They might have sized the silk road website, but did they catch the suppliers and the dealers? No? Then this is a perfect real world example on how bitcoin can work for this type of business.
They also took all of their money that was still hosted in Silk Road's wallet at the time. That's a perfect real world example of why BitCoin *doesn't* work for this type of business.
Oh well, at least they know there's a Constitution, and that it governs a Republic (not a democracy) unlike Republicans and Democrats.
What do you think that means, and what do you think isn't being respected about that right now?
I'm always curious when people trot out that whole "Republic v. Democracy" bit, because it seems to be one of those commonly said phrases that means something completely different to most everyone who utters it.
What needs to happen is that there needs to be an in-depth and independent review of the effectiveness of the information gathering activity after the fact by a party other than the FISA court and security establishment.
What schema would you propose that differs from my own? You'd need someone with an understanding of probable cause (i.e. a court of some sort). You'd need someone with a reason to challenge it, so that an adversarial process is kept up, and it's not some sort of intra-government drum circle. You'd need some kind of security clearance to prevent data from leaking to the public if it turns out that it *is* good and useful (or that revealing it would put agents in harms way or undermine other good programs).
We should create a society of people who can handle responsibility and understand there are consequences to their actions.
So, in essence, your proposed society only works if we fundamentally change humanity. Congratulations. You've also proposed the fix that makes communism, libertarianism, anarchy and Star Trek-like utopias work. If humans were rational, moral, and responsible, then any social structure would work.
But we don't live in that world. Ours is far more imperfect. Most violent crimes, just like this one, are crimes of passion not reason. This was a retired cop. Someone whose job had been to uphold laws and deal out the consequences to those who did not uphold their responsibilities. And yet, in a fit of anger, he forgot all of that.
This is why, for example, the death penalty has little deterrence compared to life in prison. Most people committing violent crimes are not thinking about the consequences, weighing the risks, and then rationally deciding to go through with the crime. Most people are just acting on impulse. Stupid, angry impulse. You can't fix that by just getting on a high horse and demanding that people be better, and the law should not be based on that pipe dream.
The only thing you gain is the illusion that by making a bunch of stuff illegal you have somehow made the world safer.
The whole point of a weapon is to make the wielder more dangerous to their opponents. Guns make violence easier and more effective; it's what they are designed to do, after all. Removing concealable weapons from the general populace means that only cops and hardened criminals will have them. No amount of legislation will prevent the truly dedicated from using violence to achieve their aims, but it would at least prevent one stupid mistake, one fit of short temper from depriving a child of a father.
There is no evidence that the presence of a gun during a moment like this decreases risk of harm instead of increasing it. No amount of other people in the audience with guns would have stopped this. They would have, at best, added to the body count.
You have the wrong amendments. The Fifth Amendment doesn't apply here because the surveyed targets are not yet being held to answer for any crime and are not being deprived of "liberty" in the sense that the amendment means (i.e. put in jail). The Sixth similarly doesn't apply because there is no prosecution here yet.
The Fourth is more relevant because it governs searches, which is what FISA is all about. The Fourth requires warrants for searches and requires that they be (a) supported by probably cause and (b) judicially sanctioned. There naturally is no adversarial process because the very nature of investigating a crime prevents notifying the accused to prevent destruction of evidence, and the typical remedy is the exclusion of ill-gotten evidence from trial.
While my knee-jerk response is to dislike the FISA court's arguments here, they make sense. FISA doesn't need an advocate for the surveyed, because that advocate cannot effectively do their job without tipping off the suspect. All they can do, essentially, is complain and put up red tape roadblocks.
What FISA needs instead is a court of review and some means for defendants who are prosecuted with evidence found by searches that had the FISA court's sanction to object to and review their decisions to exclude any unconstitutionally obtained evidence from trial. Just like we do for improper warrants in normal criminal trials. Currently, most attempts at that are effectively barred by the state secrets doctrine which is the real Constitutional abomination here. The blanket denial of access to supposed state secrets to parties suing the government or appealing a conviction frequently blocks standing, which prevents a case from going forward on its actual merits.
That is what needs to change. The state secrets doctrine must be revoked or reformed to allow a truly adversarial process. The most logical way of doing this is to grant attorneys for the defense limited clearance to cover all evidence at issue in the trial and to balance it with heavy sanctions for leaking this evidence outside of the court -- including if necessary to his own client. This exception would naturally also extend to any plaintiffs attorneys involved in ethics complaints against a defense attorney who had access to state secrets but is accused of malpractice. Basically, "need to know" is extended to attorneys in a dispute over the issue. We would probably still need to limit access to attorneys with a security clearance instead of just anybody, and we would probably need to bar self-representation when the person in question doesn't have a security clearance.
Actually, yes. Maybe her mother can find a man who's not such a fucking douche that will be a better role model for her. As it is, when she grows up, she gets to tell everyone her dad was murdered for being asshole.
If that's the standard, then based on your tone, I hope you aren't a parent.
Clearly you don't understand the argument then. Anyone who does something wrong with their gun is, by definition, no longer one of the good guys.
The problem is finding out that they aren't a good guy too late. This guy was a retired cop. He should have been one of the people who could be trusted with a firearm in public, but he wasn't. That calls into question whether or not anyone can really be trusted with firearms in public, as a matter of public policy.
What should the law be when it's impossible or impractical to determine whether or not someone will lash out this way? Were there warning signs about him? Should people with ill tempers be allowed to own firearms, and if not, how do you identify them reasonably? A man is dead, and a three-year old is without a father because we choose that it was more important for the shooter to be allowed to have a gun than for him not to be allowed to have one.
The gun rights groups answer to gun violence is almost always to suggest more guns. All that could have done here with short tempers and close range is make more dead people and grieving families.
If information comes out that the governor was involved then he just lost himself a chance at being president.
Even if he wasn't involved, if somehow we informed all of America, and if they all believed it in this day of partisanship, it would still be a huge problem for his Presidential chances. After all, what kind of an administration does he run where he hires people who are prone to this sort of petty political madness and who manage to pull it off without him getting a whiff of it?
One is malice and conspiracy. The other is somewhere between incompetence and bad judge of character. Neither looks good.
If your Mac supports it, it seems to be a free upgrade.
To quote the Spartans: "If."
I have a late-2007 MacBook. Apple decided not to continue to support the Intel graphics driver for it and used it as an excuse to cut it off from 10.8 and above. The notion that I won't even get security updates anymore kind of ticks me off.
The doctor dismissed that at first, suspecting that it was involuntarily in her blood, before finding out evidence that she had previously been an addict. I'm not really sure how anyone would read the summary any other way.
It looks like he was a buffoon. He voted no on everything including adjournment of the meetings. To top it off, it looks like the only reason he resigned was because he got bored and wanted to perform one last stunt. No one was forcing him to resign.
Nope. He's a conservative politician in a primarily progressive area whose main shtick (as you mentioned) was to simply vote "No" on everything regardless of sense or reason. So, naturally, he's resigning to campaign for the U.S. Senate where his skills are clearly in high demand right now.
Let me repeat. PETA isn't the end all, be all of animal rights activists, but if you're freaking obsessed with them, then I'll also repeat that they are just the worst example of "preach to the choir and expect everyone else to sing hallelujah" ideologues in the animal rights movement. e.g. "Sea kittens," nude protests, promoting beer over milk to college students, etc. are fine example of the messenger shooting their own message.
They seem completely tone deaf to the effects that owning all-kill animal shelters does to their message of love and rights for animals. (I mean, who would think the solution to slavery would be to kill all the slaves you can get your hands on?) They pick publicly visible targets for protests that are often not the people actually behind the actions they protest, making them look irrational and giving the target the cover of innocence. (e.g. Running the "animal torture" campaign against KFC, who owns no chicken farms nor slaughterhouses.) They also don't care at all about burning bridges with anyone who might be an ally (like mother's groups over the beer campaign), because they believe themselves to be righteous and have the cold disdain for those who don't immediately recognize that fact that any other zealot does.
PETA undermines animal rights far more than it helps it due to a complete lack of understanding of people who aren't already on board for their message or who would take a more moderate stance. They're classic extremists in that way, and the lack of sensible strategy shows.
Clearly, you don't know what hyperbole actually is. There is no exaggeration in my post. You see, PETA isn't end all, be all of animal rights activism (just the noisiest and most ridiculous public actors), and there are plenty of less crazy people involved. But sadly, while many of them are compassionate people with huge hearts, many also have sadly little in the way of logic or sense. And it shows in the history of poorly-made plans to convince the public to see things the way they do.
Which is a shame, because there are a lot of animal rights issues that are important like CAFOs and puppy mills which are undermined by stunts like nude sit-ins, campaigns of harassment and property destruction against cancer researchers, and that whole "sea kittens" nonsense. All these stunts do is make members of "the choir" feel good about how righteous they are and make everyone else think that the cause is as delusional as the people advocating it and to harden their views against it.
Take that shark fin example I mentioned. I got roped into one of these by being the roommate of one of the people involved. They didn't do research on how rare and expensive it actually is and went to mass market and low-end stores. They didn't try to enlist anyone in the restaurant industry or who might possibly pass themselves off as a home cook. They went in with thinly-veiled hostile attitude and no good way of breaking the ice with the vendors who might have sold them the product if they had it. (I did my best to help by taking the shocking step of actually, you know, buying something and acting like a customer, but there was only so much that could help.) In short, they acted on a rumor, did no research, and undermined themselves at every step of the way. Utterly. No. Strategy.
What offends me about this law is that it's so blatantly bought and paid for by lobbyists by who is applies to. Why not just make harassing people with drones period illegal and not just hunters and fishermen?
What hyperbole? I'm not sure you actually know what the word means.
My experience with animal rights activists has been pretty similar. People with too much privilege to have personal experience with human problems and an utter lack of strategy in pursuing their agenda that results in a bunch of actions that only sound clever to people inside the group, that alienate everyone outside of it, and that more often than not hurt the cause of animal rights by being the worst living strawmen against it.
My law school had an animal rights program that overlapped a lot with the environmental program I was in, and most of the animal rights people were pretty flaky -- harmless and not nearly as self-sabotaging as PETA activists, but prone to stupid things like running around "casing" Asian food markets for sharks fin while all being a bunch of suspicious-acting white people who didn't speak a bit of Chinese and not really realizing the cost of shark's fin vs. the income bracket the stores they went to serviced.
There's a hard limit on personal technology. It can't advance beyond the point where putting a pocket knife on someone's throat to steal it becomes a profitable job. That's why in most cyberpunk scenarios one of the technological advances is in self defense.
i.e.: There won't be ultra-tech glasses/contact lenses/etc unless someone thinks of a way of protecting the clients form increasingly profitable mugging.
Yes. That's why no one carries around internet-connected, handheld computers in their pockets today, and Google's pie in the sky ultra-tech glasses have never made it outside of lab demos. Because muggers will descend like a plague of locusts to consume them all.
Putting a knife to someone's throat for money has always been profitable job -- just a high risk one. The reason most cyberpunk scenarios include advances in self-defense is because they are worlds in which the fabric of society has been rent asunder, and human life is much cheaper. Not because the toys are so shiny that otherwise normal, law-abiding people just can't resist robbing people for them.
I think the crowd that want to completely rid the UK of libel laws are very mistaken... yes, they make investigative journalism much more tedious and expensive, but they also protect journalists from being gradually replaced by glorified PR people which has largely happened in many other places around the world.
Please explain. I'd like an explanation of how the fear of being sued for saying anything overly critical has improved the UK's resilience to just putting out what people want said about them instead of things they don't want said about them.
those who shift the argument to 'world-wide' are intellectually dishonest.
Actually, yes they are in this context. The original exchange that started this whole thread was someone saying that we should sell info on "the 1%," obviously meaning the phrase as coined by the Occupy movement in the context of the wealthiest members of American society who the original poster conflated with those in control of selling this information.
Then someone responded that everyone on Slashdot was part of "the 1%" by changing the definition of what "the 1%" meant to something different that suited his argument. Of course, in the process he committed a few math errors, which is what I was addressing in the bulk of my post, but that attempt to argue by definition was intellectually dishonest, and I stand by my statement to that effect.
HOW CAN ANYBODY THROW AWAY HALF A MILLION TONS OF FOOD WHEN SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS ARE STARVING?
Well, it depends. Is that food actually safe to eat? In this case, probably, but that hasn't been vetted and proven by the Chinese government, so they're quite sane in erring on the side of safety. Especially considering all the product recalls involving tainted food from their local producers. Plus, it's not like the US or China are strapped for food at the national level.
The problem with starvation has been one of distribution for much of the past century. If this food IS being thrown away (and that's a big "if"), then it's because there's no good way of getting it to someone who could pay some price for it before it spoils. (And food aid is generally not done for completely free.)
In this case, it isn't really so much about "keeping the genie in the bottle," since they're quite alright with the genie in general. This is just about double-checking safety of a product and one country's industries not doing enough to respect another country's approval process by keeping the supply-chain neatly segregated.
Of course, the irony is that this sort of story usually happens the other way with China. e.g. Honey containing traces of pesticides of antibiotics approved for general use in China but not approved in the US.
How would spending the time to look through the source code themselves have been more of a waste than spending a year fighting with a recalcitrant vendor?
The best solution is to have access to the source code AND a dev team that is actively developing it that you can submit bugs to. If they are willing to spend the time to fix it, then that's great. If they aren't, then at least you have recourse. Also, you have greater ability to prove it IS their fault and that they do need to fix it themselves.
It's not like having access to the code is mutually exclusive with having support.
When those people came to Hawaii and wed other Japanese (and Chinese) people from other villages, their children were inches taller - living in the same culture, often on similar diets. Their children were taller still, and THEIR children are the size of everybody else.
Similar, but almost certainly not the same diet their parents had growing up. Heights is up across the Western world across population due to increases in available calories. The Dustbowl and the Great Depression were the last times in America that large swathes of the population suffered famine. Despite all the unhealthy effects of too many calories in the American diet, we generally have far more access to protein and to vitamins & minerals than our ancestors from about a century ago and than people in most of China even today.
Ironically though, too much nutrition (i.e. obesity) in childhood can retard the adolescent growth spurt. This is part of why America is no longer the tallest nation.
Slashdot Mirror
They might have sized the silk road website, but did they catch the suppliers and the dealers? No? Then this is a perfect real world example on how bitcoin can work for this type of business.
They also took all of their money that was still hosted in Silk Road's wallet at the time. That's a perfect real world example of why BitCoin *doesn't* work for this type of business.
Oh well, at least they know there's a Constitution, and that it governs a Republic (not a democracy) unlike Republicans and Democrats.
What do you think that means, and what do you think isn't being respected about that right now?
I'm always curious when people trot out that whole "Republic v. Democracy" bit, because it seems to be one of those commonly said phrases that means something completely different to most everyone who utters it.
What needs to happen is that there needs to be an in-depth and independent review of the effectiveness of the information gathering activity after the fact by a party other than the FISA court and security establishment.
What schema would you propose that differs from my own? You'd need someone with an understanding of probable cause (i.e. a court of some sort). You'd need someone with a reason to challenge it, so that an adversarial process is kept up, and it's not some sort of intra-government drum circle. You'd need some kind of security clearance to prevent data from leaking to the public if it turns out that it *is* good and useful (or that revealing it would put agents in harms way or undermine other good programs).
We should create a society of people who can handle responsibility and understand there are consequences to their actions.
So, in essence, your proposed society only works if we fundamentally change humanity. Congratulations. You've also proposed the fix that makes communism, libertarianism, anarchy and Star Trek-like utopias work. If humans were rational, moral, and responsible, then any social structure would work.
But we don't live in that world. Ours is far more imperfect. Most violent crimes, just like this one, are crimes of passion not reason. This was a retired cop. Someone whose job had been to uphold laws and deal out the consequences to those who did not uphold their responsibilities. And yet, in a fit of anger, he forgot all of that.
This is why, for example, the death penalty has little deterrence compared to life in prison. Most people committing violent crimes are not thinking about the consequences, weighing the risks, and then rationally deciding to go through with the crime. Most people are just acting on impulse. Stupid, angry impulse. You can't fix that by just getting on a high horse and demanding that people be better, and the law should not be based on that pipe dream.
The only thing you gain is the illusion that by making a bunch of stuff illegal you have somehow made the world safer.
The whole point of a weapon is to make the wielder more dangerous to their opponents. Guns make violence easier and more effective; it's what they are designed to do, after all. Removing concealable weapons from the general populace means that only cops and hardened criminals will have them. No amount of legislation will prevent the truly dedicated from using violence to achieve their aims, but it would at least prevent one stupid mistake, one fit of short temper from depriving a child of a father.
There is no evidence that the presence of a gun during a moment like this decreases risk of harm instead of increasing it. No amount of other people in the audience with guns would have stopped this. They would have, at best, added to the body count.
You have the wrong amendments. The Fifth Amendment doesn't apply here because the surveyed targets are not yet being held to answer for any crime and are not being deprived of "liberty" in the sense that the amendment means (i.e. put in jail). The Sixth similarly doesn't apply because there is no prosecution here yet.
The Fourth is more relevant because it governs searches, which is what FISA is all about. The Fourth requires warrants for searches and requires that they be (a) supported by probably cause and (b) judicially sanctioned. There naturally is no adversarial process because the very nature of investigating a crime prevents notifying the accused to prevent destruction of evidence, and the typical remedy is the exclusion of ill-gotten evidence from trial.
While my knee-jerk response is to dislike the FISA court's arguments here, they make sense. FISA doesn't need an advocate for the surveyed, because that advocate cannot effectively do their job without tipping off the suspect. All they can do, essentially, is complain and put up red tape roadblocks.
What FISA needs instead is a court of review and some means for defendants who are prosecuted with evidence found by searches that had the FISA court's sanction to object to and review their decisions to exclude any unconstitutionally obtained evidence from trial. Just like we do for improper warrants in normal criminal trials. Currently, most attempts at that are effectively barred by the state secrets doctrine which is the real Constitutional abomination here. The blanket denial of access to supposed state secrets to parties suing the government or appealing a conviction frequently blocks standing, which prevents a case from going forward on its actual merits.
That is what needs to change. The state secrets doctrine must be revoked or reformed to allow a truly adversarial process. The most logical way of doing this is to grant attorneys for the defense limited clearance to cover all evidence at issue in the trial and to balance it with heavy sanctions for leaking this evidence outside of the court -- including if necessary to his own client. This exception would naturally also extend to any plaintiffs attorneys involved in ethics complaints against a defense attorney who had access to state secrets but is accused of malpractice. Basically, "need to know" is extended to attorneys in a dispute over the issue. We would probably still need to limit access to attorneys with a security clearance instead of just anybody, and we would probably need to bar self-representation when the person in question doesn't have a security clearance.
Actually, yes. Maybe her mother can find a man who's not such a fucking douche that will be a better role model for her. As it is, when she grows up, she gets to tell everyone her dad was murdered for being asshole.
If that's the standard, then based on your tone, I hope you aren't a parent.
Wouldn't need another child losing a loved one.
Clearly you don't understand the argument then. Anyone who does something wrong with their gun is, by definition, no longer one of the good guys.
The problem is finding out that they aren't a good guy too late. This guy was a retired cop. He should have been one of the people who could be trusted with a firearm in public, but he wasn't. That calls into question whether or not anyone can really be trusted with firearms in public, as a matter of public policy.
What should the law be when it's impossible or impractical to determine whether or not someone will lash out this way? Were there warning signs about him? Should people with ill tempers be allowed to own firearms, and if not, how do you identify them reasonably? A man is dead, and a three-year old is without a father because we choose that it was more important for the shooter to be allowed to have a gun than for him not to be allowed to have one.
The gun rights groups answer to gun violence is almost always to suggest more guns. All that could have done here with short tempers and close range is make more dead people and grieving families.
If information comes out that the governor was involved then he just lost himself a chance at being president.
Even if he wasn't involved, if somehow we informed all of America, and if they all believed it in this day of partisanship, it would still be a huge problem for his Presidential chances. After all, what kind of an administration does he run where he hires people who are prone to this sort of petty political madness and who manage to pull it off without him getting a whiff of it?
One is malice and conspiracy. The other is somewhere between incompetence and bad judge of character. Neither looks good.
If your Mac supports it, it seems to be a free upgrade.
To quote the Spartans: "If."
I have a late-2007 MacBook. Apple decided not to continue to support the Intel graphics driver for it and used it as an excuse to cut it off from 10.8 and above. The notion that I won't even get security updates anymore kind of ticks me off.
Polite people capable of rational discourse?
So maybe, what? 20-30 people total?
The doctor dismissed that at first, suspecting that it was involuntarily in her blood, before finding out evidence that she had previously been an addict. I'm not really sure how anyone would read the summary any other way.
It looks like he was a buffoon. He voted no on everything including adjournment of the meetings. To top it off, it looks like the only reason he resigned was because he got bored and wanted to perform one last stunt. No one was forcing him to resign.
Nope. He's a conservative politician in a primarily progressive area whose main shtick (as you mentioned) was to simply vote "No" on everything regardless of sense or reason. So, naturally, he's resigning to campaign for the U.S. Senate where his skills are clearly in high demand right now.
Let me repeat. PETA isn't the end all, be all of animal rights activists, but if you're freaking obsessed with them, then I'll also repeat that they are just the worst example of "preach to the choir and expect everyone else to sing hallelujah" ideologues in the animal rights movement. e.g. "Sea kittens," nude protests, promoting beer over milk to college students, etc. are fine example of the messenger shooting their own message.
They seem completely tone deaf to the effects that owning all-kill animal shelters does to their message of love and rights for animals. (I mean, who would think the solution to slavery would be to kill all the slaves you can get your hands on?) They pick publicly visible targets for protests that are often not the people actually behind the actions they protest, making them look irrational and giving the target the cover of innocence. (e.g. Running the "animal torture" campaign against KFC, who owns no chicken farms nor slaughterhouses.) They also don't care at all about burning bridges with anyone who might be an ally (like mother's groups over the beer campaign), because they believe themselves to be righteous and have the cold disdain for those who don't immediately recognize that fact that any other zealot does.
PETA undermines animal rights far more than it helps it due to a complete lack of understanding of people who aren't already on board for their message or who would take a more moderate stance. They're classic extremists in that way, and the lack of sensible strategy shows.
Clearly, you don't know what hyperbole actually is. There is no exaggeration in my post. You see, PETA isn't end all, be all of animal rights activism (just the noisiest and most ridiculous public actors), and there are plenty of less crazy people involved. But sadly, while many of them are compassionate people with huge hearts, many also have sadly little in the way of logic or sense. And it shows in the history of poorly-made plans to convince the public to see things the way they do.
Which is a shame, because there are a lot of animal rights issues that are important like CAFOs and puppy mills which are undermined by stunts like nude sit-ins, campaigns of harassment and property destruction against cancer researchers, and that whole "sea kittens" nonsense. All these stunts do is make members of "the choir" feel good about how righteous they are and make everyone else think that the cause is as delusional as the people advocating it and to harden their views against it.
Take that shark fin example I mentioned. I got roped into one of these by being the roommate of one of the people involved. They didn't do research on how rare and expensive it actually is and went to mass market and low-end stores. They didn't try to enlist anyone in the restaurant industry or who might possibly pass themselves off as a home cook. They went in with thinly-veiled hostile attitude and no good way of breaking the ice with the vendors who might have sold them the product if they had it. (I did my best to help by taking the shocking step of actually, you know, buying something and acting like a customer, but there was only so much that could help.) In short, they acted on a rumor, did no research, and undermined themselves at every step of the way. Utterly. No. Strategy.
What offends me about this law is that it's so blatantly bought and paid for by lobbyists by who is applies to. Why not just make harassing people with drones period illegal and not just hunters and fishermen?
What hyperbole? I'm not sure you actually know what the word means.
My experience with animal rights activists has been pretty similar. People with too much privilege to have personal experience with human problems and an utter lack of strategy in pursuing their agenda that results in a bunch of actions that only sound clever to people inside the group, that alienate everyone outside of it, and that more often than not hurt the cause of animal rights by being the worst living strawmen against it.
My law school had an animal rights program that overlapped a lot with the environmental program I was in, and most of the animal rights people were pretty flaky -- harmless and not nearly as self-sabotaging as PETA activists, but prone to stupid things like running around "casing" Asian food markets for sharks fin while all being a bunch of suspicious-acting white people who didn't speak a bit of Chinese and not really realizing the cost of shark's fin vs. the income bracket the stores they went to serviced.
There's a hard limit on personal technology. It can't advance beyond the point where putting a pocket knife on someone's throat to steal it becomes a profitable job. That's why in most cyberpunk scenarios one of the technological advances is in self defense.
i.e.: There won't be ultra-tech glasses/contact lenses/etc unless someone thinks of a way of protecting the clients form increasingly profitable mugging.
Yes. That's why no one carries around internet-connected, handheld computers in their pockets today, and Google's pie in the sky ultra-tech glasses have never made it outside of lab demos. Because muggers will descend like a plague of locusts to consume them all.
Putting a knife to someone's throat for money has always been profitable job -- just a high risk one. The reason most cyberpunk scenarios include advances in self-defense is because they are worlds in which the fabric of society has been rent asunder, and human life is much cheaper. Not because the toys are so shiny that otherwise normal, law-abiding people just can't resist robbing people for them.
I think the crowd that want to completely rid the UK of libel laws are very mistaken... yes, they make investigative journalism much more tedious and expensive, but they also protect journalists from being gradually replaced by glorified PR people which has largely happened in many other places around the world.
Please explain. I'd like an explanation of how the fear of being sued for saying anything overly critical has improved the UK's resilience to just putting out what people want said about them instead of things they don't want said about them.
those who shift the argument to 'world-wide' are intellectually dishonest.
Actually, yes they are in this context. The original exchange that started this whole thread was someone saying that we should sell info on "the 1%," obviously meaning the phrase as coined by the Occupy movement in the context of the wealthiest members of American society who the original poster conflated with those in control of selling this information.
Then someone responded that everyone on Slashdot was part of "the 1%" by changing the definition of what "the 1%" meant to something different that suited his argument. Of course, in the process he committed a few math errors, which is what I was addressing in the bulk of my post, but that attempt to argue by definition was intellectually dishonest, and I stand by my statement to that effect.
Uhhhh... there are many more places in the world than that. The OP is right - if you're here, you're most likely part of the global 1%.
The total population of the US, Canada, and the EU, as of 2008 is 550 million people out of a total global population of about 6.7 billion. 8% > 1%.
Of course, this is an irrelevant distraction, because the phrase "the 1%" was coined to cover the top 1% of Americans, not the world.
Just how much do you think a direct metal laser sintering printer costs?
HOW CAN ANYBODY THROW AWAY HALF A MILLION TONS OF FOOD WHEN SO MANY HUMAN BEINGS ARE STARVING?
Well, it depends. Is that food actually safe to eat? In this case, probably, but that hasn't been vetted and proven by the Chinese government, so they're quite sane in erring on the side of safety. Especially considering all the product recalls involving tainted food from their local producers. Plus, it's not like the US or China are strapped for food at the national level.
The problem with starvation has been one of distribution for much of the past century. If this food IS being thrown away (and that's a big "if"), then it's because there's no good way of getting it to someone who could pay some price for it before it spoils. (And food aid is generally not done for completely free.)
In this case, it isn't really so much about "keeping the genie in the bottle," since they're quite alright with the genie in general. This is just about double-checking safety of a product and one country's industries not doing enough to respect another country's approval process by keeping the supply-chain neatly segregated.
Of course, the irony is that this sort of story usually happens the other way with China. e.g. Honey containing traces of pesticides of antibiotics approved for general use in China but not approved in the US.
How would spending the time to look through the source code themselves have been more of a waste than spending a year fighting with a recalcitrant vendor?
The best solution is to have access to the source code AND a dev team that is actively developing it that you can submit bugs to. If they are willing to spend the time to fix it, then that's great. If they aren't, then at least you have recourse. Also, you have greater ability to prove it IS their fault and that they do need to fix it themselves.
It's not like having access to the code is mutually exclusive with having support.
When those people came to Hawaii and wed other Japanese (and Chinese) people from other villages, their children were inches taller - living in the same culture, often on similar diets. Their children were taller still, and THEIR children are the size of everybody else.
Similar, but almost certainly not the same diet their parents had growing up. Heights is up across the Western world across population due to increases in available calories. The Dustbowl and the Great Depression were the last times in America that large swathes of the population suffered famine. Despite all the unhealthy effects of too many calories in the American diet, we generally have far more access to protein and to vitamins & minerals than our ancestors from about a century ago and than people in most of China even today.
Ironically though, too much nutrition (i.e. obesity) in childhood can retard the adolescent growth spurt. This is part of why America is no longer the tallest nation.