> For all we know, the "anonymous caller" could have been his ex trying to get him in trouble, or a member of a > rival drug gang trying to get his payload confiscated....
Exactly, and you know....I know people with exes who would pull shit like that. I mean for fucks sake, when my friend's wife went down to report his ex-wife punching her, she found the ex-wife was already down there filing a report saying that she was the one punched. Now, after years of back and forth battles (custody would you believe) in and out of court, including false charges of various kinds,
More than that though.... if there is no need to go back and verify the original tip, if it can be anonymous....then the police can phone in their own tips! This is yet more parallell construction bullshit. How do we even know there was such a woman? For all we really know it was a cop, or the wife of a cop, making a call to cover up the real source of the information....ie a criminal conspiracy to deny the driver the right to a fair trial.
If you think that is fishy, you might also ask how $2.4 million in loss, which I believe with investigation and legal fees etc.... but.... how does such a tiny loss compared to a company engaged in billion dollar deals.... translate into an increase in every customer's bill? By what, a penny?
Who is the real crook now, the guy who defrauded the big company, or the big company who used that fraud as an excuse for a naked price hike.
"We are raising money for the douglasses, they got robbed last week" "Oh my how much have you raised" "About 10,000 dollars" "Oh my god how much got stolen" "Oh they lost about 2 grand, but if we reach our goal of 20,000 we can pay them back 80% of it after our salaries on the committee of course"
> I think blowing up terrorists with drones and claiming executive privilege predates Obama by at least one administration.
Oh well, I stand corrected. I didn't know someone else had done it first! Well that fucking changes everything doesn't it? Who am I to question the traditional practices of our people?
> If anything the Republicans are likely to argue he didn't blow up enough of them
Yes the pot often does seem to spend a lot of energy calling the kettle black.
Bullshit. The so-called "drug problem" is 99% caused by prohibition itself. Prohibition has consistently failed to even influence overall addiction rates; much less drop them. It has consistently created perverse markets for low quality unsafe manufacture. It CREATED the problem of meth labs, and thus created the situation where we have half the people in burn units around the country in there for cooking meth. You asshole prohibitionists did that...its on your head.
Never mind that the next 3 major drugs of abuse combined don't have HALF the users of fucking pot...one of the most innocuous drugs ever, safer than alcohol. But I know you prohibitions are the kind of scum who lament that we gave up on that crudade too. So what if it cost lives as long as they are lives you can discount for being users and addicts.
> Even a full Republican Congress would not move to impeach Obama on the basis of targeting Americans that > are ALLEGED terrorist operatives hanging out with other ALLEGED terrorists in Yemen...
"Any people at the destination," the team's paper concludes, "would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles."
sure, maybe we can use this new-fangled drive to meet up with them, but, when we do, we will release a gamma ray burst that will sterilize their entire ship.
Now maybe it might be possible to aim to "miss" them by enough that little gets to them and then the last gap can be closed as subluminal speeds, but.... that ah, sure would be one hell of an entrance.
> It will cost billions to fix for the US and the taxpayers will foot the bill.
It already cost us billions, and it was always going to cost us billions more. Any suggestion they were not going to waste that money anyway is just laughable. They will spend as much as they can justify in their crusade against whatever bogeymen they can dream up.
Do belly-laughs count? I bet they got a number of those.
> His material is being carefully vetted by journalists and experts before any is released
Of course, since russia, china, and several others players all have their own NSA and CIA-like entities, I would assume they have made attempts, and probably been successful by now, at obtaining the entire archive... or at least, what they didn't already have of it from their own operations pre-snowden.
With Manning, I would easily make the case that nothing was revealed, because any intelligence service that couldn't get their hands on those state department cables would have to be totally incompetent and barely even trying. NSA internal docs, a bit less likely... but I wouldn't doubt they had some of it.
Now, I don't doubt that they have all of it....oh well.... its their own fault for abusing their technical abilities, NSA brought this leak upon itself.
> Bruce Schneier is one helping them in their analysis.
This is one of the few reasons to suspect they have a chance of having not been compromised; if they follow his advice of course. Discipline is hard. I remember some of the security experts expressing being quite impressed by OBLs ability to maintain an effective air gap for so many years while so prolifically using email.
OTOH, you could grab a notebook and start watching lectures for free on youtube. Sure you can't ask questions or go to the TA for help, but you can get lectures from physics classes taught by Leonard Susskind (and others of course, but I watched some of his) on youtube right now.
I have a notebook somewhere with several pages of notes that I took while watching his Quantum Mechanics lectures...mostly while riding the bus back and forth to work (I stopped after I stopped taking the bus)
Of course, while there are the obvious disadvantages of not having tests to gauge progeress and help available.... you do have the ability to pause and rewind thelectures; which is really huge.
> by giving an unreadable version of the encrypted keys
My only real nitpick is... hardly unreadble. Small yes, but its not like they don't easily posess the technology to deal with such a minor inconvinence. A bit childish yes, but nothing more than a symbolic statement. I consider them claiming anything otherwise quite disingenuine.
They just didn't like that he didn't roll over when they snapped their fingers and that he would rather shut down than help them. In the end they both may have acted childish but, they acted childish on our dime, whereas he has every right to be a childish asshole.
Why does it matter? Is the global pool of money stagnating? Who cares if it is here in the US? So what? So people in other countries will take the lead. Its not really a big deal....we are all human; this my team your team BS is getting old.
About 10 years ago I was laid off and while I was out of work I called up the U of Pheonix. What a mistake. Whenever I think of maybe going back to school, I know I don't need a degree for my career so I think of like... why don't I study physics?
Anyway, I checked out their course catalog, not only did they not have any math courses that were not covered in high school, I took more advanced courses in high school. I may need a refresher before I am ready to jump into a calculus course, but, I don't need math for accountants thanks.
I had to tell them several times I had no interest in their program. They seemed to have trouble with the idea of a person with no degree already having a professional career and not really needing what they offer.
Could be, though we don't know for sure if they actually knew this (not unlikely) or if they just got lucky in having chosen a method which was both accessible and didn't expose them to personal danger. Certainly, if they didn't know this, and chose different methods, they may not have gotten past the first one.
I know a number of people, including myself, who started at jobs like that with no degree and did not get stuck as tier one support all their life. Lots of tech jobs claim to require a degree but don't really.
The thing is you have to just realize that "bachelors degree" really is shorthand for "Degree, or reasonable experience". If you don't have experience, they want to see a degree. If you have experience, the degree is often optional.
Just off the top of my head I can think of about 4 people without degrees who started in support and moved up to senior level positions as administrators, system architects, even one IT Director.
I feel like this should be the gold standard. Whatever method you use, it should be either a lot cheaper or a lot more acurate; if neither, you chose very poorly.
Not sure exactly what lines but, if I remember right, distribution lines are in the 13kV range.... you don't just "cut" them with a pair of dykes. The result of the connection being disrupted can generate some amazing sparks. Electricians who work on circuits like that wear protective suits: https://www.google.com/search?...
> In Conway's game of life there are strict rules for where new cells are set and old are removed. By > injecting cells you invalidate those rules and they no longer works.
By injecting cells you are no longer playing conways game of life.
> That is, sentient cells would be able to observe that certain cells doesn't work according to the rule-set.
No. You are postulating something that seems to make sense on the surface but, why would the sentient cells have any particular knowledge of what the rules that created them are? Those rules and the machine that interprets them is also not contained within their universe.
Now, I will concede that yes, it should be possible for such a creator to induce phenomena in such a way as to convince them he exists and open up some communication channel; however, simply exercising his power to add the occasional cell outside of the normal rules wouldn't really do that.
It might create a situation where they have phenomena they can't reconcile, but that doesn't prove anything in particular... "retrograde" planet motions used to be unreconcilable phenomena too.
They are absolutely correct, there is no creator, he doesn't exist inside their universe. Within the context of their universe, the existance or nonexsitance of this creator is essentially meaningless to them.
I really think the clock in a black box metaphor for scientific theories is the best. If someone gives you a watch and you have no way to look inside.... you can make observations, you can model its behgaviour, you can make theories which make predictions.... but unless you can open it, any gears you postulate, no matter how accurately they may model the output, can never be proven to be what is inside.
Until you can devise a test based on observations that seperates one theory of whats inside form another, then the claim of which predictive theory with equivalent results is better has no basis.
So until a theory of a creator produces a testable hypothesis, its really nothing special at all.
A more fitting analogy would be that you designed and built yourself a car, and posted the plans up online. Other people took your plans, built their own cars with it, and started selling them bundled with a bunch of accessories; while still others built their own to drive around.
Now it turns out there is a major flaw in your design that makes it unsafe to drive. Clearly you are at fault for the design, but, are you at fault for all the places other people chose to use your design without reviewing it? You didn't sell it to them, you recieved no royalties, you didn't even get to review or approve what they used it for.
Generally speaking, unless you have some relationship to the coder that would otherwise confer a liability (like you hired them to write that code, etc) I think its really the responsibility of the person building the service around it to make sure they are using good components.
There is a world of difference between "Here is the product I make that works and can offer you" and "here are the plans for how I built mine, you can use them if you want"
> The fact that OpenSSL won't even work using regular malloc() suggests that there're more issues > waiting to pop up here.
Has it been tried? I saw the claim that they didn't make a compile time option to switch and so they have not had any way to test with the system malloc() in a long time, but I didn't see any claims that someone actually swapped it out for malloc() and it didn't work.
Not in private homes, because I do think people deserve some amount of privacy in their home but, definitely for where the real corruption is: commercial buildings.
My wife's previous employer owned the building that their office was in. They tried to get a permit to build a roof deck and were blatantly extorted by the Boston city building inspector. They refused to pay, he denied them the permit.
Except said stalker has a different problem set than the article's author. The author is looking at the data, and picking out an individual. It is a whole different problem to take an individual, that you have some information about, and pick them out.
So maybe the stalker is looking at an employee of some establishment. He watches when that employee comes in for a few days. Lots of people use the same bike terminal, but how many individuals checked in at 8 am today, 8:03 yesterday, 7:58 the day before?
Before he may have had to follow his prey home, case them through social engagements... now, collect data in the same place every day for a few days, and he has a literal map of their life; all with no danger of exposing himself.
This is far too easy to abuse, and a danger to too many people. It could be used to kidnap children of rich people, it could be used to rob drug dealers, it could be used to track women back to their homes to rape, it could be used to ambush ex-lovers or their new spouses.
Frankly, it is actually putting people in danger in a way that is especially enormously terrible since it would be so easy to avoid. Why would you EVER publish unique identifiers that map to people like that? I can understand this was probably an oversight, but it really is indefensible as an intentional disclosure.
As I finished that statement I realized we may not be in so much disagreement so much as a semantics battle.
I conceede. You are absolutely correct, a different standard should NOT be applied. However, the fact that they are police should be considered an aggrivating circumstance: One which increases the enormity of the crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
So not a different standard at all, but a different punishment, because it is a more enormous crime...by the same standards.
> Yes, the current situation is unjust. So is the suggestion that police officers be held to a higher standard.
While I agree with the general argument, in the specific I am not sure it holds. Unlike any other group that might be under consideration, police have taken an oath to uphold the law, and accept a paycheck to do the same. When they break the law, especially if they do so to willfully sabotage their own job, and do so on the clock or by making use of the privileges/access they are afforded as part of their jobs.... they really are doing something different that deserves different consideration and a different standard than an ordinary citizen who breaks the law.
If I did the same thing they did, yes I would be charged with crimes....but I wouldn't be doing it after accepting a job and taking a paycheck specifically to uphold the very laws I am wilfully breaking. I wouldn't be using any special access (access to cruisers and equipment) or knowledge (which antena is which?) that I had, only as a result of accepting that job and taking that paycheck.
If we were talking about off duty cops breaking a law unrelated to their day to day job, then I would agree, but that isn't what we are talking about at all.
While I would normally agree here, we are talking about the people who sign up and take an oath to uphold the law....laws which they are clearly breaking by damaging public property. Worst, they are doing so with the intention of obstructing their own job of collecting evidence of crimes to present to the court. So in fact, they are obstructing justice, destroying property, and possibly breaking several other statutes at the same time.
This is nothing other people wouldn't be charged with for destroying police equipment willfully. I garauntee you if I took one of these devices and damaged it so it didn't work, I would be charged with all that and more.
So the reality is...in NOT charging them, the law is being applied differently.
Slashdot Mirror
> For all we know, the "anonymous caller" could have been his ex trying to get him in trouble, or a member of a
> rival drug gang trying to get his payload confiscated....
Exactly, and you know....I know people with exes who would pull shit like that. I mean for fucks sake, when my friend's wife went down to report his ex-wife punching her, she found the ex-wife was already down there filing a report saying that she was the one punched. Now, after years of back and forth battles (custody would you believe) in and out of court, including false charges of various kinds,
More than that though.... if there is no need to go back and verify the original tip, if it can be anonymous....then the police can phone in their own tips! This is yet more parallell construction bullshit. How do we even know there was such a woman? For all we really know it was a cop, or the wife of a cop, making a call to cover up the real source of the information....ie a criminal conspiracy to deny the driver the right to a fair trial.
If you think that is fishy, you might also ask how $2.4 million in loss, which I believe with investigation and legal fees etc.... but.... how does such a tiny loss compared to a company engaged in billion dollar deals.... translate into an increase in every customer's bill? By what, a penny?
Who is the real crook now, the guy who defrauded the big company, or the big company who used that fraud as an excuse for a naked price hike.
"We are raising money for the douglasses, they got robbed last week"
"Oh my how much have you raised"
"About 10,000 dollars"
"Oh my god how much got stolen"
"Oh they lost about 2 grand, but if we reach our goal of 20,000 we can pay them back 80% of it after our salaries on the committee of course"
> I think blowing up terrorists with drones and claiming executive privilege predates Obama by at least one administration.
Oh well, I stand corrected. I didn't know someone else had done it first! Well that fucking changes everything doesn't it? Who am I to question the traditional practices of our people?
> If anything the Republicans are likely to argue he didn't blow up enough of them
Yes the pot often does seem to spend a lot of energy calling the kettle black.
Bullshit. The so-called "drug problem" is 99% caused by prohibition itself. Prohibition has consistently failed to even influence overall addiction rates; much less drop them. It has consistently created perverse markets for low quality unsafe manufacture. It CREATED the problem of meth labs, and thus created the situation where we have half the people in burn units around the country in there for cooking meth. You asshole prohibitionists did that...its on your head.
Never mind that the next 3 major drugs of abuse combined don't have HALF the users of fucking pot...one of the most innocuous drugs ever, safer than alcohol. But I know you prohibitions are the kind of scum who lament that we gave up on that crudade too. So what if it cost lives as long as they are lives you can discount for being users and addicts.
> Even a full Republican Congress would not move to impeach Obama on the basis of targeting Americans that
> are ALLEGED terrorist operatives hanging out with other ALLEGED terrorists in Yemen...
FTFY
Not only that but, it might not be safe to try and rendez-vous: http://io9.com/5889628/warp-dr...
sure, maybe we can use this new-fangled drive to meet up with them, but, when we do, we will release a gamma ray burst that will sterilize their entire ship.
Now maybe it might be possible to aim to "miss" them by enough that little gets to them and then the last gap can be closed as subluminal speeds, but.... that ah, sure would be one hell of an entrance.
> It will cost billions to fix for the US and the taxpayers will foot the bill.
It already cost us billions, and it was always going to cost us billions more. Any suggestion they were not going to waste that money anyway is just laughable. They will spend as much as they can justify in their crusade against whatever bogeymen they can dream up.
> Russia & China got nothing from Snowden.
Do belly-laughs count? I bet they got a number of those.
> His material is being carefully vetted by journalists and experts before any is released
Of course, since russia, china, and several others players all have their own NSA and CIA-like entities, I would assume they have made attempts, and probably been successful by now, at obtaining the entire archive... or at least, what they didn't already have of it from their own operations pre-snowden.
With Manning, I would easily make the case that nothing was revealed, because any intelligence service that couldn't get their hands on those state department cables would have to be totally incompetent and barely even trying. NSA internal docs, a bit less likely... but I wouldn't doubt they had some of it.
Now, I don't doubt that they have all of it....oh well.... its their own fault for abusing their technical abilities, NSA brought this leak upon itself.
> Bruce Schneier is one helping them in their analysis.
This is one of the few reasons to suspect they have a chance of having not been compromised; if they follow his advice of course. Discipline is hard. I remember some of the security experts expressing being quite impressed by OBLs ability to maintain an effective air gap for so many years while so prolifically using email.
OTOH, you could grab a notebook and start watching lectures for free on youtube. Sure you can't ask questions or go to the TA for help, but you can get lectures from physics classes taught by Leonard Susskind (and others of course, but I watched some of his) on youtube right now.
I have a notebook somewhere with several pages of notes that I took while watching his Quantum Mechanics lectures...mostly while riding the bus back and forth to work (I stopped after I stopped taking the bus)
Of course, while there are the obvious disadvantages of not having tests to gauge progeress and help available.... you do have the ability to pause and rewind thelectures; which is really huge.
> by giving an unreadable version of the encrypted keys
My only real nitpick is... hardly unreadble. Small yes, but its not like they don't easily posess the technology to deal with such a minor inconvinence. A bit childish yes, but nothing more than a symbolic statement. I consider them claiming anything otherwise quite disingenuine.
They just didn't like that he didn't roll over when they snapped their fingers and that he would rather shut down than help them. In the end they both may have acted childish but, they acted childish on our dime, whereas he has every right to be a childish asshole.
Why does it matter? Is the global pool of money stagnating? Who cares if it is here in the US? So what? So people in other countries will take the lead. Its not really a big deal....we are all human; this my team your team BS is getting old.
About 10 years ago I was laid off and while I was out of work I called up the U of Pheonix. What a mistake. Whenever I think of maybe going back to school, I know I don't need a degree for my career so I think of like... why don't I study physics?
Anyway, I checked out their course catalog, not only did they not have any math courses that were not covered in high school, I took more advanced courses in high school. I may need a refresher before I am ready to jump into a calculus course, but, I don't need math for accountants thanks.
I had to tell them several times I had no interest in their program. They seemed to have trouble with the idea of a person with no degree already having a professional career and not really needing what they offer.
Could be, though we don't know for sure if they actually knew this (not unlikely) or if they just got lucky in having chosen a method which was both accessible and didn't expose them to personal danger. Certainly, if they didn't know this, and chose different methods, they may not have gotten past the first one.
I know a number of people, including myself, who started at jobs like that with no degree and did not get stuck as tier one support all their life. Lots of tech jobs claim to require a degree but don't really.
The thing is you have to just realize that "bachelors degree" really is shorthand for "Degree, or reasonable experience". If you don't have experience, they want to see a degree. If you have experience, the degree is often optional.
Just off the top of my head I can think of about 4 people without degrees who started in support and moved up to senior level positions as administrators, system architects, even one IT Director.
I feel like this should be the gold standard. Whatever method you use, it should be either a lot cheaper or a lot more acurate; if neither, you chose very poorly.
Not sure exactly what lines but, if I remember right, distribution lines are in the 13kV range.... you don't just "cut" them with a pair of dykes. The result of the connection being disrupted can generate some amazing sparks. Electricians who work on circuits like that wear protective suits:
https://www.google.com/search?...
> In Conway's game of life there are strict rules for where new cells are set and old are removed. By
> injecting cells you invalidate those rules and they no longer works.
By injecting cells you are no longer playing conways game of life.
> That is, sentient cells would be able to observe that certain cells doesn't work according to the rule-set.
No. You are postulating something that seems to make sense on the surface but, why would the sentient cells have any particular knowledge of what the rules that created them are? Those rules and the machine that interprets them is also not contained within their universe.
Now, I will concede that yes, it should be possible for such a creator to induce phenomena in such a way as to convince them he exists and open up some communication channel; however, simply exercising his power to add the occasional cell outside of the normal rules wouldn't really do that.
It might create a situation where they have phenomena they can't reconcile, but that doesn't prove anything in particular... "retrograde" planet motions used to be unreconcilable phenomena too.
They are absolutely correct, there is no creator, he doesn't exist inside their universe. Within the context of their universe, the existance or nonexsitance of this creator is essentially meaningless to them.
I really think the clock in a black box metaphor for scientific theories is the best. If someone gives you a watch and you have no way to look inside.... you can make observations, you can model its behgaviour, you can make theories which make predictions.... but unless you can open it, any gears you postulate, no matter how accurately they may model the output, can never be proven to be what is inside.
Until you can devise a test based on observations that seperates one theory of whats inside form another, then the claim of which predictive theory with equivalent results is better has no basis.
So until a theory of a creator produces a testable hypothesis, its really nothing special at all.
A more fitting analogy would be that you designed and built yourself a car, and posted the plans up online. Other people took your plans, built their own cars with it, and started selling them bundled with a bunch of accessories; while still others built their own to drive around.
Now it turns out there is a major flaw in your design that makes it unsafe to drive. Clearly you are at fault for the design, but, are you at fault for all the places other people chose to use your design without reviewing it? You didn't sell it to them, you recieved no royalties, you didn't even get to review or approve what they used it for.
Generally speaking, unless you have some relationship to the coder that would otherwise confer a liability (like you hired them to write that code, etc) I think its really the responsibility of the person building the service around it to make sure they are using good components.
There is a world of difference between "Here is the product I make that works and can offer you" and "here are the plans for how I built mine, you can use them if you want"
> The fact that OpenSSL won't even work using regular malloc() suggests that there're more issues
> waiting to pop up here.
Has it been tried? I saw the claim that they didn't make a compile time option to switch and so they have not had any way to test with the system malloc() in a long time, but I didn't see any claims that someone actually swapped it out for malloc() and it didn't work.
Not in private homes, because I do think people deserve some amount of privacy in their home but, definitely for where the real corruption is: commercial buildings.
My wife's previous employer owned the building that their office was in. They tried to get a permit to build a roof deck and were blatantly extorted by the Boston city building inspector. They refused to pay, he denied them the permit.
Corruption is everywhere where people have power.
Except said stalker has a different problem set than the article's author. The author is looking at the data, and picking out an individual. It is a whole different problem to take an individual, that you have some information about, and pick them out.
So maybe the stalker is looking at an employee of some establishment. He watches when that employee comes in for a few days. Lots of people use the same bike terminal, but how many individuals checked in at 8 am today, 8:03 yesterday, 7:58 the day before?
Before he may have had to follow his prey home, case them through social engagements... now, collect data in the same place every day for a few days, and he has a literal map of their life; all with no danger of exposing himself.
This is far too easy to abuse, and a danger to too many people. It could be used to kidnap children of rich people, it could be used to rob drug dealers, it could be used to track women back to their homes to rape, it could be used to ambush ex-lovers or their new spouses.
Frankly, it is actually putting people in danger in a way that is especially enormously terrible since it would be so easy to avoid. Why would you EVER publish unique identifiers that map to people like that? I can understand this was probably an oversight, but it really is indefensible as an intentional disclosure.
As I finished that statement I realized we may not be in so much disagreement so much as a semantics battle.
I conceede. You are absolutely correct, a different standard should NOT be applied. However, the fact that they are police should be considered an aggrivating circumstance: One which increases the enormity of the crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
So not a different standard at all, but a different punishment, because it is a more enormous crime...by the same standards.
> Yes, the current situation is unjust. So is the suggestion that police officers be held to a higher standard.
While I agree with the general argument, in the specific I am not sure it holds. Unlike any other group that might be under consideration, police have taken an oath to uphold the law, and accept a paycheck to do the same. When they break the law, especially if they do so to willfully sabotage their own job, and do so on the clock or by making use of the privileges/access they are afforded as part of their jobs.... they really are doing something different that deserves different consideration and a different standard than an ordinary citizen who breaks the law.
If I did the same thing they did, yes I would be charged with crimes....but I wouldn't be doing it after accepting a job and taking a paycheck specifically to uphold the very laws I am wilfully breaking. I wouldn't be using any special access (access to cruisers and equipment) or knowledge (which antena is which?) that I had, only as a result of accepting that job and taking that paycheck.
If we were talking about off duty cops breaking a law unrelated to their day to day job, then I would agree, but that isn't what we are talking about at all.
While I would normally agree here, we are talking about the people who sign up and take an oath to uphold the law....laws which they are clearly breaking by damaging public property. Worst, they are doing so with the intention of obstructing their own job of collecting evidence of crimes to present to the court. So in fact, they are obstructing justice, destroying property, and possibly breaking several other statutes at the same time.
This is nothing other people wouldn't be charged with for destroying police equipment willfully. I garauntee you if I took one of these devices and damaged it so it didn't work, I would be charged with all that and more.
So the reality is...in NOT charging them, the law is being applied differently.