So what if there are some new people involved in a successor system, and their names prominently associated with it? What if the new version's name doesn't sound linearly derived from a predecessor? Or if the owners take that new name and politicise it, put up a site for "Freedombin" or "Newsliberty", and slap a few portraits of the royal family and union jacks on the webpage? What if they rewrite the info files and such to stress how this software is for the free exchange of political information in the face of a rising tide of dictatorial officials who have forgotten what freedom is, and they expect there will be attempts by some overreaching judge to destroy this last, lone voice of freedom, but the people will ultimately prevail? Does the judge still want to automatically grant requests without the cost of discovery when it looks like he is shortcutting the judicial process for opposed political speech, not just for "piracy"?
July and August are not exceptions - They were named after Julius and Augustus as part of ceremonially making those Caesers gods after their deaths. Squeezing them in moved the month numbered seven (September) to the ninth slot, October to tenth and so on.
There were some people who got as far as officially changing the week and month so that there were no ancient religious mentions involved. For example, they made the name of the hottest month Thermidore so as to give it a quite rational association and avoid naming months after deified Roman emperors in their new calender. This didn't stick, because they a. also instituted what was called 'The Reign of Terror", b. died violently within weeks of tampering with the calender, and c. went down in history as mostly first class jerks.
I put Kubuntu 9.04 on an old IBM Thinkpad (R-32), from the era when a 30 Gb. hard drive was big for laptops. This machine us now up to version 11.04, and runs reasonably fast. It sleeps when you close the lid, sound worked out of the box, and while battery life is lousy, it's certainly better than when the Thinkpad was running Win Xp, and we are talking about an 11 year old original battery here, and a system that originally shipped with Win 98se.
Linux seems to meet many of his feature requests, running on very old hardware that was never designed for it. (I don't know about backup solutions, as everything essential is easily backed up by just copying it to a cheap 8 Gb. thumbdrive for a system that small, so I haven't bothered with more complex solutions.). Did something break in the design of all the newer laptops? I mean, Kubuntu and Ubuntu came out with laptop specific versions, Xubuntu and Edubuntu versions were created with extra backwards compatibility, there are Damned Small or Puppy Linux distros which run with 64 Mg or RAM or less, Advanced Power Management got all formalized and regularized and all the hooks documented, everybody's sound cards and chips now have an old Soundblaster 16 compatible mode so you can always coax something out of them... Why has Linux on laptops evidently gotten harder? I'd assume that most of what the original poster wants is dead easy now, except for the Apple specific item.
The underlying reason 'slippery slope' arguments are considered a logical fallacy is that formal logic uses absolute formulas: ALL men are mortal - Socrates is a man - therefore Socrates is mortal. You can't use logic the same way starting from "MOST men are mortal". It's not considered a proper logical argument to say "If we take step E, we will inevitably eventually end up at Step Z". That doesn't mean it's illogical to argue that a series of events tends in a certain direction, or that it is at least possible people will take more steps in that direction until they end up at Step Z, just that it's illogical to argue any one step makes all the rest inevitable.
If you deal only with formal logic, you can't reason by analogy at all. If, for example, you say that people tried something similar to Step G in the past, and eventually bad things happened, You possibly face the problem of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc", the slippery slope fallacy, and the problem of just what constitutes 'similar'. Ergo, we can't really learn from the example of history, nor can we be condemned to repeat it, and 'logically' we should all ignore Santayana's warning.
Religions are a type of Philosophy. The religious fanatic is a subtype of philosophically driven fanatics in the more general sense. Your stamp collecting metaphor assumes it's possible to not have a philosophy of life at all, or to have one that is as trivial as a hobby. So if your philosophy of life is a trivial hobby, are you willing to keep arguing for it on slashdot? Whatever you believe or don't believe, the choice here is to respect your own opinion enough to take it as much more than a hobby, or to become a fanatic who respects others beliefs or lack thereof so little as to try compulsion, but I doubt you've ever met a person who actually, consciously followed the third choice of reducing it to the level of hobbies.
Quantization itself most certainly does stop arithmetic encoding from achieving infinite precision, The fact that the real universe seems to have a minimum length and a minimum interval is why, for just one example, storing all the information that has fallen into a black hole requires the surface area of its event horizon. For the simpler case of a matchstick, you simply cannot infinitely divide the matchstick. 1.616199(97)×10(E-35) meters is as small as things get. That's about 10(E-20) x the diameter of a proton, so not only is no known technology anywhere close to that accuracy, but even if a way was somehow found to reduce the temperature of a matchstick to incredibly near absolute zero, 'notch' a single proton, and read the information back without disturbing the length, we'd still be nowhere close. Now, how does the universe apply physical laws, when the actual events themselves can be considered as analog computations, either of themselves or other events? Even the simplest equation, such as F=ma, will sometimes produce numbers that are infinite non-repeating decimals (or whatever base the universe uses). The universe doesn't have infinite registers to store those numbers, ergo the real events are only approximate calculations, and the universe, if viewed as a gigantic computer as some people have suggested, fudges its maths.
because the abusive images came from somewhere and by collecting them, you are providing the "customer demand" for more abuse of children.
More specifically than the general principle of demand, when it comes to child porn, there are boards and servers where people must provide some new content to get access to an inner core of photos or video showing the most explicitly pornographic images. To get new content to swap for access, the visitor just about has to commit the actual acts necessary to create new child porn. While I can imagine cases where somebody photographs a simulated rape to access rape porn, or photographs a person over the age of consent to gain access to images of, say, 15-16 year olds, some of these sites, when raided by the FBI, were specifically insisting on penetration images, obviously pre-pubescent children, and other such rules where there's simply no way the original act was not criminal.
(Yes, I know this is Slashdot). The cameras in question are USB 2.0 based devices, so that defines what's practical here by the USB standard. For example, if the project is worth about $29 US per camera, then cameras can each be located about 100-150 feet away from a PC, using CAT 5 based extensions to USB. If you can't raise about that much money for the project, it's out - for example mounting cameras near raptor's nests that may be 50-80 feet off the ground is probably only going to be feasible even with free student labor if there's at least that $29 additional per camera available. Figure you might get extensions a bit cheaper in bulk, but you might also need some things like silicon caulk to waterproof connectors, and I don't see it getting much cheaper. Whether risk approval issues would block such uses or not, this financial issue has to be considered in any location.
By themselves, limited range means largely indoor use in classrooms or a public setting. Maybe a sociology or history course could use them to record public interviews. Right now, many communities would like to record interviews with older people who were there since the town was built, or remember what it was like before the interstate came through or the old mill burned down or whatever. Interviewing Vietnam, Korean or even WW2 veterans is still needed some places.
They're on a Ubuntu system, so don't they normally see a $ instead of a #, and have to sudo everywhere?
Kubuntu is moving ahead of its big brother in therms of users having control over both function and customization. Unless someone is so attached to the ability to set a wallpaper like image behind the panes in Nautilus and that's a deal-breaker until Dolphin implements it, I don't see why anyone dissatisfied with either the Unity interface or the current direction of Gnome wouldn't give Kubuntu and KDE a try.
While I naturally considered suggesting a spell checker for your posts, I must admit you've got me. Seclated? Not only do I have absolutely no idea what word that was supposed to be, but it sounds like it should be a real word. In fact, please come up with a real definition for 'seclated' and try to get it widely adopted.
However, please don' t try that with "casue", "redrick", "tyhe"or "froma".
I'm still puzzling over the weak weapons bit... As the footage on You-tube shows scenario after scenario where the player makes multiple successful kills with various sniper weapons - one shot, one kill. I saw weapons that blew enemies into ittie bitties that came falling down out of the sky seconds later just to knock down other enemies, insta-gib kills galore, grenade like explosions with realistically lethal ranges, a spinning blade thingee that lopped off heads or cleaved torsos in half on a single toss, Now there's admittedly things in the dead city that don't drop too fast, but they are literally twenty feet tall in scale, There was a fifty footer too, which eventually polished off the player POV in the demo, maybe that's the one Opposable Thumbs is measuring the weapons against.
There are objectively defined cases of price fixing, and this particular case seems to fit the definition. I'm not particularly trying to take heat off Hitachi in what follows, but it needs to be pointed out:
Whenever a tech industry member gets charged with price fixing, anti-trust, violating export restrictions, or similar, remember, the way the US government calculates the inflation rate, they include an adjustment to new tech for the new features. The way the formula works, if a basic laptop computer sells for, say, $499, and two years later, one still sells for $499, but the DVD reader has been upgraded to a Blue Ray reader for entry level models, the formula counts that as deflation, making the overall inflation rate lower. Pushing tech companies to stop price fixing, while ignoring price fixing by, say, kid's cereal makers, will make the inflation rate look a little better, while the reverse isn't usually true with the formula adjustments now used. Many parts of the financial sector benefit from the claim that inflation is low, as do those political factions that don't want COLAs for social security. If you really tally up just who would prefer the government investigate Microsoft, Sony, Hitachi or AMD, vrs. investigating, say, Caterpillar Tractor, Tesla Motors, General Mills, Walmart or Archer Daniels Midland, you can see some real pressure to pursue some investigations thoroughly and drop others quickly.
You're using obscurity and secrecy as though they are synonyms, and they aren't. Take the Air Force 1 example already introduced in this thread. Secrecy means that certain information about the craft or procedures might, for example, be stored only on machines that are separated from the Internet by an air gap, dispensed only on a need to know basis, accessible only under a two man rule, or otherwise controlled by a set of formal rules. Obscurity might be relying on the fact that few people know who contracted to service various systems or where those people might keep information filed. That sort of definition is true whether obscurity is all you rely on or if its just a part of a greater security system.
You could have both these situations at once, and they could each have some properties in common, (such as there being 20 people who might serve as the source of information to an outsider), so they can look similar. But, and it's a big but,, they are still very different. In the case of organized secrecy, the supervisors know that an exact number of people have the information, they know if those people have had background checks, if they have been trained in not talking about their jobs, reporting attempts to contact them, and other indicators of a possible attack, and a number of things that the person relying on obscurity hasn't checked (or they would have turned the obscure system into a genuine secret.). The point is, when you take something somewhat obscure, and you put in place formal methods, you move out of just using obscurity for that part of the security system. When you take those 20 employees and former employees that might spill the beans, make a list of just who they are and change '20 or so' to an exact number, check up on the former employees who might be disgruntled, or change information access so those people can't rely on their old knowledge to harm your security, and probably take a dozen other steps, you've stopped relying on the obscurity of some information to protect you and started relying on something else.
It's not simply a matter of popularity, but go on posting anonymously and making it personal if you really think you need to enlighten me. Here's why:
1. UNIX based systems are used on a lot of business and banking facilities, which are much more valuable targets for some purposes than the typical home machine. If you want a botnet, yeah, you're going to prioritize having large numbers above many other considerations, but that would mean other types of cracking would not necessarily follow the same pattern, yet they generally do, within a few percent.
If you can explain why, for example, the servers that hold data on 10,000+ clients get subjected to successful attacks in almost exactly the same proportions as home machines, heavily 'favoring' Microsoft, yet the various UNIX related operating systems are much, much more common there, then you can claim popularity makes all, or even much of, the difference.
For another example, why didn't Apple cracking go up when i-tunes was first introduced, or when any other Apple product showed a big spike in popularity? Why, knowing Apples get a lot of use in Hollywood for film editing and art, don't the people who bootleg video workprints and such target Apples more there - a place where they are quite popular?
For another, certain brands of routers and networking gear are much more common than others and actually have a market share similar to MS vrs. their competition - why doesn't popularity there translate into anything like proportionately more exploits? 2. Microsoft set its own standards for API access, and several other things, and Microsoft chose to allow certain third party corporations such as Norton to do things in non-standard ways (again, non-standard and SUB-STANDARD to MS's own internally written rules, not to some other standards MS didn't really want to deal with anyway). Microsoft chose to give some third party software its "Windows Compatible" and higher seals of approval and let them use those in their advertising and packaging without vetting their code at all first, instead of insisting they first write to the specs to get them, and this opened up some specific holes for intrusion, simply because the best fixes for those attacks would have made third party product X also non-compatible. Microsoft's marketing, wanting to be able to boast of how much software ran on Windows, overrode the engineering department repeatedly to create that vulnerability. Even if it were true that ALL desktop exploits start off as exploits against apps, the way Microsoft dealt with some apps contributed to the problem. Just the the choice way back in the Win 95 days, to allow putting all sorts of third party app data in the registry instead of individual.ini's in the same directory as the third party owners, contributed to the system vulnerability. That this kept happening at least through XP, and by some accounts into the Vista years, has created a lot of momentum for Windows crackers.
For starters, Lot didn't manage to convince the mob - he attempted it, and the mob rejected the offer. Second, when somebody has offered hospitality to that 'some guy', and he keeps his promise, even to the extent of offering his own daughters up to the mob instead, that's a conflict of two moral virtues. Yeah, you can argue that it's not that tough a decision for Lot because he doesn't think of his daughters as people so much as property, But really, that''s something modern people infer from other sources that are very separate in time and culture, and maybe Lot really did love his daughters as people. Why is Lot NOT a role model? If he had broken his promise of hospitality, perhaps fought for hospitality until it looked like the price of fighting further would be his daughters, but then gave up, would he then be a good role model? It sounds a lot like you're saying that, whichever choice Lot had made among some very lousy alternatives, he would somehow be wrong in your eyes. So, if you can judge a man that way, why should I believe your moral understanding is sufficient to justify your other judgments?
You know, I've heard the Bible criticized for being morally simplistic in the past, and I can even agree with some of that, but this is probably the first time I've seen someone announce that morality is awfully fluid and then complain that the Bible presented a tough moral dilemma like there isn't an easy comfortable answer.
Sex with my ex-wife is the bet sex I've ever had, although it was pretty damned good when we were still married too (just less frequent than it is these days). I was married 23 years, and have been in a monogamous relationship with the same woman for 29 years now.
Diabetic needle reuse and sharing is seen almost exclusively in diabetics who are homeless or otherwise at severely low incomes, but it is documented. People who are unable to afford all the oral meds also used, or who have trouble getting the required prescriptions for injectors refilled regularly, do sometimes reuse needles, and even borrow from each other. Needles are controlled by prescription since they are also sought by illegal drug users, meaning diabetics without good access to doctors can run short. In other cases, not being able to afford the oral medications means the diabetic uses needles faster than their doctor thought they might and runs short. It's not that they are as uncaring about the risks as for typical heroin users or similar, but even with some risk awareness, sometimes it's the only option left.
Any power the government has includes paying for that power to be exercised with money raised by taxes, and taxation is always backed up by force. You're arguing that the federal government doesn't actually have the power to actually promote the general welfare as granted to it by the constitution. They can only promote the general welfare when they don't spend any taxes doing it. I guess that clause is only decorative. How about this: Common defense doesn't include forcefully taking money from one group of people only to give it to another, so the government has no right to actually buy bullets for its army's guns. See how earth-shakingly stupid that sounds?
If you go back to the original roman metaphor for Fascism, it is a bundle of sticks that is much harder to break tied together than it would be to break each stick individually if they were not. Technically, each stick could be said to shut up and go along with all the other sticks as an aggregate. In practice, however, there's never been any attempt at a Fascist government where the bundle of sticks as a whole directly decided where the bundle was going. It's always been that biggest stick in the middle claiming to represent all the rest by virtue of its superior position. I suppose there could be said to be exceptions when the metaphorical sticks are entire governments, i.e. Italian Fascism didn't always go along 100% with Nazi Germany, but when the metaphorical sticks are individual humans, I can't think of a single counterexample.
It does seem as if natural neutrino sources should have made this effect very apparent years before now if CERN is really seeing what they think they are. I can, however, think of a couple of reasons why this is different though, although I really doubt that this proves FTL Neutrinos are real.
The CERN experiment was originally about detecting type change in Neutrinos, with the detector spotting only one type of conversion, (Electron Neutrinos that had converted to Muon Neutrinos, if I remember right). Neutrinos formed deep inside the sun undergo a type of conversion before they reach the less dense layers of the Sun itself, but then switch to vacuum conversion and travel much farther between type changes. Supernova observations would all be of Neutrinos that have changed types many, many times as they cross millions of light years, so any difference in speeds would be an average, which might be expected to be very close to C. Even locally produced solar Neutrinos are crossing 93 Million miles. The CERN Neutrinos have not cycled many times in transiting only 700 Km or so..
Maybe we 'got lucky', and observed Neutrinos over a close to optimal distance for them to go through just one type change, and picked two types where the effect was to see faster than light motion rather than slower. Maybe a different experiment design and we'd be seeing (much less spectacular) headlines about how some CERN Neutrinos appeared to be moving slower than Light, as though they had rest masses above what previous experiments showed to be possible maximums, and the general public would be paying much less attention.
Slashdot Mirror
So what if there are some new people involved in a successor system, and their names prominently associated with it? What if the new version's name doesn't sound linearly derived from a predecessor? Or if the owners take that new name and politicise it, put up a site for "Freedombin" or "Newsliberty", and slap a few portraits of the royal family and union jacks on the webpage? What if they rewrite the info files and such to stress how this software is for the free exchange of political information in the face of a rising tide of dictatorial officials who have forgotten what freedom is, and they expect there will be attempts by some overreaching judge to destroy this last, lone voice of freedom, but the people will ultimately prevail? Does the judge still want to automatically grant requests without the cost of discovery when it looks like he is shortcutting the judicial process for opposed political speech, not just for "piracy"?
July and August are not exceptions - They were named after Julius and Augustus as part of ceremonially making those Caesers gods after their deaths.
Squeezing them in moved the month numbered seven (September) to the ninth slot, October to tenth and so on.
There were some people who got as far as officially changing the week and month so that there were no ancient religious mentions involved. For example, they made the name of the hottest month Thermidore so as to give it a quite rational association and avoid naming months after deified Roman emperors in their new calender. This didn't stick, because they a. also instituted what was called 'The Reign of Terror", b. died violently within weeks of tampering with the calender, and c. went down in history as mostly first class jerks.
I put Kubuntu 9.04 on an old IBM Thinkpad (R-32), from the era when a 30 Gb. hard drive was big for laptops. This machine us now up to version 11.04, and runs reasonably fast. It sleeps when you close the lid, sound worked out of the box, and while battery life is lousy, it's certainly better than when the Thinkpad was running Win Xp, and we are talking about an 11 year old original battery here, and a system that originally shipped with Win 98se.
Linux seems to meet many of his feature requests, running on very old hardware that was never designed for it. (I don't know about backup solutions, as everything essential is easily backed up by just copying it to a cheap 8 Gb. thumbdrive for a system that small, so I haven't bothered with more complex solutions.). Did something break in the design of all the newer laptops? I mean, Kubuntu and Ubuntu came out with laptop specific versions, Xubuntu and Edubuntu versions were created with extra backwards compatibility, there are Damned Small or Puppy Linux distros which run with 64 Mg or RAM or less, Advanced Power Management got all formalized and regularized and all the hooks documented, everybody's sound cards and chips now have an old Soundblaster 16 compatible mode so you can always coax something out of them... Why has Linux on laptops evidently gotten harder? I'd assume that most of what the original poster wants is dead easy now, except for the Apple specific item.
I am Spartacus!
The underlying reason 'slippery slope' arguments are considered a logical fallacy is that formal logic uses absolute formulas: ALL men are mortal - Socrates is a man - therefore Socrates is mortal. You can't use logic the same way starting from "MOST men are mortal". It's not considered a proper logical argument to say "If we take step E, we will inevitably eventually end up at Step Z". That doesn't mean it's illogical to argue that a series of events tends in a certain direction, or that it is at least possible people will take more steps in that direction until they end up at Step Z, just that it's illogical to argue any one step makes all the rest inevitable.
If you deal only with formal logic, you can't reason by analogy at all. If, for example, you say that people tried something similar to Step G in the past, and eventually bad things happened, You possibly face the problem of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc", the slippery slope fallacy, and the problem of just what constitutes 'similar'. Ergo, we can't really learn from the example of history, nor can we be condemned to repeat it, and 'logically' we should all ignore Santayana's warning.
Religions are a type of Philosophy. The religious fanatic is a subtype of philosophically driven fanatics in the more general sense. Your stamp collecting metaphor assumes it's possible to not have a philosophy of life at all, or to have one that is as trivial as a hobby. So if your philosophy of life is a trivial hobby, are you willing to keep arguing for it on slashdot? Whatever you believe or don't believe, the choice here is to respect your own opinion enough to take it as much more than a hobby, or to become a fanatic who respects others beliefs or lack thereof so little as to try compulsion, but I doubt you've ever met a person who actually, consciously followed the third choice of reducing it to the level of hobbies.
Not sure I believe this, as the only show my cat likes is Fringe, which she watches religiously.
Charles Stross beat you to it, in "HaltinG StatE". Now if I could only remember who beat him to it.
Actually, yes, I suspect most professional historians of science who have seen Back to the Future would agree with that sentiment.
I'm reasonably sure that there is definitely no air that deep into space.
Quantization itself most certainly does stop arithmetic encoding from achieving infinite precision, The fact that the real universe seems to have a minimum length and a minimum interval is why, for just one example, storing all the information that has fallen into a black hole requires the surface area of its event horizon. For the simpler case of a matchstick, you simply cannot infinitely divide the matchstick.
1.616199(97)×10(E-35) meters is as small as things get. That's about 10(E-20) x the diameter of a proton, so not only is no known technology anywhere close to that accuracy, but even if a way was somehow found to reduce the temperature of a matchstick to incredibly near absolute zero, 'notch' a single proton, and read the information back without disturbing the length, we'd still be nowhere close.
Now, how does the universe apply physical laws, when the actual events themselves can be considered as analog computations, either of themselves or other events? Even the simplest equation, such as F=ma, will sometimes produce numbers that are infinite non-repeating decimals (or whatever base the universe uses). The universe doesn't have infinite registers to store those numbers, ergo the real events are only approximate calculations, and the universe, if viewed as a gigantic computer as some people have suggested, fudges its maths.
because the abusive images came from somewhere and by collecting them, you are providing the "customer demand" for more abuse of children.
More specifically than the general principle of demand, when it comes to child porn, there are boards and servers where people must provide some new content to get access to an inner core of photos or video showing the most explicitly pornographic images. To get new content to swap for access, the visitor just about has to commit the actual acts necessary to create new child porn. While I can imagine cases where somebody photographs a simulated rape to access rape porn, or photographs a person over the age of consent to gain access to images of, say, 15-16 year olds, some of these sites, when raided by the FBI, were specifically insisting on penetration images, obviously pre-pubescent children, and other such rules where there's simply no way the original act was not criminal.
(Yes, I know this is Slashdot).
The cameras in question are USB 2.0 based devices, so that defines what's practical here by the USB standard. For example, if the project is worth about $29 US per camera, then cameras can each be located about 100-150 feet away from a PC, using CAT 5 based extensions to USB. If you can't raise about that much money for the project, it's out - for example mounting cameras near raptor's nests that may be 50-80 feet off the ground is probably only going to be feasible even with free student labor if there's at least that $29 additional per camera available. Figure you might get extensions a bit cheaper in bulk, but you might also need some things like silicon caulk to waterproof connectors, and I don't see it getting much cheaper. Whether risk approval issues would block such uses or not, this financial issue has to be considered in any location.
By themselves, limited range means largely indoor use in classrooms or a public setting. Maybe a sociology or history course could use them to record public interviews. Right now, many communities would like to record interviews with older people who were there since the town was built, or remember what it was like before the interstate came through or the old mill burned down or whatever. Interviewing Vietnam, Korean or even WW2 veterans is still needed some places.
They're on a Ubuntu system, so don't they normally see a $ instead of a #, and have to sudo everywhere?
Kubuntu is moving ahead of its big brother in therms of users having control over both function and customization. Unless someone is so attached to the ability to set a wallpaper like image behind the panes in Nautilus and that's a deal-breaker until Dolphin implements it, I don't see why anyone dissatisfied with either the Unity interface or the current direction of Gnome wouldn't give Kubuntu and KDE a try.
While I naturally considered suggesting a spell checker for your posts, I must admit you've got me. Seclated? Not only do I have absolutely no idea what word that was supposed to be, but it sounds like it should be a real word. In fact, please come up with a real definition for 'seclated' and try to get it widely adopted.
However, please don' t try that with "casue", "redrick", "tyhe"or "froma".
I'm still puzzling over the weak weapons bit... As the footage on You-tube shows scenario after scenario where the player makes multiple successful kills with various sniper weapons - one shot, one kill. I saw weapons that blew enemies into ittie bitties that came falling down out of the sky seconds later just to knock down other enemies, insta-gib kills galore, grenade like explosions with realistically lethal ranges, a spinning blade thingee that lopped off heads or cleaved torsos in half on a single toss, Now there's admittedly things in the dead city that don't drop too fast, but they are literally twenty feet tall in scale, There was a fifty footer too, which eventually polished off the player POV in the demo, maybe that's the one Opposable Thumbs is measuring the weapons against.
There are objectively defined cases of price fixing, and this particular case seems to fit the definition. I'm not particularly trying to take heat off Hitachi in what follows, but it needs to be pointed out:
Whenever a tech industry member gets charged with price fixing, anti-trust, violating export restrictions, or similar, remember, the way the US government calculates the inflation rate, they include an adjustment to new tech for the new features. The way the formula works, if a basic laptop computer sells for, say, $499, and two years later, one still sells for $499, but the DVD reader has been upgraded to a Blue Ray reader for entry level models, the formula counts that as deflation, making the overall inflation rate lower. Pushing tech companies to stop price fixing, while ignoring price fixing by, say, kid's cereal makers, will make the inflation rate look a little better, while the reverse isn't usually true with the formula adjustments now used. Many parts of the financial sector benefit from the claim that inflation is low, as do those political factions that don't want COLAs for social security. If you really tally up just who would prefer the government investigate Microsoft, Sony, Hitachi or AMD, vrs. investigating, say, Caterpillar Tractor, Tesla Motors, General Mills, Walmart or Archer Daniels Midland, you can see some real pressure to pursue some investigations thoroughly and drop others quickly.
You're using obscurity and secrecy as though they are synonyms, and they aren't. Take the Air Force 1 example already introduced in this thread. Secrecy means that certain information about the craft or procedures might, for example, be stored only on machines that are separated from the Internet by an air gap, dispensed only on a need to know basis, accessible only under a two man rule, or otherwise controlled by a set of formal rules. Obscurity might be relying on the fact that few people know who contracted to service various systems or where those people might keep information filed. That sort of definition is true whether obscurity is all you rely on or if its just a part of a greater security system.
You could have both these situations at once, and they could each have some properties in common, (such as there being 20 people who might serve as the source of information to an outsider), so they can look similar. But, and it's a big but,, they are still very different. In the case of organized secrecy, the supervisors know that an exact number of people have the information, they know if those people have had background checks, if they have been trained in not talking about their jobs, reporting attempts to contact them, and other indicators of a possible attack, and a number of things that the person relying on obscurity hasn't checked (or they would have turned the obscure system into a genuine secret.). The point is, when you take something somewhat obscure, and you put in place formal methods, you move out of just using obscurity for that part of the security system. When you take those 20 employees and former employees that might spill the beans, make a list of just who they are and change '20 or so' to an exact number, check up on the former employees who might be disgruntled, or change information access so those people can't rely on their old knowledge to harm your security, and probably take a dozen other steps, you've stopped relying on the obscurity of some information to protect you and started relying on something else.
It's not simply a matter of popularity, but go on posting anonymously and making it personal if you really think you need to enlighten me. .ini's in the same directory as the third party owners, contributed to the system vulnerability. That this kept happening at least through XP, and by some accounts into the Vista years, has created a lot of momentum for Windows crackers.
Here's why:
1. UNIX based systems are used on a lot of business and banking facilities, which are much more valuable targets for some purposes than the typical home machine. If you want a botnet, yeah, you're going to prioritize having large numbers above many other considerations, but that would mean other types of cracking would not necessarily follow the same pattern, yet they generally do, within a few percent.
If you can explain why, for example, the servers that hold data on 10,000+ clients get subjected to successful attacks in almost exactly the same proportions as home machines, heavily 'favoring' Microsoft, yet the various UNIX related operating systems are much, much more common there, then you can claim popularity makes all, or even much of, the difference.
For another example, why didn't Apple cracking go up when i-tunes was first introduced, or when any other Apple product showed a big spike in popularity? Why, knowing Apples get a lot of use in Hollywood for film editing and art, don't the people who bootleg video workprints and such target Apples more there - a place where they are quite popular?
For another, certain brands of routers and networking gear are much more common than others and actually have a market share similar to MS vrs. their competition - why doesn't popularity there translate into anything like proportionately more exploits?
2. Microsoft set its own standards for API access, and several other things, and Microsoft chose to allow certain third party corporations such as Norton to do things in non-standard ways (again, non-standard and SUB-STANDARD to MS's own internally written rules, not to some other standards MS didn't really want to deal with anyway). Microsoft chose to give some third party software its "Windows Compatible" and higher seals of approval and let them use those in their advertising and packaging without vetting their code at all first, instead of insisting they first write to the specs to get them, and this opened up some specific holes for intrusion, simply because the best fixes for those attacks would have made third party product X also non-compatible. Microsoft's marketing, wanting to be able to boast of how much software ran on Windows, overrode the engineering department repeatedly to create that vulnerability. Even if it were true that ALL desktop exploits start off as exploits against apps, the way Microsoft dealt with some apps contributed to the problem. Just the the choice way back in the Win 95 days, to allow putting all sorts of third party app data in the registry instead of individual
For starters, Lot didn't manage to convince the mob - he attempted it, and the mob rejected the offer. Second, when somebody has offered hospitality to that 'some guy', and he keeps his promise, even to the extent of offering his own daughters up to the mob instead, that's a conflict of two moral virtues. Yeah, you can argue that it's not that tough a decision for Lot because he doesn't think of his daughters as people so much as property, But really, that''s something modern people infer from other sources that are very separate in time and culture, and maybe Lot really did love his daughters as people. Why is Lot NOT a role model? If he had broken his promise of hospitality, perhaps fought for hospitality until it looked like the price of fighting further would be his daughters, but then gave up, would he then be a good role model? It sounds a lot like you're saying that, whichever choice Lot had made among some very lousy alternatives, he would somehow be wrong in your eyes. So, if you can judge a man that way, why should I believe your moral understanding is sufficient to justify your other judgments?
You know, I've heard the Bible criticized for being morally simplistic in the past, and I can even agree with some of that, but this is probably the first time I've seen someone announce that morality is awfully fluid and then complain that the Bible presented a tough moral dilemma like there isn't an easy comfortable answer.
Sex with my ex-wife is the bet sex I've ever had, although it was pretty damned good when we were still married too (just less frequent than it is these days). I was married 23 years, and have been in a monogamous relationship with the same woman for 29 years now.
Diabetic needle reuse and sharing is seen almost exclusively in diabetics who are homeless or otherwise at severely low incomes, but it is documented. People who are unable to afford all the oral meds also used, or who have trouble getting the required prescriptions for injectors refilled regularly, do sometimes reuse needles, and even borrow from each other. Needles are controlled by prescription since they are also sought by illegal drug users, meaning diabetics without good access to doctors can run short. In other cases, not being able to afford the oral medications means the diabetic uses needles faster than their doctor thought they might and runs short. It's not that they are as uncaring about the risks as for typical heroin users or similar, but even with some risk awareness, sometimes it's the only option left.
Any power the government has includes paying for that power to be exercised with money raised by taxes, and taxation is always backed up by force. You're arguing that the federal government doesn't actually have the power to actually promote the general welfare as granted to it by the constitution. They can only promote the general welfare when they don't spend any taxes doing it. I guess that clause is only decorative. How about this: Common defense doesn't include forcefully taking money from one group of people only to give it to another, so the government has no right to actually buy bullets for its army's guns. See how earth-shakingly stupid that sounds?
If you go back to the original roman metaphor for Fascism, it is a bundle of sticks that is much harder to break tied together than it would be to break each stick individually if they were not. Technically, each stick could be said to shut up and go along with all the other sticks as an aggregate. In practice, however, there's never been any attempt at a Fascist government where the bundle of sticks as a whole directly decided where the bundle was going. It's always been that biggest stick in the middle claiming to represent all the rest by virtue of its superior position. I suppose there could be said to be exceptions when the metaphorical sticks are entire governments, i.e. Italian Fascism didn't always go along 100% with Nazi Germany, but when the metaphorical sticks are individual humans, I can't think of a single counterexample.
It does seem as if natural neutrino sources should have made this effect very apparent years before now if CERN is really seeing what they think they are.
I can, however, think of a couple of reasons why this is different though, although I really doubt that this proves FTL Neutrinos are real.
The CERN experiment was originally about detecting type change in Neutrinos, with the detector spotting only one type of conversion, (Electron Neutrinos that had converted to Muon Neutrinos, if I remember right). Neutrinos formed deep inside the sun undergo a type of conversion before they reach the less dense layers of the Sun itself, but then switch to vacuum conversion and travel much farther between type changes. Supernova observations would all be of Neutrinos that have changed types many, many times as they cross millions of light years, so any difference in speeds would be an average, which might be expected to be very close to C. Even locally produced solar Neutrinos are crossing 93 Million miles. The CERN Neutrinos have not cycled many times in transiting only 700 Km or so..
Maybe we 'got lucky', and observed Neutrinos over a close to optimal distance for them to go through just one type change, and picked two types where the effect was to see faster than light motion rather than slower. Maybe a different experiment design and we'd be seeing (much less spectacular) headlines about how some CERN Neutrinos appeared to be moving slower than Light, as though they had rest masses above what previous experiments showed to be possible maximums, and the general public would be paying much less attention.