Why is everyone acting like page ranking should be anything but whatever Google wants them to be? They are free to use whatever they wish to determine the search results. If they decide to never show Hotmail when you search for email, there is absolutely nothing wrong, ethically or legally, with this. They are free to shun a competitor. They are free to put you last on every search if they just simply don't like you. They can put whatever they want into the search results, in whatever order they wish, with whatever advertisements they want, and it is legally and morally fine.
If their results start to suck, then people will switch to a different search engine, as has already happened once. There are dozens of competitors...
You make a good point. If a search engine starts to fail conspicuously, or another search engine performs noticeably better, then—given a level playing field—the better product will eventually dominate the market. But what if search results are skewed in a more subtle way? What if a search engine seems to give the kind of results you think you want, but those results are just a bit distorted? Would we even notice?
The people who run Google—the world's biggest and most popular source of information—are subject to some very powerful temptations. One temptation is simply money: Google is an advertising company, not a search engine company. Many people seem to think that Google's big breakthrough was to design a search engine that works really well. I remember going from the tedious boolean searches of Alta Vista to Google, and finding that not only did I get far better search results, but I didn't even need boolean logic—all I had to do was to enter a phrase, and Google would give me what I wanted. I was impressed; their search engine was (and is) damn good. But Google's real breakthrough was that it figured out how to make the Web profitable, and they are still far and away the best in their field. (Do they even have real competitors?) Given that Google's primary interest is in making money through their advertising (and indirectly, in making money for their clients), can we really depend on their integrity to prevent them from diddling with their search engine to skew the results just a bit to give a slight edge to their advertising interests? It seems to me that there is a conflict of interest between providing honest neutral search results and making money through advertising that is affected by those results. Maybe Google is the only company in the world that is led and staffed by people who are not only brilliant, but incorruptible as well. Is that possible? Sure. But it's not the way to bet.
There's another possibility also—one that bothers me from time to time, but I keep dismissing it as sheer paranoia. What if the people at Google decided to Do Good? Like everyone else, they know what the Good is...but they are in a unique position to advance the cause of the Good. If you run the world's premier information source, and you want to influence people's opinions—for Good, of course!— would you not do Good? I think I'd better leave that line of thought as an exercise for the reader.
On a more serious note, correctly assigning "positive" or "negative" to a given adjective or phrase, across a wide range of subject areas, must actually be something that would give the computational linguists a bit of trouble(or 10,000 interns a very boring time of it)... Simply parsing star ratings or "out of 10" is easy enough; but is a vacuum cleaner that sucks good or bad?
Y e e e e e s...the problem would seem to be quite complex; I'm surprised that this is the first time I've heard of Google's breakthrough in "sentiment analysis". I would have thought that a breakthrough of this magnitude would be announced on the front pages of all newspapers across the globe in font four inches high: "Google Solves Mankind's Communications Problems Forever". I knew these guys were really, really smart, but wow...I had no idea. I want to kiss the hem of their collective robe. From now on, you can just toss some ill-considered words onto/., and Google will make sense of them for you ! Employing the miracles of sentiment analysis, Google knows what you really intended to say! I'm sure that real soon now, there will be an SA button by every Google search result, and if you click it, you will not see the original text as posted, but what the writer was really trying to say! That, ladies and gentlemen, is progress.
I wonder how well that algorithm works with sarcasm.
Didn't you read TFA? Google has sentiment analysis. Sarcasm is (arguably) a sentiment, so this should be no problem whatsoever for Google. Now if only/. would make a <sentiment analysis="label_sarcasm" color="purple"/> option available to its often humor-challenged readers, perhaps there would be fewer of those awkward whoosh experiences.
And then I see amazon.com page, along with the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.co.uk page... one of them is useful... the other copies... not so much.
You lost me on that last one. Which site did you find useful? Why only one? I often order books from UK Amazon that haven't been published here in the US of A. I even order from amazon.de, because I read German. You think Amazon should consolidate all its localized stores into one huge site? That strikes me as having some obvious problems—like turning up a lot of book search results that are in languages you can't read.
It was a phone screen test. They were going to fly me out to the bay area for the interview - I was definitely interested in a free trip to California.
But I don't think they would have made me an offer to make it worth a move to a much more expensive part of the country.
I used to think the same way, but hasn't that problem more or less been corrected by the recent total reality smack-down? It seems to me that "affordable" and "housing" can once again be used without negation in a sentence that also contains "California". Or maybe all the home-owners there have not yet adjusted to the new realities? Seems to me you could probably get a reasonable deal on a house these days if you shopped around. Of course, there are other negatives to living in California—such as the entire state government being in financial free-fall. And the ridiculous gun laws, of course.
Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy state. Information wants to be free.
You forgot Aristotle's observation that objects want to fall to the ground. Such statements only become seriously problematic if they are proffered as explanations of natural phenomena—as was the case with Aristotle; otherwise, they are merely cute or redundant.
These are all expressions that treat very abstract concepts as if they had desires. This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains. It's no more illogical than using any other optimization tricks. Of course it has pitfalls and you need to remember that concepts are not really thinking entities, but it often works amazingly well.
Your last two paragraphs appear to be complete blather. "Hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits": zero meaning. "Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains": do you write self-improvement books? When I want to get the most out of my brain, I eat chocolate. Personifying it...man that could be dangerous.
Pinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!"
(For more information, please consult this reference.)
I do believe that comments gets you a "whoosh" award. The OP was being sarcastic. The proposition that "people shouldn't be allowed to have secrets" could not possibly have been meant seriously. Perhaps you should count to ten before you deploy the large caliber rhetorical artillery.
A friend of mine (retired sheriff deputy and Air Force reservist) explained it to me, and I've also heard this from my neighbor, who is a city police officer.
Most police who are on the beat, actually out there in contact with the public heavily favor private gun ownership and "must-issue" CCW laws. Most police chiefs (politicians) are against private ownership of firearms. When you hear talk about proposed ordinances, etc., listen to exactly who is doing the endorsing. If it's a police CHIEFS organization, they want you under their heel. If it's a police OFFICERS association, they want you guarding their backs. In my friend's words, "an armed citizen is a police officer's guardian angel".
I can personally attest to this friendly attitude on the part of the police. As a Texas CHL (Concealed Handgun License) holder, I have from time to time been stopped while driving—allegedly—over the posted speed limits. I always show the officers my permit and my license right at first contact, to make sure there are no misunderstandings. The police officers have always been very polite to me (as I have to them), and I suspect the CHL may have saved me a couple of traffic tickets, because I was issued a warning instead of a citation.
Also, there was recently an incident involving some people messing with my garage door—I can only suspect they were checking to see how easy it would be to get in. I called the police first, of course, but then I walked out my front door and headed toward the alley in back of my house...with my Glock prominently visible in its holster. You can yap about how "foolish" my action was all you like; I'd rather take some chances than cower "safely" in my house. That's my choice. I briefly saw a head poke around the corner, and then the rapidly attenuating scuffling of running feet. The cop got here in record time—4 minutes; and he certainly didn't so much as lift an eyebrow when he saw the Glock. (Remember, I was on my own property, so I didn't have to keep the weapon concealed, nor did I need any sort of license...in the free state of Texas, anyway.) When he spoke to me, it was as an equal; he was helping me defend my property and the public welfare, and I made certain he understood that his presence was most welcome, and that we were on the same team.
Fine, as long as it's just the poor, and not the mentally deranged who tend to accumulate among the ranks of the homeless. However, I'm not convinced that such a program is necessary, as it could be handled by private charities. I'd be happy to donate a gun to a poor man or woman who want to defend themselves and their families.
I would suggest that, since they're heading toward "universal" security measures, we take a cue from the Old West and require that everyone carry a sidearm. That'll take security down to the individual person, regardless of mode of transportation.
Yes, there will be some irresponsible behavior at first (consider it an initial boundary condition,) but things will sort themselves out once the yahoos have removed each other from the equation.
It's been done...I live in Texas. Concealed carry permits were introduced...oh I think about 15 years ago. The widely predicted rivers of blood gushing down the streets did not materialize. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single incident of a CHL (Concealed Handgun Licensee) misusing his weapon while taking advantage of the privileges of the license. There have been a few well-publicized incidents in which CHL holders made use of their rights, with lethal results. For example, in a road rage incident, a guy from New Jersey blocked the other guy's car, got out and started punching the hapless CHL holder in the face. Feeling no obligation to let himself be beaten to death, the CHL holder killed the jerk from Jersey with his.40 S&W. Of course, the grand jury found his actions completely justified, and there was never even a trial.
It's interesting that the dead guy was from New Jersey—probably the state with the strictest gun control laws in the Union. Clearly, he figured that because he was big and strong, and had the other guy trapped, he could do what he liked. Not in Texas, he couldn't.
Oh, I'd love to be able to carry my 9mm on the airplane with me (loaded with frangible bullets that won't penetrate the hull). But it's actually not necessary. As shown in cases like the Shoe Bomber and Captain Underpants, unarmed people are quite capable of taking down some yahoo who wants to blow up a plane. That's the irony—people are capable of protecting themselves, but the government doesn't like that. The government wants to feel needed.
Unfortunately, the TSA officials here are treating warfare as if it is an ordinary law enforcement matter. If you want to understand why this problem is getting worse, you have to realize that these "security experts" really have contempt for ordinary citizens and certainly don't believe in civil rights and a presumption of innocence. It is a presumption of guilt until being proven innocent which is causing all of the problems.
Extending this to trains or other forms of transportation isn't going to solve a single thing.
Excuse me, but what has the TSA got to do with "warfare" of any kind? Groping small children, strip-searching people or forcing them to submit to scanning that amounts to the same thing has zip to do with any kind of war. You don't fight wars by humiliating your own citizens...unless the war is against those very citizens. And that is what is happening—a psychological war waged to bring the people under totalitarian control.
On the pretext of one very effective attack that has a very low possibility of being repeated, and a clutch of amateurish failed attempts to blow up a few airplanes, our Beloved Leaders have conditioned the mindless populace to abject obedience, no matter what humiliating and pointless harassment they are subjected to (in the name of the "war on terror", of course). This harassment has a purpose: it is designed to accustom the people to being controlled. As we know, there is nothing more effective than an external threat to justify any repressive government actions, no matter how repugnant it ought to be to a people who are free in spirit. Bin Laden handed the elite bureaucrats of the U.S. government all the justification it needed to destroy the fundamental dignity and freedom of the American people. It would not be so bad if said people would stop bending over and hand their molesters the vaseline.
I was on vacation in Munich, Germany, a few weeks ago. It so happened that I got a ride from a Moslem taxi driver (well, I jumped to this conclusion because he wore unusual headgear—something like a lace doily, very decorative, really), and we struck up a conversation (in German, his English was not very good). He asked me if I hated Moslems because of the 9-11 attacks. I replied that I did not, but that my contempt is reserved for my own government. He was visibly taken aback by this, and wanted to know why. I told him what I am essentially saying here: the attack by a very small subset of the worlds Moslem population was used by our own government as justification for tightening its control over us. I could tell that this really blew his mind...but it was (and is) the truth.
Want to know what's really pathetic? He told me that he had always wanted to come to America; from his wistful tone, it was clear that the admired this country. I didn't have the heart to tell him not to bother.
Seriously, is everyone who works for "Homeland Security" an idiot? Is there some maximum IQ you can have before you're unqualified?
Attacking a bus is completely different than attacking a plane.
Even if these measure were useful in defending a plane (which they are not) they wouldn't apply to a bus because any terrorist WOULD NOT GO THROUGH THEM and would, instead, drive next to the bus and blow up his car.
There you go again—trying to use logic, you poor fool. The average TSA security jerk-off may have the mind of a mosquito, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous, for these people follow orders. No matter what those orders may be. Every day, the borders of human decency are trespassed upon with greater force (not to mention enthusiasm) by those who promise safety to the frightened American sheep. Every day, the pressure is turned up a little bit. When the camps are opened and the gas chambers built, the morons will still be following orders. Those who are giving the orders—the bureaucratic elite, on the other hand, know exactly what their goal is: total power. So laugh at the morons...while you are still allowed.
China may be bold, but sub launching a missile within a few miles of major US cities and military installations is a quick way to nuclear annihilation.
...
Chinese sub simply popping up in US coastal waters would likely involve it being attacked....
That would presume competence on the part of the U.S. Government and military, would it not? Our attention is focused on backing out of Iraq with as little damage to ourselves as we can manage, fighting "terrorists" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly with the work "phoned in" from some Predator base in Nevada, and maybe the occasional bunch of high CIA officers flying out to some remote base to give a group hug to a guy who swears he can deliver the straight dope on A.Q.'s number 2, and who is to prissy to be searched.
The craziest thing is that "panorama photography" has been explicitly allowed by law in Germany for ages and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. Now they're looking to severely restrict the right to take pictures in public space, because apparently now your private property extends to blurry images of your house facade...Germans actually love being watched as long as it's their own Big Brother who watches them, not some American company.
That's a cheap shot. What's happening is that their government (and some of their media) are distracting the German people from the real problem by making a big deal out of Google. Germany has very strict "data protection laws" ("Datenschutz") that are ostensibly meant to safeguard individual privacy. They don't: they only prevent individuals from finding out stuff—corporations and the government are not hampered a bit by these laws.
So Google is just a convenient whipping boy; the fact that they are foreigners, and most especially the fact that they are American, makes them an easy mark. We have plenty of big brothers watching us over here in the U.S. of A. That doesn't mean we "love" it.
Bullets are typically found in the hunting part of the Sporting Goods section, near all the camping gear, fishing supplies, etc.
Really? I've never seen them selling any reloading supplies...just cartridges. FYI..."bullets" are pieces of lead, possibly in combination with other metals, like copper. A cartridge is composed of a bullet stuck in a case (usually made of brass), gunpowder inside the case, and a primer on the bottom (the little button thingy that explodes and ignites the powder when the firing pin of a gun strikes it).
and BTW.... if I weigh myself in kilos, I would weigh the same number of kilos no matter where I weighed myself in the universe. It isn't so with pounds, practical or not.
I am not sure I understand what you just said. The first sentence almost sort of makes sense, but then your distinction between pounds and kilos seems to indicate you are completely off.
You would indeed weigh the same on earth as on the moon...if you are using a balance scale. That's because the reference weights would weigh about one sixth of what they do on earth...as would you. However, if you are using a spring scale (i.e., a common "bathroom scale") or any type of scale that relies on pressure to measure weight, the scale would say you weigh one sixth of what you weigh on earth.
I do not understand why you think pounds are earth-bound, while kilos are universal. In any place where there is sufficient gravity (or its equivalent, provided by acceleration) for "weighing" to be a sensible undertaking, it does not matter whether your scale is calibrated in pounds or kilos—the type of scale is what determines whether you get constant results or not.
It is probably a simple matter for the US to accept the new standard.
That's right! Who cares about the rest of the world! Simply define the new kilogram (US) in terms of sticks of butter. Of course, the British will also insist on going their own way, and will define a kilogram as "6 stone, more or less". The French will seek revenge by defining the kilogram in terms of wheels of camenbert. The Germans will rule the world by default, as they will do something sensible.
Because they're the same thing. For example, Windows Command Prompt is what UNIX users would call a "shell", and its scripts are text files with names ending in.bat.
Either you have never written both Windows Batch files and Unix shell scripts, or you're being sarcastic, or you are using a very loose meaning of the word "same". Yeah sure, they both have something to do with the command line.
Heck, one german soldier helped my grandmother to carry down, from a train, the stroller with my aunt. Well, it was the proper thing to do, I guess. Plus it was quite heavy. Contraband in the form of half pig probably contributing (though to be fair, from his comment it would seem it was also a deliberate neglecting of the war effort on his part / he knew what was going on)
Of course, and he was doing the same thing. German soldiers coming home from leave generally tended to bring along the odd goose, brace of chickens, sausages, or whatever else the black market would yield. Food rationing for German civilians was very tight toward the end of the war. The last thing he would want to do was draw the attention of the Feldjäger (military police). I know it's true...my grandmother told me so.
That's exactly why the Soviet Navy gave their ships non-sequential pennant (hull) numbers, and frequently re-assigned them. They would also sometimes paint one number on one side of the bow, and different on the other.
Sure, but that didn't have anything to do with any rational conception of security—it happened because the real number of the ship was so secret nobody was allowed to know it (not even the guy in charge of making up ship numbers) and the guy who painted the number on the left side of the ship wasn't allowed to know what the guy on the right side was painting, and vice versa. Security through complete paranoia—that was the Soviet way. That they completely confused themselves using such methods was deemed an acceptable risk, I guess.
...but sitting down with your keys in the same pocket as the phone will most definitely scratch normal glass if your keys get pressed against it just so.
I'm not sure if can I believe that. Glass is approximately 1550 on the Brinnell scale (of hardness). Hardened tool steel—with a typical hardness of 1500–1900—can indeed scratch glass; in fact, the glass cutters I've seen all have steel wheels. However, who would make keys out of hardened steel? That would make cutting the key something of a problem! It seems to me that every key I've seen is made out of a relatively soft material, such as aluminum, brass, or "mild" (i.e. soft) steel. None of these materials will cut glass. (See the Wikipedia article on the Brinell scale for this information.
According to the Mohs hardness scale, knife blades are about 5.5, and glass ranges from 6-7. (As with the Brinell scale, higher values mean harder materials.) Of course there are many varieties of glass with a considerable variance in surface hardness, and there's an even greater selection of steels available for knife-making, so I don't think one can categorically state that a knife will never scratch glass. However, glass is pretty far up there on all the measures of scratchiness. I don't think keys are a threat. Unless you are very heavy, have both keys and gadget in the same back pocket when you sit down, and bring enough force to bear to break the glass outright, of course...
I didn't know they used glass for the backs of iPhones. I know the screen is covered by glass, but I didn't know they made the whole shell out of that material. It seems to me that this is indeed likely make the phones too fragile—I figured that dropping my 3G was a bad thing because it could break the screen, I didn't realize the whole thing might shatter all over the floor. So using some kind of shock-absorbing case should be considered mandatory for such devices.
It's still a puzzling design decision. Why not make the shell out of shock-absorbing plastic? Well, I suppose they got a lot of flack for those "easily scratched" iPods, so they picked a hard material that is actually pretty darn difficult to scratch—glass. There aren't that many common materials around that will actually scratch glass. I wonder what kind of debris might get between the case and the phone and cause scratching...maybe abrasive from sand paper, if you have hobbies that require a lot of sanding? Personally, I couldn't care less about cosmetic defects on my iPhone, except for scratches on the screen.
I always get a laugh out of people who put "screen protectors" (thin sheets of plastic) on their personal devices. If the screen is covered with glass, you really don't need to worry about scratching it. I've never scratched a screen on any of the multitude of personal electronic devices I have owned, because the screens were always made of glass.
In conclusion, I think covering the screen with glass makes sense; making the whole frame out of glass strikes me as dumb. If the device was made of a more elastic material, you would not even have to worry about breaking the recessed glass over the screen if you drop the device. As it is, you must put a plastic cover on your iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is everyone acting like page ranking should be anything but whatever Google wants them to be? They are free to use whatever they wish to determine the search results. If they decide to never show Hotmail when you search for email, there is absolutely nothing wrong, ethically or legally, with this. They are free to shun a competitor. They are free to put you last on every search if they just simply don't like you. They can put whatever they want into the search results, in whatever order they wish, with whatever advertisements they want, and it is legally and morally fine.
If their results start to suck, then people will switch to a different search engine, as has already happened once. There are dozens of competitors...
You make a good point. If a search engine starts to fail conspicuously, or another search engine performs noticeably better, then—given a level playing field—the better product will eventually dominate the market. But what if search results are skewed in a more subtle way? What if a search engine seems to give the kind of results you think you want, but those results are just a bit distorted? Would we even notice?
The people who run Google—the world's biggest and most popular source of information—are subject to some very powerful temptations. One temptation is simply money: Google is an advertising company, not a search engine company. Many people seem to think that Google's big breakthrough was to design a search engine that works really well. I remember going from the tedious boolean searches of Alta Vista to Google, and finding that not only did I get far better search results, but I didn't even need boolean logic—all I had to do was to enter a phrase, and Google would give me what I wanted. I was impressed; their search engine was (and is) damn good. But Google's real breakthrough was that it figured out how to make the Web profitable, and they are still far and away the best in their field. (Do they even have real competitors?) Given that Google's primary interest is in making money through their advertising (and indirectly, in making money for their clients), can we really depend on their integrity to prevent them from diddling with their search engine to skew the results just a bit to give a slight edge to their advertising interests? It seems to me that there is a conflict of interest between providing honest neutral search results and making money through advertising that is affected by those results. Maybe Google is the only company in the world that is led and staffed by people who are not only brilliant, but incorruptible as well. Is that possible? Sure. But it's not the way to bet.
There's another possibility also—one that bothers me from time to time, but I keep dismissing it as sheer paranoia. What if the people at Google decided to Do Good? Like everyone else, they know what the Good is...but they are in a unique position to advance the cause of the Good. If you run the world's premier information source, and you want to influence people's opinions—for Good, of course!— would you not do Good? I think I'd better leave that line of thought as an exercise for the reader.
On a more serious note, correctly assigning "positive" or "negative" to a given adjective or phrase, across a wide range of subject areas, must actually be something that would give the computational linguists a bit of trouble(or 10,000 interns a very boring time of it)... Simply parsing star ratings or "out of 10" is easy enough; but is a vacuum cleaner that sucks good or bad?
Y e e e e e s...the problem would seem to be quite complex; I'm surprised that this is the first time I've heard of Google's breakthrough in "sentiment analysis". I would have thought that a breakthrough of this magnitude would be announced on the front pages of all newspapers across the globe in font four inches high: "Google Solves Mankind's Communications Problems Forever". I knew these guys were really, really smart, but wow...I had no idea. I want to kiss the hem of their collective robe. From now on, you can just toss some ill-considered words onto /., and Google will make sense of them for you ! Employing the miracles of sentiment analysis, Google knows what you really intended to say! I'm sure that real soon now, there will be an SA button by every Google search result, and if you click it, you will not see the original text as posted, but what the writer was really trying to say! That, ladies and gentlemen, is progress.
I wonder how well that algorithm works with sarcasm.
Didn't you read TFA? Google has sentiment analysis. Sarcasm is (arguably) a sentiment, so this should be no problem whatsoever for Google. Now if only /. would make a <sentiment analysis="label_sarcasm" color="purple"/> option available to its often humor-challenged readers, perhaps there would be fewer of those awkward whoosh experiences.
And then I see amazon.com page, along with the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.co.uk page... one of them is useful... the other copies... not so much.
You lost me on that last one. Which site did you find useful? Why only one? I often order books from UK Amazon that haven't been published here in the US of A. I even order from amazon.de, because I read German. You think Amazon should consolidate all its localized stores into one huge site? That strikes me as having some obvious problems—like turning up a lot of book search results that are in languages you can't read.
It was a phone screen test. They were going to fly me out to the bay area for the interview - I was definitely interested in a free trip to California.
But I don't think they would have made me an offer to make it worth a move to a much more expensive part of the country.
I used to think the same way, but hasn't that problem more or less been corrected by the recent total reality smack-down? It seems to me that "affordable" and "housing" can once again be used without negation in a sentence that also contains "California". Or maybe all the home-owners there have not yet adjusted to the new realities? Seems to me you could probably get a reasonable deal on a house these days if you shopped around. Of course, there are other negatives to living in California—such as the entire state government being in financial free-fall. And the ridiculous gun laws, of course.
Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy state. Information wants to be free.
You forgot Aristotle's observation that objects want to fall to the ground. Such statements only become seriously problematic if they are proffered as explanations of natural phenomena—as was the case with Aristotle; otherwise, they are merely cute or redundant.
These are all expressions that treat very abstract concepts as if they had desires. This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains. It's no more illogical than using any other optimization tricks. Of course it has pitfalls and you need to remember that concepts are not really thinking entities, but it often works amazingly well.
Your last two paragraphs appear to be complete blather. "Hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits": zero meaning. "Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains": do you write self-improvement books? When I want to get the most out of my brain, I eat chocolate. Personifying it...man that could be dangerous.
Pinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!"
(For more information, please consult this reference.)
I do believe that comments gets you a "whoosh" award. The OP was being sarcastic. The proposition that "people shouldn't be allowed to have secrets" could not possibly have been meant seriously. Perhaps you should count to ten before you deploy the large caliber rhetorical artillery.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing.
Go to a shooting range some time. Everybody's always very polite.
I can personally attest to this friendly attitude on the part of the police. As a Texas CHL (Concealed Handgun License) holder, I have from time to time been stopped while driving—allegedly—over the posted speed limits. I always show the officers my permit and my license right at first contact, to make sure there are no misunderstandings. The police officers have always been very polite to me (as I have to them), and I suspect the CHL may have saved me a couple of traffic tickets, because I was issued a warning instead of a citation.
Also, there was recently an incident involving some people messing with my garage door—I can only suspect they were checking to see how easy it would be to get in. I called the police first, of course, but then I walked out my front door and headed toward the alley in back of my house...with my Glock prominently visible in its holster. You can yap about how "foolish" my action was all you like; I'd rather take some chances than cower "safely" in my house. That's my choice. I briefly saw a head poke around the corner, and then the rapidly attenuating scuffling of running feet. The cop got here in record time—4 minutes; and he certainly didn't so much as lift an eyebrow when he saw the Glock. (Remember, I was on my own property, so I didn't have to keep the weapon concealed, nor did I need any sort of license...in the free state of Texas, anyway.) When he spoke to me, it was as an equal; he was helping me defend my property and the public welfare, and I made certain he understood that his presence was most welcome, and that we were on the same team.
Fine, as long as it's just the poor, and not the mentally deranged who tend to accumulate among the ranks of the homeless. However, I'm not convinced that such a program is necessary, as it could be handled by private charities. I'd be happy to donate a gun to a poor man or woman who want to defend themselves and their families.
I would suggest that, since they're heading toward "universal" security measures, we take a cue from the Old West and require that everyone carry a sidearm. That'll take security down to the individual person, regardless of mode of transportation. Yes, there will be some irresponsible behavior at first (consider it an initial boundary condition,) but things will sort themselves out once the yahoos have removed each other from the equation.
It's been done...I live in Texas. Concealed carry permits were introduced...oh I think about 15 years ago. The widely predicted rivers of blood gushing down the streets did not materialize. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single incident of a CHL (Concealed Handgun Licensee) misusing his weapon while taking advantage of the privileges of the license. There have been a few well-publicized incidents in which CHL holders made use of their rights, with lethal results. For example, in a road rage incident, a guy from New Jersey blocked the other guy's car, got out and started punching the hapless CHL holder in the face. Feeling no obligation to let himself be beaten to death, the CHL holder killed the jerk from Jersey with his .40 S&W. Of course, the grand jury found his actions completely justified, and there was never even a trial.
It's interesting that the dead guy was from New Jersey—probably the state with the strictest gun control laws in the Union. Clearly, he figured that because he was big and strong, and had the other guy trapped, he could do what he liked. Not in Texas, he couldn't.
Oh, I'd love to be able to carry my 9mm on the airplane with me (loaded with frangible bullets that won't penetrate the hull). But it's actually not necessary. As shown in cases like the Shoe Bomber and Captain Underpants, unarmed people are quite capable of taking down some yahoo who wants to blow up a plane. That's the irony—people are capable of protecting themselves, but the government doesn't like that. The government wants to feel needed.
Unfortunately, the TSA officials here are treating warfare as if it is an ordinary law enforcement matter. If you want to understand why this problem is getting worse, you have to realize that these "security experts" really have contempt for ordinary citizens and certainly don't believe in civil rights and a presumption of innocence. It is a presumption of guilt until being proven innocent which is causing all of the problems.
Extending this to trains or other forms of transportation isn't going to solve a single thing.
Excuse me, but what has the TSA got to do with "warfare" of any kind? Groping small children, strip-searching people or forcing them to submit to scanning that amounts to the same thing has zip to do with any kind of war. You don't fight wars by humiliating your own citizens...unless the war is against those very citizens. And that is what is happening—a psychological war waged to bring the people under totalitarian control.
On the pretext of one very effective attack that has a very low possibility of being repeated, and a clutch of amateurish failed attempts to blow up a few airplanes, our Beloved Leaders have conditioned the mindless populace to abject obedience, no matter what humiliating and pointless harassment they are subjected to (in the name of the "war on terror", of course). This harassment has a purpose: it is designed to accustom the people to being controlled. As we know, there is nothing more effective than an external threat to justify any repressive government actions, no matter how repugnant it ought to be to a people who are free in spirit. Bin Laden handed the elite bureaucrats of the U.S. government all the justification it needed to destroy the fundamental dignity and freedom of the American people. It would not be so bad if said people would stop bending over and hand their molesters the vaseline.
I was on vacation in Munich, Germany, a few weeks ago. It so happened that I got a ride from a Moslem taxi driver (well, I jumped to this conclusion because he wore unusual headgear—something like a lace doily, very decorative, really), and we struck up a conversation (in German, his English was not very good). He asked me if I hated Moslems because of the 9-11 attacks. I replied that I did not, but that my contempt is reserved for my own government. He was visibly taken aback by this, and wanted to know why. I told him what I am essentially saying here: the attack by a very small subset of the worlds Moslem population was used by our own government as justification for tightening its control over us. I could tell that this really blew his mind...but it was (and is) the truth.
Want to know what's really pathetic? He told me that he had always wanted to come to America; from his wistful tone, it was clear that the admired this country. I didn't have the heart to tell him not to bother.
Seriously, is everyone who works for "Homeland Security" an idiot? Is there some maximum IQ you can have before you're unqualified?
Attacking a bus is completely different than attacking a plane. Even if these measure were useful in defending a plane (which they are not) they wouldn't apply to a bus because any terrorist WOULD NOT GO THROUGH THEM and would, instead, drive next to the bus and blow up his car.
There you go again—trying to use logic, you poor fool. The average TSA security jerk-off may have the mind of a mosquito, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous, for these people follow orders. No matter what those orders may be. Every day, the borders of human decency are trespassed upon with greater force (not to mention enthusiasm) by those who promise safety to the frightened American sheep. Every day, the pressure is turned up a little bit. When the camps are opened and the gas chambers built, the morons will still be following orders. Those who are giving the orders—the bureaucratic elite, on the other hand, know exactly what their goal is: total power. So laugh at the morons...while you are still allowed.
China may be bold, but sub launching a missile within a few miles of major US cities and military installations is a quick way to nuclear annihilation.
...
Chinese sub simply popping up in US coastal waters would likely involve it being attacked. ...
That would presume competence on the part of the U.S. Government and military, would it not? Our attention is focused on backing out of Iraq with as little damage to ourselves as we can manage, fighting "terrorists" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly with the work "phoned in" from some Predator base in Nevada, and maybe the occasional bunch of high CIA officers flying out to some remote base to give a group hug to a guy who swears he can deliver the straight dope on A.Q.'s number 2, and who is to prissy to be searched.
So, you were saying...?
The craziest thing is that "panorama photography" has been explicitly allowed by law in Germany for ages and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. Now they're looking to severely restrict the right to take pictures in public space, because apparently now your private property extends to blurry images of your house facade...Germans actually love being watched as long as it's their own Big Brother who watches them, not some American company.
That's a cheap shot. What's happening is that their government (and some of their media) are distracting the German people from the real problem by making a big deal out of Google. Germany has very strict "data protection laws" ("Datenschutz") that are ostensibly meant to safeguard individual privacy. They don't: they only prevent individuals from finding out stuff—corporations and the government are not hampered a bit by these laws.
So Google is just a convenient whipping boy; the fact that they are foreigners, and most especially the fact that they are American, makes them an easy mark. We have plenty of big brothers watching us over here in the U.S. of A. That doesn't mean we "love" it.
Bullets are typically found in the hunting part of the Sporting Goods section, near all the camping gear, fishing supplies, etc.
Really? I've never seen them selling any reloading supplies...just cartridges. FYI..."bullets" are pieces of lead, possibly in combination with other metals, like copper. A cartridge is composed of a bullet stuck in a case (usually made of brass), gunpowder inside the case, and a primer on the bottom (the little button thingy that explodes and ignites the powder when the firing pin of a gun strikes it).
All spelling and grammar errors are intentional. Grammar Nazis' need entertainment.
Your use of the apostrophe is incorrect.
and BTW.... if I weigh myself in kilos, I would weigh the same number of kilos no matter where I weighed myself in the universe. It isn't so with pounds, practical or not.
I am not sure I understand what you just said. The first sentence almost sort of makes sense, but then your distinction between pounds and kilos seems to indicate you are completely off.
You would indeed weigh the same on earth as on the moon...if you are using a balance scale. That's because the reference weights would weigh about one sixth of what they do on earth...as would you. However, if you are using a spring scale (i.e., a common "bathroom scale") or any type of scale that relies on pressure to measure weight, the scale would say you weigh one sixth of what you weigh on earth.
I do not understand why you think pounds are earth-bound, while kilos are universal. In any place where there is sufficient gravity (or its equivalent, provided by acceleration) for "weighing" to be a sensible undertaking, it does not matter whether your scale is calibrated in pounds or kilos—the type of scale is what determines whether you get constant results or not.
It is probably a simple matter for the US to accept the new standard.
That's right! Who cares about the rest of the world! Simply define the new kilogram (US) in terms of sticks of butter. Of course, the British will also insist on going their own way, and will define a kilogram as "6 stone, more or less". The French will seek revenge by defining the kilogram in terms of wheels of camenbert. The Germans will rule the world by default, as they will do something sensible.
Because they're the same thing. For example, Windows Command Prompt is what UNIX users would call a "shell", and its scripts are text files with names ending in .bat.
Either you have never written both Windows Batch files and Unix shell scripts, or you're being sarcastic, or you are using a very loose meaning of the word "same". Yeah sure, they both have something to do with the command line.
Yeah. And I was hoping to be able to play some of the really old DOS games on my phone.
Heck, one german soldier helped my grandmother to carry down, from a train, the stroller with my aunt. Well, it was the proper thing to do, I guess. Plus it was quite heavy. Contraband in the form of half pig probably contributing (though to be fair, from his comment it would seem it was also a deliberate neglecting of the war effort on his part / he knew what was going on)
Of course, and he was doing the same thing. German soldiers coming home from leave generally tended to bring along the odd goose, brace of chickens, sausages, or whatever else the black market would yield. Food rationing for German civilians was very tight toward the end of the war. The last thing he would want to do was draw the attention of the Feldjäger (military police). I know it's true...my grandmother told me so.
That's exactly why the Soviet Navy gave their ships non-sequential pennant (hull) numbers, and frequently re-assigned them. They would also sometimes paint one number on one side of the bow, and different on the other.
Sure, but that didn't have anything to do with any rational conception of security—it happened because the real number of the ship was so secret nobody was allowed to know it (not even the guy in charge of making up ship numbers) and the guy who painted the number on the left side of the ship wasn't allowed to know what the guy on the right side was painting, and vice versa. Security through complete paranoia—that was the Soviet way. That they completely confused themselves using such methods was deemed an acceptable risk, I guess.
...but sitting down with your keys in the same pocket as the phone will most definitely scratch normal glass if your keys get pressed against it just so.
I'm not sure if can I believe that. Glass is approximately 1550 on the Brinnell scale (of hardness). Hardened tool steel—with a typical hardness of 1500–1900—can indeed scratch glass; in fact, the glass cutters I've seen all have steel wheels. However, who would make keys out of hardened steel? That would make cutting the key something of a problem! It seems to me that every key I've seen is made out of a relatively soft material, such as aluminum, brass, or "mild" (i.e. soft) steel. None of these materials will cut glass. (See the Wikipedia article on the Brinell scale for this information.
According to the Mohs hardness scale, knife blades are about 5.5, and glass ranges from 6-7. (As with the Brinell scale, higher values mean harder materials.) Of course there are many varieties of glass with a considerable variance in surface hardness, and there's an even greater selection of steels available for knife-making, so I don't think one can categorically state that a knife will never scratch glass. However, glass is pretty far up there on all the measures of scratchiness. I don't think keys are a threat. Unless you are very heavy, have both keys and gadget in the same back pocket when you sit down, and bring enough force to bear to break the glass outright, of course...
I didn't know they used glass for the backs of iPhones. I know the screen is covered by glass, but I didn't know they made the whole shell out of that material. It seems to me that this is indeed likely make the phones too fragile—I figured that dropping my 3G was a bad thing because it could break the screen, I didn't realize the whole thing might shatter all over the floor. So using some kind of shock-absorbing case should be considered mandatory for such devices.
It's still a puzzling design decision. Why not make the shell out of shock-absorbing plastic? Well, I suppose they got a lot of flack for those "easily scratched" iPods, so they picked a hard material that is actually pretty darn difficult to scratch—glass. There aren't that many common materials around that will actually scratch glass. I wonder what kind of debris might get between the case and the phone and cause scratching...maybe abrasive from sand paper, if you have hobbies that require a lot of sanding? Personally, I couldn't care less about cosmetic defects on my iPhone, except for scratches on the screen.
I always get a laugh out of people who put "screen protectors" (thin sheets of plastic) on their personal devices. If the screen is covered with glass, you really don't need to worry about scratching it. I've never scratched a screen on any of the multitude of personal electronic devices I have owned, because the screens were always made of glass.
In conclusion, I think covering the screen with glass makes sense; making the whole frame out of glass strikes me as dumb. If the device was made of a more elastic material, you would not even have to worry about breaking the recessed glass over the screen if you drop the device. As it is, you must put a plastic cover on your iPhone.