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Comment Unions. (Score 5, Insightful) 308

by harrkev (#47298383) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Lawrence Lessig About His Mayday PAC

I was just wondering if you were also concerned about money from unions? To me, a millionaire donating is own money is somehow less problematic than unions taking money from their members to donate. Keep in mind that in many states, union membership is required in order to get the job. Therefore, many union members may find their money being used to support candidates that they do not support.

Comment Re:This will hugely backfire... (Score 2) 422

by harrkev (#47232053) Attached to: FWD.us: GOP Voters To Be Targeted By Data Scientists

I agree with this completely. I am a rather moderate conservative. And I am against illegal immigration.

Hypothetical question. You are the ruler of a country and you want to have more citizens. Who do you choose to offer citizenship to:

1) Person who goes to an embassy, fills out the required paperwork, and tried to do things the right way.

2) Person who decides that they want in, and ignores the law and smuggles themselves in, making their first act in the country breaking the law.

To me, it seem that #1 has already proven that they can obey the law, while #2 has already proven that they do not mind breaking it.

I must admit that I do have a lot of sympathy for youths who were brought over here with their parents. They did not have much choice in the matter. If there is anyone deserving of amnesty, it is this class. However, the parents should return to where they came from, and fill out the proper paperwork to return here.

Comment Re:It's not really a myth anymore (Score 4, Interesting) 222

by harrkev (#47182369) Attached to: The Sci-Fi Myth of Killer Machines

The problem is not who controls the strings, it is what happens when the strings are no longer needed.

A.I. will present little danger (except A.I. the movie, which is so bad it ought to be banned as a WMD) as long as a human can pull the plug. Two decades ago, the Internet was a novelty. Now, the economic consequences would be catastrophic if the Internet suddenly went dark. Similarly if/when A.I. actually arrives, it will be useful and helpful. It will become more and more critical such that a decade or two after it arrives, the act of unplugging it would have catastrophic consequences. So, if Skynet goes bad, then bad things will happen whether you unplug it or not.

To me, what it all comes down to is will. Can an artificial personality actually have a will? Can it become afraid of its own demise? Even if it is theoretically possible, can our researchers and programmers achieve it? Will it be able to reach outside its own programming and decide to eliminate humans? Maybe, maybe not.

On the other hand, once A.I. becomes common, can a rogue state task the A.I. with eliminating all humans on a certain continent? Almost certainly. What happens then is simply a battle of A.I. agents. Who can outsmart the other?

Just my opinion, and worth every penny that you paid for it.
Democrats

Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden Would Not Get a Fair Trial – and Kerry Is Wrong 519

Posted by timothy from the where-liddy-was-wrong dept.
Daniel Ellsberg, no slouch himself in bringing to public awareness documents that reveal uncomfortable facts about government operations, says that "Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time." Ellsberg says, in an editorial at The Guardian pointed out by reader ABEND (15913), that Snowden cannot receive a fair trial without reform of the Espionage Act. According to Ellsberg, "Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden's chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment). More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars have strongly argued that the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First Amendment, is what they're saying. As I know from my own case, even Snowden's own testimony on the stand would be gagged by government objections and the (arguably unconstitutional) nature of his charges. That was my own experience in court, as the first American to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act – or any other statute – for giving information to the American people." Ellsberg rejects the distinction made by John Kerry in praising Ellsberg's own whistleblowing as patriotic, but Snowden's as cowardly and traitorous.
Security

Security Researchers Threatened With US Cybercrime Laws 156

Posted by Soulskill from the building-inspectors-threatened-with-arson-laws dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports that many of the security industry's top researchers are being threatened by lawyers and law enforcement over their efforts to track down vulnerabilities in internet infrastructure. 'HD Moore, creator of the ethical hacking tool Metasploit and chief research officer of security consultancy Rapid7, told the Guardian he had been warned by U.S. law enforcement last year over a scanning project called Critical.IO, which he started in 2012. The initiative sought to find widespread vulnerabilities using automated computer programs to uncover the weaknesses across the entire internet. ... Zach Lanier, senior security researcher at Duo Security, said many of his team had "run into possible CFAA issues before in the course of research over the last decade." Lanier said that after finding severe vulnerabilities in an unnamed "embedded device marketed towards children" and reporting them to the manufacturer, he received calls from lawyers threatening him with action."

Comment Re:A boon for CAD, hopefully (Score 2) 207

by harrkev (#47129283) Attached to: 4K Displays Ready For Prime Time

I often work on fancy PCB designs and can always use more resolution and a bigger screen, within limits. There's no point in having a screen so wide that my head is always moving like at a tennis match.

But more resolution makes editing quicker and easier.

Bah. You PC board wusses. Try doing physical design on a custom ASIC (note my sig).

More pixels definitely helps. I have been using a 30" 2560x1600 (Dell for about $1200), but more pixels for half the money seems like a great deal! The down side is less glass itself, so the pixels are smaller. My old eyes would probably have a hard time staring at text at that resolution. Yes, I know that I can change fonts, but I am a strong believer in more monitors in general. You can have the layout on the big glass, and terminal and/or EMACS windows on the side monitors. Now THAT is a productivity boost. The problem is that with your side monitors having a significantly different pixel density from the main monitor make having an ideal font size impossible. Either too big on the side monitors or too small on the big, central monitor.

Comment Re:What! (Score 2) 566

by harrkev (#47113759) Attached to: TrueCrypt Website Says To Switch To BitLocker

So, assuming that this IS real, any suggestions on FOSS encryption for those without access to BitLocker?

On a side-note, how could TrueCrypt be actually broken? Even if the encryption is broken, that can be fixed in a later release. There is a LOT of stuff in TC (boot manager, GUI, etc.), and you cannot tell me that ALL of it is bad.

Comment Re:What the f*$# is wrong with us? (Score 3, Insightful) 1198

by harrkev (#47112247) Attached to: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

The best trolls are indistinguishable from serious comments.

No, not trolling. Sorry, but there IS a grain of truth in geek misogyny. This toon is a humorous example:

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/20...

Also, when was the last time that you saw a woman depicted in a video game that was less than a "C" cup? Sorry, but if you were to go back a few centuries and give a woman a sword and armor, I am pretty sure that the armor would cover more than about six square inches of her body. Sorry, but in video games, women are sex objects (Metroid is the one notable exception that I can think of). Even as protagonists, they will dress scantily, while standing next to a male character that is so covered in so much armor that you can only see his eyes.

Perhaps part of it is that women are, in general, under-represented in geek culture. Guys are attracted to girls, but there are damn few of them floating around in geek circles. So, they go from being "people" to becoming something closer to a "trophy."

Comment Re:Killowatts are power, not energy (Score 0) 262

by harrkev (#47058967) Attached to: The Brakes That Stop a 1,000 MPH Bloodhound SSC

At hundreds of miles per hour, the car aerodynamics would probably be closer to an aircraft. Why not use some sort of air brake -- little flaps that stick out causing wind resistance? Once you get down to, say, 300 MPH, there are certainly commercial car brakes that can handle that -- NASCAR does it every day.
Government

White House Pressures Legislators Into Gutting USA FREEDOM Act 284

Posted by Soulskill from the too-bad-everybody-moved-their-indignation-over-to-net-neutrality dept.
The U.S. House of Representatives has substantially reduced the effectiveness of the USA FREEDOM Act, a surveillance reform bill that sought to end mass collection of U.S. citizens' data. House Leadership was pressured by the Obama Administration to weaken many of the bill's provisions. The EFF and the Center for Democracy & Technology had both given their backing to the bill earlier this month, but they've now withdrawn their support. CDT Senior Counsel Harley Geiger said, "The Leadership of the House is demonstrating that it wants to end the debate about surveillance, rather than end bulk collection. As amended, the bill may not prevent collection of data on a very large scale in a manner that infringes upon the privacy of Americans with no connection to a crime or terrorism. This is quite disappointing given the consensus by the public, Congress, the President, and two independent review groups that ending bulk collection is necessary."

Robyn Greene of the Open Technology Institute added, "We are especially disappointed by the weakening of the language intended to prohibit bulk collection of innocent Americans’ records. Although we are still hopeful that the bill’s language will end the bulk collection of telephone records and prevent indiscriminate collection of other types of records, it may still allow data collection on a dangerously massive scale. Put another way, it may ban ‘bulk’ collection of all records of a particular kind, but still allow for ‘bulky’ collection impacting the privacy of millions of people. Before this bill becomes law, Congress must make clear—either through amendments to the bill, through statements in the legislative record, or both—that mass collection of innocent people’s records isn’t allowed."
United States

Al Franken Says FCC Proposed Rules Are "The Opposite of Net Neutrality" 282

Posted by samzenpus from the you-keep-using-that-word-I-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Senator Al Franken can be counted among the many who are at odds with the FCC's proposed net neutrality rules. From the article: 'Senator Al Franken has a pretty good idea of what the term "net neutrality" means—and that, he says, puts him head-and-shoulders above many of his colleagues in the U.S. Congress. "We literally have members of Congress—I've heard members of the House—say, 'We've had all this innovation on the Internet without net neutrality. Why do we need it now?'" he told TIME in an interview last week. "I want to say, 'Come on, just try to understand the idea. Or at least just don't give a speech if you don't know what you're saying. Please—it hurts my head."'"

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