> All that money goes towards jobs and construction.
It does not. Much of the money goes to security, advertising, and the relentless "studies" that form such a large part of large scale projects. And much of the money is effectively stolen. Between contractors deliberately lowballing their bids and demanding unplanned budget increases to complete partial work, to human trafficking in workmen to do the actual hands-on construction, to the fraudulent ticketing practices of the 2002 Olympics, there is a large amount of theft and corruption in any large economic endeavor.
The International Olympics Committee seems to do a reasonable job of reigning in such abuses and trying to be honest in their dealilngs, as do most cities' Olympic committees. But do not mistake "good" with perfect. And do not be suprised when money is spent by bureaucracies to ensure the presence of the bureaucracy itself.
They _expected_ to make back the money in increased business and tourism. They didn't So the difference was between an expectation of roughly $300 billion/year, and $250 billion per year. It's often the difference between expected income and costs, and real income and costs, that bankrupt a person or a nation.
> They have the guns after all. But they didn't. So it seems a bit strange to assert that they're seeking to construct this kind of society when it's easily done without it
"Almost no one"? Almost anyone who examines the extent and nature of the bulk, untargeted monitoring is appalled.
If this is the same Geoffrey Stone as the man on the board of the ACLU, the man is a respected author and previously practicing lawyer on various import civil rights cases, with insights on the Supreme Court's handling of abortion cases.
I'm concerned that his remarks were edited and published completely out of context in the article. It's difficult to reconcile the claims in the article with any knowledge of civil rights or constitutional law.
I've seen little evidence that they act brutally and without warning against civilians uninvolved in a conflict, one of the more useful definitions of terrorism. They're certainly a criminal organization often in violation of US law and international treaty.
> People went to college to prepare for life and learn the ways of the world.
And to join the clubs of the powerful elite. Have you any idea how many of the Harvard law school graduates are able to use that to their advantage in court? Not just being able to reach out to classmates and professors who might know the judge or the opposing counsel in an opposing case, but who might know them and have personal influence over them? Similar things happen in the technology world at elite schools. It might take my intern a chain of seven people to reach the author of a critical software project. It usually takes me 3 or 4, from my professional contacts. But for engineers from Caltech, MIT, or Oxford, and some other very elite schools, it's usually only one or two calls.
You can't abuse those kinds of access or they'll be cut off, but they are _invaluable_ when a deep and subtle problem comes up. And they take decades to generate the way I did, from professional and public work.
I really don't know how you conclude this. Many highly paid executives are thieves and scoundrels, and many are quite cheap in their personal habits. There are old British "class" distinctions of dress, of hobbies, and of personal habits. It's especially true in the tech world, where the hobbies they learned in technological schools and focusing on their technology left little time for expensive pursuits.
Highly paid executives often have expensive hobbies on which they lavish resources and affection, and do pay for quality in those particular interests. But to generalize this to say that they would therefore pay for "quality" in the sex trade is not well founded.
> And no sane man wants anything to do with jailbait
The sexual popularity of children is well documented. You cannot reasonably say "no one sane would do this, therefore it does not happen". Various child trafficking reports claim that over 100,000 children in the US each year are engaged in child prostitution, usually forced.
> Human trafficking is just "immigration" against the receiving countries wishes.
And against the immigrant's wishes. The key to "sex trafficking" is the forced prostitution. Many of the victims, typically women and often children, are deceived, or abused into immigration and then trapped with no access to passports and risks to their families or especially children back home.
> The prostitutes may be victims of sex trafficking but, the people being charged had nothing to do with that if it did take place
The traffickers should be charged, of course. But the condition of these victims of sex trafficking as frightened, often brutalized, under-age, underpaid, slaves of their traffickers is not normally any surprise to the clients.
> So what are the realistic expectations of privacy in a public space,
The legal limitations seem to depend very much on the state. Unless the records were of people personally aware that they were being recorded, or at least one party was aware of the recording, I cannot see how the FBI's recordings of _personal_ conversations meets even the minimum requirements of states wehre a single party can record without the knowledge of the other party. In states where both parties must consent to record a personal conversation, I don't see any way these recordings could have been legal.
If there were public speeches being recorded, it would be very different. But the bus stop outside a court house is a prime place to record personal conversations of plaintiffs or defendants, or their attorneys, in legal matters. It could be clear violation of attorney-client privilege if they recorded such conversations. I'm frankly unsurprised that the.FBI committed such acts, they've repeatedly demonstrated their incompetence and willingness to violate the law to pursue "big fish". What startles me is that they revealed the surveillance in court: anyone who's ever discovered criminal violations, or workplace improprieties through accidental or deliberate illegal surveillance knows to gather other evidence legally, now that you know where to dig for that evidence, and use the legally obtained information for termination or prosecution. That is what "confidential informants" and "anonymous tips" are often used for, to provide plausible deniability of criminal activity by investigating officers or manipulative personnel managers.
> Why the distinction when Type 2 diabetes is also not caused by sugar and carbs?
No more than hay fever is caused by pollen. Being sedentary with poor exercise and poor diet turn a vulnerability to Type 2 diabetes from a possibly unnoticed sensitivity into a dangerous disorder that can kill. More active lifestyles, with notably less food and less glucose spike inducing carbohydrates can prevent it from ever being noticed, and remain the safest treatment for Type 2 diabetes.
There seems to be a large difference between a medication already being available, and a medication approved for a separate use. The existence of the drug for pme use is not _proof_ that the drug's use for another condition is not being hindered by lobbying, by fraud, or by the simple encouragement of the need for more careful studies before its approval for a disease as dangerous and sometimes as complex as Type 1 diabetes.
> Omeprazole is cheap.. very cheap and over the counter. I think this kind of shoots down the whole.. "Oh billion dollar industry barons want to keep diabetes a disease and sit on any cure" arguments..
I don't see how it shoots anything down. The researchers who get this working for humans are good candidates for a Nobel Prize and would improve millions of lives around the world, so certainly various labs will pursue such research vigorously. The industry for Type 1 diabetes supplies includes insulin pumps, infusion sets, and continuous sensors (for people whose insurance will cover those quite expensive treatments). It also includes insulin, which is about $150/10 ml bottle which is apparently less than a one month supply for many diabetics. And it includes glucose test strips, which are roughly $1/each and may cost $150/month for a closely managed diabetic. That is a a very large captive audience for long-term medical treatment. I would expect the main manufacturers of diabetes supplies to delay FDA approval of a new treatment as long as possible before a large amount of their annual income evaporates.
Certain brands of continuous glocose sensor, insulin pump, an insulin pump with glucagon instead of insul, and iPhone app already provide this commercially.
It's very interesting that open source software is available and I applaud the father for his involvement with his son's medical issues. I'd urge him to be very careful indeed: many programmers of my acquaintance fail to properly sanitize their inputs, and not to properly handle edge cases. And remote controlled insulin pumps do present profound security risks, so I'd urge caution for any Type 1 diabetics with genuinely malicious and cunning enemies.
> Negotiation is fine and dandy, but agreeing to be charged with, and plead guilty to, a crime that both you and the prosecutor know that you didn't commit in order to avoid being tried for a crime that the prosecutor suspects that you actually did commit makes a mockery of the justice system.
Whether it is a "mockery of the whole justice system", it's hardly innovative. Most children accused of stealing a cookie or hiding their report card experienced this kind of plea bargaining before they ever experienced the criminal justice system.
"Innovation"? I'm not aware of any society that has ever existed without i. People learn it in childhood, dealing with accusations or suspicions by their peers and parents. Negotiation, and forms of haggling, are visible even in animals.
> Some of you jokesters are old enough to be able to recognize just how dystopian the present is
Some of us are old enough to recognize how much better it's gotten. I'm not quite old enough to remember the McCarthy era, but I do remember the hippie movement and the anti-war protests of the 1960's, and abuses of federal and police power during that era. Technology has made broad searching easier, but it's also made publicly reporting the abuses easier.
The war on drugs asset forfeiture cases are a source of funding for police departments, both honest and corrupt departments. They're a very real problem for honest citizens. But the ability to get information and find out the relevant laws, to fight it in court, has improved tremendously during my adult lifetime.
SpaceX is still on course to lower the cost/pound to orbit by a factor of roughly 25. Even if that figure is very optimistic, I'd anticipate them lowering the cost/pound by at least a factor of 5. That makes repairs vastly more reasonable. And it would not need a permanent outpost. At those kinds of prices, and with the spare maneuvering capacity of these craft, multiple satellite repairs become possible on a much smaller budget.
The ability to do manned repair of satellites lowers the cost of the satellites and improves their longevity. That helps weather prediction, which affects food availability and food prices worldwide. This also paves the way to refuel and upgrade LEO satellites, and the next generation of such craft should be able to reach geo-synchronous orbits. It also paves the way for manned manufacturing in space, where zero gee make the creation of large, uniform crystals or silicon wafers for computers much easier, and certain types of electrolysis based chemical synthesis and analysis becomes much easier.
It also paves the way for solar satellites to harvest solar power and send it to non-polluting power stations on Earth, which can provide far more energy than is available from fossil fuels or fusion, and far more safely than fission.
>> Why are the majority of bug fixes flowing from OpenSSL to LibreSSL and not the other way around?
> Because there have hardly been any fixes in LibreSSL needed in the first place?
Because the original LibreSSL was not to add features. It was to discard unnecessary code from the forked version of OpenSSL. Shrinking a large project by 25%, as LibraSSL seems to have done successfully, can easily solve quite a few problems, especially the complex cross-platform components. But it doesn't automatically fix _any_ of the original problems in the shared codebase.
> I have to wonder if the low donations is reflective of the fact that people are actually unwilling to donate to people/organisations when they know they're actually doing the "wrong" thing
It also reflects the quality of goods and services on the site. I've used it to obtain fast torrents of Linux isos (which I checksummed carefully!) before the main HTTP or FTP downloads could take the traffic, and and for media I'd purchased but was blocked from using by region codes (with thorough virus checks!). But the quality of service is so poor and so much of the content either poisoned, mislabeled, or incomplete, it's not left me wanting to support them.
I don't know where you are, nor have hands-on access. MythBusters reprised the 2002 paper: Feel free to repeat the experiment, yourself, with a scanner, a printer, and a permanent marker to print the expanded scan, correct broken lines with a fine marker, then reduce the scan. And yes, I've done this about 3 years ago, at a data center with a laser printed paper fingerprint, moistened, on my own fingerprint. I'm not sure which model it was, but it was a useful proof of concept. The claims of "this is a 3D scanner and therefore cannot be fooled" seem to be complete nonsense.
And the police fingerprints are still good enough to be used to defeat the best fingerprint scanners. There's been no noticeable improvement in the technology since the paper on defeating it was published in 2002.
Slashdot Mirror
> All that money goes towards jobs and construction.
It does not. Much of the money goes to security, advertising, and the relentless "studies" that form such a large part of large scale projects. And much of the money is effectively stolen. Between contractors deliberately lowballing their bids and demanding unplanned budget increases to complete partial work, to human trafficking in workmen to do the actual hands-on construction, to the fraudulent ticketing practices of the 2002 Olympics, there is a large amount of theft and corruption in any large economic endeavor.
The International Olympics Committee seems to do a reasonable job of reigning in such abuses and trying to be honest in their dealilngs, as do most cities' Olympic committees. But do not mistake "good" with perfect. And do not be suprised when money is spent by bureaucracies to ensure the presence of the bureaucracy itself.
They _expected_ to make back the money in increased business and tourism. They didn't So the difference was between an expectation of roughly $300 billion/year, and $250 billion per year. It's often the difference between expected income and costs, and real income and costs, that bankrupt a person or a nation.
> They have the guns after all. But they didn't. So it seems a bit strange to assert that they're seeking to construct this kind of society when it's easily done without it
"Almost no one"? Almost anyone who examines the extent and nature of the bulk, untargeted monitoring is appalled.
If this is the same Geoffrey Stone as the man on the board of the ACLU, the man is a respected author and previously practicing lawyer on various import civil rights cases, with insights on the Supreme Court's handling of abortion cases.
I'm concerned that his remarks were edited and published completely out of context in the article. It's difficult to reconcile the claims in the article with any knowledge of civil rights or constitutional law.
> The CIA isn't a terrorist organization.
I've seen little evidence that they act brutally and without warning against civilians uninvolved in a conflict, one of the more useful definitions of terrorism. They're certainly a criminal organization often in violation of US law and international treaty.
> People went to college to prepare for life and learn the ways of the world.
And to join the clubs of the powerful elite. Have you any idea how many of the Harvard law school graduates are able to use that to their advantage in court? Not just being able to reach out to classmates and professors who might know the judge or the opposing counsel in an opposing case, but who might know them and have personal influence over them? Similar things happen in the technology world at elite schools. It might take my intern a chain of seven people to reach the author of a critical software project. It usually takes me 3 or 4, from my professional contacts. But for engineers from Caltech, MIT, or Oxford, and some other very elite schools, it's usually only one or two calls.
You can't abuse those kinds of access or they'll be cut off, but they are _invaluable_ when a deep and subtle problem comes up. And they take decades to generate the way I did, from professional and public work.
> High-paid executives pay for quality.
I really don't know how you conclude this. Many highly paid executives are thieves and scoundrels, and many are quite cheap in their personal habits. There are old British "class" distinctions of dress, of hobbies, and of personal habits. It's especially true in the tech world, where the hobbies they learned in technological schools and focusing on their technology left little time for expensive pursuits.
Highly paid executives often have expensive hobbies on which they lavish resources and affection, and do pay for quality in those particular interests. But to generalize this to say that they would therefore pay for "quality" in the sex trade is not well founded.
> And no sane man wants anything to do with jailbait
The sexual popularity of children is well documented. You cannot reasonably say "no one sane would do this, therefore it does not happen". Various child trafficking reports claim that over 100,000 children in the US each year are engaged in child prostitution, usually forced.
> Human trafficking is just "immigration" against the receiving countries wishes.
And against the immigrant's wishes. The key to "sex trafficking" is the forced prostitution. Many of the victims, typically women and often children, are deceived, or abused into immigration and then trapped with no access to passports and risks to their families or especially children back home.
> The prostitutes may be victims of sex trafficking but, the people being charged had nothing to do with that if it did take place
The traffickers should be charged, of course. But the condition of these victims of sex trafficking as frightened, often brutalized, under-age, underpaid, slaves of their traffickers is not normally any surprise to the clients.
> So what are the realistic expectations of privacy in a public space,
The legal limitations seem to depend very much on the state. Unless the records were of people personally aware that they were being recorded, or at least one party was aware of the recording, I cannot see how the FBI's recordings of _personal_ conversations meets even the minimum requirements of states wehre a single party can record without the knowledge of the other party. In states where both parties must consent to record a personal conversation, I don't see any way these recordings could have been legal.
If there were public speeches being recorded, it would be very different. But the bus stop outside a court house is a prime place to record personal conversations of plaintiffs or defendants, or their attorneys, in legal matters. It could be clear violation of attorney-client privilege if they recorded such conversations. I'm frankly unsurprised that the .FBI committed such acts, they've repeatedly demonstrated their incompetence and willingness to violate the law to pursue "big fish". What startles me is that they revealed the surveillance in court: anyone who's ever discovered criminal violations, or workplace improprieties through accidental or deliberate illegal surveillance knows to gather other evidence legally, now that you know where to dig for that evidence, and use the legally obtained information for termination or prosecution. That is what "confidential informants" and "anonymous tips" are often used for, to provide plausible deniability of criminal activity by investigating officers or manipulative personnel managers.
> Why the distinction when Type 2 diabetes is also not caused by sugar and carbs?
No more than hay fever is caused by pollen. Being sedentary with poor exercise and poor diet turn a vulnerability to Type 2 diabetes from a possibly unnoticed sensitivity into a dangerous disorder that can kill. More active lifestyles, with notably less food and less glucose spike inducing carbohydrates can prevent it from ever being noticed, and remain the safest treatment for Type 2 diabetes.
There seems to be a large difference between a medication already being available, and a medication approved for a separate use. The existence of the drug for pme use is not _proof_ that the drug's use for another condition is not being hindered by lobbying, by fraud, or by the simple encouragement of the need for more careful studies before its approval for a disease as dangerous and sometimes as complex as Type 1 diabetes.
> Omeprazole is cheap.. very cheap and over the counter. I think this kind of shoots down the whole.. "Oh billion dollar industry barons want to keep diabetes a disease and sit on any cure" arguments..
I don't see how it shoots anything down. The researchers who get this working for humans are good candidates for a Nobel Prize and would improve millions of lives around the world, so certainly various labs will pursue such research vigorously. The industry for Type 1 diabetes supplies includes insulin pumps, infusion sets, and continuous sensors (for people whose insurance will cover those quite expensive treatments). It also includes insulin, which is about $150/10 ml bottle which is apparently less than a one month supply for many diabetics. And it includes glucose test strips, which are roughly $1/each and may cost $150/month for a closely managed diabetic. That is a a very large captive audience for long-term medical treatment. I would expect the main manufacturers of diabetes supplies to delay FDA approval of a new treatment as long as possible before a large amount of their annual income evaporates.
Certain brands of continuous glocose sensor, insulin pump, an insulin pump with glucagon instead of insul, and iPhone app already provide this commercially.
* http://www.imedicalapps.com/20...
It's very interesting that open source software is available and I applaud the father for his involvement with his son's medical issues. I'd urge him to be very careful indeed: many programmers of my acquaintance fail to properly sanitize their inputs, and not to properly handle edge cases. And remote controlled insulin pumps do present profound security risks, so I'd urge caution for any Type 1 diabetics with genuinely malicious and cunning enemies.
> Negotiation is fine and dandy, but agreeing to be charged with, and plead guilty to, a crime that both you and the prosecutor know that you didn't commit in order to avoid being tried for a crime that the prosecutor suspects that you actually did commit makes a mockery of the justice system.
Whether it is a "mockery of the whole justice system", it's hardly innovative. Most children accused of stealing a cookie or hiding their report card experienced this kind of plea bargaining before they ever experienced the criminal justice system.
> Plea bargaining was an evil innovation,
"Innovation"? I'm not aware of any society that has ever existed without i. People learn it in childhood, dealing with accusations or suspicions by their peers and parents. Negotiation, and forms of haggling, are visible even in animals.
> Some of you jokesters are old enough to be able to recognize just how dystopian the present is
Some of us are old enough to recognize how much better it's gotten. I'm not quite old enough to remember the McCarthy era, but I do remember the hippie movement and the anti-war protests of the 1960's, and abuses of federal and police power during that era. Technology has made broad searching easier, but it's also made publicly reporting the abuses easier.
The war on drugs asset forfeiture cases are a source of funding for police departments, both honest and corrupt departments. They're a very real problem for honest citizens. But the ability to get information and find out the relevant laws, to fight it in court, has improved tremendously during my adult lifetime.
SpaceX is still on course to lower the cost/pound to orbit by a factor of roughly 25. Even if that figure is very optimistic, I'd anticipate them lowering the cost/pound by at least a factor of 5. That makes repairs vastly more reasonable. And it would not need a permanent outpost. At those kinds of prices, and with the spare maneuvering capacity of these craft, multiple satellite repairs become possible on a much smaller budget.
The ability to do manned repair of satellites lowers the cost of the satellites and improves their longevity. That helps weather prediction, which affects food availability and food prices worldwide. This also paves the way to refuel and upgrade LEO satellites, and the next generation of such craft should be able to reach geo-synchronous orbits. It also paves the way for manned manufacturing in space, where zero gee make the creation of large, uniform crystals or silicon wafers for computers much easier, and certain types of electrolysis based chemical synthesis and analysis becomes much easier.
It also paves the way for solar satellites to harvest solar power and send it to non-polluting power stations on Earth, which can provide far more energy than is available from fossil fuels or fusion, and far more safely than fission.
>> Why are the majority of bug fixes flowing from OpenSSL to LibreSSL and not the other way around?
> Because there have hardly been any fixes in LibreSSL needed in the first place?
Because the original LibreSSL was not to add features. It was to discard unnecessary code from the forked version of OpenSSL. Shrinking a large project by 25%, as LibraSSL seems to have done successfully, can easily solve quite a few problems, especially the complex cross-platform components. But it doesn't automatically fix _any_ of the original problems in the shared codebase.
> LibreSSL has avoided many CVE by getting rid of dangerous and bloated code
And discarded compatibility with many, if not most, of the platforms that OpenSSL supports.
And point out what you found makes one scanner superior to the other?
> I have to wonder if the low donations is reflective of the fact that people are actually unwilling to donate to people/organisations when they know they're actually doing the "wrong" thing
It also reflects the quality of goods and services on the site. I've used it to obtain fast torrents of Linux isos (which I checksummed carefully!) before the main HTTP or FTP downloads could take the traffic, and and for media I'd purchased but was blocked from using by region codes (with thorough virus checks!). But the quality of service is so poor and so much of the content either poisoned, mislabeled, or incomplete, it's not left me wanting to support them.
I don't know where you are, nor have hands-on access. MythBusters reprised the 2002 paper: Feel free to repeat the experiment, yourself, with a scanner, a printer, and a permanent marker to print the expanded scan, correct broken lines with a fine marker, then reduce the scan. And yes, I've done this about 3 years ago, at a data center with a laser printed paper fingerprint, moistened, on my own fingerprint. I'm not sure which model it was, but it was a useful proof of concept. The claims of "this is a 3D scanner and therefore cannot be fooled" seem to be complete nonsense.
And the police fingerprints are still good enough to be used to defeat the best fingerprint scanners. There's been no noticeable improvement in the technology since the paper on defeating it was published in 2002.
https://cryptome.org/gummy.htm
The crack was confirmed by MythBusters in 2011.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There has been no basic change in the technology. Fingerprint scanners are still trivially beaten.