From a mathematical perspective, this discussion is structurally broken, in that it is an attempt to debate the relationship between reality and a description of reality without acknowledging that the two are distinct! On the one hand, it is perfectly reasonable to posit that the Universe has some internal structure, that there is a 'real' reality, if you will. And the notion of mathematics is sufficiently flexible that we can almost certainly assume that this structure is 'mathematical,' supporting the view that 'the mathematics is on fire', that the mathematics of the Universe is the Universe and that you don't have to stick some kind of metaphysical putty on it to make it 'come true'. (This does indeed in turn suggest that every piece of mathematics can be a 'Universe' to anyone who happens to be living inside it. This notion doesn't bother me; it merely suggests that we can, for example, write simulation games. Some people are more religious about that putty I was speaking of, however.)
At the same time it is crystal clear that we have finite information resources, and a limited ability to do experiments, and thus our physical descriptions of the Universe are only approximations to this reality, bounded by the limits of information and insight.
There is reality and there are descriptions and they are not the same thing; but both are mathematical objects and the kinds of relationships that exist between systems and descriptions of systems are extremely well studied. That is what statistics is about; that is what model theory is about; that is what arithmetic is about; that is what category theory is about; indeed, I'd go so far as to say that, in the broadest terms, this is the actual content of mathematics.
There is a lot of extra effort involved in confusing ourselves between physical 'laws' and the things they describe, to really get stuck into this debate. So let's not bother.
A more interesting thing to philosophise about (given that philosophy can be defined as discussions that occur between the second and sixth beers) is this: given that our measurements of reality produce only an approximation to that reality, it would appear that 'real' reality is not, at any given moment in time, uniquely determined. Does this matter? Is there, in short, a macroscale dual to quantum uncertainty, whereby scientific experiment 'collapses' scientific law?
First of all, the sickle cell / malaria evolution happened many thousands of years ago so it has nothing to do with what happens today.
I can't interpret this—I hope. If you seriously believe that observation of events at one point in time tells us nothing about events at another point in time, then so long scientific method. Indeed, so long to learning to talk. Might I ask what you really meant to say?
If evolution was still allowed to take it's proper course, people who were born with congenital heart defects and brain defects would all die at a very early age. Instead, they are allowed to live full lives in modern society, possibly passing their defective genes along in the pool.
Goodness me, if evolution turns our offspring into tapeworms (as it did to tapeworms!), can this truly be said to be 'improper'? But I still suspect that rock stars have many times the reproductive capacity of people on life support, so much as there are few rock stars I have great respect for, evolution will in fact continue to do something not so far from what you perceive as its job. At least until the point where there is no advantage to having a functional heart (perhaps when artificial ones work so much better that we swap them out routinely anyway)—at which point I submit it truly, truly does not matter. Provably so, since whether it matters will be directly measured by the standard of reproductive viability.
That's not how it works; or at any rate, I made no attempt to work it that way. The experience was that Claudia gives you a nice and lengthy chat and a fist full of somewhat naughty pictures, but you then have really good odds with the fans you have just made wait - and Claudia seems to have good fans.
One of the characteristics of good advice, I'm afraid, is that it is realistic.
Little steps, of course. When I worked in AI, I used to tell people, First we need to solve the artificial stupidity problem. That will let us do the tasks that everyone does routinely. Intelligence is rare, anyway.
But of course, I agree with you completely. Much science has been passed by in the rush to get useful techniques out of statistical methods. Humans are all about grammar extraction and pragmatics; it's only one level of abstraction beyond where we are now, but we are being very slow in going there because the first order systems are well understood and can be trained without interaction. (Cognitive scientists should be made to do structural and informational analyses of videos of people interacting with infants as part of their training. I think it brings the point home faster than the mathematical results from proof theory.)
Unfortunately, current political thinking (and here I grant I draw in black and white) is that research should be put at the service of applications (and education at that of industry), and this clamps us to those first-order solutions. Disruptive technologies need not apply for grants.
That's a problem with all voting systems, indeed all government. Which citizens, in fact, exist, and therefore have rights? I tend to favour secure centrally administered ID schemes in which there's a trusted token associated with each person, but one that can manage multiple logical personae; but clearly that's also a politically hot question. But in any case, I think we need to separate voter enumeration from voting per se (indeed, that's exactly the point of secret ballot).
One of the tables you plan to join should not exist. Voter registration passes to vote counting the list of 'red' numbers and the list of 'blue' numbers, but no record is kept of who gets which number. Yes, ensuring that there are no side channels requires auditing the process, as do some parts of any electoral mechanism, but at considerably less effort than, say, thwarting conventional distributed ballot-stuffing attacks.
E-voting is only hard to understand if you don't choose the right protocol. Actually, the internal details of how paper votes are manipulated are pretty arcane; it's only at the 'count the tokens' level of abstraction it seems easy. So—make sure your electronic voting scheme has a 'count the tokens' layer, already!
The trouble is, we live in a world where the resources of the adversaries of the electoral system seem to be immense. It appears to be feasible for them to 'buy' (or in any case control) significant numbers of the polling stations, and to manipulate their procedures on a grand scale. As such, an electronic voting system that worked would be a big help: it would make verifiability a centralised problem that organisations with some clout could get involved with. To put is differently, we are currently allowing the enemies of democracy to employ distributed fraud. Centralised fraud is easier to detect, and (at least in principle) easier to audit.
Think about it as a protocol problem. As I've said elsewhere today, they can give you a printed sheet bearing two random numbers. On voting day, you enter one of the random numbers into the voting system, by an insecure channel if you like. Only the tallying system knows which numbers are 'red' and which are 'blue'. At the end of the election, all the votes are published: a sorted list of all the numbers counted for each candidate. Voters can choose themselves between being paranoid and destroying their information sheets as soon as they have cast their votes, or retaining them and verifying that their votes were correctly counted.
Fixed numbers of dummy votes (indistinguishable from real ones) can be inserted for each candidate (and then subtracted off the candidates' totals at the end, of course) to provide for detection of systematic fraud without revealing anyone's vote.
Does this scheme have any flaws worse than those of a paper ballot? Is it difficult to implement? The only disadvantages I really see are that it doesn't make a lot of money for anyone's friends, and it makes the election's outcome hard to manipulate, neither of which is attractive to the kinds of people we find in contemporary politics:(.
People always worry about the loss of the secret ballot in electronically verifiable schemes, and I don't get it. The voter registration service mails you two random numbers (which include some checksum mechanism against typos, of course). You enter one of them. Voter identity and voter preference can be completely segregated. What's the difficulty?
You can even check that the counting mechanism is being applied correctly by issuing 'probe votes'. These are additional pseudo-voters, indistinguishable at the electronic level from actual voters, with pre-determined uniformly distributed votes that are entered into the system during the election process and subtracted out again after vote counting. If the subtraction step fails, then you have evidence of fraud. (There is no significant overhead this way, because if all passes off as it is supposed to, each candidate receives the same number of probe votes, and you just subtract this number from their tally. The probe votes serve only to provide a supply of electors who do not mind revealing their identity in order to validate their votes with the central authority and force a recount if necessary.)
Yeah, I recently took a Chinese class. Acquiring a Chinese given name turned into a lengthy negotiation (my name even has a specified algorithm for translation—my parents are a bit odd—but unfortunately it sees to have failed in this case because of some historical/linguistic misfortune), and my surname is an unresolved disaster.:) (And yes, you recall correctly. Holland, for example, unless they changed matters.)
I think what I resent about it is that I now need to allocate two new slots in my mental lexicon—one for "spintronics" (ok, fine, it's a new concept) and one for "-tron-" (but meaning what, exactly?). If they want a catchy new word, why not just call it something new, like 'flarp', or something more regularly derived, like 'spinics' (still an abomination in classical terms, but far more structurally resonable)?
I wish all these PhD-types would go to school, or something!;)
"Basically the majority of all Canadian government projects go badly and go overbudget, not just a wee little bit, but by a lot - incompetence and lack of any accountability are systemic problems in virtually every government project. Corruption too."
Fixed version:
Basically the majority of all government projects go badly and go overbudget, not just a wee little bit, but by a lot - incompetence and lack of any accountability are systemic problems in every government project together with corruption and bribes.
It's oh so much worse than either of you imagine. It turns out that in many cases, nondelivery of services is specific government policy. A tiny example from personal experience in Quebec: some years ago now there was a large ice-storm in these parts which caused huge property damage, both directly and indirectly through midwinter power loss; and the government, very generously, announced that it was going to pay for repairs to affected residents' houses. A few years later I chanced to run into the man who oversaw the relief program. He was moonlighting as an R&D tax credit consultant, taking people's money to tell them how to evade the impossible-to-satisfy oversight measures that he enforced in his day job - "Please list the areas of technical doubt and uncertainty of this project and the dates on which these difficulties will be overcome" (really!).
Anyway, he told me with great pride that he had received accolades within the department because he had managed to keep the payouts for the ice storm relief program down to about 10% of the budgetary allocation by careful design of the bureaucratic process. He said that he had followed the official guidelines to the letter—that 25% of the potential payout for any given application would be consumed in up-front lawyers' and accountants' fees (again, really!); but that he had managed to make the applications so daunting that most private citizens concluded that they would see no net gain from it at all, and did not even apply.
This is the reality of Canada. The corruption is official government policy, and there's no secret about it at all. I'm not sure there's any need for incompetence here!
The amazing thing is that it's still a nice place to live, aside from the weather. All the immigrants help a lot. The natives (I use the word in the English sense - the people born here) are, by and large, crooks. The customs officers get upset at you when you do declare what you are importing, and while paying your taxes and not taking drugs are looked upon as acceptable eccentricities, the combination of the two puts you on the far, far fringes of society.
I've always wondered quite how far into unpronounceability (and indeed unprintability) names are allowed to venture. Merely giving your child a name with a formfeed in it would probably cause chaos enough.
I've also long wondered what the perpetrators of these text-string-passing SQL bindings were on. That's an 'idea' that just isn't one!
Ah, so as someone academically qualified to discuss xons in general, is there indeed such a mathematical object as a 'spintron,' or is this another case of a journalist and/or PR person who doesn't have a clue about the atomic structure of language?
Interrogation should be performed by asking people questions; I believe that's what the word means. Neither rubber hoses nor hair scissors are required; those are tools for the emotional gratification of the interrogator.
If there are answers that you are determined to get, well, to be utterly Machiavellian about this, manufacturing data is better done by making it up from whole cloth than it is by pressuring people to 'admit' to it—you have better control of both presentation and content, and there are actually less long-term political ramifications.
As to "(suspected) enemy combatants," a suspect is innocent. That is a fundamental legal principle. If you can't even prove that they're a soldier, much less that they're guilty of anything, then let them go!
So, no, I will not admit that it is necessary. Even if you take your rubber hose to me I will not be admitting that it is necessary—those will forever your words and your ideas, no matter what sounds you force from my mouth.
There are methods for dealing with actual problems. The situation here, though, is that a problem has been invented and generating evidence for it is proving troublesome!
Now, none of this is to say that there aren't terrorists, or that terrorists aren't a problem. But the difficulty is not what is pretended. First, terrorists often seem to be, or be epiphenomena of, covert operations of prominent governments. The rational thing to do would be for governments to scale back such operations—to take a stance of simply not doing such things. Second, when looked at politically and statistically, it is apparent that terrorism is a problem on the scale of a crime, not of a war. The tools for dealing with international crimes are institutions such as Interpol, not the army. Should the problem rise to the scale of genocide, we now even have the International Criminal Court (though the US refuses to submit to it). The only obvious adjustments to be made are (a) to take these institutions more seriously, (b) perhaps to extended the scope of the ICC downwards to sub-genocidal patterns of violent crime that national governments decline to deal with, and (c) to abide by the principles of universal respect for human rights and the rule of law, without which you become the enemy of civilisation.
It's true that there are worse things, but - would you care to be forced to wear lipstick? To have your armpits shaved? I don't think you're thinking about this clearly. Taking control of another person's appearance is a serious psychological exercise.
For the life of me (and believe me, I know about needing more coffee, so you hae my utter sympathy on that score) that's a normal English sentence. Some of these words may have technical legal nuances, but 'relief' and 'action' are the only words there that I would not have used in everyday speech in roughly these senses; and these two exceptions are ones that are found in almost every discussion of these matters here on slashdot, so presumably the readership has some familiarity with them by now!
Then again, I'm increasingly getting responses to comments here of the form 'you use big words and I refuse to read past the first sentence so you must be wrong.'
Yesterday we had an entire conversation about how some poor parent was remiss because their five year old was not yet a fluent reader.
Um, am I reading this differently from everyone else? It says,
enemy combatants are "Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government," then "Unlawful combatants do not receive POW status and do not receive the full protections of the Third Geneva Convention," and finally "The President has determined that al Qaida members are unlawful combatants because (among other reasons) they are members of a non-state actor terrorist group that does not receive the protections of the Third Geneva Convention."
So the idea here is that an 'enemy combatant' is someone working for a hostile foreign government; and that these are subdivided into 'lawful combatants,' those who are working for a hostile foreign government, and 'unlawful combatants,' who are not. Thus an unlawful combatant is someone who does and does not work for a foreign government. The logic we learned at school allows us to conclude immediately that there is no such person.
Soldiers are covered by the Geneva convention; civilians by the usual laws. There is no third case, because you either are or are not an enemy combatant, 'a citizen who associates themselves with the military arm of an enemy government.' Where's the flaw in this reasoning?
Finally, of course, the President gets to decide? Who made him God? I thought the US was a Western democracy, with the rule of law and all that good stuff?
Re:so much DRM, most data will be inaccessible
on
Security in Ten Years
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· Score: 1
More worrisome is not that universal DRM and DMCA-like measures, patent abuse, etc., will restrict us by requiring us to pay money for access to our data, or by narrowing our selection of data sources, but that they will continue to require us to install shoddy and insecure client/plugin software. These legal measures provide a specific incentive for the trusted components of a computing environment to be the least trustworthy; in short, for a security meltdown. We are already seeing the consequences, though while the slashdot readership generally see the 'trees' of company-x-has-a-bug-this-week it often misses the 'forest' of an emergent wholesale attack on system integrity.
You must understand that at heart the DMCA was legal protection for snake oil; it says that anything that claims to be secure is secure in law, regardless of technical considerations such as whether it is correctly written, provides actual protection, or in fact enforces the same license as was nominally granted (and this protection of snake-oil is what it was for; the intellectual property protections it supposedly provides would be equally well addressed by saying that ignoring a notice saying 'please do not copy this data' is punishable by fine - pretty much what copyright law already does). It furthermore has the specific technical effect, in the case of general purpose computers, that the content owner and not the hardware owner is given control of the security of the playback hardware. But the content owner derives no benefit from the security of other people's hardware. Nor (at least under the current - perhaps, if we're feeling paranoid, carefully cultivated - prevailing mores that computers fail randomly and that this is entirely normal) do content providers actually derive benefit from content delivery mechanisms that work reliably. The bulk of their revenue stream, now that the legislation is in place, is evidently from sale of replacements for what are in essence defective items!
So you must remember that, despite what supporters of this philosophy may pretend, it is technically impossible to prove the security of a client in the customer's physical possession. It is, however, legally possible to ensure its insecurity - providing there is legislated support for DRM and 'trusted computing' mechanisms (which we must carefully distinguish from mutually suspicious computing mechanisms) whereby privilege escalation attacks are mandated as part of content licensing. I fear that this means that the future holds as many more rootkits as dubious serverisation schemes.
To address both the security and the long term data accessibility problems, a law desperately needs to be enacted that all data formats used in commerce contain explicit embedded references to platform independent, publicly archived (in the Library of Congress sense) and peer-reviewed playback clients, which, if not free to use, at least have license fees that are guaranteed in perpetuity and collected on behalf of the owners by that public institution.
The present path leads to cultural, technical and economic ruin, because at the deepest level of principle, self help runs counter to both the free market and the rule of law. There is no security to be had from vigilantes, privateers and protection rackets, but that is what the Western governments are providing for the average computer user.
(And that's even assuming that all O/S's don't suck.)
Well, it was a little rabid, but it's really important to understand that this is increasingly how the US is seen by the rest of the world. Other people aren't calling it the 'land of the free,' they're seeing it as the land of violence; and to Europeans, they're seeing what they think of as its traditional arrogant isolationism as being replaced by arrogant interventionism. You need to remember that (unlike what they teach in schools) the traditional American respect for civil rights was adopted from British tradition, and that in Europe it has in many ways grown stronger than in America. You need to remember that Iraq is in Europe's back yard. You need to remember that the US' PR is being handled by Hollywood and the Army.
There's a reason that posts you perceive as 'anti-American' get modded +5 Insightful. It may not be insight that is deep, but it is insight that is needed.
Perhaps the child is not so brilliant. Perhaps the child is brilliant, but is, for example, dyslexic. Lots of other comments here are also from people saying, 'ooh, but I was a genius, I was reading in the womb!' Well, good for you. But other people do not have a moral obligation to be you.
So yes, in general, this is a bit late to be starting reading.
But have some thought for the specific, why not?
... Or maybe the stereotype of the slashdot crowd as a gaggle of empathy-impaired clods is justified, after all.:(
Slashdot Mirror
It's an inverse Schrödinger thing. Dead people make no observations, therefore handguns are anti-scientific.
Hm, the phrase "co-Schrödingerisation argument" is sparky. I have to start using it in my gibberish.
From a mathematical perspective, this discussion is structurally broken, in that it is an attempt to debate the relationship between reality and a description of reality without acknowledging that the two are distinct! On the one hand, it is perfectly reasonable to posit that the Universe has some internal structure, that there is a 'real' reality, if you will. And the notion of mathematics is sufficiently flexible that we can almost certainly assume that this structure is 'mathematical,' supporting the view that 'the mathematics is on fire', that the mathematics of the Universe is the Universe and that you don't have to stick some kind of metaphysical putty on it to make it 'come true'. (This does indeed in turn suggest that every piece of mathematics can be a 'Universe' to anyone who happens to be living inside it. This notion doesn't bother me; it merely suggests that we can, for example, write simulation games. Some people are more religious about that putty I was speaking of, however.)
At the same time it is crystal clear that we have finite information resources, and a limited ability to do experiments, and thus our physical descriptions of the Universe are only approximations to this reality, bounded by the limits of information and insight.
There is reality and there are descriptions and they are not the same thing; but both are mathematical objects and the kinds of relationships that exist between systems and descriptions of systems are extremely well studied. That is what statistics is about; that is what model theory is about; that is what arithmetic is about; that is what category theory is about; indeed, I'd go so far as to say that, in the broadest terms, this is the actual content of mathematics.
There is a lot of extra effort involved in confusing ourselves between physical 'laws' and the things they describe, to really get stuck into this debate. So let's not bother.
A more interesting thing to philosophise about (given that philosophy can be defined as discussions that occur between the second and sixth beers) is this: given that our measurements of reality produce only an approximation to that reality, it would appear that 'real' reality is not, at any given moment in time, uniquely determined. Does this matter? Is there, in short, a macroscale dual to quantum uncertainty, whereby scientific experiment 'collapses' scientific law?
Pass me another, I'm still upright.
I can't interpret this—I hope. If you seriously believe that observation of events at one point in time tells us nothing about events at another point in time, then so long scientific method. Indeed, so long to learning to talk. Might I ask what you really meant to say?
Goodness me, if evolution turns our offspring into tapeworms (as it did to tapeworms!), can this truly be said to be 'improper'? But I still suspect that rock stars have many times the reproductive capacity of people on life support, so much as there are few rock stars I have great respect for, evolution will in fact continue to do something not so far from what you perceive as its job. At least until the point where there is no advantage to having a functional heart (perhaps when artificial ones work so much better that we swap them out routinely anyway)—at which point I submit it truly, truly does not matter. Provably so, since whether it matters will be directly measured by the standard of reproductive viability.
That's not how it works; or at any rate, I made no attempt to work it that way. The experience was that Claudia gives you a nice and lengthy chat and a fist full of somewhat naughty pictures, but you then have really good odds with the fans you have just made wait - and Claudia seems to have good fans.
One of the characteristics of good advice, I'm afraid, is that it is realistic.
Little steps, of course. When I worked in AI, I used to tell people, First we need to solve the artificial stupidity problem. That will let us do the tasks that everyone does routinely. Intelligence is rare, anyway.
But of course, I agree with you completely. Much science has been passed by in the rush to get useful techniques out of statistical methods. Humans are all about grammar extraction and pragmatics; it's only one level of abstraction beyond where we are now, but we are being very slow in going there because the first order systems are well understood and can be trained without interaction. (Cognitive scientists should be made to do structural and informational analyses of videos of people interacting with infants as part of their training. I think it brings the point home faster than the mathematical results from proof theory.)
Unfortunately, current political thinking (and here I grant I draw in black and white) is that research should be put at the service of applications (and education at that of industry), and this clamps us to those first-order solutions. Disruptive technologies need not apply for grants.
'Be doodling on your Newton 2000 when you meet Claudia Christian.'
It's extremely outmoded advice by now, yes, but you clearly have no idea what you are talking about if you imagine that such tips cannot be useful.
That's a problem with all voting systems, indeed all government. Which citizens, in fact, exist, and therefore have rights? I tend to favour secure centrally administered ID schemes in which there's a trusted token associated with each person, but one that can manage multiple logical personae; but clearly that's also a politically hot question. But in any case, I think we need to separate voter enumeration from voting per se (indeed, that's exactly the point of secret ballot).
One of the tables you plan to join should not exist. Voter registration passes to vote counting the list of 'red' numbers and the list of 'blue' numbers, but no record is kept of who gets which number. Yes, ensuring that there are no side channels requires auditing the process, as do some parts of any electoral mechanism, but at considerably less effort than, say, thwarting conventional distributed ballot-stuffing attacks.
E-voting is only hard to understand if you don't choose the right protocol. Actually, the internal details of how paper votes are manipulated are pretty arcane; it's only at the 'count the tokens' level of abstraction it seems easy. So—make sure your electronic voting scheme has a 'count the tokens' layer, already!
The trouble is, we live in a world where the resources of the adversaries of the electoral system seem to be immense. It appears to be feasible for them to 'buy' (or in any case control) significant numbers of the polling stations, and to manipulate their procedures on a grand scale. As such, an electronic voting system that worked would be a big help: it would make verifiability a centralised problem that organisations with some clout could get involved with. To put is differently, we are currently allowing the enemies of democracy to employ distributed fraud. Centralised fraud is easier to detect, and (at least in principle) easier to audit.
Think about it as a protocol problem. As I've said elsewhere today, they can give you a printed sheet bearing two random numbers. On voting day, you enter one of the random numbers into the voting system, by an insecure channel if you like. Only the tallying system knows which numbers are 'red' and which are 'blue'. At the end of the election, all the votes are published: a sorted list of all the numbers counted for each candidate. Voters can choose themselves between being paranoid and destroying their information sheets as soon as they have cast their votes, or retaining them and verifying that their votes were correctly counted.
Fixed numbers of dummy votes (indistinguishable from real ones) can be inserted for each candidate (and then subtracted off the candidates' totals at the end, of course) to provide for detection of systematic fraud without revealing anyone's vote.
Does this scheme have any flaws worse than those of a paper ballot? Is it difficult to implement? The only disadvantages I really see are that it doesn't make a lot of money for anyone's friends, and it makes the election's outcome hard to manipulate, neither of which is attractive to the kinds of people we find in contemporary politics :(.
People always worry about the loss of the secret ballot in electronically verifiable schemes, and I don't get it. The voter registration service mails you two random numbers (which include some checksum mechanism against typos, of course). You enter one of them. Voter identity and voter preference can be completely segregated. What's the difficulty?
You can even check that the counting mechanism is being applied correctly by issuing 'probe votes'. These are additional pseudo-voters, indistinguishable at the electronic level from actual voters, with pre-determined uniformly distributed votes that are entered into the system during the election process and subtracted out again after vote counting. If the subtraction step fails, then you have evidence of fraud. (There is no significant overhead this way, because if all passes off as it is supposed to, each candidate receives the same number of probe votes, and you just subtract this number from their tally. The probe votes serve only to provide a supply of electors who do not mind revealing their identity in order to validate their votes with the central authority and force a recount if necessary.)
Yeah, I recently took a Chinese class. Acquiring a Chinese given name turned into a lengthy negotiation (my name even has a specified algorithm for translation—my parents are a bit odd—but unfortunately it sees to have failed in this case because of some historical/linguistic misfortune), and my surname is an unresolved disaster. :) (And yes, you recall correctly. Holland, for example, unless they changed matters.)
I think what I resent about it is that I now need to allocate two new slots in my mental lexicon—one for "spintronics" (ok, fine, it's a new concept) and one for "-tron-" (but meaning what, exactly?). If they want a catchy new word, why not just call it something new, like 'flarp', or something more regularly derived, like 'spinics' (still an abomination in classical terms, but far more structurally resonable)?
I wish all these PhD-types would go to school, or something! ;)
Mod, I think, parent up.
It's oh so much worse than either of you imagine. It turns out that in many cases, nondelivery of services is specific government policy. A tiny example from personal experience in Quebec: some years ago now there was a large ice-storm in these parts which caused huge property damage, both directly and indirectly through midwinter power loss; and the government, very generously, announced that it was going to pay for repairs to affected residents' houses. A few years later I chanced to run into the man who oversaw the relief program. He was moonlighting as an R&D tax credit consultant, taking people's money to tell them how to evade the impossible-to-satisfy oversight measures that he enforced in his day job - "Please list the areas of technical doubt and uncertainty of this project and the dates on which these difficulties will be overcome" (really!).
Anyway, he told me with great pride that he had received accolades within the department because he had managed to keep the payouts for the ice storm relief program down to about 10% of the budgetary allocation by careful design of the bureaucratic process. He said that he had followed the official guidelines to the letter—that 25% of the potential payout for any given application would be consumed in up-front lawyers' and accountants' fees (again, really!); but that he had managed to make the applications so daunting that most private citizens concluded that they would see no net gain from it at all, and did not even apply.
This is the reality of Canada. The corruption is official government policy, and there's no secret about it at all. I'm not sure there's any need for incompetence here!
The amazing thing is that it's still a nice place to live, aside from the weather. All the immigrants help a lot. The natives (I use the word in the English sense - the people born here) are, by and large, crooks. The customs officers get upset at you when you do declare what you are importing, and while paying your taxes and not taking drugs are looked upon as acceptable eccentricities, the combination of the two puts you on the far, far fringes of society.
Canada is all about hypocrisy.
I've always wondered quite how far into unpronounceability (and indeed unprintability) names are allowed to venture. Merely giving your child a name with a formfeed in it would probably cause chaos enough.
I've also long wondered what the perpetrators of these text-string-passing SQL bindings were on. That's an 'idea' that just isn't one!
Ah, so as someone academically qualified to discuss xons in general, is there indeed such a mathematical object as a 'spintron,' or is this another case of a journalist and/or PR person who doesn't have a clue about the atomic structure of language?
Makes a lot more sense, actually. I understand what's so upsetting about instant death.
Interrogation should be performed by asking people questions; I believe that's what the word means. Neither rubber hoses nor hair scissors are required; those are tools for the emotional gratification of the interrogator.
If there are answers that you are determined to get, well, to be utterly Machiavellian about this, manufacturing data is better done by making it up from whole cloth than it is by pressuring people to 'admit' to it—you have better control of both presentation and content, and there are actually less long-term political ramifications.
As to "(suspected) enemy combatants," a suspect is innocent. That is a fundamental legal principle. If you can't even prove that they're a soldier, much less that they're guilty of anything, then let them go!
So, no, I will not admit that it is necessary. Even if you take your rubber hose to me I will not be admitting that it is necessary—those will forever your words and your ideas, no matter what sounds you force from my mouth.
There are methods for dealing with actual problems. The situation here, though, is that a problem has been invented and generating evidence for it is proving troublesome!
Now, none of this is to say that there aren't terrorists, or that terrorists aren't a problem. But the difficulty is not what is pretended. First, terrorists often seem to be, or be epiphenomena of, covert operations of prominent governments. The rational thing to do would be for governments to scale back such operations—to take a stance of simply not doing such things. Second, when looked at politically and statistically, it is apparent that terrorism is a problem on the scale of a crime, not of a war. The tools for dealing with international crimes are institutions such as Interpol, not the army. Should the problem rise to the scale of genocide, we now even have the International Criminal Court (though the US refuses to submit to it). The only obvious adjustments to be made are (a) to take these institutions more seriously, (b) perhaps to extended the scope of the ICC downwards to sub-genocidal patterns of violent crime that national governments decline to deal with, and (c) to abide by the principles of universal respect for human rights and the rule of law, without which you become the enemy of civilisation.
It's true that there are worse things, but - would you care to be forced to wear lipstick? To have your armpits shaved? I don't think you're thinking about this clearly. Taking control of another person's appearance is a serious psychological exercise.
For the life of me (and believe me, I know about needing more coffee, so you hae my utter sympathy on that score) that's a normal English sentence. Some of these words may have technical legal nuances, but 'relief' and 'action' are the only words there that I would not have used in everyday speech in roughly these senses; and these two exceptions are ones that are found in almost every discussion of these matters here on slashdot, so presumably the readership has some familiarity with them by now!
Then again, I'm increasingly getting responses to comments here of the form 'you use big words and I refuse to read past the first sentence so you must be wrong.'
Yesterday we had an entire conversation about how some poor parent was remiss because their five year old was not yet a fluent reader.
Perhaps that missionary zeal was misplaced!
Um, am I reading this differently from everyone else? It says, enemy combatants are "Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government," then "Unlawful combatants do not receive POW status and do not receive the full protections of the Third Geneva Convention," and finally "The President has determined that al Qaida members are unlawful combatants because (among other reasons) they are members of a non-state actor terrorist group that does not receive the protections of the Third Geneva Convention."
So the idea here is that an 'enemy combatant' is someone working for a hostile foreign government; and that these are subdivided into 'lawful combatants,' those who are working for a hostile foreign government, and 'unlawful combatants,' who are not. Thus an unlawful combatant is someone who does and does not work for a foreign government. The logic we learned at school allows us to conclude immediately that there is no such person.
Soldiers are covered by the Geneva convention; civilians by the usual laws. There is no third case, because you either are or are not an enemy combatant, 'a citizen who associates themselves with the military arm of an enemy government.' Where's the flaw in this reasoning?
Finally, of course, the President gets to decide? Who made him God? I thought the US was a Western democracy, with the rule of law and all that good stuff?
More worrisome is not that universal DRM and DMCA-like measures, patent abuse, etc., will restrict us by requiring us to pay money for access to our data, or by narrowing our selection of data sources, but that they will continue to require us to install shoddy and insecure client/plugin software. These legal measures provide a specific incentive for the trusted components of a computing environment to be the least trustworthy; in short, for a security meltdown. We are already seeing the consequences, though while the slashdot readership generally see the 'trees' of company-x-has-a-bug-this-week it often misses the 'forest' of an emergent wholesale attack on system integrity.
You must understand that at heart the DMCA was legal protection for snake oil; it says that anything that claims to be secure is secure in law, regardless of technical considerations such as whether it is correctly written, provides actual protection, or in fact enforces the same license as was nominally granted (and this protection of snake-oil is what it was for; the intellectual property protections it supposedly provides would be equally well addressed by saying that ignoring a notice saying 'please do not copy this data' is punishable by fine - pretty much what copyright law already does). It furthermore has the specific technical effect, in the case of general purpose computers, that the content owner and not the hardware owner is given control of the security of the playback hardware. But the content owner derives no benefit from the security of other people's hardware. Nor (at least under the current - perhaps, if we're feeling paranoid, carefully cultivated - prevailing mores that computers fail randomly and that this is entirely normal) do content providers actually derive benefit from content delivery mechanisms that work reliably. The bulk of their revenue stream, now that the legislation is in place, is evidently from sale of replacements for what are in essence defective items!
So you must remember that, despite what supporters of this philosophy may pretend, it is technically impossible to prove the security of a client in the customer's physical possession. It is, however, legally possible to ensure its insecurity - providing there is legislated support for DRM and 'trusted computing' mechanisms (which we must carefully distinguish from mutually suspicious computing mechanisms) whereby privilege escalation attacks are mandated as part of content licensing. I fear that this means that the future holds as many more rootkits as dubious serverisation schemes.
To address both the security and the long term data accessibility problems, a law desperately needs to be enacted that all data formats used in commerce contain explicit embedded references to platform independent, publicly archived (in the Library of Congress sense) and peer-reviewed playback clients, which, if not free to use, at least have license fees that are guaranteed in perpetuity and collected on behalf of the owners by that public institution.
The present path leads to cultural, technical and economic ruin, because at the deepest level of principle, self help runs counter to both the free market and the rule of law. There is no security to be had from vigilantes, privateers and protection rackets, but that is what the Western governments are providing for the average computer user.
(And that's even assuming that all O/S's don't suck.)
Well, it was a little rabid, but it's really important to understand that this is increasingly how the US is seen by the rest of the world. Other people aren't calling it the 'land of the free,' they're seeing it as the land of violence; and to Europeans, they're seeing what they think of as its traditional arrogant isolationism as being replaced by arrogant interventionism. You need to remember that (unlike what they teach in schools) the traditional American respect for civil rights was adopted from British tradition, and that in Europe it has in many ways grown stronger than in America. You need to remember that Iraq is in Europe's back yard. You need to remember that the US' PR is being handled by Hollywood and the Army.
There's a reason that posts you perceive as 'anti-American' get modded +5 Insightful. It may not be insight that is deep, but it is insight that is needed.
Perhaps the child is not so brilliant. Perhaps the child is brilliant, but is, for example, dyslexic. Lots of other comments here are also from people saying, 'ooh, but I was a genius, I was reading in the womb!' Well, good for you. But other people do not have a moral obligation to be you.
So yes, in general, this is a bit late to be starting reading.
But have some thought for the specific, why not?
... Or maybe the stereotype of the slashdot crowd as a gaggle of empathy-impaired clods is justified, after all. :(