So we have to wait until the average slashdotter knows people who have been blinded by lasers in order to do anything about it? I don't know anybody who was seriously injured because somebody threw a tennis ball at them out of a fast-moving vehicle without realising that their throw speed plus the speed of the car made for a fairly high velocity. This is still illegal and dangerous and reportable. I don't think there's a 10000 dollar reward for it, and I don't know how common it is compared to aircraft lasering, but I do support taking measures against it because I know it happens a nontrivial amount of time (the extent of the measures can be debated). These things aren't just potentially harmful, they're aggressively and unnecessarily harmful. We're not talking about making it illegal to blow bubblegum bubbles because it might pop and then a little bit might splash into the mouth of somebody else with a deadly bubblegum allergy. We're talking about pointing lasers at aircraft generally for reasons of dickishness.
When you're selling hot dogs at the side of the street, if you set the price at $0, you'll lose money, and if you set the price at $100000, you'll lose money, but if you set the price at $3, you might make money?
You can't reductio ad absurdum a minimum wage like that.
As a difficult-to-implement experiment, I'd love to see what actually happens (I know what people of various political stripes will predict happens; I want to see reality tried and I want to see it tried a few times in different cultures so we aren't extrapolating from a single datapoint) when you combine Mincome that met the "living wage" criteria, with abolishing the minimum wage.
Since everybody now makes Mincome, the living wage is no longer a factor and that knocks out the key motivation behind a minimum wage. Therefore, in principle, you can hire your fast food vendors at 50 cents an hour. Provided you can find them, of course, since if they have a livable wage, they don't have "sheer desperation" as a motivator to get a low-paying job -- but so long as the entire economy doesn't collapse to the point that the mincome is unsustainable, I'd view that as a positive change, not a negative. Job experience might be a motivator, though, and anyway a living wage isn't exactly a luxury wage -- somebody who made $10 an hour might be perfectly willing to work the same job at $2 an hour to effectively push their income up and save up for that xbox or whatever. Maybe shit job wages go down, maybe they go up, maybe it depends on the industry -- there are factors pushing in both directions.
Meanwhile, the mincome wouldn't be completely irrelevant to the lives of the relatively high-paid tech workers (obviously this varies with geography), but it wouldn't be an overriding concern either. It gives a bit more power to the worker in that they can be confident that their family won't starve if they quit in outrage or if a prospective employer calls the employee's bluff in a salary negotiation.
I know the mincome concept makes a lot of people grind their teeth just on the face of it (COMMUNISM LEADS TO DEAD BABIEZ!), but among other things it's about the only practical way to realize the theory of having truly no minimum wage at all. Bluntly, even slaves cost money to keep alive -- that expense combined with the limited hours in a day generates an effective wage floor even without the law, in the absence of some other income source like a parent or spouse or independent wealth or rampant theft.
It's indexed to inflation. The value is $15 in 2017 dollars. For the sake of making this readable, I will represent the value of $15 in 2017 as $X, and the value of $15 in the year it is earned as $Y. Thus, in 2017, X = Y. After 2017, X > Y. Before 2017, X Y. X and Y might still be hard to read but I promise this was worse before I edited it, since I kept saying "$15 in 2017 dollars" for X and "$15 in contemporary dollars" for Y:).
If you look at the graph, it only converges on $X wage for all businesses by 2025.
The 2021 figure is when the last business category ( 500 employees) hits a $Y minimum wage, and minimum $X of total compensation. Eg. in 2021 those companies can count healthcare against the $X, while only actually paying $Y. But by 2025, and they still have to be ready to pay the full $X by 2025.
Drunk driving laws are wrong in principle and are at best a necessary evil.
It's wrong in principle to outlaw recklessly endangering the public by wielding deadly heavy machinery in an irresponsible manner?
Is it wrong in principle to outlaw firing a gun on public streets while blindfolded? Even if, statistically, you're unlikely to hit anybody with just one shot?
Like you can drive your car drunk, but it's aware of when you're going to cause an accident and prevents it.
In that case you aren't driving. This is like riding a taxi while drunk, which is perfectly legal and often encouraged.
I am *perfectly* okay with robot cars driving drunk people around (and sober people for that matter).
You could use your same line of reasoning as an argument for prohibition. Hey if you're drunk you make poor decisions. If you're drunk you may go out in your car because you don't realize at the time that you're taking a big risk, even though when you're sober you would never dream of driving drunk. So you shouldn't be allowed to drink to begin with!
If you can't definitively state that you won't choose not to drive once you're drunk, then yes, you shouldn't be allowed to drink. At least, not without relinquishing your ability to drive beforehand (eg. handing the keys off to a trusted sober party). Much like, if you can't trust yourself not to go out shooting random people when you're drunk, then you should not have simultaneous access to guns and alcohol.
The thing that allows us not to live in prohibition is the idea that people aren't so helpless that they can't handle making these decisions while sober.
For instance, moving away from drinking, do you want to make it illegal to stop paying your mortgage because once a neighborhood loses "herd immunity" to foreclosures it begins dramatically lowering property values even for healthy homes?
...it is illegal to stop paying your mortgage, and rightly so. It's called "breach of contract", and it violates contract law.
I can only assume that you're using "illegal" to mean against criminal law instead of against civil law, or some similar distinction, which is really separating out illegal acts by the legal remedy. The legal remedy for failing to make mortgage payments is often (though not always!) less severe than that given to drunk drivers, because the harm done is less severe. Drunk driving, and remaining unvaccinated for no reason to easily-vaccinable bad diseases, both endanger the health & welfare of others. Drunk Driving also endangers property. Not paying mortgages only endangers finances. Yes, finances can parlay into health and welfare but it's indirect and to some degree insurable.
Paradox doesn't mean it's contrary to the way the universe works. Weird and counter-intuitive is a near synonym to paradox.
Some definitions:
a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.
a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.
Nothing says the previous packet has the previous sequence number
The word "previous" says the previous packet has the previous sequence number. I that reasonable people skilled in the art would generally assume previous meant sequentially previous, not time-of-receipt previous.
However I would say is that nothing says that the "immediately earlier" packet has the previous sequence number.
We could get pedantic and talk about sequentially previous and chronologically previous, further clarifying that chronologically previous is from the point of view of the receiver (since in the sender's point of view, the sequence and chronology are likely identical since we don't usually have to re-transmit lost packets).
As a result, I think "immediately earlier sequenced packet" is ambiguous. I could read "sequenced packet" as a compound noun, and thus it means the chronologically previous packet. Or I could read "immediately earlier sequenced" to mean previous, as in sequentially previous, as the GP did. From context, I think the latter is more likely, because what relevance could chronology possibly have? But that makes "immediately previous" an exceptionally poor choice of words, and thus I disagree that:
You need to use a spherical coordinate system, not cartesian, to understand perspectives hitting an approximate point sensor (or pair of approximate point sensors). So the Z direction isn't really a thing, and the R direction *does* vary with the Theta and Phi directions on a TV screen, much as a road's edges R-values vary with Theta and Phi.
All that said, I actually agree with you. Rectangles are rectangles from your eye's perspective. It's a defining feature of rectangles that they look like rectangles -- it's tautological. We've always looked at rectangles with eyes. Eyes are what we have for seeing rectangles. There's nothing particularly special about a TV vs. a small drawing of a rectangle on a piece of paper.
3D has a real, indisputable benefit. What's disputable is whether the benefit has value that justifies its costs (monetary, bandwidth, filmmaking constraints, etc.).
If curved TVs are a gimmick in the sense of 3D, then curved TVs have a real benefit. I didn't think that they did. I thought that they were literally only detriments. This guy actually undermined his own point by making the comparison to something where I can easily detect the benefit.
I suspect that will be reduced with time (both developing technology, proper uses of technology, and people getting used to it).
Anecdotally, my parents' generation complains far more about motion sickness from video games than mine does.
That said, even the 3D services that claim to be agnostic to viewing angle, in my experience...are not agnostic to viewing angle, and really have only a finite number of "golden regions" where you have to keep your head inside. That's a real disadvantage of the 3D experience. I avoid 3D movies in theatre until they are almost cycled out so I can just sit my ass down front and centre on a row to myself.
MS share price is a valid measure, though not the only one.
I don't blame him for 2001 or a short time after. However his tenure was flat for a *very* long time, during which several notable competitors outperformed him by a lot.
I think people are a little hard on Ballmer sometimes, but there are lots of realistic measures where he's not wildly successful. And frankly, you pay CEOs what they get paid expecting wild success (Ballmer did request a relatively low salary as major CEOs go, with cash well-under a million and about 1.3 million in total compensation, cite: http://www.cnbc.com/id/1010870...), probably in part because he already had a shit-tonne of MS stock and was a billionaire so money could not possibly motivate him in the same sense that it motivates people who live on their salaries. He'd have received hundreds of times more than his total compensation *purely in dividends from MSFT stock*. A quick back-of-the envelope calculation is about 300x more.
What do you imagine is non-scientific about "it stands to reason"?
Anyway, the empirical data is that we've only ever observed evidence of consciousness in a biological substrate, and we haven't come up with any non-biological thing that is similarly associated with consciousness.
There is also empirical evidence that consciousness is affected by biological machinery. Obviously there's sensation, but also hormone levels are associated with sexual thoughts, and lobotomies change the nature of consciousness' expression.
At some point, not deliberately not being vaccinated even when the opportunity is presented to you is tantamount to recklessly endangering society. Just like at some point setting fire to the trees in your backyard without adequately controlling the flames, even though you own those trees and that backyard, constitutes public endangerment.
Of course, exceptions apply if you have a bizarre allergy to a necessary vaccine ingredient etc.. This is one of those situations where reduction ad absurdum fails because the correct answer doesn't lie in the extremes. Skipping a flu vaccine, as currently implemented, should not be a fineable offense or really have any consequences outside of some special circumstances. These things must be taken on a case-by-case basis.
I've seen people be afraid to talk on a cellphone, indoors, during a lightning storm. Because they thought a lightning bolt would hit a telephone pole, and then conduct...into the cellphone.
I'm familiar with that phenomenon but mostly from YA books, which I mostly grew out of (I made an exception for Steelheart and don't regret it).
Or occasionally it's an excerpted chapter from the next book in the exact same series, which is technically an ad I guess, but if I read to the end I'm probably going to want to read the series.
This might actually vary with geography as well -- maybe where you're from, even books for grown-ups tend to get a sample from a random other book. Or maybe you still like YA novels and there's actually nothing necessarily wrong with that, no judging, I like some cartoons.
Your comment seemed to suggest that books aren't like any other consumer good because different books aren't completely fungible for different types of books (I would absolutely say that one copy of Meyer's Twilight is pretty much like another, with minor exceptions like a signed copy or whatever).
The reply is that virtually no consumer good is completely fungible, so that argument implies that there is no such thing as a consumer good, which is ridiculous.
If Facebook chooses to hire an all "white" staff, it is none of your damn business. Don't like it? Don't use Facebook.
That's not a choice he has, because he doesn't know if Facebook is hiring an (essentially) all-white staff, because that's not disclosed.
I'm undecided on whether companies should have to disclose this, leaning toward no, they shouldn't, because in theory employees shouldn't have to disclose this information to Facebook itself (even if in many cases it's visibly obvious), so it shouldn't necessarily be possible for Facebook to furnish this information.
But you kind of made a good argument for "these other nut bags" because they literally can't just not use these companies if they don't like their hiring practices because they don't get to know the hiring practices.
Facebook has 6818 employees. As you can see, there is no way for things to be mostly H1B, although H1B hiring has picked up recently (probably just because Facebook has grown).
Your link doesn't suport your claim. It talks about how others do such things less, but the thing you quoted was explicitly about "entirely abandon[ing]" the prison system.
Maybe the question doesn't answer itself, and you could step up to answer it instead?
Slashdot Mirror
So we have to wait until the average slashdotter knows people who have been blinded by lasers in order to do anything about it? I don't know anybody who was seriously injured because somebody threw a tennis ball at them out of a fast-moving vehicle without realising that their throw speed plus the speed of the car made for a fairly high velocity. This is still illegal and dangerous and reportable. I don't think there's a 10000 dollar reward for it, and I don't know how common it is compared to aircraft lasering, but I do support taking measures against it because I know it happens a nontrivial amount of time (the extent of the measures can be debated). These things aren't just potentially harmful, they're aggressively and unnecessarily harmful. We're not talking about making it illegal to blow bubblegum bubbles because it might pop and then a little bit might splash into the mouth of somebody else with a deadly bubblegum allergy. We're talking about pointing lasers at aircraft generally for reasons of dickishness.
When you're selling hot dogs at the side of the street, if you set the price at $0, you'll lose money, and if you set the price at $100000, you'll lose money, but if you set the price at $3, you might make money?
You can't reductio ad absurdum a minimum wage like that.
As a difficult-to-implement experiment, I'd love to see what actually happens (I know what people of various political stripes will predict happens; I want to see reality tried and I want to see it tried a few times in different cultures so we aren't extrapolating from a single datapoint) when you combine Mincome that met the "living wage" criteria, with abolishing the minimum wage.
Since everybody now makes Mincome, the living wage is no longer a factor and that knocks out the key motivation behind a minimum wage. Therefore, in principle, you can hire your fast food vendors at 50 cents an hour. Provided you can find them, of course, since if they have a livable wage, they don't have "sheer desperation" as a motivator to get a low-paying job -- but so long as the entire economy doesn't collapse to the point that the mincome is unsustainable, I'd view that as a positive change, not a negative. Job experience might be a motivator, though, and anyway a living wage isn't exactly a luxury wage -- somebody who made $10 an hour might be perfectly willing to work the same job at $2 an hour to effectively push their income up and save up for that xbox or whatever. Maybe shit job wages go down, maybe they go up, maybe it depends on the industry -- there are factors pushing in both directions.
Meanwhile, the mincome wouldn't be completely irrelevant to the lives of the relatively high-paid tech workers (obviously this varies with geography), but it wouldn't be an overriding concern either. It gives a bit more power to the worker in that they can be confident that their family won't starve if they quit in outrage or if a prospective employer calls the employee's bluff in a salary negotiation.
I know the mincome concept makes a lot of people grind their teeth just on the face of it (COMMUNISM LEADS TO DEAD BABIEZ!), but among other things it's about the only practical way to realize the theory of having truly no minimum wage at all. Bluntly, even slaves cost money to keep alive -- that expense combined with the limited hours in a day generates an effective wage floor even without the law, in the absence of some other income source like a parent or spouse or independent wealth or rampant theft.
So...way to skip the second half of the *only sentence in that post*?
I mean, I critiqued his point too, but come on.
It's indexed to inflation. The value is $15 in 2017 dollars. For the sake of making this readable, I will represent the value of $15 in 2017 as $X, and the value of $15 in the year it is earned as $Y. Thus, in 2017, X = Y. After 2017, X > Y. Before 2017, X Y. X and Y might still be hard to read but I promise this was worse before I edited it, since I kept saying "$15 in 2017 dollars" for X and "$15 in contemporary dollars" for Y :).
If you look at the graph, it only converges on $X wage for all businesses by 2025.
The 2021 figure is when the last business category ( 500 employees) hits a $Y minimum wage, and minimum $X of total compensation. Eg. in 2021 those companies can count healthcare against the $X, while only actually paying $Y. But by 2025, and they still have to be ready to pay the full $X by 2025.
It doesn't necessarily require action on their part. They could get in a car accident for instance and bleed everywhere.
The fact that there's no vaccine makes it more important to be forewarned, doesn't it?
You want to be forewarned so that you won't get into a car accident that leaves your neighbour spilling their blood into your bloodstream?
Drunk driving laws are wrong in principle and are at best a necessary evil.
It's wrong in principle to outlaw recklessly endangering the public by wielding deadly heavy machinery in an irresponsible manner?
Is it wrong in principle to outlaw firing a gun on public streets while blindfolded? Even if, statistically, you're unlikely to hit anybody with just one shot?
Like you can drive your car drunk, but it's aware of when you're going to cause an accident and prevents it.
In that case you aren't driving. This is like riding a taxi while drunk, which is perfectly legal and often encouraged.
I am *perfectly* okay with robot cars driving drunk people around (and sober people for that matter).
You could use your same line of reasoning as an argument for prohibition. Hey if you're drunk you make poor decisions. If you're drunk you may go out in your car because you don't realize at the time that you're taking a big risk, even though when you're sober you would never dream of driving drunk. So you shouldn't be allowed to drink to begin with!
If you can't definitively state that you won't choose not to drive once you're drunk, then yes, you shouldn't be allowed to drink. At least, not without relinquishing your ability to drive beforehand (eg. handing the keys off to a trusted sober party). Much like, if you can't trust yourself not to go out shooting random people when you're drunk, then you should not have simultaneous access to guns and alcohol.
The thing that allows us not to live in prohibition is the idea that people aren't so helpless that they can't handle making these decisions while sober.
For instance, moving away from drinking, do you want to make it illegal to stop paying your mortgage because once a neighborhood loses "herd immunity" to foreclosures it begins dramatically lowering property values even for healthy homes?
...it is illegal to stop paying your mortgage, and rightly so. It's called "breach of contract", and it violates contract law.
I can only assume that you're using "illegal" to mean against criminal law instead of against civil law, or some similar distinction, which is really separating out illegal acts by the legal remedy. The legal remedy for failing to make mortgage payments is often (though not always!) less severe than that given to drunk drivers, because the harm done is less severe. Drunk driving, and remaining unvaccinated for no reason to easily-vaccinable bad diseases, both endanger the health & welfare of others. Drunk Driving also endangers property. Not paying mortgages only endangers finances. Yes, finances can parlay into health and welfare but it's indirect and to some degree insurable.
Paradox doesn't mean it's contrary to the way the universe works. Weird and counter-intuitive is a near synonym to paradox.
Some definitions:
a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.
a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.
Nothing says the previous packet has the previous sequence number
The word "previous" says the previous packet has the previous sequence number. I that reasonable people skilled in the art would generally assume previous meant sequentially previous, not time-of-receipt previous.
However I would say is that nothing says that the "immediately earlier" packet has the previous sequence number.
We could get pedantic and talk about sequentially previous and chronologically previous, further clarifying that chronologically previous is from the point of view of the receiver (since in the sender's point of view, the sequence and chronology are likely identical since we don't usually have to re-transmit lost packets).
As a result, I think "immediately earlier sequenced packet" is ambiguous. I could read "sequenced packet" as a compound noun, and thus it means the chronologically previous packet. Or I could read "immediately earlier sequenced" to mean previous, as in sequentially previous, as the GP did. From context, I think the latter is more likely, because what relevance could chronology possibly have? But that makes "immediately previous" an exceptionally poor choice of words, and thus I disagree that:
it was so worded [sic] for a reason
This guy is a traitor, plain and simple.
There's nothing plain nor simple about this story.
...no, he was not a double agent.
Where are you getting this?
Part of that is scaling. Square-cube law and all that.
To be fair to the GP...
You need to use a spherical coordinate system, not cartesian, to understand perspectives hitting an approximate point sensor (or pair of approximate point sensors). So the Z direction isn't really a thing, and the R direction *does* vary with the Theta and Phi directions on a TV screen, much as a road's edges R-values vary with Theta and Phi.
All that said, I actually agree with you. Rectangles are rectangles from your eye's perspective. It's a defining feature of rectangles that they look like rectangles -- it's tautological. We've always looked at rectangles with eyes. Eyes are what we have for seeing rectangles. There's nothing particularly special about a TV vs. a small drawing of a rectangle on a piece of paper.
3D has a real, indisputable benefit. What's disputable is whether the benefit has value that justifies its costs (monetary, bandwidth, filmmaking constraints, etc.).
If curved TVs are a gimmick in the sense of 3D, then curved TVs have a real benefit. I didn't think that they did. I thought that they were literally only detriments. This guy actually undermined his own point by making the comparison to something where I can easily detect the benefit.
I suspect that will be reduced with time (both developing technology, proper uses of technology, and people getting used to it).
Anecdotally, my parents' generation complains far more about motion sickness from video games than mine does.
That said, even the 3D services that claim to be agnostic to viewing angle, in my experience...are not agnostic to viewing angle, and really have only a finite number of "golden regions" where you have to keep your head inside. That's a real disadvantage of the 3D experience. I avoid 3D movies in theatre until they are almost cycled out so I can just sit my ass down front and centre on a row to myself.
MS share price is a valid measure, though not the only one.
I don't blame him for 2001 or a short time after. However his tenure was flat for a *very* long time, during which several notable competitors outperformed him by a lot.
I think people are a little hard on Ballmer sometimes, but there are lots of realistic measures where he's not wildly successful. And frankly, you pay CEOs what they get paid expecting wild success (Ballmer did request a relatively low salary as major CEOs go, with cash well-under a million and about 1.3 million in total compensation, cite: http://www.cnbc.com/id/1010870...), probably in part because he already had a shit-tonne of MS stock and was a billionaire so money could not possibly motivate him in the same sense that it motivates people who live on their salaries. He'd have received hundreds of times more than his total compensation *purely in dividends from MSFT stock*. A quick back-of-the envelope calculation is about 300x more.
What do you imagine is non-scientific about "it stands to reason"?
Anyway, the empirical data is that we've only ever observed evidence of consciousness in a biological substrate, and we haven't come up with any non-biological thing that is similarly associated with consciousness.
There is also empirical evidence that consciousness is affected by biological machinery. Obviously there's sensation, but also hormone levels are associated with sexual thoughts, and lobotomies change the nature of consciousness' expression.
Yes actually.
At some point, not deliberately not being vaccinated even when the opportunity is presented to you is tantamount to recklessly endangering society. Just like at some point setting fire to the trees in your backyard without adequately controlling the flames, even though you own those trees and that backyard, constitutes public endangerment.
Of course, exceptions apply if you have a bizarre allergy to a necessary vaccine ingredient etc.. This is one of those situations where reduction ad absurdum fails because the correct answer doesn't lie in the extremes. Skipping a flu vaccine, as currently implemented, should not be a fineable offense or really have any consequences outside of some special circumstances. These things must be taken on a case-by-case basis.
I've seen people be afraid to talk on a cellphone, indoors, during a lightning storm. Because they thought a lightning bolt would hit a telephone pole, and then conduct...into the cellphone.
I'm familiar with that phenomenon but mostly from YA books, which I mostly grew out of (I made an exception for Steelheart and don't regret it).
Or occasionally it's an excerpted chapter from the next book in the exact same series, which is technically an ad I guess, but if I read to the end I'm probably going to want to read the series.
This might actually vary with geography as well -- maybe where you're from, even books for grown-ups tend to get a sample from a random other book. Or maybe you still like YA novels and there's actually nothing necessarily wrong with that, no judging, I like some cartoons.
"So...?" is I think what we're asking you.
Your comment seemed to suggest that books aren't like any other consumer good because different books aren't completely fungible for different types of books (I would absolutely say that one copy of Meyer's Twilight is pretty much like another, with minor exceptions like a signed copy or whatever).
The reply is that virtually no consumer good is completely fungible, so that argument implies that there is no such thing as a consumer good, which is ridiculous.
People do that every single day:
1. Bus
2. Taxi
3. Airplane (most people are passengers, not drivers)
4. Train
5. Streetcar
6. Subway
7. Carpool
8. Use of public roadways
If Facebook chooses to hire an all "white" staff, it is none of your damn business. Don't like it? Don't use Facebook.
That's not a choice he has, because he doesn't know if Facebook is hiring an (essentially) all-white staff, because that's not disclosed.
I'm undecided on whether companies should have to disclose this, leaning toward no, they shouldn't, because in theory employees shouldn't have to disclose this information to Facebook itself (even if in many cases it's visibly obvious), so it shouldn't necessarily be possible for Facebook to furnish this information.
But you kind of made a good argument for "these other nut bags" because they literally can't just not use these companies if they don't like their hiring practices because they don't get to know the hiring practices.
The number of H1-B employees is a matter of public record:
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa...
Facebook has 6818 employees. As you can see, there is no way for things to be mostly H1B, although H1B hiring has picked up recently (probably just because Facebook has grown).
Your link doesn't suport your claim. It talks about how others do such things less, but the thing you quoted was explicitly about "entirely abandon[ing]" the prison system.
Maybe the question doesn't answer itself, and you could step up to answer it instead?
To summarize:
"It is better than ten innocent persons be murdered than one guilty person escape".
Right?