I thought we had all agreed we're not doing this Google Plus thing.
This isn't like a cardiologist attempting to resuscitate his patient after his heart stops on the operating table. This is like a cardiologist attempting to resuscitate his patient three days after his heart stops, as they're lowering the casket into the ground.
If I picked you up, and dropped you naked on primitive Waikiki, you'd be able to survive pretty easily without any special tools or equipment[...] Try doing that on Mars, and you'll be dead within a minute.
Well, it depends on how high you drop me from. If it's from, like, 60 feet, it's possible I might actually survive slightly longer on Mars than on Waikiki. Also, since apparently I'm not allowed to keep the tools I used to get there, even for a second, it becomes necessary to ask: do bears live there? Because of course no hypothetical scenario can pretend to relevance unless it takes bears into account.
the orders of magnitude you're LITERALLY waving away
Now it just seems like you're trying to annoy me. Which means you must have read my comment history to figure out how best to do that. Which is actually kind of flattering, I guess. You magnificent bastard... you read my book!
All the islands they hopped along were suitable for human habitation from the moment they landed.
Sure they were, provided that you knew how to: find fresh water, gather building materials, make huts, make boats, make spears, fish, raise pigs, grow taro root, make poi, etc.
In other words, they had a bunch of technology going for them before they could even get there. They then used that technology to survive. Without that technology, those islands would indeed not have been "suitable for human habitation".
There's a different, albeit far more advanced, set of technologies that would allow for the colonization of the solar system. Maybe we don't have everything we need yet. But there's no particular reason to believe we never will.
It was already moronic for a US politican to express any even-slightly nuanced view on ISIS, much less since Paris happened, and even stupider to phrase it like he did. But likely what the guy meant to say was that "these guys don't see themselves as evil".
Hardly anybody ever does, of course. In the case of ISIS, they believe that God wants them to conquer the world for Islam. And even though that requires killing a bunch of what we would call "innocent" people, well, that's okay, because all those people they're killing are evil, because they oppose the spread of Islam. It's not evil to destroy evil, right? It takes all the moral horror out of violence, and "righteous" violence is like crack to the 18-year-olds that ISIS is marketing itself to.
Yeah, it's pretty obviously evil to the rest of us. But then again, if you go far enough back, we're all of us living on land that our ancestors stole from somebody else's ancestors. It wasn't a smooth and amicable transfer of ownership, either. Unless you believe that there's such a thing as absolute morality, which is actually kind of the problem here, you can't really "prove" that ISIS isn't "right" to put zero or even negative value on the lives of the rest of us. It's just our word against theirs, so to speak.
That said, I think that, at this point, the rest of the world we can all agree that ISIS is a pack of rabid dogs that are wandering our streets intent on spreading the infection. Whether they're evil or not is irrelevant. Evil or not, they gotta go.
There's no need for believers in homeopathy to worry about this. They can just grind the remaining prescriptions for homeopathic remedies into dust, and present a grain of that dust to the pharmacist, who then gives them a glass of water. Problem solved.
All packets are broadcast by every node -- which re-broadcasts what it hears until the TTL drops to zero. This creates broadcast storms, and doesn't scale even on systems that have orders of magnitude more bandwidth than BTLE.
Yeesh. I'm no network engineer, but that seems kind of... terrible. Okay, it sounds like this is not a serious solution yet. Thanks for the explanations.
Finally, its mesh solution can best be described as "pray and spray", pretty much incapable of scaling to anything useful int he real world. Their mesh WG seems to believe they can somehow ignore the realities that every other mesh attempt has run into.
Interesting. You seem knowledgeable on this subject. Can you elaborate on the meaning of "pray and spray", and on what some of those challenging "realities" are?
"We here highly resolve that these [redacted] shall not have [redacted] in [redacted]—that this nation, under [redacted], shall have a new [redacted] of [redacted]—and that government [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], shall not perish from the earth."
...our system of employer provided healthcare/pensions is...dumb. There are advantages and disadvantages to privatized and socialized healthcare and pensions, but the third option, of employer provided benefits, gives the worst of both, with the benefits of neither. Employees should be paid with money and only money. Benefits should be provided privately or by the government. They should not be tied to employers.
Yeah, this is how I feel too. If employers are responsible for providing health insurance, why not just skip the middle man and pay your employees in surgical gauze and forceps?
The current system doesn't really make any sense--it just sort of happened. It started out with the government taxing employees to pay for the unemployed, then it just sort of mutated from there, because elected officials never saw an unnecessarily complicated regulatory system they didn't immediately want to make worse. We need to separate these concerns.
It's a nice idea, but Weather Generator operations are actually a very small part of the COBRA budget.
Many armchair accountants are surprised to learn that, by far, COBRA's major expenditures are, simply, blue lasers. Laser weapons capable of blowing up a aircraft in flight and compact enough to be wielded by a common foot soldier are almost impossibly expensive, and COBRA loses at least four hundred of these in every single engagement. When you add to this fact that not a single COBRA laser blast has ever managed to inflict a human casualty, it really exposes how desperately overdue they are for a shakeup in their tactics.
It's about who the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow belongs to. That's about as realistic as asteroid mining. Leprechauns, space mining, same thing. You can talk all you want, fantasize all you want, it will never happen. Ever.
Bah! You're just as bad as the rest of the space nutters on Slashdot. How many times do I have to tell you space nutters? Space doesn't exist! It's just a sheet of canvas that God put up above the Earth to keep us from seeing what else is on his desk.
If a US company launches into space, reaches an asteroid, mines it, takes the stuff, and lands back in the US.... they want to know whether the US government is going to let them call what they mined their property. They could care less what Tajikistan thinks. The launch, operations, and returned goods would be within the US. If someone from some other country wants to try to intercept and destroy them en route, that's a "hurdle" this doesn't address. It's also not a realistic scenario in the near-term, or even mid-term, future.
Yeah. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is pretty vague, and maybe even self-contradictory, about how property works in space. This ambiguity was probably intentional, as it would otherwise have been impossible to get so many countries to sign on to it, especially in the midst of the Cold War.
Personally, I think we should just agree to treat outer space the same way we currently treat international waters. Seems like the underlying problems and legal issues are mostly the same. But I guess some people wouldn't agree with that, either. That's diplomacy for you.
Unions are legalized bullies and borderline gangsters.
Yes, they often are. This and your other criticisms are valid. Your anecdotes are completely believable. And yet...
Management is going to try like hell to get as much out of its workers as it can, and give them as little as possible in compensation. A union is going to try like hell to get as much as possible out of the management, and supply as little work as possible in return.
It's an adversarial system, like the legal system, Even though you may think both sides are execrable, putrescent, double-dealing, weaselly assholes, if one side gains ascendancy over the other for too long, it leads to massive and sustained problems for everyone.
Does every American need to file suit to shut it down completely?
Sorry, it's established precedent that individual Americans do not have the standing to bring legal proceedings against the NSA and other intelligence agencies for these so-called "blatant" and "ongoing" "violations" of the "Constitution". And of course civil liberties groups don't have standing either, since they're made up of individual Americans, and a million times zero is still zero. Too bad, so sad.
Don't worry, though--there's plenty of Congressional oversight of these agencies. The oversight process works like this: One: A whistleblower and/or the news media reveals evidence of wrongdoing. Two: Congress holds a hearing and calls in various top-level officials of the relevant agencies. Three: Congresspeople ask these officials tough and pointed questions about the legality and Constitutionality of various agency programs. Four: The officials lie about it, and also point out that terrorists and child molesters exist. Five: The news media and your Uncle Mark point out these transparent lies. Six: The officials are not terminated, nor do they suffer any other consequences for lying to Congress. Seven: Democracy is saved!
So most of the objections to programmers being called "engineers" under discussion here seem to fall into two groups:
1. Manipulating code is sufficiently unlike the engineering of physical systems that using the same term to describe both robs the term of some of its meaning. That is to say: "programming is not engineering".
2. Programming is engineering, but there's no generally accepted formal certification and licensure process for computer programmers, like there is for engineers who design physical systems. Engineers who design physical systems thus find it unfair that they had to jump through all these regulatory hoops before they could legally call themselves "engineers", while a 13-year-old who codes Flash games in his bedroom doesn't. This is roughly equivalent to an actual physician's objection to chiropractors or Dr.-Laura-style "psychologists" calling themselves "doctor".
Certifications are well and good, but I don't think it's a good idea to require people to be licensed by some regulatory body before they can legally identify themselves by their profession, be it "realtor", "plumber", "accountant", or "engineer". Because then what do you call people who don't happen to have those qualifications, but are still doing the job? "Faketor"? "Plumberoid"? "Accountaint"?
These organizations are staffed and run by thousands of average Americans who like freedom and our way of life... every person and boss at every level is doing his best to follow all applicable laws, the constitution, and the bill of rights.
So, don't take this the wrong way, but: Do you actually know any people? Have you ever had a job?
Because none of that is how being an employee works. If there's no accountability, people just surf the internet all day. If there is some kind of accountability, people do their best to keep their immediate supervisor happy, so that they don't get fired. If the accountability system is measurement-based, and most are, that means maximizing your "performance", which means maximizing some statistic about how you do your job. If any part of your job can't be measured, you can't be held accountable for it.
In most fields, the employee is under no pressure to break laws, because the laws are irrelevant. If you're writing software, for instance, it's pretty hard to accidentally break a law by typing a semicolon in the wrong place. So the laws don't interfere with you maximizing your measured performance.
But when you work for law enforcement? There are hundreds of laws designed specifically to get in your way. You have to work around them constantly. Law officers resent these laws, much as a computer programmer might resent bugs in the underlying operating system. So the natural inclination is to work around them. And they do, because there's often no reason not to.
Because how do you measure the statistic "laws adhered to, in spirit and in letter"? It's hard. Usually you can't. So nobody measures it. So people aren't held accountable for it. But the employee is still under pressure to maximize some other stats, and these laws prevent them from doing that. That is, following the laws lowers their measured performance, which has a negative effect on their employment. Breaking the laws, on the other hand, has no effect on their employment.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought we had all agreed we're not doing this Google Plus thing.
This isn't like a cardiologist attempting to resuscitate his patient after his heart stops on the operating table. This is like a cardiologist attempting to resuscitate his patient three days after his heart stops, as they're lowering the casket into the ground.
Oops... that last paragraph was obviously not a supposed to be a quote. Sorry, clicked too soon. Just imagine if I did that ON MARS, huh?
If I picked you up, and dropped you naked on primitive Waikiki, you'd be able to survive pretty easily without any special tools or equipment[...] Try doing that on Mars, and you'll be dead within a minute.
Well, it depends on how high you drop me from. If it's from, like, 60 feet, it's possible I might actually survive slightly longer on Mars than on Waikiki. Also, since apparently I'm not allowed to keep the tools I used to get there, even for a second, it becomes necessary to ask: do bears live there? Because of course no hypothetical scenario can pretend to relevance unless it takes bears into account.
the orders of magnitude you're LITERALLY waving away
Now it just seems like you're trying to annoy me. Which means you must have read my comment history to figure out how best to do that. Which is actually kind of flattering, I guess. You magnificent bastard... you read my book!
All the islands they hopped along were suitable for human habitation from the moment they landed.
Sure they were, provided that you knew how to: find fresh water, gather building materials, make huts, make boats, make spears, fish, raise pigs, grow taro root, make poi, etc.
In other words, they had a bunch of technology going for them before they could even get there. They then used that technology to survive. Without that technology, those islands would indeed not have been "suitable for human habitation".
There's a different, albeit far more advanced, set of technologies that would allow for the colonization of the solar system. Maybe we don't have everything we need yet. But there's no particular reason to believe we never will.
It was already moronic for a US politican to express any even-slightly nuanced view on ISIS, much less since Paris happened, and even stupider to phrase it like he did. But likely what the guy meant to say was that "these guys don't see themselves as evil".
Hardly anybody ever does, of course. In the case of ISIS, they believe that God wants them to conquer the world for Islam. And even though that requires killing a bunch of what we would call "innocent" people, well, that's okay, because all those people they're killing are evil, because they oppose the spread of Islam. It's not evil to destroy evil, right? It takes all the moral horror out of violence, and "righteous" violence is like crack to the 18-year-olds that ISIS is marketing itself to.
Yeah, it's pretty obviously evil to the rest of us. But then again, if you go far enough back, we're all of us living on land that our ancestors stole from somebody else's ancestors. It wasn't a smooth and amicable transfer of ownership, either. Unless you believe that there's such a thing as absolute morality, which is actually kind of the problem here, you can't really "prove" that ISIS isn't "right" to put zero or even negative value on the lives of the rest of us. It's just our word against theirs, so to speak.
That said, I think that, at this point, the rest of the world we can all agree that ISIS is a pack of rabid dogs that are wandering our streets intent on spreading the infection. Whether they're evil or not is irrelevant. Evil or not, they gotta go.
There's no need for believers in homeopathy to worry about this. They can just grind the remaining prescriptions for homeopathic remedies into dust, and present a grain of that dust to the pharmacist, who then gives them a glass of water. Problem solved.
gratz on surviving what was basically stalinism lite
The preferred term is "Atrocity with Chinese Characteristics".
Apple is planning peer-to-peer services (paywalled)
A paywalled peer-to-peer service, huh? Yeah, I'd say that sums up Apple pretty well.
"The opposite of truth is falsehood. The opposite of an irrelevant Google service is another irrelevant Google service."
All packets are broadcast by every node -- which re-broadcasts what it hears until the TTL drops to zero. This creates broadcast storms, and doesn't scale even on systems that have orders of magnitude more bandwidth than BTLE.
Yeesh. I'm no network engineer, but that seems kind of... terrible. Okay, it sounds like this is not a serious solution yet. Thanks for the explanations.
Finally, its mesh solution can best be described as "pray and spray", pretty much incapable of scaling to anything useful int he real world. Their mesh WG seems to believe they can somehow ignore the realities that every other mesh attempt has run into.
Interesting. You seem knowledgeable on this subject. Can you elaborate on the meaning of "pray and spray", and on what some of those challenging "realities" are?
"We here highly resolve that these [redacted] shall not have [redacted] in [redacted]—that this nation, under [redacted], shall have a new [redacted] of [redacted]—and that government [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], shall not perish from the earth."
...our system of employer provided healthcare/pensions is...dumb. There are advantages and disadvantages to privatized and socialized healthcare and pensions, but the third option, of employer provided benefits, gives the worst of both, with the benefits of neither. Employees should be paid with money and only money. Benefits should be provided privately or by the government. They should not be tied to employers.
Yeah, this is how I feel too. If employers are responsible for providing health insurance, why not just skip the middle man and pay your employees in surgical gauze and forceps?
The current system doesn't really make any sense--it just sort of happened. It started out with the government taxing employees to pay for the unemployed, then it just sort of mutated from there, because elected officials never saw an unnecessarily complicated regulatory system they didn't immediately want to make worse. We need to separate these concerns.
It's a nice idea, but Weather Generator operations are actually a very small part of the COBRA budget.
Many armchair accountants are surprised to learn that, by far, COBRA's major expenditures are, simply, blue lasers. Laser weapons capable of blowing up a aircraft in flight and compact enough to be wielded by a common foot soldier are almost impossibly expensive, and COBRA loses at least four hundred of these in every single engagement. When you add to this fact that not a single COBRA laser blast has ever managed to inflict a human casualty, it really exposes how desperately overdue they are for a shakeup in their tactics.
It's about who the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow belongs to. That's about as realistic as asteroid mining. Leprechauns, space mining, same thing. You can talk all you want, fantasize all you want, it will never happen. Ever.
Bah! You're just as bad as the rest of the space nutters on Slashdot. How many times do I have to tell you space nutters? Space doesn't exist! It's just a sheet of canvas that God put up above the Earth to keep us from seeing what else is on his desk.
Space nutters!
If a US company launches into space, reaches an asteroid, mines it, takes the stuff, and lands back in the US.... they want to know whether the US government is going to let them call what they mined their property. They could care less what Tajikistan thinks. The launch, operations, and returned goods would be within the US. If someone from some other country wants to try to intercept and destroy them en route, that's a "hurdle" this doesn't address. It's also not a realistic scenario in the near-term, or even mid-term, future.
Yeah. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is pretty vague, and maybe even self-contradictory, about how property works in space. This ambiguity was probably intentional, as it would otherwise have been impossible to get so many countries to sign on to it, especially in the midst of the Cold War.
Personally, I think we should just agree to treat outer space the same way we currently treat international waters. Seems like the underlying problems and legal issues are mostly the same. But I guess some people wouldn't agree with that, either. That's diplomacy for you.
"Space nutter"? I have space mental illness, you insensitive clod! This is supposed to be a space safe space! You're space triggering me!
In all seriousness, if you're going to go around yelling "space nutters" five times a day, you'd better at least be British.
Unions are legalized bullies and borderline gangsters.
Yes, they often are. This and your other criticisms are valid. Your anecdotes are completely believable. And yet...
Management is going to try like hell to get as much out of its workers as it can, and give them as little as possible in compensation. A union is going to try like hell to get as much as possible out of the management, and supply as little work as possible in return.
It's an adversarial system, like the legal system, Even though you may think both sides are execrable, putrescent, double-dealing, weaselly assholes, if one side gains ascendancy over the other for too long, it leads to massive and sustained problems for everyone.
Does every American need to file suit to shut it down completely?
Sorry, it's established precedent that individual Americans do not have the standing to bring legal proceedings against the NSA and other intelligence agencies for these so-called "blatant" and "ongoing" "violations" of the "Constitution". And of course civil liberties groups don't have standing either, since they're made up of individual Americans, and a million times zero is still zero. Too bad, so sad.
Don't worry, though--there's plenty of Congressional oversight of these agencies. The oversight process works like this: One: A whistleblower and/or the news media reveals evidence of wrongdoing. Two: Congress holds a hearing and calls in various top-level officials of the relevant agencies. Three: Congresspeople ask these officials tough and pointed questions about the legality and Constitutionality of various agency programs. Four: The officials lie about it, and also point out that terrorists and child molesters exist. Five: The news media and your Uncle Mark point out these transparent lies. Six: The officials are not terminated, nor do they suffer any other consequences for lying to Congress. Seven: Democracy is saved!
Experimenting on himself? Well, he may be a neuroscientist, but he sure ain't no brain surgeon.
So most of the objections to programmers being called "engineers" under discussion here seem to fall into two groups:
1. Manipulating code is sufficiently unlike the engineering of physical systems that using the same term to describe both robs the term of some of its meaning. That is to say: "programming is not engineering".
2. Programming is engineering, but there's no generally accepted formal certification and licensure process for computer programmers, like there is for engineers who design physical systems. Engineers who design physical systems thus find it unfair that they had to jump through all these regulatory hoops before they could legally call themselves "engineers", while a 13-year-old who codes Flash games in his bedroom doesn't. This is roughly equivalent to an actual physician's objection to chiropractors or Dr.-Laura-style "psychologists" calling themselves "doctor".
Certifications are well and good, but I don't think it's a good idea to require people to be licensed by some regulatory body before they can legally identify themselves by their profession, be it "realtor", "plumber", "accountant", or "engineer". Because then what do you call people who don't happen to have those qualifications, but are still doing the job? "Faketor"? "Plumberoid"? "Accountaint"?
I personally would prefer to see a streetlight that's smart enough to know when it's not needed. See: http://darksky.org/.
we all get fucked; big pharma and big media have a great time.
So the TPP is all about movies, drugs, and sex that one partner enjoys way more than the other? Say, that really does sound like a date!
Fix stupidity (and laziness) first.
Yeah, that's a realistic and practical precondition for any project.
These organizations are staffed and run by thousands of average Americans who like freedom and our way of life... every person and boss at every level is doing his best to follow all applicable laws, the constitution, and the bill of rights.
So, don't take this the wrong way, but: Do you actually know any people? Have you ever had a job?
Because none of that is how being an employee works. If there's no accountability, people just surf the internet all day. If there is some kind of accountability, people do their best to keep their immediate supervisor happy, so that they don't get fired. If the accountability system is measurement-based, and most are, that means maximizing your "performance", which means maximizing some statistic about how you do your job. If any part of your job can't be measured, you can't be held accountable for it.
In most fields, the employee is under no pressure to break laws, because the laws are irrelevant. If you're writing software, for instance, it's pretty hard to accidentally break a law by typing a semicolon in the wrong place. So the laws don't interfere with you maximizing your measured performance.
But when you work for law enforcement? There are hundreds of laws designed specifically to get in your way. You have to work around them constantly. Law officers resent these laws, much as a computer programmer might resent bugs in the underlying operating system. So the natural inclination is to work around them. And they do, because there's often no reason not to.
Because how do you measure the statistic "laws adhered to, in spirit and in letter"? It's hard. Usually you can't. So nobody measures it. So people aren't held accountable for it. But the employee is still under pressure to maximize some other stats, and these laws prevent them from doing that. That is, following the laws lowers their measured performance, which has a negative effect on their employment. Breaking the laws, on the other hand, has no effect on their employment.
So laws get broken. It happens every day.