I have mixed feelings about Mr. Snowden..... his disclosures of NSA's domestic activities may have been legitimate, but I have yet to hear a good justification for his leaks about NSA's foreign operations.
Because maybe he wanted the whole world to know that the NSA are spying on everyone and not just tell Americans?
I don't expect many non-Americans to understand this, and even many of my fellow countryman will rush to shout me down, but NSA's overseas activities are legitimate activities that every other nation-state on the blue marble engages in.
To a point, but really, the rest of us aren't prepared to give up our rights and privacy for you guys.
Essentially you're saying "if he'd only leaked about what they're doing in the US, I wouldn't care because it doesn't affect me". The rest of the world doesn't see it that way.
If you think your country should act like self-entitled people whose security fears trump the rights of everyone else in the world, then you're kinda part of the problem of why Snowden leaked this in the first place.
I agree, and this is also why I tend to unplug my Kinect when I'm not using it (or keep the Xbox powered down).
That's why my Xbox got disconnected from the network. As soon as I started seeing ads and realized MS was using the network connection for their own benefit, it has never seen the network since.
Paper bags are hard to hold from the top and can't stand getting wet. Try carrying half-a dozen paper bags to the bust stop in the rain and you will see why they don't work so well in Europe.
Paper suffers from that same problem in a lot of places.
But grocery stores, at least where I'm at, have been selling re-usable bags with handles for years. We've got a bunch of them we've been using for at least 3-4 years. They also charge 5 cents/plastic bag to make people less interested in using them, and I think even offer a small discount per re-usable bag.
We still occasionally end up with plastic for one reason or another, but we find out re-usable bags hold a LOT more than the store plastic bags, and are far more durable (and machine washable despite being made out of recycled plastic bottles).
As much as I can, I don't want to get too many plastic bags. They do come in handy for small garbage bags and the like, but on balance, you'll accumulate a lifetime supply in a relatively short period.
Playing devil's advocate here... Why is this result some failure of the judge/jury of this case?
When the guy who invented public key encryption tells you that the basis of the patent had been around for years, that is a failure of the jury in this case.
At this point, I think people should just be suing the USPTO for lousy patents which should never have been granted in the first place.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to let the defendant be in charge of the judicial process.
They aren't.
But when the judicial process is demonstrated to be biased against one group of people, things get tossed out.
In this case, the people that determine what threat people pose as sex offenders were clearly acting in a way that was biased against the people in there. (You can become a 'sex offender' for the damnedest things, like peeing in public.)
And, quite frankly, if you're posting the details (even in the broad strokes) of cases you're adjudicating and indicating how you hate these people... congratulations, you have demonstrated bias and have possibly tainted the outcomes.
Due to Lynch's apparent bias, the court vacated the registry board's ruling against Doe and granted Doe another hearing. That resolution should be just the tip of the iceberg because every other case Lynch heard could be susceptible to similar claims of bias. Not only would any biased rulings by Lynch have potentially ruined people's lives, but it take years and enormous amounts of tax dollars to resolve the many likely bias claims from Lynch's prior cases.
That's not the defendant being in charge of the judicial process. That's the judicial process suffering a huge failure.
And if a judge went onto Facebook and said he hated all of the black defendants in his courtroom, then you could well expect a lot of his decisions to be reviewed very closely.
When your judicial system loses its objectivity, you are pretty much fucked unless you're prepared to correct it.
Now if you're proposing a legal framework where people are allowed to try and talk me into killing myself
Hell no.
I'm proposing a legal framework whereby someone can make that decision for themselves when and if the time is right, and have that be recognized as a valid choice.
The devil is in the details... my wife is a neurologist, and in her view she simply has to do what is best for the patients quality of life.
And at a certain point, it has to be the patient who decides if "life at any cost" is actually the better of the two choices.
If you know what you have is killing you, and the prospect of being kept alive for that just so we get to pretend that life is the better choice -- it really isn't a medical decision any more unless they think they can fix it.
I've know several people who had very long, protracted illnesses. They were in constant pain and misery long past the point where they felt it was necessary or served any point.
But if I've got six months to live in agony, or can choose to have it humanely ended sooner because nothing is going to change the fact that I'm dying soon, I'm always going to come down on the side that it's my choice, and it should be legal for a doctor to reach that medical decision with me.
Kill yourself all you want (please don't, though), but don't demand of us to let you kill other people.
Not asking for wholesale permission to kill other people.
I'm saying that the individual decision to choose when and how they die, including having a doctor humanely end the life of a terminal patient who has given prior consent and understands -- well, that's none of your business, and is purely between that person, their doctor, and their family.
You acting like you are required to 'let' this happen is where things fall apart -- because people who believe it's up to them to approve or deny these things have injected themselves into a conversation that has nothing to do with them.
You don't REALLY need to make those decisions if you trust your healthcare proxy
Yes, you do. If for nothing else so that if you ever reach a point where you are incapable of participating in the discussion that your wishes are unequivocal.
I don't want there to be room for debate of "are you sure he wanted this, maybe he really wanted this" -- I would want it in black and white saying "under these circumstances, stop all medical care".
As long as there's room for someone to refute that those are in fact your wishes, someone will try. And quite often, that someone has nothing at all to do with you or your family, but they're just someone opposed to what choices you can make based on their religion.
I don't allow other people's religion to affect my choices now, the last thing I want is when I'm incapable is to have that get injected into the conversation. Because I don't care if you or someone else thinks that my choosing to die in a manner of my choosing is a 'sin' (instead of being kept alive and in pain for no good reason) -- because I do not acknowledge your sense of 'sin' as being in any way relevant to the conversation.
My problem with this 'debate' is the hand-wringing by unaffected parties, and the inevitable illogical leap that next we'll be killing the old and infirm because they're inconvenient.
Nobody is saying we're going to kill you, and nobody is suggesting we make this easy or something hospital staff can decide when they get tired of changing your sheets.
But the people screeching the loudest about ensuring that other people do not have the right to choose their own death with dignity aren't even affected by it.
If I was terminally ill, and would rather die at a time of my own choosing, that should be my right. It should not be someone else's right to prevent this from happening based on their moral objections to it -- because it's none of their fucking business.
Usually when I hear someone fighting against doctor assisted suicide, they're doing it on purely religious grounds and expect the rest of us to care. It's usually just a much of moralizing old bitties who have said "killing anyone is bad, so you have to suffer, and if we let you die by your own choice next it will be us". I rank it right up there with someone trying to pass laws which define my morality and which has nothing to do with them.
I've known a few people who have died after the long, protracted palliative care which didn't serve any purpose but to prolong suffering and keep up the pretense it's a better option than dying.
And, I must confess, I share some of the same rage as Adams does on this. What your religion tells you about how you want to die has nothing at all to do with if I want to die in a long drawn-out process that serves no purpose. So I'm of the opinion that you don't get a vote about how/if I get to choose to die with some dignity.
And if you want a vote in that, my vote is that you should also die a long and horrible death.
It's own gravity is due to its own mass. However, if all fuel is exhausted, then what mass remains that the star is still endowed with such immense gravity? That is, what mass does a star have besides the helium and hydrogen that should be all gone at this point?
First of all, I'm not a physicist.
But, the fusion happening in a star means it's taking the hydrogen and helium and turning it into heavier elements like iron and the like. It's not "burning" fuel in the sense of consuming it and leaving smoke, but crazy big nuclear reactions are energetically making heavier kinds of matter (that's what fusion means, things are getting stuck together, as opposed to fission which is ripping things apart).
Once the crazy big nuclear reaction runs out, the forces keeping the star occupying a larger volume stop, and everything collapses in on itself.
Once that happens, it makes a really really big boom. Because eleventy zillion tons of hot iron and other stuff collapsing onto itself is, to make a huge understatement, exceedingly energetic -- to the point that it can briefly kick out things like gamma rays. (Because, as far as I understand, the magnitude of the collapse is well beyond anything we could even ponder and has a mass likely millions or billions of times that of the Earth.)
So the star hasn't exhausted its mass, it has exhausted its fuel. And then a really vast amount of mass collapses in on itself under its own gravity. And then we see some of the most energetic events we can even fathom. And the crazy collapse under gravity pushes matter to even more ridiculous levels of density, and then releases even more energy.
At least, that's my best understanding of it. I'm sure several people will tell me how horribly wrong I am. I already know it's horribly simplified.
1) We're slashdot and we think we know everything, they should have just asked us, how dare they
2) Maybe we might trust that a "A group of researchers from AMD and the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory" aren't idiots and wanted specific empirical evidence on the topic?
Is this why when I'm in an airplane I can never remember if I turned all the lights out?;-)
Re:WH Pushes Next Year's Enrollment Period Deadlin
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But in the end it is the socialist who is forcing their agenda on society.
Right, and the Tea Party in no way wants to force their agenda on society.
Oh, but wait, that's different, right? Because it's capitalism instead of socialism?
Such intellectual dishonesty and double standards is why we end up with two groups of idiots telling loudly they're 100% right and the other is 100% wrong -- when in practice, they're both full of shit.
Re:PA says UI is a mess, Ars liked it.
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I wasn't honestly making any specific claim about or against Ars, because I don't really read Ars very often.
I just added the corollary of "all reviews are broadly subjective, or paid for".
Re:PA says UI is a mess, Ars liked it.
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What baffles me about the whole thing is how can this scam be worth the expense of running a call center?
For the same reason spam is profitable, because 2% or so of people fall for it.
So you've got a whole large number of cheap labor, calling from VOIP lines overseas, who may or may not get told to fuck off 100 times each day. But the two who think you sound like you're legit, well, that's probably your quota anyway.
The economics of this doesn't mean you have a bunch of North Americans hanging around in a call center getting paid decent money. You have hundreds (or thousands) of people in a foreign country who have been coached to learn enough English who just call huge numbers of people and hope for even a modest rate of people falling for it.
Doesn't seem like they could call enough people that way to have reached everyone as many times as they have.
Do you know why some of the time you get nobody on the phone? The computers dial a vast amount of numbers, and when one connects they direct to an available operator. There isn't always someone there to answer.
And that's why you can get the same call 10 times in a week. It's purely made up on volume.
After all these years, when my phone rings, unless I know the number, recognize the voice, or can reach a threshold at which I believe that it's a legitimate call (which requires you be able to provide me with information, not the other way around) -- I more or less start out half hostile on the phone. Because some months, as many as 95% of all incoming calls are just scams. At least, before I started blocking "Unknown" and "Private Caller" -- if you won't tell me who you are, I'm not answering.
In fairness, this has nothing at all to do with Microsoft, other than most people have it, and most people aren't really tech savvy.
This is just social engineering. Some guys calls up, claims to be from "tech support" or "the Windows Service Provider" and tells you a little techno-babble that sounds scary.
They don't actually have any information about you, and if pressed couldn't even tell you your IP address or even your name -- it's just a blanket approach.
But then they tell you to follow some steps to give them access to your computer, and they make some mumbling about how bad it is and attempt to either steal your files, or convince you that you need to buy some extra services.
A friends father in law got scammed with this a few years ago, and my friend was somewhat livid because he'd explicitly told them about such scams and to hang up on anybody who is telling you that. But people don't know that Microsoft doesn't really have your phone number and aren't monitoring your system.
If you know that 80% of everyone is running Windows, and most of them don't really have a good understanding of what's going on, all you think is some friendly guy is contacting you to solve problems you didn't even know you had. It's just like spam, hit enough people and some fraction will fall for it.
I've actually spent the last 5+ years explaining to my parents how to spot a scam, why they should never trust someone who calls them, and to be generally skeptical of such things. I've managed to turn my parents into somewhat skeptical, and a lot more street smart people by hammering home some of this stuff. But I had a great aunt who was a lot more trusting and got scammed several times.
And since every time someone tries to implement a Do Not Call list, the lobbyists cry "but what about our business model" and the protections get weakened to the point of being meaningless.
And since everyone can fake their phone number (which to me is a huge part of the problem) people see something on their call display and believe it. Which means some douchebag is whateverthefuckistan can call you and look like anything they want to, and the phone companies and the companies who believe it's their right to call you exploit that.
I've actually set my Panasonic cordless phone to say "Unknown caller id means hang up", "Private caller means hang up". I still get stuff that gets through (when you see a local number and hear a long distance ring) -- but I start out with the assumption that I don't trust incoming callers.
But getting everyone to understand how these scams work is hard. Getting people to overcome a belief that others are honest and good takes work.
Don't we have laws against this kind of discriminatory crap?
Not when the benefactors of the laws are the ones writing them.
And since private industry has been writing the text of laws for lawmakers to rubber-stamp for several years now -- welcome to the future.
This is also how a lot of 'treaties' are written these days -- private industry tells government what they require, and the government (having been duly bought and paid for by lobbyists) obliges.
Slashdot Mirror
Because maybe he wanted the whole world to know that the NSA are spying on everyone and not just tell Americans?
To a point, but really, the rest of us aren't prepared to give up our rights and privacy for you guys.
Essentially you're saying "if he'd only leaked about what they're doing in the US, I wouldn't care because it doesn't affect me". The rest of the world doesn't see it that way.
If you think your country should act like self-entitled people whose security fears trump the rights of everyone else in the world, then you're kinda part of the problem of why Snowden leaked this in the first place.
That's why my Xbox got disconnected from the network. As soon as I started seeing ads and realized MS was using the network connection for their own benefit, it has never seen the network since.
Yeah, as tin-foil hattish as it is, my first though was "what, and give Google even more data, hell no".
I don't trust that it won't be listening when it's not supposed to, or that it won't be misusing that data.
I still use some Google stuff, but I'm increasingly treating them like they're an entity I would rather keep at arms length these days.
Paper suffers from that same problem in a lot of places.
But grocery stores, at least where I'm at, have been selling re-usable bags with handles for years. We've got a bunch of them we've been using for at least 3-4 years. They also charge 5 cents/plastic bag to make people less interested in using them, and I think even offer a small discount per re-usable bag.
We still occasionally end up with plastic for one reason or another, but we find out re-usable bags hold a LOT more than the store plastic bags, and are far more durable (and machine washable despite being made out of recycled plastic bottles).
As much as I can, I don't want to get too many plastic bags. They do come in handy for small garbage bags and the like, but on balance, you'll accumulate a lifetime supply in a relatively short period.
Because they have no business knowledge either? ;-)
When the guy who invented public key encryption tells you that the basis of the patent had been around for years, that is a failure of the jury in this case.
At this point, I think people should just be suing the USPTO for lousy patents which should never have been granted in the first place.
I've worked at places where everything gets built every night to ensure nobody has broken anything.
So, in some cases, you may well compile many many times.
I'm not sure it's how I'd primarily choose a compiler, but in some places it could certainly be a factor.
They aren't.
But when the judicial process is demonstrated to be biased against one group of people, things get tossed out.
In this case, the people that determine what threat people pose as sex offenders were clearly acting in a way that was biased against the people in there. (You can become a 'sex offender' for the damnedest things, like peeing in public.)
And, quite frankly, if you're posting the details (even in the broad strokes) of cases you're adjudicating and indicating how you hate these people ... congratulations, you have demonstrated bias and have possibly tainted the outcomes.
That's not the defendant being in charge of the judicial process. That's the judicial process suffering a huge failure.
And if a judge went onto Facebook and said he hated all of the black defendants in his courtroom, then you could well expect a lot of his decisions to be reviewed very closely.
When your judicial system loses its objectivity, you are pretty much fucked unless you're prepared to correct it.
Hell no.
I'm proposing a legal framework whereby someone can make that decision for themselves when and if the time is right, and have that be recognized as a valid choice.
And at a certain point, it has to be the patient who decides if "life at any cost" is actually the better of the two choices.
If you know what you have is killing you, and the prospect of being kept alive for that just so we get to pretend that life is the better choice -- it really isn't a medical decision any more unless they think they can fix it.
I've know several people who had very long, protracted illnesses. They were in constant pain and misery long past the point where they felt it was necessary or served any point.
But if I've got six months to live in agony, or can choose to have it humanely ended sooner because nothing is going to change the fact that I'm dying soon, I'm always going to come down on the side that it's my choice, and it should be legal for a doctor to reach that medical decision with me.
Not asking for wholesale permission to kill other people.
I'm saying that the individual decision to choose when and how they die, including having a doctor humanely end the life of a terminal patient who has given prior consent and understands -- well, that's none of your business, and is purely between that person, their doctor, and their family.
You acting like you are required to 'let' this happen is where things fall apart -- because people who believe it's up to them to approve or deny these things have injected themselves into a conversation that has nothing to do with them.
Yeah, then tell us why the death penalty closely corresponds with the bible belt?
Because it seems like a lot of religious people feel that revenge and two wrongs making a right is how it's supposed to be done.
Yes, you do. If for nothing else so that if you ever reach a point where you are incapable of participating in the discussion that your wishes are unequivocal.
I don't want there to be room for debate of "are you sure he wanted this, maybe he really wanted this" -- I would want it in black and white saying "under these circumstances, stop all medical care".
As long as there's room for someone to refute that those are in fact your wishes, someone will try. And quite often, that someone has nothing at all to do with you or your family, but they're just someone opposed to what choices you can make based on their religion.
I don't allow other people's religion to affect my choices now, the last thing I want is when I'm incapable is to have that get injected into the conversation. Because I don't care if you or someone else thinks that my choosing to die in a manner of my choosing is a
'sin' (instead of being kept alive and in pain for no good reason) -- because I do not acknowledge your sense of 'sin' as being in any way relevant to the conversation.
My problem with this 'debate' is the hand-wringing by unaffected parties, and the inevitable illogical leap that next we'll be killing the old and infirm because they're inconvenient.
Nobody is saying we're going to kill you, and nobody is suggesting we make this easy or something hospital staff can decide when they get tired of changing your sheets.
But the people screeching the loudest about ensuring that other people do not have the right to choose their own death with dignity aren't even affected by it.
If I was terminally ill, and would rather die at a time of my own choosing, that should be my right. It should not be someone else's right to prevent this from happening based on their moral objections to it -- because it's none of their fucking business.
Usually when I hear someone fighting against doctor assisted suicide, they're doing it on purely religious grounds and expect the rest of us to care. It's usually just a much of moralizing old bitties who have said "killing anyone is bad, so you have to suffer, and if we let you die by your own choice next it will be us". I rank it right up there with someone trying to pass laws which define my morality and which has nothing to do with them.
I've known a few people who have died after the long, protracted palliative care which didn't serve any purpose but to prolong suffering and keep up the pretense it's a better option than dying.
And, I must confess, I share some of the same rage as Adams does on this. What your religion tells you about how you want to die has nothing at all to do with if I want to die in a long drawn-out process that serves no purpose. So I'm of the opinion that you don't get a vote about how/if I get to choose to die with some dignity.
And if you want a vote in that, my vote is that you should also die a long and horrible death.
The exact same is true of capitalism.
So, teledildonics then?
You remember a 'helpful' Clippy? I mostly remember "it seems you are type, would you like a tutorial on that?".
In other words, completely useless and quite the opposite of 'helpful'.
First of all, I'm not a physicist.
But, the fusion happening in a star means it's taking the hydrogen and helium and turning it into heavier elements like iron and the like. It's not "burning" fuel in the sense of consuming it and leaving smoke, but crazy big nuclear reactions are energetically making heavier kinds of matter (that's what fusion means, things are getting stuck together, as opposed to fission which is ripping things apart).
Once the crazy big nuclear reaction runs out, the forces keeping the star occupying a larger volume stop, and everything collapses in on itself.
Once that happens, it makes a really really big boom. Because eleventy zillion tons of hot iron and other stuff collapsing onto itself is, to make a huge understatement, exceedingly energetic -- to the point that it can briefly kick out things like gamma rays. (Because, as far as I understand, the magnitude of the collapse is well beyond anything we could even ponder and has a mass likely millions or billions of times that of the Earth.)
So the star hasn't exhausted its mass, it has exhausted its fuel. And then a really vast amount of mass collapses in on itself under its own gravity. And then we see some of the most energetic events we can even fathom. And the crazy collapse under gravity pushes matter to even more ridiculous levels of density, and then releases even more energy.
At least, that's my best understanding of it. I'm sure several people will tell me how horribly wrong I am. I already know it's horribly simplified.
Well, there's two possible responses to this.
1) We're slashdot and we think we know everything, they should have just asked us, how dare they
2) Maybe we might trust that a "A group of researchers from AMD and the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory" aren't idiots and wanted specific empirical evidence on the topic?
Is this why when I'm in an airplane I can never remember if I turned all the lights out? ;-)
Right, and the Tea Party in no way wants to force their agenda on society.
Oh, but wait, that's different, right? Because it's capitalism instead of socialism?
Such intellectual dishonesty and double standards is why we end up with two groups of idiots telling loudly they're 100% right and the other is 100% wrong -- when in practice, they're both full of shit.
I wasn't honestly making any specific claim about or against Ars, because I don't really read Ars very often.
I just added the corollary of "all reviews are broadly subjective, or paid for".
Or outright paid for.
For the same reason spam is profitable, because 2% or so of people fall for it.
So you've got a whole large number of cheap labor, calling from VOIP lines overseas, who may or may not get told to fuck off 100 times each day. But the two who think you sound like you're legit, well, that's probably your quota anyway.
The economics of this doesn't mean you have a bunch of North Americans hanging around in a call center getting paid decent money. You have hundreds (or thousands) of people in a foreign country who have been coached to learn enough English who just call huge numbers of people and hope for even a modest rate of people falling for it.
Do you know why some of the time you get nobody on the phone? The computers dial a vast amount of numbers, and when one connects they direct to an available operator. There isn't always someone there to answer.
And that's why you can get the same call 10 times in a week. It's purely made up on volume.
After all these years, when my phone rings, unless I know the number, recognize the voice, or can reach a threshold at which I believe that it's a legitimate call (which requires you be able to provide me with information, not the other way around) -- I more or less start out half hostile on the phone. Because some months, as many as 95% of all incoming calls are just scams. At least, before I started blocking "Unknown" and "Private Caller" -- if you won't tell me who you are, I'm not answering.
In fairness, this has nothing at all to do with Microsoft, other than most people have it, and most people aren't really tech savvy.
This is just social engineering. Some guys calls up, claims to be from "tech support" or "the Windows Service Provider" and tells you a little techno-babble that sounds scary.
They don't actually have any information about you, and if pressed couldn't even tell you your IP address or even your name -- it's just a blanket approach.
But then they tell you to follow some steps to give them access to your computer, and they make some mumbling about how bad it is and attempt to either steal your files, or convince you that you need to buy some extra services.
A friends father in law got scammed with this a few years ago, and my friend was somewhat livid because he'd explicitly told them about such scams and to hang up on anybody who is telling you that. But people don't know that Microsoft doesn't really have your phone number and aren't monitoring your system.
If you know that 80% of everyone is running Windows, and most of them don't really have a good understanding of what's going on, all you think is some friendly guy is contacting you to solve problems you didn't even know you had. It's just like spam, hit enough people and some fraction will fall for it.
I've actually spent the last 5+ years explaining to my parents how to spot a scam, why they should never trust someone who calls them, and to be generally skeptical of such things. I've managed to turn my parents into somewhat skeptical, and a lot more street smart people by hammering home some of this stuff. But I had a great aunt who was a lot more trusting and got scammed several times.
And since every time someone tries to implement a Do Not Call list, the lobbyists cry "but what about our business model" and the protections get weakened to the point of being meaningless.
And since everyone can fake their phone number (which to me is a huge part of the problem) people see something on their call display and believe it. Which means some douchebag is whateverthefuckistan can call you and look like anything they want to, and the phone companies and the companies who believe it's their right to call you exploit that.
I've actually set my Panasonic cordless phone to say "Unknown caller id means hang up", "Private caller means hang up". I still get stuff that gets through (when you see a local number and hear a long distance ring) -- but I start out with the assumption that I don't trust incoming callers.
But getting everyone to understand how these scams work is hard. Getting people to overcome a belief that others are honest and good takes work.
Not when the benefactors of the laws are the ones writing them.
And since private industry has been writing the text of laws for lawmakers to rubber-stamp for several years now -- welcome to the future.
This is also how a lot of 'treaties' are written these days -- private industry tells government what they require, and the government (having been duly bought and paid for by lobbyists) obliges.