So, uh, which firm does your dad work for, exactly? I'm sure the IRS would love to know...
Tax avoidance and tax evasion are markedly different. Tax avoidance is straightforward: You plan decisions and investments so that all money is taxed honestly, but at the lowest rate for the return. For example, if you need to raise cash, you can choose to sell a stagnant stock at a loss, which will raise the cash you need and build a capital loss credit, rather than selling a stock that's moving up and will likely make even more money than it will cost in capital gains.
Tax evasion is where money is dishonestly hidden from being taxed, such as claiming the purchase of that new fishing rod is really a business expense for your car dealership, or moving it offshore to a country with lax enforcement and claiming to the IRS that you're paying taxes there, while telling the foreign government that it's being taxed here. It's pretty easy to tell when you're "dabbling" in tax evasion, because somewhere in the paper trail, somebody lies.
Effectively avoiding taxes does require having enough money to be able to maneuver around so that the minimum taxes are paid. The taxpayer must have enough money available that they can move their profits into inaccessible places (foreign companies, unrealized investments, etc.) while still having cash to live on. Then when the time is right they can move that money back into something easier to work with, paying a lower tax rate and profiting from the time spent.
Source: I work at a financial advising firm. We do some tax avoidance, but no tax evasion.
A big car transportation truck (double bottomed) with the car navigation systems left on.
But the navigation systems won't have any destination programmed, nor will the engine be running. It's pretty easy to recognize "I'm moving but not trying to... something else is in charge"
Multiple, physically adjacent highways - with concrete barriers between them
If you're suggesting the cars would try to merge through the barrier, that's what lane tracking is for. If you're suggesting the cars would get confused as to where they are, it won't matter, because they're completely different roads to the routing system.
Traffic stalls on multi-deck bridges
...won't matter, because they're different roads to the routing system.
Bleed-over from service roads running parallel to highways.
...won't matter, because they're different roads to the routing system.
Black-hat/vandals leaving false transmitters on the side of the road or attached to bridges.
There's been research into these, and how to identify them by noticing that their data doesn't match with other sources. It's a fairly difficult problem, but the results are promising.
Back doors (required by Homeland Security?) hacked to allow:
Nice conspiracy theory, but such things are already planned for emergency services.
Self-important people (congressmen, lawyers, financiers) to force a favorable path through the hoi-poloi.
...Which should be accompanied by the same laws we currently have to prosecute people abusing traffic light systems like Opticom.
Black--hat/vandals creating obvious gaps in traffic - encouraging people to disregard the system
Also already intended, somewhat. The systems I've dealt with (in a minor research capacity) left gaps between trains for non-automated cars to use. The gaps' size would be automatically adjusted based on traffic needs, to ensure there's always space for humans to drive themselves.
>I think what you're missing here is that our Constitution, and in particular, the Bill of Rights, was founded on the principle of denying the government too much power...
I don't miss that point at all. The Constitution limits government power, but it also charges the government with other duties that require certain power. I say we should continue that tradition. Let's not fear the creation of a facial-recognition database, but rather explicitly limit the government's uses to what the people approve of.
The general public has no possibility of building a database like this for their use
But that's exactly what it's doing! The government is still "of the people, by the people, for the people"... but it's managed by Congress. Anything that Congress does, they think they do on our behalf. From the perspective of Congress, the people need and want this database, to better protect their security. There's just a small group of naysayers who worry about privacy, but they always complain about privacy...
We can only maintain freedom by carefully maintaining the balance between what your country can do to you and what you can do to your country.
In short, that's ridiculous. This is not an us-vs.-them war, and it hasn't been since the invention of modern warfare. The government can drop a nuke on your hometown. You can't drop a nuke on DC. What matters is that the government, with all its power, must always try to serve the people. If it doesn't, vote for someone to change it. Vote for representatives who will keep the government's actions limited to good things.
But it won't matter, because the cars will also have algorithms to determine when to just safely move around a car that can't keep up, and that synchronized roadblock won't block your also-upgraded car from joining (or passing through) them.
More irritating will be the Luddites who don't take advantage of the technology, so they create obstacles that the networks will have to route around. When that old geezer going 45mph is getting passed by that other old geezer going 46mph, the whole train of cars behind them will have to slow down. Then, of course, the people in the automatic cars will complain about slowing down, and the old geezer will proudly boast that his old car can always travel however fast he wants.
He was also pretty argumentative, so I think he'd take umbrage no matter what I said, regardless of his views.
Throughout his life, Orwell spoke against totalitarian control, and that's the motivation that let to him becoming a syndicalist and a democratic socialist. His view generally was that the government should respect the public good the most, then the individuals' freedoms, with government interests having a very low priority. The size of those governments seemed to be of little concern to him, so long as the freedom and welfare was respected. He advocated unifying Europe under a single democratic socialist government, and supported the Allies in World War II - except for the Soviet Union.
Regardless of what syndicalists tend to prefer, Orwell's views are his own.
The copyright holders recognize that the only remotely-feasible way to stop illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies.
The copyright holders (represented by the myriad trade associations and lobbyist groups) recognize that (and lobby for) the only remotely-feasible (though imperfect) way to stop (or at least hinder) illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies (with difficulty to the users notwithstanding).
The MPAA/RIAA/AAP/etc. aren't naive enough to think that DRM is actually going to completely stop piracy. Rather, they aim to make piracy just ever more difficult, eventually forcing the time-consuming and quality-reducing analog loophole. Similarly, they don't particularly care about the burden to their customers. Most people don't care about minor inconvenience. That unskippable short at the start of a DVD might be a little irritating to a customer, but it reinforces the MPAA's anti-piracy campaign, and the average viewer doesn't realize that the MPAA just wasted 60 seconds of their life. It's more important that when they want to get their next movie, they'll get a gut feeling that "piracy is wrong" and go buy the fully-licensed DVD.
The copyright groups are in this for the long haul. DRM won't stop piracy, but DRM will ever-so-slowly convince consumers to avoid piracy, and eventually the device manufacturers will work out the inconvenience of most DRM. iTunes just works, Kindle just works, and DVDs usually just work. That's all consumers care about.
If your text-to-speech program can read the text, your text-to-text program can copy the text to somewhere else.
Of course, the text-to-speech program isn't illegal, but redistributing the copyrighted text is. The copyright holders recognize that the only remotely-feasible way to stop illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies. That means that legally accessing the work becomes collateral damage, but that's perfectly acceptable to a special-interest group like the MPAA. They're not interested in helping the blind. They're interested in helping copyright holders.
Unfortunately, there is no "everybody playing nicely together" lobby.
The surveillance isn't the scary part of 1984. The surveillance is just a tool being used by an oppressive government. The warning of the story is that we must ensure our government exists to serve the people, and not the other way around. Sure, that might mean the government must serve the paranoid folks clamoring for theatrical security, but it's still trying to serve the people. In 1984, every aspect of life was controlled and manipulated by the Inner Party to serve the Inner Party.
Giant facial recognition databases are a powerful tool. That technological power can be used for good or evil, but the risk of evil is no reason to fear the technology itself.
I'd just go with a small handful of analog tuning circuitry. From the article (can't watch the video currently), it sounds like the device detects a two-tone whistle and toggles a relay. That's not terribly hard to do with two adjustable tuners, some voltage comparators, and a few other bits for cleaning.
I work at a finance company. Anything over 50 years is good length to plan for, because short-term problems don't actually affect long-term expectations. A low-risk investment plan for an average of 4% real return isn't unreasonable, and with enough a large enough initial investment (such as a few hundred million dollars in government grants, reality-show profits, and venture capital), the returns on that could fund operations for long enough, especially with launch costs dropping.
All of which originate in the same fear of death. I also think the laws against suicide are silly. The laws forbidding snuff films aim to eliminate a financial incentive for murder, but they're all irrelevant here.
Those laws only apply to someone committing an act with intent. A prosecutor would have to prove that the people in charge intended for the travelers to die, and that the death was a direct result of their actions.
Gladiators, executions, and snuff films differ from pioneering in one major aspect: the pioneers choose to take the risk. The AC summed up my opinion pretty well. Everybody dies. Every moment we live is another moment closer to our death... If someone has no better long-term plans, why not volunteer?
It's a simple gamble. The prize is an extremely valuable contribution to human exploration. The entry price is difficult communication with most other humans for the rest of your life, however long that may be. The risk is a sudden death.
Like every other wager, whether it's advantageous depends on the cost/benefit analysis. Someone who doesn't value their connections on Earth nearly as much as their contributions to science may find it perfectly reasonable to risk a sudden death for the chance to begin human planetary colonization. If that's their opinion and their choice, why not respect it?
There is a pervasive idea in Western culture that death is something tragic. We avoid death to the point where we spend our whole lives taking pills, exercising, and cowering in fear of what new deaths we might encounter. The very mention of death brings sadness into a party, and funerals are silent orgies of despair. Why must we all be such cowards? Let us go each day seeking new ways to die. Not merely new to each individual, but a death unlike any other in history. Now, the corollary to that is that we must avoid deaths that have been done before. Avoid heart attacks lying on the couch, avoid getting hit by a bus that you thought would stop, and avoid getting mauled by animals.
A natural death on Mars after a long career of science hasn't happened yet, and neither has a fiery death in a do-or-die effort to return a drifting interplanetary spacecraft. Let's do it.
What dying moments will be broadcast? Ideally, the travelers would survive long enough to set up a viable sustainable colony, whose expenses could be handled by a large enough trust fund. By the time they die of natural causes, the reality show would be long-since off the air.
In a less ideal situation, the travelers' catastrophic dying moments are broadcast to the world, and the travelers are martyrs in the ongoing process of human exploration. This is a known risk, which all the travelers must accept before volunteering. Why, then, would it be a problem to broadcast the unintentional deaths of these brave folks? The chance of their sudden death is something they accept... why can't we viewers accept it as well?
You're still confusing a "product" vs. a "brand". A product is a salable good of a particular kind, such as milk. A brand is a product from a specific manufacturer, such as Borden milk. When an entity is competing against other producers, it's worth the effort to promote a brand. On the other hand, when an entity stands to gain more from promoting the whole industry, it's cheaper and easier to just advertise the product in general, saving the hassle of fighting with other brands. As is common in the food-supply industry, multiple suppliers of a single product can band together in associations like the "California Milk Processor Board" to jointly purchase advertising.
This is somewhat orthogonal to the distinction of a "commodity". A commodity is a good that has no product differentiation. One manufacturer's car is wildly different from another manufacturer's, but one mine's gold is not different from another's. Diamond is somewhat odd in this regard, as the minor or even intangible differences in diamonds from different mines are magnified in the price and legality. Being lab-grown or natural also is a major difference in demand.
De Beers is not really marketing a brand to the public at large. They're advertising a rock, promoting its image to create a market. That turns the industrial good into something far more salable - and that makes a product. Since they control most of the world's diamond production, it's easier for them to advertise diamonds in general, even if it helps their competitors. By increasing the public demand for diamonds, they increase the demand from distributors. They'll then advertise their brand to those distributors, who have to keep up their own supply.
It is a commodity, and is advertized as such on financial markets. It is not advertized to the general population on MTV.
It's also advertised in magazines, newspapers, and everywhere else there are people looking for investments. Since the gold fanatics profit most from driving up gold prices, they're promoting gold as a whole, rather than any particular brand of gold-investment strategy.
Although you can Google it, we don't know who the threats came from, so it is irrelevant.
Yes, it is irrelevant and unfounded, but you brought it up. It's a conspiracy theory that doesn't hold water.
The stated reason why Apollo Diamond was trying to grow large artificial diamonds was not to undercut De Beers, but to be able to manufacture a CPU on a 1x1 inch diamond wafer.
Such wafers already exist from other manufacturers for other purposes. Apollo just made improvements to the technology, but still failed at the business. Perhaps it's because, as mentioned in my last post, we still can't make reliable diamond transistors because our technology is immature, but they were focusing on making wafers for full CPUs. Perhaps in 50 years, they'll have a market.
Clearly a diamond powder does not cut it.
Quite the contrary... Diamond powder is one of the very few things that can cut a diamond wafer!
I guess all those articles and comments talking about how Linux is also gratis are really just advertisements, too. You still need to buy a computer to do anything with it.
Students signing up for a course generally expect that there will be overpriced textbooks required. An arrangement that promotes a wider array of textbooks free of charge is notable.
diamonds is not a product, it's a mineral (aka raw material, commodity)
Diamond is indeed a mineral, with many industrial uses. Most of the diamonds mined, though, aren't used or marketed as an exclusive product. More on this in a minute.
and what is the difference between "rare" and "uncommon"?
Something "rare" is hard to find, even if you have the resources to acquire it. Something "uncommon" is just something that's not commonplace. It might also be rare, but in this case (as with Apple products) the price is kept just high enough that not everybody that wants one will have the resources to get one. They're readily available, but for some reason, it's still remarkable to see one.
To use the venerable car analogy, a DeLorean is rare, because there's so few of them in existence. A brand-new Mercedes Benz is uncommon, because it's unlikely for the average person to buy one.
...it is a status symbol because De Beers adverised it... as a brand!...
Less of a brand (because diamonds don't carry a big label saying "De Beers"), but more of a specific product. The symbolism of a diamond standing for love and commitment is purely a De Beers invention. Want to impress your wife? Give her a new Mercedes. Love her forever? Give her a diamond!
A car is just a chunk of metal, and a diamond is just a rock. A chunk of metal with the promise of reliable transportation and the luxury of comfort is a product. A rock with the symbolism of love and promise of durability is also a product.
Have you ever seen anybody advertising a commodity before? "Gold is Forever", anybody?
Every. Goddamned. Day.
I work in finance, so I watch a lot of finance-oriented television. Yes, there are many companies touting their gold-related investment strategies, which basically boil down to "buy gold and make the price go up so my pre-existing gold holdings are worth more". In a way, it's similar: They're shifting the public perception of a mundane item into a valuable product.
Excepts this product is needed practically everywhere in technology, if not for De Beers having a chock-hold on the market and inflating prices.
There are many other manufacturers of synthetic diamonds, perfect for industrial use. Until recently, though, the diamonds they could easily produce were all colored, which aren't as suitable for jewelry. Now Gemesis, Scio, and others can produce gem-quality colorless diamonds.
These guys produces a flawless artificial diamond for use in technology, and got death threats over it.
[citation needed]
If the price went down it could revolutionize semiconductors industry.
The price is currently a few dollars per carat, in powder form. One carat is a huge amount compared to the size of existing transistors, so it's rather ridiculous to blame the price for the lack of diamond semiconductors. Instead, it's likely the immaturity of diamond semiconductor technology that holds up back:
The combinations of the extreme properties of diamond... suggest that diamond should out-perform nearly every other semiconducting material system for electronic applications. IN PRINCIPLE! The reality is that there are many other factors involved in developing and implementing a technology: cost, manufacturing infrastructure, investment, and knowledge base. I think it is fair to say that diamond materials need a lot more research, knowledge, and technology development before they can be considered a mature semiconducting material.
...that technology is going to be squashed by De Beers, much like the electric ca
De Beers creates artificial exclusivity, not scarcity. It's a subtle but important distinction.
They produce a product that people value not because it's particularly rare, but because it's just uncommon enough to be a status symbol. Various substitutes can look and act similarly, so the high prices aren't justified by an actual need for the product. Rather, the need is for the brand itself, and the company creates and perpetuates the value of that brand by limiting supply. They ensure there's just enough supply to meet demand, but not enough surplus to impact the prices people are willing to pay.
...and many more fields I don't have time to list. The Slashdot hivemind loves to find the downside to every advancement in every field, and thanks to the excessive hyperbole, any attempt at discussing reasonable compromises is cast as sympathizing with the enemy. As noted, there's even a few diametrically-opposed biases, where we really just seem to want awesome technology to exist, but never be used. We're a terribly fickle bunch.
That's more dead-on accurate than I think you realize.
US privacy laws, including HIPAA, typically only apply to living persons. Once they're dead, their personal information quickly loses legal protection. There is a bit of a gray area concerning living relatives of the deceased, and organizations may keep information protected because it's easier, but the legal protection expires.
Standardization is important to nerds and manufacturers, but it's not the source of profit for car manufacturers, especially in the luxury market. When somebody's buying a new computer, they look at the number of USB ports and consider what kind of future capabilities the machine will have. When buying a car, they look at the gadgets and think about what features they get now. It doesn't matter if the stereo can't be upgraded with new codecs. What matters is that it plays music from an internal MP3 library now. When the salesman says the car can "play movies", the buyer doesn't think about the need to load those movies using a proprietary Java program that only runs on Windows XP. That hands-free calling looks great as a bullet point, but only one in a hundred buyers will notice that it doesn't work with some particular brand of phone.
The manufacturers can get away with this because cars are an infrequent purchase. If a customer gets burned by a poorly-working feature, they'll forget about it by the time they're ready to make their next purchase, by which time all of the features' trademarked names will change and the salesmen will say how vastly improved the new system is.
Standards are future-proofing, but car buyers are firmly planted in the world of today.
Even if you're having something hosted by a third party, it's not hard to set up its DNS at foo.chase.com.
It's not hard to set up DNS, but it is hard to get third-party programs to use it. The browser requests the script from foo.chase.com, and that's hosted at ru4.com... but the script requests another script, likely without knowing it's supposed to be at Chase... so it'll request from ru4.com, The uncertainty is still there, but now it's hidden under another layer of obscurity.
Alternatively, the third-party script gets a custom-branded version for each major contractor, which increases development cost, or the script is made aware of how it was requested, which involves more painful scripting and also drives up costs. Reassuring paranoid users just doesn't make business sense.
Wiretap warrants require a lot more than just reasonable suspicion of a crime, though. Wiretap laws were written to fit the idea that phone companies were simple carriers who would respect the integrity of customer's conversations, and since they didn't provide services themselves, people had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now that we willingly send information to companies knowing it will be manipulated for the provided services, that clear expectation of privacy gets a lot more blurry. Post a threat to Facebook, and your friends can pass it on as a tip to police, but the police can't just ask Facebook who made threats? That doesn't really make much sense.
if only there was some legislation allowing companies to look at the data they carry, that didn't require a tedious and detailed warrant request for every detail... And of course, that's the goal of CISPA. Where CISPA fails is that it doesn't just remove the excessive red tape on wiretap warrants, but apparently bypasses due process altogether, for any kind of query.
No, the fourth amendment is there to make sure that investigations are actually investigating something reasonable, rather than just harassing somebody the officers don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
So, uh, which firm does your dad work for, exactly? I'm sure the IRS would love to know...
Tax avoidance and tax evasion are markedly different. Tax avoidance is straightforward: You plan decisions and investments so that all money is taxed honestly, but at the lowest rate for the return. For example, if you need to raise cash, you can choose to sell a stagnant stock at a loss, which will raise the cash you need and build a capital loss credit, rather than selling a stock that's moving up and will likely make even more money than it will cost in capital gains.
Tax evasion is where money is dishonestly hidden from being taxed, such as claiming the purchase of that new fishing rod is really a business expense for your car dealership, or moving it offshore to a country with lax enforcement and claiming to the IRS that you're paying taxes there, while telling the foreign government that it's being taxed here. It's pretty easy to tell when you're "dabbling" in tax evasion, because somewhere in the paper trail, somebody lies.
Effectively avoiding taxes does require having enough money to be able to maneuver around so that the minimum taxes are paid. The taxpayer must have enough money available that they can move their profits into inaccessible places (foreign companies, unrealized investments, etc.) while still having cash to live on. Then when the time is right they can move that money back into something easier to work with, paying a lower tax rate and profiting from the time spent.
Source: I work at a financial advising firm. We do some tax avoidance, but no tax evasion.
A big car transportation truck (double bottomed) with the car navigation systems left on.
But the navigation systems won't have any destination programmed, nor will the engine be running. It's pretty easy to recognize "I'm moving but not trying to... something else is in charge"
Multiple, physically adjacent highways - with concrete barriers between them
If you're suggesting the cars would try to merge through the barrier, that's what lane tracking is for. If you're suggesting the cars would get confused as to where they are, it won't matter, because they're completely different roads to the routing system.
Traffic stalls on multi-deck bridges
...won't matter, because they're different roads to the routing system.
Bleed-over from service roads running parallel to highways.
...won't matter, because they're different roads to the routing system.
Black-hat/vandals leaving false transmitters on the side of the road or attached to bridges.
There's been research into these, and how to identify them by noticing that their data doesn't match with other sources. It's a fairly difficult problem, but the results are promising.
Back doors (required by Homeland Security?) hacked to allow:
Nice conspiracy theory, but such things are already planned for emergency services.
Self-important people (congressmen, lawyers, financiers) to force a favorable path through the hoi-poloi.
...Which should be accompanied by the same laws we currently have to prosecute people abusing traffic light systems like Opticom.
Black--hat/vandals creating obvious gaps in traffic - encouraging people to disregard the system
Also already intended, somewhat. The systems I've dealt with (in a minor research capacity) left gaps between trains for non-automated cars to use. The gaps' size would be automatically adjusted based on traffic needs, to ensure there's always space for humans to drive themselves.
>I think what you're missing here is that our Constitution, and in particular, the Bill of Rights, was founded on the principle of denying the government too much power...
I don't miss that point at all. The Constitution limits government power, but it also charges the government with other duties that require certain power. I say we should continue that tradition. Let's not fear the creation of a facial-recognition database, but rather explicitly limit the government's uses to what the people approve of.
The general public has no possibility of building a database like this for their use
But that's exactly what it's doing! The government is still "of the people, by the people, for the people"... but it's managed by Congress. Anything that Congress does, they think they do on our behalf. From the perspective of Congress, the people need and want this database, to better protect their security. There's just a small group of naysayers who worry about privacy, but they always complain about privacy...
We can only maintain freedom by carefully maintaining the balance between what your country can do to you and what you can do to your country.
In short, that's ridiculous. This is not an us-vs.-them war, and it hasn't been since the invention of modern warfare. The government can drop a nuke on your hometown. You can't drop a nuke on DC. What matters is that the government, with all its power, must always try to serve the people. If it doesn't, vote for someone to change it. Vote for representatives who will keep the government's actions limited to good things.
But it won't matter, because the cars will also have algorithms to determine when to just safely move around a car that can't keep up, and that synchronized roadblock won't block your also-upgraded car from joining (or passing through) them.
More irritating will be the Luddites who don't take advantage of the technology, so they create obstacles that the networks will have to route around. When that old geezer going 45mph is getting passed by that other old geezer going 46mph, the whole train of cars behind them will have to slow down. Then, of course, the people in the automatic cars will complain about slowing down, and the old geezer will proudly boast that his old car can always travel however fast he wants.
He was also pretty argumentative, so I think he'd take umbrage no matter what I said, regardless of his views.
Throughout his life, Orwell spoke against totalitarian control, and that's the motivation that let to him becoming a syndicalist and a democratic socialist. His view generally was that the government should respect the public good the most, then the individuals' freedoms, with government interests having a very low priority. The size of those governments seemed to be of little concern to him, so long as the freedom and welfare was respected. He advocated unifying Europe under a single democratic socialist government, and supported the Allies in World War II - except for the Soviet Union.
Regardless of what syndicalists tend to prefer, Orwell's views are his own.
Don't fix what isn't broken.
The copyright holders recognize that the only remotely-feasible way to stop illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies.
The copyright holders (represented by the myriad trade associations and lobbyist groups) recognize that (and lobby for) the only remotely-feasible (though imperfect) way to stop (or at least hinder) illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies (with difficulty to the users notwithstanding).
The MPAA/RIAA/AAP/etc. aren't naive enough to think that DRM is actually going to completely stop piracy. Rather, they aim to make piracy just ever more difficult, eventually forcing the time-consuming and quality-reducing analog loophole. Similarly, they don't particularly care about the burden to their customers. Most people don't care about minor inconvenience. That unskippable short at the start of a DVD might be a little irritating to a customer, but it reinforces the MPAA's anti-piracy campaign, and the average viewer doesn't realize that the MPAA just wasted 60 seconds of their life. It's more important that when they want to get their next movie, they'll get a gut feeling that "piracy is wrong" and go buy the fully-licensed DVD.
The copyright groups are in this for the long haul. DRM won't stop piracy, but DRM will ever-so-slowly convince consumers to avoid piracy, and eventually the device manufacturers will work out the inconvenience of most DRM. iTunes just works, Kindle just works, and DVDs usually just work. That's all consumers care about.
If your text-to-speech program can read the text, your text-to-text program can copy the text to somewhere else.
Of course, the text-to-speech program isn't illegal, but redistributing the copyrighted text is. The copyright holders recognize that the only remotely-feasible way to stop illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies. That means that legally accessing the work becomes collateral damage, but that's perfectly acceptable to a special-interest group like the MPAA. They're not interested in helping the blind. They're interested in helping copyright holders.
Unfortunately, there is no "everybody playing nicely together" lobby.
The surveillance isn't the scary part of 1984. The surveillance is just a tool being used by an oppressive government. The warning of the story is that we must ensure our government exists to serve the people, and not the other way around. Sure, that might mean the government must serve the paranoid folks clamoring for theatrical security, but it's still trying to serve the people. In 1984, every aspect of life was controlled and manipulated by the Inner Party to serve the Inner Party.
Giant facial recognition databases are a powerful tool. That technological power can be used for good or evil, but the risk of evil is no reason to fear the technology itself.
My bananas are diced, you insensitive clod!
I'd just go with a small handful of analog tuning circuitry. From the article (can't watch the video currently), it sounds like the device detects a two-tone whistle and toggles a relay. That's not terribly hard to do with two adjustable tuners, some voltage comparators, and a few other bits for cleaning.
It might be bad taste, but yes. Heck, it's pretty much just a more honest variant on any other extreme sport.
I work at a finance company. Anything over 50 years is good length to plan for, because short-term problems don't actually affect long-term expectations. A low-risk investment plan for an average of 4% real return isn't unreasonable, and with enough a large enough initial investment (such as a few hundred million dollars in government grants, reality-show profits, and venture capital), the returns on that could fund operations for long enough, especially with launch costs dropping.
All of which originate in the same fear of death. I also think the laws against suicide are silly. The laws forbidding snuff films aim to eliminate a financial incentive for murder, but they're all irrelevant here.
Those laws only apply to someone committing an act with intent. A prosecutor would have to prove that the people in charge intended for the travelers to die, and that the death was a direct result of their actions.
Gladiators, executions, and snuff films differ from pioneering in one major aspect: the pioneers choose to take the risk. The AC summed up my opinion pretty well. Everybody dies. Every moment we live is another moment closer to our death... If someone has no better long-term plans, why not volunteer?
It's a simple gamble. The prize is an extremely valuable contribution to human exploration. The entry price is difficult communication with most other humans for the rest of your life, however long that may be. The risk is a sudden death.
Like every other wager, whether it's advantageous depends on the cost/benefit analysis. Someone who doesn't value their connections on Earth nearly as much as their contributions to science may find it perfectly reasonable to risk a sudden death for the chance to begin human planetary colonization. If that's their opinion and their choice, why not respect it?
There is a pervasive idea in Western culture that death is something tragic. We avoid death to the point where we spend our whole lives taking pills, exercising, and cowering in fear of what new deaths we might encounter. The very mention of death brings sadness into a party, and funerals are silent orgies of despair. Why must we all be such cowards? Let us go each day seeking new ways to die. Not merely new to each individual, but a death unlike any other in history. Now, the corollary to that is that we must avoid deaths that have been done before. Avoid heart attacks lying on the couch, avoid getting hit by a bus that you thought would stop, and avoid getting mauled by animals.
A natural death on Mars after a long career of science hasn't happened yet, and neither has a fiery death in a do-or-die effort to return a drifting interplanetary spacecraft. Let's do it.
Is that a problem?
What dying moments will be broadcast? Ideally, the travelers would survive long enough to set up a viable sustainable colony, whose expenses could be handled by a large enough trust fund. By the time they die of natural causes, the reality show would be long-since off the air.
In a less ideal situation, the travelers' catastrophic dying moments are broadcast to the world, and the travelers are martyrs in the ongoing process of human exploration. This is a known risk, which all the travelers must accept before volunteering. Why, then, would it be a problem to broadcast the unintentional deaths of these brave folks? The chance of their sudden death is something they accept... why can't we viewers accept it as well?
You're still confusing a "product" vs. a "brand". A product is a salable good of a particular kind, such as milk. A brand is a product from a specific manufacturer, such as Borden milk. When an entity is competing against other producers, it's worth the effort to promote a brand. On the other hand, when an entity stands to gain more from promoting the whole industry, it's cheaper and easier to just advertise the product in general, saving the hassle of fighting with other brands. As is common in the food-supply industry, multiple suppliers of a single product can band together in associations like the "California Milk Processor Board" to jointly purchase advertising.
This is somewhat orthogonal to the distinction of a "commodity". A commodity is a good that has no product differentiation. One manufacturer's car is wildly different from another manufacturer's, but one mine's gold is not different from another's. Diamond is somewhat odd in this regard, as the minor or even intangible differences in diamonds from different mines are magnified in the price and legality. Being lab-grown or natural also is a major difference in demand.
De Beers is not really marketing a brand to the public at large. They're advertising a rock, promoting its image to create a market. That turns the industrial good into something far more salable - and that makes a product. Since they control most of the world's diamond production, it's easier for them to advertise diamonds in general, even if it helps their competitors. By increasing the public demand for diamonds, they increase the demand from distributors. They'll then advertise their brand to those distributors, who have to keep up their own supply.
It is a commodity, and is advertized as such on financial markets. It is not advertized to the general population on MTV.
It's also advertised in magazines, newspapers, and everywhere else there are people looking for investments. Since the gold fanatics profit most from driving up gold prices, they're promoting gold as a whole, rather than any particular brand of gold-investment strategy.
Although you can Google it, we don't know who the threats came from, so it is irrelevant.
Yes, it is irrelevant and unfounded, but you brought it up. It's a conspiracy theory that doesn't hold water.
The stated reason why Apollo Diamond was trying to grow large artificial diamonds was not to undercut De Beers, but to be able to manufacture a CPU on a 1x1 inch diamond wafer.
Such wafers already exist from other manufacturers for other purposes. Apollo just made improvements to the technology, but still failed at the business. Perhaps it's because, as mentioned in my last post, we still can't make reliable diamond transistors because our technology is immature, but they were focusing on making wafers for full CPUs. Perhaps in 50 years, they'll have a market.
Clearly a diamond powder does not cut it.
Quite the contrary... Diamond powder is one of the very few things that can cut a diamond wafer!
Meh.
I guess all those articles and comments talking about how Linux is also gratis are really just advertisements, too. You still need to buy a computer to do anything with it.
Students signing up for a course generally expect that there will be overpriced textbooks required. An arrangement that promotes a wider array of textbooks free of charge is notable.
diamonds is not a product, it's a mineral (aka raw material, commodity)
Diamond is indeed a mineral, with many industrial uses. Most of the diamonds mined, though, aren't used or marketed as an exclusive product. More on this in a minute.
and what is the difference between "rare" and "uncommon"?
Something "rare" is hard to find, even if you have the resources to acquire it. Something "uncommon" is just something that's not commonplace. It might also be rare, but in this case (as with Apple products) the price is kept just high enough that not everybody that wants one will have the resources to get one. They're readily available, but for some reason, it's still remarkable to see one.
To use the venerable car analogy, a DeLorean is rare, because there's so few of them in existence. A brand-new Mercedes Benz is uncommon, because it's unlikely for the average person to buy one.
...it is a status symbol because De Beers adverised it... as a brand!...
Less of a brand (because diamonds don't carry a big label saying "De Beers"), but more of a specific product. The symbolism of a diamond standing for love and commitment is purely a De Beers invention. Want to impress your wife? Give her a new Mercedes. Love her forever? Give her a diamond!
A car is just a chunk of metal, and a diamond is just a rock. A chunk of metal with the promise of reliable transportation and the luxury of comfort is a product. A rock with the symbolism of love and promise of durability is also a product.
Have you ever seen anybody advertising a commodity before? "Gold is Forever", anybody?
Every. Goddamned. Day.
I work in finance, so I watch a lot of finance-oriented television. Yes, there are many companies touting their gold-related investment strategies, which basically boil down to "buy gold and make the price go up so my pre-existing gold holdings are worth more". In a way, it's similar: They're shifting the public perception of a mundane item into a valuable product.
Excepts this product is needed practically everywhere in technology, if not for De Beers having a chock-hold on the market and inflating prices.
There are many other manufacturers of synthetic diamonds, perfect for industrial use. Until recently, though, the diamonds they could easily produce were all colored, which aren't as suitable for jewelry. Now Gemesis, Scio, and others can produce gem-quality colorless diamonds.
These guys produces a flawless artificial diamond for use in technology, and got death threats over it.
[citation needed]
If the price went down it could revolutionize semiconductors industry.
The price is currently a few dollars per carat, in powder form. One carat is a huge amount compared to the size of existing transistors, so it's rather ridiculous to blame the price for the lack of diamond semiconductors. Instead, it's likely the immaturity of diamond semiconductor technology that holds up back:
The combinations of the extreme properties of diamond ... suggest that diamond should out-perform nearly every other semiconducting material system for electronic applications. IN PRINCIPLE! The reality is that there are many other factors involved in developing and implementing a technology: cost, manufacturing infrastructure, investment, and knowledge base. I think it is fair to say that diamond materials need a lot more research, knowledge, and technology development before they can be considered a mature semiconducting material.
...that technology is going to be squashed by De Beers, much like the electric ca
De Beers creates artificial exclusivity, not scarcity. It's a subtle but important distinction.
They produce a product that people value not because it's particularly rare, but because it's just uncommon enough to be a status symbol. Various substitutes can look and act similarly, so the high prices aren't justified by an actual need for the product. Rather, the need is for the brand itself, and the company creates and perpetuates the value of that brand by limiting supply. They ensure there's just enough supply to meet demand, but not enough surplus to impact the prices people are willing to pay.
Steve Jobs understood this concept well.
I blame your confirmation bias. Really, Slashdot is also heavily biased against certain advances in:
...and many more fields I don't have time to list. The Slashdot hivemind loves to find the downside to every advancement in every field, and thanks to the excessive hyperbole, any attempt at discussing reasonable compromises is cast as sympathizing with the enemy. As noted, there's even a few diametrically-opposed biases, where we really just seem to want awesome technology to exist, but never be used. We're a terribly fickle bunch.
That's more dead-on accurate than I think you realize.
US privacy laws, including HIPAA, typically only apply to living persons. Once they're dead, their personal information quickly loses legal protection. There is a bit of a gray area concerning living relatives of the deceased, and organizations may keep information protected because it's easier, but the legal protection expires.
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid.
Standardization is important to nerds and manufacturers, but it's not the source of profit for car manufacturers, especially in the luxury market. When somebody's buying a new computer, they look at the number of USB ports and consider what kind of future capabilities the machine will have. When buying a car, they look at the gadgets and think about what features they get now. It doesn't matter if the stereo can't be upgraded with new codecs. What matters is that it plays music from an internal MP3 library now. When the salesman says the car can "play movies", the buyer doesn't think about the need to load those movies using a proprietary Java program that only runs on Windows XP. That hands-free calling looks great as a bullet point, but only one in a hundred buyers will notice that it doesn't work with some particular brand of phone.
The manufacturers can get away with this because cars are an infrequent purchase. If a customer gets burned by a poorly-working feature, they'll forget about it by the time they're ready to make their next purchase, by which time all of the features' trademarked names will change and the salesmen will say how vastly improved the new system is.
Standards are future-proofing, but car buyers are firmly planted in the world of today.
Even if you're having something hosted by a third party, it's not hard to set up its DNS at foo.chase.com.
It's not hard to set up DNS, but it is hard to get third-party programs to use it. The browser requests the script from foo.chase.com, and that's hosted at ru4.com... but the script requests another script, likely without knowing it's supposed to be at Chase... so it'll request from ru4.com, The uncertainty is still there, but now it's hidden under another layer of obscurity.
Alternatively, the third-party script gets a custom-branded version for each major contractor, which increases development cost, or the script is made aware of how it was requested, which involves more painful scripting and also drives up costs. Reassuring paranoid users just doesn't make business sense.
Wiretap warrants require a lot more than just reasonable suspicion of a crime, though. Wiretap laws were written to fit the idea that phone companies were simple carriers who would respect the integrity of customer's conversations, and since they didn't provide services themselves, people had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now that we willingly send information to companies knowing it will be manipulated for the provided services, that clear expectation of privacy gets a lot more blurry. Post a threat to Facebook, and your friends can pass it on as a tip to police, but the police can't just ask Facebook who made threats? That doesn't really make much sense.
if only there was some legislation allowing companies to look at the data they carry, that didn't require a tedious and detailed warrant request for every detail... And of course, that's the goal of CISPA. Where CISPA fails is that it doesn't just remove the excessive red tape on wiretap warrants, but apparently bypasses due process altogether, for any kind of query.
No, the fourth amendment is there to make sure that investigations are actually investigating something reasonable, rather than just harassing somebody the officers don't like.