But when you agree to join the military and have a security clearance you make promises to protect that information.
That's not the only promise they make, though. Specifically, you also swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So suppose you think some domestic enemy is undermining it, and the best way to fight that is to expose some classified secrets. Wouldn't it be your duty to do just that, then?
Rule of Law is not even a moral principle. It is the motto of the amoral. And yes someone who believes in that idea is likely to be authoritarian.
So what happens without it? What happens without Rule of Law? Why, I decide what's acceptable, based on whatever whims I care to, and the rest of you will just have to adapt to them. How is that not the very spirit of authoritarianism? How is that not the very soul of tyranny?
Necessity is supposed to be the mother of invention.
And yet Europe failed to invent antibiotics during the Black Plague, the Aztecs failed to invent machine guns when Cortez arrived, etc.
Necessity might be the mother of invention, but opportunity is the father, and Moon doesn't really have that since it lacks a support infrastructure, both physical and social.
The reality is that information is currency these days, and people will mine for this sort of data because it is valuable.
Knowledge is power, like it has always been.
You won't have much luck just blocking everything because the incentives to find a way around whatever blocks are put in place are high.
You won't have much luck just blocking everything because Mozilla, just like every other browser, leaks information like a sieve. And why wouldn't they? You're the product, the advertisers are the customers.
You have to compare the waste that there would be without any investigation, to the cost of the investigation.
Which is impossible, since you don't have access to alternative timelines where you didn't do the investigation.
As investigation discourages waste, the latter number is larger than the former number.
This is a non-sequiter. Even if investigation discourages waste, it does not follow that waste is reduced by more than the investigation costs.
Also, in my experience, stick-based waste discouragement leads to far more waste since everyone is busy ensuring they can't be blamed for it, thus any problem won't get funding for a fix until it becomes a full-blown disaster. Maintenance is always the first to go, because if you fund it you'll get blamed for wasting money but if you don't, the next guy gets blamed when something breaks.
The only objective evidence I have is that I have never met someone who is involved with hiring developers who has said how easy it is to find quality talent at market rates.
Which is a tautology due to the law of supply and demand, and thus proves nothing.
"(Despite that sales spike, HP decided to kill the TouchPad; the margins on $99 obviously didn't work out to everyone's satisfaction.)" who the fuck cares if it flies off the shelf for a very limited amount of time?
Someone who has lots of unsold devices and needs to get rid of them somehow?
Entropy coding is implicitly single threaded, and the complexity of this process will impose a lower bound on the clock speed of your decoder. While the rest of the decoding process can be done in parallel with lower powered circuits.
Well, how about SHA-1 encoding? Each frame is an unpacked bitmap image, giving them a fixed size in bits. The encoder generates every frame which hashes to the same SHA-1 as the target, sorts them by their contents, and notes the ordinal of the target. The final packet consists of the SHA-1 and the ordinal, and the stream header contains the framesize. And the decoder simply repeats the process, picking the frame indicated by the SHA-1 and the ordinal.
This scheme should parallelize nicely, and can be further sped up easily by using a rainbow table of all SHA-1 hashes.
A high noise floor would have the world in a bright white haze, trying to pick out flashes of color. Like picking out an airplane diving out of the sun. There'd have to be some noise cancellation, like the noise cancellation headphones to make such a view of any use to a human.
You're thinking of this the wrong way. It's not sound, it's light, captured by a camera. Simply run the resulting image trough a standard camera gamma correction algorithm.
Heck, noise cancelling couldn't possibly work here since it's based on knowing what's signal and what's noise, and a camera can't possibly know that.
I can't really see how that would end up hurting Finland more than it would the US.
And that's the problem, actually. Finnish politicians have this weird thing going where they show their responsibility and altruism by hurting their own country. It lets them pretend to be European leaders or global leaders rather than the leaders of a small, insignificant country at the arctic circle. And being leaders, it's not them but the rest of us who pay the price.
That's the reason why Finland typically goes above and beyond what any bad agreements actually require: a weird form of national self-harm. And it's why this initiative doesn't have any chance of passing.
The downside of the computer era is that we think that everything can be digitized, reduced, run through mathematical processes and produce gold. It's just the modern-day philosopher's stone, in a way.
And it works too. It really produces gold. And the result is that gold is worth no more than the lead it's made from. Which is only bad if you were planning on getting rich by controlling an effort-free supply in a world of scarcity. Which, of course, is precisely what the Hollywood execs wanted, and as usualy failed to think things through.
Art is art, not science, and it is better so, or all the artists would be replaced by kaleidoscopic art generation machines a la 1984 and the human touch would be lost.
Art is art, and the Net is full of human-made art in all its (often horrible) glory. And you don't have to pay to access it (beyond the Internet connection, of course). And as technology improves, what's available to a persistent amateur gets closer and closer to what is available to Hollywood studios, which in turn can't really improve what's available to them because that already includes pretty much anything.
Hollywood blockbusters are failing because they've hit the wall for the wow factor, can't compete with Youtube for the sheer entertainment factor, and lose to most shitty fanfiction in the plot department since even shitty fanfiction authors care more about their work's (nonexistent) artistic value than Hollywood does. And various amateur projects will only continue improving their technical quality, while Sturgeon's law works its corollary as their numbers increase. Hollywood will die, and won't be missed.
So the writers of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, for example, were theorising and speculating, were they?
Compare and contrast having your comment, this entire discussion, and the original article on file versus having something like "In the twelfth year after the Gleaming Towers fell, Simon of Slashdot spoke out in doubt against the Chronicle of Saxon."
The teaching of critical thinking, or lack thereof, is the real problem.
Is it? Because I recall a discussion on Slashdot, a long time ago, about the viability of space-based solar. Specifically, I remember a particular comment which said something like "I know these microwave beams are harmless, but I'll still oppose this since they might hit my children".
People make decisions based on emotion, not logic. An alcoholic who knows about liver cirhosis won't be helped by analytical skill, because he'll simply use it to rationalize his actions after the temptation wins. What might actually help him - and what is not taught in school - is learning to reprogram his emotional responses according to his desires, so that alcohol no longer brings to mind pleasure but death. And the same goes to other people who make irrational choices too: it's not that they're too stupid to realize what they're doing, it's that they don't have the discipline to take it into account, or even to admit that. And discipline is ultimately a skill.
Of course, a disciplined consumer is not a very good consumer from the viewpoint of sellers, so we probably shouldn't be too surprised about that.
iTunes manages to sell a lot of music without protecting it at all, for example. Maybe you're thinking about it backwards - rather than focussing on making it hard to get at your content, instead think "how can we deliver this content in a compelling, visually interesting, easy to navigate way?
And the answer, contained in that very same paragraph, is of course: sell it through appropriate online stores and let them deal with it.
This is a fallacy. It's perfectly possible to have renewables and a better quality of life due to reduced pollution and cheaper, more abundant energy.
No. The energy in renewables is dispersed and unreliable, which requires building a huge capture and storage infrastructure to produce significant quantities of it, which then has to be maintained. This, in turn, is bad for both the environment - because you need larger areas of land to gather a given quantity of energy - and economy - because you need to devote a greater proportion of economic output to said maintenance, rather than consumer goods.
German seems to have the right idea. In a few years they will be almost entirely renewable, but keep around some gas and coal plants for backup. It isn't a "perfect" zero carbon system but it's a lot better than what we have now, and when the weather gets hot like it is now they won't be sweating and worrying about the cost of aircon like I am.
"A few years" means two decades and "almost entirely" means 50 percent. And even that is starting to hurt.
Also, how will you get the air conditioner in the first place? As I explained above, with less industrial output available to making consumer goods, it will cost more to assemble, and it's parts cost more to make, due to simple supply and demand.
Couple that with a move to mostly electric vehicles and not only will their carbon footprint be massively reduced but so will the amount of pollution from particulate matter.
Which requires even more energy to be produced by renewables, thus making even less industrial output available for other things. This combines badly with the sudden need to replace the entire vehicle fleet with new, high-tech (read expensive) ones.
The media have a role to play in this, as well. By not informing people that these kinds of abuses are happening, it prevents us from knowing just how bad the situation is becoming. If these things stay at the local level of reporting, or aren't even reported because the local media don't have the budget or the concern, nothing will improve.
Wall Street Journal reported it on the very article Slashdot subsequently linked to, prompting this discussion. And as these first few comments show, it shocked no one, implying that it was already general knowledge.
No, media has done its part. If nothing improves, the fault lies with the public, not the watchdogs. It's not even tyrannical leaders oppressing the helpless public; no, it's people who ran on "tough on crime" platform being elected and delivering exactly what they promised to their constituents: heavy-handed authoritarianism.
I am amazed at how people love to attribute the worst possible motives to scientists (lying for what? to get a 20K-100K grant?) but refuse to see the motives of those who fund climate CHANGE deniers, which would be oil companies, investment fund managers with big stakes in petroleum, etc. with billions at stake.
It's cheap energy that's at stake. Basically, if anthropogenic climate change is true, then the options are:
1. Continue using fossil fuels and suffer the consequences.
2. Switch to nuclear and live with the associated risks, both real and imagined.
3. Reduce energy usage to whatever can be supported by renewables and accept the resulting lower quality of life.
None of these are good options, so people prefer fantasy to reality. Specifically, they pretend either that climate change is a lie or that windmills can keep the lights on. It isn't, and they can't, but it's not fun admitting that your children will be worse off than you are.
The arguments passed to D3D functions, for example, may be of different formats, number and lengths than those passed to OpenGL and therefore will require translation in the middle, ie. several extra steps. Obviously having to do extra steps in-between will result in a performance hit.
But isn't it even worse with Gallium? Now you need to translate arguments between the D3D/OpenGL/whatever state machine and the low-level state machine, and then again when the low-level state machine actually speaks to the hardware. Rather than speed up D3D, all you've done is ensure that OpenGL suffers a similar performance hit too.
In a way I see those laws not being allowed as being anti diversity.
It's not. Diversity is when people of various backgrounds come together. The purpose of a "Catholic town" (or any other special-rules town) is exactly the opposite: to drive away anyyone who doesn't agree with the rules of the local theocracy, thus only leaving true believers.
Why not have a town that wants to ban condoms ban them?
Because that would infringe on the right of Joe Shopkeeper to sell them and Joe Whoremonger to buy them. Their right to do whatever they want by default overrides the right of Joe Busybody to impose his will on them. Simply because JB doesn't like what JS and JW are doing is not any reason why JB should get the force of the law to stop them.
Besides, who's going to pay for all the associated costs of increased teen pregnancies in a condom-free town - you?
As long as it is a small enough community that people are not stuck there I see it as an interesting social experiment.
Even if you're independently wealthy, thus not needing a new job and being able to trivially afford the cost of moving, it will still impose a cost in social relations. And frankly, we have more than enough data on what happens (bad things and completely needless misery) when you let moral busybodies impose their rules on others. We don't need to experiment on that any more.
This is, of course, not taking into account the devaluation your house is likely to undergo when it's suddenly located in a theocracy.
Of course the citizens are left to fend for themselves but the prisoners are evacuated in air conditioned buses.
If you hold someone prisoner, you are responsible for his wellbeing. So either lobby for your government to hold less prisoners, or lobby for a welfare state where it has a responsibility to everyone, or accept that you'll be paying for buses - air-conditioned where appropriate - to haul felons out of danger's way while you're left to fend for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the only promise they make, though. Specifically, you also swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So suppose you think some domestic enemy is undermining it, and the best way to fight that is to expose some classified secrets. Wouldn't it be your duty to do just that, then?
So what happens without it? What happens without Rule of Law? Why, I decide what's acceptable, based on whatever whims I care to, and the rest of you will just have to adapt to them. How is that not the very spirit of authoritarianism? How is that not the very soul of tyranny?
Yeah, who wouldn't love the Singaporean Inquisition? Perhaps the GP is a heretic?
And yet Europe failed to invent antibiotics during the Black Plague, the Aztecs failed to invent machine guns when Cortez arrived, etc.
Necessity might be the mother of invention, but opportunity is the father, and Moon doesn't really have that since it lacks a support infrastructure, both physical and social.
Knowledge is power, like it has always been.
You won't have much luck just blocking everything because Mozilla, just like every other browser, leaks information like a sieve. And why wouldn't they? You're the product, the advertisers are the customers.
Which is impossible, since you don't have access to alternative timelines where you didn't do the investigation.
This is a non-sequiter. Even if investigation discourages waste, it does not follow that waste is reduced by more than the investigation costs.
Also, in my experience, stick-based waste discouragement leads to far more waste since everyone is busy ensuring they can't be blamed for it, thus any problem won't get funding for a fix until it becomes a full-blown disaster. Maintenance is always the first to go, because if you fund it you'll get blamed for wasting money but if you don't, the next guy gets blamed when something breaks.
That's not quite fair. Politicians have plenty of empathy, it's just directed at the poor, struggling megacorporations and ultra-rich.
That would give the Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning.
Which is a tautology due to the law of supply and demand, and thus proves nothing.
Someone who has lots of unsold devices and needs to get rid of them somehow?
Well, how about SHA-1 encoding? Each frame is an unpacked bitmap image, giving them a fixed size in bits. The encoder generates every frame which hashes to the same SHA-1 as the target, sorts them by their contents, and notes the ordinal of the target. The final packet consists of the SHA-1 and the ordinal, and the stream header contains the framesize. And the decoder simply repeats the process, picking the frame indicated by the SHA-1 and the ordinal.
This scheme should parallelize nicely, and can be further sped up easily by using a rainbow table of all SHA-1 hashes.
You're thinking of this the wrong way. It's not sound, it's light, captured by a camera. Simply run the resulting image trough a standard camera gamma correction algorithm.
Heck, noise cancelling couldn't possibly work here since it's based on knowing what's signal and what's noise, and a camera can't possibly know that.
And that's the problem, actually. Finnish politicians have this weird thing going where they show their responsibility and altruism by hurting their own country. It lets them pretend to be European leaders or global leaders rather than the leaders of a small, insignificant country at the arctic circle. And being leaders, it's not them but the rest of us who pay the price.
That's the reason why Finland typically goes above and beyond what any bad agreements actually require: a weird form of national self-harm. And it's why this initiative doesn't have any chance of passing.
And it works too. It really produces gold. And the result is that gold is worth no more than the lead it's made from. Which is only bad if you were planning on getting rich by controlling an effort-free supply in a world of scarcity. Which, of course, is precisely what the Hollywood execs wanted, and as usualy failed to think things through.
Art is art, and the Net is full of human-made art in all its (often horrible) glory. And you don't have to pay to access it (beyond the Internet connection, of course). And as technology improves, what's available to a persistent amateur gets closer and closer to what is available to Hollywood studios, which in turn can't really improve what's available to them because that already includes pretty much anything.
Hollywood blockbusters are failing because they've hit the wall for the wow factor, can't compete with Youtube for the sheer entertainment factor, and lose to most shitty fanfiction in the plot department since even shitty fanfiction authors care more about their work's (nonexistent) artistic value than Hollywood does. And various amateur projects will only continue improving their technical quality, while Sturgeon's law works its corollary as their numbers increase. Hollywood will die, and won't be missed.
The only true Batman movie is the 1966 version
. "How was I to know they'd have a can of shark-repellent Bat-spray handy?" Instant classic :).
Compare and contrast having your comment, this entire discussion, and the original article on file versus having something like "In the twelfth year after the Gleaming Towers fell, Simon of Slashdot spoke out in doubt against the Chronicle of Saxon."
Is it? Because I recall a discussion on Slashdot, a long time ago, about the viability of space-based solar. Specifically, I remember a particular comment which said something like "I know these microwave beams are harmless, but I'll still oppose this since they might hit my children".
People make decisions based on emotion, not logic. An alcoholic who knows about liver cirhosis won't be helped by analytical skill, because he'll simply use it to rationalize his actions after the temptation wins. What might actually help him - and what is not taught in school - is learning to reprogram his emotional responses according to his desires, so that alcohol no longer brings to mind pleasure but death. And the same goes to other people who make irrational choices too: it's not that they're too stupid to realize what they're doing, it's that they don't have the discipline to take it into account, or even to admit that. And discipline is ultimately a skill.
Of course, a disciplined consumer is not a very good consumer from the viewpoint of sellers, so we probably shouldn't be too surprised about that.
You also hear apocryphal stories of David Cameron molesting dead horses. Better act on that too.
And the answer, contained in that very same paragraph, is of course: sell it through appropriate online stores and let them deal with it.
No. The energy in renewables is dispersed and unreliable, which requires building a huge capture and storage infrastructure to produce significant quantities of it, which then has to be maintained. This, in turn, is bad for both the environment - because you need larger areas of land to gather a given quantity of energy - and economy - because you need to devote a greater proportion of economic output to said maintenance, rather than consumer goods.
"A few years" means two decades and "almost entirely" means 50 percent. And even that is starting to hurt.
Also, how will you get the air conditioner in the first place? As I explained above, with less industrial output available to making consumer goods, it will cost more to assemble, and it's parts cost more to make, due to simple supply and demand.
Which requires even more energy to be produced by renewables, thus making even less industrial output available for other things. This combines badly with the sudden need to replace the entire vehicle fleet with new, high-tech (read expensive) ones.
Wall Street Journal reported it on the very article Slashdot subsequently linked to, prompting this discussion. And as these first few comments show, it shocked no one, implying that it was already general knowledge.
No, media has done its part. If nothing improves, the fault lies with the public, not the watchdogs. It's not even tyrannical leaders oppressing the helpless public; no, it's people who ran on "tough on crime" platform being elected and delivering exactly what they promised to their constituents: heavy-handed authoritarianism.
It's cheap energy that's at stake. Basically, if anthropogenic climate change is true, then the options are:
None of these are good options, so people prefer fantasy to reality. Specifically, they pretend either that climate change is a lie or that windmills can keep the lights on. It isn't, and they can't, but it's not fun admitting that your children will be worse off than you are.
But isn't it even worse with Gallium? Now you need to translate arguments between the D3D/OpenGL/whatever state machine and the low-level state machine, and then again when the low-level state machine actually speaks to the hardware. Rather than speed up D3D, all you've done is ensure that OpenGL suffers a similar performance hit too.
It's not. Diversity is when people of various backgrounds come together. The purpose of a "Catholic town" (or any other special-rules town) is exactly the opposite: to drive away anyyone who doesn't agree with the rules of the local theocracy, thus only leaving true believers.
Because that would infringe on the right of Joe Shopkeeper to sell them and Joe Whoremonger to buy them. Their right to do whatever they want by default overrides the right of Joe Busybody to impose his will on them. Simply because JB doesn't like what JS and JW are doing is not any reason why JB should get the force of the law to stop them.
Besides, who's going to pay for all the associated costs of increased teen pregnancies in a condom-free town - you?
Even if you're independently wealthy, thus not needing a new job and being able to trivially afford the cost of moving, it will still impose a cost in social relations. And frankly, we have more than enough data on what happens (bad things and completely needless misery) when you let moral busybodies impose their rules on others. We don't need to experiment on that any more.
This is, of course, not taking into account the devaluation your house is likely to undergo when it's suddenly located in a theocracy.
If you hold someone prisoner, you are responsible for his wellbeing. So either lobby for your government to hold less prisoners, or lobby for a welfare state where it has a responsibility to everyone, or accept that you'll be paying for buses - air-conditioned where appropriate - to haul felons out of danger's way while you're left to fend for yourself.
Vengeance is not cheap.