Why? No one has explained why anything needs to be done at all. It's all "rich people are making money therefore we need to screw it up for them".
Money is a form of power. Letting the rich get richer without limit lets them concentrate power in their hands without limit. This, in turn, leads to a dictatorship: it's not exactly a secret that the Government does whatever it's corporate masters tell it to.
Besides, stock market is a zero-sum game. It generates no value, therefore every single cent a HFT makes comes out of someone else's pocket. So if the rich get richer the poor get poorer and suffer needless economic hardship, all just a few people can live in a lap of luxury.
It's about time to acknowledge that the 1% are waging a class war against the rest of humanity and start fighting back. Or at least I will; you, of course, are free to lick the boot that stomps on your face, if it makes you feel you're vicariously succesful.
This situations is akin to suing Wal-Mart for food poisoning instead of suing the company that made the food.
Which is actually correct. Wal-Mart sold you the food, so you sue Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart can then turn around and sue the food manufacturer, if they think the food was bad to begin rather than, say, mishandled by Wal-Mart. But that's between them and no longer involves you.
That's how delivery chains work: products travel down, money and blame travel up.
Regan completely missed the point. Sure, he said we must avoid nuclear war at all costs, but he also did so by making sure we had a nuclear first and second strike capability (aka MAD)
This is not dissimilar to claiming that we must do everything in our power to prevent AI powered robots from taking over the world, and to assure they do not, we will build an AI powered robot army to prevent it from happening.
Actually, it is completely different. In the case of AI overlords, none exists until you build them. In the case of nuclear weapons, both sides had an arsenal by the time Reagan came to power. At that point you either trust in the goodness of heart of the other side, or ensure they can't get away with starting anything. Which is a horrible trap to be in, but it's also not something you can solve by unilaterally lowering your guard because the temptation just might prove too much for your enemies to resist. It takes negotiation and a gradual, stepped retreat to go to something more sane.
After all, the United States had already proven that they were willing to use nukes to win a war when safe from return fire. Why would the Soviets be any less so? They certainly believed in their cause.
The mind truly boggles at the logic such people use.
But it shouldn't. It's the logic of a stalemated duel where both know that whoever gets shot first still has time to fire a perfectly aimed shot - but only if they keep their gun on their opponent. Thus neither can pull the trigger, nor can either lower their gun. It's the circumstances - the duel, or the Cold War - that are idiotic, not the people caught in them.
If it can charge a smart phone, is it enough energy to burn you if you get in the way, or start a fire if it happens to be going through a nail in your wall?
It's impossible to say without getting numbers, which the article doesn't provide. However, I very much doubt a wall socket can supply sufficient power to cause burns fast enough that you wouldn't feel uncomfortable and move away first. A 100% efficient water heater takes everal minutes to boil a litre of water; your body is made mostly of water, so it would be almost as hard to heat; and the power beam is unlikely to have a 100% absorbtion rate.
The comment you're replying to was in response to somebody claiming that in order to disable the instruction entirely, you only have to pass an argument to the kernel. Clearly, that doesn't disable it entirely, as stated in the comment that he pasted into his own reply.
The petition, this thread and the comment you replied to were all talking about the kernel and the random numbers it provides through/dev/random. So, in the context of this discussion, passing an argument to the kernel does disable RDRAND completely. This is a bit too obvious to believe you're arguing in good faith here.
Of course, this being Slashdot, people don't give a shit about context, and reading is for the weak.
They didn't make the Breaking Bad series, they're not the ones who decided to split up the season in two.
They are, however, the ones who run the store that sold it to the customer. That makes it their problem.
What's next, suing Apple because the new pop music album is crap?
No, but if they sell a 16-track album and then inform the buyer that he'll have to fork over extra cash for the last 8 tracks, they should be sued.
Seriously, how can even an Apple fanatic defend outright fraud? One would think you'd at the very least want to ensure that the iBoxes you take home actually contain the iDevice you thought you bought, rather than an iSlip telling you to send more money to actually receive it (or an empty postal package containing another note - why quit a winning strategy?). Or do you get paid for defending them and couldn't come up with anything better?
If there were some terrorists going to blow up thousands of people... I'd want there to be a way to stop that. But I generally want to be personally left alone to do what I want.
As the last 10+ years have proven beyond any shadow of doubt, that's not possible. You either have the Lidless Eye watching everything you do and occasionally catching bad guys, or you don't. Even if we assume a hypothethical intelligence agent who's absolutely immune to corruption, they still have no magical ability to tell whether you're a terrorist or not until they've already searched you.
the Chinese government has for a long time had an active policy of protecting minorities, their cultures and languages.
I find that statement extremely difficult to believe.
And I think it is worth remembering that it was us proud, freedom-loving and democratic Westerners that went about ttrying to strangle local dialects and minority languages: in UK Welsh and Gaelic were suppressed, the Danes tried to eradicate inuit in Greenland, etc etc.
And apparently you do too, since you immediately start making excuses for them. Not that Danish or British doing bad things to fourth parties actually excuses anything the Chinese might do to unrelated ones.
Nobody's going to change their mind on the subject at this point.
Nobody's going to chance their mind on religion, politics, or superiority of programming languages either, so what does that leave for Slashdot to discuss? Or any Internet forum, for that matter?
Besides, I very much doubt most people have any kind of opinion on the incident itself, simply because they don't know the participants. Rather, taking a side is a symbolic gesture which allows people to define their own identity in a binary fashion, which seems quite popular in America. The question is, then: what does siding with either Zimmerman or Trayvon mean? What are people using them as symbols for? That's certainly an interesting philosophical, ethical and psychological question, especially since the facts of the case are anyone's guess, thus there's less need to twist them than when discussing a typical political act.
But seriously, I use the stock fan/heatsink that comes with the CPU and even with video encoding pushing all 6 cores to almost 100% I have no problems. "High End CPU Cooler" is as much of a scam as "High End Bottled Water".
A high-end CPU cooler gets the same cooling with less noise than the stock one. Not everything is about raw power.
It's hard to make a living as a mugger if you only prowl the neighborhood where you are on the neighborhood watch.
Why would you? Do the Stand Your Ground laws require you to be part of one to stand it? If they do, what is is the legal definition of "neighborhood watch" - could you form one? Remember, it's the law, it deals with such interesting questions as what the meaning of the word "is" is.
Also, people might start to notice when you are killing dozens of people in self defense.
You're really unlucky, which is hardly beyond reasonable suspicion, especially in a bad neighborhood with muggers and all. If it is, at what specific point (how many corpses) does it go beyond reasonable doubt and why (legal reason, please)?
Also, it's kind of hard to get them to jump on top of you and pound your head into the concrete.
Do the Stand Your Ground laws require you to receive physical injury before standing it? The other guy came at you with fists swinging but you were quicker. Prove that wrong in a court.
See Robert Heinlein's book "Take Back Your Government" for details.
I remember reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". I'm not so sure I'd want political reform to take cues from someone who was obviously quite enamored with the benevolent dictator archetype.
And what happens if he refuses? Is he "disappeared"?
Or has an accident. Or an anonymous tip results in a raid that optionally kills him and reveals a meth lab at his home. Or child porn on his computer. Or he is accused of rape or molesting children and gets put to the sex offender registry. Or a kin of his dies and it's discovered he took a life insurance in their name a month earlier.
A good part of the reason Zimmerman was acquitted was because of the lack of evidence for all these lazy-ass assertions.
I think we're far past the point where anyone's the least bit interested in evidence. Instead, everyone who talks about this case simply makes up stuff - often ludicrously detailed - to support their own notions, often twisted by insane troll logic (no, you don't really want Zimmerman to be the poster boy for gun rights, now do you?).
Which is why I think this asteroid should be named "Trayvon-Zimmerman". Human capacity for self-deception certainly deserves a monument, and if irony is on our side archeologists in a few (dozen) generations might well promote it to an actual Greek god.
You could move somewhere cheaper, live with a ton of roommates, etc..
Moving requires money. Commuting requires money. And whether you can live with a roommate or several is not up to you, it's up to your landlord, who has a vested interest to make all of you rent a separate apartment.
As many others have said, what "poor" people in the U.S. have is extravagant to much of the rest of the world.
No matter how bad things are, there's always someone else who has it even worse. In all of human history there's been exactly one person who that doesn't apply to, by definition. So it's an idiotic argument.
If they are spending every single cent and have NOTHING to save (no Starbucks, no cable, no expensive cell phone, etc..), then I guess you have a point.
It's not possible to cut of all pleasures from your life and stay even remotely functional. But even if it was, not only would it likely lead to a rebellion (because if you have nothing to lose except your chains, what's stopping you?) but it would also utterly destroy economy by killing demand for pretty much anything.
I personally think it's the parents' responsibility to put their kids through college (bachelor's degree).
Colleges have limited admission, so it isn't possible to push everyone through them. And if you increase the admission to the point where it will, the degree becomes meaningless - it'll be the new high school diploma.
The banks / credit unions should just drop the cost of wire transfers, and be done with it; the result would probably destroy PayPal in a week, provided the cost was low enough, and painless enough...
Well, either they do it or Bitcoin will. It still requires an auxiliary receipt system to faciliate settling disputes - something like "the signee agrees to deliver X goods within Y days of payment of N bitcoins to adress M, on the condition that the payment happens by Z", signed with the merchant's public key. Integrate that to the existing sertificate system and the Bitcoin client (so that you can download the contract file, inspect it within the client, and accept it for payment) and it becomes both more secure and convenient than PayPal, Visa or even going through banks for wire transfer.
They should use their savings, which they should have, to pay for education, even if a trade school, for a better job.
Saving up requires having disposable income.
Instead, they should have gone to college in the first place and gotten a degree, instead of expecting a lifetime manual labor job that could eventually be replaced by robots.
Going to college requires disposable income. Well, at least in the US it does. That might have to change if you want to stay competitive.
Also, everyone does not have what it takes to be an engineer or an artist. But they still have to eat, too. Do you think they will just quietly lay down and die when the society doesn't need their work anymore? Should they just lay down and die? Just because that happens to be convenient for the rest of us?
We need to start seriously thinking how to rearrange our economy in a world where human labour is no longer scarce, and is in fact quickly becoming redundant. Failure to do so is unlikely to result in an optimal outcome for any value of optimal anyone would care to get behind.
The other alternative is to not turn things that do not absolutely have to be done by the government into another government bureaucracy.
There is no such thing as "absolutely have to". You don't absolutely have to eat; you'll die if you don't, but that's just a matter of consequences which you would likely find unpleasant. And in some cases it might be better to go hungry for a while rather than eat unhealthy or downright poisonous food. It's the same with government: you have to actually think about the consequences of taking one option or another, not just pick an ideology such as minarchism and shoot it at every problem like it was a silver bullet. That's been done, over and over again, and it's always been a disaster.
Bureaucracy is a necessary evil. Let us do our best to keep it as small as possible though.
And this is another thing: why do you consider bureaucracy to be evil? What is it that you're trying to achieve by minimising it? I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here and assuming you're not just trying to get people killed, as your original post would lead me to think.
The alternative to bureaucracy is that some guy makes the decisions by himself. He dictates them. Let's call him "the dicatotor", shall we? Or we could go with anarchy and let the guy with the biggest stick take over.
Congratulations, you're one of the "fucking idiots" who "need to die", according to yourself. But the problem is that you'll take more people with you and fuck things up on your way out even for those left behind. Which is why we need the warning labels on things and why the cold, unfeeling, bean-counting rationality of bureaucracy demands them to be there, even when morons like you might feel emotional distress at the terrifying thought of people continuing to draw breath despite failing some arbitrary witness test based on an imaginary alternative reality where humans aren't social animals yet somehow still developed culture.
Count yourself lucky that some of us are capable of thinking beyond our gut reactions, you creep.
Slashdot Mirror
Money is a form of power. Letting the rich get richer without limit lets them concentrate power in their hands without limit. This, in turn, leads to a dictatorship: it's not exactly a secret that the Government does whatever it's corporate masters tell it to.
Besides, stock market is a zero-sum game. It generates no value, therefore every single cent a HFT makes comes out of someone else's pocket. So if the rich get richer the poor get poorer and suffer needless economic hardship, all just a few people can live in a lap of luxury.
It's about time to acknowledge that the 1% are waging a class war against the rest of humanity and start fighting back. Or at least I will; you, of course, are free to lick the boot that stomps on your face, if it makes you feel you're vicariously succesful.
And suddenly we have a perfect way to summarize the WH40k universe...
Penrose is an advocate of mind is quantum magic, because otherwise my mad math skills would be bound by the laws of logic" -theory. I suggest a certain amount of scepticism regarding any claim of his which isn't accompanied by mathematical proof, especially when said claims would be equally at home in a New Age religious text.
Which is actually correct. Wal-Mart sold you the food, so you sue Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart can then turn around and sue the food manufacturer, if they think the food was bad to begin rather than, say, mishandled by Wal-Mart. But that's between them and no longer involves you.
That's how delivery chains work: products travel down, money and blame travel up.
Actually, it is completely different. In the case of AI overlords, none exists until you build them. In the case of nuclear weapons, both sides had an arsenal by the time Reagan came to power. At that point you either trust in the goodness of heart of the other side, or ensure they can't get away with starting anything. Which is a horrible trap to be in, but it's also not something you can solve by unilaterally lowering your guard because the temptation just might prove too much for your enemies to resist. It takes negotiation and a gradual, stepped retreat to go to something more sane.
After all, the United States had already proven that they were willing to use nukes to win a war when safe from return fire. Why would the Soviets be any less so? They certainly believed in their cause.
But it shouldn't. It's the logic of a stalemated duel where both know that whoever gets shot first still has time to fire a perfectly aimed shot - but only if they keep their gun on their opponent. Thus neither can pull the trigger, nor can either lower their gun. It's the circumstances - the duel, or the Cold War - that are idiotic, not the people caught in them.
It's impossible to say without getting numbers, which the article doesn't provide. However, I very much doubt a wall socket can supply sufficient power to cause burns fast enough that you wouldn't feel uncomfortable and move away first. A 100% efficient water heater takes everal minutes to boil a litre of water; your body is made mostly of water, so it would be almost as hard to heat; and the power beam is unlikely to have a 100% absorbtion rate.
The petition, this thread and the comment you replied to were all talking about the kernel and the random numbers it provides through /dev/random. So, in the context of this discussion, passing an argument to the kernel does disable RDRAND completely. This is a bit too obvious to believe you're arguing in good faith here.
Indeed.
Dynamic query generation? The literal might actually be a variable on the client side - say, the contents of some optional string.
They are, however, the ones who run the store that sold it to the customer. That makes it their problem.
No, but if they sell a 16-track album and then inform the buyer that he'll have to fork over extra cash for the last 8 tracks, they should be sued.
Seriously, how can even an Apple fanatic defend outright fraud? One would think you'd at the very least want to ensure that the iBoxes you take home actually contain the iDevice you thought you bought, rather than an iSlip telling you to send more money to actually receive it (or an empty postal package containing another note - why quit a winning strategy?). Or do you get paid for defending them and couldn't come up with anything better?
As the last 10+ years have proven beyond any shadow of doubt, that's not possible. You either have the Lidless Eye watching everything you do and occasionally catching bad guys, or you don't. Even if we assume a hypothethical intelligence agent who's absolutely immune to corruption, they still have no magical ability to tell whether you're a terrorist or not until they've already searched you.
I find that statement extremely difficult to believe.
And I think it is worth remembering that it was us proud, freedom-loving and democratic Westerners that went about ttrying to strangle local dialects and minority languages: in UK Welsh and Gaelic were suppressed, the Danes tried to eradicate inuit in Greenland, etc etc.
And apparently you do too, since you immediately start making excuses for them. Not that Danish or British doing bad things to fourth parties actually excuses anything the Chinese might do to unrelated ones.
Nobody's going to chance their mind on religion, politics, or superiority of programming languages either, so what does that leave for Slashdot to discuss? Or any Internet forum, for that matter?
Besides, I very much doubt most people have any kind of opinion on the incident itself, simply because they don't know the participants. Rather, taking a side is a symbolic gesture which allows people to define their own identity in a binary fashion, which seems quite popular in America. The question is, then: what does siding with either Zimmerman or Trayvon mean? What are people using them as symbols for? That's certainly an interesting philosophical, ethical and psychological question, especially since the facts of the case are anyone's guess, thus there's less need to twist them than when discussing a typical political act.
According to Wikipedia, "A stand-your-ground law is a type of self-defense law that gives individuals the right to use deadly force to defend themselves without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation."
Seeing how deadly force is explicitly allowed, I really don't see how blunt trauma to the skull wouldn't fall under that.
A high-end CPU cooler gets the same cooling with less noise than the stock one. Not everything is about raw power.
Why would you? Do the Stand Your Ground laws require you to be part of one to stand it? If they do, what is is the legal definition of "neighborhood watch" - could you form one? Remember, it's the law, it deals with such interesting questions as what the meaning of the word "is" is.
You're really unlucky, which is hardly beyond reasonable suspicion, especially in a bad neighborhood with muggers and all. If it is, at what specific point (how many corpses) does it go beyond reasonable doubt and why (legal reason, please)?
Do the Stand Your Ground laws require you to receive physical injury before standing it? The other guy came at you with fists swinging but you were quicker. Prove that wrong in a court.
I remember reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". I'm not so sure I'd want political reform to take cues from someone who was obviously quite enamored with the benevolent dictator archetype.
Or has an accident. Or an anonymous tip results in a raid that optionally kills him and reveals a meth lab at his home. Or child porn on his computer. Or he is accused of rape or molesting children and gets put to the sex offender registry. Or a kin of his dies and it's discovered he took a life insurance in their name a month earlier.
The possibilities are endless.
Well, if they do, just shoot them and say you were defending yourself.
I think we're far past the point where anyone's the least bit interested in evidence. Instead, everyone who talks about this case simply makes up stuff - often ludicrously detailed - to support their own notions, often twisted by insane troll logic (no, you don't really want Zimmerman to be the poster boy for gun rights, now do you?).
Which is why I think this asteroid should be named "Trayvon-Zimmerman". Human capacity for self-deception certainly deserves a monument, and if irony is on our side archeologists in a few (dozen) generations might well promote it to an actual Greek god.
Moving requires money. Commuting requires money. And whether you can live with a roommate or several is not up to you, it's up to your landlord, who has a vested interest to make all of you rent a separate apartment.
No matter how bad things are, there's always someone else who has it even worse. In all of human history there's been exactly one person who that doesn't apply to, by definition. So it's an idiotic argument.
It's not possible to cut of all pleasures from your life and stay even remotely functional. But even if it was, not only would it likely lead to a rebellion (because if you have nothing to lose except your chains, what's stopping you?) but it would also utterly destroy economy by killing demand for pretty much anything.
Colleges have limited admission, so it isn't possible to push everyone through them. And if you increase the admission to the point where it will, the degree becomes meaningless - it'll be the new high school diploma.
So think again.
Well, either they do it or Bitcoin will. It still requires an auxiliary receipt system to faciliate settling disputes - something like "the signee agrees to deliver X goods within Y days of payment of N bitcoins to adress M, on the condition that the payment happens by Z", signed with the merchant's public key. Integrate that to the existing sertificate system and the Bitcoin client (so that you can download the contract file, inspect it within the client, and accept it for payment) and it becomes both more secure and convenient than PayPal, Visa or even going through banks for wire transfer.
Saving up requires having disposable income.
Going to college requires disposable income. Well, at least in the US it does. That might have to change if you want to stay competitive.
Also, everyone does not have what it takes to be an engineer or an artist. But they still have to eat, too. Do you think they will just quietly lay down and die when the society doesn't need their work anymore? Should they just lay down and die? Just because that happens to be convenient for the rest of us?
We need to start seriously thinking how to rearrange our economy in a world where human labour is no longer scarce, and is in fact quickly becoming redundant. Failure to do so is unlikely to result in an optimal outcome for any value of optimal anyone would care to get behind.
Maybe, maybe not, but we can't afford to take the risk. Let's strike first while we still can!
Also, congrats. Painting a nightmare scenario about fear of fear is very meta. Was it intentional?
There is no such thing as "absolutely have to". You don't absolutely have to eat; you'll die if you don't, but that's just a matter of consequences which you would likely find unpleasant. And in some cases it might be better to go hungry for a while rather than eat unhealthy or downright poisonous food. It's the same with government: you have to actually think about the consequences of taking one option or another, not just pick an ideology such as minarchism and shoot it at every problem like it was a silver bullet. That's been done, over and over again, and it's always been a disaster.
And this is another thing: why do you consider bureaucracy to be evil? What is it that you're trying to achieve by minimising it? I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here and assuming you're not just trying to get people killed, as your original post would lead me to think.
The alternative to bureaucracy is that some guy makes the decisions by himself. He dictates them. Let's call him "the dicatotor", shall we? Or we could go with anarchy and let the guy with the biggest stick take over.
Congratulations, you're one of the "fucking idiots" who "need to die", according to yourself. But the problem is that you'll take more people with you and fuck things up on your way out even for those left behind. Which is why we need the warning labels on things and why the cold, unfeeling, bean-counting rationality of bureaucracy demands them to be there, even when morons like you might feel emotional distress at the terrifying thought of people continuing to draw breath despite failing some arbitrary witness test based on an imaginary alternative reality where humans aren't social animals yet somehow still developed culture.
Count yourself lucky that some of us are capable of thinking beyond our gut reactions, you creep.