So as long as our personal information is only reasonably exploited, it's a-ok?
Yup, that's the deal. Facebook gets to use your personal information in certain more-or-less socially acceptable ways, e.g. to choose which ads they show to you, and in return you get unlimited use of the FaceBook site, without ever having to pay anyone any money.
That may or may not be a-ok for you, but FaceBook's user seem to find it acceptable; otherwise they presumably would not be FaceBook users.
If people are going to be on the web, they should at least have a clue about what the web is.
That would be nice, but face it -- if the only people who used the Internet were the people who had the time, brains, and inclination to understand how the Internet works, there wouldn't be an Internet.
Hell, I'm willing to bet that 75% of the people on this very site (subtitle: "News for Nerds") would have trouble identifying a privacy leak before they stepped in it. Myself included.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication.
I think you don't understand the concept of "reasonable expectation of privacy". It's not a technical idea meaning "this data is secure". It's a social/legal idea, meaning "third parties are supposed to know that this data is private, and so they should keep out of it even if they are technically able to look".
By that measure, you certainly do have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" for your email. For example, if your ISP started posting your emails to a public web page, you would have grounds for a lawsuit. Therefore, you can "reasonably expect" that your ISP won't do that.
Why can the government mandate what I put in my body? Who CARES if other people take drugs!
For the drugs that people can use and still remain functional and productive members of society (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, marijuana), I agree with you.
On the other hand, there are the "harder" drugs (speed, cocaine, heroine, PCP) where becoming addicted to the drug makes it likely that the person will no longer be able to stay employed/productive, and will end up an invalid or a petty criminal. A society can tolerate a certain number of people "dropping out", but if the participation rate in productive life drops too much, society suffers. i.e. every person who is spending the day staring at the ceiling is one person who is not contributing any economic or social value to society -- but who still needs food, shelter, and housing.
For that reason, society does have a legitimate interest in reducing the number of drug addicts. You may have a "right" to take drugs to the extent it hurts only yourself, but it needs to be balanced against my right not to have my car stereo stolen twice a month.
I usually roll with the slashdot crowd on liberty issues but not here. There's a reason medicine is locked up in pharmacies behind a prescription. People are stupid; very stupid.
Generally speaking, I agree with you -- heroine is a much more dangerous drug than, say, marijuana, and it should be kept out of peoples' hands to the extent possible.
The tough question, however, is how do we go about doing that? The current method -- making heroine illegal to sell or possess -- had had limited success, to put it diplomatically. Heroine junkies can still get heroine whenever they want it and can pay for it; their only problem is raising the cash to pay for their addiction, which is often done through petty crime.
So making heroine illegal has made heroin expensive, and thereby encourages heroine junkies to become criminal heroine junkies. Not exactly the result we wanted. (It may have kept some unknown other number of people from trying heroine in the first place -- but it's impossible to know how many. Personally I would imagine that heroine's reputation is a more effective deterrent than law enforcement in that regard, but that's just a guess)
I don't have a solution to the problem; I wish I did.
It always bugs me when people use this argument, I would be all for banning alcohol as well, it does far more damage then other drugs, but unfortunately they tried at already and it didn't work
There's nothing wrong with the argument AFAICT. They ended Prohibition because it didn't work -- too many people drank anyway, all making it illegal did was drive everything underground and encourage crime -- and they should lift "Prohibition on Marijuana" for the exact same reasons.
no machine should ever be connected to the internet "naked".
Of course, the NAT routers that you hide your Windows PCs behind are also computers... and you are attaching them to the internet "naked". What will protect them?:^)
If they didn't manifest in reality, we'd all have switched by now
Why would we? For those of us that already have IPv4 addresses, there's not a whole lot that IPv6 can do that IPv4 won't... so why bother?
It's the people who don't yet have IPv4 addresses and find it difficult to get them who will find IPv6 attractive.
IPv6 has been around long enough to call it an abysmal failure as far as I'm concerned. Next, please.
What alternatives are there? The world can stick with IPv4 until it's not practical anymore... and then what, IPv8? Not bloody likely... it will be IPv6, sooner or later. Probably later.
But even with me trying to accept it on that different format and what I thought was a honest effort on the part of the movie it just fell flat for me. (And most everyone else.)
I was initially disappointed by the movie also; I think that's because I was expecting it to be as funny as the book, and it wasn't. On a second watching on DVD, however, I was able to stop comparing it to the book and just enjoy it on its merits, and at that point I was able to appreciate it a good deal more -- it is, in fact, a good movie, when it's not obscured by the shadow of the books and the radio plays (neither of which had to cram everything into 90 minutes). My sister (who has never read any HHGTTG books) liked the movie even more than I did, which suggests to me that my initially disappointment was largely caused by my outsized expectations.
Why on earth do some people continue to abuse the thin (read: skinny and bone-rattling) web standards for tasks that are clearly more suited for a traditional rich client application?
There's only one real reason: having to download, install, and (every so often) upgrade an application is a pain in the ass. It's much more convenient to just point your (already-installed) web browser at the right URL and get right to doing (whatever it is the application does).
Seems to me the ideal solution is to host the Java code on the server, but cache a copy of it on the client, so that the client auto-downloads any changed code modules as part of the application startup.
That way the diverging-versions problem is taken care of (it acts like a web-app), but you still minimize startup time (in the common case where the app hasn't been updated on the server, anyway) and get to run rich code on the client.
There should have been non-stop crews ferrying materials down from that thing 24 hours a day. It should have been crawling with research teams, anchored to the ground, etc.
Presumably there were... but after 28 years, everything that could be safely ferried out, had been, and the research teams were either gone or semi-permanently residing inside the ship. As for anchoring it to the ground.... I'd imagine that when you have a gazillion-ton spaceship that is mysteriously hovering over a densely populated area, the last thing you want to do is try to mess with its anti-gravity system (assuming such an action is even possible, of course)
the Wikus, but I think the storytellers dropped the ball with what was happening in the background. My opinion...
Keep in mind that the ship has been sitting there for 28 years, without any noticeable change. The scientists, the media, the philosophers all got bored and went home 20 years ago.
If he were being honest, he would say that recursion is a just convoluted, unnecessarily confusing method of doing iteration
Some would say that iteration is just a convoluted, unnecessarily confusing method of doing recursion.
For example, try iterating over all the nodes in a tree without using recursion. It's doable, but more complicated and error-prone than the recursive method.
So, would you rather use a program that has been tested for 5 years and not "formally" verified, or a program that has been "formally" verified for 5 years but not tested
So, if this works, would we then have whole artifical forests creating hydrogen and methanol? How safe would these things be?
Tell you what -- when someone proposes actually building an "artificial hydrogen forest", we'll have a look at the blueprints they provide and discuss potential safety hazards and how to mitigate them. Until then, worrying about what might happen in a hypothetical energy plant that might be built some decades from, if the basic research (that has not even started yet) comes to fruition, is rather a pointless exercise in paranoia, don't you think?
Why on earth would you allow someone out of jail if you expected them to commit their crime over and over again?
Well, one reason is because there is the concept of "due process of law" in this country, which makes it illegal to hold people indefinitely just because they worry you. People are convicted and sentenced for their crimes, and once they have served their sentence they have the right to go free. (*)
You could argue that sex offenders should have longer sentences, but you really don't want to give policement/guards/politicians the ability to keep prisoners in jail indefinitely just because they don't like them. That kind of power quickly leads to the kind of abuses that habeus corpus was made to prevent.
(*) In theory, anyway -- in practice, it seems you can get around this by calling the person a terrorist, at which point the person's civil rights magically evaporate. But just because the application of law is currently f*cked up doesn't mean we should try to make the situation worse.
Aaaaannnd you just succinctly stated the major conflict between consumerism and environmentalism - in order for the latter to actually be effective, SOMEONE has to have the power to deny people what they wish, regardless of market forces
Sometimes it's a zero-sum game, but not always. There are cases (more common than you think) where what's better for the environment and what's better for the consumer are in fact the same thing.
For example, building insulation -- lots of people spend large amounts of their income every year on heating oil to keep poorly insulated houses livable. The environmentally correct thing to do -- install better insulation to reduce heating oil usage -- is also the best thing for the consumer, since the up-front cost of the insulation pays for itself in reduced heating costs, and once it is paid for the consumer continues to enjoy lowered costs thereafter.
Long range electric or efficient internal combustion. Please, please, pick one.
They chose a model that people are (hopefully) willing to buy. Until there are 5-minute electric charge "pumps" at every gas station, there are a lot of people who won't want to risk getting stranded somewhere because they can't find an electrical outlet, or because the electrical outlet they do find requires 3 hours to recharge the car.
Yes, there are tradeoffs to a hybrid design. But that's how you get there from here, not by wishing the world was perfect but by moving in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
So as long as our personal information is only reasonably exploited, it's a-ok?
Yup, that's the deal. Facebook gets to use your personal information in certain more-or-less socially acceptable ways, e.g. to choose which ads they show to you, and in return you get unlimited use of the FaceBook site, without ever having to pay anyone any money.
That may or may not be a-ok for you, but FaceBook's user seem to find it acceptable; otherwise they presumably would not be FaceBook users.
If people are going to be on the web, they should at least have a clue about what the web is.
That would be nice, but face it -- if the only people who used the Internet were the people who had the time, brains, and inclination to understand how the Internet works, there wouldn't be an Internet.
Hell, I'm willing to bet that 75% of the people on this very site (subtitle: "News for Nerds") would have trouble identifying a privacy leak before they stepped in it. Myself included.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication.
I think you don't understand the concept of "reasonable expectation of privacy". It's not a technical idea meaning "this data is secure". It's a social/legal idea, meaning "third parties are supposed to know that this data is private, and so they should keep out of it even if they are technically able to look".
By that measure, you certainly do have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" for your email. For example, if your ISP started posting your emails to a public web page, you would have grounds for a lawsuit. Therefore, you can "reasonably expect" that your ISP won't do that.
Thanks for posting that article; it is extremely informative.
Why can the government mandate what I put in my body? Who CARES if other people take drugs!
For the drugs that people can use and still remain functional and productive members of society (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, marijuana), I agree with you.
On the other hand, there are the "harder" drugs (speed, cocaine, heroine, PCP) where becoming addicted to the drug makes it likely that the person will no longer be able to stay employed/productive, and will end up an invalid or a petty criminal. A society can tolerate a certain number of people "dropping out", but if the participation rate in productive life drops too much, society suffers. i.e. every person who is spending the day staring at the ceiling is one person who is not contributing any economic or social value to society -- but who still needs food, shelter, and housing.
For that reason, society does have a legitimate interest in reducing the number of drug addicts. You may have a "right" to take drugs to the extent it hurts only yourself, but it needs to be balanced against my right not to have my car stereo stolen twice a month.
I'll get one of these, mount the camera part on the back of my bike helmet, and be able to "see" both forward and backwards at the same time!
I can finally get rid of that helmet-mounted mirror, so I won't look like a dork anymore!
I usually roll with the slashdot crowd on liberty issues but not here. There's a reason medicine is locked up in pharmacies behind a prescription. People are stupid; very stupid.
Generally speaking, I agree with you -- heroine is a much more dangerous drug than, say, marijuana, and it should be kept out of peoples' hands to the extent possible.
The tough question, however, is how do we go about doing that? The current method -- making heroine illegal to sell or possess -- had had limited success, to put it diplomatically. Heroine junkies can still get heroine whenever they want it and can pay for it; their only problem is raising the cash to pay for their addiction, which is often done through petty crime.
So making heroine illegal has made heroin expensive, and thereby encourages heroine junkies to become criminal heroine junkies. Not exactly the result we wanted. (It may have kept some unknown other number of people from trying heroine in the first place -- but it's impossible to know how many. Personally I would imagine that heroine's reputation is a more effective deterrent than law enforcement in that regard, but that's just a guess)
I don't have a solution to the problem; I wish I did.
It always bugs me when people use this argument, I would be all for banning alcohol as well, it does far more damage then other drugs, but unfortunately they tried at already and it didn't work
There's nothing wrong with the argument AFAICT. They ended Prohibition because it didn't work -- too many people drank anyway, all making it illegal did was drive everything underground and encourage crime -- and they should lift "Prohibition on Marijuana" for the exact same reasons.
It seems like most people here are scared of ipv6, yet never bothered to actually learn anything about it.
OTOH, some of us are scared by the things we have learned about it ;^)
no machine should ever be connected to the internet "naked".
Of course, the NAT routers that you hide your Windows PCs behind are also computers... and you are attaching them to the internet "naked". What will protect them? :^)
If they didn't manifest in reality, we'd all have switched by now
Why would we? For those of us that already have IPv4 addresses, there's not a whole lot that IPv6 can do that IPv4 won't... so why bother?
It's the people who don't yet have IPv4 addresses and find it difficult to get them who will find IPv6 attractive.
IPv6 has been around long enough to call it an abysmal failure as far as I'm concerned. Next, please.
What alternatives are there? The world can stick with IPv4 until it's not practical anymore... and then what, IPv8? Not bloody likely... it will be IPv6, sooner or later. Probably later.
But even with me trying to accept it on that different format and what I thought was a honest effort on the part of the movie it just fell flat for me. (And most everyone else.)
I was initially disappointed by the movie also; I think that's because I was expecting it to be as funny as the book, and it wasn't. On a second watching on DVD, however, I was able to stop comparing it to the book and just enjoy it on its merits, and at that point I was able to appreciate it a good deal more -- it is, in fact, a good movie, when it's not obscured by the shadow of the books and the radio plays (neither of which had to cram everything into 90 minutes). My sister (who has never read any HHGTTG books) liked the movie even more than I did, which suggests to me that my initially disappointment was largely caused by my outsized expectations.
Why on earth do some people continue to abuse the thin (read: skinny and bone-rattling) web standards for tasks that are clearly more suited for a traditional rich client application?
There's only one real reason: having to download, install, and (every so often) upgrade an application is a pain in the ass. It's much more convenient to just point your (already-installed) web browser at the right URL and get right to doing (whatever it is the application does).
Seems to me the ideal solution is to host the Java code on the server, but cache a copy of it on the client, so that the client auto-downloads any changed code modules as part of the application startup.
That way the diverging-versions problem is taken care of (it acts like a web-app), but you still minimize startup time (in the common case where the app hasn't been updated on the server, anyway) and get to run rich code on the client.
There should have been non-stop crews ferrying materials down from that thing 24 hours a day. It should have been crawling with research teams, anchored to the ground, etc.
Presumably there were... but after 28 years, everything that could be safely ferried out, had been, and the research teams were either gone or semi-permanently residing inside the ship. As for anchoring it to the ground.... I'd imagine that when you have a gazillion-ton spaceship that is mysteriously hovering over a densely populated area, the last thing you want to do is try to mess with its anti-gravity system (assuming such an action is even possible, of course)
the Wikus, but I think the storytellers dropped the ball with what was happening in the background. My opinion...
Don't worry, it's all grist for the prequel... ;)
That's a lot of oil in a plant which is supposed to generate electricity without fossil fuels...
The oil involved in this case was not fuel.
Read the book instead, it's really good. (and I say that as a male SF reader, btw)
Keep in mind that the ship has been sitting there for 28 years, without any noticeable change. The scientists, the media, the philosophers all got bored and went home 20 years ago.
What if your dog tells you to do something....like kill people?
Are you evil or is the dog?
The dog is evil, and you are silly for blindly obeying the commands of a dog.
The real question is, what if your God tells you to do something.. like kill people?
Are you evil, or is your God?
If he were being honest, he would say that recursion is a just convoluted, unnecessarily confusing method of doing iteration
Some would say that iteration is just a convoluted, unnecessarily confusing method of doing recursion.
For example, try iterating over all the nodes in a tree without using recursion. It's doable, but more complicated and error-prone than the recursive method.
So, would you rather use a program that has been tested for 5 years and not "formally" verified, or a program that has been "formally" verified for 5 years but not tested
I'd rather have both, please.
So, if this works, would we then have whole artifical forests creating hydrogen and methanol? How safe would these things be?
Tell you what -- when someone proposes actually building an "artificial hydrogen forest", we'll have a look at the blueprints they provide and discuss potential safety hazards and how to mitigate them. Until then, worrying about what might happen in a hypothetical energy plant that might be built some decades from, if the basic research (that has not even started yet) comes to fruition, is rather a pointless exercise in paranoia, don't you think?
Why on earth would you allow someone out of jail if you expected them to commit their crime over and over again?
Well, one reason is because there is the concept of "due process of law" in this country, which makes it illegal to hold people indefinitely just because they worry you. People are convicted and sentenced for their crimes, and once they have served their sentence they have the right to go free. (*)
You could argue that sex offenders should have longer sentences, but you really don't want to give policement/guards/politicians the ability to keep prisoners in jail indefinitely just because they don't like them. That kind of power quickly leads to the kind of abuses that habeus corpus was made to prevent.
(*) In theory, anyway -- in practice, it seems you can get around this by calling the person a terrorist, at which point the person's civil rights magically evaporate. But just because the application of law is currently f*cked up doesn't mean we should try to make the situation worse.
Aaaaannnd you just succinctly stated the major conflict between consumerism and environmentalism - in order for the latter to actually be effective, SOMEONE has to have the power to deny people what they wish, regardless of market forces
Sometimes it's a zero-sum game, but not always. There are cases (more common than you think) where what's better for the environment and what's better for the consumer are in fact the same thing.
For example, building insulation -- lots of people spend large amounts of their income every year on heating oil to keep poorly insulated houses livable. The environmentally correct thing to do -- install better insulation to reduce heating oil usage -- is also the best thing for the consumer, since the up-front cost of the insulation pays for itself in reduced heating costs, and once it is paid for the consumer continues to enjoy lowered costs thereafter.
Long range electric or efficient internal combustion. Please, please, pick one.
They chose a model that people are (hopefully) willing to buy. Until there are 5-minute electric charge "pumps" at every gas station, there are a lot of people who won't want to risk getting stranded somewhere because they can't find an electrical outlet, or because the electrical outlet they do find requires 3 hours to recharge the car.
Yes, there are tradeoffs to a hybrid design. But that's how you get there from here, not by wishing the world was perfect but by moving in that direction.