the Cuban Tourist Ministry, estimates that if Americans were free to travel to Cuba today, the number of visitors would increase by two million the first year
I've been to Cuba 5 times in the last 8 years or so, and while I really like Cuba and the Cubans, I've also seen a considerable decline over that time.
The quality of the service has gone down. The resort staff are much less interested in good service and are now expecting tips. They doubled the size of the airport, but their internal stuff couldn't scale, so there can be days where it takes hours to check in for your flight.
Cuba has a lot of older resorts. It's still a really poor country with some shady infrastructure.
If you start throwing millions of Americans into that mix, I firmly believe the systems won't be able to handle it.
The last two times I was there the airport devolved into madness and chaos, because they had more passengers and aircraft than they could handle.
And there's going to be a lot of disappointed Americans as they discover that the effects of the embargo is a country which is impoverished and can't give them the kind of experience they want.
Honestly, for me, Florida is becoming more attractive than Cuba. The same weather, all the first world amenities, and none of the tourist stomach ailments.
I just don't think Cuba will weather a sudden influx of more tourists who are expecting first world luxuries. Cuba is beautiful and charming, but it's also small and poor.
I think that question says "are you embarking on legal proceeding against me, or are you just flapping your gums?".
If the officer isn't detaining you, he's not doing anything other than speaking to you and you can walk away from him, or just stand there.
That, of course, assumes the police officer knows or cares what that is supposed to mean... just like the officer obviously neither knows nor cares about the fact that you can legally film him in the first place.
The problem becomes when police don't give a fuck about the law, attempt to illegally detain you, and then when you say "what the hell are you doing?" they charge you with resisting arrest, despite that you weren't being arrested.
In theory this says "unless you are arresting me, this is a voluntary interaction which I am ending".
In practice, I'm not convinced all the police know or care about these things, because they believe they can do whatever they wish.
And it's those police officers who are causing us to say "fuck it, I can't tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones, so put a body camera on them at all times and stop trusting them at their word". And I'm sorry to the good police who feel all butt hurt over this, but too damned bad.
Honestly, for some of us "hack" means anywhere from "an inelegant but necessary workaround", to "a really awesome and unexpected use of something", to "defeating system security", or a clueless person bashing away at something they don't understand, or "something I just whipped up".
GP is absolutely correct... for many of us, "hack" is a very generic term.
Yeah, but is this a legally binding NDA... or is it some sorority mumbo-jumbo which amounts to "I swear on the holy training bra, as a testament to the paddling of the swollen ass, that I am beholden to the sorority, ack ack a-dack".
Maybe, just maybe, the oaths and rituals which take place in sororities and fraternities doesn't meed the legal threshold of a binding NDA?
I'm sorry, but people are talking about trademarking secret handshakes, which sounds idiotic to someone who only ever saw the fraternity system in bad movies.
So, just keep hearing Patrick Stewart saying "And now, the paddling of the swollen ass", and ask yourself... does this crap merit legal protection?
Sure, but by which point you're doing much more involved forensics and hunting this down.
In many companies, a misbehaving computer is just re-imaged.
We used to have a receptionist who put so much crap on her PC that every couple of months when she decided she'd broken it enough, they'd just re-image it.
Why nobody ever told her to stop putting that crap on in the first place I'll never understand.
In that kind of scenario, nobody would even know she had any specific malware or what it did.
Yes. They are going to learn very quickly that there is no such thing as "outside of U.S. jurisdiction".
Of course not, the US government has become the enforcement arm for the multinational copyright cartels.
Which is why industry groups write the text of trade agreements and then tell the US government to go implement it and pressure other countries to adopt it.
I think there is some kind of law that says all reports must be written in in passive voice
But, honestly, anybody old enough (by which I mean over around 30) who had a decent enough education had passive voice hammered into us for many many things.
Pretty much anything which was intended to be a factual reporting of something is supposed to be in passive voice.
So much so that when Microsoft introduced their annoying grammar checker it would give me warnings that I was writing in passive voice. Unfortunately I was writing technical stuff, and had no intention of writing "and then I'm all like pew pew, take that sucker".
By the time you're talking about anything written within the FBI, you're going to have this be even more pervasive.
I'd bet some of the Feds found Spot the Fed humorous...
Because, in all honesty, you can probably assume that the "trade deal" is heavily skewed to protect corporate interests, and will not benefit anybody else.
Essentially these treaties are heavily influenced (if not actually written) by corporate demands.
It's secret because if people knew the government was essentially acting as lackeys for the copyright cartels and the like, people might disagree with it.
It really can't be a good "treaty" if you have secret terms with each of the countries you're trying to get do sign on.
They just don't want their peers to know how much they're getting screwed by globalization.
Mark my words, the only ones who will benefit from this will be multinational corporations. And it will probably extend copyright in a few more countries.
Re:I'm sure no one will misconstrue this at all...
on
Apple's Plans For Your DNA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sure, until insurance companies and governments start demanding access to it.
You don't need to be much of a conspiracy nut to realize the potential for privacy invasion and abuse of this data is absolutely staggering.
There simply are way too few legal controls on how this stuff is used to safely make it as commonplace as that.
Essentially, corporations and the government will have massive databases of the DNA of pretty much everybody... and it will be used to deny you service, in criminal proceedings because they can demand it, and who knows what else.
DNA samples on an iPhone is a hell of a way to get the fully distopian future and Big Brother.. because you can bet your ass that secret warrants will be used to force companies to hand this stuff over and then have it collated into one big giant database.
I don't care if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, or anybody else... this is a creepy idea which will have enormous implications to society.
There have been enough high profile instances of police officers outright lying about what happened that I simply am not willing to assume they're telling the truth. Because often when a video shows up the police are proven to be lying.
If the good cops can't weed out the bad ones, then it's time to treat them all like children who can't be trusted.
In the fall of 2012, Ben Livingston (a past Stranger contributor) was the subject of a Washington State Patrol traffic stop. Livingston requested dash-cam video of the traffic stop, but the Washington State Patrol denied possessing such footage. The following year, Livingston, Rachner, Mocek, and Seattle civil rights attorney Cleveland Stockmeyer created a nonprofit called the Center for Open Policing (COP). Their first effort was to sue.
They won, and the state patrol settled to the tune of about $23,000. "I particularly enjoyed that case," said Mocek.
If you or I did that, it would be perjury and obstruction of justice.
This is a police force which was already under a federal consent decree... which means they've been acting like this for a long time.
Boo hoo... the poor police feel all ganged up on because they can't break the law and get away with it.
And though they have only combed through a small portion of the data, they say they have found several instances of officers appearing to lie, use racist language, and use excessive forceâ"with no consequences. In fact, they believe that the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has systematically "run interference" for cops. In the aforementioned cases of alleged officer misconduct, all of the involved officers were exonerated and still remain on the force.
"We're trying to do OPA's job for them because OPA was so explicitly not interested in doing their own job," said Rachner.
When the police ignore the law without consequence, someone needs to be doing something, because clearly the damned police are incapable of it.
Sorry, but crooked cops are just criminals like the rest of them... and they deserve the same treatment.
You mean when the police investigate their own misconduct they find there was none?
I'm shocked I tell 'ya.
And the police wonder why they're no longer treated with respect, while being people who regularly abuse their power and ignore the law. All cops need to start wearing body cameras at all times. Because it has reached the point where taking them at their word is a stupid idea.
If the police choose to ignore the law, they should be charged like the rest of us.
You could reasonably address this to some degree by marking the temporary lanes with colored paints.
Yeah, sure.
Let's change all construction practices and infrastructure to try to solve the ways in which self driving vehicles will be completely unprepared for the real world.
We can remove all the other drivers, embed tracking sensors in the road, build it out of special materials, put sensors everywhere. That will totally work. Except in the massive amount of places where it won't.
For these things to ever actually work in the real world, it's not the world which will have to adapt to them.
Who is going to pay for all of this? Everybody except the company who makes them.
"People" aren't pushing back, entrenched "organizations" are pushing back
Bullshit.
Municipalities and states which have passed laws around commercial for-hire vehicles are pushing back and saying "you don't get to tell us what our laws are". This has nothing to do with entrenched players pushing back other than them pointing out that if they're subject to those laws, Uber can't come along and claim to not be.
Let's keep some perspective, even while Uber is obviously circumventing laws
They're breaking the law, and throwing a whiny temper tantrum is irrelevant.
The laws exist to protect people from shady players without proper licensing and insurance looking to make a buck.
Uber is basically a dispatcher for illegal cabs. That's it.
You can claim it's some innovative noble thing to be assholes who ignore the law. But that doesn't make it true.
Criminal activity isn't a business model. It's a temper tantrum by greedy assholes who claim the law doesn't apply to them.
If by "pushing the boundaries" you mean "straight up ignoring the law", then that is essentially what they do.
They show up, say they're going to ignore the law because they're special little snowflakes, and then act like victims when they get told that's not going to work.
Their entire business model is "we don't give a crap about the law, because we're magical and special assholes".
Essentially they want to pretend that they shouldn't be covered by existing regulations.
I'm forced to conclude the owners are either massive assholes, or seriously delusional.
Sorry, but this is a $40 billion dollar corporation whose entire operations is based on ignoring laws and throwing a temper tantrum when they're enforced.
They say disruptive technology. I say uber douchebags.
Honestly, it's stupidity, and trying very hard to "protect" their culture and language.
This is a province where they've tried to get companies like "Canadian Tire" and "Home Depot" to rename their companies to French because they've outlawed English signage. It's a place where they keep trying to make it illegal to have your kids educated in English.
Ironically, French speakers from almost anywhere else in the world typically can't understand WTF Quebec people are saying.
From what I can tell, the only people who believe it have no other skills and are terrified that if the truth were known (that anyone can learn to program) then they'd no longer be special.
Well, then let's dispel with that piece of bullshit, shall we?
When I say "but many moons ago I was told by numerous profs that programming/CS had pretty much always been the bi-modal distribution"... I mean tenured professors, with PhD's, with published books and actively teaching in accredited universities. Not just "I heard it from a guy".
You seem to be comfortable suggesting I feel my penis will be larger if I convince myself this is a true fact. Allow me to suggest this: You're acting like a dick and making an ad-hominem attack -- a sign of a moron or an asshole; or both.
I'm telling you what I've heard from professors, and what I've personally seen.
I marked both first and second year CS courses, I have personally seen graphs of the same course's grades for a trailing decade. And it was empirically a real thing.
I honestly have no idea the extent to which this is universally applicable, isolated, or purely random. But I have had it described to me by professors, I have seen it in courses I've marked, and been hearing this 'factoid' for... well, almost three decades.
This doesn't come out of nowhere. It isn't a self inflating of ego. It is, in my own personal and exceedingly constrained opinion, an actual observation of reality. It is a thing, and I am curious as to what it really means.
If you think I have my personal identity wrapped up in being some special little snowflake who is unique as a programmer (something I no longer do, BTW)... well, either you're a moron, or you're just an ass who has no better reasoning skills than to fall back on the claims that I must be delusional and acting out of self interest in saying this.
I am genuinely curious if this is true, and would love to see definitive stats... it has always baffled me, but I've witnessed it... but if you think I'm saying this out of some mechanism of puffing myself up, then you can piss off.
But if you can state your counterargument without suggesting I need to justify my existence to you or anybody else, I might actually be interested in hearing evidence to the contrary.
Bah! For a cheaper, faster, better mission with a modest initial budget it's been an amazing success. NASA put two functioning units on Mars for not all that much money (in relative terms).. around $820 million dollars for the initial 90 days. Compared to military and other expenses... that's chump change.
The on-board computers are tiny by most standards:
Spirit's onboard computer uses a 20 MHz RAD6000 CPU with 128 MB of DRAM, 3 MB of EEPROM, and 256 MB of flash memory. The rover's operating temperature ranges from â'40 to +40 ÂC (â'40 to 104 ÂF) and radioisotope heater units provide a base level of heating, assisted by electrical heaters when necessary. A gold film and a layer of silica aerogel provide insulation.
Operating from -40C to +40C is absolutely not a "cool dry place"; it's a hostile environment. Did we mention the dust storms? And the radiation?
We're talking about something which had to travel millions of miles, not miss the planet, not get destroyed on landing, and which has been there for 11 years and is still (to some degree) an operational unit. It's sibling keeled over five years ago.
You go ahead and wait for something else to be impressed with, me, I'll be impressed right now.
Because there simply isn't another thing which has ever existed which humans have made which has operated and traveled on the surface of another planet for anywhere near as long as this thing has.
Opportunity needs to be recognized as an absolutely amazing achievement, because it absolutely is.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to Cuba 5 times in the last 8 years or so, and while I really like Cuba and the Cubans, I've also seen a considerable decline over that time.
The quality of the service has gone down. The resort staff are much less interested in good service and are now expecting tips. They doubled the size of the airport, but their internal stuff couldn't scale, so there can be days where it takes hours to check in for your flight.
Cuba has a lot of older resorts. It's still a really poor country with some shady infrastructure.
If you start throwing millions of Americans into that mix, I firmly believe the systems won't be able to handle it.
The last two times I was there the airport devolved into madness and chaos, because they had more passengers and aircraft than they could handle.
And there's going to be a lot of disappointed Americans as they discover that the effects of the embargo is a country which is impoverished and can't give them the kind of experience they want.
Honestly, for me, Florida is becoming more attractive than Cuba. The same weather, all the first world amenities, and none of the tourist stomach ailments.
I just don't think Cuba will weather a sudden influx of more tourists who are expecting first world luxuries. Cuba is beautiful and charming, but it's also small and poor.
I think that question says "are you embarking on legal proceeding against me, or are you just flapping your gums?".
If the officer isn't detaining you, he's not doing anything other than speaking to you and you can walk away from him, or just stand there.
That, of course, assumes the police officer knows or cares what that is supposed to mean ... just like the officer obviously neither knows nor cares about the fact that you can legally film him in the first place.
The problem becomes when police don't give a fuck about the law, attempt to illegally detain you, and then when you say "what the hell are you doing?" they charge you with resisting arrest, despite that you weren't being arrested.
In theory this says "unless you are arresting me, this is a voluntary interaction which I am ending".
In practice, I'm not convinced all the police know or care about these things, because they believe they can do whatever they wish.
And it's those police officers who are causing us to say "fuck it, I can't tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones, so put a body camera on them at all times and stop trusting them at their word". And I'm sorry to the good police who feel all butt hurt over this, but too damned bad.
Honestly, for some of us "hack" means anywhere from "an inelegant but necessary workaround", to "a really awesome and unexpected use of something", to "defeating system security", or a clueless person bashing away at something they don't understand, or "something I just whipped up".
GP is absolutely correct ... for many of us, "hack" is a very generic term.
Yeah, but is this a legally binding NDA ... or is it some sorority mumbo-jumbo which amounts to "I swear on the holy training bra, as a testament to the paddling of the swollen ass, that I am beholden to the sorority, ack ack a-dack".
Maybe, just maybe, the oaths and rituals which take place in sororities and fraternities doesn't meed the legal threshold of a binding NDA?
I'm sorry, but people are talking about trademarking secret handshakes, which sounds idiotic to someone who only ever saw the fraternity system in bad movies.
So, just keep hearing Patrick Stewart saying "And now, the paddling of the swollen ass", and ask yourself ... does this crap merit legal protection?
Sure, but by which point you're doing much more involved forensics and hunting this down.
In many companies, a misbehaving computer is just re-imaged.
We used to have a receptionist who put so much crap on her PC that every couple of months when she decided she'd broken it enough, they'd just re-image it.
Why nobody ever told her to stop putting that crap on in the first place I'll never understand.
In that kind of scenario, nobody would even know she had any specific malware or what it did.
Honestly though, a borked Windows box often just gets re-imaged because people aren't all that surprised by one which has gone flaky.
So, you know your machine is having problems, but that doesn't mean you know you have malware.
And, as TFA says:
Basically it sounds like there's not much left to look at.
Or, alternately ... why would I rely on someone else in the first place? Why would I waste time and bandwidth copying my files around the internet?
I'm probably in the minority, but I still buy CDs, rip them to MP3, and then put them on whatever the hell I like.
I don't have ads either. I also don't have DRM, annual fees, or any of the other crap associated with keeping my stuff in the cloud.
Of course not, the US government has become the enforcement arm for the multinational copyright cartels.
Which is why industry groups write the text of trade agreements and then tell the US government to go implement it and pressure other countries to adopt it.
But, honestly, anybody old enough (by which I mean over around 30) who had a decent enough education had passive voice hammered into us for many many things.
Pretty much anything which was intended to be a factual reporting of something is supposed to be in passive voice.
So much so that when Microsoft introduced their annoying grammar checker it would give me warnings that I was writing in passive voice. Unfortunately I was writing technical stuff, and had no intention of writing "and then I'm all like pew pew, take that sucker".
By the time you're talking about anything written within the FBI, you're going to have this be even more pervasive.
Don't they surgically remove the sense of humor?
Honesty, just don't use max power.
Everybody takes a microwave, sets it to max power, and presses start.
You have 9 other power settings besides "incinerate".
Show some restraint, Grasshopper.
Somewhere in there is a Farside cartoon waiting to happen.
Why was the grammatical badly?
Do they make you guys demonstrate any proficiency in the English language at all?
So, you put 10,000 lawyers and politicians into a hermetically sealed bag ... you launch that bag into space.
Once you've done that, get back to me and I'll tell you the rest.
Because, in all honesty, you can probably assume that the "trade deal" is heavily skewed to protect corporate interests, and will not benefit anybody else.
Essentially these treaties are heavily influenced (if not actually written) by corporate demands.
It's secret because if people knew the government was essentially acting as lackeys for the copyright cartels and the like, people might disagree with it.
It really can't be a good "treaty" if you have secret terms with each of the countries you're trying to get do sign on.
They just don't want their peers to know how much they're getting screwed by globalization.
Mark my words, the only ones who will benefit from this will be multinational corporations. And it will probably extend copyright in a few more countries.
Sure, until insurance companies and governments start demanding access to it.
You don't need to be much of a conspiracy nut to realize the potential for privacy invasion and abuse of this data is absolutely staggering.
There simply are way too few legal controls on how this stuff is used to safely make it as commonplace as that.
Essentially, corporations and the government will have massive databases of the DNA of pretty much everybody ... and it will be used to deny you service, in criminal proceedings because they can demand it, and who knows what else.
DNA samples on an iPhone is a hell of a way to get the fully distopian future and Big Brother .. because you can bet your ass that secret warrants will be used to force companies to hand this stuff over and then have it collated into one big giant database.
I don't care if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, or anybody else ... this is a creepy idea which will have enormous implications to society.
That is, until the video surfaces.
There have been enough high profile instances of police officers outright lying about what happened that I simply am not willing to assume they're telling the truth. Because often when a video shows up the police are proven to be lying.
If the good cops can't weed out the bad ones, then it's time to treat them all like children who can't be trusted.
If you or I did that, it would be perjury and obstruction of justice.
This is a police force which was already under a federal consent decree ... which means they've been acting like this for a long time.
Boo hoo ... the poor police feel all ganged up on because they can't break the law and get away with it.
Oh, look, fascists defending corrupt police forces.
How cute.
When the police ignore the law without consequence, someone needs to be doing something, because clearly the damned police are incapable of it.
Sorry, but crooked cops are just criminals like the rest of them ... and they deserve the same treatment.
You mean when the police investigate their own misconduct they find there was none?
I'm shocked I tell 'ya.
And the police wonder why they're no longer treated with respect, while being people who regularly abuse their power and ignore the law. All cops need to start wearing body cameras at all times. Because it has reached the point where taking them at their word is a stupid idea.
If the police choose to ignore the law, they should be charged like the rest of us.
Yeah, sure.
Let's change all construction practices and infrastructure to try to solve the ways in which self driving vehicles will be completely unprepared for the real world.
We can remove all the other drivers, embed tracking sensors in the road, build it out of special materials, put sensors everywhere. That will totally work. Except in the massive amount of places where it won't.
For these things to ever actually work in the real world, it's not the world which will have to adapt to them.
Who is going to pay for all of this? Everybody except the company who makes them.
Bullshit.
Municipalities and states which have passed laws around commercial for-hire vehicles are pushing back and saying "you don't get to tell us what our laws are". This has nothing to do with entrenched players pushing back other than them pointing out that if they're subject to those laws, Uber can't come along and claim to not be.
They're breaking the law, and throwing a whiny temper tantrum is irrelevant.
The laws exist to protect people from shady players without proper licensing and insurance looking to make a buck.
Uber is basically a dispatcher for illegal cabs. That's it.
You can claim it's some innovative noble thing to be assholes who ignore the law. But that doesn't make it true.
Criminal activity isn't a business model. It's a temper tantrum by greedy assholes who claim the law doesn't apply to them.
If by "pushing the boundaries" you mean "straight up ignoring the law", then that is essentially what they do.
They show up, say they're going to ignore the law because they're special little snowflakes, and then act like victims when they get told that's not going to work.
Their entire business model is "we don't give a crap about the law, because we're magical and special assholes".
Essentially they want to pretend that they shouldn't be covered by existing regulations.
I'm forced to conclude the owners are either massive assholes, or seriously delusional.
Sorry, but this is a $40 billion dollar corporation whose entire operations is based on ignoring laws and throwing a temper tantrum when they're enforced.
They say disruptive technology. I say uber douchebags.
Honestly, it's stupidity, and trying very hard to "protect" their culture and language.
This is a province where they've tried to get companies like "Canadian Tire" and "Home Depot" to rename their companies to French because they've outlawed English signage. It's a place where they keep trying to make it illegal to have your kids educated in English.
Ironically, French speakers from almost anywhere else in the world typically can't understand WTF Quebec people are saying.
No no no .. this is Quebec ... it's oui.
Well, then let's dispel with that piece of bullshit, shall we?
When I say "but many moons ago I was told by numerous profs that programming/CS had pretty much always been the bi-modal distribution" ... I mean tenured professors, with PhD's, with published books and actively teaching in accredited universities. Not just "I heard it from a guy".
You seem to be comfortable suggesting I feel my penis will be larger if I convince myself this is a true fact. Allow me to suggest this: You're acting like a dick and making an ad-hominem attack -- a sign of a moron or an asshole; or both.
I'm telling you what I've heard from professors, and what I've personally seen.
I marked both first and second year CS courses, I have personally seen graphs of the same course's grades for a trailing decade. And it was empirically a real thing.
I honestly have no idea the extent to which this is universally applicable, isolated, or purely random. But I have had it described to me by professors, I have seen it in courses I've marked, and been hearing this 'factoid' for ... well, almost three decades.
This doesn't come out of nowhere. It isn't a self inflating of ego. It is, in my own personal and exceedingly constrained opinion, an actual observation of reality. It is a thing, and I am curious as to what it really means.
If you think I have my personal identity wrapped up in being some special little snowflake who is unique as a programmer (something I no longer do, BTW)... well, either you're a moron, or you're just an ass who has no better reasoning skills than to fall back on the claims that I must be delusional and acting out of self interest in saying this.
I am genuinely curious if this is true, and would love to see definitive stats ... it has always baffled me, but I've witnessed it ... but if you think I'm saying this out of some mechanism of puffing myself up, then you can piss off.
But if you can state your counterargument without suggesting I need to justify my existence to you or anybody else, I might actually be interested in hearing evidence to the contrary.
Bah! For a cheaper, faster, better mission with a modest initial budget it's been an amazing success. NASA put two functioning units on Mars for not all that much money (in relative terms) .. around $820 million dollars for the initial 90 days. Compared to military and other expenses ... that's chump change.
The on-board computers are tiny by most standards:
Operating from -40C to +40C is absolutely not a "cool dry place"; it's a hostile environment. Did we mention the dust storms? And the radiation?
We're talking about something which had to travel millions of miles, not miss the planet, not get destroyed on landing, and which has been there for 11 years and is still (to some degree) an operational unit. It's sibling keeled over five years ago.
You go ahead and wait for something else to be impressed with, me, I'll be impressed right now.
Because there simply isn't another thing which has ever existed which humans have made which has operated and traveled on the surface of another planet for anywhere near as long as this thing has.
Opportunity needs to be recognized as an absolutely amazing achievement, because it absolutely is.