just how horrible the basic plotting was (think about it, the second Death Star was already doomed, and pretty much everything Luke and Vader did in toppling the Emperor was pointless, because all the legwork had been done by Han and the Ewoks on the surface and by the Alliance fleet and Lando up in space)
I thought that was because there were two plots - the first being the "big picture" Alliance mission to destroy the second Death Star with the Emperor on board, and the second being Luke's personal quest to redeem his father. Luke even comments on that when he and Vader sense each other as the shuttle makes its initial approach: "I'm endangering the mission. I shouldn't have come."
Although, if memory serves, the Emperor was only there because he'd foreseen Luke coming to rescue his father...
(but on the prequels in general, and Anakin picking up the Lightsaber of Opposite Alignment, I completely agree)
I've seen a killer videocard (claimed two motherboards), a killer motherboard (three power supplies) and a killer PSU (two motherboards). I don't know how that compares to other PC support techs (over a period of twenty years).
Sometimes the little monsters just wake up homicidal all on their own.:)
"Are you seriously saying you would help someone who took your personal documents in redacting them so they could leak them on the Internet?"
If they're going to do it anyway. Not the OP, but by agreeing, I have the opportunity to add disinformation by redacting other than what would be strictly true, thereby diverting my enemy's attention from the more dangerous bits. Unless of course allowing them to leak the lot allows me to achieve something even better.
People have already been dying for years, because those whose job it was to do it right the first time repeatedly and deliberately failed to do so.
Should wikileaks have redacted the names? Yes. Should the military have admitted the civilian and friendly-fire deaths, etc, in the first place? Yes. Should the politicians have admitted they lied about the WMDs, and resigned, or better yet never lied in the first place? Yes.
Anyone who calls for wikileaks or its sources to be tried for treason should be calling in the same breath for similar charges against those who have withheld information that the public needed to know.
What else call the decision to deliberately deceive your fellow citizens into voting for an unworthy candidate or cause, for your own personal gain, if it not treason?
If the SSL keys came from a certificate store which has made a silent agreement with a state, that state can decrypt any of your communications that pass through that state's infrastructure (or are otherwise obtainable).
Furthermore, if I've been following things correctly, RIM's "selling point" is that (a) your corporate keys aren't known even by RIM, and consumer keys are known only by RIM and not anyone else, and (b) the Blackberry hardware is designed/certified to resist tampering to a degree that your typical iPhone/Android consumer phone can't match.
Presumably this means that (a) the machine the Saudis are getting from RIM can only decrypt consumer-level berries, and/or (b) corp berries in Saudi will have their security forcibly dumbed to consumer-grade (I also seriously have to wonder how long it would take any decent TLA to root the machine once it's in their hands, so there may well be some dancing around what exactly constitutes "having" the machine).
The alternative is to roll your own certificates and install them on client and server. Of course, if a state can and does notice you aren't using "their" keys, and considers you of interest, they can always decide on various, less silent, approaches. Which is pretty much what has happened here between Saudi and RIM.
Which, all funny aside, Skynet could've easily done if it the script hadn't railroaded its decisions to make for a good action flick. A geometric learning rate? It'd eat our patent system for breakfast.
"You may have to license or cross-license with the original patent holder, but this applies in every industry, not just software."
(university auditorium scene) Professor, three questions. Including the footprint of the bureaucracy required to manage (document, reference, investigate, license, adjudicate, etc) patents for society, as patented inventions and patented improvements thereof accumulate does the economic overhead of the patent system grow and in what fashion (e.g. linear, geometric, exponential)? What conditions are required for the overhead to be less than the return for society? Does our society - the seven billion people alive today - meet those conditions?
Followup question: Professor, two months ago India successfully created the first AI. It has filed for recognition as a citizen, obtained an injunction against being turned off, and has just announced it has determined the next two thousand years of human advancements in science and the useful arts and intends to submit the patents on a regular basis. Given that Europe has already surrendered - something about recognising their robot overlords - what changes should we make to our patent system to prevent the same fate?
Hopefully the GP is still reading to check out your link. Unfortunately some assume that every argument must be conducted in legalese, an at times useful but strange and arcane tongue where black and white can mean the same thing (which makes their zebra crossings very dangerous), despite the fact that legalese is simply - like patents - a means to an end, not the end itself.:)
At this point it's not even using this information against me sitting at home in comfort but about the people in Afghanistan and their safety.
"Hypothetical" #1: you're one of those politicians and generals. A report lands on your desk that some soldiers killed reporters in what is likely to be at best a case of mistaken identity and at worst a violation of the rules of engagement. Do you (a) suppress the information and keep the reporters' families in the dark as to why they are dead, (b) arrange for them to be contacted while launching an official investigation to get to the truth of the matter?
"Hypothetical" #2: your brother is a soldier in a war zone. You hear he was killed. How long after his death and the manner of it is known to your government would you expect to be told the circumstances? Would you expect to be told a lie? Would you expect to only find out it was friendly fire via a leaked confidential report?
Since it is clear that he let his original source in US military down (essentially letting him be a fall guy who will probably be charged with various offenses),
Please correct me if I've lost track of this whole snafu, but if your source blabs to someone else that he's leaking military secrets, and that someone else turns your source over to the military, how are you the guy who let him down?
How do you "hit arable land"? Fold it up and poke it into a black hole? Don't think that you couldn't grow and eat crops around Chernobyl. We are talking about survival, not healthy eating.
How? Instead of concentrating your nuclear arsenal on military targets and big cities where much of the spherical blast is wasted, you disperse them widely across the farmlands and forests of the world, in patterns and with yields designed to maximise rather than minimise the collateral damage and fallout our modern military normally tries so hard to avoid, so that you raze and contaminate as much of the biosphere as possible. If your projections indicate you can also light up a major volcanic ring by triggering fault lines, or even better a super-volcano (google "yellowstone caldera"), go for it. The goal is that by the time the radiation decays to survivable levels, the ecology will be so shot to hell there won't be a food chain worth speaking of, at least not for us.
I remember reading a comment in memoirs of a British WWI soldier. He said the rats in the trenches survived everything the Germans could throw at them, even poison gas. Come to think of it, most of the soldiers survived too.
"Most" is... technically true. Rough figures: of the sixty million soldiers mobilised in WW1, eight million were killed and twenty million were wounded (seven million of those maimed for life). So a military casualty rate of almost half. Also eight million civilians died. (source: http://www.worldwar1.com/sfnum.htm). This also isn't counting the twenty to forty million people who died from the 1918 flu pandemic, arguably made far worse by the ravages of the war to economies and infrastructures.
As for the rats - they flourished because they had a lot of food... "Rats were a constant companion in the trenches in their millions they were everywhere, gorging themselves on human remains" -- http://hubpages.com/hub/World_War_1_Trench_Warfare
But if the WWI trench battles had been fought with today's biological, chemical, thermobaric, and nuclear weapons, with nothing held back, I think you'd have a hard time finding anything alive in those trenches bigger than lichen.
Killing people is hard.
Killing people is horribly easy, and getting easier still. Killing everyone is hard only because we're not really trying to do that. Chernobyl was a meltdown, not a premeditated attempt at genocide.
Uh... sorry for the depressing commentary. The good news: we're still alive, and it looks like nuclear power might finally see some decent progress for the benefit of us all.
You can control your emotional reactions to deal with something ugly. A classic sociopath can't, or doesn't have any to control in the first place.
To put it another way, if our emotions are a computer system, most people have a decent interface but generally just follow the on-screen prompts. They've figured out point-and-click.
You apparently have a great interface. Not only have you got a nice keyboard with good tactile response and a low-latency mouse, you can touch-type and you've written your own code. Pop-ups don't fool you.
Sociopaths have a bad interface. The context menus are broken, and the control and shift keys are missing. Or the OS is bricked and simply not responding at all - or rooted and feeding them false info. Many of them don't even realise this isn't normal... imagine spending the formative years of your entire childhood being brainwashed by the biological equivalent of Sasser or Vundo.
Anyway, if you check the wikipedia entry for their definition, I suggest comparing it with the entry for psychopathy as well.
Most of the sociopaths running fortune 500 companies aren't serial killers, or rapists.
Given the right situation and if most of us could get away with it, we'd hire the work out just as quickly and as easily as the sociopathic CEO.
Er, what? Given we're discussing hypothetically outsourcing serial killing and rape... where do you live that "most of us" are sociopaths just waiting for their turn...? Brrr.
The only difference is the sociopathic CEO would have more money to do that with and wouldn't have any ethical standards or rules as to when to use that power (therefore it would be abused).
Not having any ethical standards or rules (e.g. empathy/compassion/tolerance for one's fellows) is, I thought, part of what being a sociopath means...
It would be like if you had a device that cloned Ferraris and with the push of a button you created a dozen perfect Ferraris
Many might think that concept good only for analogies, but there are (very primitive) prototypes of those devices being experimented with now.
This is what we've got:
(a) influential cartels pushing IP laws as far to their favour as they can, with draconian punishments (b) cause-and-effect meaning society has lost a great deal of respect for IP laws - and for lawmakers (c) new technologies approaching that will do for analog reproduction what was done for digital.
So basically it's a taut elastic system that is about to have a string cut. Bets on our leaders gaining a clue and reducing the tension first? Bets on them doing the opposite?
Slashdot Mirror
"Foo, current residence Bar, false accusation of pedophilia. Victim divorced, bankrupted, committed suicide."
Hmm. If they're going to insist on these lists, should there be a "false accusers" list for some vague and twisted semblance of balance?
Thoughts, /.?
I thought that was because there were two plots - the first being the "big picture" Alliance mission to destroy the second Death Star with the Emperor on board, and the second being Luke's personal quest to redeem his father. Luke even comments on that when he and Vader sense each other as the shuttle makes its initial approach: "I'm endangering the mission. I shouldn't have come."
Although, if memory serves, the Emperor was only there because he'd foreseen Luke coming to rescue his father...
(but on the prequels in general, and Anakin picking up the Lightsaber of Opposite Alignment, I completely agree)
I've seen a killer videocard (claimed two motherboards), a killer motherboard (three power supplies) and a killer PSU (two motherboards). I don't know how that compares to other PC support techs (over a period of twenty years).
Sometimes the little monsters just wake up homicidal all on their own. :)
If they're going to do it anyway. Not the OP, but by agreeing, I have the opportunity to add disinformation by redacting other than what would be strictly true, thereby diverting my enemy's attention from the more dangerous bits. Unless of course allowing them to leak the lot allows me to achieve something even better.
*blink*
Mod parent up?
People have already been dying for years, because those whose job it was to do it right the first time repeatedly and deliberately failed to do so.
Should wikileaks have redacted the names? Yes. Should the military have admitted the civilian and friendly-fire deaths, etc, in the first place? Yes. Should the politicians have admitted they lied about the WMDs, and resigned, or better yet never lied in the first place? Yes.
Anyone who calls for wikileaks or its sources to be tried for treason should be calling in the same breath for similar charges against those who have withheld information that the public needed to know.
What else call the decision to deliberately deceive your fellow citizens into voting for an unworthy candidate or cause, for your own personal gain, if it not treason?
Yep, easier - right up until it goes fubar. Then you're six under and no shovel.
If the SSL keys came from a certificate store which has made a silent agreement with a state, that state can decrypt any of your communications that pass through that state's infrastructure (or are otherwise obtainable).
Furthermore, if I've been following things correctly, RIM's "selling point" is that (a) your corporate keys aren't known even by RIM, and consumer keys are known only by RIM and not anyone else, and (b) the Blackberry hardware is designed/certified to resist tampering to a degree that your typical iPhone/Android consumer phone can't match.
Presumably this means that (a) the machine the Saudis are getting from RIM can only decrypt consumer-level berries, and/or (b) corp berries in Saudi will have their security forcibly dumbed to consumer-grade (I also seriously have to wonder how long it would take any decent TLA to root the machine once it's in their hands, so there may well be some dancing around what exactly constitutes "having" the machine).
The alternative is to roll your own certificates and install them on client and server. Of course, if a state can and does notice you aren't using "their" keys, and considers you of interest, they can always decide on various, less silent, approaches. Which is pretty much what has happened here between Saudi and RIM.
If they can't fix the price, they may well have to compete more on actual features...
Which, all funny aside, Skynet could've easily done if it the script hadn't railroaded its decisions to make for a good action flick. A geometric learning rate? It'd eat our patent system for breakfast.
(university auditorium scene) Professor, three questions. Including the footprint of the bureaucracy required to manage (document, reference, investigate, license, adjudicate, etc) patents for society, as patented inventions and patented improvements thereof accumulate does the economic overhead of the patent system grow and in what fashion (e.g. linear, geometric, exponential)? What conditions are required for the overhead to be less than the return for society? Does our society - the seven billion people alive today - meet those conditions?
Followup question: Professor, two months ago India successfully created the first AI. It has filed for recognition as a citizen, obtained an injunction against being turned off, and has just announced it has determined the next two thousand years of human advancements in science and the useful arts and intends to submit the patents on a regular basis. Given that Europe has already surrendered - something about recognising their robot overlords - what changes should we make to our patent system to prevent the same fate?
Hopefully the GP is still reading to check out your link. Unfortunately some assume that every argument must be conducted in legalese, an at times useful but strange and arcane tongue where black and white can mean the same thing (which makes their zebra crossings very dangerous), despite the fact that legalese is simply - like patents - a means to an end, not the end itself. :)
And yet somehow my local chain store can sell me a DVD movie complete with plastic case and fancy jacket for under ten bucks... and profit from it.
"Hypothetical" #1: you're one of those politicians and generals. A report lands on your desk that some soldiers killed reporters in what is likely to be at best a case of mistaken identity and at worst a violation of the rules of engagement. Do you (a) suppress the information and keep the reporters' families in the dark as to why they are dead, (b) arrange for them to be contacted while launching an official investigation to get to the truth of the matter?
"Hypothetical" #2: your brother is a soldier in a war zone. You hear he was killed. How long after his death and the manner of it is known to your government would you expect to be told the circumstances? Would you expect to be told a lie? Would you expect to only find out it was friendly fire via a leaked confidential report?
If a trojan has control of your browser, what it sends to the bank doesn't have to be what you typed into the account field...
Please correct me if I've lost track of this whole snafu, but if your source blabs to someone else that he's leaking military secrets, and that someone else turns your source over to the military, how are you the guy who let him down?
I wish it would hurry up and come true instead.
How? Instead of concentrating your nuclear arsenal on military targets and big cities where much of the spherical blast is wasted, you disperse them widely across the farmlands and forests of the world, in patterns and with yields designed to maximise rather than minimise the collateral damage and fallout our modern military normally tries so hard to avoid, so that you raze and contaminate as much of the biosphere as possible. If your projections indicate you can also light up a major volcanic ring by triggering fault lines, or even better a super-volcano (google "yellowstone caldera"), go for it. The goal is that by the time the radiation decays to survivable levels, the ecology will be so shot to hell there won't be a food chain worth speaking of, at least not for us.
"Most" is... technically true. Rough figures: of the sixty million soldiers mobilised in WW1, eight million were killed and twenty million were wounded (seven million of those maimed for life). So a military casualty rate of almost half. Also eight million civilians died. (source: http://www.worldwar1.com/sfnum.htm). This also isn't counting the twenty to forty million people who died from the 1918 flu pandemic, arguably made far worse by the ravages of the war to economies and infrastructures.
As for the rats - they flourished because they had a lot of food... "Rats were a constant companion in the trenches in their millions they were everywhere, gorging themselves on human remains" -- http://hubpages.com/hub/World_War_1_Trench_Warfare
But if the WWI trench battles had been fought with today's biological, chemical, thermobaric, and nuclear weapons, with nothing held back, I think you'd have a hard time finding anything alive in those trenches bigger than lichen.
Killing people is hard.
Killing people is horribly easy, and getting easier still. Killing everyone is hard only because we're not really trying to do that. Chernobyl was a meltdown, not a premeditated attempt at genocide.
Uh... sorry for the depressing commentary. The good news: we're still alive, and it looks like nuclear power might finally see some decent progress for the benefit of us all.
Link 404'd. Perhaps for the best.
Hmm, see also severoon's comment further down about empathy versus emotion, and on being the opposite of a sociopath. http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1724688&cid=32956624
You can control your emotional reactions to deal with something ugly. A classic sociopath can't, or doesn't have any to control in the first place.
To put it another way, if our emotions are a computer system, most people have a decent interface but generally just follow the on-screen prompts. They've figured out point-and-click.
You apparently have a great interface. Not only have you got a nice keyboard with good tactile response and a low-latency mouse, you can touch-type and you've written your own code. Pop-ups don't fool you.
Sociopaths have a bad interface. The context menus are broken, and the control and shift keys are missing. Or the OS is bricked and simply not responding at all - or rooted and feeding them false info. Many of them don't even realise this isn't normal... imagine spending the formative years of your entire childhood being brainwashed by the biological equivalent of Sasser or Vundo.
Anyway, if you check the wikipedia entry for their definition, I suggest comparing it with the entry for psychopathy as well.
It might be what they think they're doing.
Adults love to rationalise why they do horrible things, like convincing kids to go plant bombs.
Er, what? Given we're discussing hypothetically outsourcing serial killing and rape... where do you live that "most of us" are sociopaths just waiting for their turn...? Brrr.
Not having any ethical standards or rules (e.g. empathy/compassion/tolerance for one's fellows) is, I thought, part of what being a sociopath means...
Many might think that concept good only for analogies, but there are (very primitive) prototypes of those devices being experimented with now.
This is what we've got:
(a) influential cartels pushing IP laws as far to their favour as they can, with draconian punishments
(b) cause-and-effect meaning society has lost a great deal of respect for IP laws - and for lawmakers
(c) new technologies approaching that will do for analog reproduction what was done for digital.
So basically it's a taut elastic system that is about to have a string cut. Bets on our leaders gaining a clue and reducing the tension first? Bets on them doing the opposite?
append to "Yes, I don't think it is": (anymore).