So when the US firebombed civilian populations in Japan killing hundreds of thousands of people was that an act of war or terrorism? How about the more recent example of the US's use of drones to terrorize the local populations by flying overhead for days on end before firing missiles that more often than not kill 10x more civilians than actual militants? The debate has been going on long before that as to whether or not the civilian population, which drives the industry for the war machine, is as much a target in a war as any soldier. Does the man who builds warships become a military asset when he makes the weapons used to fight? How about the drone pilots? Do they stop being fair game when they leave the office and drive home?
The world trade center was targeted for the same reason as the pentagon. Not as a military asset but as a symbol. The pentagon represented the dirty dealings of the US through the CIA that built and ultimately abandoned Al Qaeda. While the trade center was the symbol of western capitalism which runs against the ideology of hard line Islam and Sharia.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Please note the part were it says "all men" and "unalienable rights." If you believe in the values that this country holds even slightly then you must believe that even the worst kind of human beings still have rights. Should they be called upon to answer for their crimes? Absolutely. But stop this nonsense of dehumanizing people to justify their extermination. That is the reasoning of tyrants, murderers, and Despots. It is one of the tactics used in Germany and Rwanda, and I want to believe that we can be better than that.
And what happens when the fire department finds out you can't afford to pay them for putting out your house fire? Do they just let your house burn and put out the fire when it spreads to the houses of people that can pay? We subsidize these things as a society because it benefits the entire society to do so. By ensuring that the fire department shows up we can insure that we don't have a Chicago style fire every few months which protects everyone from the added cost of subduing a wildfire as apposed to a house fire.
Even in your own stupid example about paying for a fire subscription you state that such payments would be required by a mortgage company. In what way is being required to pay for a service from a private company different from being required to pay for a service from a not for profit public institution other than conflict of interest? What safeguards do we have that the fire station will properly maintain its equipment? Or do you propose that we regulate these industries to ensure that conflict of interest is handled appropriately? Of course that would put a few holes in your bubble regarding a perfect libertarian fantasy.
The best societies are built on the understanding that a mix of laws, regulations, and services that are applied using data driven thought rather than blanket ideologies that have no foundation in anything other than academia.
I had a big argument in another thread about automation in McDonald's and long story short somewhere along the line you need humans to make the robots. All automation does is push the jobs further up the supply chain.
The real danger of automation is for the people who don't have the experience or education to get the more specialized jobs that automation creates, making a divide between those who are able to afford schooling for those positions and those who can't.
Bear in mind that one of the primary reasons for taxi medallions that was not listed in the article was that limits were placed on taxi services to control congestion. Cities were trying to prevent their streets from flooding with every halfway qualified driver from the suburbs during rush hour and clogging the streets. In that respect taxi medallions do have an effect on controlling that congestion that less strict regulation wouldn't.
I guessing that based on the Manhattan project reference he was referring to locking the engineers in the room to develop the standards of design for nuclear plants.
It doesn't change the core of the argument that DRM is punishing the paying customers as in the example from Zontar and has done nothing to punish the pirates. There is a high quality copy of every piece of protected music available on the pirate bay and the people who download that copy don't have to mess around with restrictions of any kind.
I would certainly think that a company should be worried when a bootlegger is offering a better product, better service, and a better price than their own company. The first step to combating piracy is to view pirates not as thieves, but as potential customers and treat them as such. Valve tried this in Russia, a market with so much piracy is was thought to be lost, and to date it is their fastest growing market.
When you look at pirates as potential customers and people who post the torrents as competitors you can see just how shortsighted it is to try and lock in people to your distribution when an alternative product exists. That's just asking for loss of business.
Like it or not piracy is here to stay, and it will continue to act as a competitor in the market. If you want to beat pirates compete on service and physical products. Just like the Russians if you make people want to buy a product from your company, not just buy your product despite your company, you will see a dramatic decline in piracy.
We will never know because the second a Judge inquires about parallel construction the states claims the state secrets privilege to block any investigation. They've got all the angles covered which is why this is so frustrating.
Because the people who were suffering from the use of Sony's nasty DRM were the legitimate customers? The pirates were the ones laughing their heads off in 2007.
We are hiring good people. The pay isn't bad considering the cost of living, the benefits are great, and I haven't been forced to work more than 40 hour a week yet.
This makes a lot of sense, but the problem that I see is that Police in other countries are not having the same issues with lack of trust and they are frequently required to do their jobs without even a sidearm much less and assault rifle and an MRAP. Secondly most cops you will meet don't escalate a situation because they feel that their person is in danger, they escalate because they feel that their pride is in danger. Try telling a cop no to an unlawful search and revel as they pull out every intimidating trick in the book to scare you into submission.
I agree that courtesy goes a long way, but the problem that a lot of poorer neighborhoods are facing is that with laws as complex an vague as they are, many counties have criminalized everything short of staying home from work. I live ~5 miles from Ferguson and some of the crap that goes on in these county courts is unbelievable. They cops are unbelievably aggressive in issuing tickets because many of these municipal budgets are 60%-70% funded off of traffic tickets. As a result people are poked and prodded almost constantly which leads to frustration and anger. People believe that they are being victimized.
Its easy to be nice the first few times, and to acknowledge that you made a mistake, but what about the tenth time that month? what about the 40th time that year? That is what a lot of these people are facing. There are 50% more warrants for arrest, based almost solely on failure to pay tickets, in Ferguson than there are people in the entire city. When you can't even get into a car without getting a ticket it becomes a lot harder to be civil.
If paying a small subscription would eliminate Google's tracking nonsense then sign me up, but from the link it seems that all it does is replace the adds with a "thank you" message. I can get that for free with add block and no script that also reduce the clutter on the page, vastly improve load times, and improve security.
From the conclusion: "The average percentages of wins for the five strategies are always comparable and oscillate around , with small random differences which depend on the financial index considered."
"The second important result is that the fluctuations of the random strategy are always smaller than those of the other strategies (as it is also visible in Fig. 9 for the case ): this means that the random strategy is less risky than the considered standard trading strategies"
I agree that the article is misrepresented badly. I read the article long before it was posted here and what I drew from it was that Greenwald seemed to advocating that the solution to mass surveillance would start from bottom up activism, such as boycotts and demonstrations, and not from congress spontaneously deciding that they would play nice. Which is honestly how democracy really works. If congress is failing to reign in mass surveillance it is because they don't fear losing their jobs over their failure to do so.
This is, however, wrapped up in Greenwald's writing style which tends to pack more than a little vitriol towards the government in general.
I don't care about douche bags in power because I don't believe someone should be punished for being an asshole. If that douche bag takes a specific action that damages other innocent people then they should be punished for that action, not because you find them to be offensive or abrasive people. This is the concept behind free speech.
If the VP of Uber was actually engaging in smear campaigns by spying on journalists then he should be punished for that, but if he said that they deserve to be smeared then he has not done anything that has caused harm despite how offensive we may find that statement.
"Also if you don't already have a good monitor, that's even more of an investment"
Just like an xbox needs a TV to be used and TVs, at least good ones, are far more expensive than monitors.
" you forget the a console gamer can buy used games at a store"
for less than 15% off the price of a new version and your trade ins will net you a pittance. On the PC I could preorder Borderlands 2 for $35 with a season pass and a free copy of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a then $50 title.
I play around 15-20 games a year and I spend less than $100 on the lot of them. XBox live alone nearly meets that price line and the $10 console markup rate on most games along with the lack of giant sales means that even if you buy 5-7 games a year at only +$20 each over the PC counterpart you have earned enough every 2 years to buy a new graphics card. Also I use my old graphics cards as physx cards and I am able to run most new AAA games at ultra with a 650Ti Boost ($150 at retail). Add to that I can use my PC for general use you save far more money gaming on a PC.
Furthermore, to suggest that a console owner saves money based on a 1:1 comparison between the cost of a console and the cost of a PC you also have to assume that the console owner doesn't own a PC. Really what needs to be compared is the marginal cost between a standard computer and a gaming rig which is less than $400 even if you are being generous.
The console being more cost effective is a myth. The real draw to a console is that it is an out of the box solution, no messing around with third party apps an installers, and much more effective local multiplayer.
Very true that the companies benefit more from your continued business.
Another key part is that credit card companies also make money from the funds that they have frozen. All of that cash is sitting in their accounts accruing interest, and in that sense they are incentivised to hold the money as long as possible, not to cave to the merchants.
Slashdot Mirror
So when the US firebombed civilian populations in Japan killing hundreds of thousands of people was that an act of war or terrorism? How about the more recent example of the US's use of drones to terrorize the local populations by flying overhead for days on end before firing missiles that more often than not kill 10x more civilians than actual militants? The debate has been going on long before that as to whether or not the civilian population, which drives the industry for the war machine, is as much a target in a war as any soldier. Does the man who builds warships become a military asset when he makes the weapons used to fight? How about the drone pilots? Do they stop being fair game when they leave the office and drive home?
The world trade center was targeted for the same reason as the pentagon. Not as a military asset but as a symbol. The pentagon represented the dirty dealings of the US through the CIA that built and ultimately abandoned Al Qaeda. While the trade center was the symbol of western capitalism which runs against the ideology of hard line Islam and Sharia.
Let me share a little quote with you:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Please note the part were it says "all men" and "unalienable rights." If you believe in the values that this country holds even slightly then you must believe that even the worst kind of human beings still have rights. Should they be called upon to answer for their crimes? Absolutely. But stop this nonsense of dehumanizing people to justify their extermination. That is the reasoning of tyrants, murderers, and Despots. It is one of the tactics used in Germany and Rwanda, and I want to believe that we can be better than that.
Would it not be possible to steal the drives one at a time, image them, and then use the images to rebuild the raid array?
And what happens when the fire department finds out you can't afford to pay them for putting out your house fire? Do they just let your house burn and put out the fire when it spreads to the houses of people that can pay? We subsidize these things as a society because it benefits the entire society to do so. By ensuring that the fire department shows up we can insure that we don't have a Chicago style fire every few months which protects everyone from the added cost of subduing a wildfire as apposed to a house fire.
Even in your own stupid example about paying for a fire subscription you state that such payments would be required by a mortgage company. In what way is being required to pay for a service from a private company different from being required to pay for a service from a not for profit public institution other than conflict of interest? What safeguards do we have that the fire station will properly maintain its equipment? Or do you propose that we regulate these industries to ensure that conflict of interest is handled appropriately? Of course that would put a few holes in your bubble regarding a perfect libertarian fantasy.
The best societies are built on the understanding that a mix of laws, regulations, and services that are applied using data driven thought rather than blanket ideologies that have no foundation in anything other than academia.
I had a big argument in another thread about automation in McDonald's and long story short somewhere along the line you need humans to make the robots. All automation does is push the jobs further up the supply chain.
The real danger of automation is for the people who don't have the experience or education to get the more specialized jobs that automation creates, making a divide between those who are able to afford schooling for those positions and those who can't.
Bear in mind that one of the primary reasons for taxi medallions that was not listed in the article was that limits were placed on taxi services to control congestion. Cities were trying to prevent their streets from flooding with every halfway qualified driver from the suburbs during rush hour and clogging the streets. In that respect taxi medallions do have an effect on controlling that congestion that less strict regulation wouldn't.
I guessing that based on the Manhattan project reference he was referring to locking the engineers in the room to develop the standards of design for nuclear plants.
It doesn't change the core of the argument that DRM is punishing the paying customers as in the example from Zontar and has done nothing to punish the pirates. There is a high quality copy of every piece of protected music available on the pirate bay and the people who download that copy don't have to mess around with restrictions of any kind.
I would certainly think that a company should be worried when a bootlegger is offering a better product, better service, and a better price than their own company. The first step to combating piracy is to view pirates not as thieves, but as potential customers and treat them as such. Valve tried this in Russia, a market with so much piracy is was thought to be lost, and to date it is their fastest growing market.
When you look at pirates as potential customers and people who post the torrents as competitors you can see just how shortsighted it is to try and lock in people to your distribution when an alternative product exists. That's just asking for loss of business.
Like it or not piracy is here to stay, and it will continue to act as a competitor in the market. If you want to beat pirates compete on service and physical products. Just like the Russians if you make people want to buy a product from your company, not just buy your product despite your company, you will see a dramatic decline in piracy.
We will never know because the second a Judge inquires about parallel construction the states claims the state secrets privilege to block any investigation. They've got all the angles covered which is why this is so frustrating.
Because the people who were suffering from the use of Sony's nasty DRM were the legitimate customers? The pirates were the ones laughing their heads off in 2007.
Tell him to apply here:
https://us-erac.icims.com/jobs...
We are hiring good people. The pay isn't bad considering the cost of living, the benefits are great, and I haven't been forced to work more than 40 hour a week yet.
It's also because in Missouri it is legal for an officer to murder a suspect that is running away not just resisting.
This makes a lot of sense, but the problem that I see is that Police in other countries are not having the same issues with lack of trust and they are frequently required to do their jobs without even a sidearm much less and assault rifle and an MRAP. Secondly most cops you will meet don't escalate a situation because they feel that their person is in danger, they escalate because they feel that their pride is in danger. Try telling a cop no to an unlawful search and revel as they pull out every intimidating trick in the book to scare you into submission.
I agree that courtesy goes a long way, but the problem that a lot of poorer neighborhoods are facing is that with laws as complex an vague as they are, many counties have criminalized everything short of staying home from work. I live ~5 miles from Ferguson and some of the crap that goes on in these county courts is unbelievable. They cops are unbelievably aggressive in issuing tickets because many of these municipal budgets are 60%-70% funded off of traffic tickets. As a result people are poked and prodded almost constantly which leads to frustration and anger. People believe that they are being victimized.
Its easy to be nice the first few times, and to acknowledge that you made a mistake, but what about the tenth time that month? what about the 40th time that year? That is what a lot of these people are facing. There are 50% more warrants for arrest, based almost solely on failure to pay tickets, in Ferguson than there are people in the entire city. When you can't even get into a car without getting a ticket it becomes a lot harder to be civil.
If paying a small subscription would eliminate Google's tracking nonsense then sign me up, but from the link it seems that all it does is replace the adds with a "thank you" message. I can get that for free with add block and no script that also reduce the clutter on the page, vastly improve load times, and improve security.
Its worse than that. Traders have been shown to be potentially even worse than a random investment strategy.
http://www.plosone.org/article...
From the conclusion:
"The average percentages of wins for the five strategies are always comparable and oscillate around , with small random differences which depend on the financial index considered."
"The second important result is that the fluctuations of the random strategy are always smaller than those of the other strategies (as it is also visible in Fig. 9 for the case ): this means that the random strategy is less risky than the considered standard trading strategies"
I agree that the article is misrepresented badly. I read the article long before it was posted here and what I drew from it was that Greenwald seemed to advocating that the solution to mass surveillance would start from bottom up activism, such as boycotts and demonstrations, and not from congress spontaneously deciding that they would play nice. Which is honestly how democracy really works. If congress is failing to reign in mass surveillance it is because they don't fear losing their jobs over their failure to do so.
This is, however, wrapped up in Greenwald's writing style which tends to pack more than a little vitriol towards the government in general.
And how far we've fallen. Our congressmen used to have brawls on the floor.
http://history.house.gov/Histo...
funny enough they could still laugh it off and get stuff done just two days later.
The good news is that in order to keep up NOAA is planning to buy Chinese super computers....right after a Chinese team hacked them.
Citation please.
I would also like to see a comparison between experience levels, seniority in the company, and other factors.
I don't care about douche bags in power because I don't believe someone should be punished for being an asshole. If that douche bag takes a specific action that damages other innocent people then they should be punished for that action, not because you find them to be offensive or abrasive people. This is the concept behind free speech.
If the VP of Uber was actually engaging in smear campaigns by spying on journalists then he should be punished for that, but if he said that they deserve to be smeared then he has not done anything that has caused harm despite how offensive we may find that statement.
"Also if you don't already have a good monitor, that's even more of an investment"
Just like an xbox needs a TV to be used and TVs, at least good ones, are far more expensive than monitors.
" you forget the a console gamer can buy used games at a store"
for less than 15% off the price of a new version and your trade ins will net you a pittance. On the PC I could preorder Borderlands 2 for $35 with a season pass and a free copy of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a then $50 title.
I play around 15-20 games a year and I spend less than $100 on the lot of them. XBox live alone nearly meets that price line and the $10 console markup rate on most games along with the lack of giant sales means that even if you buy 5-7 games a year at only +$20 each over the PC counterpart you have earned enough every 2 years to buy a new graphics card. Also I use my old graphics cards as physx cards and I am able to run most new AAA games at ultra with a 650Ti Boost ($150 at retail). Add to that I can use my PC for general use you save far more money gaming on a PC.
Furthermore, to suggest that a console owner saves money based on a 1:1 comparison between the cost of a console and the cost of a PC you also have to assume that the console owner doesn't own a PC. Really what needs to be compared is the marginal cost between a standard computer and a gaming rig which is less than $400 even if you are being generous.
The console being more cost effective is a myth. The real draw to a console is that it is an out of the box solution, no messing around with third party apps an installers, and much more effective local multiplayer.
Very true that the companies benefit more from your continued business.
Another key part is that credit card companies also make money from the funds that they have frozen. All of that cash is sitting in their accounts accruing interest, and in that sense they are incentivised to hold the money as long as possible, not to cave to the merchants.
If you are so terrified of such an attack then lock yourself in a box and bury it deep. It's the only real way to be safe.
In the meantime I would rather live free and happy right up until the blast.
Unless it's a farm!