There is no 'more important data'. That term is a relativistic concept that bears no actual meaning when read by anyone but the original believer. What is more important to one person is worthless to another.
Maybe not, but it's obvious that some types of data are more time-sensitive than others. If your P2P connection spikes and dips regularly it makes no real difference; if your average speed is fine it doesn't even matter if sometimes it drops to 0 to make way for other types of traffic. VOIP and regular streaming video are very time sensitive, and need a solid connection; they don't necessarily need the same average downspeed as P2P, but they need to be able to guarantee a minimum speed (especially for VOIP, which doesn't benefit from buffering). In this context it's not a system that is denying the use of P2P, but a technology that makes it possible to use VOIP and many other systems that require consistent speeds.
Of course, it depends on how it's used; maybe it will be used by ISPs to simply reduce their load. However, used intelligently, a system like this could give priority to time-sensitive applications when load is particularly high, knowing that the load will return to sub-100% soon enough, at which point it will stop throttling P2P, allowing it to make up for lost time.
What is their job again ? To check that goods entering are legit and that people entering are legit. No, their job is to check that people and goods enter and leave the country compliant with the law of the country. This can mean a lot of things as well as checking that people and goods are "legit". It can mean checking that people aren't carrying illegal drugs, it can mean checking that people aren't carrying illegal weapons, and, yes, it can mean checking people aren't carrying illegal pictures. The fact that it's on a computer makes no difference; it is illegal to possess child pornography and customs can perfectly legitimately search you for things you aren't allowed to carry.
Nothing done today prevents anyone from getting a weapon on board. The current security measures might stop someone who makes a half-hearted attempt, with no preparation, to get a weapon on board, but those aren't the threat.
Anyone with half a brain can shave their leg and duct tape an obsidian knife to it. Or fit a knife into complementary shaped plate and put it in their laptop. This isn't really true. You could make a tray in your laptop that holds a knife. And you could make it look fine on x-ray, and so that it looks totally normal and the laptop still boots. But you'd need a lot more than "half a brain".
The fact that you can concoct ways that would allow a weapon onto a plane doesn't change the fact that airport security does catch people with weapons. It catches people with knives, it catches people with guns, and it catches people with bombs. If one attack succeeds it doesn't make the security a failure - no security screen can be 100% effective. Unless every attack gets through or every attack is stopped there will be a debate to be had.
Nothing on the plane will stop someone from hijacking it if they have enough manpower and willpower. period. think it through. The alleged story from the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania shows that it is not possible to hijack if passengers don't want it. [...] What is the point of intrusive security checks again? Maybe we can't make ourselves 100% safe - but the closer we get the more difficult it becomes to hijack a plane. Yes there is no way to stop terrorists 100%, but if they can't get a weapon on board it's much harder, if they can't get into the cockpit it's much harder, if they can't...
I'm not totally convinced that this is a worthwhile security measure - I don't know enough about it to make an informed decision and the article is rather sketchy. But even if it's not it's no reason to throw out all the post-9/11 security changes. People still successfully rob banks - but the security measures mean that very few people try. If someone tries to hijack a plane people can die - whether they succeed or not - so discouraging people from trying is a victory all on its own.
BTW, terrorist acts on the infrastructure are next, not loss of life. The idea is to get us to spend tons of money trying to protect ourselves from what we are told is to be feared. To waste that money and resources. They will always be able to find an easy target that we are not watching. There's no way you can know that. Learning from the past is the only reasonable thing to do now; planes were hijacked, the loss of life and damage was significant, so we work to stop it happening again. Anything else would be reckless.
If the general thought that terrorists are smart is true, airliners will be the last thing they would use next time. It's far easier to sabotage the electric grid, water supply, or nuclear power plant. Or they'll attack an airline - because even if it's harder and less effective in reality it looks much more impressive on the news and is hard to blame on freak accident. American airlines being hit once was damaging - if they are repeatedly targeted successfully the fear and the damage would be ten times as great. Not to mention that there's no reason to assume they'll only attack one target, not everything they can think of.
I guess maybe the 2006 question seems easy to me because I know the simple way to solve it, while the 1970 question seems easy to you because you know the easy way to solve that? That's a really good point actually; if you notice that the 1951 question is a quadratic it becomes a case of "oh that's obviously a quadratic, easy". The 1970 question solves in a couple of lines - if you're familiar with the way to do it. What we really need is someone who hasn't seen any of these types of questions before and can try to do them all "from scratch".
I'm sorry, again maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think it is.
(x-3)(x^2-2x-24) is the result of the first line (which I got by comparing coefficients). Now surely I can just either solve the second part using the quadratic formula or, as I'm not using a calculator, it factorises nicely to (x-3)(x-6)(x+4) and the answer is obvious.
Where would you require long division or anything similar to the third question? There are no simultaneous equations for a start!
The core 3 exam is fairly new. Until a few years ago there were, I believe, 6 core exams (called pure and applied) They dealt with a rather different syllabus to the one you see today with core 1-4, and some of what you see in P3 papers builds on what is now in C4 or FP exams; since there were only three pure modules previously, the fact that P3 contains more than C3 is hardly a surprise! The change was made to allow people to study AS maths without having to do a whole A level and to allow people more freedom to choose the modules that are interesting and relevant to them - you can now tailor the syllabus to the interests of the class.
The other big change is that a lot of the "deeper" theory is gone from the basic AS/A2 course, having been moved into the more advanced optional units (S3,S4,M3,M4 and the FP units). This makes sense since, while I accept the need for people to have a solid grounding in maths, there really is no need for anyone who doesn't intend to make heavy use of maths later to learn about Markov chains, fluid friction or complex numbers. They just won't come up in most peoples lives in anything but a cursory fashion. The syllabus still contains more than enough to challenge most people - I'm not worried about maths being too easy now so much as it being made unnecessary to study sciences and computing. These subjects really suffer from having all the maths removed, since in many cases there's very little left.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't look to me like the 2006 question is necessarily any easier than the others; personally I would put the 1970 question as the easiest of the three. The 1951 question is long and looks complex but it multiplies out readily. The 1970 question can be solved readily in one line for the first part (although the exam board probably requires 3+) and then the second part is probably obvious. The third is still fairly basic stuff but I think it's the hardest of the three.
A private prosecution is possible over here (the UK); I don't know if it is in the US. Basically a privately hired lawyer prosecutes rather than the state; this is normally because the case is "not in the public interest" or because the state judges the chances of conviction to be too low to bother. If the situation changes the state can take over the prosecution at a later stage - either to continue the prosecution or to drop it.
You still have to get their public key - if someone is intercepting mail they can man-in-the-middle this without much more difficulty than intercepting passwords. Public key makes the problem less serious but it still exists.
Gotta love it! It is disheartening that it seems every European country, and Canada too, seems to have some kind of idiotic anti-speech law(s).
The scientology thing just serves to unmask this rather gigantic lapse in liberty. I think a better question than whether the kid is guilty or not is why you Brits have such laws. Further why aren't you outraged that such laws exist and why you aren't actively trying to overturn them? This isn't a flame but a serious question, since when the slightest bit of censorship rears its head in America we tend to jump all over it - as evidenced by the Youtube article still on the frontpage. As another user has pointed out, the British justice system doesn't work in the same way as the US system and you can't just compare the laws. We don't have a written constitution - our rights are (mostly) made up of those laid down in statute, those from the European Union and those in common law. This last section is the most important to note for this case; it's unlikely that precedent will back up the arrest of a boy for calling Scientology a cult, and based on the right to free speech the Judge will almost certainly direct the jury to acquit. And that's if it even gets that far - it's far more likely that the CPS will simply recognise that there is no chance of a prosecution succeeding and choose not to go ahead.
Laws against "hate speech" do not exist to target genuine "speech" however offensive it is - we have our fair share of unashamedly racist people and politicians whose right to air their views is supported. Hate speech laws simply recognise that not everything you can say should be protected speech. Harassment should not be, bullying should not be and neither should inciting violence or hatred - which are the uses targeted by hate speech law.
Obviously there's a delicate balance to be struck here, and you'll probably never hit the ideal. It isn't an attempt at censoring genuine dissent or protest though, and I'm confident that this arrest won't stand. Police officers are people too, and they make mistakes. This is just a mistake made by a couple of officers.
Oh for Goodness' sake. I know that it's very fashionable at the moment to claim that the UK and US are turning into repressive police states, but is this comment actually based on any knowledge?
Russia is moving toward becoming more free? Under Putin the state control of the media increased massively, the President's powers were increased hugely and the Duma was reduced to almost nothing. Now we have Medvedev, who won in a landslide that could never have been anything other than a landslide, while Putin is Prime Minister and still hugely powerful, leading a party with a constitutional majority and his hand-picked successor as president.
China is pretty much the archetypal example of a repressive regime working today. A country employing the most complex control system ever built to prevent the people exercising any control and employing methods that have been associated with tyranny since the days of Aristotle.
Claiming that these countries are as free as the UK or the US is a very strong statement, especially when you assert it with no evidence or information of any sort. It's a long time since we have been any different? The Republic of China has existed for 58 years, the Russian Federation for 16. And even if we just look at the UK it's difficult to see what you could be talking about.
In the UK we have a three party system. The candidates embody genuine differences in philosophy, have massive differences in their manifestos and represent different sides of the political divide. It's very popular at the moment to make fun of the parties for having no real differences in policy, but it's mostly popular among people who have no idea what the parties' policies are. People "go on about the vote as if it makes a difference" because it does make a difference - you sound like you're in the UK so you have probably noticed there are some by-elections on at the moment, and the peoples' votes are forcing the Government to give people what they want. If the by-elections are as bad for Labour as many people expect, their entire policy agenda will have to change. This accountability is one of the things the vote guarantees; politicians have to govern reasonably or lose office.
But, I would have to say, when you actions lead to someone being beaten, jailed, and forced to use the same dish to eat and shit, then you can be sure your action was evil. Only if you knew that was what would happen. If I reported someone to the police here (in the UK) and this happened I wouldn't think it was my fault - there's no way I would expect the police to do that. I don't know enough about India to know if this was expected though.
"Ready for the desktop", though, is a phrase whose meaning changes as peoples' understanding of a desktop changes. People don't expect their desktop to behave like DOS anymore.
There was a time when university campuses were bastions of free thought and conscience.
This isn't an issue of free thought, it's an issue of free movies, TV programs and music. Universities are places for discussion, discourse and intellectual and academic study. They don't exist to protect students who break a law that they are well aware of. This is in the same vein as the speech that every university student gets at the start of their course - the one that starts "The university doesn't condone...". The university doesn't want to be held responsible for the actions of students who repeatedly and deliberately break the law; if the students were campaigning to change the law instead the university might be on their side.
That said, once every 6 hours seems a bit much. I guess unless you're a prolific downloader it won't be much hassle though.
Given that the downside I was responding to was that you wouldn't be able to work on a plane since your confidential data would be on a remote server I think my point is valid - don't worry, I understand that actually reading before hitting reply can be a drag.
And yes, keeping confidential data on a laptop you're carrying around is never a great idea especially if it might get searched, so if you're going to work on confidential data you have to take care. Most people, though, don't work on anything confidential, so as long as they check that their wallpaper isn't a picture of their wife in the bath they probably won't have anything to worry about.
If all you want to do is work then for 99% this really isn't going to be an issue. Firstly because any checking they do is likely to be with automated commercial tools, simply because it's cheaper, and most of the time you won't be working on anything secret. If what you need to work on is illegal, embarrassing or confidential you're not going to want it open on a plane anyway, so it's not an issue either.
I think what you're referring to is "notional agreement". It's pretty logical really - when you're talking about a company as a single entity, you treat it as singular, when you really mean the group of people/interests/whatever it represents you use the plural. The same thing's seen in most European languages (well, those I speak anyway). I have no idea why it disappeared in American English.
People have the right to liberty - but criminals get locked up. People have the right to free expression - but you can't yell abuse at your neighbour's house all night. People have the right to free movement - but you can't just waltz across borders. Just like everything else, rights are not a black-and-white issue. We have to accept some curtailment of our freedoms in order to live in a society, and it's worth it because what we lose in freedom we gain in safety, and security, and opportunity.
China isn't the only country in the world that restricts its citizens access to online content. Most countries control what you can look at online, and they claim to do it to protect people and national interests, just like China does. I don't agree with the Chinese policy, but seeing this as some sort of all-or-nothing situation, unique to China is just confused.
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There is no 'more important data'. That term is a relativistic concept that bears no actual meaning when read by anyone but the original believer. What is more important to one person is worthless to another.
Maybe not, but it's obvious that some types of data are more time-sensitive than others. If your P2P connection spikes and dips regularly it makes no real difference; if your average speed is fine it doesn't even matter if sometimes it drops to 0 to make way for other types of traffic. VOIP and regular streaming video are very time sensitive, and need a solid connection; they don't necessarily need the same average downspeed as P2P, but they need to be able to guarantee a minimum speed (especially for VOIP, which doesn't benefit from buffering). In this context it's not a system that is denying the use of P2P, but a technology that makes it possible to use VOIP and many other systems that require consistent speeds.
Of course, it depends on how it's used; maybe it will be used by ISPs to simply reduce their load. However, used intelligently, a system like this could give priority to time-sensitive applications when load is particularly high, knowing that the load will return to sub-100% soon enough, at which point it will stop throttling P2P, allowing it to make up for lost time.
Bolts are extremely lock-pick resistant.
Anyone with half a brain can shave their leg and duct tape an obsidian knife to it. Or fit a knife into complementary shaped plate and put it in their laptop. This isn't really true. You could make a tray in your laptop that holds a knife. And you could make it look fine on x-ray, and so that it looks totally normal and the laptop still boots. But you'd need a lot more than "half a brain".
The fact that you can concoct ways that would allow a weapon onto a plane doesn't change the fact that airport security does catch people with weapons. It catches people with knives, it catches people with guns, and it catches people with bombs. If one attack succeeds it doesn't make the security a failure - no security screen can be 100% effective. Unless every attack gets through or every attack is stopped there will be a debate to be had.
[...]
What is the point of intrusive security checks again? Maybe we can't make ourselves 100% safe - but the closer we get the more difficult it becomes to hijack a plane. Yes there is no way to stop terrorists 100%, but if they can't get a weapon on board it's much harder, if they can't get into the cockpit it's much harder, if they can't...
I'm not totally convinced that this is a worthwhile security measure - I don't know enough about it to make an informed decision and the article is rather sketchy. But even if it's not it's no reason to throw out all the post-9/11 security changes. People still successfully rob banks - but the security measures mean that very few people try. If someone tries to hijack a plane people can die - whether they succeed or not - so discouraging people from trying is a victory all on its own. BTW, terrorist acts on the infrastructure are next, not loss of life. The idea is to get us to spend tons of money trying to protect ourselves from what we are told is to be feared. To waste that money and resources. They will always be able to find an easy target that we are not watching. There's no way you can know that. Learning from the past is the only reasonable thing to do now; planes were hijacked, the loss of life and damage was significant, so we work to stop it happening again. Anything else would be reckless. If the general thought that terrorists are smart is true, airliners will be the last thing they would use next time. It's far easier to sabotage the electric grid, water supply, or nuclear power plant. Or they'll attack an airline - because even if it's harder and less effective in reality it looks much more impressive on the news and is hard to blame on freak accident. American airlines being hit once was damaging - if they are repeatedly targeted successfully the fear and the damage would be ten times as great. Not to mention that there's no reason to assume they'll only attack one target, not everything they can think of.
I'm sorry, again maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think it is.
(x-3)(x^2-2x-24) is the result of the first line (which I got by comparing coefficients). Now surely I can just either solve the second part using the quadratic formula or, as I'm not using a calculator, it factorises nicely to (x-3)(x-6)(x+4) and the answer is obvious.
Where would you require long division or anything similar to the third question? There are no simultaneous equations for a start!
The core 3 exam is fairly new. Until a few years ago there were, I believe, 6 core exams (called pure and applied) They dealt with a rather different syllabus to the one you see today with core 1-4, and some of what you see in P3 papers builds on what is now in C4 or FP exams; since there were only three pure modules previously, the fact that P3 contains more than C3 is hardly a surprise! The change was made to allow people to study AS maths without having to do a whole A level and to allow people more freedom to choose the modules that are interesting and relevant to them - you can now tailor the syllabus to the interests of the class.
The other big change is that a lot of the "deeper" theory is gone from the basic AS/A2 course, having been moved into the more advanced optional units (S3,S4,M3,M4 and the FP units). This makes sense since, while I accept the need for people to have a solid grounding in maths, there really is no need for anyone who doesn't intend to make heavy use of maths later to learn about Markov chains, fluid friction or complex numbers. They just won't come up in most peoples lives in anything but a cursory fashion. The syllabus still contains more than enough to challenge most people - I'm not worried about maths being too easy now so much as it being made unnecessary to study sciences and computing. These subjects really suffer from having all the maths removed, since in many cases there's very little left.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't look to me like the 2006 question is necessarily any easier than the others; personally I would put the 1970 question as the easiest of the three. The 1951 question is long and looks complex but it multiplies out readily. The 1970 question can be solved readily in one line for the first part (although the exam board probably requires 3+) and then the second part is probably obvious. The third is still fairly basic stuff but I think it's the hardest of the three.
A private prosecution is possible over here (the UK); I don't know if it is in the US. Basically a privately hired lawyer prosecutes rather than the state; this is normally because the case is "not in the public interest" or because the state judges the chances of conviction to be too low to bother. If the situation changes the state can take over the prosecution at a later stage - either to continue the prosecution or to drop it.
A fresh start to the franchise?
So that would be the Fresh Prince of Persia, then?
Five words: I want to play, too!
Now I need to get back to work, I've been spending over 100% of my time on Slashdot.
You still have to get their public key - if someone is intercepting mail they can man-in-the-middle this without much more difficulty than intercepting passwords. Public key makes the problem less serious but it still exists.
Did you have any reasons behind that or was it just a throwaway remark?
The scientology thing just serves to unmask this rather gigantic lapse in liberty. I think a better question than whether the kid is guilty or not is why you Brits have such laws. Further why aren't you outraged that such laws exist and why you aren't actively trying to overturn them? This isn't a flame but a serious question, since when the slightest bit of censorship rears its head in America we tend to jump all over it - as evidenced by the Youtube article still on the frontpage. As another user has pointed out, the British justice system doesn't work in the same way as the US system and you can't just compare the laws. We don't have a written constitution - our rights are (mostly) made up of those laid down in statute, those from the European Union and those in common law. This last section is the most important to note for this case; it's unlikely that precedent will back up the arrest of a boy for calling Scientology a cult, and based on the right to free speech the Judge will almost certainly direct the jury to acquit. And that's if it even gets that far - it's far more likely that the CPS will simply recognise that there is no chance of a prosecution succeeding and choose not to go ahead.
Laws against "hate speech" do not exist to target genuine "speech" however offensive it is - we have our fair share of unashamedly racist people and politicians whose right to air their views is supported. Hate speech laws simply recognise that not everything you can say should be protected speech. Harassment should not be, bullying should not be and neither should inciting violence or hatred - which are the uses targeted by hate speech law.
Obviously there's a delicate balance to be struck here, and you'll probably never hit the ideal. It isn't an attempt at censoring genuine dissent or protest though, and I'm confident that this arrest won't stand. Police officers are people too, and they make mistakes. This is just a mistake made by a couple of officers.
Oh for Goodness' sake. I know that it's very fashionable at the moment to claim that the UK and US are turning into repressive police states, but is this comment actually based on any knowledge?
Russia is moving toward becoming more free? Under Putin the state control of the media increased massively, the President's powers were increased hugely and the Duma was reduced to almost nothing. Now we have Medvedev, who won in a landslide that could never have been anything other than a landslide, while Putin is Prime Minister and still hugely powerful, leading a party with a constitutional majority and his hand-picked successor as president.
China is pretty much the archetypal example of a repressive regime working today. A country employing the most complex control system ever built to prevent the people exercising any control and employing methods that have been associated with tyranny since the days of Aristotle.
Claiming that these countries are as free as the UK or the US is a very strong statement, especially when you assert it with no evidence or information of any sort. It's a long time since we have been any different? The Republic of China has existed for 58 years, the Russian Federation for 16. And even if we just look at the UK it's difficult to see what you could be talking about.
In the UK we have a three party system. The candidates embody genuine differences in philosophy, have massive differences in their manifestos and represent different sides of the political divide. It's very popular at the moment to make fun of the parties for having no real differences in policy, but it's mostly popular among people who have no idea what the parties' policies are. People "go on about the vote as if it makes a difference" because it does make a difference - you sound like you're in the UK so you have probably noticed there are some by-elections on at the moment, and the peoples' votes are forcing the Government to give people what they want. If the by-elections are as bad for Labour as many people expect, their entire policy agenda will have to change. This accountability is one of the things the vote guarantees; politicians have to govern reasonably or lose office.
"Ready for the desktop", though, is a phrase whose meaning changes as peoples' understanding of a desktop changes. People don't expect their desktop to behave like DOS anymore.
There was a time when university campuses were bastions of free thought and conscience.
This isn't an issue of free thought, it's an issue of free movies, TV programs and music. Universities are places for discussion, discourse and intellectual and academic study. They don't exist to protect students who break a law that they are well aware of. This is in the same vein as the speech that every university student gets at the start of their course - the one that starts "The university doesn't condone...". The university doesn't want to be held responsible for the actions of students who repeatedly and deliberately break the law; if the students were campaigning to change the law instead the university might be on their side.That said, once every 6 hours seems a bit much. I guess unless you're a prolific downloader it won't be much hassle though.
Given that the downside I was responding to was that you wouldn't be able to work on a plane since your confidential data would be on a remote server I think my point is valid - don't worry, I understand that actually reading before hitting reply can be a drag.
And yes, keeping confidential data on a laptop you're carrying around is never a great idea especially if it might get searched, so if you're going to work on confidential data you have to take care. Most people, though, don't work on anything confidential, so as long as they check that their wallpaper isn't a picture of their wife in the bath they probably won't have anything to worry about.
Seems a bit harsh to blame poor inspection for letting them land though!
If all you want to do is work then for 99% this really isn't going to be an issue. Firstly because any checking they do is likely to be with automated commercial tools, simply because it's cheaper, and most of the time you won't be working on anything secret. If what you need to work on is illegal, embarrassing or confidential you're not going to want it open on a plane anyway, so it's not an issue either.
It's wrong here in the UK too.
I think what you're referring to is "notional agreement". It's pretty logical really - when you're talking about a company as a single entity, you treat it as singular, when you really mean the group of people/interests/whatever it represents you use the plural. The same thing's seen in most European languages (well, those I speak anyway). I have no idea why it disappeared in American English.
People have the right to liberty - but criminals get locked up. People have the right to free expression - but you can't yell abuse at your neighbour's house all night. People have the right to free movement - but you can't just waltz across borders. Just like everything else, rights are not a black-and-white issue. We have to accept some curtailment of our freedoms in order to live in a society, and it's worth it because what we lose in freedom we gain in safety, and security, and opportunity.
China isn't the only country in the world that restricts its citizens access to online content. Most countries control what you can look at online, and they claim to do it to protect people and national interests, just like China does. I don't agree with the Chinese policy, but seeing this as some sort of all-or-nothing situation, unique to China is just confused.