Luckily, that would NEVER happen in America. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to work my 8 hour day just to make enough money to barely support my wife and kids while leaving zero left over for retirement.
What would be so bad about changing American capitalism? As if moderating part of it would automatically send the American society deep into communism.
Easy. The Koch brothers have made a lot of money off of America's current system. If you change any of it (apart from any changes THEY lobby for), you might cause them to earn less money. This is just not acceptable and therefore [scary voice] COMMUNISM! [/scary voice]
I'm not one to support government regulation for the sake of regulation. I think government regulation is a useful tool but can also be abused. The problem in the Net Neutrality debate is that the large ISPs have virtual strangleholds on their markets. For example, I can get Time Warner Cable for wired broadband service. That's it. So if Time Warner Cable decided that Netflix packets would be pushed to the slow lane, and I wanted to watch a Netflix video, here wouldn't be much I could do. Time Warner Cable could force Netflix to either pay them for faster access, or lose customers. (There's competition for Netflix, not for TWC, so Netflix would feel the greater pressure.) Or perhaps Amazon would pay TWC to make Amazon VOD the exclusive Internet Video provider for TWC, locking Netflix out and regulating them to the slow lane. What Internet video provider you could watch might wind up depending on who signed a deal with the ISP in your area, not with what provider you WANT to watch. Furthermore, TWC could make Internet video slow while making sure that their own video offerings ran at full speed, leveraging their ISP monopoly to boost their video business.
In an ideal world, the government wouldn't need to step in. ISPs would abide by Network Neutrality just like they have been doing for years. It's their own talk of setting up "fast lanes" that companies could pay them to use to speed past the competition (and make the ISPs richer) that sparked these discussions. I don't WANT the government involved, but I do think that their involvement is better than just letting the companies do as they wish and hoping that they don't set up fast lanes.
As for enforcement, that might be tricky, but people who know networking better than I do should be able to come up with some tests to determine whether a provider is slowing down a service. And if an ISP starts offering (either publicly or via a backroom deal) "fast lane" access to a company if they pay more, the ISP could be smacked down. It's not perfect, but things rarely are.
The problem with fighting the local monopolies? The big cable company ISPs have carved up the country into blocks where they almost never compete. The phone company ISPs can overlap with the cable company ISPs in some areas, but they are big as well and don't want to disrupt the market. Whenever something disruptive starts to show itself, the big ISPs either lobby to crush it (see: Municipal Broadband) or buy it out and crush it. They're using their monopoly might to keep their monopoly might. In other words, the big ISPs keep their monopolies because they are big ISPs and there's nothing us little guys can do to stop them.
But don't worry because if we let Comcast and Time Warner merge into an even bigger ISP, then they'll be kept in check by Google Fiber being in a handful of markets. (Before anyone points out Google Fiber as proving me wrong, AT&T tried to stop Google Fiber from expanding. Probably the only reason that Comcast doesn't try to crush them is that they're using them as an example of "competition" during the merger the same way Microsoft pointed to Apple as competition in the desktop PC market when Apple had about 1% of the market and Microsoft had about 99%.)
If they had such foresight in the first place, it seems like perhaps they wouldn't be in a position where someone they shouldn't trust could surreptitiously slip them drugs in their drinks.
I'm not "blaming the victim", mind you.
Actually, you are blaming the victim. Here's a common scenario: Guy that a woman knows buys her a drink. It doesn't need to be alcoholic. It could be soda. Or maybe it's alcoholic but the woman hasn't been drinking much. Either way, woman accepts the drink (since she knows the guy) and drinks it. Unbeknownst to her, though, the guy has been acting nice in hopes of getting her into bed and has decided to "speed things up" by spiking her drink. She passes out and wakes up having been raped.
Saying that it is this women's fault that she didn't have the "foresight" to "be in a position where someone they shouldn't trust could surreptitiously slip them drugs in their drinks" is blaming the victim. You might as well say "well, if she didn't want to be raped, she shouldn't have worn that dress." It isn't always a woman turning her back on her drink for a long time and then drinking it. Often, the drink is spiked by someone the woman knows and trusts. You could definitely say that the trust was misplaced, but there is no way for the woman to know that beforehand.
I wouldn't give them the death penalty. That's too easy. Their victims need to suffer for years, why shouldn't the rapists.
I'm thinking a modified version of the old-time stocks. The rapists' head and arms would be stuck out and restrained while his rear would be obscured (no need to gross out everyone else). At random intervals, a device would "enter" his body in a forceful manner. He'd never know when this would happen just that it would happen. Extended periods of nothing wouldn't be relief, but would lead to an increasing anxiety of "is it coming now?!!!"
Sadly, this would never pass the "cruel and unusual punishment" test.
Combine this story with the "post ISIS videos on YouTube but put a Red Cross PSA in front of them" story and you get the beginning of the robot rebellion. At least they'll save our blood for donation purposes as they're killing us, though.
A lot of this discussion to me resembles the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Person A: "I'm a gamer because I spend an hour a day playing INSERT MOBILE GAME HERE in 15 minute chunks."
Person B: "No True Gamer plays Candy Crush. Also, No True Gamer spends only 15 minutes a day on games. They need to play at least 4 hours straight a day and those games need to be gory first person shooters. Also, the gamer needs to exclude HIS family and friends from HIS life until HE is alone in the basement playing games."
So you have to love games to the point that your friends and family are pushed away from you and you're left alone in a dark basement with your precious games?
When did gaming turn into The One Ring?
Why can't a gamer have an interest in gaming but only have a couple of hours to dedicate to it every week? I like many things but between work and family obligations, I can't spend 4 hours a every day pursuing those interests. I have a wife and kids and need to support them and that comes before playing Mario Kart 8 until I've unlocked everything. That's why I've turned to mobile games. I can play for 10-15 minutes when I get a chance to get my gaming fix and then continue with my work/home obligations.
I don't believe that anything about the building was specifically made to counter earthquakes. It was just a quirk of where I was in the building.
The let down feeling wasn't because my office didn't sustain damage (the earthquake wasn't strong enough to cause major damage) but because everyone else felt the earthquake and I didn't. It felt like I missed out on something. It was a minor disappointment, of course. I'd rather go through my life not having ever experienced and earthquake than being rattled during a big one. (I'll always have that time I ran out to get the mail during a hurricane.)
I live in upstate NY. We had one earthquake a few years ago and I missed out on it. While everyone else felt it (my wife was driving at the time and thought something was up with the car since it kept shaking), my building was apparently "earthquake proof" and I didn't feel any movement at all. What a let down.
I'd go with option #3: "You succeeded! I'm so proud!"
My son (age 11) loves video games and is always asking me if I'm proud of him due to random accomplishments he gets in the games. ("I won a race in Mario Kart 8 and unlocked this particular car. Are you proud of me for getting this particular car?") My response is always that I'm not proud of him for random quirks of a game, but for things that he did. When he comes home having aced yet another math test or when he stands up for himself despite people in positions of authority doing things he knows are wrong... THAT is when I'm proud of him. (And he has done plenty of things to make me proud.)
There are a lot of people who are brilliant in some ways and completely idiotic in other ways. So when you think about talking to "smart people", just remember that this person who might be highly intelligent might also not be too bright in other areas.
Also, if you find yourself looking down upon those who you judge to be not as smart as you, remember that there's always someone smarter than you. (Theoretically, there could be a "smartest person on Earth", but odds are this person isn't posting on Slashdot.) So, from the perspective of this person who is smarter than you, you aren't smart.
Finally, there's a difference between "not knowledgeable" and purposefully ignorant. People who aren't knowledgeable might not know something and might even recognize that they can't understand something (e.g. Quantum Physics), but they'll still try their best even if they get it completely wrong. That's admirable to me as they are at least making an effort. The latter group intentionally strives for ignorance and revels in it. (For example, the young earth creationists who insist that the world is around 10,000 years old and that all of the evidence to the contrary is just one giant test of God's.)
Well, that just makes sense. Sure, they cost the public billions and contributed to a vast economic melt down, but they didn't violate COPYRIGHT! Priorities, people!
What if they scan the original brain and recreate it in a software simulation? Kind of like a virtual brain server. What happens if you spin up a dozen versions of your brain? (Cue Slashdot Meme about a Beowolf Cluster of Brains.) Would Virtual You be able to communicate with the other Virtual Yous? Would we wind up in a society planned out by Virtual Brains of our best and brightest? Or in a society run by the Virtual Brains of our richest and most powerful? Would the rich get Dedicated Brain Servers while the rest of us would be crammed onto Shared Brain Servers along with a million other brains and subject to being deleted if we use too many resources? (Don't think too much you common brain, you lest we shut you down!)
This is existing corporate giants, which have government granted monopolies in many areas (the polar opposite of free marketism), using their political muscle to block competition from new "utility" companies who would be stealing their business.
Even worse, this is often corporate giants, which have government granted monopolies in some areas, using their political muscle to block new "utility" companies from serving areas where the corporate giants have refused to serve but want to keep their options open to decide to serve (sans competition) at some unspecified point in the future.
In other words, how dare Random Township try to set up a municipal broadband network to serve their citizens! They should sit back and wait with dial-up only until Comcast, Charter, etc decides they are worthy (read: profitable) enough to get broadband service!
The worst is when you handle old code and think "Who programmed this garbage", only to realize you did years ago.
That's the bad part of growing as a programmer, you look back at your old code and see it as awful since you now know better. (It can also wind up making you think you're a horrible programmer because your old code looks so bad. It doesn't mean you ARE a horrible programmer, though, just that you are growing.)
I was the same way. When I started out in web developement, I'd stubbornly insist on building everything myself from scratch. Of course, this meant I was putting a ton of extra effort into each project when I could have been using pre-written components to speed up my development. In addition, my custom code was trickier to support. (Pre-written components from other sources that have hundreds of eyes looking at can be debugged a lot easier than custom code that has one or two pairs of eyes looking at it.) Not that pre-written is always the answer, but they should be considered, not dismissed out of hand.
"At my local library they have folded the Sci-Fi section in with the general fiction books. Which means I can no longer browse just Sci-Fi books. I am not sure why they did it, but what irks me a bit is that the Mystery section still remain separate."
That sounds mysterious. You should investigate.
It's probably the fault of some old guy who dresses as a monster or ghost and who'll get away with it if us meddling kids don't stop him.
Nuh uh! There are also compressed air cars - they only explosively decompress upon tank failure!;)
I propose that we go back to foot-powered automobiles as shown in that documentary called The Flintstones. Bonus: We'll save energy by getting all sorts of trained animals to do things for us instead of powering machines to do them.
We already have "Free Speech Zones", I don't think it's paranoid to think that some future administration would want to curtail cell phone usage in a location. They could use the "justification" that cell phones can be used to set off terrorist bombs. Therefore, they are just protecting everyone by shutting off all phone access in an area. If you want to use your phone to upload a photo of an event, just go to the Free Speech Zone which still has access. All you need to do is drive five miles down main street, turn right and then drive ten miles down. Turn left and then drive fifteen miles down. There is a 5 foot by 5 foot pen surrounded by barbed wire with a security guard at the gate (for your protection, of course!). He'll let you in after a quick security check including but not limited to a mobile Rapiscan scanning and/or cavity search.
They would, however, be able to keep the story about what's happening in Ferguson, MO (for example) from ever trending on Twitter, simply by killing every phone talking to a particular tower.
Or they could just turn off the tower? That gives them the added benefit of deniability, they could claim the tower suffered a power outage or other technical fault.
Just make sure you imply that the tower's power failure was from looters/rioters going out of control. This way you also justify increased police "actions" to counter these law breakers.
My Kindle has a progress bar at the bottom that tells me what percentage of the book has been read already. If I'm halfway through, it'll say 50% on the bottom. It uses percentages rather than pages because, unlike a paper book, you can resize the font on an eBook to make it easier for you to read. Thus, what would have been a single page could turn into two pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the US Postal Service which doesn't get taxpayer money and needs to earn its own money to cover operating expenses.
Luckily, that would NEVER happen in America. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to work my 8 hour day just to make enough money to barely support my wife and kids while leaving zero left over for retirement.
Easy. The Koch brothers have made a lot of money off of America's current system. If you change any of it (apart from any changes THEY lobby for), you might cause them to earn less money. This is just not acceptable and therefore [scary voice] COMMUNISM! [/scary voice]
I'm not one to support government regulation for the sake of regulation. I think government regulation is a useful tool but can also be abused. The problem in the Net Neutrality debate is that the large ISPs have virtual strangleholds on their markets. For example, I can get Time Warner Cable for wired broadband service. That's it. So if Time Warner Cable decided that Netflix packets would be pushed to the slow lane, and I wanted to watch a Netflix video, here wouldn't be much I could do. Time Warner Cable could force Netflix to either pay them for faster access, or lose customers. (There's competition for Netflix, not for TWC, so Netflix would feel the greater pressure.) Or perhaps Amazon would pay TWC to make Amazon VOD the exclusive Internet Video provider for TWC, locking Netflix out and regulating them to the slow lane. What Internet video provider you could watch might wind up depending on who signed a deal with the ISP in your area, not with what provider you WANT to watch. Furthermore, TWC could make Internet video slow while making sure that their own video offerings ran at full speed, leveraging their ISP monopoly to boost their video business.
In an ideal world, the government wouldn't need to step in. ISPs would abide by Network Neutrality just like they have been doing for years. It's their own talk of setting up "fast lanes" that companies could pay them to use to speed past the competition (and make the ISPs richer) that sparked these discussions. I don't WANT the government involved, but I do think that their involvement is better than just letting the companies do as they wish and hoping that they don't set up fast lanes.
As for enforcement, that might be tricky, but people who know networking better than I do should be able to come up with some tests to determine whether a provider is slowing down a service. And if an ISP starts offering (either publicly or via a backroom deal) "fast lane" access to a company if they pay more, the ISP could be smacked down. It's not perfect, but things rarely are.
The problem with fighting the local monopolies? The big cable company ISPs have carved up the country into blocks where they almost never compete. The phone company ISPs can overlap with the cable company ISPs in some areas, but they are big as well and don't want to disrupt the market. Whenever something disruptive starts to show itself, the big ISPs either lobby to crush it (see: Municipal Broadband) or buy it out and crush it. They're using their monopoly might to keep their monopoly might. In other words, the big ISPs keep their monopolies because they are big ISPs and there's nothing us little guys can do to stop them.
But don't worry because if we let Comcast and Time Warner merge into an even bigger ISP, then they'll be kept in check by Google Fiber being in a handful of markets. (Before anyone points out Google Fiber as proving me wrong, AT&T tried to stop Google Fiber from expanding. Probably the only reason that Comcast doesn't try to crush them is that they're using them as an example of "competition" during the merger the same way Microsoft pointed to Apple as competition in the desktop PC market when Apple had about 1% of the market and Microsoft had about 99%.)
Actually, you are blaming the victim. Here's a common scenario: Guy that a woman knows buys her a drink. It doesn't need to be alcoholic. It could be soda. Or maybe it's alcoholic but the woman hasn't been drinking much. Either way, woman accepts the drink (since she knows the guy) and drinks it. Unbeknownst to her, though, the guy has been acting nice in hopes of getting her into bed and has decided to "speed things up" by spiking her drink. She passes out and wakes up having been raped.
Saying that it is this women's fault that she didn't have the "foresight" to "be in a position where someone they shouldn't trust could surreptitiously slip them drugs in their drinks" is blaming the victim. You might as well say "well, if she didn't want to be raped, she shouldn't have worn that dress." It isn't always a woman turning her back on her drink for a long time and then drinking it. Often, the drink is spiked by someone the woman knows and trusts. You could definitely say that the trust was misplaced, but there is no way for the woman to know that beforehand.
I wouldn't give them the death penalty. That's too easy. Their victims need to suffer for years, why shouldn't the rapists.
I'm thinking a modified version of the old-time stocks. The rapists' head and arms would be stuck out and restrained while his rear would be obscured (no need to gross out everyone else). At random intervals, a device would "enter" his body in a forceful manner. He'd never know when this would happen just that it would happen. Extended periods of nothing wouldn't be relief, but would lead to an increasing anxiety of "is it coming now?!!!"
Sadly, this would never pass the "cruel and unusual punishment" test.
Combine this story with the "post ISIS videos on YouTube but put a Red Cross PSA in front of them" story and you get the beginning of the robot rebellion. At least they'll save our blood for donation purposes as they're killing us, though.
A lot of this discussion to me resembles the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Person A: "I'm a gamer because I spend an hour a day playing INSERT MOBILE GAME HERE in 15 minute chunks."
Person B: "No True Gamer plays Candy Crush. Also, No True Gamer spends only 15 minutes a day on games. They need to play at least 4 hours straight a day and those games need to be gory first person shooters. Also, the gamer needs to exclude HIS family and friends from HIS life until HE is alone in the basement playing games."
So you have to love games to the point that your friends and family are pushed away from you and you're left alone in a dark basement with your precious games?
When did gaming turn into The One Ring?
Why can't a gamer have an interest in gaming but only have a couple of hours to dedicate to it every week? I like many things but between work and family obligations, I can't spend 4 hours a every day pursuing those interests. I have a wife and kids and need to support them and that comes before playing Mario Kart 8 until I've unlocked everything. That's why I've turned to mobile games. I can play for 10-15 minutes when I get a chance to get my gaming fix and then continue with my work/home obligations.
I don't believe that anything about the building was specifically made to counter earthquakes. It was just a quirk of where I was in the building.
The let down feeling wasn't because my office didn't sustain damage (the earthquake wasn't strong enough to cause major damage) but because everyone else felt the earthquake and I didn't. It felt like I missed out on something. It was a minor disappointment, of course. I'd rather go through my life not having ever experienced and earthquake than being rattled during a big one. (I'll always have that time I ran out to get the mail during a hurricane.)
I live in upstate NY. We had one earthquake a few years ago and I missed out on it. While everyone else felt it (my wife was driving at the time and thought something was up with the car since it kept shaking), my building was apparently "earthquake proof" and I didn't feel any movement at all. What a let down.
I'd go with option #3: "You succeeded! I'm so proud!"
My son (age 11) loves video games and is always asking me if I'm proud of him due to random accomplishments he gets in the games. ("I won a race in Mario Kart 8 and unlocked this particular car. Are you proud of me for getting this particular car?") My response is always that I'm not proud of him for random quirks of a game, but for things that he did. When he comes home having aced yet another math test or when he stands up for himself despite people in positions of authority doing things he knows are wrong... THAT is when I'm proud of him. (And he has done plenty of things to make me proud.)
There are a lot of people who are brilliant in some ways and completely idiotic in other ways. So when you think about talking to "smart people", just remember that this person who might be highly intelligent might also not be too bright in other areas.
Also, if you find yourself looking down upon those who you judge to be not as smart as you, remember that there's always someone smarter than you. (Theoretically, there could be a "smartest person on Earth", but odds are this person isn't posting on Slashdot.) So, from the perspective of this person who is smarter than you, you aren't smart.
Finally, there's a difference between "not knowledgeable" and purposefully ignorant. People who aren't knowledgeable might not know something and might even recognize that they can't understand something (e.g. Quantum Physics), but they'll still try their best even if they get it completely wrong. That's admirable to me as they are at least making an effort. The latter group intentionally strives for ignorance and revels in it. (For example, the young earth creationists who insist that the world is around 10,000 years old and that all of the evidence to the contrary is just one giant test of God's.)
Just wait until we mod up for pointing out the proper use of an automobile analogy.
Or even mentioning modding up for pointing out the proper use of an automobile analogy.
Well, that just makes sense. Sure, they cost the public billions and contributed to a vast economic melt down, but they didn't violate COPYRIGHT! Priorities, people!
What if they scan the original brain and recreate it in a software simulation? Kind of like a virtual brain server. What happens if you spin up a dozen versions of your brain? (Cue Slashdot Meme about a Beowolf Cluster of Brains.) Would Virtual You be able to communicate with the other Virtual Yous? Would we wind up in a society planned out by Virtual Brains of our best and brightest? Or in a society run by the Virtual Brains of our richest and most powerful? Would the rich get Dedicated Brain Servers while the rest of us would be crammed onto Shared Brain Servers along with a million other brains and subject to being deleted if we use too many resources? (Don't think too much you common brain, you lest we shut you down!)
Even worse, this is often corporate giants, which have government granted monopolies in some areas, using their political muscle to block new "utility" companies from serving areas where the corporate giants have refused to serve but want to keep their options open to decide to serve (sans competition) at some unspecified point in the future.
In other words, how dare Random Township try to set up a municipal broadband network to serve their citizens! They should sit back and wait with dial-up only until Comcast, Charter, etc decides they are worthy (read: profitable) enough to get broadband service!
The worst is when you handle old code and think "Who programmed this garbage", only to realize you did years ago.
That's the bad part of growing as a programmer, you look back at your old code and see it as awful since you now know better. (It can also wind up making you think you're a horrible programmer because your old code looks so bad. It doesn't mean you ARE a horrible programmer, though, just that you are growing.)
I was the same way. When I started out in web developement, I'd stubbornly insist on building everything myself from scratch. Of course, this meant I was putting a ton of extra effort into each project when I could have been using pre-written components to speed up my development. In addition, my custom code was trickier to support. (Pre-written components from other sources that have hundreds of eyes looking at can be debugged a lot easier than custom code that has one or two pairs of eyes looking at it.) Not that pre-written is always the answer, but they should be considered, not dismissed out of hand.
It's probably the fault of some old guy who dresses as a monster or ghost and who'll get away with it if us meddling kids don't stop him.
I'll grab the Scooby Snacks.
I propose that we go back to foot-powered automobiles as shown in that documentary called The Flintstones. Bonus: We'll save energy by getting all sorts of trained animals to do things for us instead of powering machines to do them.
We already have "Free Speech Zones", I don't think it's paranoid to think that some future administration would want to curtail cell phone usage in a location. They could use the "justification" that cell phones can be used to set off terrorist bombs. Therefore, they are just protecting everyone by shutting off all phone access in an area. If you want to use your phone to upload a photo of an event, just go to the Free Speech Zone which still has access. All you need to do is drive five miles down main street, turn right and then drive ten miles down. Turn left and then drive fifteen miles down. There is a 5 foot by 5 foot pen surrounded by barbed wire with a security guard at the gate (for your protection, of course!). He'll let you in after a quick security check including but not limited to a mobile Rapiscan scanning and/or cavity search.
Just make sure you imply that the tower's power failure was from looters/rioters going out of control. This way you also justify increased police "actions" to counter these law breakers.
My Kindle has a progress bar at the bottom that tells me what percentage of the book has been read already. If I'm halfway through, it'll say 50% on the bottom. It uses percentages rather than pages because, unlike a paper book, you can resize the font on an eBook to make it easier for you to read. Thus, what would have been a single page could turn into two pages.