Little known fact: State constitutions override federal law.
Little known possibly because you just made it up and it hasn't had to time to percolate yet. No worries, I'm sure misinformation can travel faster than facts.
Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment.
But I enjoy watching TV shows (not all of them, the ones I chose to wach). I would not enjoy sitting in prison. I would much prefer to do things that I enjoy than things I don't enjoy. Why is it shocking then that I should spend a lot of time doing something I enjoy -- without coercion naturally -- instead of something I don't?
It's not particularly democratic (or respectful of other individuals) to disregard individual preferences even when you might have different ones. This sort of haughty attitude doesn't further your cause either -- it makes it seem like you don't respect other's choices and want to substitute your own.
I'm fine with them breaking your encryption if they have probable cause; however, forcing you to give the password does seem to have a pretty straight-forward logical path to incriminating yourself (Especially if you are guilty and a subsequent search will yield something on the device).
They aren't forcing you to give up the password, they are forcing you to deliver up evidence (in cleartext). Generally speaking, the right not to self-incriminate has never held to apply to tangible evidence like documents -- to which the court analogizes computer files. The distinction between testimony and evidence seems to me to be on old
If the armchair lawyers at/. want to suggest that the 5A privilege extends to documents (or that a defendant can protect documents from the courts merely by running TrueCrypt), they are most free to do so. I, at least, would caution that this would have serious implications for the investigation of white collar crime, financial malfeasance, collusion. The antitrust case against Microsoft, for instance, was based largely on email correspondence that could well have been encrypted before the court ordered them disclosed -- and if such protection actually existed, would have certainly been encrypted if only to trigger that legal protection.
And, let's be honest, for every hapless Joe whose child pornography collection lands him in hot water, there will be a dozen of these well-dressed assholes with well-dressed-lawyers whose job it is to argue any and all points that have a chance of sticking to the fan. The law has this perverse sort of uniformity about it that let's everyone have the same sort of protections regardless of the circumstances that it was thought up in.
Because DVI is also an analog interface? Or are you forgetting the VGA-compatible (analog) C1-C5 signals? Which are, amazingly not at all present in a HDMI connection.
You are thinking of DVI-I, which is a hack to the connector to fit them both in the same footprint on the back of a video card. That's got nothing to do with DVI as the interface.
[DVI] gives me crystal-clear digital connection to my monitor, and unlike HDMI, it works every time without fail.
Trying to close the analog hole I guess. Using "smart" HDMI can more easily be used with DRMs. Coupled with machine you can not choose the OS of, and you might have quite annoying copy protection schemes.
Nevermind that HDMI is electrically equivalent (adapters are under $3.
Nevermind that DRM operates at different layer than the physical interface, which itself is different from the electrical interface.
No, no, forget all that nonsense, the real question I have for your post is how you think anyone can try to close the analog hole by deprecating a digital interface?!
Re:Scheduled to end....
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That's a shame, because the subsidy was originally intended to support this fuel alternative for a short time in order to give it a chance to become economically viable. Well, it's had that chance and the results have been a disaster.
And this is a reason that I've become a bit more wary about these sorts of government subsidies that are intended to 'kick-start' a particular technology. It's not that I think that it's not a good and valid use of government money to provide this sort of startup from which innovation can flourish but rather the high risk that, having gotten on the gravy train and now being dependent on the government for financing, those industries can often manage to get entrenched into a position from which they cannot be dislodged even after the justification for the subsidy is gone. Look at the sugar industry in the US for instance -- you just can't get rid of the subsidies because they've used all that lucre to buy enough support and now we are absolutely stuck with them.
IOW, I just don't believe the second prong of "well if it doesn't work we'll try something else" because you've generated a whole bunch of people whose jobs depend on not trying something else. And no one wants to be against jobs right? A Senator can quite validly say that cutting subsidy X will lose Y jobs in his State -- jobs that were created by a subsidy that has failed to make the industry self-sustaining. So it becomes a one-way ratchet....
Facebook is taking data that users are providing them, and sending it off to a third party to do statistical analysis on it. This is a terrible invasion of privacy, because Facebook users never intended for their private data to be shipped off to other companies.
Facebook never intended for users to give them data that they considered private. If you want to keep something private, common sense dictates that you not give it to other people. Heck, it's not even common sense, it's tautological -- data that you give to other people isn't private (anymore) unless there are specific safeguards (attorney-client privilege, HIPAA comes to mind) that create a positive duty on them not to share it.
Seriously folks, if you've sent it to someone else, it's not private. If you've kept it to yourself, no one can leak it but you.
DNSSEC is no proof against the men with shotguns and a court order saying "You will remove this domain from your server... or else."
Nor was it ever intended to be -- those sites (i.e. the ones within range of the Marshals) are already easy enough to deal with lawfully. The issue was when some guy in Kerbleckistan runs a server that you've got a court order against, you can't do much unless you've got the power to order DNS servers not to give out his IP or black him out of the BGs (with Marshals to back it up).
So what advice do you have to give to those of us who NEVER get our opinions or positions represented?
Suck it up.
As a single citizen in a country of hundreds of millions that has a representative government, some people are outliers and just have to live with the policy made by the rest of us. I mean, fairly simple logic will lead you to the conclusion that:
IF: My policy preferences are different from everyone else's (not that there's anything immoral with that, but it's an empirical fact sometimes) THEN
EITHER:
(1) I will convince people that my policy is right or at least gain support for a compromise policy OR
(2) I will institute a dictatorship that implements this policy irrespective of what others prefer OR
(3) I will not get my position implemented
END_EITHER END_IF
If you see a fourth option, I'd love to hear it...
An oft-repeated sentiment on Slashdot is that we should change the situation by voting in better officials. An opinion that appears in nearly every political thread is: 'we're to blame because we elected these people.' On the eve of the first primary (in New Hampshire), I have to wonder: how can we tell the candidates apart? Ron Paul is an obvious exception, and I am not discounting him, but otherwise it seems that no candidate has made a stand on any issue. Consider the candidates (all of them, of any party) as a set. What issue can I use to divide them into two groups, such that one group is 'for' something and the other is 'against'?
I don't think you got the appropriate sense of the pronouns in use. When it's said that we(1) should change the situation by voting in better officials and that we(1) have no one to blame but ourselves, that we(1) refers to the voting populace at large. You've transposed that to mean we(2) meaning/.ers (or perhaps geeks in general) but we(2) do not have a lot of political clout for a number of reasons mainly boiling down to the number of voters that will base their decision on "geek issues". First, there aren't many of us -- so already that's going to be a niche demographic to target. Second, as a group, we are very divided on non-geek issues such as economics and foreign policy. That makes us less attractive as a target because it means that we aren't likely to vote as a bloc unless geek issues become so important that they override other policy differences (for instance, most/.ers wouldn't vote for a foreign-policy hawk that was anti-gay and pro-life even if he had 100% from the EFF). Finally, geek issues just aren't very poignant with the electorate at large -- virtually no one is going to make their political decision based on those issues so there's very little for candidates to gain (and much to lose) by staking out strong positions.
Ultimately, living in a democracy means accepting that sometimes the voters either don't care or disagree with you, even after all your attempts to convince them otherwise. It's a hard pill to swallow, especially when many arguments are of the form "if you REALLY understood issue X then you would have policy Y" and its contrapositive "if you don't favor policy Y then you don't understand issue X" that simply can't accept that sometimes you just can't convince people. Politics always has losers, and the losers invariably believe that they are right and somehow the political process must be defective merely because they lost.
[ And, I hate to say this but I'm not being cruel here, I personally will not vote on geek issues. I think foreign policy and economics are far more important than SOPA and patent law. That's not to say I don't have opinions on the latter, or think that the 'wrong' policy might harm us, but rather I have priorities and I'd rather have the foreign policy that I like and the geek law that I don't rather than the other way around, in such cases where it appears that I cannot have both concurrently. ]
In a civilized society everyone is subsidized (otherwise it's law of the jungle). Also most people have vices of one kind or another.
Where do I sign up for subsidized motorcycle insurance for my crotch rocket?!
Here I was riding a regular motorcycle like an idiot when I could apparently ride a far more powerful and fun cycle for no additional cost!
[ I should also inquire with my insurance company why it would cost thousands more to insure the sportbike given that apparently I'm entitled to the same rate no matter what risk I take! ]
So at one level I can see your resentment. Its not fair to subsidize the irresponsible. My question is that when you see someone overweight coming out of a car in a handicapped parking place, do you even for one microsecond consider that their malady might be the reason for their obesity.
Of course I do. Hence my ending parenthetical about being unable to distinguish between self-inflicted disability and otherwise.
You have to admit though, that in the space of obese people, you are the exceptional case. For every obese person that has gone through what you did, there are plenty more who inflicted it on themselves. This is not an insult to you in any possible way, it's just a fact.
Ultimately it takes a doctor to say a person needs it or not, though most doctors will lean towards the needs and want of the patient, a good doctor would almost certain say to a simply obese patient, get your fat ass to the furthest parking space and walk... its good for you.
That's a joke right? I wish I could have such faith in doctors, in reality here there are scandals after scandals of doctors that will affirm (under oath) that individuals are sick for the purpose of getting them State benifits/pensions/disability. Some of them give out placards and disability letters for a fee. Sometimes, you find individuals who have a doctor's affirmation that they are disabled taking part in bodybuilding competitions!
In fact, as a legitimately disabled person, I reckon you should be more outraged about those doctors than the rest of us, since they are diluting your benefits!
There. Done thinking about it. You're still a cunt for parking there if you aren't disabled. Walk the extra dozen or so feet, it might do you some good.
I agree.
On the other, here in CA they give out the placards for obesity. If you are obese, you should be given a placard that forces you to park at the other end of the supermarket lot so you can get a whole 0.1 miles of walking in before buying 2 dozen bacon-wrapped-cupcakes.
So yeah, you are a cunt if you park in handicapped spots and deprive someone that legitimately needs it. On the other hand, you are a cunt if you neglect (or even just destroy) you entire body and then expect society to accommodate you in the consequences of your own decision making.
[ And no, I don't propose that I can tell the difference in all cases. Nor do I think we need to start policing people's lifestyle choices. I'm just expressing the pretty common feeling among the conscientious that we are subsidizing risks taken by everyone else -- it's as if everyone had to pitch in to fix property damage in car crashes without regard to whose fault the crash was. There are unavoidable crashes/illnesses and there are avoidable ones -- a fair society should pitch in for the former but not the latter. ]
Sure, the numbers work out, but the Walmart business model is only good for the Waltons: no one else.
And the consumers of mass-produced goods, whose dollar goes a lot further and hence can consume* far more than they would otherwise be able to. Those consumers at Wal-Mart tend to be lower-class where even modest savings go a long way -- estimates are that discounters are 3-5% cheaper, amounting to billions in savings for the poor every year.
I mean, have you ever actually visited a corner shop in a poor neighborhood? Those places get away with highway robbery prices -- 30% above even normal grocery shops and 50-75% above discount retailers. There are quantitative studies comparing an average "basket" of goods showing how much poor consumers are being fleeced for (to be fair, part of that just goes to the overhead of having a dozen tiny shops running instead of one centralized one).
* Of course, many will object that being able to consume more goods is not actually beneficial. They might be right (and, of course, people are free to spend their money on whatever else they like) but given that nearly everyone in the population, rich and poor alike, seem to want more toys, it's a bit besides the point.
** That's not to say that (being a liberal and all) we can't insist that WM pay a better wage and include health insurance. Such modest changes won't break their business model. But insisting on better labor conditions and insisting on an inefficient business model are two different things -- the former helps the poor and the latter, I think, is really destructive by locking them into paying significantly more for goods that comprise a significant portion of their discretionary budget.
Ballpark figures, this isn't exact, redo it with your preferred constants, I'm just trying to explain my reasoning against huge enclosures with > 10 drives,
Standard drive idle usage (W) ~ 10W [1] Low-power (green) drive idle usage (W) ~ 5W [1] Cost of power ~0.20 $/KWH Cost of an older drive per year = $17 Cost of a green drive per year = $8.50 Replacing 6x500GB older drives with one 3TB green power savings = $95/yr
So think about that for a sec. At $150[2] for a 3TB drive, you cover the price in power savings in 18 months. That's assuming that there is zero fixed-cost per drive. At the point where you are talking about adding SATA controllers or fancy multi-bay enclosures or, worse, external enclosures with their own PSUs (and fans!), the turnaround-point for older drives is far sooner.
I'm a hobbyist, I understand that it's really cool to make do with older hardware and feel like you aren't letting anything to go waste but sometimes using old hardware instead of buying new is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Spending money on increasing how many hard drives you can accommodate instead of just buying newer high-capacity lower-wattage drives is absolutely batty; especially when you get into the price for anything remotely good in the RAID dept.
My advice, move everything to the largest capacity drives that are reasonably priced (after the flood damage is sorted). Replace the drives when you can do between 4:1 and 6:1 replacement -- should be every 3-4 years. Live happily, quietly and simpler. Save money on power transparently.
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
You understand that this would never really work in practice. Sites load resources (jquery!) from other servers all the time. A restaurant page might have a frame that loads the Google Maps API or a YouTube review. Blogs load related posts from other blogs on the sidebar. Slashdot has some freshmeat content listed!
Trying to shoehorn the web into back into a single-server single-client architecture is a huge step backwards and violates the basic principle of one-resource-one-location. Your cache doesn't need a separate copy of jquery for each server that serves it.
Loops imply you're doing things one at a time. map() doesn't imply that, which means your code can never assume it, which means the next version of your compiler might realize it doesn't have to happen that way.
Uh, in Python you can be assured that map(func,seq) does things one at a time. For instance, you could write:
socket = GetASocket() data = GetSomeData() map(lambda x: socket.send(x), data)
And you are assured that the no more than one instance of socket.send is in flight at any one point. Think about it for a sec, if map(func,seq) meant that any number of function calls cold be dispatched, you would need to write a massive quantity of locking code whenever those functions touch state. Consider this:
class DataProcessor:
def __init__(self):
self.processedCount = 0
def Process(self, datum): /* some implementation */
self.processedCount += datum.entryCount
data = SomeData() processor = DataProcessor() map(processor.Process, data)
Oops! Now you need to lock and unlock the self.processedCount line! Except you don't, because it would be absurd for the language to start calling more than one Process at the same time!
You clearly do not understand jury nullification. It *increase* justice, it doesn't make it harder to obtain justice. The jury can refuse to convict someone of an unjust law. Many laws are either not just, or are not just when applied to a particular circumstance where other factors were involved. In such cases, the jury has the power to nullify the unjust law.
Yeah, how dare those prosecutors think they can convict a white man for killing a negro as murder? There are obviously particular circumstances (he whistled at a white girl) and factors (negros have been particularly uppity since the end of WWII, thinking that because we fought for democracy in France they ought to have it in Alabama) that make the conviction particularly unjust.
Remember, it goes both ways -- if a jury has the power to nullify because they believe that the law shouldn't prohibit the act in question for reasons that you approve, then they have the power to do so for reasons you find repugnant. Be careful what you wish for.
For stuff that's more bare metal, replacing anything with anything else this is true too; assuming the linker gives you a binary in the required binary format. Not a big deal right?
This is a joke right? You think writing tooling for a build process onto the metal is no big deal? Besides a good compiler and linker, you need build tools, debuggers, simulators. Oh, and you'll need to port all your external interfaces and drivers to the new language (or write a shim layer in the old language). While you are doing the interfaces, make sure that it has the same semantics for dealing with the hardware or be prepared to spend a while looking at coredumps.
You have the right to privacy; that right is not predicated on being a political dissident. The fact that these companies are undermining that right is what Assange is referring to when he says that you have been screwed.
I didn't say that the right is predicated on being a political dissident, I only noted that I am not really materially screwed in any sense because my private information is just not interesting enough for anyone to care about. Whether or not I have such a right to privacy is sort of immaterial in such case where I don't care if it's violated. It's like saying that it matters that we have a Fourth Amendment in a case where I want to invite a police officer into my apartment for dinner. It only matters when I don't want him there and he does want to be in there and there is a conflict between our desires and some third party (a judge) needs to mediate whether he can enter against my will or I can exclude him against his will.
To phrase it another way, the concept of "rights" governs what happens when I want to assert the prerogative of telling someone what they may not do. It never comes up in such cases where I have no objection to the action in the first instance.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told press conference attendees in London that all the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Gmail users in the crowd were 'screwed.'
Yes, now they will know that I messaged my girlfriend to grab some coffee on her way home. I'm definitely screwed!
Does this guy realize that the vast majority of us aren't political dissidents (practically tautologically, since once the vast majority of us hold a political view it becomes the orthodoxy against which the minority dissent) or whatever else he imagines is actually worth someone's time to read my messages out of the billions of electronic messages that exist?
Surely if the government compromises his communications, he's screwed -- that comes with the territory. But to imagine that this applies to everyone else evinces a serious disconnect with reality, a reality in which most people are boring enough that the dissemination of our entire digital lives to the government is quite harmless.
Slashdot Mirror
Little known fact: State constitutions override federal law.
Little known possibly because you just made it up and it hasn't had to time to percolate yet. No worries, I'm sure misinformation can travel faster than facts.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=5155054279368574623&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2984439589202067076&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1635&context=faculty_scholarship
In particular, any computer needs to be built in the west, with chips from the west, to be trusted.
The A5 that powers the iPad2 is made in Texas.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/16/us-apple-samsung-idUSTRE7BF0D420111216
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/16/tech/mobile/apple-a5-chip-texas/index.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57344151-17/iphone-ipad-processor-made-by-samsung-in-texas-report-says/
Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment.
But I enjoy watching TV shows (not all of them, the ones I chose to wach). I would not enjoy sitting in prison. I would much prefer to do things that I enjoy than things I don't enjoy. Why is it shocking then that I should spend a lot of time doing something I enjoy -- without coercion naturally -- instead of something I don't?
It's not particularly democratic (or respectful of other individuals) to disregard individual preferences even when you might have different ones. This sort of haughty attitude doesn't further your cause either -- it makes it seem like you don't respect other's choices and want to substitute your own.
... I'ld play her all day and night.
Probably wouldn't be nearly as educational though.
I'm fine with them breaking your encryption if they have probable cause; however, forcing you to give the password does seem to have a pretty straight-forward logical path to incriminating yourself (Especially if you are guilty and a subsequent search will yield something on the device).
They aren't forcing you to give up the password, they are forcing you to deliver up evidence (in cleartext). Generally speaking, the right not to self-incriminate has never held to apply to tangible evidence like documents -- to which the court analogizes computer files. The distinction between testimony and evidence seems to me to be on old
If the armchair lawyers at /. want to suggest that the 5A privilege extends to documents (or that a defendant can protect documents from the courts merely by running TrueCrypt), they are most free to do so. I, at least, would caution that this would have serious implications for the investigation of white collar crime, financial malfeasance, collusion. The antitrust case against Microsoft, for instance, was based largely on email correspondence that could well have been encrypted before the court ordered them disclosed -- and if such protection actually existed, would have certainly been encrypted if only to trigger that legal protection.
And, let's be honest, for every hapless Joe whose child pornography collection lands him in hot water, there will be a dozen of these well-dressed assholes with well-dressed-lawyers whose job it is to argue any and all points that have a chance of sticking to the fan. The law has this perverse sort of uniformity about it that let's everyone have the same sort of protections regardless of the circumstances that it was thought up in.
Because DVI is also an analog interface? Or are you forgetting the VGA-compatible (analog) C1-C5 signals? Which are, amazingly not at all present in a HDMI connection.
You are thinking of DVI-I, which is a hack to the connector to fit them both in the same footprint on the back of a video card. That's got nothing to do with DVI as the interface.
[DVI] gives me crystal-clear digital connection to my monitor, and unlike HDMI, it works every time without fail.
Trying to close the analog hole I guess. Using "smart" HDMI can more easily be used with DRMs. Coupled with machine you can not choose the OS of, and you might have quite annoying copy protection schemes.
Nevermind that HDMI is electrically equivalent (adapters are under $3.
Nevermind that DRM operates at different layer than the physical interface, which itself is different from the electrical interface.
Nevermind that HDMI and DVI, by virtue of the above, support the . Note that this is independent of whether a particular display does.
No, no, forget all that nonsense, the real question I have for your post is how you think anyone can try to close the analog hole by deprecating a digital interface?!
That's a shame, because the subsidy was originally intended to support this fuel alternative for a short time in order to give it a chance to become economically viable. Well, it's had that chance and the results have been a disaster.
And this is a reason that I've become a bit more wary about these sorts of government subsidies that are intended to 'kick-start' a particular technology. It's not that I think that it's not a good and valid use of government money to provide this sort of startup from which innovation can flourish but rather the high risk that, having gotten on the gravy train and now being dependent on the government for financing, those industries can often manage to get entrenched into a position from which they cannot be dislodged even after the justification for the subsidy is gone. Look at the sugar industry in the US for instance -- you just can't get rid of the subsidies because they've used all that lucre to buy enough support and now we are absolutely stuck with them.
IOW, I just don't believe the second prong of "well if it doesn't work we'll try something else" because you've generated a whole bunch of people whose jobs depend on not trying something else. And no one wants to be against jobs right? A Senator can quite validly say that cutting subsidy X will lose Y jobs in his State -- jobs that were created by a subsidy that has failed to make the industry self-sustaining. So it becomes a one-way ratchet ....
Facebook is taking data that users are providing them, and sending it off to a third party to do statistical analysis on it. This is a terrible invasion of privacy, because Facebook users never intended for their private data to be shipped off to other companies.
Facebook never intended for users to give them data that they considered private. If you want to keep something private, common sense dictates that you not give it to other people. Heck, it's not even common sense, it's tautological -- data that you give to other people isn't private (anymore) unless there are specific safeguards (attorney-client privilege, HIPAA comes to mind) that create a positive duty on them not to share it.
Seriously folks, if you've sent it to someone else, it's not private. If you've kept it to yourself, no one can leak it but you.
DNSSEC is no proof against the men with shotguns and a court order saying "You will remove this domain from your server... or else."
Nor was it ever intended to be -- those sites (i.e. the ones within range of the Marshals) are already easy enough to deal with lawfully. The issue was when some guy in Kerbleckistan runs a server that you've got a court order against, you can't do much unless you've got the power to order DNS servers not to give out his IP or black him out of the BGs (with Marshals to back it up).
So what advice do you have to give to those of us who NEVER get our opinions or positions represented?
Suck it up.
As a single citizen in a country of hundreds of millions that has a representative government, some people are outliers and just have to live with the policy made by the rest of us. I mean, fairly simple logic will lead you to the conclusion that:
IF: My policy preferences are different from everyone else's (not that there's anything immoral with that, but it's an empirical fact sometimes)
THEN
EITHER:
(1) I will convince people that my policy is right or at least gain support for a compromise policy OR
(2) I will institute a dictatorship that implements this policy irrespective of what others prefer OR
(3) I will not get my position implemented
END_EITHER
END_IF
If you see a fourth option, I'd love to hear it ...
An oft-repeated sentiment on Slashdot is that we should change the situation by voting in better officials. An opinion that appears in nearly every political thread is: 'we're to blame because we elected these people.' On the eve of the first primary (in New Hampshire), I have to wonder: how can we tell the candidates apart? Ron Paul is an obvious exception, and I am not discounting him, but otherwise it seems that no candidate has made a stand on any issue. Consider the candidates (all of them, of any party) as a set. What issue can I use to divide them into two groups, such that one group is 'for' something and the other is 'against'?
I don't think you got the appropriate sense of the pronouns in use. When it's said that we(1) should change the situation by voting in better officials and that we(1) have no one to blame but ourselves, that we(1) refers to the voting populace at large. You've transposed that to mean we(2) meaning /.ers (or perhaps geeks in general) but we(2) do not have a lot of political clout for a number of reasons mainly boiling down to the number of voters that will base their decision on "geek issues". First, there aren't many of us -- so already that's going to be a niche demographic to target. Second, as a group, we are very divided on non-geek issues such as economics and foreign policy. That makes us less attractive as a target because it means that we aren't likely to vote as a bloc unless geek issues become so important that they override other policy differences (for instance, most /.ers wouldn't vote for a foreign-policy hawk that was anti-gay and pro-life even if he had 100% from the EFF). Finally, geek issues just aren't very poignant with the electorate at large -- virtually no one is going to make their political decision based on those issues so there's very little for candidates to gain (and much to lose) by staking out strong positions.
Ultimately, living in a democracy means accepting that sometimes the voters either don't care or disagree with you, even after all your attempts to convince them otherwise. It's a hard pill to swallow, especially when many arguments are of the form "if you REALLY understood issue X then you would have policy Y" and its contrapositive "if you don't favor policy Y then you don't understand issue X" that simply can't accept that sometimes you just can't convince people. Politics always has losers, and the losers invariably believe that they are right and somehow the political process must be defective merely because they lost.
[ And, I hate to say this but I'm not being cruel here, I personally will not vote on geek issues. I think foreign policy and economics are far more important than SOPA and patent law. That's not to say I don't have opinions on the latter, or think that the 'wrong' policy might harm us, but rather I have priorities and I'd rather have the foreign policy that I like and the geek law that I don't rather than the other way around, in such cases where it appears that I cannot have both concurrently. ]
In a civilized society everyone is subsidized (otherwise it's law of the jungle). Also most people have vices of one kind or another.
Where do I sign up for subsidized motorcycle insurance for my crotch rocket?!
Here I was riding a regular motorcycle like an idiot when I could apparently ride a far more powerful and fun cycle for no additional cost!
[ I should also inquire with my insurance company why it would cost thousands more to insure the sportbike given that apparently I'm entitled to the same rate no matter what risk I take! ]
So at one level I can see your resentment. Its not fair to subsidize the irresponsible. My question is that when you see someone overweight coming out of a car in a handicapped parking place, do you even for one microsecond consider that their malady might be the reason for their obesity.
Of course I do. Hence my ending parenthetical about being unable to distinguish between self-inflicted disability and otherwise.
You have to admit though, that in the space of obese people, you are the exceptional case. For every obese person that has gone through what you did, there are plenty more who inflicted it on themselves. This is not an insult to you in any possible way, it's just a fact.
Ultimately it takes a doctor to say a person needs it or not, though most doctors will lean towards the needs and want of the patient, a good doctor would almost certain say to a simply obese patient, get your fat ass to the furthest parking space and walk... its good for you.
That's a joke right? I wish I could have such faith in doctors, in reality here there are scandals after scandals of doctors that will affirm (under oath) that individuals are sick for the purpose of getting them State benifits/pensions/disability. Some of them give out placards and disability letters for a fee. Sometimes, you find individuals who have a doctor's affirmation that they are disabled taking part in bodybuilding competitions!
In fact, as a legitimately disabled person, I reckon you should be more outraged about those doctors than the rest of us, since they are diluting your benefits!
[1] http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-27/new-york-rail-workers-sought-1-billion-for-fake-disabilities-u-s-says
[2] http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-06/news/29859246_1_pension-scandal-pension-abuse-tax-free-pension
TL;DR version: a doctor's note means nothing except a compliant doctor.
Don't be so quick to judge, unless you've walked a mile on my crutches.
I don't think I judged. If it came off that way, I apologize and clarify that it was not my intent.
There. Done thinking about it. You're still a cunt for parking there if you aren't disabled. Walk the extra dozen or so feet, it might do you some good.
I agree.
On the other, here in CA they give out the placards for obesity. If you are obese, you should be given a placard that forces you to park at the other end of the supermarket lot so you can get a whole 0.1 miles of walking in before buying 2 dozen bacon-wrapped-cupcakes.
So yeah, you are a cunt if you park in handicapped spots and deprive someone that legitimately needs it. On the other hand, you are a cunt if you neglect (or even just destroy) you entire body and then expect society to accommodate you in the consequences of your own decision making.
[ And no, I don't propose that I can tell the difference in all cases. Nor do I think we need to start policing people's lifestyle choices. I'm just expressing the pretty common feeling among the conscientious that we are subsidizing risks taken by everyone else -- it's as if everyone had to pitch in to fix property damage in car crashes without regard to whose fault the crash was. There are unavoidable crashes/illnesses and there are avoidable ones -- a fair society should pitch in for the former but not the latter. ]
Unpaid overtime: evil.
Unpaid on-cal time: evil.
Being interrupted on vacation: extra evil.
Finishing your normally assigned tasks and doing something extra during your time at work: not evil.
Sure, the numbers work out, but the Walmart business model is only good for the Waltons: no one else.
And the consumers of mass-produced goods, whose dollar goes a lot further and hence can consume* far more than they would otherwise be able to. Those consumers at Wal-Mart tend to be lower-class where even modest savings go a long way -- estimates are that discounters are 3-5% cheaper, amounting to billions in savings for the poor every year.
I mean, have you ever actually visited a corner shop in a poor neighborhood? Those places get away with highway robbery prices -- 30% above even normal grocery shops and 50-75% above discount retailers. There are quantitative studies comparing an average "basket" of goods showing how much poor consumers are being fleeced for (to be fair, part of that just goes to the overhead of having a dozen tiny shops running instead of one centralized one).
* Of course, many will object that being able to consume more goods is not actually beneficial. They might be right (and, of course, people are free to spend their money on whatever else they like) but given that nearly everyone in the population, rich and poor alike, seem to want more toys, it's a bit besides the point.
** That's not to say that (being a liberal and all) we can't insist that WM pay a better wage and include health insurance. Such modest changes won't break their business model. But insisting on better labor conditions and insisting on an inefficient business model are two different things -- the former helps the poor and the latter, I think, is really destructive by locking them into paying significantly more for goods that comprise a significant portion of their discretionary budget.
Ballpark figures, this isn't exact, redo it with your preferred constants, I'm just trying to explain my reasoning against huge enclosures with > 10 drives,
Standard drive idle usage (W) ~ 10W [1]
Low-power (green) drive idle usage (W) ~ 5W [1]
Cost of power ~0.20 $/KWH
Cost of an older drive per year = $17
Cost of a green drive per year = $8.50
Replacing 6x500GB older drives with one 3TB green power savings = $95/yr
So think about that for a sec. At $150[2] for a 3TB drive, you cover the price in power savings in 18 months. That's assuming that there is zero fixed-cost per drive. At the point where you are talking about adding SATA controllers or fancy multi-bay enclosures or, worse, external enclosures with their own PSUs (and fans!), the turnaround-point for older drives is far sooner.
I'm a hobbyist, I understand that it's really cool to make do with older hardware and feel like you aren't letting anything to go waste but sometimes using old hardware instead of buying new is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Spending money on increasing how many hard drives you can accommodate instead of just buying newer high-capacity lower-wattage drives is absolutely batty; especially when you get into the price for anything remotely good in the RAID dept.
My advice, move everything to the largest capacity drives that are reasonably priced (after the flood damage is sorted). Replace the drives when you can do between 4:1 and 6:1 replacement -- should be every 3-4 years. Live happily, quietly and simpler. Save money on power transparently.
[1] http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Western-Digital-2TB-Caviar-Green-Power-Hard-Drive/
[2] I bought some Hitachi 3TBs before the Thailand floods at $130 on Newegg. Of course you would be silly as heck to buy hard drives now for your hobby storage project before they at least fall back to pre-flood level.
[3] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182221
[4] Older drives need not go to waste, they can become offline storage with a simple USB dock[3] -- make a backup, throw it in an anti-static bag, leave it at your relative's house when you visit!
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
You understand that this would never really work in practice. Sites load resources (jquery!) from other servers all the time. A restaurant page might have a frame that loads the Google Maps API or a YouTube review. Blogs load related posts from other blogs on the sidebar. Slashdot has some freshmeat content listed!
Trying to shoehorn the web into back into a single-server single-client architecture is a huge step backwards and violates the basic principle of one-resource-one-location. Your cache doesn't need a separate copy of jquery for each server that serves it.
Loops imply you're doing things one at a time. map() doesn't imply that, which means your code can never assume it, which means the next version of your compiler might realize it doesn't have to happen that way.
Uh, in Python you can be assured that map(func,seq) does things one at a time. For instance, you could write:
And you are assured that the no more than one instance of socket.send is in flight at any one point. Think about it for a sec, if map(func,seq) meant that any number of function calls cold be dispatched, you would need to write a massive quantity of locking code whenever those functions touch state. Consider this:
Oops! Now you need to lock and unlock the self.processedCount line! Except you don't, because it would be absurd for the language to start calling more than one Process at the same time!
You clearly do not understand jury nullification. It *increase* justice, it doesn't make it harder to obtain justice. The jury can refuse to convict someone of an unjust law. Many laws are either not just, or are not just when applied to a particular circumstance where other factors were involved. In such cases, the jury has the power to nullify the unjust law.
Yeah, how dare those prosecutors think they can convict a white man for killing a negro as murder? There are obviously particular circumstances (he whistled at a white girl) and factors (negros have been particularly uppity since the end of WWII, thinking that because we fought for democracy in France they ought to have it in Alabama) that make the conviction particularly unjust.
Remember, it goes both ways -- if a jury has the power to nullify because they believe that the law shouldn't prohibit the act in question for reasons that you approve, then they have the power to do so for reasons you find repugnant. Be careful what you wish for.
For stuff that's more bare metal, replacing anything with anything else this is true too; assuming the linker gives you a binary in the required binary format. Not a big deal right?
This is a joke right? You think writing tooling for a build process onto the metal is no big deal? Besides a good compiler and linker, you need build tools, debuggers, simulators. Oh, and you'll need to port all your external interfaces and drivers to the new language (or write a shim layer in the old language). While you are doing the interfaces, make sure that it has the same semantics for dealing with the hardware or be prepared to spend a while looking at coredumps.
Yeah, a piece of cake.
All these also have (in case of Java, will have) their equivalents of map/filter/reduce.
How is map/filter/reduce functional programming? Map, for instance, is just syntactic sugar around 'foreach' and a sequence generator.
You have the right to privacy; that right is not predicated on being a political dissident. The fact that these companies are undermining that right is what Assange is referring to when he says that you have been screwed.
I didn't say that the right is predicated on being a political dissident, I only noted that I am not really materially screwed in any sense because my private information is just not interesting enough for anyone to care about. Whether or not I have such a right to privacy is sort of immaterial in such case where I don't care if it's violated. It's like saying that it matters that we have a Fourth Amendment in a case where I want to invite a police officer into my apartment for dinner. It only matters when I don't want him there and he does want to be in there and there is a conflict between our desires and some third party (a judge) needs to mediate whether he can enter against my will or I can exclude him against his will.
To phrase it another way, the concept of "rights" governs what happens when I want to assert the prerogative of telling someone what they may not do. It never comes up in such cases where I have no objection to the action in the first instance.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told press conference attendees in London that all the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Gmail users in the crowd were 'screwed.'
Yes, now they will know that I messaged my girlfriend to grab some coffee on her way home. I'm definitely screwed!
Does this guy realize that the vast majority of us aren't political dissidents (practically tautologically, since once the vast majority of us hold a political view it becomes the orthodoxy against which the minority dissent) or whatever else he imagines is actually worth someone's time to read my messages out of the billions of electronic messages that exist?
Surely if the government compromises his communications, he's screwed -- that comes with the territory. But to imagine that this applies to everyone else evinces a serious disconnect with reality, a reality in which most people are boring enough that the dissemination of our entire digital lives to the government is quite harmless.