You can be sure that there are at least as many bitcoin proponents who would like a government to simply stay out of the whole affair and let them engage in vigilantism as there are those who would like a government to provide a remedy.
To be sure. The value of this social experiment is not so much in pointing out the hypocrisy of the anarcho-libertarians, or convincing them they're wrong, but in showing everyone else what an anarchist "utopia" actually looks like in practice.
It's that cops always want to cover their asses. But sometimes the suspect *does* shoot first. In this case, there are dozens of eyewitnesses who should be able to straighten out the truth.
Sorry, you were saying something? Europe is absolutely racist, it's just a bit less visible because the minority population is smaller, less visible, and doesn't try to hold power. Also, the historical repercussions of your past racism are less visible because you guys mostly kept your slaves in your colonies rather than in your backyard: it's a lot easier to pretend that Nigeria isn't your problem any more than to abandon Birmingham.
Great analysis. Another statistic I'd like to see is a comparison of number of shootings due to police error: cop misses and hits bystander, cop mistakes fake gun for a real one, cop shoots self in foot.
One could argue that cops shooting bad guys and getting shot in turn is part of the ugly job of law enforcement: the bigger tragedy is when innocents get killed.
"Sir, I don't have a gun. Would you please don't shoot at me until my associates arrive?"
Yes, that's pretty much how it works. As others have noted, it works because guns are the exception rather than the rule. But another advantage: when a gun is in the picture, the beat cops back off and call the professional shooting-people cops, who're actually trained in the art of shooting people, as opposed to the American beat cops who will shoot kids with water pistols, black men reaching for their wallets, miss and shoot bystanders, shoot themselves in the foot, etc.
Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things, which come to nothing as they keeping on doing the same stuff they were doing in the 1980s. As opposed to the U.S. manned space program, which consists of making plans to get back to the stuff they were doing in the 1980s, which come to nothing.
The headline misquotes Bloomberg. He didn't say you *can't* teach a coal miner to code, he said you won't. And he's right. While it's certainly *possible* for some older adults to radically change their career paths into tech jobs, the majority of us lack the motivation and mental flexibility, and society doesn't want to spend the money to help us make the switch. It's just not going to happen. Bloomberg's overall point is dead on: we need to come up with ways to allow people to gently move into new careers that make the most of their talents, rather than just firing them, throwing a Javascript for Dummies book at them, and expecting them to become the next Zuckerberg.
That said, Bloomberg's got a pretty 19th century view of what coal mining is. Since it's all done with heavy machinery and robots these days, it's a pretty technically demanding job.
"Oh look," I said to myself, "an article on sexist and homophobic game culture. On Slashdot. I bet 90% of the comments are going to be 'we like our disgusting frat house the way it is' by sociopathic morons, and the other 10% will be self-professed 'nice guys' explaining to women how they're doing feminism wrong."
Agree. The ratio of people talking about Bitcoin to people who know *anything* about how it works is astounding.
More informed slashdotters explained that those "expired" blocks have been purged from most miners.
When I first read the details of the Bitcoin system, this is the point at which I got a gigantic sinking feeling in my chest. The documentation said, "Look, we keep a distributed record of all bitcoin transactions!", and I said, "Well that does make it vulnerable to law enforcement, but that means it can't be stolen which is awesome." And then it said, "And then after a while we throw those records out." "...so all I've got to do is conceal my theft until the records get purged?" "Pretty much!" "..."
Turns out those evil corporate bankers with their evil statist money turn out to have some useful skills. Like, they know how to prevent the theft of a good chunk of all the money in their world. Apparently it involves boring stuff like spreadsheets and regulations and corporate hierarchy rather than algorithms, so that's kind of a drag, but so it goes.
yeah those idiots at NASA that landed a buggy-sized nuclear powered rover on mars. they have a pretty good track record. i tend to put more credence in what NASA has to say than you. nice analogy though.
You're missing the point. NASA is not one thing. The NASA scientists and genius engineers who actually build all the cool stuff say it'll cost $2 billion. Administrator Bolden, the political appointee who's in charge of figuring out how to pay for it all, says he doesn't want to budget more than $1 billion. I guarantee you he has no good ideas about how to make the mission fit into a $1b budget: he himself says "that may or may not be possible."
Just to emphasize your point: the judge in this case is not trying to let the accused off the hook: he/she is pointing out a hole in Massachusetts law.
I'm totally not a lawyer, but I live in Massachusetts and spent some time reading the law today so that makes me an expert. As far as I can tell, upskirt doesn't fall within any of the following Mass sexual crimes:
Rape: Rape in Mass requires penetration. Indecent assault and battery: Requires physical contact. Sexual harassment: is specific to the workplace. Peeping tom: requires that the victim be partly undressed. Criminal harassment: must be repeated on three occasions. Unnatural and lascivious acts: applies to sexual acts in public.
It really does seem to me that as far as criminal law goes, upskirting really does fall between the cracks of Massachusetts law.
I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, but I'd have a lot of trouble getting behind the idea of putting a 20-year flagship mission project on a rocket that exists only on Youtube. But if NASA and congress screw around much longer, SpaceX will be there when they're needed. Or maybe there'll be a smoking crater where their launch site used to be, who knows.
As for ESA, they already had a joint mission agreement with us, where they'd launch a Jupiter system spacecraft focused on Ganymede and we'd launch a Europa orbiter, to carry out joint observations as a team. We fell down on our end of the deal, so they're going on to Jupiter without us, and they are *not* in the mood to get screwed again.
What NASA Headquarters is proposing is not a mission, it's a recipe for failure. They want to spend no more than $1 billion on a mission we planetary scientists have told them costs $2 billion.
Suppose you're planning a trip for two to New Zealand. You've got the budget all worked out: airfare costs about half of the total, even during the off-season, and you're skimping on hotels and meals and skipping the helicopter tour to save money. Then your spouse comes along and says you can only spend half as much. You can't make the plane tickets any cheaper, so unless you consider sleeping in the Auckland airport a vacation, she's saying you're not going to New Zealand at all.
It costs a billion dollars to send a bucket of bricks to Europa. Doing science once you get there is extra.
Oh no, I mean 20% *more*. And I'd tax coal and gas too. Actually I want to do a 1% tax increase per year up to 100%, but nobody takes me seriously when I say that.
He said that industry *was* unaccountable in the '70s, because there were no environmental laws to hold them to account. So we created some, and an agency called the EPA to administer them.
You're absolutely right, industry is accountable to the law. So we'd better keep the law around!
Great idea, but you can't get it started without a big pile of cash. Nobody will be willing to pay full price for college and then have to pay the taxes too, so you're going to have to subsidize college until you've got enough tax-paying graduates. Social Security had the same startup problem, but that was back when the government was flush with cash.
There's an old Tom Stoppard play called Albert's Bridge, in which a couple of guys constantly work to repaint a bridge. It takes four years to paint it, and the paint lasts four years, so all is well. But then they come out with a new 8-year paint, so the managers fire one of the painters and let the other guy do it alone on an 8-year cycle. After 4 years, the bridge is only half painted, and it eventually collapses.
Good for you. How many of your classmates drove BMWs to school? Sorry I'm not trying to be catty, but that much attention to AP only happens at well-funded schools with prosperous, college-focused students. Not so much rich, just "adequate", which is rare in rural America.
I went to a large, fairly rural high school in a not-particularly-poor area. We had AP U.S. history and AP English. That's it.
Many of you (especially those of you who read and write the New York Times) come from adequately-funded suburban schools, and while you've watched The Wire and think you know what urban schools are like, you have no idea how weak the educational programs at rural high schools are.
Possibly a small piece of sensor code in a major automaker's engine computers. These are very conservatively built -- probably there are large chunks of code that haven't changed since engine computers appeared in 1980 or so. They're very common -- probably hundreds of millions have been built. And they run the same code constantly over and over, every moment the car is running.
The main reason I might be wrong is that the clock speeds for these engine computers are presumably pretty slow.
Slashdot Mirror
To be sure. The value of this social experiment is not so much in pointing out the hypocrisy of the anarcho-libertarians, or convincing them they're wrong, but in showing everyone else what an anarchist "utopia" actually looks like in practice.
It's that cops always want to cover their asses. But sometimes the suspect *does* shoot first. In this case, there are dozens of eyewitnesses who should be able to straighten out the truth.
HA HA HAHAHAHAHAA!
http://www.gmu.edu/programs/ic...
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Sorry, you were saying something? Europe is absolutely racist, it's just a bit less visible because the minority population is smaller, less visible, and doesn't try to hold power. Also, the historical repercussions of your past racism are less visible because you guys mostly kept your slaves in your colonies rather than in your backyard: it's a lot easier to pretend that Nigeria isn't your problem any more than to abandon Birmingham.
Great analysis. Another statistic I'd like to see is a comparison of number of shootings due to police error: cop misses and hits bystander, cop mistakes fake gun for a real one, cop shoots self in foot.
One could argue that cops shooting bad guys and getting shot in turn is part of the ugly job of law enforcement: the bigger tragedy is when innocents get killed.
Yes, that's pretty much how it works. As others have noted, it works because guns are the exception rather than the rule. But another advantage: when a gun is in the picture, the beat cops back off and call the professional shooting-people cops, who're actually trained in the art of shooting people, as opposed to the American beat cops who will shoot kids with water pistols, black men reaching for their wallets, miss and shoot bystanders, shoot themselves in the foot, etc.
Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things, which come to nothing as they keeping on doing the same stuff they were doing in the 1980s. As opposed to the U.S. manned space program, which consists of making plans to get back to the stuff they were doing in the 1980s, which come to nothing.
(Unmanned is another story.)
The headline misquotes Bloomberg. He didn't say you *can't* teach a coal miner to code, he said you won't. And he's right. While it's certainly *possible* for some older adults to radically change their career paths into tech jobs, the majority of us lack the motivation and mental flexibility, and society doesn't want to spend the money to help us make the switch. It's just not going to happen. Bloomberg's overall point is dead on: we need to come up with ways to allow people to gently move into new careers that make the most of their talents, rather than just firing them, throwing a Javascript for Dummies book at them, and expecting them to become the next Zuckerberg.
That said, Bloomberg's got a pretty 19th century view of what coal mining is. Since it's all done with heavy machinery and robots these days, it's a pretty technically demanding job.
Ask not, "why are the lion's share of visa quotas going to offshore companies?" Ask, "why are there visa quotas?"
America's rise to become a great nation was driven by unlimited immigration. Let everybody in. Everybody.
"Oh look," I said to myself, "an article on sexist and homophobic game culture. On Slashdot. I bet 90% of the comments are going to be 'we like our disgusting frat house the way it is' by sociopathic morons, and the other 10% will be self-professed 'nice guys' explaining to women how they're doing feminism wrong."
But I was wrong. It's 100% sociopathic morons.
Agree. The ratio of people talking about Bitcoin to people who know *anything* about how it works is astounding.
When I first read the details of the Bitcoin system, this is the point at which I got a gigantic sinking feeling in my chest.
The documentation said, "Look, we keep a distributed record of all bitcoin transactions!", and I said,
"Well that does make it vulnerable to law enforcement, but that means it can't be stolen which is awesome." And then it said,
"And then after a while we throw those records out."
"...so all I've got to do is conceal my theft until the records get purged?"
"Pretty much!"
"..."
Turns out those evil corporate bankers with their evil statist money turn out to have some useful skills. Like, they know how to prevent the theft of a good chunk of all the money in their world. Apparently it involves boring stuff like spreadsheets and regulations and corporate hierarchy rather than algorithms, so that's kind of a drag, but so it goes.
Disturbing the peace is a crime in Massachusetts, but it's a misdemeanor: the punishment is a small fine.
You're missing the point. NASA is not one thing. The NASA scientists and genius engineers who actually build all the cool stuff say it'll cost $2 billion. Administrator Bolden, the political appointee who's in charge of figuring out how to pay for it all, says he doesn't want to budget more than $1 billion. I guarantee you he has no good ideas about how to make the mission fit into a $1b budget: he himself says "that may or may not be possible."
http://www.spacenews.com/artic...
Just to emphasize your point: the judge in this case is not trying to let the accused off the hook: he/she is pointing out a hole in Massachusetts law.
I'm totally not a lawyer, but I live in Massachusetts and spent some time reading the law today so that makes me an expert. As far as I can tell, upskirt doesn't fall within any of the following Mass sexual crimes:
Rape: Rape in Mass requires penetration.
Indecent assault and battery: Requires physical contact.
Sexual harassment: is specific to the workplace.
Peeping tom: requires that the victim be partly undressed.
Criminal harassment: must be repeated on three occasions.
Unnatural and lascivious acts: applies to sexual acts in public.
It really does seem to me that as far as criminal law goes, upskirting really does fall between the cracks of Massachusetts law.
I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, but I'd have a lot of trouble getting behind the idea of putting a 20-year flagship mission project on a rocket that exists only on Youtube. But if NASA and congress screw around much longer, SpaceX will be there when they're needed. Or maybe there'll be a smoking crater where their launch site used to be, who knows.
As for ESA, they already had a joint mission agreement with us, where they'd launch a Jupiter system spacecraft focused on Ganymede and we'd launch a Europa orbiter, to carry out joint observations as a team. We fell down on our end of the deal, so they're going on to Jupiter without us, and they are *not* in the mood to get screwed again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
What NASA Headquarters is proposing is not a mission, it's a recipe for failure. They want to spend no more than $1 billion on a mission we planetary scientists have told them costs $2 billion.
Suppose you're planning a trip for two to New Zealand. You've got the budget all worked out: airfare costs about half of the total, even during the off-season, and you're skimping on hotels and meals and skipping the helicopter tour to save money. Then your spouse comes along and says you can only spend half as much. You can't make the plane tickets any cheaper, so unless you consider sleeping in the Auckland airport a vacation, she's saying you're not going to New Zealand at all.
It costs a billion dollars to send a bucket of bricks to Europa. Doing science once you get there is extra.
Cameras work on the same principles, and at the same wavelengths, as the human eye. Anything that disables a camera will blind a human.
Oh no, I mean 20% *more*. And I'd tax coal and gas too. Actually I want to do a 1% tax increase per year up to 100%, but nobody takes me seriously when I say that.
He said that industry *was* unaccountable in the '70s, because there were no environmental laws to hold them to account. So we created some, and an agency called the EPA to administer them.
You're absolutely right, industry is accountable to the law. So we'd better keep the law around!
I'm with the conservatives on this one: we can't use deficit spending for a major climate mitigation program like this, it has to be paid for.
With a 20% fossil fuel tax.
Oh wait, did I lose you guys there?
Great idea, but you can't get it started without a big pile of cash. Nobody will be willing to pay full price for college and then have to pay the taxes too, so you're going to have to subsidize college until you've got enough tax-paying graduates. Social Security had the same startup problem, but that was back when the government was flush with cash.
There's an old Tom Stoppard play called Albert's Bridge, in which a couple of guys constantly work to repaint a bridge. It takes four years to paint it, and the paint lasts four years, so all is well. But then they come out with a new 8-year paint, so the managers fire one of the painters and let the other guy do it alone on an 8-year cycle. After 4 years, the bridge is only half painted, and it eventually collapses.
"the TorMail e-mail server"
The server. Singular. Did TorMail's creators and users skip class the day they explained how Tor worked?
Good for you. How many of your classmates drove BMWs to school? Sorry I'm not trying to be catty, but that much attention to AP only happens at well-funded schools with prosperous, college-focused students. Not so much rich, just "adequate", which is rare in rural America.
I went to a large, fairly rural high school in a not-particularly-poor area. We had AP U.S. history and AP English. That's it.
Many of you (especially those of you who read and write the New York Times) come from adequately-funded suburban schools, and while you've watched The Wire and think you know what urban schools are like, you have no idea how weak the educational programs at rural high schools are.
Possibly a small piece of sensor code in a major automaker's engine computers. These are very conservatively built -- probably there are large chunks of code that haven't changed since engine computers appeared in 1980 or so. They're very common -- probably hundreds of millions have been built. And they run the same code constantly over and over, every moment the car is running.
The main reason I might be wrong is that the clock speeds for these engine computers are presumably pretty slow.