If I remember correctly, I think that's part of Operant Conditioning [wikipedia.org] - producing a reward only occasionally is more effective at reinforcing a behaviour than rewarding the behaviour every time. After you've conditioned the rat to press the bar to receive a food pellet you reduce the frequency of the reward and it ends up pressing the food bar manically in the hope of receiving another. Thus in this case, hot chicks stand out from fat birds and the operator is stimulated to continue looking to find another.
Wouldn't the moral of that be for terrorists to find ugly fat chicks to hide stuff on?
I think there is a ton of money to be made in astrology. With what we know now, it should be possible to work backward and find out if visible lights in the sky have had effects on a personal/societal level for the past few thousand years. There is a part of me that wonders if the gravity of other planets or the moon/sun has noticeable/predictable effects on us. With all the crazy crap that we fund, that sounds like a fun off the wall one. The only problem is if we discovered that "astrology" was actually real. I have a feeling that we could make astrology work.
What I find funny is that we'd find it impossible to fund NASA to observe all the asteroids that might hit the earth. We'd actually come up with the money to fund that for astrology though. Those asteroids might have a noticeable impact on our collective future if left unaccounted for.
I think astrology actually can match up fairly well under science. The thing is it would be that crazy blue sky science until we really started looking at it. For a means to predict the future though? Nope, I wouldn't buy that, yet. I do think daily horoscopes and the like are great fun. If some one takes one as daily instructions of a high priest/priestess that's their problem. I bet astrology would turn out some what like the weather. With enough data, we could predict it for 4 days or so. (I find funny is its not sky data that we'd need to determine your likely future, its knowledge about the person and what they are likely to do. Actual successful astrologers might be pretty good at reading people and learning to guide people into the directions that they want to go anyway. i wonder if anyone has studied the careers of successful astrologers and their impact on "important" people in business/government.
Isn't adding surveillance to monitor a group a punishment of said group? One student flips out and goes on a killing spree, therefore all other students need to be monitored from now on -- that seems like a treatment, not a cure, for the problem.
You know a great excuse for this? To slow/stop teacher/student sex. Go to fark just about any day of the week and you'll see some teacher or sub being arrested for having sex with student. The school can say, yes we screen all personnel for sex offenders so that they aren't hired, but we are even more proactive. We are taking the precaution of recording all of the campus in order to prevent any teacher/student or student/student sex acts or personal contact on the school campus.
Since this is the age of zero tolerance, we are going to record on file charges for everything that might be a crime on campus. You're new student and teacher ID cards will have RFID to assist us in monitoring you. Any parent or other person that comes on campus without an office pass will get criminal trespassing charges filed on them and a ban from this place filed on them for good measure with the local police. So now we will issue parents those nice RFID school IDs so they'll be ID/tracked while on/near campus.
Our next school rule is complaining about school policies or rules is now a punishable offense. The next new school rule is trying to get any school policy or rule changed is a punishable offense.
I read an article about it earlier where a homeless guy followed him back from the square and started joking with him about it. If this is a major money-making area for these drug dealers, it's only a matter of time before one of them follows him and shoots him. I like that he's trying to clean up the neighborhood, and the idea is novel, but I can certainly imagine someone getting a little stabby or shooty after getting sprayed with ice cold water while trying to conduct "business"
The better solution than going stabby on the inventor would be to pay others to have a cash transaction in public to activate this thing. A couple of innocents are sprayed with ice cold water while exchanging money. Then call the cops and have them deal with the guy. If the cops don't do something, then you keep paying different relatively innocent people to get soaked and to complain to the police about it. Once you have a stack of 20-30 complaints from different people, then you have a random one sue the guy to stop soaking random people so the courts might order an injunction against the guy. If one law suit doesn't work, have a couple of them do it. It doesn't matter if they all go to the same judge. Arrange for somewhat valid reasons why each person was out there to get soaked. When all these various legit sounding people all come before the same judge, then they'll almost be forced to "do something." IF that "do something," is to tell the guy not to have his robot soaking people, so be it.
What's even better is that you could monitor the process and see if the guy still uses his robot after a court rules on him. If so, make sure you have some one out there legit get soaked, and complain loudly that time. The legal system ought to take care of the guy at that point.
The problem with adding lights to the street is that it just allows the criminals to see what they are doing.
There is a part of me that wonders if we'd have much less crime if we got rid of all those street lights that are everywhere. I understand them at business parking lots that want customers after dark. I don't understand them along road sides and such.
US Military Bases are small towns. They have Burger Kings, Shopping areas, Pools, Golf Courses, Snack Bars and Grills, picnic areas, fishing lakes, child care centers, housing areas....etc. For most of the Base the security is fairly low level. They screen people coming in but it can be evaded if you are determined. Once inside they have areas that are high security. Don't try your luck with those. They've got 19 year olds with automatic weapons that have been brainwashed to the max and are very serious about security. I used to work on perimeter security equipment....those cops are scary. More than one person I know has found themselves in the wrong area....face down on concrete with a locked and loaded M16 to the back of the head. It's not any fun.
Um, that's actually a good thing... Most of us would consider our selfs somewhat supportive of our country. If we were told to guard X and only let Y through, we'd do our damn best to try to let only Y through and well if it takes a loaded gun to the head to stop Not Y, then that's what we'd do. I actually support the military for not wanting all the "public" open stuff mapped on goggle. The answer is fairly simple, you'd have to just filter for not public area on the military base to find something that the military considers important enough to classify as secure and guard. That would be an area you'd additional intel on and target some missions on until you find out what's in there, and why its classified in that manner. From other slashdot comments it sounds like that military base had sloppy security and really didn't have anything much worth securing. Well, so freaking what. You just IDed that base as not that important or only medically important. That means foreign intel folks now know really secret stuff isn't going on there...
Of course, if the base security is that sloppy there, I'd really hope that we aren't doing any thing worth keeping secret there.
I've actually heard this term around vendors once or twice. It's on the horizon, but not being sold at the moment. Heck, we'd be happy to get out of Uniform Crime Reports and into National Incident-Based Reporting System. Trust me. Its not the cops or the police agencies that want those things. They like to keep their data in their black box and share it with no one. It's the various folks at the federal/state level and the newspaper people that like to compare how your police department is doing with the neighbors that drives this. NIBRS is all about crime stats so that those that like to compare crime stats have more columns of information to compare.
There was a program called RPIS that died still born that was one of the precursors to this. It was mainly aimed at drug task forces to share intel data. It never really went anywhere. No one at our agency every entered anything into the system.
I've heard N-Dex in connection with NIBRs. The way its talked about is using those crime stats and sort of generating a "weather map" of crime stats or at least trying to predict future crimes based on current crime trends at more than just the local level. I think that sounds really cool in theory. I have serious doubts that they'll get and keep it up though. This sounds like something the feds will work on for a few years and will die off in 5 or so years. I'll wait until vendors start pushing N-Dex as a selling point or the state suddenly requiring it before I'm interested in it for our agency.
Before today you would have thought "Government Seeks Warrant to Search the Internet" was a headline from The Onion.
Well, it gets better. Wait until they go after MS and Google and request/require them to use those desktop search apps to search for things on your desktop.
We've always had this... You are watched by everyone else. They aren't really out to get you, but if you act too stupid or do something too annoying then you'll be sorry!
Society works because everyone wants/tries to control everyone else's behavior. Behavior that we don't like, we label as childish, stupid, anti-social, or criminal.
I don't care anymore that we are building God or at least Omnius. God is supposed to observe and control everything. We are far from building God. Omnius was limited to watching all humans, enslaving most of humanity, and controlling them. That's something that I think we could do in a generation or two if we worked at it. Heck, add in RFID, and Omnius could monitor almost all objects.
I'm not really worried about Google or Google Street view as of yet as long as we don't have robots or real AI. The only thing that I really fear is other humans. Other humans will setup the rules for Omnius. Omnius could be a great thing for humanity. It could enslave us for a few thousand years, or breed us anyway the rules were setup.
Omnius isn't just going to pop into existence. It'll be funded and built by people. Humanity is childish, stupid, anti-social, and criminal. Omnius would have a hard task of trying to raise humanity to be adults, relatively smart, social, and non-criminal.
It's kinda funny how we've been evolving our social control devices from little old ladies/shamans to religions, to communism/socialist governments, towards some google government. We will build Omnius on day. I just hope that when we do that we'll have matured that we don't need it as much.
Right now it seems like the things users want to optimize most for are A: speed and B: cost. One day every other month where our home internet is down doesn't seem like the end of the world, especially with the cost of the alternative.
We put up with tons. We could bury all our power and telephone lines so that storms don't bring those services down. It's very expensive so only a handful of communities have done that. As it is, most of us are o.k. if a thunder storm or some other weather event our telephone or power down for the day. Why? Because that's when you find out how well your service actually is. Most outages that I've experienced were less than 30 minutes at night and the only effect that it had on me was that we had to reset clocks. I've only had one water outage issue, and it was fixed with an two hours.
This is why I laughed about the entire Y2K thing. People don't realize how much of everything is constantly falling down! The power, ISPs, water companies are always sending people out to fix some thing, some where. You might never notice this though. The same applies to those servers that need 24x7 uptime. They've got things that need to be done to them every now and then to keep 'em going. Well, most of the the users don't ever notice any service issues. That's just how they are designed.
I'm not surprised XP or Vista isn't designed like that. I am kinda surprised that MS doesn't have any OS to fit that niche though.
Limit going after the parents to insisting that science is taught in science classes and religion is not.
Yeah, and please remove the evolution religion from the science classes as well! The religion folks won't have any problems with it being taught with the rest of the religions. That's exactly where it belongs.
I have yet to see an evolution class that wasn't a religious sermon presenting as much factual information as the Genesis story as gospel truth. I actually somewhat believe in evolution, but I believe that its far more a religion than a science. Aspects of evolution could be taught in the science class, but overall its a religion and taught pretty much how religions are. This is the truth, and you better believe it or you'll burn with bad grades!
Students aren't allowed to disagree with teachers/professors/scientists. Teachers/professors/scientists can all be stupid and spread stupid ideas. When students recongize something as smelling and tasting like snake oil, of course they don't believe it! They do have to pass the stupid teachers/professors/scientists tests so they learn it and pass the damned religious test. I hate religion being taught as science. Evolution and creation should both be kicked!
Now look -- as a scientist, I can completely respect and agree with the fact that ID is not science, for a multitude of reasons. But look at it from the point of view of someone "new" to science that was curious -- they showed up to an event, hoping to learn more about what evolution is and understand the "debate", and all they heard was how Creationism is wrong and how we need to fight religious groups and educate the people about the truth. "Educate with what?", that person will ask. "They haven't given any proof yet, and just seem to talk about how much they hate religion when they get together.". THAT is what the average person sees, and it doesn't really make scientists look good, and gives ammunition to the people that spread misinformation about evolution. Will that person ever go back to an evolution talk in order for us to clear up misconceptions? Probably not; forever, that person will now think "Wow, Evolutionists are crazy, I'm not going to that again.".
I was taught the creationism thing at home. I was taught the evolution religion at school/college/university. I say evolution religion because that's exactly how it is believed, defended, and presented. Creationists don't really have to fight evolutionists. They just need to let the evolutionist show up for the debate and let the faithful hear the new religion try their thing. The faithful recognize a come to our new religion/cult sermon when they hear it. Evolution as religion fails at filling all the moral/cultural niches that religion does. I think this is why selection has been working against evolutionists and religionists are the norm. Religion fills a niche. You can't just kill the niche because you and your followers dislike it. Evolution apparently is enough to fill the religion niche in some people, but not most people. This is where selection comes in.;) I see the entire creationism/evolutionism thing as just a religious war, and so as a sane person I like to stay out of it.
why would we need to push this on everyone outside the context of science?
Why would we need to push "earth orbits the sun" on everyone outside the context of science? Science touches upon every area of our lives, and we are generally screwed if we don't have a population with a reasonable basic general education.
I thought it was so that the masses don't come up and burn or kill in another messy way the crazy professors/teachers/university guy that is teaching anything against what everyone knows as truth.
This is kinda what I dislike about the entire creationism/evolution thing. I really don't need it to live my life. My kids could go through their lives without it impacting them very much. But to some, the entire creationism/evolution thing seems to be some loved debate both sides love to engage in at every chance. I hate useless arguing. The only time the entire creationism/evolution thing ever comes up is when kids are at the why, why, why stage and might as where life came from. At that point, cultural imprinting goes on. I really hope it'll actually prove useful in any form other than an excuse for people to debate.
Long and short, when we let robots do our fighting for us, it becomes so cheep to make war that its cheaper to make war then peace. his is why I feel that people should always be required for the front line, war has to suck so it will always be a last resort.
This is funny. War has to suck for the other guys. As long as conquest is cheap/easy, your empire/government will roll over the barbarians or lesser civilizations.
You are linking to a site that is funded by Exxon, in case you didn't know.
Does Exxon fund wikipedia now? Most of those looked like US Federal Agencies or universities. I know Exxon's a tax payer, but I seriously doubt that they pay for that much climate research. Damn, that's really impressive. I didn't realize Exxon funded Joint science academies' statement 2007 Federal Climate Change Science Program, 2006 American Meteorological Society American Association for the Advancement of Science.
That actually makes Exxon look like the greenest company around.
You know, since we're on the subject of fashion, I want to err the gripe I have about the black suit. It has been making a comeback in business attire, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why.
Second, the practical argument. You are completely right in that black suits are absolutely miserable to wear in the summer. They also tend to get noticably washed out faster from dry cleaning. They also are show absolutely no originality or as Office Space would say, "flare."
Gosh, I only where suits at weddings, but come on even I know why. What folks here seem to be forgetting is that board rooms are "elite" clubs. Part of that has always been to make the climb up to that club as uncomfortable for underlings as possible. So think of wearing suits as a very gentle sort of hazing. If you've had to wear a suit for 15-25 years to get to the top, wouldn't you require those that follow you to dress similar? (Note: you might have a relaxed dress code for everyone other than management, but it is a sort of selection process. If you aren't willing to go through wearing a suit, then you don't meet one of the basic requirements of the upper management club. You could get to be the first level management without wearing suits, but if you appear before B.O.D. then you need to be wearing a suit.)
I'm kinda giggling at your life expectancy of the garment. This is a sort of a reoccurring price of admission to be in the club. Don't you get it? Guys in suits don't stand out. If you want to stand out, then you bring along a window dressing female that glitters and shines in those social occasions.
There is a part of me that agrees with one of the comments about violent looking upper management that looks like they are in the mafia or just scary enough to beat the shit out of the middle managers if you don't meet the next monthly quota. Part of that "violent looking" is optional uncomfortable suits. What kinda of crazy person would wear a suit given a choice?
There is another part that I think most people aren't grasping. Those that wear suits don't usually mind it. They've been wearing them for years. Sure they were uncomfortable when they were in their early 20s, but now that they've gotten to be in their mid 30s or 40s and have been wearing suits for a good 2 decades, its like wearing glasses or contacts in that they just don't notice anything uncomfortable about it anymore.
Basically, all you need for an infection is to get a pathogen inside a cell it can infect. A vector can be anything that compromises your body's numerous and insanely effective defenses against that happening. (Oh sure, we get sick fairly frequently from our point of view, but we're walking around in a lethal organic soup for every minute of our lives. That tabletop you just disinfected makes the.ru namespace look like a threat-free Eden.)
Sometimes I'd want my immune system running my virtual security. It would do a better job.
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that.
There already is. The problem is that mapmaking is much, much more difficult than many here at Slashdot seem to think. (Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I have made maps. Both as part of a professional work and at an amateur level. I've been a cartography geek for around thirty years.)
Why do I keep forgetting about TIGER? Oh, yes I remember now. TIGER is an o.k. starting point for around here, but it sucks for us to actually use in detail wise. The problem is that TIGER is where the public/companies should be downloading the maps from. I work in city government and well its the local city government that changes these street centerline crap around here. There ought to be a process where our local GIS guy dumps his stuff up the change to where ever. I personally don't think that the census should be responsible for keeping up with this. O.k. the postal service usually has a bit more current info, but I was thinking streets should logically fall under the department of transportation not well the census. I guess its more a matter that our federal, state, and local governments don't communicate/data share very well.
I'd hate to look into where TIGER gets their data. I'd be afraid that the feds redo the work that our local GIS guy does. That's actually more likely than them getting the current data from us as how the system should work. The thing is as a public citizen; I'd never use TIGER. I use google maps or map quest. I just hope that they use TIGER for something.;)
Check your local streets dept.
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Open US GPS Data?
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You can blame the government mainly your local streets dept for this. I've noticed state and federal highways being much more accurate than local or rural streets. May your deity help you if you live in a town that likes to rename side streets every few months.
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that. I doubt it'll ever be that clean cut or that your local street department will want to even give any other city much less state or federal government department access to updated street info. This is just my personal experience working in a city police department and occasionally trying to get this information from the city entities that physically make and should be tracking these things.
The more that I see that its difficult or impossible for intercity departments to communicate I tend to think that the only real solution is for Pizza companies or UPS/FedEx to partner with Google streets to actually physically map out where their fleets move through.
If your city has a GIS department, then that should be keeping track of this information.... You could always do a FOIA request for any arcview street centerline data. The problem is that most of us have problems getting that "updated" arcview street centerline data into our lowest price GPS device.
Let's see. Viable infection vectors are still being used. This is kinda common sense. I expect to see a Phd paper on it next week.
Let's compare this to medical infection vectors. There is sexual, by touch, by air, by liquid/drink, or by food. I can't really think other disease transmission ways. We've got what millions of bacteria/viruses spreading by those means every second. As long as its still effective, it'll still be in use.
I think of net security sort of like keeping a eco system healthy and without too many hostile diseases/organisms about.
Humans don't have to worry about too many predators because we kill off any thing that tries to kill us. We've only recently become aware of microscopic things trying to kill us. So it's not surprising if we'd try to kill off all the diseases that usually attack us before they get us. We aren't too good at it, yet. There is a part of me that thinks that one of the reasons that we'll finally crack nano machines is that we'd have our unofficial war on all disease and spend trillions on it.
Now apply that thinking to the virtual world. Currently, we can only be economically hurt by ID theft through security breaches. I guess there is potential to get really upset if your medical info or other private stuff is leaked in a breach, but we generally can live through it and since we do "live through it" we can scream bloody murder at the people/companies responsible to stop that behavior in the future. Worse comes to worse we can even take political action and get the government to do something.
Our whole virtual ecosystem isn't very old. Wait for it to get a few decades older and then let's see if these same attacks are still around. How many attacks from the 70s or 80s are still floating around and effective? I wouldn't be surprised it all to find 90s stuff targetting win95/win98 computers still around.
The only time I ever have cash on me is when I've just gone to happy hour at the Mountain Sun. It's the only place I can think of that doesn't take credit/debit cards (friggin' hippies) and they have an ATM right in the back. Why else would I ever have cash with me?
I'm not that paranoid, but I only use my debit card at places that I trust like walmart. Any mom & pop gas station could be over charging/double charging me. I'd much rather pay cash there. What's this aversion some people have with physical money? If you are concerned at all about your privacy, you'd pay cash every where except large purchases that you want registered.
I shop at 3 types of places: gas stations, fast food, and Walmart. I only use debit card at Walmart.
Teaching evolution - does it really matter? Evolution is the least popular theory ever proposed. And evolution has survived all of these attacks because it is true
You know. I take both sides as a religious thing. Why? Because I've never seen any of this so called evidence. Oh, I'm sure that something exists and its proof enough for them. As far as I'm concerned though, I've been taught the religion of evolution and the religion of creationism. I'm sure the evolutionists have something physical that they pass around and share with each other like a holy grail or something, but I just take it on faith that they have this evidence!
And let's not forget the different shapes of the beaks of the birds that Darwin studied. Those certainly don't show any kind of evolutionary action.
You are right. It just shows Darwin made some mistakes trying to classify existing/living species. Existing/living species aren't evolution in action. Fossils can show evolution, but different shapes of the beaks of the birds that Darwin studied are only a classification thing.
The problem is that science fanatics are trying to use evolution as an issue to undermine established religions. Most of the actual established religions have taken their stand and you their members "learn evolution but don't believe in it." Its the fringe that barely understand things or like to take things like the ten commandments and use them as the basis of all laws that have a fit about evolution now. I just want both sides to shut the fuck up. I've had to endure listening to sermons from both sides, (yes evolution is a sermon.)
I hate this more than the damned abortion issue. Things that should be so simple aren't. My issue with abortion is that only the state should/can kill and it only kills criminals. So what class of crimes have those to be aborted been accused/found guilty by the state? I want all those women to be sterilized. This would remove them from the gene pool in the long term. I have issues with evolution, but I do believe that it could be possible to breed humanity. Any one that kills their offspring is removing themselves from the gene pool. O.k. I shouldn't care about their gene lines at all, but I do.
Evolution *is* a theory. Perhaps they should also teach what "theory" means.
That's the problem. The fanatics (esp. the so called science ones) can't shut up. I actually want to dump evolution and religion out of most classes because it just needlessly stirs a mess up. Evolution is a theory. The science guys esp teachers can't teach high schoolers what a theory is! I'm more upset that folks are walking out not knowing any basic science crap rather than evolution. I'm sorry sorry, evolution is about useless to teach and only gets people mad/furious for no good reason.
Evolution isn't basic science. I wouldn't even put it on my top 50 list of science crap things to crap down students throats. Why do people get so focused on this one thing? Oh, yes because there are fanatics on both sides trying to push their views down on everyone else.
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If I remember correctly, I think that's part of Operant Conditioning [wikipedia.org] - producing a reward only occasionally is more effective at reinforcing a behaviour than rewarding the behaviour every time. After you've conditioned the rat to press the bar to receive a food pellet you reduce the frequency of the reward and it ends up pressing the food bar manically in the hope of receiving another. Thus in this case, hot chicks stand out from fat birds and the operator is stimulated to continue looking to find another.
Wouldn't the moral of that be for terrorists to find ugly fat chicks to hide stuff on?
Sure why not? People believe in all kinda of crazy things like religion, astrology, string theory, and evolution.
A quick google search shows up this url http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html for those that were ridiculed, but later vindicated.
I think there is a ton of money to be made in astrology. With what we know now, it should be possible to work backward and find out if visible lights in the sky have had effects on a personal/societal level for the past few thousand years. There is a part of me that wonders if the gravity of other planets or the moon/sun has noticeable/predictable effects on us. With all the crazy crap that we fund, that sounds like a fun off the wall one. The only problem is if we discovered that "astrology" was actually real. I have a feeling that we could make astrology work.
What I find funny is that we'd find it impossible to fund NASA to observe all the asteroids that might hit the earth. We'd actually come up with the money to fund that for astrology though. Those asteroids might have a noticeable impact on our collective future if left unaccounted for.
I think astrology actually can match up fairly well under science. The thing is it would be that crazy blue sky science until we really started looking at it. For a means to predict the future though? Nope, I wouldn't buy that, yet. I do think daily horoscopes and the like are great fun. If some one takes one as daily instructions of a high priest/priestess that's their problem. I bet astrology would turn out some what like the weather. With enough data, we could predict it for 4 days or so. (I find funny is its not sky data that we'd need to determine your likely future, its knowledge about the person and what they are likely to do. Actual successful astrologers might be pretty good at reading people and learning to guide people into the directions that they want to go anyway. i wonder if anyone has studied the careers of successful astrologers and their impact on "important" people in business/government.
Isn't adding surveillance to monitor a group a punishment of said group? One student flips out and goes on a killing spree, therefore all other students need to be monitored from now on -- that seems like a treatment, not a cure, for the problem.
You know a great excuse for this? To slow/stop teacher/student sex. Go to fark just about any day of the week and you'll see some teacher or sub being arrested for having sex with student. The school can say, yes we screen all personnel for sex offenders so that they aren't hired, but we are even more proactive. We are taking the precaution of recording all of the campus in order to prevent any teacher/student or student/student sex acts or personal contact on the school campus.
Since this is the age of zero tolerance, we are going to record on file charges for everything that might be a crime on campus. You're new student and teacher ID cards will have RFID to assist us in monitoring you. Any parent or other person that comes on campus without an office pass will get criminal trespassing charges filed on them and a ban from this place filed on them for good measure with the local police. So now we will issue parents those nice RFID school IDs so they'll be ID/tracked while on/near campus.
Our next school rule is complaining about school policies or rules is now a punishable offense. The next new school rule is trying to get any school policy or rule changed is a punishable offense.
I read an article about it earlier where a homeless guy followed him back from the square and started joking with him about it. If this is a major money-making area for these drug dealers, it's only a matter of time before one of them follows him and shoots him. I like that he's trying to clean up the neighborhood, and the idea is novel, but I can certainly imagine someone getting a little stabby or shooty after getting sprayed with ice cold water while trying to conduct "business"
The better solution than going stabby on the inventor would be to pay others to have a cash transaction in public to activate this thing. A couple of innocents are sprayed with ice cold water while exchanging money. Then call the cops and have them deal with the guy. If the cops don't do something, then you keep paying different relatively innocent people to get soaked and to complain to the police about it. Once you have a stack of 20-30 complaints from different people, then you have a random one sue the guy to stop soaking random people so the courts might order an injunction against the guy. If one law suit doesn't work, have a couple of them do it. It doesn't matter if they all go to the same judge. Arrange for somewhat valid reasons why each person was out there to get soaked. When all these various legit sounding people all come before the same judge, then they'll almost be forced to "do something." IF that "do something," is to tell the guy not to have his robot soaking people, so be it.
What's even better is that you could monitor the process and see if the guy still uses his robot after a court rules on him. If so, make sure you have some one out there legit get soaked, and complain loudly that time. The legal system ought to take care of the guy at that point.
The problem with adding lights to the street is that it just allows the criminals to see what they are doing.
There is a part of me that wonders if we'd have much less crime if we got rid of all those street lights that are everywhere. I understand them at business parking lots that want customers after dark. I don't understand them along road sides and such.
US Military Bases are small towns. They have Burger Kings, Shopping areas, Pools, Golf Courses, Snack Bars and Grills, picnic areas, fishing lakes, child care centers, housing areas....etc. For most of the Base the security is fairly low level. They screen people coming in but it can be evaded if you are determined. Once inside they have areas that are high security. Don't try your luck with those. They've got 19 year olds with automatic weapons that have been brainwashed to the max and are very serious about security. I used to work on perimeter security equipment....those cops are scary. More than one person I know has found themselves in the wrong area....face down on concrete with a locked and loaded M16 to the back of the head. It's not any fun.
Um, that's actually a good thing... Most of us would consider our selfs somewhat supportive of our country. If we were told to guard X and only let Y through, we'd do our damn best to try to let only Y through and well if it takes a loaded gun to the head to stop Not Y, then that's what we'd do. I actually support the military for not wanting all the "public" open stuff mapped on goggle. The answer is fairly simple, you'd have to just filter for not public area on the military base to find something that the military considers important enough to classify as secure and guard. That would be an area you'd additional intel on and target some missions on until you find out what's in there, and why its classified in that manner. From other slashdot comments it sounds like that military base had sloppy security and really didn't have anything much worth securing. Well, so freaking what. You just IDed that base as not that important or only medically important. That means foreign intel folks now know really secret stuff isn't going on there...
Of course, if the base security is that sloppy there, I'd really hope that we aren't doing any thing worth keeping secret there.
What the heck is N-Dex?
N-DEx: Law Enforcement National Data Exchange
http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cjisd/ndex/ndex_home.htm
I've actually heard this term around vendors once or twice. It's on the horizon, but not being sold at the moment. Heck, we'd be happy to get out of Uniform Crime Reports and into National Incident-Based Reporting System. Trust me. Its not the cops or the police agencies that want those things. They like to keep their data in their black box and share it with no one. It's the various folks at the federal/state level and the newspaper people that like to compare how your police department is doing with the neighbors that drives this. NIBRS is all about crime stats so that those that like to compare crime stats have more columns of information to compare.
There was a program called RPIS that died still born that was one of the precursors to this. It was mainly aimed at drug task forces to share intel data. It never really went anywhere. No one at our agency every entered anything into the system.
I've heard N-Dex in connection with NIBRs. The way its talked about is using those crime stats and sort of generating a "weather map" of crime stats or at least trying to predict future crimes based on current crime trends at more than just the local level. I think that sounds really cool in theory. I have serious doubts that they'll get and keep it up though. This sounds like something the feds will work on for a few years and will die off in 5 or so years. I'll wait until vendors start pushing N-Dex as a selling point or the state suddenly requiring it before I'm interested in it for our agency.
Before today you would have thought "Government Seeks Warrant to Search the Internet" was a headline from The Onion.
Well, it gets better. Wait until they go after MS and Google and request/require them to use those desktop search apps to search for things on your desktop.
We've always had this... You are watched by everyone else. They aren't really out to get you, but if you act too stupid or do something too annoying then you'll be sorry!
Society works because everyone wants/tries to control everyone else's behavior. Behavior that we don't like, we label as childish, stupid, anti-social, or criminal.
I don't care anymore that we are building God or at least Omnius. God is supposed to observe and control everything. We are far from building God. Omnius was limited to watching all humans, enslaving most of humanity, and controlling them. That's something that I think we could do in a generation or two if we worked at it. Heck, add in RFID, and Omnius could monitor almost all objects.
I'm not really worried about Google or Google Street view as of yet as long as we don't have robots or real AI. The only thing that I really fear is other humans. Other humans will setup the rules for Omnius. Omnius could be a great thing for humanity. It could enslave us for a few thousand years, or breed us anyway the rules were setup.
Omnius isn't just going to pop into existence. It'll be funded and built by people. Humanity is childish, stupid, anti-social, and criminal. Omnius would have a hard task of trying to raise humanity to be adults, relatively smart, social, and non-criminal.
It's kinda funny how we've been evolving our social control devices from little old ladies/shamans to religions, to communism/socialist governments, towards some google government. We will build Omnius on day. I just hope that when we do that we'll have matured that we don't need it as much.
Right now it seems like the things users want to optimize most for are A: speed and B: cost. One day every other month where our home internet is down doesn't seem like the end of the world, especially with the cost of the alternative.
We put up with tons. We could bury all our power and telephone lines so that storms don't bring those services down. It's very expensive so only a handful of communities have done that. As it is, most of us are o.k. if a thunder storm or some other weather event our telephone or power down for the day. Why? Because that's when you find out how well your service actually is. Most outages that I've experienced were less than 30 minutes at night and the only effect that it had on me was that we had to reset clocks. I've only had one water outage issue, and it was fixed with an two hours.
This is why I laughed about the entire Y2K thing. People don't realize how much of everything is constantly falling down! The power, ISPs, water companies are always sending people out to fix some thing, some where. You might never notice this though. The same applies to those servers that need 24x7 uptime. They've got things that need to be done to them every now and then to keep 'em going. Well, most of the the users don't ever notice any service issues. That's just how they are designed.
I'm not surprised XP or Vista isn't designed like that. I am kinda surprised that MS doesn't have any OS to fit that niche though.
And after that, could we review the difference between comedians and mathematicians?
Comedians are funny. Mathematicians write math books.
That's pretty much it.
Limit going after the parents to insisting that science is taught in science classes and religion is not.
Yeah, and please remove the evolution religion from the science classes as well! The religion folks won't have any problems with it being taught with the rest of the religions. That's exactly where it belongs.
I have yet to see an evolution class that wasn't a religious sermon presenting as much factual information as the Genesis story as gospel truth. I actually somewhat believe in evolution, but I believe that its far more a religion than a science. Aspects of evolution could be taught in the science class, but overall its a religion and taught pretty much how religions are. This is the truth, and you better believe it or you'll burn with bad grades!
Students aren't allowed to disagree with teachers/professors/scientists. Teachers/professors/scientists can all be stupid and spread stupid ideas. When students recongize something as smelling and tasting like snake oil, of course they don't believe it! They do have to pass the stupid teachers/professors/scientists tests so they learn it and pass the damned religious test. I hate religion being taught as science. Evolution and creation should both be kicked!
Now look -- as a scientist, I can completely respect and agree with the fact that ID is not science, for a multitude of reasons. But look at it from the point of view of someone "new" to science that was curious -- they showed up to an event, hoping to learn more about what evolution is and understand the "debate", and all they heard was how Creationism is wrong and how we need to fight religious groups and educate the people about the truth. "Educate with what?", that person will ask. "They haven't given any proof yet, and just seem to talk about how much they hate religion when they get together.". THAT is what the average person sees, and it doesn't really make scientists look good, and gives ammunition to the people that spread misinformation about evolution. Will that person ever go back to an evolution talk in order for us to clear up misconceptions? Probably not; forever, that person will now think "Wow, Evolutionists are crazy, I'm not going to that again.".
;) I see the entire creationism/evolutionism thing as just a religious war, and so as a sane person I like to stay out of it.
I was taught the creationism thing at home. I was taught the evolution religion at school/college/university. I say evolution religion because that's exactly how it is believed, defended, and presented. Creationists don't really have to fight evolutionists. They just need to let the evolutionist show up for the debate and let the faithful hear the new religion try their thing. The faithful recognize a come to our new religion/cult sermon when they hear it. Evolution as religion fails at filling all the moral/cultural niches that religion does. I think this is why selection has been working against evolutionists and religionists are the norm. Religion fills a niche. You can't just kill the niche because you and your followers dislike it. Evolution apparently is enough to fill the religion niche in some people, but not most people. This is where selection comes in.
why would we need to push this on everyone outside the context of science?
Why would we need to push "earth orbits the sun" on everyone outside the context of science? Science touches upon every area of our lives, and we are generally screwed if we don't have a population with a reasonable basic general education.
I thought it was so that the masses don't come up and burn or kill in another messy way the crazy professors/teachers/university guy that is teaching anything against what everyone knows as truth.
This is kinda what I dislike about the entire creationism/evolution thing. I really don't need it to live my life. My kids could go through their lives without it impacting them very much. But to some, the entire creationism/evolution thing seems to be some loved debate both sides love to engage in at every chance. I hate useless arguing. The only time the entire creationism/evolution thing ever comes up is when kids are at the why, why, why stage and might as where life came from. At that point, cultural imprinting goes on. I really hope it'll actually prove useful in any form other than an excuse for people to debate.
Long and short, when we let robots do our fighting for us, it becomes so cheep to make war that its cheaper to make war then peace. his is why I feel that people should always be required for the front line, war has to suck so it will always be a last resort.
This is funny. War has to suck for the other guys. As long as conquest is cheap/easy, your empire/government will roll over the barbarians or lesser civilizations.
You are linking to a site that is funded by Exxon, in case you didn't know.
Does Exxon fund wikipedia now? Most of those looked like US Federal Agencies or universities. I know Exxon's a tax payer, but I seriously doubt that they pay for that much climate research. Damn, that's really impressive. I didn't realize Exxon funded
Joint science academies' statement 2007
Federal Climate Change Science Program, 2006
American Meteorological Society
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
That actually makes Exxon look like the greenest company around.
You know, since we're on the subject of fashion, I want to err the gripe I have about the black suit. It has been making a comeback in business attire, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why.
Second, the practical argument. You are completely right in that black suits are absolutely miserable to wear in the summer. They also tend to get noticably washed out faster from dry cleaning. They also are show absolutely no originality or as Office Space would say, "flare."
Gosh, I only where suits at weddings, but come on even I know why. What folks here seem to be forgetting is that board rooms are "elite" clubs. Part of that has always been to make the climb up to that club as uncomfortable for underlings as possible. So think of wearing suits as a very gentle sort of hazing. If you've had to wear a suit for 15-25 years to get to the top, wouldn't you require those that follow you to dress similar? (Note: you might have a relaxed dress code for everyone other than management, but it is a sort of selection process. If you aren't willing to go through wearing a suit, then you don't meet one of the basic requirements of the upper management club. You could get to be the first level management without wearing suits, but if you appear before B.O.D. then you need to be wearing a suit.)
I'm kinda giggling at your life expectancy of the garment. This is a sort of a reoccurring price of admission to be in the club. Don't you get it? Guys in suits don't stand out. If you want to stand out, then you bring along a window dressing female that glitters and shines in those social occasions.
There is a part of me that agrees with one of the comments about violent looking upper management that looks like they are in the mafia or just scary enough to beat the shit out of the middle managers if you don't meet the next monthly quota. Part of that "violent looking" is optional uncomfortable suits. What kinda of crazy person would wear a suit given a choice?
There is another part that I think most people aren't grasping. Those that wear suits don't usually mind it. They've been wearing them for years. Sure they were uncomfortable when they were in their early 20s, but now that they've gotten to be in their mid 30s or 40s and have been wearing suits for a good 2 decades, its like wearing glasses or contacts in that they just don't notice anything uncomfortable about it anymore.
Basically, all you need for an infection is to get a pathogen inside a cell it can infect. A vector can be anything that compromises your body's numerous and insanely effective defenses against that happening. (Oh sure, we get sick fairly frequently from our point of view, but we're walking around in a lethal organic soup for every minute of our lives. That tabletop you just disinfected makes the .ru namespace look like a threat-free Eden.)
Sometimes I'd want my immune system running my virtual security. It would do a better job.
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that.
;)
There already is. The problem is that mapmaking is much, much more difficult than many here at Slashdot seem to think.
(Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I have made maps. Both as part of a professional work and at an amateur level. I've been a cartography geek for around thirty years.)
Why do I keep forgetting about TIGER? Oh, yes I remember now. TIGER is an o.k. starting point for around here, but it sucks for us to actually use in detail wise. The problem is that TIGER is where the public/companies should be downloading the maps from. I work in city government and well its the local city government that changes these street centerline crap around here. There ought to be a process where our local GIS guy dumps his stuff up the change to where ever. I personally don't think that the census should be responsible for keeping up with this. O.k. the postal service usually has a bit more current info, but I was thinking streets should logically fall under the department of transportation not well the census. I guess its more a matter that our federal, state, and local governments don't communicate/data share very well.
I'd hate to look into where TIGER gets their data. I'd be afraid that the feds redo the work that our local GIS guy does. That's actually more likely than them getting the current data from us as how the system should work. The thing is as a public citizen; I'd never use TIGER. I use google maps or map quest. I just hope that they use TIGER for something.
You can blame the government mainly your local streets dept for this. I've noticed state and federal highways being much more accurate than local or rural streets. May your deity help you if you live in a town that likes to rename side streets every few months.
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that. I doubt it'll ever be that clean cut or that your local street department will want to even give any other city much less state or federal government department access to updated street info. This is just my personal experience working in a city police department and occasionally trying to get this information from the city entities that physically make and should be tracking these things.
The more that I see that its difficult or impossible for intercity departments to communicate I tend to think that the only real solution is for Pizza companies or UPS/FedEx to partner with Google streets to actually physically map out where their fleets move through.
If your city has a GIS department, then that should be keeping track of this information.... You could always do a FOIA request for any arcview street centerline data.
The problem is that most of us have problems getting that "updated" arcview street centerline data into our lowest price GPS device.
Let's see. Viable infection vectors are still being used. This is kinda common sense. I expect to see a Phd paper on it next week.
Let's compare this to medical infection vectors. There is sexual, by touch, by air, by liquid/drink, or by food. I can't really think other disease transmission ways. We've got what millions of bacteria/viruses spreading by those means every second. As long as its still effective, it'll still be in use.
I think of net security sort of like keeping a eco system healthy and without too many hostile diseases/organisms about.
Humans don't have to worry about too many predators because we kill off any thing that tries to kill us. We've only recently become aware of microscopic things trying to kill us. So it's not surprising if we'd try to kill off all the diseases that usually attack us before they get us. We aren't too good at it, yet. There is a part of me that thinks that one of the reasons that we'll finally crack nano machines is that we'd have our unofficial war on all disease and spend trillions on it.
Now apply that thinking to the virtual world. Currently, we can only be economically hurt by ID theft through security breaches. I guess there is potential to get really upset if your medical info or other private stuff is leaked in a breach, but we generally can live through it and since we do "live through it" we can scream bloody murder at the people/companies responsible to stop that behavior in the future. Worse comes to worse we can even take political action and get the government to do something.
Our whole virtual ecosystem isn't very old. Wait for it to get a few decades older and then let's see if these same attacks are still around. How many attacks from the 70s or 80s are still floating around and effective? I wouldn't be surprised it all to find 90s stuff targetting win95/win98 computers still around.
Having cash?
The only time I ever have cash on me is when I've just gone to happy hour at the Mountain Sun. It's the only place I can think of that doesn't take credit/debit cards (friggin' hippies) and they have an ATM right in the back. Why else would I ever have cash with me?
I'm not that paranoid, but I only use my debit card at places that I trust like walmart. Any mom & pop gas station could be over charging/double charging me. I'd much rather pay cash there. What's this aversion some people have with physical money? If you are concerned at all about your privacy, you'd pay cash every where except large purchases that you want registered.
I shop at 3 types of places: gas stations, fast food, and Walmart. I only use debit card at Walmart.
Teaching evolution - does it really matter? Evolution is the least popular theory ever proposed. And evolution has survived all of these attacks because it is true
You know. I take both sides as a religious thing. Why? Because I've never seen any of this so called evidence. Oh, I'm sure that something exists and its proof enough for them. As far as I'm concerned though, I've been taught the religion of evolution and the religion of creationism. I'm sure the evolutionists have something physical that they pass around and share with each other like a holy grail or something, but I just take it on faith that they have this evidence!
And let's not forget the different shapes of the beaks of the birds that Darwin studied. Those certainly don't show any kind of evolutionary action.
You are right. It just shows Darwin made some mistakes trying to classify existing/living species. Existing/living species aren't evolution in action. Fossils can show evolution, but different shapes of the beaks of the birds that Darwin studied are only a classification thing.
The problem is that science fanatics are trying to use evolution as an issue to undermine established religions. Most of the actual established religions have taken their stand and you their members "learn evolution but don't believe in it." Its the fringe that barely understand things or like to take things like the ten commandments and use them as the basis of all laws that have a fit about evolution now. I just want both sides to shut the fuck up. I've had to endure listening to sermons from both sides, (yes evolution is a sermon.)
I hate this more than the damned abortion issue. Things that should be so simple aren't. My issue with abortion is that only the state should/can kill and it only kills criminals. So what class of crimes have those to be aborted been accused/found guilty by the state? I want all those women to be sterilized. This would remove them from the gene pool in the long term. I have issues with evolution, but I do believe that it could be possible to breed humanity. Any one that kills their offspring is removing themselves from the gene pool. O.k. I shouldn't care about their gene lines at all, but I do.
Evolution *is* a theory. Perhaps they should also teach what "theory" means.
That's the problem. The fanatics (esp. the so called science ones) can't shut up. I actually want to dump evolution and religion out of most classes because it just needlessly stirs a mess up. Evolution is a theory. The science guys esp teachers can't teach high schoolers what a theory is! I'm more upset that folks are walking out not knowing any basic science crap rather than evolution. I'm sorry sorry, evolution is about useless to teach and only gets people mad/furious for no good reason.
Evolution isn't basic science. I wouldn't even put it on my top 50 list of science crap things to crap down students throats. Why do people get so focused on this one thing? Oh, yes because there are fanatics on both sides trying to push their views down on everyone else.