I am rather equally okay with "I pay more tax but get more stuff for it" and "I pay less tax and have to procure stuff on my own". I am also quite okay with "I pay tax to pay for things like police and schools for poor communities who can't afford these things on their own".
What I am not okay with is "I pay tax that gets embezzled", "I pay tax that goes to pay incompetent teachers and for bad schools", and so on. The trouble with the high-tax-high-services model is that it is vulnerable to diversion in a way that the other model isn't.
So what's happening now is that the mechanisms that once made cities desirable places to live and work are falling apart as the automobile and the computer mean that more people don't need to work right in the middle of everything else any more.
"Responsible" for the blight is a funny way to put it -- you say that like they're being malicious. They're not; they're just moving to the best place to do business, which no longer needs to be right next door to other businesses. The world has changed.
There was a picture posted today of a Washington Metro (subway) station manager flipping off a passenger asking a question.
I've noticed this too; mass transit employees in the eastern US (at least) tend to be exceedingly assholish, with a few exceptions. One notable one is the folks who run the MARC trains, the commuter rail from Maryland to Washington DC; they are *excellent*.
Washington is weird. I used to live at T and 9th, and that area was a bizarre mix of rapidly gentrifying (the U Street corridor, etc.) and crackheads breaking into cars and random gunfire. I understand the same thing is going on in NoMa and some other places near Eastern Market. But there are still plenty of bad places in DC proper (throw darts at a map of Southeast).
Where is there blight in VA, out of curiosity? From what I've seen (when I was looking for a new apartment) anything in Northern Virginia is still 1) safe and 2) expensive...
I don't know what the floating-point performance of their computers is, but some of the scientific computing community would probably appreciate it if Fort Meade was auctioned off. Or, for that matter, [bit|lite|doge]coin miners.
This is the problem in the US these days: the government is supposed to be a steward of the public's property and an avenue by which the public can engage in collective action ("hey guys, let's pay for some garbage trucks and some people to collect the garbage, no?")
But increasingly the government is becoming an independent agent outside the realm of merely acting as a proxy for the public will, and therein lies the problem...
I have no expectation of privacy on public roadways. If someone wants to hang out behind a cactus with a 400mm lens and take pictures of me as I drive by then that's his right, so long as he is somewhere he is legally allowed to be and I'm in public.
The question is whether or not the government should be doing it. The government doesn't get to do anything it has a legal right to do; the government does whatever we tell it to do and not a thing more. Is it unconstitutional for the cops to take pictures of motorists' cars? No. Should we let them do it? No.
It's not a question of whether Bitcoin costs something; it's whether the inefficiencies associated with Bitcoin (the electricity and hardware costs to sustain the network) are more or less than the inefficiencies associated with other currencies.
The day that fines for trafficking narcotics become an important revenue stream for the government, then, yes, you will be committing a crime.
The reason there is so much legal/ethical awkwardness surrounding speed traps is that they are a fundamentally different sort of law enforcement than enforcing laws against, say, burglary or assault.
It is no sin to make a different GUI for a device with a 7" screen that is controlled by a touchscreen and runs on a few watts, a device with a 21" screen that is controlled by a keyboard and mouse and runs on a hundred watts, and a device with a 4" touchscreen whose power draw is measured in milliwatts.
Microsoft's failure was to think that we wanted a consistent user experience for all these things.
Deceptive advertising is fraud. Don't "regulate" -- prosecute them for fraud if they're committing fraud. If they're not, then leave them the hell alone.
Whilst the USA might be having an unusually cold snap, how often is the temp below 0F there, other than Alaska?
The much warmer 0C is very commonplace throughout every winter in Europe
Add to that the fact that 0C has some significance (snow and ice threshold), whereas 0F is an insignificant temperature.
Plus the fact that fahrenheit is used in very few countries. The vast majority of the world uses Celcius.
So, no, it's certainly not used "just as much". Though a small minority of times the phrase "below zero" is used it might be fahrenheit, worldwide, it far more often means celsius.
There are places in the US that quite regularly get below 0F; the northern Great Plains are cold (and windy) as hell in the winter.
The fact that the Iranians convinced a shiny new US stealth drone to land intact on their runway probably says something about the immunity of these things to spoofing and jamming.
Why are German police to be despised? Other than that little interlude with the Nazis, I've found them to be pretty friendly when I've been to Germany. Perhaps Chinese/Russian/American-if-you're-Hispanic police would be more appropriate?
That was a typo made in haste before work; I meant to write "she" there, although I'm not sure of the protocol: is it correct to use male pronouns to describe a MtF transgender person when referring, in the past tense, to a time before her gender identification changed?
Whistleblowing is reporting malpractice to a higher authority.
In a democracy, the highest authority is the people. Manning knew that she'd have no success going to her commanding officer, or his CO, or his CO, or even the President or Congress. So he reported the malpractice to the President's boss: the people.
Who in hell thought it was a good idea to use a system where a single piece of information, consisting of just a few bytes, gives someone a blank check to my bank account? There are innumerable ways to concoct something more secure than this, especially these days when computing power (to do encryption) is ubiquitous. Such methods are of course not bulletproof, but they're a hell of a lot better than a guy with a pair of binoculars stealing credit card numbers, or what happened at Target.
I'm not talking about recognition of a particular face -- this isn't a replacement for a password/passphrase. It's not a technique for unlocking; it's a technique for automatic *re*locking: "unmount everything and wipe the keys if this guy leaves the keyboard."
It seems like the attack vector people are worried about here is "people get physical access to your machine while the key resides in RAM and extract it".
Could you program Truecrypt to maintain a continuous watch via a laptop's built-in webcam for the physical presence of someone at the keyboard (face detection, say), and upon detecting that the person has moved, dismounts the volume, overwrites the section of memory storing keys with random bits (to protect against "put the RAM modules in the freezer" attacks), kills the bulk of the Truecrypt software, overwrites it, and then kills itself? You could add other failsafes if you wanted, I suppose (based on the machine's microphone input, perhaps), but the idea is to have a dead-man's switch that will automatically dismount the partition and remove the keys from memory when Something Goes Wrong, so the keys are only around when you are actually sitting there working, and as soon as you aren't there, they are wiped.
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I am rather equally okay with "I pay more tax but get more stuff for it" and "I pay less tax and have to procure stuff on my own". I am also quite okay with "I pay tax to pay for things like police and schools for poor communities who can't afford these things on their own".
What I am not okay with is "I pay tax that gets embezzled", "I pay tax that goes to pay incompetent teachers and for bad schools", and so on. The trouble with the high-tax-high-services model is that it is vulnerable to diversion in a way that the other model isn't.
So what's happening now is that the mechanisms that once made cities desirable places to live and work are falling apart as the automobile and the computer mean that more people don't need to work right in the middle of everything else any more.
"Responsible" for the blight is a funny way to put it -- you say that like they're being malicious. They're not; they're just moving to the best place to do business, which no longer needs to be right next door to other businesses. The world has changed.
There was a picture posted today of a Washington Metro (subway) station manager flipping off a passenger asking a question.
I've noticed this too; mass transit employees in the eastern US (at least) tend to be exceedingly assholish, with a few exceptions. One notable one is the folks who run the MARC trains, the commuter rail from Maryland to Washington DC; they are *excellent*.
Washington is weird. I used to live at T and 9th, and that area was a bizarre mix of rapidly gentrifying (the U Street corridor, etc.) and crackheads breaking into cars and random gunfire. I understand the same thing is going on in NoMa and some other places near Eastern Market. But there are still plenty of bad places in DC proper (throw darts at a map of Southeast).
Where is there blight in VA, out of curiosity? From what I've seen (when I was looking for a new apartment) anything in Northern Virginia is still 1) safe and 2) expensive...
I don't know what the floating-point performance of their computers is, but some of the scientific computing community would probably appreciate it if Fort Meade was auctioned off. Or, for that matter, [bit|lite|doge]coin miners.
This is the problem in the US these days: the government is supposed to be a steward of the public's property and an avenue by which the public can engage in collective action ("hey guys, let's pay for some garbage trucks and some people to collect the garbage, no?")
But increasingly the government is becoming an independent agent outside the realm of merely acting as a proxy for the public will, and therein lies the problem...
I have no expectation of privacy on public roadways. If someone wants to hang out behind a cactus with a 400mm lens and take pictures of me as I drive by then that's his right, so long as he is somewhere he is legally allowed to be and I'm in public.
The question is whether or not the government should be doing it. The government doesn't get to do anything it has a legal right to do; the government does whatever we tell it to do and not a thing more. Is it unconstitutional for the cops to take pictures of motorists' cars? No. Should we let them do it? No.
(Except the North American Starcraft champion and arguably best player outside Korea)
It's not a question of whether Bitcoin costs something; it's whether the inefficiencies associated with Bitcoin (the electricity and hardware costs to sustain the network) are more or less than the inefficiencies associated with other currencies.
The day that fines for trafficking narcotics become an important revenue stream for the government, then, yes, you will be committing a crime.
The reason there is so much legal/ethical awkwardness surrounding speed traps is that they are a fundamentally different sort of law enforcement than enforcing laws against, say, burglary or assault.
Why is "dual purpose system" a good thing?
It is no sin to make a different GUI for a device with a 7" screen that is controlled by a touchscreen and runs on a few watts, a device with a 21" screen that is controlled by a keyboard and mouse and runs on a hundred watts, and a device with a 4" touchscreen whose power draw is measured in milliwatts.
Microsoft's failure was to think that we wanted a consistent user experience for all these things.
This doesn't require any more regulation.
Deceptive advertising is fraud. Don't "regulate" -- prosecute them for fraud if they're committing fraud. If they're not, then leave them the hell alone.
"Deal with the devil" isn't meant to be taken literally; it's a reference to all the Faust-esque stories out there.
One of the draws of EVE is that it is an artificial economy, and perhaps the most developed one in existence.
Can't tell if troll:
I have heard of a gasoline engine car's main energy storage mechanism bursting into flames. It happens pretty often.
Just as much???
Whilst the USA might be having an unusually cold snap, how often is the temp below 0F there, other than Alaska?
The much warmer 0C is very commonplace throughout every winter in Europe
Add to that the fact that 0C has some significance (snow and ice threshold), whereas 0F is an insignificant temperature.
Plus the fact that fahrenheit is used in very few countries. The vast majority of the world uses Celcius.
So, no, it's certainly not used "just as much". Though a small minority of times the phrase "below zero" is used it might be fahrenheit, worldwide, it far more often means celsius.
There are places in the US that quite regularly get below 0F; the northern Great Plains are cold (and windy) as hell in the winter.
Filming the police from a distance without interfering is treated as a crime.
SCOTUS has said, very explicitly, that this is legal.
The fact that the Iranians convinced a shiny new US stealth drone to land intact on their runway probably says something about the immunity of these things to spoofing and jamming.
Why are German police to be despised? Other than that little interlude with the Nazis, I've found them to be pretty friendly when I've been to Germany. Perhaps Chinese/Russian/American-if-you're-Hispanic police would be more appropriate?
I shudder to think of an Italian banker.
That was a typo made in haste before work; I meant to write "she" there, although I'm not sure of the protocol: is it correct to use male pronouns to describe a MtF transgender person when referring, in the past tense, to a time before her gender identification changed?
Whistleblowing is reporting malpractice to a higher authority.
In a democracy, the highest authority is the people. Manning knew that she'd have no success going to her commanding officer, or his CO, or his CO, or even the President or Congress. So he reported the malpractice to the President's boss: the people.
Who in hell thought it was a good idea to use a system where a single piece of information, consisting of just a few bytes, gives someone a blank check to my bank account? There are innumerable ways to concoct something more secure than this, especially these days when computing power (to do encryption) is ubiquitous. Such methods are of course not bulletproof, but they're a hell of a lot better than a guy with a pair of binoculars stealing credit card numbers, or what happened at Target.
Sort of like how the railroad network is a bunch of proprietary tracks whose trains can't travel back and forth ... wait.
I'm not talking about recognition of a particular face -- this isn't a replacement for a password/passphrase. It's not a technique for unlocking; it's a technique for automatic *re*locking: "unmount everything and wipe the keys if this guy leaves the keyboard."
It seems like the attack vector people are worried about here is "people get physical access to your machine while the key resides in RAM and extract it".
Could you program Truecrypt to maintain a continuous watch via a laptop's built-in webcam for the physical presence of someone at the keyboard (face detection, say), and upon detecting that the person has moved, dismounts the volume, overwrites the section of memory storing keys with random bits (to protect against "put the RAM modules in the freezer" attacks), kills the bulk of the Truecrypt software, overwrites it, and then kills itself? You could add other failsafes if you wanted, I suppose (based on the machine's microphone input, perhaps), but the idea is to have a dead-man's switch that will automatically dismount the partition and remove the keys from memory when Something Goes Wrong, so the keys are only around when you are actually sitting there working, and as soon as you aren't there, they are wiped.