That would definitely increase the police brutality factor might be a good idea, but I think it might be hard to work into the framework of a believable 911 call. If you tried to say that it was an on-duty cop it would be really easy to cross-check even from memory. And if it was an off-duty cop you'd have a hard time explaining how in the midst of all the excitement you knew they were a cop.
Upon review, it does not look like you're the sort of jack-booted authoritarian who loves the police no matter what they do. And you aren't incapable of some reasonable degree of thought. So, you don't go on my foes list. Not that I expect you care all that much. But I thought I'd tell you that I considered it.
You might want to do some reading and research. The police in the US are definitely a mixed bag and have a strong tendency towards unnecessary violence and being brutish thugs. I think it varies a lot by location, but in some locations they are truly vicious thugs who get off on hurting and/or killing people. Unfortunately the establishment considers even vicious thugs better than no police and almost always acts to cover things up to avoid destroying the police's reputation.
I tend to give them a bit of a benefit of a doubt because they sometimes deal with some pretty extreme situations, but I still think that we have way overly brutal police in most places in the US.
SWAT isn't going to shoot unless they have reason to AT THE SCENE. There is no way in hell anyone could send orders to SWAT to say "kill person XYZ". SWAT doesn't do assassinations, they are called in to prevent deaths if possible.
Well, that's very true. But it would be stupid to do that, and I clearly somehow manage to miscommunicate my point in my post if that's what you think I meant.
To be perfectly clear, here are the steps you would follow:
Trick the 911 system like this teenager did.
Report the description of the person you want to kill.
Say that the person has killed a few other people and seems to be really handy with just about any weapon.
For even better effect, say that he has killed one person who tried to fight back in close quarters with a well placed jab to the throat.
Say the person is on PCP.
Call the person in question and say you're a neighbor and saw someone outside with a light.
Poof, there's a recipe for a likely 'accidental' shooting of an innocent person by the cops. You've basically told them there's a horribly deranged and dangerous person somewhere and then primed the person to react belligerently in the first instant the person notices anything.
It wouldn't work as well if your target were a woman because of cultural conditioning, but you might still be able to pull it off.
Even better, because the cops never, ever admit they're wrong, ever, the person then ends up framed for some bogus crime so the shooting seems justified.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. Though I do commend the cops in question on having made the right decision and they didn't shoot the guy. But it could easily have gone the other way. With a little more knowledge by the teenager he could've set the cops up for it even more than he did and made it that much more likely.
Assassination by tricking the cops into doing it for you has now been proven to be possible. It's only a matter of time. And I bet if it had gone down that way instead of the way it did, we'd never even be hearing about this case.
IMHO, the real test is "Could they use this technology without revealing how it worked?". The thing you get from the patent office should be an exchange. We give you this funny monopoly right, you tell everybody in plain English how it works. If there is no exchange, no monopoly right should be granted. Amazon's 1-click patent fails that test completely. There is no way they can use this technology at all without it becoming obvious to the world what's up.
Many things seem obvious after you learn about them, but you would never in a million years have thought of it. So obviousness is a very fuzzy criteria.
There is no way for anybody but Microsoft to adequately implement the OOXML 'standard' but it is trivial for others to implement FAT. ODF at least has several existing implementations of varying levels of quality. Most are Open Source and so other implementers have code to look at when they're implementing.
In my opinion, a standard without source really isn't a standard at all. English is not a sufficiently precise language to really adequately describe a standard for computers, especially a complex one. Source code is the only real standard.
The IETF knows this, which is why the rule used to be (maybe it still is) that there have to be two inter-operating implementations before they'll call it a standard. IMHO, they should go the extra step and require one of the implementations to be licensed in a manner that meets the Open Source definition, but they created the rule before the concept of Free Software was all that widespread.
You are their friend if you think that people should just take their ridiculous settlement offer and leave it at that. IMHO, she shouldn't have bothered with saying she didn't do it and gone for the ridiculousness of the fine right away. But I can't fault her for having tried.
There is a lot of evidence to show that chess grand masters get so good at the game by essentially memorizing positions and what to do. If you give people a chess board to memorize that is the result of an actual series of moves, they don't do so well, and grandmaster chess players do really well. If you give people a random chess board to memorize everybody does fairly poorly, though the grand master chess players still beat most people the margin is not nearly so wide.
There are other pieces of evidence other than this.
So a database of opening positions is likely not so different from what a grand master chess player is carrying around in h(is/er) head. The only difference is that a computer can spit back a list of all the different boards whereas the grand master likely can only access the positions that are near the one (s)he is currently concerned with.
What I do call cheating is the programmers adjusting the algorithm between games to account for the play of the person the program is up against. And that did happen during the famous match with Kasparov.
IMHO, for reasons of locality I think the no shared state model generally wins. The shared state models all involve lots of shuffling around of things between different caches under the hood, and that takes time. I wrote a couple of LJ entries on this:
As I understand it, the GPLv3 is actually much more compatible with other Open Source licenses than the GPLv2 was. I honestly don't know of anything I would consider a downside to the GPLv3. I think it's all around a better license than the GPLv2.
AFAIK, there are no quantum computing algorithms that do more than effectively halve the effective key length for symmetric key cryptography (things like AES, DES and Blowfish). This means that if you use quantum cryptography to exchange symmetric keys, you should then be able to continue on using these kinds of ciphers in a normal communications channel.
That's not quite true, there's quantum suicide and immortality.
What is quantum suicide, and why does it help resolve whether or not the many worlds hypothesis is true? Similarly, how does immortality help resolve the issue?
I'm not a physicist, but it seems to me that dark matter (to some small extent) and dark energy definitely point to something being fundamentally mistaken in our current understanding of things. I think your explanation has as many problems as invoking some mysterious energy stuff pervading all of space, but again I'm not a physicist.
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't fit a primary requirement which is that it be falsifiable. We need to be able to do an experiment that would have a different outcome of the hypothesis were true or false. As far as I know, nobody has thought of any such experiment yet. The many world interpretation is a philosophical debate, but not yet a scientific one.
OTOH, dark matter and dark energy demonstrably do exist. There are repeatable experiments that show that dark matter definitely does exist. At least, there's something bending all the light and we sure can't see what it is, and the most logical explanation given the things we currently know about how the universe works indicates that there has to be a whole bunch of matter we can't see there.
Dark energy is a little trickier. There all we can tell is that the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating. The easiest interpretation of this piece of data is that there is some kind of stuff suffusing all of space that repels things that we will choose to call dark energy.
So if a single person can boss people around because he has a nuke strapped to him, he constitutes a government?
Provided people start doing what he says instead of figuring out a way to get rid of him. Once they start doing what he says an organization will start growing around him to carry out those orders.
I would argue that laws governing property and such also prop up monopolies. In a country ruled by gangs, you don't have any single government to appeal to, but if the gangs all tacitly agreed not to touch a certain organization's stuff, then that organization could use those rules to create a monopoly.
If a monopoly develops around a resource, I guarantee you that the resource has an army of thugs protecting it. They might be police, or guns beholden to the local autocrat or whatever. And that constitutes a government.
So, in essence I agree with the original poster. Monopoly power requires governmental support to create.
They assist primarily with copyright law, but also with trademark law and trade secret law. They also assist with the laws that define corporations and give them rights as if they were people. There is a whole host of ways in which government assists just about any corporation. IMHO, a corporation can not be thought of separate from the government and laws that allow it to exist as a legal entity.
If that's true, he needs to be removed from the board. While I agree that Microsoft is engaging in some really underhanded and shady tactics to get a non-interoperable 'standard' shoved through, that's none of OSI's concern. It's like the state revoking the driver's licenses of deadbeat dads.
Ahh, so torturing people into being obedient to authority is how we should be doing things now? Yet another authoritarian asshole. I'm compiling quite a list from this story.
No. Religion is explicitly prohibited as a reason for discrimination. What the manager did was not at all unconstitutional. If it was in violation of anything, it was corporate policy.
No it's not. It's not allowed for the government to discriminate, but private entities are free to discriminate all they want to.
True, which is why vital resources are protected by the government.
Could you please cite some source or example or something for your random bald assertion?
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I've read numerous stories of 'accidental' shootings that hardly seemed justified. Almost always there is a coverup of some kind.
That would definitely increase the police brutality factor might be a good idea, but I think it might be hard to work into the framework of a believable 911 call. If you tried to say that it was an on-duty cop it would be really easy to cross-check even from memory. And if it was an off-duty cop you'd have a hard time explaining how in the midst of all the excitement you knew they were a cop.
Upon review, it does not look like you're the sort of jack-booted authoritarian who loves the police no matter what they do. And you aren't incapable of some reasonable degree of thought. So, you don't go on my foes list. Not that I expect you care all that much. But I thought I'd tell you that I considered it.
You might want to do some reading and research. The police in the US are definitely a mixed bag and have a strong tendency towards unnecessary violence and being brutish thugs. I think it varies a lot by location, but in some locations they are truly vicious thugs who get off on hurting and/or killing people. Unfortunately the establishment considers even vicious thugs better than no police and almost always acts to cover things up to avoid destroying the police's reputation.
I tend to give them a bit of a benefit of a doubt because they sometimes deal with some pretty extreme situations, but I still think that we have way overly brutal police in most places in the US.
Well, that's very true. But it would be stupid to do that, and I clearly somehow manage to miscommunicate my point in my post if that's what you think I meant.
To be perfectly clear, here are the steps you would follow:
Poof, there's a recipe for a likely 'accidental' shooting of an innocent person by the cops. You've basically told them there's a horribly deranged and dangerous person somewhere and then primed the person to react belligerently in the first instant the person notices anything.
It wouldn't work as well if your target were a woman because of cultural conditioning, but you might still be able to pull it off.
Even better, because the cops never, ever admit they're wrong, ever, the person then ends up framed for some bogus crime so the shooting seems justified.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. Though I do commend the cops in question on having made the right decision and they didn't shoot the guy. But it could easily have gone the other way. With a little more knowledge by the teenager he could've set the cops up for it even more than he did and made it that much more likely.
Assassination by tricking the cops into doing it for you has now been proven to be possible. It's only a matter of time. And I bet if it had gone down that way instead of the way it did, we'd never even be hearing about this case.
IMHO, the real test is "Could they use this technology without revealing how it worked?". The thing you get from the patent office should be an exchange. We give you this funny monopoly right, you tell everybody in plain English how it works. If there is no exchange, no monopoly right should be granted. Amazon's 1-click patent fails that test completely. There is no way they can use this technology at all without it becoming obvious to the world what's up.
Many things seem obvious after you learn about them, but you would never in a million years have thought of it. So obviousness is a very fuzzy criteria.
There is no way for anybody but Microsoft to adequately implement the OOXML 'standard' but it is trivial for others to implement FAT. ODF at least has several existing implementations of varying levels of quality. Most are Open Source and so other implementers have code to look at when they're implementing.
In my opinion, a standard without source really isn't a standard at all. English is not a sufficiently precise language to really adequately describe a standard for computers, especially a complex one. Source code is the only real standard.
The IETF knows this, which is why the rule used to be (maybe it still is) that there have to be two inter-operating implementations before they'll call it a standard. IMHO, they should go the extra step and require one of the implementations to be licensed in a manner that meets the Open Source definition, but they created the rule before the concept of Free Software was all that widespread.
You are their friend if you think that people should just take their ridiculous settlement offer and leave it at that. IMHO, she shouldn't have bothered with saying she didn't do it and gone for the ridiculousness of the fine right away. But I can't fault her for having tried.
There is a lot of evidence to show that chess grand masters get so good at the game by essentially memorizing positions and what to do. If you give people a chess board to memorize that is the result of an actual series of moves, they don't do so well, and grandmaster chess players do really well. If you give people a random chess board to memorize everybody does fairly poorly, though the grand master chess players still beat most people the margin is not nearly so wide.
There are other pieces of evidence other than this.
So a database of opening positions is likely not so different from what a grand master chess player is carrying around in h(is/er) head. The only difference is that a computer can spit back a list of all the different boards whereas the grand master likely can only access the positions that are near the one (s)he is currently concerned with.
What I do call cheating is the programmers adjusting the algorithm between games to account for the play of the person the program is up against. And that did happen during the famous match with Kasparov.
IMHO, for reasons of locality I think the no shared state model generally wins. The shared state models all involve lots of shuffling around of things between different caches under the hood, and that takes time. I wrote a couple of LJ entries on this:
As I understand it, the GPLv3 is actually much more compatible with other Open Source licenses than the GPLv2 was. I honestly don't know of anything I would consider a downside to the GPLv3. I think it's all around a better license than the GPLv2.
AFAIK, there are no quantum computing algorithms that do more than effectively halve the effective key length for symmetric key cryptography (things like AES, DES and Blowfish). This means that if you use quantum cryptography to exchange symmetric keys, you should then be able to continue on using these kinds of ciphers in a normal communications channel.
What is quantum suicide, and why does it help resolve whether or not the many worlds hypothesis is true? Similarly, how does immortality help resolve the issue?
I'm not a physicist, but it seems to me that dark matter (to some small extent) and dark energy definitely point to something being fundamentally mistaken in our current understanding of things. I think your explanation has as many problems as invoking some mysterious energy stuff pervading all of space, but again I'm not a physicist.
I'll feed this troll...
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't fit a primary requirement which is that it be falsifiable. We need to be able to do an experiment that would have a different outcome of the hypothesis were true or false. As far as I know, nobody has thought of any such experiment yet. The many world interpretation is a philosophical debate, but not yet a scientific one.
OTOH, dark matter and dark energy demonstrably do exist. There are repeatable experiments that show that dark matter definitely does exist. At least, there's something bending all the light and we sure can't see what it is, and the most logical explanation given the things we currently know about how the universe works indicates that there has to be a whole bunch of matter we can't see there.
Dark energy is a little trickier. There all we can tell is that the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating. The easiest interpretation of this piece of data is that there is some kind of stuff suffusing all of space that repels things that we will choose to call dark energy.
So if a single person can boss people around because he has a nuke strapped to him, he constitutes a government?
Provided people start doing what he says instead of figuring out a way to get rid of him. Once they start doing what he says an organization will start growing around him to carry out those orders.
Let me guess: you're an anarchist ?
Sometimes. On alternate Sundays and some weekdays according to a complex cycle involving the moon and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. :-)
I would argue that laws governing property and such also prop up monopolies. In a country ruled by gangs, you don't have any single government to appeal to, but if the gangs all tacitly agreed not to touch a certain organization's stuff, then that organization could use those rules to create a monopoly.
If a monopoly develops around a resource, I guarantee you that the resource has an army of thugs protecting it. They might be police, or guns beholden to the local autocrat or whatever. And that constitutes a government.
So, in essence I agree with the original poster. Monopoly power requires governmental support to create.
They assist primarily with copyright law, but also with trademark law and trade secret law. They also assist with the laws that define corporations and give them rights as if they were people. There is a whole host of ways in which government assists just about any corporation. IMHO, a corporation can not be thought of separate from the government and laws that allow it to exist as a legal entity.
If that's true, he needs to be removed from the board. While I agree that Microsoft is engaging in some really underhanded and shady tactics to get a non-interoperable 'standard' shoved through, that's none of OSI's concern. It's like the state revoking the driver's licenses of deadbeat dads.
I've gotten enough 'pain compliance' in my life to make me want to rip the throat out of the cop who uses it on me.
Ahh, so torturing people into being obedient to authority is how we should be doing things now? Yet another authoritarian asshole. I'm compiling quite a list from this story.
I love Slashdot, it makes it so easy to find the authoritarian assholes who deserve to be tortured in a Chinese prison camp.
No it's not. It's not allowed for the government to discriminate, but private entities are free to discriminate all they want to.
Could you please cite some source or example or something for your random bald assertion?
The ip address link in your homepage link makes me very suspicious.