I said, "The US could eat a 9/11 10 times a year, and if we didn't act like fucking cowards in response, terrorism still wouldn't even make it into the top 10 most likely ways to die as an American."
30,000 deaths each year still would not break you into the top 10 leading causes of death. You would still be below the number 10 spot which is occupied by a specific infection. The 9 spot kills 60,000 people a year due to the flu. We lose 300,000 people in just six months to heart disease alone.
It isn't hyperbole. The terrorist are not going to kill you. Stop being such a god damn coward and realize that you are going to eat your fat ass to death, not get struck dead by a sheep herder. Mewing and pleading for the government to strip you of your liberties over the absurdly rare possibility that a terrorist might get you is pathetic and cowardly. Stop trying to defend such pathetic craven bleating.
Terrorism as practiced by groups like Al Qaida is much different. Al Qaida is a military organization with a global reach that has essentially declared war on the United States (as well as dozens of others governments, it seems). One of the core responsibilities of government is to defend its citizenry against military threats. But terrorists don't stop at attacking our military installations; by definition, they aim to kill thousands of civilians at a time as part of a campaign of psychological warfare. To say that we don't need a DHS, greatly increased security at airports and subway stations, etc. is ridiculous. Al Qaida would love it if we went back to our pre-9/11 levels of security (which was mostly aimed at common criminals). They would continue with their 9/11 style attacks on airplanes, the shoe bombing attacks that Richard Reid blew the cover on later, the London subway bombings, the Mumbai hotel massacre, etc, with the goal of getting Americans to believe that government was incapable of protecting them. Like a schoolyard bully, they will continue until they are effectively confronted and stopped.
Americans poured out their blood and tears over the past 200+ years to gain essential freedoms and liberties. Ripping up the fourth and fifth amendment because a bunch of sheep herders can on rare occasion kill a few Americans is pure cowardice. We don't respond violently to each and every little trivial threat, and terrorist fall firmly in the 'trivial threat' category. For the same reason why I would HOPE that Americans would be against random warrantless searches of their homes in attempt to capture more normal criminals, I would hope that they can get a handle on their mewing cowardly fright of an extremely rare way to die, and respond in the same way when confront with terrorism.
There are lots of things we could do to marginally increase our safety. We don't do most of them because it isn't worth the cost. A brutal Soviet style police state has less violent crime. We reject that sort of police state because we are willing to tolerate a little more crime in exchange for liberty. Our courts are biased to let guilty people go free because we don't want to jail innocent people. Terrorism is not magically different. Sure, it is the responsibility of the government to make reasonable efforts to stop terrorist. It sure as shit isn't their responsibility to do it at any cost. The amount we pay in terms of money and liberty to defend against terrorism needs to be balanced by the fact that it is an absurdly rare way for anyone to actually die.
The US has a 200+ year history of bleeding to grow and defend its liberties. We faced down the Soviet Union with one hand tied behind our back in terms of counter espionage because we were so insistent about preserving the liberties that we were fighting for. It is sad and pathetic that when faced with fucking sheep herders that are a couple of centuries behind what the USSR was in terms of population, resources, and technological capability, we promptly shit ourselves and couldn't surrender our liberties against a trivial threat fast enough.
If you want to be a coward, fearful of death due to the absurdly rare chance of being struck down by a terrorist (rather than eating yourself to death), do it quietly. Don't mew and bleat for politicians to piss away MY money and liberty because you can't control your bowels. I appreciate the blood and sacrifices that Americans have made over the past 200+ years to grow and defend their liberty. I don't appreciate sniveling cowards rushing to surrender away what other far more deserving men and women have built.
It is not asking much that you honor the blood and sacrifices made by better and braver men and women than you by making your own tiny and nearly effortless sacrifice of not pissing yourself and bleating to politicians to save you on the rare occasion that a terrorist manages to kill a trivial and minuscule portion of the population. If previous Americans co
The US faced down the fucking USSR. The USSR could literally destroy the world, and we had a policy of going toe to toe with them if they messed with us or our allies. We were just as ready to jab the 'blow up the god damn world' as they were, if not more so. We went nearly a decade in that mindset without pissing away our civil liberties.
9/11 comes along and one of the least scary threats to Americans, a threat that ranks well below eating McDonalds food (which actually DOES kill Americans), and we piss ourselves.
Our actions didn't scare away OBL. OBL couldn't do it again because as soon as we installed $100 security doors and airplanes and passengers decided to beat the shit out of anyone trying to take over the airplane, it made that attack impossible. The US could eat a 9/11 10 times a year, and if we didn't act like fucking cowards in response, terrorism still wouldn't even make it into the top 10 most likely ways to die as an American. Eating your fat American ass to death would remain safely on top by over two orders of magnitude.
I am all for beating the piss out of Afghanistan post 9/11. It is a friendly reminder to other nations not to harbor enemies. I was okay with dropping a couple hundred on security doors for airplanes and telling passengers to beat the shit out of anyone trying to take over and airplane. Absolutely everything beyond that was a complete fucking waste of money and much of it a violation of civil liberties we managed to keep even when facing down the fucking USSR.
Seriously, consider that. The fourth amendment meant something when facing down the god damn USSR, an world ending threat. When faced with sheep herders who are as likely to blow their own dicks off as they are to blow up a single airplane (of our many thousands), we promptly rip up the constitution and use it as toilet paper to help clean up the mess when made we shit ourselves in cowardly fright.
Anyone who fears terrorist in the US is a fucking coward, pure and simple. Anyone who fears them enough to mew and bleat to politicians to strip their fellow Americans of civil liberties and constitutional protection is not only a complete and total fucking coward, but a sniveling traitorous coward of the worst kind, as they have the nerve to bleat for politicians to strip their fellow citizens of freedoms that 200+ years of Americans fought and died to build and protect. If you are going to be a coward, do it quietly, and don't be a traitorous piece of filth working to undo freedoms bought with 200+ years of sweat and blood by men and women far more deserving of those freedoms than your sniveling pathetic ass. If the thought of dying really causes your bowels to loosen, eat less fucking food.
The anniversary of 9/11 always pisses me off. No, not because 3000 people died. 3000 people dying was a tragedy to be sure and the relatives of the victims certainly have my condolences. What pisses me off is the cowardly way that we as Americans reacted and how we continue to behave.
After 9/11 we had a decision. We could either have been brave or cowardly. We chose the path of cowardice. Cowardice is submitting to terror by stripping ourselves of civil liberty, creating a department of "homeland security", and installing pr0n scanners in airports. Cowardice is secret no-fly lists and domestic spying. The worst cowardice was Americans mewing to their politicians to strip them of their liberties to save them from the oh-so-scary terrorist. Cowardice is the path we picked. We gave up essential liberties for a trivial amount of security.
The path of bravery would have been to have by clinging to our essential freedoms and liberties. The nation that stood down the fucking USSR, a REAL threat, managed to go half a century without surrendering their freedoms and running away screaming like cowards. Seriously, consider that. 9/11 stripped away freedoms that we had even when the US was facing down a nation armed with a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the world multiple times over. We faced down a world ending threat and didn't balk, but when a couple of sheep herders managed to knock down two buildings in a manner that they can never repeat again, we promptly shit ourselves and surrender those liberties we guarded when facing down the existential threat that was the USSR. Talking about acting the part of the fucking coward. If there was ever a time to piss ourselves and wipe our ass with the constitution, it was during the Cold War.
Just think about it for a moment. In a time when it was our policy the literally destroy the world if our allies were attacked, you could get on an airplane unmolested and the fourth amendment was still actively enforced.
If you are an American, you are going to die by stuffing your face with too much fucking food. Fucking deal with it. You are not going to die in a terrorist attack. The food you stuff into your god damn face is going to be the death of you. That, or your own body is going to murder you with cancer. If you are really lucky, you might die in an exciting car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to kill you. If you believe so, you are a god damn coward and an idiot.
Fucking food bacteria kills 10x more people every year than terrorist did in 2001. It kills 300x more people than terrorist have killed Americans in the past decade. Terrorism in 2001 didn't even make it to the top 10 most likely ways to die. It falls well below chocking on your own god damn food over the past decade. That is right, stuffing food into your fat face is literally more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
So what pisses me off about 9/11 is that it is not a time for memorials and what not. What pisses me off is that we sit around circle jerking each other over how scary the terrorist are as we stuff our fat Americans asses with McDonalds food. We mew and bleat to politicians to protect us from one of the most unlikely ways to die imaginable, as we work on scoring a heart attack before the age of 60 by eating ourselves to death.
We could have a 9/11 style attack every single MONTH, and we would still have more people dying to being fat asses. Despite this, I don't see us cowardly begging the government to strip us of our civil liberties to save us from eating ourselves to death.
9/11 pisses me off each and every year because it is a sore reminder that when faced with a minor and petty threat to ourselves, we shit our pants, pissed ourselves, and picked the path of the coward. We gave up our civil liberties and elected asshole politicians who promised to rip apart the constitution. It pains me to think
This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
Let's assume that the incident really did happen. The US has already denied it, but less assume it happened. Jamming is all about blasting a very loud signal that drowns out other signals. During a military operation GPS jamming the US is a pretty ineffective technique for a number of reasons.
First, there are a number of methods of navigating and targeting without GPS. GPS is easy and accurate, but if all of the GPS satellites fell out of the sky, they US military would still happily navigate its planes around and drop bombs. The US military is designed to go toe to toe with Russia and China. Go ahead and assume that the idea that their GPS satellites might be denied to them has crossed their minds. The US doesn't build stealth bombers to kill sheep herders. The US military might be good and killing sheep herders, but it is designed to fight a modern military.
Second, if you are dumb enough to turn on a GPS jammer powerful enough to knock out a plane's GPS navigation during a time of conflict, you pretty much deserve the missile that is going to fly up your arse a few minutes later. Jamming is done by blasting a very powerful signal out into the air. A very powerful signal is trivial to track. You might as well paint your GPS jamming equipment bright red and leave it out in an open field with arrows pointing to it. The first thing the US does in any sort of air war is to level anything that transmits. Normally, this is for taking out radar stations to blind air defenses, but it also applies to any attempts to jam. You really don't want to try and get into an ECM battle with the US. If you are screaming at the top of your long loud enough to jam GPS, you are being more than noisy enough for a missile to follow the signal back to the source.
Third, the airplane was not 'forced down'. If the story is true, what happened was they aborted their mission. That seems like a pretty legitimate thing to do if the mission isn't critical. I am sure they could have carried on if they wanted to, but they decided to play it safe. They were flying close to hostile territory doing a mission that will be fine if it waits a day or two longer. Hell, they might not even known they were being jammed until after the fact and were just concerned that their GPS equipment was malfunctioning. Delaying a signal flight for a couple of hours is hardly a stirring victory. If those plans had been sent to do something hostile, GPS jamming wouldn't have worked. The jammers would have been quickly destroyed or the plans could have navigated and hit their targets without GPS, or more likely, both would have happened. The jammer would have been destroyed and the plans on a mission would have merrily carried on without waiting.
But wait until you try and do something about the world. Maybe you'll run for political office. Or want to help out at child care center down the street. Wanted that teacher's license? Maybe someone will find out that people that google Cheerios, fucktards, and pantyhose are statistically proven to be terrorists and need to be rounded up and vilified. They'll look around for a while until that one row in one table in one database outs you. Then you're toast.
Google (and Facebook), don't sell information on you personal. Period. Full stop. Stop being paranoid. No one can pay Google for your personal search history or get a profile on you. Google does try and understand who you are. When Google "sells you", they sell you by slapping you into a bundle of "nerds who are likely to buy your goofy as Firefly shirt" and promise to the people who make Firefly shirts that they are going to show ads to people like you. This is harmless. Not only is it harmless, but it is actively good. If an advertiser can target me enough to try and offer me up crap that I actually want, it becomes a service rather than an annoyance. I only wish Google knew 'my type' well enough to sell me a good interesting book instead of offering me the chance to refinance a mortgage that I don't have.
The only real danger is when your government jumps in and start trying to hunt down people based upon their data. That is a legitimate concern,but frankly, if your government wants to fuck you, they are going to have their way. Otherwise, all that matters is controlling your data from people who you want to hide it from. Don't friend your fucking boss on Facebook and then declare him the devil incarnate. Friend with care on Facebook, use Google Plus, use e-mail, or simply keep it off the tubes. If you over share, you are just being a moron.
In fact, there's not so much difference between the machines as a 1977 XT with 128k, a tape drive and a monochrome monitor and a 1987 80386 with megabytes of memory, megabytes of hard disk space, a VGA monitor, sound card, multitasking, etc. Now leap forwards to 1997 and your Pentium II... better but only incrementally so.
Yikes! Did you REALLY just use that as an example? Right now I have sitting in front of me my phone. It can curb stomp a Pentium II in raw computing power. It uses a couple of orders of magnitude less power, has a couple of orders of magnitude more storage capacity, it has the capacity to send and/or receive on a half a dozen different signals, has a handful of sensors on it that you would need a wheel barrel to hold 15 years ago, it costs 1/4 as much, and and it fits in my fucking pocket . Seriously... in-my-fucking-pocket . That isn't "incremental" change. That is orders of magnitude exponential change. That is horse to steam engine in 15 years.
You are living in an age of accelerated technological growth. The only thing your example does is show how amazingly flexible humans are in dealing with it. The fact that your head doesn't blow in two when you realize that you can now communicate with anyone in the world, receive the answer to any question with a well known answer, locate any publicly known place and your relation to it, and do it with a hunk of technology that fits in your pocket and costs chump change, just shows that humans can accept that blue is now red and carry on.
If you were to revert the world to the technology of 20 years ago (which is before the widespread use of E-mail and the world wide web), most industries would implode, most people wouldn't even know how to work, and the global economy would grind to a halt. As an engineer working on those chips you find so dully unremarkable and incremental, I physically wouldn't be able to do my job. I wouldn't even know how to do my job. How the fuck do you run a semi-conductor fab when your most powerful computer is a x386? I know we did it in the past, but fuck if I know how you would even begin to contemplate going back to it. Engineering without storing massive amounts of data, computer assistance, and electronic tracking is like going from shopping in a super market to hunting and gathering. They are barely related.
Just because you take a technological revolution that has remade the earth in stride and 'meh' at instant world wide communication of everything over the course of a decade or two doesn't mean it isn't remarkable. Fuck flying cars. Flying cars are shit next to the internet. You are like someone complaining that the mine must be worthless because you only found a little copper, utterly ignoring that it is encrusted in fucking diamonds.
Finally, if you are really hung up on flying cars, consider the fact that if people were allowed to build flying cars with the same "safety" standards as a 1950's car, you could fill the sky with the little death traps. We just choose to focus on safety and price, instead of speed. I say this as someone who managed to get into a spin at 70 mph, bounce across some guard rails, and walk way from the crash without a single bruise, cut or scrap. Try that in a 1950s death trap.
Technology is changing so rapidly these days that anyone who attempts to make dire predictions of 'physical limits' in the next 50 years should be laughed into oblivion, the same way the fools of the steam age proclaiming the same should have been. The semi-conductor industry (that would be 'computer chips' to the layman) has been crushing proclaimed unmovable "physical limits" that are always 10 years away with clockwork regularity for decades, and that is the industry riding edge of our physical understanding of the world. Most industries have not even scratched the surface of what is possible. Anyone who predicts the end of technological development in our lifetime is a god damn fool like all the fools who made the same prediction before them.
The BSA is, very literally, an extortion racket. Yes, they absolutely and without any question are the bad guys. Their goal is to extort as much money as humanly possible out of everyone they can get their hands on, and use the threat greater legal expenses to prevent people from fighting, even when they are clearly in the right. They do the business equivalent of asking if you want your knee cap broken or a lighter wallet. On top of that, they deal in one of the most horrible and arcane areas of law, copyright and licensing. It is entirely possible in good faith buy software/computers/etc legally, and still have the BSA try and kneecap you if every receipt isn't there or in exactly the right forum.
The BSA is a small business vampire, living to suck the life out of defenseless small businesses. They will always find something, regardless of intent, and then use that to extort money from your business. The BSA is a drag on small businesses across America and basically are robbing EVERYONE when they jack up the cost of operating a small business in the US by forcing everyone to pay protection money to their cute little extortion racket.
There's a lot of anti-BSA whargarbl going on in this thread.
There is a very good reason why there is as a lot of hate on the BSA, and it is because they are the fucking devil.
I don't disagree that there is other shit that needs cutting. Do we REALLY need a military that can stomp two of any other conventional armies on their own land at once? I personally think not. Self defense the ability to act WITH others in the world community is more than enough for me. I don't think the US needs a military designed to fight China and Russia on their own shores, considering that the only possible end game to that kind of 'victory' are a few thousand nuclear missiles up the arse.
That said... the Jame's Webb telescope, while being an awesome piece of potential science, is a poster child for being a catastrofuck of poor planning and budgeting. They are going to miss both their launch data AND the cost by at least a 4X factor. Maybe canceling a few of these messes will convince people not to write rosy prediction of cost and time. Firing all of the management involves, killing the project, and proposing a realistic budget and timing is hardly the worst fate that cold befall NASA.
Now if only we could fire all of the congressmen shit heads who propose their own unrealistic budgets on absurd timetables...
Apple and Microsoft have (theoretically) had access to all of this via your desktop OS for years, and so has the NSA (via AT&T) so maybe it's no big deal. Still, Google, like Facebook, is an advertising company. You are not the customer -- you are the product
I never really understood this fear. My personal data in the hands of a reputable company really doesn't scare me. Google serving up targeted ads that I might actually like seems like a feature, not a bug. The only really 'scary' thing about personal data is when criminals get it, corporations of ill repute get it, employers get it, and when a malicious government gets it.
Criminals having this data is bad for obvious reasons. With that much data, nailing down my financial accounts and preventing a phishing attempt becomes more difficult. Phishing is hard to run on someone who isn't stupid, but weak financial security can certainly bite you in the ass.
Corporations of ill repute can spam me using my personal information. This is annoying, but it is not much of a serious concern. Most email services do a pretty solid job blocking spam. I only really worry about my poor little physical mailbox getting stuffed with annoying junk mail.
Employers or potential employers getting my data is annoying. What I do on my personal time is my own business so long as when I show up at work I do my job. If you are not public facing, it is never a good idea to let potential employers use their personal biases on how you use your free time to decide employment. Not getting a job because an employer with access to too much data decides he is just going to chuck everyone who isn't of X political party, Y religion, or has a drunk photo from college is no fun. It means that you need to tightly control what you might want to be public to a select group of people (likely your friends). This is probably the biggest problem with Facebook right now.
Governments are scary. All of the above you can pretty handily dodge and are simply nuisances. Governments can toss you in jail. Governments can make your life completely horrible. If they are nasty enough, they can do it without even the pretense of using the law (witness the US no-fly list). They can apply brutal and arbitrary laws, like tossing you in jail and giving you a criminal record for smoking pot or something equally as stupid. This is the real danger but frankly, short of refusing to participate on the intertubes in any meaningful way, you are just going to have to trust that the government isn't going to go nuts and mine that data to toss as many people as they can in jail. Your only real option is the electronic equivalent of being a hermit on a mountain.
Personally, I think that Google+ has done a pretty solid job keeping its users safe from the real described dangers. Only the government remains as a real danger, but even on that account Google has done a good job being transparent. Notice that being served good ads you might want to buy isn't on the list. If this is a problem for you, the problem is you. Personally, I like getting worthwhile ads. There is a reason why Steam has a crap-ton of my money. They serve up sales that I am interested in and I merrily give them my cash for things I want. I am pretty sure we both walk away from the deal happy.
Whether I am the 'customer' or not seems like pure semantics. Google's business is setting up voluntary two party transactions. They get cash every time they set up one of these relationships. The fact that they are voluntary implies that both parties are happy to have the relationship.
Relax. It has not been released for like three whole days.
Google is in a tricky spot. The only way to REALLY figure out how this is going to all work together is to throw some bodies at it. If they screw it up though, they don't want everyone to already be in. Think of the Buzz disaster. They let everyone in at once, made a few missteps, and Buzz was promptly dead. Google learned that they suck at rolling out products like that and are going back to their Gmail roots.
They need Google+ to not suck before they start letting everyone pile in. From the sounds of it from two friends of mine who did get in, they are well on their way there. They just need to figure out the timing and balance the need to tweak and not piss people off by changing things with their desire to get people in
People are taking shots at Apple because who the hell reads the NY Post? If one newspaper does this, who cares? The bigger issue the WHY this newspaper was able to do this. The answer is Apple's 'walled garden' approach. The Apple alternative browser market is a wasteland due to people being rightfully terrified of Apple's response. Apple doesn't play nice with people that offer competing functionality. This is the same company that pulled a camera app that let you use the volume key as the shoot button because it violated what Apple declared the volume key is used for, and then pulled them again when they removed the functionality, but allowed people to download a mod on their website to put it back. If you live in Apple's little walled garden, you don't fuck with Apple or you get treated like a weed. Android's browser market on the other hand is fast, bloody, and diverse. Further, the OS plays nicely with alternative browsers doesn't care if you use them.
I'm not saying that Android is better than iOS. It is different, and this is one of the differences. The 'it always works this way' approach that Apple takes means that the NY Post can make it so that the way it is going to work for now on is you have to use their horrid little app. If you don't care or don't understand this new sphere of technology, iOS is going to do you well. I would give my mom or grandfather an iOS device. For myself and all of my younger and more tech savvy friends, we sport Android devices with custom ROMs. Different folks, different strokes.
There is another solution. Let Google do its shit. Google is really unhappy when people can't use the tubes. They start to do crazy things like building their own network, OSes, and the like. It isn't altruistic. They want you searching for stuff and seeing advertisements, and to do that, you need to be using the tubes, preferable as much as humanly possible. It just so happens that what they want lines up pretty well with what most people want. They also have more money than god.
I think there is a non-zero chance you will see them try and do something to try and resolve the bandwidth issue. They already made a decent, if failed, attempt with the wireless spectrum. Here is hoping. Google can plug its tubes into me any time. Er, um... ok. I'm done.
Yet the median public-school teacher salary is significantly higher than the median private-school teacher salary ($49,600 versus $36,300 in 2007-2008): http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55 [ed.gov]
If we continue to throw education under the corporate-model bus, then we can only expect teacher salaries to go even further down from here (and likewise, further expansion of the salary and power for the administrative/manager/PHB caste).
A huge number of people want to do the same job. This drives down the price. You know going in that the job isn't going to pay as much as other jobs. If money matters... DO ONE OF THOSE OTHER JOBS. If you are content doing something you like for lower pay, then, um, do that. Everyone makes decisions when they go to college. Everyone with half of a brain balances the happiness of a potential career with the pay. Why should the people who picked a "fun" career knowing full well what the pay is suddenly be entitled to more money while every other asshole has to slog along in their jobs they don't like for whatever pay they can get for it?
The solutions are simple.
If the complaint is that our current teachers are too dumb and we need higher quality teachers, then do things that let you weed out idiots. Let teachers be fired easily, like in any other job. Make their pay merit based. Make it so that the demand for a teacher is actually tied to their pay, and then demand better quality teachers. As you weed the massively overstocked supply of teachers of the less capable, the salary of those left will rise.
If the complaint is that the quality of teachers is fine, but they are unhappy, then we need to do a better job spelling out to perspective teachers what their salary is going to be so that they can do what everyone else does, and choose something that will make them happy. Give them more information so that they can decide if the fun of teaching outweighs their more modest salary. If it doesn't, kindly point them to a field that makes more money or that requires more work to get a degree.
The only thing that pointing out that private school teachers make less money than public school teachers does is suggest that taxpayers are subsidizing an oversupply of poor quality teachers. We are paying college kids to get a degree in education by offering them up a pile of everyone else's money, only to dump them into a field where there are such an over abundance of teachers that a private school can offer 25% less salary and still get their needs met. The only thing that using tax payer money to give teachers even more money is going to do is increase the over supply problem further.
that of all possible career paths, education has the lowest financial incentive? What does this portend for our future?
I think it says that a lot of people want to go into education. How much people are willing to pay for something is a function of its worth and its scarcity. I REALLY need water, but I won't pay $100 for it because I get get some out of the tap for nearly free. That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate and love water, it just means that I am not an idiot and won't pay for something, even something I really find important, more than what I have to.
This is also why you pay engineers so much. We don't need as anywhere near as many engineers as we need teachers. That said, very few people want to be engineers, and even fewer still have the ability to pass the required classes to be an engineer. So, even though our society demands fewer engineers than teacher, we pay engineers more. Not just any idiot off the street has the capacity to walk away with an engineering degree, and the salary for an engineer shows that.
If you want people to pay more for teachers, restrict the supply. Make it so that you can fire bad teachers and banish them teaching. This will force schools that turn out teachers to show a little more rigorousness in their standards so that not just any idiot with a pulse can walk away with an education degree. The supply of teachers will start to shrink as their quality goes up. The salary for teachers will also start to raise, assuming that you have a system where there is competition for good teachers and bad teachers are quickly canned. The "any idiot with a pulse can get an education degree" combined with the "we will never fire you once tenured" system of hiring pretty much ensures that there is no demand to raise the salary for teachers.
I work for an engineering company. I recently got promoted into a new position. My position needed to be filled. My position was initially entry level and it was pretty well understood that I wasn't going to be there long. I work in a semi-manufacturing environment where we have a lot of operators of equipment who have no degree. My position that I was leaving was one that was occasionally filled by people without a degree promoted from this operator pool.
I worked with an operator while I was in this roll who had no college degree that was sharp as hell. He caught mistakes I made, found things no of the other hundred eyes on some problems saw, and learned things extremely quick. By any measure, he could have filled my role easily. Not only could he have filled my role, but he could of done it with almost no training because he was such a keen observer that he had already learned most of what he needed. Everyone who met this guy got along with him. You couldn't pick a better person for this particular role. I advocated for him to get the spot to the n'th degree and laid out how supremely well he would do in it.
What happened? They hired someone else. Pencil pushing HR folks decided to toss someone with a degree into the position. We got a fresh out of college grad who turned out to be an idiot. We dumped a pile of time into training this person up and got someone who is barely competent in return. When I poked and prodded a little about why the hell we hired the guy with the degree, it turned out that one person in the chain of command who knew literally nothing about the position nor the people applying to fill it decreed that the person to fill it must have a degree.
If you are going to work in a field where people have college degrees, get a degree yourself. It only takes one asshole who wants to weed out the applicant pool quickly, or one douche bag HR who doesn't even understand the position to sink you without ever having laid eyes on you or reading your resume. Even with personal advocates, a lack of a degree in world of degrees is the kiss of death.
Pretty much everything you said is either a rationalization or justification as to why you believe you have no choice but to root the phone, and violate your EULA and carrier agreement in the process. As such, my original point still stands: If you believe that X set of circumstances is unfair, or that you're entitled to "cheat" under Y set of circumstances, then I, as Google, have no reason to believe that you won't rationalize your way into cheating under other circumstances as well.
Um yeah... they were justifications. I would like to think that most of my actions have justification. I could follow a paranoid EULA (BTW, how many of those have you actually read before slamming "I agree!"), or I could just merrily use the device that I bought in a way that pleases me. If I was doing damage or stealing, or anything of that nature, maybe you could make an argument that mindlessly following one of the 50 EULAs you slam "I agree!" on in a day are worth pondering for a moment. Seeing as how I have done no damage in modifying the software on a piece of hardware that I own, I pretty merrily justify ignoring the commands of the pop ups. Hell, if anything I consume less of the network if for no other reason than that I can actually turn off the crapware they infest the phone with. Justification? Sure, but most worthwhile humans should be pretty happy break stupid rules. Maybe I am just more of a rebel than you. I also occasionally jay walk if no cars are coming, I drive 72 mph in 65 mph zones when traffic conditions permit it, and I have strolled in a public park after sunset. Oh dear god, the humanity of it all! I also once killed a man just for looking at me funny, but that was totally justified because, as I said, he looked at me funny.
I also broke the EULA when I replaced the backing on my phone to shove a bigger battery into it. OMFG! DEVICE MODIFICATION!!!11!!! He can't be trusted!
Though as others have mentioned, this is probably a restriction insisted upon by the studios. From their perspective, who knows what sort of capture software might exist on an unsafe device.
It is an idiot decision. You literally can't name a movie that they are going to sell that you can't already pirate. It isn't going to stop, slow down, or in any way impede piracy. It might drive some people too piracy. It will certainly prevent me from giving them money. As my Steam account with a few thousand dollars of video games shows (all of which I could have pirated instead), that is a pretty dumb decision. They don't slow piracy down for a fraction of a second, encourage it infact, and prevent people who would on a normal day give them money from giving them money. It is a dumb decision no matter how hard you try and rationalize and justify it. It fails in its goal of reducing piracy, likely increases it, hurts profits, and pisses off consumers.
Regardless of how stupid I think the decision is, I won't actually lose much sleep on it. I'll just use that money to download a few more games on my ROOTED!!!!11!!! computer from Steam, or just use the Netflix app which doesn't care if you have root or not.
All your reasons for rooting your android phone are also reasons why normal users are better of buying an iphone if you ask me.
Then you pretty clearly don't understand what rooting is doing or what Android lets you do in general. My phone is tricked out with entirely custom interfaces. Everything from the lock screen, to the home screens, to keyboard, is set up for me and me alone. The phone itself is also physically moded in that it has a new back plate that lets me ram a 3500 mAh batter up its arse. Hell, just the basic level of normal non-rooted Android blows iOS out of the water in terms of customizability and control. A phone that isn't rooted can swap out its launcher, change keyboards, and replace nearly every little piece of the OS with something different. It also has widgets. I mean come on... a phone in this day and age that doesn't let you have widgets? That seems a little goofy. In fact, wasn't it not until iOS 4 that they let you change your background picture to a non-Apple approved one? Yeah... I'll pass.
iPhones are great if you find technology scary, disorienting, or just don't want to think about it at all. I would get my mom an iPhone. She more or less can't break it and never has to worry about it. It is like a big feature phone that can do the Internet. If you have even a touch of the technophile about you and even a fraction of the desire to customize your phone to be more useful to you, Android is the way to go. Granted, that could change. They could lock down Android as tightly as an iPhone so that I can't have wonderful things like Swype, but until that day, I'll stick with Android. A phone that my mother can use and understand (and really, she is a great woman, just not my gold standard for technology) is an order of magnitude too dumbed down, controlled, and nerfed to be of any interest to me.
Most savvy... and demonstrably the most untrustworthy. I mean, you've already shown you could care less about violating your carrier contract, and your device EULA, and probably Google's Android agreement to boot.
Rooting a phone probably does violate some EULA or another (not Google's BTW). If there actually existed an alternative, I would pretty happily jump on it. Sadly, here in the States you have basically three cell network left and they have colluded to make it so that you can't simply buy a phone that works on their networks. With the pending doom of T-Mobile, we don't even have non-two year contracts any more.
The manufacturers are almost as bad as a the cell networks. They have amassed a pile of patents, cross licenses those patents, and created a cartel. There should be a thousand and one Silicon Valley cellphone maker startups designing phones in the Valley and then mass producing them in China. They don't exist because patent law has made it physically impossible. It is utterly impossible to make a cell phone these days without violating literally hundreds of patents. Hell, every time someone makes a phone they knowingly violate patents. The only thing that keeps the system somewhat in check is that the other guy is doing the same thing, and if he sues you, you can sue him back. For an example, just look at Apple and Samsung currently suing the piss out of each other. If you don't have a few billion for lawyers, you can't even consider stepping into that fucked up industry.
If there was any sort of real competition left to be had you could make an argument with doing it the "right" way (as if a EULA isn't legal flaming piece of shit). As it stands, if you want a cell phone you need jump a mountain of meaningless 30 page EULAs. I am sure that my fucking alarm clock these days has a EULA that declares that I agree surrender my rights to my first born child by plugging it into a wall.
And you *had* a choice, rationalizations aside. You had a choice as to which phone to buy. You had a choice of carriers. But every sentence you wrote demonstrates that you believe you're entitled to whatever it is you want, however you want it, and no matter what it takes to get it. Face it. If it wasn't this, it would have been the rental price. Or the selection. Or the quality. Or the rental period. Or whatever.
That is very much untrue. Point me to the carrier that doesn't have stuffed into their contract an agreement not to mod your device and I'll pretty happily switch carriers. There is however literally no choice. You get to pick between, shit, shittier, and shittiest (that would be Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, respectively). I in fact have picked the one with the most liberal policies (Sprint), coverage and cost be damned.
Your declaration that anyone who doesn't want the fucking NASCAR app on their phone must be a pirate it also pretty fucking stupid. That is my Steam profile. Unless I have been hacking Steam, it looks like I bought 139 video games. I'll apparently throw $60 at any video game that looks shinny. It is a pretty safe bet that I'll pay a couple of bucks to watch a movie too. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197969828904
There are a lot of very good reasons to root your phone, almost none of which are nefarious. Unless you are on AT&T's shit network, all Android phones allow side loading which allows for piracy without violating any 59 page EULAs or rooting. The biggest and best reasons to root your phone is so that you actually have an up to date version of Android. Being able to customize the shit out of your interface is also very nice. On older phones, rooting is almost mandatory because the carriers and manufactures love to fill your phone full of uninstallable crapware and skin it with their shitty memory hog proprietary interfaces. If uninstalling the fucking NASCAR app violates my EULA, then Sp
Wait... so I have a rooted device. Forget all of the added functionality you can get by rooting, I would root for no other reason than that CyanogenMod skull fucks HTC Sense and is always up to date. Is Google basically saying that if I root and ROM my phone the only way I can get movies is to, um, pirate them? Good policy. I am sure that nothing is going to drop piracy rates faster than by making it so that your most savvy users have no choice but to pirate if they want movies. What asshole thought that that was a good idea? What brilliant idea is next? Maybe we should only hand out condoms to people who are celibate.
This wont stop me from rooting. It sure is fucking stupid though.
Maybe if they keep going down this path and are annoying enough I'll just say fuck it and get an iPhone. If I am going to be stuck with a locked down piece of shit, I might as well have on that isn't filled with bloatware and NASCAR apps. Android is awesome, but some times I feel that between the carriers, the manufactures, and now apparently Google, they are desperately trying to fix that.
>I quibble with the "no evidence of any significant release of radiation" quote for Fukushima
I did say significant (not no release, I'm a Nuclear Engineer too!).:-)
So yes, there certainly should have been noble gas releases, and probably C-131 radioisotopes. Possibly others with cladding damage, but its hard to know all the facts at Fukushima right now (we sent people, and the Japanese have not been really that cooperative), including release so I agree that a release of some radiation occurred. We can messure that, but the amounts so far appear to present no threat to public health and safety, hence the use of the words "significant release of radiation". Thats why I mentioned the WHO quote, they seem like the best non-nuclear source, so it seems reasonable they probably aren't trying to spin it and there conclusion was no threat to health at this point.
As an aside, going back on GE BWR training I would have expected some release of nobles and C-131. Until we have cold shutdown and we can all study the events its all just inference at this point, so this could all change.
>Three incidents like you describe above, over thirty-two years, is a pretty darned good safety record, with the > 440+ commercial power reactors around the world. Why does nuclear have a bad rap? > One possibility is it stems from fear [anengineerindc.com] since it all started with a few mushroom clouds, >but whatever the reason, it seems awfully visceral.
Yeah I agree. I think you have it right, mushroom clouds and nuclear weapons. That and general ignorance of how power reactors work coupled with a general misunderstanding of the health effects of ionizing radiation, and that we are all exposed to it all day long. As Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I wonder if we still called them something else, like "atomic steam generator plants" instead of "Nuclear Power Reactors" if people would be less irrationally afraid of them.
Eh, and if people were perfectly rational we would hit the snooze button in the face of the absurdly small danger that terrorism represents and spend our money on something useful that will save lives, like choking prevention courses, or trying to teach people how not eat yourself to death. To bad people are stupid.
Nuclear suffers the double edged blade of stupid fears and rational fears. You are not being stupid if you decide you don't feel like living next to Fukushima right now. The area is irradiated. Sure, the levels are low, but things in the environment can concentrate it in particular points. Nothing is going to cause you to drop dead, but you might bump your risk of cancer in a non-trivial way. The blight that Fukushima has created in Japan is larger and will last longer than the irrational fears. That area is going to be a dead zone for a long time. Everyone who had property there can basically write it off. They have been screwed. A large piece of the long term losses in value might very well be psychological, but that doesn't do you much good if you have a worthless piece of property in the area.
If we build nukes, we should do it under 3 conditions.
1) We can accept the losses if the planet blows up. There will always be a way to cause a nuclear plant to cause a radioactive mess. It might be you need to ram an airplane into it, but there will always be away, even if we built perfect mechanical systems. Wherever you drop one of these things, you need to be will to have a large radius around the thing be evacuated. I'm okay if a plant in northern Maine blows up and we need to evacuate a few hundred miles of forest. I can't accept a nuclear power plant blowing up next to New York City. The consequences to the entire national would be economically fatal.
2) All plants need full insurance to deal with a disaster. Fukushima has economically destroyed the lives of everyone in a 30 mile radius of
The government pretty sternly told Wikileaks not to release any of them, and why.
Wikileaks ignored them.
Of course they did. Yet clearly, not all of what Wikileaks released was actually OMG WE CAN'T KILL BIN LADEN ANY MORE!!!!111!! important. Wikileaks gave the government a chance to play along. The government took the position of "fuck off". Wikileaks fucked off and did it their own way. Clearly, the position of "fuck off" has its consequences.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you run a network of violent Islamic fundamentalist who deliberately murder people, you probably should not take credit for any other mass killings unless you are okay with people taking all of the evidence and your word at face value and trying murder you right back. I think I can sleep pretty soundly confident that someone who deserved to die is dead. At worst, if all conspiracy theories are correct, then a violent psychopath who took credit for murderous work not of his own doing got killed. I can live with that.
The guy was pretty open about what he had done. He only claimed responsibility for 9/11, among other things, a few dozen times. I think I can sleep well at night know that an asshole got what was coming. Lots of nicer people die each day. We offer up due process as a fair way to ensure that everyone gets a shot (at least in theory) at justice. Due process isn't "justice", it is a convenient rule to reduce corruption and miscarriages of justice. We give it to nearly everyone to be fare and thorough, not because due process itself is justice. If a murderer is tried but released due to a failure in getting due process, that is in fact a failure in bringing justice. The reason why we tolerate due process bringing us occasional injustice is because we consider the inverse, an innocent person getting tossed in jail for a murder they didn't commit, to be a bigger miscarriage of justice. Due process is a mechanism we use to try and ensure justice. It isn't justice in it of itself.
You can safely pop a bullet in Bin Laden's head and call it justice, even if he didn't get full American due process.
More to the point, "due process" requires surrendering. Due process is something you get after you are in custody. Police are free to put a bullet between the eyes of a kidnapper if they feel that is the safest way to end a standoff. I am pretty sure that when you have to fucking invade another country and storm a compound, you don't need to take all possible measures to ensure that you capture the ass hat alive. If we find a video with Osama surrendering and US special ops turning him into swiss cheese, eh, we might have a very mild moral dilemma on our hands... and frankly, not even then. If he did anything other than throw up his hands and scream "I surrender", there is not even pretense of a moral dilemma.
Um, speaking as one of those engineers, no. I don't look at the steel industry or the auto industry with envy. I see a handful of people with seniority and nothing else who have survived it all and make a modest wage, and everyone else getting fucked. Maybe you can do the 'most senior is best senior' approach in unskilled labor, but it doesn't hack it in skilled labor, like engineering. The thought of the oldest engineer getting the most pay and being the last asshole you lay off makes me ill. I'll suffer outsourcing and rapid technological change long before I suffer the inane ponzi scheme that is unionization.
Unions suffer a serious organizational issue in that they don't reward skill and talent, they reward seniority and longevity. That might be fine with unskilled labor, but it doesn't work for skilled labor. Scientist and engineers are elitist, pure and simple. They think they are smarter than the next guy, and they are probably right. The day they submit to a hierarchy where the oldest fuck head gets the rule and the idiots are protected from being kicked out on their ass is the day hell freezes over. I would surrender my soul and go throw myself into the financial industry long before I submit to a union hierarchy.
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Quote the whole sentence, asshole.
I said, "The US could eat a 9/11 10 times a year, and if we didn't act like fucking cowards in response, terrorism still wouldn't even make it into the top 10 most likely ways to die as an American."
30,000 deaths each year still would not break you into the top 10 leading causes of death. You would still be below the number 10 spot which is occupied by a specific infection. The 9 spot kills 60,000 people a year due to the flu. We lose 300,000 people in just six months to heart disease alone.
It isn't hyperbole. The terrorist are not going to kill you. Stop being such a god damn coward and realize that you are going to eat your fat ass to death, not get struck dead by a sheep herder. Mewing and pleading for the government to strip you of your liberties over the absurdly rare possibility that a terrorist might get you is pathetic and cowardly. Stop trying to defend such pathetic craven bleating.
Top 10 ways to die in the US: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
Terrorism as practiced by groups like Al Qaida is much different. Al Qaida is a military organization with a global reach that has essentially declared war on the United States (as well as dozens of others governments, it seems). One of the core responsibilities of government is to defend its citizenry against military threats. But terrorists don't stop at attacking our military installations; by definition, they aim to kill thousands of civilians at a time as part of a campaign of psychological warfare. To say that we don't need a DHS, greatly increased security at airports and subway stations, etc. is ridiculous. Al Qaida would love it if we went back to our pre-9/11 levels of security (which was mostly aimed at common criminals). They would continue with their 9/11 style attacks on airplanes, the shoe bombing attacks that Richard Reid blew the cover on later, the London subway bombings, the Mumbai hotel massacre, etc, with the goal of getting Americans to believe that government was incapable of protecting them. Like a schoolyard bully, they will continue until they are effectively confronted and stopped.
Americans poured out their blood and tears over the past 200+ years to gain essential freedoms and liberties. Ripping up the fourth and fifth amendment because a bunch of sheep herders can on rare occasion kill a few Americans is pure cowardice. We don't respond violently to each and every little trivial threat, and terrorist fall firmly in the 'trivial threat' category. For the same reason why I would HOPE that Americans would be against random warrantless searches of their homes in attempt to capture more normal criminals, I would hope that they can get a handle on their mewing cowardly fright of an extremely rare way to die, and respond in the same way when confront with terrorism.
There are lots of things we could do to marginally increase our safety. We don't do most of them because it isn't worth the cost. A brutal Soviet style police state has less violent crime. We reject that sort of police state because we are willing to tolerate a little more crime in exchange for liberty. Our courts are biased to let guilty people go free because we don't want to jail innocent people. Terrorism is not magically different. Sure, it is the responsibility of the government to make reasonable efforts to stop terrorist. It sure as shit isn't their responsibility to do it at any cost. The amount we pay in terms of money and liberty to defend against terrorism needs to be balanced by the fact that it is an absurdly rare way for anyone to actually die.
The US has a 200+ year history of bleeding to grow and defend its liberties. We faced down the Soviet Union with one hand tied behind our back in terms of counter espionage because we were so insistent about preserving the liberties that we were fighting for. It is sad and pathetic that when faced with fucking sheep herders that are a couple of centuries behind what the USSR was in terms of population, resources, and technological capability, we promptly shit ourselves and couldn't surrender our liberties against a trivial threat fast enough.
If you want to be a coward, fearful of death due to the absurdly rare chance of being struck down by a terrorist (rather than eating yourself to death), do it quietly. Don't mew and bleat for politicians to piss away MY money and liberty because you can't control your bowels. I appreciate the blood and sacrifices that Americans have made over the past 200+ years to grow and defend their liberty. I don't appreciate sniveling cowards rushing to surrender away what other far more deserving men and women have built.
It is not asking much that you honor the blood and sacrifices made by better and braver men and women than you by making your own tiny and nearly effortless sacrifice of not pissing yourself and bleating to politicians to save you on the rare occasion that a terrorist manages to kill a trivial and minuscule portion of the population. If previous Americans co
The US faced down the fucking USSR. The USSR could literally destroy the world, and we had a policy of going toe to toe with them if they messed with us or our allies. We were just as ready to jab the 'blow up the god damn world' as they were, if not more so. We went nearly a decade in that mindset without pissing away our civil liberties.
9/11 comes along and one of the least scary threats to Americans, a threat that ranks well below eating McDonalds food (which actually DOES kill Americans), and we piss ourselves.
Our actions didn't scare away OBL. OBL couldn't do it again because as soon as we installed $100 security doors and airplanes and passengers decided to beat the shit out of anyone trying to take over the airplane, it made that attack impossible. The US could eat a 9/11 10 times a year, and if we didn't act like fucking cowards in response, terrorism still wouldn't even make it into the top 10 most likely ways to die as an American. Eating your fat American ass to death would remain safely on top by over two orders of magnitude.
I am all for beating the piss out of Afghanistan post 9/11. It is a friendly reminder to other nations not to harbor enemies. I was okay with dropping a couple hundred on security doors for airplanes and telling passengers to beat the shit out of anyone trying to take over and airplane. Absolutely everything beyond that was a complete fucking waste of money and much of it a violation of civil liberties we managed to keep even when facing down the fucking USSR.
Seriously, consider that. The fourth amendment meant something when facing down the god damn USSR, an world ending threat. When faced with sheep herders who are as likely to blow their own dicks off as they are to blow up a single airplane (of our many thousands), we promptly rip up the constitution and use it as toilet paper to help clean up the mess when made we shit ourselves in cowardly fright.
Anyone who fears terrorist in the US is a fucking coward, pure and simple. Anyone who fears them enough to mew and bleat to politicians to strip their fellow Americans of civil liberties and constitutional protection is not only a complete and total fucking coward, but a sniveling traitorous coward of the worst kind, as they have the nerve to bleat for politicians to strip their fellow citizens of freedoms that 200+ years of Americans fought and died to build and protect. If you are going to be a coward, do it quietly, and don't be a traitorous piece of filth working to undo freedoms bought with 200+ years of sweat and blood by men and women far more deserving of those freedoms than your sniveling pathetic ass. If the thought of dying really causes your bowels to loosen, eat less fucking food.
The anniversary of 9/11 always pisses me off. No, not because 3000 people died. 3000 people dying was a tragedy to be sure and the relatives of the victims certainly have my condolences. What pisses me off is the cowardly way that we as Americans reacted and how we continue to behave.
After 9/11 we had a decision. We could either have been brave or cowardly. We chose the path of cowardice. Cowardice is submitting to terror by stripping ourselves of civil liberty, creating a department of "homeland security", and installing pr0n scanners in airports. Cowardice is secret no-fly lists and domestic spying. The worst cowardice was Americans mewing to their politicians to strip them of their liberties to save them from the oh-so-scary terrorist. Cowardice is the path we picked. We gave up essential liberties for a trivial amount of security.
The path of bravery would have been to have by clinging to our essential freedoms and liberties. The nation that stood down the fucking USSR, a REAL threat, managed to go half a century without surrendering their freedoms and running away screaming like cowards. Seriously, consider that. 9/11 stripped away freedoms that we had even when the US was facing down a nation armed with a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the world multiple times over. We faced down a world ending threat and didn't balk, but when a couple of sheep herders managed to knock down two buildings in a manner that they can never repeat again, we promptly shit ourselves and surrender those liberties we guarded when facing down the existential threat that was the USSR. Talking about acting the part of the fucking coward. If there was ever a time to piss ourselves and wipe our ass with the constitution, it was during the Cold War.
Just think about it for a moment. In a time when it was our policy the literally destroy the world if our allies were attacked, you could get on an airplane unmolested and the fourth amendment was still actively enforced.
If you are an American, you are going to die by stuffing your face with too much fucking food. Fucking deal with it. You are not going to die in a terrorist attack. The food you stuff into your god damn face is going to be the death of you. That, or your own body is going to murder you with cancer. If you are really lucky, you might die in an exciting car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to kill you. If you believe so, you are a god damn coward and an idiot.
Look here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
Fucking food bacteria kills 10x more people every year than terrorist did in 2001. It kills 300x more people than terrorist have killed Americans in the past decade. Terrorism in 2001 didn't even make it to the top 10 most likely ways to die. It falls well below chocking on your own god damn food over the past decade. That is right, stuffing food into your fat face is literally more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
So what pisses me off about 9/11 is that it is not a time for memorials and what not. What pisses me off is that we sit around circle jerking each other over how scary the terrorist are as we stuff our fat Americans asses with McDonalds food. We mew and bleat to politicians to protect us from one of the most unlikely ways to die imaginable, as we work on scoring a heart attack before the age of 60 by eating ourselves to death.
We could have a 9/11 style attack every single MONTH, and we would still have more people dying to being fat asses. Despite this, I don't see us cowardly begging the government to strip us of our civil liberties to save us from eating ourselves to death.
9/11 pisses me off each and every year because it is a sore reminder that when faced with a minor and petty threat to ourselves, we shit our pants, pissed ourselves, and picked the path of the coward. We gave up our civil liberties and elected asshole politicians who promised to rip apart the constitution. It pains me to think
This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
Let's assume that the incident really did happen. The US has already denied it, but less assume it happened. Jamming is all about blasting a very loud signal that drowns out other signals. During a military operation GPS jamming the US is a pretty ineffective technique for a number of reasons.
First, there are a number of methods of navigating and targeting without GPS. GPS is easy and accurate, but if all of the GPS satellites fell out of the sky, they US military would still happily navigate its planes around and drop bombs. The US military is designed to go toe to toe with Russia and China. Go ahead and assume that the idea that their GPS satellites might be denied to them has crossed their minds. The US doesn't build stealth bombers to kill sheep herders. The US military might be good and killing sheep herders, but it is designed to fight a modern military.
Second, if you are dumb enough to turn on a GPS jammer powerful enough to knock out a plane's GPS navigation during a time of conflict, you pretty much deserve the missile that is going to fly up your arse a few minutes later. Jamming is done by blasting a very powerful signal out into the air. A very powerful signal is trivial to track. You might as well paint your GPS jamming equipment bright red and leave it out in an open field with arrows pointing to it. The first thing the US does in any sort of air war is to level anything that transmits. Normally, this is for taking out radar stations to blind air defenses, but it also applies to any attempts to jam. You really don't want to try and get into an ECM battle with the US. If you are screaming at the top of your long loud enough to jam GPS, you are being more than noisy enough for a missile to follow the signal back to the source.
Third, the airplane was not 'forced down'. If the story is true, what happened was they aborted their mission. That seems like a pretty legitimate thing to do if the mission isn't critical. I am sure they could have carried on if they wanted to, but they decided to play it safe. They were flying close to hostile territory doing a mission that will be fine if it waits a day or two longer. Hell, they might not even known they were being jammed until after the fact and were just concerned that their GPS equipment was malfunctioning. Delaying a signal flight for a couple of hours is hardly a stirring victory. If those plans had been sent to do something hostile, GPS jamming wouldn't have worked. The jammers would have been quickly destroyed or the plans could have navigated and hit their targets without GPS, or more likely, both would have happened. The jammer would have been destroyed and the plans on a mission would have merrily carried on without waiting.
This whole article is sensationalist crap.
But wait until you try and do something about the world. Maybe you'll run for political office. Or want to help out at child care center down the street. Wanted that teacher's license? Maybe someone will find out that people that google Cheerios, fucktards, and pantyhose are statistically proven to be terrorists and need to be rounded up and vilified. They'll look around for a while until that one row in one table in one database outs you. Then you're toast.
Google (and Facebook), don't sell information on you personal. Period. Full stop. Stop being paranoid. No one can pay Google for your personal search history or get a profile on you. Google does try and understand who you are. When Google "sells you", they sell you by slapping you into a bundle of "nerds who are likely to buy your goofy as Firefly shirt" and promise to the people who make Firefly shirts that they are going to show ads to people like you. This is harmless. Not only is it harmless, but it is actively good. If an advertiser can target me enough to try and offer me up crap that I actually want, it becomes a service rather than an annoyance. I only wish Google knew 'my type' well enough to sell me a good interesting book instead of offering me the chance to refinance a mortgage that I don't have.
The only real danger is when your government jumps in and start trying to hunt down people based upon their data. That is a legitimate concern,but frankly, if your government wants to fuck you, they are going to have their way. Otherwise, all that matters is controlling your data from people who you want to hide it from. Don't friend your fucking boss on Facebook and then declare him the devil incarnate. Friend with care on Facebook, use Google Plus, use e-mail, or simply keep it off the tubes. If you over share, you are just being a moron.
In fact, there's not so much difference between the machines as a 1977 XT with 128k, a tape drive and a monochrome monitor and a 1987 80386 with megabytes of memory, megabytes of hard disk space, a VGA monitor, sound card, multitasking, etc. Now leap forwards to 1997 and your Pentium II... better but only incrementally so.
Yikes! Did you REALLY just use that as an example? Right now I have sitting in front of me my phone. It can curb stomp a Pentium II in raw computing power. It uses a couple of orders of magnitude less power, has a couple of orders of magnitude more storage capacity, it has the capacity to send and/or receive on a half a dozen different signals, has a handful of sensors on it that you would need a wheel barrel to hold 15 years ago, it costs 1/4 as much, and and it fits in my fucking pocket . Seriously... in-my-fucking-pocket . That isn't "incremental" change. That is orders of magnitude exponential change. That is horse to steam engine in 15 years.
You are living in an age of accelerated technological growth. The only thing your example does is show how amazingly flexible humans are in dealing with it. The fact that your head doesn't blow in two when you realize that you can now communicate with anyone in the world, receive the answer to any question with a well known answer, locate any publicly known place and your relation to it, and do it with a hunk of technology that fits in your pocket and costs chump change, just shows that humans can accept that blue is now red and carry on.
If you were to revert the world to the technology of 20 years ago (which is before the widespread use of E-mail and the world wide web), most industries would implode, most people wouldn't even know how to work, and the global economy would grind to a halt. As an engineer working on those chips you find so dully unremarkable and incremental, I physically wouldn't be able to do my job. I wouldn't even know how to do my job. How the fuck do you run a semi-conductor fab when your most powerful computer is a x386? I know we did it in the past, but fuck if I know how you would even begin to contemplate going back to it. Engineering without storing massive amounts of data, computer assistance, and electronic tracking is like going from shopping in a super market to hunting and gathering. They are barely related.
Just because you take a technological revolution that has remade the earth in stride and 'meh' at instant world wide communication of everything over the course of a decade or two doesn't mean it isn't remarkable. Fuck flying cars. Flying cars are shit next to the internet. You are like someone complaining that the mine must be worthless because you only found a little copper, utterly ignoring that it is encrusted in fucking diamonds.
Finally, if you are really hung up on flying cars, consider the fact that if people were allowed to build flying cars with the same "safety" standards as a 1950's car, you could fill the sky with the little death traps. We just choose to focus on safety and price, instead of speed. I say this as someone who managed to get into a spin at 70 mph, bounce across some guard rails, and walk way from the crash without a single bruise, cut or scrap. Try that in a 1950s death trap.
Technology is changing so rapidly these days that anyone who attempts to make dire predictions of 'physical limits' in the next 50 years should be laughed into oblivion, the same way the fools of the steam age proclaiming the same should have been. The semi-conductor industry (that would be 'computer chips' to the layman) has been crushing proclaimed unmovable "physical limits" that are always 10 years away with clockwork regularity for decades, and that is the industry riding edge of our physical understanding of the world. Most industries have not even scratched the surface of what is possible. Anyone who predicts the end of technological development in our lifetime is a god damn fool like all the fools who made the same prediction before them.
The BSA is, very literally, an extortion racket. Yes, they absolutely and without any question are the bad guys. Their goal is to extort as much money as humanly possible out of everyone they can get their hands on, and use the threat greater legal expenses to prevent people from fighting, even when they are clearly in the right. They do the business equivalent of asking if you want your knee cap broken or a lighter wallet. On top of that, they deal in one of the most horrible and arcane areas of law, copyright and licensing. It is entirely possible in good faith buy software/computers/etc legally, and still have the BSA try and kneecap you if every receipt isn't there or in exactly the right forum.
The BSA is a small business vampire, living to suck the life out of defenseless small businesses. They will always find something, regardless of intent, and then use that to extort money from your business. The BSA is a drag on small businesses across America and basically are robbing EVERYONE when they jack up the cost of operating a small business in the US by forcing everyone to pay protection money to their cute little extortion racket.
There's a lot of anti-BSA whargarbl going on in this thread.
There is a very good reason why there is as a lot of hate on the BSA, and it is because they are the fucking devil.
I don't disagree that there is other shit that needs cutting. Do we REALLY need a military that can stomp two of any other conventional armies on their own land at once? I personally think not. Self defense the ability to act WITH others in the world community is more than enough for me. I don't think the US needs a military designed to fight China and Russia on their own shores, considering that the only possible end game to that kind of 'victory' are a few thousand nuclear missiles up the arse.
That said... the Jame's Webb telescope, while being an awesome piece of potential science, is a poster child for being a catastrofuck of poor planning and budgeting. They are going to miss both their launch data AND the cost by at least a 4X factor. Maybe canceling a few of these messes will convince people not to write rosy prediction of cost and time. Firing all of the management involves, killing the project, and proposing a realistic budget and timing is hardly the worst fate that cold befall NASA.
Now if only we could fire all of the congressmen shit heads who propose their own unrealistic budgets on absurd timetables...
Apple and Microsoft have (theoretically) had access to all of this via your desktop OS for years, and so has the NSA (via AT&T) so maybe it's no big deal. Still, Google, like Facebook, is an advertising company. You are not the customer -- you are the product
I never really understood this fear. My personal data in the hands of a reputable company really doesn't scare me. Google serving up targeted ads that I might actually like seems like a feature, not a bug. The only really 'scary' thing about personal data is when criminals get it, corporations of ill repute get it, employers get it, and when a malicious government gets it.
Criminals having this data is bad for obvious reasons. With that much data, nailing down my financial accounts and preventing a phishing attempt becomes more difficult. Phishing is hard to run on someone who isn't stupid, but weak financial security can certainly bite you in the ass.
Corporations of ill repute can spam me using my personal information. This is annoying, but it is not much of a serious concern. Most email services do a pretty solid job blocking spam. I only really worry about my poor little physical mailbox getting stuffed with annoying junk mail.
Employers or potential employers getting my data is annoying. What I do on my personal time is my own business so long as when I show up at work I do my job. If you are not public facing, it is never a good idea to let potential employers use their personal biases on how you use your free time to decide employment. Not getting a job because an employer with access to too much data decides he is just going to chuck everyone who isn't of X political party, Y religion, or has a drunk photo from college is no fun. It means that you need to tightly control what you might want to be public to a select group of people (likely your friends). This is probably the biggest problem with Facebook right now.
Governments are scary. All of the above you can pretty handily dodge and are simply nuisances. Governments can toss you in jail. Governments can make your life completely horrible. If they are nasty enough, they can do it without even the pretense of using the law (witness the US no-fly list). They can apply brutal and arbitrary laws, like tossing you in jail and giving you a criminal record for smoking pot or something equally as stupid. This is the real danger but frankly, short of refusing to participate on the intertubes in any meaningful way, you are just going to have to trust that the government isn't going to go nuts and mine that data to toss as many people as they can in jail. Your only real option is the electronic equivalent of being a hermit on a mountain.
Personally, I think that Google+ has done a pretty solid job keeping its users safe from the real described dangers. Only the government remains as a real danger, but even on that account Google has done a good job being transparent. Notice that being served good ads you might want to buy isn't on the list. If this is a problem for you, the problem is you. Personally, I like getting worthwhile ads. There is a reason why Steam has a crap-ton of my money. They serve up sales that I am interested in and I merrily give them my cash for things I want. I am pretty sure we both walk away from the deal happy.
Whether I am the 'customer' or not seems like pure semantics. Google's business is setting up voluntary two party transactions. They get cash every time they set up one of these relationships. The fact that they are voluntary implies that both parties are happy to have the relationship.
Relax. It has not been released for like three whole days.
Google is in a tricky spot. The only way to REALLY figure out how this is going to all work together is to throw some bodies at it. If they screw it up though, they don't want everyone to already be in. Think of the Buzz disaster. They let everyone in at once, made a few missteps, and Buzz was promptly dead. Google learned that they suck at rolling out products like that and are going back to their Gmail roots.
They need Google+ to not suck before they start letting everyone pile in. From the sounds of it from two friends of mine who did get in, they are well on their way there. They just need to figure out the timing and balance the need to tweak and not piss people off by changing things with their desire to get people in
People are taking shots at Apple because who the hell reads the NY Post? If one newspaper does this, who cares? The bigger issue the WHY this newspaper was able to do this. The answer is Apple's 'walled garden' approach. The Apple alternative browser market is a wasteland due to people being rightfully terrified of Apple's response. Apple doesn't play nice with people that offer competing functionality. This is the same company that pulled a camera app that let you use the volume key as the shoot button because it violated what Apple declared the volume key is used for, and then pulled them again when they removed the functionality, but allowed people to download a mod on their website to put it back. If you live in Apple's little walled garden, you don't fuck with Apple or you get treated like a weed. Android's browser market on the other hand is fast, bloody, and diverse. Further, the OS plays nicely with alternative browsers doesn't care if you use them.
I'm not saying that Android is better than iOS. It is different, and this is one of the differences. The 'it always works this way' approach that Apple takes means that the NY Post can make it so that the way it is going to work for now on is you have to use their horrid little app. If you don't care or don't understand this new sphere of technology, iOS is going to do you well. I would give my mom or grandfather an iOS device. For myself and all of my younger and more tech savvy friends, we sport Android devices with custom ROMs. Different folks, different strokes.
There is another solution. Let Google do its shit. Google is really unhappy when people can't use the tubes. They start to do crazy things like building their own network, OSes, and the like. It isn't altruistic. They want you searching for stuff and seeing advertisements, and to do that, you need to be using the tubes, preferable as much as humanly possible. It just so happens that what they want lines up pretty well with what most people want. They also have more money than god.
I think there is a non-zero chance you will see them try and do something to try and resolve the bandwidth issue. They already made a decent, if failed, attempt with the wireless spectrum. Here is hoping. Google can plug its tubes into me any time. Er, um... ok. I'm done.
Yet the median public-school teacher salary is significantly higher than the median private-school teacher salary ($49,600 versus $36,300 in 2007-2008): http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55 [ed.gov]
If we continue to throw education under the corporate-model bus, then we can only expect teacher salaries to go even further down from here (and likewise, further expansion of the salary and power for the administrative/manager/PHB caste).
A huge number of people want to do the same job. This drives down the price. You know going in that the job isn't going to pay as much as other jobs. If money matters... DO ONE OF THOSE OTHER JOBS. If you are content doing something you like for lower pay, then, um, do that. Everyone makes decisions when they go to college. Everyone with half of a brain balances the happiness of a potential career with the pay. Why should the people who picked a "fun" career knowing full well what the pay is suddenly be entitled to more money while every other asshole has to slog along in their jobs they don't like for whatever pay they can get for it?
The solutions are simple.
If the complaint is that our current teachers are too dumb and we need higher quality teachers, then do things that let you weed out idiots. Let teachers be fired easily, like in any other job. Make their pay merit based. Make it so that the demand for a teacher is actually tied to their pay, and then demand better quality teachers. As you weed the massively overstocked supply of teachers of the less capable, the salary of those left will rise.
If the complaint is that the quality of teachers is fine, but they are unhappy, then we need to do a better job spelling out to perspective teachers what their salary is going to be so that they can do what everyone else does, and choose something that will make them happy. Give them more information so that they can decide if the fun of teaching outweighs their more modest salary. If it doesn't, kindly point them to a field that makes more money or that requires more work to get a degree.
The only thing that pointing out that private school teachers make less money than public school teachers does is suggest that taxpayers are subsidizing an oversupply of poor quality teachers. We are paying college kids to get a degree in education by offering them up a pile of everyone else's money, only to dump them into a field where there are such an over abundance of teachers that a private school can offer 25% less salary and still get their needs met. The only thing that using tax payer money to give teachers even more money is going to do is increase the over supply problem further.
that of all possible career paths, education has the lowest financial incentive? What does this portend for our future?
I think it says that a lot of people want to go into education. How much people are willing to pay for something is a function of its worth and its scarcity. I REALLY need water, but I won't pay $100 for it because I get get some out of the tap for nearly free. That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate and love water, it just means that I am not an idiot and won't pay for something, even something I really find important, more than what I have to.
This is also why you pay engineers so much. We don't need as anywhere near as many engineers as we need teachers. That said, very few people want to be engineers, and even fewer still have the ability to pass the required classes to be an engineer. So, even though our society demands fewer engineers than teacher, we pay engineers more. Not just any idiot off the street has the capacity to walk away with an engineering degree, and the salary for an engineer shows that.
If you want people to pay more for teachers, restrict the supply. Make it so that you can fire bad teachers and banish them teaching. This will force schools that turn out teachers to show a little more rigorousness in their standards so that not just any idiot with a pulse can walk away with an education degree. The supply of teachers will start to shrink as their quality goes up. The salary for teachers will also start to raise, assuming that you have a system where there is competition for good teachers and bad teachers are quickly canned. The "any idiot with a pulse can get an education degree" combined with the "we will never fire you once tenured" system of hiring pretty much ensures that there is no demand to raise the salary for teachers.
I work for an engineering company. I recently got promoted into a new position. My position needed to be filled. My position was initially entry level and it was pretty well understood that I wasn't going to be there long. I work in a semi-manufacturing environment where we have a lot of operators of equipment who have no degree. My position that I was leaving was one that was occasionally filled by people without a degree promoted from this operator pool.
I worked with an operator while I was in this roll who had no college degree that was sharp as hell. He caught mistakes I made, found things no of the other hundred eyes on some problems saw, and learned things extremely quick. By any measure, he could have filled my role easily. Not only could he have filled my role, but he could of done it with almost no training because he was such a keen observer that he had already learned most of what he needed. Everyone who met this guy got along with him. You couldn't pick a better person for this particular role. I advocated for him to get the spot to the n'th degree and laid out how supremely well he would do in it.
What happened? They hired someone else. Pencil pushing HR folks decided to toss someone with a degree into the position. We got a fresh out of college grad who turned out to be an idiot. We dumped a pile of time into training this person up and got someone who is barely competent in return. When I poked and prodded a little about why the hell we hired the guy with the degree, it turned out that one person in the chain of command who knew literally nothing about the position nor the people applying to fill it decreed that the person to fill it must have a degree.
If you are going to work in a field where people have college degrees, get a degree yourself. It only takes one asshole who wants to weed out the applicant pool quickly, or one douche bag HR who doesn't even understand the position to sink you without ever having laid eyes on you or reading your resume. Even with personal advocates, a lack of a degree in world of degrees is the kiss of death.
Pretty much everything you said is either a rationalization or justification as to why you believe you have no choice but to root the phone, and violate your EULA and carrier agreement in the process. As such, my original point still stands: If you believe that X set of circumstances is unfair, or that you're entitled to "cheat" under Y set of circumstances, then I, as Google, have no reason to believe that you won't rationalize your way into cheating under other circumstances as well.
Um yeah... they were justifications. I would like to think that most of my actions have justification. I could follow a paranoid EULA (BTW, how many of those have you actually read before slamming "I agree!"), or I could just merrily use the device that I bought in a way that pleases me. If I was doing damage or stealing, or anything of that nature, maybe you could make an argument that mindlessly following one of the 50 EULAs you slam "I agree!" on in a day are worth pondering for a moment. Seeing as how I have done no damage in modifying the software on a piece of hardware that I own, I pretty merrily justify ignoring the commands of the pop ups. Hell, if anything I consume less of the network if for no other reason than that I can actually turn off the crapware they infest the phone with. Justification? Sure, but most worthwhile humans should be pretty happy break stupid rules. Maybe I am just more of a rebel than you. I also occasionally jay walk if no cars are coming, I drive 72 mph in 65 mph zones when traffic conditions permit it, and I have strolled in a public park after sunset. Oh dear god, the humanity of it all! I also once killed a man just for looking at me funny, but that was totally justified because, as I said, he looked at me funny.
I also broke the EULA when I replaced the backing on my phone to shove a bigger battery into it. OMFG! DEVICE MODIFICATION!!!11!!! He can't be trusted!
Though as others have mentioned, this is probably a restriction insisted upon by the studios. From their perspective, who knows what sort of capture software might exist on an unsafe device.
It is an idiot decision. You literally can't name a movie that they are going to sell that you can't already pirate. It isn't going to stop, slow down, or in any way impede piracy. It might drive some people too piracy. It will certainly prevent me from giving them money. As my Steam account with a few thousand dollars of video games shows (all of which I could have pirated instead), that is a pretty dumb decision. They don't slow piracy down for a fraction of a second, encourage it infact, and prevent people who would on a normal day give them money from giving them money. It is a dumb decision no matter how hard you try and rationalize and justify it. It fails in its goal of reducing piracy, likely increases it, hurts profits, and pisses off consumers.
Regardless of how stupid I think the decision is, I won't actually lose much sleep on it. I'll just use that money to download a few more games on my ROOTED!!!!11!!! computer from Steam, or just use the Netflix app which doesn't care if you have root or not.
All your reasons for rooting your android phone are also reasons why normal users are better of buying an iphone if you ask me.
Then you pretty clearly don't understand what rooting is doing or what Android lets you do in general. My phone is tricked out with entirely custom interfaces. Everything from the lock screen, to the home screens, to keyboard, is set up for me and me alone. The phone itself is also physically moded in that it has a new back plate that lets me ram a 3500 mAh batter up its arse. Hell, just the basic level of normal non-rooted Android blows iOS out of the water in terms of customizability and control. A phone that isn't rooted can swap out its launcher, change keyboards, and replace nearly every little piece of the OS with something different. It also has widgets. I mean come on... a phone in this day and age that doesn't let you have widgets? That seems a little goofy. In fact, wasn't it not until iOS 4 that they let you change your background picture to a non-Apple approved one? Yeah... I'll pass.
iPhones are great if you find technology scary, disorienting, or just don't want to think about it at all. I would get my mom an iPhone. She more or less can't break it and never has to worry about it. It is like a big feature phone that can do the Internet. If you have even a touch of the technophile about you and even a fraction of the desire to customize your phone to be more useful to you, Android is the way to go. Granted, that could change. They could lock down Android as tightly as an iPhone so that I can't have wonderful things like Swype, but until that day, I'll stick with Android. A phone that my mother can use and understand (and really, she is a great woman, just not my gold standard for technology) is an order of magnitude too dumbed down, controlled, and nerfed to be of any interest to me.
Most savvy... and demonstrably the most untrustworthy. I mean, you've already shown you could care less about violating your carrier contract, and your device EULA, and probably Google's Android agreement to boot.
Rooting a phone probably does violate some EULA or another (not Google's BTW). If there actually existed an alternative, I would pretty happily jump on it. Sadly, here in the States you have basically three cell network left and they have colluded to make it so that you can't simply buy a phone that works on their networks. With the pending doom of T-Mobile, we don't even have non-two year contracts any more.
The manufacturers are almost as bad as a the cell networks. They have amassed a pile of patents, cross licenses those patents, and created a cartel. There should be a thousand and one Silicon Valley cellphone maker startups designing phones in the Valley and then mass producing them in China. They don't exist because patent law has made it physically impossible. It is utterly impossible to make a cell phone these days without violating literally hundreds of patents. Hell, every time someone makes a phone they knowingly violate patents. The only thing that keeps the system somewhat in check is that the other guy is doing the same thing, and if he sues you, you can sue him back. For an example, just look at Apple and Samsung currently suing the piss out of each other. If you don't have a few billion for lawyers, you can't even consider stepping into that fucked up industry.
If there was any sort of real competition left to be had you could make an argument with doing it the "right" way (as if a EULA isn't legal flaming piece of shit). As it stands, if you want a cell phone you need jump a mountain of meaningless 30 page EULAs. I am sure that my fucking alarm clock these days has a EULA that declares that I agree surrender my rights to my first born child by plugging it into a wall.
And you *had* a choice, rationalizations aside. You had a choice as to which phone to buy. You had a choice of carriers. But every sentence you wrote demonstrates that you believe you're entitled to whatever it is you want, however you want it, and no matter what it takes to get it. Face it. If it wasn't this, it would have been the rental price. Or the selection. Or the quality. Or the rental period. Or whatever.
That is very much untrue. Point me to the carrier that doesn't have stuffed into their contract an agreement not to mod your device and I'll pretty happily switch carriers. There is however literally no choice. You get to pick between, shit, shittier, and shittiest (that would be Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, respectively). I in fact have picked the one with the most liberal policies (Sprint), coverage and cost be damned.
Your declaration that anyone who doesn't want the fucking NASCAR app on their phone must be a pirate it also pretty fucking stupid. That is my Steam profile. Unless I have been hacking Steam, it looks like I bought 139 video games. I'll apparently throw $60 at any video game that looks shinny. It is a pretty safe bet that I'll pay a couple of bucks to watch a movie too.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197969828904
There are a lot of very good reasons to root your phone, almost none of which are nefarious. Unless you are on AT&T's shit network, all Android phones allow side loading which allows for piracy without violating any 59 page EULAs or rooting. The biggest and best reasons to root your phone is so that you actually have an up to date version of Android. Being able to customize the shit out of your interface is also very nice. On older phones, rooting is almost mandatory because the carriers and manufactures love to fill your phone full of uninstallable crapware and skin it with their shitty memory hog proprietary interfaces. If uninstalling the fucking NASCAR app violates my EULA, then Sp
Wait... so I have a rooted device. Forget all of the added functionality you can get by rooting, I would root for no other reason than that CyanogenMod skull fucks HTC Sense and is always up to date. Is Google basically saying that if I root and ROM my phone the only way I can get movies is to, um, pirate them? Good policy. I am sure that nothing is going to drop piracy rates faster than by making it so that your most savvy users have no choice but to pirate if they want movies. What asshole thought that that was a good idea? What brilliant idea is next? Maybe we should only hand out condoms to people who are celibate.
This wont stop me from rooting. It sure is fucking stupid though.
Maybe if they keep going down this path and are annoying enough I'll just say fuck it and get an iPhone. If I am going to be stuck with a locked down piece of shit, I might as well have on that isn't filled with bloatware and NASCAR apps. Android is awesome, but some times I feel that between the carriers, the manufactures, and now apparently Google, they are desperately trying to fix that.
>I quibble with the "no evidence of any significant release of radiation" quote for Fukushima
I did say significant (not no release, I'm a Nuclear Engineer too!). :-)
So yes, there certainly should have been noble gas releases, and probably C-131 radioisotopes. Possibly others with cladding damage, but its hard to know all the facts at Fukushima right now (we sent people, and the Japanese have not been really that cooperative), including release so I agree that a release of some radiation occurred. We can messure that, but the amounts so far appear to present no threat to public health and safety, hence the use of the words "significant release of radiation". Thats why I mentioned the WHO quote, they seem like the best non-nuclear source, so it seems reasonable they probably aren't trying to spin it and there conclusion was no threat to health at this point.
As an aside, going back on GE BWR training I would have expected some release of nobles and C-131. Until we have cold shutdown and we can all study the events its all just inference at this point, so this could all change.
>Three incidents like you describe above, over thirty-two years, is a pretty darned good safety record, with the
> 440+ commercial power reactors around the world. Why does nuclear have a bad rap?
> One possibility is it stems from fear [anengineerindc.com] since it all started with a few mushroom clouds,
>but whatever the reason, it seems awfully visceral.
Yeah I agree. I think you have it right, mushroom clouds and nuclear weapons. That and general ignorance of how power reactors work coupled with a general misunderstanding of the health effects of ionizing radiation, and that we are all exposed to it all day long. As Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I wonder if we still called them something else, like "atomic steam generator plants" instead of "Nuclear Power Reactors" if people would be less irrationally afraid of them.
Eh, and if people were perfectly rational we would hit the snooze button in the face of the absurdly small danger that terrorism represents and spend our money on something useful that will save lives, like choking prevention courses, or trying to teach people how not eat yourself to death. To bad people are stupid.
Nuclear suffers the double edged blade of stupid fears and rational fears. You are not being stupid if you decide you don't feel like living next to Fukushima right now. The area is irradiated. Sure, the levels are low, but things in the environment can concentrate it in particular points. Nothing is going to cause you to drop dead, but you might bump your risk of cancer in a non-trivial way. The blight that Fukushima has created in Japan is larger and will last longer than the irrational fears. That area is going to be a dead zone for a long time. Everyone who had property there can basically write it off. They have been screwed. A large piece of the long term losses in value might very well be psychological, but that doesn't do you much good if you have a worthless piece of property in the area.
If we build nukes, we should do it under 3 conditions.
1) We can accept the losses if the planet blows up. There will always be a way to cause a nuclear plant to cause a radioactive mess. It might be you need to ram an airplane into it, but there will always be away, even if we built perfect mechanical systems. Wherever you drop one of these things, you need to be will to have a large radius around the thing be evacuated. I'm okay if a plant in northern Maine blows up and we need to evacuate a few hundred miles of forest. I can't accept a nuclear power plant blowing up next to New York City. The consequences to the entire national would be economically fatal.
2) All plants need full insurance to deal with a disaster. Fukushima has economically destroyed the lives of everyone in a 30 mile radius of
The government pretty sternly told Wikileaks not to release any of them, and why.
Wikileaks ignored them.
Of course they did. Yet clearly, not all of what Wikileaks released was actually OMG WE CAN'T KILL BIN LADEN ANY MORE!!!!111!! important. Wikileaks gave the government a chance to play along. The government took the position of "fuck off". Wikileaks fucked off and did it their own way. Clearly, the position of "fuck off" has its consequences.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you run a network of violent Islamic fundamentalist who deliberately murder people, you probably should not take credit for any other mass killings unless you are okay with people taking all of the evidence and your word at face value and trying murder you right back. I think I can sleep pretty soundly confident that someone who deserved to die is dead. At worst, if all conspiracy theories are correct, then a violent psychopath who took credit for murderous work not of his own doing got killed. I can live with that.
The guy was pretty open about what he had done. He only claimed responsibility for 9/11, among other things, a few dozen times. I think I can sleep well at night know that an asshole got what was coming. Lots of nicer people die each day. We offer up due process as a fair way to ensure that everyone gets a shot (at least in theory) at justice. Due process isn't "justice", it is a convenient rule to reduce corruption and miscarriages of justice. We give it to nearly everyone to be fare and thorough, not because due process itself is justice. If a murderer is tried but released due to a failure in getting due process, that is in fact a failure in bringing justice. The reason why we tolerate due process bringing us occasional injustice is because we consider the inverse, an innocent person getting tossed in jail for a murder they didn't commit, to be a bigger miscarriage of justice. Due process is a mechanism we use to try and ensure justice. It isn't justice in it of itself.
You can safely pop a bullet in Bin Laden's head and call it justice, even if he didn't get full American due process.
More to the point, "due process" requires surrendering. Due process is something you get after you are in custody. Police are free to put a bullet between the eyes of a kidnapper if they feel that is the safest way to end a standoff. I am pretty sure that when you have to fucking invade another country and storm a compound, you don't need to take all possible measures to ensure that you capture the ass hat alive. If we find a video with Osama surrendering and US special ops turning him into swiss cheese, eh, we might have a very mild moral dilemma on our hands... and frankly, not even then. If he did anything other than throw up his hands and scream "I surrender", there is not even pretense of a moral dilemma.
Um, speaking as one of those engineers, no. I don't look at the steel industry or the auto industry with envy. I see a handful of people with seniority and nothing else who have survived it all and make a modest wage, and everyone else getting fucked. Maybe you can do the 'most senior is best senior' approach in unskilled labor, but it doesn't hack it in skilled labor, like engineering. The thought of the oldest engineer getting the most pay and being the last asshole you lay off makes me ill. I'll suffer outsourcing and rapid technological change long before I suffer the inane ponzi scheme that is unionization.
Unions suffer a serious organizational issue in that they don't reward skill and talent, they reward seniority and longevity. That might be fine with unskilled labor, but it doesn't work for skilled labor. Scientist and engineers are elitist, pure and simple. They think they are smarter than the next guy, and they are probably right. The day they submit to a hierarchy where the oldest fuck head gets the rule and the idiots are protected from being kicked out on their ass is the day hell freezes over. I would surrender my soul and go throw myself into the financial industry long before I submit to a union hierarchy.