No, they know it's an account that accepts email. They don't even know that it delivers mail to a mail spool somewhere, let alone that a human reads it until someone replies...
Maybe he'd like a challenge? Maybe he's tired of everyone comparing him to Jobs and knows that being compared to Ballmer couldn't possibly be worse. Or maybe there's a reason why there are 100:1 odds against him...
Lady was quoted by Il Giornale newspaper in 2009 as saying: "I'm not guilty. I'm only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors."
When that's your best defence, you know you've been doing something wrong...
Depends on what he's done in the past. I can think of a few things I've done that would be mildly embarrassing if they were published, but nothing that would really work as blackmail. For one thing, because enough people saw the various embarrassing things I did that there wouldn't really be any sense of revelation. Most people are in a similar situation.
It is not "retarded" to limit the government's power
No, it's retarded to believe that the constitution magically does limit the government's power.
or ask that it obey the very document that grants it any power to begin with
The constitution doesn't grant the government any power. Governments exist solely at sufferance of the governed. If the people wish to limit the power of the government (and are willing to accept the costs of doing so) then they can. If they wish to grant the government total authority, then they can. The constitution simply enumerates the compromise that a group of people a couple of hundred years ago were willing to agree to on what that limit should be. There is very little evidence that the population of the USA over the subsequent two centuries has been willing to enforce those limits.
The alternative is the government doing whatever it pleases, and while the current situation is bad, it isn't that bad.
The belief that the alternatives are belief in the mythical power of a piece of paper and a government doing whatever it wishes (or even the idea that these are mutually exclusive) is exactly what the grandparent was referring to.
Good requirement. When I'm paying a premium rate billed per minute, I really want to have to spend 20-30 seconds listening to a recorded message telling me how much I'm paying...
In the UK, the 0845, 0870 and 0871 prefixes all have fixed costs. The exact cost of calling them depends on your phone company - it does me absolutely no good to be told how much it would cost me to call the number from a BT landline, because I have never had a BT landline.
It's a bit of an odd requirement, because all 0871 numbers are premium-rate lines that cost 10p/minute. Simply advertising the prefix is enough. It's even more silly, because the rate that you're supposed to advertise is the rate of calling from a BT landline, the cost of calling from a mobile or a non-BT landline may be very different.
Good point. If you have cheap energy then mining the moon for other raw materials is possible and so is putting much manufacturing either on the moon or in Earth orbit. Unlike travel in the opposite direction, you don't need large amounts of energy to get things from orbit back to Earth (you do need a lot of cooling / heat shielding). I wonder what the impact on the environment would be if we moved all manufacturing off Earth...
They most likely won't go after the USA, but after corporations that cooperated with the NSA. Given that these are lots of big companies and very few of them are paying much (if any) tax in Europe, there's likely to be little public opposition to very large fines on such entities and hopefully it will mean that companies like Google can then go to members of the US government and say 'this NSA activity is costing the US economy billions of dollars a year and we'll be reminding your constituents of this and the fact that you supported it at the next election'.
It highlights the idiocy in having special laws for religious beliefs. If something should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. If something should be legal, it should be legal for everyone. You shouldn't get special privileges for holding certain beliefs. If it's fine for some people to wear hats or other head coverings in official photographs then it should be legal for everyone.
I got a Voodoo2 when they were new and very expensive (after much pleading and agreeing for it to be counted as a combined Christmas and birthday present). It lasted 3-4 years, until I replaced it with a low-end GeForce 2MX (which was much cheaper). At the time, I was playing a lot of FPS games and so on. Many of my friends had cheaper cards than the Voodoo2. You could always get better graphics by spending more, but most games were quite playable with cheaper cards. Games like Quake 1 and 2 and Half Life even had software renderers that worked fine, albeit at a lower resolution.
There were communist spies in the state department. And there was almost zero intersection between the communist spies and the lives destroyed by McCarthism. So your point is...?
If you're only able to move at 5MPH on average it's not likely you will die in an accident.
I'm not sure why you'd think this is the case in the UK - perhaps you've only tried driving around central London. A few factors affect the relatively low rate of road fatalities in the UK:
The first is the relative difficulty of getting a driving license. You must pass a theory test, which is multiple choice. It's not that difficult, but you can't pass it without having at least read the highway code, even if you can't remember quite all of it. Then you must pass a hazard awareness test, which shows you videos recorded from cars and checks that you are aware of things that may potentially be dangerous and so need your attention. Finally, you need to pass a practical test, which takes 30-60 minutes and involves driving on various kinds of road, where one major fault will result in failure. It's not unusual for people to require 2-3 attempts to pass, with lessons in between
Perhaps more important, however, is that safety statistics are the primary input into the road signal design system. Speed limits are set and traffic lights are installed in response to accident statistics, not (usually) to raise revenue. Police speed traps are also placed according to these rules. The USA has no equivalent system.
I'm not on LinkedIn, and my spam filter has now learned that everything from them is spam. Looking though my spam folder, I seem to get 2-3 invitations from people whose names I don't even recognise (and some sent to aliases, for example the FreeBSD Core Team, rather than to me personally). I can't imagine anyone getting sensible results from any exploration of the LinkedIn graph.
Is everything in your world a false dichotomy? Yes, you stop the owners from harming the slaves. You also deprive the owners of their property. We, as a society, have decided that the harm of slave owning is so great that it warrants restrictions on property rights. We unfortunately reached that conclusion more for economic than moral reasons a couple of hundred years ago but now, thankfully, the moral argument is more widely accepted.
Property is an abstract notion determined by society. I believe, as a moral judgement, that allowing humans to be property is an abhorrent notion. This does not alter the fact that many societies across history (and some today) do allow it. When you free the slaves, you harm their owners. This is a form of harm that I am totally fine with, and indeed would encourage. But saying that your moral judgements are absolute statements of fact is not only wrong, it is insulting to the people who struggled and, in many cases, died to make the societies that we live in today accept those beliefs as self-evident.
Wow. You're really trying stake this out as a moral stand? Seriously?
No, he's stating a fact, which is independent of moral interpretation. This is why people who are not libertarians realise that it's a question of balance. Most people today would realise that the harm of being a slave is greater than the harm of depriving a slave owner of his or her property.
To put that in perspective, the InterCity 125 was a rail service introduced in 1976 in the UK with a top speed of 125mph. Sadly, we've neglected our rail infrastructure as a result of one of the stupidest privatisation plans in the history of the world and so they rarely hit over 100mph now. Meanwhile, the French TGV has, on some lines, an average speed of 173.6 mph, with top speeds of over 200mph. It recently lost the record for the fastest journey speed for a scheduled train to the Chinese.
Doing that journey in 3 hours wouldn't even be stretching modern technology. You do, however, hit diminishing returns quite quickly. At 125mph, it's about 3 hours. To get to 2 hours, you need to go up to 191mph. To get down to 1 hour, you're up at 382mph and the Hyperloop speed makes it just over half an hour. While there's an obvious advantage to half an hour over 3 hours, there's not much difference in convenience between a 2-hour and a 3-hour journey. Even getting a 3-hour trip down to 1.5 hours isn't something that many people would be willing to pay a significant premium for, especially when you have half an hour of much slower travelling to get you to the station at each end.
If California wants to spend a lot of money on their train system, they should consider improvements to the Caltrain. It's under 80 miles of track, but getting between San Jose to San Francisco on a Sunday is painful. Upgrading 80 miles of track to support even 150mph trains and replacing the archaic rolling stock would mean that most of the valley on the Caltrain would take less time than one side of San Francisco to the other on the BART (which could also benefit from some modernisation). And if you've ever driven from one side of SF to the other, then you'll see the attraction of public transport...
Has the speed of rail journeys increased at the same rate? And how much does the EuroStar contribute to that? Most of the time, I'd rather spend two hours travelling in comfort than one hour in cramped conditions - there are a few times when I'd really appreciate more speed, but most of the time I'd like to be on a mode of transport where I'm comfortable enough to work or relax. When I started here, I took a few first-class train trips back on the London to Swansea route, at off-peak times, so I got a 4-seat table to myself and could spread a laptop and some papers out and found it very productive time (no distractions). A half-hour train instead of the three-hour train just wouldn't be much more of an incentive.
Yup, I agree. I started writing a blog post about the DevMeeting, but didn't get around to posting it - I should soon. For reference, Ohloh has some pretty activity graphs.
Yes, we had a DevMeeting in Cambridge last month. Lots of progress on LanguageKit, CoreObject and EtoileUI, not much progress on a web site that doesn't suck...
Slashdot Mirror
No, they know it's an account that accepts email. They don't even know that it delivers mail to a mail spool somewhere, let alone that a human reads it until someone replies...
Maybe he'd like a challenge? Maybe he's tired of everyone comparing him to Jobs and knows that being compared to Ballmer couldn't possibly be worse. Or maybe there's a reason why there are 100:1 odds against him...
Lady was quoted by Il Giornale newspaper in 2009 as saying: "I'm not guilty. I'm only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors."
When that's your best defence, you know you've been doing something wrong...
Depends on what he's done in the past. I can think of a few things I've done that would be mildly embarrassing if they were published, but nothing that would really work as blackmail. For one thing, because enough people saw the various embarrassing things I did that there wouldn't really be any sense of revelation. Most people are in a similar situation.
It is not "retarded" to limit the government's power
No, it's retarded to believe that the constitution magically does limit the government's power.
or ask that it obey the very document that grants it any power to begin with
The constitution doesn't grant the government any power. Governments exist solely at sufferance of the governed. If the people wish to limit the power of the government (and are willing to accept the costs of doing so) then they can. If they wish to grant the government total authority, then they can. The constitution simply enumerates the compromise that a group of people a couple of hundred years ago were willing to agree to on what that limit should be. There is very little evidence that the population of the USA over the subsequent two centuries has been willing to enforce those limits.
The alternative is the government doing whatever it pleases, and while the current situation is bad, it isn't that bad.
The belief that the alternatives are belief in the mythical power of a piece of paper and a government doing whatever it wishes (or even the idea that these are mutually exclusive) is exactly what the grandparent was referring to.
Good requirement. When I'm paying a premium rate billed per minute, I really want to have to spend 20-30 seconds listening to a recorded message telling me how much I'm paying...
In the UK, the 0845, 0870 and 0871 prefixes all have fixed costs. The exact cost of calling them depends on your phone company - it does me absolutely no good to be told how much it would cost me to call the number from a BT landline, because I have never had a BT landline.
It's a bit of an odd requirement, because all 0871 numbers are premium-rate lines that cost 10p/minute. Simply advertising the prefix is enough. It's even more silly, because the rate that you're supposed to advertise is the rate of calling from a BT landline, the cost of calling from a mobile or a non-BT landline may be very different.
Good point. If you have cheap energy then mining the moon for other raw materials is possible and so is putting much manufacturing either on the moon or in Earth orbit. Unlike travel in the opposite direction, you don't need large amounts of energy to get things from orbit back to Earth (you do need a lot of cooling / heat shielding). I wonder what the impact on the environment would be if we moved all manufacturing off Earth...
They most likely won't go after the USA, but after corporations that cooperated with the NSA. Given that these are lots of big companies and very few of them are paying much (if any) tax in Europe, there's likely to be little public opposition to very large fines on such entities and hopefully it will mean that companies like Google can then go to members of the US government and say 'this NSA activity is costing the US economy billions of dollars a year and we'll be reminding your constituents of this and the fact that you supported it at the next election'.
It highlights the idiocy in having special laws for religious beliefs. If something should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. If something should be legal, it should be legal for everyone. You shouldn't get special privileges for holding certain beliefs. If it's fine for some people to wear hats or other head coverings in official photographs then it should be legal for everyone.
I got a Voodoo2 when they were new and very expensive (after much pleading and agreeing for it to be counted as a combined Christmas and birthday present). It lasted 3-4 years, until I replaced it with a low-end GeForce 2MX (which was much cheaper). At the time, I was playing a lot of FPS games and so on. Many of my friends had cheaper cards than the Voodoo2. You could always get better graphics by spending more, but most games were quite playable with cheaper cards. Games like Quake 1 and 2 and Half Life even had software renderers that worked fine, albeit at a lower resolution.
Perl.
They should hire Andy Rubin. That would shut a lot of people up, and lead to some awesome products
If you'd said that while he was still at Google, I'd have agreed...
There were communist spies in the state department. And there was almost zero intersection between the communist spies and the lives destroyed by McCarthism. So your point is...?
If you're only able to move at 5MPH on average it's not likely you will die in an accident.
I'm not sure why you'd think this is the case in the UK - perhaps you've only tried driving around central London. A few factors affect the relatively low rate of road fatalities in the UK:
The first is the relative difficulty of getting a driving license. You must pass a theory test, which is multiple choice. It's not that difficult, but you can't pass it without having at least read the highway code, even if you can't remember quite all of it. Then you must pass a hazard awareness test, which shows you videos recorded from cars and checks that you are aware of things that may potentially be dangerous and so need your attention. Finally, you need to pass a practical test, which takes 30-60 minutes and involves driving on various kinds of road, where one major fault will result in failure. It's not unusual for people to require 2-3 attempts to pass, with lessons in between
Perhaps more important, however, is that safety statistics are the primary input into the road signal design system. Speed limits are set and traffic lights are installed in response to accident statistics, not (usually) to raise revenue. Police speed traps are also placed according to these rules. The USA has no equivalent system.
You haven't actually read anything I've read in this entire thread, have you?
I'm not on LinkedIn, and my spam filter has now learned that everything from them is spam. Looking though my spam folder, I seem to get 2-3 invitations from people whose names I don't even recognise (and some sent to aliases, for example the FreeBSD Core Team, rather than to me personally). I can't imagine anyone getting sensible results from any exploration of the LinkedIn graph.
Is everything in your world a false dichotomy? Yes, you stop the owners from harming the slaves. You also deprive the owners of their property. We, as a society, have decided that the harm of slave owning is so great that it warrants restrictions on property rights. We unfortunately reached that conclusion more for economic than moral reasons a couple of hundred years ago but now, thankfully, the moral argument is more widely accepted.
Property is an abstract notion determined by society. I believe, as a moral judgement, that allowing humans to be property is an abhorrent notion. This does not alter the fact that many societies across history (and some today) do allow it. When you free the slaves, you harm their owners. This is a form of harm that I am totally fine with, and indeed would encourage. But saying that your moral judgements are absolute statements of fact is not only wrong, it is insulting to the people who struggled and, in many cases, died to make the societies that we live in today accept those beliefs as self-evident.
When was the Bitcoin protocol changed so that the difficulty was not a function that monotonically increased in difficulty?
Yes, a slave running away DOES hurt the master.
Wow. You're really trying stake this out as a moral stand? Seriously?
No, he's stating a fact, which is independent of moral interpretation. This is why people who are not libertarians realise that it's a question of balance. Most people today would realise that the harm of being a slave is greater than the harm of depriving a slave owner of his or her property.
Doing that journey in 3 hours wouldn't even be stretching modern technology. You do, however, hit diminishing returns quite quickly. At 125mph, it's about 3 hours. To get to 2 hours, you need to go up to 191mph. To get down to 1 hour, you're up at 382mph and the Hyperloop speed makes it just over half an hour. While there's an obvious advantage to half an hour over 3 hours, there's not much difference in convenience between a 2-hour and a 3-hour journey. Even getting a 3-hour trip down to 1.5 hours isn't something that many people would be willing to pay a significant premium for, especially when you have half an hour of much slower travelling to get you to the station at each end.
If California wants to spend a lot of money on their train system, they should consider improvements to the Caltrain. It's under 80 miles of track, but getting between San Jose to San Francisco on a Sunday is painful. Upgrading 80 miles of track to support even 150mph trains and replacing the archaic rolling stock would mean that most of the valley on the Caltrain would take less time than one side of San Francisco to the other on the BART (which could also benefit from some modernisation). And if you've ever driven from one side of SF to the other, then you'll see the attraction of public transport...
Has the speed of rail journeys increased at the same rate? And how much does the EuroStar contribute to that? Most of the time, I'd rather spend two hours travelling in comfort than one hour in cramped conditions - there are a few times when I'd really appreciate more speed, but most of the time I'd like to be on a mode of transport where I'm comfortable enough to work or relax. When I started here, I took a few first-class train trips back on the London to Swansea route, at off-peak times, so I got a 4-seat table to myself and could spread a laptop and some papers out and found it very productive time (no distractions). A half-hour train instead of the three-hour train just wouldn't be much more of an incentive.
Yup, I agree. I started writing a blog post about the DevMeeting, but didn't get around to posting it - I should soon. For reference, Ohloh has some pretty activity graphs.
Yes, we had a DevMeeting in Cambridge last month. Lots of progress on LanguageKit, CoreObject and EtoileUI, not much progress on a web site that doesn't suck...