Sounds more like they're anti-Chinese. Seriously, though, it would be more "anti-US Government" for the same reason it would be "anti-China government". Governments have a large part in regulating industrial pollution. Governments also have a large part in regulating standards for devices used by individuals to inherently reduce pollution. Governments also have a large part in subsidizing nascent technology so that it can become mainstream on its own.*
Most of what the US government has regularly done for decades is to do what a lesser degree of what China does now--ignore their own regulation policies, actually cripple the ability of regulators to act, and to be in full-force denial of actual pollution that is clearly going on. On the personal front, the heavily slanted view of personal liberty (of big auto companies) has consistently delayed or reduced higher efficiency standards on vehicles--and the heavily big-than-life selling of trucks to "get the job done" has been a great financial success for the auto industry but has been disastrous for the environment.
Of course the elephant in the room is the obvious. China has near zero respect for human rights or health, so no amount of bitching by anyone matters. Only a few select areas are there enough political leaders in a position in an area who actually have enough force to actual curtail industrial-scale pollution. Meanwhile, even if Chinese leadership gave a damn and tomorrow seriously cracked down on industrial polluters and adopted the newest technologies to curtail pollution, to actually produce a sizable middle class would still result in China having a larger CO2 and other footprint than other countries by virtue of its population size. To even attempt to deny China of a right to produce a prosperous middle class is both repugnant and any sort of enforcement could lead potentially to all sorts of very nasty negative international consequences (like war).
Of course, it doesn't help that Americans per capita use nearly twice the energy of most other developed nations so inherently has a lot of room it could improve without sacrificing a developed nation lifestyle, yet the US has basically promised it won't act unless China acts first. Well, perhaps China will act first. Then what will be the excuse?
*PS - If you don't believe any of this, well, congratulations. I presume you also don't believe it's an issue if I vaporize mercury and blow it in your face (literally directly or indirectly in coal burning pollution).
Oh where do I begin to describe the skewed perspective of this article. It seems clear the author had recently read the book "The Pencil" and thought they could write up a little tidbit about it with patents. But, when you start doing the math, it really falls through. The "invention" was created in 1858. The supreme court ruling about the patent came in 1875, nearly 20 years later (so at the point where the patent would have nearly expired anyways). Meanwhile, it's not really at all clear that the whole eraser-on-pencil really took off on its own. It sounds like, instead, some American companies liked the idea (perhaps to match parity with said investor, Joseph Reckendorfer) and started producing such pencils. Meanwhile, some 60+ years later and Europe still wasn't making such pencils (well, not commonly enough, anyways).
Oh, and the best part is the silly:
So does our pencil say something about us as a people? A writer for a 1922 issue of American Stationer and Office Outfitter thought so: “Throughout Europe, the rubber-tipped pencil is practically unknown,” they wrote. “It may be that foreigners consider themselves less apt to make mistakes than the happy-go-lucky Americans.”
Or it could be that, oh, Europeans were still using their separate erasers and perhaps snarkily mocking the Americans for throwing away tons of perfectly good erasers just for the convenience of having one glued to the end of their pencil. Meanwhile, the more honest truth is probably the more simple that European pencil manufacturers probably didn't think there much demand and the vast majority of people weren't going to pay a premium to import the stupid things In the end, wide scale adoption would have more to do with there being only a few manufacturers which made up the effective industry in the area and with a majority all deciding something, whatever it was, was a good enough idea and offering the X + Y product as either a replacement for X or as a premium version of X, wide side adoption basically inherently happened. But even today, plenty of places sell pencils without erasers. And there's separate eraser heads you can pull off and reuse until they're heavily wore out (although those are still mighty wasteful as usually the base is pretty unusable for erasing.
So, now with that, I can happily say my comment is about as much a rambling little conjecture as the article.
And I suspect the same was true for cocaine before it was rendered illegal. Of course, the adverse effects of cocaine use on its user wasn't the basis for making it illegal--at least officially. It's considered too odious to infringe upon a person's liberty for their own well being. But if you can make up even the most frivolous extrapolation that it might lead to harm to another, well lock them up and throw away the key. And as much as I agree about the ideas of personal liberty and the right of self destruction--let's ignore how suicide is effectively if not outright illegal in plenty of those self-described personal liberty states--, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we'd just admit to the real reason so many things are rendered illegal as they are. Perhaps then they could be limited in scope or later repealed as it's recognized how it isn't the place of the state to regulate such things (exactly the circumstances that lead to the repeal of prohibition in the US--well, that and the decade long violence). But, that is in the same scope as wishing that laws be named in accordance with their purpose or politicians lie less.
Sad to say, but I'd imagine only a lot more school shootings will eventually make people realize how stupid this idea of targeted zero tolerance really is. And I don't wish for that any more than I wish for a lot more terrorist attacks to show the stupidity of the TSA. But, in the mean time, people have to life with the hassle and the inherent corruption in giving people who shouldn't have the power a position to ruin a lot of peoples lives for no good reason. That's the real travesty here. The whole NSA scandal just makes me feel even more pessimistic that public uproar would even matter.
I guess my issue with your proposal is that I just can't see very many cases where it's practical.
Granted, most desktop users buy a computer as a unit and don't make modifications. Those that do rarely know ahead of time what they want and even if options were available by OEMs, a lot would make poor choices. So, it seems an almost inevitable that only the technically minded who are willing to make modifications are the majority in the middle, without the cash to spend the significantly more on a pure RAID SDD setup. Of course, the same people are liable to just use one SDD as a boot/root device and forgo the idea of RAID.:) And the practical SDD/HDD hybrids which I can only presume have even worse reliability than standard HDDs or SDDs (I don't presume that hybrids do good fall back onto just SDD or just HDD if one part fails) will likely be the major penetration in the desktop arena.
Still, I'd prefer a 4x HDD RAID for the performance/capacity/reliability (the latter is more important to me actually as I've seen plenty of computers die). But, then even I'm in the boat of having a system not designed to physically contain that many HDDs and my system doesn't support eSATA or USB 3.0 for an enclosure.:( So, it's all still too much of a theoretical for me. It's nice to think about The cost of multiple SSDs isn't, though.
Well can you blame them. What is the first thing that happens when kid does something wrong.
Sure we can blame them. The issue, after all, isn't that there wasn't some level of an investigation into the incident. The issue is that (a) the school officials jumped well beyond the "there's a remote possibility that there's more to this than the simple stupidity/frustrations/whatever of a teenager" and (b) the police were more than willing to act on the "threat" that really wasn't there.
"WHY DIDN'T ANYONE SEE THESE CLEAR WARNING SIGNS!" This kid played first person shooters, read gun magazines, and didn't get along with the popular kids! Just like millions of other people....
Precisely. Every time people ask that, ask them if they'd like to get preemptive yearly speeding tickets which they have to pay in full regardless of whether they're ever stopped--and without it excluding them from having to pay if stopped. After all, all the warnings signs are there for most people. Point out that the law isn't there to stop every crime before it happens and that appropriate steps were taken to try to read warning signs. But, in the end, lots of people match the warning signs and it's not enough reason to lock up half the teenagers just because.
Just like in the old days they used to say, "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". No school administrator ever got in trouble for putting a kid in jail as a potential danger. Man I am glad they didn't have first person shooters when I was in school. I know for a fact that at least one of my friends if not myself would have made a map of the school. Of course that person and everyone that played that map would go to jail for planning a terrorist attack.
That always reminds me of the funny story. I was in school during Columbine. At the time, there were a group of us who would play Duke Nukem 3D in the computer lab. The net result was we had to get our parents to sign a waver and it was clear the person "in charge" thought it was all just stupid but never the less a CYOA move by the school. So, well, why isn't that enough now days?
And the parents will not stop it because it is always better to throw another persons kid in jail to protect your own.
Yea, until their own precocious snowflake gets thrown into jail for 50 years for sniffing glue. Really, it just shows the clear cowardice and slime of politicians who don't have the backbone to follow a clear path and will cave in to every little demand to be/stay elected. And yea, the parents are to blame too for the same reason. The real reaction that should be for this? Shaming all the parents who aren't (a) calling for the boy to be released and (b) for the rules to be changed (preemptively in other schools) to avoid this whole mess. In the end, it's almost always the parents fault. Well, except when the kid is responsible, but that'd require actual harm.
Most workloads are in fact dominated by small, mostly random, reads and writes, which is why SSDs are just that much faster in the majority of cases.
Yes and no. SSDs offer much lower latency and can handle near instantly the common small, mostly random, reads (and writes, but that's heavily covered with RAM caching). But the common workflow rate is nothing closer to on the order of 90,000 IOPS. Instead, the issue is more that spikes in most workflows can reach the low thousands range and HDDs will strain for seconds to fulfill requests*. Hence, the actual performance difference is on the scope of SSDs being 5-10x faster. It also heavily implies that with a proper RAID1 implementation ferreting out requests that a lot, though not all, of the read requests could scale near linearly across all the drives. The main issue, as you note, is that plenty of RAID1 implementations likely don't do such things well if at all (although I wonder if what you say holds true for Linux's dm-mirror (which I know isn't strictly RAID1, and you can readily fault me that I wasn't necessarily strictly speaking of the official spec RAID1 but primarily of a fault-tolerant mirroring system)).
There are still reasons to use HDDs, but performance is absolutely not one of them. It's not even close. Take it from someone who manages several hundred HDDs + SSDs.
Except my point wasn't that HDDs are better performance wise, even in a RAID configuration. It was that a RAID of HDDs could obtain a better fault tolerance rate and still see a substantial performance spec of SSDs (really, you should look at the benchmarks I linked to before or try to find other workflow examples to see just how big of a difference in scale having 1000x the possible IOPS really has on most use cases) with the unstated point of relatively cost being a lot less--and 4TBs were admittedly a bad example because 1TB (on the order of $60/drive) are more than sufficient for a comparison given the SSD price range for such things. I don't think your notes about power usage hold up--4 6W drives** work out to be ~1kW*h/1.736 day sustained or ~$31.53/year at $0.15/kW*h--figures I think are just overboard to realistic. Maintenance and enclosure costs are the real killers, I think, although the former has to be weighed against the downtime costs on an SDD system vs a RAID system and the latter can be possibly avoided (presuming maintenance is done after hours and computers were bought with sufficient internal space for the necessary drives--admittedly a possible blocking issue).
In any case, yes, SSD is the clear winner as far as raw performance goes. But the whole article was about reliability. And you and others keep bringing up IOPS as if they remotely linearly scale to real world performance (they rarely do). Meanwhile, RAID HDDs offer a pretty clear middle ground for a lot of people who care about reliability first and can still see performance gains in many cases. But, I'd readily defer to your experience upon the subject. I'd just prefer some actual numbers to back it up rather and some clear observations to sustain that position than using vague words like small and big or random and sequential or focusing on IOPS when throughput is a major factor too in judging things too:)
*I base this all on personal observation of actual throughput on systems which varies greatly but can readily sustain in the 7MiB/sec to 20MiB/sec range which based upon 120IOPS implies minimally common sequential reads/sec of at least ~60KiB to ~170KiB blocks (presuming saturated IOPS) and likely much higher actual numbers since I doubt IOPS requests are actually commonly saturated. Of course once you do get to saturated IOPS on a HDD you are looking at a potentially dismal (presuming 4KiB/block) 480KiB/sec while SDD is likely only limited by its ability to saturate SATA or whatever the connection is. Yet benchmarks rarely bare out figures like that (that I've seen, anyways)
Typical IOPS on a 7200 RPM HDD is around 80. Typical IOPS on a garden variety SSD is 80,000. We'll be generous and assume linear speedup for the four HDDs, which gives us 320 IOPS, or 0.4% of the performance of a single SSD.
Great. Thanks for, like so many other people in this thread, pulling out a near meaningless benchmark figure*. As others point out, you might see 1000x the IOPS but real world results are more on the order of at most 5-10x speedup (a look at some of Tom's Hardwares HDD vs SDD seems to confirm it with adding music to WMP on HDD and on SDD and Gaming on HDD and on SDD). Why is that? Obviously because most applications and activities don't involve randomly accessing 4K files/sectors scattered all over the storage device. File systems are heavily designed to avoid fragmentation and most file accesses are linear and of considerable enough size that actual streaming performance is more critical. Hell, ReiserFS (both in synethic and real benchmarks) has shown that just having the file system actually intelligently deal with smaller files (NTFS does this with the MFT, AFAIK) nets most of the same benefits.
So the other point would be something about whether four HDDs would see a linear performance increase and see the 3x increase and start to approach SDD territory. Honestly, I actually doubt it. And I'm certain in some circumstances SDD would still heavily blow away what even a large stack of HDDs in RAID1 could do. But in most real world circumstances, the difference would be pretty damn negligible, except probably noticing how slow big file copying can be.
*Yea, I know this isn't an actually meaningless figure. It gives you some idea of just how much better random access to files will be. And if you have a specific workload that deals with lots of non-cached random files or sectors in large files, I can certainly see some clear benefits to SDD. But, honestly, coupled with things like caching, lots of RAM in system now days, things like Superfetch, and having just limits on just much data can actually stream over SATA, SDD isn't worth it to me or a lot of people--but then most people aren't going to do RAID at all and SDDs main benefit would be the no-moving-parts and lower power usage for portables. If you're one of the exceptions and can afford the massive extra cost, good for you.
More to the point, you can buy 4 4TB HDDs for $800 and setup a RAID1 and get a lot of the same read performance as an SDD while having heavy redundancy. Yes, you don't get the same level of gains for writes nor do a lot of systems support 4HDs readily (not enough physical space to place them) and there's the issue of power consumption. But if there's a 5% of failure with one HD, then presuming there's no relationship to the drives (ie, you don't just buy a bunch of drives from the same company which were all from the same batch production), then you'd expect a very low probability that all the drives would fail (something like 0.000625%). Besides that, you could very trivially buy multiple extra HDs for backups and still be way cheaper all around.
biological agents simply do not have good longevity. They are not shelf stable (which is a problem for stock piling munitions). They require special storage to preserve viability. They are prone to being killed off by ultraviolet light (i.e., outside during the day). They do not have consistent potency. Their effect on a given individual varies considerably.
The former of which are important to, say, smuggling out dangerous biological sample strains and keeping them alive long enough to deploy. For terrorists, I can readily imagine that the actual time from theft or culture (there are wild strains of viruses and bacteria that could be used) to usage would be small, so while certainly there are specific points to consider about their usage, at least part of what you say may not apply when terrorism is involved. For the last part, that's a key part of what terrorism is all about.
Chemical agents can have good longevity. They can be shelf stable. Storage concerns are more about accidental leaks than loss of potency. They are equally good at night and day. They have consistent potency. Their effect on individuals is relatively constant.
And they have limited potency. If x gallons of Chemical Agent X are used, you have an upper bound on those affected and the time frame upon when those affects are reached.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say by bringing up the Tokyo sarin gas attack. You say that it was *less* effective because it was so lethal?
"In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on several lines of the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people, severely injuring fifty and causing temporary vision problems for nearly a thousand others." -- Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. I wouldn't call that "so lethal"*. In fact, it would seem to be nearly as effective as releasing the flu.
Is your argument then that you could seed some mythical biological agent and keep dispersing it but no one would know until you had exposed more people? If that is indeed your point I can see where your coming from, but it relies on things that simply aren't true for biological weapons.
Put on gloves soaked in a flu virus from a few years ago that was particularly virulent (yes, keeping a flu virus alive for that long is by far the hardest part) and actively touch every handle, every door knob, every turnstile, etc you can during morning and evening rush hours. Have about five or ten people do it, making sure they repeatedly resoak their gloves every few minutes (or I guess just have them carry a gel mixture in a tube with hoses to the gloves and have them pump that gel bottle regularly--so, yea, requires that this be in winter or later fall). Keep doing this activity for days (it'll take perhaps a week or two before people get sick and the cause is linked presuming the people involved don't get caught early). And yes, I'm sure I'm missing a lot, but that's the general gist of it.
Longer exposure would be *required* to even have a chance at affecting anywhere near the same number of people. If you rig a biological weapons container to slowly output its contents so as to provide continuing exposure in a region then you are also increasing the likelihood of its discovery simply because it is present. On the other hand you could improve coverage of a chemical attack simply by not limiting it to a single location. If you are willing to risk discovery of the weapons containers (which shouldn't be an issue if willing to accept biowarfare) then the devices could be pre-planted and triggered simultaneously, or staggered via timers, remote activation, whatever.
And yet producing enough chemical agent and releasing it even in confined spaces to produce enough exposure is apparently non-trivial. I mean, you're
In both cases it was not the passengers subduing the attackers which prevented the deaths of those onboard... but instead luck that neither device went off.
A major point: even if the bombs had went off, it's not a given that even most the people onboard would have died. There have in fact been multiple bombs on planes where the plane was successfully landed. In fact, the reinforced pilot cabin door makes that scenario more likely as it greatly increases the chances of pilots being able to retain control--and yes, this presumes the bomb isn't sufficiently big enough to cause massive damage to the fuselage or the wings, but then that's what luggage checking is for.
Of course, all of the above misses the point. The reason for the TSA and all the security theater wasn't because of a plane being blown up. Plenty of planes were blown up in the 60s and 70s. What changed things was the plane became itself a bomb upon ground targets. To that end, no amount of blowing up the plane (except possible on the tarmac) is likely to be of any real use of the plane as a weapon. And even then, that's likely more to terrorize than to actually kill.
And that really highlights the point that all the people in the plane are effectively considered expendable and the real fear is killing a lot of people (on the order of thousands, not hundreds) for which a plane full of people just doesn't count. The really sad part, then, is how easy it would be to kill a lot of people in a lot simpler ways (biological warfare* in the subways comes to mind) which are basically unpreventable. Yet, I can only imagine the TSA's grip on subways if such a successful attack were to occur.
*I discount chemical weapons because they're too fast acting in general to kill thousands--look no further than the whole Tokyo Sarin Gas attack---, nuclear dirty bombs because increasing your cancer risk as badly as smoking cigarettes doesn't have the same sort of instant impact you really aim for in terrorism, and nuclear weapons because they're just too hard to construct and possibly even harder to buy. Biological attacks are trivial by comparison.
Nah, I think we already have the answer available in Obama's recent speech about Syria. We won't put troops on the ground in the NSA building. We'll just authorize strategic bombing to destroy the illegally obtained data. Of course, the NSA currently denies having the illegally obtained data, but perhaps Russia can come in and broker a deal to come in and collect and destroy the data--and then the NSA can admit to having said data. We will have to have confirmation of the data being actually destroyed. And if the diplomacy breaks down, we'll just carry on with the bombing. Just please ignore that going in and destroying the chemical weapons^W^Willegal data may take months or years to do successfully, yet we think we can just drop a few bombs and solve the problem. Oh, and please don't cry to me about the "collateral damage".
PS - If you think the above sounds absurd, well, that's the story with Syria too.
... and since CLANG is BSD-licensed it is more in line with the project's goals anyway.
"The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide a stable and fast general purpose operating system that may be used for any purpose without strings attached."
So, yes, more in line with the project's goals. But I'm still waiting for FreeBSD to switch to WTFPL, since clearly the whole disclaimer of warranty is a very-much strings attached component of BSD licensing that I don't see ever going away. After all, given that a big part of FreeBSD support is corporate funding and corporations just love suing each other over all sorts of ridiculous things, included things like implied warranty.... Really, the BSD licensing is just tying their hands.
it's like buying a half-assed PS3 with equally half-assed games!
I'd say it's more like the GB Player all over again, but as you note without the massive good collection of games.
games designed for a small screen are not going to translate well to a large screen. i'll stick to my PS3 and (soon) PS4.
See, the former is not the issue in theory*. The latter is more the issue. If you're likely to have to buy a bunch of games anyways to enjoy the system, you might as well get a full console. The catch, of course, is if the games are cheap enough (that's Ouya's approach, anyways) then you can get away with getting a lot of potentially casual gamers to plunk down some relatively cheap cash (a $100 unit) to play some casual games. Somehow, I doubt Sony will do that because it's liable to enrage the small fan base it already has who will feel cheated either in having to repurchase games or that their library has effectively depreciated in value by 90% or something.
*Well, that's the rub. PSP came out as being a very high-end handheld. As a result, it was a sucky battery-life handheld. But at the same time, its move towards a console makes it a sucky console-power platform. Really, Sony just doesn't seem to get the whole point that the PSP is just too much of a middle-ground to be any sort of major success. It doesn't help that Android has heavily invaded their high-end handheld position or that the Ouya is basically the same concept. Really, the only reason the GB Player didn't have the same sort of blow-back as I see this having is the GB player (1) finally allowed people with adult hands to, for long hours, play GBA games, (2) there were a lot of decent GBA games, (3) there was never an expectation that the GBA was some sort of new-age, wow graphical experience (it was in many ways the answer to people's desire for a portable SNES), and (4) the GB Player was a relatively cheap add-on to a system which basically went hand-in-hand with having a GBA in the first place--ie, already being a somewhat devote fan towards the company--(and I'd argue the biggest flaw with the GB Player was more to do with not supporting multiple games simultaneous, split screen, on-screen link-up, or having a decent long link cable).
So, yea, a very wordy way of say I mostly agree though I think there's room to quibble over some of the details.
Such a statement could only be made by one unfamiliar with history. As I recall the greek city-states had a habit of NOT attacking the populace during their conflicts, among other examples.
"Peloponnesian War, (431–404 bc), war fought between the two leading city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta..... The years of fighting that followed can be divided into two periods, separated by a truce of six years. The first period lasted 10 years and began with the Spartans, under Archidamus, leading an army into Attica, the region around Athens. Pericles declined to engage the superior allied forces and instead urged the Athenians to keep to their city and make full use of their naval superiority by harassing their enemies’ coasts and shipping. Within a few months, however, Pericles fell victim to a terrible plague that raged through the crowded city, killing a large part of its army as well as many civilians." -- http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/449362/Peloponnesian-War
In short, what you say may be true but it's misleading. My point still stands, although I'd probably want to amend it with the point that even trying not to fight a war or otherwise prevent attacking civilians outright still turns into a war of attrition (that'd be my major point about the use of civilian resources to fight) which leaves the civilians crowded and vulnerable to pestilence and plaque. Or their basic system of sanitation is destroyed or contaminated and under threat of war, regardless of how benevolent they believe their opponent is, civilians won't engage in the general grand public works to resolve such issues precisely because those things are "dual use" and liable as a target and civilians to be collateral damage. The same holds true today, as electricity powers lights for everyone, gasoline is used by everyone, etc. It's magic thinking to believe there aren't consequences upon the general population when you start dropping bombs, physical or cyber, upon the government.
For people who want censorship, censorship is great. To the extent that the filter hassles anyone, the filter is working. You have to understand, the purpose isn't to really block porn. It's to stigmatize it and those who would commit actions that seem designed to be able to view it.
Here's a suggestion for you instead: How about you get parents to actually pay attention to what their kids are doing instead of making the internet tougher and more annoying to use for everyone?
Except that's the whole point. It's to (a) allow irresponsible parents to have the ISPs (through UK government mandate) be a babysitter. More importantly, it's to (b) allow busybodies to force their viewpoint on group (a) because group (b) believes they *are* responsible parents and it's everyone else's kids who are doing all sorts of evil things, spurred on by lustful things like pornography. The more annoyed they may people of group (a) and the more vocally against the censorship group (a) is, the more group (b) can counter with vocal chastising of "irresponsible parents". Because if those in the media chose to voluntarily not make moral judgments in their news reporting, that's oppression of (b) and their God. But, if group (b) actively uses the government to suppress access to pornography against the wishes of more liberal-minded, responsible-acting parents, well, that's just fine--because you can always get your name added to the, possibly made pubic in the future, opt-out list.
I point all this out because its so often misrepresented in the media, which rarely questions a President's authority to go to war (again, R or D president).
And why would they? War is good for business. If it bleeds, it leads. Really, it's outright disgusting just how complicit the media is not only in just accepting war is inevitable--which is, btw, one reason I don't doubt the anti-Iraq war coverage was so limited/skewed--, but plenty of journalists are more than happy to be armchair generals and push for the attack over their own pet ideas.
The absurdity of calling cyber attacks "can be compliant with international humanitarian law" is so utterly revolting, I hardly know where to begin. Inherently to any successful war is to attack the populace at some level, for if the government is the only target a tyrannical regime (basically any country, including the US, behaves as such at war which is inherently apparent as the Constitution's respect of most rights is largely forgone when war is occurring) will use civilian resources to continue the fight which indirectly is crippling to the civilian populace regardless.
Of course the author's true allegiance shows through when he makes it clear not to attack Syria's leader financially. He worries about retaliation. He worries about the all-mighty dollar. Won't someone think of the humanitarianism of that?
No. People stand up for rights because, in their opinions, they believe they should have those rights; it has nothing to do with innateness or any other such thing, or at least it doesn't have to be.
And why do people believe they should have those rights? I'd say in large part because without some sort of outside interference a lot of the rights are the sort of things that are innate. We all have the power of speech*, the right to liberty, the right to possession (if not outright property), etc. It's heavily the basis of outside force (courts and individual force) that impinge upon those things. And for plenty of the positive rights, they're usually a manifestation of recognizing that to actually live in society almost invariably grants a lot of defacto power to some people which virtually needs to be addressed with a balance of positive force by society for those innate rights to continue to exist in some form--the rights of life, liberty, and property are pretty meaningless if you're effectively reliant upon a local baron who can choose to hire you and pay you in a minimal of food or leave you without work and almost certainly see you starve as you attempt to migrate to yet another baron for work.
That always happens anyway no matter how people frame their opinions. People act according to their own self-interests to realize their desires.
You skipped over the word "immediate". That's the salient point. To say and fight that others can speak horrible things about me is not in my immediate self-interest but is in my more long-term self-interest when such a right is reciprocated. Yet coups are more often fought with "us vs them" leaving little room for consideration but the immediate, "don't be labelled as them". Enlightenment and enlightened self-interest is not a process the vast majority of people go through. Instead, people heavily adopt the framework of others to rely upon and to fight for. To sort of highlight the point, there's a reason it is "religion is the opium of the masses" and not "religion is the endorphin of persons".
If I am, then I don't truly understand why people keep using the words "innate" and "unalienable" when referring to rights; it seems utterly unnecessary to me.
For the same reason people refer to other things as innate or inalienable. As some point, you have to accept some set of axioms in a logical or philosophical construct as circular logic is invalid. It almost seems like that's an uncomfortable truth to you.
Nonsense. Governments infringe upon people's rights no matter how 'innate' people say they are, and if the government does not recognize your rights, that is the same as losing them. The only way to keep governments from infringing upon people's rights (and even this method fails) is for a significant amount of people who believe they should have certain rights to stand up and try to get a government to recognize said rights.
Yep, that's exactly what I said. The basis of people standing up for those rights is to frame those rights as axiomatic (innate and inalienable). Without that, the people who do stand up eventually do so purely on their own immediate self-interests.
It's not working, and it has never worked; any successes have been due to large numbers of individuals who take action, or something such as that.
Morals don't work because people kill. Ethics don't work because misconduct is a given. Religions don't work because not even the most ardent believers are ever 100% sure of their message to follow it exactly. And during particularly bad moments, all these truths are specifically made clear because they're more pressing than usual. Yes, action must be taken to clean house at times precisely for the fact that humans, imperfect and impure in various ways, are the very actors that run each system. It says nothing about the ideological backing of if or why action should be taken and what the threshold of cleaning house should be or what the new house should look like.
In short, I think you're missing the point.
PS - That whole "don't work" speech is part and parcel of the human condition. Whether any given example could ever work in a ideal world is rather beside the point of the discussion. But of specific point, as the saying goes government is a necessary evil. It would almost seem to go without saying that to expect government to respect anyone or anything is silly (corporations are the same, btw), so the whole conversation is inherently about the people and what they believe and do, not just in a snapshot or short span of time but for hundreds or thousands of years. The only real argument that could be made is that the ideology of freedom is rarely if ever the pivotal mover of action of the people. To that I'd agree. It is merely the new construction once the daily evil that starts the insurrection needs to be built, with the whole that (a) the new system lasts longer and (b) if nothing else to accept that the new system is itself a good thing even if it doesn't last.
You're out of your mind. Rights exist only because and to the extent that people recognize them, particularly governments that are in a position to defend or deny them.
Which is precisely the reason those Rights are spoken of as innate and inalienable. The only position one can take to force a government to defend a right is to argue its innateness because clearly ever other method is consistently infringed by government who would like nothing better to infringe them in pursuit of the politics of the day.
There are no god given rights and if there were, you weren't offered any right to privacy according to any religion that I know of.
You should look into deism, then. It seems pretty clear that the human condition demands things like the right to speak, the right to travel, the right to privacy, and the right to justice system based on fairness--but a small list of things. Deism exemplifies the idea that a non-interfering God has left man to explore and expound upon the very things that are human rights and make up a person's humanity. The whole Age of Enlightenment very much was upon this discourse and spoke in terms of such things. Now, if you want to argue that Deism is a philosophical construct because it's not an organized religion, well, that's another matter.
As for their being innate, that can't be true. If the were innate, people would have had the same rights everywhere and throughout history. They manifestly have not and do not.
And you confuse the idea that something that is innate cannot be infringed. Well, I innately can see, but I can be blinded. Is sight not innate? Because mail delivery didn't exist since the dawn of time, does access to mail delivery suddenly not become an innate right in a society where mail delivery can, is, and can be a common thing? If you think that because there are parts of the world, even today, which are so tyrannical or so impoverished to not the high standards expected of the enlightened that such things cannot be innate, then I'd argue you don't understand the concept of how a positive right can be innate. This is because the innateness of rights comes not from being inborn or being from the dawn of time. They stem naturally from the experience of man in seeing the world and understanding exactly the things that innately are without interference from a tyrannical government or corporation or such and hence are inherently rights.
Your rights depend on where you are and who you are with. Thinking otherwise is simply asking for trouble you can avoid by recognising the facts.
And you think the trouble is chicken and egg. The trouble runs deeper. To argue something is innate and inalienable is to believe, at one level, that something cannot be infringed, broken, or removed. Yet is clear that the argument for innate and inalienability is precisely such that rights are recognized so they will not be infringed, broken, or removed. To frame the discussion as if your rights are all but that which are written down chains you not only to the very finiteness of past experience and imagination but chains you to alterations to the paper they are written on. It is why the 9th Amendment as written is so clear and dear: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The words "innate" and "inalienable" rights are a rallying cry that we do not step down the dark path we now tread. And trying to semantically dissecting the words only further dissects are freedom.
I think that's the reason for the rallying cry of "kill all the lawyers". In the end, though, it should have always been "kill all the legislators".
I appears he gave a few specific people methods on how to avoid the feds on specific (federal) crimes they had committed, that in itself could be (and was) considered aiding.
Which is about equivalent to misdirecting the fed's divining rod so they won't find the well where you hid the bodies.
The prosecution is using it as a religious platform for their pseudoscience saying that any negative speak of their golden cow (polygraph tests) is an affront to god and country.
Of course. If you show that polygraphs can be beat, then the curtain opens and you see the pseudoscience for what it is. The thing is, there's already plenty of solid case law that throws into question polygraphs--it's why they're inadmissible as evidence in a lot of places and why inherently beating or not beating a polygraph should be of no real aid to a criminal.
Essentially the government is trying to frame the issue that anyone that does anti-poly is a child molesting terrorist so they can control the discussion and then control debate on they laws surrounding it.
While they're at it, they can enlist the Scientologists to their side. And then we can get some decent donations from the anti-Scientologists and anti-Polygraphersr and perhaps get polygraphs fully stricken from all State/Federal/whatever positions and criminal cases for the shams that they are. Of course, that's just wishful thinking, and I'm sure the fed will just use plea bargain to get an effective conviction while continuing their cheerleading.
My experience with poor people is that they don't see the connection between large and small amounts of money. They see the money they spend on a soda, and the money they need to send their kid to college as completely unrelated. They are unable to comprehend that by drinking water instead of three sodas a day, and putting the savings into a tax deferred education savings account, they can easily afford in-state tuition at a good university.
So, what you're saying is...if soda (or bread) costs too much, cut back and drink water instead and eat cake with it?,/p>
A funny pie chart on page 8. 8% of the budget is dedicated to "Enhance Cybersecurity". That is, ~$4.16 Billion is spent just on *enhancing* cybersecurity (yea, maybe it's actually all the money spent on the subject and the title is misleading/wrong). To put that in perspective, that's enough to hire 41,600* $100,000 programmers on the task of fixing open source software . Imagine what that'd do for enhancing cyber security.
*A figure close to ~1.7x how many people worked at Google in 2010. Yes, a lot of people at Google aren't programmers and their top programmers/engineers/whatever may well earn over $100,000/year on average, but it does give you a ballpark idea on the scope of the potential.
In the first case, why are we allowing people to forgo it because of their religion?
Because government officials/politicians are lazy/sheep who'd rather not have to deal with the media or even one belligerent religious folk over having to remove a hat or whatever. This is, presumably, precisely why this guy got away with forgoing the rules as well. That this can be spun into "local officials are secretly pastafarians" or some such is why there's any push back, but they'll obviously miss the whole point and simply order more push back at the BMV/DMV under some claim that because the belief in pastafarian isn't genuine the exception doesn't apply. And that just means the next successful pastafarian who comes along will have to make a big scene of it, being very belligerent about it. This will, of course, cause negative publicity for the atheists/pastafarians. Butthe only time actual equity will occur is when enough people claim pastafarianism at BMV/DMVs that the push back from below becomes enough that the law is changed to remove the exception--though odds are just as good they'll go the quasi-equality route and give broader exceptions for the atheists or more classes of people.
In the second case, why is the rule there?
For the same reason the photo is there at all, as a means to further attempt to identify the person in question as being one and the same as the license. Of course, license photos are notorious for being so far off from what a person normally looks like, so it's questionable if it'd matter much regardless. Although I guess it could be argued that a religious person who regularly wears a hat would be more identifiable by wearing their hat in the photo...but that would basically highlight that no hats should be removed ever if it's the norm for the person. The same should hold true for glasses, jewelry, mustaches, etc. In short, it all sounds like a rather ill-conceived rule.
No, quite the opposite. The whole point is that the Streisand Effect more or less dictates that just about *anything* that even mentions terrorism in any detail in relationship to any spying by a politician of any sort would fall into the scope of Lord Blair's proposed law precisely because there's a clear causal relationship: news picks up "hot" story of a politician talking about a recent crime (and potentially new laws to combat them) -> said "hot" story is about the crime of terrorism including people, places, or methods -> reader becomes now more capable of engaging in terrorism by figuring out who to target, where to target, or how to target.
In short, really, any news story that leaves the reader more informed by details involving any case of terrorism would fall into the scope of the law. The paradox is clear in the same way that any law that tries to ban something (porn, profanity, blasphemy, etc) has to basically spell out* the thing being banned which makes the law itself something that needs to be banned and if the ban includes facilitating such things all the politicians who passed the law are guilty of the crime.
* I've seen examples where they try to get around this by using medical terminology, obtuse language, or simply by using something like a "community standard" as a basis for the ban. They generally result in new terms being created to circumvent the ban (as people want porn, profanity, blasphemy, etc) or a mostly unenforced/unenforceable law (very few things are considered legally "obscene" and instead courts or juries come up with excuses to ban/not ban things rather than relying upon the letter of the law, anyways). So, beyond being ignorant of the history of such things--which conservatism of all sorts seem to be guilty of--, they're also generally guilty of the very laws they wish to pass if by nothing else by the laws they want to pass.:/
I suggest there be a law to remove Lord Blair's Peerage. if Lord Blair is so adamant that " there was a 'new threat which is not of somebody personally intending to aid terrorism, but of conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism.'", then I'd like to introduce Lord Blair to the concept known as the Streisand Effect and the point that the internet is like a pool--once information is in there, it's in there*. It seems clear then that any action to highlight any "conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism" would itself be "conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism". Ergo, Lord Blair is calling for a law to make his own acts illegal. It only stands to reason he would consider himself not worthy of his Peerage, and if he cannot or will not revoke his Peerage, a law should be written to do so. And yes, I'm rather serious.
*Technically, this is not absolutely true. But coupled with the Streisand Effect, it's almost certainly true. The real caveat is that the information may not be available on a web site, may not be available 24/7, and it may be password protected or otherwise not publicly available. The last part is the real kicker, of course, since that's the very current rub of the insurance file. It's also one reason why I can only imagine that free speech is the next largest target of people like Lord Blair, as certainly any word or phrase (or hash/known algorithm of said word or phrase) could be the password. To grant any person arrested who might know a password for a "time bomb" like an insurance file free speech would allow "sleepers" to undermine, well, the whole twisted system that Lord Blair seemingly supports. And the sad truth, I think, is free speech rights in the west for hundreds of years have shown us that the truth when exposed rarely has the damaging effect imagined, not only in the "bad" that Lord Blair would like to quiet but also in the "good" that would revoke privileges to people clearly unworthy of their position.
So, no good deed goes unpunished. But the principled ones will continue on. And that's why we would call them hero, not Lord.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds more like they're anti-Chinese. Seriously, though, it would be more "anti-US Government" for the same reason it would be "anti-China government". Governments have a large part in regulating industrial pollution. Governments also have a large part in regulating standards for devices used by individuals to inherently reduce pollution. Governments also have a large part in subsidizing nascent technology so that it can become mainstream on its own.*
Most of what the US government has regularly done for decades is to do what a lesser degree of what China does now--ignore their own regulation policies, actually cripple the ability of regulators to act, and to be in full-force denial of actual pollution that is clearly going on. On the personal front, the heavily slanted view of personal liberty (of big auto companies) has consistently delayed or reduced higher efficiency standards on vehicles--and the heavily big-than-life selling of trucks to "get the job done" has been a great financial success for the auto industry but has been disastrous for the environment.
Of course the elephant in the room is the obvious. China has near zero respect for human rights or health, so no amount of bitching by anyone matters. Only a few select areas are there enough political leaders in a position in an area who actually have enough force to actual curtail industrial-scale pollution. Meanwhile, even if Chinese leadership gave a damn and tomorrow seriously cracked down on industrial polluters and adopted the newest technologies to curtail pollution, to actually produce a sizable middle class would still result in China having a larger CO2 and other footprint than other countries by virtue of its population size. To even attempt to deny China of a right to produce a prosperous middle class is both repugnant and any sort of enforcement could lead potentially to all sorts of very nasty negative international consequences (like war).
Of course, it doesn't help that Americans per capita use nearly twice the energy of most other developed nations so inherently has a lot of room it could improve without sacrificing a developed nation lifestyle, yet the US has basically promised it won't act unless China acts first. Well, perhaps China will act first. Then what will be the excuse?
*PS - If you don't believe any of this, well, congratulations. I presume you also don't believe it's an issue if I vaporize mercury and blow it in your face (literally directly or indirectly in coal burning pollution).
Oh where do I begin to describe the skewed perspective of this article. It seems clear the author had recently read the book "The Pencil" and thought they could write up a little tidbit about it with patents. But, when you start doing the math, it really falls through. The "invention" was created in 1858. The supreme court ruling about the patent came in 1875, nearly 20 years later (so at the point where the patent would have nearly expired anyways). Meanwhile, it's not really at all clear that the whole eraser-on-pencil really took off on its own. It sounds like, instead, some American companies liked the idea (perhaps to match parity with said investor, Joseph Reckendorfer) and started producing such pencils. Meanwhile, some 60+ years later and Europe still wasn't making such pencils (well, not commonly enough, anyways).
Oh, and the best part is the silly:
Or it could be that, oh, Europeans were still using their separate erasers and perhaps snarkily mocking the Americans for throwing away tons of perfectly good erasers just for the convenience of having one glued to the end of their pencil. Meanwhile, the more honest truth is probably the more simple that European pencil manufacturers probably didn't think there much demand and the vast majority of people weren't going to pay a premium to import the stupid things In the end, wide scale adoption would have more to do with there being only a few manufacturers which made up the effective industry in the area and with a majority all deciding something, whatever it was, was a good enough idea and offering the X + Y product as either a replacement for X or as a premium version of X, wide side adoption basically inherently happened. But even today, plenty of places sell pencils without erasers. And there's separate eraser heads you can pull off and reuse until they're heavily wore out (although those are still mighty wasteful as usually the base is pretty unusable for erasing.
So, now with that, I can happily say my comment is about as much a rambling little conjecture as the article.
And I suspect the same was true for cocaine before it was rendered illegal. Of course, the adverse effects of cocaine use on its user wasn't the basis for making it illegal--at least officially. It's considered too odious to infringe upon a person's liberty for their own well being. But if you can make up even the most frivolous extrapolation that it might lead to harm to another, well lock them up and throw away the key. And as much as I agree about the ideas of personal liberty and the right of self destruction--let's ignore how suicide is effectively if not outright illegal in plenty of those self-described personal liberty states--, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we'd just admit to the real reason so many things are rendered illegal as they are. Perhaps then they could be limited in scope or later repealed as it's recognized how it isn't the place of the state to regulate such things (exactly the circumstances that lead to the repeal of prohibition in the US--well, that and the decade long violence). But, that is in the same scope as wishing that laws be named in accordance with their purpose or politicians lie less.
Sad to say, but I'd imagine only a lot more school shootings will eventually make people realize how stupid this idea of targeted zero tolerance really is. And I don't wish for that any more than I wish for a lot more terrorist attacks to show the stupidity of the TSA. But, in the mean time, people have to life with the hassle and the inherent corruption in giving people who shouldn't have the power a position to ruin a lot of peoples lives for no good reason. That's the real travesty here. The whole NSA scandal just makes me feel even more pessimistic that public uproar would even matter.
Granted, most desktop users buy a computer as a unit and don't make modifications. Those that do rarely know ahead of time what they want and even if options were available by OEMs, a lot would make poor choices. So, it seems an almost inevitable that only the technically minded who are willing to make modifications are the majority in the middle, without the cash to spend the significantly more on a pure RAID SDD setup. Of course, the same people are liable to just use one SDD as a boot/root device and forgo the idea of RAID. :) And the practical SDD/HDD hybrids which I can only presume have even worse reliability than standard HDDs or SDDs (I don't presume that hybrids do good fall back onto just SDD or just HDD if one part fails) will likely be the major penetration in the desktop arena.
Still, I'd prefer a 4x HDD RAID for the performance/capacity/reliability (the latter is more important to me actually as I've seen plenty of computers die). But, then even I'm in the boat of having a system not designed to physically contain that many HDDs and my system doesn't support eSATA or USB 3.0 for an enclosure. :( So, it's all still too much of a theoretical for me. It's nice to think about The cost of multiple SSDs isn't, though.
Sure we can blame them. The issue, after all, isn't that there wasn't some level of an investigation into the incident. The issue is that (a) the school officials jumped well beyond the "there's a remote possibility that there's more to this than the simple stupidity/frustrations/whatever of a teenager" and (b) the police were more than willing to act on the "threat" that really wasn't there.
Precisely. Every time people ask that, ask them if they'd like to get preemptive yearly speeding tickets which they have to pay in full regardless of whether they're ever stopped--and without it excluding them from having to pay if stopped. After all, all the warnings signs are there for most people. Point out that the law isn't there to stop every crime before it happens and that appropriate steps were taken to try to read warning signs. But, in the end, lots of people match the warning signs and it's not enough reason to lock up half the teenagers just because.
That always reminds me of the funny story. I was in school during Columbine. At the time, there were a group of us who would play Duke Nukem 3D in the computer lab. The net result was we had to get our parents to sign a waver and it was clear the person "in charge" thought it was all just stupid but never the less a CYOA move by the school. So, well, why isn't that enough now days?
Yea, until their own precocious snowflake gets thrown into jail for 50 years for sniffing glue. Really, it just shows the clear cowardice and slime of politicians who don't have the backbone to follow a clear path and will cave in to every little demand to be/stay elected. And yea, the parents are to blame too for the same reason. The real reaction that should be for this? Shaming all the parents who aren't (a) calling for the boy to be released and (b) for the rules to be changed (preemptively in other schools) to avoid this whole mess. In the end, it's almost always the parents fault. Well, except when the kid is responsible, but that'd require actual harm.
Yes and no. SSDs offer much lower latency and can handle near instantly the common small, mostly random, reads (and writes, but that's heavily covered with RAM caching). But the common workflow rate is nothing closer to on the order of 90,000 IOPS. Instead, the issue is more that spikes in most workflows can reach the low thousands range and HDDs will strain for seconds to fulfill requests*. Hence, the actual performance difference is on the scope of SSDs being 5-10x faster. It also heavily implies that with a proper RAID1 implementation ferreting out requests that a lot, though not all, of the read requests could scale near linearly across all the drives. The main issue, as you note, is that plenty of RAID1 implementations likely don't do such things well if at all (although I wonder if what you say holds true for Linux's dm-mirror (which I know isn't strictly RAID1, and you can readily fault me that I wasn't necessarily strictly speaking of the official spec RAID1 but primarily of a fault-tolerant mirroring system)).
Except my point wasn't that HDDs are better performance wise, even in a RAID configuration. It was that a RAID of HDDs could obtain a better fault tolerance rate and still see a substantial performance spec of SSDs (really, you should look at the benchmarks I linked to before or try to find other workflow examples to see just how big of a difference in scale having 1000x the possible IOPS really has on most use cases) with the unstated point of relatively cost being a lot less--and 4TBs were admittedly a bad example because 1TB (on the order of $60/drive) are more than sufficient for a comparison given the SSD price range for such things. I don't think your notes about power usage hold up--4 6W drives** work out to be ~1kW*h/1.736 day sustained or ~$31.53/year at $0.15/kW*h--figures I think are just overboard to realistic. Maintenance and enclosure costs are the real killers, I think, although the former has to be weighed against the downtime costs on an SDD system vs a RAID system and the latter can be possibly avoided (presuming maintenance is done after hours and computers were bought with sufficient internal space for the necessary drives--admittedly a possible blocking issue).
In any case, yes, SSD is the clear winner as far as raw performance goes. But the whole article was about reliability. And you and others keep bringing up IOPS as if they remotely linearly scale to real world performance (they rarely do). Meanwhile, RAID HDDs offer a pretty clear middle ground for a lot of people who care about reliability first and can still see performance gains in many cases. But, I'd readily defer to your experience upon the subject. I'd just prefer some actual numbers to back it up rather and some clear observations to sustain that position than using vague words like small and big or random and sequential or focusing on IOPS when throughput is a major factor too in judging things too :)
*I base this all on personal observation of actual throughput on systems which varies greatly but can readily sustain in the 7MiB/sec to 20MiB/sec range which based upon 120IOPS implies minimally common sequential reads/sec of at least ~60KiB to ~170KiB blocks (presuming saturated IOPS) and likely much higher actual numbers since I doubt IOPS requests are actually commonly saturated. Of course once you do get to saturated IOPS on a HDD you are looking at a potentially dismal (presuming 4KiB/block) 480KiB/sec while SDD is likely only limited by its ability to saturate SATA or whatever the connection is. Yet benchmarks rarely bare out figures like that (that I've seen, anyways)
Great. Thanks for, like so many other people in this thread, pulling out a near meaningless benchmark figure*. As others point out, you might see 1000x the IOPS but real world results are more on the order of at most 5-10x speedup (a look at some of Tom's Hardwares HDD vs SDD seems to confirm it with adding music to WMP on HDD and on SDD and Gaming on HDD and on SDD). Why is that? Obviously because most applications and activities don't involve randomly accessing 4K files/sectors scattered all over the storage device. File systems are heavily designed to avoid fragmentation and most file accesses are linear and of considerable enough size that actual streaming performance is more critical. Hell, ReiserFS (both in synethic and real benchmarks) has shown that just having the file system actually intelligently deal with smaller files (NTFS does this with the MFT, AFAIK) nets most of the same benefits.
So the other point would be something about whether four HDDs would see a linear performance increase and see the 3x increase and start to approach SDD territory. Honestly, I actually doubt it. And I'm certain in some circumstances SDD would still heavily blow away what even a large stack of HDDs in RAID1 could do. But in most real world circumstances, the difference would be pretty damn negligible, except probably noticing how slow big file copying can be.
*Yea, I know this isn't an actually meaningless figure. It gives you some idea of just how much better random access to files will be. And if you have a specific workload that deals with lots of non-cached random files or sectors in large files, I can certainly see some clear benefits to SDD. But, honestly, coupled with things like caching, lots of RAM in system now days, things like Superfetch, and having just limits on just much data can actually stream over SATA, SDD isn't worth it to me or a lot of people--but then most people aren't going to do RAID at all and SDDs main benefit would be the no-moving-parts and lower power usage for portables. If you're one of the exceptions and can afford the massive extra cost, good for you.
More to the point, you can buy 4 4TB HDDs for $800 and setup a RAID1 and get a lot of the same read performance as an SDD while having heavy redundancy. Yes, you don't get the same level of gains for writes nor do a lot of systems support 4HDs readily (not enough physical space to place them) and there's the issue of power consumption. But if there's a 5% of failure with one HD, then presuming there's no relationship to the drives (ie, you don't just buy a bunch of drives from the same company which were all from the same batch production), then you'd expect a very low probability that all the drives would fail (something like 0.000625%). Besides that, you could very trivially buy multiple extra HDs for backups and still be way cheaper all around.
The former of which are important to, say, smuggling out dangerous biological sample strains and keeping them alive long enough to deploy. For terrorists, I can readily imagine that the actual time from theft or culture (there are wild strains of viruses and bacteria that could be used) to usage would be small, so while certainly there are specific points to consider about their usage, at least part of what you say may not apply when terrorism is involved. For the last part, that's a key part of what terrorism is all about.
And they have limited potency. If x gallons of Chemical Agent X are used, you have an upper bound on those affected and the time frame upon when those affects are reached.
"In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on several lines of the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people, severely injuring fifty and causing temporary vision problems for nearly a thousand others." -- Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. I wouldn't call that "so lethal"*. In fact, it would seem to be nearly as effective as releasing the flu.
Put on gloves soaked in a flu virus from a few years ago that was particularly virulent (yes, keeping a flu virus alive for that long is by far the hardest part) and actively touch every handle, every door knob, every turnstile, etc you can during morning and evening rush hours. Have about five or ten people do it, making sure they repeatedly resoak their gloves every few minutes (or I guess just have them carry a gel mixture in a tube with hoses to the gloves and have them pump that gel bottle regularly--so, yea, requires that this be in winter or later fall). Keep doing this activity for days (it'll take perhaps a week or two before people get sick and the cause is linked presuming the people involved don't get caught early). And yes, I'm sure I'm missing a lot, but that's the general gist of it.
And yet producing enough chemical agent and releasing it even in confined spaces to produce enough exposure is apparently non-trivial. I mean, you're
A major point: even if the bombs had went off, it's not a given that even most the people onboard would have died. There have in fact been multiple bombs on planes where the plane was successfully landed. In fact, the reinforced pilot cabin door makes that scenario more likely as it greatly increases the chances of pilots being able to retain control--and yes, this presumes the bomb isn't sufficiently big enough to cause massive damage to the fuselage or the wings, but then that's what luggage checking is for.
Of course, all of the above misses the point. The reason for the TSA and all the security theater wasn't because of a plane being blown up. Plenty of planes were blown up in the 60s and 70s. What changed things was the plane became itself a bomb upon ground targets. To that end, no amount of blowing up the plane (except possible on the tarmac) is likely to be of any real use of the plane as a weapon. And even then, that's likely more to terrorize than to actually kill.
And that really highlights the point that all the people in the plane are effectively considered expendable and the real fear is killing a lot of people (on the order of thousands, not hundreds) for which a plane full of people just doesn't count. The really sad part, then, is how easy it would be to kill a lot of people in a lot simpler ways (biological warfare* in the subways comes to mind) which are basically unpreventable. Yet, I can only imagine the TSA's grip on subways if such a successful attack were to occur.
*I discount chemical weapons because they're too fast acting in general to kill thousands--look no further than the whole Tokyo Sarin Gas attack---, nuclear dirty bombs because increasing your cancer risk as badly as smoking cigarettes doesn't have the same sort of instant impact you really aim for in terrorism, and nuclear weapons because they're just too hard to construct and possibly even harder to buy. Biological attacks are trivial by comparison.
Nah, I think we already have the answer available in Obama's recent speech about Syria. We won't put troops on the ground in the NSA building. We'll just authorize strategic bombing to destroy the illegally obtained data. Of course, the NSA currently denies having the illegally obtained data, but perhaps Russia can come in and broker a deal to come in and collect and destroy the data--and then the NSA can admit to having said data. We will have to have confirmation of the data being actually destroyed. And if the diplomacy breaks down, we'll just carry on with the bombing. Just please ignore that going in and destroying the chemical weapons^W^Willegal data may take months or years to do successfully, yet we think we can just drop a few bombs and solve the problem. Oh, and please don't cry to me about the "collateral damage".
PS - If you think the above sounds absurd, well, that's the story with Syria too.
"The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide a stable and fast general purpose operating system that may be used for any purpose without strings attached."
So, yes, more in line with the project's goals. But I'm still waiting for FreeBSD to switch to WTFPL, since clearly the whole disclaimer of warranty is a very-much strings attached component of BSD licensing that I don't see ever going away. After all, given that a big part of FreeBSD support is corporate funding and corporations just love suing each other over all sorts of ridiculous things, included things like implied warranty.... Really, the BSD licensing is just tying their hands.
I'd say it's more like the GB Player all over again, but as you note without the massive good collection of games.
See, the former is not the issue in theory*. The latter is more the issue. If you're likely to have to buy a bunch of games anyways to enjoy the system, you might as well get a full console. The catch, of course, is if the games are cheap enough (that's Ouya's approach, anyways) then you can get away with getting a lot of potentially casual gamers to plunk down some relatively cheap cash (a $100 unit) to play some casual games. Somehow, I doubt Sony will do that because it's liable to enrage the small fan base it already has who will feel cheated either in having to repurchase games or that their library has effectively depreciated in value by 90% or something.
*Well, that's the rub. PSP came out as being a very high-end handheld. As a result, it was a sucky battery-life handheld. But at the same time, its move towards a console makes it a sucky console-power platform. Really, Sony just doesn't seem to get the whole point that the PSP is just too much of a middle-ground to be any sort of major success. It doesn't help that Android has heavily invaded their high-end handheld position or that the Ouya is basically the same concept. Really, the only reason the GB Player didn't have the same sort of blow-back as I see this having is the GB player (1) finally allowed people with adult hands to, for long hours, play GBA games, (2) there were a lot of decent GBA games, (3) there was never an expectation that the GBA was some sort of new-age, wow graphical experience (it was in many ways the answer to people's desire for a portable SNES), and (4) the GB Player was a relatively cheap add-on to a system which basically went hand-in-hand with having a GBA in the first place--ie, already being a somewhat devote fan towards the company--(and I'd argue the biggest flaw with the GB Player was more to do with not supporting multiple games simultaneous, split screen, on-screen link-up, or having a decent long link cable).
So, yea, a very wordy way of say I mostly agree though I think there's room to quibble over some of the details.
"Peloponnesian War, (431–404 bc), war fought between the two leading city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta. .... The years of fighting that followed can be divided into two periods, separated by a truce of six years. The first period lasted 10 years and began with the Spartans, under Archidamus, leading an army into Attica, the region around Athens. Pericles declined to engage the superior allied forces and instead urged the Athenians to keep to their city and make full use of their naval superiority by harassing their enemies’ coasts and shipping. Within a few months, however, Pericles fell victim to a terrible plague that raged through the crowded city, killing a large part of its army as well as many civilians." -- http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/449362/Peloponnesian-War
In short, what you say may be true but it's misleading. My point still stands, although I'd probably want to amend it with the point that even trying not to fight a war or otherwise prevent attacking civilians outright still turns into a war of attrition (that'd be my major point about the use of civilian resources to fight) which leaves the civilians crowded and vulnerable to pestilence and plaque. Or their basic system of sanitation is destroyed or contaminated and under threat of war, regardless of how benevolent they believe their opponent is, civilians won't engage in the general grand public works to resolve such issues precisely because those things are "dual use" and liable as a target and civilians to be collateral damage. The same holds true today, as electricity powers lights for everyone, gasoline is used by everyone, etc. It's magic thinking to believe there aren't consequences upon the general population when you start dropping bombs, physical or cyber, upon the government.
Depends on what you mean by "not qualified". You're also presuming a lot on the politicians (and their supports) stating their true intentions.
For people who want censorship, censorship is great. To the extent that the filter hassles anyone, the filter is working. You have to understand, the purpose isn't to really block porn. It's to stigmatize it and those who would commit actions that seem designed to be able to view it.
Except that's the whole point. It's to (a) allow irresponsible parents to have the ISPs (through UK government mandate) be a babysitter. More importantly, it's to (b) allow busybodies to force their viewpoint on group (a) because group (b) believes they *are* responsible parents and it's everyone else's kids who are doing all sorts of evil things, spurred on by lustful things like pornography. The more annoyed they may people of group (a) and the more vocally against the censorship group (a) is, the more group (b) can counter with vocal chastising of "irresponsible parents". Because if those in the media chose to voluntarily not make moral judgments in their news reporting, that's oppression of (b) and their God. But, if group (b) actively uses the government to suppress access to pornography against the wishes of more liberal-minded, responsible-acting parents, well, that's just fine--because you can always get your name added to the, possibly made pubic in the future, opt-out list.
And why would they? War is good for business. If it bleeds, it leads. Really, it's outright disgusting just how complicit the media is not only in just accepting war is inevitable--which is, btw, one reason I don't doubt the anti-Iraq war coverage was so limited/skewed--, but plenty of journalists are more than happy to be armchair generals and push for the attack over their own pet ideas.
The absurdity of calling cyber attacks "can be compliant with international humanitarian law" is so utterly revolting, I hardly know where to begin. Inherently to any successful war is to attack the populace at some level, for if the government is the only target a tyrannical regime (basically any country, including the US, behaves as such at war which is inherently apparent as the Constitution's respect of most rights is largely forgone when war is occurring) will use civilian resources to continue the fight which indirectly is crippling to the civilian populace regardless.
Of course the author's true allegiance shows through when he makes it clear not to attack Syria's leader financially. He worries about retaliation. He worries about the all-mighty dollar. Won't someone think of the humanitarianism of that?
And why do people believe they should have those rights? I'd say in large part because without some sort of outside interference a lot of the rights are the sort of things that are innate. We all have the power of speech*, the right to liberty, the right to possession (if not outright property), etc. It's heavily the basis of outside force (courts and individual force) that impinge upon those things. And for plenty of the positive rights, they're usually a manifestation of recognizing that to actually live in society almost invariably grants a lot of defacto power to some people which virtually needs to be addressed with a balance of positive force by society for those innate rights to continue to exist in some form--the rights of life, liberty, and property are pretty meaningless if you're effectively reliant upon a local baron who can choose to hire you and pay you in a minimal of food or leave you without work and almost certainly see you starve as you attempt to migrate to yet another baron for work.
You skipped over the word "immediate". That's the salient point. To say and fight that others can speak horrible things about me is not in my immediate self-interest but is in my more long-term self-interest when such a right is reciprocated. Yet coups are more often fought with "us vs them" leaving little room for consideration but the immediate, "don't be labelled as them". Enlightenment and enlightened self-interest is not a process the vast majority of people go through. Instead, people heavily adopt the framework of others to rely upon and to fight for. To sort of highlight the point, there's a reason it is "religion is the opium of the masses" and not "religion is the endorphin of persons".
For the same reason people refer to other things as innate or inalienable. As some point, you have to accept some set of axioms in a logical or philosophical construct as circular logic is invalid. It almost seems like that's an uncomfortable truth to you.
Yep, that's exactly what I said. The basis of people standing up for those rights is to frame those rights as axiomatic (innate and inalienable). Without that, the people who do stand up eventually do so purely on their own immediate self-interests.
Morals don't work because people kill. Ethics don't work because misconduct is a given. Religions don't work because not even the most ardent believers are ever 100% sure of their message to follow it exactly. And during particularly bad moments, all these truths are specifically made clear because they're more pressing than usual. Yes, action must be taken to clean house at times precisely for the fact that humans, imperfect and impure in various ways, are the very actors that run each system. It says nothing about the ideological backing of if or why action should be taken and what the threshold of cleaning house should be or what the new house should look like.
In short, I think you're missing the point.
PS - That whole "don't work" speech is part and parcel of the human condition. Whether any given example could ever work in a ideal world is rather beside the point of the discussion. But of specific point, as the saying goes government is a necessary evil. It would almost seem to go without saying that to expect government to respect anyone or anything is silly (corporations are the same, btw), so the whole conversation is inherently about the people and what they believe and do, not just in a snapshot or short span of time but for hundreds or thousands of years. The only real argument that could be made is that the ideology of freedom is rarely if ever the pivotal mover of action of the people. To that I'd agree. It is merely the new construction once the daily evil that starts the insurrection needs to be built, with the whole that (a) the new system lasts longer and (b) if nothing else to accept that the new system is itself a good thing even if it doesn't last.
Which is precisely the reason those Rights are spoken of as innate and inalienable. The only position one can take to force a government to defend a right is to argue its innateness because clearly ever other method is consistently infringed by government who would like nothing better to infringe them in pursuit of the politics of the day.
You should look into deism, then. It seems pretty clear that the human condition demands things like the right to speak, the right to travel, the right to privacy, and the right to justice system based on fairness--but a small list of things. Deism exemplifies the idea that a non-interfering God has left man to explore and expound upon the very things that are human rights and make up a person's humanity. The whole Age of Enlightenment very much was upon this discourse and spoke in terms of such things. Now, if you want to argue that Deism is a philosophical construct because it's not an organized religion, well, that's another matter.
And you confuse the idea that something that is innate cannot be infringed. Well, I innately can see, but I can be blinded. Is sight not innate? Because mail delivery didn't exist since the dawn of time, does access to mail delivery suddenly not become an innate right in a society where mail delivery can, is, and can be a common thing? If you think that because there are parts of the world, even today, which are so tyrannical or so impoverished to not the high standards expected of the enlightened that such things cannot be innate, then I'd argue you don't understand the concept of how a positive right can be innate. This is because the innateness of rights comes not from being inborn or being from the dawn of time. They stem naturally from the experience of man in seeing the world and understanding exactly the things that innately are without interference from a tyrannical government or corporation or such and hence are inherently rights.
And you think the trouble is chicken and egg. The trouble runs deeper. To argue something is innate and inalienable is to believe, at one level, that something cannot be infringed, broken, or removed. Yet is clear that the argument for innate and inalienability is precisely such that rights are recognized so they will not be infringed, broken, or removed. To frame the discussion as if your rights are all but that which are written down chains you not only to the very finiteness of past experience and imagination but chains you to alterations to the paper they are written on. It is why the 9th Amendment as written is so clear and dear: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The words "innate" and "inalienable" rights are a rallying cry that we do not step down the dark path we now tread. And trying to semantically dissecting the words only further dissects are freedom.
I think that's the reason for the rallying cry of "kill all the lawyers". In the end, though, it should have always been "kill all the legislators".
Which is about equivalent to misdirecting the fed's divining rod so they won't find the well where you hid the bodies.
Of course. If you show that polygraphs can be beat, then the curtain opens and you see the pseudoscience for what it is. The thing is, there's already plenty of solid case law that throws into question polygraphs--it's why they're inadmissible as evidence in a lot of places and why inherently beating or not beating a polygraph should be of no real aid to a criminal.
While they're at it, they can enlist the Scientologists to their side. And then we can get some decent donations from the anti-Scientologists and anti-Polygraphersr and perhaps get polygraphs fully stricken from all State/Federal/whatever positions and criminal cases for the shams that they are. Of course, that's just wishful thinking, and I'm sure the fed will just use plea bargain to get an effective conviction while continuing their cheerleading.
So, what you're saying is...if soda (or bread) costs too much, cut back and drink water instead and eat cake with it?,/p>
A funny pie chart on page 8. 8% of the budget is dedicated to "Enhance Cybersecurity". That is, ~$4.16 Billion is spent just on *enhancing* cybersecurity (yea, maybe it's actually all the money spent on the subject and the title is misleading/wrong). To put that in perspective, that's enough to hire 41,600* $100,000 programmers on the task of fixing open source software . Imagine what that'd do for enhancing cyber security.
*A figure close to ~1.7x how many people worked at Google in 2010. Yes, a lot of people at Google aren't programmers and their top programmers/engineers/whatever may well earn over $100,000/year on average, but it does give you a ballpark idea on the scope of the potential.
Because government officials/politicians are lazy/sheep who'd rather not have to deal with the media or even one belligerent religious folk over having to remove a hat or whatever. This is, presumably, precisely why this guy got away with forgoing the rules as well. That this can be spun into "local officials are secretly pastafarians" or some such is why there's any push back, but they'll obviously miss the whole point and simply order more push back at the BMV/DMV under some claim that because the belief in pastafarian isn't genuine the exception doesn't apply. And that just means the next successful pastafarian who comes along will have to make a big scene of it, being very belligerent about it. This will, of course, cause negative publicity for the atheists/pastafarians. Butthe only time actual equity will occur is when enough people claim pastafarianism at BMV/DMVs that the push back from below becomes enough that the law is changed to remove the exception--though odds are just as good they'll go the quasi-equality route and give broader exceptions for the atheists or more classes of people.
For the same reason the photo is there at all, as a means to further attempt to identify the person in question as being one and the same as the license. Of course, license photos are notorious for being so far off from what a person normally looks like, so it's questionable if it'd matter much regardless. Although I guess it could be argued that a religious person who regularly wears a hat would be more identifiable by wearing their hat in the photo...but that would basically highlight that no hats should be removed ever if it's the norm for the person. The same should hold true for glasses, jewelry, mustaches, etc. In short, it all sounds like a rather ill-conceived rule.
No, quite the opposite. The whole point is that the Streisand Effect more or less dictates that just about *anything* that even mentions terrorism in any detail in relationship to any spying by a politician of any sort would fall into the scope of Lord Blair's proposed law precisely because there's a clear causal relationship: news picks up "hot" story of a politician talking about a recent crime (and potentially new laws to combat them) -> said "hot" story is about the crime of terrorism including people, places, or methods -> reader becomes now more capable of engaging in terrorism by figuring out who to target, where to target, or how to target.
In short, really, any news story that leaves the reader more informed by details involving any case of terrorism would fall into the scope of the law. The paradox is clear in the same way that any law that tries to ban something (porn, profanity, blasphemy, etc) has to basically spell out* the thing being banned which makes the law itself something that needs to be banned and if the ban includes facilitating such things all the politicians who passed the law are guilty of the crime.
* I've seen examples where they try to get around this by using medical terminology, obtuse language, or simply by using something like a "community standard" as a basis for the ban. They generally result in new terms being created to circumvent the ban (as people want porn, profanity, blasphemy, etc) or a mostly unenforced/unenforceable law (very few things are considered legally "obscene" and instead courts or juries come up with excuses to ban/not ban things rather than relying upon the letter of the law, anyways). So, beyond being ignorant of the history of such things--which conservatism of all sorts seem to be guilty of--, they're also generally guilty of the very laws they wish to pass if by nothing else by the laws they want to pass. :/
I suggest there be a law to remove Lord Blair's Peerage. if Lord Blair is so adamant that " there was a 'new threat which is not of somebody personally intending to aid terrorism, but of conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism.'", then I'd like to introduce Lord Blair to the concept known as the Streisand Effect and the point that the internet is like a pool--once information is in there, it's in there*. It seems clear then that any action to highlight any "conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism" would itself be "conduct which is likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism". Ergo, Lord Blair is calling for a law to make his own acts illegal. It only stands to reason he would consider himself not worthy of his Peerage, and if he cannot or will not revoke his Peerage, a law should be written to do so. And yes, I'm rather serious.
*Technically, this is not absolutely true. But coupled with the Streisand Effect, it's almost certainly true. The real caveat is that the information may not be available on a web site, may not be available 24/7, and it may be password protected or otherwise not publicly available. The last part is the real kicker, of course, since that's the very current rub of the insurance file. It's also one reason why I can only imagine that free speech is the next largest target of people like Lord Blair, as certainly any word or phrase (or hash/known algorithm of said word or phrase) could be the password. To grant any person arrested who might know a password for a "time bomb" like an insurance file free speech would allow "sleepers" to undermine, well, the whole twisted system that Lord Blair seemingly supports. And the sad truth, I think, is free speech rights in the west for hundreds of years have shown us that the truth when exposed rarely has the damaging effect imagined, not only in the "bad" that Lord Blair would like to quiet but also in the "good" that would revoke privileges to people clearly unworthy of their position.
So, no good deed goes unpunished. But the principled ones will continue on. And that's why we would call them hero, not Lord.