ICE in no way requires fossil fuel to run. It just happens to be convenient. However, you can buy a car right now that will run on nothing more than yeast piss.
You could also buy a car right now that would run on nothing more than slightly-modified waste restaurant grease. In fact, you could buy such a vehicle from VW until very recently...
(Of course, actually running one of said cars on restaurant grease would void the warranty because of the EPA-mandated emissions bullshit, which just goes to show how fucked-up this situation is in the first place!)
That's why we need to be able to say "no, I won't put that code in and neither will any of the other licensed engineers, which means the designs won't get stamped, which means you have no product to sell."
If engineers need leverage in order to maintain ethical standards, well, we know how to get it. We just have to collectively (gasp! shock! horror!) demand it!
but I suppose if your interpreted program calls into some really well-written libraries, and you compiled program doesn't....
This is the key! Start out by writing your program in the quickest, easiest, highest-level (i.e., most appropriately idiomatic for the problem domain) language you can find, then benchmark it and re-write the slow parts to call some really fast C library.
In the corporate world, physical desktop machines will stick around for a long time.
I'm not so sure about that; at my new (software dev) job I asked for one desktop and one laptop (expecting a Macbook and a Dell tower or something), but got issued a Thinkpad and a Mac Mini. I have yet to see another new employee get a computer with actual ATX-compatible components.
I'm not sure that's the same thing I said. It's more like, "anything written into law anywhere gets enforced everywhere" (whether it's written into law in the other places or not).
I can suss out a 20% tip in my head in seconds, but I see people doing it on their smartphones. Why?
Reply #1: Oh, look at me, I'm a human calculator! I'm smart, you're dumb!
To calculate a 20% tip, move the total's decimal point one place to the left then multiply by two. Everyone should be capable of that. Calculating a 15% tip is slightly harder (requires dividing by two, then adding the original and divided value), and an 18% tip is reasonable to use a calculator for.
Also, who decided that 20% is now the "standard" tip amount? It's supposed to be 15%!
It matters because "IOS" is a different operating system, made by Cisco. Sure, it's clear from context which one is being talked about in this case, but that's not always true.
(On a related note, it was pretty stupid of Cisco to license the trademark.)
To explicitly disclaim ownership, so that anyone who wants to can grab and make billions from your communications by putting an ad next to it?
Posting AC doesn't disclaim ownership; it just makes the owner harder to track down. Stuff only gets into the Public Domain by the author writing "I hereby release this work to the Public Domain" or some such thing. (Or by the copyright expiring, but since that never happens anymore it's irrelevant...)
In other words, far from letting anyone make billions off the AC's comment, by posting AC he's made it harder to use his work commercially because it's more difficult to track him down to get permission.
Furthermore, what Google does is Fair Use, not "using his work commercially." By posting on Slashdot, the AC (implicitly) gives Slashdot a license to use the work, but does not give that right to anybody else. That's OK though, because Google doesn't re-publish Slashdot; it only links to it. If there were some Google-Dot website out there that was screen-scraping Slashdot to populate itself, that would be copyright infringement unless Google tracked down the AC and got his permission.
It is totally the same! Either freedom of information is preserved and copyright infringement will happen, or it is made possible to block things in order to prevent copyright infringement and that power is abused to create censorship. It is not possible for the power to censor to exist without that power being abused!
Advertising in the sense of "getting the word out" is not just non-evil, it's necessary. The world can't advance without people becoming informed of the advancements.
Nope. Anything awesome enough to be worth caring about will be spread by word of mouth anyway.
Literally, the only thing that car has in common with an actual Jeep is the 80" wheelbase. From elsewhere on the site you linked:
People ask why a Jeep and the answer is simple. The class rule is that the wheelbase of the vehicle can't be shorter than 80", and that the car you build, must resemble the car it's based off of. The builder, Del Long, started searching for cars that had an 80 wheelbase, and discovered that a 1946 Jeep had one. So at that point, Del started building the only autocross Jeep in the country. Oh... there are no real Jeep parts used on the car at all. Even the grill is a replica.
No kidding! And it's even worse than the situation you're talking about for your town: in Atlanta, trash pickup is run directly by the Public Works department. And it's billed as part of the property tax, so if you don't pay it they can foreclose on your house.
I'm pretty paranoid, but even I've given up caring about non-removable batteries. If you're that worried, carry an anti-static bag (or other Faraday cage) around with you.
Our cans -- for both trash and recycling -- are "herby curbys," so they're (just barely) small enough to be wheeled or dragged around by a person, but probably not lifted. There are always three guys on a garbage truck: one to drive, and two to grab cans from the curb and put them on the lift to be dumped in the truck. The crew works both sides of the street at the same time, which is why there are two guys in the back, not one.
Maybe "manually" was a poor choice of words since a machine actually dumps the can, but the process isn't totally automated such that the truck only needs a driver, either.
There are still some places where two or three men work each truck, where one drives and one or two manually dump the tenants' or residents' own cans instead of a standardized can supplied by the municipality
The City of Atlanta supplies standardized cans but still has guys on the truck manually emptying them. Maybe that's why trash pickup costs almost $50/month (for a single-family residence) here.
Right, but because it isn't an ad-blocker, it also fails to stop all tracking. From the Privacy Badger FAQ:
When you view a webpage, that page will often be made up of content from many different sources. (For example, a news webpage might load the actual article from the news company, ads from an ad company, and the comments section from a different company that's been contracted out to provide that service.) Privacy Badger keeps track of all of this. If as you browse the web, the same source seems to be tracking your browser across different websites, then Privacy Badger springs into action, telling your browser not to load any more content from that source. [Emphasis added]
In other words, it's going to let the third-party 'maybe-tracker' load a certain number of times until it "seems" like a tracker and only then will block it... which means that until that happens the 'maybe-tracker' has 'maybe-succeeded' in tracking you.
The only way to stop 100% of tracking is to not allow the tracker to load even the first time, which is what RequestPolicy does.
Switching over to a redundant system with the same software bug won't fix anything.
In most cases*, the redundant system won't have the same software bug because the ops people weren't so stupid that they tried to upgrade it at the same time. That means any issue that causes downtime is almost always an operations issue, because if it were a development issue then the devs could fix it at their leisure while the old version of the service stayed up.
(*the exception, of course, are preexisting bugs that are triggered by some external factor, like a DDOS attack or a time-related overflow.)
I was just reading the FAQ on Privacy Badger, and it seems like it tries to "intelligently" block only tracking while still allowing ads through. Because of that, I don't trust it to work 100% of the time. Instead, I use RequestPolicy (among other things) to default-deny all third-party requests.
I'm not sure I trust even Privacy Badger to go far enough: it sounds like instead of just disabling all third-party requests by default, it allows them until it pattern-matches that tracking is happening. Unfortunately, by the time that happens, you've already been tracked (at least a little bit).
Instead, I use:
RequestPolicy to block all third-party requests (scripts, images, everything) except the ones I whitelist
RefControl to forge referrer headers (so it always looks like the request is coming from the root of the current site)
BetterPrivacy to protect against super cookies
Self-Destructing Cookies to protect against regular cookies
NoScript to block first-party Javascript (I often have to whitelist the site to view it properly, but if I don't then I leave it off)
and finally uBlock, which probably isn't necessary but provides "belt and suspenders" protection
With the revelations about Windows 10, I'm also moving towards router-hosts-file blocking -- I have no intention to actually use Windows 10, but I have Windows 7 and (unfortunately) 8 hosts on my network that I need to protect.
Slashdot Mirror
You could also buy a car right now that would run on nothing more than slightly-modified waste restaurant grease. In fact, you could buy such a vehicle from VW until very recently...
(Of course, actually running one of said cars on restaurant grease would void the warranty because of the EPA-mandated emissions bullshit, which just goes to show how fucked-up this situation is in the first place!)
That's why we need to be able to say "no, I won't put that code in and neither will any of the other licensed engineers, which means the designs won't get stamped, which means you have no product to sell."
If engineers need leverage in order to maintain ethical standards, well, we know how to get it. We just have to collectively (gasp! shock! horror!) demand it!
This is the key! Start out by writing your program in the quickest, easiest, highest-level (i.e., most appropriately idiomatic for the problem domain) language you can find, then benchmark it and re-write the slow parts to call some really fast C library.
I'm not so sure about that; at my new (software dev) job I asked for one desktop and one laptop (expecting a Macbook and a Dell tower or something), but got issued a Thinkpad and a Mac Mini. I have yet to see another new employee get a computer with actual ATX-compatible components.
I'm not sure that's the same thing I said. It's more like, "anything written into law anywhere gets enforced everywhere" (whether it's written into law in the other places or not).
GP is using synecdoche to express his schadenfreude.
Paraphrased, it means "I love it when salespeople reveal themselves to be assholes by over-promising things they can't deliver."
To calculate a 20% tip, move the total's decimal point one place to the left then multiply by two. Everyone should be capable of that. Calculating a 15% tip is slightly harder (requires dividing by two, then adding the original and divided value), and an 18% tip is reasonable to use a calculator for.
Also, who decided that 20% is now the "standard" tip amount? It's supposed to be 15%!
It matters because "IOS" is a different operating system, made by Cisco. Sure, it's clear from context which one is being talked about in this case, but that's not always true.
(On a related note, it was pretty stupid of Cisco to license the trademark.)
Posting AC doesn't disclaim ownership; it just makes the owner harder to track down. Stuff only gets into the Public Domain by the author writing "I hereby release this work to the Public Domain" or some such thing. (Or by the copyright expiring, but since that never happens anymore it's irrelevant...)
In other words, far from letting anyone make billions off the AC's comment, by posting AC he's made it harder to use his work commercially because it's more difficult to track him down to get permission.
Furthermore, what Google does is Fair Use, not "using his work commercially." By posting on Slashdot, the AC (implicitly) gives Slashdot a license to use the work, but does not give that right to anybody else. That's OK though, because Google doesn't re-publish Slashdot; it only links to it. If there were some Google-Dot website out there that was screen-scraping Slashdot to populate itself, that would be copyright infringement unless Google tracked down the AC and got his permission.
It is totally the same! Either freedom of information is preserved and copyright infringement will happen, or it is made possible to block things in order to prevent copyright infringement and that power is abused to create censorship. It is not possible for the power to censor to exist without that power being abused!
In other words, a race to the bottom where anything that's illegal anywhere becomes illegal everywhere.
Thanks, <strike>Obama</strike> fuckers in Congress and/or the Supreme Court, who decided this extraterritorial bullshit was a good idea!
Yes, yes it is. (I get to see it all the time since I'm in the same region!)
Nope. Anything awesome enough to be worth caring about will be spread by word of mouth anyway.
Literally, the only thing that car has in common with an actual Jeep is the 80" wheelbase. From elsewhere on the site you linked:
No kidding! And it's even worse than the situation you're talking about for your town: in Atlanta, trash pickup is run directly by the Public Works department. And it's billed as part of the property tax, so if you don't pay it they can foreclose on your house.
I'm pretty paranoid, but even I've given up caring about non-removable batteries. If you're that worried, carry an anti-static bag (or other Faraday cage) around with you.
Our cans -- for both trash and recycling -- are "herby curbys," so they're (just barely) small enough to be wheeled or dragged around by a person, but probably not lifted. There are always three guys on a garbage truck: one to drive, and two to grab cans from the curb and put them on the lift to be dumped in the truck. The crew works both sides of the street at the same time, which is why there are two guys in the back, not one.
Maybe "manually" was a poor choice of words since a machine actually dumps the can, but the process isn't totally automated such that the truck only needs a driver, either.
The City of Atlanta supplies standardized cans but still has guys on the truck manually emptying them. Maybe that's why trash pickup costs almost $50/month (for a single-family residence) here.
Right, but because it isn't an ad-blocker, it also fails to stop all tracking. From the Privacy Badger FAQ:
In other words, it's going to let the third-party 'maybe-tracker' load a certain number of times until it "seems" like a tracker and only then will block it... which means that until that happens the 'maybe-tracker' has 'maybe-succeeded' in tracking you.
The only way to stop 100% of tracking is to not allow the tracker to load even the first time, which is what RequestPolicy does.
Bullshit. Other options include donations (even large sites, notably Wikipedia, can work this way) or distributed hosting like Bittorrent or Freenet.
Who said that paywalls and (especially) donations were unacceptable? Nobody, that's who, which is why your argument is a strawman.
In most cases*, the redundant system won't have the same software bug because the ops people weren't so stupid that they tried to upgrade it at the same time. That means any issue that causes downtime is almost always an operations issue, because if it were a development issue then the devs could fix it at their leisure while the old version of the service stayed up.
(*the exception, of course, are preexisting bugs that are triggered by some external factor, like a DDOS attack or a time-related overflow.)
I was just reading the FAQ on Privacy Badger, and it seems like it tries to "intelligently" block only tracking while still allowing ads through. Because of that, I don't trust it to work 100% of the time. Instead, I use RequestPolicy (among other things) to default-deny all third-party requests.
I'm not sure I trust even Privacy Badger to go far enough: it sounds like instead of just disabling all third-party requests by default, it allows them until it pattern-matches that tracking is happening. Unfortunately, by the time that happens, you've already been tracked (at least a little bit).
Instead, I use:
With the revelations about Windows 10, I'm also moving towards router-hosts-file blocking -- I have no intention to actually use Windows 10, but I have Windows 7 and (unfortunately) 8 hosts on my network that I need to protect.
Even "well behaved" ads are almost always hosted by third-party domains and loaded by javascript, and are thus a privacy and security risk.