I like the idea of posting all voting results publicly, where you are identified by something like a randomly generated UUID given to you at the time of voting (or some hash of your various personal information like name and SSN, etc.).
Although it doesn't address "extra" votes, you would at least be able to verify that your vote got counted as you intended, which is something...
I certainly would recommend checking out Google Fi. (I'm not affiliated with them other than being a customer.)
The base fee (unlimited US talk and text) is $20/mo., data is $10/GB but you *only* pay for what you use (and for me, taxes & fees work out to under $3/mo.). The data isn't the cheapest, so it might be a horrible plan for you, depending on your use. But it's very nice in that going 1MB over your plan costs you $0.01 -- and going 500MB *under* your plan gives you a $5 deduction on the next bill. My bills tend to be in the $25-$35/mo. range.
The icing on the cake is that international data is the same price, and international texting is free. Calls are $0.20/minute over cell and generally free over wifi. (This is for the supported 135+ countries.) Plus, you can get additional data-only SIMs for free (same data pool) to slap in old phones.
The two cases are very different. Your dystopic scene is in regards to the content production, whereas the common carrier comment was in reference to the distribution infrastructure.
For the Internet scenario, I think we all agree that, yes, it is a Bad Idea if all websites/content providers (news sites, *media, etc.) are merged into one government-run conglomerate. However, going back to food, the fact that the government maintains the roads which are used to deliver food has not, personally, been a problem for me.
Variety and choice tend to be good things -- but whatever we're doing now isn't working perfectly, as not everyone has access to fast internet. Fiber/cable/etc., like transportation networks, are defined as Good by a relatively narrow set of parameters, and I'm pretty sure 99+% of/. agrees on what those are (namely, it should be fast and low latency both ways, with faster/lower always being better). Food, on the other hand, is a very personal thing.
...but isn't this the very definition of small government? It sounds like this legislation uses *large* (state) government to take away powers from *small* (municipal) government.
From the standard arguments of small government that I've heard, this sounds like a very bad thing. Shouldn't the People vote on these things through their small municipal government, where your vote buys you more substantial representation? (It looks like the smallest city in Virginia is around 4k people.)
But that's only half the issue -- the convenience is also extremely important to some people.
Many people carry around modest power bricks in their backpacks, which they basically only use for charging their phone. I know that batteries are getting better in efficiency, and voltage converters can be very efficient, but it strikes me as fundamentally wrong to have to carry around a separate battery, power supply, and cable -- all so that you can discharge one battery to fill up another battery. Why not cut the middle man and just carry around two batteries?
Extending life is certainly one good reason to have removable batteries, but there are convenience factors, too.
Not to mention obscene contrast ratios (which is implied by your post, I guess) -- some claim 1,000,000:1, others seem to claim infinite.
I have an LCD (backlit) TV and a OLED phone -- in a dark room, displaying a black image on the TV will cause a noticeable amount of bleedthrough light. A black image on my OLED phone, on the other hand, can only be described by Nigel Tufnel.
But I doubt wonder if it could hold up doing that *all day*. Battery charging issues aside, I'm not convinced a Tesla or a Faraday could be driven to the limit for 24 hours straight, whereas the great race cars could still (mostly) outperform a Tesla or a Faraday, and do it (hopefully) for 24 hours.
According to Wikipedia, the Porsche 917 could do 0-100km/h (62mph) in 2.3s, 0-200km/h (124mph) in 5.3s (!!!), and top out around 390km/h (240mph). (Admittedly it was not raced until 1970, and the quoted numbers may be from later in the 70s.)
Pretty amazing car...they even used the tubular frame as oil piping, saving the need for dedicated oil lines.
I'm on Google Fi, and although I'm overall very happy with the service, flaky networks cause no end of pain.
I use hangouts for SMS (so that I can read them on my computer, too) -- however, this appears (???) to require a decent network connection on the phone, to the extent that sometimes I can make calls but cannot send SMS messages (!). I don't know much about telephony, but I suspect it's because hangouts uses a proper TCP/IP connection, rather than the old school SMS protocol (and I'm guessing the phone calls from the stock dialer make standard -- not VoIP -- calls, such that they work on marginal connections). The fact that it doesn't seem to offer any sort of SMS fallback is very annoying.
Additionally, adding a reminder when I have poor cell service is like pulling teeth...I'm sorry, but adding a reminder should not require an LTE internet connection...
Sounds like this would make a great little media box, but it's a shame it doesn't (appear to) have HDMI CEC support -- it looks like adapters cost about as much as a Raspberry Pi (which supports HDMI CEC out of the box!).
It seems like a silly feature, but it's been incredibly useful for my RPi media center -- the ability to switch between an app (Yatse) and a physical remote is very handy.
Would the rich and powerful hire people to keep track of those who had compatible organs and arrange suitable 'accidents' in case that rich & powerful person needed one or more of their organs?
But what's to stop that from happening now? At least where I live in the USA, we have a little donor sticker on our license. It shouldn't be hard to get a list of donors (either legitimately or by paying someone at a liquor store an extra buck to log every ID checked) and arrange for 'accidents' for them.
But I think the real issue here is that your nightmarish scenario -- and I do agree it's nightmarish -- relies on organs being a scarce commodity, which ostensibly will not be the case going forward in France. So there's no need to kill someone when you're drowning in viable organs. As macabre as that phrasing is, I think it's a Good Thing. Personally, I make a huge distinction between dead people and living people, and I think that our default actions should favor the living. Should the deceased specifically not want that, they have -- er, had? -- a way to change that.
But isn't this the technological equivalent of saying you need a driver's license to drive? If Uber is allowed to drive without one, yes, it may be safe -- but does that mean I have the right to attach a Raspberry Pi to my car and let it loose on public roads?
I think it's pretty reasonable to require that a human have a license, and I don't really see why the same shouldn't apply to an "autonomous driver" (i.e., the particular hardware/software/etc. implementation used).
For the future, EVs also help, but are not required - insofar as they're mainly nighttime loads, steady draws, and easy targets for charge rate modulation (or even reversal). Nobody cares exactly when their vehicle takes power from the wall, so long as it has a full charge when they told it to be done by. The more flexible they let their car be, the cheaper they get their power for. But again, this sort of arrangement being wirespread is not a requirement - just a bonus.
I've also wondered if the whole smart device thing could end up being a net bonus -- for example, during the cheap hours, freezers/electric water heaters/dishwashers/etc. could do their thing. Most of this could of course be done with a simple timer, but having some amount of communication with the grid and the personal schedule of the user could be more effective.
I dont trust any company which at its very beginning has such a megalomaniacal view of itself that it makes its logo "Do no Evil" .
Fair enough, but what large, successful company *doesn't* have the opportunity to be evil? I don't view that as megalomaniacal, I view it as taking the viewpoint that you may one day be wildly successful. I'm not suggesting that they've adhered to this motto exactly, but compared to banks, agrochem and pharma (in particular Monsanto's pending merger with Bayer), the food/tobacco industry (in particular Altria)...
Yes, it's a mildly disturbing motto, but at least they're confronting it head-on. Just my opinion though.
They barely covered a couple of items of evidence in that.
Fair enough, but there appear to be blatantly fabricated "evidence" from the pizzagaters (photos taken from random websites, etc.). There's a huge difference between innocent mistakes or sloppy journalism, and intentional fabrication. And while we're at it, what ever happened to the Fun Time Kidz Day Care conspiracy?
But hey, maybe you're right and we should take these claims seriously. And since/. doesn't let us delete our posts, we'll have some sort of record of this discussion in a year or two when the whole thing ends -- either with serious prison sentences or with nothing.
Looking at the temperatures (data, linking page), the annual average global temperature (as defined and measured by NASA) is indeed going up (I plotted the values from 2000 through 2015, and got a slope of around 0.015 C/year for a linear least-squares fit).
Regarding hurricanes, etc., I think -- and I could be wrong, I'm no climatologist -- the relevant thing is the higher moments (e.g., variance), not the mean. That is to say, given that we have such a poor understanding of climate, a prediction such as, "there will absolutely be more hurricanes going forward" is a tricky statement, but something like, "there will be a greater variance in XYZ" is (perhaps...) a safer statement. Whether (weather?) or not this is the case, I'm not sure...
The record-smashing heat led to searing heatwaves across the year: a new high of 42.7C was recorded in Pretoria, South Africa in January; Mae Hong Son in Thailand saw 44.6C on 28 April; Phalodi in India reached 51.0C in May and Mitribah in Kuwait recorded 54.0C in July. Parts of Arctic Russia also saw extreme warming - 6C to 7C above average.
While I agree with your general sentiment, I think there are some subtleties to this, somewhat analogous to the "fire in a crowded theater" sort of thing.
For instance, at least in the US, one doesn't (AFAIK...) have the "right" to call in a bomb threat. This is, if you like, removing some freedom of speech -- but I think it's entirely justifiable. So, what if someone names their SSID, "I_put_a_bomb_in_PS118" -- should we allow that? What about, "I will kill your family, $NameOfNeighbor"?
And regarding the Franklin quote, I believe the passage is
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
(my emphasis) Freedom of speech is, in my mind, essential; but one has to balance the "freedom to cause legitimate concern for personal safety" on the one hand, and the "freedom to feel safe using common-sense metrics" on the other. (Whether or not this particular case falls under those categories is debatable, of course.)
That said, in this particular instance, I agree that it's a bit over-the-top, but I could imagine a similar, more malicious situation where this sort of action makes some amount of sense. In such cases, a catch-all "the government said I couldn't do this there goes all my freedoms" attitude can lack some of the necessary subtleties, at least in my opinion.
The police are just fucking lazy. Instead of doing their job, they want the people to do it for them.
...and if they don't at least make an effort to use technology to assist, someone would be accusing them of being stuck in the last century.
Maybe -- just maybe -- this is a difficult issue that requires some subtlety, with an informed opinion being somewhere between "use any means to lock up the murderers" and "anything done by police = 1984".
This is one of the things I'm extremely happy about with Google Fi (just a user, no affiliation).
At $10/GB, the data may be a bit pricey -- but all data is prorated. I don't use data much at all, so my $30/mo. plan (unlimited call, 1GB data) is almost always *less* than $30/mo. Plus, international data is the same price.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the idea of posting all voting results publicly, where you are identified by something like a randomly generated UUID given to you at the time of voting (or some hash of your various personal information like name and SSN, etc.).
Although it doesn't address "extra" votes, you would at least be able to verify that your vote got counted as you intended, which is something...
I certainly would recommend checking out Google Fi. (I'm not affiliated with them other than being a customer.)
The base fee (unlimited US talk and text) is $20/mo., data is $10/GB but you *only* pay for what you use (and for me, taxes & fees work out to under $3/mo.). The data isn't the cheapest, so it might be a horrible plan for you, depending on your use. But it's very nice in that going 1MB over your plan costs you $0.01 -- and going 500MB *under* your plan gives you a $5 deduction on the next bill. My bills tend to be in the $25-$35/mo. range.
The icing on the cake is that international data is the same price, and international texting is free. Calls are $0.20/minute over cell and generally free over wifi. (This is for the supported 135+ countries.) Plus, you can get additional data-only SIMs for free (same data pool) to slap in old phones.
The two cases are very different. Your dystopic scene is in regards to the content production, whereas the common carrier comment was in reference to the distribution infrastructure.
/. agrees on what those are (namely, it should be fast and low latency both ways, with faster/lower always being better). Food, on the other hand, is a very personal thing.
For the Internet scenario, I think we all agree that, yes, it is a Bad Idea if all websites/content providers (news sites, *media, etc.) are merged into one government-run conglomerate. However, going back to food, the fact that the government maintains the roads which are used to deliver food has not, personally, been a problem for me.
Variety and choice tend to be good things -- but whatever we're doing now isn't working perfectly, as not everyone has access to fast internet. Fiber/cable/etc., like transportation networks, are defined as Good by a relatively narrow set of parameters, and I'm pretty sure 99+% of
...but isn't this the very definition of small government? It sounds like this legislation uses *large* (state) government to take away powers from *small* (municipal) government.
From the standard arguments of small government that I've heard, this sounds like a very bad thing. Shouldn't the People vote on these things through their small municipal government, where your vote buys you more substantial representation? (It looks like the smallest city in Virginia is around 4k people.)
But that's only half the issue -- the convenience is also extremely important to some people.
Many people carry around modest power bricks in their backpacks, which they basically only use for charging their phone. I know that batteries are getting better in efficiency, and voltage converters can be very efficient, but it strikes me as fundamentally wrong to have to carry around a separate battery, power supply, and cable -- all so that you can discharge one battery to fill up another battery. Why not cut the middle man and just carry around two batteries?
Extending life is certainly one good reason to have removable batteries, but there are convenience factors, too.
Not to mention obscene contrast ratios (which is implied by your post, I guess) -- some claim 1,000,000:1, others seem to claim infinite.
I have an LCD (backlit) TV and a OLED phone -- in a dark room, displaying a black image on the TV will cause a noticeable amount of bleedthrough light. A black image on my OLED phone, on the other hand, can only be described by Nigel Tufnel.
But I doubt wonder if it could hold up doing that *all day*. Battery charging issues aside, I'm not convinced a Tesla or a Faraday could be driven to the limit for 24 hours straight, whereas the great race cars could still (mostly) outperform a Tesla or a Faraday, and do it (hopefully) for 24 hours.
According to Wikipedia, the Porsche 917 could do 0-100km/h (62mph) in 2.3s, 0-200km/h (124mph) in 5.3s (!!!), and top out around 390km/h (240mph). (Admittedly it was not raced until 1970, and the quoted numbers may be from later in the 70s.)
Pretty amazing car...they even used the tubular frame as oil piping, saving the need for dedicated oil lines.
I'm on Google Fi, and although I'm overall very happy with the service, flaky networks cause no end of pain.
I use hangouts for SMS (so that I can read them on my computer, too) -- however, this appears (???) to require a decent network connection on the phone, to the extent that sometimes I can make calls but cannot send SMS messages (!). I don't know much about telephony, but I suspect it's because hangouts uses a proper TCP/IP connection, rather than the old school SMS protocol (and I'm guessing the phone calls from the stock dialer make standard -- not VoIP -- calls, such that they work on marginal connections). The fact that it doesn't seem to offer any sort of SMS fallback is very annoying.
Additionally, adding a reminder when I have poor cell service is like pulling teeth...I'm sorry, but adding a reminder should not require an LTE internet connection...
Sounds like this would make a great little media box, but it's a shame it doesn't (appear to) have HDMI CEC support -- it looks like adapters cost about as much as a Raspberry Pi (which supports HDMI CEC out of the box!).
It seems like a silly feature, but it's been incredibly useful for my RPi media center -- the ability to switch between an app (Yatse) and a physical remote is very handy.
Would the rich and powerful hire people to keep track of those who had compatible organs and arrange suitable 'accidents' in case that rich & powerful person needed one or more of their organs?
But what's to stop that from happening now? At least where I live in the USA, we have a little donor sticker on our license. It shouldn't be hard to get a list of donors (either legitimately or by paying someone at a liquor store an extra buck to log every ID checked) and arrange for 'accidents' for them.
But I think the real issue here is that your nightmarish scenario -- and I do agree it's nightmarish -- relies on organs being a scarce commodity, which ostensibly will not be the case going forward in France. So there's no need to kill someone when you're drowning in viable organs. As macabre as that phrasing is, I think it's a Good Thing. Personally, I make a huge distinction between dead people and living people, and I think that our default actions should favor the living. Should the deceased specifically not want that, they have -- er, had? -- a way to change that.
But isn't this the technological equivalent of saying you need a driver's license to drive? If Uber is allowed to drive without one, yes, it may be safe -- but does that mean I have the right to attach a Raspberry Pi to my car and let it loose on public roads?
I think it's pretty reasonable to require that a human have a license, and I don't really see why the same shouldn't apply to an "autonomous driver" (i.e., the particular hardware/software/etc. implementation used).
For the future, EVs also help, but are not required - insofar as they're mainly nighttime loads, steady draws, and easy targets for charge rate modulation (or even reversal). Nobody cares exactly when their vehicle takes power from the wall, so long as it has a full charge when they told it to be done by. The more flexible they let their car be, the cheaper they get their power for. But again, this sort of arrangement being wirespread is not a requirement - just a bonus.
I've also wondered if the whole smart device thing could end up being a net bonus -- for example, during the cheap hours, freezers/electric water heaters/dishwashers/etc. could do their thing. Most of this could of course be done with a simple timer, but having some amount of communication with the grid and the personal schedule of the user could be more effective.
I dont trust any company which at its very beginning has such a megalomaniacal view of itself that it makes its logo "Do no Evil" .
Fair enough, but what large, successful company *doesn't* have the opportunity to be evil? I don't view that as megalomaniacal, I view it as taking the viewpoint that you may one day be wildly successful. I'm not suggesting that they've adhered to this motto exactly, but compared to banks, agrochem and pharma (in particular Monsanto's pending merger with Bayer), the food/tobacco industry (in particular Altria)...
Yes, it's a mildly disturbing motto, but at least they're confronting it head-on. Just my opinion though.
They must mean eight (numbered 0-7, of course).
They barely covered a couple of items of evidence in that.
Fair enough, but there appear to be blatantly fabricated "evidence" from the pizzagaters (photos taken from random websites, etc.). There's a huge difference between innocent mistakes or sloppy journalism, and intentional fabrication. And while we're at it, what ever happened to the Fun Time Kidz Day Care conspiracy?
/. doesn't let us delete our posts, we'll have some sort of record of this discussion in a year or two when the whole thing ends -- either with serious prison sentences or with nothing.
But hey, maybe you're right and we should take these claims seriously. And since
That entire thing was FILLED with evidence...
Not according to the New York Times.
--oh, wait, you can only download on mobile devices?!? Shit, what's the point?
I assume you could use this with an Android TV stick (or use a phone with HDMI out).
You know how stupid the average person is? Dy[sic] definition, half the people are stupider than that...
was what I took issue with, whereas I would agree with something like, "about half the people are stupider than average".
/., after all :)
Yes, I'm being pedantic, but this is
I don't think that's correct -- "average" (generally) refers to the mean, not the median.
Looking at the temperatures (data, linking page), the annual average global temperature (as defined and measured by NASA) is indeed going up (I plotted the values from 2000 through 2015, and got a slope of around 0.015 C/year for a linear least-squares fit).
Regarding hurricanes, etc., I think -- and I could be wrong, I'm no climatologist -- the relevant thing is the higher moments (e.g., variance), not the mean. That is to say, given that we have such a poor understanding of climate, a prediction such as, "there will absolutely be more hurricanes going forward" is a tricky statement, but something like, "there will be a greater variance in XYZ" is (perhaps...) a safer statement. Whether (weather?) or not this is the case, I'm not sure...
The record-smashing heat led to searing heatwaves across the year: a new high of 42.7C was recorded in Pretoria, South Africa in January; Mae Hong Son in Thailand saw 44.6C on 28 April; Phalodi in India reached 51.0C in May and Mitribah in Kuwait recorded 54.0C in July. Parts of Arctic Russia also saw extreme warming - 6C to 7C above average.
For instance, at least in the US, one doesn't (AFAIK...) have the "right" to call in a bomb threat. This is, if you like, removing some freedom of speech -- but I think it's entirely justifiable. So, what if someone names their SSID, "I_put_a_bomb_in_PS118" -- should we allow that? What about, "I will kill your family, $NameOfNeighbor"?
And regarding the Franklin quote, I believe the passage is
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
(my emphasis) Freedom of speech is, in my mind, essential; but one has to balance the "freedom to cause legitimate concern for personal safety" on the one hand, and the "freedom to feel safe using common-sense metrics" on the other. (Whether or not this particular case falls under those categories is debatable, of course.)
That said, in this particular instance, I agree that it's a bit over-the-top, but I could imagine a similar, more malicious situation where this sort of action makes some amount of sense. In such cases, a catch-all "the government said I couldn't do this there goes all my freedoms" attitude can lack some of the necessary subtleties, at least in my opinion.
The police are just fucking lazy. Instead of doing their job, they want the people to do it for them.
...and if they don't at least make an effort to use technology to assist, someone would be accusing them of being stuck in the last century.
Maybe -- just maybe -- this is a difficult issue that requires some subtlety, with an informed opinion being somewhere between "use any means to lock up the murderers" and "anything done by police = 1984".
A beowulf cluster, perhaps...
This is one of the things I'm extremely happy about with Google Fi (just a user, no affiliation).
At $10/GB, the data may be a bit pricey -- but all data is prorated. I don't use data much at all, so my $30/mo. plan (unlimited call, 1GB data) is almost always *less* than $30/mo. Plus, international data is the same price.