"People here are talking about killing people like sweeping floors or serving coffee - completely abstracted from the horror that a real war would be. Just wait until the Chinese start making robots to sweep through the street, packing heat and rounding up US-ians for internment camps. Maybe THEN people will finally say, "Hey, maybe we should work on making peace instead of war!" All the while you're maching down to a camp."
Way to shoot your own argument in the foot. Since you seem to think it's a make peace or make war choice, what do you do about countries that choose war when yours chooses peace. It's a classic prisoners dillema and the stakes are too high to be left the only person who didn't confess. Maybe many others on slashdot are just more pragmatic than you. If you live in a dangerous neighborhood, you can work to improve it and the peace of everyone living there without saying "if someone breaks into my house, I'm so dedicated to peace that I won't have a means to protect myself." Only a dedicated pacifist can say they wouldn't and I haven't met one lately (I'd consider letting the police expel your intruders with lethal force no different than doing it yourself).
It's always a prevent terrorism vs. protect privacy argument by politicians, but for the most part, this is a fallacy. The cameras can't physically stop people from committing crime any more than the RFID scanners at the mall keep you from shoplifting. It's the threat of those devices alerting authorities nearby enough to stop or apprehend you that makes a difference. In all likelihood, these cameras will be deployed with no additional manpower to do anything in real time with the information. They'll likely just help authorities prosecute crimes after the fact or figure out what occurred (as happened with the London transit bombings). When you ask people about this privacy vs. prosecution tradeoff (if there's anyone left to prosecute), many fewer people respond "put us on camera" than when you claim it can help "prevent terrorism."
The best part is that the system will protect the new Freedom Tower. It's not a Ring of Steel, it's a Ring of Freedom. I don't think we've taken the Freedom Fries legacy far enough. We should have Freedom Checkpoints at the airport, and Freedom Routers to sniff our e-mail, and Freedom Inquiries into our financial records. We spread Freedom all over Iraq and look how well it turned out.
This simply raises the number of people attracted to the teaching profession. There is no shortage of people willing to be teachers. There is a shortage of effective teachers. Raising the wage of any class of worker only assures you will have more people (of all abilities and skill sets) willing to do that job. Providing incentives to attract and retain effective teachers is far more difficult.
This may be flame-bait, but I don't care because I'm dating a teacher and I've already had to dodge a flying vase or two over this issue:
TEACHERS UNIONS ARE NOT GOOD AUTHORITIES ON WHAT IS BEST FOR STUDENTS
I agree that this virtual classroom idea is a questionable way to teach students, but the Chicago Teacher's Union opposition to it really has nothing to do with its effect on students.
Teachers unions exist for one reason alone: to advocate for for teachers as workers. Higher wages, better benefits, shorter working hours, better working conditions, more job security, etc. Sometimes these aims go hand-in-hand with what's best for students, but often they do not, and it is the job of the union to further these aims anyway. Why don't we provide the incentive of better pay for better teaching, instead of just years of work? Why can't lousy teachers be fired (look up "rubber rooms" in NY)? Why don't students have a longer day and learn through the summer when their math and science skills are way behind other developed countries? Why is the same government that runs the post office running every taxpayer funded school (because vouchers are "evil")? Why are performance testing mechanisms "stifling creativity" even when they test objective skills like math and science? Because these question touch upon the conflict between what's best for teachers and what's best for students.
Let's not confuse teacher unions with professional associations like the AMA and IEEE. When it comes to what is best for students, any teacher union input needs to be viewed in context. Virtual classrooms have the potential to reduce the number of traditional, secure teaching positions. Of course the union opposes it.
It seems that there is confusion here because people believe the item is the only thing being bid upon. In reality, "winning" is a good that has value for people too (usually in the form of a drug release in their brain). When you bid, some other bidder (especially one that has already bid) values beating you enough to change their max bid. Though their original bid accounted for their maximum value of the item, it also accounted for the satisfaction of winning. Now that you have bid, the threat of disappointment makes the value of winning higher, and hence, they raise their bid. The value of sniping is in overcoming the slow response of these human participants to this induced demand. In effect, if everyone used a sniping program set to their max bid, then we would be back to bidding only for the value of the item (and our joy of winning the item, but not of beating another participant).
I thought the law proposing people give the government their encryption keys was dumb and ineffective, but this is a whole order of magnitude dumber and just plain crazy. There is only one explanation:
MAD COW!!!!!!
The gestation period for Mad Cow can be years or decades and it seems those pesky prions have finally let loose the dogs of war.
Hogwash. A favorite trick in totalitarian regimes is giving citizens the means and incentive to snitch on their neighbors. Using citizens as all-seeing agents of the government is cheaper and more effective than hiring actual government agents to do the job. And, if you can't trust your neighbors not to turn you in, you're less likely to collaborate against the government.
Lawsuits are as American as Apple Pie and Baseball.
When you can't sue anyone and everyone who has done or is doing anything you don't like, the terrorists have won.
Given the average percentage of people developing brain tumors in some geographic area every year, as well as the standard deviation of said average, the probability of this many people in the same building being diagnosed can be computed. Many office buildings are equipped with cellular base stations nowadays because it's cheaper than putting up a tower. Unless they show the epidemiological statistics to prove this event unlikely to occur in even one building in a sample of cell-equipped office buildings, this is bullshit. Obviously, test away to be sure the tower is operating properly, but given that it is, it's giving off non-ionizing radiation. One more example of luddites looking to prove that we've unleashed another technology to destroy ourselves.
Ignoring the lost aversion to "sending our men and women into harm's way" as a deciding factor for going to war. Robots in combat may have a few advantages outside of "killing power." A remote robot need not decide between its own well being and a potential target in a combat situation, and military security/peacekeeping details are riddled with such problems. So many awful stories begin: "It looked as if the person/car might be a hostile. I ordered them to stop, but they did not understand or comply and I was forced to open fire to protect myself and my unit." A remote operator can take the chance that a target may be friendly and not fire until the target is clearly hostile. The most that may be lost is a robot. Additionally, a robot is more likely to hit what is necessary and avoid collateral damage from inaccurate fire.
The Emperor: In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years!
[Senate fills with enormous applause]
Senator Amidala: So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.
Just finish it already. The supreme court is stacked in Bush's favor too. Why not just pass a law against criticizing the president and let the supreme court deem it constitutional upon challenge. Then we can finally lay the republic to rest. It had a good 200+ year run. Let's call it a day.
Everything we do that's enjoyable is addicting, otherwise it wouldn't be enjoyable. We feel happy when our brain releases one or more drugs to encourage certain behaviors (dopamine, serotonin, etc.). TV viewing, which I enjoy myself, is in the group of activities that triggers these drug releases, as are eating, drinking, spending time with friends, having sex, reading slashdot, getting code to work, etc. Sure, some things like narcotics bathe your brain in a lot more of these chemicals, but it's the same system at work.
Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette, or a chocolate cookie, or a five second orgasm. That's it, ok! You cum, you eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to f***ing work, ok!
- Denis Leary
Everyone's brains are stimulated by a different set of activities, and finding a set that best suits you is about as close to happiness as you're going to get. The reason people are up in arms is because you are pushing a set that suits you best onto other people which, less often is to improve their happiness and more often to improve yours through a brain chemical release trigger we all enjoy:
Having your beliefs validated by someone else's approval
When you're using a product that charges by the month for usage, you'd better expect it to reward continued subscribership. If the publishers of Street Fighter had been able to charge for monthly usage, they wouldn't have given you instant access to everything contingent on your skills. If you are very skilled and have subscribed a month, and some toddler can barely press the buttons (but whose parents have steadily paid the monthly fee for 2 years), you're going down because you haven't been putting out long enough.
Getting a light gun to finally work with all the different screen types is great. Unfortunately, the gun looks very close to a real Glock. There is a very good reason to make toy guns a bright obnoxous color, even if it kills the "I'm holding a real gun" buzz a bit. How long until some some little kid gets killed in a rough neighborhood by a cop who thought this thing was real?
This is completely false. Yes, the phones radiate energy in a fixed pattern around them regardless of what they are communicating with (in this case the tower, which requires significant energy to reach). However, cell phone transmissions do not occur on the microwave band which can excite water molecules (and hence increase their motion, i.e. heat). If this were true, your head should get unbearably warm after a long phone conversation. Sounds like the "cell phones cause cancer" myth taken to a new level.
Windows XP should be easy to make accommodating to the imac with no traditional BIOS. Just open up the source code and change . . . oh wait. I guess it will be linux.
In this new global war on terrorism, it is vital that the government have the cookies it needs to track and catch terrorists. Remember the attacks on 9/11 that took the lives of nearly 3000 americans. You're either with us or with the terrorists. Cookies will allow is to monitor for WMDs in rogue states around the globe. The hijackers on 9/11 might have been stopped by the use of cookies, but we will never know. Stay the course, support government cookies. God bless America and nowhere else.
Talking points: Because evidence has no place in a political debate
If you try the 360's demo downloading capability, you know that it can run downloaded content. I haven't sniffed the data stream myself, but encrypted connections slow servers down quite a bit and it's doubtful that xbox live servers even use them for content download on the order of a 500MB demo. Those binaries are signed just like the demos on the discs which can be burned. By signing the binaries, they don't need to worry about how the code got on the xbox. DVD-R, download, remove hard drive->write binary->reinstall hard drive, iPod, it doesn't matter a bit. If it doesn't execute binaries that aren't signed by microsoft's private key, it doesn't matter how you give it the binary, it won't run it. This is a non-story. Unless someone steals or or breaks microsoft's private key, this is gonna need a hardware hack at minimum.
I, for one, welcome our new Literal-Bible-Reading overlords.
With scientific explanations out of the way, I can think of a bunch of ways to make a pile of cash:
- Blood Letting - "It worked in the 1700s and now it cures Bird Flu"
- Computer Security Pixie Dust - "Got popups and malware? Then have I got a magic sand bag for you"
- Magic Box DRM - "Now through this amazing process your record company too can protect its products from unauthorized consumer replication. Simply place products in the box for 30 minutes prior to shipment, add sheep's blood, and rest assured that your copyrighted content is safe (sheep's blood NOT included)"
- The list goes on and on...
This is a monopoly revenue maximization scheme. Since users cannot trade purchased songs and the store can sell items without significant production costs, they sell at the highest (price)*(willing purchasers at that price) like any good monopolist. A market would price items close to their production cost over time. This scheme only maximizes profit for the vendor.
Slashdot Mirror
"People here are talking about killing people like sweeping floors or serving coffee - completely abstracted from the horror that a real war would be. Just wait until the Chinese start making robots to sweep through the street, packing heat and rounding up US-ians for internment camps. Maybe THEN people will finally say, "Hey, maybe we should work on making peace instead of war!" All the while you're maching down to a camp."
Way to shoot your own argument in the foot. Since you seem to think it's a make peace or make war choice, what do you do about countries that choose war when yours chooses peace. It's a classic prisoners dillema and the stakes are too high to be left the only person who didn't confess. Maybe many others on slashdot are just more pragmatic than you. If you live in a dangerous neighborhood, you can work to improve it and the peace of everyone living there without saying "if someone breaks into my house, I'm so dedicated to peace that I won't have a means to protect myself." Only a dedicated pacifist can say they wouldn't and I haven't met one lately (I'd consider letting the police expel your intruders with lethal force no different than doing it yourself).
It's always a prevent terrorism vs. protect privacy argument by politicians, but for the most part, this is a fallacy. The cameras can't physically stop people from committing crime any more than the RFID scanners at the mall keep you from shoplifting. It's the threat of those devices alerting authorities nearby enough to stop or apprehend you that makes a difference. In all likelihood, these cameras will be deployed with no additional manpower to do anything in real time with the information. They'll likely just help authorities prosecute crimes after the fact or figure out what occurred (as happened with the London transit bombings). When you ask people about this privacy vs. prosecution tradeoff (if there's anyone left to prosecute), many fewer people respond "put us on camera" than when you claim it can help "prevent terrorism."
The best part is that the system will protect the new Freedom Tower. It's not a Ring of Steel, it's a Ring of Freedom. I don't think we've taken the Freedom Fries legacy far enough. We should have Freedom Checkpoints at the airport, and Freedom Routers to sniff our e-mail, and Freedom Inquiries into our financial records. We spread Freedom all over Iraq and look how well it turned out.
Did the check clear?
This simply raises the number of people attracted to the teaching profession. There is no shortage of people willing to be teachers. There is a shortage of effective teachers. Raising the wage of any class of worker only assures you will have more people (of all abilities and skill sets) willing to do that job. Providing incentives to attract and retain effective teachers is far more difficult.
This may be flame-bait, but I don't care because I'm dating a teacher and I've already had to dodge a flying vase or two over this issue:
TEACHERS UNIONS ARE NOT GOOD AUTHORITIES ON WHAT IS BEST FOR STUDENTS
I agree that this virtual classroom idea is a questionable way to teach students, but the Chicago Teacher's Union opposition to it really has nothing to do with its effect on students. Teachers unions exist for one reason alone: to advocate for for teachers as workers. Higher wages, better benefits, shorter working hours, better working conditions, more job security, etc. Sometimes these aims go hand-in-hand with what's best for students, but often they do not, and it is the job of the union to further these aims anyway. Why don't we provide the incentive of better pay for better teaching, instead of just years of work? Why can't lousy teachers be fired (look up "rubber rooms" in NY)? Why don't students have a longer day and learn through the summer when their math and science skills are way behind other developed countries? Why is the same government that runs the post office running every taxpayer funded school (because vouchers are "evil")? Why are performance testing mechanisms "stifling creativity" even when they test objective skills like math and science? Because these question touch upon the conflict between what's best for teachers and what's best for students.
Let's not confuse teacher unions with professional associations like the AMA and IEEE. When it comes to what is best for students, any teacher union input needs to be viewed in context. Virtual classrooms have the potential to reduce the number of traditional, secure teaching positions. Of course the union opposes it.
It seems that there is confusion here because people believe the item is the only thing being bid upon. In reality, "winning" is a good that has value for people too (usually in the form of a drug release in their brain). When you bid, some other bidder (especially one that has already bid) values beating you enough to change their max bid. Though their original bid accounted for their maximum value of the item, it also accounted for the satisfaction of winning. Now that you have bid, the threat of disappointment makes the value of winning higher, and hence, they raise their bid. The value of sniping is in overcoming the slow response of these human participants to this induced demand. In effect, if everyone used a sniping program set to their max bid, then we would be back to bidding only for the value of the item (and our joy of winning the item, but not of beating another participant).
I thought the law proposing people give the government their encryption keys was dumb and ineffective, but this is a whole order of magnitude dumber and just plain crazy. There is only one explanation:
MAD COW!!!!!!
The gestation period for Mad Cow can be years or decades and it seems those pesky prions have finally let loose the dogs of war.
Hogwash. A favorite trick in totalitarian regimes is giving citizens the means and incentive to snitch on their neighbors. Using citizens as all-seeing agents of the government is cheaper and more effective than hiring actual government agents to do the job. And, if you can't trust your neighbors not to turn you in, you're less likely to collaborate against the government.
Lawsuits are as American as Apple Pie and Baseball.
When you can't sue anyone and everyone who has done or is doing anything you don't like, the terrorists have won.
Given the average percentage of people developing brain tumors in some geographic area every year, as well as the standard deviation of said average, the probability of this many people in the same building being diagnosed can be computed. Many office buildings are equipped with cellular base stations nowadays because it's cheaper than putting up a tower. Unless they show the epidemiological statistics to prove this event unlikely to occur in even one building in a sample of cell-equipped office buildings, this is bullshit. Obviously, test away to be sure the tower is operating properly, but given that it is, it's giving off non-ionizing radiation. One more example of luddites looking to prove that we've unleashed another technology to destroy ourselves.
Stop blowing our tax dollars on this crap and develop something useful, like an army of trained monkey butlers (with cute little hats).
Ignoring the lost aversion to "sending our men and women into harm's way" as a deciding factor for going to war. Robots in combat may have a few advantages outside of "killing power." A remote robot need not decide between its own well being and a potential target in a combat situation, and military security/peacekeeping details are riddled with such problems. So many awful stories begin: "It looked as if the person/car might be a hostile. I ordered them to stop, but they did not understand or comply and I was forced to open fire to protect myself and my unit." A remote operator can take the chance that a target may be friendly and not fire until the target is clearly hostile. The most that may be lost is a robot. Additionally, a robot is more likely to hit what is necessary and avoid collateral damage from inaccurate fire.
The Emperor: In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society which I assure you will last for ten thousand years!
[Senate fills with enormous applause]
Senator Amidala: So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.
Just finish it already. The supreme court is stacked in Bush's favor too. Why not just pass a law against criticizing the president and let the supreme court deem it constitutional upon challenge. Then we can finally lay the republic to rest. It had a good 200+ year run. Let's call it a day.
Everything we do that's enjoyable is addicting, otherwise it wouldn't be enjoyable. We feel happy when our brain releases one or more drugs to encourage certain behaviors (dopamine, serotonin, etc.). TV viewing, which I enjoy myself, is in the group of activities that triggers these drug releases, as are eating, drinking, spending time with friends, having sex, reading slashdot, getting code to work, etc. Sure, some things like narcotics bathe your brain in a lot more of these chemicals, but it's the same system at work.
Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette, or a chocolate cookie, or a five second orgasm. That's it, ok! You cum, you eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to f***ing work, ok!
- Denis Leary
Everyone's brains are stimulated by a different set of activities, and finding a set that best suits you is about as close to happiness as you're going to get. The reason people are up in arms is because you are pushing a set that suits you best onto other people which, less often is to improve their happiness and more often to improve yours through a brain chemical release trigger we all enjoy:
Having your beliefs validated by someone else's approval
Free energy? When did the scientific community start buying equipment on ebay?
When you're using a product that charges by the month for usage, you'd better expect it to reward continued subscribership. If the publishers of Street Fighter had been able to charge for monthly usage, they wouldn't have given you instant access to everything contingent on your skills. If you are very skilled and have subscribed a month, and some toddler can barely press the buttons (but whose parents have steadily paid the monthly fee for 2 years), you're going down because you haven't been putting out long enough.
Getting a light gun to finally work with all the different screen types is great. Unfortunately, the gun looks very close to a real Glock. There is a very good reason to make toy guns a bright obnoxous color, even if it kills the "I'm holding a real gun" buzz a bit. How long until some some little kid gets killed in a rough neighborhood by a cop who thought this thing was real?
I guess if google already stored and indexed all your files then "Comrade! Where are your papers?" won't be necessary.
Double-plus good!
This is completely false. Yes, the phones radiate energy in a fixed pattern around them regardless of what they are communicating with (in this case the tower, which requires significant energy to reach). However, cell phone transmissions do not occur on the microwave band which can excite water molecules (and hence increase their motion, i.e. heat). If this were true, your head should get unbearably warm after a long phone conversation. Sounds like the "cell phones cause cancer" myth taken to a new level.
Windows XP should be easy to make accommodating to the imac with no traditional BIOS. Just open up the source code and change . . . oh wait. I guess it will be linux.
In this new global war on terrorism, it is vital that the government have the cookies it needs to track and catch terrorists. Remember the attacks on 9/11 that took the lives of nearly 3000 americans. You're either with us or with the terrorists. Cookies will allow is to monitor for WMDs in rogue states around the globe. The hijackers on 9/11 might have been stopped by the use of cookies, but we will never know. Stay the course, support government cookies. God bless America and nowhere else.
Talking points: Because evidence has no place in a political debate
If you try the 360's demo downloading capability, you know that it can run downloaded content. I haven't sniffed the data stream myself, but encrypted connections slow servers down quite a bit and it's doubtful that xbox live servers even use them for content download on the order of a 500MB demo. Those binaries are signed just like the demos on the discs which can be burned. By signing the binaries, they don't need to worry about how the code got on the xbox. DVD-R, download, remove hard drive->write binary->reinstall hard drive, iPod, it doesn't matter a bit. If it doesn't execute binaries that aren't signed by microsoft's private key, it doesn't matter how you give it the binary, it won't run it. This is a non-story. Unless someone steals or or breaks microsoft's private key, this is gonna need a hardware hack at minimum.
Comrade! Where are your papers?
I, for one, welcome our new Literal-Bible-Reading overlords.
With scientific explanations out of the way, I can think of a bunch of ways to make a pile of cash:
- Blood Letting - "It worked in the 1700s and now it cures Bird Flu"
- Computer Security Pixie Dust - "Got popups and malware? Then have I got a magic sand bag for you"
- Magic Box DRM - "Now through this amazing process your record company too can protect its products from unauthorized consumer replication. Simply place products in the box for 30 minutes prior to shipment, add sheep's blood, and rest assured that your copyrighted content is safe (sheep's blood NOT included)"
- The list goes on and on...
This is a monopoly revenue maximization scheme. Since users cannot trade purchased songs and the store can sell items without significant production costs, they sell at the highest (price)*(willing purchasers at that price) like any good monopolist. A market would price items close to their production cost over time. This scheme only maximizes profit for the vendor.