1) They have plenty of money to toss around on nukes, it seems...
Well, nukes ain't as costly as they used to be. I mean, when you get right down to it it's just some lumps of fissionable material and a device to keep them apart until you want the thing to go boom. Most 50-year-old technology is pretty simple to implement these days.
More importantly, though, being able to nuke the Pakis is clearly more important that educating and improving the lifestyle of the populace. If you educate them, how will they be dumb enough to go and sit in Kashmir and freeze and be shot at? Geez. Don't you know anything about public policy?:-)
Right below the paragraph you quoted, there's a link to a further FAQ. I quote:
CD-R, short for Compact Disc-Recordable, is a type of disk that allows you to "write" or record onto the disk only once. When we use the term "CD-R," we are also referring to CD-RW disks, which is short for CD-ReWritable disk, a type of CD that enables you to "write" or record onto the disk multiple times. You can treat these types of disks like a floppy disk or hard disk, by writing data onto the disk once or multiple times.
A CD you can write to only once? Sure sounds like a CD-ROM to me, unless I'm missing something very fundamental.
(Boy, I seem to spend a lot of time pointing out problems anymore. Yeesh. I'm turning into a leech.)
1) You're running on the spare carrying capacity of a dedicated control system? Just how much spare bandwidth is there on this thing? Knowing how much money India generally has to toss around, I can't imagine that they've built a whole lot of extra in there. If this gets implemented on a national scale, won't there be congestion from hell?
2) What do people in the villages need with the Internet anyway? They're currently working on a model where there's one woman who's the "phone lady" and who acts as the primary link to other villages. Despite what pundits claim, you can't really get much of an education from the Web alone (yet). If I were a person in a rural Indian village, I'd be more interested in getting me some of that modern plumbing and health care before I wanted to go read Slashdot. It's basic Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs stuff.
Then again, maybe somebody wants to auction off a used water buffalo on eBay...
I'm not going to comment on the messing with feedback, but the yanking of auctions conforms to the policy Jamie referenced. If you look at the questionable items page, it states that any software on a CD cannot be auctioned unless you hold the copyright. They claim that this policy has been in place since 1999; can't verify that either way.
In any case, they've specifically said they're arbitrarily disallowing software CD sales because it's a bitch to sort pirates and OEM copies from legit sales. It's arbitrary and maybe unfair, but it shouldn't engender shock.
Any fact which adds bias to guilty but does not directly concern the current trial should be left out so that the jury can concentrate on facts (and falsities) presented during the trial.
But someone's psych profile and behavior patterns are relevant to the current trial, because they give some probabilities of what this person is likely to have done. Do you deny that the probability of someone having done a particular murder given that he's killed before is higher than the probability given that he hasn't?
looking beard. That's why lawers get their clients to get cleaned up and dressed nicely for court.
So? If someone has so little respect for the justice system that he comes to court wearing a t-shirt saying "KILL EVERYTHING", I can reasonably infer that he also has no respect for laws, and thus is more likely to be a criminal.
On DNA. Here we are talking about odds. The odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000 or something like that. Such odds do *not* preclude that two people can't have the same DNA. It means that they *can*. Unlikely, but it can happen.
1) The odds are a lot closer to 1/1 than that, by at least 3 orders of magnitude.
2) I know there can be DNA match errors; I've worked as a molecular biologist. This is precisely my point. In any database encompassing a country or state, there is a signficant chance of a given person matching an arbitrary probe by pure chance. Thus, DNA evidence must not be treated with the "pure truth" status it currently enjoys.
First, that if the numbers are, in fact, cryptographic messages, they were designed to be unencoded by someone somewhere.
While this is true, it in no way affects the strength of the argument. As previously mentioned, it is reasonable to suspect use of an OTP here. If that is the case, the target may be able to decrypt, but J. Random Hacker is SOL.
Second, the person unencoding the message probably hasn't had a computer transcribing the numbers for auto-decryption for the duration that the messages have been transmitted.
1) If the target is a government agency (making an assumption that number stations transmit from field to central and not vice versa), why wouldn't they autotranscribe and decrypt?
2) What does that have to do with the crackability of the data stream?
Yeah, the "hiding in plain sight" approach. Problem is, at least for the foreseeable future, the majority of human-to-human traffic is nonencrypted. This means that it's worthwhile to run an Echelon, which in turn means that your message might not be safe. (Were I the NSA, I'd flag things that were just plain odd as well as things with keywords.)
Actually, I think the pattern will be true in the future as well. It doesn't make sense to have one universal level of crypto, because there are some things (data that's only valid for a few minutes) where octuple-DES-Blowfish-RSA-YoMama with 1 G keys is just plain overkill. It also makes sense to have a large background of easier-to-crack messages, because that can keep the opponent busy working on the tractable problems. In fact, there's likely to be an Echelon targeted at those weakly encrypted transmissions, scavenging whatever useful data it can.
In short, hiding in plain sight only works if there aren't observers everywhere, and that's not the kind of world we're heading towards.
I honestly don't see how someone could hope to succeed at this. Let's say you get distributed.net to jump on the bandwagon. Great. Now what exactly are you going to do? You have arbitrary strings of numbers. This could be a fragment of a single text, parts of multiple texts, multiple complete texts, and so on. Sure, you could scan for patterns first and try to identify delimiters, but were I sending data through this, I wouldn't do you the favor of using a fixed separation string. I'd base it on conditions at the time of broadcast, or on some computation on the ciphertext, or some other thing that's not trivially detectable. In short, you don't know which decryption method to try. It's been pointed out that it's probably a one-time pad anyway.
Even if you can find an algorithm, how big are the keys? How will you know when you've got the plaintext? Something transmitted by the NSA is likely to be in highly obfuscated English at best. Like the handmade strong crypto challenge, the true plaintext might be very strange. How will you recognize that this is the correct decryption and not just a coincidental decryption into random gibberish?
Finally, while I agree that some numbers stations probably are espionage related, I'll bet they keep the noise very high. Many of them are probably reading right off the random number generator of the nearest computer. Did the challenge supervisors pick ones that are actual signal?
This is not to say it's impossible, but the benefit/difficulty ratio seems so high that anybody wizardly enough to succeed should probably be working on developing better algorithms for us instead.
Yes, but there is no true proof in a courtroom. Maybe he really was framed. Maybe the DNA samples were switched at the lab, or worse yet, this is one of those cases where the test fails. (There are actually a lot of those if one is doing a sufficient amount of DNA testing, which is why I'm a bit scared that DNA is currently treated as though God came down out of the sky and said "He did it.") Maybe the eyewitness is mistaken or lying.
In short, it all comes down to the subjective opinion of twelve people based on all sorts of testimony, much of which is also based on subjective criteria. If you're going to let that much noise into the system, adding in the prior record isn't going to introduce significant inaccuracy, IMHO.
Note that I'm not saying that the judicial system is bad for being the way it is. I think it works much of the time, with exceptions made for anything involving the rich or the powerful.
The *more likely* part of your statement is for the police to investigate, not for the jury to consider. The jury is concerned with the facts of *this* murder. Past history should not be entered as evidence (it's circumstantial, and could be misleading.)
We accept psychological opinions as evidence in trials (or at least we do in the USA). To me, knowledge that a person has killed before, and especially that he/she has killed repeatedly, is information about his/her psychological makeup. If nothing else, it shows that any prior claims of reform and repentance were not sincere. This means that I should also distrust any statements that the defendant may make in the current trial; what is a charge of perjury to one who is on trial for murder?
Lie detector technology doesn't really work. The only known way to detect bullshit is via context and contradictory evidence. Details of someone's criminal history seem to be useful in this regard and therefore seem likely to lead to improved decisions, and therefore I'd say juries should have access to them.
One is that this might actually be a valid use for censorware. You can use a keyword-based system that only blocks web pages which contain the full name of persons involved in the trial. It's not perfect, but if there's a web page a juror really needs to see, it seems to be a simple matter of asking the judge to have it specifically whitelisted.
Of course, since you'd need to be able to install that software on any platform, that means you'd need to develop censorware for Linux/BSD. (I'm assuming nobody runs IRIX or OSF or any of that stuff on a machine which they'd actually be using while stuck on jury duty.)
To me, barring jurors from reading info about the accused isn't true censorship, because they always have the option to read it once the trial is done. If you go to the library to get a book and someone else has checked out that book, that's not censorship --- you just have to wait.
Also, can some lawyer/historian type person explain what's up with this particular way of preventing jury bias? It seems to me that a defendant's past history is very relevant. If he's got multiple murder convictions, it probably is more likely that he did the one he's on trial for now. Yes, there will be bias, but that's what happens when you violate social contracts --- people stop trusting you. I think that's fair, and it's probably one of the better incentives not to commit crimes.
The way I see it, if you're infected with a virus you are to blame. If your computer is performing illegal activities then I believe you are at least partially at fault. Certainly running stupid software (Outlook) makes this more likely, but ultimately it's your responsibility to run good software, and to use it sensibly.
Whoa there. Do you realize exactly the implications of such a policy? Let's say, for example, that I get news of a new root exploit before most systems are patched. I combine my knowledge of this exploit with my l33t sk1llz to write a virus that contains a payload of a few bits of kiddie porn I yank off of FreeNet. The virus infects a target machine and attempts to locate addresses of further hosts to infiltrate. Once it has found compatible hosts, it pauses to send a few emails to president@whitehouse.gov, mib@fbi.gov, and so on. Each email contains the text "I am a pedophile and distributor of child pornography. Enclosed are images as proof of my crimes. I confess and repent. Please come and arrest me."
Your computer has just distributed child pornography. Maybe you didn't know about the hole yet or maybe you haven't had time to apply the patch, but either way you didn't exercise "due diligence". Enjoy prison.
People who catch viruses are often victims of their own stupidity and shouldn't have "victims' rights". This much I agree with. However, if a virus does illegal things, it is unfair to hold a user responsible for those things in most situations.
Except, of course, that you are obviously one of Them who wants me to think that that's what you wanted me to think, butI already know that that's what you want me to think, and thus I knew that you would post this and am way ahead of you.
First off, I agree that this story is a good idea, and I hope we see more like it in the future.
Now. Area 51, home of UFOs, Little Green (or is it Grey?) Men, Top Sekrit Projects, and possibly Will Smith. Has it occurred to anyone that the government may not have anything interesting down there?
Think about it. The Groom Lake facility is probably one of the most famous testing grounds. Everything going on is surrounded by serious security. Naturally, this means that we all think something big is going on and we spend a lot of time and money trying to get a peek. ("We" probably includes various national governments.) What if the whole thing is just bait? What if Area 51 is a big hoax with DoD-class special effects to keep us mesmerized while the real secret research is going on somewhere totally different?
Hell, if I wanted to keep nosy UFO nuts away from my captured alien specimens and anti-gravity drives, it's what I might do.
Some people have been wondering why TRCY chose to use the Basic Stamps as the "brain". I admit that it's not the choice I would have made, but since it seems people have had good experiences with Stamps, that can slide.
To me, the real question is: why buy a robotics kit that gives you this kind of robot body? If you want to add anything other than new sensors, it's going to start getting unwieldy. IMHO, the better thing to do would be to package a preferred control board with some Lego pieces. It's easy enough to build a TRaCY-style body using Lego, and you have the option of rapidly reconfiguring the chassis to suit your needs. Lego also offers a lot more expandability.
Yes, it'd cost more. OTOH, if you're shelling out $90 for a kit, why not wait a bit longer, pay $120 or so, and get something a heck of a lot more powerful?
You have 45 minutes to spend just to annoy a spammer and cost him money?
I hope the server falls on you the next time you walk past it.
Seriously, though, the whole problem with spam is that it wastes my resources. If I spend any nontrivial time (where "trivial" is defined as the time to SpamCop it) on spam, it only aggravates the problem. Your solution works, but I think it's unfeasible in practice.
My dad gets telecom spam. Some of it is from legit companies like GTC offering very good rates. He will respond to those, because they offer him something he wants. There are probably other people out there who look forward to porn spam so they can mooch a few more free pics.
Spam exists because the risk-to-reward is very low. Email costs nothing. One reply in a thousand, or even in a hundred thousand, and you've got significant profit.
The real question is: why would anyone want top performance in a laptop? The damn things are supposed to be reliable and portable, not able to outperform a workstation!
Speaking as a person who recently used Other People's Money to buy a P3-500 laptop, some of us are greedy bastards who want the power of a Cray and three years of battery life in an adamantium-strength package which weighs a single kilo. Oh, and it had better come with drivers for every OS ever.
I see no reason why portability must entail loss of power; you just pay more to buy the "portable" option.
While I believe this is true, it is my understanding (and you can see the subject line about my understanding) that current precedent declares laymen not competent for the purpose because they do not understand prior court decisions or the finer points of IP law. As we've seen, in such cases it is far more important to be legally correct than technologically/ethically correct.
And remember that we are all the source of the law's power. If a lawyer or judge ever talks down to me on the topic of law, I will consider that to be arrogant. It's arrogant, because it assumes that law is a black art and the knowledge is limited to the elite.
In the USA (which I believe you are in from the tone of your post), this is in fact the situation. Legally speaking, the common man is not considered to be capable of interpreting the law.
Let me give you an example: patents and the infringement thereof. You might think that if you want to avoid stepping on somebody's toes, the best thing to do would be to gather a big heap of patents, give them to your chief science dudes, and let them work out how close they are to infringing. After all, they understand the subject better than lawyers, so they can figure out what's similar and different and obvious and fair, right?
Wrong. Even if your guys look at a patent and conclude that you're not infringing, you can be sued for knowingly infringing on that patent. The only person considered competent to decide infringement is an IP lawyer. Thus, you order your scientists to avoid even glancing in the general direction of other patents in the field and leave it all to the legal department.
Is this fair? Hell no. I would certainly trust a lawyer's legal opinion over my own in most cases, but I don't think that means I'm unable to understand the law if pointed to the correct sections. However, the law is not always concerned with fairness.
NASA is run by a special interest: the scientists and the aerospace industry. Their interests include more scientific research and more money spent on spacecraft. That's really the entire purpose of NASA, isn't it? So, corruption and special interests are equally present in all areas of government, it's just a matter of how much that corruption is felt by the general population.
If I read you right, you're saying "NASA is in the pocket of Big Business, but the goals of Big Business and NASA coincide, so it doesn't appear corrupt." I can partially buy this theory, given the symbiosis between NASA (and DoD in general) and the contractors such as Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, etc. On the other hand, when I think of those companies, I think of them as producing fairly high-quality products without being big oppressive monsters like the members of the MPAA. What does it mean if an agency is in the pocket of a good corporation?
For that matter, being heavily involved with a few large corps may not signify corruption. The FDA is pretty heavily intertwined with the big pharmaceutical companies, and those companies lobby like mad to get new stuff approved. However, I can't think of cases where the FDA allowed a known unsafe drug to go to market; contrarily, I can think of a couple cases where a drug was discovered to have some very rare side effect (only detectable once it's in wide circulation) and was promptly pulled.
Similarly, I don't know that scientists can really count as a serious special interest, because they're not very unified and don't have a lot of money to spend. The voice of the Religious Right is pretty clear: censor everything and give us legislated "family values". What does the voice of the scientific community call for? Scientists may want more grants, but I don't see them bribing their Congresspeople to expand the funding of the NSF/NIH/DARPA/etc.
Today they are a very impressive nation with huge resources but they have the same problem - corruption at all levels.
You know, this could be describing the USA just as easily as China, and I think perhaps it could be applied to several other first-world nations as well. Corruption is not a feature of communism as much as it is one of bureaucracy, which both capitalist and communist governments tend towards.
Interestingly, despite being part of said bureaucracy-laden government, I personally do not find NASA to be corrupt. It's not a lean, mean machine as some would like it to be, but it also isn't run by any special interest. In fact, when you get down to it, most Federal agencies are not corrupt. Some are doing nasty things (FBI, CIA, BATF, etc.) but it's in their mandate to Make America Safe. The corruption seems to mainly be in the Congress and President, which then direct their subordinates to do bad things. This is good: there is a maximum of 437 people to remove in order to restore the system.
Slashdot Mirror
1) They have plenty of money to toss around on nukes, it seems...
:-)
Well, nukes ain't as costly as they used to be. I mean, when you get right down to it it's just some lumps of fissionable material and a device to keep them apart until you want the thing to go boom. Most 50-year-old technology is pretty simple to implement these days.
More importantly, though, being able to nuke the Pakis is clearly more important that educating and improving the lifestyle of the populace. If you educate them, how will they be dumb enough to go and sit in Kashmir and freeze and be shot at? Geez. Don't you know anything about public policy?
Right below the paragraph you quoted, there's a link to a further FAQ. I quote:
CD-R, short for Compact Disc-Recordable, is a type of disk that allows you to "write" or record onto the disk only once. When we use the term "CD-R," we are also referring to CD-RW disks, which is short for CD-ReWritable disk, a type of CD that enables you to "write" or record onto the disk multiple times. You can treat these types of disks like a floppy disk or hard disk, by writing data onto the disk once or multiple times.
A CD you can write to only once? Sure sounds like a CD-ROM to me, unless I'm missing something very fundamental.
(Boy, I seem to spend a lot of time pointing out problems anymore. Yeesh. I'm turning into a leech.)
1) You're running on the spare carrying capacity of a dedicated control system? Just how much spare bandwidth is there on this thing? Knowing how much money India generally has to toss around, I can't imagine that they've built a whole lot of extra in there. If this gets implemented on a national scale, won't there be congestion from hell?
2) What do people in the villages need with the Internet anyway? They're currently working on a model where there's one woman who's the "phone lady" and who acts as the primary link to other villages. Despite what pundits claim, you can't really get much of an education from the Web alone (yet). If I were a person in a rural Indian village, I'd be more interested in getting me some of that modern plumbing and health care before I wanted to go read Slashdot. It's basic Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs stuff.
Then again, maybe somebody wants to auction off a used water buffalo on eBay...
...and CD-R copies.
And this is different from software on CD how exactly? CD-R is defined to cover both ROM and RW. Anything on a CD is disallowed.
I'm not going to comment on the messing with feedback, but the yanking of auctions conforms to the policy Jamie referenced. If you look at the questionable items page, it states that any software on a CD cannot be auctioned unless you hold the copyright. They claim that this policy has been in place since 1999; can't verify that either way.
In any case, they've specifically said they're arbitrarily disallowing software CD sales because it's a bitch to sort pirates and OEM copies from legit sales. It's arbitrary and maybe unfair, but it shouldn't engender shock.
Any fact which adds bias to guilty but does not directly concern the current trial should be left out so that the jury can concentrate on facts (and falsities) presented during the trial.
But someone's psych profile and behavior patterns are relevant to the current trial, because they give some probabilities of what this person is likely to have done. Do you deny that the probability of someone having done a particular murder given that he's killed before is higher than the probability given that he hasn't?
looking beard. That's why lawers get their clients to get cleaned up and dressed nicely for court.
So? If someone has so little respect for the justice system that he comes to court wearing a t-shirt saying "KILL EVERYTHING", I can reasonably infer that he also has no respect for laws, and thus is more likely to be a criminal.
On DNA. Here we are talking about odds. The odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000 or something like that. Such odds do *not* preclude that two people can't have the same DNA. It means that they *can*. Unlikely, but it can happen.
1) The odds are a lot closer to 1/1 than that, by at least 3 orders of magnitude.
2) I know there can be DNA match errors; I've worked as a molecular biologist. This is precisely my point. In any database encompassing a country or state, there is a signficant chance of a given person matching an arbitrary probe by pure chance. Thus, DNA evidence must not be treated with the "pure truth" status it currently enjoys.
First, that if the numbers are, in fact, cryptographic messages, they were designed to be unencoded by someone somewhere.
While this is true, it in no way affects the strength of the argument. As previously mentioned, it is reasonable to suspect use of an OTP here. If that is the case, the target may be able to decrypt, but J. Random Hacker is SOL.
Second, the person unencoding the message probably hasn't had a computer transcribing the numbers for auto-decryption for the duration that the messages have been transmitted.
1) If the target is a government agency (making an assumption that number stations transmit from field to central and not vice versa), why wouldn't they autotranscribe and decrypt?
2) What does that have to do with the crackability of the data stream?
Yeah, the "hiding in plain sight" approach. Problem is, at least for the foreseeable future, the majority of human-to-human traffic is nonencrypted. This means that it's worthwhile to run an Echelon, which in turn means that your message might not be safe. (Were I the NSA, I'd flag things that were just plain odd as well as things with keywords.)
Actually, I think the pattern will be true in the future as well. It doesn't make sense to have one universal level of crypto, because there are some things (data that's only valid for a few minutes) where octuple-DES-Blowfish-RSA-YoMama with 1 G keys is just plain overkill. It also makes sense to have a large background of easier-to-crack messages, because that can keep the opponent busy working on the tractable problems. In fact, there's likely to be an Echelon targeted at those weakly encrypted transmissions, scavenging whatever useful data it can.
In short, hiding in plain sight only works if there aren't observers everywhere, and that's not the kind of world we're heading towards.
Oh. Right. That'll teach me to post before caffeine.
I honestly don't see how someone could hope to succeed at this. Let's say you get distributed.net to jump on the bandwagon. Great. Now what exactly are you going to do? You have arbitrary strings of numbers. This could be a fragment of a single text, parts of multiple texts, multiple complete texts, and so on. Sure, you could scan for patterns first and try to identify delimiters, but were I sending data through this, I wouldn't do you the favor of using a fixed separation string. I'd base it on conditions at the time of broadcast, or on some computation on the ciphertext, or some other thing that's not trivially detectable. In short, you don't know which decryption method to try. It's been pointed out that it's probably a one-time pad anyway.
Even if you can find an algorithm, how big are the keys? How will you know when you've got the plaintext? Something transmitted by the NSA is likely to be in highly obfuscated English at best. Like the handmade strong crypto challenge, the true plaintext might be very strange. How will you recognize that this is the correct decryption and not just a coincidental decryption into random gibberish?
Finally, while I agree that some numbers stations probably are espionage related, I'll bet they keep the noise very high. Many of them are probably reading right off the random number generator of the nearest computer. Did the challenge supervisors pick ones that are actual signal?
This is not to say it's impossible, but the benefit/difficulty ratio seems so high that anybody wizardly enough to succeed should probably be working on developing better algorithms for us instead.
History is circumstancial. It's not proof.
Yes, but there is no true proof in a courtroom. Maybe he really was framed. Maybe the DNA samples were switched at the lab, or worse yet, this is one of those cases where the test fails. (There are actually a lot of those if one is doing a sufficient amount of DNA testing, which is why I'm a bit scared that DNA is currently treated as though God came down out of the sky and said "He did it.") Maybe the eyewitness is mistaken or lying.
In short, it all comes down to the subjective opinion of twelve people based on all sorts of testimony, much of which is also based on subjective criteria. If you're going to let that much noise into the system, adding in the prior record isn't going to introduce significant inaccuracy, IMHO.
Note that I'm not saying that the judicial system is bad for being the way it is. I think it works much of the time, with exceptions made for anything involving the rich or the powerful.
The *more likely* part of your statement is for the police to investigate, not for the jury to consider. The jury is concerned with the facts of *this* murder. Past history should not be entered as evidence (it's circumstantial, and could be misleading.)
We accept psychological opinions as evidence in trials (or at least we do in the USA). To me, knowledge that a person has killed before, and especially that he/she has killed repeatedly, is information about his/her psychological makeup. If nothing else, it shows that any prior claims of reform and repentance were not sincere. This means that I should also distrust any statements that the defendant may make in the current trial; what is a charge of perjury to one who is on trial for murder?
Lie detector technology doesn't really work. The only known way to detect bullshit is via context and contradictory evidence. Details of someone's criminal history seem to be useful in this regard and therefore seem likely to lead to improved decisions, and therefore I'd say juries should have access to them.
One is that this might actually be a valid use for censorware. You can use a keyword-based system that only blocks web pages which contain the full name of persons involved in the trial. It's not perfect, but if there's a web page a juror really needs to see, it seems to be a simple matter of asking the judge to have it specifically whitelisted.
Of course, since you'd need to be able to install that software on any platform, that means you'd need to develop censorware for Linux/BSD. (I'm assuming nobody runs IRIX or OSF or any of that stuff on a machine which they'd actually be using while stuck on jury duty.)
To me, barring jurors from reading info about the accused isn't true censorship, because they always have the option to read it once the trial is done. If you go to the library to get a book and someone else has checked out that book, that's not censorship --- you just have to wait.
Also, can some lawyer/historian type person explain what's up with this particular way of preventing jury bias? It seems to me that a defendant's past history is very relevant. If he's got multiple murder convictions, it probably is more likely that he did the one he's on trial for now. Yes, there will be bias, but that's what happens when you violate social contracts --- people stop trusting you. I think that's fair, and it's probably one of the better incentives not to commit crimes.
The way I see it, if you're infected with a virus you are to blame. If your computer is performing illegal activities then I believe you are at least partially at fault. Certainly running stupid software (Outlook) makes this more likely, but ultimately it's your responsibility to run good software, and to use it sensibly.
Whoa there. Do you realize exactly the implications of such a policy? Let's say, for example, that I get news of a new root exploit before most systems are patched. I combine my knowledge of this exploit with my l33t sk1llz to write a virus that contains a payload of a few bits of kiddie porn I yank off of FreeNet. The virus infects a target machine and attempts to locate addresses of further hosts to infiltrate. Once it has found compatible hosts, it pauses to send a few emails to president@whitehouse.gov, mib@fbi.gov, and so on. Each email contains the text "I am a pedophile and distributor of child pornography. Enclosed are images as proof of my crimes. I confess and repent. Please come and arrest me."
Your computer has just distributed child pornography. Maybe you didn't know about the hole yet or maybe you haven't had time to apply the patch, but either way you didn't exercise "due diligence". Enjoy prison.
People who catch viruses are often victims of their own stupidity and shouldn't have "victims' rights". This much I agree with. However, if a virus does illegal things, it is unfair to hold a user responsible for those things in most situations.
That's just what they want you to think.
Except, of course, that you are obviously one of Them who wants me to think that that's what you wanted me to think, butI already know that that's what you want me to think, and thus I knew that you would post this and am way ahead of you.
I think.
Unless that's what They want me to think...
The article includes commentary about Area 51. It's the second item. While reading that story, I had a thought about Area 51, so I posted it.
What's so irrelevant about that, pray tell?
First off, I agree that this story is a good idea, and I hope we see more like it in the future.
Now. Area 51, home of UFOs, Little Green (or is it Grey?) Men, Top Sekrit Projects, and possibly Will Smith. Has it occurred to anyone that the government may not have anything interesting down there?
Think about it. The Groom Lake facility is probably one of the most famous testing grounds. Everything going on is surrounded by serious security. Naturally, this means that we all think something big is going on and we spend a lot of time and money trying to get a peek. ("We" probably includes various national governments.) What if the whole thing is just bait? What if Area 51 is a big hoax with DoD-class special effects to keep us mesmerized while the real secret research is going on somewhere totally different?
Hell, if I wanted to keep nosy UFO nuts away from my captured alien specimens and anti-gravity drives, it's what I might do.
Some people have been wondering why TRCY chose to use the Basic Stamps as the "brain". I admit that it's not the choice I would have made, but since it seems people have had good experiences with Stamps, that can slide.
To me, the real question is: why buy a robotics kit that gives you this kind of robot body? If you want to add anything other than new sensors, it's going to start getting unwieldy. IMHO, the better thing to do would be to package a preferred control board with some Lego pieces. It's easy enough to build a TRaCY-style body using Lego, and you have the option of rapidly reconfiguring the chassis to suit your needs. Lego also offers a lot more expandability.
Yes, it'd cost more. OTOH, if you're shelling out $90 for a kit, why not wait a bit longer, pay $120 or so, and get something a heck of a lot more powerful?
You have 45 minutes to spend just to annoy a spammer and cost him money?
I hope the server falls on you the next time you walk past it.
Seriously, though, the whole problem with spam is that it wastes my resources. If I spend any nontrivial time (where "trivial" is defined as the time to SpamCop it) on spam, it only aggravates the problem. Your solution works, but I think it's unfeasible in practice.
My dad gets telecom spam. Some of it is from legit companies like GTC offering very good rates. He will respond to those, because they offer him something he wants. There are probably other people out there who look forward to porn spam so they can mooch a few more free pics.
Spam exists because the risk-to-reward is very low. Email costs nothing. One reply in a thousand, or even in a hundred thousand, and you've got significant profit.
The real question is: why would anyone want top performance in a laptop? The damn things are supposed to be reliable and portable, not able to outperform a workstation!
Speaking as a person who recently used Other People's Money to buy a P3-500 laptop, some of us are greedy bastards who want the power of a Cray and three years of battery life in an adamantium-strength package which weighs a single kilo. Oh, and it had better come with drivers for every OS ever.
I see no reason why portability must entail loss of power; you just pay more to buy the "portable" option.
I think the judges generally make this call.
While I believe this is true, it is my understanding (and you can see the subject line about my understanding) that current precedent declares laymen not competent for the purpose because they do not understand prior court decisions or the finer points of IP law. As we've seen, in such cases it is far more important to be legally correct than technologically/ethically correct.
And remember that we are all the source of the law's power. If a lawyer or judge ever talks down to me on the topic of law, I will consider that to be arrogant. It's arrogant, because it assumes that law is a black art and the knowledge is limited to the elite.
In the USA (which I believe you are in from the tone of your post), this is in fact the situation. Legally speaking, the common man is not considered to be capable of interpreting the law.
Let me give you an example: patents and the infringement thereof. You might think that if you want to avoid stepping on somebody's toes, the best thing to do would be to gather a big heap of patents, give them to your chief science dudes, and let them work out how close they are to infringing. After all, they understand the subject better than lawyers, so they can figure out what's similar and different and obvious and fair, right?
Wrong. Even if your guys look at a patent and conclude that you're not infringing, you can be sued for knowingly infringing on that patent. The only person considered competent to decide infringement is an IP lawyer. Thus, you order your scientists to avoid even glancing in the general direction of other patents in the field and leave it all to the legal department.
Is this fair? Hell no. I would certainly trust a lawyer's legal opinion over my own in most cases, but I don't think that means I'm unable to understand the law if pointed to the correct sections. However, the law is not always concerned with fairness.
Alik
NASA is run by a special interest: the scientists and the aerospace industry. Their interests include more scientific research and more money spent on spacecraft. That's really the entire purpose of NASA, isn't it? So, corruption and special interests are equally present in all areas of government, it's just a matter of how much that corruption is felt by the general population.
If I read you right, you're saying "NASA is in the pocket of Big Business, but the goals of Big Business and NASA coincide, so it doesn't appear corrupt." I can partially buy this theory, given the symbiosis between NASA (and DoD in general) and the contractors such as Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, etc. On the other hand, when I think of those companies, I think of them as producing fairly high-quality products without being big oppressive monsters like the members of the MPAA. What does it mean if an agency is in the pocket of a good corporation?
For that matter, being heavily involved with a few large corps may not signify corruption. The FDA is pretty heavily intertwined with the big pharmaceutical companies, and those companies lobby like mad to get new stuff approved. However, I can't think of cases where the FDA allowed a known unsafe drug to go to market; contrarily, I can think of a couple cases where a drug was discovered to have some very rare side effect (only detectable once it's in wide circulation) and was promptly pulled.
Similarly, I don't know that scientists can really count as a serious special interest, because they're not very unified and don't have a lot of money to spend. The voice of the Religious Right is pretty clear: censor everything and give us legislated "family values". What does the voice of the scientific community call for? Scientists may want more grants, but I don't see them bribing their Congresspeople to expand the funding of the NSF/NIH/DARPA/etc.
Alik
Today they are a very impressive nation with huge resources but they have the same problem - corruption at all levels.
You know, this could be describing the USA just as easily as China, and I think perhaps it could be applied to several other first-world nations as well. Corruption is not a feature of communism as much as it is one of bureaucracy, which both capitalist and communist governments tend towards.
Interestingly, despite being part of said bureaucracy-laden government, I personally do not find NASA to be corrupt. It's not a lean, mean machine as some would like it to be, but it also isn't run by any special interest. In fact, when you get down to it, most Federal agencies are not corrupt. Some are doing nasty things (FBI, CIA, BATF, etc.) but it's in their mandate to Make America Safe. The corruption seems to mainly be in the Congress and President, which then direct their subordinates to do bad things. This is good: there is a maximum of 437 people to remove in order to restore the system.
Alik