Duane spends about thirty seconds of his entire lecture talking about why the fifth amendment exists, then the rest of the time saying that if you have it use it because whether you're guilty or innocent you're better off than if you don't. In the supreme court's own words "one of the Fifth Amendment's basic functions... is to protect innocent men... who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances." Or as Cardinal Richelieu put it, "Give me six words of an innocent man, and I will find something in them with which to hang him" Your own words contribute nothing to your defense but can easily be used as circumstantial evidence to convict, for example if you know you are innocent but you are a suspect and was very near the scene of the crime but there's no witnesses to that. Are you going to give the jury rope to hang you by or make yourself a felon?
You are already making the "information-less" guilty plea, if you plead not guilty but the court ends up finding you guilty anyway that's sort of saying you were lying. Anything else you're trying to do by compelling the accused is to try to extract information from him that could be used to catch him in a lie about something else. I hope Bennet Haselton gets stuck between a rock and a hard place and get the choice between having to answer true, appear guilty and go to jail or lie, get caught and go to jail. Maybe from his jail cell he can get a new perspective on the meaning and purpose of the fifth amendment.
You know what happens to people in real life when they are laid off, even if temporarily? They find another job. Being a mechanic you'd think he could find some work pretty rapidly if he needed income badly.
How easy is it to find work when - as I understand it - you can be called back to work on a day's notice? Not many employers need an employee that could disappear in a puff of smoke at any time. Of course you could be clearing out a work backlog or something like that, but yeah...
I think it's more about playing the stock market, it sounds so much better when you're sold out by slightly undersupplying the market even if it doesn't bring in more sales - perhaps even a bit less as people pick something else instead. "Almost sold out" sounds more like "we really wanted to give you the news that it was sold out but people bought fewer than our lowballed estimates so we're saying they almost sold out" at this point.
That's still not counting the biggest reason it sucked so hard and that was that it had a touchscreen but it wasn't designed to use with your fingers. I had one demonstrated to me and there was hardly anything you could get done without the stylus because the interface required pinpoint precision, which made it more like a laptop with a very awkward mouse. As far as I can recall it wasn't multi-touch either which was fine for the stylus but means you couldn't do pinches and stretches nor fast typing. I remember it had some sort of letter recognition for the stylus but it required a special technique and was still way more awkward than any other text input method. And it was way too expensive for a second device, whereas most current tablet owners haven't thrown out their desktop/laptop.
There's no use for Tor that is against my interests. None. It's just speech going down wires. You may not like the kiddie diddlers discussing their kiddy diddling, or the terrorists discussing.... well nothing, because terrorists have no reason to use it... but its all just speech. Acts are not speech, people like Clapper pretend that saying things terrorists might say is the same as committing an *act* of terrorism.
Sorry to have to Godwin this thread, but as far as I know Hitler never personally killed a jew. So since acts are not speech, he's a totally innocent guy right? Or can speech be orders, threats, fraud, slander, conspiracy and a host of other illegal things... never mind that bits can be many other things like botnet controls, money (Bitcoins) and so on. I'm assuming you know, since you went out of your way to pretend kiddie diddlers use TOR just for discussion and nothing else. But seriously mods, that's +5 Insightful? More like smoking crack...
If you use an anonymizing service they'll assume you're non-US until proven otherwise. So they "have to" unmask everybody to know who they're supposed to watch and who they're not supposed to watch. Which of course means they're doing surveillance on everyone, which they didn't really mind in the first place so... convenient.
once they start seeing the signs on the wall it will be a simple matter for them to put in a little effort and make "radeon" the best graphics driver for gaming on Linux
Or a lot more work, from what I gather one of the key differences between the radeon driver and the catalyst driver is that they've created a ton of behavior profiles to fit different workloads and they're continuously working to update them and providing even more specific ones tuned to the individual game. That takes a lot of manpower and a rather complicated driver infrastructure, while the open source driver has gone for a much simpler "jack of all trades" acceleration. Last I was really paying attention they were hoping to reach 60-70% performance on average relative to the closed source driver when it was feature complete.
Now remember that there's often a huge gap between software fallback and hardware acceleration, so 60-70% is a lot better than 1% emulating on the CPU. But from the perspective of a GPU buyer that difference between 60-70% and 100% translates to a rather big price difference. If you're not on the bleeding edge and your games aren't straining the graphics card to the fullest of its ability it might not matter, but to a lot of people it will. A lot of other things are like that too, yes it has implemented a form of power management so it doesn't run at full speed all the time. Is it as aggressive and efficient as it could be? Probably not, but again it's more about having it as opposed to not having it at the moment.
Now, if you have some proof that the laws of thermodynamics are broken, the second law in particular... please step forward and collect about 50 consecutive Nobel Prizes.
Exhibit A: The Big Bang. Yeah so I'm sort of cheating since it's a total unexplained "phenomenon" if you can call the birth of a universe that but by the laws of thermodynamics as we know them the universe could never have begun. Even if you assume our universe sucked that energy out from somewhere else then that source must have even higher entropy, which must come from a place with even higher entropy and so on. If it's constantly decreasing then we either started at infinity - meaning we could build an infinite power source - or it was created in which case we in theory could create entropy in the same way resulting in an infinite power source. It is not entirely inconceivable to have "miniature Big Bang" generators that pull energy/entropy out of the same source, though I wouldn't have the first clue on how to build one.
That said, perpetual motion is a shyster's tool. If you could really pull off infinite energy production which is the only way to keep it going in perpetuity due to imperfections and most certainly the only way to extract any work from it except just to sit there and be pretty, then you wouldn't need perpetual motion. You'd just have a black block containing your magic with a socket on it and after verifying you're not transferring power into the box via hidden wires, magnetic induction, heat pumps or some other trick you'd be the richest man on earth. The only reason to use perpetual motion is because you can make the losses so negligible it lasts long enough to appear as infinite to the gullible.
The real question is whether AMD is trying to use this to change gears or not. After all, the PS4 and XBone aren't going to be replaced for many years with something that might or might not be AMD so if they want to exit the performance market and enter the... well, whatever they're trying to do with APUs and ARM like embedded and microservers and custom hybrids and whatnot then this would be the time. They've bagged the current generation fo consoles, exit stage right. They've been very quiet about any successor to FX-8350 and their server roadmap is more of the current Opterons so well... Kaveri is fine but it's nothing but the current Steamroller cores combined with GCN graphics, as a CPU it's no better than what's already here.
I guess we'll get another indication in two weeks when their Q3 earnings call comes out, the geek in me would like them to succeed but the economist sees very many big red blinkenlights in their last economic reports. People here like to point out how competitive their prices are but the reality is that AMD prices them the way they need to sell, they're losing money now but if they raise prices they lose sales and also lose money. Last time they were royally screwed and losing money they spun off their fabs and got huge external investors in GloFo, this time around they either stand or fall. They desperately need more profitable business and ordinarily I'd say Intel wouldn't squeeze them to bankruptcy but right now Intel is in a duel with ARM and if AMD is stuck in the crossfire, well....
2-3 qualified people making about 2-3 times what the fresh off the street people in India make can resolve about 5 times the cases with better customer satisfaction
Dude, an Indian call center staff gets paid about $300/month or $3600/year. What kind of qualified staff do you expect to find in the US for <$10000/year? Not that it'd be legal to hire anyone at that wage anyway. I'd be surprised if you got anyone with any decent IT skills for less than ten times what an Indian costs and even then they're probably looking to get out of the helldesk and into software development/system administration/project management as soon as possible.
Capitalism requires that increased productivity should cause increased wages. When the 10 Luddites are replaced by a machine (that costs the same as paying 4 Luddites) and 1 Luddite, does the remaining Luddite's pay increase 10 fold, 4 fold, or 2 fold? Where does the money go? This is the riddle of the robot menace, and why Capitalism can't solve the problem by itself.
According to capitalism there's be many robot makers who'd push the prices down to half as it's now costs 4+1 = 5 luddite wages instead of 10 luddite wages to produce while the last 5 wages would stay in the pockets of the customers. And the 4 wages spent on the machine would be spent on luddites to build the machine or by even more layers of indirections, so really no money is lost at all only more is produced with less effort freeing up more people to work on producing value to society. Sorry, you'll have to work a little harder on nailing down your point.
The main difference between a socialist and a capitalist is that socialists think you shouldn't be rewarded for investment, only for work, IOW no reward for laziness.
Meh, depends on the brand of socialist. Those that follow "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" don't put much value on rewarding those who work to the best of their ability nor are they overly concerned with how you ended up needing so much. Marx talked a lot about workers and capitalists, but most of the discussion I find here in Europe is about the middle class versus the welfare state, workers with moderate income and/or wealth that are being taxed heavily to pay for universal services for all. The rich have largely given up getting any public support for their interests and are mostly trying to find ways to dodge taxes and threats to take their money and jobs elsewhere and the socialists hate them because they can't control them.
I think looking at history is not really a good predication, in the beginning you had primary industry which was mainly agriculture. Then you had the industrial revolution and people moved to the manufacturing industry. Through mass production and automation we transitioned to the service industry. But what happens when computer systems take over providing services, is there something past services? Or do we think services is a never-ending well of services we'll need as others are automated? Or that they won't need less and less maintenance? If I'm thinking 50 years in the future, remember this is as far back as 1963 was in the past, then there's a lot of jobs I think would be gone and not really many new ones to add.
Did anyone see the Tesla battery swap in 90 seconds? Imagine that + 50 years and I'm thinking you drive your car on top of a repair pod and it'll give your car a full overhaul and replace anything worn and damaged from a storage of spare parts, goodbye auto mechanic. Do you need any other services? No, those jobs are just gone vanished in a puff of smoke. And on your way home you can pick up a fast food meal from an automated burger joint. Unless you're taking one of the automated driverless taxis, that is. You could of course assume that we'll invent all sorts of frivolous and luxurious services to replace those jobs, but I don't think the paychecks will be getting that much bigger and the automation will only undercut the employees, not make it free.
Of course we're not running out of jobs, we'll still need lots of people to run these systems and there's lots of personal services that don't really translate well to a machine but we might be running seriously short on jobs. Don't assume that the market economy is interested in fixing this, if there's not any profit in adding more workers they don't care how many people are unemployed. At which point you might say supply and demand, lower wages and you'll get more jobs but mainly what's happening is that you're taking jobs from other places. It doesn't work if there's a global shortage of jobs compared to people that need a job, unless you're trying to undercut the computer to take jobs back. But those costs are dropping fast and it's not a race to the bottom we can win.
Competition is great where you can run multiple choices in parallel, it's not so great when you can only pick one. I don't know who the heck considers the ALSA/OSS/aRts/PulseAudio/JACK FUBAR a benefit of open source, I see that more as a bad case of not invented here, reinventing the wheel and lack of cooperation, my gold standard for things like that is Linux the kernel which has kept it all together and still makes great progress. The display server is another one of those mutually exclusive choices, it's not like apps that you can run side by side. Progress is fine, but I think everyone here has tasted the bitterness when choices are taken away. The "old" way, the way you wanted to work, the way you actually liked much better than the new way? Gone. No configurability, no classic interface, can't fix, won't fix, not supported, in short suck it up and like it.
It's a great fallacy to think that people want competition on things that are largely invisible when they do work and a huge PITA when they don't work. When I plug in my speakers or headphones I want sound, when I turn on my Bluetooth keyboard I want it to work, when I turn on wifi I want it to connect and so on and it is not a matter of preference such as with GUIs, it's largely obvious what is meant with working and broken, stable and unstable. I need one stack with a dilligent management that keeps the quality high and integrates the work the community does, warring factions doesn't benefit anyone unless it's a revolt and reformation under new management like xfree86/x.org. I'm glad there's one dominant X implementation and not many.
So Slashdot goes the way of Ars Technica. Simple readability gives way to stylish nonsense.
Well, I just hit the front page of Ars Technica and I'm able to see nine headlines. One "Top Post", one big Review, three "In-depth reports", three "On the radar" and two "Feature Stories". On slashdot beta in standard mode I see all of two headlines and a poll. I'd pick Ars Technica over this any day of the week, if they're going to columnize the site site then at least make several columns and put something interesting in them.
Well that's true but a newspaper can either have one ultra-wide column or two narrow ones, either way the same amount of text fits in the same vertical space. With the new layout I felt the information density dropped to half, I have to do at least twice as much scrolling to glance through the comments. Compared to that I very much the current compact format instead of the long and narrow.
Free market competition in almost all cases, except for absolutely needed government actions, always results in intense competition and ultimately the lowest cost that a good provider can supply and maintain. Government has no interest in providing the best at the lowest cost if they run a service.
God, that is so naive it's almost sweet. Just about the first thing any MBA learns about "perfect competition" is that there's no profit in it, which is really bad for a profit-seeking company. Nobody wants to compete that way, all companies want to find profitable markets and if there aren't barriers to competition and entry you build them. Fortunately there's lots of ways to do that, if you're confusing "perfect competition" with free competition you're not even in the right ball park. Granted, you can't have perfect competition in a monopoly but just because technically, theoretically it's a free market it can still be in a company's death grip.
Here's some of the requirements for "perfect competition", depending on whose definition you use there might be more: * No returns to scale * Homogeneous products * Perfect information * Perfect mobility, no transaction costs * No barriers to entry or exit * Profit maximization with no game theory
Roughly all of them are false for any real market and none of them involve the government in any way. The first one is probably the most violated one, if there are returns to scale then big companies will produce at lower costs than small companies, either taking it out as profit or by undercutting smaller competitors. Some ways of throwing your weight around might be illegal like anti-trust but others aren't, if you're a big customer you get discounts. The next one is homogeneous products, if you're buying two cans of Coca-Cola from different stores they're perfect substitutes but if you're considering McDonalds or Burger King then it's two different tastes and brands. People have preferences and they're willing to pay for that, they won't instantly switch like perfect competition assumes.
The third is perfect information, consumers aren't instantly aware of all products on the market, all relevant information about them and all offers and campaign. Those who can get in touch with their market will sell better than those who might have a great product nobody's heard about or know the advantages of. Anything that creates customer loyalty like bonus cards, frequent flyer miles and so on try to counteract mobility so you won't go to a competitor when they're cheaper because of the overall benefits. This is particularly effective at squishing small competitors that only try to compete with one small part of your business.
Having barriers to entry or exit basically means you can threaten to lower prices when and if you're facing competition, perfect competition assume you can "hit and run" any imperfection in the market but in reality you need people, equipment, systems and once you're set up to offer say a competing air line, the ticket prices are set way down and your "opportunity" vanishes in a puff of smoke. Finally, perfect competition assumes business owners are stupid. Two competitors in a duopoly are going to undercut each other cent by cent until they both make no profit at all, does that sound realistic to anyone? Hell no, we'll use price signalling to "negotiate" a good margin for both of us, if you lower prices, I'll lower prices and we both lose. Why don't we both rise prices and make money?
I have a big book with hundreds of pages that explains this and much, much more in detail, don't get me wrong it's not all about tripping up the competition but it is pretty much all about how to find profit and it is found everywhere else but in this "intense competition" of which you speak. If you have a big cash cow you'd be surprised how much business sense it makes to build a moat around it, even if it doesn't bring you any money or is even a direct loss. The more unrealistic you know it is they'll go to the competition, the higher margins you can take. Even in a supposedly free market, there's a surprising number of ways of creating a captive audience. Government regulation is just one of many tools in the toolbox.
What seems strange to me is that they do limit GPS in the first place. Seems like anything where military level GPS could be used dangerously, it's not that high of a barrier. You don't need super accurate GPS to make a car bomb, and if you're competent to make your own attack drone, you probably know how to bypass the restrictions.
Well we're mixing apples and oranges here, there is a civilian signal and a military signal and what this article is talking about is removing some software limitations on where and when a civilian GPS unit will work, in short if you tried to use one aboard an airplane it'd blank out, not because it couldn't get signal but because the reciever is too high and going too fast for what is permitted. They still can't decrypt the military signal which gives them higher accuracy and timing signals to make precision strikes with high speed missiles.
Another good argument is how many symmetric crypto algorithms have been broken at all, at least known to the public? For example you can take GOST, developed by the Soviet Union as a Top Secret algorithm in the 70s, then later downclassified and eventually made public in 1994. It has a theoretical attack strength of 2^256 that researchers have gotten down to 2^101 but if you have a 1 GHz computer testing 1 key/cycle for 1 year that's still only 2^55. A million such computers running a million years is 2^95. I think you can be quite certain the NSA didn't cooperate with the Soviet Union in the 70s, so the only way it could be cracked is if the NSA did it through cryptanalysis. The rest of the world hardly seem able to crack a single cipher yet the NSA would have the magic to crack everything in a reasonable time? In the land of unicorns...
Same with RSA and public crypto, it's not from the Soviet Union but it's from the 70s and 35 years of public research has come up with nothing to break it. Really, do we think that the NSA is sitting on a completely new math in which every hard problem is now easy? I don't buy it, I'm quite sure there are things such as secure crypto no matter how much money and manpower you throw at it simply because they are as much chasing ghosts as we are, they may be looking for a solution that doesn't exist. Of course they're absolutely not going to tell you about that, but I find it far more likely they're now exploiting flaws and compromising systems rather than with pure math.
So what are you going to do, drop by a few days each year for reserve training and if you're ever called into action you'll be issued your standard script kiddie pack? Hand a bunch of guys semi-automatic rifles and they'll be a decent fighting force but I don't see "cyberwarriors" functioning the same way...
I probably don't do networking right, but I couldn't see the value of it.
Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 40% of all jobs are never offered to the public, 30% are filled with a person already known to the employer and only 30% are filled by total strangers. However, the often quoted number that 70% of all jobs happen through networking is dubious at best. Managers, past and present coworkers and anyone else you come in contact with through your work will have some opinion of your skill and work performance even if you've made no effort to network at all, simply by performing your job duties. If you restrict networking to only mean actively seeking contact with other professionals above or outside your work duties I'm sure the number would be much, much lower.
I mean, even if you live in a fairly large town I'm sure the people who work with the same things end up knowing each other and are probably rotating around among a relatively narrow set of companies. That said, I have seen networks being used as icebreakers. If you get a recommendation from a friend that works in the same company you're applying to that means more to them than if a random reference of your choosing recommends you. After all a misleading reference would reflect poorly on that employee, while for anyone else it'd be of little consequence.
You (and GP) make it sound like the free software movement has been sitting on a bench idle. But I find that there have been lots of project designed to "free" the user from the domination of large actors. (...) These projects were all presented on Slashdot, they are not small obscure stuff. Did you check them out? Did you use them? They were looking for money, did you help them?
Without any disrespect to the people trying, I feel they are small obscure stuff that I've rarely seen mentioned outside slashdot and are very far from competing with the applications they hope to replace. The latter is particularly a problem when you're talking about applications I can't use on my own, there's no point in having a Diaspora account when nobody I know has one or wants to create one. But I will take another look at what owncloud has to offer....
Slashdotters love to drool over SpaceX successes, but just ignore all of Lockheed Martin's bloated contracts. The big step isn't private versus public, it's smart versus dumb.
That's a little simplistic. The government uses cost-plus contracts to develop new technology and craft that is being designed as they go, you can't buy an F35 off the shelf and it'd be a crazy risk for a private company to promise delivery of specific features and performance on a specific schedule at a specific price. Nobody would agree to that, so instead the government says here's a running tab to cover costs and a reasonable profit margin - if you fail to show good progress we might have to abort but the risk is all on us, you get your money anyway. Of course as a company that's a dream project, it can't fail and the normal rules of business doesn't apply so they're more like a heavily protected semi-government agency.
SpaceX shows delivering payloads to orbit is no longer the kind of exotic experiment it was in the 60s, the technology and risks are sufficiently known that you can do it on normal commercial terms where NASA pays a fixed price for a service and SpaceX delivers, taking the risk of profit or loss. It's nice that we get there, but it's very hard to get there without these "bloated contracts" to pave the way. The alternative would be for NASA to do all the bleeding edge projects in-house, which would probably get just as many complaints of public inefficiency and become a monopolist without any choice. True there aren't many candidates for such government contracts either, but you can at least pick your poison.
While proprietary software won't always do things the way you want them for normal applications you could always restrict their permissions, firewall their network and most importantly unless you had a very serious leak built in the data stayed on your own computer, it might be locked up in a proprietary format with software that has forced obsolescence but I always felt the hyperbole was a bit thick. If you buy a CD you buy the mix the artist wanted you to have, you don't get the raw tracks to remix it the way you wanted it to be. Likewise when you buy a closed source game you get the game experience they wanted you to have, not all the source and assets to remake it the way you wanted it to be. All other things being equal it'd of course be desirable, but it's doesn't make it worthless or immoral to buy it without that possibility.
With "Service as a Software Substitution" as RMS calls it or as web services and the cloud as I'd call it you've got no control at all of neither the software nor the data. You can't even do the slightest change in how it works. When they want it to change, it changes and there's nothing you can do to stay on an old version the only thing you could do is to go nuclear and stop using it at all. Getting the data out and over to a competing service is often far worse and more locked up than a proprietary format. And again, they control your data. I'd be far more concerned about all my documents being on a Google Docs server somewhere than in a MS Office document on my disk under my control.
The worst part is really the way you're tied not technically to their service though, but legally. When the iTunes app store tells me they've updated their Terms of Service and asks me to answer yes or no, it's basically "Would you like to continue using your phone as normal or totally cripple all access to new software and updates?" I don't even bother reading it, it's accepting at gunpoint anyway. And I really don't feel it'd be much different with Android and the Play store. It didn't concern me much when it was primarily so I'd have a phone to play Angry Birds on (see above) because I totally don't care where my scores go, but as you start wanting to use it for more serious things it matters but there's really no opting out.
The stupid thing is that I really do like advantages of cloud syncing, I'd just like it to be against my own private server or at least in a local colo of my choice. I don't want to route it through Apple or Google or Facebook or any of the other big megacorporations. But what we need is a solid alternative, not the wailing song of RMS. He could have complained about the lack of a free kernel forever but as long as HURD wasn't an alternative it just didn't matter much until Linux came along and became usable. Give us a real alternative, based perhaps on AOSP or Ubuntu Touch (ugh) and maybe we can turn the tide. P.S. There was a poll here, 90% wouldn't change their online habits one bit after the Snowden revelations - don't assume the general public is with you.
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Duane spends about thirty seconds of his entire lecture talking about why the fifth amendment exists, then the rest of the time saying that if you have it use it because whether you're guilty or innocent you're better off than if you don't. In the supreme court's own words "one of the Fifth Amendment's basic functions ... is to protect innocent men ... who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances." Or as Cardinal Richelieu put it, "Give me six words of an innocent man, and I will find something in them with which to hang him" Your own words contribute nothing to your defense but can easily be used as circumstantial evidence to convict, for example if you know you are innocent but you are a suspect and was very near the scene of the crime but there's no witnesses to that. Are you going to give the jury rope to hang you by or make yourself a felon?
You are already making the "information-less" guilty plea, if you plead not guilty but the court ends up finding you guilty anyway that's sort of saying you were lying. Anything else you're trying to do by compelling the accused is to try to extract information from him that could be used to catch him in a lie about something else. I hope Bennet Haselton gets stuck between a rock and a hard place and get the choice between having to answer true, appear guilty and go to jail or lie, get caught and go to jail. Maybe from his jail cell he can get a new perspective on the meaning and purpose of the fifth amendment.
You know what happens to people in real life when they are laid off, even if temporarily? They find another job. Being a mechanic you'd think he could find some work pretty rapidly if he needed income badly.
How easy is it to find work when - as I understand it - you can be called back to work on a day's notice? Not many employers need an employee that could disappear in a puff of smoke at any time. Of course you could be clearing out a work backlog or something like that, but yeah...
I think it's more about playing the stock market, it sounds so much better when you're sold out by slightly undersupplying the market even if it doesn't bring in more sales - perhaps even a bit less as people pick something else instead. "Almost sold out" sounds more like "we really wanted to give you the news that it was sold out but people bought fewer than our lowballed estimates so we're saying they almost sold out" at this point.
That's still not counting the biggest reason it sucked so hard and that was that it had a touchscreen but it wasn't designed to use with your fingers. I had one demonstrated to me and there was hardly anything you could get done without the stylus because the interface required pinpoint precision, which made it more like a laptop with a very awkward mouse. As far as I can recall it wasn't multi-touch either which was fine for the stylus but means you couldn't do pinches and stretches nor fast typing. I remember it had some sort of letter recognition for the stylus but it required a special technique and was still way more awkward than any other text input method. And it was way too expensive for a second device, whereas most current tablet owners haven't thrown out their desktop/laptop.
There's no use for Tor that is against my interests. None. It's just speech going down wires. You may not like the kiddie diddlers discussing their kiddy diddling, or the terrorists discussing.... well nothing, because terrorists have no reason to use it... but its all just speech. Acts are not speech, people like Clapper pretend that saying things terrorists might say is the same as committing an *act* of terrorism.
Sorry to have to Godwin this thread, but as far as I know Hitler never personally killed a jew. So since acts are not speech, he's a totally innocent guy right? Or can speech be orders, threats, fraud, slander, conspiracy and a host of other illegal things... never mind that bits can be many other things like botnet controls, money (Bitcoins) and so on. I'm assuming you know, since you went out of your way to pretend kiddie diddlers use TOR just for discussion and nothing else. But seriously mods, that's +5 Insightful? More like smoking crack...
If you use an anonymizing service they'll assume you're non-US until proven otherwise. So they "have to" unmask everybody to know who they're supposed to watch and who they're not supposed to watch. Which of course means they're doing surveillance on everyone, which they didn't really mind in the first place so... convenient.
once they start seeing the signs on the wall it will be a simple matter for them to put in a little effort and make "radeon" the best graphics driver for gaming on Linux
Or a lot more work, from what I gather one of the key differences between the radeon driver and the catalyst driver is that they've created a ton of behavior profiles to fit different workloads and they're continuously working to update them and providing even more specific ones tuned to the individual game. That takes a lot of manpower and a rather complicated driver infrastructure, while the open source driver has gone for a much simpler "jack of all trades" acceleration. Last I was really paying attention they were hoping to reach 60-70% performance on average relative to the closed source driver when it was feature complete.
Now remember that there's often a huge gap between software fallback and hardware acceleration, so 60-70% is a lot better than 1% emulating on the CPU. But from the perspective of a GPU buyer that difference between 60-70% and 100% translates to a rather big price difference. If you're not on the bleeding edge and your games aren't straining the graphics card to the fullest of its ability it might not matter, but to a lot of people it will. A lot of other things are like that too, yes it has implemented a form of power management so it doesn't run at full speed all the time. Is it as aggressive and efficient as it could be? Probably not, but again it's more about having it as opposed to not having it at the moment.
Now, if you have some proof that the laws of thermodynamics are broken, the second law in particular... please step forward and collect about 50 consecutive Nobel Prizes.
Exhibit A: The Big Bang. Yeah so I'm sort of cheating since it's a total unexplained "phenomenon" if you can call the birth of a universe that but by the laws of thermodynamics as we know them the universe could never have begun. Even if you assume our universe sucked that energy out from somewhere else then that source must have even higher entropy, which must come from a place with even higher entropy and so on. If it's constantly decreasing then we either started at infinity - meaning we could build an infinite power source - or it was created in which case we in theory could create entropy in the same way resulting in an infinite power source. It is not entirely inconceivable to have "miniature Big Bang" generators that pull energy/entropy out of the same source, though I wouldn't have the first clue on how to build one.
That said, perpetual motion is a shyster's tool. If you could really pull off infinite energy production which is the only way to keep it going in perpetuity due to imperfections and most certainly the only way to extract any work from it except just to sit there and be pretty, then you wouldn't need perpetual motion. You'd just have a black block containing your magic with a socket on it and after verifying you're not transferring power into the box via hidden wires, magnetic induction, heat pumps or some other trick you'd be the richest man on earth. The only reason to use perpetual motion is because you can make the losses so negligible it lasts long enough to appear as infinite to the gullible.
Whoa, you're right. AMD *is* screwed!
The real question is whether AMD is trying to use this to change gears or not. After all, the PS4 and XBone aren't going to be replaced for many years with something that might or might not be AMD so if they want to exit the performance market and enter the ... well, whatever they're trying to do with APUs and ARM like embedded and microservers and custom hybrids and whatnot then this would be the time. They've bagged the current generation fo consoles, exit stage right. They've been very quiet about any successor to FX-8350 and their server roadmap is more of the current Opterons so well... Kaveri is fine but it's nothing but the current Steamroller cores combined with GCN graphics, as a CPU it's no better than what's already here.
I guess we'll get another indication in two weeks when their Q3 earnings call comes out, the geek in me would like them to succeed but the economist sees very many big red blinkenlights in their last economic reports. People here like to point out how competitive their prices are but the reality is that AMD prices them the way they need to sell, they're losing money now but if they raise prices they lose sales and also lose money. Last time they were royally screwed and losing money they spun off their fabs and got huge external investors in GloFo, this time around they either stand or fall. They desperately need more profitable business and ordinarily I'd say Intel wouldn't squeeze them to bankruptcy but right now Intel is in a duel with ARM and if AMD is stuck in the crossfire, well....
2-3 qualified people making about 2-3 times what the fresh off the street people in India make can resolve about 5 times the cases with better customer satisfaction
Dude, an Indian call center staff gets paid about $300/month or $3600/year. What kind of qualified staff do you expect to find in the US for <$10000/year? Not that it'd be legal to hire anyone at that wage anyway. I'd be surprised if you got anyone with any decent IT skills for less than ten times what an Indian costs and even then they're probably looking to get out of the helldesk and into software development/system administration/project management as soon as possible.
Capitalism requires that increased productivity should cause increased wages. When the 10 Luddites are replaced by a machine (that costs the same as paying 4 Luddites) and 1 Luddite, does the remaining Luddite's pay increase 10 fold, 4 fold, or 2 fold? Where does the money go? This is the riddle of the robot menace, and why Capitalism can't solve the problem by itself.
According to capitalism there's be many robot makers who'd push the prices down to half as it's now costs 4+1 = 5 luddite wages instead of 10 luddite wages to produce while the last 5 wages would stay in the pockets of the customers. And the 4 wages spent on the machine would be spent on luddites to build the machine or by even more layers of indirections, so really no money is lost at all only more is produced with less effort freeing up more people to work on producing value to society. Sorry, you'll have to work a little harder on nailing down your point.
The main difference between a socialist and a capitalist is that socialists think you shouldn't be rewarded for investment, only for work, IOW no reward for laziness.
Meh, depends on the brand of socialist. Those that follow "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" don't put much value on rewarding those who work to the best of their ability nor are they overly concerned with how you ended up needing so much. Marx talked a lot about workers and capitalists, but most of the discussion I find here in Europe is about the middle class versus the welfare state, workers with moderate income and/or wealth that are being taxed heavily to pay for universal services for all. The rich have largely given up getting any public support for their interests and are mostly trying to find ways to dodge taxes and threats to take their money and jobs elsewhere and the socialists hate them because they can't control them.
I think looking at history is not really a good predication, in the beginning you had primary industry which was mainly agriculture. Then you had the industrial revolution and people moved to the manufacturing industry. Through mass production and automation we transitioned to the service industry. But what happens when computer systems take over providing services, is there something past services? Or do we think services is a never-ending well of services we'll need as others are automated? Or that they won't need less and less maintenance? If I'm thinking 50 years in the future, remember this is as far back as 1963 was in the past, then there's a lot of jobs I think would be gone and not really many new ones to add.
Did anyone see the Tesla battery swap in 90 seconds? Imagine that + 50 years and I'm thinking you drive your car on top of a repair pod and it'll give your car a full overhaul and replace anything worn and damaged from a storage of spare parts, goodbye auto mechanic. Do you need any other services? No, those jobs are just gone vanished in a puff of smoke. And on your way home you can pick up a fast food meal from an automated burger joint. Unless you're taking one of the automated driverless taxis, that is. You could of course assume that we'll invent all sorts of frivolous and luxurious services to replace those jobs, but I don't think the paychecks will be getting that much bigger and the automation will only undercut the employees, not make it free.
Of course we're not running out of jobs, we'll still need lots of people to run these systems and there's lots of personal services that don't really translate well to a machine but we might be running seriously short on jobs. Don't assume that the market economy is interested in fixing this, if there's not any profit in adding more workers they don't care how many people are unemployed. At which point you might say supply and demand, lower wages and you'll get more jobs but mainly what's happening is that you're taking jobs from other places. It doesn't work if there's a global shortage of jobs compared to people that need a job, unless you're trying to undercut the computer to take jobs back. But those costs are dropping fast and it's not a race to the bottom we can win.
Launch HL3 with a small exclusivity period - I think a week will do - and they'll get plenty Steambox publicity.
Competition is great where you can run multiple choices in parallel, it's not so great when you can only pick one. I don't know who the heck considers the ALSA/OSS/aRts/PulseAudio/JACK FUBAR a benefit of open source, I see that more as a bad case of not invented here, reinventing the wheel and lack of cooperation, my gold standard for things like that is Linux the kernel which has kept it all together and still makes great progress. The display server is another one of those mutually exclusive choices, it's not like apps that you can run side by side. Progress is fine, but I think everyone here has tasted the bitterness when choices are taken away. The "old" way, the way you wanted to work, the way you actually liked much better than the new way? Gone. No configurability, no classic interface, can't fix, won't fix, not supported, in short suck it up and like it.
It's a great fallacy to think that people want competition on things that are largely invisible when they do work and a huge PITA when they don't work. When I plug in my speakers or headphones I want sound, when I turn on my Bluetooth keyboard I want it to work, when I turn on wifi I want it to connect and so on and it is not a matter of preference such as with GUIs, it's largely obvious what is meant with working and broken, stable and unstable. I need one stack with a dilligent management that keeps the quality high and integrates the work the community does, warring factions doesn't benefit anyone unless it's a revolt and reformation under new management like xfree86/x.org. I'm glad there's one dominant X implementation and not many.
So Slashdot goes the way of Ars Technica. Simple readability gives way to stylish nonsense.
Well, I just hit the front page of Ars Technica and I'm able to see nine headlines. One "Top Post", one big Review, three "In-depth reports", three "On the radar" and two "Feature Stories". On slashdot beta in standard mode I see all of two headlines and a poll. I'd pick Ars Technica over this any day of the week, if they're going to columnize the site site then at least make several columns and put something interesting in them.
Well that's true but a newspaper can either have one ultra-wide column or two narrow ones, either way the same amount of text fits in the same vertical space. With the new layout I felt the information density dropped to half, I have to do at least twice as much scrolling to glance through the comments. Compared to that I very much the current compact format instead of the long and narrow.
Free market competition in almost all cases, except for absolutely needed government actions, always results in intense competition and ultimately the lowest cost that a good provider can supply and maintain. Government has no interest in providing the best at the lowest cost if they run a service.
God, that is so naive it's almost sweet. Just about the first thing any MBA learns about "perfect competition" is that there's no profit in it, which is really bad for a profit-seeking company. Nobody wants to compete that way, all companies want to find profitable markets and if there aren't barriers to competition and entry you build them. Fortunately there's lots of ways to do that, if you're confusing "perfect competition" with free competition you're not even in the right ball park. Granted, you can't have perfect competition in a monopoly but just because technically, theoretically it's a free market it can still be in a company's death grip.
Here's some of the requirements for "perfect competition", depending on whose definition you use there might be more:
* No returns to scale
* Homogeneous products
* Perfect information
* Perfect mobility, no transaction costs
* No barriers to entry or exit
* Profit maximization with no game theory
Roughly all of them are false for any real market and none of them involve the government in any way. The first one is probably the most violated one, if there are returns to scale then big companies will produce at lower costs than small companies, either taking it out as profit or by undercutting smaller competitors. Some ways of throwing your weight around might be illegal like anti-trust but others aren't, if you're a big customer you get discounts. The next one is homogeneous products, if you're buying two cans of Coca-Cola from different stores they're perfect substitutes but if you're considering McDonalds or Burger King then it's two different tastes and brands. People have preferences and they're willing to pay for that, they won't instantly switch like perfect competition assumes.
The third is perfect information, consumers aren't instantly aware of all products on the market, all relevant information about them and all offers and campaign. Those who can get in touch with their market will sell better than those who might have a great product nobody's heard about or know the advantages of. Anything that creates customer loyalty like bonus cards, frequent flyer miles and so on try to counteract mobility so you won't go to a competitor when they're cheaper because of the overall benefits. This is particularly effective at squishing small competitors that only try to compete with one small part of your business.
Having barriers to entry or exit basically means you can threaten to lower prices when and if you're facing competition, perfect competition assume you can "hit and run" any imperfection in the market but in reality you need people, equipment, systems and once you're set up to offer say a competing air line, the ticket prices are set way down and your "opportunity" vanishes in a puff of smoke. Finally, perfect competition assumes business owners are stupid. Two competitors in a duopoly are going to undercut each other cent by cent until they both make no profit at all, does that sound realistic to anyone? Hell no, we'll use price signalling to "negotiate" a good margin for both of us, if you lower prices, I'll lower prices and we both lose. Why don't we both rise prices and make money?
I have a big book with hundreds of pages that explains this and much, much more in detail, don't get me wrong it's not all about tripping up the competition but it is pretty much all about how to find profit and it is found everywhere else but in this "intense competition" of which you speak. If you have a big cash cow you'd be surprised how much business sense it makes to build a moat around it, even if it doesn't bring you any money or is even a direct loss. The more unrealistic you know it is they'll go to the competition, the higher margins you can take. Even in a supposedly free market, there's a surprising number of ways of creating a captive audience. Government regulation is just one of many tools in the toolbox.
What seems strange to me is that they do limit GPS in the first place. Seems like anything where military level GPS could be used dangerously, it's not that high of a barrier. You don't need super accurate GPS to make a car bomb, and if you're competent to make your own attack drone, you probably know how to bypass the restrictions.
Well we're mixing apples and oranges here, there is a civilian signal and a military signal and what this article is talking about is removing some software limitations on where and when a civilian GPS unit will work, in short if you tried to use one aboard an airplane it'd blank out, not because it couldn't get signal but because the reciever is too high and going too fast for what is permitted. They still can't decrypt the military signal which gives them higher accuracy and timing signals to make precision strikes with high speed missiles.
Another good argument is how many symmetric crypto algorithms have been broken at all, at least known to the public? For example you can take GOST, developed by the Soviet Union as a Top Secret algorithm in the 70s, then later downclassified and eventually made public in 1994. It has a theoretical attack strength of 2^256 that researchers have gotten down to 2^101 but if you have a 1 GHz computer testing 1 key/cycle for 1 year that's still only 2^55. A million such computers running a million years is 2^95. I think you can be quite certain the NSA didn't cooperate with the Soviet Union in the 70s, so the only way it could be cracked is if the NSA did it through cryptanalysis. The rest of the world hardly seem able to crack a single cipher yet the NSA would have the magic to crack everything in a reasonable time? In the land of unicorns...
Same with RSA and public crypto, it's not from the Soviet Union but it's from the 70s and 35 years of public research has come up with nothing to break it. Really, do we think that the NSA is sitting on a completely new math in which every hard problem is now easy? I don't buy it, I'm quite sure there are things such as secure crypto no matter how much money and manpower you throw at it simply because they are as much chasing ghosts as we are, they may be looking for a solution that doesn't exist. Of course they're absolutely not going to tell you about that, but I find it far more likely they're now exploiting flaws and compromising systems rather than with pure math.
So what are you going to do, drop by a few days each year for reserve training and if you're ever called into action you'll be issued your standard script kiddie pack? Hand a bunch of guys semi-automatic rifles and they'll be a decent fighting force but I don't see "cyberwarriors" functioning the same way...
I probably don't do networking right, but I couldn't see the value of it.
Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 40% of all jobs are never offered to the public, 30% are filled with a person already known to the employer and only 30% are filled by total strangers. However, the often quoted number that 70% of all jobs happen through networking is dubious at best. Managers, past and present coworkers and anyone else you come in contact with through your work will have some opinion of your skill and work performance even if you've made no effort to network at all, simply by performing your job duties. If you restrict networking to only mean actively seeking contact with other professionals above or outside your work duties I'm sure the number would be much, much lower.
I mean, even if you live in a fairly large town I'm sure the people who work with the same things end up knowing each other and are probably rotating around among a relatively narrow set of companies. That said, I have seen networks being used as icebreakers. If you get a recommendation from a friend that works in the same company you're applying to that means more to them than if a random reference of your choosing recommends you. After all a misleading reference would reflect poorly on that employee, while for anyone else it'd be of little consequence.
You (and GP) make it sound like the free software movement has been sitting on a bench idle. But I find that there have been lots of project designed to "free" the user from the domination of large actors. (...) These projects were all presented on Slashdot, they are not small obscure stuff. Did you check them out? Did you use them? They were looking for money, did you help them?
Without any disrespect to the people trying, I feel they are small obscure stuff that I've rarely seen mentioned outside slashdot and are very far from competing with the applications they hope to replace. The latter is particularly a problem when you're talking about applications I can't use on my own, there's no point in having a Diaspora account when nobody I know has one or wants to create one. But I will take another look at what owncloud has to offer....
Slashdotters love to drool over SpaceX successes, but just ignore all of Lockheed Martin's bloated contracts. The big step isn't private versus public, it's smart versus dumb.
That's a little simplistic. The government uses cost-plus contracts to develop new technology and craft that is being designed as they go, you can't buy an F35 off the shelf and it'd be a crazy risk for a private company to promise delivery of specific features and performance on a specific schedule at a specific price. Nobody would agree to that, so instead the government says here's a running tab to cover costs and a reasonable profit margin - if you fail to show good progress we might have to abort but the risk is all on us, you get your money anyway. Of course as a company that's a dream project, it can't fail and the normal rules of business doesn't apply so they're more like a heavily protected semi-government agency.
SpaceX shows delivering payloads to orbit is no longer the kind of exotic experiment it was in the 60s, the technology and risks are sufficiently known that you can do it on normal commercial terms where NASA pays a fixed price for a service and SpaceX delivers, taking the risk of profit or loss. It's nice that we get there, but it's very hard to get there without these "bloated contracts" to pave the way. The alternative would be for NASA to do all the bleeding edge projects in-house, which would probably get just as many complaints of public inefficiency and become a monopolist without any choice. True there aren't many candidates for such government contracts either, but you can at least pick your poison.
While proprietary software won't always do things the way you want them for normal applications you could always restrict their permissions, firewall their network and most importantly unless you had a very serious leak built in the data stayed on your own computer, it might be locked up in a proprietary format with software that has forced obsolescence but I always felt the hyperbole was a bit thick. If you buy a CD you buy the mix the artist wanted you to have, you don't get the raw tracks to remix it the way you wanted it to be. Likewise when you buy a closed source game you get the game experience they wanted you to have, not all the source and assets to remake it the way you wanted it to be. All other things being equal it'd of course be desirable, but it's doesn't make it worthless or immoral to buy it without that possibility.
With "Service as a Software Substitution" as RMS calls it or as web services and the cloud as I'd call it you've got no control at all of neither the software nor the data. You can't even do the slightest change in how it works. When they want it to change, it changes and there's nothing you can do to stay on an old version the only thing you could do is to go nuclear and stop using it at all. Getting the data out and over to a competing service is often far worse and more locked up than a proprietary format. And again, they control your data. I'd be far more concerned about all my documents being on a Google Docs server somewhere than in a MS Office document on my disk under my control.
The worst part is really the way you're tied not technically to their service though, but legally. When the iTunes app store tells me they've updated their Terms of Service and asks me to answer yes or no, it's basically "Would you like to continue using your phone as normal or totally cripple all access to new software and updates?" I don't even bother reading it, it's accepting at gunpoint anyway. And I really don't feel it'd be much different with Android and the Play store. It didn't concern me much when it was primarily so I'd have a phone to play Angry Birds on (see above) because I totally don't care where my scores go, but as you start wanting to use it for more serious things it matters but there's really no opting out.
The stupid thing is that I really do like advantages of cloud syncing, I'd just like it to be against my own private server or at least in a local colo of my choice. I don't want to route it through Apple or Google or Facebook or any of the other big megacorporations. But what we need is a solid alternative, not the wailing song of RMS. He could have complained about the lack of a free kernel forever but as long as HURD wasn't an alternative it just didn't matter much until Linux came along and became usable. Give us a real alternative, based perhaps on AOSP or Ubuntu Touch (ugh) and maybe we can turn the tide. P.S. There was a poll here, 90% wouldn't change their online habits one bit after the Snowden revelations - don't assume the general public is with you.