96 karma · joined June 30, 2013
I routinely get stories about single families in China who have had their kids kidnapped for organ theft, even if it's not all of them. I find it HIGHLY unlikely that an international celebrities child would be kidnapped without it being major news.
You're going to have to do better than bald assertion for me to be convinced of that.
I don't really see your point, since it doesn't even remotely talk about the relative rates of the two populations or compare what would happen with humans to what would happen without for any of the species.
It seems to be contentless objection to what I said, despite the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species, many of which seem to be getting by just fine for many of their members.
What the government did was the equivalent of show up at the houses of everyone who used a particular post office and forcibly finger print them because that post office routed 95% of the child porn magazines in the US (regardless of what percentage of their traffic that actually was, which you don't even mention besides 'there were other sites, too').
That would be a clear abuse of powers, as is this.
Do you really contend that we wouldn't?
Can you support this?
We're not seeing any mass deaths which are sufficient to even slow the population growth rate, and instead, seem to simply be seeing more statistically unlikely events as the population grows larger - which is what we would expect.
I'm not sure it ever really "worked", and seems to be an idea that is less than 100 years old. If it's failing already, I'm not sure we can count the couple generations it happened to it "working".
It would be easy enough to make a one-click batch process, and would help provide cover noise for real communication channels.
You can set up a situation where a team has shared access to a particular folder, and install the necessary programming tools there.
ie, set PREFIX to /projects/MYPROJECT or similar, and then grant access to that directory to everyone on the project team.
Yes, all it really takes to stop the terror of terrorism is to not play along by being scared of attacks.
It would take a 9/11 every month to cause as many deaths as gun violence... which we don't use the NSA approach to, because we realize that would massively destroy civil liberties.
If drastic measures aren't requires - if we can just shrug off as "freedom isn't free", "you need to let some bad things happen to ensure freedom", etc a 10x number of deaths - we're probably taking drastically the wrong approach by using the NSA style surveillance to battle terrorism.
This is literally us gutting out country on behalf of the terrorists - something they could never have hoped to achieve by force - because we're afraid and can't handle something dramatic happening now and then without loosing our heads.
That's childish and cowardly, as a society.
Here's some fun statistics:
There are about 30,000 gun related deaths a year in the United States (19000 suicide, 11000 murders).
There are about another 30,000 vehicle related deaths a year in the United States.
There are about 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 attacks - the deadliest act of terrorism perpetrated against the United States.
Are you saying that we should use the massive spying apparatus - including invading cellphone calls and emails - to stop even one third of murders? How about stop one sixth of suicides before they happen?
Because that would save more Americans than stopping a 9/11 scale attack every year would do - which is more than the NSA is claimed to have done.
In reality, it would take 10 9/11 scale attacks on the US each and every year to rival the number of deaths caused by guns.
Do you support using the government spy apparatus to stop these gun deaths? If not, why support something that isn't appropriate for a /larger/ problem to solve a small one?
I think most Americans panicked when they felt attacked, and became total cowards - as did their leadership at the time.
The correct response to terrorism is simply to shrug it off and ignore it (or at least limit yourself to prudent measures) - the deaths, strictly speaking, are a statistical blip on the radar - but the damage you can do to your civil liberties and society at large can last decades and impact generations of an entire nation.
tl;dr: America got sucker punched, and just like a bitch, got all fearful and cowardly about how it acted. The NSA spying is a sign of that fear and cowardice (possibly being used to nefarious ends by people exploiting it).
This part of what the legal system is up to is clearly what people should be upset about and protesting in the streets.
Our low level code (ie, directly controlling machines) is written in the SPARK environment. This code tends not to get updated often, and has a high level of verification to it. It's what actually handles the pressure cut-offs (ie, hard limits on the machine), turning vales, etc.
Our middleware code is based on a specially developed VM that gets code generated for it in Coq, to ensure that it doesn't choke or become unresponsive. However, it's not directly responsible for safety control and has somewhat laxer restrictions.
Coq is useful for demonstrating that the middleware analytics will complete in a given time profile and not crash out the server on erroneous input.
I assume that the crypto group I know, who developed most of the code generator I use, takes similar measures to make sure that their verified "theorems" translate correctly to code.
The unverified stage is actually the hardware, which is an open problem.
Formal verification of software properties is an interesting field.
Even unrelated code is heavily audited to make sure that it can't somehow impact the main control loop and cause an invalid state.
Cryptography software should be much the same.
Similarly, if word never filters back, they can't exercise indirect oversight through elected officials, because they're incapable of even knowing that they should be electing officials based on how they will resolve those issues.
Sorry for the delay, I just saw your comment and wanted to respond to this:
The point isn't that /everyone/ can use it; it's that /anyone/ can use it.
Similarly, at the point that drones become easy to construct at home, it doesn't matter that it won't be everyone that has home-operated drones monitoring government actions - just that people who want to can.
Release it with a big "WARNING - EXPERIMENTAL" at the top and don't claim it's a secure solution for end-users?
That seems to be what the complaint is about, not that people are experimenting in crypto.
I'd be fine with it if they just slapped big red letters across the top saying "WARNING - EXPERIMENTAL". Why? Because people do need to experiment with topics and that doesn't hurt.
What's upsetting is they're basically claiming their product is on the same level as lots of products that have been heavily tested and verified by groups of people when it's an amateur experiment in the topic.
That might be fine for most kinds of software, but is irresponsible in crypto, embedded safety systems, etc.
* Being able to retrieve a stolen car * Not being blown up by terrorists * Practice any religion I choose * Fly safely between 5 states and 5 different countries * Drive hundreds even thousands of miles safely * Buy and sell what I please, without fear of jail
They've either been able to do these things, or simply failed to do it even with the data.
Until we have evidence that all this data mining is actually useful and essential to government function - and that the /improvements/ to the job they do at those things actually merits the risk we're taking by arming them with the tools to easily take political prisoners or implement a highly repressive regime, your argument is critically flawed.
Just because I can buy a candy bar with $500 doesn't mean I need $500 to buy it - I might be able to with $1 - and you should probably check that the money is actually going where it should.
Similarly, privacy.
tl;dr: Your argument misses the point, because it's not the spying they're doing that enables most of those things, and they were doing a pretty good job of all of those before the mass surveillance.
You are not necessarily obligated to testify to that fact for the police, and unless they can demonstrate that the drive belonged to you (or you had access) through some other means, the production of an encryption key is tantamount to forcing that confession.
It's much like if there were a lock on a gun they found on the street: if they can't link the gun to you already, they can't demand you turn over the combination for the lock, because knowing such a combination would be a tacit admission to knowing about the gun.