To my post as a whole, Curunir_wolf took the following quote out of context:
the Chinese have, for literally centuries, been known as the "Jews of Asia"
Then sneered:
Because you're a racist anti-Semite too?
You're an Olympic-quality conclusion-jumper.
You also neatly managed to dodge my point - so, congratulations on achieving the Full Slashdot.
What I stated about the historical characterization of Chinese business practices (which is not exclusive to the West) is fact.
Just because I happen to have read history, does not mean I approve of such characterizations, however commonplace they once were. I have neither sympathy nor patience with bigotry of any stripe.
I'm pretty intolerant of self-righteousness, however...
I've been dealing with Amazon for 8 years. Trust me, they are drones. Spend some time on the seller forums.
A glaring example of this from earlier this year is when a seller called in to get help with a policy issue. The person "at" Amazon wound up using the Amazon forums and unknowingly cited a forum post from the caller themselves as an answer.
If you see anything online about Amazon Customer Service being outsourced, note that isn't limited to buyer interactions. It is the entire marketplace platform. People who can end your business of multiple employees, because they are in fact drones who don't understand left from right.
The people who answer the phone are not managers. Most of the time - and this goes for basically every tech company across the board - they are, indeed, drones, reading from a script, without the authority to wipe their own butts.
TFS included this quote from the team that wrote TFA:
As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which may embolden them to take risks.
Prompting Curunir_wolf to observe:
Not sure why I have to point this out, but the US employees are in the same boat. Plus, Amazon treats them like crap.
So no sympathy for Amazon in this - it's of their own doing. When you know your employer is raking in big bucks and only dropping you crumbs, you tend to want to find ways to cash in yourself. Amazon does it themselves - these guys just want in on the deal.
This has nothing to do with the "fulfillment" staff (i.e. - the warehouse workforce). The individuals who are selling confidential information (and, apparently, unauthorized account restorations) are office workers. They can't be mere drones, either, because access to that data is undoubtedly restricted to the ranks of managers and above. That makes them better-paid than the average Chinese Amazonian. They're simply greedy and unscrupulous - like most Chinese businesspeople.
There is a reason why the Chinese have, for literally centuries, been known as the "Jews of Asia" - and it's that their culture has always treated cheating, lying, and fraud as normal business practice. (And, yes, those same standards have also been attributed to Jews since Rome became the economic center of the Western world - and they continue to apply to Israeli Jews, because it'they're still the norm there, exactly as they are everywhere else along the northern African coast. The business communities of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia all share those same values. It's why the warning "caveat emptor" still applies a couple of thousand years after it was coined.)
But, to your point, I don't think the U.S. managerial staff routinely engages in such practices, if only because there's a lot more security consciousness at Amazon's HQ than there is in China - and because getting caught doing any of those things here is grounds for instant dismissal.
Oh, and here it's the kiss of death for your career in tech to be fired for cause on those grounds, if word about it gets out...
In response to my reply to the parent, Alypius commented:
This is exactly why Trump's election was a surprise. A majority of his voters stayed silent because they didn't want to be harassed or lose their job.
It wasn't a surprise to everyone - not even everyone on the left.
Michael Moore knew it, made a documentary called Trump that predicted it, and spent the final couple of months prior to the election on the talk-show circuit, warning viewers that Trump was probably going to win - to no avail.
In his new account of Trump's campaign and the first 18 months of his administration, Bob Woodward claims that he suspected that Hillary would lose, because of the very large number of Obama voters he talked to who were furious and (more importantly) fearful about the economy and our profoundly disfunctional Congress. He also repeatedly makes the point that, once he agreed to manage the campaign, Steve Bannon steadfastly insisted he was absolutely certain Trump would win, even during the media shitstorm over Pussygate, when every Republican official, and every other member of the campaign's inner circle was urging him to withdraw, and cede the nomination to Pence.
However, I strongly disagree with your contention that crossover voters kept quiet about their intentions out of fear for their jobs.
It is a Federal felony to fire a person for expressing his or her political preference. (That's a Good Thing, and we have the First Amendment to thank for it.) The only exception to that rule is for poll workers, on election day, who express their personal preference to voters at their polling place, where it's legally considered to be election tampering - because it is exactly that. (That's the same reason that even voters themselves are barred from wearing hats, shirts, buttons, or other clothing or accessories that advocate for a particular candidate, party, or issue. Voters who show up wearing them will be asked to remove and/or cover them up while they are within 100 feet of the polling place - and asked to leave, if they refuse. Oh, and if they refuse to do that, the police will be called to arrest them for trespassing.)
(Note that expressing a political preference in an email or discussion topic written on an employer's computer, and/or cc-ed to other employees or the public may legitimately be considered as grounds for termination, as can starting arguments with other employees about them, insisting on wearing campaign garb at work, or expressing those opinions to customers - because the latter can be construed as falsely representing their employer's position, rather than their own, and the former can be considered as creating unacceptable disruption, and/or harming morale in the workplace, thereby harming productivity. And most large companies explicitly spell that out in their employee handbooks, btw. It's not that you have no right to express your opinion at work. The principle is that you can't do so in a way that makes you a nuisance. Simply responding to a direct question on the subject, however, or non-confrontationally discussing politics during a break is always legal - or, in other words, as long as you're not being an asshole about it, and you're doing it on time that your employer isn't paying you to focus on your duties, you're fine.)
No, I agree with Woodward's conclusion that those voters simply didn't want to get involved in political arguments with other people, regardless of whether they were co-workers, friends, neighbors, or even other family members. (In my experience, most people dislike arguing politics simply because it both causes hard feelings, and it almost never persuades other people to change their vote.)
On the ancient iPad I use for bathroom reading: Fear by Bob Woodward.
On the the 55-incher in the liviing room (which is a display for our media computer): The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks (which, unusually for his mainstream stuff, is a real slog).
On my phone (which I mostly use as an ereader in doctors' office waiting rooms): Let's Spend the Night Together by Pamela DesBarres.
Upcoming?
I haven't really decided which one will go on which device yet, but John Dies at the End by Steven Wong (because I enjoyed the movie), any one of a number of musicians' (auto)biographies, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate by Owen L. Sirrs (as research for my work-in-progress, War - Volume Two of American Sulla) are next in the queue.
What I'm not going to read?
Anything on technology that doesn't directly bear on my writing - because I walked away from the tech journalism industry after the first Internet bubble collapsed, taking about 650 of the industry's rags down with it...
I have never read a C.J. Cherryh book, series or standalone that was anything but entertaining - and I've been reading her stuff since her first novel was published. They're all good...
Political correctness is following somebody else's guidelines for what is acceptable speech. As a result it can come across as insincere. The speaker may even resent being coerced into speaking that way. Politeness comes from the individual and so comes across as more heartfelt and sincere.
Rather than getting to the root of the problem, political correctness simply encourages people to mask their real views until an opportunity to vote in somebody who shares their disdain for political correctness comes along. The more they feel their free speech has been trampled upon, the more keen they'll be to vote this way.
I wish I had mod points left. Unlike so many others that get one, your comment actually deserves a +1 Insightful upmod...
Torn from their home and kidnapped? Try sold by their own people, for whom they were already slaves. Not that the reality of what actually happened is any better than your ignorant understanding, mind you, but... you could at least make an attempt to be factually accurate.
I'm assuming you are referring strictly to victims of the 16th- through 18th-Century trade in African slaves, rather than to slavery worldwide, prior to the Industrial Revolution, as lgw noted above? Because his comment is spot-on, and bears emphasizing.
Before that time, the economies of every major civilization on this planet were powered by slaves (okay, in Medieval times, they were called "serfs," but, since they were forbidden to move away from the land they worked as tenant farmers, and had to endure customs such as prima nocta, it's a distincion without a difference). Without them, there wouldn't have been a Hellenic or Hellenistic Greek civilization, or a Roman Republic or Empire - to name two of the most important wellsprings of Western culture.
But you're dead wrong about "their own people" selling Africans into the Atlantic slave trade - unless by "their own people" you mean "other black Africans from completely different tribes who made their living kidnapping members of tribes too primitive to have firearms, and selling them to European slave traders."
In which case, talk about arguing a false equivalence!
You're basically saying, "They (i.e. - black Africans) are all 'the same people,'" when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. That's exactly the equivalent of lumping Canadians and citizens of the USA together, and claiming that they too are "all the same people."
Try that in a crowd of Canadians at your next opportunity, and see how they react.
(Hint: Odds are they will express their disagreement politely. Then try the same experiment in a crowd of, say Southies, or Philly fans. Compare and contrast the experiences, and report back - once you get out of the hospital, I mean... )
While it is unquestionably true that/. publishes <wild_exaggeration>an average of 2,000 "battery breakthrough" stories per hour</wild_exaggeration>, this one is different from the sludgepipe of ordinary hype in two important ways:
according to TFS, Solid Power has already secured $20 million in Series A funding to build a pilot plant, and
some (presumably-significant portion of that funding is from BMW, Hyundai, and Samsung.
We never see that with any of the other battery-breakthrough hype pieces. They're all either announcements of tabletop-scale demonstrations (at best), or simply theoretical extrapolations of what some newly-discovered phenomenon could, eventually mean for increaing power density and/or rechargeability, making batteries out of less-expensive materials, incorporating unicorn scat, or other examples of wishful thinking in search of investors.
This one, by contrast, is an announcement unveiling a startup that has convinced some solidly-credible major corporate investors who have (at in Samsung's case) undoubtedly heard presentations on gee-whiz battery "breakthroughs" from a raft of wannabes and scam artists in the past - and have obviously passed on all of them. It's real enough that the bean-counters in these multi-billion-dollar enterprises have signed off on those investments. That's a completely different thing than the pure hype that virtually every other story on the subject consists of.
It's certainly still possible that their pilot plant will reveal scalar problems in manufacturing that eventually will relegate Solid Power's claimed breakthrough to "nice try, but no cigar" staus. It appears that we'll have to wait until 2019 to see if that happens (although, if the actual product doesn't live up to the investors' expectations, I kinda doubt we'll see a big, public announcement about it - more likely, it'll just quietly close its doors and disappear into the investor's writeoff disclosures in their annual reports to the SEC). But I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt - at least, until their Series A financing runs out...
(Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Solid Power. I have no financial interest in any tech or automotive company whatsoever, nor do I advise any such entity. Hell, my wife and I own a grand total of ONE share of stock - and it's a legacy of an employee profitsharing plan from her employment in the retail sector almost 20 years ago. And, fwiw, hype of any kind tends to make me break out in acute scepticism.)
Thank you for your commentary, which is quite to the point except for two details which I'd like to set straight:
The existence of this vulnerability, let alone its nature, has never been disclosed neither to me or the Tor Browser team. The very first hint I had about it has been this tweet by the ZDNet reporter, sent about one later than Zerodium's one, and noticed even later.
Based exclusively on that Zerodium's tweet (not a proper bug report, just a innuendo without even a link to a live PoC), the "NoScript team" (just me, actually) scrambled to create a reproducible test-case, dig in NoScript 5 "Classic"'s code base which had not been touched for months*, find the bug, fix it, test the patch, package two new versions (one for the beta autoupdate channel, one for the stable one) and deploy them both in quite less than one hour, real-time while been interviewed by the journalist. In the old days, when I had my own garage bands, our typical rehearsals were much longer -- and pleasant;)
Thank you for your detailed corrections to my (largely guesswork-based) post. I couldn't ask for a more credible source for them!
(I'm more impressed by your patch-fu now than I was in the first place, btw.)
While I have your attention, I also want to thank you for what you do for us FF users. Without NoScript, I wouldn't feel safe browsing the modern web with anything short of a completely air-gapped PC that had a browser, an OS, and basically nothing else of value installed, so I could take it down to bare metal and reinstall them both, whenever it got infected from rogue scripts - which would likely be every couple of days...
There've been quite a number of posts beardmuttering about a severe NoScript vulnerability for much of the past couple of weeks. The fact is that, if you use the Tor browser at all regularly, you've been seeing a notification flag about that very thing in the addons bar for the whole of that time.
What I take from this story is that, although the existence of the vulnerability had to have been disclosed to the Tor developers - and very likely to the NoScript folks, as well - just prior to the appearance of that flag, it wasn't until today that the Zerodium folks disclosed the actual code to them. Now, if you know there's some kind of vulnerability that's been discovered, but you don't know exactly what that vulnerability consists of, it's pretty fucking difficult to fix the damned thing, because, essentially, you'd have to just blindly guess at its nature and where in your code it might be hiding.
Otherwise you'd just quietly fix it, push out an update, and get on with the task of developing the next version, rather than have to expend those resources on more bughunting. So, to me, the fact that the NoScript team produced a fix in two hours from the time Zerodium released the exploit code is a tribute to their commitment to protecting their users.
It also tells me that the fix itself must have been relatively trivial - which in no way diminishes my admiration for the devs who coded it, tested it, integrated it into the addon, and got it out the door in the duration of a typical garage band rehearsal.
So, good job, guys!
What does give me pause is Zerodium's casual disclosure that they had already thoroughly saturated their market for that exploit, and concluded that they couldn't squeeze another dollar out of the black hat sector (having previously sold it to every nation-state in the intelligence world - or, rather, every one in the market for zero-days). At a guess, that means they've been actively hawking it for not less than six months or so.
the problem would be using direct energy such as oil, nat gas, etc to desalinate with. Instead, it should be waste heat from any electricity producing thermal system, but ideally, a nuclear reactor. Than add in solar for the low-end stuff.
Nope.
The problem with nuclear power is that reactors have to be cooled. That's why they tend to be sited on riverbanks, or on coasts that are swept by cold-water currents, such as the Humboldt Current. Dubai has access to no such cooling source.
"B...b...but the Persian Gulf!" I hear you mentally object?
Sorry. The Gulf is as warm as bathwater, which makes it a poor choice of heat sink for a nuke plant. Also, there's a pretty good chance the neighbors are going to object to the very real possibility of having to live with the long-term contamination of their shared acess to ocean-based shipping to and from the rest of the world in the event of a containment breach...
Given Dubai's geography and location, a large-scale solar power plant is the only reasonable (and responsible) power source for a desal plant - and it wouldn't even require power storage, if the desal operation ran only during daylight hours...
Now it does say -mineral- resources and I don't think ice counts as a mineral, but still, I'd imagine the environmental impact isn't negligible. Specially if done in large scale.
Nope. Doesn't apply, even if you can twist the legal definition of "a mineral" to extend to ice.
(NB - the legal and scientific definitions of a term don't necessarily have the same definition, nor do courts typically allow themselves to be bound - or even influenced - by the scientific one, where legal precedent to the contrary exists, because, as Mr. Bumble opines in Oliver Twist, "the law is an ass.")
An iceberg, by definition, is not part of Antarctica in any way, shape, or form. It is, instead, its own entity - a chunk of ice floating in the ocean. As such, the protocol in question simply doesn't apply, just as it doesn't apply to, for instance, snow in the process of falling on the continent - because that snow is strictly an atmospheric phenomenon until it hits the ground, where it instantaneously transforms into a constituent part of Antarctica, and can then be considered a "resource".
Objects floating on the oceans are subject to international maritime law, but not to treaties regarding land-based mineral rights treaties, so it's salvage law that would apply - and anything afloat that's not actively crewed is fair game, where that's concerned.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
If I had mod points, this comment would definitely get a +1 Funny.
Right now the internet is one big space that every user shares with every other user.
That is irrespective of whether one user is a grandma trying to email to a relative, an individual buying a product, a city's traffic light network, a government department, a car or a battleship
This is a ridiculous situation to be in. We segregate road users for their own safety (and that of others) and in order to provide facilities that are appropriate for each type of user. What we don't need is a one-size-fits-all security model. We should be separating out the various forms of network traffic into physically discrete networks. Maybe even to the extent of having multiple networks with little or no cross-over between them.
This would be especially apt for a break between commercial and non-commercial traffic. Or between government and civilian use. And especially between safety-critical infrastructure and everything else.
The concept of an "internet" is past its useful life. The whole structure never took security seriously and was designed more around trust than enforcement. It is past time to move a LOT of stuff off the public network and to make it harder for grandma to accidentally email the Pentagon's National Military Command Centre - just like it isn't (I hope) possible for someone to accidentally walk in through its front door.
I could not more strongly disagree.
The Internet is a voluntary interconnection between (at this point) millions of private networks. It is only that interconnection that made the staggering revolution in how people in the developed world interact with everything from local government to retailers to social networks to... well... virtually every other person, organization, and resource in the modern world.
What you are describing is, in many ways, not unlike the Internet in the days of NSFnet being the only backbone provider in the USA. Commerical traffic was banned, period. Networks in the.com domain were permitted to use the net only to provide free-of-cost-to-the-user resources for the public. A private individual could only register for a.com domain by providing a statement of the use to which he/she intended to put it. Only netrwork providers could register in the.net TLD. And so on.
That proved extremely problematic, and, when NSFnet was defunded and went out of business in favor of commercial telecom providers' much-higher-speed backbones, virtually everyone on the 'net cheered. Loudly - because the NSFnet restrictions on content were essentially global constraints, since the USA had by far the largest population of users at the time, so even Europeans had to abide by the prohibitions, because some portion of their traffic would inevitably transit NSFnet.
You are arguing for an officially-balkanized Internet - a change that would, in every meaningful way, destroy the usefullness of the most important advance in human communication in modern history. Not coincidentally, it would deny the populations of emerging economies the opportunity to interact with the rest of the world, and thereby force them to play technological catch-up with the equivalent of one foot in a bucket.
There's a well-worn cliché that warns against the class of solutions you suggest to the problem of securing the subset of devices we call the IoT: "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
As for the insight you display, the H. L. Menchken, the Bard of Baltimore, probably said it best when he observed that "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong... "
I predicted this would happen when/. ran a clickbait headline about how the chair of the Assembly telecom committee "killed" the original bill by unilaterally approving telecom-authored amendments to it before it went to the Assembly floor for a vote.
Obviously, he did nothing of the kind. Instead, all of the bought-and-paid-for telecom industry amendments went bye-bye in the process of the bill making its way through the Assembly, then the Senate, then reconcilliation, just as I said they would.
That's the way legislative checks and balances work in California. Not even the Assembly Speaker - the second-most-powerful politician in the state - can unilaterally dictate the contents of a bill, and expect it to survive the sausage-making process intact. That's especially the case with public-interest legislation, which this very much is. There are too many eyes on the process, both within the Lege and outside it (i.e. - journalists, public-interest lobbying groups, gadflys, etc.)
Would that it worked as well on the national level...
Try driving conservatively here in NJ, NYC, or any major city and you'll be an obstacle to be run over. Self driving cars, to be successful, need to adapt to the drivers around them instead of being an outlier when it comes to driving habits.
I'm sorry, but this story strongly activated my clickbait bullshit filter when I first read it - the original article, straight from The Information's website, I mean.
First off, nobody else is reporting this. Secondly, The Information appears to be a startup that's utterly desperate for visibility. Its website makes the proud boast that it doesn't accept advertising - but it does rather desperately plead for likes and reposts of its articles to social media. Thirdly (and most importantly), the complaints themselves all seem to be of the "darned pesky kids these days!" variety.
I mean, c'mon - the one neighbor whose complaint The Information actually quotes bitches about a Waymo car stopping suddenly while in the process of making a right turn, causing her to "almost run into it." Let's unpack that, shall we?
I'm a fairly aggressive driver. Nonetheless, on any number of occasions, I have stopped short in the process of turning right. Sometimes, it's because I don't trust pedestrians on the corner not to suddenly yield to the impulse to dart across the street before the "don't walk" sign comes on. Sometimes, it's because I've spotted a cat or a dog doing much the same thing - and a driver who's tailgating me would not be able to see the animal. And sometimes, it's because I'm exercising due caution regarding who has the right-of-way. Regardless of which is the case, anyone who's trying to crawl up my tailpipe because they lack patience, common sense, and impulse control is still obligated by law to maintain an assured clear following distance. That they choose not to do so is entirely their problem, not mine.
The fact that the driver they're tailgating is an AI doesn't alter that obligation...
No contortion at all for muff to be deemed 'naughty'. It explicitly means vagina.
Sure, it's a tamer word than minge but if a site is censoring then it's a legitimate target.
It ONLY means vagina when used as part of the compound verb "muff diving" - an increasingly-obsolete and tame term for cunnilingus.
And, again, it's the name of a family of products this retailer currently sells, for which it actively solicits reviews.
If you'd care to diagram exactly how one goes about reviewing a pedal called a "Big Muff" without using the word "muff" - and without dancing around the issue by substituting "this product" or other quasi-euphemisms - I'd be interested in your suggestions.
Otherwise, it's pure, gutless hypocrisy on the part of the company - whose name rhymes with "Musician's Bend"...
In response to my anecdote about reviewing the Digitech RP1000, dunkelfalke observed:
Must have been quite a while ago, the RP1000 is about as old as my GNX3000.
Mmm - I think the GNX3000 is a little older vintage than the RP1000.
Nonetheless, at the time I posted my review, the retailer in question was still selling the RP1000. That pedal was in production for a surprisingly long time, which I ascribe to the fact that it was an incredible bargain, given the quality and variety of the effects it offered at the price people were paying for it at the time.
FWIW - as I'm sure you know (but most slashdotters probably don't) list prices for musical equipment and instruments are generally ludicrously high. Street prices are a much more accurate measure of the actual perceived value of that kind of stuff. At the time, the RP1000 was selling for around $300 (about half its list price), and that was a freakin' steal...
...on how silly/childish we still are by schoolyard snickering over "funny names". Apparently, we'll just never grow the fuck up.
Well - some of us don't.
Religious types, for instance.
I've been a customer of a certain online-warehouse music store for donkey's years, now (it rhymes with "Musician's Trend"). Naturally, they encourage customers to leave reviews of products we buy. So, a couple of years ago, I bought a Digitech RP1000 multi-effects pedal board from this operation. I was very pleased with it, and I succumbed to the urge to submit a review.
I swiftly discovered the site's nanny filter had some peculiar notions about what it considered objectionable language. First of all, it will let you use neither the terms "dollar" or "dollars," nor the "$" character. It also flagged and blocked words that are dirty only by dint of extreme mental contortion - like "muff" for instance. That came up in the context of discussing distortion models included in the device. The Maestro Big Muff is kind of the Ur-fuzzbox. (If you know the song American Woman by the Guess Who, that lead guitar tone is the perfect example of what it does to a guitar's sound.) The RP1000 does a great job of emulating it, as well as many other classic distortions, overdrives, and fuzzboxen - but the nanny filter wouldn't let me mention the Big Muff by name - even though this Musician's Blend-sounding retailer stocks many variants of that pedal and solicits reviews for them!
So, I don't bother posting reviews there, because the corporate pinheads who are responsible for emplacing that imbecilic thing in the first place refuse to treat their customers as adults - and I have zero interest in posting reviews about sophisticated digital electronic modeling gear for an audience of children...
Y'know, I've been a fan of Robert A. Heinlein's literally since I was six years old. I've read all his fiction, and much of his non-fiction, as well (Grumbles from the Grave is pretty darned entertaining, believe it or not). And the thing is that, even when I first read Beyond This Horizon - from whence that quote is taken - at the age of eight or so, I knew enough to take it as a premise for the world RAH built to set that story in, rather than any sort of universal truth.
And that, in turn, is because there is ZERO real-world evidence of that proposition's truth - nor was there any such evidence available to Heinlein when he made that statement. Instead, as a writer of fiction, he set out to explore a world that was based on that proposition, as a source of the conflict his protagonist must resolve to move the book's plot to its resolution.
The inescapable fact is that in the present day, there are quite a few armed societies we can study to provide evidence for or against the truth of RAH's proposition - and, frankly, it doesn't hold water.
Heinlein imagined a world in which a formalized code duello made it possible for people who choose to go armed to fight to the death over insults, but that specifically exempted those who choose not to arm themselves. In that world, challenging, menacing, or targeting anyone who is NOT visible carrying is automatically treated as a felonious criminal act to which all armed bystanders are obligated to respond with deadly force. In the actual, phenomenological world in which real people live, that kind of social firewall just doesn't exist. Live in, say, Afghanistan, or the DRC, or Iraq, or Somalia, or - well, anywhere other than the USA where some significant portion of the local population routinely goes strapped, and another percentage does not, the unarmed ones are simply not, as a rule, routinely provided protection by the civilian folks with guns. (Or by local militias, for that matter.)
Instead, the armed population essentially does as it pleases, and the unarmed ones keep their heads down and their mouths shut - from fear for their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, against whom retaliation is to be expected, for those who are foolish enough to make themselves targets by, for example, standing up to armed teenage bullies, professional predators, or adherents of a different belief system than those locals who go armed.
The same was true of the American West in the 19th century. That's why one of the first institutions that arose in any newly-settled area was formally-constituted and empowered law enforcement: local constables, county sheriffs, U.S. marshalls, Texas Rangers, and so on.
In point of fact, all the evidence is that an armed, non-fictional society is a polite one only when its armed members are forced by laws and law enforcement personnnel to behave themselves. Because people - and especially young men - are, by default, basically assholes when they suddenly acquire the means to impose their will on others with impunity.
It has nothing whatever to do with self-defense. It's about self-aggrandizement, and the addictive pleasure of forcing others to bend to your will. Everything else - everything - is post hoc rationalization.
Note that I'm not talking about rural folks who use firearms to control the local varmint population, nor am I talking about those who use guns to hunt for food, or strictly for target shooting. I'm talking here about urban and suburban Americans who fetishize gun ownership and fantasize that they are somehow capable of effectively resisting government authorities, should they feel the need to revolt against authority - despite the fact that small arms are essentially worthless against trained military personnel armed with everything from satellite-directed drones to B1 bombers to tanks to RPGs and...
You can now also heat your house with it while discharging!
If your house is a materials lab, that is.
The headline is (surprise!) profoundly - and purposefully - misleading. These researchers delivered nothing more than a benchtop demonstration. In other words, a glorified science fair project.
Perhaps it's just me, but to use the word "deliver" accurately to describe what these folks have built, it would have to be, at a minimum, a working commercial prototype, designed for mass manufacture. The demo here is a long damned way from that...
Slashdot Mirror
sexconker announced:
Because CNET doesn't want you actually expressing your thoughts on privacy, I'll provide the goods: https://www.ntia.doc.gov/feder...
Somebody with points, please MOD PARENT +1 Informative.
Also, msmash, please include the above link in TFS.
That is all ...
When an AC responded:
Wish i could upvote 5 times
To my post as a whole, Curunir_wolf took the following quote out of context:
the Chinese have, for literally centuries, been known as the "Jews of Asia"
Then sneered:
Because you're a racist anti-Semite too?
You're an Olympic-quality conclusion-jumper.
You also neatly managed to dodge my point - so, congratulations on achieving the Full Slashdot.
What I stated about the historical characterization of Chinese business practices (which is not exclusive to the West) is fact.
Just because I happen to have read history, does not mean I approve of such characterizations, however commonplace they once were. I have neither sympathy nor patience with bigotry of any stripe.
I'm pretty intolerant of self-righteousness, however ...
kingbilly responded
I've been dealing with Amazon for 8 years. Trust me, they are drones. Spend some time on the seller forums.
A glaring example of this from earlier this year is when a seller called in to get help with a policy issue. The person "at" Amazon wound up using the Amazon forums and unknowingly cited a forum post from the caller themselves as an answer.
If you see anything online about Amazon Customer Service being outsourced, note that isn't limited to buyer interactions. It is the entire marketplace platform. People who can end your business of multiple employees, because they are in fact drones who don't understand left from right.
The people who answer the phone are not managers. Most of the time - and this goes for basically every tech company across the board - they are, indeed, drones, reading from a script, without the authority to wipe their own butts.
And that's exactly my point ...
TFS included this quote from the team that wrote TFA:
As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which may embolden them to take risks.
Prompting Curunir_wolf to observe:
Not sure why I have to point this out, but the US employees are in the same boat. Plus, Amazon treats them like crap.
So no sympathy for Amazon in this - it's of their own doing. When you know your employer is raking in big bucks and only dropping you crumbs, you tend to want to find ways to cash in yourself. Amazon does it themselves - these guys just want in on the deal.
This has nothing to do with the "fulfillment" staff (i.e. - the warehouse workforce). The individuals who are selling confidential information (and, apparently, unauthorized account restorations) are office workers. They can't be mere drones, either, because access to that data is undoubtedly restricted to the ranks of managers and above. That makes them better-paid than the average Chinese Amazonian. They're simply greedy and unscrupulous - like most Chinese businesspeople.
There is a reason why the Chinese have, for literally centuries, been known as the "Jews of Asia" - and it's that their culture has always treated cheating, lying, and fraud as normal business practice. (And, yes, those same standards have also been attributed to Jews since Rome became the economic center of the Western world - and they continue to apply to Israeli Jews, because it'they're still the norm there, exactly as they are everywhere else along the northern African coast. The business communities of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia all share those same values. It's why the warning "caveat emptor" still applies a couple of thousand years after it was coined.)
But, to your point, I don't think the U.S. managerial staff routinely engages in such practices, if only because there's a lot more security consciousness at Amazon's HQ than there is in China - and because getting caught doing any of those things here is grounds for instant dismissal.
Oh, and here it's the kiss of death for your career in tech to be fired for cause on those grounds, if word about it gets out ...
In response to my reply to the parent, Alypius commented:
This is exactly why Trump's election was a surprise. A majority of his voters stayed silent because they didn't want to be harassed or lose their job.
It wasn't a surprise to everyone - not even everyone on the left.
Michael Moore knew it, made a documentary called Trump that predicted it, and spent the final couple of months prior to the election on the talk-show circuit, warning viewers that Trump was probably going to win - to no avail.
In his new account of Trump's campaign and the first 18 months of his administration, Bob Woodward claims that he suspected that Hillary would lose, because of the very large number of Obama voters he talked to who were furious and (more importantly) fearful about the economy and our profoundly disfunctional Congress. He also repeatedly makes the point that, once he agreed to manage the campaign, Steve Bannon steadfastly insisted he was absolutely certain Trump would win, even during the media shitstorm over Pussygate, when every Republican official, and every other member of the campaign's inner circle was urging him to withdraw, and cede the nomination to Pence.
However, I strongly disagree with your contention that crossover voters kept quiet about their intentions out of fear for their jobs.
It is a Federal felony to fire a person for expressing his or her political preference. (That's a Good Thing, and we have the First Amendment to thank for it.) The only exception to that rule is for poll workers, on election day, who express their personal preference to voters at their polling place, where it's legally considered to be election tampering - because it is exactly that. (That's the same reason that even voters themselves are barred from wearing hats, shirts, buttons, or other clothing or accessories that advocate for a particular candidate, party, or issue. Voters who show up wearing them will be asked to remove and/or cover them up while they are within 100 feet of the polling place - and asked to leave, if they refuse. Oh, and if they refuse to do that, the police will be called to arrest them for trespassing.)
(Note that expressing a political preference in an email or discussion topic written on an employer's computer, and/or cc-ed to other employees or the public may legitimately be considered as grounds for termination, as can starting arguments with other employees about them, insisting on wearing campaign garb at work, or expressing those opinions to customers - because the latter can be construed as falsely representing their employer's position, rather than their own, and the former can be considered as creating unacceptable disruption, and/or harming morale in the workplace, thereby harming productivity. And most large companies explicitly spell that out in their employee handbooks, btw. It's not that you have no right to express your opinion at work. The principle is that you can't do so in a way that makes you a nuisance. Simply responding to a direct question on the subject, however, or non-confrontationally discussing politics during a break is always legal - or, in other words, as long as you're not being an asshole about it, and you're doing it on time that your employer isn't paying you to focus on your duties, you're fine.)
No, I agree with Woodward's conclusion that those voters simply didn't want to get involved in political arguments with other people, regardless of whether they were co-workers, friends, neighbors, or even other family members. (In my experience, most people dislike arguing politics simply because it both causes hard feelings, and it almost never persuades other people to change their vote.)
YMMV, of course ...
Current:
Upcoming?
I haven't really decided which one will go on which device yet, but John Dies at the End by Steven Wong (because I enjoyed the movie), any one of a number of musicians' (auto)biographies, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate by Owen L. Sirrs (as research for my work-in-progress, War - Volume Two of American Sulla) are next in the queue.
What I'm not going to read?
Anything on technology that doesn't directly bear on my writing - because I walked away from the tech journalism industry after the first Internet bubble collapsed, taking about 650 of the industry's rags down with it ...
I have never read a C.J. Cherryh book, series or standalone that was anything but entertaining - and I've been reading her stuff since her first novel was published. They're all good ...
SqueakyMouse opined:
Political correctness is following somebody else's guidelines for what is acceptable speech. As a result it can come across as insincere. The speaker may even resent being coerced into speaking that way. Politeness comes from the individual and so comes across as more heartfelt and sincere.
Rather than getting to the root of the problem, political correctness simply encourages people to mask their real views until an opportunity to vote in somebody who shares their disdain for political correctness comes along. The more they feel their free speech has been trampled upon, the more keen they'll be to vote this way.
I wish I had mod points left. Unlike so many others that get one, your comment actually deserves a +1 Insightful upmod ...
BronsCon claimed:
Torn from their home and kidnapped? Try sold by their own people, for whom they were already slaves. Not that the reality of what actually happened is any better than your ignorant understanding, mind you, but... you could at least make an attempt to be factually accurate.
I'm assuming you are referring strictly to victims of the 16th- through 18th-Century trade in African slaves, rather than to slavery worldwide, prior to the Industrial Revolution, as lgw noted above? Because his comment is spot-on, and bears emphasizing.
Before that time, the economies of every major civilization on this planet were powered by slaves (okay, in Medieval times, they were called "serfs," but, since they were forbidden to move away from the land they worked as tenant farmers, and had to endure customs such as prima nocta, it's a distincion without a difference). Without them, there wouldn't have been a Hellenic or Hellenistic Greek civilization, or a Roman Republic or Empire - to name two of the most important wellsprings of Western culture.
But you're dead wrong about "their own people" selling Africans into the Atlantic slave trade - unless by "their own people" you mean "other black Africans from completely different tribes who made their living kidnapping members of tribes too primitive to have firearms, and selling them to European slave traders."
In which case, talk about arguing a false equivalence!
You're basically saying, "They (i.e. - black Africans) are all 'the same people,'" when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. That's exactly the equivalent of lumping Canadians and citizens of the USA together, and claiming that they too are "all the same people."
Try that in a crowd of Canadians at your next opportunity, and see how they react.
(Hint: Odds are they will express their disagreement politely. Then try the same experiment in a crowd of, say Southies, or Philly fans. Compare and contrast the experiences, and report back - once you get out of the hospital, I mean ... )
While it is unquestionably true that /. publishes <wild_exaggeration>an average of 2,000 "battery breakthrough" stories per hour</wild_exaggeration>, this one is different from the sludgepipe of ordinary hype in two important ways:
We never see that with any of the other battery-breakthrough hype pieces. They're all either announcements of tabletop-scale demonstrations (at best), or simply theoretical extrapolations of what some newly-discovered phenomenon could, eventually mean for increaing power density and/or rechargeability, making batteries out of less-expensive materials, incorporating unicorn scat, or other examples of wishful thinking in search of investors.
This one, by contrast, is an announcement unveiling a startup that has convinced some solidly-credible major corporate investors who have (at in Samsung's case) undoubtedly heard presentations on gee-whiz battery "breakthroughs" from a raft of wannabes and scam artists in the past - and have obviously passed on all of them. It's real enough that the bean-counters in these multi-billion-dollar enterprises have signed off on those investments. That's a completely different thing than the pure hype that virtually every other story on the subject consists of.
It's certainly still possible that their pilot plant will reveal scalar problems in manufacturing that eventually will relegate Solid Power's claimed breakthrough to "nice try, but no cigar" staus. It appears that we'll have to wait until 2019 to see if that happens (although, if the actual product doesn't live up to the investors' expectations, I kinda doubt we'll see a big, public announcement about it - more likely, it'll just quietly close its doors and disappear into the investor's writeoff disclosures in their annual reports to the SEC). But I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt - at least, until their Series A financing runs out ...
(Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Solid Power. I have no financial interest in any tech or automotive company whatsoever, nor do I advise any such entity. Hell, my wife and I own a grand total of ONE share of stock - and it's a legacy of an employee profitsharing plan from her employment in the retail sector almost 20 years ago. And, fwiw, hype of any kind tends to make me break out in acute scepticism.)
Giorgio Maone responded to my post thusly:
The NoScript dev -- not "devs" ;) -- here.
Thank you for your commentary, which is quite to the point except for two details which I'd like to set straight:
Thank you for your detailed corrections to my (largely guesswork-based) post. I couldn't ask for a more credible source for them!
(I'm more impressed by your patch-fu now than I was in the first place, btw.)
While I have your attention, I also want to thank you for what you do for us FF users. Without NoScript, I wouldn't feel safe browsing the modern web with anything short of a completely air-gapped PC that had a browser, an OS, and basically nothing else of value installed, so I could take it down to bare metal and reinstall them both, whenever it got infected from rogue scripts - which would likely be every couple of days ...
There've been quite a number of posts beardmuttering about a severe NoScript vulnerability for much of the past couple of weeks. The fact is that, if you use the Tor browser at all regularly, you've been seeing a notification flag about that very thing in the addons bar for the whole of that time.
What I take from this story is that, although the existence of the vulnerability had to have been disclosed to the Tor developers - and very likely to the NoScript folks, as well - just prior to the appearance of that flag, it wasn't until today that the Zerodium folks disclosed the actual code to them. Now, if you know there's some kind of vulnerability that's been discovered, but you don't know exactly what that vulnerability consists of, it's pretty fucking difficult to fix the damned thing, because, essentially, you'd have to just blindly guess at its nature and where in your code it might be hiding.
Otherwise you'd just quietly fix it, push out an update, and get on with the task of developing the next version, rather than have to expend those resources on more bughunting. So, to me, the fact that the NoScript team produced a fix in two hours from the time Zerodium released the exploit code is a tribute to their commitment to protecting their users.
It also tells me that the fix itself must have been relatively trivial - which in no way diminishes my admiration for the devs who coded it, tested it, integrated it into the addon, and got it out the door in the duration of a typical garage band rehearsal.
So, good job, guys!
What does give me pause is Zerodium's casual disclosure that they had already thoroughly saturated their market for that exploit, and concluded that they couldn't squeeze another dollar out of the black hat sector (having previously sold it to every nation-state in the intelligence world - or, rather, every one in the market for zero-days). At a guess, that means they've been actively hawking it for not less than six months or so.
And that is a Very Bad Thing, indeed ...
manu0601 harrumphed:
And the democrats are really ready to vote for a corporate lobbyist? This is more a problem than the candidature itself.
From TFS:
According to Ars, recent polls show that Eve is in last place behind three other Democrats running for the office.
So, apparently not ...
Windboure suggested:
the problem would be using direct energy such as oil, nat gas, etc to desalinate with. Instead, it should be waste heat from any electricity producing thermal system, but ideally, a nuclear reactor. Than add in solar for the low-end stuff.
Nope.
The problem with nuclear power is that reactors have to be cooled. That's why they tend to be sited on riverbanks, or on coasts that are swept by cold-water currents, such as the Humboldt Current. Dubai has access to no such cooling source.
"B...b...but the Persian Gulf!" I hear you mentally object?
Sorry. The Gulf is as warm as bathwater, which makes it a poor choice of heat sink for a nuke plant. Also, there's a pretty good chance the neighbors are going to object to the very real possibility of having to live with the long-term contamination of their shared acess to ocean-based shipping to and from the rest of the world in the event of a containment breach ...
Given Dubai's geography and location, a large-scale solar power plant is the only reasonable (and responsible) power source for a desal plant - and it wouldn't even require power storage, if the desal operation ran only during daylight hours ...
Edis Krad noted:
The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty prohibits the exploitation of Antarctica's resources based on environmental concerns.
Now it does say -mineral- resources and I don't think ice counts as a mineral, but still, I'd imagine the environmental impact isn't negligible. Specially if done in large scale.
Nope. Doesn't apply, even if you can twist the legal definition of "a mineral" to extend to ice.
(NB - the legal and scientific definitions of a term don't necessarily have the same definition, nor do courts typically allow themselves to be bound - or even influenced - by the scientific one, where legal precedent to the contrary exists, because, as Mr. Bumble opines in Oliver Twist, "the law is an ass.")
An iceberg, by definition, is not part of Antarctica in any way, shape, or form. It is, instead, its own entity - a chunk of ice floating in the ocean. As such, the protocol in question simply doesn't apply, just as it doesn't apply to, for instance, snow in the process of falling on the continent - because that snow is strictly an atmospheric phenomenon until it hits the ground, where it instantaneously transforms into a constituent part of Antarctica, and can then be considered a "resource".
Objects floating on the oceans are subject to international maritime law, but not to treaties regarding land-based mineral rights treaties, so it's salvage law that would apply - and anything afloat that's not actively crewed is fair game, where that's concerned.
I'm surprised I have to explain this ...
Entrope pointed out:
I saw that movie!
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
If I had mod points, this comment would definitely get a +1 Funny.
(Your username deserves one, too, btw ...)
Keep up the good work!
https://slashdot.org/~petes_PoV blathered:
Right now the internet is one big space that every user shares with every other user.
That is irrespective of whether one user is a grandma trying to email to a relative, an individual buying a product, a city's traffic light network, a government department, a car or a battleship
This is a ridiculous situation to be in. We segregate road users for their own safety (and that of others) and in order to provide facilities that are appropriate for each type of user. What we don't need is a one-size-fits-all security model. We should be separating out the various forms of network traffic into physically discrete networks. Maybe even to the extent of having multiple networks with little or no cross-over between them.
This would be especially apt for a break between commercial and non-commercial traffic. Or between government and civilian use. And especially between safety-critical infrastructure and everything else.
The concept of an "internet" is past its useful life. The whole structure never took security seriously and was designed more around trust than enforcement. It is past time to move a LOT of stuff off the public network and to make it harder for grandma to accidentally email the Pentagon's National Military Command Centre - just like it isn't (I hope) possible for someone to accidentally walk in through its front door.
I could not more strongly disagree.
The Internet is a voluntary interconnection between (at this point) millions of private networks. It is only that interconnection that made the staggering revolution in how people in the developed world interact with everything from local government to retailers to social networks to ... well ... virtually every other person, organization, and resource in the modern world.
What you are describing is, in many ways, not unlike the Internet in the days of NSFnet being the only backbone provider in the USA. Commerical traffic was banned, period. Networks in the .com domain were permitted to use the net only to provide free-of-cost-to-the-user resources for the public. A private individual could only register for a .com domain by providing a statement of the use to which he/she intended to put it. Only netrwork providers could register in the .net TLD. And so on.
That proved extremely problematic, and, when NSFnet was defunded and went out of business in favor of commercial telecom providers' much-higher-speed backbones, virtually everyone on the 'net cheered. Loudly - because the NSFnet restrictions on content were essentially global constraints, since the USA had by far the largest population of users at the time, so even Europeans had to abide by the prohibitions, because some portion of their traffic would inevitably transit NSFnet.
You are arguing for an officially-balkanized Internet - a change that would, in every meaningful way, destroy the usefullness of the most important advance in human communication in modern history. Not coincidentally, it would deny the populations of emerging economies the opportunity to interact with the rest of the world, and thereby force them to play technological catch-up with the equivalent of one foot in a bucket.
There's a well-worn cliché that warns against the class of solutions you suggest to the problem of securing the subset of devices we call the IoT: "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
As for the insight you display, the H. L. Menchken, the Bard of Baltimore, probably said it best when he observed that "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong ... "
I predicted this would happen when /. ran a clickbait headline about how the chair of the Assembly telecom committee "killed" the original bill by unilaterally approving telecom-authored amendments to it before it went to the Assembly floor for a vote.
Obviously, he did nothing of the kind. Instead, all of the bought-and-paid-for telecom industry amendments went bye-bye in the process of the bill making its way through the Assembly, then the Senate, then reconcilliation, just as I said they would.
That's the way legislative checks and balances work in California. Not even the Assembly Speaker - the second-most-powerful politician in the state - can unilaterally dictate the contents of a bill, and expect it to survive the sausage-making process intact. That's especially the case with public-interest legislation, which this very much is. There are too many eyes on the process, both within the Lege and outside it (i.e. - journalists, public-interest lobbying groups, gadflys, etc.)
Would that it worked as well on the national level ...
fluffernutter confided:
I am just temping fate.
Which one? Klotho, Lachesis or Atropos?
And, out of curiosity, are you "temping" her while she's on vacation - or is it maternity leave ... ?
slasher999 observed:
Try driving conservatively here in NJ, NYC, or any major city and you'll be an obstacle to be run over. Self driving cars, to be successful, need to adapt to the drivers around them instead of being an outlier when it comes to driving habits.
I'm sorry, but this story strongly activated my clickbait bullshit filter when I first read it - the original article, straight from The Information's website, I mean.
First off, nobody else is reporting this. Secondly, The Information appears to be a startup that's utterly desperate for visibility. Its website makes the proud boast that it doesn't accept advertising - but it does rather desperately plead for likes and reposts of its articles to social media. Thirdly (and most importantly), the complaints themselves all seem to be of the "darned pesky kids these days!" variety.
I mean, c'mon - the one neighbor whose complaint The Information actually quotes bitches about a Waymo car stopping suddenly while in the process of making a right turn, causing her to "almost run into it." Let's unpack that, shall we?
I'm a fairly aggressive driver. Nonetheless, on any number of occasions, I have stopped short in the process of turning right. Sometimes, it's because I don't trust pedestrians on the corner not to suddenly yield to the impulse to dart across the street before the "don't walk" sign comes on. Sometimes, it's because I've spotted a cat or a dog doing much the same thing - and a driver who's tailgating me would not be able to see the animal. And sometimes, it's because I'm exercising due caution regarding who has the right-of-way. Regardless of which is the case, anyone who's trying to crawl up my tailpipe because they lack patience, common sense, and impulse control is still obligated by law to maintain an assured clear following distance. That they choose not to do so is entirely their problem, not mine.
The fact that the driver they're tailgating is an AI doesn't alter that obligation ...
Cederic opined:
No contortion at all for muff to be deemed 'naughty'. It explicitly means vagina.
Sure, it's a tamer word than minge but if a site is censoring then it's a legitimate target.
It ONLY means vagina when used as part of the compound verb "muff diving" - an increasingly-obsolete and tame term for cunnilingus.
And, again, it's the name of a family of products this retailer currently sells, for which it actively solicits reviews.
If you'd care to diagram exactly how one goes about reviewing a pedal called a "Big Muff" without using the word "muff" - and without dancing around the issue by substituting "this product" or other quasi-euphemisms - I'd be interested in your suggestions.
Otherwise, it's pure, gutless hypocrisy on the part of the company - whose name rhymes with "Musician's Bend" ...
In response to my anecdote about reviewing the Digitech RP1000, dunkelfalke observed:
Must have been quite a while ago, the RP1000 is about as old as my GNX3000.
Mmm - I think the GNX3000 is a little older vintage than the RP1000.
Nonetheless, at the time I posted my review, the retailer in question was still selling the RP1000. That pedal was in production for a surprisingly long time, which I ascribe to the fact that it was an incredible bargain, given the quality and variety of the effects it offered at the price people were paying for it at the time.
FWIW - as I'm sure you know (but most slashdotters probably don't) list prices for musical equipment and instruments are generally ludicrously high. Street prices are a much more accurate measure of the actual perceived value of that kind of stuff. At the time, the RP1000 was selling for around $300 (about half its list price), and that was a freakin' steal ...
GerryGilmore lamented:
...on how silly/childish we still are by schoolyard snickering over "funny names". Apparently, we'll just never grow the fuck up.
Well - some of us don't.
Religious types, for instance.
I've been a customer of a certain online-warehouse music store for donkey's years, now (it rhymes with "Musician's Trend"). Naturally, they encourage customers to leave reviews of products we buy. So, a couple of years ago, I bought a Digitech RP1000 multi-effects pedal board from this operation. I was very pleased with it, and I succumbed to the urge to submit a review.
I swiftly discovered the site's nanny filter had some peculiar notions about what it considered objectionable language. First of all, it will let you use neither the terms "dollar" or "dollars," nor the "$" character. It also flagged and blocked words that are dirty only by dint of extreme mental contortion - like "muff" for instance. That came up in the context of discussing distortion models included in the device. The Maestro Big Muff is kind of the Ur-fuzzbox. (If you know the song American Woman by the Guess Who, that lead guitar tone is the perfect example of what it does to a guitar's sound.) The RP1000 does a great job of emulating it, as well as many other classic distortions, overdrives, and fuzzboxen - but the nanny filter wouldn't let me mention the Big Muff by name - even though this Musician's Blend-sounding retailer stocks many variants of that pedal and solicits reviews for them!
So, I don't bother posting reviews there, because the corporate pinheads who are responsible for emplacing that imbecilic thing in the first place refuse to treat their customers as adults - and I have zero interest in posting reviews about sophisticated digital electronic modeling gear for an audience of children ...
https://slashdot.org/~_Sharp'r_ quoted RAH thusly:
"An armed society is a polite society."
Y'know, I've been a fan of Robert A. Heinlein's literally since I was six years old. I've read all his fiction, and much of his non-fiction, as well (Grumbles from the Grave is pretty darned entertaining, believe it or not). And the thing is that, even when I first read Beyond This Horizon - from whence that quote is taken - at the age of eight or so, I knew enough to take it as a premise for the world RAH built to set that story in, rather than any sort of universal truth.
And that, in turn, is because there is ZERO real-world evidence of that proposition's truth - nor was there any such evidence available to Heinlein when he made that statement. Instead, as a writer of fiction, he set out to explore a world that was based on that proposition, as a source of the conflict his protagonist must resolve to move the book's plot to its resolution.
The inescapable fact is that in the present day, there are quite a few armed societies we can study to provide evidence for or against the truth of RAH's proposition - and, frankly, it doesn't hold water.
Heinlein imagined a world in which a formalized code duello made it possible for people who choose to go armed to fight to the death over insults, but that specifically exempted those who choose not to arm themselves. In that world, challenging, menacing, or targeting anyone who is NOT visible carrying is automatically treated as a felonious criminal act to which all armed bystanders are obligated to respond with deadly force. In the actual, phenomenological world in which real people live, that kind of social firewall just doesn't exist. Live in, say, Afghanistan, or the DRC, or Iraq, or Somalia, or - well, anywhere other than the USA where some significant portion of the local population routinely goes strapped, and another percentage does not, the unarmed ones are simply not, as a rule, routinely provided protection by the civilian folks with guns. (Or by local militias, for that matter.)
Instead, the armed population essentially does as it pleases, and the unarmed ones keep their heads down and their mouths shut - from fear for their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, against whom retaliation is to be expected, for those who are foolish enough to make themselves targets by, for example, standing up to armed teenage bullies, professional predators, or adherents of a different belief system than those locals who go armed.
The same was true of the American West in the 19th century. That's why one of the first institutions that arose in any newly-settled area was formally-constituted and empowered law enforcement: local constables, county sheriffs, U.S. marshalls, Texas Rangers, and so on.
In point of fact, all the evidence is that an armed, non-fictional society is a polite one only when its armed members are forced by laws and law enforcement personnnel to behave themselves. Because people - and especially young men - are, by default, basically assholes when they suddenly acquire the means to impose their will on others with impunity.
It has nothing whatever to do with self-defense. It's about self-aggrandizement, and the addictive pleasure of forcing others to bend to your will. Everything else - everything - is post hoc rationalization.
Note that I'm not talking about rural folks who use firearms to control the local varmint population, nor am I talking about those who use guns to hunt for food, or strictly for target shooting. I'm talking here about urban and suburban Americans who fetishize gun ownership and fantasize that they are somehow capable of effectively resisting government authorities, should they feel the need to revolt against authority - despite the fact that small arms are essentially worthless against trained military personnel armed with everything from satellite-directed drones to B1 bombers to tanks to RPGs and ...
You get the p
Narcocide observed:
You can now also heat your house with it while discharging!
If your house is a materials lab, that is.
The headline is (surprise!) profoundly - and purposefully - misleading. These researchers delivered nothing more than a benchtop demonstration. In other words, a glorified science fair project.
Perhaps it's just me, but to use the word "deliver" accurately to describe what these folks have built, it would have to be, at a minimum, a working commercial prototype, designed for mass manufacture. The demo here is a long damned way from that ...