A lot of people _like_ sharing all the minutia of their day with the entire world. I don't get it, but it's their choice.
And that's RMS's exact point: it's their choice. Not Canonical's, not society's, not law enforcement's, and it should not be chosen for us by them as the default setting. If they think it's valuable, they can turn it on for themselves. And that can be made very easy for them, certainly no harder than entering a Facebook password.
Now, I've never used the search feature in Unity, so maybe I've never sent anything to Amazon or Canonical. But I really don't know that for sure any longer, and now my whole damn netbook is suspect.
As much as I hate to agree with RMS on just about anything, he's absolutely right on this one. We should be able to trust an Open Source distro. And that's been blown.
I didn't want this to be a partisan discussion because both sides clearly have voted to crap all over us on the particular issue of copyright and IP. Yes, there are plenty of other issues where one side is clearly there to shit upon the 99%ers, and there are a handful of greedy idiots here who defend those lies, but that has nothing to do with this particular topic.
Sorry, just keeping track of who voted for bad things is hard enough. Keeping track of who is being hypocritical in Congress is a full-time job, best left to late-night-comedian-staff-writers. And it turns out that is pretty much non-partisan. The harder task is keeping track of those who occasionally aren't being disingenuous.
I don't believe anyone goes into politics with that attitude. I think people get into politics because they want to make a real positive change.
But once they get into office, they discover that the only way they can get anything at all is to strike a deal with an existing Devil, which earns them their junior grade horns. From there, it's not far down the slope to the pit of lying to anyone for a few reelection dollars - and there's no climbing out of that pit. So they grab a pitchfork and become a fully licensed devil, striking "deals" with the next crop of new guys.
No, this is not a party line problem at all. Both R's and D's voted for copyright extension, and I know the D's are at least as bad as the R's because so many of them also supported crap like SOPA.
Basically, it's whoever takes money from the [MP|RI|MAFI]AA is who votes in favor of copyright extension.
If you want more interesting confirmation, take a look at the books written by Christopher Andrew from Vasily Mitrokhin's notes. Mitrokhin was a senior archivist for the KGB during a significant span of the Cold War, and one of his jobs was to destroy old case notes of KGB activities. He was troubled that these significant activities should be lost to history, so he made handwritten copies of many of the intelligence activities the KGB undertook. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he drove his collection of notes over the border and delivered them to the British Consulate.
The absolutely stunning thing about his notes is that they reinforce almost everything the U.S. government had told us was Soviet lies and propaganda. That includes really dirty stuff, like the pernicious rumors that "AIDS was a product of U.S. Army experiments in Fort Dietrich", which he reveals to be the product of an active KGB disinformation campaign that was part of a deliberate plan to embarrass the U.S. government. (That particular rumor was so cruel and useless that the KGB later tried to discredit it, but it still lives on in the minds of conspiracy theorists.)
It's really cool to read the book and have direct confirmation from the USSR's own records that that the U.S. government and the CIA were not lying to us, and that these lies came straight from a KGB operation. This isn't the CIA whining "we didn't lie, please believe our records," this is direct evidence that the KGB created these lies.
But does the U.S. lie to us? They certainly withhold a metric ton of facts on a daily basis, and undoubtedly there are some specific instances of individuals lying. But I don't think it happens on the vast scale that the conspiracy theorists would have us believe.
Besides this, the article is bollocks made up by people who have had too much pot/coffee and not enough exposure to the real world. China's govt doesn't give a shit about your crappy companies secrets. They don't bother stealing technology when it's cheaper and easier to buy it from the Russians. As for corporate espionage, once again not a big problem as it's cheaper to buy it than steal it and it's easier to steal it from the factory (where there are lots of low paid workers to bribe) than sneaking into some gwailo's room and rifling through his shit (also, people capable of stealing secrets from you are typically quite smart).
While I hate the screwed up metadata too, I found that correcting it one time after importing a bunch of CDs simply wasn't that hard. I figured out how to efficiently navigate my way through the screens, and which fields to go fix. Most tracks didn't need any clean up at all, and it took less than a minute per disc to fix those that did. Once I established a repeatable pattern, I knocked off the whole collection with about two hours of work.
That was a lot easier than trying to fix them in EAC on a disc-by-disc basis. Trying to do it while ripping slowed down the import process, and EAC doesn't have the best interface for all that stuff.
It's just one of those things where you just have to sit down and do it. And I certainly don't blame the crowd for the varying quality of the crowdsourced data, either. It just comes with the package.
Yes, big TVs are a big deal in the US. Size Matters over everything else. That means that some people even buy TVs that are too big for their room.
But size was one reason DLP was never on my list of choices. The footprint for a 42" TV is something like 8 square feet of floor space, and I just don't have that big of a house. A flat panel hangs on the wall, nicely out of the way.
Actually, long ago I remember reading the story of SimTower, and it actually started out as an elevator simulator research tool! It turned out that the simulator was so much fun to play that someone had the bright idea to morph it into a video game.
Cellular is just a last mile solution to reach the mobile devices. The actual infrastructure that carries data between cells is primarily a physical network, generally fiber, with some copper to older towers. It's not going to do much to get data in and out of the country if Syrian Telecommunications has shut off the network.
Unless you were just trying to make a joke. In that case, keep trying. Eventually you might.
That's like an old math puzzler: if you are 30 miles from your destination, and you drive 30 MPH to get there, how fast do you have to make the return trip to average 60 MPH for the whole trip?
Don't panic. It doesn't matter for this application if your phone is tied to your identity. All they care about is if the average times of devices detected that passed points a, b, and c. They don't have to perfectly scan every phone, or perfectly know every MAC address. They're just trying to learn the average speed of the traffic moving on a particular stretch of road at a particular time.
They can get equal information from a spoofed MAC.
Now, what they probably aren't expecting is a concerted effort by hackers to time the spoofing of a bunch of MAC addresses so as to make traffic appear to be averaging 200/kph, and then driving the course in reverse.
the city says it cannot connect the MAC address collected to the device owner...until you renew your license at the DMV while wearing your MAC-transmitting Bluetooth enabled device and they sniff it from you.
Thanks for doing the math. I agree that $16 billion is not an unrealistic number. The thing is I think it would be close enough to profitable that most large automakers would assume that risk.
Wow. You are nuts. Not only will computer-controlled cars not reduce accidents by 95%, but overall damage from accidents will increase.
The number of accidents will go down, but many of those are minor--such as backing out of a parking spot and tapping the car behind you. Pretty all minor accidents may be eliminated. But in their place we'll see more serious accidents. So instead of one person hitting the gas instead of the break, you'll have every car of a particular make or model hitting the gas instead of the break.
[Thanks for the ad hominem attack.]
You are imagining an awful lot of things there, things I didn't say, things about bad implementations that should never see the light of day, and you are forgetting the most crucial element: the standard of comparison is an Average American Driver. Yes, those idiots who eat their donuts and drink their coffee and shave their faces and read their newspapers and apply lipstick and mascara and text their spouses lies about their whereabouts while sitting behind the wheel of their two ton vehicles traveling at 65 MPH. And those are over and above all the drunk, stoned, and just plain stupid drivers out there.
I would drive in the middle of a crowd of robot-controlled cars 7 days a week compared to sharing the roads with those selfish fools. And I would be the one putting the occupants of those robotic cars at the most risk, because I could sneeze or snooze or have a heart attack or a seizure. Humans may be far more capable and flexible, but we are more fragile, a lot slower, and a whole lot less attentive than an automated system. Assuming we would see a 95% reduction in serious accidents would be an unfair comparison -- to the robots.
Now, I don't know you. For all I know, you may have godlike driving abilities, reflexes faster than Jeff Gordon, and you may live and breathe in a hyperaware state that NoDoz users can only envy. Fine. I will trust that you are way above average, and that you are in fact the guy who taught Jason Statham's stunt driver everything he knows. Now imagine all those lesser beings out there, threatening you with their very existence. Would you rather share a road with Sally Soccermom who is racing home at 90MPH because her Precious Little Jimmy got beat up on the playground and has a nosebleed? Do you want to be stuck next to Cathy Cougar who just found out her husband has been cheating on her, and she can't wait to get home and beat him with his damn golf clubs? Or do you want to drive next to a fleet of programmed automatons that aren't going to change lanes without signalling 100 yards in advance, that aren't going to slow down because there's a pretty bird on a signpost and its a lovely Tuesday afternoon, and that aren't going to be mad at their ex- for not paying the child support this month?
What about a crossbow with broadhead arrows (bolts?)
The nice thing about a crossbow is the park's neighbors won't hear you firing it, and you won't get a dozen phone calls to the police about shotgun fire in the nearby woodlands. The bad thing about a crossbow bolt is that is every bit as dangerous at the end of its flight as it is at the start. Shotgun pellets fired skyward will not reach a lethal velocity on the way down. A slug will tumble and lose energy. A broadhead tipped bolt, on the other hand, has nice aligning feathers that ensure it will fall back to earth razor-sharp-point-first at a high terminal velocity.
Oh, I know they don't like to spend money. But if the choice is between being forced into an upgrade by a clearly untrustworthy vendor for $50/room, and an unknown but Open Source vendor for $40/room, I should think that the money would win out above all other factors. And yes, I hear you that the preferential option that will likely be chosen by the sleazier hotels (read: almost all of them) will be to do nothing for $0/room.
But all of that has to be weighed against the potential for lawsuits filed by burglary victims, or worse, by people who are assaulted on your property due in part to a failure of security. Upgrading all the locks in an entire building wing is likely cheaper than fighting a lawsuit that you are almost certain to lose if you knew about the problem but didn't upgrade.
Even if you won every single time, can you imagine the legal costs?
No, but I can imagine a change to the legal system limiting the liability of the manufacturers of self-driving cars.
If we could know that self-driving cars reduce accidents by 95% (a not unrealistic amount), it would be morally wrong for us to not put them on the road. If the only hurdle the manufacturers had left was the liability issue, then it would be morally wrong for Congress to not change the laws.
Of course, Congress has been morally bankrupt since, oh, about 1789, so I doubt that they'll see this as an imperative. On the other hand, I do imagine the car makers paying lobbyists and making campaign contributions to ensure that self-driving car manufacturers are exempted from these lawsuits, so it could still happen.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people _like_ sharing all the minutia of their day with the entire world. I don't get it, but it's their choice.
And that's RMS's exact point: it's their choice. Not Canonical's, not society's, not law enforcement's, and it should not be chosen for us by them as the default setting. If they think it's valuable, they can turn it on for themselves. And that can be made very easy for them, certainly no harder than entering a Facebook password.
Now, I've never used the search feature in Unity, so maybe I've never sent anything to Amazon or Canonical. But I really don't know that for sure any longer, and now my whole damn netbook is suspect.
As much as I hate to agree with RMS on just about anything, he's absolutely right on this one. We should be able to trust an Open Source distro. And that's been blown.
Well spoken, my anonymous friend. I would grant you mod points, if I had them to give.
Best Godwin Evar!
I didn't want this to be a partisan discussion because both sides clearly have voted to crap all over us on the particular issue of copyright and IP. Yes, there are plenty of other issues where one side is clearly there to shit upon the 99%ers, and there are a handful of greedy idiots here who defend those lies, but that has nothing to do with this particular topic.
Sorry, just keeping track of who voted for bad things is hard enough. Keeping track of who is being hypocritical in Congress is a full-time job, best left to late-night-comedian-staff-writers. And it turns out that is pretty much non-partisan. The harder task is keeping track of those who occasionally aren't being disingenuous.
I don't believe anyone goes into politics with that attitude. I think people get into politics because they want to make a real positive change.
But once they get into office, they discover that the only way they can get anything at all is to strike a deal with an existing Devil, which earns them their junior grade horns. From there, it's not far down the slope to the pit of lying to anyone for a few reelection dollars - and there's no climbing out of that pit. So they grab a pitchfork and become a fully licensed devil, striking "deals" with the next crop of new guys.
No, this is not a party line problem at all. Both R's and D's voted for copyright extension, and I know the D's are at least as bad as the R's because so many of them also supported crap like SOPA.
Basically, it's whoever takes money from the [MP|RI|MAFI]AA is who votes in favor of copyright extension.
If you want more interesting confirmation, take a look at the books written by Christopher Andrew from Vasily Mitrokhin's notes. Mitrokhin was a senior archivist for the KGB during a significant span of the Cold War, and one of his jobs was to destroy old case notes of KGB activities. He was troubled that these significant activities should be lost to history, so he made handwritten copies of many of the intelligence activities the KGB undertook. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he drove his collection of notes over the border and delivered them to the British Consulate.
The absolutely stunning thing about his notes is that they reinforce almost everything the U.S. government had told us was Soviet lies and propaganda. That includes really dirty stuff, like the pernicious rumors that "AIDS was a product of U.S. Army experiments in Fort Dietrich", which he reveals to be the product of an active KGB disinformation campaign that was part of a deliberate plan to embarrass the U.S. government. (That particular rumor was so cruel and useless that the KGB later tried to discredit it, but it still lives on in the minds of conspiracy theorists.)
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB is one of my favorite books.
It's really cool to read the book and have direct confirmation from the USSR's own records that that the U.S. government and the CIA were not lying to us, and that these lies came straight from a KGB operation. This isn't the CIA whining "we didn't lie, please believe our records," this is direct evidence that the KGB created these lies.
But does the U.S. lie to us? They certainly withhold a metric ton of facts on a daily basis, and undoubtedly there are some specific instances of individuals lying. But I don't think it happens on the vast scale that the conspiracy theorists would have us believe.
Besides this, the article is bollocks made up by people who have had too much pot/coffee and not enough exposure to the real world. China's govt doesn't give a shit about your crappy companies secrets. They don't bother stealing technology when it's cheaper and easier to buy it from the Russians. As for corporate espionage, once again not a big problem as it's cheaper to buy it than steal it and it's easier to steal it from the factory (where there are lots of low paid workers to bribe) than sneaking into some gwailo's room and rifling through his shit (also, people capable of stealing secrets from you are typically quite smart).
Oh, really? China has been caught stealing from all kinds of crappy little companies. http://www.defensenews.com/article/20111106/DEFSECT04/111060302/Chinese-Cyber-Espionage-Growing-U-S-Report
Did you just suggest "two ports, one drive"? Eeew.
While I hate the screwed up metadata too, I found that correcting it one time after importing a bunch of CDs simply wasn't that hard. I figured out how to efficiently navigate my way through the screens, and which fields to go fix. Most tracks didn't need any clean up at all, and it took less than a minute per disc to fix those that did. Once I established a repeatable pattern, I knocked off the whole collection with about two hours of work.
That was a lot easier than trying to fix them in EAC on a disc-by-disc basis. Trying to do it while ripping slowed down the import process, and EAC doesn't have the best interface for all that stuff.
It's just one of those things where you just have to sit down and do it. And I certainly don't blame the crowd for the varying quality of the crowdsourced data, either. It just comes with the package.
Yes, big TVs are a big deal in the US. Size Matters over everything else. That means that some people even buy TVs that are too big for their room.
But size was one reason DLP was never on my list of choices. The footprint for a 42" TV is something like 8 square feet of floor space, and I just don't have that big of a house. A flat panel hangs on the wall, nicely out of the way.
Actually, long ago I remember reading the story of SimTower, and it actually started out as an elevator simulator research tool! It turned out that the simulator was so much fun to play that someone had the bright idea to morph it into a video game.
Ooo! Good point!
All he has to do is say "Look at Windows 8. Now look at Unity."
Oh, wait. Bad example.
Cellular is just a last mile solution to reach the mobile devices. The actual infrastructure that carries data between cells is primarily a physical network, generally fiber, with some copper to older towers. It's not going to do much to get data in and out of the country if Syrian Telecommunications has shut off the network.
Unless you were just trying to make a joke. In that case, keep trying. Eventually you might.
Or the Symbionese Libation Army?
That's like an old math puzzler: if you are 30 miles from your destination, and you drive 30 MPH to get there, how fast do you have to make the return trip to average 60 MPH for the whole trip?
A lot of people will quickly say 90 MPH.
Don't panic. It doesn't matter for this application if your phone is tied to your identity. All they care about is if the average times of devices detected that passed points a, b, and c. They don't have to perfectly scan every phone, or perfectly know every MAC address. They're just trying to learn the average speed of the traffic moving on a particular stretch of road at a particular time.
They can get equal information from a spoofed MAC.
Now, what they probably aren't expecting is a concerted effort by hackers to time the spoofing of a bunch of MAC addresses so as to make traffic appear to be averaging 200/kph, and then driving the course in reverse.
I figured your non-fix deserved my non-fix.
Thanks for doing the math. I agree that $16 billion is not an unrealistic number. The thing is I think it would be close enough to profitable that most large automakers would assume that risk.
Wow. You are nuts. Not only will computer-controlled cars not reduce accidents by 95%, but overall damage from accidents will increase.
The number of accidents will go down, but many of those are minor--such as backing out of a parking spot and tapping the car behind you. Pretty all minor accidents may be eliminated. But in their place we'll see more serious accidents. So instead of one person hitting the gas instead of the break, you'll have every car of a particular make or model hitting the gas instead of the break.
[Thanks for the ad hominem attack.]
You are imagining an awful lot of things there, things I didn't say, things about bad implementations that should never see the light of day, and you are forgetting the most crucial element: the standard of comparison is an Average American Driver. Yes, those idiots who eat their donuts and drink their coffee and shave their faces and read their newspapers and apply lipstick and mascara and text their spouses lies about their whereabouts while sitting behind the wheel of their two ton vehicles traveling at 65 MPH. And those are over and above all the drunk, stoned, and just plain stupid drivers out there.
I would drive in the middle of a crowd of robot-controlled cars 7 days a week compared to sharing the roads with those selfish fools. And I would be the one putting the occupants of those robotic cars at the most risk, because I could sneeze or snooze or have a heart attack or a seizure. Humans may be far more capable and flexible, but we are more fragile, a lot slower, and a whole lot less attentive than an automated system. Assuming we would see a 95% reduction in serious accidents would be an unfair comparison -- to the robots.
Now, I don't know you. For all I know, you may have godlike driving abilities, reflexes faster than Jeff Gordon, and you may live and breathe in a hyperaware state that NoDoz users can only envy. Fine. I will trust that you are way above average, and that you are in fact the guy who taught Jason Statham's stunt driver everything he knows. Now imagine all those lesser beings out there, threatening you with their very existence. Would you rather share a road with Sally Soccermom who is racing home at 90MPH because her Precious Little Jimmy got beat up on the playground and has a nosebleed? Do you want to be stuck next to Cathy Cougar who just found out her husband has been cheating on her, and she can't wait to get home and beat him with his damn golf clubs? Or do you want to drive next to a fleet of programmed automatons that aren't going to change lanes without signalling 100 yards in advance, that aren't going to slow down because there's a pretty bird on a signpost and its a lovely Tuesday afternoon, and that aren't going to be mad at their ex- for not paying the child support this month?
What about a crossbow with broadhead arrows (bolts?)
The nice thing about a crossbow is the park's neighbors won't hear you firing it, and you won't get a dozen phone calls to the police about shotgun fire in the nearby woodlands. The bad thing about a crossbow bolt is that is every bit as dangerous at the end of its flight as it is at the start. Shotgun pellets fired skyward will not reach a lethal velocity on the way down. A slug will tumble and lose energy. A broadhead tipped bolt, on the other hand, has nice aligning feathers that ensure it will fall back to earth razor-sharp-point-first at a high terminal velocity.
Oh, I know they don't like to spend money. But if the choice is between being forced into an upgrade by a clearly untrustworthy vendor for $50/room, and an unknown but Open Source vendor for $40/room, I should think that the money would win out above all other factors. And yes, I hear you that the preferential option that will likely be chosen by the sleazier hotels (read: almost all of them) will be to do nothing for $0/room.
But all of that has to be weighed against the potential for lawsuits filed by burglary victims, or worse, by people who are assaulted on your property due in part to a failure of security. Upgrading all the locks in an entire building wing is likely cheaper than fighting a lawsuit that you are almost certain to lose if you knew about the problem but didn't upgrade.
Even if you won every single time, can you imagine the legal costs?
No, but I can imagine a change to the legal system limiting the liability of the manufacturers of self-driving cars.
If we could know that self-driving cars reduce accidents by 95% (a not unrealistic amount), it would be morally wrong for us to not put them on the road. If the only hurdle the manufacturers had left was the liability issue, then it would be morally wrong for Congress to not change the laws.
Of course, Congress has been morally bankrupt since, oh, about 1789, so I doubt that they'll see this as an imperative. On the other hand, I do imagine the car makers paying lobbyists and making campaign contributions to ensure that self-driving car manufacturers are exempted from these lawsuits, so it could still happen.