Dude, didn't you pick up ANY context of what he was saying?
Here we go:
"People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?"
"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that, that information could be made available to the authorities."
You should really take that as a not-too-subtle reminder that the cops are looking over his shoulder and he's required by law to turn all your info over to the cops.
If all your little brain is capable of retaining is the bold section, then big issues like Internet privacy might not be for you.
If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is
Popeye is God?
I get what you're saying, but there are some things which are REALLY good bets. I mean, 1+1=2. PROBABLY. Boil it down, and it depends on things like the null set axiom. But, on a philosophical level, you're right. If 1+1=42, then that's the way it is and we have to accept that. It also means that we have to accept that all of mathematics is built on a lie and most of our understanding of physics is balls-to-the-walls wrong.
Mathematical axioms, like our views of omni-fillintheblank, are unprovable assumptions. But so far they look like a good bet. To take a cue from the professor, I'm willing to bet you $200 that the null set axiom is true... as long as I get to hold onto the wager money.
Whoa, Swilden, you can't just stop there. You have to explain it all the way otherwise you look like a complete head-over-heels Google fanboy-with-blinders-on.
No Google doesn't read your mail. The OP is full of shit. And the "Scroogle" propaganda campaign by Microsoft is the worst kind of FUD.
But they make their money from having data about their users. In aggregate. They sell ad-space. SPECIFICALLY, they sell TARGETED ADS. That aggregated data? It comes in a spreadsheet of "who do you want to sell ads to" next to a number of users. You're technically correct. They don't sell that data. It's given away for free in their BUY AD SPACE NOW page.
So they don't read your email. They don't sell your personal information. They don't sell (much) aggregated information about you. But they make a FUCKTON of money collecting aggregated information about you and selling ads which target you.
Do your civic duty, suck it up, and fight the good fight. Steering the boat IS a constructive activity. Now get back in there citizen, go mail your rep, and trash talk Mike Rogers to anyone you know in Michigan.
OH SNAP! That's right Chihowa, you show that OP what's what about Hamilton. That trash-talking Chihowa didn't know SHIT about Hamilton, but you dun took the words STRAIGHT FROM THE SOURCE and threw it all up in his business.
As much as I like to point out silly religious laws, I think this is actually more a factor of their time and level of societal progress. With progress and stability the system changes and certain things make sense. I mean, imagine anarchy. The concept of a loan is laughable as they can simply walk away with your money. Now take a small step of progress and you have some jackboot thugs that hunt down deadbeats. Loans are now a good thing... for the bank. But there's nothing there stopping predatory practices and even kings can be laid low by owing a buck. This is where the stigma against loans and interest comes from. And rightly so. But take another step of progress, and have a society that understand bankruptcy, predatory loans, and we have jackboot thugs that hunt down loan-sharks. Now loans are a financial tool that (mostly) do good. There are still people that skip town and there are still loan-sharks, but we fight against them. Yay progress.
Islamic finance is indeed a backwards way of doing things, but it makes sense for a less established society. It's important to understand why these silly laws get written down in the first place, it tells you something about society.
Yeah, dude, that's kinda my point. They have a drinking straw when they need a fire hose.
Under my proposal, during NON-emergencies, there would be an abundance of bandwidth. You're bitching that they'd shovel the cost onto the consumer, while I'm countering that with extra supply, they'd compete more fiercely for customers. Do try to keep up.
Also, I was under the impression that it was the trunk lines and central stations which were overloaded, not so much the wireless spectrum. Given that you think more towers equals more bandwidth, you're probably not the best person to listen to on the subject. (More towers equal more coverage. If you want more bandwidth, it's the guts that go into the tower and the infrastructure that feeds into the tower).
In most titles, the idea of in-game advertising makes little sense. Sarah Kerrigan doesn't shop at Victoria's Secret, Booker DeWitt is an unlikely fan of Coca-Cola, and the post-apocalyptic setting of Metro 2033 isn't exactly prime McDonald's turf.
Ok, work with me here. I've got money on the table and I WANT to give it to you. Just keep an open mind. Roll with me here. Ok ok, here we go:
1) The queen of blades is casually strolling through the ruined husk of a terran world she just devistated. Fires and corpses everywhere. Zerglings scootin about everywhere. She looks around with a faint memory of a previous life. Her eyes focus on something. She smirks. The last scene is her walking into the mostly intake Victoria's Secrets store.
2) It's a cold unbearable post-apocalyptic Moscow. Your health slowly comes back as you fight you way through Icouldn'tbebotheredtoreadtheplotsummary. Sure, medkits can heal you to full, but what's better than a meal chock-full of preservatives? Every now and then you can find an old abandoned Micky-Dee's, salvage some old patties, and give your health a minor boost to regeneration.
3) Ok, ok, this last one is easy. Booker DeWitt scounges around some trashcans for food all the time right? All we ask is that a cocacola be in there. Easy as pie. Easier then pie. Pie has that flakey crust. All we want is a simple aluminum can in the trash. Is that too much to ask? There's all sorts of reasons it could be in there. Come ON baby, work with me here!
We've seen several eras in Earth's history where life appears to "stagnate" at some level, proceeding with little-or-no change for long periods. The last of which was the "age of dinosaurs", which lasted 170 million years or so, depending on how you define the starting point.
Whoa whoa whoa, the drake equation deals with intelligence arising out of evolution. And you're arguing that there needs to be a rapid rate of evolution on a global scale to achieve intelligence? It doesn't quite work that way. Intelligence is not the goal of evolution. You don't build up a value of evolution points and exchange them for opposable thumbs and enough frontal cortex to use them. "What caused us to be smarter than the average bear?" is one of those really good questions that we'd like a definite answer to. But you can't just take a pool of Genetic Algorithm agents, cause a near global extinction event every now and then, and expect them to start saying "hello god, please stop nuking us".
Utilities, scarcity, and the rates they charge. Remember Enron? Remember how they were given control of power generation? The idea was that with the magic of the free market and competition that prices would come down. It turns out that if there's a fundamental need for a resource, like a utility, the people that control said resource strive to keep it scarce so they can justify exorbitant prices for it. Now, that might all be different if we have a large host of people competing to eat each other's lunch. But thank god we've got a lot of wireless carriers to choose from, so THAT'LL never happen.
If bandwidth is scarce, they'll charge more. If bandwidth is plentiful, if we have plenty of supply, they'll charge less. And it's not that some exec will see that they have excess supply and start a sale, no. You'll have some accountant see that they could take all the customers in district X and still be functional, even if they sold at a lower price than normal. All they have to do is undercut the competition. The only difference to them is extra paying customers at the end of the day. They have the infrastructure already in place.
But no, this is not without side effect. There's an initial big expense as the phone companies upgrade their infrastructure. I'm saying the cost of installing extra bandwidth is negligible compared to the benefit of getting the wireless carriers to compete with each other and having a utility that actually functions when we need it most.
So... considering that's we hear about this with EVERY major catastrophe, would this be the sort of national infrastructure concern that we would want to mandate that the cell companies install extra capacity? You know, in case of emergencies. Are we at the point that we can consider cellular connection, or generically wireless connection, to be a basic utility and not a cutting edge hip new ordeal that only the rich can afford?
And hey, since they've got ALL THAT BANDWIDTH, just lying about in case shit hits the fan, it'd be great to sell it on the cheap. You know, that idea that society and the fundamental utilities is here to foster growth rather than wringing out the last coin from the customer's pockets.
So your senior engineers had such a monoculture they had to have the benefits of a code repository explained to them? Or didn't understand unit testing and why they would want to write code to test their code when they could just as easily write a procedure to have a tech test "the real deal" by hand?
I'm in a place which has had a bunch of EE's do coding on the side. All of them have been here for 20-30 years. Me and the other new guy are trying desperately to bring the code-shop up to snuff and we're facing resistance. And I don't think it's an age thing. I think they simply never experienced anything better. They know the archaic system that they use here, and it's served them well enough for decades. Monoculture.
Oh my god, are you calling eldavojohn, Eldavo-fucking-john, he who practically monopolizes ask-Slashdot questions, he who is a better editor than the editors, he who practically always has well thought out posts on the topic at hand.... you're calling that guy a bot?
For all the privacy fear-mongering, Google-is-a-big-scary-company-and-therefore-evil vibe, and disdain for dorkiness, this is probably the first bit of critisism that I actually understand.
The smartphone zombies are getting to be a problem and I'm not sure society is ready for people to be even further removed in their day-to-day life. On the plus side, I know the battery life on this thing isn't going to let them wander that much so they'll probably gravitate to charging stations and/or heroin dens.
On the cynical side though, smartphones are hardly being used to their full potential. I mean, everyone has a wearable crazy-connected really-fast computer. This was the DREAM back in the 80's and 90's. And what do most people do with them? Instant messenger and Angry Birds... The geek inside me weeps.
You've been there and done that with 7 LEDs. Seven.
My goodness. Think of all the data you could pump through that to the user! All it takes is someone proficient with Morse code and you've practically got a webpage browser. Maybe they could shake their head quickly and get a PoV effect.
Hell, call up Oculus Rift and tell them they've been beat to the market!
No, really, that's it's main perk. Instead of mindless zombies hunched over staring at their waist, we'll have mindless zombies blithely staring where ever they want.
So you're one of those poor slobs that burns oil to make electricity?
Wow who are you? I mean, I've heard of some people burning it for heat, but electricity? That's just crazy. No son, we burn coal, fissionable material, and some natural gas when we want to burn things for electricity.
That whole "bringing it back to earth" thing is a bit of a bitch.
I mean, percentage wise, our solar system is primarily emptyish void. Next is being in a state of FIREY HELLSCAPE OF CONSTANT FUSION, followed closely by entombed in soul-crushing pressures under miles of rock. The percentage of our solar system where it'd be nice to have some helium for fun and profit is shockingly small.
and ignore the what you obviously would believe to be false claims?
As a co-worker I would not ignore his false claims and I would call him out on it.
A believer in god is okay - an evangelist is not.
They are pretty much the same thing at the end of the day.
Yeah, I'm calling you out on that one. Either: a) No True Scotsman fallacy, and according to you, the vast swath of Christianity aren't "real" Christians or b) You don't understand what "evangelizing" means, or c) You're unaware of the vast majority of Christian sects.
This isn't the sort of spirited debate that managers like to hear. It get's their liability all riled up.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, didn't you pick up ANY context of what he was saying?
Here we go:
"People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?"
"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that, that information could be made available to the authorities."
You should really take that as a not-too-subtle reminder that the cops are looking over his shoulder and he's required by law to turn all your info over to the cops.
If all your little brain is capable of retaining is the bold section, then big issues like Internet privacy might not be for you.
There is nothing that philosophers can't waste time on. Omniscience included.
And you can't prove axioms.
So you suck at math just about as much as you suck at philosophy.
Try to get a grip. Your arguments do so many mental backflips that I dissuaded from believing anything you say simply by it's association with you.
If God is real, then he is real and he is who he is
Popeye is God?
I get what you're saying, but there are some things which are REALLY good bets. I mean, 1+1=2. PROBABLY. Boil it down, and it depends on things like the null set axiom. But, on a philosophical level, you're right. If 1+1=42, then that's the way it is and we have to accept that. It also means that we have to accept that all of mathematics is built on a lie and most of our understanding of physics is balls-to-the-walls wrong.
Mathematical axioms, like our views of omni-fillintheblank, are unprovable assumptions. But so far they look like a good bet. To take a cue from the professor, I'm willing to bet you $200 that the null set axiom is true... as long as I get to hold onto the wager money.
Historically?
No, not really.
Whoa, Swilden, you can't just stop there. You have to explain it all the way otherwise you look like a complete head-over-heels Google fanboy-with-blinders-on.
No Google doesn't read your mail. The OP is full of shit. And the "Scroogle" propaganda campaign by Microsoft is the worst kind of FUD.
But they make their money from having data about their users. In aggregate. They sell ad-space. SPECIFICALLY, they sell TARGETED ADS. That aggregated data? It comes in a spreadsheet of "who do you want to sell ads to" next to a number of users. You're technically correct. They don't sell that data. It's given away for free in their BUY AD SPACE NOW page.
So they don't read your email.
They don't sell your personal information.
They don't sell (much) aggregated information about you.
But they make a FUCKTON of money collecting aggregated information about you and selling ads which target you.
I like what Anon said above:
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Do your civic duty, suck it up, and fight the good fight. Steering the boat IS a constructive activity. Now get back in there citizen, go mail your rep, and trash talk Mike Rogers to anyone you know in Michigan.
OH SNAP! That's right Chihowa, you show that OP what's what about Hamilton. That trash-talking Chihowa didn't know SHIT about Hamilton, but you dun took the words STRAIGHT FROM THE SOURCE and threw it all up in his business.
That'll show 'em.
As much as I like to point out silly religious laws, I think this is actually more a factor of their time and level of societal progress. With progress and stability the system changes and certain things make sense. I mean, imagine anarchy. The concept of a loan is laughable as they can simply walk away with your money. Now take a small step of progress and you have some jackboot thugs that hunt down deadbeats. Loans are now a good thing... for the bank. But there's nothing there stopping predatory practices and even kings can be laid low by owing a buck. This is where the stigma against loans and interest comes from. And rightly so. But take another step of progress, and have a society that understand bankruptcy, predatory loans, and we have jackboot thugs that hunt down loan-sharks. Now loans are a financial tool that (mostly) do good. There are still people that skip town and there are still loan-sharks, but we fight against them. Yay progress.
Islamic finance is indeed a backwards way of doing things, but it makes sense for a less established society. It's important to understand why these silly laws get written down in the first place, it tells you something about society.
Yeah, dude, that's kinda my point. They have a drinking straw when they need a fire hose.
Under my proposal, during NON-emergencies, there would be an abundance of bandwidth. You're bitching that they'd shovel the cost onto the consumer, while I'm countering that with extra supply, they'd compete more fiercely for customers. Do try to keep up.
Also, I was under the impression that it was the trunk lines and central stations which were overloaded, not so much the wireless spectrum. Given that you think more towers equals more bandwidth, you're probably not the best person to listen to on the subject. (More towers equal more coverage. If you want more bandwidth, it's the guts that go into the tower and the infrastructure that feeds into the tower).
In most titles, the idea of in-game advertising makes little sense. Sarah Kerrigan doesn't shop at Victoria's Secret, Booker DeWitt is an unlikely fan of Coca-Cola, and the post-apocalyptic setting of Metro 2033 isn't exactly prime McDonald's turf.
Ok, work with me here. I've got money on the table and I WANT to give it to you. Just keep an open mind. Roll with me here. Ok ok, here we go:
1) The queen of blades is casually strolling through the ruined husk of a terran world she just devistated. Fires and corpses everywhere. Zerglings scootin about everywhere. She looks around with a faint memory of a previous life. Her eyes focus on something. She smirks. The last scene is her walking into the mostly intake Victoria's Secrets store.
2) It's a cold unbearable post-apocalyptic Moscow. Your health slowly comes back as you fight you way through Icouldn'tbebotheredtoreadtheplotsummary. Sure, medkits can heal you to full, but what's better than a meal chock-full of preservatives? Every now and then you can find an old abandoned Micky-Dee's, salvage some old patties, and give your health a minor boost to regeneration.
3) Ok, ok, this last one is easy. Booker DeWitt scounges around some trashcans for food all the time right? All we ask is that a cocacola be in there. Easy as pie. Easier then pie. Pie has that flakey crust. All we want is a simple aluminum can in the trash. Is that too much to ask? There's all sorts of reasons it could be in there. Come ON baby, work with me here!
We've seen several eras in Earth's history where life appears to "stagnate" at some level, proceeding with little-or-no change for long periods. The last of which was the "age of dinosaurs", which lasted 170 million years or so, depending on how you define the starting point.
Well that explains why we hardly saw anything interesting happen at all during the age of the... reptiles. No real change at all. Totally stagnant.
Whoa whoa whoa, the drake equation deals with intelligence arising out of evolution. And you're arguing that there needs to be a rapid rate of evolution on a global scale to achieve intelligence? It doesn't quite work that way. Intelligence is not the goal of evolution. You don't build up a value of evolution points and exchange them for opposable thumbs and enough frontal cortex to use them. "What caused us to be smarter than the average bear?" is one of those really good questions that we'd like a definite answer to. But you can't just take a pool of Genetic Algorithm agents, cause a near global extinction event every now and then, and expect them to start saying "hello god, please stop nuking us".
Utilities, scarcity, and the rates they charge. Remember Enron? Remember how they were given control of power generation? The idea was that with the magic of the free market and competition that prices would come down. It turns out that if there's a fundamental need for a resource, like a utility, the people that control said resource strive to keep it scarce so they can justify exorbitant prices for it. Now, that might all be different if we have a large host of people competing to eat each other's lunch. But thank god we've got a lot of wireless carriers to choose from, so THAT'LL never happen.
If bandwidth is scarce, they'll charge more. If bandwidth is plentiful, if we have plenty of supply, they'll charge less. And it's not that some exec will see that they have excess supply and start a sale, no. You'll have some accountant see that they could take all the customers in district X and still be functional, even if they sold at a lower price than normal. All they have to do is undercut the competition. The only difference to them is extra paying customers at the end of the day. They have the infrastructure already in place.
But no, this is not without side effect. There's an initial big expense as the phone companies upgrade their infrastructure. I'm saying the cost of installing extra bandwidth is negligible compared to the benefit of getting the wireless carriers to compete with each other and having a utility that actually functions when we need it most.
So... considering that's we hear about this with EVERY major catastrophe, would this be the sort of national infrastructure concern that we would want to mandate that the cell companies install extra capacity? You know, in case of emergencies. Are we at the point that we can consider cellular connection, or generically wireless connection, to be a basic utility and not a cutting edge hip new ordeal that only the rich can afford?
And hey, since they've got ALL THAT BANDWIDTH, just lying about in case shit hits the fan, it'd be great to sell it on the cheap. You know, that idea that society and the fundamental utilities is here to foster growth rather than wringing out the last coin from the customer's pockets.
So your senior engineers had such a monoculture they had to have the benefits of a code repository explained to them? Or didn't understand unit testing and why they would want to write code to test their code when they could just as easily write a procedure to have a tech test "the real deal" by hand?
I'm in a place which has had a bunch of EE's do coding on the side. All of them have been here for 20-30 years. Me and the other new guy are trying desperately to bring the code-shop up to snuff and we're facing resistance. And I don't think it's an age thing. I think they simply never experienced anything better. They know the archaic system that they use here, and it's served them well enough for decades. Monoculture.
It puts them in the top 100% bracket. Which, since you only have the one bracket, includes ALL PROGRAMMERS. Stop making lazy meaningless statements.
If you wanted to contribute you could state how much a "top flight" programmer makes.
Oh my god, are you calling eldavojohn, Eldavo-fucking-john, he who practically monopolizes ask-Slashdot questions, he who is a better editor than the editors, he who practically always has well thought out posts on the topic at hand.... you're calling that guy a bot?
Dude, that would be a FANTASTIC chatbot.
I like you. You're a straight shooter. You believe Friday what you believed on Monday.
Entirely in spite of what happened Wednesday.
For all the privacy fear-mongering, Google-is-a-big-scary-company-and-therefore-evil vibe, and disdain for dorkiness, this is probably the first bit of critisism that I actually understand.
The smartphone zombies are getting to be a problem and I'm not sure society is ready for people to be even further removed in their day-to-day life. On the plus side, I know the battery life on this thing isn't going to let them wander that much so they'll probably gravitate to charging stations and/or heroin dens.
On the cynical side though, smartphones are hardly being used to their full potential. I mean, everyone has a wearable crazy-connected really-fast computer. This was the DREAM back in the 80's and 90's. And what do most people do with them? Instant messenger and Angry Birds... The geek inside me weeps.
You've been there and done that with 7 LEDs. Seven.
My goodness. Think of all the data you could pump through that to the user! All it takes is someone proficient with Morse code and you've practically got a webpage browser. Maybe they could shake their head quickly and get a PoV effect.
Hell, call up Oculus Rift and tell them they've been beat to the market!
I imagine he'll do a lot of fun things with the settlement. You've heard of this thing called "streaming" right?
And sadly it will beat out the stylish black iPatch for pirates. It's not open source, but nobody pays.
It's just a smartphone display.
Well yeah, but IN YOUR FACE.
No, really, that's it's main perk. Instead of mindless zombies hunched over staring at their waist, we'll have mindless zombies blithely staring where ever they want.
So you're one of those poor slobs that burns oil to make electricity?
Wow who are you? I mean, I've heard of some people burning it for heat, but electricity? That's just crazy. No son, we burn coal, fissionable material, and some natural gas when we want to burn things for electricity.
That whole "bringing it back to earth" thing is a bit of a bitch.
I mean, percentage wise, our solar system is primarily emptyish void. Next is being in a state of FIREY HELLSCAPE OF CONSTANT FUSION, followed closely by entombed in soul-crushing pressures under miles of rock. The percentage of our solar system where it'd be nice to have some helium for fun and profit is shockingly small.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
and ignore the what you obviously would believe to be false claims?
As a co-worker I would not ignore his false claims and I would call him out on it.
A believer in god is okay - an evangelist is not.
They are pretty much the same thing at the end of the day.
Yeah, I'm calling you out on that one. Either:
a) No True Scotsman fallacy, and according to you, the vast swath of Christianity aren't "real" Christians or
b) You don't understand what "evangelizing" means, or
c) You're unaware of the vast majority of Christian sects.
This isn't the sort of spirited debate that managers like to hear. It get's their liability all riled up.