Clever analogy. If America consumed 20 million barrels of raw sewage every day, and if humankind's thirst for raw sewage was so desperate that it led them to start wars, dig in environmentally special areas until the only places left for them to find more sewage was underneath the ocean - then you'd be spot on. I find it funny to see America looking around for who to blame here. They bought the SUVs. They are the biggest oil consumers in the world (along with the UK) - and they're still buying. The pollution in Nigeria caused by oil is desperate - this kind of thing happens every year. But no one cares at all about Nigeria, because Nigerians are worth a lot less than Americans. The board of BP aren't my favourite people, but singling them out is ridiculous (and politically expedient). So in short, perhaps better to throw shit at the next SUV you see, or the next person who tells you they've been scuba diving in the caribbean (like the then-head of Greenpeace, Lord Melchett)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
stereographic is a real word - disney used it to describe the sound on Fantasia - it means that you can visualise the position of the object based on the stereophonic effect. Quite an interesting use of words because it highlights the primacy of vision over the other senses in terms of how we perceive the world.
I think the difference is that all 27 TeX users actually *use* TeX. This is the difference between a useful tool, and an aspirational ornament/"perfect gift suggestion!" like the iPad.
Absolutely. Why is it that artists are praised for producing "difficult" art, but scientists are criticised for not bending over backwards to explain their ideas to a public too lazy (not stupid) to understand the basic tools that they rely on from day to day. I would lay almost every major issue that we face today (climate change, credit crunch, BP spill) at the scientific, financial and numerical illiteracy of the public. I really don't like to think of myself as in an elite, but in this single case I think the "average American/European" needs to take a good hard look at himself and try to make sure his children aren't as mentally underequipped as he is. And arts graduates might want to stop writing clever little films critiquing this or that political theory, and concentrate on bringing the real goods that scientists produce to the public. The arts need to recognise their place - they have produced no breakthroughs in the last 100 years while science has delivered again and again. Their main job should be to explain what scientists do, and what the modern world is about. But I guess I'm preaching to the choir here.
I agree wholeheartedly. Fantastic to see the viewpoint known as "common-sense" being represented in a YRO debate (one day maybe it will even get modded up). While it's true that (for example) GCHQ is full of super clever mathematicians, and when they break a cipher it would be a waste to tell anyone, global academia is a free and open network of collaborating individuals - sound like anything we've heard of before? If it's true that all bugs are trivial given many eyes, then all weak encryption standards should be trivial, given the many experts working on encryption. Since the industrial revolution society has seen a shift towards the power of individuals over the power of authority, this is just a part of the trend. And why not try trusting and working with governments? They are the people that brought civilisation from nothing to the industrial revolution. Without them we'd all be living in mud huts.
Good point. Marx's wrote that industrial capitalism was in crisis and its end was inevitable, and imminent. He was perplexed by the durability of the capitalist system, which he expected to fall within his own lifetime (he died in 1883). Marx's "theories" have also largely been discredited from a scientific stance, since he does not make falsifiable hypotheses. Where he did make hypotheses, like the fall of capitalism, he was incorrect. Marx and Engels are fashionable names to drop - having made the effort to read and understand their work I estimate their present-day relevance as approximately zero. Keynes appears to have been far more interesting.
Haha - I Just saw Keynes's comment on "Das Kapital" - he calls it "an obsolete textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world."
Ok I read all of your post, so I really appreciate why I should try to keep this brief. 1) IDs would be cloned. So they are exactly as secure as existing ID then. Why not use a single method for more convenience. 2) Sousveillence - please don't bother me with wacky comedy concepts. 3) Who watches the watchers? The courts. Labour gave them massive powers of oversight of (only) government departments when they brought the human rights legislation into law. Tories, of course, opposed it tooth and nail. 4) Name, d.o.b. etc - so banks use insecure methods of authentication, which can easily be cracked with just facebook access - and you're scared of the government having access to this info? Almost like worrying about the id on a voting slip and then telling all of slashdot you vote tory! Your whole argument appears to boil down to "fear authority", which since people in authority (even police) are just ordinary people, means "fear others". I don't understand this fear of authority. I rarely ever regret trusting people too much. Except on ebay.
I mean to get in my workplace, to get money out of my bank, there's a picture on my rail pass that I have to show. I have to remember a lot of little bits of plastic, and remember a lot of little bits of metal, to live my life. I work in IT - I thought our job was to try to make things simpler for people? The argument against this seems to be that we fear the state, the company, the man. Strikes me as fud.
It's always a pain trying to find a "recent bill" when you haven't moved somewhere yet, or when the bills are in someone else's name. But I suppose that doesn't matter to your point.
I think you are focusing on a part of the argument that doesn't really matter. I have to prove my identity several times a day. There is no system in the UK for doing this. That seems to be a pretty massive failure of the existing system. Having said all that, even in countries with identity cards, you still need all that crud to open a bank account.
I don't understand the privacy issue. I like the lib dems, I'm glad they are in power, and I think ID cards are expensive - but I don't understand why this is such a massive issue for so many people. I'm not afraid of CCTV and I'm not afraid of ID cards. I can't say I'm an expert in the issues (the wiki article is pretty lame, for example), so please feel free to educate me.
The reason I want ID cards, is not really for ID cards. I want my identity to be electronic, to make real world transactions, authentication etc as easy as internet authentication. On the internet I can access any site and make any payments with just a username and password. In the real world there are a bunch of ass backwards tools - coins, keys, access cards, phone sim cards and other bull. One of the reasons I can't shed this crap is because of "privacy concerns", which I don't worry about. For example, I share almost all of my personal information with google - and I don't worry about them trying to misuse it. I also share all of my wealth with the Bank Of England - I don't worry about them either. Germany also has a system of ID cards, which works.
The reason I want CCTV is because it should make solving crime a lot easier. Combine it with face recognition and you can build a map of where people go and when. Add datamining, and perhaps you can start to track down drug dealers, burglars, rapists, etc. It starts to get very difficult to commit the really nasty crimes that still happen (although not nearly as much as people think)
The best/most frequent arguments against seem to me to be that it would give a corrupt government the power to identify certain elements of society, who could then be, say, put in camps, and it would give police power which they could use to victimise certain groups
From a purely personal standpoint I don't see these things happening in Britain. The progress of Nazi Germany towards the holocaust was a step by step progression, a series of sets of laws defined the Jews as a separate group and began isolating them. Britain has adopted human rights conventions which make this (I think) unconstitutional. The only "warning sign" I heard of with CCTV was that an operator was using a camera to spy on a woman in her bedroom. That's not something which is hard to fix, and it doesn't scare me.
As far as I recall, you're right that gravitational waves would propagate at or below the speed of light. I think there are two ways to look at this problem - 1) I think it's impossible to destroy mass. If you converted it to energy, it would still bend spacetime (I think), so there seems to be no way to move energy or mass faster than the speed of light. 2) I'd trust GR more than inflation. But it seems like under GR the restriction to travelling below the speed of light is purely a local restriction - under inflation, if every part of the spacetime is expanding at the speed of light, perhaps that means that two different pieces of spacetime could appear to be moving faster than the speed of light, to each other. It's quite hard to answer these questions, as under GR time is just another coordinate, but the coordinate system changes over time. Argh.
Ok that deserves mod interesting/informative. I always need to be reminded to KISS. I guess the difference with poker machines is that the cost of a tweaked machine is (max) a few million dollars. If the government tweaks the voting machines we lose control of government.
Why are there so many stories on slashdot about how awful e-Voting is? Is there a large part of the slashdot audience that seeks a return to pencil and paper solutions, instead of this new-fangled transistorisation? I think your idea makes perfect sense, the situation where a PROM is touched is the same situation as where a ballot box has been broken open.
Well, I'm afraid you disagree with Ben Franklin too. He said the choice for the American colonies was to "Join or die". What a choice. Was Pearl Harbor the sort of event that the American president could just ignore, and sign a non-aggression pact with Germany over? It has 13 million hits on google - twice as many as Auschwitz, 43 times as many hits as Kristallnacht. I think that would have been very difficult for him to do. So yes - I think the revolution was the easy choice. I think fighting the second world war was the easy choice - the Americans avoided war for 2 years until they had no other option. Essentially revolution, regime change, changing the constitution are like re-architecting a running system. No one wants to do it, unless they have to. When I was a young programmer, I was eager to make architectural changes. As you get more experience, you realise that it's very hard to predict the effect of major changes. This is something that we are currently learning in the middle east - regime change is not a simple matter.
I, respectfully, disagree. You have rights because it became easier for people to stand up for them than not to. The pilgrim fathers left England because everyone wanted to kill them. MLK fought for equality because America was racially segregated. The United States fought the Nazis after Japan bombed pearl harbor, not after Kristallnacht (which actually came before the war - the United States actually withdrew its ambassador in response to the placing of 20,000 Jews in concentration camps, the theft of their belongings, the destruction of their synagogues).
Let me get my head around your position: A drunk IT consultant, earning $100k+ a year, starts debating law with a policeman at midnight (the policeman earns $35k a year). The white-collar professional is playing golf on the street. The blue-collar policeman is at work. Since he thinks it's his job, and the professional will not meet him halfway, he takes the young professional into custody. It turns out the policeman made a mistake in a stressful situation (ever done that at work?). A clerk who earns $25k in a police office makes a mistake when writing a letter to the gentleman's lawyer (who earns $250k++ a year), and the professional spends 3 man-months proving that the letter was untrue. Do I admire the IT professional? Not really. If he wants to fix the police system, maybe he should join the force, or become a prosecuting attorney. The interest in this case does, however, give me a different perspective on why America's health care system is dying under a mountain of litigation. It seems that if you're legally entitled to a "right" then you are morally obliged to force everyone to acknowledge it, even if it takes a year of your life, a legal case, and 5 man-years of public officials time. Otherwise it seems, we are not properly "free".
I'm guessing that they figured that was the easiest thing to do as opposed to doing actual testing.
- I'd say "most sensible" rather than "easiest" - today's passengers tend to go for low cost airlines. Having engines tested for volcanic ash and every comparable risk would doubtless increase their cost, and they would no longer be manufacturing engines. They probably made the right choice - we have a great opportunity to test engines in ash conditions now. Most European airlines are doing it now.
I wouldn't blame the governments for following the written specifications
- if they were sysadmins and this was a systems outage which had been going on for 5 days, I think they would be showing a little more imagination than "it says in the manual it's not safe to turn it on". This of course isn't a systems outage, it's keeping people away from their families and lives.
liability
- the magic word. Who is willing to take responsibility for this? No-one? Thanks Lawyers!
Balls. Governments want to "protect" people - i.e. cover their own asses in case anything goes wrong. They haven't got any power anyway. This becomes apparent when you see American politicians talking about the internet as a system of tubes, 5 years after we all got online (shit - is it too late to regulate it?). Never assume a politician has an evil plan - he hasn't got a plan at all. If he had the ability to make plans, he would work in the private sector.
Last I checked, the people of the former Soviet Union will back me up on this.
Good point - I'd be interested in their take on it too. I guess you mean Hiroshima not Dresden though - Stalin seems to have been quite keen on the firebombing.
I can hardly be blamed for their foolishness despite decades of being lied to about the meaning of wars, over and over.
Heh point well made - I've been on the wrong side of that before - but would you really prefer if the Allies (and soviets) hadn't fought WW2? Maybe they needed to fight, but went too far?
Slashdot Mirror
Clever analogy. If America consumed 20 million barrels of raw sewage every day, and if humankind's thirst for raw sewage was so desperate that it led them to start wars, dig in environmentally special areas until the only places left for them to find more sewage was underneath the ocean - then you'd be spot on. I find it funny to see America looking around for who to blame here. They bought the SUVs. They are the biggest oil consumers in the world (along with the UK) - and they're still buying. The pollution in Nigeria caused by oil is desperate - this kind of thing happens every year. But no one cares at all about Nigeria, because Nigerians are worth a lot less than Americans. The board of BP aren't my favourite people, but singling them out is ridiculous (and politically expedient). So in short, perhaps better to throw shit at the next SUV you see, or the next person who tells you they've been scuba diving in the caribbean (like the then-head of Greenpeace, Lord Melchett) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
stereographic is a real word - disney used it to describe the sound on Fantasia - it means that you can visualise the position of the object based on the stereophonic effect. Quite an interesting use of words because it highlights the primacy of vision over the other senses in terms of how we perceive the world.
It's good to see that fans of Fisher-Price style gadgets don't have difficulty understanding complex concepts like irony :)
I think the difference is that all 27 TeX users actually *use* TeX. This is the difference between a useful tool, and an aspirational ornament/"perfect gift suggestion!" like the iPad.
Absolutely. Why is it that artists are praised for producing "difficult" art, but scientists are criticised for not bending over backwards to explain their ideas to a public too lazy (not stupid) to understand the basic tools that they rely on from day to day. I would lay almost every major issue that we face today (climate change, credit crunch, BP spill) at the scientific, financial and numerical illiteracy of the public. I really don't like to think of myself as in an elite, but in this single case I think the "average American/European" needs to take a good hard look at himself and try to make sure his children aren't as mentally underequipped as he is. And arts graduates might want to stop writing clever little films critiquing this or that political theory, and concentrate on bringing the real goods that scientists produce to the public. The arts need to recognise their place - they have produced no breakthroughs in the last 100 years while science has delivered again and again. Their main job should be to explain what scientists do, and what the modern world is about. But I guess I'm preaching to the choir here.
I agree wholeheartedly. Fantastic to see the viewpoint known as "common-sense" being represented in a YRO debate (one day maybe it will even get modded up). While it's true that (for example) GCHQ is full of super clever mathematicians, and when they break a cipher it would be a waste to tell anyone, global academia is a free and open network of collaborating individuals - sound like anything we've heard of before? If it's true that all bugs are trivial given many eyes, then all weak encryption standards should be trivial, given the many experts working on encryption. Since the industrial revolution society has seen a shift towards the power of individuals over the power of authority, this is just a part of the trend. And why not try trusting and working with governments? They are the people that brought civilisation from nothing to the industrial revolution. Without them we'd all be living in mud huts.
Good point. Marx's wrote that industrial capitalism was in crisis and its end was inevitable, and imminent. He was perplexed by the durability of the capitalist system, which he expected to fall within his own lifetime (he died in 1883). Marx's "theories" have also largely been discredited from a scientific stance, since he does not make falsifiable hypotheses. Where he did make hypotheses, like the fall of capitalism, he was incorrect. Marx and Engels are fashionable names to drop - having made the effort to read and understand their work I estimate their present-day relevance as approximately zero. Keynes appears to have been far more interesting.
Haha - I Just saw Keynes's comment on "Das Kapital" - he calls it "an obsolete textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world."
Ok I read all of your post, so I really appreciate why I should try to keep this brief. 1) IDs would be cloned. So they are exactly as secure as existing ID then. Why not use a single method for more convenience. 2) Sousveillence - please don't bother me with wacky comedy concepts. 3) Who watches the watchers? The courts. Labour gave them massive powers of oversight of (only) government departments when they brought the human rights legislation into law. Tories, of course, opposed it tooth and nail. 4) Name, d.o.b. etc - so banks use insecure methods of authentication, which can easily be cracked with just facebook access - and you're scared of the government having access to this info? Almost like worrying about the id on a voting slip and then telling all of slashdot you vote tory!
Your whole argument appears to boil down to "fear authority", which since people in authority (even police) are just ordinary people, means "fear others". I don't understand this fear of authority. I rarely ever regret trusting people too much. Except on ebay.
It won't be unconstitutional without a written constitution - so you're not a lawyer then?
I mean to get in my workplace, to get money out of my bank, there's a picture on my rail pass that I have to show. I have to remember a lot of little bits of plastic, and remember a lot of little bits of metal, to live my life. I work in IT - I thought our job was to try to make things simpler for people? The argument against this seems to be that we fear the state, the company, the man. Strikes me as fud.
Depends how good the national database is I guess. If there's a lot of rows, the update statement might take a while to execute.
It's always a pain trying to find a "recent bill" when you haven't moved somewhere yet, or when the bills are in someone else's name.
But I suppose that doesn't matter to your point.
I think you are focusing on a part of the argument that doesn't really matter. I have to prove my identity several times a day. There is no system in the UK for doing this. That seems to be a pretty massive failure of the existing system. Having said all that, even in countries with identity cards, you still need all that crud to open a bank account.
I don't understand the privacy issue. I like the lib dems, I'm glad they are in power, and I think ID cards are expensive - but I don't understand why this is such a massive issue for so many people. I'm not afraid of CCTV and I'm not afraid of ID cards. I can't say I'm an expert in the issues (the wiki article is pretty lame, for example), so please feel free to educate me.
The reason I want ID cards, is not really for ID cards. I want my identity to be electronic, to make real world transactions, authentication etc as easy as internet authentication. On the internet I can access any site and make any payments with just a username and password. In the real world there are a bunch of ass backwards tools - coins, keys, access cards, phone sim cards and other bull. One of the reasons I can't shed this crap is because of "privacy concerns", which I don't worry about. For example, I share almost all of my personal information with google - and I don't worry about them trying to misuse it. I also share all of my wealth with the Bank Of England - I don't worry about them either. Germany also has a system of ID cards, which works.
The reason I want CCTV is because it should make solving crime a lot easier. Combine it with face recognition and you can build a map of where people go and when. Add datamining, and perhaps you can start to track down drug dealers, burglars, rapists, etc. It starts to get very difficult to commit the really nasty crimes that still happen (although not nearly as much as people think)
The best/most frequent arguments against seem to me to be that it would give a corrupt government the power to identify certain elements of society, who could then be, say, put in camps, and it would give police power which they could use to victimise certain groups
From a purely personal standpoint I don't see these things happening in Britain. The progress of Nazi Germany towards the holocaust was a step by step progression, a series of sets of laws defined the Jews as a separate group and began isolating them. Britain has adopted human rights conventions which make this (I think) unconstitutional. The only "warning sign" I heard of with CCTV was that an operator was using a camera to spy on a woman in her bedroom. That's not something which is hard to fix, and it doesn't scare me.
As far as I recall, you're right that gravitational waves would propagate at or below the speed of light. I think there are two ways to look at this problem - 1) I think it's impossible to destroy mass. If you converted it to energy, it would still bend spacetime (I think), so there seems to be no way to move energy or mass faster than the speed of light. 2) I'd trust GR more than inflation. But it seems like under GR the restriction to travelling below the speed of light is purely a local restriction - under inflation, if every part of the spacetime is expanding at the speed of light, perhaps that means that two different pieces of spacetime could appear to be moving faster than the speed of light, to each other. It's quite hard to answer these questions, as under GR time is just another coordinate, but the coordinate system changes over time. Argh.
Ok that deserves mod interesting/informative. I always need to be reminded to KISS. I guess the difference with poker machines is that the cost of a tweaked machine is (max) a few million dollars. If the government tweaks the voting machines we lose control of government.
Why are there so many stories on slashdot about how awful e-Voting is? Is there a large part of the slashdot audience that seeks a return to pencil and paper solutions, instead of this new-fangled transistorisation? I think your idea makes perfect sense, the situation where a PROM is touched is the same situation as where a ballot box has been broken open.
Eerily similar to one of my favourite sketches from Brasseye
Unless you're a senator.
Well, I'm afraid you disagree with Ben Franklin too. He said the choice for the American colonies was to "Join or die". What a choice. Was Pearl Harbor the sort of event that the American president could just ignore, and sign a non-aggression pact with Germany over? It has 13 million hits on google - twice as many as Auschwitz, 43 times as many hits as Kristallnacht. I think that would have been very difficult for him to do. So yes - I think the revolution was the easy choice. I think fighting the second world war was the easy choice - the Americans avoided war for 2 years until they had no other option. Essentially revolution, regime change, changing the constitution are like re-architecting a running system. No one wants to do it, unless they have to. When I was a young programmer, I was eager to make architectural changes. As you get more experience, you realise that it's very hard to predict the effect of major changes. This is something that we are currently learning in the middle east - regime change is not a simple matter.
I, respectfully, disagree. You have rights because it became easier for people to stand up for them than not to. The pilgrim fathers left England because everyone wanted to kill them. MLK fought for equality because America was racially segregated. The United States fought the Nazis after Japan bombed pearl harbor, not after Kristallnacht (which actually came before the war - the United States actually withdrew its ambassador in response to the placing of 20,000 Jews in concentration camps, the theft of their belongings, the destruction of their synagogues).
Let me get my head around your position: A drunk IT consultant, earning $100k+ a year, starts debating law with a policeman at midnight (the policeman earns $35k a year). The white-collar professional is playing golf on the street. The blue-collar policeman is at work. Since he thinks it's his job, and the professional will not meet him halfway, he takes the young professional into custody. It turns out the policeman made a mistake in a stressful situation (ever done that at work?). A clerk who earns $25k in a police office makes a mistake when writing a letter to the gentleman's lawyer (who earns $250k++ a year), and the professional spends 3 man-months proving that the letter was untrue. Do I admire the IT professional? Not really. If he wants to fix the police system, maybe he should join the force, or become a prosecuting attorney. The interest in this case does, however, give me a different perspective on why America's health care system is dying under a mountain of litigation. It seems that if you're legally entitled to a "right" then you are morally obliged to force everyone to acknowledge it, even if it takes a year of your life, a legal case, and 5 man-years of public officials time. Otherwise it seems, we are not properly "free".
I'm guessing that they figured that was the easiest thing to do as opposed to doing actual testing.
- I'd say "most sensible" rather than "easiest" - today's passengers tend to go for low cost airlines. Having engines tested for volcanic ash and every comparable risk would doubtless increase their cost, and they would no longer be manufacturing engines. They probably made the right choice - we have a great opportunity to test engines in ash conditions now. Most European airlines are doing it now.
I wouldn't blame the governments for following the written specifications
- if they were sysadmins and this was a systems outage which had been going on for 5 days, I think they would be showing a little more imagination than "it says in the manual it's not safe to turn it on". This of course isn't a systems outage, it's keeping people away from their families and lives.
liability
- the magic word. Who is willing to take responsibility for this? No-one? Thanks Lawyers!
Balls. Governments want to "protect" people - i.e. cover their own asses in case anything goes wrong. They haven't got any power anyway. This becomes apparent when you see American politicians talking about the internet as a system of tubes, 5 years after we all got online (shit - is it too late to regulate it?). Never assume a politician has an evil plan - he hasn't got a plan at all. If he had the ability to make plans, he would work in the private sector.
Last I checked, the people of the former Soviet Union will back me up on this.
Good point - I'd be interested in their take on it too. I guess you mean Hiroshima not Dresden though - Stalin seems to have been quite keen on the firebombing.
I can hardly be blamed for their foolishness despite decades of being lied to about the meaning of wars, over and over.
Heh point well made - I've been on the wrong side of that before - but would you really prefer if the Allies (and soviets) hadn't fought WW2? Maybe they needed to fight, but went too far?