Comment Re:Questions (Score 1) 477
Though not really relavant to this story, cannabis does cause schizophreniform disorder in people with two common allelic variants in the gene for catechol-O-methyltransferase (esp one of these variants).
Comment Re:how about no (Score 1) 487
The Directive 1999/93/EC of of the European Parliament and of the Council already has established a framework where digital signatures are legally binding. In my country, Portugal, this has been implemented even before the directive. These certificates for signing can be emitted by any company as long as it follows some certifications. So on that aspect, it's been more than 10 years now...
The second aspect of what you say -- and the supposedly what the article mentions (not that I've read it, of course) -- is authentication against web services. Since the introduction of smart cards replacing the usual id cards, this has also become more common, but really, only some government services use it. Anyone can of course do authentication against the smart card certificate, all you need is Apache, mod_ssl and the root certificate. The certificate will tell you name and unique id of the person. This is a bit more insidious, but really no really less privacy than giving a credit card number and your name when you're shopping.
I'm surprised to hear it's so wild-spread in Bulgaria, almost no one here has smartcard readers or for that matter would know how to use it...
Comment Re:Misleading report (Score 3, Interesting) 305
This is not an IE bug. It is a
.Net bug in mscorie.dll. Mscorie.dll is not required by IE. (IE works just fine, so to speak, without .Net.)
Referece? The CVE description says:
Use-after-free vulnerability in the CSharedStyleSheet::Notify function in the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) parser in mshtml.dll, as used in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8 and possibly other products, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) and execute arbitrary code via multiple @import calls in a crafted document.
Comment Re:So what (Score 1) 840
But increasingly in non-Islamic countries Sharia law is being given precedence over local laws for violations between Muslims. This is happening in the US, Australia, Germany and the UK.
What the hell are you talking about?
Comment Re:So what (Score 4, Insightful) 840
A jury? In Sweden?
Amazon Taking Down Erotica, Removing From Kindles 641
ctmurray writes "The independent writers who publish on Amazon report that erotica books containing incest are being taken down with no explanation by Amazon, and removed from the Kindles of purchasers of the books. Author Selena Kitt writes: 'I want to be clear that while the subject of incest may not appeal to some, there is no underage contact in any of my work, and I make that either explicitly clear in all my stories or I state it up front in the book's disclaimer. I don't condone or support actual incest, just as someone who writes mysteries about serial killers wouldn't condone killing. What I write is fiction.' Kindle's own TV ad features a book with a story line of sex between a 19-year-old and his stepmother, defined in some states as incest (Sleepwalking by Amy Bloom)."
Comment Re:Are you kidding me? (Score 1) 470
Smoking in not a choice; for the vast majority of the smokers, it's an addiction. These people don't smoke because they want to, they smoke because they can't help it. So the point of personal liberty is very weakened.
Comment Re:Who knew! (Score 2, Insightful) 156
Try not to be ignorant, not to say idiotic. "Any possible message" includes "any reasonable message".
Come back when you understand Shannon's theorem.
Can Solar Storms Cause Wildfires? 87
astroengine writes "In the wake of recent solar activity, some space cadets were very quick to point out a causal link between geomagnetic storms and the wildfires currently ravaging the landscape surrounding Moscow. Of course, this is patently false. But is there a scenario when the onset of a solar storm could have secondary effects, sparking fires in already arid regions? Possibly. What's more, it already happened, 150 years ago."
Submission + - 11th Circuit Eliminates 4th Amend. in E-mail (volokh.com)
Artefacto writes: Orin Kerr writes in the Volokh Conspiracy:
Last Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a Fourth Amendment case, Rehberg v. Paulk, that takes a very narrow view of how the Fourth Amendment applies to e-mail. The Eleventh Circuit held that constitutional protection in stored copies of e-mail held by third parties disappears as soon as any copy of the communication is delivered. Under this new decision, if the government wants get your e-mails, the Fourth Amendment lets the government go to your ISP, wait the seconds it normally takes for the e-mail to be delivered, and then run off copies of your messages.
Last Thursday, the Eleventh Circuit handed down a Fourth Amendment case, Rehberg v. Paulk, that takes a very narrow view of how the Fourth Amendment applies to e-mail. The Eleventh Circuit held that constitutional protection in stored copies of e-mail held by third parties disappears as soon as any copy of the communication is delivered. Under this new decision, if the government wants get your e-mails, the Fourth Amendment lets the government go to your ISP, wait the seconds it normally takes for the e-mail to be delivered, and then run off copies of your messages.
Submission + - MySpace to sell user data (readwriteweb.com)
OnlyJedi writes: Hot on the news of Netflix canceling its latest contest over privacy concerns, news has spread that MySpace is going the opposite direction. Apparently, the one-time leading social network is now selling user data to third party collection firms. From the article, the data that InfoChimps has listed includes, "user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes." InfoChimps is a reseller that deals with individuals and groups, from academic researchers to marketers and industry analysts. So if you're worried about your data on MySpace being sold off to anybody with a few hundred dollars, now's the time to delete that little-used account.
Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."
Comment Re:So (Score 1) 334
That's strange, I find that behavior much worse in Linux (i.e., Linux is more aggressive swapping out applications). I usually tune the "swappiness" (see http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000 ) to very low levels, but sometimes after having to wait a few seconds each time I switched to some huge application such as NetBeans made me disabled the swap space.
Comment Bogus Story; Statute from the 1950s (Score 1) 849
This statute was actually passed in 1951; actually, there was an attempt to get the law repeated and they got it backwards. See http://volokh.com/2010/02/10/did-south-carolina-pass-a-subversive-activities-registration-act-last-year/
Comment BRANDENBURG v. OHIO (Score 1) 849
Exactly. The first amendment should be applied in declaring this unconstitutional. In BRANDENBURG v. OHIO (1969). This is the summary:
Appellant, a Ku Klux Klan leader, was convicted under the Ohio Criminal Syndicalism statute for "advocat[ing] . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform" and for "voluntarily assembl[ing] with any society, group or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism." Neither the indictment nor the trial judge's instructions refined the statute's definition of the crime in terms of mere advocacy not distinguished from incitement to imminent lawless action. Held: Since the statute, by its words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action, it falls within the condemnation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
