If you are a citizen of a country that country ALWAYS has jurisdiction over you regardless of where you are. Now the country usually does not exercise the jurisdiction because a country usually has very limited police powers abroad, but that does not mean they do not have it.
If those guys did not want to be subject to the English laws they should have given up their UK citizenships.
It used to be very good. When I was at work (in downtown LA) it would not only identify the building I was in correctly, but it would also identify which side of the building I was in). When I was home it gave my location as being less than a block away from my real location.
But bizarrely, it is getting worse. Nowadays, it is not unusual for it to be way off. Right now I tried my location on my cell phone and my true location is just outside of the blue circle "my location" gives out.
So that is rather unusual. Google services usually get better over time, not worse. I wonder about this crowd sourcing stuff. What information are the crowds putting in the system exactly? Because it seems like there may be saboteurs working among those crowds. There are many companies that really need google's "my location" to be unreliable (such as those providers that want to charge you a monthly fee for their map app.)
It seems to me that child pornography is a really bad justification for warrantless searches. I mean if the police find child porn on the net, why not get a warrant? It is pretty easy to prove that you found child porn, just print it out and show it to the judge. If it is illegal, the judge will not hesitate to issue the warrant, I am sure. There are magistrates out there that just sit and wait for the police/fbi/etc. to send them a high priority warrant request to that they can approve/reject it within minutes.
I mean the whole idea that our civil rights somehow makes it easy for child pornographers is not really true. The police have plenty of tools and power to fight that particular type of crime.
Of course it will be easier and cheaper for the police if they did not have to get a warrant, but that is the case for all civil rights. It would be much easier for the police if we were a dictatorship with absolute police rights, but we as a society have decided to trade certain police efficiencies for personal rights.
Well, the tagline maybe but the book itself is much more complicated than that. The book is actually mostly about a totalitarian society and the way they keep control.
PKD picked up on the hatred and fear that is always bubbling under the surface in US (and for that matter all other countries') politics and imagined a very possible totalitarian society that could grow out of it.
You see the problem with the main character is not that much that nobody remembers him or knows of his existence, but that all records of his existence have disappeared. Once the government discovers a living adult person that is not listed once in any existing database, they decide he is very dangerous. The book is actually a very eerily current political horror story considering how it was written so long ago.
I know, he's an entertaining writer. But his ideas are about as interesting as the ramblings of a stoned college freshman-philosophy major.
Is the sort of drunken, glassy-eyed speculation presented to us in his movies, the Matrix, Gattica, etc really the best that can sold in a movie? What about some of John Barne's work, or Ian M Banks, or Robert Forward, or Vernor Vinge, or Neil Stephenson... where thoughtful authors weave fantastic tales?
Really? Have you considered that you may be simply too stupid to get it. Have you actually read any of his books?
I can agree that Matrix and Gattaca are kind of simplified and dumbed down sci-fi, but none of these were written by PKD and they only borrow some of the most superficial of his ideas.
PKD is one of the very very few truly brilliant writers to emerge in the twentieth century, so sorry I have to flame you for calling his writing drivel. He has the most rare ability to see society and human nature clearly and to describe it and show it in a compelling manner. In don't see much of this in the movies, as the movies mostly borrow his more superficial sci-fi plot devices than the main themes of his books, but you will see it in his books.
Of the writers you mentioned I have only read Stevenson, and while he does offer a good read, he cannot be compared to PKD. Stephenson merely makes up interesting fantastic tales as you mentioned, but his writing does not have a ring of truth to it. You do not learn more about yourself, human nature, etc., after reading a Stephenson book. So yeah, PKD is in a whole other category.
So please do not talk shit, you can say you do not understand it, but by calling it drivel you only reveal your own ignorance.
Oh, and btw I did not major in phillosophy, I graduated almost 10 years ago and I do not do any drugs.
Good point but in regard to Lem and Tarkovsky you have to keep in mind that there has been a flame war going on between Polish and Russian writers for hundreds of years.
See for example, Dostoevsky (whose every Polish character is a cheap swindler), or Nabokov (ditto) or Conrad (who wrote an entire book about how the Russian government sponsors terrorists, being careful to note that the Russians are really asiatic and not european people). I think Lem was simply bound by centuries old tradition to give Tarkovsky the finger.
There are some very significant advantages to the 4/3rds system, that go beyond the sensor size.
I am not going to go into them, but the 4/3 system is the only system designed from the ground up for digital cameras and not a compromise used to keep compatibility with film cameras.
This allows olympus to make affordable high quality light and portable SLR systems. If you consider both camera and lens competing systems require much more money and give you a system that is much bulkier and heavier to achieve the same quality.
So no the 4/3 system is not a mistake although it kind of puts olympus in a bad position with respect to the megapixel pisssing contest.
You should get an Olympus 420 or 620 (when the latter comes out).
They are small and are known to have the best lenses for the price. Also, their telephoto lenses are about twice smaller than the competition (cannon, nikon) as they do not need to worry about full frame compatibility.
This was tried unsuccessfully many times before. These things used to be called expert systems and there was a special language (called prolog) for programming them.
Anyways, no one ever made a program that used ordinary language well, but boy did I have a lot of fun programming in prolog. That language made forming a simple "For" loop a challenge involving symbolic logic.
Anyways my guess is he will try, he will fail and then we will all decide that artificial intelligence is mere 10 years away.
Did you read the article you fucking dimwit? This is not a Peace Corps project, and the only connection to the Peace Corps is that one of the people doing it used to be a Peace Corps volunteer.
He is allowed to do other things I hope.
Look, I know, being apparently rather stupid and badly educated, you do not like to read articles; I am sure entire articles with all their long paragraphs and sentences and stuff tire you out and are terrible burden upon you. And I am sure it is much easier and more fun to just vent this pent up hatred you have of volunteer organizations. I mean whats not to hate about volunteer organizations -- they try to help people. The bastards.
But you see, if you are going to start flaming on slashdot, you should try very hard to read the article (you can do it, just get plenty of sleep beforehand). You have to do it just to cover your ass. Otherwise you get flamed yourself. Asshole.
This is a really good idea. Not because this code is any good. In fact it is quite obvious that whatever code Wall Street used to price CDS did not quite work, as AIG (who I am sure used a Wall Street bank for advice) was not able to correctly price these. So this is a classic situation of someone opensourcing code that is known to be useless, in order to get some good will out of it.
But if the code is open sourced, at least people will be able to analyze it and know how worthless it is. So when somebody wants to buy shares in a bank or an insurance company, he/she can look at the code used to price that company's assets and liablities and will know how much to trust the company's books.
There was a story a couple of months ago that some people examined the computer code that rating agencies used to rate mortgage backed securities. They asked the rating agency to plug in the code a slight decrease in home prices to see what prediction the code makes. The rating agency said that that would be impossible because the code was written under the assumption that housing prices never fall!!!
Unsurprisingly all major rating agencies rated most mortgage backed securities AAA right before the market crashed, and thus fucked over shitloads of investors that were stupid enough to believe them.
Now if an investor had access to the code, they might know that the rating agencies are full of shit and not trust their ratings.
Well, the idea was more to take a lot of things that were typically done in hardware (such as trying to exploit parallel execution as much as possible) and push those tasks into the compiler. An interesting idea that never really sat well with me though.
Oh it is a great idea IMO. But somebody has to write the compilers first. When you think about it, writing a compiler that automatically arranges any kind of input software into parallel executable threads, is maddeningly difficult task. And much more difficult than merely designing the chip that will later execute the parallel threads.
So just putting the chip out there and assuming someone else will do you a big favor and make the compiler is kind of silly. It's like building an elaborate spaceport for interstellar travel and assuming someone else will come up with the spaceships.
BTW, playstation 3 suffers from the same problem and thats probably the main reason the Wii is kicking its ass.
Google has their own backups I am sure. So the only way your data would be lost is if the entire Google company goes under.
And would you really want to live in a world without Google?
The way i understand things, is that initially Hans' mom had cutody of the children. Then after the wife disappeared, and since Hans was a murder suspect they awarded custory to the wife's parents who took them to russia.
I am very doubtful Nina took off to Russia. First of all she would have had no way of knowing whether Hans would be suspect and whether her parents would win custody at all. She had no control of him ripping out his car seat buying a bunch of murder books and all the other behavior that made him a suspect. If he was not a suspect, then she would just never be able to see her kids again.
Also if Hans really did not murder her, then he would hire a cheap Russian private eye to just hang around her parents' and look for her. Therefore, even in russia, she would not be able to see her kids. If that was the case, then what was the purpose of her big conspiracy?
Sorry but there is no effing way she could have left to russia through alaska without being noticed. The actual distance between russia and alaska may not be great but that area has some of the most vicious weather on the planet. It is also very heavily guarded on both sides. And no, you cannot drive to that edge of alaska, so you cannot "almost drive to russia" it is not even close.
If she was some kind of crazy advanturer with a lot of money to various ships and vehicles she could have made it far enough accross the bering straight only to be arrested by the US or Russian military. But she could not pass it unnoticed.
No, if she left the country she has to do it by plane or commercial ship, and for that she must be recorded somewhere (even if she left through mexico or canada). Of course it may certainly be possible for a seasoned criminal to get fake papers and leave the US unnoticed, but some housewife that has been moved to a foreign country? I doubt it.
Actually I see nothing unusual about that. It is not unusual for a friend of a suspect to confess in order to the suspects trial more confusing and to introduce reasonable doubt, etc. Especially if there really isn't enough evidence to convict the friend.
In this case the friend confesses that he is a serial killer but he did not kill that particular woman. Well, guess what, that means that he does not have a murder confession that can land him in jail but he can still go to trial talk a lot about how he loves to kill people and cause reasonable doubt in the jury's mind (without creating sufficient evidence to get him in trouble).
If he actually pointed out anybody he could have possibly murdered to the police, he would be in jail now. But he isnt, so it is safe to say he has not shown any plausible victims of his serial killing.
So it seems pretty reasonable for the police and the judge to assume that he is just trying to act out and confuse things to get his friend off.
The article also says he was walking around with 9000 cash in his pocket and he was running some kind of business out of Russia. He also has a commercial lawyer not a court appointed one. I am sure the police will find out exactly what his finances are, but thus far he does not seem destitute at all.
Sorry, but I do not believe the living out of his car story one bit. People that do that do it as a last resort. Nobody lives in their car and walks around with 9000k in their pockets and runs a business. Being homeless is very very dangerous.
Also, if he had to tear out his seat because he was living in his car he would be able to tell the cops where and when he threw the seat out and they would be able to find it in a dumpster somewhere.
I dont know why you assume that the people that will be living in there are hypocrites.
People that care about the environment and live in new york just do not own cars. New York is rare in that it is much more convenient if you do not own a car and it is a complete pain in the ass if you do (and insist on using it). So if you care about the environment the choice is pretty simple.
I think people that will be living in that building just do not give a shit about the environment and need some way to get the out of the city and to the hamptons without having to use public transportation of any kind.
Ok Apple fanboys, before you start flaming Woz and or biting your nails in despair over having to choose between Jobs and Woz, you should read the entire article.
Woz was not nearly as confrontational as the slashdot summary suggests. Also, the summary combines to quotes from completely different and unrelated parts of the interview which is pretty confusing (no Google has nothing to do with Iphone pricing). Also, Woz said that he thinks that Apple is still more innovative, even though he said all these nice things about innovation at Google.
So yeah, the slashdot summary was very sensationalistic and misleading. So no need to tear down that topless Woz poster from your bedroom wall just yet.
I really doubt deflation is happening. Gas prices are going up and so are food prices. Healthcare prices are still going up. Rents are going up. The value of the dollar against other currencies is plummeting.
What really happened in Apple is that they had some very rosy preditcions about iphone demand that turned out to be flat out wrong. So mindfull of what happened with the Apple Lisa, they decided to slash prices and move inventory.
"The thing is, they *didn't* accuse him of shoplifting. In most (all?) states, a store owner has the right to detain you on the accusation of shoplifting until the police arrive. He challenged the manager to "either accuse me, or let me go". The manager did neither."... and that is false imprisonment. You are not allowed to detain someone against their will. There is a storekeeper exception (as you mentioned) but that only works if the storekeeper has some kind of reasonable suspicion the guy was stealing. In that case the manager had no reason to believe so, thus the manager essentially committed false imprisonment by detaining the guy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are a citizen of a country that country ALWAYS has jurisdiction over you regardless of where you are. Now the country usually does not exercise the jurisdiction because a country usually has very limited police powers abroad, but that does not mean they do not have it.
If those guys did not want to be subject to the English laws they should have given up their UK citizenships.
It used to be very good. When I was at work (in downtown LA) it would not only identify the building I was in correctly, but it would also identify which side of the building I was in). When I was home it gave my location as being less than a block away from my real location.
But bizarrely, it is getting worse. Nowadays, it is not unusual for it to be way off. Right now I tried my location on my cell phone and my true location is just outside of the blue circle "my location" gives out.
So that is rather unusual. Google services usually get better over time, not worse. I wonder about this crowd sourcing stuff. What information are the crowds putting in the system exactly? Because it seems like there may be saboteurs working among those crowds. There are many companies that really need google's "my location" to be unreliable (such as those providers that want to charge you a monthly fee for their map app.)
It seems to me that child pornography is a really bad justification for warrantless searches. I mean if the police find child porn on the net, why not get a warrant? It is pretty easy to prove that you found child porn, just print it out and show it to the judge. If it is illegal, the judge will not hesitate to issue the warrant, I am sure. There are magistrates out there that just sit and wait for the police/fbi/etc. to send them a high priority warrant request to that they can approve/reject it within minutes.
I mean the whole idea that our civil rights somehow makes it easy for child pornographers is not really true. The police have plenty of tools and power to fight that particular type of crime.
Of course it will be easier and cheaper for the police if they did not have to get a warrant, but that is the case for all civil rights. It would be much easier for the police if we were a dictatorship with absolute police rights, but we as a society have decided to trade certain police efficiencies for personal rights.
Well, the tagline maybe but the book itself is much more complicated than that. The book is actually mostly about a totalitarian society and the way they keep control.
PKD picked up on the hatred and fear that is always bubbling under the surface in US (and for that matter all other countries') politics and imagined a very possible totalitarian society that could grow out of it.
You see the problem with the main character is not that much that nobody remembers him or knows of his existence, but that all records of his existence have disappeared. Once the government discovers a living adult person that is not listed once in any existing database, they decide he is very dangerous. The book is actually a very eerily current political horror story considering how it was written so long ago.
I know, he's an entertaining writer. But his ideas are about as interesting as the ramblings of a stoned college freshman-philosophy major.
Is the sort of drunken, glassy-eyed speculation presented to us in his movies, the Matrix, Gattica, etc really the best that can sold in a movie? What about some of John Barne's work, or Ian M Banks, or Robert Forward, or Vernor Vinge, or Neil Stephenson... where thoughtful authors weave fantastic tales?
Really? Have you considered that you may be simply too stupid to get it. Have you actually read any of his books?
I can agree that Matrix and Gattaca are kind of simplified and dumbed down sci-fi, but none of these were written by PKD and they only borrow some of the most superficial of his ideas.
PKD is one of the very very few truly brilliant writers to emerge in the twentieth century, so sorry I have to flame you for calling his writing drivel. He has the most rare ability to see society and human nature clearly and to describe it and show it in a compelling manner. In don't see much of this in the movies, as the movies mostly borrow his more superficial sci-fi plot devices than the main themes of his books, but you will see it in his books.
Of the writers you mentioned I have only read Stevenson, and while he does offer a good read, he cannot be compared to PKD. Stephenson merely makes up interesting fantastic tales as you mentioned, but his writing does not have a ring of truth to it. You do not learn more about yourself, human nature, etc., after reading a Stephenson book. So yeah, PKD is in a whole other category.
So please do not talk shit, you can say you do not understand it, but by calling it drivel you only reveal your own ignorance.
Oh, and btw I did not major in phillosophy, I graduated almost 10 years ago and I do not do any drugs.
Good point but in regard to Lem and Tarkovsky you have to keep in mind that there has been a flame war going on between Polish and Russian writers for hundreds of years.
See for example, Dostoevsky (whose every Polish character is a cheap swindler), or Nabokov (ditto) or Conrad (who wrote an entire book about how the Russian government sponsors terrorists, being careful to note that the Russians are really asiatic and not european people). I think Lem was simply bound by centuries old tradition to give Tarkovsky the finger.
I am glad they had the good taste to copy maserati ...
There are some very significant advantages to the 4/3rds system, that go beyond the sensor size.
I am not going to go into them, but the 4/3 system is the only system designed from the ground up for digital cameras and not a compromise used to keep compatibility with film cameras.
This allows olympus to make affordable high quality light and portable SLR systems. If you consider both camera and lens competing systems require much more money and give you a system that is much bulkier and heavier to achieve the same quality.
So no the 4/3 system is not a mistake although it kind of puts olympus in a bad position with respect to the megapixel pisssing contest.
You should get an Olympus 420 or 620 (when the latter comes out).
They are small and are known to have the best lenses for the price. Also, their telephoto lenses are about twice smaller than the competition (cannon, nikon) as they do not need to worry about full frame compatibility.
This was tried unsuccessfully many times before. These things used to be called expert systems and there was a special language (called prolog) for programming them.
Anyways, no one ever made a program that used ordinary language well, but boy did I have a lot of fun programming in prolog. That language made forming a simple "For" loop a challenge involving symbolic logic.
Anyways my guess is he will try, he will fail and then we will all decide that artificial intelligence is mere 10 years away.
Did you read the article you fucking dimwit? This is not a Peace Corps project, and the only connection to the Peace Corps is that one of the people doing it used to be a Peace Corps volunteer.
He is allowed to do other things I hope.
Look, I know, being apparently rather stupid and badly educated, you do not like to read articles; I am sure entire articles with all their long paragraphs and sentences and stuff tire you out and are terrible burden upon you. And I am sure it is much easier and more fun to just vent this pent up hatred you have of volunteer organizations. I mean whats not to hate about volunteer organizations -- they try to help people. The bastards.
But you see, if you are going to start flaming on slashdot, you should try very hard to read the article (you can do it, just get plenty of sleep beforehand). You have to do it just to cover your ass. Otherwise you get flamed yourself. Asshole.
This is a really good idea. Not because this code is any good. In fact it is quite obvious that whatever code Wall Street used to price CDS did not quite work, as AIG (who I am sure used a Wall Street bank for advice) was not able to correctly price these. So this is a classic situation of someone opensourcing code that is known to be useless, in order to get some good will out of it.
But if the code is open sourced, at least people will be able to analyze it and know how worthless it is. So when somebody wants to buy shares in a bank or an insurance company, he/she can look at the code used to price that company's assets and liablities and will know how much to trust the company's books.
There was a story a couple of months ago that some people examined the computer code that rating agencies used to rate mortgage backed securities. They asked the rating agency to plug in the code a slight decrease in home prices to see what prediction the code makes. The rating agency said that that would be impossible because the code was written under the assumption that housing prices never fall!!!
Unsurprisingly all major rating agencies rated most mortgage backed securities AAA right before the market crashed, and thus fucked over shitloads of investors that were stupid enough to believe them.
Now if an investor had access to the code, they might know that the rating agencies are full of shit and not trust their ratings.
Well, the idea was more to take a lot of things that were typically done in hardware (such as trying to exploit parallel execution as much as possible) and push those tasks into the compiler. An interesting idea that never really sat well with me though.
Oh it is a great idea IMO. But somebody has to write the compilers first. When you think about it, writing a compiler that automatically arranges any kind of input software into parallel executable threads, is maddeningly difficult task. And much more difficult than merely designing the chip that will later execute the parallel threads. So just putting the chip out there and assuming someone else will do you a big favor and make the compiler is kind of silly. It's like building an elaborate spaceport for interstellar travel and assuming someone else will come up with the spaceships. BTW, playstation 3 suffers from the same problem and thats probably the main reason the Wii is kicking its ass.
can't do melee? you will make a terrible zergling.
That will do it.
Google has their own backups I am sure. So the only way your data would be lost is if the entire Google company goes under. And would you really want to live in a world without Google?
The way i understand things, is that initially Hans' mom had cutody of the children. Then after the wife disappeared, and since Hans was a murder suspect they awarded custory to the wife's parents who took them to russia.
I am very doubtful Nina took off to Russia. First of all she would have had no way of knowing whether Hans would be suspect and whether her parents would win custody at all. She had no control of him ripping out his car seat buying a bunch of murder books and all the other behavior that made him a suspect. If he was not a suspect, then she would just never be able to see her kids again.
Also if Hans really did not murder her, then he would hire a cheap Russian private eye to just hang around her parents' and look for her. Therefore, even in russia, she would not be able to see her kids. If that was the case, then what was the purpose of her big conspiracy?
Sorry but there is no effing way she could have left to russia through alaska without being noticed. The actual distance between russia and alaska may not be great but that area has some of the most vicious weather on the planet. It is also very heavily guarded on both sides. And no, you cannot drive to that edge of alaska, so you cannot "almost drive to russia" it is not even close.
If she was some kind of crazy advanturer with a lot of money to various ships and vehicles she could have made it far enough accross the bering straight only to be arrested by the US or Russian military. But she could not pass it unnoticed.
No, if she left the country she has to do it by plane or commercial ship, and for that she must be recorded somewhere (even if she left through mexico or canada). Of course it may certainly be possible for a seasoned criminal to get fake papers and leave the US unnoticed, but some housewife that has been moved to a foreign country? I doubt it.
Actually I see nothing unusual about that. It is not unusual for a friend of a suspect to confess in order to the suspects trial more confusing and to introduce reasonable doubt, etc. Especially if there really isn't enough evidence to convict the friend.
In this case the friend confesses that he is a serial killer but he did not kill that particular woman. Well, guess what, that means that he does not have a murder confession that can land him in jail but he can still go to trial talk a lot about how he loves to kill people and cause reasonable doubt in the jury's mind (without creating sufficient evidence to get him in trouble).
If he actually pointed out anybody he could have possibly murdered to the police, he would be in jail now. But he isnt, so it is safe to say he has not shown any plausible victims of his serial killing.
So it seems pretty reasonable for the police and the judge to assume that he is just trying to act out and confuse things to get his friend off.
The article also says he was walking around with 9000 cash in his pocket and he was running some kind of business out of Russia. He also has a commercial lawyer not a court appointed one. I am sure the police will find out exactly what his finances are, but thus far he does not seem destitute at all.
Sorry, but I do not believe the living out of his car story one bit. People that do that do it as a last resort. Nobody lives in their car and walks around with 9000k in their pockets and runs a business. Being homeless is very very dangerous.
Also, if he had to tear out his seat because he was living in his car he would be able to tell the cops where and when he threw the seat out and they would be able to find it in a dumpster somewhere.
I dont know why you assume that the people that will be living in there are hypocrites.
People that care about the environment and live in new york just do not own cars. New York is rare in that it is much more convenient if you do not own a car and it is a complete pain in the ass if you do (and insist on using it). So if you care about the environment the choice is pretty simple.
I think people that will be living in that building just do not give a shit about the environment and need some way to get the out of the city and to the hamptons without having to use public transportation of any kind.
Ok Apple fanboys, before you start flaming Woz and or biting your nails in despair over having to choose between Jobs and Woz, you should read the entire article.
Woz was not nearly as confrontational as the slashdot summary suggests. Also, the summary combines to quotes from completely different and unrelated parts of the interview which is pretty confusing (no Google has nothing to do with Iphone pricing). Also, Woz said that he thinks that Apple is still more innovative, even though he said all these nice things about innovation at Google.
So yeah, the slashdot summary was very sensationalistic and misleading. So no need to tear down that topless Woz poster from your bedroom wall just yet.
I really doubt deflation is happening. Gas prices are going up and so are food prices. Healthcare prices are still going up. Rents are going up. The value of the dollar against other currencies is plummeting.
What really happened in Apple is that they had some very rosy preditcions about iphone demand that turned out to be flat out wrong. So mindfull of what happened with the Apple Lisa, they decided to slash prices and move inventory.
"The thing is, they *didn't* accuse him of shoplifting. In most (all?) states, a store owner has the right to detain you on the accusation of shoplifting until the police arrive. He challenged the manager to "either accuse me, or let me go". The manager did neither." ... and that is false imprisonment. You are not allowed to detain someone against their will. There is a storekeeper exception (as you mentioned) but that only works if the storekeeper has some kind of reasonable suspicion the guy was stealing. In that case the manager had no reason to believe so, thus the manager essentially committed false imprisonment by detaining the guy.
Oh yes they do. If you are on US soil US laws apply. If you are a US citizen US laws apply regardless of where you are.