In my country Kenya (that's spelt A-F-R-I-C-A for all you americans reading this).
Actually, your country appears to be spelt K-E-N-Y-A. Just thought I'd point that out.
We have a service called M-PESA that allows for such functionality - you can basically pay anyone (person or business) that has an M-PESA account. Heck, you can even withdraw money from an ATM using just your cellphone.
Duh huh. Isn't this country "Africa" you speak of right next to this other country "Nigeria" that I keep getting desperate emails from? How can I help? I've been helping deposed dictators' families since 1995!
Unfortunately, the internet is also a splendid tool for radical groups to communicate and share techniques for murdering people.
What you say is true. Let me (a bit off your topic) expand a bit on my take on this, however.
A gun can be used to kill as well. It can be used to revolt. But it can also save your life, be used for hunting, or simply recreation (target shooting). Does that mean they should be forbidden? This example holds for many other things, as well (cars, weapons, knives, electricity, pointy things) that can be used for good or evil.
If a Caliphate somehow undergoes an Islamist revolt that turns out to be successful, I don't approve of that. However, I also feel that if not by one way, then by another it will happen. The internet is a tool of good as well as evil. One must always take the good with the bad, especially if the bad is outweighed by the good (which in this case, I think it is).
In the end, we'll be defending ourselves, so it probably doesn't matter that much.
Would someone let me know when this product is available in the form of an X10 camera that will NEVER catch any naked girls in my house, spy on evil relatives, and see who dropped that toilet-clogger at my last party.
Awesome idea. I propose we start off by banning the following unsafe items that could harm you and possibly others: smoking, alcohol, cars, and electricity.
Besides, having explosives is not illegal just because you could use them for therrorism, but because accidents happen; accidents which might not only harm yourself (being stupid enough to have a bomb with you, whatever happens, you had it coming), but those around you as well. More so with something as powerful as a nuke.
!Insightful.
Having explosives is illegal because minds greater than ours (the so-called powers that be) have decided in their infinite wisdom that anything that could be used against them be forbidden knowledge. e.g. England banning pointy knives in the 17th century, firearms in the 20th, pointy things and cricket bats in the 21st.
In the US, if you have anything involving forbidden knowledge (dynamite, TNT, drugs, various esoteric chemicals precursors (and their precursors, ad infinitum)) you're automatically a terrorist and must be erased.
A working replica would be dangerous and surely illegal. It would not be terrorism unless he used it deliberately to terrorize a group of people. Just because something is bad doesn't make it terrorism.
I suspect this would be a fascinating 2nd Amendment fight.
I agree, this seems to be a growing problem. These companies seem to have little incentive to protect us, so perhaps they need a disincentive to let our data get stolen. I think it should be indexed to the number of accounts compromised and also increase with every violation. It is just criminal that these companies have next to zero accountability to protect their customers.
They'll just find a better way to get around disclosing information. Some legal, yet convoluted loophole. "No officer, that information wasn't personal." or like Heartland Payment Systems did, disclose it at an inappropriate time, and state that essentially, special information (addresses) wasn't lost, so they're not responsible if someone ingeniously cross-references a phone directory to the stolen data.
> It is just criminal that these companies have next to zero accountability to protect
> their customers.
As you are a paying customer they have whatever accountability their contract with you provides for. If it isn't adequate why did you agree to those terms?
Don't forget in a lot of cases, it's not like their competitor is going to do that much better. You can't boycott a data-losing gov't, and on the business end, you can boycott company X for losing data, but that doesn't really help when company Y does just as poorly.
Also, X keeps your data to lose again. And it only takes one of the two companies screwing up once to lose control of your information.
In Kansas City, they charge you a small fee to have an unlisted number, so it's not opt-in here. And on top of that, they charge you for the opt-out.
You must work for the department of redundancy department. Wouldn't having an unlisted phone number be exactly analogous to opting out? Basically, you're saying they're charging you twice for what appears to be the exact same thing.
All of this ignores the possibility of degeneracy pressures, since if the electroweak forces do apply, they could potentially repel the target from the black hole before it gets close enough to be captured.
I thought a lot of these small 'forces' were caused by exchanges of small amounts of sub-atomic particles between the not-so-sub-atomic particles.
whether or not my reasoning is correct, would the strong force/etc be 'sucked' in by the gravitational collapse and leave it a moot point?
someone with more info of the subject please point me in the right direction.
That assumes that forces are mediated by wave/particles. If that is true, then I would expect no force interaction between black holes and the target (because the mediating particles can't escape). Obviously this doesn't hold for gravity ("gravitons"), since a black hole still exerts gravity on the target outside the event horizon. I would conclude electroweak and strong forces are effected similarly, but the scales normally seen with black holes reduces their effect to infinitesimal.
I'm not going to get into the possibilities of these mediating particles behaving according to quantum effects and somehow effecting "action at a distance".
1kg black hole would have a cross sectional area far smaller than that of an atomic nucleus (or electron, or even the elementary particles), and gravity will be too small to do any attractions.
How would electroweak and strong forces apply to this? I can certainly theorize that since strong forces act over the femtometer scale, and the schw. radius is smaller than that, the particle would certainly be able to get within strong range. And the strong force of 1kg worth of mass acting on an atom would have to be absolutely astronomical.
A second thought would be what would happen if the black hole collides with the particle. Assuming the event horizon can't envelop the whole particle, and the particle is indivisible (unlike stars, gases, planets, and other macroscopic objects), what happens? Do we have a particle with a hole in it, a particle that goes completely into the hole, or do they not interact?
The amounts of energy found in nature are enormous by cosmic standards. The amounts of energy in the LHC are enormous by technological standards. The energy in the LHC probably isn't enough to do much more than destroy the LHC if something goes wrong. And a tiny black hole probably won't do much damage even if it did get loose (it would have too little mass-energy)
why is he - or his legal team, taking such extraordinary steps to avoid testifying?
Because he's so morbidly overweight that he's no longer able to leave his bed. That and the bad hair plugs keep him from going out in public. Oh, and he's got one of those crazy eyes where you can't tell where he's looking and he knows everybody on the internet will put his testimony on YouTube and laugh at him and leave mean comments. He's really a very sensitive soul and if you met him you'd like him, except for the horrible odor that comes from his unwillingness to bathe due to his persistent aquaphobia.
That, and if he showed his face he'd be in more danger than Barack Obama at a Klan meeting.
Actually, a human-like machine of comparable intelligence might be quite dangerous, as it would be prone to the more base emotions such as anger, greed, jealousy, but without the limitations on things like strength (pure speculation)
The wife and I were looking for ways to spice up the ol' Turing Test.
They sell "warming" lubricant at your local drug store. However, as it is a test of your Turing abilities, your wife can't be involved, and will instead be replaced by Sancho!
I'd bet that if spam were to "softly and silently vanish away, and never be seen again," our monthly ISP fees would drop.
No it wouldn't. They'd probably just pocket the difference. They've already set a price point. It's like food or fuel. It floats for awhile, then a crisis happens. The prices jump past some arbitrary watershed. People get used to the higher price at that watershed, and the price never goes back down, even if the prices of the inputs goes back to the previous levels.
I understand what's going on. The White House isn't allowed to track users, and Google is. So the White House is going to let Google track the users. Then when the POTUS wants to find out who's been at the site, he'll issue some kind of EO to google to release that information in the name of "National Security".
Insidious. Clever!
Of course, now that I've figured this out, I'll be expecting a visit from some droll men in suits and sunglasses. I better have some tea ready for them.
Slashdot Mirror
In my country Kenya (that's spelt A-F-R-I-C-A for all you americans reading this).
Actually, your country appears to be spelt K-E-N-Y-A. Just thought I'd point that out.
We have a service called M-PESA that allows for such functionality - you can basically pay anyone (person or business) that has an M-PESA account. Heck, you can even withdraw money from an ATM using just your cellphone.
Duh huh. Isn't this country "Africa" you speak of right next to this other country "Nigeria" that I keep getting desperate emails from? How can I help? I've been helping deposed dictators' families since 1995!
Unfortunately, the internet is also a splendid tool for radical groups to communicate and share techniques for murdering people.
What you say is true. Let me (a bit off your topic) expand a bit on my take on this, however.
A gun can be used to kill as well. It can be used to revolt. But it can also save your life, be used for hunting, or simply recreation (target shooting). Does that mean they should be forbidden? This example holds for many other things, as well (cars, weapons, knives, electricity, pointy things) that can be used for good or evil.
If a Caliphate somehow undergoes an Islamist revolt that turns out to be successful, I don't approve of that. However, I also feel that if not by one way, then by another it will happen. The internet is a tool of good as well as evil. One must always take the good with the bad, especially if the bad is outweighed by the good (which in this case, I think it is).
In the end, we'll be defending ourselves, so it probably doesn't matter that much.
Would someone let me know when this product is available in the form of an X10 camera that will NEVER catch any naked girls in my house, spy on evil relatives, and see who dropped that toilet-clogger at my last party.
Original Reference
Interview with X10 Creator
That might be the only remaining function of democracy in the US, letting the population take turns saying it's not their fault. ;)
Sadly, you're probably right. If I had mod points, this would be insightful.
Awesome idea. I propose we start off by banning the following unsafe items that could harm you and possibly others: smoking, alcohol, cars, and electricity.
The sun causes cancer! We must ban it, I tell you!
Besides, having explosives is not illegal just because you could use them for therrorism, but because accidents happen; accidents which might not only harm yourself (being stupid enough to have a bomb with you, whatever happens, you had it coming), but those around you as well. More so with something as powerful as a nuke.
!Insightful.
Having explosives is illegal because minds greater than ours (the so-called powers that be) have decided in their infinite wisdom that anything that could be used against them be forbidden knowledge. e.g. England banning pointy knives in the 17th century, firearms in the 20th, pointy things and cricket bats in the 21st.
In the US, if you have anything involving forbidden knowledge (dynamite, TNT, drugs, various esoteric chemicals precursors (and their precursors, ad infinitum)) you're automatically a terrorist and must be erased.
A working replica would be dangerous and surely illegal. It would not be terrorism unless he used it deliberately to terrorize a group of people. Just because something is bad doesn't make it terrorism.
I suspect this would be a fascinating 2nd Amendment fight.
I agree, this seems to be a growing problem. These companies seem to have little incentive to protect us, so perhaps they need a disincentive to let our data get stolen. I think it should be indexed to the number of accounts compromised and also increase with every violation. It is just criminal that these companies have next to zero accountability to protect their customers.
They'll just find a better way to get around disclosing information. Some legal, yet convoluted loophole. "No officer, that information wasn't personal." or like Heartland Payment Systems did, disclose it at an inappropriate time, and state that essentially, special information (addresses) wasn't lost, so they're not responsible if someone ingeniously cross-references a phone directory to the stolen data.
> It is just criminal that these companies have next to zero accountability to protect > their customers.
As you are a paying customer they have whatever accountability their contract with you provides for. If it isn't adequate why did you agree to those terms?
Don't forget in a lot of cases, it's not like their competitor is going to do that much better. You can't boycott a data-losing gov't, and on the business end, you can boycott company X for losing data, but that doesn't really help when company Y does just as poorly.
Also, X keeps your data to lose again. And it only takes one of the two companies screwing up once to lose control of your information.
In Kansas City, they charge you a small fee to have an unlisted number, so it's not opt-in here. And on top of that, they charge you for the opt-out.
You must work for the department of redundancy department. Wouldn't having an unlisted phone number be exactly analogous to opting out? Basically, you're saying they're charging you twice for what appears to be the exact same thing.
You can't spell Kucinich without UFO.
So much for not sacrificing ideals for safety.
Asshole.
Don't blame me. I didn't vote for him.
All of this ignores the possibility of degeneracy pressures, since if the electroweak forces do apply, they could potentially repel the target from the black hole before it gets close enough to be captured.
I thought a lot of these small 'forces' were caused by exchanges of small amounts of sub-atomic particles between the not-so-sub-atomic particles.
whether or not my reasoning is correct, would the strong force/etc be 'sucked' in by the gravitational collapse and leave it a moot point?
someone with more info of the subject please point me in the right direction.
That assumes that forces are mediated by wave/particles. If that is true, then I would expect no force interaction between black holes and the target (because the mediating particles can't escape). Obviously this doesn't hold for gravity ("gravitons"), since a black hole still exerts gravity on the target outside the event horizon. I would conclude electroweak and strong forces are effected similarly, but the scales normally seen with black holes reduces their effect to infinitesimal.
I'm not going to get into the possibilities of these mediating particles behaving according to quantum effects and somehow effecting "action at a distance".
Here's an interesting thought.
1kg black hole would have a cross sectional area far smaller than that of an atomic nucleus (or electron, or even the elementary particles), and gravity will be too small to do any attractions.
How would electroweak and strong forces apply to this? I can certainly theorize that since strong forces act over the femtometer scale, and the schw. radius is smaller than that, the particle would certainly be able to get within strong range. And the strong force of 1kg worth of mass acting on an atom would have to be absolutely astronomical.
A second thought would be what would happen if the black hole collides with the particle. Assuming the event horizon can't envelop the whole particle, and the particle is indivisible (unlike stars, gases, planets, and other macroscopic objects), what happens? Do we have a particle with a hole in it, a particle that goes completely into the hole, or do they not interact?
If we do generate black holes that swallow the Earth, at least worrying about that will take our minds off the economy!
Where's my bailout?
The amounts of energy found in nature are enormous by cosmic standards.
The amounts of energy in the LHC are enormous by technological standards.
The energy in the LHC probably isn't enough to do much more than destroy the LHC if something goes wrong. And a tiny black hole probably won't do much damage even if it did get loose (it would have too little mass-energy)
Because he's so morbidly overweight that he's no longer able to leave his bed. That and the bad hair plugs keep him from going out in public. Oh, and he's got one of those crazy eyes where you can't tell where he's looking and he knows everybody on the internet will put his testimony on YouTube and laugh at him and leave mean comments. He's really a very sensitive soul and if you met him you'd like him, except for the horrible odor that comes from his unwillingness to bathe due to his persistent aquaphobia.
That, and if he showed his face he'd be in more danger than Barack Obama at a Klan meeting.
It's time we pimp'd your mod!
Wow.
Shouldn't we make something that passes the original Turing Test first, before we go moving the goalposts?
Maybe mimicking appearance is easier (you know, like appearance + intelligence = regular turing test) or a subset.
We don't serve droids here.
Actually, a human-like machine of comparable intelligence might be quite dangerous, as it would be prone to the more base emotions such as anger, greed, jealousy, but without the limitations on things like strength (pure speculation)
The wife and I were looking for ways to spice up the ol' Turing Test.
They sell "warming" lubricant at your local drug store. However, as it is a test of your Turing abilities, your wife can't be involved, and will instead be replaced by Sancho!
I'd bet that if spam were to "softly and silently vanish away, and never be seen again," our monthly ISP fees would drop.
No it wouldn't. They'd probably just pocket the difference. They've already set a price point. It's like food or fuel. It floats for awhile, then a crisis happens. The prices jump past some arbitrary watershed. People get used to the higher price at that watershed, and the price never goes back down, even if the prices of the inputs goes back to the previous levels.
Join the Mobile Infantry and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?
Where do I sign up to squash bugs?
I understand what's going on. The White House isn't allowed to track users, and Google is. So the White House is going to let Google track the users. Then when the POTUS wants to find out who's been at the site, he'll issue some kind of EO to google to release that information in the name of "National Security".
Insidious. Clever!
Of course, now that I've figured this out, I'll be expecting a visit from some droll men in suits and sunglasses. I better have some tea ready for them.