I, for one, certainly can't imagine why anyone would dislike market traders, aside from envy. As we all know, financial markets have been widely regarded as practically a paragon of model free markets, remarkably free of corruption, fraud, regulatory capture, and other such socially disruptive distortions.
Also, trading floors are frictionless ideally planar surfaces, inhabited by perfectly spherical traders who obey the ideal gas laws...
With the exception of failure analysis(which certainly wouldn't be done by every outfit for every replacement; but might become a factor if some FRU is getting replaced a lot, knowing which subcontractor to fire can be handy...) or "parts" that are swapped as units but can be trivially refurbed and contain enough good bits to be worth salvaging; the company probably doesn't want the dead part back, just something they have to have shipped and recycled; but everyone I've ever dealt with has(unless specified to the contrary for some specific reason, as with hard drives that can't leave the premises anything close to intact) has at least reserved the right to ask for the dead part back if you request a warranty replacement.
Actually exercising that right is considerably rarer, because most of the time they don't have anything to gain; but there is usually a spot somewhere in the documentation that either says "Here's the new one, don't bother about the old one." or "Here's a mailing label, old part is back to us in 30 days, or you are getting invoiced as though you'd ordered a spare."
That's what bothers me more than the tweeting per se(yes, they might have been discussing the case in some covert way, and a phone would certainly give them the capability to be influenced during the case from the outside, which would be bad): If you are falling asleep, or twitting away about the coffee, you aren't even paying basic attention to the case, which is your job(or you suck so badly at paying basic attention to presentations of data that you should probably be excused from jury service and allowed to clear trash from the highway median for an equivalent length of time...)
Even if there was no jury tampering, as seems reasonably likely, there was definitely a bunch of jury-just-not-giving-a-fuck...
Arguably, the fact that the jurors had their phones with them provided valuable evidence of them absolutely not giving a fuck about a fairly important matter(It's only some guy being charged with murder, this isn't going to be on the test, right your honor?). In a way, it might be more valuable to leave people the means to easily and verifiably show that they are slacking off, rather than force them to slack off in more silent ways...
Seriously, tweeting about coffee and falling asleep during presentation of evidence, in a case about something slightly graver than a parking ticket?
I suppose the downside of a jury of one's peers is that one's peers are dangerously likely to be fuckwits with an attention span challenged by most commercial breaks...
The headline might as well read "Agency universally reviled as useless, degrading, expensive, criminal, nobody has the nerve to do more than nibble around its edges."
If what they've done so far has earned them only these relatively feeble stabs at powers they mostly just took during their time anyway(they didn't used to dress up in cop costumes or grope people on the record), exactly what would they have to do to earn a reorganization, or even a replacement? Execute a randomly chosen passenger once a shift, just to show the terrorists our resolve?
Android likely has an unassailable lead in application availability; but I know that WebOS's superior windowing/'card/swipe' gesture system made me feel like I was kicking a puppy by comparing a XOOM to a TouchPad...
I'm not sure that it would matter quite as much at phone-screen sizes; but the comparison at 10 inches was pretty stark.
I imagine that the fact that most PC vendors aren't trying to re-flash the wifi firmware every update, just in case you've cracked it and been able to connect to hotspots produced by another vendor, might help them with that feat...
My understanding is that giving young children access to finger-paint is also intended to foster creativity. It's just too bad that the result with the OEMs is so similar...
I'm not actually planning on exempting Apple. Their recent "iOS5 battery drain" thing, and various other glitches here and there are better than some of the other vendors; but still rather tepid for somebody who controls the entire OS, chooses the parts that go into the hardware, and has enough market dominance to shake some serious engineering support out of their vendors and contractors....
I'm not sure if most handset vendors just don't care, since they really want you to buy the new hardware, whether they just don't have a sufficient history of in-house software expertise, or whether the vendors of low-power mobile silicon are far nastier about driver blobs and things than their PC counterparts; but smartphones seem surprisingly glitchy for a fixed platform product with substantial vendor control over most of the software. They aren't quite on the same level as, say, ACPI issues in random homebuilds of questionable quality; but they seem pretty mediocre.
So, this long and rigorous testing process is why smartphones are known for their rock-solid stability, seamless integration between hardware and software, and general lack of baffling fail, right?
Never mind the boring stuff, you can get good old-fashioned blood sports right up to the present day. Bear baiting has seen hard times since Shakespear's day; but cockfights, dogfights, and bullfights are still on the menu, sometimes even legally, in a fair number of jurisdictions...
Unless you feel like dissecting a bunch of autistic children, having an animal model of the detection of emotions in conspecifics would be pretty useful, wouldn't it?
And you aren't going to get one of those without demonstrating that some suitable model animal can, indeed, detect and react to emotional cues in some usefully measurable way, so that you can start poking at the mechanisms responsible...
While the question of whether that is true or not is philosophically interesting and (hopefully) will one day progress to being neurologically interesting, it seems like a good working assumption, pending evidence to the contrary.
The options are pretty much "Sit in front of chalkboard and wring hands about what it means to experience an emotion, and whether rats do" or "start experimenting with rat behavior, learn something about that, and then possibly ascribe it an emotional significance"....
How many times do we see these "studies", only too look into it and see that these IMBECILE scientists are equating correlation with causation and are anthromopormophising *constantly*, interpreting the rats actions as if they had uniquely human intentions. Also, just look at their sample size, that is way too small to actually understand what is happening in all the rats. Another worthless animal-rights-nazi inspired science article, thats all this is.
While we are riding the fallacy train, would it be worth pointing out that the phrase "interpreting rats actions as if they had uniquely human intentions." begs the question(in the original sense of the term) so damned hard that the question has filed for a restraining order and moved to a different state? By definition, only humans possess uniquely human intentions. All intentions possessed by at least one nonehuman, or not possessed by any humans, are not uniquely human. Therefore, a non human cannot have a uniquely human intention...
It is certainly possible that the study is flawed in terms of sample size or statistical power, and I would quibble that you would really need to observe rats enduring a personal cost of some kind to assist a conspecific in order to suggest that they feel empathy, rather than mere cooperation(giving somebody something you have no use for doesn't require empathy. Giving up something you want in order to alleviate somebody else's distress arguably does). However, if you are just going to declare empathy a "uniquely human intention", what's the point? Nonhumans couldn't possibly have it; but they could exhibit a behavioral structure that is game-theoretically identical to empathy in operation, which would still be an interesting result...
In the future, bold advances in genetic engineering and biotechnology will allow humans to transplant their faces onto idealized bodies in order to meet impossible ideals of physical perfection!
Ya-Ha-Ha Ho Ho Ho
Shipped your job to Mexico
But we got plans for all of you to re-train
Pit the whole world against each other
For who will work for the lowest wage
The rest of you can die
As epidemics rage
Worked hard all your life
Now you must go on line
And stare all day
At a little plastic screen
Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation
Same old job
Now you're just a temp
Less pay, no benefits
No raise, no vacation
Or sick leave days
Chain the slaves to the oars
Faster, faster, row some more!
In carpel tunnel caverns
Til you break
We monitor you all
Every time you leave your chair
Or talk on the phone
One minute overtime
At the toilet
And you're fired
Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation
Only use we've left for you
Is burn you at both ends
Locked in the research triangle
Shirtwaist fire's flames
Lot's of people need your job
And you can be replaced
Replaced.
I'm pretty sure that this hypothetical 10-year keyboard would be the ghastliest of laptop-feel membrane crap.
Model Ms don't need active cooling or anything; but they pull a few hundred milliamps at 5v, wired, so I'm guessing that good, honest, real keyswitches are not the choice of champions when it comes to low power devices...
"Lockdown" or "Kiosk" or any of the other terms are simply shorthand ways of referring to sets of system modifications. If you can't modify the OS configuration, or even create new limited users, about the worst you can do is have your application do something annoying like constantly re-grabbing focus if it detects that it has lost focus, or other horrid little WM-nuisance tricks...
You pretty much have two options:
1. Lean on/buy beer for/be real nice to/go over the heads of/whatever it takes the IT staff and get authorization to run your own OS image(liveCD, PXE boot). The desire to not have you breaking their image is fair; but if you need a kiosk, and can boot a kiosk without touching the disk(indeed, any good kiosk mode image wouldn't touch r/w storage) they can suck it up.
2. Assuming the Ubuntu is reasonably stock, it has a provision for the user to allow a VNC session to shadow their desktop. Tell the kiddies that this test is going to be proctored. Have each open a server with the password you give on the whiteboard or whatever before the test starts. Point vncrec or vnc2flv at each VNC server. If the resultant footage shows cheating, garrote the offender with a mouse cord.
It's even more alarming because Voyager is 11 billion miles away and still might as well just be down the corner getting a pack of smokes in terms of its location relative to known concentrations of anything. 1.1*10^10 miles is a lot; but the nearest extrasolar star system is on the order of 2.5*10^13...
Y'know what "hurts community sentiment" more than all the trolls in the world, no matter how socially malformed, photoshop adept, and equipped with free time equal only to their misanthropy?
How about you work on the "brutal violence in response to hurt feelings about whose invisible friend is better" problem and then worry about scary things on the internet?
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, certainly can't imagine why anyone would dislike market traders, aside from envy. As we all know, financial markets have been widely regarded as practically a paragon of model free markets, remarkably free of corruption, fraud, regulatory capture, and other such socially disruptive distortions.
Also, trading floors are frictionless ideally planar surfaces, inhabited by perfectly spherical traders who obey the ideal gas laws...
With the exception of failure analysis(which certainly wouldn't be done by every outfit for every replacement; but might become a factor if some FRU is getting replaced a lot, knowing which subcontractor to fire can be handy...) or "parts" that are swapped as units but can be trivially refurbed and contain enough good bits to be worth salvaging; the company probably doesn't want the dead part back, just something they have to have shipped and recycled; but everyone I've ever dealt with has(unless specified to the contrary for some specific reason, as with hard drives that can't leave the premises anything close to intact) has at least reserved the right to ask for the dead part back if you request a warranty replacement.
Actually exercising that right is considerably rarer, because most of the time they don't have anything to gain; but there is usually a spot somewhere in the documentation that either says "Here's the new one, don't bother about the old one." or "Here's a mailing label, old part is back to us in 30 days, or you are getting invoiced as though you'd ordered a spare."
I thought, for a sinking moment, that there had been a rogue employee at military contractor Union Aerospace Corp...
That's what bothers me more than the tweeting per se(yes, they might have been discussing the case in some covert way, and a phone would certainly give them the capability to be influenced during the case from the outside, which would be bad): If you are falling asleep, or twitting away about the coffee, you aren't even paying basic attention to the case, which is your job(or you suck so badly at paying basic attention to presentations of data that you should probably be excused from jury service and allowed to clear trash from the highway median for an equivalent length of time...)
Even if there was no jury tampering, as seems reasonably likely, there was definitely a bunch of jury-just-not-giving-a-fuck...
Arguably, the fact that the jurors had their phones with them provided valuable evidence of them absolutely not giving a fuck about a fairly important matter(It's only some guy being charged with murder, this isn't going to be on the test, right your honor?). In a way, it might be more valuable to leave people the means to easily and verifiably show that they are slacking off, rather than force them to slack off in more silent ways...
Seriously, tweeting about coffee and falling asleep during presentation of evidence, in a case about something slightly graver than a parking ticket?
I suppose the downside of a jury of one's peers is that one's peers are dangerously likely to be fuckwits with an attention span challenged by most commercial breaks...
The headline might as well read "Agency universally reviled as useless, degrading, expensive, criminal, nobody has the nerve to do more than nibble around its edges."
If what they've done so far has earned them only these relatively feeble stabs at powers they mostly just took during their time anyway(they didn't used to dress up in cop costumes or grope people on the record), exactly what would they have to do to earn a reorganization, or even a replacement? Execute a randomly chosen passenger once a shift, just to show the terrorists our resolve?
Android likely has an unassailable lead in application availability; but I know that WebOS's superior windowing/'card/swipe' gesture system made me feel like I was kicking a puppy by comparing a XOOM to a TouchPad...
I'm not sure that it would matter quite as much at phone-screen sizes; but the comparison at 10 inches was pretty stark.
I imagine that the fact that most PC vendors aren't trying to re-flash the wifi firmware every update, just in case you've cracked it and been able to connect to hotspots produced by another vendor, might help them with that feat...
My understanding is that giving young children access to finger-paint is also intended to foster creativity. It's just too bad that the result with the OEMs is so similar...
I'm not actually planning on exempting Apple. Their recent "iOS5 battery drain" thing, and various other glitches here and there are better than some of the other vendors; but still rather tepid for somebody who controls the entire OS, chooses the parts that go into the hardware, and has enough market dominance to shake some serious engineering support out of their vendors and contractors....
I'm not sure if most handset vendors just don't care, since they really want you to buy the new hardware, whether they just don't have a sufficient history of in-house software expertise, or whether the vendors of low-power mobile silicon are far nastier about driver blobs and things than their PC counterparts; but smartphones seem surprisingly glitchy for a fixed platform product with substantial vendor control over most of the software. They aren't quite on the same level as, say, ACPI issues in random homebuilds of questionable quality; but they seem pretty mediocre.
So, this long and rigorous testing process is why smartphones are known for their rock-solid stability, seamless integration between hardware and software, and general lack of baffling fail, right?
Never mind the boring stuff, you can get good old-fashioned blood sports right up to the present day. Bear baiting has seen hard times since Shakespear's day; but cockfights, dogfights, and bullfights are still on the menu, sometimes even legally, in a fair number of jurisdictions...
Personally I have a hard time looking at this people without utter disgust.
I'll take it that you aren't really the empathic type, eh?
Unless you feel like dissecting a bunch of autistic children, having an animal model of the detection of emotions in conspecifics would be pretty useful, wouldn't it?
And you aren't going to get one of those without demonstrating that some suitable model animal can, indeed, detect and react to emotional cues in some usefully measurable way, so that you can start poking at the mechanisms responsible...
While the question of whether that is true or not is philosophically interesting and (hopefully) will one day progress to being neurologically interesting, it seems like a good working assumption, pending evidence to the contrary.
The options are pretty much "Sit in front of chalkboard and wring hands about what it means to experience an emotion, and whether rats do" or "start experimenting with rat behavior, learn something about that, and then possibly ascribe it an emotional significance"....
How many times do we see these "studies", only too look into it and see that these IMBECILE scientists are equating correlation with causation and are anthromopormophising *constantly*, interpreting the rats actions as if they had uniquely human intentions. Also, just look at their sample size, that is way too small to actually understand what is happening in all the rats. Another worthless animal-rights-nazi inspired science article, thats all this is.
While we are riding the fallacy train, would it be worth pointing out that the phrase "interpreting rats actions as if they had uniquely human intentions." begs the question(in the original sense of the term) so damned hard that the question has filed for a restraining order and moved to a different state? By definition, only humans possess uniquely human intentions. All intentions possessed by at least one nonehuman, or not possessed by any humans, are not uniquely human. Therefore, a non human cannot have a uniquely human intention...
It is certainly possible that the study is flawed in terms of sample size or statistical power, and I would quibble that you would really need to observe rats enduring a personal cost of some kind to assist a conspecific in order to suggest that they feel empathy, rather than mere cooperation(giving somebody something you have no use for doesn't require empathy. Giving up something you want in order to alleviate somebody else's distress arguably does). However, if you are just going to declare empathy a "uniquely human intention", what's the point? Nonhumans couldn't possibly have it; but they could exhibit a behavioral structure that is game-theoretically identical to empathy in operation, which would still be an interesting result...
This just in, rats morally superior to alarming percentage of humans...
In the future, bold advances in genetic engineering and biotechnology will allow humans to transplant their faces onto idealized bodies in order to meet impossible ideals of physical perfection!
Ya-Ha-Ha Ho Ho Ho
Shipped your job to Mexico
But we got plans for all of you to re-train
Pit the whole world against each other
For who will work for the lowest wage
The rest of you can die
As epidemics rage
Worked hard all your life
Now you must go on line
And stare all day
At a little plastic screen
Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation
Same old job
Now you're just a temp
Less pay, no benefits
No raise, no vacation
Or sick leave days
Chain the slaves to the oars
Faster, faster, row some more!
In carpel tunnel caverns
Til you break
We monitor you all
Every time you leave your chair
Or talk on the phone
One minute overtime
At the toilet
And you're fired
Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation
Only use we've left for you
Is burn you at both ends
Locked in the research triangle
Shirtwaist fire's flames
Lot's of people need your job
And you can be replaced
Replaced.
Replaced.
Unemployed and overqualified
I'm pretty sure that this hypothetical 10-year keyboard would be the ghastliest of laptop-feel membrane crap.
Model Ms don't need active cooling or anything; but they pull a few hundred milliamps at 5v, wired, so I'm guessing that good, honest, real keyswitches are not the choice of champions when it comes to low power devices...
"Lockdown" or "Kiosk" or any of the other terms are simply shorthand ways of referring to sets of system modifications. If you can't modify the OS configuration, or even create new limited users, about the worst you can do is have your application do something annoying like constantly re-grabbing focus if it detects that it has lost focus, or other horrid little WM-nuisance tricks...
You pretty much have two options:
1. Lean on/buy beer for/be real nice to/go over the heads of/whatever it takes the IT staff and get authorization to run your own OS image(liveCD, PXE boot). The desire to not have you breaking their image is fair; but if you need a kiosk, and can boot a kiosk without touching the disk(indeed, any good kiosk mode image wouldn't touch r/w storage) they can suck it up.
2. Assuming the Ubuntu is reasonably stock, it has a provision for the user to allow a VNC session to shadow their desktop. Tell the kiddies that this test is going to be proctored. Have each open a server with the password you give on the whiteboard or whatever before the test starts. Point vncrec or vnc2flv at each VNC server. If the resultant footage shows cheating, garrote the offender with a mouse cord.
It may not look like much; but it's got it where it counts....
It's even more alarming because Voyager is 11 billion miles away and still might as well just be down the corner getting a pack of smokes in terms of its location relative to known concentrations of anything. 1.1*10^10 miles is a lot; but the nearest extrasolar star system is on the order of 2.5*10^13...
We call this a "Zuckerpunch".
Y'know what "hurts community sentiment" more than all the trolls in the world, no matter how socially malformed, photoshop adept, and equipped with free time equal only to their misanthropy?
Your own bloody, medieval, sectarian clusterfucks...
How about you work on the "brutal violence in response to hurt feelings about whose invisible friend is better" problem and then worry about scary things on the internet?