Yes, Megan's law is obviously intended to incite mob 'justice'. Executions are expensive and socially messy. It is much simpler to 'think of the children', publish the addresses of sex offenders, and hope that some other sicko takes care of the problem for you.
The days are numbered for ALL computer equipment, and most software. XP will be around for quite a few years, so buying it now is not a waste of money. Worrying that you will have to buy another OS in 3 years is like worrying that you will need to buy a new computer in three years... A waste of effort.
Now add to that, the fact that populations tend to bunch together, and you can massively increase your odds of those two point being within 200 km of each other. This is without any image recognition at all.
With the most basic of image recognition, you could narrow things even farther with things like, "Is there ocean in the picture?", "what is the height of buildings in the background?", or "how many people are in the background". One almost needs to ask how they got their accuracy so low...
A good test here, if your IT head is an ex-HR manager, mailroom clerk, secretary, or other far removed profession and have yet to get any certifications or degrees to prove their competence after 10 years then you probably are in trouble. Not in every case, but enough to make you worry.
Im not saying that a cert or degree proves that you are competent, but it at least shows that you try to be. I would say the opposite. If after 10 years in the industry, your IT guys are still chasing the meaningless certifications, then you are probably in trouble.
Wow. This person is phenomenally stupid. She is a senior vice president of a company in California, and she is not only making derogatory comments about people based on their gender, but she is also saying that the maleness of the code needs to be fixed?!?!?!
So, basically, any man that applies for a programming job at Ingres can now sue the company for sexual discrimination if they don't get the job. Or, any male programmer that gets fired will have public statements from a senior VP on how it was done to fix the problem of having male written code. Actually, any male programmer within the company now has a sexual harassment case against Ingres.
You clearly do not know what the word 'violence' means. Showing a person a gun is in no way violent. It might be a threat to commit a later act of violence, but to call it a violent act in and of itself indicates that you do not understand what the word means. So, no, drawing a gun on someone is NOT an escalation of violence in any way shape or form.
That is absolutely made up. Most firearm incidents are not unintended. You simply don't here about 99.99% of the gun incidents because they don't get reported. Why? Because someone picked up their gun, and showed it to an aggressor, thus ending the conflict before it ever becomes violent.
Here is a little hint for you. Most humans are far more likely to enter a physical conflict that they believe they are sure to win. As soon as someone sees a gun, they are no longer sure they are going to win, and thus are far less likely to continue the aggression.
If the security of the data is really important, you can only destroy them, but if the data on it is not something that is really worth worrying about, I would look at selling them to retro computer users. I know the old Amigas have something like a 4 gig usable size limit. Many of the people using them, hate the idea of putting in a 500 gig drive just to use 4 of it. I assume that some of the other old machines have similar restrictions.
You joke, but I have seen many houses with bars on the windows, and big sliding glass doors on the back of the house where no one would see a universal key (rock) being used to open the door.
When this is pointed out to people, they start planning how they could secure the glass door. They tend to stop when you point out that a cheap battery operated circular saw will take you right through the wall.
Basically, there is no secure home security system. They are all trivial to bypass. The key is to just make your house more trouble than it is worth compared to your neighbor. About the most secure you can do is have motion sensors hooked to an alarm that uses a cellular phone to call the police. Of course, even that doesn't stop a simple smash and grab.
Funny thing is, I get a lot more paper spam than email spam. From where I stand, paper spam is a worse problem. It certainly kills a lot more trees. And I can't set up a filter for my paper spam. You could look on the bright side. When those trees get killed, they make room for new trees. If the paper that the trees were made from get buried in a landfill, the carbon that those trees absorbed gets sequestered for a very long time. Possibly permenently. The more trees that are grown and buried, the more carbon that gets put back in the ground.
I think you fail in your understanding of the parent posters example.
The parent poster was pointing out that Ockham's Razor is stupid, and the kind of thing that sounds profound to stoned college freshmen who think that they are discovering the mysteries of existence. Very clearly the simplest explanation of our universe is that God willed it to be that way. All of the other explanations that require calculating energy and mass, and doing math that is more complex than most of the people even here on slashdot can understand, clearly fail Ockham's Razor. Even your strawman example of the existence/non-existence of the universe fails the razor, as 'Because that is how God willed it to be' is still the simplest explanation.
Ockham's Razor is useful for shutting up people who are smart enough to come up with grand stories about how things are, but are not smart enough to understand that they are being mocked. It is the same kind of saying as "Murphy's Law". It was clearly intended to be a joke when it was coined. It wasn't even coined by Ockham. It was coined by William Rowan Hamilton who clearly understood that sometimes things ARE very complex, and the simple answer is not always right.
Now, why would someone make up, and attribute a saying to a scholar from 500 years prior? Well, the simplest answer is that it adds an air of authority to a rediculous statement. Given that Hamilton was considered one of the great minds of this time, AND regularly worked on massively complex concepts, the only conclusion that can be gained from Ockham's Razor is that it was very dry nerd humor. It is unfortunate that most people don't get it.
I agree. We just never here that populations will have to be reduced, one way or another, from the "Inconvenient Truth" crowd. Why? Because even though it is true, it is inconvenient to their agenda.
"Besides the only solution for the food and oil problem is "lowering the world's population". THAT is the real "Inconvenient Truth". Conservation is only temporary band-aid so that people today can shove the problem on the next generation. I do have to concede that after all of his inane blathering, at the end of his movie, Gore did suggest that people just kill themselves.
No, people have always been stupid. The Internet is just supplying us with information like it was designed to do. In this case, that information is that most people are stupid. The Internet isn't making people stupid any more than the Internet is making the Detroit Tigers win the 1945 world series.
If you want to look at something that is making people stupid, you need to look at our public education system. This is a system that forces the vast majority of the population to spend ~7 hours a day in room where they are told that knowing things doesn't matter. What matters it that you look like your trying. This is often done under threat of imprisonment.
My tin foil hat has been telling me that this is actually why there is such a push for "every one to vote". When people have no idea who the candidates are, they will randomly pick from the names they have heard of. This will result in pretty much a wash for the two primary candidates, but will push the required number of votes up to make things more difficult for third party candidates. So, they are convincing the ignorant masses that they are doing something good, and helping democracy, when all they are really doing is acting as a spoiler for third party candidates.
This is why I try to convince people that don't have an opinion, or who are thinking of not voting out of protest, to vote third party. It doesn't matter who they are because they won't win anyway. BUT, if enough of the people who don't like either candidate where to vote 3rd party to even show up on the radar, whoever wins will behave in their interest.
Consider this. If you were running for president, would you try to woo the people that you knew would vote for you no matter what you do, or would you try to woo the people that are not mindlessly voting the party line, who also happen to be showing disdain for your primary opponent?
I found it out eventually in the newspapers. At which point, it was a little too late for me to go effectively expose it by working for anybody. So, now you are claiming you are stupid? Because only the truly stupid didn't know this was going on long before the news started scape goating. If you are claiming you are that stupid, then you are not smart enough to have a valid opinion on the subject. If you are not too stupid to have a valid opinion, then you obviously knew about this in plenty of time to have done something about it, and by your own standards, are personally responsible for all of the current financial problems that people are facing.
I'm not even saying you had a particularly big share, but it was definitely larger than the average citizen. No, the average citizen was fully aware of what was going on. The vast majority of people who bough and sold during that time wanted it that way.
Clearly, you are upset, and not thinking straight. That's an absurd statement.
I pay people to do this exact thing. I call them police. They are handy. Unlike me, they have guns and subpoenas. Ohhhhh.... So when other people don't quit their jobs as some kind of martyr they are bad, but when you are asked to do the same thing, the requester is not thinking straight, and it's not your job, that's what the police are for. Your comments ooze with hypocrisy.
Probably not. I turned down mortgage-related work and housing-bubble work the same way I turn down advertising work and anything else that I think is morally dubious. You have already set the standard that one does not have to be directly involved with the fraud to be responsible. While you might not have worked directly worked for a lender, you certainly worked for businesses that collected money from people that had profited from the fraud. Heck, the very roads you drive on were being maintained with money that was earned with the fraud. Those police you commented about earlier... They were hired and payed with the fraud money. You were suckling from the fraud tit right along with the rest of the country.
Only one of us had detailed advance knowledge that crime was being committed. Again, trying to play dumb.
Only one of us got a paycheck from it. You gained financially.
But when I heard, I did choose to do things about it: I wrote my government reps, I warned friends, I wrote publicly on the topic. And believe me, I will vote based on this. Sure, you'll do all sorts of things, as long as it in no way threatens your income.
All of us as citizens are responsible for this. I accept that, and will be paying plenty taxes because of it for years to come. Yet you keep trying to explain why your inaction isn't so bad.
I'm just saying that everybody who had detailed advance knowledge of this bears a greater share of the moral responsibility, and in direct proportion to their involvement. Since you fully knew what was happening, you are just as responsible as anyone else. Since you claim to have a higher moral understanding than the rest of the population, yet still did nothing, you are MORE responsible.
Especially those, like yourselves, who continued to consciously take money from criminal enterprises. Money is only an accounting system for goods and services. You continued to consciously take goods and service from criminal enterprises. Thus, you are especially responsible for the housing crash.
Sure, there are other people who knew a lot more and did a lot worse. I look forward to seeing them in federal prison. But that doesn't absolve the you and yours, either. Sure, there are other people who knew a lot more and did a lot worse. I look forward to seeing them in federal prison. But that doesn't absolve the YOU and YOURS, either.
If I take my POTS phone and plug it into my neighbors VIOP box, Vonage sees me at my neighbors house. The same phone moved whether it is running over POTS lines or VOIP lines works the same for identifying location. Which is to say, the phone simply has no mechanism to do that. When you use standard AT&T phone service, you have a phone jack that you plug your telephone into. The location of this jack is registered with the phone company. When you use Vonage, you have a phone jack that you plug your phone into. The location of this jack is registered with the phone company. Yes, I can break the ability for 911 under Vonage to identify my location by taking the jack to another location. I can break the ability of 911 under AT&T to identify my location by cutting the wire outside my house. Either way, the user CHOOSES to break 911. There is no technical reason for VOIP 911 not to work just as well and reliably as POTS.
So, no, there is no way for a VOIP provider to track your position if you are actively trying to prevent it. This is a benefit to the consumer, not a drawback. The answer to your example of VIOP over wifi on a smartphone is that you are just as safe, as there is no equivalent that is not VIOP, so you would just not have a phone, and thus 911 wouldn't know where you were either way.
Nope. While you CAN take the VIOP device to a new location. When you sign up with at least Vonage, you register the location of the device. Vonage knows where my phone is just as well as AT&T knows where my neighbors phone is.
It gets even worse when you consider that an RPG could easily be used from the ground to blow up planes on take off or landing. I'm sure that someone with even a modicum of military hardware knowledge could list off plenty of other accessible weapons that could do an even more reliable job at taking out a plane from the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Megan's law is obviously intended to incite mob 'justice'. Executions are expensive and socially messy. It is much simpler to 'think of the children', publish the addresses of sex offenders, and hope that some other sicko takes care of the problem for you.
The days are numbered for ALL computer equipment, and most software. XP will be around for quite a few years, so buying it now is not a waste of money. Worrying that you will have to buy another OS in 3 years is like worrying that you will need to buy a new computer in three years... A waste of effort.
Now add to that, the fact that populations tend to bunch together, and you can massively increase your odds of those two point being within 200 km of each other. This is without any image recognition at all.
With the most basic of image recognition, you could narrow things even farther with things like, "Is there ocean in the picture?", "what is the height of buildings in the background?", or "how many people are in the background". One almost needs to ask how they got their accuracy so low...
Wow. This person is phenomenally stupid. She is a senior vice president of a company in California, and she is not only making derogatory comments about people based on their gender, but she is also saying that the maleness of the code needs to be fixed?!?!?!
So, basically, any man that applies for a programming job at Ingres can now sue the company for sexual discrimination if they don't get the job. Or, any male programmer that gets fired will have public statements from a senior VP on how it was done to fix the problem of having male written code. Actually, any male programmer within the company now has a sexual harassment case against Ingres.
You clearly do not know what the word 'violence' means. Showing a person a gun is in no way violent. It might be a threat to commit a later act of violence, but to call it a violent act in and of itself indicates that you do not understand what the word means. So, no, drawing a gun on someone is NOT an escalation of violence in any way shape or form.
That is absolutely made up. Most firearm incidents are not unintended. You simply don't here about 99.99% of the gun incidents because they don't get reported. Why? Because someone picked up their gun, and showed it to an aggressor, thus ending the conflict before it ever becomes violent.
Here is a little hint for you. Most humans are far more likely to enter a physical conflict that they believe they are sure to win. As soon as someone sees a gun, they are no longer sure they are going to win, and thus are far less likely to continue the aggression.
If the security of the data is really important, you can only destroy them, but if the data on it is not something that is really worth worrying about, I would look at selling them to retro computer users. I know the old Amigas have something like a 4 gig usable size limit. Many of the people using them, hate the idea of putting in a 500 gig drive just to use 4 of it. I assume that some of the other old machines have similar restrictions.
You joke, but I have seen many houses with bars on the windows, and big sliding glass doors on the back of the house where no one would see a universal key (rock) being used to open the door.
When this is pointed out to people, they start planning how they could secure the glass door. They tend to stop when you point out that a cheap battery operated circular saw will take you right through the wall.
Basically, there is no secure home security system. They are all trivial to bypass. The key is to just make your house more trouble than it is worth compared to your neighbor. About the most secure you can do is have motion sensors hooked to an alarm that uses a cellular phone to call the police. Of course, even that doesn't stop a simple smash and grab.
Fear Him!!! Obama! Master of the Ice Zombies!!!
Because he is using Ockham's Razor. 'Because God willed it to be so' is the simplest answer to every question.
I think you fail in your understanding of the parent posters example.
The parent poster was pointing out that Ockham's Razor is stupid, and the kind of thing that sounds profound to stoned college freshmen who think that they are discovering the mysteries of existence. Very clearly the simplest explanation of our universe is that God willed it to be that way. All of the other explanations that require calculating energy and mass, and doing math that is more complex than most of the people even here on slashdot can understand, clearly fail Ockham's Razor. Even your strawman example of the existence/non-existence of the universe fails the razor, as 'Because that is how God willed it to be' is still the simplest explanation.
Ockham's Razor is useful for shutting up people who are smart enough to come up with grand stories about how things are, but are not smart enough to understand that they are being mocked. It is the same kind of saying as "Murphy's Law". It was clearly intended to be a joke when it was coined. It wasn't even coined by Ockham. It was coined by William Rowan Hamilton who clearly understood that sometimes things ARE very complex, and the simple answer is not always right.
Now, why would someone make up, and attribute a saying to a scholar from 500 years prior? Well, the simplest answer is that it adds an air of authority to a rediculous statement. Given that Hamilton was considered one of the great minds of this time, AND regularly worked on massively complex concepts, the only conclusion that can be gained from Ockham's Razor is that it was very dry nerd humor. It is unfortunate that most people don't get it.
I agree. We just never here that populations will have to be reduced, one way or another, from the "Inconvenient Truth" crowd. Why? Because even though it is true, it is inconvenient to their agenda.
Taking "kill the fucking cop" to heart is so old school. Not 2008. Not 1950. More like 1775.
Well, that was pretty stupid of me not to get that. Damn Internet!
No, people have always been stupid. The Internet is just supplying us with information like it was designed to do. In this case, that information is that most people are stupid. The Internet isn't making people stupid any more than the Internet is making the Detroit Tigers win the 1945 world series.
If you want to look at something that is making people stupid, you need to look at our public education system. This is a system that forces the vast majority of the population to spend ~7 hours a day in room where they are told that knowing things doesn't matter. What matters it that you look like your trying. This is often done under threat of imprisonment.
My tin foil hat has been telling me that this is actually why there is such a push for "every one to vote". When people have no idea who the candidates are, they will randomly pick from the names they have heard of. This will result in pretty much a wash for the two primary candidates, but will push the required number of votes up to make things more difficult for third party candidates. So, they are convincing the ignorant masses that they are doing something good, and helping democracy, when all they are really doing is acting as a spoiler for third party candidates.
This is why I try to convince people that don't have an opinion, or who are thinking of not voting out of protest, to vote third party. It doesn't matter who they are because they won't win anyway. BUT, if enough of the people who don't like either candidate where to vote 3rd party to even show up on the radar, whoever wins will behave in their interest.
Consider this. If you were running for president, would you try to woo the people that you knew would vote for you no matter what you do, or would you try to woo the people that are not mindlessly voting the party line, who also happen to be showing disdain for your primary opponent?
I'm with you. I want nothing to do with any game that requires me to have an internet connection.
But...But...But... Those are natural. So they must be good for you!!!
I'm not even saying you had a particularly big share, but it was definitely larger than the average citizen. No, the average citizen was fully aware of what was going on. The vast majority of people who bough and sold during that time wanted it that way.
Clearly, you are upset, and not thinking straight. That's an absurd statement. I pay people to do this exact thing. I call them police. They are handy. Unlike me, they have guns and subpoenas. Ohhhhh.... So when other people don't quit their jobs as some kind of martyr they are bad, but when you are asked to do the same thing, the requester is not thinking straight, and it's not your job, that's what the police are for. Your comments ooze with hypocrisy.
Probably not. I turned down mortgage-related work and housing-bubble work the same way I turn down advertising work and anything else that I think is morally dubious. You have already set the standard that one does not have to be directly involved with the fraud to be responsible. While you might not have worked directly worked for a lender, you certainly worked for businesses that collected money from people that had profited from the fraud. Heck, the very roads you drive on were being maintained with money that was earned with the fraud. Those police you commented about earlier... They were hired and payed with the fraud money. You were suckling from the fraud tit right along with the rest of the country.
Only one of us had detailed advance knowledge that crime was being committed. Again, trying to play dumb. Only one of us got a paycheck from it. You gained financially. But when I heard, I did choose to do things about it: I wrote my government reps, I warned friends, I wrote publicly on the topic. And believe me, I will vote based on this. Sure, you'll do all sorts of things, as long as it in no way threatens your income. All of us as citizens are responsible for this. I accept that, and will be paying plenty taxes because of it for years to come. Yet you keep trying to explain why your inaction isn't so bad. I'm just saying that everybody who had detailed advance knowledge of this bears a greater share of the moral responsibility, and in direct proportion to their involvement. Since you fully knew what was happening, you are just as responsible as anyone else. Since you claim to have a higher moral understanding than the rest of the population, yet still did nothing, you are MORE responsible. Especially those, like yourselves, who continued to consciously take money from criminal enterprises. Money is only an accounting system for goods and services. You continued to consciously take goods and service from criminal enterprises. Thus, you are especially responsible for the housing crash. Sure, there are other people who knew a lot more and did a lot worse. I look forward to seeing them in federal prison. But that doesn't absolve the you and yours, either. Sure, there are other people who knew a lot more and did a lot worse. I look forward to seeing them in federal prison. But that doesn't absolve the YOU and YOURS, either.
If I take my POTS phone and plug it into my neighbors VIOP box, Vonage sees me at my neighbors house. The same phone moved whether it is running over POTS lines or VOIP lines works the same for identifying location. Which is to say, the phone simply has no mechanism to do that. When you use standard AT&T phone service, you have a phone jack that you plug your telephone into. The location of this jack is registered with the phone company. When you use Vonage, you have a phone jack that you plug your phone into. The location of this jack is registered with the phone company. Yes, I can break the ability for 911 under Vonage to identify my location by taking the jack to another location. I can break the ability of 911 under AT&T to identify my location by cutting the wire outside my house. Either way, the user CHOOSES to break 911. There is no technical reason for VOIP 911 not to work just as well and reliably as POTS.
So, no, there is no way for a VOIP provider to track your position if you are actively trying to prevent it. This is a benefit to the consumer, not a drawback. The answer to your example of VIOP over wifi on a smartphone is that you are just as safe, as there is no equivalent that is not VIOP, so you would just not have a phone, and thus 911 wouldn't know where you were either way.
Nope. While you CAN take the VIOP device to a new location. When you sign up with at least Vonage, you register the location of the device. Vonage knows where my phone is just as well as AT&T knows where my neighbors phone is.
It gets even worse when you consider that an RPG could easily be used from the ground to blow up planes on take off or landing. I'm sure that someone with even a modicum of military hardware knowledge could list off plenty of other accessible weapons that could do an even more reliable job at taking out a plane from the ground.