There is no one "it" here. The existence of some secrets does not imply that it's possible to keep any secret.
For one thing, it was most assuredly not a secret that the US had spy satellites. As much as the US would have loved to keep that fact secret, they couldn't. The world might not have known the exact details of some specific program, but the general idea was definitely too big of a secret to keep under wraps.
Did they also ask you if you've ever stolen from work, lied to your boss, or more mundane things like that? They assume everyone has at some point, so if you say you haven't, that means you're a liar. They're not really expecting you to admit to being part of a terrorist group.
They make sure everyone "fails" the polygraph test. They ask you questions that they think they know the answer to and claim some squiggle proves you were lying. Except the machine is constantly making squiggles, so they get to choose which answers they interpret as lies. Then they use that "proof" to badger you until you confess to whatever it is that they already think you did.
In the context of an interview, if you don't reveal anything embarrassing or unflattering because you're not intimidated by the polygraph, that might just be a reason not to hire you since they're looking for people who will respond to the polygraph.
Copyright trolls use residential ISP accounts with dynamic IPs like everyone else. By the time you've figured out who they are (and how exactly did you do that?) they've already got a new IP. The only people you're protecting yourself from are other legitimate peers.
The lawyer says it's not a problem because the representatives are "unlikely to be willful infringers". They're public officials and everyone knows them. Therefore, no one is really going to take an infringement case against them seriously.
But what about the rest of us? What about some random kid posting the same sorts of videos to YouTube? Will there be anyone to say he's unlikely to be a willful infringer as well? Or will he just get sued straight away? Maybe he could hire an attorney, go to court, and spend months or years trying to prove he had a good-faith belief his actions weren't infringing. Or maybe he'll be scared into settling by some troll looking to extort money.
Neither does that mean that the reason is meaningful or useful for predicting future success. The signs seem to point to taste as being chaotic; as soon as you identify a trend and try to exploit it, that trend falls out of fashion because everyone is trying to exploit it. To be a success, you have to invest in a trend before anyone could possibly know that it will be a success, which is nothing less than gambling.
AFAIK, the bodies were never identified. No one is quite sure if they actually were bloggers or if they were merely used to create fear among bloggers. If they were bloggers, there's no way to know what kind of precautions they took, if any. Given the large numbers of bloggers still criticizing the cartels, it doesn't appear that the cartels truly have the ability to identify and kill anyone who posts things they don't like. For people outside of Mexico, which I assume is most of Anonymous, the risk seems to be minimal to nonexistent.
Why would they care about the Silk Road at all? Even if the Zetas are behind it, which seems incredibly unlikely, it can't be more than a drop in the bucket of their total operations. More likely, it's run by some nerd in a basement who has more in common with Anonymous than the Zetas.
The Zetas may indeed use the Internet for other purposes, but I doubt they're so brazen as to start a website openly selling drugs direct to users.
From the article, it's clear that he regards talking to journalists as an effort, something he does only begrudgingly. If the journalist doesn't have the time to do the research, I'm sure he'd be more than happy not to have to talk to them in the first place. They can do their story without him or not do a story at all.
But people can't own people, so either you agree there should be different rules for people and corporations, or you think slavery should be legal, or you think corporations should be emancipated from people like yourself.
Corporations and people are different. Different rules ought to apply according to those differences. Do we need inspectors to visit your home kitchen to make sure you're cooking all your meat to 165 degrees and don't leave food out? No, of course not. You have the choice to prepare your own food however you'd like because you're only taking the risk upon yourself. But they'd damn well better inspect factory farms and commercial restaurants as those have the potential to affect thousands of people.
It isn't about "small government" or "big government". Those are just slogans. It's about applying the policy that suits the situation without deciding that it has to be one way or another ahead of time.
What does 'cost something' mean in the context of a world where the cost of labor is zero, though?
The missed opportunity to do something else with the limited resources available. Each loaf of bread baked represents energy that wasn't used to power a robot arm, a computer processor, etc. If somebody gets the bright idea to put the robot arm and computer processor to the task of obtaining more resources, it creates an arms race where everyone has to spend as much of their resources as possible, as efficiently as possible, in the pursuit of more resources. If they don't, they'll soon find themselves losing the competition for resources from those that do. Eventually, they'll run out of resources and won't be able to make any bread.
Really your statement's a tautology: the 'cost' simply represents the finite nature of the resource, assuming it really *is* finite.
It represents the fact that resources are used up and no longer available to you once you choose that particular option. It's not a tautology, but I am going back to the definition of the word "cost" to show that yes, the resources used in producing a loaf of bread do indeed count as a "cost". That resource cost does not go away just because the cost of labor goes away. That's a very basic idea, so it may seem trivial, but here I am having to explain it because some people don't agree.
I said that machines will be better than us, not that they will be omnipotent gods capable of magicking free resources into existence from nothing. They will be better at finding resources than us, sure, but those resources will still be finite, which poses a problem of opportunity cost.
Which do you think gives a better rate of return on the investment of resources: planting wheat to make bread to feed humans (who have no money to pay for the bread) or putting up solar panels to power machines (who work tirelessly for free)? If you make the right choice, you will have a bigger share of the finite resources to go out and do it again. If you make the wrong choice, your share will shrink over time until you run out of resources entirely. In the end, the only ones left will be the ones who made the right choice.
No it won't. The cost of labor can go to zero, but as long as there is only a finite supply of the resources needed to produce a loaf of bread (in particular land and energy), it will always cost something.
You do have to have an income of some sort. Otherwise even one dollar is too expensive.
Machines have been slowly claiming one domain after another from humans for the past two hundred years or so. There's no reason to believe it will ever stop. Eventually machines will be better than us at literally everything, including making new machines. Economically, it's hard to see what our place would be when that happens.
If you want to eat once you get to Fiji, you don't have to bring your food with you on your 15 connecting flights. You can eat the food grown in Fiji so you don't incur any transportation costs.
By contrast, your plan amounts to building a series of outposts on a chain of desert islands in a barren sea. Not only do you have to bring all the food you'll need once you get there, you also have to bring enough food to feed all of the people manning all of the outposts along the way because they have no way to feed themselves. Instead of being convenient rest stops where travelers can pick up fresh supplies, these outposts would be a drain on the travelers' supplies.
Even if your outposts are self-contained habitats that perfectly recycle all of their resources (a hard enough problem in itself), you just need to swap "food" with "energy" and the problem remains the same.
Yes, but when you know someone is from Eastern Europe but you don't know if they are Polish or Ukrainian or what, you can just say "Eastern European", which is a useful grouping.
Likewise, people from eastern Russia are Asian, right? And Caucasians are from the Caucasus Mountains? No, ethnonyms are more complicated than you suggest, subject to historical accident, whim, and connotation as much as universal rules.
Just because the First Nations didn't have a word for this doesn't negate the need for such a word.
There are several terms for the aboriginal peoples of the United States, all of which have some problem. "First Nations" is a Canadian term and the Assembly of First Nations is a Canadian organization. That's fine for Canadians, but don't pretend that isn't a problem for people in the US.
The safest way is to find out the actual tribe or ethnic group a person belongs to and call them by that name, e.g. Cherokee. They do not recognize themselves as a single ethic group, let alone one that includes the Eskimo (a name with similar issues as "Indian") and the peoples of South America.
Anyone who cares about fixing the code is welcome to it, but the kernel developers do not care. They just don't want to be bothered with bug reports anymore.
Even if it is just a matter of clarifying the paper, it's still peer review in action. When OPERA responds, Contaldi will have the opportunity to review their clarifications. Maybe he'll respond again and point out that OPERA is still in the wrong. Or maybe he'll be satisfied and move on. This is how science is done. How is that not news?
Slashdot Mirror
Except the existence of US spy satellites was not a secret even at the time.
It can be kept secret.
There is no one "it" here. The existence of some secrets does not imply that it's possible to keep any secret.
For one thing, it was most assuredly not a secret that the US had spy satellites. As much as the US would have loved to keep that fact secret, they couldn't. The world might not have known the exact details of some specific program, but the general idea was definitely too big of a secret to keep under wraps.
My guess is those degrees typically don't require as much math or science.
Did they also ask you if you've ever stolen from work, lied to your boss, or more mundane things like that? They assume everyone has at some point, so if you say you haven't, that means you're a liar. They're not really expecting you to admit to being part of a terrorist group.
They make sure everyone "fails" the polygraph test. They ask you questions that they think they know the answer to and claim some squiggle proves you were lying. Except the machine is constantly making squiggles, so they get to choose which answers they interpret as lies. Then they use that "proof" to badger you until you confess to whatever it is that they already think you did.
In the context of an interview, if you don't reveal anything embarrassing or unflattering because you're not intimidated by the polygraph, that might just be a reason not to hire you since they're looking for people who will respond to the polygraph.
If companies can't or won't uphold the freedoms the GPL was designed to protect, then they shouldn't be using GPL-licensed code.
Copyright trolls use residential ISP accounts with dynamic IPs like everyone else. By the time you've figured out who they are (and how exactly did you do that?) they've already got a new IP. The only people you're protecting yourself from are other legitimate peers.
This is some idiot asking for advice on an absolutely terrible scheme which has been explained before
Isn't that what Ask Slashdot is all about?
The lawyer says it's not a problem because the representatives are "unlikely to be willful infringers". They're public officials and everyone knows them. Therefore, no one is really going to take an infringement case against them seriously.
But what about the rest of us? What about some random kid posting the same sorts of videos to YouTube? Will there be anyone to say he's unlikely to be a willful infringer as well? Or will he just get sued straight away? Maybe he could hire an attorney, go to court, and spend months or years trying to prove he had a good-faith belief his actions weren't infringing. Or maybe he'll be scared into settling by some troll looking to extort money.
Neither does that mean that the reason is meaningful or useful for predicting future success. The signs seem to point to taste as being chaotic; as soon as you identify a trend and try to exploit it, that trend falls out of fashion because everyone is trying to exploit it. To be a success, you have to invest in a trend before anyone could possibly know that it will be a success, which is nothing less than gambling.
AFAIK, the bodies were never identified. No one is quite sure if they actually were bloggers or if they were merely used to create fear among bloggers. If they were bloggers, there's no way to know what kind of precautions they took, if any. Given the large numbers of bloggers still criticizing the cartels, it doesn't appear that the cartels truly have the ability to identify and kill anyone who posts things they don't like. For people outside of Mexico, which I assume is most of Anonymous, the risk seems to be minimal to nonexistent.
Why would they care about the Silk Road at all? Even if the Zetas are behind it, which seems incredibly unlikely, it can't be more than a drop in the bucket of their total operations. More likely, it's run by some nerd in a basement who has more in common with Anonymous than the Zetas.
The Zetas may indeed use the Internet for other purposes, but I doubt they're so brazen as to start a website openly selling drugs direct to users.
From the article, it's clear that he regards talking to journalists as an effort, something he does only begrudgingly. If the journalist doesn't have the time to do the research, I'm sure he'd be more than happy not to have to talk to them in the first place. They can do their story without him or not do a story at all.
People, like myself, own corporations.
But people can't own people, so either you agree there should be different rules for people and corporations, or you think slavery should be legal, or you think corporations should be emancipated from people like yourself.
Corporations and people are different. Different rules ought to apply according to those differences. Do we need inspectors to visit your home kitchen to make sure you're cooking all your meat to 165 degrees and don't leave food out? No, of course not. You have the choice to prepare your own food however you'd like because you're only taking the risk upon yourself. But they'd damn well better inspect factory farms and commercial restaurants as those have the potential to affect thousands of people.
It isn't about "small government" or "big government". Those are just slogans. It's about applying the policy that suits the situation without deciding that it has to be one way or another ahead of time.
What does 'cost something' mean in the context of a world where the cost of labor is zero, though?
The missed opportunity to do something else with the limited resources available. Each loaf of bread baked represents energy that wasn't used to power a robot arm, a computer processor, etc. If somebody gets the bright idea to put the robot arm and computer processor to the task of obtaining more resources, it creates an arms race where everyone has to spend as much of their resources as possible, as efficiently as possible, in the pursuit of more resources. If they don't, they'll soon find themselves losing the competition for resources from those that do. Eventually, they'll run out of resources and won't be able to make any bread.
Really your statement's a tautology: the 'cost' simply represents the finite nature of the resource, assuming it really *is* finite.
It represents the fact that resources are used up and no longer available to you once you choose that particular option. It's not a tautology, but I am going back to the definition of the word "cost" to show that yes, the resources used in producing a loaf of bread do indeed count as a "cost". That resource cost does not go away just because the cost of labor goes away. That's a very basic idea, so it may seem trivial, but here I am having to explain it because some people don't agree.
I said that machines will be better than us, not that they will be omnipotent gods capable of magicking free resources into existence from nothing. They will be better at finding resources than us, sure, but those resources will still be finite, which poses a problem of opportunity cost.
Which do you think gives a better rate of return on the investment of resources: planting wheat to make bread to feed humans (who have no money to pay for the bread) or putting up solar panels to power machines (who work tirelessly for free)? If you make the right choice, you will have a bigger share of the finite resources to go out and do it again. If you make the wrong choice, your share will shrink over time until you run out of resources entirely. In the end, the only ones left will be the ones who made the right choice.
No it won't. The cost of labor can go to zero, but as long as there is only a finite supply of the resources needed to produce a loaf of bread (in particular land and energy), it will always cost something.
You do have to have an income of some sort. Otherwise even one dollar is too expensive.
Machines have been slowly claiming one domain after another from humans for the past two hundred years or so. There's no reason to believe it will ever stop. Eventually machines will be better than us at literally everything, including making new machines. Economically, it's hard to see what our place would be when that happens.
I don't think many newborns read Slashdot.
If you want to eat once you get to Fiji, you don't have to bring your food with you on your 15 connecting flights. You can eat the food grown in Fiji so you don't incur any transportation costs.
By contrast, your plan amounts to building a series of outposts on a chain of desert islands in a barren sea. Not only do you have to bring all the food you'll need once you get there, you also have to bring enough food to feed all of the people manning all of the outposts along the way because they have no way to feed themselves. Instead of being convenient rest stops where travelers can pick up fresh supplies, these outposts would be a drain on the travelers' supplies.
Even if your outposts are self-contained habitats that perfectly recycle all of their resources (a hard enough problem in itself), you just need to swap "food" with "energy" and the problem remains the same.
Yes, but when you know someone is from Eastern Europe but you don't know if they are Polish or Ukrainian or what, you can just say "Eastern European", which is a useful grouping.
Likewise, people from eastern Russia are Asian, right? And Caucasians are from the Caucasus Mountains? No, ethnonyms are more complicated than you suggest, subject to historical accident, whim, and connotation as much as universal rules.
Just because the First Nations didn't have a word for this doesn't negate the need for such a word.
There are several terms for the aboriginal peoples of the United States, all of which have some problem. "First Nations" is a Canadian term and the Assembly of First Nations is a Canadian organization. That's fine for Canadians, but don't pretend that isn't a problem for people in the US.
The safest way is to find out the actual tribe or ethnic group a person belongs to and call them by that name, e.g. Cherokee. They do not recognize themselves as a single ethic group, let alone one that includes the Eskimo (a name with similar issues as "Indian") and the peoples of South America.
Anyone who cares about fixing the code is welcome to it, but the kernel developers do not care. They just don't want to be bothered with bug reports anymore.
Even if it is just a matter of clarifying the paper, it's still peer review in action. When OPERA responds, Contaldi will have the opportunity to review their clarifications. Maybe he'll respond again and point out that OPERA is still in the wrong. Or maybe he'll be satisfied and move on. This is how science is done. How is that not news?