My local seat of power takes a whole city block. Protest of one, or of a hundred, will not be noticed.
There is another factor at play: there is strength in numbers. It is trivial for police to arrest an unwanted protestor for whatever reason ("disturbing the peace" is the favorite catch-all.) Arrest of a single person will not attract anyone's attention. A local, corrupt judge (that you were protesting against) will convict you of a small crime. A conviction these days is a harsh punishment if you work in a field that is not a cabbage field.
However the police cannot easily and invisibly arrest 100,000 people. They cannot also easily slap them with imaginary offences. A large gathering will have hundreds, if not thousands of witnesses, all with camera phones. In other words, there is strength in numbers. It doesn't guarantee you personal safety, but you probably will not be railroaded.
The most important things they see are definitely real. Like for example, the price of Gas and Groceries.
It is all negated by MiniTrue coming up with an editorial where they explain that the price of gas has been reduced to $4.50 (from the past $4.10, but who remembers that, in the age of Internet?)
You can see an example of that when MiniTrue followed the case of that raysist white hispanic, George Zimmerman, who totally evilly profiled, hunted down and murdered, in cold blood, using a high-powered assault rifle with an extended magazine, using cop-killer bullets from a mile away, that innocent baby Travon who only was trying to return home to see his daddy. [Did I miss anything?] If you poll the population, a good half of it will tell you that that's exactly how events unfolded.
If you could mobilize a couple million people to march on Washington every weekend for a couple of months - the TSA would be no more.
I don't like TSA, but I will not join your march, simply because I'm too far away. Flying there every weekend is not an option, even if TSA would have made an exception for protesters.
You have to gather the whole crowd in situ - and that is not easy. You cannot expect that every 10th polled person will gladly join you. In general I have to agree with the GP - people haven't suffered enough yet. Take the social security away, though, and you will surely have a revolt on your hands.
Typing "power" is likely sufficient to identify your "Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003" application.
So you walk up to a computer that someone else put together (a friend, a parent, or your beloved IT department. Or maybe it was you, a year ago.) How do you know what applications are available on that computer? What do you do to begin work? Do you just type "Firefox"... nothing; scratch that. "Chrome" - nothing; try something else; "Internet Explorer" - now it's there... but there are also Safari and Opera installed, but how would you know that?
With a menu it's trivial. Without the menu... perhaps you can go into "Programs and Features," but MS put so much purely technical stuff there that it's hard for anyone but a geek to figure out what is there.
Search is evil. It requires you to stop using the GUI and switch into a command line mode. Instead of thinking images and places you need to start thinking words. Why does MS insist that I do that context switch each time I start something? Are they charged one cent each time I open a menu?
What if I don't know the application's name? What if the executable and the launcher/shortcut have different names? What if I have several copies of the same program in different locations? (debug, release, stable, beta, etc.?) What if an application has a long and convoluted name, like "Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003?" How in the hell would I remember the difference between "FileZilla Server Interface", "Start FileZilla Server" and "Stop FileZilla Server?"
Menus are based on discoverability and on visual memory. I know where menus are, so I don't need to remember anything. Typing requires remembering the entire list of applications that are installed on each and every computer you use. There is zero reuse of experience; you can be a master on your home computer and a green novice at work.
if you put your mouse in the absolute corner, you get a little popup showing the start menu. DONT MOVE, just click the corner.
The hot spot is about 3x3 pixels. It requires superhuman abilities to do this reliably. And what for? There is plenty of space on the toolbar for a Start button.
I tried Win8 in VirtualBox. It's garbage. There is not one redeeming quality in it, compared to Win7. The Metro UI screen is filled with junk "apps" that do nothing but invoke a browser in a tiny little window. The IE that runs from Metro is junk beyond belief (it is unusable.) Perhaps it would work on a tablet, but we are talking desktop here. I have no idea what Win8 would be good for on a regular PC.
Also not all applications insert themselves into places that Win8 expects them to be. PuTTY was one of those. I installed it and I couldn't find it anywhere. I had to create a shortcut from Program Files.
If MS loves their Metro so much they could build it as a layer on top of the desktop, or perhaps as an alternative desktop with its own login... but since BG left Ballmer is focused on breaking backward compatibility in every way he can.
The answer to speech you dislike/disagree with is always *more* speech (voice your views as well), not less (suppressing/silencing opposing voices/opinions), in any society that could reasonably be called "free".
I wish it was that simple. The rise (and fall) of one Barack Hussein Obama is a good example. Speech was not really suppressed four years ago. Sure, First Amendment zones did not help, but you could make yourself heard. The problem is that sweet lies are much more pleasant than bitter truth. For example:
tftp: "The USA is in trouble, and I don't see an easy way out. I can lead the country out of the hole but it will require reassessment of many things that Americans take for granted, and you can bet I will make you work hard, just like those Chinese workers that you despise so much."
Obama: "The USA has few problems, but I, being the most experiencest world leader, am uniquely qualified to fix them at no cost to you. Elect me and I will deliver you the Moon - and perhaps a few stars too, for good measure. Most of you will not even need to work!"
How do you fight this with truth? Truth may set you free, but it will not get you elected. People don't want to hear about difficult decisions and hard labor. They want ponies.
The problem here is that democracy hinges on educated electorate that makes informed decisions even when those decisions are unpleasant. We are very far from that ideal, and that's why democracy in the West is failing. Initially not everyone could vote; one had to be a white, male property owner. The intent was to only collect votes of people who are sufficiently aware of the issues and have a dog in the fight. This was an artificial constraint, and eventually the bathwater was thrown out, along with the baby. Now you don't even need to be able to fog a mirror or be a citizen in order to vote. The voting system in the USA is kept convoluted and archaic before it becomes a very handy fiddle for fiddlers in Washington. How many countries are there in the world that don't ask for a citizen's ID at the polling booth?
It is difficult for people to live in hostile environments where their speech is constantly suppressed
That's one of causes of stagnation. Yes, people are not chickens, they cannot live in little pens. History offers many examples of countries where dissent was an instant death sentence. Eventually people lose all desire to live.
I believe people have a right to say things, beneficial or not.
Perhaps. I'm sure Salman Rushdie is fully supporting the right of Islamists to demand his head on a platter. I don't know what Theo van Gogh has to say about it, I can't find my ouija board.
Similarly, Communists in 1917 Russia used their free speech (not really a right, but they had it anyway) to kill tens of millions in 20th century. A certain other person, let he remain unmentioned here, used his right of free speech (which he did have) to construct one of evilest empires in history of the planet. (Pol Pot is nervously smoking in the corner.)
Speech is a very sharp tool. It can kill millions, and it did just that more than once. Where do you draw a line? Will you allow paid agent provocateurs to lead your people off the cliff, like lemmings?
Ok.. does Google have hardware in the UK? Obviously they have the cams going around, but any servers in the UK?
They do have www.google.co.uk... I don't know where the hardware is, but even if it is Sealand the UK government can prohibit Google from providing services to UK subjects.
If the UK bosses really get angry they can even issue an arrest warrant for Google personnel - and it will be executed in EU. Governments have a lot of weight and they know it. They can even send MI\d to assassinate or kidnap an unwanted person - and if caught they will not be punished. The USA is doing killing openly from the air, for years. Israel kidnapped Mordechai Vanunu and... crickets. Assange is getting ready for a perfectly legal railroading.
That might work on Google, but it will not apply to all hosted services.
The logic above tells us that it will apply to anything and anyone that the UK bureucrats point at. For a preview of the future see China. All countries will have firewalls, and intentional bypassing of them will be a crime. You say it can't be done? See China again. You say that citizens of $western_country will not allow that? It only depends on the size of the next horrific terrorist act. With blood of children for lubrication, population of any country will let their government do whatever they declare necessary. The PATRIOT act is just one example; it was adopted within two months from 9/11, even before all the rubble was removed.
What if I visit the UK (highly unlikely at this point) and use SSL protected sessions between me and my mailserver hosted back in the US?
Today - nothing. Tomorrow you may be unable to establish an SSL connection. The port 443 will be blocked; and if you are smart enough to run SSL on port 80 then the traffic analyzer will kill the connection. You will have no option but to drop to plaintext. If you are even smarter you can use steganography... just don't get caught, it's a certain jail time in police states.
Industrial use of VPNs will be allowed, but... you must have a license, and the license comes with your personal FIPS140 encryption device that encrypts your traffic to the nearest government-provided VPN exit into the greater Internet. This device authenticates you as a licensed user; it also encrypts your traffic until it hits the VPN; and finally it allows the government to record your VPN activity.
If you insist on having your own VPN box (as most companies will do) then the government may relent and only require an encrypted tunnel (with already encrypted VPN data inside) to their exit point. Then the encryption device only does authentication of you as a licensed user.
Scenarios can be numerous. It's not hard to break the Internet.
How does the law force Google, or a foreign mail service (like GoDaddy, appriver, etc.) to turn over the logs?
"Google, you can comply with our law or be out of our country in... [looks at the wristwatch] exactly five minutes. Oh, if five minutes is not enough for you then we arrest all your equipment. Your choice."
Here, we are simply shifting electrons around, real wealth and power are elsewhere.
People used to make just sound waves with their own mouths. Those waves couldn't propagate farther than a few meters. Still, those people were often arrested, imprisoned and killed. A technology that allows anyone to talk to unlimited audience over unlimited distances [on this planet] is far more dangerous.
Speech in general is dangerous. All palace revolts, all military coups, all popular revolutions started with people who were speaking.
In an ideally peaceful society free speech would be completely outlawed. Without being able to communicate you can only lead a revolt of one, easily suppressable. However such a society is likely to stagnate (see USSR.)
The real problem with human societies is the people. Someone always wants something from others, be it money or power or attention. Those are called "troublemakers." But this is normal behavior for homo sapiens. We might just as well ask molecules to stop their Brownian motion. It's what they are.
Democracy allows free speech on a slim chance that some of those new proposals are beneficial. In practice new political leaders only want to unseat current political leaders, and they use the people as fuel and cannon fodder for their purposes. Will Romney be better than Obama? Or worse? Or the same? Nobody knows; this is quantum information - the act of listening to either of those politicians changes the message. On top of that, the electorate is usually not even aware of all pertinent facts - because the facts are hard to find and because they are hard to comprehend. The electorate simply remembers who called them last and votes for that guy.
I could even understand if a government would offer zero free speech in exchange for absolute safety and stability. But this is not going to happen, in any country. You would lose your free speech but the government would be even more abusive. Losing your freedom of speech (or freedom of speaking anonymously) does not come with any benefits whatsoever. Not to you, at least. The government benefits mightily.
I think you overestimate the common gang-banging criminal.
He does not. It is trivial for a criminal to carry a few "drop" casings that he picked up at a range.
Criminals are not entirely idiots. They may be not rocket scientists in the IQ department, but we are talking about very simple things here. In some aspects criminals know more than rocket scientists. Criminals know where to get a gun, ammo for it, drugs; they know how to select victims; they know what areas are safe from police and when; they know who buys stolen goods. I am clueless about all of that. Essentially, they know how to commit crimes. If they have enough foresight to carry a handgun then they are smart enough to carry ammo with it - and perhaps a few spent casings for dropping at the site of shooting. It is important, after all - their life may depend on it. It is also perfectly legal even for a felon.
Anybody who whines about filling out a form and paying a $10 fee to own a gun... In California, which is allegedly a "may issue" state, most counties are effectively "will not issue."
You do not need a "license" to own a firearm in CA or to transport it, unloaded. You only need a CCW to carry the firearm concealed and loaded.
here it is generally possible for someone with a job to get a license, and definitely for someone with a business
"Someone with a business" is already allowed to carry a gun on premises in any way they like. Go to a gun store and look at salespeople there. They are usually armed - not just because it's an additional protection but largely as advertisement.
The gun is cheaper.
That's easy to fix. Buy more expensive guns, many of them:-) The same CCW covers all of them.
Except when I misuse a hammer I can't accidentally kill someone 50 yards away. [FTFY]
Yes, you can. Work at a construction site and drop the tool from the roof.
By the way, shooting a handgun at 50 yards is not trivial, unless you are talking about a barn-sized target. Many people can't reliably hit a human-sized target at that distance. Most shootings with handguns occur within 3 to 5 yards.
Sure, the insurance company will pay out when someplace is robbed, but that just means that all your transactions with them are more expensive. You pay for that reduced risk.
Amazingly, not only bank's clients don't have to chip in for the insurance - the bank even pays them INTEREST! Imagine that!
Who then pays for the insurance? Those who want to borrow money today in exchange of returning more money tomorrow. Without them banks would close their doors.
But of course banks' losses from robberies are a drop in the ocean, compared to just daily expenses to keep the lights on. Branches don't even have much cash on hand. Loans do cost money, but out of that cost 99% is the insurance against the risk of your default - not against the risk of some robber getting away with $20K in small bills.
What if another ten million people don't want to be inconvenienced by those ten million people?
It depends on who can insist on his solution, who is more powerful. I think Chairman Mao already explained what the origin of power is.
In this case it is quite obvious who is in control in the country: it's the country's government, representing all citizens. Opinions of citizens of other countries, or of employees of foreign corporations, have no weight here.
if i can stand on the street corner and see something, there is no reason Google cant record it too.
Privacy, just like security, is largely based on obscurity. Yes, you can stand on the street corner and watch. However you have to physically be there to do that. Given that not everyone is overly interested in doings at street corners, most people are safe and secure simply because there are too many street corners for observers to stand at.
Google offers to be your personal army of watchers. You no longer need to personally visit places - your proxies do that for you. All you now need is to sit in your comfortable chair at home and inspect as many photos as you can. Rain, snow, national borders are no longer an obstacle to you, and you cannot even be stopped by the local police. StreetView is a huge force multiplier. There are already examples of private acts that were observed by StreetView and completely missed by locals.
Don't want to be on Google, don't do whatever you are doing within sight of the street
If ten million people don't want to be inconvenienced by Google, it's entirely up to them to tell Google to get lost.
What's not really reasonable is having to blur out faces, license plates
It is perfectly reasonable because leaving them in does not contribute anything to the value of StreetView. It's not FaceView or LicenseView, after all. Even if you leave those things unblurred the presence of a certain person or a vehicle at a certain location is generally useless - those things are mobile...
In case of Stuxnet Iranians simply bought the centrifuges with control boxes and all. You cannot rewrite *that* overnight, not without engineering documentation that the customer doesn't have.
Probably other cases are similar. If a country has a large installed base of Windows it cannot drop it all overnight. It would be chaos everywhere, with every pension payment missed, with all paychecks not printed, with all work orders not issued, with all maps lost... It's very tough to switch the OS.
No GIPO headers which is going to be an issue for some uses.
There are tons of USB modules (FTDI based) that give you GPIO. If your latency demands are tougher than the USB interrupt pipe can deliver then you need a real-time microcontroller, if not an FPGA.
Consider a school district - you could equip an entire computer classroom for less than $1,000.
OK, you spent $1K and now each of 20-25 students has a naked PCB in front of him. Now what? You need, as a bare minimum:
A child-safe enclosure (hard to make because there are connectors on all sides of the board.)
A power supply and a socket to plug it into.
An LCD monitor and its cables.
USB keyboard and mouse.
None of that is in the carton that R-Pi ships in. How much do you need to add? I have no clue what would be the cost of an enclosure - and especially of inserting the R-Pi board into it because two walls have to be removable. But let's assume the impossible and you can get it made and fitted for $50 (requires high volume to get to that price.) The LCD monitor will cost you $100. The power supply: $10, together with all the cables and the power strip. The keyboard and mouse can be had for $20 total (cheap ones!) Total additions: $180 on top of the cost of the R-Pi. If you bought R-Pi for $40 then the combined cost of your homemade computer becomes $220.
But hey, for $220 a school district can buy a complete laptop that requires no wires, comes with the power supply, can be given to the student, is much faster, and runs all the software that the school district purchased. Does that make sense?
You want to use R-Pi only when it is better than the alternatives. You want R-Pi if you are not a child but a, say, student of a university or some tech school. You want R-Pi if you are specifically interested in its advantages, such as:
Small size
Small power consumption, flexible power source
GPIO
Linux
R-Pi does not compete, price-wise, with a low end laptop because it is incomplete. You can't even touch the thing, really, outside of an ESD-safe workstation, with the wrist strap and all. Can you imagine how many children will run like crazy in synthetic clothes and then touch parts on those boards? A little zap and the board goes straight into Silicon Heaven.
Could you actually find me a smartphone with HDMI out (1080p), ability to use USB peripherals, and cost within 3x as much as the RPi?
I don't know why you'd want a smartphone for a media PC though. Those aren't capable enough for the job. But my Galaxy Tab has HDMI out. Never needed it, but it's there and I have the cable and the stand.
Some tablets have USB host mode, other don't. Choose one that fits your needs. If you have USB host then you have all other peripherals, including the GPIO and JTAG and serial and whatnot.
Learning should not be done on a minimalistic system. It simply isn't worth it. Get an old PC for that. You don't want your learning to be constrained by irrelevant factors such as lack of RAM or poor performance or insufficient disk space or unavailable libraries. Get a PC, load a development system and install every development package under the Sun. Your task would be to learn how to code in $foo, not to discover problems with interpreter of $foo on architecture $bar. It is not always easy even for experienced coders to port an already working software from the development system into the embedded target.
Bricking of a PC is all but impossible (unless you are rewriting GRUB, that is.) I wrote drivers for Linux and haven't damaged the system even once. But if you insist, on a PC it is much easier to make a backup of a partition. You can't plug another SATA cable into R-PI, can you? There are no SATA interfaces at all, IIRC.
R-Pi is useful, but I don't think it is useful for what you suggest. IMO R-Pi is best used as an embedded system to control something else. For example you can connect a camera and write software that tracks your squirrels on the lawn and shoots them with water (that had been done on a laptop.) You can do many things with it... but forget about it being easy. Coding for minimalistic targets is hard.
Math as such is an abstract science. Rarely you can find someone who is willing to pay you to prove a theorem.
However math is a necessary foundation in many very useful jobs. Computer science had been mentioned, but it's not that math-heavy. Rarely a common coder has to come up with a novel solution of a complex math problem. There are companies who do FEA, those are actually trying to find those novel solutions, but most coders are just making dumb GUIs and a fairly trivial business logic for them. Most problems in the world (like the payroll) are not scientifically complicated, but they are very common.
Analog RF and microwave design, however, is built on math, and some of that math is not obvious. Analog RF designers are a dying breed in the USA because of exactly that reason - it is hard. But for a well prepared student it's not hard at all. Get a diploma in electrical engineering and a big stick to chase employers away. Every CEO and his dog want to have "wireless something" - but at frequencies above 2 GHz (where most of the good stuff currently is) you cannot wind a coil on a pencil. You have to design a PCB structure that makes no sense whatsoever to unitiated. With frequencies going higher and higher every year, as more bandwidth is demanded by gluttonous public, RF design is an art where you have to balance semiconductors, laminates, mechanics, and the laws of free space. Power needs and the BOM cost are just icing on that cake.
There are other applications of math - like in financial business, for example. But I'm not familiar with them and cannot advise either way.
distance and time are interchangeable thanks to the speed of light.
Speed of light is a constant only in vacuum (and even that is challenged by some.) On top of that, gravitation bends the light, so the path from A to B "as photon flies" is not a straight line.
These may be only small deviations, but you don't want to replace distance with time in fundamental formulas. It would be like replacing ten miles of perfectly measurable distance from your home to your school with time that it takes you to get there in a car. And to what purpose?
Slashdot Mirror
So protest in front of your local seat of power
My local seat of power takes a whole city block. Protest of one, or of a hundred, will not be noticed.
There is another factor at play: there is strength in numbers. It is trivial for police to arrest an unwanted protestor for whatever reason ("disturbing the peace" is the favorite catch-all.) Arrest of a single person will not attract anyone's attention. A local, corrupt judge (that you were protesting against) will convict you of a small crime. A conviction these days is a harsh punishment if you work in a field that is not a cabbage field.
However the police cannot easily and invisibly arrest 100,000 people. They cannot also easily slap them with imaginary offences. A large gathering will have hundreds, if not thousands of witnesses, all with camera phones. In other words, there is strength in numbers. It doesn't guarantee you personal safety, but you probably will not be railroaded.
The most important things they see are definitely real. Like for example, the price of Gas and Groceries.
It is all negated by MiniTrue coming up with an editorial where they explain that the price of gas has been reduced to $4.50 (from the past $4.10, but who remembers that, in the age of Internet?)
You can see an example of that when MiniTrue followed the case of that raysist white hispanic, George Zimmerman, who totally evilly profiled, hunted down and murdered, in cold blood, using a high-powered assault rifle with an extended magazine, using cop-killer bullets from a mile away, that innocent baby Travon who only was trying to return home to see his daddy. [Did I miss anything?] If you poll the population, a good half of it will tell you that that's exactly how events unfolded.
If you could mobilize a couple million people to march on Washington every weekend for a couple of months - the TSA would be no more.
I don't like TSA, but I will not join your march, simply because I'm too far away. Flying there every weekend is not an option, even if TSA would have made an exception for protesters.
You have to gather the whole crowd in situ - and that is not easy. You cannot expect that every 10th polled person will gladly join you. In general I have to agree with the GP - people haven't suffered enough yet. Take the social security away, though, and you will surely have a revolt on your hands.
Typing "power" is likely sufficient to identify your "Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003" application.
So you walk up to a computer that someone else put together (a friend, a parent, or your beloved IT department. Or maybe it was you, a year ago.) How do you know what applications are available on that computer? What do you do to begin work? Do you just type "Firefox" ... nothing; scratch that. "Chrome" - nothing; try something else; "Internet Explorer" - now it's there... but there are also Safari and Opera installed, but how would you know that?
With a menu it's trivial. Without the menu... perhaps you can go into "Programs and Features," but MS put so much purely technical stuff there that it's hard for anyone but a geek to figure out what is there.
Search is evil. It requires you to stop using the GUI and switch into a command line mode. Instead of thinking images and places you need to start thinking words. Why does MS insist that I do that context switch each time I start something? Are they charged one cent each time I open a menu?
or just start> type app name
What if I don't know the application's name? What if the executable and the launcher/shortcut have different names? What if I have several copies of the same program in different locations? (debug, release, stable, beta, etc.?) What if an application has a long and convoluted name, like "Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003?" How in the hell would I remember the difference between "FileZilla Server Interface", "Start FileZilla Server" and "Stop FileZilla Server?"
Menus are based on discoverability and on visual memory. I know where menus are, so I don't need to remember anything. Typing requires remembering the entire list of applications that are installed on each and every computer you use. There is zero reuse of experience; you can be a master on your home computer and a green novice at work.
if you put your mouse in the absolute corner, you get a little popup showing the start menu. DONT MOVE, just click the corner.
The hot spot is about 3x3 pixels. It requires superhuman abilities to do this reliably. And what for? There is plenty of space on the toolbar for a Start button.
I tried Win8 in VirtualBox. It's garbage. There is not one redeeming quality in it, compared to Win7. The Metro UI screen is filled with junk "apps" that do nothing but invoke a browser in a tiny little window. The IE that runs from Metro is junk beyond belief (it is unusable.) Perhaps it would work on a tablet, but we are talking desktop here. I have no idea what Win8 would be good for on a regular PC.
Also not all applications insert themselves into places that Win8 expects them to be. PuTTY was one of those. I installed it and I couldn't find it anywhere. I had to create a shortcut from Program Files.
If MS loves their Metro so much they could build it as a layer on top of the desktop, or perhaps as an alternative desktop with its own login... but since BG left Ballmer is focused on breaking backward compatibility in every way he can.
The answer to speech you dislike/disagree with is always *more* speech (voice your views as well), not less (suppressing/silencing opposing voices/opinions), in any society that could reasonably be called "free".
I wish it was that simple. The rise (and fall) of one Barack Hussein Obama is a good example. Speech was not really suppressed four years ago. Sure, First Amendment zones did not help, but you could make yourself heard. The problem is that sweet lies are much more pleasant than bitter truth. For example:
tftp: "The USA is in trouble, and I don't see an easy way out. I can lead the country out of the hole but it will require reassessment of many things that Americans take for granted, and you can bet I will make you work hard, just like those Chinese workers that you despise so much."
Obama: "The USA has few problems, but I, being the most experiencest world leader, am uniquely qualified to fix them at no cost to you. Elect me and I will deliver you the Moon - and perhaps a few stars too, for good measure. Most of you will not even need to work!"
How do you fight this with truth? Truth may set you free, but it will not get you elected. People don't want to hear about difficult decisions and hard labor. They want ponies.
The problem here is that democracy hinges on educated electorate that makes informed decisions even when those decisions are unpleasant. We are very far from that ideal, and that's why democracy in the West is failing. Initially not everyone could vote; one had to be a white, male property owner. The intent was to only collect votes of people who are sufficiently aware of the issues and have a dog in the fight. This was an artificial constraint, and eventually the bathwater was thrown out, along with the baby. Now you don't even need to be able to fog a mirror or be a citizen in order to vote. The voting system in the USA is kept convoluted and archaic before it becomes a very handy fiddle for fiddlers in Washington. How many countries are there in the world that don't ask for a citizen's ID at the polling booth?
It is difficult for people to live in hostile environments where their speech is constantly suppressed
That's one of causes of stagnation. Yes, people are not chickens, they cannot live in little pens. History offers many examples of countries where dissent was an instant death sentence. Eventually people lose all desire to live.
I believe people have a right to say things, beneficial or not.
Perhaps. I'm sure Salman Rushdie is fully supporting the right of Islamists to demand his head on a platter. I don't know what Theo van Gogh has to say about it, I can't find my ouija board.
Similarly, Communists in 1917 Russia used their free speech (not really a right, but they had it anyway) to kill tens of millions in 20th century. A certain other person, let he remain unmentioned here, used his right of free speech (which he did have) to construct one of evilest empires in history of the planet. (Pol Pot is nervously smoking in the corner.)
Speech is a very sharp tool. It can kill millions, and it did just that more than once. Where do you draw a line? Will you allow paid agent provocateurs to lead your people off the cliff, like lemmings?
Ok.. does Google have hardware in the UK? Obviously they have the cams going around, but any servers in the UK?
They do have www.google.co.uk ... I don't know where the hardware is, but even if it is Sealand the UK government can prohibit Google from providing services to UK subjects.
If the UK bosses really get angry they can even issue an arrest warrant for Google personnel - and it will be executed in EU. Governments have a lot of weight and they know it. They can even send MI\d to assassinate or kidnap an unwanted person - and if caught they will not be punished. The USA is doing killing openly from the air, for years. Israel kidnapped Mordechai Vanunu and... crickets. Assange is getting ready for a perfectly legal railroading.
That might work on Google, but it will not apply to all hosted services.
The logic above tells us that it will apply to anything and anyone that the UK bureucrats point at. For a preview of the future see China. All countries will have firewalls, and intentional bypassing of them will be a crime. You say it can't be done? See China again. You say that citizens of $western_country will not allow that? It only depends on the size of the next horrific terrorist act. With blood of children for lubrication, population of any country will let their government do whatever they declare necessary. The PATRIOT act is just one example; it was adopted within two months from 9/11, even before all the rubble was removed.
What if I visit the UK (highly unlikely at this point) and use SSL protected sessions between me and my mailserver hosted back in the US?
Today - nothing. Tomorrow you may be unable to establish an SSL connection. The port 443 will be blocked; and if you are smart enough to run SSL on port 80 then the traffic analyzer will kill the connection. You will have no option but to drop to plaintext. If you are even smarter you can use steganography... just don't get caught, it's a certain jail time in police states.
Industrial use of VPNs will be allowed, but... you must have a license, and the license comes with your personal FIPS140 encryption device that encrypts your traffic to the nearest government-provided VPN exit into the greater Internet. This device authenticates you as a licensed user; it also encrypts your traffic until it hits the VPN; and finally it allows the government to record your VPN activity.
If you insist on having your own VPN box (as most companies will do) then the government may relent and only require an encrypted tunnel (with already encrypted VPN data inside) to their exit point. Then the encryption device only does authentication of you as a licensed user.
Scenarios can be numerous. It's not hard to break the Internet.
How does the law force Google, or a foreign mail service (like GoDaddy, appriver, etc.) to turn over the logs?
"Google, you can comply with our law or be out of our country in ... [looks at the wristwatch] exactly five minutes. Oh, if five minutes is not enough for you then we arrest all your equipment. Your choice."
Here, we are simply shifting electrons around, real wealth and power are elsewhere.
People used to make just sound waves with their own mouths. Those waves couldn't propagate farther than a few meters. Still, those people were often arrested, imprisoned and killed. A technology that allows anyone to talk to unlimited audience over unlimited distances [on this planet] is far more dangerous.
Speech in general is dangerous. All palace revolts, all military coups, all popular revolutions started with people who were speaking.
In an ideally peaceful society free speech would be completely outlawed. Without being able to communicate you can only lead a revolt of one, easily suppressable. However such a society is likely to stagnate (see USSR.)
The real problem with human societies is the people. Someone always wants something from others, be it money or power or attention. Those are called "troublemakers." But this is normal behavior for homo sapiens. We might just as well ask molecules to stop their Brownian motion. It's what they are.
Democracy allows free speech on a slim chance that some of those new proposals are beneficial. In practice new political leaders only want to unseat current political leaders, and they use the people as fuel and cannon fodder for their purposes. Will Romney be better than Obama? Or worse? Or the same? Nobody knows; this is quantum information - the act of listening to either of those politicians changes the message. On top of that, the electorate is usually not even aware of all pertinent facts - because the facts are hard to find and because they are hard to comprehend. The electorate simply remembers who called them last and votes for that guy.
I could even understand if a government would offer zero free speech in exchange for absolute safety and stability. But this is not going to happen, in any country. You would lose your free speech but the government would be even more abusive. Losing your freedom of speech (or freedom of speaking anonymously) does not come with any benefits whatsoever. Not to you, at least. The government benefits mightily.
I think you overestimate the common gang-banging criminal.
He does not. It is trivial for a criminal to carry a few "drop" casings that he picked up at a range.
Criminals are not entirely idiots. They may be not rocket scientists in the IQ department, but we are talking about very simple things here. In some aspects criminals know more than rocket scientists. Criminals know where to get a gun, ammo for it, drugs; they know how to select victims; they know what areas are safe from police and when; they know who buys stolen goods. I am clueless about all of that. Essentially, they know how to commit crimes. If they have enough foresight to carry a handgun then they are smart enough to carry ammo with it - and perhaps a few spent casings for dropping at the site of shooting. It is important, after all - their life may depend on it. It is also perfectly legal even for a felon.
Anybody who whines about filling out a form and paying a $10 fee to own a gun ... In California, which is allegedly a "may issue" state, most counties are effectively "will not issue."
You do not need a "license" to own a firearm in CA or to transport it, unloaded. You only need a CCW to carry the firearm concealed and loaded.
here it is generally possible for someone with a job to get a license, and definitely for someone with a business
"Someone with a business" is already allowed to carry a gun on premises in any way they like. Go to a gun store and look at salespeople there. They are usually armed - not just because it's an additional protection but largely as advertisement.
The gun is cheaper.
That's easy to fix. Buy more expensive guns, many of them :-) The same CCW covers all of them.
Except when I misuse a hammer I can't accidentally kill someone 50 yards away. [FTFY]
Yes, you can. Work at a construction site and drop the tool from the roof.
By the way, shooting a handgun at 50 yards is not trivial, unless you are talking about a barn-sized target. Many people can't reliably hit a human-sized target at that distance. Most shootings with handguns occur within 3 to 5 yards.
Sure, the insurance company will pay out when someplace is robbed, but that just means that all your transactions with them are more expensive. You pay for that reduced risk.
Amazingly, not only bank's clients don't have to chip in for the insurance - the bank even pays them INTEREST! Imagine that!
Who then pays for the insurance? Those who want to borrow money today in exchange of returning more money tomorrow. Without them banks would close their doors.
But of course banks' losses from robberies are a drop in the ocean, compared to just daily expenses to keep the lights on. Branches don't even have much cash on hand. Loans do cost money, but out of that cost 99% is the insurance against the risk of your default - not against the risk of some robber getting away with $20K in small bills.
What if another ten million people don't want to be inconvenienced by those ten million people?
It depends on who can insist on his solution, who is more powerful. I think Chairman Mao already explained what the origin of power is.
In this case it is quite obvious who is in control in the country: it's the country's government, representing all citizens. Opinions of citizens of other countries, or of employees of foreign corporations, have no weight here.
if i can stand on the street corner and see something, there is no reason Google cant record it too.
Privacy, just like security, is largely based on obscurity. Yes, you can stand on the street corner and watch. However you have to physically be there to do that. Given that not everyone is overly interested in doings at street corners, most people are safe and secure simply because there are too many street corners for observers to stand at.
Google offers to be your personal army of watchers. You no longer need to personally visit places - your proxies do that for you. All you now need is to sit in your comfortable chair at home and inspect as many photos as you can. Rain, snow, national borders are no longer an obstacle to you, and you cannot even be stopped by the local police. StreetView is a huge force multiplier. There are already examples of private acts that were observed by StreetView and completely missed by locals.
Don't want to be on Google, don't do whatever you are doing within sight of the street
If ten million people don't want to be inconvenienced by Google, it's entirely up to them to tell Google to get lost.
What's not really reasonable is having to blur out faces, license plates
It is perfectly reasonable because leaving them in does not contribute anything to the value of StreetView. It's not FaceView or LicenseView, after all. Even if you leave those things unblurred the presence of a certain person or a vehicle at a certain location is generally useless - those things are mobile...
Why do the Iranians persist in using Windows?
In case of Stuxnet Iranians simply bought the centrifuges with control boxes and all. You cannot rewrite *that* overnight, not without engineering documentation that the customer doesn't have.
Probably other cases are similar. If a country has a large installed base of Windows it cannot drop it all overnight. It would be chaos everywhere, with every pension payment missed, with all paychecks not printed, with all work orders not issued, with all maps lost... It's very tough to switch the OS.
No GIPO headers which is going to be an issue for some uses.
There are tons of USB modules (FTDI based) that give you GPIO. If your latency demands are tougher than the USB interrupt pipe can deliver then you need a real-time microcontroller, if not an FPGA.
Consider a school district - you could equip an entire computer classroom for less than $1,000.
OK, you spent $1K and now each of 20-25 students has a naked PCB in front of him. Now what? You need, as a bare minimum:
None of that is in the carton that R-Pi ships in. How much do you need to add? I have no clue what would be the cost of an enclosure - and especially of inserting the R-Pi board into it because two walls have to be removable. But let's assume the impossible and you can get it made and fitted for $50 (requires high volume to get to that price.) The LCD monitor will cost you $100. The power supply: $10, together with all the cables and the power strip. The keyboard and mouse can be had for $20 total (cheap ones!) Total additions: $180 on top of the cost of the R-Pi. If you bought R-Pi for $40 then the combined cost of your homemade computer becomes $220.
But hey, for $220 a school district can buy a complete laptop that requires no wires, comes with the power supply, can be given to the student, is much faster, and runs all the software that the school district purchased. Does that make sense?
You want to use R-Pi only when it is better than the alternatives. You want R-Pi if you are not a child but a, say, student of a university or some tech school. You want R-Pi if you are specifically interested in its advantages, such as:
R-Pi does not compete, price-wise, with a low end laptop because it is incomplete. You can't even touch the thing, really, outside of an ESD-safe workstation, with the wrist strap and all. Can you imagine how many children will run like crazy in synthetic clothes and then touch parts on those boards? A little zap and the board goes straight into Silicon Heaven.
Could you actually find me a smartphone with HDMI out (1080p), ability to use USB peripherals, and cost within 3x as much as the RPi?
I don't know why you'd want a smartphone for a media PC though. Those aren't capable enough for the job. But my Galaxy Tab has HDMI out. Never needed it, but it's there and I have the cable and the stand.
Some tablets have USB host mode, other don't. Choose one that fits your needs. If you have USB host then you have all other peripherals, including the GPIO and JTAG and serial and whatnot.
Learning should not be done on a minimalistic system. It simply isn't worth it. Get an old PC for that. You don't want your learning to be constrained by irrelevant factors such as lack of RAM or poor performance or insufficient disk space or unavailable libraries. Get a PC, load a development system and install every development package under the Sun. Your task would be to learn how to code in $foo, not to discover problems with interpreter of $foo on architecture $bar. It is not always easy even for experienced coders to port an already working software from the development system into the embedded target.
Bricking of a PC is all but impossible (unless you are rewriting GRUB, that is.) I wrote drivers for Linux and haven't damaged the system even once. But if you insist, on a PC it is much easier to make a backup of a partition. You can't plug another SATA cable into R-PI, can you? There are no SATA interfaces at all, IIRC.
R-Pi is useful, but I don't think it is useful for what you suggest. IMO R-Pi is best used as an embedded system to control something else. For example you can connect a camera and write software that tracks your squirrels on the lawn and shoots them with water (that had been done on a laptop.) You can do many things with it... but forget about it being easy. Coding for minimalistic targets is hard.
Math as such is an abstract science. Rarely you can find someone who is willing to pay you to prove a theorem.
However math is a necessary foundation in many very useful jobs. Computer science had been mentioned, but it's not that math-heavy. Rarely a common coder has to come up with a novel solution of a complex math problem. There are companies who do FEA, those are actually trying to find those novel solutions, but most coders are just making dumb GUIs and a fairly trivial business logic for them. Most problems in the world (like the payroll) are not scientifically complicated, but they are very common.
Analog RF and microwave design, however, is built on math, and some of that math is not obvious. Analog RF designers are a dying breed in the USA because of exactly that reason - it is hard. But for a well prepared student it's not hard at all. Get a diploma in electrical engineering and a big stick to chase employers away. Every CEO and his dog want to have "wireless something" - but at frequencies above 2 GHz (where most of the good stuff currently is) you cannot wind a coil on a pencil. You have to design a PCB structure that makes no sense whatsoever to unitiated. With frequencies going higher and higher every year, as more bandwidth is demanded by gluttonous public, RF design is an art where you have to balance semiconductors, laminates, mechanics, and the laws of free space. Power needs and the BOM cost are just icing on that cake.
There are other applications of math - like in financial business, for example. But I'm not familiar with them and cannot advise either way.
is that it will attract the Eddorians
It's far more likely that humans become Eddorians. Morality-wise we are already there.
distance and time are interchangeable thanks to the speed of light.
Speed of light is a constant only in vacuum (and even that is challenged by some.) On top of that, gravitation bends the light, so the path from A to B "as photon flies" is not a straight line.
These may be only small deviations, but you don't want to replace distance with time in fundamental formulas. It would be like replacing ten miles of perfectly measurable distance from your home to your school with time that it takes you to get there in a car. And to what purpose?