From the abstract "herbicide resistance is expected to spread to conspecific weedy rice (Oryza sativa f. spontanea) via hybridization"
Exactly. The study does not say it has. And this particular study isn't even related to how or how likely resistance would get passed to the weeds. The headline, on the other hand, says GM rice "passes" which means it currently is passing, which is a lie. I'm not saying the study doesn't mean anything important, I'm saying it doesn't mean what the headline says it means. It is the headline that is the problem, not the study. Something about journalistic integrity or whatever that concept was that doesn't seem to exist anymore.
The headline is outright wrong and misleading. The headline implies that GM rice is passing the trait onto weeds. That is not the case here. The study has nothing to do with whether or not the traits can get passed to weeds from GM rice. The study is not saying that GM rice passed anything along to weeds. It is saying that when intentionally GM'd, the weeds get benefits other than just glyphosate resistance. The stated conclusion of the article is that if the trait got into the weed it would be bad. Duh. The thing that makes the study a bit interesting is that it challenges a previous assumption regarding why it would be bad.
I saw the same issue. This is currently only for a select few who were hand picked.
Wait until it is offered to the general public, then I will be interested.
Any program like this is going to need a pilot with a limited number of students. Normally those few students would be selected based on admissions criteria. But in this case, it appears that AT&T is funding the pilot, and did so in exchange for getting to choose who is in the pilot program.
While Georgia Tech may not exactly be on the moral high ground for letting a for-profit corporation choose who gets in, it's not necessarily fundamentally evil. They get their pilot funded, where they otherwise may have had no pilot and thus nobody gets to be in the program in the future. OTOH, imagine if Apple paid Stanford a ton of money to let it choose the freshman class...that sounds fundamentally evil and corrupt. The difference is, in that case, they're taking opportunities away from somebody else.
So the question is: What will Georgia Tech be able to do in the future without more money from AT&T?
Somebody please *please* hear this message before it's too late. Too many bright foreign students who get into top notch schools are denied visas. I've seen this happen first hand multiple times at a good school. Politicians can debate visa allocation as much as they want in general. But when MIT (or some other top notch school) accepts someone can you please just give the kid a visa? Oh, and not kick him out when he graduates? Because if not, then your protectionist strategy creates a market for programs such as this one, which is a hundred times worse than the scenario you are trying to prevent.
The point is to give first priority to non-foreigners. The point is not to crush foreigners, but rather to increase access for Americans to education and jobs. E.g. if a foreigner gets into and attends MIT, that's one less American that gets to attend MIT. Yes, it's a protectionist strategy (whether we should have such a strategy is a separate debate), but how does this program make things 100x worse? How does it prevent Americans from getting an education or a job?
All of the answers so far say do this or do that. I think that probably each piece of conflicting advice applies to the that person's specific situation. Since you're asking the question, I assume you actually care about not being able to collect those 2 weeks worth of pay and don't want to be terminated on the spot. I'm also going to assume that collecting anything for accumulated vacation or sick time is irrelevant, otherwise that should answer the question for you.
If you're working for a small company, then you should feel out the personalities of your bosses. If you are in a position where you have unique knowledge or responsibilities that others don't have, then your bosses will probably be appreciative of as much notice as possible so you can handoff your responsibilities, or possibly train or even hire your replacement. It's always good to not burn your bridges if you have the choice.
If you work for a big company and do the same thing as a bunch of other people, then they might just let you go on the spot because they don't need you and can just get on with hiring your replacement. In this situation, you should be mindful of what the HR department will say if future potential employers call for a reference. Some large companies have a policy of only being allowed to tell others the dates you worked there. Others may have a policy of saying whether you were terminated or quit. Also be mindful of the working relationship you have with your bosses. Are they going to be pissed off and likely to fire you on the spot, or maybe the figure you're not going to get anything done anyway and let you go, or are they going to be happy to have you around for 2 more weeks, throw you a going away party (hopefully with cake and ice cream), and wish you the best?
And of course, if you work for a large company see what's happened to other people who have given notice.
The interim President has also declared an indefinite state of emergency, "allowing security forces to arrest and detain civilians indefinitely without charge."
That sounds really scary, but the US has been doing this for TWELVE YEARS. If the US's goal is to spread its ways...mission accomplished in Egypt!
This isn't about being white or race in general, it's about domestic labor versus imported labor.
They could have hired British H1B workers and it would be just as illegal.
While that's true, that's not what the lawsuit claims. According to TFA, she is claiming discrimination, and it even mentions the Civil Rights Act, although the article does mention that the lawsuit mention that they are abusing H-1B visas, probably to set the stage for the motivation behind the discrimination. My guess is that if it's discrimination, then the plaintiff (and of course her lawyers) can sue for damages. If it's a violation of H-1B law, then it's probably up to the government to deal with it, which will depend of course on the lobbying power and campaign contributions of Infosys and its ilk.
Of course, now they'll probably just change all of their job requirements to include fluency in Hindi with the excuse that all employees need to be able to communication with their counterparts in India.
Sounds great but it will be expensive. Probably somewhere well over $50 billion.
In other words, still less than the US government's (pretty much failed) F-22 program. Of course, NBN benefits everybody in the country, while the F-22 mostly benefits a few individuals (aka campaign contributors) who got to pocket the profits of the $66.7 billion.
Also, your first responders should always be prepared, right? Sounds to me like you folks have issues with what the responsibilities of first responders are supposed to be. Hint: Its not "be unprepared most of the time."
Wow. So in your area, 100% of your cops, paramedics, firefighters, and utility workers are on duty and working 100% of the time? No off time, no shift changes? I hope they're getting paid very well considering they aren't allowed sleep, have a family life, hobbies, recreation, etc. Your municipality must have lots and lots of extra money to spend on overtime, your property tax must be astronomical. Wasn't there a movie about personnel like that? I think it was called Universal Soldier, and as a recall some of them went insane and started killing innocent people.
If you have every available resource on duty and staged in predetermined areas, you can respond to incidents a lot faster than calling people in from home once the storm actually hits.
Spoken by somebody who has not experienced a severe storm. Just 2 days ago we had tropical storm Flossie hit us. The predictions saved *a lot* of damage and maybe lives. It gave time to inform fisherman of the coming ocean conditions. It gave time for first responders and utilities to prepare. It gave me time to secure my home. It turns out that in my area, it didn't last very long but had intense lightning/thunder that shook my house, followed by intense wind that shook my house, and heavy, horizontal rain. I only lost power for about an hour and half and water was unaffected, thanks to the preparations of our utility providers.
Now that said, we didn't know exactly when it would hit or what areas would be affected how much. Were we to have had more precision, we could saved a lot of time and effort in the areas that it didn't hit while focusing on the areas that it did hit. So, while supercomputers are expensive, storm prediction saves more money than it costs [citation needed, I know I know]. If it had been a full on hurricane, then the more precise the prediction the more millions of dollars in damage (not to mention grief and potentially lives) it'll save.
It seems that slashdotters think that the title of a patent IS the patent. For any patent title "A method for doing X," it does not mean that any method for doing X is covered by the patent. The patent describes the specific method of doing X. Now, sometimes the specific method is still totally obvious, not novel, and/or has plenty of prior art. But just because the title says "Method and system to create, transmit, receive and process information, including an address to further information" does not mean or imply that it covers every method for doing so.
Now that said, based on the abstract this is still likely a bullshit patent, I'm just sayin' don't assume so based only on the title because there are plenty of legit, novel patents that are titled in this manner. Of course, this is still just based on the abstract, I'm not gonna read the whole patent.
Abstract A method and system for sending and receiving Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in electronic mail over the Internet. An electronic mail document containing a URL may have several different types. If the message type indicates a URL, when the received URL type document is read or browsed using a multimedia Internet browser, the URL is looked up so that the information corresponding to the URL is displayed without necessarily displaying any portion of the received message. If the received document is of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) type, the document may be displayed and a user may "click" on the URL to look up the information corresponding to the URL. If the received document is of the text type, the text may be converted to the HTML format and the HTML format document displayed so that a user may "click" on the URL in order to look up the information corresponding to the URL without the need to type in the URL address.
I agree. In my case, it's because they don't seem to distinguish common weather alerts from real natural disasters. In my area (Maui), every time it rains there's potential for flash flooding, and everyone who lives here knows it. So every time it rains, I get a loud annoying alert every couple of hours. I can see out the window. Everyone who lives here can see out the window. But I'm sure there's liability involved because tourists don't know not to play in the gullies in the rain, and the state has been sued before when someone got swept out to sea (happens sometimes), so they are probably scared to not send those out and in reality it really could save a tourist's life. The problem is, if I turn it off, I'm turning it off for real natural disasters too. I want to know ASAP if a tsunami is on its way. I want to turn off the weather alerts (flash flood warnings) but not the alerts for real disasters.
If you work for a corporation and its telling you they never back anything up and anything you delete is deleted forever and then you find out that they lied and everything any employee every did was secretly backed up for all eternity, this would change how you view that corporation. This would also change how the customers view that corporation which lies to it's own employees about it's practices.
I know it's just an analogy, but here's where your analogy is so fundamentally different that it is completely inapplicable: In the case of the corporation, the corporation is backing up data they own on systems they own. The NSA, on the other hand, is not just backing up data on its own systems. If you visit the NSA's website, and they log that activity, sure, that meets your analogy. But we're talking about the NSA collecting and storing data from systems that do not belong to them. Add to that the fact that they're a government entity and that whole pesky constitution document....
It's catch 22
No, it's not. They didn't simply lie about their activities. They lied about breaking the law and violating the constitution. You're focused entirely on the fact that they lied, not the fact that they broke the law. A more appropriate analogy would be if you lied about committing a murder, then were later found out to be the murderer. Which is the sentencing judge going to focus more on, the fact that you lied, or that fact that you committed a murder?
How can the NSA expect the uninformed voter to make an informed decision if it keeps the voter in the dark?
I know a lot of./ is gonna come at this from a "those greedy scum bags" point of view, but this makes perfect sense from an overall humanity point of view, not just a greedy corporation point of view. Put power hungry stuff in a place where the power doesn't spew CO2 into the atmosphere thanks to hydroelectric. Someplace where they can use much less power by taking advantage of the outside cold. This is how it should be.
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
I'm pretty sure I'd notice a keylogger on my network sending every keystroke out to elsewhere...
As for the leap from idea to typing, that technology is the sole purview of the NSA it seems...
If you're talking about what you're typing into a search engine's text box, then yeah, the implementations/configurations of most users send keystroke by keystroke for autocomplete/suggest purposes. How about word processing...ever heard of Google Docs? Yeah, a lot of people use it, and yeah, it sends keystroke by keystroke.
Okay, maybe not literally as you type as there is sure to be some latency between idea and keyboard and a little more between keyboard and Google, but close enough. And of course, he didn't say all of your ideas, this would would be the case for ideas that you form while you're typing, and for typing then sends everything you type somewhere they're watching.
To be fair to PETA, at least one example from TFA is absolutely false:
it objects to terms like "animal Kervorkians,"
It is completely false and unfair to compare PETA to Dr. Kevorkian. Dr. Kervokian only killed people who volunteered to die. PETA, on the other hand, is killing animals who have not volunteered to die. PETA is an organization animal murderers (the meat goes to waste, therefore it is murder and not food) while Dr. Kevorkian assisted patients in committing suicide. Big difference.
I saw the title and said to myself, "No shit flu can spread from person to person."
Then they talk about "bird" flu and say it spreads from ferret to ferret. I've had a public school education, so maybe I missed the day where they told us ferrets were birds and not mammals.
The connection with ferrets is that ferrets and humans share the same "human influenza" virus and can pass it on to each other. So, that means that if ferrets can get this type of influenza and pass it on, there is a reasonable probability that humans can too. That doesn't mean this is an "OMG were all gonna die!!!" sort of thing, it just means that this particular test shows a reasonable probably that humans could spread the virus from each other, and points out that the test were done under ideal (ideal to the virus) conditions.
Frankly I don't think the title is overly sensationalistic, nor is the quoted part of the summary, but the part "how the bird flu may wipe us out" is sensationalistic, inaccurate, and the editor who put it in there should be fired or sent over to Fox News.
Except that's just not how the market work. Focusing might sound good on the surface, but in reality it's not going to be the most successful. It might even be better for the customers that it has, but it's not going to make more money. First off, if you can buy everything from one place then you are used to and comfortable with buying stuff from that place, so a vast majority of people will buy stuff from that store. Who do you think sells more dog food in America, Petco or WalMart? Secondly, if you're a company with more revenue streams, you have more resources to develop new products, and you have more resources to hold yourself up between the time you release those products and the time you actually start making a profit off of them.
You can argue that Kobo's focusing could lead to better results in terms of user experience, but they aren't going to beat Amazon in terms of market share unless they really come up with something consumers think is unique and amazing.
So why not have a minimum salary for H1B employees? Increase with inflation every year of course.
If an H1B is truly necessary because the talent is lacking, the presumably they'd be willing to pay. If it's because they only want to pay a foreigner $35k/yr for job with a market value of $70k/yr, then that's not what the H1B program is supposed to be about. Set the minimum at something like $80k/yr, and you'll be limiting it to folks who are really in high demand and the absolute in their field, otherwise you can hire an American.
I mean, really, what talent is there that should pay less than $80k/yr that you really cannot find an American to hire for?
Imagine it's 2003, and Slashdot has an article about the widely criticized Iraqi invasion. An American makes a post just like yours:
"But invading Kuwait was ok, huh?"
Would you have embraced that sentiment? Would the moderators have modded it up? I imagine that poster would be flooded with indignant replies containing variations of "two wrongs don't make a right"
Now imagine again that it's 2003. We know that North Korea is close to getting nukes, and their leader is literally insane. Far away, we have a bit of unreliable intelligence from some dude that was tortured and told us Saddam had WMDs, that we know is unreliable (because the guys that tortured him and told us about it also told us that it was unreliable). We also know that even if these WMDs do exist, they are not nukes. Also, unlike North Korea, Saddam was a major asshole but was not actually literally insane (at least not more than any other asshole politician). We know that if we take Saddam's regime out, we'll have to be there for a very, very long time to prevent an even bigger asshole from taking over. Meanwhile, our friends in South Korea would be happy to take over North Korea if we took out Kim Jong-Il's regime, and unite North and South Korea, significantly helping the entire population of North Korea.
10 Years prior, your daddy (president at that time) and your current VP (Secretary of Defense at that time) had both said invading Iraq to go after Saddam would have been obviously stupid. Your current VP even explained why it would be utterly stupid in an interview with C-SPAN in 1994.
Major internet service providers today will start monitoring the internet traffic to their customers' computers
False. The ISPs will not be monitoring traffic. The *IAA will monitor bittorrent and report IPs to the ISPs. Not that this isn't still bad, but at least get your facts straight in the first sentence of the summary. Even TFA got it more or less right:
Under the new program, the industry will monitor "peer-to-peer" software services for evidence of copyrighted files being shared.
How about just making it require a password to power off, put it in airplane mode, or disable Find My iPhone so you can use find my phone? As it is you can still turn the phone off even if the lock screen is passworded. I don't want to have to enter a PIN every time I unlock my phone, but I also don't want a thief to be able to disable Find My iPhone (such as by turning it off), and I wouldn't mind entering a password on the rare occasions I turn the phone off or put it in airplane mode. Do any Android phones have a feature like that?
I think most thieves know to turn off an iPhone that they've stolen.
If I knowingly loan one of my guns or vehicles to someone I know, or should know, to be a problem, I would expect to be held liable to some degree. If, however, someone steals one of these things or otherwise accesses them without my permission, the liability is theirs.
And what if you loan out your hunting rifle to your friend to go hunting, and they end up murdering somebody with it, should you be held responsible? What if you loan your car to your friend to go grocery shopping and they end up running a red light and killing somebody, should you be liable? I think only if you have a reasonable belief that the individual might use it for that purpose. How about if somebody steals your car or gun and does the same?
One problem with WiFi is that you don't necessarily know if somebody else is using it. In the case of a car or a gun, you generally know if it gets stolen because it's not where you left it. Sure, you can lock your doors, but somebody can always break a window. With WiFi, sure, you can always click the little password checkbox, but it's still not hard for somebody to break into it. In most situations (that is, most people with most setups) they're not going to be able to tell if somebody else was using their WiFi.
Another car analogy...if your car runs a red light with a red light camera, or speeds and gets caught by photo radar, if somebody else is driving your car then should the burden of proof lie on you to prove somebody else was driving, or on law enforcement to prove you were driving?
Slashdot Mirror
From the abstract
"herbicide resistance is expected to spread to conspecific weedy rice (Oryza sativa f. spontanea) via hybridization"
Exactly. The study does not say it has. And this particular study isn't even related to how or how likely resistance would get passed to the weeds. The headline, on the other hand, says GM rice "passes" which means it currently is passing, which is a lie. I'm not saying the study doesn't mean anything important, I'm saying it doesn't mean what the headline says it means. It is the headline that is the problem, not the study. Something about journalistic integrity or whatever that concept was that doesn't seem to exist anymore.
The headline is outright wrong and misleading. The headline implies that GM rice is passing the trait onto weeds. That is not the case here. The study has nothing to do with whether or not the traits can get passed to weeds from GM rice. The study is not saying that GM rice passed anything along to weeds. It is saying that when intentionally GM'd, the weeds get benefits other than just glyphosate resistance. The stated conclusion of the article is that if the trait got into the weed it would be bad. Duh. The thing that makes the study a bit interesting is that it challenges a previous assumption regarding why it would be bad.
I saw the same issue. This is currently only for a select few who were hand picked.
Wait until it is offered to the general public, then I will be interested.
Any program like this is going to need a pilot with a limited number of students. Normally those few students would be selected based on admissions criteria. But in this case, it appears that AT&T is funding the pilot, and did so in exchange for getting to choose who is in the pilot program.
While Georgia Tech may not exactly be on the moral high ground for letting a for-profit corporation choose who gets in, it's not necessarily fundamentally evil. They get their pilot funded, where they otherwise may have had no pilot and thus nobody gets to be in the program in the future. OTOH, imagine if Apple paid Stanford a ton of money to let it choose the freshman class...that sounds fundamentally evil and corrupt. The difference is, in that case, they're taking opportunities away from somebody else.
So the question is: What will Georgia Tech be able to do in the future without more money from AT&T?
Somebody please *please* hear this message before it's too late. Too many bright foreign students who get into top notch schools are denied visas. I've seen this happen first hand multiple times at a good school. Politicians can debate visa allocation as much as they want in general. But when MIT (or some other top notch school) accepts someone can you please just give the kid a visa? Oh, and not kick him out when he graduates? Because if not, then your protectionist strategy creates a market for programs such as this one, which is a hundred times worse than the scenario you are trying to prevent.
The point is to give first priority to non-foreigners. The point is not to crush foreigners, but rather to increase access for Americans to education and jobs. E.g. if a foreigner gets into and attends MIT, that's one less American that gets to attend MIT. Yes, it's a protectionist strategy (whether we should have such a strategy is a separate debate), but how does this program make things 100x worse? How does it prevent Americans from getting an education or a job?
All of the answers so far say do this or do that. I think that probably each piece of conflicting advice applies to the that person's specific situation. Since you're asking the question, I assume you actually care about not being able to collect those 2 weeks worth of pay and don't want to be terminated on the spot. I'm also going to assume that collecting anything for accumulated vacation or sick time is irrelevant, otherwise that should answer the question for you.
If you're working for a small company, then you should feel out the personalities of your bosses. If you are in a position where you have unique knowledge or responsibilities that others don't have, then your bosses will probably be appreciative of as much notice as possible so you can handoff your responsibilities, or possibly train or even hire your replacement. It's always good to not burn your bridges if you have the choice.
If you work for a big company and do the same thing as a bunch of other people, then they might just let you go on the spot because they don't need you and can just get on with hiring your replacement. In this situation, you should be mindful of what the HR department will say if future potential employers call for a reference. Some large companies have a policy of only being allowed to tell others the dates you worked there. Others may have a policy of saying whether you were terminated or quit. Also be mindful of the working relationship you have with your bosses. Are they going to be pissed off and likely to fire you on the spot, or maybe the figure you're not going to get anything done anyway and let you go, or are they going to be happy to have you around for 2 more weeks, throw you a going away party (hopefully with cake and ice cream), and wish you the best?
And of course, if you work for a large company see what's happened to other people who have given notice.
The interim President has also declared an indefinite state of emergency, "allowing security forces to arrest and detain civilians indefinitely without charge."
That sounds really scary, but the US has been doing this for TWELVE YEARS. If the US's goal is to spread its ways...mission accomplished in Egypt!
Those are your chances of being a victim. 230 deaths a year is the justification for all the tax dollars, trampled rights and illegal activity.
I wonder how many more lives would be saved if that money was funneled into medical care or medical research, or into making cars and roads safer...
This isn't about being white or race in general, it's about domestic labor versus imported labor.
They could have hired British H1B workers and it would be just as illegal.
While that's true, that's not what the lawsuit claims. According to TFA, she is claiming discrimination, and it even mentions the Civil Rights Act, although the article does mention that the lawsuit mention that they are abusing H-1B visas, probably to set the stage for the motivation behind the discrimination. My guess is that if it's discrimination, then the plaintiff (and of course her lawyers) can sue for damages. If it's a violation of H-1B law, then it's probably up to the government to deal with it, which will depend of course on the lobbying power and campaign contributions of Infosys and its ilk.
Of course, now they'll probably just change all of their job requirements to include fluency in Hindi with the excuse that all employees need to be able to communication with their counterparts in India.
Sounds great but it will be expensive. Probably somewhere well over $50 billion.
In other words, still less than the US government's (pretty much failed) F-22 program. Of course, NBN benefits everybody in the country, while the F-22 mostly benefits a few individuals (aka campaign contributors) who got to pocket the profits of the $66.7 billion.
Also, your first responders should always be prepared, right? Sounds to me like you folks have issues with what the responsibilities of first responders are supposed to be. Hint: Its not "be unprepared most of the time."
Wow. So in your area, 100% of your cops, paramedics, firefighters, and utility workers are on duty and working 100% of the time? No off time, no shift changes? I hope they're getting paid very well considering they aren't allowed sleep, have a family life, hobbies, recreation, etc. Your municipality must have lots and lots of extra money to spend on overtime, your property tax must be astronomical. Wasn't there a movie about personnel like that? I think it was called Universal Soldier, and as a recall some of them went insane and started killing innocent people.
If you have every available resource on duty and staged in predetermined areas, you can respond to incidents a lot faster than calling people in from home once the storm actually hits.
Spoken by somebody who has not experienced a severe storm. Just 2 days ago we had tropical storm Flossie hit us. The predictions saved *a lot* of damage and maybe lives. It gave time to inform fisherman of the coming ocean conditions. It gave time for first responders and utilities to prepare. It gave me time to secure my home. It turns out that in my area, it didn't last very long but had intense lightning/thunder that shook my house, followed by intense wind that shook my house, and heavy, horizontal rain. I only lost power for about an hour and half and water was unaffected, thanks to the preparations of our utility providers.
Now that said, we didn't know exactly when it would hit or what areas would be affected how much. Were we to have had more precision, we could saved a lot of time and effort in the areas that it didn't hit while focusing on the areas that it did hit. So, while supercomputers are expensive, storm prediction saves more money than it costs [citation needed, I know I know]. If it had been a full on hurricane, then the more precise the prediction the more millions of dollars in damage (not to mention grief and potentially lives) it'll save.
It seems that slashdotters think that the title of a patent IS the patent. For any patent title "A method for doing X," it does not mean that any method for doing X is covered by the patent. The patent describes the specific method of doing X. Now, sometimes the specific method is still totally obvious, not novel, and/or has plenty of prior art. But just because the title says "Method and system to create, transmit, receive and process information, including an address to further information" does not mean or imply that it covers every method for doing so.
Now that said, based on the abstract this is still likely a bullshit patent, I'm just sayin' don't assume so based only on the title because there are plenty of legit, novel patents that are titled in this manner. Of course, this is still just based on the abstract, I'm not gonna read the whole patent.
Abstract
A method and system for sending and receiving Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in electronic mail over the Internet. An electronic mail document containing a URL may have several different types. If the message type indicates a URL, when the received URL type document is read or browsed using a multimedia Internet browser, the URL is looked up so that the information corresponding to the URL is displayed without necessarily displaying any portion of the received message. If the received document is of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) type, the document may be displayed and a user may "click" on the URL to look up the information corresponding to the URL. If the received document is of the text type, the text may be converted to the HTML format and the HTML format document displayed so that a user may "click" on the URL in order to look up the information corresponding to the URL without the need to type in the URL address.
It's been incredibly annoying.
I agree. In my case, it's because they don't seem to distinguish common weather alerts from real natural disasters. In my area (Maui), every time it rains there's potential for flash flooding, and everyone who lives here knows it. So every time it rains, I get a loud annoying alert every couple of hours. I can see out the window. Everyone who lives here can see out the window. But I'm sure there's liability involved because tourists don't know not to play in the gullies in the rain, and the state has been sued before when someone got swept out to sea (happens sometimes), so they are probably scared to not send those out and in reality it really could save a tourist's life. The problem is, if I turn it off, I'm turning it off for real natural disasters too. I want to know ASAP if a tsunami is on its way. I want to turn off the weather alerts (flash flood warnings) but not the alerts for real disasters.
If you work for a corporation and its telling you they never back anything up and anything you delete is deleted forever and then you find out that they lied and everything any employee every did was secretly backed up for all eternity, this would change how you view that corporation. This would also change how the customers view that corporation which lies to it's own employees about it's practices.
I know it's just an analogy, but here's where your analogy is so fundamentally different that it is completely inapplicable: In the case of the corporation, the corporation is backing up data they own on systems they own. The NSA, on the other hand, is not just backing up data on its own systems. If you visit the NSA's website, and they log that activity, sure, that meets your analogy. But we're talking about the NSA collecting and storing data from systems that do not belong to them. Add to that the fact that they're a government entity and that whole pesky constitution document....
It's catch 22
No, it's not. They didn't simply lie about their activities. They lied about breaking the law and violating the constitution. You're focused entirely on the fact that they lied, not the fact that they broke the law. A more appropriate analogy would be if you lied about committing a murder, then were later found out to be the murderer. Which is the sentencing judge going to focus more on, the fact that you lied, or that fact that you committed a murder?
How can the NSA expect the uninformed voter to make an informed decision if it keeps the voter in the dark?
Now you're getting it!
I know a lot of ./ is gonna come at this from a "those greedy scum bags" point of view, but this makes perfect sense from an overall humanity point of view, not just a greedy corporation point of view. Put power hungry stuff in a place where the power doesn't spew CO2 into the atmosphere thanks to hydroelectric. Someplace where they can use much less power by taking advantage of the outside cold. This is how it should be.
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
I'm pretty sure I'd notice a keylogger on my network sending every keystroke out to elsewhere...
As for the leap from idea to typing, that technology is the sole purview of the NSA it seems...
If you're talking about what you're typing into a search engine's text box, then yeah, the implementations/configurations of most users send keystroke by keystroke for autocomplete/suggest purposes. How about word processing...ever heard of Google Docs? Yeah, a lot of people use it, and yeah, it sends keystroke by keystroke.
Okay, maybe not literally as you type as there is sure to be some latency between idea and keyboard and a little more between keyboard and Google, but close enough. And of course, he didn't say all of your ideas, this would would be the case for ideas that you form while you're typing, and for typing then sends everything you type somewhere they're watching.
To be fair to PETA, at least one example from TFA is absolutely false:
it objects to terms like "animal Kervorkians,"
It is completely false and unfair to compare PETA to Dr. Kevorkian. Dr. Kervokian only killed people who volunteered to die. PETA, on the other hand, is killing animals who have not volunteered to die. PETA is an organization animal murderers (the meat goes to waste, therefore it is murder and not food) while Dr. Kevorkian assisted patients in committing suicide. Big difference.
I saw the title and said to myself, "No shit flu can spread from person to person."
Then they talk about "bird" flu and say it spreads from ferret to ferret. I've had a public school education, so maybe I missed the day where they told us ferrets were birds and not mammals.
The connection with ferrets is that ferrets and humans share the same "human influenza" virus and can pass it on to each other. So, that means that if ferrets can get this type of influenza and pass it on, there is a reasonable probability that humans can too. That doesn't mean this is an "OMG were all gonna die!!!" sort of thing, it just means that this particular test shows a reasonable probably that humans could spread the virus from each other, and points out that the test were done under ideal (ideal to the virus) conditions.
Frankly I don't think the title is overly sensationalistic, nor is the quoted part of the summary, but the part "how the bird flu may wipe us out" is sensationalistic, inaccurate, and the editor who put it in there should be fired or sent over to Fox News.
Except that's just not how the market work. Focusing might sound good on the surface, but in reality it's not going to be the most successful. It might even be better for the customers that it has, but it's not going to make more money. First off, if you can buy everything from one place then you are used to and comfortable with buying stuff from that place, so a vast majority of people will buy stuff from that store. Who do you think sells more dog food in America, Petco or WalMart? Secondly, if you're a company with more revenue streams, you have more resources to develop new products, and you have more resources to hold yourself up between the time you release those products and the time you actually start making a profit off of them.
You can argue that Kobo's focusing could lead to better results in terms of user experience, but they aren't going to beat Amazon in terms of market share unless they really come up with something consumers think is unique and amazing.
talent pool is lacking = we don't want to pay
So why not have a minimum salary for H1B employees? Increase with inflation every year of course.
If an H1B is truly necessary because the talent is lacking, the presumably they'd be willing to pay. If it's because they only want to pay a foreigner $35k/yr for job with a market value of $70k/yr, then that's not what the H1B program is supposed to be about. Set the minimum at something like $80k/yr, and you'll be limiting it to folks who are really in high demand and the absolute in their field, otherwise you can hire an American.
I mean, really, what talent is there that should pay less than $80k/yr that you really cannot find an American to hire for?
And calling this "bribery" isn't always correct. "Extortion" is probably just as a appropriate at times.
Or, in the US, where it's called "campaign contributions" and "lobbying."
Imagine it's 2003, and Slashdot has an article about the widely criticized Iraqi invasion. An American makes a post just like yours:
"But invading Kuwait was ok, huh?"
Would you have embraced that sentiment? Would the moderators have modded it up?
I imagine that poster would be flooded with indignant replies containing variations of "two wrongs don't make a right"
Now imagine again that it's 2003. We know that North Korea is close to getting nukes, and their leader is literally insane. Far away, we have a bit of unreliable intelligence from some dude that was tortured and told us Saddam had WMDs, that we know is unreliable (because the guys that tortured him and told us about it also told us that it was unreliable). We also know that even if these WMDs do exist, they are not nukes. Also, unlike North Korea, Saddam was a major asshole but was not actually literally insane (at least not more than any other asshole politician). We know that if we take Saddam's regime out, we'll have to be there for a very, very long time to prevent an even bigger asshole from taking over. Meanwhile, our friends in South Korea would be happy to take over North Korea if we took out Kim Jong-Il's regime, and unite North and South Korea, significantly helping the entire population of North Korea.
10 Years prior, your daddy (president at that time) and your current VP (Secretary of Defense at that time) had both said invading Iraq to go after Saddam would have been obviously stupid. Your current VP even explained why it would be utterly stupid in an interview with C-SPAN in 1994.
Which country do you invade?
Major internet service providers today will start monitoring the internet traffic to their customers' computers
False. The ISPs will not be monitoring traffic. The *IAA will monitor bittorrent and report IPs to the ISPs. Not that this isn't still bad, but at least get your facts straight in the first sentence of the summary. Even TFA got it more or less right:
Under the new program, the industry will monitor "peer-to-peer" software services for evidence of copyrighted files being shared.
Industry, as in the *IAA, not the ISP.
How about just making it require a password to power off, put it in airplane mode, or disable Find My iPhone so you can use find my phone? As it is you can still turn the phone off even if the lock screen is passworded. I don't want to have to enter a PIN every time I unlock my phone, but I also don't want a thief to be able to disable Find My iPhone (such as by turning it off), and I wouldn't mind entering a password on the rare occasions I turn the phone off or put it in airplane mode. Do any Android phones have a feature like that?
I think most thieves know to turn off an iPhone that they've stolen.
If I knowingly loan one of my guns or vehicles to someone I know, or should know, to be a problem, I would expect to be held liable to some degree. If, however, someone steals one of these things or otherwise accesses them without my permission, the liability is theirs.
And what if you loan out your hunting rifle to your friend to go hunting, and they end up murdering somebody with it, should you be held responsible? What if you loan your car to your friend to go grocery shopping and they end up running a red light and killing somebody, should you be liable? I think only if you have a reasonable belief that the individual might use it for that purpose. How about if somebody steals your car or gun and does the same?
One problem with WiFi is that you don't necessarily know if somebody else is using it. In the case of a car or a gun, you generally know if it gets stolen because it's not where you left it. Sure, you can lock your doors, but somebody can always break a window. With WiFi, sure, you can always click the little password checkbox, but it's still not hard for somebody to break into it. In most situations (that is, most people with most setups) they're not going to be able to tell if somebody else was using their WiFi.
Another car analogy...if your car runs a red light with a red light camera, or speeds and gets caught by photo radar, if somebody else is driving your car then should the burden of proof lie on you to prove somebody else was driving, or on law enforcement to prove you were driving?