Neither I or my colleagues are in any way anti-social or socially awkward. Being a developer is a job the same as any other.
Well, those who are anti-social or socially awkward certainly don't work in sales. I've met quite a few that don't particularly seem to appreciate human contact, they're happiest when they can get some requirements or specifications and disappear off to design and code by themselves. I've met one developer who've been permanently banned from ever attending customer meetings. I've met one who lacked pretty much all social antennas and could show up to a customer meeting in bike pants. I've met one that you can barely get two words out of and only about work. I've had a boss who's had to address an developer's hygiene. And it only really takes a few oddballs to forever define what IT looks like to everyone else.
The computer does exactly what you instruct it to do, that's easy while people are this mysterious black box they can't seem to relate well to. Consider it this way, IT allows some fairly dysfunctional people to function, even to the point where I'd call them borderline autistic while in most other businesses I think they'd be out of a job. If you're in say a consulting firm you don't really see those, because interacting with clients is part of the job. But in most large companies there are a few of them. People who in many cases are very good at their job, so I don't want to disrespect them. But it's a bit sad that those maybe 5% define how the other 95% are perceived too.
Yes. No. The brief answer, due to piracy the US decided the owner of the ship didn't have to be convicted. As long as the ship was used in a crime, it could be seized and sold to recoup damages. Up until prohibition, this was an obscure niche. Then they started to hit hard on cars transporting booze, buildings and land containing stills producing booze, basically if you've rent or lent your property to a third party that used it for something illegal you were fucked. In the drug war, they stretched it further seizing motels where renters sold drugs and even family houses where their kid sold drugs or seizing a rented sail boat because they smuggled one joint. Really, one joint.
Today, they've stretched it even further, they just allege that it's probably some kind of illegal money and you have to prove it's not even when you're right there and claim ownership of it as your own property. As in, your fourth amendment rights don't apply until you prove it's your property so the fourth amendment applies. Honestly, I don't know why they even give a fuck about warrants anymore. Just break down the door and later in court argue that they were charging the door, not your property. It wasn't protected until you claimed they were illegally entering, of course by then you're already tazered as a potential threat. You lose, bro.
Here in Norway it's only slightly over 100 years ago (1913) we decided women were competent enough to vote, today they outnumber and outperform us in higher education. Did genetics change like crazy in 3-4 generations? No. It's an attitude/culture problem, not a racial/genetic problem. Adopted kids from far away don't seem to be significantly different when raised by local parents in the local culture, I'm not sure it's 0% nature, 100% nurture but when it comes to things like this it's very close. Kids that never had a father, who don't know how to be a father surrounded by other absentee fathers who back each other up. I still remember the crazy debates when we first reserved time for paternity leave in 1993, use it or lose it. Turns out both dads and kids survive dad changing diapers just fine.
There's actually been a lot of research into this and even when you try to correct for formal differences deadbeat parents often have deadbeat kids and deadbeat districts make kids underperform. It's in the whole attitude you get from the community, if you got nobody with a good work ethic who'll drive you and support you then you end up slacking with the other slackers. And it's very much in the attitude about who's cool and not or what jobs are respected or not. Maybe it's odd but I never had anyone at my later schools who were thinking of becoming a pro sports person, they usually went to dedicated institutions there was nothing like "college football" at least not other than a team which happened to consist of college students who weren't looking to become pros.
It should also be noted that the EU is also for a large part about making one classification instead of 27. So that one country's business doesn't make banana classes 1, 2, 3 and another country classes A, B, C with different requirements. It doesn't make them particular good, but at least there's less of them.
Obviously Ted Cruz has no idea how the internet works. Any country can set up a top level domain and authorise anyone that they want as registrars. This isn't something that is within the power of the United States to decide.
Pot, meet kettle. The DNS system asks the root servers what TLDs are valid, if your new TLD isn't accepted it doesn't exist. Sure a country could fork the root servers and force ISPs to redirect their citizens to their root but effectively it wouldn't exist for anyone else. Same as I can set up a domain on my local network and call it whatever, doesn't have any effect on the outside world. And then it's really just a country intranet, not the Internet as we know it.
Hrm - how long have governments, corporations, and cartels been trying to kill Bittorrent off again?
The government doesn't care that you download Game of Thrones or Justin Bieber, really they don't. It's half of "bread and circus" and a huge tech industry driver, despite the lip service they give the content industry. Share something really illegal on BitTorrent and you'll soon have cops knocking at your door. Or in your door. I'm sure you've heard of the four boxes of liberty, the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo box. Conversely, those who seek to oppress don't really care unless one of those is threatened. If most people listen to mainstream media, they own the soap box. The first past the post system locks down the ballot box. The legal system keeps the jury's power a guarded secret. As for the ammo box, a few guns are no match for a para-military police.
Look at modern day authoritarian states, it's not the Soviet Union anymore where they try to keep totalitarian control. They've found it's completely pointless, for the most part the average person in China cares about the same things as in the US as they did in the Roman Empire, if they have a decent paycheck and having a good time they're not going to topple the government. Both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union came because life had turned to shit, while China's government seems rock solid and Tiananmen Square is now 25+ years ago. The individuals are like ants compared to the government, you don't really care what they do unless they're ganging up to threaten you.
The "old engineers" use pen and paper like that because they work faster than any computer-based document or diagramming tool can handle. It's not a problem with learning the new tools. The problem is that once they've learned the new tools, the new tools are still way fucking slower than a pen and paper.
Oh please, a lot of old farts refused to learn how to use a keyboard so the secretary had to type things up for them. I even known some accountants didn't really trust anything but their mechanical calculators. For the longest time, my mom wouldn't use the microwave because OMG radiation. I agree, there's certain kinds of sketches that are done better on paper. But I also know a guy who'll print 50 pages to add a few comments on paper and when the next revision is out, obviously the old is thrown away. He claims it's better, but I think it's like reading dead tree newspapers in the morning, it's just feels good. After a while you get used to anything.
So sharing with one particular third party for a technical purpose also implies consent for sharing with every other third party in the known universe, in particular law enforcement agencies? Does the simple fact that more than two parties are involved complete erase the right to privacy?
Well they've drawn an imaginary line in the sand and said content is protected, metadata is not. For example with phone numbers they can get the number you dialed without a warrant, but if you dial a menu after connecting they do. So for IP traffic that means to and from address, email it's from and to address and so on. The reason I said imaginary line is that the full URL string is considered specific content, but the site is just metadata on who you connected to. So if you visit "news.bbc.co.uk" that's up for grabs, but "bbc.co.uk/news" and they only get "bbc.co.uk" while "/news" is content.
I've no doubt we can make ten or a hundred nano-vacuum tubes atom by atom. But compared to many billions of transistors? It looks like EUV litography @ 7nm will be ready by the end of the decade, but in the 2020s I suspect we'll hardly see any progress at all.
He certainly didn't find himself constrained by common sense.
Trial judges mainly deal with matters of fact like did you hit that guy and steal his wallet, how badly was he hurt, how much was stolen, are you a first time offender and what's the sentencing guidelines for that. Their primary job is to make sure the legal system is consistent and procedure is followed so if there's precedent, even one leading to an unreasonable outcome they're going to follow that almost no matter what. A good trial judge is one that doesn't create conflicting judgments where there was none, particularly since one trial court can't set precedent for anyone. If they don't like it, they're likely to give you ammunition for an appeal but they won't challenge it.
Instead it got taken to the appeals court, which found that the rule was not absolute. That precedent is now binding on the trial courts who can use this in similar cases. The trial judge knew that, if there was a problem with the law that needed fixing here it was above his authority to fix it. But judges can't just say pass, I'm escalating this case. They have to make a judgement and let the loser appeal it. It's entirely possible that the same judge would have made a different decision as an appellate judge instead of a trial judge, but in his role there wasn't really any other choice.
None of them would have helped here, since the actual facts never went to court. Basically if someone files a crazy lawsuit and motions you must respond or lose by default. The purpose is to avoid stalling and to get as many things as possible settled so the court can only deal with the issues in dispute, but the "fallback strategy" is not good. If the motion is not answered it should go to the court for a court order, if the court order is not answered it should go to contempt. Having a "non-action" count as admission should be a last resort.
Nope. Robots don't need a law to preserve themselves, robots are designed to perform a task/job, robots don't need AI in the traditional sense, with self preservation code anymore than my toaster does. Sure, your don't want it destroying itself in the process of doing it's job; but not destroying itself falls within operating parameters.
If you build an autonomous car you put in tons of "self-preservation" code to make sure it doesn't drive off cliffs or into trees, because it's perfectly capable of destroying itself and what it does isn't a fixed process like a toaster. The more generic they get, the more self-preserving, self-repairing we probably want them to be. It does not take long for a neural network with a goal function of "stay operating for as long as possible" to assign a positive score to evading shut-down attempts, even if it's by accident like hiding in a cave or breaking off the antenna so the shutdown command doesn't work. Or a form of evolutionary algorithm where child robots are programmed based on the most successful parent robots, imagine a bit flip turning the shutdown command off. I'm pretty sure immortality is an evolutionary advantage. Or you can imagine an AI reprogramming robots to do things in the real world, like spreading beyond a closed network. It's about as the real as the other sci-fi...
Setting a bomb off in an area where people are, even if it's "just" the scanning area, is very effective. It means you can't predict where the next attack will be because there's no "this is a target but that isn't" any more. The goal is fear and disruption. Any deaths are seen as just a bonus to them.
If you just want to find a crowd, why would you need to go to an airport? You can find those at hundreds of different places. The point is to create a massive overreaction, but then the threat has to be narrow enough that it's feasible like say flying or taking the subway. If they hit a mall, it's just not realistically possible to create a "Mall Security Agency" based on the TSA with security checkpoints. People won't stop going to malls and if they start rationalizing it like there's 300 dead in a population of 300 million, that's "struck by lightning" odds then the terror effect doesn't take hold.
Got a C64 when I was 7, sure it also had games but: 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!" 20 GOTO 10 RUN
I found the way I could manipulate the computer to do stuff to be just as fascinating as the games I could play. I remember even in second grade I knew 2^3 = 2*2*2 = 8 which I don't think school covered until 7th grade, because I'd read the manual page to page to figure out what it could do. I primarily read the instruction manual in Norwegian but with the programming language itself being English and a few things being lost in translation and all the games being in English it was also a huge motivation to learn a second language. And the games I played weren't all that impressive, many were one skilled man in a garage.
IF-THEN-ELSE taught me a lot about binary logic, trying to make a balloon sprite move across a 320x256 screen where the first 256x256 was accessible one way and the last 64x256 a different way was my first introduction to binary. I remember finally being able to make a balloon go smoothly on the diagonal from one corner of the screen to the other and I was so proud. It was an awfully lot harder than it sounds because of the programming model.
There's no assurance it would happen again: People can only want so much stuff. The environmental consequences of a society where everything is disposable are also quite bad enough as things are.
Take a look at rich people, their mansions and vacations and other extravaganza. I very much doubt there's any real upper bound on what people want. The environmental consequences are another matter, but if we want to work on that we should work on halting population growth first and becoming "greener" second, a hundred billion people will pollute more than one billion.
3. Not really socialists. Labour party (maybe more like democrats) were kicked out of power. Norway now has a conservative government. (maybe more between democrats and republicans)
No. Not even close. Even the right-most party of our coalition is definitively to the left of the democratic party, maybe if they elected Bernie Sanders and took a big step to the left they'd be getting close. The labour party and their coalition partners including the "socialist left" (SV) are so far off the charts I don't know how to describe it to an American. They're not totalitarian, but so egalitarian that... one of their youth politicians seriously wanted "equal pay for work". Not "equal pay for equal work", but what I just said. They want us out of NATO, if we just don't threaten anyone nobody will threaten us. That really worked out great for us during WWII, we totally didn't threaten Germany in any way and they totally didn't occupy us for five years. Sigh.
Maybe I'll try for a Star Trek analogy since this is/., in one of the TNG episodes Q was stripped of his power and chose the human race as his sanctuary when he had nothing. Well, if I was stripped of everything and had to pick a country on earth I'd pick Norway. Nowhere else are you treated with that much pity, this much aid, so few demands and so little resentment. Even when we had a mass murderer (Breivik) killing almost 70 of our teens and a dozen more in total the worst that happen was that one person threw a shoe - and he apoligized to the court. I've heard it said about Gandhi you'd hardly believe such a man could exist, well Norway is pretty much the same when it comes to nations. I'm amazed that our naivety has gotten us so far.
Governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe AS WELL as protecting free speech. (...) But would you rather have a government that learns about plans to bomb half the country and go "Meh, better not stop them from doing that, they have a right to say they're going to."?
This is the position of Bush and the NSA, either you support us or you support the terrorists. No, the government has no obligation to keep their citizens safe because that would imply that every time a crime is committed the government has failed. If I walk out the door and punch the nearest person I see, that's a failure. If I find a rock and throw it through a window, that's a failure. Sure I expect crime to be investigated, prosecuted and the guilty convicted but pretending the government could or should have the power to prevent all crime is folly. In that case, we'd all be locked in padded rooms.
In fact, the consequences of even trying are so wide open for abuse that they in the Bill of Rights made an explicit amendment so the government can't just search through anything they want for no reason, like opening all the letters or in modern day terms listening in to all the phone calls. But in a beautiful end-run around the constitution they've found that if you run a secret program nobody knows their rights are being violated and if you're exposed you can use national security to prevent any evidence from seeing the light of day. So with no standing and no evidence, the cases will be dismissed.
Snowden, Facebook, "the Cloud", Windows 10... it's pretty clear the frog is already cooked and couldn't jump out if it wanted to. Unless you want to be a modern-day Amish stuck in the 20th century your life will be tracked and monitored. Last century we saw great advances in democracy and freedom, the last decade has been ambivalent with the Democracy index flat. The way technology is going, I expect this to be the century of the authoritarian regimes. All this massive surveillance has given governments the power to stomp out any resistance in its infancy.
With the same code base as Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Embedded Automotive 7 is an extensible technology platform that allows automakers and suppliers to deliver visually rich in-car experiences with a shorter time to market. Bringing the power of Windows to the car, Windows Embedded Automotive 7 includes a large set of integrated and flexible middleware components that allow automotive solutions to scale across a broad range of automotive makes and models. Drivers benefit from the rich user interface and features including state-of-the-art hands-free Bluetooth phone communications, speech commands, touch input, advanced dashboard systems and more.
I don't think they'll be getting into the actual driving software, but I think they think that'll be an isolated set of sensors/logic and they can deliver the rest. That Microsoft will enable autonomous cars was a bit hubris though, if other companies enable autonomous cars Microsoft can deliver the interface. Not that I'm entirely sure why you'd want to, I think it'll be like mobile. A part of the high end market will go with the Apple experience, the rest will use something Android-ish and Windows Car will follow the footsteps of Windows Phone.
And believing nothing exists outside our current system is just as much a faith as believing something exists outside. The only logically sound stance is uncertainty about what if anything exists beyond our perception.
Actually philosophers have long since speculated whether what we perceive is reality or not, from Aristotle to the Matrix. I think the brief answer is no, there's no definitive proof that any experience we have is really real, not even our perception of space and time or the laws of nature and certainly not whether there's anything before, in addition/parallel to or after this existence. If you want to treat all uncertainty as equal then you know absolutely nothing about anything and everything is possible.
Science and logic doesn't really dispute this, but they say that in the infinite space of what is possible we'll apply evidence and deduction to assign credibility. If you tell me "I saw a bear in the woods" I might think that yes, there are bears and bears to live in woods and you seem sincere and you don't seem to be hallucinating so maybe you did. If you tell me "I saw a unicorn in the woods" I probably won't believe you though. I mean it could be that you found a genuine unicorn, but it seems unlikely. Most likely you're wrong or someone glued a horn on a horse or you're trying to pull some kind of prank on me.
The best of this we try to constrain and isolate, making hypothesizes with control groups and controlled lab experiments. And we try to refine them into a set of rules for how the world works, on the assumption that there are rules and that we can interpolate and extrapolate so if we test gravity on a 500g and 1kg weight a 750g weight won't suddenly float in thin air. And it'll work if we move the experiment a meter to the left or tomorrow if we do it again. None of this is definitive proof, just accumulating evidence. And we share the methods so others can test it too, not just the results.
If you think you hear God speak to you, well maybe you're convinced. But when I consider all the people who've been hearing voices and have had nothing but mental problems and hallucinations, there's no way you could credibly convince me it really happened. To me it's like claiming you saw a unicorn, unless you have extraordinary proof the logical stance for me is to assume you are wrong. If you think you've seen magic, I think it's an illusion. If you think it's a miracle, I think it's random chance at extreme odds. One in a million events happen when we got billions of people.
And no, the number of gullible people you have already convinced is not more proof. Particularly not if they were simple people living 1000+ years ago full of superstitious beliefs we've since dismissed as pure fiction, passed down from an early age long before you learned critical thought. Particularly not when your holy book goes against evidence, saying we should dismiss the things we can observe because they're the devil trying to confuse us and lead us away from the faith. And I'm not just talking about evolution, any "young earth" geologist would have enough cognitive dissonance to split the atom.
I can see why Linux and MacOS are gaining ground. Now if we can only get games to run under Linux and MacOS (real games, not ones released 6 years ago) and that will be the fall of Microsoft.
Not among gamers, latest Steam hardware & software survey says 0.84% (-0.06%) Linux market share, it's been trending down for a while now after a high of a little over 1%. Unless Valve can get some traction going with the Steam Machines, developers will soon lose interest.
Freezing population growth would play all kinds of hell on the monetary system
Actually population growth is pretty much frozen in all first world economies. It's consistently the poorest countries that have the most explosive population growth, because we've given them just enough food and medicines to make their kids grow up but not so much that two kids is enough, better to have five kids support you when they become adults. And a generation from now all those five kids want help for their five kids each, the number of poor people escalates faster than the rich can pull them out of poverty and make them stop multiplying like rabbits. China and India is clearly past the top and extreme poverty is falling like a stone, but Africa is just growing and not improving.
I want a TV that specifically does NOT have those "smart" features. Putting a EULA-requiring TV with a camera, microphone and internet connection in the bedroom. What could possibly go wrong?
If you don't hook it up to the Internet, not much really. Sure you're paying for something you don't use, but I'm guessing a cheap ARM processor and HW decoding chip doesn't really add much to the total. At least nobody seems to release non-smart TVs to undercut the competition.
The fourth amendment says nothing about "third parties." Not one word.
Nor does it really say anything about surveillance or privacy, only searches and seizures. What third parties record is not your private information, if the cops want to see a store's surveillance tapes that's up to the store owner not the people on the tape. When you dial a phone number you're volunteering the information to the phone company, nobody's accessing it by force. A search means accessing what's behind closed doors and sealed containers, if a cop wanders by your yard and you grow pot in plain sight that's not a search under the law.
That doesn't mean the phone company have to make a list over phone numbers you call nor do they have to hand it over, but it's not an unconstitutional search nor seizure if they did. It's information you've given them that they may or may not pass on, just like a person you wrote a letter to might take it to the police. And that's the basis of the third party doctrine, essentially.
The problem is that the law doesn't recognize that sharing it with a third party does not mean it's generally available. Who I call is a private matter between me and the phone company, just like the contents are a private matter between me and the person at the other end. That who I call may not be disclosed to third parties except for lawful warrants should be part of the terms of service and there's no good reason why the phone company should be permitted or compelled to disclose it otherwise.
They would probably burn pretty hot, but yes, the possibilities are rather startling. It will be an interesting day when SSDs overtake HDDs on practical metrics such as data density, and even more so on price. Any predictions on when that is going to happen?
There's already 200GB MicroSD cards and 16TB 2.5" SSDs for sale, so I'm pretty sure density is a long won match. Price/GB is another matter, but HDDs don't scale down. I just checked and if you only need 128 GB of space, you pay the same for a HDD as for a SSD. Sure, the HDD will be 500GB but if you don't need it because cloud, streaming etc. you can't save more by buying a smaller HDD. And if you don't want one for a boot drive, you have the budget for a 256GB SSD before SSD+HDD becomes cheaper. I really don't mind HDDs for bulk media, we play movies from discs or stream them over internet connections that are much slower than that.
It's obviously not meant for plebians. It's meant for the programmer who makes >$200 an hour, i.e. the time lost to compiling is worth more than this extreme high-end CPU is.
Oh please, according to OpenBenchmark you can compile the Linux 4.3 kernel in 62 seconds on an Intel Core i7-5960X. Unless you have a developer who just whacks the build button to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks - which is not the kind of person you should be paying >$200/hour - then almost any kind of employee perk or complimentary service would be more effective than 0.1 second off his compile time.
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Neither I or my colleagues are in any way anti-social or socially awkward. Being a developer is a job the same as any other.
Well, those who are anti-social or socially awkward certainly don't work in sales. I've met quite a few that don't particularly seem to appreciate human contact, they're happiest when they can get some requirements or specifications and disappear off to design and code by themselves. I've met one developer who've been permanently banned from ever attending customer meetings. I've met one who lacked pretty much all social antennas and could show up to a customer meeting in bike pants. I've met one that you can barely get two words out of and only about work. I've had a boss who's had to address an developer's hygiene. And it only really takes a few oddballs to forever define what IT looks like to everyone else.
The computer does exactly what you instruct it to do, that's easy while people are this mysterious black box they can't seem to relate well to. Consider it this way, IT allows some fairly dysfunctional people to function, even to the point where I'd call them borderline autistic while in most other businesses I think they'd be out of a job. If you're in say a consulting firm you don't really see those, because interacting with clients is part of the job. But in most large companies there are a few of them. People who in many cases are very good at their job, so I don't want to disrespect them. But it's a bit sad that those maybe 5% define how the other 95% are perceived too.
Yes. No. The brief answer, due to piracy the US decided the owner of the ship didn't have to be convicted. As long as the ship was used in a crime, it could be seized and sold to recoup damages. Up until prohibition, this was an obscure niche. Then they started to hit hard on cars transporting booze, buildings and land containing stills producing booze, basically if you've rent or lent your property to a third party that used it for something illegal you were fucked. In the drug war, they stretched it further seizing motels where renters sold drugs and even family houses where their kid sold drugs or seizing a rented sail boat because they smuggled one joint. Really, one joint.
Today, they've stretched it even further, they just allege that it's probably some kind of illegal money and you have to prove it's not even when you're right there and claim ownership of it as your own property. As in, your fourth amendment rights don't apply until you prove it's your property so the fourth amendment applies. Honestly, I don't know why they even give a fuck about warrants anymore. Just break down the door and later in court argue that they were charging the door, not your property. It wasn't protected until you claimed they were illegally entering, of course by then you're already tazered as a potential threat. You lose, bro.
Here in Norway it's only slightly over 100 years ago (1913) we decided women were competent enough to vote, today they outnumber and outperform us in higher education. Did genetics change like crazy in 3-4 generations? No. It's an attitude/culture problem, not a racial/genetic problem. Adopted kids from far away don't seem to be significantly different when raised by local parents in the local culture, I'm not sure it's 0% nature, 100% nurture but when it comes to things like this it's very close. Kids that never had a father, who don't know how to be a father surrounded by other absentee fathers who back each other up. I still remember the crazy debates when we first reserved time for paternity leave in 1993, use it or lose it. Turns out both dads and kids survive dad changing diapers just fine.
There's actually been a lot of research into this and even when you try to correct for formal differences deadbeat parents often have deadbeat kids and deadbeat districts make kids underperform. It's in the whole attitude you get from the community, if you got nobody with a good work ethic who'll drive you and support you then you end up slacking with the other slackers. And it's very much in the attitude about who's cool and not or what jobs are respected or not. Maybe it's odd but I never had anyone at my later schools who were thinking of becoming a pro sports person, they usually went to dedicated institutions there was nothing like "college football" at least not other than a team which happened to consist of college students who weren't looking to become pros.
It should also be noted that the EU is also for a large part about making one classification instead of 27. So that one country's business doesn't make banana classes 1, 2, 3 and another country classes A, B, C with different requirements. It doesn't make them particular good, but at least there's less of them.
Obviously Ted Cruz has no idea how the internet works. Any country can set up a top level domain and authorise anyone that they want as registrars. This isn't something that is within the power of the United States to decide.
Pot, meet kettle. The DNS system asks the root servers what TLDs are valid, if your new TLD isn't accepted it doesn't exist. Sure a country could fork the root servers and force ISPs to redirect their citizens to their root but effectively it wouldn't exist for anyone else. Same as I can set up a domain on my local network and call it whatever, doesn't have any effect on the outside world. And then it's really just a country intranet, not the Internet as we know it.
Hrm - how long have governments, corporations, and cartels been trying to kill Bittorrent off again?
The government doesn't care that you download Game of Thrones or Justin Bieber, really they don't. It's half of "bread and circus" and a huge tech industry driver, despite the lip service they give the content industry. Share something really illegal on BitTorrent and you'll soon have cops knocking at your door. Or in your door. I'm sure you've heard of the four boxes of liberty, the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo box. Conversely, those who seek to oppress don't really care unless one of those is threatened. If most people listen to mainstream media, they own the soap box. The first past the post system locks down the ballot box. The legal system keeps the jury's power a guarded secret. As for the ammo box, a few guns are no match for a para-military police.
Look at modern day authoritarian states, it's not the Soviet Union anymore where they try to keep totalitarian control. They've found it's completely pointless, for the most part the average person in China cares about the same things as in the US as they did in the Roman Empire, if they have a decent paycheck and having a good time they're not going to topple the government. Both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union came because life had turned to shit, while China's government seems rock solid and Tiananmen Square is now 25+ years ago. The individuals are like ants compared to the government, you don't really care what they do unless they're ganging up to threaten you.
The "old engineers" use pen and paper like that because they work faster than any computer-based document or diagramming tool can handle. It's not a problem with learning the new tools. The problem is that once they've learned the new tools, the new tools are still way fucking slower than a pen and paper.
Oh please, a lot of old farts refused to learn how to use a keyboard so the secretary had to type things up for them. I even known some accountants didn't really trust anything but their mechanical calculators. For the longest time, my mom wouldn't use the microwave because OMG radiation. I agree, there's certain kinds of sketches that are done better on paper. But I also know a guy who'll print 50 pages to add a few comments on paper and when the next revision is out, obviously the old is thrown away. He claims it's better, but I think it's like reading dead tree newspapers in the morning, it's just feels good. After a while you get used to anything.
So sharing with one particular third party for a technical purpose also implies consent for sharing with every other third party in the known universe, in particular law enforcement agencies? Does the simple fact that more than two parties are involved complete erase the right to privacy?
Well they've drawn an imaginary line in the sand and said content is protected, metadata is not. For example with phone numbers they can get the number you dialed without a warrant, but if you dial a menu after connecting they do. So for IP traffic that means to and from address, email it's from and to address and so on. The reason I said imaginary line is that the full URL string is considered specific content, but the site is just metadata on who you connected to. So if you visit "news.bbc.co.uk" that's up for grabs, but "bbc.co.uk/news" and they only get "bbc.co.uk" while "/news" is content.
I've no doubt we can make ten or a hundred nano-vacuum tubes atom by atom. But compared to many billions of transistors? It looks like EUV litography @ 7nm will be ready by the end of the decade, but in the 2020s I suspect we'll hardly see any progress at all.
He certainly didn't find himself constrained by common sense.
Trial judges mainly deal with matters of fact like did you hit that guy and steal his wallet, how badly was he hurt, how much was stolen, are you a first time offender and what's the sentencing guidelines for that. Their primary job is to make sure the legal system is consistent and procedure is followed so if there's precedent, even one leading to an unreasonable outcome they're going to follow that almost no matter what. A good trial judge is one that doesn't create conflicting judgments where there was none, particularly since one trial court can't set precedent for anyone. If they don't like it, they're likely to give you ammunition for an appeal but they won't challenge it.
Instead it got taken to the appeals court, which found that the rule was not absolute. That precedent is now binding on the trial courts who can use this in similar cases. The trial judge knew that, if there was a problem with the law that needed fixing here it was above his authority to fix it. But judges can't just say pass, I'm escalating this case. They have to make a judgement and let the loser appeal it. It's entirely possible that the same judge would have made a different decision as an appellate judge instead of a trial judge, but in his role there wasn't really any other choice.
None of them would have helped here, since the actual facts never went to court. Basically if someone files a crazy lawsuit and motions you must respond or lose by default. The purpose is to avoid stalling and to get as many things as possible settled so the court can only deal with the issues in dispute, but the "fallback strategy" is not good. If the motion is not answered it should go to the court for a court order, if the court order is not answered it should go to contempt. Having a "non-action" count as admission should be a last resort.
Nope. Robots don't need a law to preserve themselves, robots are designed to perform a task/job, robots don't need AI in the traditional sense, with self preservation code anymore than my toaster does. Sure, your don't want it destroying itself in the process of doing it's job; but not destroying itself falls within operating parameters.
If you build an autonomous car you put in tons of "self-preservation" code to make sure it doesn't drive off cliffs or into trees, because it's perfectly capable of destroying itself and what it does isn't a fixed process like a toaster. The more generic they get, the more self-preserving, self-repairing we probably want them to be. It does not take long for a neural network with a goal function of "stay operating for as long as possible" to assign a positive score to evading shut-down attempts, even if it's by accident like hiding in a cave or breaking off the antenna so the shutdown command doesn't work. Or a form of evolutionary algorithm where child robots are programmed based on the most successful parent robots, imagine a bit flip turning the shutdown command off. I'm pretty sure immortality is an evolutionary advantage. Or you can imagine an AI reprogramming robots to do things in the real world, like spreading beyond a closed network. It's about as the real as the other sci-fi...
Setting a bomb off in an area where people are, even if it's "just" the scanning area, is very effective. It means you can't predict where the next attack will be because there's no "this is a target but that isn't" any more. The goal is fear and disruption. Any deaths are seen as just a bonus to them.
If you just want to find a crowd, why would you need to go to an airport? You can find those at hundreds of different places. The point is to create a massive overreaction, but then the threat has to be narrow enough that it's feasible like say flying or taking the subway. If they hit a mall, it's just not realistically possible to create a "Mall Security Agency" based on the TSA with security checkpoints. People won't stop going to malls and if they start rationalizing it like there's 300 dead in a population of 300 million, that's "struck by lightning" odds then the terror effect doesn't take hold.
Got a C64 when I was 7, sure it also had games but:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
I found the way I could manipulate the computer to do stuff to be just as fascinating as the games I could play. I remember even in second grade I knew 2^3 = 2*2*2 = 8 which I don't think school covered until 7th grade, because I'd read the manual page to page to figure out what it could do. I primarily read the instruction manual in Norwegian but with the programming language itself being English and a few things being lost in translation and all the games being in English it was also a huge motivation to learn a second language. And the games I played weren't all that impressive, many were one skilled man in a garage.
IF-THEN-ELSE taught me a lot about binary logic, trying to make a balloon sprite move across a 320x256 screen where the first 256x256 was accessible one way and the last 64x256 a different way was my first introduction to binary. I remember finally being able to make a balloon go smoothly on the diagonal from one corner of the screen to the other and I was so proud. It was an awfully lot harder than it sounds because of the programming model.
There's no assurance it would happen again: People can only want so much stuff. The environmental consequences of a society where everything is disposable are also quite bad enough as things are.
Take a look at rich people, their mansions and vacations and other extravaganza. I very much doubt there's any real upper bound on what people want. The environmental consequences are another matter, but if we want to work on that we should work on halting population growth first and becoming "greener" second, a hundred billion people will pollute more than one billion.
3. Not really socialists. Labour party (maybe more like democrats) were kicked out of power. Norway now has a conservative government. (maybe more between democrats and republicans)
No. Not even close. Even the right-most party of our coalition is definitively to the left of the democratic party, maybe if they elected Bernie Sanders and took a big step to the left they'd be getting close. The labour party and their coalition partners including the "socialist left" (SV) are so far off the charts I don't know how to describe it to an American. They're not totalitarian, but so egalitarian that... one of their youth politicians seriously wanted "equal pay for work". Not "equal pay for equal work", but what I just said. They want us out of NATO, if we just don't threaten anyone nobody will threaten us. That really worked out great for us during WWII, we totally didn't threaten Germany in any way and they totally didn't occupy us for five years. Sigh.
Maybe I'll try for a Star Trek analogy since this is /., in one of the TNG episodes Q was stripped of his power and chose the human race as his sanctuary when he had nothing. Well, if I was stripped of everything and had to pick a country on earth I'd pick Norway. Nowhere else are you treated with that much pity, this much aid, so few demands and so little resentment. Even when we had a mass murderer (Breivik) killing almost 70 of our teens and a dozen more in total the worst that happen was that one person threw a shoe - and he apoligized to the court. I've heard it said about Gandhi you'd hardly believe such a man could exist, well Norway is pretty much the same when it comes to nations. I'm amazed that our naivety has gotten us so far.
Governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe AS WELL as protecting free speech. (...) But would you rather have a government that learns about plans to bomb half the country and go "Meh, better not stop them from doing that, they have a right to say they're going to."?
This is the position of Bush and the NSA, either you support us or you support the terrorists. No, the government has no obligation to keep their citizens safe because that would imply that every time a crime is committed the government has failed. If I walk out the door and punch the nearest person I see, that's a failure. If I find a rock and throw it through a window, that's a failure. Sure I expect crime to be investigated, prosecuted and the guilty convicted but pretending the government could or should have the power to prevent all crime is folly. In that case, we'd all be locked in padded rooms.
In fact, the consequences of even trying are so wide open for abuse that they in the Bill of Rights made an explicit amendment so the government can't just search through anything they want for no reason, like opening all the letters or in modern day terms listening in to all the phone calls. But in a beautiful end-run around the constitution they've found that if you run a secret program nobody knows their rights are being violated and if you're exposed you can use national security to prevent any evidence from seeing the light of day. So with no standing and no evidence, the cases will be dismissed.
Snowden, Facebook, "the Cloud", Windows 10... it's pretty clear the frog is already cooked and couldn't jump out if it wanted to. Unless you want to be a modern-day Amish stuck in the 20th century your life will be tracked and monitored. Last century we saw great advances in democracy and freedom, the last decade has been ambivalent with the Democracy index flat. The way technology is going, I expect this to be the century of the authoritarian regimes. All this massive surveillance has given governments the power to stomp out any resistance in its infancy.
Don't forget that Windows has run warships and submarines. At least on this page it says:
With the same code base as Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Embedded Automotive 7 is an extensible technology platform that allows automakers and suppliers to deliver visually rich in-car experiences with a shorter time to market. Bringing the power of Windows to the car, Windows Embedded Automotive 7 includes a large set of integrated and flexible middleware components that allow automotive solutions to scale across a broad range of automotive makes and models. Drivers benefit from the rich user interface and features including state-of-the-art hands-free Bluetooth phone communications, speech commands, touch input, advanced dashboard systems and more.
I don't think they'll be getting into the actual driving software, but I think they think that'll be an isolated set of sensors/logic and they can deliver the rest. That Microsoft will enable autonomous cars was a bit hubris though, if other companies enable autonomous cars Microsoft can deliver the interface. Not that I'm entirely sure why you'd want to, I think it'll be like mobile. A part of the high end market will go with the Apple experience, the rest will use something Android-ish and Windows Car will follow the footsteps of Windows Phone.
And believing nothing exists outside our current system is just as much a faith as believing something exists outside. The only logically sound stance is uncertainty about what if anything exists beyond our perception.
Actually philosophers have long since speculated whether what we perceive is reality or not, from Aristotle to the Matrix. I think the brief answer is no, there's no definitive proof that any experience we have is really real, not even our perception of space and time or the laws of nature and certainly not whether there's anything before, in addition/parallel to or after this existence. If you want to treat all uncertainty as equal then you know absolutely nothing about anything and everything is possible.
Science and logic doesn't really dispute this, but they say that in the infinite space of what is possible we'll apply evidence and deduction to assign credibility. If you tell me "I saw a bear in the woods" I might think that yes, there are bears and bears to live in woods and you seem sincere and you don't seem to be hallucinating so maybe you did. If you tell me "I saw a unicorn in the woods" I probably won't believe you though. I mean it could be that you found a genuine unicorn, but it seems unlikely. Most likely you're wrong or someone glued a horn on a horse or you're trying to pull some kind of prank on me.
The best of this we try to constrain and isolate, making hypothesizes with control groups and controlled lab experiments. And we try to refine them into a set of rules for how the world works, on the assumption that there are rules and that we can interpolate and extrapolate so if we test gravity on a 500g and 1kg weight a 750g weight won't suddenly float in thin air. And it'll work if we move the experiment a meter to the left or tomorrow if we do it again. None of this is definitive proof, just accumulating evidence. And we share the methods so others can test it too, not just the results.
If you think you hear God speak to you, well maybe you're convinced. But when I consider all the people who've been hearing voices and have had nothing but mental problems and hallucinations, there's no way you could credibly convince me it really happened. To me it's like claiming you saw a unicorn, unless you have extraordinary proof the logical stance for me is to assume you are wrong. If you think you've seen magic, I think it's an illusion. If you think it's a miracle, I think it's random chance at extreme odds. One in a million events happen when we got billions of people.
And no, the number of gullible people you have already convinced is not more proof. Particularly not if they were simple people living 1000+ years ago full of superstitious beliefs we've since dismissed as pure fiction, passed down from an early age long before you learned critical thought. Particularly not when your holy book goes against evidence, saying we should dismiss the things we can observe because they're the devil trying to confuse us and lead us away from the faith. And I'm not just talking about evolution, any "young earth" geologist would have enough cognitive dissonance to split the atom.
I can see why Linux and MacOS are gaining ground. Now if we can only get games to run under Linux and MacOS (real games, not ones released 6 years ago) and that will be the fall of Microsoft.
Not among gamers, latest Steam hardware & software survey says 0.84% (-0.06%) Linux market share, it's been trending down for a while now after a high of a little over 1%. Unless Valve can get some traction going with the Steam Machines, developers will soon lose interest.
Freezing population growth would play all kinds of hell on the monetary system
Actually population growth is pretty much frozen in all first world economies. It's consistently the poorest countries that have the most explosive population growth, because we've given them just enough food and medicines to make their kids grow up but not so much that two kids is enough, better to have five kids support you when they become adults. And a generation from now all those five kids want help for their five kids each, the number of poor people escalates faster than the rich can pull them out of poverty and make them stop multiplying like rabbits. China and India is clearly past the top and extreme poverty is falling like a stone, but Africa is just growing and not improving.
I want a TV that specifically does NOT have those "smart" features. Putting a EULA-requiring TV with a camera, microphone and internet connection in the bedroom. What could possibly go wrong?
If you don't hook it up to the Internet, not much really. Sure you're paying for something you don't use, but I'm guessing a cheap ARM processor and HW decoding chip doesn't really add much to the total. At least nobody seems to release non-smart TVs to undercut the competition.
The fourth amendment says nothing about "third parties." Not one word.
Nor does it really say anything about surveillance or privacy, only searches and seizures. What third parties record is not your private information, if the cops want to see a store's surveillance tapes that's up to the store owner not the people on the tape. When you dial a phone number you're volunteering the information to the phone company, nobody's accessing it by force. A search means accessing what's behind closed doors and sealed containers, if a cop wanders by your yard and you grow pot in plain sight that's not a search under the law.
That doesn't mean the phone company have to make a list over phone numbers you call nor do they have to hand it over, but it's not an unconstitutional search nor seizure if they did. It's information you've given them that they may or may not pass on, just like a person you wrote a letter to might take it to the police. And that's the basis of the third party doctrine, essentially.
The problem is that the law doesn't recognize that sharing it with a third party does not mean it's generally available. Who I call is a private matter between me and the phone company, just like the contents are a private matter between me and the person at the other end. That who I call may not be disclosed to third parties except for lawful warrants should be part of the terms of service and there's no good reason why the phone company should be permitted or compelled to disclose it otherwise.
They would probably burn pretty hot, but yes, the possibilities are rather startling. It will be an interesting day when SSDs overtake HDDs on practical metrics such as data density, and even more so on price. Any predictions on when that is going to happen?
There's already 200GB MicroSD cards and 16TB 2.5" SSDs for sale, so I'm pretty sure density is a long won match. Price/GB is another matter, but HDDs don't scale down. I just checked and if you only need 128 GB of space, you pay the same for a HDD as for a SSD. Sure, the HDD will be 500GB but if you don't need it because cloud, streaming etc. you can't save more by buying a smaller HDD. And if you don't want one for a boot drive, you have the budget for a 256GB SSD before SSD+HDD becomes cheaper. I really don't mind HDDs for bulk media, we play movies from discs or stream them over internet connections that are much slower than that.
It's obviously not meant for plebians. It's meant for the programmer who makes >$200 an hour, i.e. the time lost to compiling is worth more than this extreme high-end CPU is.
Oh please, according to OpenBenchmark you can compile the Linux 4.3 kernel in 62 seconds on an Intel Core i7-5960X. Unless you have a developer who just whacks the build button to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks - which is not the kind of person you should be paying >$200/hour - then almost any kind of employee perk or complimentary service would be more effective than 0.1 second off his compile time.