The US isnt supposed to be a democracy, dumbshits like you are just so ignorant on political philosophy you cant remember the greeks figured out democracy doesnt work 3000 years ago.
If the United states was not supposed to be a democracy, why didnt someone stop the founding fathers from making one.
You seem confused by terms. Lets look at those terms.
Republic;- A country without a king or queen. Examples: United states, North Korea.
Monarchy;- A country with a king or queen: Examples: Australia, Saudi Arabia.
Democracy:- A country where people vote for their leaders. Examples: United States, Australia
Dictatorship: A country where the people dont vote for their leaders. Examples: North Korea, Saudi Arabia.
So the United states isnt JUST a democracy OR a republic. Its a democratic republic.
Yep. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. The US is a great democracy, but its a prototype of a democracy at a time where there where not many examples to go by and forged by revolutionaries without the hindsight we have today. And sadly the old girl is definitely showing her age.
We know that no system is perfect (See Arrows Theorem) but there are many systems that are better. My personal favourite is instant runoff voting, used in Australia and a few others. Another good one is proportional seats, and there are others. And all of these have in common the idea of not wasting votes (Instant runoff does this by incrementally adding in preferences until a clear prefered candidate emerges as having 50+1 majority, good for presidents and individual seats. Proportional works by dividing seats by the number of votes. Good for houses of representation) All of these can be number crunched and manipulated, but so can "Just give it to whoever got the most votes". So if you really want to vote for the Greens or the Liberty, you can do so without endangering your prefered majority party candidate.
The problem is the current system is so favourable to the major parties, I highly doubt we'll see change anytime soon
Unicodes completely broken on Slashdot. God knows if I post from my iphone , the iphones "helpful" smart quotes feature interacts with slashdot to turn a humble ' into a splatter of unicode mess
Actually, the standards bodies do specify not to use "Degrees Kelvin" and instead use just "Kelvins"
However, I'd argue that was a poor choice, because there are other uses of the term Kelvins in physics, notably in noise measurements, and using degrees Kelvin makes it unambiguous.
There was an interesting study a few years back that found Drone operators suffered wartime PTSD at nearly the same rate (ie pretty damn high) as combat soldiers, the implication being that the sort of adrenal escalation that is behind PTSD appears to happen just as much with people who kill remotely as those who actually hold the gun.
The problem, of course, is that its unlikely the drone operator is going to realise what a head fuck he's in for until he's actually killed. Though I assume the same also applies to a combat soldier, who graduates boot camp thinking its going to be one epic game of counter-strike, takes his first life and then collapses under the unbearable moral weight of what killing really means.
Autonomous killing machines are a frankly horrific idea. In principle, machines should serve us, NEVER the other way around. On first principles alone the idea that a machine could determine who to kill and who not to kill is a chilling idea.
And in practice, its a terrible idea. Human soldiers already face baffling moral situations. Woman with child at checkpoint acting suspiciously. Maybe suicide bomber. But she has a child. To shoot or not to shoot. Thats the kind of thing guaranteed to give a marine a gnarly case of PTSD,if he choses wrong, and possibly also a dead mother and child (or conversely a dead platoon). But the possibiliy of a horrifically wrong choice means that Marine is going to deploy ever fragment of reason his brain can muster. . How the hell would we entrust such a monumental decision to a robot. Its "wrong" choice has no repercussions for it. If it kills an innocent mother, it doesnt care, its just a thing. If it opts for caution and it choses wrong, it still doesnt care, its already dead. Theres no incentive anywhere up the chain of command to get this right, because 'Well a robot chose badly, sorry not our fault!' is a get out of jail free to just let the bloody thing go robocop on a civilian population. We *morally* AND *practically* NEED humans in that decision loop, even if its just some guy in an air conditioned office and a VR headset.
How about "Nothing in this law forbids an ISP from introducing "Speed lanes" or slowing down a competitors content. However if they chose to behave this way, they will be required to pay the cost of providing a physical interconnect to a competitors network-neutrality respecting service if the customer requests it.".
So basically, sure Comcast, by all means block netflix, but only if your prepared to fork up the cost of installing Google fibre in an unhappy customers house.
The best way these days to find packages for languages , imho are the "Awesome " compilations you'll find in various githubs. Check it. If your a C# dude, look for "Awesome C#". If your a python dude, look for "Awesome Python". They tend to be well curated and work on submissions and review, so MOST of them are fairly trusty.
However different languages have their own discovery mechanisms too. For PHP, use Packagist, and similar things exist for Gem, Pip , NPM etc.
Strictly speaking, the courts involvement in this at all is unconstitutional.
That is extremely poor understanding of how courts and constitutions works.
The constitution is a framework for the courts to use to keep the executive and legislative branches in order. The executive branches and legislative branches can kind of do what they want, but the courts can then review it and throw it out if it violates the constitions. To put it more bluntly, without courts, theres no constitutions, thus the court is *always* a party to questions of constitutionality, as no other body really has the power to enforce it (Even the DOJ etc, they can only refer stuff to the courts)
A decade from now we'll see which cryptocurrencies were the Amazon / Google ideas, and which were just the petz.com..
That'll be: All of them.
This blockchain hype is straight up snake oil, and the people selling it either know it , or are too innept to realise it yet. Almost everything these companies are promoting block chains for can be achieved trivially with a boring old PKI exchange , and whatever can't be done is going to turn out to be either "Bitcoins" or "Pointless". No company wants to stick their ledger in a public blockchain. Its complete insanity, your finances are between you, your accountant, and the tax man, and maybe an edited summary for the shareholders. Anything beyond that goes into the realm of industrial espionage bait. And anyway, your accountant can still just sign the fucking regular old one with his PGP key for precisely the same effect.
And bitcoin? The last two major crash was bad (When it dropped from around $700 to somewhere south of $100). The next one is going to be catastrophic. Well except for whoever manages to walk away with the loot (What you think money just appears and disapears in thin air?)
No, the alternative behaviour is that they recall and give your a fixed phone. That's what Google did.
How is this a plausible solution to batery life? Should all tech companies be required to constantly repair their devices for problems that arent actually faults (And its not a fault, because the battery is functioning as designed). Techniology would become ridiculously expensive. No battery on earth lasts forever, and as a result pretty much all countries with legislatively guaranteed life (of machine) warranties like australia excempt batteries because batteries aint got long lifes.
Apples actions objectively extended the life of batteries.
I still have fond memories of giving a talk in the 90s in "the $70 web server" to a Linux conf about dumpster diving an old 486 with a minescule amount of ram and repurposing it as a webserver , IRC host and mail server for a bunch of clubs at the uni I was at. (The $75 was for a hard drive and coax network card). I remember being approached by some IBM drones afterwards offering us a license for OS/2 to replace the Linux of the machine. I think my response was something to the effect of "haha.... god no"
Job adverts are certainly an interesting method but never the whole story. I've been checking job listings since the 90s for python and up till about 3-4 years ago where rarer than hens teeth (there's a tonne now since the management types finally discovered it). But all that time there was a huge amount of local devs using python for personal projects , glueing things together with it in server racks, holding conferences and meets and so on. Hell one of the founding devs of Django even lives near me. But goddamn it was hard to find work with it , until recently
While there is some evidence that sociopathy has an organic cause, for the most part the medical and legal fraternities dont REALLY see sociopathy as a mental illness, but more as a personality disorder. Which might sound like splitting hairs, but what its really saying is a sociopath is sane. However they are also basically, for want of a better term, capital-C cunts.
Science doesn't really like to use a term like Evil, so they developed a bit of a parallell concept, the sociopath, a person who is full able to grasp that their actions create deep suffering to another, but simply does not care.
Which leads me to suspect AMD would very much be happy to take whatever business NVIDIA could lose if the high performance compute crowd rises in anger.
Non-reparability is a feature not a bug. It is broken by design, at the direction of management at the highest levels.
Apple just cant help themself, and it will be their undoing.
FINALLY apple had thrown a bone to the power users who had been stuck with the trashcan macs to handle workstation loads (3d/video production, hardcore audio processing/GIS/etc) , butr decided to kick back at the ONE GODDAMN complaint we had about the trashcans, the lack of upgradability. Sure a wad of glue and shiny might be fine for the average dont-give-a-fuck-about-tech user who just wants a relatively reliable and simple email and web machine, but people who buy the high end stuff are very very different sorts of customers.
How the hell am I to justify $7K+ on a new computer if I cant upgrade the thing to keep it alive long enough to justify the price when I could by a goddamn godzilla of a PC for that price and just accept Logic Pro aint following me across the transition.
God only knows I live in terror of breaking my new macbook which unlike the 2011 macbook which I broke and self-repaired repeatedly, if this thing dies I'm screwed.
Apple I want to remain a customer, I really frigging love OSX. But your management are idiots who are destroying everything your technicians created for short term gain.
If its actually proper white noise then no, no you can not. The defining feature of white noise is that its truly random and contains all frequencies simultaneously (limited of course by hardware).
Please try again when you understand the full implications of conflict of interest.
Dude, you cant just make up your own personal definition of a word and get up on people who don't comply with it. Its *clearly* a conflict of interest if your reviewing a product and concealing an undisclosed vendetta unrelated to the product itself. When I worked in the courts it was *always* held that a former employee has a conflict of interest in certain dealings with former employers if that prior interest is somehow concealed. Take for instance a mining exploration. You generally are restricted in certain forms of share trading of your companies shares if you work there. But say a situation of a worker who works at a pilot mine , finds out that the mine is going to be upgraded to a full mine, quits and buys out a huge chunk of shares knowing when the stock market announcement occurs, its going to junp up. Just because he stopped working there. doesnt dischare his responsibilities. Its still insider trading.
One of the big problems in climate change communication is we probably shouldnt be using the term "heat", its too confusing to the punters (even if its at the core of the issue), rather we should be using *energy*. Climate change is causing more energy to be inputted to the climate system, and this sometimes takes the form of kinetic energy rather than heat. As heat builds up in one area of the system, the differential in heats cause convection currents to build up leading to fast winds and ocean currents and other phenomena like storms, cyclones, etc. As you could imagine in places this will actually generate *colder* local weather systems as the energy from that system rushes out into the convections.
Agreed. U.S. criminal penalties are so weak and lame they do nothing to deter crime.
My god, how harsher could criminal penalties BE? The united states , which comically imagines itself to be "free", has more people imprisoned than the rest of the world combined, is the *only* western country that authorizes judicial homicide, and in fact until relatively recently (early 2000s) was one of only a few countries in the world that authorized executing children. Its a country where you can get life, LIFE, for a huge number of crimes that don't involve murder.
Maybe "deterrence" isn't working, because the penalties are already so high is tearing communities appart.
Why wait for the revolution when you can pretend its already happened! I'll clue you in on this one, Libertopia is a fantasy of a tiny fraction of americans and complaining a british politician isnt following a rule soundly rejected by even the majority of americans is flat out silly.
Look, I dislike censorship as much as the next guy, but if you want to engage in a debate, at least make an attempt to live on the same planet as them.Nobody gives a shit about "The NAP". Hell even Ayn Rand thought it was silly.
Well its not always defamatory, sometimes the former employer are just terrible, and thats why you left.
But sometimes.... We had a recent issue where a very senior employee left to start at another company, all good and fine, and then started spamming reviews of our apps with absolute nonsense, and he knows it would be nonsense because he was on the design team. It was baffling, we thought he left on good terms, but apparently he had something bottled up.
Shame he never told us what was irking him while he was here. We could have sorted it. It wasnt like the guy was shy when he had something he didnt like.
So I get googles position here. It IS a conflict of interest.
This kids fucked. But he's *very* damn lucky Swatting isn't a felony, because Felony + Someone dies is enough to trigger a capital murder case in some states. And even if thats not the case wherever he is, theres a good chance all the cops would need is three felonies and the kid goes away for the best part of his life.
Oh, he'll be doing big time though, count on that much.
Slashdot Mirror
If the United states was not supposed to be a democracy, why didnt someone stop the founding fathers from making one.
You seem confused by terms. Lets look at those terms.
Republic;- A country without a king or queen.
Examples: United states, North Korea.
Monarchy;- A country with a king or queen:
Examples: Australia, Saudi Arabia.
Democracy:- A country where people vote for their leaders.
Examples: United States, Australia
Dictatorship: A country where the people dont vote for their leaders.
Examples: North Korea, Saudi Arabia.
So the United states isnt JUST a democracy OR a republic. Its a democratic republic.
Examples: United States, Australia
Unfortunately, Slashcode is a terrifying mess of Perl and unfresh hell. It's an ancient codebase that probably can't be saved.
Yep. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. The US is a great democracy, but its a prototype of a democracy at a time where there where not many examples to go by and forged by revolutionaries without the hindsight we have today. And sadly the old girl is definitely showing her age.
We know that no system is perfect (See Arrows Theorem) but there are many systems that are better. My personal favourite is instant runoff voting, used in Australia and a few others. Another good one is proportional seats, and there are others. And all of these have in common the idea of not wasting votes (Instant runoff does this by incrementally adding in preferences until a clear prefered candidate emerges as having 50+1 majority, good for presidents and individual seats. Proportional works by dividing seats by the number of votes. Good for houses of representation) All of these can be number crunched and manipulated, but so can "Just give it to whoever got the most votes". So if you really want to vote for the Greens or the Liberty, you can do so without endangering your prefered majority party candidate.
The problem is the current system is so favourable to the major parties, I highly doubt we'll see change anytime soon
Unicodes completely broken on Slashdot. God knows if I post from my iphone , the iphones "helpful" smart quotes feature interacts with slashdot to turn a humble ' into a splatter of unicode mess
Actually, the standards bodies do specify not to use "Degrees Kelvin" and instead use just "Kelvins"
However, I'd argue that was a poor choice, because there are other uses of the term Kelvins in physics, notably in noise measurements, and using degrees Kelvin makes it unambiguous.
There was an interesting study a few years back that found Drone operators suffered wartime PTSD at nearly the same rate (ie pretty damn high) as combat soldiers, the implication being that the sort of adrenal escalation that is behind PTSD appears to happen just as much with people who kill remotely as those who actually hold the gun.
The problem, of course, is that its unlikely the drone operator is going to realise what a head fuck he's in for until he's actually killed. Though I assume the same also applies to a combat soldier, who graduates boot camp thinking its going to be one epic game of counter-strike, takes his first life and then collapses under the unbearable moral weight of what killing really means.
Autonomous killing machines are a frankly horrific idea. In principle, machines should serve us, NEVER the other way around. On first principles alone the idea that a machine could determine who to kill and who not to kill is a chilling idea.
And in practice, its a terrible idea. Human soldiers already face baffling moral situations. Woman with child at checkpoint acting suspiciously. Maybe suicide bomber. But she has a child. To shoot or not to shoot. Thats the kind of thing guaranteed to give a marine a gnarly case of PTSD,if he choses wrong, and possibly also a dead mother and child (or conversely a dead platoon). But the possibiliy of a horrifically wrong choice means that Marine is going to deploy ever fragment of reason his brain can muster. . How the hell would we entrust such a monumental decision to a robot. Its "wrong" choice has no repercussions for it. If it kills an innocent mother, it doesnt care, its just a thing. If it opts for caution and it choses wrong, it still doesnt care, its already dead. Theres no incentive anywhere up the chain of command to get this right, because 'Well a robot chose badly, sorry not our fault!' is a get out of jail free to just let the bloody thing go robocop on a civilian population. We *morally* AND *practically* NEED humans in that decision loop, even if its just some guy in an air conditioned office and a VR headset.
Stop replying to obvious trolls dude
How about "Nothing in this law forbids an ISP from introducing "Speed lanes" or slowing down a competitors content. However if they chose to behave this way, they will be required to pay the cost of providing a physical interconnect to a competitors network-neutrality respecting service if the customer requests it.".
So basically, sure Comcast, by all means block netflix, but only if your prepared to fork up the cost of installing Google fibre in an unhappy customers house.
The best way these days to find packages for languages , imho are the "Awesome " compilations you'll find in various githubs. Check it. If your a C# dude, look for "Awesome C#". If your a python dude, look for "Awesome Python". They tend to be well curated and work on submissions and review, so MOST of them are fairly trusty.
However different languages have their own discovery mechanisms too. For PHP, use Packagist, and similar things exist for Gem, Pip , NPM etc.
That is extremely poor understanding of how courts and constitutions works.
The constitution is a framework for the courts to use to keep the executive and legislative branches in order. The executive branches and legislative branches can kind of do what they want, but the courts can then review it and throw it out if it violates the constitions.
To put it more bluntly, without courts, theres no constitutions, thus the court is *always* a party to questions of constitutionality, as no other body really has the power to enforce it (Even the DOJ etc, they can only refer stuff to the courts)
That'll be: All of them.
This blockchain hype is straight up snake oil, and the people selling it either know it , or are too innept to realise it yet. Almost everything these companies are promoting block chains for can be achieved trivially with a boring old PKI exchange , and whatever can't be done is going to turn out to be either "Bitcoins" or "Pointless". No company wants to stick their ledger in a public blockchain. Its complete insanity, your finances are between you, your accountant, and the tax man, and maybe an edited summary for the shareholders. Anything beyond that goes into the realm of industrial espionage bait. And anyway, your accountant can still just sign the fucking regular old one with his PGP key for precisely the same effect.
And bitcoin? The last two major crash was bad (When it dropped from around $700 to somewhere south of $100). The next one is going to be catastrophic. Well except for whoever manages to walk away with the loot (What you think money just appears and disapears in thin air?)
How is this a plausible solution to batery life? Should all tech companies be required to constantly repair their devices for problems that arent actually faults (And its not a fault, because the battery is functioning as designed). Techniology would become ridiculously expensive. No battery on earth lasts forever, and as a result pretty much all countries with legislatively guaranteed life (of machine) warranties like australia excempt batteries because batteries aint got long lifes.
Apples actions objectively extended the life of batteries.
I still have fond memories of giving a talk in the 90s in "the $70 web server" to a Linux conf about dumpster diving an old 486 with a minescule amount of ram and repurposing it as a webserver , IRC host and mail server for a bunch of clubs at the uni I was at. (The $75 was for a hard drive and coax network card). I remember being approached by some IBM drones afterwards offering us a license for OS/2 to replace the Linux of the machine. I think my response was something to the effect of "haha.... god no"
Job adverts are certainly an interesting method but never the whole story. I've been checking job listings since the 90s for python and up till about 3-4 years ago where rarer than hens teeth (there's a tonne now since the management types finally discovered it). But all that time there was a huge amount of local devs using python for personal projects , glueing things together with it in server racks, holding conferences and meets and so on. Hell one of the founding devs of Django even lives near me. But goddamn it was hard to find work with it , until recently
While there is some evidence that sociopathy has an organic cause, for the most part the medical and legal fraternities dont REALLY see sociopathy as a mental illness, but more as a personality disorder. Which might sound like splitting hairs, but what its really saying is a sociopath is sane. However they are also basically, for want of a better term, capital-C cunts.
Science doesn't really like to use a term like Evil, so they developed a bit of a parallell concept, the sociopath, a person who is full able to grasp that their actions create deep suffering to another, but simply does not care.
Which leads me to suspect AMD would very much be happy to take whatever business NVIDIA could lose if the high performance compute crowd rises in anger.
Apple just cant help themself, and it will be their undoing.
FINALLY apple had thrown a bone to the power users who had been stuck with the trashcan macs to handle workstation loads (3d/video production, hardcore audio processing/GIS/etc) , butr decided to kick back at the ONE GODDAMN complaint we had about the trashcans, the lack of upgradability. Sure a wad of glue and shiny might be fine for the average dont-give-a-fuck-about-tech user who just wants a relatively reliable and simple email and web machine, but people who buy the high end stuff are very very different sorts of customers.
How the hell am I to justify $7K+ on a new computer if I cant upgrade the thing to keep it alive long enough to justify the price when I could by a goddamn godzilla of a PC for that price and just accept Logic Pro aint following me across the transition.
God only knows I live in terror of breaking my new macbook which unlike the 2011 macbook which I broke and self-repaired repeatedly, if this thing dies I'm screwed.
Apple I want to remain a customer, I really frigging love OSX. But your management are idiots who are destroying everything your technicians created for short term gain.
If its actually proper white noise then no, no you can not. The defining feature of white noise is that its truly random and contains all frequencies simultaneously (limited of course by hardware).
Dude, you cant just make up your own personal definition of a word and get up on people who don't comply with it. Its *clearly* a conflict of interest if your reviewing a product and concealing an undisclosed vendetta unrelated to the product itself. When I worked in the courts it was *always* held that a former employee has a conflict of interest in certain dealings with former employers if that prior interest is somehow concealed. Take for instance a mining exploration. You generally are restricted in certain forms of share trading of your companies shares if you work there. But say a situation of a worker who works at a pilot mine , finds out that the mine is going to be upgraded to a full mine, quits and buys out a huge chunk of shares knowing when the stock market announcement occurs, its going to junp up. Just because he stopped working there. doesnt dischare his responsibilities. Its still insider trading.
One of the big problems in climate change communication is we probably shouldnt be using the term "heat", its too confusing to the punters (even if its at the core of the issue), rather we should be using *energy*. Climate change is causing more energy to be inputted to the climate system, and this sometimes takes the form of kinetic energy rather than heat. As heat builds up in one area of the system, the differential in heats cause convection currents to build up leading to fast winds and ocean currents and other phenomena like storms, cyclones, etc. As you could imagine in places this will actually generate *colder* local weather systems as the energy from that system rushes out into the convections.
My god, how harsher could criminal penalties BE? The united states , which comically imagines itself to be "free", has more people imprisoned than the rest of the world combined, is the *only* western country that authorizes judicial homicide, and in fact until relatively recently (early 2000s) was one of only a few countries in the world that authorized executing children. Its a country where you can get life, LIFE, for a huge number of crimes that don't involve murder.
Maybe "deterrence" isn't working, because the penalties are already so high is tearing communities appart.
Why wait for the revolution when you can pretend its already happened! I'll clue you in on this one, Libertopia is a fantasy of a tiny fraction of americans and complaining a british politician isnt following a rule soundly rejected by even the majority of americans is flat out silly.
Look, I dislike censorship as much as the next guy, but if you want to engage in a debate, at least make an attempt to live on the same planet as them.Nobody gives a shit about "The NAP". Hell even Ayn Rand thought it was silly.
Well its not always defamatory, sometimes the former employer are just terrible, and thats why you left.
But sometimes.... We had a recent issue where a very senior employee left to start at another company, all good and fine, and then started spamming reviews of our apps with absolute nonsense, and he knows it would be nonsense because he was on the design team. It was baffling, we thought he left on good terms, but apparently he had something bottled up.
Shame he never told us what was irking him while he was here. We could have sorted it. It wasnt like the guy was shy when he had something he didnt like.
So I get googles position here. It IS a conflict of interest.
Probably didn't work out who it was.
This kids fucked. But he's *very* damn lucky Swatting isn't a felony, because Felony + Someone dies is enough to trigger a capital murder case in some states. And even if thats not the case wherever he is, theres a good chance all the cops would need is three felonies and the kid goes away for the best part of his life.
Oh, he'll be doing big time though, count on that much.