Well, that assumes that every regime is rational and willing to be cooperative when its in the interest of the people it serves (or rules). It also assumes that people in key positions don't let their personal feelings affect their decisions or judgment.
That's a bit naive, isn't it?
Take Robert Mugabe. One of the cables leaked was a very frank and incisive assessment of his (unpleasant) character: intelligent, tactically brilliant even, but vicious and consumed with malignant narcissism. The kind of guy you want to tell your successor: be very, very guarded about what you say to this guy. He is not nice, but that does not make him stupid.
You're thinking of ambassadors, and only *some* of them, at that.
You don't think that the US embassy in Moscow or China is staffed *entirely* by political hacks, do you? Or that everyone currently in the US embassy in Pakistan picked up Pashto or Urdu from listening to Berlitz tapes after the 2008 election?
Well, bankruptcy doesn't preclude the government assuming certain liabilities, since stockholder liability is capped at the value of their stocks. It's quite possible to prop up a bank without propping up the shareholders. I'd say propping up the banks and letting the shareholders twist slowly, slowly in the wind is the way to go. You can't run an economy without banks. For one thing, those humongous banks are the only way for central banks to put money into the economy. But you can buy back the worthless stock of the stockholders and reissue it once the institution has been stabilised, thus preserving the flow of money in the economy and the principle of investor responsibility. Not that that has been tried anywhere, to my knowledge.
The 5th Amendment says that "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". The 5th Amendment says that "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Due process means that one must be found guilty in a court of law by a jury of their peers.
Not always true. What you are describing is a "criminal forfeiture". You are first convicted of a crime, then if the preponderance of evidence shows the property in question was used to commit the crime, or was the fruit of the crime, the government can seize that property. In this case, the right to use the domain name *might* be an instrument of the crime, and the site owner could be deprived of it if he were convicted.
But there is another kind of forfeiture which does not require anyone to be found guilty of anything: *civil* forfeiture. It has been used extensively since the 1980s to combat drug traffickers' planes and boats. In such cases the government essentially sues *the property itself* for the harm it caused in a crime. Charges are not brought against the owner, who is treated as a third party claimant. Because criminal charges aren't involved, the rules of evidence are looser and a preponderance of evidence standard is applied and a unanimous jury is not required.
I believe what is going on here is an attempt to treat domain name rights as something other than property or a liberty protected under the 5th. That's a really quite interesting problem. Most reasonable people, I think, would look at this analogously to the police seizing a leased automobile; the police are depriving the renter of something of value.
If we accept that 5th Amendment applies to domain name control, there are two Constitutional issues I can see.
(1) Was a warrant required? If I'm caught cutting down a tree on your front yard, the police don't need a warrant to seize my chainsaw for evidence and later for forfeiture as an instrument of my crime. The necessity of protecting your property rights allows them to deprive me of my chainsaw until I have been exonerated in court. Arguably an immediate domain takedown prevents further copyright violations, but the degree of harm imposed by the delay getting a warrant would be negligible, I think.
(2) The manner of taking provides no recourse for the site owner or affected users to challenge the seizure. The announcement does not give a phone number, email address or even program name to contact, and the domain seizure uses anonymization techniques to obscure which office or agency is actually responsible for the seizure. That denies everyone affected by this action even a starting point for obtaining due process protection. This would obviously be an outrageous way to seize property, which is why I think the administration position will be that domain names and their associated rights are not property at all.
Well, it looks fishy to me. Here are the questionable elements.
(1) The domain registration information information still lists a private domain owner and and admin contact.
(2) The name servers ns1.torrent-finder.com and ns2.torrent-finder.com, as well as the torrent-finder.com ALL redirect to addresses in a private hosting company (74.81.170.108,.109 and.110 respectively), physically in Charlotte, NC. The picture you're greeted with is served from one of the hosting company's addresses.
(3) Whois reports the registrar to be Go Daddy, but the name servers ns1 and ns2.seizedservers.com whose IP addresses aremanaged by a private company called "wild west domains".
(4) The "seizedservers.com" domain is controlled by a company called "immixGroup IT solutions". The registrar is network solutions and the registrant is using network solution's privacy service to block his contact identity.
Notice what is missing here: any reference to a government controlled host, domain or name controller. All we have is a set of privately procured and managed name and web servers with anonymous administrative contacts. There is literally *nothing* to connect the picture you are seeing at the torrent-finders.com website to DHS, other than the picture's *claim*.
A little googling shows this exact same picture shows up in similar "DHS seizure" cases, with the exact same pattern of private servers and domains leading back to some anonymity service and NO government ip addresses, domains or contacts involved, although the *private* domains and servers involved are different. If this were a DHS seizure program, wouldn't the trail lead back to the same government contacts?
It looks to me like this is either a hoax or a case of private hijacking by a private individual or group who uses different domains and accounts to cover his tracks.
Yep. when all those ignorant young people discover that Fry is actually intelligent, educated and talented, they'll drop him like a hot potato and go back to pirating videos of anaemic pop songs performed by anorexic, Auto-tuned[tm] teen fashion models.
If you want to know the truth, look at the calendar. People who were born more than ten years apart have nothing to say to each other. Koko Taylor or Billie Holiday have nothing to offer that fashion model pop star, because they belong to an era before iTunes. The Blues is dead; long live the Blues. And from the other side of the coin, there's no possibility of any *new* artists making anything worthy paying attention to. We might as well stop producing new culture, and content ourselves with trading old vinyl 78s.
I see a different front page headline: "Science decodes message from God." Below the fold:
Oxford, UK. Physicist Roger Penrose has deciphered a hidden message from the creator Deity, encoded in subtle variations of the universe's background radiation. The message consists of a single word sentence: "Suckers!"
Hmmm. It would seem that the patent is for an operating system memory management feature. Note in claim 1:
wherein setting the allocation mode for the process to enable determining in real-time an invalid access is performed in real-time, and wherein the setting sets the allocation mode for an application executed by the process without requiring recompiling, linking or loading of the application to set, in real-time,
So you don't have to modify your source or link against a certain library, either statically or dynamically. In fact, it *sounds* like you can turn this on for a process as it is running. An argument might be made that the existence of techniques for the programmer to compile and link his program with relative transparency makes putting this capability into the operating system an obvious step, but I think reasonable people might disagree.
I have to say that other than games, you've just named the things I like *least* about the iTunes store. I don't give a fig what apps the staff likes, and I *really* hate the way iTunes wants to steer your purchases to what they think is (or want to be) hot.
WTF? I have an iPod touch and an Android phone, and I can honestly say that "not enough apps" hasn't been my experience on Android at all.
I'd characterize the difference between the app stoes this way. There's no question that Apple's store has *more* apps, but in terms of *useful* apps there's not much practical difference between them. I think my one or two very favorite apps are on iOS; I particularly like a version of WordNet that not only has the definitions, but the whole/part (e.g. hand to finger) more general/more specific (e.g. disease/malignancy) links. I really wish that something like this was available on Android.
Among the very best apps, I think there is a slight edge in polish to the ios apps. On the other hand, there are certain things that apps aren't allowed to do in the Apple world that I'd like them to. I can buy non-DRM MP3s from Amazon in several Android apps, which of course isn't possible on any Apple ios device. You have to through Apple's iTunes store.
I often have both devices on me, and if you don't count Apple's own iTunes and video apps I'd say 90% of my app use is on Android. In part that's just habit, in part it is functionality allowed in Android but not ios. When I need a thesaurus or a graphing calculator, I go for the iPod because the best apps I've found for those happen to be on ios.
Your experience may be different, of course. There may be that one app you absolutely have to have which currently is only on ios; or it may be the other way around. But my experience suggests to me that if forced to choose between an Android phone and an iPhone, I could live with either and not miss the other. I'd ditch the iPod touch today except I'd lose access to all my Apple movie and music purchases (which is another kettle of fish right there).
Well, it's actually slightly more complicated than you think. Most people here are probably too young to remember defrosting a refrigerator, but back in the day you had to periodically unplug the fridge and remove all the food so all the ice from condensation could melt. This condensation occurs because when you open the fridge door, warm moist air enters the box and condenses on the cooling element.
Modern refrigerators periodically heat the cooling element to remove the accumulated ice. Older frost free systems ran the heater on a fixed timer, but in *newer* systems the timer adapts to refrigerator use by only advancing when the compressor runs. Since the compressor running is correlated to how often you open the door and introduce warm moist air into the box, this saves energy and reduces spoilage by keeping the box cooler.
So it's quite reasonable to take the next logical step and adjust the operation of the fridge based on how often you actually open the door. It might even figure out that you are doing something that has you opening the door frequently (e.g. during a party) and run both the compressor and defroster aggressively. Alternatively it can notice that nobody has opened the door in in the last several days and go into an energy saving mode.
Of course, this is all for marginal benefits. A standard modern refrigerator does a pretty good job using simple rules of thumb. But this is the endgame for Moore's law we all imagined a decade or two ago, when computing power had become so cheap it was ubiquitous. It doesn't cost any more to install a microcontroller into a fridge than some clever analog control circuitry, and it's feasible on a high appliance to install a fairly sophisticated computer.
Well, I suppose from the point of view of Buddhist psychology you're right as far as you go, but you're missing quite a bit. "Right Speech" is the third item of the "Eightfold Path", right after "Right Intention" and before even "Right Action".
The Buddha explained "Right Speech" as consisting of the following elements:
1. abstention from false or deceitful speech.
2. abstention from slanderous or malicious speech.
3. abstention from words that hurt or offend others.
4. abstention from purposeless chatter.
Note how little the state of mind or semiotic opinions of the speaker come into this. The Buddhist must consider the rightness of his speech by its effects on others. Speech that coerces (through deceit), belittles (through slander), wounds (through insensitivity or hostility), or even *distracts* other people is wrong in Buddhist ethics. Notably, wrong speech is wrong not just because it harms others; it also thwarts the speaker's attempts to liberate himself from falsehood, malice and trivial obsessions. It makes sense that it comes on the list between "Right Intent" and "Right Action". Wrong speech undoes the ethical perspective gained from "Right View" and "Right Intent" before it can even be translated into action.
So, your opinion about what a symbol *could* mean or *ought to* mean is ethically irrelevant when you know very well it will (a) offend some people and (b) waste the time of others.
So much so that they'd rather take some dudgeon mongering website's word for what happened than to google the original sources and find out this is a non-story. Well, I don't mind being wet blanket, so I did it for you.
If you must know, a couple of sixth grade teachers got fed up with students playing with toy pens, then losing them and disrupting the class looking for them. So they decided to ban student owned writing instruments altogether, but rather than come right out and tell parents that their kids are badly behaved, they used a pen modified by one of the students to shoot spitballs as an excuse for the ban. Since using a writing instrument as a "weapon" conjures images of students stabbing each other in the eye with a pencil, that naturally garnered a lot more attention than the teachers expected. The acting superintendent stepped in, reversed the policy and wrote a memo explaining everything and suggesting everybody calm down.
But of course the story of a couple of beleaguered teachers being too timid to tell parents they'd raised a mob of brats isn't as much fun for people who like to complain about the nanny state.
I dunno. If the certification program *promises* internalized payback and doesn't deliver, that's a problem with the program, isn't it? If an engineer promised a 15 year payback and is off by a factor of 10x, then that's either bad engineering or fraud.
While I agree with you about building design, I'm not so puritanical about showcase solar or wind projects because somebody has to be the early adopters for any technology. Early adoption is seldom an entirely pragmatic choice. As long as the people selling the system aren't committing some kind of fraud or engineering malpractice, marketing yourself as forward looking is an entirely valid reason to install a system before it is economically practical.
Actually, I think this whole controversy from beginning (obtaining the machines) to end (the protest movement) is bogus.
Why do we have this machines? Because there is a threat that has been shown to be reasonable that these machines prevent? Can anybody point to a hijacking these machines *would* have prevented, but that wasn't preventable with the technology we already had? Almost certainly not. We are doing this simply to show we *can*. This is, unfortunately, a typical American approach to any kind of complicated problem: gamble on a quick technological fix. It doesn't hurt that this makes great security theater. Hiring more and better trained agents is not politically advantageous, because if people breeze through security and *don't* get hijacked, they won't notice anything but the high and expensive head count. Send them through a machine that transmits naked pictures of them into the next room, and they *will* notice their tax dollars at work, even though that has no practical utility.
Now the protest side is totally bogus too. So the machine sends a naked picture of me to a guy in the next room, so what? I walk to the showers at the gym and everyone in the locker room is naked. And if the guy watching the scanner gets off on watching *my* naked body, what do *I* care? He's obviously got bigger problems than I do.
No, the real problem is that this whole bogus affair takes money, time and focus away from real security concerns.
Depends on what you mean by "we". The people doing the hiring are not "us"; they are corporation that have no particular reason to care about the fate of the American labor market.
See, there's two big things that exist now that didn't exist in the post WW2 days you are talking about. (1) Free trade and (2) the Internet. Those two things are game changers. It's never been easier for a corporation to move jobs (not to mention profits) overseas.
You can't think about this in mercantilist terms. It's not like there are a fixed number of jobs that have to go to Americans or foreigners. The number of jobs in a country is highly variable. Information technology in particular creates interlocking sets of jobs. IT people create jobs for other IT people. Your DBA creates jobs for your network admins by creating new uses for the networks; the network admins create jobs for DBAs by providing a delivery mechanism for data. This much is classical economics. If you reduce the cost of data, more bandwidth is demanded; if you reduce the cost of bandwidth, more data is demanded. The same goes for software developers. The IT labor market is a complex system where one part supports the other, and jobs filled create new jobs.
Furthermore labor is, from the employer's standpoint, nothing more than a production factor he hires. It's not a national institution or a way of life. Naturally the employer goes for the lowest price labor he can get of the necessary quality, but he doesn't have an unlimited quantity at that price. The answer that engineers should prefer is to bring more qualified engineers to high labor price markets rather than ship jobs to low labor price markets, and those are really the only choices you have. You can't choose "ship jobs to high labor cost markets" unless you've exhausted all the engineers the low labor market can provide, or create trade barriers.
So keep the existing visa programs, but change them to encourage the foreigners to stay. The best way to keep jobs for Americans is to keep the focus of the IT labor market in the US.
for setting a new *fundamental* benchmark for coherency in a Slashdot submission.
I believe that this submission achieves the smallest quantum of coherency observed to date -- possibly the smallest unit of information that might conceivably be called informative in any meaningful sense of the word. After reading over five hundred words reviewing this book, I determined that the book has something to do with language instruction, but remain uncertain as to whether the book describes hardware or software, a product or standard, an pedagogical method or, just possibly, a cookbook. I'm about 50% certain that the "languages" being discussed are natural languages and not computer languages; what is remarkable about this fact is that if I were any less certain, I couldn't reasonably be said to have learned anything at all from this article.
It's actually rather dumbfounding. I never imagined that I could be so little informed on any topic without being totally ignorant of it. Furthermore, I find that for once in my life I treasure my remaining ignorance of the topic discussed, although I do confess that I have conceived an intense curiosity about the review author's English as a Foreign Language students and how they fare putting the communication skills they've learned from him to practical use.
I'd mod you as being "funny", if I could be sure you were actually being funny. Irony is something of a lost art these days, more often a happy accident than a deliberate choice.
Well, I am certainly sympathetic to the argument that if the concert promoter sets the price of tickets wrong by making it too low, it's not necessarily *dishonest* for some third party to make a few bucks at arbitrage. Still, there's a few wrinkles in this scenario worth considering.
First, what are you buying when you buy a ticket, a piece of paper? No. You are buying the right to attend an event. *If* the providers of that event stipulate that the right being sold is not transferable unless it is given away or the purchaser was acting as an agent for the planned attendee when he bought the ticket, then what has the purchaser bought from the scalper? A piece of paper. He *cannot* buy the right to attend the event because that right is not transferable. The scalper is encouraging the purchaser to attend the event fraudulently.
Of course, you might say, "no harm, no foul." That's a different ethical approach, more utilitarian and less legalistic. Well, it's not necessarily the case that there is no harm. The economic relationship between the performer and the audience does not begin and end at the ticket price. There's merchandise sales, for example. The economically optimal price for the ticket, all things being equal, might result in fewer attendees, reducing merchandise sales and future sales of recordings and tickets. Some performers may not like playing to venues with many empty seats, and choose to the avoid larger venues. That harms the venue's owners.
I believe if the performers and concert promoters are amenable to reselling tickets that's a *different* story; but if tickets are on sale at less than the price which maximizes gross revenue, that doesn't necessarily mean the price has been set too low.
Uh, no. You can't just take someones property away. Not even temporarily. Again, the fourth amendment.
Actually, yes you can. The fourth amendment restricts *unreasonable* searches and seizures. You might not think that is *morally right*, you might even be correct, but the fourth amendment certainly allows *reasonable* seizures, such as impounding property that is an evidence in a criminal case. It limits the ability of the government to transform that into an arbitrary power to seize property, but it has not, and never has been interpreted as a blanket proscription on *all* seizing of property.
This is not some new-fangled interpretation of the 4th. Property entering the country has been impounded for inspection since the earliest days of the country.
Important in this sense must mean whatever the government decides is important, because I certainly don't think this is important.
The test is whether a reasonable person would think the purpose is important enough, and more to the point in this case whether he'd believe the *evidence* is strong enough to warrant the extent to which the person has been deprived. THAT's the rub. The government is imposing on this person on the basis of tenuous evidence that a reasonable person would not think reasonable warrants this.
I actually would like to follow the fourth amendment.
People keep saying things like this without apparently having read the text carefully. The 4th doesn't proscribe *all* seizures of persons (i.e., arrests) or effects, only unreasonable ones. It doesn't even require warrants for every seizure or search (e.g. hot pursuit does not require a warrant), it only sets criteria for warrants in cases where they can be reasonably obtained (e.g. a planned search part of an ongoing investigation). That actually cuts both ways. When the government seeks a *new* power to search without warrant, that means it knows it *could* reasonably obtain a warrant, but wants to avoid the Constitutional warrant restrictions.
Technically, sure -- your laptop is an "effect"; but the *most important* interest you have in such situations is in controlling access to the *information* on the laptop. One might reasonably be deprived of one's laptop for a few minutes or even hours in service of some important public purpose, but losing control of the information on it is a very different matter. That is a far more serious and permanent deprivation of liberty than the temporary loss of physical access to your laptop.
I think most of us would agree that our interest in controlling our personal *information* is at least part of what the fourth amendment was intended to protect (although there will always be a few stubbornly ultra-literal dissenters). It wasn't a practical necessity in the era of paper documents and scriveners to draw distinctions between information and the documents that carry it. It *is* in the era of electronic data.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that assumes that every regime is rational and willing to be cooperative when its in the interest of the people it serves (or rules). It also assumes that people in key positions don't let their personal feelings affect their decisions or judgment.
That's a bit naive, isn't it?
Take Robert Mugabe. One of the cables leaked was a very frank and incisive assessment of his (unpleasant) character: intelligent, tactically brilliant even, but vicious and consumed with malignant narcissism. The kind of guy you want to tell your successor: be very, very guarded about what you say to this guy. He is not nice, but that does not make him stupid.
You're thinking of ambassadors, and only *some* of them, at that.
You don't think that the US embassy in Moscow or China is staffed *entirely* by political hacks, do you? Or that everyone currently in the US embassy in Pakistan picked up Pashto or Urdu from listening to Berlitz tapes after the 2008 election?
Well, bankruptcy doesn't preclude the government assuming certain liabilities, since stockholder liability is capped at the value of their stocks. It's quite possible to prop up a bank without propping up the shareholders. I'd say propping up the banks and letting the shareholders twist slowly, slowly in the wind is the way to go. You can't run an economy without banks. For one thing, those humongous banks are the only way for central banks to put money into the economy. But you can buy back the worthless stock of the stockholders and reissue it once the institution has been stabilised, thus preserving the flow of money in the economy and the principle of investor responsibility. Not that that has been tried anywhere, to my knowledge.
The 5th Amendment says that "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". The 5th Amendment says that "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Due process means that one must be found guilty in a court of law by a jury of their peers.
Not always true. What you are describing is a "criminal forfeiture". You are first convicted of a crime, then if the preponderance of evidence shows the property in question was used to commit the crime, or was the fruit of the crime, the government can seize that property. In this case, the right to use the domain name *might* be an instrument of the crime, and the site owner could be deprived of it if he were convicted.
But there is another kind of forfeiture which does not require anyone to be found guilty of anything: *civil* forfeiture. It has been used extensively since the 1980s to combat drug traffickers' planes and boats. In such cases the government essentially sues *the property itself* for the harm it caused in a crime. Charges are not brought against the owner, who is treated as a third party claimant. Because criminal charges aren't involved, the rules of evidence are looser and a preponderance of evidence standard is applied and a unanimous jury is not required.
I believe what is going on here is an attempt to treat domain name rights as something other than property or a liberty protected under the 5th. That's a really quite interesting problem. Most reasonable people, I think, would look at this analogously to the police seizing a leased automobile; the police are depriving the renter of something of value.
If we accept that 5th Amendment applies to domain name control, there are two Constitutional issues I can see.
(1) Was a warrant required? If I'm caught cutting down a tree on your front yard, the police don't need a warrant to seize my chainsaw for evidence and later for forfeiture as an instrument of my crime. The necessity of protecting your property rights allows them to deprive me of my chainsaw until I have been exonerated in court. Arguably an immediate domain takedown prevents further copyright violations, but the degree of harm imposed by the delay getting a warrant would be negligible, I think.
(2) The manner of taking provides no recourse for the site owner or affected users to challenge the seizure. The announcement does not give a phone number, email address or even program name to contact, and the domain seizure uses anonymization techniques to obscure which office or agency is actually responsible for the seizure. That denies everyone affected by this action even a starting point for obtaining due process protection. This would obviously be an outrageous way to seize property, which is why I think the administration position will be that domain names and their associated rights are not property at all.
Well, it looks fishy to me. Here are the questionable elements.
(1) The domain registration information information still lists a private domain owner and and admin contact.
(2) The name servers ns1.torrent-finder.com and ns2.torrent-finder.com, as well as the torrent-finder.com ALL redirect to addresses in a private hosting company (74.81.170.108, .109 and .110 respectively), physically in Charlotte, NC. The picture you're greeted with is served from one of the hosting company's addresses.
(3) Whois reports the registrar to be Go Daddy, but the name servers ns1 and ns2.seizedservers.com whose IP addresses aremanaged by a private company called "wild west domains".
(4) The "seizedservers.com" domain is controlled by a company called "immixGroup IT solutions". The registrar is network solutions and the registrant is using network solution's privacy service to block his contact identity.
Notice what is missing here: any reference to a government controlled host, domain or name controller. All we have is a set of privately procured and managed name and web servers with anonymous administrative contacts. There is literally *nothing* to connect the picture you are seeing at the torrent-finders.com website to DHS, other than the picture's *claim*.
A little googling shows this exact same picture shows up in similar "DHS seizure" cases, with the exact same pattern of private servers and domains leading back to some anonymity service and NO government ip addresses, domains or contacts involved, although the *private* domains and servers involved are different. If this were a DHS seizure program, wouldn't the trail lead back to the same government contacts?
It looks to me like this is either a hoax or a case of private hijacking by a private individual or group who uses different domains and accounts to cover his tracks.
Yep. when all those ignorant young people discover that Fry is actually intelligent, educated and talented, they'll drop him like a hot potato and go back to pirating videos of anaemic pop songs performed by anorexic, Auto-tuned[tm] teen fashion models.
If you want to know the truth, look at the calendar. People who were born more than ten years apart have nothing to say to each other. Koko Taylor or Billie Holiday have nothing to offer that fashion model pop star, because they belong to an era before iTunes. The Blues is dead; long live the Blues. And from the other side of the coin, there's no possibility of any *new* artists making anything worthy paying attention to. We might as well stop producing new culture, and content ourselves with trading old vinyl 78s.
I see a different front page headline: "Science decodes message from God." Below the fold:
Oxford, UK. Physicist Roger Penrose has deciphered a hidden message from the creator Deity, encoded in subtle variations of the universe's background radiation. The message consists of a single word sentence: "Suckers!"
Hmmm. It would seem that the patent is for an operating system memory management feature. Note in claim 1:
wherein setting the allocation mode for the process to enable determining in real-time an invalid access is performed in real-time, and wherein the setting sets the allocation mode for an application executed by the process without requiring recompiling, linking or loading of the application to set, in real-time,
So you don't have to modify your source or link against a certain library, either statically or dynamically. In fact, it *sounds* like you can turn this on for a process as it is running. An argument might be made that the existence of techniques for the programmer to compile and link his program with relative transparency makes putting this capability into the operating system an obvious step, but I think reasonable people might disagree.
Well, if you feel that way, get a move on, Dick Whittington. There's a fortune to be made.
I have to say that other than games, you've just named the things I like *least* about the iTunes store. I don't give a fig what apps the staff likes, and I *really* hate the way iTunes wants to steer your purchases to what they think is (or want to be) hot.
WTF? I have an iPod touch and an Android phone, and I can honestly say that "not enough apps" hasn't been my experience on Android at all.
I'd characterize the difference between the app stoes this way. There's no question that Apple's store has *more* apps, but in terms of *useful* apps there's not much practical difference between them. I think my one or two very favorite apps are on iOS; I particularly like a version of WordNet that not only has the definitions, but the whole/part (e.g. hand to finger) more general/more specific (e.g. disease/malignancy) links. I really wish that something like this was available on Android.
Among the very best apps, I think there is a slight edge in polish to the ios apps. On the other hand, there are certain things that apps aren't allowed to do in the Apple world that I'd like them to. I can buy non-DRM MP3s from Amazon in several Android apps, which of course isn't possible on any Apple ios device. You have to through Apple's iTunes store.
I often have both devices on me, and if you don't count Apple's own iTunes and video apps I'd say 90% of my app use is on Android. In part that's just habit, in part it is functionality allowed in Android but not ios. When I need a thesaurus or a graphing calculator, I go for the iPod because the best apps I've found for those happen to be on ios.
Your experience may be different, of course. There may be that one app you absolutely have to have which currently is only on ios; or it may be the other way around. But my experience suggests to me that if forced to choose between an Android phone and an iPhone, I could live with either and not miss the other. I'd ditch the iPod touch today except I'd lose access to all my Apple movie and music purchases (which is another kettle of fish right there).
"The Boy Who Cried Wolf"
Well, it's actually slightly more complicated than you think. Most people here are probably too young to remember defrosting a refrigerator, but back in the day you had to periodically unplug the fridge and remove all the food so all the ice from condensation could melt. This condensation occurs because when you open the fridge door, warm moist air enters the box and condenses on the cooling element.
Modern refrigerators periodically heat the cooling element to remove the accumulated ice. Older frost free systems ran the heater on a fixed timer, but in *newer* systems the timer adapts to refrigerator use by only advancing when the compressor runs. Since the compressor running is correlated to how often you open the door and introduce warm moist air into the box, this saves energy and reduces spoilage by keeping the box cooler.
So it's quite reasonable to take the next logical step and adjust the operation of the fridge based on how often you actually open the door. It might even figure out that you are doing something that has you opening the door frequently (e.g. during a party) and run both the compressor and defroster aggressively. Alternatively it can notice that nobody has opened the door in in the last several days and go into an energy saving mode.
Of course, this is all for marginal benefits. A standard modern refrigerator does a pretty good job using simple rules of thumb. But this is the endgame for Moore's law we all imagined a decade or two ago, when computing power had become so cheap it was ubiquitous. It doesn't cost any more to install a microcontroller into a fridge than some clever analog control circuitry, and it's feasible on a high appliance to install a fairly sophisticated computer.
Well, I suppose from the point of view of Buddhist psychology you're right as far as you go, but you're missing quite a bit. "Right Speech" is the third item of the "Eightfold Path", right after "Right Intention" and before even "Right Action".
The Buddha explained "Right Speech" as consisting of the following elements:
1. abstention from false or deceitful speech.
2. abstention from slanderous or malicious speech.
3. abstention from words that hurt or offend others.
4. abstention from purposeless chatter.
Note how little the state of mind or semiotic opinions of the speaker come into this. The Buddhist must consider the rightness of his speech by its effects on others. Speech that coerces (through deceit), belittles (through slander), wounds (through insensitivity or hostility), or even *distracts* other people is wrong in Buddhist ethics. Notably, wrong speech is wrong not just because it harms others; it also thwarts the speaker's attempts to liberate himself from falsehood, malice and trivial obsessions. It makes sense that it comes on the list between "Right Intent" and "Right Action". Wrong speech undoes the ethical perspective gained from "Right View" and "Right Intent" before it can even be translated into action.
So, your opinion about what a symbol *could* mean or *ought to* mean is ethically irrelevant when you know very well it will (a) offend some people and (b) waste the time of others.
So much so that they'd rather take some dudgeon mongering website's word for what happened than to google the original sources and find out this is a non-story. Well, I don't mind being wet blanket, so I did it for you.
If you must know, a couple of sixth grade teachers got fed up with students playing with toy pens, then losing them and disrupting the class looking for them. So they decided to ban student owned writing instruments altogether, but rather than come right out and tell parents that their kids are badly behaved, they used a pen modified by one of the students to shoot spitballs as an excuse for the ban. Since using a writing instrument as a "weapon" conjures images of students stabbing each other in the eye with a pencil, that naturally garnered a lot more attention than the teachers expected. The acting superintendent stepped in, reversed the policy and wrote a memo explaining everything and suggesting everybody calm down.
But of course the story of a couple of beleaguered teachers being too timid to tell parents they'd raised a mob of brats isn't as much fun for people who like to complain about the nanny state.
I dunno. If the certification program *promises* internalized payback and doesn't deliver, that's a problem with the program, isn't it? If an engineer promised a 15 year payback and is off by a factor of 10x, then that's either bad engineering or fraud.
While I agree with you about building design, I'm not so puritanical about showcase solar or wind projects because somebody has to be the early adopters for any technology. Early adoption is seldom an entirely pragmatic choice. As long as the people selling the system aren't committing some kind of fraud or engineering malpractice, marketing yourself as forward looking is an entirely valid reason to install a system before it is economically practical.
Actually, I think this whole controversy from beginning (obtaining the machines) to end (the protest movement) is bogus.
Why do we have this machines? Because there is a threat that has been shown to be reasonable that these machines prevent? Can anybody point to a hijacking these machines *would* have prevented, but that wasn't preventable with the technology we already had? Almost certainly not. We are doing this simply to show we *can*. This is, unfortunately, a typical American approach to any kind of complicated problem: gamble on a quick technological fix. It doesn't hurt that this makes great security theater. Hiring more and better trained agents is not politically advantageous, because if people breeze through security and *don't* get hijacked, they won't notice anything but the high and expensive head count. Send them through a machine that transmits naked pictures of them into the next room, and they *will* notice their tax dollars at work, even though that has no practical utility.
Now the protest side is totally bogus too. So the machine sends a naked picture of me to a guy in the next room, so what? I walk to the showers at the gym and everyone in the locker room is naked. And if the guy watching the scanner gets off on watching *my* naked body, what do *I* care? He's obviously got bigger problems than I do.
No, the real problem is that this whole bogus affair takes money, time and focus away from real security concerns.
Depends on what you mean by "we". The people doing the hiring are not "us"; they are corporation that have no particular reason to care about the fate of the American labor market.
See, there's two big things that exist now that didn't exist in the post WW2 days you are talking about. (1) Free trade and (2) the Internet. Those two things are game changers. It's never been easier for a corporation to move jobs (not to mention profits) overseas.
You can't think about this in mercantilist terms. It's not like there are a fixed number of jobs that have to go to Americans or foreigners. The number of jobs in a country is highly variable. Information technology in particular creates interlocking sets of jobs. IT people create jobs for other IT people. Your DBA creates jobs for your network admins by creating new uses for the networks; the network admins create jobs for DBAs by providing a delivery mechanism for data. This much is classical economics. If you reduce the cost of data, more bandwidth is demanded; if you reduce the cost of bandwidth, more data is demanded. The same goes for software developers. The IT labor market is a complex system where one part supports the other, and jobs filled create new jobs.
Furthermore labor is, from the employer's standpoint, nothing more than a production factor he hires. It's not a national institution or a way of life. Naturally the employer goes for the lowest price labor he can get of the necessary quality, but he doesn't have an unlimited quantity at that price. The answer that engineers should prefer is to bring more qualified engineers to high labor price markets rather than ship jobs to low labor price markets, and those are really the only choices you have. You can't choose "ship jobs to high labor cost markets" unless you've exhausted all the engineers the low labor market can provide, or create trade barriers.
So keep the existing visa programs, but change them to encourage the foreigners to stay. The best way to keep jobs for Americans is to keep the focus of the IT labor market in the US.
for setting a new *fundamental* benchmark for coherency in a Slashdot submission.
I believe that this submission achieves the smallest quantum of coherency observed to date -- possibly the smallest unit of information that might conceivably be called informative in any meaningful sense of the word. After reading over five hundred words reviewing this book, I determined that the book has something to do with language instruction, but remain uncertain as to whether the book describes hardware or software, a product or standard, an pedagogical method or, just possibly, a cookbook. I'm about 50% certain that the "languages" being discussed are natural languages and not computer languages; what is remarkable about this fact is that if I were any less certain, I couldn't reasonably be said to have learned anything at all from this article.
It's actually rather dumbfounding. I never imagined that I could be so little informed on any topic without being totally ignorant of it. Furthermore, I find that for once in my life I treasure my remaining ignorance of the topic discussed, although I do confess that I have conceived an intense curiosity about the review author's English as a Foreign Language students and how they fare putting the communication skills they've learned from him to practical use.
I'd mod you as being "funny", if I could be sure you were actually being funny. Irony is something of a lost art these days, more often a happy accident than a deliberate choice.
Because it's so easy to decrypt a one-time pad encrypted message, it's boring.
What, you say *my* plaintext doesn't match the message in the ciphertext? Well, that's what *you* say.
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine. There are starving children in Berlin who'd do anything for a nice glass of Ovaltine like that."
Well, I am certainly sympathetic to the argument that if the concert promoter sets the price of tickets wrong by making it too low, it's not necessarily *dishonest* for some third party to make a few bucks at arbitrage. Still, there's a few wrinkles in this scenario worth considering.
First, what are you buying when you buy a ticket, a piece of paper? No. You are buying the right to attend an event. *If* the providers of that event stipulate that the right being sold is not transferable unless it is given away or the purchaser was acting as an agent for the planned attendee when he bought the ticket, then what has the purchaser bought from the scalper? A piece of paper. He *cannot* buy the right to attend the event because that right is not transferable. The scalper is encouraging the purchaser to attend the event fraudulently.
Of course, you might say, "no harm, no foul." That's a different ethical approach, more utilitarian and less legalistic. Well, it's not necessarily the case that there is no harm. The economic relationship between the performer and the audience does not begin and end at the ticket price. There's merchandise sales, for example. The economically optimal price for the ticket, all things being equal, might result in fewer attendees, reducing merchandise sales and future sales of recordings and tickets. Some performers may not like playing to venues with many empty seats, and choose to the avoid larger venues. That harms the venue's owners.
I believe if the performers and concert promoters are amenable to reselling tickets that's a *different* story; but if tickets are on sale at less than the price which maximizes gross revenue, that doesn't necessarily mean the price has been set too low.
Uh, no. You can't just take someones property away. Not even temporarily. Again, the fourth amendment.
Actually, yes you can. The fourth amendment restricts *unreasonable* searches and seizures. You might not think that is *morally right*, you might even be correct, but the fourth amendment certainly allows *reasonable* seizures, such as impounding property that is an evidence in a criminal case. It limits the ability of the government to transform that into an arbitrary power to seize property, but it has not, and never has been interpreted as a blanket proscription on *all* seizing of property.
This is not some new-fangled interpretation of the 4th. Property entering the country has been impounded for inspection since the earliest days of the country.
Important in this sense must mean whatever the government decides is important, because I certainly don't think this is important.
The test is whether a reasonable person would think the purpose is important enough, and more to the point in this case whether he'd believe the *evidence* is strong enough to warrant the extent to which the person has been deprived. THAT's the rub. The government is imposing on this person on the basis of tenuous evidence that a reasonable person would not think reasonable warrants this.
I actually would like to follow the fourth amendment.
People keep saying things like this without apparently having read the text carefully. The 4th doesn't proscribe *all* seizures of persons (i.e., arrests) or effects, only unreasonable ones. It doesn't even require warrants for every seizure or search (e.g. hot pursuit does not require a warrant), it only sets criteria for warrants in cases where they can be reasonably obtained (e.g. a planned search part of an ongoing investigation). That actually cuts both ways. When the government seeks a *new* power to search without warrant, that means it knows it *could* reasonably obtain a warrant, but wants to avoid the Constitutional warrant restrictions.
Technically, sure -- your laptop is an "effect"; but the *most important* interest you have in such situations is in controlling access to the *information* on the laptop. One might reasonably be deprived of one's laptop for a few minutes or even hours in service of some important public purpose, but losing control of the information on it is a very different matter. That is a far more serious and permanent deprivation of liberty than the temporary loss of physical access to your laptop.
I think most of us would agree that our interest in controlling our personal *information* is at least part of what the fourth amendment was intended to protect (although there will always be a few stubbornly ultra-literal dissenters). It wasn't a practical necessity in the era of paper documents and scriveners to draw distinctions between information and the documents that carry it. It *is* in the era of electronic data.