Terrorists must be anyone who isn't an old rich white guy. If they talk funny, look different, or behave differently due to cultural differences, they must be terrorists.
No, it's not like that at all. See, for example, Senator Paul getting escorted out of the terminal for refusing a pat down. The problem is that there isn't any official attempt at profiling. Instead, they have a completely asinine random selection system for triggering detailed searches, and despite the fact that it's bloody obvious that a 6-year old girl or an elderly woman in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag aren't going to have any explosives on them, they still search them. The only profiling by TSA gate personnel is unofficial, unsanctioned, and largely driven by pigheaded individual ignorance on the part of the TSA agent. No, the system as it is now has the TSA agents who follow the rules searching obvious non-threats based on a random die roll, and the rule-breaking TSA assholes doing their own seat of the pants profiling and doing detailed searches on Sikhs because they wear turbans, and Bangladeshis because they look suspiciously dark skinned. Neither approach is even remotely reasonable or effective.
What they should be doing is what all other reasonable countries with a terrorist problem have been doing for decades: First, you take the fucking badges of the TSA. They aren't fucking cops, and nothing about their job should give them the impression they have power. Second, you replace insane regulations against box cutters and baby bottles with what we had pre-9/11. 9/11 isn't going to happen again, because no one will ever cooperate with lightly armed hostage takers anymore. Third, you hire trained, intelligent interviewers. These interviewers take each group flying together (i.e. a whole family) and ask them a few simple, relaxed questions about their trip and destination. This technique is sufficient to pick out the suspicious from the innocuous. People planning criminal acts on an airplane have certain characteristics: they're usually male, young, flying alone, don't have much baggage, can't usually provide plausible details about their plans at the flight's destination, and on top of it are often very nervous. Note that none of this profiling involves skin color, ethnicity, or country of origin. It does, however, work extremely well. When's the last bomb or hijacking of El Al?
But we'll never see that. TSA is makework bullshit security theater, and everyone knows it.
I know that there are those of us who like to learn, and therefore use efficient memory techniques, and that there are those who ridicule those of us who learn. On a website for geeks, I had expected to find the former, not the latter.
I'd say the fact that keypads being evenly split into two opposing formats makes using muscle memory/spatial patterns a decisively non-efficient memory technique, and the reason you're seeing ridicule is your insistence upon pursuing it anyway, even to the extreme of reordering your computer keypad and scraping the PCB of your calculator to create one-off device layouts no one else uses.
Either way, it's a wasted question. Years ago, when Ma Bell was the only phone company and they came out with touch-tone phones, they patented the arrangement with 1-2-3 at the top. So if you want to make a calculator that uses that, you'll have to pay a fee.
That's not true. There's no patent for the 1-2-3 keypad (nor was Bell/AT&T the only phone company in the US, but that's not relevant here). Calculators in the form of mechanical adding machines predated the DTMF keypad by decades. When Bell came up with the touch-tone system, they actually spent a lot of money researching whether it should be adding machine layout, or 1-2-3 from the top. As it turned out, even experienced ten-key operators were able to dial phone numbers faster on the 1-2-3 pad because everyone--- even tenkey operators--- approached the task of dialing a phone with their index finger alone, regardless of whether it was pushbuttons or dial, because they were already in the habit of doing so with dial phones. 1-2-3 keypads are faster to use when visually hunting and pecking with one finger. Given that no one was ever going to be doing rapid data entry on a phone, it made more sense to use top-to-bottom order, because the reverse order of tenkey exists only to make rapid multi-digit data entry faster (i.e. zero under the thumb, pinkie for enter, and most common digits under the fingers as per Benford's Law)
I don't know what the hell is wrong with the OP that his brain doesn't have room for two different keypad layouts.
I think the thing that voice recognition proponents are missing is that all non-text entry via a voice command system has to happen in band. This creates the problem of either a) systems that erroneously respond to conversations that aren't directed at them, or b) systems that are so tightly limited to very specific cues that they're difficult to use. The infuriatingly non-intuitive escape sequences necessary to switch between direct literal transcription and command entry just add fuel to that fire. Voice command is a great workaround for the problem of doing anything with a electronic device while driving, but my GPS still frequently thinks I said to it "voice command" when I am talking to my passenger and said something only vaguely similar.
That's always been the entire point of "science fiction", from the very beginning. Science fiction without even a token attempt to work from a basic factual grounding in *actual* science is just *fiction*. Fringe is so unimaginatively bad that it fails to leap even the low hurdle of suspension of disbelief found in early 30's pulp SF.
The gaming commission has nothing to say on the matter of slot machine programmers using version control or any other facets of good programming practice. Gaming commission only cares that machines pay out honestly. If they can somehow make an honest machine by dumping/dev/random to a microcontroller, that's within their right.
They don't have to cry to the government to stop you winning by counting cards. They are allowed to simply bar you from gambling at their tables. There's no law that says they are REQUIRED to let everyone gamble. Truly effective card counters are so few that all the pit bosses know them on sight and instruct the dealers to not deal to them. That's why card counters write books on card counting, because they can't make money at cards anymore.
I suspect my mext phone might be the Desire with the keyboard... (HTC Vision)
I have a Desire Z/Vision. Works great with connectbot. My only complaint is the lack of a dedicated number row on the keyboard. I would have preferred the HTC TYTN2 style keyboard they had for it in the early mockup.
Pretty much. I jumped ship to Reddit months ago. Between the perpetual obnoxification of the Slashdot interface, the stupidification of the Slashdot "editors" and their inscrutable logic in approving idiotic stories for the front page, and the hordes of trollish mundanes that have watered down the geek quotient, I hardly bother to check Slashdot anymore. Back when it was CmdrTaco posting cool dork/nerd shit he found on the internet it was pretty fun, but now... meh.
Why does Occam's Razor favor the airliner when there is a very distinct history of missile tests off the coast of southern California and from Vandenberg on the coast of southern California?
Because 1) the military never says "missile? what missile?" when they've done a very obvious launch, and 2) Vandenberg is 150miles northwest of Los Angeles and a launch from there wouldn't be seen to the west of Manhattan Beach. I've seen Vandenberg launches from that area, and they look like they're coming from land, as Vandenberg is effectively behind the Santa Monica Mountains from that vantage point.
This idiotic "Laura Ingalls Test" is utterly pointless. Some things--- including teaching elementary basics of reading, writing, math, etc.--- remain the same over the years because the efficient use of these things requires no additional technological complication. Laura Ingalls would also still recognize a kitchen table, a fancy restaurant, and a pair of fucking work boots in the modern age because the basics of such things simply do not change. Really, this article reeks of the same tripe we had to hear back when it was television that was going to revolutionize education. A TV in every classroom! It will change everything!
They are recent works that would have fallen under the original 14 year copyright terms
That's not as relevant as you'd like to believe. We cannot choose to follow an outdated law in lieu of the newer, more onerous one and still be considered "law abiding". If the law is going to be broken, why follow an arbitrary restriction?
That's not even getting into the greater point, which is that copyright is a favor, a boon granted to creators which they can leverage for some profit, and in exchange the public domain is enriched. Perpetual extension of copyright essentially eliminates the public's gain in that social contract. As there's simply no moral requirement to adhere to a bargain that's completely one-sided, there's nothing wrong with telling the publishers/jailors of our common culture the bargain is invalid and reverting to the natural state of information exchange. In fact, the only ethical course of action at this point is to refuse to obey the law. Because the legislators are all in the back pockets of the copyright industry, the only hope for change is in forcing a collapse of the system. Meekly obeying the law and hoping legislators someday decide the change the law isn't going to work.
It sure would be nice if the phone had a web browser that you could go to a search engine where you could find directions and maybe even turn by turn directions from where you were..
I'd pay money for a phone like that! Google should totally make a phone!
hey have guns, too, and probably more training with them than you
If you go to the range and fire more than 50 rounds through your pistol, and/or do it more than once every couple months, you have more training than they do. Police "training" is generally laughably minimal. There's usually more of them, though, so you're still screwed.
This is nothing new. California did something similar with hybrids. When hybrids like the first generation Prius came out, California allowed their owners to apply for a special sticker which allowed them to drive in High Occupancy Vehicle lanes with only one person in the car. Now, this is already fucking asinine, as the purpose of HOV lanes was never to reduce fuel consumption, but rather to reduce traffic. A high efficiency vehicle is still just another single-occupant car clogging up the freeway. No matter, the California legislature is full of idiots, so this is not surprising. What made it especially offensive was that they made it a "pilot program", limited to the first 15,000 applicants. This very obviously means that only the wealthy would be getting them, as they were the only ones with the money to be able to afford a first generation Prius at the high prices they started at. The worst part is that it probably wasn't even intentional. Their stupidity and feel-good foolishness just naturally leads to handouts for their rich, commie-lib friends.
FWIW, both civil and criminal operate under "innocent until proven guilty". The difference you're thinking of is the difference in what constitutes "proven guilty". The burden of proof in civil is "preponderance of the evidence" and criminal is "beyond a reasonable doubt".
What happened to America where the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty
Sorry, but there's no such rule for the court of public opinion. It exists as part of due process in criminal and civil courts because the courts have the power to deprive you of life, liberty, and property. A few thousand people on Slashdot are under no obligation to follow such restrictive rules.
I got married because I love my wife, not because I get a tax break.
Same here... because we actually don't get a tax break. We're both employed and have our own insurance, and since a married couple is essentially treated as a single entity, we took a significant tax hit. Instead of paying as two separate people making $50K each with one deduction, we now pay as one person with two deductions making $100K. The tax paid on post-tax benefits would be chickenfeed in comparison.
Yes, technically constitution is a subset of law, and while saying sticking to the law has some technical accuracy, it is overly vague and implies that the mere fact of being law gives something weight. It is more accurate to say the court rules on the constitutionality of law. Claiming that the constitution is part of the law is engaging in weasel-wording to justify a patently stupid comment.
Slashdot Mirror
I do believe the phrase he was looking for is "palsy walsy"
Terrorists must be anyone who isn't an old rich white guy. If they talk funny, look different, or behave differently due to cultural differences, they must be terrorists.
No, it's not like that at all. See, for example, Senator Paul getting escorted out of the terminal for refusing a pat down. The problem is that there isn't any official attempt at profiling. Instead, they have a completely asinine random selection system for triggering detailed searches, and despite the fact that it's bloody obvious that a 6-year old girl or an elderly woman in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag aren't going to have any explosives on them, they still search them. The only profiling by TSA gate personnel is unofficial, unsanctioned, and largely driven by pigheaded individual ignorance on the part of the TSA agent. No, the system as it is now has the TSA agents who follow the rules searching obvious non-threats based on a random die roll, and the rule-breaking TSA assholes doing their own seat of the pants profiling and doing detailed searches on Sikhs because they wear turbans, and Bangladeshis because they look suspiciously dark skinned. Neither approach is even remotely reasonable or effective.
What they should be doing is what all other reasonable countries with a terrorist problem have been doing for decades: First, you take the fucking badges of the TSA. They aren't fucking cops, and nothing about their job should give them the impression they have power. Second, you replace insane regulations against box cutters and baby bottles with what we had pre-9/11. 9/11 isn't going to happen again, because no one will ever cooperate with lightly armed hostage takers anymore. Third, you hire trained, intelligent interviewers. These interviewers take each group flying together (i.e. a whole family) and ask them a few simple, relaxed questions about their trip and destination. This technique is sufficient to pick out the suspicious from the innocuous. People planning criminal acts on an airplane have certain characteristics: they're usually male, young, flying alone, don't have much baggage, can't usually provide plausible details about their plans at the flight's destination, and on top of it are often very nervous. Note that none of this profiling involves skin color, ethnicity, or country of origin. It does, however, work extremely well. When's the last bomb or hijacking of El Al?
But we'll never see that. TSA is makework bullshit security theater, and everyone knows it.
I know that there are those of us who like to learn, and therefore use efficient memory techniques, and that there are those who ridicule those of us who learn. On a website for geeks, I had expected to find the former, not the latter.
I'd say the fact that keypads being evenly split into two opposing formats makes using muscle memory/spatial patterns a decisively non-efficient memory technique, and the reason you're seeing ridicule is your insistence upon pursuing it anyway, even to the extreme of reordering your computer keypad and scraping the PCB of your calculator to create one-off device layouts no one else uses.
Either way, it's a wasted question. Years ago, when Ma Bell was the only phone company and they came out with touch-tone phones, they patented the arrangement with 1-2-3 at the top. So if you want to make a calculator that uses that, you'll have to pay a fee.
That's not true. There's no patent for the 1-2-3 keypad (nor was Bell/AT&T the only phone company in the US, but that's not relevant here). Calculators in the form of mechanical adding machines predated the DTMF keypad by decades. When Bell came up with the touch-tone system, they actually spent a lot of money researching whether it should be adding machine layout, or 1-2-3 from the top. As it turned out, even experienced ten-key operators were able to dial phone numbers faster on the 1-2-3 pad because everyone--- even tenkey operators--- approached the task of dialing a phone with their index finger alone, regardless of whether it was pushbuttons or dial, because they were already in the habit of doing so with dial phones. 1-2-3 keypads are faster to use when visually hunting and pecking with one finger. Given that no one was ever going to be doing rapid data entry on a phone, it made more sense to use top-to-bottom order, because the reverse order of tenkey exists only to make rapid multi-digit data entry faster (i.e. zero under the thumb, pinkie for enter, and most common digits under the fingers as per Benford's Law)
I don't know what the hell is wrong with the OP that his brain doesn't have room for two different keypad layouts.
True, but from my experience people usually have a polarized opinion about the site.
I feel strongly that the site is a big waste of time, but I have absolutely no opinion on the ownership of the site.
I think the thing that voice recognition proponents are missing is that all non-text entry via a voice command system has to happen in band. This creates the problem of either a) systems that erroneously respond to conversations that aren't directed at them, or b) systems that are so tightly limited to very specific cues that they're difficult to use. The infuriatingly non-intuitive escape sequences necessary to switch between direct literal transcription and command entry just add fuel to that fire. Voice command is a great workaround for the problem of doing anything with a electronic device while driving, but my GPS still frequently thinks I said to it "voice command" when I am talking to my passenger and said something only vaguely similar.
That's always been the entire point of "science fiction", from the very beginning. Science fiction without even a token attempt to work from a basic factual grounding in *actual* science is just *fiction*. Fringe is so unimaginatively bad that it fails to leap even the low hurdle of suspension of disbelief found in early 30's pulp SF.
It's not illegal to count cards. Casinos, however, are under no obligation to allow a card counter to play.
The gaming commission has nothing to say on the matter of slot machine programmers using version control or any other facets of good programming practice. Gaming commission only cares that machines pay out honestly. If they can somehow make an honest machine by dumping /dev/random to a microcontroller, that's within their right.
They don't have to cry to the government to stop you winning by counting cards. They are allowed to simply bar you from gambling at their tables. There's no law that says they are REQUIRED to let everyone gamble. Truly effective card counters are so few that all the pit bosses know them on sight and instruct the dealers to not deal to them. That's why card counters write books on card counting, because they can't make money at cards anymore.
I suspect my mext phone might be the Desire with the keyboard... (HTC Vision)
I have a Desire Z/Vision. Works great with connectbot. My only complaint is the lack of a dedicated number row on the keyboard. I would have preferred the HTC TYTN2 style keyboard they had for it in the early mockup.
You ever installed Windows 7? It practically installs itself. Your "02c" with its snide non-specific insinuations isn't worth anything.
I think reddit has finally killed slashdot.
Pretty much. I jumped ship to Reddit months ago. Between the perpetual obnoxification of the Slashdot interface, the stupidification of the Slashdot "editors" and their inscrutable logic in approving idiotic stories for the front page, and the hordes of trollish mundanes that have watered down the geek quotient, I hardly bother to check Slashdot anymore. Back when it was CmdrTaco posting cool dork/nerd shit he found on the internet it was pretty fun, but now... meh.
Why does Occam's Razor favor the airliner when there is a very distinct history of missile tests off the coast of southern California and from Vandenberg on the coast of southern California?
Because 1) the military never says "missile? what missile?" when they've done a very obvious launch, and 2) Vandenberg is 150miles northwest of Los Angeles and a launch from there wouldn't be seen to the west of Manhattan Beach. I've seen Vandenberg launches from that area, and they look like they're coming from land, as Vandenberg is effectively behind the Santa Monica Mountains from that vantage point.
This idiotic "Laura Ingalls Test" is utterly pointless. Some things--- including teaching elementary basics of reading, writing, math, etc.--- remain the same over the years because the efficient use of these things requires no additional technological complication. Laura Ingalls would also still recognize a kitchen table, a fancy restaurant, and a pair of fucking work boots in the modern age because the basics of such things simply do not change. Really, this article reeks of the same tripe we had to hear back when it was television that was going to revolutionize education. A TV in every classroom! It will change everything!
They are recent works that would have fallen under the original 14 year copyright terms
That's not as relevant as you'd like to believe. We cannot choose to follow an outdated law in lieu of the newer, more onerous one and still be considered "law abiding". If the law is going to be broken, why follow an arbitrary restriction?
That's not even getting into the greater point, which is that copyright is a favor, a boon granted to creators which they can leverage for some profit, and in exchange the public domain is enriched. Perpetual extension of copyright essentially eliminates the public's gain in that social contract. As there's simply no moral requirement to adhere to a bargain that's completely one-sided, there's nothing wrong with telling the publishers/jailors of our common culture the bargain is invalid and reverting to the natural state of information exchange. In fact, the only ethical course of action at this point is to refuse to obey the law. Because the legislators are all in the back pockets of the copyright industry, the only hope for change is in forcing a collapse of the system. Meekly obeying the law and hoping legislators someday decide the change the law isn't going to work.
It sure would be nice if the phone had a web browser that you could go to a search engine where you could find directions and maybe even turn by turn directions from where you were..
I'd pay money for a phone like that! Google should totally make a phone!
hey have guns, too, and probably more training with them than you
If you go to the range and fire more than 50 rounds through your pistol, and/or do it more than once every couple months, you have more training than they do. Police "training" is generally laughably minimal. There's usually more of them, though, so you're still screwed.
This is nothing new. California did something similar with hybrids. When hybrids like the first generation Prius came out, California allowed their owners to apply for a special sticker which allowed them to drive in High Occupancy Vehicle lanes with only one person in the car. Now, this is already fucking asinine, as the purpose of HOV lanes was never to reduce fuel consumption, but rather to reduce traffic. A high efficiency vehicle is still just another single-occupant car clogging up the freeway. No matter, the California legislature is full of idiots, so this is not surprising. What made it especially offensive was that they made it a "pilot program", limited to the first 15,000 applicants. This very obviously means that only the wealthy would be getting them, as they were the only ones with the money to be able to afford a first generation Prius at the high prices they started at. The worst part is that it probably wasn't even intentional. Their stupidity and feel-good foolishness just naturally leads to handouts for their rich, commie-lib friends.
of cough something can be done, of cough!
George Bernard Shaw is not an authority on reason. This quote from him is a glib platitude.
FWIW, both civil and criminal operate under "innocent until proven guilty". The difference you're thinking of is the difference in what constitutes "proven guilty". The burden of proof in civil is "preponderance of the evidence" and criminal is "beyond a reasonable doubt".
What happened to America where the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty
Sorry, but there's no such rule for the court of public opinion. It exists as part of due process in criminal and civil courts because the courts have the power to deprive you of life, liberty, and property. A few thousand people on Slashdot are under no obligation to follow such restrictive rules.
I got married because I love my wife, not because I get a tax break.
Same here... because we actually don't get a tax break. We're both employed and have our own insurance, and since a married couple is essentially treated as a single entity, we took a significant tax hit. Instead of paying as two separate people making $50K each with one deduction, we now pay as one person with two deductions making $100K. The tax paid on post-tax benefits would be chickenfeed in comparison.
Yes, technically constitution is a subset of law, and while saying sticking to the law has some technical accuracy, it is overly vague and implies that the mere fact of being law gives something weight. It is more accurate to say the court rules on the constitutionality of law. Claiming that the constitution is part of the law is engaging in weasel-wording to justify a patently stupid comment.