Justices Scalia and Breyer showed some skepticism that patents could cover the use of scientific correlations in medical practice. But the other justices expressed no such skepticism. At one point, Justice Kagan offered some advice to Prometheus's lawyer. "What you haven't done is say at a certain number you should use a certain treatment, at another number you should use another treatment," she said. "I guess the first question is why didn't you file a patent like that? Because that clearly would have been patentable. Everybody agrees with that."
It's not that the fact that they are hearing the case legitimizes anything. It's the fact that they are making comments about how medical patents are valid will legitimize medical patents...
A late response to a dead thread, but it's worth pointing out that the problem we examined in detail was not too much load, it was a rapid reduction of load. The precise problem was that, if the smart meter is ever compromised (or some other home automation system was compromised in very large numbers), one could switch enough meters off supply such that the load at the generator is very drastically reduced to the point that it is mechanically damaged.
If powerplant controls are exposed to the internet, the government should "step in" to waterboard those responsible with battery acid.
I feel like I repeat this at least once per 'cyberwar' thread, but it bears repeating until people start to understand. "Power plants can be attacked via the internet" is not equivalent to "Power plant controls are exposed to the internet". There's plenty of risk to the power infrastructure that comes from systems that can affect power usage being exposed to the internet, even if the power plant isn't exposed to the internet...
The reason that some people give 'cyberwar' more thought than that is that it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I'm a coauthor on a DOE sponsored paper (under security review, so no citation for now) that covers some more subtle aspects of the problem. The electrical grid can be attacked by compromising the control system if that system is internet connected, true. However, if a significant proportion of the electrical load for any one generator can be controlled via the internet, then that generator can be attacked via the internet without requiring any direct internet contact. Case in point, X10, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies are currently looking into home automation and controlling the home's electrical system via the computer. So, what happens the next time there's a runaway MS worm, but instead of just sending spam it gives control of the home automation system to the attacker? Simply by turning the power off in enough houses in an area, an attacker could actually cause physical damage to the power plant.
That's why we can't just dismiss the problem as "unhook the power plants from the internet." In a world that's increasingly hooked to the internet, we can't afford to overlook how the internet-connected components can possibly have an effect on the non-connected components.
Fuck U.S. intellectual property laws, and the American legal system for condoning the litigious tendencies of those wanting to bully or extort money from others. Apple's suit is disgusting, yet almost any other U.S. company would pursue the same suit if in the same position; hell, we've had a car company both sponsor and send legal threats to the same web site (with no significant changes to the site).
The owners of registered trademarks can lose their rights in a number of ways. When a trade or the general public adopts a trademark as the name for a type of goods, the mark is no longer distinctive and the rights to it are lost. The owner of trademark rights must be vigilant to ensure that this does not occur.
The general idea is that, if Apple allows the practice of calling a small electronic device a 'pod' to continue without objection, I can sell my ePod and directly claim that it is 'a better Pod than the iPod!'. Apple has no recourse, because 'pod' can be argued to be a common term applying to handheld electronics, and not anything particularly referring to the 'iPod' or any Apple product...
The general message: blame the legislation and legal precedent. Don't blame Apple for vigilantly defending its trademarks; Apple has to do this or else face losing any trademark rights that it has...
You've missed the point I was trying to make entirely (possibly because I did not do a good job of trying to make it...): I'm not arguing that emotions do not exist or that they cannot be privately experienced.
What I was trying to illustrate is that, if a program or other 'artificial intelligence' has a state that it calls 'sadness', it's not such an absurd idea to call that an 'emotion'. If being in the 'sad' state has an impact on certain aspects of the program's function, causes the program to report being 'sad', and has an associated set of measurable internal symptoms of being 'sad', how is that qualitatively or quantitatively different than a human being 'sad'?
My point was not that a machine could at all have a similar experience to a human's experience. That is absolutely untrue. My point is that a machine could have an analogous experience to a human's experience. If I define 'sad' as being a state possible for a machine to be in (with an associated set of possible data stored in the RAM), how is that more significant than defining 'sad' as being a specific emotional state a person can be in (win an associated set of possible chemical reactions occurring in the brain) ?
My point is not that you actually do not get sad, my point is that there is nothing magical about emotion that makes it somehow uncomputable. Emotion is just a possible state that a person can be in that has measurable and predictable effects on their behavior. Can you not envision 'virtual emotion' as being a possible state for a program to be in that has measurable and predictable effects on its operation?
What makes your emotional state so 'special' as to be something that only chemical reactions can represent and not something that computers could represent? When thinking about this, be sure to keep in mind that, in general, it is possible for computers to represent chemical reactions...
The damned machine is a machine; it doesn't get sad when it's fed a sad story, it just reports sadness.
As a graduate student getting a doctorate researching the field of machine learning, let me present a little thought experiment to you...
I would assert that you never actually get sad. You are, in reality, a soul-less shell of a person that just claims to 'feel' sadness, happiness, or any other human qualities. You never actually have any feelings in reality, you just report that you have feelings in order to not raise suspicion. Prove me wrong; somehow demonstrate to me that there is some abstract notion of 'emotion' that you possess that is present even in the absence of you reporting to feel that way or acting in a manner that implies you feel that way. I.e. prove to me that you somehow feel 'sad' when there are no external signs (you 'report' sadness, you cry, etc.) of your emotional state.
Before you mention that your metabolic processes are affected by your emotion, your body behaves differently (in a manner uncontrollable by you), etc., consider that if you looked at the memory space of the program that is running you could read register values that indicated 'sadness' in a way that is analogous to taking measurements of your physical body that indicate sadness.
If I had to take a guess, it looks like the original code was run through some obfuscation routines in order to deliberately make it harder to view what it performs by looking at the source... Not something I'd run on my machine...
The EU version of the DMCA specifically only provides protection for effective encryption measures.
Not trying to troll here, but isn't the whole concept of "illegal to circumvent DRM encryption measures only if the encryption measure is effective" somewhat ludicrous? The central concept behind DRM is that the content provider will give the user (the potential attacker) some encrypted content and a means to decrypt that content, and then attempt to restrict the use of the decrypted content or the setting in which the key can be used to do the decryption... The only premise in which effective cryptography can take place is when the key is kept secret from the attacker...
For example, if one is taking a proper mathematical analysis class but they do not know (by heart!) the formal definition of the limit by midterm, then one is left to wonder how much actual analysis they can do. Ditto for Newton's laws of motion, for example, in the corresponding physics class. In every discipline there are these basic things one needs to understand thoroughly—without having to look them up—to even begin to appreciate the rest of the results.
As a person currently enrolled in a graduate level Real Analysis course, I would argue that memorization of a definition is different than understanding the concept and the implications of the concept. The proper way, on both homework assignments and tests, to determine if a student actually understands the concept of 'a limit' is to ask them to analytically prove statements involving limits, not to ask them to mechanically calculate the value of the limit of some function.
It's the difference between the question: "F(x) =...; find the limit of F as x goes to..." and the question "Suppose you have a function F, with the following properties... prove that F has a limit and that this limit is finite."
As a developer I don't get that vibe at all. Apple realizes the success they have enjoyed COMES from the development community, and offers a ton of stuff in support of developers. [...] There really are no "hoops" at all in application development, and honestly how can you claim there are with 250k approved apps?
As a developer, I absolutely get that vibe. Get back to me when I can code for an iPhone without buying an Apple computer. Cross-platform compilation is a non-issue, and has been for some time. If there really are some horrendous dependencies on the _entirety_ of the Apple environment that make cross-platform development impossible, the problem could be solved by providing a stripped-down virtual machine for development.
They don't offer anything like that. They don't intend to ever offer it. Apple is saying that they would rather me not spend my time developing programs which provide added value to the iPhone unless I'm willing to purchase $500 of hardware to do it... That's not "hoops" enough for you?
Don't design [...] critical infrastructure to communicate with the internet. Life support, power plants, hospitals, water treatment plants can use very secure computers and use local networking. BUT DON'T PUT THEM ON THE [...] INTERNET.
The reason that some people give 'cyberwar' more thought than that is that it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I'm a coauthor on a DOE sponsored paper (under security review, so no citation for now) that covers some more subtle aspects of the problem. The electrical grid can be attacked by compromising the control system if that system is internet connected, true. However, if a significant proportion of the electrical load for any one generator can be controlled via the internet, then that generator can be attacked via the internet without requiring any direct internet contact. Case in point, X10, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies are currently looking into home automation and controlling the home's electrical system via the computer. So, what happens the next time there's a runaway MS worm, but instead of just sending spam it gives control of the home automation system to the attacker? Simply by turning the power off in enough houses in an area, an attacker could actually cause physical damage to the power plant.
That's why we can't just dismiss the problem as "unhook the power plants from the internet." In a world that's increasingly hooked to the internet, we can't afford to overlook how the internet-connected components can possibly have an effect on the non-connected components.
they should be thankful that they will be getting free advertising indefinitely, the way the big G does every time someone tells you to go google something.
Google absolutely hates when someone says to go 'google' something, and with good reason. Trademark law is actually somewhat sensible when it comes to recognizing that language changes over time. A company is not allowed to trademark a word that refers to a type of product or a type of action (IANAL, and I'm sure I'm overlooking some finer points, but that's the idea). This includes precedent for invalidating a trademark if the trademark becomes equivalent to such a word later on. This is the reason you never hear the phrase "buy Band-Aids" or "buy Kleenex" in a commercial. They make a specific point of saying "buy Band-Aid brand bandages" or "Kleenex tissues". If usage changes to the point where you cannot refer to an adhesive bandage and have most people understand what you mean (i.e. only 'Band-Aid' refers to that item in popular language to the point that it causes confusion), then SmithCorp can sell "SmithCorp brand band-aids" and make the case that band-aid is a noun, not a trademark anymore.
If Google supports the usage of the verb 'google' as a synonym for 'search on the internet,' then it actually may become the case that you see an ad on TV advertising that "Bing is the best place to do your googling!"
So for example the government can read your e-mail without a warrant but can't read your postal mail without a warrant;
You should at least recognize when the law has actually understood the technology. Making an analogy between postal mail (communication in a sealed envelope sent privately) and e-mail (communication that takes place by broadcasting the message, in the clear, across many parties) is not appropriate. The appropriate analogy is that the government can read the message you write on the outside of a postcard without a warrant just like they can read your e-mail without a warrant.
I know this was intended as a joke, but it does prove something about the 'heat ray' that is rather important: the military-industrial PR machine is operational and effective. This weapon is not a 'heat ray' at all; it is a _pain_ ray. The microwaves emitted by this device may cause some incidental heating of the skin, but that is not the intent at all. The microwaves emitted are of the precise frequency used by pain-emitting neurons. The goal is to have to pain neuron fire at full capacity regardless of the actual level of damage being caused. An article from 2007 ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-482560/Run-away-ray-gun-coming--We-test-US-armys-new-secret-weapon.html ) describes this and introduces the idea of a pain ray... 3 years later the military is celebrating its 'heat ray,' a term which is less associated with the evils that can be caused by a 'pain ray.'
Re:"Turn off our electricity"
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems."
The reason that some people give 'cyberwar' more thought than that is that it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I'm a coauthor on a DOE sponsored paper (under security review, so no citation for now) that covers some more subtle aspects of the problem. The electrical grid can be attacked by compromising the control system if that system is internet connected, true. However, if a significant proportion of the electrical load for any one generator can be controlled via the internet, then that generator can be attacked via the internet without requiring any direct internet contact. Case in point, X10, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies are currently looking into home automation and controlling the home's electrical system via the computer. So, what happens the next time there's a runaway MS worm, but instead of just sending spam it gives control of the home automation system to the attacker? Simply by turning the power off in enough houses in an area, an attacker could actually cause physical damage to the power plant.
That's why we can't just dismiss the problem as "unhook the power plants from the internet." In a world that's increasingly hooked to the internet, we can't afford to overlook how the internet-connected components can possibly have an effect on the non-connected components.
I guess it's a good thing I don't have a cell phone. No cell phone, no tracking. No tracking, no data mining.
This is possibly the most dangerous attitude for people to have. The 'magic' of data mining is that it relies on probabilities that are learned from populations as a whole. Knowing how millions of people who do have cellphones behave can, and will, give data miners valuable (or dangerous...) insight about how people in general will behave. Don't think for a second that, because you personally do not have a cell phone, you don't stand to lose some privacy with the rest of us.
They've come a long way since three years ago when I... didn't get it to work out. Of course, I haven't yet tried to move over my previous computer's hard drives or critical files like email.
The thing that floored me (and was an iconic example of Ubuntu being willing to 'play nice' when Windows doesn't) is that if you install Ubuntu onto a computer with a pre-existing Windows install then Ubuntu will offer to move your personal files over to the Ubuntu install. Compare that to the fact that even booting from the Windows install CD will cause a Linux system to fail to boot (it wipes out the MBR and kills Grub) and it's a testament to the Linux mindset...
When are you "climate change sheep" going to stop using the fact that some ice is melting or the climate has "changed" (it's ALWAYS changed in case you didn't know) as an excuse to peddle crisis hysteria that says the end of the world is coming.
I too would be skeptical of any scientist claiming that climate change is going to cause the end of the world. However, the fact that the planet still exists will be of little comfort to the human beings who can no longer easily live in the climate there...
Imagine a small business where 50 people are sharing a T1 line. For web browsing, this many users could all get decent performance, even if a handful of people are doing big downloads, provided they are all using TCP. But all it takes is one guy hammering the link at full throttle to ruin it for everyone else.
That analogy broke down right after the words 'small business.' Any private shared internet connection has someone who is in charge of it. If the employee is hammering the router with BT traffic, they need to be disciplined or cut off from the internet. My ISP should ensure that I get the bandwidth I paid for; their IT guy should ensure that their private network works acceptably.
If I, as a customer, say "allow port 80 and 443 outbound 24x7, IRC ports in and out 4PM-1AM and 6AM-8AM M-F + weekends, 25 only within the ISP's Walled Garden, ftp main 24x7 ftp data only when ftp main active, all other ports blocked 24x7" then no matter what virus gets on my computer, it can't send through port 25 to anywhere but your server and it can't connect to IRC bot-rooms while I'm at work or in the wee hours of the morning.
It can't connect to the bot-room IRC server? Sure it can; if you're going to allow port 80 outbound 24x7, I'm going to run my C&C server on port 80. Simple as that. For bonus points, I'll do it on port 443 and use encrypted traffic, so that the ISP couldn't tell that traffic from legit HTTPS traffic.
Or do you mean to suggest that it's a risk to employ anyone who wasn't a natural-born citizen on secure projects?
The USA does more than 'suggest' that: there's a NOFORN caveat for classified documents that means 'no one who is not a natural-born citizen may have access.'
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
Justices Scalia and Breyer showed some skepticism that patents could cover the use of scientific correlations in medical practice. But the other justices expressed no such skepticism. At one point, Justice Kagan offered some advice to Prometheus's lawyer. "What you haven't done is say at a certain number you should use a certain treatment, at another number you should use another treatment," she said. "I guess the first question is why didn't you file a patent like that? Because that clearly would have been patentable. Everybody agrees with that."
It's not that the fact that they are hearing the case legitimizes anything. It's the fact that they are making comments about how medical patents are valid will legitimize medical patents...
You can't add a salt to the password hash if you're going to require that the client be able to hash the password before sending it.
A late response to a dead thread, but it's worth pointing out that the problem we examined in detail was not too much load, it was a rapid reduction of load. The precise problem was that, if the smart meter is ever compromised (or some other home automation system was compromised in very large numbers), one could switch enough meters off supply such that the load at the generator is very drastically reduced to the point that it is mechanically damaged.
If powerplant controls are exposed to the internet, the government should "step in" to waterboard those responsible with battery acid.
I feel like I repeat this at least once per 'cyberwar' thread, but it bears repeating until people start to understand. "Power plants can be attacked via the internet" is not equivalent to "Power plant controls are exposed to the internet". There's plenty of risk to the power infrastructure that comes from systems that can affect power usage being exposed to the internet, even if the power plant isn't exposed to the internet...
The reason that some people give 'cyberwar' more thought than that is that it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I'm a coauthor on a DOE sponsored paper (under security review, so no citation for now) that covers some more subtle aspects of the problem. The electrical grid can be attacked by compromising the control system if that system is internet connected, true. However, if a significant proportion of the electrical load for any one generator can be controlled via the internet, then that generator can be attacked via the internet without requiring any direct internet contact. Case in point, X10, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies are currently looking into home automation and controlling the home's electrical system via the computer. So, what happens the next time there's a runaway MS worm, but instead of just sending spam it gives control of the home automation system to the attacker? Simply by turning the power off in enough houses in an area, an attacker could actually cause physical damage to the power plant.
That's why we can't just dismiss the problem as "unhook the power plants from the internet." In a world that's increasingly hooked to the internet, we can't afford to overlook how the internet-connected components can possibly have an effect on the non-connected components.
Fuck U.S. intellectual property laws, and the American legal system for condoning the litigious tendencies of those wanting to bully or extort money from others. Apple's suit is disgusting, yet almost any other U.S. company would pursue the same suit if in the same position; hell, we've had a car company both sponsor and send legal threats to the same web site (with no significant changes to the site).
The lawsuit is a direct consequence of the American trademark laws. From http://www.answers.com/topic/trademark :
The owners of registered trademarks can lose their rights in a number of ways. When a trade or the general public adopts a trademark as the name for a type of goods, the mark is no longer distinctive and the rights to it are lost. The owner of trademark rights must be vigilant to ensure that this does not occur.
The general idea is that, if Apple allows the practice of calling a small electronic device a 'pod' to continue without objection, I can sell my ePod and directly claim that it is 'a better Pod than the iPod!'. Apple has no recourse, because 'pod' can be argued to be a common term applying to handheld electronics, and not anything particularly referring to the 'iPod' or any Apple product...
The general message: blame the legislation and legal precedent. Don't blame Apple for vigilantly defending its trademarks; Apple has to do this or else face losing any trademark rights that it has...
You've missed the point I was trying to make entirely (possibly because I did not do a good job of trying to make it...): I'm not arguing that emotions do not exist or that they cannot be privately experienced.
What I was trying to illustrate is that, if a program or other 'artificial intelligence' has a state that it calls 'sadness', it's not such an absurd idea to call that an 'emotion'. If being in the 'sad' state has an impact on certain aspects of the program's function, causes the program to report being 'sad', and has an associated set of measurable internal symptoms of being 'sad', how is that qualitatively or quantitatively different than a human being 'sad'?
My point was not that a machine could at all have a similar experience to a human's experience. That is absolutely untrue. My point is that a machine could have an analogous experience to a human's experience. If I define 'sad' as being a state possible for a machine to be in (with an associated set of possible data stored in the RAM), how is that more significant than defining 'sad' as being a specific emotional state a person can be in (win an associated set of possible chemical reactions occurring in the brain) ?
My point is not that you actually do not get sad, my point is that there is nothing magical about emotion that makes it somehow uncomputable. Emotion is just a possible state that a person can be in that has measurable and predictable effects on their behavior. Can you not envision 'virtual emotion' as being a possible state for a program to be in that has measurable and predictable effects on its operation?
What makes your emotional state so 'special' as to be something that only chemical reactions can represent and not something that computers could represent? When thinking about this, be sure to keep in mind that, in general, it is possible for computers to represent chemical reactions...
The damned machine is a machine; it doesn't get sad when it's fed a sad story, it just reports sadness.
As a graduate student getting a doctorate researching the field of machine learning, let me present a little thought experiment to you...
I would assert that you never actually get sad. You are, in reality, a soul-less shell of a person that just claims to 'feel' sadness, happiness, or any other human qualities. You never actually have any feelings in reality, you just report that you have feelings in order to not raise suspicion. Prove me wrong; somehow demonstrate to me that there is some abstract notion of 'emotion' that you possess that is present even in the absence of you reporting to feel that way or acting in a manner that implies you feel that way. I.e. prove to me that you somehow feel 'sad' when there are no external signs (you 'report' sadness, you cry, etc.) of your emotional state.
Before you mention that your metabolic processes are affected by your emotion, your body behaves differently (in a manner uncontrollable by you), etc., consider that if you looked at the memory space of the program that is running you could read register values that indicated 'sadness' in a way that is analogous to taking measurements of your physical body that indicate sadness.
If I had to take a guess, it looks like the original code was run through some obfuscation routines in order to deliberately make it harder to view what it performs by looking at the source... Not something I'd run on my machine...
The EU version of the DMCA specifically only provides protection for effective encryption measures.
Not trying to troll here, but isn't the whole concept of "illegal to circumvent DRM encryption measures only if the encryption measure is effective" somewhat ludicrous? The central concept behind DRM is that the content provider will give the user (the potential attacker) some encrypted content and a means to decrypt that content, and then attempt to restrict the use of the decrypted content or the setting in which the key can be used to do the decryption... The only premise in which effective cryptography can take place is when the key is kept secret from the attacker...
For example, if one is taking a proper mathematical analysis class but they do not know (by heart!) the formal definition of the limit by midterm, then one is left to wonder how much actual analysis they can do. Ditto for Newton's laws of motion, for example, in the corresponding physics class. In every discipline there are these basic things one needs to understand thoroughly—without having to look them up—to even begin to appreciate the rest of the results.
As a person currently enrolled in a graduate level Real Analysis course, I would argue that memorization of a definition is different than understanding the concept and the implications of the concept. The proper way, on both homework assignments and tests, to determine if a student actually understands the concept of 'a limit' is to ask them to analytically prove statements involving limits, not to ask them to mechanically calculate the value of the limit of some function.
It's the difference between the question: "F(x) = ...; find the limit of F as x goes to ..." and the question "Suppose you have a function F, with the following properties... prove that F has a limit and that this limit is finite."
As a developer I don't get that vibe at all. Apple realizes the success they have enjoyed COMES from the development community, and offers a ton of stuff in support of developers. [...] There really are no "hoops" at all in application development, and honestly how can you claim there are with 250k approved apps?
As a developer, I absolutely get that vibe. Get back to me when I can code for an iPhone without buying an Apple computer. Cross-platform compilation is a non-issue, and has been for some time. If there really are some horrendous dependencies on the _entirety_ of the Apple environment that make cross-platform development impossible, the problem could be solved by providing a stripped-down virtual machine for development.
They don't offer anything like that. They don't intend to ever offer it. Apple is saying that they would rather me not spend my time developing programs which provide added value to the iPhone unless I'm willing to purchase $500 of hardware to do it... That's not "hoops" enough for you?
Don't design [...] critical infrastructure to communicate with the internet. Life support, power plants, hospitals, water treatment plants can use very secure computers and use local networking. BUT DON'T PUT THEM ON THE [...] INTERNET.
The reason that some people give 'cyberwar' more thought than that is that it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I'm a coauthor on a DOE sponsored paper (under security review, so no citation for now) that covers some more subtle aspects of the problem. The electrical grid can be attacked by compromising the control system if that system is internet connected, true. However, if a significant proportion of the electrical load for any one generator can be controlled via the internet, then that generator can be attacked via the internet without requiring any direct internet contact. Case in point, X10, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies are currently looking into home automation and controlling the home's electrical system via the computer. So, what happens the next time there's a runaway MS worm, but instead of just sending spam it gives control of the home automation system to the attacker? Simply by turning the power off in enough houses in an area, an attacker could actually cause physical damage to the power plant.
That's why we can't just dismiss the problem as "unhook the power plants from the internet." In a world that's increasingly hooked to the internet, we can't afford to overlook how the internet-connected components can possibly have an effect on the non-connected components.
they should be thankful that they will be getting free advertising indefinitely, the way the big G does every time someone tells you to go google something.
Google absolutely hates when someone says to go 'google' something, and with good reason. Trademark law is actually somewhat sensible when it comes to recognizing that language changes over time. A company is not allowed to trademark a word that refers to a type of product or a type of action (IANAL, and I'm sure I'm overlooking some finer points, but that's the idea). This includes precedent for invalidating a trademark if the trademark becomes equivalent to such a word later on. This is the reason you never hear the phrase "buy Band-Aids" or "buy Kleenex" in a commercial. They make a specific point of saying "buy Band-Aid brand bandages" or "Kleenex tissues". If usage changes to the point where you cannot refer to an adhesive bandage and have most people understand what you mean (i.e. only 'Band-Aid' refers to that item in popular language to the point that it causes confusion), then SmithCorp can sell "SmithCorp brand band-aids" and make the case that band-aid is a noun, not a trademark anymore.
If Google supports the usage of the verb 'google' as a synonym for 'search on the internet,' then it actually may become the case that you see an ad on TV advertising that "Bing is the best place to do your googling!"
So for example the government can read your e-mail without a warrant but can't read your postal mail without a warrant;
You should at least recognize when the law has actually understood the technology. Making an analogy between postal mail (communication in a sealed envelope sent privately) and e-mail (communication that takes place by broadcasting the message, in the clear, across many parties) is not appropriate. The appropriate analogy is that the government can read the message you write on the outside of a postcard without a warrant just like they can read your e-mail without a warrant.
The error occurs in step 5. You cannot divide by (a-b) when a == b -> a-b = 0. Not sure if you knew this already or not...
I know this was intended as a joke, but it does prove something about the 'heat ray' that is rather important: the military-industrial PR machine is operational and effective. This weapon is not a 'heat ray' at all; it is a _pain_ ray. The microwaves emitted by this device may cause some incidental heating of the skin, but that is not the intent at all. The microwaves emitted are of the precise frequency used by pain-emitting neurons. The goal is to have to pain neuron fire at full capacity regardless of the actual level of damage being caused. An article from 2007 ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-482560/Run-away-ray-gun-coming--We-test-US-armys-new-secret-weapon.html ) describes this and introduces the idea of a pain ray... 3 years later the military is celebrating its 'heat ray,' a term which is less associated with the evils that can be caused by a 'pain ray.'
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems."
The reason that some people give 'cyberwar' more thought than that is that it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I'm a coauthor on a DOE sponsored paper (under security review, so no citation for now) that covers some more subtle aspects of the problem. The electrical grid can be attacked by compromising the control system if that system is internet connected, true. However, if a significant proportion of the electrical load for any one generator can be controlled via the internet, then that generator can be attacked via the internet without requiring any direct internet contact. Case in point, X10, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies are currently looking into home automation and controlling the home's electrical system via the computer. So, what happens the next time there's a runaway MS worm, but instead of just sending spam it gives control of the home automation system to the attacker? Simply by turning the power off in enough houses in an area, an attacker could actually cause physical damage to the power plant.
That's why we can't just dismiss the problem as "unhook the power plants from the internet." In a world that's increasingly hooked to the internet, we can't afford to overlook how the internet-connected components can possibly have an effect on the non-connected components.
I guess it's a good thing I don't have a cell phone. No cell phone, no tracking. No tracking, no data mining.
This is possibly the most dangerous attitude for people to have. The 'magic' of data mining is that it relies on probabilities that are learned from populations as a whole. Knowing how millions of people who do have cellphones behave can, and will, give data miners valuable (or dangerous...) insight about how people in general will behave. Don't think for a second that, because you personally do not have a cell phone, you don't stand to lose some privacy with the rest of us.
If they just follow the old testament then they aren't really Christains, but that would be some valid form of religion I guess.
Uhh.. perhaps you'd call those people 'Jews'?
They've come a long way since three years ago when I ... didn't get it to work out. Of course, I haven't yet tried to move over my previous computer's hard drives or critical files like email.
The thing that floored me (and was an iconic example of Ubuntu being willing to 'play nice' when Windows doesn't) is that if you install Ubuntu onto a computer with a pre-existing Windows install then Ubuntu will offer to move your personal files over to the Ubuntu install. Compare that to the fact that even booting from the Windows install CD will cause a Linux system to fail to boot (it wipes out the MBR and kills Grub) and it's a testament to the Linux mindset...
When are you "climate change sheep" going to stop using the fact that some ice is melting or the climate has "changed" (it's ALWAYS changed in case you didn't know) as an excuse to peddle crisis hysteria that says the end of the world is coming.
I too would be skeptical of any scientist claiming that climate change is going to cause the end of the world. However, the fact that the planet still exists will be of little comfort to the human beings who can no longer easily live in the climate there...
Imagine a small business where 50 people are sharing a T1 line. For web browsing, this many users could all get decent performance, even if a handful of people are doing big downloads, provided they are all using TCP. But all it takes is one guy hammering the link at full throttle to ruin it for everyone else.
That analogy broke down right after the words 'small business.' Any private shared internet connection has someone who is in charge of it. If the employee is hammering the router with BT traffic, they need to be disciplined or cut off from the internet. My ISP should ensure that I get the bandwidth I paid for; their IT guy should ensure that their private network works acceptably.
If I, as a customer, say "allow port 80 and 443 outbound 24x7, IRC ports in and out 4PM-1AM and 6AM-8AM M-F + weekends, 25 only within the ISP's Walled Garden, ftp main 24x7 ftp data only when ftp main active, all other ports blocked 24x7" then no matter what virus gets on my computer, it can't send through port 25 to anywhere but your server and it can't connect to IRC bot-rooms while I'm at work or in the wee hours of the morning.
It can't connect to the bot-room IRC server? Sure it can; if you're going to allow port 80 outbound 24x7, I'm going to run my C&C server on port 80. Simple as that. For bonus points, I'll do it on port 443 and use encrypted traffic, so that the ISP couldn't tell that traffic from legit HTTPS traffic.
Or do you mean to suggest that it's a risk to employ anyone who wasn't a natural-born citizen on secure projects?
The USA does more than 'suggest' that: there's a NOFORN caveat for classified documents that means 'no one who is not a natural-born citizen may have access.'