One thing I thought was promising in the NYT article is that there are laws in place which protect political organizations from this sort of spying. So we don't have to rely solely on voting to stop this kind of activity.
Warning: if you do not follow the group think and echo the popular sentiment being expressed in the thread, you will be labeled "Flamebait". Evidently, it is not enough to follow big brother, you must love him as well.
Perhaps you're focused on the wrong big brother. The big brother of societal disapproval will always exist in many forms, but it is not usually backed by the force of law, and in fact the law acts to protect your right to say unpopular things. It's those same laws we're discussing here, that the NYPD is accused of violating.
But more to the point, perhaps in this case the moderators are not entirely off-base, in the sense that it's really sounding to me as though you haven't read the article, or if you have, then you're dismissing some concerns which you should consider taking more seriously. (I don't agree that moderation should be used to suppress legitimate debate, but I'm not so sure about uninformed debate.)
I don't see this as any different than placing an undercover officer in a drug ring or underground casino or whatever. I mean, going into a bar looking for illegal gaming, it is not known if any crime has been committed. When you send out a "John" to try to hire hookers, up until that point, the suspect has committed no crime. How is this any different than any other undercover operation?
From the article: "Before monitoring political activity, the police must have 'some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,' United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month." The standard for monitoring political activity is different, for the exact reasons I've described. There's a demonstrated chilling effect on political activity if you allow unrestricted government spying on political organizations.
Nothing came from it. The abuse of power that could have come, didn't.
You don't know that. The ongoing lawsuit, described in the article, alleges that the NYPD broke the law in this case. If that's true, that may be an abuse of power in itself, and if they were allowed to get away with it without investigation, it certainly would be.
Ironically, it's exactly this sense of the word that most people are claiming Alanis failed at. For example, neither "Rain on your wedding day" or "A traffic jam when you're already late" are outside of what might naturally be expected -- as many people have observed, it's simply bad luck. One could argue that both qualify as an outcome "as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things", but the problem with this is that they don't meet the test of being opposite to what might naturally be expected. One could further argue that these outcomes might not be what was expected, but having unrealistic expectations thwarted by everyday reality is not ironic.
Other questionable examples of Alanis-irony include "Good advice that you just didn't take" and "a black fly in your Chardonnay". The best explanation I've heard is that by writing a song about irony which used examples which were not ironic, Alanis was indulging in meta-irony. Who knew she was such an intellectual?!
So was I. A friend of mine worked on the NYC host committee staff for the convention.
These people were allowed to crowd the streets, scream, yell, carry their signs, and even harass anyone they thought to be a delegate, which was anyone not dressed in "protester attire". There was no repression of free speech.
That has almost nothing to do with the chilling effects of spying on legitimate political groups.
Tangentially, you're making all sorts of errors in generalizing from the behavior of the most visible protesters. I originally responded to a comment about "destructive assholes", and was pointing out that not all protesters, or political groups, fall into that category. If you conflate the two, you're helping us as a society go down the road I'm warning about, because it makes it all too easy to legitimize excessive investigative tactics.
But all it seems to me that they did was look into potentially harmful groups that may pose a security risk
And if that's all they did, there wouldn't be an issue. However, a point which the NYT article raises is that NYPD's collection and sharing of information went beyond this. I'm saying that this is something to be wary of, that it can very easily get out of hand. Simply saying "Yay NYPD" as the comment I responded to essentially did, is missing the point.
Thank you for your efforts at keeping folks in NYC safe from destrutive assholes.
Hopefully you don't mean to conflate "people who planned to protest at the convention" with "destructive assholes". And that's the problem here: the police are treating people with dissenting political views as potential criminals. That's an unfortunate situation in a supposedly free society: at the very least, it certainly has a chilling effect on free speech. I've lived in a country where you had to worry about whether your neighbor or some of your college buddies were reporting on what you said to the government. That's a very effective tool for keeping a populace in line and suppressing dissent, or at least driving it underground. Paradoxically, though, the more you do that kind of thing, the more likely you are to have a huge blowup (figuratively and literally) in future.
Have you ever sat around with a group of friends who you know share your opinions, and bullshitted about how you'd like to kill someone, or see them killed, or blow up something to make a point, etc.? People say that sort of stuff all the time, even quite respectable people, especially when they're young. Now imagine there's an undercover cop in the room, and what's going to go in his report. Watch the movie "A Scanner Darkly" (or read the book) to get a bit of a feel for this, it's quite accurate in that respect. Pretty soon you've got federal agents chasing shadows, and SWAT raids on innocent people's houses. That hasn't happened all that much in the U.S. recently, yet, but the way things are going, it seems like just a matter of time. Perhaps every few generations, it's necessary to rediscover firsthand why the iron fist approach to governance doesn't work.
That all said, cops still have a job to do. But when conducting operations like this one, they need to be held to a high standard. Did you RTFA? Here's a quote:
In hundreds of reports stamped "N.Y.P.D. Secret," the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.
These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.
In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.
The problem is that when you give people power over other people, abuse all too easily follows. We saw that in Abu Ghraib, and it's been demonstrated over and over in psychological experiments. When you turn someone into a spy, especially someone who isn't properly trained, it can be difficult for them to remember their real mission -- suddenly, finding anything out about anyone starts to seem important. (Some special prosecutors seem to have suffered from this effect, too.) So with operations like this, real care and oversight is needed.
If the purpose of this emulator is just to run DOS, DOS programs, and programs of similar size, then perhaps implementing it in Java is "acceptable", as you say. However, DOS ran happily in 640KB of memory or less, on CPUs that started from 4.77 MHz. That's why it's possible to emulate it successfully on modern hardware, because the hardware now has clock speeds nearly 1,000 times faster and memories more than a thousand time larger. To emulate more demanding systems, better performance would be needed, and Java would become a handicap.
My other point is that the sandbox features of Java are really not that significant if you're writing your own emulator. Finally, of course, there's the fact that Java is a rather inexpressive and unnecessarily verbose language, with a relatively primitive yet complex type system.
You're missing something here. Sure, Java is faster than some languages like Python or Ruby or PHP, but that doesn't necessarily put it in the realm of languages that are a good choice for implementing hardware emulators. There are many other languages that would be faster and, at the same time, more high-level than Java. (The ML family comes to mind.) The Java sandbox argument they use in this case is rather bogus - if you're writing an emulator, you can easily build sandbox functionality into it. In short, the choice of Java for this project is nowhere near as rational as the authors would have you believe. They probably chose it because that's what they were familiar with, or because it helped them get funding.
You're right that what you think of as a job, which probably involves filing a lot of TPS reports, is not an "end". But believe it or not, there are people who really do enjoy what they do, and for whom their job is an "end".
If your view was the predominant one, people would work until they died, no?
Some people do. A classic example is Paul Erdös, who died of a heart attack at a conference at age 83, "while he was working on another equation." Although Erdös may be an extreme example, he's not the only one by a long shot. Many other academics similarly work for as long as they're allowed to - sometimes age catches up with them and they're forced to stop. It's not a coincidence that you find this in academia, where people are more often paid to work on something that interests them. Another example is John Conway, who at age 70 is professor of math at Princeton. I'm pretty sure he's not still working just because he needs the money. There are quite a few other well-known examples in the math and computer science fields, which I'm most familiar with, but they exist elsewhere, too, and amongst much less famous people.
I personally know people in business in their 70s, who could afford to retire many times over. They don't do it because they enjoy their work. They might take longer vacations, because they can afford to, but they don't stop working, because their job is something that they do because they like to do it.
I dunno, I'm an atheist but I don't think Dawkins does us any favors. Much of what he writes about religion would be modded as "flamebait" on Slashdot, and rightly so. Luckily, it's possible to coexist with people with different beliefs from ours (otherwise we'd all be dead), but Dawkins seems to want to stamp them out by logical argument. He gives atheists a bad name.
In the final analysis, all Dawkins can logically argue is, as you say, "the improbability of God". And sure, God is hella improbable, duh. But anyone religious doesn't believe in their god for statistical or logical reasons, so Dawkins' argument is entirely irrelevant to them. Dawkins implies that this somehow isn't the case. Where Dawkins' argument is "cleverly written" is in being able to snow so many smart atheists into blindly saying "yeah!", where all he's done is belabored the obvious and not advanced any real debate on the subject at all. He should stick to analysing his sociobiological tautologies ("if it survived, it's good at surviving").
Maybe I'm clueless, but I just don't see what the "effective point" of that ad was. It looks like just a cheap attempt to say, "Hillary bad". And indeed she is. But you could replace the video of her in the ad with Bush, or Cheney, or Obama, or the challenger in the dog-catcher primary for Hicksville County, Alabama. What actual negative information does it convey about Hillary Clinton other than "She, like the rest of the human race, kinda looks scary (but actually mostly boring) when edited into that cool Mac ad." ?
That was my initial reaction, too. But talking to other people, it seems that the what the ad has done is to help crystallize a set of concerns that many people have about Hilary in particular. You couldn't put just anybody in that ad if those feelings didn't already exist amongst the target audience. In that sense, the ad could be very effective, because it provides provocation and a concrete focus for discussion of what might otherwise be some fairly vague feelings.
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating hiding one's head in the sand. But the point is that the things wrong with Microsoft can't be fixed by their mounting a better PR effort, and the idea that this demonstrates that Microsoft is "taking us seriously" is silly. They're trying to figure out how to keep their freight train running at full speed while continuing to engage in the same business practices that have made them very unpopular with a lot of people. It won't help. Everything that Microsoft has done related to Linux, since the Halloween memos were first leaked around '98, has just increased the exposure of Linux, and made it a more serious contender in the world's eyes. If Microsoft is taking Linux seriously, it must be worth taking seriously. It's a compliment, but it's not a threat.
Microsoft is taking you seriously now - you better start doing the same thing.
Oh, please. Microsoft is in a desperate battle to hang onto its monopoly. Its revenues are at risk because its cash cow product lines have all long since hit maturity. And we should "take it seriously" why? Just ignore it, it'll go away.
No-one said that fire doesn't burn at 6000 feet. They said it doesn't burn in this oxygen-reduced environment, because the percentage of oxygen is too low. They also said that the environment was similar, for humans, to being at altitudes of 6000 feet. That's not because the percentage of oxygen is lower at that altitude, it's because overall atmospheric pressure is lower, which (apparently) gives a similar effect for humans as being in a reduced-oxygen environment at higher pressure.
Lie is well-known amongst people who know mathematicians, but given that the Slashdot audience is more general than that, the pronunciation help is needed. This is actually an example of why natural language is challenging for computers to understand -- which means, I'm afraid, that you fail the Turing Test. Ask your programmer to work on your contextualization module.:)
Yeah, that's where they lost me. I don't see how they can draw any conclusions about real-life driving behavior from this. They've discovered that playing one video game can influence one's behavior when playing another, more realistic video game. Woohoo.
Yes, but Funny mods don't bestow karma, so funny posts have to be modded Insightful, which of course means insightful posts have to be modded Funny. Duh!
No, because in this case the patent system is a self-inflicted wound, not something imposed by an outside aggressor.
Don't be so quick to eliminate the possibility of an outside aggressor. I'm starting to come around to the Bush way of thinking -- after all, being able to ship people like Ming-Jen Wang and the partners of Cochran Freund & Young LLP off to Guantanamo Bay could be quite useful!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, obviously they can. How else would Starbucks have become so popular?
One thing I thought was promising in the NYT article is that there are laws in place which protect political organizations from this sort of spying. So we don't have to rely solely on voting to stop this kind of activity.
Perhaps you're focused on the wrong big brother. The big brother of societal disapproval will always exist in many forms, but it is not usually backed by the force of law, and in fact the law acts to protect your right to say unpopular things. It's those same laws we're discussing here, that the NYPD is accused of violating.
But more to the point, perhaps in this case the moderators are not entirely off-base, in the sense that it's really sounding to me as though you haven't read the article, or if you have, then you're dismissing some concerns which you should consider taking more seriously. (I don't agree that moderation should be used to suppress legitimate debate, but I'm not so sure about uninformed debate.)
From the article: "Before monitoring political activity, the police must have 'some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,' United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month." The standard for monitoring political activity is different, for the exact reasons I've described. There's a demonstrated chilling effect on political activity if you allow unrestricted government spying on political organizations.You don't know that. The ongoing lawsuit, described in the article, alleges that the NYPD broke the law in this case. If that's true, that may be an abuse of power in itself, and if they were allowed to get away with it without investigation, it certainly would be.
Ironically, it's exactly this sense of the word that most people are claiming Alanis failed at. For example, neither "Rain on your wedding day" or "A traffic jam when you're already late" are outside of what might naturally be expected -- as many people have observed, it's simply bad luck. One could argue that both qualify as an outcome "as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things", but the problem with this is that they don't meet the test of being opposite to what might naturally be expected. One could further argue that these outcomes might not be what was expected, but having unrealistic expectations thwarted by everyday reality is not ironic.
Other questionable examples of Alanis-irony include "Good advice that you just didn't take" and "a black fly in your Chardonnay". The best explanation I've heard is that by writing a song about irony which used examples which were not ironic, Alanis was indulging in meta-irony. Who knew she was such an intellectual?!
That has almost nothing to do with the chilling effects of spying on legitimate political groups.
Tangentially, you're making all sorts of errors in generalizing from the behavior of the most visible protesters. I originally responded to a comment about "destructive assholes", and was pointing out that not all protesters, or political groups, fall into that category. If you conflate the two, you're helping us as a society go down the road I'm warning about, because it makes it all too easy to legitimize excessive investigative tactics.
And if that's all they did, there wouldn't be an issue. However, a point which the NYT article raises is that NYPD's collection and sharing of information went beyond this. I'm saying that this is something to be wary of, that it can very easily get out of hand. Simply saying "Yay NYPD" as the comment I responded to essentially did, is missing the point.
Hopefully you don't mean to conflate "people who planned to protest at the convention" with "destructive assholes". And that's the problem here: the police are treating people with dissenting political views as potential criminals. That's an unfortunate situation in a supposedly free society: at the very least, it certainly has a chilling effect on free speech. I've lived in a country where you had to worry about whether your neighbor or some of your college buddies were reporting on what you said to the government. That's a very effective tool for keeping a populace in line and suppressing dissent, or at least driving it underground. Paradoxically, though, the more you do that kind of thing, the more likely you are to have a huge blowup (figuratively and literally) in future.
Have you ever sat around with a group of friends who you know share your opinions, and bullshitted about how you'd like to kill someone, or see them killed, or blow up something to make a point, etc.? People say that sort of stuff all the time, even quite respectable people, especially when they're young. Now imagine there's an undercover cop in the room, and what's going to go in his report. Watch the movie "A Scanner Darkly" (or read the book) to get a bit of a feel for this, it's quite accurate in that respect. Pretty soon you've got federal agents chasing shadows, and SWAT raids on innocent people's houses. That hasn't happened all that much in the U.S. recently, yet, but the way things are going, it seems like just a matter of time. Perhaps every few generations, it's necessary to rediscover firsthand why the iron fist approach to governance doesn't work.
That all said, cops still have a job to do. But when conducting operations like this one, they need to be held to a high standard. Did you RTFA? Here's a quote:
The problem is that when you give people power over other people, abuse all too easily follows. We saw that in Abu Ghraib, and it's been demonstrated over and over in psychological experiments. When you turn someone into a spy, especially someone who isn't properly trained, it can be difficult for them to remember their real mission -- suddenly, finding anything out about anyone starts to seem important. (Some special prosecutors seem to have suffered from this effect, too.) So with operations like this, real care and oversight is needed.
Too late! I've already shaved my head and painted it with this stuff.
If the purpose of this emulator is just to run DOS, DOS programs, and programs of similar size, then perhaps implementing it in Java is "acceptable", as you say. However, DOS ran happily in 640KB of memory or less, on CPUs that started from 4.77 MHz. That's why it's possible to emulate it successfully on modern hardware, because the hardware now has clock speeds nearly 1,000 times faster and memories more than a thousand time larger. To emulate more demanding systems, better performance would be needed, and Java would become a handicap.
My other point is that the sandbox features of Java are really not that significant if you're writing your own emulator. Finally, of course, there's the fact that Java is a rather inexpressive and unnecessarily verbose language, with a relatively primitive yet complex type system.
You're missing something here. Sure, Java is faster than some languages like Python or Ruby or PHP, but that doesn't necessarily put it in the realm of languages that are a good choice for implementing hardware emulators. There are many other languages that would be faster and, at the same time, more high-level than Java. (The ML family comes to mind.) The Java sandbox argument they use in this case is rather bogus - if you're writing an emulator, you can easily build sandbox functionality into it. In short, the choice of Java for this project is nowhere near as rational as the authors would have you believe. They probably chose it because that's what they were familiar with, or because it helped them get funding.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
Some people do. A classic example is Paul Erdös, who died of a heart attack at a conference at age 83, "while he was working on another equation." Although Erdös may be an extreme example, he's not the only one by a long shot. Many other academics similarly work for as long as they're allowed to - sometimes age catches up with them and they're forced to stop. It's not a coincidence that you find this in academia, where people are more often paid to work on something that interests them. Another example is John Conway, who at age 70 is professor of math at Princeton. I'm pretty sure he's not still working just because he needs the money. There are quite a few other well-known examples in the math and computer science fields, which I'm most familiar with, but they exist elsewhere, too, and amongst much less famous people.
I personally know people in business in their 70s, who could afford to retire many times over. They don't do it because they enjoy their work. They might take longer vacations, because they can afford to, but they don't stop working, because their job is something that they do because they like to do it.
I dunno, I'm an atheist but I don't think Dawkins does us any favors. Much of what he writes about religion would be modded as "flamebait" on Slashdot, and rightly so. Luckily, it's possible to coexist with people with different beliefs from ours (otherwise we'd all be dead), but Dawkins seems to want to stamp them out by logical argument. He gives atheists a bad name.
In the final analysis, all Dawkins can logically argue is, as you say, "the improbability of God". And sure, God is hella improbable, duh. But anyone religious doesn't believe in their god for statistical or logical reasons, so Dawkins' argument is entirely irrelevant to them. Dawkins implies that this somehow isn't the case. Where Dawkins' argument is "cleverly written" is in being able to snow so many smart atheists into blindly saying "yeah!", where all he's done is belabored the obvious and not advanced any real debate on the subject at all. He should stick to analysing his sociobiological tautologies ("if it survived, it's good at surviving").
Glad we agree.
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating hiding one's head in the sand. But the point is that the things wrong with Microsoft can't be fixed by their mounting a better PR effort, and the idea that this demonstrates that Microsoft is "taking us seriously" is silly. They're trying to figure out how to keep their freight train running at full speed while continuing to engage in the same business practices that have made them very unpopular with a lot of people. It won't help. Everything that Microsoft has done related to Linux, since the Halloween memos were first leaked around '98, has just increased the exposure of Linux, and made it a more serious contender in the world's eyes. If Microsoft is taking Linux seriously, it must be worth taking seriously. It's a compliment, but it's not a threat.
No-one said that fire doesn't burn at 6000 feet. They said it doesn't burn in this oxygen-reduced environment, because the percentage of oxygen is too low. They also said that the environment was similar, for humans, to being at altitudes of 6000 feet. That's not because the percentage of oxygen is lower at that altitude, it's because overall atmospheric pressure is lower, which (apparently) gives a similar effect for humans as being in a reduced-oxygen environment at higher pressure.
Sorry, Slashdot is only news for nerds without reading comprehension disabilities.
Lie is well-known amongst people who know mathematicians, but given that the Slashdot audience is more general than that, the pronunciation help is needed. This is actually an example of why natural language is challenging for computers to understand -- which means, I'm afraid, that you fail the Turing Test. Ask your programmer to work on your contextualization module. :)
You don't have to shout.
Yeah, that's where they lost me. I don't see how they can draw any conclusions about real-life driving behavior from this. They've discovered that playing one video game can influence one's behavior when playing another, more realistic video game. Woohoo.
"Back to C"? That's only the 1970s. Lisp predates C by nearly two decades, to the 1950s.
Now that you've gone public, expect to hear from 5.7 billion people wanting tech support!
Yes, but Funny mods don't bestow karma, so funny posts have to be modded Insightful, which of course means insightful posts have to be modded Funny. Duh!
Not in C++.
/.)
(In C++, reference pointers you! No, that doesn't make any sense, except possibly on