My point is, these restrictions are here to keep us safe, not in a vote winning kind of way, but a way that might stop people getting hurt.
Well, if it might stop people getting hurt, I guess my rights aren't all that important.
Also, there is no nanny state issue here, as these policies are not abused.
You state that like it's a fundamental law of nature. It's not. Giving the government more power over its citizens is always bringing up a potential nanny state issue. You might be able to sleep easily trusting your government (and all subsequent incarnations of it) to do the right thing, but a lot of us don't have so much faith. I have absolutely no idea how much any of these monitoring schemes are being abused. It's not like it would be obvious if they were.
Collectivists like you are disgusting to individualists.
So are you basically saying here that scale is not important when considering how to deal with something? If the individual is all that matters, why does 9/11 matter more than the odd American here or there getting killed by terrorists abroad? You seem to think things have changed substantially since 1996, so I'd like to know how that fits into your "individualist" philosophy.
GP's point is that it's absurd to ask us to compromise as citizens (i.e., give up our rights and pay for ridiculous wars) over something like 9/11. That's like your local police department asserting new rights for itself because of a serial killing in another state.
However, now, if you and yours are wrong, thousands more innocents will die, and many more will suffer.
Huh? Thousands more innocents will die if... ? That's a pretty powerful consequence to invoke without really coming clear about what you're saying. If Bush gets impeached? If it turns out that there were WMDs in Iraq? I'm also really confused as to how wrongfully removing Bush would cost so many lives, considering how much he's accomplished as far inciting the next generation of terrorists, and how studiously he ignored the threat of terrorism in the pre-9/11 days.
We know already that over 30,000 innocents have died in Iraq as a result of the war. Some might even go so far as to say the administration mislead us into that war, or that some members of the administration wanted to invade Iraq all along. I think, given their existing track record, it's far more dangerous to assume the administration is at all on the level.
Of course, those things you mentioned can also easily happen right now. The main difference being the cameras could catch the guys burgling the house, and the girl would likely be on camera when she got grabbed. Which makes those acts less likely to happen in the first place. More wins for the Transparent Society.
Brin's argument is being somewhat misrepresented. His point is that surveillance is virtually guaranteed to become ubiquitous for many reasons, from a technological standpoint as much as anything else. If we try and insist on a level of privacy that is utterly impractical, we'll lose both privacy and liberty (it's like Ben Franklin's safety and liberty quote, but s/safety/privacy/).
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly, by doing things somewhere where there are no cameras. (In real life the perps do not know where the cameras are, what they cover, at a range of how many hundreds of metres they can read a newspaper headline, that sort of thing.)
(2) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. So they will be able to have accomplices who can see from moment to moment where the cameras are pointing, and phone or text their mates on the street to tell them the coast is clear.
Who are the "perps" exactly in this scenario? Average street thugs? They're really going to study the layout of the cameras all over the city and commit the map to memory, recalling perfectly at all times which areas are "safe" and which are not? Granted, I don't live in the UK, so I don't know the extent of their street criminal genius, but over here across the pond I've known more than a few, and they're not this smart. 1 out of 10 might bother to even look at that stuff.
(4) Innocent victims. You might be doing something which is perfectly legal and of no interest to the police but which you still might not want your friends and relatives and employer to see. OK, so if you're snogging someone else's wife in the park when you're supposed to be home sick from work then maybe you deserve what you get, but I'm sure that if I tried a little harder I'd come up with a more deserving example.
How do you know right now that a hi-res satellite isn't capturing your antics? Or your suspicious wife (or the mistress' suspicious husband) isn't keeping an eye on you with a telescope? Or just gone and hired a private detective to keep track of you? None of these things are illegal, and most of them are plausible. You cannot reasonably demand privacy in public. However, you should demand the right to walk the streets unmolested (that is why we've this whole "civilization" thing, right?). Gee, 2/2 for public cameras. And compared to the disadvantages of having a truly "closed" system where only the police have access, I'd say the points you've brought up here are pretty miniscule.
I used to think this way, but there's an issue I have with Nodoz: it hits you all at once. Whereas you can consume a beverage over the course of half an hour and smoothly transition into and out of the caffeine state, a Nodoz pill hits you fast and hard. Too harsh for me.
Yeah, the consoles are rock solid. I know a guy who's accidentally dropped a couple different Nintendo systems down flights of stairs, with no problems. A friend of mine just recently dropped a TV right on a Gamecube, putting a big crack across the top of the cube. The TV is completely broken, but the cube still works just fine.
They seem to have gotten their act together with the Gamecube controller, at least as far as guaranteed failure is concerned. As far as the 64 goes, my roommates and I are habitual SSB players, and at this point we've rendered three sets (so, nine total) of controllers' sticks non-viable. I can't help but feel a bit like I'm getting taken for a ride shelling out the money on yet another triplet of doomed controllers.
Not that my ire has any impact on my Nintendo fanboyism, of course.
In general, you're right, Nintendo stuff is indestructible. However, it's a shame they designed the analog sticks on the N64 controller with a blatantly limited lifespan. They don't always get it right.
As I wrote: giving a variable a type. I wrote giving, not having.
You're not really giving variables types in Java, either, their type is intrinsic upon construction. All you're doing is constraining what variables a reference may point to at compile-time.
I'm being nitpicky because this terminology gets thrown around a lot when talking about static vs. dynamic languages, and it's too imprecise to capture the details of the differences. The difference between Groovy and Python is that Groovy supports static type-checking.
I know that Python variables have a type.... as long as they are not null
Actually, that's a Java idiosyncrasy. Observe:
>>> x = None >>> type(x) <type 'NoneType'>
Your comment is completely out of scope of my comment and the whoe thread;D
My comment was nitpicky and pedantic (this one doubly so), but correcting something I perceive to be a misinterpretation isn't out of the scope of your comment.
That's a lot of savings. In fact, here's a page with actual stats on Wal-Mart's economic impact on the poor.
With sources for your analysis like forwalmart.com, your credibility soars higher than ever. Your "I ignore health benefits when it's convenient" analysis wasn't doing too well on its own, you probably should have left the astroturf website out of it.
Maybe you should stop to think about why living there costs so much, Mr. Engineer.
The people who benefit the most from Wal-Mart are the ones who can't afford to buy groceries
Hmm, pretty spurious, unless there's no such thing as food stamps in CA. The thing they probably can't afford is health care.
What most people fail to realize when they see Wal-Mart as the big, bad, evil juggernaut, is that the employees of Wal-Mart often end up better off with less benefits from Wal-Mart supercenters than they do with better benefits from unionized, benefits-bearing labor at other supermarkets. Why? Because when the supercenter moves into town, those low-paid workers end up paying so much less for their basic needs.
Wait, by "most people" do you mean, "most Americans living in wealthy areas"? I've known Wal-Mart employees in several fairly poor (for America) areas, and believe me, the difference in wage is a lot more than some paltry savings they might make at Wal-Mart (pretending Costco doesn't exist there) on groceries, assuming their groceries aren't paid for by the state, which they likely are if it actually matters that much. Gee, then Wal-Mart's just a bad deal all around, isn't it?
Anyway, now please attempt to justify Wal-Mart's international record. You've got to if you want to be able to keep reaping those low, low prices with a clear conscience, right?
driving ludicrous costs down to something more reasonable that everyone can afford
Oh, c'mon, talk about bleeding-heart. Cry me a fucking river about the cost of strawberries in Silicon Valley you smug asshole. I guess the Alberton's employees will just have to eat cake if Wal-Mart doesn't show up.
And of course the majority of Americans love Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is living the American dream... expanding at an absurd rate in the developing world, crushing their local businesses, using the money to sell at a loss in America to get anyone with enough money to live in Silicon Valley in the door.
In addition, substantial authority indicates that the President has inherent constitutional authority over the gathering of foreign intelligence
So, then please explain to us laymen:
A. Why that applies to domestic wiretapping.
B. Where the "inherent constitutional authority" to violate the Bill of Rights comes from.
Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. The one Senator to vote against the Patriot Act. The Senator to call for the censure of Bush over the whole wiretapping thing in the first place. If anyone's the One Good Senator, it's Feingold.
If I'm going to let someone peep over my fucking shoulder, I know it is someone I can trust. Most generally, there IS no one.
While I'm thrilled you have the opportunity to employ Security By Isolation (patent pending), there are use cases for almost anything involving a password that also involve untrusted parties with at least the ability to glimpse your screen.
Maybe password fields should come with a checkbox to "turn them off"?
Also in my eyes Ruby is obscure and as well Pythons is;D and both don't support giving avariable a type.
Eh? Type is pretty fundamental to variables in both languages. I'd like to see a case of a variable in either one not having a type.
I assume you mean there's no syntax built directly into the language to perform type checking. I see it more as the language doesn't force me to type-check every single variable I use in a program. Static code analysis is a continuum, I could just as easily accuse Java of "not supporting" the code checks Jlint could provide at compile-time.
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My point is, these restrictions are here to keep us safe, not in a vote winning kind of way, but a way that might stop people getting hurt.
Well, if it might stop people getting hurt, I guess my rights aren't all that important.
Also, there is no nanny state issue here, as these policies are not abused.
You state that like it's a fundamental law of nature. It's not. Giving the government more power over its citizens is always bringing up a potential nanny state issue. You might be able to sleep easily trusting your government (and all subsequent incarnations of it) to do the right thing, but a lot of us don't have so much faith. I have absolutely no idea how much any of these monitoring schemes are being abused. It's not like it would be obvious if they were.
Collectivists like you are disgusting to individualists.
So are you basically saying here that scale is not important when considering how to deal with something? If the individual is all that matters, why does 9/11 matter more than the odd American here or there getting killed by terrorists abroad? You seem to think things have changed substantially since 1996, so I'd like to know how that fits into your "individualist" philosophy.
GP's point is that it's absurd to ask us to compromise as citizens (i.e., give up our rights and pay for ridiculous wars) over something like 9/11. That's like your local police department asserting new rights for itself because of a serial killing in another state.
However, now, if you and yours are wrong, thousands more innocents will die, and many more will suffer.
Huh? Thousands more innocents will die if... ? That's a pretty powerful consequence to invoke without really coming clear about what you're saying. If Bush gets impeached? If it turns out that there were WMDs in Iraq? I'm also really confused as to how wrongfully removing Bush would cost so many lives, considering how much he's accomplished as far inciting the next generation of terrorists, and how studiously he ignored the threat of terrorism in the pre-9/11 days.
We know already that over 30,000 innocents have died in Iraq as a result of the war. Some might even go so far as to say the administration mislead us into that war, or that some members of the administration wanted to invade Iraq all along. I think, given their existing track record, it's far more dangerous to assume the administration is at all on the level.
Surely the incessant reminders they get every time they read /. will convince them to... oh. Nevermind.
Of course, those things you mentioned can also easily happen right now. The main difference being the cameras could catch the guys burgling the house, and the girl would likely be on camera when she got grabbed. Which makes those acts less likely to happen in the first place. More wins for the Transparent Society.
Thanks for proving once again that you can type a lot of pretentious nothing and get it modded +5, Insightful.
Brin's argument is being somewhat misrepresented. His point is that surveillance is virtually guaranteed to become ubiquitous for many reasons, from a technological standpoint as much as anything else. If we try and insist on a level of privacy that is utterly impractical, we'll lose both privacy and liberty (it's like Ben Franklin's safety and liberty quote, but s/safety/privacy/).
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly, by doing things somewhere where there are no cameras. (In real life the perps do not know where the cameras are, what they cover, at a range of how many hundreds of metres they can read a newspaper headline, that sort of thing.)
(2) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. So they will be able to have accomplices who can see from moment to moment where the cameras are pointing, and phone or text their mates on the street to tell them the coast is clear.
Who are the "perps" exactly in this scenario? Average street thugs? They're really going to study the layout of the cameras all over the city and commit the map to memory, recalling perfectly at all times which areas are "safe" and which are not? Granted, I don't live in the UK, so I don't know the extent of their street criminal genius, but over here across the pond I've known more than a few, and they're not this smart. 1 out of 10 might bother to even look at that stuff.
(4) Innocent victims. You might be doing something which is perfectly legal and of no interest to the police but which you still might not want your friends and relatives and employer to see. OK, so if you're snogging someone else's wife in the park when you're supposed to be home sick from work then maybe you deserve what you get, but I'm sure that if I tried a little harder I'd come up with a more deserving example.
How do you know right now that a hi-res satellite isn't capturing your antics? Or your suspicious wife (or the mistress' suspicious husband) isn't keeping an eye on you with a telescope? Or just gone and hired a private detective to keep track of you? None of these things are illegal, and most of them are plausible. You cannot reasonably demand privacy in public. However, you should demand the right to walk the streets unmolested (that is why we've this whole "civilization" thing, right?). Gee, 2/2 for public cameras. And compared to the disadvantages of having a truly "closed" system where only the police have access, I'd say the points you've brought up here are pretty miniscule.
The "stick" (left hand) part of the "full" motion-sensitive setup, shown here: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/e3_2006/wii/controll er.html
I'm pretty sure the "Nunchuck" is actually just the motion-sensitive controller.
I used to think this way, but there's an issue I have with Nodoz: it hits you all at once. Whereas you can consume a beverage over the course of half an hour and smoothly transition into and out of the caffeine state, a Nodoz pill hits you fast and hard. Too harsh for me.
you buy product shillings by the pound.
Yeah, the consoles are rock solid. I know a guy who's accidentally dropped a couple different Nintendo systems down flights of stairs, with no problems. A friend of mine just recently dropped a TV right on a Gamecube, putting a big crack across the top of the cube. The TV is completely broken, but the cube still works just fine.
They seem to have gotten their act together with the Gamecube controller, at least as far as guaranteed failure is concerned. As far as the 64 goes, my roommates and I are habitual SSB players, and at this point we've rendered three sets (so, nine total) of controllers' sticks non-viable. I can't help but feel a bit like I'm getting taken for a ride shelling out the money on yet another triplet of doomed controllers.
Not that my ire has any impact on my Nintendo fanboyism, of course.
the Patriot Act hates it when you anthropomorphize it.
In general, you're right, Nintendo stuff is indestructible. However, it's a shame they designed the analog sticks on the N64 controller with a blatantly limited lifespan. They don't always get it right.
I also know that I could say PRETTY much anything i wanted and unless it involved bombs or planes, I'd have no trouble with the police.
What's your point here, exactly? That monitoring is a Very Good Thing because it will only impact the naughty terrorists?
You're not really giving variables types in Java, either, their type is intrinsic upon construction. All you're doing is constraining what variables a reference may point to at compile-time.
I'm being nitpicky because this terminology gets thrown around a lot when talking about static vs. dynamic languages, and it's too imprecise to capture the details of the differences. The difference between Groovy and Python is that Groovy supports static type-checking.
I know that Python variables have a type
Actually, that's a Java idiosyncrasy. Observe:
Your comment is completely out of scope of my comment and the whoe thread
My comment was nitpicky and pedantic (this one doubly so), but correcting something I perceive to be a misinterpretation isn't out of the scope of your comment.
ODE isn't closed and proprietary.
That's a lot of savings. In fact, here's a page with actual stats on Wal-Mart's economic impact on the poor.
With sources for your analysis like forwalmart.com, your credibility soars higher than ever. Your "I ignore health benefits when it's convenient" analysis wasn't doing too well on its own, you probably should have left the astroturf website out of it.
There were several "No" votes in the House, IIRC.
Adjusted for cost of living
Maybe you should stop to think about why living there costs so much, Mr. Engineer.
The people who benefit the most from Wal-Mart are the ones who can't afford to buy groceries
Hmm, pretty spurious, unless there's no such thing as food stamps in CA. The thing they probably can't afford is health care.
What most people fail to realize when they see Wal-Mart as the big, bad, evil juggernaut, is that the employees of Wal-Mart often end up better off with less benefits from Wal-Mart supercenters than they do with better benefits from unionized, benefits-bearing labor at other supermarkets. Why? Because when the supercenter moves into town, those low-paid workers end up paying so much less for their basic needs.
Wait, by "most people" do you mean, "most Americans living in wealthy areas"? I've known Wal-Mart employees in several fairly poor (for America) areas, and believe me, the difference in wage is a lot more than some paltry savings they might make at Wal-Mart (pretending Costco doesn't exist there) on groceries, assuming their groceries aren't paid for by the state, which they likely are if it actually matters that much. Gee, then Wal-Mart's just a bad deal all around, isn't it?
Anyway, now please attempt to justify Wal-Mart's international record. You've got to if you want to be able to keep reaping those low, low prices with a clear conscience, right?
driving ludicrous costs down to something more reasonable that everyone can afford
Oh, c'mon, talk about bleeding-heart. Cry me a fucking river about the cost of strawberries in Silicon Valley you smug asshole. I guess the Alberton's employees will just have to eat cake if Wal-Mart doesn't show up.
And of course the majority of Americans love Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is living the American dream... expanding at an absurd rate in the developing world, crushing their local businesses, using the money to sell at a loss in America to get anyone with enough money to live in Silicon Valley in the door.
In addition, substantial authority indicates that the President has inherent constitutional authority over the gathering of foreign intelligence
So, then please explain to us laymen:
A. Why that applies to domestic wiretapping.
B. Where the "inherent constitutional authority" to violate the Bill of Rights comes from.
Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. The one Senator to vote against the Patriot Act. The Senator to call for the censure of Bush over the whole wiretapping thing in the first place. If anyone's the One Good Senator, it's Feingold.
If I'm going to let someone peep over my fucking shoulder, I know it is someone I can trust. Most generally, there IS no one.
While I'm thrilled you have the opportunity to employ Security By Isolation (patent pending), there are use cases for almost anything involving a password that also involve untrusted parties with at least the ability to glimpse your screen.
Maybe password fields should come with a checkbox to "turn them off"?
Also in my eyes Ruby is obscure and as well Pythons is ;D and both don't support giving avariable a type.
Eh? Type is pretty fundamental to variables in both languages. I'd like to see a case of a variable in either one not having a type.
I assume you mean there's no syntax built directly into the language to perform type checking. I see it more as the language doesn't force me to type-check every single variable I use in a program. Static code analysis is a continuum, I could just as easily accuse Java of "not supporting" the code checks Jlint could provide at compile-time.