Of course it can! Why the resistance? Human-level AI will exist by the time young people reading this are dead. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future was, more or less, right.
"They're stalking this man and his family, tracking his movements and his financial workings. "
I have no problem with this if his movements and financial workings are public knowledge. If something is there for me to observe, I am allowed to observe it, and report my observations. That is what a free press is, and it doesn't just mean reporting on celebrities and politicians, it means reporting on anybody you want.
"They're calling him evil"
All human beings should be allowed to state their opinion on whoever they think is evil.
All human beings should be allowed to state their opinion on who they wish were dead. (coughcheneycough)
"They're calling him evil - the kind of evil they "stake [their] lives against". "
I find your analysis quite dishonest. The paragraph was about capitalism. He was an example of a person connected to it. He was one small part of the kind of evil they stake their lives against. Being willing to lay down your life to fight evil is one of the most sacred duties any human being can have. That you have a different definition of evil than other people is what makes you the same as all people: We all think different things are evil.
"They targeted him specifically, tracked down his home address, printed up flyers with his name and a bunch of other information about him, showed up at his house,"
And why would any of that be illegal or even immoral? How is this different from me printing up flyers telling my neighbors about a sex offender living near us? (No, we don't get notification otherwise.) The only difference is your subjective opinion about which people are evil.
"This isn't why we have a first amendment."
This is exactly why we have it.
"This isn't stating an unpopular opinion or speaking truth to power. "
1) You're disagreeing with the opinion yourself! It's definitely not popular. You're part of it not being popular.
2) Speaking truth? Sorry, beyond slander and impeding an investigation, there is no legal burden to tell the truth. And those only apply to facts, not opinions. Furthermore, even with facts, lying is legal and cops do it all the time, legally. Your rights have nothing to do with whether or not you speak the "truth". And there is no such thing as an absolute truth for that which is subjective. Total red herring for you to even use that word unless we were talking about factual statements. Jesus man. Why don't we just appoint a bureau to define how reality is, then tell everyone who disagrees they aren't allowed to speak? Reminds me of prosecuting holocaust deniers for not stating the same truth. (For bias purposes, I'm only alive because my grandmother lived in a chimney that the gestapo literally looked down, but didn't see her, but would still defend a holocaust deniers right to state whatever he believes. I would, however, possibly throw a bottle at him when nobody's looking, and possibly rightfully go to jail if caught.)
3) Also, they are speaking to power. Not that that affects whether you should be able to speak. If I want to find out where you live, go up to your front door, and hold up a sign telling your neighbors I think you're an asshole -- too fucking bad for you. Public space is for the public, not for you to lord over.
I loved the part where you mentioned they blocked his driveway. Did you forget they have private buses pick them up? So he doesn't take a vehicle out of his driveway. So he was never blocked. Whoever bothered to denote that they blocked his driveway is a drama-queen playing martyr for them.
"This is about terrorizing a family."
Ahhh, so the fact that he has a family should afford him extra protections. Your must be a breeder to think like that.
"They're hoping to terrorize him and other tech workers into quitting their jobs and staying home, hiding from the mobs of angry people threatening them and their families."
You made that up and don't know that. That's what you think they are hoping, but neither of us
But honestly... Any law that says me & my associates can't stand, on public property, in front of someone's house and tell them how we feel IS anti-free speech. Just as the attempts to criminalize Fred Phelps are. Freedom is meaningless with people we agree with. No protections are needed to utter something that offends no one. Freedom's only meaning is when we disagree with someone's expression of it. Otherwise, it's just a happy coincidence. But I digress.
Terrorize is subjective. Your post just terrorized me. I was scared for my life. You are very stern.
Stalk is pretty subjective, too... If you want to get legal pedantic and talk California legal statute, I'd accept that. Though I must warn you I'd almost assuredly have a huge problem with the statute and, despite being fairly liberal myself (Obama == too far to the right for me!), would probably blame it on liberal pussydom.
I'm not seeing how that's a point. If we import it, we don't have enough. That we mine our own may at least mean it's mined under more human working conditions (though sometimes I'm not so sure about that in America, where workers get the least sickdays and shitty benefits and somehow rail against the very concept of unions to protect their interests), but if we are importing it, our demand is indeed so great that it reaches wherever we buy it from. Is some of that from Congo? Hell if I actually know. Kinda doubt you do either.;)
First I've heard of that. I actually don't know what you're talking about now. Interesting.
" they will have to admit they know that the behavior they have publicly engages in is illegal"
Sorry, protest and assembly are protected by the 1st amendment. Any law that prevents this is de facto unconstitutional and would [hopefully] be SCOTUS'ed the fuck out of existence as soon as someone gets inconvenienced enough to actually go to SCOTUS over this.
How does that work? They force their employees to live near each other? Say I live 5 miles out from any other employee. How is me having a vehicle to myself saving in congestion? I get what you're saying, and see how it can be applicable some of the time, but the fact of the matter is, a private bus won't let anyone on 'til it gets to its first stop. You've already lost there, as a proper bus would pick up all the people needing a ride from point A to point B. Imagine if every company did this. You'd have 100 buses driving by your house every day, each to pick up 1 person. Yeah, they might have some people on them. But the obvious way to delimit bus routes for maximum efficiency is geographically, not by employer.
I used to ride a short bus to one school to get on a long bus to goto another. Maybe some gas was saved, but when half the bus ride was 2 kids on a short bus, it sure as hell didn't feel like it. ~10MPG on those things, and they're slow as fuck so people have to pass you all the time, meaning you're adding congestion. It definitely wasn't as efficient as the normal bus distribution of "this bus gets this neighborhood, that bus gets that other neighborhood". But since I went to school in another county.... My situation was actually somewhat similar to the Googlers here.
You were doing fine until you made up facts you can't possibly know about a group of people. Does this group have a record blocking new residential developments? I'm sure you could point out the evidence supporting your assertion to me, right?
So they're idiots for not wanting to live surrounded by skyscrapers. Ignoring the fact that you can't possibly know that these were the same people, and are just basically shaking your fist online at a feeling, why should I have to live in unending construction around me just to not have my rent go up?
Regular people should be looked down upon. Average intelligence is insultingly stupid, and 50 percent of people are even stupider than that. You don't get an education to become average, you get an education to become smarter than most people. (It doesn't work for everybody...)
It doesn't necessarily beat having those people all driving themselves. Buses take a lot more fuel. It's only when they run at a certain capacity that you have ROI. That's not a given when picking up individuals. A single bus also causes a lot more congestion than a car -- it pretty much makes the entire lane behind the bus untenable in areas with lots of red lights. Again, it's only net-positive, congestion-wise, for a specific number of people.
In case I'm unclear: I'd much rather be on a road with 1,000 people driving 1,000 cars, than 500 buses with 2 people in them. I used n=2 in this example, but I'm thinking even for n=6, it's a net loss. I don't actually know the value of n.
Regardless of how pro-technology I am, they have valid points about the Congo and rising rent caused by google's self-driving cars spreading their high-earning workers into lower-rent neighborhoods.
1) Of course a drive doesn't drop dead upon warranty expiration. I never said that and that's a strawman of a point, sorry.
2) No I won't ignore the flood. Cherry picking to remove data that supports my viewpoint isn't in my best interest;)
3) It's kind of subjective, but I don't consider it to be at all same as buying an in-store, extended warranty. Extended warranties only apply after manufacturer warranties expire. They also tend to cost way more than the value they provide. It may not be apples & oranges, but it's certainly red apples vs green apples. Not the same thing. You don't get ROI.
4) "If the drive survives the warranty period, odds are it will go a bit longer, by which point, you destroy any advantage you gained by a longer warranty." Absolutely false. A warranty's advantage doesn't disappear the day a warranty expires! Western Digital ran the numbers. They can afford to warrant their blacks for 5 years because they know they last, on average, long enough for it to be a solid business decision. They can not afford to warrant their greens for 5 years because they know they would lose money on it. You act as if the warranty determines when the drive will die and/or you kind of act like that's what I'm thinking. No. The warranty doesn't determine when a drive will die. The mean time of failure for that model of drive determines how long the warranty will be. They can afford longer warranties on better drives. The drives are inherently better. They last longer not because of the warranty -- which is an effect -- but because of their superior manufacturing -- which is the cause.
"by the time that drive does fail, out of warranty, you can buy newer, faster, bigger, for less." What's your point? The time it does fail out of warranty will be 2 years later on average. So the drive I get will be bigger and cheaper than if I'd gotten a replacement drive earlier.
I don't know why people resist realizing this so much. Companies don't just throw on warranties based on a whim. The warranty is a legal endorsement, backed by money, that the product will last a certain period of time. It doesn't materialize out of thin air; it is in effect [not the cause] of superior workmanship.
Now, for the sake of argument, let us pretend, for this paragraph, that a drive DOES fail the day its warranty dies. Considering that 5 years is 66% longer than 3 years, and 5-year drives tend to cost 50-60% more, it's even a better decision dollar-wise. When you bring in personal hassle, downtime, and your systems being stopped and data being inaccessible (for instance, if a system drive dies on one of my machines, there's about 10TB of data I can't get to until I reinstall windows on a new drive), and put a price on that, the gap widens even more.
You have thousands of servers in your house? Oh, you must mean your job. So it's not even your money. Anyway, I'm sure you bought a bunch of 3-year warranty drives and a bunch of 5-year warranty drives and compared their avg failure, right?
You seem to be angry that I have experiences you do not. There is no superstition, ignorance, or myopia here. Nor did you refute my refutations of your points. For example, your bullshit point that a replacement drive is refurbished. Every time I get a drive I record the manufacture date, serial #, etc. None are refurbished. It's funny how when I called you out on this, you simply made an appeal to the mysterious fact that you have 1000s of servers, and therefore somehow "know". It was a reverse ad hominem. Brilliantly fallacious.
I'm making no assumptions. I'm speaking from experience. I have more harddrives in my house than any human being I know, and always have. I know which purchases last because I keep track of purchase dates and prices and failure dates. I left the comment because of my experience, not because I wanted to burden you with untested assumptions.
Thanks for pretending to know why I posted my comment, though. (You don't.)
Also, regarding your lettered points:
A is irrelevant. This is an article about which drives don't fail. Other people not keeping drives around long enough to not fail doesn't mean they won't. You've basically broken the scope of this article just to quibble. B is an example of people throwing away their money. Again, not relevant in the scope of this article's topic of which harddrives last the longest. That someone wouldn't bother with a warranty return doesn't change which harddrive lasts the lonest. C) Shipping is usually $10. You've obviously never returned a harddrive. D) No, they are new drives with the manufacture date on them. E) No prices "crash through the floor". They go down very slowly. when they're not going up for 2 years after a flood, that is. You obviously don't have a record of your harddrive expenditures. F) It won't be 20TB drives in 5 years. YOu're really not paying attention to the growth pattern.
In short, and with all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
Most people don't run 20TB lans at home, so their sample sets are small. I have 15 harddrives 24/7 for well over a week. The 5 year ones last. The 3 year ones don't. It's pretty consistent. I deal with a failure almost every year due to how many drives I have. Each failure comes with a severe time and disruption cost. My computer is how I listen to all music and watch all video. Downtime is thus very bad. For my larger sample set, my terabyte-years are still the cheapest. Seagate drives started failing for me with the first drive issued after they reduced their warranty back to 3 years. WD stopped failing for me with the first drive issued after they increased their warranty back to 5 years. Except the 2 3-year warranty WDs I bought after they raised back up to 5 for their Caviar Blacks. Both of those died within 6 months.
You are purchasing STORAGE-TIME. Not just storage. Storage that disappears is useless.
1 terabyte of storage that lasts 2 years is twice as useful as 1 terabyte of storage that lasts 1 year.
Always buy whatever drive is warranted for 5 years. I pay 50% more for this! It's worth every penny. My terabyte-years are the cheapest.
I have a 20TB LAN spread out over 3-4 computers (depending on the year). The only major crashes I've had on anything under 5 years old was, ironically, the 2 WD Cavier Green's I accidentally bought (meant to buy black; got a little slaphappy with the shopping cart one afternoon). They both died within 6 months.
The choice now is: Western Digital Cavier Black. The study posted in this article will not acknowledge this as they bought the cheapest drives possible. It may make business sense with redundancy, but i do not RAID. Too expensive. (Ironic?)
Slashdot Mirror
Me too, actually, but I didn't want to overstate my position.
Of course it can! Why the resistance? Human-level AI will exist by the time young people reading this are dead. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future was, more or less, right.
Interesting logic. Why does the logic for "If you decide to be X, then you aren't really X" work [for you] for whistleblowers but not doctors?
I have no problem with this if his movements and financial workings are public knowledge. If something is there for me to observe, I am allowed to observe it, and report my observations. That is what a free press is, and it doesn't just mean reporting on celebrities and politicians, it means reporting on anybody you want.
"They're calling him evil"
All human beings should be allowed to state their opinion on whoever they think is evil. All human beings should be allowed to state their opinion on who they wish were dead. (coughcheneycough)
"They're calling him evil - the kind of evil they "stake [their] lives against". "
I find your analysis quite dishonest. The paragraph was about capitalism. He was an example of a person connected to it. He was one small part of the kind of evil they stake their lives against. Being willing to lay down your life to fight evil is one of the most sacred duties any human being can have. That you have a different definition of evil than other people is what makes you the same as all people: We all think different things are evil.
"They targeted him specifically, tracked down his home address, printed up flyers with his name and a bunch of other information about him, showed up at his house,"
And why would any of that be illegal or even immoral? How is this different from me printing up flyers telling my neighbors about a sex offender living near us? (No, we don't get notification otherwise.) The only difference is your subjective opinion about which people are evil.
"This isn't why we have a first amendment."
This is exactly why we have it.
"This isn't stating an unpopular opinion or speaking truth to power. "
1) You're disagreeing with the opinion yourself! It's definitely not popular. You're part of it not being popular.
2) Speaking truth? Sorry, beyond slander and impeding an investigation, there is no legal burden to tell the truth. And those only apply to facts, not opinions. Furthermore, even with facts, lying is legal and cops do it all the time, legally. Your rights have nothing to do with whether or not you speak the "truth". And there is no such thing as an absolute truth for that which is subjective. Total red herring for you to even use that word unless we were talking about factual statements. Jesus man. Why don't we just appoint a bureau to define how reality is, then tell everyone who disagrees they aren't allowed to speak? Reminds me of prosecuting holocaust deniers for not stating the same truth. (For bias purposes, I'm only alive because my grandmother lived in a chimney that the gestapo literally looked down, but didn't see her, but would still defend a holocaust deniers right to state whatever he believes. I would, however, possibly throw a bottle at him when nobody's looking, and possibly rightfully go to jail if caught.)
3) Also, they are speaking to power. Not that that affects whether you should be able to speak. If I want to find out where you live, go up to your front door, and hold up a sign telling your neighbors I think you're an asshole -- too fucking bad for you. Public space is for the public, not for you to lord over.
I loved the part where you mentioned they blocked his driveway. Did you forget they have private buses pick them up? So he doesn't take a vehicle out of his driveway. So he was never blocked. Whoever bothered to denote that they blocked his driveway is a drama-queen playing martyr for them.
"This is about terrorizing a family."
Ahhh, so the fact that he has a family should afford him extra protections. Your must be a breeder to think like that.
"They're hoping to terrorize him and other tech workers into quitting their jobs and staying home, hiding from the mobs of angry people threatening them and their families."
You made that up and don't know that. That's what you think they are hoping, but neither of us
But honestly... Any law that says me & my associates can't stand, on public property, in front of someone's house and tell them how we feel IS anti-free speech. Just as the attempts to criminalize Fred Phelps are. Freedom is meaningless with people we agree with. No protections are needed to utter something that offends no one. Freedom's only meaning is when we disagree with someone's expression of it. Otherwise, it's just a happy coincidence. But I digress.
Stalk is pretty subjective, too... If you want to get legal pedantic and talk California legal statute, I'd accept that. Though I must warn you I'd almost assuredly have a huge problem with the statute and, despite being fairly liberal myself (Obama == too far to the right for me!), would probably blame it on liberal pussydom.
I'm not seeing how that's a point. If we import it, we don't have enough. That we mine our own may at least mean it's mined under more human working conditions (though sometimes I'm not so sure about that in America, where workers get the least sickdays and shitty benefits and somehow rail against the very concept of unions to protect their interests), but if we are importing it, our demand is indeed so great that it reaches wherever we buy it from. Is some of that from Congo? Hell if I actually know. Kinda doubt you do either. ;)
First I've heard of that. I actually don't know what you're talking about now. Interesting.
" they will have to admit they know that the behavior they have publicly engages in is illegal"
Sorry, protest and assembly are protected by the 1st amendment. Any law that prevents this is de facto unconstitutional and would [hopefully] be SCOTUS'ed the fuck out of existence as soon as someone gets inconvenienced enough to actually go to SCOTUS over this.
I used to ride a short bus to one school to get on a long bus to goto another. Maybe some gas was saved, but when half the bus ride was 2 kids on a short bus, it sure as hell didn't feel like it. ~10MPG on those things, and they're slow as fuck so people have to pass you all the time, meaning you're adding congestion. It definitely wasn't as efficient as the normal bus distribution of "this bus gets this neighborhood, that bus gets that other neighborhood". But since I went to school in another county.... My situation was actually somewhat similar to the Googlers here.
Read the fucking article; get a fucking clue. Sitting here and making up shit just makes you look retarded.
Right and wrong are opinions. Your post is total bullshit, but the meter went off the scale when you said the word perjury.
I feel sorry that you mind seems incapable of modeling things at the level of complexity they actually occur at.
You were doing fine until you made up facts you can't possibly know about a group of people. Does this group have a record blocking new residential developments? I'm sure you could point out the evidence supporting your assertion to me, right?
Guess I can blame this one on the breeders.
Regular people should be looked down upon. Average intelligence is insultingly stupid, and 50 percent of people are even stupider than that. You don't get an education to become average, you get an education to become smarter than most people. (It doesn't work for everybody...)
In case I'm unclear: I'd much rather be on a road with 1,000 people driving 1,000 cars, than 500 buses with 2 people in them. I used n=2 in this example, but I'm thinking even for n=6, it's a net loss. I don't actually know the value of n.
Regardless of how pro-technology I am, they have valid points about the Congo and rising rent caused by google's self-driving cars spreading their high-earning workers into lower-rent neighborhoods.
1) Of course a drive doesn't drop dead upon warranty expiration. I never said that and that's a strawman of a point, sorry. ;)
3) It's kind of subjective, but I don't consider it to be at all same as buying an in-store, extended warranty. Extended warranties only apply after manufacturer warranties expire. They also tend to cost way more than the value they provide. It may not be apples & oranges, but it's certainly red apples vs green apples. Not the same thing. You don't get ROI.
2) No I won't ignore the flood. Cherry picking to remove data that supports my viewpoint isn't in my best interest
4) "If the drive survives the warranty period, odds are it will go a bit longer, by which point, you destroy any advantage you gained by a longer warranty." Absolutely false. A warranty's advantage doesn't disappear the day a warranty expires! Western Digital ran the numbers. They can afford to warrant their blacks for 5 years because they know they last, on average, long enough for it to be a solid business decision. They can not afford to warrant their greens for 5 years because they know they would lose money on it. You act as if the warranty determines when the drive will die and/or you kind of act like that's what I'm thinking. No. The warranty doesn't determine when a drive will die. The mean time of failure for that model of drive determines how long the warranty will be. They can afford longer warranties on better drives. The drives are inherently better. They last longer not because of the warranty -- which is an effect -- but because of their superior manufacturing -- which is the cause.
"by the time that drive does fail, out of warranty, you can buy newer, faster, bigger, for less." What's your point? The time it does fail out of warranty will be 2 years later on average. So the drive I get will be bigger and cheaper than if I'd gotten a replacement drive earlier.
I don't know why people resist realizing this so much. Companies don't just throw on warranties based on a whim. The warranty is a legal endorsement, backed by money, that the product will last a certain period of time. It doesn't materialize out of thin air; it is in effect [not the cause] of superior workmanship.
Now, for the sake of argument, let us pretend, for this paragraph, that a drive DOES fail the day its warranty dies. Considering that 5 years is 66% longer than 3 years, and 5-year drives tend to cost 50-60% more, it's even a better decision dollar-wise. When you bring in personal hassle, downtime, and your systems being stopped and data being inaccessible (for instance, if a system drive dies on one of my machines, there's about 10TB of data I can't get to until I reinstall windows on a new drive), and put a price on that, the gap widens even more.
You seem to be angry that I have experiences you do not. There is no superstition, ignorance, or myopia here. Nor did you refute my refutations of your points. For example, your bullshit point that a replacement drive is refurbished. Every time I get a drive I record the manufacture date, serial #, etc. None are refurbished. It's funny how when I called you out on this, you simply made an appeal to the mysterious fact that you have 1000s of servers, and therefore somehow "know". It was a reverse ad hominem. Brilliantly fallacious.
Thanks for pretending to know why I posted my comment, though. (You don't.)
Also, regarding your lettered points:
A is irrelevant. This is an article about which drives don't fail. Other people not keeping drives around long enough to not fail doesn't mean they won't. You've basically broken the scope of this article just to quibble. B is an example of people throwing away their money. Again, not relevant in the scope of this article's topic of which harddrives last the longest. That someone wouldn't bother with a warranty return doesn't change which harddrive lasts the lonest. C) Shipping is usually $10. You've obviously never returned a harddrive. D) No, they are new drives with the manufacture date on them. E) No prices "crash through the floor". They go down very slowly. when they're not going up for 2 years after a flood, that is. You obviously don't have a record of your harddrive expenditures. F) It won't be 20TB drives in 5 years. YOu're really not paying attention to the growth pattern.
In short, and with all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
curse slashdot for not having an edit button: when i said 'week', i meant 'decade'.
Most people don't run 20TB lans at home, so their sample sets are small. I have 15 harddrives 24/7 for well over a week. The 5 year ones last. The 3 year ones don't. It's pretty consistent. I deal with a failure almost every year due to how many drives I have. Each failure comes with a severe time and disruption cost. My computer is how I listen to all music and watch all video. Downtime is thus very bad. For my larger sample set, my terabyte-years are still the cheapest. Seagate drives started failing for me with the first drive issued after they reduced their warranty back to 3 years. WD stopped failing for me with the first drive issued after they increased their warranty back to 5 years. Except the 2 3-year warranty WDs I bought after they raised back up to 5 for their Caviar Blacks. Both of those died within 6 months.
1 terabyte of storage that lasts 2 years is twice as useful as 1 terabyte of storage that lasts 1 year.
Always buy whatever drive is warranted for 5 years. I pay 50% more for this! It's worth every penny. My terabyte-years are the cheapest.
I have a 20TB LAN spread out over 3-4 computers (depending on the year). The only major crashes I've had on anything under 5 years old was, ironically, the 2 WD Cavier Green's I accidentally bought (meant to buy black; got a little slaphappy with the shopping cart one afternoon). They both died within 6 months.
The choice now is: Western Digital Cavier Black. The study posted in this article will not acknowledge this as they bought the cheapest drives possible. It may make business sense with redundancy, but i do not RAID. Too expensive. (Ironic?)
Fuck you! People should only get full rights if they have the threat of losing their job weighed against them? Go back to your fucking cave.
If only scientists were statisticians, your comment might have actually been actionable.