Thanks for that... I'm surprised that people on slashdot are calling for political solutions to political "problems" instead of technological solutions that do more to guarantee security and privacy against surveillance, be it "legal" or illegal.
I'll reserve my outrage for when using strong encryption becomes regulated.
Of course, political involvment is the more adequate approach to a political problem. But why neglect the technical tools?
According to the US constitution, arms is the correct approach to governmental oppression.
But far be it for me to advocate the constitution, because that's illegal...
Why not both? The database of cell phone towers that shows you which tower you're connected to already exists: http://opensignal.com/android/
It's more useful for trying to figure out where to go to get the best signal in your environment, but if you can use it to figure out when you're being oppressed, then all the more power to you.
My kids have awful Dell netbooks running an absurdly locked-down Windows 7. It takes forever for them to do any of their work online, because they can only use the IE browser to run all these java and javascript -heavy sites (mostly because of the sidebar ads), like http://www.easybib.com/ . Editing their work in their haiku wiki is painful... particularly dealing with images which they're required to use 2-3 per assignment.
The worst part is that they've figured out that even though they can't launch cmd.exe or install real programming languages, they've found they can save and execute.bat files. So yes, they're learning to program.bat *cry*
If you're in a hurry to see the performance improvements over the UI improvements, you can go ahead and switch from the Dalvik JIT to the ART precompiled runtime now: http://www.cultofandroid.com/5...
(you may want to have a charger nearby while recompiling all of your apps, though)
I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like I want to be just like all the different people I have no further interest in being the same Because I have seen difference all around And now I know that that's what I want
I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable I want to be a part of the different crowd And assert my individuality along with the others Who are different like me
I don't want to be identical to anyone or anything I don't even want to be identical to myself I want to look in the mirror and wonder "Who is that person? I've never seen that person before I've never seen anyone like that before"
I want to call into question the very idea That identity can be attached I want a floating, shifting, ever changing persona Invisibility and obscurity
Detachment from the ego and all of it's pursuits Unity is useless Conformity is competitive and divisive and leads only to Stagnation and death
If you actually scroll down the page a http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo you'll see it actually has two speakers, a "woofer" and a tweeter.
More interesting is the array of 7 mics. Should be possible to get some good positional audio capture and noise reduction that way.
I picked up an el-cheapo bluetooth speaker/mic a while ago, and it works decently enough. I can see people paying 10x more for a "premium" version of something like http://www.amazon.com/Wireless... I suppose... "Real" speakerphones for conference rooms with good NC and AEC are pretty expensive.
yeah, yeah, greenhouse gases like CO2, and to a larger extent methane and water vapor reflect energy attempting to leave the biosphere back to Earth, keeping energy in like a blanket (or insulator), affecting the energy balance. My father-in-law is a mathematician at NASA GSFC, where he works on radiative transfer equations used to tune LIDAR instruments on NASA/NOAA satellites that measure cloud and vegetation cover. What would you like to know?
You can ask me about UNIX too... I did Slackware back when it came on 80 floppies, but I don't talk about that much; at least compared to the time I bootstrapped Debian on a laptop through its parallel port since it didn't have a removable drive or CD or USB.
Ah, yeah... I'm not demonizing the deniers, just admitting that they're likely more rational and politically savvy than environmentalists give them credit for. More scientific studies (and certainly IPCC announcements) are not going to change that no matter how much you rub their faces in it.
So anyone trying to "save the world" by cutting down carbon footprint will just have to do that much better to pick up the slack. Probably even more to make up for all the coal-rollers trolling them.
We have the benefit of watching this play out in Southeast Asia before it's politically expedient to do anything here. Having lived in Bangkok for a few years, the effects of pollution witnessed by average americans here in the US is a joke. We have a loooonng way to fall before we might have to even consider implementing things like China's One Child Policy. But legislation is reactionary, not proactive. No one is really going to do anything or even legislate anything until the shit really hits the fan. Which, even by the most dire global warming projection, isn't going to be that severe even 100 years out. So this is really going to be a blame game to see if they can spread some of the guilt around to people who don't really have a conscience about this sort of thing anyways.
The problem is even with global warming, the shit will never really hit the fan in a way that fault can be directly tied back to the polluters, and even if it was, good luck getting them to pay for the damages. Higher pollution will erode our health slightly. Sure lots of low-lying population centers will be wiped out, but those events will occur after hurricanes or tsunamis, and migrating the refugees will be part of some humanitarian rescue operation. I bet that even around that time, there will be more government intervention passed to stop the influx of refugees migrating to higher ground than there will be for government intervention to limit pollution.
I agree! Politics is just administrative overhead that should be minimized in both time and expense. My electricity comes primarily from hydro and wind, and I take public transit to work. What were we arguing about again?
Yes, yes, you're smart. We get it. Just substitute your nitpick with "Burning Things Bad". Sheesh.
FWIW, my original post included "Heat and Pollution". The "Pollution" bit that you omitted from your quote should more than cover the greenhouse gas effects, as well as the aerosols that reflect energy back to space and counteract global warming to some degree. Isn't it great how pollution causes both global warming and global dimming? And kinda ironic how our thirst for energy is so high that the stored sunlight we burn from the past also diminishes the amount of energy we receive for the future?
Heat is an issue as well. Urban "heat islands" are well documented in scientific literature. Sure, they're caused just as much by the sun warming up hot pavement as ICE emissions, but they've been demonstrated to change the micro-climates of cities. As you know, heat rises, pulling in denser, cooler air from elsewhere. And then you get all these people wondering why anthropogenic global warming is happening since it's been colder than usual.
Everyone is going to pay one way or another... some just seem to think starting with prevention will be cheaper than dealing with scrambling for a cure later on.
Others, understandably, will just keep chugging along as they're accustomed to. No reason to change your ways if the sky isn't falling. Can't get blamed for anything that happens that you don't see coming. Can't be held accountable for it either. And they probably won't.
Case in point: drought... (whether it's related to Anthropogenic Climate Change or not is irrelevant). As you may recall, farmers in CA had to ration their water rights this year. The government stepped in and enforced a 30% reduction on farms as they have during past droughts.
For the smaller farms that had already invested in more efficient drip irrigation technologies, this pretty much means they suffered a 30% reduction in crop output, since they're already getting the maximum crop output from their water.
For the larger farms that were using inefficient flood irrigation, they got a nice emergency government subsidy to upgrade to drip irrigation. So they had the same crop output as before this year, because the increases in efficiencies more than made up for reduced quota.
So as you see, under the system we have in place now, it absolutely makes sense to be as wasteful as possible from an entirely rational perspective. The early adopters will bear the brunt of the cost of cleaning things up both before and after issues arise. That's logic. That's the way it is.
For my part, I recently moved to a part of the US which is almost all hydro and wind power. Utilities are expensive. I pay more to to the sanitation dept. to clean my water runoff than it costs to deliver.
1/2 of the world's population lives in southeast Asia... including China, India, etc. http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-... They've been enacting lots of policies to deal with pollution and resources, stuff you'd absolutely hate to have here in the West. The smart and rich ones come here to get away from the pollution and crowding at home. It's nice.
That's nice, but it's not going to change the stance of any Anthropogenic Climate Change deniers.
I'm pretty sure the reason they're denying that Burning Things Causes Heat and Pollution is not because they're dumb, but because they don't want to pay for the cleanup.
First rule of politics and law: never admit fault.
So everyone's wasting their time trying to convince the deniers of anything. They're never going to take responsibility for cleanup. Just start cleaning up without them.
Huh, you're right... looks like China is run by engineers and scientists, and they went ahead and did away with DST in China after the turn of the millennium.
Well my current company is doing work in the UK, and I just found out a few days ago that some of servers there are set to EST/EDT. So this week we'll have to adjust the daily reboot cron jobs by an hour, and next week we'll get to dork with it again when BST switches over to GMT.
At least China still has a lot of corruption to make up for it... well at least according to Western media:-/
Eh, I just set everything to UTC and don't worry about weird things, like cron jobs between midnight and 1am running twice or not at all every once in a while.
Of course, my last major employer has everything set to PST/PDT, since that's where their major data center is, even though they have rather large branches in every major timezones. And because of some stupid thing in Oracle 10/11 of all things, all of the new data centers in other time zones/also/ are running in PST/PDT, because it's the only way to get Oracle's XDCR to work.
Which means their new international data center in China will not only be on PST/PDT, but will enjoy 4 DST transitions per year, since China switches their clocks a few weeks off from North America.
And what are the first solutions your head can come up with?
People somehow manage to deal with that stuff in hospitals. I might finally get the opportunity to ring the service button for once in my life for the stewardess to help affix my catheter. Working on a laptop isn't exactly practical with the current situation.
Anyway, it's not like you wouldn't be able to slide out of your pod and wander around the rest of the plane. And of course there could still be "normal" seating in other sections... and maybe even a pool and a piano bar like the A380 had always promised:P
And I've ridden sideways seats on a C-130. That... wasn't so bad.
But to hell with seats... I'd much rather have a sleeper pod, like in 5th Element or the Tokyo pod hotels. Then everyone can effectively have a window AND aisle access, and flip whichever way is most comfortable for them. Or maybe even have some sort of suspension hammock that just adjusts to whichever way feels like "down" to them during whichever flight condition.
The airlines could probably pack more people on board arranged into sleeper pods as well. Sedation is optional.
But yeah, windows... buses and trains might as well not have windows anymore, everyone just has their noses pressed into their smartphones for the entire trip. I could certainly see everyone in a sleeper pod wanting their own window, though, which would turn the sides of an airplane into a honeycomb without some sort of virtual window option.
Yes it's faster, since they're migrating from the Dalvik JIT runtime to the new ART precompiled app runtime. But actually, you don't really have to wait for Android 5 to hit your device, it's been buried in the developer options dialog since 4.2.2 http://www.cultofandroid.com/5...
Hit our Nexus 4 and 5 with this yesterday after reading about it in an arstechnica comment... they're much snappier opening and switching between apps now.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an EVGA GTX 560Ti . My wife finally made me replace my fans.
They used really cheap fan mounts that vibrate like heck whenever they spin up.
Just replaced the stock fans with this rig today: http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Ad...
Much quieter now.
Thanks for that... I'm surprised that people on slashdot are calling for political solutions to political "problems" instead of technological solutions that do more to guarantee security and privacy against surveillance, be it "legal" or illegal.
I'll reserve my outrage for when using strong encryption becomes regulated.
People always say this, but they neglect to mention WHICH FEDERAL LAWS are being broken daily by everybody.
You know, the secret ones. They can't tell you what they are, though, that'll ruin the surprise. The essence of surprise is critical. CRITICAL!
Of course, political involvment is the more adequate approach to a political problem. But why neglect the technical tools?
According to the US constitution, arms is the correct approach to governmental oppression.
But far be it for me to advocate the constitution, because that's illegal...
Why not both? The database of cell phone towers that shows you which tower you're connected to already exists:
http://opensignal.com/android/
It's more useful for trying to figure out where to go to get the best signal in your environment, but if you can use it to figure out when you're being oppressed, then all the more power to you.
I used gmail as my smarthost when I had Verizon FiOS
Something like:
https://alimanfoo.wordpress.co...
(generate a dedicated gmail password for this instead of using your "main" one)
Ugh. Thanks for making me cry.
My kids have awful Dell netbooks running an absurdly locked-down Windows 7. It takes forever for them to do any of their work online, because they can only use the IE browser to run all these java and javascript -heavy sites (mostly because of the sidebar ads), like http://www.easybib.com/ . Editing their work in their haiku wiki is painful... particularly dealing with images which they're required to use 2-3 per assignment.
The worst part is that they've figured out that even though they can't launch cmd.exe or install real programming languages, they've found they can save and execute .bat files. So yes, they're learning to program .bat *cry*
... and I'll be looking forward to "Nanaimo" after that.
Hopefully they'll still be making bar phones at that time, and put off the transition to some wearable-in-your-face thing until "Pie"
If you're in a hurry to see the performance improvements over the UI improvements, you can go ahead and switch from the Dalvik JIT to the ART precompiled runtime now:
http://www.cultofandroid.com/5...
(you may want to have a charger nearby while recompiling all of your apps, though)
John S. Hall (aka King Missile) It's Saturday:
I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like
I want to be just like all the different people
I have no further interest in being the same
Because I have seen difference all around
And now I know that that's what I want
I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable
I want to be a part of the different crowd
And assert my individuality along with the others
Who are different like me
I don't want to be identical to anyone or anything
I don't even want to be identical to myself
I want to look in the mirror and wonder
"Who is that person? I've never seen that person before
I've never seen anyone like that before"
I want to call into question the very idea
That identity can be attached
I want a floating, shifting, ever changing persona
Invisibility and obscurity
Detachment from the ego and all of it's pursuits
Unity is useless
Conformity is competitive and divisive and leads only to
Stagnation and death
Read more: King Missile - It's Saturday Lyrics | MetroLyrics
http://www.metrolyrics.com/its...
If you actually scroll down the page a http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo you'll see it actually has two speakers, a "woofer" and a tweeter.
More interesting is the array of 7 mics. Should be possible to get some good positional audio capture and noise reduction that way.
I picked up an el-cheapo bluetooth speaker/mic a while ago, and it works decently enough. I can see people paying 10x more for a "premium" version of something like http://www.amazon.com/Wireless... I suppose... "Real" speakerphones for conference rooms with good NC and AEC are pretty expensive.
Huh, huh, huh, thank you, drive through.
I mean, thru
yeah, yeah, greenhouse gases like CO2, and to a larger extent methane and water vapor reflect energy attempting to leave the biosphere back to Earth, keeping energy in like a blanket (or insulator), affecting the energy balance. My father-in-law is a mathematician at NASA GSFC, where he works on radiative transfer equations used to tune LIDAR instruments on NASA/NOAA satellites that measure cloud and vegetation cover. What would you like to know?
You can ask me about UNIX too... I did Slackware back when it came on 80 floppies, but I don't talk about that much; at least compared to the time I bootstrapped Debian on a laptop through its parallel port since it didn't have a removable drive or CD or USB.
Ah, yeah... I'm not demonizing the deniers, just admitting that they're likely more rational and politically savvy than environmentalists give them credit for. More scientific studies (and certainly IPCC announcements) are not going to change that no matter how much you rub their faces in it.
So anyone trying to "save the world" by cutting down carbon footprint will just have to do that much better to pick up the slack. Probably even more to make up for all the coal-rollers trolling them.
We have the benefit of watching this play out in Southeast Asia before it's politically expedient to do anything here. Having lived in Bangkok for a few years, the effects of pollution witnessed by average americans here in the US is a joke. We have a loooonng way to fall before we might have to even consider implementing things like China's One Child Policy. But legislation is reactionary, not proactive. No one is really going to do anything or even legislate anything until the shit really hits the fan. Which, even by the most dire global warming projection, isn't going to be that severe even 100 years out. So this is really going to be a blame game to see if they can spread some of the guilt around to people who don't really have a conscience about this sort of thing anyways.
The problem is even with global warming, the shit will never really hit the fan in a way that fault can be directly tied back to the polluters, and even if it was, good luck getting them to pay for the damages. Higher pollution will erode our health slightly. Sure lots of low-lying population centers will be wiped out, but those events will occur after hurricanes or tsunamis, and migrating the refugees will be part of some humanitarian rescue operation. I bet that even around that time, there will be more government intervention passed to stop the influx of refugees migrating to higher ground than there will be for government intervention to limit pollution.
I agree! Politics is just administrative overhead that should be minimized in both time and expense. My electricity comes primarily from hydro and wind, and I take public transit to work. What were we arguing about again?
Yes, yes, you're smart. We get it. Just substitute your nitpick with "Burning Things Bad". Sheesh.
FWIW, my original post included "Heat and Pollution". The "Pollution" bit that you omitted from your quote should more than cover the greenhouse gas effects, as well as the aerosols that reflect energy back to space and counteract global warming to some degree. Isn't it great how pollution causes both global warming and global dimming? And kinda ironic how our thirst for energy is so high that the stored sunlight we burn from the past also diminishes the amount of energy we receive for the future?
Heat is an issue as well. Urban "heat islands" are well documented in scientific literature. Sure, they're caused just as much by the sun warming up hot pavement as ICE emissions, but they've been demonstrated to change the micro-climates of cities. As you know, heat rises, pulling in denser, cooler air from elsewhere. And then you get all these people wondering why anthropogenic global warming is happening since it's been colder than usual.
Everyone is going to pay one way or another... some just seem to think starting with prevention will be cheaper than dealing with scrambling for a cure later on.
Others, understandably, will just keep chugging along as they're accustomed to. No reason to change your ways if the sky isn't falling. Can't get blamed for anything that happens that you don't see coming. Can't be held accountable for it either. And they probably won't.
Case in point: drought... (whether it's related to Anthropogenic Climate Change or not is irrelevant). As you may recall, farmers in CA had to ration their water rights this year. The government stepped in and enforced a 30% reduction on farms as they have during past droughts.
For the smaller farms that had already invested in more efficient drip irrigation technologies, this pretty much means they suffered a 30% reduction in crop output, since they're already getting the maximum crop output from their water.
For the larger farms that were using inefficient flood irrigation, they got a nice emergency government subsidy to upgrade to drip irrigation. So they had the same crop output as before this year, because the increases in efficiencies more than made up for reduced quota.
So as you see, under the system we have in place now, it absolutely makes sense to be as wasteful as possible from an entirely rational perspective. The early adopters will bear the brunt of the cost of cleaning things up both before and after issues arise. That's logic. That's the way it is.
For my part, I recently moved to a part of the US which is almost all hydro and wind power. Utilities are expensive. I pay more to to the sanitation dept. to clean my water runoff than it costs to deliver.
1/2 of the world's population lives in southeast Asia... including China, India, etc.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-...
They've been enacting lots of policies to deal with pollution and resources, stuff you'd absolutely hate to have here in the West. The smart and rich ones come here to get away from the pollution and crowding at home. It's nice.
OK, I can simplify it more for you... "shit where you eat"
That's nice, but it's not going to change the stance of any Anthropogenic Climate Change deniers.
I'm pretty sure the reason they're denying that Burning Things Causes Heat and Pollution is not because they're dumb, but because they don't want to pay for the cleanup.
First rule of politics and law: never admit fault.
So everyone's wasting their time trying to convince the deniers of anything. They're never going to take responsibility for cleanup. Just start cleaning up without them.
Huh, you're right... looks like China is run by engineers and scientists, and they went ahead and did away with DST in China after the turn of the millennium.
Well my current company is doing work in the UK, and I just found out a few days ago that some of servers there are set to EST/EDT. So this week we'll have to adjust the daily reboot cron jobs by an hour, and next week we'll get to dork with it again when BST switches over to GMT.
At least China still has a lot of corruption to make up for it... well at least according to Western media :-/
Nothing to do with DST, though. But that's probably because this xkcd makes sense, and DST does not.
http://xkcd.com/1335/
Move to Iceland. Fun fact: it's the only country in the world that uses GMT. All. Year. Long.
OK, I guess parts of Western Africa too.
http://www.timeanddate.com/tim...
Eh, I just set everything to UTC and don't worry about weird things, like cron jobs between midnight and 1am running twice or not at all every once in a while.
Of course, my last major employer has everything set to PST/PDT, since that's where their major data center is, even though they have rather large branches in every major timezones. And because of some stupid thing in Oracle 10/11 of all things, all of the new data centers in other time zones /also/ are running in PST/PDT, because it's the only way to get Oracle's XDCR to work.
Which means their new international data center in China will not only be on PST/PDT, but will enjoy 4 DST transitions per year, since China switches their clocks a few weeks off from North America.
And what are the first solutions your head can come up with?
People somehow manage to deal with that stuff in hospitals. I might finally get the opportunity to ring the service button for once in my life for the stewardess to help affix my catheter. Working on a laptop isn't exactly practical with the current situation.
Anyway, it's not like you wouldn't be able to slide out of your pod and wander around the rest of the plane. And of course there could still be "normal" seating in other sections... and maybe even a pool and a piano bar like the A380 had always promised :P
And I've ridden sideways seats on a C-130. That... wasn't so bad.
But to hell with seats... I'd much rather have a sleeper pod, like in 5th Element or the Tokyo pod hotels. Then everyone can effectively have a window AND aisle access, and flip whichever way is most comfortable for them. Or maybe even have some sort of suspension hammock that just adjusts to whichever way feels like "down" to them during whichever flight condition.
The airlines could probably pack more people on board arranged into sleeper pods as well. Sedation is optional.
But yeah, windows... buses and trains might as well not have windows anymore, everyone just has their noses pressed into their smartphones for the entire trip. I could certainly see everyone in a sleeper pod wanting their own window, though, which would turn the sides of an airplane into a honeycomb without some sort of virtual window option.
Yes it's faster, since they're migrating from the Dalvik JIT runtime to the new ART precompiled app runtime.
But actually, you don't really have to wait for Android 5 to hit your device, it's been buried in the developer options dialog since 4.2.2 http://www.cultofandroid.com/5...
Hit our Nexus 4 and 5 with this yesterday after reading about it in an arstechnica comment... they're much snappier opening and switching between apps now.