Come to think of it, I can see why those Obama ballots would be trickier to load into a voting machine than a Clinton ballot. The pencil graphite moves from one side of the paper to the other, and really throws the balance off.;-}
I'll choose to believe the more likely explanation that Obama had bigger support in rural precincts, which is where hand counting is more likely.
First of all, the people they single out are not being arrested or detained. They're simply being searched a little more carefully.
Second, you're using the wrong metric to measure success. You're dwelling on the relatively high false positive rate, which doesn't really mean much unless you compare it to the same metric without the program. That isn't given, but I'm sure it's much worse if you just randomly select people for secondary screening—probably orders of magnitude worse. 1% doesn't look so bad if it's an improvement from 0.01%.
The critical metric is the false negative rate, which is impossible to calculate accurately. The only way to estimate it would be to see how many dangerous people are missed by the profilers, but caught by other layers of security. Those numbers are also not given, but I'm sure they are collected for their internal use.
I read a lot of non-fiction, a lot more than I ever did in college, and I have to tell you that wikipedia is one of the best sources out there.
I don't care what a college professor deems acceptable. People in the academic world teach you to only trust information that is generated and controlled by their world. They don't see the value of an open market of information to which anyone can contribute free of charge, because they make their living charging others for that same service, and think any knowledge worth knowing must be bought and paid for. When they say something is peer reviewed, they mean other people who work in universities, the vast majority of whom agree with them. People in the real world don't care where you learned something, as long as it can reasonably be expected to be accurate.
I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect, but if an entry is controversial or its impartiality is at all in doubt, you know about it. At the very least, you see a "citation needed." I've never seen a warning saying "The impartiality of this work is in doubt" on an academic paper, or any of the other types of sources they deem acceptable to cite, even though I've read several where that was certainly the case.
The quality of Wikipedia reminds me of something Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace said a while ago about all the bickering in Washington over the war:
But the strength of the U.S. government is its ability to hear all voices and then act. Our enemies don't understand that. They don't understand democracy at all. They hear the dialogue in our country and assume it to be weakness. We hear the dialogue and understand it is the strength of our democracy. Over time, it gets us to the right place.
Wikipedia may occasionally seem chaotic, but over time, it gets to the right place.
You make an excellent point, and I would like to extend it to include handling disappointment as well as failure. I know some parents who are scared to death to tell their 3 year old "no" because, "she doesn't handle disappointment well." They see it as a fixed trait that they can't do anything about.
If they observe a better-behaved child the same age they either lament that they are not as good of parents as that child's parents, or comment that the other parents are "lucky" to have such an "inherently well-behaved" child. They then dismiss advice with, "That won't work on my kid. I tried it once." Instead of teaching her to handle disappointment, they go to elaborate lengths to avoid it.
Along with handling failure, we need to teach our kids to evaluate risks. I see so many adults today who either won't take a risk when they should, or take on too big of a risk when they shouldn't. We want our kids to be able to handle failure, but we don't want all their failures to be huge ones either.
FUD aside, it has more potential for abuse than the DMCA, and that's saying something...
Potential for abuse? All the bill does is authorize a committee of experts to study the problem and produce a report. Not only that, it specifically charges the committee to keep the protection of civil liberties foremost in their recommendations. Congress will then use the report to decide what, if anything, should be done. No one will be prosecuted or even investigated as a result of this bill. Unless you consider committee meetings to be abusive (I know I do sometimes), there is zero potential for abuse in this bill.
By the way, these types of reports are usually extremely well-researched, thorough yet concise, and non-partisan. You can watch the news coverage on a topic for a year and still not pick up a tenth of what you can get by spending 15 minutes reading one of these reports. I very much look forward to reading this one.
In extreme cases, the BSA will get court approval to raid companies in search of evidence.
I presume the testimony of an employee is sufficient probable cause for a court to order a raid. However, the article states that it's only necessary in extreme cases. There are two good reasons why a company would voluntarily submit to a raid:
Money. If the BSA has to take you to court, you can bet they will ask for a lot more money than if you cooperate willingly.
Vendor Lock-in. Members of the BSA do not have to do business with you. If you don't follow the terms of your licensing agreement, they are perfectly within their rights to refuse to allow you to use the software. If you think your business can't survive without the software, you have a big problem.
What I don't understand is why these businesses put themselves in such a risky position in the first place. Can you imagine if every small business with these six-figure fines or licensing fees invested that money instead to developing/improving an open source alternative that they could all benefit from?
You could put all the security researchers in the world together and they still couldn't tell you all the vulnerabilities that exist in currently deployed software. Perfection is not required to be considered an expert. Now, if this had gone on for a long time, or happened repeatedly, you might have a point.
My favorite covered toggle was in the avionics integration lab at my last job. It was the "self destruct every electronic component that might contain classified information" switch for the apache helicopter. Needless to say, the cover was wired shut, and I never got to experience the fun of toggling it.
I would have loved having this as a child. The thing I hated most was my Mom saying, "You've been on the computer long enough." She never gave a warning ahead of time. Sometimes 2 hours was "long enough" and sometimes it was 15 minutes.
This feature works perfectly with one of my first principles of marriage and parenting: Never have an argument over and over again that you can solve once and for all. Kids accept rules that are consistent and fairly applied. They will complain for a while, and then learn to deal with it. They will learn that the amount of time they have to play on any given day is a consequence of their own decisions, not of mom and dad's mood that day, and they will plan accordingly.
Did I miss the tag? People actually still pay money to live under those kinds of restrictions? What features does a home user need that they can't get with free software?
Why is it that we have to wait for FF3 (or worse, run the unstable CVS copy) just to have some critical fixes?
The short answer is you don't. If you don't have the skills to backport it yourself, you can pay someone to do it for you. The long answer is that not everyone has the same idea of an urgent fix as you do, and there is a limited amount of resources.
I occasionally wonder if an ultra-stable linux distribution would be feasible. Basically, you would only add bug fixes, but do it quickly. I did this for a while with just my kernel back in 2.4 days. A feature change was made that broke a third-party patch I needed for some commercial software from work, so I manually backported the security fixes for the several months it took for the third party to get its act together.
The side effect was that I had an extremely stable kernel, and sometimes my system had security fixes even before a change was checked in, just from reading the posts to the mailing list. The downside, of course, was a lot of manual effort.
Of course government has a compelling interest in establishing standards of weight and measure. On the other hand, you make a very good point that there is little reason that a government can't maintain two different sets.
Sometimes, people have the impression that Americans don't use the metric system. Nothing could be further from the truth. Science, engineering, and medicine use the metric system extensively. However, our government seems to have caught on that humans might be able to use both systems for different purposes.
Even non-scientists here use the metric system when it is appropriate. For example, my wife keeps our kitchen scale set to grams, because that's how our daughter's medicine is measured. She also has no problem measuring in milliliters, and knows that a milliliter of water is the same as a cubic centimeter and weighs 1 gram.
On the other hand, she has no idea how many milliliters are in a teaspoon, even though she uses both units extensively. She has no need to know.
Is there anybody who just goes ahead and installs an update the day it comes out without at least checking to see if anybody is having trouble with it?
Well, obviously someone has to be the first one to have trouble with it.
The short answer is if you have to ask, gentoo is not for you, and that's okay.
The long answer is that there are reasons you may want to use suboptimal compile options, such as if you are compiling on one high end machine with the intent of distributing binary packages to a bunch of disparate machines on your network (yes, gentoo does binary packages). Another reason could be not wanting to maintain a database of every possible processor variant. Another reason is that the configuration file method is actually simpler to people who are familiar with such things, and gentoo is geared towards that type of person.
Gentoo makes absolutely no sense until you find that you are investing a lot of time and effort into manually compiling and configuring packages, to get around limitations of your distribution for whatever reason. For people at that point, gentoo is a lot easier. If you're not at that point, gentoo is unnecessarily complex, and you'll never understand its appeal. Gentoo definitely isn't for everyone, but that doesn't mean it isn't for anyone.
That being said, there are other distributions for which it would make complete sense to autodetect the CPU, and you shouldn't confuse Gentoo Linux with Linux in general. Linspire comes immediately to mind, and maybe Ubuntu. However, it seems a little strange to want to switch from Windows without having a clear idea of what you want to switch to. How do you know Windows isn't the best option for you?
I've been married for 10 years and only agree with you 50%. Yes, men who don't take any crap from their wives normally end up divorced. However, men who take all their wives' crap aren't any better off. I know several divorced people who had marriages exactly like that, including my own parents. If you don't tell your wife she's wrong when she is, she will never fully believe you are being honest when you tell her she is right.
The result is she will trust the advice of her friends or parents over yours, and will confide in them when she should be confiding in you. She will feel like you are not there for her as much as they are, and will sense that you are unhappy but hiding something from her. Part of her happiness depends on your happiness, so neither of you end up being as happy as you could be. Giving in all the time only sacrifices long term happiness to prevent short term conflicts.
Man I hate when my finance deletes stuff off the Replay before I get a chance to watch it.
Trust me this was around a 6 month battle
As someone who has been married for ten years, only the last 3 of which had a DVR, trust me that there is about a tenth the TV arguments with one than without it. First of all, being able to record your preferred show and hers at the same time automatically prevents a ton of arguments.
Second, if you don't give your wife attention as soon as she wants it — and they don't always understand when is a good time or a bad time to interrupt a game or other show they aren't interested in — she will feel like you think TV is more important than she is, even if you just need ten seconds to get past a very critical part to a good stopping place. If you have a healthy relationship, she will consider your feelings and hardly ever say anything, but she will still feel it. Conversely, you probably won't say anything about missing parts of your favorite shows, but you will still feel it. Those pause and rewind buttons prevent a lot of hard feelings on both sides.
Six months seems like a long time to fix that deleting thing, but those sorts of conflicts become easier to solve the longer you've been married, and often don't even happen in the first place, as you both get more attuned to each other's needs and wants.
This is longer, but requires less effort to read because it splits up the ideas. First, it selects a list of items. Next, it deletes one of those items. In the original, those actions are mixed up, requiring the reader to hold more concepts in his mind at once. It takes some effort to determine whether delete and count are even referring to the same object.
Of course, if it comes up more than once (and occasionally even if it doesn't), it's even better as:
First of all, we're only at a competitive disadvantage if the politicians and lawyers leading other countries are more tech savvy than ours. I highly doubt that is the case, but please provide counterexamples if you know any.
Second, while our leaders may not be tech savvy themselves, they are intelligent enough to at least know the right people to ask for help. If you want to learn a lot about a topic, read the expert testimony at a congressional hearing about it. For example, here is the guest list for a senate hearing a few months ago on net neutrality:
Mr. Vinton Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
Mr. Walter McCormick
President and CEO, United States Telecom Association
Mr. Jeffrey Citron
Chairman and CEO, Vonage
Mr. Kyle McSlarrow
President and CEO, National Cable & Telecommunications Association
Mr. Earl Comstock
President and CEO, CompTel
Mr. Kyle Dixon
Senior Fellow and Director of the federal Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics, The Progress & Freedom Foundation
Mr. Lawrence Lessig
Professor of Law, Standford Law School
Mr. J. Gregory Sidak
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Mr. Gary Bachula
Vice President for External Affairs, Internet2
A pretty impressive list, if you ask me. It would be pretty difficult to walk away from a meeting with that group and not have all the information you need to make a good decision on net neutrality.
If it helps you feel better, you can go on believing that politicians make decisions you disagree with out of ignorance. The truth is, the vast majority of them are highly intelligent, highly educated, and just happen to either have a different point of view than you, or hold the same opinion but allow themselves to succumb to the corrupting influence of money and power.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of it, I can see why those Obama ballots would be trickier to load into a voting machine than a Clinton ballot. The pencil graphite moves from one side of the paper to the other, and really throws the balance off. ;-}
I'll choose to believe the more likely explanation that Obama had bigger support in rural precincts, which is where hand counting is more likely.
First of all, the people they single out are not being arrested or detained. They're simply being searched a little more carefully.
Second, you're using the wrong metric to measure success. You're dwelling on the relatively high false positive rate, which doesn't really mean much unless you compare it to the same metric without the program. That isn't given, but I'm sure it's much worse if you just randomly select people for secondary screening—probably orders of magnitude worse. 1% doesn't look so bad if it's an improvement from 0.01%.
The critical metric is the false negative rate, which is impossible to calculate accurately. The only way to estimate it would be to see how many dangerous people are missed by the profilers, but caught by other layers of security. Those numbers are also not given, but I'm sure they are collected for their internal use.
Homosexual traits evolved through the ages as Darwin theorized, because their offspring was more likely to survive to pass on the homosexual gene.
I read a lot of non-fiction, a lot more than I ever did in college, and I have to tell you that wikipedia is one of the best sources out there.
I don't care what a college professor deems acceptable. People in the academic world teach you to only trust information that is generated and controlled by their world. They don't see the value of an open market of information to which anyone can contribute free of charge, because they make their living charging others for that same service, and think any knowledge worth knowing must be bought and paid for. When they say something is peer reviewed, they mean other people who work in universities, the vast majority of whom agree with them. People in the real world don't care where you learned something, as long as it can reasonably be expected to be accurate.
I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect, but if an entry is controversial or its impartiality is at all in doubt, you know about it. At the very least, you see a "citation needed." I've never seen a warning saying "The impartiality of this work is in doubt" on an academic paper, or any of the other types of sources they deem acceptable to cite, even though I've read several where that was certainly the case.
The quality of Wikipedia reminds me of something Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace said a while ago about all the bickering in Washington over the war:
Wikipedia may occasionally seem chaotic, but over time, it gets to the right place.
You make an excellent point, and I would like to extend it to include handling disappointment as well as failure. I know some parents who are scared to death to tell their 3 year old "no" because, "she doesn't handle disappointment well." They see it as a fixed trait that they can't do anything about.
If they observe a better-behaved child the same age they either lament that they are not as good of parents as that child's parents, or comment that the other parents are "lucky" to have such an "inherently well-behaved" child. They then dismiss advice with, "That won't work on my kid. I tried it once." Instead of teaching her to handle disappointment, they go to elaborate lengths to avoid it.
Along with handling failure, we need to teach our kids to evaluate risks. I see so many adults today who either won't take a risk when they should, or take on too big of a risk when they shouldn't. We want our kids to be able to handle failure, but we don't want all their failures to be huge ones either.
Come on, I can't be the only one who used to GPL his homework assignments.
Potential for abuse? All the bill does is authorize a committee of experts to study the problem and produce a report. Not only that, it specifically charges the committee to keep the protection of civil liberties foremost in their recommendations. Congress will then use the report to decide what, if anything, should be done. No one will be prosecuted or even investigated as a result of this bill. Unless you consider committee meetings to be abusive (I know I do sometimes), there is zero potential for abuse in this bill.
By the way, these types of reports are usually extremely well-researched, thorough yet concise, and non-partisan. You can watch the news coverage on a topic for a year and still not pick up a tenth of what you can get by spending 15 minutes reading one of these reports. I very much look forward to reading this one.
I was referring to "viva" as the first word, which is the Spanish spelling. In French, this would be "vive."
Considering that he wrote the first word in Spanish and the last word in English, it probably doesn't matter if the middle word isn't proper French.
From the article:
I presume the testimony of an employee is sufficient probable cause for a court to order a raid. However, the article states that it's only necessary in extreme cases. There are two good reasons why a company would voluntarily submit to a raid:
What I don't understand is why these businesses put themselves in such a risky position in the first place. Can you imagine if every small business with these six-figure fines or licensing fees invested that money instead to developing/improving an open source alternative that they could all benefit from?
You could put all the security researchers in the world together and they still couldn't tell you all the vulnerabilities that exist in currently deployed software. Perfection is not required to be considered an expert. Now, if this had gone on for a long time, or happened repeatedly, you might have a point.
My favorite covered toggle was in the avionics integration lab at my last job. It was the "self destruct every electronic component that might contain classified information" switch for the apache helicopter. Needless to say, the cover was wired shut, and I never got to experience the fun of toggling it.
I would have loved having this as a child. The thing I hated most was my Mom saying, "You've been on the computer long enough." She never gave a warning ahead of time. Sometimes 2 hours was "long enough" and sometimes it was 15 minutes.
This feature works perfectly with one of my first principles of marriage and parenting: Never have an argument over and over again that you can solve once and for all. Kids accept rules that are consistent and fairly applied. They will complain for a while, and then learn to deal with it. They will learn that the amount of time they have to play on any given day is a consequence of their own decisions, not of mom and dad's mood that day, and they will plan accordingly.
Did I miss the tag? People actually still pay money to live under those kinds of restrictions? What features does a home user need that they can't get with free software?
Don't blame us. Your government is the one that not only tolerated piracy, but actually paid people to do it.
Actually, that's a great rate — for us. My next vacation I'm going to forgo the traveler's checks and just bring a bunch of MP3s.
The short answer is you don't. If you don't have the skills to backport it yourself, you can pay someone to do it for you. The long answer is that not everyone has the same idea of an urgent fix as you do, and there is a limited amount of resources.
I occasionally wonder if an ultra-stable linux distribution would be feasible. Basically, you would only add bug fixes, but do it quickly. I did this for a while with just my kernel back in 2.4 days. A feature change was made that broke a third-party patch I needed for some commercial software from work, so I manually backported the security fixes for the several months it took for the third party to get its act together.
The side effect was that I had an extremely stable kernel, and sometimes my system had security fixes even before a change was checked in, just from reading the posts to the mailing list. The downside, of course, was a lot of manual effort.
Of course government has a compelling interest in establishing standards of weight and measure. On the other hand, you make a very good point that there is little reason that a government can't maintain two different sets.
Sometimes, people have the impression that Americans don't use the metric system. Nothing could be further from the truth. Science, engineering, and medicine use the metric system extensively. However, our government seems to have caught on that humans might be able to use both systems for different purposes.
Even non-scientists here use the metric system when it is appropriate. For example, my wife keeps our kitchen scale set to grams, because that's how our daughter's medicine is measured. She also has no problem measuring in milliliters, and knows that a milliliter of water is the same as a cubic centimeter and weighs 1 gram.
On the other hand, she has no idea how many milliliters are in a teaspoon, even though she uses both units extensively. She has no need to know.
Trust me, they think watching you is just as much a waste of time as you do. The ego connected with paranoia never ceases to amaze me.
Well, obviously someone has to be the first one to have trouble with it.
The short answer is if you have to ask, gentoo is not for you, and that's okay.
The long answer is that there are reasons you may want to use suboptimal compile options, such as if you are compiling on one high end machine with the intent of distributing binary packages to a bunch of disparate machines on your network (yes, gentoo does binary packages). Another reason could be not wanting to maintain a database of every possible processor variant. Another reason is that the configuration file method is actually simpler to people who are familiar with such things, and gentoo is geared towards that type of person.
Gentoo makes absolutely no sense until you find that you are investing a lot of time and effort into manually compiling and configuring packages, to get around limitations of your distribution for whatever reason. For people at that point, gentoo is a lot easier. If you're not at that point, gentoo is unnecessarily complex, and you'll never understand its appeal. Gentoo definitely isn't for everyone, but that doesn't mean it isn't for anyone.
That being said, there are other distributions for which it would make complete sense to autodetect the CPU, and you shouldn't confuse Gentoo Linux with Linux in general. Linspire comes immediately to mind, and maybe Ubuntu. However, it seems a little strange to want to switch from Windows without having a clear idea of what you want to switch to. How do you know Windows isn't the best option for you?
I've been married for 10 years and only agree with you 50%. Yes, men who don't take any crap from their wives normally end up divorced. However, men who take all their wives' crap aren't any better off. I know several divorced people who had marriages exactly like that, including my own parents. If you don't tell your wife she's wrong when she is, she will never fully believe you are being honest when you tell her she is right.
The result is she will trust the advice of her friends or parents over yours, and will confide in them when she should be confiding in you. She will feel like you are not there for her as much as they are, and will sense that you are unhappy but hiding something from her. Part of her happiness depends on your happiness, so neither of you end up being as happy as you could be. Giving in all the time only sacrifices long term happiness to prevent short term conflicts.
As someone who has been married for ten years, only the last 3 of which had a DVR, trust me that there is about a tenth the TV arguments with one than without it. First of all, being able to record your preferred show and hers at the same time automatically prevents a ton of arguments.
Second, if you don't give your wife attention as soon as she wants it — and they don't always understand when is a good time or a bad time to interrupt a game or other show they aren't interested in — she will feel like you think TV is more important than she is, even if you just need ten seconds to get past a very critical part to a good stopping place. If you have a healthy relationship, she will consider your feelings and hardly ever say anything, but she will still feel it. Conversely, you probably won't say anything about missing parts of your favorite shows, but you will still feel it. Those pause and rewind buttons prevent a lot of hard feelings on both sides.
Six months seems like a long time to fix that deleting thing, but those sorts of conflicts become easier to solve the longer you've been married, and often don't even happen in the first place, as you both get more attuned to each other's needs and wants.
Personally I prefer something like:
This is longer, but requires less effort to read because it splits up the ideas. First, it selects a list of items. Next, it deletes one of those items. In the original, those actions are mixed up, requiring the reader to hold more concepts in his mind at once. It takes some effort to determine whether delete and count are even referring to the same object.
Of course, if it comes up more than once (and occasionally even if it doesn't), it's even better as:
First of all, we're only at a competitive disadvantage if the politicians and lawyers leading other countries are more tech savvy than ours. I highly doubt that is the case, but please provide counterexamples if you know any.
Second, while our leaders may not be tech savvy themselves, they are intelligent enough to at least know the right people to ask for help. If you want to learn a lot about a topic, read the expert testimony at a congressional hearing about it. For example, here is the guest list for a senate hearing a few months ago on net neutrality:
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
President and CEO, United States Telecom Association
Chairman and CEO, Vonage
President and CEO, National Cable & Telecommunications Association
President and CEO, CompTel
Senior Fellow and Director of the federal Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics, The Progress & Freedom Foundation
Professor of Law, Standford Law School
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Vice President for External Affairs, Internet2
A pretty impressive list, if you ask me. It would be pretty difficult to walk away from a meeting with that group and not have all the information you need to make a good decision on net neutrality.
If it helps you feel better, you can go on believing that politicians make decisions you disagree with out of ignorance. The truth is, the vast majority of them are highly intelligent, highly educated, and just happen to either have a different point of view than you, or hold the same opinion but allow themselves to succumb to the corrupting influence of money and power.
True, but 95% is generally accepted as the default when it is unstated.