What have you smoked? Do you honestly think that Europe, South America, most of Africa and Asia don't have a presumption of innocence?
What have you smoked that you think I'm talking about Europe? And no, Africa and the Middle East (and much of South America for that matter) do not have presumption of innocence.
It's worse than this. Hasselton assumes that the authorities in question have to prove someone is guilty of spreading malicious lies about their government by using steganography. But none of the countries he's writing about have a common law system, they have a civil law system. And one of the important differences between those two forms of law is the presumption of innocence. In that, it doesn't exist in civil law systems. If the authorities arrest you, it's up to you to prove yourself innocent. If you can't, then you're guilty. Obviously, the easiest way to prove that in a case where you're arrested for spreading damnable lies through hidden messages is to provide the key to read those messages. But, whoops!, you've just proven the state's case, off to the gallows with you! Or if you don't turn over the keys then you didn't prove yourself innocent, off to the gallows with you!
I'm not saying that something like Collage can't help people stuck under those regimes. But it's naive to think the state agents involved would be stymied in their attempts of suppressing dissent just because they can't read the specific messages involved. That would assume they care about the truth, when what they really care about is scaring the populace into submission. You really don't need guilty parties to do that, and in fact sometimes it helps if the people you're executing are truly innocent.
At the end of the day, Google doesn't have men with guns who can kick in your door, shoot your dog, and confiscate your property under color of law. They are definitely the lessor evil here.
Since we don't keep code on the dev box that isn't actively being worked on, we frequently will copy existing code that runs great on the production environment
Wait wait wait, back up. You're not checking the code out of source control into dev to do your work? You're just copying it from production? What the fuck kind of SDLC is that? What kind of monkey do you have doing change control and release management?
It sounds like your entire SDLC process is broken. Any OS-level updates should be done in dev first, then test, then production/DR. Not only will this keep things humming along, but it allows you to test the code against any changes to make sure nothing breaks. From what you're saying, it sounds like the SA is just applying patches in production without having gone through the dev and test environments first. He's lucky nothing's broken in prod yet.
I have to seriously wonder what kind of leadership you're stuck with that this kind of situation is allowed to fester. You have my condolences.
So the code that works in production (where the devs don't have access) doesn't work in dev (where they can do whatever they want), but somehow this is the SA's fault?
Let me say first, thanks for the taking the time to engage in this discussion. I find it fascinating.
But you can't say "day 1", it makes no sense in relativity.
And that's where, for me, relativity falls apart. Two events can happen at the same time, regardless of how they appear to happen to observers in different locations. It might appear the event happens earlier to one observer than another, but that doesn't change the fact that, to an omnipotent observer, the events occurred simultaneously.
Same with your barn-pole paradox. It's only a paradox because the pole appears to be shorter than it is to someone within a given frame of reference. But in reality, it's still the same length it's always been, so when it appears to be completely within the barn it's only due to, in effect, an optical illusion (not really, but the metaphor works better than any other I can think of at the moment).
Keep in mind, that Lorentz contractions only work when you're parallel to the direction of movement; the observer on top of the barn might see the pole contract at first, but as it got closer that effect would lessen until the pole would resume its original shape and size as it passed underneath the observer.
Day 1:.99c ship leaves C, 520c ship leaves B for A. Day 7:.99c ship still in transit, 520c ship arrives at A. Day 14:.99c ship still in transit, 520c ship leaves A. Day 21:.99c ship still in transit, 520c ship arrives at B. Day 3252:.99c ship gets its first view of 520c ship leaving B. Day 3613:.99c ship arrives at B, learns from people of B just how cool A is and how all the really cool ships are going there now. Day 3664:.99c ship sees the light reflecting from 520c ship leaving A.
Again, none of this violates causality. Just because something has already happened doesn't mean you can't learn about it, fresh from your perspective, in the future.
If you're on the moon talking with someone on the ground, there's a 1.28 second lag in communications due to the distance involved. Something happens on the moon and we won't know of it until 1.28 seconds later. If someone can travel sufficiently faster than light to make the knowledge of that incident essentially simultaneous, it doesn't mean you can find out about it before it happens. It still happens at a particular point in time.
Even if time slows down as you go faster (which I recall is the case), so far as I know there is zero real-world (eg, not just on a blackboard) evidence that time would go backwards if you went fast enough. Show me evidence of that happening and I'll grant that the non-intuitive aspects of all this could prevent FTL communication/travel. Until then, I stand by my assertion that, just because we don't know how to do something now, doesn't mean we won't ever know.
A government bureaucracy won't allow manufacturers or operators to make consistent changes to a product, yet it's the free market that has failed. Mr. Orwell would be so [proud|aghast] (take your pick).
So, if you can affect something which is outside of your light cone, e.g. travel faster than light, some observers will observe you affecting something happening before you acted to affect them.
OK, so star system A is at one point on a grid; star system B is at another and they are 10 light years apart. Star system C is 10 light years from B and 20 from A; D is 10 light years from A and 20 from B. All are on a straight line from each other.
A ship leaves B going many times the speed of light towards A, arriving there in about a week. An observer on C sees the ship leave and, due to the limitations of light-speed observation, it seems to take B 10 years to reach A (though it looks really really red while it's traveling). Meanwhile, an observer on D sees B's ship arrive before it sees it leave B. Does this cause a paradox?
No, of course not. Just because you find out the ending of something before you find out the beginning doesn't mean there's a paradox. The people on both A and D will be surprised by the ship's sudden, untracked appearance, but that doesn't mean any rules of causality will have been violated any more than seeing a plane flying overhead before you hear its engines means that going faster than sound violates causality.
Now, if the ship from B turns around and heads home after a one-week visit, it'll arrive three weeks after it left, carrying the information about its visit (which won't arrive via light for another 10 years). Again, causality isn't violated, as it shouldn't matter the method of information exchange as long as time continues to march along (the one-week transit time encompasses time-dilation effects for the purposes of this scenario, feel free to expound on this part to show me why I'm completely wrong).
Unless the universe just really really doesn't like spoilers (in which case I would expect both Wikipedia and TV Tropes to magically vanish), it just doesn't make any sense to say you can't go faster than light just because it would let someone know something has happened sooner than they otherwise would've.
I have a seriously hard time understanding how going faster-than-light could violate causality. If you go faster than sound and arrive at a location before the sound of your engines does, it doesn't mean no one can interact with you until they hear you coming. Light should work the same way: event A happens at a given time and the light reporting that event begins spreading out. Observer B is located one light year from event A's location and starts moving at twice the speed of light towards A. B reaches A six months later, and flew right through the light reporting A's activity at about the 3/4 mark. When B arrives, it should be six months in the future after A happened.
Now, there are the occasional bad apples who get blinded by their win/loss records, usually because they have political ambitions or want to get their face on the news
I call bullshit. If they were "occasional" we wouldn't have nearly the level of prosecutorial misconduct we do in this country. So either you're completely wrong and lots of prosecutors are assholes who only care about winning, or the ones who want to make a difference don't want to rock the boat by policing their colleagues. Which is it? Because they're both about equally bad.
DAs are rewarded for getting guilty verdicts and sending people to prison, not for finding the guilty party and punishing them. There's a very subtle difference there, and it means that a DA with so-so evidence against a defendant who's easily portrayed as scum (with a PD for a lawyer) versus rock-solid evidence against an upstanding citizen (who can afford their own attorney) will prosecute the former over the latter. It's an easy win, who cares if the guy is really guilty?
You're right, spending $7.7B to gain $2.2B worth of assets completely changes the picture.
Also keep in mind that Intel is spending cash, a current asset. So ignoring total assets and focusing on current assets in the correct accounting to use in this situation.
In other words, you don't know what you're talking about so stop gumming up the conversation.
They have total current assets of $1.5B, and total liabilities of $1.8B (I'm ignoring their total assets, because so much of it is in "goodwill" and I think that number is grossly overrated given the bad press they've gotten over the last few years). That means they have negative value of $300 million. Why would you spend $7.7 billion in cash to have a guarantee of losing $300 million???
Not to mention, their cash flow for this year so far has been horrible. For the first two quarters, they had a net gain of only $2.4 million, from a starting total current assets of $1.7B at the end of last year, of which $893 million was cash and short-term investments. That's a 0.2% rate of return, the same rate of return you currently get from six-month Treasuries. If whatever you're doing can't beat the risk-free rate of return, you need to do something else, pronto. Their CEO and CFO should've been fired months, if not years, ago. And Intel's board need their collective head examined for okaying this deal.
It's never been illegal to record police in public. That hasn't stopped certain corrupt police departments and district attorneys from persecuting people who do so, of course, but they've used twisted logic, not actual law, to make their cases. Radley Balko at Reason has done a number of excellent exposes on this problem.
That's OK, it's perfectly legal in Wisconsin, just an hour north of Chicago. Drive across state lines, make your recording, then broadcast for the world to hear.
Eh, it's no different from the 50-year-old men who drool over Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry. Just because you're older (or younger) than someone, doesn't mean your hormones won't respond to their physical appearance.
Slashdot Mirror
What have you smoked? Do you honestly think that Europe, South America, most of Africa and Asia don't have a presumption of innocence?
What have you smoked that you think I'm talking about Europe? And no, Africa and the Middle East (and much of South America for that matter) do not have presumption of innocence.
It's worse than this. Hasselton assumes that the authorities in question have to prove someone is guilty of spreading malicious lies about their government by using steganography. But none of the countries he's writing about have a common law system, they have a civil law system. And one of the important differences between those two forms of law is the presumption of innocence. In that, it doesn't exist in civil law systems. If the authorities arrest you, it's up to you to prove yourself innocent. If you can't, then you're guilty. Obviously, the easiest way to prove that in a case where you're arrested for spreading damnable lies through hidden messages is to provide the key to read those messages. But, whoops!, you've just proven the state's case, off to the gallows with you! Or if you don't turn over the keys then you didn't prove yourself innocent, off to the gallows with you!
I'm not saying that something like Collage can't help people stuck under those regimes. But it's naive to think the state agents involved would be stymied in their attempts of suppressing dissent just because they can't read the specific messages involved. That would assume they care about the truth, when what they really care about is scaring the populace into submission. You really don't need guilty parties to do that, and in fact sometimes it helps if the people you're executing are truly innocent.
At the end of the day, Google doesn't have men with guns who can kick in your door, shoot your dog, and confiscate your property under color of law. They are definitely the lessor evil here.
Decode this:
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
Didn't see that one coming.
Since we don't keep code on the dev box that isn't actively being worked on, we frequently will copy existing code that runs great on the production environment
Wait wait wait, back up. You're not checking the code out of source control into dev to do your work? You're just copying it from production? What the fuck kind of SDLC is that? What kind of monkey do you have doing change control and release management?
It sounds like your entire SDLC process is broken. Any OS-level updates should be done in dev first, then test, then production/DR. Not only will this keep things humming along, but it allows you to test the code against any changes to make sure nothing breaks. From what you're saying, it sounds like the SA is just applying patches in production without having gone through the dev and test environments first. He's lucky nothing's broken in prod yet.
I have to seriously wonder what kind of leadership you're stuck with that this kind of situation is allowed to fester. You have my condolences.
We hire the best devs, and work in an environment where fixing bugs is more important than adding features.
And I'll bet there are free hookers and black jack for everyone.
So the code that works in production (where the devs don't have access) doesn't work in dev (where they can do whatever they want), but somehow this is the SA's fault?
Either your devs are a bunch of barely trained lunatics
Is there any other kind?
(Posting in rebuttal to http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1765854&cid=33370852)
Let me say first, thanks for the taking the time to engage in this discussion. I find it fascinating.
But you can't say "day 1", it makes no sense in relativity.
And that's where, for me, relativity falls apart. Two events can happen at the same time, regardless of how they appear to happen to observers in different locations. It might appear the event happens earlier to one observer than another, but that doesn't change the fact that, to an omnipotent observer, the events occurred simultaneously.
Same with your barn-pole paradox. It's only a paradox because the pole appears to be shorter than it is to someone within a given frame of reference. But in reality, it's still the same length it's always been, so when it appears to be completely within the barn it's only due to, in effect, an optical illusion (not really, but the metaphor works better than any other I can think of at the moment).
Keep in mind, that Lorentz contractions only work when you're parallel to the direction of movement; the observer on top of the barn might see the pole contract at first, but as it got closer that effect would lessen until the pole would resume its original shape and size as it passed underneath the observer.
That makes no sense whatsover.
Day 1: .99c ship leaves C, 520c ship leaves B for A. .99c ship still in transit, 520c ship arrives at A. .99c ship still in transit, 520c ship leaves A. .99c ship still in transit, 520c ship arrives at B. .99c ship gets its first view of 520c ship leaving B. .99c ship arrives at B, learns from people of B just how cool A is and how all the really cool ships are going there now. .99c ship sees the light reflecting from 520c ship leaving A.
Day 7:
Day 14:
Day 21:
Day 3252:
Day 3613:
Day 3664:
Again, none of this violates causality. Just because something has already happened doesn't mean you can't learn about it, fresh from your perspective, in the future.
If you're on the moon talking with someone on the ground, there's a 1.28 second lag in communications due to the distance involved. Something happens on the moon and we won't know of it until 1.28 seconds later. If someone can travel sufficiently faster than light to make the knowledge of that incident essentially simultaneous, it doesn't mean you can find out about it before it happens. It still happens at a particular point in time.
Even if time slows down as you go faster (which I recall is the case), so far as I know there is zero real-world (eg, not just on a blackboard) evidence that time would go backwards if you went fast enough. Show me evidence of that happening and I'll grant that the non-intuitive aspects of all this could prevent FTL communication/travel. Until then, I stand by my assertion that, just because we don't know how to do something now, doesn't mean we won't ever know.
A government bureaucracy won't allow manufacturers or operators to make consistent changes to a product, yet it's the free market that has failed. Mr. Orwell would be so [proud|aghast] (take your pick).
Nah, women are rarely colorblind.
<whispers in background>
Wait, there male nurses now? When did that happen?
So, if you can affect something which is outside of your light cone, e.g. travel faster than light, some observers will observe you affecting something happening before you acted to affect them.
OK, so star system A is at one point on a grid; star system B is at another and they are 10 light years apart. Star system C is 10 light years from B and 20 from A; D is 10 light years from A and 20 from B. All are on a straight line from each other.
A ship leaves B going many times the speed of light towards A, arriving there in about a week. An observer on C sees the ship leave and, due to the limitations of light-speed observation, it seems to take B 10 years to reach A (though it looks really really red while it's traveling). Meanwhile, an observer on D sees B's ship arrive before it sees it leave B. Does this cause a paradox?
No, of course not. Just because you find out the ending of something before you find out the beginning doesn't mean there's a paradox. The people on both A and D will be surprised by the ship's sudden, untracked appearance, but that doesn't mean any rules of causality will have been violated any more than seeing a plane flying overhead before you hear its engines means that going faster than sound violates causality.
Now, if the ship from B turns around and heads home after a one-week visit, it'll arrive three weeks after it left, carrying the information about its visit (which won't arrive via light for another 10 years). Again, causality isn't violated, as it shouldn't matter the method of information exchange as long as time continues to march along (the one-week transit time encompasses time-dilation effects for the purposes of this scenario, feel free to expound on this part to show me why I'm completely wrong).
Unless the universe just really really doesn't like spoilers (in which case I would expect both Wikipedia and TV Tropes to magically vanish), it just doesn't make any sense to say you can't go faster than light just because it would let someone know something has happened sooner than they otherwise would've.
I have a seriously hard time understanding how going faster-than-light could violate causality. If you go faster than sound and arrive at a location before the sound of your engines does, it doesn't mean no one can interact with you until they hear you coming. Light should work the same way: event A happens at a given time and the light reporting that event begins spreading out. Observer B is located one light year from event A's location and starts moving at twice the speed of light towards A. B reaches A six months later, and flew right through the light reporting A's activity at about the 3/4 mark. When B arrives, it should be six months in the future after A happened.
Just seems like common sense to me.
Now, I survey the reality television landscape and realize that maybe killer mutants with shouldpads and mohawks wouldn't have been so bad after all.
Not so bad? Hell, they have their own show on MTV now.
Now, there are the occasional bad apples who get blinded by their win/loss records, usually because they have political ambitions or want to get their face on the news
I call bullshit. If they were "occasional" we wouldn't have nearly the level of prosecutorial misconduct we do in this country. So either you're completely wrong and lots of prosecutors are assholes who only care about winning, or the ones who want to make a difference don't want to rock the boat by policing their colleagues. Which is it? Because they're both about equally bad.
DAs are rewarded for getting guilty verdicts and sending people to prison, not for finding the guilty party and punishing them. There's a very subtle difference there, and it means that a DA with so-so evidence against a defendant who's easily portrayed as scum (with a PD for a lawyer) versus rock-solid evidence against an upstanding citizen (who can afford their own attorney) will prosecute the former over the latter. It's an easy win, who cares if the guy is really guilty?
You're right, spending $7.7B to gain $2.2B worth of assets completely changes the picture.
Also keep in mind that Intel is spending cash, a current asset. So ignoring total assets and focusing on current assets in the correct accounting to use in this situation.
In other words, you don't know what you're talking about so stop gumming up the conversation.
"Moderately useful" is not worth $7.7 billion.
Put down the hashpipe, dude, and take a look at McAfee's balance sheet and cash flow:
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MFE&fstype=ii
They have total current assets of $1.5B, and total liabilities of $1.8B (I'm ignoring their total assets, because so much of it is in "goodwill" and I think that number is grossly overrated given the bad press they've gotten over the last few years). That means they have negative value of $300 million. Why would you spend $7.7 billion in cash to have a guarantee of losing $300 million???
Not to mention, their cash flow for this year so far has been horrible. For the first two quarters, they had a net gain of only $2.4 million, from a starting total current assets of $1.7B at the end of last year, of which $893 million was cash and short-term investments. That's a 0.2% rate of return, the same rate of return you currently get from six-month Treasuries. If whatever you're doing can't beat the risk-free rate of return, you need to do something else, pronto. Their CEO and CFO should've been fired months, if not years, ago. And Intel's board need their collective head examined for okaying this deal.
It's never been illegal to record police in public. That hasn't stopped certain corrupt police departments and district attorneys from persecuting people who do so, of course, but they've used twisted logic, not actual law, to make their cases. Radley Balko at Reason has done a number of excellent exposes on this problem.
That's OK, it's perfectly legal in Wisconsin, just an hour north of Chicago. Drive across state lines, make your recording, then broadcast for the world to hear.
Eh, it's no different from the 50-year-old men who drool over Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry. Just because you're older (or younger) than someone, doesn't mean your hormones won't respond to their physical appearance.
It's dangerous to assume that sexual harassment can't escalate to a criminal charge:
Gee, I guess you're right. So what would the crime be, then?
Is Sexual Harassment A Crime?
Hmmm.
Embezzlement is technically a victimless crime, whereas Sexual Harassment is a very victim-oriented crime.
First, stealing is never a victimless crime. The victim might not be harmed greatly by it, but the victim still exists.
Second, since sexual harassment, by itself, is not a crime, it cannot be a "very victim-oriented crime" since it's not a crime in the first place.