Would that immunity extend to perjury from testimony? What if the prosecutor believes that a person has witnessed something which they have not? Perhaps the person made early statements, which what they now consider to be truthful testimony would contradict?
If such an immunity was granted, such that a person on the stand stood no jeapordy at all, not even perjury for his statements on the stand... would he be considered "under oath" and would the jury (if any) be informed of this unique status? What would really stop him, at that point, from telling them he was Abraham Lincoln and has been hunting vampires for the past 160 years?
Putting any sort of condition upon what can be said doesn't seem like it should fly either; as it presupposes the answer to the very question the trial is attempting to settle.
Ahh but what if your honest testimony contradicts known facts? (memory can be wrong, people make mistakes, "facts" can be errors).
If the prosecution believes that you saw something, which you deny, or the truth contradicts your own previous statements, then you could, in your testimony, be creating evidence against yourself for another crime: that of perjury, even by giving honest testimony.
Sure you could give you immunity from any crimes evidenced by your testimony, including perjury, but, can you then still be said to be "under oath"? Wouldn't that make the oath a bit of a farce?
However, without knowing what the testimony would be, there is know way to know for certain if giving the testimony would or would not be evidence of a crime committed by the person giving it...a crime which may or may not be related to the actual testimony.
So while technically I can see an argument here, as a practical matter, how do you prove a person wouldn't incriminate himself by a statement of which you don't know the content?
Well I said good bit, not all of it...they definitely don't need all of it.
That said, the educational system is doing a piss poor job of getting people ready to enter the workforce of 15 years ago, say nothing about the one today or going forward into the future.... so if they were to spend gobs of money on fixing that, I would at least have trouble saying it didn't go to something worthwhile...
Something other than supporting the share price of military contractors.
> So we evolved a tendency to monoculture, making us more vulnerable to disease? > That would seem... counterintuitive.
Not really, only if taken out of context and to the extreme. The relation between friends is states as about the same as a "fourth cousin". A fair amount of mixing happens even amongst the children of a single pair of parents with 2 copies of up to 4 possibilites being selected for each gene in each individual... fourth cousins is still enough room for quite a bit of diversity.
Think of it like plant or animal breeding. Breeders generally don't take two dissimilar phenotypes breed them once, and then take their progeny and look to whole new lines. They call those the F1 and then breed them back with another of their own type.
Is it really so surprizing that nature would have found the same trick for keeping some stability in the local gene pool? I mean, its hardly a case of "monoculture".
We have had evidence for many years that fists can be used to kill people standing in a public place.
Should there or should there not be some kind of regulation on the use of these appendages on public property?
I dunno, "Don't kill, maim, injure, or put people at risk for killing, maiming or injury" seems to be a standard we already have plenty of laws about. Seems those should cover it pretty well.
Seriously, stop playing Team America World Police. Stop getting into so many wars and taking so many actions, cut the military....in half or more; and spend a good bit of that money on education here, and developing the technology to colonize space. If you INSIST on making it about war, can't we pretend the next force that will need to be mobilized is on the moon or mars?
> Not sure what you are getting at here, my head is not massive enough to create any kind of > significant gravitational pull, nor does it have a magnetic field. My head would in no way affect the > gyroscope, unless it were touching, or there was a wind blowing.
Ahh, but to whirl a gyroscope about your head, you must be attached to it in some way. So to make it whirl like that, you would have to be giving it a constant (or as close as you can muster) inward force that is perpendicular to its current travel.
So while you are not exerting a real gravitational pull, the act of whirling it simulates such a pull. It also simulates the pull of gravity (or magentic forces). Now, its easy to think that the answer is yes, because if you start holding a gyroscope up, and attach the string to the bottom or top, starting to whirl it WILL change the axis since your force is not going through the center of mass, which would be a bad approximation of what we are trying to model.
So I think the right answer is the axis will change until the force pulling to the center aligns through its center of mass. However, in the case of a spinning star, since gravity acts on every particle, it ALWAYS is through the center of mass, so no matter what orientation you start with, the axis will not change from gravity.
I imagine there might be an exception if the distance between the bodies is short enough relative to their masses that tidal forces become significant.... but if tidal forces are significant in the kind of distances between stars.... well that is pretty wow in and of itself.
Actually, he didn't make that mistake, it only looks that way from the quote because its an excerpt. He makes that point in another section of the argument. It is probably worth mentioning though, because it is quite true, in fact, quoting again from the same:
Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Shoe bomber Richard Reid was British with a Jamaican father. One of the London subway bombers, Germaine Lindsay, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American.
I don't remember the episode, but if there was one, it was likely where the kernel of the idea made it into my wetware. Of course, its not even original for them. There was a controversy just a few years back where some US soldiers were photographed with Hillary Clinton and one or two of them (I forget) was showing a hand signal which is intended to convey that same message.
Alternatively, the signal may be incorporated into the authentication process itself, typically in the form of a panic password, distress password, or duress PIN that is distinct from the user's normal password or PIN.
Though I particularly like this one:
A simple but effective duress code used over the telephone by SOE agents in occupied Europe during World War II was to give a coded answer when someone checked whether it was convenient to visit a safe-house. If it was genuinely safe to visit, the answer would be "No, I'm too busy." However, if the safe-house had been compromised (i.e. the Nazis had captured it, forcing the occupants to answer the phone at gunpoint in order to lure in other members of the SOE network) the captured agent would say "Yes, come on over."
I have a couple of friends who are Freemasons. While none of them has divulged the actual secret, I am assured that they have a similar sort of conversational code that can be used to allow one member to signal to another that he is in some form of distress without announcing it to casual observers.
The fact that this could be used for more than just duress situations is also pretty obvious. As I remember my first cut at an implementation had 3 defined passwords, normal, duress, and admin for admin users, but, as implemented I left it open to have as many as needed, as it was just using the username and hash outcome to join sql tables to reveal the access type.
Please, I know the lies of a worldwide gangsrer computer god parroting puppet assasain when i see them. You are not going to fool anyone here with your frankenstien controls.
It certainly didn't seem like a terribly novel idea to me when I was writing code to implement it a few years back. The project never went anywhere but, it seemed to me to just be the most obvious way to implement a "duress" password that could be used to set off an alarm. Slightly clever but, I assumed it had already been done since it was so freaking obvious.
Very true. Every generation since language was invented has been adament that the current generation of kids is ill mannered, disrespect their elders in ways "we never did"...and furthermore, this used to be a safer place, because even if crime rates and murder rates are down, the ones that happen today are so much worst.
That's the gist of the latest study to find that social media photos of people drinking and smoking can influence teens into partaking in the same degenerate behavior.
And what is it that pressures people into partaking in judging others choices as "degenerate". Seems like a more important question to answer since its a problem that tends to lead to attempts to control others behaviour, as this sort of behavior often turns violent as the perpetrators find their means of control don't work and they inevitably turn their eye towards punishment.
That would be quite a turnabout for this particular author since he has personally eviscerated the very idea that you are espousing: That profiling passengers by any simple means would ever work.
However, it isn't true that almost all Muslims are out to blow up airplanes. In fact, almost none of them are. Post 9/11, weâ(TM)ve had 2 Muslim terrorists on U.S airplanes: the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. If you assume 0.8% (thatâ(TM)s one estimate of the percentage of Muslim Americans) of the 630 million annual airplane fliers are Muslim and triple it to account for others who look Semitic, then the chances any profiled flier will be a Muslim terrorist is 1 in 80 million. Add the 19 9/11 terrorists -- arguably a singular event -- that number drops to 1 in 8 million. Either way, because the number of actual terrorists is so low, almost everyone selected by the profile will be innocent. This is called the "base rate fallacy," and dooms any type of broad terrorist profiling, including the TSAâ(TM)s behavioral profiling.
> Having googled the guy, it sounds like he at least had notions of making life better for other people. > He didn't hate the whole of humanity, he hated industrialisation.
Well you could say the same about Bin Laden, couldn't you? All you really need to do is warp around your idea of "a better life" a little bit. Afterall, "better" is itself a value judgement. Ted said "life is better without technology because it means more jobs" (or something to that effect, and probably more nuanced).
Bin Laden's "better life" was.... "Living the life God intended for us". If you believe in his God and that his God wants a world run the way he espoused, then it makes sense too.
Personally, I tend to think its the desire to judge other people's life and make it better for them, with their cooperation or without that is the problem. The old adage "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" rings pretty true. Good intentions of one sort or another have justified more atrocities than I have time to mention.
These boats are heavily heavily instrumented and tested - it was also not just one boat. I think that maybe they figured out that doing this was an advantage of some sort and thought they could get away with it. It's being made to sound really miniscule but one cannot help but wonder why they did it and then even denied having done it after being caught.
True but, boats are not designed by their crew either. Crew are typically not engineers, and its not unheard of for people in general to become convinced that something works or has greater advantage than it really does, without doing what an engineer would do and actually figuring out the expected real effect.
So its possible that it could both A. Make little to no difference and B. The crew believed it made a significant difference (which would explain hiding it)
It could even be that someone saw the rule, figured it must confer advantage and then tried to guesstimate how much weight he needed/could get away with, and used an amount that was enough to get caught but not enough to make a difference.
Or Internet meme style, someone else saw the rule, made an overly specific statement based on it like "You know adding even 5 lbs of weight can be enough to change the outcome of a race", some second person repeated it, and it got back to one of these crew members who took it as gospel.
In the end it doesn't matter so much but, I have no trouble with the idea that they could be both dishonest and hold incorrect technical ideas, while otherwise being excellent sailors.
One need not be brilliant to be right. The man is an astronomer not an economist, and generally seems to be assuming that there are only 2 possibilities.... 1. Government 2. For profit enterprise
I would submit that its entirely possible for groups of private individuals to come together and work on things for purposes other than either violently imposing their will on others, or building their own personal wealth. He may be right about private for profit business ventures but.... government is too focused on beating the heads of people here.
You're missing the forest for the trees friend. The significance of Snowden is not what he leaked by itself. As you said, we/.'ers "knew" that something like this has been going on for at least the last 10 years. The significance is the breadth of surveillance and how the NSA reacted to him leaking it.
I really liked the pace of the disclosures. First he discloses a few things, the officials come out and start spinning and making up lies for the public about what is really happening, then the next disclosure comes out, exposing exactly what they just lied and said wasn't happening.
That was just....masterful.
I can understand wanting to keep secrets, but there is no excuse for telling lies to the people. Its ridiculous that I or anyone can be charged for telling lies to the FBI, but, the politicians can't be charged with telling lies to us.
> I'll get right on that. Please provide me with a few hundred million dollars to fund my campaign. Oh > yeah, those are gonna need to be no strings attached dollars so that I'm not bought and paid for like > 99.8% of the people who are currently in congress.
Will need more than that too. Most are bought and paid for by the parties who broker the money.
If you don't get on your knees for party money, and of course, agree to tow their line, then they will work against you, both of them. They don't like being cut out of election deals.... afterall... everybody likes to get his beak wet right?
They get like 7% of their funding from the government.
Don't get me wrong, they are a mouthpiece of the regieme. They still interview people from the ONDCP even after the GAO report stating that it wasn't worth evaluating their statements since the ONDCP charter requires them to lie.
They still lap up the official story like the government has never lied to them....every single time....
but all that aside, they get my monthly contribution because for all their faults and regieme loving, they are the closest thing to reasonable mainstream news out there.
RT is pretty good if you are willing to go international and get it from a Russian mouthpiece.
When I read the study a light went off in my brain. A light in the specific shape of a man I will call Bob, not because that is his name, just to protect the identity of the stupid.
Most people I know drive. Most drivers, from time to time use their cell phone. Most drivers I know, don't use the cell phone much, and seem to do a fine job of driving even while using it, and know how to choose when NOT to use it.
Not Bob. Nope that guy can't seem to pay attention to much other than his cell phone, not on the road or off. On top of that, he is one of the few people that I swear has almost gotten me killed as a passenger in his car....not even while on the phone, but off it too. He is, in short, an atrocious driver. About the only one I actually avoid getting in the car with as a passenger.
But...he was an atrocious driver before he had a cell phone.
Here is the thing.... If I were to text you while driving, you might get a "yes" or "no", or "I am on my way". Simple, short. This guy.... well I feel strange about posting the exact text of what he said but... right before "I am driving on the highway now" he sent me two messages, each one detailed and about 20 words long....and time stamped within 30 seconds of eachother.
This is more than a question of using the phone or texting, its a question of judgement. Its not whether you text, its when you choose to and how you choose to use it. I find the whole thing a little bit like saying hamburgers make you fat. No, they have a lot of calories, its how often you choose to eat them, and what percentage of your diet they make up that might make you fat, and not, the fact that you eat burgers.
Slashdot Mirror
Would that immunity extend to perjury from testimony? What if the prosecutor believes that a person has witnessed something which they have not? Perhaps the person made early statements, which what they now consider to be truthful testimony would contradict?
If such an immunity was granted, such that a person on the stand stood no jeapordy at all, not even perjury for his statements on the stand... would he be considered "under oath" and would the jury (if any) be informed of this unique status? What would really stop him, at that point, from telling them he was Abraham Lincoln and has been hunting vampires for the past 160 years?
Putting any sort of condition upon what can be said doesn't seem like it should fly either; as it presupposes the answer to the very question the trial is attempting to settle.
Ahh but what if your honest testimony contradicts known facts? (memory can be wrong, people make mistakes, "facts" can be errors).
If the prosecution believes that you saw something, which you deny, or the truth contradicts your own previous statements, then you could, in your testimony, be creating evidence against yourself for another crime: that of perjury, even by giving honest testimony.
Sure you could give you immunity from any crimes evidenced by your testimony, including perjury, but, can you then still be said to be "under oath"? Wouldn't that make the oath a bit of a farce?
However, without knowing what the testimony would be, there is know way to know for certain if giving the testimony would or would not be evidence of a crime committed by the person giving it...a crime which may or may not be related to the actual testimony.
So while technically I can see an argument here, as a practical matter, how do you prove a person wouldn't incriminate himself by a statement of which you don't know the content?
Well I said good bit, not all of it...they definitely don't need all of it.
That said, the educational system is doing a piss poor job of getting people ready to enter the workforce of 15 years ago, say nothing about the one today or going forward into the future.... so if they were to spend gobs of money on fixing that, I would at least have trouble saying it didn't go to something worthwhile...
Something other than supporting the share price of military contractors.
> So we evolved a tendency to monoculture, making us more vulnerable to disease? ... counterintuitive.
> That would seem
Not really, only if taken out of context and to the extreme. The relation between friends is states as about the same as a "fourth cousin". A fair amount of mixing happens even amongst the children of a single pair of parents with 2 copies of up to 4 possibilites being selected for each gene in each individual... fourth cousins is still enough room for quite a bit of diversity.
Think of it like plant or animal breeding. Breeders generally don't take two dissimilar phenotypes breed them once, and then take their progeny and look to whole new lines. They call those the F1 and then breed them back with another of their own type.
Is it really so surprizing that nature would have found the same trick for keeping some stability in the local gene pool? I mean, its hardly a case of "monoculture".
We have had evidence for many years that fists can be used to kill people standing in a public place.
Should there or should there not be some kind of regulation on the use of these appendages on public property?
I dunno, "Don't kill, maim, injure, or put people at risk for killing, maiming or injury" seems to be a standard we already have plenty of laws about. Seems those should cover it pretty well.
Seriously, stop playing Team America World Police. Stop getting into so many wars and taking so many actions, cut the military....in half or more; and spend a good bit of that money on education here, and developing the technology to colonize space. If you INSIST on making it about war, can't we pretend the next force that will need to be mobilized is on the moon or mars?
> Not sure what you are getting at here, my head is not massive enough to create any kind of
> significant gravitational pull, nor does it have a magnetic field. My head would in no way affect the
> gyroscope, unless it were touching, or there was a wind blowing.
Ahh, but to whirl a gyroscope about your head, you must be attached to it in some way. So to make it whirl like that, you would have to be giving it a constant (or as close as you can muster) inward force that is perpendicular to its current travel.
So while you are not exerting a real gravitational pull, the act of whirling it simulates such a pull. It also simulates the pull of gravity (or magentic forces). Now, its easy to think that the answer is yes, because if you start holding a gyroscope up, and attach the string to the bottom or top, starting to whirl it WILL change the axis since your force is not going through the center of mass, which would be a bad approximation of what we are trying to model.
So I think the right answer is the axis will change until the force pulling to the center aligns through its center of mass. However, in the case of a spinning star, since gravity acts on every particle, it ALWAYS is through the center of mass, so no matter what orientation you start with, the axis will not change from gravity.
I imagine there might be an exception if the distance between the bodies is short enough relative to their masses that tidal forces become significant.... but if tidal forces are significant in the kind of distances between stars.... well that is pretty wow in and of itself.
Actually, he didn't make that mistake, it only looks that way from the quote because its an excerpt. He makes that point in another section of the argument. It is probably worth mentioning though, because it is quite true, in fact, quoting again from the same:
I don't remember the episode, but if there was one, it was likely where the kernel of the idea made it into my wetware. Of course, its not even original for them. There was a controversy just a few years back where some US soldiers were photographed with Hillary Clinton and one or two of them (I forget) was showing a hand signal which is intended to convey that same message.
In fact, looking for the article on that shows that this idea is so unoriginal, there is a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duress_code
Though I particularly like this one:
I have a couple of friends who are Freemasons. While none of them has divulged the actual secret, I am assured that they have a similar sort of conversational code that can be used to allow one member to signal to another that he is in some form of distress without announcing it to casual observers.
The fact that this could be used for more than just duress situations is also pretty obvious. As I remember my first cut at an implementation had 3 defined passwords, normal, duress, and admin for admin users, but, as implemented I left it open to have as many as needed, as it was just using the username and hash outcome to join sql tables to reveal the access type.
Please, I know the lies of a worldwide gangsrer computer god parroting puppet assasain when i see them. You are not going to fool anyone here with your frankenstien controls.
It certainly didn't seem like a terribly novel idea to me when I was writing code to implement it a few years back. The project never went anywhere but, it seemed to me to just be the most obvious way to implement a "duress" password that could be used to set off an alarm. Slightly clever but, I assumed it had already been done since it was so freaking obvious.
Very true. Every generation since language was invented has been adament that the current generation of kids is ill mannered, disrespect their elders in ways "we never did"...and furthermore, this used to be a safer place, because even if crime rates and murder rates are down, the ones that happen today are so much worst.
And what is it that pressures people into partaking in judging others choices as "degenerate". Seems like a more important question to answer since its a problem that tends to lead to attempts to control others behaviour, as this sort of behavior often turns violent as the perpetrators find their means of control don't work and they inevitably turn their eye towards punishment.
That would be quite a turnabout for this particular author since he has personally eviscerated the very idea that you are espousing: That profiling passengers by any simple means would ever work.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_trouble_wit.html
> Having googled the guy, it sounds like he at least had notions of making life better for other people.
> He didn't hate the whole of humanity, he hated industrialisation.
Well you could say the same about Bin Laden, couldn't you? All you really need to do is warp around your idea of "a better life" a little bit. Afterall, "better" is itself a value judgement. Ted said "life is better without technology because it means more jobs" (or something to that effect, and probably more nuanced).
Bin Laden's "better life" was.... "Living the life God intended for us". If you believe in his God and that his God wants a world run the way he espoused, then it makes sense too.
Similarly men like Nelson Rockafeller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Drug_Laws thought that the "better life" was one where nobody was addicted to drugs.
Personally, I tend to think its the desire to judge other people's life and make it better for them, with their cooperation or without that is the problem. The old adage "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" rings pretty true. Good intentions of one sort or another have justified more atrocities than I have time to mention.
True but, boats are not designed by their crew either. Crew are typically not engineers, and its not unheard of for people in general to become convinced that something works or has greater advantage than it really does, without doing what an engineer would do and actually figuring out the expected real effect.
So its possible that it could both A. Make little to no difference and B. The crew believed it made a significant difference (which would explain hiding it)
It could even be that someone saw the rule, figured it must confer advantage and then tried to guesstimate how much weight he needed/could get away with, and used an amount that was enough to get caught but not enough to make a difference.
Or Internet meme style, someone else saw the rule, made an overly specific statement based on it like "You know adding even 5 lbs of weight can be enough to change the outcome of a race", some second person repeated it, and it got back to one of these crew members who took it as gospel.
In the end it doesn't matter so much but, I have no trouble with the idea that they could be both dishonest and hold incorrect technical ideas, while otherwise being excellent sailors.
One need not be brilliant to be right. The man is an astronomer not an economist, and generally seems to be assuming that there are only 2 possibilities.... 1. Government 2. For profit enterprise
I would submit that its entirely possible for groups of private individuals to come together and work on things for purposes other than either violently imposing their will on others, or building their own personal wealth. He may be right about private for profit business ventures but.... government is too focused on beating the heads of people here.
Of course, just because its a legitimate name doesn't mean its not a fake one or a joke. Dick Swett is a real guy (and former congressman).
would you claim it was definitely a real name if the target was American and had the name Mike Hunt? Pretty legitimate name right there.
Splitters!
I really liked the pace of the disclosures. First he discloses a few things, the officials come out and start spinning and making up lies for the public about what is really happening, then the next disclosure comes out, exposing exactly what they just lied and said wasn't happening.
That was just....masterful.
I can understand wanting to keep secrets, but there is no excuse for telling lies to the people. Its ridiculous that I or anyone can be charged for telling lies to the FBI, but, the politicians can't be charged with telling lies to us.
> I'll get right on that. Please provide me with a few hundred million dollars to fund my campaign. Oh
> yeah, those are gonna need to be no strings attached dollars so that I'm not bought and paid for like
> 99.8% of the people who are currently in congress.
Will need more than that too. Most are bought and paid for by the parties who broker the money.
If you don't get on your knees for party money, and of course, agree to tow their line, then they will work against you, both of them. They don't like being cut out of election deals.... afterall... everybody likes to get his beak wet right?
They get like 7% of their funding from the government.
Don't get me wrong, they are a mouthpiece of the regieme. They still interview people from the ONDCP even after the GAO report stating that it wasn't worth evaluating their statements since the ONDCP charter requires them to lie.
They still lap up the official story like the government has never lied to them....every single time....
but all that aside, they get my monthly contribution because for all their faults and regieme loving, they are the closest thing to reasonable mainstream news out there.
RT is pretty good if you are willing to go international and get it from a Russian mouthpiece.
> That performance .... I've ever seen
I think I have identified your problem. Until people started talking about this Miley person and her twerking, I had no idea MTV even still existed.
All in all, I feel pretty bi-winning with tiger blood about that.
When I read the study a light went off in my brain. A light in the specific shape of a man I will call Bob, not because that is his name, just to protect the identity of the stupid.
Most people I know drive. Most drivers, from time to time use their cell phone. Most drivers I know, don't use the cell phone much, and seem to do a fine job of driving even while using it, and know how to choose when NOT to use it.
Not Bob. Nope that guy can't seem to pay attention to much other than his cell phone, not on the road or off. On top of that, he is one of the few people that I swear has almost gotten me killed as a passenger in his car....not even while on the phone, but off it too. He is, in short, an atrocious driver. About the only one I actually avoid getting in the car with as a passenger.
But...he was an atrocious driver before he had a cell phone.
Here is the thing.... If I were to text you while driving, you might get a "yes" or "no", or "I am on my way". Simple, short. This guy.... well I feel strange about posting the exact text of what he said but... right before "I am driving on the highway now" he sent me two messages, each one detailed and about 20 words long....and time stamped within 30 seconds of eachother.
This is more than a question of using the phone or texting, its a question of judgement. Its not whether you text, its when you choose to and how you choose to use it. I find the whole thing a little bit like saying hamburgers make you fat. No, they have a lot of calories, its how often you choose to eat them, and what percentage of your diet they make up that might make you fat, and not, the fact that you eat burgers.