It's not even so much morality as self interest. If they'll do this to some of their customers, they'll do it to others, so you don't want to be one of those others. And if software is too easily removed they're quite capable of doing it in firmware.
Doing business only with reputable companies falls within the area of "enlightened self-interest" rather than altruism.
Read the other reports above. Lenovo seems untrustworthy from one end to the other. (Of course, I can't verify that those other posts are made by disinterested parties.)
More particularly he said that *he* wasn't going to add that patch and called it Google spyware. This is the comment of a single maintainer, and it's hard to tell whether it's well justified or not, because Chrome is a binary blob. He could be dead on right.
Perhaps I read it after you did, but *one* maintainer said he wouldn't support it, and called it spyware. (I don't know whether it is or not.) Another said that if it turns out to be needed and someone submits a "quality patch" then he would submit it. (He also said that if Chromium needed it, he would revert the patch that made it a requirement, but that Chrome was a binary that he [and implicitly Debian] had no control over.)
OK. I've never used ARM assembler. Your "scheme" example shows mainly that you don't understand Lispish syntax, it's actually rather simple. Pascal is a good choice, but the documentation would need to be specially written, because the available sources on-line are pathetic. (And if you're using Pascal be very certain you stay well away from not only Objects, but also Units.)
But BASIC, including explicitly Dartmoth BASIC, is terrible. I'd rather recommend FORTRAN II. (FORTRAN IV would be a decent choice, but I don't know about fortran77, but that doesn't seem to be supported anymore either, and fortran95 introduces objects.) Forth would be better than BASIC.
Saying that you can't test the theory is quite different from saying that the theory is false. And often it's just "we can't *yet* test the theory".
OTOH, I do agree that it will probably never be possible to prove that the origin of cellular life happened in a particular way. There will almost certainly be many ways it could have happened, and the evidence won't allow us to choose between them. Sorry. In physics the name of the answer to this is "sum over histories". But you still can't pick one path. Just a set of probabilities.
What you don't understand is the reason for the puzzle. It's not that there's no way to do most of the things that happened, is that there are so many possibilities, and so little evidence, that you can't verifiably select which is the correct choice. (And Paley was an ignorant savage who was proud of being ignorant.)
Were that to be the process implemented by the body, how much information do you believe the communication would contain?
If you say "About 1 bit, and it means be more alert." I might consider this a plausible scemario to investigate. Quite dubious, but not totally beyond possibility. Once, however, you get as far as 2 bits I become considerably more skeptical. If you go as far as "There's a hungry tiger off to the right, and he's looking at me." I become totally incredulous.
FWIW, I also believe that much traditional medical practices had considerable value, and that there is considerable influence exerted by the mind over the body, including ability to stimulate the immune system to greater or lesser activity. This, however, doesn't depend on speedy quantum effects, and any claim that it does is quite strongly suspect, and renders any further claims from the same source as "consider carefully before taking this seriously". Not only is there no evidence in support of that, there are good theoretical reasons to doubt it. Also please remember that any use of the term "energy" in traditional beliefs has little in common with the definition of the term used by physicists (though I admit it has considerable in common with informal usages by those who don't commonly work in the physical sciences). Mana is a better translation than energy, though even that is suspect, as different cultures mean significantly different things by the analogous terms.
Traditional BASIC was a lousy language for learning to program. Modern C++ is, if anything, worse.
I can think of several reasonable starting points ranging from MIX, through Scheme, C, and Smalltalk (Squeak). Each have their benefits, but were I designing the class I'd probably start with MIX, move onto Scheme (probably Racket) and then do most of the work in C, with an end segment on how to adapt your C code to run under C++. C++ would be an advanced course...or two. Or you might make Erlang your first advanced course, and C++ your second.
Python has lots of good points if you can already program, but it hides too many details about what's going on under the hood, and this inhibits understanding. (That's why I'd start with MIX. The Apple ][ assembler would be even better, but the machine it runs on isn't reasonably available anymore. The M68000 assembler would also be a good starting point, but the i8080 much less so. Too much hardware specificity. Again, however, those machines are no longer generally available, and assemblers for current machines are as baroque as Objective-C++.)
I can think of *no* benefit to using any dialect of BASIC with which I am familiar.
I'm in the Calif. Bay Area, and it's been warm and dry here, also. But I don't think of this as good fortune, as that means drought and invasive species. Even if this develops into a summer rainy season it's not going to yield as good a climate as we had in the 1950's-90's. (Do note I'm including one major [7 year] drought cycle in the good weather.)
I wish. This report, though, doesn't make me want to cheer. In the first place it's weaker than expected, and in the second place it's 6 months out of phase. I'm not sure that translates into summer rain, I suppose it could, but it could also translate into "This rain is going somewhere else. Sucks to be you." as wind patterns in warm months tend to be different than those in colder months.
While it's true that "The various US federal government agencies are all filled with *people*, all different kinds of people." this doesn't mean that they are trustworthy. The FCC, in particular, has done some rather vile things to support "its constituents" (i.e., the money making groups it is supposed to regulate). And the current chairman is not particularly trustworthy, being closely associated with the MPAA.
OTOH, the FCC has less direct reason to abuse the general citizenry than do the large monopoly ISPs. So while I hardly trust them, I still trust them more than, say Verizon, or AT&T.
IIUC, German law is different on this, and anyone is allowed to file suit to enforce anyone's copyright claim. I usually think this is a bad idea, but in this case I'm unsure.
It's not that difficult to do, but: 1) you need to set it up ahead of time. 2) you make yourself vulnerable to a hacker activating it by accident.
P.S.: This is based on Linux, not Android, but it probably works the same. A logon activates a script at logon time. Write a shell script that actually runs an emulation of "rm -rf/*". (You can't actually use that, because it's been intentionally disabled as too dangerous to allow.)
Militarism wasn't central to Mussolini's beliefs, it was derived...though I admit that the Roman model he used was strongly focused on militarism. The essentials was the binding together of the various interests of the state, as symbolized by the Roman fasces. Militarism was one tool to achieve this, and to allow that combined force to project its power. (Symbolized by the axe within the rods that were bound together.)
That part about syndicates sounds right though. I've got to admit that I don't understand the difference between syndicates and trade unions...unless they are intended to be company specific unions, which have a *very* bad history, and did even then, so I can't believe that he was pushing THAT.
About Mussolini's "moderate racism"... Just about everyone was racist to that extent at that time (with some major exceptions). Read some of the stuff that was being pushed on the public in the US. Hell, read Heinlein's "Fifth Column" or John W. Campbell's "Mightiest Machine". Or look into the history of IQ tests. And at that time there wasn't much hard evidence that race actually was unimportant. (There is now...but it's not totally solid, just essentially solid.)
OTOH, I guess I, also, tend to oversimplify Fascism, and think of it as the corporate state. I doubt that it would have been any better than the corporate state, but it sounds more like a traditional monarchy...without the "divine right of kings", or at least with that strongly backgrounded. Mussolini was a charismatic leader, but it's not clear what the follow on would have been, had that happened. (I wonder what Mao Tse Tung would think of modern China.)
??? From this you get the Republicans are the good guys? If this were my only measure I'd count the Dems as the good guys. This bill is a weird combination of stupid and evil.
There are other convincing reasons to *not* count the Dems as good guys, but this isn't one of them. This is just more evidence that we've got two sets of bad guys with slightly different goals. Generally I find the Dems a hair less evil, but I consider them sufficiently evil that I rarely vote for them. I vote for some third party or other. There's usually one that's less evil in it's promises than the Dems and Repubs are in their actions.
There might well be a way to do that, though I'm not quite certain what it would be. However, IIRC, Heinlein didn't discuss the ways that would be used to prevent corruption, so it's unfair to presume that they didn't exist as well as to presume that they did.
OTOH, our current system doesn't prevent the powerful from manuvering their progeny into positions of power, so it's reasonable to guess that another system wouldn't either, without strong built in protections. And I can't recall a historical civilization that both tried to do that and was successful. So perhaps that happening wouldn't prevent a culture from lasting, say a couple of hundred years.
I'm going to be picky, but that's not fascism. Fascism is the corporate state, i.e. the corporations and the state working hand in glove. In Mussolini's case he took a bit of time picking sides in WWII, and finally picked what he thought was the winning side BECAUSE he thought it was the winning side, not because he agreed with it. His fascism became militarist because of the environment that it developed in, it wasn't a part of his central ideas, merely a tool in making Italy strong. And though he was anti-intellectual, he wasn't racist, he was nationalist. There really *is* a big difference. His central goal was to make Italy strong, and his choice of how to do it was the corporate state. Everything else was derivative from that, if you include mistakes as being derivative.
Perhaps the movie was fascist propaganda. I never saw it and don't intend to. The book wasn't, though it was militarist. And the viewpoint character spent almost all his time in a military environment. (Fascist has more to do with the corporations and the government working hand in glove. Read Mussolini. You can properly call the US government fascist. And it's quite distinct from Nazi (which, frankly, is bug-fuck crazy rascism, with a few other loony twists).
Well, I don't know what they're planning, but ISTM that if they divide the storage area they can greatly extend the time at which they're generating energy in exchange for nearly halving the peak generation capability...and without much pumping (which adds an additional inefficiency or three).
OTOH, the amount of energy that can be generated by water stored at a particular height depends on the fall distance. So the potential generation capability will vary a lot as the tide changes. Maybe some of the inflow could be used to drive a hydralic ram to lift some of the water higher than max high tide level. But that *does* introduce additional inefficiencies.
All in all, I don't know, but it looks pretty iffy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not even so much morality as self interest. If they'll do this to some of their customers, they'll do it to others, so you don't want to be one of those others. And if software is too easily removed they're quite capable of doing it in firmware.
Doing business only with reputable companies falls within the area of "enlightened self-interest" rather than altruism.
Read the other reports above. Lenovo seems untrustworthy from one end to the other. (Of course, I can't verify that those other posts are made by disinterested parties.)
More particularly he said that *he* wasn't going to add that patch and called it Google spyware. This is the comment of a single maintainer, and it's hard to tell whether it's well justified or not, because Chrome is a binary blob. He could be dead on right.
If *you* are maintaining the server, you can install Firefox on it yourself. (I may think it a bad idea, but there's nothing stopping you.)
Moved on to....
Perhaps I read it after you did, but *one* maintainer said he wouldn't support it, and called it spyware. (I don't know whether it is or not.) Another said that if it turns out to be needed and someone submits a "quality patch" then he would submit it. (He also said that if Chromium needed it, he would revert the patch that made it a requirement, but that Chrome was a binary that he [and implicitly Debian] had no control over.)
OK. I've never used ARM assembler. Your "scheme" example shows mainly that you don't understand Lispish syntax, it's actually rather simple. Pascal is a good choice, but the documentation would need to be specially written, because the available sources on-line are pathetic. (And if you're using Pascal be very certain you stay well away from not only Objects, but also Units.)
But BASIC, including explicitly Dartmoth BASIC, is terrible. I'd rather recommend FORTRAN II. (FORTRAN IV would be a decent choice, but I don't know about fortran77, but that doesn't seem to be supported anymore either, and fortran95 introduces objects.) Forth would be better than BASIC.
Saying that you can't test the theory is quite different from saying that the theory is false. And often it's just "we can't *yet* test the theory".
OTOH, I do agree that it will probably never be possible to prove that the origin of cellular life happened in a particular way. There will almost certainly be many ways it could have happened, and the evidence won't allow us to choose between them. Sorry. In physics the name of the answer to this is "sum over histories". But you still can't pick one path. Just a set of probabilities.
What you don't understand is the reason for the puzzle. It's not that there's no way to do most of the things that happened, is that there are so many possibilities, and so little evidence, that you can't verifiably select which is the correct choice. (And Paley was an ignorant savage who was proud of being ignorant.)
Were that to be the process implemented by the body, how much information do you believe the communication would contain?
If you say "About 1 bit, and it means be more alert." I might consider this a plausible scemario to investigate. Quite dubious, but not totally beyond possibility. Once, however, you get as far as 2 bits I become considerably more skeptical. If you go as far as "There's a hungry tiger off to the right, and he's looking at me." I become totally incredulous.
FWIW, I also believe that much traditional medical practices had considerable value, and that there is considerable influence exerted by the mind over the body, including ability to stimulate the immune system to greater or lesser activity. This, however, doesn't depend on speedy quantum effects, and any claim that it does is quite strongly suspect, and renders any further claims from the same source as "consider carefully before taking this seriously". Not only is there no evidence in support of that, there are good theoretical reasons to doubt it. Also please remember that any use of the term "energy" in traditional beliefs has little in common with the definition of the term used by physicists (though I admit it has considerable in common with informal usages by those who don't commonly work in the physical sciences). Mana is a better translation than energy, though even that is suspect, as different cultures mean significantly different things by the analogous terms.
Traditional BASIC was a lousy language for learning to program. Modern C++ is, if anything, worse.
I can think of several reasonable starting points ranging from MIX, through Scheme, C, and Smalltalk (Squeak). Each have their benefits, but were I designing the class I'd probably start with MIX, move onto Scheme (probably Racket) and then do most of the work in C, with an end segment on how to adapt your C code to run under C++. C++ would be an advanced course...or two. Or you might make Erlang your first advanced course, and C++ your second.
Python has lots of good points if you can already program, but it hides too many details about what's going on under the hood, and this inhibits understanding. (That's why I'd start with MIX. The Apple ][ assembler would be even better, but the machine it runs on isn't reasonably available anymore. The M68000 assembler would also be a good starting point, but the i8080 much less so. Too much hardware specificity. Again, however, those machines are no longer generally available, and assemblers for current machines are as baroque as Objective-C++.)
I can think of *no* benefit to using any dialect of BASIC with which I am familiar.
I'm in the Calif. Bay Area, and it's been warm and dry here, also. But I don't think of this as good fortune, as that means drought and invasive species. Even if this develops into a summer rainy season it's not going to yield as good a climate as we had in the 1950's-90's. (Do note I'm including one major [7 year] drought cycle in the good weather.)
I wish. This report, though, doesn't make me want to cheer. In the first place it's weaker than expected, and in the second place it's 6 months out of phase. I'm not sure that translates into summer rain, I suppose it could, but it could also translate into "This rain is going somewhere else. Sucks to be you." as wind patterns in warm months tend to be different than those in colder months.
I'm not Korean, but I lived in Japan around 1958. Perhaps things have changed, but my cousin who lives there now has indicated that they haven't.
While it's true that "The various US federal government agencies are all filled with *people*, all different kinds of people." this doesn't mean that they are trustworthy. The FCC, in particular, has done some rather vile things to support "its constituents" (i.e., the money making groups it is supposed to regulate). And the current chairman is not particularly trustworthy, being closely associated with the MPAA.
OTOH, the FCC has less direct reason to abuse the general citizenry than do the large monopoly ISPs. So while I hardly trust them, I still trust them more than, say Verizon, or AT&T.
IIUC, German law is different on this, and anyone is allowed to file suit to enforce anyone's copyright claim. I usually think this is a bad idea, but in this case I'm unsure.
It's not that difficult to do, but:
1) you need to set it up ahead of time.
2) you make yourself vulnerable to a hacker activating it by accident.
P.S.: This is based on Linux, not Android, but it probably works the same. A logon activates a script at logon time. Write a shell script that actually runs an emulation of "rm -rf /*". (You can't actually use that, because it's been intentionally disabled as too dangerous to allow.)
If you were a Korean you wouldn't feel that way.
Militarism wasn't central to Mussolini's beliefs, it was derived...though I admit that the Roman model he used was strongly focused on militarism. The essentials was the binding together of the various interests of the state, as symbolized by the Roman fasces. Militarism was one tool to achieve this, and to allow that combined force to project its power. (Symbolized by the axe within the rods that were bound together.)
That part about syndicates sounds right though. I've got to admit that I don't understand the difference between syndicates and trade unions...unless they are intended to be company specific unions, which have a *very* bad history, and did even then, so I can't believe that he was pushing THAT.
About Mussolini's "moderate racism"... Just about everyone was racist to that extent at that time (with some major exceptions). Read some of the stuff that was being pushed on the public in the US. Hell, read Heinlein's "Fifth Column" or John W. Campbell's "Mightiest Machine". Or look into the history of IQ tests. And at that time there wasn't much hard evidence that race actually was unimportant. (There is now...but it's not totally solid, just essentially solid.)
OTOH, I guess I, also, tend to oversimplify Fascism, and think of it as the corporate state. I doubt that it would have been any better than the corporate state, but it sounds more like a traditional monarchy...without the "divine right of kings", or at least with that strongly backgrounded. Mussolini was a charismatic leader, but it's not clear what the follow on would have been, had that happened. (I wonder what Mao Tse Tung would think of modern China.)
Hmm...that sounds quite plausible, but labor wasn't stressed in the sources I read.
???
From this you get the Republicans are the good guys? If this were my only measure I'd count the Dems as the good guys. This bill is a weird combination of stupid and evil.
There are other convincing reasons to *not* count the Dems as good guys, but this isn't one of them. This is just more evidence that we've got two sets of bad guys with slightly different goals. Generally I find the Dems a hair less evil, but I consider them sufficiently evil that I rarely vote for them. I vote for some third party or other. There's usually one that's less evil in it's promises than the Dems and Repubs are in their actions.
There might well be a way to do that, though I'm not quite certain what it would be. However, IIRC, Heinlein didn't discuss the ways that would be used to prevent corruption, so it's unfair to presume that they didn't exist as well as to presume that they did.
OTOH, our current system doesn't prevent the powerful from manuvering their progeny into positions of power, so it's reasonable to guess that another system wouldn't either, without strong built in protections. And I can't recall a historical civilization that both tried to do that and was successful. So perhaps that happening wouldn't prevent a culture from lasting, say a couple of hundred years.
I'm going to be picky, but that's not fascism. Fascism is the corporate state, i.e. the corporations and the state working hand in glove. In Mussolini's case he took a bit of time picking sides in WWII, and finally picked what he thought was the winning side BECAUSE he thought it was the winning side, not because he agreed with it. His fascism became militarist because of the environment that it developed in, it wasn't a part of his central ideas, merely a tool in making Italy strong. And though he was anti-intellectual, he wasn't racist, he was nationalist. There really *is* a big difference. His central goal was to make Italy strong, and his choice of how to do it was the corporate state. Everything else was derivative from that, if you include mistakes as being derivative.
Perhaps the movie was fascist propaganda. I never saw it and don't intend to. The book wasn't, though it was militarist. And the viewpoint character spent almost all his time in a military environment. (Fascist has more to do with the corporations and the government working hand in glove. Read Mussolini. You can properly call the US government fascist. And it's quite distinct from Nazi (which, frankly, is bug-fuck crazy rascism, with a few other loony twists).
Well, I don't know what they're planning, but ISTM that if they divide the storage area they can greatly extend the time at which they're generating energy in exchange for nearly halving the peak generation capability...and without much pumping (which adds an additional inefficiency or three).
OTOH, the amount of energy that can be generated by water stored at a particular height depends on the fall distance. So the potential generation capability will vary a lot as the tide changes. Maybe some of the inflow could be used to drive a hydralic ram to lift some of the water higher than max high tide level. But that *does* introduce additional inefficiencies.
All in all, I don't know, but it looks pretty iffy.