The only part of X11 that people need is network transparent remote display, but that's the one part that the Wayland developers are absolutely hell bent on removing.
They aren't removing anything... they are building something new from the ground up. In doing so, they are choosing not to build the whole castle in one go, but to focus their technical expertise on building a low-level protocol/library, on top of which other developers will inevitably keep building and add support for remote rendering.
Wayland isn't removing your network transparency, it's delegating that responsibility to other yet-to-be-written software. This would be a concern if all distros were moving to Wayland next month, but they aren't. Wayland is a long-term strategy.
There is definitely going to be confusion, but Futureshop is the one making the mess here.
Not Microsoft, not even Asus.
The fault is entirely Microsoft's for using the same "Windows 8" brand on two similar-looking products that have vastly different technical underpinnings. If you don't do a good job branding and distinguishing your products up front, don't expect your retail outlets (especially no-name mediocre ones) to fill the gap. This is not some one-off fuck-up by Futureshop... it's a problem on multiple sites that journalist and bloggers have been predicting for months. Microsoft has loads of experience with marketing and branding, so the real mystery here is why they have committed to such an obviously confusing strategy.
Of course, who we blame here--in this Slashdot discussion--doesn't really matter. It's who the consumer chooses to blame (rightly or wrongly) after having a bad experience. I think they will blame Microsoft, so I'd be really irked if I were a Microsoft shareholder.
It looks like they didn't consider the need for a data connection until just recently (in the 2012 standard, according to Wikipedia). That seems like a MAJOR failure of imagination, as a data connection would be useful for time-of-use charging, mileage-based taxes, firmware updates, parking fares, and POS services [e.g., browse the web or watch a complimentary sitcom while you wait the 20 min. for your car to recharge]. Heck, it would be worth it for automated billing alone... just "park & plug" while doing your groceries... no need to fiddle with swiping your card at a grimey public terminal.
It looks like they are now planning to hack it on (send signals over the powerline), but you'd think that would have drawbacks in terms of extra equipment, lower data rates, and perhaps functionality if the charging pins must be energized. IAMNAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) though... anyone with an EE degree care to comment on this apparent gap in the standard?
...not in the FSF thing, but by donating cash to several open source projects I use daily.
Not large amounts, mind you, just $5 or $10 to some small projects and $20 each to a few large projects. I'm not a very generous person and this is something I should have been doing years ago, but I would like to get in the habit of routinely kicking back a few bucks each month to the various projects and organizations that enrich my life.
the state of computer "engineering" is complete and utter shit if a fucking pacemaker can be hacked
Ever seen the signs "warning: microwave ovens may be in use" on fast food joints and other places? Guess why: pacemakers used to be programmed via microwave signals. I hate to break it to you, but insecure, wirelessly manipulable pacemakers have been the norm for decades. Do they need to be secured? Yes, but don't assume that's the highest or most urgent design priority for these little boxes. After all, if you want to kill someone from 30 feet away, there are other devices that will do it for you.
Can you imagine the utter chaos in the U.S. when all our magic electronic boxes suddenly stop working, or worse, work silently behind our backs to sabotage and/or kill us?
Okay... someone's seen a few too many Hollywood movies. The next world war will feature some amount of state-sponsored hacking and some amount of deaths from such hacking, but it's not going to be a "Die Hard 4" scenario. More likely, resistance movements working against an aggressor nation will use small amounts of hacking in combination with other methods (social engineering, insider support, etc.) to carry out sabotage.
Hands up: who here is looking forward to jumping into a world war with both feet, then being surprised by how much we don't know about our own security vulnerabilities, learning the hard way from powerful foreign countries that just might kick our asses, or at the very least cause massive damage (bombing, etc) to the mainland U.S.?
You win an honorary eye-roll. Not because cybersecurity isn't a concern, but because you have quite an active imagination. It seems to me that US national defense has much bigger worries from other factors: a poor economy and shrinking middle class, radicalized ideologies both at home and abroad, unmaintainable federal debt, military pork and bureaucracy, and loss of domestic manufacturing (***this is the biggie, because it's PRODUCTION that wins wars). Just to name a few.
This is how surveillance states gain ground in leaps and bounds over generations. Kids that are GPS tracked by their parents get used to being GPS tracked by authority and as adults, don't mind it or are less likely to *actually* fight it from a state/national authority. Same logic here, with RFID chip tracking.
I don't think it will take that long. Tomorrow, some other parent will sue some other school district for their kid being kidnapped because the school should have known kidnappers were out there and done GPS-tracking preemptively.
Which ignores the fact that Britain had legally secured the mineral rights to virtually all of Iran. The new government was going to welch on the deal. It was clear and plain act of war. The actions taken in response were perfectly justified; unless you want to argue that nations should be freely allowed to ignore treaties with no retaliatory action from the counter party.
I judge governments by whether they uphold civil liberties and democratic principles. Getting screwed on a business deal is not an excuse to abandon those principles.
I'm fairly certain that Einstein, no longer being alive, now knows more about the existence of God (or not) than all of the people posting comments on his religious views.
Given that his brain was preserved and diced up into sugar-cubes, I think his ability to form new memories is... rather limited.
Of course, he might have had a soul that magically took a copy of his brain in the moments prior to death, but the storage media of the era would have had difficulty handling the couple of petabytes that represent a raw, uncompressed brain.... and you know how unreliable those things were, right?:O
"dysgenic" was recognized by my spellchecker as a non-word. Sad, eh? What's that we say about the memory hole?
Umm... that's not a conspiracy or memory hole, that's Firefox's mediocre spellchecker. There are a lot of esoteric words that it doesn't know.
Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it
I think most people have a fairly negative association with the word "eugenics" (which is the term most frequently associated with the various eugenic social movements), even if they don't understand the specifics of that topic. I sense a popular wariness with the consequences of genetic engineering. As evidence I'd point to the movie Gattacca or invite you to Google the term "designer babies" and notice how often ethical concerns are raised.
She's the founder of Planned Parenthood
And antisemitic Henry Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Company. So what? PP explicitly repudiates Sanger's views on eugenics just as Ford no doubt prohibits discrimination based on race. We all subscribe to a mixture of good and bad ideas. Some fail the test of time while others (such as birth control and the assembly line) prove very successful.
Sorry, but this is yet another modern version of Eugenics being pushed in to your face.
So... are you saying that we should never conduct correlative studies between genes and life outcomes? Or are you saying that we should only publish the results of such studies if the naive (e.g., causative) interpretation of them supports a specific political philosophy? Because saying "yes" to either of those questions is completely objectionable from a scientific viewpoint.
Perhaps it's something about how this specific studied was prepared and presented? A problem with methodology or a proposed conclusion? Did you completely miss the part in the summary about genetics being a proxy for the culture and history of ethnic groups? It's certainly possible to embed racist assumptions in the design of a scientific experience (consciously or not): if you see any such problems with this specific experiment, by all means name them. But if you're just objecting to the question being studied or the outcome of this particular experiment... you're pretty much in the same boat as evangelicals who object to studying homosexuality or energy companies who object to studying global warming, and you've got a very tall wall to climb to argue that the study is "bad".
BTW, I would suggest that what made "eugenics" ultimately objectionable from an ethics standpoint wasn't the idea that some genes are better than others, it was the act of killing (or force-sterilizing) people who's genes you didn't like. Science helps us determine facts. Everything else (emotions, philosophy, religion, etc.) help us determine values that govern how we react to those facts.
You and Joe both want a limited resource, so you get an even slice of it.
BMW's are limited: should they be sold for an artificially low price at rationed quantities?
It may not be fair that some people have more money than others (that's a whole 'nother discussion), but price is a convenient way to determine how much everyone gets of which resources. How come? Well, it encourages people to weigh their need for a product against their other needs/wants/desires. It encourages people to weigh their need for a product against other people's need (even though there is the "unfair" aspect of wealth disparity to it). It encourages people to find/invent/use alternatives. It also encourages people to start manufacturing a scarce product (which brings down the price, ultimately).
It's not a perfect system for resource allocation, but for most things it seems to work pretty well (and much better than other systems that have been tried). The counterexample you bring up (outbidding famine victims for bread) is one of the things where free-market economies do make an exception thru various government programs (such as food stamps, but also differing tax rates, welfare programs, subsidies, etc.). But BMW's and hard drives are not subsistence items, and conscientious societies do not need to redistribute wealth to help folks of meager means acquire these things.
Costco's rationing was probably a customer-experience strategy (they want people to experience the occasional "awesome deal" to reinforce the idea that Costco has the lowest prices and is worth the membership fee), not an attempt at "fairness". They can tell others to "deal with it" because they own the drives and decided this was how they wanted to monetize them, not because they have any particular obligation to make them equally available to all customers.
It is a deliberate attempt to cause mental harm and should be prosecuted appropriately...
Here's a better opinion:
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it."
--Voltaire
Anyone can claim "mental harm" at hearing a joke they don't like. And maybe they actually are mentally harmed, but you can't make the world a perfect place thru legislation: human conflict is an inevitable part of living and you can't just rule it out existence. By making a law like this, you open wide avenues of abuse ("offensiveness" is vague and subjective, unlike harm caused by actual physical violence), and you cast a mental shroud across the entire populace, because each person now has to watch what they say extra hard. It's a silent oppression... the sort of thing that inhibits spontaneity and interferes with the business of living.
What's next? A law against facial expressions (frowns, angry glares) intended to cause mental distress?
Making a joke about an alledged murderer before the case has come to court or the body of his victim has even come to light yet? That's an extra special level of offense rarely seen these days
You obviously don't get around a lot if you think that's a "high" level of offense.
At any rate, it's not worth ruining a person's life just because they said something offensive. There is nothing but misery in society going down that road (just imagine the potential for abuse by the ideologically driven). That you have a little bit of sympathy for the offended party does not change that basic fact.
In a way, the internet (and other early online communities) has proven that there are much better ways to deal with trolls. Slashdot's moderation system is a great example of this.
Dependency isn't a problem if you handle taxes this way, because you don't use the pollution tax to pay for wars or Medicare or anything else which is unrelated to the tax.
Except it all goes into the same fiscal bucket.
And even if you completely reworked how state and federal budgets are done (to more closely map revenue streams with their related outlays), there would still be a dependency problem because--in planting those forest or whatever--you've invested capital resources, hired people, contracted with vendors, and done something that plays well with a constituency. When the revenue stream dries up, all these folks will cry out and argue that planting forests is still important. Environmental groups will jump on it too (nevermind the original intent of forest-planting), and for once they will be on the same side of the table as loggers and paper mills who get to harvest government land. Then they'll start running sob ads with a handsome-yet-gristled father enjoying a walk thru the woods with his kids (obligatory close up of dad holding laughing daughter up while spinning around), talking about conservation.
See how it works?
I'm not arguing for Republican-style laizee-faire-for-big-business-and-screw-everyone-else... I'm just pointing out that "use taxes" aren't the easy answer they seem.
And as a non-Webber fan I couldn't be happier for his loss. Phantom is the worst insult to music since someone farted Happy Birthday.
Phantom was the most successful show in history based on its own artistic merits... e.g., not as a result of some marketing trick, captive audience, vendor lock-in, or government-granted monopoly. Perhaps it is your definition of music (or the standards by which you judge it) that needs to be reassessed. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is wrong.
(Though if you're feeling snobbish, you might want to dig up Harold Bloom's opinion piece on the Harry Potter novels, entitled "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.".)
You know what real austerity is? Cutting spending until it matches the amount of revenue actually coming in.
I'm no economist, but I suspect that
(1) debt growth can probably be positive, so long as it is sufficiently less than long-term GDP growth,
(2) you can tinker with both sides of the equation (e.g., spending cuts and revenue growth).
The Tea Party would have a lot more credibility (and support) with me if it was willing to trim ALL the fat (do we really need a $1T military?), had some tolerance for new taxation, and recognized that some long term investments (education, research) are needed for the dividends they will pay down the road.
Of course, not all revenue growth needs to come from the existing tax base. Tourism is a cheap, renewable resource. Can we increase our appeal to foreign travelers? We have scientific outposts, military bases, and sensor networks scattered around the world... is there a way we can monetize those? Are there are some Pacific atolls we could issue 50-year leases on (for the Larry Ellison-wannabee billionaires), perhaps? De-criminalizing (not necessarily legalizing) soft drug usage would probably result in both spending cuts (on enforcement) and new revenue (from taxes). Finally, there have to be some "national treasures" that aren't really all that treasurable: can't the Smithosonian find a few pieces worth putting up for auction? Just some thoughts...
I may have a design for the next big mobile phone case, or the next big laptop stand, or the next big removable hard drive enclosure...
Why would I lease a machine from Stratasys for my prototypes knowing for fact they are willing to revoke my printer lease and take it back?
Because a mobile phone case isn't going doesn't have the (1) potential for PR backlash, (2) potential for legislative backlash, and (3) potential for a major liability exposure.
There are plenty of other companies who will lease on more reasonable terms.
I doubt it, especially after this incident.
Perhaps [they want] to steal my idea or prevent me from competing with them.
Perhaps my next big product is closely related to the little town store run by an executives family member, and they want to shut down me as competition.
Now you're branching into pure speculation. Look... Ms. Jane Doe who just wants to print a few hundred avant garde rubber duckies for her final Master's thesis/project in art **does not care** that Stratasys yanked the lease on some gun nut (as she uncharitably calls them). She cares about the price of the lease and the capabilities of the machine. Even if she is familiar with this particular episode (and she isn't), she won't be too concerned about it because she doesn't see her own product as being "at-risk" in the same legally "gray" sense.
This is all about Stratasys PR department not wanting a product they market to creative types to be linked in the public mind with... firearms.
Mod parent up. The "illegal" angle here is being waayyyy over-discussed, but it's really just an excuse for good PR.
It's a good legal move too. Whenever a radically new technology becomes mainstream enough to enter the public consciousness, the "bad" uses are discovered and fretted about very early on. (Remember this? It almost kept me off the internet completely in high school.) Too much public outcry early on might result in some preemptive legislation for the 3D printer industry, and I imagine Stratasys would like to avoid that.
How does the US know the actual nationality of the hackers and not just their end-proxy?
Perhaps they have collaborating intel from another source (e.g., spies or signals intelligence).
Or do you just want to start a war with China for some reason?
I wouldn't be surprised if it was posturing for election rhetoric. Could have been done to preempt a GOP leak ahead of Wednesday's debate, or it could tie-in with Obama's recent "tough on China" talking points. I try not to follow this stuff too closely though, so take my speculation with a grain of salt...
Was there a shortage of ice, or was the vendor just jacking up prices cause he could. Also how high did the prices go.
If there was no shortage, and he raised prices extremely high (say more then 300% of typical) then there is a logical argument that he was price gouging.
Link to story. Article implies they were charging at least 4.5x the non-emergency cost of ice. Note that some places have very restrictive definitions of gouging; in Alabama for instance, it's unlawful to charge more than 1.25x the previous 30-day rolling average during a declared emergency.
How society should react to that I am torn about though.
I think we have a natural distaste for explicit gouging (as opposed to the hidden type that teleco's and cable companies and patent trolls get away with). Munger's article makes a good anecdotal case that legislative responses to this emotional reaction aren't necessarily in the best interest of disaster victims. OTOH, there are counterexamples where it seems like businesses really abused public trust (like the hotels that jacked up prices on 9/11 to milk stranded air passengers).
FB users make a legally binding agreement not to share their passwords as part of the ToS for having a FB account.
I think the courts have been inconsistent in their recognition of click-thru ToS agreements, so I don't think the legally-binding part is accurate.
However, it is pretty staggering when you think about it: in order to assess your trustworthiness, these employers are asking you to do something that proves yourself untrustworthy. If anything, they should turn it around and only hire the people who won't give them their passwords.
Compounding the irony is that the employers most likely have written policies that forbid password-sharing ("upon penalty of termination") that are identical to the one they are asking you to break.
Is it just a lost concept that--if an individual is willing to lie to another person, he'll be willing to lie to you too?
Even if you bust the seller, and get his entire history of addresses to trace through the blockchain... You still have no way to tell that buyer-A equals buyer-B.
My hypothetical defendant was using a particular gambit that my hypothetical prosecutor saw thru. You now suggest a more sophisticated gambit to use, but there are ways of seeing thru it too. Like I said in another post, it's an arms race. Law enforcement will discover gambits and devise strategies for detecting the tell-tell patterns they leave in bitcoin transaction histories. The obvious gambits (fake intermediaries, scatter/gather, pool/split, currency conversion, etc.) will be countered quickly once law enforcement gets serious (though some aspects may have to wait for legislation and/or regulatory crackdowns on the exchanges). Some gambiteers will succeed, others will be caught.
I think you are seriously underestimating the white hats here: JUST working with bitcoin transaction history one can apply all sorts of graph analysis, forensic accounting, etc., much of it automated. THEN think about all the externalities that can be investigated: your phone records, your browsing history, a GPS tracker on your car, your FaceBook page, etc. THEN think about the laws that will be passed to give law enforcement more visibility into bitcoin exchanges. THEN think about what unknown technical attacks might be used to augment the transaction history (one wild idea: if the government ran a lot of their own P2P nodes, perhaps they could record the timing and IP addresses of block confirmations and infer something about the geographic origin of the buyer?). THEN think about all the other tactics that can be used that apply to ALL drug busts and money-laundering crackdowns (like informants and stakeouts).
Of course, the criminal underground has tactics too. And both sides have limitations of costs, time, manpower, and natural interest. My point is that it gets complex quickly, and police aren't limited to knowing what an algorithm can know. Transaction histories--even that between the pseudo-anonymous nodes in the big bitcoin graph--will be a powerful investigative tool.
Well, sure if you want to track enough bitcoin transfers you probably can and they probably will for the large-enough scale crime. For the small timers though, you can create a separate dummy account for each day of the month and make it too much hassle for them to waste their time on you.
It's an arms race for sure. At first, being a small-timer and being just a little more sophisticated than other small-timers will probably be sufficient, but once they start to develop tools to track down the large-timers, those same tools can be turned on the small-timers as well. On balance, I feel this race will favor the prosecution in the long run, as long as they can explain the data analytics to juries. Or it would if the money-laundering underground was dumb enough to stay on a platform that provides the level of traceability that bitcoin does.
I extremely skeptical of the productive value of talking to completely random people who just happen to be at the same office as you. Talking to people can certainly be extremely productive, but it's the right people, not just anyone.
I have to completely and utterly disagree with you: random conversations with random people provide unexpected benefits and add flavor to your life. Such encounters can be the source of new things: a fresh perspective, a bold idea, a useful tip, a gripping story, an anecdote to tell later, an unusual hobby, a business opportunity, even a friendship. You will savor the memory of a successful conversation years later, long after you've forgotten whatever specific urgencies you were pursuing that day. Those moments will shine thru with beauty, amazement, hope, serendipity, and shared humanity.
Yes, it's hard to make the effort. I should know: I'm not a big people person. I love excuses to avoid social interactions. I'm usually annoyed when strangers talk to for no good reason, and I am suspicious of their intentions. Sometimes the conversation flops or ends badly. And I'm always skeptical in advance: what's the value? Why should I do this? But see the key word above: unexpected. If you knew what the benefit was in advance, there would be no discovery. So it's worth swinging the bat everytime you step up to the plate, no matter how much you feel at the onset that you don't want to. (Though if you're like me, it may help to get some general advice on human interaction.)
Slashdot Mirror
The only part of X11 that people need is network transparent remote display, but that's the one part that the Wayland developers are absolutely hell bent on removing.
They aren't removing anything... they are building something new from the ground up. In doing so, they are choosing not to build the whole castle in one go, but to focus their technical expertise on building a low-level protocol/library, on top of which other developers will inevitably keep building and add support for remote rendering.
Wayland isn't removing your network transparency, it's delegating that responsibility to other yet-to-be-written software. This would be a concern if all distros were moving to Wayland next month, but they aren't. Wayland is a long-term strategy.
There is definitely going to be confusion, but Futureshop is the one making the mess here. Not Microsoft, not even Asus.
The fault is entirely Microsoft's for using the same "Windows 8" brand on two similar-looking products that have vastly different technical underpinnings. If you don't do a good job branding and distinguishing your products up front, don't expect your retail outlets (especially no-name mediocre ones) to fill the gap. This is not some one-off fuck-up by Futureshop... it's a problem on multiple sites that journalist and bloggers have been predicting for months. Microsoft has loads of experience with marketing and branding, so the real mystery here is why they have committed to such an obviously confusing strategy.
Of course, who we blame here--in this Slashdot discussion--doesn't really matter. It's who the consumer chooses to blame (rightly or wrongly) after having a bad experience. I think they will blame Microsoft, so I'd be really irked if I were a Microsoft shareholder.
It looks like they didn't consider the need for a data connection until just recently (in the 2012 standard, according to Wikipedia). That seems like a MAJOR failure of imagination, as a data connection would be useful for time-of-use charging, mileage-based taxes, firmware updates, parking fares, and POS services [e.g., browse the web or watch a complimentary sitcom while you wait the 20 min. for your car to recharge]. Heck, it would be worth it for automated billing alone... just "park & plug" while doing your groceries... no need to fiddle with swiping your card at a grimey public terminal.
It looks like they are now planning to hack it on (send signals over the powerline), but you'd think that would have drawbacks in terms of extra equipment, lower data rates, and perhaps functionality if the charging pins must be energized. IAMNAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) though... anyone with an EE degree care to comment on this apparent gap in the standard?
Not large amounts, mind you, just $5 or $10 to some small projects and $20 each to a few large projects. I'm not a very generous person and this is something I should have been doing years ago, but I would like to get in the habit of routinely kicking back a few bucks each month to the various projects and organizations that enrich my life.
the state of computer "engineering" is complete and utter shit if a fucking pacemaker can be hacked
Ever seen the signs "warning: microwave ovens may be in use" on fast food joints and other places? Guess why: pacemakers used to be programmed via microwave signals. I hate to break it to you, but insecure, wirelessly manipulable pacemakers have been the norm for decades. Do they need to be secured? Yes, but don't assume that's the highest or most urgent design priority for these little boxes. After all, if you want to kill someone from 30 feet away, there are other devices that will do it for you.
Can you imagine the utter chaos in the U.S. when all our magic electronic boxes suddenly stop working, or worse, work silently behind our backs to sabotage and/or kill us?
Okay... someone's seen a few too many Hollywood movies. The next world war will feature some amount of state-sponsored hacking and some amount of deaths from such hacking, but it's not going to be a "Die Hard 4" scenario. More likely, resistance movements working against an aggressor nation will use small amounts of hacking in combination with other methods (social engineering, insider support, etc.) to carry out sabotage.
Hands up: who here is looking forward to jumping into a world war with both feet, then being surprised by how much we don't know about our own security vulnerabilities, learning the hard way from powerful foreign countries that just might kick our asses, or at the very least cause massive damage (bombing, etc) to the mainland U.S.?
You win an honorary eye-roll. Not because cybersecurity isn't a concern, but because you have quite an active imagination. It seems to me that US national defense has much bigger worries from other factors: a poor economy and shrinking middle class, radicalized ideologies both at home and abroad, unmaintainable federal debt, military pork and bureaucracy, and loss of domestic manufacturing (***this is the biggie, because it's PRODUCTION that wins wars). Just to name a few.
This is how surveillance states gain ground in leaps and bounds over generations. Kids that are GPS tracked by their parents get used to being GPS tracked by authority and as adults, don't mind it or are less likely to *actually* fight it from a state/national authority. Same logic here, with RFID chip tracking.
I don't think it will take that long. Tomorrow, some other parent will sue some other school district for their kid being kidnapped because the school should have known kidnappers were out there and done GPS-tracking preemptively.
Which ignores the fact that Britain had legally secured the mineral rights to virtually all of Iran. The new government was going to welch on the deal. It was clear and plain act of war. The actions taken in response were perfectly justified; unless you want to argue that nations should be freely allowed to ignore treaties with no retaliatory action from the counter party.
I judge governments by whether they uphold civil liberties and democratic principles. Getting screwed on a business deal is not an excuse to abandon those principles.
I'm fairly certain that Einstein, no longer being alive, now knows more about the existence of God (or not) than all of the people posting comments on his religious views.
Given that his brain was preserved and diced up into sugar-cubes, I think his ability to form new memories is... rather limited.
Of course, he might have had a soul that magically took a copy of his brain in the moments prior to death, but the storage media of the era would have had difficulty handling the couple of petabytes that represent a raw, uncompressed brain.... and you know how unreliable those things were, right? :O
"dysgenic" was recognized by my spellchecker as a non-word. Sad, eh? What's that we say about the memory hole?
Umm... that's not a conspiracy or memory hole, that's Firefox's mediocre spellchecker. There are a lot of esoteric words that it doesn't know.
Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it
I think most people have a fairly negative association with the word "eugenics" (which is the term most frequently associated with the various eugenic social movements), even if they don't understand the specifics of that topic. I sense a popular wariness with the consequences of genetic engineering. As evidence I'd point to the movie Gattacca or invite you to Google the term "designer babies" and notice how often ethical concerns are raised.
She's the founder of Planned Parenthood
And antisemitic Henry Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Company. So what? PP explicitly repudiates Sanger's views on eugenics just as Ford no doubt prohibits discrimination based on race. We all subscribe to a mixture of good and bad ideas. Some fail the test of time while others (such as birth control and the assembly line) prove very successful.
Sorry, but this is yet another modern version of Eugenics being pushed in to your face.
So... are you saying that we should never conduct correlative studies between genes and life outcomes? Or are you saying that we should only publish the results of such studies if the naive (e.g., causative) interpretation of them supports a specific political philosophy? Because saying "yes" to either of those questions is completely objectionable from a scientific viewpoint.
Perhaps it's something about how this specific studied was prepared and presented? A problem with methodology or a proposed conclusion? Did you completely miss the part in the summary about genetics being a proxy for the culture and history of ethnic groups? It's certainly possible to embed racist assumptions in the design of a scientific experience (consciously or not): if you see any such problems with this specific experiment, by all means name them. But if you're just objecting to the question being studied or the outcome of this particular experiment... you're pretty much in the same boat as evangelicals who object to studying homosexuality or energy companies who object to studying global warming, and you've got a very tall wall to climb to argue that the study is "bad".
BTW, I would suggest that what made "eugenics" ultimately objectionable from an ethics standpoint wasn't the idea that some genes are better than others, it was the act of killing (or force-sterilizing) people who's genes you didn't like. Science helps us determine facts. Everything else (emotions, philosophy, religion, etc.) help us determine values that govern how we react to those facts.
You and Joe both want a limited resource, so you get an even slice of it.
BMW's are limited: should they be sold for an artificially low price at rationed quantities?
It may not be fair that some people have more money than others (that's a whole 'nother discussion), but price is a convenient way to determine how much everyone gets of which resources. How come? Well, it encourages people to weigh their need for a product against their other needs/wants/desires. It encourages people to weigh their need for a product against other people's need (even though there is the "unfair" aspect of wealth disparity to it). It encourages people to find/invent/use alternatives. It also encourages people to start manufacturing a scarce product (which brings down the price, ultimately).
It's not a perfect system for resource allocation, but for most things it seems to work pretty well (and much better than other systems that have been tried). The counterexample you bring up (outbidding famine victims for bread) is one of the things where free-market economies do make an exception thru various government programs (such as food stamps, but also differing tax rates, welfare programs, subsidies, etc.). But BMW's and hard drives are not subsistence items, and conscientious societies do not need to redistribute wealth to help folks of meager means acquire these things.
Costco's rationing was probably a customer-experience strategy (they want people to experience the occasional "awesome deal" to reinforce the idea that Costco has the lowest prices and is worth the membership fee), not an attempt at "fairness". They can tell others to "deal with it" because they own the drives and decided this was how they wanted to monetize them, not because they have any particular obligation to make them equally available to all customers.
It is a deliberate attempt to cause mental harm and should be prosecuted appropriately...
Here's a better opinion:
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it."
--Voltaire
Anyone can claim "mental harm" at hearing a joke they don't like. And maybe they actually are mentally harmed, but you can't make the world a perfect place thru legislation: human conflict is an inevitable part of living and you can't just rule it out existence. By making a law like this, you open wide avenues of abuse ("offensiveness" is vague and subjective, unlike harm caused by actual physical violence), and you cast a mental shroud across the entire populace, because each person now has to watch what they say extra hard. It's a silent oppression... the sort of thing that inhibits spontaneity and interferes with the business of living.
What's next? A law against facial expressions (frowns, angry glares) intended to cause mental distress?
Making a joke about an alledged murderer before the case has come to court or the body of his victim has even come to light yet? That's an extra special level of offense rarely seen these days
You obviously don't get around a lot if you think that's a "high" level of offense.
At any rate, it's not worth ruining a person's life just because they said something offensive. There is nothing but misery in society going down that road (just imagine the potential for abuse by the ideologically driven). That you have a little bit of sympathy for the offended party does not change that basic fact.
In a way, the internet (and other early online communities) has proven that there are much better ways to deal with trolls. Slashdot's moderation system is a great example of this.
Dependency isn't a problem if you handle taxes this way, because you don't use the pollution tax to pay for wars or Medicare or anything else which is unrelated to the tax.
Except it all goes into the same fiscal bucket.
And even if you completely reworked how state and federal budgets are done (to more closely map revenue streams with their related outlays), there would still be a dependency problem because--in planting those forest or whatever--you've invested capital resources, hired people, contracted with vendors, and done something that plays well with a constituency. When the revenue stream dries up, all these folks will cry out and argue that planting forests is still important. Environmental groups will jump on it too (nevermind the original intent of forest-planting), and for once they will be on the same side of the table as loggers and paper mills who get to harvest government land. Then they'll start running sob ads with a handsome-yet-gristled father enjoying a walk thru the woods with his kids (obligatory close up of dad holding laughing daughter up while spinning around), talking about conservation.
See how it works?
I'm not arguing for Republican-style laizee-faire-for-big-business-and-screw-everyone-else... I'm just pointing out that "use taxes" aren't the easy answer they seem.
And as a non-Webber fan I couldn't be happier for his loss. Phantom is the worst insult to music since someone farted Happy Birthday.
Phantom was the most successful show in history based on its own artistic merits... e.g., not as a result of some marketing trick, captive audience, vendor lock-in, or government-granted monopoly. Perhaps it is your definition of music (or the standards by which you judge it) that needs to be reassessed. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is wrong.
(Though if you're feeling snobbish, you might want to dig up Harold Bloom's opinion piece on the Harry Potter novels, entitled "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.".)
Empirically speaking, it appears that we practically live for the chance to build absurd little social hierarchies
Pfft... spoken like one with a 7-digit user ID. ;-O
You know what real austerity is? Cutting spending until it matches the amount of revenue actually coming in.
I'm no economist, but I suspect that (1) debt growth can probably be positive, so long as it is sufficiently less than long-term GDP growth, (2) you can tinker with both sides of the equation (e.g., spending cuts and revenue growth).
The Tea Party would have a lot more credibility (and support) with me if it was willing to trim ALL the fat (do we really need a $1T military?), had some tolerance for new taxation, and recognized that some long term investments (education, research) are needed for the dividends they will pay down the road.
Of course, not all revenue growth needs to come from the existing tax base. Tourism is a cheap, renewable resource. Can we increase our appeal to foreign travelers? We have scientific outposts, military bases, and sensor networks scattered around the world... is there a way we can monetize those? Are there are some Pacific atolls we could issue 50-year leases on (for the Larry Ellison-wannabee billionaires), perhaps? De-criminalizing (not necessarily legalizing) soft drug usage would probably result in both spending cuts (on enforcement) and new revenue (from taxes). Finally, there have to be some "national treasures" that aren't really all that treasurable: can't the Smithosonian find a few pieces worth putting up for auction? Just some thoughts...
I may have a design for the next big mobile phone case, or the next big laptop stand, or the next big removable hard drive enclosure...
Why would I lease a machine from Stratasys for my prototypes knowing for fact they are willing to revoke my printer lease and take it back?
Because a mobile phone case isn't going doesn't have the (1) potential for PR backlash, (2) potential for legislative backlash, and (3) potential for a major liability exposure.
There are plenty of other companies who will lease on more reasonable terms.
I doubt it, especially after this incident.
Perhaps [they want] to steal my idea or prevent me from competing with them. Perhaps my next big product is closely related to the little town store run by an executives family member, and they want to shut down me as competition.
Now you're branching into pure speculation. Look... Ms. Jane Doe who just wants to print a few hundred avant garde rubber duckies for her final Master's thesis/project in art **does not care** that Stratasys yanked the lease on some gun nut (as she uncharitably calls them). She cares about the price of the lease and the capabilities of the machine. Even if she is familiar with this particular episode (and she isn't), she won't be too concerned about it because she doesn't see her own product as being "at-risk" in the same legally "gray" sense.
This is all about Stratasys PR department not wanting a product they market to creative types to be linked in the public mind with ... firearms.
Mod parent up. The "illegal" angle here is being waayyyy over-discussed, but it's really just an excuse for good PR.
It's a good legal move too. Whenever a radically new technology becomes mainstream enough to enter the public consciousness, the "bad" uses are discovered and fretted about very early on. (Remember this? It almost kept me off the internet completely in high school.) Too much public outcry early on might result in some preemptive legislation for the 3D printer industry, and I imagine Stratasys would like to avoid that.
How does the US know the actual nationality of the hackers and not just their end-proxy?
Perhaps they have collaborating intel from another source (e.g., spies or signals intelligence).
Or do you just want to start a war with China for some reason?
I wouldn't be surprised if it was posturing for election rhetoric. Could have been done to preempt a GOP leak ahead of Wednesday's debate, or it could tie-in with Obama's recent "tough on China" talking points. I try not to follow this stuff too closely though, so take my speculation with a grain of salt...
Was there a shortage of ice, or was the vendor just jacking up prices cause he could. Also how high did the prices go.
If there was no shortage, and he raised prices extremely high (say more then 300% of typical) then there is a logical argument that he was price gouging.
Link to story. Article implies they were charging at least 4.5x the non-emergency cost of ice. Note that some places have very restrictive definitions of gouging; in Alabama for instance, it's unlawful to charge more than 1.25x the previous 30-day rolling average during a declared emergency.
How society should react to that I am torn about though.
I think we have a natural distaste for explicit gouging (as opposed to the hidden type that teleco's and cable companies and patent trolls get away with). Munger's article makes a good anecdotal case that legislative responses to this emotional reaction aren't necessarily in the best interest of disaster victims. OTOH, there are counterexamples where it seems like businesses really abused public trust (like the hotels that jacked up prices on 9/11 to milk stranded air passengers).
FB users make a legally binding agreement not to share their passwords as part of the ToS for having a FB account.
I think the courts have been inconsistent in their recognition of click-thru ToS agreements, so I don't think the legally-binding part is accurate.
However, it is pretty staggering when you think about it: in order to assess your trustworthiness, these employers are asking you to do something that proves yourself untrustworthy. If anything, they should turn it around and only hire the people who won't give them their passwords.
Compounding the irony is that the employers most likely have written policies that forbid password-sharing ("upon penalty of termination") that are identical to the one they are asking you to break.
Is it just a lost concept that--if an individual is willing to lie to another person, he'll be willing to lie to you too?
Even if you bust the seller, and get his entire history of addresses to trace through the blockchain... You still have no way to tell that buyer-A equals buyer-B.
My hypothetical defendant was using a particular gambit that my hypothetical prosecutor saw thru. You now suggest a more sophisticated gambit to use, but there are ways of seeing thru it too. Like I said in another post, it's an arms race. Law enforcement will discover gambits and devise strategies for detecting the tell-tell patterns they leave in bitcoin transaction histories. The obvious gambits (fake intermediaries, scatter/gather, pool/split, currency conversion, etc.) will be countered quickly once law enforcement gets serious (though some aspects may have to wait for legislation and/or regulatory crackdowns on the exchanges). Some gambiteers will succeed, others will be caught.
I think you are seriously underestimating the white hats here: JUST working with bitcoin transaction history one can apply all sorts of graph analysis, forensic accounting, etc., much of it automated. THEN think about all the externalities that can be investigated: your phone records, your browsing history, a GPS tracker on your car, your FaceBook page, etc. THEN think about the laws that will be passed to give law enforcement more visibility into bitcoin exchanges. THEN think about what unknown technical attacks might be used to augment the transaction history (one wild idea: if the government ran a lot of their own P2P nodes, perhaps they could record the timing and IP addresses of block confirmations and infer something about the geographic origin of the buyer?). THEN think about all the other tactics that can be used that apply to ALL drug busts and money-laundering crackdowns (like informants and stakeouts).
Of course, the criminal underground has tactics too. And both sides have limitations of costs, time, manpower, and natural interest. My point is that it gets complex quickly, and police aren't limited to knowing what an algorithm can know. Transaction histories--even that between the pseudo-anonymous nodes in the big bitcoin graph--will be a powerful investigative tool.
Well, sure if you want to track enough bitcoin transfers you probably can and they probably will for the large-enough scale crime. For the small timers though, you can create a separate dummy account for each day of the month and make it too much hassle for them to waste their time on you.
It's an arms race for sure. At first, being a small-timer and being just a little more sophisticated than other small-timers will probably be sufficient, but once they start to develop tools to track down the large-timers, those same tools can be turned on the small-timers as well. On balance, I feel this race will favor the prosecution in the long run, as long as they can explain the data analytics to juries. Or it would if the money-laundering underground was dumb enough to stay on a platform that provides the level of traceability that bitcoin does.
I extremely skeptical of the productive value of talking to completely random people who just happen to be at the same office as you. Talking to people can certainly be extremely productive, but it's the right people, not just anyone.
I have to completely and utterly disagree with you: random conversations with random people provide unexpected benefits and add flavor to your life. Such encounters can be the source of new things: a fresh perspective, a bold idea, a useful tip, a gripping story, an anecdote to tell later, an unusual hobby, a business opportunity, even a friendship. You will savor the memory of a successful conversation years later, long after you've forgotten whatever specific urgencies you were pursuing that day. Those moments will shine thru with beauty, amazement, hope, serendipity, and shared humanity.
Yes, it's hard to make the effort. I should know: I'm not a big people person. I love excuses to avoid social interactions. I'm usually annoyed when strangers talk to for no good reason, and I am suspicious of their intentions. Sometimes the conversation flops or ends badly. And I'm always skeptical in advance: what's the value? Why should I do this? But see the key word above: unexpected. If you knew what the benefit was in advance, there would be no discovery. So it's worth swinging the bat everytime you step up to the plate, no matter how much you feel at the onset that you don't want to. (Though if you're like me, it may help to get some general advice on human interaction.)