"So, what the real issue? Surveillance? Like it or not, that's legal."
But that doesn't mean it still has to be legal next year. For that matter, it doesn't have to be outlawed, if whatever accountable public servant (the mayor?) tells the cops to knock it off, then it is no longer part of their job description.
I'm sure whoever tried to ban it would get slammed for being "soft on crime" during the next election. But surely that pendulum has to swing back eventually? At some point imprisoning everybody just reaches the point of absurdity.
All I can say is that the police have no reasonable expectation of getting their GPS back since they are obviously disposing of it by leaving in on my property.
What do they care about the cost of the GPS? It's your tax dollars at work. And that's a pittance to the salary you're paying them to stalk you.
I know some people feel that way. My guess is the new generation communicates much more effectively by writing that previous generations did because they have so much more practice.
There is more information and meaning in a 15 second voice mail than in any text. Is the caller angry? Sad? Frustrated? What did the environment he was calling from sound like?
We have a whole generation of people who grew up with the textual Internet. I think they are more comfortable communicating by text, either because they're better writers, or because they have a richer set of conventions for conveying emotion that way, or because they are accustomed to the emotional ambiguity.
The question isn't whether you get more information from a 60 second voicemail than you get from skimming an email in 10 seconds; the contest is between listening to 1 voicemail or skimming 6 emails.
The median price of a house in Detroit is $7500. Floorplans vary, but they are larger than these apartments.
Floor plan? Those shells of homes in Detroit are tear-downs; they detract from the value of the land they're on. Even the copper wiring has been ripped from the walls. Comparing that to a new home or apartment you could actually live in is not fair.
So some guy spends a decade or two of his life getting the specialized training necessary to be scientist and then he gets out-competed by someone else and ends up on food stamps working minimum wage at McDonalds?
Normally if somebody is not going to cut it, they should get weeded out during the educational process. If not, they usually still end up doing science, but in a supporting role with less discretion than the stars. Actually all researchers start that way, then some move up more quickly than others.
You don't just wake up one morning and decide you're going to quit your job as a mailman and go lead a research project at CERN - and then when the project gets canceled go back to your job as a mailman. To work at CERN (as a scientific researcher) you've got to plan years in advance and spend years and years studying all kinds of specialized topics.
The idea that it's OK for politicians to capriciously reallocate funding from year to year ignores the very real human cost. And it discourages people from becoming scientists. Why spend years of your life preparing for a specialized career if some politician may arbitrarily cancel it at the last minute.
A reduction in funding at CERN doesn't necessarily mean scientists are becoming burger flippers. It may mean that some of them have to move onto other projects at places other than CERN, executing the spending priorities of whoever has decision-making authority. Hopefully those decision-makers are accomplished scientists with a broader vision rather than just "some politician." Though, at a very high level, the stewards of tax money are politicans so they do make general decisions about the course of taxpayer-supported science, e.g. send money to DoD vs. NSF, or NIH, or NASA.
What I would like to see is more of an open source model of scientific research - in that the government finds some motivated and educated people and pays them enough to live comfortably but simply. These people could then attach themselves to whatever projects seemed promising or drift away from whatever projects seemed to be stalled without all kinds of bureaucratic hassles from the politicians. If they thought CERN was promising they could work at CERN but, if not, they attach themselves to other projects.
That's basically what "tenure" means. Of course, the competition to obtain tenure at research universities is fierce - it's a privileged position.
There would still be mechanisms for accountability but it would be more about good faith effort than about politicians micromanaging science (that they know little about). Basically, you'd create positions like Einstein had at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study but for average working scientists rather than just for the super stars.
Even if you doubled the number of such positions, the field of applications would soon double as well, and you'd be back to selecting the stars again.
Getting paid to follow your curiosity is simply too desirable a position to be available to just anybody who wants it.
Most of the comments here are assuming this represents a reduction in spending on science by Austria. But the last sentence of the blurb says "The newly-available funds will now allow Austria to take part in new European projects, boost its participation in old ones as well as help the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the country's main organization funding research." Are they actually reducing science spending at all, or just re-allocating from one project to others with more perceived bang for the buck? That happens all the time in science. IMHO drawing a salary to conduct research I find interesting is a privilege that can't be extended to everybody, so it has to be earned and continually re-established by competing with others who want the money for their ideas.
This kind of research is expensive, and there's an economic slump going on right now. What should the Austrian government cancel to pay for this research? Roads? Schools?
The other alternative is to simply not balance the budget when the economy is in a slump, and help it recover faster with deficit spending, like what the US is doing. It's a reasonable plan, except that we never seem to get around to paying it back when the economy is good...
That is the only difference that matters as equal crimes will be treated differently in different countries.
You must have missed the verdict. What TPB case showed us is that different countries' laws are pretty much the same after all. Some of us might like to think there's no international consensus on this, but there is.
Everybody dies from something eventually, and it is usually expensive. The study I cited shows that despite what you described, smokers still have lower average lifelong medical expenses than nonsmokers.
Eh? I have yet to hear a justification for agricultural subsidies that doesn't amount to: "because I'm from Iowa, and I like money." Why don't they do away with the H1B program and institute programmer subsidies instead? (Sarcasm).
Well, I did say just that - tabs should still download in the background. That shouldn't take substantial CPU. I can imagine a case where the browser doesn't know it's supposed to download something until (for instance) it runs some javascript that makes a link to a flash app - in that case it wouldn't finish background loading which would admittedly be bad.
The President needs a big clue. Those nuclear arms are for deterrence against all the suicidal nutjobs out there trying to get their hands on their own bombs.
Here's a big clue for you: think carefully about whether "suicidal nutjobs" care about deterrence.
I'm not a nuclear scientist by any means, but would it be possible to harvest the heat and radiation from spent fuel and convert that to electricity?
My vote is "no," by definition, since "spent fuel" simply means the fuel is depleted enough that you don't think it's worth harvesting the energy from it any more.
Multi-processing aside, I wish firefox had an option to NOT use any CPU (including scripts, plugins, etc) on tabs except the one visible. I do NOT want 30 different processes, all firefox tabs, using up all my cores just to run spam animations. Granted, I DO usually want tabs to at least download in the background, so maybe it's harder than it sounds.
And when I tried it just now, opening a new tab spawned a new thread (maybe more than one).
The question for this article is, why separate processes instead of threads? If you have processes sharing memory (especially read/write memory) this distinction between threading vs. multiple processes becomes rather small.
I do hope they can firefox survive a plugin crash, because youtube always locks up firefox eventually.
I pay PBS and NPR. Not only were these once free to me, but they're still free to me, if I didn't want to pay. But I really enjoy their content, it doesn't cost that much to produce (it's almost all nonfiction), and I don't want them dry up or disappear.
Slashdot headlines with "Phony Wikipedia" should be marked {{tautology}}. The mere fact that supposedly responsible journalists are even citing Wikipedia shows what an intellectual cancer Wikipedia is on the Internet.
Mischievous deception of news agencies has a storied history which long predates Wikipedia:
This past spring, a physicist called Alan Sokal rocked the academic world and made the editors of a major intellectual journal look pretty silly when they published his gibberish-filled parody as an authentic scholarly work. And the humor magazine Might, in an effort to mock the sensational news media, snowed readers and Hard Copy, and set news organizations running after a story that claimed former Eight Is Enough child actor Adam Rich had died. But frankly, when it comes to making fools of the experts, there is no one like Joey Skaggs.
Skaggs, a lean ex-Brooklynite who favors cowboy boots, is a surprisingly affable artist who has made it his life's work to embarrass the Establishment, and to humiliate the media in particular. "They have a big stake in making everyone believe that they have integrity," he said matter-of factly one rainy afternoon at a SoHo café, as he handed over an immense packet of news clippings dating back more than 20 years.
...
But in 1976, his work moved to a new level. Those early brushes with the press inspired him to attempt a different kind of conceptual piece, one that would make it clear that the media were far from infallible -- that reporters, in fact, were more than willing to forgo some deep digging in their shameless pursuit of an apparently hot story.
So Skaggs took out an ad in the Village Voice that read CATHOUSE FOR DOGS and announced "a savory selection of hot bitches." And he sent out press releases trumpeting this great new way to reward your dog: get him laid. Potential customers, furious animal-rights activists, and, of course, the press started calling immediately. The local ABC affiliate did a segment. Skaggs finally gave up the truth when he was subpoenaed by the state attorney general. The ABC affiliate, he says, never retracted its story.
So, yes, people can be tricked. But you'll notice most of these types of pranks (including the one on Wikipedia) are inconsequential. You might argue that's because the pranksters are well-meaning, but it does make it uniquely hard to verify the stories, since whether they did or didn't happen has no lasting effect. Did Skaggs actually take out an ad for a doggie brothel he intended to open, or did he actually just take out an ad for a doggie brothel he was pretending to indend to open? Did one person pen a poetic remark about music influencing his life, or was it somebody else? Yes, it would be better to have the absolute truth even on such trivial issues, but this is not necessarily indicative of equally faulty reporting on more weighty matters. (Those kind of lies usually take somebody higher up in the government to start them:)
It appears most of EMC is technically "located" in foreign tax havens (click Locations & Production). As such, I don't think the US Justice System should waste US taxpayer money enforcing EMC contracts. They like the low taxes in the Bahamas and Bermuda, let's see them protect EMC.
I love how the bill starts with the classic, "for the children" clauses to rationalize the trampling of the bill of rights.clever
So you think their ultimate goal is to overthrow the Constitution, and drawing attention to kids committing suicide is just a cynical ploy? Give me a break. Bullying is a real problem. I'm not saying it's a good bill, I don't support it, but you won't get anywhere by assuming the "other side" is just inherently evil and wants to destroy motherhood and apple pie, and that any half-reasonable thing they say must be a trick.
Slashdot Mirror
But that doesn't mean it still has to be legal next year. For that matter, it doesn't have to be outlawed, if whatever accountable public servant (the mayor?) tells the cops to knock it off, then it is no longer part of their job description.
I'm sure whoever tried to ban it would get slammed for being "soft on crime" during the next election. But surely that pendulum has to swing back eventually? At some point imprisoning everybody just reaches the point of absurdity.
What do they care about the cost of the GPS? It's your tax dollars at work. And that's a pittance to the salary you're paying them to stalk you.
I know some people feel that way. My guess is the new generation communicates much more effectively by writing that previous generations did because they have so much more practice.
We have a whole generation of people who grew up with the textual Internet. I think they are more comfortable communicating by text, either because they're better writers, or because they have a richer set of conventions for conveying emotion that way, or because they are accustomed to the emotional ambiguity.
The question isn't whether you get more information from a 60 second voicemail than you get from skimming an email in 10 seconds; the contest is between listening to 1 voicemail or skimming 6 emails.
The word "actually" just screams for a cite. Good luck!
Floor plan? Those shells of homes in Detroit are tear-downs; they detract from the value of the land they're on. Even the copper wiring has been ripped from the walls. Comparing that to a new home or apartment you could actually live in is not fair.
Normally if somebody is not going to cut it, they should get weeded out during the educational process. If not, they usually still end up doing science, but in a supporting role with less discretion than the stars. Actually all researchers start that way, then some move up more quickly than others.
A reduction in funding at CERN doesn't necessarily mean scientists are becoming burger flippers. It may mean that some of them have to move onto other projects at places other than CERN, executing the spending priorities of whoever has decision-making authority. Hopefully those decision-makers are accomplished scientists with a broader vision rather than just "some politician." Though, at a very high level, the stewards of tax money are politicans so they do make general decisions about the course of taxpayer-supported science, e.g. send money to DoD vs. NSF, or NIH, or NASA.
That's basically what "tenure" means. Of course, the competition to obtain tenure at research universities is fierce - it's a privileged position.
Even if you doubled the number of such positions, the field of applications would soon double as well, and you'd be back to selecting the stars again. Getting paid to follow your curiosity is simply too desirable a position to be available to just anybody who wants it.
Most of the comments here are assuming this represents a reduction in spending on science by Austria. But the last sentence of the blurb says "The newly-available funds will now allow Austria to take part in new European projects, boost its participation in old ones as well as help the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the country's main organization funding research." Are they actually reducing science spending at all, or just re-allocating from one project to others with more perceived bang for the buck? That happens all the time in science. IMHO drawing a salary to conduct research I find interesting is a privilege that can't be extended to everybody, so it has to be earned and continually re-established by competing with others who want the money for their ideas.
The other alternative is to simply not balance the budget when the economy is in a slump, and help it recover faster with deficit spending, like what the US is doing. It's a reasonable plan, except that we never seem to get around to paying it back when the economy is good...
You must have missed the verdict. What TPB case showed us is that different countries' laws are pretty much the same after all. Some of us might like to think there's no international consensus on this, but there is.
Everybody dies from something eventually, and it is usually expensive. The study I cited shows that despite what you described, smokers still have lower average lifelong medical expenses than nonsmokers.
Huh? Actually, lifelong medical expenses for healthy people are higher than for people who die younger.
Eh? I have yet to hear a justification for agricultural subsidies that doesn't amount to: "because I'm from Iowa, and I like money." Why don't they do away with the H1B program and institute programmer subsidies instead? (Sarcasm).
Well, I did say just that - tabs should still download in the background. That shouldn't take substantial CPU. I can imagine a case where the browser doesn't know it's supposed to download something until (for instance) it runs some javascript that makes a link to a flash app - in that case it wouldn't finish background loading which would admittedly be bad.
Here's a big clue for you: think carefully about whether "suicidal nutjobs" care about deterrence.
My vote is "no," by definition, since "spent fuel" simply means the fuel is depleted enough that you don't think it's worth harvesting the energy from it any more.
Multi-processing aside, I wish firefox had an option to NOT use any CPU (including scripts, plugins, etc) on tabs except the one visible. I do NOT want 30 different processes, all firefox tabs, using up all my cores just to run spam animations. Granted, I DO usually want tabs to at least download in the background, so maybe it's harder than it sounds.
No, your post and the one you replied to are off base, because firefox is already multithreaded:
# ps -eLF | grep firefox /bin/sh -c firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7/firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7/firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7/firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7/firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7/firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7/firefox
user 23146 20837 23146 0 1 468 496 1 15:26 ? 00:00:00
user 23147 23146 23147 4 6 43763 59000 0 15:26 ? 00:00:12
user 23147 23146 23149 0 6 43763 59000 0 15:26 ? 00:00:00
user 23147 23146 23150 0 6 43763 59000 0 15:26 ? 00:00:00
user 23147 23146 23154 0 6 43763 59000 1 15:26 ? 00:00:00
user 23147 23146 23155 0 6 43763 59000 1 15:26 ? 00:00:00
user 23147 23146 23156 0 6 43763 59000 0 15:26 ? 00:00:02
And when I tried it just now, opening a new tab spawned a new thread (maybe more than one).
The question for this article is, why separate processes instead of threads? If you have processes sharing memory (especially read/write memory) this distinction between threading vs. multiple processes becomes rather small.
I do hope they can firefox survive a plugin crash, because youtube always locks up firefox eventually.
I pay PBS and NPR. Not only were these once free to me, but they're still free to me, if I didn't want to pay. But I really enjoy their content, it doesn't cost that much to produce (it's almost all nonfiction), and I don't want them dry up or disappear.
Mischievous deception of news agencies has a storied history which long predates Wikipedia:
So, yes, people can be tricked. But you'll notice most of these types of pranks (including the one on Wikipedia) are inconsequential. You might argue that's because the pranksters are well-meaning, but it does make it uniquely hard to verify the stories, since whether they did or didn't happen has no lasting effect. Did Skaggs actually take out an ad for a doggie brothel he intended to open, or did he actually just take out an ad for a doggie brothel he was pretending to indend to open? Did one person pen a poetic remark about music influencing his life, or was it somebody else? Yes, it would be better to have the absolute truth even on such trivial issues, but this is not necessarily indicative of equally faulty reporting on more weighty matters. (Those kind of lies usually take somebody higher up in the government to start them :)
China has a big shortage of females, so you never know.
It appears most of EMC is technically "located" in foreign tax havens (click Locations & Production). As such, I don't think the US Justice System should waste US taxpayer money enforcing EMC contracts. They like the low taxes in the Bahamas and Bermuda, let's see them protect EMC.
So you think their ultimate goal is to overthrow the Constitution, and drawing attention to kids committing suicide is just a cynical ploy? Give me a break. Bullying is a real problem. I'm not saying it's a good bill, I don't support it, but you won't get anywhere by assuming the "other side" is just inherently evil and wants to destroy motherhood and apple pie, and that any half-reasonable thing they say must be a trick.
The whole Israel/Palestine issue is also just one big blood feud, and we have taken a big stake in that for some reason.
Inheritance tax doesn't punish success, it punishes leeches on society.