Futility? Really? The SM is incomplete, in that you have to plug and chug 17 constants that can only be determined via observation. This incompleteness may not be wrong, per se, but it certainly means that refining the SM is unlikely to be the optimal path towards truth. What is the optimal path? You tell me. But spending a lot of resources on a theory that is known to be incomplete and can never be made complete, when there exist other theories that don't have those issues, sounds like the very definition of futilty to me, ranking up there with rain dances.
...so the future can be predicted, in theory, to within an arbitrarily small epsilon neighborhood. But...there is a difference between "predicting the future" and "extrapolating the present." The latter is just one of a myriad ways of accomplishing the former. SF is replete with interesting and intriguing attempts at extrapolating and correlating social/political trends with technological trends. The key, I think, is in identifying which correlations remain stable as the axes along which we are making the extrapolations vary in time. In chaos theory, these stable correlations are called strange attractors. For example, I would offer the the correlation between energy storage density and population density as a remarkably resilient strange attractor -- the correlation remains very significant, whether you are looking at a Neolithic encampment or a modern metropolis. As energy storage density rises, so does the social/political/economic infrastructure around it. This would suggest that the flow of energy and how we manage it will be strongly correlated with the social/political/economic trends at some future point. Models that incorporate this particular correlation will thus be more likely to model actual conditions than models that do not.
A CS degree, like any degree, is a means to an end. It's a tool, more or less, and you use it to help build what you want out of your life. One thing autodidacts don't have is the instant credibility that a sheepskin can confer. Not saying that sheepskin credibility is always legitimate (University of Phoenix, anybody?) but HR managers have been conditioned to prefer applicants with sheepskins over applicants without sheepskins. My CS sheepskin from the University of Arizona got my foot in the door with a large defense contractor in their IT department as a sysadmin. It also got me access to company Fellowship programs that my autodidact colleagues could not get, even though they were *much* better sysadmins than I was, or for that matter, than I even wanted to be. This created a lot of interpersonal friction between me and those autodidacts, especially around white sheet time. They were mostly ex-enlisted military computer operators, and they made up the bulk of the sysadmin pool. Eventually, I got a door and a mini-skirted buffer between me and them, so it was a lot easier to deal with their anger and frustration.
The thing is, though, and I think this is the point the OP is trying to make, I was completely self-taught as a sysadmin. My background in CS helped me abstract the individual quirks and idiosyncrasies of the OS's I had to support into something I could get my head around, to be sure, but riding herd on a bunch of users and their mish-mash of Linux, Unix, Windows and VMS platforms (and later managing those same frustrated autodidacts in pursuit of same) is not what I wanted out of life and is definitely not what my BS in CS prepared me for. But thanks to the sheepskin, I eventually had an office and a secretary, so I was no longer stuck in a a cube with a surly, sullen cube mate, and I got to take what were essentially multi-year paid vacations via the Fellowship programs to get More of the Same (MS) and then to Pile it Higher and Deeper (PhD) on the company dime -- a career track that was structurally denied to those angry autodidacts.
So yeah, a CS degree has been worth it to me, even if I ended up becoming self-educated in my career field, which, tbh, was just glorified tech-support monkeyism, and definitely not computer science. But I was a well-compensated tech-support monkey, and now that I've retired from that company (at the ripe old age of 50) with a good company pension and a well-fortified 401(k) to meet my day-to day living expenses, I'm looking forward to actually using my CS degrees in a constructive way as a private consultant, and maybe to even help pay for the toys on my bucket list that I haven't checked off yet. Have I really used any of the deep CS theory I was taught at this point in my life? No, at least not outside of trying to grok a few of the more abstruse posts here on slashdot. But the sheepskin did let me get a job that allowed me to create a pretty decent standard of living for myself, and which, two decades or so down the road, might now actually be used for what it was meant to be used for.
The reason why the watermark is not mentioned in the TOS is because there is no moral, ethical, or most importantly legal reason to do so, because nothing in the watermark payload is information that can compromise a user's privacy. Blizz started using the watermarks to enforce NDAs with its beta testers, and probably also to locate non-licensed private game servers. Hard to see how you could get your knickers in a twist about this, unless you are a paid shill for one of Blizz's competitors, in which case you've now outed yourself and will be hitting our plonk files in short order.
...Malthus saw one iteration of a fixed-point solution to a resource allocation problem, and assumed it applied to *all* resource allocation problems. It doesn't. The mathematical model that these dire predictions are based on could benefit from a more game-theoretic approach. What is going to happen is the establishment of a series of Nash equilibria until our species lands on the right (read: optimal) strategy for resource allocation. Right now, a little under half the planet's food supply is produced in nations that account for less than a fifth of the planet's human population. These food producing nations are bound by extremely strong and resilient cultural, political, and social ties...you don't have to be John Nash to see where I'm going with this: there is no way in hell that humans aligned with these nations are going to suffer a food crisis under any new Nash equilibrium. Will there be food riots? Yes. Will they affect resource allocation? No. A new equilibrium will be established, and humanity will carry on.
Geesh. It is not about forking a CC project. You can already do that. It's about people that misrepresented themselves to direct traffic away from a site. I think the author of the quoted story is simply trying to provide some damage control, so that the shit storm that these volunteers have stirred up by their deceptive actions won't completely wreck the already forked part of the CC project.
My issue with the organizations like the NRA is that they tend to promote the toys, but not the well regulated malitia that would stand between the populous and foreign or domestic raiding force. Where is the support of rocketry clubs that could actually provide a real defense against helicopters that would place boots on the ground? Clustering a few E engines in a simple shell could deliver enough reactant to be seriously annoying. But all they talk about is how a few pop guns are going to fend off the tanks and hummers.
Anything more than this gets you a one-way ticket to a federal prison as a domestic terrorist. The US Government and national media successfully turned the notion of a militia into a slur during the Clinton years. Just saying you belonged to a militia meant you were at least a right-wing kook and more likely a dangerous terrorist.
Police are going to have a field day with printed guns, which by nature won't have/need serial numbers or registration (except possibly for conceal and carry)
*re-reads the Second Amendment*
Hmm, don't see the clause where it requires all my firearms to be registered with the government...
Hmmm...you better reread the whole fucking document, dude -- quoting the 2nd Amendment out of context like you just did doesn't score you any credibility points. From my POV, you have just landed yourself in the same boat with the assholes who think shouting fire in a crowded theater is protected by the 1st Amendment. Registering weapons does not infringe on an individual's right to keep and bear arms. What it does do is promote the general welfare and provide for the common defense, two points which your out-of-context interpretation conveniently ignore. Constitutional amendments are not some kind of detachable coupon that you can offer up in support of your personal political agenda. When you quote any part of the Constitution, you are quoting all of it.
As for this idea, it is a veritable certainty it will be denounced by exactly the same people who support all other information being free. Pirate Party Yea! But not this. Double standard.
As a supporter of information freedom and (from the average American perspective) a radical leftist, I would like to say that I support this project in the strongest terms possible. These people are exercising their freedom of speech and should be able to do so without interference from the government. I want you to have those plans to 3D print a fully automatic weapon, just to watch your head explode at the realization that I'm OK with that.
Go ahead, 3d print whatever you want. It's all just shapes until you shoot someone.
Hmmm. I think your heart is in the right place, but freedom of speech does not give one the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and it's not much of a stretch to see how 3D printing of weapons poses the same public hazard that shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater does.
More to the point, this might force a radical change in strategy from the anti-gun wing on the left. The problem with guns, as they see it, is in the readily available supply, not in the demand. Millions of Americans own guns, certainly; but they are in the minority, compared to, say, the people who own automobiles or TV sets. Anti-gun lobbyists know that legislative attempts to control gun ownership will always fail at the second amendment hurdle. The anti-gun wing on the left has been lobbying for decades for legislation to attack America's gun problem from the supply side, by making it more and more expensive to get the licenses necessary to manufacture the weapons, and making it outright illegal to import parts that are much more cheaper to use. 3D printing is going to pretty much undermine that supply-side strategy, which means the left is going to have to double down and try to rescind the second amendment. I really don't see another option for the left, and I fear that it may trigger a genuine civil war in this country.
Hmmmm. In your first paragraph, you condemn the Sovs for their tactics, but give the US a pass by not pointing out that the US engages in the same tactics. In your second paragraph you then attempt to deflect criticism of the US use of those tactics by strongly suggesting that, at least in the US case the ends justify the means, but not in the Soviet case. In your third paragraph you attack the Sovs again from a different angle, again without acknowledging that Americans, if you take the same angle that you took on their Sov counterparts, are acknowledging (look up the Occupy movement in your favorite search engine) that the American system is a mistake.
Which brings us to your fourth paragraph - a masterpiece of irony, given the preceding three paragraphs - asserting that context is necessary to understanding history.
Tell me -- are you practicing to become a script writer for Fox news, or a research assistant for Rush Limbaugh? Or are you honestly unaware that your "answer" is just propaganda, and doesn't really answer the question posed by the GP?
Well, war is an ugly thing. But not the ugliest of things. The degraded state of moral decay wherein nothing seems worth war is far worse (with apologies to John Stuart Mill.) Tell me, what do you think drove the technological advancements that got Curiosity to Mars? Here's a hint: It was an ugly thing -- war. Humans are an aggressive species -- we didn't make it to the top of the food chain on this planet by being pacifists. Instead of lamenting the cost of war, we should be celebrating the fact that as aggressive as we are (and always will be as long as we remain human!) we can still channel some of that aggression constructively.
Wouldn't it be great if the U.S. started a public works program (not unlike the Hoover Dam project) that provided unemployed Americans jobs building solar/battery systems? Wouldn't that be a fantastic use of taxpayer's dollars? Why isn't that already happening to help out of work Americans?
...and I think I have a couple answers for you, though you probably aren't going to like them.
1) I think your heart is in the right place, but your head isn't. The fossil fuel industry in the US *owns* the energy market. When you own the market, other players have to get your permission to compete. Big Oil *will not* permit alternative forms of energy to compete, period. Leaving aside the social and political pressure that Big Oil can bring to bear, all Big Oil really has to do is leverage their economic power to incrementally adjust energy prices downwards (trivial to accomplish through the entirely legal tactic of increasing production) until the competitor's technology is no longer cost effective. Please understand that Big Oil can make a profit even if oil is selling for $20/bbl; there is no alternative technology that can compete on a playing field that can be tilted at the whim of the home team.
2) Public works projects are a bandaid, not a solution. You are treating the symptom, not the disease. The problem is the US's broken economic model, not unemployment. Even in a perfect capitalist economy, there will be unemployment -- ask yourself what you are going to do when the solar/battery infrastructure your public works project creates is functional and in place and all those citizens are unemployed again. For what it is worth, the fix is a social and economic safety net, not more jobs.
I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I am a mathematician with a modicum of experience solving two-point boundary value problems, which are what you are up against when you have an energy budget and have fewer thrusters than degrees of freedom. Angular momentum (and the conservation thereof) is a much better approach, I would think...watch some Olympic gymnasts if you want to see some fine examples of human wetware doing this in real-time.
Efforts to de-emphasize curricula that help develop a capacity for critical reasoning in the subject population is to be expected. Rulers want compliant subjects, not critical ones.
The attack on critical reasoning skills has a long, well-documented history. For a milenia, the Roman Catholic church made sure that relatively few people learned to read, and exerted serious effort to make sure that those who did learn to read were either in the Church already, or were members of the elite with a track record for supporting the Church. When technology (the printing press) bypassed the Church's chokehold on knowledge, the Church ruthlessly suppressed knowledge that was deemed inimical to the Church's interests. The modern neo-Conservative movement in the US adopted pretty much the same strategy, but shifted targets slightly. Instead of targeting reading, they went after something a bit deeper -- critical reasoning skills. The neoCon strategy ultimately resulted in the passage of NCLB in 2001, virtually guaranteeing that the vast majority of the next generation of US voters would be denied access to an education that included training in critical reasoning skills.
The first rule of power is "hold on to it." In a democracy, the corollary would be "get re-elected." For the neoCons, dumbing down the next generation of voters was a good strategy for a political movement with an agenda that anyone with even minimal critical reasoning skills would reject out of hand. Now we have a political scientist whose politics were relentlessly skewered in Allison Lurie's culture war classic "The War Between the Tates" and whose long time domestic partner flunked basic geometry four times advocating a position that lines up with the current NeoCon strategy to dumb American voters down. And if you need further evidence of Hacker's agenda, his appearance on the Colbert Report should be all you need.
The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits. What is the point to kill yourself with drugs and supplements?
You have an interesting definition of the word "sport." The point of sports is to beat your peers, period -- second place is just first loser. For athletes, the point of doping and supplementing is to obtain a competitive advantage. It follows that the health benefits (benefits can be negative, too, you know) are mere side-effects. If you aren't competing, you aren't doing sports. Compromising one's overall health to increase one's performance in a specific area is an accepted and perfectly valid outcome, as long as you keep winning. The key is to quit competing, ie, leave the sport, before the compromises to your health become unacceptable.
Personal anecdote time, I guess. I had really lousy vision until I underwent laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis (LASIK). I compete in motor sports, mainly motorcycle racing, and martial arts (armed and unarmed) where uncompromised vision has a definite competitive advantage. The procedure improved my visual acuity from 20/100 to 20/10. The downside of the LASIK procedure was that it left me with moderately compromised distant vision, and slightly compromised night vision, but it was an acceptable trade-off for me, because none of the sports I compete in take place in poorly lit venues, or require the ability to discern lots of detail at the horizon. The benefits to me were a vastly improved sight picture with my Beretta 92F, and no need to wear corrective lenses (which compromise situational awareness) at the track or in the dojo.
...if it is demonstrably incorrect? As far as I can tell, the observation of the Higgs Boson at best simply confirms a model that is fundamentally incomplete, in that the model's parameters have to be set via experimental observation. If the Standard Model has to be tuned to this extent, why do you think the Standard Model is a good guide to truth?
It sounds to me like you've bought into sci-fi writer David Brin's theories on "sousveillance" uncritically, and are ignoring Bruce Schneier's debunking of Brin's myth of the transparent society in this Wired article. For what it is worth, cops can already seize recording equipment from by-standers at a crime scene; I don't think giving everybody a camera is going to change that. What I think is far more likely to happen is that the government will attempt to maintain their asymmetric (I'm thinking you meant asymmetric, not asynchronous) advantage by minimizing a citizen's ability to record cops/firefighters/soldiers, either legislatively or technologically. Ironically, this legislation, if I'm right, will probably be passed in the name of maintaining privacy. It's already illegal to publish photos of dead US soldiers being returned to the US for interment -- and that was done by an executive order issued by Bush II and reaffirmed by Obama. The technology already exists to disrupt communications -- selectively blanking cell and wi-fi transmissions over arbitrary areas is trivial to accomplish and DHS has policies and procedures in place to control information in emergencies, something they inherited from FEMA.
I use Ghostery, an excellent tracker-phage for Firefox and Chrome. I installed Collusion and was a bit miffed it wasn't working, until I realized why: Ghostery works, period. It seems to me that Ghostery's list of web trackers already provides what Collusion is trying to create, so what is the point?
Fox has a point, oh my god I will go to hell for that, TV broadcasting gets it money by giving YOU TV and advertisters eyeballs to watch the commercials.
If Fox can't generate sufficient revenue to continue broadcasting, because people are skipping ads, then Fox should stop broadcasting.
They shouldn't sue people that aren't watching the ads.
That expectation that the law must protect their outmoded (and exploitative) business models is what fucks me off so much about the media industries. Find a new business model. Find a new business. Engage and embrace your customers, because clearly they want to watch Fox, they just don't want fucking adverts.
I think your anger is misdirected. If you agree that providing content to people who want to watch it is a legitimate business, why should the law protect content consumers who insist on using outmoded technology that is easily exploitable by content pirates? I think you should be more angry at those consumers than at Fox, dude. For what it's worth, the RIAA successfully argued a lawsuit many years ago that the makers of blank recording media were enabling copyright violations. That lawsuit forced the blank media industry to pay the RIAA a portion of their blank media sales up front to compensate for potential revenue loss, and I'm pretty certain that is what Fox's lawyers are going to seek in this lawsuit.
...why not Fox? The legal theory behind the Fox suit is not without precedent -- I will go out on a limb, here, and predict that this suit will run pretty much the same course as a similar suit successfully filed by the RIAA many, many years ago. A compliant judge could be convinced that hardware makers who include a skip capability must compensate the content providers, in the same way the RIAA convinced other compliant judges that the makers of blank recording media must fork over a portion of their sales to the RIAA, even if the blank media is never used to record content produced by the RIAA's clients. At least, if I were a lawyer for Fox, that is what I'd be trying to do. In our precedent-saturated legal system in the US, if it worked once, it will probably work again.
Here's what I find unacceptable. When companies sell the information they gathered from their business relationship with me to others. As long as they keep it to themselves, what they do with the information they acquired from me should be used to increase their profits. That's certainly what I'd do.
Hmmm...so you are okay with a shopkeeper charging you $40 for a Red Baron pizza, because he predicted that is the optimal price point for you? Really? And pardon me if I think you are naive for believing that preventing retailers from selling your shopping habit data to other retailers is going to protect you. Every store that sells Red Baron pizzas is eventually going to be able to profile you if you continue to demand Red Baron pizzas. Eventually every store you have access to is going to be able to predict exactly what you can and can't afford and set their prices for you accordingly. They don't need to share the data among themselves -- you are going to bring it with you whenever you go shopping for a Red Baron pizza; as long as they are allowed to accumulate and data-mine your shopping habits, you are screwed. Per-customer pricing is the holy grail of price optimization, and you are blithely endorsing it.
Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence.
Price fluctuates with demand you say? Egads, you should write a paper!
Well, yeah, it does indeed, but the problem with optimizing a price point is that variability. That pesky, fluctuating curve makes profit optimization damn near impossible. Entrepreneurs have attacked the variability problem from the supply side (monopolies, cartels, and consortia conspiring to artificially constrain supply and kill off competition) and from the demand side (marketing campaigns to artificially boost demand) but both those strategies are sub-optimal in that both still introduce enough unpredictability in price points to make real optimization impossible. What I was trying to point out is that the glut of information on buying habits data-mined from unwary consumers is going to completely distort that curve into something way more amenable to optimization. I don't mind a boutique dealer charging all the traffic will bear for a diamond-coated iPod, but I really do have issues with the guy I need to buy food from having the same kind of price-setting power as the boutique dealer when I'm hungry. This kind of information makes attacking the variability problem with the supply/demand curve not only feasible, but has the disturbing potential of removing that variability completely, leaving consumers without any protection at all from predatory pricing.
Slashdot Mirror
Futility? Really? The SM is incomplete, in that you have to plug and chug 17 constants that can only be determined via observation. This incompleteness may not be wrong, per se, but it certainly means that refining the SM is unlikely to be the optimal path towards truth. What is the optimal path? You tell me. But spending a lot of resources on a theory that is known to be incomplete and can never be made complete, when there exist other theories that don't have those issues, sounds like the very definition of futilty to me, ranking up there with rain dances.
...so the future can be predicted, in theory, to within an arbitrarily small epsilon neighborhood. But...there is a difference between "predicting the future" and "extrapolating the present." The latter is just one of a myriad ways of accomplishing the former. SF is replete with interesting and intriguing attempts at extrapolating and correlating social/political trends with technological trends. The key, I think, is in identifying which correlations remain stable as the axes along which we are making the extrapolations vary in time. In chaos theory, these stable correlations are called strange attractors. For example, I would offer the the correlation between energy storage density and population density as a remarkably resilient strange attractor -- the correlation remains very significant, whether you are looking at a Neolithic encampment or a modern metropolis. As energy storage density rises, so does the social/political/economic infrastructure around it. This would suggest that the flow of energy and how we manage it will be strongly correlated with the social/political/economic trends at some future point. Models that incorporate this particular correlation will thus be more likely to model actual conditions than models that do not.
...I guess.
A CS degree, like any degree, is a means to an end. It's a tool, more or less, and you use it to help build what you want out of your life. One thing autodidacts don't have is the instant credibility that a sheepskin can confer. Not saying that sheepskin credibility is always legitimate (University of Phoenix, anybody?) but HR managers have been conditioned to prefer applicants with sheepskins over applicants without sheepskins. My CS sheepskin from the University of Arizona got my foot in the door with a large defense contractor in their IT department as a sysadmin. It also got me access to company Fellowship programs that my autodidact colleagues could not get, even though they were *much* better sysadmins than I was, or for that matter, than I even wanted to be. This created a lot of interpersonal friction between me and those autodidacts, especially around white sheet time. They were mostly ex-enlisted military computer operators, and they made up the bulk of the sysadmin pool. Eventually, I got a door and a mini-skirted buffer between me and them, so it was a lot easier to deal with their anger and frustration.
The thing is, though, and I think this is the point the OP is trying to make, I was completely self-taught as a sysadmin. My background in CS helped me abstract the individual quirks and idiosyncrasies of the OS's I had to support into something I could get my head around, to be sure, but riding herd on a bunch of users and their mish-mash of Linux, Unix, Windows and VMS platforms (and later managing those same frustrated autodidacts in pursuit of same) is not what I wanted out of life and is definitely not what my BS in CS prepared me for. But thanks to the sheepskin, I eventually had an office and a secretary, so I was no longer stuck in a a cube with a surly, sullen cube mate, and I got to take what were essentially multi-year paid vacations via the Fellowship programs to get More of the Same (MS) and then to Pile it Higher and Deeper (PhD) on the company dime -- a career track that was structurally denied to those angry autodidacts.
So yeah, a CS degree has been worth it to me, even if I ended up becoming self-educated in my career field, which, tbh, was just glorified tech-support monkeyism, and definitely not computer science. But I was a well-compensated tech-support monkey, and now that I've retired from that company (at the ripe old age of 50) with a good company pension and a well-fortified 401(k) to meet my day-to day living expenses, I'm looking forward to actually using my CS degrees in a constructive way as a private consultant, and maybe to even help pay for the toys on my bucket list that I haven't checked off yet. Have I really used any of the deep CS theory I was taught at this point in my life? No, at least not outside of trying to grok a few of the more abstruse posts here on slashdot. But the sheepskin did let me get a job that allowed me to create a pretty decent standard of living for myself, and which, two decades or so down the road, might now actually be used for what it was meant to be used for.
The reason why the watermark is not mentioned in the TOS is because there is no moral, ethical, or most importantly legal reason to do so, because nothing in the watermark payload is information that can compromise a user's privacy. Blizz started using the watermarks to enforce NDAs with its beta testers, and probably also to locate non-licensed private game servers. Hard to see how you could get your knickers in a twist about this, unless you are a paid shill for one of Blizz's competitors, in which case you've now outed yourself and will be hitting our plonk files in short order.
...Malthus saw one iteration of a fixed-point solution to a resource allocation problem, and assumed it applied to *all* resource allocation problems. It doesn't. The mathematical model that these dire predictions are based on could benefit from a more game-theoretic approach. What is going to happen is the establishment of a series of Nash equilibria until our species lands on the right (read: optimal) strategy for resource allocation. Right now, a little under half the planet's food supply is produced in nations that account for less than a fifth of the planet's human population. These food producing nations are bound by extremely strong and resilient cultural, political, and social ties...you don't have to be John Nash to see where I'm going with this: there is no way in hell that humans aligned with these nations are going to suffer a food crisis under any new Nash equilibrium. Will there be food riots? Yes. Will they affect resource allocation? No. A new equilibrium will be established, and humanity will carry on.
Geesh. It is not about forking a CC project. You can already do that. It's about people that misrepresented themselves to direct traffic away from a site. I think the author of the quoted story is simply trying to provide some damage control, so that the shit storm that these volunteers have stirred up by their deceptive actions won't completely wreck the already forked part of the CC project.
My issue with the organizations like the NRA is that they tend to promote the toys, but not the well regulated malitia that would stand between the populous and foreign or domestic raiding force. Where is the support of rocketry clubs that could actually provide a real defense against helicopters that would place boots on the ground? Clustering a few E engines in a simple shell could deliver enough reactant to be seriously annoying. But all they talk about is how a few pop guns are going to fend off the tanks and hummers.
Anything more than this gets you a one-way ticket to a federal prison as a domestic terrorist. The US Government and national media successfully turned the notion of a militia into a slur during the Clinton years. Just saying you belonged to a militia meant you were at least a right-wing kook and more likely a dangerous terrorist.
If the shoe fits...
Police are going to have a field day with printed guns, which by nature won't have/need serial numbers or registration (except possibly for conceal and carry)
*re-reads the Second Amendment* Hmm, don't see the clause where it requires all my firearms to be registered with the government...
Hmmm...you better reread the whole fucking document, dude -- quoting the 2nd Amendment out of context like you just did doesn't score you any credibility points. From my POV, you have just landed yourself in the same boat with the assholes who think shouting fire in a crowded theater is protected by the 1st Amendment. Registering weapons does not infringe on an individual's right to keep and bear arms. What it does do is promote the general welfare and provide for the common defense, two points which your out-of-context interpretation conveniently ignore. Constitutional amendments are not some kind of detachable coupon that you can offer up in support of your personal political agenda. When you quote any part of the Constitution, you are quoting all of it.
As for this idea, it is a veritable certainty it will be denounced by exactly the same people who support all other information being free. Pirate Party Yea! But not this. Double standard.
As a supporter of information freedom and (from the average American perspective) a radical leftist, I would like to say that I support this project in the strongest terms possible. These people are exercising their freedom of speech and should be able to do so without interference from the government. I want you to have those plans to 3D print a fully automatic weapon, just to watch your head explode at the realization that I'm OK with that.
Go ahead, 3d print whatever you want. It's all just shapes until you shoot someone.
Hmmm. I think your heart is in the right place, but freedom of speech does not give one the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and it's not much of a stretch to see how 3D printing of weapons poses the same public hazard that shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater does.
More to the point, this might force a radical change in strategy from the anti-gun wing on the left. The problem with guns, as they see it, is in the readily available supply, not in the demand. Millions of Americans own guns, certainly; but they are in the minority, compared to, say, the people who own automobiles or TV sets. Anti-gun lobbyists know that legislative attempts to control gun ownership will always fail at the second amendment hurdle. The anti-gun wing on the left has been lobbying for decades for legislation to attack America's gun problem from the supply side, by making it more and more expensive to get the licenses necessary to manufacture the weapons, and making it outright illegal to import parts that are much more cheaper to use. 3D printing is going to pretty much undermine that supply-side strategy, which means the left is going to have to double down and try to rescind the second amendment. I really don't see another option for the left, and I fear that it may trigger a genuine civil war in this country.
Hmmmm. In your first paragraph, you condemn the Sovs for their tactics, but give the US a pass by not pointing out that the US engages in the same tactics. In your second paragraph you then attempt to deflect criticism of the US use of those tactics by strongly suggesting that, at least in the US case the ends justify the means, but not in the Soviet case. In your third paragraph you attack the Sovs again from a different angle, again without acknowledging that Americans, if you take the same angle that you took on their Sov counterparts, are acknowledging (look up the Occupy movement in your favorite search engine) that the American system is a mistake.
Which brings us to your fourth paragraph - a masterpiece of irony, given the preceding three paragraphs - asserting that context is necessary to understanding history.
Tell me -- are you practicing to become a script writer for Fox news, or a research assistant for Rush Limbaugh? Or are you honestly unaware that your "answer" is just propaganda, and doesn't really answer the question posed by the GP?
Well, war is an ugly thing. But not the ugliest of things. The degraded state of moral decay wherein nothing seems worth war is far worse (with apologies to John Stuart Mill.) Tell me, what do you think drove the technological advancements that got Curiosity to Mars? Here's a hint: It was an ugly thing -- war. Humans are an aggressive species -- we didn't make it to the top of the food chain on this planet by being pacifists. Instead of lamenting the cost of war, we should be celebrating the fact that as aggressive as we are (and always will be as long as we remain human!) we can still channel some of that aggression constructively.
Wouldn't it be great if the U.S. started a public works program (not unlike the Hoover Dam project) that provided unemployed Americans jobs building solar/battery systems? Wouldn't that be a fantastic use of taxpayer's dollars? Why isn't that already happening to help out of work Americans?
...and I think I have a couple answers for you, though you probably aren't going to like them.
1) I think your heart is in the right place, but your head isn't. The fossil fuel industry in the US *owns* the energy market. When you own the market, other players have to get your permission to compete. Big Oil *will not* permit alternative forms of energy to compete, period. Leaving aside the social and political pressure that Big Oil can bring to bear, all Big Oil really has to do is leverage their economic power to incrementally adjust energy prices downwards (trivial to accomplish through the entirely legal tactic of increasing production) until the competitor's technology is no longer cost effective. Please understand that Big Oil can make a profit even if oil is selling for $20/bbl; there is no alternative technology that can compete on a playing field that can be tilted at the whim of the home team.
2) Public works projects are a bandaid, not a solution. You are treating the symptom, not the disease. The problem is the US's broken economic model, not unemployment. Even in a perfect capitalist economy, there will be unemployment -- ask yourself what you are going to do when the solar/battery infrastructure your public works project creates is functional and in place and all those citizens are unemployed again. For what it is worth, the fix is a social and economic safety net, not more jobs.
I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I am a mathematician with a modicum of experience solving two-point boundary value problems, which are what you are up against when you have an energy budget and have fewer thrusters than degrees of freedom. Angular momentum (and the conservation thereof) is a much better approach, I would think...watch some Olympic gymnasts if you want to see some fine examples of human wetware doing this in real-time.
Efforts to de-emphasize curricula that help develop a capacity for critical reasoning in the subject population is to be expected. Rulers want compliant subjects, not critical ones.
The attack on critical reasoning skills has a long, well-documented history. For a milenia, the Roman Catholic church made sure that relatively few people learned to read, and exerted serious effort to make sure that those who did learn to read were either in the Church already, or were members of the elite with a track record for supporting the Church. When technology (the printing press) bypassed the Church's chokehold on knowledge, the Church ruthlessly suppressed knowledge that was deemed inimical to the Church's interests. The modern neo-Conservative movement in the US adopted pretty much the same strategy, but shifted targets slightly. Instead of targeting reading, they went after something a bit deeper -- critical reasoning skills. The neoCon strategy ultimately resulted in the passage of NCLB in 2001, virtually guaranteeing that the vast majority of the next generation of US voters would be denied access to an education that included training in critical reasoning skills.
The first rule of power is "hold on to it." In a democracy, the corollary would be "get re-elected." For the neoCons, dumbing down the next generation of voters was a good strategy for a political movement with an agenda that anyone with even minimal critical reasoning skills would reject out of hand. Now we have a political scientist whose politics were relentlessly skewered in Allison Lurie's culture war classic "The War Between the Tates" and whose long time domestic partner flunked basic geometry four times advocating a position that lines up with the current NeoCon strategy to dumb American voters down. And if you need further evidence of Hacker's agenda, his appearance on the Colbert Report should be all you need.
I, for one, welcome our hydroenchephalitic dwarf overlords.
The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits. What is the point to kill yourself with drugs and supplements?
You have an interesting definition of the word "sport." The point of sports is to beat your peers, period -- second place is just first loser. For athletes, the point of doping and supplementing is to obtain a competitive advantage. It follows that the health benefits (benefits can be negative, too, you know) are mere side-effects. If you aren't competing, you aren't doing sports. Compromising one's overall health to increase one's performance in a specific area is an accepted and perfectly valid outcome, as long as you keep winning. The key is to quit competing, ie, leave the sport, before the compromises to your health become unacceptable.
Personal anecdote time, I guess. I had really lousy vision until I underwent laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis (LASIK). I compete in motor sports, mainly motorcycle racing, and martial arts (armed and unarmed) where uncompromised vision has a definite competitive advantage. The procedure improved my visual acuity from 20/100 to 20/10. The downside of the LASIK procedure was that it left me with moderately compromised distant vision, and slightly compromised night vision, but it was an acceptable trade-off for me, because none of the sports I compete in take place in poorly lit venues, or require the ability to discern lots of detail at the horizon. The benefits to me were a vastly improved sight picture with my Beretta 92F, and no need to wear corrective lenses (which compromise situational awareness) at the track or in the dojo.
...if it is demonstrably incorrect? As far as I can tell, the observation of the Higgs Boson at best simply confirms a model that is fundamentally incomplete, in that the model's parameters have to be set via experimental observation. If the Standard Model has to be tuned to this extent, why do you think the Standard Model is a good guide to truth?
It sounds to me like you've bought into sci-fi writer David Brin's theories on "sousveillance" uncritically, and are ignoring Bruce Schneier's debunking of Brin's myth of the transparent society in this Wired article. For what it is worth, cops can already seize recording equipment from by-standers at a crime scene; I don't think giving everybody a camera is going to change that. What I think is far more likely to happen is that the government will attempt to maintain their asymmetric (I'm thinking you meant asymmetric, not asynchronous) advantage by minimizing a citizen's ability to record cops/firefighters/soldiers, either legislatively or technologically. Ironically, this legislation, if I'm right, will probably be passed in the name of maintaining privacy. It's already illegal to publish photos of dead US soldiers being returned to the US for interment -- and that was done by an executive order issued by Bush II and reaffirmed by Obama. The technology already exists to disrupt communications -- selectively blanking cell and wi-fi transmissions over arbitrary areas is trivial to accomplish and DHS has policies and procedures in place to control information in emergencies, something they inherited from FEMA.
I use Ghostery, an excellent tracker-phage for Firefox and Chrome. I installed Collusion and was a bit miffed it wasn't working, until I realized why: Ghostery works, period. It seems to me that Ghostery's list of web trackers already provides what Collusion is trying to create, so what is the point?
Millions of legitimate gamers will rejoice.
Fox has a point, oh my god I will go to hell for that, TV broadcasting gets it money by giving YOU TV and advertisters eyeballs to watch the commercials.
If Fox can't generate sufficient revenue to continue broadcasting, because people are skipping ads, then Fox should stop broadcasting.
They shouldn't sue people that aren't watching the ads.
That expectation that the law must protect their outmoded (and exploitative) business models is what fucks me off so much about the media industries. Find a new business model. Find a new business. Engage and embrace your customers, because clearly they want to watch Fox, they just don't want fucking adverts.
I think your anger is misdirected. If you agree that providing content to people who want to watch it is a legitimate business, why should the law protect content consumers who insist on using outmoded technology that is easily exploitable by content pirates? I think you should be more angry at those consumers than at Fox, dude. For what it's worth, the RIAA successfully argued a lawsuit many years ago that the makers of blank recording media were enabling copyright violations. That lawsuit forced the blank media industry to pay the RIAA a portion of their blank media sales up front to compensate for potential revenue loss, and I'm pretty certain that is what Fox's lawyers are going to seek in this lawsuit.
...why not Fox? The legal theory behind the Fox suit is not without precedent -- I will go out on a limb, here, and predict that this suit will run pretty much the same course as a similar suit successfully filed by the RIAA many, many years ago. A compliant judge could be convinced that hardware makers who include a skip capability must compensate the content providers, in the same way the RIAA convinced other compliant judges that the makers of blank recording media must fork over a portion of their sales to the RIAA, even if the blank media is never used to record content produced by the RIAA's clients. At least, if I were a lawyer for Fox, that is what I'd be trying to do. In our precedent-saturated legal system in the US, if it worked once, it will probably work again.
Why is that bad? That seems rather smart.
Here's what I find unacceptable. When companies sell the information they gathered from their business relationship with me to others. As long as they keep it to themselves, what they do with the information they acquired from me should be used to increase their profits. That's certainly what I'd do.
Hmmm...so you are okay with a shopkeeper charging you $40 for a Red Baron pizza, because he predicted that is the optimal price point for you? Really? And pardon me if I think you are naive for believing that preventing retailers from selling your shopping habit data to other retailers is going to protect you. Every store that sells Red Baron pizzas is eventually going to be able to profile you if you continue to demand Red Baron pizzas. Eventually every store you have access to is going to be able to predict exactly what you can and can't afford and set their prices for you accordingly. They don't need to share the data among themselves -- you are going to bring it with you whenever you go shopping for a Red Baron pizza; as long as they are allowed to accumulate and data-mine your shopping habits, you are screwed. Per-customer pricing is the holy grail of price optimization, and you are blithely endorsing it.
Some simple analysis allows him to predict quite accurately what you are going to buy and when you are going to buy it. So he jacks up those prices on D-1 and lowers them again on D+1. The Walmart grocery store in my neighborhood appears to be already doing this; the variance I get in the price of a Red Baron pizza correlates too strongly with payroll dates for the lower middle class neighborhood I live in for it to be a coincidence.
Price fluctuates with demand you say? Egads, you should write a paper!
Well, yeah, it does indeed, but the problem with optimizing a price point is that variability. That pesky, fluctuating curve makes profit optimization damn near impossible. Entrepreneurs have attacked the variability problem from the supply side (monopolies, cartels, and consortia conspiring to artificially constrain supply and kill off competition) and from the demand side (marketing campaigns to artificially boost demand) but both those strategies are sub-optimal in that both still introduce enough unpredictability in price points to make real optimization impossible. What I was trying to point out is that the glut of information on buying habits data-mined from unwary consumers is going to completely distort that curve into something way more amenable to optimization. I don't mind a boutique dealer charging all the traffic will bear for a diamond-coated iPod, but I really do have issues with the guy I need to buy food from having the same kind of price-setting power as the boutique dealer when I'm hungry. This kind of information makes attacking the variability problem with the supply/demand curve not only feasible, but has the disturbing potential of removing that variability completely, leaving consumers without any protection at all from predatory pricing.