Attacks are attacks from the perspective of the attacker, or else they really suck at it. And you might find causing of harm to be part of the meaning of attack.
You're so busy moralizing and accusing others of it so that you can be on the other side than them that you failed to consider that somebody might simply find value in the correct meaning of words and in communicating honestly from an objective basis instead of just spewing subjectivity from opinion.
And yes, the TOR project is there to give "back doors" to "good guys," assuming you agree that the local oppressive government being unable to locate them to punish them for speech is a "back door." I think that is rather specious, personally. I think it is generally agreed that people engaging in political free speech and trying not to get in trouble for it are "good guys." Even if you think they're bad, you'd have to acknowledge that in general language they will be talked about as being good.
Wishing that the purpose of TOR was privacy, instead of free (political) speech is just technical ignorance. It is historical fact, it is not opinion. Nobody cares if it offends you, certainly not me. But when people are whining about how their fake privacy isn't being respected by people using the tool as it was intended (a tool to expand certain western political values), they're just being loud and lame.
Also, when they talk about this thing being "like" (or falsely using the word "fingerprint of" when they really mean "the technique used by") what CMU did, lets remember that CMU helped bust some pedos. That is who the actual "bad guys" in question are when discussing CMU. And somebody, maybe them or more likely somebody else, then also used the same technique to catch other criminals.
So, are you proposing that security researchers who won't take money from the government for white-hat work is the majority, or even a significant faction?
I would propose instead that even the ones who don't really like this will very carefully limit any complaints to hair-splitting details. They certainly won't refer to the government as The Feds, or call service work of identifying online parties based on existing (unrelated) research to be an "exploit." For one thing, calling it an exploit would cause them to lose a lot of professional reputation. For another, selling exploits to the government is a large part of what white-hat security researchers (that's the ones that work in academia, to be sure) do. I mean, that is the top-shelf stuff of what they do that involves having a "career" in the industry instead of just being teachers and summertime contractors. To the extent that their peers look over the fence because of this, it is probably fond gazes, maybe a few extra resumes get mailed or something.
As far as coordinating security improvements goes, the industry is used to working with even black-hats, to the extent that many of the black-hats are good-intentioned security activists who are breaking into stuff to piss people off into securing it. Even when it comes to commercially interested black hats, there is a willingness in the industry to pay them for information, for example. Extremists who view working with the government as being worse than working with criminals... I hate to break it to you, but people in that category are not exactly lining up to participate in coordinated security improvements.
And ultimately, people who care the most about security improvements are sysadmin types who do not care who did what or who coordinated what. CMU reputation as an institution is what they'll look at to decide if they can trust them to still be around in the future. That's the part they care about; will the improvement be in long-term stable use, or is it an imperfect improvement with a lot of feature thrash or potential abandonment in the future? And it turns out to be "above their pay grade" anyways.
I bet it's pretty ugly in terms of battery life/CPU on mobile
It is likely to be nearly free, because the 2d video hardware handles moving the squares around. From a CPU perspective it is just re-ordering an array and making a few API calls to the video driver. The standard fiddling of the DOM that modern websites do with JS is way worse.
I always just assume that the photographer doesn't want the unwashed masses to see their work, so I oblige them and find content that wants to be Free. Content wants to be Free, but not all content. Humans want to be Free, but not all humans. Free humans should use Free content. Everybody wins! Even elitist-DRM-guy, who is protected from the limelight.
If you believe that Federal law applies all the time, you're crazy. Read more, spew less.
Federal law doesn't even come up unless I cross a state line with it, or at least conspire to.
The funny part is, the Federal Government agrees with me. Check their legal filings regarding the challenges to the Colorado law. I recommend SCOTUSblog for a high-level review. They have even adjusted the federal policy about marijuana marketing to make clear that small quantities legal under state law can be locally marketed.
"Attacks on TOR" or the unmasking of criminals abusing a free speech platform by building a black market inside it?
I don't approve of the drug war, but I'm not convinced that black is white whenever a drug dealer gets arrested. How is it an attack on the tool they were abusing? If they were using TOR to engage in anonymous speech about how awful drug prohibition is and discussing their efforts to get the law changed, and they were arrested for the content of their speech, then that would clearly be an attack on TOR. Or if the researchers had used some sort of exploit to gain control of somebody else's computers, and used that control to get the information, that would clearly be an attack. But tipping off the police with information about the identity of a criminal? Even if you dislike the law, it seems obvious that isn't an "attack" at all, especially not when the context is computer security research.
CMU is a high-profile institution, their reputation won't be negatively impacted in any way.
To believe their reputation would suffer you should believe that the general public would view their activities negatively. It shouldn't matter at all what your own personal opinion of their actions are. If you dislike what they do, that doesn't mean the public does, or that they should be concerned the impression would be negative.
I think most people would view this as them doing one of the tasks that security research is for, even if there are others with different color hats in the niche who might disagree. Don't expect an educational institution to take stands against the government on your behalf; they never agreed with your position, and whatever the government is lawfully doing is going to be seen as "white hat" work by, lets see, almost all of society.
That people who disagree have an echo chamber should not alter their analysis about what the standard, default public position will be.
TOR was created and supported by the US government to encourage free speech in oppressive locations. From the view of many academics, using it for criminal activity subverts its purpose and is harmful to free speech. If the drug war is absurd, that does not change that calculation for most people. TOR is absolutely not viewed by most people as being intended as an anti-government tool of anarchy; arresting users for non-speech-related crimes in no way tarnishes TOR, or the researchers involved. That criminals have made such extensive use of it is the blemish on the reputations of all the researchers whose work involves TOR. Turnabout is exactly what might improve the reputations of these people.
Don't confuse disagreement with being in a silent majority, and don't let an echo chamber convince you of it either. CMU researchers got paid by the government to do legal stuff. That will enhance their reputation. There is no way to avoid it.
Right, when you keep it functional and don't make changes, the level of importance of the so-called "problems" ends up being that some people complain that a feature is given an extra line in a pull-down menu. Oh the horrors, instead of clicking one word in a menu, you click a different word in the same exact menu. This proves how awesome they do at not fiddle-faddling my interface to meet the whims of the silly. There are real reasons why some users like that feature; it communicates function to them. It doesn't harm me for it to be one way, or the other way.
Reality: GIMP is a professional tool that anybody can use because it is Free Software. Their response to complaints is that they are serious professional users themselves, and they don't want to fiddle-faddle their software to pander to the masses. If you don't use it the way they use it, either write a plugin that changes it to your way, or quit whining. There are lots of options. That they don't care what you think is the feature that prevents them from making excess changes, because they're not new and not trying to make a name for themselves by changing what was there. It shows the real value in a long-term maintainer culture instead of "community driven" culture.
The problem is that UX/UI people like to invent new and exciting stuff, while they should be making stuff familiar and boring.
An interface that a user doesn't notice while using it, is an interface done right.
Damn straight! I hate it when these jerks start trying to fluff my interface, or massage my paradigm. Leave it alone, it is a tool. That is why I chose open source, because I just want the tool that does the thing, and if I want it to do something else, I can add it.
First they start diddling the paradigms and they say, "oh you can still use the old one" and then when a critical security patch is required, they say, "oh gosh, well you can just upgrade if you want it to be secure."
Nothing goes to hell faster than a popular project. Give me a boring project that is grudgingly maintained with a few lines of bug fixes every few years. I'm still using gimp, it still works the same as in the 90s, and it still does all the stuff I need. I can still write plugins, now in new languages too. And it still looks the same way that people said was "ugly" and all sorts of nasty things. And the features are still in the same places. Being "ugly," for whatever reason people thought, never once stopped me from getting beautiful results with it.
Fact 1: Your opinion that there is no difference between index cards and computers is ludicrous. Any such opinion that violates basic facts is too stupid to ever be considered.
I'm not going to read past that, or comment except to say that if you were ever to decide to go back to school and get a CS degree, you would be taught how to execute code using 3x5 cards. That you think it is impossible is hilarious, and that you call the idea names is even funnier.
File that in the, "if you don't know, don't comment" drawer.
Nonsense, just because you don't know what gate it is doesn't mean that it is both. It would have to have already collapsed to one or the other in order to compute anything.
Until it interacts with something (what you describe as being "observed," though that is specific to inputs and this has outputs too) it doesn't have inputs or outputs and you not only can't prove that it is calculating anything, you can't even make a basic argument that there is a reason to believe that it is capable of calculation. Just as, holding a rock in your hand that has a high silicon content, with a little copper mixed in, doesn't mean you have a computer that is calculating everything that could be calculated with the devices you could make from those ingredients. Or put another way, it isn't that you don't know where something is until you interact with it, it is that it doesn't even have a specific location until something interacts with it. It is spread out over the probabilities. NAND and NOR gates don't operate on probabilities; they operate on achieved electromagnetic properties. Nothing at all can be happening until it is one gate or the other.
Not that that is what the thing in TFA is. This is more about a type of logic gate that can connect to what they're using as quantum logic gates, and also what they're using as pointers, which you could think of as being like a quantum system bus for communication between different parts of the machine. Also note that the part they just demonstrated is entirely deterministic. It is sortof analogous to Harvard architecture microcontrollers, which have separate data areas for program code and data. Quantum computers as being researched by academia use different types of logic structures for storing memory and doing calculations, so they have this separation inherently. This is a special logic gate that can connect to both. So presumably this will end up being part of some kind of programmable register with branching capabilities.
While your comment was clearly in jest, what it might actually be like is that you set up a complex calculation, expose that system of gates to this gate, the whole thing collapses at the average speed of the photons exchanged, and the branching based on the result happened that fast; literally as the calculation is "being" made, the branch associated with the answer is being activated. As close to instantly as humans can detect, minus whatever considerable lag and blanking periods are required before triggering these events, of course. Quantum computers might not have or need branch prediction.
I didn't say it, I don't support it, and it is a lie that it was the situation described. You can say that doesn't amount to a "straw man," but it is a lie all the same. You stand by it, but you can't stand by a lie about what somebody else is supporting even after they not only disclaim it, but inform you that they never did support it.
You attempted to argue from absurdity, but it is a straw man because I never supported the position you extended to absurdity. Your spillway situation has nothing at all to do with what was discussed, is not analogous, and seems designed solely to imply people with an opposing position are trying to kill somebody. The only relevant part of all that is that you're telling lies to make others look bad.
I switched from Power Bar to Clif Bar over a decade ago, but that was close to my first thought, but I assumed it was some sort of promotional product with Power Bar advertising. And they do describe it as a promotional product, so it is ambiguous.
Lithium batteries to charge other lithium batteries, it seems a bit silly to me from the start. This is what the people who buy whatever they're offered for sale end up with; they have devices without removable batteries that don't last long enough for their uses, and so they use these battery batteries.
Batteries included, battery batteries not included.
The idea that there is "a bill" before it is voted on is silly, because it is changing from one minute to the next.
And yet you called it "it". Plenty of things change from minute to minute (such as people) yet we don't have any trouble hanging names on them either. This is just bad philosophical reasoning to support a thoughtless, callous insult.
If you're down to arguing over the definition of "it," you've already lost. That is the size of your objection, why do you not simply concede the point? LOL No, calling a changeable thing "it" is not any problem. That is a very standard and correct use of "it." Whereas, a "bill" is a certain type of thing that doesn't actually exist until it has been passed; it is only a proposal, a prototype. A bill that is still changing already has a number, and the proposal is a thing that gets talked about; but the actual content hasn't formed yet. Odd that you don't understand this part, and yet are accusing me of "bad philosophical reasoning." Which is an extreme insult, and yet in the same sentence you accuse me of a "thoughtless, callous insult" but you don't even say what it was. All of that said, the "a" in "a bill" is important. It precludes your analysis.
And given that the eventual Obamacare bill was a pile of nasty crap, concern over what was in the bill turned out to be warranted.
"Obamacare" passed, and is popular. Concern didn't "turn out to be warranted," the same people who expressed "concern" continued to, and none of their actual predictions of doom happened. It tells everybody what your political category is, but it tells us nothing about the Affordable Care Act. Who are these magic elves that determine the concerns were "warranted?" The doomsayers made specific predictions of doom that did not happen. The people who expressed concerns that didn't include predictions of doom were largely liberals who wanted a law that went a lot further.
How would you feel about "we must open the spillway to find out if anyone will be drowned!"? I know that you would soon be known as "the defendant" and you would not have a good time in court if you did that.
I would know it as a straw man as soon as you said it, and I would weigh its true value and consider the implications about the intent of the speaker to be seen as having said something rather than saying something relevant.
You would vote "no" on everything, government would shut down if other voted the same way, and eventually after a few years of not funding any military Mexico would invade.
Sounds like we ought to call your bluff on that. Personally, I would love the obstruction of bad and unaccountable law that this would create. When the US creates laws and regulations that each grow faster than someone can read and understand those, then something needs to be done to slow the process down.
It isn't "my bluff." That's just... LOL WOW.
You probably also will accuse bankers of having each invented the banking system.
You may disagree, but if you think there was any original research in what I said then you do not yet even know if you agree or disagree, because you've never looked into these issues.
If you want to disagree with not only the mainstream analysis, but with the next dozen opinions too, fine. But it is on you to know what the basic beliefs about the field of study are before deciding that your own personal idea is better.
And as far as calling bluffs, you only waved your hands and said that I am wrong. I call your bluff; I say you don't really have any idea about the subject. You talk about laws and regulations, but avoid the budget, which requires annual laws authorizing the government to spend money. Explain how you are right, by getting specific about what you claim I am wrong about. Don't just wave your hands and say there will be less bad laws; how will you cause the necessary budgets to get passed with his proposed system of voting "no" on anything that hadn't been static for 2 weeks on a non-negotiable basis. If you get enough of Congress to vote your way, but there are still other Americans whose reps vote differently, how are you going to negotiate and pass a budget?
And the laws don't "grow faster than someone can read and understand [them]," that is just a small-minded lie. My business is vertically integrated across multiple industries, including electronics, and it is not very hard to understand the rules. The problem people have is that they adopt a sort of South Park "they took er jobs" attitude, and that creates a distortion field where they can't learn about rules, because rules are written by hippies, and therefor they can't be understood; and only hippies would even want to; therefore it is total government oppression that they got fined by OSHA for something listed on the one-page version of the rules for their industry. I hear morons every week telling me how OSHA rules won't let them do their work, and I actually look those up when people say it. They've been wrong 100% of the time. That's right; 100% of the complaints by whiners about how OSHA makes their lives impossible turn out to be horseshit. Just blatant horse shit where the rule is easy and simple and common sense, and the complainers don't even know what the rule is before they decide it "doesn't make any sense." How can they know without reading the rules? Hippies.
Why should somebody who doesn't like to read about regulations be able to read them all and know what they are? Is human knowledge in general sized so that you can know all the human knowledge and systems and rules for different situations in other fields? If I hire an engineer, does he know all the voluntary "best practices" for his field? No? Can he memorize all the different safety considerations (that he would agree to, lets limit it to those) that might need to consider on different types of projects? No! Even less important, voluntary rules are too numerous for an individual to memorize. And yet, if they are well categorized and recorded, using some sort of predictable system to locate the rules, then they can look up what they need for each situation. All the same stuff applies to doctors, programmers, pilots, lawyers, politicians. In the case of the law, and of government regulations, there are easily searchable online databases of the rules. It is easy to find the rules that apply to what you're doing, if you know how to read technical language. And if you don't understand the language they use for that, you won't understand the rules even if they're so few that you memorized their words.
I'm not the average consumer, by far, but once a company does crap like this I don't care if they claim to reverse course. That they were willing to harm customers before they realized the customers would fight them on it, that is not improved by saying, "gosh, OK, we won't do it." There is no way to trust them. That they were willing to do it more worrisome than if they are doing it already, because these types of changes to existing products can make a past purchase useless. It is the willing-change-that-harms-customers that needs to be punished, not the specific product feature.
They may or may not try to rerun the same gimmick, but it doesn't matter. They'll do something as bad, or worse. It is the nature of the "smart crap" product category; if their theory of business allowed them to do this the first time, after having carefully considered it, then they'll keep doing it because they'll still have the same business theories running their company.
Not quite right. The stop-gap spending bills are to "keep the government running," and the Omnibus is to agree to terms to stop having to fund things temporarily.
Temporary funding is much cleaner, since there is little value in temporary rules changes.
If the Omnibus sucks, it can be vetoed or get stuck in the reconciliation committee and government won't shut down without separate refusal to pass temporary spending bills.
You would vote "no" on everything, government would shut down if other voted the same way, and eventually after a few years of not funding any military Mexico would invade.
It sounds nice, if you have no idea how the US government is organized. But eventually when you find out that the average voter wants you to do your job and pass a budget, you'll realize you can't have it all your way, and you'll have to compromise or be replaced by the voters with somebody who will. And once you realize that you have to compromise, because we don't have a dictator-for-life, then you'll eventually have to come to terms with the fact that Congress has too many representatives and interests and opinions to come up with a proposed text in advance of having negotiated it. It works fine that way for buying a used car; you can agree orally what the price will be, and then go into the office and write it up, and you sometimes will still have agreement when the contract is printed. But when you're dealing with hundreds of people who want different things for their own districts, and don't want what the other guy wants, then it is just too complicated to attempt to negotiate that without proposing actual texts. And then you realize there is still too many people; you can't read 300 different complete proposals with different details, and it is too much even to delegate. That is why the current system exists. You start with a basic text that is somebody's idea, and then different amendments get added with changes. Simplistic hand-wavy folsky stuff like you suggest would not simplify the process. You'd have the entire current process, but instead of voting on the bill, they'd be voting to freeze the language and schedule another vote in 2 weeks. It isn't clear that that improves the process at all. It certainly makes it impossible for Congress to act quickly when required.
There are ways to "force ill behaved [people] to behave in a manner consistent with [your preference]," the problem is we won't agree on what "ill behaved" means. That road has been explored, and in fact it is what our system is designed to prevent.;)
So you are on board with legislatures essentially rubberstamping whatever piece of legislation makes it to the chamber floor? Because that's basically what you just said.
THat's the thing, you hear the word "Pelosi" and you're trying to figure out who is on what side so you'll know what to believe. I was talking about the false accusation that idiots make about that particular comment. See, thing is, I actually went and watched the clip of her whole statement the first time that came up. It is a factual thing about how the US Congress works. Knowing how the current system works isn't predicated on agreeing that it is perfect. There is actually no position-taking at all there. The reality of the current system and how it is designed is the same for everybody. Disliking Pelosi isn't magical thinking that makes you somehow live in a country with a different political system. That you think that there is something to tease her about there simply shows you don't know what she's talking about. Ignorance is not wisdom, sorry.
And for the record, no that isn't "what I said." What I said contained no opinions at all. You don't get special facts, the facts are the same for you and for me. You disliking Pelosi doesn't mean she is wrong if she says the sky is blue, but you would be instantly down a rabbit hole arguing about what "blue" means and accusing anybody who agrees with her of agreeing with anything else she said.
Even if you're 100% against the system of government we have now, she was still describing it. She wasn't making a proposal for how to do things, or giving an opinion. She was trying to explain to idiot reporters how stupid some of their questions were. Which of course is a fool's errand, but IME it provides some small amount of satisfaction in the moment, and the idiots will believe whatever nonsense they already believed either way. The same idiocy is here in this thread; people who don't even comprehend how the system works, but have lots of ideas about specific changes they think they would like. Of course, they don't actually have any fucking clue if they would like those changes, because they don't know how it works already. So from their perspective, nothing would have changed; government would do stuff, and they would still have no idea what was being done, by who, in what way, or to what effect.
Assume that my comment was literally correct, and then parse for the understanding that makes sense. You'll figure out what I said a lot more quickly that way. Did you think I didn't know about the expected expansion of the Sun? The thing is, if I made the 5-year-old level mistake that you presume, there would be no content left in my statement. It makes way more sense as the correct statement that I made than it does as the misunderstanding you imply.
What is different about a life form "falling into" the Sun, or an inanimate object doing so? In the context of conservation of energy, is there a difference? Why would I have mentioned non-living things being the sum of the parts?
If nobody read it, how do you know it doesn't do what you want?
And if nobody read it, and you've been told it is bad... do you not see any problem with believing what these people are telling you?!
I suspect a bunch of people read it, and they're trying to manipulate the critics into sounding like idiots by using flamebait tactics. They probably even have an aide that calls up some idiot bloviator from the "other side" to tip them off that they just slipped something in that "nobody has read" to get the blog posts going.
And if nobody in Congress ever does read it, they won't succeed at creating a compromise bill, and it will never reach the President anyways. If nobody reads it, there are few worries.
Slashdot Mirror
I got tired of waiting for Perl 6 and switched to Ruby... 11 years ago.
I think the only reason would be, "I use Perl and I like the new stuff." If that isn't you, this probably isn't your stop.
Good point. And SCSI was intended to be sexy rather than scuzzy. Nerds love etymology, but they know not to honor it. ;)
Attacks are attacks from the perspective of the attacker, or else they really suck at it. And you might find causing of harm to be part of the meaning of attack.
You're so busy moralizing and accusing others of it so that you can be on the other side than them that you failed to consider that somebody might simply find value in the correct meaning of words and in communicating honestly from an objective basis instead of just spewing subjectivity from opinion.
And yes, the TOR project is there to give "back doors" to "good guys," assuming you agree that the local oppressive government being unable to locate them to punish them for speech is a "back door." I think that is rather specious, personally. I think it is generally agreed that people engaging in political free speech and trying not to get in trouble for it are "good guys." Even if you think they're bad, you'd have to acknowledge that in general language they will be talked about as being good.
Wishing that the purpose of TOR was privacy, instead of free (political) speech is just technical ignorance. It is historical fact, it is not opinion. Nobody cares if it offends you, certainly not me. But when people are whining about how their fake privacy isn't being respected by people using the tool as it was intended (a tool to expand certain western political values), they're just being loud and lame.
Also, when they talk about this thing being "like" (or falsely using the word "fingerprint of" when they really mean "the technique used by") what CMU did, lets remember that CMU helped bust some pedos. That is who the actual "bad guys" in question are when discussing CMU. And somebody, maybe them or more likely somebody else, then also used the same technique to catch other criminals.
So, are you proposing that security researchers who won't take money from the government for white-hat work is the majority, or even a significant faction?
I would propose instead that even the ones who don't really like this will very carefully limit any complaints to hair-splitting details. They certainly won't refer to the government as The Feds, or call service work of identifying online parties based on existing (unrelated) research to be an "exploit." For one thing, calling it an exploit would cause them to lose a lot of professional reputation. For another, selling exploits to the government is a large part of what white-hat security researchers (that's the ones that work in academia, to be sure) do. I mean, that is the top-shelf stuff of what they do that involves having a "career" in the industry instead of just being teachers and summertime contractors. To the extent that their peers look over the fence because of this, it is probably fond gazes, maybe a few extra resumes get mailed or something.
As far as coordinating security improvements goes, the industry is used to working with even black-hats, to the extent that many of the black-hats are good-intentioned security activists who are breaking into stuff to piss people off into securing it. Even when it comes to commercially interested black hats, there is a willingness in the industry to pay them for information, for example. Extremists who view working with the government as being worse than working with criminals... I hate to break it to you, but people in that category are not exactly lining up to participate in coordinated security improvements.
And ultimately, people who care the most about security improvements are sysadmin types who do not care who did what or who coordinated what. CMU reputation as an institution is what they'll look at to decide if they can trust them to still be around in the future. That's the part they care about; will the improvement be in long-term stable use, or is it an imperfect improvement with a lot of feature thrash or potential abandonment in the future? And it turns out to be "above their pay grade" anyways.
History, or at least English, also teaches that etymology is just for nerds and is not instructive of meaning.
I bet it's pretty ugly in terms of battery life/CPU on mobile
It is likely to be nearly free, because the 2d video hardware handles moving the squares around. From a CPU perspective it is just re-ordering an array and making a few API calls to the video driver. The standard fiddling of the DOM that modern websites do with JS is way worse.
I always just assume that the photographer doesn't want the unwashed masses to see their work, so I oblige them and find content that wants to be Free. Content wants to be Free, but not all content. Humans want to be Free, but not all humans. Free humans should use Free content. Everybody wins! Even elitist-DRM-guy, who is protected from the limelight.
Sorry, false pedant, in this case "Javascript" is just a colloquialism for ECMAScript.
If you believe that Federal law applies all the time, you're crazy. Read more, spew less.
Federal law doesn't even come up unless I cross a state line with it, or at least conspire to.
The funny part is, the Federal Government agrees with me. Check their legal filings regarding the challenges to the Colorado law. I recommend SCOTUSblog for a high-level review. They have even adjusted the federal policy about marijuana marketing to make clear that small quantities legal under state law can be locally marketed.
"Attacks on TOR" or the unmasking of criminals abusing a free speech platform by building a black market inside it?
I don't approve of the drug war, but I'm not convinced that black is white whenever a drug dealer gets arrested. How is it an attack on the tool they were abusing? If they were using TOR to engage in anonymous speech about how awful drug prohibition is and discussing their efforts to get the law changed, and they were arrested for the content of their speech, then that would clearly be an attack on TOR. Or if the researchers had used some sort of exploit to gain control of somebody else's computers, and used that control to get the information, that would clearly be an attack. But tipping off the police with information about the identity of a criminal? Even if you dislike the law, it seems obvious that isn't an "attack" at all, especially not when the context is computer security research.
CMU is a high-profile institution, their reputation won't be negatively impacted in any way.
To believe their reputation would suffer you should believe that the general public would view their activities negatively. It shouldn't matter at all what your own personal opinion of their actions are. If you dislike what they do, that doesn't mean the public does, or that they should be concerned the impression would be negative.
I think most people would view this as them doing one of the tasks that security research is for, even if there are others with different color hats in the niche who might disagree. Don't expect an educational institution to take stands against the government on your behalf; they never agreed with your position, and whatever the government is lawfully doing is going to be seen as "white hat" work by, lets see, almost all of society.
That people who disagree have an echo chamber should not alter their analysis about what the standard, default public position will be.
TOR was created and supported by the US government to encourage free speech in oppressive locations. From the view of many academics, using it for criminal activity subverts its purpose and is harmful to free speech. If the drug war is absurd, that does not change that calculation for most people. TOR is absolutely not viewed by most people as being intended as an anti-government tool of anarchy; arresting users for non-speech-related crimes in no way tarnishes TOR, or the researchers involved. That criminals have made such extensive use of it is the blemish on the reputations of all the researchers whose work involves TOR. Turnabout is exactly what might improve the reputations of these people.
Don't confuse disagreement with being in a silent majority, and don't let an echo chamber convince you of it either. CMU researchers got paid by the government to do legal stuff. That will enhance their reputation. There is no way to avoid it.
Right, when you keep it functional and don't make changes, the level of importance of the so-called "problems" ends up being that some people complain that a feature is given an extra line in a pull-down menu. Oh the horrors, instead of clicking one word in a menu, you click a different word in the same exact menu. This proves how awesome they do at not fiddle-faddling my interface to meet the whims of the silly. There are real reasons why some users like that feature; it communicates function to them. It doesn't harm me for it to be one way, or the other way.
Reality: GIMP is a professional tool that anybody can use because it is Free Software. Their response to complaints is that they are serious professional users themselves, and they don't want to fiddle-faddle their software to pander to the masses. If you don't use it the way they use it, either write a plugin that changes it to your way, or quit whining. There are lots of options. That they don't care what you think is the feature that prevents them from making excess changes, because they're not new and not trying to make a name for themselves by changing what was there. It shows the real value in a long-term maintainer culture instead of "community driven" culture.
The problem is that UX/UI people like to invent new and exciting stuff, while they should be making stuff familiar and boring.
An interface that a user doesn't notice while using it, is an interface done right.
Damn straight! I hate it when these jerks start trying to fluff my interface, or massage my paradigm. Leave it alone, it is a tool. That is why I chose open source, because I just want the tool that does the thing, and if I want it to do something else, I can add it.
First they start diddling the paradigms and they say, "oh you can still use the old one" and then when a critical security patch is required, they say, "oh gosh, well you can just upgrade if you want it to be secure."
Nothing goes to hell faster than a popular project. Give me a boring project that is grudgingly maintained with a few lines of bug fixes every few years. I'm still using gimp, it still works the same as in the 90s, and it still does all the stuff I need. I can still write plugins, now in new languages too. And it still looks the same way that people said was "ugly" and all sorts of nasty things. And the features are still in the same places. Being "ugly," for whatever reason people thought, never once stopped me from getting beautiful results with it.
Fact 1: Your opinion that there is no difference between index cards and computers is ludicrous. Any such opinion that violates basic facts is too stupid to ever be considered.
I'm not going to read past that, or comment except to say that if you were ever to decide to go back to school and get a CS degree, you would be taught how to execute code using 3x5 cards. That you think it is impossible is hilarious, and that you call the idea names is even funnier.
File that in the, "if you don't know, don't comment" drawer.
Nonsense, just because you don't know what gate it is doesn't mean that it is both. It would have to have already collapsed to one or the other in order to compute anything.
Until it interacts with something (what you describe as being "observed," though that is specific to inputs and this has outputs too) it doesn't have inputs or outputs and you not only can't prove that it is calculating anything, you can't even make a basic argument that there is a reason to believe that it is capable of calculation. Just as, holding a rock in your hand that has a high silicon content, with a little copper mixed in, doesn't mean you have a computer that is calculating everything that could be calculated with the devices you could make from those ingredients. Or put another way, it isn't that you don't know where something is until you interact with it, it is that it doesn't even have a specific location until something interacts with it. It is spread out over the probabilities. NAND and NOR gates don't operate on probabilities; they operate on achieved electromagnetic properties. Nothing at all can be happening until it is one gate or the other.
Not that that is what the thing in TFA is. This is more about a type of logic gate that can connect to what they're using as quantum logic gates, and also what they're using as pointers, which you could think of as being like a quantum system bus for communication between different parts of the machine. Also note that the part they just demonstrated is entirely deterministic. It is sortof analogous to Harvard architecture microcontrollers, which have separate data areas for program code and data. Quantum computers as being researched by academia use different types of logic structures for storing memory and doing calculations, so they have this separation inherently. This is a special logic gate that can connect to both. So presumably this will end up being part of some kind of programmable register with branching capabilities.
While your comment was clearly in jest, what it might actually be like is that you set up a complex calculation, expose that system of gates to this gate, the whole thing collapses at the average speed of the photons exchanged, and the branching based on the result happened that fast; literally as the calculation is "being" made, the branch associated with the answer is being activated. As close to instantly as humans can detect, minus whatever considerable lag and blanking periods are required before triggering these events, of course. Quantum computers might not have or need branch prediction.
I didn't say it, I don't support it, and it is a lie that it was the situation described. You can say that doesn't amount to a "straw man," but it is a lie all the same. You stand by it, but you can't stand by a lie about what somebody else is supporting even after they not only disclaim it, but inform you that they never did support it.
You attempted to argue from absurdity, but it is a straw man because I never supported the position you extended to absurdity. Your spillway situation has nothing at all to do with what was discussed, is not analogous, and seems designed solely to imply people with an opposing position are trying to kill somebody. The only relevant part of all that is that you're telling lies to make others look bad.
I switched from Power Bar to Clif Bar over a decade ago, but that was close to my first thought, but I assumed it was some sort of promotional product with Power Bar advertising. And they do describe it as a promotional product, so it is ambiguous.
Lithium batteries to charge other lithium batteries, it seems a bit silly to me from the start. This is what the people who buy whatever they're offered for sale end up with; they have devices without removable batteries that don't last long enough for their uses, and so they use these battery batteries.
Batteries included, battery batteries not included.
The idea that there is "a bill" before it is voted on is silly, because it is changing from one minute to the next.
And yet you called it "it". Plenty of things change from minute to minute (such as people) yet we don't have any trouble hanging names on them either. This is just bad philosophical reasoning to support a thoughtless, callous insult.
If you're down to arguing over the definition of "it," you've already lost. That is the size of your objection, why do you not simply concede the point? LOL
No, calling a changeable thing "it" is not any problem. That is a very standard and correct use of "it." Whereas, a "bill" is a certain type of thing that doesn't actually exist until it has been passed; it is only a proposal, a prototype. A bill that is still changing already has a number, and the proposal is a thing that gets talked about; but the actual content hasn't formed yet. Odd that you don't understand this part, and yet are accusing me of "bad philosophical reasoning." Which is an extreme insult, and yet in the same sentence you accuse me of a "thoughtless, callous insult" but you don't even say what it was. All of that said, the "a" in "a bill" is important. It precludes your analysis.
And given that the eventual Obamacare bill was a pile of nasty crap, concern over what was in the bill turned out to be warranted.
"Obamacare" passed, and is popular. Concern didn't "turn out to be warranted," the same people who expressed "concern" continued to, and none of their actual predictions of doom happened. It tells everybody what your political category is, but it tells us nothing about the Affordable Care Act. Who are these magic elves that determine the concerns were "warranted?" The doomsayers made specific predictions of doom that did not happen. The people who expressed concerns that didn't include predictions of doom were largely liberals who wanted a law that went a lot further.
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How would you feel about "we must open the spillway to find out if anyone will be drowned!"? I know that you would soon be known as "the defendant" and you would not have a good time in court if you did that.
I would know it as a straw man as soon as you said it, and I would weigh its true value and consider the implications about the intent of the speaker to be seen as having said something rather than saying something relevant.
You would vote "no" on everything, government would shut down if other voted the same way, and eventually after a few years of not funding any military Mexico would invade.
Sounds like we ought to call your bluff on that. Personally, I would love the obstruction of bad and unaccountable law that this would create. When the US creates laws and regulations that each grow faster than someone can read and understand those, then something needs to be done to slow the process down.
It isn't "my bluff." That's just... LOL WOW.
You probably also will accuse bankers of having each invented the banking system.
You may disagree, but if you think there was any original research in what I said then you do not yet even know if you agree or disagree, because you've never looked into these issues.
If you want to disagree with not only the mainstream analysis, but with the next dozen opinions too, fine. But it is on you to know what the basic beliefs about the field of study are before deciding that your own personal idea is better.
And as far as calling bluffs, you only waved your hands and said that I am wrong. I call your bluff; I say you don't really have any idea about the subject. You talk about laws and regulations, but avoid the budget, which requires annual laws authorizing the government to spend money. Explain how you are right, by getting specific about what you claim I am wrong about. Don't just wave your hands and say there will be less bad laws; how will you cause the necessary budgets to get passed with his proposed system of voting "no" on anything that hadn't been static for 2 weeks on a non-negotiable basis. If you get enough of Congress to vote your way, but there are still other Americans whose reps vote differently, how are you going to negotiate and pass a budget?
And the laws don't "grow faster than someone can read and understand [them]," that is just a small-minded lie. My business is vertically integrated across multiple industries, including electronics, and it is not very hard to understand the rules. The problem people have is that they adopt a sort of South Park "they took er jobs" attitude, and that creates a distortion field where they can't learn about rules, because rules are written by hippies, and therefor they can't be understood; and only hippies would even want to; therefore it is total government oppression that they got fined by OSHA for something listed on the one-page version of the rules for their industry. I hear morons every week telling me how OSHA rules won't let them do their work, and I actually look those up when people say it. They've been wrong 100% of the time. That's right; 100% of the complaints by whiners about how OSHA makes their lives impossible turn out to be horseshit. Just blatant horse shit where the rule is easy and simple and common sense, and the complainers don't even know what the rule is before they decide it "doesn't make any sense." How can they know without reading the rules? Hippies.
Why should somebody who doesn't like to read about regulations be able to read them all and know what they are? Is human knowledge in general sized so that you can know all the human knowledge and systems and rules for different situations in other fields? If I hire an engineer, does he know all the voluntary "best practices" for his field? No? Can he memorize all the different safety considerations (that he would agree to, lets limit it to those) that might need to consider on different types of projects? No! Even less important, voluntary rules are too numerous for an individual to memorize. And yet, if they are well categorized and recorded, using some sort of predictable system to locate the rules, then they can look up what they need for each situation. All the same stuff applies to doctors, programmers, pilots, lawyers, politicians. In the case of the law, and of government regulations, there are easily searchable online databases of the rules. It is easy to find the rules that apply to what you're doing, if you know how to read technical language. And if you don't understand the language they use for that, you won't understand the rules even if they're so few that you memorized their words.
I'm not the average consumer, by far, but once a company does crap like this I don't care if they claim to reverse course. That they were willing to harm customers before they realized the customers would fight them on it, that is not improved by saying, "gosh, OK, we won't do it." There is no way to trust them. That they were willing to do it more worrisome than if they are doing it already, because these types of changes to existing products can make a past purchase useless. It is the willing-change-that-harms-customers that needs to be punished, not the specific product feature.
They may or may not try to rerun the same gimmick, but it doesn't matter. They'll do something as bad, or worse. It is the nature of the "smart crap" product category; if their theory of business allowed them to do this the first time, after having carefully considered it, then they'll keep doing it because they'll still have the same business theories running their company.
Not quite right. The stop-gap spending bills are to "keep the government running," and the Omnibus is to agree to terms to stop having to fund things temporarily.
Temporary funding is much cleaner, since there is little value in temporary rules changes.
If the Omnibus sucks, it can be vetoed or get stuck in the reconciliation committee and government won't shut down without separate refusal to pass temporary spending bills.
You would vote "no" on everything, government would shut down if other voted the same way, and eventually after a few years of not funding any military Mexico would invade.
It sounds nice, if you have no idea how the US government is organized. But eventually when you find out that the average voter wants you to do your job and pass a budget, you'll realize you can't have it all your way, and you'll have to compromise or be replaced by the voters with somebody who will. And once you realize that you have to compromise, because we don't have a dictator-for-life, then you'll eventually have to come to terms with the fact that Congress has too many representatives and interests and opinions to come up with a proposed text in advance of having negotiated it. It works fine that way for buying a used car; you can agree orally what the price will be, and then go into the office and write it up, and you sometimes will still have agreement when the contract is printed. But when you're dealing with hundreds of people who want different things for their own districts, and don't want what the other guy wants, then it is just too complicated to attempt to negotiate that without proposing actual texts. And then you realize there is still too many people; you can't read 300 different complete proposals with different details, and it is too much even to delegate. That is why the current system exists. You start with a basic text that is somebody's idea, and then different amendments get added with changes. Simplistic hand-wavy folsky stuff like you suggest would not simplify the process. You'd have the entire current process, but instead of voting on the bill, they'd be voting to freeze the language and schedule another vote in 2 weeks. It isn't clear that that improves the process at all. It certainly makes it impossible for Congress to act quickly when required.
There are ways to "force ill behaved [people] to behave in a manner consistent with [your preference]," the problem is we won't agree on what "ill behaved" means. That road has been explored, and in fact it is what our system is designed to prevent. ;)
So you are on board with legislatures essentially rubberstamping whatever piece of legislation makes it to the chamber floor? Because that's basically what you just said.
THat's the thing, you hear the word "Pelosi" and you're trying to figure out who is on what side so you'll know what to believe. I was talking about the false accusation that idiots make about that particular comment. See, thing is, I actually went and watched the clip of her whole statement the first time that came up. It is a factual thing about how the US Congress works. Knowing how the current system works isn't predicated on agreeing that it is perfect. There is actually no position-taking at all there. The reality of the current system and how it is designed is the same for everybody. Disliking Pelosi isn't magical thinking that makes you somehow live in a country with a different political system. That you think that there is something to tease her about there simply shows you don't know what she's talking about. Ignorance is not wisdom, sorry.
And for the record, no that isn't "what I said." What I said contained no opinions at all. You don't get special facts, the facts are the same for you and for me. You disliking Pelosi doesn't mean she is wrong if she says the sky is blue, but you would be instantly down a rabbit hole arguing about what "blue" means and accusing anybody who agrees with her of agreeing with anything else she said.
Even if you're 100% against the system of government we have now, she was still describing it. She wasn't making a proposal for how to do things, or giving an opinion. She was trying to explain to idiot reporters how stupid some of their questions were. Which of course is a fool's errand, but IME it provides some small amount of satisfaction in the moment, and the idiots will believe whatever nonsense they already believed either way. The same idiocy is here in this thread; people who don't even comprehend how the system works, but have lots of ideas about specific changes they think they would like. Of course, they don't actually have any fucking clue if they would like those changes, because they don't know how it works already. So from their perspective, nothing would have changed; government would do stuff, and they would still have no idea what was being done, by who, in what way, or to what effect.
You missed the entire point, sorry. Keep parsing.
Assume that my comment was literally correct, and then parse for the understanding that makes sense. You'll figure out what I said a lot more quickly that way. Did you think I didn't know about the expected expansion of the Sun? The thing is, if I made the 5-year-old level mistake that you presume, there would be no content left in my statement. It makes way more sense as the correct statement that I made than it does as the misunderstanding you imply.
What is different about a life form "falling into" the Sun, or an inanimate object doing so? In the context of conservation of energy, is there a difference? Why would I have mentioned non-living things being the sum of the parts?
Keep trying, kiddo. You'll get it.
If nobody read it, how do you know it doesn't do what you want?
And if nobody read it, and you've been told it is bad... do you not see any problem with believing what these people are telling you?!
I suspect a bunch of people read it, and they're trying to manipulate the critics into sounding like idiots by using flamebait tactics. They probably even have an aide that calls up some idiot bloviator from the "other side" to tip them off that they just slipped something in that "nobody has read" to get the blog posts going.
And if nobody in Congress ever does read it, they won't succeed at creating a compromise bill, and it will never reach the President anyways. If nobody reads it, there are few worries.