Notice that in the part about the protest, if they're are, say, 30 people in a camera shot, identifying everybody without this kind of face recognition is quite a chore and is typically only done if the footage shows something illegal happening. By comparison, with face recognition, it's basically a matter of pressing a button, so it will be done whenever the police feel like it. Of course, this isn't entirely flawless: It could very well be that you end up getting blamed for the activities of your no-good cousin who looks very similar to you.
The problem is that cameras plus other spying techniques can see things, and analyze them quickly, and helpfully inform any police officer that's interested that Leinad177 left his house at 7:56 AM, drove 2 blocks east, 3 blocks south, went into a Dunkin' Donuts (from the credit card and POS system, he likes a double latte and 3 Boston Cremes), got back into his car, got on the nearby interstate, drove to the office (where he works according to tax forms), arriving at 8:36 AM. He then browsed/. much of the morning, left for lunch at Applebees (had a chicken fajita rollup and a large soda), went back to work, did some sysadmin work (all you can tell here is the ssh to the company servers) most of the afternoon, left at 4:42 PM, and then drove downtown to the political protest. At the protest, he chatted with a few people, shouted some slogans, and held a camera phone while watching police beat up an Iraq War veteran, and footage of the Iraq War veteran being beaten made it on to the evening news.
And later that evening, Leinad177 got a visit from the PD demanding that he turn over his phone. He refused because the police couldn't produce a warrant, so a secret instruction went out to pull over his car for minor infractions, the IRS was instructed to make sure he was given a thorough audit, and prosecutors asked to look for something they could arrest him for.
Well, I'm reminded of a political cartoon I saw about 15 years ago, that had 3 pictures of a depressed-looking man with a glass of vodka in his hand. The first was captioned "Russia under the Czars", the second "Russia under Communism", and the third "Russia under democracy".
Here's part of why: The guy selling you stock to finance his vacation, the 'boomer selling down his IRA, etc are not even close to the majority of the market. The very large institutional investors like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America basically set the prices on everything, for whatever reason they so choose.
6 paid demonstrators, and a bunch of others who were identified as staff members to the Bush campaign and Republican congressmen who just happened to receive cushy jobs in the Bush White House. Organized, quite proudly, by then-Republican Congressman John Sweeney.
Simplify things and get rid of the whole "Proposition X" nonsense. It certainly does nothing to improve democracy
Not necessarily. The reason these direct democracy provisions were added to many state constitutions (mostly around 1895) was to prevent a politician that was elected saying he'd do one thing to then go on and instead do something completely different.
Case in point: In Ohio, in 2010, the citizens elected a Republican state legislature and governor on promises that they would work to attract businesses to the state and thus reduce unemployment. However, one of the first things they did was pass a law which (similarly to what Scott Walker was doing in Wisconsin) removed the collective bargaining rights of public worker unions. In 2011, citizen organizers put the repeal of that bill on the ballot and won by almost a 2:1 margin, indicating that the original bill was probably not what the citizens had thought they were voting for in 2010.
And you know what? For all the flak that got, the election officials in Florida in 2000 were doing the right thing - examining each ballot to try to understand the intentions of the person who cast it. They did so in full view of everyone, with observers from both parties.
The problem was that the Bush campaign didn't like the answer the counters were coming up with, so they staged a riot to stop the recount in the short term, and then made sure their pals on the US Supreme Court gave orders to prevent further counting from occurring.
The problem is we havent seen TRUE computer voting in action.
Do you have any idea how expensive that would be, to really do that right? 1. All hardware would have to be thoroughly verified and checked, pin by pin, to ensure that nothing funny was going on. 2. Any operating system used on the machines would have to be verified, byte by byte, to ensure that nothing funny was going on. 3. And of course, you'd also have to verify the compiled software used, byte by byte (if you want to know why the compiled software rather than the source has to be verified, read Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson).
And yes, we don't have any of that verification done today, but that's what would be necessary if we wanted a computer that was able to do a job as good as a human hand-counted system.
Really, paper ballots and human counters work just fine, on any scale (Too many votes? Add more counters.). Electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem.
My general formula for valuing Wikipedia articles:
Useful Information = Level of Interest - Degree of Political Controversy
For instance, the article on Neptune (the planet) is quite good. If I'm somebody who doesn't know much about it, I'm going to find lots of useful facts there with plenty of links to find out more information from reputable sources on the subject. There are a bunch of users actively maintaining it (mostly fixing broken links and the like) because there's a pretty decent amount of interest, and there's no political advantage whatsoever to be gained by slanting the article in some way.
By contrast, the article on the Cryptic Era (on the geological time scale) isn't all that great, probably because there aren't too many people, even people working in the field of geology, with much interest in the topic. And articles on, say, well-known politicians tend to carefully exclude most of the bad stuff they've done.
When Android was in China's land... let my cell phones go! Just trolled so hard they could not stand.. let my cell phones go! Go down, Samsung, way down in China's land, tell ol' Jintao to let my cell phones go!
(Nah, it just doesn't quite have the same ring to it)
It's not like that on everything, just those things that people with clout care about.
For instance, I was browsing Wikipedia one day, found something that was clearly vandalism (had added a statement that a particular screen actor was a "faggot" with no citation), and removed it without the slightest bit of difficulty. I also noticed, on an unrelated article about a public figure, that there was a list of commemorative statues, and I knew of one that wasn't on the list, and added it in without any kind of problem. The reason for this is that there's absolutely no value to setting oneself up as a petty tyrant on either of those articles, so nobody acts like a petty tyrant.
But try to do the same thing on an article like "Barack Obama" or "Mitt Romney", and you're going to have a lot of difficulties.
In your court case, it makes a big difference if the case in question is something like US v Richard Peters, 1795, or something like Citizen's United v FEC, 2010. Nobody really has an ax to grind over the first one (as far as I know, there are no modern political issues depending on the jurisdiction of US courts over captured privateers), but a lot of people have axes to grind over the second one (which has a major impact on US political campaigns going on right now).
At least in every case of a scientific theory that I've heard of, it has to be both capable of creating testable predictions, and those predictions have to have been tested and come back as being essentially correct.
Consider the idea that if a person believes something enough, it's true. It provides a testable prediction as well: If it's raining outside, and I truly believe it's not, then it must stop raining. However, it's not a scientific theory, because most of the tests of this prediction fail.
I capitalized "Communism" because the argument about Stalin is exactly the kind of thing believed by die-hard members of the Communist Party, particularly but not exclusively in the Soviet Union. Other communists advocated and in some cases implemented very different policies.
Premise: Scientific consensus is that a certain problem exists, which means that we must institute a particular policy agenda.
That's circular reasoning: You're declaring a premise that says that you're right.
Another way of looking at it: Assume that there exists a libertarian-approved market-based solution to AGW and that this solution would be acceptable to those who think that AGW is scientific fact. Would you then believe or disbelieve that AGW is happening?
Like any theory, this is always up for debate. If a better or more complete explanation can be found then it'll be replaced. That doesn't mean it is wrong, just that it could be, theories can always be wrong. You don't prove them true, you repeatedly show they aren't false.
One thing worth making very very clear here is that theories are much harder to unseat than hypotheses, because they have in fact been repeatedly demonstrated to be not false. For something to be a theory, it has to make a prediction about what will happen in the real world, and match those predictions consistently and within a fairly small margin of error. Which AGW actually has done in numerous small-scale experiments. The trouble is, of course, that we don't have several spare planets to use for large-scale tests.
My point was that whether or not a particular policy response to global warming is wise or desirable has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on answering the question of whether global warming is happening.
So let me get this straight, is your argument that: Premise: Scientific consensus with lots of evidence says that a certain problem exists, but Premise: The solutions proposed so far to address the problem involve ideologies distasteful to you, so Conclusion: The science must be wrong.
Let me make a similar argument that we'll both agree is absurd: Premise: There are reliable historical reports that Stalin sent millions of people to the gulag. Premise: But acknowledging these facts means that maybe Communism isn't so peachy. Conclusion: The historical reports must be capitalist propaganda.
Acknowledging that there might be a problem with lots of extra CO2 in the atmosphere does not require replacing a free market with a state-run economy.
Not at all: 1. Sometimes you're using a confusing and complex feature of some library or server. Providing a comment with a link to the documentation on that feature makes things a lot easier for the next person to come along.
2. Sometimes you're working around a bug in a library. You should leave a comment explaining what the mis-behavior was.
3. Sometimes you're implementing an algorithm that's relatively new academic work. Adding a comment explaining exactly what this is, where you can find it, and why you're using it here will help somebody learn more about it.
4. While expressive code can explain what you are doing, it can't explain why you're doing it. If your method is called "zoich_the_fleemoid", your comments about this should probably provide some kind of indication of what a fleemoid is and why you'd want to zoich it.
5. Anything residing on a major code boundary (e.g. a library method relied on by other developers) should get the full round of documentation - what it does, what it accepts as parameters, what it does with those parameters, what it returns, and what side effects are expected. Yes, your code should be clear enough that the other devs could learn this stuff by reading your code, but they shouldn't have to dive into it to figure out what your APIs do.
It's a very rare case where I think a programmer wrote too many comments.
The most successful tech entrepreneurs had significant technical skills. And that absolutely mattered - without those skills, they have no way of evaluating technical employees and applicants. If they weren't in charge of product development themselves, then they at least had to know who they should hire to run product development.
For example: Bill Gates was an extremely effective developer and architect (worth reading is Joel Spolsky writing about a time he met with Bill Gates). Larry and Sergei of Google were well-respected developers doing graduate work at Stanford. Steve Jobs wasn't at good at the technical stuff as Woz was, but he had tinkered with electronics and done technical work for Atari.
Many MBAs of the world would like to think that managers don't need to understand the details of their product line. But that's simply not true - the manager that understands the details will hire better people, make wiser decisions about how to accomplish tasks, and have a more realistic outlook of what the organization can do.
Yes, "spending" as a big category has gone up a great deal since 2008. The reason is that there was the biggest financial meltdown since 1929 (if you didn't notice), so all the social safety net costs went up as millions of people fell into it. It wasn't that Obama created a huge number of government programs or something, it was an increase in food stamps, housing assistance, and unemployment insurance in accordance with laws passed over a decade ago. Federal civilian employment has been around 1.2 million people since 1990, and state and local government employment has dropped dramatically in the last few years, so it's not like there are politicians on a hiring spree.
As far as taxes go, the Bush tax cuts did cost us way more than they were originally projected to cost, because although they were sold as 'temporary', they've in fact become permanent.
No, they'll Prop 123 to demand X (which passes), and in the same election Prop 124 for the tax increase to pay for X (which gets voted down). Which is one of the major reasons why they're budget is in a serious mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice that in the part about the protest, if they're are, say, 30 people in a camera shot, identifying everybody without this kind of face recognition is quite a chore and is typically only done if the footage shows something illegal happening. By comparison, with face recognition, it's basically a matter of pressing a button, so it will be done whenever the police feel like it. Of course, this isn't entirely flawless: It could very well be that you end up getting blamed for the activities of your no-good cousin who looks very similar to you.
Notice, also, that in the example I gave, Leinad177 probably committed no crime more serious than going 5 mph over the speed limit.
That's not the problem.
The problem is that cameras plus other spying techniques can see things, and analyze them quickly, and helpfully inform any police officer that's interested that Leinad177 left his house at 7:56 AM, drove 2 blocks east, 3 blocks south, went into a Dunkin' Donuts (from the credit card and POS system, he likes a double latte and 3 Boston Cremes), got back into his car, got on the nearby interstate, drove to the office (where he works according to tax forms), arriving at 8:36 AM. He then browsed /. much of the morning, left for lunch at Applebees (had a chicken fajita rollup and a large soda), went back to work, did some sysadmin work (all you can tell here is the ssh to the company servers) most of the afternoon, left at 4:42 PM, and then drove downtown to the political protest. At the protest, he chatted with a few people, shouted some slogans, and held a camera phone while watching police beat up an Iraq War veteran, and footage of the Iraq War veteran being beaten made it on to the evening news.
And later that evening, Leinad177 got a visit from the PD demanding that he turn over his phone. He refused because the police couldn't produce a warrant, so a secret instruction went out to pull over his car for minor infractions, the IRS was instructed to make sure he was given a thorough audit, and prosecutors asked to look for something they could arrest him for.
Well, I'm reminded of a political cartoon I saw about 15 years ago, that had 3 pictures of a depressed-looking man with a glass of vodka in his hand. The first was captioned "Russia under the Czars", the second "Russia under Communism", and the third "Russia under democracy".
His view of the stock market is cynical.
So is almost anyone who knows anything about it.
Here's part of why: The guy selling you stock to finance his vacation, the 'boomer selling down his IRA, etc are not even close to the majority of the market. The very large institutional investors like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America basically set the prices on everything, for whatever reason they so choose.
6 paid demonstrators, and a bunch of others who were identified as staff members to the Bush campaign and Republican congressmen who just happened to receive cushy jobs in the Bush White House. Organized, quite proudly, by then-Republican Congressman John Sweeney.
Simplify things and get rid of the whole "Proposition X" nonsense. It certainly does nothing to improve democracy
Not necessarily. The reason these direct democracy provisions were added to many state constitutions (mostly around 1895) was to prevent a politician that was elected saying he'd do one thing to then go on and instead do something completely different.
Case in point: In Ohio, in 2010, the citizens elected a Republican state legislature and governor on promises that they would work to attract businesses to the state and thus reduce unemployment. However, one of the first things they did was pass a law which (similarly to what Scott Walker was doing in Wisconsin) removed the collective bargaining rights of public worker unions. In 2011, citizen organizers put the repeal of that bill on the ballot and won by almost a 2:1 margin, indicating that the original bill was probably not what the citizens had thought they were voting for in 2010.
And you know what? For all the flak that got, the election officials in Florida in 2000 were doing the right thing - examining each ballot to try to understand the intentions of the person who cast it. They did so in full view of everyone, with observers from both parties.
The problem was that the Bush campaign didn't like the answer the counters were coming up with, so they staged a riot to stop the recount in the short term, and then made sure their pals on the US Supreme Court gave orders to prevent further counting from occurring.
The problem is we havent seen TRUE computer voting in action.
Do you have any idea how expensive that would be, to really do that right?
1. All hardware would have to be thoroughly verified and checked, pin by pin, to ensure that nothing funny was going on.
2. Any operating system used on the machines would have to be verified, byte by byte, to ensure that nothing funny was going on.
3. And of course, you'd also have to verify the compiled software used, byte by byte (if you want to know why the compiled software rather than the source has to be verified, read Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson).
And yes, we don't have any of that verification done today, but that's what would be necessary if we wanted a computer that was able to do a job as good as a human hand-counted system.
Really, paper ballots and human counters work just fine, on any scale (Too many votes? Add more counters.). Electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem.
My general formula for valuing Wikipedia articles:
Useful Information = Level of Interest - Degree of Political Controversy
For instance, the article on Neptune (the planet) is quite good. If I'm somebody who doesn't know much about it, I'm going to find lots of useful facts there with plenty of links to find out more information from reputable sources on the subject. There are a bunch of users actively maintaining it (mostly fixing broken links and the like) because there's a pretty decent amount of interest, and there's no political advantage whatsoever to be gained by slanting the article in some way.
By contrast, the article on the Cryptic Era (on the geological time scale) isn't all that great, probably because there aren't too many people, even people working in the field of geology, with much interest in the topic. And articles on, say, well-known politicians tend to carefully exclude most of the bad stuff they've done.
When Android was in China's land ... let my cell phones go! .. let my cell phones go!
Just trolled so hard they could not stand
Go down, Samsung, way down in China's land,
tell ol' Jintao to let my cell phones go!
(Nah, it just doesn't quite have the same ring to it)
I'm from Cleveland. Call me when the Yangste is on fire.
It's not like that on everything, just those things that people with clout care about.
For instance, I was browsing Wikipedia one day, found something that was clearly vandalism (had added a statement that a particular screen actor was a "faggot" with no citation), and removed it without the slightest bit of difficulty. I also noticed, on an unrelated article about a public figure, that there was a list of commemorative statues, and I knew of one that wasn't on the list, and added it in without any kind of problem. The reason for this is that there's absolutely no value to setting oneself up as a petty tyrant on either of those articles, so nobody acts like a petty tyrant.
But try to do the same thing on an article like "Barack Obama" or "Mitt Romney", and you're going to have a lot of difficulties.
In your court case, it makes a big difference if the case in question is something like US v Richard Peters, 1795, or something like Citizen's United v FEC, 2010. Nobody really has an ax to grind over the first one (as far as I know, there are no modern political issues depending on the jurisdiction of US courts over captured privateers), but a lot of people have axes to grind over the second one (which has a major impact on US political campaigns going on right now).
At least in every case of a scientific theory that I've heard of, it has to be both capable of creating testable predictions, and those predictions have to have been tested and come back as being essentially correct.
Consider the idea that if a person believes something enough, it's true. It provides a testable prediction as well: If it's raining outside, and I truly believe it's not, then it must stop raining. However, it's not a scientific theory, because most of the tests of this prediction fail.
I capitalized "Communism" because the argument about Stalin is exactly the kind of thing believed by die-hard members of the Communist Party, particularly but not exclusively in the Soviet Union. Other communists advocated and in some cases implemented very different policies.
Premise: Scientific consensus is that a certain problem exists, which means that we must institute a particular policy agenda.
That's circular reasoning: You're declaring a premise that says that you're right.
Another way of looking at it: Assume that there exists a libertarian-approved market-based solution to AGW and that this solution would be acceptable to those who think that AGW is scientific fact. Would you then believe or disbelieve that AGW is happening?
Like any theory, this is always up for debate. If a better or more complete explanation can be found then it'll be replaced. That doesn't mean it is wrong, just that it could be, theories can always be wrong. You don't prove them true, you repeatedly show they aren't false.
One thing worth making very very clear here is that theories are much harder to unseat than hypotheses, because they have in fact been repeatedly demonstrated to be not false. For something to be a theory, it has to make a prediction about what will happen in the real world, and match those predictions consistently and within a fairly small margin of error. Which AGW actually has done in numerous small-scale experiments. The trouble is, of course, that we don't have several spare planets to use for large-scale tests.
My point was that whether or not a particular policy response to global warming is wise or desirable has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on answering the question of whether global warming is happening.
So let me get this straight, is your argument that:
Premise: Scientific consensus with lots of evidence says that a certain problem exists, but
Premise: The solutions proposed so far to address the problem involve ideologies distasteful to you, so
Conclusion: The science must be wrong.
Let me make a similar argument that we'll both agree is absurd:
Premise: There are reliable historical reports that Stalin sent millions of people to the gulag.
Premise: But acknowledging these facts means that maybe Communism isn't so peachy.
Conclusion: The historical reports must be capitalist propaganda.
Acknowledging that there might be a problem with lots of extra CO2 in the atmosphere does not require replacing a free market with a state-run economy.
Not at all:
1. Sometimes you're using a confusing and complex feature of some library or server. Providing a comment with a link to the documentation on that feature makes things a lot easier for the next person to come along.
2. Sometimes you're working around a bug in a library. You should leave a comment explaining what the mis-behavior was.
3. Sometimes you're implementing an algorithm that's relatively new academic work. Adding a comment explaining exactly what this is, where you can find it, and why you're using it here will help somebody learn more about it.
4. While expressive code can explain what you are doing, it can't explain why you're doing it. If your method is called "zoich_the_fleemoid", your comments about this should probably provide some kind of indication of what a fleemoid is and why you'd want to zoich it.
5. Anything residing on a major code boundary (e.g. a library method relied on by other developers) should get the full round of documentation - what it does, what it accepts as parameters, what it does with those parameters, what it returns, and what side effects are expected. Yes, your code should be clear enough that the other devs could learn this stuff by reading your code, but they shouldn't have to dive into it to figure out what your APIs do.
It's a very rare case where I think a programmer wrote too many comments.
You're right about the "is", but not about the "always has been", unless Ronald Reagan was a figment of my imagination.
The most successful tech entrepreneurs had significant technical skills. And that absolutely mattered - without those skills, they have no way of evaluating technical employees and applicants. If they weren't in charge of product development themselves, then they at least had to know who they should hire to run product development.
For example: Bill Gates was an extremely effective developer and architect (worth reading is Joel Spolsky writing about a time he met with Bill Gates). Larry and Sergei of Google were well-respected developers doing graduate work at Stanford. Steve Jobs wasn't at good at the technical stuff as Woz was, but he had tinkered with electronics and done technical work for Atari.
Many MBAs of the world would like to think that managers don't need to understand the details of their product line. But that's simply not true - the manager that understands the details will hire better people, make wiser decisions about how to accomplish tasks, and have a more realistic outlook of what the organization can do.
Yes, "spending" as a big category has gone up a great deal since 2008. The reason is that there was the biggest financial meltdown since 1929 (if you didn't notice), so all the social safety net costs went up as millions of people fell into it. It wasn't that Obama created a huge number of government programs or something, it was an increase in food stamps, housing assistance, and unemployment insurance in accordance with laws passed over a decade ago. Federal civilian employment has been around 1.2 million people since 1990, and state and local government employment has dropped dramatically in the last few years, so it's not like there are politicians on a hiring spree.
As far as taxes go, the Bush tax cuts did cost us way more than they were originally projected to cost, because although they were sold as 'temporary', they've in fact become permanent.
No, they'll Prop 123 to demand X (which passes), and in the same election Prop 124 for the tax increase to pay for X (which gets voted down). Which is one of the major reasons why they're budget is in a serious mess.