Just to throw a hand grenade into the discussion - I honestly don't think it matters if people go to Mars - at least not right now. People can't live on Mars. Or on the Moon. Or anywhere else that we know of except Earth.

The distance between here and where ever the hell else in the universe people can live is so far, that in the absolute best case scenario it would take many, many, many times longer than written history to reach such a place using any propulsion system that we can currently imagine constructing.

Its a total fantasy. In order to make it a reality you need one of three things:

1. New physics.
2. Artificial BioSpheres that are sustainable for multiple generations.
3. Post-Humans.

You're not going to find any of these things on Mars. The first may not exist at all. The second is enormously risky, expensive, and far fetched. We're going to build cities under the sea long before we know how to build sustainable space craft that can last thousands of years, and we're aren't working on the former as far as I know. The later seems like the most likely bet.

We should be focusing on genetics and robotics - not space craft.

We'll build things with human like intelligence that can live comfortably in alien environments before we'll build vessels that enable humans to live comfortably in those same environments.

Who cares if people go to Mars?

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

Awesome! Thanks Adobe!

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again | Epicenter | Wired.com

IF Thomas M. Siebel can accurately see the future, computer science students with the entrepreneurial gene may want to look for a different major. And investors who think that information technology is a sector that will produce outsized returns should wake up.

In Mr. Siebel’s view, I.T. is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy. He contends that its glory days are past — long past, having ended in 2000.

Digital Domain - Are the Glory Days Long Gone for I.T.? - NYTimes.com

The U.S. economy may be just as sluggish during the next 20 years as Japan’s economy was in the last 20, according to Comstock Partners, a money manager founded and run by Charles Minter.

sigh.

‘Lost Couple of Decades’ Looming for U.S. Economy: Chart of Day - Bloomberg.com

Continental Airlines diverted a Twin-Cities-bound plane to Rochester due to a storm, and then locked the entire planeload of passengers in the plane overnight for nine hours.

Continental imprisons 50 passengers overnight in grounded plane with no food, overflowing toilets - Boing Boing

Patry should be read for the very reason he quit blogging:

“Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works,” he wrote on his former blog. “Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes harm, but which is beneficial to copyright holders.”

This sounds interesting.

Google’s Patry Returns to Blogosphere | Threat Level | Wired.com

As far as I've been able to tell, Michael Arnold did not seem like a very sympathetic defendant. It seems clear from the court documents that he was traveling to the Philippines to have sex with minors.

Nevertheless, one of the foundations of a free society is the idea that citizens are presumed to be innocent and the state leaves innocent people alone unless it has some reason to be suspicious of them. It has long been understood that in a free society the government must not rifle through people's personal papers and correspondence in search of anything that is in any way incriminating.

An accident of technology has placed most modern people's papers and correspondence in their hands at border crossings, a place where people's belongings have been subject to search for at least 100 years. How the government reacts to this paradox affects whether or not we can think of our society as a free one, and unfortunately they've made the wrong decision.

Did they have to make that decision in order to convict Arnold? Apparently not.

In their successful attempt to get the Supreme Court to ignore Arnold's argument about the basis for the search of this computer, the Government argued that it did have a reason to suspect Arnold:

Those facts raised a reasonable suspicion that petitioner's computer might contain illegal photographs of minors, such that petitioner would not prevail even under his own legal position.

But this argument cuts both directions - if the government had a reason to suspect Arnold, why have it out in court that they don't need one? Why attempt to cut down one of the pillars of our free society when it isn't necessary in order to convict this defendant?

Of course, the case over Arnold is happening in a greater context, and that context is absolute national hysteria over sex crimes. The right to be secure against unreasonable searches of ones personal papers is not the only threat to liberty that exists in the midst of this hysteria. Stories about teenagers being placed on permanent sex offender registries right next to child molesters because they engaged in consensual sex are frankly shocking. So is the idea that people might be rick rolled into a conviction with extreme prison sentences and mandatory minimums.

In the midst of this the only real hope you have is that most of these cases are like Arnold's - that prosecutors are using these tools only to go after people who really are likely to hurt children. But that sort of rationalization isn't very comforting because one has a hard time believing that its true across the board. There are ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Sex laws: Unjust and ineffective | The Economist

zeugma wrote:
This is a real question that I am curious about as an interested layman (I am not trying to be snarky or sarcastic).

Good questions all!

First, the reason there is money in VoIP is because you want PSTN interconnection. If you don't want PSTN interconnection, you could use Skype. Skype is free (although Skype does make money).

The reason that there aren't that many people doing raw SIP on their PCs is that, conversely, there is no money in it, but if they did, you wouldn't want to use it, because it would be full of spam (and some other nastiness like denial of service attacks). While there has been lots of interesting research on preventing spam in decentralized SIP environments, I think its far easier to do if you have a central "VoIP Centrex" which handles everyone's calls and can see suspicious call patterns from a central position and block them. Therefore I don't think you are ever going to see raw SIP on a broad basis.

This perspective is my own and is very unpopular with both the IETF and several people I work with. I am, nevertheless, convinced that I am correct about it.

is it really that expensive to set up a STUN server to traverse the NAT?

Yes, the purpose of STUN (really ICE) is to do what you're saying and the people who are promoting it believe that people want to do raw SIP and need ICE to do it because NAT devices just aren't going to behave.

My perspective is that people want to control what is going on with their networks, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem isn't NAT devices, the problem is the fact that SIP causes unpredictable UDP back connections on random ports. ICE layers sin upon sin, by taking a protocol that is hard to accommodate and making it even more unruly in hopes of successfully piercing holes in firewalls. You know something is not right when it has become hard to tell the difference between IETF standards and malware.

Also, if the move to IPv6 ever happens, will the need for NAT traversal pretty much disappear?

Another belief that is popular with the IETF and which I reject. There are three problems with this perspective.

The first problem is the idea that NAT is going to go away. The IETF seems to believe that the world is teeming with people who hate NAT and are praying for the day when someone parachutes into their networks and liberates them from its oppression.

IPv6 will not be welcomed as a liberator.

The fact is that people like NAT. They NAT because they don't want to have to ask an external third party permission in order to change their internal network architecture. If you NAT, you don't have to bother your ISP with a request for more IP addresses and you don't have to wait for them to decide whether or not they approve of your actions before your proceed. Furthermore, some people NAT because it makes them f... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Dear Memestreams: Why is there any money in VOIP?

The case upon which the whole border search exemption rests is United States vs. Ramsey, which strings together a whole bunch of prior decisions in an attempt to demonstrate that border searches are presumptively reasonable. One of the oldest references it reaches to is Boyd vs. United States. Turns out that Boyd justifies its holding based on the following notion:

The search for and seizure of stolen or forfeited goods, or goods liable to duties and concealed to avoid the payment thereof, are totally different things from a search for and seizure of a man's private books and papers for the purpose of obtaining information therein contained, or of using them as evidence against him. The two things differ toto coelo.

In the information age, these things don't differ "toto coelo" anymore and you cannot have different standards that apply to them. They are the same.

A border search of the contents of a laptop is precisely a search of a "man's private books and papers for the purpose of obtaining informaiton therein contained, or of using them as evidence against him." It is precisely the sort of search the Fourth Amendment was set against.

If the rights protected by the Fourth Amendment are to survive in this context the state must conceed.

BOYD V. UNITED STATES, 116 U. S. 616 (1886) -- US Supreme Court Cases from Justia & Oyez

The burst of public discussion last year about whether the border search exemption applies to laptops was the result of a bizarre and frankly nonsensical ruling by the ninth circuit that unheld suspicionless laptop searches by conflating them with searches of vehicles. It was my opinion that this ruling, being so obviously unsound, would be accepted for appeal regardless of the higher court's inclinations about the correctness of its conclusion, as even supporters of random, suspicionless searches should want their position to be staked out in a logical way.

Nope. The circuit refused to rehear the case enblanc and the Supreme Court denied the petition for certiorari. Two days later, Arnold was found dead. He committed suicide.

The Supreme Court doesn't say why they denied certiorari. The government argued that the issue was not ripe for review because no conviction had been handed down against Arnold, so perhaps thats the reason.

In any event, judicial review of these searches has stopped with a (tortured) conclusion that they are A-OK, the Obama administration is way past their self imposed deadline for taking a position on this, Feingold seems to have fallen silent on it, and AFAIK we have one bill from Loretta Sanchez winding its way through the system which will require the collection of more information and kick the debate out a few more years into the future.

Is there anyone reading this who has any genuine experience doing historical research? One of the conclusions uponwhich this whole search regime is based is the idea that the government has always searched the belongings of international travelers. In digging into this it appears that in fact the founders intended the 4th amendment to prohibit customs searches and that with one short exception, searches of travelers were not performed until after the Civil War. I'd like to dig up some more information about that, but I have no idea where to start.

Michael Arnold committed suicide