Substantial over-generalization... I'll settle for "many scientific endeavors are well-assisted by math." Science is fundamentally the process of evaluating a hypothesis. If my hypothesis is that the next time I close my eyes I'll smell tulips, there's no math involved in evaluating this. I could *make* it mathematical, changing my hypothesis to something statistical, like "50% of people smell tulips upon closing their eyes at least some of the time"... but that's a different hypothesis.
I totally know what you're feeling. I lived in a big city on the coast for twenty years (San Fran). One catchy way I think of it is that I loved the people but not the population. Four years ago I bit the bullet and moved my family to a small town far away where we knew nobody. We chose the town per a careful survey of housing prices, population density, job market, and culture. The two things I'll say are (1) it was the hardest fucking thing I've ever done in my life, and (2) I'm so glad I did it.
Illegal wiretaps for cameramen? I can recall nothing of that nature. Stories involving cameramen and not releasing certain information about the contents of the film sure, but your reply just just plain ol FUD.
george orwell is bullshit. the future of cameras everywhere is that they can be used AGAINST big government
Don't be so hasty in your optimism. The only reason We The People can see google maps is because the government is allowing it; all the govt has to do is make it illegal for the public to access it, and poof the alleged hedge against tyranny evaporates.
Consider the extensive network of cameras in England. Can anyone see their contents? Nope. Just the government. Wanna bet who'll be able to access the views of the extensive camera network planned for Manhattan?
And pay attention: police in this country are increasingly trying their hand at suppressing/confiscating/outlawing citizen camera operation. Note the numerous stories about permits being required for operating cameras, about "illegal wiretap" laws being used to incarcerate people using cameras, and on and on.
That'll teach me to NRTFA; didn't realize they were wiping the drives.
IMO the definition of stealing should be that of taking something for one's self and -- in so doing -- depriving the previous holder of that something *against the previous holder's will*. For example, if someone tells me, "I want you to get rid of the furniture in this house, as I don't want the furniture anymore" and I take all the furniture and put it in my house, have I stolen? If the owner specifically said, "And don't do anything with it other than destroy it", I'd certainly be violating his wishes and (to whatever extent contractually enforceable) violating the law... but I don't think the particular crime would be stealing. Probably something more like "misappropriation". I admit it's kind of a gray area, but given that it's gray I come down on the "it's not stealing" side, since the term "stealing" has been so abused by the MAFIAA.
searching for and stealing media files from a customer's computer
I'm not sympathizing or condemning, and it's beside the point, but: copying files is NOT stealing. It may be illicit, illegal, immoral, or any of a number of other things that people other than me can debate. But it's not stealing. Stealing would be if they copied the files and erased them off of the hard drives, thereby depriving the hardware owners of the data.
Thanks for the explanation. To be sure I understand one aspect:
(3)... LGPL'd code that is modified must be redistributed in source form...
and
(4)... a product that includes LGPL'd code must be built in such a way that it is *possible* for end-users to swap-out and otherwise replace the distributed LGPL'd portions of the codebase with complementary versions of their choosing...
If I understand, (4) is saying that if the API of the LGPL'd code is modified, such mods must be source distributed. Isn't that covered by (3) already?
Why the fuck [shouldn't health care be for-profit?
Because none of the following are present in healthcare, and all are required for a functioning free market:
elasticity of demand
elasticity of supply (aka low barriers to market entry)
consumers informed sufficiently to make intelligent choices
Free markets are great when these are the case. Health care misses all by quite a lot. NOTE TO SELF-TAUGHT ECONOMICS WANNABES: Free markets are not the right solution for everything.
The "e-voting" concept should be that the computer prints the ballot and that paper ballot is your vote. That ballot lists ONLY the names you chose. You read that and drop it into the ballot box.
The computer counts the number of paper ballots it has printed for each candidate. This number can be released to the news agencies. But the real vote is the paper ballot.
At the end of the day, the names of the voters who used that machine are counted, the paper ballots are counted and both of those are compared to the total number of votes the machine says were cast. If they don't match, there is a problem.
In case of recount, the paper ballots are hand counted.
A random number of machines are checked against the ballots cast at them.
The fact that this is such an obvious solution and that it is so trivial to implement is what makes the chosen convoluted, hackable, no-recount alternative so suspicious. What company would choose (and what government would allow) anything but the easy and elegant solution described if not because they plan to perpetrate election fraud?
If so many people had departed as suggested in the Bible, then many critical tasks would have gone undone or would have been performed poorly due to low staffing or unskilled workers performing the tasks in the place of the slaves.
There are no records to indicate any such crisis to the KMT economy.
One of the tasks previously performed by the slaves was that of record-keeping.
The ATM like most inventions is both a social and a technical problem.
It has to be understood and trusted by the customer, it has to be
understood and trusted by the bank. The solution to the problem is
not a trivial achievement.
Ok, but I'd think that that solution/achievement was realized with the involvement of many people, and by their orchestrating what amounts to a PR and marketing campaign. The technology involved was trivial, consisting of fundamentally minor modifications to existing appliances, and dwarfed in complexity by many other already-common things like the automobile. Yet the way it's framed here (the aha moment in the bath) invites the reader to suppose that the mere idea to do it was something great. I think that too many people worship themselves and others on the supposition that various ideas could only have come to those who were first on record to utter them, whereas in fact they simply happened to be the earliest to do all of (a) realizing something was needed, or hearing someone else realize something was needed (b) communicating that idea to the right people with the right funding and manufacturing capability and (c) happening to have the outcome be that the thing caught on. It's one thing to appreciate progress, but there's too much hero-worship and narcissism in the world that isn't warranted.
Inspiration had struck Mr Shepherd-Barron, now 82, while he was in the bath.... " It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.""
The subtext to the above seems to be that this "invention" was some kind of genius. I disagree; this is an obvious and straightforward usage of technology that would have been "invented" by a hundred other people within the span of a few years had not someone else first done it.
And the detail about replacing chocolate bars with cash just rings of the same mindset that has lead to so many patents of similarly obvious things, like "selling goods and services... OVER THE INTERNET! The idea came to me when I realized in a flash of inspiration that people could use the internet to communicate their desired purchases." What'll they think of next, phones that have a built-in organizer?? What an age we live in...
I actually own a video-capable iPod but I have never used the feature except once or twice for the novelty when it was brand new. Likewise, I have no desire to listen to the radio -- that's exactly why I use an iPod. It can do a number of other things I don't need, and don't really care about. I like it because it's very good at its primary function of being an MP3 player and does so in style. The rest is fluff and I couldn't really care less about it.
Just to weigh in with another point of view, I too have a video ipod and am head over heels in love with the ability to watch video on it. I can see various valid reasons why not everybody would use an ipod to view video, but for me it has become by far the best and most fun way to see movies.
(I couldn't read the pdf for some reason but re the others) The links you gave are to news articles referring to alleged studies, not studies themselves. Actual studies have a number of important traits: (1) they precisely list what controls were employed (2) the list what assumptions were made (3) they produce statistical confidence levels (4) they list where funding and initiative came from for the study (5) they give enough information for other interested researchers to contact the study authors. Without these pieces of information, all one has is political spin and allegation. Not trying to be pedantic here, these are well-established foundations of research publication, and for good reason.
I notice that the first link alleges that it's not cellphone operation that's the problem but just being in a conversation. So where are the studies examining whether talking to a passenger endangers everyone similarly? Surely that's a reasonable line of investigation, given the first link's allegations. Along with many, many others.
With broadcast regs, it is reasoned that the airwaves are a limited public resource. Thus, the public supposedly has a right to regulate content broadcast over it.
The implication being that the public wants the content regulations currently in place? I know *I* don't want them. And I don't recall being asked.
When I say "Macs cost more than PCs" what I actually mean to say is that "Apple isn't in the low end market". Of course, everyone I say the former to understands that I mean the later, except the Apple advocates.
I think they (or anyone) could be forgiven for not understanding what you mean. If I can buy 1 pound of sugar for $1 at Safeway, or 100 pounds of sugar for $2 at Costco, and a friend asked me whether Safeway or Costco had cheaper sugar, it'd be negligent+misleading of me to simply answer "Safeway".
The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear head to help carry injured soldiers out of combat. The "friendly appearance" of the robot is designed to put the wounded at ease.
Damn! That is SO much better than the prototype my startup has been working on for five years, which has a metal skull for a head and wears grim reaper robes. Teddy bears! Why didn't we think of that?? I mean, we should have realized we were on the wrong path since our prototypes weren't testing well (lots of heart attacks in the focus groups)... boy is my face red.
How [do watermarked mp3s enable data tracking]? Keep them on computers that you control, and nothing is tracked.
If you use iTunes to manage your ipod, then the ability to track marked mp3s is (IMO) obvious. That there are alternatives to using iTunes is (1) mostly moot, since most people will use iTunes to do it, and (2) incidental, in that Apple hasn't happened to get around to making the protocols completely opaque yet.
Please explain how a username EMBEDDED into the AAC file itself is equivalent to a camera monitoring somebody?
(I didn't read the GP but) it's an analogy. Cameras record people, and those people don't know to what purposes the data will be put. Likewise, watermarked mp3s enable the tracking of data that people know neither when its collected nor how it is -- or will be -- used.
Slashdot Mirror
Substantial over-generalization... I'll settle for "many scientific endeavors are well-assisted by math." Science is fundamentally the process of evaluating a hypothesis. If my hypothesis is that the next time I close my eyes I'll smell tulips, there's no math involved in evaluating this. I could *make* it mathematical, changing my hypothesis to something statistical, like "50% of people smell tulips upon closing their eyes at least some of the time"... but that's a different hypothesis.
I totally know what you're feeling. I lived in a big city on the coast for twenty years (San Fran). One catchy way I think of it is that I loved the people but not the population. Four years ago I bit the bullet and moved my family to a small town far away where we knew nobody. We chose the town per a careful survey of housing prices, population density, job market, and culture. The two things I'll say are (1) it was the hardest fucking thing I've ever done in my life, and (2) I'm so glad I did it.
Guess again.
Don't be so hasty in your optimism. The only reason We The People can see google maps is because the government is allowing it; all the govt has to do is make it illegal for the public to access it, and poof the alleged hedge against tyranny evaporates.
Consider the extensive network of cameras in England. Can anyone see their contents? Nope. Just the government. Wanna bet who'll be able to access the views of the extensive camera network planned for Manhattan?
And pay attention: police in this country are increasingly trying their hand at suppressing/confiscating/outlawing citizen camera operation. Note the numerous stories about permits being required for operating cameras, about "illegal wiretap" laws being used to incarcerate people using cameras, and on and on.
IMO the definition of stealing should be that of taking something for one's self and -- in so doing -- depriving the previous holder of that something *against the previous holder's will*. For example, if someone tells me, "I want you to get rid of the furniture in this house, as I don't want the furniture anymore" and I take all the furniture and put it in my house, have I stolen? If the owner specifically said, "And don't do anything with it other than destroy it", I'd certainly be violating his wishes and (to whatever extent contractually enforceable) violating the law... but I don't think the particular crime would be stealing. Probably something more like "misappropriation". I admit it's kind of a gray area, but given that it's gray I come down on the "it's not stealing" side, since the term "stealing" has been so abused by the MAFIAA.
I'm not sympathizing or condemning, and it's beside the point, but: copying files is NOT stealing. It may be illicit, illegal, immoral, or any of a number of other things that people other than me can debate. But it's not stealing. Stealing would be if they copied the files and erased them off of the hard drives, thereby depriving the hardware owners of the data.
Because none of the following are present in healthcare, and all are required for a functioning free market:
- elasticity of demand
- elasticity of supply (aka low barriers to market entry)
- consumers informed sufficiently to make intelligent choices
Free markets are great when these are the case. Health care misses all by quite a lot. NOTE TO SELF-TAUGHT ECONOMICS WANNABES: Free markets are not the right solution for everything.Wasn't there some movie about this? Nitin and Kumar go to Black Hat, or some such?
One of the tasks previously performed by the slaves was that of record-keeping.
Ok, but I'd think that that solution/achievement was realized with the involvement of many people, and by their orchestrating what amounts to a PR and marketing campaign. The technology involved was trivial, consisting of fundamentally minor modifications to existing appliances, and dwarfed in complexity by many other already-common things like the automobile. Yet the way it's framed here (the aha moment in the bath) invites the reader to suppose that the mere idea to do it was something great. I think that too many people worship themselves and others on the supposition that various ideas could only have come to those who were first on record to utter them, whereas in fact they simply happened to be the earliest to do all of (a) realizing something was needed, or hearing someone else realize something was needed (b) communicating that idea to the right people with the right funding and manufacturing capability and (c) happening to have the outcome be that the thing caught on. It's one thing to appreciate progress, but there's too much hero-worship and narcissism in the world that isn't warranted.
The subtext to the above seems to be that this "invention" was some kind of genius. I disagree; this is an obvious and straightforward usage of technology that would have been "invented" by a hundred other people within the span of a few years had not someone else first done it.
And the detail about replacing chocolate bars with cash just rings of the same mindset that has lead to so many patents of similarly obvious things, like "selling goods and services... OVER THE INTERNET! The idea came to me when I realized in a flash of inspiration that people could use the internet to communicate their desired purchases." What'll they think of next, phones that have a built-in organizer?? What an age we live in...
How is this a step forward, I thought we already had gates that were NOT quantum gates...
Just to weigh in with another point of view, I too have a video ipod and am head over heels in love with the ability to watch video on it. I can see various valid reasons why not everybody would use an ipod to view video, but for me it has become by far the best and most fun way to see movies.
I notice that the first link alleges that it's not cellphone operation that's the problem but just being in a conversation. So where are the studies examining whether talking to a passenger endangers everyone similarly? Surely that's a reasonable line of investigation, given the first link's allegations. Along with many, many others.
Great. Now just tell us where these studies are so we can evaluate them, rather than inviting us to give sheep-like acceptance to the idea.
The implication being that the public wants the content regulations currently in place? I know *I* don't want them. And I don't recall being asked.
I think they (or anyone) could be forgiven for not understanding what you mean. If I can buy 1 pound of sugar for $1 at Safeway, or 100 pounds of sugar for $2 at Costco, and a friend asked me whether Safeway or Costco had cheaper sugar, it'd be negligent+misleading of me to simply answer "Safeway".
Darwinism in action. People who believe velociraptors look peaceful and cuddly will be exiting the pool.
Damn! That is SO much better than the prototype my startup has been working on for five years, which has a metal skull for a head and wears grim reaper robes. Teddy bears! Why didn't we think of that?? I mean, we should have realized we were on the wrong path since our prototypes weren't testing well (lots of heart attacks in the focus groups)... boy is my face red.
If you use iTunes to manage your ipod, then the ability to track marked mp3s is (IMO) obvious. That there are alternatives to using iTunes is (1) mostly moot, since most people will use iTunes to do it, and (2) incidental, in that Apple hasn't happened to get around to making the protocols completely opaque yet.
(I didn't read the GP but) it's an analogy. Cameras record people, and those people don't know to what purposes the data will be put. Likewise, watermarked mp3s enable the tracking of data that people know neither when its collected nor how it is -- or will be -- used.
Java speeds still lag far behind native code speeds.
we've got .NET / Mono.
For whatever reasons, these api's haven't spread far beyond Windows boxes.
And we got Cygwin, which allows you to use the Linux API on Windows.
The difference here would be that Cygwin requires a recompilation... while the new offering does not require compilation.