Unfortunately, the only way to really fix this is to go ahead and get arrested.
Nothing will turn this around. This is the fruit of the "for the children" insanity combined with the "Terry-wrists! Terry-wrists!" insanity. All getting arrested will do is (a) cost you a shitload of money and time which you will not get back in full, and (b) eventually get you lynched by the surrounding crowd if you give the "authorities" trouble. After which, they'll all go have a beer and laugh at the beating you took.
Can't be fixed. They've found a perfect combination of imaginary threats to keep the population in line. You stick your head up, they'll bring out the mallet and smash it right back down where they think it's supposed to be.
Only problem with this is that the power to tax is the power to destroy.
If taxation destroys one's faith, then as far as I'm concerned, one's faith wasn't worth having. More broadly, if your religion has to be a business, then maybe it isn't a religion anyway.
Yeah? Well, I have elves and unicorns on my side, and they trump your imaginary night-shirted buddy completely. And the spaghetti monster sees to my nutrition, may his holy meatballs rest in a delicate, yet spicy, bed of delicious red sauce. Also, btw, your "god" is a limpwristed, egg-sucking pissant with a huge fail of a "holy" book.:P
That's because you credulously have faith in the federal authorities.
In this area, they've earned it -- it isn't that I'm credulous, it is that they are credible. What do I mean? Well, let me tell you:
They've managed to keep my meat inspected, get my kids a basic education, prevent most infected/infested fruit from reaching my table, built a really outstanding interstate system in a country of huge extents, put our citizens on the moon and in orbit and gotten pictures of far away galaxies, give me clean water to drink, and even paid for treatment of my sweetheart's breast cancer -- and I still have her for that specific reason. WRT the military, I don't like what they've got it doing at the moment (though WW1 and WW2... good job!), but I am forced to admit that it's damned good at being a military force, so yeah, they get considerable credit there as well.
In the meantime, the private sector would not insure either of us (we're oldish... 50's, and we have pre-existing conditions... she's diabetic, for instance, and has been absolutely uninsurable) and emergency room "care" is not in the least bit comparable with a normal course of treatment under a doctor and with access to the correct drugs, etc. So yeah, I'm for the feds kicking the insurance industry under the rug and starting over. They (the insurance industry) have made a complete cock-up of the opportunity they had, and so they can take a long walk off a short pier as far as I'm concerned.
Do I think the feds will get it right first thing out the door? No. Hardly. But I do think they'll nudge, wiggle and tweak their way to something better than what I have now, which is... nothing. Maybe in time for my kids to get medical care if and when they need it.
Insurance companies have a built-in conflict of interest: They make more money when they don't pay for care, and they are for-profit corporations. That's a recipe for disaster, and so I can't say that I am surprised that it is a disaster we have.
As it stands, because healthcare is private, I pay for the health care of everyone above me - the people employed by the utilities, the city employees, etc., before I get to spend a penny on my own. Which leaves me without any, as it turns out. I'd much rather see everyone taxed for healthcare, and everyone getting it when they need it, than the current, I pay it for the utility or corporate employee because it's built into my prices, but I don't *get* it because I don't have anything left and there's no one I get to say "pay me more" to in order to cover those costs.
You have to pay for cops, for firefighters, for medics, in some cases for healthcare and schools.
With the exception of "cops", I'm in agreement with you.
If the cops were on the street and actually patrolling the neighborhoods, interacting with the residents and deterring crime (instead of arriving 20 minutes late and arresting the victim for putting up a defense), I'd be all for them. However, paying for them to sit in air conditioned patrol cars, isolated from everyone, writing tickets and stepping all over people's personal choices... that's ultimately worse than wasted money -- it's like paying to have someone kick your dog.
The current military budget (fed) is also not on my "we should be paying for that" list. Very little useful is being accomplished. At the state level, the drug war is *very* expensive and should be ended forthwith; streetlights are a good example of a mostly useless cost we pay without thinking (cars have headlights, strollers can use flashlights... and a lot more of us would be able to see the stars again.) There are plenty of places we should be cutting, and we're talking significant portions of the budget.
ok, why? Wouldn't that money be better spent invested in improving our infrastructure, investing in technology, education, and healthcare?
What threats do we actually face that require the military we're maintaining at the moment? Why do we need to be pursuing the military actions we presently are, and why do we need to be the world's police presence?
I'm intrigued by your idea that we should *increase* the military. Seems completely counter-intuitive to me. Please explain yourself.
What we don't want is federally controlled healthcare.
We? Speak for yourself. I do want federally controlled healthcare. I want private sector medical insurance to be illegal, and medical care to be universal just as education is universal, only more so. I am delighted to see we've taken a few baby steps in that direction. A society that doesn't put the health and education of its citizens first is, in my opinion, wrongheaded - and I'm trying to be polite about it.
NASA historically has produced much technological goodness for us; Not to mention hope and wonder. And there are all those resources out there waiting to be tapped. I'd just as soon keep NASA while the private sector gets wound up.
Alaska... that's foolish. The state is really, really loaded with natural resources. Metals; petroleum; timber; etc. You're literally giving away a gold mine. Not good.
The rest, yeah, not bad. I like the budget thing. Add to it, if the fed doesn't balance, then all the elected officials automatically lose their jobs.:)
That's great for Massachusetts. My state also has a balanced budget (Montana.) But the rest of the country... not so much. Many states (California, anyone?) are spending into the future, and the feds are definitely spending into the future, and on hugely wasteful and harmful operations (like two useless wars, being the police for much of the world, the drug war (also a state problem), etc., etc.) If things are balanced, then you need NO new taxes. If you're cutting costs, likewise, only you should be reducing taxes.
As for Glen Beck, no. Really, really bad guess.:) Not right wing, not left, not middle. An intent to hold rational positions on most matters. Which puts me all over the spectrum. I'm for a society that makes medical care as important a priority as education, against making war outside our borders, strongly conservative in the constitutional sense, but strongly biased against tolerance of religion, superstition, spin and deception because they are tools that unfairly leverage the left side of the Gaussian - intellectual snake oil. I don't think people should be free to lie or make unsubstantiated claims; I don't think people should be forced to speak; I think the deceived have been injured in the most practical sense of the term.
Give the business's any sort of tax and the tax goes upon the heads of the people. So in the end the consumer is taxed the most.
This doesn't mean that the tax doesn't burden the business; eventually, the total spent for the product begins to edge into the "unreasonable" zone for the consumer, and they stop buying. You can't pass along a cost or a tax if the consumer won't pay it. And lets face it -- for most people, "must have" means food, medical needs, utilities, fuel/transport, basic clothing, and (for this group) Internet.
Amazon and other Internet retailers have an edge (the tax and storefront things) but they also have a serious downside - your local folks can hand you the item. Amazon and crew have to ship it to you, generally speaking, and that's a counter-force working against pervasive "I want it now" mentality and the in-your-face shipping costs.
Take away the tax benefits, and you'll see some Internet businesses fold, as their gains from advantages drop beneath their losses from disadvantages on the overall ledger. The smaller, niche businesses will go first, as they aren't doing enough volume to obtain deep discounts. I can think of quite a few I patronize that I would *really* hate to see go.
The real problem here is the political concept of "we can always spend more for a 'good' idea." No. They can't. There is a limit, and when you're doing spending into the future based on credit, along with very high tax rates, as most states and the federal government are, you're well past that limit.
Get people on board with a "spend LESS" platform, and elect them. Throw out the incumbents, they think *wrong*.
...equally, of course. No more free rides for the superstitious. Tax the land they put their churches on just like they tax the land I put my home on. Etc. That'll tweak the bottom line a little.
Instead of allowing them to constantly add new programs and new spending, how about electing some folks on the platform to reduce spending until you have a balanced budget (which means you won't need any new taxes), and then reduce spending, which means you'll need less taxes.
Make some noise. At the state level, you might even get something done.
One of the biggest problems our government has is an inability to revisit past decisions; bad law, bad spending, obsolete law, obsolete spending. All they ever do is add; that's a key reason why taxes go up, freedoms narrow, and law-books only get heavier.
Thank you for all the helpful citations and examples. Oh, wait, you don't give a single one, you stereotypical, paranoid fruit loop.
Are you familiar with the website "Google"? It's really kind of neat. For instance, watch this:
Google: "Money confiscated"
Very first result:
Headline: Federal Appeals Court: Driving With Money is a Crime
Lede: Eighth Circuit Appeals Court ruling says police may seize cash from motorists even in the absence of any evidence that a crime has been committed.
Link: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/12/1296.asp
Isn't that awesome the way that works? You just type in the thing you want a reference for, and there it is. Tech is cool, eh? Also, I assure you that the other matters I referred to... references are just as easily located.
So... if you really wanted those answers, they're right there to be found. Or, you could have asked politely (or even tersely, such as "Cite?") Instead, you wasted time calling me names. Interesting approach. Not likely to get you want you ask for in the general case, just so you know. I just did it to show what an idiot you are, considering that you took the time to call me unjustified names.
Next time think first, type second. Like "Why would he write that..." google... "oh." Or just ask politely. Then you won't have your butt handed to you so neatly packaged.
...it is considered a lot worse for an innocent man to go to jail than for a guilty man to go free.
I guess you didn't get the memo. Warrants are passe, especially within a few hundred miles of the nation's border; you can be arrested (anywhere in the country) for carrying large amounts of money (and they'll confiscate it, and you won't get it back); and of course, once convicted of anything at all, you're a permanent member of the new underclass. Not to mention that "innocence" is highly correlated with how much the defendant spends on lawyers.
In addition, the average person seems to be incapable of really understanding statistics (which is very important for climatology).
At least with AGW, it is -- because there is no valid [hypothesis, to test, to theory] path, inasmuch as no AGW hypothesis can be described as any more than a projection into the future. Which is why it cannot be said that there is a valid AGW theory.
You can only establish a theory on the back of careful testing, falsification, etc. When the proposed result of a theory cannot be shown... there can be no theory.
It's also worth mentioning that the models for even parts of the concept are very poor performers. For instance, models that predict behavior at the equator inevitably fail to do so elsewhere.
And it certainly doesn't help to have all this shrill yelling about how we're surely going to "drown", or "die", etc.
Statistics, however, can be used to project trends almost any way one likes. This is the source of the scaled imprecation: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
If you've never heard of the giants on whose shoulders you could stand, the very best you can hope for is to duplicate their work, and it'd be pretty arrogant to assume you can do even that.
That's just pompous bullshit. Knuth, et al, didn't write any e-commerce apps, now did they? Did they do any definitive treatments on 3d texturing? No? How about image warping? No??? Did I need to study these fine CS giants to write my first compiler? No, I did not. My first assembler? No. Linker? No. Did I need to study them to figure out high performance dithering? No.
Knuth and his ivory tower buddies no doubt contributed plenty, but not everything out there depends on a knowledge of what they did. Some things - like the limits of compression, for instance - are pretty damned obvious without going in for a semester of noise theory, or reading Shannon until your eyelids lock open. Aliasing is a blatantly obvious effect that we've seen examples of all the time for decades thanks to video; a month of theory, or a lecture about it, is 100% overkill if you simply think the matter through. Not that I knock anyone for thinking it through *first*, or being rigorous about it, but damn, man, if you can't work out the consequences of sampling a changing waveform too slowly, or not making the waveform change slowly enough so that your sampling becomes fast enough, you're kind of a dumbass anyway.
Programming is such a deep field, and such a broad one, that to say that a programmer can't be "good" because they don't know Knuth (or Shannon, or Babbage, or Lovelace, or electronics, or assembly language, or queuing theory, etc.) is just purest nonsense. There's lots of room for work in areas that don't need a bit of any of that.
Further, there are areas - like AI - where it hasn't been demonstrated that *anyone* has got anything right, so that even though lots of time has been spent by very smart people, we still don't even know for sure what we should be looking at and what is pure bunk. A new outlook, untainted by any previous work, might be just the ticket. I'm suddenly reminded of Minsky's utter failure to correctly assess neural nets. Some "Giant" he turned out to be - smart as hell, and just as wrong. And he did a huge amount of harm with that.
I've got the background that seems to be so highly recommended here, and I have to tell you, in coding just about every day since the late 1960s, I very rarely deal with issues where those giants, as it were, are even slightly relevant. The vast majority of programming isn't about that kind of coding, frankly, and if it was, we wouldn't have many interesting programs to play with.
Certificates don't ensure you're talking to anyone in particular, other than someone who has managed to get their hands on the certificate, which, based on prevalance of rooting and etc., could be quite a range of people.
Certs reliably encrypt traffic between the two endpoints. That's the entire usefulness to the two endusers.
HOWEVER: An entire deceptive financial ecosystem was created when the browser manufacturers put those "scare the heck out of the user" dialogs in there; that meant that ecommerce types *HAD* to get certs that would not raise those warnings -- meaning, buying a bag of bits from someone else, a bag you could have made yourself for free, for all the good it would do you, instead purchased for $50 (or many more) dollars.
It's all based upon one key falsehood: The idea that a cert "assures" you that you're talking to someone in particular. As opposed to the guy who physically walked up to the machine while root was logged in, lifted the cert, and walked away. As opposed to the guy who rooted Apache or Postgres or etc., went in, lifted the cert AND the access to the DNS server, and disconnected. As opposed to the guy who has rooted the DNS elsewhere and has your cert.
It's 100% pure bunk. Certs encrypt. Probably not from the government, but from your average hacker, yeah, they generally succeed in making traffic look like a mess of indecipherable bitrot. That's all the actual service they're good for. That, and keeping browser warnings from ruining your attempt to do e-commerce. Just remember: The latter problem was *caused* by the browser writers in collusion with people like Verisign. The problem didn't exist until they put their heads together.
Reminds me very much of the government's war on drugs. The violence, the killings, the black market... 99.9999% a consequence of stupid, stupid rules, every one of which the government is entirely responsible for. Here, every scared consumer was created by the certificate "authorities" in conjunction with the browser makers. They created a fear of a non-issue so strong that everyone was forced to get in line and pretend (or be bewildered into thinking) that the threat was resolved with the purchased certificate, when that is utter bunkum from start to finish.
It doesn't matter how much power it uses if it won't play Mechassault.
If I had the xbox folks to talk to, my line would be "It's the GAMES, stupid!"
When they forewent XBox compatibility, they lost me, really. That whole emulation thing... they didn't follow through. So they can keep their low power box. I'll just keep on keeping on with my old XBox (and the several spares I now have.) I did buy a 360 (because they were promising it would run the old games), but since it in FACT won't play my favorite game, the urge to upgrade it... zero.
When I pay $50 for a game, I expect that to count for something. I'm as annoyed about this as I would be if my bluray player wouldn't play DVDs.
When Sony put the PS2 compatibility in the PS3, they had me, and I bit. When they took it out later, I started collecting a few extras of the older machine cheaply. Same deal. Either respect my investment in software, or piss the hell up a rope. When I spend my money in the used machine market, it does Sony, Microsoft, etc., no good at all. If they want me to purchase a new machine... low power isn't going to do it.
It is my opinion that armed revolt would destroy the country. I don't consider it a viable option (nor do I think that the average citizen has any idea what is going on, or cares... hence, there will be no revolt, regardless of what anyone thinks.) That does not mean that I shouldn't speak my mind -- I've put forty years into studying this (yeah, I'm old) and I'm pretty sure of most of my positions. I can defend them against educated, critical attacks. The government, however, cannot defend many of its positions without using coercion and violating the restrictions set upon by its authorizing document; likewise, its officials cannot do the things they do without violating their oaths.
The inversion of the commerce clause; the rubber stamping of ex post facto laws; the direct and profound violation of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th amendments; the usurpation of article three power by the judiciary; these things cannot be hidden successfully under a claim of "it's a living document", etc. "Shall not infringe" still means what it meant when it was written; "shall make no law" still means the same thing; "among the several states" still doesn't mean "within the several states"; "ex post facto" still means what it did in 1798 when Justice Chase laid it out... those who would make excuses for the violations of these specifics are a poison to the country's body as far as I'm concerned.
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You mean like lead? [looks at pencil on desk, realizes huge threat of all that graphite] TERRORISTS!
Nothing will turn this around. This is the fruit of the "for the children" insanity combined with the "Terry-wrists! Terry-wrists!" insanity. All getting arrested will do is (a) cost you a shitload of money and time which you will not get back in full, and (b) eventually get you lynched by the surrounding crowd if you give the "authorities" trouble. After which, they'll all go have a beer and laugh at the beating you took.
Can't be fixed. They've found a perfect combination of imaginary threats to keep the population in line. You stick your head up, they'll bring out the mallet and smash it right back down where they think it's supposed to be.
If taxation destroys one's faith, then as far as I'm concerned, one's faith wasn't worth having. More broadly, if your religion has to be a business, then maybe it isn't a religion anyway.
Yeah? Well, I have elves and unicorns on my side, and they trump your imaginary night-shirted buddy completely. And the spaghetti monster sees to my nutrition, may his holy meatballs rest in a delicate, yet spicy, bed of delicious red sauce. Also, btw, your "god" is a limpwristed, egg-sucking pissant with a huge fail of a "holy" book. :P
In this area, they've earned it -- it isn't that I'm credulous, it is that they are credible. What do I mean? Well, let me tell you:
They've managed to keep my meat inspected, get my kids a basic education, prevent most infected/infested fruit from reaching my table, built a really outstanding interstate system in a country of huge extents, put our citizens on the moon and in orbit and gotten pictures of far away galaxies, give me clean water to drink, and even paid for treatment of my sweetheart's breast cancer -- and I still have her for that specific reason. WRT the military, I don't like what they've got it doing at the moment (though WW1 and WW2... good job!), but I am forced to admit that it's damned good at being a military force, so yeah, they get considerable credit there as well.
In the meantime, the private sector would not insure either of us (we're oldish... 50's, and we have pre-existing conditions... she's diabetic, for instance, and has been absolutely uninsurable) and emergency room "care" is not in the least bit comparable with a normal course of treatment under a doctor and with access to the correct drugs, etc. So yeah, I'm for the feds kicking the insurance industry under the rug and starting over. They (the insurance industry) have made a complete cock-up of the opportunity they had, and so they can take a long walk off a short pier as far as I'm concerned.
Do I think the feds will get it right first thing out the door? No. Hardly. But I do think they'll nudge, wiggle and tweak their way to something better than what I have now, which is... nothing. Maybe in time for my kids to get medical care if and when they need it.
Insurance companies have a built-in conflict of interest: They make more money when they don't pay for care, and they are for-profit corporations. That's a recipe for disaster, and so I can't say that I am surprised that it is a disaster we have.
As it stands, because healthcare is private, I pay for the health care of everyone above me - the people employed by the utilities, the city employees, etc., before I get to spend a penny on my own. Which leaves me without any, as it turns out. I'd much rather see everyone taxed for healthcare, and everyone getting it when they need it, than the current, I pay it for the utility or corporate employee because it's built into my prices, but I don't *get* it because I don't have anything left and there's no one I get to say "pay me more" to in order to cover those costs.
With the exception of "cops", I'm in agreement with you.
If the cops were on the street and actually patrolling the neighborhoods, interacting with the residents and deterring crime (instead of arriving 20 minutes late and arresting the victim for putting up a defense), I'd be all for them. However, paying for them to sit in air conditioned patrol cars, isolated from everyone, writing tickets and stepping all over people's personal choices... that's ultimately worse than wasted money -- it's like paying to have someone kick your dog.
The current military budget (fed) is also not on my "we should be paying for that" list. Very little useful is being accomplished. At the state level, the drug war is *very* expensive and should be ended forthwith; streetlights are a good example of a mostly useless cost we pay without thinking (cars have headlights, strollers can use flashlights... and a lot more of us would be able to see the stars again.) There are plenty of places we should be cutting, and we're talking significant portions of the budget.
ok, why? Wouldn't that money be better spent invested in improving our infrastructure, investing in technology, education, and healthcare?
What threats do we actually face that require the military we're maintaining at the moment? Why do we need to be pursuing the military actions we presently are, and why do we need to be the world's police presence?
I'm intrigued by your idea that we should *increase* the military. Seems completely counter-intuitive to me. Please explain yourself.
We? Speak for yourself. I do want federally controlled healthcare. I want private sector medical insurance to be illegal, and medical care to be universal just as education is universal, only more so. I am delighted to see we've taken a few baby steps in that direction. A society that doesn't put the health and education of its citizens first is, in my opinion, wrongheaded - and I'm trying to be polite about it.
NASA historically has produced much technological goodness for us; Not to mention hope and wonder. And there are all those resources out there waiting to be tapped. I'd just as soon keep NASA while the private sector gets wound up.
Alaska... that's foolish. The state is really, really loaded with natural resources. Metals; petroleum; timber; etc. You're literally giving away a gold mine. Not good.
The rest, yeah, not bad. I like the budget thing. Add to it, if the fed doesn't balance, then all the elected officials automatically lose their jobs. :)
That's great for Massachusetts. My state also has a balanced budget (Montana.) But the rest of the country... not so much. Many states (California, anyone?) are spending into the future, and the feds are definitely spending into the future, and on hugely wasteful and harmful operations (like two useless wars, being the police for much of the world, the drug war (also a state problem), etc., etc.) If things are balanced, then you need NO new taxes. If you're cutting costs, likewise, only you should be reducing taxes.
As for Glen Beck, no. Really, really bad guess. :) Not right wing, not left, not middle. An intent to hold rational positions on most matters. Which puts me all over the spectrum. I'm for a society that makes medical care as important a priority as education, against making war outside our borders, strongly conservative in the constitutional sense, but strongly biased against tolerance of religion, superstition, spin and deception because they are tools that unfairly leverage the left side of the Gaussian - intellectual snake oil. I don't think people should be free to lie or make unsubstantiated claims; I don't think people should be forced to speak; I think the deceived have been injured in the most practical sense of the term.
This doesn't mean that the tax doesn't burden the business; eventually, the total spent for the product begins to edge into the "unreasonable" zone for the consumer, and they stop buying. You can't pass along a cost or a tax if the consumer won't pay it. And lets face it -- for most people, "must have" means food, medical needs, utilities, fuel/transport, basic clothing, and (for this group) Internet.
Amazon and other Internet retailers have an edge (the tax and storefront things) but they also have a serious downside - your local folks can hand you the item. Amazon and crew have to ship it to you, generally speaking, and that's a counter-force working against pervasive "I want it now" mentality and the in-your-face shipping costs.
Take away the tax benefits, and you'll see some Internet businesses fold, as their gains from advantages drop beneath their losses from disadvantages on the overall ledger. The smaller, niche businesses will go first, as they aren't doing enough volume to obtain deep discounts. I can think of quite a few I patronize that I would *really* hate to see go.
The real problem here is the political concept of "we can always spend more for a 'good' idea." No. They can't. There is a limit, and when you're doing spending into the future based on credit, along with very high tax rates, as most states and the federal government are, you're well past that limit.
Get people on board with a "spend LESS" platform, and elect them. Throw out the incumbents, they think *wrong*.
Instead of allowing them to constantly add new programs and new spending, how about electing some folks on the platform to reduce spending until you have a balanced budget (which means you won't need any new taxes), and then reduce spending, which means you'll need less taxes.
Make some noise. At the state level, you might even get something done.
One of the biggest problems our government has is an inability to revisit past decisions; bad law, bad spending, obsolete law, obsolete spending. All they ever do is add; that's a key reason why taxes go up, freedoms narrow, and law-books only get heavier.
Are you familiar with the website "Google"? It's really kind of neat. For instance, watch this:
Google: "Money confiscated"
Very first result:
Isn't that awesome the way that works? You just type in the thing you want a reference for, and there it is. Tech is cool, eh? Also, I assure you that the other matters I referred to... references are just as easily located.
So... if you really wanted those answers, they're right there to be found. Or, you could have asked politely (or even tersely, such as "Cite?") Instead, you wasted time calling me names. Interesting approach. Not likely to get you want you ask for in the general case, just so you know. I just did it to show what an idiot you are, considering that you took the time to call me unjustified names.
Next time think first, type second. Like "Why would he write that..." google... "oh." Or just ask politely. Then you won't have your butt handed to you so neatly packaged.
I guess you didn't get the memo. Warrants are passe, especially within a few hundred miles of the nation's border; you can be arrested (anywhere in the country) for carrying large amounts of money (and they'll confiscate it, and you won't get it back); and of course, once convicted of anything at all, you're a permanent member of the new underclass. Not to mention that "innocence" is highly correlated with how much the defendant spends on lawyers.
[looks at slashdot user ID] Yeah, you're new here.
At least with AGW, it is -- because there is no valid [hypothesis, to test, to theory] path, inasmuch as no AGW hypothesis can be described as any more than a projection into the future. Which is why it cannot be said that there is a valid AGW theory.
You can only establish a theory on the back of careful testing, falsification, etc. When the proposed result of a theory cannot be shown... there can be no theory.
It's also worth mentioning that the models for even parts of the concept are very poor performers. For instance, models that predict behavior at the equator inevitably fail to do so elsewhere.
And it certainly doesn't help to have all this shrill yelling about how we're surely going to "drown", or "die", etc.
Statistics, however, can be used to project trends almost any way one likes. This is the source of the scaled imprecation: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
That's just pompous bullshit. Knuth, et al, didn't write any e-commerce apps, now did they? Did they do any definitive treatments on 3d texturing? No? How about image warping? No??? Did I need to study these fine CS giants to write my first compiler? No, I did not. My first assembler? No. Linker? No. Did I need to study them to figure out high performance dithering? No.
Knuth and his ivory tower buddies no doubt contributed plenty, but not everything out there depends on a knowledge of what they did. Some things - like the limits of compression, for instance - are pretty damned obvious without going in for a semester of noise theory, or reading Shannon until your eyelids lock open. Aliasing is a blatantly obvious effect that we've seen examples of all the time for decades thanks to video; a month of theory, or a lecture about it, is 100% overkill if you simply think the matter through. Not that I knock anyone for thinking it through *first*, or being rigorous about it, but damn, man, if you can't work out the consequences of sampling a changing waveform too slowly, or not making the waveform change slowly enough so that your sampling becomes fast enough, you're kind of a dumbass anyway.
Programming is such a deep field, and such a broad one, that to say that a programmer can't be "good" because they don't know Knuth (or Shannon, or Babbage, or Lovelace, or electronics, or assembly language, or queuing theory, etc.) is just purest nonsense. There's lots of room for work in areas that don't need a bit of any of that.
Further, there are areas - like AI - where it hasn't been demonstrated that *anyone* has got anything right, so that even though lots of time has been spent by very smart people, we still don't even know for sure what we should be looking at and what is pure bunk. A new outlook, untainted by any previous work, might be just the ticket. I'm suddenly reminded of Minsky's utter failure to correctly assess neural nets. Some "Giant" he turned out to be - smart as hell, and just as wrong. And he did a huge amount of harm with that.
I've got the background that seems to be so highly recommended here, and I have to tell you, in coding just about every day since the late 1960s, I very rarely deal with issues where those giants, as it were, are even slightly relevant. The vast majority of programming isn't about that kind of coding, frankly, and if it was, we wouldn't have many interesting programs to play with.
Certificates don't ensure you're talking to anyone in particular, other than someone who has managed to get their hands on the certificate, which, based on prevalance of rooting and etc., could be quite a range of people.
Certs reliably encrypt traffic between the two endpoints. That's the entire usefulness to the two endusers.
HOWEVER: An entire deceptive financial ecosystem was created when the browser manufacturers put those "scare the heck out of the user" dialogs in there; that meant that ecommerce types *HAD* to get certs that would not raise those warnings -- meaning, buying a bag of bits from someone else, a bag you could have made yourself for free, for all the good it would do you, instead purchased for $50 (or many more) dollars.
It's all based upon one key falsehood: The idea that a cert "assures" you that you're talking to someone in particular. As opposed to the guy who physically walked up to the machine while root was logged in, lifted the cert, and walked away. As opposed to the guy who rooted Apache or Postgres or etc., went in, lifted the cert AND the access to the DNS server, and disconnected. As opposed to the guy who has rooted the DNS elsewhere and has your cert.
It's 100% pure bunk. Certs encrypt. Probably not from the government, but from your average hacker, yeah, they generally succeed in making traffic look like a mess of indecipherable bitrot. That's all the actual service they're good for. That, and keeping browser warnings from ruining your attempt to do e-commerce. Just remember: The latter problem was *caused* by the browser writers in collusion with people like Verisign. The problem didn't exist until they put their heads together.
Reminds me very much of the government's war on drugs. The violence, the killings, the black market... 99.9999% a consequence of stupid, stupid rules, every one of which the government is entirely responsible for. Here, every scared consumer was created by the certificate "authorities" in conjunction with the browser makers. They created a fear of a non-issue so strong that everyone was forced to get in line and pretend (or be bewildered into thinking) that the threat was resolved with the purchased certificate, when that is utter bunkum from start to finish.
(Tries to imagine hot chick squatting on a domain)
[fails, shrugs] I guess there really is a site for every kind of fetish.
It doesn't matter how much power it uses if it won't play Mechassault.
If I had the xbox folks to talk to, my line would be "It's the GAMES, stupid!"
When they forewent XBox compatibility, they lost me, really. That whole emulation thing... they didn't follow through. So they can keep their low power box. I'll just keep on keeping on with my old XBox (and the several spares I now have.) I did buy a 360 (because they were promising it would run the old games), but since it in FACT won't play my favorite game, the urge to upgrade it... zero.
When I pay $50 for a game, I expect that to count for something. I'm as annoyed about this as I would be if my bluray player wouldn't play DVDs.
When Sony put the PS2 compatibility in the PS3, they had me, and I bit. When they took it out later, I started collecting a few extras of the older machine cheaply. Same deal. Either respect my investment in software, or piss the hell up a rope. When I spend my money in the used machine market, it does Sony, Microsoft, etc., no good at all. If they want me to purchase a new machine... low power isn't going to do it.
Software, software, software, software. Compatibility. Software! COMPATIBILITY!
It is my opinion that armed revolt would destroy the country. I don't consider it a viable option (nor do I think that the average citizen has any idea what is going on, or cares... hence, there will be no revolt, regardless of what anyone thinks.) That does not mean that I shouldn't speak my mind -- I've put forty years into studying this (yeah, I'm old) and I'm pretty sure of most of my positions. I can defend them against educated, critical attacks. The government, however, cannot defend many of its positions without using coercion and violating the restrictions set upon by its authorizing document; likewise, its officials cannot do the things they do without violating their oaths.
The inversion of the commerce clause; the rubber stamping of ex post facto laws; the direct and profound violation of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th amendments; the usurpation of article three power by the judiciary; these things cannot be hidden successfully under a claim of "it's a living document", etc. "Shall not infringe" still means what it meant when it was written; "shall make no law" still means the same thing; "among the several states" still doesn't mean "within the several states"; "ex post facto" still means what it did in 1798 when Justice Chase laid it out... those who would make excuses for the violations of these specifics are a poison to the country's body as far as I'm concerned.
Same as fusion: Ten years from now, for all possible values of "now."