"their persons and papers".... it still takes a warrant to pull the NSA data.
I want to live in a country where a US citizen can't be spied on without a warrant. I don't want to live in a country where the government spies on everyone as a matter of course, but pinky-swears not to look at the data unless they need to.
Well, they don't know what my prostate feels like. (Can't wait for them to innovate that.)
Well, they know your age, and likely know what doctors you've recently visited (if they sent appointment reminders to your gmail box), so they might have a first approximation.
ve grown to trust Google less and less. After the Damore letter and now this, i'm seriously considering switching to an alternative email service.
As I've said here before: outlook.com doesn't suck. I switched to it a few years back out of frustration with the changes to the gmail UI, and haven't regretted it. I'm not sure it's better in some objective way, beyond not sending your data to Google, but if the goal is to live a Google-free life, outlook.com is fine.
OTOH, I've come to like duckduckgo better than google search, mostly for the handy "bangs" (try "!wa erf(x)" or "!a go the fuck to sleep").
I still don't see a use for a smartphone - I'd take a feature phone with Audible and Kindle if one existed. And Apple's MP3 players were shiny garbage - they were always the worst, from a geek perspective, and not well liked on Slashdot back in the day.
Jobs's genius was in turning personal electronics into jewelry. Having an iPod, and later an iPhone, was a status symbol. He invented that! Didn't matter whether the actual products were any good. Pure genius.
he doesn't explain how Google is no longer being innovative for people who buy or display ads
To be fair, that's all NDA stuff. Still, I expect there hasn't been much innovation on the "creepy stalking of your personal information" front either. Once they know everything about you, what's left to innovate?
What I am getting at is....there is no moral failing in ceasing to be an innovator once you have built your empire. It is natural and ok to shift to the conservative. And it is also ok for people who dislike that corporate environment to leave (and be replaced by people who prefer the new, less risk-takey corporate environment).
There is no cause for lamentation here.
Unless you're a stockholder. Alphabet is priced at about 3x what it should be for a company that's done innovating, and it doesn't even pay a dividend. At least Microsoft had the common decency to start paying a dividend when it was obvious that the days of innovation-driven growth were behind it.
As the AC said, it's not just the football - the president has to carry a little card on his person. And it has come out that certain presidents couldn't be bothered.
To be fair to Hawaii - the proper, non-twitter method was used to send the missile alert. That same system had a way to say "oops", but bureaucracy happened. The tweet would have been an improvisation, not the intended system, for cancelling the alert.
You'd think that e.g. a president of the US could be bothered to carry the little card with him needed to authorize a nuclear strike should things go bad in a hurry. More than a couple of people involved in getting that one right, and yet some recent residents couldn't be bothered. Rather more important than a twitter password (OK, that has me wondering what Trump would tweet as he launched the nukes).
Likewise for web browsers. It's not bloat to blame for the fact I expect a browser to be able to stream a 4K movie in surround sound. It's not bloat to blame for the 40 tabs I run concurrently. It's not bloat that I have 10 office apps open along side video conferencing software along with those browser windows.
Yes, that is bloat. You've just lowered your expectations so far you don't see it. Browsers are a great example - what they actually do is so simple that you should be able to have 1000 tabs open with no meaningful load, since you the human are only interacting with a small number of them at any given time. But there's so much crazy cruft going on that it's at least 99% abstraction layers, with very little time left for the actual logic (if any) of the page.
For example, look at using JS to parse a DOM where everything is not just serialized to text, but wrapped in a markup-based protocol (often multiple layers deep). Compare that to using optimized assembly to traverse a binary protocol hand-tuned for optimal performance. Because I've done that, back in the day, and we supported 2000 active users (think 2000 tabs) on a machine similar to a 200 MHz Pentium in power.
And this has been the case for longer than America has existed, yet democracy seems to do OK. You think the anonymous handbills the Founding Fathers were printing to foment revolution were fair and balanced? Man, they'd make 4chan blush.
Biased propaganda to influence elections is precisely what the First Amendment is there to protect - good thing too, as some "news" networks are 100% anti-Trump propaganda 24/7.
I know it's fashionable with pseudo-intellectuals (e.g., TFA) to believe that the average person is incapable of making any important decision, and thus media should only exist to guide them to the decision make by their betters, but that's aristocracy, not democracy.
No, really, going around believing what you're told by "experts" is religion. It's all about faith. It's not that you have to perform every experiment, though as an undergrad you'll perform a lot of the key ones, but that you need to understand why experts say everything they do insofar as it relates to your field, and later your specialty. If you want to do original work you must understand what's gone before.
I know it's fashionable in some circles to "love the science," which typically means unquestioning belief in popularizers (who, BTW, lie to you) but that's not science. Science is very much the questioning.
So, yes, this guy is doing science. He's not doing it well, mind you, as there are much better and simpler experiments he could do, but he's got the essence of it.
Is this why Sydney, Australia is undergoing the the most extreme heat wave on record?
Well, duh, of course it is - the Sun if off orbiting close to Australia during the winter, and orbits close to America during the summer so of course it's cold in Australia then.
He is doing science because he thinks the government lies to us all. And of course the government does lie to us all, constantly. He's simply wrong about the governments ability to lie consistently, as would be need for such a conspiracy.
Believing what experts tell you is the opposite of science. Performing your own experiment in an attempt to falsify a published result is the very essence of science.
Plus he'll likely be just fine - this is just a modestly scaled-up version of his previous run.
Plenty of jobs in other tech cities, and they'll be delighted to have you. I just moved out of Seattle, as it had become insane, to Texas. Definite step up.
Or, if you're smarter than a sack of hammers, you'll buy another house somewhere cheap, and retire on the difference. Or rent, if you want to keep working in that area.
Heck, that worked for two different families I'm friends with: they sold their home near the peak of a real estate bubble, and one rented until the bubble collapsed, while the other moved to Europe. Each pocketed severed hundred thousand dollars.
It sucks to be the new guy who has to move there, but just don't be that guy (unless the pay more than makes up for the cost).
If you want an electric car because of "environmental issues" that's virtue signalling. If you want to force electric cars on others, that's totalitarianism. But if you want an electric car because it's a better car, well, that better car isn't quite here yet. Once it is, you can invent conspiracy theories about The Man keeping it down, but in the meantime no evil government action is needed to explain why consumers didn't buy bad products.
But don't you get the feeling that the US government might be?
No. Nor do I believe Bush did 9/11, or Obama was born in Kenya, or any other whackjob conspirator theory. The simple fact is: electric cars pre-Tesla were garbage cars, sold at a massive loss. Tesla is a big step up, to a markedly sub-standard car at the price (but still something reasonable) sold at break even or a minor loss (once you net out the subsidies). It's a difference in kind: the Tesla S is almost a viable electric car, and the 3 might actually be the first to cross that line.
Tesla is remarkable for demonstrating that electric cars might soon be viable, to break through the conservatism of the board room. But we won't see a good electric car, a car that normal people unconcerned with virtue signalling want to buy, until we get a decade or two of competition; competition that hasn't quite started yet.
Airships full of hydrogen gas? I can see no flaw in that plan, from either an engineering or marketing perspective. It's a non-starter - doesn't pass the laugh test, doesn't pass the smoke test.
Having your health damaged so that some politician can get paid is not "objectively good" in any meaningful sense, at least not for you.
Corruption is everywhere, but ignoring blatant health risks isn't the norm in either the US or the EU (which is why manufacture shit in China!). Not sure what your point is here.
The US has a very high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, as do most EU nations. We're doing something right.
Most people don't have the freedom to pick the one they like, since they can't just emigrate if they don't like the situation in their country.
True, the US accepts far and away more people than most nations, and in any case it takes some combination of economic resources and determination to emigrate anywhere. But if everyone does things the same way, there's 0 such freedom for anyone.
In fact, the US and UK are currently trying really hard to stop people doing just that.
Well, in the US we'd like to limit it to people with something to contribute; can't speak for the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
"their persons and papers" .... it still takes a warrant to pull the NSA data.
I want to live in a country where a US citizen can't be spied on without a warrant. I don't want to live in a country where the government spies on everyone as a matter of course, but pinky-swears not to look at the data unless they need to.
Well, they don't know what my prostate feels like. (Can't wait for them to innovate that.)
Well, they know your age, and likely know what doctors you've recently visited (if they sent appointment reminders to your gmail box), so they might have a first approximation.
ve grown to trust Google less and less. After the Damore letter and now this, i'm seriously considering switching to an alternative email service.
As I've said here before: outlook.com doesn't suck. I switched to it a few years back out of frustration with the changes to the gmail UI, and haven't regretted it. I'm not sure it's better in some objective way, beyond not sending your data to Google, but if the goal is to live a Google-free life, outlook.com is fine.
OTOH, I've come to like duckduckgo better than google search, mostly for the handy "bangs" (try "!wa erf(x)" or "!a go the fuck to sleep").
I still don't see a use for a smartphone - I'd take a feature phone with Audible and Kindle if one existed. And Apple's MP3 players were shiny garbage - they were always the worst, from a geek perspective, and not well liked on Slashdot back in the day.
Jobs's genius was in turning personal electronics into jewelry. Having an iPod, and later an iPhone, was a status symbol. He invented that! Didn't matter whether the actual products were any good. Pure genius.
he doesn't explain how Google is no longer being innovative for people who buy or display ads
To be fair, that's all NDA stuff. Still, I expect there hasn't been much innovation on the "creepy stalking of your personal information" front either. Once they know everything about you, what's left to innovate?
What I am getting at is....there is no moral failing in ceasing to be an innovator once you have built your empire. It is natural and ok to shift to the conservative. And it is also ok for people who dislike that corporate environment to leave (and be replaced by people who prefer the new, less risk-takey corporate environment).
There is no cause for lamentation here.
Unless you're a stockholder. Alphabet is priced at about 3x what it should be for a company that's done innovating, and it doesn't even pay a dividend. At least Microsoft had the common decency to start paying a dividend when it was obvious that the days of innovation-driven growth were behind it.
As the AC said, it's not just the football - the president has to carry a little card on his person. And it has come out that certain presidents couldn't be bothered.
"#NAGA" surely?
To be fair to Hawaii - the proper, non-twitter method was used to send the missile alert. That same system had a way to say "oops", but bureaucracy happened. The tweet would have been an improvisation, not the intended system, for cancelling the alert.
Fortunately, many news stations also have YouTube channels.
You'd think that e.g. a president of the US could be bothered to carry the little card with him needed to authorize a nuclear strike should things go bad in a hurry. More than a couple of people involved in getting that one right, and yet some recent residents couldn't be bothered. Rather more important than a twitter password (OK, that has me wondering what Trump would tweet as he launched the nukes).
Yes let's compare portable interpreted code that is simple and actually performs pretty damn well to your optimised assembly.
If you imagine that JS "performs pretty damn well", well, you have quite an imagination.
While you're painfully optimising it to get it working we've already served our first 2000 users.
Not so much, not so much. But then, programmers were real programmers in those days.[/butterflies]
Likewise for web browsers. It's not bloat to blame for the fact I expect a browser to be able to stream a 4K movie in surround sound. It's not bloat to blame for the 40 tabs I run concurrently. It's not bloat that I have 10 office apps open along side video conferencing software along with those browser windows.
Yes, that is bloat. You've just lowered your expectations so far you don't see it. Browsers are a great example - what they actually do is so simple that you should be able to have 1000 tabs open with no meaningful load, since you the human are only interacting with a small number of them at any given time. But there's so much crazy cruft going on that it's at least 99% abstraction layers, with very little time left for the actual logic (if any) of the page.
For example, look at using JS to parse a DOM where everything is not just serialized to text, but wrapped in a markup-based protocol (often multiple layers deep). Compare that to using optimized assembly to traverse a binary protocol hand-tuned for optimal performance. Because I've done that, back in the day, and we supported 2000 active users (think 2000 tabs) on a machine similar to a 200 MHz Pentium in power.
And this has been the case for longer than America has existed, yet democracy seems to do OK. You think the anonymous handbills the Founding Fathers were printing to foment revolution were fair and balanced? Man, they'd make 4chan blush.
Biased propaganda to influence elections is precisely what the First Amendment is there to protect - good thing too, as some "news" networks are 100% anti-Trump propaganda 24/7.
I know it's fashionable with pseudo-intellectuals (e.g., TFA) to believe that the average person is incapable of making any important decision, and thus media should only exist to guide them to the decision make by their betters, but that's aristocracy, not democracy.
No, really, going around believing what you're told by "experts" is religion. It's all about faith. It's not that you have to perform every experiment, though as an undergrad you'll perform a lot of the key ones, but that you need to understand why experts say everything they do insofar as it relates to your field, and later your specialty. If you want to do original work you must understand what's gone before.
I know it's fashionable in some circles to "love the science," which typically means unquestioning belief in popularizers (who, BTW, lie to you) but that's not science. Science is very much the questioning.
So, yes, this guy is doing science. He's not doing it well, mind you, as there are much better and simpler experiments he could do, but he's got the essence of it.
Gotta STOP making stupid people famous.
But without Hollywood or news shows, what would people watch?
Is this why Sydney, Australia is undergoing the the most extreme heat wave on record?
Well, duh, of course it is - the Sun if off orbiting close to Australia during the winter, and orbits close to America during the summer so of course it's cold in Australia then.
Bullshit.
He is doing science because he thinks the government lies to us all. And of course the government does lie to us all, constantly. He's simply wrong about the governments ability to lie consistently, as would be need for such a conspiracy.
Believing what experts tell you is the opposite of science. Performing your own experiment in an attempt to falsify a published result is the very essence of science.
Plus he'll likely be just fine - this is just a modestly scaled-up version of his previous run.
Plenty of jobs in other tech cities, and they'll be delighted to have you. I just moved out of Seattle, as it had become insane, to Texas. Definite step up.
Or, if you're smarter than a sack of hammers, you'll buy another house somewhere cheap, and retire on the difference. Or rent, if you want to keep working in that area.
Heck, that worked for two different families I'm friends with: they sold their home near the peak of a real estate bubble, and one rented until the bubble collapsed, while the other moved to Europe. Each pocketed severed hundred thousand dollars.
It sucks to be the new guy who has to move there, but just don't be that guy (unless the pay more than makes up for the cost).
If you want an electric car because of "environmental issues" that's virtue signalling. If you want to force electric cars on others, that's totalitarianism. But if you want an electric car because it's a better car, well, that better car isn't quite here yet. Once it is, you can invent conspiracy theories about The Man keeping it down, but in the meantime no evil government action is needed to explain why consumers didn't buy bad products.
But don't you get the feeling that the US government might be?
No. Nor do I believe Bush did 9/11, or Obama was born in Kenya, or any other whackjob conspirator theory. The simple fact is: electric cars pre-Tesla were garbage cars, sold at a massive loss. Tesla is a big step up, to a markedly sub-standard car at the price (but still something reasonable) sold at break even or a minor loss (once you net out the subsidies). It's a difference in kind: the Tesla S is almost a viable electric car, and the 3 might actually be the first to cross that line.
Tesla is remarkable for demonstrating that electric cars might soon be viable, to break through the conservatism of the board room. But we won't see a good electric car, a car that normal people unconcerned with virtue signalling want to buy, until we get a decade or two of competition; competition that hasn't quite started yet.
Airships full of hydrogen gas? I can see no flaw in that plan, from either an engineering or marketing perspective. It's a non-starter - doesn't pass the laugh test, doesn't pass the smoke test.
Income tax completely dominates state taxes. Sure, a few hundred in gas taxes etc, vs $5-10k in Cali income tax.
So, again, the point fails.
Having your health damaged so that some politician can get paid is not "objectively good" in any meaningful sense, at least not for you.
Corruption is everywhere, but ignoring blatant health risks isn't the norm in either the US or the EU (which is why manufacture shit in China!). Not sure what your point is here.
The US has a very high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, as do most EU nations. We're doing something right.
Most people don't have the freedom to pick the one they like, since they can't just emigrate if they don't like the situation in their country.
True, the US accepts far and away more people than most nations, and in any case it takes some combination of economic resources and determination to emigrate anywhere. But if everyone does things the same way, there's 0 such freedom for anyone.
In fact, the US and UK are currently trying really hard to stop people doing just that.
Well, in the US we'd like to limit it to people with something to contribute; can't speak for the UK.