Metallurgy is 0.004 million years old at most. Now try to imagine how long 10 million years was.
I have a very good idea of the durations in question. Once I read an interview with an accountant who balanced Uncle Sam's accounts by day and her own household accounts in her non-work hours. Her quote: "It's pretty much the same thing, you just shift some zeroes."
A new car is $0.000,000,030 trillion dollars, which puts the recent Wall St. bail-out into good perspective.
You almost seem to be complaining that the use of the word "explosion" is insufficiently anthropomorphic. I find it quite refreshing for once.
My favourite part is where the wardrobe malfunction puts a dagger through Muhammad's heart. Please, daddy, tell us that part again! I'm waiting with beta'd breath.
That 9% is pretty used to having reduced access to licensed, live television content as a direct consequence of not paying a subscription for licensed, live television content.
Not only are we used to this: it's a feature, not a bug.
Very little that stems from the IOC is a net constructive influence on human society, although if you're a major urban center looking for a good pretext to cull some undesirables, nothing beats it... if you can afford the price.
you can see why the idea of a "flying companion" would raise the collective blood pressure of traffic-safety officials
Noooooooooo! The stupidity of manual driver control (are there really people out there this fucking dumb?) would just give them the reason they're seeking anyway to clamp down on a showy and unorthodox public behaviour.
Everyone else, you can boycott the BETA. I'm going to trash the stupidity of the story submission in the vast majority of stories that show up here now. To each his own.
A proper geek knows the difference between one kind of blame masturbation and another. Most of our stories these days are wank wank wank random blame masturbation wank wank wank.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Stack ranking, meet regression to the mean.
Yes, p accomplishes 1-p (for some p, always) but it's not necessarily the same people in the p pie slice year over year. The Pareto does not state that 20% of the people with account for 80% of the output and will continue to do so, because as we all know 100% of what drives performance is whether you have it, or you don't, end of story.
The problem with "a" gene-environment interaction is that there is no gene that does something. It only has a particular effect in a particular environment, and to say that a gene has a consistent effect in every environment is really only to say that it has a consistent effect in all the environments in which it has been studied to date. This has become ever more clear in studies of the genetics of behavior, as there has been increasing appreciation of environmental regulation of epigenetics, transcription factors, splicing factors, and so on. And this is most dramatically pertinent to humans, given the extraordinary range of environments—both natural and culturally constructed—in which we live.
What does stack-ranking achieve as a long-term evolutionary pressure? It helps the company accumulate the people who are best at concealing their dips, no matter how the chill winds blow.
Just what you want cultivate, a whole cadre of engineers specializing in meteorology.
There was a different passage about genetics I was trying to find. A population will only retain multiple genetic phenotypes if each of those phenotypes is advantageous in some circumstance or environment. Any phenotype that dominates across the board, in nearly every circumstance, soon extinguishes the competition.
That we have so many phenotypes indicates that human circumstance is extremely fluid.
I also have a "funny" demotion. I believe I'm on the classicest classic available. I don't even have threaded comments. Just flat. As close to static layout as possible.
The story submissions have been getting worse and worse for shedding more heat than light. I only ever cared about the comments section.
While I appreciate that our evil redesign overlords are apparently listening, the level of communication around this (e.g. lack of clearly esoupsed objectives) screams of an underlying agenda that's incompatible with my long-established pattern of participation. Thus I can't see myself remaining here after classicest classic goes to classic heaven, unless there's more than listening, something which approaches a major change of heart and some serious backtracking on the original plan.
Once the comments go away, another core function will wither. Whether it's submissions, moderation, or just consumption I don't know. Then another function withers and it's game over. Ecologies are tricky things.
Right now driving is a game. A game with screwed up rules like: It's okay to drive the speed you feel safe. Unless there is a cop trying to enforce some arbitrary limit. Then you must drive the arbitrary limit. You are less likely to see a cop during rush hour because they don't want to slow down traffic. You are more likely to see the cop when the lanes have fewer people and are therefore safer for higher speeds. It's a crazy system we have.
Right now snitching cookies from Mom's cookie jar is a game. You can grab one or two if she's not in the kitchen and the jar is pretty full (but not completely full to the top) and you don't take enough for her to notice or you've got brothers and sisters around who also snitch cookies, so she won't know who to blame.
Right now using four letter words is a game. You can use them on the playground if the adults aren't around, or if it's just your crazy crass uncle pretending to supervise who just sits there and chuckles into his brown paper bag.
It's a crazy system we have.
Right. And the police invented this from whole cloth.
I personally do not use noscript as this would kill the web. Without javascript it is not useful and a big fucking pain the in ass UAC style to enable for each site. Enabling it makes you vulnerable all over gain.
No, it doesn't. It's the difference between a toddler who puts everything into his mouth, and an adult who only puts food from the A-list into her mouth.
Granted, one can die from taking contaminated pill from a legitimate bottle of Tylenol. But generally one doesn't die from visiting name brand web sites one chooses to add to the A-list if you're halfway sensible about it (subject to having other 3rd party blocks in place). The biggest risk is that a site on your A-list ceases to operate and some criminal subsequently snatches up the disused domain. I wish my Noscript also checked for continuity of domain ownership.
The other advantage of Noscript and my various default-deny cookie monsters is that when I go to do a simple enable, sometimes a menu with twenty cookies pops up, which is my sign to beat a hasty retreat and find equivalent content elsewhere. Organisms with twenty pairs of beady eyeballs are not to be trusted.
About once a month I land on an outright typo domain, whose Javascript would be running by default were it not for Noscript default deny. I grant you it is kind of a lot of work to think about where that street weiner stand has actually been. So much simpler just to mainline antibiotics and wander unencumbered through Mystery Meat Paradiso.
Man, and about those third-party gate crashers. Mind if I bring a friend? How about a friend of a friend? How about a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend? Don't worry, he won't do drugs, bang some slut on your dad's antique coffee table, vomit all over the bearskin in the den, leave BBQ tools embedded in various walls, lose his balance and crash through the bay window, and then get carted off in an ambulance with lots of flashing lights and sirens that wake the neighbours.
Does anyone who ever attended high school think this is a good security model?
I do not run an ad blocker, and I am fairly tolerant of adverts alongside my news. I will continue reading a site even if the entire sidebar is flashing animated gifs at me.
That is my payment.
You haven't paid a nickel until your willingness to tolerate the advertising seeps into your psyche in such a way that causes you to behave differently in how you participate in the economy to the advantage of those who generated the advertisement stream.
Ads function on at least four levels. The first is to create direct demand. Suddenly you know something exists and you decide you want it. The second is to make rational people less rational. You already had a perfectly rational plan suited to your economic interests and life goals, but then something changes, so you end up paying more for less (some part of your brain believes those beer girls are hiding inside those beer cans filled with inferior beer). The third level is to cause you to crave those munchies you already have in the pantry. This is a direct boost to consumption level, of a product you already buy. This works extremely well for salty snack foods. It's hard to watch people eat salty snack food on TV all day long and not get a craving. The fourth level is to get people to buy into status glow. When your friend buys three times as much truck as he really needs, it takes a lot of his buddies oohing and awing in suitable hushed and gushing terms, to back-fill the 10 k$ hole in his wallet relative to a different purchase where he would have hardly noticed the downgrade on a daily basis—not even getting into what he could have lived without.
I happen to believe that the engine that really drives the free market is rational decision making. Advertising for the most part reduces the contribution of rational decision making to the free market, to where we end up with a power law (or a law of power): the wealthiest and smartest 20% of the economy (these are not uncorrelated) makes 80% of the rational decisions. The other 80% of the market makes 20% of the rational decisions, in between mouthfuls of Cheetos.
Wired ran a retrospective recently featuring famous commercials of recording artists selling their souls. Take a look at the Pepsi commercial circa 1980 with His Dancing Whiteness. The entire cast look like well nourished Kenyan distance runners. There's exactly one physique I would even describe as burly (you catch a glimpse of half of his back as he provides a backdrop of some guy unloading a candy van). Burly man is not drinking a Pepsi. All the skinny people are drinking Pepsi.
Thirty years later all those Pepsi customers are so fat they need double-wide remote controls just to sink into the couch after school because the mere thought of going outside to dribble a basketball would cause their overworked hearts to explode.
Is that a free market outcome? Really, you think so? What all these rational economic agents wanted deep down was to become fat, unhealthy, and unsexy? It's a good thing God had the foresight to allow humans to copulate in a mutually horizontal orientation.
Bad things come from bad markets. Look around at the outcomes of so many people who willingly welcome these toxic payment streams into their lives stuffed to the gills with lizard-brain visual heroine.
And that's the big issue. Because guess who pays his prize money? The people watching it on TV!
That's why a major league sports team, at the end of a season where they finish last in the league, refunds all admissions to all fans in acknowledgement that they didn't get what they paid for.
when you have loaded it up with debt again, you declare it bankrupt and walk away
Walk away from what, exactly? The only parties extending you credit in the final chapter are parties who have already padded their fees to account for the looming insolvency risk.
In your economic model, is it the case that stupid creditors grow on trees?
Corporations have a natural life cycle. So they die ugly? It has to happen, one way or another.
Would someone knowledgeable about this—someone who can refrain from jumping on one finger-wagging bandwagon or another long enough to compose a sober paragraph—please jump in and sort out whether this is primarily a problem of older hardware not being able to handle newer publications, or of newer hardware becoming unable/unwilling to render older content?
These are totally different things.
This circus of layered tread marks is not shedding much light.
By making fun of people who use the word "literally", I am "voting" to keep the old definition and keep the new definition from becoming accepted, and I will do so as long as it is practical.
Amen.
Abuse of "literally" or "exponentially" pretty much consigns a person to the beer leagues of serious debate, so far as I'm concerned. From the perspective of a thinking mind, neither of these common uses is all that different from making a fist with your thumb inside. Sure, maybe the chump punches above his or her weight class, but first impression is squarely in the "not" quadrant.
Correct application of "fewer" to countable nouns signals an adversary who has properly joined the fight.
Just because some other guy rides his Harley wearing nothing but a Speedo and a chin strap affixed to a burnt piece of toast, doesn't mean you have to endorse the practice yourself. As the old saying goes: Looks good on you!
No matter what the dictionary might say, the taste of others ends at my nose.
Ugh... you're missing the plain and simple truth that polygraphs DONT WORK. They are complete horseshit...
No, you're missing the point.
Imposing the polygraph protocol on the polygraph subject forces the polygraph subject into a highly disadvantaged mode of engagement. If the horseshitness of the polygraph test were to become the subject of public outrage, the powers-that-be would lose a valuable interrogation tactic.
It runs deep. The cloud of uncertainty over being convicted by a fallible machine with no viable recourse or defense adds to the psychological stress of the subject. This effect would be greatly lessened if the damn thing actually worked. Basically the polygraph examiner gets to sit there and decide your fate in an elaborate ritual of faux objectivity.
How could you say that this doesn't work? Faux objectivity practically bats clean-up in the fine-grinding mill of democratic disempowerment.
Do you consent to a polygraph test?
Absolutely, so long as I'm not forced to hang my head and grunt monosyllables.
Are you refusing to take the polygraph test?
No. I'm refusing the invasive, fucked up protocol that you've willingly elaborated around the idiotic, frightening wires. Wire me up, then engage me in normal conversation, eye to eye. Not my fault if your machine has no technical merit once stripped of the demeaning ritual. If that bugs you, work harder. Innovate. Get the captains of industry on the blower. To hear them tell it, they innovate twice a day and thrice on Saturdays. Surely simple eye contact does not exceed your far-reaching dystopian prowess?
Hardly anyone would consent to answering questions within these bizarre strictures without the quasi-religious deference to the cult of the coloured wires. It's such a Milgramesque whitecoat scam, which nevertheless works a treat if your subject complies.
A girl of 17 years, 364 days, looking "provocative"?
The original formulation of Zeno's paradoxes concerned hair-splitting the age of consent, but posterity abstracted the quivering quibbling to better suit the Victoria era.
But you can't not prosecute people who undoubtedly did commit crimes because you agree with their stated motives.
Your ultimate appeal to non-discretion is just another form of deterrence porn modestly clad in a knee-length skirt.
When the rules themselves are a clear and present danger, it's time for collective social judgement to enter the system. Any society that makes rule of law its highest virtue puts itself under a stiff obligation not to enact stupid laws. Rule of law is only as good as the law itself. If the law itself is extraordinarily well conceived, there should hardly ever be a valid exception to the rule of law.
No provision of law beatifies a corrupt taskmaster.
There is also the issue that historically GCC architecture is deliberately unclean in order to prevent your previous (and following) suggestions. RMS does not want GCC to play any part in a toolchain/process which might have non-GPL parts, but that can't be controlled with copyright licence because simply reading / producing e.g an intermediate language does not make a derivative work. Hence GCC is locked-down technically so you can't access any of the intermediate steps.
Isn't that called security through obfuscation? Doesn't that create the conditions for a large number of people who are mainly governed by pragmatism to stampede into the arms of your mortal enemy?
Or is he also trying to stamp out pragmatism as part of the bycatch?
Besides, my "high speed" Internet from Comcast seemed fast enough, enabling my household to stream HD videos, load web pages quickly, and connect multiple devices as needed, largely without hiccup. I was wrong.
Is there a special Olympics for underestimating one's needy narcissism?
There are first world problems, and then there are 90210 problems, and then there is the unreliable gardener who once over-trimmed the bonsai tree beside the Arowana pond in the sunken garden of your private Luxembourg vacation villa, and then there's this.
I didn't think I needed a seventh naked women with especially plump breasts dropping peeled grapes into my mouth, but I was wrong. — Caligula
I get it. The Concorde is sexy. If I sunk my backside into a Bugatti Veyron the first words out of my mouth would be "I could get used to this real quick."
China for the most part isn't even trying. The USA at least tries.
It won't be long now--maybe a generation--before China is working overtime to outsource their dirtiest industries to lower-wage economics in sub-Saharan Africa, at which point their index of "at least they are trying" will bend abruptly upwards like the knee in a tree-ring extrapolated global warming infographic.
Funny how often the people regarded as trying the hardest are usually handy to a lumpy carpet covering a trap door which opens onto a long shaft.
They actually only know your email and that your Adobe password was 'Adobe123'. That might indicate that you reuse that password pattern, but you might not.
Trust me, the NSA uses statistics and not fuzzy logic. Trust me, in the general case, it's an entropy leak. As someone with apg-generated unique passwords for every place I visit (as short as 10 characters if I really don't give a shit) I might have one such password in my portfolio, but it would be a joke, a highly self-conscious joke. It's still an entropy leak. I'm sure the NSA has a special folder for people with my sense of humour.
Now to trash on the story summary.
and worse
And worse than "password"? Oh, please. In the most contrived example, you might find a way. But generally, "password" has a death grip on most worstest. Just couldn't resist tacking on the rubber-necker woot-woot, could you?
You know what? There were a few typos in my last post. I prefer to catch those, but I was too busy seething over what Slashdot did the u-umlaut. Motherfuckers! Could they please fix this? What does it take, a nuclear bomb?
Any legislator who accepts such money deserves 20 years in federal prison...and not a "gentleman's club", either.
You do know where deterrence porn goes, don't you? Missing hands. Honour killing of single mothers... by their own families. And the political transparency index just zooms right up.
This from one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known, where once upon a the Western Europeans weren't worthy to lick their curly shoes (on the web are more associated with Pakistan, but that could have something to do with Arab culture raising "shoe fetish" almost to the top of the state's checklist of people to watch closely).
The Europeans were no slouch in the deterrence department, either. Here's a hot, glowing pinnacle of deterrence that settled accounts a long year after the horse had already left the barn.
And yet, it's not the last crime ever recorded. What does it take, a nuclear bomb?
I'm presently reading Tyler Cowen's Average is Over. This is about how the machines are presently driving a wedge through the middle class. It's a sobering—rather than alarmist—perspective on what comes next (sorry, no Armageddon porn for the tin hats).
One current is that the machines are poised to begin gnawing away at the tedious underbelly of routine law. The downsides are easier to enumerate, not having been there. The upside—which is hard to envision in precise terms—is that old bastion of the workings of law as privileged knowledge will finally experience a scary, erosive Borg-like incursion.
This I think will have more long term effect that throwing a bunch of lawyers into a stone box, where they become subject to psychopathic depredations of their person while justice-loving members of greater society snuggle into their beds to dream happy dreams.
That said, if there's so much as a pebble of deterrence we've left unturned, the executives of Network Solutions should be high on the list. Their behaviour leaves you wanting to believe in deterrence soooo badly.
But if nobody runs it, you do not uncover bugs and you never get a.1 release.
Yeah, we're talking the NIMFY effect: not in my front yard.
Really, with the.0 releases, if you try to stay fairly mainstream in your deployment, and you're mindfull about the necessary mitigations if it doesn't go well, the risk is not outrageous. But first test your backups.
If I had to choose between 10.0 (which I hardly know) and 5.3 (all too well known) I'd pick 10.0 in a heartbeat. That series should have started out at 5.-5 (five dot negative five).
As American cities grew, people found it very easy and affordable to move 10, 15, or 20 miles away from the city center, and do the same thing.
Your whole argument hinges on this point, but you undermine it later by confessing that infrastructure to serve these low population densities is very expensive.
How could this be?
Public policy. Implicit subsidies. Reaping what you don't sow.
One example of this is how the civic center soon finds it difficult to finance their police services. Yet everyone in suburbia benefits from the law and order in the downtown as maintained 9-5, without actually paying their fair share of the cost.
During the baby boom, the middle class got what the middle class wanted. For the politicians it was buy now, pay later. Benefits delivered immediately, true costs deferred.
... the big idea was a vast, vertically integrated factory. And that's a great recipe for short run productivity, but a really bad recipe for long run reinvention. And a bad recipe for urban areas more generally, because once you've got a River Rouge plant, once you've got this mass vertically integrated factory, it doesn't need the city; it doesn't give to the city. It's very, very productive but you could move it outside the city, as indeed Ford did when he moved his plant from the central city of Detroit to River Rouge. And then of course once you are at this stage of the technology of an industry, you can move those plants to wherever it is that cost minimization dictates you should go. And that's of course exactly what happens. Jobs first suburbanized, then moved to lower cost areas. The work of Tom Holmes at the U. of Minnesota shows how remarkable the difference is in state policies towards unions, labor, how powerful those policies were in explaining industrial growth after 1947. And of course it globalizes. It leaves cities altogether. And that's exactly what happened in automobiles. In some sense--and what was left was relatively little, because it's a sort of inversion[?] of the natural resource curse, because it was precisely because Detroit had these incredibly productive machines that they squeezed out all other sources of invention--rather than having lots of small entrepreneurs you had middle managers for General Motors (GM) and Ford. And those guys were not going to be particularly adept at figuring out some new industry and new activity when the automobile production moved elsewhere or declined. And that's at least how I think about this--that successful cities today are marked by small firms, smart people, and connections to the outside world. And that was what Detroit was about in 1890 but it's not what Detroit was about in 1970. And I think that sowed the seeds of decline.
There's the invisible hand for you, hard at word squandering tax-payer dollars, only at first it all seems so tremendously win-win.
Also, a false report that denigrates some other organization but bolsters one's value in the eyes of another can also be fraudulent, particularly if the others net value, including goodwill is harmed.
Dude, eristic argument is the mainstay of civilization. We're always engaged in the internecine struggle to discredit other parties to our own ends. I'm doing it right now.
More interestingly, this is perhaps the founding principle of the human language capacity.
The article... is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?
From the text itself:
We do all these irrational things, and despite mounting results, people are not really changing their basic assumption. They are not challenging the basic idea that reasoning is for individual purposes. The premise is that reasoning should help us make better decisions, get at better beliefs. And if you start from this premise, then it follows that reasoning should help us deal with logical problems and it should help us understand statistics. But reasoning doesn't do all these things, or it does all these things very, very poorly.
But for some reason, psychologists are unable to challenge this basic premise that reasoning really is supposed to help us. And that's why Dan Sperber came up with the idea that reasoning doesn't have this function of helping us get better beliefs and make better decisions. Instead, reasoning is for argumentation. Dan's basic idea is that the function of reasoning, the reason it evolved, is to help us convince other people and to evaluate their arguments.
What this fellow did is conduct a hack against pompous insularity. Take a turd, disguise it with some food colouring, put it on their plate when they aren't looking, then watch the gobble it up while the pound the table exclaiming "We don't eat turd!"
What you end up demonstrating is that they distinguish turd from non-turd mainly by social optics, and not by its sensory quality.
Always the rule with those engaged in pompous insularity is that no outsider has standing to challenge their practices unless first vetted by the gatekeepers of the pompous insularity itself.
In order to achieve this, you'll have to master the extremely arduous standards of the profession (prestige barriers are usually high) in the pursuit of an outcome (deflating the eminent within that profession) that will have you black-listed from any form of employment where you could ever hope to receive a personal gain in exercise of the mastery you slaved to achieve. And then the gate keepers mock you when you say "thanks, but no thanks".
It's so much easier to sneak a poop pie onto the buffet table and watch them eat it smacking their lips.
It's the same deal with a packet filter in network security: hard crunchy outside, soft chewy inside. The professional walls are exceedingly hard to breach, but the defences inside those walls (which involve hard intellectual work to sustain) have long since gone to the dogs, yet they behave externally as if their house is in perfect order. This is an eternal story.
What it comes down to is whether one regards this kind of hack, which begins with a small deception, as a valid form of whistleblowing.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a very good idea of the durations in question. Once I read an interview with an accountant who balanced Uncle Sam's accounts by day and her own household accounts in her non-work hours. Her quote: "It's pretty much the same thing, you just shift some zeroes."
A new car is $0.000,000,030 trillion dollars, which puts the recent Wall St. bail-out into good perspective.
You almost seem to be complaining that the use of the word "explosion" is insufficiently anthropomorphic. I find it quite refreshing for once.
My favourite part is where the wardrobe malfunction puts a dagger through Muhammad's heart. Please, daddy, tell us that part again! I'm waiting with beta'd breath.
Not only are we used to this: it's a feature, not a bug.
Very little that stems from the IOC is a net constructive influence on human society, although if you're a major urban center looking for a good pretext to cull some undesirables, nothing beats it ... if you can afford the price.
Noooooooooo! The stupidity of manual driver control (are there really people out there this fucking dumb?) would just give them the reason they're seeking anyway to clamp down on a showy and unorthodox public behaviour.
Everyone else, you can boycott the BETA. I'm going to trash the stupidity of the story submission in the vast majority of stories that show up here now. To each his own.
A proper geek knows the difference between one kind of blame masturbation and another. Most of our stories these days are wank wank wank random blame masturbation wank wank wank.
Stack ranking, meet regression to the mean.
Yes, p accomplishes 1-p (for some p, always) but it's not necessarily the same people in the p pie slice year over year. The Pareto does not state that 20% of the people with account for 80% of the output and will continue to do so, because as we all know 100% of what drives performance is whether you have it, or you don't, end of story.
Sapolsky on Heights And Lengths And Areas Of Rectangles:
What does stack-ranking achieve as a long-term evolutionary pressure? It helps the company accumulate the people who are best at concealing their dips, no matter how the chill winds blow.
Just what you want cultivate, a whole cadre of engineers specializing in meteorology.
There was a different passage about genetics I was trying to find. A population will only retain multiple genetic phenotypes if each of those phenotypes is advantageous in some circumstance or environment. Any phenotype that dominates across the board, in nearly every circumstance, soon extinguishes the competition.
That we have so many phenotypes indicates that human circumstance is extremely fluid.
I also have a "funny" demotion. I believe I'm on the classicest classic available. I don't even have threaded comments. Just flat. As close to static layout as possible.
The story submissions have been getting worse and worse for shedding more heat than light. I only ever cared about the comments section.
While I appreciate that our evil redesign overlords are apparently listening, the level of communication around this (e.g. lack of clearly esoupsed objectives) screams of an underlying agenda that's incompatible with my long-established pattern of participation. Thus I can't see myself remaining here after classicest classic goes to classic heaven, unless there's more than listening, something which approaches a major change of heart and some serious backtracking on the original plan.
Once the comments go away, another core function will wither. Whether it's submissions, moderation, or just consumption I don't know. Then another function withers and it's game over. Ecologies are tricky things.
Right now snitching cookies from Mom's cookie jar is a game. You can grab one or two if she's not in the kitchen and the jar is pretty full (but not completely full to the top) and you don't take enough for her to notice or you've got brothers and sisters around who also snitch cookies, so she won't know who to blame.
Right now using four letter words is a game. You can use them on the playground if the adults aren't around, or if it's just your crazy crass uncle pretending to supervise who just sits there and chuckles into his brown paper bag.
Right. And the police invented this from whole cloth.
No, it doesn't. It's the difference between a toddler who puts everything into his mouth, and an adult who only puts food from the A-list into her mouth.
Granted, one can die from taking contaminated pill from a legitimate bottle of Tylenol. But generally one doesn't die from visiting name brand web sites one chooses to add to the A-list if you're halfway sensible about it (subject to having other 3rd party blocks in place). The biggest risk is that a site on your A-list ceases to operate and some criminal subsequently snatches up the disused domain. I wish my Noscript also checked for continuity of domain ownership.
The other advantage of Noscript and my various default-deny cookie monsters is that when I go to do a simple enable, sometimes a menu with twenty cookies pops up, which is my sign to beat a hasty retreat and find equivalent content elsewhere. Organisms with twenty pairs of beady eyeballs are not to be trusted.
About once a month I land on an outright typo domain, whose Javascript would be running by default were it not for Noscript default deny. I grant you it is kind of a lot of work to think about where that street weiner stand has actually been. So much simpler just to mainline antibiotics and wander unencumbered through Mystery Meat Paradiso.
Man, and about those third-party gate crashers. Mind if I bring a friend? How about a friend of a friend? How about a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend? Don't worry, he won't do drugs, bang some slut on your dad's antique coffee table, vomit all over the bearskin in the den, leave BBQ tools embedded in various walls, lose his balance and crash through the bay window, and then get carted off in an ambulance with lots of flashing lights and sirens that wake the neighbours.
Does anyone who ever attended high school think this is a good security model?
You haven't paid a nickel until your willingness to tolerate the advertising seeps into your psyche in such a way that causes you to behave differently in how you participate in the economy to the advantage of those who generated the advertisement stream.
Ads function on at least four levels. The first is to create direct demand. Suddenly you know something exists and you decide you want it. The second is to make rational people less rational. You already had a perfectly rational plan suited to your economic interests and life goals, but then something changes, so you end up paying more for less (some part of your brain believes those beer girls are hiding inside those beer cans filled with inferior beer). The third level is to cause you to crave those munchies you already have in the pantry. This is a direct boost to consumption level, of a product you already buy. This works extremely well for salty snack foods. It's hard to watch people eat salty snack food on TV all day long and not get a craving. The fourth level is to get people to buy into status glow. When your friend buys three times as much truck as he really needs, it takes a lot of his buddies oohing and awing in suitable hushed and gushing terms, to back-fill the 10 k$ hole in his wallet relative to a different purchase where he would have hardly noticed the downgrade on a daily basis—not even getting into what he could have lived without.
I happen to believe that the engine that really drives the free market is rational decision making. Advertising for the most part reduces the contribution of rational decision making to the free market, to where we end up with a power law (or a law of power): the wealthiest and smartest 20% of the economy (these are not uncorrelated) makes 80% of the rational decisions. The other 80% of the market makes 20% of the rational decisions, in between mouthfuls of Cheetos.
Wired ran a retrospective recently featuring famous commercials of recording artists selling their souls. Take a look at the Pepsi commercial circa 1980 with His Dancing Whiteness. The entire cast look like well nourished Kenyan distance runners. There's exactly one physique I would even describe as burly (you catch a glimpse of half of his back as he provides a backdrop of some guy unloading a candy van). Burly man is not drinking a Pepsi. All the skinny people are drinking Pepsi.
Thirty years later all those Pepsi customers are so fat they need double-wide remote controls just to sink into the couch after school because the mere thought of going outside to dribble a basketball would cause their overworked hearts to explode.
Is that a free market outcome? Really, you think so? What all these rational economic agents wanted deep down was to become fat, unhealthy, and unsexy? It's a good thing God had the foresight to allow humans to copulate in a mutually horizontal orientation.
Bad things come from bad markets. Look around at the outcomes of so many people who willingly welcome these toxic payment streams into their lives stuffed to the gills with lizard-brain visual heroine.
That's why a major league sports team, at the end of a season where they finish last in the league, refunds all admissions to all fans in acknowledgement that they didn't get what they paid for.
Walk away from what, exactly? The only parties extending you credit in the final chapter are parties who have already padded their fees to account for the looming insolvency risk.
In your economic model, is it the case that stupid creditors grow on trees?
Corporations have a natural life cycle. So they die ugly? It has to happen, one way or another.
Would someone knowledgeable about this—someone who can refrain from jumping on one finger-wagging bandwagon or another long enough to compose a sober paragraph—please jump in and sort out whether this is primarily a problem of older hardware not being able to handle newer publications, or of newer hardware becoming unable/unwilling to render older content?
These are totally different things.
This circus of layered tread marks is not shedding much light.
Amen.
Abuse of "literally" or "exponentially" pretty much consigns a person to the beer leagues of serious debate, so far as I'm concerned. From the perspective of a thinking mind, neither of these common uses is all that different from making a fist with your thumb inside. Sure, maybe the chump punches above his or her weight class, but first impression is squarely in the "not" quadrant.
Correct application of "fewer" to countable nouns signals an adversary who has properly joined the fight.
Just because some other guy rides his Harley wearing nothing but a Speedo and a chin strap affixed to a burnt piece of toast, doesn't mean you have to endorse the practice yourself. As the old saying goes: Looks good on you!
No matter what the dictionary might say, the taste of others ends at my nose.
No, you're missing the point.
Imposing the polygraph protocol on the polygraph subject forces the polygraph subject into a highly disadvantaged mode of engagement. If the horseshitness of the polygraph test were to become the subject of public outrage, the powers-that-be would lose a valuable interrogation tactic.
It runs deep. The cloud of uncertainty over being convicted by a fallible machine with no viable recourse or defense adds to the psychological stress of the subject. This effect would be greatly lessened if the damn thing actually worked. Basically the polygraph examiner gets to sit there and decide your fate in an elaborate ritual of faux objectivity.
How could you say that this doesn't work? Faux objectivity practically bats clean-up in the fine-grinding mill of democratic disempowerment.
Do you consent to a polygraph test?
Absolutely, so long as I'm not forced to hang my head and grunt monosyllables.
Are you refusing to take the polygraph test?
No. I'm refusing the invasive, fucked up protocol that you've willingly elaborated around the idiotic, frightening wires. Wire me up, then engage me in normal conversation, eye to eye. Not my fault if your machine has no technical merit once stripped of the demeaning ritual. If that bugs you, work harder. Innovate. Get the captains of industry on the blower. To hear them tell it, they innovate twice a day and thrice on Saturdays. Surely simple eye contact does not exceed your far-reaching dystopian prowess?
Hardly anyone would consent to answering questions within these bizarre strictures without the quasi-religious deference to the cult of the coloured wires. It's such a Milgramesque whitecoat scam, which nevertheless works a treat if your subject complies.
The original formulation of Zeno's paradoxes concerned hair-splitting the age of consent, but posterity abstracted the quivering quibbling to better suit the Victoria era.
Your ultimate appeal to non-discretion is just another form of deterrence porn modestly clad in a knee-length skirt.
When the rules themselves are a clear and present danger, it's time for collective social judgement to enter the system. Any society that makes rule of law its highest virtue puts itself under a stiff obligation not to enact stupid laws. Rule of law is only as good as the law itself. If the law itself is extraordinarily well conceived, there should hardly ever be a valid exception to the rule of law.
No provision of law beatifies a corrupt taskmaster.
Isn't that called security through obfuscation? Doesn't that create the conditions for a large number of people who are mainly governed by pragmatism to stampede into the arms of your mortal enemy?
Or is he also trying to stamp out pragmatism as part of the bycatch?
Is there a special Olympics for underestimating one's needy narcissism?
There are first world problems, and then there are 90210 problems, and then there is the unreliable gardener who once over-trimmed the bonsai tree beside the Arowana pond in the sunken garden of your private Luxembourg vacation villa, and then there's this.
I get it. The Concorde is sexy. If I sunk my backside into a Bugatti Veyron the first words out of my mouth would be "I could get used to this real quick."
Need? Not so much.
It won't be long now--maybe a generation--before China is working overtime to outsource their dirtiest industries to lower-wage economics in sub-Saharan Africa, at which point their index of "at least they are trying" will bend abruptly upwards like the knee in a tree-ring extrapolated global warming infographic.
Funny how often the people regarded as trying the hardest are usually handy to a lumpy carpet covering a trap door which opens onto a long shaft.
Trust me, the NSA uses statistics and not fuzzy logic. Trust me, in the general case, it's an entropy leak. As someone with apg-generated unique passwords for every place I visit (as short as 10 characters if I really don't give a shit) I might have one such password in my portfolio, but it would be a joke, a highly self-conscious joke. It's still an entropy leak. I'm sure the NSA has a special folder for people with my sense of humour.
Now to trash on the story summary.
And worse than "password"? Oh, please. In the most contrived example, you might find a way. But generally, "password" has a death grip on most worstest. Just couldn't resist tacking on the rubber-necker woot-woot, could you?
You know what? There were a few typos in my last post. I prefer to catch those, but I was too busy seething over what Slashdot did the u-umlaut. Motherfuckers! Could they please fix this? What does it take, a nuclear bomb?
You do know where deterrence porn goes, don't you? Missing hands. Honour killing of single mothers ... by their own families. And the political transparency index just zooms right up.
This from one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known, where once upon a the Western Europeans weren't worthy to lick their curly shoes (on the web are more associated with Pakistan, but that could have something to do with Arab culture raising "shoe fetish" almost to the top of the state's checklist of people to watch closely).
Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane
The Europeans were no slouch in the deterrence department, either. Here's a hot, glowing pinnacle of deterrence that settled accounts a long year after the horse had already left the barn.
Münster Rebellion
And yet, it's not the last crime ever recorded. What does it take, a nuclear bomb?
I'm presently reading Tyler Cowen's Average is Over. This is about how the machines are presently driving a wedge through the middle class. It's a sobering—rather than alarmist—perspective on what comes next (sorry, no Armageddon porn for the tin hats).
One current is that the machines are poised to begin gnawing away at the tedious underbelly of routine law. The downsides are easier to enumerate, not having been there. The upside—which is hard to envision in precise terms—is that old bastion of the workings of law as privileged knowledge will finally experience a scary, erosive Borg-like incursion.
This I think will have more long term effect that throwing a bunch of lawyers into a stone box, where they become subject to psychopathic depredations of their person while justice-loving members of greater society snuggle into their beds to dream happy dreams.
That said, if there's so much as a pebble of deterrence we've left unturned, the executives of Network Solutions should be high on the list. Their behaviour leaves you wanting to believe in deterrence soooo badly.
Yeah, we're talking the NIMFY effect: not in my front yard.
Really, with the .0 releases, if you try to stay fairly mainstream in your deployment, and you're mindfull about the necessary mitigations if it doesn't go well, the risk is not outrageous. But first test your backups.
If I had to choose between 10.0 (which I hardly know) and 5.3 (all too well known) I'd pick 10.0 in a heartbeat. That series should have started out at 5.-5 (five dot negative five).
The .0 thing is just a loose heuristic.
Your whole argument hinges on this point, but you undermine it later by confessing that infrastructure to serve these low population densities is very expensive.
How could this be?
Public policy. Implicit subsidies. Reaping what you don't sow.
One example of this is how the civic center soon finds it difficult to finance their police services. Yet everyone in suburbia benefits from the law and order in the downtown as maintained 9-5, without actually paying their fair share of the cost.
During the baby boom, the middle class got what the middle class wanted. For the politicians it was buy now, pay later. Benefits delivered immediately, true costs deferred.
Glaeser on Cities
There's the invisible hand for you, hard at word squandering tax-payer dollars, only at first it all seems so tremendously win-win.
Dude, eristic argument is the mainstay of civilization. We're always engaged in the internecine struggle to discredit other parties to our own ends. I'm doing it right now.
More interestingly, this is perhaps the founding principle of the human language capacity.
The Argumentative Theory
From the text itself:
What this fellow did is conduct a hack against pompous insularity. Take a turd, disguise it with some food colouring, put it on their plate when they aren't looking, then watch the gobble it up while the pound the table exclaiming "We don't eat turd!"
What you end up demonstrating is that they distinguish turd from non-turd mainly by social optics, and not by its sensory quality.
Always the rule with those engaged in pompous insularity is that no outsider has standing to challenge their practices unless first vetted by the gatekeepers of the pompous insularity itself.
In order to achieve this, you'll have to master the extremely arduous standards of the profession (prestige barriers are usually high) in the pursuit of an outcome (deflating the eminent within that profession) that will have you black-listed from any form of employment where you could ever hope to receive a personal gain in exercise of the mastery you slaved to achieve. And then the gate keepers mock you when you say "thanks, but no thanks".
It's so much easier to sneak a poop pie onto the buffet table and watch them eat it smacking their lips.
It's the same deal with a packet filter in network security: hard crunchy outside, soft chewy inside. The professional walls are exceedingly hard to breach, but the defences inside those walls (which involve hard intellectual work to sustain) have long since gone to the dogs, yet they behave externally as if their house is in perfect order. This is an eternal story.
What it comes down to is whether one regards this kind of hack, which begins with a small deception, as a valid form of whistleblowing.