I'd hardly consider such a response knee jerk or at all unjustified when this is supposedly part of "'Eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU".
Moreover, I'd go so far as to say that your reacion is knee jerk. Did you look at the proposal? This is their statement, with not context removed: "whereas violence against women is an infringement of human rights that affects all social, cultural and economic strata;"
There is no nuance, no particulars. They are just stating that any violence against women is a violation of human rights.
Now, certainly you could argue that, as this was about "on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU" and proposed by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality that it's their prerogative to only consider violence against women and thus might consider violence against just men as much a violation of human rights. However, that's a difficult position to justify and remains an affront to the notion of gender equality.
All that said, though, I think that what they _mean_ when they say "violence" is, in a word, rape. For that, I suppose they can get a "fair enough" on their points to the extent that is true... While it certainly lacks nuance and perspective it is just a motion _for_ a resolution, so basically a "you should look at these things".
Congress created the Secret Service, the FCC, DHS, and damn near every part of the executive branch outside the military (which is, essentially, created by the constitution rather than a legislative act, though congress still basically created it.)
While it's true that presidential appointment doesn't mean that it's accountable to the president, being created by congress is even more meaningless as far as the part of government to which it belongs. Sure, you could argue that congress has greater control as it can rewrite the legislation that created it while the president has no clear powers, but the former would be true for most executive organizations.
That is hardly clear from that article, at best it is a very weak conclusion drawn from "the Federal Communications Commission will investigate... if the executive branch has any authority to change the law" which can mean any number of things.
It is pretty clear that the Library of Congress isn't terribly well defined in many aspects. It was created "for Coongress", but the Librarian is appointed by the president (without any oversight from congress, until the Senate started being required to approve presidential appointees). Given the fact that the person in charge is appointed by the president and the lack of any other clear control from either the president or congress, it does seem that the LoC falls under the executive branch, to the extent that really matters. (Realistically, the branches aren't so formal, it's more like reports to the president or doesn't, as most government entities are created and funded by acts of congress, so such things aren't really very telling.)
"With the Advice and Consent of the Senate." applies to most appointed positions. Take, for example, the Secretary of State, which is a very clearly executive branch, close to the president position. So you can't really infer anything from that.
> It is not clear that the Librarian answers to the President. Nor is it clear that the President can remove him.
That's certainly true, and quite probably why the position's term has defaulted to life. Still, there is more to influence than 'can vs can't fire'. If Obama says "reverse that" it would take some serious balls and justification to tell him off, even Obama doesn't threaten his job directly. And that's what I was touching on with my last statement... If the Librarian can just say 'no' without any accountability, that a pretty serious problem and some amount of shit will probably hit the fan, be it changes to the DMCA in terms of who's in charge of these exemptions, or what accountability the Librarian has to the government/people.
Technically it's not so much the "Library of Congress" as it is the "Librarian of Congress", a position appointed by the president, that delivered the decision. The current guy was appointed by Regan in '87, and while it's not terribly clear if he was reappointed by Obama or was just left in place, it is fair to say that he answers to President Obama. (There isn't a specific term on the position; it's life by precedent but there's no reason he couldn't be removed.)
The point is, that this is something that the office of the president has a fair amount of control over. If Obama wants it to happen, there's no real reason it shouldn't. As far as the GP's post, a public "urging" could be seen as grandstanding since this would be a bit like your boss holding a press conference to urge you to change your decision on something. However, as it was publicly asked, a public response is warranted.
With that in mind though, if the ban on unlocking isn't reversed, and rather quickly at that, it'll highlight some serious problems with the system and "grandstanding" would be about the nicest thing you can say about it...
> What the hell is it with these science stories of astronomers finding a picture of something that require an > artists impression of said picture to be up front and at the top of the article?
Because they don't find a picture in the first place? They find about ~100 pixels at best from a number of different wavelengths (usually not like what we can see to boot). Most people can't really understand what's going on in such images, and they aren't generally very interesting. The artist can take data from the various images and current theory and construct a picture that looks good and gives a more meaningful representation than the raw data. Also, if you want the actual pictures just click the second or third links (the paper and another "science story" respectively). That's usually a given so it's a bit silly to complain about the practices of a few news outlets when people wanting the raw data can so easily find it.
In this particular case, though, I will grant you that the infrared picture is uncommonly scrutable and the artist's interpretation is particularly bad. The former has a lot to do, I'd expect, with this being a particularly distant planet (~47AU, about Pluto's maximum distance) so the interference from the star is more manageable. When it comes to the hot supergiants or maybe X-ray images of black holes, for example, they often have some value.
> I hate to imagine what the artist's impression of the Pale Blue Dot [wikipedia.org] photo would look like today.
I guess this is hyperbole because obviously what makes the Pale Blue Dot interesting is that it's a real photo from far away. There's no value in an artists interpretation because we already know what Earth looks like. If we didn't, though, and the Pale Blue Dot was the best image we had, I'd probably like to see an artists interpretation, based sampling spectographic information, distance from the sun, etc to come up with what the planet might look like.
> Price isn't the only determinant of whether something is a 'routine part of medicine'. For the foreseeable future, > there is remarkably little utility that an individual's genome brings to the table.
Technically, yes, it's not so much price and it is value, but realistically price is still a major factor in that calculation.
As it stands, there are quite a few diseases that we can identify just looking at the genome. For many, sure, there are other tests, but if genome screening was, say, cheaper than two of those, then it would be a significant and valuable first stop for both diagnostic and preventative medicine.
(And of course, the cheaper it becomes, the more analysis can be done and the more useful it becomes.)
And relativistic effects and thus why any of this is even mildly interesting. I guess they explained accretion disc too, though, so that's something.
But beyond that, what I find most awesome about it is that it's completely unnecessary for understanding anything about this. They could've said "X-ray emissions from walruses (large flippered marine mammals) trapped in the black hole's accretion disk" and it wouldn't have really made any difference to 99+% of the audience, aside from causing us to wonder why walruses were in space at all. It's really quite bizarre that the author felt a need to elaborate on that one.
First: It's 66% heavier than aluminum, and about half the strength of hardened steel.
Don't get me wrong, titanium is pretty good stuff, but it still has trade offs beyond price. After all, it's only about 2-5 more expensive than stainless (depending on type of stainless form factor, etc) so if it was so clearly better, why is it so specialty?
As a comparison:
Aluminum: Vastly easier machine, vastly easier to cast (much lower melting point). In terms of strength/weight, aluminum is actually quite competitive with titanium (obviously depending on alloys): it's modulus of elasticity is very slightly better, and it's yield strength is within roughly 20%. Thus aluminum wins: not only is it's similar to titanium in terms of usable strength, it's more rigid because rigidity depends on the elasticity AND the thickness (i.e. modulus*area*thick^2). (The latter assumes a solid piece; using a 'hollow' design like a tube or ibeam would bring the stiffness of the pieces on-par.)
Stainless Steel: Somewhat easier to machine and cast. While the melting point is comparable to titanium, titanium's is just hot enough to start causing problems with most common refractories. I'd also worry that it's a lot more reactive with could mean more difficulties. I'm not familiar with the practical casting of it, though, so I could be wrong. As far as steel is concerned, well, hardened 440C stainless wins in terms of yield strength and elasticity vs weight. It also achieves higher hardness for things like shafts and knives, and can be annealed for easier machining. Of course, one tradeoff is that the strength suffers pretty severely when not hardened (~1/4 of Ti vs weigth), so for larger pieces that can't be hardened effectively, titanium comes out on top. Also, the austenitic stainless steels (e.g. 304, 316) cannot be hardened, and so lack Ti's strength. (And, of course, similar elasticities means titanium will be more rigid, for the same reasons aluminum is.)
Titanium does have its uses though: it had better corrosion resistance, better performance at high temperatures, etc. It's a good material it it's own right to be sure, but it's not perfect. If the price came down to be comparable to stainless I'd expect that usage would take off in a few areas, but especially when you account for difficulty of machining, don't expect to see it everywhere.
> conspicuous lack of high-end A15 chips in smartphones
Sort of? Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 chips have a custom A15-styled "Krait" core which has been in phones for a while. It's a little different than a stock A15 design, but not massively. It's just a few design tweaks (Added a L0 cache, reduced L1, reduced pipeline) that make a fair bit of sense. Performance is only slightly reduced (~5%).
With that said, I don't know if that "ARM can just press a button" myth was ever really present. There may have been some discussion that ARM would be able to do so with Intel-quality manufacturing processes, and to a degree that's true: the A9 - A15 (or Qualcomm's A8/9-ish Scorpion to Krait at least) transition is a pretty good example of that being true.
> Myth 1: Intel can't make x86 power/performance competitive with ARM: Being busted as we speak.
First, Intel is still nowhere near Context-M (embedded; controls your toaster) levels of power/performance, and that's a target they are highly unlikely to ever hit. Even though it is not as high-profile/large(?) a market the Cortex-A, it is still a very important one, and enough to cement ARM as a very important architecture. At those power levels, ISA matters a lot as there is no cache, branch prediction, register renaming, out of order execution, etc. You are just running the instructions as written, and ARM has solid advantages over x86 there.
As for the Cortex-A (phones) levels, well, it very much remains to be seen. Intel is competitive but not really surprisingly. Manufacturing has advanced to a point where you can put enough transistors in a chip to use a lot of the aforementioned optimizations. That means the ISA is starting to be abstracted enough that things like x86's limited registers aren't going to hurt and much, and the CISC instructions show some benefit. However, the conspicuous lack of power specification indicates that they probably haven't gotten there quite yet.
So it's still a battle, but I think that myth is pretty fact-y yet. As manufacturing improves and designed matures, we will probably see them meet in the middle, but Intel/x86 flat out winning? Pretty unlikely. (Keep in mind that it's not just x86 vs ARM, but also SSE vs NEON and MMU vs MMU. ARM is a little less burdened with history as was more designed with low power and concrete use cases in mind.)
As you allude to, though, 64bit ARM is coming, and it's going to change a lot. X86-64 addressed many of x86's shortcomings, so the battle will begin anew there.
This is news for nerds, jock solutions like that aren't welcome here!
Correct solution: Pinpoint the attacker using a highly directional 2.4 GHz waveguide antenna. Once you're sure only the attacker is visible, attach a microwave magnetron to the antenna and watch him burn.
While this is a fun goal, it's only really effective against un-savy users. Anyone that could break WPS, including all but the most incompetent script kiddies, would figure out what's going on. And now you've let them on to your network and you're hosed. They can easily copy an allowed MAC address, assign themselves an unfiltered IP (including yours), etc.
First and foremost, I should point out that additional security is unrelated to the issue at hand: the poster seems to have to attacker locked out since disabling WPS. This is about what to do to disable the annoyance of the various attacks still being performed. Security doesn't seem to be significantly at risk.
That aside, what do you expect limiting DHCP will do? Especially coupled with leaving a few addresses available? An attacker would just log on to your network as soon as the authentication was compromised and get assigned one of your extra IPs. Even if you didn't have extra IPs, the attacker could just adopt a static IP address within your subnet (trivial) and be on their merry way. MAC address filtering isn't terrible high security, but at least requires more work to get around than hoping that they don't get assigned on of your extra DHCP addresses for no good reason.
That article is entirely supportive of AC's position that the original remark is made up BS:
" A libertarian society would certainly have police to protect citizens from gangs and criminals, they just wouldn't be tax-supported. One way of providing this would be government provision, similar to today, but funded by donations, user fees, fee-based charges, or similar methods or combinations.... So we already have a mixed public-private police system, and the private sector part is the largest, and is growing."
Only at the very end does it throw out: "Of course, some people might decide to go without such protection and rely on their trusty handguns." As an option for people that decided to not involve themselves in a subscription based police service.
It makes clear arguments _for_ a police force, just not a tax funded one and makes no claim about money saved from lower taxes having anything to do with increased self-defense. If you don't think that would work, that's a valid opinion. Regardless, the original statement from the GP is indeed crap... Thanks for proving it.
(For completeness I will also point out that, being a third party, Libertarianism shows more ideological that the main stream liberalism and conservatism. Saying that libertarianism means no taxes and poliece is as reasonable as saying the same for conservatism or that liberalism means 100% taxes. It doesn't. In the real world it means both less taxation like conservatism and less social control like liberalism. The idealistic stuff is just as sane as you'll see from hardline liberal socialists or hardline conservative puritans, and riffing on it is just a productive: Fantastic for shutting up people you disagree with.)
> The insanity here is not in choosing a R or D, but the absolutist manner in which he identified himself as a conservative
You're putting words into his mouth too. And not just a little, but completely: "... but my opinions are conservative and the Republican Party reflects more of the conservative ideology."
He's not labeling himself. He is establishing an identity here. He is simply using a word to describe his opinions. One word. The insanity here is you claiming it's "insane" that he would provide a one word summary of his political position when it is immaterial anyways. This isn't his biography or manifesto. It's an article on copyright. There are plenty on places where you can see that he is clearly thinking for himself when you actually bother to read what he has to say about the main points of discussion.
> You should always be willing to recalibrate your theories in light of new information
Um, no, that's stupid. You should recalibrate your theories based on new substantial evidence. Recalibrating based on new information requires about as much introspection as one would expect from a goldfish. What does that have to do the topic at hand anyways? Are you claiming that getting fired for releasing a memo that follows your beliefs should make you change your beliefs? Like, 'man I was so wrong about my thoughts on copyright I got fired; I better reevaluate that'. Friggin goldfish.
(And if you bothered to read TFA, he provides evidence to support his opinions and considers them to be in line with conservatism and thus only somewhat in line with Republicanism. So if he's not supposed to follow the path I parodied above, that what is the new evidence he failed to consider and/or what recalibration did he fail to make?)
Finally, with regards to party membership (more related to the GGP and this thread in general), there too he is clearly not blindly following, but has decided to be a member of the Republican party because it better matches his opinions. You can argue that membership in a party is not the best thing, but he has obviously given it some thought and decided it was best for him. Honestly, I think that's far more introspective than the rage-against-everything individuality-at-all-costs challenge-everything nonsense that you're spouting.
> I don't really see how you can ensure that externalities are "built in" (or priced in) without regulation.
He was discussing "regulation and forbidding conduct" and said nothing about total deregulation. Especially taken with the context of the question he was pretty clearly discussing regulation in terms of, say, 'no you can't do that unless you file the right paper work and we approve it *wink*' for the EPA case.
For the copyright case, he was probably interpreting the question along the lines of Canada's blank media tax which theoretically allows people to copy and ensures the artists get paid. That doesn't allow the market to sort it out, but instead has the government take money from people and give it to some select artists based on regulatory decisions rather than market forces.
> And even if you can, IMO, it's better to prevent negative externalities than to pay off the afflicted bystanders afterwards.
What's a negative externality, exactly? If I don't shower for a week and I stink, is that a negative externality of saving water and thus I should be mandated to shower? Or, is water usage a negative externality of cleanliness so I should be mandated to not shower? How does this change if I'm renting a place where water is a fixed cost included in the rent?
The point is, most things in this world require tradeoffs. "Negative externalizes" is just a buzzword for those tradeoffs where the cost is borne by a different party than receives the benefit. The thought of disallowing such things in general shows a complete understanding of the workings of a world with limited resources. Trying to implement such laws is an exercise in futility and is necessarily going to be over politicized and fundamentally unfair. By ensuring that the externalities are internalized than we can then let normal market forces dictate what tradeoffs are fair.
And keep in mind that's not to say that certain activities cannot be made illegal (e.g. you don't charge a hitman the cost of a life). "Negative externalities" pretty much by definition is referring to legal (and non-ideal) economic behavior. However, a free market solution _does_ mean that you don't have a regulatory agency saying that something is sort-of illegal depending on who you are or how much of it you are doing.
> I am not interested in being tied to one carrier, nor in a midrange phone.
Good luck with that on nearly any phone. Besides, the Relay can be unlocked for free from a service menu, DMCA not withstanding (T-Mobile is good with unlock codes besides).
> None of those are high end devices.
Yeah, sorry, they are, even months later. Really, aside from not having massive internal storage (a non-issue since they support SD cards), the only thing they are behind on is having 1GB RAM instead of 2GB, something that wasn't present on any devices available when they were released, IIRC. Their processors are still top of the line: the dual core Snapdragon S4s (based on Cortex-A15) have similar, if not better, performance than Samsung's quad core Cortex-A9s (as seen in international version of S3).
The cell radio has the same performance as the S3/Note II, it supports NFC, Bluetooth 4, MHL, 802.11n, etc.
What are you using to define "high end" exactly? Unreleased phones based on unreleased processors?
> The display on the Relay is pathetic, it compares with my old Droid1 not a GS3.
And this is where you reveal you are simply talking out of your ass. Of course the screen is "pathetic": you want a damn keyboard. The Relay's display tech is on par with the Note II: ~250dpi Super AMOLED. The problem is that it's currently impossible achieve the DPI required to make a 720p screen in that form factor (>350, vs 306 for the S3 and 326 for the iPhone 5's retina display). The only way to make the display better would be to make it larger. Specifically, the side of the Galaxy S3 and I would find a physical keyboard on that whale to be hard to use. Could they have maybe have split the difference and made it 270+dpi and ~960×540 like some other devices? Yeah, I suppose, but really that's splitting hairs.
In conclusion, the problem isn't with the phones, the problem is that you have a poor understanding of what the state of the art is and what is possible and you'd rather nitpick little things and necessary design tradeoffs than be happy with a solid high end device.
Samsung put out the Relay on T-Mobile in the fall, which is quite competitive with the S3. While I don't care too much for Samsung phones, it has an unlocked bootloader, a decent keyboard, and reasonably active development.
Verizon and Sprint respectively have the similarly speced Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II and Motorola Photon Q, both of which released around the same time. I can't speak to their lockedness.
While it is sad that they're few and far between, they aren't low end devices... They come out a few months or two after their tech is cutting edge and stay on the market much longer, since a carrier will only get 1-2/year. The delayed launch also gives that not high end appearance because, well, they're technically similar to last month's latest, which also means no fanfare for their release. (It also doesn't help that they'll usually cheap out a little on something like storage to pay for the keyboard.)
Anyways, in short, yeah, enthusiast phones don't generally have keyboards, but as far as high end just daily use devices, they're there.
Once upon a time there was this thing "innocent until proven guilty" which meant that stuff wasn't declared in violation of the law until that violation was argued and confirmed. People had a right to a defense. Think that's going to happen here? Or is this going to be 'shoot first, ask questions never' like the rest of internet enforcement? How many fair use sites will just have their money stolen from them (usually when these sorts of decisions happen, they also take any owed money for the last payment period... usually a month) without any ability to argue their case?
Also, keep in mind that 'illegal' in these sorts of cases very often means more like 'things we don't like' and will intentionally sweep up any not-even-gray zone stuff that they don't want to deal with. Hosting an image board / cloud storage / video share? Except to be black listed the moment some troll posts something illegal no matter how fast the mods pull it down or even if you comply with the DMCA.
(And if you don't believe me, see how funding was cut for WikiLeaks, despite the fact that publishing classified material is not a crime. Publishing certain secrets can be, but was that proven before funding was cut? Nope. As I understand it, despite their best efforts, they still have yet to find anything illegal about WikiLeaks's behavior.)
RHEL 6 came out in late 2010, while Windows 7 came out in mid 2009. Their respective latest major patches were mid 2012 (6.3) and early 2011 (SP1).
Short version: RHEL 6 is newer than Windows 7 by more than a year by any metric.
There is no excuse for Chrome dropping support for RHEL 6 and keeping it for Windows 7 (let alone XP). Linux may be more of a moving target, but it's not so bad that something can't run on the latest release and one from a couple years ago. This is almost certainly the result of wanting some latest-and-greatest feature and not really caring that some people might want to have stable OSes.
Indeed. This is an incredibly stupid article and the implication that this is some inherit law of math is outrageous... Somehow the missile defense installations have a fixed amount of resources but the enemy doesn't? Come on!
One of the most basic rules of warfare is this: a strategy if a winner if it costs them more than it costs you. A missile defense is still a valuable tool if interceptors cost less than what they're intercepting regardless of whether or not what they're intercepting would do any damage because the enemy still had to build the thing. And from the same perspective if an enemy is going to build a missile why not just put a ton of TNT on it and point it in the general direction of a city? Even without guidance (which would add meaningful cost, unlike the TNT) a city is a big enough target that it presents a credible threat anyways and so needs to be intercepted.
Really? Because this seems to have an awful lot more to do with race (and stereotypes thereof) than religion. Heck, the "mosque" in question has been a museum for almost 70 years! (And in the long past if was Christian rather than Islamic.) It has far more meaning at this point as an iconic and history bit of architecture that represents the region.
I know hating on religion is all the rage these day, but racial stereotyping and sensitivity (like this article and discussion are about) have basically nothing to do with it. You'll find plenty of overly sensitive or overly insensitive atheists. Many westerns that get upset about this kind of thing are anti-religion and a lot of hate groups are agnostic. So I quite fail to see where religion plays into this at all.
My guess would be that it has to do with a statute of limitations...
Apparently California has a limit of four years from the filing date to collect any unpaid taxes. So I would conclude that the FTB's logic here is that, because the tax break was unconstitutional, these people should have known that(?) and their returns were all filed incorrectly. Thus, the FTB can collect the last four years of these back taxes because the deductions that were claimed weren't valid.
It's adorable the logic governments use to make ex post facto effects happen.
They aren't terribly specific on what exactly constitutes misconduct, but it seems to be correlated with retracted papers and bad science. Given this, I can't think sneakiness is really going to account for much. After all, no amount of sneakiness really makes up for flawed science because, well, that's the point of science;). Of course, it could let them get away with bad science and not be accused of misconduct. That I don't know.
But, as a simple musing, I wonder if this is because female scientists feel they are under greater scrutiny, while men have a more old-boys-club outlook that makes them less concerned that they'll get in trouble for misconduct.
> I'd love something the size of my Acer ZG5 that had a quad i7 and 8GB of ram
That's not a netbook, it's an ultrabook and it's expensive as hell: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834127833 Yeah, it's 11.6" and not 8.9" but seeing as it's the same weight I don't really see that as a major issue. (I, in fact, consider it a big win since I've always thought the 9" keyboards were basically unusable.)
> Underpowered Atom based machines with 2GB ram at nearly the price of a dual core equiped laptop.
That is the essence of a netbook: An ultra low end computer that ran a browser, an email client and maybe a text editor. They were supposed to be cheap, but pretty much started at $200 and rose to $300 when Windows butted in. A decent laptop would run about $400, and they never really made sense for (or were intended for) anything but a sort of secondary travel-ish computer. (BTW, seeing as the Eee PC started with Linux and kept a Linux version through most of it's revisions, I don't really know why you say Microsoft defined the netbook design...)
> Who wants that? No one and I can't believe they could not figure that out.
Uh, yeah, they figured it out and that's why they aren't making them.
But people _did_ want them. Not because they were good, but because they were cheap and somewhat because they were small. People saw them as proper laptops that were cheaper because they were smaller and not because they were just altogether cheaper. They would buy one thinking they saved $100, only to realize that they wasted $300 because it was to slow to actually do what they wanted.
I don't believe it was intentional... I think they were introduced as trying to be the cheapest possible computer; about half the price of a normal one. Partly for travel, partly for people who didn't do much, partly for just having a computer you can use look up that actor in the TV show you're watching, and it didn't have to be your 'main computer'.
But it turned out to be a stunning bait and switch: If you put Windows on it, you could charge $300. People would buy it thinking they were getting a new laptop. Then they'd be back in the store spending $500 six months later when they found out they needed a real machine. I think that's why they really 'took off' and were pushed so hard. They were just printing money by dramatically shortening an upgrade cycle that had stalled because proper computers had become fast enough.
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I'd hardly consider such a response knee jerk or at all unjustified when this is supposedly part of "'Eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU".
Moreover, I'd go so far as to say that your reacion is knee jerk. Did you look at the proposal? This is their statement, with not context removed:
"whereas violence against women is an infringement of human rights that affects all social, cultural and economic strata;"
There is no nuance, no particulars. They are just stating that any violence against women is a violation of human rights.
Now, certainly you could argue that, as this was about "on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU" and proposed by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality that it's their prerogative to only consider violence against women and thus might consider violence against just men as much a violation of human rights. However, that's a difficult position to justify and remains an affront to the notion of gender equality.
All that said, though, I think that what they _mean_ when they say "violence" is, in a word, rape. For that, I suppose they can get a "fair enough" on their points to the extent that is true... While it certainly lacks nuance and perspective it is just a motion _for_ a resolution, so basically a "you should look at these things".
Congress created the Secret Service, the FCC, DHS, and damn near every part of the executive branch outside the military (which is, essentially, created by the constitution rather than a legislative act, though congress still basically created it.)
While it's true that presidential appointment doesn't mean that it's accountable to the president, being created by congress is even more meaningless as far as the part of government to which it belongs. Sure, you could argue that congress has greater control as it can rewrite the legislation that created it while the president has no clear powers, but the former would be true for most executive organizations.
That is hardly clear from that article, at best it is a very weak conclusion drawn from "the Federal Communications Commission will investigate ... if the executive branch has any authority to change the law" which can mean any number of things.
It is pretty clear that the Library of Congress isn't terribly well defined in many aspects. It was created "for Coongress", but the Librarian is appointed by the president (without any oversight from congress, until the Senate started being required to approve presidential appointees). Given the fact that the person in charge is appointed by the president and the lack of any other clear control from either the president or congress, it does seem that the LoC falls under the executive branch, to the extent that really matters. (Realistically, the branches aren't so formal, it's more like reports to the president or doesn't, as most government entities are created and funded by acts of congress, so such things aren't really very telling.)
> With the Advice and Consent of the Senate.
"With the Advice and Consent of the Senate." applies to most appointed positions. Take, for example, the Secretary of State, which is a very clearly executive branch, close to the president position. So you can't really infer anything from that.
> It is not clear that the Librarian answers to the President. Nor is it clear that the President can remove him.
That's certainly true, and quite probably why the position's term has defaulted to life. Still, there is more to influence than 'can vs can't fire'. If Obama says "reverse that" it would take some serious balls and justification to tell him off, even Obama doesn't threaten his job directly. And that's what I was touching on with my last statement... If the Librarian can just say 'no' without any accountability, that a pretty serious problem and some amount of shit will probably hit the fan, be it changes to the DMCA in terms of who's in charge of these exemptions, or what accountability the Librarian has to the government/people.
Technically it's not so much the "Library of Congress" as it is the "Librarian of Congress", a position appointed by the president, that delivered the decision. The current guy was appointed by Regan in '87, and while it's not terribly clear if he was reappointed by Obama or was just left in place, it is fair to say that he answers to President Obama. (There isn't a specific term on the position; it's life by precedent but there's no reason he couldn't be removed.)
The point is, that this is something that the office of the president has a fair amount of control over. If Obama wants it to happen, there's no real reason it shouldn't. As far as the GP's post, a public "urging" could be seen as grandstanding since this would be a bit like your boss holding a press conference to urge you to change your decision on something. However, as it was publicly asked, a public response is warranted.
With that in mind though, if the ban on unlocking isn't reversed, and rather quickly at that, it'll highlight some serious problems with the system and "grandstanding" would be about the nicest thing you can say about it...
> What the hell is it with these science stories of astronomers finding a picture of something that require an
> artists impression of said picture to be up front and at the top of the article?
Because they don't find a picture in the first place? They find about ~100 pixels at best from a number of different wavelengths (usually not like what we can see to boot). Most people can't really understand what's going on in such images, and they aren't generally very interesting. The artist can take data from the various images and current theory and construct a picture that looks good and gives a more meaningful representation than the raw data.
Also, if you want the actual pictures just click the second or third links (the paper and another "science story" respectively). That's usually a given so it's a bit silly to complain about the practices of a few news outlets when people wanting the raw data can so easily find it.
In this particular case, though, I will grant you that the infrared picture is uncommonly scrutable and the artist's interpretation is particularly bad. The former has a lot to do, I'd expect, with this being a particularly distant planet (~47AU, about Pluto's maximum distance) so the interference from the star is more manageable. When it comes to the hot supergiants or maybe X-ray images of black holes, for example, they often have some value.
> I hate to imagine what the artist's impression of the Pale Blue Dot [wikipedia.org] photo would look like today.
I guess this is hyperbole because obviously what makes the Pale Blue Dot interesting is that it's a real photo from far away. There's no value in an artists interpretation because we already know what Earth looks like. If we didn't, though, and the Pale Blue Dot was the best image we had, I'd probably like to see an artists interpretation, based sampling spectographic information, distance from the sun, etc to come up with what the planet might look like.
> Price isn't the only determinant of whether something is a 'routine part of medicine'. For the foreseeable future,
> there is remarkably little utility that an individual's genome brings to the table.
Technically, yes, it's not so much price and it is value, but realistically price is still a major factor in that calculation.
As it stands, there are quite a few diseases that we can identify just looking at the genome. For many, sure, there are other tests, but if genome screening was, say, cheaper than two of those, then it would be a significant and valuable first stop for both diagnostic and preventative medicine.
(And of course, the cheaper it becomes, the more analysis can be done and the more useful it becomes.)
And relativistic effects and thus why any of this is even mildly interesting. I guess they explained accretion disc too, though, so that's something.
But beyond that, what I find most awesome about it is that it's completely unnecessary for understanding anything about this. They could've said "X-ray emissions from walruses (large flippered marine mammals) trapped in the black hole's accretion disk" and it wouldn't have really made any difference to 99+% of the audience, aside from causing us to wonder why walruses were in space at all. It's really quite bizarre that the author felt a need to elaborate on that one.
Meh.
First: It's 66% heavier than aluminum, and about half the strength of hardened steel.
Don't get me wrong, titanium is pretty good stuff, but it still has trade offs beyond price. After all, it's only about 2-5 more expensive than stainless (depending on type of stainless form factor, etc) so if it was so clearly better, why is it so specialty?
As a comparison:
Aluminum:
Vastly easier machine, vastly easier to cast (much lower melting point).
In terms of strength/weight, aluminum is actually quite competitive with titanium (obviously depending on alloys): it's modulus of elasticity is very slightly better, and it's yield strength is within roughly 20%.
Thus aluminum wins: not only is it's similar to titanium in terms of usable strength, it's more rigid because rigidity depends on the elasticity AND the thickness (i.e. modulus*area*thick^2). (The latter assumes a solid piece; using a 'hollow' design like a tube or ibeam would bring the stiffness of the pieces on-par.)
Stainless Steel:
Somewhat easier to machine and cast. While the melting point is comparable to titanium, titanium's is just hot enough to start causing problems with most common refractories. I'd also worry that it's a lot more reactive with could mean more difficulties. I'm not familiar with the practical casting of it, though, so I could be wrong.
As far as steel is concerned, well, hardened 440C stainless wins in terms of yield strength and elasticity vs weight. It also achieves higher hardness for things like shafts and knives, and can be annealed for easier machining. Of course, one tradeoff is that the strength suffers pretty severely when not hardened (~1/4 of Ti vs weigth), so for larger pieces that can't be hardened effectively, titanium comes out on top. Also, the austenitic stainless steels (e.g. 304, 316) cannot be hardened, and so lack Ti's strength. (And, of course, similar elasticities means titanium will be more rigid, for the same reasons aluminum is.)
Titanium does have its uses though: it had better corrosion resistance, better performance at high temperatures, etc. It's a good material it it's own right to be sure, but it's not perfect. If the price came down to be comparable to stainless I'd expect that usage would take off in a few areas, but especially when you account for difficulty of machining, don't expect to see it everywhere.
> conspicuous lack of high-end A15 chips in smartphones
Sort of? Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 chips have a custom A15-styled "Krait" core which has been in phones for a while. It's a little different than a stock A15 design, but not massively. It's just a few design tweaks (Added a L0 cache, reduced L1, reduced pipeline) that make a fair bit of sense. Performance is only slightly reduced (~5%).
With that said, I don't know if that "ARM can just press a button" myth was ever really present. There may have been some discussion that ARM would be able to do so with Intel-quality manufacturing processes, and to a degree that's true: the A9 - A15 (or Qualcomm's A8/9-ish Scorpion to Krait at least) transition is a pretty good example of that being true.
> Myth 1: Intel can't make x86 power/performance competitive with ARM: Being busted as we speak.
First, Intel is still nowhere near Context-M (embedded; controls your toaster) levels of power/performance, and that's a target they are highly unlikely to ever hit. Even though it is not as high-profile/large(?) a market the Cortex-A, it is still a very important one, and enough to cement ARM as a very important architecture. At those power levels, ISA matters a lot as there is no cache, branch prediction, register renaming, out of order execution, etc. You are just running the instructions as written, and ARM has solid advantages over x86 there.
As for the Cortex-A (phones) levels, well, it very much remains to be seen. Intel is competitive but not really surprisingly. Manufacturing has advanced to a point where you can put enough transistors in a chip to use a lot of the aforementioned optimizations. That means the ISA is starting to be abstracted enough that things like x86's limited registers aren't going to hurt and much, and the CISC instructions show some benefit. However, the conspicuous lack of power specification indicates that they probably haven't gotten there quite yet.
So it's still a battle, but I think that myth is pretty fact-y yet. As manufacturing improves and designed matures, we will probably see them meet in the middle, but Intel/x86 flat out winning? Pretty unlikely. (Keep in mind that it's not just x86 vs ARM, but also SSE vs NEON and MMU vs MMU. ARM is a little less burdened with history as was more designed with low power and concrete use cases in mind.)
As you allude to, though, 64bit ARM is coming, and it's going to change a lot. X86-64 addressed many of x86's shortcomings, so the battle will begin anew there.
This is news for nerds, jock solutions like that aren't welcome here!
Correct solution:
Pinpoint the attacker using a highly directional 2.4 GHz waveguide antenna. Once you're sure only the attacker is visible, attach a microwave magnetron to the antenna and watch him burn.
While this is a fun goal, it's only really effective against un-savy users. Anyone that could break WPS, including all but the most incompetent script kiddies, would figure out what's going on. And now you've let them on to your network and you're hosed. They can easily copy an allowed MAC address, assign themselves an unfiltered IP (including yours), etc.
First and foremost, I should point out that additional security is unrelated to the issue at hand: the poster seems to have to attacker locked out since disabling WPS. This is about what to do to disable the annoyance of the various attacks still being performed. Security doesn't seem to be significantly at risk.
That aside, what do you expect limiting DHCP will do? Especially coupled with leaving a few addresses available? An attacker would just log on to your network as soon as the authentication was compromised and get assigned one of your extra IPs. Even if you didn't have extra IPs, the attacker could just adopt a static IP address within your subnet (trivial) and be on their merry way. MAC address filtering isn't terrible high security, but at least requires more work to get around than hoping that they don't get assigned on of your extra DHCP addresses for no good reason.
That article is entirely supportive of AC's position that the original remark is made up BS:
" A libertarian society would certainly have police to protect citizens from gangs and criminals, they just wouldn't be tax-supported. ...
One way of providing this would be government provision, similar to today, but funded by donations, user fees, fee-based charges, or similar methods or combinations.
So we already have a mixed public-private police system, and the private sector part is the largest, and is growing."
Only at the very end does it throw out:
"Of course, some people might decide to go without such protection and rely on their trusty handguns."
As an option for people that decided to not involve themselves in a subscription based police service.
It makes clear arguments _for_ a police force, just not a tax funded one and makes no claim about money saved from lower taxes having anything to do with increased self-defense. If you don't think that would work, that's a valid opinion. Regardless, the original statement from the GP is indeed crap... Thanks for proving it.
(For completeness I will also point out that, being a third party, Libertarianism shows more ideological that the main stream liberalism and conservatism. Saying that libertarianism means no taxes and poliece is as reasonable as saying the same for conservatism or that liberalism means 100% taxes. It doesn't. In the real world it means both less taxation like conservatism and less social control like liberalism. The idealistic stuff is just as sane as you'll see from hardline liberal socialists or hardline conservative puritans, and riffing on it is just a productive:
Fantastic for shutting up people you disagree with.)
> The insanity here is not in choosing a R or D, but the absolutist manner in which he identified himself as a conservative
You're putting words into his mouth too. And not just a little, but completely:
"... but my opinions are conservative and the Republican Party reflects more of the conservative ideology."
He's not labeling himself. He is establishing an identity here. He is simply using a word to describe his opinions. One word. The insanity here is you claiming it's "insane" that he would provide a one word summary of his political position when it is immaterial anyways. This isn't his biography or manifesto. It's an article on copyright. There are plenty on places where you can see that he is clearly thinking for himself when you actually bother to read what he has to say about the main points of discussion.
> You should always be willing to recalibrate your theories in light of new information
Um, no, that's stupid. You should recalibrate your theories based on new substantial evidence. Recalibrating based on new information requires about as much introspection as one would expect from a goldfish. What does that have to do the topic at hand anyways? Are you claiming that getting fired for releasing a memo that follows your beliefs should make you change your beliefs? Like, 'man I was so wrong about my thoughts on copyright I got fired; I better reevaluate that'. Friggin goldfish.
(And if you bothered to read TFA, he provides evidence to support his opinions and considers them to be in line with conservatism and thus only somewhat in line with Republicanism. So if he's not supposed to follow the path I parodied above, that what is the new evidence he failed to consider and/or what recalibration did he fail to make?)
Finally, with regards to party membership (more related to the GGP and this thread in general), there too he is clearly not blindly following, but has decided to be a member of the Republican party because it better matches his opinions. You can argue that membership in a party is not the best thing, but he has obviously given it some thought and decided it was best for him. Honestly, I think that's far more introspective than the rage-against-everything individuality-at-all-costs challenge-everything nonsense that you're spouting.
> I don't really see how you can ensure that externalities are "built in" (or priced in) without regulation.
He was discussing "regulation and forbidding conduct" and said nothing about total deregulation. Especially taken with the context of the question he was pretty clearly discussing regulation in terms of, say, 'no you can't do that unless you file the right paper work and we approve it *wink*' for the EPA case.
For the copyright case, he was probably interpreting the question along the lines of Canada's blank media tax which theoretically allows people to copy and ensures the artists get paid. That doesn't allow the market to sort it out, but instead has the government take money from people and give it to some select artists based on regulatory decisions rather than market forces.
> And even if you can, IMO, it's better to prevent negative externalities than to pay off the afflicted bystanders afterwards.
What's a negative externality, exactly? If I don't shower for a week and I stink, is that a negative externality of saving water and thus I should be mandated to shower? Or, is water usage a negative externality of cleanliness so I should be mandated to not shower? How does this change if I'm renting a place where water is a fixed cost included in the rent?
The point is, most things in this world require tradeoffs. "Negative externalizes" is just a buzzword for those tradeoffs where the cost is borne by a different party than receives the benefit. The thought of disallowing such things in general shows a complete understanding of the workings of a world with limited resources. Trying to implement such laws is an exercise in futility and is necessarily going to be over politicized and fundamentally unfair. By ensuring that the externalities are internalized than we can then let normal market forces dictate what tradeoffs are fair.
And keep in mind that's not to say that certain activities cannot be made illegal (e.g. you don't charge a hitman the cost of a life). "Negative externalities" pretty much by definition is referring to legal (and non-ideal) economic behavior. However, a free market solution _does_ mean that you don't have a regulatory agency saying that something is sort-of illegal depending on who you are or how much of it you are doing.
> I am not interested in being tied to one carrier, nor in a midrange phone.
Good luck with that on nearly any phone. Besides, the Relay can be unlocked for free from a service menu, DMCA not withstanding (T-Mobile is good with unlock codes besides).
> None of those are high end devices.
Yeah, sorry, they are, even months later. Really, aside from not having massive internal storage (a non-issue since they support SD cards), the only thing they are behind on is having 1GB RAM instead of 2GB, something that wasn't present on any devices available when they were released, IIRC. Their processors are still top of the line: the dual core Snapdragon S4s (based on Cortex-A15) have similar, if not better, performance than Samsung's quad core Cortex-A9s (as seen in international version of S3).
The cell radio has the same performance as the S3/Note II, it supports NFC, Bluetooth 4, MHL, 802.11n, etc.
What are you using to define "high end" exactly? Unreleased phones based on unreleased processors?
> The display on the Relay is pathetic, it compares with my old Droid1 not a GS3.
And this is where you reveal you are simply talking out of your ass. Of course the screen is "pathetic": you want a damn keyboard. The Relay's display tech is on par with the Note II: ~250dpi Super AMOLED. The problem is that it's currently impossible achieve the DPI required to make a 720p screen in that form factor (>350, vs 306 for the S3 and 326 for the iPhone 5's retina display). The only way to make the display better would be to make it larger. Specifically, the side of the Galaxy S3 and I would find a physical keyboard on that whale to be hard to use. Could they have maybe have split the difference and made it 270+dpi and ~960×540 like some other devices? Yeah, I suppose, but really that's splitting hairs.
In conclusion, the problem isn't with the phones, the problem is that you have a poor understanding of what the state of the art is and what is possible and you'd rather nitpick little things and necessary design tradeoffs than be happy with a solid high end device.
Samsung put out the Relay on T-Mobile in the fall, which is quite competitive with the S3. While I don't care too much for Samsung phones, it has an unlocked bootloader, a decent keyboard, and reasonably active development.
Verizon and Sprint respectively have the similarly speced Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II and Motorola Photon Q, both of which released around the same time. I can't speak to their lockedness.
While it is sad that they're few and far between, they aren't low end devices... They come out a few months or two after their tech is cutting edge and stay on the market much longer, since a carrier will only get 1-2/year. The delayed launch also gives that not high end appearance because, well, they're technically similar to last month's latest, which also means no fanfare for their release. (It also doesn't help that they'll usually cheap out a little on something like storage to pay for the keyboard.)
Anyways, in short, yeah, enthusiast phones don't generally have keyboards, but as far as high end just daily use devices, they're there.
Once upon a time there was this thing "innocent until proven guilty" which meant that stuff wasn't declared in violation of the law until that violation was argued and confirmed. People had a right to a defense. Think that's going to happen here? Or is this going to be 'shoot first, ask questions never' like the rest of internet enforcement? How many fair use sites will just have their money stolen from them (usually when these sorts of decisions happen, they also take any owed money for the last payment period... usually a month) without any ability to argue their case?
Also, keep in mind that 'illegal' in these sorts of cases very often means more like 'things we don't like' and will intentionally sweep up any not-even-gray zone stuff that they don't want to deal with. Hosting an image board / cloud storage / video share? Except to be black listed the moment some troll posts something illegal no matter how fast the mods pull it down or even if you comply with the DMCA.
(And if you don't believe me, see how funding was cut for WikiLeaks, despite the fact that publishing classified material is not a crime. Publishing certain secrets can be, but was that proven before funding was cut? Nope. As I understand it, despite their best efforts, they still have yet to find anything illegal about WikiLeaks's behavior.)
RHEL 6 came out in late 2010, while Windows 7 came out in mid 2009.
Their respective latest major patches were mid 2012 (6.3) and early 2011 (SP1).
Short version: RHEL 6 is newer than Windows 7 by more than a year by any metric.
There is no excuse for Chrome dropping support for RHEL 6 and keeping it for Windows 7 (let alone XP). Linux may be more of a moving target, but it's not so bad that something can't run on the latest release and one from a couple years ago. This is almost certainly the result of wanting some latest-and-greatest feature and not really caring that some people might want to have stable OSes.
Indeed. This is an incredibly stupid article and the implication that this is some inherit law of math is outrageous... Somehow the missile defense installations have a fixed amount of resources but the enemy doesn't? Come on!
One of the most basic rules of warfare is this: a strategy if a winner if it costs them more than it costs you. A missile defense is still a valuable tool if interceptors cost less than what they're intercepting regardless of whether or not what they're intercepting would do any damage because the enemy still had to build the thing. And from the same perspective if an enemy is going to build a missile why not just put a ton of TNT on it and point it in the general direction of a city? Even without guidance (which would add meaningful cost, unlike the TNT) a city is a big enough target that it presents a credible threat anyways and so needs to be intercepted.
Arg, this is just ridiculous!
Really? Because this seems to have an awful lot more to do with race (and stereotypes thereof) than religion. Heck, the "mosque" in question has been a museum for almost 70 years! (And in the long past if was Christian rather than Islamic.) It has far more meaning at this point as an iconic and history bit of architecture that represents the region.
I know hating on religion is all the rage these day, but racial stereotyping and sensitivity (like this article and discussion are about) have basically nothing to do with it. You'll find plenty of overly sensitive or overly insensitive atheists. Many westerns that get upset about this kind of thing are anti-religion and a lot of hate groups are agnostic. So I quite fail to see where religion plays into this at all.
My guess would be that it has to do with a statute of limitations...
Apparently California has a limit of four years from the filing date to collect any unpaid taxes. So I would conclude that the FTB's logic here is that, because the tax break was unconstitutional, these people should have known that(?) and their returns were all filed incorrectly. Thus, the FTB can collect the last four years of these back taxes because the deductions that were claimed weren't valid.
It's adorable the logic governments use to make ex post facto effects happen.
They aren't terribly specific on what exactly constitutes misconduct, but it seems to be correlated with retracted papers and bad science. Given this, I can't think sneakiness is really going to account for much. After all, no amount of sneakiness really makes up for flawed science because, well, that's the point of science ;). Of course, it could let them get away with bad science and not be accused of misconduct. That I don't know.
But, as a simple musing, I wonder if this is because female scientists feel they are under greater scrutiny, while men have a more old-boys-club outlook that makes them less concerned that they'll get in trouble for misconduct.
> I'd love something the size of my Acer ZG5 that had a quad i7 and 8GB of ram
That's not a netbook, it's an ultrabook and it's expensive as hell:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834127833
Yeah, it's 11.6" and not 8.9" but seeing as it's the same weight I don't really see that as a major issue. (I, in fact, consider it a big win since I've always thought the 9" keyboards were basically unusable.)
> Underpowered Atom based machines with 2GB ram at nearly the price of a dual core equiped laptop.
That is the essence of a netbook: An ultra low end computer that ran a browser, an email client and maybe a text editor. They were supposed to be cheap, but pretty much started at $200 and rose to $300 when Windows butted in. A decent laptop would run about $400, and they never really made sense for (or were intended for) anything but a sort of secondary travel-ish computer.
(BTW, seeing as the Eee PC started with Linux and kept a Linux version through most of it's revisions, I don't really know why you say Microsoft defined the netbook design...)
> Who wants that? No one and I can't believe they could not figure that out.
Uh, yeah, they figured it out and that's why they aren't making them.
But people _did_ want them. Not because they were good, but because they were cheap and somewhat because they were small. People saw them as proper laptops that were cheaper because they were smaller and not because they were just altogether cheaper. They would buy one thinking they saved $100, only to realize that they wasted $300 because it was to slow to actually do what they wanted.
I don't believe it was intentional... I think they were introduced as trying to be the cheapest possible computer; about half the price of a normal one. Partly for travel, partly for people who didn't do much, partly for just having a computer you can use look up that actor in the TV show you're watching, and it didn't have to be your 'main computer'.
But it turned out to be a stunning bait and switch: If you put Windows on it, you could charge $300. People would buy it thinking they were getting a new laptop. Then they'd be back in the store spending $500 six months later when they found out they needed a real machine. I think that's why they really 'took off' and were pushed so hard. They were just printing money by dramatically shortening an upgrade cycle that had stalled because proper computers had become fast enough.