Slashdot Mirror

Unlike today people back then knew how war is suppose to be waged. Using the very simple strategy of killing all your enemies using any weapons available and dropping bombs until the rubble bounced.

Actually civilians usually weren't purposely targeted before WWII. I believe there were even international agreements about it.
Assuming you're American, laws against attacking civilians go back at least to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed with Mexico in 1848. Remember, treaties are the second highest laws in the land.
Modern laws of war can be said to start with the Hague conventions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
It was also as much the Allies who first started targeting civilians in WWII, carpet bombing, incendiary bombing were western inventions.

• If your customer service drops too low, customers stop buying from you. The drop in sales leads to a decrease in profits.
• If your customer service becomes too good, the cost to address customer complaints eats into your profit margin, or even turns it negative (you lose money per sale on average). And your overall profit decreases.

At some point along that scale, profit is maximized The company is happy because it's making lots of profit. The customers are happy because they're getting stuff for cheaper because the company isn't wasting money on excessive customer service.

If you're a naive businessman who thinks you should make sure 100% of your customers are satisfied*, then yes having worse customer service will increase your profits Likewise, if you're a naive businessman who thinks cutting customer service expenses will always increase profit, then no, at some point having worse customer service results in decreased profits. Pretty much everyone who has run a business understands this. These professors would too if they'd spent some time running a business instead of only theorizing about them.

* (The phrase, "the customer is always right," doesn't mean you should give the customer whatever they demand. It means you're better off selling the customer what they want, rather than what you think they should get. In other words, what the customer thinks they want is always right. The phrase has unfortunately been appropriated by abusive customers trying to justify their excessive demands for service from businesses.)

JaneTheIgnorantSlut confided:

Many employers offer to deduct charitable contributions from your pay automatically, but they generally offer only a select list of charities they will handle.

This is absolutely the case in the USA. (I can't speak knowlegeably about whether it's also true for companies operating in other countries.)

FWIW - it's also true that not-for-profit aggregators, such as The United Way, which distribute net donations (i.e. - what's left after they deduct their own expenses) only pass money through to a select set of other non-profits (for instance, TUN does not, as a matter of policy, contribute to Planned Parenthood, because conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants would refuse to donate to their pledge drives if they did). And I can tell you from experience, enormous pressure is exerted upon employees of Fortune 500 corporations to contribute to TUN's fundraising campaigns in order to ensure "100% participation" by those employees, for purposes of corporate optics.

In other words, "To make the company look good to potential customers and investors."

When I worked for the IT department of a major U.S. bank during the early 1990's, I was made to feel like an outcast, because I refused, on principle, to contribute to their United Way drive, specifically because TUN discriminated against Planned Parenthood - and because I understood just how much of each donated dollar TUN's management raked off the top before passing what was left through to "non-controversial" end recipient organizations ...

(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

--

Check out my novel ...

Best estimates are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims

While the parent poster was incorrect about the largest group of victims, they were 100% correct in pointing out that the death toll is substantially higher than the 6 million figure. The objection being that due to Jewish exceptionalism the 6 million figure is so often misrepresented as the total death toll, when it is obviously not.

Wait... you act like this stuff has never happened before. I guess you do not read history. So do tell, what am I being paranoid about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/t...

It's not really paranoia. There is always an ebb and flow to government corruption. This year nothing happened, next year there is controversy where someone lied to the government got things done. How many times does government get to murder people before you stop worshiping them? How many Mao's, Hitler's, Stalin's, Pol Pot's, Maduro's, Ill's, and Trump's do you need to see in government to figure out that government is not something you can trust and that government does not care about you as an individual?

Governments, Businesses, and other groups are more than happy to turn you into a slime pool the moment it serves their needs, wants, or desires.

Why is is paranoid to want to take steps from preventing something that HAS ACTUALLY happened? Perhaps you are the on missing a few fries from their happy meal?

If your phone doesn't support App permissions now granted individually at run-time, not all-or-nothing at install time, then your phone is hopelessly out of date, and it contains dozens of un-patched critical security flaws, so app permissions are the least of your concern.

Step 1. Buy a newer phone.
Step 2. Remove your sim card from the old phone and put it in the new phone.

Amazing how Britain did just fine on its own before 1973, huh?

They weren't on their own, they were stealing resources from other nations.

I guess they must have been "asleep" for those hundreds of years prior, when they were helping to develop modern civilization,

...in their image, at gunpoint.

Wild guess: India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Have you been in a coma for a decade?

Again, you would think Britain hadn't existed just fine on its own for hundreds of years before 1973.

That's probably because it didn't. Its success was due to imperialism, which became less profitable for them in recent times, so they abandoned it and moved towards free trade instead. Brexit will interfere with free trade, and they can't realistically go back to imperialism...

Bicicle weels are getting bigger? [...] So no idea what you are talking about.

So why, uh, "contribute"? Just trying to make Slashdot grate?

Why wait until they've completely taken over the economy when they're already breaking the law?

That argument is violating Hume's law. Can't take anyone serious that doesn't understand why the way you argues is a fallacy.

From a legal standpoint Hitler was duly elected and became the dictator of Germany via legal means.

Will you uneducated American rightwing fucktards ever stop repeating this Nazi lie?

Hitler became a dictator by orchestrating the Reichstag fire, blaming it on the Communists and the Social Democrats, and using that as a pretext to detain their MPs illegally. Then he proceeded to threaten the remaining MPs from the conservative parties to give him absolute power, which they did by violating a bunch of rules of the Weimar constitution.

It was all illegal as the war in Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

BOS is an optical density visualization technique, belonging to the same family as schlieren photography, shadowgraphy or interferometry. In contrast to these older techniques, BOS uses correlation techniques on a background dot pattern to quantitatively characterize compressible and thermal flows with good spatial and temporal resolution. The main advantages of this technique, the experimental simplicity and the robustness of correlation-based digital analysis, mean that it is widely used, and variant versions are reviewed in the article.

Source: https://link.springer.com/arti...

Or for those who are not inclined to refuse Wikipedia as a source:

Background-oriented schlieren (BOS) is a novel technique for flow visualization of density gradients in fluids using the Gladstone–Dale relation between density and refractive index of the fluid. BOS simplifies the visualization process by eliminating the need for the use of expensive mirrors, lasers and knife-edges. In its simplest form, BOS makes use of simple background patterns of the form of a randomly generated dot-pattern, an inexpensive strobe light source and a high speed digital camera.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Google schoolar places the earliest mention of this method into 2001, which is not that new: https://iopscience.iop.org/art...

Schlieren is a technique to make deformations caused by diffraction that aren't obvious to the naked eye visible. The jets were photographed with a high speed camera from above, so there was a background of land or sea with quite a lot of detail in it. I expect the deformations can be found by comparing the background in subsequent images taken by a high resolution high speed camera. That would make the visualisation technique similar to InSAR.

Bernie Sanders doesn't work for anyone but himself. He dresses it up in populist left wing idiocy, but his three houses show he is a full and complete hypocrite. He should donate two of them to people without homes. He is the 1% he hates. He hates himself, having never worked a day in his life. Definition:Parasite

Anyone remember Mr. Cranky? Satirical movie reviews, under the premise that all movies were bad. If the reviewer actually liked the film being reviewed, they'd just make up a bunch of stupid bullshit, like Raiders of the Lost Arc really being about Indiana Jones coming to grips with his bisexuality.

So you must really like Bernie Sanders, if you're making up a bunch of stupid bullshit like this.

Some interesting stuff from Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin

In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), [British historian Robert] Conquest states that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, at least 15 million people were killed "by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors".[64] Rudolph Rummel in 2006 said that the earlier higher victim total estimates are correct, although he includes those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well.[65][66] Conversely, J. Arch Getty, Stephen G. Wheatcroft and others insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by "revisionist" scholars.[67][68] [British historian] Simon Sebag Montefiore in 2003 suggested that Stalin was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people.

gun deaths are a disease as well, in some sense --- although there is a federal law prohibiting the CDC's researchers from publishing in support of gun control.

And there's some research noting

the "mere presence of a gun in a home increased the risk of a firearm-related death by 2.7 percent, and suicide fivefold

In response to research outcomes the NRA didn't like? In response, the NRA launched a "campaign to shut down the (CDC's) Injury Center."

Got the balls to split out gun deaths from inner cities?

And then figure out the rates?

This reminds me of Van Eyk Phreaking (1982)- capturing electromagnetic emissions from computer monitors, keyboards, printers, etc. and reconstructing the digital data. This and the hard disk song are examples of side channel attacks. They exploit vulnerabilities in the implementation of a computer system rather than in its algorithms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

gun deaths are a disease as well, in some sense --- although there is a federal law prohibiting the CDC's researchers from publishing in support of gun control.

And there's some research noting

the "mere presence of a gun in a home increased the risk of a firearm-related death by 2.7 percent, and suicide fivefold

In response to research outcomes the NRA didn't like? In response, the NRA launched a "campaign to shut down the (CDC's) Injury Center."

"We want to identify the risk factors for those who get injured, ...

I'd start with Newton's 3 Laws of Motion and Gravity (The force, not the film -- though I imagine her injuries and the orbital destruction would have been way worse had Dr. Ryan Stone been also riding an electric scooter...)

I'd like to follow-up with a note that something very similar was an underlying premise in the film Battlestar Galactica: Razor -- it's, obviously, very subtle ...

"We want to identify the risk factors for those who get injured, ...

I'd start with Newton's 3 Laws of Motion and Gravity (The force, not the film -- though I imagine her injuries and the orbital destruction would have been way worse had Dr. Ryan Stone been also riding an electric scooter...)

I'd like to follow-up with a note that something very similar was an underlying premise in the film Battlestar Galactica: Razor -- it's, obviously, very subtle ...

"We want to identify the risk factors for those who get injured, ...

I'd start with Newton's 3 Laws of Motion and Gravity (The force, not the film -- though I imagine her injuries and the orbital destruction would have been way worse had Dr. Ryan Stone been also riding an electric scooter...)

I'd like to follow-up with a note that something very similar was an underlying premise in the film Battlestar Galactica: Razor -- it's, obviously, very subtle ...

"We want to identify the risk factors for those who get injured, ...

I'd start with Newton's 3 Laws of Motion and Gravity (The force, not the film -- though I imagine her injuries and the orbital destruction would have been way worse had Dr. Ryan Stone been also riding an electric scooter...)

"We want to identify the risk factors for those who get injured, ...

I'd start with Newton's 3 Laws of Motion and Gravity (The force, not the film -- though I imagine her injuries and the orbital destruction would have been way worse had Dr. Ryan Stone been also riding an electric scooter...)

A dedicated spy group could probably do really well by selling cheap external enclosures that modified common drives inserted with this hack, then had a cellular data feed built in to transmit real-time audio to whoever on demand.

If you're making the enclosures, why bother hacking the firmware? Let me introduce you to The Thing. A marvelous piece of KGB engineering which was a half century ahead of its time. (If you don't want to read the link, you can make the enclosure a passive microphone which re-transmits sounds into the RF band when "illuminated" by an external RF energy source. Basically an RFID tag hooked up to a microphone.)

ICD-10 Diagnose Code: F60.0

Cause: a result of an underlying belief that other people are hostile [and long time spying on others] in combination with a lack in self-awareness

Treatment: hard to treat, i.e. a terminal illness.

ICD-10 Diagnose Code: F60.0

Cause: a result of an underlying belief that other people are hostile [and long time spying on others] in combination with a lack in self-awareness

Treatment: hard to treat, i.e. a terminal illness.

SpaceX is always trying to make things less expensive. Their original plan was to test propulsive landing on cargo missions, so they'd essentially get the rocket and Dragon for free. NASA stopped that, saying the return cargo was too valuable to put at risk. And because SpaceX did not budget to test propulsive landing with separate missions (as Boeing did) they lost out. Also, the feet were supposed to go through the heat shield, which made NASA engineers nervous. However, NASA had an entire hatch through the heat shield for Manned Orbiting Laboratory: photo.

In contrast the 60s capsules were allowed to sink to the bottom of the ocean if not needed for inspection.

Huh? Now that I'd like to see a citation for unless you consider every capsule needed for inspection.
There was one or two that accidentally sank or allowed to burn up IIRC but most are still around including the Gemini (2) that was reused (unmanned).
Can't find a citation right now but I believe Gemini was intended to be reusable. It was actually the most advanced of the spacecraft due to being designed latest and originally was meant to land on land using a para-glider.
Lists of locations of the spacecraft,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pl...

In contrast the 60s capsules were allowed to sink to the bottom of the ocean if not needed for inspection.

Huh? Now that I'd like to see a citation for unless you consider every capsule needed for inspection.
There was one or two that accidentally sank or allowed to burn up IIRC but most are still around including the Gemini (2) that was reused (unmanned).
Can't find a citation right now but I believe Gemini was intended to be reusable. It was actually the most advanced of the spacecraft due to being designed latest and originally was meant to land on land using a para-glider.
Lists of locations of the spacecraft,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pl...

You can be compelled by the court to testify in a case unrelated to you (other than you being a witness). Refusal to do so is contempt of court, and can result in jail time (not prison). Your desire to protect someone does not override the court's responsibility to get at the truth.

This seems like an odd reason to refuse to comply with the court. Grand jury hearings (they determine if there's sufficient evidence for a case to go to a real trial) act as a shield against government harassing innocents by constantly sending them to trial on frivolous charges. They are frequently held in secret so as not to prejudice potential future jurors, and not to prejudice the public in case there's a determination that there's insufficient evidence (people have this bad habit of assuming that being accused = guilty).

The only other notable case I can think of where someone refused to testify was a reporter who was ordered by a court to give up the name of his anonymous source, and was jailed (for years) under contempt of court. But in that case, the principle of freedom of the press was at stake - people wishing to inform the press anonymously would no longer do so if their anonymity could be stripped by a simple court order.

I'rr take the cuttrefish and aspargus!

That episode funny only to those who don't read T&C.

Because if you actually do, which I did, you quickly realize that you CAN. NOT. READ. IT.!
It is like reading the Necronomicon. You can make the sounds, but the words and sentences make no sense, but to unleash the vile spirits from Hell, Hell & McGill, to torment you for profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Streaming is completely logical for Disney. $10/mo for the entire catalog ~= six $25 DVDs/yr, and you're not bothered by physical media.

Hell, my household would only use the Star Wars and Marvel channels, and if you included ALL the episodic animation (SW Rebels, Avengers Assemble, the underrated Lego Star Wars), I could almost see subscribing to it. If they're REALLY smart, they'll throw in ESPN+ for free. Gives Dad a reason to hook it up.

The question is what happens when their IP doesn't even appear on wider content aggregators (NetFlix/Prime/Hulu/Whatever). If half a generation never sees it, and/or finds alternatives (e.g. Amazon's "Just Add Magic"), Disney's position moving foward is unclear.

Here's hoping...

Sad when a company has to resort to artificial scarcity in order to drive sales.

I guess they have run out of ideas because I see they are remaking the same crap over and over again. e.g. Lion King (2019)

Bringing this back on topic -- so if the vault is going to be closed does that mean that everything can now be finally bought as a physical copy instead of being artificially restricted or will the only way to "own" these movies is to pay for a subscription to Disney+ ?

"The Saturn V rocket is still the most powerful rocket on record"

and even it would tremble at the thought of trying to lift your fat ass by twelve feet jigglypuff

" was ahead of its time with performance similar to a 6502 microprocessor"

um no
it was a 1MHz 16 bit design
it had a lot more registers and a divide instruction

" The AGC operating system was crash proof and that light years ahead of anything like it."

except for the f-14
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

but hey what's important is that you are trying to karma whore again

An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft without constant 'hands-on' control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the aircraft. This allows them to focus on broader aspects of operations such as monitoring the trajectory, weather and systems. The autopilot is often used in conjunction with the autothrottle, when present, which is the analogous system controlling the power delivered by the engines.

Autopilot.

Not quite. The Saturn V rocket is still the most powerful rocket on record. The Apollo Guidance Computer was ahead of its time with performance similar to a 6502 microprocessor found in Apple II and other 8-bit computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The AGC operating system was crash proof and that light years ahead of anything like it.

A freaking socialist wants to break up the companies that give the US a competitive advantage over China and Russia.

When are people going to wake up and clue in that socialists are un-American traitors?

Yes, Warren is just like the original trust-buster, that well-known un-American socialist traitor, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. It's quite revealing of how far the Republican party has fallen that all the things Teddy's presidency stood for (trust-busting, regulation, environmental protection, expanding Federal government) are now viewed by his party as "lefty" and "socialist".

Google ->DDG, SearX, or any of.

Amazon ->Ebay, or any of.

Facebook -> XMPP, SIgnal, or any of.

Google ->DDG, SearX, or any of.

Amazon ->Ebay, or any of.

Facebook -> XMPP, SIgnal, or any of.

Google ->DDG, SearX, or any of.

Amazon ->Ebay, or any of.

Facebook -> XMPP, SIgnal, or any of.

Sidenote, it's 20fucking19. There's a mountain of technological options available that make sorting our your bill afterwards easier and faster than having the restaurant split the bill in the first place.

And there's a rather large percent of us who aren't interested in paying to use the technological offerings of dodgy startups that aren't financial institutions but are trying to play them. And aren't willing to link our bank accounts to said companies, and share with them all our personal info, the info of our friends, and our spending habits. Some of us aren't brain-dead morons who still remember all the fucking shit that PayPal has done to screw over customers. I don't have any additional faith in venmo or whoever the current not-a-financial-institution of-the-day is.

(Well shit, apparently PayPal owns venmo. No surprise then that, In February 2018, the FTC settled with Venmo, after an investigation uncovered false representations about "bank grade" security and failures to comply with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Safeguards Rule and Privacy Rule)

At least in the US, there's no easy way to transfer money from one financial institution to another. It might be easier to transfer between accounts in one institution, but even then it's hit or miss depending on who you're a customer of.

Personally, I'm not paying a third party money to help me transfer it to another person. There are multiple free ways to do that. The only downside is that they take time.

It's 20fucking19. If a restaurant is living 20 years in the past and can't split a bill, they can fuck right off. If my local dive-bars which haven't put any money into their establishment for the last decade can split a check, I expect that anyone can do that. Even by hand if it comes down to that.

Those numbers are insanity.
3 phase systems deliver power in 3 phases that are 120 degrees apart. You can't get 90 or 270 degree phase alignments out of that.

I just love it when ignorant people "correct" me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Finnish government was dissolved today. PM Juha Sipilä was known as an engineer who wanted to lead the country as if it were a tech business, with little regard to constitutional law.

What I find most troubling about this is how it shows Musk does not get enough push back and/or there are not enough critically thinking people from academia allied with Tesla to even raise the issue.

Because this was completely predictable.

We've known about the complexity or reality since the 80's, with people like Lucy Suchman pointing out how we underestimate the complexity of the world (in books like Situated Actions). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We've know about the limits to AI since then too. The famous quote is "the hard things turned out to be easy, and the easy things turned out to be hard".

Machine learning, as one Slashdot commenter once said, is basically "statistics on steroids". It you say "we're going to build self-driving cars that can handle the complexity of the life world with statistics", well... then you will fall into the same trap that technologists have been falling into for the past 30 years.

The problem with Silicon Valley is that it started to believe the stories that were originally designed to separate investors from their money. The Californian Ideology slowly became an unspoken faith, and anyone who questioned it was branded a 'pessimist'.

Musk is a clever man, but he is clearly from Silicon Valley. His fear of AI taking over is another example of this, as anyone who has studied the digital humanities can explain. It's only a valid fear if you have a simplified view on the world, a view where everything can, in the end, be modeled in a system.

The truth is it can't. Society is amazing at producing never before seen situations. The long tail of edge cases is unending, and the degree to which society demands that you cover them is greater than any non-intelligent/non-sentient system ever can.

Don't get me wrong - having a simplified view of the world is what makes people like Musk such powerful forces. But as we've seen here it has its limitations too.

Electric cars are 100 year old, and no gas car maker successfully made a no compromise electric car, BEV that can compete with ICEV in at least a few significant performance parameters like, speed, range, capacity and price. Every industry analyst was saying it is impossible, till 2017. The industry started saying, "we can build them BEV anytime we want, when we do we will wipe the floor with Tesla's ass" only recently.

BEVs can be made profitably. BEVs achieved price parity[* 1] with F segment cars (roadsters, above 120K $) in 2012, in E segment (80K) in 2015, in F segment (50K +) in 2018. Tesla is claiming price parity in D segment (35 K) in 2019. Giving Elon Time dilation, it will be probably in 2020. It should have price parity with C segment, (25 to 35 K) in 2023 [* 2]. But not sure Tesla is planning to enter this market. Might leave these segments to Korea and China and stay in D and above. Half the profits of the car industry are made in D, E and F segments. So it might not enter A (less than 15K), B (15 to 25 K) or C (25 to 35 K).

Go rent a Tesla for a week, get used to its handling and performance. Then see if you feel the same about the gas car. I find BMW 3 series under powered and laggy once I got used to the Tesla. 40 mph to 60 mph is 1.5 seconds. In merging traffic, this is incredible. When people see what an electric car can do, the gas car sales will tank faster than BEVs could be made. [* 3]

[* 1] I am talking about price parity, not cost, not including tax subsidies or savings in running costs.

[* 2] Citation provided.

[* 3] The Osbourne Effect.

In addition, of the two juggernaut nations, one has had a proven MO of fomenting chaos (read regime change) in distant lands, the other country has mostly followed bilateral cooperation even though some experts have seen this as a form of imperialism.

Ah, another millennial who thinks history started in the last few decades.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

The price reflects the total resources something is worth to someone else

The price does not reflect externalised costs.

Where recycling and reusing actually makes economic sense, no one has to create a government program for it, nor fine people for not doing it.

It made good economic sense to polllute rivers to the point where they could catch fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Government programs and fines were necessary to stop people doing something which to them made "good economoc sense".

On another forum, I had someone argue vehemently with me that US houses do not have 2-phase supplies (which is implied by your post). According the poster on the other forum, US houses have a single phase supply. Even Wikipedia goes along with this nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A split-phase or single-phase three-wire system is a type of single-phase electric power distribution.

The problem is that, historically, there was a 2-phase system that had 2 phases that were 90/270 degrees apart, so people in the industry believe that "2-phase" must only mean that old system.

Yes, the two "legs" are not really "+" and "-". I assumed that people were smart enough to understand that. Apparently I was wrong about how smart people are.

I assumed that people were smart enough to realize when I wrote "+" and "-", they were not to be taken literally. Obviously I was wrong. We all know it's A/C.

Also, many people will tell you that US houses do NOT have 2-phase, instead it's "split-phase". Personally, I think the term 2-phase is appropriate, but, in the USA 2-phase was used in the past for a system where the two phases were 90/270 degrees apart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, no, I wasn't wrong, unlike the GGP. You are just being pointlessly pedantic.