A search history on a personal computer is a personal document, for whomever did the search. If the defendant is the only person able to access the PC, he has to live with the document.
A very similar situation would be a spiral notebook with detailed lists and notes and entries identified by day (a real OC piece of work) all about how to kill your wife, all in the defendant's handwriting. I see no difference in admitting both of these into evidence, given a proper foundation. Murder is a crime and should be punished.
The problem is not that the record itself is bad. The problem is that most people do not know how to do searches without leaving behind a broad trail of bread crumbs for whomever might follow.
Why is this so surprising?
My understanding was that carbonized Chicken Feathers, like many charcoals obtained from natural biologic materials, contains significant amounts of carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and all sorts of unrelated glop.
The nanotubes cannot be separated from the glop, so researchers write off the whole thing as a failure.
Now to find the reference. That is going to be a pain. I heard this a long time ago.
I have had all kinds of experience. Some of it a little strange.
A couple of things I did around the end of law school bear mention here.
I probably should not discuss it, but I helped calibrate the Multi-State Bar exam, during my third year of law school. Most lawyers will scream bloody murder, that I should have been allowed anywhere near the data.
It is not like it sounds. I was working with a real psychometrician. He knew the statistics and methodology, and I knew the practical parts of computer systems. We both knew SAS, very well.
(Statistical Analysis System - it is its' own little language. In many ways, the language is an improvement over languages like Fortran, and I *like* Fortran)
The data was double-blinded. Neither my friend nor I saw the questions or any of the answers. Someone else handled that part. All we knew was that for each one of the thousands of examinees, for each question, whether or not the examinee got the correct answer or not. The order of the questions was also scrambled, so we did not even know the order of the questions as they were taken by the examinees.
FWIW, for the Multi-State Bar in my State, and many others, only one thing counts: the total correct. Nothing is taken off for wrong answers. A passing score is much higher than 25% of the total. I do not recall now, but 60-80% is the neighborhood of correct answers to pass (actually it was a combined score from the written and Multi-State, but if you got only 25% on the Multi-State, you failed, period.)
Bad statisticians get crappy results because they make wrong assumptions. Whoever the guy is that wrote the article, never let him do your statistics. He makes assumptions that competent psychometricians know are false.
I know the article's assumptions. I made them myself until I worked with my friend.
Strange things happen with really good test questions. This is not all, but most.
First, some guy randomly guessing, say, by going down the questions and always taking the first answer, will fail. Even if he is incredibly lucky and is nearly three standard deviations out (one of the very unlikely possibilities from a uniform distribution), he will still fail the exam.
Second, if his answers were educated guesses instead of blindly picking from a, b, c, d, or e, then his chances of getting the correct answer went down.
You cannot even take the exam until you graduate from an accredited law school, or you practice in California. *Every* single person that took the exam made at least educated guesses on most of the answers.
(One of the top guys in my law school class decided he was going to give the psychometricians a heart attack, by answering every single question correctly. He bragged about it before the exam. The smartest guy I ever met, bar none. Later he said that at the end of the day, he looked up, realized that he had twenty-five questions to go, and there were five minutes left. He *blindly* answered the last twenty-five questions (all with (b), IIRC) and turned in his exam. He passed, of course.)
My friend and I could sort of tell the order of some of the questions, in spite of the double-blind. The more difficult questions, in the last fifty or sixty, clearly had a higher random component of correct answers. Taking into account the difficulty of the question and the size of the random component, we felt confident that we could identify and order three-fourths of the final fourty questions.
Difficulty == number of examinees getting a correct answer, adjusted for their relative ability to correctly answer all the other questions. For small numbers of examinees, this is perilous. Our sample set was more than ten thousand, and verified against results from previous years going back. Those answers, in turn, were sampled, then diligently validated against LSAT scores (a law school entrance IQ test), law school grades, relative difficulty of law school, undergraduate grades, and personal inquiries to indiv
This is not a situation where some commercial outfit is making money off of using the name of the Library of Congress. If I see some commercial business doing that, I will turn them in myself.
This is plainly about freedom of political speech, a right enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Mr. Harper's use of the site, even his comparison of his search engine against THOMAS, is aimed at promoting his personal political agenda, both for his site and including his comparison.
Congress did not repeal the First Amendment.
For once, somebody has a beef with some meat on it. This is where you hire the attorney to reply with a nastygram.
Step 1. Hire an attorney. Sorry for the bad news, but disasters happen to people. This one happens to be yours. Find yourself a reasonable, but aggressive attorney. The kind that makes the opponent break out in a cold sweat, just reading the introductory letter. The kind of a guy that other attorneys have represent them. Don't save yourself money here. This is the wrong time and place. If you haven't interviewed ten attorneys, you aren't ready to hire any of them.
Step 2. (actually step 1, but it fits better here) Develop a plan of attack. Not defense: attack. Make no mistake about it. You have already been attacked. Your job, your livelihood, has been threatened. A stranger to you, the Controller, has ordered you to violate the law.
Step 3. Recognize the nature of the people you are dealing with, and plan accordingly. This is not the first time that these bozos have done this, and you are not the first person that they have tried to intimidate. There is zero job security with these folks: none. They might very well fire you as soon as you have installed all the software. Certainly, they plan on lying about something in the future. If they would lie about that, they would lie about something else, as well. They would happily lie to the FBI about your independent and unsanctioned actions, in spite of actually ordering you to do it in the first place.
Step 4. Plumb your own courage and self-regrets. A professor of mine told the story of when he, the professor, was a younger man, an accountant, in a three-man conference. The two senior participants were the company president and the company controller. The president told the controller to fudge the books. They had had a bad year, and the president wanted to conceal the losses in accounting floobie dust. The controller refused. He said "If I'll lie for you, I'll lie to you. Losing my reputation isn't worth it. I won't do it." Much to my professor's surprise, the president backed down, and found another way. That professor, by the way, is still younger than I.
Could you live with that story in your past? I have, and I can. Would you regret backing down and breaking the law? In other circumstances, I have, and I still carry the regrets. It wasn't worth it.
5. *They have done this before*. A leopard cannot change his spots, and this bunch of lying scoundrels has pulled this stunt before. Probably earlier today. Do some quiet investigation. You won't have to dig very deep. Most of the software in the place has been pirated, unless I miss my guess. This place is just a sitting target for an FBI raid. There is a nice reward in it for you, if you are the snitch. Plus, the FBI won't give out your name, unlike some civilian organizations. Talk with your attorney and develop some good evidence.
6. Do what your attorney tells you to do. When push comes to shove, he and his malpractice insurance will be there with you, not me.
7. Practice saying after me "I own you now, Monkey Boy." These idiots are now targets. They have exposed themselves to you. They are vulnerable. You have a narrow window of opportunity to exploit. Get some solid evidence in a place they cannot reach, and you can be very persuasive. You will be surprised at how generous these thieving liars can be, when facing possible exposure and criminal sanctions. Just do not commit blackmail (this is one of those places where your own lawyer comes in). Propose a generous severance package for yourself, and back it up with a written contract drafted by your lawyer. You will be very pleasantly surprised. They will give you most, or all, of it.
As mechanical devices, hard drives are appallingly reliable.
The electronics on the hard drive rank as major players in heat generation in the boxen.
Heat kills transistorized components.
"Hard Drive Data Recovery" companies often have nothing more sophisticated than a hard drive buying program, and very competent techs soldering and unsoldering drive electronics. They buy a few each of most available hard drives, as the drives appear on the market. When a customer sends them a hard drive for "recovery", the techs find a matching drive in inventory, disconnect the electronics, and replace the electronics in the drive. The percentage of drive failures due to mechanical failure is very low.
When I bought a desktop computer for an unsophisticated family member, I also purchased and installed a drive cooler - a special fan that blows directly on the drive electronics.
I was very concerned about MTBF. I just assumed that the manufacturer's information was totally irrelevant to my situation - a hard drive in a corner of the tower, covered with dust, and no air circulation.
I occasionally pick up used equipment from family and friends. Usually, it is broken. Often, it is the hard drive. What is amazing is not that they failed, but that they lasted so long with a 1.5 inch coating of insulating dust.
I suspect this would also explain the rising failure rate with time. Nobody seems to clean the darned things. They just sit and run 24/7/365, until they fail.
Pamela Jones, a.k.a. PJ, exists.
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Google has created its business on a single rock-solid concept: integrity.
Google will not route weird advertising to you just because they get paid for it. They will do their level best to allow you to run your own searches, and find whatever it may be that you seek. Any advertising is strictly ignorable in the right column.
Granting Google the possibility of ethical and honest conduct, I can think of a more likely possibility.
AT&T, the *Mother* of all telephone companies, wants to provide net services to all their customers. As part of their "services" they intend to randomly interrupt the flow of packets, effectively degrading the truly fearsome competitor to the phone company: Vonage.
Google, with power backups and significant broadband capability, can deliver what AT&T wants to disrupt: quality Vonage or other VOIP services.
After that, who needs MS? Google can be your phone company.
I sure trust them more than I do AT&T or Ed Whitacre.
If they had just looked at the case, and dismissed it when they realized it had no merit, they would have been fine.
Dismiss much, much later, and the harassing nature shows through.
No one but themselves to blame.
Some dumb and sort-of-unrelated observations:
It isn't how it looks to you, it is how it feels to him. I was walking out of the courthouse with a client after the judge ruled against us. My client told me not to worry about it. He said I had clearly presented his case. He knew there was a chance of losing, and he had lost the gamble. He thought he had received justice because he had his side clearly and eloquently presented, and he felt the judge had ruled against him on one of the marginal points.
Southwest Airlines employees like to re-tell the story of the lady that wrote numerous complaint letters, objecting to many of Southwest's unique policies. The staff finally kicked one of her letters up to CEO Herb Kelleher. It took Kelleher sixty seconds to compose his response:
Dear Mrs. Crabapple:
We will miss you.
Love, Herb.
It isn't how it looks to him, it is how it looks to everyone else. That one sale will neither make nor break your business. If the rest of the general public is convinced that you treated him fairly and respectfully, listened to his problems, and made a serious effort to find and eliminate any possible problems, then you are ahead of the game. With those kinds of folks, I find it best to go a little overboard. When they complain to friends and neighbors that you didn't do what they wanted, they will be quizzed about what you did do. When the complainers describe the above-and-beyond things you did to fix their problem, first, the audience will disbelieve the complainer, and second, it might just generate some business. It often worked that way for me.
Just as the vendors claimed, this full-open-disclosure business is promoting distribution of powerful tools to, well, just anybody.
Now the bad guys know about it and are using it.
Can it get worse than this? Oh, sure. Try stopping it.
__________________________________________
AllParadox - Retired Attorney, no legal opinions, just my opinion.
Power, within the Beltway in Washington, D.C., sits on a foundation of votes.
Cynics confuse the impact of outside money and power with the effect of direct voter expressions of preference. Congressional Representatives are swayed by everyone who contacts them, with an agenda. Everyone who contacts them has an agenda. Those who are not elected into the system gain influence with money and power. The money and power are used to generate more votes at election time.
On most bills, Representatives get precious little idea of what their voters want. Often, a few dozen emails can be a landslide.
Money and power have precious little effect on an angry voter, and every Congressman knows it.
A few thousand communications from voting constituents, clearly stating their opinion, is a tremendous expression of voter sympathies.
I vote, and I sent my Representative an email.
If you are a U.S. citizen, won't you do it too, please?
Slashdot Mirror
A search history on a personal computer is a personal document, for whomever did the search. If the defendant is the only person able to access the PC, he has to live with the document. A very similar situation would be a spiral notebook with detailed lists and notes and entries identified by day (a real OC piece of work) all about how to kill your wife, all in the defendant's handwriting. I see no difference in admitting both of these into evidence, given a proper foundation. Murder is a crime and should be punished. The problem is not that the record itself is bad. The problem is that most people do not know how to do searches without leaving behind a broad trail of bread crumbs for whomever might follow.
Why is this so surprising? My understanding was that carbonized Chicken Feathers, like many charcoals obtained from natural biologic materials, contains significant amounts of carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and all sorts of unrelated glop. The nanotubes cannot be separated from the glop, so researchers write off the whole thing as a failure. Now to find the reference. That is going to be a pain. I heard this a long time ago.
I have had all kinds of experience. Some of it a little strange.
A couple of things I did around the end of law school bear mention here.
I probably should not discuss it, but I helped calibrate the Multi-State Bar exam, during my third year of law school. Most lawyers will scream bloody murder, that I should have been allowed anywhere near the data.
It is not like it sounds. I was working with a real psychometrician. He knew the statistics and methodology, and I knew the practical parts of computer systems. We both knew SAS, very well.
(Statistical Analysis System - it is its' own little language. In many ways, the language is an improvement over languages like Fortran, and I *like* Fortran)
The data was double-blinded. Neither my friend nor I saw the questions or any of the answers. Someone else handled that part. All we knew was that for each one of the thousands of examinees, for each question, whether or not the examinee got the correct answer or not. The order of the questions was also scrambled, so we did not even know the order of the questions as they were taken by the examinees.
FWIW, for the Multi-State Bar in my State, and many others, only one thing counts: the total correct. Nothing is taken off for wrong answers. A passing score is much higher than 25% of the total. I do not recall now, but 60-80% is the neighborhood of correct answers to pass (actually it was a combined score from the written and Multi-State, but if you got only 25% on the Multi-State, you failed, period.)
Bad statisticians get crappy results because they make wrong assumptions. Whoever the guy is that wrote the article, never let him do your statistics. He makes assumptions that competent psychometricians know are false.
I know the article's assumptions. I made them myself until I worked with my friend.
Strange things happen with really good test questions. This is not all, but most.
First, some guy randomly guessing, say, by going down the questions and always taking the first answer, will fail. Even if he is incredibly lucky and is nearly three standard deviations out (one of the very unlikely possibilities from a uniform distribution), he will still fail the exam.
Second, if his answers were educated guesses instead of blindly picking from a, b, c, d, or e, then his chances of getting the correct answer went down.
You cannot even take the exam until you graduate from an accredited law school, or you practice in California. *Every* single person that took the exam made at least educated guesses on most of the answers.
(One of the top guys in my law school class decided he was going to give the psychometricians a heart attack, by answering every single question correctly. He bragged about it before the exam. The smartest guy I ever met, bar none. Later he said that at the end of the day, he looked up, realized that he had twenty-five questions to go, and there were five minutes left. He *blindly* answered the last twenty-five questions (all with (b), IIRC) and turned in his exam. He passed, of course.)
My friend and I could sort of tell the order of some of the questions, in spite of the double-blind. The more difficult questions, in the last fifty or sixty, clearly had a higher random component of correct answers. Taking into account the difficulty of the question and the size of the random component, we felt confident that we could identify and order three-fourths of the final fourty questions.
Difficulty == number of examinees getting a correct answer, adjusted for their relative ability to correctly answer all the other questions. For small numbers of examinees, this is perilous. Our sample set was more than ten thousand, and verified against results from previous years going back. Those answers, in turn, were sampled, then diligently validated against LSAT scores (a law school entrance IQ test), law school grades, relative difficulty of law school, undergraduate grades, and personal inquiries to indiv
This is not a situation where some commercial outfit is making money off of using the name of the Library of Congress. If I see some commercial business doing that, I will turn them in myself.
This is plainly about freedom of political speech, a right enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Mr. Harper's use of the site, even his comparison of his search engine against THOMAS, is aimed at promoting his personal political agenda, both for his site and including his comparison.
Congress did not repeal the First Amendment.
For once, somebody has a beef with some meat on it. This is where you hire the attorney to reply with a nastygram.
What a bunch of wusses.
Step 1. Hire an attorney. Sorry for the bad news, but disasters happen to people. This one happens to be yours. Find yourself a reasonable, but aggressive attorney. The kind that makes the opponent break out in a cold sweat, just reading the introductory letter. The kind of a guy that other attorneys have represent them. Don't save yourself money here. This is the wrong time and place. If you haven't interviewed ten attorneys, you aren't ready to hire any of them.
Step 2. (actually step 1, but it fits better here) Develop a plan of attack. Not defense: attack. Make no mistake about it. You have already been attacked. Your job, your livelihood, has been threatened. A stranger to you, the Controller, has ordered you to violate the law.
Step 3. Recognize the nature of the people you are dealing with, and plan accordingly. This is not the first time that these bozos have done this, and you are not the first person that they have tried to intimidate. There is zero job security with these folks: none. They might very well fire you as soon as you have installed all the software. Certainly, they plan on lying about something in the future. If they would lie about that, they would lie about something else, as well. They would happily lie to the FBI about your independent and unsanctioned actions, in spite of actually ordering you to do it in the first place.
Step 4. Plumb your own courage and self-regrets. A professor of mine told the story of when he, the professor, was a younger man, an accountant, in a three-man conference. The two senior participants were the company president and the company controller. The president told the controller to fudge the books. They had had a bad year, and the president wanted to conceal the losses in accounting floobie dust. The controller refused. He said "If I'll lie for you, I'll lie to you. Losing my reputation isn't worth it. I won't do it." Much to my professor's surprise, the president backed down, and found another way. That professor, by the way, is still younger than I.
Could you live with that story in your past? I have, and I can. Would you regret backing down and breaking the law? In other circumstances, I have, and I still carry the regrets. It wasn't worth it.
5. *They have done this before*. A leopard cannot change his spots, and this bunch of lying scoundrels has pulled this stunt before. Probably earlier today. Do some quiet investigation. You won't have to dig very deep. Most of the software in the place has been pirated, unless I miss my guess. This place is just a sitting target for an FBI raid. There is a nice reward in it for you, if you are the snitch. Plus, the FBI won't give out your name, unlike some civilian organizations. Talk with your attorney and develop some good evidence.
6. Do what your attorney tells you to do. When push comes to shove, he and his malpractice insurance will be there with you, not me.
7. Practice saying after me "I own you now, Monkey Boy." These idiots are now targets. They have exposed themselves to you. They are vulnerable. You have a narrow window of opportunity to exploit. Get some solid evidence in a place they cannot reach, and you can be very persuasive. You will be surprised at how generous these thieving liars can be, when facing possible exposure and criminal sanctions. Just do not commit blackmail (this is one of those places where your own lawyer comes in). Propose a generous severance package for yourself, and back it up with a written contract drafted by your lawyer. You will be very pleasantly surprised. They will give you most, or all, of it.
SCO v IBM will come to an end, either by judgment in Judge Kimball's Utah courtroom, or in a bankruptcy filing.
The graph is goofy, but it *is* a Finite State Machine.
I just hope I live to see the day.
"temperature has no effect on the failure rate"
Said by people who do not know how to light off a cutting torch.
Trust me, I *can* make 'em fail.
Real quick, too.
As mechanical devices, hard drives are appallingly reliable.
The electronics on the hard drive rank as major players in heat generation in the boxen.
Heat kills transistorized components.
"Hard Drive Data Recovery" companies often have nothing more sophisticated than a hard drive buying program, and very competent techs soldering and unsoldering drive electronics. They buy a few each of most available hard drives, as the drives appear on the market. When a customer sends them a hard drive for "recovery", the techs find a matching drive in inventory, disconnect the electronics, and replace the electronics in the drive. The percentage of drive failures due to mechanical failure is very low.
When I bought a desktop computer for an unsophisticated family member, I also purchased and installed a drive cooler - a special fan that blows directly on the drive electronics.
I was very concerned about MTBF. I just assumed that the manufacturer's information was totally irrelevant to my situation - a hard drive in a corner of the tower, covered with dust, and no air circulation.
I occasionally pick up used equipment from family and friends. Usually, it is broken. Often, it is the hard drive. What is amazing is not that they failed, but that they lasted so long with a 1.5 inch coating of insulating dust.
I suspect this would also explain the rising failure rate with time. Nobody seems to clean the darned things. They just sit and run 24/7/365, until they fail.
I, however, am a figment of my own imagination.
Google has created its business on a single rock-solid concept: integrity.
Google will not route weird advertising to you just because they get paid for it. They will do their level best to allow you to run your own searches, and find whatever it may be that you seek. Any advertising is strictly ignorable in the right column.
Granting Google the possibility of ethical and honest conduct, I can think of a more likely possibility.
AT&T, the *Mother* of all telephone companies, wants to provide net services to all their customers. As part of their "services" they intend to randomly interrupt the flow of packets, effectively degrading the truly fearsome competitor to the phone company: Vonage.
Google, with power backups and significant broadband capability, can deliver what AT&T wants to disrupt: quality Vonage or other VOIP services.
After that, who needs MS? Google can be your phone company.
I sure trust them more than I do AT&T or Ed Whitacre.
If they had just looked at the case, and dismissed it when they realized it had no merit, they would have been fine. Dismiss much, much later, and the harassing nature shows through. No one but themselves to blame.
Some dumb and sort-of-unrelated observations: It isn't how it looks to you, it is how it feels to him. I was walking out of the courthouse with a client after the judge ruled against us. My client told me not to worry about it. He said I had clearly presented his case. He knew there was a chance of losing, and he had lost the gamble. He thought he had received justice because he had his side clearly and eloquently presented, and he felt the judge had ruled against him on one of the marginal points. Southwest Airlines employees like to re-tell the story of the lady that wrote numerous complaint letters, objecting to many of Southwest's unique policies. The staff finally kicked one of her letters up to CEO Herb Kelleher. It took Kelleher sixty seconds to compose his response: Dear Mrs. Crabapple: We will miss you. Love, Herb. It isn't how it looks to him, it is how it looks to everyone else. That one sale will neither make nor break your business. If the rest of the general public is convinced that you treated him fairly and respectfully, listened to his problems, and made a serious effort to find and eliminate any possible problems, then you are ahead of the game. With those kinds of folks, I find it best to go a little overboard. When they complain to friends and neighbors that you didn't do what they wanted, they will be quizzed about what you did do. When the complainers describe the above-and-beyond things you did to fix their problem, first, the audience will disbelieve the complainer, and second, it might just generate some business. It often worked that way for me.
Just as the vendors claimed, this full-open-disclosure business is promoting distribution of powerful tools to, well, just anybody. Now the bad guys know about it and are using it. Can it get worse than this? Oh, sure. Try stopping it. __________________________________________ AllParadox - Retired Attorney, no legal opinions, just my opinion.
Power, within the Beltway in Washington, D.C., sits on a foundation of votes.
Cynics confuse the impact of outside money and power with the effect of direct voter expressions of preference. Congressional Representatives are swayed by everyone who contacts them, with an agenda. Everyone who contacts them has an agenda. Those who are not elected into the system gain influence with money and power. The money and power are used to generate more votes at election time.
On most bills, Representatives get precious little idea of what their voters want. Often, a few dozen emails can be a landslide.
Money and power have precious little effect on an angry voter, and every Congressman knows it.
A few thousand communications from voting constituents, clearly stating their opinion, is a tremendous expression of voter sympathies.
I vote, and I sent my Representative an email.
If you are a U.S. citizen, won't you do it too, please?