Threatening someone with jail time or fines if they don't volunteer is like saying there is a mandatory donation required to attend a free event.
So should they also scrap community service and probation options and stick everyone with pure jail-time instead? If you've done something you can be jailed for but they think you'll reform with some minimal oversight I don't see the issue with offering it as an option.
If nothing else, it (in combination with some decent speech recognition software) brings us one step closer to a Star Trek style voice interface, and that's a damn worthwhile cause in my book!
This is sadly not true. Watson couldn't actually see or hear anything and the clues had to be fed to him electronically. Still impressive NLP but no speech recognition.
When clues are read by the host they are fed electronically to Watson, which parses the text, formulates hunches and checks all the evidence it can retrieve to test its hunches and then generates its five best answers, assigning each a confidence level before deciding whether to buzz in. (source)
If you have to abstract the description of the product to some ridiculous qualifiers such as "the only currently commercially available device that contains cell processor" instead of basing your expectations of what you'd expect a "current gaming console" to do then you probably just lost the reasonable person debate. When one bases their expectations on the actual product category the product is in, and how all the other products from other companies in that category work (Xbox, Wii) one would be hard pressed to have the expectation that they could mod the system and still connect to the systems online services. A reasonable person doesn't even need to read the specific ToS for the online service to realize that won't fly with any console maker.
it isnt difficult to answer. everything must be publicly available. even if a witness protection programme is in question, it can be exploited to do underhanded things due to the secrecy i provides. everything must be public.
I disagree strongly with your view then. I think the risk of government corruption through a witness protection program is immeasurably smaller than the risks to a free and lawful society not being able to protect witnesses from retribution and intimidation when testifying against large criminal organizations, corporations, and even other branches of the government itself. I value the changes and justice brought about in society by such witnesses far more then I fear the risk that some small amount of tax dollars is somehow siphoned off from the witness security budget without any of the appointed officials or auditors noticing and blowing the whistle.
We're both entitled to our own opinion of course, but luckily for me there's enough people in this democracy that agree with me that I don't think those practices will get changed anytime soon.
I didn't exaggerate a single thing. I asked where you draw the line when it comes to real things that the government does every single day in your claim that everything is black and white, good and evil. I didn't even make any claim to invalidate your statements I merely asked you questions related to the application of your claims. It's a very difficult question to answer so I can understand your reluctance to try, but that is why no one reasonably believes things are so perfectly clear as black and white, good and evil when it comes to transparency, secrets and privacy. All of these issues are an immensely complex tangle of give and take, balance of freedom of information and protection of both innocents and national interests.
How about you have a department of nothing but hackers who try to crack your systems. As they get through, they report what they did and you fix it? No 3.0 needed.
Out of curiosity how does one form an entire department of highly skilled and reliable workers AND perform security clearance background checks on them for free?
me knowing what my government is doing with my money : good.
anyone trying to prevent me from knowing what my government is doing with my money, for ANY reason : evil
anyone helping me know what my government is doing : good.
So if the government relocates a witness for their protection using your tax money you need the line-item details that could give their location away or can we abstract it to a budget for witness relocation used by the Marshals Service? At what level of abstraction does the flip immediately switch from Good [tm] to Evil [tm]? Do the motives for someone leaking what the government is doing with that witness (because they want the witness killed or because there's some sort of government scam) matter or is it just plain good either way?
It really amazes me how we've survived as a species if this many people have trouble with the whole "don't poke the bear" concept. What you say is true, if you decide a bear needs to be dealt with you go hunt it with a gun. But can you guess what you DON'T walk up and do to it first?;) But I jest, I think we're on the same page here.
I'm not sure if you deserve the *whoosh* or me because it's hard to tell if you're joking or not with just how much everyone has a raging hardon for adblock here that they have to tell everyone about, but the 'ad' he's talking about is the story's ad for a hitman in the form of a facebook status update.
You mean the FBI that keeps being proven to have just plain MADE SHIT UP to go after people?
I don't think you understand the whole poking a bear concept. Your response is akin to saying "You mean the same bear that ripped a dude's arm off and ate it for NO REASON?!?" Yes kind sir, that is indeed the bear you should think twice before poking.
From your own link you used to claim Christianity is somehow the main guiding force responsible for Hitler and Nazi Germany:
In 1985 the Austrian author Wilfried Daim published a photograph of an alleged document signed by Hitler in 1943, which proposed the:
"Immediate and unconditional abolition of all religions after the final victory ('Endsieg') not only for the territory of Greater Germany but also for all released, occupied and annexed countries..., proclaiming at the same time Hitler as the new messiah. Out of political considerations the Muslim, Buddhist and Shintoist religion will be spared for the present. The 'Führer' has to be presented as an intermediate between a redeemer and a liberator, yet surely as one sent by God, who has to get godly honour. The existing churches, chapels, temples and cult places of the different religions have to be changed into 'Adolf-Hitler-consecration places'. The theological faculties of the universities have to be transformed into the new faith. Special emphasis has to be lain on the education of missionaries and wandering preachers, who have to proclaim the teaching in Greater Germany and in the rest of the world and have to form religious bodies, which can be used as centres for further extension. (With this the problems with the abolition of monogamy will disappear, because polygamy can be included into the new teaching as one of the statements of faith.)"[69][70]
Blaming the holocaust on Christianity is more intellectually dishonest then blaming domestic violence on 'love'.
Without subsidized infrastructure like phone, electricity, roads, airport and internet many modern businesses are impossible. Walmart could never exist, google could never exist, etc.
And neither would modern lifestyle. You only wish to look at one half of the equation here. Without the subsidized infrastructure like roads, electricity, water, airport and internet you'd find yourself farming land tied to one area. Who uses and benefits from the roads more? Wall-mart that sends out a bunch of trucks with goods or the millions of workers (including one driving each one of those trucks) that drive to and from work each day? Personally I see a hell of a lot more personal vehicles and small time construction/plumbing/contractor/service vehicles using the roads then I do wall-mart tractor trailers.
Let me put it this way. Say I'm a crappy software engineer and make $40k a year and drive 10 miles to work. Now say I'm a really really good software engineer and I make $150k a year and also drive 10 miles to work. I'm using the exact same resources (roads, electricity, ect) as the lower paid engineer, and without those resources neither of our jobs would exist. Your justification for taking a greater percentage from the higher salary breaks down here. The only justification I can see being made is that because they make more, the perks will outweigh being forced to pay a greater percentage. If that's what your argument really is just say so, but I think justifications about them "owing" more or using society more don't hold water.
It's a fallacy to think that 100% of a tax gets passed down. If that were true, in 1946, when the top tax rate was 94%, then the government would have gotten around 94% of the money. And yet, it only got 20% of GDP or so. Check it out, these figures are easily available on the web.
Continuing the trend of simply arguing faulty logic, your argument here doesn't make sense to me. If you tax person A 75% and person B 25% no matter how much of the amount person A owes that he passes on to person B through price increases of goods/services the amount the government collects from the entire population can never reach 75%. And as you end up with more and more "Person B" to pass the tax on to the less and less it is felt. Hence the idea of it simply being another way to "hide" the true taxes they are paying.
The wealthy are those who reap the greatest benefits of society as a whole.
So your saying the advent of well trained and organized police, fair court systems and judges with well pay salaries so they are harder to buy, infrastructure so workers are more mobile and not tied to the land are all things that benefit the rich the most as opposed to how they have helped the working class people compared to society in the middle ages when none of these things existed? Sure, these things help wealthy people to in some ways, but if your looking at society as a WHOLE I think there's no doubt on which side benefits and quality of life have increased the most since society has advanced.
No, them telling us it is a good idea is NOT good enough fool. And THIS leak shows exactly what the mentality of the Bank of America is. No, not because there is proof they did this but because they EVEN considered it.
That requires some advanced thinking but basically goes that for some thought crimes are indeed crimes. Some people/institutions should NOT even be allowed to consider certain things.
Well there's something you don't see every day, a conspiracy nutter arguing in favor of thought crimes being real crimes. I fail to see how a company A proposing something to company B would make company B guilty of a crime for having heard and therefore considered it. No society could function under such ludicrous rules. Under your idea if I were to hypothetically say "That's crazy, go jump off a bridge!" and you read it, then you'd be guilty of considering suicide (even though you chose not to go with my outlandish hypothetical proposal).
Also, where do you get off calling me a fool and deciding to set up strawmen regarding my stances on regulation/deregulation of the banking industry when I've commented on absolutely nothing of the sort? No where did I say I trust the bank or anything to that effect, I merely made the case that the proposal by the defense companies by not have been the cause for what actually happened. It seems to me if the first 4 domino already fell and the 5th is starting I'm not going to give credit to the guy who just then submits a proposal suggesting the 5th domino knocks over the 6th when that actually happens.
The plan was pitched to Bank of America on the 3rd. Amazon and EveryDNS already had withdrawn services so I think it's a stretch to try to insinuate that Paypal doing the same on the 4th is somehow related to a proposal submitted to a separate financial institution on the 3rd. It's also not entirely surprising that people pointed out to be weak links and ready to leave Wikileaks turned out to be weak leaks and decided to leave Wikileaks. This sounds like a case of some defense companies ever looking to scrape up some profits pointing out the blindingly obvious and now when a couple of the obvious things happen on their own people trying to attribute it to a successful implementation of said plot.
Microsoft shouldn't even be in the phone market. Or the console game market
So your suggestion would be to focus on the business area that is slowly losing ground and abandon those that are becoming very profitable?
Revenues at its entertainment and devices division, which produces the Xbox and Kinect grew by 55%, to $3.7bn, and profits by 83% to $679m. But revenues were down 30% at its workhorse Windows division, to $5bn, and profits fell by 40% year-on-year to $3.2bn. The principal cause of weakness was slow growth in the PC market, which only grew by 3% during the year; the Windows division relies on sales of its Windows operating sytem.
Microsoft Profits
[Built-in voice chat is] a feature of the game itself. Not the platform it's on.
Not for the 360 it isn't. The best thing Microsoft did for the 360 was create the party system that transcends the game you're playing in. That way you can choose to talk to only the people you want to talk to, whether they have made it into your game session, are waiting to get picked up by the party the next round, or are simply playing a different game but chatting with you. This is much more agreeable then losing communication when the game screws up and your party gets separated or constantly having to either mute or listen to whiny 12-year-olds throw racial slurs around because now that they're able to speak to someone without risk of getting their face broken they're suddenly tough shit.
If it was truly a war, the international laws on war, like the Geneva convention, would apply. Some US politicians are fond of calling it "the war on terrorism", but they conveniently forget that it's a "war" as soon as they are asked to follow the rules of war.
Really dude? If you are going to speak with authority on legal conventions you could at least bother to read TWO sentences into the thing;)
2nd Sentence of Geneva Convention:
In addition to the provisions which shall be implemented in peacetime, the present Convention shall apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them.source
Isn't this how facebook got its initial data too? By scraping the websites of Universities for student profiles.
No. It started by only allowing university students with specific.edu addresses to join, starting with only Harvard and then expanding to more and more colleges before they finally opened it up to High School students and then anyone. It was limited to universities because Zuckerburg's own social network was a university and they are a good target demographic, not because they had pages to pre-scrape user data from. To my knowledge no college would post such user data on a public website anyways as it'd be an extreme breach of that student's privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Threatening someone with jail time or fines if they don't volunteer is like saying there is a mandatory donation required to attend a free event.
So should they also scrap community service and probation options and stick everyone with pure jail-time instead? If you've done something you can be jailed for but they think you'll reform with some minimal oversight I don't see the issue with offering it as an option.
The US Government thinks Cyber war is a stupid term now too?! Quick, everyone switch positions!! ;)
Ah, yea, I totally misread that, my bad.
If nothing else, it (in combination with some decent speech recognition software) brings us one step closer to a Star Trek style voice interface, and that's a damn worthwhile cause in my book!
This is sadly not true. Watson couldn't actually see or hear anything and the clues had to be fed to him electronically. Still impressive NLP but no speech recognition.
When clues are read by the host they are fed electronically to Watson, which parses the text, formulates hunches and checks all the evidence it can retrieve to test its hunches and then generates its five best answers, assigning each a confidence level before deciding whether to buzz in. (source)
If you have to abstract the description of the product to some ridiculous qualifiers such as "the only currently commercially available device that contains cell processor" instead of basing your expectations of what you'd expect a "current gaming console" to do then you probably just lost the reasonable person debate. When one bases their expectations on the actual product category the product is in, and how all the other products from other companies in that category work (Xbox, Wii) one would be hard pressed to have the expectation that they could mod the system and still connect to the systems online services. A reasonable person doesn't even need to read the specific ToS for the online service to realize that won't fly with any console maker.
One interesting fact about China is that its current average age is 40, so in twenty years it will be 60.
It scares me that this might not be a joke, and that is has been modded Interesting. Windmills do not work that way!
it isnt difficult to answer. everything must be publicly available. even if a witness protection programme is in question, it can be exploited to do underhanded things due to the secrecy i provides. everything must be public.
I disagree strongly with your view then. I think the risk of government corruption through a witness protection program is immeasurably smaller than the risks to a free and lawful society not being able to protect witnesses from retribution and intimidation when testifying against large criminal organizations, corporations, and even other branches of the government itself. I value the changes and justice brought about in society by such witnesses far more then I fear the risk that some small amount of tax dollars is somehow siphoned off from the witness security budget without any of the appointed officials or auditors noticing and blowing the whistle.
We're both entitled to our own opinion of course, but luckily for me there's enough people in this democracy that agree with me that I don't think those practices will get changed anytime soon.
I didn't exaggerate a single thing. I asked where you draw the line when it comes to real things that the government does every single day in your claim that everything is black and white, good and evil. I didn't even make any claim to invalidate your statements I merely asked you questions related to the application of your claims. It's a very difficult question to answer so I can understand your reluctance to try, but that is why no one reasonably believes things are so perfectly clear as black and white, good and evil when it comes to transparency, secrets and privacy. All of these issues are an immensely complex tangle of give and take, balance of freedom of information and protection of both innocents and national interests.
Here's an idea. You can have it for free.
How about you have a department of nothing but hackers who try to crack your systems. As they get through, they report what they did and you fix it? No 3.0 needed.
Out of curiosity how does one form an entire department of highly skilled and reliable workers AND perform security clearance background checks on them for free?
me knowing what my government is doing with my money : good.
anyone trying to prevent me from knowing what my government is doing with my money, for ANY reason : evil
anyone helping me know what my government is doing : good.
So if the government relocates a witness for their protection using your tax money you need the line-item details that could give their location away or can we abstract it to a budget for witness relocation used by the Marshals Service? At what level of abstraction does the flip immediately switch from Good [tm] to Evil [tm]? Do the motives for someone leaking what the government is doing with that witness (because they want the witness killed or because there's some sort of government scam) matter or is it just plain good either way?
It really amazes me how we've survived as a species if this many people have trouble with the whole "don't poke the bear" concept. What you say is true, if you decide a bear needs to be dealt with you go hunt it with a gun. But can you guess what you DON'T walk up and do to it first? ;) But I jest, I think we're on the same page here.
I'm not sure if you deserve the *whoosh* or me because it's hard to tell if you're joking or not with just how much everyone has a raging hardon for adblock here that they have to tell everyone about, but the 'ad' he's talking about is the story's ad for a hitman in the form of a facebook status update.
You mean the FBI that keeps being proven to have just plain MADE SHIT UP to go after people?
I don't think you understand the whole poking a bear concept. Your response is akin to saying "You mean the same bear that ripped a dude's arm off and ate it for NO REASON?!?" Yes kind sir, that is indeed the bear you should think twice before poking.
In 1985 the Austrian author Wilfried Daim published a photograph of an alleged document signed by Hitler in 1943, which proposed the:
"Immediate and unconditional abolition of all religions after the final victory ('Endsieg') not only for the territory of Greater Germany but also for all released, occupied and annexed countries ..., proclaiming at the same time Hitler as the new messiah. Out of political considerations the Muslim, Buddhist and Shintoist religion will be spared for the present. The 'Führer' has to be presented as an intermediate between a redeemer and a liberator, yet surely as one sent by God, who has to get godly honour. The existing churches, chapels, temples and cult places of the different religions have to be changed into 'Adolf-Hitler-consecration places'. The theological faculties of the universities have to be transformed into the new faith. Special emphasis has to be lain on the education of missionaries and wandering preachers, who have to proclaim the teaching in Greater Germany and in the rest of the world and have to form religious bodies, which can be used as centres for further extension. (With this the problems with the abolition of monogamy will disappear, because polygamy can be included into the new teaching as one of the statements of faith.)"[69][70]
Blaming the holocaust on Christianity is more intellectually dishonest then blaming domestic violence on 'love'.
Without subsidized infrastructure like phone, electricity, roads, airport and internet many modern businesses are impossible. Walmart could never exist, google could never exist, etc.
And neither would modern lifestyle. You only wish to look at one half of the equation here. Without the subsidized infrastructure like roads, electricity, water, airport and internet you'd find yourself farming land tied to one area. Who uses and benefits from the roads more? Wall-mart that sends out a bunch of trucks with goods or the millions of workers (including one driving each one of those trucks) that drive to and from work each day? Personally I see a hell of a lot more personal vehicles and small time construction/plumbing/contractor/service vehicles using the roads then I do wall-mart tractor trailers.
Let me put it this way. Say I'm a crappy software engineer and make $40k a year and drive 10 miles to work. Now say I'm a really really good software engineer and I make $150k a year and also drive 10 miles to work. I'm using the exact same resources (roads, electricity, ect) as the lower paid engineer, and without those resources neither of our jobs would exist. Your justification for taking a greater percentage from the higher salary breaks down here. The only justification I can see being made is that because they make more, the perks will outweigh being forced to pay a greater percentage. If that's what your argument really is just say so, but I think justifications about them "owing" more or using society more don't hold water.
It's a fallacy to think that 100% of a tax gets passed down. If that were true, in 1946, when the top tax rate was 94%, then the government would have gotten around 94% of the money. And yet, it only got 20% of GDP or so. Check it out, these figures are easily available on the web.
Continuing the trend of simply arguing faulty logic, your argument here doesn't make sense to me. If you tax person A 75% and person B 25% no matter how much of the amount person A owes that he passes on to person B through price increases of goods/services the amount the government collects from the entire population can never reach 75%. And as you end up with more and more "Person B" to pass the tax on to the less and less it is felt. Hence the idea of it simply being another way to "hide" the true taxes they are paying.
The wealthy are those who reap the greatest benefits of society as a whole.
So your saying the advent of well trained and organized police, fair court systems and judges with well pay salaries so they are harder to buy, infrastructure so workers are more mobile and not tied to the land are all things that benefit the rich the most as opposed to how they have helped the working class people compared to society in the middle ages when none of these things existed? Sure, these things help wealthy people to in some ways, but if your looking at society as a WHOLE I think there's no doubt on which side benefits and quality of life have increased the most since society has advanced.
No, them telling us it is a good idea is NOT good enough fool. And THIS leak shows exactly what the mentality of the Bank of America is. No, not because there is proof they did this but because they EVEN considered it.
That requires some advanced thinking but basically goes that for some thought crimes are indeed crimes. Some people/institutions should NOT even be allowed to consider certain things.
Well there's something you don't see every day, a conspiracy nutter arguing in favor of thought crimes being real crimes. I fail to see how a company A proposing something to company B would make company B guilty of a crime for having heard and therefore considered it. No society could function under such ludicrous rules. Under your idea if I were to hypothetically say "That's crazy, go jump off a bridge!" and you read it, then you'd be guilty of considering suicide (even though you chose not to go with my outlandish hypothetical proposal).
Also, where do you get off calling me a fool and deciding to set up strawmen regarding my stances on regulation/deregulation of the banking industry when I've commented on absolutely nothing of the sort? No where did I say I trust the bank or anything to that effect, I merely made the case that the proposal by the defense companies by not have been the cause for what actually happened. It seems to me if the first 4 domino already fell and the 5th is starting I'm not going to give credit to the guy who just then submits a proposal suggesting the 5th domino knocks over the 6th when that actually happens.
The plan was pitched to Bank of America on the 3rd. Amazon and EveryDNS already had withdrawn services so I think it's a stretch to try to insinuate that Paypal doing the same on the 4th is somehow related to a proposal submitted to a separate financial institution on the 3rd. It's also not entirely surprising that people pointed out to be weak links and ready to leave Wikileaks turned out to be weak leaks and decided to leave Wikileaks. This sounds like a case of some defense companies ever looking to scrape up some profits pointing out the blindingly obvious and now when a couple of the obvious things happen on their own people trying to attribute it to a successful implementation of said plot.
Microsoft shouldn't even be in the phone market. Or the console game market
So your suggestion would be to focus on the business area that is slowly losing ground and abandon those that are becoming very profitable?
Revenues at its entertainment and devices division, which produces the Xbox and Kinect grew by 55%, to $3.7bn, and profits by 83% to $679m. But revenues were down 30% at its workhorse Windows division, to $5bn, and profits fell by 40% year-on-year to $3.2bn. The principal cause of weakness was slow growth in the PC market, which only grew by 3% during the year; the Windows division relies on sales of its Windows operating sytem. Microsoft Profits
[Built-in voice chat is] a feature of the game itself. Not the platform it's on.
Not for the 360 it isn't. The best thing Microsoft did for the 360 was create the party system that transcends the game you're playing in. That way you can choose to talk to only the people you want to talk to, whether they have made it into your game session, are waiting to get picked up by the party the next round, or are simply playing a different game but chatting with you. This is much more agreeable then losing communication when the game screws up and your party gets separated or constantly having to either mute or listen to whiny 12-year-olds throw racial slurs around because now that they're able to speak to someone without risk of getting their face broken they're suddenly tough shit.
If it was truly a war, the international laws on war, like the Geneva convention, would apply. Some US politicians are fond of calling it "the war on terrorism", but they conveniently forget that it's a "war" as soon as they are asked to follow the rules of war.
Really dude? If you are going to speak with authority on legal conventions you could at least bother to read TWO sentences into the thing ;)
2nd Sentence of Geneva Convention:
In addition to the provisions which shall be implemented in peacetime, the present Convention shall apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them. source
Of course, my parent and grandparent posters both meant "major tenets" and not "major tenants" of science. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tenets
Science: Falsifiability lives here
Isn't this how facebook got its initial data too? By scraping the websites of Universities for student profiles.
No. It started by only allowing university students with specific .edu addresses to join, starting with only Harvard and then expanding to more and more colleges before they finally opened it up to High School students and then anyone. It was limited to universities because Zuckerburg's own social network was a university and they are a good target demographic, not because they had pages to pre-scrape user data from. To my knowledge no college would post such user data on a public website anyways as it'd be an extreme breach of that student's privacy.
Difficult not impossible. one would resort to hardlines. Which would be better anyways in most cases.
Which is why no one owns a cellphone in the first place, because hardlines are better in most cases right?