How about fMRI studies? AFAIK no section of the brain has been found which isn't used regularly. Granted that I'm not a neurologist, but I think if there'd been unused sections we'd have heard about it.
Well you haven't heard it enough apparently so I'm going to repeat it for you: America has way better protection for the press and general freedom of expression than Europe and the UK in particular.
And yet, both Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders rate the UK higher than the US with respect to freedom of the press. On paper the US has strong constitutional protection for the press. In practice, we're happy to ignore the constitution whenever it's inconvenient, and analysis of the actual treatment of the press demonstrates that.
The NSA didn't exactly get much opposition from Google, Microsoft and everyone else they've tapped into, did they?
I think the NSA got considerable opposition from Google, and knew from the beginning that it would, which is why Google was (per David Drummond) never even asked to provide broad access to user data. The revelation that the NSA might be tapping connections between data centers caused a crash project to make sure all of that traffic was encrypted, for example. In general, this stuff has really pissed Googlers off and Google engineers are working to plug every potential leak they can find.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't speak for Google.)
I don't worship science as a religion. I reserve worship for God. I do look to science as the best method we've devised to obtain solid, useful explanations of observable phenomena. While we certainly did develop and use many technologies prior to discovering the scientific method of inquiry, contrast the effectiveness and pace of progress before and after the enlightenment to see that science makes our knowledge dramatically more effective and impactful.
As for using the whole of my brain, not just the "scientific" part, that statement doesn't even make any sense. The whole of my brain encompasses all sorts of functions, most of which contribute to scientific reasoning -- including, in particular, all of the so-called "creative" elements, since creativity is a core part of the scientific method; some of which have no relevance to or even detract from scientific reasoning but enrich personal experience; and some of which are purely involved with survival processes. It's impossible not to use one's whole brain.
What *I* find "interesting" is that even though old grandparents have always been saying things like "It's not that grandma's getting stupid, sweetie, it's just that when you're my age you know so much that it takes awhile to remember what you know", none of that matters if the newest generation hasn't climbed out of their dungeons to announce that they simulated the same thing on a computer. Relevance, anyone? Reverence, maybe?
Bah.
There are old saws explaining all sorts of phenomena that we don't understand, and their relationship with the truth is... random. They're often completely wrong, sometimes have elements of intersection with the truth and occasionally hit the mark exactly, though without the precision or detail that a scientific analysis provides. It shouldn't be surprising that they're sometimes somewhat correct, but neither is it actually meaningful, and it's pretty rare that there's much value even for taking them as hyphotheses for scientific testing, especially since they're often not very testable.
In short, your grandparents may have accidentally been right. So what? At this point we don't even know for certain that they were; this one study provides a strong hint, but a lot more work will be required to fully understand the mechanisms and implications. At the end of all that, it may well turn out that their assumption had a vague overlap with the truth. Or not.
I think the bill is a bad idea, but I don't think it would stop Google from deploying fiber elsewhere in Kansas. It doesn't do anything to prevent deployments, it just prevents municipalities from offering the special treatment that helped get KC selected as the first city out of 1100 candidates.
I always suspected that Google would divest itself of Motorola, mostly for the reason you mention. In addition, I noticed that Google was operating Motorola as a completely separate business, not merging them with the rest of the company at all. That might have been to help maintain an arms' length distance to reassure other handset manufacturers, but I think it was mostly because they knew this day was coming. They just had to get Motorola back on track as a phone maker so they could sell it for a reasonable price while retaining nearly all of the patents.
Google seems willing to pay 10B to rent companies for a while...
They didn't "rent" anything -- they paid $10 billion for Motorola's patents. The rest wasn't worth much to them.
According to this Google+ post, it wasn't that bad. Motorola came to Google with $5.6B in cash and deferred tax assets, plus Google recovered some more of their money by selling the set-top box business ($2.35) and some factories ($75M), and finally the sale price to Lenovo ($2.91B).
So the net cost was about $1.56B. For that Google got most of the Motorola patents and Motorola's advanced products group. Good deal? Bad deal? You decide.
Presumably. Even a 3-hop request would count as involving only one account, so just request emails from "info@gmail.com" and get all the people they email to notify about a new feature.
If the company generating the report has an incentive to minimize the numbers they report, yes, because I don't think the directive defines details like this. And companies may want to minimize the numbers. Users should ask the companies to define their counting methodology.
What do you mean by "scope"? The companies also report the number of user accounts affected/targeted, so increasing the scope by requesting data for more users will still be apparent in the reports. The government can request more information about a given user, I suppose, but can't go beyond "all of it".
If you want to see an imperial presidency, look at Roosevelt, Lincoln or Kennedy.
Don't forget Andrew Jackson. He defied a Supreme Court ruling in order to forcibly relocate tens of thousands of Native Americans, murdering thousands in the process.
The "zero emissions" lap is from energy stored during regenerative braking. Since the braking will be done regardless and the normal method is to simply discard the energy as heat the zero emissions lap is really emissions-free.
This is why the FIRMWARE of phone radio CPUs needs to be fully open-sourced. Until they are, there is no way to audit them for privacy concerns nor modify them to close such loopholes.
Either the firmware didn't have spyware built in or the NSA's slides are misinformation, describing rootkits they didn't actually need to create in order to keep us from worrying about bugged firmware. Oh, and they must have planted this misinformation expecting that Snowden (or someone like him) would leak it.
I'm not discounting your concern, firmware is a nice vector for such spyware. But this particular data release is fairly strong evidence against it being a real problem, at least in the recent past.
First generation immigrants are generally more motivated and productive compared to those farmed locally.
This is why immigration has always been the economic engine that drives the United States. It is the reason that we became a superpower. Sure, abundance of natural resources and a business-friendly government infrastructure plus a culture with a healthy respect for the rule of law have been important, too, but the American Dream is all about lifting oneself economically, and without the influx of motivated and productive people to fill the bottom tiers, it wouldn't work. We got where we are by sucking smart people and hard-working people from the rest of the world, each generation of Americans hating the damned foreigners flooding into "their" country -- and doing most of the work to build it up.
Anti-immigration xenophobes ("They're takin' our jobs!") should think about that. And, no, "but we just want them to immigrate legally!" isn't any less of an anti-immigration, xenophobic position, unless it's coupled with a desire to reform US immigration policies to make legal immigration feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
What would have been better left on the cutting room floor? Denver's offensive line.
With ubiquity comes desensitization.
With well-disguised cameras, desensitization is irrelevant.
There's a good reason they don't dump a million tonnes of rubble near residential zones.
Sure they do. There are lots of places where there are landfills right next to residential areas.
How about fMRI studies? AFAIK no section of the brain has been found which isn't used regularly. Granted that I'm not a neurologist, but I think if there'd been unused sections we'd have heard about it.
Amazon registered the .book TLD, I believe.
Well you haven't heard it enough apparently so I'm going to repeat it for you: America has way better protection for the press and general freedom of expression than Europe and the UK in particular.
And yet, both Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders rate the UK higher than the US with respect to freedom of the press. On paper the US has strong constitutional protection for the press. In practice, we're happy to ignore the constitution whenever it's inconvenient, and analysis of the actual treatment of the press demonstrates that.
The NSA didn't exactly get much opposition from Google, Microsoft and everyone else they've tapped into, did they?
I think the NSA got considerable opposition from Google, and knew from the beginning that it would, which is why Google was (per David Drummond) never even asked to provide broad access to user data. The revelation that the NSA might be tapping connections between data centers caused a crash project to make sure all of that traffic was encrypted, for example. In general, this stuff has really pissed Googlers off and Google engineers are working to plug every potential leak they can find.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but don't speak for Google.)
I don't worship science as a religion. I reserve worship for God. I do look to science as the best method we've devised to obtain solid, useful explanations of observable phenomena. While we certainly did develop and use many technologies prior to discovering the scientific method of inquiry, contrast the effectiveness and pace of progress before and after the enlightenment to see that science makes our knowledge dramatically more effective and impactful.
As for using the whole of my brain, not just the "scientific" part, that statement doesn't even make any sense. The whole of my brain encompasses all sorts of functions, most of which contribute to scientific reasoning -- including, in particular, all of the so-called "creative" elements, since creativity is a core part of the scientific method; some of which have no relevance to or even detract from scientific reasoning but enrich personal experience; and some of which are purely involved with survival processes. It's impossible not to use one's whole brain.
What is a web site, but writing, images, sounds, and data. Kansas has been officially disconnected from the Internet.
Not disconnected, but it sounds like municipal web sites may be verboten.
What *I* find "interesting" is that even though old grandparents have always been saying things like "It's not that grandma's getting stupid, sweetie, it's just that when you're my age you know so much that it takes awhile to remember what you know", none of that matters if the newest generation hasn't climbed out of their dungeons to announce that they simulated the same thing on a computer. Relevance, anyone? Reverence, maybe?
Bah.
There are old saws explaining all sorts of phenomena that we don't understand, and their relationship with the truth is... random. They're often completely wrong, sometimes have elements of intersection with the truth and occasionally hit the mark exactly, though without the precision or detail that a scientific analysis provides. It shouldn't be surprising that they're sometimes somewhat correct, but neither is it actually meaningful, and it's pretty rare that there's much value even for taking them as hyphotheses for scientific testing, especially since they're often not very testable.
In short, your grandparents may have accidentally been right. So what? At this point we don't even know for certain that they were; this one study provides a strong hint, but a lot more work will be required to fully understand the mechanisms and implications. At the end of all that, it may well turn out that their assumption had a vague overlap with the truth. Or not.
I think the bill is a bad idea, but I don't think it would stop Google from deploying fiber elsewhere in Kansas. It doesn't do anything to prevent deployments, it just prevents municipalities from offering the special treatment that helped get KC selected as the first city out of 1100 candidates.
There are controls on that page that let you view the data different ways.
does Opera these days get counted as Chrome, since it's using that engine? .. or did it pretty much finally drop off the map?
http://gs.statcounter.com/
Opera is at 1.3%.
Some become addicted to drugs, others drink or gambling or base jumping.
And some read and comment on slashdot articles, long after the site has become crap. Sigh.
The original price was $12.5B, not 10B.
I always suspected that Google would divest itself of Motorola, mostly for the reason you mention. In addition, I noticed that Google was operating Motorola as a completely separate business, not merging them with the rest of the company at all. That might have been to help maintain an arms' length distance to reassure other handset manufacturers, but I think it was mostly because they knew this day was coming. They just had to get Motorola back on track as a phone maker so they could sell it for a reasonable price while retaining nearly all of the patents.
They didn't "rent" anything -- they paid $10 billion for Motorola's patents. The rest wasn't worth much to them.
According to this Google+ post, it wasn't that bad. Motorola came to Google with $5.6B in cash and deferred tax assets, plus Google recovered some more of their money by selling the set-top box business ($2.35) and some factories ($75M), and finally the sale price to Lenovo ($2.91B).
So the net cost was about $1.56B. For that Google got most of the Motorola patents and Motorola's advanced products group. Good deal? Bad deal? You decide.
The only solution is to replace plurality voting itself with a better method.
I'm sure the two dominant parties will be anxious to push that through.
Presumably. Even a 3-hop request would count as involving only one account, so just request emails from "info@gmail.com" and get all the people they email to notify about a new feature.
If the company generating the report has an incentive to minimize the numbers they report, yes, because I don't think the directive defines details like this. And companies may want to minimize the numbers. Users should ask the companies to define their counting methodology.
Keep the number of requests below 1000.
Vastly expand the scope of each request.
What do you mean by "scope"? The companies also report the number of user accounts affected/targeted, so increasing the scope by requesting data for more users will still be apparent in the reports. The government can request more information about a given user, I suppose, but can't go beyond "all of it".
If you want to see an imperial presidency, look at Roosevelt, Lincoln or Kennedy.
Don't forget Andrew Jackson. He defied a Supreme Court ruling in order to forcibly relocate tens of thousands of Native Americans, murdering thousands in the process.
Did you read the summary?
The "zero emissions" lap is from energy stored during regenerative braking. Since the braking will be done regardless and the normal method is to simply discard the energy as heat the zero emissions lap is really emissions-free.
Very interesting. Having open source firmware is irrelevant if the authorities can simply and silently replace it at will.
This is why the FIRMWARE of phone radio CPUs needs to be fully open-sourced. Until they are, there is no way to audit them for privacy concerns nor modify them to close such loopholes.
Either the firmware didn't have spyware built in or the NSA's slides are misinformation, describing rootkits they didn't actually need to create in order to keep us from worrying about bugged firmware. Oh, and they must have planted this misinformation expecting that Snowden (or someone like him) would leak it.
I'm not discounting your concern, firmware is a nice vector for such spyware. But this particular data release is fairly strong evidence against it being a real problem, at least in the recent past.
First generation immigrants are generally more motivated and productive compared to those farmed locally.
This is why immigration has always been the economic engine that drives the United States. It is the reason that we became a superpower. Sure, abundance of natural resources and a business-friendly government infrastructure plus a culture with a healthy respect for the rule of law have been important, too, but the American Dream is all about lifting oneself economically, and without the influx of motivated and productive people to fill the bottom tiers, it wouldn't work. We got where we are by sucking smart people and hard-working people from the rest of the world, each generation of Americans hating the damned foreigners flooding into "their" country -- and doing most of the work to build it up.
Anti-immigration xenophobes ("They're takin' our jobs!") should think about that. And, no, "but we just want them to immigrate legally!" isn't any less of an anti-immigration, xenophobic position, unless it's coupled with a desire to reform US immigration policies to make legal immigration feasible.