The real question is, how is the first goddamn post redundant? Idiot mods.
Anyway, I'll help you out.
He says normally you resist bad policy by promoting how good things are without it.
This, however, obviously implies that things are good without it.
If things are bad and getting worse, promoting the bad in favor of something worse legitimizes the bad. All policy makers need to do to legitimize bad policy then is to simply introduce worse policy, which gets people to accept the bad in favor of something worse.
He's basically saying "Don't say 'look how good things are now, don't destroy it with new restrictions', say 'you ass-holes have been destroying our freedom for 50 years, cut it the hell out!'". In a nutshell.
It's worth noting that this is exactly what happens in politics anytime you hear someone say "Well, he's better than the alternative".
I think the little prick has a really good point here.
It's a violation of federal law to monitor another person's communications device. They are compensating you for using your, device to conduct their business. They get no claim over the phone or its records. What they could do is record any conversations on their devices, but that would not include any conversations between you and their customers.
It's the exact opposite of what is going on in this case, and the SCOTUS would strike it down in a heartbeat for the very same reasons they upheld it in this circumstance.
"Will not" and "can not" are two entirely different things. With no compensation in return for the bonus of not having your private messages monitored, there isn't even a verbal contract there. If he was promised something by his boss, it doesn't bind anybody further up the chain. Furthermore, it's rather douche-bagish, but there is nothing keeping the boss from breaking his word either.
They're going to have to spend money keeping the A4 competitive with other ARM SoC offerings from companies who make them for a living.
No they aren't, the A4 is Samsung's chip. Apple designers were just involved in the process this time. More than likely, they simply had a set of specifications that their designers wanted, all of the grunt work (including 99.9% of the chip design - it's the next iteration of an existing chip line) was Samsung.
Jobs taking credit for the A4 is like Obama taking credit for putting out the oil booms in the Gulf. It's total bull.
"Off-the-shelf" means it's a vendor's product, not a custom in-house design. It means Apple ordered it from Samsung as a finished product, though they ordered specific design features to be included (which is common in industries with customers who spend millions of dollars on a single run of parts). It does not mean there is a literal shelf the average Joe can go and find an A4 for purchase.
You could, however, order an S5PC110A01 from Samsung, it's the same chip. The S5PC110A01 is found in other devices, including Samsung's own "Wave" phone. You won't find a web site to buy it from, but if you were to call Samsung you could almost certainly negotiate a price for a single chip, and they'd sell it to you.
That's what off-the-shelf means - it's not a product that is owned by Apple, or exclusive to Apple (though they were apparently influential in its design). It's a Samsung product and other manufacturers can buy the chip directly from Samsung if they want to use it.
That's the game of life forum - Conway is the guy who invented it.
Reading the replies suggests this is a very, very big deal. Lots of comments like "A new age in Game of Life exploration and design!" or "undoubtedly the single most impressive construction so far in Life" seem to indicate that this is a very significant achievement.
One big distinction, is a glider doesn't take 34 million generations to replicate. In fact, the pattern itself is what moves it, so it's not really generating new gliders at all. More like a "take a pixel from here and put it here" operation, caterpillar style movement.
From the article, there are other designs that should work, but they require 10^18 generations to complete the replication, which isn't workable.
I'm very pro-patents. I think they are necessary to spur new innovations in technology and, more importantly, share innovations with everyone as quickly as possible. Without patents, almost all manufacturing would be a trade secret, instead of the knowledge being spread world-wide as soon as a new invention arises. This, I think, is vital to our society.
However, the more I think about the nature of software the more I think software patents are unnecessary, even for the true innovations out there, and therefore actually harmful to progress. With traditional patents, what you get is a machine design, which by necessity must give you the "secret" to the innovation. That secret can be small, so long as it's new and non-obvious it's still worth copying. But with the current state of software patents, even if you read the patent you must still either re-create the patented idea from scratch, using the patent as nothing more than a direction (with no "secret" revealed at all), or you must reverse engineer the product to discover the secret for yourself. That doesn't spread the knowledge of the innovation at all, and does nothing to add incentive to the creators of a new innovation. In fact, thanks to patent trolls, it actually inhibits innovation in a lot of cases.
In my opinion, software patents need to either start coming with pseudo-code or be dismissed out of hand. All this bullshit of just listing a bunch of claims without any actual code behind it that can be applied by a software engineer is worthless. If the patent doesn't need any code for a competent engineer to re-create the product, then it's obviously not novel and should have been dismissed in the first place. Given the speed with which the software industry moves and strength of the open source movement, I think there is also strong evidence to suggest they are entirely unnecessary to promote innovation (which is what they exist to do).
Who says the US government is a preferred customer?
My money is on the contract Oracle negotiated that said the US Government would get discounts that were as good or better than any other Oracle customer's discount.
This isn't the gov strong arming Oracle, this is Oracle signing a contract and then looking for every way they could to avoid doing what they agreed to do.
Generally we call that a "breech of contract", and there are serious legal ramifications whether the US government is involved in the contract or not.
Or, to put it more simply, fucking read you dumbass.
In the quake case, the investigation started because the people responsible for monitoring the situation explicitly reassured the population by telling them that there would be no big quake. Any responsible scientist, given the continuous small shakes that were ongoing, would have at least said something on the line "We believe there will be no major quake, but please do not lower your guard".
Except for the guy who warned them about it, of course.
He was muzzled for attempting to incite a panic after predicting the very same quake these other seismologists said there was no evidence for. In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don't. There was no evidence, really, not anything definitive. It was just an educated guess that happened to be correct.
What's really disgusting is the only reason the scientists said anything at all was because the government set up a panel specifically to reassure the population that there would not be an earthquake. So the scientists told the truth: there was nothing abnormal about the tremors, and there was no evidence for an impending quake. They also said that did not mean there would not be a quake, just that there was nothing to suggest there would be one. Italians obviously missed that part.
The people who should be on trial are the politicians/bureaucrats who set up the panel to begin with, not the scientists who told them exactly what they asked for (and truthfully).
At this point, if you're an Italian seismologist and the government asks you if there is going to be an earthquake, my advice is to respond with "Fuck if I know."
Just as Einstein's theories fall apart in the real of quantum mechanics. But that doesn't mean that they're wrong.
Einstein's theories don't fall apart in the realm of quantum mechanics, they simply don't address them at all. He deals with objects with very large mass. Quantum level particles have infinitesimal mass.
The only time Einstein's work interacts with quantum mechanics is in the center of black holes, where objects are both extremely tiny (in the realm of quantum mechanics) and extremely massive (where relativity applies). Well, everything breaks in the center of black holes, including pretty much all modern physics, so you can't really hold that over his head.
Your overall point stands though, all physics is technically broken, but the proper limits the current theory (and even older theories) can work 100% of the time.
Lifehacker? Hahaha. Sorry, but I can't take a site whose 30 something founder just put together her first desktop from parts LAST YEAR as a serious tech head's site. Again, this site is about being a fan of geek/nerddom but isn't really run by real geeks and nerds.
Lifehacker isn't a geek site, it's a modern personal improvement site. They offer "life" hacks, generally geared toward productivity or health or finances, not hardware or software hacks. Some of their hacks are actually utilizing a new piece of software (typically free) to get things done better than the old way of doing things. To say it is about being a fan of geek/nerddom is flat out idiotic, and I don't know what kind of moron you must be to come up with such an idea.
Frankly, putting together a computer from scratch is on the extreme technical side of what they do, because that isn't really what that website is about at all.
The fact that the GP put the site in there is a bit odd, but for what it is it is an excellent site, and I think a lot of geeks could get quite a lot out of it (though not for normal geeky reasons, more practical life reasons).
All you need to understand about Location Awareness is that it tracks your location. That's it. That's not at all a technical concept, and it isn't difficult in any way.
You don't need to know that it somehow uses cell phone towers and wifi hotspots to track you. You don't need to understand that GPS can track you from anywhere between 3 feet and 100 feet.
None of that is necessary to understand the implications of Location Awareness. All you need to know is that if you use it, people will know where you are. That's it. No technical understanding necessary. In fact, non-technical people probably understand the implications of this better than most technical people, because they are bogged down by an understanding of the current limitations of the technology.
That actually is common sense, and I don't see how anybody with an IQ higher than about 20 could not understand that concept.
You know, new technology creates new situations which previously hadn't needed to be considered.
And these issues happen to be exactly the same as what people have been dealing with for a thousand years.
If you tell someone where you are, they know where you are.
Wow, that's a totally brand new concept that has never before been considered in human history! Oh wait, no it's not, it's common fucking sense. Common sense simply means that anybody of average intelligence should be able to understand.
You don't need to understand how location awareness works. All you need to know is that it automatically tracks where you are, and if you tie it in to things like facebook and such anybody who reads your facebook will automatically know where you are.
Since that's exactly what these services are advertised to do, it's not a huge fucking leap to realize that if your phone is automatically telling everyone where you are, everyone is automatically going to know where you are.
It's not a new concept. It's a new, and more convenient, implementation of a very, very, very old concept.
Why is the Slashdot crowd so myopic about technology that they think all of these issues have been around for decades, or that everyone who happens to use what is now a fairly ubiquitous technology is fully dialed into all of the aspects of that technology?
Perhaps because the issues have actually been around for millenia, and a basic reading of a product's advertisement tells you everything you need to know to understand how said technology may affect you. Hell, in this case, the name is enough to clue anybody of moderate intelligence in. Location Awareness - it's aware of your location. If you don't want your location known, you probably shouldn't use a product who's stated purpose is to track your location at all times.
It's really not hard. The technical details don't matter in the slightest.
And if that bothers you, don't hang out with that friend.
It is no different than tacking a sign on your door saying "Hey! I'm out, but here's where you can find me!" which is perfectly legal and legitimate and ethical, even if you're inadvertently saying where someone else will be also.
It's real fucking life people, we don't need idiotic new laws, just deal with it.
Section 1. After a Bill has become Law, if one-half of the Member State legislatures declare the Law to be "unconstitutional" it shall be null and void.
That's just stupid. Upholding the constitution is the duty of Congress, not the states, and enforcing it is the duty of the Court. This is ideal, since the Court also adjudicates the law, actions taken by the Court regarding the constitutionality of a law are immediate, and require no group consensus.
The states already have the right to sue for the constitutionality of a law. Since all rights not expressly granted to the Federal Government are automatically the rights of the State governments by default, a state simply has to declare that their rights are being infringed upon, and sue for justice in federal court.
Such high profile cases move through the judicial system pretty quickly, more likely a lot more quickly than getting 50 states to declare a law unconstitutional. While not very common today, such suits were quite common in the early years of the United States.
its better safe than sorry. Take the oil rig disaster. Had *PROPER* precautions been taken, it wouldn't have happened.
To be fair though, the government signed off on every step BP took leading up to the spill, so turning these things over to the government to manage obviously doesn't help a damn thing.
There also happens to be zero evidence to support the idea that cell phone radiation is harmful, which stem from radio technology which has been around for 70 years. In all that time, we have only identified a few applications of radiation that are potentially harmful to humans. Microwaves are about the minimum, and are much more intense than cell phone radiation, and even that is so safe we have a microwave generating box to cook food. After that is infra-red radiation, also known as heat, which is potentially dangerous in very high concentrations (aka fire). Visible light is potentially dangerous if intense enough - see lasers. At UV and above, radiation becomes dangerous on a generic level in large quantities. X-rays, gamma rays, etc fall into this category, and even then we can withstand large quantities of said radiation without any adverse effects.
If you have a problem with cell phones, then you should also have a problem with walkie talkies, AM/FM radio, WiFi, and broadcast television, because they are all about the same and all just as harmless.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems you missed the part where the mercury provides the smooth surface, not the bowl.
The bowl gives it shape, the mercury gives it the ultra smooth mirror.
Which sounded friggin cool.
There are (retarded looking) glasses that are similar, but they use water pumped into a bladder to alter the lense.
Mercury changes color as it solidifies, from silvery white (highly reflective) to tin white (not nearly as reflective).
In other words, if you freeze it it's not a good mirror any more, and then what's the point?
That's not even considering the serious difficulty in getting a spinning liquid to freeze uniformly.
The real question is, how is the first goddamn post redundant? Idiot mods.
Anyway, I'll help you out.
He says normally you resist bad policy by promoting how good things are without it.
This, however, obviously implies that things are good without it.
If things are bad and getting worse, promoting the bad in favor of something worse legitimizes the bad. All policy makers need to do to legitimize bad policy then is to simply introduce worse policy, which gets people to accept the bad in favor of something worse.
He's basically saying "Don't say 'look how good things are now, don't destroy it with new restrictions', say 'you ass-holes have been destroying our freedom for 50 years, cut it the hell out!'". In a nutshell.
It's worth noting that this is exactly what happens in politics anytime you hear someone say "Well, he's better than the alternative".
I think the little prick has a really good point here.
It's a violation of federal law to monitor another person's communications device. They are compensating you for using your, device to conduct their business. They get no claim over the phone or its records. What they could do is record any conversations on their devices, but that would not include any conversations between you and their customers.
It's the exact opposite of what is going on in this case, and the SCOTUS would strike it down in a heartbeat for the very same reasons they upheld it in this circumstance.
It's a violation of federal law unless you own the cordless phone you're monitoring.
Same thing applies to cell phones.
"Will not" and "can not" are two entirely different things. With no compensation in return for the bonus of not having your private messages monitored, there isn't even a verbal contract there. If he was promised something by his boss, it doesn't bind anybody further up the chain. Furthermore, it's rather douche-bagish, but there is nothing keeping the boss from breaking his word either.
Don't laugh - I've heard of (but not been involved in any) meeting-planning meetings.
I'm like, huh?
Actually I think it's been happening that way for a while now, it's just the first we've realized it.
They're going to have to spend money keeping the A4 competitive with other ARM SoC offerings from companies who make them for a living.
No they aren't, the A4 is Samsung's chip. Apple designers were just involved in the process this time. More than likely, they simply had a set of specifications that their designers wanted, all of the grunt work (including 99.9% of the chip design - it's the next iteration of an existing chip line) was Samsung.
Jobs taking credit for the A4 is like Obama taking credit for putting out the oil booms in the Gulf. It's total bull.
"Off-the-shelf" means it's a vendor's product, not a custom in-house design. It means Apple ordered it from Samsung as a finished product, though they ordered specific design features to be included (which is common in industries with customers who spend millions of dollars on a single run of parts). It does not mean there is a literal shelf the average Joe can go and find an A4 for purchase.
You could, however, order an S5PC110A01 from Samsung, it's the same chip. The S5PC110A01 is found in other devices, including Samsung's own "Wave" phone. You won't find a web site to buy it from, but if you were to call Samsung you could almost certainly negotiate a price for a single chip, and they'd sell it to you.
That's what off-the-shelf means - it's not a product that is owned by Apple, or exclusive to Apple (though they were apparently influential in its design). It's a Samsung product and other manufacturers can buy the chip directly from Samsung if they want to use it.
But it seems a fairly arbitrary distinction, since that destruction is going to happen and it's not going to reverse itself.
It seems arbitrary, but given that they haven't been able to do it in the last 20 years, it's obviously not an arbitrary distinction.
Check out the forum where it was posted: http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0
That's the game of life forum - Conway is the guy who invented it.
Reading the replies suggests this is a very, very big deal. Lots of comments like "A new age in Game of Life exploration and design!" or "undoubtedly the single most impressive construction so far in Life" seem to indicate that this is a very significant achievement.
One big distinction, is a glider doesn't take 34 million generations to replicate. In fact, the pattern itself is what moves it, so it's not really generating new gliders at all. More like a "take a pixel from here and put it here" operation, caterpillar style movement.
From the article, there are other designs that should work, but they require 10^18 generations to complete the replication, which isn't workable.
I'm very pro-patents. I think they are necessary to spur new innovations in technology and, more importantly, share innovations with everyone as quickly as possible. Without patents, almost all manufacturing would be a trade secret, instead of the knowledge being spread world-wide as soon as a new invention arises. This, I think, is vital to our society.
However, the more I think about the nature of software the more I think software patents are unnecessary, even for the true innovations out there, and therefore actually harmful to progress. With traditional patents, what you get is a machine design, which by necessity must give you the "secret" to the innovation. That secret can be small, so long as it's new and non-obvious it's still worth copying. But with the current state of software patents, even if you read the patent you must still either re-create the patented idea from scratch, using the patent as nothing more than a direction (with no "secret" revealed at all), or you must reverse engineer the product to discover the secret for yourself. That doesn't spread the knowledge of the innovation at all, and does nothing to add incentive to the creators of a new innovation. In fact, thanks to patent trolls, it actually inhibits innovation in a lot of cases.
In my opinion, software patents need to either start coming with pseudo-code or be dismissed out of hand. All this bullshit of just listing a bunch of claims without any actual code behind it that can be applied by a software engineer is worthless. If the patent doesn't need any code for a competent engineer to re-create the product, then it's obviously not novel and should have been dismissed in the first place. Given the speed with which the software industry moves and strength of the open source movement, I think there is also strong evidence to suggest they are entirely unnecessary to promote innovation (which is what they exist to do).
That's networking, not social networking.
NEXT!
Who says the US government is a preferred customer?
My money is on the contract Oracle negotiated that said the US Government would get discounts that were as good or better than any other Oracle customer's discount.
This isn't the gov strong arming Oracle, this is Oracle signing a contract and then looking for every way they could to avoid doing what they agreed to do.
Generally we call that a "breech of contract", and there are serious legal ramifications whether the US government is involved in the contract or not.
Or, to put it more simply, fucking read you dumbass.
In the quake case, the investigation started because the people responsible for monitoring the situation explicitly reassured the population by telling them that there would be no big quake. Any responsible scientist, given the continuous small shakes that were ongoing, would have at least said something on the line "We believe there will be no major quake, but please do not lower your guard".
Except for the guy who warned them about it, of course.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L6566682.htm
He was muzzled for attempting to incite a panic after predicting the very same quake these other seismologists said there was no evidence for. In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don't. There was no evidence, really, not anything definitive. It was just an educated guess that happened to be correct.
What's really disgusting is the only reason the scientists said anything at all was because the government set up a panel specifically to reassure the population that there would not be an earthquake. So the scientists told the truth: there was nothing abnormal about the tremors, and there was no evidence for an impending quake. They also said that did not mean there would not be a quake, just that there was nothing to suggest there would be one. Italians obviously missed that part.
The people who should be on trial are the politicians/bureaucrats who set up the panel to begin with, not the scientists who told them exactly what they asked for (and truthfully).
At this point, if you're an Italian seismologist and the government asks you if there is going to be an earthquake, my advice is to respond with "Fuck if I know."
Just as Einstein's theories fall apart in the real of quantum mechanics. But that doesn't mean that they're wrong.
Einstein's theories don't fall apart in the realm of quantum mechanics, they simply don't address them at all. He deals with objects with very large mass. Quantum level particles have infinitesimal mass.
The only time Einstein's work interacts with quantum mechanics is in the center of black holes, where objects are both extremely tiny (in the realm of quantum mechanics) and extremely massive (where relativity applies). Well, everything breaks in the center of black holes, including pretty much all modern physics, so you can't really hold that over his head.
Your overall point stands though, all physics is technically broken, but the proper limits the current theory (and even older theories) can work 100% of the time.
Chill dude, it was corrected. These things tend to work out on slashdot.
Lifehacker? Hahaha. Sorry, but I can't take a site whose 30 something founder just put together her first desktop from parts LAST YEAR as a serious tech head's site. Again, this site is about being a fan of geek/nerddom but isn't really run by real geeks and nerds.
Lifehacker isn't a geek site, it's a modern personal improvement site. They offer "life" hacks, generally geared toward productivity or health or finances, not hardware or software hacks. Some of their hacks are actually utilizing a new piece of software (typically free) to get things done better than the old way of doing things. To say it is about being a fan of geek/nerddom is flat out idiotic, and I don't know what kind of moron you must be to come up with such an idea.
Frankly, putting together a computer from scratch is on the extreme technical side of what they do, because that isn't really what that website is about at all.
The fact that the GP put the site in there is a bit odd, but for what it is it is an excellent site, and I think a lot of geeks could get quite a lot out of it (though not for normal geeky reasons, more practical life reasons).
And in pretty much all of them you can disable Location Awareness.
It isn't hard to understand at all.
All you need to understand about Location Awareness is that it tracks your location. That's it. That's not at all a technical concept, and it isn't difficult in any way.
You don't need to know that it somehow uses cell phone towers and wifi hotspots to track you. You don't need to understand that GPS can track you from anywhere between 3 feet and 100 feet.
None of that is necessary to understand the implications of Location Awareness. All you need to know is that if you use it, people will know where you are. That's it. No technical understanding necessary. In fact, non-technical people probably understand the implications of this better than most technical people, because they are bogged down by an understanding of the current limitations of the technology.
That actually is common sense, and I don't see how anybody with an IQ higher than about 20 could not understand that concept.
You know, new technology creates new situations which previously hadn't needed to be considered.
And these issues happen to be exactly the same as what people have been dealing with for a thousand years.
If you tell someone where you are, they know where you are.
Wow, that's a totally brand new concept that has never before been considered in human history! Oh wait, no it's not, it's common fucking sense. Common sense simply means that anybody of average intelligence should be able to understand.
You don't need to understand how location awareness works. All you need to know is that it automatically tracks where you are, and if you tie it in to things like facebook and such anybody who reads your facebook will automatically know where you are.
Since that's exactly what these services are advertised to do, it's not a huge fucking leap to realize that if your phone is automatically telling everyone where you are, everyone is automatically going to know where you are.
It's not a new concept. It's a new, and more convenient, implementation of a very, very, very old concept.
Why is the Slashdot crowd so myopic about technology that they think all of these issues have been around for decades, or that everyone who happens to use what is now a fairly ubiquitous technology is fully dialed into all of the aspects of that technology?
Perhaps because the issues have actually been around for millenia, and a basic reading of a product's advertisement tells you everything you need to know to understand how said technology may affect you. Hell, in this case, the name is enough to clue anybody of moderate intelligence in. Location Awareness - it's aware of your location. If you don't want your location known, you probably shouldn't use a product who's stated purpose is to track your location at all times.
It's really not hard. The technical details don't matter in the slightest.
And if that bothers you, don't hang out with that friend.
It is no different than tacking a sign on your door saying "Hey! I'm out, but here's where you can find me!" which is perfectly legal and legitimate and ethical, even if you're inadvertently saying where someone else will be also.
It's real fucking life people, we don't need idiotic new laws, just deal with it.
Section 1. After a Bill has become Law, if one-half of the Member State legislatures declare the Law to be "unconstitutional" it shall be null and void.
That's just stupid. Upholding the constitution is the duty of Congress, not the states, and enforcing it is the duty of the Court. This is ideal, since the Court also adjudicates the law, actions taken by the Court regarding the constitutionality of a law are immediate, and require no group consensus.
The states already have the right to sue for the constitutionality of a law. Since all rights not expressly granted to the Federal Government are automatically the rights of the State governments by default, a state simply has to declare that their rights are being infringed upon, and sue for justice in federal court.
Such high profile cases move through the judicial system pretty quickly, more likely a lot more quickly than getting 50 states to declare a law unconstitutional. While not very common today, such suits were quite common in the early years of the United States.
its better safe than sorry. Take the oil rig disaster. Had *PROPER* precautions been taken, it wouldn't have happened.
To be fair though, the government signed off on every step BP took leading up to the spill, so turning these things over to the government to manage obviously doesn't help a damn thing.
There also happens to be zero evidence to support the idea that cell phone radiation is harmful, which stem from radio technology which has been around for 70 years. In all that time, we have only identified a few applications of radiation that are potentially harmful to humans. Microwaves are about the minimum, and are much more intense than cell phone radiation, and even that is so safe we have a microwave generating box to cook food. After that is infra-red radiation, also known as heat, which is potentially dangerous in very high concentrations (aka fire). Visible light is potentially dangerous if intense enough - see lasers. At UV and above, radiation becomes dangerous on a generic level in large quantities. X-rays, gamma rays, etc fall into this category, and even then we can withstand large quantities of said radiation without any adverse effects.
If you have a problem with cell phones, then you should also have a problem with walkie talkies, AM/FM radio, WiFi, and broadcast television, because they are all about the same and all just as harmless.