This system is designed to track present and future criminals. John Poindexter hasn't broken any laws, nor is he likely to whereas the general public obviously breaks laws all the time.
It's called "risk management".
What's the difference?
on
Decentralization
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Geeks make new stuff primarily because it's fun, because it's useful, and because they can. Suits make new stuff primarily because they hope to earn a profit.
As if that was somehow a lesser goal. They are isomorphic, in that they both consist of informational efficiency gains. Here's what I mean.
Geeks see a need for a device/program. They function as a evolutionary force to fill an "ecological" niche. The niche is the need, the device is the thing that exploits the niche. "Suits" do the same thing. They see a financial or economic inefficiency and they create a "device" (a financial instrument or business, say) to exploit it. They are money hackers. Profit is just another way of saying efficiency which everyone here knows is related to elegance.
Sure, suits don't care about the elegance of YOUR crap--but you don't care about yours, so why should they. And they are rightly in charge, since their feet are on the ground. Now if only those damn liberals in Congress would understand that people like Ken Lay should be praised for increasing efficiency instead of castigated.
You can find kaleidoscopes everywhere
on
Low Tech Toys?
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· Score: 0, Troll
The real question is, why would you want to give one to a 3 year old? They can't close just one eye at a time, making it hard to use. Worse, it contains glass and small parts (==choking hazards). Not safe for children, dude, how did your child even survive this long?
I think we have more to fear from popular news sites spreading pseudo-scientific garbage like this. Not the research, I'm sure that's valid. But going from "identified a gene that plays a role in subjects learning to fear" to "creating a clone army that is impervious to fear" is a huge leap.
It is ironic, but unfunny, that you would use scare tactics to try get us all worked up about this fear research.
Because of the interference of wireless technology with radial astronomy, I would like to suggest a couple alternate ideas.
1) Why would I want my wireless devices to "penetrate walls"? I want security, which means I want to keep people from being able to look through my walls. Perhaps a different wavelength or a building code change to make walls opaque to these wavelengths.
2) 90% of wireless adoption is due to laziness--people just don't want to run a wire from their TV to the speakers or from the computer to the toaster, or whatever. What about another building code change to run fiber throughout the house with a lot of available plugs? That way the problems that wireless (claims to) address can be met in other ways.
So there you are: a computer system for cops in their cars that is better, more flexible, more durable, and a lot less expensive than traditional ones -- all based on a bit of imagination from a couple of sysadmins who are not overwhelmed with reboots and software problems, so they have time to research what the police really need from their in-car data terminals...
I thought we were against digitized cops with access to all our private data.
Even the Microsoft people couldn't refute the fact that Largo's current setup uses far less hardware and is far easier to administer and physically maintain than an equivalent Windows-based system.
Yay for Linux!
I also was impressed that they spend less than half the money other towns do on their IT. Of course, from the sysadmin POV that's bad as it means they aren't paid much. But that's the price of freedom, I guess.
While I enjoy pretty graphs (and I enjoy pretty young female actresses even more), I'd like to call attention to the fact that this guy is not a mathematician, he is an ecologist. Look how wrong they were back in the 70's about global cooling and how obviously wrong they are right now about global warming and you will agree that this should be taken with a grain of salt.
Andromeda Strain was pretty good, though it had a bit of a confusing ending.
The Great Train Robbery is definitely his best work (and the movie stars Sean Connery, you can't beat that with a stick). To this day I have no idea if it's fiction or non.
Sphere was pretty good the first time around and as a pre-teen, but sucks after you know the trick.
Jurassic Park was actually better as a movie and that's saying something because the movie, except for the special effects, was terrible.
"somehow involved"?
on
Bigfoot A Hoax?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They are going to have to be a lot more convincing and specific than that to turn the tide of belief in Bigfoot. We need actual photographic proof that this guy is Bigfoot or maybe a diary or something where he wrote "June 13. Dressed up as large ape-like creature. Was spotted by hunters."
As an example of this kind of thing, remember crop circles. No one seriously believes that those guys pulled this hoax because the geometric shapes are too perfect, plus the wheat stems show no signs of cracking. There is clearly more here than meets the eye.
Something new every time? Then how come when I browse Freshmeat I see 18,000 IRC clients and a further 5,000 "aim workalikes"?
The problems people face have barely changed in thousands of years. The problems that business (which uses 95% of the software out there) faces haven't changed in 200 years. The requirements are well-known. The solutions exist. The reason the software sucks isn't that you have a PHB, it's that you lack discipline to find and fix all your bugs.
that solar and wind won't work, due to the size requirements. Unless you can devote a full backpack to a bunch of folded up panels, but that's going to be fragile and heavy.
Can you bring a hand/foot crank generator? An hour or two of cranking would probably give you enough time to boot up (Windows) or boot, log in, check email, browse pr0n, IRC for a bit and play some Tux Racer (Linux).
Physicists are now struggling toward a theory that would go beyond general relativity-a "theory of everything" that would unite gravity with the other forces of nature. Yet the quest is more of a homage to Einstein than a challenge, since Einstein himself worked-unsuccessfully, in the end-toward the same goal.
Einstein couldn't do it, therefore it couldn't be done? But we're going to try anyway, "in his memory"? What kind of stupid BS is this? We've gotten light-years (heh) ahead of where Al was back then, some of it despite his "help" (God does not play dice.)
I think this will never see the light of day in the US.
Why, you ask? Not because it's not interesting and efective technology, but because we Americans don't like mass transit. We want cars. We have a *right* to cars. Look in the Bill of Rights. It's there. Or if it's not, I think it should be, so it might as well be there right next to my right to own a minigun.
Seriously, though, there are hundreds neat ideas for viable mass-transit available, but I'm stuck riding a 30 year-old, beaurocracy-lader system called BART to work everyday. That has, to put it mildly, soured my viewpoint somewhat. Until we remove the corruption that wil always accompany mass transit, we might as well forget about it.
Analysts of various kinds already have access to our shopping and TV viewing habits. The web is used by a much smaller percentage of people. If they can't use the data they already have to make economic predictions then adding a bunch of porn sites isn't going to tip the balance.
I've found that Winblows 2000 has a lot of problems in the networking subsystem. My network is constantly going down and the only Wincrap machines are on the secretaries desk! Those Winjunk programmers must sure be terrible to be able to take down a hospital like this. Somebody should hold them responsible, I call boycott!!!
As a working physicist, I have the utmost respect for science and the scientific method. I revere Newton, Galileo and Darwin as gods among men. I use computers every day and am very thankful (how timely!) that Turing created them for us.
But when are space "scientists" going to come clean? Every time it looks like their wild-eyed claims are about to be put the test, some "anomaly" takes down the supposed craft, mooting the point for another 5 years and $10 billion. It's time to expose "space flight" (and possibly astronomy in general) as the pseudo-scientific frauds that they are.
Filters are not censorship
on
The Wireless City
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· Score: -1, Troll
The Constitution doesn't say you can read whatever you want, only that you can say whatever you want. And it only applies to Americans anyway, not illegal immigrants.
You would think that with the WTC tragedy just blocks away, NYC would be a little bit more cautious. What security precautions have they taken to ensure that terrorists don't utilize this wireless connectivity to access bomb-making instructions from the Internet? And even if they've been responsible enough to put a filter on the information available, what about all the non-savvy folk in the park who don't have firewalls? Are we to just stand by while their hard drives are violated by swarthy assailants?
Unfortunately the courts have already decided that downloading music == stealing, so I don't expect this "service" to last very long. I certainly wouldn't throw money down this particular short-lived hole.
Back the actual question, nobody is claiming that 19 year olds are subhuman. The claim is that they are inexperienced. You are right that "young" and "inexperienced" are non-synonymous. But one is a proper subset of the other, pretty much by definition.
Saying young people are inexperienced isn't maligning their character. It is akin to saying black people are poor. An unfortunate and to-be-mended, but nonetheless entirely factual circumstance.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called "risk management".
As if that was somehow a lesser goal. They are isomorphic, in that they both consist of informational efficiency gains. Here's what I mean.
Geeks see a need for a device/program. They function as a evolutionary force to fill an "ecological" niche. The niche is the need, the device is the thing that exploits the niche. "Suits" do the same thing. They see a financial or economic inefficiency and they create a "device" (a financial instrument or business, say) to exploit it. They are money hackers. Profit is just another way of saying efficiency which everyone here knows is related to elegance.
Sure, suits don't care about the elegance of YOUR crap--but you don't care about yours, so why should they. And they are rightly in charge, since their feet are on the ground. Now if only those damn liberals in Congress would understand that people like Ken Lay should be praised for increasing efficiency instead of castigated.
The real question is, why would you want to give one to a 3 year old? They can't close just one eye at a time, making it hard to use. Worse, it contains glass and small parts (==choking hazards). Not safe for children, dude, how did your child even survive this long?
It is ironic, but unfunny, that you would use scare tactics to try get us all worked up about this fear research.
With today's high-tech antibiotics, I seriously doubt an influenza epidemic could get very far.
1) Why would I want my wireless devices to "penetrate walls"? I want security, which means I want to keep people from being able to look through my walls. Perhaps a different wavelength or a building code change to make walls opaque to these wavelengths.
2) 90% of wireless adoption is due to laziness--people just don't want to run a wire from their TV to the speakers or from the computer to the toaster, or whatever. What about another building code change to run fiber throughout the house with a lot of available plugs? That way the problems that wireless (claims to) address can be met in other ways.
Just my $.02, any thoughts?
OTOH, it would be in violation of the DMCA, not to mention stealing from Intuit and your bank, so maybe you better not confess to it here.
I thought we were against digitized cops with access to all our private data.
Even the Microsoft people couldn't refute the fact that Largo's current setup uses far less hardware and is far easier to administer and physically maintain than an equivalent Windows-based system.
Yay for Linux!
I also was impressed that they spend less than half the money other towns do on their IT. Of course, from the sysadmin POV that's bad as it means they aren't paid much. But that's the price of freedom, I guess.
While I enjoy pretty graphs (and I enjoy pretty young female actresses even more), I'd like to call attention to the fact that this guy is not a mathematician, he is an ecologist. Look how wrong they were back in the 70's about global cooling and how obviously wrong they are right now about global warming and you will agree that this should be taken with a grain of salt.
The Great Train Robbery is definitely his best work (and the movie stars Sean Connery, you can't beat that with a stick). To this day I have no idea if it's fiction or non.
Sphere was pretty good the first time around and as a pre-teen, but sucks after you know the trick.
Jurassic Park was actually better as a movie and that's saying something because the movie, except for the special effects, was terrible.
As an example of this kind of thing, remember crop circles. No one seriously believes that those guys pulled this hoax because the geometric shapes are too perfect, plus the wheat stems show no signs of cracking. There is clearly more here than meets the eye.
The problems people face have barely changed in thousands of years. The problems that business (which uses 95% of the software out there) faces haven't changed in 200 years. The requirements are well-known. The solutions exist. The reason the software sucks isn't that you have a PHB, it's that you lack discipline to find and fix all your bugs.
Can you bring a hand/foot crank generator? An hour or two of cranking would probably give you enough time to boot up (Windows) or boot, log in, check email, browse pr0n, IRC for a bit and play some Tux Racer (Linux).
This would be a great niche for Linux to occupy!
Einstein couldn't do it, therefore it couldn't be done? But we're going to try anyway, "in his memory"? What kind of stupid BS is this? We've gotten light-years (heh) ahead of where Al was back then, some of it despite his "help" (God does not play dice.)
Why, you ask? Not because it's not interesting and efective technology, but because we Americans don't like mass transit. We want cars. We have a *right* to cars. Look in the Bill of Rights. It's there. Or if it's not, I think it should be, so it might as well be there right next to my right to own a minigun.
Seriously, though, there are hundreds neat ideas for viable mass-transit available, but I'm stuck riding a 30 year-old, beaurocracy-lader system called BART to work everyday. That has, to put it mildly, soured my viewpoint somewhat. Until we remove the corruption that wil always accompany mass transit, we might as well forget about it.
Analysts of various kinds already have access to our shopping and TV viewing habits. The web is used by a much smaller percentage of people. If they can't use the data they already have to make economic predictions then adding a bunch of porn sites isn't going to tip the balance.
I've found that Winblows 2000 has a lot of problems in the networking subsystem. My network is constantly going down and the only Wincrap machines are on the secretaries desk! Those Winjunk programmers must sure be terrible to be able to take down a hospital like this. Somebody should hold them responsible, I call boycott!!!
As you can see xbill has been out a lot longer than your precious OS, which is to be expected as all your good ideas were stolen from Unix.
But when are space "scientists" going to come clean? Every time it looks like their wild-eyed claims are about to be put the test, some "anomaly" takes down the supposed craft, mooting the point for another 5 years and $10 billion. It's time to expose "space flight" (and possibly astronomy in general) as the pseudo-scientific frauds that they are.
The Constitution doesn't say you can read whatever you want, only that you can say whatever you want. And it only applies to Americans anyway, not illegal immigrants.
You would think that with the WTC tragedy just blocks away, NYC would be a little bit more cautious. What security precautions have they taken to ensure that terrorists don't utilize this wireless connectivity to access bomb-making instructions from the Internet? And even if they've been responsible enough to put a filter on the information available, what about all the non-savvy folk in the park who don't have firewalls? Are we to just stand by while their hard drives are violated by swarthy assailants?
Unfortunately the courts have already decided that downloading music == stealing, so I don't expect this "service" to last very long. I certainly wouldn't throw money down this particular short-lived hole.
Back the actual question, nobody is claiming that 19 year olds are subhuman. The claim is that they are inexperienced. You are right that "young" and "inexperienced" are non-synonymous. But one is a proper subset of the other, pretty much by definition.
Saying young people are inexperienced isn't maligning their character. It is akin to saying black people are poor. An unfortunate and to-be-mended, but nonetheless entirely factual circumstance.
How many of the Fortune 100, 500 or even 1000 companies have 19 year old CEOs?