The helicoptor was in an active combat zone. There were reports of RPG fire. The press were not wearing identifying uniforms that press in an active warzone are expected to wear. The children in the van were only visible when looking carefully at the footage and freeze framing, not in a combat situation (wtf were they doing driving children to the site of a bombing) and the van appeared to be insurgents recovering the weapons and preventing wounded combatants being captured.. There was an RPG launcher and an AK-47 clone visible in the footage (in addition to the pilots mistaking the camera for another RPG). The pilots waited for authorisation before firing.
As tragic as it was, procedure was followed and there a combination of circumstances contributed to the mistake. It was not a war crime.
Can I have your birth records? Your school history? Your tax returns? Criminal record? Oh heck, anything you've ever done that has received any sort of government funding or subsidy? You should be fine with that right?
There's a big difference between 'whistleblowing on a crime' and 'leaking every single thing you have access to in the hope that some of it may be criminal'.
The figures are excluding ultra portables, tablets and convertible laptops.
Hard to take these figures seriously when they exclude pretty much all the big growth areas for PC sales.
Having a couple of officers do undercover work to get the organisers is more efficient and effective then sending loads of officers to a concert, filling up the cells and having a high chance of the organisers getting away. It's also far more likely to discourage people from even attempting a show.
Plus there's lots of stuff that goes with the concerts other than just noise; poor safety, drink driving, general vandalism to the area, all the stuff that licenced concerts have to plan for or try to prevent.
The article states that they were all sent out on the same date. It's probably safe to assume that they were all taken to the post office or mail handlers at the same time.
There's no way of knowing if the samples arrived at the post office in separate, pre-sorted atheist/unmarked piles/sacks or if the post office then decided to sort them by markings themselves. Having samples done at different times can eliminate data 'bunching up' or samples interfering with each other.
Depends how they were handed over to the postal service. They may have been handed over sorted already by the store. They may have been sorted by a postal worker who thought they were all part of the same batch after they were handed over. There's no way of knowing if something like this occurred which is why using a random method is so important.
It's not suspicious in itself. It's just an easy way to identify a bunch of packages coming from the safe supplier from a distance. My experience is that stuff with heavy branding gets inspected by customs more often.
9 out of 10 is a high proportion but until outside factors are eliminated (for example rather than "atheist" tape, use "Christian" or even something neutral like "Shoes", not just leaving it unmarked), and a more concerted effort to make the sampling more random (different origins, different times, different German postal agencies), it'd be too dangerous to draw any sort of conclusion.
That assumes that each individual package was independent and random.
A single unlucky or freak event could affect multiple samples (for example if a sack holding 6 atheist packages gets lost or damaged).
To use a classic example. I could carry out a survey for people's favourite dog and have 99 out of 100 say poodle. If you assumed it to be truly random, the chances of that not indicating that American is a nation of poodle lovers is astronomical. However what if I then revealed that all these people had been asked in the same morning at the national poodle lovers convention? Would my survey still be nailed on? Even if I went to great lengths to randomly pick random attendees?
What likely happens is the packages get split up into different planes depending on which part of the US it is, say 3-4 different flights. From those flights they're put on different trucks going to different states. They'd only likely ever be travelling on their own by the time they get shipped out to local sorting offices.
Chances are, you'll end up with scenarios will several packages going on the same vehicle (which may not have an even number of atheist and unmarked packages due to them getting jumbled around in the sorting process) which is a single point of failure affecting multiple samples.
89 non-random samples is not a good sample size for a population in the hundreds of thousands to millions either.
A sample size of 89, all carried out at the exact same time from the same starting point is frankly an awful sample. How many international packages get sent from Germany every day? 100,000? 1mill? How is a non-random sample of 89 in any way representative of that?
Then there are other variables and questions. Why didn't they track the packages? They'd get detailed information that'd let them pinpoint where the problems happen. Are all the packages the exact same in terms of shape, size and contents? What were the contents? How long did they wait before saying the packages were classed as missing?
My suspicion would be that a lot of the Atheist branded packages were stopped by customs for inspection. I've had packages delayed by months because of this in the past (and the goods arrived damaged from them being opened). But that still shows signs of discrimination by customs right? Not really. They gave all the Atheist packages the same, very obvious branding (far more obvious than the plain packaging at least), one of the customs centres could've spotted that a 10 or so goods arriving at their centre were obviously from one company and picked those for inspection on the basis of them checking out the company. My experience is that certain companies are magnets for getting goods stopped/inspected by customs.
They're too big to prosecute in because there's no effective target for prosecution.
Want to prosecute the person at the top? Even if they did know about the laundering, it'll be near impossible to prove it. Try the "you have a responsibility to organise your company to follow the law", you've then got to prove that they didn't make reasonable attempts to follow the regulations and the activity wasn't caused by rogue traders, innocent mistakes or simple beurocracy.
You could try to go against the middle managers, you'll possibly have the same outcome.
Eventually you might get to 4 or 5 low level traders or accountants who carried out the transactions. You spend 3 years dragging it through courts and appeals, they go to jail for a few years. Meanwhile, the instability at the bank causes job losses, they stop lending as they build a financial buffer and people's investment and pension funds start shrinking. But hey, you got those 5 guys who nobody really cares about!
Yep it was all down to racism and of course, BIG PAPER!
Which naturally explains why cannabis is illegal or controlled in most of the northern hemisphere, including a lot of countries which have poor relations with America.
Cannabis is illegal because its effects are more pronounced than tobacco (which had addicted too many people by the time its effects were clear to realistically ban) and it's not as widely used and available as alcohol. It's that simple.
To introduce nonsensical conspiracy theories, often, like with your example, to try and introduce an ad hominem attack angle to opponents, may seem like a good idea, but it just destroys credibility.
Did the author, or the distributors make it clear that they cannot put DRM on the books when supplying to WHSmiths or Kobo?
Sure WHSmiths may suck for including DRM on all their books but, providing they didn't break any agreements or contract terms, it's frankly the author or the publisher to blame for blindly making their books available to them without checking.
You can't sell your books to a company that only sells DRM encoded books then act outraged when your books feature DRM.
That's not a fair comparison for a number of reasons though:
Commercial fisherman tend to earn a lot more.
The danger is of a different nature. A cop may die because he has no choice but to put himself in a dangerous position, an electrician or roofer is more likely to die through his (or a co-workers) carelessness in an avoidable death.
Lastly lots of police officers aren't actively on the beat or in harms way. They may be crime scene or have a deskjob but they'll all be described as being a member of the police. In the case of roofers/electricians/fisherman, people who are in the industry but aren't active on the core job don't describe themselves as roofers/etc. they describe themselves as being a salesman or an office worker. Skews the statistics heavily.
Seems to me like it could've funded their own alternative to AMD's APU line which seems to be something they'd like a lot given they're investing in CPU development.
Not only that, the tech they came up with could likely be used for new laptops and set top boxes.
I suspect it was more likely because they didn't have the level of tech needed. ATI had their APU systems lined up already and with tweaking, they're perfect for a console. I'm not sure that NVidia had anything approaching the power of these APUs drawn up (their focus has been on desktop graphics and tablet).
Rumours suggest that the 3DS was going to use NVidia tegra based tech but they couldn't keep the heat down so Nintendo went with the as-seen-in-every-bargain-bucket-chinese-tablet Mali+arm combination.
Although the traffic goes through multiple third parties, your encrypted traffic was never hosted in a way where anyone who wanted it could get it with zero effort or knowledge.
More importantly, the only people who knew the key are you and the server, Wikileaks handed out keys to that file to lots of people who (as it was probably obvious at the time and certainly turned out) couldn't be relied upon to treat them securely, creating a large number of points of failure.
What you don't understand is that this was piss poor security that was bound to be compromised. They could've handed over uniquely encrypted files with unique keys and it would've been infinitely more secure.
Sorry, giving Wikileaks a pass for that is laughable.
Let me put it this way. If your bank put up your encyrpted bank details for people to download at will, then the key/password gets compromised, would you go "Oh, my bank did nothing wrong and shouldn't receive any criticism, it was that nasty XxDeEpburNxX!"?
Putting the encrypted file to download was stupid (and purely ego driven), Handing out the key to that file to multiple people and trusting it remain secure was just incompetence.
I'd go so far as to say that they would have expected the file to get compromised and it done so that when the file did get compromised they could act holier than thou and claim their noble intentions were sabotaged.
Slashdot Mirror
The helicoptor was in an active combat zone. There were reports of RPG fire. The press were not wearing identifying uniforms that press in an active warzone are expected to wear. The children in the van were only visible when looking carefully at the footage and freeze framing, not in a combat situation (wtf were they doing driving children to the site of a bombing) and the van appeared to be insurgents recovering the weapons and preventing wounded combatants being captured.. There was an RPG launcher and an AK-47 clone visible in the footage (in addition to the pilots mistaking the camera for another RPG). The pilots waited for authorisation before firing.
As tragic as it was, procedure was followed and there a combination of circumstances contributed to the mistake. It was not a war crime.
Your point? Those weren't from Manning, nor were they published alongside thousands of other documents.
aaaaand that was a reply to the wrong post.
Can I have your birth records? Your school history? Your tax returns? Criminal record? Oh heck, anything you've ever done that has received any sort of government funding or subsidy? You should be fine with that right?
There's a big difference between 'whistleblowing on a crime' and 'leaking every single thing you have access to in the hope that some of it may be criminal'.
I like Bitstamp personally. Largely because they do SEPA payments with a fairly low fee.
Everyone go to bitstamp to buy lots of bitcoins!
*moves finger from 'pump' button to 'dump' button*
The figures are excluding ultra portables, tablets and convertible laptops.
Hard to take these figures seriously when they exclude pretty much all the big growth areas for PC sales.
Having a couple of officers do undercover work to get the organisers is more efficient and effective then sending loads of officers to a concert, filling up the cells and having a high chance of the organisers getting away. It's also far more likely to discourage people from even attempting a show.
Plus there's lots of stuff that goes with the concerts other than just noise; poor safety, drink driving, general vandalism to the area, all the stuff that licenced concerts have to plan for or try to prevent.
The article states that they were all sent out on the same date. It's probably safe to assume that they were all taken to the post office or mail handlers at the same time.
There's no way of knowing if the samples arrived at the post office in separate, pre-sorted atheist/unmarked piles/sacks or if the post office then decided to sort them by markings themselves. Having samples done at different times can eliminate data 'bunching up' or samples interfering with each other.
Depends how they were handed over to the postal service. They may have been handed over sorted already by the store. They may have been sorted by a postal worker who thought they were all part of the same batch after they were handed over. There's no way of knowing if something like this occurred which is why using a random method is so important.
It's not suspicious in itself. It's just an easy way to identify a bunch of packages coming from the safe supplier from a distance. My experience is that stuff with heavy branding gets inspected by customs more often.
9 out of 10 is a high proportion but until outside factors are eliminated (for example rather than "atheist" tape, use "Christian" or even something neutral like "Shoes", not just leaving it unmarked), and a more concerted effort to make the sampling more random (different origins, different times, different German postal agencies), it'd be too dangerous to draw any sort of conclusion.
That assumes that each individual package was independent and random.
A single unlucky or freak event could affect multiple samples (for example if a sack holding 6 atheist packages gets lost or damaged).
To use a classic example. I could carry out a survey for people's favourite dog and have 99 out of 100 say poodle. If you assumed it to be truly random, the chances of that not indicating that American is a nation of poodle lovers is astronomical. However what if I then revealed that all these people had been asked in the same morning at the national poodle lovers convention? Would my survey still be nailed on? Even if I went to great lengths to randomly pick random attendees?
What likely happens is the packages get split up into different planes depending on which part of the US it is, say 3-4 different flights. From those flights they're put on different trucks going to different states. They'd only likely ever be travelling on their own by the time they get shipped out to local sorting offices.
Chances are, you'll end up with scenarios will several packages going on the same vehicle (which may not have an even number of atheist and unmarked packages due to them getting jumbled around in the sorting process) which is a single point of failure affecting multiple samples.
89 non-random samples is not a good sample size for a population in the hundreds of thousands to millions either.
Apparently applying good scientific standards to an experiment is flamebait.
I'm sure there's something to be said about blindly accepting the results of flawed experiments so long as they match your beliefs here...
A sample size of 89, all carried out at the exact same time from the same starting point is frankly an awful sample. How many international packages get sent from Germany every day? 100,000? 1mill? How is a non-random sample of 89 in any way representative of that?
Then there are other variables and questions. Why didn't they track the packages? They'd get detailed information that'd let them pinpoint where the problems happen. Are all the packages the exact same in terms of shape, size and contents? What were the contents? How long did they wait before saying the packages were classed as missing?
My suspicion would be that a lot of the Atheist branded packages were stopped by customs for inspection. I've had packages delayed by months because of this in the past (and the goods arrived damaged from them being opened). But that still shows signs of discrimination by customs right? Not really. They gave all the Atheist packages the same, very obvious branding (far more obvious than the plain packaging at least), one of the customs centres could've spotted that a 10 or so goods arriving at their centre were obviously from one company and picked those for inspection on the basis of them checking out the company. My experience is that certain companies are magnets for getting goods stopped/inspected by customs.
They're too big to prosecute in because there's no effective target for prosecution.
Want to prosecute the person at the top? Even if they did know about the laundering, it'll be near impossible to prove it. Try the "you have a responsibility to organise your company to follow the law", you've then got to prove that they didn't make reasonable attempts to follow the regulations and the activity wasn't caused by rogue traders, innocent mistakes or simple beurocracy.
You could try to go against the middle managers, you'll possibly have the same outcome.
Eventually you might get to 4 or 5 low level traders or accountants who carried out the transactions. You spend 3 years dragging it through courts and appeals, they go to jail for a few years. Meanwhile, the instability at the bank causes job losses, they stop lending as they build a financial buffer and people's investment and pension funds start shrinking. But hey, you got those 5 guys who nobody really cares about!
Yep it was all down to racism and of course, BIG PAPER!
Which naturally explains why cannabis is illegal or controlled in most of the northern hemisphere, including a lot of countries which have poor relations with America.
Cannabis is illegal because its effects are more pronounced than tobacco (which had addicted too many people by the time its effects were clear to realistically ban) and it's not as widely used and available as alcohol. It's that simple.
To introduce nonsensical conspiracy theories, often, like with your example, to try and introduce an ad hominem attack angle to opponents, may seem like a good idea, but it just destroys credibility.
Did the author, or the distributors make it clear that they cannot put DRM on the books when supplying to WHSmiths or Kobo?
Sure WHSmiths may suck for including DRM on all their books but, providing they didn't break any agreements or contract terms, it's frankly the author or the publisher to blame for blindly making their books available to them without checking.
You can't sell your books to a company that only sells DRM encoded books then act outraged when your books feature DRM.
That's not a fair comparison for a number of reasons though:
Commercial fisherman tend to earn a lot more.
The danger is of a different nature. A cop may die because he has no choice but to put himself in a dangerous position, an electrician or roofer is more likely to die through his (or a co-workers) carelessness in an avoidable death.
Lastly lots of police officers aren't actively on the beat or in harms way. They may be crime scene or have a deskjob but they'll all be described as being a member of the police. In the case of roofers/electricians/fisherman, people who are in the industry but aren't active on the core job don't describe themselves as roofers/etc. they describe themselves as being a salesman or an office worker. Skews the statistics heavily.
Seems to me like it could've funded their own alternative to AMD's APU line which seems to be something they'd like a lot given they're investing in CPU development.
60million units doesn't have revenue potential?
Not only that, the tech they came up with could likely be used for new laptops and set top boxes.
I suspect it was more likely because they didn't have the level of tech needed. ATI had their APU systems lined up already and with tweaking, they're perfect for a console. I'm not sure that NVidia had anything approaching the power of these APUs drawn up (their focus has been on desktop graphics and tablet).
Rumours suggest that the 3DS was going to use NVidia tegra based tech but they couldn't keep the heat down so Nintendo went with the as-seen-in-every-bargain-bucket-chinese-tablet Mali+arm combination.
Nope sorry, not comparable.
Although the traffic goes through multiple third parties, your encrypted traffic was never hosted in a way where anyone who wanted it could get it with zero effort or knowledge.
More importantly, the only people who knew the key are you and the server, Wikileaks handed out keys to that file to lots of people who (as it was probably obvious at the time and certainly turned out) couldn't be relied upon to treat them securely, creating a large number of points of failure.
What you don't understand is that this was piss poor security that was bound to be compromised. They could've handed over uniquely encrypted files with unique keys and it would've been infinitely more secure.
And still say the bank is an innocent party who were responsible with your data?
Sorry, giving Wikileaks a pass for that is laughable.
Let me put it this way. If your bank put up your encyrpted bank details for people to download at will, then the key/password gets compromised, would you go "Oh, my bank did nothing wrong and shouldn't receive any criticism, it was that nasty XxDeEpburNxX!"?
Putting the encrypted file to download was stupid (and purely ego driven), Handing out the key to that file to multiple people and trusting it remain secure was just incompetence.
I'd go so far as to say that they would have expected the file to get compromised and it done so that when the file did get compromised they could act holier than thou and claim their noble intentions were sabotaged.
There are a few thousand ways you could 'hide' a input field, you could maybe protect against 2 of them.
In return for that pathetic amount of protection you would break millions of websites.