"The hard part was figuring out how to wirelessly transmit payment to the power provider for the stolen energy."
Simply charge it on the people being surveyed (you are using face recognition technology, right?). If they weren't such suspicious characters, always complaining and plotting against their clearly deserving masters, this kind of thing would be completely unnecessary. But the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
The only reason Comcast has a monopoly in my neighborhood is because government GAVE them a monopoly. That's right: Government regulated the monopoly into existence.
And do you know why they did that? Hint: it has to do with all the cables that need to be dug under public streets and private property.
What the government needs to do is *step away* and allow other providers like Cox and T-W and ATT and Verizon to enter the market, run their own fiber optics in parallel with Comcast's, and give customers multiple choices to choose from.
How could the government step away when those fibers need to be dug under government-controlled roads? And do you really think that Cox and T-W and ATT and Verizon are going to negotiate with both government and all the private individuals in the area and then pay millions to lay those cables, then try to recover that investment with competition, when they can all stay in their own little fiefdoms instead and let Comcast stay in its own?
You free-market fundamentalists are pretty amusing when you display such a total lack of even the very basics of economics. I wonder if there's a causal connection there?
How come no company has the freedom to make their own business decisions anymore (and live or die by them)?
Because, with the level of power these giants wield, the rest of us also live and die by their decisions.
A real flesh-and-blood human's right to swing his fist ends where someone else's nose begins. Why would a fictitious person have more freedom than real persons?
Sure there is, it's called negative user feedback. Amazon would backpedal so fast your head would spin. Look at what happened when Blizzard tried to make all their users use their real name on their forums. They reversed course the next day due to the overwhelming negative response.
Negative user feedback requires both consumer choice and consumer awareness. Amazon and Comcast could simply keep their dirty dealings secret.
Unlike the current administration, businesses realize that if they piss off their customers, their customers will go elsewhere.
They have nowhere else to go. The businesses understand this very well, which is why they cry out against Net Neutrality.
The competition between Comcast and whoever else may be scant in some areas, but it does exist.
No, it doesn't exist. There have been numerous stories on this very website discussing htis matter. But even if it did, the profit potential by abusing customers is simply too great in a market with such high barriers of entry for losing the lucky few who can choose to matter.
Net neutrality means nothing of the sort. Net neutrality tells the providers that they can't charge for tiered access, something they already do. So your $40 per month cable bill will instantly go to over $100.
This is in an outright lie. Net Neutrality means that an ISP may not throttle or block traffick based on what remote machine it's going to or coming from. Of course they can still offer different connection speeds for different pay.
If they have to give the same quality of service to everyone, you can bet your ass that they're going to make sure you pay for it.
I already pay for bandwidth. Net Neutrality simply makes it impossible for the ISP to try and make the other endpoint of my communications also pay.
This bill removes the freedom we all enjoy right now.
This, again, is a lie.
I'll take throttled traffic over a tripled bill any day of the week.
This is a non-sequitur based on your earlier lies.
You're either an astroturfer being paid to spread lies, a libertarian spreading lies due to ideology, or a moron who has no idea what you're talking about. Which one is it?
If a policeman walking down the road sees you shooting a gun at your girlfriend through the window with the open blinds he will damn sure rush in and intervene. "Plain sight" is not covered by the 4th ammendment and broadcast data is much closer to "plain sight" than thermal imagery from INSIDE the house.
Actually, no. The difference here is between a policeman walking down the road happens to see something and a policeman sets up equipment to spy on you. That is the difference, not the part of electromagnetic spectrum used. Well, that and the difference between immediate life-and-death emergency situation and an ongoing investigation.
More-over there is no practical way to PREVENT thermal energy if you want to,
Of course there is: just put thermal insulation in your walls. It'll also save you a lot of money in heating/cooling bills, and might help save the planet.
That was some really nice street view mapping, location discovery, and concept of 'out in the public' we had there once:/
Yeah, we had such concepts once. That was before everything you did "out in the public" was recorded and followed you everywhere.
"You have no expectation of privacy in the public" was fine when "no privacy" meant that you could be observed, but stops being fine when "no privacy" means "everybody you ever interact with can view a record of everything you've ever done". I, for one, do not wish to live under the Lidless Eye.
Imagine that a hacker makes his way into your system.
My system has better security than US military seems to have, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument.
How much money and how many man-hours will it take to investigate and repair the breach?
Who cares? I'm doing that work because I left my computer wide open to attack. If I can't simply restore a backup... though.
And in any case, this is not anyone's system. This is something's system. All these "imagine someone broke into your home/system/whatever" -analogies people come up with are trying to confuse the issue by giving it an emotional slant. Slap the guy on the wrist, bitchslap whoever was supposed to secure these systems, and call it a day.
Also, imagine that a thief makes it into a bank vault. Is the thief responsible for the bank installing a better lock?
Will you give a rat's ass about his motives?
Again, does it matter? This is not about whether I am pissed about getting caught with my pants down. It's whether someone else should be punished horribly because they caught me with my pants down.
There's a reason why we leave judging to impartial third parties, rather than just letting the injured party engage in whatever vengeance he pleases.
Otherwise, when they perfect mind-reading technology and can store your memories, will you be saying "it's all just integers"? Almost everyone agrees that some information should be controlled. After that, we're just arguing about where to draw the line[s].
Guess what? I'm not letting them read my memories, precisely because I know that once they're read, I have no control whatsoever who can access them. Nor am I accepting the ridiculous stance that speech needs to be controlled (by whom? I don't trust anyone else with that kind of power, will you trust me with it?) because otherwise my memories might be spread online.
Servers live places. The people who do the uploading live places. The people who run the servers can be punished. The people who do the uploading can be punished.
The horror of horrors to all who dream themselves the master of others: Freedom's here. You can no longer keep us ignorant. Die, shitheads, die and be forgotten!
First we'd need to throw away IP law entirely, which is pretty much the opposite of what is going on in the world today.
Really? Because to me, that seems to be exactly what's going on: nobody cares about copyrights anymore. The ever-more draconian attempts to upkeep the damn thing are failing miserably.
His case makes sense to me (as would be the case if a Brittan, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, whoever wanted a US citizen for a similar premise, I'd say 'send him/her over...'
And stoning someone because they drew a picture of Mohammed would make sense to a muslim. What's you're point?
14 is still 'ick' for me, but I have to be honest that there are a number of 14 year olds who's hormones are telling them that they're ready. They really aren't, but hormones are powerful.
They really are ready. Not as ready as they'll ever get, but that's true of anyone at any age. And while we Western people can afford to get more ready, that's a relatively new development; 14-year olds used to go off to war, and 30-year old used to be an old man. And most of the world is still a hellhole like that.
What I'm getting at, is that living to be 70 is common nowadays, but it used to be a rare and wondrous event. People got married and make as many kids as early as they could just a few generations ago, because otherwise there wouldn't be a next generation. And the parts of the world where it's okay to marry 14-year olds are still like that, or have changed from that so recently that customs haven't have a chance to catch up.
So basically, it's not a problem with religious marriage, or arranged marriage; it's a problem with most people not living to see even 14. Fix that, and the culture will adjust accordingly; don't fix it, and people will continue to do whatever they must to survive. But either way, being or not being ready has nothing to do with anything.
Few applications need more power than a single core provides.
Almost all applications could benefit from an artificial intelligence, which requires a lot of computing power. Or do you particularly enjoy typing in progress reports for the boss rather than being able to say "make progress report for the boss" and let the computer handle that?
While massive code bloat (largely due to languages that "do everything for you") has made it possible to run on a 4 GHz processer and still be slow, most end-user or server tasks are fine with a single modern core dedicated to that task.
Most modern programs are fine with a single modern core, for the simple reason that they have been designed for that. This is the same as saying that Wordstar ran on 8086, therefore anything beyond that is pointless.
As for "code bloat", you do realize that most programs are still made in C++, which is why they are still so open to random crashes and buffer overruns, right?
Not all libertarians are Rand-style right-wing loonies.
The funny thing about Rand is, she survived by charity when she first arrived at the United States, and then promptly forgot her benefactors later on, and outright condemned charity.
There's also a lot of moderate left-wing libertarians (well, maybe not so many in the US, but certainly elsewhere).
Maybe left-wing libertarians should change their name, then? "Individual liberty, social responsibility" is certainly an ideology I could get behind, but calling that "libertarianism" has some unfortunate package.
Maybe left-wing libertarians should simply call themselves "Freedom Party"? After all, that is what they stand for: freedom from coercion by force and freedom from coercion by threat of starvation, right?
And left-wing libertarian loonies, of course. That goes without saying.
I don't mind the loonies, really. They serve a valuable function by being the metaphorical canary in the coal mine: as long as their freedom of expression is guaranteed, so is mine. If someone tries to silence them, I can react before that someone turns to me.
No, I dislike the right-wing libertarians who aren't the loonies: the ones who realize that people will die, starve to death in the streets, if they get their way.
The city area was far too small, even with the neigbouring cities, and laying highways was horrible.
Apart from that, I wish they'd make a more detailed economical simulation. For example, if the industrial zone has a car factory, it needs to import steel, right? And that should prompt someone to make a steel mill to manufacture it in the city, undercutting imports by price, helping the factory make more profits, and generating tax revenue. Similarly, a burger place needs to get raw materials from somewhere, such as an agricultural farm.
Modern machines have a huge amount of power and memory, so make a modern SimCity which uses it to make a detailed simulation. Or simply go all the way and make it a micro-nation simulation instead.
fail to impose sufficient deterrents to driving while being a moron
And what would those be? "Moron" means someone who doesn't understand the consequences of his actions; and that includes any and all possible deterrents you could come up with.
This is the same problem as with the laws against drunk driving: someone who doesn't care that he's risking his own life isn't likely to worry about a fine, loss of license, or jail time either.
While I acknowledge that it did happen, I find it hard to fathom people getting killed by a horse-drawn carriage without some sort of severe mental impairment, with any regularity;
I don't. Apart from the fact that cart-drivers can be just as much irresponsible selfish maniacs than car drivers, there's also the fact that a horse is a living thing and as such quite capable of getting out of control and causing mayhem on its own.
On a good side, a drunk cart-driver who just lets his horse take him home at walking speed while he sleeps probably is safer than a drunk driver... Hmm.
and those rates would almost certainly be a fraction of injuries and deaths attributed to modern automobile accidents.
Of course they would, the whole population was a fraction of what it is today, partly because having horseshit everywhere is an excellent way to spread diseases.
Computers haven't really changed your job or the way you work, you have.
Actually, they have; the tracking of everything they enable combines with the free-market drive to efficiency to squeeze every last bit of juice out of those lucky few who aren't fired due to all this increased efficiency.
YOU think you need to answer an email the instant it comes in. YOU think you are shackled to your desk.
If you don't answer it, or leave your desk, you get a mark against you. Enough marks and you lose the job, and have no chance of getting another one in today's market.
If you don't respond to an email within a couple hours, no one is going to die.
Along with the job, you lose your health insurance, which means that you actually have a pretty good chance of dying.
If you don't like your job, LEAVE. McDonalds is hiring. And yes, it is that simple. The reality of it is, everything you throw out to justify why you can't go work at McDonalds comes down to one thing: You don't want to work at McDonalds. Your current job is better on a number of levels, and thats all you've got for reasons to not work there. You're just whining about bullshit because you need to have something in your life that makes you feel needed.
You are making the assumption that McDonald's isn't participating in the race to the bottom, as far as pay and working conditions go. It is. It is indeed a worse job than almost any office job, but that doesn't make those office jobs good, any more than being better than Hell makes Somalia a good place to live.
Oh dear. Did someone feel their pet ideology being slighted? "-1 Overrated" is such a good moderation option for those who are sure of of their ideals but not quite as sure of how to defend them rationally, eh?
But don't feel bad, randroids/libertarians. Defending your ideology is an impossible task. After all, reality has a liberal bias.
Everybody says it is not their responsibility and the US, with its dislike of government control, does not have the mechanisms for someone to take charge and decide who pays for it in the short term, and how they are going to get paid back buy the other beneficiaries.
Ah yes, libertarian idealism runs headfirst into reality once again. I wonder how long it'll take for some randroid to blame it all on government regulation? After all, John Galt would simply pull a thermodynamics-violating engine out of his ass and solve everything that way.
In the long term the market will work; in the short term the economy and people will suffer.
Not really, because there's always short-term problems causing unnecessary suffering. Free market is a fine-tuning mechanism, it's idotic to leave large-scale decisions to it.
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Wouldn't that make it unfit for enterprise use?
Simply charge it on the people being surveyed (you are using face recognition technology, right?). If they weren't such suspicious characters, always complaining and plotting against their clearly deserving masters, this kind of thing would be completely unnecessary. But the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
And do you know why they did that? Hint: it has to do with all the cables that need to be dug under public streets and private property.
How could the government step away when those fibers need to be dug under government-controlled roads? And do you really think that Cox and T-W and ATT and Verizon are going to negotiate with both government and all the private individuals in the area and then pay millions to lay those cables, then try to recover that investment with competition, when they can all stay in their own little fiefdoms instead and let Comcast stay in its own?
You free-market fundamentalists are pretty amusing when you display such a total lack of even the very basics of economics. I wonder if there's a causal connection there?
Because, with the level of power these giants wield, the rest of us also live and die by their decisions.
A real flesh-and-blood human's right to swing his fist ends where someone else's nose begins. Why would a fictitious person have more freedom than real persons?
Negative user feedback requires both consumer choice and consumer awareness. Amazon and Comcast could simply keep their dirty dealings secret.
They have nowhere else to go. The businesses understand this very well, which is why they cry out against Net Neutrality.
No, it doesn't exist. There have been numerous stories on this very website discussing htis matter. But even if it did, the profit potential by abusing customers is simply too great in a market with such high barriers of entry for losing the lucky few who can choose to matter.
This is in an outright lie. Net Neutrality means that an ISP may not throttle or block traffick based on what remote machine it's going to or coming from. Of course they can still offer different connection speeds for different pay.
I already pay for bandwidth. Net Neutrality simply makes it impossible for the ISP to try and make the other endpoint of my communications also pay.
This, again, is a lie.
This is a non-sequitur based on your earlier lies.
You're either an astroturfer being paid to spread lies, a libertarian spreading lies due to ideology, or a moron who has no idea what you're talking about. Which one is it?
So it has potential as an MBA teaching tool, then?
Actually, no. The difference here is between a policeman walking down the road happens to see something and a policeman sets up equipment to spy on you. That is the difference, not the part of electromagnetic spectrum used. Well, that and the difference between immediate life-and-death emergency situation and an ongoing investigation.
Of course there is: just put thermal insulation in your walls. It'll also save you a lot of money in heating/cooling bills, and might help save the planet.
Yeah, we had such concepts once. That was before everything you did "out in the public" was recorded and followed you everywhere.
"You have no expectation of privacy in the public" was fine when "no privacy" meant that you could be observed, but stops being fine when "no privacy" means "everybody you ever interact with can view a record of everything you've ever done". I, for one, do not wish to live under the Lidless Eye.
Just out of curiosity, has there been any case - I mean even a single one - where Obama actually has done something?
My system has better security than US military seems to have, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument.
Who cares? I'm doing that work because I left my computer wide open to attack. If I can't simply restore a backup... though.
And in any case, this is not anyone's system. This is something's system. All these "imagine someone broke into your home/system/whatever" -analogies people come up with are trying to confuse the issue by giving it an emotional slant. Slap the guy on the wrist, bitchslap whoever was supposed to secure these systems, and call it a day.
Also, imagine that a thief makes it into a bank vault. Is the thief responsible for the bank installing a better lock?
Again, does it matter? This is not about whether I am pissed about getting caught with my pants down. It's whether someone else should be punished horribly because they caught me with my pants down.
There's a reason why we leave judging to impartial third parties, rather than just letting the injured party engage in whatever vengeance he pleases.
This reminds me of something I've once heard...
...And this pretty much confirms it.
Do you, by any chance, believe in the Rapture? As in the Left Behind series?
Guess what? I'm not letting them read my memories, precisely because I know that once they're read, I have no control whatsoever who can access them. Nor am I accepting the ridiculous stance that speech needs to be controlled (by whom? I don't trust anyone else with that kind of power, will you trust me with it?) because otherwise my memories might be spread online.
Where does Tor live? Where does Freenet live?
The horror of horrors to all who dream themselves the master of others: Freedom's here. You can no longer keep us ignorant. Die, shitheads, die and be forgotten!
Really? Because to me, that seems to be exactly what's going on: nobody cares about copyrights anymore. The ever-more draconian attempts to upkeep the damn thing are failing miserably.
And stoning someone because they drew a picture of Mohammed would make sense to a muslim. What's you're point?
You're doing it wrong.
They really are ready. Not as ready as they'll ever get, but that's true of anyone at any age. And while we Western people can afford to get more ready, that's a relatively new development; 14-year olds used to go off to war, and 30-year old used to be an old man. And most of the world is still a hellhole like that.
What I'm getting at, is that living to be 70 is common nowadays, but it used to be a rare and wondrous event. People got married and make as many kids as early as they could just a few generations ago, because otherwise there wouldn't be a next generation. And the parts of the world where it's okay to marry 14-year olds are still like that, or have changed from that so recently that customs haven't have a chance to catch up.
So basically, it's not a problem with religious marriage, or arranged marriage; it's a problem with most people not living to see even 14. Fix that, and the culture will adjust accordingly; don't fix it, and people will continue to do whatever they must to survive. But either way, being or not being ready has nothing to do with anything.
Almost all applications could benefit from an artificial intelligence, which requires a lot of computing power. Or do you particularly enjoy typing in progress reports for the boss rather than being able to say "make progress report for the boss" and let the computer handle that?
Most modern programs are fine with a single modern core, for the simple reason that they have been designed for that. This is the same as saying that Wordstar ran on 8086, therefore anything beyond that is pointless.
As for "code bloat", you do realize that most programs are still made in C++, which is why they are still so open to random crashes and buffer overruns, right?
The funny thing about Rand is, she survived by charity when she first arrived at the United States, and then promptly forgot her benefactors later on, and outright condemned charity.
Maybe left-wing libertarians should change their name, then? "Individual liberty, social responsibility" is certainly an ideology I could get behind, but calling that "libertarianism" has some unfortunate package.
Maybe left-wing libertarians should simply call themselves "Freedom Party"? After all, that is what they stand for: freedom from coercion by force and freedom from coercion by threat of starvation, right?
I don't mind the loonies, really. They serve a valuable function by being the metaphorical canary in the coal mine: as long as their freedom of expression is guaranteed, so is mine. If someone tries to silence them, I can react before that someone turns to me.
No, I dislike the right-wing libertarians who aren't the loonies: the ones who realize that people will die, starve to death in the streets, if they get their way.
Or make a walking vagina, attack it with a penis-creature, and post an animated gif to various imageboards.
Coming to think of it, I suspect that at least some tabloids will do just this: "Maxis releases rape simulator!"
The city area was far too small, even with the neigbouring cities, and laying highways was horrible.
Apart from that, I wish they'd make a more detailed economical simulation. For example, if the industrial zone has a car factory, it needs to import steel, right? And that should prompt someone to make a steel mill to manufacture it in the city, undercutting imports by price, helping the factory make more profits, and generating tax revenue. Similarly, a burger place needs to get raw materials from somewhere, such as an agricultural farm.
Modern machines have a huge amount of power and memory, so make a modern SimCity which uses it to make a detailed simulation. Or simply go all the way and make it a micro-nation simulation instead.
And what would those be? "Moron" means someone who doesn't understand the consequences of his actions; and that includes any and all possible deterrents you could come up with.
This is the same problem as with the laws against drunk driving: someone who doesn't care that he's risking his own life isn't likely to worry about a fine, loss of license, or jail time either.
I don't. Apart from the fact that cart-drivers can be just as much irresponsible selfish maniacs than car drivers, there's also the fact that a horse is a living thing and as such quite capable of getting out of control and causing mayhem on its own.
On a good side, a drunk cart-driver who just lets his horse take him home at walking speed while he sleeps probably is safer than a drunk driver... Hmm.
Of course they would, the whole population was a fraction of what it is today, partly because having horseshit everywhere is an excellent way to spread diseases.
Actually, they have; the tracking of everything they enable combines with the free-market drive to efficiency to squeeze every last bit of juice out of those lucky few who aren't fired due to all this increased efficiency.
If you don't answer it, or leave your desk, you get a mark against you. Enough marks and you lose the job, and have no chance of getting another one in today's market.
Along with the job, you lose your health insurance, which means that you actually have a pretty good chance of dying.
You are making the assumption that McDonald's isn't participating in the race to the bottom, as far as pay and working conditions go. It is. It is indeed a worse job than almost any office job, but that doesn't make those office jobs good, any more than being better than Hell makes Somalia a good place to live.
Oh dear. Did someone feel their pet ideology being slighted? "-1 Overrated" is such a good moderation option for those who are sure of of their ideals but not quite as sure of how to defend them rationally, eh?
But don't feel bad, randroids/libertarians. Defending your ideology is an impossible task. After all, reality has a liberal bias.
Ah yes, libertarian idealism runs headfirst into reality once again. I wonder how long it'll take for some randroid to blame it all on government regulation? After all, John Galt would simply pull a thermodynamics-violating engine out of his ass and solve everything that way.
Not really, because there's always short-term problems causing unnecessary suffering. Free market is a fine-tuning mechanism, it's idotic to leave large-scale decisions to it.