There is at least one other difference: Snowden didn't commit his alleged crime inside a member country (Asange's alleged sex crime happened in Switzerland). Moreover Snowden's revelations didn't seriously harm or indict any member governments (except the UK though to a much lesser degree than the US) while Asange has targetted all governments and embarrassed the EU and several member countries more than once.
I would like to believe the former aspect is the decider here, but the cynic in me suspects the latter may play a bigger role. Embarrassing the US (and gaining member countries political capital to spend in intelligence negotiations that way) is valuable to them, while embarrassing member countries in the same way is not.
Sending people to space is the sole chance we have to avoid extinction. Everything goes extinct. Sooner or later we'll have another massive ice-age, or a volcanic superplume, or get hit by a giant rock from space again, or some star within 20 lightyears will go nova and every higher lifeform (including us) will be either dead or sterile, or we'll get hit by a gamma-ray burster. For the latter two, we wouldn't even have any warning since the deadly stuff travels at the speed of light.
The average lifespan of a species is 10-million years, we're already there.
There is one chance, and one chance only, to avoid our inevitable extinction (for which 5 years from now is exactly as likely as 50 or 500 or 5000). We spread the risk - we need to colonize other worlds.
Start with the moon or mars (and Mars is actually probably easier since it has the ability to retain an atmosphere so teraforming is much more viable). Get people there - and you've made the cost of launching elsewhere much cheaper. More importantly - you've now greatly reduced the risk - the odds of both Mars and Earth colonies being wiped out at once is massively smaller than the 1 to 1 odds of it happening to either. As long as one survives, it can repopulate the other - and the next step is to spread outside this solar system.
Who knows, that way we may actually outlive the sun - here on earth there is zero chance of that (granted that is a long term goal, but it's also a longer term risk so it's okay).
The reason we should be investing in space, and notably in manned space travel is because that's literally the only chance we have to not end up like every other dominant species that came before us. The dinosaurs lasted 3 times as long as mammals have been around... and there isn't one left - and that's just the most famous one. When the Permian age ended it ended in a gigantic graveyard... 94% of all the species on the planet went extinct at once. We still aren't sure what killed them all - though evidence points to a possible collusion between a comet and a volcanic superplume (there is strong evidence that large impacts can cause superplumes on the other side of the earth basically doubling the deadly effects).
Looks interesting. As an unschooling parent that may come in handy in a little while. But the rugrat should at least be using sentences first. "Dog naughty" is her current crowning achievement.
>5.56- won a raffle from a coworker whose son's Little League team was having an AR-15 raffle as a fundraiser This is the most Murica sentence in the history of the world.
Don't be surprized if what actually happens is your bullet goes clean through and leaves only a bullet-sized hole in the phone, without shattering the screen.
High-powered weapons are notorious for that. The R4 requires custom made extra thick falling-plate targets for soldier training because it's bullets will go clean through a standard 4mm target without knocking it over.
for decades. I learned it when I was 7, learned basic when I was 9 and was using proper programming languages within 2 years of that.
Give them LOGO and turtle graphics.
It was the best tool for the job in 1967. It's still the best tool for the job today.
The reason is because nobody has tried to build a better one. You don't teach 7 year olds ruby or javascript or python but FFS you don't teach them BASIC either - give them LOGO, and when they mastered that, they will be able to grasp any modern language you throw at them. And if you want something new and shiny, then design that something FOR CHILDREN. That's why LOGO remains the best for the job - because it was designed specifically for children by a team that included a behavioral child psychologist.
You could make a solid and scientific case that emissions from humans (and indeed, all animals) are carbon neutral (ditto every other gas). You can't produce more of any of these gasses than you consume the materials for in the food you eat. Your CO2 output in mass can never be more than 3 times the mass of the food you ate (the other 2X is the oxygen part). In reality it's far less than that - a big chunk of that carbon is not emitted at all, but instead used to build the proteins for new cells in your body - those only get turned back into CO2 after you die (and presumably cannot be prosecuted). Of course that too, cannot exceed what you ate.
Since the carbon you're adding was removed by plants to become your food just a short while previously - the effect is a nett-zero change in CO2 levels. Ditto for methane and water vapour (you can't breath out more water than you've drunk).
So no, we probably won't ever see regulations against human emissions - that's a strawman the deniers made up. If anybody proposed it, unlike regulations against fossil fuels - no scientist would support them because they would be... erm... completely idiotic. The amazing thing is that such an idiotic idea nevertheless became a strawman that, based on slashdot, a helluva lot of people (who also consider themselves "smart") seriously believe...
The theory is pretty old though, and well-known enough that there was a House episode on it (House VS God from Season 2).
There have been recordings of cancer remissions and tumors being shrunken by viruses since the 19th century, and we've known for a long time that the herpes virus is particularly effective at this.
What we didn't have before was a way to boost that efficacy to the level where it was a reliable treatment. Previous cases were almost entirely down to observed events in accidental infections. Of course, current cancer treatments are all rather bad for the immune system which actually made it more effective than it would have been if you were not getting those as well.
The big change is that we can now modify genes - including virus RNA to take something that occasionally worked by accident, and make it into a reliable treatment.
>When does regulation lead to innovation that leads to extra services.
Always, and without exception. Anything that creates an inconvenience creates the possibility of selling people a way to avoid that inconvenience. Here in my country for example there are several companies that make their money from offering a very simple service: standing in government office queues for you. You need to renew your car license and don't want to spend half the day waiting to get helped - you give them the paperwork and some money, they go do it and deliver the new license disk right to your home.
Some government offices even started adding a special priority lane for them -since each staff member who gets to the front has dozens of applications to handle and that way they don't hold up the other lanes where people are coming one at a time.
Even something as simple as "slow queues" created a business opportunity which somebody innovated a service to get around.
Now how VALUABLE these services are is debatable - the broken window fallacy concept would say "not much if anything" but you weren't asking for services that would be valueable regardless of regulation and the broken window fallacy is frequently over-applied. I'm not sure it's true that it applies in this case at all. It would only be a valid example, I think, if the purposes of the regulation were not ALSO valuable. Licensing cars for use on the road is not a proposition without merit. So making that easier on consumers (especially those whose time are particularly valuable) is not without value. Putting food on somebody's table while you're at it is a not insignificant bonus.
My reading here is that these EU regulations were done with a degree of stupid that makes the name utterly inappropriate and they are adding no value and utterly ignored the whole POINT of having them in the first place. So with that considered, it's definitely more in the broken window region - but make no mistake, if people get annoyed, somebody will find a way to make money out of reducing that annoyance.
Most refferred to phone models not to users. And if you really believe that then there could be quite a lucrative business selling phone rooting to users.
Only because Japan didn't have nukes as well, nor any allies or sympathizers that did.
If you do that now - you can expect a serious barrage of other countries dropping nukes on you... a cycle that can rapidly spread out of control.
The world changes, and so history is not always a predictor of what can happen. The big change since 1945 is that there are now a great many nuclear powers, not just one.
I didn't bother to do that until I was about 30, I had spent my life living in urban areas where I just didn't need to own a car and thus had no reason to bother learning to drive. I had more interesting things to do with my life. Around 30 I moved to an area that wasn't well served, my public transport commute went way up - so I paid for driving lessons, got a license and bought a car.
My first car was an Audi A3 - partly possible because of all the money I saved by not owning one before I actually needed one.
The area I live in now is not wonderfully served at present (badly enough that I wouldn't try to use PT right now) but the best bus system in the city is going to be extended here in the near future, my office is in the center of town so options on the other end are many. Once that line comes in, I'll probably sell the car and probably won't bother buying another. I have everything I need in walking distance from the house, my wife and my little girl don't use it anyway (since I take it when commuting) so no real change for them.
If anything, I look forward to taking my little girl down to see the penguins at boulder's beach and going by train rather than by car. No risk of some idiot crashing into me and hurting her. That means arriving there a lot less stressed and without those terrible back, neck and shoulder pains that long driving stretches give me. It means being able to actually play with her while we are on our way there. And enjoy the day out with her better.
Frankly, that bus service was the best investment the municipality ever made and every time they add a line to it they make a lot of people's lives a lot better. This is a bus service with it's own dedicated roads, so especially in rush hour it's much faster than using a car - despite all the stops.
Sure it's not perfect, but the problems I've experienced have been few and far between. On the other hand - my car is a constant cost, with spikes of massive sudden and unplanneable expenses. A bus may sometimes make me 15 minutes late for work (and in a flextime world... that is easily rectified by working 15 minutes later in the evening) - but I've never had to pay 15% of my nett salary with no prior warning because the BUS broke a bearing, somebody else has to pay that. Such things are way too common with cars... apparently even when you buy a high-end luxury German one chosen primarly for it's many safety features which you desperately hope will give that tiny life that is so dependent on you a fighting chance when some drunken idiot inevitably hits you.
Frankly - anybody who enjoys driving is pretty much the worst person on earth to allow to drive. Driving is fucking terrifying, it needs intense concentration to avoid accidents, and even then you are surrounded by idiots who are not concentrating and you have to try and account for whatever insane and unpredictable stunt one of them may follow next and pray you have time to react and that the circumstances give you a reaction that can avoid getting yourself and your loved ones killed. If you are NOT spending the entire time behind the wheel, while engaging in one of the most dangerous activities humans engage in, feeling absolutely fucking terified (with resulting stress risks to health) then you are frankly irresponsible and a risk to others.
There are only two states of minds in a driver: ignorance or terror. And ignorance never, ever leads to responsible behavior.
The US had some of the most expansive, affordable and efficient public transport in the world until not that long ago, it was known as the tram system (or in the American parlance: the streetcar companies). So much so that they represented a serious problem to profit growth for car companies.
The car companies dealt with it by actually buying the streetcar companies out one by one, just so they could liquidate them, shut them down and destroy that public transport infrastructure to force commuters to buy cars.
It was called "The redcar conspiracy" and it was pretty major news when it happened, congressional hearings and everything.
Americans frequently cite lack of good public transportation as the reason they need cars. Fair enough. But don't blame population density or any other factors for this lack. That lack is not because of any significant difficulty in providing the service - that lack exists because the car companies created it (at significant expense) to get rid of competition they could surely not defeat. If there is any lesson in America's "everybody needs a car" situation it's the critical importance of having public transport be publicly OWNED. You can't buy out, liquidate and destroy a publicly owned utility.
In most cases, if you root those devices there are third-party ROMS that can run much more recent versions of Android on them. No such pathway exists for apple users.
> That's as stupid as being mad a a politician who changes their views when they learn more things. We're supposed to be ever changing and able to admit our mistakes!
Sadly. most voters around the world do not agree. They want politicians to be "principled" (a euphemism that means: stick to your guns and defend what I want to believe regardless of facts and evidence). A politician who changes his mind based on new information gets branded a "flip-flopper" and deemed unreliable. Voters believe that such a politician is less likely to keep their election promises as they may change their minds after being elected.
Rationality has almost no place in the democratic process - if it did attack-ads (blatant ad hominem fallacies) would be neither common nor effective .
None of which, I may add, is an argument against democracy - for despite it's irrational and illogical nature, ever alternative we've come up so far is even worse and relies on depriving people of any say in their governance at all. The argument that people should have a say in the laws they live under is purely philosophical and based on the (not particularly logical) concept of natural human rights, but then so is a lot of things that we probably don't want to live without (like say - not letting people murder those who inconvenience them). But it is important to recognize the shortcomings too - most important among those that rationality and the laws of logic are essentially absent (and, in fact, punished) by the system. This is one reason why we need checks and balances and means of ensuring accountability in between elections - exactly because elections do not (ever) select the rationally most suitable candidate, or even the one with the most rational policies, it merely selects the most popular one (and to suggest that those correlate is, itself, a fallacy).
Slashdot Mirror
There is at least one other difference: Snowden didn't commit his alleged crime inside a member country (Asange's alleged sex crime happened in Switzerland). Moreover Snowden's revelations didn't seriously harm or indict any member governments (except the UK though to a much lesser degree than the US) while Asange has targetted all governments and embarrassed the EU and several member countries more than once.
I would like to believe the former aspect is the decider here, but the cynic in me suspects the latter may play a bigger role. Embarrassing the US (and gaining member countries political capital to spend in intelligence negotiations that way) is valuable to them, while embarrassing member countries in the same way is not.
Sending people to space is the sole chance we have to avoid extinction.
Everything goes extinct. Sooner or later we'll have another massive ice-age, or a volcanic superplume, or get hit by a giant rock from space again, or some star within 20 lightyears will go nova and every higher lifeform (including us) will be either dead or sterile, or we'll get hit by a gamma-ray burster. For the latter two, we wouldn't even have any warning since the deadly stuff travels at the speed of light.
The average lifespan of a species is 10-million years, we're already there.
There is one chance, and one chance only, to avoid our inevitable extinction (for which 5 years from now is exactly as likely as 50 or 500 or 5000). We spread the risk - we need to colonize other worlds.
Start with the moon or mars (and Mars is actually probably easier since it has the ability to retain an atmosphere so teraforming is much more viable). Get people there - and you've made the cost of launching elsewhere much cheaper. More importantly - you've now greatly reduced the risk - the odds of both Mars and Earth colonies being wiped out at once is massively smaller than the 1 to 1 odds of it happening to either.
As long as one survives, it can repopulate the other - and the next step is to spread outside this solar system.
Who knows, that way we may actually outlive the sun - here on earth there is zero chance of that (granted that is a long term goal, but it's also a longer term risk so it's okay).
The reason we should be investing in space, and notably in manned space travel is because that's literally the only chance we have to not end up like every other dominant species that came before us.
The dinosaurs lasted 3 times as long as mammals have been around... and there isn't one left - and that's just the most famous one. When the Permian age ended it ended in a gigantic graveyard... 94% of all the species on the planet went extinct at once. We still aren't sure what killed them all - though evidence points to a possible collusion between a comet and a volcanic superplume (there is strong evidence that large impacts can cause superplumes on the other side of the earth basically doubling the deadly effects).
None of our technology could survive that.
Looks interesting. As an unschooling parent that may come in handy in a little while. But the rugrat should at least be using sentences first. "Dog naughty" is her current crowning achievement.
>5.56- won a raffle from a coworker whose son's Little League team was having an AR-15 raffle as a fundraiser
This is the most Murica sentence in the history of the world.
Don't be surprized if what actually happens is your bullet goes clean through and leaves only a bullet-sized hole in the phone, without shattering the screen.
High-powered weapons are notorious for that. The R4 requires custom made extra thick falling-plate targets for soldier training because it's bullets will go clean through a standard 4mm target without knocking it over.
I'm pretty sure the word "programmer" should always be in quotes when describing those...
On second thought... apparently a helluva lot of people want to give that power to Donald Trump... I'd trust the average 4 year old more with it.
>can do powerful things.
But do you really want to give the big red "End of civilization" button to a 4 year old ?
for decades. I learned it when I was 7, learned basic when I was 9 and was using proper programming languages within 2 years of that.
Give them LOGO and turtle graphics.
It was the best tool for the job in 1967. It's still the best tool for the job today.
The reason is because nobody has tried to build a better one. You don't teach 7 year olds ruby or javascript or python but FFS you don't teach them BASIC either - give them LOGO, and when they mastered that, they will be able to grasp any modern language you throw at them.
And if you want something new and shiny, then design that something FOR CHILDREN. That's why LOGO remains the best for the job - because it was designed specifically for children by a team that included a behavioral child psychologist.
You could make a solid and scientific case that emissions from humans (and indeed, all animals) are carbon neutral (ditto every other gas).
You can't produce more of any of these gasses than you consume the materials for in the food you eat. Your CO2 output in mass can never be more than 3 times the mass of the food you ate (the other 2X is the oxygen part).
In reality it's far less than that - a big chunk of that carbon is not emitted at all, but instead used to build the proteins for new cells in your body - those only get turned back into CO2 after you die (and presumably cannot be prosecuted). Of course that too, cannot exceed what you ate.
Since the carbon you're adding was removed by plants to become your food just a short while previously - the effect is a nett-zero change in CO2 levels. Ditto for methane and water vapour (you can't breath out more water than you've drunk).
So no, we probably won't ever see regulations against human emissions - that's a strawman the deniers made up. If anybody proposed it, unlike regulations against fossil fuels - no scientist would support them because they would be... erm... completely idiotic.
The amazing thing is that such an idiotic idea nevertheless became a strawman that, based on slashdot, a helluva lot of people (who also consider themselves "smart") seriously believe...
Well... you never know..
The theory is pretty old though, and well-known enough that there was a House episode on it (House VS God from Season 2).
There have been recordings of cancer remissions and tumors being shrunken by viruses since the 19th century, and we've known for a long time that the herpes virus is particularly effective at this.
What we didn't have before was a way to boost that efficacy to the level where it was a reliable treatment. Previous cases were almost entirely down to observed events in accidental infections. Of course, current cancer treatments are all rather bad for the immune system which actually made it more effective than it would have been if you were not getting those as well.
The big change is that we can now modify genes - including virus RNA to take something that occasionally worked by accident, and make it into a reliable treatment.
Well he could be holding out for a steambox next month ?
Or maybe he still plays on a WII ?
>When does regulation lead to innovation that leads to extra services.
Always, and without exception.
Anything that creates an inconvenience creates the possibility of selling people a way to avoid that inconvenience.
Here in my country for example there are several companies that make their money from offering a very simple service: standing in government office queues for you.
You need to renew your car license and don't want to spend half the day waiting to get helped - you give them the paperwork and some money, they go do it and deliver the new license disk right to your home.
Some government offices even started adding a special priority lane for them -since each staff member who gets to the front has dozens of applications to handle and that way they don't hold up the other lanes where people are coming one at a time.
Even something as simple as "slow queues" created a business opportunity which somebody innovated a service to get around.
Now how VALUABLE these services are is debatable - the broken window fallacy concept would say "not much if anything" but you weren't asking for services that would be valueable regardless of regulation and the broken window fallacy is frequently over-applied.
I'm not sure it's true that it applies in this case at all. It would only be a valid example, I think, if the purposes of the regulation were not ALSO valuable. Licensing cars for use on the road is not a proposition without merit. So making that easier on consumers (especially those whose time are particularly valuable) is not without value.
Putting food on somebody's table while you're at it is a not insignificant bonus.
My reading here is that these EU regulations were done with a degree of stupid that makes the name utterly inappropriate and they are adding no value and utterly ignored the whole POINT of having them in the first place.
So with that considered, it's definitely more in the broken window region - but make no mistake, if people get annoyed, somebody will find a way to make money out of reducing that annoyance.
Most refferred to phone models not to users. And if you really believe that then there could be quite a lucrative business selling phone rooting to users.
I have seen some code like that. Pray you never need to maintain python written by a java coder.
Only because Japan didn't have nukes as well, nor any allies or sympathizers that did.
If you do that now - you can expect a serious barrage of other countries dropping nukes on you... a cycle that can rapidly spread out of control.
The world changes, and so history is not always a predictor of what can happen. The big change since 1945 is that there are now a great many nuclear powers, not just one.
Python has been a lot more than "scripting language" (at least in the sense you use it) for a very long time.
If it's an STD that can spread via dickpix we're all doomed...
Not really, we just put them in everybody's pockets... if anything, that would probably make it spread faster :P
I didn't bother to do that until I was about 30, I had spent my life living in urban areas where I just didn't need to own a car and thus had no reason to bother learning to drive. I had more interesting things to do with my life.
Around 30 I moved to an area that wasn't well served, my public transport commute went way up - so I paid for driving lessons, got a license and bought a car.
My first car was an Audi A3 - partly possible because of all the money I saved by not owning one before I actually needed one.
The area I live in now is not wonderfully served at present (badly enough that I wouldn't try to use PT right now) but the best bus system in the city is going to be extended here in the near future, my office is in the center of town so options on the other end are many. Once that line comes in, I'll probably sell the car and probably won't bother buying another.
I have everything I need in walking distance from the house, my wife and my little girl don't use it anyway (since I take it when commuting) so no real change for them.
If anything, I look forward to taking my little girl down to see the penguins at boulder's beach and going by train rather than by car. No risk of some idiot crashing into me and hurting her. That means arriving there a lot less stressed and without those terrible back, neck and shoulder pains that long driving stretches give me. It means being able to actually play with her while we are on our way there. And enjoy the day out with her better.
Frankly, that bus service was the best investment the municipality ever made and every time they add a line to it they make a lot of people's lives a lot better. This is a bus service with it's own dedicated roads, so especially in rush hour it's much faster than using a car - despite all the stops.
Sure it's not perfect, but the problems I've experienced have been few and far between. On the other hand - my car is a constant cost, with spikes of massive sudden and unplanneable expenses.
A bus may sometimes make me 15 minutes late for work (and in a flextime world... that is easily rectified by working 15 minutes later in the evening) - but I've never had to pay 15% of my nett salary with no prior warning because the BUS broke a bearing, somebody else has to pay that. Such things are way too common with cars... apparently even when you buy a high-end luxury German one chosen primarly for it's many safety features which you desperately hope will give that tiny life that is so dependent on you a fighting chance when some drunken idiot inevitably hits you.
Frankly - anybody who enjoys driving is pretty much the worst person on earth to allow to drive. Driving is fucking terrifying, it needs intense concentration to avoid accidents, and even then you are surrounded by idiots who are not concentrating and you have to try and account for whatever insane and unpredictable stunt one of them may follow next and pray you have time to react and that the circumstances give you a reaction that can avoid getting yourself and your loved ones killed.
If you are NOT spending the entire time behind the wheel, while engaging in one of the most dangerous activities humans engage in, feeling absolutely fucking terified (with resulting stress risks to health) then you are frankly irresponsible and a risk to others.
There are only two states of minds in a driver: ignorance or terror.
And ignorance never, ever leads to responsible behavior.
The US had some of the most expansive, affordable and efficient public transport in the world until not that long ago, it was known as the tram system (or in the American parlance: the streetcar companies). So much so that they represented a serious problem to profit growth for car companies.
The car companies dealt with it by actually buying the streetcar companies out one by one, just so they could liquidate them, shut them down and destroy that public transport infrastructure to force commuters to buy cars.
It was called "The redcar conspiracy" and it was pretty major news when it happened, congressional hearings and everything.
Americans frequently cite lack of good public transportation as the reason they need cars. Fair enough. But don't blame population density or any other factors for this lack. That lack is not because of any significant difficulty in providing the service - that lack exists because the car companies created it (at significant expense) to get rid of competition they could surely not defeat.
If there is any lesson in America's "everybody needs a car" situation it's the critical importance of having public transport be publicly OWNED. You can't buy out, liquidate and destroy a publicly owned utility.
You do remember what happened to Golgafrincham afterwards right ? ... went extinct from a virulent plague spread by unhygienic telephone handsets.
In an odd way... it's as if Adams were in favor of the useless middle manager types.
In most cases, if you root those devices there are third-party ROMS that can run much more recent versions of Android on them. No such pathway exists for apple users.
> That's as stupid as being mad a a politician who changes their views when they learn more things. We're supposed to be ever changing and able to admit our mistakes!
Sadly. most voters around the world do not agree. They want politicians to be "principled" (a euphemism that means: stick to your guns and defend what I want to believe regardless of facts and evidence). A politician who changes his mind based on new information gets branded a "flip-flopper" and deemed unreliable. Voters believe that such a politician is less likely to keep their election promises as they may change their minds after being elected.
Rationality has almost no place in the democratic process - if it did attack-ads (blatant ad hominem fallacies) would be neither common nor effective .
None of which, I may add, is an argument against democracy - for despite it's irrational and illogical nature, ever alternative we've come up so far is even worse and relies on depriving people of any say in their governance at all.
The argument that people should have a say in the laws they live under is purely philosophical and based on the (not particularly logical) concept of natural human rights, but then so is a lot of things that we probably don't want to live without (like say - not letting people murder those who inconvenience them).
But it is important to recognize the shortcomings too - most important among those that rationality and the laws of logic are essentially absent (and, in fact, punished) by the system. This is one reason why we need checks and balances and means of ensuring accountability in between elections - exactly because elections do not (ever) select the rationally most suitable candidate, or even the one with the most rational policies, it merely selects the most popular one (and to suggest that those correlate is, itself, a fallacy).