Drugs with side effects trigger attachments. Caffeine is just as dangerous as Alcohol in that respect
Except that "attachments" are not dangerous. Coma and death are dangerous, brain damage is dangerous, liver damage is dangerous, and the typical doses of alcohol are frighteningly close to such adverse effects -- whereas the typical dose of caffeine is nowhere near that point.
Go to a coffee stand (or at work) and watch some people with their hands shaking so hard they can't hold the coffee in the cup.
Which may be scary, but is not a sign of any permanent damage to that person's mind or body. Caffeine withdrawal is tough, but it is not life threatening, and a person who is committed to it can get through the symptoms at home (maybe with the help of close friend) in less than a week. Alcohol withdrawal, on the other hand, can be so dangerous that it requires medical supervision.
That is a sign of a drug addiction beyond the persons ability to control.
Yet the drug abuse and dependence treatment programs that emerged from clinical psychology (read: science) are based on teaching people how to take control and avoid harmful behaviors.
Prescribed drugs can be abused but at least someone is trying to limit the effects
Really? A typical Adderall prescription (d,l-amphetamine salts) is for 10-20mg, two-three times per day, for a month. That is well above a lethal quantity, and a person could easily give themselves brain damage by taking a large fraction of their month's supply. People who abuse Adderall and related medicines (other amphetamines, Ritalin, etc.) can have psychotic episodes; see, for example, this recent NY Times article (sorry for paywall) about prescription stimulant abuse among high school and college students:
It's not just psychiatric drugs; prescription opiates are also readily abused, and people get high by using the prescribed amount of those drugs. Some pharmaceutical opiates are more potent than heroin, and abuse is an ever-present concern with those drugs; Rush Limbaugh abused prescription opiates:
Here is the problem with the war on drugs: recreational drugs need not be any more dangerous than prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical methamphetamine is safer than "truck stop" methamphetamine, not because it is a different drug, but because the production is much better controlled. Many of the dangerous of recreational methamphetamine stem from the adulterants that are left over from poor production techniques.
So in a sense, I agree with you: we need better regulation. That means legalizing recreational drugs, and requiring that legal sources adhere to standardized and regulation production and distribution methods (I do not think anyone can argue that a 14 year old should be buying recreational drugs). When someone buys cocaine, they should not have to worry about what is mixed into the drug; when someone buys MDMA (ecstasy), they should not worry about having actually received methamphetamine mixed with caffeine (a well known trick on the black market). There will still be problems with abuse, but when someone visits their doctor, they should be able to tell their doctor what drugs they have been taking, and in what doses -- which is basically impossible if you are buying some mystery powder in an alley somewhere.
That depends on your definition of "success" -- D.A.R.E. has been overwhelmingly successful at convincing people that some drugs should be illegal. See, for example, the large number of people who are convinced that cocaine, heroine, and methamphetamine are evil and must be banned (and never mind that two of the three drugs are legal by prescription).
I don't know how attentive the average person is, but if I picked-up a power strip and it weighed twice as much as others, I'd be very suspiscious that something was off with it (maybe something fell in?)
Well, I said this elsewhere, but when I saw the picture I thought it could pass for a UPS -- and who is going to question a heavy UPS? You can get even nastier with a UPS, since it normal for it to be connected to a USB port or to a LAN (if my power strip were connected to a LAN, I would be a bit curious).
Sure, but nearly as many as we have in America, and definitely not as heavily armed as they are today (assault rifles, grenades, and even tanks). These things cost money, and when the police are not getting their money by recycling seized assets into their own budgets, they are getting the money from the tax payers. At the end of the day, if we did not want paramilitary police running around terrorizing people, we could just cut their budgets until they are forced to choose between catching dangerous criminals or harassing people who pose no threat at all (and they would quickly lose whatever public sympathy they have left if they chose not to catch murderers).
We could stop paying them. Of course, that would require us to vote for some real liberal politicians, not the "liberals" who are really "not as far to the right as the other guy on a few issues."
regulation (reducing diversity and thus making attacks more effective because more widespread),
Regulation does not necessarily lead to this. Suppose, for example, that infrastructure services were required to use systems that have been rated EAL4+ (essentially the highest level that typical commercial products receive), and that they were required to develop RBAC or MLS/MCS policies to secure their systems -- this is not a substantial loss of diversity, and it would go a long way toward security. Similarly, minimum key sizes for common crypto algorithms, and the use of cryptography could be mandated for certain things (authentication, control messages for infrastructure machines, etc.).
The real issue is that nobody is willing to commit the money needed to engage in such an effort. It would probably require enormous amounts of money to upgrade legacy systems, hire people who know how to configure security systems, get audited, train staff, etc., etc., etc. Why spend the money, when we could just buy insurance policies instead?
I read this as basically saying that we are a millimeter closer to a quantum computer. Whatever apparatus is used to create these fields would cease to exist, according to the scientists who published the paper -- not surprising, given how chemistry changes under those conditions. The engineering challenges involved with making a scalable quantum computer remain just as big as they were before; this looks like a drop in a nearly-empty swimming pool to me.
So, two atoms fused together via this magnetic bonding, do they need to be in this ludicrous magnetic field to remain bonded?
That's how I read it -- the field makes it possible for the atoms to remain bonded even when the electron enters an excited state, which would typically break the bond (in layman's terms: it would be much harder to get hydrogen to combust under such conditions). Take the field away, and the atoms should return to normal bonding states, where the excited electrons break the bond and things still operate like we expect.
Of course, this is still pretty exciting for manufacturing things. If you could sustain this field somehow, you could probably induce previously unknown chemical reactions, which would be useful in making new classes of materials.
your augment is that we need inefficiency to limit the enforcement laws?
Yes, but I would add that law enforcement itself is not bad; law enforcement becomes bad when the law is tyrannical or out of control (e.g. where there are so many laws that everyone becomes a criminal). If some new technology helps the police catch murderers more efficiently, great -- fingerprinting, DNA testing, etc. are all examples, and nobody can really argue against the police arresting murderers. On the other hand, if a new technology helps the police catch people who were present at a political protest, we do not want the police to use that technology to harass people; political protests are important and constitutionally protected.
In the case of facial recognition, we have an interesting situation, since there is both desirable and abusive ways for the police to use those systems. It is not hard to imagine how facial recognition systems could help solve a murder -- maybe a sketch can be made that is good enough for the system to use, or maybe the murderer was caught on camera but nobody could identify the face, etc. On the other hand, it is easy for such a system to be used to harass innocent people; the police might photograph a protest, then arrest the protesters at their homes in the days following the protest. That is why we need to create legal obstacles to using such technologies -- otherwise known as requiring a warrant, and given the strong possibility of facial recognition systems being abuse, there should be stringent requirements for obtaining a warrant.
It is also worth noting that whenever the police receive new powers or capabilities, there is always an argument that the police have limited resources and will only be able to use their new powers to catch criminals. There are two problems with that logic:
The new powers never go away; once the police gain some new capability, they keep it indefinitely. This results in a "compounding" effect -- future new capabilities often enable the police to apply powers they gained in the past on a wider basis. GPS is an example; whereas previously, the police needed to be out in the field carefully following a car with a tracker on it, GPS made it possible for the police to track a car automatically and without having to even leave their desks (thankfully, the courts ruled that the police must get a warrant before doing this). Similarly, we have license plates on cars to help the police identify vehicle owners; yet we now have computers with wireless connections to police networks in patrol cars, and so now the police can check every car they come across for outstanding warrants (and they do just that -- when stopped by a red light, the police have been known to check the license plate number from the car in front, just in case).
Police capabilities may become the justification for new laws and new classes of crimes. For example, forensic labs frequently use GC-MS testing to identify materials; thus it is possible to outlaw an enormous number of drugs, because the police can actually catch and provide evidence against people who possess or sell those drugs.
Again, requiring the police to work through some amount of bureaucracy is a useful and sometimes necessary way to ensure that new powers do not result in the problems mentioned above. That is what the court did when they ruled that a warrant is required for the police to use a GPS tracking system: they placed a bit of bureaucracy between the police and mass tracking systems.
One final thought: putting some hurdles between the police and new powers or technologies does not make us any less safe. Over the past 40 years, there has been a vast increase in police power, and the obstacles to using those powers have not scaled up accordingly; similarly, there has been an enormous increase in the number of prisoners in this country. Yet we are not substantially safer today than we were in the 1960s (disturbingly, the response to that seems to be to keep giving the police more power and making the police more efficient at arresting people).
Sure, but even if I was talking about the US Congress, it is still the case that there is a law (the third amendment to the Constitution) that prevents the police from commandeering a home. My only point is that the Constitution comprises the laws that govern the government itself, and that those laws protect us from the government.
The constitution defined the government; it did not establish Congress. Congress approved the Declaration of Independence years before the constitution; the Articles of Confederation were also voted on by Congress before the Constitution was even written. The states did indeed ratify both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, but it is not as though there was no Congress before those things happened.
Another way to look at it is that before the Articles of Confederation and before the Constitution, Congress could pass whatever act it wanted, and the states had no obligation to actually follow or respect any such act. The Constitution is the law that the government itself is bound to; it is the legal reason that states cannot just ignore laws passed by Congress (so e.g. right now, some states have medical marijuana programs, but Congress has not re-legalized marijuana yet; eventually, the legality of state medical marijuana initiatives will have to be decided in court. Without the Constitution, there would be no issue; the states could just ignore Congressional votes and have their medical marijuana programs.).
Regardless of any issues with that study, two have conducted since and reached the same conclusions
Then cite them; like I said, I am at a university, so I should be able to find whatever articles you cite. Prove me wrong; my instinct is that the same problems with the 1987 Koss study will turn up in later studies, but I am willing to admit that I could be wrong about that.
But I don't recall seeing a right not to be seen in a public place anywhere in the bill of rights.
It is not a question of the right to not be seen, it is a question of how much information can be obtained just by seeing your face. The police have certain powers that other people do not have (like the power to hold someone against their will), and so it is absolutely necessary to limit police activities to protect innocent people from tyranny.
In the case of facial recognition, consider the difference between these two situations:
The police are looking for a suspect, and they only have a sketch of his face; they go around neighborhoods where the suspect is believed to live, asking people if they recognize the face.
The police install cameras in their patrol cars, and record and identify all the people they pass by; if a suspect is identified by the system, they jump out to make an arrest.
In the first situation, it takes effort on the part of the police, and cooperation from the people they speak to. That sort of effort cannot be expended for every single suspect, and it limits the ability of the government to enforce a crushingly complex legal code. The second situation substantially reduces the effort required by the police; they can cruise through crowded areas to arrest dozens of people (think of a police van with such a system), and do not need to prioritize any particular crime. It is particularly bad for "lesser" crimes, which people may not even be aware of, because you could assign one or two officers to drive the van around and make arrests.
The same reasoning applies to giving the police assault rifles, giving them tanks and military helicopters, giving them CALEA powers, etc. Every time we increase police power, we see an increase in the size and complexity of the legal code and in the number of reasons a person could be arrested.
Actually I was conflating quartering soldiers with facial recognition. My point was that it is not as though the law is irrelevant when it comes to how the government behaves or how our rights are protected. We do not just reach for our guns whenever there is a new threat to our rights; we pass laws to protect those rights in a changing world.
To put it another way, how else do you expect to prevent the police from using facial recognition systems to further expand their power? We are not going to walk around wearing masks, nor are we going to wear high intensity IR LEDs on our foreheads. Either we need to vote to stop the use of such systems without a warrant, or we need to accept that our rights will be eroded by new technology.
The constitution is law -- it is the law that governs the government, and it both requires that the government do things and restricts how what the government can do. Congress voted on the bill of rights at the beginning of this nation, and they have voted on changes to the constitution several times since then (in the form of amendments).
You do realize that this is about federal agencies, right? You know that the reason the cops cannot just commandeer your house is because of a law passed by Congress.
There is no evidence that someone working at the university is responsible, but there is no evidence to implicate anyone on the planet right now. Whoever did this covered their tracks and probably committed the attack from a public location to hide their identity. Maybe it was someone from the university, or someone from the lab, or someone secretly working for Fox news -- we really have no way to tell.
My first guess (before reading the excerpts from the police report) was that someone bought a cheap netbook and just walked into the university one night. Judging by what I have seen, university offices are not terribly well protected, and computers at universities are not terribly hard to gain access to. If they have reason to believe the attacker used the Internet, fine -- but how does that rule out someone from the school?
No; A implies that hackers should be out trying to impress women that are not interested in what hackers want to talk about, and B implies that the sort of women hackers would do best with are running for the hills when hackers pursue them. I was just pointing out that there is a third option: that hackers are just not finding women that interest them (and why should they try to hide who they are just to attract women they are not interested in?).
We're going on 7 years (or is it 8?), and I still think of her as a giant pain in the ass and frustrating hurdle on my path to enlightenment
I am nearing my first anniversary with my girlfriend, and some recent topics of conversations we have had include...
Combinator logic
The merits of the Common Lisp approach to exceptions over C++, Java, and Python
Why homoiconicity is cool
Whether there is too much Javascript on the web / if we even need Javascript
How radio waves propagate
The moral implications of copyright violations
Whether it makes sense to "lend" ebooks
SELinux
Whether Nouveau is better or worse than NVidia's official drivers
The list goes on and on -- and that is on top of mundane things (money, travel, food, sleep, sex, etc.). My girlfriend challenges me on my views and assertions, and can debate me about technical topics. Neither of us is holding the other back.
Indeed, and it is not as though we do not exist. I suspect that most hackers and other classes of "geeks" want girlfriends and boyfriends who can participate in a conversation about interesting technical topics.
Slashdot Mirror
Drugs with side effects trigger attachments. Caffeine is just as dangerous as Alcohol in that respect
Except that "attachments" are not dangerous. Coma and death are dangerous, brain damage is dangerous, liver damage is dangerous, and the typical doses of alcohol are frighteningly close to such adverse effects -- whereas the typical dose of caffeine is nowhere near that point.
Go to a coffee stand (or at work) and watch some people with their hands shaking so hard they can't hold the coffee in the cup.
Which may be scary, but is not a sign of any permanent damage to that person's mind or body. Caffeine withdrawal is tough, but it is not life threatening, and a person who is committed to it can get through the symptoms at home (maybe with the help of close friend) in less than a week. Alcohol withdrawal, on the other hand, can be so dangerous that it requires medical supervision.
That is a sign of a drug addiction beyond the persons ability to control.
Yet the drug abuse and dependence treatment programs that emerged from clinical psychology (read: science) are based on teaching people how to take control and avoid harmful behaviors.
Prescribed drugs can be abused but at least someone is trying to limit the effects
Really? A typical Adderall prescription (d,l-amphetamine salts) is for 10-20mg, two-three times per day, for a month. That is well above a lethal quantity, and a person could easily give themselves brain damage by taking a large fraction of their month's supply. People who abuse Adderall and related medicines (other amphetamines, Ritalin, etc.) can have psychotic episodes; see, for example, this recent NY Times article (sorry for paywall) about prescription stimulant abuse among high school and college students:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic-edge-teenagers-abuse-stimulants.html?_r=1&hp
It's not just psychiatric drugs; prescription opiates are also readily abused, and people get high by using the prescribed amount of those drugs. Some pharmaceutical opiates are more potent than heroin, and abuse is an ever-present concern with those drugs; Rush Limbaugh abused prescription opiates:
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-1561324.html
Here is the problem with the war on drugs: recreational drugs need not be any more dangerous than prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical methamphetamine is safer than "truck stop" methamphetamine, not because it is a different drug, but because the production is much better controlled. Many of the dangerous of recreational methamphetamine stem from the adulterants that are left over from poor production techniques.
So in a sense, I agree with you: we need better regulation. That means legalizing recreational drugs, and requiring that legal sources adhere to standardized and regulation production and distribution methods (I do not think anyone can argue that a 14 year old should be buying recreational drugs). When someone buys cocaine, they should not have to worry about what is mixed into the drug; when someone buys MDMA (ecstasy), they should not worry about having actually received methamphetamine mixed with caffeine (a well known trick on the black market). There will still be problems with abuse, but when someone visits their doctor, they should be able to tell their doctor what drugs they have been taking, and in what doses -- which is basically impossible if you are buying some mystery powder in an alley somewhere.
That depends on your definition of "success" -- D.A.R.E. has been overwhelmingly successful at convincing people that some drugs should be illegal. See, for example, the large number of people who are convinced that cocaine, heroine, and methamphetamine are evil and must be banned (and never mind that two of the three drugs are legal by prescription).
Historically? Just what do you think D.A.R.E. is?
I don't know how attentive the average person is, but if I picked-up a power strip and it weighed twice as much as others, I'd be very suspiscious that something was off with it (maybe something fell in?)
Well, I said this elsewhere, but when I saw the picture I thought it could pass for a UPS -- and who is going to question a heavy UPS? You can get even nastier with a UPS, since it normal for it to be connected to a USB port or to a LAN (if my power strip were connected to a LAN, I would be a bit curious).
To best honest, when I first saw that, I thought, "Hm, that's a strange looking UPS." Not that that would make it out of place in my office...
Sure, but nearly as many as we have in America, and definitely not as heavily armed as they are today (assault rifles, grenades, and even tanks). These things cost money, and when the police are not getting their money by recycling seized assets into their own budgets, they are getting the money from the tax payers. At the end of the day, if we did not want paramilitary police running around terrorizing people, we could just cut their budgets until they are forced to choose between catching dangerous criminals or harassing people who pose no threat at all (and they would quickly lose whatever public sympathy they have left if they chose not to catch murderers).
We could stop paying them. Of course, that would require us to vote for some real liberal politicians, not the "liberals" who are really "not as far to the right as the other guy on a few issues."
regulation (reducing diversity and thus making attacks more effective because more widespread),
Regulation does not necessarily lead to this. Suppose, for example, that infrastructure services were required to use systems that have been rated EAL4+ (essentially the highest level that typical commercial products receive), and that they were required to develop RBAC or MLS/MCS policies to secure their systems -- this is not a substantial loss of diversity, and it would go a long way toward security. Similarly, minimum key sizes for common crypto algorithms, and the use of cryptography could be mandated for certain things (authentication, control messages for infrastructure machines, etc.).
The real issue is that nobody is willing to commit the money needed to engage in such an effort. It would probably require enormous amounts of money to upgrade legacy systems, hire people who know how to configure security systems, get audited, train staff, etc., etc., etc. Why spend the money, when we could just buy insurance policies instead?
I read this as basically saying that we are a millimeter closer to a quantum computer. Whatever apparatus is used to create these fields would cease to exist, according to the scientists who published the paper -- not surprising, given how chemistry changes under those conditions. The engineering challenges involved with making a scalable quantum computer remain just as big as they were before; this looks like a drop in a nearly-empty swimming pool to me.
So, two atoms fused together via this magnetic bonding, do they need to be in this ludicrous magnetic field to remain bonded?
That's how I read it -- the field makes it possible for the atoms to remain bonded even when the electron enters an excited state, which would typically break the bond (in layman's terms: it would be much harder to get hydrogen to combust under such conditions). Take the field away, and the atoms should return to normal bonding states, where the excited electrons break the bond and things still operate like we expect.
Of course, this is still pretty exciting for manufacturing things. If you could sustain this field somehow, you could probably induce previously unknown chemical reactions, which would be useful in making new classes of materials.
your augment is that we need inefficiency to limit the enforcement laws?
Yes, but I would add that law enforcement itself is not bad; law enforcement becomes bad when the law is tyrannical or out of control (e.g. where there are so many laws that everyone becomes a criminal). If some new technology helps the police catch murderers more efficiently, great -- fingerprinting, DNA testing, etc. are all examples, and nobody can really argue against the police arresting murderers. On the other hand, if a new technology helps the police catch people who were present at a political protest, we do not want the police to use that technology to harass people; political protests are important and constitutionally protected.
In the case of facial recognition, we have an interesting situation, since there is both desirable and abusive ways for the police to use those systems. It is not hard to imagine how facial recognition systems could help solve a murder -- maybe a sketch can be made that is good enough for the system to use, or maybe the murderer was caught on camera but nobody could identify the face, etc. On the other hand, it is easy for such a system to be used to harass innocent people; the police might photograph a protest, then arrest the protesters at their homes in the days following the protest. That is why we need to create legal obstacles to using such technologies -- otherwise known as requiring a warrant, and given the strong possibility of facial recognition systems being abuse, there should be stringent requirements for obtaining a warrant.
It is also worth noting that whenever the police receive new powers or capabilities, there is always an argument that the police have limited resources and will only be able to use their new powers to catch criminals. There are two problems with that logic:
Again, requiring the police to work through some amount of bureaucracy is a useful and sometimes necessary way to ensure that new powers do not result in the problems mentioned above. That is what the court did when they ruled that a warrant is required for the police to use a GPS tracking system: they placed a bit of bureaucracy between the police and mass tracking systems.
One final thought: putting some hurdles between the police and new powers or technologies does not make us any less safe. Over the past 40 years, there has been a vast increase in police power, and the obstacles to using those powers have not scaled up accordingly; similarly, there has been an enormous increase in the number of prisoners in this country. Yet we are not substantially safer today than we were in the 1960s (disturbingly, the response to that seems to be to keep giving the police more power and making the police more efficient at arresting people).
Sure, but even if I was talking about the US Congress, it is still the case that there is a law (the third amendment to the Constitution) that prevents the police from commandeering a home. My only point is that the Constitution comprises the laws that govern the government itself, and that those laws protect us from the government.
The constitution defined the government; it did not establish Congress. Congress approved the Declaration of Independence years before the constitution; the Articles of Confederation were also voted on by Congress before the Constitution was even written. The states did indeed ratify both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, but it is not as though there was no Congress before those things happened.
Another way to look at it is that before the Articles of Confederation and before the Constitution, Congress could pass whatever act it wanted, and the states had no obligation to actually follow or respect any such act. The Constitution is the law that the government itself is bound to; it is the legal reason that states cannot just ignore laws passed by Congress (so e.g. right now, some states have medical marijuana programs, but Congress has not re-legalized marijuana yet; eventually, the legality of state medical marijuana initiatives will have to be decided in court. Without the Constitution, there would be no issue; the states could just ignore Congressional votes and have their medical marijuana programs.).
Regardless of any issues with that study, two have conducted since and reached the same conclusions
Then cite them; like I said, I am at a university, so I should be able to find whatever articles you cite. Prove me wrong; my instinct is that the same problems with the 1987 Koss study will turn up in later studies, but I am willing to admit that I could be wrong about that.
But I don't recall seeing a right not to be seen in a public place anywhere in the bill of rights.
It is not a question of the right to not be seen, it is a question of how much information can be obtained just by seeing your face. The police have certain powers that other people do not have (like the power to hold someone against their will), and so it is absolutely necessary to limit police activities to protect innocent people from tyranny.
In the case of facial recognition, consider the difference between these two situations:
In the first situation, it takes effort on the part of the police, and cooperation from the people they speak to. That sort of effort cannot be expended for every single suspect, and it limits the ability of the government to enforce a crushingly complex legal code. The second situation substantially reduces the effort required by the police; they can cruise through crowded areas to arrest dozens of people (think of a police van with such a system), and do not need to prioritize any particular crime. It is particularly bad for "lesser" crimes, which people may not even be aware of, because you could assign one or two officers to drive the van around and make arrests.
The same reasoning applies to giving the police assault rifles, giving them tanks and military helicopters, giving them CALEA powers, etc. Every time we increase police power, we see an increase in the size and complexity of the legal code and in the number of reasons a person could be arrested.
The constitution is a legal document, and the bill of rights was voted on by congress...
Actually I was conflating quartering soldiers with facial recognition. My point was that it is not as though the law is irrelevant when it comes to how the government behaves or how our rights are protected. We do not just reach for our guns whenever there is a new threat to our rights; we pass laws to protect those rights in a changing world.
To put it another way, how else do you expect to prevent the police from using facial recognition systems to further expand their power? We are not going to walk around wearing masks, nor are we going to wear high intensity IR LEDs on our foreheads. Either we need to vote to stop the use of such systems without a warrant, or we need to accept that our rights will be eroded by new technology.
The constitution is law -- it is the law that governs the government, and it both requires that the government do things and restricts how what the government can do. Congress voted on the bill of rights at the beginning of this nation, and they have voted on changes to the constitution several times since then (in the form of amendments).
You do realize that this is about federal agencies, right? You know that the reason the cops cannot just commandeer your house is because of a law passed by Congress.
There is no evidence that someone working at the university is responsible, but there is no evidence to implicate anyone on the planet right now. Whoever did this covered their tracks and probably committed the attack from a public location to hide their identity. Maybe it was someone from the university, or someone from the lab, or someone secretly working for Fox news -- we really have no way to tell.
My first guess (before reading the excerpts from the police report) was that someone bought a cheap netbook and just walked into the university one night. Judging by what I have seen, university offices are not terribly well protected, and computers at universities are not terribly hard to gain access to. If they have reason to believe the attacker used the Internet, fine -- but how does that rule out someone from the school?
Or they just bought a $200 netbook and walked into the building one night. Universities are not exactly high-security facilities...
No; A implies that hackers should be out trying to impress women that are not interested in what hackers want to talk about, and B implies that the sort of women hackers would do best with are running for the hills when hackers pursue them. I was just pointing out that there is a third option: that hackers are just not finding women that interest them (and why should they try to hide who they are just to attract women they are not interested in?).
We're going on 7 years (or is it 8?), and I still think of her as a giant pain in the ass and frustrating hurdle on my path to enlightenment
I am nearing my first anniversary with my girlfriend, and some recent topics of conversations we have had include...
The list goes on and on -- and that is on top of mundane things (money, travel, food, sleep, sex, etc.). My girlfriend challenges me on my views and assertions, and can debate me about technical topics. Neither of us is holding the other back.
Actually...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_and_submission
Indeed, and it is not as though we do not exist. I suspect that most hackers and other classes of "geeks" want girlfriends and boyfriends who can participate in a conversation about interesting technical topics.