There are plenty of good arguments you can make against Apple's "walled garden" approach. I simply don't believe that "you don't own it" is one of them.
"Ownership" of a thing (like a phone) means chattel rights to the property. It does NOT mean "I can do anything I want to it."
I own my car, but I am not allowed by the manufacturer or US law to disable the air bags or roll back the odometer. I own my house and surrounding property, but am not allowed to use my land to grow opium poppies in it and harvest them. (I'm in Washington, so I could grow pot in it, but that's a different issue...) I own a semi-automatic pistol, but am not allowed by the manufacturer or law to convert it to fully automatic. I currently own a number of bottles of nice wine and aged scotch, but I am not allowed by law to charge people money to come to my house and drink them. None of these things means that I don't "own" these objects.
Furthermore, when it comes to most iOS or major-vendor Android devices, you CAN root them. It may be complicated and it will certainly void your warranty and deny you the right to OEM/carrier customer support, but otherwise knock yourself out. Just like if you try hard enough you will find ways to disable your airbags, file your pistol's firing pin, or get opium poppy seeds.
A walled garden is a walled garden. You buys your ticket, you takes the ride. That's what you signed up for when you bought it... or didn't want that, so you didn't buy it. But either way, it doesn't impact "ownership" in a legal sense at all.
So, explain why license plates are required... The only arguments I can think of are stolen cars or chases.
Fair enough question. License plates serve several purposes:
Indirectly (but probably most importantly) through vehicle license tabs as a way of ensuring cars are up to date for emissions, etc. and extracting money directly from automobile users on a per-vehicle basis for road upkeep. And being able to identify (through expired tags) which should not be on the road.
Identifying stolen cars on the road before they get to a chop shop, or even for those which are just being taken for "joyrides"
Visually identifying cars that are the subject of Amber Alerts or other vehicle APBs
Assessing tolls for photo-based/"toll booth-less" toll roads, or for "red light cameras."
Identifying (through security cameras) "drive offs" at gas stations, getaway cars from crimes, etc.
Being able to pull over a driver who has (or claims) to have no ID for a DUI, etc. and identify them based on to whom the vehicle is registered so you know if they are wanted on other charges (or to flag them for a stolen car).
You may or may not agree with the validity of all these uses, but none of these things can effectively be done at the range required to recognize a unique VIN.
I don't think I can think of a single UX improvements from updates after Windows 95
Really? How about:
Mac OS X "column browser" view in the Finder
Android/iOS/Windows tablets with "swipe from below/above" to view key system settings or notifications very easily (or right-side notifications single-click icon on Mac OS X)
Windows 8/10 "tiles" or Mac OS X "Launchpad" to put the most frequently used applications front and center for easy access
Transparency (all modern OSes) to make background applications/windows partly visible when useful
Anti-aliased fonts and vector graphics (all modern OSes) for icons to make desktops usable at any resolution
"Dock" icon repositories (all modern OSes) to make the current and most frequently used applications available at one click, not just a la the Win95 task bar
System + web search through an integrated one-click desktop search bar (dates back to MacOS 9[!] Sherlock)
"Mission Control" on MacOS X to show live previews of all open application windows using a three-finger mouse swipe, not just Alt+Tab style switching
Look, I agree with you that the advances in desktop OS UIs have been incremental rather than revolutionary since Windows 95, there has been a LOT of good work done there. Try downgrading to Gnome 1.0 and tell me if you see anything missing...
We already have national identification cards - they are called passports.
Except, that, you know, passports are optional. O-P-T-I-O-N-A-L. If you never want to leave the US, you don't have to get one. I know plenty of people who never have. And in what way are passports even a bad idea? All countries have an interest in knowing who is coming into their own country, and if they have permission to be there (or should be denied such). You strike me as the sort of person who probably doesn't want Syrian immigrants coming into the US - without passports, how would you know that, and if the immigrant in question is a risk to US security? Other countries have the same rights regarding US citizens traveling to their countries.
I'm actually surprised that you didn't cite what is actually far closer to a "national ID" - your Social Security card. But as long as you don't plan on participating in the US economy in such a way that you involves taxable transactions, you technically don't need one of those either. Get born, grow up and live on a farm where you are self-sufficient and don't make monetary transactions which are subject to Federal taxation, and you can skip that too. Good luck with that, but there are plenty of US citizens in Alaska, Idaho and elsewhere (not to mention millions of illegal immigrants) who do just fine without SSNs.
What this brings us closer to are implantable transponder chips inserted into new born babies if you opt into the keep living plan.
Oh, FFS. That's like saying that because the vast majority of US residents have cellphones, that brings us closer to all having SIM cards implanted at birth. Your tinfoil hat is probably uncomfortable; you may wish to take it off from time to time for the benefit of your hair follicles. Unless you plan to blame your hair loss on "chemtrails."
Why can I not travel anonymously, exactly? How did we allow the Statists to play us so?
Welcome to Nazi Germany.
Oh fucking PLEASE. Godwin-ing this does nothing to improve the quality of discourse.
Look, I am no fan of the TSA and the Security Theater bullshit apparatus they have set up. But it's not unreasonable to understand that your ability to travel anonymously is correlated to the vehicle you are traveling on and its ability to be hijacked and used as a weapon.
You want to walk or bicycle, coast to coast, anonymously? Fine. Go right ahead.
You want to drive a car? I think most of us can agree that you can do enough damage to lives and property with two+ tons of vehicle that the government should be able to 1.) minimally verify that you know how to drive one; 2.) know who you are in case you break the rules and need to be fined or punished; and 3.) have that driver's license revoked if you show you can't operate that vehicle responsibly. But if you want to drive coast to coast anonymously, you can do that. Stay within the speed limit and don't have any malfunctioning vehicle parts, and you have given no one Probable Cause to see you and your license. Avoid those particular toll roads where your license plate is photographed for billing purposes. (You may run into DUI checkpoints, which I think are of dubious constitutionality, but those are comparatively rare.) You can easily go anywhere in the US without anyone knowing who you are, where you're going or why.
You want to travel by train or aircraft? Okay, nobody has hijacked a train in the US (AFAIK) in many decades, but at least for airplanes I think there's a generally understood common good in preventing those people who may pose a risk to a flying WMD from getting on board the aircraft. Is that really hard to understand? It's unlikely but not totally beyond the pale either that a train hijacking could kill everyone on board the train, let alone any bystanders. (Positive Train Control, which could avoid this, has yet to be implemented on Amtrak, sadly.)
Long story short, the US Security Theater apparatus is bloated, inefficient, ineffective and overly intrusive. But to suggest that either 1.) it is impossible to travel across the US anonymously, or that 2.) the government doesn't have a reasonable right to know who is traveling on certain conveyances, is doctrinaire and unrealistic.
blame sub prime housing loans, enacted under president Clinton for the majority of what happened there
No. Blame everybody who was involved. Big awful financial crises don't usually happen because of a few bad actors, they happen because enough different people participated them in different ways to make them Big and Awful.
Blame the Clinton administration and the then-Republican Congress for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act that did the equivalent of letting casinos play against their own guests, using house money.
Blame the Fed under the Bush administration for keeping US interest rates very low to make buying houses very cheap and attractive, which resulted in 1.) boosting the economy by creating lots of construction jobs (good); 2.) appreciating housing prices, which suddenly made lots of US homeowners very wealthy on paper and spurred consumer spending (good short term, bad long term); and 3.) driving foreign sovereign wealth funds and other investors to look away from the usual store of "stable value" (then-low-paying US T-Bills) and into the arms of more risky investments like, oh, amalgamated blocks of consumer housing mortgages (Collateralized Debt Obligations, or CDOs). (very bad)
Blame the Wall Street investment houses for pressuring retail lending institutions (small mortgage banks) to lower their lending standards ("sub-prime" mortgages) in order to increase the pool of available mortgages to pack into CDOs.
Blame the mortgage brokers and the people who worked for them (including, indirectly, the real estate agents) for making it very easy for idiots to buy real estate they couldn't afford because - hey, it always goes up! So it will be fine because you can sell it for a profit! And honestly, if someone offered to sell you, say, a rare comic book that you couldn't really afford, but you had every reasonable indication that you would be able to "flip" that comic book in 12-24 months and double your money, isn't there a good chance you would do it?
Blame the people who saw Dutch Tulips, Beanie Babies, Foil-Bagged Spider Man #1 issues or whatever else in the housing market and bought houses they shouldn't have. Houses too big, second houses, investment properties, whatever... they took a big gamble and didn't realize that the same game of economic "musical chairs" has been going on in different environments for at least 400 years, and it always ends the same way. This is the least politically convenient group to blame, but by far the most numerically significant, and they share equal blame.
So long story short - if you want to find the "villains" of the Great Recession, forget the Illuminati and realize that the blame properly spreads very far and very wide.
Do you also get auto-reverted when you discuss the correction on the article's talk page?
Can't speak to the original commenter's experience. But I did take the time to go to the talk pages sometimes, and my experience was that if the change (or especially deletion of a page for "non notability") was made by an Editor, the response was approximately "This was changed due to 'WP:Antediluvian Reactionary Recalibration' and you should have voted on that topic six years ago, so too bad, it stands." If I made the exertion to actually dig up that policy and make a counter-argument, the result was essentially "I am an EDITOR. Run, coward! [read all in the voice of Sinistar]. All will kneel before me."
I used to make dozens of minor edits (usually typographical corrections) to Wikipedia articles a year, as well a contributing generously. Since a few experiences where major changes were made or whole articles were deleted with nothing representing a fair discourse that didn't amount to a policy citation or editorial bullying, I have done neither. Wikipedia will of course go on just fine without me. But someday the Awesome Powers That Be will find that the "crowdsourcing" that once made Wikipedia great has been reduced to an oligarchy.
I have only followed the cultural goings-on there at a distance, but it seems like the reaction of US Army generals in Vietnam - any criticism of an individual's performance is a criticism of The System, and The System must be protected at all costs, so the Establishment must stand behind every member of the Establishment's reactions to preserve their collective credibility. And as that war demonstrated, any system which does not have a systemic ability to internally evaluate and critique its own strategic errors and fallibility is doomed to failure.
Like I said, Wikipedia loses very little from my withdrawal and non-participation. But how many of "me" are there out there, and when does it reach some form of tipping point?
Sorry, can you remind me where I proposed "BOMB THE EVER LIVING SHIT OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NOW AND ETERNITY" anywhere?
All I did was suggest that "getting the fuck out of the Middle East" - per your previous post - was not a great idea because we have legitimate interests in how things turn out there. There is a lot of space between the two responses.
While we're at it...
The US has not been dependent on ME oil for quite some time. Domestic production and Canada provide most of the US' needs.
You are confusing natural gas production (which provides a significant amount of North American electrical generation and home utility) with light sweet crude oil production, which is what goes into the cars people drive to work, the tractor trailers that haul their consumer goods, and the airplanes they fly in. Middle Eastern oil prices have a HUGE impact on the American economy.
Oh, and:
If ISIS or any muslim group ever poses a legitimate threat to the Western way of life
I think there are many family members of the victims of the Bali nightclub bombings, 9/11 attacks, Charlie Hebdo slaughter, London Underground bombing, Paris 2015 attacks, and others who think that being dead is a "legitimate threat."
This viewpoint is remarkably similar to the (very popular in some areas, especially Midwestern) Republican Isolationist view prior to WWII. It's not our fight. It's not worth spending the blood of American soldiers. Let's just stay the f--k away, right? And, even if history disagrees with them, they had a very valid viewpoint at the time.
Years ago, before I travelled more internationally, I would absolutely have agreed with you. We have no dog in that fight, right? Our meddling there has produced no objective benefits to the US. Fuck 'em, let the crazies fight over whether the Temple Mount, which was the site of the Jewish Temple of Solomon, before it became a Roman Temple of Venus, before it became a Christian Church, before it became the Muslim Dome of the Rock... etc.
But eventually I realized that this view - while prima facie correct - is naive. What if ISIS takes over the whole Middle East and decides that oil should be sold at $250/barrel for any non-Sharia buyer? What happens when the US economy spins into massive inflation because the cost of trucking every box of Mac 'n Cheese to a grocery store goes up 200%, or an airline ticket across the country costs $1100, or it now costs every driver 3x as much to drive to work and their disposable income goes down commensurately? And what if their success encourages ISIS to export terror to Europe and Russia, just because they can?
What if Iran takes over the Middle East and decides to reinstate a nuclear program that sets up a missile program capable of reaching Europe? What if the Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria is left unchecked and conquers ISIS then rolls into the hollow governmental shell known as Iraq to take over? Are you fine standing by if the Saudis take over the region and install a stable political regime founded on gross human rights violations (from women being unable to drive, to gays being stoned to death)? What about the legitimate political interests of all the voting American citizens of Jewish, Arab-American or Persian-American descent who feel they have a vested interest there?
The point being that - UNFORTUNATELY from my personal perspective - what happens in the Middle East affects the US a lot. Perhaps actively (oil prices), or passively (will you sleep well when women are stoned to death for not wearing hijabs, if you could have done something about it?). Nobody else but us can have a decisive influence, so if we want the world to look the way we want it to, then we can't be isolationist.
The sad truth of the matter is that because the US has the world's largest economy and the only military force on the planet with a presence that can truly be projected globally (e.g. we have more active aircraft carriers than the rest of the planet combined), we will always get involved because we have direct/indirect economic, political or (vaguely) humanitarian interests. Depending on your viewpoint, we may be the good guys or the bad guys. But unless we decide to radically shrink our military, we will always be expected to play a role, one way or another. The best we as Americans can hope for is the collective wisdom to vote in people who use that influence for the better.
So I suppose you hear no difference between radio trash full-range speakers and Klipsch reference series or palladium series speakers?
Maybe, maybe not, honestly. In my (limited) experience with audio gear, the situation is best analogized to my (extensive) experience with wine. Wait, that sounded bad. Anyway...
If you don't know anything about wine, you will still probably be able to tell the difference between a $3 bottle of Night Train and a decent $10 bottle of wine. (And yes, there is a LOT of decent $10 wine; $3 is more or less guaranteed to be made from the grapes that the $10 wineries classified as "dog food" quality.) Frankly, that's where most people are in terms of audiophile gear.
But can you tell the difference between a $10 bottle and a $25 bottle? Of course, even a connoisseur may find a $10 wine preferable to a $25 wine, but you take my point. The short answer is if your wine tasting palate is not very sophisticated, you can't. If it is (either because your palate is naturally sensitive or you have tasted a lot of wines) then yes.
Okay, now - can you taste the difference between a $25 bottle of wine and a $50 bottle? How about $50 vs. $100? Vs. $300? Except for those who taste high end wine frequently or have a naturally crazy sensitive palate, the answer is no. If you are one of the few who can genuinely taste the difference between a nice quality $25 French Bordeaux and a $150 bottle of Joseph Phelps, the difference is important and worth the money. If you can't, then you have just wasted $125. And there is a rarefied crowd that can tell the difference between a $350 2002 Grand Cru Bordeaux and a 2009 $1500 Grand Cru Bordeaux. But there is unfortunately a larger population of people who actually can't but delude themselves into thinking they can and (from an outside perspective) waste thousands and thousands of dollars in doing so.
The point being that 1.) I have never heard "Klipsch reference series" or "Palladium series" speakers, so I have no idea if I can hear the difference or not; and 2.) most people don't know if they can hear the difference or not, and probably can't anyway. You may say you feel sorry for me if I can't tell the two apart, but if I really can't, then there's nothing wrong with that. In return, I promise not to tell you that I feel sorry for you for being unable to distinguish a white Burgundy from a California Chardonnay.
It's not necessarily even a SNAFU. The non-paranoid view would be: Yahoo! was a mess and most in the industry viewed it as impossible to turn around. Ambitious Google executive - who wasn't going to be getting the top spot at her current employer anytime soon - decided to take the challenge. Three years later it turns out everyone was right, it was an impossible task.
The idea of a reverse auction is probably the best suggestion on how to cure the problem to date. Start out with prices 100 times as much as normal, and after a time have the ticket prices drop. The site could even allow people to place a bid and if the tickets are sold out for that area or tow, it would automatically purchase them for the buyer once the price dropped to what was asked.
On one hand, as a business person, I agree with you 100%. This is absolutely the most rational way to squeeze scalpers out of the market and maximize profit for the musician/event/whatever performer. If these people were economically rational, this unquestionably should be how all tickets are sold.
On the other hand, I think we are generally pretty aware that rock musicians et. al. are remarkably stupid when it comes to money. I had always wondered why these people were clearly cheating themselves out of profit by pricing tickets the way they do, and my question was answered by an episode of NPR's Planet Money podcast. It turns out that the answer is altruism - of a sort - on the part of the "artists."
Most rock musicians apparently hate the idea that only rich fans will be able to go to their concerts - which would likely be the result in a reverse-auction scenario. Instead, they prefer to keep ticket prices low in a (possibly naive?) attempt to ensure that their concert tickets are accessible to all their fans. They are willing to sacrifice the revenue they, by any economic theory, should be collecting by offering tickets in a market-based environment, in order to gamble that some average fans will be able to beat the scalpers and buy tickets at a low face value. Musicians also seem to be particularly worried about the perception that their events are only available to the rich (because of high face value prices), although in practice this is mainly what happens because of scalping.
Interestingly, they noted that Kid Rock - who I would never have picked out of a lineup for intelligence - was actually taking some steps towards defeating scalpers while maintaining low ticket prices by offering certain tickets only to members of his fan club through a lottery. So some musicians at least are taking steps to deter the scalpers... although not the obviously economically rational one that you pointed out above.
The jews were disarmed before they were rounded up during WWII. How did not having a way to protect themselves work out for them?
Are you seriously suggesting that the German Jews of the 1930s, if they had not had gun ownership restrictions, would have been able to successfully resist the Gestapo, SD, SS and Wehrmacht? Or that the above organizations would have said to themselves, "Whoa. Our political ideology is based on blaming 'international Jewry' for the economic woes of the Aryan German volk. Since the early '20s we've been very clear in saying we'd like to see them out of Germany entirely... one way or another. But some of them have rifles or handguns, and AMG (Ach Mein Gott!) concealed carry permits! Let's back off and not implement the Final Solution."
There are plenty of valid reasons for responsible people to own guns. To claim that one of them is because it will prevent tyranny by one's own government in the modern era is totally fucking batshit insane. Find a real justification.
Apple CEO Tim Cook: Announces things before they are ready.
Slashdot reader Futurepower(R): doesn't actually read articles or even article summaries enough to understand that Tim Cook and/or Apple didn't announce anything here. It was speculation by some douchebag "analyst."
There are plenty of good reasons to criticize Apple. Making shit up is not one of them. Please don't give fuel to flamewars by just posting anti-Apple shit without actually even reading either the article or the goddamn summary.
Hitler embraced the Catholic church and they embraced him back. Does "Gott Mitt Un" ring a bell?
I am taking no side on the current "religious assholes kill lots of people" vs. "atheist assholes kill lots of people" war. I just noticed the above statement, which I see a lot, and wanted to provide some historical context to it.
I have seen it frequently mentioned on the Internet that Hitler was Catholic and/or had a close relationship to the church. While Hitler may have been born to a Catholic family, he was never visibly religious throughout his life one way or another. Also, despite his Wagner fetish, he was not a devotee of the old Germanic paganism that mystic fringe elements of the SS seemed intent on reintroducing to German society. He never disavowed religion publicly, but it never played any role in his life either, at least according to modern Hitler scholarship.
Hitler's relationship to the Catholic church oscillated between uneasy truce and outright hostility throughout the time the Third Reich was in power. Germany was majority Protestant in the north, and majority Catholic in the south, and the Catholic church (which even had its own political party, the Center Party) was a useful ally at times. It disagreed with Hitler on many issues (primarily social), but Hitler showed no compunction about shutting down Protestant churches that preached against the excesses of its administration, and the Catholic hierarchy in Germany was perfectly willing to make a deal with the devil to avoid being shut down or expelled. There is also strong evidence (though not 100%) that the Pope (who had previously been Papal Legate in Germany) and his representatives made a deal with Hitler to turn a blind eye to Jews trying to flee the country in exchange for a continued presence in the country.
However, Hitler and the Catholic authorities in the Third Reich frequently clashed as well. Many Catholic priests spoke out against the human rights abuses of Hitler, and it was only through continued wrangling and negotiation with Hitler that priests weren't bundled off by the Gestapo en masse. Many politically active priests were nonetheless. And at times Hitler talked about putting the whole church on his "enemies" list and shutting it down for stirring up anti-government feeling (which wasn't hard to come by from 1942 onwards).
Long story short: Hitler wasn't a Catholic, and they weren't really allies. But the Catholic church did make deals with Hitler to preserve their power and legitimacy which are shameful in retrospect. If you're interested in more details, read the first volume of Ian Kershaw's excellent Hitler or Richard Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich.
Let's see if we can find common ground in the following statements:
Anyone who believes in violence as a solution to anything - other than in self defense or to protect imminent violence against another - is an asshole.
The Christian Bible (mostly Old Testament) and the Quran both contain plenty of God/Allah endorsements of aggressive, unprovoked violence as a Good Thing. Plenty of Asshole Fuel.
In some parts of the planet, violence is societally treated as an acceptable solution to religious disagreements. Most of these places but not all happen to be poor, lacking in a tradition of rule of law and/or democracy and/or aggrieved at having been kicked out of what they consider to be their rightful territory. More of these places happen to be where a lot of Muslims live (Syria, the Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya, etc.) vs. places where Christians live (Armenia, Ireland) or Jews live (Israel).
There are crazy-ass fundamentalist Evangelical Protestant Christians who shoot abortion doctors, crazy-ass IRA Irish Catholics who blow up Irish Protestants, and crazy-ass Orange Irish Protestants who shoot up bars full of Irish Catholics. Some Christians be all crazy and shit. There are also quantitatively and comparatively a fuck-ton more of Muslims willing to blow up Jews, Muslims willing to blow up Christians, Muslims willing to blow up Infidel historical artifacts, Shia Muslims willing to blow up Sunni Muslims, Sunni Muslims willing to blow up Shia Muslims... you get the idea. Seemingly more Muslims be all crazy and shit.
Islam is incredibly decentralized (other than Sunni/Shia) compared to Christianity. Most Christians belong to some denominational church that has central representation and are unused to the idea of religious people belonging to tiny, hyper-local churches whose beliefs can be almost any crazy-ass thing (well, unless you're an Evangelical in the American South). They can't understand why there isn't a "Muslim Pope" or the equivalent telling radical Muslims to SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STOP KILLING PEOPLE.
In conclusion: There are an overwhelming majority of Muslims who believe in peaceful coexistence and don't care about the bullshit parts of the Quran any more than most non-fundamentalist Christians mind the bullshit in Leviticus. But more Muslims than Christians live in shitty parts of the world where being a violent asshole is sometimes okay. Muslims have more assholes in total, although not necessarily per capita. And unfortunately, there are no massive moderate voice(s) of Islam to make the PR case to Western/Christian audiences that most Muslims are peaceful.
If you are afraid of all Muslims, it is pretty much the same as being an old white lady in the Bronx who is afraid of all black people because you think they are "more likely to commit a crime in your neighborhood." You may not be technically incorrect but you are still wrong about the vast majority of black people you see.
TL/DR: don't blame "Muslims" as a whole for the Asshole Muslim population.
For them, having a variable cost they literally have no control over
That is literally the dumbest thing I have read today. Yes, your mobile phone usage is a random number selected from a hat each month by your wireless company and arbitrarily inserted into your bill for kicks, with no involvement from you.
think DDoS... I'm just waiting for the first (desktop and/or server) malware that sends a steady stream of packets to random AT&T and Verizon mobile IPs
I'm not sure who your phone company is, but most wireless networks I know of assign dynamic non-routable IP addresses behind carrier grade NAT to their customers' mobile devices. So, you know, good luck with your DDoS there.
Think class-action, because you KNOW neither providers will block that traffic when they could bill for it instead.
Yes, wireless companies are just dying to have people flood their networks with junk packets so they have an excuse to overbill people. They certainly don't do anything already to prevent just that kind of thing. You uncovered the conspiracy! You should probably just go out and spend the money right now that you are planning to win from your class action lawsuit. I hear tinfoil hats are on sale, but you may not wish to prop up the widely known corrupt practices of Big Tinfoil.
I had that idea years ago. They could mount one in a chopper and once they get a ping, crank down the range to quickly narrow the search.
That's almost entirely unnecessary (and this article is almost total crap).
If your cellphone is turned on (and not out of battery), and within range of a cell tower, your provider will know about it. Your phone "checks in" every so often to make sure calls to it are being routed to the correct tower. Police can lawfully, with a warrant, subpoena this information from your provider, no Stingray required. If for some reason your phone was on but outside the range of any cell towers, your idea might make some sense. But in that case it wouldn't need to be a Stingray per se; a portable cell tower (like providers deploy for disasters/emergencies) would do the trick just the same.
Oh, and while I'm at it, college students have no way to access the information of cell phones pinging providers' cell towers. The closest you could reasonably get is if they have each others' iPhone "Find My Friends" or Android equivalent, which would actually pull a full GPS location off the phone. But that is available to every jackass in the world you choose to share your location with, no engineering prowess or ingenuity involved. And it has nothing to do with "tower pings."
TL/DR; Stingrays not necessary. College students have no legal access to the cellphone tower "ping" information and shouldn't. Slashdot editors should consider actually, you know, editing story submissions into being cogent rather than clickbait.
All of the medicine prior to the XX century, whether advanced or not, had one thing in common and it was pay-as-you-go-basis.
You know what else medicine had in common prior to the 20th century? People died early and often. As late as the 19th century in the US, surgery frequently involved a saw and they didn't even know to wash their hands before performing it. They had no concept of the role of sterilization or even cleaning wounds in preventing infection. No x-rays, no anesthesia (other than a slug of whiskey), no medications - no wonder it was cheap. The rural county doctor could make a 25 cent house call on you because he didn't do anything f---ing useful, and hoped you got better anyway. Or in earlier centuries he'd use some leeches on you before he left. Hospitals as such were places for people to be brought to die, rather than to be cured. So, yeah, it was cheap, and you got what you paid for. Also, you know what didn't exist before the 20th century? Malpractice lawsuits.
I think the modern healthcare industry is a clusterf--k and severely in need of reform, but to compare it to previous centuries is absurd. Comparing costs of today's healthcare, for all its deficiencies, is like comparing the cost of an airliner to an oxcart and saying "in the good old days, it cost a ha'penny to buy a vehicle to get around."
Fine, but the fact that your government spied on you illegally (which honestly should have shocked no one who has been paying attention since J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI) doesn't justify unrelated and uninformed privacy invasion theories. And while I don't think I want to waste time reading TFA, if the summary is accurate, I am disappointed in The Atlantic, an otherwise reputable source of journalism.
For example, while I think Google is filled with smug, hypocritical bastards, I have never ever heard a serious accusation that they are selling search results to spammers. Or e-mail marketers of any stripe, actually. If the author genuinely believes that he started getting spam about art purchases because he searched for a gallery's address in Google, that is a HUGE accusation against Google - that they are selling spammers e-mail addresses of people who search for stuff. Fucking HUGE. There's some proof that this is why he's getting spam, right? He's absolutely sure he didn't, for example, sign in at the gallery and leave his e-mail, which was viewed and copied down by others? Or something else? Anything?
You're wise to watch your privacy, if that's something you care a lot about. But be very VERY careful when you start attributing where and how your privacy is being violated unless you can actually prove what is going on and not just making guesses. You can be right about the effects and still wear a monster tinfoil hat about the causes, which still discredits your reasoning.
I'm not sure which is worse. You only have 1 example (NK) to show, but the US has toppled more than one leader and supported more than one brutal regime.
So what? The Russians have toppled more than one leader and supported more than one brutal regime as well. So have the Brits, the French, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Italians, the Japanese, the Venezuelans, the Pakistanis, and the... well, I pretty much dare you to find a country that had any significant degree of wealth or power and didn't exercise it in promoting or dethroning dubiously moral leaders in other countries. Oh, shut up Switzerland, nobody cares about you.
It's a sort of "risk/reward" equation. How does one balance years of tyranny under a brutal regime against the bad actors?
If you're positing that every ten-cent, tin-pot dictator in the world deserves to have nuclear weapons so that they can avoid being bossed around or dethroned by another country's influence, you can certainly make that argument. But it's an absolutely terrible argument in favor of nuclear proliferation, since it will result in nuclear wars. Unquestionably. Do you think that South Sudan would still exist if Sudan had nukes? That if Iran or Iraq had nukes in the 1980s that large parts of both their territories wouldn't today be large radioactive parking lots? Visualize what a dickhead Robert Mugabe is and honestly tell me that the world would be a better place if he was a nuclear-armed dickhead just so he could refuse international pressure to GTFO.
You can make cogent arguments that some currently non-nuclear powers (or non-declared nuclear powers) could be responsible with nukes. But treating nuclear proliferation as some kind of positive just because it might keep the big powers out of your backyard - no matter how batshit insane you are or your likelihood to sell those nukes to terrorists because you want another gold-plated Gulfstream V - is not a sane or serious argument.
The idea that in every field, we must have 50/50 is simply stupid.
I completely agree with you on this. As a worker in the technology field, I believe this is an area that naturally suits a meritocracy (confession: this is also why I am not a big union supporter specifically in tech). With that being said, I think Slashdotters should consider that there are some potential upsides to "getting women into tech/coding" efforts:
1.) I believe that people have natural affinities to certain fields of endeavor. It's possible (probable?) that more women than men don't find tech attractive. However, it is undeniably true that there may be some females who would otherwise like tech but are discouraged by a culture that feels like it is discriminating against them. To throw out a counter-example: I see a disproportionate(?) number of Slashdot posters who express no interest in sports. (I am a huge nerd and huge NFL fan, BTW.) What percentage of those Slashdotters might otherwise have found that they really like (football, baseball, hockey, whatever) but were turned off by a middle/high school culture where the football players were dicks and picked on nerds? Had they had a different environment in which to acclimate themselves to the topic, would they have found something that they really enjoyed and are missing out on because of how they were introduced to it? I was introduced to sushi in the mid-90s by a group of rich douchebag semi-friends (I used to spend on food in a whole day what they spent on a single sashimi order) who insisted I throw a glob of wasabi on top of everything, and I hated it. It took me more than a decade to figure out it was something I really liked just because of the social context in which I first experienced it, and when I tried it "on my own terms" I found out I loved it.
2.) Racists are generally people who have never spent serious personal time with a large group (not just a few) of people they discriminate against. Most of their opinions are formed by inherited bias or media. Similarly, MOST (not all) misogynists are generally men who have had very limited SERIOUS interpersonal experience with women outside their family. (I want to note for the record that my 17-year-old, turned-down-by-every-girl-I-asked-out self would certainly have qualified as a misogynist; just like at that age I thought "fags" were perverts because I didn't actually "know" any, even though I knew several who were my friends but I didn't know they were gay). Just like I think the "cure" for racism is to actually get to know a LOT of people of other races (not just a few and in limited contexts), I think the "cure" for misogyny is to get to really know a LOT of women, as friends, bosses, subordinates, co-workers, whatever. It may not relieve your frustration with dating, but it will certainly change your opinion of "what women want/are." And having more women VOLUNTARILY in tech cannot possibly help but make that situation better.
TL/DR: it makes no sense to force women into tech or require a certain percentage of workers be women (or other minorities). But efforts that encourage females (but don't mandate them) to enter tech should be encouraged by every male tech worker.
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Keep pretending you own your device.
There are plenty of good arguments you can make against Apple's "walled garden" approach. I simply don't believe that "you don't own it" is one of them.
"Ownership" of a thing (like a phone) means chattel rights to the property. It does NOT mean "I can do anything I want to it."
I own my car, but I am not allowed by the manufacturer or US law to disable the air bags or roll back the odometer. I own my house and surrounding property, but am not allowed to use my land to grow opium poppies in it and harvest them. (I'm in Washington, so I could grow pot in it, but that's a different issue...) I own a semi-automatic pistol, but am not allowed by the manufacturer or law to convert it to fully automatic. I currently own a number of bottles of nice wine and aged scotch, but I am not allowed by law to charge people money to come to my house and drink them. None of these things means that I don't "own" these objects.
Furthermore, when it comes to most iOS or major-vendor Android devices, you CAN root them. It may be complicated and it will certainly void your warranty and deny you the right to OEM/carrier customer support, but otherwise knock yourself out. Just like if you try hard enough you will find ways to disable your airbags, file your pistol's firing pin, or get opium poppy seeds.
A walled garden is a walled garden. You buys your ticket, you takes the ride. That's what you signed up for when you bought it... or didn't want that, so you didn't buy it. But either way, it doesn't impact "ownership" in a legal sense at all.
So, explain why license plates are required ... The only arguments I can think of are stolen cars or chases.
Fair enough question. License plates serve several purposes:
You may or may not agree with the validity of all these uses, but none of these things can effectively be done at the range required to recognize a unique VIN.
I don't think I can think of a single UX improvements from updates after Windows 95
Really? How about:
Look, I agree with you that the advances in desktop OS UIs have been incremental rather than revolutionary since Windows 95, there has been a LOT of good work done there. Try downgrading to Gnome 1.0 and tell me if you see anything missing...
We already have national identification cards - they are called passports.
Except, that, you know, passports are optional. O-P-T-I-O-N-A-L. If you never want to leave the US, you don't have to get one. I know plenty of people who never have. And in what way are passports even a bad idea? All countries have an interest in knowing who is coming into their own country, and if they have permission to be there (or should be denied such). You strike me as the sort of person who probably doesn't want Syrian immigrants coming into the US - without passports, how would you know that, and if the immigrant in question is a risk to US security? Other countries have the same rights regarding US citizens traveling to their countries.
I'm actually surprised that you didn't cite what is actually far closer to a "national ID" - your Social Security card. But as long as you don't plan on participating in the US economy in such a way that you involves taxable transactions, you technically don't need one of those either. Get born, grow up and live on a farm where you are self-sufficient and don't make monetary transactions which are subject to Federal taxation, and you can skip that too. Good luck with that, but there are plenty of US citizens in Alaska, Idaho and elsewhere (not to mention millions of illegal immigrants) who do just fine without SSNs.
What this brings us closer to are implantable transponder chips inserted into new born babies if you opt into the keep living plan.
Oh, FFS. That's like saying that because the vast majority of US residents have cellphones, that brings us closer to all having SIM cards implanted at birth. Your tinfoil hat is probably uncomfortable; you may wish to take it off from time to time for the benefit of your hair follicles. Unless you plan to blame your hair loss on "chemtrails."
Why can I not travel anonymously, exactly? How did we allow the Statists to play us so?
Welcome to Nazi Germany.
Oh fucking PLEASE. Godwin-ing this does nothing to improve the quality of discourse.
Look, I am no fan of the TSA and the Security Theater bullshit apparatus they have set up. But it's not unreasonable to understand that your ability to travel anonymously is correlated to the vehicle you are traveling on and its ability to be hijacked and used as a weapon.
You want to walk or bicycle, coast to coast, anonymously? Fine. Go right ahead.
You want to drive a car? I think most of us can agree that you can do enough damage to lives and property with two+ tons of vehicle that the government should be able to 1.) minimally verify that you know how to drive one; 2.) know who you are in case you break the rules and need to be fined or punished; and 3.) have that driver's license revoked if you show you can't operate that vehicle responsibly. But if you want to drive coast to coast anonymously, you can do that. Stay within the speed limit and don't have any malfunctioning vehicle parts, and you have given no one Probable Cause to see you and your license. Avoid those particular toll roads where your license plate is photographed for billing purposes. (You may run into DUI checkpoints, which I think are of dubious constitutionality, but those are comparatively rare.) You can easily go anywhere in the US without anyone knowing who you are, where you're going or why.
You want to travel by train or aircraft? Okay, nobody has hijacked a train in the US (AFAIK) in many decades, but at least for airplanes I think there's a generally understood common good in preventing those people who may pose a risk to a flying WMD from getting on board the aircraft. Is that really hard to understand? It's unlikely but not totally beyond the pale either that a train hijacking could kill everyone on board the train, let alone any bystanders. (Positive Train Control, which could avoid this, has yet to be implemented on Amtrak, sadly.)
Long story short, the US Security Theater apparatus is bloated, inefficient, ineffective and overly intrusive. But to suggest that either 1.) it is impossible to travel across the US anonymously, or that 2.) the government doesn't have a reasonable right to know who is traveling on certain conveyances, is doctrinaire and unrealistic.
blame sub prime housing loans, enacted under president Clinton for the majority of what happened there
No. Blame everybody who was involved. Big awful financial crises don't usually happen because of a few bad actors, they happen because enough different people participated them in different ways to make them Big and Awful.
Blame the Clinton administration and the then-Republican Congress for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act that did the equivalent of letting casinos play against their own guests, using house money.
Blame the Fed under the Bush administration for keeping US interest rates very low to make buying houses very cheap and attractive, which resulted in 1.) boosting the economy by creating lots of construction jobs (good); 2.) appreciating housing prices, which suddenly made lots of US homeowners very wealthy on paper and spurred consumer spending (good short term, bad long term); and 3.) driving foreign sovereign wealth funds and other investors to look away from the usual store of "stable value" (then-low-paying US T-Bills) and into the arms of more risky investments like, oh, amalgamated blocks of consumer housing mortgages (Collateralized Debt Obligations, or CDOs). (very bad)
Blame the Wall Street investment houses for pressuring retail lending institutions (small mortgage banks) to lower their lending standards ("sub-prime" mortgages) in order to increase the pool of available mortgages to pack into CDOs.
Blame the mortgage brokers and the people who worked for them (including, indirectly, the real estate agents) for making it very easy for idiots to buy real estate they couldn't afford because - hey, it always goes up! So it will be fine because you can sell it for a profit! And honestly, if someone offered to sell you, say, a rare comic book that you couldn't really afford, but you had every reasonable indication that you would be able to "flip" that comic book in 12-24 months and double your money, isn't there a good chance you would do it?
Blame the people who saw Dutch Tulips, Beanie Babies, Foil-Bagged Spider Man #1 issues or whatever else in the housing market and bought houses they shouldn't have. Houses too big, second houses, investment properties, whatever... they took a big gamble and didn't realize that the same game of economic "musical chairs" has been going on in different environments for at least 400 years, and it always ends the same way. This is the least politically convenient group to blame, but by far the most numerically significant, and they share equal blame.
So long story short - if you want to find the "villains" of the Great Recession, forget the Illuminati and realize that the blame properly spreads very far and very wide.
We should also only be eating what can be raised locally.
I would love to be there when you tell the 8 million residents of Manhattan that all they should be eating is junk bonds.
Do you also get auto-reverted when you discuss the correction on the article's talk page?
Can't speak to the original commenter's experience. But I did take the time to go to the talk pages sometimes, and my experience was that if the change (or especially deletion of a page for "non notability") was made by an Editor, the response was approximately "This was changed due to 'WP:Antediluvian Reactionary Recalibration' and you should have voted on that topic six years ago, so too bad, it stands." If I made the exertion to actually dig up that policy and make a counter-argument, the result was essentially "I am an EDITOR. Run, coward! [read all in the voice of Sinistar]. All will kneel before me."
I used to make dozens of minor edits (usually typographical corrections) to Wikipedia articles a year, as well a contributing generously. Since a few experiences where major changes were made or whole articles were deleted with nothing representing a fair discourse that didn't amount to a policy citation or editorial bullying, I have done neither. Wikipedia will of course go on just fine without me. But someday the Awesome Powers That Be will find that the "crowdsourcing" that once made Wikipedia great has been reduced to an oligarchy.
I have only followed the cultural goings-on there at a distance, but it seems like the reaction of US Army generals in Vietnam - any criticism of an individual's performance is a criticism of The System, and The System must be protected at all costs, so the Establishment must stand behind every member of the Establishment's reactions to preserve their collective credibility. And as that war demonstrated, any system which does not have a systemic ability to internally evaluate and critique its own strategic errors and fallibility is doomed to failure.
Like I said, Wikipedia loses very little from my withdrawal and non-participation. But how many of "me" are there out there, and when does it reach some form of tipping point?
Sorry, can you remind me where I proposed "BOMB THE EVER LIVING SHIT OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NOW AND ETERNITY" anywhere?
All I did was suggest that "getting the fuck out of the Middle East" - per your previous post - was not a great idea because we have legitimate interests in how things turn out there. There is a lot of space between the two responses.
While we're at it...
The US has not been dependent on ME oil for quite some time. Domestic production and Canada provide most of the US' needs.
You are confusing natural gas production (which provides a significant amount of North American electrical generation and home utility) with light sweet crude oil production, which is what goes into the cars people drive to work, the tractor trailers that haul their consumer goods, and the airplanes they fly in. Middle Eastern oil prices have a HUGE impact on the American economy.
Oh, and:
If ISIS or any muslim group ever poses a legitimate threat to the Western way of life
I think there are many family members of the victims of the Bali nightclub bombings, 9/11 attacks, Charlie Hebdo slaughter, London Underground bombing, Paris 2015 attacks, and others who think that being dead is a "legitimate threat."
Get the fuck out of the middle east.
This viewpoint is remarkably similar to the (very popular in some areas, especially Midwestern) Republican Isolationist view prior to WWII. It's not our fight. It's not worth spending the blood of American soldiers. Let's just stay the f--k away, right? And, even if history disagrees with them, they had a very valid viewpoint at the time.
Years ago, before I travelled more internationally, I would absolutely have agreed with you. We have no dog in that fight, right? Our meddling there has produced no objective benefits to the US. Fuck 'em, let the crazies fight over whether the Temple Mount, which was the site of the Jewish Temple of Solomon, before it became a Roman Temple of Venus, before it became a Christian Church, before it became the Muslim Dome of the Rock... etc.
But eventually I realized that this view - while prima facie correct - is naive. What if ISIS takes over the whole Middle East and decides that oil should be sold at $250/barrel for any non-Sharia buyer? What happens when the US economy spins into massive inflation because the cost of trucking every box of Mac 'n Cheese to a grocery store goes up 200%, or an airline ticket across the country costs $1100, or it now costs every driver 3x as much to drive to work and their disposable income goes down commensurately? And what if their success encourages ISIS to export terror to Europe and Russia, just because they can?
What if Iran takes over the Middle East and decides to reinstate a nuclear program that sets up a missile program capable of reaching Europe? What if the Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria is left unchecked and conquers ISIS then rolls into the hollow governmental shell known as Iraq to take over? Are you fine standing by if the Saudis take over the region and install a stable political regime founded on gross human rights violations (from women being unable to drive, to gays being stoned to death)? What about the legitimate political interests of all the voting American citizens of Jewish, Arab-American or Persian-American descent who feel they have a vested interest there?
The point being that - UNFORTUNATELY from my personal perspective - what happens in the Middle East affects the US a lot. Perhaps actively (oil prices), or passively (will you sleep well when women are stoned to death for not wearing hijabs, if you could have done something about it?). Nobody else but us can have a decisive influence, so if we want the world to look the way we want it to, then we can't be isolationist.
The sad truth of the matter is that because the US has the world's largest economy and the only military force on the planet with a presence that can truly be projected globally (e.g. we have more active aircraft carriers than the rest of the planet combined), we will always get involved because we have direct/indirect economic, political or (vaguely) humanitarian interests. Depending on your viewpoint, we may be the good guys or the bad guys. But unless we decide to radically shrink our military, we will always be expected to play a role, one way or another. The best we as Americans can hope for is the collective wisdom to vote in people who use that influence for the better.
So I suppose you hear no difference between radio trash full-range speakers and Klipsch reference series or palladium series speakers?
Maybe, maybe not, honestly. In my (limited) experience with audio gear, the situation is best analogized to my (extensive) experience with wine. Wait, that sounded bad. Anyway...
If you don't know anything about wine, you will still probably be able to tell the difference between a $3 bottle of Night Train and a decent $10 bottle of wine. (And yes, there is a LOT of decent $10 wine; $3 is more or less guaranteed to be made from the grapes that the $10 wineries classified as "dog food" quality.) Frankly, that's where most people are in terms of audiophile gear.
But can you tell the difference between a $10 bottle and a $25 bottle? Of course, even a connoisseur may find a $10 wine preferable to a $25 wine, but you take my point. The short answer is if your wine tasting palate is not very sophisticated, you can't. If it is (either because your palate is naturally sensitive or you have tasted a lot of wines) then yes.
Okay, now - can you taste the difference between a $25 bottle of wine and a $50 bottle? How about $50 vs. $100? Vs. $300? Except for those who taste high end wine frequently or have a naturally crazy sensitive palate, the answer is no. If you are one of the few who can genuinely taste the difference between a nice quality $25 French Bordeaux and a $150 bottle of Joseph Phelps, the difference is important and worth the money. If you can't, then you have just wasted $125. And there is a rarefied crowd that can tell the difference between a $350 2002 Grand Cru Bordeaux and a 2009 $1500 Grand Cru Bordeaux. But there is unfortunately a larger population of people who actually can't but delude themselves into thinking they can and (from an outside perspective) waste thousands and thousands of dollars in doing so.
The point being that 1.) I have never heard "Klipsch reference series" or "Palladium series" speakers, so I have no idea if I can hear the difference or not; and 2.) most people don't know if they can hear the difference or not, and probably can't anyway. You may say you feel sorry for me if I can't tell the two apart, but if I really can't, then there's nothing wrong with that. In return, I promise not to tell you that I feel sorry for you for being unable to distinguish a white Burgundy from a California Chardonnay.
It's not necessarily even a SNAFU. The non-paranoid view would be: Yahoo! was a mess and most in the industry viewed it as impossible to turn around. Ambitious Google executive - who wasn't going to be getting the top spot at her current employer anytime soon - decided to take the challenge. Three years later it turns out everyone was right, it was an impossible task.
The idea of a reverse auction is probably the best suggestion on how to cure the problem to date. Start out with prices 100 times as much as normal, and after a time have the ticket prices drop. The site could even allow people to place a bid and if the tickets are sold out for that area or tow, it would automatically purchase them for the buyer once the price dropped to what was asked.
On one hand, as a business person, I agree with you 100%. This is absolutely the most rational way to squeeze scalpers out of the market and maximize profit for the musician/event/whatever performer. If these people were economically rational, this unquestionably should be how all tickets are sold.
On the other hand, I think we are generally pretty aware that rock musicians et. al. are remarkably stupid when it comes to money. I had always wondered why these people were clearly cheating themselves out of profit by pricing tickets the way they do, and my question was answered by an episode of NPR's Planet Money podcast. It turns out that the answer is altruism - of a sort - on the part of the "artists."
Most rock musicians apparently hate the idea that only rich fans will be able to go to their concerts - which would likely be the result in a reverse-auction scenario. Instead, they prefer to keep ticket prices low in a (possibly naive?) attempt to ensure that their concert tickets are accessible to all their fans. They are willing to sacrifice the revenue they, by any economic theory, should be collecting by offering tickets in a market-based environment, in order to gamble that some average fans will be able to beat the scalpers and buy tickets at a low face value. Musicians also seem to be particularly worried about the perception that their events are only available to the rich (because of high face value prices), although in practice this is mainly what happens because of scalping.
Interestingly, they noted that Kid Rock - who I would never have picked out of a lineup for intelligence - was actually taking some steps towards defeating scalpers while maintaining low ticket prices by offering certain tickets only to members of his fan club through a lottery. So some musicians at least are taking steps to deter the scalpers... although not the obviously economically rational one that you pointed out above.
The jews were disarmed before they were rounded up during WWII. How did not having a way to protect themselves work out for them?
Are you seriously suggesting that the German Jews of the 1930s, if they had not had gun ownership restrictions, would have been able to successfully resist the Gestapo, SD, SS and Wehrmacht? Or that the above organizations would have said to themselves, "Whoa. Our political ideology is based on blaming 'international Jewry' for the economic woes of the Aryan German volk. Since the early '20s we've been very clear in saying we'd like to see them out of Germany entirely... one way or another. But some of them have rifles or handguns, and AMG (Ach Mein Gott!) concealed carry permits! Let's back off and not implement the Final Solution."
And, by the way, the majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust were from Poland, Soviet territories or otherwise outside Germany. How did not being subject to Germany's confiscation of Jews' guns work out for them? How did the Warsaw uprising work out for anyone?
There are plenty of valid reasons for responsible people to own guns. To claim that one of them is because it will prevent tyranny by one's own government in the modern era is totally fucking batshit insane. Find a real justification.
Apple CEO Tim Cook: Announces things before they are ready.
Slashdot reader Futurepower(R): doesn't actually read articles or even article summaries enough to understand that Tim Cook and/or Apple didn't announce anything here. It was speculation by some douchebag "analyst."
There are plenty of good reasons to criticize Apple. Making shit up is not one of them. Please don't give fuel to flamewars by just posting anti-Apple shit without actually even reading either the article or the goddamn summary.
I though the internet was supposed to route around damage. Something is too centralized.
At an IP routing level, sure. But that doesn't do any good if there's only one physical cable or set of cables linking you to the rest of the world.
Hitler embraced the Catholic church and they embraced him back. Does "Gott Mitt Un" ring a bell?
I am taking no side on the current "religious assholes kill lots of people" vs. "atheist assholes kill lots of people" war. I just noticed the above statement, which I see a lot, and wanted to provide some historical context to it.
I have seen it frequently mentioned on the Internet that Hitler was Catholic and/or had a close relationship to the church. While Hitler may have been born to a Catholic family, he was never visibly religious throughout his life one way or another. Also, despite his Wagner fetish, he was not a devotee of the old Germanic paganism that mystic fringe elements of the SS seemed intent on reintroducing to German society. He never disavowed religion publicly, but it never played any role in his life either, at least according to modern Hitler scholarship.
Hitler's relationship to the Catholic church oscillated between uneasy truce and outright hostility throughout the time the Third Reich was in power. Germany was majority Protestant in the north, and majority Catholic in the south, and the Catholic church (which even had its own political party, the Center Party) was a useful ally at times. It disagreed with Hitler on many issues (primarily social), but Hitler showed no compunction about shutting down Protestant churches that preached against the excesses of its administration, and the Catholic hierarchy in Germany was perfectly willing to make a deal with the devil to avoid being shut down or expelled. There is also strong evidence (though not 100%) that the Pope (who had previously been Papal Legate in Germany) and his representatives made a deal with Hitler to turn a blind eye to Jews trying to flee the country in exchange for a continued presence in the country.
However, Hitler and the Catholic authorities in the Third Reich frequently clashed as well. Many Catholic priests spoke out against the human rights abuses of Hitler, and it was only through continued wrangling and negotiation with Hitler that priests weren't bundled off by the Gestapo en masse. Many politically active priests were nonetheless. And at times Hitler talked about putting the whole church on his "enemies" list and shutting it down for stirring up anti-government feeling (which wasn't hard to come by from 1942 onwards).
Long story short: Hitler wasn't a Catholic, and they weren't really allies. But the Catholic church did make deals with Hitler to preserve their power and legitimacy which are shameful in retrospect. If you're interested in more details, read the first volume of Ian Kershaw's excellent Hitler or Richard Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich.
Who is "all of them"?
Let's see if we can find common ground in the following statements:
In conclusion: There are an overwhelming majority of Muslims who believe in peaceful coexistence and don't care about the bullshit parts of the Quran any more than most non-fundamentalist Christians mind the bullshit in Leviticus. But more Muslims than Christians live in shitty parts of the world where being a violent asshole is sometimes okay. Muslims have more assholes in total, although not necessarily per capita. And unfortunately, there are no massive moderate voice(s) of Islam to make the PR case to Western/Christian audiences that most Muslims are peaceful.
If you are afraid of all Muslims, it is pretty much the same as being an old white lady in the Bronx who is afraid of all black people because you think they are "more likely to commit a crime in your neighborhood." You may not be technically incorrect but you are still wrong about the vast majority of black people you see.
TL/DR: don't blame "Muslims" as a whole for the Asshole Muslim population.
For them, having a variable cost they literally have no control over
That is literally the dumbest thing I have read today. Yes, your mobile phone usage is a random number selected from a hat each month by your wireless company and arbitrarily inserted into your bill for kicks, with no involvement from you.
think DDoS ... I'm just waiting for the first (desktop and/or server) malware that sends a steady stream of packets to random AT&T and Verizon mobile IPs
I'm not sure who your phone company is, but most wireless networks I know of assign dynamic non-routable IP addresses behind carrier grade NAT to their customers' mobile devices. So, you know, good luck with your DDoS there.
Think class-action, because you KNOW neither providers will block that traffic when they could bill for it instead.
Yes, wireless companies are just dying to have people flood their networks with junk packets so they have an excuse to overbill people. They certainly don't do anything already to prevent just that kind of thing. You uncovered the conspiracy! You should probably just go out and spend the money right now that you are planning to win from your class action lawsuit. I hear tinfoil hats are on sale, but you may not wish to prop up the widely known corrupt practices of Big Tinfoil.
I had that idea years ago. They could mount one in a chopper and once they get a ping, crank down the range to quickly narrow the search.
That's almost entirely unnecessary (and this article is almost total crap).
If your cellphone is turned on (and not out of battery), and within range of a cell tower, your provider will know about it. Your phone "checks in" every so often to make sure calls to it are being routed to the correct tower. Police can lawfully, with a warrant, subpoena this information from your provider, no Stingray required. If for some reason your phone was on but outside the range of any cell towers, your idea might make some sense. But in that case it wouldn't need to be a Stingray per se; a portable cell tower (like providers deploy for disasters/emergencies) would do the trick just the same.
Oh, and while I'm at it, college students have no way to access the information of cell phones pinging providers' cell towers. The closest you could reasonably get is if they have each others' iPhone "Find My Friends" or Android equivalent, which would actually pull a full GPS location off the phone. But that is available to every jackass in the world you choose to share your location with, no engineering prowess or ingenuity involved. And it has nothing to do with "tower pings."
TL/DR; Stingrays not necessary. College students have no legal access to the cellphone tower "ping" information and shouldn't. Slashdot editors should consider actually, you know, editing story submissions into being cogent rather than clickbait.
All of the medicine prior to the XX century, whether advanced or not, had one thing in common and it was pay-as-you-go-basis.
You know what else medicine had in common prior to the 20th century? People died early and often. As late as the 19th century in the US, surgery frequently involved a saw and they didn't even know to wash their hands before performing it. They had no concept of the role of sterilization or even cleaning wounds in preventing infection. No x-rays, no anesthesia (other than a slug of whiskey), no medications - no wonder it was cheap. The rural county doctor could make a 25 cent house call on you because he didn't do anything f---ing useful, and hoped you got better anyway. Or in earlier centuries he'd use some leeches on you before he left. Hospitals as such were places for people to be brought to die, rather than to be cured. So, yeah, it was cheap, and you got what you paid for. Also, you know what didn't exist before the 20th century? Malpractice lawsuits.
I think the modern healthcare industry is a clusterf--k and severely in need of reform, but to compare it to previous centuries is absurd. Comparing costs of today's healthcare, for all its deficiencies, is like comparing the cost of an airliner to an oxcart and saying "in the good old days, it cost a ha'penny to buy a vehicle to get around."
Fine, but the fact that your government spied on you illegally (which honestly should have shocked no one who has been paying attention since J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI) doesn't justify unrelated and uninformed privacy invasion theories. And while I don't think I want to waste time reading TFA, if the summary is accurate, I am disappointed in The Atlantic, an otherwise reputable source of journalism.
For example, while I think Google is filled with smug, hypocritical bastards, I have never ever heard a serious accusation that they are selling search results to spammers. Or e-mail marketers of any stripe, actually. If the author genuinely believes that he started getting spam about art purchases because he searched for a gallery's address in Google, that is a HUGE accusation against Google - that they are selling spammers e-mail addresses of people who search for stuff. Fucking HUGE. There's some proof that this is why he's getting spam, right? He's absolutely sure he didn't, for example, sign in at the gallery and leave his e-mail, which was viewed and copied down by others? Or something else? Anything?
You're wise to watch your privacy, if that's something you care a lot about. But be very VERY careful when you start attributing where and how your privacy is being violated unless you can actually prove what is going on and not just making guesses. You can be right about the effects and still wear a monster tinfoil hat about the causes, which still discredits your reasoning.
Too much sugar for your pup can lead to dental issues, obesity, and even diabetes.
So? Too much sugar for your ANY ANIMAL INCLUDING HUMANS can lead to dental issues, obesity and even diabetes.
I'm not sure which is worse. You only have 1 example (NK) to show, but the US has toppled more than one leader and supported more than one brutal regime.
So what? The Russians have toppled more than one leader and supported more than one brutal regime as well. So have the Brits, the French, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Italians, the Japanese, the Venezuelans, the Pakistanis, and the... well, I pretty much dare you to find a country that had any significant degree of wealth or power and didn't exercise it in promoting or dethroning dubiously moral leaders in other countries. Oh, shut up Switzerland, nobody cares about you.
It's a sort of "risk/reward" equation. How does one balance years of tyranny under a brutal regime against the bad actors?
If you're positing that every ten-cent, tin-pot dictator in the world deserves to have nuclear weapons so that they can avoid being bossed around or dethroned by another country's influence, you can certainly make that argument. But it's an absolutely terrible argument in favor of nuclear proliferation, since it will result in nuclear wars. Unquestionably. Do you think that South Sudan would still exist if Sudan had nukes? That if Iran or Iraq had nukes in the 1980s that large parts of both their territories wouldn't today be large radioactive parking lots? Visualize what a dickhead Robert Mugabe is and honestly tell me that the world would be a better place if he was a nuclear-armed dickhead just so he could refuse international pressure to GTFO.
You can make cogent arguments that some currently non-nuclear powers (or non-declared nuclear powers) could be responsible with nukes. But treating nuclear proliferation as some kind of positive just because it might keep the big powers out of your backyard - no matter how batshit insane you are or your likelihood to sell those nukes to terrorists because you want another gold-plated Gulfstream V - is not a sane or serious argument.
The idea that in every field, we must have 50/50 is simply stupid.
I completely agree with you on this. As a worker in the technology field, I believe this is an area that naturally suits a meritocracy (confession: this is also why I am not a big union supporter specifically in tech). With that being said, I think Slashdotters should consider that there are some potential upsides to "getting women into tech/coding" efforts:
1.) I believe that people have natural affinities to certain fields of endeavor. It's possible (probable?) that more women than men don't find tech attractive. However, it is undeniably true that there may be some females who would otherwise like tech but are discouraged by a culture that feels like it is discriminating against them. To throw out a counter-example: I see a disproportionate(?) number of Slashdot posters who express no interest in sports. (I am a huge nerd and huge NFL fan, BTW.) What percentage of those Slashdotters might otherwise have found that they really like (football, baseball, hockey, whatever) but were turned off by a middle/high school culture where the football players were dicks and picked on nerds? Had they had a different environment in which to acclimate themselves to the topic, would they have found something that they really enjoyed and are missing out on because of how they were introduced to it? I was introduced to sushi in the mid-90s by a group of rich douchebag semi-friends (I used to spend on food in a whole day what they spent on a single sashimi order) who insisted I throw a glob of wasabi on top of everything, and I hated it. It took me more than a decade to figure out it was something I really liked just because of the social context in which I first experienced it, and when I tried it "on my own terms" I found out I loved it.
2.) Racists are generally people who have never spent serious personal time with a large group (not just a few) of people they discriminate against. Most of their opinions are formed by inherited bias or media. Similarly, MOST (not all) misogynists are generally men who have had very limited SERIOUS interpersonal experience with women outside their family. (I want to note for the record that my 17-year-old, turned-down-by-every-girl-I-asked-out self would certainly have qualified as a misogynist; just like at that age I thought "fags" were perverts because I didn't actually "know" any, even though I knew several who were my friends but I didn't know they were gay). Just like I think the "cure" for racism is to actually get to know a LOT of people of other races (not just a few and in limited contexts), I think the "cure" for misogyny is to get to really know a LOT of women, as friends, bosses, subordinates, co-workers, whatever. It may not relieve your frustration with dating, but it will certainly change your opinion of "what women want/are." And having more women VOLUNTARILY in tech cannot possibly help but make that situation better.
TL/DR: it makes no sense to force women into tech or require a certain percentage of workers be women (or other minorities). But efforts that encourage females (but don't mandate them) to enter tech should be encouraged by every male tech worker.