You lost me at "Your", then I knew the rest of the message would be literally clueless. It didn't disappoint.
s/then/at which point/
Correlation is not causation. At least the GP wasn't subscribing to logical fallacies but was instead using satire to make a point that everyone has an axe to grind, not just those who are directly paid to spin the story. Or did you miss that?
Awfully strange place to clip my comment.... You're talking like it's a binary issue again, and not a 2-D continuum (there's really a front-of-center and back-of-center as well)
There are Americans who believe all sorts of things. Both the Dems and Reps are right of center on many policies, and left of center on a few. But the American people as a whole tend to be slightly-right-of-centrist, and lately have been voting against the party whose policies they want to prevent from being executed.
How you could respond with "thanks for drawing that line" to a comment that was pointing out there's no line is a bit of a head scratcher.
From your examples (some of which I also mentioned), it appears to me that you think that left wing is about the government telling people how to run their lives (abortion rights notwithstanding). Maybe this is a good time to point out that governance as a whole boils down to telling people how to run their lives. There's no "center" here -- just degrees of governance, with some degree being culturally "too much".
Um... no. Fixing XSS is trivial. I work in this field myself; only a small percentage of our clients take more than a week to fix a reported issue, and many manage it same-day. This includes quite large and well-known software companies and websites, including in the financial sector (although I'll admit that the financial sector tends to be on the slower end of things).
Actually fixing the XSS is trivial; it's QAing and publishing the fix that takes the time.
Just think of Microsoft and their recent security patches; you can really make a mess of things while applying a trivial fix. The testing is needed to verify that applying the fix doesn't do something bad (doesn't matter what quality the fix is or how long it takes to write).
That said, it really shouldn't take longer than a week, assuming it's been properly flagged as critical. My guess is that it was incorrectly triaged in this case, so the entire change schedule started late.
Nobody but the Belgians and the EU, which has their offices located in that country. Oh, and the nations of Northern Africa, who have close ties to Belgium and use the national carrier as their trunk line. Oh, and many parts of the middle east who also use the same carrier. And people who like French (cut) Fries, French Toast, Belgian Waffles and Belgian Chocolates. And people who have family living there. And people whose megacorporations have offices there and are subject to their laws. And countries who share borders with them....
So, in fact, a significant chunk of the world's population, not (directly) including the US, China, India and Brazil (well, Brazil might care a bit, as they have trading partners in the EU, and China might, as they have close ties in North Africa and the Mid-East with the countries who use those trunk lines... oh, and the US government seems to care, as they're tapping those trunk lines).
So maybe the answer is "everyone but India and the uninformed?"
If that's what the US considers "left wing" -- well, I think some people should study world politics a bit more.
The entire point here is that people saw Obama as "not as right wing as Bush". Nobody voted for the guy from the Communist Party; very few voted Libertarian; nobody voted to increase government and social programs or to switch from a penal system to a correction system.
In fact, the monologue basically said "people voted for Obama because he didn't have Bush's track record." That doesn't sound very wingy to me -- in fact, your response appeals to the same binary political system the GP is pointing out is a complete fabrication in reality.
If I said "Vote Green!" would you call me a tailfeather?
Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population). Probably only 30% of that 20%, in reality.
If only 20% of slashdotters RTFA and approximately 30,000 RTFA (seems to be the common stats recently), that means there are approximately 150,000 active slashdotters, which easily fits within 6% of the world's population.
Oh, and "first world" ceased meaning anything useful when the cold war ended. You want "industrialized nation".
not sure what you're trying to say here, I'm sure you didn't mean that 150,000 is 6% of 7 billion.
Do you mind re-phrasing?
I meant that by those off-the-cuff calculations, 6% of the world's population max would be interested in news for nerds, and my quick calculations show that the actual number of people interested in this site is significantly lower than that. So it makes sense that there's a lot of stuff that isn't all that pertinent to people in non-industrialized nations on here.
people still use Windows XP? It is 2013! Don't tell me they are still running Pentium 3 computers at 900 MHz. My university uses Windows 8 and Dual Core processers at 2.6 GHz. Just saying.
You should try running XP on a recent system sometime; it's very zippy, and with all the patches applied, quite stable.
Plus, it virtualizes well with a low memory footprint.
I always figured that phasers had some sort of reclamation tech -- where the energy deployed in the first phase was then reclaimed, thus solving the issue of a bunch of superheated water vapor -- leaving it instead as ambient temperature water vapor, and the phaser as reusable. That was my own way of reasoning it away all those years ago, anyway.
I could never figure out how you could set a phaser to "stun" though -- does it just change the phase of some molecules while ignoring the bulk of them?
"Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon" and "They will always be ten times the cost of a hard drive," are two completely different things. The article is saying two things:
1: Other technologies are unlikely to overtake flash on price/performance in the near future 2: Flash will always be 10x cost of harddrives. In other words, Flash won't overtake harddrives on price.
However, Flash will continue to get cheaper per capcity, at least for now, as will harddrives. It'll be a race where Flash will never be able to catch up.
The article makes clear that at least for now, Flash will continue to undergo price reductions until limits are reached. It being a silicon based product, it is going to be limited by the same basic manufacturing and feature shrinking limits of most other silicon chips. There may be advancements similar to MLC that are specific to flash, but otherwise the same rules apply. Decrease feature size, and you fit more features int he die, decreasing cost.
So... when do we get our spinning platters of NAND memory?
Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population). Probably only 30% of that 20%, in reality.
If only 20% of slashdotters RTFA and approximately 30,000 RTFA (seems to be the common stats recently), that means there are approximately 150,000 active slashdotters, which easily fits within 6% of the world's population.
Oh, and "first world" ceased meaning anything useful when the cold war ended. You want "industrialized nation".
Exactly! I just wish this method was available when I was in school -- it took me almost 2 years to treat my courses in this way; spelling it out in advance is definitely the way to go.
My favourite course I ever took made the lecture notes available the day before; the "lecture" time was mostly spent clarifying issues, after a quick skim through the slides at the start. People who didn't pre-read the notes in the first week either dropped out or caught on really quickly. The class resulted in the entire body of students having a solid grasp of the material by the end, PLUS a great reference set of slides, with added notes from class (which I still have to this day).
It also had the benefit that students sent the prof corrections to his notes prior to class, so any typos/logic errors etc. were discussed at the start, clarifying the bugs for everyone.
Funny you mention gay sex and then go on to list the only ones that care about privacy are those doing something "illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous." Have you not been paying attention to Russia lately? Gay sex recently became illegal again. Just because society and politicians don't care NOW doesn't mean they will continue not caring.
This just made me remember something else; the adage that in an established society, it is impossible to live for a week without committing at least one illegal act*.
*"Illegal act' being something that COULD be deemed illegal by a court of law, depending on interpretation.
As such, everyone has something to hide, because everyone is breaking the law. But that's not really a useful argument to drag into the discussion anyway; just thought I'd point it out while I was thinking of it.
I think I see why you were labeled a troll... you pack retrospective, editorial, controversial opinion and passing off opinion as fact into the same comment. If you broke this up into multiple comments, you'd probably find that the passing off opinion as fact was the only bit that got modded troll.
Basically, I'm sure when you mentioned that there was no privacy in the US, someone else mentioned that you can have no expectation of privacy in the US (different than saying there's no privacy), and got modded Informative.
The US is big. People came to the US from other countries because there was room to have privacy and freedom of expression -- through obscurity. If you burn flags in the middle of a forest and there's nobody there to see you do it, does anyone care? BUT, if you burn flags in the town square and shout "down with the government!" even if it's not illegal, you can rest assured that your name and face have been noted and will be remembered during the next uprising.
The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous. I bet Castro was a privacy advocate.
I agree. Everyone else who cares about privacy are aware of how private information can be taken advantage of by others. Only the dumbasses, as you state, care about it because they have something socially unacceptable to hide. Privacy, of course, is not anthropomorphic, and doesn't care whether you're a dumbass or not.
The systems I'm used to ping over POTS with a backup SMS ping. If you suddenly lose both POTS service and cellular service, you've got issues whether it's burgalers or a natural disaster.
This is why house alarms often start going off in the event of a power outage btw.
My thoughts exactly... have your alarm system send off sentinel signals, and go off immediately when it gets the appropriate response.
The only serious alarm systems I've ever used were wired (unless they used the phone system, at which point a cordless phone could also activate/deactivate them).
Best one I ever saw used a modified asterisk system.
rather than treasonously reporting government info requests, every time they receive such a request they will make their logo slightly blander. by this time next year, it'll look just like helvetica
I think in conjunction with increasing the transparency of their logo, they should make the "scales" of the Y more and more unbalanced. Eventually they can overturn it completely.
You pledge your rifle to their defense -- will that hold if you discover what else they've been up to? You are, after all, giving them a similar deal to what the US government gave AT&T (who, by the way, use Yahoo Mail for their mail service).
I think you may want to be a bit more specific in how you're defending them.
Since these warrants tend to be used for national security investigations, such as into spying and terrorism, how to you think that telling people they are being investigated isn't a bad thing?
Maybe they should skip the warrants and courts and everything, and just go to notifying people they are being investigated. If the evidence disappears, that means it can't be used. Plot foiled.
That's just one way off the top of my head that it isn't a bad thing. I'm sure there are others.
Except that there is no common law precedent for doing so (AFAIK), and to make that stretch would be to take a huge gamble as to what happens under appeal.
Luckily, you don't have to worry about common law precedent and appeals so much in trials held in a secret court.
Aid and Comfort is often referred to as "harboring a fugitive" -- which, if Yahoo Mail has evidence of where someone is hiding or what they are up to, and Yahoo has the means to ferret that out, but doesn't provide the information to the government when they ask for it with a warrant, could be considered treason. From there to providing any information to the government because they've requested it, and being in contempt of a secret court if you refuse to do so or talk about it, is the slippery slope we've slid down.
So which, pray tell, personal data would they take as sufficient to allow water to be carried again?
Of course as we know all those potential explosives (that are too dangerous to allowed on a plane) are disposed of.. on site.. in a trash can.... at the screening station.......
I just had this image of someone giving away free bottles of "energy drink" to people in the security lineup... is there a liquid explosive that wouldn't make people sick if they consumed it? Maybe one that only becomes active when mixed with sani-flush? Because then you'd have a large concentration of the stuff not only at the screening station, but by the end of a flight, inside the holding tanks on the airplanes. Setting it off wouldn't be that difficult either; wires/battery down the toilet.
Oops. Did I just trigger a new "no food or drink within 8 hours of flying" policy? Sorry....
Slashdot Mirror
You lost me at "Your", then I knew the rest of the message would be literally clueless. It didn't disappoint.
s/then/at which point/
Correlation is not causation. At least the GP wasn't subscribing to logical fallacies but was instead using satire to make a point that everyone has an axe to grind, not just those who are directly paid to spin the story. Or did you miss that?
Awfully strange place to clip my comment....
You're talking like it's a binary issue again, and not a 2-D continuum (there's really a front-of-center and back-of-center as well)
There are Americans who believe all sorts of things. Both the Dems and Reps are right of center on many policies, and left of center on a few. But the American people as a whole tend to be slightly-right-of-centrist, and lately have been voting against the party whose policies they want to prevent from being executed.
How you could respond with "thanks for drawing that line" to a comment that was pointing out there's no line is a bit of a head scratcher.
From your examples (some of which I also mentioned), it appears to me that you think that left wing is about the government telling people how to run their lives (abortion rights notwithstanding). Maybe this is a good time to point out that governance as a whole boils down to telling people how to run their lives. There's no "center" here -- just degrees of governance, with some degree being culturally "too much".
Um... no. Fixing XSS is trivial. I work in this field myself; only a small percentage of our clients take more than a week to fix a reported issue, and many manage it same-day. This includes quite large and well-known software companies and websites, including in the financial sector (although I'll admit that the financial sector tends to be on the slower end of things).
Actually fixing the XSS is trivial; it's QAing and publishing the fix that takes the time.
Just think of Microsoft and their recent security patches; you can really make a mess of things while applying a trivial fix. The testing is needed to verify that applying the fix doesn't do something bad (doesn't matter what quality the fix is or how long it takes to write).
That said, it really shouldn't take longer than a week, assuming it's been properly flagged as critical. My guess is that it was incorrectly triaged in this case, so the entire change schedule started late.
Who cares about Belgium anyhow?
Nobody but the Belgians and the EU, which has their offices located in that country. Oh, and the nations of Northern Africa, who have close ties to Belgium and use the national carrier as their trunk line. Oh, and many parts of the middle east who also use the same carrier. And people who like French (cut) Fries, French Toast, Belgian Waffles and Belgian Chocolates. And people who have family living there. And people whose megacorporations have offices there and are subject to their laws. And countries who share borders with them....
So, in fact, a significant chunk of the world's population, not (directly) including the US, China, India and Brazil (well, Brazil might care a bit, as they have trading partners in the EU, and China might, as they have close ties in North Africa and the Mid-East with the countries who use those trunk lines... oh, and the US government seems to care, as they're tapping those trunk lines).
So maybe the answer is "everyone but India and the uninformed?"
If that's what the US considers "left wing" -- well, I think some people should study world politics a bit more.
The entire point here is that people saw Obama as "not as right wing as Bush". Nobody voted for the guy from the Communist Party; very few voted Libertarian; nobody voted to increase government and social programs or to switch from a penal system to a correction system.
In fact, the monologue basically said "people voted for Obama because he didn't have Bush's track record." That doesn't sound very wingy to me -- in fact, your response appeals to the same binary political system the GP is pointing out is a complete fabrication in reality.
If I said "Vote Green!" would you call me a tailfeather?
Wooooosh!
Duck!
er, I mean Gull!
Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population). Probably only 30% of that 20%, in reality.
If only 20% of slashdotters RTFA and approximately 30,000 RTFA (seems to be the common stats recently), that means there are approximately 150,000 active slashdotters, which easily fits within 6% of the world's population.
Oh, and "first world" ceased meaning anything useful when the cold war ended. You want "industrialized nation".
not sure what you're trying to say here, I'm sure you didn't mean that 150,000 is 6% of 7 billion.
Do you mind re-phrasing?
I meant that by those off-the-cuff calculations, 6% of the world's population max would be interested in news for nerds, and my quick calculations show that the actual number of people interested in this site is significantly lower than that. So it makes sense that there's a lot of stuff that isn't all that pertinent to people in non-industrialized nations on here.
people still use Windows XP? It is 2013! Don't tell me they are still running Pentium 3 computers at 900 MHz. My university uses Windows 8 and Dual Core processers at 2.6 GHz. Just saying.
You should try running XP on a recent system sometime; it's very zippy, and with all the patches applied, quite stable.
Plus, it virtualizes well with a low memory footprint.
I always figured that phasers had some sort of reclamation tech -- where the energy deployed in the first phase was then reclaimed, thus solving the issue of a bunch of superheated water vapor -- leaving it instead as ambient temperature water vapor, and the phaser as reusable. That was my own way of reasoning it away all those years ago, anyway.
I could never figure out how you could set a phaser to "stun" though -- does it just change the phase of some molecules while ignoring the bulk of them?
No windows, the entire passenger area covered with advertising screens.
Targeted advertising screens. Not to mention recording your shopping habits and recording anything you say while inside the cab....
Why don't they buy out Moller while they're at it and give us autonomous flying taxicabs (like in Fifth Element)?
"Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon" and "They will always be ten times the cost of a hard drive," are two completely different things. The article is saying two things:
1: Other technologies are unlikely to overtake flash on price/performance in the near future
2: Flash will always be 10x cost of harddrives. In other words, Flash won't overtake harddrives on price.
However, Flash will continue to get cheaper per capcity, at least for now, as will harddrives. It'll be a race where Flash will never be able to catch up.
The article makes clear that at least for now, Flash will continue to undergo price reductions until limits are reached. It being a silicon based product, it is going to be limited by the same basic manufacturing and feature shrinking limits of most other silicon chips. There may be advancements similar to MLC that are specific to flash, but otherwise the same rules apply. Decrease feature size, and you fit more features int he die, decreasing cost.
So... when do we get our spinning platters of NAND memory?
Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population). Probably only 30% of that 20%, in reality.
If only 20% of slashdotters RTFA and approximately 30,000 RTFA (seems to be the common stats recently), that means there are approximately 150,000 active slashdotters, which easily fits within 6% of the world's population.
Oh, and "first world" ceased meaning anything useful when the cold war ended. You want "industrialized nation".
Exactly! I just wish this method was available when I was in school -- it took me almost 2 years to treat my courses in this way; spelling it out in advance is definitely the way to go.
My favourite course I ever took made the lecture notes available the day before; the "lecture" time was mostly spent clarifying issues, after a quick skim through the slides at the start. People who didn't pre-read the notes in the first week either dropped out or caught on really quickly. The class resulted in the entire body of students having a solid grasp of the material by the end, PLUS a great reference set of slides, with added notes from class (which I still have to this day).
It also had the benefit that students sent the prof corrections to his notes prior to class, so any typos/logic errors etc. were discussed at the start, clarifying the bugs for everyone.
Funny you mention gay sex and then go on to list the only ones that care about privacy are those doing something "illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous." Have you not been paying attention to Russia lately? Gay sex recently became illegal again. Just because society and politicians don't care NOW doesn't mean they will continue not caring.
This just made me remember something else; the adage that in an established society, it is impossible to live for a week without committing at least one illegal act*.
*"Illegal act' being something that COULD be deemed illegal by a court of law, depending on interpretation.
As such, everyone has something to hide, because everyone is breaking the law. But that's not really a useful argument to drag into the discussion anyway; just thought I'd point it out while I was thinking of it.
I think I see why you were labeled a troll... you pack retrospective, editorial, controversial opinion and passing off opinion as fact into the same comment. If you broke this up into multiple comments, you'd probably find that the passing off opinion as fact was the only bit that got modded troll.
Basically, I'm sure when you mentioned that there was no privacy in the US, someone else mentioned that you can have no expectation of privacy in the US (different than saying there's no privacy), and got modded Informative.
The US is big. People came to the US from other countries because there was room to have privacy and freedom of expression -- through obscurity. If you burn flags in the middle of a forest and there's nobody there to see you do it, does anyone care? BUT, if you burn flags in the town square and shout "down with the government!" even if it's not illegal, you can rest assured that your name and face have been noted and will be remembered during the next uprising.
The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous. I bet Castro was a privacy advocate.
I agree. Everyone else who cares about privacy are aware of how private information can be taken advantage of by others. Only the dumbasses, as you state, care about it because they have something socially unacceptable to hide. Privacy, of course, is not anthropomorphic, and doesn't care whether you're a dumbass or not.
The systems I'm used to ping over POTS with a backup SMS ping. If you suddenly lose both POTS service and cellular service, you've got issues whether it's burgalers or a natural disaster.
This is why house alarms often start going off in the event of a power outage btw.
My thoughts exactly... have your alarm system send off sentinel signals, and go off immediately when it gets the appropriate response.
The only serious alarm systems I've ever used were wired (unless they used the phone system, at which point a cordless phone could also activate/deactivate them).
Best one I ever saw used a modified asterisk system.
It's almost as if the security company is selling the appearance of security instead of actual security. Surely, they wouldn't be so mercenary.
Is it mercenary if they contracted the TSA to construct the system for them?
Personally, I use a flock of seagulls.
Ah; so you use the "indellible tracking marker on body" method instead of the "break his legs" method....
rather than treasonously reporting government info requests, every time they receive such a request they will make their logo slightly blander. by this time next year, it'll look just like helvetica
I think in conjunction with increasing the transparency of their logo, they should make the "scales" of the Y more and more unbalanced. Eventually they can overturn it completely.
You pledge your rifle to their defense -- will that hold if you discover what else they've been up to? You are, after all, giving them a similar deal to what the US government gave AT&T (who, by the way, use Yahoo Mail for their mail service).
I think you may want to be a bit more specific in how you're defending them.
Since these warrants tend to be used for national security investigations, such as into spying and terrorism, how to you think that telling people they are being investigated isn't a bad thing?
Maybe they should skip the warrants and courts and everything, and just go to notifying people they are being investigated. If the evidence disappears, that means it can't be used. Plot foiled.
That's just one way off the top of my head that it isn't a bad thing. I'm sure there are others.
Except that there is no common law precedent for doing so (AFAIK), and to make that stretch would be to take a huge gamble as to what happens under appeal.
Luckily, you don't have to worry about common law precedent and appeals so much in trials held in a secret court.
Aid and Comfort is often referred to as "harboring a fugitive" -- which, if Yahoo Mail has evidence of where someone is hiding or what they are up to, and Yahoo has the means to ferret that out, but doesn't provide the information to the government when they ask for it with a warrant, could be considered treason. From there to providing any information to the government because they've requested it, and being in contempt of a secret court if you refuse to do so or talk about it, is the slippery slope we've slid down.
So which, pray tell, personal data would they take as sufficient to allow water to be carried again?
Of course as we know all those potential explosives (that are too dangerous to allowed on a plane) are disposed of.. on site.. in a trash can.... at the screening station.......
I just had this image of someone giving away free bottles of "energy drink" to people in the security lineup... is there a liquid explosive that wouldn't make people sick if they consumed it? Maybe one that only becomes active when mixed with sani-flush? Because then you'd have a large concentration of the stuff not only at the screening station, but by the end of a flight, inside the holding tanks on the airplanes. Setting it off wouldn't be that difficult either; wires/battery down the toilet.
Oops. Did I just trigger a new "no food or drink within 8 hours of flying" policy? Sorry....