You might have had this experience with any number of banks. Possibly somebody raided your mailbox for personal data, or you were careless about personal info you left online. Anybody who knows enough about you can open a credit card account in your name. A lot of fraud occurs this way. Consumers don't get stuck with the bills (usually!) but it can still cost them in terms of lost time and damaged credit ratings. Banks really ought to tighten up their procedures, but that would mean a lot less income from their (extremely profitable) credit card businesses. More cost effective to just eat the fraudulent charges.
Of course, this is really bad business ethics, as is using private data in training classes. But anybody who's followed the news lately knows about banks and business ethics.
You're correct, that's exactly how the water cycle works. But this gadget skips a couple of steps.
The water that's in the bottle on my desk started out as atmospheric moisture over Northern California. Then it precipitated out as snow or rain, ending up as ground water or in a reservoir. From there it was pumped into the local water system, and where I siphoned it into my bottle. Eventually I'll drink it, piss it into a toilet, whence it will find its way through the sewage system and out to sea. Then it will evaporate into the air and the whole cycle will start over again.
Right now, only a small part of the the rain and snow that falls on Northern California ends up in the various water systems we humans depend on. The rest is used by what's left of the natural ecology. One reason this ecology keeps shrinking is that humans keep sequestering more and more water for their own use. With gadgets like this one, we could potentially sequester every single drop before it has a chance to fall out of the sky.
That notion might seem far-fetched. And indeed, we'll probably never go that far in a relatively moist region like the one I live in. But consider an arid region like Arizona. There's relatively little atmospheric moisture there, but what there is sustains a thriving desert ecology. It also is home to human communities that are always struggling to find water. It's not hard to imagine Arizonans building enough of this gadgets to grab virtually all the precipitation before it has a chance to fall. When that happens, the desert ecologies are, so to speak, toast.
Which is not to say that this technology is totally evil. I can think of many situations where it would be the most ecologically sound way to obtain water. You just have to remember that this is not an ecological free lunch.
He definitely deleted several posts, both his and mine.
This is not the first time I've suspected pudge of abusing his editor powers. Some years back, I wrote a post accusing him of using his infinite mod points to downmod posts he didn't like. He saw it and vehemently denied it. I accepted that then. Now, I'm not so sure. For more on that, follow the link in my sig.
Except that I don't do that. There are plenty of positions which are strongly opposed to mine which, in my opinion, do not involve being irrational.
Let me put it this way: I don't think that somebody who thinks that censorship can make school kids safer is "irrational". I strongly disagree with that point of view. (As I said before, I share your absolutist belief in the sanctity of the First Amendment.) I consider it poorly informed and influenced by emotion. But "irrational"? It's just absurd.
I don't have the energy (it's Friday!) to give this discussion the attention it deserves. So please just chew on this: somebody who strongly agrees with you on the issue strongly objects to your assessment of the other side. Am I irrational?
Do me a favor: don't respond. Just think about what I've said. And the next time you get into an argument with somebody who's pro-censorship, don't write them off the first time you hear them say something that pisses you off. Because I really do think you're confusing pissoffiness with irrationality.
Mine got stolen many years ago, but I think it was the same model as yours. I can't explain why yours works as designed and mine didn't, but my experience seems to be pretty typical.
I now own a Motion Computing tablet with a 1Mhz processor that runs very hot indeed. But it makes no noise at all. Or almost: if you put your ear right up to the air vent, you can just barely here the fan. Can't hear the disk drive at all.
Got my sister a used Optiplex SX270 that's just as quiet.
Noise is primarily a matter of mechanical engineering, and it's only recently that vendors started doing anything about it.
Very true. And I think everybody working on Chrome knows it. So this story had me really confused. So I did the unthinkable: I read TFA.
Which turns out to be just some pundits half-assed speculation based on the following quote by a Google exec:
"We will probably do distribution deals," Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, told The Times. "We could work with an OEM and have them ship computers with Chrome pre-installed."
That's a long way from actually pursuing OEM deals. I suspect Pichai was actually talking about how they might try to get some market share once Chrome is ready for prime time.
Either that, or he's one of those dimwitted marketeers who doesn't really understand the product he's marketing.
Their position isn't based on rational thinking...
Now that is nonsense.
I don't know how to make a good case for this fact, but it is a fact. All I can say is that if you're detecting irrationality in the opinions of everybody who strongly disagrees with you, you're using the concept to avoid giving people a fair hearing.
You're not unusual in this respect. I don't think you'd have to look very hard to find somebody who thinks that your opinions and beliefs are irrational.
According to the article you link, the Coast Guard Academy is the only service academy with a Spirenet node. I'd be very curious to know why the CG thinks their cadets need access to classified information on this level. After all, the CG is primarily a law enforcement and safety entity these days.
If you go into a discussion that the person you're arguing with has an "unreasonable position", and therefore doesn't deserve your courtesy, then they'll repay you in kind, and you're never going to have a discussion at all. When you do that, you're writing off the opinions of 2/3 of the population.
You may consider yourself broad-minded because you still talk to 1/3 of the population that doesn't hold opinions that irritate you. I must respectfully disagree.
You mean, once Pudge bit my finger off, I should have stopped trying to shake hands with him? A reasonable POV, but my fingers always seem to grow back, so I don't really care.
I think you misunderstand my point. The fact that pudge is a jerk isn't all that important, and that's not what I'm peeved about. I'm just tired of jerkdom always dominating the argument.
Do you have kids? I'm guessing not. Parents tend to get a little hyped when the safety of their kids is involved. You may think it's silly. Most people do not.
And obviously they don't agree with you that the increases in safety are "marginal" Can we please disagree with people without belittling them?
Really? Pudge did go back and clean it up a little. (Do the editors have any rules of conduct at all?) But it still seems pretty bloody to me.
It's not so much that Pudge was nasty. (I mean, jeez, if you have a think skin you really don't belong here.) It's that he dealt with every argument I made by calling me a liar and various other names. (He also said I was "being defensive" which I find kind of ironic.) I'm not offended by his BS, but his using insult to avoid hearing what I was trying to say is really irritating. And in an editor with infinite mod points and the ability to alter discussions after they're posted, it's quite disturbing.
Really, really sensitive information isn't available that way. I'm told that organizations like the DoD that have separate networks with no physical connection to the Internet for the "burn before reading" stuff.
But you can't hide all your sensitive data behind that kind of security. Your organization would grind to a halt. Besides, not all data really merits that level of protection. You don't want the bad guys to have it, but it isn't the end of the world if they do.
Security is always a tradeoff of cost (including the cost of making it hard for your own people to get the information they need) versus risk. If you have a good security policy and enforce it properly, you can do a reasonable compromise between the two. The problem is that many organizations either don't have the policy or are sloppy about enforcing.
I share your absolutist attitude toward the First Amendment. Hey, without free flow of information, not only would we be living in a dictatorship, but most Slashdotters would be unemployed! We do work in the "information economy" after all.
But let's dial back on the loaded, simplistic language. People who are concerned about campus violence aren't "nanny statists". They just want their kids to come home from school without a lot of exit wounds. The idea that they can do so by abridging our freedom of speech may seem shortsighted to you (and to me), but they do have legitimate concerns.
I've always been a little impatient with people who like to vilify people they disagree with. The last few years, with the Limbaughs and the Palins (and yes, the MoveOn.Orgs) using insult in place of logic have changed "a little" to "extremely". And yesterday I had this totally poisonous conversation which left me with no tolerance for this kind of BS at all.
That sounds about right. The adaptive compiler CPU idea was very intriguing (sort of like Hot Spot for x86 code) but nothing really useful seems to have come out of it.
I used to own a Crusoe-based laptop. It ran hot, and battery life was unimpressive. So where's the alleged benefit for this technology?
People apparently make a bit of money by uploading their games to casual game sites, like Kongregate. Anybody can do this, and if your game becomes popular, you get a taste of the advertising revenue. The problem there is that only Flash games seem to be supported. Perhaps there's a way to compile a Java program to flash bytecodes instead of Java bytecodes?
Ever since I got my first PDA, I've downloaded (and often bought) mobile device software from sites like Handango. Google for "mobile software". Their mainstay seems to one-programmer shops like yours. Don't know how you get your software there, but it can't be hard.
Third idea: just put the software on your own web site, together with an Amazon or PayPal tip jar. Sometimes you can make more money by using your invention to create good will than you can by productizing it. I think over the years I've spend as much money rewarding authors of innovative mobile device freeware as I have buying software for these same devices.
This would imply that earlier heliocentric models where just that, i.e. wild speculations. It doesn't seem to me that the advances of astronomy in the hellenistic period can be described and explained that way.
You're right, they can't. But you're imposing a false dichotomy here. I see at least 3 levels of reasoning.
Somebody who doesn't really know what he's talking about posits that the Earth revolves around the sun.
An intelligent natural philospher assembles observation, conjecture, and deduction to argue that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A scientist posits a theory that involves the earth revolving around the sun, and shows how other scientists can perform objective observations that confirm or deny this theory.
The first level is the only one that deserves the label "wild speculation". The second level is intelligent speculation, but it's still just speculation, because there's no real way to test the argument. Only the third level counts as science.
Of course, by reducing this all to the question of who revolves around who, I'm oversimplifying the scientific argument, as your comment on models shows. But I don't think that matters. My point here is that science is not about facts, it's about the structure of reason that surrounds the facts. In science, the first person to have an idea is less important that the first person to erect a scientific structure to validate the idea.
Cute story, not very plausible. Both bread and butter have been around for thousands of years. Do you really think that before 1519, nobody thought to spread one on the other?
Although the heliocentric concept had been suggested earlier, Copernicus is widely thought of as the father of the scientific theory of the heliocentric solar system.
Please. All these qualifications are unnecessary. Copernicus is not considered a great scientist because he woke up one day and said, "Gee, maybe the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around!" His greatness came from all the insight, creativity, and mind-boggling hard work he put in to make this idea objectively sound.
Being the first to have an idea doesn't give you precedence. It's inventing the scientific structure that allows people to validate (and, more importantly, invalidate) your ideas that matters. That's what separates real science from mere speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
You might have had this experience with any number of banks. Possibly somebody raided your mailbox for personal data, or you were careless about personal info you left online. Anybody who knows enough about you can open a credit card account in your name. A lot of fraud occurs this way. Consumers don't get stuck with the bills (usually!) but it can still cost them in terms of lost time and damaged credit ratings. Banks really ought to tighten up their procedures, but that would mean a lot less income from their (extremely profitable) credit card businesses. More cost effective to just eat the fraudulent charges.
Of course, this is really bad business ethics, as is using private data in training classes. But anybody who's followed the news lately knows about banks and business ethics.
...carnivorous spacemonster attached to the hull of a spaceship...
{Citation Needed}
You're correct, that's exactly how the water cycle works. But this gadget skips a couple of steps.
The water that's in the bottle on my desk started out as atmospheric moisture over Northern California. Then it precipitated out as snow or rain, ending up as ground water or in a reservoir. From there it was pumped into the local water system, and where I siphoned it into my bottle. Eventually I'll drink it, piss it into a toilet, whence it will find its way through the sewage system and out to sea. Then it will evaporate into the air and the whole cycle will start over again.
Right now, only a small part of the the rain and snow that falls on Northern California ends up in the various water systems we humans depend on. The rest is used by what's left of the natural ecology. One reason this ecology keeps shrinking is that humans keep sequestering more and more water for their own use. With gadgets like this one, we could potentially sequester every single drop before it has a chance to fall out of the sky.
That notion might seem far-fetched. And indeed, we'll probably never go that far in a relatively moist region like the one I live in. But consider an arid region like Arizona. There's relatively little atmospheric moisture there, but what there is sustains a thriving desert ecology. It also is home to human communities that are always struggling to find water. It's not hard to imagine Arizonans building enough of this gadgets to grab virtually all the precipitation before it has a chance to fall. When that happens, the desert ecologies are, so to speak, toast.
Which is not to say that this technology is totally evil. I can think of many situations where it would be the most ecologically sound way to obtain water. You just have to remember that this is not an ecological free lunch.
He definitely deleted several posts, both his and mine.
This is not the first time I've suspected pudge of abusing his editor powers. Some years back, I wrote a post accusing him of using his infinite mod points to downmod posts he didn't like. He saw it and vehemently denied it. I accepted that then. Now, I'm not so sure. For more on that, follow the link in my sig.
Perhaps it was less tame before pudge went back and re-edited it.
Except that I don't do that. There are plenty of positions which are strongly opposed to mine which, in my opinion, do not involve being irrational.
Let me put it this way: I don't think that somebody who thinks that censorship can make school kids safer is "irrational". I strongly disagree with that point of view. (As I said before, I share your absolutist belief in the sanctity of the First Amendment.) I consider it poorly informed and influenced by emotion. But "irrational"? It's just absurd.
I don't have the energy (it's Friday!) to give this discussion the attention it deserves. So please just chew on this: somebody who strongly agrees with you on the issue strongly objects to your assessment of the other side. Am I irrational?
Do me a favor: don't respond. Just think about what I've said. And the next time you get into an argument with somebody who's pro-censorship, don't write them off the first time you hear them say something that pisses you off. Because I really do think you're confusing pissoffiness with irrationality.
Mine got stolen many years ago, but I think it was the same model as yours. I can't explain why yours works as designed and mine didn't, but my experience seems to be pretty typical.
I now own a Motion Computing tablet with a 1Mhz processor that runs very hot indeed. But it makes no noise at all. Or almost: if you put your ear right up to the air vent, you can just barely here the fan. Can't hear the disk drive at all.
Got my sister a used Optiplex SX270 that's just as quiet.
Noise is primarily a matter of mechanical engineering, and it's only recently that vendors started doing anything about it.
Very true. And I think everybody working on Chrome knows it. So this story had me really confused. So I did the unthinkable: I read TFA.
Which turns out to be just some pundits half-assed speculation based on the following quote by a Google exec:
"We will probably do distribution deals," Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, told The Times. "We could work with an OEM and have them ship computers with Chrome pre-installed."
That's a long way from actually pursuing OEM deals. I suspect Pichai was actually talking about how they might try to get some market share once Chrome is ready for prime time.
Either that, or he's one of those dimwitted marketeers who doesn't really understand the product he's marketing.
Their position isn't based on rational thinking...
Now that is nonsense.
I don't know how to make a good case for this fact, but it is a fact. All I can say is that if you're detecting irrationality in the opinions of everybody who strongly disagrees with you, you're using the concept to avoid giving people a fair hearing.
You're not unusual in this respect. I don't think you'd have to look very hard to find somebody who thinks that your opinions and beliefs are irrational.
According to the article you link, the Coast Guard Academy is the only service academy with a Spirenet node. I'd be very curious to know why the CG thinks their cadets need access to classified information on this level. After all, the CG is primarily a law enforcement and safety entity these days.
If you go into a discussion that the person you're arguing with has an "unreasonable position", and therefore doesn't deserve your courtesy, then they'll repay you in kind, and you're never going to have a discussion at all. When you do that, you're writing off the opinions of 2/3 of the population.
You may consider yourself broad-minded because you still talk to 1/3 of the population that doesn't hold opinions that irritate you. I must respectfully disagree.
You mean, once Pudge bit my finger off, I should have stopped trying to shake hands with him? A reasonable POV, but my fingers always seem to grow back, so I don't really care.
I think you misunderstand my point. The fact that pudge is a jerk isn't all that important, and that's not what I'm peeved about. I'm just tired of jerkdom always dominating the argument.
Do you have kids? I'm guessing not. Parents tend to get a little hyped when the safety of their kids is involved. You may think it's silly. Most people do not.
And obviously they don't agree with you that the increases in safety are "marginal" Can we please disagree with people without belittling them?
Really? Pudge did go back and clean it up a little. (Do the editors have any rules of conduct at all?) But it still seems pretty bloody to me.
It's not so much that Pudge was nasty. (I mean, jeez, if you have a think skin you really don't belong here.) It's that he dealt with every argument I made by calling me a liar and various other names. (He also said I was "being defensive" which I find kind of ironic.) I'm not offended by his BS, but his using insult to avoid hearing what I was trying to say is really irritating. And in an editor with infinite mod points and the ability to alter discussions after they're posted, it's quite disturbing.
Really, really sensitive information isn't available that way. I'm told that organizations like the DoD that have separate networks with no physical connection to the Internet for the "burn before reading" stuff.
But you can't hide all your sensitive data behind that kind of security. Your organization would grind to a halt. Besides, not all data really merits that level of protection. You don't want the bad guys to have it, but it isn't the end of the world if they do.
Security is always a tradeoff of cost (including the cost of making it hard for your own people to get the information they need) versus risk. If you have a good security policy and enforce it properly, you can do a reasonable compromise between the two. The problem is that many organizations either don't have the policy or are sloppy about enforcing.
I share your absolutist attitude toward the First Amendment. Hey, without free flow of information, not only would we be living in a dictatorship, but most Slashdotters would be unemployed! We do work in the "information economy" after all.
But let's dial back on the loaded, simplistic language. People who are concerned about campus violence aren't "nanny statists". They just want their kids to come home from school without a lot of exit wounds. The idea that they can do so by abridging our freedom of speech may seem shortsighted to you (and to me), but they do have legitimate concerns.
I've always been a little impatient with people who like to vilify people they disagree with. The last few years, with the Limbaughs and the Palins (and yes, the MoveOn.Orgs) using insult in place of logic have changed "a little" to "extremely". And yesterday I had this totally poisonous conversation which left me with no tolerance for this kind of BS at all.
That sounds about right. The adaptive compiler CPU idea was very intriguing (sort of like Hot Spot for x86 code) but nothing really useful seems to have come out of it.
I used to own a Crusoe-based laptop. It ran hot, and battery life was unimpressive. So where's the alleged benefit for this technology?
You make some interesting points that I'd like to read more about. Can you point me at your sources?
People apparently make a bit of money by uploading their games to casual game sites, like Kongregate. Anybody can do this, and if your game becomes popular, you get a taste of the advertising revenue. The problem there is that only Flash games seem to be supported. Perhaps there's a way to compile a Java program to flash bytecodes instead of Java bytecodes?
Ever since I got my first PDA, I've downloaded (and often bought) mobile device software from sites like Handango. Google for "mobile software". Their mainstay seems to one-programmer shops like yours. Don't know how you get your software there, but it can't be hard.
Third idea: just put the software on your own web site, together with an Amazon or PayPal tip jar. Sometimes you can make more money by using your invention to create good will than you can by productizing it. I think over the years I've spend as much money rewarding authors of innovative mobile device freeware as I have buying software for these same devices.
This would imply that earlier heliocentric models where just that, i.e. wild speculations. It doesn't seem to me that the advances of astronomy in the hellenistic period can be described and explained that way.
You're right, they can't. But you're imposing a false dichotomy here. I see at least 3 levels of reasoning.
The first level is the only one that deserves the label "wild speculation". The second level is intelligent speculation, but it's still just speculation, because there's no real way to test the argument. Only the third level counts as science.
Of course, by reducing this all to the question of who revolves around who, I'm oversimplifying the scientific argument, as your comment on models shows. But I don't think that matters. My point here is that science is not about facts, it's about the structure of reason that surrounds the facts. In science, the first person to have an idea is less important that the first person to erect a scientific structure to validate the idea.
Cute story, not very plausible. Both bread and butter have been around for thousands of years. Do you really think that before 1519, nobody thought to spread one on the other?
Although the heliocentric concept had been suggested earlier, Copernicus is widely thought of as the father of the scientific theory of the heliocentric solar system.
Please. All these qualifications are unnecessary.
Copernicus is not considered a great scientist because he woke up one day and said, "Gee, maybe the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around!" His greatness came from all the insight, creativity, and mind-boggling hard work he put in to make this idea objectively sound.
Being the first to have an idea doesn't give you precedence. It's inventing the scientific structure that allows people to validate (and, more importantly, invalidate) your ideas that matters. That's what separates real science from mere speculation.
Still, there are probably a lot of compute-intensive loops that would run more efficiently if they were coded in C.
Uhhuh. And you were also drone in a low-end job who couldn't afford to lose it?
You mean there are no CIA hit teams going after botnet operators? What do I pay taxes for?!