I am certainly not interested in Transformers-like robots, fights (of robots) or similar. I cannot even imagine that what is being shown in that video could trigger reactions like what any similar enough event could do. But all this might even be ignored to understand the point I am trying to make here.
I have always had serious difficulties to understand this kind of businesses requiring a huge amount of funding and eventually (if at all) having some profit which can rarely compensate that initial funding; in fact, this is usually a way to get even more funding?! Perhaps this is because I am (kind of) poor and because losing more than earning doesn't seem too logical to me. Perhaps because I have had horrible experiences with financial/money-lending institutions, with their impatience, unmotivatedly pushy behaviours and their absolute lack of understanding about almost anything (they give you 3, expect 5 in return and very quickly; in case of not getting it, they start having bully-like attitudes by spending in that process even more than the profit of 2 that they were expecting to get! And all that for not-too-big, even small amounts! I know that these extreme behaviours are common in my area/country, but not everywhere; even though they seem quite descriptive of what these people are usually up to). So, I have serious problems to picture what is somehow common in certain areas like Silicon Valley or businesses backed by huge amount of VC capital. Even despite all that, this seems a new upper limit for me on this let's say peculiar approach to the world.
I did a quick research and this company seems to have a maximum audience of around 250K people (what they claim and about the number of subscribers in their Youtube channel; in other social media, their numbers are much lower). They seem to have got various millions of dollars in funding from companies like Autodesk (for promoting AutoCAD?). They have a Kickstarter campaign to fund this specific battle, where they got a bit over $500M. Their whole business model seems to be focused on selling merchandising and making these videos. Their expenses seem to be quite big, not just to build all the robots (currently looking for hiring engineers for various positions) but also to gain all this visibility. Just by taking this battle as an example, they spent 3 years to be in a position to record that 30 min. video!
It seems that their ultimate goal is to be the pioneers in what they think that will be the very lucrative business of robot fights. To have an impression of what this might imply, let's take as a reference professional wrestling. Apparently, it went though a quite long and difficult process before becoming popular/profitable; although nowadays and with enough money the process might certainly be much quicker, something like 10-20 years under ideal conditions? Let's imagine for one second that robot fights have already reached that stage of popularity and that battles like the one shown in that video might attract millions of fans. This is the ideal output for all this, the final prize justifying the huge invested amounts and all the effort. Even by assuming that this point is actually reachable and that all the losses to get there are affordable, the question is: could seriously this format become profitable at all? Professional wrestling seems profitable, but not extremely profitable; I guess that the most successful investors, managers, fighters, etc. are reasonably wealthy but this is it. And that is the maximum aspiration of robot fights: getting as much attention as the human equivalent. The problem with robots is that they imply much higher expenses than people; I don't know, something like 100 times, 1000 times more? They need specific conditions, highly specialised staff to build, fix, improve them; there are huge entrance barriers for new fighters (and without contenders you don't have battles or a tournament or anything even remotely attractive for your a
- As commented in various posts above, what you develop while being an employee belongs to the company. In any case, you rarely validate your work at a company with code samples but with time, generically-defined tasks and, eventually, feedback from the given employer.
- Code samples are expected to be individually developed by you or, at least, have clearly defined your exact contribution. Ideally, you should be the responsible for everything: ideation, implementation, bug fixing, etc. All this seems quite incompatible with what you do as an employee, by implementing what you are being instructed to do, what, how, when and at what cost. Even in case of using company's code as your samples, you would be mostly proving to be a good fit for that company rather than your actual value as developer/worker/person. A slightly different story would be you having a very high flexibility regarding how to implement a roughly-defined set of ideas; but even in that case, your exact contribution and the effect of other factors like company's culture would be unclear.
- My work has always been almost exclusively focused on algorithm development, efficiency improvement, data management, etc. or, in web-based lingo, back-end. I have always had lots of problems to show my work with previous clients because of rarely being public and, most of times, not even shareable with anyone else. I guess that most of developers like me have always had these "problems" which, until relatively recent times, weren't felt as such as far as private, proprietary, close-source software is quite common. The only reason why this issue has started to be seen as a problem is because of the huge increase of low-quality, non-specialised, ignorant offer/demand, where things like "you have people taking care of GUI/aesthetics and people taking care of internals" aren't evident anymore. I am commenting more about this in the last point.
- The most logical way to have good code samples is to spend some time on building them at your own expense. This is also the best proceeding to maximise what code samples are precisely being expected to deliver: a good idea about your skills in the widest sense of the expression. This doesn't just mean having some technical knowledge, being able to follow orders and dealing with comfortable and well-defined conditions, but also coming up with nice/innovative approaches, showing your main priorities or how much effort/interest you put in your work and, in general, delivering comprehensive solutions saying quite a lot about you to people willing and able to understand them. Despite all this, I have personally decided to reduce my number of public contributions/code samples; firstly, because I have done a quite relevant effort on this front already and, secondly, because people don't seem to care about all this as I expect them to do (i.e., objectively and knowledgeably analysing my work as opposed to just counting the number of stars/likes/lines of code).
- My last point is about recruiters and HR/hiring departments with low-to-no technical knowledge/concerns, even when dealing with expert candidates. This thing of a front-end implementation having any kind of impact on a back-end developer is quite indicative of the level of tremendous ignorance and arbitrariness which you can find out there. Just about 1 week ago, I had a "technical" interview where I was (generically and crappily) asked about how I would implement a web interface, what is pretty much the opposite to what most of my experience is about. Note that I have no problem with non-technical staff for as long as they accept their (lack of) knowledge and compensate it with the adequate means (e.g., taking advise from actual experts). These ridiculously bad to everyone nonsense is even more intense under my specific conditions (remotely working/freelancing/external contractors). My ideas regarding how to proceed in these cases are extremely clear since some time ago: zero tolerance with stupidity. I will not be patient or understanding with any
Actually, the previous version was also fine depending upon the interpretation of the sentence. A much clearer version would have been "you have intuitively assumed that the wrong groups were more similar to each other and different to the valid one than".
Unlikely a person like you who, apparently, isn't able to understand that ">" has no effect here. You saw it working somewhere and came to the conclusion that it has to work everywhere else, right? You are undoubtedly a really brilliant fellow! LOL. In the future, you should better rely on the HTML version (<quote> + </quote>).
Low distance subsets with low entropy in the difference of the differences is a pretty damn simple pattern to computationally cluster.
So many words, sounding so nicely (for very stupid people) and saying so little. Do you know, genius, that the intrinsic meaning of "low distance subsets with low entropy" and its constituents is none? Do you, beyond-stupid, know about something called context? That things cannot be defined intrinsically and generically in certain way unless under very specific conditions, which are usually being misinterpreted as such by poorly-understanding idiots like you?
In fact, Levenshtein distance is motivated by biology in part
Really? Very interesting. You are a very wise person who only say relevant things which make lots of sense. LOL.
you'll find this is a very solved problem.
The world is a solved problem for people like you, right? LOL. I will never stop laughing at the (always invasive and aggressive) ingenuity and ignorance of those only talking and guessing, never actually doing/solving/understanding. Always failing and always coming back with a new stupidity (+ being curiously obsessed with me -> I will never understand this bit).
So you're wasting your time doing a mindless job, and by your own definition you've classed your mental ability as sub-machine which is sub-human.
I see. So, you are criticising (well... plainly insulting, because you are a fucking idiot) an approach to a problem about which you know pretty much nothing, defining the person coming up with the given solution (about which you, again, know nothing) and proposing an inexistent alternative (the practical value of all your empty, abstract, saying-nothing statements is exactly zero)! Excellent work, you should be very proud of yourself. LOL. OK, now I will make a small effort to help you understand what is the flaw of your "reasoning" (additionally to your pathetic behaviour and ridiculous blind trust in abstract, saying-nothing statements)
Where do you see the similarities (because this is what you tried to say with "low distance subsets with low entropy", although perhaps you aren't even aware about that fact) between the two proposed sets and conventional domain names? Both are using letters? OK, google.com and facebook.com also use letters. Lengths of the strings? They can have any length. Including numbers, too many consonants/vowels, etc.? These are very variable conditions too. Extensions/TLDs? Also extremely variable. The only difference between asfasfas.com and google.com is that you (even despite your evident stupidity) should be able to immediately recognise google.com as valid because it refers to a familiar word. Perhaps 20 years ago, google.com would also have sounded wrong. Now that you have reached this point of basic understanding of the problem (hopefully, because your understanding capabilities seem extremely poor), can you finally get the flaw of your "critic"? You have intuitively assumed that the proposed scenarios were much different than what they really are, because your understanding/analysing skills are extremely low. Now, thanks to these adapted-to-idiots explanations, you should know that the only way to proceed in this case is to rely on a very comprehensive dictionary helping an automated approach to differentiate between what most of people nowadays consider valid and not.
It compiles, but doesn't illustrate the point which the parent poster is trying to make. A more adequate version would be something like this (impossible to write it here! Additionally to having to include all the indentation/new lines manually, I kept getting the "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." error message!). But even after spending a huge amount of time improving that simplistic code to deal with a relevant number of scenarios, you would have to take care of the really difficult part which is implementing a programmer brain.
Imagine that you have available a huge number of algorithms taking care of virtually any detail and that you can easily rely on any of them. Having that in place is a requisite before building any coding automaton and it is already very difficult (if possible at all). But that task is extremely simple in comparison with the next one: allowing that machine to know how and when to use each coding bit. Where and how should you use that print statement? How could you convert a set of high level requirements into the multiple coding steps forming the given implementation? Having that in place would require not just excellent human-like understanding capabilities, but also a relevant amount of highly specialised know-how. This simply cannot be accomplished.
I have been visiting Slashdot for long enough to get that reference and to know who you are. A big, colourful and extremely dysfunctional family of which I am already feeling part:)
I am currently working on an approach able to automatically track not-too-honest links among web domains. Note that there are lots of groups of inter-linked domains following more or less regular patterns. For example, one group might be formed by ffffggg123.com, ffffggg5555.com, ffffggg2.com, ffffhhh123.com; and another one by asdfasfasf.net, aseraraf.com, areafassfa.info (+ hundreds more because these groups include lots of domains). These two sets should be easily spotted as suspicious by anyone within a sample of normal domains; but creating an algorithm able to automatically do so would be very difficult (and much, much more difficult to create a piece of software, AI if you wish, able to create an algorithm performing such actions). And this is just one of the multiple scenarios which I am trying to address; that's why I have been forced to rely on something much more powerful than any computer: myself.
Some (ignorant) people thinks that the main difficulty of programming is getting used to the given syntax. This is as stupid as expecting a kid able to read/write in whatever language to have all what it takes to write a proper book. Someone can have a perfect knowledge about certain programming language and be a horrible developer; on the other hand, a good programmer is usually able to start using new languages almost right away. Programming or engineering or any other highly-specialised field requiring lots of learning and certain attitude/skills will never be automated; not even any activity involving understanding complex/variable conditions and delivering irregular outputs. Only human-like knowledge, learning, understanding, etc. capabilities can deal with so complex realities.
I am really looking forward to get a proper feeling about what a quantum-based whatever can do. I guess that the APIs will be identical to the ones in the other.NET languages, perhaps with some restrictions, but delivering pretty much the same; that's why having access to the source code might be required. I also guess that the theoretical advantages of these new approaches could only be enjoyed in quantum computers of very difficult (at least, to me) access.
I am quite skeptical about all this, but certainly willing to analyse the whole situation properly; and I happen to be very experienced in the.NET Framework/Visual Studio. How are all these companies expecting to justify having to rebuild virtually everything from the ground up to comply with the dubious quantum label? A priori it seems very difficult to build hardware/software applying ideas on the lines of cats being there and/or not:)
Location and image recognition are two different events which are very difficult to be related in an automated way. Imagine that you know the exact location of person A on certain day and at certain time; and also that there is a video recorded by a shop at that same moment. A person analysing all the people being in that shop is likely to do a much more efficient work than any automated system. Now start increasing the scope of the search (people during that day in that street, in that neighbourhood, during that week, etc.) and the automated recognition would become virtually impossible.
The whole point of having an automated system analysing huge amounts of information is it to be able to do so accurately. This means that it has to gracefully deal with unfiltered, low-quality, imprecise, etc. inputs, the kind of stuff with which almost any person can deal intuitively. That's why automation is mostly meant for well-defined scenarios, not for abstract ones like random people in random videos. I am not saying that it is impossible or even that it might not be kind of helpful under very specific conditions. All what I am saying is that the probability that such a system might be used at a large enough scale to represent any kind of threat for the privacy of random citizens is extremely low.
If they can reliably track your blob-of-pixels throughout the city, then they only need 1 good clean pic of your face to identify everywhere you go.
How is that supposed to work? Just for recognising a very simple and well-defined shape you needs a relevant amount of training; and even in that case, a different colour or a weird shape might provoke the whole recognition to fail. Faces are very complicated when considered dynamically; say the same person smiling, being sad, etc. But if additionally you add the millions of positions in which that face could be and the millions of further factors seriously affecting the storage of said face, the possibilities are way too high. Additionally bear in mind that you don't have too many pictures of the same person and that when people takes their pictures they have a very specific gesture and are in a very specific position. If you can make a close enough good picture of a person (ideally, more than one), you might have some chance at automatically crosschecking that photo against a database; but random situations from random footages? This is extremely inaccurate/requires a very complex and extremely well trained system.
There are many web-based companies which have nothing to do with tech and whose sites always work fine. You don't need to be an expert programmer to have a competent team and a properly working site (+ to share information which is appealing to your target audience).
Recognising faces in random footages with different quality and weather conditions, from any angle, people being in whatever position, wearing anything, performing any action, etc.? Like in the movies, where laser beam are automatically pointing to the eyes of each person entering in a building? LOL. I don't think so. The accuracy of any system on these lines is probably extremely low.
Being down for so long two days in a row? A so big site? A site for nerds, mostly from the computer sub-division? Isn't it a bit weird? Also why aren't they sharing any details about the problems?
Really? So which German party was founded by a minister of Hitler and is (today) populated by children and grandchildren of those in power during Hitler days? Which German party refuses to condemn Hitler's acts?
Let me tell you something about me to help you understand the tremendous irony of me having to reply that comment and many others before it. In general, I don't care about politics at all and rarely vote. I am not the kind of guy who blindly defends/attacks absolutely anything (other than perhaps the specific outputs of very abstract ideas like fairness or honesty), much less so imprecise realities like political parties, movements or public figures of any type. I rarely define myself or anyone else according to generic abstractions as far as I do consider individually each single person. Despite all that and as a way to minimise the chances of me wasting time in the most stupid and ridiculous ways (no idea why but some people in internet seem to be extremely interested in not understanding others properly and creating mini-chaos of nonsense where neither the intention nor the context are properly understood), I have written various texts with extremely clear statements about my personality and expectations which should help anyone to almost immediately get a good enough picture about myself. You can find one these texts in my profile here (RHS of this page). As clearly stated there, I am left-winged (+ quite a few ideas which locate me not exactly in the centre-left) what, translated to the Spanish reality, means that I have never and will never support, vote, tolerate, be understanding, etc. with Partido Popular, equivalent parties and, very far away from considering even slightly acceptable extreme-right movements like what Franco represents.
After that short introduction about the context here (= political ideas of the person writing all this), let's sum up what has happened in the last comments. First of all, I want to re-highlight that me participating in this thread yesterday was an almost forced decision after having read tons of extremely misleading and wrong ideas; so, I would have ideally avoided all my posts including the current one. This specific sub-thread about PP came from comparisons on the lines of Rajoy/Erdogan Spain/Turkey PP/Franco all of them making only slight sense within an oversimplying context of insults, personal attacks and similar. In fact, listening things on these lines is relatively easy and even kind of acceptable (e.g., left calling right nazis and right calling left antifa); the difference here is that there seems to be an underlying extremely wrong set of assumptions depicting a very inaccurate picture of Spain/what is happening now in Catalonia and that's why I clarified these issues. In summary and by being completely realistic without forgetting my exact position and the previous ideas, the modern PP as a whole is very far away from Franco or any other far-right party on the lines of what happens in other European countries. In Spain, leaning-more-right-than-centre parties have always been very secondary (unlikely more leftist ones), some examples might be Vox (right) or Falange (far right). Until relatively recently, PP has been the only relevant enough alternative to right-wing ideology in Spain, a fact which might help understand certain issues. On the other hand, new parties have recently appeared and younger right-centre people might start moving outside PP, which might keep older and a bit more right-leaning voters. Typical PP voters are catholic elderly and finance/business people. Spain is a left-leaning country where the only option for the right to have serious chances (PP has been one of the main two parties during the last quite a few years) is to be quite moderate.
Hopefully, you and others can finally understand the proper context (regarding myself, this discussion and Spain) and, with it, my words in its correct sense. By assuming that you get all this (wh
curious how you can deny the power grab the current government managed to pull off despite its loss in votes last election cycle.
Power grab?! How are you supposed to measure power in a parliament-has-all-powers kind of country? The more representatives you have either directly or agreeing with you, the more power you get. Partido Popular has currently the majority in the Spanish parliament because, according to our current election system, they won the last election. Getting more/less votes isn't as relevant as getting more sits in the parliament (defined by the votes being weighted on account of some regional factors) than the other parties. Who is to blame? Spanish voters, other parties and Spanish voting system. People at Partido Popular has proven to be very corrupt, but not in the sense that you seem to be implying; they mostly focus on stealing money and hiring friends/family. This kind of power hording Erdogan or Putin style isn't compatible with the Spanish system, overall attitude and even the EU expectations.
was willing to arrest public servants in order to proceed their goals
I am starting to get a bit tired of explaining clearly misleading ideas (honestly denoting a quite bad basic understanding about how a big proportion of democracies are expected to work) about what I don't really care. Let's see if I need only this one comment with you.
- Rajoy personal power like the one of all the remaining presidents in Spain since Franco is virtually inexistent. Even though his party has the majority in the parliament, he wouldn't be able to do too many things on this front if the opposition (e.g., the socialist party, its left-center counter-part) wouldn't approve it, but they do. In fact, all the parties in Madrid (+ some of them taking advantage from the situation to attack Rajoy a bit), the other regional governments, most of media and public figures (including the ones in Catalonia, traditionally associated with the independentism) don't agree with how this situation has evolved. At the moment, this process seems to be exclusively supported by some of the people voting these parties, by the official regional resources and by what seems a relevant international misinformation campaign.
- All this process has been declared illegal by the highest court regarding all what affects the constitution. Just in case you don't know it, the judicial system is independent from the government. The Catalan government ignored that declaration + all the associated orders to stop that process (public servants not obeying orders from a court = acting illegally!). A court from Catalonia (independent like all the other courts and only linked to the aforementioned highest court because of their common interest in applying the law in Spain) ordered to arrest some people from the Catalan government because of being apparently misusing public resources. If a court tells you that you cannot do something, but you don't obey that order, the police (or "guardia civil" a police-like body) might come and arrest you.
- Rajoy, well I guess that the internal affairs ministry (because again: Rajoy's power is very limited), decided to perform certain actions to make sure that the so-far-disobeying regional governments starts acting according to the law. But they didn't make any decision because they feel like doing it or to repress anyone's freedom or to comply with their fascist goals as you and others imply. They are simply one of the parts of a more complex mechanism formed by: parliament (issues laws and decides), judges/courts (make sure that everything is compatible with the laws) and president/ministries (perform the specific actions to ensure the two aforementioned outputs to succeed).
- All what I am describing in this post is how most of modern western (European) countries work. All this could be known by virtually everyone after performing a quite simple research/learning. All this doesn't matter to me at all for two reasons: firstly, I am not Catalan/live in Catalonia/have nothing to win/lose with whatever happens in Catalonia; secondly, I don't care too much about politics and, mainly in Slashdot, I have zero interest in discussing about these issues. In fact, I promised myself (+ publicly, via posting it here) to try to avoid non-technical discussion in Slashdot as much as possible. I couldn't refrain myself this time because of reading so many extremely wrong posts. Lesson (re-)learned: from now, I will make an extra effort to ignore this kind of threads, no matter how much nonsense I see.
I'm sure Erdogan charged his opponents with crimes before removing them from power.
This is so far away from being even remotely applicable (not just in Spain, but also in the other UE countries) that I don't even know what to say. Rajoy, or any other president before, has nothing close to Erdogan's power; not even to Trump's power. Spain is a parliamentary democracy where everything has to go through the parliament.
My understanding is that the Guardia Civil is a military force that usually has police duties and that 1200 were sent to Catalonia. It might not be the "real army" but it's still a military force.
For its proper definition, do some research. I can give you some informal ideas though: there are different levels of police-like bodies in Spain with different attributions. As what happens with everything else, here we have 3 main levels: local (city), regional (comunidades autónomas like Catalonia; there are also intermediate divisions, but their powers are very limited) and national. So, we have local/regional/national police bodies. Some regions like Catalonia have taken competence on police and they created their own regional/local police departments.
At the national level, the two main alternatives are "policía nacional" and "guardia civil"; where the latter is mostly focused on traffic and road control, but they also work on other issues like security. Although their origins (and even internal structure) might be closer to the army, they are an independent body mostly meant to perform police-like work. For army-like work, I guess that they use the army.
ramblings about what op thinks about Catalonia separating from Spain
The whole intention of my original comment was highlighting that being pro/against Catalan separatists isn't too relevant to analyse this whole situation or what is being discussed in the article. The main problem is that a regional government (with lots of attributions and in a rich region) acted illegally by disobeying the national authorities/legal system. This is the reason for the.cat domain restrictions, arrests, etc.: banning the actions of regional public officials allegedly acting outside the law.
Your understanding of US stateship is weak. If Texas wanted to secede from the Federal government, long before the Texas state government having a referendum the talks with the federal government would have stopped any thought of holding one. Same thing with Canada and Quebec. That's ok, you guys need to work this out. Sure, try to suppress the vote. See how that turns out.
I am not included within this "you guys" as far as I am not telling my position regarding the whole separatism/voting issue, don't consider that it affects me in any way (living in Spain but far away from Catalonia and with no relationship with Catalan politics) and don't support our current president/his party in any way. The whole point of my comment was to clarify some ideas which seem (not sure if intentionally transmitted) wrong. The problem with Catalonia is that their regional government decided to go against what the national government (like it or not, agree with it or not) said and, consequently, started acting illegally. In your examples, it would be like Texas/Quebec starting whatever process against the express indications, law and constitution of US/Canada. Nothing about suppressing vote or censorship, but about a (perhaps a bit too aggressive) reaction to actions against what the current Spanish legislation and courts consider legal.
Without dialogue it's obviously next to impossible to figure out the details that will affect everyone, but when the central government is the one that decided to send troops and arrest officials instead of saying "have your vote and if it gets a yes we'll work on the details".
Sending troops?! LOL. Nothing of this has happened. To know more about the different local/regional/national outside-military law-enforcement bodies in Spain, do some research or take a look at one of my other posts in this thread. I will tell you two recent events to help you understand the situation better: - The Catalan government decided to not send the due periodic economic report to the national government. The national government froze all the payments to the government-related employees in Catalonia. The Catalan government changed its mind and sent the due economic reports to the national government. - The national government has recently taken control of the Catalan regional police because, in extreme cases, they can restrict all the regional authorities like having their own police.
They arrested officials because they were acting illegally; all their actions have an illegal component (= against the Spanish Constitution as stated by the highest court on this front), but the arrests you are mentioning (performing by Guardia Civil, a police-like body present in Catalonia and in all the other Spanish regions) were ordered by a judge in a Catalan court apparently investigating these officials for misusing public money. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the unwillingness to having any kind of sensible dialogue is quite implicit in the fact of disobeying direct indications of the highest court on that matter: you aren't just not setting the best mood for any kind of dialogue, but additionally behaving illegally.
comes to self determination as long as it doesn't infringe on others. If a person never uses any of the services or infrastructure
I see. So you think that, in the case of Spain, a pluri-democracy of over 45 million people should work fine, right? The funniest thing is that you seem to seriously believe that! And regarding your not using infrastructures, I guess that you mean that you never go through the streets/roads, breath (sanitisation/pollution reduction), eat/drink (safety regulations), etc. I guess that you live inside a neutral-to-the-environment bubble floating in the only spot where there is nothing else around you, being both fed and entertained by your words, ideas and expectations, right? LOL.
Revolutions are always illegal, that doesn't mean that they're wrong or undemocratic.
Illegal doesn't need to be compatible with right, not even with democratic. Illegal is exclusively compatible with applicable authority and consequences from disobeying it. Democratic is related with what the most think what is usually incompatible with revolutionary movements. I am not precisely a pro (random) authority person, but a pro fairness and common sense one. So, I am kind of anti-authority, but this doesn't mean that I don't understand and accept the consequences of my actions. In any legal system, illegal actions have consequences.
Most of this whole process might have been done without going against the law at all. Just asking citizens about their opinion by relying on whatever means might have been done without any problem (some time, patience and even constitutional modifications might have been required though). There shouldn't even be problems with talking about long-term plans as part of your political speech. The problems started when governmental bodies, bounded to the Catalan and Spanish laws, performed actions against the legal system and expected no consequences.
They proposed certain format for the referendum which the highest court for constitutional issues said that was illegal; this should have been it, but they continued anyway. Then they kept ignoring national authorities requests and this is where we are right now. All this is about a regional government which stopped caring about what the national authorities say. You can like the underlying ideas or not, but nothing of this will avoid all the actions against the law to have consequences. You don't care about all this and want to unilaterally start a secession process? OK. You can find quite a few references in this thread about US colonies and other independence processes; all of them illegal in that moment under the applicable legal system and succeeding after beating the corresponding country in a war. This is what you have ahead of you right now: either accepting the consequences of your illegal actions or somehow managing the corresponding authority to stop being applicable to you.
It's founder was a minister under Franco, and it has not been so long ago (the party was founded in 1989) that one can claim such bounds are a thing from the past and things have changed.
My point was that it isn't a far-right party on the lines of what being pro-Franco would suggest. Bear in mind that Franco died in his bed (I was born 3 years later together with our Constitution) and our transition to a democracy was a peaceful process. This might sound a bit weird and Spain, at many different levels, might be quite weird for some people. But this is all about it: curious facts, weirdness, peculiarities. Partido Popular has been the main centre-right party for quite a few years already and, as such, is likely to be somehow appealing to some more-right-than-centre people. In any case, the modern PP has very little to do with pure fascism, but a lot with money-, church-, centralised-government-prone views.
So? Even if what you claim is true (and that's arguable)
They have an option supported by the Spanish Constitution itself. Each region in Spain can determine the level of autonomy they want to reach and go through the corresponding process. Even those rules might be changed/updated/extended. Catalonia chose (and got) one of the highest levels of independence.
if a people feel that they're not being represented by a government, secession should always be an option.
Firstly, we are not seeing what people want, but what a few parties (+ noisy supporters) promote as a way to fulfill their long-term expectations. Regarding secession, I am personally not too attached to abstract concepts of ownership/belonging and don't like forcing anyone to anything. On the other hand, there are quite a few people who don't think like me and have more profound feelings about abstract realities as the whole Spain. Even if I would have ignored all that and would only consider people living in Catalonia (now or since how many years ago? what about companies? what about people going in/out? etc), you would have to follow a legal/fair/considering everyone process, whose underlying requirement is legally-recognised authorities performing legally-binding actions. How can you get that under the current conditions?
It's the repression of a democratic process, and while thankfully it's not at Turkey's level, it's still escalating.
How can it be so? Let me put you an extreme example to help transmit this point. Imagine that I don't want to pay more taxes, to care about what the national/regional/local government say to me and decide to create my own virtual country formed by just one person: Alvaronia. The authorities say me that I cannot do such a thing, I reply to them that I don't feel represented by all what surrounds my virtual kingdom (yeah! I decided to convert myself in a king. LOL), that they are repressing my rights because of not allowing me to do so. What is the problem with this example? That I am just 1 person (with not too much money/assets)? But according to your idea, my intention might be fine otherwise? What about if I convince 100 people more to join my kingdom (all of them as slaves, logically; LOL)? And 1000? And 1 million? What is the number of people which I would need to allow me to arbitrarily impose my expectations to the legislation of the given country? So, we are a group of people in a democracy, but we don't like what that democracy and the associated legislation have for us (perhaps we don't even understand what we are talking about!?) and, one day, we decide to make our own rules. When the country we live in avoids us to do what we want to do, we complain about our democratic rights not being respected? The national authorities avoiding us to do whatever we want are the ones being supported by a democracy, by what is wanted by the most people! Our attempt wouldn't be democratic, but counter-democratic, illegal, revolutionary, call it whatever you want, but certainly not democratic. You cannot redefine the target audience of a democracy as a way to facilitate you meeting whatever expectations! Otherwise, you could call anti-democratic anything going against whatever that a group of any size might decide at whatever moment!
but when the Spanish government claims that secession is against the constitution
It is actually against the Spanish Constitution, as clearly stated by the most important authority in Spain about this matter: Tribunal Constitucional (whatever the name in English is). A different story is you not liking it or wanting it to be modified.
and stands by said constitution as if it were perfection on paper
Not at all. Everything is improvable. But the Spanish Constitution is the basic law for the whole Spanish legal system, similarly to what happens in other countries. You can try to change it but, meanwhile, all yo
One of the competences of Catalonia (and other Spanish regions) is to have their own law-enforcement bodies at the local (I think that these are mostly managed by the given local government/city council) and regional levels. Equivalently to what happens in other countries, there are also national bodies with authority in the whole country. Guardia Civil (with pretty peculiar characteristics about which I am not personally too aware) is one of these national-level bodies. This whole problem was about the national government considering the regional-government actions unlawful and, consequently, relying on a national-level law-enforcement body. But it seems that the central government has taken control of the regional police (because, under extreme circumstances, the national government can rightfully intervene regional attributions) too and might continue relying on them.
HOPE AND DREAM: I expect this to be my last comment in this thread (not counting the eventual replies which might be triggered by the ones I already wrote) and about politics in Slashdot. I couldn't refrain myself from participating here after reading so many inaccurate, clearly misleading and completely pointless posts.
Slashdot Mirror
I am certainly not interested in Transformers-like robots, fights (of robots) or similar. I cannot even imagine that what is being shown in that video could trigger reactions like what any similar enough event could do. But all this might even be ignored to understand the point I am trying to make here.
I have always had serious difficulties to understand this kind of businesses requiring a huge amount of funding and eventually (if at all) having some profit which can rarely compensate that initial funding; in fact, this is usually a way to get even more funding?! Perhaps this is because I am (kind of) poor and because losing more than earning doesn't seem too logical to me. Perhaps because I have had horrible experiences with financial/money-lending institutions, with their impatience, unmotivatedly pushy behaviours and their absolute lack of understanding about almost anything (they give you 3, expect 5 in return and very quickly; in case of not getting it, they start having bully-like attitudes by spending in that process even more than the profit of 2 that they were expecting to get! And all that for not-too-big, even small amounts! I know that these extreme behaviours are common in my area/country, but not everywhere; even though they seem quite descriptive of what these people are usually up to). So, I have serious problems to picture what is somehow common in certain areas like Silicon Valley or businesses backed by huge amount of VC capital. Even despite all that, this seems a new upper limit for me on this let's say peculiar approach to the world.
I did a quick research and this company seems to have a maximum audience of around 250K people (what they claim and about the number of subscribers in their Youtube channel; in other social media, their numbers are much lower). They seem to have got various millions of dollars in funding from companies like Autodesk (for promoting AutoCAD?). They have a Kickstarter campaign to fund this specific battle, where they got a bit over $500M. Their whole business model seems to be focused on selling merchandising and making these videos. Their expenses seem to be quite big, not just to build all the robots (currently looking for hiring engineers for various positions) but also to gain all this visibility. Just by taking this battle as an example, they spent 3 years to be in a position to record that 30 min. video!
It seems that their ultimate goal is to be the pioneers in what they think that will be the very lucrative business of robot fights. To have an impression of what this might imply, let's take as a reference professional wrestling. Apparently, it went though a quite long and difficult process before becoming popular/profitable; although nowadays and with enough money the process might certainly be much quicker, something like 10-20 years under ideal conditions? Let's imagine for one second that robot fights have already reached that stage of popularity and that battles like the one shown in that video might attract millions of fans. This is the ideal output for all this, the final prize justifying the huge invested amounts and all the effort. Even by assuming that this point is actually reachable and that all the losses to get there are affordable, the question is: could seriously this format become profitable at all? Professional wrestling seems profitable, but not extremely profitable; I guess that the most successful investors, managers, fighters, etc. are reasonably wealthy but this is it. And that is the maximum aspiration of robot fights: getting as much attention as the human equivalent. The problem with robots is that they imply much higher expenses than people; I don't know, something like 100 times, 1000 times more? They need specific conditions, highly specialised staff to build, fix, improve them; there are huge entrance barriers for new fighters (and without contenders you don't have battles or a tournament or anything even remotely attractive for your a
- As commented in various posts above, what you develop while being an employee belongs to the company. In any case, you rarely validate your work at a company with code samples but with time, generically-defined tasks and, eventually, feedback from the given employer.
- Code samples are expected to be individually developed by you or, at least, have clearly defined your exact contribution. Ideally, you should be the responsible for everything: ideation, implementation, bug fixing, etc. All this seems quite incompatible with what you do as an employee, by implementing what you are being instructed to do, what, how, when and at what cost. Even in case of using company's code as your samples, you would be mostly proving to be a good fit for that company rather than your actual value as developer/worker/person. A slightly different story would be you having a very high flexibility regarding how to implement a roughly-defined set of ideas; but even in that case, your exact contribution and the effect of other factors like company's culture would be unclear.
- My work has always been almost exclusively focused on algorithm development, efficiency improvement, data management, etc. or, in web-based lingo, back-end. I have always had lots of problems to show my work with previous clients because of rarely being public and, most of times, not even shareable with anyone else. I guess that most of developers like me have always had these "problems" which, until relatively recent times, weren't felt as such as far as private, proprietary, close-source software is quite common. The only reason why this issue has started to be seen as a problem is because of the huge increase of low-quality, non-specialised, ignorant offer/demand, where things like "you have people taking care of GUI/aesthetics and people taking care of internals" aren't evident anymore. I am commenting more about this in the last point.
- The most logical way to have good code samples is to spend some time on building them at your own expense. This is also the best proceeding to maximise what code samples are precisely being expected to deliver: a good idea about your skills in the widest sense of the expression. This doesn't just mean having some technical knowledge, being able to follow orders and dealing with comfortable and well-defined conditions, but also coming up with nice/innovative approaches, showing your main priorities or how much effort/interest you put in your work and, in general, delivering comprehensive solutions saying quite a lot about you to people willing and able to understand them. Despite all this, I have personally decided to reduce my number of public contributions/code samples; firstly, because I have done a quite relevant effort on this front already and, secondly, because people don't seem to care about all this as I expect them to do (i.e., objectively and knowledgeably analysing my work as opposed to just counting the number of stars/likes/lines of code).
- My last point is about recruiters and HR/hiring departments with low-to-no technical knowledge/concerns, even when dealing with expert candidates. This thing of a front-end implementation having any kind of impact on a back-end developer is quite indicative of the level of tremendous ignorance and arbitrariness which you can find out there. Just about 1 week ago, I had a "technical" interview where I was (generically and crappily) asked about how I would implement a web interface, what is pretty much the opposite to what most of my experience is about. Note that I have no problem with non-technical staff for as long as they accept their (lack of) knowledge and compensate it with the adequate means (e.g., taking advise from actual experts). These ridiculously bad to everyone nonsense is even more intense under my specific conditions (remotely working/freelancing/external contractors). My ideas regarding how to proceed in these cases are extremely clear since some time ago: zero tolerance with stupidity. I will not be patient or understanding with any
Actually, the previous version was also fine depending upon the interpretation of the sentence. A much clearer version would have been "you have intuitively assumed that the wrong groups were more similar to each other and different to the valid one than".
You have intuitively assumed that the proposed scenarios were much different than
I meant "You have intuitively assumed that the proposed scenarios were much more similar than".
> much more powerful than any computer: myself.
Yourself isn't very bright
Stupid is as stupid does.
Unlikely a person like you who, apparently, isn't able to understand that ">" has no effect here. You saw it working somewhere and came to the conclusion that it has to work everywhere else, right? You are undoubtedly a really brilliant fellow! LOL. In the future, you should better rely on the HTML version (<quote> + </quote>).
Low distance subsets with low entropy in the difference of the differences is a pretty damn simple pattern to computationally cluster.
So many words, sounding so nicely (for very stupid people) and saying so little. Do you know, genius, that the intrinsic meaning of "low distance subsets with low entropy" and its constituents is none? Do you, beyond-stupid, know about something called context? That things cannot be defined intrinsically and generically in certain way unless under very specific conditions, which are usually being misinterpreted as such by poorly-understanding idiots like you?
In fact, Levenshtein distance is motivated by biology in part
Really? Very interesting. You are a very wise person who only say relevant things which make lots of sense. LOL.
you'll find this is a very solved problem.
The world is a solved problem for people like you, right? LOL. I will never stop laughing at the (always invasive and aggressive) ingenuity and ignorance of those only talking and guessing, never actually doing/solving/understanding. Always failing and always coming back with a new stupidity (+ being curiously obsessed with me -> I will never understand this bit).
So you're wasting your time doing a mindless job, and by your own definition you've classed your mental ability as sub-machine which is sub-human.
I see. So, you are criticising (well... plainly insulting, because you are a fucking idiot) an approach to a problem about which you know pretty much nothing, defining the person coming up with the given solution (about which you, again, know nothing) and proposing an inexistent alternative (the practical value of all your empty, abstract, saying-nothing statements is exactly zero)! Excellent work, you should be very proud of yourself. LOL. OK, now I will make a small effort to help you understand what is the flaw of your "reasoning" (additionally to your pathetic behaviour and ridiculous blind trust in abstract, saying-nothing statements)
Where do you see the similarities (because this is what you tried to say with "low distance subsets with low entropy", although perhaps you aren't even aware about that fact) between the two proposed sets and conventional domain names? Both are using letters? OK, google.com and facebook.com also use letters. Lengths of the strings? They can have any length. Including numbers, too many consonants/vowels, etc.? These are very variable conditions too. Extensions/TLDs? Also extremely variable. The only difference between asfasfas.com and google.com is that you (even despite your evident stupidity) should be able to immediately recognise google.com as valid because it refers to a familiar word. Perhaps 20 years ago, google.com would also have sounded wrong. Now that you have reached this point of basic understanding of the problem (hopefully, because your understanding capabilities seem extremely poor), can you finally get the flaw of your "critic"? You have intuitively assumed that the proposed scenarios were much different than what they really are, because your understanding/analysing skills are extremely low. Now, thanks to these adapted-to-idiots explanations, you should know that the only way to proceed in this case is to rely on a very comprehensive dictionary helping an automated approach to differentiate between what most of people nowadays consider valid and not.
Is it even valid C?
It compiles, but doesn't illustrate the point which the parent poster is trying to make. A more adequate version would be something like this (impossible to write it here! Additionally to having to include all the indentation/new lines manually, I kept getting the "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." error message!). But even after spending a huge amount of time improving that simplistic code to deal with a relevant number of scenarios, you would have to take care of the really difficult part which is implementing a programmer brain.
Imagine that you have available a huge number of algorithms taking care of virtually any detail and that you can easily rely on any of them. Having that in place is a requisite before building any coding automaton and it is already very difficult (if possible at all). But that task is extremely simple in comparison with the next one: allowing that machine to know how and when to use each coding bit. Where and how should you use that print statement? How could you convert a set of high level requirements into the multiple coding steps forming the given implementation? Having that in place would require not just excellent human-like understanding capabilities, but also a relevant amount of highly specialised know-how. This simply cannot be accomplished.
I have been visiting Slashdot for long enough to get that reference and to know who you are. A big, colourful and extremely dysfunctional family of which I am already feeling part :)
I am currently working on an approach able to automatically track not-too-honest links among web domains. Note that there are lots of groups of inter-linked domains following more or less regular patterns. For example, one group might be formed by ffffggg123.com, ffffggg5555.com, ffffggg2.com, ffffhhh123.com; and another one by asdfasfasf.net, aseraraf.com, areafassfa.info (+ hundreds more because these groups include lots of domains). These two sets should be easily spotted as suspicious by anyone within a sample of normal domains; but creating an algorithm able to automatically do so would be very difficult (and much, much more difficult to create a piece of software, AI if you wish, able to create an algorithm performing such actions). And this is just one of the multiple scenarios which I am trying to address; that's why I have been forced to rely on something much more powerful than any computer: myself.
Some (ignorant) people thinks that the main difficulty of programming is getting used to the given syntax. This is as stupid as expecting a kid able to read/write in whatever language to have all what it takes to write a proper book. Someone can have a perfect knowledge about certain programming language and be a horrible developer; on the other hand, a good programmer is usually able to start using new languages almost right away. Programming or engineering or any other highly-specialised field requiring lots of learning and certain attitude/skills will never be automated; not even any activity involving understanding complex/variable conditions and delivering irregular outputs. Only human-like knowledge, learning, understanding, etc. capabilities can deal with so complex realities.
I am really looking forward to get a proper feeling about what a quantum-based whatever can do. I guess that the APIs will be identical to the ones in the other .NET languages, perhaps with some restrictions, but delivering pretty much the same; that's why having access to the source code might be required. I also guess that the theoretical advantages of these new approaches could only be enjoyed in quantum computers of very difficult (at least, to me) access.
.NET Framework/Visual Studio. How are all these companies expecting to justify having to rebuild virtually everything from the ground up to comply with the dubious quantum label? A priori it seems very difficult to build hardware/software applying ideas on the lines of cats being there and/or not :)
I am quite skeptical about all this, but certainly willing to analyse the whole situation properly; and I happen to be very experienced in the
Location and image recognition are two different events which are very difficult to be related in an automated way. Imagine that you know the exact location of person A on certain day and at certain time; and also that there is a video recorded by a shop at that same moment. A person analysing all the people being in that shop is likely to do a much more efficient work than any automated system. Now start increasing the scope of the search (people during that day in that street, in that neighbourhood, during that week, etc.) and the automated recognition would become virtually impossible.
The whole point of having an automated system analysing huge amounts of information is it to be able to do so accurately. This means that it has to gracefully deal with unfiltered, low-quality, imprecise, etc. inputs, the kind of stuff with which almost any person can deal intuitively. That's why automation is mostly meant for well-defined scenarios, not for abstract ones like random people in random videos. I am not saying that it is impossible or even that it might not be kind of helpful under very specific conditions. All what I am saying is that the probability that such a system might be used at a large enough scale to represent any kind of threat for the privacy of random citizens is extremely low.
If they can reliably track your blob-of-pixels throughout the city, then they only need 1 good clean pic of your face to identify everywhere you go.
How is that supposed to work? Just for recognising a very simple and well-defined shape you needs a relevant amount of training; and even in that case, a different colour or a weird shape might provoke the whole recognition to fail. Faces are very complicated when considered dynamically; say the same person smiling, being sad, etc. But if additionally you add the millions of positions in which that face could be and the millions of further factors seriously affecting the storage of said face, the possibilities are way too high. Additionally bear in mind that you don't have too many pictures of the same person and that when people takes their pictures they have a very specific gesture and are in a very specific position. If you can make a close enough good picture of a person (ideally, more than one), you might have some chance at automatically crosschecking that photo against a database; but random situations from random footages? This is extremely inaccurate/requires a very complex and extremely well trained system.
join that to your mobile phone location
This is a different story.
Um new owners are into marketing not tech.
There are many web-based companies which have nothing to do with tech and whose sites always work fine. You don't need to be an expert programmer to have a competent team and a properly working site (+ to share information which is appealing to your target audience).
Recognising faces in random footages with different quality and weather conditions, from any angle, people being in whatever position, wearing anything, performing any action, etc.? Like in the movies, where laser beam are automatically pointing to the eyes of each person entering in a building? LOL. I don't think so. The accuracy of any system on these lines is probably extremely low.
Being down for so long two days in a row? A so big site? A site for nerds, mostly from the computer sub-division? Isn't it a bit weird? Also why aren't they sharing any details about the problems?
Really? So which German party was founded by a minister of Hitler and is (today) populated by children and grandchildren of those in power during Hitler days? Which German party refuses to condemn Hitler's acts?
Let me tell you something about me to help you understand the tremendous irony of me having to reply that comment and many others before it. In general, I don't care about politics at all and rarely vote. I am not the kind of guy who blindly defends/attacks absolutely anything (other than perhaps the specific outputs of very abstract ideas like fairness or honesty), much less so imprecise realities like political parties, movements or public figures of any type. I rarely define myself or anyone else according to generic abstractions as far as I do consider individually each single person. Despite all that and as a way to minimise the chances of me wasting time in the most stupid and ridiculous ways (no idea why but some people in internet seem to be extremely interested in not understanding others properly and creating mini-chaos of nonsense where neither the intention nor the context are properly understood), I have written various texts with extremely clear statements about my personality and expectations which should help anyone to almost immediately get a good enough picture about myself. You can find one these texts in my profile here (RHS of this page). As clearly stated there, I am left-winged (+ quite a few ideas which locate me not exactly in the centre-left) what, translated to the Spanish reality, means that I have never and will never support, vote, tolerate, be understanding, etc. with Partido Popular, equivalent parties and, very far away from considering even slightly acceptable extreme-right movements like what Franco represents.
After that short introduction about the context here (= political ideas of the person writing all this), let's sum up what has happened in the last comments. First of all, I want to re-highlight that me participating in this thread yesterday was an almost forced decision after having read tons of extremely misleading and wrong ideas; so, I would have ideally avoided all my posts including the current one. This specific sub-thread about PP came from comparisons on the lines of Rajoy/Erdogan Spain/Turkey PP/Franco all of them making only slight sense within an oversimplying context of insults, personal attacks and similar. In fact, listening things on these lines is relatively easy and even kind of acceptable (e.g., left calling right nazis and right calling left antifa); the difference here is that there seems to be an underlying extremely wrong set of assumptions depicting a very inaccurate picture of Spain/what is happening now in Catalonia and that's why I clarified these issues. In summary and by being completely realistic without forgetting my exact position and the previous ideas, the modern PP as a whole is very far away from Franco or any other far-right party on the lines of what happens in other European countries. In Spain, leaning-more-right-than-centre parties have always been very secondary (unlikely more leftist ones), some examples might be Vox (right) or Falange (far right). Until relatively recently, PP has been the only relevant enough alternative to right-wing ideology in Spain, a fact which might help understand certain issues. On the other hand, new parties have recently appeared and younger right-centre people might start moving outside PP, which might keep older and a bit more right-leaning voters. Typical PP voters are catholic elderly and finance/business people. Spain is a left-leaning country where the only option for the right to have serious chances (PP has been one of the main two parties during the last quite a few years) is to be quite moderate.
Hopefully, you and others can finally understand the proper context (regarding myself, this discussion and Spain) and, with it, my words in its correct sense. By assuming that you get all this (wh
curious how you can deny the power grab the current government managed to pull off despite its loss in votes last election cycle.
Power grab?! How are you supposed to measure power in a parliament-has-all-powers kind of country? The more representatives you have either directly or agreeing with you, the more power you get. Partido Popular has currently the majority in the Spanish parliament because, according to our current election system, they won the last election. Getting more/less votes isn't as relevant as getting more sits in the parliament (defined by the votes being weighted on account of some regional factors) than the other parties. Who is to blame? Spanish voters, other parties and Spanish voting system. People at Partido Popular has proven to be very corrupt, but not in the sense that you seem to be implying; they mostly focus on stealing money and hiring friends/family. This kind of power hording Erdogan or Putin style isn't compatible with the Spanish system, overall attitude and even the EU expectations.
was willing to arrest public servants in order to proceed their goals
I am starting to get a bit tired of explaining clearly misleading ideas (honestly denoting a quite bad basic understanding about how a big proportion of democracies are expected to work) about what I don't really care. Let's see if I need only this one comment with you.
- Rajoy personal power like the one of all the remaining presidents in Spain since Franco is virtually inexistent. Even though his party has the majority in the parliament, he wouldn't be able to do too many things on this front if the opposition (e.g., the socialist party, its left-center counter-part) wouldn't approve it, but they do. In fact, all the parties in Madrid (+ some of them taking advantage from the situation to attack Rajoy a bit), the other regional governments, most of media and public figures (including the ones in Catalonia, traditionally associated with the independentism) don't agree with how this situation has evolved. At the moment, this process seems to be exclusively supported by some of the people voting these parties, by the official regional resources and by what seems a relevant international misinformation campaign.
- All this process has been declared illegal by the highest court regarding all what affects the constitution. Just in case you don't know it, the judicial system is independent from the government. The Catalan government ignored that declaration + all the associated orders to stop that process (public servants not obeying orders from a court = acting illegally!). A court from Catalonia (independent like all the other courts and only linked to the aforementioned highest court because of their common interest in applying the law in Spain) ordered to arrest some people from the Catalan government because of being apparently misusing public resources. If a court tells you that you cannot do something, but you don't obey that order, the police (or "guardia civil" a police-like body) might come and arrest you.
- Rajoy, well I guess that the internal affairs ministry (because again: Rajoy's power is very limited), decided to perform certain actions to make sure that the so-far-disobeying regional governments starts acting according to the law. But they didn't make any decision because they feel like doing it or to repress anyone's freedom or to comply with their fascist goals as you and others imply. They are simply one of the parts of a more complex mechanism formed by: parliament (issues laws and decides), judges/courts (make sure that everything is compatible with the laws) and president/ministries (perform the specific actions to ensure the two aforementioned outputs to succeed).
- All what I am describing in this post is how most of modern western (European) countries work. All this could be known by virtually everyone after performing a quite simple research/learning. All this doesn't matter to me at all for two reasons: firstly, I am not Catalan/live in Catalonia/have nothing to win/lose with whatever happens in Catalonia; secondly, I don't care too much about politics and, mainly in Slashdot, I have zero interest in discussing about these issues. In fact, I promised myself (+ publicly, via posting it here) to try to avoid non-technical discussion in Slashdot as much as possible. I couldn't refrain myself this time because of reading so many extremely wrong posts. Lesson (re-)learned: from now, I will make an extra effort to ignore this kind of threads, no matter how much nonsense I see.
I'm sure Erdogan charged his opponents with crimes before removing them from power.
This is so far away from being even remotely applicable (not just in Spain, but also in the other UE countries) that I don't even know what to say. Rajoy, or any other president before, has nothing close to Erdogan's power; not even to Trump's power. Spain is a parliamentary democracy where everything has to go through the parliament.
My understanding is that the Guardia Civil is a military force that usually has police duties and that 1200 were sent to Catalonia. It might not be the "real army" but it's still a military force.
For its proper definition, do some research. I can give you some informal ideas though: there are different levels of police-like bodies in Spain with different attributions. As what happens with everything else, here we have 3 main levels: local (city), regional (comunidades autónomas like Catalonia; there are also intermediate divisions, but their powers are very limited) and national. So, we have local/regional/national police bodies. Some regions like Catalonia have taken competence on police and they created their own regional/local police departments.
At the national level, the two main alternatives are "policía nacional" and "guardia civil"; where the latter is mostly focused on traffic and road control, but they also work on other issues like security. Although their origins (and even internal structure) might be closer to the army, they are an independent body mostly meant to perform police-like work. For army-like work, I guess that they use the army.
ramblings about what op thinks about Catalonia separating from Spain
The whole intention of my original comment was highlighting that being pro/against Catalan separatists isn't too relevant to analyse this whole situation or what is being discussed in the article. The main problem is that a regional government (with lots of attributions and in a rich region) acted illegally by disobeying the national authorities/legal system. This is the reason for the .cat domain restrictions, arrests, etc.: banning the actions of regional public officials allegedly acting outside the law.
Your understanding of US stateship is weak. If Texas wanted to secede from the Federal government, long before the Texas state government having a referendum the talks with the federal government would have stopped any thought of holding one. Same thing with Canada and Quebec. That's ok, you guys need to work this out. Sure, try to suppress the vote. See how that turns out.
I am not included within this "you guys" as far as I am not telling my position regarding the whole separatism/voting issue, don't consider that it affects me in any way (living in Spain but far away from Catalonia and with no relationship with Catalan politics) and don't support our current president/his party in any way. The whole point of my comment was to clarify some ideas which seem (not sure if intentionally transmitted) wrong. The problem with Catalonia is that their regional government decided to go against what the national government (like it or not, agree with it or not) said and, consequently, started acting illegally. In your examples, it would be like Texas/Quebec starting whatever process against the express indications, law and constitution of US/Canada. Nothing about suppressing vote or censorship, but about a (perhaps a bit too aggressive) reaction to actions against what the current Spanish legislation and courts consider legal.
Without dialogue it's obviously next to impossible to figure out the details that will affect everyone, but when the central government is the one that decided to send troops and arrest officials instead of saying "have your vote and if it gets a yes we'll work on the details".
Sending troops?! LOL. Nothing of this has happened. To know more about the different local/regional/national outside-military law-enforcement bodies in Spain, do some research or take a look at one of my other posts in this thread. I will tell you two recent events to help you understand the situation better:
- The Catalan government decided to not send the due periodic economic report to the national government. The national government froze all the payments to the government-related employees in Catalonia. The Catalan government changed its mind and sent the due economic reports to the national government.
- The national government has recently taken control of the Catalan regional police because, in extreme cases, they can restrict all the regional authorities like having their own police.
They arrested officials because they were acting illegally; all their actions have an illegal component (= against the Spanish Constitution as stated by the highest court on this front), but the arrests you are mentioning (performing by Guardia Civil, a police-like body present in Catalonia and in all the other Spanish regions) were ordered by a judge in a Catalan court apparently investigating these officials for misusing public money. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the unwillingness to having any kind of sensible dialogue is quite implicit in the fact of disobeying direct indications of the highest court on that matter: you aren't just not setting the best mood for any kind of dialogue, but additionally behaving illegally.
comes to self determination as long as it doesn't infringe on others. If a person never uses any of the services or infrastructure
I see. So you think that, in the case of Spain, a pluri-democracy of over 45 million people should work fine, right? The funniest thing is that you seem to seriously believe that! And regarding your not using infrastructures, I guess that you mean that you never go through the streets/roads, breath (sanitisation/pollution reduction), eat/drink (safety regulations), etc. I guess that you live inside a neutral-to-the-environment bubble floating in the only spot where there is nothing else around you, being both fed and entertained by your words, ideas and expectations, right? LOL.
Revolutions are always illegal, that doesn't mean that they're wrong or undemocratic.
Illegal doesn't need to be compatible with right, not even with democratic. Illegal is exclusively compatible with applicable authority and consequences from disobeying it. Democratic is related with what the most think what is usually incompatible with revolutionary movements. I am not precisely a pro (random) authority person, but a pro fairness and common sense one. So, I am kind of anti-authority, but this doesn't mean that I don't understand and accept the consequences of my actions. In any legal system, illegal actions have consequences.
nothing is against the law
Most of this whole process might have been done without going against the law at all. Just asking citizens about their opinion by relying on whatever means might have been done without any problem (some time, patience and even constitutional modifications might have been required though). There shouldn't even be problems with talking about long-term plans as part of your political speech. The problems started when governmental bodies, bounded to the Catalan and Spanish laws, performed actions against the legal system and expected no consequences.
They proposed certain format for the referendum which the highest court for constitutional issues said that was illegal; this should have been it, but they continued anyway. Then they kept ignoring national authorities requests and this is where we are right now. All this is about a regional government which stopped caring about what the national authorities say. You can like the underlying ideas or not, but nothing of this will avoid all the actions against the law to have consequences. You don't care about all this and want to unilaterally start a secession process? OK. You can find quite a few references in this thread about US colonies and other independence processes; all of them illegal in that moment under the applicable legal system and succeeding after beating the corresponding country in a war. This is what you have ahead of you right now: either accepting the consequences of your illegal actions or somehow managing the corresponding authority to stop being applicable to you.
It's founder was a minister under Franco, and it has not been so long ago (the party was founded in 1989) that one can claim such bounds are a thing from the past and things have changed.
My point was that it isn't a far-right party on the lines of what being pro-Franco would suggest. Bear in mind that Franco died in his bed (I was born 3 years later together with our Constitution) and our transition to a democracy was a peaceful process. This might sound a bit weird and Spain, at many different levels, might be quite weird for some people. But this is all about it: curious facts, weirdness, peculiarities. Partido Popular has been the main centre-right party for quite a few years already and, as such, is likely to be somehow appealing to some more-right-than-centre people. In any case, the modern PP has very little to do with pure fascism, but a lot with money-, church-, centralised-government-prone views.
So? Even if what you claim is true (and that's arguable)
They have an option supported by the Spanish Constitution itself. Each region in Spain can determine the level of autonomy they want to reach and go through the corresponding process. Even those rules might be changed/updated/extended. Catalonia chose (and got) one of the highest levels of independence.
if a people feel that they're not being represented by a government, secession should always be an option.
Firstly, we are not seeing what people want, but what a few parties (+ noisy supporters) promote as a way to fulfill their long-term expectations. Regarding secession, I am personally not too attached to abstract concepts of ownership/belonging and don't like forcing anyone to anything. On the other hand, there are quite a few people who don't think like me and have more profound feelings about abstract realities as the whole Spain. Even if I would have ignored all that and would only consider people living in Catalonia (now or since how many years ago? what about companies? what about people going in/out? etc), you would have to follow a legal/fair/considering everyone process, whose underlying requirement is legally-recognised authorities performing legally-binding actions. How can you get that under the current conditions?
It's the repression of a democratic process, and while thankfully it's not at Turkey's level, it's still escalating.
How can it be so? Let me put you an extreme example to help transmit this point. Imagine that I don't want to pay more taxes, to care about what the national/regional/local government say to me and decide to create my own virtual country formed by just one person: Alvaronia. The authorities say me that I cannot do such a thing, I reply to them that I don't feel represented by all what surrounds my virtual kingdom (yeah! I decided to convert myself in a king. LOL), that they are repressing my rights because of not allowing me to do so. What is the problem with this example? That I am just 1 person (with not too much money/assets)? But according to your idea, my intention might be fine otherwise? What about if I convince 100 people more to join my kingdom (all of them as slaves, logically; LOL)? And 1000? And 1 million? What is the number of people which I would need to allow me to arbitrarily impose my expectations to the legislation of the given country? So, we are a group of people in a democracy, but we don't like what that democracy and the associated legislation have for us (perhaps we don't even understand what we are talking about!?) and, one day, we decide to make our own rules. When the country we live in avoids us to do what we want to do, we complain about our democratic rights not being respected? The national authorities avoiding us to do whatever we want are the ones being supported by a democracy, by what is wanted by the most people! Our attempt wouldn't be democratic, but counter-democratic, illegal, revolutionary, call it whatever you want, but certainly not democratic. You cannot redefine the target audience of a democracy as a way to facilitate you meeting whatever expectations! Otherwise, you could call anti-democratic anything going against whatever that a group of any size might decide at whatever moment!
but when the Spanish government claims that secession is against the constitution
It is actually against the Spanish Constitution, as clearly stated by the most important authority in Spain about this matter: Tribunal Constitucional (whatever the name in English is). A different story is you not liking it or wanting it to be modified.
and stands by said constitution as if it were perfection on paper
Not at all. Everything is improvable. But the Spanish Constitution is the basic law for the whole Spanish legal system, similarly to what happens in other countries. You can try to change it but, meanwhile, all yo
...aren't the local police.
One of the competences of Catalonia (and other Spanish regions) is to have their own law-enforcement bodies at the local (I think that these are mostly managed by the given local government/city council) and regional levels. Equivalently to what happens in other countries, there are also national bodies with authority in the whole country. Guardia Civil (with pretty peculiar characteristics about which I am not personally too aware) is one of these national-level bodies. This whole problem was about the national government considering the regional-government actions unlawful and, consequently, relying on a national-level law-enforcement body. But it seems that the central government has taken control of the regional police (because, under extreme circumstances, the national government can rightfully intervene regional attributions) too and might continue relying on them.
HOPE AND DREAM: I expect this to be my last comment in this thread (not counting the eventual replies which might be triggered by the ones I already wrote) and about politics in Slashdot. I couldn't refrain myself from participating here after reading so many inaccurate, clearly misleading and completely pointless posts.