"if you do "double blind" experiments with plants e.g. you see clearly that homeopathy works."
Only sorryness is that "plants" is not homeopathy. I know that in Europe "homeopathy" tends to be a connundrum of all "natural medicine", but that's not true "homeopathy". I don't think anyone doubts some herbs contain active principles, that's obvious. What I doubt is double blind finding anything significative if you take that herbal essence and then dilute it till there's good chances not a single atom from the original solution is in the dosis, and *that's* homepathy.
"The fun comes when your development system has the latest version but your target server has the previous version. You quickly become expert in compromising hacks."
You mean... like never do such an idiotic thing as having a development environment that doesn't match your production one?
"I do have to wonder if the information age would change that [direct democracy] though."
You can consider it based on your own case: you have the power to stay in touch with current political decisions. I don't know where are you from, but surely they make their govern acts public and readily accesible on the Internet. Do you take the time to know what's happening lately? I mean, to the detail level needed if you were to take part on the decision process.
Last friday on my country, the Congress Acts show: Education Ministry: A correction of mistakes on a Law regulating Primary Education curriculum. Work and Social Issues Ministry: Approval of an extraordinary order regarding forest fires. Industry, Commerce and Turism: Modification of an order law to take it into accomplacy with EU regulation about Metrology Control.
That's only the "General Dispositions" sections. Then it comes new asignations to public positions; then public contracts and concurses; then "Other Dispositions" and finally some "Relevant News".
Are *you* able to track all this issues *daily*? If you are not, then you *need* somebody to represent you. Even if only "General dispositions" where passed to laymen, what is going to be your opinion about the modifications to a law regulating control of Metrology Tools and Methods going to be? Have you really a formed opinion about the need for the public test on primary teachers to be valued 50% the lecture, then 30% curriculum presentation and 20% a practical activity or it will be better reduce the lecture to 40% and increase the practical activity value up to 30%? Because exactly *that* is what your representatives (and their working teams) expend their time.
"But...it happened a day after tooking those 2 pills."
What did I tell you? On one hand you can't have "half an attack"; you either suffer them or not. On the other, they guy I told about han not a single attack as soon as he knew that girl: you see? One day to the next.
"I'm curious how he might manage to cram 300lbs of ash into the ashtray of a Volkswagen beetle."
Just drop them in a swimming pool, vigorously agitate the water, take a drop and put it on the beetle's ashtray. Any homeopathe will tell you that single drop is as jewish, if not more, than the whole original active principle.
"You take 100 people, 50 you treat with acupuncture, 50 not, or 50 with a placebo if you think that makes a difference. Then you record the results of the 100 "experiments" then you compare the results to figure the effectiveness. Pretty simple, in fact a standard way in science for conducting tests."
Sorry but no, sorry. That's not the "way in science for conducting tests". In your case the patients know when they are treated with acupunture and when they are not. The practiotioners know when they administrating acupunture and when they do not too. It has been proben beyond doubt that you can't get confiable results about the effectiveness of the treatment under those circumnstances.
Go please, and do some research on the Internet about "double blind tests".
"Since I was 10, I've been suffering epilepsia (petit mal, that means little attacks). After few years my life became nightmare, every day I had terrible symptoms and once a year the great fit with unconsciousness, muscles tension and very bad feeling a day or two afterwards. I tried 2 different therapies (Depakine Chrono - twice a day, convulex - three times - these were newest on the market 20 years ago), changed the style of life - NOPE. Only if I've forgotten my pills on certain hour, symptoms arisen automatically. And pills affected my brain:( After 3-4 years I tried the homeopathy. My doctor had dozens of certificates and so on; he examined me 3 hours, very detailed. After examination, he gave me 2 little pills (AFAIK that was sulphur). After that I'm absolutely healthy"
The word the previous poster was looking for was "bullshit". the one you are looking for is "anecdote".
I'll tell you one from my pocket so you can compare. I knew a fine guy when we started University and we became friends. He told me he suffered epileptical attacks and indeed he suffered three on the first two years at the University. No treatment made any significant advance and he was just resigned to suffer this illness all his life. Then he knew a girl and became in love. He told me how good his relationship made him feel. The fact is that he has never suffered a single epileptic attack again.
Another fact is that many childs suffering epileptic attacks just espontanously cure somewhere between tenage and adult age.
"That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area."
The "double" in "double blind" comes from the fact that neither the patient (single blind) *nor* the practitioner know when the glass contains medicine and when it contains sugar. Try now to "fool" an acupuntor this way, if you can.
The only possible way I can imagine about is take a well known acupuntor and teach on Universty A what he feels to be the "right way" and on University B a "fake way" and look for differences between those two groups over the years (not a very sensible method, anyway).
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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"the whole point of the double-blind random clinical trial is that it is the only known way to distinguish between drug effects and placebo effects."
Well, not exactly. As per the definition, placebo is only possible on the patient side. For this to be taken into account single-blind is enough. The problem is doctors can be delusioned too (or even malicious): that's the point of *double* blind: neither doctors nor patients get to know who took medicine and who took placebo. I'd say "triple-blind" would be even better, where "triple" comes from the fact that not only neither patients nor doctors knew "who's who", but they should even ignore to be involved into an experiment. Of course this would bring so big ethic problems that is no to be consider.
"Any legitimate medical treatment should go through great pains to at least do no harm. If it can't do that at least, then it isn't something which has any right to be considered legitimate."
That's astoundingly stupid, plain simple.
It's stupid from a logical point of view: it's obvious that any "legitimate anything" must focus on the "anything" part, so first plain obvious objective for a say, a flu treatment is to take flu away. Anything that can take flu away is a thing to be considered. Under your point of view you would be forced to consider anything from charming words to pure water going through orange mermelade as "potential flu treatments": Not. Potential flu treatments are those that show signs that they are able to take flu away.
Next to this you should consider imbalance: from the lot of treatments that show effective against flu, (which is percieved as a gross benefit by itself) you will retain those that show a net benefit: killing the one suffering flu will certainly be effective against the illness, but the net benefit will be percieved as negative, so no way. Only those treatments that show effective against flu *and* are percieved to offer a positive net effect should be prescribed.
The other sign of the stupidness of your assertion is the ubiquity of treatments where obvious harm is involved, sometimes not only obvious but even *great* harm and still there's not the slightest chance any sane mind would reject them, just think -gasp! surgery: they literally rip your body with very sharp knives, sometimes they cut your members off, and no one would want it otherwise (well, they would, but understand there's no better way, not currently, at least). They accept the harm, the great harm sometimes under the conviction that the net balance is beneficial.
While you are somehow right with the metric system not admiting number 3 so easily, you forget you don't need to be so precise when not needed.
I live on a "metric society" and I can assure you we don't have problems. On the butcher you will ask for a kilogram, half a kilogram, 100 grams, 150 grams, 200 grams, a quarter (250g) or even a "quarter and a half" (which being 250+125=375 grams comes "near enough" to be one third of a kilogram for this kind of practical purpouses).
But regarding woodworking or any other trades, I really doubt you really do in practice what you say. I don't know of anybody on the trade that would really divide any piece of raw material by adding measures: you will always end up adding measure errors on the farest end. You always do it by proportions, so errors get evenly distributed (of course, your average carpenter, or butcher or whatever won't know that, but still will apply some practical recipy that "just works" that probably will be based upon the "even error distribution" principle).
So, going to your example, even if you wanted to hang three hooks on a four meter wall (that makes for a very easy measure of hooking at 1, 2 and 3 exact meters from the beginning) you won't go to one end of the wall, take one meter, hook, take another, hook, take another hook, and then discover your last hook it's clearly out of place, but you'd go to the middle point, hook, then the middle to the right, then the middle to the left and you'll end up better even just by eye-metering.
When dividing by three (or any other odd number) you will see most of the times that disregarding if measuring on decimal or imperial units, people will go using the Thales Principle (projecting a known lenght segment over the one to divide) or the fact than an hexagon's side is exactly the lenght of the radius of the circunscribing circle, or the fact that a twelve units long rope (whatever the units are) will make for you a perfect square angle and will give you 3, 4 and 5 units long segments for free.
All in all, I'm used to the metrical system and I can tell its advantages outweight by faaaaaaaaaaar any minimal problems .
"Apart from math, this is quite far from the truth."
I'd say *including* math, not except from it. Chemistry or Physics are sciencies, but not so "exact". And then, Math, while quite exact is not a true "science".
"Yeah, cause that meridian is so different to the rest _"
Yes, they are different enough, and since the ones effectively making the measures were French, they started out from Paris and then going North and South. It started as a quite local project: just laying out a better map of France (by the French for the French), nothing chauvinist here, but then it "outscaled", so to say and, again, nothing chauvinist here (just look at the so many USA "chauvinisms" on technological affairs, from ASCII-7 to flying altitude measured in feet) just common output from being the one effectively making the things happen at the time: every developed metropolis was engaded by the XVIII century on measure problems for very practical reasons (cartography and navigation); of course, English had "point zero" at London or Greenwich, French on Paris or Spanish on Madrid, Cadiz or Canary Islands at different times. Since French were the strong ones on the base-10 metric system, we got metre or kilogram defined over something Paris-based; since the English went to be the strongest metropoly by the XIX century (and USA being its cultural son), you get cartography based on Greenwich and navigational measures being feet and nautical miles; since Spain just lost the race, you get nothing but siesta based on Madrid, Cadiz or Canary Islands.
"This makes it hard to get (or define) exactly 1 litre of water."
Not really. We have two problems here: one of definition and a different one of an operational reference. If we can come up with a valid definition, we can go with a "good enough" operational reference in hopes that our operational reference will be made up better as needs arises.
I.E.: We can define a kilogram to be an exact number of particles of a common enough material (probably for practical purpouses "particles" become "atoms", maybe mollecules, and "material" becomes "element", but there's no practical limits not to stick with water). We know Hydrogen to be quite common and simple, so why just not take the Avogadro's number and define the gram to be (6.024x10^23)/2 mollecules of H2 (isotope H1)? Or else, since Hydrogen is quite active, use the lightest noble gas instead (so it becomes (6.024x10^23)/4 atoms of Helium-2).
Of course, you come then to the problem of taking apart exactly (6.024x10^23)/4 atoms where exactly all of them are Helium-2 isotopes (no, the fact that the atoms may decay with time is not a problem, as long as you can "build" another kilogram afresh at any moment), but then you go with the "good enough" operational reference: If you are unable to currently get anything better than, say, (6.024x10^(23+-2))/4 Helium-2 99.99% pure, it means that for any practical usage you don't need any better either. And you can build a better operational reference as the need arises while the definition is still constant.
Because by the time these light-based definitions came to live we already "knew" what a metre or a second was, and the IBWM just "made up" the number that just fitted.
For the meter case (you probably already know it) it started from being 1/10^7 the lenght of the quadrant of the meridian crossing Paris to the lenght between to marks on a bar in Paris. Using this unit, the speed of light in vacuum was stablished to be 299.792.458 m/s, so by the time they decided to change the definition seeking that basic SI units were based upon natural "artifacts" as much as possible, considering 'c' to be a universal constant, it just made sense that the "new" metre and the old one lenght's were the same, so there you come with the current "funny" number.
That being send, probably it would have been good for the sanity of the new generations to "round it up" to 1/300.000.000 of the distance the light travels in a second instead of this wacky number.
Can you please explain what this has to be (a faked root authority) with my question? Remember: I *already* have the site's public key; I don't need to be confident in *any* other third party.
Even in the case from you article, remember that if your "MiM attack" strategy includes owning my box or the server, that's not a MiM attack anymore.
"It does help a little to sign your own certs and inspect them ALL the time on every use."
Wouldn't you find a little suspicious that while visiting a site which public key is already known by your client app it asks you to accept a new one?
The attack presented in the article only works because your app doesn't know the public certificate from the server upfront (and I explicitly said that not being the case) and because you were fooled to accept services from an ill-behaving individual/company. If you think such foolery (or bad luck) is just a "new technologies" hazard, ask yourself about it next time you *physically* allow some unknown guy into your home "just" bacause he happens to wear your cable-tv company uniform.
"Don't put too much faith in SSL. Yep, even with SSL, someone can play a man in the middle attack on you."
Just tell me how do you expect to launch a MiM attack against a site I got the public key already on hand. Yeah, well, not a valid case for a USA high school where -it's commonplace, students usually reside up to ten thousand miles away from the premises.
"IPSec is a better choice for remote services."
Yessir, specially when you only can make one side agree. Surely forcing an IPSec tunnel to any single student that wants just to download her e-mail from the school server is the proper, mensurated, well engineered solution for the problem. Just using POP3S? Naaah!
"anyone who wants to distribute the kernel under GPL v3 would have to ask all authors to relicense their code or remove/replace the code."
Or make a very public advise of his intent and wait for a reasonable time period. Then, just release under GPLv3. If down the river someone appears that claims his software was not intended to be relased under GPLv3, then they will be able to reach a deal, retire the offending code or go for a trial under aprehended-by-fact rights (sorry, I don't know how to properly translate this into English) and see what happens.
After all, the only provisions under GPLv2 itself about distribution violations are "just stop distributing the code, please", and that only *once* the copyright holder itself appears asking so (paragraph #7 from GPLv2; p.#10 is even meagrer: if you want to distribute under GPLv3, just write the author -not even the copyright holder! but not provisions about what the answer should be, or even if you have to wait for an answer).
"I can't think of one instance where being off by even a half a minute or so that I would be affected."
Being off by half a minute... against what? If you happen to choose to be off by half a minute to a source that it's half a minute off from its source, that it's off by half a minute from its source, all in sudden you are off by one minute and a half from the first source; wrong enough for a reliable NFS conection, Kerberos ticket or bidding by the limit to an e-bay auction.
"how many servers does it take to tell you what time it is?"
Just one. On the other hand, how many servers does it take for *you* to be confident about the info recieved? That's a different -and pointy, problem. After all, even an stopped watch will tell you what time is it -only, it will tell you wrongly.
"Isn't it more likely that some of 1000 servers somehow report wrong information instead of one single atomic clock?"
Yes. But then, ask yourself what the effect will be for tens of thousands of clients asking time data to a single atomic clock on its network. What would happen if every single bypasser asks you the time as you go?
"Seriously, what's wrong with one atomic clock? I hear they're KINDA accurate"
Even if they are KINDA accurate, they are no accurate ENOUGH for current standards. For a countrie's official time it usually takes about three atomic clocks to be sure. But, again, the problem here is not about accuracy, but bandwith considerations. That's true both for public Stratum 1 NTP servers as well as for the ntp.pool.org network.
"Can someone please explain this whole concept for us?"
"1) You are, in fact, guessing. You are looking at imprecise data and trying to figure out what was there. Any competent defense attorney would tear such a thing apart. Just because the technician assumes a string of bits corresponds to a given waveform, doesn't mean they are right."
Not to say you are wrong; I think you are overall right, in fact. But in an ideal world, a competent attorney can't have more than justice gives him (after all, if you can hope for a "competent defense attorney" you should expect for a "competent accusation attorney" too). It's true that telling one single bit to be a 0 or a 1 is "guessing", but a single bit doesn't tell anything. It's a hughe colletion of bits what holds info: if, by fair guessing any single bit to be a 0 or a 1 you end up with the literal text of the USA constitution, you must be pretty sure your guess is right (you can through some statistical analysis at it). If you guess a password and the password in fact gives you access to some protected data, you guess is OK. After all, even for the "true" data on a hard disk (the one coming from the last write), the reader just "guess" the bits on the platters to be 0s or 1s, why its "guess" is more "factical" than any other one you can through at it?
"However that isn't the kind of shit that flies in court"
On the contrary, my friend. There's nothing cualitatively different between this and DNA analysis, which is nothing more than statistics and guessing and you see it holds in court every day (for a very valid reason).
But, in the end, this completly goes out ot the article scope: the device is just a rugged PC that can extract low level data from the hard disks as fast as possible -by using the hard disk readers themselves, so its "sensibility" is just the one you get on "usual" read, so it's nothing more than a glorified dd.
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"if you do "double blind" experiments with plants e.g. you see clearly that homeopathy works."
Only sorryness is that "plants" is not homeopathy. I know that in Europe "homeopathy" tends to be a connundrum of all "natural medicine", but that's not true "homeopathy". I don't think anyone doubts some herbs contain active principles, that's obvious. What I doubt is double blind finding anything significative if you take that herbal essence and then dilute it till there's good chances not a single atom from the original solution is in the dosis, and *that's* homepathy.
"The fun comes when your development system has the latest version but your target server has the previous version. You quickly become expert in compromising hacks."
You mean... like never do such an idiotic thing as having a development environment that doesn't match your production one?
"I do have to wonder if the information age would change that [direct democracy] though."
You can consider it based on your own case: you have the power to stay in touch with current political decisions. I don't know where are you from, but surely they make their govern acts public and readily accesible on the Internet. Do you take the time to know what's happening lately? I mean, to the detail level needed if you were to take part on the decision process.
Last friday on my country, the Congress Acts show:
Education Ministry: A correction of mistakes on a Law regulating Primary Education curriculum.
Work and Social Issues Ministry: Approval of an extraordinary order regarding forest fires.
Industry, Commerce and Turism: Modification of an order law to take it into accomplacy with EU regulation about Metrology Control.
That's only the "General Dispositions" sections. Then it comes new asignations to public positions; then public contracts and concurses; then "Other Dispositions" and finally some "Relevant News".
Are *you* able to track all this issues *daily*? If you are not, then you *need* somebody to represent you. Even if only "General dispositions" where passed to laymen, what is going to be your opinion about the modifications to a law regulating control of Metrology Tools and Methods going to be? Have you really a formed opinion about the need for the public test on primary teachers to be valued 50% the lecture, then 30% curriculum presentation and 20% a practical activity or it will be better reduce the lecture to 40% and increase the practical activity value up to 30%? Because exactly *that* is what your representatives (and their working teams) expend their time.
"But...it happened a day after tooking those 2 pills."
What did I tell you? On one hand you can't have "half an attack"; you either suffer them or not. On the other, they guy I told about han not a single attack as soon as he knew that girl: you see? One day to the next.
"I'm curious how he might manage to cram 300lbs of ash into the ashtray of a Volkswagen beetle."
Just drop them in a swimming pool, vigorously agitate the water, take a drop and put it on the beetle's ashtray. Any homeopathe will tell you that single drop is as jewish, if not more, than the whole original active principle.
"I usually counter the "natural" argument by mentioning curare. So far nobody wanted a dose of that."
Curare? too exotic. I usually mention pure, natural and fresh shit. Usually they don't want a dose of that either.
"You take 100 people, 50 you treat with acupuncture, 50 not, or 50 with a placebo if you think that makes a difference.
Then you record the results of the 100 "experiments" then you compare the results to figure the effectiveness.
Pretty simple, in fact a standard way in science for conducting tests."
Sorry but no, sorry. That's not the "way in science for conducting tests". In your case the patients know when they are treated with acupunture and when they are not. The practiotioners know when they administrating acupunture and when they do not too. It has been proben beyond doubt that you can't get confiable results about the effectiveness of the treatment under those circumnstances.
Go please, and do some research on the Internet about "double blind tests".
"Since I was 10, I've been suffering epilepsia (petit mal, that means little attacks). After few years my life became nightmare, every day I had terrible symptoms and once a year the great fit with unconsciousness, muscles tension and very bad feeling a day or two afterwards. I tried 2 different therapies (Depakine Chrono - twice a day, convulex - three times - these were newest on the market 20 years ago), changed the style of life - NOPE. Only if I've forgotten my pills on certain hour, symptoms arisen automatically. And pills affected my brain :( After 3-4 years I tried the homeopathy. My doctor had dozens of certificates and so on; he examined me 3 hours, very detailed. After examination, he gave me 2 little pills (AFAIK that was sulphur). After that I'm absolutely healthy"
The word the previous poster was looking for was "bullshit". the one you are looking for is "anecdote".
I'll tell you one from my pocket so you can compare. I knew a fine guy when we started University and we became friends. He told me he suffered epileptical attacks and indeed he suffered three on the first two years at the University. No treatment made any significant advance and he was just resigned to suffer this illness all his life. Then he knew a girl and became in love. He told me how good his relationship made him feel. The fact is that he has never suffered a single epileptic attack again.
Another fact is that many childs suffering epileptic attacks just espontanously cure somewhere between tenage and adult age.
"That is indeed about the closest you can get to "double blind": There just has to be a mechanism in place to tell the acufakers when to target the "proper" area and when to stick the "wrong" area."
The "double" in "double blind" comes from the fact that neither the patient (single blind) *nor* the practitioner know when the glass contains medicine and when it contains sugar. Try now to "fool" an acupuntor this way, if you can.
The only possible way I can imagine about is take a well known acupuntor and teach on Universty A what he feels to be the "right way" and on University B a "fake way" and look for differences between those two groups over the years (not a very sensible method, anyway).
"the whole point of the double-blind random clinical trial is that it is the only known way to distinguish between drug effects and placebo effects."
Well, not exactly. As per the definition, placebo is only possible on the patient side. For this to be taken into account single-blind is enough. The problem is doctors can be delusioned too (or even malicious): that's the point of *double* blind: neither doctors nor patients get to know who took medicine and who took placebo. I'd say "triple-blind" would be even better, where "triple" comes from the fact that not only neither patients nor doctors knew "who's who", but they should even ignore to be involved into an experiment. Of course this would bring so big ethic problems that is no to be consider.
"Any legitimate medical treatment should go through great pains to at least do no harm. If it can't do that at least, then it isn't something which has any right to be considered legitimate."
That's astoundingly stupid, plain simple.
It's stupid from a logical point of view: it's obvious that any "legitimate anything" must focus on the "anything" part, so first plain obvious objective for a say, a flu treatment is to take flu away. Anything that can take flu away is a thing to be considered. Under your point of view you would be forced to consider anything from charming words to pure water going through orange mermelade as "potential flu treatments": Not. Potential flu treatments are those that show signs that they are able to take flu away.
Next to this you should consider imbalance: from the lot of treatments that show effective against flu, (which is percieved as a gross benefit by itself) you will retain those that show a net benefit: killing the one suffering flu will certainly be effective against the illness, but the net benefit will be percieved as negative, so no way. Only those treatments that show effective against flu *and* are percieved to offer a positive net effect should be prescribed.
The other sign of the stupidness of your assertion is the ubiquity of treatments where obvious harm is involved, sometimes not only obvious but even *great* harm and still there's not the slightest chance any sane mind would reject them, just think -gasp! surgery: they literally rip your body with very sharp knives, sometimes they cut your members off, and no one would want it otherwise (well, they would, but understand there's no better way, not currently, at least). They accept the harm, the great harm sometimes under the conviction that the net balance is beneficial.
Net balance is what counts.
While you are somehow right with the metric system not admiting number 3 so easily, you forget you don't need to be so precise when not needed.
I live on a "metric society" and I can assure you we don't have problems. On the butcher you will ask for a kilogram, half a kilogram, 100 grams, 150 grams, 200 grams, a quarter (250g) or even a "quarter and a half" (which being 250+125=375 grams comes "near enough" to be one third of a kilogram for this kind of practical purpouses).
But regarding woodworking or any other trades, I really doubt you really do in practice what you say. I don't know of anybody on the trade that would really divide any piece of raw material by adding measures: you will always end up adding measure errors on the farest end. You always do it by proportions, so errors get evenly distributed (of course, your average carpenter, or butcher or whatever won't know that, but still will apply some practical recipy that "just works" that probably will be based upon the "even error distribution" principle).
So, going to your example, even if you wanted to hang three hooks on a four meter wall (that makes for a very easy measure of hooking at 1, 2 and 3 exact meters from the beginning) you won't go to one end of the wall, take one meter, hook, take another, hook, take another hook, and then discover your last hook it's clearly out of place, but you'd go to the middle point, hook, then the middle to the right, then the middle to the left and you'll end up better even just by eye-metering.
When dividing by three (or any other odd number) you will see most of the times that disregarding if measuring on decimal or imperial units, people will go using the Thales Principle (projecting a known lenght segment over the one to divide) or the fact than an hexagon's side is exactly the lenght of the radius of the circunscribing circle, or the fact that a twelve units long rope (whatever the units are) will make for you a perfect square angle and will give you 3, 4 and 5 units long segments for free.
All in all, I'm used to the metrical system and I can tell its advantages outweight by faaaaaaaaaaar any minimal problems .
"Apart from math, this is quite far from the truth."
I'd say *including* math, not except from it. Chemistry or Physics are sciencies, but not so "exact". And then, Math, while quite exact is not a true "science".
"Yeah, cause that meridian is so different to the rest _"
Yes, they are different enough, and since the ones effectively making the measures were French, they started out from Paris and then going North and South. It started as a quite local project: just laying out a better map of France (by the French for the French), nothing chauvinist here, but then it "outscaled", so to say and, again, nothing chauvinist here (just look at the so many USA "chauvinisms" on technological affairs, from ASCII-7 to flying altitude measured in feet) just common output from being the one effectively making the things happen at the time: every developed metropolis was engaded by the XVIII century on measure problems for very practical reasons (cartography and navigation); of course, English had "point zero" at London or Greenwich, French on Paris or Spanish on Madrid, Cadiz or Canary Islands at different times. Since French were the strong ones on the base-10 metric system, we got metre or kilogram defined over something Paris-based; since the English went to be the strongest metropoly by the XIX century (and USA being its cultural son), you get cartography based on Greenwich and navigational measures being feet and nautical miles; since Spain just lost the race, you get nothing but siesta based on Madrid, Cadiz or Canary Islands.
"This makes it hard to get (or define) exactly 1 litre of water."
Not really. We have two problems here: one of definition and a different one of an operational reference. If we can come up with a valid definition, we can go with a "good enough" operational reference in hopes that our operational reference will be made up better as needs arises.
I.E.: We can define a kilogram to be an exact number of particles of a common enough material (probably for practical purpouses "particles" become "atoms", maybe mollecules, and "material" becomes "element", but there's no practical limits not to stick with water). We know Hydrogen to be quite common and simple, so why just not take the Avogadro's number and define the gram to be (6.024x10^23)/2 mollecules of H2 (isotope H1)? Or else, since Hydrogen is quite active, use the lightest noble gas instead (so it becomes (6.024x10^23)/4 atoms of Helium-2).
Of course, you come then to the problem of taking apart exactly (6.024x10^23)/4 atoms where exactly all of them are Helium-2 isotopes (no, the fact that the atoms may decay with time is not a problem, as long as you can "build" another kilogram afresh at any moment), but then you go with the "good enough" operational reference: If you are unable to currently get anything better than, say, (6.024x10^(23+-2))/4 Helium-2 99.99% pure, it means that for any practical usage you don't need any better either. And you can build a better operational reference as the need arises while the definition is still constant.
"I'll bite: why 1/299,792,458?"
Because by the time these light-based definitions came to live we already "knew" what a metre or a second was, and the IBWM just "made up" the number that just fitted.
For the meter case (you probably already know it) it started from being 1/10^7 the lenght of the quadrant of the meridian crossing Paris to the lenght between to marks on a bar in Paris. Using this unit, the speed of light in vacuum was stablished to be 299.792.458 m/s, so by the time they decided to change the definition seeking that basic SI units were based upon natural "artifacts" as much as possible, considering 'c' to be a universal constant, it just made sense that the "new" metre and the old one lenght's were the same, so there you come with the current "funny" number.
That being send, probably it would have been good for the sanity of the new generations to "round it up" to 1/300.000.000 of the distance the light travels in a second instead of this wacky number.
"Try this site for the issue"
Can you please explain what this has to be (a faked root authority) with my question? Remember: I *already* have the site's public key; I don't need to be confident in *any* other third party.
Even in the case from you article, remember that if your "MiM attack" strategy includes owning my box or the server, that's not a MiM attack anymore.
"It does help a little to sign your own certs and inspect them ALL the time on every use."
Wouldn't you find a little suspicious that while visiting a site which public key is already known by your client app it asks you to accept a new one?
The attack presented in the article only works because your app doesn't know the public certificate from the server upfront (and I explicitly said that not being the case) and because you were fooled to accept services from an ill-behaving individual/company. If you think such foolery (or bad luck) is just a "new technologies" hazard, ask yourself about it next time you *physically* allow some unknown guy into your home "just" bacause he happens to wear your cable-tv company uniform.
"people using TOR are not protected from anyone reading traffic that comes out the exit nodes"
In other exciting news:
* influenza vaccina doesn't protect you against AIDS.
* you can get warm water by putting together hot and cold water.
"Of course, we all know email is for old people and they know how to use it!"
Well, at least in China.
"Don't put too much faith in SSL. Yep, even with SSL, someone can play a man in the middle attack on you."
Just tell me how do you expect to launch a MiM attack against a site I got the public key already on hand. Yeah, well, not a valid case for a USA high school where -it's commonplace, students usually reside up to ten thousand miles away from the premises.
"IPSec is a better choice for remote services."
Yessir, specially when you only can make one side agree. Surely forcing an IPSec tunnel to any single student that wants just to download her e-mail from the school server is the proper, mensurated, well engineered solution for the problem. Just using POP3S? Naaah!
"anyone who wants to distribute the kernel under GPL v3 would have to ask all authors to relicense their code or remove/replace the code."
Or make a very public advise of his intent and wait for a reasonable time period. Then, just release under GPLv3. If down the river someone appears that claims his software was not intended to be relased under GPLv3, then they will be able to reach a deal, retire the offending code or go for a trial under aprehended-by-fact rights (sorry, I don't know how to properly translate this into English) and see what happens.
After all, the only provisions under GPLv2 itself about distribution violations are "just stop distributing the code, please", and that only *once* the copyright holder itself appears asking so (paragraph #7 from GPLv2; p.#10 is even meagrer: if you want to distribute under GPLv3, just write the author -not even the copyright holder! but not provisions about what the answer should be, or even if you have to wait for an answer).
"If the answer to any of the above is negative, you are just as safe with closed source."
No, you aren't. You should read about the "panoptical effect"
"I can't think of one instance where being off by even a half a minute or so that I would be affected."
Being off by half a minute... against what? If you happen to choose to be off by half a minute to a source that it's half a minute off from its source, that it's off by half a minute from its source, all in sudden you are off by one minute and a half from the first source; wrong enough for a reliable NFS conection, Kerberos ticket or bidding by the limit to an e-bay auction.
"how many servers does it take to tell you what time it is?"
Just one. On the other hand, how many servers does it take for *you* to be confident about the info recieved? That's a different -and pointy, problem. After all, even an stopped watch will tell you what time is it -only, it will tell you wrongly.
"Isn't it more likely that some of 1000 servers somehow report wrong information instead of one single atomic clock?"
Yes. But then, ask yourself what the effect will be for tens of thousands of clients asking time data to a single atomic clock on its network. What would happen if every single bypasser asks you the time as you go?
"Seriously, what's wrong with one atomic clock? I hear they're KINDA accurate"
Even if they are KINDA accurate, they are no accurate ENOUGH for current standards. For a countrie's official time it usually takes about three atomic clocks to be sure. But, again, the problem here is not about accuracy, but bandwith considerations. That's true both for public Stratum 1 NTP servers as well as for the ntp.pool.org network.
"Can someone please explain this whole concept for us?"
Go to http://www.pool.ntp.org/ and you will find enough information to satisfy your curiosity.
"1) You are, in fact, guessing. You are looking at imprecise data and trying to figure out what was there. Any competent defense attorney would tear such a thing apart. Just because the technician assumes a string of bits corresponds to a given waveform, doesn't mean they are right."
Not to say you are wrong; I think you are overall right, in fact. But in an ideal world, a competent attorney can't have more than justice gives him (after all, if you can hope for a "competent defense attorney" you should expect for a "competent accusation attorney" too). It's true that telling one single bit to be a 0 or a 1 is "guessing", but a single bit doesn't tell anything. It's a hughe colletion of bits what holds info: if, by fair guessing any single bit to be a 0 or a 1 you end up with the literal text of the USA constitution, you must be pretty sure your guess is right (you can through some statistical analysis at it). If you guess a password and the password in fact gives you access to some protected data, you guess is OK. After all, even for the "true" data on a hard disk (the one coming from the last write), the reader just "guess" the bits on the platters to be 0s or 1s, why its "guess" is more "factical" than any other one you can through at it?
"However that isn't the kind of shit that flies in court"
On the contrary, my friend. There's nothing cualitatively different between this and DNA analysis, which is nothing more than statistics and guessing and you see it holds in court every day (for a very valid reason).
But, in the end, this completly goes out ot the article scope: the device is just a rugged PC that can extract low level data from the hard disks as fast as possible -by using the hard disk readers themselves, so its "sensibility" is just the one you get on "usual" read, so it's nothing more than a glorified dd.