Missile defences in Poland and Romania were never of use against Russia nukes in the first place. As another poster mentioned, the geometry makes interceptors in those locations useful against Iranian missiles if their nuclear program comes to fruition. But Russian missiles would be launched northward over the pole, not westward over the Atlantic. So to anyone who knows geometry and ballistics... and Russia has their share of people who do... it's perfectly clear that Russian objections to those interceptors are not at all about their security or the new weapons they had in the pipeline, but were nothing more than a grandstanding pissing match.
Sure. But effectively destroying a country as an entity is one thing. "Wiping out an area the size of" a country is something else entirely. And the text specifies the latter. And I'm not even convinced that destroying a countries 15 largest cities would totally destroy it as a country. See, for example, the still very much in existence countries that had many of their cities wiped out in WW2.
Importantly though, France and the UK have nukes of their own. And if you target the cities with your 15 nukes, you leave the weapons untouched. And if you target the weapons and facilities; not only are the cities untouched, but there's still the nuclear missile submarines that you can't target because you don't know where the hell they are.
No, it wouldn't. Nuclear weapons may be the most destructive thing we know how to build. But they're not black magic. And witless alarmism does no one any good. A 400MT nuke airbursted over Paris at the optimum height would pretty well wipe out it, its suburbs, and quite a lot of the surrounding countryside. But the majority of France would survive. and the UK would be untouched:
Maybe it'd solve privacy in reality. But it wouldn't solve privacy in the minds of the narcissists who think the camera is there to record them. And if their minds were grounded in reality instead of their self-importance, they'd already realize that the vast and overwhelming majority of people don't care about them and aren't trying to spy on them in the first place.
> And there is your problem. Operating it out of line-of- > sight. Perhaps the Swedish ruling is based on the > nature of constitutes acceptable use, and out of line-> of-sight does not meet their criteria.
And that would be a fine and sensible restriction. I have my own doubts about bandwidth and autopilot issues on consumer-level kit operated by uncertified amateurs that make that sound like a reasonable safety precaution. And if I were to drop... What do they start at? $800?... on essentially a toy, I don't think I'd want to let it out of sight while flying it anyway.
But if the issue really is out of line-of-sight operation, then that's the restriction that should be put in place, not the one on cameras. And don't cater to the "ZOMG, everybody wants to record me, ME, ME" mob.
Your argument still presumes, though, that the only reason for the camera to be on the drone is to film the people in the FOV of the camera. And really, it doesn't matter if the operator is present or not. The principle is the same. The cameras are required for very legitimate and perfectly innocent reasons that have nothing to do with spying on anyone. A drone needs a camera to manually navigate the thing whilst out of line-of-sight. And (the eventual successors of) Google Glass requires a camera for augmented reality overlays within the user's FOV to function.
It's no worse than all the self-important narcissists who rail against things like quadcopter drones and Google Glass because the only reason they can conceive for a camera to be attached to technology used in public is that the user wants to secretly record them.
Here in California, a couple gun shops tried to stock and offer a smart gun. This one didn't use a fingerprint scanner, it came with a watch with an RFID chip, and validated that connection to fire. And it wasn't even the sort of gun anyone would use in a "life or death" situation. It was a little.22LR pistol, the likes of which would probably only be bought as a gimmick by collectors. (It even *looks* like something Q-branch would issue to 007.) It was the Armatix iP1:
It never got the chance to succeed or fail in the market. The NRA types flipped their shit, demanded that the store stop selling it, called for boycotts, and even fired off death threats against the store's owner. So even if you wanted one, you can't buy one because the pro-gun people don't want you to be allowed to own one. The hypocrisy there is so thick you could cut it with a cake knife.
How about this: Take a page from your own book. I hear the "if you don't like guns then don't buy one" like a lot when topics revolving around gun control come up. So if you don't want a smart gun, then don't buy one; and lay off the manufacturers and stores that try to introduce them. If enough other people want smart guns, STFU and let them succeed in the market. If enough other people don't, let them fail on their own accord.
Amazon lets third party sellers use their platform. The fakes are usually stocked and sold by these, and not Amazon themselves. And they don't make it especially obvious that you're not actually buying from Amazon either. I wish to hell they'd either knock off the crap, or at lease give me the option to see only items sold by Amazon themselves. You can separate out most of the shysters by filtering only for items available with Amazon Prime. But some of the crooks still get through. You can see these with the "Sold by $x, fulfilled by Amazon" text.
Eh? If your company is spending money on Beats by Dre headphones for any reason other than you've been hired by Apple to produce marketing collateral, you're a bunch of fools. They're crap. Apple didn't but Beats for their hardware. They bought Beats for Jimmy Iovine and his music industry experience and relationships.
The "Magic" lineup is actually quite good kit, so far as I've experienced. I don't like the keyboard, but that's personal preference because I like the full-sized keyboards and those extra USB ports are handy. The trackpad is fantastic though. I switched from a mouse after consulting with my doctor; and pretty much every hint of carpal was gone in less than six months. (Suffice it to say, I don't use the Magic Mouse though. So it could very well be utter crap for all I know.) And pinching pennies over peripherals is just stupid as hell. The cost of buying your people gear that is ergonomically correct for their needs... even if you go full out with the top-of-the-line Kinesis lineup... is TRIVIAL compared to reduced productivity, increased health insurance costs, and the potential for workman's comp claims, if RSI becomes a problem.
And there's no voodoo to restoring a Mac. You can maintain an official image and clone it to the hard drive just like any windows or Linux box. Or if you want a "out of the retail box" state, you just boot into recovery, start the install, and go do something else while it does its thing.
Well, "PC" does by default imply Windows, or at least a Microsoft operating system running on x86 hardware. I know it's a bit pedantic, but I still grate my teeth a bit when people lump Macs, PCs, Linux boxes, and the like, all under "PC"; the correct term being microcomputer. An IBM-er making the mistake is especially egregious; considering it was IBM that marketed the terminology "Personal Computer", "PC", "PC Jr.", and the like... specifically running Microsoft on Intel... as their entries into the microcomputer segment.
In most places I've worked, if you were allowed to use Linux as your desktop OS at all; you were on your own and completely unsupported by IT, whether you needed it or nor.
> Yeah, imagine a huge swath of land with no purpose > other than being covered with solar cells that have to > be kept clean and maintained. A chunk of land > nobody can be allowed to enter, no trees or animals > can be allowed to inhabit.. just imagine it all.
Not do be anti-nuclear or a solar fanboy... I'm actually a fan of both. But we do have quite a lot of uninhabited desert that would do perfectly fine for solar farms. Plus there are rooftops, which are otherwise essentially unused.
If not jail time, what punishment would you suggest for people who file fraudulent DMCA claims then? If you take the automatic mass takedowns out of the equation, and make the individual content owner or lawyer responsible for reviewing and filing the claim; you take any chance of an honest accident out of the equation. So false claims in this case would be, at the very least, willful negligence in the case of a more mercenary lawyer who just went: "Ready, Fire, Aim" at the orders of his client without verifying the claim; or in the case of the content owner himself, or a lawyer who does do due diligence and yet files a false claim anyway, acts of deliberate and malicious fraud and/or perjury. So why hold back on punishing those people.
Seriously, this... very much this. I don't think I'd even go so far as 28 years though, or require anyone to go through the hassle of filing for the extension. I'd just go with a flat 20 years. For the life of me, I can't think of a single good reason that a copyright should last any longer than a patent.
Even in the case of very highly-paid CEOs though, the annual salary of that employee still won't sting a big corporation like Samsung very much. Now, make it 1% of their annual revenue, and then we're talking.
Personally though, I think the DMCA could be fairly easily reworked to put some parity between the parties into the system:
1) Forbid any automated, multiple, and/or electronic takedowns. Each takedown should be for a single alleged infraction, and delivered by registered mail, FedEx, or some other similarly-reliable delivery service that provides evidence of delivery.
2) Those claims of infringement need to be made by a single, identifiable, individual. It doesn't matter if that's the actual owner or their lawyer; so long as the claim can be traced back to that person claiming, under penalty of perjury, that the content is owned and infringing.
3) Give the "under penalty of perjury" part some teeth. If the content is not actually owned by the claimant, covered by fair use, or in any other way determined to be non-infringing; the individual from step 2 above goes to jail for perjury. I think a nice schedule would be: 1st false claim: 30 days in county. 2nd false claim: 90 days in county. 3rd false claim: 1 year in state, plus felony conviction on their criminal record and disbarment if the claimant is a lawyer.
Three simple steps. And I'd bet that we'd eliminate nearly all false and frivolous DMCA claims; but, more importantly, equalize the risk and power differential between the plaintiff and defendant.
The problem here is that words mean things. And when the carriers throw out words like "unlimited", when what they're selling is not in fact unlimited; they are being duplicitous. And they absolutely deserve to be slapped down for that. And whether a technical person should know that they are lying does not change the fact that they are lying. Remember, not everyone is a technical person. If they'd just spell out EXACTLY what they are selling at EXACTLY the price they're charging upfront, with no "gotchas" buried in the fine print, there'd be no issue.
Honestly? They're dumb data pipes, like any other. There's no good reason they should be treated like anything else. And I wish they'd stop trying to imagine themselves otherwise and just sell me bandwidth like any other provider: Give me guaranteed and burstable Mbps rates; and sod off as to whether I use it for voice, data, video, music, tethering, VPN, running a web or email server, or just downloading Linux ISOs to/dev/null 24/7 because I can.
Boycotts, divestment, and disassociation are not at all undemocratic. And they are perfectly legitimate expressions of disagreement.
Look... you or anyone else absolutely have the right to be an asshole. Your own freedom of speech gives you that right. Your freedom of association gives you the right to support assholes. But you're not entitled to anything at all beyond that. *I* have the absolute right not to give you my money. My own freedom of association absolutely gives me the right not to support assholes. My own freedom of speech gives me the right to say so. You (or Donald Trump or Peter Thiel or Y-Combinator) are not at all entitled to anything from ME. And it's not undemocratic for me to associate with better people or to give my money to better businesses.
Oh please... Does the Battle of Agincourt ring a bell? Clever people have been figuring ways to strike at the enemy from longer range pretty much since the beginning of warfare. And the losers have whined about the "unfairness" and questioned the "bravery of being out of range"... right up until the point that they invented new weapons and were themselves the ones fighting from out of range.
In fairness to Assange, if I were cooped indoors in one building for years, with torture and murder at the hands of the CIA awaiting me should I ever leave, I'd probably be going a bit batty and attention-seeking myself. So while, yeah, he's behaving like a tool, I can sympathize.
I think a big problem is that all of the independent tour and concert promoters are gone, and replaced by the monopolistic conglomerates like Live Nation, Insomniac, and the like. Little to no competition means ticket prices in the stratosphere. And when I was going to see, for example, Nine Inch Nails at the peak of their popularity for $20 at The Edge, with the likes of Gravity Kills or Thrill Kill Cult as openers; the notion of paying $200 to see them at Outside Lands as a nostalgia act with a roster of dull and genre-inappropriate openers just rubs me all kinds of the wrong way.
I outgrew the mosh pit many years ago myself. But to categorize it as violence worthy of counseling is hyperbole to the point of absurdity. It's very... enthusiastic... and definitely full-contact. But it's not about violence any more than rugby or hockey is. There's actually a lot more order and custom to it than is apparent to the unfamiliar observer. And people who actually go in to fight are put in check and shown the door fairly quickly.
Or is an applicant "someone with whom HR has made first contact and has expressed interest in the job"? That contact will nearly always lead to a technical phone interview if you want it to happen. A lot of people will fall out here simply because HR seldom has a real idea of what the job really entails; just that the resume and job req have matching keywords. And if it's not a fit, even the interviewee will stop the process here if they have any integrity. This is where the wheat has been separated from the chaff and the first place you can reasonably begin to look for discrimination.
Slashdot Mirror
Missile defences in Poland and Romania were never of use against Russia nukes in the first place. As another poster mentioned, the geometry makes interceptors in those locations useful against Iranian missiles if their nuclear program comes to fruition. But Russian missiles would be launched northward over the pole, not westward over the Atlantic. So to anyone who knows geometry and ballistics... and Russia has their share of people who do... it's perfectly clear that Russian objections to those interceptors are not at all about their security or the new weapons they had in the pipeline, but were nothing more than a grandstanding pissing match.
Sure. But effectively destroying a country as an entity is one thing. "Wiping out an area the size of" a country is something else entirely. And the text specifies the latter. And I'm not even convinced that destroying a countries 15 largest cities would totally destroy it as a country. See, for example, the still very much in existence countries that had many of their cities wiped out in WW2.
Importantly though, France and the UK have nukes of their own. And if you target the cities with your 15 nukes, you leave the weapons untouched. And if you target the weapons and facilities; not only are the cities untouched, but there's still the nuclear missile submarines that you can't target because you don't know where the hell they are.
No, it wouldn't. Nuclear weapons may be the most destructive thing we know how to build. But they're not black magic. And witless alarmism does no one any good. A 400MT nuke airbursted over Paris at the optimum height would pretty well wipe out it, its suburbs, and quite a lot of the surrounding countryside. But the majority of France would survive. and the UK would be untouched:
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nuke...
Well, it's a good thing that monitors have progressed pretty far past 72 dpi/ppi, isn't it?
Maybe it'd solve privacy in reality. But it wouldn't solve privacy in the minds of the narcissists who think the camera is there to record them. And if their minds were grounded in reality instead of their self-importance, they'd already realize that the vast and overwhelming majority of people don't care about them and aren't trying to spy on them in the first place.
> And there is your problem. Operating it out of line-of-
> sight. Perhaps the Swedish ruling is based on the
> nature of constitutes acceptable use, and out of line-> of-sight does not meet their criteria.
And that would be a fine and sensible restriction. I have my own doubts about bandwidth and autopilot issues on consumer-level kit operated by uncertified amateurs that make that sound like a reasonable safety precaution. And if I were to drop... What do they start at? $800?... on essentially a toy, I don't think I'd want to let it out of sight while flying it anyway.
But if the issue really is out of line-of-sight operation, then that's the restriction that should be put in place, not the one on cameras. And don't cater to the "ZOMG, everybody wants to record me, ME, ME" mob.
Your argument still presumes, though, that the only reason for the camera to be on the drone is to film the people in the FOV of the camera. And really, it doesn't matter if the operator is present or not. The principle is the same. The cameras are required for very legitimate and perfectly innocent reasons that have nothing to do with spying on anyone. A drone needs a camera to manually navigate the thing whilst out of line-of-sight. And (the eventual successors of) Google Glass requires a camera for augmented reality overlays within the user's FOV to function.
It's no worse than all the self-important narcissists who rail against things like quadcopter drones and Google Glass because the only reason they can conceive for a camera to be attached to technology used in public is that the user wants to secretly record them.
Here in California, a couple gun shops tried to stock and offer a smart gun. This one didn't use a fingerprint scanner, it came with a watch with an RFID chip, and validated that connection to fire. And it wasn't even the sort of gun anyone would use in a "life or death" situation. It was a little .22LR pistol, the likes of which would probably only be bought as a gimmick by collectors. (It even *looks* like something Q-branch would issue to 007.) It was the Armatix iP1:
http://www.armatix.com/iP1-Pis...
It never got the chance to succeed or fail in the market. The NRA types flipped their shit, demanded that the store stop selling it, called for boycotts, and even fired off death threats against the store's owner. So even if you wanted one, you can't buy one because the pro-gun people don't want you to be allowed to own one. The hypocrisy there is so thick you could cut it with a cake knife.
How about this: Take a page from your own book. I hear the "if you don't like guns then don't buy one" like a lot when topics revolving around gun control come up. So if you don't want a smart gun, then don't buy one; and lay off the manufacturers and stores that try to introduce them. If enough other people want smart guns, STFU and let them succeed in the market. If enough other people don't, let them fail on their own accord.
Amazon lets third party sellers use their platform. The fakes are usually stocked and sold by these, and not Amazon themselves. And they don't make it especially obvious that you're not actually buying from Amazon either. I wish to hell they'd either knock off the crap, or at lease give me the option to see only items sold by Amazon themselves. You can separate out most of the shysters by filtering only for items available with Amazon Prime. But some of the crooks still get through. You can see these with the "Sold by $x, fulfilled by Amazon" text.
Oh, so much FUD...
Eh? If your company is spending money on Beats by Dre headphones for any reason other than you've been hired by Apple to produce marketing collateral, you're a bunch of fools. They're crap. Apple didn't but Beats for their hardware. They bought Beats for Jimmy Iovine and his music industry experience and relationships.
The "Magic" lineup is actually quite good kit, so far as I've experienced. I don't like the keyboard, but that's personal preference because I like the full-sized keyboards and those extra USB ports are handy. The trackpad is fantastic though. I switched from a mouse after consulting with my doctor; and pretty much every hint of carpal was gone in less than six months. (Suffice it to say, I don't use the Magic Mouse though. So it could very well be utter crap for all I know.) And pinching pennies over peripherals is just stupid as hell. The cost of buying your people gear that is ergonomically correct for their needs... even if you go full out with the top-of-the-line Kinesis lineup... is TRIVIAL compared to reduced productivity, increased health insurance costs, and the potential for workman's comp claims, if RSI becomes a problem.
And there's no voodoo to restoring a Mac. You can maintain an official image and clone it to the hard drive just like any windows or Linux box. Or if you want a "out of the retail box" state, you just boot into recovery, start the install, and go do something else while it does its thing.
Well, "PC" does by default imply Windows, or at least a Microsoft operating system running on x86 hardware. I know it's a bit pedantic, but I still grate my teeth a bit when people lump Macs, PCs, Linux boxes, and the like, all under "PC"; the correct term being microcomputer. An IBM-er making the mistake is especially egregious; considering it was IBM that marketed the terminology "Personal Computer", "PC", "PC Jr.", and the like... specifically running Microsoft on Intel... as their entries into the microcomputer segment.
In most places I've worked, if you were allowed to use Linux as your desktop OS at all; you were on your own and completely unsupported by IT, whether you needed it or nor.
> Yeah, imagine a huge swath of land with no purpose
> other than being covered with solar cells that have to
> be kept clean and maintained. A chunk of land
> nobody can be allowed to enter, no trees or animals
> can be allowed to inhabit.. just imagine it all.
Not do be anti-nuclear or a solar fanboy... I'm actually a fan of both. But we do have quite a lot of uninhabited desert that would do perfectly fine for solar farms. Plus there are rooftops, which are otherwise essentially unused.
> Those teeth are too sharp.
If not jail time, what punishment would you suggest for people who file fraudulent DMCA claims then? If you take the automatic mass takedowns out of the equation, and make the individual content owner or lawyer responsible for reviewing and filing the claim; you take any chance of an honest accident out of the equation. So false claims in this case would be, at the very least, willful negligence in the case of a more mercenary lawyer who just went: "Ready, Fire, Aim" at the orders of his client without verifying the claim; or in the case of the content owner himself, or a lawyer who does do due diligence and yet files a false claim anyway, acts of deliberate and malicious fraud and/or perjury. So why hold back on punishing those people.
Seriously, this... very much this. I don't think I'd even go so far as 28 years though, or require anyone to go through the hassle of filing for the extension. I'd just go with a flat 20 years. For the life of me, I can't think of a single good reason that a copyright should last any longer than a patent.
Even in the case of very highly-paid CEOs though, the annual salary of that employee still won't sting a big corporation like Samsung very much. Now, make it 1% of their annual revenue, and then we're talking.
Personally though, I think the DMCA could be fairly easily reworked to put some parity between the parties into the system:
1) Forbid any automated, multiple, and/or electronic takedowns. Each takedown should be for a single alleged infraction, and delivered by registered mail, FedEx, or some other similarly-reliable delivery service that provides evidence of delivery.
2) Those claims of infringement need to be made by a single, identifiable, individual. It doesn't matter if that's the actual owner or their lawyer; so long as the claim can be traced back to that person claiming, under penalty of perjury, that the content is owned and infringing.
3) Give the "under penalty of perjury" part some teeth. If the content is not actually owned by the claimant, covered by fair use, or in any other way determined to be non-infringing; the individual from step 2 above goes to jail for perjury. I think a nice schedule would be:
1st false claim: 30 days in county.
2nd false claim: 90 days in county.
3rd false claim: 1 year in state, plus felony conviction on their criminal record and disbarment if the claimant is a lawyer.
Three simple steps. And I'd bet that we'd eliminate nearly all false and frivolous DMCA claims; but, more importantly, equalize the risk and power differential between the plaintiff and defendant.
Using "globalist" as an insult is pretty well indicative of xenophobia.
The problem here is that words mean things. And when the carriers throw out words like "unlimited", when what they're selling is not in fact unlimited; they are being duplicitous. And they absolutely deserve to be slapped down for that. And whether a technical person should know that they are lying does not change the fact that they are lying. Remember, not everyone is a technical person. If they'd just spell out EXACTLY what they are selling at EXACTLY the price they're charging upfront, with no "gotchas" buried in the fine print, there'd be no issue.
Honestly? They're dumb data pipes, like any other. There's no good reason they should be treated like anything else. And I wish they'd stop trying to imagine themselves otherwise and just sell me bandwidth like any other provider: Give me guaranteed and burstable Mbps rates; and sod off as to whether I use it for voice, data, video, music, tethering, VPN, running a web or email server, or just downloading Linux ISOs to /dev/null 24/7 because I can.
Boycotts, divestment, and disassociation are not at all undemocratic. And they are perfectly legitimate expressions of disagreement.
Look... you or anyone else absolutely have the right to be an asshole. Your own freedom of speech gives you that right. Your freedom of association gives you the right to support assholes. But you're not entitled to anything at all beyond that. *I* have the absolute right not to give you my money. My own freedom of association absolutely gives me the right not to support assholes. My own freedom of speech gives me the right to say so. You (or Donald Trump or Peter Thiel or Y-Combinator) are not at all entitled to anything from ME. And it's not undemocratic for me to associate with better people or to give my money to better businesses.
Oh please... Does the Battle of Agincourt ring a bell? Clever people have been figuring ways to strike at the enemy from longer range pretty much since the beginning of warfare. And the losers have whined about the "unfairness" and questioned the "bravery of being out of range"... right up until the point that they invented new weapons and were themselves the ones fighting from out of range.
It's nothing new, and it's not going to stop.
In fairness to Assange, if I were cooped indoors in one building for years, with torture and murder at the hands of the CIA awaiting me should I ever leave, I'd probably be going a bit batty and attention-seeking myself. So while, yeah, he's behaving like a tool, I can sympathize.
I think a big problem is that all of the independent tour and concert promoters are gone, and replaced by the monopolistic conglomerates like Live Nation, Insomniac, and the like. Little to no competition means ticket prices in the stratosphere. And when I was going to see, for example, Nine Inch Nails at the peak of their popularity for $20 at The Edge, with the likes of Gravity Kills or Thrill Kill Cult as openers; the notion of paying $200 to see them at Outside Lands as a nostalgia act with a roster of dull and genre-inappropriate openers just rubs me all kinds of the wrong way.
I outgrew the mosh pit many years ago myself. But to categorize it as violence worthy of counseling is hyperbole to the point of absurdity. It's very... enthusiastic... and definitely full-contact. But it's not about violence any more than rugby or hockey is. There's actually a lot more order and custom to it than is apparent to the unfamiliar observer. And people who actually go in to fight are put in check and shown the door fairly quickly.
How do you define "applicant" though? It's not as though most jobs these days actually make you fill out an application form, after all.
Is it: "someone who's submitted their resume on the web site"? In my experience, 90% or more of these will never even be seen by a human. They'll get filtered either for not having the right keyword match, or for poor spelling or grammar. Of the remainder, most will get little more than a cursory glance. Trends for what constitutes a good resume change over time. Five years or so ago I was seeing a lot that ran 5 or more pages long. I hated that; and usually interpreted those as a "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, bury them in bullshit." move. Thankfully, we seem to be back to no more than two pages. But even ostensibly silly things like font choice make a difference. I'm not particular on that myself, so long as it's not jackassery like Comic Sans. But Helvetica is the hot trend that hip HR people want to see nowadays. Times New Roman, or any font with serifs for that matter, is a considered passé and may get you overlooked. Oh, and referrals from employees or recruiting partners will nearly always goto the top of the pile.
Or is an applicant "someone with whom HR has made first contact and has expressed interest in the job"? That contact will nearly always lead to a technical phone interview if you want it to happen. A lot of people will fall out here simply because HR seldom has a real idea of what the job really entails; just that the resume and job req have matching keywords. And if it's not a fit, even the interviewee will stop the process here if they have any integrity. This is where the wheat has been separated from the chaff and the first place you can reasonably begin to look for discrimination.