You could build a box with some transparent bricks or windshields as sides. Use some Technic blocks (the ones with holes) and pins to allow additional air in (to supplement what can get in since the blocks aren't airtight when connected) without allowing larger insects to escape. That would allow you to capture live specimens. But yes, that is not the topic of the article.
Ms. Caldwell, I have here a lockbox with one key. Please place a $20 from your pocket in the box, lock it, and you hold onto the key. How secure do you think your money is in that box? Do you want the government to mandate that it must have a key to that box?
Now here I have a second key for that lockbox. I (representing the government) am the only one who has access to that key, so you should still feel relatively confident in the security of your money. \begin{JamesEarlJones}We are the United States Government. We don't DO that sort of thing. \end{JamesEarlJones} Do you still feel confident? Are you more or less confident in its security that you were in the first case?
Whoops, I lost the second key or someone stole it from me. Anyone may have access to the second key now. Now how confident are you in the security of your $20? More or less than the first two cases?
When we encrypt our data, we are basically putting it in a lockbox with one key, like the first case. You may think you're advocating for the second case, but a government-mandated "second key" will inevitably (and quickly) be compromised, resulting in the third case.
From what I gathered from the article, a particular cancer medication needs to be produced using expensive materials (hamster ovaries) because the proteins produced by the ovaries don't get tangled up for some reason. Producing those proteins in a less expensive material (E. coli, yeast) would lead to tangling of the proteins. If they can use the less expensive material and detangle the proteins for less than the cost of producing the proteins in the hamster ovaries, the price of the medication would (hopefully) go down and the supply would increase.
So the next step is to un-tangle proteins produced from yeast, I guess.
It's not exactly opposite, but what about when measured by C or C++'s sizeof operator? They're probably the same size unless your code has separate 3-bit and 4-bit integer types of different sizes, which would be quite unusual.
How about using something like "IjaywalkedTuesdayJanuary20,2015" as your password and insist that you plead the 5th? Technically revealing the password would be confessing to a (very minor) crime and therefore would fall under self-incrimination.
If there's "substantive claims made about bullying, harassment, threats, etc." then there should be plenty of evidence (that can be provided by the victim) to involve the authorities and the court system to get a warrant, yes? [If the victim is no longer able to provide the evidence, their testimony or the investigation into the reason why they are unable to provide the evidence may itself may provide that evidence, again through use of legal means.]
MIT, the organization whose access was used to download the documents, declined to press civil charge and according to the report on MIT's involvement "MIT never requested that a criminal prosecution be brought against Aaron Swartz." (page 13) and "MIT did inform the prosecution that it was not seeking punishment for Swartz, and it did inform the defense that it was not seeking any civil remedy from him." (page 14)
JSTOR, the organization whose documents were copied, declined to press civil charges. A quote in the MIT report attributed to JSTOR said "The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter." (page 84)
When the two parties who were affected choose not to proceed with civil charges and don't press for criminal charges, is calling for criminal charges that carried a possible 50 years of imprisonment and a $1 million dollar fine, and which a former White House counsel called "overcharging" and "overzealous" really necessary? Consider that several Senators, including both Republicans and Democrats, questioned or criticized the prosecution using words or phrases like scapegoat, outrageous, and way out of line. How often does THAT happen anymore?
Let's let the parents who choose not to vaccinate their children send their kids to a public school... just not the same public school as the vaccinated kids. [I'm guessing someone will bring up "separate but equal" -- but the division here is not along racial lines but along an axes that the parents can control and easily modify.] The teachers can be paid a bit more (and be vaccinated) to compensate them for their increased risk. If a student displays symptoms of an illness for which they and others are not vaccinated, they get to stay home in unofficial or official quarantine until a doctor and/or the school nurse clears them to return. Of course, given the waves of sickness that are probably going to sweep those schools, it may take the whole year (no summer vacation) or even multiple calendar years for a student to advance a grade. But when the 8th or 9th graders turn 18, they can make their own decision as to whether to stay in the non-vaccinated school or be vaccinated and take summer school to finish only a little behind their peers.
Offer drivers low-cost or free phone cases with space to hold their driver's license on the back. Driver pulls their phone out of their pocket (it's likely more accessible than their wallet) and shows/hands the back of the phone to the officer.
Offer drivers a holder that attaches via suction cups or similar mechanism to their dashboard. Find some way (driver's license doubles as an EZPass? Cops have a scanner that lets them bring up the driver's information more quickly when they stop a motorist, rather than having to take it back to their vehicle?) to encourage drivers to put their licenses in that holder while they're driving.
The privacy and security considerations are strong arguments against turning the driver's license into an app or something similar. But if they really want a high-tech solution, working with phone manufacturers to create a lock screen app (open source, to reduce the chances of a back door) that allows a police officer to enter a code (which gets logged on the phone manufacturer's servers and should be able to be associated with the individual officer) into the lock screen to display JUST the license info, not actually unlock the phone. This would also be useful if a phone is lost, stolen, or used as part of a crime; it would allow the police to identify the owner.
Theoretically yes, you may be able to determine if a particular program will halt by testing and inspecting.
Practically, you may not be able to determine if a program will halt. See the Collatz conjecture. Assume a program that accepts as input a positive integer n and returns the number of steps before the first time the Collatz iteration reaches 1. Does that program halt for all possible legal input values?
As another point, regardless of whether or not a program or robot can _choose_ to kill a human, Asimov's robot stories indicate that not even the First Law of Robotics excludes the possibility of robots killing humans. Does the robot _know_ that to take a particular action will kill a human? A robot chef could use shrimp in the preparation of a dish not knowing the diner who will eat it is deathly allergic. What is the definition of "human"? The debate about abortion shows human beings can't answer that one. And then there's the Zeroth Law of Robotics, a limited version of which these researchers seem to be trying to test. That one is particularly tricky as neither humans nor robots can predict the future (no one has developed psychohistory yet.)
If the original reviewer is still at the Post, inviting them to write the new review would make it an apples-to-apples comparison. If the original reviewer is not still at the Post, inviting the person who has responsibility for writing "culture" or "entertainment" reviews now would at least make the comparison apples-to-crabapples (same genus, different species.)
Nothing is ever "clearly". The pianist could argue that he's greatly improved since then and thus the post is now wrong, outdated, and unduly hurts the pianist. Therefore it's in the public interest to remove that terrible post from the internet.
Then the artist should invite the Post reviewer to his next concert and ask the Post to amend the review by adding a link to a new article describing how the artist has improved.
There was an episode of the animated series "The Batman" (specifically "Artifacts" in season 4) where future archaeologists find the Batcave in an attempt to find information that will enable them to defeat Mr. Freeze. Turns out Batman had had his database of information on criminals etched into the titanium supports of the Cave for just such a possibility.
If I were going to store these electronically, I'd include a solar charger for the electronic display device (tablet, laptop, etc.) as well as a manual one.
If you were going to print these documents out, I probably wouldn't use paper. When I worked at the university library in college, we had a large machine storing I don't know how many microfiche. You could fit a whole reference book on a sheet barely larger than an index card and store hundreds of those books in a shoebox. In addition, as long as you have the ability to create a magnifying lens and a light source, you could theoretically project the information on a wall or screen -- you wouldn't necessarily need a highly technical reader to view the text. As long as the books include only text and black-and-white drawings, this seems like a good archival medium -- and the Wikipedia page gives a reference claiming a lifetime of 500 years.
Is that one offense total (distributing the driver) or one offense _per bricked chip_ (unauthorized modification of the code in the chip itself that renders it unusuable?)
If 500 people each use the "correct horse battery staple" approach to generating pass phrases, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts is going to have to break 5 passwords.
If 500 people each use the same password manager, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts needs to break just one security mechanism -- the password manager itself. In addition, that attacker may have help in doing so, from all the other attackers that want to compromise a different set of 5 accounts from that group of 500.
If the security for that password manager is sufficiently stronger than the security of those pass phrases (think Fort Knox versus your local bank branch) then attacking the individual accounts will be easier. But if the password manager's security has a vulnerability (a back door into Fort Knox, manned by a guard who's just two days away from retirement) then that leaves not just one person vulnerable, but all 500.
"The number of law enforcement investigations in which I am one of the parties being investigated" seems like a piece of information about you that the government has a legitimate reason to refuse to provide you. If the government says that there are some such investigations (or delays answering until they have enough information to arrest you) then you're likely to try to reach a country with no extradition agreement with your government before they move. So they're always going to say that there are none or refuse to answer -- and to avoid lying in the case where they ARE investigating you, I'd prefer them to simply refuse to provide that information in all cases, at least until they get into the courtroom.
According to the article, he claims that the law requires them to provide him with the information.
So I asked Telstra to provide me with all of the metadata it had stored about my mobile phone account, informing them that they had a duty to do this under the Privacy Act's National Privacy Principles, which gives Australian citizens a right of access to their "personal information" from a company, and the right to have that information corrected if it is inaccurate, incomplete or out-of-date.
After about a month of back and forth phone calls chasing up a response, Telstra refused me access, saying I needed a subpoena to access the data. A subpoena is a writ usually issued by a court with authority to compel production of evidence under a penalty for failure.
As I didn't have the cash to sue Telstra and get a court to issue a writ, I complained to the federal privacy commissioner, claiming Telstra was in breach of the Privacy Act.
Now it's up to the privacy commissioner to decide who's correct: Telstra or Mr. Grubb.
"I also talked to various executives at the company and besides giving me apologies, nothing good is coming my way. It's been more than two years (on a three-year subscription that I can't terminate early)"
How many customers do you think have spoken to multiple executives at the security company? That may narrow down the number of people who could be moofo. [Assuming moofo is telling the truth about that; it could have been a misdirection.] The duration and terms of the contract may narrow that even further. If moofo used that same name in another place, linked in some way to his or her real identity, or if he or she provided more information about him or herself in another Slashdot comment it may not be too difficult to deanonymize him or her given a short list of subjects.
I interpreted Firethorn's first point to be that the shuttle was designed to retrieve and bring back to Earth a large object, but none of the objects it actually did return to Earth were that large. In that case, if the shuttle's payload bay had been smaller in the original design the orbiter itself would have been smaller and lighter and so would not have required quite so complicated a booster system (or a booster system at all.)
I'm not sure why that capability was included in the original design; if it was included in case a bad but still reasonably possible scenario happened then retroactively removing it from the design seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. On the other hand, if it was included just in case the worst-case scenario happened, which was very unlikely, then _maybe_ it could have been smaller.
He specifically notes this -- see sections 3.1 through 3.3 of the paper.
I think another approach that might be interesting to try would be to model the distance between adjacent POV chapters by a given character given the distribution of their previous POV chapters. For instance, if Arya's POV chapters are 10 chapters apart on average and book 6 will be 70 chapters, you'd probably expect 6 or 7 Arya POV chapters if they're uniformly distributed. On the other hand, Ned's last POV chapter was quite a while ago, and so you would expect that trend to continue. [He could still have a POV chapter via Bran trying to see into Ned's past. That would certainly surprise readers looking at the list of POV characters!]
Slashdot Mirror
You could build a box with some transparent bricks or windshields as sides. Use some Technic blocks (the ones with holes) and pins to allow additional air in (to supplement what can get in since the blocks aren't airtight when connected) without allowing larger insects to escape. That would allow you to capture live specimens. But yes, that is not the topic of the article.
Ms. Caldwell, I have here a lockbox with one key. Please place a $20 from your pocket in the box, lock it, and you hold onto the key. How secure do you think your money is in that box? Do you want the government to mandate that it must have a key to that box?
Now here I have a second key for that lockbox. I (representing the government) am the only one who has access to that key, so you should still feel relatively confident in the security of your money. \begin{JamesEarlJones}We are the United States Government. We don't DO that sort of thing. \end{JamesEarlJones} Do you still feel confident? Are you more or less confident in its security that you were in the first case?
Whoops, I lost the second key or someone stole it from me. Anyone may have access to the second key now. Now how confident are you in the security of your $20? More or less than the first two cases?
When we encrypt our data, we are basically putting it in a lockbox with one key, like the first case. You may think you're advocating for the second case, but a government-mandated "second key" will inevitably (and quickly) be compromised, resulting in the third case.
A couple of inches of snow is one thing.
Almost two feet of snow in Boston itself, and very close to three feet of snow in other places in Massachusetts, is quite another. As it stands right now, only five storms in Boston history (going back to 1892) have higher snowfall totals (the data on that page predates the 2013 storm, which had a higher snowfall total, if I remember correctly.) The ticker at the bottom of the local TV programming listing school closings and activity cancellations for Wednesday (recovering from the storm) takes a couple minutes to finish its cycle.
From what I gathered from the article, a particular cancer medication needs to be produced using expensive materials (hamster ovaries) because the proteins produced by the ovaries don't get tangled up for some reason. Producing those proteins in a less expensive material (E. coli, yeast) would lead to tangling of the proteins. If they can use the less expensive material and detangle the proteins for less than the cost of producing the proteins in the hamster ovaries, the price of the medication would (hopefully) go down and the supply would increase.
So the next step is to un-tangle proteins produced from yeast, I guess.
It's not exactly opposite, but what about when measured by C or C++'s sizeof operator? They're probably the same size unless your code has separate 3-bit and 4-bit integer types of different sizes, which would be quite unusual.
How about using something like "IjaywalkedTuesdayJanuary20,2015" as your password and insist that you plead the 5th? Technically revealing the password would be confessing to a (very minor) crime and therefore would fall under self-incrimination.
If there's "substantive claims made about bullying, harassment, threats, etc." then there should be plenty of evidence (that can be provided by the victim) to involve the authorities and the court system to get a warrant, yes? [If the victim is no longer able to provide the evidence, their testimony or the investigation into the reason why they are unable to provide the evidence may itself may provide that evidence, again through use of legal means.]
To be fair, the pictures I've seen of the barge indicate it came through mostly unscathed. So they only blew up the rocket. :)
MIT, the organization whose access was used to download the documents, declined to press civil charge and according to the report on MIT's involvement "MIT never requested that a criminal prosecution be brought against Aaron
Swartz." (page 13) and "MIT did inform the prosecution that it was not seeking punishment for Swartz, and it did inform the defense that it was not seeking any civil remedy from him." (page 14)
JSTOR, the organization whose documents were copied, declined to press civil charges. A quote in the MIT report attributed to JSTOR said "The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter." (page 84)
When the two parties who were affected choose not to proceed with civil charges and don't press for criminal charges, is calling for criminal charges that carried a possible 50 years of imprisonment and a $1 million dollar fine, and which a former White House counsel called "overcharging" and "overzealous" really necessary? Consider that several Senators, including both Republicans and Democrats, questioned or criticized the prosecution using words or phrases like scapegoat, outrageous, and way out of line. How often does THAT happen anymore?
How about a non-Islam run country? The United States doesn't exactly have clean hands in this regard.
Let's let the parents who choose not to vaccinate their children send their kids to a public school ... just not the same public school as the vaccinated kids. [I'm guessing someone will bring up "separate but equal" -- but the division here is not along racial lines but along an axes that the parents can control and easily modify.] The teachers can be paid a bit more (and be vaccinated) to compensate them for their increased risk. If a student displays symptoms of an illness for which they and others are not vaccinated, they get to stay home in unofficial or official quarantine until a doctor and/or the school nurse clears them to return. Of course, given the waves of sickness that are probably going to sweep those schools, it may take the whole year (no summer vacation) or even multiple calendar years for a student to advance a grade. But when the 8th or 9th graders turn 18, they can make their own decision as to whether to stay in the non-vaccinated school or be vaccinated and take summer school to finish only a little behind their peers.
Offer drivers low-cost or free phone cases with space to hold their driver's license on the back. Driver pulls their phone out of their pocket (it's likely more accessible than their wallet) and shows/hands the back of the phone to the officer.
Offer drivers a holder that attaches via suction cups or similar mechanism to their dashboard. Find some way (driver's license doubles as an EZPass? Cops have a scanner that lets them bring up the driver's information more quickly when they stop a motorist, rather than having to take it back to their vehicle?) to encourage drivers to put their licenses in that holder while they're driving.
The privacy and security considerations are strong arguments against turning the driver's license into an app or something similar. But if they really want a high-tech solution, working with phone manufacturers to create a lock screen app (open source, to reduce the chances of a back door) that allows a police officer to enter a code (which gets logged on the phone manufacturer's servers and should be able to be associated with the individual officer) into the lock screen to display JUST the license info, not actually unlock the phone. This would also be useful if a phone is lost, stolen, or used as part of a crime; it would allow the police to identify the owner.
Theoretically yes, you may be able to determine if a particular program will halt by testing and inspecting.
Practically, you may not be able to determine if a program will halt. See the Collatz conjecture. Assume a program that accepts as input a positive integer n and returns the number of steps before the first time the Collatz iteration reaches 1. Does that program halt for all possible legal input values?
As another point, regardless of whether or not a program or robot can _choose_ to kill a human, Asimov's robot stories indicate that not even the First Law of Robotics excludes the possibility of robots killing humans. Does the robot _know_ that to take a particular action will kill a human? A robot chef could use shrimp in the preparation of a dish not knowing the diner who will eat it is deathly allergic. What is the definition of "human"? The debate about abortion shows human beings can't answer that one. And then there's the Zeroth Law of Robotics, a limited version of which these researchers seem to be trying to test. That one is particularly tricky as neither humans nor robots can predict the future (no one has developed psychohistory yet.)
If the original reviewer is still at the Post, inviting them to write the new review would make it an apples-to-apples comparison. If the original reviewer is not still at the Post, inviting the person who has responsibility for writing "culture" or "entertainment" reviews now would at least make the comparison apples-to-crabapples (same genus, different species.)
Nothing is ever "clearly". The pianist could argue that he's greatly improved since then and thus the post is now wrong, outdated, and unduly hurts the pianist. Therefore it's in the public interest to remove that terrible post from the internet.
Then the artist should invite the Post reviewer to his next concert and ask the Post to amend the review by adding a link to a new article describing how the artist has improved.
There was an episode of the animated series "The Batman" (specifically "Artifacts" in season 4) where future archaeologists find the Batcave in an attempt to find information that will enable them to defeat Mr. Freeze. Turns out Batman had had his database of information on criminals etched into the titanium supports of the Cave for just such a possibility.
If I were going to store these electronically, I'd include a solar charger for the electronic display device (tablet, laptop, etc.) as well as a manual one.
If you were going to print these documents out, I probably wouldn't use paper. When I worked at the university library in college, we had a large machine storing I don't know how many microfiche. You could fit a whole reference book on a sheet barely larger than an index card and store hundreds of those books in a shoebox. In addition, as long as you have the ability to create a magnifying lens and a light source, you could theoretically project the information on a wall or screen -- you wouldn't necessarily need a highly technical reader to view the text. As long as the books include only text and black-and-white drawings, this seems like a good archival medium -- and the Wikipedia page gives a reference claiming a lifetime of 500 years.
Is that one offense total (distributing the driver) or one offense _per bricked chip_ (unauthorized modification of the code in the chip itself that renders it unusuable?)
With the UK proposing life sentences for people who cause economic damage that threatens national security, I suppose it's good (for them) that they pulled this now rather than when or if that proposal is approved and enacted. After all, can they be SURE that this didn't affect some computer used by a security agency?
If 500 people each use the "correct horse battery staple" approach to generating pass phrases, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts is going to have to break 5 passwords.
If 500 people each use the same password manager, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts needs to break just one security mechanism -- the password manager itself. In addition, that attacker may have help in doing so, from all the other attackers that want to compromise a different set of 5 accounts from that group of 500.
If the security for that password manager is sufficiently stronger than the security of those pass phrases (think Fort Knox versus your local bank branch) then attacking the individual accounts will be easier. But if the password manager's security has a vulnerability (a back door into Fort Knox, manned by a guard who's just two days away from retirement) then that leaves not just one person vulnerable, but all 500.
"The number of law enforcement investigations in which I am one of the parties being investigated" seems like a piece of information about you that the government has a legitimate reason to refuse to provide you. If the government says that there are some such investigations (or delays answering until they have enough information to arrest you) then you're likely to try to reach a country with no extradition agreement with your government before they move. So they're always going to say that there are none or refuse to answer -- and to avoid lying in the case where they ARE investigating you, I'd prefer them to simply refuse to provide that information in all cases, at least until they get into the courtroom.
According to the article, he claims that the law requires them to provide him with the information.
So I asked Telstra to provide me with all of the metadata it had stored about my mobile phone account, informing them that they had a duty to do this under the Privacy Act's National Privacy Principles, which gives Australian citizens a right of access to their "personal information" from a company, and the right to have that information corrected if it is inaccurate, incomplete or out-of-date.
After about a month of back and forth phone calls chasing up a response, Telstra refused me access, saying I needed a subpoena to access the data. A subpoena is a writ usually issued by a court with authority to compel production of evidence under a penalty for failure.
As I didn't have the cash to sue Telstra and get a court to issue a writ, I complained to the federal privacy commissioner, claiming Telstra was in breach of the Privacy Act.
Now it's up to the privacy commissioner to decide who's correct: Telstra or Mr. Grubb.
The summary gives some information about moofo:
"I also talked to various executives at the company and besides giving me apologies, nothing good is coming my way. It's been more than two years (on a three-year subscription that I can't terminate early)"
How many customers do you think have spoken to multiple executives at the security company? That may narrow down the number of people who could be moofo. [Assuming moofo is telling the truth about that; it could have been a misdirection.] The duration and terms of the contract may narrow that even further. If moofo used that same name in another place, linked in some way to his or her real identity, or if he or she provided more information about him or herself in another Slashdot comment it may not be too difficult to deanonymize him or her given a short list of subjects.
I interpreted Firethorn's first point to be that the shuttle was designed to retrieve and bring back to Earth a large object, but none of the objects it actually did return to Earth were that large. In that case, if the shuttle's payload bay had been smaller in the original design the orbiter itself would have been smaller and lighter and so would not have required quite so complicated a booster system (or a booster system at all.)
I'm not sure why that capability was included in the original design; if it was included in case a bad but still reasonably possible scenario happened then retroactively removing it from the design seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. On the other hand, if it was included just in case the worst-case scenario happened, which was very unlikely, then _maybe_ it could have been smaller.
My prediction is that the last chapter will be two sentences long:
Snow falls. Everyone dies.
Whether the first word is "snow" or "Snow" is left as an exercise to the reader.
He specifically notes this -- see sections 3.1 through 3.3 of the paper.
I think another approach that might be interesting to try would be to model the distance between adjacent POV chapters by a given character given the distribution of their previous POV chapters. For instance, if Arya's POV chapters are 10 chapters apart on average and book 6 will be 70 chapters, you'd probably expect 6 or 7 Arya POV chapters if they're uniformly distributed. On the other hand, Ned's last POV chapter was quite a while ago, and so you would expect that trend to continue. [He could still have a POV chapter via Bran trying to see into Ned's past. That would certainly surprise readers looking at the list of POV characters!]