What specifically surprised me was the fact that the Navy plans to deploy these systems as early as 2011, on their DD(X) Frigates.
Forget the railguns--I wanna hear more about these Dance Dance Xtreme frigates--sounds like a great way for swabbies to get in shape and destroy the enemy at the same time!
P.S. Linking to PDFs in article summaries makes baby Mozilla cry.
Because I have. Five of them. They're all holes in the wall, at least thirty minutes away and you can walk around for half an hour before they'll even acknowledge your presence. Then they charge 10% more than Apple does on their web site.
Amen. What's more, the Apple Resellers I've been to are almost invariably tucked into nondescript storefronts in nondescript commercial developments. They are, in a word, boring places.
I go to the Apple Store and it's fun. It's well-lit and aesthetically pleasing, the products are all out in the open just begging to be played with, and the staff are almost frighteningly professional and courteous. No cheap brown carpet, no bare metal racks, no random stacks of crap lying around, no buzzing industrial-grade fluorescent lights, no hand-written sale signs on orange starburst paper cut-outs.
I walk into an Apple store and it feels like a candy store for big kids. It's a fun experience. I walk into the typical Apple reseller and it's nothing special.
I don't give two farts about the "scoop". I am interested in reading the comments here on Slashdot, as they're a fun mix of intelligent geekiness, mind-boggling stupidity, and interesting opinion. You don't get that with CNN.
Slashdot not having a pre-launch story up is like throwing a New Years' party at 12:15 AM on the first of January. Where's the fun in getting things underway after it's all done?
Anybody with more details on this? Is this an Issue Of Significance, or is it no big deal?
Note to editors: It's not like you didn't have advance notice of this. It's not like this isn't a huge story. SpacesShipOne successfully lifted off over an hour before this previewed on the front page. Step lively!
A fair enough point. I made a bit of a stretch to go for the joke.
That being said, by the grandparent post's logic, Joe Average shouldn't care about his local energy costs and more than his nation's energy costs--his sole concern should be his own power costs. The grandparent would have you believe that a nation can function effectively as little more than a sea of individuals, all acting in their own best interests.
This is supremely naive, in that it assumes that what's best for the individual will scale gracefully into what's best for the nation. It wouldn't work for national defense, it wouldn't work for a national freeway system, and it wouldn't work for energy distribution.
Without national coordination, you've got huge swaths of the United States quite literally in the dark. Rural communities couldn't possibly hope to power their own communities by modern standards without significant federal aid, and there really isn't sufficient reason for Joe Stockbroker to care about whether or not Haystack, Nebraska has working streetlamps. Is your solution to just tell' em, "well, tough titty. You should live in the city, instead!"? Without federal oversight, what incentive would there be for Colorado not to simply dam up all the rivers running down from the Rockies, generate shitloads of power, bottle the water, and sell both electricty and water at exorbitant prices to Arizona and New Mexico?
Hell, while we're at it, why bother thinking of anything at a federal level--we're all intelligent adults, right? We know what's best for ourselves, and we're good at looking out for number one, right?
The central government = Borg analogy doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Do you really think that Paul Wellstone, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Hillary Clinton, Orrin Hatch, Jesse Helms, Nancy Pelosi, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Ted Kennedy, and Dick Cheney are all indistinguishable, single-minded drones who march in lock-step and speak with one voice?
Do you sincerely believe that a specialized, hierarchical government is inferior for a group of self-serving individuals? That centralized government is symptomatic of the devolution of humankind?
Section 1. SHORT TITLE
This Act may be cited as the "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act of 2004."
Child Exploitation? Child Exploitation? This has about as much to do with child exploitation as it does with farming subsidies or strategic national defense. The only reason this has "Child Exploitation" in the title is so that Hatch et al. can demonize anybody who opposes this as "having voted against protecting children from exploitation".
This is not about protecting America's children against exploitation; this is about protecting the revenue stream of a powerful business lobby.
Senator, you're a schmuck and a tool. The afterlife, if it exists, will most likely be a very unpleasant place for you.
Nobody except liberals consider 'the annual energy costs of the USA' [...] Treating the entire country as one entity is the first step on a long, dark road.
Three cheers for liberals and a centralized federal government, then! Without them, the city streets wouldn't have lamps--let alone the power to run 'em--and we'd all be walking down long, dark...
Urgh, this is what I get for posting before coffee. I had been relying on the/. blurb, since I couldn't reach Symantec (Akamai, perhaps?) Turns out the blurb wasn't entirely accurate, anyhow. From Symantec:
The worm spreads as a.SIS file, which is automatically installed into the "APPS" directory when the receiver accepts the transmission. Upon execution, it will display a message then copy itself to a directory that is not visible by default. The worm runs from this directory whenever the phone is rebooted, so it continues to work even if the files are deleted from the APPS directory.
...so you're right--this is a classic trojan horse. As for the definition of 'worm', I prefer the Jargon File's version (if nothing else, it's most likely the oldest contextually-appropriate definition:)
"[a worm is] A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes."
...so according to TJF, it's not sufficient that it transmits itself--it must also reporoduce itself, which implies that the worm must be an autonomous program.
The UK and most other countries switched to tungsten after the first gulf war.
...yes, but if I were to stand up at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs and say "Screw U, Let's shoot W instead!" I'd be clapped in irons and not-quite-tortured 'till the cows came home.
I'd respectfully point out that pressure response varies wildly between individuals, whether it relates to firing a gun, driving a car, or participating in a spelling bee. Some people excel under pressure; others crack.
Please don't take this as me second guessing you--this is a genuine request: I'm interested in looking at the results of that Front Sight study--I'm particularly curious about the composition of the test and control groups. Can you point me in the right direction? (When I was younger, I'd lose my nerve quite easily--suced at sports, couldn't take pressure, etc...but at some point late in high school, I took a 180 degree turn began to excel in high-pressure situations...I've always wondered about how this happens, and this topic is something of personal interest to me.)
It's really not up to you. If someone makes a bad decision they need to suffer the consequences (ie. shooting and hitting a bystander). Carrying a firearm is a decision not to be taken lightly. In the end, it should be up to the individual to judge whether or not they are capable.
I'd agree with you entirely, but for one thing: if somebody makes a bad decision, they're not the only one who suffers the consequences. In fact, the poor schmoe facing the involuntary manslaughter charge gets the better end of the deal. Whether your daughter gets killed by a mugger with an illegal handgun or a well-meaning citizen who missed their intended target by half an inch, dead is dead, and she's not coming home.
I don't know how I'll react if I ever end up in a situation where deadly force is needed. I hope it never happens. But given the choice between submitting to a thug who will just move on and kill someone else and either stopping him for good or getting him into custody, I will choose the latter every time.
I admire your candor, and I, too, hope you're never thrust into that position. I only fear that there are far more possible outcomes than the two you describe, and that the majority of them are worse overall than losing one's wallet or car...
Under your logic, any sort of tool that has the capacity to be mishandled or accidently used incorrectly by people should be banned? Yeah, that's a great piece of logic there. Under your rule we'd have to ban pretty much everything in existance.
...so that's the game--everything or nothing, no middle ground? Under your logic, it's perfectly fine for a person to go traipsing through a shopping mall with a vat of nitroglycerine. After all, since virtually anything can kill someone, why should we bother banning anything at all?
Also, as a side comment, if you're properly trained in handling a firearm, you'd know when it's appropriate to draw your weapon. If there's a crowd present/blocking your shot, you are probably not going to draw your weapon. Or if you do have it drawn, it's pointed away from any targets.
I know Cooper's rules (just because I don't like the idea of guns in public places doesn't mean I'm anti-gun, you know.) I also know people. Most people, when they perceive that their life is at risk, will throw rules straight out the window for the sake of self-preservation. When people panic, they stop thinking in a rational manner. You can kill a person from many yards away in under a second with a handgun, simply by pointing the gun and pulling the trigger. If you're panicked or in 'fight or flight' mode, odds are your aim will be nowhere near as good as it normally is. (Again, I know there are exceptional individuals who can handle the pressure, but they certainly do not represent the majority of Americans.)
So you think we should ban knives as well? Spears?
It may surprise you to learn that I'm no big fan of knives and spears in public places, either.
That aside, though--if you are genuinely incapable of seeing the difference between the risk posed by a person wielding a knife and a person wielding a handgun, why not simply arm yourself with a knife?
The Second Amendment is an essential piece of the Bill of Rights, and I'm upset with a number of gun laws. That said, I do not believe that the Second Amendment is a carte blanche for guns wherever and whenever. I firmly believe that there's a damn good reason they threw that "well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state" bit in there.
If I'm a crack-shot patriotic American, I'm not going to spew bullets through a crowd. I'm going to follow Cooper's laws of firearms handling and be sure of my target and what's behind it before I pull the trigger. If there's a mother of septuplets behind the gunman / thug attacking me, I'd come up with a different plan.
...if only we could trust that all persons carrying concealed firearms have the capacity to display such grace under fire as you. Human beings are flawed creatures and prone to error--especially so in high-stress situations. Rigorous training can help mitigate this, but even professionals--police officers, soldiers, and the like--make mistakes. I honestly don't trust the majority of Americans to be able to handle that sort of pressure. The last thing I want in the hands of a panicked civilian is a weapon specifically designed to kill other people.
Galileo had to build his own telescope, today, you can just go buy one and start using it immediately and actually find out stuff. No knowledge of optics required.
...yes, but 99.999% of all home telescope users aren't 'discovering' anything. A consumer-grade telescope allows you to observe and learn about known science--virtually anything you can observe through that has already been observed and meticulously documented.
I'd wager most doctors and MRI operators have a fairly good understanding of how an MRI works. True, they couldn't invent such a machine, but understanding what's going on isn't all that challenging, especially for somebody who's been through med school and trained on how to interpret the results of an MRI scan.
Basically, every scientific method starts with the method-developer and develops into a state where the user is not necessarily in the same field as the developer. It's becomes a black-box, giving the results the user wants, but without the user needing to know exactly how the thing works.
...and we may eventually have black-box, Johnny-Biochemist Southern Blot kits. And people will use these kits, by in large, to repeat experiments that have already been done and learn how to get to the cutting edge stuff. Very few people discover anything in high school science class--but that high school science class is an essential step if you want to become a biologist someday.
I'm not saying that today's biotech won't ever be distilled into a breathlyzer-style device. I am saying that, as far as scientific research goes, such devices rarely serve to advance science, as by the time they're cheap and easy enough for the masses to use, their research potential is all but exhausted. (Please note that I'm carefully qualifying this--I do understand that momentous discoveries are sometimes made through a combination of happenstance, serendipity, genius, and a Bic lighter...)
Baltimore already has a shitload of police, and they're more visible here than you'd think. That said, poverty is pretty rampant here, too, so it doesn't matter how many cops you throw at this problem--there's still gonna be no shortage of people with absolutely nothing to lose. A properly run camera system could probably do a fair amount of good.
I don't trust anybody wielding a handgun in a setting like Downtown Baltimore or Inner Harbor. I don't care whether or not you're a police officer, thug, or crack-shot patriotic American--one more handgun in a bad situation means one more handgun spitting bullets through a crowd.
Trade your handgun in for a bit of street sense--it's a lot less likely to get you or bystanders killed in an urban center...
...but those areas are still well away from the ports and shipping areas, which are further south.
I used to be suspicious of this sort of thing, but I must admit that downtown Baltimore could really use it, as could a few other areas in the city. Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not the implementation is successful--for it to work, they'll need to integrate tightly with the police and actually respond to things happening on-camera...the cameras alone likely won't provide much deterrant.
If biotech becomes really easy for consumers to use/create, similar to the manner of open source software, I think something like this could put a lot of power into the hands of the people.
Does OpenGL make understanding discrete mathematics any easier?
Biotech is hard. It isn't something you just pick up and do. Making it open source wouldn't make it any more accessible to non-biologists. Similarly, whether a program is open-source or not has virtually no bearing on how your 'average' user uses said program. John Q. Webmonkey isn't going to derive any value from the Apache source code unless he's already a competent programmer.
Open source will help make work easier for biologists, but "the people" won't have a damn bit of use for it...unless, of course, they go through years of study and training first--at which point, they're biologists.
Which is probably why something like this will never be allowed to happen now that people have seen how successful open source is.
Oh, for pete's sake--don't be such a fucking cynic. It's not a sign of some deep wisdom, it's a sign of laziness. You're basically declaring that you're not about to lift a finger in trying to make things better, since you think it'd be a futile effort, anyhow. Here's a clue: humanity has dealt with power-hungry tyrants and money-grubbing shysters since the dawn of civilization, and yet somehow we've managed to progress beyond pointy sticks and thatch huts. You're nutty if you think that the little guys and the altruists have it harder now than they did before.
There are people who make a difference on the world. These people generally do not kvetch about how it's not worth even trying, seeing as The Man will just put 'em down, anyhow.
I'd maintain that unless you are in the presence of other people you have every reasonable expectation of privacy.
Believe me, if you're walking around downtown Baltimore at night and you don't have a crowd of people around you, your personal privacy is going to be the absolute last thing on your mind.
Privacy in public in downtown Baltimore is not something you'd want to seek out. It's just not smart. Downtown Baltimore can be a very dangerous place, and you can go from 'very safe place' to 'very dangerous place' in less than a city block.
Baltimore's harbor is a major port for goods coming into the country so it does make a logical location to monitor.
...yes, but Baltimore's "Inner Harbor" is the city's tourist and commercial heart. You don't see any port activities on the Inner Harbor--you see the National Aquarium, overpriced shops, the USS Constellation, water taxis, and a brick pedestrian mall where special events and concerts occur on a regular basis. Inner Harbor is a safe haven in an otherwise gritty downtown environment.
I'm all for this, but I'd like to see it spread a bit further into downtown, too--Inner Harbor is great, but it's only a matter of blocks before you get into more dangerous parts of town. Better still, install this system in the blocks surrounding the Johns Hopkins Hospital (where my wife works.) The hospital itself is a roughly four block by four block island of security in what is probably the single scariest area of the city.
What, exactly, should I do before ordering a peanut-butter sandwich at the local deli?
Is it enough to look around the place and gauge the general cleanliness of the kitchen, or should I take the time to research the deli's record with the Health Department? Should I inquire as to what brand of peanut butter they use, then run a background check on that company for cases where they've released peanut butter with unsafe levels of alfatoxin? Is it safe to assume the bread is uncontaminated, and should I test to confirm that the plates are sufficiently rinsed and free from potentially toxic detergent residue? Or should I take a more proactive approach and have the contents of the actual sandwitch analyzed for alfatoxin (and any adulterants, while I'm at it)? Heaven help me if I order a glass of OJ to go with it.
You've given me a laundry list of bad things that happened because we either didn't know better or because somebody was trying to cheat people. You've confirmed what I already know: bad things happen in this world, and there exist people who are willing to do bad things to you in order to get your money. What you haven't done is told me how a person can go about protecting themselves from the above examples--do you know whether or not your orange juice is laced with adulterants? Do you know whether or not your car has a deadly design flaw? Do you know whether or not your peanut butter contains dangerous levels of alfatoxin? How do you know?
There must be trust at some level. Where you set that bar is up to you, but to live in this world one must put one's own life at the mercy of thousands of strangers--no matter how hard you try to maintain control.
No. Companies are in the business of selling their product. They don't really care if your laptop dies or not - so long as you don't blame them for it. And what average computer-ignorant person would? They're most likely going to blame the laptop manufacturer for a dead harddrive or whatnot - even if they have been running their laptop at high temperatures.
...so do you assume that your pen is going to fail and leak ink all over your letter, seeing as Bic doesn't really car about whether or not their pen works--so long as you don't blame them?
You think that the folks who made the alternator in your car just kinda half-assed it, in the hopes that you don't know enough about cars alternators to be able to trace the problem to their product?
I'm all for a healthy level of skepticism when it comes to evaluating new products, but to assume that any given company is looking to sell you snake oil is silly. Most companies do care about making a quality product. They also care about making money--the two aren't mutually excusive.
What's more, while many users wouldn't have a clue as to how to go about testing LapLogic's claims, it's freakin' trivial for a moderately tech-saavy laptop user to monitor the temperature of their laptop and compare the results between tabletop, bare lap, and laptop pad. We're not talkin' mass spectrometer analysis of the secret sauce, here.
Still your faith in commercial designers is worrisome. There are examples of poor design everywhere, and if you haven't noticed it in things you've bought and used, then you haven't been very observant.
There's a difference between being a blind fool and being willing to give a company the benefit of the doubt. When you buy a shower curtain, do you worry about whether or not it will disintegrate when exposed to water? When you buy coffee, do you wonder if the manufacturer mixed rabbit shit into the beans to increase volume? Do you have proof that dismisses these concerns?
What reason do I have to believe that this company has released a product that doesn't do the two things it explicitly states it can do, especially when the two claims are so easily tested? Should I really just assume that small businesses are out to fuck me over for my dollar, until proven otherwise?
Slashdot Mirror
Forget the railguns--I wanna hear more about these Dance Dance Xtreme frigates--sounds like a great way for swabbies to get in shape and destroy the enemy at the same time!
P.S. Linking to PDFs in article summaries makes baby Mozilla cry.
Amen. What's more, the Apple Resellers I've been to are almost invariably tucked into nondescript storefronts in nondescript commercial developments. They are, in a word, boring places.
I go to the Apple Store and it's fun. It's well-lit and aesthetically pleasing, the products are all out in the open just begging to be played with, and the staff are almost frighteningly professional and courteous. No cheap brown carpet, no bare metal racks, no random stacks of crap lying around, no buzzing industrial-grade fluorescent lights, no hand-written sale signs on orange starburst paper cut-outs.
I walk into an Apple store and it feels like a candy store for big kids. It's a fun experience. I walk into the typical Apple reseller and it's nothing special.
Which store would you rather frequent?
Slashdot not having a pre-launch story up is like throwing a New Years' party at 12:15 AM on the first of January. Where's the fun in getting things underway after it's all done?
Anybody with more details on this? Is this an Issue Of Significance, or is it no big deal?
Note to editors: It's not like you didn't have advance notice of this. It's not like this isn't a huge story. SpacesShipOne successfully lifted off over an hour before this previewed on the front page. Step lively!
That being said, by the grandparent post's logic, Joe Average shouldn't care about his local energy costs and more than his nation's energy costs--his sole concern should be his own power costs. The grandparent would have you believe that a nation can function effectively as little more than a sea of individuals, all acting in their own best interests.
This is supremely naive, in that it assumes that what's best for the individual will scale gracefully into what's best for the nation. It wouldn't work for national defense, it wouldn't work for a national freeway system, and it wouldn't work for energy distribution.
Without national coordination, you've got huge swaths of the United States quite literally in the dark. Rural communities couldn't possibly hope to power their own communities by modern standards without significant federal aid, and there really isn't sufficient reason for Joe Stockbroker to care about whether or not Haystack, Nebraska has working streetlamps. Is your solution to just tell' em, "well, tough titty. You should live in the city, instead!"? Without federal oversight, what incentive would there be for Colorado not to simply dam up all the rivers running down from the Rockies, generate shitloads of power, bottle the water, and sell both electricty and water at exorbitant prices to Arizona and New Mexico?
Hell, while we're at it, why bother thinking of anything at a federal level--we're all intelligent adults, right? We know what's best for ourselves, and we're good at looking out for number one, right?
The central government = Borg analogy doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Do you really think that Paul Wellstone, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Hillary Clinton, Orrin Hatch, Jesse Helms, Nancy Pelosi, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Ted Kennedy, and Dick Cheney are all indistinguishable, single-minded drones who march in lock-step and speak with one voice?
Do you sincerely believe that a specialized, hierarchical government is inferior for a group of self-serving individuals? That centralized government is symptomatic of the devolution of humankind?
Child Exploitation? Child Exploitation? This has about as much to do with child exploitation as it does with farming subsidies or strategic national defense. The only reason this has "Child Exploitation" in the title is so that Hatch et al. can demonize anybody who opposes this as "having voted against protecting children from exploitation".
This is not about protecting America's children against exploitation; this is about protecting the revenue stream of a powerful business lobby.
Senator, you're a schmuck and a tool. The afterlife, if it exists, will most likely be a very unpleasant place for you.
Three cheers for liberals and a centralized federal government, then! Without them, the city streets wouldn't have lamps--let alone the power to run 'em--and we'd all be walking down long, dark...
Um...
Quick, close port 80!
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My god! What have I done?
The worm spreads as a .SIS file, which is automatically installed into the "APPS" directory when the receiver accepts the transmission. Upon execution, it will display a message then copy itself to a directory that is not visible by default. The worm runs from this directory whenever the phone is rebooted, so it continues to work even if the files are deleted from the APPS directory.
"[a worm is] A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes."
Sure, the difference isn't that big a deal, but to most people, there isn't any real difference between Linux and Unix...
In the end, it should be up to the individual to judge whether or not they are capable.
It bears mentioning that people tend to overestimate their own capabilities. As an example, 75% of American drivers think that their driving skills are better than average.
Please don't take this as me second guessing you--this is a genuine request: I'm interested in looking at the results of that Front Sight study--I'm particularly curious about the composition of the test and control groups. Can you point me in the right direction? (When I was younger, I'd lose my nerve quite easily--suced at sports, couldn't take pressure, etc...but at some point late in high school, I took a 180 degree turn began to excel in high-pressure situations...I've always wondered about how this happens, and this topic is something of personal interest to me.)
I'd agree with you entirely, but for one thing: if somebody makes a bad decision, they're not the only one who suffers the consequences. In fact, the poor schmoe facing the involuntary manslaughter charge gets the better end of the deal. Whether your daughter gets killed by a mugger with an illegal handgun or a well-meaning citizen who missed their intended target by half an inch, dead is dead, and she's not coming home.
I don't know how I'll react if I ever end up in a situation where deadly force is needed. I hope it never happens. But given the choice between submitting to a thug who will just move on and kill someone else and either stopping him for good or getting him into custody, I will choose the latter every time.
I admire your candor, and I, too, hope you're never thrust into that position. I only fear that there are far more possible outcomes than the two you describe, and that the majority of them are worse overall than losing one's wallet or car...
Also, as a side comment, if you're properly trained in handling a firearm, you'd know when it's appropriate to draw your weapon. If there's a crowd present/blocking your shot, you are probably not going to draw your weapon. Or if you do have it drawn, it's pointed away from any targets.
I know Cooper's rules (just because I don't like the idea of guns in public places doesn't mean I'm anti-gun, you know.) I also know people. Most people, when they perceive that their life is at risk, will throw rules straight out the window for the sake of self-preservation. When people panic, they stop thinking in a rational manner. You can kill a person from many yards away in under a second with a handgun, simply by pointing the gun and pulling the trigger. If you're panicked or in 'fight or flight' mode, odds are your aim will be nowhere near as good as it normally is. (Again, I know there are exceptional individuals who can handle the pressure, but they certainly do not represent the majority of Americans.)
So you think we should ban knives as well? Spears?
It may surprise you to learn that I'm no big fan of knives and spears in public places, either.
That aside, though--if you are genuinely incapable of seeing the difference between the risk posed by a person wielding a knife and a person wielding a handgun, why not simply arm yourself with a knife?
The Second Amendment is an essential piece of the Bill of Rights, and I'm upset with a number of gun laws. That said, I do not believe that the Second Amendment is a carte blanche for guns wherever and whenever. I firmly believe that there's a damn good reason they threw that "well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state" bit in there.
I'd wager most doctors and MRI operators have a fairly good understanding of how an MRI works. True, they couldn't invent such a machine, but understanding what's going on isn't all that challenging, especially for somebody who's been through med school and trained on how to interpret the results of an MRI scan.
Basically, every scientific method starts with the method-developer and develops into a state where the user is not necessarily in the same field as the developer. It's becomes a black-box, giving the results the user wants, but without the user needing to know exactly how the thing works.
I'm not saying that today's biotech won't ever be distilled into a breathlyzer-style device. I am saying that, as far as scientific research goes, such devices rarely serve to advance science, as by the time they're cheap and easy enough for the masses to use, their research potential is all but exhausted. (Please note that I'm carefully qualifying this--I do understand that momentous discoveries are sometimes made through a combination of happenstance, serendipity, genius, and a Bic lighter...)
I don't trust anybody wielding a handgun in a setting like Downtown Baltimore or Inner Harbor. I don't care whether or not you're a police officer, thug, or crack-shot patriotic American--one more handgun in a bad situation means one more handgun spitting bullets through a crowd.
Trade your handgun in for a bit of street sense--it's a lot less likely to get you or bystanders killed in an urban center...
I used to be suspicious of this sort of thing, but I must admit that downtown Baltimore could really use it, as could a few other areas in the city. Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not the implementation is successful--for it to work, they'll need to integrate tightly with the police and actually respond to things happening on-camera...the cameras alone likely won't provide much deterrant.
Does OpenGL make understanding discrete mathematics any easier?
Biotech is hard. It isn't something you just pick up and do. Making it open source wouldn't make it any more accessible to non-biologists. Similarly, whether a program is open-source or not has virtually no bearing on how your 'average' user uses said program. John Q. Webmonkey isn't going to derive any value from the Apache source code unless he's already a competent programmer.
Open source will help make work easier for biologists, but "the people" won't have a damn bit of use for it...unless, of course, they go through years of study and training first--at which point, they're biologists.
Which is probably why something like this will never be allowed to happen now that people have seen how successful open source is.
Oh, for pete's sake--don't be such a fucking cynic. It's not a sign of some deep wisdom, it's a sign of laziness. You're basically declaring that you're not about to lift a finger in trying to make things better, since you think it'd be a futile effort, anyhow. Here's a clue: humanity has dealt with power-hungry tyrants and money-grubbing shysters since the dawn of civilization, and yet somehow we've managed to progress beyond pointy sticks and thatch huts. You're nutty if you think that the little guys and the altruists have it harder now than they did before.
There are people who make a difference on the world. These people generally do not kvetch about how it's not worth even trying, seeing as The Man will just put 'em down, anyhow.
Believe me, if you're walking around downtown Baltimore at night and you don't have a crowd of people around you, your personal privacy is going to be the absolute last thing on your mind.
In downtown Baltimore in 2002, there were:
- 2,275 reported cases of larceny
- 243 reported cases of robbery
- 213 reported cases of aggravated assault
- 136 stolen automobiles reported
- 5 reported cases of rape
- 5 reported murders
sourcePrivacy in public in downtown Baltimore is not something you'd want to seek out. It's just not smart. Downtown Baltimore can be a very dangerous place, and you can go from 'very safe place' to 'very dangerous place' in less than a city block.
I'm all for this, but I'd like to see it spread a bit further into downtown, too--Inner Harbor is great, but it's only a matter of blocks before you get into more dangerous parts of town. Better still, install this system in the blocks surrounding the Johns Hopkins Hospital (where my wife works.) The hospital itself is a roughly four block by four block island of security in what is probably the single scariest area of the city.
What, exactly, should I do before ordering a peanut-butter sandwich at the local deli?
Is it enough to look around the place and gauge the general cleanliness of the kitchen, or should I take the time to research the deli's record with the Health Department? Should I inquire as to what brand of peanut butter they use, then run a background check on that company for cases where they've released peanut butter with unsafe levels of alfatoxin? Is it safe to assume the bread is uncontaminated, and should I test to confirm that the plates are sufficiently rinsed and free from potentially toxic detergent residue? Or should I take a more proactive approach and have the contents of the actual sandwitch analyzed for alfatoxin (and any adulterants, while I'm at it)? Heaven help me if I order a glass of OJ to go with it.
You've given me a laundry list of bad things that happened because we either didn't know better or because somebody was trying to cheat people. You've confirmed what I already know: bad things happen in this world, and there exist people who are willing to do bad things to you in order to get your money. What you haven't done is told me how a person can go about protecting themselves from the above examples--do you know whether or not your orange juice is laced with adulterants? Do you know whether or not your car has a deadly design flaw? Do you know whether or not your peanut butter contains dangerous levels of alfatoxin? How do you know?
There must be trust at some level. Where you set that bar is up to you, but to live in this world one must put one's own life at the mercy of thousands of strangers--no matter how hard you try to maintain control.
You think that the folks who made the alternator in your car just kinda half-assed it, in the hopes that you don't know enough about cars alternators to be able to trace the problem to their product?
I'm all for a healthy level of skepticism when it comes to evaluating new products, but to assume that any given company is looking to sell you snake oil is silly. Most companies do care about making a quality product. They also care about making money--the two aren't mutually excusive.
What's more, while many users wouldn't have a clue as to how to go about testing LapLogic's claims, it's freakin' trivial for a moderately tech-saavy laptop user to monitor the temperature of their laptop and compare the results between tabletop, bare lap, and laptop pad. We're not talkin' mass spectrometer analysis of the secret sauce, here.
Still your faith in commercial designers is worrisome. There are examples of poor design everywhere, and if you haven't noticed it in things you've bought and used, then you haven't been very observant.
There's a difference between being a blind fool and being willing to give a company the benefit of the doubt. When you buy a shower curtain, do you worry about whether or not it will disintegrate when exposed to water? When you buy coffee, do you wonder if the manufacturer mixed rabbit shit into the beans to increase volume? Do you have proof that dismisses these concerns?
What reason do I have to believe that this company has released a product that doesn't do the two things it explicitly states it can do, especially when the two claims are so easily tested? Should I really just assume that small businesses are out to fuck me over for my dollar, until proven otherwise?