This seems obvious to me. Could someone explain what the argument for cameras even is?
It's hard enough for a human police officer -- possessing a far greater sensory capacity than these cameras -- to monitor a busy street when he's there in person. What makes us think that a single officer can monitor ten streets with his attention divided among ten cameras? Is there any evidence that this approach is effective?
One thing it seems we can be sure of is that cameras in general do not deter crime by their presence, perhaps because people learn that they are so ineffective.
Sometimes they are; that's why we have paragraphs. Given this particular sentence as an example, your excuse in insufficient as the thoughts being expressed are not complex at all.
The correct defense of this particular sentence is that it is written in legalese. I'm anything but a lawyer, but even I understand the need for judicial orders to be written in a very specific style designed to minimize any possible confusion of meaning. The result is not always particularly clear as English.
What does the binary language of the CPU have to do with the quality of the hardware? Who cares? By "quality hardware", I'm sure that we would mean something more important than that.
Witness the process of lowered expectations as applied to Microsoft software. We've gone from "Outlook/Exchange is a fantastic product" to "do users REALLY need multiple gigabytes of email"?
For shame. Of course they do, and there should be no debate about this in 2008. GMail's capabilities have proven to millions of users the benefits of having a large, centralized mail store that is accessible (and searchable) from any device.
I haven't run an Exchange server since the days when Outlook would silently(!) corrupt PST files that attempted to exceed 2GB in size, so perhaps they have improved it a lot. But when I see someone defend Exchange by saying users don't really need a mere few gigs of email, I doubt it.
Cool idea! Now I'll go break my neighbor's window with a brick. Sure I'll have to pay for the damage, but I'll also be owed a share of the profits from the people who make the replacement window, and from the people who install the window. Until I get my share of those I'll refuse to pay, which means even more money will be generated when my neighbor hires a lawyer to sue me. If I'm really lucky, the local newspaper will cover the whole incident, which will entitle me to a share of the newspaper's profits!
Ok then, go write me a program that determines whether to stop at a yellow light or continue. Be sure to take into account the distance, car make/model, amount of stuff/people in the car, the weather, the slope, and whether someone is tailgating, among other factors. Keep in mind that the distance will not be supplied in feet or meters but in measurements like "kinda-sorta far" and "closer than last time".
Come back to me when you have memorized your program and can run it in your head within one second, and it produces correct results in absolutely all situations, including situations never encountered before (like driving a different car than usual).
The problem many people seem to be missing is that a yellow light requires the driver to make a judgement as to whether they can stop in time. There are no markings or hard-and-fast rules that make this judgement easy.
Many lights are timed so that this judgement must be made in a fraction of a second, which is difficult for many drivers. This is not enough time to make much of a conscious analysis so many times what you get from the driver is a reaction, not a decision.
Even if the driver is expecting the possibility of the light turning yellow, the reaction will not always be accurate. If the reactive mind decides to continue through the intersection but subsequently becomes uncomfortable with that decision, the choice to gun the engine is a natural reaction (now that it is too late to go back and stop).
It's easy for an observer like yourself to come around and say "gee, that's not what you're supposed to do", but reactions like this cannot be addressed with arguments. People can get better with practice, but allowing more "wiggle room" will be a more effective solution overall (since the average experience level of the driving public is unlikely to increase).
Bravo... there ought to be a law requiring this post to be reproduced on every credit card application. Sadly, I'm sure that it would make no difference.
You're forgetting that some Slashdotters have been taught that there's some law requiring corporations to be evil as long as there is profit in it. After all, if it's in a documentary it must be true.
Well, obviously you could guess where the 5,000 number came from, but I couldn't tell you in polite company.
The real threshold should probably be some percentage of the population, like 0.5% or something. Again, that percentage comes from the same source.
The point is that rather than arguing endlessly about exactly where to draw the line between a butter knife and a nuclear warhead, we should use some simple metric based on the government's military power.
Well, we could be a little more balanced than that. After all, there could be legitimate reasons for the military to have something like a tank, but we don't really want private companies to be driving tanks around -- that would hardly protect individual rights. Instead, I think we need some threshold; say if the military has more than 5,000 of any particular type of weapon, it becomes fair game.
Even that would be passe at this point -- years ago Google announced GMail on April 1 and with the claim that they would offer 1GB of storage a lot of people were tricked into thinking it was an April Fool.
At this point the obvious creative thing to do would be to skip April 1 and make everyone think that Slashdot had changed their ways, and there would be much rejoicing... then have a hideously annoying gag the next day.
I don't know, maybe it's nit-picking, but any kill signal (including -9) will have no effect on a zombie process, pretty much by definition. A "zombie" process is just an entry in the process table that can't be removed for some reason (usually because the parent process hasn't read its exit code). There isn't any actual process associated with it, so no signals have any effect.
But seriously, at the risk of wasting a funny post, who modded the parent insightful? Why is it that dark, brooding fears about the future are considered so profound? I mean really, +5 Insightful?
That sort of nonsense makes a captivating story for those who disagree with the course of human society and progress. It's the ultimate modern power fantasy to be so right in your views of economics, ecology, sociology, etc that everyone dies because they didn't listen to you.
That's why peak oil, for instance, is almost never discussed as an opportunity to make an absolute killing on some other energy source (of which there are plenty) -- it's always about how nobody will be able to grow crops and we will all die.
Seriously though, I'd like to know exactly what makes life on gas giants so unlikely. You've got all sorts of chemicals swirling around, different temperatures at different depths, and frequent capture of diverse debris. We've hardly explored the interiors of the gas giants right here in our own system, so what's the basis for ruling out life on gas giants 60 ly away?
I'm sure there's good science involved, I'm just curious to know what it is.
Your feeling of offense, like anger at the weather, is perhaps justified but most certainly useless.
The problem with profanity, and government censorship thereof, is that profane speech is such a slippery topic. An example: Fark is a moderated forum, and there's nothing particularly wrong with a privately-controlled forum exercising censorship. But as a whole, it's doubtful that restricting profanity has elevated the level of discourse. People seem encouraged to write "shiat", though there is no possible argument that this is any different from the word that they are avoiding. At the same time, a disgusting word has been invented which means (of all things) "child", and personally I cannot imagine how any word could ever be more offensive, but it seems to be allowed without complaint. Here on Slashdot it's rare that anyone would use either word, but that is probably due to the different audience that this site attracts.
I'm sure that, over time, social awareness of this word will increase, and it will be placed on the list of words that are frequently objected to. I'm sure that by then there will be plenty of new words, and ultimately there is no purpose or meaning to such an arms race. In particular, you can be sure that no part of the process will raise the level of discourse or improve anyone's vocabulary.
Just a followup/clarification to my last post: my problem is that you're provided me with a program that cannot be executed -- a function that never returns. That doesn't let me know the exact value of pi; it lets me calculate it to some arbitrary precision.
I see that you've provided a program with an infinite number of steps. That isn't exactly a value; more of a definition, wouldn't you say? The definition of pi as "ratio of circumference to diameter" also tells me how to obtain pi, but it certainly isn't the value of pi.
This is very different from the example given in the original post of 1/3, which is only one step.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems obvious to me. Could someone explain what the argument for cameras even is?
It's hard enough for a human police officer -- possessing a far greater sensory capacity than these cameras -- to monitor a busy street when he's there in person. What makes us think that a single officer can monitor ten streets with his attention divided among ten cameras? Is there any evidence that this approach is effective?
One thing it seems we can be sure of is that cameras in general do not deter crime by their presence, perhaps because people learn that they are so ineffective.
Some of us are long since bored with karma and just hang out here in the hopes of finding a good opportunity for a joke.
Sometimes they are; that's why we have paragraphs. Given this particular sentence as an example, your excuse in insufficient as the thoughts being expressed are not complex at all.
The correct defense of this particular sentence is that it is written in legalese. I'm anything but a lawyer, but even I understand the need for judicial orders to be written in a very specific style designed to minimize any possible confusion of meaning. The result is not always particularly clear as English.
I'm ecstatic for you. Are you also great with databases?
What does the binary language of the CPU have to do with the quality of the hardware? Who cares? By "quality hardware", I'm sure that we would mean something more important than that.
Witness the process of lowered expectations as applied to Microsoft software. We've gone from "Outlook/Exchange is a fantastic product" to "do users REALLY need multiple gigabytes of email"?
For shame. Of course they do, and there should be no debate about this in 2008. GMail's capabilities have proven to millions of users the benefits of having a large, centralized mail store that is accessible (and searchable) from any device.
I haven't run an Exchange server since the days when Outlook would silently(!) corrupt PST files that attempted to exceed 2GB in size, so perhaps they have improved it a lot. But when I see someone defend Exchange by saying users don't really need a mere few gigs of email, I doubt it.
Trigun, duh.
Cool idea! Now I'll go break my neighbor's window with a brick. Sure I'll have to pay for the damage, but I'll also be owed a share of the profits from the people who make the replacement window, and from the people who install the window. Until I get my share of those I'll refuse to pay, which means even more money will be generated when my neighbor hires a lawyer to sue me. If I'm really lucky, the local newspaper will cover the whole incident, which will entitle me to a share of the newspaper's profits!
Ok then, go write me a program that determines whether to stop at a yellow light or continue. Be sure to take into account the distance, car make/model, amount of stuff/people in the car, the weather, the slope, and whether someone is tailgating, among other factors. Keep in mind that the distance will not be supplied in feet or meters but in measurements like "kinda-sorta far" and "closer than last time".
Come back to me when you have memorized your program and can run it in your head within one second, and it produces correct results in absolutely all situations, including situations never encountered before (like driving a different car than usual).
The problem many people seem to be missing is that a yellow light requires the driver to make a judgement as to whether they can stop in time. There are no markings or hard-and-fast rules that make this judgement easy.
Many lights are timed so that this judgement must be made in a fraction of a second, which is difficult for many drivers. This is not enough time to make much of a conscious analysis so many times what you get from the driver is a reaction, not a decision.
Even if the driver is expecting the possibility of the light turning yellow, the reaction will not always be accurate. If the reactive mind decides to continue through the intersection but subsequently becomes uncomfortable with that decision, the choice to gun the engine is a natural reaction (now that it is too late to go back and stop).
It's easy for an observer like yourself to come around and say "gee, that's not what you're supposed to do", but reactions like this cannot be addressed with arguments. People can get better with practice, but allowing more "wiggle room" will be a more effective solution overall (since the average experience level of the driving public is unlikely to increase).
What is right and wrong will always be a subjective and philosophical definition.
I don't agree with that in the least.
Bravo... there ought to be a law requiring this post to be reproduced on every credit card application. Sadly, I'm sure that it would make no difference.
You're forgetting that some Slashdotters have been taught that there's some law requiring corporations to be evil as long as there is profit in it. After all, if it's in a documentary it must be true.
Well, obviously you could guess where the 5,000 number came from, but I couldn't tell you in polite company.
The real threshold should probably be some percentage of the population, like 0.5% or something. Again, that percentage comes from the same source.
The point is that rather than arguing endlessly about exactly where to draw the line between a butter knife and a nuclear warhead, we should use some simple metric based on the government's military power.
Well, we could be a little more balanced than that. After all, there could be legitimate reasons for the military to have something like a tank, but we don't really want private companies to be driving tanks around -- that would hardly protect individual rights. Instead, I think we need some threshold; say if the military has more than 5,000 of any particular type of weapon, it becomes fair game.
Indeed... but I'm not sure that's the plan either. My guess is that when the prank finally hits, it's really going to hurt.
Even that would be passe at this point -- years ago Google announced GMail on April 1 and with the claim that they would offer 1GB of storage a lot of people were tricked into thinking it was an April Fool.
At this point the obvious creative thing to do would be to skip April 1 and make everyone think that Slashdot had changed their ways, and there would be much rejoicing... then have a hideously annoying gag the next day.
I don't know, maybe it's nit-picking, but any kill signal (including -9) will have no effect on a zombie process, pretty much by definition. A "zombie" process is just an entry in the process table that can't be removed for some reason (usually because the parent process hasn't read its exit code). There isn't any actual process associated with it, so no signals have any effect.
Yeah, it takes MONEY, and in NASA's case that's money from Congress. You think they have a rocket factory in the basement? Sheesh.
But seriously, at the risk of wasting a funny post, who modded the parent insightful? Why is it that dark, brooding fears about the future are considered so profound? I mean really, +5 Insightful?
That sort of nonsense makes a captivating story for those who disagree with the course of human society and progress. It's the ultimate modern power fantasy to be so right in your views of economics, ecology, sociology, etc that everyone dies because they didn't listen to you.
That's why peak oil, for instance, is almost never discussed as an opportunity to make an absolute killing on some other energy source (of which there are plenty) -- it's always about how nobody will be able to grow crops and we will all die.
Seriously though, I'd like to know exactly what makes life on gas giants so unlikely. You've got all sorts of chemicals swirling around, different temperatures at different depths, and frequent capture of diverse debris. We've hardly explored the interiors of the gas giants right here in our own system, so what's the basis for ruling out life on gas giants 60 ly away?
I'm sure there's good science involved, I'm just curious to know what it is.
Love.
Your feeling of offense, like anger at the weather, is perhaps justified but most certainly useless.
The problem with profanity, and government censorship thereof, is that profane speech is such a slippery topic. An example: Fark is a moderated forum, and there's nothing particularly wrong with a privately-controlled forum exercising censorship. But as a whole, it's doubtful that restricting profanity has elevated the level of discourse. People seem encouraged to write "shiat", though there is no possible argument that this is any different from the word that they are avoiding. At the same time, a disgusting word has been invented which means (of all things) "child", and personally I cannot imagine how any word could ever be more offensive, but it seems to be allowed without complaint. Here on Slashdot it's rare that anyone would use either word, but that is probably due to the different audience that this site attracts.
I'm sure that, over time, social awareness of this word will increase, and it will be placed on the list of words that are frequently objected to. I'm sure that by then there will be plenty of new words, and ultimately there is no purpose or meaning to such an arms race. In particular, you can be sure that no part of the process will raise the level of discourse or improve anyone's vocabulary.
Just a followup/clarification to my last post: my problem is that you're provided me with a program that cannot be executed -- a function that never returns. That doesn't let me know the exact value of pi; it lets me calculate it to some arbitrary precision.
I see that you've provided a program with an infinite number of steps. That isn't exactly a value; more of a definition, wouldn't you say? The definition of pi as "ratio of circumference to diameter" also tells me how to obtain pi, but it certainly isn't the value of pi.
This is very different from the example given in the original post of 1/3, which is only one step.