Ok, if you want to assume that the entire system is corrupt and the police will outright fabricate stuff en-masse. Then yes, but it is no more of a problem than anything else at that point. They could take whatever they need from you to prove something or just outright lie about it if they really wanted to screw you over. The first thing that happens is images are taken under chain of evidence and then only those images are used for forensic analysis. Unless the guy doing the imaging and the guy doing the analysis decide to work together and break chain of evidence, you're ok and if they are working together, it doesn't matter if it is physical or electronic, you're screwed.
The listing I am talking about as vulnerable sites is the one described here "http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/06/eveningnews/main7123658.shtml." It is a listing of sites deemed critical to our infrastructure that are currently under-protected and open to attack. Determining at least a fair number of those locations would be non-trivial. I see no possible benefit in their release and only possible harm. I would also agree that much of the recent TSA regulation is ridiculous. Body scanners do nothing meaningful to make us more secure since a hijacking is no longer possible due to the changed social climate and a bomb could be concealed the same way drugs are smuggled (internally) and would defeat the body scanners entirely.
As for classification, the definition of what should be classified is anything that would hurt our national interests if released. This could include things that would put us in political hot water with foreign powers. The key is that classification should not be used to avoid justice. As long as legal requirements are filled and remedial action is taken, then I have no problem with something being kept secret if it is reasonable to assume that it would lead to harm coming to US interests. I think some things in the leaks may have been misclassified, but it is hard to tell without all the details that were available to those making the classification. I think this was probably a minority of the information from the general gist I got of the information. (I will admit I didn't go looking in to the whole situation to deeply, I mostly looked at the most pertinent information mentioned by summaries.)
As for the a,b,c things. I don't think that remedial action is being taken in this case, but I think that is in large part due to how ineffective the leak actually was. Politically, the excess leaked information allowed any actual issues to be ignored as public outrage was directed (and justifiably I would argue) at the information that shouldn't have been leaked. Had the leak been more targeted, public outrage would have instead been about the objectionable issues and we might have seen some results. I would agree there are issues of corruption and that we don't see what I outlined occurring in many situations. I just don't think the leaks did anything to help with that and you effectively agreed with me in your response.
As for Iran, I'm sure they did internally, but the way politics is played, you can only overtly react to what is public knowledge. The internal politics were probably much more to portray them as a beacon of leadership in the area within their country. Making the attitude of the neighboring states public knowledge forces them in to a corner of how they can maneuver and puts them on the defenses. The cables were effectively a diplomatic and political nuke being dropped on Iran.
And yes, my last point is hypothetical. I will grant that. The point I was just trying to make is that in many cases there is absolutely no value added in the release. That makes even a hypothetical possible harm to be enough reason not to release it. If you are going to go against the law as a whistle blower and release a document which has even the slightest shred of a possibility of harming someone in any way, you better be damn sure that there is a benefit to releasing it. I don't see any benefit at all in many of the documents that were released and that is my core problem. Also, even if someone had been killed, they wouldn't reveal the name. You never confirm or deny anything in intelligence. This is the exact same reason that you don't have names on the stars for CIA agents killed in the line of duty. The reasoning is simple. Say you have informant 1 in hostile country b. Hostile country B arrests and executes someone they thing is informant 1. If you then don't release something with their name saying they were killed, they now know that informant 1 wasn't the person they executed and keeps looking. If you admit it, they now have confirmation they were right and can use it as political leverage. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, so the only option is not to play and keep the info secret forever.
Any idiot could figure out what vulnerable sites are if they did a lot of surveying and went looking to figure out where things are, what isn't sufficiently guarded, etc, but that kind of recon is going to draw attention. Letting someone shortcut that process has no possible benefit and can only cause problems.
I don't know if I would agree that the people who classified distasteful information should be prosecuted necessarily, so long as those responsible for the actions were prosecuted. I can see the reason why someone wouldn't want word to get out that something bad happened and wouldn't mind it being kept quite so long as if it did see the light of day, it would appear that appropriate actions were taken. If appropriate actions were not taken, then yes, measures should be taken to a) punish those who should have been punished, b) punish those whose responsibility it was to punish those in category A and c) measures should be developed to protect against how the problem occurred in the first place.
As for your last point, harm is not always advertised and not always tangible. At a minimum, the political issues that arose out of it regarding Iran and the fact it publicly backed them in to a corner in the region helped nobody and could yet cause catastrophic harm. Do you really want nukes in the hands of a regime that now knows that everyone around them doesn't like them and that also supports terrorists? What happens if they get twitchy? What about any sources that may have been compromised and killed for doing what they felt was the right thing? The simple fact is that the onus is on the leaker to ensure that only the information pertaining to wrong doing is released. No amount of good on the leaker's part can make up for the bad. Is the world better or worse overall for the leak? I don't know and we will likely never know, however what I do know is that the bad could have been mitigated and it was the leaker's responsibility to do that. He didn't, therefore, it anything at all bad that happens as a result is directly on him.
Oh, I perhaps see what you were thinking after I re-read my post. What I meant by that line was referring to someone in Manning's position. Not someone who reprints it. I try to avoid saying Manning did it though as he is accused and not yet convicted. I don't know the evidence against him and am not in a position to stipulate that he did or did not actually leak the information. Prosecuting someone for the leak however is certainly more than fair and not going after a hero, but rather a criminal.
I will re-read the chat logs, but my impression of them on first read was that the fact the conversation even occurred in the first place was looking for a pat on the back. Either way, even if that part of the argument isn't valid, the fact remains that he was irresponsible in the type of information released. It was at best criminally negligent while committing a crime and at worst willfully harmful. Either way, it disqualifies him from even remotely resembling a hero working on his ideals.
SuperKendall did a great job of explaining it, but I will too. The fact is that the NY Times simply brought to light what had been leaked. The information was already publicly available and distributing the type of information that was released to the US population isn't really a risk. The risk is that the information was already out there for people who wanted to find it. All the NY Times did was bring that fact to light.
The one who actually does the leaking is responsible. In the case of the list I mentioned, Manning is accused of leaking the actual information initially and he did it through a proxy (wikileaks). Until wikileaks released it, it was not public information. If the NY Times had been the first to let the list of sensitive sites in to public knowledge, then yes, I would argue that they were being irresponsible and an enemy to US interests unless they had some good reason why the information needed to be released. Since wikileaks acted as a proxy for the whistle blowing, they should have acted to ensure that the information being leaked was not harmful, as should have the original source of the leaked material. To not do so is irresponsible.
I know flash has burn in issues where they get a limited number of writes before they can't be written anymore. What I don't know is if there is any practical means by which this could be used to reconstruct part of a previous state of the card. That's beyond my level of understanding of flash technology, but I would hazard that it probably isn't as I think the mechanism of failure is actually the ability to switch the state of a circuit and there wouldn't be much of an effective means to measure the deterioration of the physical circuit. That is really just a best guess though and isn't terribly informed, so I wouldn't rely on it for anything.
Thanks for that info. I did not know the tech had changed. I don't follow hard disk tech that closely and only had knowledge of the original reasoning behind the multi-wipe recommendation. It is still interesting that the government recommendation is still on the books though and from what another poster said, the number of cycles has been increased from 7 to 35. Perhaps there is some other type of residual information that we don't know about but they do, or perhaps it is just fear that someone may discover something.
But he didn't just report what he felt was a crime. He reported what he felt was distasteful and he also reported many things which were completely irrelevant to an entity known to have an ax to grind with the US. The fact that he leaked documents that have no wrongdoing and serve to destabilize not just US interests, but world stability as well and then was bragging about it reveal the true nature of whoever leaked the documents. Either it was Manning or it was someone who intentionally tried to frame Manning. In either case, the perpetrator was clearly no hero and had nobodies "best interest" in mind other than their own ego.
Yes, because heroes leak information on what the government considers sensitive sites that could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. You have a warped and naive view of what a hero is. Certainly some small amount of the information that came out indicated distasteful activity, however a large portion of it had no possible political purpose other than to try to hurt the US or give "bragging rights". The actions of whoever leaked the documents is not that of a hero trying to protect, but of an arrogant child trying to show off what they could do.
Even if the goal had been to see what they saw as atrocities stopped, it was not the correct forum to do so by and even if the correct forums had been taken, bragging about it demonstrates the true motivations. I hate corruption and abuse as much as anyone, but that doesn't even make the beginning of an excuse for the vast majority of the type of information that was leaked. What possible whistle is being blown by exposing that many neighbors and "allies" of Iran are secretly terrified of them getting nukes and begging for it to be stopped. All it does is make the situation more dangerous, less likely to be resolved peacefully and accomplishes nothing. There is no point to it.
The calls to go after Assanage seems foolish to me as he isn't a US citizen and I don't see how US law applies to him, but he could reasonably be considered a person non grata. Whoever leaked the documents however, did so from the US and is an enemy of the US and in fact world peace, whether intentionally or not and should be prosecuted as such. Arguably doing some small amount of good (in the wrong way) does not make up for the huge amount of inexcusable, irresponsible harm which was done.
There is a residual charge in a platter when set to 0. Basically, you can tell what the previous charge was because it isn't quite as strong as it would have been if you wrote a 1 twice. A hard disk platter isn't truly digital. It is actually an analog storage medium. If the magnetic field strength is above or below a certain value, it is considered a one or a zero. However, if you write a 1 twice in a row, then that 1 will be minutely stronger and if you have a one and then write it to a 0, the 0 may be slightly less strong. It is at least theorized (and likely practical fact) that this slight difference is enough to be detected by sensitive instrumentation. Writing 0s and 1s multiple times increases the noise enough that it conceals the original data. A perhaps even more ideal approach would be to write random data to the drive multiple times as this would cause further entropy on the drive and make it even harder to determine the useful data from a particular wipe.
Yes, yes I do. Because your statement seems to show a great lack of understanding of digital forensics. Great care is taken to ensure and verifiable prove that the data is not altered from the state it was when the system is taken in. There must still be a reliable link made to indicate that the files were created by the individual and not by a third party, but the files are significant evidence if they can be linked to him.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I was more expecting them to have strong enough actions to something to be easily noticeable if they are sudden changes that would perk up our attention as well (such as brake lights in front of you.) Though the fact they may see something you can't is a good example too, though if you can't see it then no amount of paying attention on your part would have really mattered since it was not visible to you. I guess I haven't had the experience where I got a strong reaction from a passenger from something occurring fairly slowly on the road, but I can see how that would make a difference if it did happen. Thanks for your insights.
If you don't want to take my word for it, here is the summary of the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration review research on traffic speed in 1998. (from Wikipedia) My comments in ()
That the evidence shows that the risk of having a crash is increased both for vehicles traveling slower than the average speed, and for those traveling above the average speed. (Risk is increased, not caused)
That the risk of being injured increases exponentially with speeds much faster than the median speed. (I stay near the median speed of traffic in my proximity.)
That the severity of a crash depends on the vehicle speed change at impact.
That there is limited evidence that suggests that lower speed limits result in lower speeds on a system wide basis.
That most crashes related to speed involve speed too fast for the conditions. (I adjust according to conditions.)
That more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of traffic calming.
That's a fair point. If they tend to react visibly and you are paying attention to them in your peripheral vision, then it would work to help. That said, if you have enough attention to notice the person you are talking to in your peripheral vision tensing, then why wouldn't you also perceive what is happening in front of you that they are noticing? Have you actually had a situation where you noticed a reaction from someone in your periphery without actually noticing what alerted them going on directly in front of you?
That you don't reduce your speed *enough* in poor conditions is what created the "unavoidable conditions"
You make broad presumptions here. I drive quickly ONLY when conditions allow. I am VERY cautious in bad weather. Both times I've had issues with this, I've been going under 15 and in some cases under 10 miles per hour. When I say one of the cars I had handled very badly, I meant VERY badly. As in it has been known to get stuck in less than an inch of snow while going downhill. I've since put blizzex tires on it and it has addressed the problem. The main situation was actually when I was getting on to an on ramp (a very sharp turn from a stopped position) and was accelerating very slowly, however there was enough ice that my car lost traction and caused a spin.
Yes speed is a major contributor to accidents, but it is not a cause in and of itself, it is a contributor. It still requires driver mistakes to be made and a lack of awareness. I adjust my speed according to driving conditions but can generally keep driving conditions acceptable for higher rates of travel. I leave longer than necessary gaps between vehicles, I monitor all traffic for about half a mile in front of me and a fifth of a mile behind me, constantly monitor for any drivers acting in an unpredictable manner, ensure two lanes of clearance if passing someone at more than 10 mph different from their speed and generally drive within 5mph of the average speed of traffic (traffic in general is fast around my area). If any of these conditions can't be met, I adjust my speed down accordingly until conditions improve. The same goes for weather and the mechanical performance of my vehicle. If I even suspect I might have a mechanical issue, then I slow down accordingly and increase margins between me and other vehicles. Driving at reasonable (I'd define as not in excess of 80, though I personally never go in excess of 75) speeds with no cars on the road in good conditions on a straight away with a mechanically sound vehicle is not going to cause any accidents, ever.
Also, as I mentioned, luck has nothing to do with it. I have had other cars do things that should have resulted in an accident, but because I was paying attention and reacted accordingly, I have avoided them. In both cases I was already not traveling at high speed because I saw the situation coming early enough to adjust my speed and position to avoid it and had the situational awareness to know where I could maneuver. Luck had nothing to do with it. Thank you for your concern, but in my case you are incorrect.
My point is that in a car, no sound source is good. It is noisy and picking out voices in a noisy environment is difficult. Having the source close to the ear (and therefore less noise) could easily negate the loss of clarity from background noise.
My Bluetooth headset sits on my ear and has one big button to answer the call and no buttons to push to talk. By your own argument it is safer than what the police radio. I agree that fiddling with a phone while driving is nuts and should be illegal beyond very basic operations performed while in a mount (for example, hitting the next button to go to a new song, or other actions similarly equivalent to an existing car function.)
In the time it would take someone to say "watc" the accident would have already occurred or the level of distraction wouldn't have mattered. Also, that assumes that the other person is paying attention to the road at all.
I could understand not having a business call while on the phone, but then again, for my purposes, many conversations related to business involve diagrams and such that I wouldn't have handy when driving anyway so I rarely if ever encounter this scenario.
I happen to have a high quality phone with a high quality headset which sits directly in my ear. You are comparing that to a person sitting several feet away, possibly not talking in my direction directly, in a noisy vehicle bouncing down the road... I'm not sure the sound quality is a good argument in many cases. If someone is struggling to hear, then sure, but the quality of even fairly cheap phones and headsets now should make that a non-existent issue.
No, he was recalling an actual scientific paper he had seen which happened to match up with his personal experience. While using anecdotal evidence is not scientific, if you have four conflicting "scientific" papers, what else are you going to go on if you can't do the research yourself? The science industry, particularly on certain topics, is unfortunately quite susceptible to trying to introduce biases for political reasons to get funding and publicity and statistics particularly make it easy. As the saying goes, there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.
While I would disagree with texting since it requires you to look away from the road. I see no possible argument for eliminating cell phone usage all together. Are we also going to make it illegal for a driver to talk to anyone in the car? Perhaps we should put them in their own sound proof partition that doesn't allow them to see or hear anyone else in the vehicle. Similar to the previous poster, I have over 11 years of driving experience and probably several hundred thousand miles driven, drive an average of 10 miles an hour over the limit if the speed limit is 55 or higher and 5mph over if it is 20 or more. I have never had anyone impact my car and I have never been the cause of an accident. I have had several times when people tried very hard to hit my car, but I was able to avoid it because I am an attentive driver and maintain awareness of what is around me and drive safely. I have even spun out before at speed due to bad weather and unavoidable conditions (I've had cars that handle very poorly in the snow) and even then have managed to maintain sufficient control to avoid either traffic or obstacles. It takes two people not paying attention to cause an accident unless one person isn't moving and then it takes one really oblivious person or a mechanical failure.
I just confirmed that AT&T also offers service with no contract, though you have to go to a store to do it (they don't do it online). They call it "No Commitment Pricing" and is referenced in their FAQ at http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/shopping-faqs.jsp#01
Q. What is no-commitment pricing? A. When you want a new AT&T phone, but don’t want to commit to a long-term contract, no-commitment pricing is an option. Also referred to as "retail price," this option does not require a two-year contract or other long-term service commitment. It’s simply the non-discounted equipment price, and is available to customers that are not on a prepaid or GoPhone® plan.
You can buy a phone at no-commitment prices by choosing one of the two options below:
Existing customers can buy online by logging in to your account to upgrade.
New customers cannot buy phones at no-commitment pricing online at this time. Please visit an AT&T retail store to purchase. Visit our store locator for a store near you.
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Ok, if you want to assume that the entire system is corrupt and the police will outright fabricate stuff en-masse. Then yes, but it is no more of a problem than anything else at that point. They could take whatever they need from you to prove something or just outright lie about it if they really wanted to screw you over. The first thing that happens is images are taken under chain of evidence and then only those images are used for forensic analysis. Unless the guy doing the imaging and the guy doing the analysis decide to work together and break chain of evidence, you're ok and if they are working together, it doesn't matter if it is physical or electronic, you're screwed.
The listing I am talking about as vulnerable sites is the one described here "http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/06/eveningnews/main7123658.shtml." It is a listing of sites deemed critical to our infrastructure that are currently under-protected and open to attack. Determining at least a fair number of those locations would be non-trivial. I see no possible benefit in their release and only possible harm. I would also agree that much of the recent TSA regulation is ridiculous. Body scanners do nothing meaningful to make us more secure since a hijacking is no longer possible due to the changed social climate and a bomb could be concealed the same way drugs are smuggled (internally) and would defeat the body scanners entirely.
As for classification, the definition of what should be classified is anything that would hurt our national interests if released. This could include things that would put us in political hot water with foreign powers. The key is that classification should not be used to avoid justice. As long as legal requirements are filled and remedial action is taken, then I have no problem with something being kept secret if it is reasonable to assume that it would lead to harm coming to US interests. I think some things in the leaks may have been misclassified, but it is hard to tell without all the details that were available to those making the classification. I think this was probably a minority of the information from the general gist I got of the information. (I will admit I didn't go looking in to the whole situation to deeply, I mostly looked at the most pertinent information mentioned by summaries.)
As for the a,b,c things. I don't think that remedial action is being taken in this case, but I think that is in large part due to how ineffective the leak actually was. Politically, the excess leaked information allowed any actual issues to be ignored as public outrage was directed (and justifiably I would argue) at the information that shouldn't have been leaked. Had the leak been more targeted, public outrage would have instead been about the objectionable issues and we might have seen some results. I would agree there are issues of corruption and that we don't see what I outlined occurring in many situations. I just don't think the leaks did anything to help with that and you effectively agreed with me in your response.
As for Iran, I'm sure they did internally, but the way politics is played, you can only overtly react to what is public knowledge. The internal politics were probably much more to portray them as a beacon of leadership in the area within their country. Making the attitude of the neighboring states public knowledge forces them in to a corner of how they can maneuver and puts them on the defenses. The cables were effectively a diplomatic and political nuke being dropped on Iran.
And yes, my last point is hypothetical. I will grant that. The point I was just trying to make is that in many cases there is absolutely no value added in the release. That makes even a hypothetical possible harm to be enough reason not to release it. If you are going to go against the law as a whistle blower and release a document which has even the slightest shred of a possibility of harming someone in any way, you better be damn sure that there is a benefit to releasing it. I don't see any benefit at all in many of the documents that were released and that is my core problem. Also, even if someone had been killed, they wouldn't reveal the name. You never confirm or deny anything in intelligence. This is the exact same reason that you don't have names on the stars for CIA agents killed in the line of duty. The reasoning is simple. Say you have informant 1 in hostile country b. Hostile country B arrests and executes someone they thing is informant 1. If you then don't release something with their name saying they were killed, they now know that informant 1 wasn't the person they executed and keeps looking. If you admit it, they now have confirmation they were right and can use it as political leverage. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, so the only option is not to play and keep the info secret forever.
Any idiot could figure out what vulnerable sites are if they did a lot of surveying and went looking to figure out where things are, what isn't sufficiently guarded, etc, but that kind of recon is going to draw attention. Letting someone shortcut that process has no possible benefit and can only cause problems.
I don't know if I would agree that the people who classified distasteful information should be prosecuted necessarily, so long as those responsible for the actions were prosecuted. I can see the reason why someone wouldn't want word to get out that something bad happened and wouldn't mind it being kept quite so long as if it did see the light of day, it would appear that appropriate actions were taken. If appropriate actions were not taken, then yes, measures should be taken to a) punish those who should have been punished, b) punish those whose responsibility it was to punish those in category A and c) measures should be developed to protect against how the problem occurred in the first place.
As for your last point, harm is not always advertised and not always tangible. At a minimum, the political issues that arose out of it regarding Iran and the fact it publicly backed them in to a corner in the region helped nobody and could yet cause catastrophic harm. Do you really want nukes in the hands of a regime that now knows that everyone around them doesn't like them and that also supports terrorists? What happens if they get twitchy? What about any sources that may have been compromised and killed for doing what they felt was the right thing? The simple fact is that the onus is on the leaker to ensure that only the information pertaining to wrong doing is released. No amount of good on the leaker's part can make up for the bad. Is the world better or worse overall for the leak? I don't know and we will likely never know, however what I do know is that the bad could have been mitigated and it was the leaker's responsibility to do that. He didn't, therefore, it anything at all bad that happens as a result is directly on him.
Oh, I perhaps see what you were thinking after I re-read my post. What I meant by that line was referring to someone in Manning's position. Not someone who reprints it. I try to avoid saying Manning did it though as he is accused and not yet convicted. I don't know the evidence against him and am not in a position to stipulate that he did or did not actually leak the information. Prosecuting someone for the leak however is certainly more than fair and not going after a hero, but rather a criminal.
I will re-read the chat logs, but my impression of them on first read was that the fact the conversation even occurred in the first place was looking for a pat on the back. Either way, even if that part of the argument isn't valid, the fact remains that he was irresponsible in the type of information released. It was at best criminally negligent while committing a crime and at worst willfully harmful. Either way, it disqualifies him from even remotely resembling a hero working on his ideals.
SuperKendall did a great job of explaining it, but I will too. The fact is that the NY Times simply brought to light what had been leaked. The information was already publicly available and distributing the type of information that was released to the US population isn't really a risk. The risk is that the information was already out there for people who wanted to find it. All the NY Times did was bring that fact to light.
The one who actually does the leaking is responsible. In the case of the list I mentioned, Manning is accused of leaking the actual information initially and he did it through a proxy (wikileaks). Until wikileaks released it, it was not public information. If the NY Times had been the first to let the list of sensitive sites in to public knowledge, then yes, I would argue that they were being irresponsible and an enemy to US interests unless they had some good reason why the information needed to be released. Since wikileaks acted as a proxy for the whistle blowing, they should have acted to ensure that the information being leaked was not harmful, as should have the original source of the leaked material. To not do so is irresponsible.
I know flash has burn in issues where they get a limited number of writes before they can't be written anymore. What I don't know is if there is any practical means by which this could be used to reconstruct part of a previous state of the card. That's beyond my level of understanding of flash technology, but I would hazard that it probably isn't as I think the mechanism of failure is actually the ability to switch the state of a circuit and there wouldn't be much of an effective means to measure the deterioration of the physical circuit. That is really just a best guess though and isn't terribly informed, so I wouldn't rely on it for anything.
Thanks for that info. I did not know the tech had changed. I don't follow hard disk tech that closely and only had knowledge of the original reasoning behind the multi-wipe recommendation. It is still interesting that the government recommendation is still on the books though and from what another poster said, the number of cycles has been increased from 7 to 35. Perhaps there is some other type of residual information that we don't know about but they do, or perhaps it is just fear that someone may discover something.
But he didn't just report what he felt was a crime. He reported what he felt was distasteful and he also reported many things which were completely irrelevant to an entity known to have an ax to grind with the US. The fact that he leaked documents that have no wrongdoing and serve to destabilize not just US interests, but world stability as well and then was bragging about it reveal the true nature of whoever leaked the documents. Either it was Manning or it was someone who intentionally tried to frame Manning. In either case, the perpetrator was clearly no hero and had nobodies "best interest" in mind other than their own ego.
Yes, because heroes leak information on what the government considers sensitive sites that could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. You have a warped and naive view of what a hero is. Certainly some small amount of the information that came out indicated distasteful activity, however a large portion of it had no possible political purpose other than to try to hurt the US or give "bragging rights". The actions of whoever leaked the documents is not that of a hero trying to protect, but of an arrogant child trying to show off what they could do.
Even if the goal had been to see what they saw as atrocities stopped, it was not the correct forum to do so by and even if the correct forums had been taken, bragging about it demonstrates the true motivations. I hate corruption and abuse as much as anyone, but that doesn't even make the beginning of an excuse for the vast majority of the type of information that was leaked. What possible whistle is being blown by exposing that many neighbors and "allies" of Iran are secretly terrified of them getting nukes and begging for it to be stopped. All it does is make the situation more dangerous, less likely to be resolved peacefully and accomplishes nothing. There is no point to it.
The calls to go after Assanage seems foolish to me as he isn't a US citizen and I don't see how US law applies to him, but he could reasonably be considered a person non grata. Whoever leaked the documents however, did so from the US and is an enemy of the US and in fact world peace, whether intentionally or not and should be prosecuted as such. Arguably doing some small amount of good (in the wrong way) does not make up for the huge amount of inexcusable, irresponsible harm which was done.
There is a residual charge in a platter when set to 0. Basically, you can tell what the previous charge was because it isn't quite as strong as it would have been if you wrote a 1 twice. A hard disk platter isn't truly digital. It is actually an analog storage medium. If the magnetic field strength is above or below a certain value, it is considered a one or a zero. However, if you write a 1 twice in a row, then that 1 will be minutely stronger and if you have a one and then write it to a 0, the 0 may be slightly less strong. It is at least theorized (and likely practical fact) that this slight difference is enough to be detected by sensitive instrumentation. Writing 0s and 1s multiple times increases the noise enough that it conceals the original data. A perhaps even more ideal approach would be to write random data to the drive multiple times as this would cause further entropy on the drive and make it even harder to determine the useful data from a particular wipe.
Yes, yes I do. Because your statement seems to show a great lack of understanding of digital forensics. Great care is taken to ensure and verifiable prove that the data is not altered from the state it was when the system is taken in. There must still be a reliable link made to indicate that the files were created by the individual and not by a third party, but the files are significant evidence if they can be linked to him.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I was more expecting them to have strong enough actions to something to be easily noticeable if they are sudden changes that would perk up our attention as well (such as brake lights in front of you.) Though the fact they may see something you can't is a good example too, though if you can't see it then no amount of paying attention on your part would have really mattered since it was not visible to you. I guess I haven't had the experience where I got a strong reaction from a passenger from something occurring fairly slowly on the road, but I can see how that would make a difference if it did happen. Thanks for your insights.
If you don't want to take my word for it, here is the summary of the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration review research on traffic speed in 1998. (from Wikipedia) My comments in ()
That the evidence shows that the risk of having a crash is increased both for vehicles traveling slower than the average speed, and for those traveling above the average speed. (Risk is increased, not caused)
That the risk of being injured increases exponentially with speeds much faster than the median speed. (I stay near the median speed of traffic in my proximity.)
That the severity of a crash depends on the vehicle speed change at impact.
That there is limited evidence that suggests that lower speed limits result in lower speeds on a system wide basis.
That most crashes related to speed involve speed too fast for the conditions. (I adjust according to conditions.)
That more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of traffic calming.
That's a fair point. If they tend to react visibly and you are paying attention to them in your peripheral vision, then it would work to help. That said, if you have enough attention to notice the person you are talking to in your peripheral vision tensing, then why wouldn't you also perceive what is happening in front of you that they are noticing? Have you actually had a situation where you noticed a reaction from someone in your periphery without actually noticing what alerted them going on directly in front of you?
That you don't reduce your speed *enough* in poor conditions is what created the "unavoidable conditions"
You make broad presumptions here. I drive quickly ONLY when conditions allow. I am VERY cautious in bad weather. Both times I've had issues with this, I've been going under 15 and in some cases under 10 miles per hour. When I say one of the cars I had handled very badly, I meant VERY badly. As in it has been known to get stuck in less than an inch of snow while going downhill. I've since put blizzex tires on it and it has addressed the problem. The main situation was actually when I was getting on to an on ramp (a very sharp turn from a stopped position) and was accelerating very slowly, however there was enough ice that my car lost traction and caused a spin.
Yes speed is a major contributor to accidents, but it is not a cause in and of itself, it is a contributor. It still requires driver mistakes to be made and a lack of awareness. I adjust my speed according to driving conditions but can generally keep driving conditions acceptable for higher rates of travel. I leave longer than necessary gaps between vehicles, I monitor all traffic for about half a mile in front of me and a fifth of a mile behind me, constantly monitor for any drivers acting in an unpredictable manner, ensure two lanes of clearance if passing someone at more than 10 mph different from their speed and generally drive within 5mph of the average speed of traffic (traffic in general is fast around my area). If any of these conditions can't be met, I adjust my speed down accordingly until conditions improve. The same goes for weather and the mechanical performance of my vehicle. If I even suspect I might have a mechanical issue, then I slow down accordingly and increase margins between me and other vehicles. Driving at reasonable (I'd define as not in excess of 80, though I personally never go in excess of 75) speeds with no cars on the road in good conditions on a straight away with a mechanically sound vehicle is not going to cause any accidents, ever.
Also, as I mentioned, luck has nothing to do with it. I have had other cars do things that should have resulted in an accident, but because I was paying attention and reacted accordingly, I have avoided them. In both cases I was already not traveling at high speed because I saw the situation coming early enough to adjust my speed and position to avoid it and had the situational awareness to know where I could maneuver. Luck had nothing to do with it. Thank you for your concern, but in my case you are incorrect.
My point is that in a car, no sound source is good. It is noisy and picking out voices in a noisy environment is difficult. Having the source close to the ear (and therefore less noise) could easily negate the loss of clarity from background noise.
My Bluetooth headset sits on my ear and has one big button to answer the call and no buttons to push to talk. By your own argument it is safer than what the police radio. I agree that fiddling with a phone while driving is nuts and should be illegal beyond very basic operations performed while in a mount (for example, hitting the next button to go to a new song, or other actions similarly equivalent to an existing car function.)
In the time it would take someone to say "watc" the accident would have already occurred or the level of distraction wouldn't have mattered. Also, that assumes that the other person is paying attention to the road at all.
I could understand not having a business call while on the phone, but then again, for my purposes, many conversations related to business involve diagrams and such that I wouldn't have handy when driving anyway so I rarely if ever encounter this scenario.
I happen to have a high quality phone with a high quality headset which sits directly in my ear. You are comparing that to a person sitting several feet away, possibly not talking in my direction directly, in a noisy vehicle bouncing down the road... I'm not sure the sound quality is a good argument in many cases. If someone is struggling to hear, then sure, but the quality of even fairly cheap phones and headsets now should make that a non-existent issue.
No, he was recalling an actual scientific paper he had seen which happened to match up with his personal experience. While using anecdotal evidence is not scientific, if you have four conflicting "scientific" papers, what else are you going to go on if you can't do the research yourself? The science industry, particularly on certain topics, is unfortunately quite susceptible to trying to introduce biases for political reasons to get funding and publicity and statistics particularly make it easy. As the saying goes, there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.
But... but... we can't blame people for being stupid.... it has to be something else's fault or we might hurtz their feelingz.
While I would disagree with texting since it requires you to look away from the road. I see no possible argument for eliminating cell phone usage all together. Are we also going to make it illegal for a driver to talk to anyone in the car? Perhaps we should put them in their own sound proof partition that doesn't allow them to see or hear anyone else in the vehicle. Similar to the previous poster, I have over 11 years of driving experience and probably several hundred thousand miles driven, drive an average of 10 miles an hour over the limit if the speed limit is 55 or higher and 5mph over if it is 20 or more. I have never had anyone impact my car and I have never been the cause of an accident. I have had several times when people tried very hard to hit my car, but I was able to avoid it because I am an attentive driver and maintain awareness of what is around me and drive safely. I have even spun out before at speed due to bad weather and unavoidable conditions (I've had cars that handle very poorly in the snow) and even then have managed to maintain sufficient control to avoid either traffic or obstacles. It takes two people not paying attention to cause an accident unless one person isn't moving and then it takes one really oblivious person or a mechanical failure.
I just confirmed that AT&T also offers service with no contract, though you have to go to a store to do it (they don't do it online). They call it "No Commitment Pricing" and is referenced in their FAQ at http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/shopping-faqs.jsp#01
Q. What is no-commitment pricing?
A. When you want a new AT&T phone, but don’t want to commit to a long-term contract, no-commitment pricing is an option. Also referred to as "retail price," this option does not require a two-year contract or other long-term service commitment. It’s simply the non-discounted equipment price, and is available to customers that are not on a prepaid or GoPhone® plan.
You can buy a phone at no-commitment prices by choosing one of the two options below:
Existing customers can buy online by logging in to your account to upgrade.
New customers cannot buy phones at no-commitment pricing online at this time. Please visit an AT&T retail store to purchase. Visit our store locator for a store near you.