The six 'days' are very close to the actual order of events, and if you had to explain the creation of the galaxy and all things in it to pre-Roman humans would you really be happy trying to explain the concept of astromechanics, biochemistry and evolution? Nah, much easier to explain it in terms of days. People understand those.
No. This entire presumption is incorrect. We know that people have not changed significantly in the last few thousand years in terms of mental capacity. Therefore, for any intelligent adult primitive and any intelligent modern adult physicist, the starting line is the same at birth, the ground to be covered is just as level, and the runners have equal capacities to run. If the concept needed to be explained, it would be no more difficult for God/Aliens/Whomever to impart that knowledge to an ancient than it is to educate a physicist today. There is no scientific basis for presuming that peoples of those days could not have been educated to the literal truth, if some entity was around who knew it, and particularly if said entity was omnipotent. Ergo, the odds hugely favor the idea that no such entity was around, and the stories are purest malarky.
If it's really as bad as you say there's no point in protesting this ID stuff, get the hell out of there while you still can, ID or no ID.
While I appreciate your sentiment - the fact that you recognize how bad all this is - it is still my opinion that the US constitution remains the most advanced and most inherently correct description of how a government should be formed and maintained. I can see how it could be better, for instance the 13th amendment is completely wrong-headed, property ownership needs much better thought-out protection and there are other warts I could cite, but overall, the whole is still very good. Inasmuch as our government is supposed to obey it, we, as citizens, have every reason to hold the document up to the government and demand compliance; that's not true anywhere else (I can't reasonably tell the government and citizens of Spain, for instance, that the Spanish government owes any compliance to the US constitution.)
We've just had a little bit of a shakeup - just a little one - in the switch from Republican majority to Democratic majority. This is almost a distinction without a difference with regard to constitutional issues, but still, it is a change and this is a reasonable opportunity to speak up. The ballot box doesn't work; the jury box has been emasculated by the judiciary and doesn't work; the soap box is the one I'm on now... and the next box, perilously close to being used IMHO, is the ammo box. Is it worth it? I think it is.
If we could have stayed with what the constitution describes, we would have been the most advanced, respected, and imitated country in the world, and would be enjoying the benefits of such advancement at present. I truly believe that. Instead, we're reviled worldwide, and our internal systems are turned more against our own citizens than against the problems they face. We're now, IMHO, the poster child for how not to allow a government to get out of hand. "Regret" doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about that.
Perhaps it's time you upgraded the 486 to something a little more reasonable with today's computing needs?
It is a 1.42 GHz PPC, 512k L2 cache, with a gig of ram and a Radeon 9200 display engine. Very roughly equivalent to a 1.5 GHz Pentium of some flavor. For most things, it zips right along. So perhaps you ought to upgrade your presumptuousness with the optional rational consideration module. I hear the price has come down; you only have to pay 2% of your ego to get the improvement installed.
I just flipped through digg, and there's no indication whatsoever of what you were talking about in it.
I see the CPU tasking rise inside digg posts with comments. The more comments there are above, say, two hundred, the longer the CPU stays pegged. A 600+ comment story will peg the CPU for as much as 45 seconds beyond the time that the download of the page completes. Compared to slashdot, where pages are complete and the CPU use falls back to the usual 4% or so as soon as the download of the page ends. This of course assumes there is no huge banner displayed on the page with animation, in which case the CPU utilization goes up and stays up until you scroll past the animation.
Java, PDF, and Flash support depend on the environment just as much as your browser does..
Look, I understand how things work perfectly well. I've designed computers, written compilers and one of the earliest hypertext browsers (ApAssist on the Amiga), designed graphics boards and so forth. I'm an engineer, and a decent one. The fact is that animation requires something to flip the data around. This takes some attention by either the CPU (in my case, that is what is being used) or the GPU. If the engine (flash, Java, etc) isn't particularly efficient about it (and clearly, it isn't) that can result in a lot of cycles being burned. And again, in my case, this is happening. It's not an illusion, it's a fact. This fact is contrasted by the other fact that once static HTML representing text or still images is loaded, it doesn't take any horsepower for it to sit there on anyone's monitor. With regard to digg, the difference between my machine having to work out all the comment structuring (such as it is) and so forth based on which comments are collapsed by dig-downs or blocked out or whatever it is doing is quite a different approach than just handing me basic HTML that says "render the page thusly." That could be the result of any of a number of design decisions, find its main villain in the browser, the Java implementation, or something going on in the OS, but regardless, the fact remains - Slash is efficient, and digg is not.
See my other reply in this thread if you're actually interested in the situation, I mean as opposed to just throwing out 100% incorrect assumptions to see yourself type.
They included a bit of bloatware with your OS called the System Idle Process.
No, they didn't. My system is a Mac. The CPU is pretty much all mine except early in the morning, when maintenance tasks are scheduled.
The marginal cost of the time you have spent worrying about this is already more than the marginal cost of extra eye candy, which is zero because your computer *will* burn those cycles or consume that RAM whether you want it to or not.
No, you're quite wrong on both issues. My daily driver, a mac (a PPC mini about a year old) idles at low power until it is called upon to do something other than just sit there; and with regard to displaying graphics, animations take a significant portion of the CPU. Digg's pages also do, exactly as I described; slashdot's don't. I'm just reporting the facts here — there's no point arguing with them.
Faster machines and perhaps other Java implementations might make lighter work of Digg and animations both. However, that doesn't change my situation, which is that I experience a significant CPU tasking for some things that websites do, including flash animations, larger GIF animations (and I have broad experience here; our software makes them) and definitely digg and similarly Java-ized sites.
Oh no, IE/Firefox chews up 40MB as soon as you turn it on...
RAM use isn't a concern; I have plenty. I didn't mention it anyway - it is CPU power, which is a limited resource, that is the issue here.
Oh, not to worry. Slavery is still alive and well. Behold the 13th amendment (emphasis mine):
1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Keeping in mind you can now be "duly convicted" for such "crimes" as smoking a plant, holding up a protest sign at a public rally or funeral, owning arms unconditionally guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, spanking your child, getting oral sex from your spouse, marrying in a non-Christian tradition (polygamy or polyandry, for instance)... slavery is a right both the feds and the states have kept alive and well. Your license plate was probably made by slaves. You could be a slave real soon if you slip up. They are waiting for you. You can never have too many license plates; and there is no shortage of rocks to break, either.
Seems the States do have some power as long as 2/3 to 3/4 agree.
That was only true as long as the federal government was obeying the constitution. Those times are gone. First they started "interpreting" the constitution (to say "creatively" is to understate the case most dramatically), then they proceeded to outright ignore it. Today, there is only one item remaining out of the bill of rights that has not been outright sundered, and that is amendment 3; they've not yet forced anyone to quarter soldiers. I presume this is because they already took enough of our money to build the soldiers their own quarters.
Of course at that point they no longer need evidence to arrest you anyway.
Oh, no. You've not been paying attention to out little screw-ups. Allow me to enlighten you. Within the last year, legislation has been passed that allows them to pick you up and hold you incommunicado without warrant or evidence. We're already there. Complete suspension of habeas corpus at the sole discretion of the executive; no access to an attorney, communications, no public notice of incarceration, much less location of incarceration, no warrant, no charges, no hearing, no time limit, no nothing. The key to this little act of joy is the ability to hold someone indefinitely with no conditions based upon a nebulous, possibly entirely imaginary future - unspecified as to date or time - determination of status as an "alien combatant."
Not that there aren't other mechanisms being put into place; there are people who are sick who are being held without access to so much as a television; there are prisoners coming out of the clink who go straight to indefinite "civil" detention; there are people dragged off for holding up signs at presidential speeches. So there are lots of sub-rosa and sneaky little methods for them to pick you up and hold you. None of them are actually legitimate in the sense that they are constitutionally valid; but again, our government no longer pays any serious attention to that particular issue, unless it is to figure out how to rationalize away another area of it.
wouldn't it make more sense to try and get data protection laws in place to prevent "them" from sharing information with each other that could be used to track you?
Yes, and no. It'd make sense if we could trust them. But we can't. They've proven it over and over. There are laws in place to do various things; our government ignores them, and the constitutional prohibitions that underlie them. Example: The social security number was an account number. It was expressly forbidden and explicitly stated that it could not be used as a form of ID or citizen tracking. But that's exactly what they used it for. Further, the money into social security was to be invested for the benefit of the taxpayer. And? No... right into the general fund, and spent. Another example: The requirement to get a warrant to tap your communications. First, they came up with FISA; the nonsense there was "we'll tap, but it'll be ok if we ask for a warrent within 48 hours... and if hey say no, we'll just "forget" what we heard - tee hee!" Then that wasn't enough, and they began to tap without even bothering with FISA. These easily brought to mind examples demonstrate that the government does not respect the law; therefore: we cannot trust the government based on laws designed to constrain its actions. Anyone who is paying even a minimum amount of honest attention knows this. This leads to RealID: There is no reason to assume - none at all - that this information will be used in the manner they say it will; and there is no reason to assume that they have our best interests in mind.
E.g. assuming "they" share data freely would mean that your insurance company could look up what you bought with your credit card and determine the quality of your nutrition that way. Most of those scenarios seem to have less to do with ID and more with collaboration and the willingness to track you.
Yes, these problems are interrelated. However, one must precede the other; if you don't know what I'm buying, or when I'm buying it, then there is zero opportunity for even the temptation to use that information against me - you don't have that info in the first place. We know that information collections are misused. Insurance companies are now using poor credit ratings to bump up insurance rates. In other words, you fail to pay your credit card, and your car insurance rate rises. We know that correlation is not causation; unless you're
One of the issues that concerns me is what essentially amounts to hijacking of my processing resources. One example is animated ads. It takes CPU power to continually flip a large ad's frames; that's *my* CPU power. So I don't let flash or animated GIFs run unless I make an exception. Same thing applies, for instance, to the difference between slashdot and digg. Slashdot provides a static page. I can load it, and the fact that it is loaded costs me nothing in particular. If I flip away from the browser, it doesn't chew CPU time. But if I load a digg page, my CPU is pegged for a while, especially with large pages, because digg is bloated, slow-as-hell pigware that uses *my* CPU to display and organize its content. Guess how much time I spend there.:)
As I generally have other things going in the background, I don't take kindly to profligate use of my resources; animations, pigware, etc. I keep my eyes open, and I tend to spend time on places that more resemble slashdot than digg in this regard. I *will* bite if the site offers something that overcomes my urge to keep my cycles for myself, but that is a conscious value judgement, not an accident.
Generally speaking, there's another advantage for sites that produce HTML and CGI forms, and do not depend upon the user's computing environment, and that is broad compatibility. If you stick to the basics, then the broadest set of browsers will function with your "stuff." No Java, no PDF, no flash... just the basics. You can make beautiful, functional websites (assuming you've the art skills) with the basics. I see no need for more; the value is in the content, and it isn't like you can't make a good presentation. The first thing I think when I run into a morass of Java, etc., is "incompetent."
That's interesting because I live in a country where ID is mandatory and yet I rarely have to show it
You're in danger of losing your geek card here. RFID means you don't have to show the card; it means that it can be read if you're within a few meters without you having to take it out of your wallet. Very... convenient. Old tech ID in another country has no relevance to the RealID program getting under way here; RealID mandates biometric identification details (retina scan, something along those lines) as well as photo and statistical data (height, age, etc.), and most importantly "undisclosed additional technologies." With RFID, if I am standing at a checkout or a toll booth, and you approach, everything on your RealID card will pop up on my display I need to verify you, including the biometric data, arrest history, and anything else they deem interesting (perhaps the prescriptions you take, or your tendency to stutter. Your location and activity can then (still automatically) be passed along to a larger network for use in tracking, privacy invasion, feedforward to entities like insurance providers, banks, various police agencies, and so forth. No one need lift a finger. You just buy your booze or copy of playboy (you filthy bastard!) and go on your way. Later, when they make a law against playboy, they'll just come and get your ass. They already have numerous "punish previous legal behavior with new law" programs running, as well as numerous "add to your sentence after conviction" programs, both the very definition of ex post facto law, which are forbidden by the constitution. Of course, they're not paying any attention to the constitution any longer; another reason to compound our worries.
In the US - traditionally - we have held that our privacy is something we hold dear. This program can erode privacy significantly; that's the general basis for resisting it. But there are others. I don't want my insurance agency to be deciding to change my insurance rates if they find that I am out in the woods from time to time (I collect rocks.) They may decide I am in the same group with hunters or dirt bikers and so pose a higher risk, when in fact, I don't. This is the kind of thing where information about you can be used against you; and like "no-fly" lists, once someone has made a decision that you are an undesirable, they are not generally going to turn around and reverse that decision without a lot of work on your part; work that would be unnecessary if they had simply kept their nose out of your business.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but you are unable to understand the problem; that makes continued conversation meaningless. I wish you were right, and only criminals had to worry. But you're not right. You're just blind.
You know what bothers me the most? Not that you asked the question, but that you asked it as if you really thought it was a reasonable one. I am not often actually stunned by ignorance, but in this case, I admit it. I am floored.
All those things were possible in my lifetime. All of them. I've been into Canada without ID; for Expo 67 (the world's fair), specifically, so that was 1967. I've been into and back out of Mexico without ID. I've been in and out of the Bahamas without ID. I've been on many aircraft without ID, both as passenger and as pilot. I've never had to show ID at a school, and I have been to many of them, and I also have three grown children, all of whom are college graduates, which adds quite a few more schools to the list. I've never had to show ID at a courthouse, and the last time I was in one was last Thursday.
And you are just as happy as a pig in shit with the idea of having to show ID in all those places. Amazing.
It is sad when we can anticipate benchmarking the termination of our freedoms with a simple, and very recent, piece of pop culture, isn't it?
I don't raise rabbits, but I do live in Montana. Montana is one of the states that is resisting RealID. I'm rather proud of my fellow Montanans, in this case. I'm sorry they folded on the speed limit issue (very, very sorry - I own some moderately high performance vehicles) and I expect they'll cave when similar pressures are applied; we literally don't have the population to pay for interstates here, but at least for the moment, they're doing the right thing.
With so much data it can only be useful as statistics.
You're quite wrong; there is no technical problem with managing this information, or with keeping it updated. Just a matter of enough hardware, and we're not talking unreasonable amounts; there are only 300 million citizens plus visitors, call it half a gig of data-points. For location, all they need is latitude and longitude, and that can be abstracted against a map when they decide to. So two 32-bit numbers (8 bytes), and they know where you to a precision of 4 thousand million in a space about 3000 miles wide and less than that high and way less than that deep if you add altitude. In other words, they would know exactly. This would take about 4 gigs of memory to track. That's in a perfectly efficient design. Call it six gigs if you want altitude information when available.
So let's say a machine with 16 gigs of ram (which you could actually buy from apple, for instance, I mean, this is strictly off the shelf stuff in terms of requirements) and enough horsepower to update the whole dataset pretty quickly. A modern CPU is limited in access to memory to about 800 million updates a second by the bus speed without getting all freaky, so it is reasonable that a DMA device could update everyone's position twice a second if the ram didn't have to do anything else. If we back off to once a second, we end up with half the RAM bandwidth available to do things like answer queries about citizens. That's the math; one Mac Pro could do this with the appropriate data feed and a DMA card any competent engineer could kick out in a few weeks. And with the other 12 or 10 gigs of ram and 1/2 the CPU bandwidth, we can draw a map, get a satellite image, and locate your sorry, over-confident butt in 0 time; one memory access and the abstraction from those floats into latitude and longitude, pop up a map, and there you are.
So much for too much data to handle, eh?
Given that they know where everyone has made last purchase, passed last tollbooth, paid last bill, bought last bag of Fritos, climbed onto an aircraft or other transport, made last cell phone call, your privacy is gone. Your ability to travel is 100% compromise-able at any time, based on decisions made by those same people who think the Internet is a "series of tubes" and that the constitution is "just a piece of paper" and that oral sex is wrong and that sex toys are wrong and free speech is outmoded and owning guns should be illegal. What you don't understand is that even if you trust the people in power to do *exactly* what you would have them do, in four years, it's a whole new ballgame, fella, and you may not like the new rules. But once this is in place, it's too late to opt out. You're playing. The feds never give back power they accumulate. Never.
IMHO the government doesnt give a shit about you.
I completely agree. And that, I'm afraid, is the problem. Not the solution.
First you model the transmissivity of the medium. As best you can; the better you do it, the better things work. You locate the original sound emission, again as best you can, and the better you do it, the better things work. Then you look at the delta-times and delta-vectors of the echos and place surfaces where those imply them. You do this with every sound you can, and the more echos coincide, the harder, or at least, more refelctive, a surface you've found. So layers of significantly different temperature water will be detectable (and also filterable, because geometrically speaking, they're pretty regular.) Ships, the surface, the bottom (and the bottom texture - hard or soft), fish, algae rafts, subs, mines... everything pretty much. Plus, the more stuff you find, the better your model of reflections gets, so it's a cumulative 3D picture generator. You need tons of horsepower at several stages; acquisition, modeling, database, object classification and tagging, graphics output.
Because there is no system in place that can track everyone; it would take millions of cameras on the road to even come close, and they'd still only be close, because you can always walk. Once RealID is fully implemented, every time you pass an RFID station, which means, every time you buy something or interact with a bank or use public transit or anywhere else they're interested in what you do, they'll get an automatic - no work required - database update that tells them right where you are. You won't have to show your papers, you won't have to be asked any question, you won't need to have a powered up cellphone or "show your papers", they'll be read automatically and with zero fanfare.
b) How does a national ID help them track you
RFID, pal. Read up on it. And it's early days yet; don't think that technology is anywhere near its potential; it isn't.
Biometrics are required already; if you don't match the card, you're arrest-able. If you use someone else's card, you're arrest-able. They'll know where you are 100% of the time. Do you want that? Are you comfortable with that? You want to see what it feels like to be on a no-fly or no-drive or no-bus list? Really?
So you're telling us that this ONLY happens in the US?
No. I didn't say that, imply it, or bring up other countries at all. Strawman.
Are you sure you want to do a "the US is evil" rant before looking in your own backyard?
The US is my country. It is my own backyard. Strawman.
Besides in case it slipped your mind, two words. Selective Service.
Selective service. You bring this up, why? Are you trying to point out that the issue of having your name in a database somewhere already exists in various forms and degrees? I know; I didn't say otherwise. However, this is a different problem. Signing up for selective service - or not - did not restrict your ability to travel freely. This will do that, and where restrictions already exist, it will make them worse.
If you meant something else, by all means, enlighten me. I'm paying attention.
No, that is entirely wrong. That wasn't the feds; that was one group of states against another. This would be the states - all of them - against the feds. Recall the citizens to the guard; the feds wouldn't even *have* an army. Trust me, a real revolt would work. The civil war was not a revolt; it was an almost equal polarizing of the states, which is something else entirely.
it's EOL or EOSL, I don't remember which becuase I pay very little attention to Windoze server issues.
Nah. It's SOL.
I love Microsoft. First Vista, now this. They're making Sony look skilled at navigating the shoals of corporate error. Of course, it is important to remember who really fucked up: Congress, with this whole idiotic idea.
You carry your "papers" with you every day in one form or another.
Yes. And this is a step beyond those, sometimes several steps beyond. Are you OK with that? Are you OK with the fact that the government decides where and when you can go, if you drive, if someone else drives? It used to be that a transportation ticket for any destination within the USA had the following information: Where you got on (sometimes), and where you're supposed to get off. In the case of the NY subway, an ID-less token got you on, and you got off when and where you pleased. You could ride all day. And I often did. I'm old enough I've had plane and train tickets w/o personal identity information; got on in NYC, getting off in Washington. Nothing else. Could have handed it to my girlfriend, it would have been perfectly valid. Didn't used to be the government's business where you were, who you were, or where you were going except in the case where your skills were a safety issue, or in other words, when you drive. In that case, the state has a compelling interest in your competence, and that is what a driver's license is supposed to attest to, not what your real name is or anything else - just that you can drive; the fact that it identifies you is peripheral to its purpose, not the other way around. These days, that's no longer true, but I submit that it is not a good thing at all.
In short, I agree, you're right in the technical sense, they are asking for more and more papers. I firmly believe that's 100% the wrong way to go, and that whatever good you might get out of it, it'll never make up for the enormous bad that it brings. I am not a criminal; I absolutely resent being treated like one. If someone is determined to be a criminal, hang a fucking GPS/RFID/venomous bracelet 'round their ankle if you must let them wander in public, otherwise incarcerate them or exterminate them, but do not bring the presumption of guilt onto the head of every warm body in the country.
I hate this whole "mommy" government thing, top to bottom. We don't need it, there are better ways to go, and getting it is going to hurt us a lot, count on it.
Hmm. Revolution: Maybe states ought to make a law that all fuel/road/highway taxes stay in-state, and cannot be "fed" to the feds; then they can build their own highways. Of course, it wouldn't work here in Montana; too much land, not enough taxpayers. Same thing for edumactionisming; figure out the portion of the federal taxes that go to education, and take them before the fed does, and indemnify the taxpayer - by force against the feds if need be - from paying the fed, then handle your own education costs. Well populated states could make a hell of a splash that way. Someone definitely needs to stick a size 12 foot up the feds ass. They're totally out of hand, using bribery as a tool of coercion on their own sub-regions. Disgusting.
Troll? Fucking troll? For crying out loud, mods, fix this - that is anything but a troll comment! It is topical, relevant, true and thought provoking./P.
Slashdot Mirror
All faith is blind. If it were not, it would not be faith.
No. This entire presumption is incorrect. We know that people have not changed significantly in the last few thousand years in terms of mental capacity. Therefore, for any intelligent adult primitive and any intelligent modern adult physicist, the starting line is the same at birth, the ground to be covered is just as level, and the runners have equal capacities to run. If the concept needed to be explained, it would be no more difficult for God/Aliens/Whomever to impart that knowledge to an ancient than it is to educate a physicist today. There is no scientific basis for presuming that peoples of those days could not have been educated to the literal truth, if some entity was around who knew it, and particularly if said entity was omnipotent. Ergo, the odds hugely favor the idea that no such entity was around, and the stories are purest malarky.
While I appreciate your sentiment - the fact that you recognize how bad all this is - it is still my opinion that the US constitution remains the most advanced and most inherently correct description of how a government should be formed and maintained. I can see how it could be better, for instance the 13th amendment is completely wrong-headed, property ownership needs much better thought-out protection and there are other warts I could cite, but overall, the whole is still very good. Inasmuch as our government is supposed to obey it, we, as citizens, have every reason to hold the document up to the government and demand compliance; that's not true anywhere else (I can't reasonably tell the government and citizens of Spain, for instance, that the Spanish government owes any compliance to the US constitution.)
We've just had a little bit of a shakeup - just a little one - in the switch from Republican majority to Democratic majority. This is almost a distinction without a difference with regard to constitutional issues, but still, it is a change and this is a reasonable opportunity to speak up. The ballot box doesn't work; the jury box has been emasculated by the judiciary and doesn't work; the soap box is the one I'm on now... and the next box, perilously close to being used IMHO, is the ammo box. Is it worth it? I think it is.
If we could have stayed with what the constitution describes, we would have been the most advanced, respected, and imitated country in the world, and would be enjoying the benefits of such advancement at present. I truly believe that. Instead, we're reviled worldwide, and our internal systems are turned more against our own citizens than against the problems they face. We're now, IMHO, the poster child for how not to allow a government to get out of hand. "Regret" doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about that.
It is a 1.42 GHz PPC, 512k L2 cache, with a gig of ram and a Radeon 9200 display engine. Very roughly equivalent to a 1.5 GHz Pentium of some flavor. For most things, it zips right along. So perhaps you ought to upgrade your presumptuousness with the optional rational consideration module. I hear the price has come down; you only have to pay 2% of your ego to get the improvement installed.
I see the CPU tasking rise inside digg posts with comments. The more comments there are above, say, two hundred, the longer the CPU stays pegged. A 600+ comment story will peg the CPU for as much as 45 seconds beyond the time that the download of the page completes. Compared to slashdot, where pages are complete and the CPU use falls back to the usual 4% or so as soon as the download of the page ends. This of course assumes there is no huge banner displayed on the page with animation, in which case the CPU utilization goes up and stays up until you scroll past the animation.
Look, I understand how things work perfectly well. I've designed computers, written compilers and one of the earliest hypertext browsers (ApAssist on the Amiga), designed graphics boards and so forth. I'm an engineer, and a decent one. The fact is that animation requires something to flip the data around. This takes some attention by either the CPU (in my case, that is what is being used) or the GPU. If the engine (flash, Java, etc) isn't particularly efficient about it (and clearly, it isn't) that can result in a lot of cycles being burned. And again, in my case, this is happening. It's not an illusion, it's a fact. This fact is contrasted by the other fact that once static HTML representing text or still images is loaded, it doesn't take any horsepower for it to sit there on anyone's monitor. With regard to digg, the difference between my machine having to work out all the comment structuring (such as it is) and so forth based on which comments are collapsed by dig-downs or blocked out or whatever it is doing is quite a different approach than just handing me basic HTML that says "render the page thusly." That could be the result of any of a number of design decisions, find its main villain in the browser, the Java implementation, or something going on in the OS, but regardless, the fact remains - Slash is efficient, and digg is not.
See my other reply in this thread if you're actually interested in the situation, I mean as opposed to just throwing out 100% incorrect assumptions to see yourself type.
No, they didn't. My system is a Mac. The CPU is pretty much all mine except early in the morning, when maintenance tasks are scheduled.
No, you're quite wrong on both issues. My daily driver, a mac (a PPC mini about a year old) idles at low power until it is called upon to do something other than just sit there; and with regard to displaying graphics, animations take a significant portion of the CPU. Digg's pages also do, exactly as I described; slashdot's don't. I'm just reporting the facts here — there's no point arguing with them.
Faster machines and perhaps other Java implementations might make lighter work of Digg and animations both. However, that doesn't change my situation, which is that I experience a significant CPU tasking for some things that websites do, including flash animations, larger GIF animations (and I have broad experience here; our software makes them) and definitely digg and similarly Java-ized sites.
RAM use isn't a concern; I have plenty. I didn't mention it anyway - it is CPU power, which is a limited resource, that is the issue here.
Oh, not to worry. Slavery is still alive and well. Behold the 13th amendment (emphasis mine):
Keeping in mind you can now be "duly convicted" for such "crimes" as smoking a plant, holding up a protest sign at a public rally or funeral, owning arms unconditionally guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, spanking your child, getting oral sex from your spouse, marrying in a non-Christian tradition (polygamy or polyandry, for instance)... slavery is a right both the feds and the states have kept alive and well. Your license plate was probably made by slaves. You could be a slave real soon if you slip up. They are waiting for you. You can never have too many license plates; and there is no shortage of rocks to break, either.
That was only true as long as the federal government was obeying the constitution. Those times are gone. First they started "interpreting" the constitution (to say "creatively" is to understate the case most dramatically), then they proceeded to outright ignore it. Today, there is only one item remaining out of the bill of rights that has not been outright sundered, and that is amendment 3; they've not yet forced anyone to quarter soldiers. I presume this is because they already took enough of our money to build the soldiers their own quarters.
Oh, no. You've not been paying attention to out little screw-ups. Allow me to enlighten you. Within the last year, legislation has been passed that allows them to pick you up and hold you incommunicado without warrant or evidence. We're already there. Complete suspension of habeas corpus at the sole discretion of the executive; no access to an attorney, communications, no public notice of incarceration, much less location of incarceration, no warrant, no charges, no hearing, no time limit, no nothing. The key to this little act of joy is the ability to hold someone indefinitely with no conditions based upon a nebulous, possibly entirely imaginary future - unspecified as to date or time - determination of status as an "alien combatant."
Not that there aren't other mechanisms being put into place; there are people who are sick who are being held without access to so much as a television; there are prisoners coming out of the clink who go straight to indefinite "civil" detention; there are people dragged off for holding up signs at presidential speeches. So there are lots of sub-rosa and sneaky little methods for them to pick you up and hold you. None of them are actually legitimate in the sense that they are constitutionally valid; but again, our government no longer pays any serious attention to that particular issue, unless it is to figure out how to rationalize away another area of it.
Yes, and no. It'd make sense if we could trust them. But we can't. They've proven it over and over. There are laws in place to do various things; our government ignores them, and the constitutional prohibitions that underlie them. Example: The social security number was an account number. It was expressly forbidden and explicitly stated that it could not be used as a form of ID or citizen tracking. But that's exactly what they used it for. Further, the money into social security was to be invested for the benefit of the taxpayer. And? No... right into the general fund, and spent. Another example: The requirement to get a warrant to tap your communications. First, they came up with FISA; the nonsense there was "we'll tap, but it'll be ok if we ask for a warrent within 48 hours... and if hey say no, we'll just "forget" what we heard - tee hee!" Then that wasn't enough, and they began to tap without even bothering with FISA. These easily brought to mind examples demonstrate that the government does not respect the law; therefore: we cannot trust the government based on laws designed to constrain its actions. Anyone who is paying even a minimum amount of honest attention knows this. This leads to RealID: There is no reason to assume - none at all - that this information will be used in the manner they say it will; and there is no reason to assume that they have our best interests in mind.
Yes, these problems are interrelated. However, one must precede the other; if you don't know what I'm buying, or when I'm buying it, then there is zero opportunity for even the temptation to use that information against me - you don't have that info in the first place. We know that information collections are misused. Insurance companies are now using poor credit ratings to bump up insurance rates. In other words, you fail to pay your credit card, and your car insurance rate rises. We know that correlation is not causation; unless you're
One of the issues that concerns me is what essentially amounts to hijacking of my processing resources. One example is animated ads. It takes CPU power to continually flip a large ad's frames; that's *my* CPU power. So I don't let flash or animated GIFs run unless I make an exception. Same thing applies, for instance, to the difference between slashdot and digg. Slashdot provides a static page. I can load it, and the fact that it is loaded costs me nothing in particular. If I flip away from the browser, it doesn't chew CPU time. But if I load a digg page, my CPU is pegged for a while, especially with large pages, because digg is bloated, slow-as-hell pigware that uses *my* CPU to display and organize its content. Guess how much time I spend there. :)
As I generally have other things going in the background, I don't take kindly to profligate use of my resources; animations, pigware, etc. I keep my eyes open, and I tend to spend time on places that more resemble slashdot than digg in this regard. I *will* bite if the site offers something that overcomes my urge to keep my cycles for myself, but that is a conscious value judgement, not an accident.
Generally speaking, there's another advantage for sites that produce HTML and CGI forms, and do not depend upon the user's computing environment, and that is broad compatibility. If you stick to the basics, then the broadest set of browsers will function with your "stuff." No Java, no PDF, no flash... just the basics. You can make beautiful, functional websites (assuming you've the art skills) with the basics. I see no need for more; the value is in the content, and it isn't like you can't make a good presentation. The first thing I think when I run into a morass of Java, etc., is "incompetent."
But that's just me. :)
You're in danger of losing your geek card here. RFID means you don't have to show the card; it means that it can be read if you're within a few meters without you having to take it out of your wallet. Very... convenient. Old tech ID in another country has no relevance to the RealID program getting under way here; RealID mandates biometric identification details (retina scan, something along those lines) as well as photo and statistical data (height, age, etc.), and most importantly "undisclosed additional technologies." With RFID, if I am standing at a checkout or a toll booth, and you approach, everything on your RealID card will pop up on my display I need to verify you, including the biometric data, arrest history, and anything else they deem interesting (perhaps the prescriptions you take, or your tendency to stutter. Your location and activity can then (still automatically) be passed along to a larger network for use in tracking, privacy invasion, feedforward to entities like insurance providers, banks, various police agencies, and so forth. No one need lift a finger. You just buy your booze or copy of playboy (you filthy bastard!) and go on your way. Later, when they make a law against playboy, they'll just come and get your ass. They already have numerous "punish previous legal behavior with new law" programs running, as well as numerous "add to your sentence after conviction" programs, both the very definition of ex post facto law, which are forbidden by the constitution. Of course, they're not paying any attention to the constitution any longer; another reason to compound our worries.
In the US - traditionally - we have held that our privacy is something we hold dear. This program can erode privacy significantly; that's the general basis for resisting it. But there are others. I don't want my insurance agency to be deciding to change my insurance rates if they find that I am out in the woods from time to time (I collect rocks.) They may decide I am in the same group with hunters or dirt bikers and so pose a higher risk, when in fact, I don't. This is the kind of thing where information about you can be used against you; and like "no-fly" lists, once someone has made a decision that you are an undesirable, they are not generally going to turn around and reverse that decision without a lot of work on your part; work that would be unnecessary if they had simply kept their nose out of your business.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but you are unable to understand the problem; that makes continued conversation meaningless. I wish you were right, and only criminals had to worry. But you're not right. You're just blind.
Well, uh, in an anonymous way, and cowardly as well, I appreciate that. I can't decide if your post was surreal, abstract or meant in fun. Huh. :)
You know what bothers me the most? Not that you asked the question, but that you asked it as if you really thought it was a reasonable one. I am not often actually stunned by ignorance, but in this case, I admit it. I am floored.
All those things were possible in my lifetime. All of them. I've been into Canada without ID; for Expo 67 (the world's fair), specifically, so that was 1967. I've been into and back out of Mexico without ID. I've been in and out of the Bahamas without ID. I've been on many aircraft without ID, both as passenger and as pilot. I've never had to show ID at a school, and I have been to many of them, and I also have three grown children, all of whom are college graduates, which adds quite a few more schools to the list. I've never had to show ID at a courthouse, and the last time I was in one was last Thursday.
And you are just as happy as a pig in shit with the idea of having to show ID in all those places. Amazing.
Simply. Fucking. Amazing.
It is sad when we can anticipate benchmarking the termination of our freedoms with a simple, and very recent, piece of pop culture, isn't it?
I don't raise rabbits, but I do live in Montana. Montana is one of the states that is resisting RealID. I'm rather proud of my fellow Montanans, in this case. I'm sorry they folded on the speed limit issue (very, very sorry - I own some moderately high performance vehicles) and I expect they'll cave when similar pressures are applied; we literally don't have the population to pay for interstates here, but at least for the moment, they're doing the right thing.
You're quite wrong; there is no technical problem with managing this information, or with keeping it updated. Just a matter of enough hardware, and we're not talking unreasonable amounts; there are only 300 million citizens plus visitors, call it half a gig of data-points. For location, all they need is latitude and longitude, and that can be abstracted against a map when they decide to. So two 32-bit numbers (8 bytes), and they know where you to a precision of 4 thousand million in a space about 3000 miles wide and less than that high and way less than that deep if you add altitude. In other words, they would know exactly. This would take about 4 gigs of memory to track. That's in a perfectly efficient design. Call it six gigs if you want altitude information when available.
So let's say a machine with 16 gigs of ram (which you could actually buy from apple, for instance, I mean, this is strictly off the shelf stuff in terms of requirements) and enough horsepower to update the whole dataset pretty quickly. A modern CPU is limited in access to memory to about 800 million updates a second by the bus speed without getting all freaky, so it is reasonable that a DMA device could update everyone's position twice a second if the ram didn't have to do anything else. If we back off to once a second, we end up with half the RAM bandwidth available to do things like answer queries about citizens. That's the math; one Mac Pro could do this with the appropriate data feed and a DMA card any competent engineer could kick out in a few weeks. And with the other 12 or 10 gigs of ram and 1/2 the CPU bandwidth, we can draw a map, get a satellite image, and locate your sorry, over-confident butt in 0 time; one memory access and the abstraction from those floats into latitude and longitude, pop up a map, and there you are.
So much for too much data to handle, eh?
Given that they know where everyone has made last purchase, passed last tollbooth, paid last bill, bought last bag of Fritos, climbed onto an aircraft or other transport, made last cell phone call, your privacy is gone. Your ability to travel is 100% compromise-able at any time, based on decisions made by those same people who think the Internet is a "series of tubes" and that the constitution is "just a piece of paper" and that oral sex is wrong and that sex toys are wrong and free speech is outmoded and owning guns should be illegal. What you don't understand is that even if you trust the people in power to do *exactly* what you would have them do, in four years, it's a whole new ballgame, fella, and you may not like the new rules. But once this is in place, it's too late to opt out. You're playing. The feds never give back power they accumulate. Never.
I completely agree. And that, I'm afraid, is the problem. Not the solution.
Absolutely.
First you model the transmissivity of the medium. As best you can; the better you do it, the better things work. You locate the original sound emission, again as best you can, and the better you do it, the better things work. Then you look at the delta-times and delta-vectors of the echos and place surfaces where those imply them. You do this with every sound you can, and the more echos coincide, the harder, or at least, more refelctive, a surface you've found. So layers of significantly different temperature water will be detectable (and also filterable, because geometrically speaking, they're pretty regular.) Ships, the surface, the bottom (and the bottom texture - hard or soft), fish, algae rafts, subs, mines... everything pretty much. Plus, the more stuff you find, the better your model of reflections gets, so it's a cumulative 3D picture generator. You need tons of horsepower at several stages; acquisition, modeling, database, object classification and tagging, graphics output.
Because there is no system in place that can track everyone; it would take millions of cameras on the road to even come close, and they'd still only be close, because you can always walk. Once RealID is fully implemented, every time you pass an RFID station, which means, every time you buy something or interact with a bank or use public transit or anywhere else they're interested in what you do, they'll get an automatic - no work required - database update that tells them right where you are. You won't have to show your papers, you won't have to be asked any question, you won't need to have a powered up cellphone or "show your papers", they'll be read automatically and with zero fanfare.
RFID, pal. Read up on it. And it's early days yet; don't think that technology is anywhere near its potential; it isn't.
Biometrics are required already; if you don't match the card, you're arrest-able. If you use someone else's card, you're arrest-able. They'll know where you are 100% of the time. Do you want that? Are you comfortable with that? You want to see what it feels like to be on a no-fly or no-drive or no-bus list? Really?
I fully expect the answer to that to be RFID or something more advanced.
Yes, I do.
No, the database and the systems that monitor the database will do that. No need for the store to do anything but collect your ID automatically.
No. I didn't say that, imply it, or bring up other countries at all. Strawman.
The US is my country. It is my own backyard. Strawman.
Selective service. You bring this up, why? Are you trying to point out that the issue of having your name in a database somewhere already exists in various forms and degrees? I know; I didn't say otherwise. However, this is a different problem. Signing up for selective service - or not - did not restrict your ability to travel freely. This will do that, and where restrictions already exist, it will make them worse.
If you meant something else, by all means, enlighten me. I'm paying attention.
No, that is entirely wrong. That wasn't the feds; that was one group of states against another. This would be the states - all of them - against the feds. Recall the citizens to the guard; the feds wouldn't even *have* an army. Trust me, a real revolt would work. The civil war was not a revolt; it was an almost equal polarizing of the states, which is something else entirely.
Nah. It's SOL.
I love Microsoft. First Vista, now this. They're making Sony look skilled at navigating the shoals of corporate error. Of course, it is important to remember who really fucked up: Congress, with this whole idiotic idea.
Yes. And this is a step beyond those, sometimes several steps beyond. Are you OK with that? Are you OK with the fact that the government decides where and when you can go, if you drive, if someone else drives? It used to be that a transportation ticket for any destination within the USA had the following information: Where you got on (sometimes), and where you're supposed to get off. In the case of the NY subway, an ID-less token got you on, and you got off when and where you pleased. You could ride all day. And I often did. I'm old enough I've had plane and train tickets w/o personal identity information; got on in NYC, getting off in Washington. Nothing else. Could have handed it to my girlfriend, it would have been perfectly valid. Didn't used to be the government's business where you were, who you were, or where you were going except in the case where your skills were a safety issue, or in other words, when you drive. In that case, the state has a compelling interest in your competence, and that is what a driver's license is supposed to attest to, not what your real name is or anything else - just that you can drive; the fact that it identifies you is peripheral to its purpose, not the other way around. These days, that's no longer true, but I submit that it is not a good thing at all.
In short, I agree, you're right in the technical sense, they are asking for more and more papers. I firmly believe that's 100% the wrong way to go, and that whatever good you might get out of it, it'll never make up for the enormous bad that it brings. I am not a criminal; I absolutely resent being treated like one. If someone is determined to be a criminal, hang a fucking GPS/RFID/venomous bracelet 'round their ankle if you must let them wander in public, otherwise incarcerate them or exterminate them, but do not bring the presumption of guilt onto the head of every warm body in the country.
I hate this whole "mommy" government thing, top to bottom. We don't need it, there are better ways to go, and getting it is going to hurt us a lot, count on it.
Hmm. Revolution: Maybe states ought to make a law that all fuel/road/highway taxes stay in-state, and cannot be "fed" to the feds; then they can build their own highways. Of course, it wouldn't work here in Montana; too much land, not enough taxpayers. Same thing for edumactionisming; figure out the portion of the federal taxes that go to education, and take them before the fed does, and indemnify the taxpayer - by force against the feds if need be - from paying the fed, then handle your own education costs. Well populated states could make a hell of a splash that way. Someone definitely needs to stick a size 12 foot up the feds ass. They're totally out of hand, using bribery as a tool of coercion on their own sub-regions. Disgusting.
Troll? Fucking troll? For crying out loud, mods, fix this - that is anything but a troll comment! It is topical, relevant, true and thought provoking. /P.