How much warning will it likely give before it does erupt? Years, months, or days?
Since there wasn't anyone recording observations of the last supervolcano eruption, and we don't have information to reconstruct a reasonably detailed picture of what goes on, that's pretty much anyone's guess, though people have been saying for years that changes observed in Yellowstone might be leading signs of an impending eruption.
If it does erupt, though, maybe we'll be able to save enough records to give our descendants a better clue next time, but that won't be much help to anyone around when it happens.
I'm not a lawyer either but if I were in her shoes, I would simply claim I was working on writing my first novel--a murder mystery. I had to do some research and, hence, the searches.
Someone happened to murder my husband in a similar fashion (he was a very detestable man, everyone hated him and as a result I suffered at home). There's your shadow of a doubt.
The standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. That's rather far from beyond a shadow of a doubt. The mere abstract possibility of innocence is not enough to establish reasonable doubt.
There is a tendency of the computer ignorant to say "HA! IP address matches! You are guilty" when in reality the evidence is extremely weak.
Um, perhaps in the RIAA cases. Here, the evidence was drawn directly from history files, etc., from several computers the defendant had access, and tied to suspicious prescriptions drawn by the defendant's lover and the clear history of physical violence between the defendant and the defendant's spouse that became the victim of murder. Its not just some kind of IP matching from a file sharing request or search engine serving as the sole evidence of guilt.
Its not the same kind of evidence, its not the same kind of case, its not the same context, its not, really, at all similar except that computers are involved in some way.
PICS can enable filters to screen out porn as effectively as any other solution that can be implemented in the real world. Further, more importantly, it can enable users with control over their own local systems (parents, for instance) to flexibly tailor what they want to filter for and whose descriptions they choose to accept.
If you want to keep porn off your computer you're going to have to do it on a whitelist rather than a blacklist basis.
True, but PICS can be used to whitelist as well as to blacklist.
You can try graylisting with a content-based filter, and PICS can help there, but it's not going to be 100% effective. And for the people campaigining For The Children, they're always after 100%.
Its possible, as a parent with control over your own computer or network, to set up a PICS system to only allow access to material you've personally reviewed. Or to impose any looser system (such as having received an acceptable—to you—description from a trusted third-party reviewer) of whitelisting you prefer. It may be that such systems are most frequently used as negative, rather than positive-choice systems, but that's not a limitation of the system.
The thing is the political advocates pretending to be seeking to "help" parents "protect" their children all too often really want to impose their own personal view of what should be seen on everyone, adult and child alike. They don't want to enhance parental control, and that's why they don't champion technologies that give parents more effective choices. They want to simply make it more expensive to provide or access content they don't like, so that by so interfering with the market they will marginalize the content and make it less available to anyone. They oppose choice, freedom, and parental judgement rather than supporting it.
I don't know: is turning these logs over to prosecute someone "evil"?
Once again, RTFA. Google didn't turn over any logs, the electronic evidence was taken from computers seized by the police that the defendant had access to, not from Google.
Let's say you didn't kill your wife but your computer happened to have those search words in its history because a month ago your kid was randomly searching violent words. So the cops see your wife is dead and violent words in your search history and pin it on you
That would suck.
However, that's not what happened here. The searches aren't the only basis for the prosecution; the prior history of violence between the victim and the defendant, the affair, the suspicious prescription written by the defendant's lover and filled at a location of the pharmacy for which the defendant a location search immediately before the prescription was filled and immediately before the murder, etc.
...its circumstantial evidence. Which isn't unusual, most evidence presented in almost every criminal case is circumstantial. The issues of interpretation that apply here are pretty much the same issues that apply to any other evidence (even, often, physical evidence.) That someone who looked like you was seen committing a crime doesn't mean it was you, it could have been someone with a strong resemblance. That DNA with a strong match to yours was found doesn't mean that you left it, it could be the other 1 in (say) 100 million people whose DNA would match. That's why we have trials and juries to weigh the credibility of evidence, etc.
I don't see the particular problem with this kind of evidence. Perhaps you could explain it rather than "illustrating" it with an example which would be equally possible with many kinds of utterly uncontroversial evidence that has been accepted in court forever.
You're correct on the first part, but search warrant is an entirely different beast than siezure.
No, they aren't. The standard (probable cause) for both is the same.
No one gets deprived of their house during the investigation, do they?
During the actual search of the house, yes, one may be deprived of the use of it. Usually, evidence that may be seized from the house is not integral to and may be seized without seizing the house itself; this less the case with your other example (cars) which, when evidence is found during a search, will more likely be seized themselves, and even less the case with computers, which if evidence is found on them, the physical evidence itself will often be inseparable from fairly critical components of the computer.
The studies show that the genetically superior corn protects against rootworm, allowing farmers to produce more grain from the same amount of land and fertilizer, with lower pesticide use. It is in fact much better for the environment than incorporating pesticide in the soil, with attendant runoff. Genes don't end up in rivers.
This is wrong in many ways: first, the toxins that the plant produces as natural pesticides do end up in the environment, though they may do so less than some other artificial pesticides. Second, genes from GM crops do spread in the environment, to fields other than where they are planted, etc.
And what if the studies do show that the corn is harmful to rats if they're fed it exclusively?
The study on rats was sponsored by Monsanto to prove that there was no cause for concern about human toxicity, so that the product could get to market. If Monsanto fudged the results, then there is no indication whatsoever that the product is safe for human consumption.
And maybe it's just me, but I don't particularly like rats, so I'd say being unhealthy for rats would be a plus, not a minus for this corn.
Once again, the only indication that the corn is safe for humans is the rat study that Greenpeace says Monsanto fudged. This isn't about rat safety, its about human safety.
The issue is that the tech is really only capable of being utilized by corporations, who given the choice between releasing a product which will slowly poison a large population undetected or doing a little more R&D, are bound by their obligation to shareholders to choose the mass poisoning.
Not all business entities (nor even all involved in agricultural biotechnology) are public traded corporations.
Forms with narrower ownership, including closely-held private corporations whose owners shared interest is not limited to maximum financial returns don't necessarily have an obligation to the shareholders that would support mass poisoning.
What are they claiming is the cause of the toxicity? There has to be a biochemical basis for it, and while they can scream to the press and be believed by the sheep of the general population, I can hardly see a scientific basis for it.
Well, since you clearly don't understand what genetic modifications do, or how proteins work, it is unsurprising that you can't see anything here.
Genetically modified foods still contain the same amino acids in their proteins as all the other foods, so unless you modify their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins, they will be digested just the same.
A protein can contain the same amino acids as a non-toxic protein and be a toxin. A protein can even contain the same amino acids in the same order as a safe protein and be harmful (that's what produces "mad cow" and other prion-caused disorders.)
Because a computer is a substantially valuable and useful piece of property. Unless the police can convince the warrant judge that it actually has evidence, they can't take it.
No, they have to convince that judge that there is probable cause to believe evidence will be found on it; probable cause is not certainty that evidence is there.
Otherwise, they'd simply sieze your car and house to review for "potential evidence."
Uh, yeah, police get search warrants for suspects cars and houses and all the time, too.
Just one question here: If the RIAA can't prove who was using a computer for filesharing, how can someone prove who was using the computer for Google searching?
It'd be pretty hard to make a if the Google searching was all there was, because while its evidence from which the jury could infer that a particular person did the search, any one of the searches alone wouldn't prove much.
OTOH, when a number of computers you have access to are used to search for certain things that might relate to plans to commit a murder, when a doctor that is also your lover writes a suspicious perscription that might be used to facilitate the murder that is filled just before the murder at a location of a pharmacy that you had just done a location search for, when the person killed is your husband that you've been having violent conflicts with immediately prior to the murder, then its not just about the searches anymore.
It seems they took this as an open and shut case... Seems to convenient, maybe they should look into it a bit more than "the computer you use has had this "searched" on it".
Uh, if you read TFA, you might notice they did look into more than "the computer you us had this 'searched' on it."
There's also: 1) You were telling others about your violent conflicts with the victim, who was your husband, and 2) A doctor you were having an affair with at the time wrote a perscription for a rarely used incapacitating drug that could have been used to facilitate the that was filled at a pharmacy you had done a search for two days before the murder, etc.
I can't get to the link for TFA....how did they find SHE did these searches?
From several computers that McGuire had access to. A few relevant bits from TFA:
Jennifer Seymour, who worked for the State Police digital technology unit, testified thismorning how she examined the digital contents of computers and hand held devices obtained as part of the investigation. . . . Seymour, now employed by the U.S. Department of Defense, testified how digital investigators can trace activity on a computer, including information the user has deleted.
She testified that she isolated data that was accessed in the weeks leading up to the murder, by inserting the keyword "search," which showed activity by Google and MSN search engines, with the searches center-ing on poisons and gun laws. . . . Seymour said that on Sept. 8, 2005, the State Police obtained eight computers, three laptops and eight hand-held devices as part of the murder investigation.
In her testimony today, she said she examined the contents of a computer obtained at the office of McGuire's attorney, though she did not identify the name of the attorney. She also said she tested a home computer used by the Woodbridge couple, and a home computer used by her parents, who now live in Barnegat.
Did you ever notice that the Creation story in Genesis gets the order wrong?
If you take Genesis literally, that may be a problem (probably not, its fairly easy, if you can take it literally rather than paying attention to whether that interpretation fits your intuitive understanding and experience, to believe the day/night first, then sun order problem.). But then, if you take Genesis literally, you have the bigger problem that there are two different creation stories which feature incompatible orders of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis.
Of course, lots of Christian groups, including the largest, don't hold to biblical literalism as a doctrine. Fundamentalists may be a particularly large, noisy group in the US, but they are hardly the whole of Christianity. (Or even the largest Christian group in the US.)
It seems to me that accepting anything on blind faith is pretty much the antithesis of science.
Science is not a belief system concerning ultimate truth, but a process to obtain pragmatically useful models. It has little to say about ultimate truth directly on its own terms (though some people have faith that it will provide that kind of insight).
There is no necessarily conflict between faith and science; though there is certainly a danger when one is mispresented as the other.
Actually, the "Windows Tax" gets offset by vendors paying the manufacturers to install all kinds of demo crap on the Windows computers they sell. Remove the Windows Tax, and you also remove the Windows Tax Credit... A PC with a free OS will prolly cost more than the one with Windows on it.
Why? Lots of the demo crap on Windows computers is for online services, etc. Some is for commercial applications. Linux users can use commercial online services, and commercial applciations exist for Linux. Why wouldn't a set of Linux-using eyeballs be worth just as much as a set of Windows-using eyeballs as a demo target? Certainly, in many cases, they would be different product demos, but so what?
Why is it the government's job to make sure people can still watch TV when the television converts to a new standard, but it wasn't the government's job to buy a new CD player for everybody when the CD took over from Vinyl records?
While I don't necessarily agree this is a good use of government funds, the situations are not parallel. Its not as if the government prohibited the use of vinyl to distribute music and mandate the future recordings be distributed only in CD form. However, in TV there is a government mandate for the switch over.
Also, government didn't use recorded media for emergency messages the way they do OTA TV broadcasts; so there is a public interest in maintaining access through the switchover.
Or, better, should specify that software acquired for use by public agencies must both be open-source and use open standard formats by a date certain, except where no suitable alternative to fill a need exists and sponsoring a conforming new system would be prohibitive.
Their "old binary cruft" preserves backwards compatibility. Are you against that for some reason?
No, I think he is against the failure to document the expected behavior instead of merely mandating mimicing of legacy applications behavior without specification of what that behavior is.
One would facilitate implementation. One is a barrier to implementation. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, chose the latter, either through incompetence or desire to produce a standard that could not practically be implemented by third parties.
Where is King's Quest, a game that is, literally, one of the first graphical games at all, and launched an entire genre?
King's Quest wasn't even close to "one of the first graphical games at all", even in the adventure genre (Ultima I, for instance, considerably predated it.) It might be one of the first 3d adventure games (though not one of the earliest 3d games, plenty of those earlier too.)
But, certainly military subs have been figuring out their location for quite some time.
What is the current mechanism of position-fixing used for subs? Or is it more of the 'traditional' type of navigation where you know where you started, what direction you travelled, how fast and how long?
The current mechanism is, best as I know, inertial navigation systems periodically recalibrated by GPS when the submarine is at a depth to use GPS, with dead reckoning, as always, the ultimate fallback.
Certainly, Tom Clancy's Submarine of, IIRC, about a decade-and-a-half to two ago (I'm too lazy to Google for the date right now) commented on the space saved in Los Angeles SSNs by using GPS instead of older, bulkier navigation instruments.
Slashdot Mirror
Since there wasn't anyone recording observations of the last supervolcano eruption, and we don't have information to reconstruct a reasonably detailed picture of what goes on, that's pretty much anyone's guess, though people have been saying for years that changes observed in Yellowstone might be leading signs of an impending eruption.
If it does erupt, though, maybe we'll be able to save enough records to give our descendants a better clue next time, but that won't be much help to anyone around when it happens.
There wasn't a run-on in that post. There was a misspelling in one sentence and a dropped word in another, but no run-on.
An extremely long sentence, sure, but that's not the same thing.
Um, perhaps in the RIAA cases. Here, the evidence was drawn directly from history files, etc., from several computers the defendant had access, and tied to suspicious prescriptions drawn by the defendant's lover and the clear history of physical violence between the defendant and the defendant's spouse that became the victim of murder. Its not just some kind of IP matching from a file sharing request or search engine serving as the sole evidence of guilt.
Its not the same kind of evidence, its not the same kind of case, its not the same context, its not, really, at all similar except that computers are involved in some way.
PICS can enable filters to screen out porn as effectively as any other solution that can be implemented in the real world. Further, more importantly, it can enable users with control over their own local systems (parents, for instance) to flexibly tailor what they want to filter for and whose descriptions they choose to accept.
True, but PICS can be used to whitelist as well as to blacklist.
Its possible, as a parent with control over your own computer or network, to set up a PICS system to only allow access to material you've personally reviewed. Or to impose any looser system (such as having received an acceptable—to you—description from a trusted third-party reviewer) of whitelisting you prefer. It may be that such systems are most frequently used as negative, rather than positive-choice systems, but that's not a limitation of the system.
The thing is the political advocates pretending to be seeking to "help" parents "protect" their children all too often really want to impose their own personal view of what should be seen on everyone, adult and child alike. They don't want to enhance parental control, and that's why they don't champion technologies that give parents more effective choices. They want to simply make it more expensive to provide or access content they don't like, so that by so interfering with the market they will marginalize the content and make it less available to anyone. They oppose choice, freedom, and parental judgement rather than supporting it.
That would suck.
However, that's not what happened here. The searches aren't the only basis for the prosecution; the prior history of violence between the victim and the defendant, the affair, the suspicious prescription written by the defendant's lover and filled at a location of the pharmacy for which the defendant a location search immediately before the prescription was filled and immediately before the murder, etc.
...its circumstantial evidence. Which isn't unusual, most evidence presented in almost every criminal case is circumstantial. The issues of interpretation that apply here are pretty much the same issues that apply to any other evidence (even, often, physical evidence.) That someone who looked like you was seen committing a crime doesn't mean it was you, it could have been someone with a strong resemblance. That DNA with a strong match to yours was found doesn't mean that you left it, it could be the other 1 in (say) 100 million people whose DNA would match. That's why we have trials and juries to weigh the credibility of evidence, etc.
I don't see the particular problem with this kind of evidence. Perhaps you could explain it rather than "illustrating" it with an example which would be equally possible with many kinds of utterly uncontroversial evidence that has been accepted in court forever.
No, they aren't. The standard (probable cause) for both is the same.
During the actual search of the house, yes, one may be deprived of the use of it. Usually, evidence that may be seized from the house is not integral to and may be seized without seizing the house itself; this less the case with your other example (cars) which, when evidence is found during a search, will more likely be seized themselves, and even less the case with computers, which if evidence is found on them, the physical evidence itself will often be inseparable from fairly critical components of the computer.
This is wrong in many ways: first, the toxins that the plant produces as natural pesticides do end up in the environment, though they may do so less than some other artificial pesticides. Second, genes from GM crops do spread in the environment, to fields other than where they are planted, etc.
The study on rats was sponsored by Monsanto to prove that there was no cause for concern about human toxicity, so that the product could get to market. If Monsanto fudged the results, then there is no indication whatsoever that the product is safe for human consumption.
Once again, the only indication that the corn is safe for humans is the rat study that Greenpeace says Monsanto fudged. This isn't about rat safety, its about human safety.
Not all business entities (nor even all involved in agricultural biotechnology) are public traded corporations.
Forms with narrower ownership, including closely-held private corporations whose owners shared interest is not limited to maximum financial returns don't necessarily have an obligation to the shareholders that would support mass poisoning.
Genetic modification fundamentally involves altering proteins.
Well, since you clearly don't understand what genetic modifications do, or how proteins work, it is unsurprising that you can't see anything here.
A protein can contain the same amino acids as a non-toxic protein and be a toxin. A protein can even contain the same amino acids in the same order as a safe protein and be harmful (that's what produces "mad cow" and other prion-caused disorders.)
No, they have to convince that judge that there is probable cause to believe evidence will be found on it; probable cause is not certainty that evidence is there.
Uh, yeah, police get search warrants for suspects cars and houses and all the time, too.
It'd be pretty hard to make a if the Google searching was all there was, because while its evidence from which the jury could infer that a particular person did the search, any one of the searches alone wouldn't prove much.
OTOH, when a number of computers you have access to are used to search for certain things that might relate to plans to commit a murder, when a doctor that is also your lover writes a suspicious perscription that might be used to facilitate the murder that is filled just before the murder at a location of a pharmacy that you had just done a location search for, when the person killed is your husband that you've been having violent conflicts with immediately prior to the murder, then its not just about the searches anymore.
Uh, if you read TFA, you might notice they did look into more than "the computer you us had this 'searched' on it."
There's also:
1) You were telling others about your violent conflicts with the victim, who was your husband, and
2) A doctor you were having an affair with at the time wrote a perscription for a rarely used incapacitating drug that could have been used to facilitate the that was filled at a pharmacy you had done a search for two days before the murder, etc.
Its not just the searches alone.
From several computers that McGuire had access to. A few relevant bits from TFA:
If you take Genesis literally, that may be a problem (probably not, its fairly easy, if you can take it literally rather than paying attention to whether that interpretation fits your intuitive understanding and experience, to believe the day/night first, then sun order problem.). But then, if you take Genesis literally, you have the bigger problem that there are two different creation stories which feature incompatible orders of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis.
Of course, lots of Christian groups, including the largest, don't hold to biblical literalism as a doctrine. Fundamentalists may be a particularly large, noisy group in the US, but they are hardly the whole of Christianity. (Or even the largest Christian group in the US.)
Science is not a belief system concerning ultimate truth, but a process to obtain pragmatically useful models. It has little to say about ultimate truth directly on its own terms (though some people have faith that it will provide that kind of insight).
There is no necessarily conflict between faith and science; though there is certainly a danger when one is mispresented as the other.
Why? Lots of the demo crap on Windows computers is for online services, etc. Some is for commercial applications. Linux users can use commercial online services, and commercial applciations exist for Linux. Why wouldn't a set of Linux-using eyeballs be worth just as much as a set of Windows-using eyeballs as a demo target? Certainly, in many cases, they would be different product demos, but so what?
While I don't necessarily agree this is a good use of government funds, the situations are not parallel. Its not as if the government prohibited the use of vinyl to distribute music and mandate the future recordings be distributed only in CD form. However, in TV there is a government mandate for the switch over.
Also, government didn't use recorded media for emergency messages the way they do OTA TV broadcasts; so there is a public interest in maintaining access through the switchover.
Or, better, should specify that software acquired for use by public agencies must both be open-source and use open standard formats by a date certain, except where no suitable alternative to fill a need exists and sponsoring a conforming new system would be prohibitive.
No, I think he is against the failure to document the expected behavior instead of merely mandating mimicing of legacy applications behavior without specification of what that behavior is.
One would facilitate implementation. One is a barrier to implementation. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, chose the latter, either through incompetence or desire to produce a standard that could not practically be implemented by third parties.
King's Quest wasn't even close to "one of the first graphical games at all", even in the adventure genre (Ultima I, for instance, considerably predated it.) It might be one of the first 3d adventure games (though not one of the earliest 3d games, plenty of those earlier too.)
The current mechanism is, best as I know, inertial navigation systems periodically recalibrated by GPS when the submarine is at a depth to use GPS, with dead reckoning, as always, the ultimate fallback.
Certainly, Tom Clancy's Submarine of, IIRC, about a decade-and-a-half to two ago (I'm too lazy to Google for the date right now) commented on the space saved in Los Angeles SSNs by using GPS instead of older, bulkier navigation instruments.
...I guess "underwater" is the new "on the internet" when it comes to patents.