"But it only works if they are ALL required to be recorded while on duty. No more double standards with them being allowed to record the public but the public not being allowed to record them."
Not just that, but let's make sure there is no more coincidental "Oops... I didn't have my camera on" when things don't go their way.
I was the victim of that myself once. Video camera was in prominent view, and recording light was on, but when it was time to go to court and describe what the police did, the recording had "mysteriously disappeared". Yeah right.
"No you either have a police state that is bad, but not bad enough to tick off the common man; or you have a state that really isn't a police state yet."
That is a false dichotomy. There are actually more than two possibilities.
For example, maybe it really IS that bad, but the "common man", as you put it, hasn't realized it yet.
While I am all for advances in CPUs, I seriously wish Intel would go back to a naming scheme for its CPUs that made any kind of sense to the average buyer (or even the technically-oriented buyer). I have grown really weary of having to look at tables of CPU specifications every time I shop around for computers.
Intel's naming scheme -- expecially in recent years -- has been a mishmash of names and numbers without any obvious coherence. Get a clue Intel. You're hurting your own market.
If I didn't have to run OS X in my business, I'd buy AMD just for that reason. Their desktop CPUs may not be quite up to the latest Intel, but they are certainly adequate and the price is better.
"Actually, turning it from strictly binary to a spectrum is the road to a healthier approach, with the eventual destination being that they are not wrong, as 'disorder' implies, but merely different."
You missed the point. I have no problem at all with defining it as a "spectrum". But making the definition so loose as to diagnose nearly everybody as suffering from a "disorder" is NOT a "healthy approach". Which is what they did. Literally. Look it up. It has been in the press even.
"As for whether autism is real, it absolutely is."
Don't misunderstand my earlier comment. I wasn't suggesting that it isn't real. But have you read the new "mental health guidelines" for medical professionals? They have made the definition of "autism spectrum disorder" so loose as to include nearly everybody, at some point in their lives. I am very serious.
To me, that represents a great deal of disrespect for those who genuinely suffer from it.
"Which idiot mod modded this troll? I see not only nothing trollish about it, but actually it's perfectly relevant both to thread and the general topic."
I have some detractors here who have modded me down whenever they got the chance. Not to resort to "conspiracy theory" here, though. Somebody might have misunderstood my comment.
On the other hand, I got another mod as "flamebait". That's actually kind of funny, in an ironic sort of way.
"of course it's just a remarkable coincidence he belongs to the very same no-think tanks as Anthony Watts, right?"
Spencer came up only incidentally in this conversation. It wasn't about Spencer and frankly I don't give a damn.
This whole post is just nothing more than yet another irrelevant, ad-hominem attack on your part. I have no reason to give you any response other than that.
Actually, I do have reason to say one thing more: why don't you grow up and learn how to make a logical argument? Then maybe people would pay attention to you.
"People never seem to learn that security requires people buying into it. If you shove it on them it will fail."
Not even that. Because you can't shove it on them. Real security cannot come from government. Pick up any history book. It never has, and it never will.
The only true security comes through freedom of The People. It trickles up, not down.
Not to disagree with your point, but I would have said, "If you believe that you are in a police state, then it already *IS* that bad. Now is the time to make it better."
"The dead horse is starting to stink. keep beating, though, if it makes you happy... We are a police state in the US now... "
And we expect him to care about about some pissant Florida town that's scanning the irises of kids eyes for "security".
Goddamn right we do. Not caring is how it got this bad in the first place. Remember The Matrix? It's getting to the point that if they aren't on the bandwagon of freedom today, they're part of the problem.
Things may not be so far gone that they're actually "the enemy" yet, but if this keeps up...
"Nobody is perfect, why shouldn't we categroize small errors as well?"
Because it flies in the face of the very definition of "normal". Calling even the slightest deviation from some arbitrary norm a "disorder" is itself dysfunctional.
We might as well label every vehicle that doesn't get exactly 50 mpg -- whether above or below -- "defective".
Remember there was a time during which homosexuals were routinely sterilized or put in prison because they were not "normal". Hell, even heterosexual oral sex is STILL against the law in some states.
Things like that are the reason why overly-narrowing the definition of "normal", and defining everything else to be a "disorder", is harmful.
Just to be clear: the argument got nowhere because you did not prove your point.
Here's how you CAN, if you can manage it: explain how radiation that is of a LOWER "black-body temperature" will be absorbed by a body of a HIGHER black-body temperature. Despite your protestations, it's really that simple. In practice, the same holds true for less-than-ideal gray bodies, if you really want to get that technical.
Why don't you go to the source... that is to say, the engineer who first pointed out this flaw in the AGW reasoning? Here is his analysis of Roy Spencer's claim that cooler bodies can warm hotter bodies via radiation (the rebuttal contains a link to Spencer's original article that it is rebutting, if you want to see what that is all about.)
To the best of my knowledge -- and I have been following the issue -- not one physicist has even attempted to refute LaTour's analysis, while a number of physicists have backed him up.
I'd maybe be more humble if you actually said ANYTHING that came close to actually refuting my comment. But you did not. You made no relevant argument, and you presented no citation or evidence.
So... what? I am supposed to be humble just because you argued with me? Somehow I don't think so.
And before you go shooting at the messenger (the site that appears on), let me tell you I won't be impressed. I'll listen to a discussion about the science, but not to ad-hominem attacks.
I took a look at your "What's So Special About Switchboard" link and I thought it was pretty terrible. Oh... it had a lot of good technical explanations, but from a marketing standpoint it pretty much stinks.
People want to know first: "What can this do for me? Then, if they are technically-minded, they will want to know HOW. But what it does NOT do -- which you go to great lengths to explain on that page -- is something they might want to know, but if they do they'll want to know it last.
Your page was really weak on the "what it does for me" and not so good on the "how it does it" part. Very strong on the "what it is not" category.
As I say: just a suggestion. The information there is valuable, I just don't feel it's presented in the best way.
I don't buy this whole "autism spectrum disorder" thing in the new guidelines anyway. If you take their standards literally, then a very large percentage of people we would consider normal are actually autistic. Pardon me: suffering from "autism spectrum disorder".
Sooner or later, if not checked, this ever-expanding list of "disorders" will eventually include literally everybody. When everybody has a "disorder", then who is normal?
It's these BS "standards" that are unhealthy and need help.
The actual problem here is tunnel vision. It happens all the time.
Because the creator thinks "Hey! This is a great idea to solve problem X!", they pursue that vision, without bothering to step back and view the whole environment around what they're working on.
The result: things like "uncrackable" electronic combination locks, on top of actual locking mechanisms that are very poorly designed and can be opened with no trouble by 4-year-olds.
"It's easy to reverse entropy - locally. It involves causing even more entropy elsewhere."
I am aware of this. If it weren't so, there would be no stars or human beings.
"It doesn't apply to individual interactions, unless they're isolated from all other interactions."
I am aware of this as well, which is why I qualified my statement, though not in so many words, with: "radiative energy by itself, without assistance from other effects".
"... acting to reduce the overall radiation from the planet and therefore keeping it warmer than it otherwise would be, much like a blanket can keep me warmer without being warmer than I am. "
Yes, well-known and demonstrable, no argument.
"Tt doesn't matter where it came from. For most purposes, the only important things about a photon are where it is, where it's going, and how energetic it is."
And here is where your argument fails. Because yes, it does matter where it came from, because where it came from determines both where it's going, and how energetic it is. You're trying to over-isolate your thought experiment from the very environment in which it has any relevance.
"If it hits something and is absorbed, it's going to warm up what it hit."
It's the "and absorbed" part that is of relevance here. An object that is radiating at a certain black-body temperature WILL NOT absorb a less-energetic photon from an outside source. This is am extremely well-known corollary of the Second Law. You're leaving this part out, and it's the most important part.
Let's review. The whole "back radiation" concept is as follows. This is not my assertion, it comes from the AGW crowd:
The Earth, which has been warmed by whatever means, radiates "heat" in the form of infrared. (We are not discussing convective or conductive effects here.) Much of that radiation (in fact, most of it, according to the AGW models as shown in the IPCC diagram I linked to earlier here), is "reflected" (actually re-radiated if you want to be technical) by greenhouse gases back toward the Earth, and is absorbed by the surface.
That last part is extremely important, because that's the part that is (A) essential to almost all of the greenhouse warming models, and (B) can't happen.
Because: that radiation comes from the surface, at a given energy (so much is explicitly asserted by the models). Some of that energy is necessarily lost in the process of reflection or re-radiation, which means the "reflected" radiation is of lower energy (2nd Law). And because it must be of lower energy than the surface it came from before that reflection, it cannot be absorbed by that same surface, which has a higher black-body temperature. 2nd Law again.
Your attempt at a lecture was presumptuous and misguided. If you think I have made a fundamental error of physics here, you are mistaken.
The very fact that it has to rely on batteries -- even very good batteries -- means they simply cannot come even close to being sufficiently reliable to justify their existence.
How can the electronics claim to be 99.99x% reliable, when the batteries it relies on aren't?
Fingerprint scanning technology isn't even very good for DOORS yet. Why would anybody try to apply it to guns, at this stage of the technology?
Maybe when it gets to the stage that the Mythbusters can't beat them ridiculously easily with photocopies and gelatin, it might be appropriate. Now? Not a chance.
"Degree in web development? Is that like Computer Science but without the rigour and more focus on bad languages like PHP and Javascript?"
No.
For one thing it's an Associates Degree, and for another it isn't intended to be any kind of substitute or "weaker version" of CS. It's Web Development
But for the record, in case that's what you're implying, I was studying for a Computer Engineering major, and I got the AS in Web Development as a separate (and in many ways unrelated) side discipline.
Having said that, I agree that PHP and JavaScript are bad languages. I wouldn't even call PHP a "language", per se. It's just a huge jumble of inconsistent utility functions.
"I understand that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall and that mobile devices and operating systems is the future source of revenue, but dumping these changes so suddenly upon the masses was a bad decision."
Suddenly has nothing to do with it. People didn't want these changes at all.
While it may be true that mobile will be the future of most computing, Microsoft and other OS vendors (I'm looking at you Apple, and Ubuntu while we're at it) NEED to understand these things:
(1) The desktop isn't going away anytime soon. Especially for power-users like developers, who -- like it or not -- are the OS makers' bread and butter. The OS is only as good as what it will run... and how well. Recent "dumbing down" of the desktop is just plain dumb.
(2) The desktop is not just a larger mobile device. There are significant and important differences, and nobody wants a desktop to have the significant and severe limitations of today's mobile devices.
(3) Change for the sake of change is very seldom a good idea. Things were the way they were through years of effort and trial-and-error, to get things to work properly. Simply tossing all that aside for something new is A Bad Idea, unless it's a significant improvement. The changes in Windows 8 were NOT "significant improvements". If they were, people would like it.
"(1) Rails and Ruby was virtually unheard of until 2007-2008 and definitely was not in mainstream use until that time."
That's pretty funny. I got my degree in Web development in 2005, and we had been studying it for a year. I then went to work for a company that had similarly been using it in production for about a year.
"(2) This vulnerability has nothing to do with "cryptographic key"; it is related to the fact that default YAML parser allows serializing/deserializing and executing arbitrary Ruby code (including objects) and ActiveSupport didn't properly sanitize the input."
Yes, it does. The vulnerability does not exist if the key for the authentication token is not changed from the default.
"Not sure about you, but no one plugs in whatever they want to our network..."
I agree with you 100%. And I go further: if the company wants me to BMOD, then they can damned well pay me for the use of it. It's okay... I'll rent it to them at the going commercial rate.
Slashdot Mirror
"But it only works if they are ALL required to be recorded while on duty. No more double standards with them being allowed to record the public but the public not being allowed to record them."
Not just that, but let's make sure there is no more coincidental "Oops... I didn't have my camera on" when things don't go their way.
I was the victim of that myself once. Video camera was in prominent view, and recording light was on, but when it was time to go to court and describe what the police did, the recording had "mysteriously disappeared". Yeah right.
"No you either have a police state that is bad, but not bad enough to tick off the common man; or you have a state that really isn't a police state yet."
That is a false dichotomy. There are actually more than two possibilities.
For example, maybe it really IS that bad, but the "common man", as you put it, hasn't realized it yet.
You still don't get it.
It doesn't matter WHO it is, as long as they are right.
That's WHY ad-hominem arguments are not allowed in debate or scientific discussions.
Now go away.
While I am all for advances in CPUs, I seriously wish Intel would go back to a naming scheme for its CPUs that made any kind of sense to the average buyer (or even the technically-oriented buyer). I have grown really weary of having to look at tables of CPU specifications every time I shop around for computers.
Intel's naming scheme -- expecially in recent years -- has been a mishmash of names and numbers without any obvious coherence. Get a clue Intel. You're hurting your own market.
If I didn't have to run OS X in my business, I'd buy AMD just for that reason. Their desktop CPUs may not be quite up to the latest Intel, but they are certainly adequate and the price is better.
"Actually, turning it from strictly binary to a spectrum is the road to a healthier approach, with the eventual destination being that they are not wrong, as 'disorder' implies, but merely different."
You missed the point. I have no problem at all with defining it as a "spectrum". But making the definition so loose as to diagnose nearly everybody as suffering from a "disorder" is NOT a "healthy approach". Which is what they did. Literally. Look it up. It has been in the press even.
"As for whether autism is real, it absolutely is."
Don't misunderstand my earlier comment. I wasn't suggesting that it isn't real. But have you read the new "mental health guidelines" for medical professionals? They have made the definition of "autism spectrum disorder" so loose as to include nearly everybody, at some point in their lives. I am very serious.
To me, that represents a great deal of disrespect for those who genuinely suffer from it.
"Which idiot mod modded this troll? I see not only nothing trollish about it, but actually it's perfectly relevant both to thread and the general topic."
I have some detractors here who have modded me down whenever they got the chance. Not to resort to "conspiracy theory" here, though. Somebody might have misunderstood my comment.
On the other hand, I got another mod as "flamebait". That's actually kind of funny, in an ironic sort of way.
"of course it's just a remarkable coincidence he belongs to the very same no-think tanks as Anthony Watts, right?"
Spencer came up only incidentally in this conversation. It wasn't about Spencer and frankly I don't give a damn.
This whole post is just nothing more than yet another irrelevant, ad-hominem attack on your part. I have no reason to give you any response other than that.
Actually, I do have reason to say one thing more: why don't you grow up and learn how to make a logical argument? Then maybe people would pay attention to you.
"People never seem to learn that security requires people buying into it. If you shove it on them it will fail."
Not even that. Because you can't shove it on them. Real security cannot come from government. Pick up any history book. It never has, and it never will.
The only true security comes through freedom of The People. It trickles up, not down.
Or maybe "Shake up, weeple!"
"Now is the time to make it that bad."
Not to disagree with your point, but I would have said, "If you believe that you are in a police state, then it already *IS* that bad. Now is the time to make it better."
"The dead horse is starting to stink. keep beating, though, if it makes you happy... We are a police state in the US now... "
And we expect him to care about about some pissant Florida town that's scanning the irises of kids eyes for "security".
Goddamn right we do. Not caring is how it got this bad in the first place. Remember The Matrix? It's getting to the point that if they aren't on the bandwagon of freedom today, they're part of the problem.
Things may not be so far gone that they're actually "the enemy" yet, but if this keeps up...
"Nobody is perfect, why shouldn't we categroize small errors as well?"
Because it flies in the face of the very definition of "normal". Calling even the slightest deviation from some arbitrary norm a "disorder" is itself dysfunctional.
We might as well label every vehicle that doesn't get exactly 50 mpg -- whether above or below -- "defective".
Remember there was a time during which homosexuals were routinely sterilized or put in prison because they were not "normal". Hell, even heterosexual oral sex is STILL against the law in some states.
Things like that are the reason why overly-narrowing the definition of "normal", and defining everything else to be a "disorder", is harmful.
Just to be clear: the argument got nowhere because you did not prove your point.
Here's how you CAN, if you can manage it: explain how radiation that is of a LOWER "black-body temperature" will be absorbed by a body of a HIGHER black-body temperature. Despite your protestations, it's really that simple. In practice, the same holds true for less-than-ideal gray bodies, if you really want to get that technical.
Why don't you go to the source... that is to say, the engineer who first pointed out this flaw in the AGW reasoning? Here is his analysis of Roy Spencer's claim that cooler bodies can warm hotter bodies via radiation (the rebuttal contains a link to Spencer's original article that it is rebutting, if you want to see what that is all about.)
To the best of my knowledge -- and I have been following the issue -- not one physicist has even attempted to refute LaTour's analysis, while a number of physicists have backed him up.
I'd maybe be more humble if you actually said ANYTHING that came close to actually refuting my comment. But you did not. You made no relevant argument, and you presented no citation or evidence.
So... what? I am supposed to be humble just because you argued with me? Somehow I don't think so.
And before you go shooting at the messenger (the site that appears on), let me tell you I won't be impressed. I'll listen to a discussion about the science, but not to ad-hominem attacks.
A large body of scientists who are PHYSICISTS agree with me. A large body of scientists who are CLIMATE RESEARCHERS disagree.
Using the principle you just espoused, which group should I listen to? The ones whose SPECIALTY it is, or the tyros?
Go learn a little humility yourself. Like for example learning to admit when you're wrong.
I took a look at your "What's So Special About Switchboard" link and I thought it was pretty terrible. Oh... it had a lot of good technical explanations, but from a marketing standpoint it pretty much stinks.
People want to know first: "What can this do for me? Then, if they are technically-minded, they will want to know HOW. But what it does NOT do -- which you go to great lengths to explain on that page -- is something they might want to know, but if they do they'll want to know it last.
Your page was really weak on the "what it does for me" and not so good on the "how it does it" part. Very strong on the "what it is not" category.
As I say: just a suggestion. The information there is valuable, I just don't feel it's presented in the best way.
I don't buy this whole "autism spectrum disorder" thing in the new guidelines anyway. If you take their standards literally, then a very large percentage of people we would consider normal are actually autistic. Pardon me: suffering from "autism spectrum disorder".
Sooner or later, if not checked, this ever-expanding list of "disorders" will eventually include literally everybody. When everybody has a "disorder", then who is normal?
It's these BS "standards" that are unhealthy and need help.
"Because Tasers are powered by pixie dust?"
The actual problem here is tunnel vision. It happens all the time.
Because the creator thinks "Hey! This is a great idea to solve problem X!", they pursue that vision, without bothering to step back and view the whole environment around what they're working on.
The result: things like "uncrackable" electronic combination locks, on top of actual locking mechanisms that are very poorly designed and can be opened with no trouble by 4-year-olds.
"It's easy to reverse entropy - locally. It involves causing even more entropy elsewhere."
I am aware of this. If it weren't so, there would be no stars or human beings.
"It doesn't apply to individual interactions, unless they're isolated from all other interactions."
I am aware of this as well, which is why I qualified my statement, though not in so many words, with: "radiative energy by itself, without assistance from other effects".
"... acting to reduce the overall radiation from the planet and therefore keeping it warmer than it otherwise would be, much like a blanket can keep me warmer without being warmer than I am. "
Yes, well-known and demonstrable, no argument.
"Tt doesn't matter where it came from. For most purposes, the only important things about a photon are where it is, where it's going, and how energetic it is."
And here is where your argument fails. Because yes, it does matter where it came from, because where it came from determines both where it's going, and how energetic it is. You're trying to over-isolate your thought experiment from the very environment in which it has any relevance.
"If it hits something and is absorbed, it's going to warm up what it hit."
It's the "and absorbed" part that is of relevance here. An object that is radiating at a certain black-body temperature WILL NOT absorb a less-energetic photon from an outside source. This is am extremely well-known corollary of the Second Law. You're leaving this part out, and it's the most important part.
Let's review. The whole "back radiation" concept is as follows. This is not my assertion, it comes from the AGW crowd:
The Earth, which has been warmed by whatever means, radiates "heat" in the form of infrared. (We are not discussing convective or conductive effects here.) Much of that radiation (in fact, most of it, according to the AGW models as shown in the IPCC diagram I linked to earlier here), is "reflected" (actually re-radiated if you want to be technical) by greenhouse gases back toward the Earth, and is absorbed by the surface.
That last part is extremely important, because that's the part that is (A) essential to almost all of the greenhouse warming models, and (B) can't happen.
Because: that radiation comes from the surface, at a given energy (so much is explicitly asserted by the models). Some of that energy is necessarily lost in the process of reflection or re-radiation, which means the "reflected" radiation is of lower energy (2nd Law). And because it must be of lower energy than the surface it came from before that reflection, it cannot be absorbed by that same surface, which has a higher black-body temperature. 2nd Law again.
Your attempt at a lecture was presumptuous and misguided. If you think I have made a fundamental error of physics here, you are mistaken.
The very fact that it has to rely on batteries -- even very good batteries -- means they simply cannot come even close to being sufficiently reliable to justify their existence.
How can the electronics claim to be 99.99x% reliable, when the batteries it relies on aren't?
Fingerprint scanning technology isn't even very good for DOORS yet. Why would anybody try to apply it to guns, at this stage of the technology?
Maybe when it gets to the stage that the Mythbusters can't beat them ridiculously easily with photocopies and gelatin, it might be appropriate. Now? Not a chance.
"Degree in web development? Is that like Computer Science but without the rigour and more focus on bad languages like PHP and Javascript?"
No.
For one thing it's an Associates Degree, and for another it isn't intended to be any kind of substitute or "weaker version" of CS. It's Web Development
But for the record, in case that's what you're implying, I was studying for a Computer Engineering major, and I got the AS in Web Development as a separate (and in many ways unrelated) side discipline.
Having said that, I agree that PHP and JavaScript are bad languages. I wouldn't even call PHP a "language", per se. It's just a huge jumble of inconsistent utility functions.
"I understand that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall and that mobile devices and operating systems is the future source of revenue, but dumping these changes so suddenly upon the masses was a bad decision."
Suddenly has nothing to do with it. People didn't want these changes at all.
While it may be true that mobile will be the future of most computing, Microsoft and other OS vendors (I'm looking at you Apple, and Ubuntu while we're at it) NEED to understand these things:
(1) The desktop isn't going away anytime soon. Especially for power-users like developers, who -- like it or not -- are the OS makers' bread and butter. The OS is only as good as what it will run... and how well. Recent "dumbing down" of the desktop is just plain dumb.
(2) The desktop is not just a larger mobile device. There are significant and important differences, and nobody wants a desktop to have the significant and severe limitations of today's mobile devices.
(3) Change for the sake of change is very seldom a good idea. Things were the way they were through years of effort and trial-and-error, to get things to work properly. Simply tossing all that aside for something new is A Bad Idea, unless it's a significant improvement. The changes in Windows 8 were NOT "significant improvements". If they were, people would like it.
"(1) Rails and Ruby was virtually unheard of until 2007-2008 and definitely was not in mainstream use until that time."
That's pretty funny. I got my degree in Web development in 2005, and we had been studying it for a year. I then went to work for a company that had similarly been using it in production for about a year.
"(2) This vulnerability has nothing to do with "cryptographic key"; it is related to the fact that default YAML parser allows serializing/deserializing and executing arbitrary Ruby code (including objects) and ActiveSupport didn't properly sanitize the input."
Yes, it does. The vulnerability does not exist if the key for the authentication token is not changed from the default.
"Not sure about you, but no one plugs in whatever they want to our network..."
I agree with you 100%. And I go further: if the company wants me to BMOD, then they can damned well pay me for the use of it. It's okay... I'll rent it to them at the going commercial rate.