When is the last time an armed uprising led to more freedom? Once freedom-lovers have to resort to guns, they've usually already lost. The second amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms (not "guns") as part of a "well regulated militia" is not the bulwark of democracy, just used recently as a political gambit designed to get the countryside to vote for a party that's against most of their best interests.
You didn't read my reply very carefully. It's not just about collecting the information. It's about building and segmenting the web of interconnects. If they took even *one* of the terrorists into custody, they could probably uncover the other 18 through a mechanism like this. Without it, they'd only have 1/18th of the problem solved. You say "there was already enough data to determine that the event was going to happen"... while that may be true (I doubt enough was in the hands of law enforcement), knowing something will happen and knowing exactly who's involved are completely different things.
Where are my mod points when I need them? The parent is the most sensible post I've seen so far on the topic. The purpose of creating such a "web" of connections is to segment the population and assign guilt by association with suspicious people. For example, there's a very real chance that if anti-terrorism funding hadn't been cut in 2001 and certain people had been on the ball we'd have stopped some percentage of the September 11th hijackers. However, without some segmentation algorithm that could divide mass intercommunication into groups, we'd probably not have found them all, or even enough to stop the attacks. However, with such an algorithm the associations would probably have stood out in 12-foot tall bold italic letters.
Does that mean I think the NSA program is good, or lawful? No. However, I think it would be possible to create a program that could do the segmentation while guaranteeing anonymity of the people, where you'd need a court order to uncover the identities of the participants. For this to happen, the phone companies would have to become more involved and pre-process the data, which they're probably pretty scared to do with the ACLU and EFF already jumping down their throats.
In summary, the system is necessary and wrong, and the reactions to it are counterproductive and righteous.
This may sound silly, but have we actually paid off the Spanish American War yet? The federal debt has never been zero between now and then, so isn't repealing this tax a little premature?
power adaptor connector failure. I don't know why these are made the way they are, but there's got to be a better way.
There is. These connectors are truly great. Not only does it protect the socket from bending, MacBook from being yanked onto the floor, and people from tripping, but because it can be attached either way and pulls itself into the socket magnetically, it can be connected easily in pitch darkness and is impossible to connect incorrectly.
Huh. As someone with both a MacBook Pro and a ThinkPad T41 in this very room, I had no idea. Sorry about the false info. It does seem that the community folks on the Apple side are taking vastly more advantage of the feature in their fun hacks, though. After 3 years I don't see half the fun things for the ThinkPads that have come out in the year that Apple's used the technology.
Is this the same motion detector that IBM's HDD labs came up with a few years ago?
No. About a year ago Apple starting adding a general purpose motion sensor to the motherboard, accessible via an API. The OS uses the motion sensor to park a HD during a jolt. Others have tapped into it for more fun/useful uses.
The IBM one, by the way, is a feature of the HD controller and is not available via a general API.
Good post. As to the foods, though, things like ecchinacea extracts have pretty much been debunked. Just eat a balanced diet. After having a kid, you learn a lot about what a good diet is comprised of, and usually realize how awfully you've been eating. The best rule of thumb-- eat lots of colors. And I don't mean all the different jelly beans. If you eat lots of natural foods of all different colors, you're pretty much guaranteed to be getting a great (and probably complete) mix of nutrients.
The ultimate goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to dismantle secular institutions and set up an Islamic state. The main thing preventing this currently is US influence in the region.
Iraq was a very secular state under Saddam Hussein. It had to be; his religious faction was the minority. The US has not been a positive influence in this regard, and the invasion, if anything, has moved them closer to an Islamic state. Otherwise, good post.
By only giving them free software, we give them the ability to make changes, to adapt the technology to their needs.
That's a good argument, but not a good one for *only* giving them free software. What about the idea of giving them the best tool for the job? Wouldn't that that raise them up a bit? Such as a copy of Eclipse running on Java? Or do you want them to be stuck in emacs/C++ land, thinking that will help "raise the third world up" faster?
It also gives them an entrance into the IT market
The absolute BEST way to do THAT would be to load Windows on these machines.
No, the open source rule is arbitrary, petty, and will ultimately hurt the recipients of these machines.
It is very rare to find a programmer that is prepared to defend software patents
I think you're projecting. I know plenty. Software patents have been one of the driving forces in the industry, making it what it is today. Yes, it's been abused. What good thing hasn't?
My guess is the programmers opposed to the entire software patent process are the ones that look at every new codebase as something that should be rewritten.
It's the private companies that abuse the social security numbers, not the government.
This is not true. The DMV asks for it, it's on government medical forms, etc. It is used today as a way to uniquely identify each American completely outside the context of social security.
They said that there were weapons of mass destruction.
It was not the government who said that, but croporate oligarchs who wanted to get Iraki oil.
This is also obviously false. Colin Powell was acting on behalf of the government when he gave a speech to the UN detailing the reasons we know Iraq to have WMDs, and implying there was much more evidence that was too secret to share (which has also, now, been found to be a lie.)
And it is the courts who said that, not the government.
Courts are part of the government. The US government is comprised of three separate (ha!) but equal (ha!) branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
Umm...who do you think conducts the elections, the Election Fairies? Elections are run by the local county Election Boards, civil servants and (usually) elderly volunteers. No other method has so far been demonstrated to be more fair or less biased.
In much of the US, these Election Boards can also double as the campaign managers to one of the candidates (ie. Florida). And I'd like to see the study that shows that no other method is more fair or less biased.
Well, I don't know what individual apps are built with, but XCode defaults to -Os and uses gcc for both architectures. Using those settings, the.o files are actually about 20% bigger on PowerPC for small things like SimpleText, contradicting what I said earlier. But I've definitely seen apps where the ratio is opposite, and most Universal Binaries claim bigger RAM requirements on the Intel side.
I generally don't hold with conspiracy theories, especially since Apple wants to keep the sales going during the transition. But it's definitely possible that things will get even better on the Intel side as the tools improve and developers get used to it.
I used to think this, too, but Macintosh Universal Binaries regularly see the Intel side both have bigger code and use more RAM (gcc codegen for both sides). I don't know why this is, but I'm wondering if the suggested instruction ordering, alignment, and such to optimize for Intel's latest processors eliminates the old advantage.
Your comment is an excellent argument for converting to the Macintosh, not to open source. The biggest argument in favor of open source software like Linux and friends is the low/nonexistant up-front cost. If you're willing to trade initial cost for lots of extra work and less features, open source software is for you. The only other argument I can think of is if you like to tinker and want the source, which contradicts your argument.
The motion-sensing demo was hilarious. The guy's ship was shaking like crazy, and it was comical seeing him try to keep both hands on the controller while twisting it around
When I read your comment the first time around, I believed you, not having seen the E3 presentation for myself. But now that it's up on the net on video I can see that you're on crack. The motion tracking was actually excellent, and quite stable. It looked impressive.
Even if I don't play one single new game right away, $600 is a pretty decent price for a Blu-Ray player. And I have an HDTV. However, the PS3 already has committed to it more exclusives than any other next-gen console, so I have little worry about in terms of game availability. Game availability will be better on the PS3 than either Revolution (I refuse to call it Wii) or XBox360. Heck, there are still a few PS2 titles I've wanted to play that I haven't yet.
If you're worried about the price, stick with the PS2 another 6-8 months and it'll surely drop.
Slashdot Mirror
When is the last time an armed uprising led to more freedom? Once freedom-lovers have to resort to guns, they've usually already lost. The second amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms (not "guns") as part of a "well regulated militia" is not the bulwark of democracy, just used recently as a political gambit designed to get the countryside to vote for a party that's against most of their best interests.
You didn't read my reply very carefully. It's not just about collecting the information. It's about building and segmenting the web of interconnects. If they took even *one* of the terrorists into custody, they could probably uncover the other 18 through a mechanism like this. Without it, they'd only have 1/18th of the problem solved. You say "there was already enough data to determine that the event was going to happen"... while that may be true (I doubt enough was in the hands of law enforcement), knowing something will happen and knowing exactly who's involved are completely different things.
Where are my mod points when I need them? The parent is the most sensible post I've seen so far on the topic. The purpose of creating such a "web" of connections is to segment the population and assign guilt by association with suspicious people. For example, there's a very real chance that if anti-terrorism funding hadn't been cut in 2001 and certain people had been on the ball we'd have stopped some percentage of the September 11th hijackers. However, without some segmentation algorithm that could divide mass intercommunication into groups, we'd probably not have found them all, or even enough to stop the attacks. However, with such an algorithm the associations would probably have stood out in 12-foot tall bold italic letters.
Does that mean I think the NSA program is good, or lawful? No. However, I think it would be possible to create a program that could do the segmentation while guaranteeing anonymity of the people, where you'd need a court order to uncover the identities of the participants. For this to happen, the phone companies would have to become more involved and pre-process the data, which they're probably pretty scared to do with the ACLU and EFF already jumping down their throats.
In summary, the system is necessary and wrong, and the reactions to it are counterproductive and righteous.
This may sound silly, but have we actually paid off the Spanish American War yet? The federal debt has never been zero between now and then, so isn't repealing this tax a little premature?
power adaptor connector failure. I don't know why these are made the way they are, but there's got to be a better way.
There is. These connectors are truly great. Not only does it protect the socket from bending, MacBook from being yanked onto the floor, and people from tripping, but because it can be attached either way and pulls itself into the socket magnetically, it can be connected easily in pitch darkness and is impossible to connect incorrectly.
One banana peel, into pure energy, would produce 1.25 billion kilowatt-hours.
Are you sure it's not 1.21 GigaWatts?
"whether it's why its slow"
..."
This one is actually grammatical, just awkward. "whether it is why MacOS X's kernel is slow, or
Not to mention the human eye has a neural net backing it to post-process the images.
Yeah, and COBOL2002 isn't outdated, either.
Huh. As someone with both a MacBook Pro and a ThinkPad T41 in this very room, I had no idea. Sorry about the false info. It does seem that the community folks on the Apple side are taking vastly more advantage of the feature in their fun hacks, though. After 3 years I don't see half the fun things for the ThinkPads that have come out in the year that Apple's used the technology.
No. About a year ago Apple starting adding a general purpose motion sensor to the motherboard, accessible via an API. The OS uses the motion sensor to park a HD during a jolt. Others have tapped into it for more fun/useful uses.
The IBM one, by the way, is a feature of the HD controller and is not available via a general API.
Apple's KB article on it
Some developer info on the motion sensor and how to tap into it
Further discussion of above link
A car alarm-style app that uses the SMS to detect if the laptop is being moved when the alarm is activated
Good post. As to the foods, though, things like ecchinacea extracts have pretty much been debunked. Just eat a balanced diet. After having a kid, you learn a lot about what a good diet is comprised of, and usually realize how awfully you've been eating. The best rule of thumb-- eat lots of colors. And I don't mean all the different jelly beans. If you eat lots of natural foods of all different colors, you're pretty much guaranteed to be getting a great (and probably complete) mix of nutrients.
Good points, except for this:
The ultimate goal of Islamic fundamentalism is to dismantle secular institutions and set up an Islamic state. The main thing preventing this currently is US influence in the region.
Iraq was a very secular state under Saddam Hussein. It had to be; his religious faction was the minority. The US has not been a positive influence in this regard, and the invasion, if anything, has moved them closer to an Islamic state. Otherwise, good post.
By only giving them free software, we give them the ability to make changes, to adapt the technology to their needs.
That's a good argument, but not a good one for *only* giving them free software. What about the idea of giving them the best tool for the job? Wouldn't that that raise them up a bit? Such as a copy of Eclipse running on Java? Or do you want them to be stuck in emacs/C++ land, thinking that will help "raise the third world up" faster?
It also gives them an entrance into the IT market
The absolute BEST way to do THAT would be to load Windows on these machines.
No, the open source rule is arbitrary, petty, and will ultimately hurt the recipients of these machines.
It is very rare to find a programmer that is prepared to defend software patents
I think you're projecting. I know plenty. Software patents have been one of the driving forces in the industry, making it what it is today. Yes, it's been abused. What good thing hasn't?
My guess is the programmers opposed to the entire software patent process are the ones that look at every new codebase as something that should be rewritten.
frivolous lawsuits
Ahhh, yes, I almost forgot that in Slashdotland all patent lawsuits are, by definition, frivolous.
You may be thinking of Taiwan.
:)
But isn't that the same country?
What purpose would publishing the details on his site serve, other than as a kind of security vulnerability "first post!" type of thing?
It's the private companies that abuse the social security numbers, not the government.
This is not true. The DMV asks for it, it's on government medical forms, etc. It is used today as a way to uniquely identify each American completely outside the context of social security.
They said that there were weapons of mass destruction.
It was not the government who said that, but croporate oligarchs who wanted to get Iraki oil.
This is also obviously false. Colin Powell was acting on behalf of the government when he gave a speech to the UN detailing the reasons we know Iraq to have WMDs, and implying there was much more evidence that was too secret to share (which has also, now, been found to be a lie.)
And it is the courts who said that, not the government.
Courts are part of the government. The US government is comprised of three separate (ha!) but equal (ha!) branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
In much of the US, these Election Boards can also double as the campaign managers to one of the candidates (ie. Florida). And I'd like to see the study that shows that no other method is more fair or less biased.
Well, I don't know what individual apps are built with, but XCode defaults to -Os and uses gcc for both architectures. Using those settings, the .o files are actually about 20% bigger on PowerPC for small things like SimpleText, contradicting what I said earlier. But I've definitely seen apps where the ratio is opposite, and most Universal Binaries claim bigger RAM requirements on the Intel side.
I generally don't hold with conspiracy theories, especially since Apple wants to keep the sales going during the transition. But it's definitely possible that things will get even better on the Intel side as the tools improve and developers get used to it.
I used to think this, too, but Macintosh Universal Binaries regularly see the Intel side both have bigger code and use more RAM (gcc codegen for both sides). I don't know why this is, but I'm wondering if the suggested instruction ordering, alignment, and such to optimize for Intel's latest processors eliminates the old advantage.
Your comment is an excellent argument for converting to the Macintosh, not to open source. The biggest argument in favor of open source software like Linux and friends is the low/nonexistant up-front cost. If you're willing to trade initial cost for lots of extra work and less features, open source software is for you. The only other argument I can think of is if you like to tinker and want the source, which contradicts your argument.
When I read your comment the first time around, I believed you, not having seen the E3 presentation for myself. But now that it's up on the net on video I can see that you're on crack. The motion tracking was actually excellent, and quite stable. It looked impressive.
Even if I don't play one single new game right away, $600 is a pretty decent price for a Blu-Ray player. And I have an HDTV. However, the PS3 already has committed to it more exclusives than any other next-gen console, so I have little worry about in terms of game availability. Game availability will be better on the PS3 than either Revolution (I refuse to call it Wii) or XBox360. Heck, there are still a few PS2 titles I've wanted to play that I haven't yet.
If you're worried about the price, stick with the PS2 another 6-8 months and it'll surely drop.