Kind of bothered some of them, but instead of learning crypto basics, they yelled at me. I do not understand this behaviour, can Slashdot explain ?
You put them on the defensive - if you'd shown them how to use Wireshark to read each other's messages, they would have realised their own privacy was at risk without feeling threatened by you. I'm not a gun nut, but the analogy that springs to mind is this: if you want people to respect guns, teach them to shoot - don't wave a gun in their faces.
The problem isn't with the airports, and it isn't with the passengers. The problem is with the planes. An airliner is basically a cruise missile with seats. So how can we make airliners less of a threat?
First we need to slow them down. A fully laden airliner has immense kinetic energy - they shouldn't be allowed to travel faster than 100 mph.
Next we need to tackle the altitude problem: a plane falling from 39,000 feet is going to destroy itself and whatever it lands on. Remove the wings.
The next problem is steering: even at 100 mph a grounded plane can be a dangerous weapon. They should only be allowed to follow predetermined paths.
The final problem is size: a modern airliner puts hundreds of soft, squishy civilians in a small target area. Instead of one large cabin we should have a series of interconnected but self-contained cabins.
The result is a new concept in air travel: the Terrorist-Resistant Airline Innovation Module, or TRAIN. I have several patents pending on this invention - please feel free to contact me about licensing.
Nobody is EVER going to do anything a hijacker asks for ever again.
The part we haven't figured out yet is what to do instead. Why was there a policy of cooperating with hijackers in the first place? Because otherwise they might crash the plane. But if that's their goal anyway, we have a choice between letting the hijackers crash the plane into a building, and forcing the hijackers to crash the plane into a field. Either way the hijackers win and the passengers lose.
So what's the alternative? Remote control that can't be deactivated once the pilot activates it? Maybe - but as many other people have pointed out, even if we make planes perfectly safe (and they're already among the safest places to spend your time), terrorists will just move on to easier targets. We really cannot prevent terrorism in an open society - our long-term choice is between living in a paranoid dictatorship and learning to live with the (statistically minor) risks of terrorism.
It would certainly be foolish to block all encrypted protocols, but with a bit of thought they should be able to block encrypted P2P without affecting HTTPS, SSH, etc - they could look at the port numbers, the plaintext handshake, or even the connection patterns.
But if the ISPs really wanted to hurt BitTorrent they'd just block incoming TCP connections - I guess they realise that if they push too hard, customers will start to leave, so they're trying to make it inconvenient to use P2P but not impossible.
I wonder though, can we use this to round up parliamentarians around the world and prosecute them for accepting bribes and corruption?
Sounds like a plan! If this comment is correct they're using a honeypot to catch people who share copyrighted material. Let's apply the same principle to politicians:
1) Mark a 50 pound note with ultraviolet ink
2) Send it to your elected representative by registered mail, with no covering letter and no return address
3) Wait for a month
4) Write and ask for it back, enclosing proof of postage and explaining that you meant to send it to the local hospital for terminally photogenic orphans
5) Forward the resulting correspondence to a member of the opposing political party
1. We know there's an encrypted file or partition somewhere, you have Truecrypt installed.
2. See 1, and remember, lying to us is a crime.
3. We know Truecrypt supports hidden partitions, we read about it on Slashdot.
Are Customs and Border Protection officers bound by copyright law like us mere mortals? Would they be violating the DMCA if they circumvented the measures I've put in place to protect my data (such as/bin/login and the screws that hold my laptop together)?
I think you've identified one of the major inconsistencies in the Western world-view: causality is recursive, but responsibility is not. When we identify the causes of an event, we can also identify the causes of the causes, the causes of the causes of the causes, and so on. But when we identify the person responsible for an event, we don't generally identify the people responsible for them being responsible, the people responsible for them being responsible, and so on - with a few exceptions, the buck stops at the first human being.
In my opinion this inconsistency should be defended: to put it bluntly, a cause is not an excuse. Science is making causes ever easier to find, and without a distinction between causality and responsibility our moral framework is in danger of collapsing as we confuse "everything has a cause" for "everything has an excuse".
But everything does have a cause - does that mean responsibility is just a "good lie" that we preach because it maintains order? I don't think so. Responsibility is truly distinct from causality if our definition is based on intent and belief as well as outcome: if you tried to make something happen, or if you believed your actions would make it happen, then you are responsible for what happened. If not, then you merely caused it. Of course, intent and belief are difficult matters for a court to judge, but the alternative - accepting any demonstrable cause as an excuse - erodes the distinction between what happened and what should have happened that is the very foundation of ethics.
(Wow, when did I start preaching about personal responsibility? Old age really creeps up on you!)
It wasn't my intention to mislead anyone. I heard about the death sentence on Friday morning and submitted the story on Friday evening; the article you linked to was published on Saturday morning. Thanks for the link and congratulations on having your finger on the pulse, but please don't assume that anyone whose information is 24 hours out of date is trying to mislead you.
Maybe the solution is to have a public referendum on important decisions, but to test each voter on their background knowledge of the situation.
The problem with that solution is that, as you've shown with your characterization of "the anti-nuclear brigade", it's easy to frame disagreement as ignorance and thereby dismiss it. Whoever writes the background knowledge tests will control the terms of the debate.
In the UK, the argument that not everyone is equally qualified to express an opinion was historically used to deny the vote to non-landowners, non-householders, women in general, and women under 30. In some countries similar arguments are still used - for example, in Saudi Arabia a woman's testimony carries less weight than a man's. Do you really think it's possible to define criteria for voting that won't be misused by the enfranchised to gain greater power at the expense of the disenfranchised? Or will the enfranchised, with the sober wisdom that is the inseparable companion of extensive factual knowledge, rule benevolently on behalf of the ignorant masses?
The PNAS paper mentioned in the Telegraph article is here. "We therefore showed that the structure, and thus indirectly the interaction causing it, depends on the topological distance rather than the metric distance. The interaction between two birds 1 m apart in flock A is as strong as that between two birds 5 m apart in flock B, provided that flock A is denser than flock B and that the topological distance n is the same."
The cool thing about this new model is that each bird only needs to track a fixed number of neighbours (seven in the starling flock on which the paper is based). IIRC every bird in the Boids model needs to track every other bird to keep the swarm cohesive.
I haven't read the paper yet, but it seems like there could be a parallel with gossip protocols and flooding protocols: if each bird tracks a small number of randomly chosen neighbours, information can move through the swarm just as efficiently as if each bird tracks every other bird.
Where did I say that reading zero books is better than reading one book? I said that studying only one book leads to dogmatism. When debating Nietzsche, of course you should read Nietzsche - but not only Nietzsche.
Because that's what you're saying here -- that the guy who's never read the Qu'ran and who has an axe to grind against it has superior wisdom over a man who has actually studied it.
That's not what I'm saying at all. People should read the Qu'ran before criticising it - I haven't read all of it, so I don't criticise it. But people shouldn't expect to arrive at a balanced evaluation of the Qu'ran, let alone a balanced viewpoint on the entirety of human knowledge and experience, by obsessively studying one book. (And if you think my use of the term "obsessive" is hyperbole, reflect on the fact that children in many countries are encouraged to memorise the Qu'ran even though they don't understand Arabic. Not all forms of study lead to wisdom.)
Faith can still leave room for seeking, and all intellectually honest people do so.
I quite agree - I have no objection to faith, only to dogma.
The dichotomy was there, but perhaps it was unintentional - you said "we are forced to act not upon knowledge of repeatable phenomena and the laws governing them (that we discovered already), but rather by our emotions". I was trying to point out that we use a combination of the two, but I guess from your response that you meant that anyway.
Your point about rational decisions ultimately being based on value judgements is well taken, I often try to make the same point to zealous rationalists myself.:-)
You ignore the influence of even Islam on preserving the maths and sciences of the ancient Greeks after the fall of Rome.
Islam did not preserve maths and science - the Islamic world preserved maths and science. To be more specific, relatively liberal societies within the Islamic world preserved maths and science, just as relatively liberal societies within the Christian world have preserved them from the Renaissance to the present day. That doesn't mean Christianity or Islam can take credit for the achievements of maths and science - conservative elements within both religions have always opposed, and continue to oppose, critical scientific thinking, but fortunately both religions are embedded within broader societies.
After all, the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here.
Yes, studying the same book every week will lead to dogmatism, which is a form of willful ignorance.
You can probably discover certain specific facts (a bone here, a footprint there), but immanent lack of possibility of observation of repeatable phenomena in a controlled environment makes a scientific studies impossible.
It's typical of engineers to think that science is about repeatable experiments.;-) Science is broader than that - it's about falsifiable predictions. One good way to test falsifiable predictions is through repeatable experiments, but that's not the only way. For example, you can make a falsifiable prediction about as-yet-undiscovered archaeological or cosmological evidence.
That illustrates how in our everyday life we are forced to act not upon knowledge of repeatable phenomena and the laws governing them (that we discovered already), but rather by our emotions: faith, hope, defiance, etc...
That's a false dichotomy - in everyday life we act both on our emotions and on the best predictions we can make about the future. Of course we can't predict everything, but to deny the value of attempting to make predictions is just absurd. Do you walk by putting one foot in front of the other, assuming on the basis of past experience that doing so will probably carry you forward, or do you stand still because it's impossible to predict the future, and putting one foot in front of the other might turn the sky pink or transform one of your legs into a hammock?
Based on those around me in my engineering training, I'd have to say that the majority are not radical nor conservative (neither am I). I call bullshit.
The paper doesn't suggest that radicals are common among engineers; it suggests that engineers are common among radicals. The difference is huge.
Let's say for the sake of argument that most professional trombonists are white men over the age of 30. Does it follow that most, or many, or even a significant fraction of white men over the age of 30 are professional trombonists?
I'm sorry if I said value instead of price - in the absence of copyright the price of a digital copy approaches zero regardless of the number of copies in circulation, because people other than the creator - who didn't have to pay the creator's fixed costs - are able to make copies for nearly nothing. That probably means some creators won't recoup their fixed costs, and that probably means some creators won't create work any more. I'm not saying that's a desirable situation, but I don't think the alternative that's currently being constructed - government surveillance of all digital transactions to prevent copyright infringement - is desirable either. So I'm saying it's time to re-evaluate the copyright bargain, not time to simply abolish copyright.
The only possible externalities I can think of are not inherent (e.g. perhaps the publisher chooses a printer that purchases paper from a company that gets its raw materials from a forestry company that, say, pollutes a river that people downstream fish or grow crops from)...
I'm talking about the externalities created by copyright law, namely the restrictions placed on people who own a copy of the work: they can't make copies or derivative works, perform the work in public, etc. Those restrictions were reasonable in the age of the printing press. Arguably, the surveillance powers required to enforce those restrictions in the age of the internet mean that they are no longer reasonable.
I don't think graphic novels represent a good example of a distorted market; it's fairly free in all respects, from producers to publishers, and the barrier to entry is low - almost anyone can produce a graphic novel these days.
You're right, but those aren't the distortions I was talking about. I was talking about the distortions created by copyright law: if I buy a copy of your graphic novel, I can cheaply create any number of digital copies, and so can anyone else. Thus without copyright the cost of a digital copy would quickly drop to nearly zero. Copyright distorts the market to keep the price high and the revenue flowing to the creator. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not - I'm just pointing out that it's a distortion.
The free market (i.e. laws of supply and demand) should allow the value of a graphic novel to be determined.
In that case all physical copies will approach the price of the paper they're printed on, and all digital copies will approach the price of the wires they're carried on.
Government control is bad.
Maybe so, but copyright is government control and nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
You put them on the defensive - if you'd shown them how to use Wireshark to read each other's messages, they would have realised their own privacy was at risk without feeling threatened by you. I'm not a gun nut, but the analogy that springs to mind is this: if you want people to respect guns, teach them to shoot - don't wave a gun in their faces.
First we need to slow them down. A fully laden airliner has immense kinetic energy - they shouldn't be allowed to travel faster than 100 mph.
Next we need to tackle the altitude problem: a plane falling from 39,000 feet is going to destroy itself and whatever it lands on. Remove the wings.
The next problem is steering: even at 100 mph a grounded plane can be a dangerous weapon. They should only be allowed to follow predetermined paths.
The final problem is size: a modern airliner puts hundreds of soft, squishy civilians in a small target area. Instead of one large cabin we should have a series of interconnected but self-contained cabins.
The result is a new concept in air travel: the Terrorist-Resistant Airline Innovation Module, or TRAIN. I have several patents pending on this invention - please feel free to contact me about licensing.
The part we haven't figured out yet is what to do instead. Why was there a policy of cooperating with hijackers in the first place? Because otherwise they might crash the plane. But if that's their goal anyway, we have a choice between letting the hijackers crash the plane into a building, and forcing the hijackers to crash the plane into a field. Either way the hijackers win and the passengers lose.
So what's the alternative? Remote control that can't be deactivated once the pilot activates it? Maybe - but as many other people have pointed out, even if we make planes perfectly safe (and they're already among the safest places to spend your time), terrorists will just move on to easier targets. We really cannot prevent terrorism in an open society - our long-term choice is between living in a paranoid dictatorship and learning to live with the (statistically minor) risks of terrorism.
Um, everyone on that plane still died. I wouldn't call that a solution exactly.
Only a nerd would object to that.
But if the ISPs really wanted to hurt BitTorrent they'd just block incoming TCP connections - I guess they realise that if they push too hard, customers will start to leave, so they're trying to make it inconvenient to use P2P but not impossible.
Sounds like a plan! If this comment is correct they're using a honeypot to catch people who share copyrighted material. Let's apply the same principle to politicians:
1) Mark a 50 pound note with ultraviolet ink
2) Send it to your elected representative by registered mail, with no covering letter and no return address
3) Wait for a month
4) Write and ask for it back, enclosing proof of postage and explaining that you meant to send it to the local hospital for terminally photogenic orphans
5) Forward the resulting correspondence to a member of the opposing political party
The same solution also fixes that pesky Great Firewall problem.
1. We know there's an encrypted file or partition somewhere, you have Truecrypt installed. 2. See 1, and remember, lying to us is a crime. 3. We know Truecrypt supports hidden partitions, we read about it on Slashdot.
A federal court recently ruled that passwords are protected under the 5th amendment.
Are Customs and Border Protection officers bound by copyright law like us mere mortals? Would they be violating the DMCA if they circumvented the measures I've put in place to protect my data (such as /bin/login and the screws that hold my laptop together)?
"Dada" is easy, it's "surrealism" that trips a lot of kids up.
In my opinion this inconsistency should be defended: to put it bluntly, a cause is not an excuse. Science is making causes ever easier to find, and without a distinction between causality and responsibility our moral framework is in danger of collapsing as we confuse "everything has a cause" for "everything has an excuse".
But everything does have a cause - does that mean responsibility is just a "good lie" that we preach because it maintains order? I don't think so. Responsibility is truly distinct from causality if our definition is based on intent and belief as well as outcome: if you tried to make something happen, or if you believed your actions would make it happen, then you are responsible for what happened. If not, then you merely caused it. Of course, intent and belief are difficult matters for a court to judge, but the alternative - accepting any demonstrable cause as an excuse - erodes the distinction between what happened and what should have happened that is the very foundation of ethics.
(Wow, when did I start preaching about personal responsibility? Old age really creeps up on you!)
It wasn't my intention to mislead anyone. I heard about the death sentence on Friday morning and submitted the story on Friday evening; the article you linked to was published on Saturday morning. Thanks for the link and congratulations on having your finger on the pulse, but please don't assume that anyone whose information is 24 hours out of date is trying to mislead you.
The problem with that solution is that, as you've shown with your characterization of "the anti-nuclear brigade", it's easy to frame disagreement as ignorance and thereby dismiss it. Whoever writes the background knowledge tests will control the terms of the debate.
In the UK, the argument that not everyone is equally qualified to express an opinion was historically used to deny the vote to non-landowners, non-householders, women in general, and women under 30. In some countries similar arguments are still used - for example, in Saudi Arabia a woman's testimony carries less weight than a man's. Do you really think it's possible to define criteria for voting that won't be misused by the enfranchised to gain greater power at the expense of the disenfranchised? Or will the enfranchised, with the sober wisdom that is the inseparable companion of extensive factual knowledge, rule benevolently on behalf of the ignorant masses?
The PNAS paper mentioned in the Telegraph article is here. "We therefore showed that the structure, and thus indirectly the interaction causing it, depends on the topological distance rather than the metric distance. The interaction between two birds 1 m apart in flock A is as strong as that between two birds 5 m apart in flock B, provided that flock A is denser than flock B and that the topological distance n is the same."
I haven't read the paper yet, but it seems like there could be a parallel with gossip protocols and flooding protocols: if each bird tracks a small number of randomly chosen neighbours, information can move through the swarm just as efficiently as if each bird tracks every other bird.
My fault for reading your post out of the context of the thread. :-)
That's not what I'm saying at all. People should read the Qu'ran before criticising it - I haven't read all of it, so I don't criticise it. But people shouldn't expect to arrive at a balanced evaluation of the Qu'ran, let alone a balanced viewpoint on the entirety of human knowledge and experience, by obsessively studying one book. (And if you think my use of the term "obsessive" is hyperbole, reflect on the fact that children in many countries are encouraged to memorise the Qu'ran even though they don't understand Arabic. Not all forms of study lead to wisdom.)
I quite agree - I have no objection to faith, only to dogma.
Your point about rational decisions ultimately being based on value judgements is well taken, I often try to make the same point to zealous rationalists myself. :-)
Islam did not preserve maths and science - the Islamic world preserved maths and science. To be more specific, relatively liberal societies within the Islamic world preserved maths and science, just as relatively liberal societies within the Christian world have preserved them from the Renaissance to the present day. That doesn't mean Christianity or Islam can take credit for the achievements of maths and science - conservative elements within both religions have always opposed, and continue to oppose, critical scientific thinking, but fortunately both religions are embedded within broader societies.
Yes, studying the same book every week will lead to dogmatism, which is a form of willful ignorance.
It's typical of engineers to think that science is about repeatable experiments. ;-) Science is broader than that - it's about falsifiable predictions. One good way to test falsifiable predictions is through repeatable experiments, but that's not the only way. For example, you can make a falsifiable prediction about as-yet-undiscovered archaeological or cosmological evidence.
That's a false dichotomy - in everyday life we act both on our emotions and on the best predictions we can make about the future. Of course we can't predict everything, but to deny the value of attempting to make predictions is just absurd. Do you walk by putting one foot in front of the other, assuming on the basis of past experience that doing so will probably carry you forward, or do you stand still because it's impossible to predict the future, and putting one foot in front of the other might turn the sky pink or transform one of your legs into a hammock?
The paper doesn't suggest that radicals are common among engineers; it suggests that engineers are common among radicals. The difference is huge.
Let's say for the sake of argument that most professional trombonists are white men over the age of 30. Does it follow that most, or many, or even a significant fraction of white men over the age of 30 are professional trombonists?
I'm sorry if I said value instead of price - in the absence of copyright the price of a digital copy approaches zero regardless of the number of copies in circulation, because people other than the creator - who didn't have to pay the creator's fixed costs - are able to make copies for nearly nothing. That probably means some creators won't recoup their fixed costs, and that probably means some creators won't create work any more. I'm not saying that's a desirable situation, but I don't think the alternative that's currently being constructed - government surveillance of all digital transactions to prevent copyright infringement - is desirable either. So I'm saying it's time to re-evaluate the copyright bargain, not time to simply abolish copyright.