The bigger question is how this complex machinery of life developed in the first billion years of Earth amidst massive meteor impacts. People can call it what they want, but knowing that all life that has ever existed has existed essentially unchanged from three billion years ago defies explanation of "evolving" in first one to two billion years to the amazing complexity of how cells work and then staying pat for almost three billion years and only losing capabilities, not gaining new and more complex capabilities as one assumes from casual science study and reading.
Why would you expect the "gaining of new and more complex capabilities"? Evolution is not oriented towards perfection. It's oriented towards "good enough". So it's quite possible that all those 3 billion year old mechanisms have been "good enough" to meet all conditions encountered since then, in which case unless the "new and more complex capability" provided a substantial survival advantage, it won't have become commonplace. And since "more complex" generally means "more expensive in terms of energy consumption", any mutations in that direction could quite likely have been a survival *disadvantage*.
Apparently Google has already given some or all of the sniffed data to authorities in Germany, Spain and France. I wonder why the US is causing so much more controversy?
Perhaps the US government is asking for more data (eg data from other countries) or has refused to meet conditions Google had set for the European governments, when handing over their shares of the data?
The issue is that it is *not* the US Government asking to see the data, it's the Attorney General of the State of Connecticut. Who may or may not have any legal justification for even asking for it.
Google has already underwent an FTC investigation over this issue, and an FCC investigation is still pending.
So how many levels in our kludgeocracy should Google have to explain its actions to?
This is most likely in response to their poor score in the NSS Labs report. Maybe their score will improve from 3%?
Er, no. That report evaluated performance against "socially engineered malware" only. In short, it tested how well the browser handled protecting the user from being careless or gullible.
Chrome's sandboxing is intended to limit the damage if an attack is encountered, not to keep the attack from happening by warning you that a given site hosts malware.
Why on earth are they mentioning how fast rainbow tables can break an old windows hash? That has nothing to do with most pages running apache on linux. The example password would last for quite a while against a brute force attack. Anyone worth their salt wouldn't allow that many auth attempts from one IP. Get it worth their salt? Lololol. Anyhow why is the windows example being used in this article at all?
You missed the point of using rainbow tables in the first place. It's not about brute force guessing a password - any system that's still vulnerable to that sort of attack should have the admin taken out and shot. It's in the case where an attacker get hold of the file containing *hashed* passwords, and want to work out what passwords correspond to those hashes (which is what happened in this case).
Windows, Linux, whatever - if a file of hashed passwords can be obtained, and those hashes aren't salted, then they are vulnerable to a rainbow table attack. They probably just used Windows as an example because there are so many attack tools written specifically for the hashes employed by the folks in Redmond.
What I do not get is, of course weight will be different in nature. Weight is dependant on acceleration due to gravity and mass. An atom would weigh more on Earth than it would on the moon.
I think these chemists mean 'atomic mass'? I'm an engineer so correct me if I'm wrong.
You aren't alone in that opinion - there is some controversy over the name, simply because it is *not* a "weight" in any sense of the word.
The most popular suggested replacement is "relative atomic mass" (the base unit is 1/12 the mass of a carbon 12 atom), but even that is somewhat misleading since it's actually intended to be relative to the average atomic mass of a sample of the element as found "in nature".
The change is a result of them realizing that that there is actually some variation in the proportions of the different isotopes in samples found "in nature", so instead of a single fixed value, it requires a range that the average should fall in, based on observed variations in those proportions.
The house essentially creates the law, and must pass it. It then goes to the senate which can revise it. In practice these tend to go on at the same time. Once it passes the house and the senate, the president can pass or veto it (veto only makes it require a larger margin).
Laws that authorize the spending of money *must* originate in the House (per the Constitution). All other types of laws can originate in either the House or the Senate.
In the US (and other common law countries) laws can be ruled unconstitutional by the judiciary. Should a law be challenged and get high enough, it can essentially be repealed by the supreme court.
Note that nowhere in the Constitution is this authority explicitly granted to the judiciary. It's not explicitly granted to *anyone*. But early in the country's history, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that it was the the job of the judiciary to judge the constitutionality of laws, and since it's been 200 or so years without anyone amending the Constitution to say otherwise it's pretty much generally accepted that the courts *do* have this power.
Has there ever been an explanation of what all the diplomatic traffic was doing going through the pentagon? Wouldn't separate channels, and perhaps distinct cryptology, whose individual security is checked and tested by the NSA be more secure in any-case?
In the aftermath of 9/11, lack of information sharing was cited as a critical flaw that allowed the attacks to happen. So they responded with information oversharing...
after sensitive defense documents were photographed using a telephoto lens in the hand of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick as he arrived at No 10 Downing Street for a briefing,
Well dammit, tell him to get the telephoto lens out of his hand...
Apart from the first couple of days of owning the fridge to set the temperature to something sensible, in the last 6 years, the controls I've wanted to use are "defrost" (once). I can also see the use for the "just got home from supermarket, chill a bit more please" button, but it's not something I need as I'm close enough to the supermarket that my food is still cold when I get it gome.
Just wait until they start putting RFID or something similar on food packages - then it'll be easy to patch in a "take inventory" mode, and have it tell you what you're out of.
Or for some of us, maybe a "time in fridge" monitor to warn us when something has passed "somewhat stale" and is heading towards "biohazard"...
Without knowing the case specifics, I can't say with authority how likely this is to be overturned, but if Seagate can demonstrate that the project fell apart for business reasons that could not be reasonably anticipated, it'll die on appeal. And it is very likely that it will.
First, if Seagate could have established that the person was hired for a perfectly valid position, which went away as a result of business conditions they couldn't have forseen, then they wouldn't have lost this trial in the first place.
Second, the "At will" issue is irrelevant - the lawsuit was based on a law that says employers are not allowed to lure people into relocating unless there's an actual job waiting for them.
Finally, appeals are generally based on issues of law, not issues of fact. So unless Seagate can come up with a good legal argument why that state law doesn't apply in this case, it's unlikely they'll get a reversal on appeal. At best, they may get the award reduced.
But...what if you were being attacked by CLONES of zombies....or zombie clones....
Someone call hollywood, i smell a hit!!!
"We thought we were smart. Creating a horde of clones to do all the menial jobs that us Americans didn't want to do anymore. And with them genetically programmed to die after a year, we were going to have an endless revenue stream selling replacements.
It never occurred to us that they might not *stay* dead..."
There is a plot. Almost always a mindlessly superficial plot which people ignore and wish wasn't getting in the way, but is included to get around the Miller test, but it is a plot.
Off topic, but I ROFLed after reading that link - something called the "Three Prong Obscenity Test" sounds more like a porn quality control standard than a legal doctrine:)
I remember reading a review of one of the early RTS games that pointed out that they weren't so much strategy games as logistics games; the reviewer predicted the failure of the genre on the basis that everyone wants to play the general, they don't want to play the quartermaster. Obviously, he was wrong, and a lot of people do want to be the quartermaster; but he captured what I've always found so boring about RTSes.
What we call "strategy" in in fact mostly a matter of logistics - having a perfect tactical plan is worthless if you can't keep your troops supplied during the course of it. RTS games are generally just a simplified/idealized version of how things work in the real world.
Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics
(attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley)
It sounds like what *you* want is a large-scale RTT (Real-time tactical) game, where all you have to worry about is deciding on which units to move and where to move them. Personally, I would consider *that* boring, as it removes a lot of the complexity that makes a good RTS challenging.
I mean they were essentially distributing their website for free online anyways, and its long been shut down, so its not like they are losing any money, so no damages can be set. At what point do you have a case to bring in front of a judge? It's copyrighted and being distributed therefor I need moneys? Like I said before - I could see someone using their copyrighted designs and that might cause damages to any new sites they might have launched after Geocities came down.
Under the current copyright laws, no damages have to be proven - the law allows the rights holder to sue for statutory damages, without a single bit of actual evidence that they were actually harmed in any way by the infringement. This is how the RIAA companies are able to sue people like Jammie Thomas and get damages of $80k per work infringed.
(Note that in the Capitol v. Thomas case it's pretty unlikely that they'll ever get any actual money from her, and even if the outrageous award was actually paid probably wouldn't cover their legal costs. They're just trying to make an example of her. But I could see a copyright troll like the US Copyright Group sending out tons of threat-o-grams, in the hopes of collecting $500-$1000 from those who are afraid that putting up a fight will bankrupt them).
Look, the government actually owns GM - Government Motors..
Uhhh...what? I think you mean General Motors. And no, they are not owned by the US government.
As of Aug 18, 2010, the U.S. Treasury held 61% of GM's stock. So saying it's "owned by the US government" is not entirely incorrect. Though I would *hope* that the term "Government Motors" was sarcasm...
you better shutup and mind ur own damn bidness or 4chan and Anonymous will come after you again
Like they care. The MPAA/RIAA are quite successful at not only creating a "unified front" for political dealings, but also at diverting attention away from the member companies. So the MPAA site get's DOS'ed, but the studios who are the heart of the MPAA remain completely untouched. Think that's going to have any effect?
I think the idea behind the rules was that this couldn't happen:
"Yes sir, we have reason to believe you have terrorist training manuals on your hard-disk" *search* "Nope, none found, but we did find some music which the RIAA might be interested in, some videos the MPAA might be interested in, a particular movie Voltage might be interested in, also you said a rude joke in a chatroom which was not properly filtered and marked for adults only"
*lawsuits to death*
But now it can:)
No - the rules were intended to prevent a repeat of what *did* happen:
1. Feds get a warrant to obtain drug testing records of 10 specific baseball players (based on actual evidence against those 10 players). 2. Judge specifically limits them, saying that they have to separate out the records of everyone else, and only keep the records on the 10 specific players. 3. Feds ignore judge's limits, getting records on hundreds of individuals (not limited to just baseball players). No attempt is made to separate out the records on the specific players. 4. Feds then use the info on other players (that they previously had no reason to suspect) to issue supoenas for evidence against those additional players.
What's really scary about this whole mess is that the government is relying on the "in plain sight" doctrine, which basically states that if an officer observes something that is in plain sight during the course of a legal search, whatever the officer observes can be seized and used as evidence even if it wasn't listed on the warrant. For instance, if they're searching your house on looking for stolen goods, and they see your stash of pot, they can seize it and charge you with possession.
But once you have access to a computer, pretty much anything on it is readily accessible (unless encrypted). So applying this doctrine to digital searches ends up being analogous to getting a search warrant for a specific set of (dead tree) files, and then claiming that *all* of the files in the file cabinet are now "in plain sight", and as such they can browse them to their heart's content.
The court *did* uphold that the supoenas, and any information resulting from them, were invalid. But by removing the specific guidelines the earlier court had created, they've opened the door to a repeat performance of this whole mess. Which you can bet *will* happen fairly quickly.
So the government is going to buy all prints straight from the press? How about a second print? Surely this will become the most popular book of all times, as measured in sales.
Except the second edition has been edited to remove the information that the DoD objects to in the first edition. They're just trying to clean up after a mistake (the book was cleared for release, but now they're claiming it wasn't cleared by the "proper" authorities).
Since US income taxes are limited to state and federal, I'm not sure how a municipality would enforce this.
Some larger cities also have an income tax. In the case of Philadelphia, they have something called a "wage tax", which they say is not an "income tax" - not sure exactly what the difference is.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I don't know why Blizzard didn't just sue Glider over intent to induce contract violations (whatever the legal term is for that).
I believe it's called Tortious Interference
Nothing has evolved, it has only specialized.
The bigger question is how this complex machinery of life developed in the first billion years of Earth amidst massive meteor impacts. People can call it what they want, but knowing that all life that has ever existed has existed essentially unchanged from three billion years ago defies explanation of "evolving" in first one to two billion years to the amazing complexity of how cells work and then staying pat for almost three billion years and only losing capabilities, not gaining new and more complex capabilities as one assumes from casual science study and reading.
Why would you expect the "gaining of new and more complex capabilities"? Evolution is not oriented towards perfection. It's oriented towards "good enough". So it's quite possible that all those 3 billion year old mechanisms have been "good enough" to meet all conditions encountered since then, in which case unless the "new and more complex capability" provided a substantial survival advantage, it won't have become commonplace. And since "more complex" generally means "more expensive in terms of energy consumption", any mutations in that direction could quite likely have been a survival *disadvantage*.
Apparently Google has already given some or all of the sniffed data to authorities in Germany, Spain and France. I wonder why the US is causing so much more controversy?
Perhaps the US government is asking for more data (eg data from other countries) or has refused to meet conditions Google had set for the European governments, when handing over their shares of the data?
The issue is that it is *not* the US Government asking to see the data, it's the Attorney General of the State of Connecticut. Who may or may not have any legal justification for even asking for it.
Google has already underwent an FTC investigation over this issue, and an FCC investigation is still pending.
So how many levels in our kludgeocracy should Google have to explain its actions to?
This is most likely in response to their poor score in the NSS Labs report. Maybe their score will improve from 3%?
Er, no. That report evaluated performance against "socially engineered malware" only. In short, it tested how well the browser handled protecting the user from being careless or gullible.
Chrome's sandboxing is intended to limit the damage if an attack is encountered, not to keep the attack from happening by warning you that a given site hosts malware.
Why on earth are they mentioning how fast rainbow tables can break an old windows hash? That has nothing to do with most pages running apache on linux. The example password would last for quite a while against a brute force attack. Anyone worth their salt wouldn't allow that many auth attempts from one IP. Get it worth their salt? Lololol. Anyhow why is the windows example being used in this article at all?
You missed the point of using rainbow tables in the first place. It's not about brute force guessing a password - any system that's still vulnerable to that sort of attack should have the admin taken out and shot. It's in the case where an attacker get hold of the file containing *hashed* passwords, and want to work out what passwords correspond to those hashes (which is what happened in this case).
Windows, Linux, whatever - if a file of hashed passwords can be obtained, and those hashes aren't salted, then they are vulnerable to a rainbow table attack. They probably just used Windows as an example because there are so many attack tools written specifically for the hashes employed by the folks in Redmond.
What I do not get is, of course weight will be different in nature. Weight is dependant on acceleration due to gravity and mass. An atom would weigh more on Earth than it would on the moon.
I think these chemists mean 'atomic mass'? I'm an engineer so correct me if I'm wrong.
You aren't alone in that opinion - there is some controversy over the name, simply because it is *not* a "weight" in any sense of the word.
The most popular suggested replacement is "relative atomic mass" (the base unit is 1/12 the mass of a carbon 12 atom), but even that is somewhat misleading since it's actually intended to be relative to the average atomic mass of a sample of the element as found "in nature".
The change is a result of them realizing that that there is actually some variation in the proportions of the different isotopes in samples found "in nature", so instead of a single fixed value, it requires a range that the average should fall in, based on observed variations in those proportions.
The house essentially creates the law, and must pass it. It then goes to the senate which can revise it. In practice these tend to go on at the same time. Once it passes the house and the senate, the president can pass or veto it (veto only makes it require a larger margin).
Laws that authorize the spending of money *must* originate in the House (per the Constitution). All other types of laws can originate in either the House or the Senate.
In the US (and other common law countries) laws can be ruled unconstitutional by the judiciary. Should a law be challenged and get high enough, it can essentially be repealed by the supreme court.
Note that nowhere in the Constitution is this authority explicitly granted to the judiciary. It's not explicitly granted to *anyone*. But early in the country's history, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that it was the the job of the judiciary to judge the constitutionality of laws, and since it's been 200 or so years without anyone amending the Constitution to say otherwise it's pretty much generally accepted that the courts *do* have this power.
Has there ever been an explanation of what all the diplomatic traffic was doing going through the pentagon? Wouldn't separate channels, and perhaps distinct cryptology, whose individual security is checked and tested by the NSA be more secure in any-case?
In the aftermath of 9/11, lack of information sharing was cited as a critical flaw that allowed the attacks to happen. So they responded with information oversharing...
after sensitive defense documents were photographed using a telephoto lens in the hand of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick as he arrived at No 10 Downing Street for a briefing,
Well dammit, tell him to get the telephoto lens out of his hand...
Apart from the first couple of days of owning the fridge to set the temperature to something sensible, in the last 6 years, the controls I've wanted to use are "defrost" (once). I can also see the use for the "just got home from supermarket, chill a bit more please" button, but it's not something I need as I'm close enough to the supermarket that my food is still cold when I get it gome.
Just wait until they start putting RFID or something similar on food packages - then it'll be easy to patch in a "take inventory" mode, and have it tell you what you're out of.
Or for some of us, maybe a "time in fridge" monitor to warn us when something has passed "somewhat stale" and is heading towards "biohazard"...
Without knowing the case specifics, I can't say with authority how likely this is to be overturned, but if Seagate can demonstrate that the project fell apart for business reasons that could not be reasonably anticipated, it'll die on appeal. And it is very likely that it will.
First, if Seagate could have established that the person was hired for a perfectly valid position, which went away as a result of business conditions they couldn't have forseen, then they wouldn't have lost this trial in the first place.
Second, the "At will" issue is irrelevant - the lawsuit was based on a law that says employers are not allowed to lure people into relocating unless there's an actual job waiting for them.
Finally, appeals are generally based on issues of law, not issues of fact. So unless Seagate can come up with a good legal argument why that state law doesn't apply in this case, it's unlikely they'll get a reversal on appeal. At best, they may get the award reduced.
But...what if you were being attacked by CLONES of zombies....or zombie clones....
Someone call hollywood, i smell a hit!!!
"We thought we were smart. Creating a horde of clones to do all the menial jobs that us Americans didn't want to do anymore. And with them genetically programmed to die after a year, we were going to have an endless revenue stream selling replacements.
It never occurred to us that they might not *stay* dead..."
There is a plot. Almost always a mindlessly superficial plot which people ignore and wish wasn't getting in the way, but is included to get around the Miller test, but it is a plot.
Off topic, but I ROFLed after reading that link - something called the "Three Prong Obscenity Test" sounds more like a porn quality control standard than a legal doctrine :)
I remember reading a review of one of the early RTS games that pointed out that they weren't so much strategy games as logistics games; the reviewer predicted the failure of the genre on the basis that everyone wants to play the general, they don't want to play the quartermaster. Obviously, he was wrong, and a lot of people do want to be the quartermaster; but he captured what I've always found so boring about RTSes.
What we call "strategy" in in fact mostly a matter of logistics - having a perfect tactical plan is worthless if you can't keep your troops supplied during the course of it. RTS games are generally just a simplified/idealized version of how things work in the real world.
Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics
(attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley)
It sounds like what *you* want is a large-scale RTT (Real-time tactical) game, where all you have to worry about is deciding on which units to move and where to move them. Personally, I would consider *that* boring, as it removes a lot of the complexity that makes a good RTS challenging.
I mean they were essentially distributing their website for free online anyways, and its long been shut down, so its not like they are losing any money, so no damages can be set. At what point do you have a case to bring in front of a judge? It's copyrighted and being distributed therefor I need moneys? Like I said before - I could see someone using their copyrighted designs and that might cause damages to any new sites they might have launched after Geocities came down.
Under the current copyright laws, no damages have to be proven - the law allows the rights holder to sue for statutory damages, without a single bit of actual evidence that they were actually harmed in any way by the infringement. This is how the RIAA companies are able to sue people like Jammie Thomas and get damages of $80k per work infringed.
(Note that in the Capitol v. Thomas case it's pretty unlikely that they'll ever get any actual money from her, and even if the outrageous award was actually paid probably wouldn't cover their legal costs. They're just trying to make an example of her. But I could see a copyright troll like the US Copyright Group sending out tons of threat-o-grams, in the hopes of collecting $500-$1000 from those who are afraid that putting up a fight will bankrupt them).
Look, the government actually owns GM - Government Motors. .
Uhhh...what? I think you mean General Motors. And no, they are not owned by the US government.
As of Aug 18, 2010, the U.S. Treasury held 61% of GM's stock. So saying it's "owned by the US government" is not entirely incorrect. Though I would *hope* that the term "Government Motors" was sarcasm...
Trapdoor to shark pit underneath the plaintiff's lawyers is optional.
Sorry, sharks won't eat lawyers. It's a matter of "professional courtesy"...
Just wait for lawyers to start patenting their particular model of "lawyering" and then the fun REALLY starts. :p
You mean like a trial lawyer patenting a method for making jury selections? Sorry, it's already happened, and I haven't seen any *fun* resulting...
you better shutup and mind ur own damn bidness or 4chan and Anonymous will come after you again
Like they care. The MPAA/RIAA are quite successful at not only creating a "unified front" for political dealings, but also at diverting attention away from the member companies. So the MPAA site get's DOS'ed, but the studios who are the heart of the MPAA remain completely untouched. Think that's going to have any effect?
lol. EXACTLY. Anyways at that point I won't want to talk, I'll want to smash.
At which point you then have to buy a new phone. I think we've identified the "profit" step in their plan...
I think the idea behind the rules was that this couldn't happen:
"Yes sir, we have reason to believe you have terrorist training manuals on your hard-disk"
*search*
"Nope, none found, but we did find some music which the RIAA might be interested in, some videos the MPAA might be interested in, a particular movie Voltage might be interested in, also you said a rude joke in a chatroom which was not properly filtered and marked for adults only"
*lawsuits to death*
But now it can :)
No - the rules were intended to prevent a repeat of what *did* happen:
1. Feds get a warrant to obtain drug testing records of 10 specific baseball players (based on actual evidence against those 10 players).
2. Judge specifically limits them, saying that they have to separate out the records of everyone else, and only keep the records on the 10 specific players.
3. Feds ignore judge's limits, getting records on hundreds of individuals (not limited to just baseball players). No attempt is made to separate out the records on the specific players.
4. Feds then use the info on other players (that they previously had no reason to suspect) to issue supoenas for evidence against those additional players.
What's really scary about this whole mess is that the government is relying on the "in plain sight" doctrine, which basically states that if an officer observes something that is in plain sight during the course of a legal search, whatever the officer observes can be seized and used as evidence even if it wasn't listed on the warrant. For instance, if they're searching your house on looking for stolen goods, and they see your stash of pot, they can seize it and charge you with possession.
But once you have access to a computer, pretty much anything on it is readily accessible (unless encrypted). So applying this doctrine to digital searches ends up being analogous to getting a search warrant for a specific set of (dead tree) files, and then claiming that *all* of the files in the file cabinet are now "in plain sight", and as such they can browse them to their heart's content.
The court *did* uphold that the supoenas, and any information resulting from them, were invalid. But by removing the specific guidelines the earlier court had created, they've opened the door to a repeat performance of this whole mess. Which you can bet *will* happen fairly quickly.
So the government is going to buy all prints straight from the press?
How about a second print?
Surely this will become the most popular book of all times, as measured in sales.
Except the second edition has been edited to remove the information that the DoD objects to in the first edition. They're just trying to clean up after a mistake (the book was cleared for release, but now they're claiming it wasn't cleared by the "proper" authorities).
And in some cases those governments will be held accountable for that trampling (Nuremberg and Tokio Trials).
Only if they lose...
Since US income taxes are limited to state and federal, I'm not sure how a municipality would enforce this.
Some larger cities also have an income tax. In the case of Philadelphia, they have something called a "wage tax", which they say is not an "income tax" - not sure exactly what the difference is.
That room doesn't exist in any government building.
Sure it does. It's the door with the "Beware of Leopard" sign on it.