40 years ago, "made in Japan" meant a cheap, cheerful, somewhat unreliable clone. They had the technology to manufacture, but not the skill to manufacture reliably, nor the smarts to create. Then they became the cloning heroes, making faithful and reliable Western designs... and today, they innovate.
China is currently at stage 2.5, building whatever the West can throw at it, and making gradual improvements. What do you think will happen when they develop an intellectual property economy to rival the West?
Enjoy your hubris, Google, as Microsoft once enjoyed its level of control.
The alternative being excessive compensation for those who/are/ talented? Not that the alternative, "to each according to his need," has ever been practised on a huge scale: even the so-called communist countries paid more to those whose skillset would also likely gain them more in capitalist countries.
When most people are working in a factory, they want to come home and dream of the stars.
When most people are in the educated middle class, they play with the stars at work, realise not every day's a Moon landing, and want to come home and dream of actually being able to build something in a weekend that works.
It's not that leisure is dumbing down per se, it's that work requires you to be less dumb than ever before. Entertainment is a break from that.
Your point is basically that it'd be impossible for you to convict an innocent, since you'd vote everyone innocent.
How did you read that into my post?
Btw, in the case of the mobster, you'd probably have 1 witness against him (the victim) and objective evidence.
That's more than just "objective" (by which I assume you mean expert witness testimony) evidence, isn't it? Did the mobster plead the 5th, so there's absolutely no opportunity for him to slip up? Is there no evidence that he was involved in anything which might have led him to do what he supposedly did, i.e. no motive suggested by recordings of meetings he's attended, photographs of people he's been with, documents in the trash (virtual or physical)? Nothing suggesting he was strangely near the victim at the time of the incident, i.e. no opportunity?
You're going to have to do a lot better than merely "the victim Z said X did it and there's X's DNA on the weapon". Perhaps actual attacker Y hated both X and Z and wanted to deal with both of them at once. Maybe Y, having brutally attacked Z, has instructed Z to blame X, and Z goes along out of fear for his/his family's life. If you were a professional criminal brutally threatening someone, wouldn't you think to set up a stooge, and make sure your victim plays along? You might not even coach your victim until after the event: if you can get to other witnesses, you can get to the victim too. Maybe through his family.
In addition to that there'd be masses of witnesses for the defense.
And the prosecution would hopefully demonstrate the unreliability of the witnesses. If they're all saying the same thing, what we need is evidence to falsify the account. Since forensic evidence is much better for falsifying rather than proving - what with being the result of a scientific endeavour - that mission has more avenues open to it.
The solution to this, it seems to me, is to put more faith in objective evidence.
I'm not sure whether I like any sentence starting "the solution is to put more faith in..." Less so when I've already argued that there's no "objective" evidence in court, only lots of witnesses, expert and otherwise, giving their testimonies.
Methods of forging fingerprints are so widely known these days that I can't see any reason to use the mere discovery of the defendant's fingerprint in support of anything beyond a preliminary investigation. It's not as if someone would have to be discovered with a home forensics lab in order for a fingerprint forgery defence to be realistic.
I'd take good notice of fingerprint evidence which adds reasonable doubt, such as indications that a fingerprint was forged (biometric IDs are just another arms race). Otherwise you'd have to engage me with a lot of convincing evidence that a fingerprint was made by the finger's owner.
In the event someone was premeditating a naughty act, the first thing they would surely plan is to sway the known variables in their favour (i.e. against the stooge's favour), such as those resulting from well-known scientific tests. It'd be unpredictable and esoteric observations which catch the prepared criminal.
Never mind that the forensic findings are (or ought to be) independently verifiable.
All worthwhile eyewitness accounts are independently verifiable, i.e. involve independent eyewitnesses. Don't let a commendable scientific spirit enter a pathologically obsessive state where you're happy to take a report of a complex scientific procedure as close to infallible but won't accept a dozen people in a park telling you that the grass is green and the snow is white because "eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable" and "the grass and snow weren't observed under scientific conditions". Such disconnect has been parodied since Aristophanes, and for good reason.
I agree with this, with the additional proviso that (as I indicated below) it's more difficult to identify tampering of a complex system, especially one you're not very familiar with.
We're all fairly familiar with the acts of recalling and forgetting events we've seen, and we will (as good jurors) expect multiple independent eyewitness accounts if we are going to rely on eyewitness testimony. But we're not very familiar with the intricacies of collecting and testing DNA, and (as successes of convictions on DNA evidence show) it doesn't seem that we're putting on our critical thinking hats on when presented with complex science[tm] by authority.
near 100% reliance on subjective evidence, and treatment of objective evidence (as reported to you by imperfect humans) as no better.
Not AC, but: precisely. See My post here. As a juror, you're not being given the opportunity to perform/commission tests, merely to determine the relative importance of various testimonies presented to you.
You could at least see that you would never convict a mobster (who'd have heaps of false witnesses standing by). Or anyone from a closely-enough-knit group for that matter.
If all eye witnesses, policemen, etc spoke in defence of the mobster, and the only evidence favourable to the prosecution was some DNA, it would be wrong to convict. Yeah, maybe the guy's a nasty piece of work, but I'm not convinced beyond reasonable doubt, and it's as likely that the exasperated LEO has planted something.
It'd also be relatively easy to get you to convict an innocent. If you based yourself on witnesses alone, obviously, you can see why you'd be liable to convict someone of witchcraft, for example.
No, because witnesses have to both provide evidence of guilt and remove reasonable doubt from my mind. 100 people saying that X is a witch may not technically have created any reasonable doubt, but it hasn't provided any evidence either.
Objective evidence must take precedence over subjective evidence.
A witness interpreting the collection and testing of DNA is subjective. A witness giving an account of what he saw is subjective. You attempt to move from "his truth" to "the truth" with peer review, and since you're neither a peer nor do you have the chance to perform much review, you should not treat the expert witness testimony as inherently more reliable.
Yes, DNA can be planted/faked, but if that's the case, more research will find inconsistencies.
Yes, eyewitnesses can be misled or their testimony be a lie, but etc.
Perhaps some of this "stimulus" money could be put into creating an agency to improve the collection of objective evidence
A government Department for the Elimination of Error and Corruption? I'm sure the USSR had something like that:-).
You are the juror, not the forensic scientist. You are not being presented with the opportunity to collect and test DNA yourself. Even if you were to ignore the evidence that separate people can appear to have matching DNA as tested, and the evidence that evidence is often planted, and evidence that accidental contamination occurs, you are still assuming that the forensic scientist is accurately reporting his results, i.e. is both competent and impartial.
there have been many, many studies proving the unreliability of eyewitnesses. In a stressful, quick situation, people's memory is often wrong.
This is precisely why you don't rely on a single eyewitness, nor even on a group of eyewitnesses alone to make your case.
So because you're a doofus who didn't pay attention in school, you ignore the facts?
I don't know about AC, but I have had enough years of schooling to have a good idea of what I do not know, and one of the things I do not know is forensic science. All I can do is judge the reliability of the expert witness's interpretation, just as I do for all the other witnesses. I have also had enough schooling to know that, the more complex a system, the more difficult it is to identify any tampering which has occurred.
I think this is an excellent idea: I would engage the right thoughts to get wood as I passed through, and recommend all others do similarly. It would be a silent yet dirty protest of the modern era.
When they march into your town, do not look away as if you have something to hide, but stare straight into their eyes so they can see your hatred.
Never has there been a projection of a man's approach to life so obvious as when he accuses another of making a statement out of jealousy.
I mean, are you so bitter and competitive that you see everything in terms of people doing better or worse than you? Even so, are you capable of thinking that people other than you might analyse things without reference to themselves?
If people dislike Bill Gates, it's jealousy. If people dislike Steve jobs, it is jealousy. If people just don't like GW Bush, it's jealousy. People dislike Obama, it's jealousy. careless drivers? You're jealous of their fast cars. Hate dictators? You are jealous of their military and sociopolitical skills. Question the ethics of African diamond mine owners? You are jealous of their marketing and productivity. Question meritocracy when the lazy Genius in the class did no work but excelled? You have no valid point, you're just jealous. Doubt the American claim of classlessness after serving the heirs of billion-dollar fortunes at a country club? Buddy, you are just jealous. hate socialised European healthcare? no you don't, you're just jealous of the French! hate American Private healthcare? Sounds like you're just jealous of Americans!
The "jealousy" argument is as specious as the "only terrorists/paedophiles/people who hate America would say that" argument.
At a glance, at least Windows XP, Vista, 7... I assume that every enterprise with enough money to be in the kind of business to worry about sector size has at least one non-OEM licence of Windows lying about.
Otherwise, you could just boot into Linux and make sure to create your partition on appropriate boundaries using your preferred partitioning tool.
Remember, we're worrying about one-time setup here.
But if the start of the partition isn't aligned to the start of a hardware sector, cue...
...chastisement for not setting up your drive using the vendor-provided software.
The main problem is solved, as always, by a layer of indirection. Your theoretical worst-case scenario of an extra rotation for every write is going to be offset by controller buffering, operating system caching, etc. Don't forget, when I am changing a couple of bytes in a file, I have to read at least a logical sector, which means the controller has to read (and may cache) at least a physical sector.
For modern high-performance environments where the driver optimises based on the physical sector size, geometry, and so on, there is going to be no assumption of a fixed sector size. More likely is the trade-off by queueing commands which are coalesced for most efficient read/write by the controller, where you let the firmware worry about such details and accept that premature optimisation on your part may reduce efficiency.
That fact that you're posting on Slashdot suggests that you've chosen the 70.
tu quoque fallacy. To see the world in terms of black and white alternatives, and moreover to only be able to argue for an ideal when consistent with the most extreme application of that ideal, will result in no advancement whatever.
Those who go with the 30 are usually too busy avoiding starvation and disease to worry about making silly ideological arguments on the internet.
The examples of medical advances given as advantages of modern life have occurred in the last 50 years. I am quite confident that being "too busy avoiding starvation and disease" has not been the lasting feature of Western society since the Renaissance. If it teaches anything, it is that a great deal can be achieved even while there is little medical care.
...while ignoring the drawbacks. Which was thepainguy’s point.
No... it just doesn't have a modern Western value system to regard those features as significant drawbacks.
For example: to you, maybe, it is important that resources are dedicated to helping a sick infant with some congenital problem to recover and be maintained to live a long, physically healthy life. There is no such expression of value to the noble savage: such an infant might be maintained only to be allowed to die peacefully, just as today we might abort a fetus with a serious defect.
No, he’s claiming that while technology has its misuses it can also be used for good.
The noble savage ideal does not discount the possibility that there are benefits to technology; it argues a benefit to living without being encumbered by the social and technological impositions of modern civilisation.
"Modern medicine cures some stuff" is true, but is not a counterargument of the noble savage ideal. I was trying to disabuse OP of his misunderstanding of the notion.
Is working 16 hours a day in the wilderness to scrape a bare minimum of food and water
Chimpanzees and big cats would both disagree with your time management, and they arguably both lack the cunning of the human brain. Seriously, 16 hours?
Or is it better to work 8 hours in a box in order to have the rest of your day with time and resources to do as you please
To do as I please? Maybe if I close my eyes and dream. If you believe you are free in your copious free time, it is because you lack the imagination to realise how much you are restricted in how you can move or express yourself.
And the flora and fauna are only hospitable in southern england because your ancestors hunted everything dangerous to extinction.
Incredible as it might be to believe, not every environment has naturally accommodated great swathes of predators of humans. In areas where that is the case, am I supposed to get up in arms or something about humans protecting themselves from immediate danger?
Also, there is no argument that society is more peaceful with this medical knowledge - when life spans have practically doubled
I have already argued against advantage of merely doubling lifespan; also, I'm not quite sure why lifespan implies more peacefulness, unless you're implying that the lack of peace implies necessary death.
and crime rates have plunged in developed countries.
I thought we were discussing peace and harmony, not efficacy of the law. You can also reduce crime rates by locking everyone up in their own individual cell - is that peace and harmony? Also, what is this obsession with concentrating on individual countries... if you interact across the globe, then your society is measured by its effect across the globe. Want to check how many deaths those civilised countries have caused year-on-year? Try not to care about whether the deaths are "legal", just about whether they can be called "peaceful and harmonious".
Why does the sector size presented by the interface have to reflect anything about the hardware? isn't this like the CHS/LBA conversion done under the hood? What about the ability to request a particular sector size, with the default being 512 bytes and the recommended amount being the hardware amount for optimisation purposes? Memories of 512 versus 2048 in the CD booting of older versions of VMS...
Ah, that old false dichotomy. There are vicious technocrats, noble technocrats, vicious savages, and noble savages. In evolutionary terms, there is very little difference between man in a cave and man in space: don't expect a few thousand years of civilisation to change our nature.
what do they do if one of their buddies is born with a genetic disease like Polycystic Kidney Disease
The same thing that happened 50 years ago, or that happens now to the majority of people who cannot afford treatment for the complex disease you mention. Now, are you arguing that society is necessarily more peaceful when there is the medical knowledge for everyone to lead a long, healthy life? Can I offer you Earth as a counterexample?
Also, in the real world packs of wolves and bears don't just leave you alone.
That pretty much depends on what part of the world you come from, and where you draw the line between savage and technocrat. Fairly hospitable weather, flora and fauna in southern England where I am now.
Tell me, friend, would you rather enjoy 30 free years or 70 in a cage? Of course we would both rather enjoy 70 free years, but where can one find that option today?
It is an essential part of the justice process that arrest records are public, to prevent secret detentions, etc. This has already been discussed by other posters, and is why such records are already public, just not accessible in such a convenient manner. A group of private individuals could easily republish such records.
Now, it is clear that the police should not be doing what is being described here, but the reason is that shaming is not part of the job description of the police. The reason is not that arrest records should be kept secret.
The more fundamental problem here, if any, is a misunderstanding of the law by those reading that twitter feed. A list of charges should be interpreted as nothing more than a list of charges - it is not a list of guilty people, and even if it were, it is not a list of people to be abused. Any employer refusing to give you a job on the basis of being on a list of charged people, unless perhaps they had determined that you were still moving through the legal process and your job involves driving, would have been a very dangerous employer to work for. Before you give me the argument that you need a roof over your head more than you need a fair and just employer, the only reason for the power imbalance is so many people like you fearing the loss of little comfort.
Note that it has not yet been proven that the public in general think a charged person is a convicted person. This sort of thing needs to be studied scientifically, as a basis for educating where necessary to disabuse the people of serious misconceptions about the legal process.
The analogue system was stable, open, technician-friendly, and degraded gracefully. A 30-year-old analogue set still works today, except in regions where the analogue signal has now been switched off.
The digital system opens the doors for tweaks to be made with protocols to add "features" or restrictions, each of which will require buying a new STB/TV every few years. It is already the case that many Freeview systems from half a decade ago need replacing - do not even dream that the majority of manufacturers are going to provide firmware updates.
Yes, we can now admit 6 to 8 channels where previously only one could be transmitted on a particular frequency, but the large majority of the channels are dedicated to repeats and/or excreta. It is hard to find and apply good writing and production talent, and not worth the time and money when the number of viewers is spread so thinly over so many channels. And do not be fooled into thinking that the number of potential channels will increase as the art allows! Two large chunks of the broadcast TV bandwidth are to be reallocated, i.e. what the people own will be sold off.
All you have gained is the potential for HDTV, but this could already have been run as a separate service alongside analog. What is more, it distracts from the original purpose of TV in the UK as a public service broadcasting medium, not an eye candy broadcasting medium.
Why? Did the US plant the bombs? Did the US tell Aznar to blame ETA?
As far as I saw the nation seeing it; this one goes up to 11:
1. The US government had a quarrel with "Arabs" (we put "Arabs" in quotes because the US couldn't really make up its mind which Arabs it had a quarrel with, but it knew they were Arabs).
2. The Spanish people did not have a quarrel with Arabs.
3. The Spanish government, however, was all BFF with the US government.
4. So, the Spanish government decides to send its troops off to help its BFF.
5. Unsurprisingly for war, Spain was met with reprisals. Because of the nature of the enemy, it couldn't drop bombs over Spanish airspace, so resorted to a tactic it was familiar with.
Aside: War is dirty and all deaths are nasty. There's no "acceptable" way to kill the enemy, in uniform or otherwise.
6. So, to recap: the Spanish government sent its troops to war over an issue between the US and Arabs, and the Spanish people had to suffer.
7. The Spanish government had a chance to say to its people, "I'm sorry, we fucked up, this is not our war, we are not using our military for the proper function of protecting our country." Instead, and without evidence, it quickly blamed a local paramilitary group, ETA, to:
(a) Prevent the need to apologise as described; (b) Justify its approach toward ETA.
8. The Spanish government was very quickly shown to be wrong to the point of either gross incompetence or maliciousness, losing the trust of both those who had confidence in its pro-war stance and those who might at least have had faith in the government's integrity, if not its position.
9. The Spanish government was very quickly replaced with one reflecting the growing anti-US sentiment.
10. The propaganda machine switched accordingly.
11. The Spanish political and democratic voice became anti-US.
An analysis of popular sentiment, Hognoxious, is more complex than, "Find out who arranged it and hate them!" In this case, once the enemy had attacked Spain, the enemy's enemy became even less a friend.
Remember, finally, that Spain and the UK have had regular bombing campaigns within their borders over the past few decades, and could never have been expected to respond as the US.
Let's hope more big chains offer open WiFi in the UK. They have enough money to make sure such travesties as Pub fined £8,000 for customer's illicit downloads don't happen very often, by lobbying for laws to protect open WiFi providers.
Apple is a strange beast. It's always seemed to aim at building a quality desktop for a restricted market which can afford it. It once lampooned Dell for being a company which makes profit on volume rather than quality. Even the click-wheel iPod remained steadfastly associated with its superior UI and superior price tag, and though it reached a mass market on "cool", it remained a winner on trademark usability and profit margin.
Then comes the iPhone, and with the iPhone comes a slurry of a very Microsoft form of press release, always discussing proportion of some market captured, number of apps downloaded, etc. The trait has trickled into their computer division, as they boast about "highest revenue in retail stores in the US in quarter X", or similar misleadingly over- or under-specified statistics. It's not that you can't make a huge profit, especially short-term, on running a business in this way. It's just not the Apple I knew from the '80s and early '90s.
The current favourite for Apple is "% of smartphone market" - this one is an easy winner, because private consumers tend not to need/care much for the full detail of smartphone features, but they do buy what's cool. And there's never been a cool smartphone before the iPhone. What is more, the market of private consumers always exceeds the market of business users, so figures illustrating the iPhone's usage where it might actually be useful are drowned out by Joe Public wanting what's shiny. Finally, private conumsers without the desire for bling or the means to obtain it just go for non-smartphones.
To summarise, iPhones would be expected to win the "consumer smartphone" quantity battle because they are the only well-established consumer smartphone. As a result, they automatically win the "smartphone" quantity battle. But this doesn't necessarily mean they are the favoured smartphone in any particular group of existing users making an informed choice. There's a good reason why there was no "switch" advert for iPhone as there was for Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
40 years ago, "made in Japan" meant a cheap, cheerful, somewhat unreliable clone. They had the technology to manufacture, but not the skill to manufacture reliably, nor the smarts to create. Then they became the cloning heroes, making faithful and reliable Western designs... and today, they innovate.
China is currently at stage 2.5, building whatever the West can throw at it, and making gradual improvements. What do you think will happen when they develop an intellectual property economy to rival the West?
Enjoy your hubris, Google, as Microsoft once enjoyed its level of control.
As a cynical old fool, I think I would be better served by a punctuation mark to indicate that, for once, no sarcasm is intended@
The alternative being excessive compensation for those who /are/ talented? Not that the alternative, "to each according to his need," has ever been practised on a huge scale: even the so-called communist countries paid more to those whose skillset would also likely gain them more in capitalist countries.
glorifying manual labor
TV = leisure.
When most people are working in a factory, they want to come home and dream of the stars.
When most people are in the educated middle class, they play with the stars at work, realise not every day's a Moon landing, and want to come home and dream of actually being able to build something in a weekend that works.
It's not that leisure is dumbing down per se, it's that work requires you to be less dumb than ever before. Entertainment is a break from that.
Your point is basically that it'd be impossible for you to convict an innocent, since you'd vote everyone innocent.
How did you read that into my post?
Btw, in the case of the mobster, you'd probably have 1 witness against him (the victim) and objective evidence.
That's more than just "objective" (by which I assume you mean expert witness testimony) evidence, isn't it? Did the mobster plead the 5th, so there's absolutely no opportunity for him to slip up? Is there no evidence that he was involved in anything which might have led him to do what he supposedly did, i.e. no motive suggested by recordings of meetings he's attended, photographs of people he's been with, documents in the trash (virtual or physical)? Nothing suggesting he was strangely near the victim at the time of the incident, i.e. no opportunity?
You're going to have to do a lot better than merely "the victim Z said X did it and there's X's DNA on the weapon". Perhaps actual attacker Y hated both X and Z and wanted to deal with both of them at once. Maybe Y, having brutally attacked Z, has instructed Z to blame X, and Z goes along out of fear for his/his family's life. If you were a professional criminal brutally threatening someone, wouldn't you think to set up a stooge, and make sure your victim plays along? You might not even coach your victim until after the event: if you can get to other witnesses, you can get to the victim too. Maybe through his family.
In addition to that there'd be masses of witnesses for the defense.
And the prosecution would hopefully demonstrate the unreliability of the witnesses. If they're all saying the same thing, what we need is evidence to falsify the account. Since forensic evidence is much better for falsifying rather than proving - what with being the result of a scientific endeavour - that mission has more avenues open to it.
The solution to this, it seems to me, is to put more faith in objective evidence.
I'm not sure whether I like any sentence starting "the solution is to put more faith in..." Less so when I've already argued that there's no "objective" evidence in court, only lots of witnesses, expert and otherwise, giving their testimonies.
Methods of forging fingerprints are so widely known these days that I can't see any reason to use the mere discovery of the defendant's fingerprint in support of anything beyond a preliminary investigation. It's not as if someone would have to be discovered with a home forensics lab in order for a fingerprint forgery defence to be realistic.
I'd take good notice of fingerprint evidence which adds reasonable doubt, such as indications that a fingerprint was forged (biometric IDs are just another arms race). Otherwise you'd have to engage me with a lot of convincing evidence that a fingerprint was made by the finger's owner.
In the event someone was premeditating a naughty act, the first thing they would surely plan is to sway the known variables in their favour (i.e. against the stooge's favour), such as those resulting from well-known scientific tests. It'd be unpredictable and esoteric observations which catch the prepared criminal.
Never mind that the forensic findings are (or ought to be) independently verifiable.
All worthwhile eyewitness accounts are independently verifiable, i.e. involve independent eyewitnesses. Don't let a commendable scientific spirit enter a pathologically obsessive state where you're happy to take a report of a complex scientific procedure as close to infallible but won't accept a dozen people in a park telling you that the grass is green and the snow is white because "eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable" and "the grass and snow weren't observed under scientific conditions". Such disconnect has been parodied since Aristophanes, and for good reason.
I agree with this, with the additional proviso that (as I indicated below) it's more difficult to identify tampering of a complex system, especially one you're not very familiar with.
We're all fairly familiar with the acts of recalling and forgetting events we've seen, and we will (as good jurors) expect multiple independent eyewitness accounts if we are going to rely on eyewitness testimony. But we're not very familiar with the intricacies of collecting and testing DNA, and (as successes of convictions on DNA evidence show) it doesn't seem that we're putting on our critical thinking hats on when presented with complex science[tm] by authority.
near 100% reliance on subjective evidence, and treatment of objective evidence (as reported to you by imperfect humans) as no better.
Not AC, but: precisely. See My post here. As a juror, you're not being given the opportunity to perform/commission tests, merely to determine the relative importance of various testimonies presented to you.
You could at least see that you would never convict a mobster (who'd have heaps of false witnesses standing by). Or anyone from a closely-enough-knit group for that matter.
If all eye witnesses, policemen, etc spoke in defence of the mobster, and the only evidence favourable to the prosecution was some DNA, it would be wrong to convict. Yeah, maybe the guy's a nasty piece of work, but I'm not convinced beyond reasonable doubt, and it's as likely that the exasperated LEO has planted something.
It'd also be relatively easy to get you to convict an innocent. If you based yourself on witnesses alone, obviously, you can see why you'd be liable to convict someone of witchcraft, for example.
No, because witnesses have to both provide evidence of guilt and remove reasonable doubt from my mind. 100 people saying that X is a witch may not technically have created any reasonable doubt, but it hasn't provided any evidence either.
Objective evidence must take precedence over subjective evidence.
A witness interpreting the collection and testing of DNA is subjective. A witness giving an account of what he saw is subjective. You attempt to move from "his truth" to "the truth" with peer review, and since you're neither a peer nor do you have the chance to perform much review, you should not treat the expert witness testimony as inherently more reliable.
Yes, DNA can be planted/faked, but if that's the case, more research will find inconsistencies.
Yes, eyewitnesses can be misled or their testimony be a lie, but etc.
Perhaps some of this "stimulus" money could be put into creating an agency to improve the collection of objective evidence
A government Department for the Elimination of Error and Corruption? I'm sure the USSR had something like that :-).
Unlike DNA evidence,
You are the juror, not the forensic scientist. You are not being presented with the opportunity to collect and test DNA yourself. Even if you were to ignore the evidence that separate people can appear to have matching DNA as tested, and the evidence that evidence is often planted, and evidence that accidental contamination occurs, you are still assuming that the forensic scientist is accurately reporting his results, i.e. is both competent and impartial.
there have been many, many studies proving the unreliability of eyewitnesses. In a stressful, quick situation, people's memory is often wrong.
This is precisely why you don't rely on a single eyewitness, nor even on a group of eyewitnesses alone to make your case.
So because you're a doofus who didn't pay attention in school, you ignore the facts?
I don't know about AC, but I have had enough years of schooling to have a good idea of what I do not know, and one of the things I do not know is forensic science. All I can do is judge the reliability of the expert witness's interpretation, just as I do for all the other witnesses. I have also had enough schooling to know that, the more complex a system, the more difficult it is to identify any tampering which has occurred.
I think this is an excellent idea: I would engage the right thoughts to get wood as I passed through, and recommend all others do similarly. It would be a silent yet dirty protest of the modern era.
When they march into your town, do not look away as if you have something to hide, but stare straight into their eyes so they can see your hatred.
Never has there been a projection of a man's approach to life so obvious as when he accuses another of making a statement out of jealousy.
I mean, are you so bitter and competitive that you see everything in terms of people doing better or worse than you? Even so, are you capable of thinking that people other than you might analyse things without reference to themselves?
If people dislike Bill Gates, it's jealousy. If people dislike Steve jobs, it is jealousy. If people just don't like GW Bush, it's jealousy. People dislike Obama, it's jealousy. careless drivers? You're jealous of their fast cars. Hate dictators? You are jealous of their military and sociopolitical skills. Question the ethics of African diamond mine owners? You are jealous of their marketing and productivity. Question meritocracy when the lazy Genius in the class did no work but excelled? You have no valid point, you're just jealous. Doubt the American claim of classlessness after serving the heirs of billion-dollar fortunes at a country club? Buddy, you are just jealous. hate socialised European healthcare? no you don't, you're just jealous of the French! hate American Private healthcare? Sounds like you're just jealous of Americans!
The "jealousy" argument is as specious as the "only terrorists/paedophiles/people who hate America would say that" argument.
At a glance, at least Windows XP, Vista, 7... I assume that every enterprise with enough money to be in the kind of business to worry about sector size has at least one non-OEM licence of Windows lying about.
Otherwise, you could just boot into Linux and make sure to create your partition on appropriate boundaries using your preferred partitioning tool.
Remember, we're worrying about one-time setup here.
But if the start of the partition isn't aligned to the start of a hardware sector, cue...
...chastisement for not setting up your drive using the vendor-provided software.
The main problem is solved, as always, by a layer of indirection. Your theoretical worst-case scenario of an extra rotation for every write is going to be offset by controller buffering, operating system caching, etc. Don't forget, when I am changing a couple of bytes in a file, I have to read at least a logical sector, which means the controller has to read (and may cache) at least a physical sector.
For modern high-performance environments where the driver optimises based on the physical sector size, geometry, and so on, there is going to be no assumption of a fixed sector size. More likely is the trade-off by queueing commands which are coalesced for most efficient read/write by the controller, where you let the firmware worry about such details and accept that premature optimisation on your part may reduce efficiency.
That fact that you're posting on Slashdot suggests that you've chosen the 70.
tu quoque fallacy. To see the world in terms of black and white alternatives, and moreover to only be able to argue for an ideal when consistent with the most extreme application of that ideal, will result in no advancement whatever.
Those who go with the 30 are usually too busy avoiding starvation and disease to worry about making silly ideological arguments on the internet.
The examples of medical advances given as advantages of modern life have occurred in the last 50 years. I am quite confident that being "too busy avoiding starvation and disease" has not been the lasting feature of Western society since the Renaissance. If it teaches anything, it is that a great deal can be achieved even while there is little medical care.
...while ignoring the drawbacks. Which was thepainguy’s point.
No... it just doesn't have a modern Western value system to regard those features as significant drawbacks.
For example: to you, maybe, it is important that resources are dedicated to helping a sick infant with some congenital problem to recover and be maintained to live a long, physically healthy life. There is no such expression of value to the noble savage: such an infant might be maintained only to be allowed to die peacefully, just as today we might abort a fetus with a serious defect.
No, he’s claiming that while technology has its misuses it can also be used for good.
The noble savage ideal does not discount the possibility that there are benefits to technology; it argues a benefit to living without being encumbered by the social and technological impositions of modern civilisation.
"Modern medicine cures some stuff" is true, but is not a counterargument of the noble savage ideal. I was trying to disabuse OP of his misunderstanding of the notion.
Is working 16 hours a day in the wilderness to scrape a bare minimum of food and water
Chimpanzees and big cats would both disagree with your time management, and they arguably both lack the cunning of the human brain. Seriously, 16 hours?
Or is it better to work 8 hours in a box in order to have the rest of your day with time and resources to do as you please
To do as I please? Maybe if I close my eyes and dream. If you believe you are free in your copious free time, it is because you lack the imagination to realise how much you are restricted in how you can move or express yourself.
And the flora and fauna are only hospitable in southern england because your ancestors hunted everything dangerous to extinction.
Incredible as it might be to believe, not every environment has naturally accommodated great swathes of predators of humans. In areas where that is the case, am I supposed to get up in arms or something about humans protecting themselves from immediate danger?
Also, there is no argument that society is more peaceful with this medical knowledge - when life spans have practically doubled
I have already argued against advantage of merely doubling lifespan; also, I'm not quite sure why lifespan implies more peacefulness, unless you're implying that the lack of peace implies necessary death.
and crime rates have plunged in developed countries.
I thought we were discussing peace and harmony, not efficacy of the law. You can also reduce crime rates by locking everyone up in their own individual cell - is that peace and harmony? Also, what is this obsession with concentrating on individual countries... if you interact across the globe, then your society is measured by its effect across the globe. Want to check how many deaths those civilised countries have caused year-on-year? Try not to care about whether the deaths are "legal", just about whether they can be called "peaceful and harmonious".
Why does the sector size presented by the interface have to reflect anything about the hardware? isn't this like the CHS/LBA conversion done under the hood? What about the ability to request a particular sector size, with the default being 512 bytes and the recommended amount being the hardware amount for optimisation purposes? Memories of 512 versus 2048 in the CD booting of older versions of VMS...
Some of this is standard noble savage stuff.
Ah, that old false dichotomy. There are vicious technocrats, noble technocrats, vicious savages, and noble savages. In evolutionary terms, there is very little difference between man in a cave and man in space: don't expect a few thousand years of civilisation to change our nature.
what do they do if one of their buddies is born with a genetic disease like Polycystic Kidney Disease
The same thing that happened 50 years ago, or that happens now to the majority of people who cannot afford treatment for the complex disease you mention. Now, are you arguing that society is necessarily more peaceful when there is the medical knowledge for everyone to lead a long, healthy life? Can I offer you Earth as a counterexample?
Also, in the real world packs of wolves and bears don't just leave you alone.
That pretty much depends on what part of the world you come from, and where you draw the line between savage and technocrat. Fairly hospitable weather, flora and fauna in southern England where I am now.
Tell me, friend, would you rather enjoy 30 free years or 70 in a cage? Of course we would both rather enjoy 70 free years, but where can one find that option today?
It is an essential part of the justice process that arrest records are public, to prevent secret detentions, etc. This has already been discussed by other posters, and is why such records are already public, just not accessible in such a convenient manner. A group of private individuals could easily republish such records.
Now, it is clear that the police should not be doing what is being described here, but the reason is that shaming is not part of the job description of the police. The reason is not that arrest records should be kept secret.
The more fundamental problem here, if any, is a misunderstanding of the law by those reading that twitter feed. A list of charges should be interpreted as nothing more than a list of charges - it is not a list of guilty people, and even if it were, it is not a list of people to be abused. Any employer refusing to give you a job on the basis of being on a list of charged people, unless perhaps they had determined that you were still moving through the legal process and your job involves driving, would have been a very dangerous employer to work for. Before you give me the argument that you need a roof over your head more than you need a fair and just employer, the only reason for the power imbalance is so many people like you fearing the loss of little comfort.
Note that it has not yet been proven that the public in general think a charged person is a convicted person. This sort of thing needs to be studied scientifically, as a basis for educating where necessary to disabuse the people of serious misconceptions about the legal process.
The analogue system was stable, open, technician-friendly, and degraded gracefully. A 30-year-old analogue set still works today, except in regions where the analogue signal has now been switched off.
The digital system opens the doors for tweaks to be made with protocols to add "features" or restrictions, each of which will require buying a new STB/TV every few years. It is already the case that many Freeview systems from half a decade ago need replacing - do not even dream that the majority of manufacturers are going to provide firmware updates.
Yes, we can now admit 6 to 8 channels where previously only one could be transmitted on a particular frequency, but the large majority of the channels are dedicated to repeats and/or excreta. It is hard to find and apply good writing and production talent, and not worth the time and money when the number of viewers is spread so thinly over so many channels. And do not be fooled into thinking that the number of potential channels will increase as the art allows! Two large chunks of the broadcast TV bandwidth are to be reallocated, i.e. what the people own will be sold off.
All you have gained is the potential for HDTV, but this could already have been run as a separate service alongside analog. What is more, it distracts from the original purpose of TV in the UK as a public service broadcasting medium, not an eye candy broadcasting medium.
Why? Did the US plant the bombs? Did the US tell Aznar to blame ETA?
As far as I saw the nation seeing it; this one goes up to 11:
1. The US government had a quarrel with "Arabs" (we put "Arabs" in quotes because the US couldn't really make up its mind which Arabs it had a quarrel with, but it knew they were Arabs).
2. The Spanish people did not have a quarrel with Arabs.
3. The Spanish government, however, was all BFF with the US government.
4. So, the Spanish government decides to send its troops off to help its BFF.
5. Unsurprisingly for war, Spain was met with reprisals. Because of the nature of the enemy, it couldn't drop bombs over Spanish airspace, so resorted to a tactic it was familiar with.
Aside: War is dirty and all deaths are nasty. There's no "acceptable" way to kill the enemy, in uniform or otherwise.
6. So, to recap: the Spanish government sent its troops to war over an issue between the US and Arabs, and the Spanish people had to suffer.
7. The Spanish government had a chance to say to its people, "I'm sorry, we fucked up, this is not our war, we are not using our military for the proper function of protecting our country." Instead, and without evidence, it quickly blamed a local paramilitary group, ETA, to:
(a) Prevent the need to apologise as described;
(b) Justify its approach toward ETA.
8. The Spanish government was very quickly shown to be wrong to the point of either gross incompetence or maliciousness, losing the trust of both those who had confidence in its pro-war stance and those who might at least have had faith in the government's integrity, if not its position.
9. The Spanish government was very quickly replaced with one reflecting the growing anti-US sentiment.
10. The propaganda machine switched accordingly.
11. The Spanish political and democratic voice became anti-US.
An analysis of popular sentiment, Hognoxious, is more complex than, "Find out who arranged it and hate them!" In this case, once the enemy had attacked Spain, the enemy's enemy became even less a friend.
Remember, finally, that Spain and the UK have had regular bombing campaigns within their borders over the past few decades, and could never have been expected to respond as the US.
Let's hope more big chains offer open WiFi in the UK. They have enough money to make sure such travesties as Pub fined £8,000 for customer's illicit downloads don't happen very often, by lobbying for laws to protect open WiFi providers.
Which might one day protect you, dear reader!
Apple is a strange beast. It's always seemed to aim at building a quality desktop for a restricted market which can afford it. It once lampooned Dell for being a company which makes profit on volume rather than quality. Even the click-wheel iPod remained steadfastly associated with its superior UI and superior price tag, and though it reached a mass market on "cool", it remained a winner on trademark usability and profit margin.
Then comes the iPhone, and with the iPhone comes a slurry of a very Microsoft form of press release, always discussing proportion of some market captured, number of apps downloaded, etc. The trait has trickled into their computer division, as they boast about "highest revenue in retail stores in the US in quarter X", or similar misleadingly over- or under-specified statistics. It's not that you can't make a huge profit, especially short-term, on running a business in this way. It's just not the Apple I knew from the '80s and early '90s.
The current favourite for Apple is "% of smartphone market" - this one is an easy winner, because private consumers tend not to need/care much for the full detail of smartphone features, but they do buy what's cool. And there's never been a cool smartphone before the iPhone. What is more, the market of private consumers always exceeds the market of business users, so figures illustrating the iPhone's usage where it might actually be useful are drowned out by Joe Public wanting what's shiny. Finally, private conumsers without the desire for bling or the means to obtain it just go for non-smartphones.
To summarise, iPhones would be expected to win the "consumer smartphone" quantity battle because they are the only well-established consumer smartphone. As a result, they automatically win the "smartphone" quantity battle. But this doesn't necessarily mean they are the favoured smartphone in any particular group of existing users making an informed choice. There's a good reason why there was no "switch" advert for iPhone as there was for Mac.