Manufacturers wouldn't go through the trouble of getting marked Kosher if it wasn't a net win for them; in fact, if you believe in the central idea of capitalism, having those little symbols lowers the price (by increasing sales and profits) because if it cut into their profits they wouldn't bother doing it.
Arguably, if it's ex post facto it's not surveillance, it's searching data that I collected (or someone collected ostensibly on my behalf) which should require a warrant. And and I'd be willing to bet that if the founding fathers could have predicted our nation becoming a panopticon where every man, woman and child is being surveilled (by your definition) every minute of every day, I would be willing to bet my hypothetical time machine that they would have included wording against it.
Put another way, it isn't "I want politicians who think like me", it's "I want politicians who think". The idea is, in my mind at least, that any proposed course of action should have evidence, or at least a verifiable theory, to back it up. And, almost more importantly, results should be reviewed and fed back into the system, something that seems sorely lacking in today's political climate. A technocracy or meritocracy can have division over what is the correct course of action, just like you can have two software engineers who are both experts in their field disagree about the best way to solve a problem. It isn't about finding the one true path forward, it's about evaluating the possible paths based on reality instead of ideology.
Considering the (mostly) invincible state of good encryption, this seems unnecessary. Sure, it is a fun idea, but not a practical one.
No encryption is invincible. Especially 5 years from now... Computing power has advanced to the point where you can just brute force "invincible encryption" from a few years back...
Short of massive developments into quantum computing, encryption is invincible for a good deal more than five years; and increasing the key size by any arbitrary factor is trivial. Anyone who is choosing key sizes for sensitive applications without taking into consideration Moore's law is probably making a dozen other mistakes in their security anyway.
If you try to reduce calories in the average American diet without reducing carbs you'll rapidly find that there's nothing left to reduce. Track what a morbidly obese person eats in a day and you'll see 75% of his calorie budget is eaten up by sugars and starches. Reducing calories in the American diet is synonymous with reducing carbs.
Reality is that if he reduced his intake signficantly, he'd feel like crap every time he chose a high carb option for his food. And, consciously or unconsciously, he'd adjust his food choices. If you go so far as to actually write down everything you eat, add up the calorie content, and keep it under a certain level for each day, you'll see people rapidly move away from the kinds of foods that cause problems because they make us miserable if eaten as part of a lower calorie diet. And it'll happen even faster if you tell them what to avoid and why.
It isn't a simple math problem. It's a control system problem where at least one of the elements is the human brain. That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't model-able, the human brain has predictable responses to repeated stimuli, at least in the bulk (might not work for a particular individual but it'll work for 80% of the population). The reasons that "eat less, move more" work aren't as simple as the GP make them out to be, but that doesn't mean that "eat less, move more" won't lead to weight loss.
If I can't parse a sentence after three tries I give up.
I gave up trying to read the summary... I suppose there's no sense in lamenting the state of the editing that (doesn't) get done on submissions though.
Poking the cage is not illegal. Pissing off those in power should not land you in prison for 2 years. His behavior is not smart and the outcome might be predictable, but that does not make the outcome right.
Either they're civilians or they're POWs either way there are rules that we need to be following. This "they're enemy combatants" is basically a way of saying "they have no rights, not even the ones what we all got together and agreed that everyone has. We will do whatever we want with them; torture, endless imprisonment, sexual and religious humiliation, it doesn't matter because we have declared that the rules don't apply to them. It's bullshit. It's the kind of thing that America (home of the free) is supposed to be better than and it makes me personally ashamed of how my nation is treating human beings.
He did nothing illegal. If being a douchebag landed you in jail all the police would have to do would be stake out half the stores in the local mall and wait for a popped collar to walk by.
It isn't over, he will sue for wrongful prosecution. He may even win, but even if he doesn't he did what he set out to do: draw lots of attention to the shoddy, expensive, ineffectual security practices in use. Oh, and also drew attention to the government's apparent imprisonment of innocent people for political reasons. I don't know if it was worth it to him or not, but he gets a nod and a thank you from people like me for what he's accomplished just in avoiding a conviction.
And alternatively again, while some people wouldn't be able to afford a car that they have now, some families will be able to get by with fewer cars. Imagine a world where my wife goes to work 30 minutes before I do, and sends the car back for me to use; then I send it to pick up my teenager from school, who sends it back to my wife, who picks me up on the way and we all go home. If we're postulating a world where trust is high enough to read and do work while in the operator's (I hesitate to say driver's) seat, there's a very small jump from there to the car that can go to a destination sans passengers entirely.
And of course, that says nothing about how it would revolutionize the statistically very dangerous world of truck driving (though I suspect the truck drivers might not be too happy about that, I'm sure they can get a lobby together to make sure that entirely autonomous semi's never get approved).
Since driver less cars will need to receive roadmap updates, you might discover that a place you went to yesterday was no longer accessible.
I don't think anyone is seriously considering cars without some kind of manual override. Though in the long term I suppose it's possible.
As a side question, why are American cities planned without any personal touch, but so "professionally"?
The same reason you lay them out in a grid when you play SimCity; it works, its efficient, it's easy to build around, it's easy to navigate, etc, etc, etc.
Actually not as integral as you'd expect. Airliners don't rely solely on GPS for obvious reasons; they take a weighted average of about a half dozen different navigational aids to determine their position. GPS has become the dominant one, fair enough, but if GPS is unavailable or unreliable (if it disagrees with the other measurements by too much) it's weighting is decreased or it is removed from the average completely. VOR stations, ADF stations, ILS, inertial navigation, and dead reckoning can all pick up the slack if GPS is unavailable. You might have a slightly longer flight as more adjustments are made, especially if flying over a large area without radio navigation aides, but you will get there and once you're in range of the airport ILS the rest is basically moot.
150 km, so what? They're largely non interacting with the atmosphere, you could set up your lenses in one place and your detector in another. No more difficult than any number of neutrino experiments. Or use a constellation of satellites, you could put the detector thousands of miles away if need be. Might be a 'big science' kind of project, but that doesn't mean it's not a usable phenomenon.
The difference between this and cell phones is, with one exception (T-Mobile), if I want a smartphone data plan I pay the same amount whether I buy their subsidized phone or not. Therefore, if I'm planning on staying with my carrier long term, I may as well sign the contract and take the discounted phone. This subscription, on the other hand, costs more than the standard xbox live subscription.
Everyone keeps asking for citation, it's extremely easy to find it if you actually look!
80% of American's think creationism should be discussed in schools, 60% think it should be discussed in science classes.
Depending on how you ask the questions and what answers you allow, you can get better than these numbers (these are, admittedly, the worst that I've seen) but it's very hard, no matter how you ask, to get more than 25% of Americans to agree with: "Evolution should be taught and creationism has no place in science".
I hear this a lot, but I also know of people, myself included, who do get the advertised life (moved into my house 4 years ago and started swapping in CFLs as the existing bulbs burnt out and have only had to replace one of them so far). My best guesses as to why some people have better luck than others:
Bulb quality: I bought relatively expensive bulbs because they were the only ones at the time that didn't put out awful blue/white light. Temperature range: The only bulb I had to replace was in the garage, which swings from 100+F to -10F depending on the season. Power quality: Spikes/brownouts/etc.
It is not a defensive system, not to the Russians anyway. It's true enough that it could be used defensively against Iran and North Korea, but it has an offensive role in an all out war against Russia. It breaks MAD, and while MAD is a ridiculously suicidal way to run a planet, it did manage to get us through the cold war pretty well.
See, here's the thing. The Russians know that even with their aging fleet of ICBMs, they can still overload any conceivable missile defense system. If the US has N interceptors gaurding New York City all Russia has to do is launch N+1 missiles at it (actually considerably less since the interception success rate is going to be much lower in real combat situations). And that ignores all the relatively cheap anti-interception technologies that could be used. So why are they so pissed? Because the US also just happens to also have a fleet of nuclear launch capable submarines, a fleet of stealth bombers, and hundreds of nuclear cruise missiles (which have been mothballed but could be easily brought back into service). A properly designed first strike could hit literally hundreds of targets inside Russia with nuclear weapons with less than 30 minutes warning.
Now, it's kind of hard to coordinate your counter attack when every military base in the country is a glowing glass crater. That's not to say they wouldn't have missiles, they'd have plenty, and the commanders in charge of them would have the authority to launch them, but launch them where? Without the communication and planning, the counter attack is going to be staggered, disorganized, and concentrated. Exactly the situation where a missile defense like the one the US is deploying could be effective against the Russians. The Russians are pissed about it (and about Star Wars in the 80s) because it gives the US a real first strike capability against them.
And yes, right now nuclear war is unlikely. But what about 30 years from now? What about 50? 50 years ago the US and Russia were staring at each other off the coast of Cuba, waiting for the other one to blink to decide who would be blamed for starting nuclear Armageddon. A lot can change in half a century.
Where do you work? Most every state in the US has at will employment; you can fire whoever you want whenever you want, as long as you aren't doing it in retaliation or to discriminate, and even then the burden is o the fired employee to prove. Maybe your company signs contracts with their employees, or explicitly states that you won't be fired without cause, or (more likely in general but given your 'playing solitaire' comment pretty unlikely) maybe they're unionized. But outside of those situations there's no reason your company couldn't fire 90% of their workforce tomorrow morning without warning.
Wasn't there a US president who's strategy during the cold war was to convince the Russians that he was borderline suicidally insane? To the point of having the ambassadors and other representatives tell their Russian counterparts how terrified they were of what he might do?
Have you ever met someone with real, severe autism. Not "I'm so quirky and antisocial, I think I has aspergers" but the debilitating flavor that basically means they will never be able to live on their own, never be able to form any but the most rudimentary relationships (and even then only with those dedicated to their care), and never be able to have real back and forth communication with another human being?
Perhaps there are sections of the Autism spectrum disorder that are just part of the normal human variation, but there are certainly sections of that are serious and life destroying disabilities that any parent in the world would treat in a heartbeat.
So your saying that instead of the research being about a disability that millions of parents fear and hundreds of thousands of children are diagnosed with, the research would be about who someone is sexually attracted to? I'd call it a waste of money, but not much beyond that; I don't understand why researching the normal ranges of human sexuality would be interesting. It would be like spending hundreds of millions of dollars to identify what genes cause red hair.
Besides, I think you'd find the ultra-conservative "homosexuality is a choice" crowd more upset with the research than the liberal "homosexuality is innate" crowd, given that they identified genetic, not environmental factors that affect the rate of autism.
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Manufacturers wouldn't go through the trouble of getting marked Kosher if it wasn't a net win for them; in fact, if you believe in the central idea of capitalism, having those little symbols lowers the price (by increasing sales and profits) because if it cut into their profits they wouldn't bother doing it.
Arguably, if it's ex post facto it's not surveillance, it's searching data that I collected (or someone collected ostensibly on my behalf) which should require a warrant. And and I'd be willing to bet that if the founding fathers could have predicted our nation becoming a panopticon where every man, woman and child is being surveilled (by your definition) every minute of every day, I would be willing to bet my hypothetical time machine that they would have included wording against it.
Put another way, it isn't "I want politicians who think like me", it's "I want politicians who think". The idea is, in my mind at least, that any proposed course of action should have evidence, or at least a verifiable theory, to back it up. And, almost more importantly, results should be reviewed and fed back into the system, something that seems sorely lacking in today's political climate. A technocracy or meritocracy can have division over what is the correct course of action, just like you can have two software engineers who are both experts in their field disagree about the best way to solve a problem. It isn't about finding the one true path forward, it's about evaluating the possible paths based on reality instead of ideology.
Yes, we all know the dangerous explosive forces involved in letting the magic smoke out of an IC.
(I'm pretty sure you're joking, but the person who modded you insightful apparently wasn't so...)
Considering the (mostly) invincible state of good encryption, this seems unnecessary. Sure, it is a fun idea, but not a practical one.
No encryption is invincible. Especially 5 years from now... Computing power has advanced to the point where you can just brute force "invincible encryption" from a few years back...
Short of massive developments into quantum computing, encryption is invincible for a good deal more than five years; and increasing the key size by any arbitrary factor is trivial. Anyone who is choosing key sizes for sensitive applications without taking into consideration Moore's law is probably making a dozen other mistakes in their security anyway.
Encryption done right is invincible. Encryption is rarely done right. Specifically, the keys are often exposed in ways they shouldn't be.
If you try to reduce calories in the average American diet without reducing carbs you'll rapidly find that there's nothing left to reduce. Track what a morbidly obese person eats in a day and you'll see 75% of his calorie budget is eaten up by sugars and starches. Reducing calories in the American diet is synonymous with reducing carbs.
Reality is that if he reduced his intake signficantly, he'd feel like crap every time he chose a high carb option for his food. And, consciously or unconsciously, he'd adjust his food choices. If you go so far as to actually write down everything you eat, add up the calorie content, and keep it under a certain level for each day, you'll see people rapidly move away from the kinds of foods that cause problems because they make us miserable if eaten as part of a lower calorie diet. And it'll happen even faster if you tell them what to avoid and why.
It isn't a simple math problem. It's a control system problem where at least one of the elements is the human brain. That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't model-able, the human brain has predictable responses to repeated stimuli, at least in the bulk (might not work for a particular individual but it'll work for 80% of the population). The reasons that "eat less, move more" work aren't as simple as the GP make them out to be, but that doesn't mean that "eat less, move more" won't lead to weight loss.
If I can't parse a sentence after three tries I give up.
I gave up trying to read the summary... I suppose there's no sense in lamenting the state of the editing that (doesn't) get done on submissions though.
Poking the cage is not illegal. Pissing off those in power should not land you in prison for 2 years. His behavior is not smart and the outcome might be predictable, but that does not make the outcome right.
Either they're civilians or they're POWs either way there are rules that we need to be following. This "they're enemy combatants" is basically a way of saying "they have no rights, not even the ones what we all got together and agreed that everyone has. We will do whatever we want with them; torture, endless imprisonment, sexual and religious humiliation, it doesn't matter because we have declared that the rules don't apply to them. It's bullshit. It's the kind of thing that America (home of the free) is supposed to be better than and it makes me personally ashamed of how my nation is treating human beings.
He did nothing illegal. If being a douchebag landed you in jail all the police would have to do would be stake out half the stores in the local mall and wait for a popped collar to walk by.
It isn't over, he will sue for wrongful prosecution. He may even win, but even if he doesn't he did what he set out to do: draw lots of attention to the shoddy, expensive, ineffectual security practices in use. Oh, and also drew attention to the government's apparent imprisonment of innocent people for political reasons. I don't know if it was worth it to him or not, but he gets a nod and a thank you from people like me for what he's accomplished just in avoiding a conviction.
And alternatively again, while some people wouldn't be able to afford a car that they have now, some families will be able to get by with fewer cars. Imagine a world where my wife goes to work 30 minutes before I do, and sends the car back for me to use; then I send it to pick up my teenager from school, who sends it back to my wife, who picks me up on the way and we all go home. If we're postulating a world where trust is high enough to read and do work while in the operator's (I hesitate to say driver's) seat, there's a very small jump from there to the car that can go to a destination sans passengers entirely.
And of course, that says nothing about how it would revolutionize the statistically very dangerous world of truck driving (though I suspect the truck drivers might not be too happy about that, I'm sure they can get a lobby together to make sure that entirely autonomous semi's never get approved).
Since driver less cars will need to receive roadmap updates, you might discover that a place you went to yesterday was no longer accessible.
I don't think anyone is seriously considering cars without some kind of manual override. Though in the long term I suppose it's possible.
As a side question, why are American cities planned without any personal touch, but so "professionally"?
The same reason you lay them out in a grid when you play SimCity; it works, its efficient, it's easy to build around, it's easy to navigate, etc, etc, etc.
Actually not as integral as you'd expect. Airliners don't rely solely on GPS for obvious reasons; they take a weighted average of about a half dozen different navigational aids to determine their position. GPS has become the dominant one, fair enough, but if GPS is unavailable or unreliable (if it disagrees with the other measurements by too much) it's weighting is decreased or it is removed from the average completely. VOR stations, ADF stations, ILS, inertial navigation, and dead reckoning can all pick up the slack if GPS is unavailable. You might have a slightly longer flight as more adjustments are made, especially if flying over a large area without radio navigation aides, but you will get there and once you're in range of the airport ILS the rest is basically moot.
150 km, so what? They're largely non interacting with the atmosphere, you could set up your lenses in one place and your detector in another. No more difficult than any number of neutrino experiments. Or use a constellation of satellites, you could put the detector thousands of miles away if need be. Might be a 'big science' kind of project, but that doesn't mean it's not a usable phenomenon.
The difference between this and cell phones is, with one exception (T-Mobile), if I want a smartphone data plan I pay the same amount whether I buy their subsidized phone or not. Therefore, if I'm planning on staying with my carrier long term, I may as well sign the contract and take the discounted phone. This subscription, on the other hand, costs more than the standard xbox live subscription.
Everyone keeps asking for citation, it's extremely easy to find it if you actually look!
80% of American's think creationism should be discussed in schools, 60% think it should be discussed in science classes.
Depending on how you ask the questions and what answers you allow, you can get better than these numbers (these are, admittedly, the worst that I've seen) but it's very hard, no matter how you ask, to get more than 25% of Americans to agree with: "Evolution should be taught and creationism has no place in science".
I hear this a lot, but I also know of people, myself included, who do get the advertised life (moved into my house 4 years ago and started swapping in CFLs as the existing bulbs burnt out and have only had to replace one of them so far). My best guesses as to why some people have better luck than others:
Bulb quality: I bought relatively expensive bulbs because they were the only ones at the time that didn't put out awful blue/white light.
Temperature range: The only bulb I had to replace was in the garage, which swings from 100+F to -10F depending on the season.
Power quality: Spikes/brownouts/etc.
It is not a defensive system, not to the Russians anyway. It's true enough that it could be used defensively against Iran and North Korea, but it has an offensive role in an all out war against Russia. It breaks MAD, and while MAD is a ridiculously suicidal way to run a planet, it did manage to get us through the cold war pretty well.
See, here's the thing. The Russians know that even with their aging fleet of ICBMs, they can still overload any conceivable missile defense system. If the US has N interceptors gaurding New York City all Russia has to do is launch N+1 missiles at it (actually considerably less since the interception success rate is going to be much lower in real combat situations). And that ignores all the relatively cheap anti-interception technologies that could be used. So why are they so pissed? Because the US also just happens to also have a fleet of nuclear launch capable submarines, a fleet of stealth bombers, and hundreds of nuclear cruise missiles (which have been mothballed but could be easily brought back into service). A properly designed first strike could hit literally hundreds of targets inside Russia with nuclear weapons with less than 30 minutes warning.
Now, it's kind of hard to coordinate your counter attack when every military base in the country is a glowing glass crater. That's not to say they wouldn't have missiles, they'd have plenty, and the commanders in charge of them would have the authority to launch them, but launch them where? Without the communication and planning, the counter attack is going to be staggered, disorganized, and concentrated. Exactly the situation where a missile defense like the one the US is deploying could be effective against the Russians. The Russians are pissed about it (and about Star Wars in the 80s) because it gives the US a real first strike capability against them.
And yes, right now nuclear war is unlikely. But what about 30 years from now? What about 50? 50 years ago the US and Russia were staring at each other off the coast of Cuba, waiting for the other one to blink to decide who would be blamed for starting nuclear Armageddon. A lot can change in half a century.
Where do you work? Most every state in the US has at will employment; you can fire whoever you want whenever you want, as long as you aren't doing it in retaliation or to discriminate, and even then the burden is o the fired employee to prove. Maybe your company signs contracts with their employees, or explicitly states that you won't be fired without cause, or (more likely in general but given your 'playing solitaire' comment pretty unlikely) maybe they're unionized. But outside of those situations there's no reason your company couldn't fire 90% of their workforce tomorrow morning without warning.
Wasn't there a US president who's strategy during the cold war was to convince the Russians that he was borderline suicidally insane? To the point of having the ambassadors and other representatives tell their Russian counterparts how terrified they were of what he might do?
Have you ever met someone with real, severe autism. Not "I'm so quirky and antisocial, I think I has aspergers" but the debilitating flavor that basically means they will never be able to live on their own, never be able to form any but the most rudimentary relationships (and even then only with those dedicated to their care), and never be able to have real back and forth communication with another human being?
Perhaps there are sections of the Autism spectrum disorder that are just part of the normal human variation, but there are certainly sections of that are serious and life destroying disabilities that any parent in the world would treat in a heartbeat.
So your saying that instead of the research being about a disability that millions of parents fear and hundreds of thousands of children are diagnosed with, the research would be about who someone is sexually attracted to? I'd call it a waste of money, but not much beyond that; I don't understand why researching the normal ranges of human sexuality would be interesting. It would be like spending hundreds of millions of dollars to identify what genes cause red hair.
Besides, I think you'd find the ultra-conservative "homosexuality is a choice" crowd more upset with the research than the liberal "homosexuality is innate" crowd, given that they identified genetic, not environmental factors that affect the rate of autism.