Why do you make such a fuss about this? Just don't read those comments if you're fed up with them. I assume you don't read Slashdot at -1 and rail against every troll that exists down there, especially since some of them have been repeating for years. So why do it with NSA comments?
It's not harmful to discuss ways to limit the NSA's reach, and it's actually good to keep the outrage alive. The worst thing for democracy is what you propose. Saying "yadda yadda, here's the solution, move on" hides the problem away and lets people forget that they should demand change at every election. The result is that the public discussion window is moved into a space where people who disagree with surveillance are now considered radicals or tinfoil hatted, just for talking about it in public.
BTW, how do you think the radical republicans win so many elections? They stay on message relentlessly. It's mindnumbing, totally braindead, AND IT WORKS.
IMHO, you can just let people discuss the NSA, and filter it out if you don't like it.
I don't mean Adam. I mean others who do the same around the world, but stay anonymous and somewhat more hidden.
There comes a time when the success of the end goal is more important than the rewards from being known as a champion of the cause.
Adam thought it was right to be martyred, he thought copying Rosa Parks' method would bring social change. But change doesn't come from a single person. It comes from unavoidable facts on the ground. To make universal knowledge a reality, it is first necessary to have all books and journals available in torrents and file sharing sites everywhere. When we can all download knowledge as easily as the latest hollywood blockbuster, only *then* can the politicians be convinced to change the laws to agree with what people already expect by that time.
People and politicians have very little imagination. They can't believe a society can flourish with universal knowledge for all. So they have to be shown, first that the world isn't going to be destroyed if knowledge is free, and second that the benefits to society outweigh the benefits to a few corporate leeches of keeping knowledge locked up.
Knowledge is like a road, even though taxpayers funded the building of it, tourists from other countries aren't forbidden to drive on it.
Luckily, there are some hackers out there who understand this, and work hard to unlock journal articles and books so that the whole world can read them.
Just because you think you're not a spammer doesn't make you not a spammer.
Spam is in the eye of the beholder, and that's not you.
So chill out, accept that your newsletter isn't the best thing since sliced bread, and that the fact you're sending it to someone who was probably tricked into subscribing, but changed their mind once they read the first paragraph, doesn't make it legitimate for all time or any time at all.
The Internet doesn't owe you a living. Don't send out your messages, make a website and leave them there. If people want to read them, they'll come. Peace.
lets fiddle with apps while driving 70 mph! what could possibly go wrong?
Nothing! Unless the apple stays stuck in your SO's hooha, in which case you'd better make an emergency stop at the side of the road before all hell breaks loose.
Well, already the analogy with the Halting Problem is flawed, an instance of the fallacy of division, actually: while the question of whether a program will halt is not solvable for all programs in general, it is trivially solvable for a whole lot of quite simple programs. There's no reason to believe that human beings, viewed as formal computer programs say, are so complex that the halting problem fails on them. In fact, that's just hubris, stemming from the religious need to consider ourselves the pinnacle of creation^H^H^H complexity.
As a society, we frown upon women going around topless in certain places, such as shopping malls, restaurants, corporate buildings, etc. and not others, eg. the beach. We also frown upon both men and women peeing in the streets in full view of passers by.
These are natural states of being, and natural bodily functions, and yet it is considered inappropriate to flaunt them in public. Similarly, breastfeeding is perfectly natural, yet being discreet about it makes perfect sense.
People can totally approve of women breastfeeding, and yet not want to see it happening when they're walking about town, and expect discretion.
Are you f*** daft? Markets don't magically fix shortages, whatever your misconceptions tell you. The predicted shortages _will_ happen, as the available oil on Earth is finite, and taking huge quantities out of the ground just to burn it is becoming harder and harder. Those are physical facts. When physics meets economic fantasy, physics wins. Every time.
The only thing markets did in this case was destroy demand, as people who would otherwise have been able to afford to buy their share of oil were unable to compete with the hoarders. That didn't solve the shortages either, it just made them more acute until the poor gave up.
It's not about firing them. It's about them doing your bidding. If you're a major funder for them, they'll close an eye when they catch you doing something illegal, and they'll even run interference with the real cops to allow you to do your illegal activities.
A private corp has no obligation to the public, or to treat people equally under the law. A private corp only has obligations to the shareholders and directors, and "helping" the local Al Capone stay in business so he can continue to fund them is entirely what you can expect to happen with any private police force.
(Please don't start in with
"That's a data type, not a structure." Nonsense. They're all structures.)
Well, 50 years ago I would have agreed, but we're no longer in the Bourbaki era, and I'm afraid structures have mostly given way to categories... Oh, sorry, wrong subject;-)
Hash tables are not "basic". [...]
In some sense they are, if you consider randomness as a basic concept. However, I think you're blurring the line between a dictionary (which is the basic structure) and a hash table (which is only one concrete implementation of a dictionary).
No, it's market capitalism. They'll sell the data to the NSA and other governments who are willing to pay for it. When Facebook does it, everyone calls it genius.
It's easy, for academics especially, to study a subject so much and
for so long, that with hindsight the early mistakes become "obvious",
and the early attitudes that people had (say, about what freedoms
should be self evident) become naive in light of the later attitudes
of the victors that prevail.
Think of it like this... Suppose you have a simple game of heads or tails. If you have a biased coin that shows heads 60% of the time, and tails only 40%, then if you start off with enough money to begin with, you can play for a long time, winning and losing. But the casino will very quickly figure out that you're not playing with a 50/50 coin, way before you come anywhere near losing all your money, or making a bundle.
Now casinos see so many players coming and going, they have very detailed stats on how a typical person behaves, and that's even before you add the mathematical analysis of the game per se. So if *you* aren't acting like 99% of the *stupid* people who go there every day, you're already suspicious and probably a cheater. Let's say the casino needs 100 events to classify you as being different from 99% of players... say there are 5 events being monitored per round, then they'll identify you within 20 rounds. That's a couple of hours at most.
(I use the word event for a reason - namely they need not have anything to do with the amount that's being won. They could be how many times you're going to the toilet in an hour, how often you drink, how many people you talk to, etc. Everything you do can classify you as being normal or an outlier especially when there are so many player stats that have already been collected for years)
Standard deviation is an elementary statistic applicable mainly to normal populations. The beauty of stats is that many quantities (they're all technically called "statistics") can be monitored, and _all_ of them converge simultaneously to their distributional values due to the law of large numbers. Detecting deviations from the expected distribution is
therefore a matter of monitoring several quantities simultaneously. In most cases, these will be of the Neyman Pearson variety, or approximations thereof, if you care to know.
If you're going to allow illegal killing of people as a valid penalty things, then you might as well say that anyone who isn't killed gets off easy for/anything/.
Full on slavery didn't have any responsibility towards the slaves. The little concessions the slaves got, if at all, were given only because it made economic sense (eg room and board, because it makes sense to keep slaves alive and in good health, so they can, you know, work for free and all).
Nonsense. It's easy to monitor cheats, you certainly don't have to know if they're folding improbable hands or not. All you have to do is see how often they win. If they win too often, they're cheating. Stats don't lie.
The original Star Wars trilogy, before stuff was retconned in, had no CGI.
(I mean, none of the immersive stuff that's supposed to integrate seamlessly with scenes, not talking about the primitive graphics displayed on targeting computers)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not harmful to discuss ways to limit the NSA's reach, and it's actually good to keep the outrage alive. The worst thing for democracy is what you propose. Saying "yadda yadda, here's the solution, move on" hides the problem away and lets people forget that they should demand change at every election. The result is that the public discussion window is moved into a space where people who disagree with surveillance are now considered radicals or tinfoil hatted, just for talking about it in public.
BTW, how do you think the radical republicans win so many elections? They stay on message relentlessly. It's mindnumbing, totally braindead, AND IT WORKS.
IMHO, you can just let people discuss the NSA, and filter it out if you don't like it.
There comes a time when the success of the end goal is more important than the rewards from being known as a champion of the cause. Adam thought it was right to be martyred, he thought copying Rosa Parks' method would bring social change. But change doesn't come from a single person. It comes from unavoidable facts on the ground. To make universal knowledge a reality, it is first necessary to have all books and journals available in torrents and file sharing sites everywhere. When we can all download knowledge as easily as the latest hollywood blockbuster, only *then* can the politicians be convinced to change the laws to agree with what people already expect by that time.
People and politicians have very little imagination. They can't believe a society can flourish with universal knowledge for all. So they have to be shown, first that the world isn't going to be destroyed if knowledge is free, and second that the benefits to society outweigh the benefits to a few corporate leeches of keeping knowledge locked up.
Knowledge is like a road, even though taxpayers funded the building of it, tourists from other countries aren't forbidden to drive on it.
Luckily, there are some hackers out there who understand this, and work hard to unlock journal articles and books so that the whole world can read them.
Spam is in the eye of the beholder, and that's not you.
So chill out, accept that your newsletter isn't the best thing since sliced bread, and that the fact you're sending it to someone who was probably tricked into subscribing, but changed their mind once they read the first paragraph, doesn't make it legitimate for all time or any time at all.
The Internet doesn't owe you a living. Don't send out your messages, make a website and leave them there. If people want to read them, they'll come. Peace.
Nothing! Unless the apple stays stuck in your SO's hooha, in which case you'd better make an emergency stop at the side of the road before all hell breaks loose.
Well, already the analogy with the Halting Problem is flawed, an instance of the fallacy of division, actually: while the question of whether a program will halt is not solvable for all programs in general, it is trivially solvable for a whole lot of quite simple programs. There's no reason to believe that human beings, viewed as formal computer programs say, are so complex that the halting problem fails on them. In fact, that's just hubris, stemming from the religious need to consider ourselves the pinnacle of creation^H^H^H complexity.
It's all in the perception. You should have shown up at the interview with an old teddybear.
Except for Lisp. Lisp is an AST.
As a society, we frown upon women going around topless in certain places, such as shopping malls, restaurants, corporate buildings, etc. and not others, eg. the beach. We also frown upon both men and women peeing in the streets in full view of passers by. These are natural states of being, and natural bodily functions, and yet it is considered inappropriate to flaunt them in public. Similarly, breastfeeding is perfectly natural, yet being discreet about it makes perfect sense.
People can totally approve of women breastfeeding, and yet not want to see it happening when they're walking about town, and expect discretion.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather see Saddam being beheaded, than seeing Saddam's boobies :/
Overdone *now* ? It's been overdone ever since Buffy ended and they started making vampires into pre-teen girly heart throbs.
The only thing markets did in this case was destroy demand, as people who would otherwise have been able to afford to buy their share of oil were unable to compete with the hoarders. That didn't solve the shortages either, it just made them more acute until the poor gave up.
Hill out man, it's a typo. He meant to write "butt"
A private corp has no obligation to the public, or to treat people equally under the law. A private corp only has obligations to the shareholders and directors, and "helping" the local Al Capone stay in business so he can continue to fund them is entirely what you can expect to happen with any private police force.
Mongo is webscale.
Well, 50 years ago I would have agreed, but we're no longer in the Bourbaki era, and I'm afraid structures have mostly given way to categories... Oh, sorry, wrong subject ;-)
In some sense they are, if you consider randomness as a basic concept. However, I think you're blurring the line between a dictionary (which is the basic structure) and a hash table (which is only one concrete implementation of a dictionary).
No, it's market capitalism. They'll sell the data to the NSA and other governments who are willing to pay for it. When Facebook does it, everyone calls it genius.
It's easy, for academics especially, to study a subject so much and for so long, that with hindsight the early mistakes become "obvious", and the early attitudes that people had (say, about what freedoms should be self evident) become naive in light of the later attitudes of the victors that prevail.
Now casinos see so many players coming and going, they have very detailed stats on how a typical person behaves, and that's even before you add the mathematical analysis of the game per se. So if *you* aren't acting like 99% of the *stupid* people who go there every day, you're already suspicious and probably a cheater. Let's say the casino needs 100 events to classify you as being different from 99% of players... say there are 5 events being monitored per round, then they'll identify you within 20 rounds. That's a couple of hours at most.
(I use the word event for a reason - namely they need not have anything to do with the amount that's being won. They could be how many times you're going to the toilet in an hour, how often you drink, how many people you talk to, etc. Everything you do can classify you as being normal or an outlier especially when there are so many player stats that have already been collected for years)
Sorry, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Standard deviation is an elementary statistic applicable mainly to normal populations. The beauty of stats is that many quantities (they're all technically called "statistics") can be monitored, and _all_ of them converge simultaneously to their distributional values due to the law of large numbers. Detecting deviations from the expected distribution is therefore a matter of monitoring several quantities simultaneously. In most cases, these will be of the Neyman Pearson variety, or approximations thereof, if you care to know.
If you're going to allow illegal killing of people as a valid penalty things, then you might as well say that anyone who isn't killed gets off easy for /anything/.
Full on slavery didn't have any responsibility towards the slaves. The little concessions the slaves got, if at all, were given only because it made economic sense (eg room and board, because it makes sense to keep slaves alive and in good health, so they can, you know, work for free and all).
Nonsense. It's easy to monitor cheats, you certainly don't have to know if they're folding improbable hands or not. All you have to do is see how often they win. If they win too often, they're cheating. Stats don't lie.
(I mean, none of the immersive stuff that's supposed to integrate seamlessly with scenes, not talking about the primitive graphics displayed on targeting computers)