example, and the US wants to inspect it or supervise loading, we just ask. 2. Even for a lot of the ones we didn't launch, we know pretty much what's on board. That's part of the CIA's share of your tax dollars at work. 3. Spysats have to either drop film to be recovered the old fashioned way, or send encripted data to a ground reciever. The Soviet Union in the early 60's was the only country that we are sure managed to hide encripted photo traffic among regular communications packets for even a few weeks without it being detected (and it looked mighty suspicious that the bird was passing over the US several times a day instead of sitting in a geo-syncronous orbit over Russia, even before wwe could technically prove it.). A useful spysat can be detected simply by its having an orbital profile that keeps putting it over things the owner would want to take pictures of.
So I doubt there are hundreds, or even dozens, of sattelites with any unknown features in near space. There are probably a few out in geosyncronous orbit that were supposedly for civilian TV traffic only and can actually relay military information, because that's an easier trick to pull off. This technology apparently isn't aimed at the stuff in high orbits though.
I'm pretty sure they have something to hide, whether it's that they acted overly paranoid about Lennon's politics or just that Hoover lusted after Yoko's wardrobe, but I doubt it has anything to do with the actual murder.
Slashdot Mirror
How far North did the sattelite orbit? We missed Hannes!
Kyoto, as finalized, was very seriously flawed, simply because it treated nations such as China and India, both nuclear powers, as entitled to claim special impoverished 3rd world nation status. These latest poliution study results show why that was a really bad idea. There are good reasons why Kyoto needed rejected in that form.
However, President Bush, and a number of White House and Senate Republicans have cited a large number of other 'flaws' that were ALL deal breakers to them. Many of these look like conditions we could have lived with, fair trade offs, or minor points we should have stayed at the table and negotiated over. Various Washington insider writers and gossippers may be deservedly unpopular in general, but in their opinions they have mentioned two big problems worth looking at.
1. Some of the people negotiating for us were very unprofessional - in particular, they didn't seem to grasp which pollution problems were the most major and which were relatively trivial, which issues could potentially cost the U.S. Billions and which 'mere' Millions, and which nations wanting exemptions were major polluters in that area and which ones so trivial it didn't really matter.
2. Some of the U.S. people appeared to be determined to set conditions that were obviously going to leave us with a treaty the U. S. Senate wouldn't ratify, or that all of the other signees would back out on. The core of this arguement is a claim that those people joined the negotiating team with ulterior motives, and weren't really there to get a treaty that would actually help with real environmental problems.
Some (not necessarily all, or even more than the general political mix) of these 'problem' people on our negotiating team were alledgedly financially connected to energy companies supporting the Republican party, or were sponsored by Republican congress-persons. The arguement goes that Bush did more than react to a badly flawed treaty, he had strong connections to the people who made sure that treaty was so badly flawed, and also treated minor flaws as additional reasons sufficient in themselves to justify his decision, so now nobody else wants to open a new round of negotiations. I would not be surprised if the same situation exists with regard some Democrat sponsored negotiators and corporate connections.
How much should Bush be held responsible? That depends on what else he does about the environment, whether Kyoto was really screwed up by a particular group of neo-conservatives or by more general veniality and incompetence that crosses party lines, and lots of other such factors. I'm perfectly fine myself with blameing a good part of it on President Clinton, and part on lots of other people who aren't Republicans, but I also think blame here couples to such related issues as how this administration has handled scientific disagreements over environmental methodology.
Of course some of the people blameing Bush think we should have taken Kyoto even in that final form. Why THEY blame Bush is a good question, as I think they are already mistaken in including that factor in their reasoning. Plenty of people who are strongly committed to one party or the other have picked out only those details of the Kyoto mess that fit their worldview, which I gather was one of your points.
Climate=!Weather
What you are argueing is basically equivalent to saying, "My insurance company can't predict the exact date of my death, so why should I believe those actuarial tables that show smoking reduces life expectancy?"
Some climateologists have predicted an increase in tornados in the midwest US as the average water table levels in the west drop, along with a shift in the distribution of those tornados. We've seen that, with 2002 being a very high year for numbers of tornados, 2003 setting a new hundred+ year record, and 2004 also running way above the old averages.
What happened with Hurricanes this year may not prove much by itself, but it's a suspicious case. In addition to the effects most US'ians have noted, the Pacific Monsoon season has been unusually tough, particularly on Japan and the Phillippines. I'd prefer to see if this pattern continues before making too much of what, granted, could still be a fluke, but the alternate theory of the 30 year natural hurricane cycle would have to be extended to cover Pacific storms as well if it's to make any sense.
In my region of the country, the deciduous tree line is rising higher on the mountaintops. Trees don't walk - for the line to rise, conditions have to favor deciduous seedling growth higher up the mountainsides, and they have to stay that way long enough for new generations to continue the process. Measurable increases in tree species altitude take a minimum of 10 years, requiring a change that has been consistent over at least that much time. For some slower growing species whose seeds don't usually travel far, the numbers are much higher than that. We can look at which species have migrated the most, and which are becoming rare or locally extinct instead of moving, and get some pretty interesting estimates of when the climate zigs and zags.
The people who have been rejecting any arguements for serious climate shift locally keep referring to each year's data as an individual case, and refusing to admit that those individual cases have to be part of a larger pattern for the observed changes to have taken place.
Local weather shows an abrupt shift, now about 5 years old, towards a major increase in rainfall. Before that time, the average August might go a whole month without rain, and could be expected to have at least 1 two week dry period. "Indian" Summers were standard (we had one 80-90% of the time), and periods when the reservoirs were very low in both the late summer and the late winter. We've seen a local average of 14" increase in yearly rainfall in these last five years. There has not been a single July or August where rains have been more than 5 days apart (And for the rest of the year, usually wetter, that number is more like 3 days).
The way this gets reported is the new years get averaged in with the older ones, so the amount we are above average keeps decreasing, and so technically each year is not as much over the hundred year average as the last. Actually graphing the numbers by week or month shows an old average and a new average, with a spectacularly sharp contrast over a few years where the graph really ramps up and then becomes a still gradually rising plateau.
The Chaos theory arguement makes a certain amount of sense, and certainly ought to be taken into account in explaining why some specific, short term predictions are a waste of time, but... Some variables are more important than others. A Hurricane is basically an enormous energy sink. The rates for heat exchange and such can vary, but still, the 2nd law overides many possibilities, and a hurricane always lasts until enough energy has poured into the low energy zone to balance out. When the energy differential is great, the flow is rapid, and when it becomes smaller, the flow is less, and Chaos effects don't overide those general trends. If the planet really is retaining more energy due to the greenhouse effect, then I don't expect any 0.01% changes in any other variables to over-ride the 2nd law, just because it's a larger scale.
Computer security research is the AI of our time.
Yes, but AI is also still the AI of our time. So's 90% of Macroeconomics, 80% of Chaos Theory, and a whopping 103.8% of Nanaotech.
Compromised is Compromised. Once you think an undercover operative has any serious chance of being recognized, they are totally useless in that job. Further publicity doesn't make them more compromised, or mean you rotate them to a desk job quicker.
Some american shotgun makers used to make 8 gauge single barrel shotguns, up until 1938, when the gun was banned for waterfoul hunting. It was such a heavy design, that almost no one wanted one anyway, so there was little protest. After that about half a dozen 8 gauge shotguns were made under special liscence, each year, until the 1950's, and sold to steel foundrys. They were used for shooting open stuck doors on pouring aparatus, in mills that still used old fashioned fire clay channels to direct molten steel. For this reason, the shells manufactured for 8 gauges after 1938 started at 000 shot, and sometimes went to Quint-0.
(Either that, or its all a cover up for the Time-Gate project's obvious need for a gun for T-Rex.)
We've got a lot of problems right here on earth, folks- and I'd much rather you all put that brainpower to them.
There are lots of down to earth problems involving high loads and other stressors on cables. How do you make the SF bay area bridge safer against earthquakes? (or against sabotage?). How do we scale up the design of that suspension bridge to get multi-mile spans in the Florida keys or elsewhere? Is it possible to build such a bridge across the Gibraltar istmus?
Can we make a cable that's strong and waterproof enough to safety retrofit earthenware dams all around the mouth of the Mississippi region, and do it cheaply? Is there something that could help stabilize really tall free standing radio masts in central Russia, and is thermally less expansive than steel cable, or better yet electrically non-conductive? What design changes could have kept the WTC standing for at least a few additional hours, and what sort of materials would they require?
The thing is, if we get good answers to even some of these questions, they are likely in this case to point us towards towards space program uses as well. The problems you cite will apply to every use, not just a space elevator. Someone will be looking into using these fibers for zeppelin fabric to build really large gasbags and set up a major freight hauling system across the Mediterranian sea, and someone else will raise the issues of safety, location or insurance just like you have here.
Half the reason so many engineers want to build really big projects like space elevators is to show all the people who toss out bullet comments just like yours for every new project, space or earth, military or peaceful, that big things can still be done. You're doing it about space. Someone else will do it about any new idea that could alleviate poverty, or clean up the environment, or somehow improve someone's quality of life. So nothing will change. Thank goodness its all perfect now.
"This is another arrow in the quivver of those who would do harm, I'd agree, but the quivver exists already."
Most definitely. I can see how this DRM method might be of some interst to a blackhat wishing to modify an existing plan, or be a sort of add on, but it really can't be counted as a serious exploit by itself. It's just not damaging enough to stop a site cold without becoming extremely obvious, and can only be used subtly if the intent is to just slow down the spread of some piece of content/a message. In many circumstances, it would be self defeating, as the news that a site had been hacked with it would probably get that site's message spread more widely later as a colateral effect.
At least, it looks that way for now, and while I really hope with every exploit that it doesn't turn into a bigger vulnerability than it first appears, I'd be willing to bet that this particular one won't turn out to be all that dangerous.
Of course, I just last night had to show my wife the effects of the "print scr" key on her Xp box's keyboard. 3 years with that particular board, She'd never wondered what any of those keys did, (and yet she is now quite disappointed that "Scrl lok" is useless to her). I can see what kind of user behavior this will be effective against. It works pretty well as a DRM method, and probably does assure some content holders they can minimize their risks enough to take part.
I still think it's paranoia to worry about preventing copying for a partial excerpt from a larger work, but I don't know of a way to get the content owners to take a magic anti-paranoia pill and Google evidently does know how to give them some reassurance that helps them over the hump and into the 21st century.
It's not necessarily possible this can be used to spread some other package, like an attached trojan. How about viewing it as the possible warhead, not the delivery system. I.e., a modifed existing virus or trojan exploits this vulnerability to turn off features like save, copy, (or maybe print) in your browser. You're trying to copy or print legally distributed content, such as instructions for removing the virus, and this slows you down. For that percentage of viruses written to be annoying, this feature looks like a great one to add to printing stupid Leet'speak on the screen, making the mouse pointer jump around, and such tricks.
Or it can be viewed as an element of a DoS. Imagine a political website that has content they want to freely distribute. Infecting a number of site visitors with something, that as one of its effects, screws up copying or saving that content, is likely to be taken by most of the site's visitors as just a case of the site not having its HTML up to par. The site is effectively under an attack which it may never know happened, unless it gets enough visitor complaints.
1. Start off as a person not using credit.
;-)
2. Apply for a moderately difficult to get account, such as a 9.5% preferred visa card, and not a simple card to get (i.e. a 21% Sears card).
3. On the application, list a low income, a job like "writer", and stipulate your income is irregular.
4. You now have been rejected for credit, and this will stay on your credit score for at least 2 years. At this point, the companies that would have issued you a small limit - high interest card won't see the reasons you were rejected, just that you were.
5. If you want to make really sure, repeat steps 2-4 a few times.
If you ever need to reverse this, complete a new application with a (hopefully true) higher listed income from a steadier paying job, voluntarily requesting a smaller line of credit that the maximum they will offer that income bracket.
At the worst, you may have to write a letter to one of the credit review agencies to make sure your record is properly updated, but no one in the more responsible side of the credit industry is going to blacklist you, and the less responsible side of the industry just looks at the highlights of the records Providian and the other review services provide.
This will not stop real fools from sending you letters that say you have been pre-approved for a line of credit based on your home ownership, even though you don't own a home. There are companies that have sent tens of thousands of offers out to minor children, and even one that sent several thousands of credit offers out to a list of people's pets some scammer had sold them after obtaining it from veterinary records.
These companies typically charge high rates and have lots of hidden penalties, have a lot of fraud committed against them, and in return play dirty in trying to collect from most of their clients. They work with collection agencies that will violate state laws whenever they think they can get away with it. They often fall afoul of the law themselves, and actually have a poor return on investment. Nothing short of finally going out of business will stop such fools from being scammed and wasting your time in return if someone commits a fraud agaisnt them using your identity.
Sorry I couldn't leave out step 2
How about "vicious"?
There's two reasons.
1. The bill may turn out to be a bad law in practice. (The 'patriot' act has an expiration date. Some of the proponents haggled over just how long the law should apply, and picked a time when we should have had opportunity to cool down a bit and think about it.).
2. If it's a pretty good law, congress will still have to renew it when the time comes. It's easier to tweak the law in the new version with automatic expiration. If it's a good law with a few flaws, it's going to have to be re-examined automatically anyway.
The biggest advantage for the non technical user is that they can take the finished list it produces and submit it for inspection by others, via the website. A user could probably make notes of what lines MSCONFIG shows and google for each one they had doubts about, but that's likely to be more time consuming than the single list, and depending on the user, less productive.
Also, clicking on the "Info on Selected item..." button in HijackThis gets a pop-up explanation of the selected line in the list. In some cases, this may be all the user needs. For example, asking for "info on selected item" over an entry like "extra button: Messenger" will give the explanation "that such items are "...usually present after system updates (MSN messenger button) and rarely used by hijackers...". The info often lists most of the most common legitmate uses.
It's not a panacea. At its worst, it gives exactly the sort of information a user can see from running MSCONFIG. For example the info the user will see on the Browser Helper Object (BHO) emplaced by Acrobat Reader won't tell them anything useful if they don't know why they have Adobe Acrobat Reader on their system. That's probably the sort of entry you tried, hence your comparison is fair enough, but it's going to depend a lot on whether what you have on your machine falls into certain classes that have gotten special attention, or not.
Well, 110 Miles/hour isn't quite optimal for me, but it's getting pretty close ... Oh, you mean 110 miles on a full charge, at say 45 to 55 MPH... Uhm, nevermind.
Whooooosh!
Viewed at the whole organism level, recursive use of code would describe parent-child incest.
Someone will be along to explain what the Whoooooshing noise was.
"The right way to fight this is to fight it on grounds that the FCC doesn't have the authority to alter the fundamental nature copyright law through their rulemaking"
I'm very glad you got mod points for this, as it seems both accurate and informative, but it raised another question in my mind.
A while back, there was a legal decision usually referred to as the "Thor Power Tool" case, that involved the IRS and company accounting/amortization methods. The case had a huge impact on the publishing industry, and is effectively the reason why now, even a popular author such as Tom Clancy or Steven King has works that cycle in and out of print instead of being reprinted constantly in anticipation of eventual demand.
For those people who have considered copying an out of print work and claiming that the fact it is long out of print means there's no economic loss, 'Thor Power Tool' is ultimately the root law that negates that defense, as 'long out of print' is no longer something the court dares consider or define more precisely, unless they want to risk screwing up tax law over a copyright case. Note that author's associations and such have frequently claimed 'Thor Power Tool' hurts the authors and publishers, and in particular new authors just starting out, and not just those persons wanting to distribute out of print works.
I'm wondering if it could be argued on the same basis as you mention, that the IRS doesn't have the authority to make 'Thor Power Tool' apply to the publishing industry, because it has more than its intended effects, limited to tax law, and instead, also alters the nature of copyright law (if it makes it harder for new authors to get started, it's doing the opposite of "promoting progress in the useful arts", as the U.S. Constitution says).
It looks like it might actually be in the publishing industry's favor to recognize a right to copy works long lapsed from print, if in return they would regain the right to make 'out of print' mean what it originally meant to them financially.
(The necessity for my signature is shown by the fact that I am actually discussing the possibilty that the courts decide an issue by reference to the constitution, rather than just precedent. It'll happen right after Monkees fly out of Rhenquist's butt.).
(Assuming you have an old laptop that most of the parts are working.)
Get copies of:
1. all the hardware manuals for all your more modern systems. Particularly, get your mainboard manual, schematics for jumpering and cabling your hard drives and CD/DVD drives, and info on your network, video and sound cards.
2. lists of your bios beep codes, and other startup info if needed.
3. selected software documentation. (mostly for essential parts, such as the OS).
4. If you have any windows boxen, copies of system configuration info, particularly how Windows has assigned IRQs and DMAs, particularly on older systems, and a known good backup or two of the registry.
5. a list of URLs for your hardware and software manufacturers (optional - only really useful if you can get to the internet by some other means without having to lug this laptop to the public library or something just to connect)
These files, with an older OS, will typically come to a few hundred Mb or less. Set up the laptop with the aprropriate software to read them all (you'll probably just need a general text reader and maybe Adobe Acrobat reader for PDFs, not usually much else). Voila! Now when you lose LAN or internet connectivity, or the machine won't even boot right, you have a portable tech support library.
There ARE a few things Joe Average can do that will make this less easy for them... ...
As just one example
One small step every person with a debit card can do is encourage businesses to get the tech to process it as debit, rather than running it as a credit transaction at their end. That little PIN is a bit of extra account security for the customer, which is lost when the business can't handle it at their end, and the business loses as well when they pay the credit card company about 2%/transaction for the privledge of handling credit cards.
Many businesses still don't realize this is a potential savings for them and a win for customers. Tell managers and small business owners it's something you want, and you tend to give your business to companies that have it.
If you are actually a loan officer for a bank, not having a plan to add debit processing capability should be a black mark in considering small business start-up plans for loans, for the same reasons. If you invest, it's one of the things you should check before investing in a retail business.
If you don't have a debit card, but use credit cards, you can't help with this, but you might want to consider how in-frackin'-credibly vulnerable you are to being the hardest hit person by an information warefare era attack.
Fascism can develop without a racial extermination angle. The current government of mainland China, for example, has survived for 3 generations, and is probably much closer to fascism than communism, while its fascist traits are generally unrecognized as such - for example their semi-official policy that ethnic Chinese that are citizens of other nations are still really subject to PRC law, and those people have an obligation not to speak ill of the Chinese government or they are betraying their entire race, etc.
Fascism tends to need scapegoats for its failures, but those don't have to be chosen along racial lines. Americans who are "soft on terror" would make a lovely scapegoat. The way the word 'Liberal' is used in some circles is well along towards scapegoat status. There don't have to be mass exterminations at all, unless the fascist government screws up the economy enough that slave labor starts looking really effective. A few lynchings here and there are often enough to keep the powers that be in power.
Let's not wait for mass exterminations this time. Protecting some big, long established businesses that have close ties to government from public scrutiny is an early sign, not just in regimes such as Nazi Germany, where the end result was genocide, but in Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, which had plenty of their own share of evil without necessarily being big on killing jews.
Anti-cocaine? Bet that has a real bang going up your nose!
It's not just that the body processes synthetic sugar differently than a natural sugar such as fructose that should give people pause.
This is a general tendency for serious drugs - The opiates are all similar to natural endorphins, with just a few OH radical's here and there for differences. When the body breaks down a synthetic opiate, several reactions proceed at the same speed as for natural endorphins, then a step occurs where the reaction chokes, as the enzymes responsible for that stage of metabolism don't fit the synthetic. Brain chemestry gets thrown off by this.
LSD and the various Mescalineoids have the same property in mimicing serotonin, again a natural brain chemical. They get a certain part of the way through the normal metabolic processes, then chemical breakdown slows, and again, brain chemistry fluctuates as a result.
There are some other drugs that the pattern isn't this clear. Psilocyben may or may not have a particular choke point in its metabolic path, although it does partially mimic some natural brain chemistry compounds. THC may or may not resemble a particular estrogen compound occuring naturally enough to go through some of the same metabolic pathways, the results are mixed. Partly, that's because these are both produced by plants and many of the tests use a mixture of several related chemical forms as those plants naturally don't make 100% pure anything.
Processed sugar metabolism involves splitting a double sugar molecule into two natural sugars right at the start of the process. The body doesn't seem to do this at a properly controlled speed, witness the fluctuations in the levels of those natural sugars as normally measured in the bloodstream.
Even in people with good tolerance for sugar (non-diabetics), those levels routinely vary by 200% or more (i.e. a typical fasting reading of 80, and a reading 15 minutes after eating sweets of 240, is not uncommon). That's an amplitude variation similar to what we see with the halucinogens for serotonin, and only moderately less than the fluctuation in natural endorphin levels of heavy opiate abusers.
I doubt that there is a single district or city that could cut their case load by enough if they stopped prosecuting drug offenses that they would need to lay off an assistant DA. Even if there was a long term effect, the existing prosecutors could stay employed for 10 years just reducing the case load to where the average case was finished in under a year again, and could probably be useful for another 10 years reviewing cold cases, doing pro-bono work, reviewing existing convict's appeals, parole hearings, and other such tasks.
Most of the people doing public service announcements got caught with something, and this is their way of working it off, not a means to profit.
That leaves the politicians. Their job security doesn't depend on scareing us witless, unless we let it. Whenever possible, vote for the candidates who don't stoop to scare tactics, (and not just drug related ones).
Biologicals are one of the few reasons it might make sense to use Nukes. A high end biological weapon (say an open air vectorable Ebola Zaire strain), can theoretically be a literal billion killer. If used, we stop counting Megadeaths and start figuring in Gigadeaths instead.
Worse, if it is used on the US, the vast majority of deaths happen to the citizens of various tropical nations, who are all innocent bystanders, likely not even involved in the war until then. We, and much of Europe, would probably manage a mortality rate of less than 30%, thanks to modern medicine and cool climates, but much of the world wouldn't.
A modest, sane, and rational response to such a weapon if it was known to still be confined to a lab in some area would be the simultanious detonation of two nuclear devices, one fused for ground and the other airbursting at about 5,000 meters, both with the dial-a-yield cranked all the way up. Sadly, to have even a chance of success at staving off Armagheddon, no warning or ultimatum could be given, let alone a two week grace period.
Unfortunately, the only time we have suspected anyone was possibly running such a Bio-weapons program, the suspected lab was within 3 miles of a major city. Despite that, killing a million to save a billion, or more, argueably isn't crazy. But we had damned well better be right, and our record on finding WMD labs isn't looking too good right now.
1. there are only a dozen or so countries that have any space capability of their own. When you get past a few European nations and China, everyone else puts up their sattelites with the aid of the US or one of those two, so of course in many cases, we know whether the widgets have cameras and such on board - we helped launch them. One of the reasons we like the European Space Agancy is they are very far from covert about launch verification. If the ESA is putting up a bird for some African nation, for example, and the US wants to inspect it or supervise loading, we just ask.
2. Even for a lot of the ones we didn't launch, we know pretty much what's on board. That's part of the CIA's share of your tax dollars at work.
3. Spysats have to either drop film to be recovered the old fashioned way, or send encripted data to a ground reciever. The Soviet Union in the early 60's was the only country that we are sure managed to hide encripted photo traffic among regular communications packets for even a few weeks without it being detected (and it looked mighty suspicious that the bird was passing over the US several times a day instead of sitting in a geo-syncronous orbit over Russia, even before wwe could technically prove it.). A useful spysat can be detected simply by its having an orbital profile that keeps putting it over things the owner would want to take pictures of.
So I doubt there are hundreds, or even dozens, of sattelites with any unknown features in near space. There are probably a few out in geosyncronous orbit that were supposedly for civilian TV traffic only and can actually relay military information, because that's an easier trick to pull off. This technology apparently isn't aimed at the stuff in high orbits though.
I'm pretty sure they have something to hide, whether it's that they acted overly paranoid about Lennon's politics or just that Hoover lusted after Yoko's wardrobe, but I doubt it has anything to do with the actual murder.