At last, conclusive evidence that the Great Green Arkleseizure is the creator (or at least, the origin) of the universe. Now we just have to worry about the Coming of the Great White Hanky.
[They still believe that...] plants obtain most of their mass from the soil rather than from the atmosphere
How could this possibly work? Farmers ship millions of tons of foodstuffs every year, unless they're spreading an equal volume of human excrement on their fields they'd be farming in pit mines after a few decades. That doesn't even begin to address that the soil that plants actually grow in is only a matter of inches deep in many locations, or the fact that you can grow plants in water more efficiently than in soil. So yeah, I'd say we're missing some basic logic tools if biology majors can't think that one through.
Hey, guess what. Even if I'm a total ass-hat to the police, unless I actually put them in danger I don't deserve any legal repercussions for it, let alone being threatened with years in prison. The OP was completely within his rights to close the door on the police officers, unless he slammed it as hard as possible with no warning and the intention to cause harm I don't see how he should possibly be charged with anything.
You're assuming that this has absolutely zero redeeming benefits to society. In reality, such a project could go a long ways towards lowering the cost to LEO and beyond which of course has the potential to benifit everyone.
I'm just going to play the Devil's advocate here, largely because the knee jerk reaction (and a reaction that I share) is that this is censorship and censorship should be prevented at all costs.
But, what if you look at it, not as censorship, but as translation. Language changes a lot in 100 years, and the meaning of the this particular word has changed even more than the average. I suspect that many of the instances of the word 'nigger' in the original text are not in line with the racist, hateful connotations that are associated with the word today. It is possible that changing the word to something less emotionally charged would more accurately reflect, from a purely narrative, non-historical point of view, the intentions of the author.
Of course, there are doubtless instances in the book where the use is meant to be racist and emotionally charged, I can't find any logical reason why those instances should be changed. And of course the targeting of this single word for changes without changing other words and phrasing in the story to make it more easily understood for the students is clearly censorship or at least pandering.
More interesting if the parents of some of the hundreds who have died sued him or even better if a few prosecutors put together a few hundred homicide cases. After all, he intentionally published fraudulent results that he logically would have know was going to lead people to not vaccinate their kids. This guy deserves more than financial ruin, he deserves to go to jail, he used the instruments of science to kill hundreds, possibly thousands of children; where the hell are the 'think of the children' nuts when you need them?
So, does anyone have a simple resource to see what the laws and/or precedents are in place in each state? I haven't seen either my home or current states in any of the several articles I've read on the subject but there's really no way of knowing for sure. Of course, this is part of the root of the problem, the legal code is so convoluted and full of legalese that you can't just do a simple DB search to get answers to your questions, you'd probably need to contact your state's Attorney General to get a for sure answer (and even then you don't really know for sure).
Targeted application of laws which are not generally enforced should be the most terrifying thing in the world to you if you worry about a police state evolving. The general lack of enforcement means that the public is unaware and/or unconcerned about the law, meaning penalties can be stiff, and that violations are common because the general public doesn't know any better. The upshot being that nearly anyone the police or judiciary doesn't like can be thrown into prison for decades, which is practically the definition of a police state, and the scary thing is that it already exists in the good old US of A. The wiretap laws are hardly the most commonly used for this purpose, but the ridiculous penalties (can easily be 100 years in prison if you have multiple offenses) make it one of the most terrifying.
'I was overwhelmed with anxiety that I might be the target of a sex crime,' the woman told a district court. 'It caused me to lose my job and I had to change my residence.'
Even ignoring the fact that the woman's underwear was apparently visible from the street in the first place and it never bothered her. This reeks of unhealthy paranoia to me, is Google really responsible for one woman's mental issues? Granted, this thinking is exactly what the modern media creates, the idea that the world is filled with kidnappers, rapists, and violence. It's ironic that there are fewer murders than ever in US history, the kidnapping rate is lower than it was in 1940, and the overall violent crime rate sets new record lows every year (maybe not since the recession, but I haven't heard).
That's not the version that I would push for personally. The quintessential example is trading latency for bandwidth. VoIP doesn't require much bandwidth, but needs as low latency as possible to function properly. Bit Torrent is the opposite, you could have 10 second latency values and get basically the same quality of service as if you had 10 ms, so long as the bandwidth is high. In an ideal world maybe every service would have access to low latency and high bandwidth pipe, but you can get much better perceived performance out of the same equipment by correctly handling different services differently.
As I understood it, net neutrality means all packets of the same type are treated equally, regardless of the source and destination. Video has to be treated the same, whether it's coming from one of the ISP's servers or Netflix. Audio has to be treated the same whether it's the ISP's VoIP server or Ventrillo. Bulk data has to be the same whether it's coming from a corporate FTP site or a peer.
Now take the time to go look up how many birds die from hitting high rise buildings every year. I'll maybe accept that windmills have an issuebut only because they are, by their very nature, positioned along common soaring and migration routes for many species. This is in the middle of the desert, with no special wind currents around it, the avian population is going to be as near to zero as you could hope for.
Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed
This title implies that people were tested on current events, randomly assigned a news source to watch or read, and after some period of time were tested again. Now that would actually be a good and interesting study to perform.
In reality, all the study did was take a survey/test that included current events and which news sources you view, there's no control group, there's no attempt to isolate which is the cause and which is the effect, and there's no meaningful result except to say that people go to the news source that agrees with their views, which isn't exactly ground breaking insight.
The study itself isn't flamebait or trolling, but the summary and title sure as hell are.
If they're smart they'd start the push for this kind of functionality in the Windows 7 phones, not the tablets. Let's face it, for what 90% of consumers do with their computer, a smartphone has the processing power for. Even mid range games are becoming playable on standard phone hardware, and the next generation of phones promises dual core with dedicated graphics. Add in a docking solution and the UI issues for things like document editing disappear. Hell, you could even make a tablet dock (basically just a big touchscreen) that accepts the phone and gives you more real estate when you're doing leisure activities.
Hold on a second... I need to go do a patent search.
On the article some guy said it is only accessible through the serial port.
Which kind of changes the whole tone in my opinion. I'm of the persuasion that if a black hat has physical access to your hardware, you've already lost. It's still shockingly bad practice from a vendor, but if this is true it goes from a serious issue to a moderate one.
The, at this point anecdotal, evidence is based on people who are beyond the generally accepted 12 month window of improvement. They showed an increase in walking speed of.2 m/s while using the device, and an additional.1-.2 m/s improvement in the months following the device's use.
So, if their results hold up in larger studies, I would say that this is either a new effect, or the conventional wisdom is dead wrong and we're giving up on rehabilitation too soon. Either way it's fantastic news for stroke victims. Some of the people they talked about were able to double their comfortable walking speed, that's a pretty big deal for a stroke victim who was told by their doctor "this is the best you will ever be able to walk".
You typed three letters. 17,549,221 users who typed those three letters got these results. We'll just feel free to assume you couldn't want anything that they didn't want, see we got it all here in our statistics.
And 90% of the time they're right. The other 10% you might have to press a fourth letter (the horror!).
So... if the only reason that Japan has higher average speeds that the US is because they're densely populated, we should be able to look at similarly densely populated portions of the US and see a similar average. Except, you know, we don't. What's the average broadband speed in the greater New York City area? I'd put lots of money on it being barely better than the national average.
Maybe a cyber-sit-in would be more accurate though. Generally picketers let people into the business, it's just that every potential customer has to walk through the picket line, get shouted at, read the signs, etc. Sit-ins actually attempt to block the business from servicing customers, they're also a bit more shady on the legal side (just like a DDoS). The sit-in analogy also has the benefit of reminding the participants that what they're doing may very well get them in trouble, people who did sit-ins during the civil rights movement were often arrested (and for that matter, beaten).
Of course, sit-ins were usually done by people whom the establishment wouldn't serve, which is kind of what makes it poetic justice; the people sitting in are just waiting to be served. Maybe if the people involved in the DDoS were ready and willing to donate to Wikileaks (which I highly doubt) I would see it as more appropriate behavior.
One thing to keep in mind, Google honestly (and IMO naively) believes every house in America will have a gigabit internet connection before 2020. If they're right (a pretty big if), then there's no reason a dumb terminal couldn't work just fine in the foreseeable future. Pictures and music will load just as fast as they load off your hard drive today, you could easily run software out of the cloud, if latency were dramatically improved you could even run the software in the cloud and just send IO back and forth (isn't there a service already that does this?).
I think that the idea of a dumb terminal, no maintenance, appliance type computer is possible, just not possible with today's connectivity options. Get rid of the artificial monopolies granted to ISPs and give competition a decade for what's commercially possible to catch up to what's technically possible and it might be a viable choice for almost everyone. As is it's only a choice for those who already live 90% in the cloud.
Is there a reason that no one combines extruders and millers in one machine? I was under the impression that extruders waste less materials but cheap ones lack precision for small features, why not extrude a 'rough' shape and mill it down to be more precise. You'd still be limited to materials that can be extruded, but it seems like it would be give really good performance without having the hassle and cost of a super high resolution extruder.
In a similar vein, it's not like things have really changed. I bet just as many people talked about the case with friends and family, heard things they weren't supposed to, and had just as many pre-trial prejudices before the connected age as they do now. It's just that the new methods of communication leave a trail that public, near permanent, and easily searchable.
So, in my opinion, the courts can either just throw out the random cases where the jurors are too stupid to hide their misconduct, or they can use this as a learning experience to find new ways to reduce that misconduct. I'm hoping that it's both, leaning towards the latter, but the US judicial system isn't always the most agile.
My first thought was 'nifty' and my second thought was that this probably enforces the laws better than 90% of places that sell alcohol do.
You check ID's against the state DB (generally a skipped step in most stores), you have one trained guy dedicated to making sure the ID matches the shopper (as opposed to an 18 year old kid who couldn't care less), and a breathalyzer to get some kind of bearing on if they're drunk or not (as opposed to the 'is he stumbling around, slurring speech, and glassy eyed?' test).
I'd put money on it that somewhere in Amazon's thousands of listings there are a handful of counterfeit or pirated goods. Should the DNS providers go along with a government order to have Amazon de-listed? You might argue that these sights knew what they were doing and Amazon does not, but I would respond with the argument that there should be some due process there, not just a random bureaucrat making the decision.
Slashdot Mirror
At last, conclusive evidence that the Great Green Arkleseizure is the creator (or at least, the origin) of the universe. Now we just have to worry about the Coming of the Great White Hanky.
[They still believe that...] plants obtain most of their mass from the soil rather than from the atmosphere
How could this possibly work? Farmers ship millions of tons of foodstuffs every year, unless they're spreading an equal volume of human excrement on their fields they'd be farming in pit mines after a few decades. That doesn't even begin to address that the soil that plants actually grow in is only a matter of inches deep in many locations, or the fact that you can grow plants in water more efficiently than in soil. So yeah, I'd say we're missing some basic logic tools if biology majors can't think that one through.
Hey, guess what. Even if I'm a total ass-hat to the police, unless I actually put them in danger I don't deserve any legal repercussions for it, let alone being threatened with years in prison. The OP was completely within his rights to close the door on the police officers, unless he slammed it as hard as possible with no warning and the intention to cause harm I don't see how he should possibly be charged with anything.
You're assuming that this has absolutely zero redeeming benefits to society. In reality, such a project could go a long ways towards lowering the cost to LEO and beyond which of course has the potential to benifit everyone.
I'm just going to play the Devil's advocate here, largely because the knee jerk reaction (and a reaction that I share) is that this is censorship and censorship should be prevented at all costs.
But, what if you look at it, not as censorship, but as translation. Language changes a lot in 100 years, and the meaning of the this particular word has changed even more than the average. I suspect that many of the instances of the word 'nigger' in the original text are not in line with the racist, hateful connotations that are associated with the word today. It is possible that changing the word to something less emotionally charged would more accurately reflect, from a purely narrative, non-historical point of view, the intentions of the author.
Of course, there are doubtless instances in the book where the use is meant to be racist and emotionally charged, I can't find any logical reason why those instances should be changed. And of course the targeting of this single word for changes without changing other words and phrasing in the story to make it more easily understood for the students is clearly censorship or at least pandering.
More interesting if the parents of some of the hundreds who have died sued him or even better if a few prosecutors put together a few hundred homicide cases. After all, he intentionally published fraudulent results that he logically would have know was going to lead people to not vaccinate their kids. This guy deserves more than financial ruin, he deserves to go to jail, he used the instruments of science to kill hundreds, possibly thousands of children; where the hell are the 'think of the children' nuts when you need them?
We agreed to sell the F35 to our allies, canceling the project would be an political nightmare.
So, does anyone have a simple resource to see what the laws and/or precedents are in place in each state? I haven't seen either my home or current states in any of the several articles I've read on the subject but there's really no way of knowing for sure. Of course, this is part of the root of the problem, the legal code is so convoluted and full of legalese that you can't just do a simple DB search to get answers to your questions, you'd probably need to contact your state's Attorney General to get a for sure answer (and even then you don't really know for sure).
Targeted application of laws which are not generally enforced should be the most terrifying thing in the world to you if you worry about a police state evolving. The general lack of enforcement means that the public is unaware and/or unconcerned about the law, meaning penalties can be stiff, and that violations are common because the general public doesn't know any better. The upshot being that nearly anyone the police or judiciary doesn't like can be thrown into prison for decades, which is practically the definition of a police state, and the scary thing is that it already exists in the good old US of A. The wiretap laws are hardly the most commonly used for this purpose, but the ridiculous penalties (can easily be 100 years in prison if you have multiple offenses) make it one of the most terrifying.
'I was overwhelmed with anxiety that I might be the target of a sex crime,' the woman told a district court. 'It caused me to lose my job and I had to change my residence.'
Even ignoring the fact that the woman's underwear was apparently visible from the street in the first place and it never bothered her. This reeks of unhealthy paranoia to me, is Google really responsible for one woman's mental issues? Granted, this thinking is exactly what the modern media creates, the idea that the world is filled with kidnappers, rapists, and violence. It's ironic that there are fewer murders than ever in US history, the kidnapping rate is lower than it was in 1940, and the overall violent crime rate sets new record lows every year (maybe not since the recession, but I haven't heard).
That's not the version that I would push for personally. The quintessential example is trading latency for bandwidth. VoIP doesn't require much bandwidth, but needs as low latency as possible to function properly. Bit Torrent is the opposite, you could have 10 second latency values and get basically the same quality of service as if you had 10 ms, so long as the bandwidth is high. In an ideal world maybe every service would have access to low latency and high bandwidth pipe, but you can get much better perceived performance out of the same equipment by correctly handling different services differently.
As I understood it, net neutrality means all packets of the same type are treated equally, regardless of the source and destination. Video has to be treated the same, whether it's coming from one of the ISP's servers or Netflix. Audio has to be treated the same whether it's the ISP's VoIP server or Ventrillo. Bulk data has to be the same whether it's coming from a corporate FTP site or a peer.
A bird dies.
Now take the time to go look up how many birds die from hitting high rise buildings every year. I'll maybe accept that windmills have an issuebut only because they are, by their very nature, positioned along common soaring and migration routes for many species. This is in the middle of the desert, with no special wind currents around it, the avian population is going to be as near to zero as you could hope for.
Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed
This title implies that people were tested on current events, randomly assigned a news source to watch or read, and after some period of time were tested again. Now that would actually be a good and interesting study to perform.
In reality, all the study did was take a survey/test that included current events and which news sources you view, there's no control group, there's no attempt to isolate which is the cause and which is the effect, and there's no meaningful result except to say that people go to the news source that agrees with their views, which isn't exactly ground breaking insight.
The study itself isn't flamebait or trolling, but the summary and title sure as hell are.
Indeed, I think they were looking for "disenchanted".
If they're smart they'd start the push for this kind of functionality in the Windows 7 phones, not the tablets. Let's face it, for what 90% of consumers do with their computer, a smartphone has the processing power for. Even mid range games are becoming playable on standard phone hardware, and the next generation of phones promises dual core with dedicated graphics. Add in a docking solution and the UI issues for things like document editing disappear. Hell, you could even make a tablet dock (basically just a big touchscreen) that accepts the phone and gives you more real estate when you're doing leisure activities.
Hold on a second... I need to go do a patent search.
On the article some guy said it is only accessible through the serial port.
Which kind of changes the whole tone in my opinion. I'm of the persuasion that if a black hat has physical access to your hardware, you've already lost. It's still shockingly bad practice from a vendor, but if this is true it goes from a serious issue to a moderate one.
The, at this point anecdotal, evidence is based on people who are beyond the generally accepted 12 month window of improvement. They showed an increase in walking speed of .2 m/s while using the device, and an additional .1-.2 m/s improvement in the months following the device's use.
So, if their results hold up in larger studies, I would say that this is either a new effect, or the conventional wisdom is dead wrong and we're giving up on rehabilitation too soon. Either way it's fantastic news for stroke victims. Some of the people they talked about were able to double their comfortable walking speed, that's a pretty big deal for a stroke victim who was told by their doctor "this is the best you will ever be able to walk".
You typed three letters. 17,549,221 users who typed those three letters got these results. We'll just feel free to assume you couldn't want anything that they didn't want, see we got it all here in our statistics.
And 90% of the time they're right. The other 10% you might have to press a fourth letter (the horror!).
So... if the only reason that Japan has higher average speeds that the US is because they're densely populated, we should be able to look at similarly densely populated portions of the US and see a similar average. Except, you know, we don't. What's the average broadband speed in the greater New York City area? I'd put lots of money on it being barely better than the national average.
Maybe a cyber-sit-in would be more accurate though. Generally picketers let people into the business, it's just that every potential customer has to walk through the picket line, get shouted at, read the signs, etc. Sit-ins actually attempt to block the business from servicing customers, they're also a bit more shady on the legal side (just like a DDoS). The sit-in analogy also has the benefit of reminding the participants that what they're doing may very well get them in trouble, people who did sit-ins during the civil rights movement were often arrested (and for that matter, beaten).
Of course, sit-ins were usually done by people whom the establishment wouldn't serve, which is kind of what makes it poetic justice; the people sitting in are just waiting to be served. Maybe if the people involved in the DDoS were ready and willing to donate to Wikileaks (which I highly doubt) I would see it as more appropriate behavior.
One thing to keep in mind, Google honestly (and IMO naively) believes every house in America will have a gigabit internet connection before 2020. If they're right (a pretty big if), then there's no reason a dumb terminal couldn't work just fine in the foreseeable future. Pictures and music will load just as fast as they load off your hard drive today, you could easily run software out of the cloud, if latency were dramatically improved you could even run the software in the cloud and just send IO back and forth (isn't there a service already that does this?).
I think that the idea of a dumb terminal, no maintenance, appliance type computer is possible, just not possible with today's connectivity options. Get rid of the artificial monopolies granted to ISPs and give competition a decade for what's commercially possible to catch up to what's technically possible and it might be a viable choice for almost everyone. As is it's only a choice for those who already live 90% in the cloud.
Is there a reason that no one combines extruders and millers in one machine? I was under the impression that extruders waste less materials but cheap ones lack precision for small features, why not extrude a 'rough' shape and mill it down to be more precise. You'd still be limited to materials that can be extruded, but it seems like it would be give really good performance without having the hassle and cost of a super high resolution extruder.
In a similar vein, it's not like things have really changed. I bet just as many people talked about the case with friends and family, heard things they weren't supposed to, and had just as many pre-trial prejudices before the connected age as they do now. It's just that the new methods of communication leave a trail that public, near permanent, and easily searchable.
So, in my opinion, the courts can either just throw out the random cases where the jurors are too stupid to hide their misconduct, or they can use this as a learning experience to find new ways to reduce that misconduct. I'm hoping that it's both, leaning towards the latter, but the US judicial system isn't always the most agile.
Wait, this was supposed to be anti-Walmart?
My first thought was 'nifty' and my second thought was that this probably enforces the laws better than 90% of places that sell alcohol do.
You check ID's against the state DB (generally a skipped step in most stores), you have one trained guy dedicated to making sure the ID matches the shopper (as opposed to an 18 year old kid who couldn't care less), and a breathalyzer to get some kind of bearing on if they're drunk or not (as opposed to the 'is he stumbling around, slurring speech, and glassy eyed?' test).
I'd put money on it that somewhere in Amazon's thousands of listings there are a handful of counterfeit or pirated goods. Should the DNS providers go along with a government order to have Amazon de-listed? You might argue that these sights knew what they were doing and Amazon does not, but I would respond with the argument that there should be some due process there, not just a random bureaucrat making the decision.