He should just say it was a typo and he meant digital privacy;-)
I may be missing something here but what does it matter what he said? Bittorrent is what it is independently of his expressed beliefs. Is he going to be prosecuted for what he did or what he thought?
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
-Dorothy Parker
Actually, I think the wikipedia entry has been defaced as I couldn't find the "French" quote there, but only the following:
"I'm Oscar Wilde, BEOTCH! Keep yo' mitts offa ma bling-age!
He is also noted as a leading literary figure in the genre of "Really, Really, Gay."
I'll grant you, though, the latter statement is accurate.
Though I notice them all the time, I don't recall ever actually pointing out a poster's spelling and grammar mistakes.
I think this whole trollish article is just an open party for grammar nazis however. Anyone who walks into it should know what sort of company she'll find.
And ever means at any time. Past, present, future. I suppose there was no need for him to attend plays in the future since the best had already been viewed.
Extraordinary! What a remarkable command over the sequence of time. However if this is the best play ever, then I concur there will be no need for me to attend plays in the future, myself.
The moment I posted that, I remembered an even more appropriate quote:
Guildenstern: The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter. Rosencrantz: Good God. We're out of our depths here. Guildenstern: No, no, no! He hasn't got a daughter! The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter. Rosencrantz: The old man is? Guildenstern: Hamlet... in love... with the old man's daughter... the old man... thinks. Rosencrantz: Ah.
I wonder what Stoppard would make of the debate here? Something amusing, probably.
That is true, but firstly, I am not unique in my knowledge. There are enough people out there who understand the precise meanings of words that I benefit from this. Secondly, even though many people cannot express why they use particular words, they often have an intuition as to their reason, having absorbed the meaning implicitly in their learning of the language and the usage they come across. Being able to consider this meaning conciously gives me additional insight. And likewise, this knowledge lets me express myself more effectively to others even if they cannot consciously define the differences between words that I've chosen from.
The knowledge gives you a feel for the underlying structure of meaning behind words and you can use it or not as you choose. Even in situations where it is "confined to my head" however, it remains useful as we think in words and a strong command over them, a large vocabulary and precision in meaning helps one to think well.
Rosencrantz: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is "not." Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no... What you've been is not on boats.
-Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Your logic breaks down in that the sets of technically competent people and pretty girls overlap to the same proportion as any other unrelated groups. That is to say the probability of a given person being both techy and pretty is smaller than them being just techy or just pretty, but of X techy people, the same proportion should be pretty as in the general population.
If this is so, then there would be no reason to think that techy people should be unattractive. If anything, I'd say brains and looks are more commonly found together. And if you're talking attractiveness rather than physical features, then they certainly are.
Now the gender balance is something else, but hopefully society is becoming more open to gender blindness in the technical fields.
There is a lot of information contained in the spelling of words. If spelling is discarded then you get ambiguities such as raze and raise, their, they're and there. If you studied latin as I did, and have a good knowledge of how the language evolved, then you can glean extra meaning from words. Enforcing proper usage of the English language prevents it being muddied until everything sinks to the lowest common denominator of those who use it.
Actually, I was more thinking of severing a little higher than the wrist. There are four little tubes you need to find - Ulnar Artery, Ulnar Vein, Interosseous Artery and Interosseous Vein. Plugging these four with catheters is all you would need to supply the hand. They branch further down. My estimate might have been a little optomistic - I'd need someone's severed hand to actually see.
Since RTFA however, I've found that the original poster was way off track. This biometric has nothing to do with the heat of the vessels, but the fact that iron-depleted blood absorbs IR much moreso than the surrounding tissues or arteries. If you simply apply a very strong tourniquet below where you sever, there may be a reasonable chance of keeping the hand useful for some time after removal. Heck - you could probably even dip the stump in liquid latex and put it in the fridge for next week.
What lengths? It's a process that takes a few minutes, £10 worth of plastic and a secondary school knowledge of anatomy.
The deterrant is one of severity of punishment for the nature of the crime, not one of technical difficulty. That's a deterrant to be sure, but the nature of it should be understood.
Your point about multiple security systems is valid of course, but the grandparent was placing erroneous faith in the technical security of the system, and that at least deserves correction.
With many systems, it is not actually possible to be sure that there is something on the drive. It can be made to look like empty space quite easily. Therefore there is no certainty on the bad guy's part that there is anything more to find after you've yielded the first password.
I'm impressed that you lasted three hours of professional torture, however.;)
1. The tubes for the computer were designed to be used this way. The hand is intended to pump blood and once it loses pressure it colapses and becomes fairly disfunctional.
I don't think it does. The veins and arteries don't suddenly deteriorate. Get the hand, prefereably with a neat cut, find the ends of the arteries and veins and stick some small catheters (tubes) in there. The other ends of the catheters are attached to a little pump of warm water. And when I say pump, you could use a whoopy cushion for all it mattered. Then you could squeeze it every second if the scanner was sophisticated enough to pick up on heart beat (which I expect it isn't).
The water will leak heat more than blood will and heat up the surrounding tissue.
Use a lower water temperature if this were true. I'm not sure that it is though. You can always use something other than water, too. Heck, if you've already taken someone's hand off, you might as well take some of their blood to use. Add an easily obtained anti-coagulant, keep it warm.
I think severing hand, adding catheters and attaching pump could be done in about three minutes if you had everything ready before you started. Hardly secure.
they can do that with a password, or keys, or almost anything else.
With a password you can have emergency passwords that trigger an alert. Maybe they don't grant you access. Maybe they grant you access but there's an alarm going off in an office somewhere.
Harder to do with biometrics. Hmmm. Left hand good, right hand bad.
I don't doubt your anecdotal story, but it doesn't detract from the fact that in general, private enterprises tend to be run more efficiently than government enterprises.
The whole thrust of what I have been saying is that this is not a general case. It is a non-competitive scenario.
As to at least the savings are getting passed on to somebody, well money is like energy. It has to go somewhere. The best place is for it to be saved by the customer which is what I'm advocating, but if it were a choice between shareholders and local employment through overstaffing, local industry through over-payment, etc, then it looks like government still wins. But I don't believe it is an either or.
The reason Governments like violent protests is because they'll win. The reason they don't like civil disobedience (especially if financial) is because they'll lose.
Thank you for that. Nicely put and I'll be using that argument from now on.
One of the things that bothers me is how "disorder" is cited in legislation as sufficient cause for various strong arm tactics. E.g. it's one of the escape clauses in the European Human Rights act. It translates to me as "the government is allowed to get heavy if the population doesn't show them enough respect."
I'll continue to work towards preserving non-violent means of protest here in the UK. I don't think it is too late for the USA however. The British were very vicious in India and Ghandi still pulled off the greatest revolution in our species' history, so far.
I believe the best path to chastising the government is to make it redundant. We do everything that we can as individuals and communities, to provide for ourselves the functions of government. Ghandi was arrested for making salt (a government monopoly) for example.
So there are still means of protesting, and I think they need to be used right now. In martial arts, you try to turn someone's punch from the shoulder, where it starts, rather than wait until it's an inch from your jaw and try to block the fist. I apply the same principle to political protest, because I can see the current governments have got that look in their eye and I know where it's leading.
If all else fails, Chaos is always lurking in the background. You never know when a new technology will open up that provides undetectable communication, or eugenics boosts average IQ, or a Millenium Bug hits, or you get your arse handed to you in a war. You never know what will happen at all. The thing with catastrophe curves is that the difference between great success and great failure may not be as large as it looks; and the reason that governments crack down on little "rebellions" as hard as they do is because small scale protest can gather momentum just the same way that authoritarianism can. Each little victory will lead on to the next.
Wow! I feel like storming the Bastille after all that. Good luck over there. I actually turned down a job in the USA because of your government. I'll look forward to visiting when you've got it back under control.;)
I'm what would usually be considered very environmentally minded. I've not only supported environmental work financially, but I attempt to live in an eco-friendly manner.
I've found Greenpeace to be predominantly made up of people who don't think for themselves and have an psychological need to "get even."
I'm not saying useful work is not done by them. They do good work against whaling for example. But as an organization they have a real inability to use logic.
Bring on the fusion, I say. I'm even happy with modern nuclear power if the alternative is fossil fuels.
In the meantime, I'll support people like IFAW, WWF and carry on cycling.
Slashdot Mirror
He should just say it was a typo and he meant digital privacy
I may be missing something here but what does it matter what he said? Bittorrent is what it is independently of his expressed beliefs. Is he going to be prosecuted for what he did or what he thought?
ARFGHH! Must check URL! br
*ahem* What makes you think there aren't?
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
-Dorothy Parker
Actually, I think the wikipedia entry has been defaced as I couldn't find the "French" quote there, but only the following:
"I'm Oscar Wilde, BEOTCH! Keep yo' mitts offa ma bling-age!
He is also noted as a leading literary figure in the genre of "Really, Really, Gay."
I'll grant you, though, the latter statement is accurate.
Though I notice them all the time, I don't recall ever actually pointing out a poster's spelling and grammar mistakes.
I think this whole trollish article is just an open party for grammar nazis however. Anyone who walks into it should know what sort of company she'll find.
Well, I wish you'd finished the job - over here, we've still got the bastards.
I just thought it was a funny quote from Churchill. I'm not even English.
And ever means at any time. Past, present, future. I suppose there was no need for him to attend plays in the future since the best had already been viewed.
Extraordinary! What a remarkable command over the sequence of time. However if this is the best play ever, then I concur there will be no need for me to attend plays in the future, myself.
The moment I posted that, I remembered an even more appropriate quote:
Guildenstern: The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: Good God. We're out of our depths here.
Guildenstern: No, no, no! He hasn't got a daughter! The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: The old man is?
Guildenstern: Hamlet... in love... with the old man's daughter... the old man... thinks.
Rosencrantz: Ah.
I wonder what Stoppard would make of the debate here? Something amusing, probably.
That is true, but firstly, I am not unique in my knowledge. There are enough people out there who understand the precise meanings of words that I benefit from this. Secondly, even though many people cannot express why they use particular words, they often have an intuition as to their reason, having absorbed the meaning implicitly in their learning of the language and the usage they come across. Being able to consider this meaning conciously gives me additional insight. And likewise, this knowledge lets me express myself more effectively to others even if they cannot consciously define the differences between words that I've chosen from.
The knowledge gives you a feel for the underlying structure of meaning behind words and you can use it or not as you choose. Even in situations where it is "confined to my head" however, it remains useful as we think in words and a strong command over them, a large vocabulary and precision in meaning helps one to think well.
Hopefully, some of that is apparent.
Rosencrantz: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is "not." Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no... What you've been is not on boats.
-Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
"I dislike the French because because they do not speak English, but I abhor the Americans because they speak English badly."
-Winston Churchill.
Your logic breaks down in that the sets of technically competent people and pretty girls overlap to the same proportion as any other unrelated groups. That is to say the probability of a given person being both techy and pretty is smaller than them being just techy or just pretty, but of X techy people, the same proportion should be pretty as in the general population.
If this is so, then there would be no reason to think that techy people should be unattractive. If anything, I'd say brains and looks are more commonly found together. And if you're talking attractiveness rather than physical features, then they certainly are.
Now the gender balance is something else, but hopefully society is becoming more open to gender blindness in the technical fields.
There is a lot of information contained in the spelling of words. If spelling is discarded then you get ambiguities such as raze and raise, their, they're and there. If you studied latin as I did, and have a good knowledge of how the language evolved, then you can glean extra meaning from words. Enforcing proper usage of the English language prevents it being muddied until everything sinks to the lowest common denominator of those who use it.
Actually, I was more thinking of severing a little higher than the wrist. There are four little tubes you need to find - Ulnar Artery, Ulnar Vein, Interosseous Artery and Interosseous Vein. Plugging these four with catheters is all you would need to supply the hand. They branch further down. My estimate might have been a little optomistic - I'd need someone's severed hand to actually see.
Since RTFA however, I've found that the original poster was way off track. This biometric has nothing to do with the heat of the vessels, but the fact that iron-depleted blood absorbs IR much moreso than the surrounding tissues or arteries. If you simply apply a very strong tourniquet below where you sever, there may be a reasonable chance of keeping the hand useful for some time after removal. Heck - you could probably even dip the stump in liquid latex and put it in the fridge for next week.
What lengths? It's a process that takes a few minutes, £10 worth of plastic and a secondary school knowledge of anatomy.
The deterrant is one of severity of punishment for the nature of the crime, not one of technical difficulty. That's a deterrant to be sure, but the nature of it should be understood.
Your point about multiple security systems is valid of course, but the grandparent was placing erroneous faith in the technical security of the system, and that at least deserves correction.
With many systems, it is not actually possible to be sure that there is something on the drive. It can be made to look like empty space quite easily. Therefore there is no certainty on the bad guy's part that there is anything more to find after you've yielded the first password.
I'm impressed that you lasted three hours of professional torture, however.
1. The tubes for the computer were designed to be used this way. The hand is intended to pump blood and once it loses pressure it colapses and becomes fairly disfunctional.
I don't think it does. The veins and arteries don't suddenly deteriorate. Get the hand, prefereably with a neat cut, find the ends of the arteries and veins and stick some small catheters (tubes) in there. The other ends of the catheters are attached to a little pump of warm water. And when I say pump, you could use a whoopy cushion for all it mattered. Then you could squeeze it every second if the scanner was sophisticated enough to pick up on heart beat (which I expect it isn't).
The water will leak heat more than blood will and heat up the surrounding tissue.
Use a lower water temperature if this were true. I'm not sure that it is though. You can always use something other than water, too. Heck, if you've already taken someone's hand off, you might as well take some of their blood to use. Add an easily obtained anti-coagulant, keep it warm.
I think severing hand, adding catheters and attaching pump could be done in about three minutes if you had everything ready before you started. Hardly secure.
they can do that with a password, or keys, or almost anything else.
With a password you can have emergency passwords that trigger an alert. Maybe they don't grant you access. Maybe they grant you access but there's an alarm going off in an office somewhere.
Harder to do with biometrics. Hmmm. Left hand good, right hand bad.
In other words, it will end when we pry the patents out of their cold dead hands and not before.
Downloaded the Ogg Theora direct link and it played under Kaffeine without problems.
It is as bad as QT is good.
I don't doubt your anecdotal story, but it doesn't detract from the fact that in general, private enterprises tend to be run more efficiently than government enterprises.
The whole thrust of what I have been saying is that this is not a general case. It is a non-competitive scenario.
As to at least the savings are getting passed on to somebody, well money is like energy. It has to go somewhere. The best place is for it to be saved by the customer which is what I'm advocating, but if it were a choice between shareholders and local employment through overstaffing, local industry through over-payment, etc, then it looks like government still wins. But I don't believe it is an either or.
You're right actually. Now I come to think of it, I do have the same view on most organizations, so perhaps it is unfair to single out Greenpeace.
Also, anyone who quotes Thucydides in their sig gets bonus points from me.
The reason Governments like violent protests is because they'll win. The reason they don't like civil disobedience (especially if financial) is because they'll lose.
;)
Thank you for that. Nicely put and I'll be using that argument from now on.
One of the things that bothers me is how "disorder" is cited in legislation as sufficient cause for various strong arm tactics. E.g. it's one of the escape clauses in the European Human Rights act. It translates to me as "the government is allowed to get heavy if the population doesn't show them enough respect."
I'll continue to work towards preserving non-violent means of protest here in the UK. I don't think it is too late for the USA however. The British were very vicious in India and Ghandi still pulled off the greatest revolution in our species' history, so far.
I believe the best path to chastising the government is to make it redundant. We do everything that we can as individuals and communities, to provide for ourselves the functions of government. Ghandi was arrested for making salt (a government monopoly) for example.
So there are still means of protesting, and I think they need to be used right now. In martial arts, you try to turn someone's punch from the shoulder, where it starts, rather than wait until it's an inch from your jaw and try to block the fist. I apply the same principle to political protest, because I can see the current governments have got that look in their eye and I know where it's leading.
If all else fails, Chaos is always lurking in the background. You never know when a new technology will open up that provides undetectable communication, or eugenics boosts average IQ, or a Millenium Bug hits, or you get your arse handed to you in a war. You never know what will happen at all. The thing with catastrophe curves is that the difference between great success and great failure may not be as large as it looks; and the reason that governments crack down on little "rebellions" as hard as they do is because small scale protest can gather momentum just the same way that authoritarianism can. Each little victory will lead on to the next.
Wow! I feel like storming the Bastille after all that. Good luck over there. I actually turned down a job in the USA because of your government. I'll look forward to visiting when you've got it back under control.
I'm what would usually be considered very environmentally minded. I've not only supported environmental work financially, but I attempt to live in an eco-friendly manner.
I've found Greenpeace to be predominantly made up of people who don't think for themselves and have an psychological need to "get even."
I'm not saying useful work is not done by them. They do good work against whaling for example. But as an organization they have a real inability to use logic.
Bring on the fusion, I say. I'm even happy with modern nuclear power if the alternative is fossil fuels.
In the meantime, I'll support people like IFAW, WWF and carry on cycling.