You might want to read up on a guy called Cecil Rhodes for a more realistic picture of the Victorian version of a "military industrial complex" that created an empire where "the sun never set". The english used the railway to open up and conquer both India and Africa, much of the infrastructure they built is still in use today. Their "agenda" was simply - build more railways and exterminate anyone who objects, the US did the same thing within its own borders.
Big bird here, VW has tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of small investors who had fuck all to do with this. Sure, vigorously pursue and punish the people who were knowingly involved, but for fuck's sake leave the rest of them alone to get on with their lives.
I've lived in Oz for over 50yrs, I had to google the question out of sheer curiosity, turns out you and the GP are both correct, the law only affects cards issued in Australia, I assume yours were issued in the US?
BTW: Hope you enjoyed your visit, Melbourne to Brisbane via the coast is still one of the world's great road trips, I've lost count of the number of times I've done it, first time was 1966 in the back seat of Dad's bright red VW beetle, it's changed quite a bit since then, hell of a lot more people and cars now. For any tourist, Oz is a hell of a long plane trip away, I don't understand (english speaking) tourists who come all the way to Oz and then don't leave the city they landed in??
I don't think the old cards have been used here in Oz for a while now, haven't seen one in years, my own cards have been chip and pin for over a decade. Doesn't matter if you swipe or insert the card, you still require a pin. "Pay wave" is the latest thing, you just wave the card over the reader like an office entry card no pin or signature required, works for purchases up to $100. If you have had a few drinks, don't let the bar staff wave it for you!!!! There is no phone call required to activate the card, it comes in the mail, pin comes separately in the mail on a different day, the card is automatically activated when the old one expires.
If the lights go out businesses can still use the old paper imprint method - at their own risk!
Do you seriously believe someone should do the murdering and burying for you?
Yep, I've seen a lot of mafia movies, and I have "dug ditches" for a living as a young bloke. Digging your own grave looks like hard yakka to me, so fuck it, just shoot me, I'm not going to work for you at gunpoint.
jcr, you're a regular poster as am I, you're a level headed guy, but as an ex taxi driver I have to say you have your head up your arse on this one.
IMO Uber are the worst kind of rent seeker, the kind that prey on people who are desperate enough to sign up as a driver. Uber's over-inflated "market value" has to collapse because at some point the "market" will become bored with the legal battles over 'freedom' and want a real ROI. I don't have any pity for the investors, just the honest drivers who go in with a reliable car and no money, and come out a year or two later with an unroadworthy clunker, and still no money.
If you think I'm exaggerating, the oldest taxi I ever drove was 5yrs off the showroom floor, it had 1.1 million kilometers on the clock, only the body work was original, even the seat sliders had been replaced at least once. Unless the Uber driver is also a mechanic, it would be cheaper for them to buy a 'runout-model' used car once a year. Most taxi's are a one man / one car operations, they lease/rent it to another regular driver or two to keep it on the road 24X7, and buying a 'new' car once every year or so is how they handle the entropy problem. They don't earn a lot of money, the 'plates' (medallion in the US) is the taxi owner's superannuation. The "hidden costs" are the reason Uber refuses to play by the rules, driving a cab doesn't pay enough to satisfy them so they insert themselves in the middle, they even "generously" offer to pay the drivers fines while at the same time offloading all the real costs onto the poor sap.
Also they are not a 'taxi' company as they would like you to think, in most places they are a traditional 'limo' company using sub-contractors, fuck me they were around when I was driving in the 80's, nobody had heard of the internet but we did have phones. Limos can't be flagged down, nor can they use taxi rank infrastructure. Using sub-contractors and ordering it on a computer is hardly revolutionary, so it's not the regulations that are broken, it's Uber's business model. For good reasons it was illegal before the internet was born, "on a computer" doesn't change that.
Again, I'm genuinely surprised you have swallowed Uber's 'hipster' marketing.
Of course, adding machines are not modern general purpose digital computers, but AFAICT that's just a straw-man to support your ad-hom attack. Look around and re-read the comments, nobody in this thread is actually making that claim.
A punch card loom and a modern computer are both programmable state machines, but the OP said nothing about "modern", he could have been talking about the IBM abacus and still have been correct. A "computer" is something that computes, pre-WW2 that literally meant a human with an adding machine, a pencil, and lots of paper. A modern computer is nothing more more than a simple finite state machine, with a very large number of possible states, it is not an example of Turing's UCM in the strict sense of the term because no physical machine can ever have an "infinite tape".
And now we need to accept the reality of our panopticon society and build a better way of living in it.
Civilization, in all it's forms, is surely our greatest creation, but I sometimes wonder if we are creating it, or visa-versa. It is evolving like a living system but much more rapidly, currently it nervous and sensory system are emerging, highly specialised "brain centers" in the form of IBM's watson and other AI systems have recently appeared. Maybe it will kill us all off, or maybe we will develop a planet wide "termite nest" that encapsulates our prefered environment in an artificial structure. One thing is for sure we are never going to get to a point where everyone is comfortable with the status-quo.
That's where the sentence should have ended. Any uprising, for any reason, will fizzle and fail without an intelligence arm, like any army it needs information more than it needs gunpowder. How would a budding freedom fighter get that information without spying?
If our grandfathers and great-grandfathers could see [us now]
Hmmmm, my grandfather (who passed away ~30yrs ago) used to switch off unused power outlets because the "electricity can leak out and catch fire", he was a young man in the 1920's when cotton insulation and electrical fires first became a thing, he had seven kids, a sixth grade education, and shoveled coal into an industrial boiler for most of his working life, he passed away in his early 80's, before the internet was born. His father was a young man living in 19th century rural England, from his POV much of our everyday world would be indistinguishable from magic.
Sure, the US is a military superpower these days, however the five eyes have been sharing intelligence since they won WW2. The code cracking techniques developed by Turing and others were a very closely held secret. It wasn't until the late 60's that the rest of the world woke up to the fact their encryption methods were transparent to the five eyes. The event that did more to bring this military and commercial spying to light than anything else was the invention of modern encryption methods. But make no mistake, this arrangement is nothing new, it was born in the UK during the darkest days of WW2 when Churchill awarded Turing his code cracking buddies an "unlimited budget".
None of those men and women could possibly foresee what it would become after the war, what they saw were immediate results such as the rapid destruction of the Nazi U-boat fleet, the successful Naval ambush at Midway island, and a thousands of smaller missions that co-opted the enemy's command and control systems to the allies advantage. The U-boat campaign is when Churchill shared his secret weapon with Eisenhower, who immediately set up a similar operation in the US that was more focused on the war with Japan. People who worked in the centers during the war were told they would face a firing squad if they discussed their work with their friends or family.
This is the real reason "terrorist" websites are not expunged as soon as they appear is that co-opting those communications systems, mapping the enemy's org chart, predicting their next move, etc, is much more productive than disrupting or destroying the comms systems and wondering who they are and what they are up to.
So to get back on topic, it's obvious a treaty won't work because only those who cheat can win, and if the cheat is the world's only superpower, who do we think is going to punish them, God? anyone who can remember 9/11 can also remember GWB spitting the dummy at the UN and announcing to the entire world the US can not be restained by anyone. It's also obvious that the currently agreed upon human rights are not fully respected by any nation, and are totally irrelevant to (say) Saudi Arabia.
Human nature is unlikely to change in my lifetime, it is still trying to evolve onto something that fits our invention of civilization. That is both fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. Ten thousand years is not enough time to declare civilization an evolutionary success story. The fact that SETI and similar efforts have not found any alien comms after listening for 4-5 decades is not a very encouraging sign. It may turn out that human civilization makes the planet uninhabitable for humans, much like the oxygen produced by primitive cyanobacteria eventually made much of the planet uninhabitable for cyanobacteria (but much more efficient in terms of time)
Fuzzy logic is just as 'real' as calculus, and what's your beef with the term "expert system", does it hurt you ego to realise Google's search engine knows more about the internet than you do?
The better solution is to give people enough space to move freely.
Of course if you can solve the space problem it no longer exists, but unless you can pull a tardis out of your arse there are many situations where "more space" is simply not an option. The religious festival in Mecca is a prime example, in particular, the part where the pilgrim is required to walk around (what looks like) a huge stone box three times and throw pebbles at the devil (the stone box). The 'box' is already in the middle of large open area, but there are only so many people who can stand within pebble throwing distance at one time.
When too many people in one place have too much freedom of movement, there is nothing to dampen that movement should everyone move in the same direction for some reason (eg: band appears on stage, some idiot drops some firecrackers, rubbish bin catches fire, etc) Correctly placed barriers can significantly REDUCE the chance of "crowd crush" and stampedes, it's a common and well-understood technique that is often used to control "mosh pits" at large concerts and similar events.
The basic principle is no different to putting baffles in a petrol tanker truck to stop it sloshing about uncontrollably and derailing the truck, a crowd has a "pressure" that is related to it's density, volume, and overall direction of motion. A larger space can build up much higher "spot" pressures than a small space with the same density and motion. As I understand the problem in TFA, the sheer number of people makes it impossible/expensive to simulate the effect of crowd control measures in real time. However the basic principles of "crowd baffles" are well understood and have significantly reduced the likelihood of tragedy over the last few decades that they have been in use. If you find that hard to believe, try obtaining public liability insurance for a large event without having a credible crowd control plan.
In Australia the people who fill prescriptions are called "Chemists", they're degree qualified and need a license from the state to operate as a pharmacy. They usually know more about the drugs than the doctor does.
History of science is a great way to study science, it tells you how science knows what it knows and it opens your eyes to just how far it has taken us in the last 400 odd years.
The kid is in a position of strength to negotiate an ongoing education, unfortunately intelligence is not a reliable indicator of wisdom, especially at that age.
When the Normans took control of England in 1066, one of the first things they did was create the 'doomsday book' (basically a record of who owned what for taxation purposes).
I have negotiated large raises every year for the past decade, I have been unable to negotiate even a single day off in the nearly five years at my current company
That "agreement" would be illegal most industrialised nations. Annual leave comes under the preview of "health and safety", employers/employees cannot simply 'negotiate' federally mandated working conditions out of existence without breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to read up on a guy called Cecil Rhodes for a more realistic picture of the Victorian version of a "military industrial complex" that created an empire where "the sun never set". The english used the railway to open up and conquer both India and Africa, much of the infrastructure they built is still in use today. Their "agenda" was simply - build more railways and exterminate anyone who objects, the US did the same thing within its own borders.
Big bird here, VW has tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of small investors who had fuck all to do with this. Sure, vigorously pursue and punish the people who were knowingly involved, but for fuck's sake leave the rest of them alone to get on with their lives.
/s "doing" "beating"
first-hand experience
I don't know anything about that, but I know what you're doing with your other hand. ;)
I've lived in Oz for over 50yrs, I had to google the question out of sheer curiosity, turns out you and the GP are both correct, the law only affects cards issued in Australia, I assume yours were issued in the US?
BTW: Hope you enjoyed your visit, Melbourne to Brisbane via the coast is still one of the world's great road trips, I've lost count of the number of times I've done it, first time was 1966 in the back seat of Dad's bright red VW beetle, it's changed quite a bit since then, hell of a lot more people and cars now. For any tourist, Oz is a hell of a long plane trip away, I don't understand (english speaking) tourists who come all the way to Oz and then don't leave the city they landed in??
I don't think the old cards have been used here in Oz for a while now, haven't seen one in years, my own cards have been chip and pin for over a decade. Doesn't matter if you swipe or insert the card, you still require a pin. "Pay wave" is the latest thing, you just wave the card over the reader like an office entry card no pin or signature required, works for purchases up to $100. If you have had a few drinks, don't let the bar staff wave it for you!!!! There is no phone call required to activate the card, it comes in the mail, pin comes separately in the mail on a different day, the card is automatically activated when the old one expires.
If the lights go out businesses can still use the old paper imprint method - at their own risk!
Do you seriously believe someone should do the murdering and burying for you?
Yep, I've seen a lot of mafia movies, and I have "dug ditches" for a living as a young bloke. Digging your own grave looks like hard yakka to me, so fuck it, just shoot me, I'm not going to work for you at gunpoint.
jcr, you're a regular poster as am I, you're a level headed guy, but as an ex taxi driver I have to say you have your head up your arse on this one.
IMO Uber are the worst kind of rent seeker, the kind that prey on people who are desperate enough to sign up as a driver. Uber's over-inflated "market value" has to collapse because at some point the "market" will become bored with the legal battles over 'freedom' and want a real ROI. I don't have any pity for the investors, just the honest drivers who go in with a reliable car and no money, and come out a year or two later with an unroadworthy clunker, and still no money.
If you think I'm exaggerating, the oldest taxi I ever drove was 5yrs off the showroom floor, it had 1.1 million kilometers on the clock, only the body work was original, even the seat sliders had been replaced at least once. Unless the Uber driver is also a mechanic, it would be cheaper for them to buy a 'runout-model' used car once a year. Most taxi's are a one man / one car operations, they lease/rent it to another regular driver or two to keep it on the road 24X7, and buying a 'new' car once every year or so is how they handle the entropy problem. They don't earn a lot of money, the 'plates' (medallion in the US) is the taxi owner's superannuation. The "hidden costs" are the reason Uber refuses to play by the rules, driving a cab doesn't pay enough to satisfy them so they insert themselves in the middle, they even "generously" offer to pay the drivers fines while at the same time offloading all the real costs onto the poor sap.
Also they are not a 'taxi' company as they would like you to think, in most places they are a traditional 'limo' company using sub-contractors, fuck me they were around when I was driving in the 80's, nobody had heard of the internet but we did have phones. Limos can't be flagged down, nor can they use taxi rank infrastructure. Using sub-contractors and ordering it on a computer is hardly revolutionary, so it's not the regulations that are broken, it's Uber's business model. For good reasons it was illegal before the internet was born, "on a computer" doesn't change that.
Again, I'm genuinely surprised you have swallowed Uber's 'hipster' marketing.
Of course, adding machines are not modern general purpose digital computers, but AFAICT that's just a straw-man to support your ad-hom attack. Look around and re-read the comments, nobody in this thread is actually making that claim.
A punch card loom and a modern computer are both programmable state machines, but the OP said nothing about "modern", he could have been talking about the IBM abacus and still have been correct. A "computer" is something that computes, pre-WW2 that literally meant a human with an adding machine, a pencil, and lots of paper. A modern computer is nothing more more than a simple finite state machine, with a very large number of possible states, it is not an example of Turing's UCM in the strict sense of the term because no physical machine can ever have an "infinite tape".
Rifles, computers, they're both "International Business Machines"
And now we need to accept the reality of our panopticon society and build a better way of living in it.
Civilization, in all it's forms, is surely our greatest creation, but I sometimes wonder if we are creating it, or visa-versa. It is evolving like a living system but much more rapidly, currently it nervous and sensory system are emerging, highly specialised "brain centers" in the form of IBM's watson and other AI systems have recently appeared. Maybe it will kill us all off, or maybe we will develop a planet wide "termite nest" that encapsulates our prefered environment in an artificial structure. One thing is for sure we are never going to get to a point where everyone is comfortable with the status-quo.
We have already lost our right to privacy
That's where the sentence should have ended. Any uprising, for any reason, will fizzle and fail without an intelligence arm, like any army it needs information more than it needs gunpowder. How would a budding freedom fighter get that information without spying?
If our grandfathers and great-grandfathers could see [us now]
Hmmmm, my grandfather (who passed away ~30yrs ago) used to switch off unused power outlets because the "electricity can leak out and catch fire", he was a young man in the 1920's when cotton insulation and electrical fires first became a thing, he had seven kids, a sixth grade education, and shoveled coal into an industrial boiler for most of his working life, he passed away in his early 80's, before the internet was born. His father was a young man living in 19th century rural England, from his POV much of our everyday world would be indistinguishable from magic.
Sure, the US is a military superpower these days, however the five eyes have been sharing intelligence since they won WW2. The code cracking techniques developed by Turing and others were a very closely held secret. It wasn't until the late 60's that the rest of the world woke up to the fact their encryption methods were transparent to the five eyes. The event that did more to bring this military and commercial spying to light than anything else was the invention of modern encryption methods. But make no mistake, this arrangement is nothing new, it was born in the UK during the darkest days of WW2 when Churchill awarded Turing his code cracking buddies an "unlimited budget".
None of those men and women could possibly foresee what it would become after the war, what they saw were immediate results such as the rapid destruction of the Nazi U-boat fleet, the successful Naval ambush at Midway island, and a thousands of smaller missions that co-opted the enemy's command and control systems to the allies advantage. The U-boat campaign is when Churchill shared his secret weapon with Eisenhower, who immediately set up a similar operation in the US that was more focused on the war with Japan. People who worked in the centers during the war were told they would face a firing squad if they discussed their work with their friends or family.
This is the real reason "terrorist" websites are not expunged as soon as they appear is that co-opting those communications systems, mapping the enemy's org chart, predicting their next move, etc, is much more productive than disrupting or destroying the comms systems and wondering who they are and what they are up to.
So to get back on topic, it's obvious a treaty won't work because only those who cheat can win, and if the cheat is the world's only superpower, who do we think is going to punish them, God? anyone who can remember 9/11 can also remember GWB spitting the dummy at the UN and announcing to the entire world the US can not be restained by anyone. It's also obvious that the currently agreed upon human rights are not fully respected by any nation, and are totally irrelevant to (say) Saudi Arabia.
Human nature is unlikely to change in my lifetime, it is still trying to evolve onto something that fits our invention of civilization. That is both fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. Ten thousand years is not enough time to declare civilization an evolutionary success story. The fact that SETI and similar efforts have not found any alien comms after listening for 4-5 decades is not a very encouraging sign. It may turn out that human civilization makes the planet uninhabitable for humans, much like the oxygen produced by primitive cyanobacteria eventually made much of the planet uninhabitable for cyanobacteria (but much more efficient in terms of time)
Fuzzy logic is just as 'real' as calculus, and what's your beef with the term "expert system", does it hurt you ego to realise Google's search engine knows more about the internet than you do?
Religion binds tribes together. When tribes go to war, religious alliances will be called on.
The better solution is to give people enough space to move freely.
Of course if you can solve the space problem it no longer exists, but unless you can pull a tardis out of your arse there are many situations where "more space" is simply not an option. The religious festival in Mecca is a prime example, in particular, the part where the pilgrim is required to walk around (what looks like) a huge stone box three times and throw pebbles at the devil (the stone box). The 'box' is already in the middle of large open area, but there are only so many people who can stand within pebble throwing distance at one time.
When too many people in one place have too much freedom of movement, there is nothing to dampen that movement should everyone move in the same direction for some reason (eg: band appears on stage, some idiot drops some firecrackers, rubbish bin catches fire, etc) Correctly placed barriers can significantly REDUCE the chance of "crowd crush" and stampedes, it's a common and well-understood technique that is often used to control "mosh pits" at large concerts and similar events.
The basic principle is no different to putting baffles in a petrol tanker truck to stop it sloshing about uncontrollably and derailing the truck, a crowd has a "pressure" that is related to it's density, volume, and overall direction of motion. A larger space can build up much higher "spot" pressures than a small space with the same density and motion. As I understand the problem in TFA, the sheer number of people makes it impossible/expensive to simulate the effect of crowd control measures in real time. However the basic principles of "crowd baffles" are well understood and have significantly reduced the likelihood of tragedy over the last few decades that they have been in use. If you find that hard to believe, try obtaining public liability insurance for a large event without having a credible crowd control plan.
Small children naturally wake by the crack of dawn and are ready to go soon after.
It starts happening again when you're in your 50's, but the only place you are going is the toilet.
In Australia the people who fill prescriptions are called "Chemists", they're degree qualified and need a license from the state to operate as a pharmacy. They usually know more about the drugs than the doctor does.
History of science is a great way to study science, it tells you how science knows what it knows and it opens your eyes to just how far it has taken us in the last 400 odd years.
The kid is in a position of strength to negotiate an ongoing education, unfortunately intelligence is not a reliable indicator of wisdom, especially at that age.
When the Normans took control of England in 1066, one of the first things they did was create the 'doomsday book' (basically a record of who owned what for taxation purposes).
I have negotiated large raises every year for the past decade, I have been unable to negotiate even a single day off in the nearly five years at my current company
That "agreement" would be illegal most industrialised nations. Annual leave comes under the preview of "health and safety", employers/employees cannot simply 'negotiate' federally mandated working conditions out of existence without breaking the law.
You don't need less vacations, you need more staff. More staff is not your problem, so why do you martyr yourself?
Executives are adept at escaping personal responsibility, coders could do the same by performing all check-in's under a shared developer account.