I find their choice of protest targets rather strange (If you think that autonomous vehicles are the biggest of your problems, or that Google is the major threat in that area, you are painfully uninformed...); but do you seriously expect people to just 'GTFO' (and to where?) whenever technological change comes knocking? Economic threats are one of the few things that reliably get people worked up, and technological change definitely is one, if you are the one being rendered obsolete at a given time.
Rhetoric for, or against, 'natural' or 'god given' rights tends to be nonsense; but expecting people to not get touchy when you come after their bread and butter seems like either profound ignorance of history and human nature, or a... perhaps unsteady... theory of social order. Hard to keep a game running if most of the players lose most of the time, no?
The two major players would be tar sands development and (relatively distant second) fisheries lobbies who would rather fish their quarry into extinction and then go bankrupt, rather than suffer some sort of limits now in the service of having fish in the future.
The fisheries guys are comparatively small-time (and have been around for decades, and also have a love/hate relationship with scientific fish experts, nobody likes being subject to quotas; but fishermen aren't dumb enough to think that the future of fishing is in having no fish, so they agree in principle, if not in yearly numbers and exact population estimates, with the science guys), so my money would be on the tar sands sector.
Unfortunately, the new "Beware of the leopard" signs are still in the contract-tender phase, and are expected to be delayed. In the meantime, feel free to check the locked filing cabinet.
...are we batshit crazy. What the FUCK ever happened to science? We are descending back into the dark ages...
In the specific context of Canada, certain uppity scientists suggested that there might be unpleasant environmental side-effects to the plan to use tar sands to turn Canada into a dysfunctional petrostate.
In a not-at-all-dysfunctional-petrostate move, the Harper regime decided to show those uppity scientists where they could shove their 'evidence'. (Probably not a library, anymore)
Nobody pays you for downtime; but vendors with 'enterprise' hopes certainly do offer warranties (usually as an option, not a baseline) that make it very clear that the customer considers time-to-fix to be a serious problem. 4 hour onsite 24/7/365 tends not to be the cheap warranty; but offering it can be attractive to customers who value their time.
Apple is sort of an oddball in that their base level of service tends to be quite high (they have their share of horror stories; but given that the consumer-level onsite support options are 'Apple Store' or 'get fucked over by the Geek Squad'...); but even their relatively expensive products don't really have anything else on the table. The various PC OEMs tend to offer service tiers all the way from 'active hostility' to 'helicopter parent'.
And her opinion on the 8th amendment matters why exactly? (yes, yes, I know that invoking the victim, and her precious fetus too, I see, is fashionable; but it's kind of a lousy substitute for thinking).
I'm skeptical of this system because it is at least the second (after 'Red Flag', possibly more of them than that, certainly a lot more if you count 'nationalist linux forks' generally, rather than just Chinese ones), and past attempts havent exactly set the world on fire with their success.
More generally, though, I'm skeptical largely because (at the present time) you basically have to shop like Richard Stallman (and possibly even harder than he does, if some TAO-level group has designs on you) to have a chance in hell to even see all the security-relevant software/firmware that goes into your system in anything other than a mixture of OSS components, proprietary userspace applications, and firmware blobs (often doing not-even-a-debugger-knows-what on the various totally undocumented application-specific processors hanging off various busses). So long as that's the case, even if your OS is FOSS and you've audited the hell out of it (odds are you haven't) and you have a robust security model designed to keep applications in check (obligatory XKCD, odds are that it will all come to nothing because your lowballing vendor has a BSP full of proprietary shit, your GPU vendor won't offer anything but a binary blob unless you abduct the entire Board's families and threaten to return them one slice at a time, and you don't have a clue what various surprisingly punchy microcontrollers and very-low-end ARM cores attached to dangerously useful (and mostly unexamined) busses are doing in their own memory spaces.
If Team China manages to solve these problems(especially acute in cellphones because the cellular baseband which makes wifi interfaces look like GNU-paradise by comparison in terms of openness and robustness), then I'll be damn interested, no matter how much their 'yet another shitty fork of something that they could have just audited' linux-derivate OS bores me. If they don't manage to solve them, or don't even bother, that this is just some balance-of-trade enthusiast crying into his beer about Android's ubiquity in the Chinese smartphone market, who cares?
Is anybody having better luck than I am coming up with the price of ~100,000 pounds of structural steel in 1943? I assume that a US Naval Research Lab project didn't need to dig ration coupons out of the couch cushions to buy hardware; but we were in the process of gearing up for one of the world's largest exercises in throwing men and materiel into the grinder...
Oh, definitely, cramming isn't a particularly good strategy, especially in the long term. My point is just that (particularly for people who have conditions for which they are prescribed; but apparently the general population as well to some degree) performance enhancing drugs are simply performance enhancing.
People who have blatantly shot study habits and/or sleep schedules need drugs to function; because they are pushing themselves well beyond sensible parameters; but it's entirely possible to take a sensible approach to sleep and study and just make it a bit better with the extra focus and alertness that drugs can provide. You have to be careful; because the greater ability to push yourself makes it easier to fall into bad habits and (at least for a bit) get away with it; but if you are careful, there isn't anything magically pathological about drug-aided activity.
1. Not enough students are persuing 'STEM' education.
2. Hypothesis: 'STEM' education needs to be improved, to improve retention and attraction and/or the rewards of pursuing 'STEM' education need to be more visible, greater, or both.
3. Ergo, we should issue more H-1B visas in order to lower the real wages for workers in 'STEM' fields and thus incentivize more students to study the (even if rewarding, quite challenging) 'STEM' subjects!
A non-sequitur would be downright sensible by comparison. At least disconnected statements tend to not be internally contradictory...
If you are having difficulty recruiting students for a subject, why would you possibly want to reduce the rewards for studying a subject? That's the opposite of what you want to do. Now, admittedly, some non-STEM students or STEM-abandoning students are motivated more by shitty teaching or other similar factors than they are by future job prospects; but unless you want to abandon basically all theories of human motivation underlying vaguely capitalist economies, you have to admit that expected payoff is sort of a major factor in whether to stick with hard math or go and do something else.
This one strikes me as similar to the (also surprisingly common and equally absurd; but self-interested) "We can't attract enough good talent, also wages are too high!" whining from employers. Hey, dumbass, supply curves, no? If you can't attract good talent, how can you also be paying too much? Unless your work environment is brutally fucked on various social levels, if you were overpaying, talent would be knocking down the door to come join you...
Clearly IE, the popular closed source browser,,is against anonymity. Who knows this for sure, the country with the code.ie - I feel dumb for not knowing earlier.
I strongly doubt that there is actually a connection here, rather than some pandering moron attempting to secure the Irish values voter/authoritarian 'security' freak vote; but MS (and most multinationals doing business in the EU) magically book enormous portions of the proceeds in Ireland, rather than countries with the actual customers and higher taxes...
He starts by condeming browsers and proxies that help people browse the internet anonymously. Then he jumps to saying that anonymous browsing leads to trading drugs, weapons, and pornography. Then he commends the USA NSA for spying on Americans but is concerned that now that they have been caught Americans might do something about it.
Would it be in poor taste to express a hope that the British come and show him how much fun being the object of 'security' is, like they used to? There's no cure for an authoritarian asshole quite like a bit of repression that he isn't in favor of....
Eh, off-label modafinil use strongly suggests that cramming is going on(since they aren't good enough to stave off sleep forever, and people who don't want to crash hard just have to suck it up and develop a vaguely healthy sleep schedule in the long term); but psychostimulants (while they may well be useful for cramming) don't magically taint what you learn while using them with some sort of 'unnatural, short-term retention only' flag. They also don't have any properties precluding long-term use in people who find them useful (plus, many are off-patent and quite cheap).
Amphetamines have a certain... associated stereotype... of high-as-a-kite tweakers too buzzed to focus on much of anything coherent. In terms of actual prescriptions, yeah, psychostimulants are all about attention, with a side of alertness aid and the occasional dubiously-approved-of weight loss application.
Obviously, doing something not-blatantly-unhealthy is probably a good idea; but amphetamines and modafinil are the tools of choice among students these days in need of a performance enhancement.
If Modafinil has any serious downsides, they certainly are subtle ones. Unlike stimulants, which leave you tired but jittery, it just makes you not tired. The amphetamines, of course, are to be treated with respect and moderation(oral doses, ideally sustained release, you aren't trying to get high here); but can, somewhat surprisingly, sharpen the hell out of your focus. Just be careful. In my experience, they Don't improve the targeting of your focus. If they help you maintain intense focus on a piece of work for far longer than would otherwise be possible, great. If they help you maintain intense focus on completing 100% of the achievements in Dishonored, less useful; but they'll do either depending on the situation you put yourself in.
What I'm always sort of shocked by is how Nintendo knows how to make good games; but their ability to make software seems stuck back in the era when you just built the hardware and let the ROM in the cartridge take over. It isn't a huge surprise that Microsoft approaches their consoles with a heavy dose of software and server backend (even if you don't like their software, they sure have years of experience with writing the stuff, and know a thing or two about running high-volume server operations). Sony is a bit of a surprise, their reputation on the software side for things like computer/minidisk connections, ebook stores, etc. is pretty fucking dire, and they do lag MS on the console side; but they've mostly risen to the occasion.
Nintendo seems to have almost entirely skipped the 'Consoles: Actually a specialized computer now, M'kay?' era. On the plus side, this usually means that they hit the lowest BOM (especially their handhelds, brutally minimalist hardware even today); but it's a total clusterfuck when they try to do anything that takes advantage of the power of having a real computer at your disposal...
I like the controller. Much better having menus/maps on hands than going to menu and dig there. And then there's the asymmetric play (from common games seen in LEGO Marvel where other player can wander off and see his things on pad controller instead of splitscreen).
I like the controller concept; but it's pretty awkward that it was released (and both the BOM teardowns and the pricing of individual controllers suggests it wasn't inexpensive compared to the console as a whole) at the same time that the market is being flooded with iPads and Android tablets, many markedly more competent, classier screens, etc.
Given that the console market is highly price sensitive, and the Wii U draws serious flack for being underpowered, it's a pity that they had to blow the cash on a dedicated, mediocre, peripheral rather than a set of buttons that snap onto one of a few major tablet types and a dollop of software.
I'm shocked. Oracle has always seemed like one the more reputable companies, willing to compete fairly, not obsessed with gouging its customers, and nary an evil bone in their corporate body. I can't imagine them hiring or promoting people that would act like this.
Honestly, I am shocked; but for totally different reasons:
Oracle is evil, sure; but they are a major corporation, with a legal department, HR, 'Compliance' people, and so on. Try to stiff an employee and fire him if he complains? Fuck yeah, Larry can't keep himself in yachts if the peons get all the crumbs they ask for.
Outright admit that you are engaging in discrimination based on racial/ethnic/national origin, when there are so many other ways to massage something as potentially ambiguous as salary level, 'fit with the company', and so on? Was somebody drunk on the job? Asking to get fired and sued? Got away with it so often that they got arrogant?
That is what strikes me as shocking (though, rather convenient for the cause of justice). There are endless legal, or at least 100% unprovable, ways of fucking with somebody. What kind of utter moron would be dumb enough to tell the guy the truth to his face?
Except the value of doing massive amounts of patent-related litigation... It's the white-collar equivalent of those little shithole towns where prisons are the engine of economic life.
Slashdot Mirror
I find their choice of protest targets rather strange (If you think that autonomous vehicles are the biggest of your problems, or that Google is the major threat in that area, you are painfully uninformed...); but do you seriously expect people to just 'GTFO' (and to where?) whenever technological change comes knocking? Economic threats are one of the few things that reliably get people worked up, and technological change definitely is one, if you are the one being rendered obsolete at a given time.
Rhetoric for, or against, 'natural' or 'god given' rights tends to be nonsense; but expecting people to not get touchy when you come after their bread and butter seems like either profound ignorance of history and human nature, or a... perhaps unsteady... theory of social order. Hard to keep a game running if most of the players lose most of the time, no?
'Weapons that don't work if there is matter between you and the target' are probably kind of a niche at present...
The two major players would be tar sands development and (relatively distant second) fisheries lobbies who would rather fish their quarry into extinction and then go bankrupt, rather than suffer some sort of limits now in the service of having fish in the future.
The fisheries guys are comparatively small-time (and have been around for decades, and also have a love/hate relationship with scientific fish experts, nobody likes being subject to quotas; but fishermen aren't dumb enough to think that the future of fishing is in having no fish, so they agree in principle, if not in yearly numbers and exact population estimates, with the science guys), so my money would be on the tar sands sector.
Unfortunately, the new "Beware of the leopard" signs are still in the contract-tender phase, and are expected to be delayed. In the meantime, feel free to check the locked filing cabinet.
...are we batshit crazy. What the FUCK ever happened to science? We are descending back into the dark ages...
In the specific context of Canada, certain uppity scientists suggested that there might be unpleasant environmental side-effects to the plan to use tar sands to turn Canada into a dysfunctional petrostate.
In a not-at-all-dysfunctional-petrostate move, the Harper regime decided to show those uppity scientists where they could shove their 'evidence'. (Probably not a library, anymore)
What kind of welfare queens were they back in 2009 if they've lost more subsidies per customer than a suburban or urban internet connection costs?
Nobody pays you for downtime; but vendors with 'enterprise' hopes certainly do offer warranties (usually as an option, not a baseline) that make it very clear that the customer considers time-to-fix to be a serious problem. 4 hour onsite 24/7/365 tends not to be the cheap warranty; but offering it can be attractive to customers who value their time.
Apple is sort of an oddball in that their base level of service tends to be quite high (they have their share of horror stories; but given that the consumer-level onsite support options are 'Apple Store' or 'get fucked over by the Geek Squad'...); but even their relatively expensive products don't really have anything else on the table. The various PC OEMs tend to offer service tiers all the way from 'active hostility' to 'helicopter parent'.
Second law of thermodynamics says 'no', though it allows some wiggle room with regard to how fast you die.
And her opinion on the 8th amendment matters why exactly? (yes, yes, I know that invoking the victim, and her precious fetus too, I see, is fashionable; but it's kind of a lousy substitute for thinking).
I'm skeptical of this system because it is at least the second (after 'Red Flag', possibly more of them than that, certainly a lot more if you count 'nationalist linux forks' generally, rather than just Chinese ones), and past attempts havent exactly set the world on fire with their success.
More generally, though, I'm skeptical largely because (at the present time) you basically have to shop like Richard Stallman (and possibly even harder than he does, if some TAO-level group has designs on you) to have a chance in hell to even see all the security-relevant software/firmware that goes into your system in anything other than a mixture of OSS components, proprietary userspace applications, and firmware blobs (often doing not-even-a-debugger-knows-what on the various totally undocumented application-specific processors hanging off various busses). So long as that's the case, even if your OS is FOSS and you've audited the hell out of it (odds are you haven't) and you have a robust security model designed to keep applications in check (obligatory XKCD, odds are that it will all come to nothing because your lowballing vendor has a BSP full of proprietary shit, your GPU vendor won't offer anything but a binary blob unless you abduct the entire Board's families and threaten to return them one slice at a time, and you don't have a clue what various surprisingly punchy microcontrollers and very-low-end ARM cores attached to dangerously useful (and mostly unexamined) busses are doing in their own memory spaces.
If Team China manages to solve these problems(especially acute in cellphones because the cellular baseband which makes wifi interfaces look like GNU-paradise by comparison in terms of openness and robustness), then I'll be damn interested, no matter how much their 'yet another shitty fork of something that they could have just audited' linux-derivate OS bores me. If they don't manage to solve them, or don't even bother, that this is just some balance-of-trade enthusiast crying into his beer about Android's ubiquity in the Chinese smartphone market, who cares?
Is anybody having better luck than I am coming up with the price of ~100,000 pounds of structural steel in 1943? I assume that a US Naval Research Lab project didn't need to dig ration coupons out of the couch cushions to buy hardware; but we were in the process of gearing up for one of the world's largest exercises in throwing men and materiel into the grinder...
Another politician known to contain whiskey!
Oh, definitely, cramming isn't a particularly good strategy, especially in the long term. My point is just that (particularly for people who have conditions for which they are prescribed; but apparently the general population as well to some degree) performance enhancing drugs are simply performance enhancing.
People who have blatantly shot study habits and/or sleep schedules need drugs to function; because they are pushing themselves well beyond sensible parameters; but it's entirely possible to take a sensible approach to sleep and study and just make it a bit better with the extra focus and alertness that drugs can provide. You have to be careful; because the greater ability to push yourself makes it easier to fall into bad habits and (at least for a bit) get away with it; but if you are careful, there isn't anything magically pathological about drug-aided activity.
It's worse than a non-sequitur:
Let's play EC101 for a second here:
1. Not enough students are persuing 'STEM' education.
2. Hypothesis: 'STEM' education needs to be improved, to improve retention and attraction and/or the rewards of pursuing 'STEM' education need to be more visible, greater, or both.
3. Ergo, we should issue more H-1B visas in order to lower the real wages for workers in 'STEM' fields and thus incentivize more students to study the (even if rewarding, quite challenging) 'STEM' subjects!
A non-sequitur would be downright sensible by comparison. At least disconnected statements tend to not be internally contradictory...
If you are having difficulty recruiting students for a subject, why would you possibly want to reduce the rewards for studying a subject? That's the opposite of what you want to do. Now, admittedly, some non-STEM students or STEM-abandoning students are motivated more by shitty teaching or other similar factors than they are by future job prospects; but unless you want to abandon basically all theories of human motivation underlying vaguely capitalist economies, you have to admit that expected payoff is sort of a major factor in whether to stick with hard math or go and do something else.
This one strikes me as similar to the (also surprisingly common and equally absurd; but self-interested) "We can't attract enough good talent, also wages are too high!" whining from employers. Hey, dumbass, supply curves, no? If you can't attract good talent, how can you also be paying too much? Unless your work environment is brutally fucked on various social levels, if you were overpaying, talent would be knocking down the door to come join you...
Clearly IE, the popular closed source browser, ,is against anonymity. Who knows this for sure, the country with the code .ie - I feel dumb for not knowing earlier.
I strongly doubt that there is actually a connection here, rather than some pandering moron attempting to secure the Irish values voter/authoritarian 'security' freak vote; but MS (and most multinationals doing business in the EU) magically book enormous portions of the proceeds in Ireland, rather than countries with the actual customers and higher taxes...
Isn't an 'Irish Ted Stevens' a politician who contains enough whiskey that it's illegal to drive across the bridge to nowhere after drinking one?
He starts by condeming browsers and proxies that help people browse the internet anonymously. Then he jumps to saying that anonymous browsing leads to trading drugs, weapons, and pornography. Then he commends the USA NSA for spying on Americans but is concerned that now that they have been caught Americans might do something about it.
Would it be in poor taste to express a hope that the British come and show him how much fun being the object of 'security' is, like they used to? There's no cure for an authoritarian asshole quite like a bit of repression that he isn't in favor of....
Eh, off-label modafinil use strongly suggests that cramming is going on(since they aren't good enough to stave off sleep forever, and people who don't want to crash hard just have to suck it up and develop a vaguely healthy sleep schedule in the long term); but psychostimulants (while they may well be useful for cramming) don't magically taint what you learn while using them with some sort of 'unnatural, short-term retention only' flag. They also don't have any properties precluding long-term use in people who find them useful (plus, many are off-patent and quite cheap).
Amphetamines have a certain... associated stereotype... of high-as-a-kite tweakers too buzzed to focus on much of anything coherent. In terms of actual prescriptions, yeah, psychostimulants are all about attention, with a side of alertness aid and the occasional dubiously-approved-of weight loss application.
Obviously, doing something not-blatantly-unhealthy is probably a good idea; but amphetamines and modafinil are the tools of choice among students these days in need of a performance enhancement.
If Modafinil has any serious downsides, they certainly are subtle ones. Unlike stimulants, which leave you tired but jittery, it just makes you not tired. The amphetamines, of course, are to be treated with respect and moderation(oral doses, ideally sustained release, you aren't trying to get high here); but can, somewhat surprisingly, sharpen the hell out of your focus. Just be careful. In my experience, they Don't improve the targeting of your focus. If they help you maintain intense focus on a piece of work for far longer than would otherwise be possible, great. If they help you maintain intense focus on completing 100% of the achievements in Dishonored, less useful; but they'll do either depending on the situation you put yourself in.
What I'm always sort of shocked by is how Nintendo knows how to make good games; but their ability to make software seems stuck back in the era when you just built the hardware and let the ROM in the cartridge take over. It isn't a huge surprise that Microsoft approaches their consoles with a heavy dose of software and server backend (even if you don't like their software, they sure have years of experience with writing the stuff, and know a thing or two about running high-volume server operations). Sony is a bit of a surprise, their reputation on the software side for things like computer/minidisk connections, ebook stores, etc. is pretty fucking dire, and they do lag MS on the console side; but they've mostly risen to the occasion.
Nintendo seems to have almost entirely skipped the 'Consoles: Actually a specialized computer now, M'kay?' era. On the plus side, this usually means that they hit the lowest BOM (especially their handhelds, brutally minimalist hardware even today); but it's a total clusterfuck when they try to do anything that takes advantage of the power of having a real computer at your disposal...
I like the controller. Much better having menus/maps on hands than going to menu and dig there. And then there's the asymmetric play (from common games seen in LEGO Marvel where other player can wander off and see his things on pad controller instead of splitscreen).
I like the controller concept; but it's pretty awkward that it was released (and both the BOM teardowns and the pricing of individual controllers suggests it wasn't inexpensive compared to the console as a whole) at the same time that the market is being flooded with iPads and Android tablets, many markedly more competent, classier screens, etc.
Given that the console market is highly price sensitive, and the Wii U draws serious flack for being underpowered, it's a pity that they had to blow the cash on a dedicated, mediocre, peripheral rather than a set of buttons that snap onto one of a few major tablet types and a dollop of software.
I'm shocked. Oracle has always seemed like one the more reputable companies, willing to compete fairly, not obsessed with gouging its customers, and nary an evil bone in their corporate body. I can't imagine them hiring or promoting people that would act like this.
Honestly, I am shocked; but for totally different reasons:
Oracle is evil, sure; but they are a major corporation, with a legal department, HR, 'Compliance' people, and so on. Try to stiff an employee and fire him if he complains? Fuck yeah, Larry can't keep himself in yachts if the peons get all the crumbs they ask for.
Outright admit that you are engaging in discrimination based on racial/ethnic/national origin, when there are so many other ways to massage something as potentially ambiguous as salary level, 'fit with the company', and so on? Was somebody drunk on the job? Asking to get fired and sued? Got away with it so often that they got arrogant?
That is what strikes me as shocking (though, rather convenient for the cause of justice). There are endless legal, or at least 100% unprovable, ways of fucking with somebody. What kind of utter moron would be dumb enough to tell the guy the truth to his face?
You mean the size of the city plots, right?
... to the District Court in Eastern Texas.
Except the value of doing massive amounts of patent-related litigation... It's the white-collar equivalent of those little shithole towns where prisons are the engine of economic life.