It sounds like this may be summed up as "news for everyone, stuff that may or may not matter."
In other words, pretty much the same as modern/., amirite?
In seriousness, though, it seems like the big difference is a "filtering system" (even though it works not by computerized filter, but by a thousand foo-obsessed types manually sorting new stories into foo and non-foo, the net effect for the "normal" user is that they can pick any of those human filters) so that nerds could filter it down to classic/. type stuff, arts guys can filter it to their stuff, etc..
That's great and all, but the big reason I started spending time on/. back in the day, and the only reason I eventually registered a nick instead of leaving when I got fed up with the AJAXy mess that is unregistered users' only option, is the discussion system. For all its problems (groupthink etc.), it's still way better than most of the net.
So I guess whether I end up spending much time on Trove will depend immensely on how the discussion system works in practice. Of course that's a function of both the discussion system itself, and what sort of user base it attracts -- after all, a high enough concentration of trolls and assholes can overwhelm any technical measures.
Re:Other people's code? I can't even figure out mi
on
Code Is Not Literature
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· Score: 1
Oops, hit submit instead of preview, and forgot to log in... Take 2:
There was one class where the instructor didn't like "showoffs" so code had to be written using only the commands that were covered in the lecture.
Heh. My favorite bit of code written for 1st-year C class was a simple function to convert grades from a numeric percentage to a character representing the letter grade. (Breaks were inclusive and at 10% increments, so 90-100%=A,80-89%=B, etc.) This problem was of course assigned at the end of the lecture introducing switch/case.
(I'm sure it's obvious enough, but integer division does the magic; multiplying by 5, then dividing by 4, maps 0-3 to 0-3, but maps 4 to 5; this skips E to give the proper sequence of ABCDF.) Actually, I may have handled the <50 case inline with the conditional operator instead (e.g. percent>50?percent:50), not sure. (I went through a conditional-operator-happy phase in school, having not yet realized how frequently it just makes code harder to read.)
Anyway, my instructor fortunately didn't have a policy like that, and knew me enough to know I grokked switch/case anyway. He told me later that he enjoyed showoffs, because grading normal solutions was tiresome, and a few minutes examining some other approach was a welcome break.
Not really upset about monetizing their product, but ONE DAY'S NOTICE?! Whomever made that decision had better start updating the `ol resume.
Eh, I'm not sure about that. I suspect the concept here is that by minimizing the notice, users have less time to shop for options, and are thus more likely to convert to the paid product. The flip side is that some (like you) will get mad about the blatantly unreasonable notice and refuse to have further dealings with them no matter how bad the competing options are, but it's not at all obvious that this isn't a net win for them, compared to a more reasonable notice.
The 7 day trial is particularly clever -- all the people who need their current setup to keep working will just go for that, and keep rolling just like before. They have 7 days to look for an alternate solution, but since they're already signed up for LogMeIn Pro, I bet they're substantially more likely to carry on using it than if you gave them 7 days' notice and no free trial.
A "networking VPN"? As opposed to some other VPN that has nothing to do with networks?;)
Anyway, VPN is overkill if all you need is remote control, sure.
But if you do have a VPN running (whether for other uses, or because there's no kill like overkill) you no longer need any special remote control solution -- standard rdp or vnc clients work from there.
Huh. Works on Firefox on Win7. Doesn't work on Android with any of Opera, Chrome, or Firefox.
Pretty sure it's a question of whether CSS "font-weight: 900;" works, which depends both on browser support (anything recent should handle it, I think), and on font choice -- if the font in use only comes in two weights, two weights is all you get.
Gah! I missed the "in a non-assembler format" qualifier. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but I suppose it was intended to rule out smart-ass answers like mine.
As most of us know, and the rest of us ought to, x86 and many other CISC architectures have their instruction set decoupled from the internal microarchitecture by using microcode.
Since multiple microcode instructions can run for one machine instruction, there's likely a sequence of three or more instructions used by many common instructions (I'm guessing something pertaining to checking for cache misses?) that thus gets executed more often than any single opcode on that machine.
From the point of view of the innocent victim, it pretty much is murder.
But from the point of view of the victim, manslaughter and justifiable homicide can also "pretty much [be] murder", yet we treat them differently.
Suppose someone seems to be threatening my life, I shoot them, and it turns out they were not in fact threatening my life (perhaps I see them with a laser pointer in their hand and mistakenly believe it to be a gun barrel; later, I see a red dot on my chest and, believing it to be a laser sight affixed to the gun I believe they are wielding, I drop, roll, draw two guns, and open fire in the best Hong Kong cinematic form.)
* If my belief that I was under imminent threat to my life is found to be "reasonable", it's justified self-defense. (This might be the case if the guy playing with the laser pointer is in fact playing that it's a gun, on the assumption I know it's really not, and says something like "Freeze! Gimme your wallet!" when he points it at my chest, or if lighting conditions were poor enough that differentiating between a laser pointer and a gun was not feasible.) * If my belief is found to be unreasonable, but honest (I truly believed I was in danger, but I should have known better, e.g. because lighting conditions were good enough that any reasonable person could have realized that was a laser pointer), it's voluntary manslaughter under the "imperfect self-defense" rule. * If my belief is found to be dishonest (it's demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that I did not believe my life was actually in danger), it's murder.
In all three cases, from the victim's point of view, it "pretty much is murder" -- he was playing with a laser pointer, even being careful not to shine it in anyone's eyes, and all of a sudden somebody flies off the handle and shoots him dead. But society doesn't run purely from the victim's perspective, and our society has found it useful to draw distinctions between these cases, and (at least in the British/American society) we've drawn substantially the same distinctions for centuries. We do have words that are broader ("homicide" or "killing") and if we want to talk about all three as one, the correct course is to use "homicide" or "killing" with appropriate specifiers (e.g. "of innocents") to narrow it to the cases we're talking about, not to misapply the word "murder".
While self-defence and capital punishment are not precisely congruent, there's enough similarity to strongly suggest the same distinctions apply:
* If everybody in town hates some fellow, and thinks we'd be better off with him hanged, so the jury deliberately ignores a reasonable doubt and convicts him of a crime he didn't commit, that's one thing, and is very aptly described by murder. * If a jury honestly but wrongly believes there's no reasonable doubt, and the defendant is actually innocent, that's another thing, and maps pretty nicely to the voluntary manslaughter case above. * If a jury honestly and correctly believes there's no reasonable doubt, and the defendant is actually innocent, but looks guilty because of some sequence of events that no reasonable person would believe (e.g. space-alien frame-up, or more worryingly, false testimony by expert witnesses who have no obvious motive for lying), that's yet another thing.
Perhaps you don't care about the distinction between these, for the purposes of this discussion (as you say, they're pretty much the same for the innocent guy getting hanged at sunrise), but if so, you shouldn't use a word that implies that distinction. This is particularly true if you're already using specifiers like "of innocent people", "the wrong people", etc., which would be needed to narrow "killing" (which of course includes all capital punishment) to the specific "killing of innocents".
You are changing what I said from what was essentially, 'all rational people value their lives'
Say I go to google maps, or mapquest, or openstreetmap, or whatever. That web page will ask the browser to do geolocation, the browser will throw up a dialog something like this:
Website foo-maps.bar wants to know your location. {Scare-text explaining why I might not want to click OK} Send location data? [Yes] [No]
If I click yes, the browser sends my location to the mapping site. Now I'm looking at a map of where I am, I can search for businesses nearby, etc.. Or, if I don't want a map of my current location, I could just click no, then I'd have to type in an address or search query to find the map I do want.
Or some ad server wants to show me banner ads for nearby stores, so it asks the browser to geolocation; the browser will throw up the same dialog, I'll click no, and the ad server doesn't get my location.
Or any other web site that might want to know my location for any reason, same story: The browser pops up a dialog, I click yes or no, and the site gets or doesn't get my current location.
There is a great bullshit test I came up with to give to someone who advocates capitol punishment. Ask them if our court system is 100% perfect in convicting the guilty.
I think you mean "in acquitting the innocent" or "in convicting only the guilty", or some such formulation -- as you worded it, you're claiming that if we only convict 10% of the guilty, but convict no innocents, we've got a problem, but if we are perfect at convicting all the guilty (and 50% of the innocent), we're good.
Then ask them if that means that means that we are murdering at least a few of the wrong people with capitol punishment.
Your use of "murdering" is an interesting choice. Coupled with "the wrong people" it sounds like you're applying "murder" to all executions, right or wrong, which is begging the question -- you're assuming capital punishment is murder in order to prove it's wrong.
Maybe that's inferring too much, and you meant "murder" to apply only to the execution of the innocent, but even there, murder hardly seems the right term. Just as with self-defense, if the killing arises from a reasonable, good faith belief that, if true, would have justified the killing, but that belief turns out to have been a mistake, it's still justified. Even if (as I suspect applies in most cases) the conviction was unreasonable, resulting from sloppiness of the jurors rather than seriously misleading evidence (e.g. aliens with god-like powers decide to frame an innocent so well nobody can be blamed for believing the clear proof they planted), it still seems more along the lines of manslaughter than murder.
(And if you can't make your case using the term "killing" instead of "murder", it seems likely you don't have a case.)
Then ask them if they would still feel that capitol punishment was fair and just if they were one of those people that was selected to die. Then ask them if they still support capitol punishment. If they say still yes, they are lying.
It's a pity you can't grasp that someone may disagree with you and still be honest.
AFAIK a prerequisite to advocating capital punishment is the belief that capital punishment makes the world a better place -- that it saves lives and/or suffering through a deterrent effect, and that it saves more lives than the innocent lives lost to wrongful convictions. (After all, if it's ineffective, why does it even matter whether it's morally tolerable -- there's no point doing it at all.) Given that belief, is it so inconceivable that a person could choose to risk their lives, along with everyone else's, for the common good, and still support the system even if they lose, because "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one"? Millions of people make a bet like that in military and police forces, so why do you reject the possibility someone could make the same bet regarding capital punishment?
FWIW, I don't advocate capital punishment, though I don't fight it either. I don't see a moral problem with it, as long as it saves more innocents from murderers than the innocents we execute. However, it's not at all clear that it actually does any net good, at least the way we apply it. With a decade or more from the crime to the consequences, it simply doesn't make the cause-effect link in the minds of typical criminals that would make it effective as a deterrent. (Of course one can't advocate rushing things along to fix this, as that seems certain to compromise what measure of justice the system currently provides.)
Having your trunk closed while driving is reason enough to be pulled over though, as the police would have to operate under the assumption that it was full of millions of dollars worth of cocaine since they have no way to tell.
To be clear, I'm not saying California law doesn't let cops make that assumption (in fact it seems that it does), but pointing out that any law which interprets "no way to tell" as "assume they're doing the most dangerous thing, and punish accordingly" comes into serious conflict with the ideal of individual liberty, limited only where your behavior actually harms or endangers someone else.
And watch the editors ignore the votes, and post whatever stories they like to the front page anyway.
The cool thing about/.'s moderation system is that, by default, the mod system works exactly as designed. The overlords do have an infinite supply of modpoints, as well as god-mode actions that can't be done with modpoints, but without action on their part, the moderation system just carries on working. As with so many things in life, pain is reduced to manageable levels by setting up an environment such that sloth opposes incompetence.
In contrast, the submission up/downvoting process doesn't ever promote a submission to a front-page article -- that process requires overlord intervention. Of course we get random retardedness, because that's what/. editors do best! What would help fix it (y'know, aside from editors who actually give a fuck) is a system that exhibits the same default-functional behavior as the mod system -- this could happen either before the front page or on the front page.
To implement a good system before the front page would basically mean giving the upvoting process teeth, so submissions with enough upvotes automatically post. This would make it easy for the overlords to sit back and not post anything, just letting content get upvoted to the front page, so we'd get a decrease in editor-generated/selected stories. If one trusts the readership to, overall, do a better job than the editors, we mostly win -- if not, the trolls mostly win. If we're really lucky, the editors can stay busy doing battle with the trolls while the non-trolls bring an enlightened era of story promotion. (It's kinda like something out of Norse mythology -- don't Odin, Thor, and that lot seem a lot more heroic when they're all off fighting the forces of chaos instead of hanging about Midgard brawling in the local pub, seducing your wife, and generally carrying on?)
Doing moderation on the front page would work pretty much like the comment moderation system: each article would have a score, starting at 1, selected users would receive modpoints which may be spent to increment/decrement that score, and users could hide/collapse articles below a threshold score. Could be a simple extension of the comment mod system requiring, say, 5 modpoints to do a single moderation action at a story level, instead of 1 to moderate a comment, or could be a whole new class of modpoints issued to a separate pool of moderators, potentially with different eligibility requirements. In either case, the overlords can post whatever they like (whether or not it's upvoted in the firehose), and we can shovel crap like this right to -1. Sure, they can override us, but as long as that requires effort on their part, it likely won't be abused any more (or less) than their override powers on the comment system.
Apparently the problem is that the app logs the password to a generic logging facility, and the attack is to read this log, not to read info from where it's "stored" as such.
AIUI, the fact that anyone can read this log file over USB is intentional, and apps are supposed to sanitize entries of sensitive data before logging them, so the fault lies with the app here.
Actually his statements suggest that it's quite possible, just not in the form-factor claimed, and not without a rebreather to recycle the inert gasses, because you can't safely breathe pure O2 at underwater pressures.
You're talking about electrolysis, where you strip chemically-bound oxygen from water molecules. The link GP posted is talking about extracting dissolved O2, which is how fish breathe (and how this device is claimed to work). If you'd actually read "his statements", I'd think you'd have noticed this discrepancy...
Electrolysis is great because you need next to no water flow to get enough oxygen to breathe -- you get about 0.9 kg O2 per litre of water, whereas dissolved oxygen is on the order of 10 mg/l. But TANSTAAFL, electrolysis requires a lot more energy per unit of oxygen extracted, because breaking chemical bonds takes work.
So while a mixed-gas rebreather with a diluent tank only (no O2 tank) + electrolysis apparatus to provide O2 on-demand is technically possible, it seems unlikely to serve any useful purpose -- you've replaced a tank with a battery that will have similar or worse weight and volume. (While I don't have the numbers on this handy, particularly for modern Li-ions, I did run some napkin calculations back in college for a similar concept, and I recall that NiMH batteries of the day had a long way to go before electrolysis could beat tanked O2...)
That second one is what kept me from ever actually live-testing middle-school science fair project - I was extracting plenty of O2 via electrolysis, but fortunately one of my contacts in my search for information on prior projects warned me of the dangers before I sent myself into sudden underwater seizures due to oxygen toxicity.
You know, early rebreathers were O2-only, and worked well enough within certain limits -- open-circuit mixed-gas SCUBA was only developed after divers encountered and recognized those limits, and the modern mixed-gas rebreathers some time after that. A perfectly serviceable (within those limits) rebreather along those lines could be based on your science fair project -- you do need a counter-lung and a CO2 absorber, but if those were included (or one were to add them), it would be OK. (Or if you want to skip the rebreather, sacrificing dive time for simplicity, you could use straight O2 in an open-circuit SCUBA for the same limits.) While not suited for any great depth, or for long periods at shallow depths, a tankless electrolytic oxygen SCUBA (open- or closed-circuit) should be good for 45 minutes at 6 meters or 2 hours at 5 meters (based on NOAA limits) -- certainly enough for tests and demonstrations in most swimming pools.
If you use GET, the search query is in the URL, thus when you click a link on the result page, the website can get the search query from the referer header (at least in typically-configured browsers -- naturally if you turn off referer sending, this doesn't happen). If you use POST, the search query is in a field, thus it's not available via the referer header.
Have you actually been raped? If not, I'm not sure why you presume to know what it feels like, and I'm not at all sure why you'd think it feels like "someone failing to hand me money I believe I've earned". (Engaging a prostitute, taking advantage of their services, then refusing to pay, is the closest sex-related analogy I can come up with. And of course that's not rape, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to feel the same.)
Or is this one of those things where someone can't persuade people's rational minds with logic, and thus has to resort to hyperbolic rhetoric in hopes of bypassing rationality with an emotional reaction?
Anyway, what it "feels like" is irrelevant. Making laws based on how people feel is just a bad mess all around, and if we're to do that for copyright law, how do we decide whether to go by your feelings that copying == rape, or by someone else's feelings that copyright == rape?
If you actually hope to persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you, you might try arguing that, integrated across society, copyright has more benefit by incentivizing new works than harm by curtailing everyone's natural freedom to copy what they like (y'know, the theory under which modern copyright was originally introduced in 1710). Or something like that. Not complaining that copying makes you feel bad.
(If you're just letting off steam, without trying to persuade anyone, then I guess coming off as an entitled jerk is an acceptable side-effect.)
That may be troublesome... Note that while DNS comparisons are supposed to be performed case-insensitively, uppercase letters are valid characters.
If your regex-based web filter doesn't canonicalize the domain name first and/or use a case-insensitive regex match, users may be able to circumvent the filter with http://www.foo.com/ (or even http://foo.com/).
Of course, browsers these days do so much "helpful" manipulation on anything typed in the URL bar, I'm not sure you can slip a mixed-case domain through them -- they may just canonicalize it for you. But stuff like wget has no problem using the URL exactly as typed.
I do take issue with one detail, though: the assumption that helmet laws will disincentivize cycling.
It's no assumption -- it's a statistically demonstrated fact. In places where helmet laws are passed, cycling does decrease, whether or not there's a good reason that should necessarily happen.
But if you want to know why its different from seatbelt laws, note that seatbelt laws came about in two stages -- first, manufacturers were required to provide seatbelts in every vehicle sold. Then, after almost every vehicle on the road had seatbelts, drivers and passengers were required to use them. The first step, while slightly increasing the price of a new vehicle, didn't cause anyone any practical inconvenience -- anyone who didn't believe in them might grumble a bit about being forced to pay for them (it's not like one would actually refuse to buy a $xxxx car over a $x addition), but he didn't have to use them. And because of the first step, the second step had no up-front cost or inconvenience -- you did have to buckle up every time, but the seatbelt was right there, no need to run down to the garage and get one installed. (AIUI, there are/were exemptions from seatbelt wearing laws in any cars old enough to have legally been sold without seatbelts, and at any rate they were a tiny fraction of the fleet by then.) So neither step caused motorists to quit motoring, especially since most of them had no practical alternative for traveling the same distance.
In contrast, many cyclists who presently ride helmetless have no helmet, and if a mandatory helmet law were passed, they'd have to make time to get to the bike shop and buy one or quit riding -- and if, like many cyclists, you've already got a car that satisfies all your functional transportation requirements, quitting is by far the easier option.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like this may be summed up as "news for everyone, stuff that may or may not matter."
In other words, pretty much the same as modern /., amirite?
In seriousness, though, it seems like the big difference is a "filtering system" (even though it works not by computerized filter, but by a thousand foo-obsessed types manually sorting new stories into foo and non-foo, the net effect for the "normal" user is that they can pick any of those human filters) so that nerds could filter it down to classic /. type stuff, arts guys can filter it to their stuff, etc..
That's great and all, but the big reason I started spending time on /. back in the day, and the only reason I eventually registered a nick instead of leaving when I got fed up with the AJAXy mess that is unregistered users' only option, is the discussion system. For all its problems (groupthink etc.), it's still way better than most of the net.
So I guess whether I end up spending much time on Trove will depend immensely on how the discussion system works in practice. Of course that's a function of both the discussion system itself, and what sort of user base it attracts -- after all, a high enough concentration of trolls and assholes can overwhelm any technical measures.
Name one bus which you can't control or at least jam, given you physically tapped into it.
The AEC Routemaster?
Oops, hit submit instead of preview, and forgot to log in... Take 2:
There was one class where the instructor didn't like "showoffs" so code had to be written using only the commands that were covered in the lecture.
Heh. My favorite bit of code written for 1st-year C class was a simple function to convert grades from a numeric percentage to a character representing the letter grade. (Breaks were inclusive and at 10% increments, so 90-100%=A,80-89%=B, etc.) This problem was of course assigned at the end of the lecture introducing switch/case.
My code was something like:
(I'm sure it's obvious enough, but integer division does the magic; multiplying by 5, then dividing by 4, maps 0-3 to 0-3, but maps 4 to 5; this skips E to give the proper sequence of ABCDF.)
Actually, I may have handled the <50 case inline with the conditional operator instead (e.g. percent>50?percent:50), not sure. (I went through a conditional-operator-happy phase in school, having not yet realized how frequently it just makes code harder to read.)
Anyway, my instructor fortunately didn't have a policy like that, and knew me enough to know I grokked switch/case anyway. He told me later that he enjoyed showoffs, because grading normal solutions was tiresome, and a few minutes examining some other approach was a welcome break.
you forgot to end the sarcasm
YMBNH; on /., the sarcasm never ends.
Not really upset about monetizing their product, but ONE DAY'S NOTICE?! Whomever made that decision had better start updating the `ol resume.
Eh, I'm not sure about that. I suspect the concept here is that by minimizing the notice, users have less time to shop for options, and are thus more likely to convert to the paid product. The flip side is that some (like you) will get mad about the blatantly unreasonable notice and refuse to have further dealings with them no matter how bad the competing options are, but it's not at all obvious that this isn't a net win for them, compared to a more reasonable notice.
The 7 day trial is particularly clever -- all the people who need their current setup to keep working will just go for that, and keep rolling just like before. They have 7 days to look for an alternate solution, but since they're already signed up for LogMeIn Pro, I bet they're substantially more likely to carry on using it than if you gave them 7 days' notice and no free trial.
A "networking VPN"? As opposed to some other VPN that has nothing to do with networks? ;)
Anyway, VPN is overkill if all you need is remote control, sure.
But if you do have a VPN running (whether for other uses, or because there's no kill like overkill) you no longer need any special remote control solution -- standard rdp or vnc clients work from there.
You may be confusing "speech to text" with "text to speech"...
I would say a typical US pizza is 14-20" diameter. Neither 12" nor 24" is very common.
Cool, thanks!
Huh. Works on Firefox on Win7. Doesn't work on Android with any of Opera, Chrome, or Firefox.
Pretty sure it's a question of whether CSS "font-weight: 900;" works, which depends both on browser support (anything recent should handle it, I think), and on font choice -- if the font in use only comes in two weights, two weights is all you get.
(You can test that here... I don't like w3schools, but it's the only site with a live css fiddling tool I know.)
Gah! I missed the "in a non-assembler format" qualifier. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but I suppose it was intended to rule out smart-ass answers like mine.
I know this is OT, but
Every Ask Slashdot gets a comment pointing out that it's the dumbest Ask Slashdot ever, I know.
This time, it's really, really the case.
True. But more importantly: I never knew /. let us do nested bold levels!
For anyone too lazy to look at the html source...
As most of us know, and the rest of us ought to, x86 and many other CISC architectures have their instruction set decoupled from the internal microarchitecture by using microcode.
Since multiple microcode instructions can run for one machine instruction, there's likely a sequence of three or more instructions used by many common instructions (I'm guessing something pertaining to checking for cache misses?) that thus gets executed more often than any single opcode on that machine.
From the point of view of the innocent victim, it pretty much is murder.
But from the point of view of the victim, manslaughter and justifiable homicide can also "pretty much [be] murder", yet we treat them differently.
Suppose someone seems to be threatening my life, I shoot them, and it turns out they were not in fact threatening my life (perhaps I see them with a laser pointer in their hand and mistakenly believe it to be a gun barrel; later, I see a red dot on my chest and, believing it to be a laser sight affixed to the gun I believe they are wielding, I drop, roll, draw two guns, and open fire in the best Hong Kong cinematic form.)
* If my belief that I was under imminent threat to my life is found to be "reasonable", it's justified self-defense. (This might be the case if the guy playing with the laser pointer is in fact playing that it's a gun, on the assumption I know it's really not, and says something like "Freeze! Gimme your wallet!" when he points it at my chest, or if lighting conditions were poor enough that differentiating between a laser pointer and a gun was not feasible.)
* If my belief is found to be unreasonable, but honest (I truly believed I was in danger, but I should have known better, e.g. because lighting conditions were good enough that any reasonable person could have realized that was a laser pointer), it's voluntary manslaughter under the "imperfect self-defense" rule.
* If my belief is found to be dishonest (it's demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that I did not believe my life was actually in danger), it's murder.
In all three cases, from the victim's point of view, it "pretty much is murder" -- he was playing with a laser pointer, even being careful not to shine it in anyone's eyes, and all of a sudden somebody flies off the handle and shoots him dead. But society doesn't run purely from the victim's perspective, and our society has found it useful to draw distinctions between these cases, and (at least in the British/American society) we've drawn substantially the same distinctions for centuries. We do have words that are broader ("homicide" or "killing") and if we want to talk about all three as one, the correct course is to use "homicide" or "killing" with appropriate specifiers (e.g. "of innocents") to narrow it to the cases we're talking about, not to misapply the word "murder".
While self-defence and capital punishment are not precisely congruent, there's enough similarity to strongly suggest the same distinctions apply:
* If everybody in town hates some fellow, and thinks we'd be better off with him hanged, so the jury deliberately ignores a reasonable doubt and convicts him of a crime he didn't commit, that's one thing, and is very aptly described by murder.
* If a jury honestly but wrongly believes there's no reasonable doubt, and the defendant is actually innocent, that's another thing, and maps pretty nicely to the voluntary manslaughter case above.
* If a jury honestly and correctly believes there's no reasonable doubt, and the defendant is actually innocent, but looks guilty because of some sequence of events that no reasonable person would believe (e.g. space-alien frame-up, or more worryingly, false testimony by expert witnesses who have no obvious motive for lying), that's yet another thing.
Perhaps you don't care about the distinction between these, for the purposes of this discussion (as you say, they're pretty much the same for the innocent guy getting hanged at sunrise), but if so, you shouldn't use a word that implies that distinction. This is particularly true if you're already using specifiers like "of innocent people", "the wrong people", etc., which would be needed to narrow "killing" (which of course includes all capital punishment) to the specific "killing of innocents".
You are changing what I said from what was essentially, 'all rational people value their lives'
But you didn't use the qualifier "rational"
Geolocation for what though?
Say I go to google maps, or mapquest, or openstreetmap, or whatever. That web page will ask the browser to do geolocation, the browser will throw up a dialog something like this:
Website foo-maps.bar wants to know your location.
{Scare-text explaining why I might not want to click OK}
Send location data?
[Yes] [No]
If I click yes, the browser sends my location to the mapping site. Now I'm looking at a map of where I am, I can search for businesses nearby, etc.. Or, if I don't want a map of my current location, I could just click no, then I'd have to type in an address or search query to find the map I do want.
Or some ad server wants to show me banner ads for nearby stores, so it asks the browser to geolocation; the browser will throw up the same dialog, I'll click no, and the ad server doesn't get my location.
Or any other web site that might want to know my location for any reason, same story: The browser pops up a dialog, I click yes or no, and the site gets or doesn't get my current location.
There is a great bullshit test I came up with to give to someone who advocates capitol punishment. Ask them if our court system is 100% perfect in convicting the guilty.
I think you mean "in acquitting the innocent" or "in convicting only the guilty", or some such formulation -- as you worded it, you're claiming that if we only convict 10% of the guilty, but convict no innocents, we've got a problem, but if we are perfect at convicting all the guilty (and 50% of the innocent), we're good.
Then ask them if that means that means that we are murdering at least a few of the wrong people with capitol punishment.
Your use of "murdering" is an interesting choice. Coupled with "the wrong people" it sounds like you're applying "murder" to all executions, right or wrong, which is begging the question -- you're assuming capital punishment is murder in order to prove it's wrong.
Maybe that's inferring too much, and you meant "murder" to apply only to the execution of the innocent, but even there, murder hardly seems the right term. Just as with self-defense, if the killing arises from a reasonable, good faith belief that, if true, would have justified the killing, but that belief turns out to have been a mistake, it's still justified. Even if (as I suspect applies in most cases) the conviction was unreasonable, resulting from sloppiness of the jurors rather than seriously misleading evidence (e.g. aliens with god-like powers decide to frame an innocent so well nobody can be blamed for believing the clear proof they planted), it still seems more along the lines of manslaughter than murder.
(And if you can't make your case using the term "killing" instead of "murder", it seems likely you don't have a case.)
Then ask them if they would still feel that capitol punishment was fair and just if they were one of those people that was selected to die. Then ask them if they still support capitol punishment. If they say still yes, they are lying.
It's a pity you can't grasp that someone may disagree with you and still be honest.
AFAIK a prerequisite to advocating capital punishment is the belief that capital punishment makes the world a better place -- that it saves lives and/or suffering through a deterrent effect, and that it saves more lives than the innocent lives lost to wrongful convictions. (After all, if it's ineffective, why does it even matter whether it's morally tolerable -- there's no point doing it at all.) Given that belief, is it so inconceivable that a person could choose to risk their lives, along with everyone else's, for the common good, and still support the system even if they lose, because "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one"? Millions of people make a bet like that in military and police forces, so why do you reject the possibility someone could make the same bet regarding capital punishment?
FWIW, I don't advocate capital punishment, though I don't fight it either. I don't see a moral problem with it, as long as it saves more innocents from murderers than the innocents we execute. However, it's not at all clear that it actually does any net good, at least the way we apply it. With a decade or more from the crime to the consequences, it simply doesn't make the cause-effect link in the minds of typical criminals that would make it effective as a deterrent. (Of course one can't advocate rushing things along to fix this, as that seems certain to compromise what measure of justice the system currently provides.)
Having your trunk closed while driving is reason enough to be pulled over though, as the police would have to operate under the assumption that it was full of millions of dollars worth of cocaine since they have no way to tell.
To be clear, I'm not saying California law doesn't let cops make that assumption (in fact it seems that it does), but pointing out that any law which interprets "no way to tell" as "assume they're doing the most dangerous thing, and punish accordingly" comes into serious conflict with the ideal of individual liberty, limited only where your behavior actually harms or endangers someone else.
Click on Submissions. Vote them up or down.
And watch the editors ignore the votes, and post whatever stories they like to the front page anyway.
The cool thing about /.'s moderation system is that, by default, the mod system works exactly as designed. The overlords do have an infinite supply of modpoints, as well as god-mode actions that can't be done with modpoints, but without action on their part, the moderation system just carries on working. As with so many things in life, pain is reduced to manageable levels by setting up an environment such that sloth opposes incompetence.
In contrast, the submission up/downvoting process doesn't ever promote a submission to a front-page article -- that process requires overlord intervention. Of course we get random retardedness, because that's what /. editors do best! What would help fix it (y'know, aside from editors who actually give a fuck) is a system that exhibits the same default-functional behavior as the mod system -- this could happen either before the front page or on the front page.
To implement a good system before the front page would basically mean giving the upvoting process teeth, so submissions with enough upvotes automatically post. This would make it easy for the overlords to sit back and not post anything, just letting content get upvoted to the front page, so we'd get a decrease in editor-generated/selected stories. If one trusts the readership to, overall, do a better job than the editors, we mostly win -- if not, the trolls mostly win. If we're really lucky, the editors can stay busy doing battle with the trolls while the non-trolls bring an enlightened era of story promotion. (It's kinda like something out of Norse mythology -- don't Odin, Thor, and that lot seem a lot more heroic when they're all off fighting the forces of chaos instead of hanging about Midgard brawling in the local pub, seducing your wife, and generally carrying on?)
Doing moderation on the front page would work pretty much like the comment moderation system: each article would have a score, starting at 1, selected users would receive modpoints which may be spent to increment/decrement that score, and users could hide/collapse articles below a threshold score. Could be a simple extension of the comment mod system requiring, say, 5 modpoints to do a single moderation action at a story level, instead of 1 to moderate a comment, or could be a whole new class of modpoints issued to a separate pool of moderators, potentially with different eligibility requirements. In either case, the overlords can post whatever they like (whether or not it's upvoted in the firehose), and we can shovel crap like this right to -1. Sure, they can override us, but as long as that requires effort on their part, it likely won't be abused any more (or less) than their override powers on the comment system.
(I didn't RTFA, of course...)
Apparently the problem is that the app logs the password to a generic logging facility, and the attack is to read this log, not to read info from where it's "stored" as such.
AIUI, the fact that anyone can read this log file over USB is intentional, and apps are supposed to sanitize entries of sensitive data before logging them, so the fault lies with the app here.
Actually his statements suggest that it's quite possible, just not in the form-factor claimed, and not without a rebreather to recycle the inert gasses, because you can't safely breathe pure O2 at underwater pressures.
You're talking about electrolysis, where you strip chemically-bound oxygen from water molecules. The link GP posted is talking about extracting dissolved O2, which is how fish breathe (and how this device is claimed to work). If you'd actually read "his statements", I'd think you'd have noticed this discrepancy...
Electrolysis is great because you need next to no water flow to get enough oxygen to breathe -- you get about 0.9 kg O2 per litre of water, whereas dissolved oxygen is on the order of 10 mg/l. But TANSTAAFL, electrolysis requires a lot more energy per unit of oxygen extracted, because breaking chemical bonds takes work.
So while a mixed-gas rebreather with a diluent tank only (no O2 tank) + electrolysis apparatus to provide O2 on-demand is technically possible, it seems unlikely to serve any useful purpose -- you've replaced a tank with a battery that will have similar or worse weight and volume. (While I don't have the numbers on this handy, particularly for modern Li-ions, I did run some napkin calculations back in college for a similar concept, and I recall that NiMH batteries of the day had a long way to go before electrolysis could beat tanked O2...)
That second one is what kept me from ever actually live-testing middle-school science fair project - I was extracting plenty of O2 via electrolysis, but fortunately one of my contacts in my search for information on prior projects warned me of the dangers before I sent myself into sudden underwater seizures due to oxygen toxicity.
You know, early rebreathers were O2-only, and worked well enough within certain limits -- open-circuit mixed-gas SCUBA was only developed after divers encountered and recognized those limits, and the modern mixed-gas rebreathers some time after that. A perfectly serviceable (within those limits) rebreather along those lines could be based on your science fair project -- you do need a counter-lung and a CO2 absorber, but if those were included (or one were to add them), it would be OK. (Or if you want to skip the rebreather, sacrificing dive time for simplicity, you could use straight O2 in an open-circuit SCUBA for the same limits.) While not suited for any great depth, or for long periods at shallow depths, a tankless electrolytic oxygen SCUBA (open- or closed-circuit) should be good for 45 minutes at 6 meters or 2 hours at 5 meters (based on NOAA limits) -- certainly enough for tests and demonstrations in most swimming pools.
It's a referer thing.
If you use GET, the search query is in the URL, thus when you click a link on the result page, the website can get the search query from the referer header (at least in typically-configured browsers -- naturally if you turn off referer sending, this doesn't happen). If you use POST, the search query is in a field, thus it's not available via the referer header.
But it still feels like being raped.
Have you actually been raped? If not, I'm not sure why you presume to know what it feels like, and I'm not at all sure why you'd think it feels like "someone failing to hand me money I believe I've earned". (Engaging a prostitute, taking advantage of their services, then refusing to pay, is the closest sex-related analogy I can come up with. And of course that's not rape, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to feel the same.)
Or is this one of those things where someone can't persuade people's rational minds with logic, and thus has to resort to hyperbolic rhetoric in hopes of bypassing rationality with an emotional reaction?
Anyway, what it "feels like" is irrelevant. Making laws based on how people feel is just a bad mess all around, and if we're to do that for copyright law, how do we decide whether to go by your feelings that copying == rape, or by someone else's feelings that copyright == rape?
If you actually hope to persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you, you might try arguing that, integrated across society, copyright has more benefit by incentivizing new works than harm by curtailing everyone's natural freedom to copy what they like (y'know, the theory under which modern copyright was originally introduced in 1710). Or something like that. Not complaining that copying makes you feel bad.
(If you're just letting off steam, without trying to persuade anyone, then I guess coming off as an entitled jerk is an acceptable side-effect.)
That may be troublesome... Note that while DNS comparisons are supposed to be performed case-insensitively, uppercase letters are valid characters.
If your regex-based web filter doesn't canonicalize the domain name first and/or use a case-insensitive regex match, users may be able to circumvent the filter with http://www.foo.com/ (or even http://foo.com/).
Of course, browsers these days do so much "helpful" manipulation on anything typed in the URL bar, I'm not sure you can slip a mixed-case domain through them -- they may just canonicalize it for you. But stuff like wget has no problem using the URL exactly as typed.
Mind if I join this Dogpile?
I do take issue with one detail, though: the assumption that helmet laws will disincentivize cycling.
It's no assumption -- it's a statistically demonstrated fact. In places where helmet laws are passed, cycling does decrease, whether or not there's a good reason that should necessarily happen.
But if you want to know why its different from seatbelt laws, note that seatbelt laws came about in two stages -- first, manufacturers were required to provide seatbelts in every vehicle sold. Then, after almost every vehicle on the road had seatbelts, drivers and passengers were required to use them. The first step, while slightly increasing the price of a new vehicle, didn't cause anyone any practical inconvenience -- anyone who didn't believe in them might grumble a bit about being forced to pay for them (it's not like one would actually refuse to buy a $xxxx car over a $x addition), but he didn't have to use them. And because of the first step, the second step had no up-front cost or inconvenience -- you did have to buckle up every time, but the seatbelt was right there, no need to run down to the garage and get one installed. (AIUI, there are/were exemptions from seatbelt wearing laws in any cars old enough to have legally been sold without seatbelts, and at any rate they were a tiny fraction of the fleet by then.) So neither step caused motorists to quit motoring, especially since most of them had no practical alternative for traveling the same distance.
In contrast, many cyclists who presently ride helmetless have no helmet, and if a mandatory helmet law were passed, they'd have to make time to get to the bike shop and buy one or quit riding -- and if, like many cyclists, you've already got a car that satisfies all your functional transportation requirements, quitting is by far the easier option.