I wasn't laughing: I consider that scenario to be plausible at least for the first round, where all the officials are lower-level morons. I've also encountered people who think that if a Windows machine can't read it natively it must be encrypted. Which, let's be honest, it IS. Any information you can't read is encrypted, but RAM yanked from someone's machine by a moron looks, to the moron, just like information that can't be read, and that's where the problem lies.
Smug user: *click*, yank, "Here ya go: my brand new Kingston DDR2 ram. Much fun may you have with it, ha ha ha ha." Clueless investigator: *jam* *snap* *click* "Hey, wait, this isn't formatted with FAT32! It looks like completely random noise! You must be encrypting the data we're looking for! Hand over the password or it's off to a secret terrorist prison for you!" Smug user suddenly looks less smug.
For the record, this happens constantly. When labs test chemicals for mutagenicity -- the chemical's ability to screw up a living cell's DNA -- this is precisely how they do the test. They take bacteria that can't metabolize lactose (we'll call them lac-) and try to grow them on a lactose-containing medium. Of course they can't because they're lac-. So the chemical in question is introduced into the (sufficient) growth medium in which the bacteria ARE growing, in different concentrations, and those bacteria are plated onto the lactose medium, and at some concentration of chemical, bacteria start growing on the lactose medium, because the chemical has sufficiently disrupted the bacterial DNA that some mistake somewhere is allowing the bacteria to produce enzymes to start metabolizing lactose. That's not sixty generations, either: it's *one*, because the bacteria go from growing in a sufficient medium, right to a lactose plate, and at that point they either starve or grow and if they grow it's because they've started being able to metabolize lactose. This test is done thousands of times every day in labs all across the world, with every chemical that people will be exposed to, so this experiment has probably been done in excess of 100,000,000 times. And, by the way, in case it's not obvious, if evolution didn't work, this experiment wouldn't work.
The old joke: it takes a week to code a complex function in C, but only two hours to debug it when it doesn't work. It only takes two hours to write it in Perl, but a week to debug it when it doesn't work.
I'll go this far: all communists are killers, and all vegetarians are killers. But it doesn't necessary follow that all vegetarians are communists, of course.
I wonder if they can get Lara to play the lead character. That'll get the public to show up in droves, and I've heard she works inexpensively and has almost infinite patience for redoing scenes.
I don't have a hard answer -- I don't think there is one. I'm fairly sure that women who drink lots of alcohol can be charged with child abuse, which is similar to your situation. I have really mixed feelings about this. There are communities of deaf people, who have been seriously debating what to do about new medical techniques that could cure their just-born children of deafness -- but then they wouldn't fit into the community. People are making the argument that they should be allowed to prevent medical care of their kids. Likewise, Christian Scientists, on a somewhat regular basis, let their children die for lack of medical care because they don't believe in doctors. I'm not comfortable with those choices: I don't think those parents should be allowed to make those choices for their children. In the same way, when I read about a couple having multiple children with cystic fibrosis, I think it's unethical of them to have any more kids after the first one. But does that mean insurance companies should be able to screw those people? I dunno. The people are making those choices, not the kids, so I think it should reflect on the people who make the choices, but as to how to make that happen, I'm not sure.
One presumes you weren't born with the speeding tickets. One presumes the information about the speeding tickets will eventually go away.
If you choose to speed, the insurers should know about that. The question is whether it's ethical to deny insurance/jobs/whatever to people who did not choose/were born with/inherited high-risk, high-premium characteristics.
There are gray areas. Many people think it's fair to discriminate against gays because they think being gay is a choice, rather than being biologically determined. Likewise many people think it's fair to discriminate against people who are fat on the basis that fat people get fat by eating lots, despite evidence that weight might be mostly controlled by genetics.
But *I* don't think anyone should be allowed access to DNA records for insurance purposes, because it penalizes people for things they cannot control or fix.
But the only way to avoid this is telling people how to raise their children, and I don't think the government should be doing that. I'm not full-bore freedom-of-everything: I think all children should have to go to public schools, for instance. But if we're going to give people the freedom to have kids, they should have the freedom to raise them the way they want, even if that means telling the kids that THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END or whatever.
I know kids who have been raised by parents who keep telling them that everyone else is evil and crazy and going to hell. They're going to grow up and be low-income carpenters in a small religious community in Arkansas, and their parents are okay with that, and they're okay with that, and I guess I am too. They'll have little or no influence on how the rest of the country runs and we'll outcompete them into the dust, and if they want to learn about the real world and get real jobs, then they get exposed to real education and have to learn some stuff.
You're totally correct, but the thing is: we should defend their right to say stupid, clearly wrong stuff (like creationism) and even teach it to kids, but we also *have* to simultaneously educate people well enough to analyze and be sceptical. If we have well-educated kids, they'll be able to figure out that the loonies holding the "WORLD IS ABOUT TO END" signs and the loonies running the creationist musuem are basically the same loonies. That doesn't mean we should stop either set of loonies from saying whatever crawls into their brains. Hell, we should encourage them. Give them National Endowment for the Arts grants. *EVERYONE* should be allowed to speak their minds, and if we're doing a good job at educating our children, it's all grist for the mill of their minds. Being exposed to wrong, stupid ideas should make them ask better questions.
For the record, my (religious) parents and my surviving (religious) grandparents are all annoyed at the Pledge Of Allegiance because "when WE were kids there wasn't any "one nation under God" part in there!" They think it's stupid that it was changed in the late 1950's to include 'under God' because, basically, that's not how it was when they were kids.
I used to work in the chemistry department of our local college (while I was getting a degree in chemistry) and we had a local nuclear magnetic resonance imaging center -- the precursors to MRI's. (Basically, sales/advertising decided that calling anything 'nuclear' was a bad idea so they renamed them 'magnetic resonance imaging'.) Anyway, they moved one of the large machines into a different room, without letting anyone else know, coz why would you? only about a month later all the secretaries started asking questions because the reception/secretary room was suddenly right above the NMR and all the women in the office had started missing their periods. They moved the NMR back to where it was and everything went back to normal.
Now, I'm not saying that's bad, or causes cancer. I'm saying it is a pretty noticeable effect, and anyone with a smidgeon of good sense would want more research before deciding that it was fine to keep exposing people to such fields.
Hey, that's cool: thanks. It's certainly not apocryphal. I always refer to sneakernet when my network's having problems and I'm forced to transfer files via USB thumbdrive or floppy, and FedExNet when the whole point is to A: stay moderately secret and B: move a whole lot of data, accepting a rather high latency.
>The fundamental problem with PC based motherboards has always been heat dissipation and interface connectors.
And the fundamental problem of things like gumstix is that they're very good for one specific function, the one for which they were designed, but if you want to do something outside that, you run into a wedding-cake-like pile of add-on cards to get the functionality you wanted. Take gumstix. I might be wrong, but my reading of their USB technical specifications says that this is a device intended to hook to a computer as a peripheral, not one capable of hooking to and controlling peripherals. I want to build remote surveillance devices that run on very low power (solar) for an off-the-grid house way up in the mountains, so I know what the weather's going to be like before I drive up. It'd also be really nice if it were small so I could stick it in the enclosure on the roof with the camera, and only have to run a phone line down, or wireless. Any PC-style system can run wireless and a USB webcam, but they're huge and power-hungry. Any small embedded processor device can fit in a tiny enclosure and run on 10W, but I have yet to find one that can run a webcam and send that video data out. So, for me, this sounds like a great bit of progress, although there are other ARM-based and x86-based very small computers that might also work. (and I might get my old Qube to do it, if I keep working at it...)
When I was in my 20's I went to a lot of local elementary schools and gave talks on medieval history and demonstrations of how to make medieval armor. In college I worked with a statewide physics education program where we built demonstrators of basic physics principles and took them to many local elementary and junior high schools. I used to work with church youth groups. Then, over a period of two years, two of my friends were convicted to lifetime sentences in federal prisons for child-related crimes that I'm 95% sure and 75% sure, respectively, they didn't actually do. From that time on, I've made very sure to not be alone with children under any circumstances. It's too bad, because I really enjoyed teaching. It was rewarding and I got a lot of kids interested in things they would've probably never encountered. But that's not worth the risk of spending the rest of my life in federal prison.
It's very hard to make that call from the outside. Was it in Kenneth Lay's best interests to ravage Enron? No: it probably killed him and he certainly would've spent the rest of his life in jail. But if he hadn't been caught? Then, as awful as it sounds, it would have been very, very much in his best interest to do exactly what he did: which is precisely why he did it. People are always caught between two competing goals, that of the community at large, and their own self-interest. Most of the time it benefits individuals to help their community, because the community will help them back, but there are rare times where it benefits an individual far, far more to be a selfish jerk. And, as it turns out, as the community gets larger and the repeated contacts between individuals decline, it becomes increasingly advantageous to be a selfish jerk, because the feedback gain is dropping and the hysteresis is increasing, in control theory terms. So, while a self-professed ethical person can decry selfish behavior, it has a good reason -- to each individual -- for existing.
"Kato! Ze network is rrrrringing!" *thwack* Clouseau was a terrible detective: any success he had was purely by chance. I can't help but wonder if this is a joke, just based on the name.
One could substitute "animal-killing-and-eating" for "jackass" in your above statement, to justify militant vegan behavior, or "muslim" for much of the Western world's current standards, or even "male" to justify militant feminism. My point is: very widely-practiced behavior is, by definition, normal, even if by your standards it's lousy. To criticize huge swaths of people for doing something that is A: normal and B: in their best interests, is Quixotic.
>if you're using match.com while you're already in a relationship with somebody then maybe you need to have a talk with that person and let them know things aren't working out.
Kind of like how if you start looking for a new job, you invariably let your boss and coworkers know that with any luck you're going to be leaving soon, right?
I'm not saying it's *right* to be looking around when you're in a relationship, unless you're one of those godforsaken poly people, but there are lots of people who do exactly what he's talking about and stand to get in trouble if someone does what he's trying. Whether or not you agree with it, it's very common human behavior.
As one of my friends, who has spent the last ten years fed-ex'ing the largest hard drives he can afford back and forth on a weekly basis with other so-inclined people, often says, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a fed-ex truck full of 500 Gb hard drives."
I'm going to preface this by saying I don't know much about encryption. From what I do know: your video player is Alice. The remote server is Bob. They exchange keys, and at that point Bob knows that Alice is authentic, and vice versa, and from then on, the encrypted material they exchange is as 'secure' as other symmetric key exchanges. From then on, you don't know what they're doing: the stuff you're sniffing is, essentially, random numbers. If they choose to distribute the entire contents of the medium via that, you can use a camcorder to record it off the screen, sure, but you can't get a digital copy. For video, this would require a big fat broadband connection (which is why I said, in another comment in this thread, that I think it's quite possible media distribution companies are going to be investing in/buying communications companies.) They could also distribute only a part of the file -- essentially a long key -- used for decoding the encrypted information you have on the medium you purchased. Someone can probably make a good estimate where the profit maximum is, for how much they have to put on the disc and how much they have to stream.
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I wasn't laughing: I consider that scenario to be plausible at least for the first round, where all the officials are lower-level morons. I've also encountered people who think that if a Windows machine can't read it natively it must be encrypted. Which, let's be honest, it IS. Any information you can't read is encrypted, but RAM yanked from someone's machine by a moron looks, to the moron, just like information that can't be read, and that's where the problem lies.
Smug user: *click*, yank, "Here ya go: my brand new Kingston DDR2 ram. Much fun may you have with it, ha ha ha ha."
Clueless investigator: *jam* *snap* *click* "Hey, wait, this isn't formatted with FAT32! It looks like completely random noise! You must be encrypting the data we're looking for! Hand over the password or it's off to a secret terrorist prison for you!"
Smug user suddenly looks less smug.
You do recall the articles about politicians editing their Wikipedia entries to remove negative information, or in some cases to alter the reports on their voting records, right?
For the record, this happens constantly. When labs test chemicals for mutagenicity -- the chemical's ability to screw up a living cell's DNA -- this is precisely how they do the test. They take bacteria that can't metabolize lactose (we'll call them lac-) and try to grow them on a lactose-containing medium. Of course they can't because they're lac-. So the chemical in question is introduced into the (sufficient) growth medium in which the bacteria ARE growing, in different concentrations, and those bacteria are plated onto the lactose medium, and at some concentration of chemical, bacteria start growing on the lactose medium, because the chemical has sufficiently disrupted the bacterial DNA that some mistake somewhere is allowing the bacteria to produce enzymes to start metabolizing lactose. That's not sixty generations, either: it's *one*, because the bacteria go from growing in a sufficient medium, right to a lactose plate, and at that point they either starve or grow and if they grow it's because they've started being able to metabolize lactose. This test is done thousands of times every day in labs all across the world, with every chemical that people will be exposed to, so this experiment has probably been done in excess of 100,000,000 times.
And, by the way, in case it's not obvious, if evolution didn't work, this experiment wouldn't work.
The old joke: it takes a week to code a complex function in C, but only two hours to debug it when it doesn't work. It only takes two hours to write it in Perl, but a week to debug it when it doesn't work.
I'll go this far: all communists are killers, and all vegetarians are killers. But it doesn't necessary follow that all vegetarians are communists, of course.
Whenever someone says that to me, I say the same thing about babies. It upsets people sometimes.
I wonder if they can get Lara to play the lead character. That'll get the public to show up in droves, and I've heard she works inexpensively and has almost infinite patience for redoing scenes.
I don't have a hard answer -- I don't think there is one. I'm fairly sure that women who drink lots of alcohol can be charged with child abuse, which is similar to your situation. I have really mixed feelings about this. There are communities of deaf people, who have been seriously debating what to do about new medical techniques that could cure their just-born children of deafness -- but then they wouldn't fit into the community. People are making the argument that they should be allowed to prevent medical care of their kids. Likewise, Christian Scientists, on a somewhat regular basis, let their children die for lack of medical care because they don't believe in doctors. I'm not comfortable with those choices: I don't think those parents should be allowed to make those choices for their children. In the same way, when I read about a couple having multiple children with cystic fibrosis, I think it's unethical of them to have any more kids after the first one. But does that mean insurance companies should be able to screw those people? I dunno. The people are making those choices, not the kids, so I think it should reflect on the people who make the choices, but as to how to make that happen, I'm not sure.
One presumes you weren't born with the speeding tickets. One presumes the information about the speeding tickets will eventually go away.
If you choose to speed, the insurers should know about that. The question is whether it's ethical to deny insurance/jobs/whatever to people who did not choose/were born with/inherited high-risk, high-premium characteristics.
There are gray areas. Many people think it's fair to discriminate against gays because they think being gay is a choice, rather than being biologically determined. Likewise many people think it's fair to discriminate against people who are fat on the basis that fat people get fat by eating lots, despite evidence that weight might be mostly controlled by genetics.
But *I* don't think anyone should be allowed access to DNA records for insurance purposes, because it penalizes people for things they cannot control or fix.
But the only way to avoid this is telling people how to raise their children, and I don't think the government should be doing that. I'm not full-bore freedom-of-everything: I think all children should have to go to public schools, for instance. But if we're going to give people the freedom to have kids, they should have the freedom to raise them the way they want, even if that means telling the kids that THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END or whatever.
I know kids who have been raised by parents who keep telling them that everyone else is evil and crazy and going to hell. They're going to grow up and be low-income carpenters in a small religious community in Arkansas, and their parents are okay with that, and they're okay with that, and I guess I am too. They'll have little or no influence on how the rest of the country runs and we'll outcompete them into the dust, and if they want to learn about the real world and get real jobs, then they get exposed to real education and have to learn some stuff.
You're totally correct, but the thing is: we should defend their right to say stupid, clearly wrong stuff (like creationism) and even teach it to kids, but we also *have* to simultaneously educate people well enough to analyze and be sceptical. If we have well-educated kids, they'll be able to figure out that the loonies holding the "WORLD IS ABOUT TO END" signs and the loonies running the creationist musuem are basically the same loonies. That doesn't mean we should stop either set of loonies from saying whatever crawls into their brains. Hell, we should encourage them. Give them National Endowment for the Arts grants. *EVERYONE* should be allowed to speak their minds, and if we're doing a good job at educating our children, it's all grist for the mill of their minds. Being exposed to wrong, stupid ideas should make them ask better questions.
For the record, my (religious) parents and my surviving (religious) grandparents are all annoyed at the Pledge Of Allegiance because "when WE were kids there wasn't any "one nation under God" part in there!" They think it's stupid that it was changed in the late 1950's to include 'under God' because, basically, that's not how it was when they were kids.
I used to work in the chemistry department of our local college (while I was getting a degree in chemistry) and we had a local nuclear magnetic resonance imaging center -- the precursors to MRI's. (Basically, sales/advertising decided that calling anything 'nuclear' was a bad idea so they renamed them 'magnetic resonance imaging'.) Anyway, they moved one of the large machines into a different room, without letting anyone else know, coz why would you? only about a month later all the secretaries started asking questions because the reception/secretary room was suddenly right above the NMR and all the women in the office had started missing their periods. They moved the NMR back to where it was and everything went back to normal.
Now, I'm not saying that's bad, or causes cancer. I'm saying it is a pretty noticeable effect, and anyone with a smidgeon of good sense would want more research before deciding that it was fine to keep exposing people to such fields.
Hey, that's cool: thanks. It's certainly not apocryphal. I always refer to sneakernet when my network's having problems and I'm forced to transfer files via USB thumbdrive or floppy, and FedExNet when the whole point is to A: stay moderately secret and B: move a whole lot of data, accepting a rather high latency.
>The fundamental problem with PC based motherboards has always been heat dissipation and interface connectors.
And the fundamental problem of things like gumstix is that they're very good for one specific function, the one for which they were designed, but if you want to do something outside that, you run into a wedding-cake-like pile of add-on cards to get the functionality you wanted. Take gumstix. I might be wrong, but my reading of their USB technical specifications says that this is a device intended to hook to a computer as a peripheral, not one capable of hooking to and controlling peripherals. I want to build remote surveillance devices that run on very low power (solar) for an off-the-grid house way up in the mountains, so I know what the weather's going to be like before I drive up. It'd also be really nice if it were small so I could stick it in the enclosure on the roof with the camera, and only have to run a phone line down, or wireless. Any PC-style system can run wireless and a USB webcam, but they're huge and power-hungry. Any small embedded processor device can fit in a tiny enclosure and run on 10W, but I have yet to find one that can run a webcam and send that video data out. So, for me, this sounds like a great bit of progress, although there are other ARM-based and x86-based very small computers that might also work. (and I might get my old Qube to do it, if I keep working at it...)
When I was in my 20's I went to a lot of local elementary schools and gave talks on medieval history and demonstrations of how to make medieval armor. In college I worked with a statewide physics education program where we built demonstrators of basic physics principles and took them to many local elementary and junior high schools. I used to work with church youth groups. Then, over a period of two years, two of my friends were convicted to lifetime sentences in federal prisons for child-related crimes that I'm 95% sure and 75% sure, respectively, they didn't actually do.
From that time on, I've made very sure to not be alone with children under any circumstances.
It's too bad, because I really enjoyed teaching. It was rewarding and I got a lot of kids interested in things they would've probably never encountered. But that's not worth the risk of spending the rest of my life in federal prison.
It's not my story, it's his, and I've heard him say it a lot of times, plus I've seen his collection of hard drives. Who is Jim Gray?
It's very hard to make that call from the outside. Was it in Kenneth Lay's best interests to ravage Enron? No: it probably killed him and he certainly would've spent the rest of his life in jail. But if he hadn't been caught? Then, as awful as it sounds, it would have been very, very much in his best interest to do exactly what he did: which is precisely why he did it. People are always caught between two competing goals, that of the community at large, and their own self-interest. Most of the time it benefits individuals to help their community, because the community will help them back, but there are rare times where it benefits an individual far, far more to be a selfish jerk. And, as it turns out, as the community gets larger and the repeated contacts between individuals decline, it becomes increasingly advantageous to be a selfish jerk, because the feedback gain is dropping and the hysteresis is increasing, in control theory terms. So, while a self-professed ethical person can decry selfish behavior, it has a good reason -- to each individual -- for existing.
"Kato! Ze network is rrrrringing!" *thwack*
Clouseau was a terrible detective: any success he had was purely by chance. I can't help but wonder if this is a joke, just based on the name.
One could substitute "animal-killing-and-eating" for "jackass" in your above statement, to justify militant vegan behavior, or "muslim" for much of the Western world's current standards, or even "male" to justify militant feminism. My point is: very widely-practiced behavior is, by definition, normal, even if by your standards it's lousy. To criticize huge swaths of people for doing something that is A: normal and B: in their best interests, is Quixotic.
>if you're using match.com while you're already in a relationship with somebody then maybe you need to have a talk with that person and let them know things aren't working out.
Kind of like how if you start looking for a new job, you invariably let your boss and coworkers know that with any luck you're going to be leaving soon, right?
I'm not saying it's *right* to be looking around when you're in a relationship, unless you're one of those godforsaken poly people, but there are lots of people who do exactly what he's talking about and stand to get in trouble if someone does what he's trying. Whether or not you agree with it, it's very common human behavior.
As one of my friends, who has spent the last ten years fed-ex'ing the largest hard drives he can afford back and forth on a weekly basis with other so-inclined people, often says, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a fed-ex truck full of 500 Gb hard drives."
I'd love to hear more about that, too.
I'm going to preface this by saying I don't know much about encryption.
From what I do know: your video player is Alice. The remote server is Bob. They exchange keys, and at that point Bob knows that Alice is authentic, and vice versa, and from then on, the encrypted material they exchange is as 'secure' as other symmetric key exchanges. From then on, you don't know what they're doing: the stuff you're sniffing is, essentially, random numbers.
If they choose to distribute the entire contents of the medium via that, you can use a camcorder to record it off the screen, sure, but you can't get a digital copy. For video, this would require a big fat broadband connection (which is why I said, in another comment in this thread, that I think it's quite possible media distribution companies are going to be investing in/buying communications companies.) They could also distribute only a part of the file -- essentially a long key -- used for decoding the encrypted information you have on the medium you purchased. Someone can probably make a good estimate where the profit maximum is, for how much they have to put on the disc and how much they have to stream.