I had a Xiaomi 3S for two years, it is still a great phone, I've strapped it to the dog harness for GPS and telemetry when we're in the woods. I moved on to Note 5, also a great phone. Bonus: both are completely open handsets, no hackery to unlock and root, all kinds of roms available.
Why would I ever look at a walled-garden or a locked phone where I'm getting a lot less but it costs three times more?
This is normal. In many fields, you begin to be able to barely understand stuff after 4 years of hard work, but you're at that point pretty far from literate. You hopefully are when you finish your PhD. As knowledge increases, it takes more time to get up to the state of the art.
This is the usual pseudo-futuristic mumbo-jumbo from Tesla they sprout out to change the subject when they are about to miss a financial or a production goal. It used to work, but these days even the rabidly pro-Tesla media are starting to stay away from peddling these musk nuggets, and fewer and fewer people fall for them.
Remember how Tesla announced a few weeks ago how their "security" was second to none and how they would be graciously gifting it to the rest of the automobile world to save it from mistakes? Remember how it happened just before they announced there is no funding and there'll be no buyout?
Remember how we later learned that their software is a hopeless half-maintained hodge-podge of spaghetti code and how their security is worse than the security you typically find in an FX trading startup? Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Enoug... Only yesterday we received a confirmation - Tesla's "network" melted down precisely in the manner the link above describes it can.
Did we see an article on Slashdot about the Tesla IT problems (a legitimate "nerd news" topic)? Nope. Did we read the news about Tesla's network meltdown? Nope, although in the past much smaller problems with a single company network have been covered regularly.
This announcement is all smoke and mirrors, and it is being spread about to try to build "a positive momentum" ahead of the Tesla troubles that are stacking up for the next few weeks - missing profitability targets, disappearing demand, supplier issues and customer service issues.
Musk may have his left turn signal on, but he's really braking.
Yes, seriously. The political process in the US (at least before it was radicalized by the fundamentalist Christian Reagan republicans and their descendants) is such that it makes it quite unlikely that the federal government will send troops to state capitals to enforce some sort of a fascist regime.
even the Left imagines Trump throwing people into camps.
That's a broad brush you're painting with, but it is very much outside of the argument we're having. A herring that is painted in bright red.
The gist: 2nd amendment was a political compromise to get some people to accept the new federal government and its powers. It was reformulated to mean "individual right to bear arms" in the first decade of the 21 century by a bunch of conservative judges who legislated from the bench to overturn a precedent of 3 centuries.
More below:
Modern debates about the Second Amendment have focused on whether it protects a private right of individuals to keep and bear arms, or a right that can be exercised only through militia organizations like the National Guard. This question, however, was not even raised until long after the Bill of Rights was adopted.
Many in the Founding generation believed that governments are prone to use soldiers to oppress the people. English history suggested that this risk could be controlled by permitting the government to raise armies (consisting of full-time paid troops) only when needed to fight foreign adversaries. For other purposes, such as responding to sudden invasions or other emergencies, the government could rely on a militia that consisted of ordinary civilians who supplied their own weapons and received some part-time, unpaid military training.
For starters, you can read up on US history. In particular, the long process of adopting the constitution. Project Gutenberg has a few books from back then, I even proofread some for you.
The US supreme court has been quite wrong and has taken populist decisions on many occasions, and this is one of them. And the drive behind it was that of the gun lobby and their political fronts. And the gun nuts like the one above, who's afraid the gubbermint will take the fredumz.
the source of rights, which is nature, IE natural rights. Hehe. Wrong. The Nature's laws are the laws of physics.
You have no idea when current notions of "rights' came about obviously, which was Hammurabi's code. LOL. Did you even try to read the link above? It has a comprehensive, if somewhat simplistic overview of how the concept evolved.
The very idea of the existence of a "natural law" that gives some "rights" appeared for the first time in the Greek philosophy, and not in "Hammurabi's code". Greeks had, believe it or not, quite an advanced society. However, even in it, the idea of natural rights was pretty far from the one we have today - for one, it didn't even apply to everyone. This interpretation is a very, very modern social construct.
Even if you propose the Hammurabi's code as the origin of the concept, it doesn't change my conclusion - that this is a construct that originated in a complex society.
What does it mean to "value" the second amendment?
Its traditional interpretation is that the ultimate goal of gun ownership is protecting the liberty of a state from a power grab by the federal government. This protection is, on paper, guaranteed by a "well regulated", well trained and disciplined state militia. This, however, is just a paper proposition. The US states do not have well trained militia, and the threat of a power grab by the federal government which gave worries to the States in the late 1700s does not exist anymore.
It is very hard to see what other objective value is there in an unrestricted "right to bear arms", while the benefits of strict gun regulations are obvious. A lot less violent crime, calmer and less trigger happy police force, fewer incidents that result in death and injury.
And yes, the only effective regulation is the strict one.
[citation needed] for the argument that knifes bring about the same levels of fear that liberal gun ownership does.
Somehow I don't see people being hysterical about knife crime in places like Japan, although they've had a mass knife attack or two there. I don't know of places in which mass acid attacks took place; there is hardly a hysteria about them anywhere. Ditto for "vehicular homicide".
As for bomb-making and explosives, this has always been a tightly regulated affair.
A "Right" is not something created by society. Yes it is. If you live alone and by yourself, you have no need of "rights" or "obligations", you can do as you please. The concept of "rights" came up historically because people realized it is better to live together, and that having rules about living together is better than doing as you would on your own. It took more than a century or two, too. Here, you can start educating yourself on how the concept of human rights evolved even here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That certain inalienable Rights are not as widely accepted by other Countries actually speaks volumes about them valuing things in different ways than the US. The US has made, in the past 50-ish years, the choice that sacrificing human lives on the altar of gun ownership is a value. Other countries have made a different choice, by putting lives first.
whatever is necessary for a person to protect themselves and their loved ones. US must be a very dangerous place if your first line of defense is an arsenal. I've never lived in a place where I'd feel the need to carry a weapon, because I'm not at risk.
"generally accepted all over the world" is just a modern-day phrasing to replace "might makes right" Not at all. It means something quite different - that these are values people can share regardless of their differences of opinion. Gun ownership is not one of these, because the goal of "personal safety" that you give as the main justification isn't a problem in places where there are no "gun rights".
No, I'm not anywhere near "completely wrong". While "right" is a social construct and depends a lot on the society, there is a list of fundamental rights that are generally accepted all over the world. Gun-toting isn't one of them. It is a social construct in some countries, notably the US, but even there it has been a subject of significant differences in its interpretation.
The current interpretation, which is the reason for the stupidity exhibited in TFA has not been the traditional one.
Gun control is completely realistic in the most general sort of sense. I've lived in 6 or 7 countries, and all of them have strict gun regulation. In all of them owning guns is allowed, but it comes with reasonable preconditions. One has to pass a base sanity check, and one cannot easily own an arsenal.
Guess what, there are no recorded mass shootings in any of these countries. The police aren't armed to the teeth. They are not trigger-happy, and you don't have to live in fear that you'll be shot by them no matter what ethnicity is.
And, guess what, schoolchildren in those countries don't get arrested for playing a game. Even it is a FPS AR one.
Even the best "wise guys" are playing under the same statistical rules as the casino
No, they are not. If they were, the odds of them winning would be the same as those of the regular punters. There'd be no "winning streaks" or extraordinarily large payouts.
What people who "game" the system do is use tricks. My trick is, for example, arbitration on betting sites. I've not only changed the odds, I've changed the game.
I don't know what tricks do people at the casino do, but it is highly unlikely they don't use something similar that vastly changes the odds of the outcome.
The gambling "business model" is simple, it stakes the odds heavily against the punters, and in favor of the operator, which collects the profits. It works like an insurance - the insurer only stays in business because there are not many big payouts.
The difference is that unlike the insurance payout, which is a consequence of a highly undesirable event, and hence of something the punters are motivated to avoid, in gambling the "insured" has no large downside if they win.
Once the punters get smarter, the gambler cannot stay solvent, just like an insurer will not stay solvent if they allow covering deliberate insurance fraud.
So, a government body which, on one hand, lives off a "casino tax" and on the other allows punters to do tricks is in a bit of a self-contradicting position.
And, of course, while the mechanism of operations is similar, a properly working insurance company has a much more important social function than a casino.
Not only are the lots full, there is almost no activity there, and a bunch of cars are already covered with dust. If Tesla were shipping, the lot would be full of rigs and personnel loading them. Instead, it looks like a graveyard.
And these are thousands of cars. That is, tens of millions of profits, which just sit and wait in the heat while the fan base is, allegedly, waiting impatiently.
A lot more likely for a random guy on/. to know an owner of a car from a certain brand than for a company deep in debt and deep in red to receive a buyout offer that puts 30% on its already hyperovervalued stock.
Actually, there was no such plan, and there was no agreement from anyone to provide the funding for it. Even the board didn't know why Musk shot out that tweet, and scrambled to come up with a way to stuff it under the carpet.
From the facts that are known this much is certain:
There was no agreed price
There were no concrete offers for funding
There were no committed funds
The board wasn't aware of Musk's intention to drop a public announcement
No formal legal or financial analysis was done, or any semblance of a due diligence process
The announcement was done under the influence of a drug or a combination
The motivation of Musk was clear - he announced himself it was done to make the "shorts" suffer
In other words, this "Tesla going private" "plan" was just, well, let's be kind here, an irresponsible act of a stressed out manager. To pretend it had some basis in reality is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a Xiaomi 3S for two years, it is still a great phone, I've strapped it to the dog harness for GPS and telemetry when we're in the woods. I moved on to Note 5, also a great phone. Bonus: both are completely open handsets, no hackery to unlock and root, all kinds of roms available.
Why would I ever look at a walled-garden or a locked phone where I'm getting a lot less but it costs three times more?
This is normal. In many fields, you begin to be able to barely understand stuff after 4 years of hard work, but you're at that point pretty far from literate. You hopefully are when you finish your PhD. As knowledge increases, it takes more time to get up to the state of the art.
This is the usual pseudo-futuristic mumbo-jumbo from Tesla they sprout out to change the subject when they are about to miss a financial or a production goal. It used to work, but these days even the rabidly pro-Tesla media are starting to stay away from peddling these musk nuggets, and fewer and fewer people fall for them.
Remember how Tesla announced a few weeks ago how their "security" was second to none and how they would be graciously gifting it to the rest of the automobile world to save it from mistakes? Remember how it happened just before they announced there is no funding and there'll be no buyout?
Remember how we later learned that their software is a hopeless half-maintained hodge-podge of spaghetti code and how their security is worse than the security you typically find in an FX trading startup? Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Enoug... Only yesterday we received a confirmation - Tesla's "network" melted down precisely in the manner the link above describes it can.
Did we see an article on Slashdot about the Tesla IT problems (a legitimate "nerd news" topic)? Nope. Did we read the news about Tesla's network meltdown? Nope, although in the past much smaller problems with a single company network have been covered regularly.
This announcement is all smoke and mirrors, and it is being spread about to try to build "a positive momentum" ahead of the Tesla troubles that are stacking up for the next few weeks - missing profitability targets, disappearing demand, supplier issues and customer service issues.
Musk may have his left turn signal on, but he's really braking.
On Slashdot, we rarely read the summary, you insensitive clod.
Seriously?
Yes, seriously. The political process in the US (at least before it was radicalized by the fundamentalist Christian Reagan republicans and their descendants) is such that it makes it quite unlikely that the federal government will send troops to state capitals to enforce some sort of a fascist regime.
even the Left imagines Trump throwing people into camps.
That's a broad brush you're painting with, but it is very much outside of the argument we're having. A herring that is painted in bright red.
Here, read up on it: https://constitutioncenter.org...
The gist: 2nd amendment was a political compromise to get some people to accept the new federal government and its powers. It was reformulated to mean "individual right to bear arms" in the first decade of the 21 century by a bunch of conservative judges who legislated from the bench to overturn a precedent of 3 centuries.
More below:
Modern debates about the Second Amendment have focused on whether it protects a private right of individuals to keep and bear arms, or a right that can be exercised only through militia organizations like the National Guard. This question, however, was not even raised until long after the Bill of Rights was adopted.
Many in the Founding generation believed that governments are prone to use soldiers to oppress the people. English history suggested that this risk could be controlled by permitting the government to raise armies (consisting of full-time paid troops) only when needed to fight foreign adversaries. For other purposes, such as responding to sudden invasions or other emergencies, the government could rely on a militia that consisted of ordinary civilians who supplied their own weapons and received some part-time, unpaid military training.
For starters, you can read up on US history. In particular, the long process of adopting the constitution. Project Gutenberg has a few books from back then, I even proofread some for you.
is absurd.
Sadly, it is also the US history.
The US supreme court has been quite wrong and has taken populist decisions on many occasions, and this is one of them. And the drive behind it was that of the gun lobby and their political fronts. And the gun nuts like the one above, who's afraid the gubbermint will take the fredumz.
the source of rights, which is nature, IE natural rights.
Hehe. Wrong. The Nature's laws are the laws of physics.
You have no idea when current notions of "rights' came about obviously, which was Hammurabi's code.
LOL. Did you even try to read the link above? It has a comprehensive, if somewhat simplistic overview of how the concept evolved.
The very idea of the existence of a "natural law" that gives some "rights" appeared for the first time in the Greek philosophy, and not in "Hammurabi's code". Greeks had, believe it or not, quite an advanced society. However, even in it, the idea of natural rights was pretty far from the one we have today - for one, it didn't even apply to everyone. This interpretation is a very, very modern social construct.
Even if you propose the Hammurabi's code as the origin of the concept, it doesn't change my conclusion - that this is a construct that originated in a complex society.
What does it mean to "value" the second amendment?
Its traditional interpretation is that the ultimate goal of gun ownership is protecting the liberty of a state from a power grab by the federal government. This protection is, on paper, guaranteed by a "well regulated", well trained and disciplined state militia. This, however, is just a paper proposition. The US states do not have well trained militia, and the threat of a power grab by the federal government which gave worries to the States in the late 1700s does not exist anymore.
It is very hard to see what other objective value is there in an unrestricted "right to bear arms", while the benefits of strict gun regulations are obvious. A lot less violent crime, calmer and less trigger happy police force, fewer incidents that result in death and injury.
And yes, the only effective regulation is the strict one.
Well, I'm getting a lot of them thrown at me, what can I do?
[citation needed] for the argument that knifes bring about the same levels of fear that liberal gun ownership does.
Somehow I don't see people being hysterical about knife crime in places like Japan, although they've had a mass knife attack or two there. I don't know of places in which mass acid attacks took place; there is hardly a hysteria about them anywhere. Ditto for "vehicular homicide".
As for bomb-making and explosives, this has always been a tightly regulated affair.
You can figure out why on your own.
A "Right" is not something created by society.
Yes it is. If you live alone and by yourself, you have no need of "rights" or "obligations", you can do as you please. The concept of "rights" came up historically because people realized it is better to live together, and that having rules about living together is better than doing as you would on your own. It took more than a century or two, too. Here, you can start educating yourself on how the concept of human rights evolved even here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That certain inalienable Rights are not as widely accepted by other Countries actually speaks volumes about them valuing things in different ways than the US. The US has made, in the past 50-ish years, the choice that sacrificing human lives on the altar of gun ownership is a value. Other countries have made a different choice, by putting lives first.
whatever is necessary for a person to protect themselves and their loved ones.
US must be a very dangerous place if your first line of defense is an arsenal. I've never lived in a place where I'd feel the need to carry a weapon, because I'm not at risk.
"generally accepted all over the world" is just a modern-day phrasing to replace "might makes right"
Not at all. It means something quite different - that these are values people can share regardless of their differences of opinion. Gun ownership is not one of these, because the goal of "personal safety" that you give as the main justification isn't a problem in places where there are no "gun rights".
Seeing how large your strawmen are, maybe it isn't a bad idea to ban them.
No, I'm not anywhere near "completely wrong". While "right" is a social construct and depends a lot on the society, there is a list of fundamental rights that are generally accepted all over the world. Gun-toting isn't one of them. It is a social construct in some countries, notably the US, but even there it has been a subject of significant differences in its interpretation.
The current interpretation, which is the reason for the stupidity exhibited in TFA has not been the traditional one.
Gun control is completely realistic in the most general sort of sense. I've lived in 6 or 7 countries, and all of them have strict gun regulation. In all of them owning guns is allowed, but it comes with reasonable preconditions. One has to pass a base sanity check, and one cannot easily own an arsenal.
Guess what, there are no recorded mass shootings in any of these countries. The police aren't armed to the teeth. They are not trigger-happy, and you don't have to live in fear that you'll be shot by them no matter what ethnicity is.
And, guess what, schoolchildren in those countries don't get arrested for playing a game. Even it is a FPS AR one.
Even the best "wise guys" are playing under the same statistical rules as the casino
No, they are not. If they were, the odds of them winning would be the same as those of the regular punters. There'd be no "winning streaks" or extraordinarily large payouts.
What people who "game" the system do is use tricks. My trick is, for example, arbitration on betting sites. I've not only changed the odds, I've changed the game.
I don't know what tricks do people at the casino do, but it is highly unlikely they don't use something similar that vastly changes the odds of the outcome.
Does removing the gun from the shooters cold dead hand count as effective gun control?
No. The point of gun control is prevention, not a collection of an arsenal.
what are the laws you want to have and enforce.
The same that apply in places where there are no shootings. Gun toting is not a "right", but a privilege and should be treated as such.
Posting that is a bit like posting "Antigravity is a must have to remove transportation issues."
Except that "antigravity" is science fiction, whereas gun control is an effective policy.
And effective gun control is a must to remove the fear of shootings.
That's all.
The gambling "business model" is simple, it stakes the odds heavily against the punters, and in favor of the operator, which collects the profits. It works like an insurance - the insurer only stays in business because there are not many big payouts.
The difference is that unlike the insurance payout, which is a consequence of a highly undesirable event, and hence of something the punters are motivated to avoid, in gambling the "insured" has no large downside if they win.
Once the punters get smarter, the gambler cannot stay solvent, just like an insurer will not stay solvent if they allow covering deliberate insurance fraud.
So, a government body which, on one hand, lives off a "casino tax" and on the other allows punters to do tricks is in a bit of a self-contradicting position.
And, of course, while the mechanism of operations is similar, a properly working insurance company has a much more important social function than a casino.
And yet... A lot more likely than "high demand for Tesla M3".
Why are all these cars burning up unplugged in the sun for months instead of being shipped to the impatiently waiting fan base?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Not only are the lots full, there is almost no activity there, and a bunch of cars are already covered with dust. If Tesla were shipping, the lot would be full of rigs and personnel loading them. Instead, it looks like a graveyard.
And these are thousands of cars. That is, tens of millions of profits, which just sit and wait in the heat while the fan base is, allegedly, waiting impatiently.
Nah, something doesn't compute here.
A lot more likely for a random guy on /. to know an owner of a car from a certain brand than for a company deep in debt and deep in red to receive a buyout offer that puts 30% on its already hyperovervalued stock.
Yet you doubt one, and firmly believe the other.
I think you're funnier.
Actually, there was no such plan, and there was no agreement from anyone to provide the funding for it. Even the board didn't know why Musk shot out that tweet, and scrambled to come up with a way to stuff it under the carpet.
From the facts that are known this much is certain:
In other words, this "Tesla going private" "plan" was just, well, let's be kind here, an irresponsible act of a stressed out manager. To pretend it had some basis in reality is ridiculous.
Probably, considering the announcement, because the actual announcement is "No buyers, dilution secured."
We'll see how the stock fares over the next few weeks.