Posts by Jaybus 401 posts • joined 21 Jan 2011
Do you really believe that the Chinese government, given access to all of the metadata gathered by TikTok, will choose to look only at inside leg measurements? What will they do with the rest of the data, sell it to GCHQ?
You must be joking. Monsegur is taking the plea bargain, thus admitting his own guilt in the identity thefts. So you are of the opinion that the child is better off with the criminal father. Some might argue that the child would be better off if the criminal father were locked up, but you are entitled to your opinion.
Also, the FBI doesn't do the bargaining, the prosecution does.
"But if the Americans did do that, then plea bargains are legal in America and so information produced as a result of one wouldn't be inadmissible in evidence."
Yes. Plea bargains are legal in America. Keep in mind that plea bargains have to be reviewed and accepted by a judge. This is because it is actually a plea of guilty, the difference being that the judge is agreeing to the reduced sentencing proposed by the prosecutor in exchange for testimony. He cannot be compelled to testify against himself, but he can agree to do so. Does this make hist testimony less believable or more believable? That question is left up to the jurors.
" Cyber weapons fall into this category, as less lethal ways of "blowing stuff up". "
I think you should add "Currently, " to the beginning of that sentence. Military leaders around the world would love to have robotic troops, and the industry will gladly produce them for the money. Very little reason to believe it won't happen as soon as technology permits.
There are millions of Chinese Americans, so of course there are. Major newspapers in the US are World Journal, Sing Tao Jih Pao, Ming Pao, and The China Press. Also some politically slanted papers, International Daily News (pro-mainland), The Epoch Times (Falun Gong religious movement), and many more.
Well, there is already ntfs-3g, which is FUSE based. Why should they work on yet another? The problem with that is the huge performance hit, especially with lots of small writes, that is directly related to it using FUSE. A kernel driver for NTFS is not a ridiculous concept.
Oh, and btw, ntfs-3g has > 29k lines of code, so the existing FUSE-based FS is actually slightly larger than the proposed kernel driver. For comparison, ext4 has 29k and xfs has 65k. So wtf?
Of course there are differences in legal obligation. For example, in the US an employer does not have to offer a retirement plan. But there is a caveat. If they DO offer a retirement plan, then they are legally obliged to offer it to all employees, not just those in the ivory tower. This is the same for the other things, health insurance, disability insurance, etc.
As a contractor, the driver is operating a business, independent from Uber. As you have pointed out, US law favors business. For example, tax deductions available to businesses are available to the drivers. I can certainly see why drivers would want to remain contractors. They make more money, or better to say they pay less taxes and so keep more of what they make. It's a fundamental difference in philosophy. The contractor is choosing to be self-reliant and manage his or her own money and affairs. The employee takes home less cash, offering up the remainder to the company and big brother with the expectation that they will manage it for his or her benefit.
That is also true in USA. A commercial driver license is required to drive anything for pay, the only exception being agricultural equipment. Also, the commercial insurance is required. I don't know if Uber informed their drivers or not, but I am sure the California magistrates know this. But they don't want to ban Uber, they want to tax them more. Most of the drivers, I am sure, want to remain contractors, because of the tax laws. They buy their own cars, fuel, and insurance, etc. As a business, these expenses are all deductible. As employees, the deductions for employee expenses are much more limited. So California will collect more taxes, from both Uber and the drivers, if the drivers are deemed employees.
This isn't about protecting workers. It is about collecting more tax revenue. Thankfully, it will be decided by the people and not left up to the government that stands to gain from making drivers employees against their will. If the people want to force Uber out, then so be it.
And they were able to fix Hubble in low Earth orbit with a space shuttle mission. Webb is going to L2. Granted, that is the best location for deep space observation, but is some 1.5 million km from Earth. Is a manned mission to L2 even feasible in the near future if something does go wrong post launch?
I believe the "double standard" that Eline Chivot was referring to is that Trans-Atlantic data transfers are being held to a different standard that Trans-Pacific data transfers, given that China's CSL specifically gives actual ownership of the data to the Chinese government.
Yes we see the supernova, but that is also true for stars that become neutron stars. Btw, we have never imaged a neutron star either, just nearby gas clouds glowing from the x-ray emissions it produces. So seeing a supernova is not definitive evidence of the formation of an event horizon. We can only estimate that it will become a black hole based on the star's original mass. Had we a powerful enough telescope, looking into the center of the supernova remnant we should be able to see a neutron star (in x-ray). But for a black hole, we should see the remnant of the star collapsing at a slower and slower rate and getting more and more red shifted. From our observation point, (according to general relativity), time literally stops at the event horizon, meaning we can never see its formation from here.
Wait. If watching from a distance, it seems we should never be able to see a star collapse into a black hole. Rather, we would see a star shrinking slower and slower toward its inevitable collapse, but never quite getting to the Schwarzschild radius due to relativistic time dilation. So how is it that we can see x-ray radiation from matter falling into the black hole when it still looks like a collapsing star that isn't quite yet a black hole from our point of observation?
While the red and blue do seem to be static in recent elections, they are not always a shoe in for one party or another. Stalwart red states Alabama and Tennessee voted for Democrats Johnson, Carter, and Clinton in my lifetime. New York voted for Reagan. California has only been blue since the 1992 Clinton election. These "exceptions" can be found for most all states. It is not nearly as cut and dried as you make it out to be.
The electoral college is not so strange. Each state has the same number of electors as they do members of Congress, 2 for their members of the Senate and one for each member of the House, which is based on population. Each state decides for itself how those electors are divided, although in all but two states it is a winner-takes-all. The purpose is to give all states a say in the election. In the beginning, it was to prevent Philadelphia, and so Pennsylvania, from choosing every president. Now it gives the so-called fly-over states a say in the election that they would not otherwise have. Bottom line, Clinton won the most individual votes, whereas Trump won the most voting districts. More individuals voted for Clinton. More communities voted for Trump. The president chosen notwithstanding, it is not such a bad system.
Actually, anyone could still have strong crypto, even in the unlikely event that it did become law. It's not like we can unlearn the maths, and existing open-source crypto is plenty strong enough for the near future. Just another bill that is doomed from the start because it is trying to legislate the impossible.
Such as the Parliament Square statue of Winston Churchill? Or do you mean for that to include churches, mosques, synagogues, sex toy shops, most women's clothing shops, and etc.? It's very complex. Perhaps we should just appoint you Minister of Propaganda to decide for us, similar to Joseph Goebbels' role in the 1930's. Wait! Churchill was instrumental in bringing down people like Goebbels, wasn't he?
"As for freedom of speech, a private company. They can choose who they host. They can choose to host the KKK but decide not to host a Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute page."
They do NOT have free reign to refuse hosting to whomever they choose. The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination by privately owned places of public accommodation on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin. Places of "public accommodation" include restaurants, hotels, banks, health clubs, and basically any service. It was enacted long before there was an Internet, but I'm fairly certain most judges would deem Facebook a place of public accommodation. In fact, FB deems itself an internet service and not a media company so that they don't fall under the media rules.
I would say it is not the result of a district based system, but rather district-based combined with a first-past-the-poll voting system. It does favor a two-party system. For example, the USA is not a two-party system, otherwise. In fact, there were 13 minor parties that ran Presidential candidates in 2016. Most are either extreme left, extreme right, or totally special interest, but at least two, Libertarian Party and Green Party, ran candidates who received over a million votes each. The last to receive any substantial vote was the Reform Party candidate Ross Perot in the 1996 election (>8 million votes).
The barriers for a third party are high in a district-based first-past-the-poll voting system, but which two parties become dominant has indeed changed in the past in the UK and USA, so it is not completely impossible. The Labour Party came to power mainly due to the Liberal Party self-destructing, and something like that is certainly possible in the USA as well. Look at the factions that already exist in the major US parties.
Well, she barely won the popular vote, but OK. As for the "retarted" voting system, have a look at the 2016 US election results by voting district at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html#3.46/39.71/-89.28. Clinton won the districts colored blue and Trump the red. There is far more red territory than blue, but because the blue is primarily the metro areas and the red everything else, Clinton won the popular vote. In other words, the electoral college system worked exactly as designed. It is a big country. Think of it this way; Clinton won the most people, while Trump won the most communities. The US is a democratic republic, not a democracy. And there is no monarch to just appoint a head of state with no vote at all. based on the predominant party.
Physicist Dr. Robert Helling at LMU Munich, one of the sites similarly attacked, published a preliminary analysis of the malware at https://atdotde.blogspot.com/2020/05/high-performance-hackers.html. He discovered altered files in /etc/fonts. In particular, the .fonts file was an executable with SUID root that simply gave a root shell (running bash). Another file in /etc/fonts named .low was larger and obfuscated by XORing. He was able to decode some of this and determine that it had lists of files in /var/log, presumably because it cleaned the logs. Also, they likely were able to steal additional SSH private keys from user directories, enabling them to login as many different legitimate users to further obscure the tracing.
Clearly, a sophisticated attack. Less clear is how they managed to implant the rootkit in /etc/fonts in the first place. Stealing a SSH private key from someone's personal device doesn't explain it. They could get a shell as a legitimate user, but still should not allow planting the rootkit in /etc/fonts. I wonder if their IPS only looks for remote password guessing attacks and not from sudo attempts.
In any case, it looks like they were able to delete logging and probably more, so the evidence of crypto mining, or anything else they did, is of course going to be limited. There is probably a gateway or router from which investigators could determine IP traffic, and that would reveal the extent of crypto mining.
I can assure you that the people selling these horses at auction for meat production most certainly do not spend money on any drug. Any bute found in horse meat was from stolen horses. The real danger is in the failure to disclose the contents. I wonder what else is in there.
Because if the perforations are smaller than 1/4 wavelength of the light striking it, the radiation pressure will be the same as if it were not perforated. This would reduce the mass needed to build a sail of the same dimensions, so would allow for a larger sail. Due to the divergence of the laser light, it would be important to make the sail as large as possible.
Difficult to jam laser comms. Typically, a CW laser diode is modulated by varying the current of its power supply. A modulation signal will be generated digitally and a DAC and amplifier will be used to drive the modulation of the current source. An optical notch filter allows a narrow range of wavelengths through to the detector. A high speed ADC directly converts the received signal to a digital signal, then a FPGA performs mixing and filtering mathematically. A QAM modulation scheme is typical. A sideband control channel would likely use a PSK modulation and could easily be used to switch carrier frequency at random.
A CW light source would show up as a DC offset, so a CW jamming signal would have to be intense enough to saturate the detector. Since the sun can't even do that, we can rule that one out. The jammer would need to know the precise wavelength and carrier frequency and would have to be able to decrypt the control signal to detect carrier frequency changes.
There is also evidence that far more people have already been exposed than previously assumed. And all of the evidence is being questioned and debated in the scientific community with no definitive answers...yet. Bottom line: we don't really know yet which of the measures in place work better or if any of them even work at all. But we have many places on strict lockdown, some early, some late, as well as places like Sweden that took a very lax approach and now Georgia in the US that opted for a very short lockdown, and no doubt there will be all manner of different approaches before it is over. So there will be plenty of data on each approach and we will have a reasonable consensus in a year or two. For now, I will withhold judgement on Sweden and Georgia's more lax approach.
Also, we don't yet know how long previously infected people will maintain the SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, so we cannot know how long these people will remain immune. We don't even know what their level of immunity is. So, neither do we know if a vaccine can be effective. We do know that people infected with the similar SARS-CoV-1 virus maintained antibodies for years. Not proof that this will be true for SARS-CoV-2, but we can hope.
Since the incompleteness could very well be in the quantum theory, that is not very strong evidence that GR is either wrong or incomplete. On the other hand, it is known that QM does not predict that gold preferentially absorbs blue light due to the 5d-6s transition distance and so appears yellow, thus we have the field of relativistic quantum chemistry. And then there's gravity... No, I would think relativity has demonstrated more incompleteness in QM than vice versa.
It is a complicated measure that seems more political than scientific. We can't be sure what he means by 'renewable energy'. You see, the state of California would consider very little of Norway's hydroelectric production to be 'renewable'. According to their self-designated Renewable Portfolio Standards, any plant with a capacity exceeding 30 MW is not considered a renewable source due to its impact on the ecology. Around 13% of California's electricity comes from hydroelectric plants that are not considered renewable.
"If you get sick, go to the hospital, and eat a bag of M&Ms every day"
Not a very good comparison. Hydroxychloroquine has gone through rigorous clinical testing and has been approved for use in many places, just not for treating COVID-19. The M&M treatment could be compared with perhaps shark cartilage, but the asinine comment would be better if aspirin were used instead of M&Ms.
Also, it's not like the principles of what this code does have changed in the past few centuries. The old accounting and etc. COBOL code produces plain text output, albeit perhaps as EBCDIC text. Nevertheless it is very straight forward to create an app that calls upon the old code to do the heavy lifting and then translates the old EBCDIC text results to JSON and makes it available to the SaaS gobbling, web-based UI flavor du jour.
Recompile, move to a VM on modern hardware, install translator app, and voila! This old code is turned into "cloud" crap.
If the lunar lander was not a spacecraft, then the Bell X-1, and all of the other drop launched vehicles, were not aircraft. They flew it from orbit, landed, then flew it back into orbit. Of course it was a spacecraft. As for the ISS, Mir, etc., they are not "flown" from point A to point B, so are space STATIONS for the same reason a floating dock is not a "seacraft". All just nomenclature, but the lunar lander was clearly a spacecraft.
By comparison, influenza related deaths range from 12,300 to 61,000 in the US (2010-2019), with known cases ranging from 9.3 to 45 million. But that is comparing real data (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html) for influenza vs. total speculation for COVID-19. So apples - oranges.
"Has the CIA proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt? No."
I think I disagree with that assessment. Reasonable doubt is not about being 100% sure. There is no way to be 100% sure, which is why we have the concept of "reasonable doubt" in the first place.
Everyone seems to agree that he indeed used the KingJosh3000 ID, and there seems to be evidence that someone using that ID accessed the VM containing the code. Seems reasonable and even logical to accuse him. Is it possible that someone else who knew about the ID (whether they hated him or not) could have used it? Yes. Is there any evidence at all that someone else did so? No. Is there evidence that a co-worker hated him? Yes. Is there any evidence at all that one of those who hated him set him up? No.
The prosecution claims "We know that someone using the ID made an unauthorized access, and we have testimony that the defendant owned and used that ID." The defense rebuts with "Right, but everybody hated him. So, so, so, .... they framed him!" Seems beyond reasonable to me.
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