A ha! now you know why us kooky small-goverment libertarians are running around screaming all the time! When bad management is hired, you can fire them. When bad management is elected, you issue more bonds!
You're right, but is this necessarily a bad thing?
The web itself is procedural. Unless you're a sadist, web applications are broken out into different URIs that handle different part of the applications. Administration functions might be in myapp/admin... and I break up each edit/add/delete into its own.php file. This way, it is inherently clear what the purpose of each file/URI is, and the functionality doesn't bleed over into 50+ deep include'd files so you have to search forever to find what you need. Especially if you're a small staff with a big project, I find that encapsulating the code for the specific job ends up being procedural on the web. The web is stateless so even if you have time to populate some decently complex object, you have to manually persist the object through later requests.
The only time I've found the web not-so-procedural is with shopping carts. Carts tend to be the kind of thing where an object makes sense $Cart->AddItemToCart(productID); makes sense to me. But on the other types of pages, like web reports, login screens, administration screens, etc? that stuff seems to be a simple branch: if POST, update database fields that map to form fields. If not, show database fields in form fields.
The iPhone has a radio-off mode, where it disables its cellphone antennae and wifi antennae. Its called 'airplane mode' and accessible through the settings.
It also has a power-off, where it essentially turns off everything except the sensor to turn it back on again. Not too many people even know this exists, even if they own an iPhone. If you press and hold the lock button at the top right, a screen will appear that says 'slide to turn off'... this is the only way to reboot the iPhone, I think.
Most people press the 'sleep' hold button once, thinking that 'turns it off', but all it does is disable the screen. its still running, and using its antennae.
He probably did so because Electricity and Phone service are government-mandated services. This means that if a company provides a service to a township or an area, they are required by law to provide that service to everyone, regardless of what that costs them. Whether water is more important than Electricity or Phone service is of course the question raised. Basically, there is no rhyme or reason why certain services are mandated by the government and certain services aren't.
I personally think the government mandate is stupid; it entrenches one company in an entire area, giving that company the default monopoly and usually resulting in that company giving poor service (since its required to support people that cost them significantly more to service).
With the requirement that 'you have to service everyone' you end up making it harder to compete with the big carriers that slashdotters hate. if you know you could provide internet access to 100 people who live near you by running your own, say underground ethernet network; you couldn't do it. You'd be required to provide service to all the outlying cul-de-sacs and other places that push your profitability away. Essentially, you can only do business if you do it just as big as the company you want to compete against. The problem with that is that most businesses build up, they don't instantly have enough capital, knowledge, and recognition to just 'start' as the next Comcast or Verizon. But they can't start small, else they'll be torched for 'not reaching everyone'.
Also, don't you think that if there was a profit to be made in these rural areas, someone would be making it? Rural areas may not fit the market economics of a traditional cable-to-home model. Instead, other methods may need to be developed so we don't have to lay expensive fiber or copper.
I work for a cable company, and let me tell you, putting up a utility pole is a minimum $10,000 investment. Not only that, but most towns and counties have their own crazy laws which means you have to put up a pole this way in town A, and that way in town B. You also have to be licensed to distribute cable television, and those licenses are expensive. Given the huge cost of getting a license per town, companies like Verizon are rolling out FiOS only to their choice communities that are filled with affluent people so they can get the most out of their money. If there was less regulation, not more, the companies would have a lower barrier to enter the market and be able to provide more service. Companies like Comcast already have the licenses (which costs them a fortune), and because this is their only recourse, they often try and leverage common carrier laws, etc to prevent market entry, when none of this would be a problem if they just de-regulated.
This is ridiculous. It seems reasonable that shadowy international criminal figures assume that their conversations are being monitored.
Wait, so because potential terrorists know their conversations are monitored, we shouldn't bother monitoring them? that's a pretty weak argument. Yes, terrorists and their funders/enablers etc code their conversations, but the codes can be cracked. Conspirators and criminals still need to communicate, and it would hurt, not help, an investigation to not monitor them.
During the second world war, each side knew the other was monitoring the communications of the other. but the communications were valuable to the war efforts, so each side eavesdropped, and eventually broke the codes. Just because the Germans or Japanese knew the Allies were intercepting their communications doesn't mean that intercepting them lost any value.
In all fairness, nobody at NASA knew the extent of the damage to Columbia prior to reentry. There were engineers who suspected that there might be some, and wanted photography to be sure, which NASA disallowed. If the existence of a large hole in the leading edge of the wing was known, some type of rescue operation could possibly have been put into place, as there was no repair possibility at that time.
Engineers at NASA requested that the management contact the DoD to have spy satellites examine the Shuttle. The reports that came out after the investigation reveal a culture of management that didn't' want to 'rock the boat' was a huge factor in allowing the disaster to happen.
Having said that, if they decide the damage is minimal, and the shuttle has a catastrophic event, it could spell the last shuttle flights ever, and most certainly derail manned spaceflight in general.
how is it that the rich reproduce faster than the poor? The poor need more children to work the fields, or in factories. Affluent people in societies tend to have less children, as is the case in europe, japan and the US. Antecdotally, poor irish families escaping the potato famine were known for having larger families than their english counterparts
OT Comment I suspect some of the.net fanboys in this post are shills, because I just don't find it *that* much better than a Free stack.
I have developed on both sides of the coin for the web. I have deployed large PHP-based web applications and large.NET web applications (with C# as the language). I have worked with IIS, LAMP, etc. And I can tell you that PHP is the best way to deploy an easy-to-modify solution in a short amount of time.
C# is an awesome language, and I love writing Windows Forms apps with it (you'll notice that a good deal of the iPhone quick-to-the-world hacks have been delivered with.NET frontends). However, C# and even VB.NET both lose it because the web is stateless, and therefore by extension, it ends up being type-less. VB is supposed to be 'type-unsafe' but it strictly enforces non-trivial types because every datatype is an object in the.NET runtime. Whereas perl and PHP are as type unsafe as you can get, with scalars becoming arrays becoming anything. And that type-unsafety is necessary in the short-term memory world of the web. most web apps do one or two things, and that is shoving data into a medium that can be remembered and recalculated. Session Variables, Cookies, form fields are all represented by strings. Most database objects are represented by strings in the insert/update/select queries from which they are derived. In C# and to a lesser extent VB, I spend most of my time shoehorning data or views into an object or a control that doesn't match.
A lot of times my manager will come in and want to tweak a datagrid or a detailsview to show another level of information, or add a different behavior. With the ASP.NET control model, I have to override the OnRender event on a control to draw a row slightly different in the event we're looking at field X. in PHP I could just change the smarty template.
Or, if my shopping cart needs to track a new type of item, I can just say $_SESSION['cart']['products'][$x]['newproperty'] == true in ASP.NET I have to walk backwards into the Shopping Cart object that I created in the App_Code Folder. Then I have to make sure at the begining and end of every page that uses the cart, that I serialize and unserialize the custom object. PHP lets me go ahead and build objects-on-the-fly, with ambiguous typing, and that allows me faster turnaround.
So yeah, I bet some of the.NET talk is snarky and unexperienced.
So what's exactly not standard? The fact that you have those mysterious cells that no one knows what to do with? It's all API'd out at this point. Sony released help for developers [joystiq.com] at the GDC six months ago. So I don't think it's really a good argument to say that it's such a craaaazy hard platform to program for anymore. There's help there if they want this.
Rockstar is having an easier time with the 360 because they already released a game on the 360 (Table Tennis). Any knowledge and code they obtained by writing that game naturally carried over into the next project. The PS3 is uncharted territory, relatively speaking.
I wouldn't be surprised if its easier to pump out a game on the 360 versus the PS3. Microsoft is a software company, Sony is a hardware company. Even amateurs can write code that runs on the 360 with Microsoft's XNA initiative (which I found really easy to use, coming from a web programming / open source background). I'm not saying Sony isn't a good company, or that their system is bad, because I was a big booster of the original Playstation (I believed using CD media and complex controllers was an important revolution that they helped foster), but now the focus is on HD graphics and sound and game complexity. The enhanced hardware handles the graphics and sound, and an easy to use API allows rapid application development so that more complexity can be added to a game in the same amount of time.
Of course MMORPGs are not the same as terror camps in Afghanistan where people were physically trained and taught. I think the idea is that MMORPGs are recruiting grounds for ideologies, not that they're rehearsal grounds for attacks. Most terrorism training is ideological. Before you can tell someone to strap a bomb on and vaporize people, you have to have control of their minds. The kind of brainwashing requires an amount of information fed to a person over time, something that can be personally tailored via an MMORPG.
In order to recruit suggestible people, terrorists appeal to disaffected groups. To expatriates living in foreign lands, like the most recent failed attacks in Britain, foreigners can appeal to a sense of duty, to a sense of persecution, to a sense of religion.
People playing MMORPGs are more likely to be disaffected by the real world and seek refuge in their online play. I'm not saying that everyone in WoW or SL is a likely terrorist, I'm saying that it might be easier to find disaffected young people with not a whole lot to live for. Start them on that, then give them a common enemy who is in charge, blame those people for their current state (or the state of their family).
Using second life is cheap, all it requires is time and you can reach a large audience worldwide. Terrorists already use message boards and video sites to distribute their martyrdom videos. SL and WoW are simply extensions of a media outlet and recruiting tools. This shouldn't be a shock. The US Army developed an entire video game to recruit kids too, its not a surprise. (FYI, I am not comparing the US military to the terrorists. I support the US military 100%.)
"Sir, we aren't getting a reading on that pedestrian..."
"Book 'em Dano."
The thing is, replace RFID with having the actual license plate, and your conclusion is correct - they can be stopped, questioned and arrested. You cannot drive a car without a license. You cannot consume alcohol without identification proving you're 21. I just don't understand how this story applies to a police state. At the moment, everyone driving a car is required to have a license plate, and driver's license, and in 48 states, auto insurance. How is being able to read those items swiftly through a computer system a crime against a nation's citizens? Assuming they hired 1 million state police / highway patrolmen, couldn't the same process of looking at the plates and referencing a database be done?
I am familiar with the quote you mention, it is a popular statement taken from a priest who witnessed the holocaust but did nothing. However, he is speaking of detention of people without due process. He is speaking of Pogroms; where individual's businesses are burned and looted simply because of race. People with political ideas who are guilty of no crime at all. What can this license plate scanning do that is as bad? An abusive cop could probably pull people over at whim, and trump up charges. But people unrelated to his job have to review... his arrestees are sent to court, not to camp. They are afforded a trial. A prosecutor, a judge, and appeals courts will all have their opportunity to review the case. If abuse is discovered, the abuser can be locked up. I'm not saying that every conviction in the justice system is the correct verdict. But I am saying we have spared little expense in trying to build a just society in the US (and in many other western nations) where people are free to live without fear of crime, or their government.
I am railing so hard against your fear-mongering against the government because you cannot hide behind the 'fascism' defense for every perceived injustice or disliked law you encounter. If everyone screams 'fascism' whenever the government invents a new way to capture crooks, the crooks will eventually take advantage of our fear of offense. Police will no longer have incentive to capture crooks if they'll be sued for profiling or 'use of an electronic device to narrow suspect lists'. Right now in Iraq, a popular insurgent tactic is to hole up in a mosque and shoot coalition soldiers, knowing their rules of engagement won't allow them to flatten the building with an airstrike. (right now those same insurgents could fortify the roof of said mosque with sandbags and guns, but coalition forces cannot shoot them until they're shot at first.) They can't flatten the building because we don't want to make the appearance of being 'anti-muslim.' Imagine police hamstrung by the same restrictions. They couldn't scan license plates during an Amber alert to find the plate number that was given to them by a witness. They couldn't produce a dragnet to capture the next DC sniper. And they couldn't get my stereo back if it was stolen.
Covering up the barcode would be punishable by death
Your analogy fails to hold up in that automatically reading license plates is unobtrusive, versus barcoding someone's forehead which is obtrusive. I mean, changing my appearance sure might violate my right to my own Happiness, right?
Technically, the government already has a way to get a pretty accurate person-identification system, its called fingerprinting. While it has some caveats (identical twins), it for the most part works. We also have DNA testing. Neither collection is mandatory, unless you're arrested. When a crime is committed and fingerprints are gathered, we run them through a crime database to see if we can identify who might be a suspect. The suspect is still given due process of the law, a trial by jury if he chooses. Can false positives surface? Certainly. However, the age old police process of knocking down doors and rounding up the usual suspects was also very inaccurate. If anything, fingerprints and DNA refined and exonerated more than it inconvenienced or violated.
People are a afraid of a police state due to technology, but they so often forget one of the most terrible police states used simple tools. Jackboots and machine guns were much more effective at creating police states in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Our government was established to protect its citizens 'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness'. Those are the essential liberties (expanded in definition and clarity by the Bill of Rights).
Scanning your license plate, or having the right to not have your license plate read, is not an essential liberty. Franklin was referring to many of the injustices of the time which curtailed property rights to the extreme, such as forcing citizens to allow British soldiers to take refuge in their homes. That's a violation of the right to all three of those rights (Life, as in , the ability to live, requires work and procurement of property, and it is a violation to usurp the property owners rights, as he needs that property to survive. Liberty, as in the freedom to choose the course of actions a man wants to take, as in, not working for the welfare of the quartered soldiers. Happiness, as in its up to the owner of a home to decide what he wants to do and what makes him happy with regard to his home and quartered guests).
The license plate scanning does not actually allow the government to stop you for new crimes, instead it allows them to close more accurately the crimes that they could legally stop you for anyways. And for Essential Liberty to exist, we can't have criminals running around stealing our stuff and getting away with it.
Eventually minor crime will be what they search for
I don't know about 'minor crime' being any less a crime than 'major crime'. There's a severity in the crime, but they are crimes, which should be punished in some manor. After all, if there's no action taken against the crime, what good is even calling it a crime?
If a minor crime is a stolen car stereo from my car, then I sure as hell want the police to more efficiently catch the criminal. You're probably more worried about things you probably think shouldn't be crimes at all. If its a crime, we should prosecute it. if it is not a crime, we should NOT prosecute it. If you have a problem with what the government defines as a crime, the solution is not to hamper the law enforcement, but rather the legislators.
These phones don't assemble, ship, market, and support themselves. They also don't spontaneously form the OSX operating system when you combine all the products together.
Component cost is only one figure in the total cost, so spending half of the retail cost on parts is actually expensive compared to most products. I have a friend who owns a small company that sells niche electronics (inexpensive items sourced from China; his products sell on ThinkGeek), and if he spends more than 10% of an estimated retail price on parts for the item, he is losing. While parts and assembly are cheap, getting those items to vendors, and coming up for the ideas, and finding the components, are his contribution to the value of the item. When you pay 10x the cost of the components, the other 90% of the money is going towards all the effort required for you solder, retrieve and produce the product. Actually, the 90% over cost the consumer pays is CHEAPER than if the consumer had to go out and buy the components himself, and spend the time writing the software, etc. Capitalistic transactions are mutually beneficial; My friend makes a living off of sourcing, designing, and selling his product, and individuals benefit from not having to do that themselves, while getting a useful service from the device.
Not unless Verizon can secretly shove a CDMA antenna into your iPhone without you noticing.
the iPhone , when unlocked, will only ever work with GSM networks (T-Mobile and AT&T). Any changes that move the phone to Verizon would require solder and hot-glue.
Why go to Mars? Because people want to go. There is a large contingent of humans on this earth who enjoy productive enterprise. They want to gain knowledge, complete tasks, and increase the reach of humanity. They don't do it out of some weird meta-altruism; they do it because they are scientists, and engineers, and people who generally love bringing the laws of nature under their command. The same arguments you made about not going to Mars could be made about any number of things. The Moon Landing, the Microchip, Sailing to the New World, all were costly human endevours. The reward is not always tangible or monetary; the reward is doing the thing itself.
You can argue that its not the place of governments to spend the money of the people who don't want to do those things, in order to do those things,fine, that's a legitimate point. However saying there's no value in going to Mars qua going to Mars, is foolish.
I agree. It is a non-issue. I know you want us all to treat Firefox like a legitimate player, and that's a decent request. However, how important is FireFox to you? Let's review
Web Development is a product of human labor, and not of magic. Therefore, humans have to develop to support multiple browsers these humans need to be paid It costs more to support multiple browsers That cost needs to be paid from somewhere That somewhere is the money you pay in your bill. So do you want to pay more on your cable bill?
You probably don't. Most people on this board will likely tell you Comcast charges too much. So unless you're willing to pay more on your cable bill, you don't really have an argument.
You make good points in the last paragraph, about used phones. When I first got a Digital/Analog handset in 1997, I had one of the classic Nokia 5100 models. It had an LCD display with big numbers. It had a long battery life and was incredibly rugged. It had big, tactile buttons and a strong backlight. It might be exactly what an older person needs. Most older people don't use the address book, instead they have most numbers memorized (or for older women, they carry a phone number journal in their purse). My mom, whose not quite as old (50s), always ended up getting the last-years model phone because it was easier to use (less features) and cheaper.
I, on the other hand, am willing to live with a small learning curve if it means the device is sleek and glyph-erific like my iPhone
If cloud-cover or water vapor are changing, what would be causing it?
The amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface? The strength of the Earth's magnetic field? Just because there is more CO2 does not mean its a slam-dunk that CO2 is causing warming. It could very well be an effect. Correlation does not equal causation. Climate is a lot more complicated than 'more CO2 = bad'.
CO2 has become a panacea that everyone blames the world's ills on anyways. Do you feel guilty that you're breathing out CO2? You're destroying the planet! Stop breathing, please.
It probably has a ton of medical uses. Right now patients with irrational fears of doctors, surgery and other procedures could have that fear wiped out, without the grogginess normally associated with sedatives.
A comparison of Earth, Venus and Mars will demonstrate this. If there really is a non-CO2 cause of warming
There is a non-CO2 cause of warming (or cooling.) Its called how far your planet is from the sun. Secondary causes include how thick of an atmosphere you have. Third might be cloud-cover / water vapor. Then maybe CO2.
Slashdot Mirror
A ha! now you know why us kooky small-goverment libertarians are running around screaming all the time! When bad management is hired, you can fire them. When bad management is elected, you issue more bonds!
almost all of the API is procedural,
... and I break up each edit/add/delete into its own .php file. This way, it is inherently clear what the purpose of each file/URI is, and the functionality doesn't bleed over into 50+ deep include'd files so you have to search forever to find what you need. Especially if you're a small staff with a big project, I find that encapsulating the code for the specific job ends up being procedural on the web. The web is stateless so even if you have time to populate some decently complex object, you have to manually persist the object through later requests.
You're right, but is this necessarily a bad thing?
The web itself is procedural. Unless you're a sadist, web applications are broken out into different URIs that handle different part of the applications. Administration functions might be in myapp/admin
The only time I've found the web not-so-procedural is with shopping carts. Carts tend to be the kind of thing where an object makes sense $Cart->AddItemToCart(productID); makes sense to me. But on the other types of pages, like web reports, login screens, administration screens, etc? that stuff seems to be a simple branch: if POST, update database fields that map to form fields. If not, show database fields in form fields.
The iPhone has a radio-off mode, where it disables its cellphone antennae and wifi antennae. Its called 'airplane mode' and accessible through the settings.
It also has a power-off, where it essentially turns off everything except the sensor to turn it back on again. Not too many people even know this exists, even if they own an iPhone. If you press and hold the lock button at the top right, a screen will appear that says 'slide to turn off'... this is the only way to reboot the iPhone, I think.
Most people press the 'sleep' hold button once, thinking that 'turns it off', but all it does is disable the screen. its still running, and using its antennae.
He probably did so because Electricity and Phone service are government-mandated services. This means that if a company provides a service to a township or an area, they are required by law to provide that service to everyone, regardless of what that costs them. Whether water is more important than Electricity or Phone service is of course the question raised. Basically, there is no rhyme or reason why certain services are mandated by the government and certain services aren't.
I personally think the government mandate is stupid; it entrenches one company in an entire area, giving that company the default monopoly and usually resulting in that company giving poor service (since its required to support people that cost them significantly more to service).
With the requirement that 'you have to service everyone' you end up making it harder to compete with the big carriers that slashdotters hate. if you know you could provide internet access to 100 people who live near you by running your own, say underground ethernet network; you couldn't do it. You'd be required to provide service to all the outlying cul-de-sacs and other places that push your profitability away. Essentially, you can only do business if you do it just as big as the company you want to compete against. The problem with that is that most businesses build up, they don't instantly have enough capital, knowledge, and recognition to just 'start' as the next Comcast or Verizon. But they can't start small, else they'll be torched for 'not reaching everyone'.
Also, don't you think that if there was a profit to be made in these rural areas, someone would be making it? Rural areas may not fit the market economics of a traditional cable-to-home model. Instead, other methods may need to be developed so we don't have to lay expensive fiber or copper.
I work for a cable company, and let me tell you, putting up a utility pole is a minimum $10,000 investment. Not only that, but most towns and counties have their own crazy laws which means you have to put up a pole this way in town A, and that way in town B. You also have to be licensed to distribute cable television, and those licenses are expensive. Given the huge cost of getting a license per town, companies like Verizon are rolling out FiOS only to their choice communities that are filled with affluent people so they can get the most out of their money. If there was less regulation, not more, the companies would have a lower barrier to enter the market and be able to provide more service. Companies like Comcast already have the licenses (which costs them a fortune), and because this is their only recourse, they often try and leverage common carrier laws, etc to prevent market entry, when none of this would be a problem if they just de-regulated.
This is ridiculous. It seems reasonable that shadowy international criminal figures assume that their conversations are being monitored.
Wait, so because potential terrorists know their conversations are monitored, we shouldn't bother monitoring them? that's a pretty weak argument. Yes, terrorists and their funders/enablers etc code their conversations, but the codes can be cracked. Conspirators and criminals still need to communicate, and it would hurt, not help, an investigation to not monitor them.
During the second world war, each side knew the other was monitoring the communications of the other. but the communications were valuable to the war efforts, so each side eavesdropped, and eventually broke the codes. Just because the Germans or Japanese knew the Allies were intercepting their communications doesn't mean that intercepting them lost any value.
In all fairness, nobody at NASA knew the extent of the damage to Columbia prior to reentry. There were engineers who suspected that there might be some, and wanted photography to be sure, which NASA disallowed. If the existence of a large hole in the leading edge of the wing was known, some type of rescue operation could possibly have been put into place, as there was no repair possibility at that time.
Engineers at NASA requested that the management contact the DoD to have spy satellites examine the Shuttle. The reports that came out after the investigation reveal a culture of management that didn't' want to 'rock the boat' was a huge factor in allowing the disaster to happen.
Having said that, if they decide the damage is minimal, and the shuttle has a catastrophic event, it could spell the last shuttle flights ever, and most certainly derail manned spaceflight in general.
how is it that the rich reproduce faster than the poor? The poor need more children to work the fields, or in factories. Affluent people in societies tend to have less children, as is the case in europe, japan and the US. Antecdotally, poor irish families escaping the potato famine were known for having larger families than their english counterparts
OT Comment .net fanboys in this post are shills, because I just don't find it *that* much better than a Free stack.
.NET web applications (with C# as the language). I have worked with IIS, LAMP, etc. And I can tell you that PHP is the best way to deploy an easy-to-modify solution in a short amount of time.
.NET frontends). However, C# and even VB.NET both lose it because the web is stateless, and therefore by extension, it ends up being type-less. VB is supposed to be 'type-unsafe' but it strictly enforces non-trivial types because every datatype is an object in the .NET runtime. Whereas perl and PHP are as type unsafe as you can get, with scalars becoming arrays becoming anything. And that type-unsafety is necessary in the short-term memory world of the web. most web apps do one or two things, and that is shoving data into a medium that can be remembered and recalculated. Session Variables, Cookies, form fields are all represented by strings. Most database objects are represented by strings in the insert/update/select queries from which they are derived. In C# and to a lesser extent VB, I spend most of my time shoehorning data or views into an object or a control that doesn't match.
.NET talk is snarky and unexperienced.
I suspect some of the
I have developed on both sides of the coin for the web. I have deployed large PHP-based web applications and large
C# is an awesome language, and I love writing Windows Forms apps with it (you'll notice that a good deal of the iPhone quick-to-the-world hacks have been delivered with
A lot of times my manager will come in and want to tweak a datagrid or a detailsview to show another level of information, or add a different behavior. With the ASP.NET control model, I have to override the OnRender event on a control to draw a row slightly different in the event we're looking at field X. in PHP I could just change the smarty template.
Or, if my shopping cart needs to track a new type of item, I can just say $_SESSION['cart']['products'][$x]['newproperty'] == true
in ASP.NET I have to walk backwards into the Shopping Cart object that I created in the App_Code Folder. Then I have to make sure at the begining and end of every page that uses the cart, that I serialize and unserialize the custom object. PHP lets me go ahead and build objects-on-the-fly, with ambiguous typing, and that allows me faster turnaround.
So yeah, I bet some of the
So what's exactly not standard? The fact that you have those mysterious cells that no one knows what to do with? It's all API'd out at this point. Sony released help for developers [joystiq.com] at the GDC six months ago. So I don't think it's really a good argument to say that it's such a craaaazy hard platform to program for anymore. There's help there if they want this.
Rockstar is having an easier time with the 360 because they already released a game on the 360 (Table Tennis). Any knowledge and code they obtained by writing that game naturally carried over into the next project. The PS3 is uncharted territory, relatively speaking.
I wouldn't be surprised if its easier to pump out a game on the 360 versus the PS3. Microsoft is a software company, Sony is a hardware company. Even amateurs can write code that runs on the 360 with Microsoft's XNA initiative (which I found really easy to use, coming from a web programming / open source background). I'm not saying Sony isn't a good company, or that their system is bad, because I was a big booster of the original Playstation (I believed using CD media and complex controllers was an important revolution that they helped foster), but now the focus is on HD graphics and sound and game complexity. The enhanced hardware handles the graphics and sound, and an easy to use API allows rapid application development so that more complexity can be added to a game in the same amount of time.
Its only an ethnic slur if the poster is white, right? Just ask Don Imus.
Of course MMORPGs are not the same as terror camps in Afghanistan where people were physically trained and taught. I think the idea is that MMORPGs are recruiting grounds for ideologies, not that they're rehearsal grounds for attacks.
Most terrorism training is ideological. Before you can tell someone to strap a bomb on and vaporize people, you have to have control of their minds. The kind of brainwashing requires an amount of information fed to a person over time, something that can be personally tailored via an MMORPG.
In order to recruit suggestible people, terrorists appeal to disaffected groups. To expatriates living in foreign lands, like the most recent failed attacks in Britain, foreigners can appeal to a sense of duty, to a sense of persecution, to a sense of religion.
People playing MMORPGs are more likely to be disaffected by the real world and seek refuge in their online play. I'm not saying that everyone in WoW or SL is a likely terrorist, I'm saying that it might be easier to find disaffected young people with not a whole lot to live for. Start them on that, then give them a common enemy who is in charge, blame those people for their current state (or the state of their family).
Using second life is cheap, all it requires is time and you can reach a large audience worldwide. Terrorists already use message boards and video sites to distribute their martyrdom videos. SL and WoW are simply extensions of a media outlet and recruiting tools. This shouldn't be a shock. The US Army developed an entire video game to recruit kids too, its not a surprise. (FYI, I am not comparing the US military to the terrorists. I support the US military 100%.)
"Sir, we aren't getting a reading on that pedestrian..."
... his arrestees are sent to court, not to camp. They are afforded a trial. A prosecutor, a judge, and appeals courts will all have their opportunity to review the case. If abuse is discovered, the abuser can be locked up. I'm not saying that every conviction in the justice system is the correct verdict. But I am saying we have spared little expense in trying to build a just society in the US (and in many other western nations) where people are free to live without fear of crime, or their government.
"Book 'em Dano."
The thing is, replace RFID with having the actual license plate, and your conclusion is correct - they can be stopped, questioned and arrested. You cannot drive a car without a license. You cannot consume alcohol without identification proving you're 21. I just don't understand how this story applies to a police state. At the moment, everyone driving a car is required to have a license plate, and driver's license, and in 48 states, auto insurance. How is being able to read those items swiftly through a computer system a crime against a nation's citizens? Assuming they hired 1 million state police / highway patrolmen, couldn't the same process of looking at the plates and referencing a database be done?
I am familiar with the quote you mention, it is a popular statement taken from a priest who witnessed the holocaust but did nothing. However, he is speaking of detention of people without due process. He is speaking of Pogroms; where individual's businesses are burned and looted simply because of race. People with political ideas who are guilty of no crime at all. What can this license plate scanning do that is as bad? An abusive cop could probably pull people over at whim, and trump up charges. But people unrelated to his job have to review
I am railing so hard against your fear-mongering against the government because you cannot hide behind the 'fascism' defense for every perceived injustice or disliked law you encounter. If everyone screams 'fascism' whenever the government invents a new way to capture crooks, the crooks will eventually take advantage of our fear of offense. Police will no longer have incentive to capture crooks if they'll be sued for profiling or 'use of an electronic device to narrow suspect lists'. Right now in Iraq, a popular insurgent tactic is to hole up in a mosque and shoot coalition soldiers, knowing their rules of engagement won't allow them to flatten the building with an airstrike. (right now those same insurgents could fortify the roof of said mosque with sandbags and guns, but coalition forces cannot shoot them until they're shot at first.) They can't flatten the building because we don't want to make the appearance of being 'anti-muslim.' Imagine police hamstrung by the same restrictions. They couldn't scan license plates during an Amber alert to find the plate number that was given to them by a witness. They couldn't produce a dragnet to capture the next DC sniper. And they couldn't get my stereo back if it was stolen.
Covering up the barcode would be punishable by death
Your analogy fails to hold up in that automatically reading license plates is unobtrusive, versus barcoding someone's forehead which is obtrusive. I mean, changing my appearance sure might violate my right to my own Happiness, right?
Technically, the government already has a way to get a pretty accurate person-identification system, its called fingerprinting. While it has some caveats (identical twins), it for the most part works. We also have DNA testing. Neither collection is mandatory, unless you're arrested. When a crime is committed and fingerprints are gathered, we run them through a crime database to see if we can identify who might be a suspect. The suspect is still given due process of the law, a trial by jury if he chooses. Can false positives surface? Certainly. However, the age old police process of knocking down doors and rounding up the usual suspects was also very inaccurate. If anything, fingerprints and DNA refined and exonerated more than it inconvenienced or violated.
People are a afraid of a police state due to technology, but they so often forget one of the most terrible police states used simple tools. Jackboots and machine guns were much more effective at creating police states in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Our government was established to protect its citizens 'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness'. Those are the essential liberties (expanded in definition and clarity by the Bill of Rights).
Scanning your license plate, or having the right to not have your license plate read, is not an essential liberty. Franklin was referring to many of the injustices of the time which curtailed property rights to the extreme, such as forcing citizens to allow British soldiers to take refuge in their homes. That's a violation of the right to all three of those rights (Life, as in , the ability to live, requires work and procurement of property, and it is a violation to usurp the property owners rights, as he needs that property to survive. Liberty, as in the freedom to choose the course of actions a man wants to take, as in, not working for the welfare of the quartered soldiers. Happiness, as in its up to the owner of a home to decide what he wants to do and what makes him happy with regard to his home and quartered guests).
The license plate scanning does not actually allow the government to stop you for new crimes, instead it allows them to close more accurately the crimes that they could legally stop you for anyways. And for Essential Liberty to exist, we can't have criminals running around stealing our stuff and getting away with it.
Eventually minor crime will be what they search for
I don't know about 'minor crime' being any less a crime than 'major crime'. There's a severity in the crime, but they are crimes, which should be punished in some manor. After all, if there's no action taken against the crime, what good is even calling it a crime?
If a minor crime is a stolen car stereo from my car, then I sure as hell want the police to more efficiently catch the criminal. You're probably more worried about things you probably think shouldn't be crimes at all. If its a crime, we should prosecute it. if it is not a crime, we should NOT prosecute it. If you have a problem with what the government defines as a crime, the solution is not to hamper the law enforcement, but rather the legislators.
Regarding the retail price quote:
These phones don't assemble, ship, market, and support themselves. They also don't spontaneously form the OSX operating system when you combine all the products together.
Component cost is only one figure in the total cost, so spending half of the retail cost on parts is actually expensive compared to most products. I have a friend who owns a small company that sells niche electronics (inexpensive items sourced from China; his products sell on ThinkGeek), and if he spends more than 10% of an estimated retail price on parts for the item, he is losing. While parts and assembly are cheap, getting those items to vendors, and coming up for the ideas, and finding the components, are his contribution to the value of the item. When you pay 10x the cost of the components, the other 90% of the money is going towards all the effort required for you solder, retrieve and produce the product. Actually, the 90% over cost the consumer pays is CHEAPER than if the consumer had to go out and buy the components himself, and spend the time writing the software, etc. Capitalistic transactions are mutually beneficial; My friend makes a living off of sourcing, designing, and selling his product, and individuals benefit from not having to do that themselves, while getting a useful service from the device.
How can sight-impaired users make use of a buttonless phone?
Even worse, there are ZERO provisions for deaf people. Its like, if you can't hear, you can't use the iPhone. that's borderline discrimination!
Not unless Verizon can secretly shove a CDMA antenna into your iPhone without you noticing.
the iPhone , when unlocked, will only ever work with GSM networks (T-Mobile and AT&T). Any changes that move the phone to Verizon would require solder and hot-glue.
Why go to Mars? Because people want to go. There is a large contingent of humans on this earth who enjoy productive enterprise. They want to gain knowledge, complete tasks, and increase the reach of humanity. They don't do it out of some weird meta-altruism; they do it because they are scientists, and engineers, and people who generally love bringing the laws of nature under their command. The same arguments you made about not going to Mars could be made about any number of things. The Moon Landing, the Microchip, Sailing to the New World, all were costly human endevours. The reward is not always tangible or monetary; the reward is doing the thing itself.
You can argue that its not the place of governments to spend the money of the people who don't want to do those things, in order to do those things,fine, that's a legitimate point. However saying there's no value in going to Mars qua going to Mars, is foolish.
I agree. It is a non-issue. I know you want us all to treat Firefox like a legitimate player, and that's a decent request. However, how important is FireFox to you? Let's review
Web Development is a product of human labor, and not of magic.
Therefore, humans have to develop to support multiple browsers
these humans need to be paid
It costs more to support multiple browsers
That cost needs to be paid from somewhere
That somewhere is the money you pay in your bill.
So do you want to pay more on your cable bill?
You probably don't. Most people on this board will likely tell you Comcast charges too much. So unless you're willing to pay more on your cable bill, you don't really have an argument.
You make good points in the last paragraph, about used phones. When I first got a Digital/Analog handset in 1997, I had one of the classic Nokia 5100 models. It had an LCD display with big numbers. It had a long battery life and was incredibly rugged. It had big, tactile buttons and a strong backlight. It might be exactly what an older person needs. Most older people don't use the address book, instead they have most numbers memorized (or for older women, they carry a phone number journal in their purse). My mom, whose not quite as old (50s), always ended up getting the last-years model phone because it was easier to use (less features) and cheaper.
I, on the other hand, am willing to live with a small learning curve if it means the device is sleek and glyph-erific like my iPhone
If cloud-cover or water vapor are changing, what would be causing it?
The amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's surface? The strength of the Earth's magnetic field? Just because there is more CO2 does not mean its a slam-dunk that CO2 is causing warming. It could very well be an effect. Correlation does not equal causation. Climate is a lot more complicated than 'more CO2 = bad'.
CO2 has become a panacea that everyone blames the world's ills on anyways. Do you feel guilty that you're breathing out CO2? You're destroying the planet! Stop breathing, please.
It probably has a ton of medical uses. Right now patients with irrational fears of doctors, surgery and other procedures could have that fear wiped out, without the grogginess normally associated with sedatives.
A comparison of Earth, Venus and Mars will demonstrate this. If there really is a non-CO2 cause of warming
There is a non-CO2 cause of warming (or cooling.) Its called how far your planet is from the sun. Secondary causes include how thick of an atmosphere you have. Third might be cloud-cover / water vapor. Then maybe CO2.
Gives new meaning th words "screaming pussy."
I might be showing my age here, but I didn't even know there was an old meaning to that phrase. What the fuck is a screaming pussy?