When someone is targetted for monitoring, they do not tell the person they are being monitorered, but simply advise them that the law prohibits them from telling them if they are being monitored, and lets them come to their own conclusion.
Or would simply repeating the text of the law itself constitute warning someone?
By the way, is anyone else having problems staying logged into slashdot lately? Almost every time I try to post anything, I am spontaneously logged out and told I am posting as anonymous coward. I log back in, click back to the stories page, and often find I am logged out again.
You touch on one right idea, that it can be caused by a hardship that the person does not know how to deal with, but gloss over it by suggesting that this should be considered synonymous with does not *want* to deal with the problem. It is not inconceivable that the hardship at hand has been quite thoroughly rationally analyzed, and living through it, perhaps because it is not so terribly short term at all, simply would make every conscious moment nothing but a burden. Death represents freedom from that. It may be seen as the easy way out, but in some all-too real cases it is the *only* way out. Suicide merely expedites the process.
So that would fit into the category I mentioned in the third paragraph.
There is very little from a commercial productivity standpoint that you can do with Windows that you cannot also do with Linux using different software other than simply being what somebody is used to.
But not everyone wants to be bothered learning something new, so Linux is simply too inconvenient for many people.
While this is a perfectly valid reason to not use Linux, it is worth noting that this is more of a case of the user not being ready to use Linux than Linux not being ready for the end-user.
Many of reasons that exist for Linux are largely a catch-22 (eg, not many people use Linux because most developers don't target that platform, and developers don't tend to target Linux beacuse there aren't enough users to justify the effort).
Certainly also Linux is not ready for the desktop of anyone who simply wants to copy what everybody else is doing (playing the latest AAA title that is only available for Windows, for example).
From a commercial standpoint, I could even see that it isn't ready for the desktop of someone who must essentially work with other people who for the sake of compatibility, dictate that everybody in the company using the exact same version of all of their software and running the exact same operating system, where their operating system is not Linux.
Where I work there are precisely zero Windows computers... reception has a mac, but all of the developers have Linux on their desktop.
It seems to me like the easiest way to avoid being identified in this regard would be to write code that follows any published general style guidelines or otherwise very common conventions.
As a side effect, it will make your source code more readable to others, which is beneficial if you are on a programming team.
The fee is not particularly excessive, and this is good, but is there any particular reason that does not ultimately reduce to simple bigotry to exclude people who are legally within the USA but not US citizens, possibly even just temporarily visiting from another country, from getting a license to safely fly their so-called "drone" while in the country's borders?
True... but many more do. Of course, bluetooth-based "drones" have never posed any of the problems for anyone that these regulations are being created because of. Excluding so-called "drones" with such a limited range that for most practical purposes would amount to line of sight operation anyways would still achieve the same ends without creating criminals out of innocent people that are not hurting or posing any threat to anyone or anything that laws are created to protect.
I'd suggest 300 feet as a maximum altitude, personally.... still *FAR* below the minimum safe flying altitude for any aircraft that is not just taking off or on final approach, and perhaps I cite this range specifically because it is also the maximum range of Bluetooth, a widely utilized wireless communication system across relatively short distances. Imposing the 300 foot maximum would not require an altimeter to be installed, and the altitude ceiling would instead be imposed by layer 1 constraints on communication with the device, rather than artificially imposed limits that require sensory devices to be installed and a mechanism that reliable responds to them.
Please enlighten me as to exactly what hazard to air navigation flying above one's own property at a height of less than 300 feet causes (the maximum range for bluetooth), exactly? Bearing in mind of course that the absolute *MINIMUM* safe altitude for an aircraft that is not either on final approach or in the process of taking off is well over twice that height. I can understand a potential hazard within perhaps as much as a few hundred yards of the airport, but outside of that? Really?
If the future is predetermined, why should whether or not the person knows about the prediction beforehand affect the outcome? Indeed, if the future is predetermined, it cannot. If the information cannot be communicated to that person, it is unknowable by that person at the time that they appear to make a decision, and therefore indistinguishable to that person from free will.
I didn't say it was urgent, I just claim that it's needed. The security issues that can arise from malicious urls or other kinds of redirects indistinguishably posing as legitimate ones can be mitigated by filtering out any characters in such redirects that do not match a white-list of acceptable characters.
Hey, I don't deny that even 7 bit ascii is more than adequate for a *vast* majority of what's out there, but that dangling few percent is still gonna be a bit of a bitch. And the time Unicode ever takes up more space than ascii is when you are using extended 8-bit ascii where the high bit of the byte is set anyways. The additional expressive power of the vastly larger character set is well worth the relatively small amount of additional storage that may be required.
I have no idea how I fundamentally make any of my decisions.
That is exactly my point.... that because we have no idea (and I suggest that we *cannot* ever know it), that your behavior is indistinguishable from that where you would have had free will, and suggesting that you don't have free will is actually a meaningless concept.
You do not invalidate the prediction, it's the prediction which was false because you calculated a universe where you did not give the information.
Obviously.... and again, that's my point, you *cannot* calculate the right universe in such a situation. The only conclusion is that such a situation cannot exist, but we can trivially show today that a person is capable of doing the opposite of whatever they are told to do (ask anyone who ever had a 4 year old child), so that aspect is certainly possible. The only remaining aspect of the problem is therefore whether that information about what they are going to do can be communicated to the person so it is knowable by them. If it cannot be communicated, then it cannot be known, and if it cannot be known, as far as they can ever be aware, their behavior is indistinguishable from that as if they had actually had free will anyways (and suggesting they do not have it is meaningless).
It seems counter-intuitive that I would be unable to make a decision other than the decision you tell me I'm going to make
It's not so much counter-intuitive to the notion of free will as much as it is impossible in a universe that can continue to offer any convincing illusion of choice at all.
One can easily build, for instance, an entirely deterministic system that has two possible outputs, and design it so it always outputs the opposite choice of whatever it is told to output, at which point it becomes impossible to truthfully provide as any input to that system whatever you might allegedly know the output is going be. Free will is not involved here at all. Either the universe itself is non-deterministic or else a sufficient knowledge of the state to predict the future in the first place is not knowable in the first place. If the universe is non-deterministic, then there is no reason to suggest that free will cannot exist. If the deterministic state of the universe is unknowable, then no test can be contrived which can demonstrate that we do not have free will, and suggesting that we do not have free will is meaningless, since our behavior is by all measurable standards indistinguishable from what a free-willed agent could do anyways.
Being free willed does not mean that one cannot or will not necessarily ever make so-called "decisions" that can be predicted from a knowledge of the state, it only means that one is *capable* of it. However, how is the behavior of a system where one is not capable of it any different than one where the state itself is unknowable? You can apply a variation of the halting problem to establish with certainty that either the universe is not deterministic, or else it impossible within its framework to contrive a test that incontrovertibly proves that it is so.
e.g. If I could know what decisions you were making (a notion that is at least theoretically possible, if the universe were truly deterministic), I could analyze it and predict the answer you would give to a particular question, even if I told you truthfully what the answer to that question were going to be.... however, with your so-called illusion of free will, you could utilize the information that I gave you in the present about your alleged future action, and then deliberately contradict it, invalidating the prediction that I made, meaning that my knowledge about the future state was incorrect, which leads one inescapably to the conclusion that even if the universe is deterministic, it is impossible to know it.
And it is noteworthy that by outward present appearances, we appear to have free will with regards to decisions that we make.
So if, by all the standards that can ever be measured, you appear to be a "free-willed" person, then how is your behavior any different than if you actually *were* a free-willed individual? And if your behavior is identical to as if you actually were a so-called "free-willed" being, what purpose does suggesting that you are not free willed even mean?
Plus of course, one cannot advocate the notion that we are not free willed without also suggesting that we abdicate the notion of personal responsibility... but that's a philosophical debate for another time.
When Apple doesn't have the keys in the first place, is that really non-compliance? And if so, how would they be expected to *POSSIBLY* "comply"? How can they hand over encryption keys they do not have?
Much like aluminum and aluminium. England got that one wrong as well. An Englishman named it Aluminum, as it was alum-like, but he didn't want the regular -ium as it wasn't a metal (it's a transition element that's semi-metalic), so he deliberately mis-named it, but this proper name assigned by the discoverer was ignored (in violation of convention) by the English and renamed. So the English re-named an element appropriately named by the discoverer, who was also English. So the proper English name is Aluminum (as it was named such by the discoverer, who was an Englishman), but used incorrectly, to this day, by the English, who insist that their error is more correct that the American's non-error.
At the time that Humphrey Davy discovered the element, in 1825, the convention was still relatively new, and it is possible that Davy had not yet really known about it when he first named the metal. There was no lack of ancient names of metals that ended in -um, and not -ium (argentum, aurum, cuprum, ferrum, hydrargyrum, plumbum, and stannum). Further, in even the few decades leading up to the metal's discovery, several English metals were quite recently named that did not use the "-ium" convention, molybdenum, platinum, and tantalum. Finally, the metal lanthanum was not discovered until 1837, over a decade later, but its discoverer did not try to follow the "-ium" convention either. "Aluminum" is hardly alone. The "-ium" suffix convention has been universally followed for all elements discovered since.
For what it's worth, Davy himself later decided to change its name from "Aluminum" to "Aluminium" to try and keep with the convention that was being adopted, substantiating the notion that when he had originally named it, he was simply not yet aware of that convention. Even the element now known Berylium had also been renamed from its original "-um" ending in the same decade (it was originally called glucinum), so such renaming is hardly a unique case even for its period. I do not know why the latter name change was internationally accepted while the former was not.
Slashdot Mirror
When someone is targetted for monitoring, they do not tell the person they are being monitorered, but simply advise them that the law prohibits them from telling them if they are being monitored, and lets them come to their own conclusion.
Or would simply repeating the text of the law itself constitute warning someone?
By the way, is anyone else having problems staying logged into slashdot lately? Almost every time I try to post anything, I am spontaneously logged out and told I am posting as anonymous coward. I log back in, click back to the stories page, and often find I am logged out again.
I make no argument to the morality of it, I only dispute the notion that suicide induced by hardship is necessarily an irrational act.
Do you seriously think that 20 years is "short term"?
You touch on one right idea, that it can be caused by a hardship that the person does not know how to deal with, but gloss over it by suggesting that this should be considered synonymous with does not *want* to deal with the problem. It is not inconceivable that the hardship at hand has been quite thoroughly rationally analyzed, and living through it, perhaps because it is not so terribly short term at all, simply would make every conscious moment nothing but a burden. Death represents freedom from that. It may be seen as the easy way out, but in some all-too real cases it is the *only* way out. Suicide merely expedites the process.
So that would fit into the category I mentioned in the third paragraph.
There is very little from a commercial productivity standpoint that you can do with Windows that you cannot also do with Linux using different software other than simply being what somebody is used to.
But not everyone wants to be bothered learning something new, so Linux is simply too inconvenient for many people.
While this is a perfectly valid reason to not use Linux, it is worth noting that this is more of a case of the user not being ready to use Linux than Linux not being ready for the end-user.
Many of reasons that exist for Linux are largely a catch-22 (eg, not many people use Linux because most developers don't target that platform, and developers don't tend to target Linux beacuse there aren't enough users to justify the effort).
Certainly also Linux is not ready for the desktop of anyone who simply wants to copy what everybody else is doing (playing the latest AAA title that is only available for Windows, for example).
From a commercial standpoint, I could even see that it isn't ready for the desktop of someone who must essentially work with other people who for the sake of compatibility, dictate that everybody in the company using the exact same version of all of their software and running the exact same operating system, where their operating system is not Linux.
Where I work there are precisely zero Windows computers... reception has a mac, but all of the developers have Linux on their desktop.
It seems to me like the easiest way to avoid being identified in this regard would be to write code that follows any published general style guidelines or otherwise very common conventions.
As a side effect, it will make your source code more readable to others, which is beneficial if you are on a programming team.
And what if the other country has no such regulations?
The fee is not particularly excessive, and this is good, but is there any particular reason that does not ultimately reduce to simple bigotry to exclude people who are legally within the USA but not US citizens, possibly even just temporarily visiting from another country, from getting a license to safely fly their so-called "drone" while in the country's borders?
True... but many more do. Of course, bluetooth-based "drones" have never posed any of the problems for anyone that these regulations are being created because of. Excluding so-called "drones" with such a limited range that for most practical purposes would amount to line of sight operation anyways would still achieve the same ends without creating criminals out of innocent people that are not hurting or posing any threat to anyone or anything that laws are created to protect.
I'd suggest 300 feet as a maximum altitude, personally.... still *FAR* below the minimum safe flying altitude for any aircraft that is not just taking off or on final approach, and perhaps I cite this range specifically because it is also the maximum range of Bluetooth, a widely utilized wireless communication system across relatively short distances. Imposing the 300 foot maximum would not require an altimeter to be installed, and the altitude ceiling would instead be imposed by layer 1 constraints on communication with the device, rather than artificially imposed limits that require sensory devices to be installed and a mechanism that reliable responds to them.
Please enlighten me as to exactly what hazard to air navigation flying above one's own property at a height of less than 300 feet causes (the maximum range for bluetooth), exactly? Bearing in mind of course that the absolute *MINIMUM* safe altitude for an aircraft that is not either on final approach or in the process of taking off is well over twice that height. I can understand a potential hazard within perhaps as much as a few hundred yards of the airport, but outside of that? Really?
How about simply on one's own fucking property?
If the future is predetermined, why should whether or not the person knows about the prediction beforehand affect the outcome? Indeed, if the future is predetermined, it cannot. If the information cannot be communicated to that person, it is unknowable by that person at the time that they appear to make a decision, and therefore indistinguishable to that person from free will.
I didn't say it was urgent, I just claim that it's needed. The security issues that can arise from malicious urls or other kinds of redirects indistinguishably posing as legitimate ones can be mitigated by filtering out any characters in such redirects that do not match a white-list of acceptable characters.
Hey, I don't deny that even 7 bit ascii is more than adequate for a *vast* majority of what's out there, but that dangling few percent is still gonna be a bit of a bitch. And the time Unicode ever takes up more space than ascii is when you are using extended 8-bit ascii where the high bit of the byte is set anyways. The additional expressive power of the vastly larger character set is well worth the relatively small amount of additional storage that may be required.
That's right up there with IBM's "there is a world market for maybe five computers".
That is exactly my point.... that because we have no idea (and I suggest that we *cannot* ever know it), that your behavior is indistinguishable from that where you would have had free will, and suggesting that you don't have free will is actually a meaningless concept.
Obviously.... and again, that's my point, you *cannot* calculate the right universe in such a situation. The only conclusion is that such a situation cannot exist, but we can trivially show today that a person is capable of doing the opposite of whatever they are told to do (ask anyone who ever had a 4 year old child), so that aspect is certainly possible. The only remaining aspect of the problem is therefore whether that information about what they are going to do can be communicated to the person so it is knowable by them. If it cannot be communicated, then it cannot be known, and if it cannot be known, as far as they can ever be aware, their behavior is indistinguishable from that as if they had actually had free will anyways (and suggesting they do not have it is meaningless).
It's not so much counter-intuitive to the notion of free will as much as it is impossible in a universe that can continue to offer any convincing illusion of choice at all.
One can easily build, for instance, an entirely deterministic system that has two possible outputs, and design it so it always outputs the opposite choice of whatever it is told to output, at which point it becomes impossible to truthfully provide as any input to that system whatever you might allegedly know the output is going be. Free will is not involved here at all. Either the universe itself is non-deterministic or else a sufficient knowledge of the state to predict the future in the first place is not knowable in the first place. If the universe is non-deterministic, then there is no reason to suggest that free will cannot exist. If the deterministic state of the universe is unknowable, then no test can be contrived which can demonstrate that we do not have free will, and suggesting that we do not have free will is meaningless, since our behavior is by all measurable standards indistinguishable from what a free-willed agent could do anyways.
Slashdot needs several things...
Unicode support being not the least of them.
They already are.
Being free willed does not mean that one cannot or will not necessarily ever make so-called "decisions" that can be predicted from a knowledge of the state, it only means that one is *capable* of it. However, how is the behavior of a system where one is not capable of it any different than one where the state itself is unknowable? You can apply a variation of the halting problem to establish with certainty that either the universe is not deterministic, or else it impossible within its framework to contrive a test that incontrovertibly proves that it is so.
e.g. If I could know what decisions you were making (a notion that is at least theoretically possible, if the universe were truly deterministic), I could analyze it and predict the answer you would give to a particular question, even if I told you truthfully what the answer to that question were going to be.... however, with your so-called illusion of free will, you could utilize the information that I gave you in the present about your alleged future action, and then deliberately contradict it, invalidating the prediction that I made, meaning that my knowledge about the future state was incorrect, which leads one inescapably to the conclusion that even if the universe is deterministic, it is impossible to know it.
And it is noteworthy that by outward present appearances, we appear to have free will with regards to decisions that we make.
So if, by all the standards that can ever be measured, you appear to be a "free-willed" person, then how is your behavior any different than if you actually *were* a free-willed individual? And if your behavior is identical to as if you actually were a so-called "free-willed" being, what purpose does suggesting that you are not free willed even mean?
Plus of course, one cannot advocate the notion that we are not free willed without also suggesting that we abdicate the notion of personal responsibility... but that's a philosophical debate for another time.
When Apple doesn't have the keys in the first place, is that really non-compliance? And if so, how would they be expected to *POSSIBLY* "comply"? How can they hand over encryption keys they do not have?
How would Apple not be complying with China's laws if they had no keys to hand over? Or would they assume that Apple was simply lying?
At the time that Humphrey Davy discovered the element, in 1825, the convention was still relatively new, and it is possible that Davy had not yet really known about it when he first named the metal. There was no lack of ancient names of metals that ended in -um, and not -ium (argentum, aurum, cuprum, ferrum, hydrargyrum, plumbum, and stannum). Further, in even the few decades leading up to the metal's discovery, several English metals were quite recently named that did not use the "-ium" convention, molybdenum, platinum, and tantalum. Finally, the metal lanthanum was not discovered until 1837, over a decade later, but its discoverer did not try to follow the "-ium" convention either. "Aluminum" is hardly alone. The "-ium" suffix convention has been universally followed for all elements discovered since.
For what it's worth, Davy himself later decided to change its name from "Aluminum" to "Aluminium" to try and keep with the convention that was being adopted, substantiating the notion that when he had originally named it, he was simply not yet aware of that convention. Even the element now known Berylium had also been renamed from its original "-um" ending in the same decade (it was originally called glucinum), so such renaming is hardly a unique case even for its period. I do not know why the latter name change was internationally accepted while the former was not.