Am I the only one thinking things might have been much worse if no terrorist leaders had been taken out at all?
Yes, you pretty much are...at least, I hope so, because you're wrong.
Groups like A Queda need an external focus. Without an enemy, they aren't going to be able to motivate their rank-and-file every day, and the US is kind enough to provide that focus. Drone attacks are only part of it - the US is busy mucking about all over their back yard: Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria...
Before anyone says "but 9/11", let me: Why did they pick the US as a target? Because the US has been mucking about in their countries for decades.
Go home, leave them alone and let them rot in the desert. Especially now that the US could realistically stop buying Middle-Eastern oil, the US has an incredible opportunity to just pack up and leave.
It's not about Google - they just happen to be named in this case. This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.
Those people who say "just direct them to the courts" are being shortsighted. A court case requires two sides. If Google (or whoever) tells someone "go to court", they will do so: by filing a lawsuit against Google (or whoever). The last thing any company needs is having to show up to millions of trivial little court cases.
Not quite true. The case that generated this decision concerned factual newspaper articles. The guy went bankrupt, his house was auctioned off, the local newspapers reported on this.
The newspaper is not required to delete the articles. They are simple, factual reporting, and are allowed to remain.
The court decided that Google is not allowed to link to these articles, because the affected person wants these facts to be unfindable.
So: it is not private information at all. It is precisely public, factual information about an individual, that that individual finds distasteful.
The problem is: Google has to review it. The court provided no guidelines other than the specific case they based the decision on.
And have you read that? It was a businessman who didn't like Google linking to articles about his previous bankruptcy. Now, I would think the bankruptcy of a business type might just be relevant to my decision whether or not to contract with him. Apparently many of his potential customers thought the same way. But the court disagreed, and used this case as justification for the general decision.
If Google refuses, you can cite this decision and take them to court. Now, one guy is no problem - but we are already seeing the beginning of the flood. When it becomes thousands, then millions of cases - just how are they supposed to deal with this?
This court decision has opened the floodgates. The ramifications threaten the entire, open Internet. Search machines can be prohibited from linking to publicly available material, and be taken to court for doing so. From there, it is a very small step to prohibiting anyone from linking to publicly available material that someone, somewhere finds distasteful or undesirable.
The court has demonstrated incredible ignorance. This decision is a disaster.
Why put a new business in California? I've been there on business a number of times, and I just don't see it.
The climate is nice enough, but boring. No decent seasons, but I suppose it counts as a plus for some folks.
On the minus side, the politics are leftist, leading to socialist-style government regulations that are downright hostile to business. The legal climate tends to lawyers looking to sue companies for trivial violations of those regulations, like people working through their lunch break.
On the personal front, holier-than-thou environmentalism is widespread, which is hard to take given that their state has huge monocultures, puts rice farms in the desert, and pumps water from Arizona to keep the lawns in LA green.
It's pretty much the last place I would want to live, and I imagine there are plenty of other techies who would agree...
I find it really strange that so few people have commented on this - this has the potential for huge impacts on the quality of information available on the Internet!
As far as I can see, the court must be populated by judges that have zero clue how the Internet works. The particular case that provoked the decision: A Spanish man went bankrupt, and his house was auctioned off. This is part of the public record in Spain (in particular, it appears in newspaper articles) and Google - obviously - has indexed this public information and provides links to it.
The court does not say that the newspaper articles must be removed - in fact, they are specifically allowed to remain. The court says that Google may be told not to link to those pages, when given a search on this person's name.
So now individual people can tell search engines "I don't like that link, delete it"? Even though the information is publicly available and objectively, factually true? Does this make any sense?
How will this scale, when millions of people want to edit their lives in the Internet? How are these requests supposed to be checked? First, what is the definition of "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" information? Second, how do you determine whether the person making the request is the person affected (especially given the possibility of shared names)?
Finally, what effect will this have on search results? What you want to hide may be exactly what I really need to know! Why does this businessman think his previous bankruptcy is irrelevant - is that not precisely the kind of information that his potential customers and/or employers are legitimately interested in?
This decision demonstrates appalling technical ignorance on the part of the court, and has the potential to seriously screw up the concepts behind public search engines.
The thing is: it isn't clear at all. There is no consensus, only a lot of media hype. It may not be a conspiracy, but it is certainly not PC to doubt - what's the latest term? - "climate disruption.
Which view is correct? Hard to say - I'm no climate expert - but I certainly do have the feeling that coverage of the issue in the mainstream media is driven more by politics than by science.
1. Big waterfall software projects fail. I collect examples of project successes and failures, and I have never come across a large software project that was successfully delivered on-time and on-budget. It's like unicorns: People dream of them, but they don't really exist. The only way you even have a chance of delivering a big project is to break it into pieces and deliver a lot of small projects.
2. Government funding forces you to do waterfall projects. Funding for big projects must be approved, meaning that you have to get all the requirements and project planning defined up front. After that, even if you can work some iterations into the implementation, you are still basically doing a big waterfall project. See (1) above.
3. Politics (if you are more direct: corruption). Big government projects go through a horrible bidding process. The successful bidder must outsource parts of the project, and the outsourcing must be distributed to the right types of businesses (women/minority/whatever) in the right political districts. None of this has anything to do with getting a good project done. It's more like making your best developers write code while carrying sacks of cement on their backs and hopping on one foot.
4. Lastly, regulations. Back when I worked in government acquisition, we once has a small contract to let. One bidder was a company that had never done government work before, but they thought they'd give it a try. They underbid the competition by a factor of 3 or 4. My boss quietly took the CEO to the side and told him that he'd better double his bid, because he had no clue how much regulatory crap and how much paperwork was about to head his way. The company doubled their bid, got the contract, and I'm pretty sure they still lost money on the deal.
tl;dr - Who in their right mind wants to work on a project that is (2) doomed to failure from the start, (3) prohibits you from trying to do a good job and (4) is more about paperwork than anything else.
I don't live in London, but I have been there (and elsewhere in the UK) many times. Yes, the ubiquitous black cab is nice, and the drivers are competent. The question really is this: Should the government prohibit consumers from paying someone else for a ride?
As long as the customer understands that they are basically hitching a ride with an unknown private person, I just don't see the problem. If I want the assurance of a black cab, I'll flag one down. If I don't care, then I don't care - it's really not much different from sticking my thumb out and hitching a ride, except I have some assurance that someone will actually stop and pick me up.
So, you install solar cells, but you only actually get to use them when your car is in the carport - otherwise they're a wasted investment. Given that solar cells already cost more per kwH that most other types of electrical generation, that makes a whole lot of sense - not.
Anyway, is "functional art" mean to be a euphemism for "ugly as sin"?
If you want to put solar cells on a roof and attach them to the grid, more power to you. But that's not what they're touting here.
The libertarian view of this: Uber customers know that they are calling a car driven by some random person. If they want to do that, really, it's their own business. If they want the assurance of a background-checked driver, they are also free to call a taxi company. What's wrong with keeping the government out of it and letting people choose?
Turning a camera off - this should work the same as things like medical hotlines. For most hotlines, every call is recorded. You, as a patient, can request that the recording be turned off. Your request will be recorded, and then nothing more (at least, that's how it is supposed to work).
It should be the same for police officers: Sure, there are times they may need to turn the camera's off, but the reason should be clear and should itself be recorded. In the absence of a justification, the camera should always run.
Note that the plaintiffs are not the manufacturers, but two random owners of Android phones. This is nothing but lawyers abusing the U.S. legal system, trying to extort a settlement out of a big company.
When is the U.S. going to get around to tort reform?
Orbital launch cost is a red herring; it's expensive, and this isn't going to change. We live in a whopping big gravity well.
The goal has to be building an infrastructure. Get mining and production infrastructure up there. That's going to be a huge investment, but once it's in place you can produce ever more of what you need directly, without having to haul it out of the well.
Provide incentives for private industry, and get the fsck out of the way.
Promise $5 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to orbit 10 times and return. $10 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to geo-sync orbit 3 times. $20 billion to the first company to bring an asteroid above size X to a lagrange point. $50 billion to the first company to have people live on the moon for two weeks. Change the goals and figures to suit. Total cost will be a fraction of having the bloated NASA bureaucracy do the same things.
Then get rid of all possible regulations, and eliminate most liability. Space is hazardous - let's assume participants are adults who know what they are getting into.
If Microsoft has half-a-brain, they will see this as the business opportunity it is. Charge a fee for additional support from every government and organization that will pay, and it's quite the business model
I'm not talking about individual companies or homes burning trash, but rather municipal incinerators with carefully controlled processes. Modern incinerators produce little beyond water vapor and CO2. You get substantial amounts of power, eliminate essentially all chemicals (that would otherwise eventually pollute the ground water) and you recover most of the metals that would otherwise be lost in a landfill. Municipal incineration is standard in much of Europe.
Other/.ers have covered the issues around the peanut butter well enough. What no one has mentioned is the continued idiocy of landfills in the US. Why doesn't the US incinerate? You get energy out of the trash, destroy poisonous chemicals, recover the metals, and at the end you have a much smaller volume of waste that needs to be disposed of.
I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good; they will be star programmers and eventually software architects. Another 40% are competent - they would be able to carry out plans created by others, but should never carry any larger responsibility. Good, solid programmers. The remaining 50% manage to graduate, but frankly should never work directly in the field. Maybe they can be testers or write documentation, but never let them write a line of code in a real project.
Unfortunately, it's not always obvious what kind of person you are hiring. Add to this mix the people who are self-taught, who are coming from some other field, and may have wildly inappropriate ideas. Just as an example, I am currently working with a company whose star programmer (and he really is very good) comes from process control - and has zero clue about testing or quality control. He writes code and assumes that it works, and his company is so glad to have him (at a grunt-level salary) that they refuse to insult him by testing his code - so they deliver his work untested straight to clients - you can imagine how well this works.
tl;dr: There is no shortage of bodies in STEM fields. However, there is a shortage of good people who also have a solid education in and understand of their field. This is true in computer science, and almost certainly in every other STEM field out there.
When you control for working hours and years of experience (as opposed to simply age - women more often take time off work to raise children), there hasn't been a male/female pay gap for decades. However, this is not PC. Feminists don't want to hear that they're done, that they have long since achieved their goals, and that feminism has become counterproductive. Hence, the studies that show this are routinely ignored, and certainly never publicized.
Taking months or years off for child raising, or working only part time, or refusing to travel - none of these things should affect your career or your pay. It ought to be possible to drop out of the workforce at 25, raise your kids full-time for 20 years, and then rejoin the workforce as a senior manager.
It makes as much sense as the rest of the progressive agenda...
Situation 1: Private citizen is in front of a court; the judge says the defendent must produce certain documents. Defendent says "sorry, judge, I refuse; I signed a private contract promising that I would never reveal that information". Judge says: To jail with you for contempt of court. Do this 200 times, and spend a long time in jail.
Situation 2: Police want to do a search, the law says they need a warrant. The police say "sorry, judge, we signed this here NDA". Two hundred times they did this. Anyone believe the police are going to jail here?
Forcefully entering the apartment for a physical search, also without a warrant, is just added some whipped cream on top...
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one thinking things might have been much worse if no terrorist leaders had been taken out at all?
Yes, you pretty much are...at least, I hope so, because you're wrong.
Groups like A Queda need an external focus. Without an enemy, they aren't going to be able to motivate their rank-and-file every day, and the US is kind enough to provide that focus. Drone attacks are only part of it - the US is busy mucking about all over their back yard: Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria...
Before anyone says "but 9/11", let me: Why did they pick the US as a target? Because the US has been mucking about in their countries for decades.
Go home, leave them alone and let them rot in the desert. Especially now that the US could realistically stop buying Middle-Eastern oil, the US has an incredible opportunity to just pack up and leave.
It's not about Google - they just happen to be named in this case. This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.
Those people who say "just direct them to the courts" are being shortsighted. A court case requires two sides. If Google (or whoever) tells someone "go to court", they will do so: by filing a lawsuit against Google (or whoever). The last thing any company needs is having to show up to millions of trivial little court cases.
Not quite true. The case that generated this decision concerned factual newspaper articles. The guy went bankrupt, his house was auctioned off, the local newspapers reported on this.
So: it is not private information at all. It is precisely public, factual information about an individual, that that individual finds distasteful.
The problem is: Google has to review it. The court provided no guidelines other than the specific case they based the decision on.
And have you read that? It was a businessman who didn't like Google linking to articles about his previous bankruptcy. Now, I would think the bankruptcy of a business type might just be relevant to my decision whether or not to contract with him. Apparently many of his potential customers thought the same way. But the court disagreed, and used this case as justification for the general decision.
If Google refuses, you can cite this decision and take them to court. Now, one guy is no problem - but we are already seeing the beginning of the flood. When it becomes thousands, then millions of cases - just how are they supposed to deal with this?
This court decision has opened the floodgates. The ramifications threaten the entire, open Internet. Search machines can be prohibited from linking to publicly available material, and be taken to court for doing so. From there, it is a very small step to prohibiting anyone from linking to publicly available material that someone, somewhere finds distasteful or undesirable.
The court has demonstrated incredible ignorance. This decision is a disaster.
Why put a new business in California? I've been there on business a number of times, and I just don't see it.
The climate is nice enough, but boring. No decent seasons, but I suppose it counts as a plus for some folks.
On the minus side, the politics are leftist, leading to socialist-style government regulations that are downright hostile to business. The legal climate tends to lawyers looking to sue companies for trivial violations of those regulations, like people working through their lunch break.
On the personal front, holier-than-thou environmentalism is widespread, which is hard to take given that their state has huge monocultures, puts rice farms in the desert, and pumps water from Arizona to keep the lawns in LA green.
It's pretty much the last place I would want to live, and I imagine there are plenty of other techies who would agree...
I find it really strange that so few people have commented on this - this has the potential for huge impacts on the quality of information available on the Internet!
As far as I can see, the court must be populated by judges that have zero clue how the Internet works. The particular case that provoked the decision: A Spanish man went bankrupt, and his house was auctioned off. This is part of the public record in Spain (in particular, it appears in newspaper articles) and Google - obviously - has indexed this public information and provides links to it.
The court does not say that the newspaper articles must be removed - in fact, they are specifically allowed to remain. The court says that Google may be told not to link to those pages, when given a search on this person's name.
So now individual people can tell search engines "I don't like that link, delete it"? Even though the information is publicly available and objectively, factually true? Does this make any sense?
How will this scale, when millions of people want to edit their lives in the Internet? How are these requests supposed to be checked? First, what is the definition of "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" information? Second, how do you determine whether the person making the request is the person affected (especially given the possibility of shared names)?
Finally, what effect will this have on search results? What you want to hide may be exactly what I really need to know! Why does this businessman think his previous bankruptcy is irrelevant - is that not precisely the kind of information that his potential customers and/or employers are legitimately interested in?
This decision demonstrates appalling technical ignorance on the part of the court, and has the potential to seriously screw up the concepts behind public search engines.
The thing is: it isn't clear at all. There is no consensus, only a lot of media hype. It may not be a conspiracy, but it is certainly not PC to doubt - what's the latest term? - "climate disruption.
Here's the abstract from an article in the NASA archives that shows Antarctic ice mass increasing during the same period. Somehow the alarmists don't cite this one...
Which view is correct? Hard to say - I'm no climate expert - but I certainly do have the feeling that coverage of the issue in the mainstream media is driven more by politics than by science.
The thing is: it isn't clear at all. There is no consensus. Here's the abstract from an article in the NASA archives that shows Antarctic ice mass increasing during the same period. Somehow the alarmists don't cite this one...
1. Big waterfall software projects fail. I collect examples of project successes and failures, and I have never come across a large software project that was successfully delivered on-time and on-budget. It's like unicorns: People dream of them, but they don't really exist. The only way you even have a chance of delivering a big project is to break it into pieces and deliver a lot of small projects.
2. Government funding forces you to do waterfall projects. Funding for big projects must be approved, meaning that you have to get all the requirements and project planning defined up front. After that, even if you can work some iterations into the implementation, you are still basically doing a big waterfall project. See (1) above.
3. Politics (if you are more direct: corruption). Big government projects go through a horrible bidding process. The successful bidder must outsource parts of the project, and the outsourcing must be distributed to the right types of businesses (women/minority/whatever) in the right political districts. None of this has anything to do with getting a good project done. It's more like making your best developers write code while carrying sacks of cement on their backs and hopping on one foot.
4. Lastly, regulations. Back when I worked in government acquisition, we once has a small contract to let. One bidder was a company that had never done government work before, but they thought they'd give it a try. They underbid the competition by a factor of 3 or 4. My boss quietly took the CEO to the side and told him that he'd better double his bid, because he had no clue how much regulatory crap and how much paperwork was about to head his way. The company doubled their bid, got the contract, and I'm pretty sure they still lost money on the deal.
tl;dr - Who in their right mind wants to work on a project that is (2) doomed to failure from the start, (3) prohibits you from trying to do a good job and (4) is more about paperwork than anything else.
I don't live in London, but I have been there (and elsewhere in the UK) many times. Yes, the ubiquitous black cab is nice, and the drivers are competent. The question really is this: Should the government prohibit consumers from paying someone else for a ride?
As long as the customer understands that they are basically hitching a ride with an unknown private person, I just don't see the problem. If I want the assurance of a black cab, I'll flag one down. If I don't care, then I don't care - it's really not much different from sticking my thumb out and hitching a ride, except I have some assurance that someone will actually stop and pick me up.
So, you install solar cells, but you only actually get to use them when your car is in the carport - otherwise they're a wasted investment. Given that solar cells already cost more per kwH that most other types of electrical generation, that makes a whole lot of sense - not.
Anyway, is "functional art" mean to be a euphemism for "ugly as sin"?
If you want to put solar cells on a roof and attach them to the grid, more power to you. But that's not what they're touting here.
The libertarian view of this: Uber customers know that they are calling a car driven by some random person. If they want to do that, really, it's their own business. If they want the assurance of a background-checked driver, they are also free to call a taxi company. What's wrong with keeping the government out of it and letting people choose?
Turning a camera off - this should work the same as things like medical hotlines. For most hotlines, every call is recorded. You, as a patient, can request that the recording be turned off. Your request will be recorded, and then nothing more (at least, that's how it is supposed to work).
It should be the same for police officers: Sure, there are times they may need to turn the camera's off, but the reason should be clear and should itself be recorded. In the absence of a justification, the camera should always run.
Note that the plaintiffs are not the manufacturers, but two random owners of Android phones. This is nothing but lawyers abusing the U.S. legal system, trying to extort a settlement out of a big company.
When is the U.S. going to get around to tort reform?
why don't we also stop using the term "congress critters"
It's just a euphemism, we all know what we mean. Anyway, "corrupt sociopath" doesn't have the same cachet...
Orbital launch cost is a red herring; it's expensive, and this isn't going to change. We live in a whopping big gravity well.
The goal has to be building an infrastructure. Get mining and production infrastructure up there. That's going to be a huge investment, but once it's in place you can produce ever more of what you need directly, without having to haul it out of the well.
Provide incentives for private industry, and get the fsck out of the way.
Promise $5 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to orbit 10 times and return. $10 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to geo-sync orbit 3 times. $20 billion to the first company to bring an asteroid above size X to a lagrange point. $50 billion to the first company to have people live on the moon for two weeks. Change the goals and figures to suit. Total cost will be a fraction of having the bloated NASA bureaucracy do the same things.
Then get rid of all possible regulations, and eliminate most liability. Space is hazardous - let's assume participants are adults who know what they are getting into.
Then get out of the way.
If Microsoft has half-a-brain, they will see this as the business opportunity it is. Charge a fee for additional support from every government and organization that will pay, and it's quite the business model
I'm not talking about individual companies or homes burning trash, but rather municipal incinerators with carefully controlled processes. Modern incinerators produce little beyond water vapor and CO2. You get substantial amounts of power, eliminate essentially all chemicals (that would otherwise eventually pollute the ground water) and you recover most of the metals that would otherwise be lost in a landfill. Municipal incineration is standard in much of Europe.
Here's the story as I understand it:
- There's an ignition switch. If you have a really heavy key-ring, it is possible that the weight of your keys can turn the switch "off".
- Over the course of a decade 13 People have died in car accidents that might have had something to do with this.
- GM apparently, at some point over all those years, altered the ignition switch to require more force to turn it.
So somehow the car manufacturer is evil?
This sounds a lot more like ambulance-chasing lawyers hoping to use publicity as a lever to pry out a big settlement...
Other /.ers have covered the issues around the peanut butter well enough. What no one has mentioned is the continued idiocy of landfills in the US. Why doesn't the US incinerate? You get energy out of the trash, destroy poisonous chemicals, recover the metals, and at the end you have a much smaller volume of waste that needs to be disposed of.
I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good; they will be star programmers and eventually software architects. Another 40% are competent - they would be able to carry out plans created by others, but should never carry any larger responsibility. Good, solid programmers. The remaining 50% manage to graduate, but frankly should never work directly in the field. Maybe they can be testers or write documentation, but never let them write a line of code in a real project.
Unfortunately, it's not always obvious what kind of person you are hiring. Add to this mix the people who are self-taught, who are coming from some other field, and may have wildly inappropriate ideas. Just as an example, I am currently working with a company whose star programmer (and he really is very good) comes from process control - and has zero clue about testing or quality control. He writes code and assumes that it works, and his company is so glad to have him (at a grunt-level salary) that they refuse to insult him by testing his code - so they deliver his work untested straight to clients - you can imagine how well this works.
tl;dr: There is no shortage of bodies in STEM fields. However, there is a shortage of good people who also have a solid education in and understand of their field. This is true in computer science, and almost certainly in every other STEM field out there.
When you control for working hours and years of experience (as opposed to simply age - women more often take time off work to raise children), there hasn't been a male/female pay gap for decades. However, this is not PC. Feminists don't want to hear that they're done, that they have long since achieved their goals, and that feminism has become counterproductive. Hence, the studies that show this are routinely ignored, and certainly never publicized.
Taking months or years off for child raising, or working only part time, or refusing to travel - none of these things should affect your career or your pay. It ought to be possible to drop out of the workforce at 25, raise your kids full-time for 20 years, and then rejoin the workforce as a senior manager.
It makes as much sense as the rest of the progressive agenda...
Situation 1: Private citizen is in front of a court; the judge says the defendent must produce certain documents. Defendent says "sorry, judge, I refuse; I signed a private contract promising that I would never reveal that information". Judge says: To jail with you for contempt of court. Do this 200 times, and spend a long time in jail.
Situation 2: Police want to do a search, the law says they need a warrant. The police say "sorry, judge, we signed this here NDA". Two hundred times they did this. Anyone believe the police are going to jail here?
Forcefully entering the apartment for a physical search, also without a warrant, is just added some whipped cream on top...