Sit down. Have a coffee. Maybe a slice. Daydream. Look at girls. Phone a loved one. Read a newspaper. Lower your blood pressure. You might even live longer.
off topic, but lack of capitalization is *not* a sign of poor english skills.
Poor English skills or laziness. It's the writing equivalent of spending all day, every day in jogging gear, and eating instant noodles or McDonalds for every meal.
You might think it's an anachronism, but you're wrong. The majority of people do use sentence capitalization. And referencing the work of a poet that's been dead 50 years hardly helps your implication that this is the new way.
You say that but on the last Tesla thread there were legions (well maybe one or two) of slashdotters who claimed that they regurlarly drove 7 hours without a break so clearly this will be a deal breaker for them and everyone else.
Electric vehicles are of course inevitable, as gasoline is only going to get ore expensive as supplies become ever more limited. And if one effect is that people aren't able to drive 7 hours at a stretch, but need to do the occasional forced 30 minute break, then that's a good thing!
Just because it isn't scalable doesn't mean it doesn't solve a particular problem. The particular problem being that electric cars are most uses in California, but the two major cities are too far apart to do in a single charge with Tesla's current generation of electric car.
Solving that particular problem with a battery exchange opportunity half way will sell some amount of extra cars.
The general range problem needs solving another way, but that doesn't make this targeted service a certain failure. It isn't intended to solve the general range problem.
Thinking of it, this could also solve the "rest charge" issue as the car could use the batteries one by one, starting to use one when the previous one is depleted. Or using 2, 3 at a time to get sufficient power, same principle applies.
Electric car battery management systems already do these kinds of tricks: using cells selectively. So it doesn't solve anything that's not already solved.
Given how recently PRISM broke, I can see EVERYBODY but statists being upset about it.
American spies spy on foreigners. Including telephone taps and internet. Are you saying you didn't know that before we got to hear the codename PRISM? Heck I'm in the UK, and there's a USA spy base here. It's no secret. Back a couple of decades their program was called Echelon. And it was the instigating reason for my then company starting to use PGP.
That's not paranoia, that's fact. However it has nothing to do with government conspiracies to equip mobile phones with kill switches in order to... what? If they want to stop mobile communications in an area they can have the towers switched off. We already know they can do that.
Wow... Libertarians don't have the money for heavy propaganda.
Maybe that's why they have so many amateurs puking their FUD all over slashdot.
I'll maintain it's good to have a healthy distrust of government - it's trustworthy on average, sure, but every so often...
Rationality is the quality that these libertarian paranoiacs don't have. For sure when a government is wanting to make war, distrust every word they say. But when there is something like a private sector anti-theft device, to have your first thought that it's a government trick is insane.
Given the amount of data that they have on people these days they shouldn't be sending ads for tampons on the single factor of being female anyway. Prior to puberty and post menopause, and most transgendered people will be just as uninterested as the men. Even if they don't store gender, the usual algorithms that establish interest in other products will work just as well for targeting tampons.
And if some men get tampon adverts they'll just have to get over it. The same way that they get over ads for impotence and penis enlargement scams.
Anyone who has been alive for more than a decade has already seen the back-and-forth that science brings us regarding simple things. Red wine is good for you. Let's pass laws making it legal for anyone to drink red wine. Red wine is bad for you, let's make it illegal for anyone to drink red wine. Red wine is good for you in small amounts, let's make it legal to buy a glass at a time.... This study shows... that study shows... the other study shows something else. Which do we follow? What law do we enact? That's just one example.
Right, but it's an example of the popular press interpreting the latest paper, and quoting it either uncritically, or as a "Look at what the mad boffins are saying now" depending on the reporters/papers position or what makes a better story.
And as democracy stands, it's these second hand layman's views that the public absorbs and politicians pander to. A Technocracy would mean scientists taking a proper scientific view on the range of papers on a topic. And to misquote Rumsfeld: having a rational view on what are the knowns, the unknowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.
Then you need to reconcile the concept of human rights and freedom against stark realities of physical law. It's dangerous to skydive. We're banning skydiving. It's dangerous to fly small airplanes. Let's ban small airplanes. It's dangerous to be distracted while driving. Let's ban all distractions. I mean ALL distractions. It's dangerous to drive anywhere, let's ban cars.
As opposed to what happened here with David Nutt. He pointed out that the drug Ecstasy was less dangerous than horse-riding. Now to me that undeniable fact makes it unacceptable that ecstasy is illegal whilst horse-riding is legal. Are YOU really suggesting that having policy that is contrary to reality such as this is preferable.
But more than that, you're confusing Technocracy with Nanny-statism. They are orthogonal. There is nothing about the concept of having things run based on scientific reality that means that people would be forbidden from taking risks.
Who elects the technocrats?
I'm more interested in the general concept of scientists running things than the details. It seems to me there are many possible systems for choosing the technocrats. Fundamentally technocracy implies meritocracy, to what extent democracy is or isn't mixed in there is open to question. Personally I'd want to see some expert opinion on that rather than suggest something off the top of my head.;-)
Let's end it with this: if I do a cost/benefit analysis of the death penalty issue, I would probably wind up with the answer that it costs society much less to execute a convicted murderer than it does to keep him in prison for any significant amount of time. (That applies to pretty much any convicted criminal sent to prison. A dollar or two of drugs vs. hundreds or thousands of dollars in incarceration costs. Benefits to society: lower population, lower costs for supporting that population, less carbon footprint as relatives and friend don't have to drive to the jail to visit. Wow, a win for the planet!) I would also probably come up with the science to support that once a person has committed a murder he's more likely to murder again. (Yes, the "one off" crimes of passion exist, but there are a lot of people who are complete psycho and sociopaths who will murder more than once, and they bring up the odds.) I could probably manage a scientific study that shows the costs of multiple, unending appeals are the main reason that the death penalty has any added expense, and that the majority of those fail. Ergo, science tells us that someone who is convicted of murder no longer gets appeals and is executed at the earliest opportunity. It's a simple cost/benefit study. Science has ruled.
Well my information about the market before the iPhone comes from the fact I've been a mobile developer since the 1990s. The iOS information comes from the fact that people know there's a one-stop-shop before they buy, and being in the iOS community I have a reasonable grasp on the feelings about that. Are you an iOS user?
There's no post-facto about it. I've been a part of every moment of the smartphone industry. And the Stockholm syndrome meme is just moronic abuse of popular science; a slashdot meme. Stockholm Syndrome is a phenomenon that may be exhibited by people kept physically captive, not about something as trivial as what product platform they use.
As to your 14 million figure, that amounts to 5% of iPhones. Which is smaller than the proportion of dedicated pirates most platforms have. So it's not doing anything to disprove my point.
Ah right, yes I remember following it up before now. Right winger telling the anti-science brigade it was stupid to deny AGW because that would mean that the right wouldn't have any say in what's to be done about AGW.
The iPad support is not such a bit deal, as it's a version 1 product. Most companies introduce their apps on iPhone first as it's the bigger market, then add in iPad support later.
With Apple, every consumer is chained only to the app store.
iOS users overwhelmingly like having a one-stop-shop with all the apps in. That's one of the things they chose that platform for.
It wasn't sprung on them as a change from previous practice. Indeed before the Apple Store, the mobile app market was tiny. Apple's one-stop-shop popularised phone apps.
The fundamental problem is that drugs policy is one of those areas that's driven by the Murdoch press. No UK politician dare to be seen as soft on drugs any more than soft on other kinds of crime. It would be electorally damaging.
Tories are if anything more war-on-drugs types, even given the scientific facts. So it's not a Labour thing.
A technocratic government. That'd be nice. Shame the idea died out, with the amount of data technocrats would have at their disposal these days, it could work really well.
I wonder why he mentioned it in the sense that it was an unthinkable thing. Other than him not being an MP for the Technocratic Party of course.
Imagine putting a PR team in charge of the Doctors dealing with an epidemic. A doctor would like to announce quarantine measure, or tell people the full risks, or advise those who are sick, etc. If you had a PR man in charge, the whole epidemic would be treated as a mild flu, no-one would be informed, contagion would spread rapidly and thousands would die. "No matter", says the PR man, "We can spin that too.". But this misses the point.
A theme examined in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, with regard to the public water supply. Which later inspired the movie Jaws, with it's rather more popcorn friendly "health risk".
Both Canada and the UK governments are conservative (The UK as the major party of a coalition.) It's par for the course for right wing governments to be anti-science. They want their agenda being put to the media, not scientific truth.
If the state doesn't fund science then an awful lot of important science simply won't get done. Private enterprise can profit from pharma, so that research will get done. But particle physics for example, not so much.
Any time you see "Don't embarrass the minister", read: This is why freedom of speech is enshrined.
Freedom of speech doesn't apply to US government employees any more than it does to UK government employees. For example the muzzling of NASA scientists on the topic of AGW under the Bush administration.
Funny, I always considered myself a Liberal... could it be that your prejudice against a particular group is forcing you to see a Libertarian where there is none?
What you posted was libertarian paranoia, regardless of what you consider the sum total of your belief set to be. If it's not your nature to come up with libertarian paranoia, then you might consider who's propaganda has been working on you.
Your libertarian paranoia is stopping you from seeing the reality of the situation again. Denying a criminal the benefits of his crime is a good in itself. And if the knock on effect is to reduce the numbers of crimes, which it will be, then there's a universal good too.
Slashdot Mirror
Sit down. Have a coffee. Maybe a slice. Daydream. Look at girls. Phone a loved one. Read a newspaper. Lower your blood pressure. You might even live longer.
off topic, but lack of capitalization is *not* a sign of poor english skills.
Poor English skills or laziness. It's the writing equivalent of spending all day, every day in jogging gear, and eating instant noodles or McDonalds for every meal.
You might think it's an anachronism, but you're wrong. The majority of people do use sentence capitalization. And referencing the work of a poet that's been dead 50 years hardly helps your implication that this is the new way.
You say that but on the last Tesla thread there were legions (well maybe one or two) of slashdotters who claimed that they regurlarly drove 7 hours without a break so clearly this will be a deal breaker for them and everyone else.
Electric vehicles are of course inevitable, as gasoline is only going to get ore expensive as supplies become ever more limited. And if one effect is that people aren't able to drive 7 hours at a stretch, but need to do the occasional forced 30 minute break, then that's a good thing!
Just because it isn't scalable doesn't mean it doesn't solve a particular problem. The particular problem being that electric cars are most uses in California, but the two major cities are too far apart to do in a single charge with Tesla's current generation of electric car.
Solving that particular problem with a battery exchange opportunity half way will sell some amount of extra cars.
The general range problem needs solving another way, but that doesn't make this targeted service a certain failure. It isn't intended to solve the general range problem.
Thinking of it, this could also solve the "rest charge" issue as the car could use the batteries one by one, starting to use one when the previous one is depleted. Or using 2, 3 at a time to get sufficient power, same principle applies.
Electric car battery management systems already do these kinds of tricks: using cells selectively. So it doesn't solve anything that's not already solved.
It's impossible to know if there are less drugs out there under the "War against drugs" than there would be in the alternative reality of no such war.
What we do know is that there are more drugs out there every year. So on that basis it's failing.
My very point was that they shouldn't have to.
Given how recently PRISM broke, I can see EVERYBODY but statists being upset about it.
American spies spy on foreigners. Including telephone taps and internet. Are you saying you didn't know that before we got to hear the codename PRISM? Heck I'm in the UK, and there's a USA spy base here. It's no secret. Back a couple of decades their program was called Echelon. And it was the instigating reason for my then company starting to use PGP.
That's not paranoia, that's fact. However it has nothing to do with government conspiracies to equip mobile phones with kill switches in order to... what? If they want to stop mobile communications in an area they can have the towers switched off. We already know they can do that.
Wow... Libertarians don't have the money for heavy propaganda.
Maybe that's why they have so many amateurs puking their FUD all over slashdot.
I'll maintain it's good to have a healthy distrust of government - it's trustworthy on average, sure, but every so often...
Rationality is the quality that these libertarian paranoiacs don't have. For sure when a government is wanting to make war, distrust every word they say. But when there is something like a private sector anti-theft device, to have your first thought that it's a government trick is insane.
Given the amount of data that they have on people these days they shouldn't be sending ads for tampons on the single factor of being female anyway. Prior to puberty and post menopause, and most transgendered people will be just as uninterested as the men. Even if they don't store gender, the usual algorithms that establish interest in other products will work just as well for targeting tampons.
And if some men get tampon adverts they'll just have to get over it. The same way that they get over ads for impotence and penis enlargement scams.
Anyone who has been alive for more than a decade has already seen the back-and-forth that science brings us regarding simple things. Red wine is good for you. Let's pass laws making it legal for anyone to drink red wine. Red wine is bad for you, let's make it illegal for anyone to drink red wine. Red wine is good for you in small amounts, let's make it legal to buy a glass at a time.... This study shows ... that study shows ... the other study shows something else. Which do we follow? What law do we enact? That's just one example.
Right, but it's an example of the popular press interpreting the latest paper, and quoting it either uncritically, or as a "Look at what the mad boffins are saying now" depending on the reporters/papers position or what makes a better story.
And as democracy stands, it's these second hand layman's views that the public absorbs and politicians pander to. A Technocracy would mean scientists taking a proper scientific view on the range of papers on a topic. And to misquote Rumsfeld: having a rational view on what are the knowns, the unknowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.
Then you need to reconcile the concept of human rights and freedom against stark realities of physical law. It's dangerous to skydive. We're banning skydiving. It's dangerous to fly small airplanes. Let's ban small airplanes. It's dangerous to be distracted while driving. Let's ban all distractions. I mean ALL distractions. It's dangerous to drive anywhere, let's ban cars.
As opposed to what happened here with David Nutt. He pointed out that the drug Ecstasy was less dangerous than horse-riding. Now to me that undeniable fact makes it unacceptable that ecstasy is illegal whilst horse-riding is legal. Are YOU really suggesting that having policy that is contrary to reality such as this is preferable.
But more than that, you're confusing Technocracy with Nanny-statism. They are orthogonal. There is nothing about the concept of having things run based on scientific reality that means that people would be forbidden from taking risks.
Who elects the technocrats?
I'm more interested in the general concept of scientists running things than the details. It seems to me there are many possible systems for choosing the technocrats. Fundamentally technocracy implies meritocracy, to what extent democracy is or isn't mixed in there is open to question. Personally I'd want to see some expert opinion on that rather than suggest something off the top of my head. ;-)
Let's end it with this: if I do a cost/benefit analysis of the death penalty issue, I would probably wind up with the answer that it costs society much less to execute a convicted murderer than it does to keep him in prison for any significant amount of time. (That applies to pretty much any convicted criminal sent to prison. A dollar or two of drugs vs. hundreds or thousands of dollars in incarceration costs. Benefits to society: lower population, lower costs for supporting that population, less carbon footprint as relatives and friend don't have to drive to the jail to visit. Wow, a win for the planet!) I would also probably come up with the science to support that once a person has committed a murder he's more likely to murder again. (Yes, the "one off" crimes of passion exist, but there are a lot of people who are complete psycho and sociopaths who will murder more than once, and they bring up the odds.) I could probably manage a scientific study that shows the costs of multiple, unending appeals are the main reason that the death penalty has any added expense, and that the majority of those fail.
Ergo, science tells us that someone who is convicted of murder no longer gets appeals and is executed at the earliest opportunity. It's a simple cost/benefit study. Science has ruled.
No, YOU"VE decided that cost/benefit analysis is
Then the original point is like saying people who are buying cactuses are disadvantaged because their plants don't need watering every day.
Well my information about the market before the iPhone comes from the fact I've been a mobile developer since the 1990s. The iOS information comes from the fact that people know there's a one-stop-shop before they buy, and being in the iOS community I have a reasonable grasp on the feelings about that. Are you an iOS user?
There's no post-facto about it. I've been a part of every moment of the smartphone industry. And the Stockholm syndrome meme is just moronic abuse of popular science; a slashdot meme. Stockholm Syndrome is a phenomenon that may be exhibited by people kept physically captive, not about something as trivial as what product platform they use.
As to your 14 million figure, that amounts to 5% of iPhones. Which is smaller than the proportion of dedicated pirates most platforms have. So it's not doing anything to disprove my point.
Ah right, yes I remember following it up before now. Right winger telling the anti-science brigade it was stupid to deny AGW because that would mean that the right wouldn't have any say in what's to be done about AGW.
Actually it's very nice. It doesn't do everything Microsoft Office does, but what it does do it does better.
Were it not for the fear of file incompatibility, most people wouldn't use MS Office. It's bloatware.
The iPad support is not such a bit deal, as it's a version 1 product. Most companies introduce their apps on iPhone first as it's the bigger market, then add in iPad support later.
With Apple, every consumer is chained only to the app store.
iOS users overwhelmingly like having a one-stop-shop with all the apps in. That's one of the things they chose that platform for.
It wasn't sprung on them as a change from previous practice. Indeed before the Apple Store, the mobile app market was tiny. Apple's one-stop-shop popularised phone apps.
Quite an amusing comment considering the sig promoting the Heartland Anti-science Institute.
The fundamental problem is that drugs policy is one of those areas that's driven by the Murdoch press. No UK politician dare to be seen as soft on drugs any more than soft on other kinds of crime. It would be electorally damaging.
Tories are if anything more war-on-drugs types, even given the scientific facts. So it's not a Labour thing.
A technocratic government. That'd be nice. Shame the idea died out, with the amount of data technocrats would have at their disposal these days, it could work really well.
I wonder why he mentioned it in the sense that it was an unthinkable thing. Other than him not being an MP for the Technocratic Party of course.
Imagine putting a PR team in charge of the Doctors dealing with an epidemic. A doctor would like to announce quarantine measure, or tell people the full risks, or advise those who are sick, etc. If you had a PR man in charge, the whole epidemic would be treated as a mild flu, no-one would be informed, contagion would spread rapidly and thousands would die. "No matter", says the PR man, "We can spin that too.". But this misses the point.
A theme examined in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, with regard to the public water supply. Which later inspired the movie Jaws, with it's rather more popcorn friendly "health risk".
Both Canada and the UK governments are conservative (The UK as the major party of a coalition.) It's par for the course for right wing governments to be anti-science. They want their agenda being put to the media, not scientific truth.
If the state doesn't fund science then an awful lot of important science simply won't get done. Private enterprise can profit from pharma, so that research will get done. But particle physics for example, not so much.
Any time you see "Don't embarrass the minister", read: This is why freedom of speech is enshrined.
Freedom of speech doesn't apply to US government employees any more than it does to UK government employees. For example the muzzling of NASA scientists on the topic of AGW under the Bush administration.
Funny, I always considered myself a Liberal... could it be that your prejudice against a particular group is forcing you to see a Libertarian where there is none?
What you posted was libertarian paranoia, regardless of what you consider the sum total of your belief set to be. If it's not your nature to come up with libertarian paranoia, then you might consider who's propaganda has been working on you.
Killing it does nobody any good
Your libertarian paranoia is stopping you from seeing the reality of the situation again. Denying a criminal the benefits of his crime is a good in itself. And if the knock on effect is to reduce the numbers of crimes, which it will be, then there's a universal good too.