are automakers responsible when someone breaks the speed limit and kills someone?

What's funny is that there's no such thing as "vicarious speeding" or "contributory reckless driving," but with copyright, there is. Analogously, sometimes the automaker is liable for drivers speeding!

But even so, Cox's behavior didn't fit contributory infringement.

The court just said T17 S501 is an ok law that they're not striking it down or anything like that, but it doesn't apply to this case!

A very good thing has happened.

The people who say that, never supply a reason. It's just dogma.

My counter-dogma: nuh uh.

It's illegal but laws aren't currently enforced, so I don't know why you're bringing the law up.

Let's perform a natural experiment: keep saying reappropriation is illegal, and then wait for the executive to do it anyway. Then watch to see if Congress gives a fuck, by impeaching the executive (or credibly threatening to impeach if the embezzled funds aren't returned in n hours).

My hypothesis is that Congress won't do anything about it, and is fine with whatever new powers that the president decides he wants.

What's your hypothesis?

Surprise: we're actually going to do that experiment. In fact, we started it last year.

It's not in society's interests, but it is in government's interests. Society and government are orthogonal teams who often conflict with each other. In the US, we spelled that out explicitly in the late 1700s, but docs go back at least as far as the Magna Carta.

Alas, "spelling out" government limitations isn't the same thing as believing limits are a good idea and enforcing them, as we're occasionally reminded. The Constitution is just ink on a page, until people give a fuck about it. And in America, the constitution is currently very unpopular. Society wants to surrender to government, or if it doesn't want that, it's sure acting like it wants that.

That's pretty neat!

The danger with using unallocated space, is that sometimes you might accidentally overwrite it. But if that happens, I guess it just means you need to figure out what your new size needs to be, make a new hidden volume, and then restore from backup. It's that last step that I never remember as a possibility, probably due to my horrible backup habits. ;-)

I think that might be a bad idea, because when thugs say "hand over your phone" and you hand them a brand new phone that you have apparently never used, you're going to get wrench-based cryptanalysis. You need to be able to hand them the keys to a realistic environment that looks like it's being used. Thugs wanna see recent timestamps.

Ideally, we need to have some casual, boring (but constantly-touched!) environment that can launch encrypted environments, but somehow not have anything that references those environments.

The biggest problem I see is storage allocation. We need to be able to plausibly deny the existence of something, but also keep it from being overwritten by not-denied environments. How do you hide "don't write to these blocks, because something else uses them"?

Some might suggest hiding in plain sight with steganography, but at some point thugs will notice that everyone they suspect, just happens to have an unnecessarily-large gigaphoto. ;-)

Having alt environments that are detectable, but can be quickly destroyed the way you suggest, might be a decent compromise as long as it keeps an innocent and recently-used one around as cover. You enter the oh-fuck PIN, and it logs you into the innocent host environment but then it immediately deletes its encrypted guests, leaving you with a truly innocent machine as far as anyone can tell. And then you just really hope you can enter that duress code (or you can trick thugs into entering it) before they image your storage.

"National Security" means anything the government wants. Anything you would consider to be an abuse, they would consider to be within bounds, because there are no bounds.

We pay money to get less energy?

Trump is confusing plus signs with minus signs. Does he need an eye exam, or a mental exam, or what?

The story here has nothing to do with sympathy; it's about incompetence.

"You used a n^2 query on a billions-of-records database?!"

"Well, yeah, but it's ok because the only people who use it are assholes."

That the victims of the breathalyzer's incompetent implementation happen to be people I mistrust, doesn't make the breathalyzer's makers look any less incompetent. They had one job, and they failed.

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

Chuck Norris is admittedly hard to beat in combat, but Bruce Schneier is NP-hard.

Chuck Norris once threw some scrambled eggs at Bruce Schneier, so Bruce unscrambled them and threw them back.

Chuck Norris was once proud, seeing his work featured at a theater. That is, until Bruce Schneier came along and showed it was security theater.

Chuck Norris once opened fire on Bruce Schneier, but nothing can ever get through Bruce's firewall.