Dumb is not a valid excuse anymore. Not on this topic, and not for the last 4 or 5 years.
Ah, that may be so. I have no experience with the windows side. Under linux, I hope being dumb is a valid excuse because it took me a while to set up a two pc home network, and getting it secured was another chore.
Maybe I was dumb because I automatically bought linksys wi-fi cards for the pcs, because the tulip-based ethernet cards they made which first came with drivers on the diskette in the box (based on software libre drivers for DEC cards complete with GPL notice), and then were mainstreamed into every linux kernel, were such a safe bet for linux support. I saw but for some reason payed no mind to the prominent Cisco logo on the box, which should have been a warning. I blame a lack of research on my part.
Not really. Lots of people are aware that particular crimes denoted by specific terms exist without knowing their parameters.
Don't be ridiculous. By definition it is the woman who says what is rape and what isn't, because it is defined by what she is willing to allow. If she doesn't think a crime was comitted then there should not be a prosecution because it wasn't rape. Arresting someone after that would be utterly retarded.
Apparently that wasn't a consideration here.
No, the implication is that she did not believe that unauthorized access in those circumstances was punishable under criminal law.
I know it is important to distinguish between legality and morality, but when the alleged victim says "I don't think there was a crime here" that means they don't think that the perpetrator did anything wrong. Someone who is angry is glad that what the person did is illegal, not befuddled. If you walk through the open door of my house and I am not offended, is that trespass?
It was a case where authorization was implicit, and the rules of the implicit authorization were unclear. He wasn't just using any random access point, he explicitly picked out a "free" one. A person not aware of the law but who didn't want to share their wi-fi would be pissed if someone jumped on, they wouldn't be all "gee i was unaware that this was actionable". The bottom line is it didn't sound like the store owner cared. If she didn't care, is it a crime?
Maybe... but you'd probably be looking at only a $20 ticket or at MOST the towing fee. There's no way on earth that crime could justify a 5 year felony charge and a $10,000 fine.
See, it's bleeding-heart soft-headed liberals like yourself that are ruining our country. You think that babying the criminals will make them your friend, but it will only teach them to take advantage of you again! You let the guy get away with using your precious parking space once with a slap on the wrist, and he'll be back, with friends, to take up all your parking spaces. Soon there'll be no empty spaces anywhere and hard-working families will have to park ten miles from work and walk through the snow to get to their jobs being productive citizens instead of lazy no-good Parking Thieves! They should be lucky to get 5 years! I say make it ten, and for the second offense, thirty, and for the third strike (because baseball analogy == justice) you either throw away the key or kill em depending on the state.
And as for this guy -- he deprived the hard-working American small businessperson of $0.50! That alone is worth $10,000 of his crime-dollars that he probably got selling drugs to children anyway. And the judge proved that the judiciary is a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals too by not bringing the full weight of the law to bear, giving him a pass just because he had no prior offenses. Well now he does, proving he's a criminal and no good to society! And now he's walking free! We must stop this sort of judicial activism with mandatory sentencing.
Rape, for instance, is still a crime if the victim doesn't consent, but doesn't know that it is criminal for the perpetrator to proceed without her consent.
But if the victim does not believe a crime was comitted and is aware that rape is a crime, then that would probably imply that she does not believe the sex was non-consensual, and her opinion would be rather relevent in that case then, wouldn't it?
Yes, in this case, whether or not he had authorization from the coffee shop owner would be relevant. Whether or not the coffee shop owner thought that it was criminal for him to use the access without authorization is not.
So you're saying that the coffee shop owner's comment was intended that she didn't know that any breaking-and-entering of a computer was illegal? I find that to be highly improbable from anyone who has watched the news or seen a movie in the last twenty years, much less someone smart enough to put wi-fi in their shop. The much more reasonable interpretation is that she was talking about the specific case of the guy in her parking lot using her free wi-fi, and the implication is that she did not believe it to be criminal -- as in unauthorized -- access.
Where I grew up, the police would've just come over and said, "Hey, you shouldn't be doing that. Don't let me see you down here again." Instead, this jerk writes up a warrant. I guess that "To protect, and to serve." idea is really an anachronism these days.
Yeah, especially since the cop wasn't actually aware this was a crime, you'd think he just could have gave the guy a warning and let it drop. I don't think he even checked with the store owner to see if she cared. It does seem like quite the asshole move.
Its just as illegal to commit a crime if both you and the victim are unaware that it is actually criminal.
Except in the many cases where whether or not it is a crime in the first place is based on the intent of the victim. The difference between stealing (crime) and borrowing (not a crime) is whether or not the "victim" thinks you're stealing or borrowing. Similar with trespassing -- it's all in the perception of the land owner whether you are trespassing or not.
"Unauthorized computer access" -- who do you think decides what is unauthorized? The state? Or maybe the owner of the store providing free wi-fi?
There's nothing really exceptional in that aspect of this case.
The only thing exceptional is that apparently the opinion of the person who was theoretically trespassed upon doesn't seem to matter. In every other case like this one, there never would have been an arrest in the first place because it would be clear that no crime had been committed.
Or are you really saying that he should have been charged with trespass due to using the parking spot, as well?
I personally think that wireless networks, even those that are being broadcast in unlicensed spectrums (like wifi) should be illegal to access if the "digital doorknob" is locked. If you have to enter in a password or decryption key, even a weak one like WEP, it's illegal to access. But, if it's open/unencrypted, then you should be free to act with impunity.
I'd say that a network that is unsecured and broadcasting its SSID is essentially an invitation to join that network. An unsecured network that is not broadcasting an SSID is like a house with the door closed but not locked -- you don't have permission to enter, even though it is still trivial to do so. A secured network, even if the security is weak, is like a locked door. It might only take a single kick to knock it in, but that's still B&E.
The problem though is that the default setting of wireless routers is unsecured and SSID broadcast enabled, and of course like with everything few people ever change the defaults. It makes it easy for anyone to set up a network -- turn on the router, click "Find network" on the PC, done -- but the result is we have tons of unsecured, open networks whose owners may not want to be open but don't know how to say that in wireless protocol terms.
I fly the BS flag. This "bullet" could have been easily dodged, but Kent County wants its free money.
Exactly. The GP called this a "waste of resources", but the only one who is out anything is the guy, for whom I guarantee the $400 is only the beginning of his expenses. He's probably also paying court fees, paying fees to whoever tracks his community service (probation officer, maybe, though TFA doesn't mention probation), and paying fees to enroll in whatever a "diversion program" is.
They may have actually been reluctant to prosecute cases like this before. But now that they have, and tasted the sweet green blood of a new revenue source, expect them to vigorously pursue this kind of case in the future.
Yeah, maybe he should have realized that "free wi-fi" probably meant "free wi-fi if you come into the store and hopefully purchase something", but that's a distinction even the store owner didn't think was a matter of law. I mean, should he be charged with a crime for using the free parking spot, since it's pretty clear that the store only has the parking spot so people can park and come in the store?
Unauthorized computer access is a crime, as it should be. This particular instance, however, probably should not be. It wasn't just an unsecured access point, it was deliberately unsecured to provide free wi-fi, and even the store owner didn't think the guy had comitted a crime. He probably should have realized that "free wi-fi" meant "free if you come in to the store, and hopefully buy something". The penalty handed down by the judge it says is because he had no record, but I would bet it's also the judge realizing that he wasn't being malicious, he just made a mistake that didn't really cost anyone anything.
This is an example of why mandatory minimum sentences are bad. It's done to "get tough" on criminals, but all it does is force judges to "get stupid" and not be able to apply any judgement to cases like this one.
Exactly. And thus the degree of freedom for the community as a whole has been decreased by the act of limiting the freedom to limit freedom.
No freedom is maximized for the community by having the absolute minimum number of restirctions necessary to ensure freedom. To be free in a community means that nobody else can take away your freedom. To ensure freedom for everyone, nobody may be allowed to own slaves.
That's what the GPL does, establish the minimum necessary restrictions on you to ensure freedom for you and for everyone else in the community. It's the copyright license equivalent of "do as you will but allow others to do the same". I can't see how that reduces freedom unless you're only thinking in terms of yourself.
We run into the same problem with those who preach tolerance. Often, those people are extremely intolerant of those who preach intolerance.
And intolerance is still wrong, especially when intolerance is acted upon and becomes discrimination. Hate speech laws would be a good example, and yes weak people can be hypocrits.
And this means that discrimination is more free than tolerance... HOW?
He said "evaluate the data yourself", not "run off on a fool's errand". Mathematicians didn't conclude that Pi was irrational by trying to compute it's value and getting bored.
Gee, what a shock. To me, this is just an example of how we can't use biofuel stupidly, specifically we should not be using corn oil. Corn is a food staple, it is foolish to tie that together with transportation, at least at this level. If we can't just take the excess corn that our government pays farmers to make and then leave to rot in piles, then it isn't worth it.
Now the thing about emissions, that's kinda not the point. Burning the fuel may not be particularly cleaner (get it, particle... n/m) but the thing is we aren't releasing carbon that's been stored in the ground for millions of years. Releasing carbon that was absorbed from the atmosphere the previous year to grow the corn to make the fuel that we burn isn't bad, because then we have a self-sustaining cycle. Releasing carbon that wasn't in the atmosphere recently is what is bad.
As far as more energy put in than we get out, well that's not unusual, even with the help of the sun for an outside source of energy. Especially since much of the corn is grown in the midwest where the land is less viable than it used to be and petrochemical-derived fertilizers must be used. Which means we are still releasing long-sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, partially defeating the whole point.
Brazil seems to be doing better with their sugar cane based ethanol program. Now I don't think of sugar as a food staple, though I could be wrong. I'm just thinking it's a matter of the whole economic situation being different.
-The new Linux based system will be promoted as the next generation of Palm OS, as opposed to something completely different -Full backward compatibility will be retained for legacy palm apps, which accounts for 90% of Palm's loyal userbase -Multithreaded preemptive multitasking will fix the stability issues that arose from cramming phone and email push functionality into a single task 68k-based OS
That's completely awesome, the backward compatability because that's necessary for it to count as a Palm OS upgrade, and the multitasking because the lack of this is the only thing that makes me truly hate my Treo. At least you can talk on the phone while browsing contacts/taking notes, but anything resembling useful multitasking (such as using the phone and web at the same time) is just not there.
Oh, did he say whether the new platform would support running native Linux apps? Because the only other thing my Treo needs to become perfect is Nethack.:)
As long as the events are independent, you remember your probability class correctly.
The only way other alien life on other planets reduces our chances of colonizing other worlds is if they are hostile towards us, or they have a habit of destroying worlds we could have potentially inhabited, or in some other way interfere with our progress so as to become non-independent. Though the theory makes a tiny bit of sense because we can probably presume that other space-faring races are much more likely to have the capability of interfering with us, and certainly are the only ones capable of interfering beyond a single planet. But to assume the mere existence of other space farers decreases our chances of doing the same is wrong.
Yeah, that's pretty scary. Just as interesting to me is the tidbit that they would not only be compiling information on potential offenders, but also of potential victims. That part kinda scares me. If ever there was information that was prone to abuse, it would be a database listing who is likely to be abused.
In the context of his ability to predict the future of technology, he is clearly neither wise nor clever. In an article called "20 Years of Bill Gates Business Decisions" I would be forced to give him a more positive review since the metric of success is different.
But what if you're a good parent and your child is just plain evil?
I'll accept that as a hypothetical possibility, but I'm going to say it's very rare. Maybe the parent is "good" as in not evil, but many "good" parents aren't "good" as in effective. If they are willing to say that their child is "just plain evil", then I'd say they probably fit in that category and don't want to deal with the tough problems. Sure, if the "child" is in their late teens then however their personality formed it's probably too late for any major fixes, at least from the parents, but there's no reason to think a third grader is fundamentally evil and cannot be changed.
For some reason I'm reminded of "The Dog Whisperer", who time and time again goes to houses where the owner is convinced that their dog is a lost cause, that they're fundamentally bad dogs. In walks the host, who within minutes has figured out what the owner is doing wrong, how they are encouraging bad behavior and not giving the dog what they need, and soon has the dog sitting politely waiting on their owner's command instead of running around tearing up the house or whatever, with the owner gasping in amazement that their dog could ever be like that.
Obviously people aren't dogs, they're much more complicated and no "Child Whisperer" is going to waltz in and make all the problems go away in time for the commercial break. I'm just saying that I strongly suspect that when a person says "I'm a good parent and my child is just plain evil" that they're wrong on both counts.
I'll give it to him, but really this was a trivial prediction. He was essentially predicting that Microsoft would remain the dominant OS vendor -- and I think we all know enough about the difficulty of breaking an entrenched monopoly to know that he wasn't really going out on a limb there.
why you can't you understand the concept of intent?
I do understand the concept of intent. "Intent" means "what you want to happen". It is distinct from what actually happens, thus the phrase "unintended consequences". Why do unintended consequences occur?
Because reality does not care what you intend.
There is only one thing that affects reality: Cause and effect.
Even in a court of law, you merely get a reduced sentence if you did not "intend" to kill. You are still responsible for reality, as in cause and effect. That is what is most important.
And in the effective execution of foreign policy, cause and effect is all that matters. Maybe you care about intent because that way when your invasion fails you can claim that you didn't intend for it to fail, didn't intend to make the humanitarian disaster worse. But the reality will be there anyway. And just like in cases of negligent homicide, it is your lack of an effective plan that will be cited as the cause of your failure and the reason you are responsible for that failure. The only thing intent affects is how severely you should be punished for your incompetence, it does not change the outcome.
Yet you hold intent to be more important than cause and effect, you deliberately eschew any discussion of actual actions and their actual consequences. You only talk in terms of what you wish would happen using unspecified means.
Asking me to support an invasion based solely on intent -- indeed, where intent is taken to be paramount in lieu of understanding cause and effect -- is asking me to support an invasion which will fail. I will not do it.
Or the short version: Intent does not trump cause and effect. Your intent can only be made real by a plan of action. Only cause and effect matter, reality does not care what you intended to happen.
Why do you not understand the concept of cause and effect? Why do you refuse to even discuss reality, instead only discussing your hypothetical wish for what would happen? I'm not going to support your wish, unless you can show me how you plan to turn that wish into a reality. I don't care about your intent, I care about your plan. You don't have one, because when someone thinks intent trumps reality, they don't need a plan. None of the neocons did either. Thus they failed. So will you.
You care about intent. I care about success or failure. You don't want to fail, and hope wanting makes it so. I try to actually succeed. One of these ideas is intelligent, the other a childish dream.
If you are going to reply with more tripe that ignores reality in favor of wishful thinking, just don't bother. If you cannot connect your intent to reality through a chain of cause-and-effect -- people call this a "plan" -- even if just a vague outline then you are useless and doomed to failure. I've had enough of real-world failure based on good intentions executed with no regard to reality.
One common theme in literature is the question of whether oracles predict the future, or create it. Would Oedipus have killed his father had the Oracle at Delphi never prophecied that he would and thus his father never sent him to die in the wilderness? Had the witches not said that Macbeth would not be harmed by any of woman born, would he have gone down the path that led to him being killed by the C-section-birthed Macduff?
Which relates to what you said in that Gates is trying to be the non-supernatural form of seer -- the one who tries to create the future with their prediction, instead of predicting some future that is destined to happen. Now, one of the common traits of literary oracles is that they are extremely wise and clever, such that truly distinguishing whether they can actually see the future or merely guide it meticulously is extremely difficult. They also tend to have unclear motivations, which also clouds the issue. This is what makes it interesting.
Gates' motivations are patently clear: Guide the direction of the industry in a way favorable to Microsoft. He also isn't supremely wise or clever. Though in the comparison I'm making he doesn't fit precisely because he's also the executor of whatever real path his company takes into the future. Somewhat like if it was Macbeth who predicted that he was to be king, hoping that saying so will help cause it to become true. Strangely that doesn't work as well.
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Dumb is not a valid excuse anymore. Not on this topic, and not for the last 4 or 5 years.
Ah, that may be so. I have no experience with the windows side. Under linux, I hope being dumb is a valid excuse because it took me a while to set up a two pc home network, and getting it secured was another chore.
Maybe I was dumb because I automatically bought linksys wi-fi cards for the pcs, because the tulip-based ethernet cards they made which first came with drivers on the diskette in the box (based on software libre drivers for DEC cards complete with GPL notice), and then were mainstreamed into every linux kernel, were such a safe bet for linux support. I saw but for some reason payed no mind to the prominent Cisco logo on the box, which should have been a warning. I blame a lack of research on my part.
Not really. Lots of people are aware that particular crimes denoted by specific terms exist without knowing their parameters.
Don't be ridiculous. By definition it is the woman who says what is rape and what isn't, because it is defined by what she is willing to allow. If she doesn't think a crime was comitted then there should not be a prosecution because it wasn't rape. Arresting someone after that would be utterly retarded.
Apparently that wasn't a consideration here.
No, the implication is that she did not believe that unauthorized access in those circumstances was punishable under criminal law.
I know it is important to distinguish between legality and morality, but when the alleged victim says "I don't think there was a crime here" that means they don't think that the perpetrator did anything wrong. Someone who is angry is glad that what the person did is illegal, not befuddled. If you walk through the open door of my house and I am not offended, is that trespass?
It was a case where authorization was implicit, and the rules of the implicit authorization were unclear. He wasn't just using any random access point, he explicitly picked out a "free" one. A person not aware of the law but who didn't want to share their wi-fi would be pissed if someone jumped on, they wouldn't be all "gee i was unaware that this was actionable". The bottom line is it didn't sound like the store owner cared. If she didn't care, is it a crime?
Maybe... but you'd probably be looking at only a $20 ticket or at MOST the towing fee.
There's no way on earth that crime could justify a 5 year felony charge and a $10,000 fine.
See, it's bleeding-heart soft-headed liberals like yourself that are ruining our country. You think that babying the criminals will make them your friend, but it will only teach them to take advantage of you again! You let the guy get away with using your precious parking space once with a slap on the wrist, and he'll be back, with friends, to take up all your parking spaces. Soon there'll be no empty spaces anywhere and hard-working families will have to park ten miles from work and walk through the snow to get to their jobs being productive citizens instead of lazy no-good Parking Thieves! They should be lucky to get 5 years! I say make it ten, and for the second offense, thirty, and for the third strike (because baseball analogy == justice) you either throw away the key or kill em depending on the state.
And as for this guy -- he deprived the hard-working American small businessperson of $0.50! That alone is worth $10,000 of his crime-dollars that he probably got selling drugs to children anyway. And the judge proved that the judiciary is a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals too by not bringing the full weight of the law to bear, giving him a pass just because he had no prior offenses. Well now he does, proving he's a criminal and no good to society! And now he's walking free! We must stop this sort of judicial activism with mandatory sentencing.
Rape, for instance, is still a crime if the victim doesn't consent, but doesn't know that it is criminal for the perpetrator to proceed without her consent.
But if the victim does not believe a crime was comitted and is aware that rape is a crime, then that would probably imply that she does not believe the sex was non-consensual, and her opinion would be rather relevent in that case then, wouldn't it?
Yes, in this case, whether or not he had authorization from the coffee shop owner would be relevant. Whether or not the coffee shop owner thought that it was criminal for him to use the access without authorization is not.
So you're saying that the coffee shop owner's comment was intended that she didn't know that any breaking-and-entering of a computer was illegal? I find that to be highly improbable from anyone who has watched the news or seen a movie in the last twenty years, much less someone smart enough to put wi-fi in their shop. The much more reasonable interpretation is that she was talking about the specific case of the guy in her parking lot using her free wi-fi, and the implication is that she did not believe it to be criminal -- as in unauthorized -- access.
Where I grew up, the police would've just come over and said, "Hey, you shouldn't be doing that. Don't let me see you down here again." Instead, this jerk writes up a warrant. I guess that "To protect, and to serve." idea is really an anachronism these days.
Yeah, especially since the cop wasn't actually aware this was a crime, you'd think he just could have gave the guy a warning and let it drop. I don't think he even checked with the store owner to see if she cared. It does seem like quite the asshole move.
Its just as illegal to commit a crime if both you and the victim are unaware that it is actually criminal.
Except in the many cases where whether or not it is a crime in the first place is based on the intent of the victim. The difference between stealing (crime) and borrowing (not a crime) is whether or not the "victim" thinks you're stealing or borrowing. Similar with trespassing -- it's all in the perception of the land owner whether you are trespassing or not.
"Unauthorized computer access" -- who do you think decides what is unauthorized? The state? Or maybe the owner of the store providing free wi-fi?
There's nothing really exceptional in that aspect of this case.
The only thing exceptional is that apparently the opinion of the person who was theoretically trespassed upon doesn't seem to matter. In every other case like this one, there never would have been an arrest in the first place because it would be clear that no crime had been committed.
Or are you really saying that he should have been charged with trespass due to using the parking spot, as well?
What do you think the router is? Yoou can't "access the network" without negotiating with the router.
I personally think that wireless networks, even those that are being broadcast in unlicensed spectrums (like wifi) should be illegal to access if the "digital doorknob" is locked. If you have to enter in a password or decryption key, even a weak one like WEP, it's illegal to access. But, if it's open/unencrypted, then you should be free to act with impunity.
I'd say that a network that is unsecured and broadcasting its SSID is essentially an invitation to join that network. An unsecured network that is not broadcasting an SSID is like a house with the door closed but not locked -- you don't have permission to enter, even though it is still trivial to do so. A secured network, even if the security is weak, is like a locked door. It might only take a single kick to knock it in, but that's still B&E.
The problem though is that the default setting of wireless routers is unsecured and SSID broadcast enabled, and of course like with everything few people ever change the defaults. It makes it easy for anyone to set up a network -- turn on the router, click "Find network" on the PC, done -- but the result is we have tons of unsecured, open networks whose owners may not want to be open but don't know how to say that in wireless protocol terms.
I fly the BS flag. This "bullet" could have been easily dodged, but Kent County wants its free money.
Exactly. The GP called this a "waste of resources", but the only one who is out anything is the guy, for whom I guarantee the $400 is only the beginning of his expenses. He's probably also paying court fees, paying fees to whoever tracks his community service (probation officer, maybe, though TFA doesn't mention probation), and paying fees to enroll in whatever a "diversion program" is.
They may have actually been reluctant to prosecute cases like this before. But now that they have, and tasted the sweet green blood of a new revenue source, expect them to vigorously pursue this kind of case in the future.
Yeah, maybe he should have realized that "free wi-fi" probably meant "free wi-fi if you come into the store and hopefully purchase something", but that's a distinction even the store owner didn't think was a matter of law. I mean, should he be charged with a crime for using the free parking spot, since it's pretty clear that the store only has the parking spot so people can park and come in the store?
Unauthorized computer access is a crime, as it should be. This particular instance, however, probably should not be. It wasn't just an unsecured access point, it was deliberately unsecured to provide free wi-fi, and even the store owner didn't think the guy had comitted a crime. He probably should have realized that "free wi-fi" meant "free if you come in to the store, and hopefully buy something". The penalty handed down by the judge it says is because he had no record, but I would bet it's also the judge realizing that he wasn't being malicious, he just made a mistake that didn't really cost anyone anything.
This is an example of why mandatory minimum sentences are bad. It's done to "get tough" on criminals, but all it does is force judges to "get stupid" and not be able to apply any judgement to cases like this one.
Exactly. And thus the degree of freedom for the community as a whole has been decreased by the act of limiting the freedom to limit freedom.
No freedom is maximized for the community by having the absolute minimum number of restirctions necessary to ensure freedom. To be free in a community means that nobody else can take away your freedom. To ensure freedom for everyone, nobody may be allowed to own slaves.
That's what the GPL does, establish the minimum necessary restrictions on you to ensure freedom for you and for everyone else in the community. It's the copyright license equivalent of "do as you will but allow others to do the same". I can't see how that reduces freedom unless you're only thinking in terms of yourself.
We run into the same problem with those who preach tolerance. Often, those people are extremely intolerant of those who preach intolerance.
And intolerance is still wrong, especially when intolerance is acted upon and becomes discrimination. Hate speech laws would be a good example, and yes weak people can be hypocrits.
And this means that discrimination is more free than tolerance... HOW?
Why worry about it when I have cheap corn tortillas? j/k
He said "evaluate the data yourself", not "run off on a fool's errand". Mathematicians didn't conclude that Pi was irrational by trying to compute it's value and getting bored.
Gee, what a shock. To me, this is just an example of how we can't use biofuel stupidly, specifically we should not be using corn oil. Corn is a food staple, it is foolish to tie that together with transportation, at least at this level. If we can't just take the excess corn that our government pays farmers to make and then leave to rot in piles, then it isn't worth it.
Now the thing about emissions, that's kinda not the point. Burning the fuel may not be particularly cleaner (get it, particle... n/m) but the thing is we aren't releasing carbon that's been stored in the ground for millions of years. Releasing carbon that was absorbed from the atmosphere the previous year to grow the corn to make the fuel that we burn isn't bad, because then we have a self-sustaining cycle. Releasing carbon that wasn't in the atmosphere recently is what is bad.
As far as more energy put in than we get out, well that's not unusual, even with the help of the sun for an outside source of energy. Especially since much of the corn is grown in the midwest where the land is less viable than it used to be and petrochemical-derived fertilizers must be used. Which means we are still releasing long-sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, partially defeating the whole point.
Brazil seems to be doing better with their sugar cane based ethanol program. Now I don't think of sugar as a food staple, though I could be wrong. I'm just thinking it's a matter of the whole economic situation being different.
-The new Linux based system will be promoted as the next generation of Palm OS, as opposed to something completely different
:)
-Full backward compatibility will be retained for legacy palm apps, which accounts for 90% of Palm's loyal userbase
-Multithreaded preemptive multitasking will fix the stability issues that arose from cramming phone and email push functionality into a single task 68k-based OS
That's completely awesome, the backward compatability because that's necessary for it to count as a Palm OS upgrade, and the multitasking because the lack of this is the only thing that makes me truly hate my Treo. At least you can talk on the phone while browsing contacts/taking notes, but anything resembling useful multitasking (such as using the phone and web at the same time) is just not there.
Oh, did he say whether the new platform would support running native Linux apps? Because the only other thing my Treo needs to become perfect is Nethack.
As long as the events are independent, you remember your probability class correctly.
The only way other alien life on other planets reduces our chances of colonizing other worlds is if they are hostile towards us, or they have a habit of destroying worlds we could have potentially inhabited, or in some other way interfere with our progress so as to become non-independent. Though the theory makes a tiny bit of sense because we can probably presume that other space-faring races are much more likely to have the capability of interfering with us, and certainly are the only ones capable of interfering beyond a single planet. But to assume the mere existence of other space farers decreases our chances of doing the same is wrong.
Yeah, that's pretty scary. Just as interesting to me is the tidbit that they would not only be compiling information on potential offenders, but also of potential victims. That part kinda scares me. If ever there was information that was prone to abuse, it would be a database listing who is likely to be abused.
Yes I get oodles of karma but it's the integrity of the discussion on slashdot that matters.
:)
I think that's the comment that should be modded +5 funny.
In the context of his ability to predict the future of technology, he is clearly neither wise nor clever. In an article called "20 Years of Bill Gates Business Decisions" I would be forced to give him a more positive review since the metric of success is different.
Awww, man, would it have killed you to put a "SPOILER" warning on that?
According to the Oracle of Delphi, I shall not die ere I have of spoilers warned the initiate to the tale of more than century told.
So, uh, maybe?
But what if you're a good parent and your child is just plain evil?
I'll accept that as a hypothetical possibility, but I'm going to say it's very rare. Maybe the parent is "good" as in not evil, but many "good" parents aren't "good" as in effective. If they are willing to say that their child is "just plain evil", then I'd say they probably fit in that category and don't want to deal with the tough problems. Sure, if the "child" is in their late teens then however their personality formed it's probably too late for any major fixes, at least from the parents, but there's no reason to think a third grader is fundamentally evil and cannot be changed.
For some reason I'm reminded of "The Dog Whisperer", who time and time again goes to houses where the owner is convinced that their dog is a lost cause, that they're fundamentally bad dogs. In walks the host, who within minutes has figured out what the owner is doing wrong, how they are encouraging bad behavior and not giving the dog what they need, and soon has the dog sitting politely waiting on their owner's command instead of running around tearing up the house or whatever, with the owner gasping in amazement that their dog could ever be like that.
Obviously people aren't dogs, they're much more complicated and no "Child Whisperer" is going to waltz in and make all the problems go away in time for the commercial break. I'm just saying that I strongly suspect that when a person says "I'm a good parent and my child is just plain evil" that they're wrong on both counts.
I'll give it to him, but really this was a trivial prediction. He was essentially predicting that Microsoft would remain the dominant OS vendor -- and I think we all know enough about the difficulty of breaking an entrenched monopoly to know that he wasn't really going out on a limb there.
I do understand the concept of intent. "Intent" means "what you want to happen". It is distinct from what actually happens, thus the phrase "unintended consequences". Why do unintended consequences occur?
Because reality does not care what you intend.
There is only one thing that affects reality: Cause and effect.
Even in a court of law, you merely get a reduced sentence if you did not "intend" to kill. You are still responsible for reality, as in cause and effect. That is what is most important.
And in the effective execution of foreign policy, cause and effect is all that matters. Maybe you care about intent because that way when your invasion fails you can claim that you didn't intend for it to fail, didn't intend to make the humanitarian disaster worse. But the reality will be there anyway. And just like in cases of negligent homicide, it is your lack of an effective plan that will be cited as the cause of your failure and the reason you are responsible for that failure. The only thing intent affects is how severely you should be punished for your incompetence, it does not change the outcome.
Yet you hold intent to be more important than cause and effect, you deliberately eschew any discussion of actual actions and their actual consequences. You only talk in terms of what you wish would happen using unspecified means.
Asking me to support an invasion based solely on intent -- indeed, where intent is taken to be paramount in lieu of understanding cause and effect -- is asking me to support an invasion which will fail. I will not do it.
Or the short version:
Intent does not trump cause and effect.
Your intent can only be made real by a plan of action.
Only cause and effect matter, reality does not care what you intended to happen.
Why do you not understand the concept of cause and effect? Why do you refuse to even discuss reality, instead only discussing your hypothetical wish for what would happen? I'm not going to support your wish, unless you can show me how you plan to turn that wish into a reality. I don't care about your intent, I care about your plan. You don't have one, because when someone thinks intent trumps reality, they don't need a plan. None of the neocons did either. Thus they failed. So will you.
You care about intent. I care about success or failure. You don't want to fail, and hope wanting makes it so. I try to actually succeed. One of these ideas is intelligent, the other a childish dream.
If you are going to reply with more tripe that ignores reality in favor of wishful thinking, just don't bother. If you cannot connect your intent to reality through a chain of cause-and-effect -- people call this a "plan" -- even if just a vague outline then you are useless and doomed to failure. I've had enough of real-world failure based on good intentions executed with no regard to reality.
One common theme in literature is the question of whether oracles predict the future, or create it. Would Oedipus have killed his father had the Oracle at Delphi never prophecied that he would and thus his father never sent him to die in the wilderness? Had the witches not said that Macbeth would not be harmed by any of woman born, would he have gone down the path that led to him being killed by the C-section-birthed Macduff?
Which relates to what you said in that Gates is trying to be the non-supernatural form of seer -- the one who tries to create the future with their prediction, instead of predicting some future that is destined to happen. Now, one of the common traits of literary oracles is that they are extremely wise and clever, such that truly distinguishing whether they can actually see the future or merely guide it meticulously is extremely difficult. They also tend to have unclear motivations, which also clouds the issue. This is what makes it interesting.
Gates' motivations are patently clear: Guide the direction of the industry in a way favorable to Microsoft. He also isn't supremely wise or clever. Though in the comparison I'm making he doesn't fit precisely because he's also the executor of whatever real path his company takes into the future. Somewhat like if it was Macbeth who predicted that he was to be king, hoping that saying so will help cause it to become true. Strangely that doesn't work as well.