For all of its failings, in the United States a hospital is required to do anything within their power short of "experimental procedures" to stabilize a person, regardless of their ability to pay, legal status, race, gender, or status as a wanted criminal. This doesn't help with things like cancer or such, as treatments for the cause are all experimental, and the treatments for the symptoms are superficial.
But if you are say, in a car crash and suffer nerve damage, the ER will attempt to save your nerves before they check your insurance. Basically, in the United States, you cannot be denied treatment for conditions for which we understand the root cause because of your ability to pay. And this fact has actually caused ERs in some parts of the country to shut down occasionally, as illegal aliens sometimes bring come in to the ER for things like an ear infection because they cannot be denied treatment, and without any sort of paper trail they also cannot be billed.
That's true for ER treatment, but it's not true for anything other than things which require immediate attention. If you want to get treated for Alzheimers with drugs that will slow down the progress of the disease and you don't have insurance, you're screwed. If you have cancer and you're having symptoms for which you need to be stabilized, they'll help you in the ER. You won't get chemotherapy to actually give you a chance to be CURED, unless you can pay for it though.
I sit on the isle and try to be subtle about checking.
I'm sorry that my job requires me to be available 24/7.
I guess that means no movies for me because some hypersensitive person might be offended.
I cannot believe this is even ambiguous to some people. If your job requires you to be on call, YES THAT MEANS YOU CAN'T GO TO A MOVIE THEATER! Holy shit, how could you possibly think otherwise?
You want to watch a movie while on call? Get a good home theater system, some comfortable chairs, and watch it at home. You think it's not reasonable to give up going to a theater? Don't take a job that requires you to be on call, or at least negotiate for somebody else to cover for you during the time you will be unavailable to do work. You cannot have both. This also applies to plays, concerts, and just about anywhere else where you are the member of an audience.
No. MAKING a bomb should be illegal. Information, no matter what it is, should never be illegal.
I wouldn't even go so far as to say that making a bomb should be illegal. Using said bomb to hurt others, put others in dangers, or destroy any property that is not yours, sure. Blowing stuff up in a safety conscious manner, mythbusters style? No.
personally I remember a really good sunset, or an awesome view of nature far more than I remember a friggin grocery store. heck there are two that I go into regularly and one I rarely go into and the one I rarely visit I can't find anything in it.
human sized spaces aren't more memorable. what it contains and that means to the viewer is what is rememberable.
Part of it is due to a literal interpretation of the word "memorable". There's a difference between easy to remember, which is what they've measured, and deemed worthy of committing to memory, which is more a more arbitrary consideration. If you see images of a supermarket isle, it might be memorable in that you'll be able to tell you've already seen that picture, but it's not memorable in the sense that most people use the word. It's not that they deem the picture special, it's just that our brains are able to recognize it without effort...you need to remember unimportant things like that in order to navigate places you've been to before, even if these places are completely uninteresting.
My field of work has nothing to do with this, so I may be off in this belief, but I would expect humans who live their lives in less urban settings to have an easier time remembering pictures of natural landscapes. We've trained ourselves to navigate supermarkets, but for most of us, a bunch of trees are just a bunch of trees. Those who actually can navigate the woods without getting lost probably have trained their brain to pay more attention to the differences, and thus should be able to remember if they've seen a picture of a particular natural landscape vs another far more easily.
Actually, you're retarded. For a lot of people, its attitudes like this that keep them away from geek culture. Not just Linux, but geek culture in general.
Not that I'm defending rude behavior, but I don't get your argument. I'm not a recruiter for geek culture, and I'm not sure why anyone else would want to be. It is what it is, and people either feel like they belong or they don't. I have no interest in being a part of biker culture, and that's not a problem with the members, it's simply a lack of interest in the same things that bring them together.
I only mention it because I constantly see comments like yours to justify other things that don't make sense. Like, "multiple window managers are the reason people don't switch to linux." Well, ok, then they can use something else. It's not supposed to be a competition to see who gets the most people belonging to the group, it's about finding what works best for me. If that's windows for most people, and linux with kde for me, so be it.
The problem is that nuclear has serious longterm issues like this. Sure there are less immediate deaths, but the longer term deaths related to nuclear are much higher. This is the fault of humanity that can't look beyond the next Apple announcement.
So tell me how do you plan on making all of the land usable again? Oh wait I forgot you are not near any of these disasters and as such could not shive a ghit. Until it happens in your backyard!
Compared to the alternatives, coal or even hydro, that's still pretty good. Especially when you consider Chernobyl was a freak accident that absolutely can never happen again because nobody uses graphite control rods anymore. There was an actual meltdown at Fukushima, care to tell me just how much farmland was lost there? You'd be surprised to find out that the impact is minimal, and that's pretty much as bad as it can get with a nuclear reactor these days. More modern designs with passive cooling can't even get THAT bad.
Probably be a waste of your time, I had a math professor or two try to and you see how much good it did;-)
Well, in that case I definitely want to give it a try. Not with the intention of berating you or anything, just because it's an often misunderstood thing, and it's not really that complicated.
If you're going to flip two fair coins, one after the other, the chances of you getting two heads is 25% (chance of getting heads on first flip (50%) * chances of getting heads on the second flip (50%) = 25%). After you flip the first coin, if you got heads, the chances of getting two heads in a row is now (chance of getting heads on first flip (100%) * chances of getting heads on the second flip (50%)). Basically, flipping a coin doesn't affect your chances for any other flips, they are all independent events, and it's always 50% chance heads, 50% chance tails.
In your example, the chances of being in two commercial aircraft crashes is lower than the chance of being in one aircraft craft if you've never been in an aircraft accident before, but only because you've gotta "win" twice. Being in an accident doesn't make you any safer, so you're just as likely of being in an aircraft accident the second time as you were in the first (which is pretty damn unlikely, so I understand your original point).
You think that patting down a random person who doesn't even come close to fitting the profile of a modern terrorists, while completely ignoring the guy behind her who does is a smart way to approach screening, do you?
Yes.
Because us morons think that taking a more focused approach might be in order.
Yep. And that frustrates the hell out of me.
Profiling works to catch serial killers, so why not use it to screen for terrorists too?
Because in the case of catching serial killers, you're trying to catch a specific someone and he can't change who he is. You're profiling a specific person based on their already executed actions and how well they fit with established data. If you stop screening people who don't fit your profile for a terrorist, you're giving the terrorists a hole in your security that they can exploit in future actions. You're telling them to recruit some caucasians, they're the ideal agents to attack an airliner. It's not like that hasn't happened before, there was one white american fighting with the Taliban when we started the Afghanistan war. Furthermore, it's not like middle-easteners are the only terrorists...everyone freaks the hell out when they crashed planes into buildings, but when Andrew Stack crashed into an IRS building because he got screwed by taxes everyone starts talking about how he might have a point and the tax code is set up against developer entrepeneurs. When Timothy McVeigh bombs a building, the police are enough to handle it, no need to pass the likes of PATRIOT act legislation.
If you're not looking for a specific person, random is much better than looking for behavior or physical features, because if you're ignoring certain types of people, those are the ones that will be recruited next.
That's a very realistic option, thanks. "Well, honey, the reason we need to quit our jobs, sell our house and relocate is that, even though we selected this place to live because AT&T's ultra-fast u-verse was available here in the first place, they've now changed the contract on us and started to cap bandwidth usage."
We’re trying to increase openness, but it’s not no-holds-barred. We do have a content policy in our market. We don’t go after trucking companies for carrying faulty goods, you go after the manufacturer. There’s a balance. Not buying it, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse fired back: You do go after the trucking company if they know what they’re carrying. Google’s in a better position to know what’s going on than a seventeen year old that wants to try a cool app. I don’t think that’s a comfortable analogy for you to rely on.
But Google does not know what they're carrying, because they're not in the business of reviewing apps that can or cannot be installed on the computer before they allow it in the marketplace, like Apple got in the business of. If somebody informs them that an app is violating their terms, they remove it from the store and kill-switch it, but they have no way of knowing ahead of time, and somebody could still install it from unofficial sources.
This kind of response from Microsoft or Apple would never be tolerated on slashdot.
Actually, it's completely consistent with the overall geek stance. We don't want the phone manufacturers to tell us what we can or can't install on our phones (thus all the complaints about the Apple-controlled app store), we want general purpose computing devices that happen to be phones. As with viruses in your PC, it's the general stance of the population here that you're responsible for what you install. If you do trust an application from a particular company, and they violate your trust, your beef is with that company, not the manufacturer of your phone (or phone's OS).
Don't you think it is a bit early to be worried about this?
Yes, it is. But why wait, or even ask Apple, when/. can run an anti-Apple piece.
What is your reasoning for believing it's too early to complain? They have distributed LGPL software without the source code for their changes. That means they are currently in violation of the license, and nothing else gives them the right to distribute the software. They're currently committing copyright infringement.
If they want to delay one of the two steps, they can release the source code first, and delay releasing the binary. They can't really do it the other way around.
You do know that there is an amazingly simple way to separate the salt from the water, right? It is called evaporation.
The concepts of desalination are certainly quite simple, its the economics that are complicated.
He means natural evaporation. Oceans are under the Sun all the time. You can't "use up" fresh water by intercepting water that's about to fall on the ocean and making it into salt water. That is happening all the time anyway, those rivers are constantly dumping fresh water into the ocean. Luckily, water evaporates off the oceans and comes back down as fresh water as rain, filling up those rivers and continuing the cycle.
The NSA can hire the best. It's entirely possible that they (or some other comparable agency) hired somebody to inject a weakness into it's algorithms that would only be noticed in a code audit by somebody extremely skilled in the art. I'm not saying there's a backdoor such as "if you == NSA, decrypt everything!" but there may be something that greatly restricts the key combination that must be tested to crack it or something.
Yeah, I agree that's a reasonable concern. That said, TrueCrypt is not only open-source, but also famous enough that heavyweights tend to use it for security research. It's no guarantee, but I think enough knowledgeable people look at it that I'd think it's most likely free of backdoors and known weaknesses.
I do agree that I'd trust open source code more than closed source code in this regard, but it's certainly possible for open source code to have backdoors or weaknesses -- intentional or accidental -- and for nobody to notice it for a long time.
Yeah, you're right, and I had no intention whatsoever of making my post sound like, "open source = safe!!!" I think it's unlikely to contain purposeful weaknesses, but yes, it's not impossible.
Either way, it's irrelevant. Even if bin laden's hard drives were fully encrypted with something with no known weaknesses and no backdoors, I don't doubt that that they still would be able to crack it fairly quickly. The world is full of data encrypted with 256-bit AES protected by a dictionary password. The encryption scheme is rarely the weakest link in the chain.
He further assumes that Truecrypt does not provide a backdoor to NSA for this in the first place.
Truecrypt is open source. No, I haven't looked at it myself, but it only takes one person to rat such a thing out. It's not probable that nobody has seen it yet, save the ones in on the conspiracy. Possible yes, but highly unlikely.
What is your point? The June launch is a shuttle too, the shuttle Atlantis. There is more than one space shuttle you know.
His point was that the "shuttle" in question was already identified as the Endeavor. They didn't say shuttles' final flight, they said shuttle's.
That said, they did screw up the sentence, so I see why you were confused. It should read, "Greg Chamitoff, a computer programmer who wrote software for NASA's Endeavour spacecraft, will be blasting off on the shuttle's final 15-day flight..."
Get a grip. Do you realize how many pets are killed in raids? Lucky he didn't have one (or more). Had he pulled a gun on the intruders he would likely be dead or facing jail time had he shot one of the swat team. There are far, far too many raids which have gone wrong - whether the individuals involved were innocent, guilty or just plain not the right house. And you cavilierly dismiss the consequences - in fact you just plain ignore them.
From my point of view, you're dismissing the consequences of accepting the status quo. Do your part to make this type of unnecessary raid impossible: make it such that an IP address is obviously not enough evidence to sign a warrant that allows a swat team to go barging into someone's home. While you're at it, voice your disapproval that the police would show up with guns to arrest a downloader. Even if it had been the right guy, what was he going to do, attack the police with child pornography?
Except it wouldn't be $1000 a year or 20 cents a gallon. It would be closer to $10K a year and $2 per gallon. It seems petty and small when you underestimate the impact.
Please. South Carolina is subsidizing college education for pretty much every resident with a 3.0 GPA or above (which is actually a pretty low GPA when you think about it). Additional income or property taxes to do that? Zero. The money comes from the state lottery. Do you think this is unfair and unjust?
The question I ask is - does free college actually have any impact on the total education level of society? Are there that many people who aren't going to college strictly because of cost - even with scholarships, government subsidized student loans, etc.
Maybe not, but I have another question for you. What's the impact on society when you start your life with a huge debt incurred from student loans?
Apparently, EFF Doesn't read the news, or Slashdot for that matter. Regardless if the guy was eventually exonerated, getting thrown to the ground at gun point and called a pedophile isn't exactly how I'd like to be rewarded for opening my wireless. Try again EFF. Open wireless is for monitored public initiatives, not for the average home user who has way more to lose (like their reputation and livelihood).
Actually, I'm pretty sure they do, and this movement is in response to those news.
As you can see they are correct in asserting that there are no legal liabilities. He was not only exonerated, but received an official apology. As in, it should never have happened in the first place. Now, you can either do nothing and let this kind of thing continue, or you can make sharing your wifi more common, making it impossible for warrants to be issued on that basis alone.
You can take the coward route, I'd rather do my part to make the world better, even if it involves some risks.
Have you ever left you middle-class suburban world to see what it's like elsewhere?
Yes, ASSHOLE. I grew up in a family where my parents didn't have college degrees, and when my dad lost his job, I spent time sleeping IN THE FUCKING STREETS after friends they thought they had turned out not to be there when times got tough. I spent a week on sugar water when I was 7 years old, and that wasn't the worst part, the worst part was seeing my mother cry every time she handed it to me. I sure as hell didn't have a computer THEN.
The fact that you have access to a computer to tell me how privileged I am and how downtrodden you are is ample proof that you, whether you believe it or not, live a life of luxury compared to most people in the rest of the world.
I didn't say I was downtrodden. I live a privileged life now, thanks to the fact that my parents sacrificed much to make sure I got an education, and thanks to the fact I got an education in a marketable field. They didn't have this luxury and I take your implication that they just didn't work hard enough as offensive as all hell. I have opportunities that they never had, same as you, and that's what gives us power. If I lose my job today, I can live on a year on my savings, and that means I don't need to take the first job that is offered, I can hold out for the good one.
So if you want to wallow in self pity because you aren't one of the "powerful" people, knock yourself out.
What I want to do is not be a fucking moron who thinks everything he's managed to acquire, he did it because he's, oh so smart and hard working. I have what I have now because I worked hard, because I was lucky, and because my family made sacrifices along the way. Hard work alone doesn't cut anywhere, it just increases your chances of success.
But don't expect me to have pity for you because you have adopted that mindset, instead of looking for ways to improve your situation.
I don't expect anything from people like you, you actually went through a rough period and still didn't learn anything from it. You admit that you spent a year on public assistance and you claim nobody is a victim? Would you have gotten out of that situation if you hadn't been helped, through the tax money of others, on programs enabled because people pitied others in your situation? Why didn't you just "look for ways to improve your situation" and manage to get through it on your own hard work? Under just what circumstances do you pity somebody enough to do something to help them?
First, since most ideas develop simultaneously and independently in different places, no single disclosure is worth very much.
And if ideas were patentable, you'd have a point. The research and development required to develop an idea costs a lot of money, and disclosure means that everyone else can skip that step. Of course, bullshit patents consists of obvious steps, but that's a problem with the patent office's having too lax a definition of non-obvious, not a problem with patents themselves.
Second, technological secret are hard to keep for long in any case.
Tell that to Peter Chamberlen who kept his invention of obstetric forceps secret within the family in order to maintain an advantage over other obstetricians. Lots of people died as a result of the technology staying hidden for 100 years.
Third, when inventors think they can keep their techniques secret, they will not claim patents at all since competitors will be unable to duplicate the technique.
And that's within their right. Of course, by doing that they risk being wrong. If somebody else manages to reverse-engineer (legally) their non-patented techniques, they are afforded no protection.
Lastly, the patent system creates a disincentive for inventors to publish their ideas early on, since premature publication can ruin the chances of getting patents. So, rather than promote disclosure, the patent system actually hurts it.
First of all, you can apply for a patent and start publishing before you know if the application was approved or not. That's what "patent pending" means. Second, if no patent system was available and you were willing to publish the work anyway, then that would imply that you don't care to have any protection of the work, in which case you can do the same today and not apply for the patent. The patent system provides no lack of incentive to that group.
Patents are a good thing. Patents as they exist today are poorly implemented: Patents on algorithms shouldn't exist. Patents on software shouldn't exist (that's called copyright). We should go back to a requirement on having a working implementation of the patent before it can be granted, and that should be verified by patent examiners. Everything patent application should be assumed to be obvious, and the burden of proof that the work is not obvious should fall ont he applicant. Patent examiners should get bonuses for finding prior art and rejecting invalid patent applications. Patent applicants should be fined for not doing a proper search for prior art before applying for the patent (fine used to pay the bonus to the patent examiner). Patent terms of 10 years with no renewals would be more than good enough (if by the time the work is available for others to use, it has been completely obsoleted, then disclosure is irrelevant).
Similarly, telling people to "work for someone else" doesn't solve the problem either - they *all* do this, you have no bargaining power at all, they have all the money.
Ummm...start your own business, then? My wife has done it twice in the last decade. It's a lot of work, and there are no guarantees that you will break even, much less earn the salary you earn as a cubicle drone in the tech sector, but if you don't like the terms of employment for anyone that's hiring, it IS an option.
Congratulations on your wonderful life. People in your position typically don't realize that others are worse off, so I will do you this service and clue you in. Not everybody has the extra cash lying around to afford that type of risk. If you're depending on your next paycheck to pay rent and eat, you don't have a strong bargaining position, and you take what you can get. Everybody else will take opportunity of the fact that they know you don't have a strong bargaining position, and they will make the terms such that they would be completely unacceptable to someone in your position.
I'm just not a big believer in the "I have no power at all" victim mentality.
Of course not. You are part of the group that does have power.
When we argue about semantics, we're arguing about how a word is used, and the meaning that it brings with its use. Debating whether or not censorship includes deciding (personally) not to say something (or to un-say something) absolutely is semantics. But when people say "just semantics," they're being dismissive about the differences between word choices or about the appropriateness of a word's use.
When people say "just semantics", they mean that they agree on the issue at hand, but disagree on the description. As in, we both agree Dropbox did nothing wrong, but we disagree on whether or not to call it censorship. This is, "just semantics."
As for the definition you've cited, you're ignoring the only part that makes it meaninful: "to avoid castigation" - meaning, the phrase, as used, is meaningful only in the sense that one values continued participation in whatever group you fear will castigate you.
No I didn't. First of all, that part of the definition said, "especially to avoid castigation" as in, not a necessary condition. Another definition on that page mentioned "out of deference for the sensibilities of others." Second, I specifically said, "Self-censoring in order to avoid escalating a confrontation with the people who requested you take the content down" even though this fear is not a necessary condition for it to be called censorship.
If you want to hang out with Mac fanboys, you self-apply the group's censorship rules about praising Bill Gates. The group has the censorship rule (or has established the expectation of the penality of castigation) and the only "self" part about it is the personal decision to continue to share the group's values/rules. Don't like a university's censorship of some sort of religious wacko speech made by roving wannabe prophets on doorsteps of every fraternity and dorm? Leave the school. Don't like Castro's censorship of your speech praising free enterprise? Leave Cuba. Oops, can't do that! Now we're talking real censorship, in the way that it really matters... and in the way that whiny people frequently invoke the word while shrilly complaining about something that makes them mad, but which really isn't censorship at all.
You cited your first two as examples of censorship, then you cited the third as example of "real" censorship. No, they're ALL real censorship, except the third one has a greater authority backing it, making it a larger problem. Once again we agree on that, but you refuse to use the word correctly because you want "censorship" to mean "censorship of the type people can't escape from, which I especially don't like." The word censorship means the removal of content deemed objectionable. That's all that the word means. Any additional meaning to the word that you bestow it is not part of the actual definition, and is incorrect. It mean censorship exists within a range, some of which you do not object to, and some of which you find oppressive. You have no standing to demand that other people use words by the definition that you want to use simply because you don't agree with the actual definition.
From the Collins 10th Unabridged World English Dictionairy, on the phrase "self-censorship:"
the regulation of a group's actions and statements by its own members rather than an external agency
I wonder if you understand that definition. You do understand that in this example, the external agency is Dropbox, and the 'group' are the set of people who received requests to take the source code down, right?
The term is used in reference to the individual only in a more poetic way
[citation needed
to paint the image of two layers of one's mind fighting over whether or not to say something, and weighing the consequences of doing so (as in, one having no choice but to bite one's tongue, because the phrase
"self-censorship" is - except perhaps in psychological terms - a contradiction in terms, when you're talking about a single person. As you've no doubt noted in the dictionary, "self-censorship" refers to the actions of a group, which controls expression within that group. There is no choice as long as you want to be a member of that group and be subject to its authority over your actions as part of that group.
Yes, I have read the dictionary definition to re-familiarize myself before starting a discussion like this. "There is no choice as long as you want to be a member of that group and be subject to its authority." I really want to start using [citation needed] tags. This is the definition I see. Self-censoring in order to avoid escalating a confrontation with the people who requested you take the content down (but have no authority to force you to take it down) certainly works as self-censorship. I'm not sure why this is a contradiction in terms in any way, shape, or form.
This isn't just semantics. The term "censorship" is wildly mis-used, all the time. It's important to get it right.
Now you're misusing the word "semantics"!. Semantics is defined as "the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text". So, arguing the meaning of the word "censorship" is indeed just semantics, that's exactly what semantics is.
I do think it's important to get it right, which is why I'm arguing this point with you. However, you're the one getting it wrong. I've given you dictionary citations above in this post, can you point me to something that supports your argument?
... but has no central authority, as a censor must in order actually censor things. The author didn't censor, he retracted, removed, etc., on his own volition. Censorship requires authority, and doesn't include choice.
Once again, you're including things which are not part of the definition for the word 'censorship'. Self-censorship is censorship and, by definition, it must include choice. Since dropbox were the people making the request for removal, they were certainly acting as censors, and the author provided them with the authority by complying.
None of this is bad, mind you. Your mistake is in assuming censorship is automatically a bad thing. It's only unequivocally bad when the censors have universal authority, which is why you dislike government censorship so much. In this case they don't, and others are hosting the project.
We're essentially on the same side of the issue, but arguing semantics here. I object to your complaint about the use of the word censorship, which is a perfectly valid term even when the authority of the censor is limited, although most certainly not worthy of the same disdain as censorship backed by higher authorities. Dropbox acted within their rights, and the article author pointed this out, even though he disagrees with their course of action.
Slashdot Mirror
Incorrect. Or at least missing the point.
For all of its failings, in the United States a hospital is required to do anything within their power short of "experimental procedures" to stabilize a person, regardless of their ability to pay, legal status, race, gender, or status as a wanted criminal. This doesn't help with things like cancer or such, as treatments for the cause are all experimental, and the treatments for the symptoms are superficial.
But if you are say, in a car crash and suffer nerve damage, the ER will attempt to save your nerves before they check your insurance. Basically, in the United States, you cannot be denied treatment for conditions for which we understand the root cause because of your ability to pay. And this fact has actually caused ERs in some parts of the country to shut down occasionally, as illegal aliens sometimes bring come in to the ER for things like an ear infection because they cannot be denied treatment, and without any sort of paper trail they also cannot be billed.
That's true for ER treatment, but it's not true for anything other than things which require immediate attention. If you want to get treated for Alzheimers with drugs that will slow down the progress of the disease and you don't have insurance, you're screwed. If you have cancer and you're having symptoms for which you need to be stabilized, they'll help you in the ER. You won't get chemotherapy to actually give you a chance to be CURED, unless you can pay for it though.
I sit on the isle and try to be subtle about checking.
I'm sorry that my job requires me to be available 24/7.
I guess that means no movies for me because some hypersensitive person might be offended.
I cannot believe this is even ambiguous to some people. If your job requires you to be on call, YES THAT MEANS YOU CAN'T GO TO A MOVIE THEATER! Holy shit, how could you possibly think otherwise?
You want to watch a movie while on call? Get a good home theater system, some comfortable chairs, and watch it at home. You think it's not reasonable to give up going to a theater? Don't take a job that requires you to be on call, or at least negotiate for somebody else to cover for you during the time you will be unavailable to do work. You cannot have both. This also applies to plays, concerts, and just about anywhere else where you are the member of an audience.
No. MAKING a bomb should be illegal. Information, no matter what it is, should never be illegal.
I wouldn't even go so far as to say that making a bomb should be illegal. Using said bomb to hurt others, put others in dangers, or destroy any property that is not yours, sure. Blowing stuff up in a safety conscious manner, mythbusters style? No.
they fscked that study up real good.
personally I remember a really good sunset, or an awesome view of nature far more than I remember a friggin grocery store. heck there are two that I go into regularly and one I rarely go into and the one I rarely visit I can't find anything in it.
human sized spaces aren't more memorable. what it contains and that means to the viewer is what is rememberable.
Part of it is due to a literal interpretation of the word "memorable". There's a difference between easy to remember, which is what they've measured, and deemed worthy of committing to memory, which is more a more arbitrary consideration. If you see images of a supermarket isle, it might be memorable in that you'll be able to tell you've already seen that picture, but it's not memorable in the sense that most people use the word. It's not that they deem the picture special, it's just that our brains are able to recognize it without effort...you need to remember unimportant things like that in order to navigate places you've been to before, even if these places are completely uninteresting.
My field of work has nothing to do with this, so I may be off in this belief, but I would expect humans who live their lives in less urban settings to have an easier time remembering pictures of natural landscapes. We've trained ourselves to navigate supermarkets, but for most of us, a bunch of trees are just a bunch of trees. Those who actually can navigate the woods without getting lost probably have trained their brain to pay more attention to the differences, and thus should be able to remember if they've seen a picture of a particular natural landscape vs another far more easily.
Actually, you're retarded. For a lot of people, its attitudes like this that keep them away from geek culture. Not just Linux, but geek culture in general.
Not that I'm defending rude behavior, but I don't get your argument. I'm not a recruiter for geek culture, and I'm not sure why anyone else would want to be. It is what it is, and people either feel like they belong or they don't. I have no interest in being a part of biker culture, and that's not a problem with the members, it's simply a lack of interest in the same things that bring them together.
I only mention it because I constantly see comments like yours to justify other things that don't make sense. Like, "multiple window managers are the reason people don't switch to linux." Well, ok, then they can use something else. It's not supposed to be a competition to see who gets the most people belonging to the group, it's about finding what works best for me. If that's windows for most people, and linux with kde for me, so be it.
No debate with your points. But here are some other insights...
Did you know to this day 20% of Belarus's farmland is unusable?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus
The problem is that nuclear has serious longterm issues like this. Sure there are less immediate deaths, but the longer term deaths related to nuclear are much higher. This is the fault of humanity that can't look beyond the next Apple announcement.
So tell me how do you plan on making all of the land usable again? Oh wait I forgot you are not near any of these disasters and as such could not shive a ghit. Until it happens in your backyard!
Compared to the alternatives, coal or even hydro, that's still pretty good. Especially when you consider Chernobyl was a freak accident that absolutely can never happen again because nobody uses graphite control rods anymore. There was an actual meltdown at Fukushima, care to tell me just how much farmland was lost there? You'd be surprised to find out that the impact is minimal, and that's pretty much as bad as it can get with a nuclear reactor these days. More modern designs with passive cooling can't even get THAT bad.
Probably be a waste of your time, I had a math professor or two try to and you see how much good it did ;-)
Well, in that case I definitely want to give it a try. Not with the intention of berating you or anything, just because it's an often misunderstood thing, and it's not really that complicated.
If you're going to flip two fair coins, one after the other, the chances of you getting two heads is 25% (chance of getting heads on first flip (50%) * chances of getting heads on the second flip (50%) = 25%). After you flip the first coin, if you got heads, the chances of getting two heads in a row is now (chance of getting heads on first flip (100%) * chances of getting heads on the second flip (50%)). Basically, flipping a coin doesn't affect your chances for any other flips, they are all independent events, and it's always 50% chance heads, 50% chance tails.
In your example, the chances of being in two commercial aircraft crashes is lower than the chance of being in one aircraft craft if you've never been in an aircraft accident before, but only because you've gotta "win" twice. Being in an accident doesn't make you any safer, so you're just as likely of being in an aircraft accident the second time as you were in the first (which is pretty damn unlikely, so I understand your original point).
You think that patting down a random person who doesn't even come close to fitting the profile of a modern terrorists, while completely ignoring the guy behind her who does is a smart way to approach screening, do you?
Yes.
Because us morons think that taking a more focused approach might be in order.
Yep. And that frustrates the hell out of me.
Profiling works to catch serial killers, so why not use it to screen for terrorists too?
Because in the case of catching serial killers, you're trying to catch a specific someone and he can't change who he is. You're profiling a specific person based on their already executed actions and how well they fit with established data. If you stop screening people who don't fit your profile for a terrorist, you're giving the terrorists a hole in your security that they can exploit in future actions. You're telling them to recruit some caucasians, they're the ideal agents to attack an airliner. It's not like that hasn't happened before, there was one white american fighting with the Taliban when we started the Afghanistan war. Furthermore, it's not like middle-easteners are the only terrorists...everyone freaks the hell out when they crashed planes into buildings, but when Andrew Stack crashed into an IRS building because he got screwed by taxes everyone starts talking about how he might have a point and the tax code is set up against developer entrepeneurs. When Timothy McVeigh bombs a building, the police are enough to handle it, no need to pass the likes of PATRIOT act legislation.
If you're not looking for a specific person, random is much better than looking for behavior or physical features, because if you're ignoring certain types of people, those are the ones that will be recruited next.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
I have 1 provider available.
You have more than one place to live available.
That's a very realistic option, thanks. "Well, honey, the reason we need to quit our jobs, sell our house and relocate is that, even though we selected this place to live because AT&T's ultra-fast u-verse was available here in the first place, they've now changed the contract on us and started to cap bandwidth usage."
We’re trying to increase openness, but it’s not no-holds-barred. We do have a content policy in our market. We don’t go after trucking companies for carrying faulty goods, you go after the manufacturer. There’s a balance.
Not buying it, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse fired back:
You do go after the trucking company if they know what they’re carrying. Google’s in a better position to know what’s going on than a seventeen year old that wants to try a cool app. I don’t think that’s a comfortable analogy for you to rely on.
But Google does not know what they're carrying, because they're not in the business of reviewing apps that can or cannot be installed on the computer before they allow it in the marketplace, like Apple got in the business of. If somebody informs them that an app is violating their terms, they remove it from the store and kill-switch it, but they have no way of knowing ahead of time, and somebody could still install it from unofficial sources.
This kind of response from Microsoft or Apple would never be tolerated on slashdot.
Actually, it's completely consistent with the overall geek stance. We don't want the phone manufacturers to tell us what we can or can't install on our phones (thus all the complaints about the Apple-controlled app store), we want general purpose computing devices that happen to be phones. As with viruses in your PC, it's the general stance of the population here that you're responsible for what you install. If you do trust an application from a particular company, and they violate your trust, your beef is with that company, not the manufacturer of your phone (or phone's OS).
My reasoning is summed up nicely by this post - http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2138492&cid=36073566
That's pretty good reasoning. I stand corrected.
Don't you think it is a bit early to be worried about this?
Yes, it is. But why wait, or even ask Apple, when /. can run an anti-Apple piece.
What is your reasoning for believing it's too early to complain? They have distributed LGPL software without the source code for their changes. That means they are currently in violation of the license, and nothing else gives them the right to distribute the software. They're currently committing copyright infringement.
If they want to delay one of the two steps, they can release the source code first, and delay releasing the binary. They can't really do it the other way around.
You do know that there is an amazingly simple way to separate the salt from the water, right? It is called evaporation.
The concepts of desalination are certainly quite simple, its the economics that are complicated.
He means natural evaporation. Oceans are under the Sun all the time. You can't "use up" fresh water by intercepting water that's about to fall on the ocean and making it into salt water. That is happening all the time anyway, those rivers are constantly dumping fresh water into the ocean. Luckily, water evaporates off the oceans and comes back down as fresh water as rain, filling up those rivers and continuing the cycle.
Encryption is hard. Really hard to do right.
The NSA can hire the best. It's entirely possible that they (or some other comparable agency) hired somebody to inject a weakness into it's algorithms that would only be noticed in a code audit by somebody extremely skilled in the art. I'm not saying there's a backdoor such as "if you == NSA, decrypt everything!" but there may be something that greatly restricts the key combination that must be tested to crack it or something.
Yeah, I agree that's a reasonable concern. That said, TrueCrypt is not only open-source, but also famous enough that heavyweights tend to use it for security research. It's no guarantee, but I think enough knowledgeable people look at it that I'd think it's most likely free of backdoors and known weaknesses.
I do agree that I'd trust open source code more than closed source code in this regard, but it's certainly possible for open source code to have backdoors or weaknesses -- intentional or accidental -- and for nobody to notice it for a long time.
Yeah, you're right, and I had no intention whatsoever of making my post sound like, "open source = safe!!!" I think it's unlikely to contain purposeful weaknesses, but yes, it's not impossible.
Either way, it's irrelevant. Even if bin laden's hard drives were fully encrypted with something with no known weaknesses and no backdoors, I don't doubt that that they still would be able to crack it fairly quickly. The world is full of data encrypted with 256-bit AES protected by a dictionary password. The encryption scheme is rarely the weakest link in the chain.
He further assumes that Truecrypt does not provide a backdoor to NSA for this in the first place.
Truecrypt is open source. No, I haven't looked at it myself, but it only takes one person to rat such a thing out. It's not probable that nobody has seen it yet, save the ones in on the conspiracy. Possible yes, but highly unlikely.
shuttle's final 15-day flight
emphasis mine
What is your point? The June launch is a shuttle too, the shuttle Atlantis. There is more than one space shuttle you know.
His point was that the "shuttle" in question was already identified as the Endeavor. They didn't say shuttles' final flight, they said shuttle's.
That said, they did screw up the sentence, so I see why you were confused. It should read, "Greg Chamitoff, a computer programmer who wrote software for NASA's Endeavour spacecraft, will be blasting off on the shuttle's final 15-day flight..."
Get a grip. Do you realize how many pets are killed in raids? Lucky he didn't have one (or more). Had he pulled a gun on the intruders he would likely be dead or facing jail time had he shot one of the swat team. There are far, far too many raids which have gone wrong - whether the individuals involved were innocent, guilty or just plain not the right house. And you cavilierly dismiss the consequences - in fact you just plain ignore them.
From my point of view, you're dismissing the consequences of accepting the status quo. Do your part to make this type of unnecessary raid impossible: make it such that an IP address is obviously not enough evidence to sign a warrant that allows a swat team to go barging into someone's home. While you're at it, voice your disapproval that the police would show up with guns to arrest a downloader. Even if it had been the right guy, what was he going to do, attack the police with child pornography?
Except it wouldn't be $1000 a year or 20 cents a gallon. It would be closer to $10K a year and $2 per gallon. It seems petty and small when you underestimate the impact.
Please. South Carolina is subsidizing college education for pretty much every resident with a 3.0 GPA or above (which is actually a pretty low GPA when you think about it). Additional income or property taxes to do that? Zero. The money comes from the state lottery. Do you think this is unfair and unjust?
The question I ask is - does free college actually have any impact on the total education level of society? Are there that many people who aren't going to college strictly because of cost - even with scholarships, government subsidized student loans, etc.
Maybe not, but I have another question for you. What's the impact on society when you start your life with a huge debt incurred from student loans?
Apparently, EFF Doesn't read the news, or Slashdot for that matter. Regardless if the guy was eventually exonerated, getting thrown to the ground at gun point and called a pedophile isn't exactly how I'd like to be rewarded for opening my wireless. Try again EFF. Open wireless is for monitored public initiatives, not for the average home user who has way more to lose (like their reputation and livelihood).
Actually, I'm pretty sure they do, and this movement is in response to those news.
As you can see they are correct in asserting that there are no legal liabilities. He was not only exonerated, but received an official apology. As in, it should never have happened in the first place. Now, you can either do nothing and let this kind of thing continue, or you can make sharing your wifi more common, making it impossible for warrants to be issued on that basis alone.
You can take the coward route, I'd rather do my part to make the world better, even if it involves some risks.
Have you ever left you middle-class suburban world to see what it's like elsewhere?
Yes, ASSHOLE. I grew up in a family where my parents didn't have college degrees, and when my dad lost his job, I spent time sleeping IN THE FUCKING STREETS after friends they thought they had turned out not to be there when times got tough. I spent a week on sugar water when I was 7 years old, and that wasn't the worst part, the worst part was seeing my mother cry every time she handed it to me. I sure as hell didn't have a computer THEN.
The fact that you have access to a computer to tell me how privileged I am and how downtrodden you are is ample proof that you, whether you believe it or not, live a life of luxury compared to most people in the rest of the world.
I didn't say I was downtrodden. I live a privileged life now, thanks to the fact that my parents sacrificed much to make sure I got an education, and thanks to the fact I got an education in a marketable field. They didn't have this luxury and I take your implication that they just didn't work hard enough as offensive as all hell. I have opportunities that they never had, same as you, and that's what gives us power. If I lose my job today, I can live on a year on my savings, and that means I don't need to take the first job that is offered, I can hold out for the good one.
So if you want to wallow in self pity because you aren't one of the "powerful" people, knock yourself out.
What I want to do is not be a fucking moron who thinks everything he's managed to acquire, he did it because he's, oh so smart and hard working. I have what I have now because I worked hard, because I was lucky, and because my family made sacrifices along the way. Hard work alone doesn't cut anywhere, it just increases your chances of success.
But don't expect me to have pity for you because you have adopted that mindset, instead of looking for ways to improve your situation.
I don't expect anything from people like you, you actually went through a rough period and still didn't learn anything from it. You admit that you spent a year on public assistance and you claim nobody is a victim? Would you have gotten out of that situation if you hadn't been helped, through the tax money of others, on programs enabled because people pitied others in your situation? Why didn't you just "look for ways to improve your situation" and manage to get through it on your own hard work? Under just what circumstances do you pity somebody enough to do something to help them?
First, since most ideas develop simultaneously and independently in different places, no single disclosure is worth very much.
And if ideas were patentable, you'd have a point. The research and development required to develop an idea costs a lot of money, and disclosure means that everyone else can skip that step. Of course, bullshit patents consists of obvious steps, but that's a problem with the patent office's having too lax a definition of non-obvious, not a problem with patents themselves.
Second, technological secret are hard to keep for long in any case.
Tell that to Peter Chamberlen who kept his invention of obstetric forceps secret within the family in order to maintain an advantage over other obstetricians. Lots of people died as a result of the technology staying hidden for 100 years.
Third, when inventors think they can keep their techniques secret, they will not claim patents at all since competitors will be unable to duplicate the technique.
And that's within their right. Of course, by doing that they risk being wrong. If somebody else manages to reverse-engineer (legally) their non-patented techniques, they are afforded no protection.
Lastly, the patent system creates a disincentive for inventors to publish their ideas early on, since premature publication can ruin the chances of getting patents. So, rather than promote disclosure, the patent system actually hurts it.
First of all, you can apply for a patent and start publishing before you know if the application was approved or not. That's what "patent pending" means. Second, if no patent system was available and you were willing to publish the work anyway, then that would imply that you don't care to have any protection of the work, in which case you can do the same today and not apply for the patent. The patent system provides no lack of incentive to that group.
Patents are a good thing. Patents as they exist today are poorly implemented: Patents on algorithms shouldn't exist. Patents on software shouldn't exist (that's called copyright). We should go back to a requirement on having a working implementation of the patent before it can be granted, and that should be verified by patent examiners. Everything patent application should be assumed to be obvious, and the burden of proof that the work is not obvious should fall ont he applicant. Patent examiners should get bonuses for finding prior art and rejecting invalid patent applications. Patent applicants should be fined for not doing a proper search for prior art before applying for the patent (fine used to pay the bonus to the patent examiner). Patent terms of 10 years with no renewals would be more than good enough (if by the time the work is available for others to use, it has been completely obsoleted, then disclosure is irrelevant).
Similarly, telling people to "work for someone else" doesn't solve the problem either - they *all* do this, you have no bargaining power at all, they have all the money.
Ummm...start your own business, then? My wife has done it twice in the last decade. It's a lot of work, and there are no guarantees that you will break even, much less earn the salary you earn as a cubicle drone in the tech sector, but if you don't like the terms of employment for anyone that's hiring, it IS an option.
Congratulations on your wonderful life. People in your position typically don't realize that others are worse off, so I will do you this service and clue you in. Not everybody has the extra cash lying around to afford that type of risk. If you're depending on your next paycheck to pay rent and eat, you don't have a strong bargaining position, and you take what you can get. Everybody else will take opportunity of the fact that they know you don't have a strong bargaining position, and they will make the terms such that they would be completely unacceptable to someone in your position.
I'm just not a big believer in the "I have no power at all" victim mentality.
Of course not. You are part of the group that does have power.
When we argue about semantics, we're arguing about how a word is used, and the meaning that it brings with its use. Debating whether or not censorship includes deciding (personally) not to say something (or to un-say something) absolutely is semantics. But when people say "just semantics," they're being dismissive about the differences between word choices or about the appropriateness of a word's use.
When people say "just semantics", they mean that they agree on the issue at hand, but disagree on the description. As in, we both agree Dropbox did nothing wrong, but we disagree on whether or not to call it censorship. This is, "just semantics."
As for the definition you've cited, you're ignoring the only part that makes it meaninful: "to avoid castigation" - meaning, the phrase, as used, is meaningful only in the sense that one values continued participation in whatever group you fear will castigate you.
No I didn't. First of all, that part of the definition said, "especially to avoid castigation" as in, not a necessary condition. Another definition on that page mentioned "out of deference for the sensibilities of others." Second, I specifically said, "Self-censoring in order to avoid escalating a confrontation with the people who requested you take the content down" even though this fear is not a necessary condition for it to be called censorship.
If you want to hang out with Mac fanboys, you self-apply the group's censorship rules about praising Bill Gates. The group has the censorship rule (or has established the expectation of the penality of castigation) and the only "self" part about it is the personal decision to continue to share the group's values/rules. Don't like a university's censorship of some sort of religious wacko speech made by roving wannabe prophets on doorsteps of every fraternity and dorm? Leave the school. Don't like Castro's censorship of your speech praising free enterprise? Leave Cuba. Oops, can't do that! Now we're talking real censorship, in the way that it really matters ... and in the way that whiny people frequently invoke the word while shrilly complaining about something that makes them mad, but which really isn't censorship at all.
You cited your first two as examples of censorship, then you cited the third as example of "real" censorship. No, they're ALL real censorship, except the third one has a greater authority backing it, making it a larger problem. Once again we agree on that, but you refuse to use the word correctly because you want "censorship" to mean "censorship of the type people can't escape from, which I especially don't like." The word censorship means the removal of content deemed objectionable. That's all that the word means. Any additional meaning to the word that you bestow it is not part of the actual definition, and is incorrect. It mean censorship exists within a range, some of which you do not object to, and some of which you find oppressive. You have no standing to demand that other people use words by the definition that you want to use simply because you don't agree with the actual definition.
From the Collins 10th Unabridged World English Dictionairy, on the phrase "self-censorship:"
the regulation of a group's actions and statements by its own members rather than an external agency
I wonder if you understand that definition. You do understand that in this example, the external agency is Dropbox, and the 'group' are the set of people who received requests to take the source code down, right?
The term is used in reference to the individual only in a more poetic way
[citation needed
to paint the image of two layers of one's mind fighting over whether or not to say something, and weighing the consequences of doing so (as in, one having no choice but to bite one's tongue, because the phrase
"self-censorship" is - except perhaps in psychological terms - a contradiction in terms, when you're talking about a single person. As you've no doubt noted in the dictionary, "self-censorship" refers to the actions of a group, which controls expression within that group. There is no choice as long as you want to be a member of that group and be subject to its authority over your actions as part of that group.
Yes, I have read the dictionary definition to re-familiarize myself before starting a discussion like this. "There is no choice as long as you want to be a member of that group and be subject to its authority." I really want to start using [citation needed] tags. This is the definition I see. Self-censoring in order to avoid escalating a confrontation with the people who requested you take the content down (but have no authority to force you to take it down) certainly works as self-censorship. I'm not sure why this is a contradiction in terms in any way, shape, or form.
This isn't just semantics. The term "censorship" is wildly mis-used, all the time. It's important to get it right.
Now you're misusing the word "semantics"!. Semantics is defined as "the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text". So, arguing the meaning of the word "censorship" is indeed just semantics, that's exactly what semantics is.
I do think it's important to get it right, which is why I'm arguing this point with you. However, you're the one getting it wrong. I've given you dictionary citations above in this post, can you point me to something that supports your argument?
... but has no central authority, as a censor must in order actually censor things. The author didn't censor, he retracted, removed, etc., on his own volition. Censorship requires authority, and doesn't include choice.
Once again, you're including things which are not part of the definition for the word 'censorship'. Self-censorship is censorship and, by definition, it must include choice. Since dropbox were the people making the request for removal, they were certainly acting as censors, and the author provided them with the authority by complying.
None of this is bad, mind you. Your mistake is in assuming censorship is automatically a bad thing. It's only unequivocally bad when the censors have universal authority, which is why you dislike government censorship so much. In this case they don't, and others are hosting the project.
We're essentially on the same side of the issue, but arguing semantics here. I object to your complaint about the use of the word censorship, which is a perfectly valid term even when the authority of the censor is limited, although most certainly not worthy of the same disdain as censorship backed by higher authorities. Dropbox acted within their rights, and the article author pointed this out, even though he disagrees with their course of action.