Ideally, arguing/agreeing on definitions should be one of the first steps in any debate. However, it often happens late (on the Internet and elsewhere), and so people spend a lot of time talking at cross-purposes. I find that in basically any non-trivial debate, the best first question is "What do you mean?". Often several times. (Of course, internet debate usually isn't quite as interactive/interrogative.)
I think, all other things being equal, a static code base is also easier to get into when you're new to it. Especially (but not only) because the tool support is much better or more thorough.
Well, like I said in the bit you chose not to quote, that's not what the grandparent was talking about, he was talking about the public reaction.
But anyway -- Merkel's and the governments reaction is quite clearly a reaction to a German populace which was always deeply wary of nuclear technology, apparently more so some of our neighbours and to a far larger percentage than just the 10+% voters of the Green party. Having displayed a pro-nuclear stance in the current term and having just postponed the (widely supported) nuclear phase-out by a more than a decade, the government clearly felt they had to appear active in some way. So yes, I'd say it's a panicky move by the government, although it's not a panicky reaction to the Japanese accident, but rather to the newly-increased widespread debate on the viability of the technology: the government is frantically trying to re-align its position with public opinion, which it can't afford to ignore at the moment (but maybe in three months). Not that debate wasn't widespread before, there were public protests with tens of thousands of participants last year, as well as large, very widely reported legislative and legal battles.
That said I don't doubt that beyond the political strategy, the accident in Japan also caused some government officials to re-evaluate their faith in the security measures taken so far. So it's really a combination of all three reasons you came up with.
Well, you're basically redefining what the word panic means to suit your argument. But whatever you want to call it, it's still in no way comparable to the reaction to the avian flu epidemic -- which I would hesitate to call a panic, too. But at least that was a major news item, not just that it's spreading elsewhere but how people are trying to protect themselves from the flu; there was public discussion on the readiness and availability of vaccination, governments stockpiling TamiFlu, etc.
None of that is happening in this case. The government reaction and the public discussion is not about the effect of the Japanese accident but about our own (and our neigbours) use of the technology.
The only thing they have to compare it to is Chernobyl, and that was a big deal for Europe. Also, "You're all gonna die!?" drives more traffic than "S'all good, Japs got it taken care of."
Oh please. Maybe it's different where you live, but nobody around here -- Germany -- is "going apeshit" and there is zero panic. Unless you consider turning away from nuclear energy as a panicky reaction, but that's not what you were talking about. Maybe some people are buying masks and iodine pills, but I haven't heard any reports about that being a wide-scale phenomenon, and besides, having those around might not be the worst idea in the world if you're living in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant.
I think everybody knows that Europe will not be directly affected by the nuclear accident in Japan, despite its massive scale. (The indirect effects, mostly economical, are something else entirely.) And of course, the whole thing, the devastation after the earthquake/tsunami as well as Fukushima, is a huge, huge story in the media -- and it damn well should be.
It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's not just a city without privacy, it's a scifi city without privacy. He explicitly says that he imagines a place where all he describes is technically possible; and much of it isn't and won't be in the forseeable future. And as far as science fiction goes, it's not that exciting a text.
He's also trying very hard -- comically so -- to imagine every consequence as being positive: "Advertisements would transform from a pervasive nuisance into something more like useful information." Sure, Scott. And while total surveillance would result in an increase in solved criminal cases which would probably reduce some kinds of crime, others would still exist: many instances of violent crime are committed in the heat of the moment, others are the result of negligence. Neither would be affected by total surveillance, although I'm sure you could come up with some scifi handwaving argument, like saying that the tendency to assault somebody can be determined from genetic traits and previous surveillance like observed shouting or threatening behaviour. And so on...
So you're saying people who are dumb enough to believe stuff they see on CSI are also dumb enough to not care about privacy and think cell phone tracking works the way shown on those shows? Yeah, I know the kind.
Nice collection of straw men you got there, Mr. Four Digit UID. You ARE being tracked with your cell phone, it's just a fact, getting your position is basically a side-effect of the technology, though storing it isn't. But the data is valuable, and without any laws to the contrary why wouldn't the network providers collect it? There have been several cases of the data being sold -- "anonymized", as far as that's possible with location traces. The data isn't routinely analyzed, but the hardware is there to do it. Equally, there have been recorded cases where cell phones that were ostensibly turned off were still active and sending voice data, so that's also not delusional.
Maybe you life a very adjusted life so that none of that worries you, but we're not all like you, and we don't all live in countries where we have the luxury to be such a sheep -- or we expect our countries to change in the future decades.
Does Cyanogen replace everything with open-sourced software? I can well imagine that there's firmware involved with enough functionality to enable the microphone and send out data, without ever reporting to the Android kernel. Maybe not, though.
The tracking comments are completely accurate. It's stunning how almost everybody -- myself included -- is running around with a tracking beacon almost all the time. I mean, that's just crazy, not even the classic dystopian fantasies had that kind of surveillance. And now it's just normal, and worse yet most people aren't even aware of it. And even if they were, they'd just shrug it off; privacy is easily traded away for convenience, and mobile phones are very convenient. Of course, the data is collected by private entities and only given to LEO on request. But the mere fact that the data is collected and stored for any lengths of time is incredible.
We're only at the beginning of what can be done with that data. Of course running around with a disabled cell phone (battery and SIM removed) kind of works to improve anonymity. Replacing the SIM with a prepaid SIM seems like a bad idea, since I'm pretty sure the phone reports the IMEI and the new SIM will immediately be tied to your identity, so that doesn't work at all; in fact, in any kind of automatic analysis doing stuff like this would stand out like a sore thumb. (Putting a bare SIM in the trunk of a car wouldn't do anything, putting it in another cell phone in the trunk of a car would just tie that cell phone to your identity, as well.) As would turning off the phone, incidentally, so while your whereabouts are unknown with a disabled cell phone, the span of time when you're "off the grid" would be part of an analysis.
Randomly switching around cell phones with SIMs among a group of people seems to be a fairly good idea, but it's terribly inconvenient and I'm not sure how big the group would have to be to make it work -- with a small group it's very simple to determine current phone ownership simply by looking at where people stay at night, etc.
Ever heard of silly season? Of course there are times when less stuff is going on and there are few if any major stories. Though I'll give you that the past couple of weeks were back-to-back with major developments. Wikileaks is widely known to take care when and how to release leaks, in fact, above and beyond the sheer infrastructure for anonymous whistleblowing, the public relations "leak" management is really their raison d'etre. Of course it's very debatable if they're really doing a good job of it or if it's a good thing to start with; many people seem to think they should just dump everything they get, possibly after some very light fact-checking and/or editing.
And there's no reason why the current tablet environments can't use a mouse and keyboard, same as the current desktop environments can use a touchscreen.
Yes and there's no reason why a dog can't wear shoes and a suit. They don't, though. And from what I've read, using a keyboard/mouse in a tablet OS -- to the degree that it works at all -- is about as enjoyable as using a touchscreen on a Linux desktop. Which is to say, not very pleasurable at all. And using a netbook is a lot closer to using a regular PC than it is to a tablet device, obviously! I've been running regular Gnome on my desktop, I don't think that'd work on a tablet. Similarly, I can just about imagine running Unity on my dual-screen desktop -- even if it was originally deployed on netbooks. (Not that I'm a big fan: I've tried it on my netbook, and there's still a lot of polishing left; I'm just not sure if Canonical is up to the task of creating a decent shell more or less from scratch.)
Ridiculous snap judgments there, with zero explanation to make them any more valuable.
How the hell do you know what people want in a desktop and who are the people you're referring to? Since Gnome Shell is too late, would it have been more successful a couple of years ago? So the people you're referring to wanted a shell-like desktop earlier, and now they don't?
And how can Unity be outdated compared to the tablet world? At first glance, that's just nonsensical -- Unity is not, primarily, a tablet environment, it's designed to work with very different hardware -- medium to (multiple) extremely large displays, keyboard+mouse, existing desktop applications. That setup is here to stay for a long time still, and it needs some kind of software driving it; that software is not iOS or Honeycomb.
Ignoring all that, a comparison can be made between the two worlds of desktop environments and tablet environments; but I don't think the desktops have a lot to be worried about in that regard. Tablets are nice -- nicer than desktops -- for a number of tasks, but working with multiple applications at the same time, organizing files, things that are at the core of desktop environments (along with providing other central utility applications) are not strong points for tablet environments. Sure, you can argue that most people prefer single-tasking and not having to worry about the file system -- though you didn't, you just obliquely referred to Unity being outdated in some manner -- but I think multi-tasking is here to stay for a long time and in the end you do have to organize your stuff somehow, whether you do it via the filesystem or in iTunes and Picasa.
Me, too. In fact, when I reconverted it back to MP3 to save on size, it sounded worse than the original MP3s! Clearly the FLAC step actually reduces sound quality!
Shareware was also extremely popular on classic Mac OS and at least in early OS X. Lots of very high quality software (including games), too, much of which would have been straight commercial releases on Windows.
Re:Apart from being dumbfoundingly mundane like al
on
Dragon Age II Released
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· Score: 1
Having played all PC versions of Pirates and a few others, the gameplay didn't really change a whole lot as you progressed. It's a fairly varied game overall, though, with elements of story, exploration, trading, fighting, strategy, character development, etc. All of them fairly light fare, though. And I don't really feel like playing an RPG which evolves into a RTS as you describe: I like the tactical combat sometimes seen in good RPGs, but I don't like RTS as a general rule.
Slashdot Mirror
At least we can agree that the packaging is contaminated.
Ideally, arguing/agreeing on definitions should be one of the first steps in any debate. However, it often happens late (on the Internet and elsewhere), and so people spend a lot of time talking at cross-purposes. I find that in basically any non-trivial debate, the best first question is "What do you mean?". Often several times. (Of course, internet debate usually isn't quite as interactive/interrogative.)
I think, all other things being equal, a static code base is also easier to get into when you're new to it. Especially (but not only) because the tool support is much better or more thorough.
Well, like I said in the bit you chose not to quote, that's not what the grandparent was talking about, he was talking about the public reaction.
But anyway -- Merkel's and the governments reaction is quite clearly a reaction to a German populace which was always deeply wary of nuclear technology, apparently more so some of our neighbours and to a far larger percentage than just the 10+% voters of the Green party. Having displayed a pro-nuclear stance in the current term and having just postponed the (widely supported) nuclear phase-out by a more than a decade, the government clearly felt they had to appear active in some way. So yes, I'd say it's a panicky move by the government, although it's not a panicky reaction to the Japanese accident, but rather to the newly-increased widespread debate on the viability of the technology: the government is frantically trying to re-align its position with public opinion, which it can't afford to ignore at the moment (but maybe in three months). Not that debate wasn't widespread before, there were public protests with tens of thousands of participants last year, as well as large, very widely reported legislative and legal battles.
That said I don't doubt that beyond the political strategy, the accident in Japan also caused some government officials to re-evaluate their faith in the security measures taken so far. So it's really a combination of all three reasons you came up with.
Well, you're basically redefining what the word panic means to suit your argument. But whatever you want to call it, it's still in no way comparable to the reaction to the avian flu epidemic -- which I would hesitate to call a panic, too. But at least that was a major news item, not just that it's spreading elsewhere but how people are trying to protect themselves from the flu; there was public discussion on the readiness and availability of vaccination, governments stockpiling TamiFlu, etc.
None of that is happening in this case. The government reaction and the public discussion is not about the effect of the Japanese accident but about our own (and our neigbours) use of the technology.
The only thing they have to compare it to is Chernobyl, and that was a big deal for Europe. Also, "You're all gonna die!?" drives more traffic than "S'all good, Japs got it taken care of."
Except they don't.
Oh please. Maybe it's different where you live, but nobody around here -- Germany -- is "going apeshit" and there is zero panic. Unless you consider turning away from nuclear energy as a panicky reaction, but that's not what you were talking about. Maybe some people are buying masks and iodine pills, but I haven't heard any reports about that being a wide-scale phenomenon, and besides, having those around might not be the worst idea in the world if you're living in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant.
I think everybody knows that Europe will not be directly affected by the nuclear accident in Japan, despite its massive scale. (The indirect effects, mostly economical, are something else entirely.) And of course, the whole thing, the devastation after the earthquake/tsunami as well as Fukushima, is a huge, huge story in the media -- and it damn well should be.
But is that a problem of the US or a problem of concentrated power? I think it's the latter.
It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's not just a city without privacy, it's a scifi city without privacy. He explicitly says that he imagines a place where all he describes is technically possible; and much of it isn't and won't be in the forseeable future. And as far as science fiction goes, it's not that exciting a text.
He's also trying very hard -- comically so -- to imagine every consequence as being positive: "Advertisements would transform from a pervasive nuisance into something more like useful information." Sure, Scott. And while total surveillance would result in an increase in solved criminal cases which would probably reduce some kinds of crime, others would still exist: many instances of violent crime are committed in the heat of the moment, others are the result of negligence. Neither would be affected by total surveillance, although I'm sure you could come up with some scifi handwaving argument, like saying that the tendency to assault somebody can be determined from genetic traits and previous surveillance like observed shouting or threatening behaviour. And so on...
So you're saying people who are dumb enough to believe stuff they see on CSI are also dumb enough to not care about privacy and think cell phone tracking works the way shown on those shows? Yeah, I know the kind.
Nice collection of straw men you got there, Mr. Four Digit UID. You ARE being tracked with your cell phone, it's just a fact, getting your position is basically a side-effect of the technology, though storing it isn't. But the data is valuable, and without any laws to the contrary why wouldn't the network providers collect it? There have been several cases of the data being sold -- "anonymized", as far as that's possible with location traces. The data isn't routinely analyzed, but the hardware is there to do it. Equally, there have been recorded cases where cell phones that were ostensibly turned off were still active and sending voice data, so that's also not delusional.
Maybe you life a very adjusted life so that none of that worries you, but we're not all like you, and we don't all live in countries where we have the luxury to be such a sheep -- or we expect our countries to change in the future decades.
Does Cyanogen replace everything with open-sourced software? I can well imagine that there's firmware involved with enough functionality to enable the microphone and send out data, without ever reporting to the Android kernel. Maybe not, though.
The tracking comments are completely accurate. It's stunning how almost everybody -- myself included -- is running around with a tracking beacon almost all the time. I mean, that's just crazy, not even the classic dystopian fantasies had that kind of surveillance. And now it's just normal, and worse yet most people aren't even aware of it. And even if they were, they'd just shrug it off; privacy is easily traded away for convenience, and mobile phones are very convenient. Of course, the data is collected by private entities and only given to LEO on request. But the mere fact that the data is collected and stored for any lengths of time is incredible.
We're only at the beginning of what can be done with that data. Of course running around with a disabled cell phone (battery and SIM removed) kind of works to improve anonymity. Replacing the SIM with a prepaid SIM seems like a bad idea, since I'm pretty sure the phone reports the IMEI and the new SIM will immediately be tied to your identity, so that doesn't work at all; in fact, in any kind of automatic analysis doing stuff like this would stand out like a sore thumb. (Putting a bare SIM in the trunk of a car wouldn't do anything, putting it in another cell phone in the trunk of a car would just tie that cell phone to your identity, as well.) As would turning off the phone, incidentally, so while your whereabouts are unknown with a disabled cell phone, the span of time when you're "off the grid" would be part of an analysis.
Randomly switching around cell phones with SIMs among a group of people seems to be a fairly good idea, but it's terribly inconvenient and I'm not sure how big the group would have to be to make it work -- with a small group it's very simple to determine current phone ownership simply by looking at where people stay at night, etc.
Wouldn't you typically have a stop order along a short sale to limit risk if the stock decides to go back up? Or isn't that how it works?
Ever heard of silly season? Of course there are times when less stuff is going on and there are few if any major stories. Though I'll give you that the past couple of weeks were back-to-back with major developments. Wikileaks is widely known to take care when and how to release leaks, in fact, above and beyond the sheer infrastructure for anonymous whistleblowing, the public relations "leak" management is really their raison d'etre. Of course it's very debatable if they're really doing a good job of it or if it's a good thing to start with; many people seem to think they should just dump everything they get, possibly after some very light fact-checking and/or editing.
Hey, if only we had a way to truly anonymously leak documents to a world-wide network (one might call it a web) of computers.
And there's no reason why the current tablet environments can't use a mouse and keyboard, same as the current desktop environments can use a touchscreen.
Yes and there's no reason why a dog can't wear shoes and a suit. They don't, though. And from what I've read, using a keyboard/mouse in a tablet OS -- to the degree that it works at all -- is about as enjoyable as using a touchscreen on a Linux desktop. Which is to say, not very pleasurable at all. And using a netbook is a lot closer to using a regular PC than it is to a tablet device, obviously! I've been running regular Gnome on my desktop, I don't think that'd work on a tablet. Similarly, I can just about imagine running Unity on my dual-screen desktop -- even if it was originally deployed on netbooks. (Not that I'm a big fan: I've tried it on my netbook, and there's still a lot of polishing left; I'm just not sure if Canonical is up to the task of creating a decent shell more or less from scratch.)
You're not the only one. Most people who only use a computer for sending email, watching movies and updating Facebook probably feel the same way.
Apparently arguments about how GNOME is hard to understand are hard to understand.
Ridiculous snap judgments there, with zero explanation to make them any more valuable.
How the hell do you know what people want in a desktop and who are the people you're referring to? Since Gnome Shell is too late, would it have been more successful a couple of years ago? So the people you're referring to wanted a shell-like desktop earlier, and now they don't?
And how can Unity be outdated compared to the tablet world? At first glance, that's just nonsensical -- Unity is not, primarily, a tablet environment, it's designed to work with very different hardware -- medium to (multiple) extremely large displays, keyboard+mouse, existing desktop applications. That setup is here to stay for a long time still, and it needs some kind of software driving it; that software is not iOS or Honeycomb.
Ignoring all that, a comparison can be made between the two worlds of desktop environments and tablet environments; but I don't think the desktops have a lot to be worried about in that regard. Tablets are nice -- nicer than desktops -- for a number of tasks, but working with multiple applications at the same time, organizing files, things that are at the core of desktop environments (along with providing other central utility applications) are not strong points for tablet environments. Sure, you can argue that most people prefer single-tasking and not having to worry about the file system -- though you didn't, you just obliquely referred to Unity being outdated in some manner -- but I think multi-tasking is here to stay for a long time and in the end you do have to organize your stuff somehow, whether you do it via the filesystem or in iTunes and Picasa.
Me, too. In fact, when I reconverted it back to MP3 to save on size, it sounded worse than the original MP3s! Clearly the FLAC step actually reduces sound quality!
(10.0 was the 'make it work' release, 10.1 was the first 'make it fast' release)
Unfortunately, we're still waiting for the 'make it right' release that should have come in between. ;) SCNR
Shareware was also extremely popular on classic Mac OS and at least in early OS X. Lots of very high quality software (including games), too, much of which would have been straight commercial releases on Windows.
Having played all PC versions of Pirates and a few others, the gameplay didn't really change a whole lot as you progressed. It's a fairly varied game overall, though, with elements of story, exploration, trading, fighting, strategy, character development, etc. All of them fairly light fare, though. And I don't really feel like playing an RPG which evolves into a RTS as you describe: I like the tactical combat sometimes seen in good RPGs, but I don't like RTS as a general rule.
Sounds like the OP is suggesting we respond to trolls with Eliza.
Please go on.
I remember using a system extension to add window shading to Mac OS 7.1. :) These days, I never use it, even though Compiz supports it.