And the reason for this all: fear... Every day we do things that are more dangerous than the things we fear most... Respond to it with logic and common sense and not with fear and emotion.
Your sane, logical argument almost tempts me to forget my belief that the source of all these silly, over-the-top 'precautions' is not fear - it's greed, and lust for power. The fear you speak of does exist among the people, but it is a fear that has been purposely manufactured and is carefully nourished. Entire industries have sprung up around 'terrorism'; millions of (entirely parasitic) jobs are on the line, as well as minor and not-so-minor financial empires. Creating and fuelling paranoia is big business - hell, it's a growth industry, and a saviour to the military-industrial complex once threatened by the end of the Cold War.
The question to ask, always, is "cui bono?" Governments, (i.e. the executive branches of trans-national corporations), use propaganda as advertising, to sell fear and to promote compliance with authority.
How long until number of Starbucks coffees becomes the global cost basis across currencies?
Never mind cost basis, how about making it the global reserve currency? It probably has better future prospects for that role than the US dollar has...
That's fine if you plan on personal/small-scale use only. The BeagleBone folks expressly do not want people using their products as a part of other products-for-sale without discussing it with them first and, (presumably), getting their permission. So if you were to start ordering in production quantities you might find yourself suddenly without a supply of BBBs.
1) Inflate bag with a lungful or two of air
2) Hold firmly in one hand, smack hard with other hand
3) Repeat with additional bags
4) Watch SWAT team disrupt the entire school
5) Get arrested for blowing up lunch bags
The field of artificial muscles already has multiple competing technologies which are superior to this.
Superior to this, for now. The techniques described may be refined to increase the strength-to-area ratio. The new technology described may also be superior with regard to granularity of control, repeatability/consistency of motion, power efficiency, or other factors not immediately evident.
A nation that's focusing its cyber-spying efforts outside its own country! We'll finally have a country that honours the privacy of its own citizens!
Yeah, right. From the country whose formerly Communist half gave us the Stasi. Still, it's kinda hard to blame them for ramping up their spying efforts - sometimes "do unto others as they insist on doing unto you" is necessary for survival.
Any chance we humans will ever come to terms with our animal origins in a way that doesn't involve dominating each other and pissing on each other's territory?
...Given the trajectory of technology and how ubiquitous it becomes over time, what starts out as optional turns into mandatory. Same thing with all these health monitoring devices. Somehow they will be used to fuck you over for engaging in bad behavior...
We can only hope that, as has largely happened with DRM, technology will help to address the problems it's being used to create. I can imagine a whole industry, (much of it underground), devoted to taking back the privacy that is being stolen. Of course, for that to happen, an awful lot of sheeple out there are going to have to stop bleating and start shouting. I'm not holding my breath though....
...I don't see why, if you were trying to stop a serious threat, spies shouldn't be able to monitor these communications in principle, with some clear restrictions:
1/ If the information gathered by spying was specifically barred from being used in court
This would still allow for 'fruits of the poison tree' attacks in court, assumin the Brit system has this concept.
2/ If additional authority had to be granted by the judiciary for the act
3/ If there were clear checks and balances in place to deal with abuse.
I have absolutely NO trust in a governent and judiciary that would allow such eavesdropping in the first place, to use "additional authority" wisely and fairly, nor to put in plae and maintain "checks and balances" with any integrity. Once exceptions like this are allowed, it's a steep slippery slope towards totalitarianism.
Totally off topic for a moment, is it just me, or is Dice finally starting to slip Beta crap into the interface in an attempted 'stealth attack'? All of a sudden commenting seems a lot more awkward than it used to.
The ruling defined Facebook as a "digital landlord".
Last time I checked, landlords charge tenants money. Since Facebook users don't pay for the service in any recognized currency, (and somehow I doubt privacy is recognized as a barterable thing), how can Facebook be a landlord?
The attempt to treat Facebook servers as the equivalent of physical premises is disturbing. Judicial over-reach, much?
However much they [tech companies] may dislike it, they have become the command and control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us... Mr. Hannigan said that smartphone and other mobile technologies increased the opportunities for terrorist activity to be concealed...
I agree fully. Things such as social media and cell phones are priceless boons to those governments which aggressively meddle in the affairs of other nations while persistently spying on their own citizens. It's good to see Mr. Hannigan admitting on behalf of his country how "transformational" the latest technology has been for him and his masters.
People and countries that complain about the sword cutting both ways, should just stop living by the sword.
As per the Wikipedia article you linked to, ensuring the metals that are in contact with or close proximity to each other have the same or similar anodic indices will largely address that problem. (That's why copper plumbing pipes are secured to joists by copper clamps; if they wer steel the pipes might eventually develop holes at the contact points).
I proposed either gold or platinum electrodes because they are the metals most resistant to corrosion. And I proposed Alternating Current because the periodic reversal negates any stripping / deposition effects of current flow. That's why electroplating, (and hydrolysis), use Direct Currrent - AC simply won't work for those purposes.
(In fact, some vaporizers available at the drug store don't have heating elements per se - just two strips of metal connected to the mains voltage and immersed in the water. They won't even work with distilled water, as it doesn't conduct electricity).
The ocean is teaming with life and it will literally grow on anything. What do you do when the entire underwater "windmill" is covered in barnacles? Every underwater generation scheme is toasted by the life problem.
Cover every bit of metal with an insulating coating, then print, deposit, or laminate gold or platinum electrodes on the surfaces. Connect 'odd' electrodes in one branch of a circuit, 'even' electrodes in another, than apply an alternating voltage between them. The seawater completes the circuit. Unless a life form lands on the metal - then IT completes the circuit. I suspect most life forms will not like a continuous alternating current passing through them, and will 'move to greener pastures". Overall generating efficiency will be reduced, but probably not as much as it would be by barnacles, etc.
I'm not a marine biologist and I don't know if this would work - just tossing the idea out there.
Outlawing lobbying would actually be bad for democracy overall. Lobbyists are a vehicle in which an interest communicates the needs of that interest to an elected official... lobbying in general is a good thing; it is a tool of democracy that enables communication between the State and the people. Like any tool, it can be used appropriately or inappropriately. The key is to create regulation that discourages inappropriate use, not throw out the tool entirely.
True - but then, how to address the disparities that the very nature of lobbying introduces? As I mentioned in a reply above, people working two or three jobs or otherwise spending every waking hour just keeping their lives together have no practical means of hiring a lobbyist; although they might manage a letter or an email, which without the 'amplifying' effect of a lobbyist will simply be ignored. As far as I can see, "inappropriate use" is built into the very mechanism of lobbying. I don't have any ideas right now for an alternative; but for ideas to come forward I think it's first necessary to widely acknowledge that the existing mechanism is broken, probably at the design level.
And you can't outlaw lobbying from corporations, because the private sector is the engine of economic creation; it creates jobs for people and better products that improve people's lives etc. Again, yes, as a tool it can be misused, but removing the primary form of communication between the State and the economy is just a stupid idea.
The private sector can't be "an engine of economic creation" without the people it employs - and the best interests of those people are often diametrically opposed to what the directors and shareholders of corporations see as their own best interests. An uncritical and submissive position with respect to the private sector is a major contributor to the wealth concentration that is destroying the middle class. Corporatocracy != meritocracy.
Asking one person to talk to your representative on behalf of a bunch of you IS NOT CIRCUMVENTING DEMOCRACY. It's using your damn head.
You DO have a valid point. But what about all those people who don't have the time to even get together with like-minded individuals, much less the money to pay a representative to lobby on their behalf? Working single mothers, and people holding down two or three jobs spend a lot of their lives in survival mode. The institution of lobbying effectively makes political change either a rich man's sport or the province of revolutionaries.
Then there are all the sub-rosa deals made during lobbying - "My client will or won't build, (or close), a factory in your district, depending on how you vote", and the like.
I don't like fracking. It overextends fossil fuel dependency when we need stronger economic incentives to get off them for our long term needs. But if it does happen, I don't want this kind of risk from it.
I know - let's ship all the frackers and their equipment and their trade secrets to China! Then at least the havoc those bastards wreak won't be in this part of the world. Just in the tradition of shipping our problems to other countries, y'understand...
The practice of paid lobbying ought to be outlawed altogether, with long prison terms in store for those who break that law. After that law is in place, anyone who formerly worked in the lobbying "industry", (and how odious to use that word in connection with lobbyists), would be forbidden forever from seeking public office or working for the government as either an employee or as a contractor.
It's time to outlaw the purchase of favourable legislation altogether. In fact, it's long past time to aggressively outlaw ANY circumvention of democracy. Yeah, I know it isn't going to happen - but I can dream...
Um, ammonium nitrate is an oxidizer, and can't explode in its own - it needs something to oxidize. Like, say, home heating fuel, or diesel fuel - the latter of which McVeigh used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This Spring, move the clocks forward by one-half hour, then LEAVE THEM THERE ALL YEAR!!! I hate the time change - it messes me up for days, sometimes even a week or more.
If the powers that be feel the need to dick around with time, they could at least do something useful by making 24 hour time and ISO date-time format truly universal. No more "is that AM or PM?", and no more confusion over whether 11/06/14 refers to the eleventh day of June or the sixth day of November. (And in that same spirit of good sense maybe the folks responsible for the GTK file chooser could get rid of that fscking "Today" and "Yesterday" BS).
Career colleges must be a stepping stone to the middle class.
Too bad "the middle class" is a rapidly shrinking island and the nearest stepping stones are increasingly far from its shores. With the possible exception of building trades, traditional middle class jobs are increasingly being exported, filled by poorly-paid H1B wage slaves, or eliminated altogether. The solution to these problems has little to do with college courses, (AKA 'job training', AKA 'shaping the peg to fit a non-existent hole'), and a lot to do with fixing massively unfair concentration of wealth.
Additionally, education should not be primarily about job training - it should be about producing well-rounded, creative, thoughtful, aware citizens who can solve problems and who can adapt readily to a variety of roles as required. Our society is not a production line for widgets, and it's time we stopped treating it as one.
Because I need the ultimate in privacy between me and the video billboard in Times square where I'm posting the intimate details of my life. Yeah, right.
Problem is, there will be many, many people who will think "Oh! Facebook is protecting my privacy now, so they must be OK!"
The article doesn't seem to point out the obvious explanation, ie that H1B applications contain personal data (of the type Slashdotters are usually passionate about protecting), and that it is good practice not to keep such information hanging around once it has served its primary purpose.
There are presumably solutions to the research concerns, such as aggregating the data before it is deleted or collecting the specific data necessary before the records are deleted.
Yes, there are solutions, but will they be implemented? And is the Dept. of Labor so tone-deaf, and so ignorant of the controversial nature of this decision, that they didn't think to put an anonymization program in place in advance of this announcement? Somehow I doubt it.
If that were true. We wouldn't be able to put these genes in there in the first place. Just because it is too complex for you, or you are ignorant of what we can and do model. Doesn't mean other can't.
You are looking at FAR too narrow a scope. Can geneticists predict the immediate and close-in effects of what they do? Yes, most of the time they can. Can they accurately predict what will happen many generations down the line, in combination with cross-breeding, spontaneous mutations, and the environment? No, they cannot. And then there is always the "we don't know what we don't know" factor - and that's why people like Taleb urge caution. Hell, Monsanto put the whole Roundup-Ready juggernaut in motion while seeming to not even consider that weeds might develop resistance to glyphosate. Guess what? We now have glyphosate-resistant weeds. Monsanto dropped the ball on that relatively simple matter - do you really think their predictive capabilities are any better when they're doing something really hard like genetic modification?
You seem to have a pretty simplistic view of the vastly complex world we live in.
Slashdot Mirror
And the reason for this all: fear... Every day we do things that are more dangerous than the things we fear most... Respond to it with logic and common sense and not with fear and emotion.
Your sane, logical argument almost tempts me to forget my belief that the source of all these silly, over-the-top 'precautions' is not fear - it's greed, and lust for power. The fear you speak of does exist among the people, but it is a fear that has been purposely manufactured and is carefully nourished. Entire industries have sprung up around 'terrorism'; millions of (entirely parasitic) jobs are on the line, as well as minor and not-so-minor financial empires. Creating and fuelling paranoia is big business - hell, it's a growth industry, and a saviour to the military-industrial complex once threatened by the end of the Cold War.
The question to ask, always, is "cui bono?" Governments, (i.e. the executive branches of trans-national corporations), use propaganda as advertising, to sell fear and to promote compliance with authority.
...It's plain old organized crime in every aspect. That is the cause of most of the world's poverty today.
You're right - corporations are among the most organized criminals the world has ever known.
How long until number of Starbucks coffees becomes the global cost basis across currencies?
Never mind cost basis, how about making it the global reserve currency? It probably has better future prospects for that role than the US dollar has...
That's fine if you plan on personal/small-scale use only. The BeagleBone folks expressly do not want people using their products as a part of other products-for-sale without discussing it with them first and, (presumably), getting their permission. So if you were to start ordering in production quantities you might find yourself suddenly without a supply of BBBs.
The RPi has no such restriction.
1) Inflate bag with a lungful or two of air
2) Hold firmly in one hand, smack hard with other hand
3) Repeat with additional bags
4) Watch SWAT team disrupt the entire school
5) Get arrested for blowing up lunch bags
The field of artificial muscles already has multiple competing technologies which are superior to this.
Superior to this, for now. The techniques described may be refined to increase the strength-to-area ratio. The new technology described may also be superior with regard to granularity of control, repeatability/consistency of motion, power efficiency, or other factors not immediately evident.
A nation that's focusing its cyber-spying efforts outside its own country! We'll finally have a country that honours the privacy of its own citizens!
Yeah, right. From the country whose formerly Communist half gave us the Stasi. Still, it's kinda hard to blame them for ramping up their spying efforts - sometimes "do unto others as they insist on doing unto you" is necessary for survival.
Any chance we humans will ever come to terms with our animal origins in a way that doesn't involve dominating each other and pissing on each other's territory?
...Given the trajectory of technology and how ubiquitous it becomes over time, what starts out as optional turns into mandatory. Same thing with all these health monitoring devices. Somehow they will be used to fuck you over for engaging in bad behavior...
We can only hope that, as has largely happened with DRM, technology will help to address the problems it's being used to create. I can imagine a whole industry, (much of it underground), devoted to taking back the privacy that is being stolen. Of course, for that to happen, an awful lot of sheeple out there are going to have to stop bleating and start shouting. I'm not holding my breath though....
...I don't see why, if you were trying to stop a serious threat, spies shouldn't be able to monitor these communications in principle, with some clear restrictions:
1/ If the information gathered by spying was specifically barred from being used in court
This would still allow for 'fruits of the poison tree' attacks in court, assumin the Brit system has this concept.
2/ If additional authority had to be granted by the judiciary for the act
3/ If there were clear checks and balances in place to deal with abuse.
I have absolutely NO trust in a governent and judiciary that would allow such eavesdropping in the first place, to use "additional authority" wisely and fairly, nor to put in plae and maintain "checks and balances" with any integrity. Once exceptions like this are allowed, it's a steep slippery slope towards totalitarianism.
Totally off topic for a moment, is it just me, or is Dice finally starting to slip Beta crap into the interface in an attempted 'stealth attack'? All of a sudden commenting seems a lot more awkward than it used to.
FTA
The ruling defined Facebook as a "digital landlord".
Last time I checked, landlords charge tenants money. Since Facebook users don't pay for the service in any recognized currency, (and somehow I doubt privacy is recognized as a barterable thing), how can Facebook be a landlord?
The attempt to treat Facebook servers as the equivalent of physical premises is disturbing. Judicial over-reach, much?
However much they [tech companies] may dislike it, they have become the command and control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us... Mr. Hannigan said that smartphone and other mobile technologies increased the opportunities for terrorist activity to be concealed...
I agree fully. Things such as social media and cell phones are priceless boons to those governments which aggressively meddle in the affairs of other nations while persistently spying on their own citizens. It's good to see Mr. Hannigan admitting on behalf of his country how "transformational" the latest technology has been for him and his masters.
People and countries that complain about the sword cutting both ways, should just stop living by the sword.
Stray electrical current... Metal parts... Salt water... What could go wrong? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... Oh, yeah...
As per the Wikipedia article you linked to, ensuring the metals that are in contact with or close proximity to each other have the same or similar anodic indices will largely address that problem. (That's why copper plumbing pipes are secured to joists by copper clamps; if they wer steel the pipes might eventually develop holes at the contact points).
I proposed either gold or platinum electrodes because they are the metals most resistant to corrosion. And I proposed Alternating Current because the periodic reversal negates any stripping / deposition effects of current flow. That's why electroplating, (and hydrolysis), use Direct Currrent - AC simply won't work for those purposes.
(In fact, some vaporizers available at the drug store don't have heating elements per se - just two strips of metal connected to the mains voltage and immersed in the water. They won't even work with distilled water, as it doesn't conduct electricity).
The ocean is teaming with life and it will literally grow on anything. What do you do when the entire underwater "windmill" is covered in barnacles? Every underwater generation scheme is toasted by the life problem.
Cover every bit of metal with an insulating coating, then print, deposit, or laminate gold or platinum electrodes on the surfaces. Connect 'odd' electrodes in one branch of a circuit, 'even' electrodes in another, than apply an alternating voltage between them. The seawater completes the circuit. Unless a life form lands on the metal - then IT completes the circuit. I suspect most life forms will not like a continuous alternating current passing through them, and will 'move to greener pastures". Overall generating efficiency will be reduced, but probably not as much as it would be by barnacles, etc.
I'm not a marine biologist and I don't know if this would work - just tossing the idea out there.
Outlawing lobbying would actually be bad for democracy overall. Lobbyists are a vehicle in which an interest communicates the needs of that interest to an elected official... lobbying in general is a good thing; it is a tool of democracy that enables communication between the State and the people. Like any tool, it can be used appropriately or inappropriately. The key is to create regulation that discourages inappropriate use, not throw out the tool entirely.
True - but then, how to address the disparities that the very nature of lobbying introduces? As I mentioned in a reply above, people working two or three jobs or otherwise spending every waking hour just keeping their lives together have no practical means of hiring a lobbyist; although they might manage a letter or an email, which without the 'amplifying' effect of a lobbyist will simply be ignored. As far as I can see, "inappropriate use" is built into the very mechanism of lobbying. I don't have any ideas right now for an alternative; but for ideas to come forward I think it's first necessary to widely acknowledge that the existing mechanism is broken, probably at the design level.
And you can't outlaw lobbying from corporations, because the private sector is the engine of economic creation; it creates jobs for people and better products that improve people's lives etc. Again, yes, as a tool it can be misused, but removing the primary form of communication between the State and the economy is just a stupid idea.
The private sector can't be "an engine of economic creation" without the people it employs - and the best interests of those people are often diametrically opposed to what the directors and shareholders of corporations see as their own best interests. An uncritical and submissive position with respect to the private sector is a major contributor to the wealth concentration that is destroying the middle class. Corporatocracy != meritocracy.
Asking one person to talk to your representative on behalf of a bunch of you IS NOT CIRCUMVENTING DEMOCRACY. It's using your damn head.
You DO have a valid point. But what about all those people who don't have the time to even get together with like-minded individuals, much less the money to pay a representative to lobby on their behalf? Working single mothers, and people holding down two or three jobs spend a lot of their lives in survival mode. The institution of lobbying effectively makes political change either a rich man's sport or the province of revolutionaries.
Then there are all the sub-rosa deals made during lobbying - "My client will or won't build, (or close), a factory in your district, depending on how you vote", and the like.
How does this NOT subvert democracy?
I don't like fracking. It overextends fossil fuel dependency when we need stronger economic incentives to get off them for our long term needs. But if it does happen, I don't want this kind of risk from it.
I know - let's ship all the frackers and their equipment and their trade secrets to China! Then at least the havoc those bastards wreak won't be in this part of the world. Just in the tradition of shipping our problems to other countries, y'understand...
The practice of paid lobbying ought to be outlawed altogether, with long prison terms in store for those who break that law. After that law is in place, anyone who formerly worked in the lobbying "industry", (and how odious to use that word in connection with lobbyists), would be forbidden forever from seeking public office or working for the government as either an employee or as a contractor.
It's time to outlaw the purchase of favourable legislation altogether. In fact, it's long past time to aggressively outlaw ANY circumvention of democracy. Yeah, I know it isn't going to happen - but I can dream...
Um, ammonium nitrate is an oxidizer, and can't explode in its own - it needs something to oxidize. Like, say, home heating fuel, or diesel fuel - the latter of which McVeigh used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This Spring, move the clocks forward by one-half hour, then LEAVE THEM THERE ALL YEAR!!! I hate the time change - it messes me up for days, sometimes even a week or more.
If the powers that be feel the need to dick around with time, they could at least do something useful by making 24 hour time and ISO date-time format truly universal. No more "is that AM or PM?", and no more confusion over whether 11/06/14 refers to the eleventh day of June or the sixth day of November. (And in that same spirit of good sense maybe the folks responsible for the GTK file chooser could get rid of that fscking "Today" and "Yesterday" BS).
Career colleges must be a stepping stone to the middle class.
Too bad "the middle class" is a rapidly shrinking island and the nearest stepping stones are increasingly far from its shores. With the possible exception of building trades, traditional middle class jobs are increasingly being exported, filled by poorly-paid H1B wage slaves, or eliminated altogether. The solution to these problems has little to do with college courses, (AKA 'job training', AKA 'shaping the peg to fit a non-existent hole'), and a lot to do with fixing massively unfair concentration of wealth.
Additionally, education should not be primarily about job training - it should be about producing well-rounded, creative, thoughtful, aware citizens who can solve problems and who can adapt readily to a variety of roles as required. Our society is not a production line for widgets, and it's time we stopped treating it as one.
Because I need the ultimate in privacy between me and the video billboard in Times square where I'm posting the intimate details of my life. Yeah, right.
Problem is, there will be many, many people who will think "Oh! Facebook is protecting my privacy now, so they must be OK!"
The article doesn't seem to point out the obvious explanation, ie that H1B applications contain personal data (of the type Slashdotters are usually passionate about protecting), and that it is good practice not to keep such information hanging around once it has served its primary purpose.
Given the recent reports of how H1B workers are treated as slaves in abuses reminicent of human trafficking, the timing of this seems more than a bit suspicious. And at least one source has the DOL saying "will no longer respond to inquiries to search for records in response to FOIA requests". Explicitly pre-empting the FOIA process without even the suggestion that the data might be anonymized to allay privacy concerns is, again, more than a little suspicious.
There are presumably solutions to the research concerns, such as aggregating the data before it is deleted or collecting the specific data necessary before the records are deleted.
Yes, there are solutions, but will they be implemented? And is the Dept. of Labor so tone-deaf, and so ignorant of the controversial nature of this decision, that they didn't think to put an anonymization program in place in advance of this announcement? Somehow I doubt it.
I have AdBlock installed, and I still see pre-roll ads sometimes.
But it's strange and I can't pronounce it so it must be bad.
But it's done by scientists who are real smart and they say it's OK so it must be good and safe.
See what happens when you argue from authority?
If that were true. We wouldn't be able to put these genes in there in the first place. Just because it is too complex for you, or you are ignorant of what we can and do model. Doesn't mean other can't.
You are looking at FAR too narrow a scope. Can geneticists predict the immediate and close-in effects of what they do? Yes, most of the time they can. Can they accurately predict what will happen many generations down the line, in combination with cross-breeding, spontaneous mutations, and the environment? No, they cannot. And then there is always the "we don't know what we don't know" factor - and that's why people like Taleb urge caution. Hell, Monsanto put the whole Roundup-Ready juggernaut in motion while seeming to not even consider that weeds might develop resistance to glyphosate. Guess what? We now have glyphosate-resistant weeds. Monsanto dropped the ball on that relatively simple matter - do you really think their predictive capabilities are any better when they're doing something really hard like genetic modification?
You seem to have a pretty simplistic view of the vastly complex world we live in.