It's not the viruses that are magically getting more clever, it's the virus and spam authors.
It's not as trivial a distinction as it seems. The article's comments are obvious when you look at it that way -- it's already well-known that organized crime and other crooks-who-know-what-they're-doing are getting involved. We've seen increasing numbers of very well-written, highly targeted attacks. It's not just Nigerian business deals any more.
This distinction goes to the core of how you fight spam and assorted malware. We're used to fighting the broadcast attack. For the targeted stuff, it's going to be doubly important to secure the computer that receives the messages or gets infected by the virus, and to decrease the amount of information that makes up the potential payoff. This is both for to prevent the crime, but also to reduce the incentive for this kind of attack in general....of course, how you do that without actually educating the less-than-savvy Common User is a daunting question, so we're probably screwed anyway. (Or at least, they are.)
Ok, everyone is saying this like it doesn't already happen? Ever walked down the street and seen someone on their phone? Or how about using your lappy at a wireless hub in some coffee shop? Right, and that's why I don't use public wireless unless absolutely necessary, or do anything other than routine appointments on the phone in public. People can usually find out what you're up to with some effort, but there's a big distinction between, say, intercepting wireless packets at your local coffeeshop, vs. vocally broadcasting cleartext. Eavesdropping is a crime of opportunity. I don't want cleartext broadcasting to be my dominant human-computer interaction paradigm.
The noisy room is close, but the mics that are expensive now won't be in the future, and they will all have noise canceling features on top of simply recognizing only your voice. Okay, the tech is coming, but it sounds expensive in equipment and processing, and my reward for adopting is that I get to whisper surreptitiously into a microphone. Why? I already type almost as fast as most people talk (certainly as fast as voice recognition software will be able to clearly recognize). So what if we can solve the problems -- it's better not to invent them in the first place.
I can see a limited application for people who have a private office and aren't fast typists or who need to produce texts for hours and hours straight -- i.e. the fatigue argument is the best one in favor of voice rec. But honestly, even if I am writing all day, it's not like I'm going continuously at 120 wpm. You've still got to think of what to say, right? And I do a lot of going back to edit/jumping around while I write. A phonetic stream is necessarily linear, in a way that really doesn't match my writing process so well (unless I want to be constantly issuing editing commands along with my text input, and switching between editing and writing modes -- which sounds like a vim-esque nightmare.)
I'm not saying vr is worthless, just that I think it's an incremental improvement in a certain niche, rather than a bold new concept set to revolutionize computing.
Parsing the archaic English is one thing; equally difficult is parsing the archaic society.
When that amendment was written, militias were a commonplace fact of life in the Colonies. For folks outside the big urban centers, a firearm (i.e. a rifle) wasn't strictly a military weapon, but a tool of everyday life, useful for protecting your property from strangers, hostile natives, and dangerous animals, as well as for hunting and guarding livestock. In short, it was something like a knife.
Modern weaponry is like a sword -- much less useful for most of the practical purposes, though most of the threats above no longer exist in any serious form anyway.
It is absolutely correct that oppressive governments have always tried to restrict people's access to force multipliers (i.e. weapons). But the ultimate determinant of a freedom defended by force of arms is not the arms involved, but the will to violence. The current American population has no will to violence; they would not shoot cops or soldiers or any officials at all, so it wouldn't matter if they had rocket launchers and grenade throwers and mustard gas; the authorities have nothing to fear. Conversely, if the people did have a will to violence, the only difference between an assault rifle and a lot of rocks is how many of the people would die before they won.
I'm not endorsing violent revolution or anything; I'm just saying that access to the means of war is immaterial; the means are always available to the creative, so a simplistic maxim like "guns = freedom" is silly and misguided.
you can't knock a technology because it's different or because it's not what you're used to. And that's a totally valid argument. My larger point was that there are some practical/implementation problems with the paradigm nonetheless, whether what they'd do to the workplace environment, or the advantages to existing paradigms that aren't immediately obvious (like, if I'm dictating all the time instead of using a keyboard, how do I write personal emails without broadcasting what I'm saying to everybody within earshot?, etc).
People are talking about making macros to open Notepad and how that's easier than just saying "open notepad". That's more of a work-around than ease of use.
I agree that macros are a little farfetched. However, input methods tend to run on a scale from power to ease-of-use-by-novice, with shell scripts on one end and voice recognition on the other; you slide up and down that scale by familiarity/knowledge. To open notepad, I don't need to write a macro; I just need to hit four keys (windows, P, right-arrow, enter) because I'm familiar with it and comfortable with it; this is perfectly fine and probably just as fast as a voice command (even without any special grammar I need to tell the computer that I want it to actually open notepad, rather than to write the phrase "open notepad" in my Firefox text pane.) Every means of communicating with a technological device is some kind of workaround, because we don't yet have the tech to think of what we want and have it automatically happen, as though the computer were an extension of the body. (And is that *really* a future we want...)
So you're totally right to point out that we shouldn't discount this paradigm, but it is also the case that there are legitimate problems that would need to be fixed or worked around before it could really compete with what we have, and denying that is somewhat disingenous.
Perhaps a better answer is that we should move towards a multi-modal way of interacting with our tools, so that I type commands replete with asterisks and regular expressions, but dictate anything long and natural-language-heavy? The keyboard is a flexible tool (as is the mouse) but it's silly to try to use just one tool for all the different ways we express our intentions.
...have you ever tried to use voice recognition technology in a noisy office? Right now I'm fortunate that I just have the vent fan humming and my neighbors clicking glasses, but then it's lunchtime, and half of my coworkers telecommute. If I were in a smaller or shared cube with a bunch of people trying to talk loudly and enunciate -- God, what a nightmare. Star Trek voice recognition is only cool because it apparently lacks any syntax above that of natural language, and problem solving is reduced to "Computer, solve this problem... thanks."
**
Never mind that TFA was apparently talking about mobiles or something -- yeah, sure, I want to be walking down the street announcing loudly to random strangers where I'm going and what I want for dinner.
[T]he Libertarian viewpoint is very well-defined, and not at all vague. As for whether it's "unworkable" or whether people can "get behind" it, well, that's debatable.
There's the crux. Libertarianism is a straightforward, clear-cut political philosophy that often serves the interests of vastly powerful non-governmental collectives that would (and increasingly do) limit individual freedoms far more effectively than do governments, without even the flimsy protection offered by voting rights.
Nihilism is also straightforward, easy to apply, and internally consistent, but what matters is whether something's right. Occam's Razor should shave only needless complexity.
Prisoners are risk-takers whose risks weren't well-chosen and didn't pan out so well (hence the whole "prison" thing). You really think they're the ideal population to found colonies in space?
Say the new world (Americas) were discovered today. Would it be foolish to send people over? Better to just send robots right?
You're being a little harsh to the New World here. Sure, it was totally different from the older European environment, but it had supported human life for substantially longer than Mars has (or will).
But many of us, believe that we need to move out. a) it protects our extinction from a catastrophic cosmic event b) it alleviates population issues
A) is potentially valid, although we're currently doing a much better job of destroying our only known habitat than any theoretical asteroid or space radiation beam; it is likely that "not killing ourselves" would pay better dividends in terms of our survival.
B) is fantasy without, like, four or five paradigm shifts. The world's population is what, like 6.6 billion? Let's assume nobody has any more babies from this day forward (though that would kind of obviate the need for population control), and that the current population is like, 15% over the Earth's carrying capacity (incredibly generous), that means we only have to ship like 990 million people out. The Gross Planetary Product in 2006 was something like $66 trillion. Let's assume we'll do the shipping over 10 years, and it's an important enough goal that we can devote 20% of world production to it; we have $132,000,000,000,000 to ship 990,000,000 people... so under all those optimistic conditions, we'll have a budget of about $135,000 per head to launch people into space and terraform another planet. Not going to happen. War, famine, genocide, and starvation are vastly cheaper means of population control (er, not to mention condoms, since legally I probably can't if I get federal funds) and, well, you know, got to maximize efficient use of shareholder^Wtaxpayer funds now...
Anyway, the task of terraforming is tremendous. I wonder if we wouldn't be better off finding a nice Earthlike planet 600 billion light-years away and sending a fleet of spacecraft to colonize. Sure, they'll never write home, but they'll have a better chance of really preventing an extinction event than we would by throwing humans onto Mars.
One begins to wonder what, exactly, would happen with all of the information that they gather from distant computers. Do the cops in question even have jurisdiction? Do the courts? Would Australian rules of evidence make any of this admissible?
It seems like the law would serve more to justify blackmail and harassment than to generate legitimate evidence. Unless, you know, they're looking for terrorists or something.
Yeah, see, in the absence of any presented evidence, it's unsupported charges made against a person with a Constitutional guarantee of the presumption of innocence. The whole point of presenting evidence and proving claims is that without evidence, those claims might not be true!
as long as you're not [accused of being] a terrorist... you can usually get a far [sic] deal from the Supreme Court.
AmeriKKKa etc America is not special in putting politics and power above justice; historically, courts which have put justice above the interests of the powerful are rare exceptions.
Heck, physics these days seems to be nothing more than experimental mathematics with string theory and the like....and that's precisely the kind of physics that may as well be philosophy, for all the science it actually does.
Would this be the same Supreme Court that feels that the President shouldn't have to present evidence to detain people arbitrarily and indefinitely? Or the one that believes that blatant evidence of a defendant being tortured while in custody has no bearing on the evidence received from that defendant?
Obviously justice says they should have to turn it over, but since when was the law ruled by justice?
Without being able to see those assessments (being changed to align with the new state standards by 2012) there is no real way for me to tell what they are really looking for teachers to teach.
Well, as it happens, I have written those assessments, fact-checked them, and worked with school boards on writing whole suites of them.
And they're written by independent contractor companies, often by people (myself and those I hired excluded) with substantially less experience or direct knowledge than they should have. In the case of science, the Standards themselves are often woefully inaccurate, even on pretty cut-and-dried things like physics; when they are not inaccurate, they are often stupid, trivial, or impossible to assess effectively in multiple-choice format.
The school boards, also, have no real idea where the Standards come from or what they're doing or why they exist. They are decided upon by committees of Educators (no one quite knows who), without substantial input from teachers or experts, often for political (in the office, not the national, sense) reasons. School boards may not even know about the Standards; I at one point had to find a published copy of some high school standards on Google because the Board in question didn't know what they were. The assessments used to measure and support the Standards are bankrupt as well; they're written on the cheap with little effective QA, they are constrained to a multiple-choice format that a monkey could ace, their question approval process is designed with schools' need-to-pass in mind, and the approval boards have a lowest-common-denominator c-y-a mindset that completely precludes whatever remaining hope the assessments had of usefulness.
But Standards and the assessments that back them up continue, because every parent agrees that we need to have standards (in the everyday sense), and because political needs cry out for measurable progress. When meaningful measurement is unavailable, we'll latch on to whatever meaningless numbers are available, if only to satisfy our desire for to quantify things and conclude that we must, therefore, understand them.
(generally defined as being passed on the right (because if traffic is passing you on the right, then you need to get the fuck over)
Caveat: there's been plenty of times I'm right at the speed limit in the middle lane (of 3) with nobody at all on my left, and people still feel obliged to pass on the right. This should be punished severely. I obey the speed limits (as should the rest of you yahoos, because it adds a good 5 mpg) but I stay out of the passing lane while I do it. There's no reason I should be driving in the merge/exit lane when the standard means of passing me is available, even if your rule would say I'm too slow.
Some people pass on the right just because they're douchebags.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now. Time should be something that always remains constant, so things can be kept in sync.
I am given to understand that all of China runs on Beijing time.
It is considered inconvenient by those living thousands of miles to the west.
Hunter College is the largest school in CUNY, NYC's public university system. So it's all publicly funded.
I'm pretty sure that the school administrators should have known better. New York does have Sunshine Laws, but I don't know the precise details, IANAL,JSGOSWHSBDRW. (....,Just Some Guy On Slashdot When He Should Be Doing Real Work)
Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff of windows XP and the real thing? Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff brake cleaner and a brand name brake cleaner?
Sure. The knockoff is cheaper.
Everything else is knowing when it pays to spend more and get quality. People generally know what is and is not worth paying more for -- and your examples to the contrary are things they have no control over (because they're paying someone else to fix their brakes, or because their health insurance will only cover Dr. Nick Riviera).
Human nature is to judge the cohort by its lowest extreme....and honestly? Even non-spoiled kids usually have trouble on planes, because the airline environment is distinctly uncomfortable. Lord knows I hated to fly as a kid. Parents should do their children and fellow travelers both a favor and avoid traveling with kids unless it's really, really necessary.
20 minutes is optimistic. I've had to have long long fights with check-in drones because they refused to let me attempt to get in the (ginormous) security line because I was only at the airport 45 minutes before my flight. Never mind that I was *waiting in the check-in line for the previous 20 minutes* so it was really their own delays that pushed me beyond their arbitrary rule... but, you know, if you fight long enough, you will get what you want, while delaying everybody else and further gumming up the entire system. Perverse incentivization ftw.
Of course this was JFK, so you have to expect a certain degree of getting screwed.
Opening your doors to such nations doesn't encourage them, it makes them interdependant, and exposes them to better systems. Just look at China - they are by no means perfect, but exposure to the free market has changed them drastically.
Don't kid yourself. After Tiananmen, the Chinese government made a tacit deal with the citizenry: we'll open to economic liberalization, so those of you living in the major coastalish cities can get rich, and in exchange, you DO NOT TALK ABOUT DEMOCRACY.
And, lo and behold, the run-of-the-mill folk in the major coastalish cities are now so busy getting rich that they mostly don't talk about democracy. Tiananmen was nearly 20 years ago, and people just don't talk about it or its issues, still.
There is a necessary back-and-forth here. By opening up trade to let them get rich off us, we've lured them in. We embraced the knife so they don't have room to cut with it. Now, if we want social change over there, we have to be willing to cut them off, which is exactly what economic sanctions would do. They would break the CCP's deal with the people; and all those newly wealthy Chinese people would ensure that the topic of democracy came up again.
The EU might be able to do this. The US can't, because at this point we embraced the knife right between our ribs, and I don't know if we could even afford to cut them off without screwing over our own economy. In fact, I wouldn't be *that* surprised if the US government implemented certain "free speech restrictions" over here if China demanded it. Lord knows plenty of our companies are all too happy to help out.
Can you give me a practical example of how formal set theory applies to an everyday computing task in a way that need concern an average user? I understand your generalization -- data-centered computing is about doing transforms on sets of data -- but I think I'm missing the significance of your point in the abstraction.
Yeah... it's pretty hard to deter somebody who doesn't care if he dies. And, y'know, maybe this just matters to them more than it should matter to us -- but either way, like you say, this is something that has to be solved outside the military, and in the mean time I'm sorry you guys have to keep taking it on the chin. (I mean I guess it's not so bad in MN, but you know, the forces as a whole).
it again diminishes God's direct role as our immediate creator
Although, note that this is only really a problem not because it alters people's ideas of God, but because it alters what religion does for people.
The Abrahamic religions are based on the idea of God's Chosen People, whether that's a God who gives you stuff if you're good, or a God who will give you immortality as a reward for believing in him. If people are epiphenomena in God's big experiment, then we no longer have a personal God who loves us, an interventional God who makes our personal lives better (or at least comforts us with a "plan" when our lives suck), and most importantly a God who promises us immortality. And people go to religion for the promise of assistance, unconditional love, and immortality, none of which a Deist God really offers.
What you're saying applies domestically, too: our own democratic society rests on the force of the state, on the threat of violence from authority (the police, the courts). But a lot of that threatened violence prevents real violence of other kinds (can you imagine $megaCorp would do if it could just rip you off the street and take your lunch money with no consequences?)
I agree with much of what you say, however:
I say that you are protected from your humanity by those of us who go out and do your killing and pillaging for you. If we didn't do it, you would be forced to. And if you refused, you would be trampled into the ground.
You're missing out on one point a little bit here, which is deterrence. No animal could survive the evolutionary gauntlet if it fought to the death over things that weren't worth dying for; and the greater the risk of injury, the more likely the rewards of victory aren't worth it. So the fact that we have folks like you -- or, as you later argue, like us -- who are ready to kill, means that others are correspondingly less likely to make us have to. Not that war is impossible unless it's misguided (obviously it's not); but it's rarer than a pure "kill-or-be-killed" logic would suggest.
Conflict is decided as more by the credible threat of violence than by actual violence. When someone powerful says "screw threat displays; I'll just shiv you in the night" you get Stalinism: a state that is threatening because it lacks a credible warning to back down, and that ultimately undermines its own power because it kills so many of its own people.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the viruses that are magically getting more clever, it's the virus and spam authors.
...of course, how you do that without actually educating the less-than-savvy Common User is a daunting question, so we're probably screwed anyway. (Or at least, they are.)
It's not as trivial a distinction as it seems. The article's comments are obvious when you look at it that way -- it's already well-known that organized crime and other crooks-who-know-what-they're-doing are getting involved. We've seen increasing numbers of very well-written, highly targeted attacks. It's not just Nigerian business deals any more.
This distinction goes to the core of how you fight spam and assorted malware. We're used to fighting the broadcast attack. For the targeted stuff, it's going to be doubly important to secure the computer that receives the messages or gets infected by the virus, and to decrease the amount of information that makes up the potential payoff. This is both for to prevent the crime, but also to reduce the incentive for this kind of attack in general.
Ok, everyone is saying this like it doesn't already happen? Ever walked down the street and seen someone on their phone? Or how about using your lappy at a wireless hub in some coffee shop?
Right, and that's why I don't use public wireless unless absolutely necessary, or do anything other than routine appointments on the phone in public. People can usually find out what you're up to with some effort, but there's a big distinction between, say, intercepting wireless packets at your local coffeeshop, vs. vocally broadcasting cleartext. Eavesdropping is a crime of opportunity. I don't want cleartext broadcasting to be my dominant human-computer interaction paradigm.
The noisy room is close, but the mics that are expensive now won't be in the future, and they will all have noise canceling features on top of simply recognizing only your voice.
Okay, the tech is coming, but it sounds expensive in equipment and processing, and my reward for adopting is that I get to whisper surreptitiously into a microphone. Why? I already type almost as fast as most people talk (certainly as fast as voice recognition software will be able to clearly recognize). So what if we can solve the problems -- it's better not to invent them in the first place.
I can see a limited application for people who have a private office and aren't fast typists or who need to produce texts for hours and hours straight -- i.e. the fatigue argument is the best one in favor of voice rec. But honestly, even if I am writing all day, it's not like I'm going continuously at 120 wpm. You've still got to think of what to say, right? And I do a lot of going back to edit/jumping around while I write. A phonetic stream is necessarily linear, in a way that really doesn't match my writing process so well (unless I want to be constantly issuing editing commands along with my text input, and switching between editing and writing modes -- which sounds like a vim-esque nightmare.)
I'm not saying vr is worthless, just that I think it's an incremental improvement in a certain niche, rather than a bold new concept set to revolutionize computing.
Parsing the archaic English is one thing; equally difficult is parsing the archaic society.
When that amendment was written, militias were a commonplace fact of life in the Colonies. For folks outside the big urban centers, a firearm (i.e. a rifle) wasn't strictly a military weapon, but a tool of everyday life, useful for protecting your property from strangers, hostile natives, and dangerous animals, as well as for hunting and guarding livestock. In short, it was something like a knife.
Modern weaponry is like a sword -- much less useful for most of the practical purposes, though most of the threats above no longer exist in any serious form anyway.
It is absolutely correct that oppressive governments have always tried to restrict people's access to force multipliers (i.e. weapons). But the ultimate determinant of a freedom defended by force of arms is not the arms involved, but the will to violence. The current American population has no will to violence; they would not shoot cops or soldiers or any officials at all, so it wouldn't matter if they had rocket launchers and grenade throwers and mustard gas; the authorities have nothing to fear. Conversely, if the people did have a will to violence, the only difference between an assault rifle and a lot of rocks is how many of the people would die before they won.
I'm not endorsing violent revolution or anything; I'm just saying that access to the means of war is immaterial; the means are always available to the creative, so a simplistic maxim like "guns = freedom" is silly and misguided.
you can't knock a technology because it's different or because it's not what you're used to.
And that's a totally valid argument. My larger point was that there are some practical/implementation problems with the paradigm nonetheless, whether what they'd do to the workplace environment, or the advantages to existing paradigms that aren't immediately obvious (like, if I'm dictating all the time instead of using a keyboard, how do I write personal emails without broadcasting what I'm saying to everybody within earshot?, etc).
People are talking about making macros to open Notepad and how that's easier than just saying "open notepad". That's more of a work-around than ease of use.
I agree that macros are a little farfetched. However, input methods tend to run on a scale from power to ease-of-use-by-novice, with shell scripts on one end and voice recognition on the other; you slide up and down that scale by familiarity/knowledge. To open notepad, I don't need to write a macro; I just need to hit four keys (windows, P, right-arrow, enter) because I'm familiar with it and comfortable with it; this is perfectly fine and probably just as fast as a voice command (even without any special grammar I need to tell the computer that I want it to actually open notepad, rather than to write the phrase "open notepad" in my Firefox text pane.) Every means of communicating with a technological device is some kind of workaround, because we don't yet have the tech to think of what we want and have it automatically happen, as though the computer were an extension of the body. (And is that *really* a future we want...)
So you're totally right to point out that we shouldn't discount this paradigm, but it is also the case that there are legitimate problems that would need to be fixed or worked around before it could really compete with what we have, and denying that is somewhat disingenous.
Perhaps a better answer is that we should move towards a multi-modal way of interacting with our tools, so that I type commands replete with asterisks and regular expressions, but dictate anything long and natural-language-heavy? The keyboard is a flexible tool (as is the mouse) but it's silly to try to use just one tool for all the different ways we express our intentions.
...have you ever tried to use voice recognition technology in a noisy office? Right now I'm fortunate that I just have the vent fan humming and my neighbors clicking glasses, but then it's lunchtime, and half of my coworkers telecommute. If I were in a smaller or shared cube with a bunch of people trying to talk loudly and enunciate -- God, what a nightmare.
Star Trek voice recognition is only cool because it apparently lacks any syntax above that of natural language, and problem solving is reduced to "Computer, solve this problem... thanks."
**
Never mind that TFA was apparently talking about mobiles or something -- yeah, sure, I want to be walking down the street announcing loudly to random strangers where I'm going and what I want for dinner.
[T]he Libertarian viewpoint is very well-defined, and not at all vague. As for whether it's "unworkable" or whether people can "get behind" it, well, that's debatable.
There's the crux. Libertarianism is a straightforward, clear-cut political philosophy that often serves the interests of vastly powerful non-governmental collectives that would (and increasingly do) limit individual freedoms far more effectively than do governments, without even the flimsy protection offered by voting rights.
Nihilism is also straightforward, easy to apply, and internally consistent, but what matters is whether something's right. Occam's Razor should shave only needless complexity.
Prisoners are risk-takers whose risks weren't well-chosen and didn't pan out so well (hence the whole "prison" thing). You really think they're the ideal population to found colonies in space?
Say the new world (Americas) were discovered today. Would it be foolish to send people over? Better to just send robots right?
You're being a little harsh to the New World here. Sure, it was totally different from the older European environment, but it had supported human life for substantially longer than Mars has (or will).
But many of us, believe that we need to move out.
a) it protects our extinction from a catastrophic cosmic event
b) it alleviates population issues
A) is potentially valid, although we're currently doing a much better job of destroying our only known habitat than any theoretical asteroid or space radiation beam; it is likely that "not killing ourselves" would pay better dividends in terms of our survival.
B) is fantasy without, like, four or five paradigm shifts. The world's population is what, like 6.6 billion? Let's assume nobody has any more babies from this day forward (though that would kind of obviate the need for population control), and that the current population is like, 15% over the Earth's carrying capacity (incredibly generous), that means we only have to ship like 990 million people out. The Gross Planetary Product in 2006 was something like $66 trillion. Let's assume we'll do the shipping over 10 years, and it's an important enough goal that we can devote 20% of world production to it; we have $132,000,000,000,000 to ship 990,000,000 people... so under all those optimistic conditions, we'll have a budget of about $135,000 per head to launch people into space and terraform another planet. Not going to happen. War, famine, genocide, and starvation are vastly cheaper means of population control (er, not to mention condoms, since legally I probably can't if I get federal funds) and, well, you know, got to maximize efficient use of shareholder^Wtaxpayer funds now...
Anyway, the task of terraforming is tremendous. I wonder if we wouldn't be better off finding a nice Earthlike planet 600 billion light-years away and sending a fleet of spacecraft to colonize. Sure, they'll never write home, but they'll have a better chance of really preventing an extinction event than we would by throwing humans onto Mars.
One begins to wonder what, exactly, would happen with all of the information that they gather from distant computers. Do the cops in question even have jurisdiction? Do the courts? Would Australian rules of evidence make any of this admissible?
It seems like the law would serve more to justify blackmail and harassment than to generate legitimate evidence. Unless, you know, they're looking for terrorists or something.
Yeah, see, that's terrorism.
Yeah, see, in the absence of any presented evidence, it's unsupported charges made against a person with a Constitutional guarantee of the presumption of innocence. The whole point of presenting evidence and proving claims is that without evidence, those claims might not be true!
as long as you're not [accused of being] a terrorist... you can usually get a far [sic] deal from the Supreme Court.
And as long as you're not the owner of a home that a major developer wants to demolish, or an American citizen of Japanese descent, or a person bound to involuntary servitude... c'mon, the Supreme Court is as fallible and subject to influence from money and politics as any other human institution.
AmeriKKKa etc
America is not special in putting politics and power above justice; historically, courts which have put justice above the interests of the powerful are rare exceptions.
Heck, physics these days seems to be nothing more than experimental mathematics with string theory and the like. ...and that's precisely the kind of physics that may as well be philosophy, for all the science it actually does.
Would this be the same Supreme Court that feels that the President shouldn't have to present evidence to detain people arbitrarily and indefinitely? Or the one that believes that blatant evidence of a defendant being tortured while in custody has no bearing on the evidence received from that defendant?
Obviously justice says they should have to turn it over, but since when was the law ruled by justice?
Without being able to see those assessments (being changed to align with the new state standards by 2012) there is no real way for me to tell what they are really looking for teachers to teach.
Well, as it happens, I have written those assessments, fact-checked them, and worked with school boards on writing whole suites of them.
And they're written by independent contractor companies, often by people (myself and those I hired excluded) with substantially less experience or direct knowledge than they should have. In the case of science, the Standards themselves are often woefully inaccurate, even on pretty cut-and-dried things like physics; when they are not inaccurate, they are often stupid, trivial, or impossible to assess effectively in multiple-choice format.
The school boards, also, have no real idea where the Standards come from or what they're doing or why they exist. They are decided upon by committees of Educators (no one quite knows who), without substantial input from teachers or experts, often for political (in the office, not the national, sense) reasons. School boards may not even know about the Standards; I at one point had to find a published copy of some high school standards on Google because the Board in question didn't know what they were. The assessments used to measure and support the Standards are bankrupt as well; they're written on the cheap with little effective QA, they are constrained to a multiple-choice format that a monkey could ace, their question approval process is designed with schools' need-to-pass in mind, and the approval boards have a lowest-common-denominator c-y-a mindset that completely precludes whatever remaining hope the assessments had of usefulness.
But Standards and the assessments that back them up continue, because every parent agrees that we need to have standards (in the everyday sense), and because political needs cry out for measurable progress. When meaningful measurement is unavailable, we'll latch on to whatever meaningless numbers are available, if only to satisfy our desire for to quantify things and conclude that we must, therefore, understand them.
(generally defined as being passed on the right (because if traffic is passing you on the right, then you need to get the fuck over)
Caveat: there's been plenty of times I'm right at the speed limit in the middle lane (of 3) with nobody at all on my left, and people still feel obliged to pass on the right. This should be punished severely. I obey the speed limits (as should the rest of you yahoos, because it adds a good 5 mpg) but I stay out of the passing lane while I do it. There's no reason I should be driving in the merge/exit lane when the standard means of passing me is available, even if your rule would say I'm too slow.
Some people pass on the right just because they're douchebags.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now. Time should be something that always remains constant, so things can be kept in sync.
I am given to understand that all of China runs on Beijing time.
It is considered inconvenient by those living thousands of miles to the west.
Clearly the answer is to do all scheduling based upon a fixed time source. Pick a WoW server and use that as "official time."
This could not possibly lead to productivity issues.
Hunter College is the largest school in CUNY, NYC's public university system. So it's all publicly funded.
I'm pretty sure that the school administrators should have known better. New York does have Sunshine Laws, but I don't know the precise details, IANAL,JSGOSWHSBDRW. (....,Just Some Guy On Slashdot When He Should Be Doing Real Work)
Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff of windows XP and the real thing? Can you tell me the difference between a knockoff brake cleaner and a brand name brake cleaner?
Sure. The knockoff is cheaper.
Everything else is knowing when it pays to spend more and get quality. People generally know what is and is not worth paying more for -- and your examples to the contrary are things they have no control over (because they're paying someone else to fix their brakes, or because their health insurance will only cover Dr. Nick Riviera).
Human nature is to judge the cohort by its lowest extreme. ...and honestly? Even non-spoiled kids usually have trouble on planes, because the airline environment is distinctly uncomfortable. Lord knows I hated to fly as a kid. Parents should do their children and fellow travelers both a favor and avoid traveling with kids unless it's really, really necessary.
20 minutes is optimistic. I've had to have long long fights with check-in drones because they refused to let me attempt to get in the (ginormous) security line because I was only at the airport 45 minutes before my flight. Never mind that I was *waiting in the check-in line for the previous 20 minutes* so it was really their own delays that pushed me beyond their arbitrary rule... but, you know, if you fight long enough, you will get what you want, while delaying everybody else and further gumming up the entire system. Perverse incentivization ftw.
Of course this was JFK, so you have to expect a certain degree of getting screwed.
Opening your doors to such nations doesn't encourage them, it makes them interdependant, and exposes them to better systems. Just look at China - they are by no means perfect, but exposure to the free market has changed them drastically.
Don't kid yourself. After Tiananmen, the Chinese government made a tacit deal with the citizenry: we'll open to economic liberalization, so those of you living in the major coastalish cities can get rich, and in exchange, you DO NOT TALK ABOUT DEMOCRACY.
And, lo and behold, the run-of-the-mill folk in the major coastalish cities are now so busy getting rich that they mostly don't talk about democracy. Tiananmen was nearly 20 years ago, and people just don't talk about it or its issues, still.
There is a necessary back-and-forth here. By opening up trade to let them get rich off us, we've lured them in. We embraced the knife so they don't have room to cut with it. Now, if we want social change over there, we have to be willing to cut them off, which is exactly what economic sanctions would do. They would break the CCP's deal with the people; and all those newly wealthy Chinese people would ensure that the topic of democracy came up again.
The EU might be able to do this. The US can't, because at this point we embraced the knife right between our ribs, and I don't know if we could even afford to cut them off without screwing over our own economy. In fact, I wouldn't be *that* surprised if the US government implemented certain "free speech restrictions" over here if China demanded it. Lord knows plenty of our companies are all too happy to help out.
Can you give me a practical example of how formal set theory applies to an everyday computing task in a way that need concern an average user? I understand your generalization -- data-centered computing is about doing transforms on sets of data -- but I think I'm missing the significance of your point in the abstraction.
Yeah... it's pretty hard to deter somebody who doesn't care if he dies. And, y'know, maybe this just matters to them more than it should matter to us -- but either way, like you say, this is something that has to be solved outside the military, and in the mean time I'm sorry you guys have to keep taking it on the chin. (I mean I guess it's not so bad in MN, but you know, the forces as a whole).
it again diminishes God's direct role as our immediate creator
Although, note that this is only really a problem not because it alters people's ideas of God, but because it alters what religion does for people.
The Abrahamic religions are based on the idea of God's Chosen People, whether that's a God who gives you stuff if you're good, or a God who will give you immortality as a reward for believing in him. If people are epiphenomena in God's big experiment, then we no longer have a personal God who loves us, an interventional God who makes our personal lives better (or at least comforts us with a "plan" when our lives suck), and most importantly a God who promises us immortality. And people go to religion for the promise of assistance, unconditional love, and immortality, none of which a Deist God really offers.
What you're saying applies domestically, too: our own democratic society rests on the force of the state, on the threat of violence from authority (the police, the courts). But a lot of that threatened violence prevents real violence of other kinds (can you imagine $megaCorp would do if it could just rip you off the street and take your lunch money with no consequences?)
I agree with much of what you say, however:
I say that you are protected from your humanity by those of us who go out and do your killing and pillaging for you. If we didn't do it, you would be forced to. And if you refused, you would be trampled into the ground.
You're missing out on one point a little bit here, which is deterrence. No animal could survive the evolutionary gauntlet if it fought to the death over things that weren't worth dying for; and the greater the risk of injury, the more likely the rewards of victory aren't worth it. So the fact that we have folks like you -- or, as you later argue, like us -- who are ready to kill, means that others are correspondingly less likely to make us have to. Not that war is impossible unless it's misguided (obviously it's not); but it's rarer than a pure "kill-or-be-killed" logic would suggest.
Conflict is decided as more by the credible threat of violence than by actual violence. When someone powerful says "screw threat displays; I'll just shiv you in the night" you get Stalinism: a state that is threatening because it lacks a credible warning to back down, and that ultimately undermines its own power because it kills so many of its own people.