I have noticed that UFO sightings were a lot more common when people weren't carrying smartphones with integrated cameras with them. Now that everybody's got one, the UFOs have disappeared.
I don't really have issues with the basic idea of UFOs as long as you manage to treat them as just that, Unknown Flying Objects and manage to restrain your imagination and maintain critical thinking when evaluating a sighting. I have issues with people who default to the assumption that UFOs are alien spacecraft and often get angry when you point out an alternative explanation or raise questions. Something like 99% of UFOs are known natural phenomenons of some kind, or caused by mundane man made objects. Of the remainder something like 0.9999...% are more interesting things, like military aircraft of some kind, possibly (if you are lucky) military prototypes or some kind of rare or (if you are REALLY lucky) unknown natural phenomenon. The remainder are things that might possibly be Aliens but the overwhelming odds are that on closer examination they belong to they are one of the former two groups.
That is a nice idea and your president is free to go down south and ask them but something tells me that the closest he'll ever get to a Mexican funded trip to the moon is a phalanx of Mexicans mooning him with the words 'Ni un peso!' written in YUGE! letters across their backsides.
The Apple Watch isn't "nearly useless" without an iPhone, It IS useless without an iPhone.
It simply will not run if not paired with an iPhone. Even then, even if you could magically make it run without a paired iPhone, there are a whole mess of settings you can ONLY set using the paired iPhone. Things that you cannot do at all through the watch. For example, you can't update the software without the paired phone, you can't change notification settings without the paired phone, you can't install apps without the paired phone, you can't set the watch's time without the paired phone, and those are just some of the things that can't be done on the watch itself.
Beyond that, as has already been pointed out multiple times, "fitness trackers" are worthless. They give people a false sense of how "active" they are, which causes them to be less active than without the tracker. Buy one for the "smart" features like notifications, forget the fitness tracking features. They're worthless.
You left out the part where it sucks the life force out of you and sends it to wirelessly to Tim Cook so he can use it in the vile necromancy experiments he conducts in the hidden dungeons underneath Apples HQ.
Next? There are wind powered ships with sails and shit under development as we speak. The concepts range anywhere from augmenting normal diesel propulsion with computer controlled sail to a ships with a super light shape optimised hull, a battery-electric propulsion and a combination of solar panels and computer controlled sails. Some of these things look like something straight out of the 5th element's Fhloston paradise. The shipping companies have expressed interest because of the potential fuel savings. Even upgrading a traditional diesel powered cargo ships with some form of computer controlled auxiliary sail can cut fuel consumption by between 5 and 15% and if you think about it, spending weeks sailing blue water with favourable winds blowing your way and not using them is kind of stupid.
This microwave system would be worthless at countering a NK missile launch. It would only be useful as a first strike weapon. Fear of an American preemptive strike is exactly what motivated NK to develop their nukes in the first place.
All this is assuming the news report itself is not complete boloney that is simply designed to cause a reaction so the recon analysts can see which ones of the 258 suspected high tech and nuclear weapons sites in N-Korea show a sudden flurry of activity erecting screen defences against a first strike with a microwave weapon.
Do you have any evidence that anything even remotely close this has ever happened? Or is this just paranoia talking?
Since we seem to be incapable of differentiating between a company and a government these days, I'm curious why the same level of fear does not govern the rest of your purchases? I mean:
That fancy phone you have? The Chinese are after you!
Your Nintendo? The Japanese are watching.
Your BMW/Mercedes? The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!
That cheese you bought? It could have been poisoned by french spies!
Can't trust anyone! Food must be grown everyone, and aluminium hats must be smelted personally or they too cannot be trusted.
There has been a claim to this effect by Israeli intelligence, i.e. that Kaspersky is a front for the FSB and they use it as a search engine to look for documents containing certain code words. They even claim to have hacked Russian systems and watched their Russian colleagues use Kaspersky's systems to run search jobs in real time:
I don't know if this is true but it sounds plausible. If you wanted to search millions of documents on millions of computers world wide for certain code words can you imagine a better way to do that than modifying an existing anti-virus program already widely installed on many computers world wide that scans every file on your hard disk searching for viruses with your explicit permission? Modifying a virus program to do this would be about as hard as bolting a trailer hook to the back of your car. Also the Defense Intelligence Agency has been flagging Kaspersky as a potential security threat for a few years now.
"Rational"? Really? I do not think it means what you think it means.
Every time I look at this chart I think: "Tulip bulbs"... of course there is once again no shortage of people telling me this is completely sustainable and will go on forever.
why is it whenever Benghazi is mentioned no one ever looks at the fact that a Republican controlled Congress slashed the security budget for the State Department?
I don't know if this applies to Benghazi but what the Republicans normally do is make sure that any spending cuts manifest themselves on the Democrat's watch. They are doing the same thing with the current tax cut. I believe it is called the "Two Santa Clause" strategy. Both parties have a Santa Claus, Republican Santa and Democrat Santa. What the Republicans must do is send in Republican Santa Claus, run up a huge deficit by having Republican Santa promise people massive and popular tax cuts, then defer the financing of those tax cuts until the democrats are in power and force them to shoot their Santa Claus to pay for Republican Santa's largesse. This theory was popularised by a guy called Jude Wanniski back in the late 1970s and the American electorate and the Democrat party are still falling for it, with Obama being the latest victim. Remember how the Republicans screamed their heads off over Obama's policies causing deficits that he actually inherited from the Bush administration?... that was the Republicans forcing Obama to shoot Democrat Santa to pay for the presents handed out by Republican Santa (and if you don't believe me get a Republican strategy lesson straight from the horse's mouth). Apart from defeating Republican tax cut bills, the only way out of this would seem to be for the Democrats to become just as fiscally irresponsible as the Republicans and continue deferring the spending cuts in some way and dump them in the lap of the next Republican administration. Either that or mount a grass roots revolution, dump their current leadership, read Machiavelli and the Republican playbook, fight back and get massively better at communicating with the electorate but that seems about as likely to happen as a dog laying an egg and that egg hatching into a unicorn.
Just how far does this guy have to go before he lacks the support to continue?
I've heard Trump voters saying things along the lines of "If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him, hold on a second, I need to check with the president if it is true. That is how confident I feel in the president."
We have a pretty long way to go if ostensibly Christian voters will choose to believe Trump rather than their God.
I heard a (female) Trumpkin and self confessed eveangelical say that: "...he must walk with god, if you are that rich god must love you". It is fascinating how Americans have managed to turn Jesus who stormed into the temple in Jerusalem and toppled the moneylender's tables into a modern day god of money and greed.
Ireland is in almost the unique position to ignore this particular EU directive. The EU will not kick them out.
No it is not. The EU is backing the Republic to the hilt in the N-Ireland border dispute with Britain due to Brexit and the EU has pretty much told them the EU will veto any offer the British make that the Irish Republic does not like. It is very much in Ireland's interest not to piss the EU off any more and the EU26 are already pretty pissed over Ireland's tax haven antics.
Meanwhile the Antarctic is being sucked dry of everything that swims as quickly as the massive seafood concerns can fish.
Lots of it is illegal fishing, and using slave labour.
Also the Pacific is being fished empty, illegally by vast foreign fishing fleets, despite the Pacific nations protests.
In my view commercial fishing is unsustainable long term, and should be outlawed completely.
Not just the Pacific, fishing fleets from the Pacific have been operating in the North Atlantic for years. A lot of these fleets come from places like Taiwan and the Comoros. There are also fleets engaging in massive overfishing operating out of Italy and the Balkans. The only way to fix this is to extend the fisheries managment authority of nations to international waters and then form naval task forces with the authority to board and confiscate illegal fishing vessels under piracy laws. Soft power isn't enough anymore, the gloves have to come off.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein told Bloomberg that the currency serves as "a vehicle for perpetrating fraud."
Whereas Goldman Sachs is a vehicle for what exactly?
Goldman Sachs and the rest of that entire system is, to quote Adam Smith, a vehicle for perpetrating a "conspiracy against the public'. Bitcoin is a way of circumventing that system which is why the system feels threatened by it. I don't think there is a real way to kill Bitcoin or rather what it represents. I've heard people like Stiglitz try to argue against Bitcoin because it 'helps terrorists' or 'facilitates criminality' but so do cash and uncut diamonds, those excuses are just fig leaves. The real threat is that Bitcoin facilitates the circumvention of the established gate keepers of the financial system. Even if Goldman Sachs and the rest of that ilk get their bought politicians to kill Bitcoin people will find other forms of portable wealth and use it as a way to circumvent the established financial system and the harder Wall Street and the politicos try to block these circuitous routes the more motivated people will become to invent new ones.
It has been argued that part of the reason to supplement farmers income is to make sure our food supply is secure. Ultimately we probably need to bring back more tech production so we can have semi secure sources to build common items.
Oh gawd I hope not the farm subsidy model is more rotten that road kill in July. Every year the subsidies for the farmers get bigger in the name of food supply security (cue flag waving and patriotic music) and more of the demands on these people to actually try to minimise the level of subsides and work for a living evaporates. I can't comment on the situation in the US but with 40-60% of farmer's direct incomes are being paid by the taxpayer and/or the EU depending on where you live in Europe. Every time somebody tries to reform the money eating black hole that is the farm subsidy system the farmers and their lobbyists go ape shit throwing crazy and choke any reform effort at birth. The last thing we need is a tech sector that works like that, where all drive for excellence and innovation has been ritually murdered by special interests cliques, lobbyists and pork barrel politics.
"Smarter" is a subjective, human-centric criterion. The article talks about "brainier" and the NUMBER of neurons. Big difference -- if YOU were smarter, that is.
There is a debate in palaeontology about how to best measure the level of advancement of ancient hominid species. Until pretty recently brain size was one of the main metrics. What happened to change that idea was a series of finds of a number of 1.8 million years old Homo Erectus skulls at a place called Dmanisi in Georgia. The reason these finds are remarkable is not only because H Erectus remains very rare but also because these individuals lived in not only in the same place but also pretty much at the same time. Even so there is an enormous variation in morphological features in the Dmanisi adults, especially brain size. These skulls had a brain size from around 550 to 750 cubic centimetres where 550 cubic centimetres is pretty close to that of a much more archaic Australopithecus. In fact proportionately this is a smaller range of variation than you see in modern humans. So the question is how much in the way of conclusions can you draw from metrics like number of neurons and brain size in cubic centimetres? I'm almost 7 feet tall, have met modern humans two feet smaller than me with brains much smaller than mine that were every bit as intelligent as I am. The point is that it's not necessarily the number of neurons or the size of the brain that matters (although having more of one type of neuron than some other species might make a difference), the brain is a neural network (surprise, surprise) and what matters is (a) is the way the network is wired up and (b) the way the network is trained.
Apple's response is just PR-driven BS, and your comment does NOT deserve the "insightful" moderation the shills and sakura gave it. The only insight from your comment is that you have minimal contact with Apple.
Try and honestly criticize Apple in an Apple-controlled venue and you will find out what total lack of respect means in a profit-dominated context. For example, if you had tried to describe this rather horrendous security problem and gotten too negative, I predict you would have found your comment blocked. Based on my years of experiences involving a MacBook Pro (which I still use on a daily basis for certain tasks), I actually think Apple has automated the censorship using sentiment analysis of the draft comment. Or perhaps it's profile-driven by the secret dossiers they have on each of us?
I could write a more substantive response on the topic, but here on Slashdot such a comment would merely be shouted down by pro-Apple fanbois with mod points to burn. Not worth the time, though I will donate a few seconds for a rerun of the capsule version:
Capitalism and communism are dead. Our new religion is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's chief prophet.
Why use so many words? You could have packaged all that into a single sentence:
Blasphemy!! Summon the Holy Inquisition !! BUUUUUUURN THE HERETIC!!!
It's funny how iPadificaton of the desktop OS seems to be a threat constantly looming over the Mac, yet always lands on Windows...
It must have decided after extensive contemplation that Microsoft is more deserving. I can't say that I will miss it, the iPad UI is one of the reasons I abandoned the iPad for a MacBook and I would do the same if I was an Android user since the Android tablet UI isn't a damn sight better. On the Desktop UI I can have multiple windows open, switch between them easily, size them as I want, navigating with the keyboard is quicker, easier and much less frustrating, especially when doing things like copy/pasting text and the apps are more powerful.
The political appointee positions you speak of typically turn over after each administration - it is rare, but not unheard of, for them to remain between administrations.
Republican obstinacy under Obama did not create additional opportunities to put republicans in political appointee positions. Democrat obstinacy under Trump is a bit more overt that under Obama - with Democrats proudly referring to themselves as the party of 'no', a label they used to mock republicans as recently as last year.
People can try and pivot this 'my way or the high way' attitude onto the Democrats all they want but it was the Reps. who started it. It was Mitch McConnell who started that tradition and now he's stuck with it. If he really pulls off the great American tax-cut the Republican party will get slaughtered in 2018 and 2020, lose the house, the senate or both and possibly the presidency as well. Jeff Flake is right, with Trump and Moore's scandal baggage tied to it's legs and McConnell's 'my way or the highway' politics weighing it down the Republican party is toast. Where does this ultra partisanship get anybody? People are not stupid, they know what that tax-cut is about, they can see their own tax-cuts will time expire limited but those for Trump's cronies are permanent. People are missing the days when Conservatives were people you could negotiate with, when you could hammer out a compromise in a smoke filled room, get a bipartisan passing vote in Congress and ignore the lunatic fringe of both parties. That is a physical impossibility today. Nobody on either side thought these compromises were optimal but everybody could live with them, all we have today is unrestrained corruption and trench warfare and people are completely sick of it.
I just watched a bunch of Republicans c*rcle j*rking on YouTube about how they were now facing an unprecedented pool of unfilled positions in the judicial system that can now be filled with 'right thinking people' thanks to McConnell's obstructionist tactics during the Obama presidency.
Not to defend the clearly-partisan choices of the Trump administration, but Hillary explicitly promised "activist judges" - one of the few campaign promises I truly believe she intended to keep. It doesn't make Trump and friends right for doing it, but there was simply no way we were going to get nonpartisan judges out of the 2016 election.
So now you have arch conservative Republican judges being appointed and those guys are not 'activist judges' ? Furthermore many of them are into the bargain either woefully inexperienced, down right incompetent, simply corrupt or some combination of the three and they are not appointed by the administration, they are being appointed by the Federalist Society. Who the hell elected the Federalist Society?
I just watched a bunch of Republicans c*rcle j*rking on YouTube about how they were now facing an unprecedented pool of unfilled positions in the judicial system that can now be filled with 'right thinking people' thanks to McConnell's obstructionist tactics during the Obama presidency. The number of slots they have to fill must be huge since the Federalist Society, to whom Trump has outsourced these appointments, is having such trouble finding qualified candidates that they are elevating people to the bench who have never even tried a case. The incompetence of some of these appointees is staggering. Basically some of the biggest crooks in the USA are reshaping the US justice system for the next 40 years so I would not get my hopes up if I was Professor Wu about these people doing squat about net neutrality.
This is completely manufactured outrage. This regulatory stunt of the Obama's administration was an overreach of the magnitude beyond that of any of Trumps, but it's good because it claims to be "network neutrality" even though it's nothing of the sort. If it were really that important, why didn't Obama implement it early in his tenure? Oh, that's right, because it was completely a political stunt.
If you were honest, you'd read what Pai wrote about many of the rollbacks of regulation. Of course, he's a Trump appointee, so he must be evil and lying. I'm sure he wasn't evil and lying when he was an Obama appointee. Much of the regulation pushed through the FCC by the Obama administration was a deliberate departure from the intent and letter of the law. This is one of them. Changing a law that clearly says "voice telephony" to apply to all data transmission demonstrates contempt for the law. Further, giving all internet metadata to the various LEOs under CALEA was, at best, an oversight, but more likely a malicious attempt to bypass many of the protections that we regained when the NSA spying was judged illegal.
Everybody is always being so unfair to Trump, SAD!:-(
I'll accept that logic as soon as they also acknowledge that "a government agency is not empowered to create real property," meaning all patents are invalid, and we can shut down the PATB due to it no longer being needed.
That is as likely to happen as posting a stop sign on the beach is likely to stop the tide coming in.
As more and more traffic is SSL, deep-packet-inspection is basically dead, except in enterprise environments where they can push their own CA into the clients and break the tunnel.
The whole thing is stupid. A typical sign of a clueless nil-whit trying to do policy.
The guy is a paid mercenary enabled by bought reactionary politicians and they are all doing the bidding of players who have vested interests in killing net neutrality and blocking torrents. If any of this is hurting tech firms then tech firms should invest some of their money in lobbying and a whole lot more in doing what the Koch brothers and other reactionary political donors do, tech firms should support progressive political candidates that think like they do. What is unfolding now is what happens when you sit with your thumb up your fundament and let the likes of the Koch brothers run riot. Bill Maher is right, it's time to fight back and fight dirty.
Slashdot Mirror
I have noticed that UFO sightings were a lot more common when people weren't carrying smartphones with integrated cameras with them. Now that everybody's got one, the UFOs have disappeared.
I don't really have issues with the basic idea of UFOs as long as you manage to treat them as just that, Unknown Flying Objects and manage to restrain your imagination and maintain critical thinking when evaluating a sighting. I have issues with people who default to the assumption that UFOs are alien spacecraft and often get angry when you point out an alternative explanation or raise questions. Something like 99% of UFOs are known natural phenomenons of some kind, or caused by mundane man made objects. Of the remainder something like 0.9999...% are more interesting things, like military aircraft of some kind, possibly (if you are lucky) military prototypes or some kind of rare or (if you are REALLY lucky) unknown natural phenomenon. The remainder are things that might possibly be Aliens but the overwhelming odds are that on closer examination they belong to they are one of the former two groups.
Simple.
He's going to get Mexico to pay for it!
and it's going to be YUGE!
That is a nice idea and your president is free to go down south and ask them but something tells me that the closest he'll ever get to a Mexican funded trip to the moon is a phalanx of Mexicans mooning him with the words 'Ni un peso!' written in YUGE! letters across their backsides.
Stuff that matters?
Yes, if only to teach the less savvy not to get into a market at the peak of a bubble.
The Apple Watch isn't "nearly useless" without an iPhone, It IS useless without an iPhone.
It simply will not run if not paired with an iPhone. Even then, even if you could magically make it run without a paired iPhone, there are a whole mess of settings you can ONLY set using the paired iPhone. Things that you cannot do at all through the watch. For example, you can't update the software without the paired phone, you can't change notification settings without the paired phone, you can't install apps without the paired phone, you can't set the watch's time without the paired phone, and those are just some of the things that can't be done on the watch itself.
Beyond that, as has already been pointed out multiple times, "fitness trackers" are worthless. They give people a false sense of how "active" they are, which causes them to be less active than without the tracker. Buy one for the "smart" features like notifications, forget the fitness tracking features. They're worthless.
You left out the part where it sucks the life force out of you and sends it to wirelessly to Tim Cook so he can use it in the vile necromancy experiments he conducts in the hidden dungeons underneath Apples HQ.
Wind powered ships with sails and shit
Next? There are wind powered ships with sails and shit under development as we speak. The concepts range anywhere from augmenting normal diesel propulsion with computer controlled sail to a ships with a super light shape optimised hull, a battery-electric propulsion and a combination of solar panels and computer controlled sails. Some of these things look like something straight out of the 5th element's Fhloston paradise. The shipping companies have expressed interest because of the potential fuel savings. Even upgrading a traditional diesel powered cargo ships with some form of computer controlled auxiliary sail can cut fuel consumption by between 5 and 15% and if you think about it, spending weeks sailing blue water with favourable winds blowing your way and not using them is kind of stupid.
This microwave system would be worthless at countering a NK missile launch. It would only be useful as a first strike weapon. Fear of an American preemptive strike is exactly what motivated NK to develop their nukes in the first place.
All this is assuming the news report itself is not complete boloney that is simply designed to cause a reaction so the recon analysts can see which ones of the 258 suspected high tech and nuclear weapons sites in N-Korea show a sudden flurry of activity erecting screen defences against a first strike with a microwave weapon.
Do you have any evidence that anything even remotely close this has ever happened? Or is this just paranoia talking?
Since we seem to be incapable of differentiating between a company and a government these days, I'm curious why the same level of fear does not govern the rest of your purchases? I mean: That fancy phone you have? The Chinese are after you! Your Nintendo? The Japanese are watching. Your BMW/Mercedes? The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming! That cheese you bought? It could have been poisoned by french spies!
Can't trust anyone! Food must be grown everyone, and aluminium hats must be smelted personally or they too cannot be trusted.
There has been a claim to this effect by Israeli intelligence, i.e. that Kaspersky is a front for the FSB and they use it as a search engine to look for documents containing certain code words. They even claim to have hacked Russian systems and watched their Russian colleagues use Kaspersky's systems to run search jobs in real time:
https://www.extremetech.com/in...
I don't know if this is true but it sounds plausible. If you wanted to search millions of documents on millions of computers world wide for certain code words can you imagine a better way to do that than modifying an existing anti-virus program already widely installed on many computers world wide that scans every file on your hard disk searching for viruses with your explicit permission? Modifying a virus program to do this would be about as hard as bolting a trailer hook to the back of your car. Also the Defense Intelligence Agency has been flagging Kaspersky as a potential security threat for a few years now.
"Rational"? Really? I do not think it means what you think it means.
Every time I look at this chart I think: "Tulip bulbs"... of course there is once again no shortage of people telling me this is completely sustainable and will go on forever.
why is it whenever Benghazi is mentioned no one ever looks at the fact that a Republican controlled Congress slashed the security budget for the State Department?
I don't know if this applies to Benghazi but what the Republicans normally do is make sure that any spending cuts manifest themselves on the Democrat's watch. They are doing the same thing with the current tax cut. I believe it is called the "Two Santa Clause" strategy. Both parties have a Santa Claus, Republican Santa and Democrat Santa. What the Republicans must do is send in Republican Santa Claus, run up a huge deficit by having Republican Santa promise people massive and popular tax cuts, then defer the financing of those tax cuts until the democrats are in power and force them to shoot their Santa Claus to pay for Republican Santa's largesse. This theory was popularised by a guy called Jude Wanniski back in the late 1970s and the American electorate and the Democrat party are still falling for it, with Obama being the latest victim. Remember how the Republicans screamed their heads off over Obama's policies causing deficits that he actually inherited from the Bush administration? ... that was the Republicans forcing Obama to shoot Democrat Santa to pay for the presents handed out by Republican Santa (and if you don't believe me get a Republican strategy lesson straight from the horse's mouth). Apart from defeating Republican tax cut bills, the only way out of this would seem to be for the Democrats to become just as fiscally irresponsible as the Republicans and continue deferring the spending cuts in some way and dump them in the lap of the next Republican administration. Either that or mount a grass roots revolution, dump their current leadership, read Machiavelli and the Republican playbook, fight back and get massively better at communicating with the electorate but that seems about as likely to happen as a dog laying an egg and that egg hatching into a unicorn.
Just how far does this guy have to go before he lacks the support to continue?
I've heard Trump voters saying things along the lines of "If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him, hold on a second, I need to check with the president if it is true. That is how confident I feel in the president."
We have a pretty long way to go if ostensibly Christian voters will choose to believe Trump rather than their God.
I heard a (female) Trumpkin and self confessed eveangelical say that: "...he must walk with god, if you are that rich god must love you". It is fascinating how Americans have managed to turn Jesus who stormed into the temple in Jerusalem and toppled the moneylender's tables into a modern day god of money and greed.
Ireland is in almost the unique position to ignore this particular EU directive. The EU will not kick them out.
No it is not. The EU is backing the Republic to the hilt in the N-Ireland border dispute with Britain due to Brexit and the EU has pretty much told them the EU will veto any offer the British make that the Irish Republic does not like. It is very much in Ireland's interest not to piss the EU off any more and the EU26 are already pretty pissed over Ireland's tax haven antics.
Meanwhile the Antarctic is being sucked dry of everything that swims as quickly as the massive seafood concerns can fish. Lots of it is illegal fishing, and using slave labour. Also the Pacific is being fished empty, illegally by vast foreign fishing fleets, despite the Pacific nations protests. In my view commercial fishing is unsustainable long term, and should be outlawed completely.
Not just the Pacific, fishing fleets from the Pacific have been operating in the North Atlantic for years. A lot of these fleets come from places like Taiwan and the Comoros. There are also fleets engaging in massive overfishing operating out of Italy and the Balkans. The only way to fix this is to extend the fisheries managment authority of nations to international waters and then form naval task forces with the authority to board and confiscate illegal fishing vessels under piracy laws. Soft power isn't enough anymore, the gloves have to come off.
Whereas Goldman Sachs is a vehicle for what exactly?
Goldman Sachs and the rest of that entire system is, to quote Adam Smith, a vehicle for perpetrating a "conspiracy against the public'. Bitcoin is a way of circumventing that system which is why the system feels threatened by it. I don't think there is a real way to kill Bitcoin or rather what it represents. I've heard people like Stiglitz try to argue against Bitcoin because it 'helps terrorists' or 'facilitates criminality' but so do cash and uncut diamonds, those excuses are just fig leaves. The real threat is that Bitcoin facilitates the circumvention of the established gate keepers of the financial system. Even if Goldman Sachs and the rest of that ilk get their bought politicians to kill Bitcoin people will find other forms of portable wealth and use it as a way to circumvent the established financial system and the harder Wall Street and the politicos try to block these circuitous routes the more motivated people will become to invent new ones.
It has been argued that part of the reason to supplement farmers income is to make sure our food supply is secure. Ultimately we probably need to bring back more tech production so we can have semi secure sources to build common items.
Oh gawd I hope not the farm subsidy model is more rotten that road kill in July. Every year the subsidies for the farmers get bigger in the name of food supply security (cue flag waving and patriotic music) and more of the demands on these people to actually try to minimise the level of subsides and work for a living evaporates. I can't comment on the situation in the US but with 40-60% of farmer's direct incomes are being paid by the taxpayer and/or the EU depending on where you live in Europe. Every time somebody tries to reform the money eating black hole that is the farm subsidy system the farmers and their lobbyists go ape shit throwing crazy and choke any reform effort at birth. The last thing we need is a tech sector that works like that, where all drive for excellence and innovation has been ritually murdered by special interests cliques, lobbyists and pork barrel politics.
"Smarter" is a subjective, human-centric criterion. The article talks about "brainier" and the NUMBER of neurons. Big difference -- if YOU were smarter, that is.
There is a debate in palaeontology about how to best measure the level of advancement of ancient hominid species. Until pretty recently brain size was one of the main metrics. What happened to change that idea was a series of finds of a number of 1.8 million years old Homo Erectus skulls at a place called Dmanisi in Georgia. The reason these finds are remarkable is not only because H Erectus remains very rare but also because these individuals lived in not only in the same place but also pretty much at the same time. Even so there is an enormous variation in morphological features in the Dmanisi adults, especially brain size. These skulls had a brain size from around 550 to 750 cubic centimetres where 550 cubic centimetres is pretty close to that of a much more archaic Australopithecus. In fact proportionately this is a smaller range of variation than you see in modern humans. So the question is how much in the way of conclusions can you draw from metrics like number of neurons and brain size in cubic centimetres? I'm almost 7 feet tall, have met modern humans two feet smaller than me with brains much smaller than mine that were every bit as intelligent as I am. The point is that it's not necessarily the number of neurons or the size of the brain that matters (although having more of one type of neuron than some other species might make a difference), the brain is a neural network (surprise, surprise) and what matters is (a) is the way the network is wired up and (b) the way the network is trained.
I'm going to enjoy seeing that thing clash with this one: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Apple's response is just PR-driven BS, and your comment does NOT deserve the "insightful" moderation the shills and sakura gave it. The only insight from your comment is that you have minimal contact with Apple.
Try and honestly criticize Apple in an Apple-controlled venue and you will find out what total lack of respect means in a profit-dominated context. For example, if you had tried to describe this rather horrendous security problem and gotten too negative, I predict you would have found your comment blocked. Based on my years of experiences involving a MacBook Pro (which I still use on a daily basis for certain tasks), I actually think Apple has automated the censorship using sentiment analysis of the draft comment. Or perhaps it's profile-driven by the secret dossiers they have on each of us?
I could write a more substantive response on the topic, but here on Slashdot such a comment would merely be shouted down by pro-Apple fanbois with mod points to burn. Not worth the time, though I will donate a few seconds for a rerun of the capsule version:
Capitalism and communism are dead. Our new religion is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's chief prophet.
Why use so many words? You could have packaged all that into a single sentence:
Blasphemy!! Summon the Holy Inquisition !! BUUUUUUURN THE HERETIC!!!
It's funny how iPadificaton of the desktop OS seems to be a threat constantly looming over the Mac, yet always lands on Windows...
It must have decided after extensive contemplation that Microsoft is more deserving. I can't say that I will miss it, the iPad UI is one of the reasons I abandoned the iPad for a MacBook and I would do the same if I was an Android user since the Android tablet UI isn't a damn sight better. On the Desktop UI I can have multiple windows open, switch between them easily, size them as I want, navigating with the keyboard is quicker, easier and much less frustrating, especially when doing things like copy/pasting text and the apps are more powerful.
The political appointee positions you speak of typically turn over after each administration - it is rare, but not unheard of, for them to remain between administrations.
Republican obstinacy under Obama did not create additional opportunities to put republicans in political appointee positions. Democrat obstinacy under Trump is a bit more overt that under Obama - with Democrats proudly referring to themselves as the party of 'no', a label they used to mock republicans as recently as last year.
People can try and pivot this 'my way or the high way' attitude onto the Democrats all they want but it was the Reps. who started it. It was Mitch McConnell who started that tradition and now he's stuck with it. If he really pulls off the great American tax-cut the Republican party will get slaughtered in 2018 and 2020, lose the house, the senate or both and possibly the presidency as well. Jeff Flake is right, with Trump and Moore's scandal baggage tied to it's legs and McConnell's 'my way or the highway' politics weighing it down the Republican party is toast. Where does this ultra partisanship get anybody? People are not stupid, they know what that tax-cut is about, they can see their own tax-cuts will time expire limited but those for Trump's cronies are permanent. People are missing the days when Conservatives were people you could negotiate with, when you could hammer out a compromise in a smoke filled room, get a bipartisan passing vote in Congress and ignore the lunatic fringe of both parties. That is a physical impossibility today. Nobody on either side thought these compromises were optimal but everybody could live with them, all we have today is unrestrained corruption and trench warfare and people are completely sick of it.
I just watched a bunch of Republicans c*rcle j*rking on YouTube about how they were now facing an unprecedented pool of unfilled positions in the judicial system that can now be filled with 'right thinking people' thanks to McConnell's obstructionist tactics during the Obama presidency.
Not to defend the clearly-partisan choices of the Trump administration, but Hillary explicitly promised "activist judges" - one of the few campaign promises I truly believe she intended to keep. It doesn't make Trump and friends right for doing it, but there was simply no way we were going to get nonpartisan judges out of the 2016 election.
So now you have arch conservative Republican judges being appointed and those guys are not 'activist judges' ? Furthermore many of them are into the bargain either woefully inexperienced, down right incompetent, simply corrupt or some combination of the three and they are not appointed by the administration, they are being appointed by the Federalist Society. Who the hell elected the Federalist Society?
I just watched a bunch of Republicans c*rcle j*rking on YouTube about how they were now facing an unprecedented pool of unfilled positions in the judicial system that can now be filled with 'right thinking people' thanks to McConnell's obstructionist tactics during the Obama presidency. The number of slots they have to fill must be huge since the Federalist Society, to whom Trump has outsourced these appointments, is having such trouble finding qualified candidates that they are elevating people to the bench who have never even tried a case. The incompetence of some of these appointees is staggering. Basically some of the biggest crooks in the USA are reshaping the US justice system for the next 40 years so I would not get my hopes up if I was Professor Wu about these people doing squat about net neutrality.
This is completely manufactured outrage. This regulatory stunt of the Obama's administration was an overreach of the magnitude beyond that of any of Trumps, but it's good because it claims to be "network neutrality" even though it's nothing of the sort. If it were really that important, why didn't Obama implement it early in his tenure? Oh, that's right, because it was completely a political stunt.
If you were honest, you'd read what Pai wrote about many of the rollbacks of regulation. Of course, he's a Trump appointee, so he must be evil and lying. I'm sure he wasn't evil and lying when he was an Obama appointee. Much of the regulation pushed through the FCC by the Obama administration was a deliberate departure from the intent and letter of the law. This is one of them. Changing a law that clearly says "voice telephony" to apply to all data transmission demonstrates contempt for the law. Further, giving all internet metadata to the various LEOs under CALEA was, at best, an oversight, but more likely a malicious attempt to bypass many of the protections that we regained when the NSA spying was judged illegal.
Everybody is always being so unfair to Trump, SAD! :-(
Too little too late.
I'll accept that logic as soon as they also acknowledge that "a government agency is not empowered to create real property," meaning all patents are invalid, and we can shut down the PATB due to it no longer being needed.
That is as likely to happen as posting a stop sign on the beach is likely to stop the tide coming in.
As more and more traffic is SSL, deep-packet-inspection is basically dead, except in enterprise environments where they can push their own CA into the clients and break the tunnel.
The whole thing is stupid. A typical sign of a clueless nil-whit trying to do policy.
The guy is a paid mercenary enabled by bought reactionary politicians and they are all doing the bidding of players who have vested interests in killing net neutrality and blocking torrents. If any of this is hurting tech firms then tech firms should invest some of their money in lobbying and a whole lot more in doing what the Koch brothers and other reactionary political donors do, tech firms should support progressive political candidates that think like they do. What is unfolding now is what happens when you sit with your thumb up your fundament and let the likes of the Koch brothers run riot. Bill Maher is right, it's time to fight back and fight dirty.