Freudian slip; happens when I write stuff at 3 AM. Though I'm glad to know that some people can look at a simple mistake for what it is rather than use it as a basis for attacking a point that has nothing to do with grammar.
It's all good though because its nationalized. Nationalized means it goes to THE PEOPLE! Right? After all, we all know that when people can vote themselves entitlements, they never abuse them.
Once the government can start ceasing private assets "for the greater good," they can start taking away a lot more than just physical goods "for the greater good." People in that country are already emigrating en masse, it's only a matter of time until the iron curtain rises.
And by the way, for anybody who still thinks that restricting imports through tariffs and other measures is a good idea for the sake of improving domestic job creation, you'll want to take a good solid look at Venezuela's recent history in the last few months where they've made it extremely difficult to buy foreign goods, and this:
Some of that stuff actually makes sense to redact, for a very good reason.
I remember how shitty search engines were in the 90's. Usually searching involved putting in your key words, getting a bunch of what you didn't want, adding more keywords, and then going through at least 10 pages or so of search results before you found your intended page. It sucked balls.
This was mainly the result of spammers gaming the search results to make sure you found their crap instead of what you were actually searching for. By keeping their page ranking algorithm and all of its quirks secret, it makes it that much harder for spammers to game the system.
Because after a point you have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to being politically correct. I mean we already have to write "he or she put on his or her hat" where we used to just write "he put on his hat" when writing about an unknown person, because the later method might offend somebody when no offense was ever intended.
I mean what, now we have to go back and rewrite every personnel database management system to include every new form of gender that somebody can philosophically surmise in order to comply with anti-discrimination laws? Shit, every year somebody comes up with a new one.
Really, if gender is that unimportant to you, then just pick one of the two at random and let everybody else get on with their business.
You don't even know what socialism is. Socialism means that there's no private ownership of the factors of production; either a government entity controls it or people just work "for the greater good". The first is socialism, the second is communism. The second has never, ever even started. Even communes like the Icarians still effectively had their own governing system that controlled it. Marx basically predicted that these communes would turn into the later scenario and there would be no need for central planning. That never actually happened anywhere. This is why when people say communism looks great on paper, they mean that because it literally has never existed off of paper.
Nordic countries don't follow either of these, by the way. They're just capitalist countries with a strong welfare system. The government doesn't issue orders to citizens to build houses or farm crops and then give it away to somebody else for free, and then claim that everything you own belongs to everybody else. They might take your money at gunpoint and give it to somebody else and call it a tax, but so does the mafia (though mafia prefers the term "protection money.") Yet I don't think the mafia claims to be socialist.
No, it's not. It's a capitalist welfare state. In socialism the factors of production are controlled by a government entity and/or aren't owned by private individuals.
Did the thief explicitly set out to steal a phone, or did the thief just set out to rob somebody and they happened to have a phone? That data really doesn't distinguish the two.
This isn't true at all, it's actually quite the opposite. The older line of thinking of organizations was to have a pyramid of managers, which gave line workers less autonomy. Today line workers are more empowered and organizations tend to be flattened in comparison.
In the early 1900's the highly bureaucratized management structures were largely a result of Max Weber's business principles, which started to fall out of favor in the 70's, and newer businesses try to avoid that system as much as they can. Some workers need to be micromanaged (yes, believe it or not most minimum wage workers can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground, which is why they make minimum wage) but firms where you're paid a higher salary want to avoid that as best as they can so that their employees can maximize their potential.
And before you go "aha you sound like a manager" no, I'm not in management, not interested in it either. I'm not morally opposed to being a manager either, like some who post on slashdot are, rather I just don't think it's a very fun thing to do. I'm actually the type who prefers to simply be handed a problem and asked to solve it within the defined parameters. You do that with management (especially project management,) but a lot of times you're bogged down with accounting, and I hate accounting (and things like it, such as logistics.)
Tell me, if the exact same thing is true of capitalism, then why is it that all of the self identified capitalist societies have the highest education rates, highest literacy rates, and highest standards of living for everybody overall?
Compare that to self identified socialist states where quality of life and education are the worst. Notice how as China has been sliding away from socialism and more towards capitalism, the quality of life and individual liberties have improved.
Another example: North Korea chose communism, South Korea chose capitalism. South Vietnam chose capitalism and when the North took over, they were forced into education camps followed by being forced into doing free labor for no reward other than the supposed "greater good." Vietnam has only recently begun to embrace capitalism again, and their economy is beginning to grow.
Look at Venezuela where the glorious socialist revolution has caused that country to fall into its current period where people have the fewest freedoms they've ever had, to the near point where the president is almost a dictator, and death by murder is more common there than Iraq. Cuba used to be capitalist as well, and look at how poor they became once the "great socialist revolution" occurred.
Yes, capitalism has its faults, and no system is perfect, but anybody who thinks socialism is any better than capitalism is dumber than a young world creationist. The evidence against that idea is so strong yet they are just flat out oblivious to it because it conflicts with their ideology of out things "ought to be."
Hmm...I somehow expected the first post to mention something akin slashdot being swallowed up by a sinkhole called beta. ACs don't quite troll like they used to.
Mandatory voting would be a horrible idea and would just make the problem worse. It would just encourage more people to vote based on what side of the bed they woke up on during election day. I can't tell you how many people I know vote for whoever they vote for for the most absurd reasons -- anywhere ranging from "because my friends are voting for him" to "because I think we need a black president" (that's the exact reason my sister voted for that moron, by the way.)
Most people can't be assed to do their research on their candidates, and so they won't. They've got other things they'd rather deal with than what is IMO a really cheesy soap opera that we call our political system.
Oh and by the way, both sides like to claim that their side wins whenever you get the highest voter turnout, but reality doesn't really favor any one side in that department. All of the major elections in recent memory were largest ever at their time, including Bush '04.
Besides, you probably wouldn't want somebody like me to vote anyways, because if forced to vote I can almost guarantee you I'd vote for a candidate that you yourself wouldn't like.
And by the way, the US has a policy that it doesn't extradite anybody (citizen or not) for breaking another country's rules if what that person did is protected by the US constitution, even if they broke a law while physically in that country and fled to the US and that country has an extradition treaty with the US.
Europeans commonly try to extradite people from the US for violating hate speech laws. Since that is protected by the constitution, it rarely works (it usually only works if that person is an immigrant and broke some other law in the US, and so the US simply doesn't want them anyways.)
How would they be able to do that even if they wanted to? They already want to filter out the pirate bay and they can't even do that successfully. Furthermore, they'd need a pretty damn good reason to effectively break all of the freedom of speech laws that each of the EU member nations have.
Seriously though, a kill switch can easily be installed aftermarket
It would be defeatable though. Basically if the phone is stolen, remove the sim card until you remove the added kill switch from the device. See my post previous to this one for a much more effective solution that also ignores borders.
Why do you need a cell tower? You have a perfectly good internet connection that has global reach. The baseband (you know, the code that runs before anything else) firmware could have a mini TCP stack that contacts say Google/Apple's (or whoever keeps track of this) servers and asks if the phone is stolen. The server can then reply back with a simple signed packet that indicates the phone's status, and the phone can take action from there. Put this part of the firmware in OTPROM so that it can only be written once (which is done at the factory,) and also make it contain the main bootstrap so that phone can't boot without it, and then it can zero it out if it is ever reported as stolen (at which point it'll be so impractical/expensive to fix that the phone is effectively bricked.)
Granted it isn't the tracking solution you're looking for, it is a rather effective kill switch, and no matter how you modify the phone you can't defeat it (unless you never boot the phone again while a SIM card is still in it, in addition to adding kernel hacks that disable these checks while the OS is running.) Not only that, but it works everywhere barring some kind of firewall added by the carrier (unlikely.)
Trouble is, stolen phones are being exported. Not a whole lot of use being able to forcibly track your phone when it now resides in China (literally, that's where they often go) especially considering that China doesn't extradite their own citizens or particularly even gives a shit when one of them breaks another country's laws.
I wouldn't rush to that judgement. We've seen people adapt to the craziest conditions within a single generation, for example the natives that live in the Andes actually have physical features that develop within literally one generation of living there (thicker skin on their feet, larger lung capacity, significantly shorter in stature.)
In addition to that, look at Pripyat. The place is toxic as hell, yet within about 15 years the place is abundant in wildlife. And we're not talking just little rodents and roaches, we're talking big game like bears and deer that not just live, but thrive there. Before making that observation, it was assumed that nothing could live there.
Humans are remarkably adaptable compared to most animals; I wouldn't be surprised if we pulled off something even more shocking than surviving in conditions like Pripyat. Sure, it would be painful as hell at first, but it would be overcome within only a few generations. What reinforces that notion is when you look at the sheer number of diseases we're immune to (Europeans at least.) We had to have seen a shitstorm of biological plagues besides just the black death, only they predate recorded history. (Hell, we carry 100,000 different partial virus genomes in our DNA, and that's only counting the ones that happened to get implanted into it and/or still remain in it to this day - only a teeny fraction of viruses we're exposed to end up actually doing that.)
I'm not a conservative so I don't speak for them, but I don't think conservatives are in favor of government sponsored monopolies or oligopolies, which is what this is. They sure made a lot of noise about how much they didn't want the ACA, that much is without a doubt.
As a libertarian, I believe pretty firmly that government sponsored monopolies are inherently bad, and I'm pretty sure that conservatives share the same view.
I can observe that, for example, Hollywood completely owns the democratic party. This is partly why copyright terms are now effectively unlimited (we just keep extending them every 20 years and there isn't any indication that this will stop) and likewise Obama completely bypassed the senate when he signed ACTA (which violates the constitution, by the way, the senate is supposed to ratify a treaty, not the president, rather the president either signs or vetoes it. When you read the letters that Hollywood unions and lobby groups signed to Obama, you can pretty clearly see why he rushed to ratify it by himself.)
You can make that choice if you want. You have the right to not vote if you want, but don't complain about what the politicians are doing if you take no part in selecting them.
Yes, because voting for a guy that I already know I'm going to be complaining about is such a brilliant plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Freudian slip; happens when I write stuff at 3 AM. Though I'm glad to know that some people can look at a simple mistake for what it is rather than use it as a basis for attacking a point that has nothing to do with grammar.
It's all good though because its nationalized. Nationalized means it goes to THE PEOPLE! Right? After all, we all know that when people can vote themselves entitlements, they never abuse them.
Once the government can start ceasing private assets "for the greater good," they can start taking away a lot more than just physical goods "for the greater good." People in that country are already emigrating en masse, it's only a matter of time until the iron curtain rises.
And by the way, for anybody who still thinks that restricting imports through tariffs and other measures is a good idea for the sake of improving domestic job creation, you'll want to take a good solid look at Venezuela's recent history in the last few months where they've made it extremely difficult to buy foreign goods, and this:
http://guardianlv.com/2014/02/...
When they say imports and domestic production rise and fall with one another, this is what they're talking about.
Some of that stuff actually makes sense to redact, for a very good reason.
I remember how shitty search engines were in the 90's. Usually searching involved putting in your key words, getting a bunch of what you didn't want, adding more keywords, and then going through at least 10 pages or so of search results before you found your intended page. It sucked balls.
This was mainly the result of spammers gaming the search results to make sure you found their crap instead of what you were actually searching for. By keeping their page ranking algorithm and all of its quirks secret, it makes it that much harder for spammers to game the system.
That's people who study herpes, right?
Because after a point you have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to being politically correct. I mean we already have to write "he or she put on his or her hat" where we used to just write "he put on his hat" when writing about an unknown person, because the later method might offend somebody when no offense was ever intended.
I mean what, now we have to go back and rewrite every personnel database management system to include every new form of gender that somebody can philosophically surmise in order to comply with anti-discrimination laws? Shit, every year somebody comes up with a new one.
Really, if gender is that unimportant to you, then just pick one of the two at random and let everybody else get on with their business.
You don't even know what socialism is. Socialism means that there's no private ownership of the factors of production; either a government entity controls it or people just work "for the greater good". The first is socialism, the second is communism. The second has never, ever even started. Even communes like the Icarians still effectively had their own governing system that controlled it. Marx basically predicted that these communes would turn into the later scenario and there would be no need for central planning. That never actually happened anywhere. This is why when people say communism looks great on paper, they mean that because it literally has never existed off of paper.
Nordic countries don't follow either of these, by the way. They're just capitalist countries with a strong welfare system. The government doesn't issue orders to citizens to build houses or farm crops and then give it away to somebody else for free, and then claim that everything you own belongs to everybody else. They might take your money at gunpoint and give it to somebody else and call it a tax, but so does the mafia (though mafia prefers the term "protection money.") Yet I don't think the mafia claims to be socialist.
No, it's not. It's a capitalist welfare state. In socialism the factors of production are controlled by a government entity and/or aren't owned by private individuals.
Did the thief explicitly set out to steal a phone, or did the thief just set out to rob somebody and they happened to have a phone? That data really doesn't distinguish the two.
This isn't true at all, it's actually quite the opposite. The older line of thinking of organizations was to have a pyramid of managers, which gave line workers less autonomy. Today line workers are more empowered and organizations tend to be flattened in comparison.
Proof: http://www.nber.org/papers/w96...
In the early 1900's the highly bureaucratized management structures were largely a result of Max Weber's business principles, which started to fall out of favor in the 70's, and newer businesses try to avoid that system as much as they can. Some workers need to be micromanaged (yes, believe it or not most minimum wage workers can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground, which is why they make minimum wage) but firms where you're paid a higher salary want to avoid that as best as they can so that their employees can maximize their potential.
And before you go "aha you sound like a manager" no, I'm not in management, not interested in it either. I'm not morally opposed to being a manager either, like some who post on slashdot are, rather I just don't think it's a very fun thing to do. I'm actually the type who prefers to simply be handed a problem and asked to solve it within the defined parameters. You do that with management (especially project management,) but a lot of times you're bogged down with accounting, and I hate accounting (and things like it, such as logistics.)
Except its not.
Tell me, if the exact same thing is true of capitalism, then why is it that all of the self identified capitalist societies have the highest education rates, highest literacy rates, and highest standards of living for everybody overall?
Compare that to self identified socialist states where quality of life and education are the worst. Notice how as China has been sliding away from socialism and more towards capitalism, the quality of life and individual liberties have improved.
Another example: North Korea chose communism, South Korea chose capitalism. South Vietnam chose capitalism and when the North took over, they were forced into education camps followed by being forced into doing free labor for no reward other than the supposed "greater good." Vietnam has only recently begun to embrace capitalism again, and their economy is beginning to grow.
Look at Venezuela where the glorious socialist revolution has caused that country to fall into its current period where people have the fewest freedoms they've ever had, to the near point where the president is almost a dictator, and death by murder is more common there than Iraq. Cuba used to be capitalist as well, and look at how poor they became once the "great socialist revolution" occurred.
Yes, capitalism has its faults, and no system is perfect, but anybody who thinks socialism is any better than capitalism is dumber than a young world creationist. The evidence against that idea is so strong yet they are just flat out oblivious to it because it conflicts with their ideology of out things "ought to be."
Hmm...I somehow expected the first post to mention something akin slashdot being swallowed up by a sinkhole called beta. ACs don't quite troll like they used to.
Mandatory voting would be a horrible idea and would just make the problem worse. It would just encourage more people to vote based on what side of the bed they woke up on during election day. I can't tell you how many people I know vote for whoever they vote for for the most absurd reasons -- anywhere ranging from "because my friends are voting for him" to "because I think we need a black president" (that's the exact reason my sister voted for that moron, by the way.)
Most people can't be assed to do their research on their candidates, and so they won't. They've got other things they'd rather deal with than what is IMO a really cheesy soap opera that we call our political system.
Oh and by the way, both sides like to claim that their side wins whenever you get the highest voter turnout, but reality doesn't really favor any one side in that department. All of the major elections in recent memory were largest ever at their time, including Bush '04.
Besides, you probably wouldn't want somebody like me to vote anyways, because if forced to vote I can almost guarantee you I'd vote for a candidate that you yourself wouldn't like.
APK would be so proud if he were still here.
Whereas private schools exist solely for the benefit of the kids, and have no need to make money or pay employees?
Why can't they do both? They already do seem to be doing a better job at both.
And by the way, the US has a policy that it doesn't extradite anybody (citizen or not) for breaking another country's rules if what that person did is protected by the US constitution, even if they broke a law while physically in that country and fled to the US and that country has an extradition treaty with the US.
Europeans commonly try to extradite people from the US for violating hate speech laws. Since that is protected by the constitution, it rarely works (it usually only works if that person is an immigrant and broke some other law in the US, and so the US simply doesn't want them anyways.)
How would they be able to do that even if they wanted to? They already want to filter out the pirate bay and they can't even do that successfully. Furthermore, they'd need a pretty damn good reason to effectively break all of the freedom of speech laws that each of the EU member nations have.
Seriously though, a kill switch can easily be installed aftermarket
It would be defeatable though. Basically if the phone is stolen, remove the sim card until you remove the added kill switch from the device. See my post previous to this one for a much more effective solution that also ignores borders.
Why do you need a cell tower? You have a perfectly good internet connection that has global reach. The baseband (you know, the code that runs before anything else) firmware could have a mini TCP stack that contacts say Google/Apple's (or whoever keeps track of this) servers and asks if the phone is stolen. The server can then reply back with a simple signed packet that indicates the phone's status, and the phone can take action from there. Put this part of the firmware in OTPROM so that it can only be written once (which is done at the factory,) and also make it contain the main bootstrap so that phone can't boot without it, and then it can zero it out if it is ever reported as stolen (at which point it'll be so impractical/expensive to fix that the phone is effectively bricked.)
Granted it isn't the tracking solution you're looking for, it is a rather effective kill switch, and no matter how you modify the phone you can't defeat it (unless you never boot the phone again while a SIM card is still in it, in addition to adding kernel hacks that disable these checks while the OS is running.) Not only that, but it works everywhere barring some kind of firewall added by the carrier (unlikely.)
These stolen phones seldom end up being used again in the US though. China is a common destination.
Trouble is, stolen phones are being exported. Not a whole lot of use being able to forcibly track your phone when it now resides in China (literally, that's where they often go) especially considering that China doesn't extradite their own citizens or particularly even gives a shit when one of them breaks another country's laws.
What would they do, mandate that ISPs start filtering google.com?
I wouldn't rush to that judgement. We've seen people adapt to the craziest conditions within a single generation, for example the natives that live in the Andes actually have physical features that develop within literally one generation of living there (thicker skin on their feet, larger lung capacity, significantly shorter in stature.)
In addition to that, look at Pripyat. The place is toxic as hell, yet within about 15 years the place is abundant in wildlife. And we're not talking just little rodents and roaches, we're talking big game like bears and deer that not just live, but thrive there. Before making that observation, it was assumed that nothing could live there.
Humans are remarkably adaptable compared to most animals; I wouldn't be surprised if we pulled off something even more shocking than surviving in conditions like Pripyat. Sure, it would be painful as hell at first, but it would be overcome within only a few generations. What reinforces that notion is when you look at the sheer number of diseases we're immune to (Europeans at least.) We had to have seen a shitstorm of biological plagues besides just the black death, only they predate recorded history. (Hell, we carry 100,000 different partial virus genomes in our DNA, and that's only counting the ones that happened to get implanted into it and/or still remain in it to this day - only a teeny fraction of viruses we're exposed to end up actually doing that.)
I'm not a conservative so I don't speak for them, but I don't think conservatives are in favor of government sponsored monopolies or oligopolies, which is what this is. They sure made a lot of noise about how much they didn't want the ACA, that much is without a doubt.
As a libertarian, I believe pretty firmly that government sponsored monopolies are inherently bad, and I'm pretty sure that conservatives share the same view.
I can observe that, for example, Hollywood completely owns the democratic party. This is partly why copyright terms are now effectively unlimited (we just keep extending them every 20 years and there isn't any indication that this will stop) and likewise Obama completely bypassed the senate when he signed ACTA (which violates the constitution, by the way, the senate is supposed to ratify a treaty, not the president, rather the president either signs or vetoes it. When you read the letters that Hollywood unions and lobby groups signed to Obama, you can pretty clearly see why he rushed to ratify it by himself.)
You can make that choice if you want. You have the right to not vote if you want, but don't complain about what the politicians are doing if you take no part in selecting them.
Yes, because voting for a guy that I already know I'm going to be complaining about is such a brilliant plan.