Actually, the CFPB really is all about the people. The problem is that the government created them and then proceeded to do everything they could to keep them toothless when, holy shit, they were actually trying to protect consumers.
Most Senate Republicans have said they would block Cordray's nomination – or any other – unless the president agrees to changes that would replace the director with a panel, let Congress more easily cut the agency's budget and allow an oversight panel of banking regulators to more easily override bureau rules.
Congress wants to have "oversight" on the commission so they can basically tell it "no" anytime it wants to enact some sort of serious protections for us. Richard Cordray seems like a good choice, but we won't really know until the Commission starts making policy.
While this is undoubtedly an important study, their findings are going to have to be replicated somehow in a larger, more diverse set of subjects.
Okay. What's the most scientifically-valid way to measure "intelligence" independently? As far as I know, there's no one accepted standard above all else. I could be wrong, of course, and would love to see what the standard is so I can take it and be depressed about how dumb I may or may not be.
I lost my T-Mobile phone. Called to report it lost and said it was likely not to be recovered. They disabled the phone.
About 4 months later, we're hit with a $200+ bill for that number alone. Turns out they reactivate a lost phone as a "courtesy" for... some reason. Suffice to say we disputed the charges and they dropped the issue. Then, we dropped T-Mobile.
I think ______ is in dire need of a more polished and coherent UI. And a comprehensive user and installation guide.
New tech feats are ok, but they'll probably make the whole thing even less useable.
Insert your favorite FOSS equivalent of a commercial program in the blank, and you now know why it has a hard time taking off and beating the competition.
Usability is severely lacking in a lot of FOSS. Here's an example from my own personal experience. I wanted to outline some text in GIMP. this is what I had to go through. I'll just quote one of the comments from that post that gets the point across best:
Nov 21, 2007, piminger said: Are you serious? 6 steps to outline text?
Tell their execs to go to an Apple store and ask themselves why many people like going there. The experience of dealing with store employees does not feel like I've walked onto a used car lot with a sales guy waiting to eat my lunch.
Well yeah, that and the weapons-grade neurotoxin they pump into the air-conditioning system to-
Red Flag term detected. Dispatching Hunter iDroids.
Maybe, but then again Germany had forces deployed everywhere. 99% of the time military forces in America are either on base or at home.
I honestly think they would cause more damage than you expect. What if they airdropped near an airport or other piece of important structure? They can do the sort of damage that can harm the local (or national!) economy for months, if not years.
I just don't like this talk of "the military will stop them before they get here". It is entirely possible for them to get here before we can do anything about it and cause a lot of damage.
You can get an associates learning networking and programming and the like, CS will make you do a lot more theory that isn't really the goal of many students in the program.
I'd wager having the students in the school for 4 years rather than 2 years is definitely the goal of the school. It's not like a little thing like taking unnecessary classes matters to them, only that you are taking classes.
For those who don't know what the big deal is, way back when PC hardware was pretty crappy these groups were putting out some of the most demanding and advanced programs, stuff that put a lot of what the game companies were pushing to shame. The aforementioned Into the Shadows demo was released in 1995. This is long before 3D accelerators and hardware floating-point math were standard. It really was impressive at the time, and it was being done by groups of kids.
These kinds of people need to get together and make games, or even better a game engine. Inefficiency is rampant in the programming world today and is especially prevalent in the gaming world. Hell, even our OSes have these kinds of problems. I tried an Amiga at a friend's house, and the OS was snappier and more responsive than any GUI from the past 10 years that I've used.
You can have libertarian ideals without being downright fucking insane. There's a split between "small l" libertarians and "big L" libertarians.
For instance, I hold the libertarian viewpoint that the government has no right to tell you what you do to or put in your own body. I also think taxes are a good thing that are necessary to provide the things needed to keep a country safe and modern. I also think that more government oversight is needed.
I really dislike this whole "group every single one of your beliefs under a name and then stick to that until you die", thing.
Wouldn't something like the Normandy night air-drops be sufficient?
If you have paratroopers penetrating via several hundred or several thousand small transports, I doubt you are going to be able to shoot them all down.
I live in Newark, NJ, and there are a bunch colleges all right next to each other. Rutgers Newark, Essex County College, UMDNJ, NJIT, and all kinds of other smaller facilities and buildings. Most of the bigger ones have their own police forces, but there is no real defined "campus" that doesn't have city roads passing through it. So in this little area we literally have four or five private police forces driving around on our city streets with nearly all of the power of the police and not nearly enough oversight IMO.
And the simple fact is i'm sure we do the same thing duh!
I think it would be harder for a Westerner to ship home Chinese information than a Chinese person to ship home Western information.
Despite the last ten years or so of us dumping civil rights into the shitter, the United States is still a pretty free place to live. Asians aren't viewed with the same irrational suspicion as blacks, latinos, or arabs by the police AFAIK.
Moreover, there's a cultural difference. Imagine the new potential for sleeper agents. I imagine the Chinese would be willing to settle down, lead perfectly suspicion-free lives, have kids, and then have their children infiltrate the system 20 years down the line. It's pretty much impossible to detect without a hell of a lot of oppressive surveillance and/or a lot of institutional racism.
I don't think it will be a "disaster" per se. I see a handful of likely scenarios.
If China invades us, our allies will likely help us. I don't think most of Europe has forgotten World War II. The layperson considers the landings at Normandy the moment we turned the tide against the Nazis.
On the other hand, if they don't help us out at all, then maybe we will get our asses kicked. Frankly, for all the shit we do to other countries around the world we really deserve it.
There's also the possibility of China getting up to speed with us and then doing the same thing we're doing - "Nation building". Sure, we give a damn about certain Asian allies like Taiwan, but what if China invaded a Middle Eastern Country that no one in the West cared about? What if China invaded Uzbekistan or something like that...
We'd eventually end up in this weird power struggle between Europe, Russia, China, and ourselves. What if the next time our government goes to invade some desert country, China steps in and stops us? Now these poor bastards who have the misfortune of living in Camelfuckistan have to be the battleground for a China vs. U.S. fight, all the while both sides claiming to protect the country they are currently ruining one way or another.
The only good side I see about it is the potential for one nation to actually be able to give us pause, militarily. One country having as much power as we do in our hands is never a good thing for anyone other than the people who stand to make a lot of money from it.
Prior art - Japanese castles and mansions would have what I believe were called "canary floors". They were deliberately designed to squeak loudly as an anti-intruder measure. They were installed in critical areas to make it difficult for assassins to sneak around the mansion or castle at night.
Probably not. The whole "racism is wrong" thing only really applies in one direction nowadays. If a black kid utters "cracker" or "honky" to a white student he'll probably not get in any trouble. Now do it the other way around and see how long the white kid who was stupid enough to use a racist slur will last in that school.
I think the article was fine up until Point 10. That's where I was starting to feel a bit uneasy. However, I think it's largely accurate. As ignorant as some of his statements may be, well, I live in a predominantly black city myself. I see a lot of this behavior that he talks about. I treat people as people and I don't really have much consideration for race beyond "Man, you must save a lot on sun tan lotion every year", but you're a moron if you don't notice certain recurring patterns.
Then again, if I went into a trailer park in the deep south I imagine my perceptions of the white people who live there wouldn't be too good either, now would they?
Right, part of the compromises in the DMCA was that all the website had to do was follow through on DMCA notices. That's it. They have no onus to actually stop infringing content unless it's reported or they willingly put it up themselves, do they?
Electricity is also not a resource like water, where if you don't pump it out one second, you can pump it out the next second. Use it or lose it. Converted to DC, it can be stored in capacitors or batteries, but at a very high cost.
Okay, now this is something I am genuinely curious about.
It's a given that electricity is cheaper at night. Hell, the government advises you to run things like dishwashers and laundry at night to reduce the load on the grid.
When you get solar panels installed, you also usually get battery packs installed in your home to handle the whole "cloudy day" scenario.
So here's my question: how come just installing the battery packs has never come up as an easy "green" solution? Some battery packs, a timer, and a AC/DC converter and you could just fill the batteries at night and bleed off of them in the daytime. If and when the batteries run low, the connection to the grid can go hot again. It wouldn't be as good as solar panels (for the environment, anyway) but it'd be better than being connected to the grid all the time and way cheaper in the long run I imagine.
You know, AIM did stuff that I wish other chat programs would do.
"Ghost mode" was one of my favorite things. You'd appear as offline, but you could talk to any one person and only them. You can see who is online, but they can't see you. It prevents 11 IMs from popping up every time you sign on, and helps you keep conversations under control.
I wish Steam had something like this and a "notes" system as well. Some of my friends swap their names and avatars around so much I forget who the hell they are! I've resorted to using "tagging", which unfortunately sorts them into their own groups with a title and collapsible menu. So now I'm gonna have over a hundred of these little shits because Steam has been too lazy to let us add a bit of text to our friends list. -.-
Hey, guess what? We're a group of people that have a lot in common. Just like "Christian" can mean Baptist, Coptic, Pentecoastal, Reformed, Unitarian, or literally dozens (hell, hundreds maybe!) of different sects, there's loads of different kinds of atheists. We're a bit hard to pin down because the only thing that unifies us is the lack of belief in God.
I don't say "only evolution occurs". I say "Evolution is the best idea we have as to how life got to this point. Maybe one day we'll have a better one, but it beats an unprovable 'a guy in the sky did it' scenario."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the CFPB really is all about the people. The problem is that the government created them and then proceeded to do everything they could to keep them toothless when, holy shit, they were actually trying to protect consumers.
Most Senate Republicans have said they would block Cordray's nomination – or any other – unless the president agrees to changes that would replace the director with a panel, let Congress more easily cut the agency's budget and allow an oversight panel of banking regulators to more easily override bureau rules.
http://www.cleveland.com/consumeraffairs/index.ssf/2011/07/elizabeth_warren_leaving_the_c.html
Congress wants to have "oversight" on the commission so they can basically tell it "no" anytime it wants to enact some sort of serious protections for us. Richard Cordray seems like a good choice, but we won't really know until the Commission starts making policy.
While this is undoubtedly an important study, their findings are going to have to be replicated somehow in a larger, more diverse set of subjects.
Okay. What's the most scientifically-valid way to measure "intelligence" independently? As far as I know, there's no one accepted standard above all else. I could be wrong, of course, and would love to see what the standard is so I can take it and be depressed about how dumb I may or may not be.
Honestly, the best way to debug a windshield is a full wipe.
I lost my T-Mobile phone. Called to report it lost and said it was likely not to be recovered. They disabled the phone.
About 4 months later, we're hit with a $200+ bill for that number alone. Turns out they reactivate a lost phone as a "courtesy" for... some reason. Suffice to say we disputed the charges and they dropped the issue. Then, we dropped T-Mobile.
I give it three months at most before a "de-bricker" tool and instructions on how to get around such disabling are online.
I think ______ is in dire need of a more polished and coherent UI. And a comprehensive user and installation guide.
New tech feats are ok, but they'll probably make the whole thing even less useable.
Insert your favorite FOSS equivalent of a commercial program in the blank, and you now know why it has a hard time taking off and beating the competition.
Usability is severely lacking in a lot of FOSS. Here's an example from my own personal experience. I wanted to outline some text in GIMP. this is what I had to go through. I'll just quote one of the comments from that post that gets the point across best:
Nov 21, 2007, piminger said:
Are you serious? 6 steps to outline text?
Tell their execs to go to an Apple store and ask themselves why many people like going there. The experience of dealing with store employees does not feel like I've walked onto a used car lot with a sales guy waiting to eat my lunch.
Well yeah, that and the weapons-grade neurotoxin they pump into the air-conditioning system to-
Red Flag term detected. Dispatching Hunter iDroids.
Oh no, they've found me!
Maybe, but then again Germany had forces deployed everywhere. 99% of the time military forces in America are either on base or at home.
I honestly think they would cause more damage than you expect. What if they airdropped near an airport or other piece of important structure? They can do the sort of damage that can harm the local (or national!) economy for months, if not years.
I just don't like this talk of "the military will stop them before they get here". It is entirely possible for them to get here before we can do anything about it and cause a lot of damage.
Dialup... service? What is this?
It's like the Internet on your Droid, but it's over a landline and you use a computer instead of a smart phone.
You can get an associates learning networking and programming and the like, CS will make you do a lot more theory that isn't really the goal of many students in the program.
I'd wager having the students in the school for 4 years rather than 2 years is definitely the goal of the school. It's not like a little thing like taking unnecessary classes matters to them, only that you are taking classes.
For those who don't know what the big deal is, way back when PC hardware was pretty crappy these groups were putting out some of the most demanding and advanced programs, stuff that put a lot of what the game companies were pushing to shame. The aforementioned Into the Shadows demo was released in 1995. This is long before 3D accelerators and hardware floating-point math were standard. It really was impressive at the time, and it was being done by groups of kids.
These kinds of people need to get together and make games, or even better a game engine. Inefficiency is rampant in the programming world today and is especially prevalent in the gaming world. Hell, even our OSes have these kinds of problems. I tried an Amiga at a friend's house, and the OS was snappier and more responsive than any GUI from the past 10 years that I've used.
You can have libertarian ideals without being downright fucking insane. There's a split between "small l" libertarians and "big L" libertarians.
For instance, I hold the libertarian viewpoint that the government has no right to tell you what you do to or put in your own body. I also think taxes are a good thing that are necessary to provide the things needed to keep a country safe and modern. I also think that more government oversight is needed.
I really dislike this whole "group every single one of your beliefs under a name and then stick to that until you die", thing.
Wouldn't something like the Normandy night air-drops be sufficient?
If you have paratroopers penetrating via several hundred or several thousand small transports, I doubt you are going to be able to shoot them all down.
Damn it, I knew it was a bird. I just got the wrong one. -.- Thanks.
I live in Newark, NJ, and there are a bunch colleges all right next to each other. Rutgers Newark, Essex County College, UMDNJ, NJIT, and all kinds of other smaller facilities and buildings. Most of the bigger ones have their own police forces, but there is no real defined "campus" that doesn't have city roads passing through it. So in this little area we literally have four or five private police forces driving around on our city streets with nearly all of the power of the police and not nearly enough oversight IMO.
FOSS proponents would say that we can just make our own beach, then hand everyone a small plastic cup and say "get to work!"
And the simple fact is i'm sure we do the same thing duh!
I think it would be harder for a Westerner to ship home Chinese information than a Chinese person to ship home Western information.
Despite the last ten years or so of us dumping civil rights into the shitter, the United States is still a pretty free place to live. Asians aren't viewed with the same irrational suspicion as blacks, latinos, or arabs by the police AFAIK.
Moreover, there's a cultural difference. Imagine the new potential for sleeper agents. I imagine the Chinese would be willing to settle down, lead perfectly suspicion-free lives, have kids, and then have their children infiltrate the system 20 years down the line. It's pretty much impossible to detect without a hell of a lot of oppressive surveillance and/or a lot of institutional racism.
I don't think it will be a "disaster" per se. I see a handful of likely scenarios.
If China invades us, our allies will likely help us. I don't think most of Europe has forgotten World War II. The layperson considers the landings at Normandy the moment we turned the tide against the Nazis.
On the other hand, if they don't help us out at all, then maybe we will get our asses kicked. Frankly, for all the shit we do to other countries around the world we really deserve it.
There's also the possibility of China getting up to speed with us and then doing the same thing we're doing - "Nation building". Sure, we give a damn about certain Asian allies like Taiwan, but what if China invaded a Middle Eastern Country that no one in the West cared about? What if China invaded Uzbekistan or something like that...
We'd eventually end up in this weird power struggle between Europe, Russia, China, and ourselves. What if the next time our government goes to invade some desert country, China steps in and stops us? Now these poor bastards who have the misfortune of living in Camelfuckistan have to be the battleground for a China vs. U.S. fight, all the while both sides claiming to protect the country they are currently ruining one way or another.
The only good side I see about it is the potential for one nation to actually be able to give us pause, militarily. One country having as much power as we do in our hands is never a good thing for anyone other than the people who stand to make a lot of money from it.
Prior art - Japanese castles and mansions would have what I believe were called "canary floors". They were deliberately designed to squeak loudly as an anti-intruder measure. They were installed in critical areas to make it difficult for assassins to sneak around the mansion or castle at night.
Probably not. The whole "racism is wrong" thing only really applies in one direction nowadays. If a black kid utters "cracker" or "honky" to a white student he'll probably not get in any trouble. Now do it the other way around and see how long the white kid who was stupid enough to use a racist slur will last in that school.
I think the article was fine up until Point 10. That's where I was starting to feel a bit uneasy. However, I think it's largely accurate. As ignorant as some of his statements may be, well, I live in a predominantly black city myself. I see a lot of this behavior that he talks about. I treat people as people and I don't really have much consideration for race beyond "Man, you must save a lot on sun tan lotion every year", but you're a moron if you don't notice certain recurring patterns.
Then again, if I went into a trailer park in the deep south I imagine my perceptions of the white people who live there wouldn't be too good either, now would they?
Right, part of the compromises in the DMCA was that all the website had to do was follow through on DMCA notices. That's it. They have no onus to actually stop infringing content unless it's reported or they willingly put it up themselves, do they?
Electricity is also not a resource like water, where if you don't pump it out one second, you can pump it out the next second. Use it or lose it. Converted to DC, it can be stored in capacitors or batteries, but at a very high cost.
Okay, now this is something I am genuinely curious about.
It's a given that electricity is cheaper at night. Hell, the government advises you to run things like dishwashers and laundry at night to reduce the load on the grid.
When you get solar panels installed, you also usually get battery packs installed in your home to handle the whole "cloudy day" scenario.
So here's my question: how come just installing the battery packs has never come up as an easy "green" solution? Some battery packs, a timer, and a AC/DC converter and you could just fill the batteries at night and bleed off of them in the daytime. If and when the batteries run low, the connection to the grid can go hot again. It wouldn't be as good as solar panels (for the environment, anyway) but it'd be better than being connected to the grid all the time and way cheaper in the long run I imagine.
You know, AIM did stuff that I wish other chat programs would do.
"Ghost mode" was one of my favorite things. You'd appear as offline, but you could talk to any one person and only them. You can see who is online, but they can't see you. It prevents 11 IMs from popping up every time you sign on, and helps you keep conversations under control.
I wish Steam had something like this and a "notes" system as well. Some of my friends swap their names and avatars around so much I forget who the hell they are! I've resorted to using "tagging", which unfortunately sorts them into their own groups with a title and collapsible menu. So now I'm gonna have over a hundred of these little shits because Steam has been too lazy to let us add a bit of text to our friends list. -.-
I dunno, I think a 12-gauge and some sort of modified clay-pigeon apparatus would be more ideal.
For added irony, you could load the shotshells with machine screws instead of buckshot.
As an Atheist, no. Just no.
Hey, guess what? We're a group of people that have a lot in common. Just like "Christian" can mean Baptist, Coptic, Pentecoastal, Reformed, Unitarian, or literally dozens (hell, hundreds maybe!) of different sects, there's loads of different kinds of atheists. We're a bit hard to pin down because the only thing that unifies us is the lack of belief in God.
I don't say "only evolution occurs". I say "Evolution is the best idea we have as to how life got to this point. Maybe one day we'll have a better one, but it beats an unprovable 'a guy in the sky did it' scenario."