Seems to me that there ought to be a corollary to Betteridge's law of headlines (A headline with a question mark can be answered by "no") for headlines with the word "may".
"Scientific advance X may achieve Y" can be read as "Will scientific advance X achieve Y?". To which the answer is "no", followed by "That's how researchers attempt to get more funding for X, a small advance of interest to those in the field but not exactly flying cars, by pretending it might lead to Y, which it almost certainly won't."
And then they vote according to whichever way their ideological predisposition leads them. After that, they direct the clerks to figure out how to justify it, which sometimes requires some stretching but always seems to be possible, especially when you can bury it in a few dozen pages of dense legal text.
I respect their learning, I really do, but they're called on to answer the cases for which there isn't a straightforward answer. (If there were, the lower courts would have it, and they wouldn't take the case.) They seem to serve, effectively, as tiebreakers, and they generally seem to do so according to their preconceptions rather than by finding novel insights. They don't have to have the most intelligent word, merely the final one.
That's an interesting and astute way of looking at it. The historical context has shifted, since democracy blurs the line between individual and state behavior. (Rome had been kinda-sorta nominally a republic, but nobody outside of the City itself would have really seen it that way, and by the time the Gospels were written the Empire was well underway.)
It's no longer morally feasible to simply submit to the state, since you can (and therefore must) work to change it. Unfortunately, there are those who believe with equal fervor, and equal moral basis, working to keep the status quo or change it in the opposite direction.
Christians have no difficulty finding text in the Bible to support just about any position they want. Paul talks about acts "worthy of death" in Acts 25:11. Jesus reinforced the Old Testament punishments in Matthew 5:17-18, "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished."
The resolution to the conflict tends to fall on the side of whatever one is ideologically predisposed to believe. It seems to me that "Turn the other cheek" is a lot clearer and more direct, but then, I'm not Christian, so what do I know?
Or at least, the mirrors could automatically retract. I suspect that even self-driving cars are going to have to have the option of allowing human steering for quite some time.
He's saying that he doesn't believe the contention that she is on the no-fly list. The government denies that she's on a no-fly list. The document that claims she was comes from an airline, not from the DHS itself, so it's possible that the reason she was denied boarding comes from further down the line.
She's reluctant to try again, since the flight isn't cheap (and they didn't refund her money). The airline is blaming DHS, and that's the part I'm not sure how they'd go about proving. They'd need to prove that the order they claim came from the DHS actually came from the DHS. I don't know what channel the message was delivered to them, so I don't know how they'd authenticate it, and the fact that DHS usually operates in secrecy makes it that much harder.
If I read it correctly, she doesn't have to try again, she simply needs to get Malaysia Airlines to cough up their source for the document they provided. I've got no idea how easy that would be.
I'd be curious to know about the makeup of their sample. Are those two-thirds of non-chicken writers covering the Hollywood and sports team beats, and therefore have nothing to be brave about? Or does their cowardly sample consist primarily of paranoiac bloggers who write lengthy screeds about how they're not allowed to write lengthy screeds?
The set of people who actually do journalism about the government, the ones who could potentially get access to real secrets and understand the context they fit into, is really quite small. The vast majority of people writing on the subject have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and I honestly don't care what they think. But I'd be rather interested to know what the few genuine journalists see and believe.
There are applications where you'll want to view the same image for a long time, like a map or a book. Both uses stand out in my mind because I just did a lot of traveling, where I couldn't be certain of when I'd next get a chance to plug in my phone. I'd have to flash it on to glance at a map, then shut it off and walk some more.
(Not to mention that I'd have to unlock it each time, a slightly cumbersome procedure while walking, though that seems a problem that could be solved with suitable programming.)
I'm coming to the conclusion that there IS a fundamental basis for it: drugs, and other black-market items. They want an online currency, and there's a lot of demand for their product. Silk Road is shut down, but new ones will keep popping up. The demand is real, so even if you didn't have speculators there would be demand for the currency in which drugs are bought.
The one thing I don't quite get, though, is that Bitcoin is too traceable for a proper black-market currency. It's famously and explicitly pseudonymous rather than anonymous. Seems to me that's very dangerous for the buyers and eventually for the sellers. I'd expect somebody to come up with a less traceable model. That would be the real crash to Bitcoin.
And ironically, that would make demand for this currency even stronger and more stable. Which would, in turn, give more real-world markets an interest in accepting it. Right now, when somebody asks what the value of the dollar is, it's ultimately based in the taxes you pay for the services you receive as a citizen, even though that's very, very abstract. I don't see why it couldn't ultimately be "because a bunch of drug dealers are willing to accept it and trade it among each other": the demand for drugs is just as real a thing.
This one is somewhat longer than most Slashdot summaries, and longer than a paragraph really should be.
And in fact, in the article from which the text was copypasted, it is two paragraphs, each a reasonable length. The article was well-written enough to summarize itself; I suspect it was the editor rather than the submitter who "contributed" by removing a helpful paragraph break.
I wonder what made the first dealer so confident that he could either (a) bully you into taking his price, or (b) get somebody else to buy the car at that price.
The answer, I suspect is that it's (a), and that the reason is that he didn't expect you to drive several hours. There was the risk to you that you'd drive all the way there and not get a much better deal, which you did.
He seems to have miscalculated, and he lost a sale in the process. He's not just a dickhole; he's a bad salesman. If the city dealer (who probably has higher costs) could sell it for $2500 under sticker, this guy could probably have convinced you to buy it at a penny below sticker and still turned a $2,500 profit. After all, it would have saved you a fair bit of travel for the uncertain price: you didn't know the other dealer's price while you were in the first dealer's showroom.
He got greedy, and lost badly. Unless he's got another buyer coming in soon, he's down $2,500 plus whatever profit the city dealer made. (Even below sticker, there's kickbacks and other ugly things designed to make the real price confusing and hard to learn.)
Some of Monty Python's routines are absolute classics that merit repetition, because they're that good. But that's only the very cream of the crop. Most skits were eminently forgettable; a fair number were just plain bad. And watching Flying Circus, it often seems as if they had no idea which were which.
Monty Python was willing to go way outside the box. The box usually exists for a reason: it's the material that has worked. There are some brilliant new ideas outside the box, and a vast world of crap. It takes a genius to find the pearls among that crap, and Monty Python were without doubt just such geniuses. But even so, what they brought back still required a fair bit of sifting.
Flying Circus episodes can be enjoyed simply for the joy of the search. The skits that fail were (frequently, at least) noble failures. They came, they tried, and we mostly forgot about them. If their stunning, world-changing successes did nothing more than expand the box... well, that's an accomplishment. You're never going to destroy the box entirely, because the fact is that the vast majority of ideas are just plain bad.
I'll be happy to see if those geniuses can find something worth expanding the box still further, but I have to suspect that it'll look more like Flying Circus than Holy Grail. (Holy Grail was, itself, a holy grail: a stunning fraction of it worked, in a way that few other things they tried did.) Good on them for trying it; it's the risk of failure that makes the successes worthwhile.
I'm far from an expert, but I would have thought that separating the lipids from the water was the easy part. Is there something about the way the algae store the lipids? Or are the algae too hard to crush to get them to release the oils?
I think Antarctica shows fairly well what happens when nobody wants to be there. It's resource-poor.
The more compelling example, I think, is at the other extreme: now that the melting North Pole is making new oil deposits available, there is considerable squabbling over boundaries.
Which seems reasonable. The treaty is easy to follow when nobody's actually going there. It helped allay paranoia when the US was going there: we weren't going to set up a base anyway.
Sooner or later, though, somebody's going to start going on some kind of regular basis. And it would be nice to have clearer guidelines than high-minded, utopian dictates that nobody owns anything.
I'm skeptical that anything will come of it, since nobody's really in a mood to cooperate, and it's too abstract and far-off for it to really focus anybody's attention. New rules are likely to be just as bad and impractical as the existing ones, in the absence of knowing what it's actually like to live and work in space.
Even without electronics, we've been distancing ourselves from our enemies since the atlatl. If we want to look into our enemy's eyes as we kill him, we're gonna have to go back to daggers. Everything after that is a matter of degree.
The report isn't about the nudie machines or the crotch groping. This was a program designed to spot potential problems based on the way people act. If it worked, they'd ditch the zappers and replace it with eagle-eyed security guards.
But it doesn't work. Presumably, they spent a billion dollars because they really wanted it to work. This is, after all, patterned after the program that they use in Israel, which is very familiar with terrorism, and has been widely touted as better alternative. In Israel, though, it amounts largely to racial profiling, which has its own drawbacks (as the report points out).
This isn't about the effectiveness of the security theater, one way or the other. It's about something that was supposed to make the security less theatrical. Except it doesn't.
I could kind of use a click suppression. I'm not actually going to do any serious typing while you're talking, since I do at least need to listen closely enough to be able to go "uh huh... that's awful... good for you" at appropriate intervals. But a quick game of solitaire doesn't take all that much attention...
It also lets you know when they're doing something when you think they're supposed to be listening. When you're complaining about your terrible break-up or going into tremendous depth about your accomplishments for the week during a business meeting, I'd just as soon you not realize that I'm searching out lolcats and sharing them on Facebook rather than listening to you drone on.
Well, it does let you place ordinary phone calls without Skype or other software. It should all be "just data" but the phones and pricing plans are still set up to make a big deal out of the difference.
I would assume, in fact, that they intend to charge you for this, as with the WiFi (since the new hardware and the satellite connection aren't free, after all, and their whole industry model is about upcharging these days). Which would be odd, since once people see that talking on phones is allowed, they're going to just take out their phones and try to connect to the ground towers to circumvent the cost. I have no idea how well that will work.
The claim isn't that metadata isn't revealing. Of course it's revealing. That's why they're gathering it.
The assertion is that metadata isn't private in the same sense that the name and address on an envelope aren't private. If you leave one out on the table, anybody can read it. They can't read what's inside the envelope without opening it, but the addressee and return address are plain as day.
Whether that argument holds legal water is up to lawyers, legislators, judges, and (ultimately) voters. But nobody needs to convince the NSA that it's revealing; they're well aware of it. And so, I assume, is everybody reading this site. What the Congress and the Courts know... honestly, I wouldn't even begin to imagine, but I suspect that they're unlikely to change their mind on it based on this. I can't imagine that "install this data-gathering app and we'll show you that we can gather a lot of data" comes as a surprise to anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that there ought to be a corollary to Betteridge's law of headlines (A headline with a question mark can be answered by "no") for headlines with the word "may".
"Scientific advance X may achieve Y" can be read as "Will scientific advance X achieve Y?". To which the answer is "no", followed by "That's how researchers attempt to get more funding for X, a small advance of interest to those in the field but not exactly flying cars, by pretending it might lead to Y, which it almost certainly won't."
It's all Americans at Oktoberfest anyway.
And then they vote according to whichever way their ideological predisposition leads them. After that, they direct the clerks to figure out how to justify it, which sometimes requires some stretching but always seems to be possible, especially when you can bury it in a few dozen pages of dense legal text.
I respect their learning, I really do, but they're called on to answer the cases for which there isn't a straightforward answer. (If there were, the lower courts would have it, and they wouldn't take the case.) They seem to serve, effectively, as tiebreakers, and they generally seem to do so according to their preconceptions rather than by finding novel insights. They don't have to have the most intelligent word, merely the final one.
That's an interesting and astute way of looking at it. The historical context has shifted, since democracy blurs the line between individual and state behavior. (Rome had been kinda-sorta nominally a republic, but nobody outside of the City itself would have really seen it that way, and by the time the Gospels were written the Empire was well underway.)
It's no longer morally feasible to simply submit to the state, since you can (and therefore must) work to change it. Unfortunately, there are those who believe with equal fervor, and equal moral basis, working to keep the status quo or change it in the opposite direction.
Christians have no difficulty finding text in the Bible to support just about any position they want. Paul talks about acts "worthy of death" in Acts 25:11. Jesus reinforced the Old Testament punishments in Matthew 5:17-18, "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished."
The resolution to the conflict tends to fall on the side of whatever one is ideologically predisposed to believe. It seems to me that "Turn the other cheek" is a lot clearer and more direct, but then, I'm not Christian, so what do I know?
Or at least, the mirrors could automatically retract. I suspect that even self-driving cars are going to have to have the option of allowing human steering for quite some time.
He's saying that he doesn't believe the contention that she is on the no-fly list. The government denies that she's on a no-fly list. The document that claims she was comes from an airline, not from the DHS itself, so it's possible that the reason she was denied boarding comes from further down the line.
She's reluctant to try again, since the flight isn't cheap (and they didn't refund her money). The airline is blaming DHS, and that's the part I'm not sure how they'd go about proving. They'd need to prove that the order they claim came from the DHS actually came from the DHS. I don't know what channel the message was delivered to them, so I don't know how they'd authenticate it, and the fact that DHS usually operates in secrecy makes it that much harder.
If I read it correctly, she doesn't have to try again, she simply needs to get Malaysia Airlines to cough up their source for the document they provided. I've got no idea how easy that would be.
I'd be curious to know about the makeup of their sample. Are those two-thirds of non-chicken writers covering the Hollywood and sports team beats, and therefore have nothing to be brave about? Or does their cowardly sample consist primarily of paranoiac bloggers who write lengthy screeds about how they're not allowed to write lengthy screeds?
The set of people who actually do journalism about the government, the ones who could potentially get access to real secrets and understand the context they fit into, is really quite small. The vast majority of people writing on the subject have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and I honestly don't care what they think. But I'd be rather interested to know what the few genuine journalists see and believe.
There are applications where you'll want to view the same image for a long time, like a map or a book. Both uses stand out in my mind because I just did a lot of traveling, where I couldn't be certain of when I'd next get a chance to plug in my phone. I'd have to flash it on to glance at a map, then shut it off and walk some more.
(Not to mention that I'd have to unlock it each time, a slightly cumbersome procedure while walking, though that seems a problem that could be solved with suitable programming.)
I'm coming to the conclusion that there IS a fundamental basis for it: drugs, and other black-market items. They want an online currency, and there's a lot of demand for their product. Silk Road is shut down, but new ones will keep popping up. The demand is real, so even if you didn't have speculators there would be demand for the currency in which drugs are bought.
The one thing I don't quite get, though, is that Bitcoin is too traceable for a proper black-market currency. It's famously and explicitly pseudonymous rather than anonymous. Seems to me that's very dangerous for the buyers and eventually for the sellers. I'd expect somebody to come up with a less traceable model. That would be the real crash to Bitcoin.
And ironically, that would make demand for this currency even stronger and more stable. Which would, in turn, give more real-world markets an interest in accepting it. Right now, when somebody asks what the value of the dollar is, it's ultimately based in the taxes you pay for the services you receive as a citizen, even though that's very, very abstract. I don't see why it couldn't ultimately be "because a bunch of drug dealers are willing to accept it and trade it among each other": the demand for drugs is just as real a thing.
This one is somewhat longer than most Slashdot summaries, and longer than a paragraph really should be.
And in fact, in the article from which the text was copypasted, it is two paragraphs, each a reasonable length. The article was well-written enough to summarize itself; I suspect it was the editor rather than the submitter who "contributed" by removing a helpful paragraph break.
I wonder what made the first dealer so confident that he could either (a) bully you into taking his price, or (b) get somebody else to buy the car at that price.
The answer, I suspect is that it's (a), and that the reason is that he didn't expect you to drive several hours. There was the risk to you that you'd drive all the way there and not get a much better deal, which you did.
He seems to have miscalculated, and he lost a sale in the process. He's not just a dickhole; he's a bad salesman. If the city dealer (who probably has higher costs) could sell it for $2500 under sticker, this guy could probably have convinced you to buy it at a penny below sticker and still turned a $2,500 profit. After all, it would have saved you a fair bit of travel for the uncertain price: you didn't know the other dealer's price while you were in the first dealer's showroom.
He got greedy, and lost badly. Unless he's got another buyer coming in soon, he's down $2,500 plus whatever profit the city dealer made. (Even below sticker, there's kickbacks and other ugly things designed to make the real price confusing and hard to learn.)
Some of Monty Python's routines are absolute classics that merit repetition, because they're that good. But that's only the very cream of the crop. Most skits were eminently forgettable; a fair number were just plain bad. And watching Flying Circus, it often seems as if they had no idea which were which.
Monty Python was willing to go way outside the box. The box usually exists for a reason: it's the material that has worked. There are some brilliant new ideas outside the box, and a vast world of crap. It takes a genius to find the pearls among that crap, and Monty Python were without doubt just such geniuses. But even so, what they brought back still required a fair bit of sifting.
Flying Circus episodes can be enjoyed simply for the joy of the search. The skits that fail were (frequently, at least) noble failures. They came, they tried, and we mostly forgot about them. If their stunning, world-changing successes did nothing more than expand the box... well, that's an accomplishment. You're never going to destroy the box entirely, because the fact is that the vast majority of ideas are just plain bad.
I'll be happy to see if those geniuses can find something worth expanding the box still further, but I have to suspect that it'll look more like Flying Circus than Holy Grail. (Holy Grail was, itself, a holy grail: a stunning fraction of it worked, in a way that few other things they tried did.) Good on them for trying it; it's the risk of failure that makes the successes worthwhile.
Thanks for that. Good to know.
I'm far from an expert, but I would have thought that separating the lipids from the water was the easy part. Is there something about the way the algae store the lipids? Or are the algae too hard to crush to get them to release the oils?
I'm pretty sure that a parallel grid would cost more than $4.95 a month.
I think Antarctica shows fairly well what happens when nobody wants to be there. It's resource-poor.
The more compelling example, I think, is at the other extreme: now that the melting North Pole is making new oil deposits available, there is considerable squabbling over boundaries.
Which seems reasonable. The treaty is easy to follow when nobody's actually going there. It helped allay paranoia when the US was going there: we weren't going to set up a base anyway.
Sooner or later, though, somebody's going to start going on some kind of regular basis. And it would be nice to have clearer guidelines than high-minded, utopian dictates that nobody owns anything.
I'm skeptical that anything will come of it, since nobody's really in a mood to cooperate, and it's too abstract and far-off for it to really focus anybody's attention. New rules are likely to be just as bad and impractical as the existing ones, in the absence of knowing what it's actually like to live and work in space.
Even without electronics, we've been distancing ourselves from our enemies since the atlatl. If we want to look into our enemy's eyes as we kill him, we're gonna have to go back to daggers. Everything after that is a matter of degree.
The report isn't about the nudie machines or the crotch groping. This was a program designed to spot potential problems based on the way people act. If it worked, they'd ditch the zappers and replace it with eagle-eyed security guards.
But it doesn't work. Presumably, they spent a billion dollars because they really wanted it to work. This is, after all, patterned after the program that they use in Israel, which is very familiar with terrorism, and has been widely touted as better alternative. In Israel, though, it amounts largely to racial profiling, which has its own drawbacks (as the report points out).
This isn't about the effectiveness of the security theater, one way or the other. It's about something that was supposed to make the security less theatrical. Except it doesn't.
I could kind of use a click suppression. I'm not actually going to do any serious typing while you're talking, since I do at least need to listen closely enough to be able to go "uh huh... that's awful... good for you" at appropriate intervals. But a quick game of solitaire doesn't take all that much attention...
It also lets you know when they're doing something when you think they're supposed to be listening. When you're complaining about your terrible break-up or going into tremendous depth about your accomplishments for the week during a business meeting, I'd just as soon you not realize that I'm searching out lolcats and sharing them on Facebook rather than listening to you drone on.
That makes sense. I'm not sure how one does such a thing without interfering with your own operations, but I can imagine that it's possible. Thanks.
Well, it does let you place ordinary phone calls without Skype or other software. It should all be "just data" but the phones and pricing plans are still set up to make a big deal out of the difference.
I would assume, in fact, that they intend to charge you for this, as with the WiFi (since the new hardware and the satellite connection aren't free, after all, and their whole industry model is about upcharging these days). Which would be odd, since once people see that talking on phones is allowed, they're going to just take out their phones and try to connect to the ground towers to circumvent the cost. I have no idea how well that will work.
The claim isn't that metadata isn't revealing. Of course it's revealing. That's why they're gathering it.
The assertion is that metadata isn't private in the same sense that the name and address on an envelope aren't private. If you leave one out on the table, anybody can read it. They can't read what's inside the envelope without opening it, but the addressee and return address are plain as day.
Whether that argument holds legal water is up to lawyers, legislators, judges, and (ultimately) voters. But nobody needs to convince the NSA that it's revealing; they're well aware of it. And so, I assume, is everybody reading this site. What the Congress and the Courts know... honestly, I wouldn't even begin to imagine, but I suspect that they're unlikely to change their mind on it based on this. I can't imagine that "install this data-gathering app and we'll show you that we can gather a lot of data" comes as a surprise to anybody.