Yeah, it would be terrible if videos of you picking your nose went up on the internet. As opposed to your bank account passwords, credit card details, actual pornography habits and home address and real name - because if someone can hack the camera its far easier to just log keystrokes and take a screen grab of your desktop every minute.
Because the first thing - the very first thing I try to do with the kinect everytime is use a closed fist or rotating hand action to try and control something, and then get frustrated when I can't.
I found Michael Critchen's Next http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(novel) quite scary with respect to the lack of ownership it says people have of their genes. It also has a very reasonable sounding solution at the end - to increase the rights of ownership of our genes up to the level of ownership we have over of a photograph of ourselves. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
1. There's actually going to be armed rebellion if the Feds really do try to take away guns. You probably don't think so, which is your prerogative. Law enforcement and the political authorities have better information.
/quote>
So, by your own admission, gun owners of America are essentially an unstable group who are willing to murder cops and US soldiers if peaceably asked to surrender their weapons?
I mean, I want to make sure I've got this very right: You believe the 20% of the population who are gun owners, would in fact start an active campaign of murder and intimidation of government workers, police and US servicemen, if they could no longer own guns.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the second amendment does not guarantee unrestricted access to small arms, and thus allows for reasonable restrictions on their ownership.
Did you know that basically all the guns in Mexico are bought legally in the US and taken over the border? And that one of the reasons "Fast and Furious" didn't blow up more is that it's been difficult to establish if it was actually illegal for any of the smugglers to buy the guns they did.
Guns are amazingly hard to obtain. Organized crime generally uses guns to shoot each other, but it's very rare. There have been precisely 0 bombing.
Isn't that fascinating? That despite the fact that guns are actually a progressively rarer illegal commodity, no one has bothered trying to blow people up?
I've seen this "oh they'll just use a bomb, look how well dairy creamer works" comes up all the damn time as though it's obviously that easy to make explosives. Hint: it's not. Bombs are heavy, and indirect. They require being placed in advance, being not-noticed, and then actually working not to mention acquiring the materials without getting a friendly visit from the Feds to ask what's up with the multiple credit cards and fertilizer. You might notice that the attempted terrorist attacks using bombs in the US have all been thwarted usually by someone calling in and saying "hey, I noticed a weird package".
Why is it that the highest violent crime rates in the US of A are in cities with the strictest gun control laws?
Because of impetus for strict gun control laws due to high violent crime rates. That explains why. Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about the actual effect of gun control laws one way or the other.
Also gun control laws aren't homogenous across the country, and importing from a city 100km away with the current straw-purchasing laws and lack of traceability is trivial. The background check system is so loosely enforced that getting around it is a matter of ticking "no" on the "do you have a mental illness?" question. That gun dealers can't actually be required to do any fundamental checks, or even engage in basic stock control (i.e. under the table sales are effectively undetectable).
You might note that when accidents happen NASCAR acts to reduce the risk of further accidents. You know - move bystanders further from the track, strengthen barricades etc. It's also run on racetracks, in large facilities where the cars can't suddenly go flying out through several layers of wall, across 2km of field and into a nearby house.
NASCAR cars aren't even street-legal to drive on public roads.
Quantum computers don't brute-force cryptography in a conventional sense, so much as they simply step around it all together. They're good at cryptographic problems, because they can represent every possible algorithm state simultaneously given enough qubits to represent the problem. Crypto is based on the idea of analyzing all states being expensive - with quantum computers, it's a basic tenet of their operation.
Yeah that's still deflationary. Deflationary is bad. It leads to economic stagnation.
See, if you hold 100 bitcoins, then every time that decimal place gets moved to accord the "value" of the bitcoin, you get functionally richer. But you didn't actually do anything to get richer. You didn't lend that BTC out for people to start a business or build a house. You didn't fulfill a role as a market intermediary for a product. They only thing you did was sit on that BTC. You got richer, but literally didn't have to do anything productive for it.
For you, the more economic activity others do, in BTC, the richer you become. Yet you still do nothing. In fact, provided BTC attracts a certain level of interest - i.e. that decimal keeps moving over at a certain rate - you're set for life. You can buy food and shelter in bitcoin for less then the increase in value of your initial bitcoin pile. Again, for doing absolutely nothing.
Conversely, those who do not hold enough bitcoin that it will increase in value faster then their costs of living, will in fact never make it. They have to spend huge fractions of their currency, and work to earn ever diminishing remuneration, just to stay alive. It's the ultimate stratified society. Where the people at the top, again, do literally nothing.
Of course in the real world, the under-class figures this out pretty quickly and, when the upper class doesn't budge (because they get something for nothing with the status quo) they get murdered and everybody celebrates.
If we're going to start assuming ZFS is producing silently corrupted snapshots, we might as well start questioning is gzip is producing corrupted archives or md5sum is working correctly.
Which are all valid assumptions, but ZFS is engineered around avoiding exactly these types of problems. It's not going to produce a silently corrupted snapshot because snapshots include their own checksums for the data coming off the disk, which is also checksummed and it's verified at every step of the way. The failure modes of ZFS always begin with a checksum failure of some sort.
If you can run "find" on your backups, you can do it on ZFS with the.zfs/snapshots directory which provides exactly that functionality.
I do not agree that it is poor design. It is UNIX-style design where the user is expected to actually understand what they are doing. Sure, you could make it fool-proof, but that is decidedly not the UNIX-way as that would break things and because UNIX takes great care to not offend those that actually understand what they are doing. These people messed up through no fault of the git tool. Quit finding apologies for them. If they do not get it, they should have used some tool more on their level. Understanding how far your skills go is a critical skill fro any engineer.
Also, git is not to blame for some amateurs not realizing that a real backup is non-optional.
Silently not doing integrity checks when your tool is built around that concept is bad design, plain and simple. Most Linux tools with potentially disaster causing command line switches also have secondary switches that make sure you understand the consequences - you can't tell hdparm to upload HDD firmware without also specifying --yes-please-destroy-my-data (or something like that).
If git --mirror isn't going to do integrity checks - and I find it exceptionally odd that it doesn't - then that needs to be made very very obvious before you can use it. Man page documentation, and an extra switch saying --do-not-verify-integrity.
If you had to do that, this problem wouldn't have happened.
The part where a major bank was caught laundering money for drug cartels, who in turn are the principle reason that town in Mexico has a death rate of 800 people per month? How about just sex slavery? Or child pornography production and distribution?
The implication that just because enforcing a law is difficult (or being politically interfered with) doesn't mean we should bother is absurd. It is definitely a good thing to police BTC for these things.
Sure, I guess. All that money being laundered from child pornography, drug cartels which can now safely get money from selling Taliban grown opium, trafficking of sex slaves. Totally victimless!
I mean, there obviously no problems at all with providing a way for people to safely launder money from illegal activities. They probably don't commit any serious crimes doing so. We definitely didn't catch Al Capone because of tax fraud either and how to spend your illegal gains definitely isn't such a huge problem that it's a big business for crime because spending your illegal profits is a good way to get caught.
It is not clinically real - it is not physiological.
I'm not sure how you define "clinically real" but the placebo effect has been demonstrated to change brain patterns, lead to (e.g.) hormone generation and change perception of pain.
I'd call those clinical outcomes, and physiological changes.
for something like a bacterial infection this is potentially fatal.
Absolutely. But placebos aren't being prescribed for bacterial infections, lethal viruses, cancer, broken limbs and heart attacks.
Actually, they probably are part of some cancer treatments. But only as part of it.
Using a known effect to achieve genuine outcomes is an excellent use of resources, and allows prioritisation of more costly treatments for patients that actually need them.
The OP I was replying to was implying they should be, and many people believe the placebo effect somehow can treat diseases caused by infection or the like. The 20% number gets thrown around without realizing that it's only applicable to some classes of problem - i.e. pain management - where psychological perception is important, and where endorphins your body makes naturally in response to state of mind are actually pain suppressants.
But even in that case, if something turns out to be no better then a placebo, then targeted therapy to address state of mind will be better still. We can and do, for issues like that, get people into meditation or exercise or any number of other things.
But you are absolutely not going to find cancer stop growing because you gave someone a sugar pill, and the idea that "costly therapies" will be avoided by giving placebos is ridiculous (unless we don't care about saving/improving lives). If something is serious enough to require a costly treatment, placebos aren't going to remove the underlying problem.
The point of the placebo effect is that it is entirely psychological. It is not clinically real - it is not physiological.
Brains are body parts, just like noses, fingers, and spleens. It's only because the brain is so much more complicated (and therefore less understood) than the other parts that this psychological/physiological dichotomy exists.
Except most drugs aren't to treat brain conditions. The placebo effect is important for pain management, because that is a perception issue and doing anything about pain is a good outcome. But the placebo effect won't stop the group of Staphylococcus aureus dumping toxins into your blood stream from continuuing to do that till they've poisoned the local environment (killed you).
The problem with corn ethanol isn't the diversion of farmland, it's that it's a completely artificial diversion. Corn is so subsidized no one knows how much it costs anywhere, and world food prices are creating local scarcity because no one can outcompete US government subsidized corn - so local farming never has any incentive to grow it or other staples, as opposed to cash crops (many of which are incredibly harmful to local soil ecology to do so).
World food prices need to be allowed to rise gradually so the local economies which are importing can transition to growing locally or, people with an actual competitive advantage can move in to drive them down in a non-artificial way. But playing games with how much corn there is predictably creates price shocks because technically there's enough product in the market place, it's just mysteriously not getting to the locals, yet simultaneously can't be expected to reliably stay high either.
Isn't this just adding a ton of boilerplate code though?
It's in the cloud so you'll always need networking support, and that's going to be TCP/IP generally. You'll need to write files, so you also need a network file system or real file system driver of some sort, and a way to write to block device like objects. At some level, all this is just "things a very minimal Linux kernel" would do for us.
That all said, I'm now very curious about how quickly said kernel would spin up and launch a custom application as init. But 1-2 seconds feels like it would easily doable considering we've had the 5 second graphical desktop previously.
Does Linux really take 20 seconds to boot on a VM?
My impression was Linux's boot time is mostly probing for hardware or waiting on slow devices to initialize. It seems like in a VM you could skip all that, and also would be ignoring all the usual daemons.
The OS-less approach seems absurd though, because at that point it's really just an application being run on a multi-user system. And we've been doing that since the 80s.
Coal, Gas, and Oil are known to be horrible for society. If you have doubts, please go purchase a cheap plot of land next to a plant or refinery and take up permanent residence
Ignorance.
The correct comparison is living next to a coal plant, compared to living in a country without coal plants. And don't say you have wind or nuclear, because those wouldn't exist without industrialization, which required coal.
So, what's the average lifespan living next to a coal plant compared to in a forest somewhere?
Well?
Guys we definitely shouldn't have family planning education because I'm the ninth of nine children and if we had family planning education I wouldn't exist!
Slashdot Mirror
I did realize I was walking right into that one :)
Yeah, it would be terrible if videos of you picking your nose went up on the internet. As opposed to your bank account passwords, credit card details, actual pornography habits and home address and real name - because if someone can hack the camera its far easier to just log keystrokes and take a screen grab of your desktop every minute.
Talk about identifying the wrong the problem.
Wait they did? Seriously?
Because the first thing - the very first thing I try to do with the kinect everytime is use a closed fist or rotating hand action to try and control something, and then get frustrated when I can't.
I found Michael Critchen's Next http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(novel) quite scary with respect to the lack of ownership it says people have of their genes.
It also has a very reasonable sounding solution at the end - to increase the rights of ownership of our genes up to the level of ownership we have over of a photograph of ourselves.
That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Don't take Michael Crichton too seriously.
=>
1. There's actually going to be armed rebellion if the Feds really do try to take away guns. You probably don't think so, which is your prerogative. Law enforcement and the political authorities have better information.
/quote>
So, by your own admission, gun owners of America are essentially an unstable group who are willing to murder cops and US soldiers if peaceably asked to surrender their weapons?
I mean, I want to make sure I've got this very right: You believe the 20% of the population who are gun owners, would in fact start an active campaign of murder and intimidation of government workers, police and US servicemen, if they could no longer own guns.
Guess we should give up on murder being illegal then.
Seriously how do people keep writing that sentence down and feeling clever about it?
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the second amendment does not guarantee unrestricted access to small arms, and thus allows for reasonable restrictions on their ownership.
Did you know that basically all the guns in Mexico are bought legally in the US and taken over the border? And that one of the reasons "Fast and Furious" didn't blow up more is that it's been difficult to establish if it was actually illegal for any of the smugglers to buy the guns they did.
I live in Australia.
Guns are amazingly hard to obtain. Organized crime generally uses guns to shoot each other, but it's very rare. There have been precisely 0 bombing.
Isn't that fascinating? That despite the fact that guns are actually a progressively rarer illegal commodity, no one has bothered trying to blow people up?
I've seen this "oh they'll just use a bomb, look how well dairy creamer works" comes up all the damn time as though it's obviously that easy to make explosives. Hint: it's not. Bombs are heavy, and indirect. They require being placed in advance, being not-noticed, and then actually working not to mention acquiring the materials without getting a friendly visit from the Feds to ask what's up with the multiple credit cards and fertilizer. You might notice that the attempted terrorist attacks using bombs in the US have all been thwarted usually by someone calling in and saying "hey, I noticed a weird package".
Why is it that the highest violent crime rates in the US of A are in cities with the strictest gun control laws?
Because of impetus for strict gun control laws due to high violent crime rates. That explains why. Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about the actual effect of gun control laws one way or the other.
Also gun control laws aren't homogenous across the country, and importing from a city 100km away with the current straw-purchasing laws and lack of traceability is trivial. The background check system is so loosely enforced that getting around it is a matter of ticking "no" on the "do you have a mental illness?" question. That gun dealers can't actually be required to do any fundamental checks, or even engage in basic stock control (i.e. under the table sales are effectively undetectable).
So NASCAR should be outlawed then I take it? It is clearly a threat to more than just those who are driving the cars.
You might note that when accidents happen NASCAR acts to reduce the risk of further accidents. You know - move bystanders further from the track, strengthen barricades etc. It's also run on racetracks, in large facilities where the cars can't suddenly go flying out through several layers of wall, across 2km of field and into a nearby house.
NASCAR cars aren't even street-legal to drive on public roads.
Quantum computers don't brute-force cryptography in a conventional sense, so much as they simply step around it all together. They're good at cryptographic problems, because they can represent every possible algorithm state simultaneously given enough qubits to represent the problem. Crypto is based on the idea of analyzing all states being expensive - with quantum computers, it's a basic tenet of their operation.
Yeah that's still deflationary. Deflationary is bad. It leads to economic stagnation.
See, if you hold 100 bitcoins, then every time that decimal place gets moved to accord the "value" of the bitcoin, you get functionally richer. But you didn't actually do anything to get richer. You didn't lend that BTC out for people to start a business or build a house. You didn't fulfill a role as a market intermediary for a product. They only thing you did was sit on that BTC. You got richer, but literally didn't have to do anything productive for it.
For you, the more economic activity others do, in BTC, the richer you become. Yet you still do nothing. In fact, provided BTC attracts a certain level of interest - i.e. that decimal keeps moving over at a certain rate - you're set for life. You can buy food and shelter in bitcoin for less then the increase in value of your initial bitcoin pile. Again, for doing absolutely nothing.
Conversely, those who do not hold enough bitcoin that it will increase in value faster then their costs of living, will in fact never make it. They have to spend huge fractions of their currency, and work to earn ever diminishing remuneration, just to stay alive. It's the ultimate stratified society. Where the people at the top, again, do literally nothing.
Of course in the real world, the under-class figures this out pretty quickly and, when the upper class doesn't budge (because they get something for nothing with the status quo) they get murdered and everybody celebrates.
Deflationary currency is bad.
A file full of data from /dev/random will also accomplish this nicely (I have a copy of that file as well).
If we're going to start assuming ZFS is producing silently corrupted snapshots, we might as well start questioning is gzip is producing corrupted archives or md5sum is working correctly.
Which are all valid assumptions, but ZFS is engineered around avoiding exactly these types of problems. It's not going to produce a silently corrupted snapshot because snapshots include their own checksums for the data coming off the disk, which is also checksummed and it's verified at every step of the way. The failure modes of ZFS always begin with a checksum failure of some sort.
If you can run "find" on your backups, you can do it on ZFS with the .zfs/snapshots directory which provides exactly that functionality.
I do not agree that it is poor design. It is UNIX-style design where the user is expected to actually understand what they are doing. Sure, you could make it fool-proof, but that is decidedly not the UNIX-way as that would break things and because UNIX takes great care to not offend those that actually understand what they are doing. These people messed up through no fault of the git tool. Quit finding apologies for them. If they do not get it, they should have used some tool more on their level. Understanding how far your skills go is a critical skill fro any engineer.
Also, git is not to blame for some amateurs not realizing that a real backup is non-optional.
Silently not doing integrity checks when your tool is built around that concept is bad design, plain and simple. Most Linux tools with potentially disaster causing command line switches also have secondary switches that make sure you understand the consequences - you can't tell hdparm to upload HDD firmware without also specifying --yes-please-destroy-my-data (or something like that).
If git --mirror isn't going to do integrity checks - and I find it exceptionally odd that it doesn't - then that needs to be made very very obvious before you can use it. Man page documentation, and an extra switch saying --do-not-verify-integrity.
If you had to do that, this problem wouldn't have happened.
The part where a major bank was caught laundering money for drug cartels, who in turn are the principle reason that town in Mexico has a death rate of 800 people per month? How about just sex slavery? Or child pornography production and distribution?
The implication that just because enforcing a law is difficult (or being politically interfered with) doesn't mean we should bother is absurd. It is definitely a good thing to police BTC for these things.
Money laundering is a victimless crime?
Sure, I guess. All that money being laundered from child pornography, drug cartels which can now safely get money from selling Taliban grown opium, trafficking of sex slaves. Totally victimless!
I mean, there obviously no problems at all with providing a way for people to safely launder money from illegal activities. They probably don't commit any serious crimes doing so. We definitely didn't catch Al Capone because of tax fraud either and how to spend your illegal gains definitely isn't such a huge problem that it's a big business for crime because spending your illegal profits is a good way to get caught.
It is not clinically real - it is not physiological.
I'm not sure how you define "clinically real" but the placebo effect has been demonstrated to change brain patterns, lead to (e.g.) hormone generation and change perception of pain.
I'd call those clinical outcomes, and physiological changes.
for something like a bacterial infection this is potentially fatal.
Absolutely. But placebos aren't being prescribed for bacterial infections, lethal viruses, cancer, broken limbs and heart attacks.
Actually, they probably are part of some cancer treatments. But only as part of it.
Using a known effect to achieve genuine outcomes is an excellent use of resources, and allows prioritisation of more costly treatments for patients that actually need them.
The OP I was replying to was implying they should be, and many people believe the placebo effect somehow can treat diseases caused by infection or the like. The 20% number gets thrown around without realizing that it's only applicable to some classes of problem - i.e. pain management - where psychological perception is important, and where endorphins your body makes naturally in response to state of mind are actually pain suppressants.
But even in that case, if something turns out to be no better then a placebo, then targeted therapy to address state of mind will be better still. We can and do, for issues like that, get people into meditation or exercise or any number of other things.
But you are absolutely not going to find cancer stop growing because you gave someone a sugar pill, and the idea that "costly therapies" will be avoided by giving placebos is ridiculous (unless we don't care about saving/improving lives). If something is serious enough to require a costly treatment, placebos aren't going to remove the underlying problem.
The point of the placebo effect is that it is entirely psychological. It is not clinically real - it is not physiological.
Brains are body parts, just like noses, fingers, and spleens. It's only because the brain is so much more complicated (and therefore less understood) than the other parts that this psychological/physiological dichotomy exists.
Except most drugs aren't to treat brain conditions. The placebo effect is important for pain management, because that is a perception issue and doing anything about pain is a good outcome. But the placebo effect won't stop the group of Staphylococcus aureus dumping toxins into your blood stream from continuuing to do that till they've poisoned the local environment (killed you).
This. Any solar panel which does better then about 4% efficiency is ahead of plants, and we can do 15% no problems these days on silicon.
The problem with corn ethanol isn't the diversion of farmland, it's that it's a completely artificial diversion. Corn is so subsidized no one knows how much it costs anywhere, and world food prices are creating local scarcity because no one can outcompete US government subsidized corn - so local farming never has any incentive to grow it or other staples, as opposed to cash crops (many of which are incredibly harmful to local soil ecology to do so).
World food prices need to be allowed to rise gradually so the local economies which are importing can transition to growing locally or, people with an actual competitive advantage can move in to drive them down in a non-artificial way. But playing games with how much corn there is predictably creates price shocks because technically there's enough product in the market place, it's just mysteriously not getting to the locals, yet simultaneously can't be expected to reliably stay high either.
Isn't this just adding a ton of boilerplate code though?
It's in the cloud so you'll always need networking support, and that's going to be TCP/IP generally. You'll need to write files, so you also need a network file system or real file system driver of some sort, and a way to write to block device like objects. At some level, all this is just "things a very minimal Linux kernel" would do for us.
That all said, I'm now very curious about how quickly said kernel would spin up and launch a custom application as init. But 1-2 seconds feels like it would easily doable considering we've had the 5 second graphical desktop previously.
Does Linux really take 20 seconds to boot on a VM?
My impression was Linux's boot time is mostly probing for hardware or waiting on slow devices to initialize. It seems like in a VM you could skip all that, and also would be ignoring all the usual daemons.
The OS-less approach seems absurd though, because at that point it's really just an application being run on a multi-user system. And we've been doing that since the 80s.
Ignorance.
The correct comparison is living next to a coal plant, compared to living in a country without coal plants. And don't say you have wind or nuclear, because those wouldn't exist without industrialization, which required coal.
So, what's the average lifespan living next to a coal plant compared to in a forest somewhere?
Well?
Guys we definitely shouldn't have family planning education because I'm the ninth of nine children and if we had family planning education I wouldn't exist!