He's a toddler in a nursery who wants a toy merely because another toddler played with it first. I don't know what Trump's motive is for hating Obama so much but his obvious intention to undo anything and everything Obama did, regardless of whether it's good or bad, is just childish and stupid. Or racist.
Or maybe, just maybe, there was a significant constituency that didn't like stupid edicts like this (even TFS notes it doesn't change behavior).
Finding and at least reviewing every stupid edict of Obama's is a great idea.
I don't buy that that's the reason. Trump doesn't seem to care about "reviewing" Obama's acts; he just wants to overturn them all. I'm all for reviewing every act of every president, and Obama certainly did a lot of things that I think were bad ideas, but I don't think that's what Trump is doing... nor do I believe that is what Trump's constituency wants. I live in the reddest state in the nation and I saw the Obama hatred building. It took me a while to recognize it for what it was/is: identity politics. Obama is a black, urban, non-religious, Democrat, law professor and that's just foreign to much of America.
Bill Clinton may have been a highly-educated Democrat, but he was a Southern good-old boy -- even sounded like one. And white, of course. Same with Jimmy Carter, except that Carter had the additional advantage that he lacked advanced degrees.
But Obama? Smart, black Chicago politician with a clipped Northern accent, elite education, no rural ties, much of his life spent on social activism. Very little common identity with any of the Republican base, he was "them", not "us". This sense of alienness generated the Birther movement, the Muslim allegations, etc. It was enhanced by Obama's conciliatory foreign policy, in which he had the audacity to apologize for America's errors, which to many on the right was final proof that he was not actually American.
I think that's the real reason. Yeah, Obama's politics were center left, but those didn't justify the hatred. Clinton was further to the left and while he was hated, too, it wasn't the visceral, vitriolic hatred directed at Obama. The feeling (note that it is very much an emotional thing, not logical) is that Obama was an unamerican invader in the Oval Office, and therefore anything and everything he did should be reversed, not because of what he did but because of who he was. That, I think, is the core of the Trumpian motive to undo everything Obama did, and thereby effectively erase the alien presence.
It's just my pet theory, but I think it holds up pretty well to scrutiny. Among other things, it explains why Trump's followers don't care about all of his lies, amorality and corruption. It's because their support is less about what he does and more about who he is (or at least pretends to be, which is close enough to the same thing).
Identity politics, top to bottom. And the left largely did it to themselves, with their focus on identity politics. No one should be surprised that there is an identity-based backlash from the right.
Didn't Obama make fun of Trump at a White House Correspondent's Dinner or some other formal function? That's my memory about why he's been stewing for so long on these things.
I never heard that. Wouldn't surprise me, but I'd want evidence, and it would need to predate Trump's Birtherism. Honestly, my best guess is that Trump's hatred of Obama is mostly about race. It can't really be about politics because Trump is a lifelong Democrat and Globalist.
Jesse James... believed in bank and train robbery right up to the bitter end
Bullshit. Show me any evidence that he believed they were acceptable and should be legal, and that he shouldn't be hunted and prosecuted for committing the crimes. Oh, I'm sure he had his rationalizations and justifications, but I seriously doubt they rose to the level of believing that bank and train robbery should be legal.
It's important to include in your passionate defense of liberty that you also don't believe in any form of social safety net. If consenting adults are allowed to engage in behavior which is highly likely to harm them in some way such that the taxpayer ends up needing to pay to keep them alive or off the streets then that's a problem.
This is, indeed, the single largest problem with social safety nets: they provide a plausible justification for imposing regulations that limit freedom merely because in some cases people who exercise the freedom may end up requiring more support. This argument says that any country that has universal health care should ban smoking, alcohol and all other drugs.
The right answer, IMO, is to recognize that safety nets and freedom are both social goods and that the potential negative interactions between them are just part of what it costs to have them. You can avoid those negative interactions by discarding one or the other (or both), but the result will be less happiness overall than if you just accept the inefficiency.
I wonder if the penal amount was 30,000, and the premium was 3,000 ( assuming 10%, juggle the numbers for other percentages as needed ), and they didnt do a good job of educating you on the difference between the two numbers.
Nope. The paperwork from the court was quite clear, and I discussed it with the court clerk. The bail amount was $3000, but the court would not allow me to simply post that amount, not even if I managed to provide it in cash. The bail was specified "bond only".
Linux based machines that hide the underlying functionality are simply stupid.
Tens (hundreds?) of millions of Chromebook users disagree with you. Many of them very strongly.
The fact is that between 95 and 100% of most people's laptop usage these days is in a browser. Having a system that is nothing but a browser turns out to be quite useful, and to have some big advantages in terms of simplicity, reliability and security. ChromeOS is by about any metric you might name, the most secure consumer operating system ever built. This is at the expense of flexibility since (until recently) the only app was a web browser. But as I already said, this lack of flexibility is actually just fine for many, many people, since the one thing it does is the only thing they need.
I hope this decision to make ChromeOS more flexible doesn't destroy the things that make it appealing.
Seriously? You actually think Trump is doing this just because Obama did it?
Have you not been paying attention? Trump has actually asked advisors and even other leaders what Obama decided about any number of things, just so he could reverse them. This is a transparent pattern that has been going on his whole presidency. I don't know about this particular situation, but many, many others have followed it exactly.
If you don't see it, it's your confirmation bias at work.
Businesses will use their own digital assistants to answer calls, so we'll end up living in a bizarre alternate universe where computers phone each other and have conversations to schedule our lives. Abbreviated botspeak will eventually supplant standard English, as humans mimic the mannerisms and verbal shortcuts used by impatient digital assistant apps.
I doubt that.
It's more likely that businesses will just publish a scheduling API, and your digital assistant will recognize that the API is available and use that instead, completing the process in tens of milliseconds. That will be cheaper for everyone, and more convenient for you, since you'll say "Okay Google (or whatever), make me a haircut appointment Wednesday morning at my usual salon" and the assistant will be able to respond instantly "Okay, I've made an appointment for you at 10. Jenny will cut your hair. Would you like me to book you a car on <your preferred self-driving car service>?". Actually, that last part will probably be unnecessary, since you'll just have standing instructions that your assistant should always arrange your transportation on your preferred service, or whichever is cheaper at the moment, etc.
1. More ways that Google (and 'partner companies', I'm sure) can track more aspects of your life.
Meh. Anyone using this is going to be putting the appointment on their Google calendar anyway.
1a. More opportunities for hackers to pry your personal data from you.
How so?
1b. More opportunities for criminal hackers to commit fraud (fraudulent purchases via hacked 'digital assistant', etc).
How so? Hacking your digital assistant would mean hacking Google's servers. If they can do that, I fail to see how the digital assistant makes anything worse.
2. More depersonalization of your interactions with other people.
Yeah, because calling to make appointments really helps you keep in touch with humanity. <sarcasm/>.
3. More excuses to avoid interactions with other human beings.
Opportunities to avoid meaningless, content-free, time-wasting interactions with people. Actually, this is just a stopgap. What we really need is for salons, restaurants, etc., to provide online scheduling APIs. All the fancy natural language processing is just to cover this deficiency.
4. Less opportunities for people to develop their interpersonal skills/be properly socialized.
If you're so isolated that making reservations is a significant part of your interpersonal interaction, you have a real problem.
Gosh, who would have thought that ruling by decree was a bad idea in a democracy? When Obama did it is was for our own good, but when Trump does it he's a nazi tyrant? It's the exact same thing.
Your reading comprehension is poor. The criticism isn't that Trump reversing Obama's directive is bad because Trump is a "nazi tyrant", the criticism is that Trump wants it reversed merely because Obama did it, regardless of its merits. He's a toddler in a nursery who wants a toy merely because another toddler played with it first. I don't know what Trump's motive is for hating Obama so much but his obvious intention to undo anything and everything Obama did, regardless of whether it's good or bad, is just childish and stupid. Or racist.
Though I guess we do have to thank the silly child for highlighting the fact that we've given the executive too much power. One good thing I hope to get out of the Trump administration is that we will we scale back the power of the president. We've trusted the holder of that office far too much, probably mostly because until now the holders of that office have demonstrated themselves to be adequately trustworthy. Lots of us recognized the danger many years ago, but Trump has made it impossible to ignore. I guess maybe we need a really, really terrible president from time to time. It's been almost 200 years since Andrew Jackson so we were overdue (though comparing Jackson to Trump is a little unfair to Jackson).
Got to love states run by religious control freaks
I'm fine with public intoxication statutes, and there's nothing "religious" about it. Drunks staggering around in public are a danger to themselves and others, as well as a nuisance. My friend wasn't merely tipsy, he was falling-down drunk.
in more civilized countries and states, it's either legal, or a ticket and small fine at most
It was a small fine. But he really did need to be picked up. According to the police he was walking down the street late at night, yelling and singing at full volume, and stumbled into traffic. Leaving him on the street would have been bad for everyone, including him. I suppose they could have tried to take him to his hotel rather than the drunk tank, but I'm not sure he could have told them what hotel it was. This was before the era of key cards and I don't recall whether the hotel room keys had the name of the hotel on them. He got belligerent with the cops, too. He was charged with resisting arrest and could have been charged with assaulting a police officer (though the police officer was clearly in no danger).
The $3K bail wasn't too unreasonable since he was out of state, and the state would have had no way to force him to come back otherwise. The bond-only requirement was weird.
I had an experience with the system that was odd, I thought.
I was bailing out a friend who had been picked up for public intoxication. We were in another state on business, which I assume is part of why things went down the way they did, because he was not local. When I found out he was in jail (after he failed to show up for client meetings), I contacted the court and was told that his bail was $3K -- bond only. I'd have been fine giving the court the cash, but they demanded I used a bail bondsman.
When I checked with a few bondsmen I got another surprise: They all demanded a 100% fee. Normally, as I understand it, bondsmen request a percentage (say, 10%) which must be paid to them up front, and they keep all of this money if you show up for court. If you don't, they have to pay the full amount to the court, and when you surface in the system they come after you to recover it. But in this case, they all wanted the full amount, $3K, up front before they'd issue the bond. And of course, it was a fee, not a deposit. Non-refundable. And if he failed to show, they'd come after him for the full amount again, to recover the money they had to pay the court.
Awesome deal for the bondsmen, since they had $0 risk. Worst case, he doesn't show and they give the fee to the court, they're out nothing but their time... and they still have an opportunity to try to collect the money again. Maybe they just sell it to a collection agency for some percentage of the face value of the debt. Best case, they got $3K for 15 minutes' work... and I had no other option because the court mandated bond only. Either I paid it or I let my buddy sit in jail (which I considered... but only very briefly).
Moreover, because he was in jail and couldn't contact a bondsman, he couldn't make bail without outside assistance, even though he'd have had no problem paying the money himself. I really don't understand the point of "bond only".
So, I paid up. I paid with a credit card, so I guess the bondsman did take a minor risk; the card processing fee. Though it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if my buddy didn't show they'd add that onto the collection amount.
As it worked out my buddy paid me back 20 minutes after he was out. We flew back home and he didn't actually have to return to go to court; he contacted an attorney who was able to handle it all for him. His fine ended up being trivial compared to what it cost to get him out of jail.
IMO, having CCTV cameras everywhere is a step too far.
I agree with pretty much the entirety of your very well thought out comment, but I'm curious on what basis you've formed this particular opinion. I myself am rather undecided on how I feel about CCTV surveillance, and to what extent it is or isn't acceptable... so I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on the matter.
Heh. I wish I had something crisp, clear and well thought out to say on it, but I don't. It just seems like it gives government too much information, too much scope for abuse. Even though there are lots of cameras recording public places in every city, it seems better that the data is fragmented and hard to assemble except upon demonstrable need. Failing that, I'd want to see a very strong anti-abuse infrastructure put in place.
When I see something double-spacing, I recognize that person as someone who is generally old enough to have learned on a typewriter (or the first generations of word processing), and who doesn't engage heavily with IT.
Or you see a professional programmer who spends a great deal of time writing code in monospace fonts, with extensive and properly-punctuated comments.
Personally, I try to remember to single-space after sentences when writing in proportional fonts, but I deliberately bias towards double-spacing because it's more important to me that my code have the double spaces than it is that my other writing have single spaces. I actually run a regexp on my code occasionally to find single-space instances and fix them, but I mostly try to train myself to double-space by default and single-space only deliberately, when I remember.
IMO, the difference has nothing to do with the face recognition system, the difference is all about the citywide police CCTV network which enables everyone out in public (or at home insufficiently-closed blinds) to be monitored and recorded all the time.
Catching criminals is a side effect. The main purpose is to create justification to investigate anyone they want.
No, the main purpose is to catch criminals. The means to that end is creating justification to investigate anyone they want.
There's no reason to assume ill intent here. The police really do just want the best possible tools to do their jobs with maximal effectiveness. It's rarely in the interest of society as a whole to give police everything they want, but that doesn't mean the police are wrong to want it.
Completely hamstringing the police and allowing crime to run unopposed is bad for society. Giving the police everything they want and allowing them to rifle through anyone's life at any time is bad for society. The balance is somewhere in between. Where, exactly, is a subject for constant debate and readjustment. IMO, having CCTV cameras everywhere is a step too far. Applying automatic face recognition makes this a little worse, but the bigger issue is the camera network. It's one thing for police to (as the do in the US) be able to request video from privately-installed security cameras when they are investigating a specific crime. It's another thing for them to have unlimited access to a police-owned city-wide surveillance network.
But maybe that's just me. Londoners seem largely okay with it, and it's their call.
a car whose instrument panel is an oversized iPad probably won't cut it in the long term
Why not?
Because tablet interfaces/feels SUCK when you can't keep your eyes on the tablet.
What kind of controls in your car do you need to use for a long period of time? I've only had my Model S for three weeks, so I can't say I have a lot of experience with it, but so far I haven't found the touchscreen to be bad at all. Actually, it's pretty nice because the controls are much larger so if anything I have to look at it less.
If there were significant damages, this would be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Insurance companies are quite good at assessing risk and delivering targeted recommendations which must be followed to get lower premiums. The problem is that there are no real damages for insurance companies to pay, so none of these incentives come into play.
Maybe what we need is statutory damages for privacy breaches, which apply above and beyond any provable actual damages. Say, $100 for each social security number, name, address etc., perhaps on an increasing scale when multiple pieces of information about one person are leaked in such a way that they are connected, since having more data about a person makes identity theft and other malicious use easier. The money should be payable to the person whose information is leaked.
Oh, and evidence that a company tries to hide a breach should result in triple damages and criminal prosecution of the individuals tried to conceal it.
If the Equifax breach had resulted in statutory payouts of, say, $500 per person to each of the 145M people harmed, the resulting $72.5B liability would have hammered Equifax flat, insurance or no. And you can bet that other companies would have gotten serious about data security -- not only that, it would make stored data about individuals a serious liability which companies would try to avoid. You can't be forced to pay out for leakage of data that you never had. Companies' own attorneys and insurance companies would be constantly harping on the need to limit liability by destroying customer/user data.
Thanks for the comment. I give it more credibility coming from someone who's been involved in a mobile OS:).
I don't work on anything directly related, but I got curious a while ago and asked people on the Android kernel team who do exactly this stuff. So you're getting it secondhand, but originally from authoritative sources. Assuming I didn't screw it up, which can never be completely discounted:-)
" The only reason it's spread so far is by forking."
Did you intentionally misspell that word?
Misspell what word? Viruses propagate, in part, by mutating. There is no definitive version 1.0, as they don't have a consistent codebase. With each fork, it is more likely to spread.
Meanwhile, Google has effectively stopped SPAM email, at no cost to me.
Google has mostly stopped SPAM calls for me, too. My phone does ring (if I'm not in a meeting or something) but shows a big red banner on the screen that says "Suspected spam caller" and the number. I never answer and the rare cases where the robocaller bothers to leave voicemail I'm proved right to have ignored it.
This isn't perfect; if the caller were to spoof the number of someone in my address book it would get through, I'm sure. And the phone does still ring (unless silenced for another reason). But until robocallers start breaking into my contact list and spoofing known people, it's a non-issue for me.
You know, the solid-fuel booster rockets on the shuttle that cannot be shut down once started? That's the NASA that is now so concerned over security problems?
Von Braun, back in the 60s, already knew that you cannot really man-rate those things exactly because you have zero control over them once they went off. And they now have a problem with "security concerns"?
They aren't allowed to learn from past mistakes?
Note that I'm not saying that there's a real problem here. I don't know. But it's not unreasonable to ask questions and evaluate tradeoffs, indeed its the absolute most rational way to proceed.
I'm not an expert but I believe flash memory in phones isn't used for paging. The reason in precisely that it would severly impact on the lifetime of the device's internal memory.
When the OS runs out of RAM it just starts killing apps.
Not so much because paging would kill the flash, but because paging in and out would kill performance. It turns out to be much better to just kill apps not used for a while when low on RAM, especially since all mobile apps already have to be written to assume they can be evicted at any time.
The only sort of paging I've seen used in any Android device, at least, is paging to compressed RAM (zram). This generally isn't a huge win, though it sometimes makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
He's a toddler in a nursery who wants a toy merely because another toddler played with it first. I don't know what Trump's motive is for hating Obama so much but his obvious intention to undo anything and everything Obama did, regardless of whether it's good or bad, is just childish and stupid. Or racist.
Or maybe, just maybe, there was a significant constituency that didn't like stupid edicts like this (even TFS notes it doesn't change behavior).
Finding and at least reviewing every stupid edict of Obama's is a great idea.
I don't buy that that's the reason. Trump doesn't seem to care about "reviewing" Obama's acts; he just wants to overturn them all. I'm all for reviewing every act of every president, and Obama certainly did a lot of things that I think were bad ideas, but I don't think that's what Trump is doing... nor do I believe that is what Trump's constituency wants. I live in the reddest state in the nation and I saw the Obama hatred building. It took me a while to recognize it for what it was/is: identity politics. Obama is a black, urban, non-religious, Democrat, law professor and that's just foreign to much of America.
Bill Clinton may have been a highly-educated Democrat, but he was a Southern good-old boy -- even sounded like one. And white, of course. Same with Jimmy Carter, except that Carter had the additional advantage that he lacked advanced degrees.
But Obama? Smart, black Chicago politician with a clipped Northern accent, elite education, no rural ties, much of his life spent on social activism. Very little common identity with any of the Republican base, he was "them", not "us". This sense of alienness generated the Birther movement, the Muslim allegations, etc. It was enhanced by Obama's conciliatory foreign policy, in which he had the audacity to apologize for America's errors, which to many on the right was final proof that he was not actually American.
I think that's the real reason. Yeah, Obama's politics were center left, but those didn't justify the hatred. Clinton was further to the left and while he was hated, too, it wasn't the visceral, vitriolic hatred directed at Obama. The feeling (note that it is very much an emotional thing, not logical) is that Obama was an unamerican invader in the Oval Office, and therefore anything and everything he did should be reversed, not because of what he did but because of who he was. That, I think, is the core of the Trumpian motive to undo everything Obama did, and thereby effectively erase the alien presence.
It's just my pet theory, but I think it holds up pretty well to scrutiny. Among other things, it explains why Trump's followers don't care about all of his lies, amorality and corruption. It's because their support is less about what he does and more about who he is (or at least pretends to be, which is close enough to the same thing).
Identity politics, top to bottom. And the left largely did it to themselves, with their focus on identity politics. No one should be surprised that there is an identity-based backlash from the right.
Didn't Obama make fun of Trump at a White House Correspondent's Dinner or some other formal function? That's my memory about why he's been stewing for so long on these things.
I never heard that. Wouldn't surprise me, but I'd want evidence, and it would need to predate Trump's Birtherism. Honestly, my best guess is that Trump's hatred of Obama is mostly about race. It can't really be about politics because Trump is a lifelong Democrat and Globalist.
Not that the motive matters that much.
Jesse James... believed in bank and train robbery right up to the bitter end
Bullshit. Show me any evidence that he believed they were acceptable and should be legal, and that he shouldn't be hunted and prosecuted for committing the crimes. Oh, I'm sure he had his rationalizations and justifications, but I seriously doubt they rose to the level of believing that bank and train robbery should be legal.
It's important to include in your passionate defense of liberty that you also don't believe in any form of social safety net. If consenting adults are allowed to engage in behavior which is highly likely to harm them in some way such that the taxpayer ends up needing to pay to keep them alive or off the streets then that's a problem.
This is, indeed, the single largest problem with social safety nets: they provide a plausible justification for imposing regulations that limit freedom merely because in some cases people who exercise the freedom may end up requiring more support. This argument says that any country that has universal health care should ban smoking, alcohol and all other drugs.
The right answer, IMO, is to recognize that safety nets and freedom are both social goods and that the potential negative interactions between them are just part of what it costs to have them. You can avoid those negative interactions by discarding one or the other (or both), but the result will be less happiness overall than if you just accept the inefficiency.
I wonder if the penal amount was 30,000, and the premium was 3,000 ( assuming 10%, juggle the numbers for other percentages as needed ), and they didnt do a good job of educating you on the difference between the two numbers.
Nope. The paperwork from the court was quite clear, and I discussed it with the court clerk. The bail amount was $3000, but the court would not allow me to simply post that amount, not even if I managed to provide it in cash. The bail was specified "bond only".
Note that this was about 20 years ago.
It was actually less than $200, as I recall. And I think the court date was more about the resisting charge.
Linux based machines that hide the underlying functionality are simply stupid.
Tens (hundreds?) of millions of Chromebook users disagree with you. Many of them very strongly.
The fact is that between 95 and 100% of most people's laptop usage these days is in a browser. Having a system that is nothing but a browser turns out to be quite useful, and to have some big advantages in terms of simplicity, reliability and security. ChromeOS is by about any metric you might name, the most secure consumer operating system ever built. This is at the expense of flexibility since (until recently) the only app was a web browser. But as I already said, this lack of flexibility is actually just fine for many, many people, since the one thing it does is the only thing they need.
I hope this decision to make ChromeOS more flexible doesn't destroy the things that make it appealing.
Seriously? You actually think Trump is doing this just because Obama did it?
Have you not been paying attention? Trump has actually asked advisors and even other leaders what Obama decided about any number of things, just so he could reverse them. This is a transparent pattern that has been going on his whole presidency. I don't know about this particular situation, but many, many others have followed it exactly.
If you don't see it, it's your confirmation bias at work.
Businesses will use their own digital assistants to answer calls, so we'll end up living in a bizarre alternate universe where computers phone each other and have conversations to schedule our lives. Abbreviated botspeak will eventually supplant standard English, as humans mimic the mannerisms and verbal shortcuts used by impatient digital assistant apps.
I doubt that.
It's more likely that businesses will just publish a scheduling API, and your digital assistant will recognize that the API is available and use that instead, completing the process in tens of milliseconds. That will be cheaper for everyone, and more convenient for you, since you'll say "Okay Google (or whatever), make me a haircut appointment Wednesday morning at my usual salon" and the assistant will be able to respond instantly "Okay, I've made an appointment for you at 10. Jenny will cut your hair. Would you like me to book you a car on <your preferred self-driving car service>?". Actually, that last part will probably be unnecessary, since you'll just have standing instructions that your assistant should always arrange your transportation on your preferred service, or whichever is cheaper at the moment, etc.
1. More ways that Google (and 'partner companies', I'm sure) can track more aspects of your life.
Meh. Anyone using this is going to be putting the appointment on their Google calendar anyway.
1a. More opportunities for hackers to pry your personal data from you.
How so?
1b. More opportunities for criminal hackers to commit fraud (fraudulent purchases via hacked 'digital assistant', etc).
How so? Hacking your digital assistant would mean hacking Google's servers. If they can do that, I fail to see how the digital assistant makes anything worse.
2. More depersonalization of your interactions with other people.
Yeah, because calling to make appointments really helps you keep in touch with humanity. <sarcasm/>.
3. More excuses to avoid interactions with other human beings.
Opportunities to avoid meaningless, content-free, time-wasting interactions with people. Actually, this is just a stopgap. What we really need is for salons, restaurants, etc., to provide online scheduling APIs. All the fancy natural language processing is just to cover this deficiency.
4. Less opportunities for people to develop their interpersonal skills/be properly socialized.
If you're so isolated that making reservations is a significant part of your interpersonal interaction, you have a real problem.
Gosh, who would have thought that ruling by decree was a bad idea in a democracy? When Obama did it is was for our own good, but when Trump does it he's a nazi tyrant? It's the exact same thing.
Your reading comprehension is poor. The criticism isn't that Trump reversing Obama's directive is bad because Trump is a "nazi tyrant", the criticism is that Trump wants it reversed merely because Obama did it, regardless of its merits. He's a toddler in a nursery who wants a toy merely because another toddler played with it first. I don't know what Trump's motive is for hating Obama so much but his obvious intention to undo anything and everything Obama did, regardless of whether it's good or bad, is just childish and stupid. Or racist.
Though I guess we do have to thank the silly child for highlighting the fact that we've given the executive too much power. One good thing I hope to get out of the Trump administration is that we will we scale back the power of the president. We've trusted the holder of that office far too much, probably mostly because until now the holders of that office have demonstrated themselves to be adequately trustworthy. Lots of us recognized the danger many years ago, but Trump has made it impossible to ignore. I guess maybe we need a really, really terrible president from time to time. It's been almost 200 years since Andrew Jackson so we were overdue (though comparing Jackson to Trump is a little unfair to Jackson).
Got to love states run by religious control freaks
I'm fine with public intoxication statutes, and there's nothing "religious" about it. Drunks staggering around in public are a danger to themselves and others, as well as a nuisance. My friend wasn't merely tipsy, he was falling-down drunk.
in more civilized countries and states, it's either legal, or a ticket and small fine at most
It was a small fine. But he really did need to be picked up. According to the police he was walking down the street late at night, yelling and singing at full volume, and stumbled into traffic. Leaving him on the street would have been bad for everyone, including him. I suppose they could have tried to take him to his hotel rather than the drunk tank, but I'm not sure he could have told them what hotel it was. This was before the era of key cards and I don't recall whether the hotel room keys had the name of the hotel on them. He got belligerent with the cops, too. He was charged with resisting arrest and could have been charged with assaulting a police officer (though the police officer was clearly in no danger).
The $3K bail wasn't too unreasonable since he was out of state, and the state would have had no way to force him to come back otherwise. The bond-only requirement was weird.
That is odd. What state was this in?
It was in Indianapolis, Indiana.
I had an experience with the system that was odd, I thought.
I was bailing out a friend who had been picked up for public intoxication. We were in another state on business, which I assume is part of why things went down the way they did, because he was not local. When I found out he was in jail (after he failed to show up for client meetings), I contacted the court and was told that his bail was $3K -- bond only. I'd have been fine giving the court the cash, but they demanded I used a bail bondsman.
When I checked with a few bondsmen I got another surprise: They all demanded a 100% fee. Normally, as I understand it, bondsmen request a percentage (say, 10%) which must be paid to them up front, and they keep all of this money if you show up for court. If you don't, they have to pay the full amount to the court, and when you surface in the system they come after you to recover it. But in this case, they all wanted the full amount, $3K, up front before they'd issue the bond. And of course, it was a fee, not a deposit. Non-refundable. And if he failed to show, they'd come after him for the full amount again, to recover the money they had to pay the court.
Awesome deal for the bondsmen, since they had $0 risk. Worst case, he doesn't show and they give the fee to the court, they're out nothing but their time... and they still have an opportunity to try to collect the money again. Maybe they just sell it to a collection agency for some percentage of the face value of the debt. Best case, they got $3K for 15 minutes' work... and I had no other option because the court mandated bond only. Either I paid it or I let my buddy sit in jail (which I considered... but only very briefly).
Moreover, because he was in jail and couldn't contact a bondsman, he couldn't make bail without outside assistance, even though he'd have had no problem paying the money himself. I really don't understand the point of "bond only".
So, I paid up. I paid with a credit card, so I guess the bondsman did take a minor risk; the card processing fee. Though it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if my buddy didn't show they'd add that onto the collection amount.
As it worked out my buddy paid me back 20 minutes after he was out. We flew back home and he didn't actually have to return to go to court; he contacted an attorney who was able to handle it all for him. His fine ended up being trivial compared to what it cost to get him out of jail.
IMO, having CCTV cameras everywhere is a step too far.
I agree with pretty much the entirety of your very well thought out comment, but I'm curious on what basis you've formed this particular opinion. I myself am rather undecided on how I feel about CCTV surveillance, and to what extent it is or isn't acceptable ... so I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on the matter.
Heh. I wish I had something crisp, clear and well thought out to say on it, but I don't. It just seems like it gives government too much information, too much scope for abuse. Even though there are lots of cameras recording public places in every city, it seems better that the data is fragmented and hard to assemble except upon demonstrable need. Failing that, I'd want to see a very strong anti-abuse infrastructure put in place.
When I see something double-spacing, I recognize that person as someone who is generally old enough to have learned on a typewriter (or the first generations of word processing), and who doesn't engage heavily with IT.
Or you see a professional programmer who spends a great deal of time writing code in monospace fonts, with extensive and properly-punctuated comments.
Personally, I try to remember to single-space after sentences when writing in proportional fonts, but I deliberately bias towards double-spacing because it's more important to me that my code have the double spaces than it is that my other writing have single spaces. I actually run a regexp on my code occasionally to find single-space instances and fix them, but I mostly try to train myself to double-space by default and single-space only deliberately, when I remember.
IMO, the difference has nothing to do with the face recognition system, the difference is all about the citywide police CCTV network which enables everyone out in public (or at home insufficiently-closed blinds) to be monitored and recorded all the time.
Catching criminals is a side effect. The main purpose is to create justification to investigate anyone they want.
No, the main purpose is to catch criminals. The means to that end is creating justification to investigate anyone they want.
There's no reason to assume ill intent here. The police really do just want the best possible tools to do their jobs with maximal effectiveness. It's rarely in the interest of society as a whole to give police everything they want, but that doesn't mean the police are wrong to want it.
Completely hamstringing the police and allowing crime to run unopposed is bad for society. Giving the police everything they want and allowing them to rifle through anyone's life at any time is bad for society. The balance is somewhere in between. Where, exactly, is a subject for constant debate and readjustment. IMO, having CCTV cameras everywhere is a step too far. Applying automatic face recognition makes this a little worse, but the bigger issue is the camera network. It's one thing for police to (as the do in the US) be able to request video from privately-installed security cameras when they are investigating a specific crime. It's another thing for them to have unlimited access to a police-owned city-wide surveillance network.
But maybe that's just me. Londoners seem largely okay with it, and it's their call.
a car whose instrument panel is an oversized iPad probably won't cut it in the long term
Why not?
Because tablet interfaces/feels SUCK when you can't keep your eyes on the tablet.
What kind of controls in your car do you need to use for a long period of time? I've only had my Model S for three weeks, so I can't say I have a lot of experience with it, but so far I haven't found the touchscreen to be bad at all. Actually, it's pretty nice because the controls are much larger so if anything I have to look at it less.
Have you actually tried a Tesla's touchscreen?
insurance will pay any damages
If there were significant damages, this would be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Insurance companies are quite good at assessing risk and delivering targeted recommendations which must be followed to get lower premiums. The problem is that there are no real damages for insurance companies to pay, so none of these incentives come into play.
Maybe what we need is statutory damages for privacy breaches, which apply above and beyond any provable actual damages. Say, $100 for each social security number, name, address etc., perhaps on an increasing scale when multiple pieces of information about one person are leaked in such a way that they are connected, since having more data about a person makes identity theft and other malicious use easier. The money should be payable to the person whose information is leaked.
Oh, and evidence that a company tries to hide a breach should result in triple damages and criminal prosecution of the individuals tried to conceal it.
If the Equifax breach had resulted in statutory payouts of, say, $500 per person to each of the 145M people harmed, the resulting $72.5B liability would have hammered Equifax flat, insurance or no. And you can bet that other companies would have gotten serious about data security -- not only that, it would make stored data about individuals a serious liability which companies would try to avoid. You can't be forced to pay out for leakage of data that you never had. Companies' own attorneys and insurance companies would be constantly harping on the need to limit liability by destroying customer/user data.
Thanks for the comment. I give it more credibility coming from someone who's been involved in a mobile OS :).
I don't work on anything directly related, but I got curious a while ago and asked people on the Android kernel team who do exactly this stuff. So you're getting it secondhand, but originally from authoritative sources. Assuming I didn't screw it up, which can never be completely discounted :-)
" The only reason it's spread so far is by forking." Did you intentionally misspell that word?
Misspell what word? Viruses propagate, in part, by mutating. There is no definitive version 1.0, as they don't have a consistent codebase. With each fork, it is more likely to spread.
I'm not sure which of you to WHOOOOSH.
Meanwhile, Google has effectively stopped SPAM email, at no cost to me.
Google has mostly stopped SPAM calls for me, too. My phone does ring (if I'm not in a meeting or something) but shows a big red banner on the screen that says "Suspected spam caller" and the number. I never answer and the rare cases where the robocaller bothers to leave voicemail I'm proved right to have ignored it.
This isn't perfect; if the caller were to spoof the number of someone in my address book it would get through, I'm sure. And the phone does still ring (unless silenced for another reason). But until robocallers start breaking into my contact list and spoofing known people, it's a non-issue for me.
You know, the solid-fuel booster rockets on the shuttle that cannot be shut down once started? That's the NASA that is now so concerned over security problems?
Von Braun, back in the 60s, already knew that you cannot really man-rate those things exactly because you have zero control over them once they went off. And they now have a problem with "security concerns"?
They aren't allowed to learn from past mistakes?
Note that I'm not saying that there's a real problem here. I don't know. But it's not unreasonable to ask questions and evaluate tradeoffs, indeed its the absolute most rational way to proceed.
I'm not an expert but I believe flash memory in phones isn't used for paging. The reason in precisely that it would severly impact on the lifetime of the device's internal memory. When the OS runs out of RAM it just starts killing apps.
Not so much because paging would kill the flash, but because paging in and out would kill performance. It turns out to be much better to just kill apps not used for a while when low on RAM, especially since all mobile apps already have to be written to assume they can be evicted at any time.
The only sort of paging I've seen used in any Android device, at least, is paging to compressed RAM (zram). This generally isn't a huge win, though it sometimes makes sense.