Does Direct TV own some piece of the wireless spectrum that AT&T could make use of, or vice versa?
Not really. DirecTV uses the same Ku band (12-18 GHz) and Ka band (26-40 GHz) spectrum as other satellite TV broadcasters and Internet services do. At such a high frequency, it's great for delivering lots of data/HD video but has such weak propagation that you need line of sight to the satellite + a big honkin' dish to use it. So it's more or less useless for mobile phones or anything that's not fixed in location. Unless you'd like your next phone to have a.75m dish hanging off it and stand still, pointed up at the sky while you're using it.
Watching a show like that (unless it's just to be horrified) absolutely says something about your intellectual capacity and your leanings.
Your leanings? Absolutely. Your intellectual capacity? Not in the least.
While I personally think homophobia is abhorrent, I acknowledge that there are lots of people who are objectively intelligent (in the sense of having high IQ scores) who nonetheless disagree about the politics. I may think these people lack critical thinking skills, but more likely their cultural background has not prepared them to think critically about the issue. I also, for example, believe that there are extremely intelligent people on both sides who radically disagree about one simple fucking sentence - the Second Amendment to the US constitution. I think it's pretty clear (why else specifically mention a well regulated militia?), but lots of other smart people don't, so I don't say they're stupid because they disagree.
Consider, for example, that - had you asked them in their historical period - almost certainly Gandhi, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Luther King Jr., Isaac Newton or John F. Kennedy would not have supported gay rights. It's not because they weren't smart, it's because they came from a background where they just weren't prepared to consider it in the same set of assumptions and contexts as many of us do today. For example, I can call Israeli settlers on the West Bank of the Jordan stupid because I believe they are "on the wrong side of history" and are harming their nation's cause in the eyes of the world; but I acknowledge that some of them may be very intelligent and - had I been through the same things as them or brought up in the same environment - I might feel the same way.
So while it's easy to say anyone who watches a show whose protagonists disagree with your views must be stupid, I counter that it's just that type of generalization which is stupid.
If they have interests such as following the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and you have interests which include baroque music and classical literature, then it's safe to say that you're more intelligent than them.
Ummm... no. There is no fundamental difference in the level of intellectual engagement required between enjoying "Duck Dynasty" and "Star Wars," and many Slashdotters (including myself) are raving fanboys when it comes to the latter. Your choice of lowbrow entertainment may be because you are dumb, or it may be because you are smart but looking for an escape that has oooh shiny and doesn't require deep thought. To draw inferences on intellectual capacity based on what TV shows someone watches is just snobbish.
Similarly, "highbrow" tastes don't indicate intellect, they indicate exposure to a different set of influences and pastimes. You probably think being an opera fan indicates higher intelligence than being a death metal fan. But 150 years ago every village idiot in Germany could hum along to Wagner, and Italian beggars could likely recite the works of Verdi. It didn't make you smart back then, and it doesn't make you smart now, it just means you've been exposed to opera while someone else was being exposed to Guns N' Roses or Lady Gaga. There is a strong argument to be made that the popular classical music or classic literature that has survived to this day is of uniformly high quality, and there is probably a good argument as well that appreciating these works properly requires an incisive intellect. But for every classic literature fan I have met with a trenchant insight into the contradictions of Proust, there is another who is just up his/her own ass and wants to make sure everyone knows they bothered to make it through "Dubliners."
So long story short - beware making intellectual judgements based on people's pastimes. Sixty seconds of hearing them talk will tell you far more about their intellect than whether, when you met them, they were holding a copy of Kierkegaard or "Fifty Shades of Grey."
It's not about the cost. It's about the convenience.
So after you conveniently download it from TPB, how do you go about paying the people whose music you downloaded? I hate waiting in Best Buy checkout lines, it's very inconvenient. But I don't think it justifies just walking out of the store with my CD.
Significant change does in fact happen, all the time. I'm pretty sure that if you were a woman, queer or black in the United States you would find that your playing field (while still not level) is far better than it was one or two generations ago. While there is still much to be done, at least in the US care for the environment is a world away from where it was even as late as the Reagan years. Poor Americans who didn't previously have access to health care as little as two years ago now have it. Across the planet, life expectancies in the poorer parts of the world have rocketed up in the past 50 years. And, for those of us who remember the Cold War, we all no longer live in the fearful knowledge that our deaths were never more than a 35 minute ballistic trajectory away with potentially no warning.
There are plenty of things out there that are worse, too. But that is change as well.
It's easy to see that the world isn't in the state you would like and conclude that nothing ever changes, that involvement in causes or politics is futile, and that everyone should throw their hands up in frustration and walk away from caring. But things really do change - even if it is slow - and to dismiss the ability of people to change things for the better... or for the worse if they fail to oppose it... is lazy at best and unworthy of our better natures.
Why don't we cut a couple hundred billion out of the multi-trillion dollar "war on everything" Militaryâ"industrial complex that's obviously going so well?
I gather that you don't like or see much benefit from the US military. I saw a commenter a few slots above you suggesting that the thing to cut is Obamacare, which provides health care to people who are probably not the commenter. Some poster who is 65 will inevitably suggest that the rotten Education department must go, while someone else who is 18 will invariably suggest it should be Medicare. I have no doubt someone who lives in Arizona will suggest that Federal subsidies for homeowners living in hurricane zones be cut, and someone else from Florida will suggest that it's that Gestapo border protection troop that needs to be slashed.
It's funny how everyone seems to know with great certainty exactly the things that are totally worthless and should be cut from the Federal budget with no ill effects - which, purely coincidentally happen to be the things that they disagree with or they don't benefit from directly.
Google should just buy Sprint and T-Mobile, merge their networks to optimize their coverage footprints and backhaul and then sell this plan to anyone and any device.
1.) There's not a lot of "optimizing" to be done since they overlap in most areas already.
2.) Sprint is a mixture of CDMA and LTE. T-Mobile is a mixture of GSM (HSPA) and a smattering of LTE. That's plenty of different technologies to support which means you might not even be able to ditch your overlapping tower leases, which is the main cost savings when consolidating carriers.
3.) Why do you think Sprint and T-Mobile are significantly cheaper than AT&T and Verizon? Because they spend much less on their networks, especially once you get outside the big cities. If Google were to actually improve their networks to the point of being competitive with the "big two," they couldn't afford to offer plans at these prices.
4.) The last two times somebody tried to buy T-Mobile, (AT&T in 2011 and Sprint just last year - remember that?) the FCC smacked them down on anti-trust concerns over having only three nationwide carriers. Not likely to change, especially given that Google has its own anti-trust issues from time to time...
Nothing a nice, expensive official repair shop won't fix.
Well, somebody needs to play Devil's Advocate here, so I will. What if onboard vehicle computers truthfully are (or soon will become) so complicated - and so integral to the functioning of the vehicle - that an untrained hobbyist screwing with it could cause injury or death? What if some homebrew-loving gearhead hacker decides to roll his own firmware for the car because he thinks he can squeeze some extra MPG out of it, and instead it zeroes out the odometer due to a glitch? Or disables the seatbelt warnings? Or randomly cuts of f the engine in the middle of the highway?
Yes, it can be argued that negligent behavior causing death or injury already has penalties, but those are after the fact. We all understand how easy it is to screw up software. Do we want to be reactive or penalize it in the first place? Might it not be reasonable to say in effect that cars with owner-modified computers are fine but are no longer street legal?
P.S. No, I don't work for a car company, I'm not a shill or a troll. In fact I generally find cars quite boring. But I find Slashdot even more boring when nobody attempts to find merit in a contrary opinion...
By what stretch of the imagination do you think he is, or should be, obligated to keep those secrets?
Absolutely none. He has no legal requirement not to publish the classified information of another country, as you pointed out. But that's not what he is in legal hot water for.
When someone can offer some proof otherwise - "zOMG Sweden must have made all this up this because the CIA has nude pictures of their bikini team and I heard this is 100% true from a dude on reddit" does not count - I will gladly listen.
If Norway does the right thing and opens up the FM spectrum for people and personal their short range transmitters, maybe we'll find something more useful to do with the FM bands.
I think you're missing the point of why this is being done in the first place. Hint: you're right that this is being done to "find something more useful to do with the FM bands" but not in the way you imagine.
Like in the US and many other countries in recent years, spectrum is being cleared out so it can be leased to cellular providers. This is in theory because the demand for wireless voice and data continues to rise rapidly; the demand for FM radio not so much; therefore the spectrum is better used by someone who is delivering what people are asking for more of rather than less.
This is licensed spectrum though, so there will be no room for individuals to screw around with broadcasting on those frequencies. As Charles Dickens - or maybe it was Spock - once said, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Given how many people listen to licensed FM radio today and the pain this shift may cause them, would the "needs of the many" actually be served by turning this spectrum over to everyone and their dog to play around with backyard broadcasting? And, honestly, is there something individuals want to do that they can't already accomplish with the ham and unlicensed Wi-Fi bands that are already available?
the iPhone only sucked marginally less (and they had apps, the iPhone didn't)
I don't think you actually remember what Windows Mobile 6 and BlackBerry 6 were like. Yes, the iPhone was the first mobile device that had a browser that wasn't painful to use, as you point out, but the user experience was RADICALLY different in many ways. Yes in 2007 when the iPhone launched, it wasn't unique in having a touch screen, but BlackBerries not only didn't have touch screens at all, they were controlled either with touchballs (that sounds weird) or scroll wheels(!). Most Windows Mobile phones were near-impossible to use without a stylus. And it wasn't just the touch interface... remember "pinch to zoom" before the iPhone? No? That's because it wasn't there. How about visual voicemail? Screens that rotated aspect quickly and easily based on orientation? A smartphone that worked with an online music store that didn't blow goats? You get the idea.
The only thing Apple did aside the incremental technical improvement, was strike a deal for unlimited internet with a major carrier (which didn't last, btw), which got attention.
Not so much, amigo. In 2007, at least in the US, unlimited smartphone data plans were very common. This was for the simple reason that it was f*$%ing painful to use more than a couple hundred MB of data on a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone with a 2G connection - 3G was very new in the US then, and the original iPhone only had a 2G connection. When people started to actually USE mobile data because the iPhone's browsing experience made it not painful - and it kicked the ass of AT&T's 2G network as a result - that was when capped plans became the norm.
Additionally, the Slashdot story is disingenuous (shocking!) when it brings up Microsoft's opposition to Washington proposition I-1098 a couple years back. Yes, Ballmer was a big contributor against the initiative but it was widely unpopular across the entire state, failing at the polls by a 2-to-1 margin.
Quick recap on what that was for non-Washington residents: WA is one of seven US states with no personal income tax. Sales taxes vary by locality, but in general they are higher than average in WA in order to make up for the lack of a sales tax (in Seattle, for example, sales tax is nearly 10%).
I-1098 proposed that individuals making more than $200K/year or families making $400K/year pay a state income tax, with a higher rate applying to those above $500K/$1M. Given WA's economically skewed demographics, the tax would hit many in the greater Seattle area (around the top 3% including Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, Google, Nintendo etc. employees), while outside Seattle it would be more like the top.01%.
So long story short - it may very well be true that Microsoft is dodging state taxes that it should be paying. If so, it should definitely be held to account. However, the fact that Ballmer or Microsoft supported a widely popular anti-state income tax initiative is not related to whether the company is shirking its tax duties.
Communism has the workers owning the means of production, while the only "attempts" have involved the government owning the means of production. Those are only compatible if the workers own the government, and I don't think that's ever been the case of any government in the history of human civilization. *Certainly* it wasn't the case in any of the so-called "communist" countries.
The irony here is that capitalism actually provides the most direct way for workers to own the means of production - through holding equity in the company. The ownership of any individual is miniscule (other than founders, executives, etc.) but there are numerous examples of "employee-owned" companies in which the Marxist ideal has been more fully realized than in any Communist nation to date.
There is also an inherent contradiction in every attempt to date to implement a Communist government. As you point out, if the government owns the means of production, the workers don't own it in turn unless they have control of the government, which can only be accomplished through Democracy. Every Communist government established during the 20th century was a single-party or totalitarian state, but arguably that's unavoidable because you will never find a Communist government (not talking about Socialist, but Communist) that is freely elected by a majority of its citizens because many aspects of Communism involve taking away property, land, etc. from the people who currently own it in order to "share" it among the population. Communism has historically always come to power through revolution or outside imposition, and human nature makes it highly unlikely for those who have won power in that way to ever risk losing it through enabling Democracy.
So I think history tends to prove for us that the ideal of a Communist state on a large scale achieving its original goal of worker ownership of the means of production to be inherently flawed. Then again, it can also be argued that the Marxist idea of Communism was a response to an Industrial Revolution status quo which has changed dramatically in the past 150 years and needs to be largely rethought to have modern relevance anyway...
The oscillations from a quake are a threat to big buildings, and bridges, but the resonance doesn't affect small structures as much.
My understanding - and I don't remember where I read this, I wish I did - is that it isn't actually that much of a threat to big buildings either. What I read was that skyscrapers and other tall buildings are just too big to oscillate in harmony with the quake waves in a way that compounds the stresses, and that essentially all of them have steel frames anyway that allow the buildings to "bend" rather than "break." And single-story buildings don't have much of a problem as long as they aren't built from unreinforced masonry or something that won't "give" either. Instead the real "danger zone" is for two- and three-story buildings because their height is just right to sync with the timing of the waves and amplify their effect, regardless of their construction material.
Can anyone who has a better understanding confirm or clarify the above statements?
Actually, I don't think Alaska is at all obvious, with its relative "frontier" attitude.
Alaska actually has the most restrictive alcohol purchase and consumption laws in the US outside certain areas of the Deep South. There are 96 communities in Alaska that prohibit sale of alcohol, and 34 of those even ban its possession. This is because in much of Alaska, there is f--k all to do except drink, and alcohol abuse is endemic enough already, even without the legal restrictions. The state even has a law, which is actually enforced that makes it a crime to be drunk in a bar. (Yeah, I know.) So while you might think that Alaska would be a "gubmint keep your hands off my guns and booze" state, it turns out to just be a "hands off my guns" state.
A council is a group of persons who meet to decide things. A counsel is an attorney or other advisor. I'm pretty sure this story refers to the latter. This is not exactly an obscure or little-used difference of homonyms - please correct.
For many (most) traditional four-year college students, the primary value of the experience is something that a MOOC or Khan or whatever online can never ever replicate.
College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day. It is a concentrated social mixing bowl where members of the opposite (or same as it may be) sexes come together with no parental supervision and have to figure out how to deal with each other - but also surrounded by a throng of peers to help them figure it out or support them as necessary. It is a halfway transition period between full-time schooling in which you are expected to learn and recite facts obediently and a world where you are expected to challenge authority figures and be fully responsible for all your own decisions.
It is, in short, the real world but with "training wheels" on.
I can't speak for anyone else, but four years of training wheels after high school just barely got me to the point of being a functional adult who didn't melt down when exposed to reality. (I also really, really, enjoyed it too.) Away from home, full-time, co-educational college is an experience at that period of life that I think is irreplaceable and can't ever be matched by a different model.
What was Churchill trying to communicate with Dresden?
I understand this comment is actually a rhetorical question to comment on the morality of the Allies in the Dresden firebombing. (BTW, Dresden was never intended to be "Dresden." It was an area bombing with incendiaries and was thus expected to cause indiscriminate damage to civilians alongside the military targets; but nobody involved had any clue it would turn out to be the indescribable charnel house it became.)
But in case anyone is interested in the actual question for purposes of historical context: there was a putative purpose for the Dresden bombing, and two actual audiences that were supposed to receive different messages.
The purported message of Dresden to the world was "Dresden has some military targets of benefit to the Wehrmacht, and we will show you that the Allies can always find and destroy them. This is part of an ongoing program where we will continue to find and destroy everything in Germany that has any military value. Please understand how fucked you are and save lives by surrendering."
The actual intended message of Dresden to Germany's leadership was "Yeah, you have figured out that our bombers can't attack from a safe altitude and hit the broad side of a barn. But that doesn't mean we will just give up. Instead, we can and will fuck your cities up to the maximum imaginable degree by bombing far and wide, even though we know lots of civilians will die. We claim that's against our principles, but you know what, Hitler? Given what you have done so far, we are not going to lose any sleep over any collateral damage in order to get you, so please leave some Earl Grey in Berchtesgaden for us."
The third message was from "Bomber Harris" and the RAF to SHAEF and Churchill - "Look, we are doing stuff to Germany that is visible and makes Allied civilians feel like Germans are feeling the pain of retribution. Oh, and by the way, look what a great job we're doing so after the war we should be a Very Important Branch of the Military." This, by the way, was pretty much the exact same message that Curtis LeMay's firebombings of Japan were intended to deliver to Roosevelt and then Truman.
He missed the point, but he did not mean well. That's why we can't have nice things.
I think the response unintentionally betrays sexism but at its root merits a direct response. At least to me, the whole "booth babes" thing is pretty simple.
Human beings like the "OOOOH SHINY." It distracts and engages us, even if it is not necessarily going to lead us to buy something as a result, but it does cause us to want to stop and engage our attention. The same is true whether it's a person, a free popcorn machine, a magic show or a huge display TV.
If you are a heterosexual male, an attractive woman is OOOOH SHINY. This is regardless of the state of her (un)dress, technical acumen, or anything else. It could be a stripper draped around a pole or Marissa Mayer in a smart business suit. You will have an involuntary response and may be "turned on." But the real question of how people react to this is one of intent.
Nobody seriously objects to the presence of attractive humans in almost any context. The objection comes from those who are made uncomfortable with the presence of people who are there (and dressed so as to make this obvious) solely for the purpose of eliciting that OOOOH SHINY MUST STARE AT BREASTS reaction.
Some men will ask, so "what is wrong with that?" which, unlike what many progressive/feminist-minded men think, is not an inherently offensive question to ask. To me, the first answer of course is that it is unprofessional unless you are at a swimwear or porn conference. But the issue most people will react to - knee-jerk, positively or negatively - is one of sexism.
Is this something to be offended about or not? For me, the simple test for me is for you - assuming you are a heterosexual male - to imagine walking around a tradeshow where most of the exhibits had buff, oiled-up dudes in speedos standing in front of the booths in Speedos. Would this make you in any way uncomfortable, want to avert your eyes or not want to stand next to them in that booth? If yes, then you need to put yourself in women's shoes and understand the objection to booth babes. If no, then, okay, you can make a straight-faced argument that there's nothing to be offended about. But that still will not prevent others from having a different reaction.
They could always try a telephone or bullhorn and ask some questions including permission to enter.
So let me get this straight. I have been kidnapped in my home by a lunatic who threatens to kill me if I try to call the police or escape. I manage to call 911 for help, and your suggestion is that the police call me back or ask permission to enter so that the kidnapper can make good on their threat to kill me.
Or... none of that happened and it's just a swatter dickbag!
How exactly do you propose that police differentiate between the two? This is why "swatting" is such a douchetastic offense that should be rewarded with hard time in pound-me-in-the-ass prison: like people wearing fake cop uniforms to prey on victims, it corrodes the (already strained) bond of trust between the people that need the police to protect them, the people who have to respond, and the people on the other end of that police response.
Honestly, I think the original Mac OS did it better with four character file type and creators; meta-properties that the file can have.
This was a much superior solution in many ways. (If you're interested in a detailed exploration of why, read any of John Siracusa's in-depth OS X reviews on Ars Technica for his fierce and well developed defenses of the old method.)
Unfortunately, the downfall of this method came in sharing files across platforms. For much of the 1990s, Mac users would send files via FTP or e-mail which - lacking file extensions - were difficult for PC users to deal with when they received them. For example, my Word doc titled "Briefing" worked fine on my Mac but when I e-mailed it to a colleague using Windows, he would get a file that his PC didn't know what to do with. He would have to ask me what type of file it was (.doc?.pdf?.ppt?), and manually append the correct extension, yadda yadda.
Macs, as the minority in a nearly all-PC world (especially the business world) needed to create as few waves as possible and "get along" with the Windows standard. So, when designing OS X, Apple decided to deprecate file/creator types and go along with the inferior system that the rest of the desktop computing world was using.
Good points. But I don't think they are "dumb" per se, they are just True Believers as you point out. Their early military successes against weak and disorganized opponents left them in the position of actually having to rule the areas they conquered, becoming the de facto government. And as nearly every rebel group that has achieved success has discovered, it's far easier to throw bombs (literally and figuratively) against the powers that be than to take up that mantle and actually be responsible for keeping the lights on and maintaining order.
Historically, the successful revolutionaries have been those who moderated their stances enough to comport with practical realities. Take for example the Soviets in the 1919-1922 period, who hired former Tsarist military specialists to run large parts of the Red Army because they knew they couldn't do it themselves. And while Lenin and Zinoviev loved to lob crazy policies out of the Kremlin at the countryside, they learned to temper some of the most radical ones to maintain the support of the peasant population which didn't really give a rip about the "workers' paradise."
Look at ISIS and the Taliban in Afghanistan in contrast - with their "we will stick to our crazy-ass policies no matter what" attitude - and you see the seeds planted for failure. ISIS is a destructive movement but is ultimately doomed to fail as a functioning state because they are True Believers. What we should all really worry about is if ISIS gets a charismatic leader who is willing to bend a bit to keep people happy - many in Iraq and Syria (except for the Kurds) might actually find that preferable to the dysfunctional governments they already have in their respective countries.
I genuinely appreciate your earnestness in wanting to reform the system, and I think more people should have strong feelings and ideas about how to "fix" things as you do. Unfortunately, a lot of things that seem like they have easy answers don't, and that's why they're hard. The devil is in the details, and the law of unintended consequences makes itself felt very keenly here. To wit:
a judge serves a randomly assigned trial with one requirement: it must be somewhere FAR from where they live
For better or worse, people elect judges because they want their views to reflect that of the community where they live. Maybe a liberal area wants judges that are more lenient in sentencing, or vice versa. Do you really want your Bay Area case where some wing nut has sued Google for not basing the Android clock on days since Biblical Creation to be decided by an imported judge from Alabama who may actually think they're right?
Third, plea bargaining has turned out to be an extremely bad thing.
Plea bargaining has its abuses, but more than anything else it is a very practical thing. A full jury trial for any serious (felony) offense is extremely expensive and time consuming, and plea bargaining is a way to reduce the burden on courts and juries by exacting some form of a minimum toll on the guilty without going for the maximum.
Congresscritter dimwit writes up a law that infringes on your right to keep and carry, he's shown the door.
What? Who decides this? Right now, through separation of powers, the courts rule on the constitutionality of laws. Under your idea - does John Boehner get to automatically impeach President Obama because he thinks executive orders on immigration are "unconstitutional?" Who gets to boot Republicans automatically for bringing DOMA to the House floor? What if I just think you're a dick and your law is unconstitutional and you should be gone?
Still in this context, the 2nd is perfectly clear if you're not being outright disingenuous or ignorant
Sorry, friend. I agree with your statement, but probably in exactly the opposite meaning you intend. Why even mention "a well regulated militia" if that is not the justification for the 2nd Amendment? And if you're not in a state-sponsored militia, why do you have this right again? This is just an example of where well intentioned people can wildly disagree on the meaning of legal/constitutional language and there is no shortcut to divining meaning.
Fourth, piling on charges post-arrest should be abolished.
So just to make this clear - I arrest you for drunk driving. But I search your trunk later and find you have a kidnapped person in there, and I can't charge you for it? Or, more likely, I arrest you for stealing a car. While the prosecutors are interviewing witnesses for the case, they talk to a chop shop operator who testifies you stole and sold 25 other cars to him. Why on earth should you not be charged with that?
I suggest lobbyists go as well, in favor of a system where a congressperson has a system that constituents can access where they can either open an issue or join other voices on an issue
You're right, nobody likes lobbyists. But they do actually have a purpose. Let's say that a congressperson from Maine is going to have to vote on a bill to grant or revoke a complicated set of tribal fishing rights on Federal land in California. Is this congress critter going to have constituents who are informed about this issue, or will they have time to learn about the issue on their own? No. Instead, lobbyists - on both sides of the issue - have their opportunity to brief lawmakers and try to sway their vote. Certainly not a perfect system, but you really do want to have professional advocates on both sides of an issue. Imagine if the EFF couldn't talk to congresspeople, and they had to rely on what some dumb-as
Slashdot Mirror
Does Direct TV own some piece of the wireless spectrum that AT&T could make use of, or vice versa?
Not really. DirecTV uses the same Ku band (12-18 GHz) and Ka band (26-40 GHz) spectrum as other satellite TV broadcasters and Internet services do. At such a high frequency, it's great for delivering lots of data/HD video but has such weak propagation that you need line of sight to the satellite + a big honkin' dish to use it. So it's more or less useless for mobile phones or anything that's not fixed in location. Unless you'd like your next phone to have a .75m dish hanging off it and stand still, pointed up at the sky while you're using it.
Watching a show like that (unless it's just to be horrified) absolutely says something about your intellectual capacity and your leanings.
Your leanings? Absolutely. Your intellectual capacity? Not in the least.
While I personally think homophobia is abhorrent, I acknowledge that there are lots of people who are objectively intelligent (in the sense of having high IQ scores) who nonetheless disagree about the politics. I may think these people lack critical thinking skills, but more likely their cultural background has not prepared them to think critically about the issue. I also, for example, believe that there are extremely intelligent people on both sides who radically disagree about one simple fucking sentence - the Second Amendment to the US constitution. I think it's pretty clear (why else specifically mention a well regulated militia?), but lots of other smart people don't, so I don't say they're stupid because they disagree.
Consider, for example, that - had you asked them in their historical period - almost certainly Gandhi, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Luther King Jr., Isaac Newton or John F. Kennedy would not have supported gay rights. It's not because they weren't smart, it's because they came from a background where they just weren't prepared to consider it in the same set of assumptions and contexts as many of us do today. For example, I can call Israeli settlers on the West Bank of the Jordan stupid because I believe they are "on the wrong side of history" and are harming their nation's cause in the eyes of the world; but I acknowledge that some of them may be very intelligent and - had I been through the same things as them or brought up in the same environment - I might feel the same way.
So while it's easy to say anyone who watches a show whose protagonists disagree with your views must be stupid, I counter that it's just that type of generalization which is stupid.
If they have interests such as following the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and you have interests which include baroque music and classical literature, then it's safe to say that you're more intelligent than them.
Ummm... no. There is no fundamental difference in the level of intellectual engagement required between enjoying "Duck Dynasty" and "Star Wars," and many Slashdotters (including myself) are raving fanboys when it comes to the latter. Your choice of lowbrow entertainment may be because you are dumb, or it may be because you are smart but looking for an escape that has oooh shiny and doesn't require deep thought. To draw inferences on intellectual capacity based on what TV shows someone watches is just snobbish.
Similarly, "highbrow" tastes don't indicate intellect, they indicate exposure to a different set of influences and pastimes. You probably think being an opera fan indicates higher intelligence than being a death metal fan. But 150 years ago every village idiot in Germany could hum along to Wagner, and Italian beggars could likely recite the works of Verdi. It didn't make you smart back then, and it doesn't make you smart now, it just means you've been exposed to opera while someone else was being exposed to Guns N' Roses or Lady Gaga. There is a strong argument to be made that the popular classical music or classic literature that has survived to this day is of uniformly high quality, and there is probably a good argument as well that appreciating these works properly requires an incisive intellect. But for every classic literature fan I have met with a trenchant insight into the contradictions of Proust, there is another who is just up his/her own ass and wants to make sure everyone knows they bothered to make it through "Dubliners."
So long story short - beware making intellectual judgements based on people's pastimes. Sixty seconds of hearing them talk will tell you far more about their intellect than whether, when you met them, they were holding a copy of Kierkegaard or "Fifty Shades of Grey."
It's not about the cost. It's about the convenience.
So after you conveniently download it from TPB, how do you go about paying the people whose music you downloaded? I hate waiting in Best Buy checkout lines, it's very inconvenient. But I don't think it justifies just walking out of the store with my CD.
"Change is coming" - sure it is
Significant change does in fact happen, all the time. I'm pretty sure that if you were a woman, queer or black in the United States you would find that your playing field (while still not level) is far better than it was one or two generations ago. While there is still much to be done, at least in the US care for the environment is a world away from where it was even as late as the Reagan years. Poor Americans who didn't previously have access to health care as little as two years ago now have it. Across the planet, life expectancies in the poorer parts of the world have rocketed up in the past 50 years. And, for those of us who remember the Cold War, we all no longer live in the fearful knowledge that our deaths were never more than a 35 minute ballistic trajectory away with potentially no warning.
There are plenty of things out there that are worse, too. But that is change as well.
It's easy to see that the world isn't in the state you would like and conclude that nothing ever changes, that involvement in causes or politics is futile, and that everyone should throw their hands up in frustration and walk away from caring. But things really do change - even if it is slow - and to dismiss the ability of people to change things for the better ... or for the worse if they fail to oppose it ... is lazy at best and unworthy of our better natures.
Why don't we cut a couple hundred billion out of the multi-trillion dollar "war on everything" Militaryâ"industrial complex that's obviously going so well?
I gather that you don't like or see much benefit from the US military. I saw a commenter a few slots above you suggesting that the thing to cut is Obamacare, which provides health care to people who are probably not the commenter. Some poster who is 65 will inevitably suggest that the rotten Education department must go, while someone else who is 18 will invariably suggest it should be Medicare. I have no doubt someone who lives in Arizona will suggest that Federal subsidies for homeowners living in hurricane zones be cut, and someone else from Florida will suggest that it's that Gestapo border protection troop that needs to be slashed.
It's funny how everyone seems to know with great certainty exactly the things that are totally worthless and should be cut from the Federal budget with no ill effects - which, purely coincidentally happen to be the things that they disagree with or they don't benefit from directly.
Google should just buy Sprint and T-Mobile, merge their networks to optimize their coverage footprints and backhaul and then sell this plan to anyone and any device.
Nothing a nice, expensive official repair shop won't fix.
Well, somebody needs to play Devil's Advocate here, so I will. What if onboard vehicle computers truthfully are (or soon will become) so complicated - and so integral to the functioning of the vehicle - that an untrained hobbyist screwing with it could cause injury or death? What if some homebrew-loving gearhead hacker decides to roll his own firmware for the car because he thinks he can squeeze some extra MPG out of it, and instead it zeroes out the odometer due to a glitch? Or disables the seatbelt warnings? Or randomly cuts of f the engine in the middle of the highway?
Yes, it can be argued that negligent behavior causing death or injury already has penalties, but those are after the fact. We all understand how easy it is to screw up software. Do we want to be reactive or penalize it in the first place? Might it not be reasonable to say in effect that cars with owner-modified computers are fine but are no longer street legal?
P.S. No, I don't work for a car company, I'm not a shill or a troll. In fact I generally find cars quite boring. But I find Slashdot even more boring when nobody attempts to find merit in a contrary opinion...
By what stretch of the imagination do you think he is, or should be, obligated to keep those secrets?
Absolutely none. He has no legal requirement not to publish the classified information of another country, as you pointed out. But that's not what he is in legal hot water for.
When someone can offer some proof otherwise - "zOMG Sweden must have made all this up this because the CIA has nude pictures of their bikini team and I heard this is 100% true from a dude on reddit" does not count - I will gladly listen.
If Norway does the right thing and opens up the FM spectrum for people and personal their short range transmitters, maybe we'll find something more useful to do with the FM bands.
I think you're missing the point of why this is being done in the first place. Hint: you're right that this is being done to "find something more useful to do with the FM bands" but not in the way you imagine.
Like in the US and many other countries in recent years, spectrum is being cleared out so it can be leased to cellular providers. This is in theory because the demand for wireless voice and data continues to rise rapidly; the demand for FM radio not so much; therefore the spectrum is better used by someone who is delivering what people are asking for more of rather than less.
This is licensed spectrum though, so there will be no room for individuals to screw around with broadcasting on those frequencies. As Charles Dickens - or maybe it was Spock - once said, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Given how many people listen to licensed FM radio today and the pain this shift may cause them, would the "needs of the many" actually be served by turning this spectrum over to everyone and their dog to play around with backyard broadcasting? And, honestly, is there something individuals want to do that they can't already accomplish with the ham and unlicensed Wi-Fi bands that are already available?
the iPhone only sucked marginally less (and they had apps, the iPhone didn't)
I don't think you actually remember what Windows Mobile 6 and BlackBerry 6 were like. Yes, the iPhone was the first mobile device that had a browser that wasn't painful to use, as you point out, but the user experience was RADICALLY different in many ways. Yes in 2007 when the iPhone launched, it wasn't unique in having a touch screen, but BlackBerries not only didn't have touch screens at all, they were controlled either with touchballs (that sounds weird) or scroll wheels(!). Most Windows Mobile phones were near-impossible to use without a stylus. And it wasn't just the touch interface... remember "pinch to zoom" before the iPhone? No? That's because it wasn't there. How about visual voicemail? Screens that rotated aspect quickly and easily based on orientation? A smartphone that worked with an online music store that didn't blow goats? You get the idea.
The only thing Apple did aside the incremental technical improvement, was strike a deal for unlimited internet with a major carrier (which didn't last, btw), which got attention.
Not so much, amigo. In 2007, at least in the US, unlimited smartphone data plans were very common. This was for the simple reason that it was f*$%ing painful to use more than a couple hundred MB of data on a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone with a 2G connection - 3G was very new in the US then, and the original iPhone only had a 2G connection. When people started to actually USE mobile data because the iPhone's browsing experience made it not painful - and it kicked the ass of AT&T's 2G network as a result - that was when capped plans became the norm.
I'm happy as the next guy to pillory Halliburton, which deserves little but scorn for its shocking profiteering in US government contracts. But you probably don't want want to cite dated Chavezista leftie Froot-Loops talking about how the rapidly disintegrating former Venezuelan economy is a model for anything except citizen outrage.
Just ask the folks living in the former Socialist Paradise where condoms now cost $755/pack on the black market because the Bolivar is worth less than toilet paper and it turned out that Chavez was mortgaging his country's future to buy temporary popularity with oil dollars.
Additionally, the Slashdot story is disingenuous (shocking!) when it brings up Microsoft's opposition to Washington proposition I-1098 a couple years back. Yes, Ballmer was a big contributor against the initiative but it was widely unpopular across the entire state, failing at the polls by a 2-to-1 margin.
Quick recap on what that was for non-Washington residents: WA is one of seven US states with no personal income tax. Sales taxes vary by locality, but in general they are higher than average in WA in order to make up for the lack of a sales tax (in Seattle, for example, sales tax is nearly 10%).
I-1098 proposed that individuals making more than $200K/year or families making $400K/year pay a state income tax, with a higher rate applying to those above $500K/$1M. Given WA's economically skewed demographics, the tax would hit many in the greater Seattle area (around the top 3% including Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, Google, Nintendo etc. employees), while outside Seattle it would be more like the top .01%.
Interestingly, Bill Gates was a visible I-1098 supporter, while Steve Ballmer was a major opponent. But keep in mind the above: the demographics of Washington State are such that had this been an issue of just Microsoft and other big corps fighting it, or "rich Seattle" against the rest of the state which is not so full of rich techies, it would have won handily. Instead, it lost by a 64-36 ratio because voters across the entire state, including a majority of Democrats, thought it was a backdoor way to introduce a state income tax whose threshold would conveniently be lowered by the state legislature whenever it found itself in a money crunch.
So long story short - it may very well be true that Microsoft is dodging state taxes that it should be paying. If so, it should definitely be held to account. However, the fact that Ballmer or Microsoft supported a widely popular anti-state income tax initiative is not related to whether the company is shirking its tax duties.
Communism has the workers owning the means of production, while the only "attempts" have involved the government owning the means of production. Those are only compatible if the workers own the government, and I don't think that's ever been the case of any government in the history of human civilization. *Certainly* it wasn't the case in any of the so-called "communist" countries.
The irony here is that capitalism actually provides the most direct way for workers to own the means of production - through holding equity in the company. The ownership of any individual is miniscule (other than founders, executives, etc.) but there are numerous examples of "employee-owned" companies in which the Marxist ideal has been more fully realized than in any Communist nation to date.
There is also an inherent contradiction in every attempt to date to implement a Communist government. As you point out, if the government owns the means of production, the workers don't own it in turn unless they have control of the government, which can only be accomplished through Democracy. Every Communist government established during the 20th century was a single-party or totalitarian state, but arguably that's unavoidable because you will never find a Communist government (not talking about Socialist, but Communist) that is freely elected by a majority of its citizens because many aspects of Communism involve taking away property, land, etc. from the people who currently own it in order to "share" it among the population. Communism has historically always come to power through revolution or outside imposition, and human nature makes it highly unlikely for those who have won power in that way to ever risk losing it through enabling Democracy.
So I think history tends to prove for us that the ideal of a Communist state on a large scale achieving its original goal of worker ownership of the means of production to be inherently flawed. Then again, it can also be argued that the Marxist idea of Communism was a response to an Industrial Revolution status quo which has changed dramatically in the past 150 years and needs to be largely rethought to have modern relevance anyway...
The oscillations from a quake are a threat to big buildings, and bridges, but the resonance doesn't affect small structures as much.
My understanding - and I don't remember where I read this, I wish I did - is that it isn't actually that much of a threat to big buildings either. What I read was that skyscrapers and other tall buildings are just too big to oscillate in harmony with the quake waves in a way that compounds the stresses, and that essentially all of them have steel frames anyway that allow the buildings to "bend" rather than "break." And single-story buildings don't have much of a problem as long as they aren't built from unreinforced masonry or something that won't "give" either. Instead the real "danger zone" is for two- and three-story buildings because their height is just right to sync with the timing of the waves and amplify their effect, regardless of their construction material.
Can anyone who has a better understanding confirm or clarify the above statements?
Actually, I don't think Alaska is at all obvious, with its relative "frontier" attitude.
Alaska actually has the most restrictive alcohol purchase and consumption laws in the US outside certain areas of the Deep South. There are 96 communities in Alaska that prohibit sale of alcohol, and 34 of those even ban its possession. This is because in much of Alaska, there is f--k all to do except drink, and alcohol abuse is endemic enough already, even without the legal restrictions. The state even has a law, which is actually enforced that makes it a crime to be drunk in a bar. (Yeah, I know.) So while you might think that Alaska would be a "gubmint keep your hands off my guns and booze" state, it turns out to just be a "hands off my guns" state.
A council is a group of persons who meet to decide things. A counsel is an attorney or other advisor. I'm pretty sure this story refers to the latter. This is not exactly an obscure or little-used difference of homonyms - please correct.
For many (most) traditional four-year college students, the primary value of the experience is something that a MOOC or Khan or whatever online can never ever replicate.
College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day. It is a concentrated social mixing bowl where members of the opposite (or same as it may be) sexes come together with no parental supervision and have to figure out how to deal with each other - but also surrounded by a throng of peers to help them figure it out or support them as necessary. It is a halfway transition period between full-time schooling in which you are expected to learn and recite facts obediently and a world where you are expected to challenge authority figures and be fully responsible for all your own decisions.
It is, in short, the real world but with "training wheels" on.
I can't speak for anyone else, but four years of training wheels after high school just barely got me to the point of being a functional adult who didn't melt down when exposed to reality. (I also really, really, enjoyed it too.) Away from home, full-time, co-educational college is an experience at that period of life that I think is irreplaceable and can't ever be matched by a different model.
What was Churchill trying to communicate with Dresden?
I understand this comment is actually a rhetorical question to comment on the morality of the Allies in the Dresden firebombing. (BTW, Dresden was never intended to be "Dresden." It was an area bombing with incendiaries and was thus expected to cause indiscriminate damage to civilians alongside the military targets; but nobody involved had any clue it would turn out to be the indescribable charnel house it became.)
But in case anyone is interested in the actual question for purposes of historical context: there was a putative purpose for the Dresden bombing, and two actual audiences that were supposed to receive different messages.
He missed the point, but he did not mean well. That's why we can't have nice things.
I think the response unintentionally betrays sexism but at its root merits a direct response. At least to me, the whole "booth babes" thing is pretty simple.
Human beings like the "OOOOH SHINY." It distracts and engages us, even if it is not necessarily going to lead us to buy something as a result, but it does cause us to want to stop and engage our attention. The same is true whether it's a person, a free popcorn machine, a magic show or a huge display TV.
If you are a heterosexual male, an attractive woman is OOOOH SHINY. This is regardless of the state of her (un)dress, technical acumen, or anything else. It could be a stripper draped around a pole or Marissa Mayer in a smart business suit. You will have an involuntary response and may be "turned on." But the real question of how people react to this is one of intent.
Nobody seriously objects to the presence of attractive humans in almost any context. The objection comes from those who are made uncomfortable with the presence of people who are there (and dressed so as to make this obvious) solely for the purpose of eliciting that OOOOH SHINY MUST STARE AT BREASTS reaction.
Some men will ask, so "what is wrong with that?" which, unlike what many progressive/feminist-minded men think, is not an inherently offensive question to ask. To me, the first answer of course is that it is unprofessional unless you are at a swimwear or porn conference. But the issue most people will react to - knee-jerk, positively or negatively - is one of sexism.
Is this something to be offended about or not? For me, the simple test for me is for you - assuming you are a heterosexual male - to imagine walking around a tradeshow where most of the exhibits had buff, oiled-up dudes in speedos standing in front of the booths in Speedos. Would this make you in any way uncomfortable, want to avert your eyes or not want to stand next to them in that booth? If yes, then you need to put yourself in women's shoes and understand the objection to booth babes. If no, then, okay, you can make a straight-faced argument that there's nothing to be offended about. But that still will not prevent others from having a different reaction.
They could always try a telephone or bullhorn and ask some questions including permission to enter.
So let me get this straight. I have been kidnapped in my home by a lunatic who threatens to kill me if I try to call the police or escape. I manage to call 911 for help, and your suggestion is that the police call me back or ask permission to enter so that the kidnapper can make good on their threat to kill me.
Or... none of that happened and it's just a swatter dickbag!
How exactly do you propose that police differentiate between the two? This is why "swatting" is such a douchetastic offense that should be rewarded with hard time in pound-me-in-the-ass prison: like people wearing fake cop uniforms to prey on victims, it corrodes the (already strained) bond of trust between the people that need the police to protect them, the people who have to respond, and the people on the other end of that police response.
I am also fine with natural gas, to be honest. Russia has been a reliable supplier even during the worst cold war days.
You may wish to ask Ukraine about how reliable a supplier of natural gas Russia is.
Honestly, I think the original Mac OS did it better with four character file type and creators; meta-properties that the file can have.
This was a much superior solution in many ways. (If you're interested in a detailed exploration of why, read any of John Siracusa's in-depth OS X reviews on Ars Technica for his fierce and well developed defenses of the old method.)
Unfortunately, the downfall of this method came in sharing files across platforms. For much of the 1990s, Mac users would send files via FTP or e-mail which - lacking file extensions - were difficult for PC users to deal with when they received them. For example, my Word doc titled "Briefing" worked fine on my Mac but when I e-mailed it to a colleague using Windows, he would get a file that his PC didn't know what to do with. He would have to ask me what type of file it was (.doc? .pdf? .ppt?), and manually append the correct extension, yadda yadda.
Macs, as the minority in a nearly all-PC world (especially the business world) needed to create as few waves as possible and "get along" with the Windows standard. So, when designing OS X, Apple decided to deprecate file/creator types and go along with the inferior system that the rest of the desktop computing world was using.
Good points. But I don't think they are "dumb" per se, they are just True Believers as you point out. Their early military successes against weak and disorganized opponents left them in the position of actually having to rule the areas they conquered, becoming the de facto government. And as nearly every rebel group that has achieved success has discovered, it's far easier to throw bombs (literally and figuratively) against the powers that be than to take up that mantle and actually be responsible for keeping the lights on and maintaining order.
Historically, the successful revolutionaries have been those who moderated their stances enough to comport with practical realities. Take for example the Soviets in the 1919-1922 period, who hired former Tsarist military specialists to run large parts of the Red Army because they knew they couldn't do it themselves. And while Lenin and Zinoviev loved to lob crazy policies out of the Kremlin at the countryside, they learned to temper some of the most radical ones to maintain the support of the peasant population which didn't really give a rip about the "workers' paradise."
Look at ISIS and the Taliban in Afghanistan in contrast - with their "we will stick to our crazy-ass policies no matter what" attitude - and you see the seeds planted for failure. ISIS is a destructive movement but is ultimately doomed to fail as a functioning state because they are True Believers. What we should all really worry about is if ISIS gets a charismatic leader who is willing to bend a bit to keep people happy - many in Iraq and Syria (except for the Kurds) might actually find that preferable to the dysfunctional governments they already have in their respective countries.
I genuinely appreciate your earnestness in wanting to reform the system, and I think more people should have strong feelings and ideas about how to "fix" things as you do. Unfortunately, a lot of things that seem like they have easy answers don't, and that's why they're hard. The devil is in the details, and the law of unintended consequences makes itself felt very keenly here. To wit:
a judge serves a randomly assigned trial with one requirement: it must be somewhere FAR from where they live
For better or worse, people elect judges because they want their views to reflect that of the community where they live. Maybe a liberal area wants judges that are more lenient in sentencing, or vice versa. Do you really want your Bay Area case where some wing nut has sued Google for not basing the Android clock on days since Biblical Creation to be decided by an imported judge from Alabama who may actually think they're right?
Third, plea bargaining has turned out to be an extremely bad thing.
Plea bargaining has its abuses, but more than anything else it is a very practical thing. A full jury trial for any serious (felony) offense is extremely expensive and time consuming, and plea bargaining is a way to reduce the burden on courts and juries by exacting some form of a minimum toll on the guilty without going for the maximum.
Congresscritter dimwit writes up a law that infringes on your right to keep and carry, he's shown the door.
What? Who decides this? Right now, through separation of powers, the courts rule on the constitutionality of laws. Under your idea - does John Boehner get to automatically impeach President Obama because he thinks executive orders on immigration are "unconstitutional?" Who gets to boot Republicans automatically for bringing DOMA to the House floor? What if I just think you're a dick and your law is unconstitutional and you should be gone?
Still in this context, the 2nd is perfectly clear if you're not being outright disingenuous or ignorant
Sorry, friend. I agree with your statement, but probably in exactly the opposite meaning you intend. Why even mention "a well regulated militia" if that is not the justification for the 2nd Amendment? And if you're not in a state-sponsored militia, why do you have this right again? This is just an example of where well intentioned people can wildly disagree on the meaning of legal/constitutional language and there is no shortcut to divining meaning.
Fourth, piling on charges post-arrest should be abolished.
So just to make this clear - I arrest you for drunk driving. But I search your trunk later and find you have a kidnapped person in there, and I can't charge you for it? Or, more likely, I arrest you for stealing a car. While the prosecutors are interviewing witnesses for the case, they talk to a chop shop operator who testifies you stole and sold 25 other cars to him. Why on earth should you not be charged with that?
I suggest lobbyists go as well, in favor of a system where a congressperson has a system that constituents can access where they can either open an issue or join other voices on an issue
You're right, nobody likes lobbyists. But they do actually have a purpose. Let's say that a congressperson from Maine is going to have to vote on a bill to grant or revoke a complicated set of tribal fishing rights on Federal land in California. Is this congress critter going to have constituents who are informed about this issue, or will they have time to learn about the issue on their own? No. Instead, lobbyists - on both sides of the issue - have their opportunity to brief lawmakers and try to sway their vote. Certainly not a perfect system, but you really do want to have professional advocates on both sides of an issue. Imagine if the EFF couldn't talk to congresspeople, and they had to rely on what some dumb-as