A cheap electric car that performs well will sell like crazy.
Define "cheap". I bought my Nissan LEAF because, compared to every other new hybrid or ICE-only vehicle I looked at, it was the cheapest option.
Now, I was looking to buy new, not used, which means I was looking at a higher price point than a lot of people, and I am willing (and able) to spend a little more money up front in order to save it over the longer term. Within those parameters, though, and making some assumptions about the price of fuel (which, I have to admit, are pretty far off base right now; I didn't anticipate such a dramatic drop), the three EVs I looked at were all significantly cheaper than any of the other options over an eight-year time horizon -- and that was without even considering the lower maintenance costs, didn't factor in the tax credits and included some pretty pessimistic assumptions about EV resale value.
With the tax credits available, the break-even point against the next-best vehicle (the Honda Insight) as just a bit over two years. And the price of the LEAF has dropped significantly since I did the analysis.
Assuming a LEAF or an i-MiEV or similar fits your driving needs, they are very cost-effective options. And my LEAF is a lot of fun to drive; it performs quite well.
GPS is not my first choice for reliability (often doesn't work well in cities
Smartphones work even better in cities, because they also use known Wifi locations. In fact, in a city you can often turn the GPS receiver off and your position data will degrade only slightly, using pure Wifi.
runs out of battery
Hub generator.
falls out of your pocket and goes smash, etc.
I put mine in a case on a handlebar mount. Visible, protected from the weather and plugged into power. The touch screen is even usable, though there are obvious issues with taking your attention off the road and looking at the screen. I normally stop, or at least slow way down, before trying to manipulate any controls.
So... your point is that in over 200 years all of the problems have been solved... and your example is a lighting device that didn't exist on bikes 20 years ago (probably less)?
it's a carefully crafted, edited, imaginary-ideal version of that person
Well, it may be a carefully crafted image. In practice, though, fairly few people bother to edit themselves that way, at least not any more (and often less!) than they edit themselves in face-to-face communication.
The idea of having a concrete and photographically provable identity is less than a century old. There was a time when leaving town, changing your name, and never speaking to anyone you knew again would effectively erase you(fame or infamy aside).
The flip side of that is that for most of human existence the small group of people you lived with (village, tribe, etc.) knew everything about you. Privacy was basically nonexistent. Sure, you could move and, assuming you could get another group to let you in, you could start with a blank slate. But your new fellows would soon know everything about your present self, even if they didn't know about your past. And, frankly, the fact that you'd be a blank slate to them is the biggest part of the reason they'd be unlikely to let you in.
Well, technically, kidnapping and imprisonment are violent acts, and we have our police and courts do those to non-violent offenders all the time. Mutilation is a little beyond the pale, though.
please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Actually, if you look at the statistics, people living in tribal/primitive lifestyles are far more violent than people living a civilized lifestyle. For a deep dive into the issue I highly recommend Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". It's a huge book (800+ pages), but the first quarter of it covers the history of human violence (interpersonal as well as organized) in tremendous detail and is well worth reading all on its own.
Your suggestion that we punish a non-violent crime with body mutilation seems contrary to your signature. Not arguing either point, they just seem dissonant to me. Perhaps you can introduce me to new information that will resolve the two.
There is a simple but deep philosophical perspective shift you need to make to resolve the apparent dichotomy between the statements. Put simply, you need to realize he was joking. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to determine which of the statements was a joke, or if perhaps both were.
Unless the admin lives somewhere that he doesn't care what you say. And even if you can scare the admin, that just means you can get that particular avenue shut down. Which isn't useless, but it doesn't mean you can actually get to the real target via a trail beginning with a Google search.
So I'd say that yes, we should do any type of recording including video, sound and GPS data. But we also need PROPER ways to protect the individual rights of the coppers.
Very simple: Automatically log all of the data in a system accessible only to the courts. Dispatchers will need real-time position information, but don't need history. Court proceedings may need historical data, but only with appropriate documentation (subpoena) and audit trails. Management may need historical data, but again only with appropriate documentation and audit trails, and probably with a process that includes notification of the officer and the opportunity for the officer to engage a union rep to oversee the management access and review. In some cases it may make sense to engage the union rep automatically and not to notify the officer.
Anonymizing the data is ridiculous. These are public servants we entrust with considerable -- and eminently abusable -- power. It's entirely appropriate that the public's representatives in court and in the police management hierarchy have access to the details, and it can be done in a way that's consistent with the privacy of officers.
OTOH, the lack of past use is a pretty good indicator that on-the-job intoxication is less likely. It's imperfect, of course, but so is everything about the hiring process.
But ever since Lincoln the presidents have been more powerful, and allowed much greater latitude in the impositon of central power. This isn't all bad, but it sure isn't all good. And it doesn't appear to be what the Consitution allowed as interpreted at any prior time.
There's a good argument that the 14th amendment fundamentally changed the meaning of the Constitution as originally written, and placed the federal government in a much more central position as the defender of individual rights against the states. This is one of what I would call the two central themes in Akhil Reed Amar's excellent book, "The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction" (the other is that the original Bill of Rights was primarily communitarian in nature, intended to protect the people collectively in most cases rather than individually, though the 14th changed that as well).
Of course, what we're talking about here isn't the federal government as a defender against overbearing states, but that change in focus, along with the changes in resources and structure provided by the 16th and 17th amendments and the fallout of the decisions caused by FDR's court packing threat, is a big part of how we got where we are. Even if we fix the overly broad interpretations of the commerce and general welfare clauses that are FDR's most enduring legacy, we're still living with a rather different Constitution than the one we had prior to the Civil War.
Personally, I think the best thing we can do to fix our nation is to re-empower the states, enabling them to act as defenders of individual liberty against the federal government. The original design assumed that the states, since they were of the people, would take on that role of protecting the citizens, and the federal government was not given any authority to act in ways that could trample the citizenry, and then the Bill of Rights was passed to make clear that it was not allowed to. Problem solved, the founders thought -- wrongly. When the 14th amendment empowered the federal government to protect citizens from the states, we essentially took that plus the supremacy clause to mean that the federal government was tasked with protecting rights, not in addition to the states, but effectively instead of the states.
I think what we've learned is that freedom is too important to be left to any one government, even one that theoretically has internal checks and balances. I think we need a states' rights amendment that specifically empowers the states to resist federal assaults on their residents. Something that says that states can overrule the federal government if state legislatures interpret the scope of a fundamental right more broadly than the federal government, and that states can sue the federal government in state courts for infringements of their citizens' rights (and that the federal government is obligated to comply with the resulting rulings). The federal government would still retain the right to step in when states are stepping on civil rights. Basically, the idea is to have two rights watchdogs and allow infringements only if both levels of government agree it's a good idea.
I think the Whistleblower Protection Act covers Snowden, particularly in light of Obama's Presidential Policy Directive 19. If WPA doesn't cover Snowden it should be extended so it does, but I think it already does, and the inconsistency isn't in the law it's in the administration's obedience to the law.
All the government has to do to make this useless is to regularly send a warrant request to every web property of any note.
What's more interesting is the suit filed by several tech companies demanding permission to provide counts of National Security Letters and the number of accounts affected. Google has already negotiated permission to share this data as long as it's in ranges no smaller than 1000, which actually tells us most of what we want to know already (e.g. in 2012 Google received between 0 and 999 NSLs, affecting between 1000 and 1999 user accounts, which, assuming Google has about a billion users, means the NSLs have affected ~0.0001% of their user base), but exact numbers would be better.
As another poster said, technological solutions to policy problems don't work, at least not well. We need to fix the law.
RPN calculators certainly cut down on the number of people asking to borrow your calculator. They usually give it back after a few minutes and never ask again.
Unless you make the mistake of showing them how to use it. The brighter ones will quickly grasp how much better it is, and you may never see your calculator again.
Now, maybe you're a special snowflake who studied extra hard and learned the material on his own. But not every student is going to do that, and the teacher has no way of knowing who has really learned the material and who is just faking it to avoid being bothered.
Nonsense. A pre-assessment quiz tells the teacher who knows what, and what each student needs to work on.
Then compare it to a PDF viewer that also does not implement those features.
Don't compare apples and oranges.
You're missing the point. What matters isn't what two things you compare, what matters is the security implications of the options available. Some other simplified PDF viewer that is more secure than Chrome's doesn't help if it's not the one that gets used. Google wants to improve the safety of Chrome users, and so they use the tools that they have to do that... and odds are very good that Chrome's PDF viewer has fewer security problems than whatever the default viewer on the user's system is (especially since it's probably Adobe Reader).
And for the savvy users who know what they're doing, they can always just change the default in Chrome and make it do what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't get the point
Hardware and OS independence?
A cheap electric car that performs well will sell like crazy.
Define "cheap". I bought my Nissan LEAF because, compared to every other new hybrid or ICE-only vehicle I looked at, it was the cheapest option.
Now, I was looking to buy new, not used, which means I was looking at a higher price point than a lot of people, and I am willing (and able) to spend a little more money up front in order to save it over the longer term. Within those parameters, though, and making some assumptions about the price of fuel (which, I have to admit, are pretty far off base right now; I didn't anticipate such a dramatic drop), the three EVs I looked at were all significantly cheaper than any of the other options over an eight-year time horizon -- and that was without even considering the lower maintenance costs, didn't factor in the tax credits and included some pretty pessimistic assumptions about EV resale value.
With the tax credits available, the break-even point against the next-best vehicle (the Honda Insight) as just a bit over two years. And the price of the LEAF has dropped significantly since I did the analysis.
Assuming a LEAF or an i-MiEV or similar fits your driving needs, they are very cost-effective options. And my LEAF is a lot of fun to drive; it performs quite well.
GPS is not my first choice for reliability (often doesn't work well in cities
Smartphones work even better in cities, because they also use known Wifi locations. In fact, in a city you can often turn the GPS receiver off and your position data will degrade only slightly, using pure Wifi.
runs out of battery
Hub generator.
falls out of your pocket and goes smash, etc.
I put mine in a case on a handlebar mount. Visible, protected from the weather and plugged into power. The touch screen is even usable, though there are obvious issues with taking your attention off the road and looking at the screen. I normally stop, or at least slow way down, before trying to manipulate any controls.
Any other reliability issues?
So... your point is that in over 200 years all of the problems have been solved... and your example is a lighting device that didn't exist on bikes 20 years ago (probably less)?
it's a carefully crafted, edited, imaginary-ideal version of that person
Well, it may be a carefully crafted image. In practice, though, fairly few people bother to edit themselves that way, at least not any more (and often less!) than they edit themselves in face-to-face communication.
The idea of having a concrete and photographically provable identity is less than a century old. There was a time when leaving town, changing your name, and never speaking to anyone you knew again would effectively erase you(fame or infamy aside).
The flip side of that is that for most of human existence the small group of people you lived with (village, tribe, etc.) knew everything about you. Privacy was basically nonexistent. Sure, you could move and, assuming you could get another group to let you in, you could start with a blank slate. But your new fellows would soon know everything about your present self, even if they didn't know about your past. And, frankly, the fact that you'd be a blank slate to them is the biggest part of the reason they'd be unlikely to let you in.
Well, technically, kidnapping and imprisonment are violent acts, and we have our police and courts do those to non-violent offenders all the time. Mutilation is a little beyond the pale, though.
please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Actually, if you look at the statistics, people living in tribal/primitive lifestyles are far more violent than people living a civilized lifestyle. For a deep dive into the issue I highly recommend Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". It's a huge book (800+ pages), but the first quarter of it covers the history of human violence (interpersonal as well as organized) in tremendous detail and is well worth reading all on its own.
Your suggestion that we punish a non-violent crime with body mutilation seems contrary to your signature. Not arguing either point, they just seem dissonant to me. Perhaps you can introduce me to new information that will resolve the two.
There is a simple but deep philosophical perspective shift you need to make to resolve the apparent dichotomy between the statements. Put simply, you need to realize he was joking. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to determine which of the statements was a joke, or if perhaps both were.
Unless the admin lives somewhere that he doesn't care what you say. And even if you can scare the admin, that just means you can get that particular avenue shut down. Which isn't useless, but it doesn't mean you can actually get to the real target via a trail beginning with a Google search.
Tom Hanks needs the cash, Da Vinci Code Part 2, coming up!
Yeah, because Captain Phillips has only raked in $100M (great show, BTW, and Hanks does an awesome job).
So I'd say that yes, we should do any type of recording including video, sound and GPS data. But we also need PROPER ways to protect the individual rights of the coppers.
Very simple: Automatically log all of the data in a system accessible only to the courts. Dispatchers will need real-time position information, but don't need history. Court proceedings may need historical data, but only with appropriate documentation (subpoena) and audit trails. Management may need historical data, but again only with appropriate documentation and audit trails, and probably with a process that includes notification of the officer and the opportunity for the officer to engage a union rep to oversee the management access and review. In some cases it may make sense to engage the union rep automatically and not to notify the officer.
Anonymizing the data is ridiculous. These are public servants we entrust with considerable -- and eminently abusable -- power. It's entirely appropriate that the public's representatives in court and in the police management hierarchy have access to the details, and it can be done in a way that's consistent with the privacy of officers.
OTOH, the lack of past use is a pretty good indicator that on-the-job intoxication is less likely. It's imperfect, of course, but so is everything about the hiring process.
But ever since Lincoln the presidents have been more powerful, and allowed much greater latitude in the impositon of central power. This isn't all bad, but it sure isn't all good. And it doesn't appear to be what the Consitution allowed as interpreted at any prior time.
There's a good argument that the 14th amendment fundamentally changed the meaning of the Constitution as originally written, and placed the federal government in a much more central position as the defender of individual rights against the states. This is one of what I would call the two central themes in Akhil Reed Amar's excellent book, "The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction" (the other is that the original Bill of Rights was primarily communitarian in nature, intended to protect the people collectively in most cases rather than individually, though the 14th changed that as well).
Of course, what we're talking about here isn't the federal government as a defender against overbearing states, but that change in focus, along with the changes in resources and structure provided by the 16th and 17th amendments and the fallout of the decisions caused by FDR's court packing threat, is a big part of how we got where we are. Even if we fix the overly broad interpretations of the commerce and general welfare clauses that are FDR's most enduring legacy, we're still living with a rather different Constitution than the one we had prior to the Civil War.
Personally, I think the best thing we can do to fix our nation is to re-empower the states, enabling them to act as defenders of individual liberty against the federal government. The original design assumed that the states, since they were of the people, would take on that role of protecting the citizens, and the federal government was not given any authority to act in ways that could trample the citizenry, and then the Bill of Rights was passed to make clear that it was not allowed to. Problem solved, the founders thought -- wrongly. When the 14th amendment empowered the federal government to protect citizens from the states, we essentially took that plus the supremacy clause to mean that the federal government was tasked with protecting rights, not in addition to the states, but effectively instead of the states.
I think what we've learned is that freedom is too important to be left to any one government, even one that theoretically has internal checks and balances. I think we need a states' rights amendment that specifically empowers the states to resist federal assaults on their residents. Something that says that states can overrule the federal government if state legislatures interpret the scope of a fundamental right more broadly than the federal government, and that states can sue the federal government in state courts for infringements of their citizens' rights (and that the federal government is obligated to comply with the resulting rulings). The federal government would still retain the right to step in when states are stepping on civil rights. Basically, the idea is to have two rights watchdogs and allow infringements only if both levels of government agree it's a good idea.
Those "dumb enough" were those that can be found via Google...
Being able to find the images doesn't necessarily mean that you can find the person.
I think the Whistleblower Protection Act covers Snowden, particularly in light of Obama's Presidential Policy Directive 19. If WPA doesn't cover Snowden it should be extended so it does, but I think it already does, and the inconsistency isn't in the law it's in the administration's obedience to the law.
Wait... Google has EVER returned results with pictures of child sex abuse?!
I doubt there's much of anything Google has never returned.
And those few "that dumb" will easily be found
Can you support that assertion? I don't think it's necessarily true.
All the government has to do to make this useless is to regularly send a warrant request to every web property of any note.
What's more interesting is the suit filed by several tech companies demanding permission to provide counts of National Security Letters and the number of accounts affected. Google has already negotiated permission to share this data as long as it's in ranges no smaller than 1000, which actually tells us most of what we want to know already (e.g. in 2012 Google received between 0 and 999 NSLs, affecting between 1000 and 1999 user accounts, which, assuming Google has about a billion users, means the NSLs have affected ~0.0001% of their user base), but exact numbers would be better.
As another poster said, technological solutions to policy problems don't work, at least not well. We need to fix the law.
RPN calculators certainly cut down on the number of people asking to borrow your calculator. They usually give it back after a few minutes and never ask again.
Unless you make the mistake of showing them how to use it. The brighter ones will quickly grasp how much better it is, and you may never see your calculator again.
Now, maybe you're a special snowflake who studied extra hard and learned the material on his own. But not every student is going to do that, and the teacher has no way of knowing who has really learned the material and who is just faking it to avoid being bothered.
Nonsense. A pre-assessment quiz tells the teacher who knows what, and what each student needs to work on.
You mean, the employees that have been working there already, who have been cooperating with the spy agencies? I feel better already!
They haven't been cooperating. Google has denied all cooperation, and none of Snowden's revelations have provided any evidence of cooperation.
That's by design.
Then compare it to a PDF viewer that also does not implement those features.
Don't compare apples and oranges.
You're missing the point. What matters isn't what two things you compare, what matters is the security implications of the options available. Some other simplified PDF viewer that is more secure than Chrome's doesn't help if it's not the one that gets used. Google wants to improve the safety of Chrome users, and so they use the tools that they have to do that... and odds are very good that Chrome's PDF viewer has fewer security problems than whatever the default viewer on the user's system is (especially since it's probably Adobe Reader).
And for the savvy users who know what they're doing, they can always just change the default in Chrome and make it do what they want.
The big tech companies want to appear to be unwilling to cooperate with spying. But what's to keep them from secretly cooperating all the same?
For one, the employees.
Too bad secret laws exist to force you, even if you don't want, and to not say that you are doing it.
I don't think there's any evidence that companies can be forced to lie. They can be forced to keep quiet.