No, I'm pretty sure "depreciated" is right, since no ceasefire has been called. Think of it as a more tongue-in-cheek equivalent, along the lines of PHP deprecation, which actually means "popular."
Snarky. I like it! You get my stamp of approval. And you're right, that does seem to be how PHP develops. But more seriously, the 'gnu/linux' tag was an attempt to politicalize the kernel by RMS. He was sharply rebuffed by Linus and others. Most distributions are less... puritanical... about what to include. So when I say 'linux' for this driver, I mean all flavors, not just the 'pure' gnu/linux ones, hence the tag 'depreciated'. Also, I tagged it as such because I knew it would piss someone off and get me modded down.:D And it succeeded brilliantly at that, proving that there are at least a few of the old guard still lurking on slashdot.
She was a friend of poverty, not of the poor, and considered suffering to be a state of grace. She was a rather nasty piece of work, who kept the poor in poverty, and prevented many dying people from getting access to medicine.
Yeah, that sounds like a good description of someone who won the Padma Shri, Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, Bharat Ratna, Ramon Magsaysay Award, the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize, Pacem in Terris Award, Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia, Order of Merit, Honorary US citizenship, Albanian Golden Honour of the Nation, Balzan Prize, Albert Schweitzer International Prize, Nobel Peace Prize...
A real nasty piece of work she is, yup. It's amazing it's gone on for so long without anybody notice. Thank goodness for Youtube publishing a inflammatory "documentary" by a man whose life work was tearing apart anyone who claimed to be religious, said that 9/11 was "exhilarating" for him, and published a book titled "God Is Not Great", if that doesn't give enough of an indication of this man's, achem, axe to grind. Who else has he grilled? Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Lady Diana, Ayn Rand, Pope Benedict XVI...
Well, I'm sure this one dude with an axe to grind was better qualified to assess this person's character than over two dozen governments and private interests who gave her awards. Oh, I forgot -- She made #1 on Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People. 18 times. So make that most of the world that she's bamboozled.
Yes, if you dig down hard enough you'll find something that even the most saintly person has done that could seem controversial. Just ask the Republicans how their whole "Bengazi" crusade is going, if you want a current-events example. With enough scrutiny, everyone can be demonized. And if you don't believe me on that, feel free to sit in an interrogation room with a trained interrogator with 30 years experience. See if you can go a few hours without admitting something that'll crucify your sorry ass. To date, nobody has beaten the Police Interrogation Reality Challenge!(tm)
I tend to believe that all those awards were for good things done by a largely good person. If she slipped a couple times, it only proves she's human... not a "nasty piece of work".
Nice nickname you got there. Wonder where the inspiration came from. Achem, now, on to the commentary!
Well, that is great news, but if Intel played a hand in its development, then that would only make sense if Intel did NOT play a hand in helping Apple develop the Apple version of the OpenGL driver.
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Since Intel is the creator of the architecture for the video hardware in question, it would be only sensible for Intel assisted development to be better than development that occured without Intel's help.
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Either way, go go Gnu/Linux (and open source!) !!!
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You have to have both or it's worse than useless, because it will get good people killed.
Good people are being killed today, with the regular guns, that the bad guys are taking away from them and then shooting them with it.
Here's the problem with your argument: You're demanding absolute reliability, which is an impossible standard even for the guns that exist today. If it misfires, jams, or any one of a handful of other failure conditions, it's a liability. Yet these risks have been accepted because the benefits outweigh the risks.
And that's where you went horribly wrong in your line of thinking: You didn't stop and consider that the goal wasn't perfection, and impossible goal even with futuristic technology from the year 2999. What you need to consider is whether the change reduces risk and/or improves the utility of the device.
Let's say out of 1000 times an officer draws his or her weapon, they have it taken from them by force 20 times and used against them. Now let's say we have a device that's 99.99% effective in eliminating that risk, but can fail and render the gun inoperative 1 out of every 1000 times the officer tries to use the weapon. Do we use the device?
Of course we do. We've reduced the risk from 2% to 0.1%. I understand the emotional need behind you wanting it to be as reliable as possible and the idea of a device that could prevent you from using it at a critical moment is fear-inducing, but statistically, it's far more likely to save a life than cost one.
These wheels aren't like your normal car wheels. The very thin atmosphere means that the soil is more like lunar soil than Earth soil. Atmospheric erosion tends to smooth out sand particulate so it has a rounder shape -- it is less sharp. Lunar soil is incredibly corrosive. Think of all the problems our troops had operating in Iraq with their equipment, now multiply that by a hundred. It's like walking on microscopic needles. Martian soil isn't quite as bad, thanks to having had an atmosphere at one point, and retains a minimal one now, but it's still inhospitable.
The rover was designed with multiple wheel-sets to operate independently, and the wheels themselves designed to wear somewhat more gracefully in the face of these obstacles. But yes, they're going to look ugly fast.
Also, in the EU, you can have nine doctors diagnose you as free of autism, but a tenth says you have autism, that final diagnosis sticks. A lot of parents take advantage of this in North America as
... As apparently North America is part of the European Union?:/
It's fairly common for parents of "hyper active" kids to intentionally seek out an ASD diagnosis just for the funding. It's pretty shameful, actually.
It's quite common as well for doctors to tell patients to shove it. I have a diagnosis of both ADHD and Asperger's (btw, that's not what they're calling it now) and getting medication is exceptionally difficult, especially for anxiety. You don't mention this, but anxiety has such a high comorbidity with ASD that it's practically unheard of to find someone without it. The reason for this is those drug-seeking parents and young adults who want mind-enhancing drugs or their precious little snowflake to stop tearing the house apart and just veg out in front of the television. Parenting, lulz -- Disney raises our kids today.
So it's not that I disagree with your assessment, but a clinical diagnosis, confirmed with neurological testing, is highly effective at screening out those segments of the population. And while it is a problem, it is still uncommon -- most people who present with ADHD or ASD symptoms have a bona-fide medical condition. Only a small fraction of patients are trying to abuse the system. Unfortunately, just as with pain medication, the political fallout and disinformation spread by well-meaning but lacking any medical certification people such as yourself only contribute to the problem of real patients, with real problems, getting help.
On a different note; I don't think this German IT firm is seeking autistic workers because they're better. They're seeking them because they're vulnerable adults without the capacity to protect themselves from exploitative labor practices. And programming, contract work -- much of our field is exploitative in nature and one must be assertive, sometimes even aggressive, in pushing back. I've had to teach my aspie friends how to assert themselves on this sort of thing, because they genuinely can't see it. They are generally very trusting people; They don't see ulterior motives. It's part of the condition -- they're so intellectual they take everything at face value or literally.
In this field... it's a recipe for disaster. Contrary to what this firm and many of the general public believe: IT is not a cash cow, nor is it glamorous work. Working with computers is emotionally draining, and long hours can be physically demanding. That attention to detail that's so sought after may be great for programming, but it's absolutely horrid when you have a team of people all like that; There's a reason we all have different skillsets and personalities -- too much of any one thing on a team leaves critical weaknesses in thinking that can lead to disaster.
Electric cars will lead to nipples and other unamerican things.
... Like paying back your government loans instead of yelling "Too big to fail! ahahahaaha..." and running to some tropical island to take daily wealth showers and drink out of gold-lined cups.:/ They should be commended... it's a decidedly unamerican approach to business. Fiscal responsibility? It's like an F-word in Congress.
yeah, fuck people after all... it cost muney and stuff...
Did you bother reading the rest of my post where I go into how we can balance public and private interests here without creating a cluster-f*ck of high cost litigation that ultimately winds up costing all of us? Or did you just knee-jerk your foot into your own mouth?
If you're a spy or diplomat or whatever, don't use Gmail. At the very least it is subject to the US government's laws. Get yourself a secured server somewhere else.
Just them? You'll note it also said suspected spies and terrorists. With "broader definitions" of terrorism coming out every day, and the criteria for being included on a watchlist, paired with these hotlines opening up for anonymous "tips"... pretty much anyone these days can be a suspected spy or terrorist. And being a citizen of the US is very little barrier against invasions of your privacy; They've even talked about revoking citizenship for people simply to avoid any legal hassles.
It might be more accurate to say "If you are writing anything you don't want made public, given to law enforcement, or any of the 170+ governments of the world, don't use Gmail." At least then we'd cover all the bases.:/
"We're changing the standards so you can't sue us immediately after the disaster. But if you get cancer 30 years down the line, we and our money will be long gone and no longer giving a darn in Pattaya Beach, Thailand."
Okay, I know you're trying to be funny, but let's be serious for a moment: Why shouldn't the EPA try to limit lawsuits? They cost you and me, the taxpayer, a lot of money. It slows down the entire judicial process, and increases the cost of excercising your rights in the judiciary. There's filing fees now, lawyers fees, and every motion and such you file also costs money. This is fine for corporations who can just pass the buck on to their customers, but for Joe Average, commencing or defending against a legal action can easily bankrupt him. Is that fair? Shouldn't he be able to sue people who have legitimately wronged him as well -- or should that be something reserved only for the wealthy? Conversely, if he is on the receiving end... should he be bankrupted defending against an action that ultimately failed? Any contact with the judicial process tends to be highly corrosive to the average person. It is often ruinous, irrespective of the merits of their position.
Given that, why shouldn't the government try to limit personal injury cases to those where the only evidence of harm won't surface for thirty years? Do you want a legal system that punishes people based on probability, or actuality? If so, thought crime suddenly becomes a lot more justifiable, as well as imprisoning people based on genetic markers, etc.
But I do acknowledge that statistically, we know that in a given group of say, 100 people, if exposed to X intensity of radiation over Y amount of time, Z of them will develop health problems. We can't say with any confidence which of them will develop health problems, but we can say with confidence how probable it is that at least Z of them will. In a case like this where you know harm has happened but the costs won't be known for a long time, a fine seems like a better way to deal with this than lawsuits, provided the fine is proportional to the actual harm caused, plus whatever punitive damages are justified (was it really an accident, or negligence?).
In this case, the government should be the plaintiff, not the individual. Conversely, the government should take the money gathered from these fines and put it into a general fund. If and when affected individuals develop health problems consistent with previously-documented radiation exposure, the government pays out of that fund.
I think this is the most fair method of enacting justice in such a situation -- the companies (or individuals) involved are penalized shortly after the actual accident occurs, so there is financial incentive to prevent it in the future, and no possibility of them profiting from it later, but at the same time recognizing that we may not know for a very long time who was actually harmed, or to what degree.
From the looks of it, this is more or less what the EPA is trying to do. Of course... such an elegant solution will never survive contact with Congress, but... it's the thought that counts.
No, he probably just looked up the statistics on the number of people that have been killed with their own gun. This is why police officers are trained to always keep their hand on their weapon during a traffic stop or during any other time when they're questioning someone who isn't in custody, and why once their gun has been drawn, they typically move away and don't holster it again until backup arrives and a second officer can approach and subdue. The risk is very real.
self-defense case on microcircuitry that is never checked or maintained
Your computer has tons of microcircuitry. Far more than this technology would require. If your life depended on being able to complete a call to the police using a VoIP product, do you think you could do it as fast as with a regular, land-line phone, assuming you had the software already installed and configured?
The fact that something isn't checked or maintained is not an indictment against its reliability. Maintenance usually happens on a schedule -- days, weeks, years, even decades. You don't just assume your car is going to run out of oil because you haven't checked the oil since the last time you started it -- you know that as long as you check it every 7,000 miles, or whatever the manual says, you do not have to worry about that. Why would a gun be different?
a lens that might be obstructed or smeared,
You know, you're working this technology all crabbed. A police officer could be issued a gun with a RF component in it that operated around 800 MHz or so. At this frequency, the signal clings to a person's skin and clothing. A low-power, short-range transmitter, perhaps embedded in the officer's radio, could complete the circuit. Thus if the officer was not in physical contact with the gun, it wouldn't fire.
Biometric identification isn't the only way of securing a weapon.
and the assumption that if there isn't a perfect picture, you're hiding some kind of guilt?
That's a social and legal problem, not a technical problem. Let's try and keep on topic here; This is a feasibility study, not an exhaustive analysis of "what if" scenarios...
"Mr. Johnson, how do we know you didn't put your blood all over the end of that gun before your wife used it to murder a poor, helpless transient you two had lured to your home for deviant sex? There's no picture. You must be trying to hide something."
Strike my last;... not an exhaustive analysis of conspiracy theories.
Now, as has become increasingly common on Slashdot (I miss the old days), nothing in what I've said is either for or against whatever political cause or position you're advocating. It is simply, and purely, an engineering analysis. What Congress is, or isn't doing, or whatever your political beliefs are, or even mine, are irrelevant here. This about answering IF we can do this with the technology available today, not should we do it.
Electronic locks require voltage to unlock, which is not local to the door, especially in a prison.
The electronic locks run on magical sky energy. There is no voltage in those wires.
Also, this doesnt take into account the cameras, and doors that do not have card readers for egress. These doors require remote unlocking with visual verification.
Right, because there has never been a case of a system being thought of as so foolproof that it didn't need to be monitored. (Ominous look upwards) And what the hell is this "visual verification" you speak of? It sounds impressive, but it could mean "I had to look at the lock," in the same way I have to visually verify that my car's ignition and not just blindly stick the key wherever.
Of course, a bag of potato chips has 3,500 picocuries, so go figure.'"
So slashdotters are safe then, since we only eat cheetoes... which I expect have been so thoroughly processed to remove any and all traces of this "potato" thing you speak of to render it both nutritionally and radiologically inert.
They're not doing this because the judiciary is very conservative; some judges are, some are very liberal. It's just because our court system has centuries of experience with this type of thing and knows that judges are like Caesar's wife.
When I used the word 'conservative', I was describing their reaction, not their political views. Conservative, as in excercising an abundance of caution, not conservative as in prudish.
Okay, first, the Judge who originally told Prenda to shove it has come under fire for pornography downloads. So we have a company who makes a living off getting people's internet download history now trying to weasel out of it, and coincidentally the Judge behind it finds his download history being made public. How coincidentally is left as an excercise for the reader to determine.
So, because the judiciary is very conservative, his appointment is being suspended until the allegations are cleared. Now here's the kicker -- moral "turpitude" isn't a crime, but it is a reason to deny a judge an appointment. Out of an abundance of caution, the judge is also being asked to drop some cases from his roster where the involved parties are obviously looking for appeals and dragging out the legal process and they don't want the judge's "moral turpitude" to come under fire in those select cases as a reason to further either parties' political or legal maneuvering. That's fair.
It's especially fair when you consider Prenda tried exploiting this very thing in their own litigation. Obviously, the appeals court saw right through this and said not just no, but "Hell no." So they've managed to make the judge's life difficult by trafficking in sleeze. But what do you expect from a business that depends on sleeze for its profits?
Oh hell yes. Only a complete idiot would test this in a residential setting first. No. You find a nice big chunk of desert or some other remote place the little bastards are, establish a way to monitor the population, and then release your pheremone bomb. True to scientific form, have an adjacent area with a similar population and environment, under the same type of observation at the same time.
I was suggesting only what the weapons of mass (ant) destruction would be, say nothing of the safety considerations or unintended consequences. To my knowledge, nobody's done this kind of thing yet. It would need to be fully researched and the effects understood before molding it into a commercially-available product!
With a graphing calculator he'd be able to properly plot the trajectory of his prison escape cannon.
Not far from the truth. Many prisons use electronic locks on all the doors, which is in turn connected to a network and controlled through a server in the control center. You can build a card reader/writer from a tape head, and use the microprocessor inside the graphing calculator to read and amplify the pulses. You can also connect the GPIO pins to, say, the controller IC inside the door lock. A few hours of being left unattended, and using just that graphing calculator, engineer not only my own escape, but the entire facility.
Think it's a bit 007? It's already been done. Security researchers have already built mockups of the exact same hardware used in prisons today and discovered that with only basic electronic components, a prisoner inside his cell could access the lock mechanism and free himself.
I've long noticed that ants seem to have a predilection for electricity. They crawl all over electrical conduits, enter homes at electrical outlets, etc.
It's because they can sense electromagnetic fields, which all electronics give off. Of course, the solution for dealing with these new ants is simple, but counterintuitive -- spray everything with this 'alarm' pheremone. If ants navigate by scent trail, and that's how they rebuild their nests, and it's too challenging to remove the scent trails... then you are left with only one option:
Blind the little bastards by coating everything in it. It's my understanding that, without those trails, they'll be helpless to organize to find food, each other, or even the way home. Everything depends on those trails... so if you overload their sense organs and blind them, they'll perish. After they're dead, the pheremones sprayed will slowly dissipate, but importantly... the trails they've laid down will dissipate faster, so the area is then chemically neutral again.
Just memorise all these and mix them up as you see fit:
I tried that, but apparently they're better at it than I am... my proposal got rejected for not supporting the datamatrix foo buffer 2.0 cloud feature-rich zero-management extranet interface. The work order was to get a replacement power cord... the cleaning people let a vaccum cleaner chew on the last one...
While I do not necessarily disagree with your premise you are making sweeping generalities about societies based on an incredibly limited number of actual slave societies within those time periods.
Would you prefer a breakout every 500 years, 100 years, 10 years? Yearly? I can point to every dominant society and show that there was a small "elite" class and a large "working class", at just about every sample point. Yes, there are some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of the time, that's how it plays out.
And the description "worker-slaves" wasn't meant to say they were a bona fide slave labor class, but to point out that they work hard for limited benefit to themselves, but a large benefit to the elite classes. If the resources were not being diverted so that a small number of affluent individuals were not taking the lion's share of the resources, then people would need to work a lot less to achieve similar increases in their own relative standard of living.
This equation doesn't change whether you're in the Bronze Age, or the Internet Age. The technology may be better. Your health may even be better. But you are still reaping only a fraction of the available benefits and resources compared to the amount of work, and when you die and are buried, we can examine your body and based solely on that examination, determine whether you were an elite, or a worker, in your own time.
While slavery can be evil, it is NOT necessarily evil.
The fact that every now and then a slave is freed or achieves wealth is not a validation of slavery, nor is it evidence of the magnanimity of the slave owner. It is evil, through and through. To subjugate another entirely to your own will is never moral, never ethical, it is a fundamental debasement of that person's humanity.
You have not made your point at all; you instead have weakened it by confusing alternate forms of slavery, by misunderstanding the power dynamics of slaves, and finally by glossing over the complex subtly of the past and replacing it with outright ignorance.
Look, if you want to nitpick over history I can get right down in the mud and examine the influence of post-summerian pottery on Chinese adoption of animal husbandry, but it's pointless. I'm trying to make a point quickly, and concisely, not write a fucking thesis about the subject matter. That isn't "glossing over", it's "summarizing", and it's something anyone who's ever wanted to scream "Get to the point!" at another person can immediately understand the value of.
...You should never be the first to break out the tech jargon in a business setting."
"So guys, our, umm, magic glowing rectangles have been, uhh, a bit less magical this week. Apparently an, umm... black box that communicates using, uhh... a special language... er, well, stopped speaking with another black box that's just like it, except not ours. So we, uhh, asked our engineers to look into that, and yeeeeah... they're ah, still doing that now. It's been about four days, and uhh, they're not exactly sure where the problem is, so if we could, you know..."
(Engineer bursts into the room) "It was the router you bleeping idiots! If you'd just told us your network was down we'd have fixed it in TWO MINUTES, but your work order was blabbering on about magical boxes and glowing rectangles and we thought you were all drugged or somesuch and called 911 instead. It was only after someone in the NOC got back from their smoke break they saw the line was dead and dispatched a tech."
(sounds of approaching sirens)
"You deserve this," says the network engineer, storming off.
I still use Google as my primary search engine, Gmail as my e-mail provider, and Google Maps when I want to figure out how to go somewhere I haven't been before. Nothing they've done since then has provided any reason to switch from whatever solution I'm currently using. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.
If there was an alternative to Google that wasn't total crap, I'd be using it. As it is, they still try to connect searches you make to a real identity by buying personal data from the major ISPs to tie your name to an IP address, etc. I've found myself having to only access it from Tor or other proxy networks to keep its privacy-invading "features" out of my web experience. And it seems like every month they roll out a new way of trying to screw with that, from "your computer may be sending automated queries" garbage to providing obviously-bogus search results if embedded javascript detects a SOCKS proxy.
There is no more "do no evil" in Google... it has become the very definition of evil.
I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?
Considering how fast new things come (and go) in this field, anyone with more than five years of industry experience can claim to be "old". Anyway... Can I just say -- you need to update your wardrobe if you have 24 year old socks. My car isn't even that old, and it's falling apart; If I kept socks for that long, they'd be like... sock molecules, held together only by determination and a fierce desire to not be trendy.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm pretty sure "depreciated" is right, since no ceasefire has been called. Think of it as a more tongue-in-cheek equivalent, along the lines of PHP deprecation, which actually means "popular."
Snarky. I like it! You get my stamp of approval. And you're right, that does seem to be how PHP develops. But more seriously, the 'gnu/linux' tag was an attempt to politicalize the kernel by RMS. He was sharply rebuffed by Linus and others. Most distributions are less... puritanical... about what to include. So when I say 'linux' for this driver, I mean all flavors, not just the 'pure' gnu/linux ones, hence the tag 'depreciated'. Also, I tagged it as such because I knew it would piss someone off and get me modded down. :D And it succeeded brilliantly at that, proving that there are at least a few of the old guard still lurking on slashdot.
She was a friend of poverty, not of the poor, and considered suffering to be a state of grace.
She was a rather nasty piece of work, who kept the poor in poverty, and prevented many dying people from getting access to medicine.
Yeah, that sounds like a good description of someone who won the Padma Shri, Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, Bharat Ratna, Ramon Magsaysay Award, the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize, Pacem in Terris Award, Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia, Order of Merit, Honorary US citizenship, Albanian Golden Honour of the Nation, Balzan Prize, Albert Schweitzer International Prize, Nobel Peace Prize...
A real nasty piece of work she is, yup. It's amazing it's gone on for so long without anybody notice. Thank goodness for Youtube publishing a inflammatory "documentary" by a man whose life work was tearing apart anyone who claimed to be religious, said that 9/11 was "exhilarating" for him, and published a book titled "God Is Not Great", if that doesn't give enough of an indication of this man's, achem, axe to grind. Who else has he grilled? Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Lady Diana, Ayn Rand, Pope Benedict XVI...
Well, I'm sure this one dude with an axe to grind was better qualified to assess this person's character than over two dozen governments and private interests who gave her awards. Oh, I forgot -- She made #1 on Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People. 18 times. So make that most of the world that she's bamboozled.
Yes, if you dig down hard enough you'll find something that even the most saintly person has done that could seem controversial. Just ask the Republicans how their whole "Bengazi" crusade is going, if you want a current-events example. With enough scrutiny, everyone can be demonized. And if you don't believe me on that, feel free to sit in an interrogation room with a trained interrogator with 30 years experience. See if you can go a few hours without admitting something that'll crucify your sorry ass. To date, nobody has beaten the Police Interrogation Reality Challenge!(tm)
I tend to believe that all those awards were for good things done by a largely good person. If she slipped a couple times, it only proves she's human... not a "nasty piece of work".
Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print?
Bread.
Nice nickname you got there. Wonder where the inspiration came from. Achem, now, on to the commentary!
Well, that is great news, but if Intel played a hand in its development, then that would only make sense if Intel did NOT play a hand in helping Apple develop the Apple version of the OpenGL driver.
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Since Intel is the creator of the architecture for the video hardware in question, it would be only sensible for Intel assisted development to be better than development that occured without Intel's help.
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Either way, go go Gnu/Linux (and open source!) !!!
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You have to have both or it's worse than useless, because it will get good people killed.
Good people are being killed today, with the regular guns, that the bad guys are taking away from them and then shooting them with it.
Here's the problem with your argument: You're demanding absolute reliability, which is an impossible standard even for the guns that exist today. If it misfires, jams, or any one of a handful of other failure conditions, it's a liability. Yet these risks have been accepted because the benefits outweigh the risks.
And that's where you went horribly wrong in your line of thinking: You didn't stop and consider that the goal wasn't perfection, and impossible goal even with futuristic technology from the year 2999. What you need to consider is whether the change reduces risk and/or improves the utility of the device.
Let's say out of 1000 times an officer draws his or her weapon, they have it taken from them by force 20 times and used against them. Now let's say we have a device that's 99.99% effective in eliminating that risk, but can fail and render the gun inoperative 1 out of every 1000 times the officer tries to use the weapon. Do we use the device?
Of course we do. We've reduced the risk from 2% to 0.1%. I understand the emotional need behind you wanting it to be as reliable as possible and the idea of a device that could prevent you from using it at a critical moment is fear-inducing, but statistically, it's far more likely to save a life than cost one.
These wheels aren't like your normal car wheels. The very thin atmosphere means that the soil is more like lunar soil than Earth soil. Atmospheric erosion tends to smooth out sand particulate so it has a rounder shape -- it is less sharp. Lunar soil is incredibly corrosive. Think of all the problems our troops had operating in Iraq with their equipment, now multiply that by a hundred. It's like walking on microscopic needles. Martian soil isn't quite as bad, thanks to having had an atmosphere at one point, and retains a minimal one now, but it's still inhospitable.
The rover was designed with multiple wheel-sets to operate independently, and the wheels themselves designed to wear somewhat more gracefully in the face of these obstacles. But yes, they're going to look ugly fast.
Also, in the EU, you can have nine doctors diagnose you as free of autism, but a tenth says you have autism, that final diagnosis sticks. A lot of parents take advantage of this in North America as
... As apparently North America is part of the European Union? :/
It's fairly common for parents of "hyper active" kids to intentionally seek out an ASD diagnosis just for the funding. It's pretty shameful, actually.
It's quite common as well for doctors to tell patients to shove it. I have a diagnosis of both ADHD and Asperger's (btw, that's not what they're calling it now) and getting medication is exceptionally difficult, especially for anxiety. You don't mention this, but anxiety has such a high comorbidity with ASD that it's practically unheard of to find someone without it. The reason for this is those drug-seeking parents and young adults who want mind-enhancing drugs or their precious little snowflake to stop tearing the house apart and just veg out in front of the television. Parenting, lulz -- Disney raises our kids today.
So it's not that I disagree with your assessment, but a clinical diagnosis, confirmed with neurological testing, is highly effective at screening out those segments of the population. And while it is a problem, it is still uncommon -- most people who present with ADHD or ASD symptoms have a bona-fide medical condition. Only a small fraction of patients are trying to abuse the system. Unfortunately, just as with pain medication, the political fallout and disinformation spread by well-meaning but lacking any medical certification people such as yourself only contribute to the problem of real patients, with real problems, getting help.
On a different note; I don't think this German IT firm is seeking autistic workers because they're better. They're seeking them because they're vulnerable adults without the capacity to protect themselves from exploitative labor practices. And programming, contract work -- much of our field is exploitative in nature and one must be assertive, sometimes even aggressive, in pushing back. I've had to teach my aspie friends how to assert themselves on this sort of thing, because they genuinely can't see it. They are generally very trusting people; They don't see ulterior motives. It's part of the condition -- they're so intellectual they take everything at face value or literally.
In this field... it's a recipe for disaster. Contrary to what this firm and many of the general public believe: IT is not a cash cow, nor is it glamorous work. Working with computers is emotionally draining, and long hours can be physically demanding. That attention to detail that's so sought after may be great for programming, but it's absolutely horrid when you have a team of people all like that; There's a reason we all have different skillsets and personalities -- too much of any one thing on a team leaves critical weaknesses in thinking that can lead to disaster.
Electric cars will lead to nipples and other unamerican things.
... Like paying back your government loans instead of yelling "Too big to fail! ahahahaaha..." and running to some tropical island to take daily wealth showers and drink out of gold-lined cups. :/ They should be commended... it's a decidedly unamerican approach to business. Fiscal responsibility? It's like an F-word in Congress.
yeah, fuck people after all... it cost muney and stuff...
Did you bother reading the rest of my post where I go into how we can balance public and private interests here without creating a cluster-f*ck of high cost litigation that ultimately winds up costing all of us? Or did you just knee-jerk your foot into your own mouth?
If you're a spy or diplomat or whatever, don't use Gmail. At the very least it is subject to the US government's laws. Get yourself a secured server somewhere else.
Just them? You'll note it also said suspected spies and terrorists. With "broader definitions" of terrorism coming out every day, and the criteria for being included on a watchlist, paired with these hotlines opening up for anonymous "tips"... pretty much anyone these days can be a suspected spy or terrorist. And being a citizen of the US is very little barrier against invasions of your privacy; They've even talked about revoking citizenship for people simply to avoid any legal hassles.
It might be more accurate to say "If you are writing anything you don't want made public, given to law enforcement, or any of the 170+ governments of the world, don't use Gmail." At least then we'd cover all the bases. :/
You forgot to consider the keyboard buildup of cheetoes which is much more deadly...
Wanna see an optical illusion? Hold your keyboard over your head, look up at it, and then shake it back and forth vigorously. (trollface)
"We're changing the standards so you can't sue us immediately after the disaster. But if you get cancer 30 years down the line, we and our money will be long gone and no longer giving a darn in Pattaya Beach, Thailand."
Okay, I know you're trying to be funny, but let's be serious for a moment: Why shouldn't the EPA try to limit lawsuits? They cost you and me, the taxpayer, a lot of money. It slows down the entire judicial process, and increases the cost of excercising your rights in the judiciary. There's filing fees now, lawyers fees, and every motion and such you file also costs money. This is fine for corporations who can just pass the buck on to their customers, but for Joe Average, commencing or defending against a legal action can easily bankrupt him. Is that fair? Shouldn't he be able to sue people who have legitimately wronged him as well -- or should that be something reserved only for the wealthy? Conversely, if he is on the receiving end... should he be bankrupted defending against an action that ultimately failed? Any contact with the judicial process tends to be highly corrosive to the average person. It is often ruinous, irrespective of the merits of their position.
Given that, why shouldn't the government try to limit personal injury cases to those where the only evidence of harm won't surface for thirty years? Do you want a legal system that punishes people based on probability, or actuality? If so, thought crime suddenly becomes a lot more justifiable, as well as imprisoning people based on genetic markers, etc.
But I do acknowledge that statistically, we know that in a given group of say, 100 people, if exposed to X intensity of radiation over Y amount of time, Z of them will develop health problems. We can't say with any confidence which of them will develop health problems, but we can say with confidence how probable it is that at least Z of them will. In a case like this where you know harm has happened but the costs won't be known for a long time, a fine seems like a better way to deal with this than lawsuits, provided the fine is proportional to the actual harm caused, plus whatever punitive damages are justified (was it really an accident, or negligence?).
In this case, the government should be the plaintiff, not the individual. Conversely, the government should take the money gathered from these fines and put it into a general fund. If and when affected individuals develop health problems consistent with previously-documented radiation exposure, the government pays out of that fund.
I think this is the most fair method of enacting justice in such a situation -- the companies (or individuals) involved are penalized shortly after the actual accident occurs, so there is financial incentive to prevent it in the future, and no possibility of them profiting from it later, but at the same time recognizing that we may not know for a very long time who was actually harmed, or to what degree.
From the looks of it, this is more or less what the EPA is trying to do. Of course... such an elegant solution will never survive contact with Congress, but... it's the thought that counts.
You willing to bet your liberty in a (snip)
No, he probably just looked up the statistics on the number of people that have been killed with their own gun. This is why police officers are trained to always keep their hand on their weapon during a traffic stop or during any other time when they're questioning someone who isn't in custody, and why once their gun has been drawn, they typically move away and don't holster it again until backup arrives and a second officer can approach and subdue. The risk is very real.
self-defense case on microcircuitry that is never checked or maintained
Your computer has tons of microcircuitry. Far more than this technology would require. If your life depended on being able to complete a call to the police using a VoIP product, do you think you could do it as fast as with a regular, land-line phone, assuming you had the software already installed and configured?
The fact that something isn't checked or maintained is not an indictment against its reliability. Maintenance usually happens on a schedule -- days, weeks, years, even decades. You don't just assume your car is going to run out of oil because you haven't checked the oil since the last time you started it -- you know that as long as you check it every 7,000 miles, or whatever the manual says, you do not have to worry about that. Why would a gun be different?
a lens that might be obstructed or smeared,
You know, you're working this technology all crabbed. A police officer could be issued a gun with a RF component in it that operated around 800 MHz or so. At this frequency, the signal clings to a person's skin and clothing. A low-power, short-range transmitter, perhaps embedded in the officer's radio, could complete the circuit. Thus if the officer was not in physical contact with the gun, it wouldn't fire.
Biometric identification isn't the only way of securing a weapon.
and the assumption that if there isn't a perfect picture, you're hiding some kind of guilt?
That's a social and legal problem, not a technical problem. Let's try and keep on topic here; This is a feasibility study, not an exhaustive analysis of "what if" scenarios...
"Mr. Johnson, how do we know you didn't put your blood all over the end of that gun before your wife used it to murder a poor, helpless transient you two had lured to your home for deviant sex? There's no picture. You must be trying to hide something."
Strike my last; ... not an exhaustive analysis of conspiracy theories.
Now, as has become increasingly common on Slashdot (I miss the old days), nothing in what I've said is either for or against whatever political cause or position you're advocating. It is simply, and purely, an engineering analysis. What Congress is, or isn't doing, or whatever your political beliefs are, or even mine, are irrelevant here. This about answering IF we can do this with the technology available today, not should we do it.
You might sound convincing, but what you are describing is BS.
Hackers take aim at prison locks and other real-world targets
Vulnerability allows hackers to open prison doors, hiding activity from central command
Hacking Prisons - John Strauchs, Tiffany Rad, & Teague Newman
Researchers Say Vulnerabilities Could Let Hackers Spring Prisoners From Cells
Clearly, they're all full of shit too.
Electronic locks require voltage to unlock, which is not local to the door, especially in a prison.
The electronic locks run on magical sky energy. There is no voltage in those wires.
Also, this doesnt take into account the cameras, and doors that do not have card readers for egress. These doors require remote unlocking with visual verification.
Right, because there has never been a case of a system being thought of as so foolproof that it didn't need to be monitored. (Ominous look upwards) And what the hell is this "visual verification" you speak of? It sounds impressive, but it could mean "I had to look at the lock," in the same way I have to visually verify that my car's ignition and not just blindly stick the key wherever.
Of course, a bag of potato chips has 3,500 picocuries, so go figure.'"
So slashdotters are safe then, since we only eat cheetoes... which I expect have been so thoroughly processed to remove any and all traces of this "potato" thing you speak of to render it both nutritionally and radiologically inert.
They're not doing this because the judiciary is very conservative; some judges are, some are very liberal. It's just because our court system has centuries of experience with this type of thing and knows that judges are like Caesar's wife.
When I used the word 'conservative', I was describing their reaction, not their political views. Conservative, as in excercising an abundance of caution, not conservative as in prudish.
Okay, first, the Judge who originally told Prenda to shove it has come under fire for pornography downloads. So we have a company who makes a living off getting people's internet download history now trying to weasel out of it, and coincidentally the Judge behind it finds his download history being made public. How coincidentally is left as an excercise for the reader to determine.
So, because the judiciary is very conservative, his appointment is being suspended until the allegations are cleared. Now here's the kicker -- moral "turpitude" isn't a crime, but it is a reason to deny a judge an appointment. Out of an abundance of caution, the judge is also being asked to drop some cases from his roster where the involved parties are obviously looking for appeals and dragging out the legal process and they don't want the judge's "moral turpitude" to come under fire in those select cases as a reason to further either parties' political or legal maneuvering. That's fair.
It's especially fair when you consider Prenda tried exploiting this very thing in their own litigation. Obviously, the appeals court saw right through this and said not just no, but "Hell no." So they've managed to make the judge's life difficult by trafficking in sleeze. But what do you expect from a business that depends on sleeze for its profits?
Oh hell yes. Only a complete idiot would test this in a residential setting first. No. You find a nice big chunk of desert or some other remote place the little bastards are, establish a way to monitor the population, and then release your pheremone bomb. True to scientific form, have an adjacent area with a similar population and environment, under the same type of observation at the same time.
I was suggesting only what the weapons of mass (ant) destruction would be, say nothing of the safety considerations or unintended consequences. To my knowledge, nobody's done this kind of thing yet. It would need to be fully researched and the effects understood before molding it into a commercially-available product!
With a graphing calculator he'd be able to properly plot the trajectory of his prison escape cannon.
Not far from the truth. Many prisons use electronic locks on all the doors, which is in turn connected to a network and controlled through a server in the control center. You can build a card reader/writer from a tape head, and use the microprocessor inside the graphing calculator to read and amplify the pulses. You can also connect the GPIO pins to, say, the controller IC inside the door lock. A few hours of being left unattended, and using just that graphing calculator, engineer not only my own escape, but the entire facility.
Think it's a bit 007? It's already been done. Security researchers have already built mockups of the exact same hardware used in prisons today and discovered that with only basic electronic components, a prisoner inside his cell could access the lock mechanism and free himself.
I've long noticed that ants seem to have a predilection for electricity. They crawl all over electrical conduits, enter homes at electrical outlets, etc.
It's because they can sense electromagnetic fields, which all electronics give off. Of course, the solution for dealing with these new ants is simple, but counterintuitive -- spray everything with this 'alarm' pheremone. If ants navigate by scent trail, and that's how they rebuild their nests, and it's too challenging to remove the scent trails... then you are left with only one option:
Blind the little bastards by coating everything in it. It's my understanding that, without those trails, they'll be helpless to organize to find food, each other, or even the way home. Everything depends on those trails... so if you overload their sense organs and blind them, they'll perish. After they're dead, the pheremones sprayed will slowly dissipate, but importantly... the trails they've laid down will dissipate faster, so the area is then chemically neutral again.
It is, quite literally, chemical warfare. (-_-)
Just memorise all these and mix them up as you see fit:
I tried that, but apparently they're better at it than I am... my proposal got rejected for not supporting the datamatrix foo buffer 2.0 cloud feature-rich zero-management extranet interface. The work order was to get a replacement power cord... the cleaning people let a vaccum cleaner chew on the last one...
While I do not necessarily disagree with your premise you are making sweeping generalities about societies based on an incredibly limited number of actual slave societies within those time periods.
Would you prefer a breakout every 500 years, 100 years, 10 years? Yearly? I can point to every dominant society and show that there was a small "elite" class and a large "working class", at just about every sample point. Yes, there are some exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of the time, that's how it plays out.
And the description "worker-slaves" wasn't meant to say they were a bona fide slave labor class, but to point out that they work hard for limited benefit to themselves, but a large benefit to the elite classes. If the resources were not being diverted so that a small number of affluent individuals were not taking the lion's share of the resources, then people would need to work a lot less to achieve similar increases in their own relative standard of living.
This equation doesn't change whether you're in the Bronze Age, or the Internet Age. The technology may be better. Your health may even be better. But you are still reaping only a fraction of the available benefits and resources compared to the amount of work, and when you die and are buried, we can examine your body and based solely on that examination, determine whether you were an elite, or a worker, in your own time.
While slavery can be evil, it is NOT necessarily evil.
The fact that every now and then a slave is freed or achieves wealth is not a validation of slavery, nor is it evidence of the magnanimity of the slave owner. It is evil, through and through. To subjugate another entirely to your own will is never moral, never ethical, it is a fundamental debasement of that person's humanity.
You have not made your point at all; you instead have weakened it by confusing alternate forms of slavery, by misunderstanding the power dynamics of slaves, and finally by glossing over the complex subtly of the past and replacing it with outright ignorance.
Look, if you want to nitpick over history I can get right down in the mud and examine the influence of post-summerian pottery on Chinese adoption of animal husbandry, but it's pointless. I'm trying to make a point quickly, and concisely, not write a fucking thesis about the subject matter. That isn't "glossing over", it's "summarizing", and it's something anyone who's ever wanted to scream "Get to the point!" at another person can immediately understand the value of.
...You should never be the first to break out the tech jargon in a business setting."
"So guys, our, umm, magic glowing rectangles have been, uhh, a bit less magical this week. Apparently an, umm... black box that communicates using, uhh... a special language... er, well, stopped speaking with another black box that's just like it, except not ours. So we, uhh, asked our engineers to look into that, and yeeeeah... they're ah, still doing that now. It's been about four days, and uhh, they're not exactly sure where the problem is, so if we could, you know..."
(Engineer bursts into the room) "It was the router you bleeping idiots! If you'd just told us your network was down we'd have fixed it in TWO MINUTES, but your work order was blabbering on about magical boxes and glowing rectangles and we thought you were all drugged or somesuch and called 911 instead. It was only after someone in the NOC got back from their smoke break they saw the line was dead and dispatched a tech."
(sounds of approaching sirens)
"You deserve this," says the network engineer, storming off.
I still use Google as my primary search engine, Gmail as my e-mail provider, and Google Maps when I want to figure out how to go somewhere I haven't been before. Nothing they've done since then has provided any reason to switch from whatever solution I'm currently using. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.
If there was an alternative to Google that wasn't total crap, I'd be using it. As it is, they still try to connect searches you make to a real identity by buying personal data from the major ISPs to tie your name to an IP address, etc. I've found myself having to only access it from Tor or other proxy networks to keep its privacy-invading "features" out of my web experience. And it seems like every month they roll out a new way of trying to screw with that, from "your computer may be sending automated queries" garbage to providing obviously-bogus search results if embedded javascript detects a SOCKS proxy.
There is no more "do no evil" in Google... it has become the very definition of evil.
I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?
Considering how fast new things come (and go) in this field, anyone with more than five years of industry experience can claim to be "old". Anyway... Can I just say -- you need to update your wardrobe if you have 24 year old socks. My car isn't even that old, and it's falling apart; If I kept socks for that long, they'd be like... sock molecules, held together only by determination and a fierce desire to not be trendy.