This reminds me of "The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade" in Catch 22, where all of the pilots had to sign a loyalty oath to the USA at each meal, before each briefing, before take-off, and so on.
Yosarian points out that all that signing makes the oath meaningless. No one reads it or considers it, they do it like they wipe their nose. Catch 22 has a lot to teach us.
Even if I believed in intellectual property (which I don't), I would think this was a silly thing.
I've suggested this before, but I think it should be repeated.
You should also put something mildly embarrassing in the shadow drive. Something so that when the customs dude sees it, he can construct a plausible narrative of why you encrypted it. Naked pictures of a girl who could be your girlfriend (but definitely looks over the age of majority in the country you're flying to), steamy love letters that aren't over the top, evidence of a fake affair. Nothing illegal, just "improper." Bonus points if you blush when the customs agent sees them.
"No, that would be seizing it. They need a reason to seize it. Customs can search without cause, but they cannot seize things without cause."
Actually, that raises an intersting point about "intellectual property". Taking an image of your harddrive and returning your laptop isn't exactly seizing it. You still have your laptop. I think it is still a gray area. The IP dorks would say they've some how deprived you of something of value (in effect a seizure). The anti-IP dorks would say they haven't deprived you of anything.
I think it's more complicated. Imagine its 1890 and you cross the border with a briefcase full of letters. If the customs man can't seize them or hold you, he can't very well read them. Once the camera is available, your privacy is diminished. The customs man can photograph your letters and read them later.
The imaging of your harddrive is even more extreme, as it can hold much more data than the contents of a bag of letters. For reasonably sized bags:)
There are lots of well constructed stars, where a handful of master nodes control several slaves. Each slave knows two or three masters for redundancy. That's good design, and I expected it.
But what's hilarious is that there are some ip addresses that are slaves to four or five different botnets. I wonder what the owners of those machines think?
"Man, the internet sure is slow today!"
"I need a new computer, this one's all slow."
"Sweet! Five botnets and counting! I'm part of something! I belong!"
Also, companies like Tesla are training another generation of expert electrical vehicle engineers. It's quite likely that some will leave to start their own EV company down the road. One of them might be the Henry Ford of electrical cars.
As in making an affordable, more practical electrical vehicle for the masses, not as in winning the Order of the German Eagle or whatever Nazi medal Ford got in 1938.
I completely agree. If you want to take the guard off your skill-saw to save time doing a job, that's your business. You might finish faster, you might cut your foot off, but it's your call.
I certainly abuse global variables in my code, but I write my code for me to solve my problems. The loss of encapsulation that results isn't so extreme when there's one author, and the gain in flexibility is pretty steep.
However, I do think that avoiding nastiness is important, especially as the size of the group coding grows. To return to the skill-saw analogy, if you cut off your own foot, that's the risk you took. If you cut off your colleague's foot, he'll be pissed:)
Or even cheaper, buy a console from the last generation: xbox, ps2, gamecube. You can get them used for peanuts or new for a bit more. Best of all, there are GOOD lists of what games for the console are actually fun.
Reviews of modern games are often clouded by hype and irrelevant trends. Many nerds will retrospectively look at their video game library and wax poetic about the ones that are still fun (and they'll do it on their blog thanks to ego^w web 2.0). You can get these games used for $3-$10. A seven-year-old game can still be fun.
You read out the first part of that sentence. It reads:
"I'm not sure that... it's generally good for every ethnic group to live in its own autonomous enclave"
I essentially agree with your point, but the one slim advantage of the ethnic enclave is that it gives the people some organization to resist oppression. The disadvantage is that it creates an us versus them mindset that leads to ethnic violence.
I think this is a great example of what the 21st century has in store.
I have a lot of Chinese (national) friends, even one who is a member of the CCP. They definitely take the Tibet protests personally. The CCP has been very clever at manipulating national sentiment on this issue, and it is very interesting to me because it is a clash between the western narrative of China as a brutal oppressor and the eastern narrative of the west as a patronizing colonial force.
Talking to Chinese of all stripes, I find they don't understand the western image of China is a man standing down a tank. That isn't the life they came from. On the other hand, most can't grapple with the Maoist atrocities. They're taught all about the opium wars and colonialism, though. So when east meets west, both sides see the world in very different light.
Personally, while I do worry about Tibetan culture being diluted and people being oppressed, I'm not sure that (a) I have the moral standing to tell others not to opppress people (It's not like we're going to offer Hawaii autonomy now, is it?) (b) it's generally good for every ethnic group to live in its own autonomous enclave.
I also think that worrying about cultural dilution is something rich nations can ponder, along with rights for dogs, and all the other quandaries of affluence.
I do wish the Chinese would confront the human rights abuses in their past more fully. I wish they had better protections for workers and better labor laws. Communist regimes seem to always have this problem. If the government is made of labor unions ("soviets"), but the union is no longer responsive to the workers needs, who can they turn to?
It's not an idle question. Look at the coal mine riots in the USSR during the 30's. The workers "unionized" and complained about unsafe conditions and long hours. The government, nominally concerned primarily with the average worker, sent in the troops who busted the riot in a way that would make Pinkertons blush.
I'm not saying that's how life in China is, but I am saying it's a structural flaw of a one-party government. But if it looks like I'm casting stones from my glass house, I'd say that my own government was set up to have competition between branches that would protect my freedoms. However, the formation of political parties has lead to collusion between branches, undoing much of the good envisioned by the writers of our constitution. It'd be nice to have a structural change here to deal with that.
Self regulation beats government regulation, by and large. It can avoid bureaucracy and calm fear in the market.
On the otherhand, Comcast has been doing underhanded things with their traffic. Do you really trust them to adhere to any self-regulation proposal?
On the third hand (if you're Zaphod), this might be a good opportunity for concerned internet users to air exactly how they think an ISP should treat their traffic. Maybe the technocrats at the IEEE can get involved too.
I work in a major research university in a different city, and we had a very similar rash of laptop thefts. The perp wandered buildings in a FedEx uniform with an empty FedEx box. When he saw a laptop, he'd put it in the box and walk out of the building. He got caught mid-act, and they recovered some five laptops from the guy. I wonder if there's an organized gang that steals and resells the laptops, or just many people having the same bright idea for a scam.
I must admit I'm impressed with the inventiveness of the crime. FedEx is a good cover. Those guys are often wandering around and are not suspicious.
I find Massimo Calabresi's article to be odious in the extreme. Suppose that his assertion was true, that nobody cared, would it then be okay for illegal domestic spying to occur? That seems to be his unwritten position, and I find that to be disgusting logic. There are numerous examples throughout history of the dangers posed by unregulated spying, some of them (like those uncovered by the Church Commission) right here at home.
I mostly liked Greenwald's response, but he does seem to tilt slightly by Calabresi's points. I think that will make it difficult for his article to be persuasive to those not already persuaded. However, he does link this excellent piece in the LA Times:
I'd also like to add a bit of insight from Molly Ivins, paraphrased. She said that moderates sometimes fret that when they give the government increased spying powers that they'll end up spying on the girl scouts. But this is wrong: they don't end up spying on the girl scouts, they don't end up making a mistake, they ALREADY ARE. Gotta keep tabs on those nonviolent Quakers, etc. It's not "what if" the government abuses its authority, it's by how much.
Everything on that list is either evolutionary technology (growth down some already determined path) or lame. Some are both.
Here's my take:
Cellulolytic enzymes -- we already (a) have some that work and (b) use them to process biomass into biofuel. Better ones are of course great, but this is an evolution...
Reality mining -- What a douch-bag term. Devices watch your every move and report helpful hints to the government -- er, I mean you.
Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.
Offline Web applications -- I've got an idea, instead of running my offline web app in a browser, let's cut out that part and run it with native system libraries. Okay, now lets deliver the application through a simple package system. I'll call this "dpkg"! (Alternative smart-ass comment: Oh, you mean Java?)
Graphene transistors -- Damn cool. But we have transistors. These are just smaller transistors. Evolutionary.
Atomic magnetometers -- Really small sensors are neat. Lose the "war on terror" retoric in the summary. These might actually allow some neat things, but it's a bit early to say.
Wireless power -- People have wanted to do this for a while, but all comers so far have big losses associated with them. Why, in a power-short future, would we be doing this?
Nanoradio -- Nifty. Especially if used for communication between multiple tiny machines... too early to tell how it'll sort itself out.
Probabilistic chips -- Right. So lets run our calculation enough times that we can have good statistics about the mean result and the standard deviation. Wait, now we've lost out power savings?
Modeling surprise -- Douche-baggery.
Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology. All we can do is say advance x will help with problem y, but that's evolutionary thinking. Revolutions, by their very nature, cause huge changes in what people do and what they think can be done. You can't predict it ahead of time. We've gotten very good at grinding away at the next evolutionary step in technology, and that's really neat. Many of the ideas above have exciting applications. But I really hate the "revolutionary" and "disruptive" technology ideas.
Exactly. If they put up an ad with my name on it, it would freak me out. I wouldn't exactly be racing to buy stuff.
If the advertiser reveals how well he knows me, he's making me uncomfortable. It's like some stranger knocking on your door an inquiring about the health of your child. It sounds like a threat, or at least establishes an asymmetric relationship (they know more about you than you do about them).
I don't know about surgery, but magnetic feedback is far easier to tune than spring feedback. It'd make a great videogame controller, though it could fall short for the same reason spring-based feedback isn't in current controllers: patents.
Some medical device company owns a force-feedback patent and sued or threatened all of the original FF joystick makers in the 90's. The only feedback we have now is vibration, which may be exciting for 51% of the population, but seems kinda lame to me. Oh, and isn't there a patent covering it as well? Lame.
You're right, it is a blunt instrument. I think a better approach might be to have a free copyright for ten years. After that it can be renewed perpetually, but at an exponentially increasing cost. Even very popular and profitable works will eventually fall behind the exponential cost of monopoly protection and move into the public domain. I'd argue that this is for the best, as these works are important cultural touchstones that need to be freely available. This would also solve the orphaned work problem without the difficulty of determining if it was still for sale. If you can't be arsed to re-register, you lose your rights.
Also, since the users will pay, the registration and tracking could be paid for by the fees. If there's an excess, maybe it could be funnelled into a public archive of public domain stuff?
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't be Evil" is localized to the local value of evil.
(It's not funny, it's pretty much how Google operates.)
There's no unified, trustable source for software updates on windows? That's hilarious.
When I see this stuff, I think "World of Warcraft must be really great to keep people on Windows!"
This reminds me of "The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade" in Catch 22, where all of the pilots had to sign a loyalty oath to the USA at each meal, before each briefing, before take-off, and so on.
Yosarian points out that all that signing makes the oath meaningless. No one reads it or considers it, they do it like they wipe their nose. Catch 22 has a lot to teach us.
Even if I believed in intellectual property (which I don't), I would think this was a silly thing.
I've suggested this before, but I think it should be repeated.
You should also put something mildly embarrassing in the shadow drive. Something so that when the customs dude sees it, he can construct a plausible narrative of why you encrypted it. Naked pictures of a girl who could be your girlfriend (but definitely looks over the age of majority in the country you're flying to), steamy love letters that aren't over the top, evidence of a fake affair. Nothing illegal, just "improper." Bonus points if you blush when the customs agent sees them.
"No, that would be seizing it. They need a reason to seize it. Customs can search without cause, but they cannot seize things without cause."
:)
Actually, that raises an intersting point about "intellectual property". Taking an image of your harddrive and returning your laptop isn't exactly seizing it. You still have your laptop. I think it is still a gray area. The IP dorks would say they've some how deprived you of something of value (in effect a seizure). The anti-IP dorks would say they haven't deprived you of anything.
I think it's more complicated. Imagine its 1890 and you cross the border with a briefcase full of letters. If the customs man can't seize them or hold you, he can't very well read them. Once the camera is available, your privacy is diminished. The customs man can photograph your letters and read them later.
The imaging of your harddrive is even more extreme, as it can hold much more data than the contents of a bag of letters. For reasonably sized bags
There are lots of well constructed stars, where a handful of master nodes control several slaves. Each slave knows two or three masters for redundancy. That's good design, and I expected it.
But what's hilarious is that there are some ip addresses that are slaves to four or five different botnets. I wonder what the owners of those machines think?
"Man, the internet sure is slow today!"
"I need a new computer, this one's all slow."
"Sweet! Five botnets and counting! I'm part of something! I belong!"
I pronounce your commen hilarious. It'd be better if he was actively oppressing people in the picture, but that's what photoshop is for.
Also, companies like Tesla are training another generation of expert electrical vehicle engineers. It's quite likely that some will leave to start their own EV company down the road. One of them might be the Henry Ford of electrical cars.
As in making an affordable, more practical electrical vehicle for the masses, not as in winning the Order of the German Eagle or whatever Nazi medal Ford got in 1938.
I completely agree. If you want to take the guard off your skill-saw to save time doing a job, that's your business. You might finish faster, you might cut your foot off, but it's your call.
:)
I certainly abuse global variables in my code, but I write my code for me to solve my problems. The loss of encapsulation that results isn't so extreme when there's one author, and the gain in flexibility is pretty steep.
However, I do think that avoiding nastiness is important, especially as the size of the group coding grows. To return to the skill-saw analogy, if you cut off your own foot, that's the risk you took. If you cut off your colleague's foot, he'll be pissed
Their take per customer has gone up 11.4% compared to the going 9.5% (headline) inflation rate. That's pretty impressive growth.
This just reminds me of the "octoparrot" from The Simpsons. "Braawk! Polly shouldn't be!"
Not a mistake. But if I could make a suggestion, it would be to upgrade your burbon to Booker's. You won't need that money later.
Or even cheaper, buy a console from the last generation: xbox, ps2, gamecube. You can get them used for peanuts or new for a bit more. Best of all, there are GOOD lists of what games for the console are actually fun.
Reviews of modern games are often clouded by hype and irrelevant trends. Many nerds will retrospectively look at their video game library and wax poetic about the ones that are still fun (and they'll do it on their blog thanks to ego^w web 2.0). You can get these games used for $3-$10. A seven-year-old game can still be fun.
And if you haven't played it, it's new to you.
You read out the first part of that sentence. It reads:
... it's generally good for every ethnic group to live in its own autonomous enclave"
"I'm not sure that
I essentially agree with your point, but the one slim advantage of the ethnic enclave is that it gives the people some organization to resist oppression. The disadvantage is that it creates an us versus them mindset that leads to ethnic violence.
I think this is a great example of what the 21st century has in store.
I have a lot of Chinese (national) friends, even one who is a member of the CCP. They definitely take the Tibet protests personally. The CCP has been very clever at manipulating national sentiment on this issue, and it is very interesting to me because it is a clash between the western narrative of China as a brutal oppressor and the eastern narrative of the west as a patronizing colonial force.
Talking to Chinese of all stripes, I find they don't understand the western image of China is a man standing down a tank. That isn't the life they came from. On the other hand, most can't grapple with the Maoist atrocities. They're taught all about the opium wars and colonialism, though. So when east meets west, both sides see the world in very different light.
Personally, while I do worry about Tibetan culture being diluted and people being oppressed, I'm not sure that (a) I have the moral standing to tell others not to opppress people (It's not like we're going to offer Hawaii autonomy now, is it?) (b) it's generally good for every ethnic group to live in its own autonomous enclave.
I also think that worrying about cultural dilution is something rich nations can ponder, along with rights for dogs, and all the other quandaries of affluence.
I do wish the Chinese would confront the human rights abuses in their past more fully. I wish they had better protections for workers and better labor laws. Communist regimes seem to always have this problem. If the government is made of labor unions ("soviets"), but the union is no longer responsive to the workers needs, who can they turn to?
It's not an idle question. Look at the coal mine riots in the USSR during the 30's. The workers "unionized" and complained about unsafe conditions and long hours. The government, nominally concerned primarily with the average worker, sent in the troops who busted the riot in a way that would make Pinkertons blush.
I'm not saying that's how life in China is, but I am saying it's a structural flaw of a one-party government. But if it looks like I'm casting stones from my glass house, I'd say that my own government was set up to have competition between branches that would protect my freedoms. However, the formation of political parties has lead to collusion between branches, undoing much of the good envisioned by the writers of our constitution. It'd be nice to have a structural change here to deal with that.
Self regulation beats government regulation, by and large. It can avoid bureaucracy and calm fear in the market.
On the otherhand, Comcast has been doing underhanded things with their traffic. Do you really trust them to adhere to any self-regulation proposal?
On the third hand (if you're Zaphod), this might be a good opportunity for concerned internet users to air exactly how they think an ISP should treat their traffic. Maybe the technocrats at the IEEE can get involved too.
I work in a major research university in a different city, and we had a very similar rash of laptop thefts. The perp wandered buildings in a FedEx uniform with an empty FedEx box. When he saw a laptop, he'd put it in the box and walk out of the building. He got caught mid-act, and they recovered some five laptops from the guy. I wonder if there's an organized gang that steals and resells the laptops, or just many people having the same bright idea for a scam.
I must admit I'm impressed with the inventiveness of the crime. FedEx is a good cover. Those guys are often wandering around and are not suspicious.
I find Massimo Calabresi's article to be odious in the extreme. Suppose that his assertion was true, that nobody cared, would it then be okay for illegal domestic spying to occur? That seems to be his unwritten position, and I find that to be disgusting logic. There are numerous examples throughout history of the dangers posed by unregulated spying, some of them (like those uncovered by the Church Commission) right here at home.
I mostly liked Greenwald's response, but he does seem to tilt slightly by Calabresi's points. I think that will make it difficult for his article to be persuasive to those not already persuaded. However, he does link this excellent piece in the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-sanchez16mar16,0,4039194.story
That might be more approachable to most.
I'd also like to add a bit of insight from Molly Ivins, paraphrased. She said that moderates sometimes fret that when they give the government increased spying powers that they'll end up spying on the girl scouts. But this is wrong: they don't end up spying on the girl scouts, they don't end up making a mistake, they ALREADY ARE. Gotta keep tabs on those nonviolent Quakers, etc. It's not "what if" the government abuses its authority, it's by how much.
Everything on that list is either evolutionary technology (growth down some already determined path) or lame. Some are both.
... too early to tell how it'll sort itself out.
Here's my take:
Cellulolytic enzymes -- we already (a) have some that work and (b) use them to process biomass into biofuel. Better ones are of course great, but this is an evolution...
Reality mining -- What a douch-bag term. Devices watch your every move and report helpful hints to the government -- er, I mean you.
Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.
Offline Web applications -- I've got an idea, instead of running my offline web app in a browser, let's cut out that part and run it with native system libraries. Okay, now lets deliver the application through a simple package system. I'll call this "dpkg"! (Alternative smart-ass comment: Oh, you mean Java?)
Graphene transistors -- Damn cool. But we have transistors. These are just smaller transistors. Evolutionary.
Atomic magnetometers -- Really small sensors are neat. Lose the "war on terror" retoric in the summary. These might actually allow some neat things, but it's a bit early to say.
Wireless power -- People have wanted to do this for a while, but all comers so far have big losses associated with them. Why, in a power-short future, would we be doing this?
Nanoradio -- Nifty. Especially if used for communication between multiple tiny machines
Probabilistic chips -- Right. So lets run our calculation enough times that we can have good statistics about the mean result and the standard deviation. Wait, now we've lost out power savings?
Modeling surprise -- Douche-baggery.
Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology. All we can do is say advance x will help with problem y, but that's evolutionary thinking. Revolutions, by their very nature, cause huge changes in what people do and what they think can be done. You can't predict it ahead of time. We've gotten very good at grinding away at the next evolutionary step in technology, and that's really neat. Many of the ideas above have exciting applications. But I really hate the "revolutionary" and "disruptive" technology ideas.
Exactly. If they put up an ad with my name on it, it would freak me out. I wouldn't exactly be racing to buy stuff.
If the advertiser reveals how well he knows me, he's making me uncomfortable. It's like some stranger knocking on your door an inquiring about the health of your child. It sounds like a threat, or at least establishes an asymmetric relationship (they know more about you than you do about them).
I don't know about surgery, but magnetic feedback is far easier to tune than spring feedback. It'd make a great videogame controller, though it could fall short for the same reason spring-based feedback isn't in current controllers: patents.
Some medical device company owns a force-feedback patent and sued or threatened all of the original FF joystick makers in the 90's. The only feedback we have now is vibration, which may be exciting for 51% of the population, but seems kinda lame to me. Oh, and isn't there a patent covering it as well? Lame.
I agree. I can skim text, sip the parts I want, skip the parts I don't. Video doesn't work that way. I have to listen to the whole response. Lame.
Some might say this is too soon, but I say it's not too soon enough.
You're right, it is a blunt instrument. I think a better approach might be to have a free copyright for ten years. After that it can be renewed perpetually, but at an exponentially increasing cost. Even very popular and profitable works will eventually fall behind the exponential cost of monopoly protection and move into the public domain. I'd argue that this is for the best, as these works are important cultural touchstones that need to be freely available. This would also solve the orphaned work problem without the difficulty of determining if it was still for sale. If you can't be arsed to re-register, you lose your rights.
Also, since the users will pay, the registration and tracking could be paid for by the fees. If there's an excess, maybe it could be funnelled into a public archive of public domain stuff?
You haven't heard of the "Travelling Assassin" problem.