Ignorance is frequently not a choice we make for ourselves, but a choice made for us by others.
If you're a capable adult with internet access, most ignorance is willful.
I remain ignorant of a great many things, by choice (most of popular culture to begin with). I remain ignorant of some things because my time is limited (e.g., I'm slowly learning quantum mechanics properly, with all the math, but it will take years). But all of these are choices. I've chosen my priorities, I've chosen how much time to spend learning vs other activities
The only thing I'd consider "a choice made by others" is the big chunk of human knowledge hidden behind journal paywalls (and not adequately covered elsewhere).
If "you" are the legal department for a company with 10,000 developers, the GPL is scary. You can either blanket-ban GPL code, and make your life easy, or create a system for separately evaluating the use of each and every piece of GPL code you allow in, plus some auditing process to catch cheaters (who check in GPL code as their own work, which happens).
Cloud services companies usually go with the latter: because you don't have to share your code if you don't distribute it, the payoff is good to allow use of GPL code, and police the corner cases where you do distribute code. Blanket bans on GPL code are still common at old-school software companies.
The internet isn't TV or radio, tough shit if the FCC doesn't like it.
That bill with the name "Net Neutrality"? The fear of internet-aware conservatives was that it gave the FCC just such authority: to regulate content. Time will tell who was right, but vigilance is certainly required here if was want to keep the FCC out of it.
Now, blanket bans on certain kinds of ads regardless of medium, that's different. The government certainly has an interest in fraud prevention that has nothing to do with how the ad is delivered.
A state's a big place, there's less overlap between specific elements of morality and politics than you seem to think, and there is no conservative political party now, so I'm not sure what connection you're trying to insist on?
Oh, I'm sorry, this is the room for an argument - you want Personal Abuse, just down the hall on the left.
And pray tell me how the logical extension of the "yes mean yes" laws isn't a step away from requiring a binding agreement before witnesses that the coming night's fun is consensual, with an "I do" on both sides? Seriously, society already has a ceremony whereby all present agree that when the 2 subjects fuck, the man is not a rapist, and the woman is not a slut. The new laws don't require the lasting relationship part yet, but give it time.
The mass of the Higgs Boson is what's called "finely tuned" - a mathematical expression of Occam's Razor. Physics as a field is highly skeptical of models which involve "fine tuning" of constants - a constant which could, by the model, take a very wide range of values, but just happens to take this one extremely convenient value. That's another way of saying: the model fails to explain this important fact about the universe from first principles, and was instead just written to incorporate it after the fact. There's a lot of that in the Standard Model, which is why there's a lot of dissatisfaction with it, despite it being great at predicting new data.
It's a clear sign that we're missing something fundamental, something that explains all these constants, and likely a whole lot more. In a sense, Dark Matter wasn't that big of a shock because that sense of missing something fundamental has been growing for so long.
To me, it's not just the Higgs, it's all the particle masses. Particle masses aren't quantized, and the mass of quarks still has a lot of guesswork. The mass of the up quark is "1.7 to 3.1", for goodness sake. Everything else is quantized, and there is theory that sets bounds on particle masses, but there's nothing that says "here's the mass quantum, and here's the multiple of that for each particle, and here's why". Missing something fundamental, something big.
If you shrink from "doesn't feel right", understand that science starts from guesswork. And it's exactly this sort of intuition by those who work professionally in the field and (unlike me) have useful intuitions about this stuff that makes science happen. To quote Feynman:
Now I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general,... First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don't laugh, that's the truth. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.
If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is... If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.
Maybe you didn't know where it all starts, when you got snarky about the scientific method?
It's getting hard to say with prohibition groups these days (MADD is simply a "ban all alcohol" group). Such groups used to find common cause with the right, and perhaps still do, but that spirit is aging out of the right with the Boomers, and increasingly it's the left on a jihad to "control all the things!" People Against Fun are increasing flipping left now. From banning video games to banning frat parties, it's a left thing now, and the "yes means yes" laws are one step away from outlawing premarital sex (and the right has been laughing quietly at that irony).
Children who have never left the hugbox are becoming parents now, having never known life outside the padding. You can't reason with them; your experience of life is too alien.
I get about 300 from a tank in normal driving (pure freeway driving is significantly better), but then I have more horsepower than a sane person needs (and yet, half of what I want).
The range on a new Tesla is plenty good, even allowing for headlights and other power drains, but I'd be wary of how it ages. If it fell to 120 or so at the end of the life of the battery pack, that would start to suck, If it stayed above 80% of new, I just can't see that being an issue often enough to matter.
We did this "pair programming" at Rice in the late 80s and early 90s, long before the eXtreme! Programming! "two tards in a box" approach was invented. It seemed to work fine, as long as your goal was education instead of pretending grades matter. There were times when we actually worked together, and the one who "got it" explained to the other, and there were times when the sober one just did his best, but we never learned less because of it.
"Going to have", future tense? That session key came from an NSA-approved RNG: the government reads what it wants. But mostly metadata is enough. "We kill people based on metadata", after all.
The NSA records every phone call, and indexes by keywords. The NSA records at least the metadata from every browser session for everyone in a well-indexed DB. What's this "going to have" sweeping powers?
It matters because the world doesn't revolve around you. I still play games that are probably older than you are.
You play "Spacewar!"? Cool, but you can retire that PDP-11, it plays in a browser now (well, assuming you'd be willing to run Java in a browser - someone needs to make an HTML5/JS version).
Sufficiently old games play better in emulation. There's a couple of C64 games I still like to play, but I'm quite happy not to have the original 2-5 minute floppy load times (not that a 5.25" floppy is likely to hold data that long, especially with the copy protection of that age doing crazy shit with the media).
Only because you can't get them on GOG or Steam. In the past few years, GOG has done wonders in getting abandoned games out of IP Hell and into their store - I'm really impressed with those guys.
"time-boxed nature of the engagement prevented auditors from reviewing the source code in its entirety, the most relevant areas were investigated thoroughly."
Was the actual quote. Those spring FUD are NSA shills. There were two specific areas they highlighted for more auditing: checking that memory was always securely wiped, and checking oddball disk sector sizes. I'd be surprised if the former were an issue, but they have a point. The latter is exactly the sort of place where bugs lurk, in my experience.
The most important thing they didn't audit, IMO, is the "hidden volumes" feature of TrueCrypt. I'm a bit skeptical of that myself, as steganography is in general a harder problem that cryptography. Hopefully another trusted group will continue the auditing effort via crowd funding.
I'm still playing XCom too -my disk got corrupted, so I just bought it on Steam. If steam ever fails I'll buy it on GOG if they have it. It's not like old games cost enough to matter if you have to replace them.
When you have tens of thousands of dollars taken from you you don't "Just shake it off".
I did, when I did the startup thing. Well, there was some drinking involved. But that's the normal, expected outcome. for a startup. Anyone with half a brain knows this. You hope for that payoff, but it's long odds. This is why most startups these days pay pretty close to what the big guys pay, assuming they really are hiring equivalent talent.
This was not like Skype, where it was actually successful and the engineers got screwed anyway - that's quite rare. When the startup fails, you get a handshake. That's the game. And shipping a fine product is no guarantee at all it won't fail.
Any game that doesn't add it's own, non-Steam DRM can be played fine in offline mode. And Steam is pretty good about warning you of bonus DRM on the store page, so you can avoid that shit.
But why does any of that matter? The number of games I play today that I'll have the slightest interest in playing more than a couple of years form now is very small indeed. Steam has thus far proven more reliable than my aging media, as well.
I always look on GOG first, but if there's something good on Steam, I have no hesitation in buying it. If it goes tits-up, GOG will get it eventually. (OTOH, EA's system can die in a fire with EA.)
This worry about some 1% per year chance of Steam breaking, if sincere, is a sign you need to take your OCD meds. Most people just use that line as a rationalization to pirate the game, of course.
If MS carries through with open-sourcing all of the C#/.NET stuff, it will be a great ecosystem. I'd love to write C# for Linux server back-end stuff, without being constrained to some subest of the language, and with full ".NET native" compiler support (or distribution support for the.NET runtime).
When we had that 90% tax rate, the tax code was nothing but loopholes. It's important to remember that the more you make, the more flexibility you have in how, where, and when you get compensated. Remember the Maryland millionaires tax? One year later, 1/3 of the people in that bracket went missing. If you own houses in two states, how hard is it to change your residency? France has a problem today with people leaving to avoid their recent high rates (also a 90% top rate IIRC).
But you're talking about an income tax, not a wealth tax. When it comes to non-property wealth, it takes a very small tax indeed to totally change the game, and create a huge disincentive to to business here (or at least to find some way to own US stocks from elsewhere, I guess). Large investment firms move will their assets around immediately for a 0.1% better guaranteed annual return. A 1% difference in property tax rates makes a big difference in affording a new house (and in a regressive way).
Maybe people are confused about how much overall property (wealth or otherwise) there is to begin with?
Sometimes people accuse progressives of wanting to punish success, to hurt the rich just for the sake of hurting. Your plan is why people say stuff like that.
In practice, when individual states start "taxing millionaires", the millionaires move to different states. We're just looking for a way to fund the government here, as a means to the end of improving everyone's standard of living. A plan that would cause the successful to move elsewhere might raise some funds for a while, but is a terrible long-term strategy for improving standard of living. (And I'm fully aware that some actually want to build a metaphorical wall around the nation to keep the successful from escaping - not the sort of nation I want to live in.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ignorance is frequently not a choice we make for ourselves, but a choice made for us by others.
If you're a capable adult with internet access, most ignorance is willful.
I remain ignorant of a great many things, by choice (most of popular culture to begin with). I remain ignorant of some things because my time is limited (e.g., I'm slowly learning quantum mechanics properly, with all the math, but it will take years). But all of these are choices. I've chosen my priorities, I've chosen how much time to spend learning vs other activities
The only thing I'd consider "a choice made by others" is the big chunk of human knowledge hidden behind journal paywalls (and not adequately covered elsewhere).
If "you" are a one-man shop, that's fine.
If "you" are the legal department for a company with 10,000 developers, the GPL is scary. You can either blanket-ban GPL code, and make your life easy, or create a system for separately evaluating the use of each and every piece of GPL code you allow in, plus some auditing process to catch cheaters (who check in GPL code as their own work, which happens).
Cloud services companies usually go with the latter: because you don't have to share your code if you don't distribute it, the payoff is good to allow use of GPL code, and police the corner cases where you do distribute code. Blanket bans on GPL code are still common at old-school software companies.
The internet isn't TV or radio, tough shit if the FCC doesn't like it.
That bill with the name "Net Neutrality"? The fear of internet-aware conservatives was that it gave the FCC just such authority: to regulate content. Time will tell who was right, but vigilance is certainly required here if was want to keep the FCC out of it.
Now, blanket bans on certain kinds of ads regardless of medium, that's different. The government certainly has an interest in fraud prevention that has nothing to do with how the ad is delivered.
A state's a big place, there's less overlap between specific elements of morality and politics than you seem to think, and there is no conservative political party now, so I'm not sure what connection you're trying to insist on?
Oh, I'm sorry, this is the room for an argument - you want Personal Abuse, just down the hall on the left.
And pray tell me how the logical extension of the "yes mean yes" laws isn't a step away from requiring a binding agreement before witnesses that the coming night's fun is consensual, with an "I do" on both sides? Seriously, society already has a ceremony whereby all present agree that when the 2 subjects fuck, the man is not a rapist, and the woman is not a slut. The new laws don't require the lasting relationship part yet, but give it time.
The mass of the Higgs Boson is what's called "finely tuned" - a mathematical expression of Occam's Razor. Physics as a field is highly skeptical of models which involve "fine tuning" of constants - a constant which could, by the model, take a very wide range of values, but just happens to take this one extremely convenient value. That's another way of saying: the model fails to explain this important fact about the universe from first principles, and was instead just written to incorporate it after the fact. There's a lot of that in the Standard Model, which is why there's a lot of dissatisfaction with it, despite it being great at predicting new data.
It's a clear sign that we're missing something fundamental, something that explains all these constants, and likely a whole lot more. In a sense, Dark Matter wasn't that big of a shock because that sense of missing something fundamental has been growing for so long.
To me, it's not just the Higgs, it's all the particle masses. Particle masses aren't quantized, and the mass of quarks still has a lot of guesswork. The mass of the up quark is "1.7 to 3.1", for goodness sake. Everything else is quantized, and there is theory that sets bounds on particle masses, but there's nothing that says "here's the mass quantum, and here's the multiple of that for each particle, and here's why". Missing something fundamental, something big.
If you shrink from "doesn't feel right", understand that science starts from guesswork. And it's exactly this sort of intuition by those who work professionally in the field and (unlike me) have useful intuitions about this stuff that makes science happen. To quote Feynman:
Now I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, ... First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don't laugh, that's the truth. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.
If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is... If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.
Maybe you didn't know where it all starts, when you got snarky about the scientific method?
It's getting hard to say with prohibition groups these days (MADD is simply a "ban all alcohol" group). Such groups used to find common cause with the right, and perhaps still do, but that spirit is aging out of the right with the Boomers, and increasingly it's the left on a jihad to "control all the things!" People Against Fun are increasing flipping left now. From banning video games to banning frat parties, it's a left thing now, and the "yes means yes" laws are one step away from outlawing premarital sex (and the right has been laughing quietly at that irony).
Children who have never left the hugbox are becoming parents now, having never known life outside the padding. You can't reason with them; your experience of life is too alien.
I get about 300 from a tank in normal driving (pure freeway driving is significantly better), but then I have more horsepower than a sane person needs (and yet, half of what I want).
The range on a new Tesla is plenty good, even allowing for headlights and other power drains, but I'd be wary of how it ages. If it fell to 120 or so at the end of the life of the battery pack, that would start to suck, If it stayed above 80% of new, I just can't see that being an issue often enough to matter.
We did this "pair programming" at Rice in the late 80s and early 90s, long before the eXtreme! Programming! "two tards in a box" approach was invented. It seemed to work fine, as long as your goal was education instead of pretending grades matter. There were times when we actually worked together, and the one who "got it" explained to the other, and there were times when the sober one just did his best, but we never learned less because of it.
"Going to have", future tense? That session key came from an NSA-approved RNG: the government reads what it wants. But mostly metadata is enough. "We kill people based on metadata", after all.
The NSA records every phone call, and indexes by keywords. The NSA records at least the metadata from every browser session for everyone in a well-indexed DB. What's this "going to have" sweeping powers?
You forgot "OMG Ponies"! And the Cowboy Neal option.
It matters because the world doesn't revolve around you. I still play games that are probably older than you are.
You play "Spacewar!"? Cool, but you can retire that PDP-11, it plays in a browser now (well, assuming you'd be willing to run Java in a browser - someone needs to make an HTML5/JS version).
Sufficiently old games play better in emulation. There's a couple of C64 games I still like to play, but I'm quite happy not to have the original 2-5 minute floppy load times (not that a 5.25" floppy is likely to hold data that long, especially with the copy protection of that age doing crazy shit with the media).
Only because you can't get them on GOG or Steam. In the past few years, GOG has done wonders in getting abandoned games out of IP Hell and into their store - I'm really impressed with those guys.
"time-boxed nature of the engagement prevented auditors from reviewing the source code in
its entirety, the most relevant areas were investigated thoroughly."
Was the actual quote. Those spring FUD are NSA shills. There were two specific areas they highlighted for more auditing: checking that memory was always securely wiped, and checking oddball disk sector sizes. I'd be surprised if the former were an issue, but they have a point. The latter is exactly the sort of place where bugs lurk, in my experience.
The most important thing they didn't audit, IMO, is the "hidden volumes" feature of TrueCrypt. I'm a bit skeptical of that myself, as steganography is in general a harder problem that cryptography. Hopefully another trusted group will continue the auditing effort via crowd funding.
Auditor auditor auditors audit auditor auditors, obviously.
I'm still playing XCom too -my disk got corrupted, so I just bought it on Steam. If steam ever fails I'll buy it on GOG if they have it. It's not like old games cost enough to matter if you have to replace them.
When you have tens of thousands of dollars taken from you you don't "Just shake it off".
I did, when I did the startup thing. Well, there was some drinking involved. But that's the normal, expected outcome. for a startup. Anyone with half a brain knows this. You hope for that payoff, but it's long odds. This is why most startups these days pay pretty close to what the big guys pay, assuming they really are hiring equivalent talent.
This was not like Skype, where it was actually successful and the engineers got screwed anyway - that's quite rare. When the startup fails, you get a handshake. That's the game. And shipping a fine product is no guarantee at all it won't fail.
Any game that doesn't add it's own, non-Steam DRM can be played fine in offline mode. And Steam is pretty good about warning you of bonus DRM on the store page, so you can avoid that shit.
But why does any of that matter? The number of games I play today that I'll have the slightest interest in playing more than a couple of years form now is very small indeed. Steam has thus far proven more reliable than my aging media, as well.
I always look on GOG first, but if there's something good on Steam, I have no hesitation in buying it. If it goes tits-up, GOG will get it eventually. (OTOH, EA's system can die in a fire with EA.)
This worry about some 1% per year chance of Steam breaking, if sincere, is a sign you need to take your OCD meds. Most people just use that line as a rationalization to pirate the game, of course.
"But sir, that's the old wheel with a fresh coat of paint."
"Right, giant hammer for you then!"
If anyone knows why Gnome chose to depend on systemd, please let me know.
It was an April Fools prank taken waaaay too far.
If MS carries through with open-sourcing all of the C#/.NET stuff, it will be a great ecosystem. I'd love to write C# for Linux server back-end stuff, without being constrained to some subest of the language, and with full ".NET native" compiler support (or distribution support for the .NET runtime).
When we had that 90% tax rate, the tax code was nothing but loopholes. It's important to remember that the more you make, the more flexibility you have in how, where, and when you get compensated. Remember the Maryland millionaires tax? One year later, 1/3 of the people in that bracket went missing. If you own houses in two states, how hard is it to change your residency? France has a problem today with people leaving to avoid their recent high rates (also a 90% top rate IIRC).
But you're talking about an income tax, not a wealth tax. When it comes to non-property wealth, it takes a very small tax indeed to totally change the game, and create a huge disincentive to to business here (or at least to find some way to own US stocks from elsewhere, I guess). Large investment firms move will their assets around immediately for a 0.1% better guaranteed annual return. A 1% difference in property tax rates makes a big difference in affording a new house (and in a regressive way).
Maybe people are confused about how much overall property (wealth or otherwise) there is to begin with?
But as long as it prevents the successful from having an unhindered better standard of living than everyone else, it's a win.
Since the rest of your post seems sane, I'm just assuming my sarcasm detector is on the fritz again with this line.
Sometimes people accuse progressives of wanting to punish success, to hurt the rich just for the sake of hurting. Your plan is why people say stuff like that.
In practice, when individual states start "taxing millionaires", the millionaires move to different states. We're just looking for a way to fund the government here, as a means to the end of improving everyone's standard of living. A plan that would cause the successful to move elsewhere might raise some funds for a while, but is a terrible long-term strategy for improving standard of living. (And I'm fully aware that some actually want to build a metaphorical wall around the nation to keep the successful from escaping - not the sort of nation I want to live in.)