Why put that in quotes? If the person who creates the material wants to assert their ownership of it, is there any ambiguity? No more than there is if AOL asserts ownership of their operational databases.
Not paying for something (which its owner has said he thinks you should pay for) that you none the less take anyway... that's avoiding a cost, and that's profiting. But why split hairs? Just because you want to give away your own musical creations doesn't mean that you've now got the rights to waive someone elses rights. The owner is the owner - period! The owner might be generous, or short sited, or just trying to make a living (or trying to get rich). Doesn't matter... it's the material creator's/owner's call on how is material is disseminated, and at what (if any) price.
If the guy vandalized AOL's office building in a way that cost as many man hours, customer good will, and bad press coverage as this event did... that person would be in hot legal water. If he physically walked off with anything else within those walls, the same. Taking something intrinsically valuable, with the express purpose of using it against the wishes of the people that own it... that's a criminal breach of trust, and damaging to a lot of people, their jobs, and their investments. Not to mention his contribution to even more spam choking our collective networks.
where copies are made of music which would not have been bought anyways? The copyright owner loses nothing in this process.
How about standing in a room with the teenager who claims to really like the music (enough to seek out a way and take the time to download it), and the artist who created the music. The teenager has to say to the artist, in so many words: "I like your stuff enough to go to some trouble to get it, but not enough to pay you to entertain my with it. Oh, and you have no choice in the matter. Now, sing for me for free!"
Because the only thing that would make you right is if the person would not have otherwise obtained the music. Take away the ability to easily steal it, and at least some of those hypocritical fans would see the light and buy it.
The copyright owner loses nothing in this process
Nothing, except the living he/she would have made if the person who just dodged paying for the wares they're now enjoying would have paid for it. That's like saying that concerts by artists you really want to see are worth paying money to go see until you notice someone holding a fire exit door to the arena open for you to slip in... and then, because there was a way to get around paying, that, by definition means that the artist should have to like singing to you for free.
This reminds me of a concern that surfaced in the immediate wake of 9/11: that the bad guys were shunning traditional net-based communication (e-mail, forum/newsgroup postings, etc.) and might be using codes or signals embedded in images in common places (eBay, for example).
I seem to recall a distributed screen-saver type app that was being used to crunch through millions of hosted images. Not much to find online about this, but there are articles like this one at NewScientist.com suggesting that the effort was a washout. here are some more stats from a study that came up dry, but there always this reference to "first stenographic image in the wild" as reported by ABC back when.
I'm curious why you would think I'd just make up these incidents
I didn't say that, or mean it. My point is that you're describing lots of bad luck, and seem unaware that all sorts of bad things are not happening to you from one day to the next. Some of those bad things not happening are not happening to you because at least some bad people have been caught in or after the act by a cop, and can't be bad to you any more. But your opinion of hundreds of thousands of people in law enforcement is driven by bad luck (whether or not you've done anything in your driving habits to push that bad luck along somewhat).
And yes, all three are dicks I'd rather not know.
But, I've encountered dozens and dozens of dicks in other places of authority (regulatory, legal, college professors, supervisors, etc.) and of course run into people on the road every day that are complete jackasses. If you know three asses that happen to be cops, you're just in the wrong orbit of humanity (or only looking at a small slice of it). Don't get me wrong - I think that the vast majority of humans are asses. But there's a reason that cops undergo psych reviews all the time... so that the true wack jobs are out of a job. Wish that were true of some college professors, utility workers, and some IT people I've come across, too.
you're forgetting thought that convicting someone of a crime requires PROOF
Actually, the way that most jurisdictions handle traffic violations is to consider them the breaking of a regulation, and the training that the cops go through is considered adequate for them to testify (if it comes to that) about what they saw. It's sort of like you pressing charges if I were to hit you in the head, but without any witnesses. If you tell a judge a convincing enough story (absent anything else to go on), the matter is (legally) considered "proved." Of course, a lot of jurisdicions are getting away from even having to squabble about it by using radar guns that are coupled with video cameras, etc. Pretty hard to argue with the picture of your car in the intersection with the light red.
According to the officer that was unsafe
One of the tickets I got was for "operating the vehicle in an unsafe manner" (weather related, in my case - we had a difference of opinion on whether my 4x4 could handle the snow) - no need for proof beyond his assesment that I wasn't being safe. Sort of like a health code violation in a restaurant. The inspector doesn't like it, and you get cited.
Hmm..not here they don't.
What, give CPR at an accident? Come on, now you're just being dramatic. Cops don't stand there and watch accident victims die. They spend days in EMT training for that reason, and the number of them that have been credited with birthing babies, restarting hearts, pulling kids out of ponds, and so on, is a lot higher than, say, the number of sanitation workers that do the same.
I'd still be subjected to possible abuses of power
Just like you are subject to any government official's whims when no one is looking closely enough. I'll take a cranky cop over an IRS agent any day of the week.
The state has no interest in saving lives, it does have an interest in using fines to pay for more police and traffic court.
Where do you live, China? Any cop that demonstrably saves a life is going to get a huge career boost. The PR that the entire department gains is worth 100 burglary busts, and every department chief knows that. Never mind that decent people are decent people, too. Before people think you've got the tinfoil hat thing going on, you should mix with a few people outside of your normal sphere - not everyone with a badge is perfect, but neither are they, as a group, "fascists." More often, they just reflect the personalities and experiences of the whole town in whihc they live
Your kowtowing to the police is quite frankly, rather amusing. I'm guessing you're either a.) related to a cop or b.) a cop yourself. I know cops, I've seen cops, I've been ticketed by cops, I have friends who are related to cops.
I'm not a cop, I am not related to any cops, and I've been ticketed by cops, more than once. You should really consider yourself lucky that you've never actually needed the police yourself. I've had cars broken into, friends assaulted, or been working in a business that was in the middle of being robbed - all with positive experience when it came to the cops. My last experience was with my seeing two jerks stashing stolen motorcycles in a neighbors' shed while the neighbor was out of town. This involved numerous long interviews with beat cops, detectives, and local sherrif's office staff. Every one of them was professional, while also being haggard and doing too many things at once. I've got a friend who used to be a county copy, then a detective... and is now a US Marshall. His duty with the county kept him working very long hours, saw him dealing day in day out with the most obnoxious, violent, and deceitful people you can imagine, and had him more than once tied up in court with lenghty cases involving everything from illegal immigrants carrying stolen property to stock brokers hiding stolen children. He never had a ticket-writing quota, and how many he did or did not write never had anything to with his pay, his promotions, or his daily activities. That all came down to reviews of his actual performance and his handling of what he ran into every day.
If that man were killed, he'd deserve it, from your point of view? That's funny to you? I'm guessing that you're of the opinion that every street gang uses murder and rape by new members as right of passage, or habitual drunk driver that's on his second manslaughter... screw it, we don't need law enforcement for that!
Cops are a deterrent. They cannot be everywhere to intercept every bad thing that might happen to you (and if they tried, you'd complain about that, too), but to suggest that they've never protected you from anything is complete crap. If you think there aren't violent people more than willing to bash in your brains for your wallet, then you're a naive little girl. If you think that the problem of people like that would go away if we got rid of transit cops on subways, highway cops checking truck stops, and county cops showing their vehicles in dark mall parking lots after closing, then you're completely out of touch with reality.
I'm guessing you've never owned a business, or known anyone that has? Never had the need to get stolen property recovered, or an embezzler stopped?
Aye, 'cause reading a person is exactly the same as reading a computer.
No, because making a quick judgement about a complex set of variables is a skill. I thought you might be sharp enough to understand an analogy, but my mistake on that one.
No, I hate the "pigs" because they let thier power go to their head. You do realize that cops are just the bullies from HS...and now realizing they suddenly have to actually do work but have no real skills, they sign up to be cops.
Know a lot of cops, do you? Personally? I do. I've met one, ever, that was personally abrasive (he talks a lot like you do, actually). They all work unbelievably hard hours, get paid squat, and are universally disliked by people until it's their house that's broken into, or their neighbor that's trashing their yard, or their business that just got ripped off, or their kid that just got killed by a drunk driver.
Yes, I know of someone turned down b/c they scored too high.
Bullshit, and you know it. These people have to have degrees, and when that education is coupled with very high scores, they typically become aware that they can shoot for a fast track towards a detective's job, or work for a state or federal agency (or a DA's office, etc) for better pay. Those people don't work for local police jurisdictions because there isn't the money to pay what they can get. It's the same reason that poor school districts can't get the best teachers.
He said he could technically ticket me anyway, based SOLEY on 'his knowledge and experience' that lead him to believe i was going that fast (never mind that he was much younger then me...).
So, is there anything in your professional life that you can size up at a glance? Do you know, when you see a certain type of server activity, that it's heavy load from a DoS attack? Or, that a certain sluggishness on a web browser is a bloated cache or some malware eating up performance? Are you at least in the neighborhood, making quick observations about things like that? Any chance that someone younger than you could, doing the same things all day, every day, for a few years, also arrive at that sort of observational skill?
Put it this way, if I drove past you at 25, and then did so again at 40, or 55, would you have a pretty good sense of it? I know I can spot it, and patrol cops are in their cars driving in traffic for 30 or 60 hours a week. Every week. Assume thirty, and assume two weeks off a year. That young cop has spent 1500 hours on the clock, watching vehicles, usually on very familiar roads. That's more hours than a lot of pilots have ever spent in the air, and for cops, it's every year. They know what they're looking at, and if they're wrong, it's not by much.
Now, combine that with the fact that some of them are shot dead during traffic stops by people that have something serious to hide, or that one out of a couple dozen stops involves people who aren't licensed correctly, don't have current registrations, are impaired in some way, or actually have warrants out... it's no wonder that bad taillights, obnoxiously loud exhaust, or just crappy driving are what get people pulled over. A traffic stop is what caught Timothy McVeigh after he just killed 300 people. But the same cops that have to look for situations like that are the ones that are called into domestic violence fist-fights in lousy neighborhoods, or that are there to give even cop-hating ingrates CPR at the scene of an accident.
Maybe you should wear a t-shirt or carry a card that says, "Don't look out for me, my family, my property, or my life - I don't like the way a cop treated me." I'm sorry that you don't have a way to avoid paying the taxes that pay for law enforcement, in exchange for getting none of the benefits. Or, would you be willing to pay more in taxes so that 160 IQ PhDs in psychology (who also happen to be in physically good health, can handle a 300 pound angry drunk, and are willing to risk their lives for you) will take jobs as cops?
I don't believe that the plan here is to challenge your use of nice, anonymous cash. It would be interesting to hear, if that's not what you're talking about, how you've managed to preserve your privacy while writing checks and using plastic (um, legally, that is).
Unfortunately, just like any other group of people, it's not the "good cops" that stand out from the crowd and get noticed.
Au contraire. I'd say that, just like any other group of people, there are always some people that are so itching to bitch about everything that the only thing they can see (or talk about) are the grossly distorted (usually, by the media) aberrations that they point to as the source of their discomfort with the entire universe. People like that hate "the pigs" because they hate the hard work of seeing what's good and why to make more of it.
How well does it work on someone that does a lot of physical activity (woodworking/metalworking) who might not have very good ridge detail?
He's probably still got enough texture on his fingers to open his wallet and remove a normal credit/debit card, a check, or (gasp!) actual cash. Come on... retna scanners don't work very well on people with acute corneal disease either... but if we ruled out every technology because of some cases in which it wouldn't work, well, you sure wouldn't be eating up your day looking at slashdot, would you?
We're all getting a little tired of hearing about that bit of legislation.
Well, thanks for at least recognizing that it is legislation (not some edict from the White House or the Justice Department, which can't do such things), and though you don't imply it, that it was supported by both policital parties in a large majority.
It is legislation, and it can and will be altered over time. But it also covers some completely crazy previous loopholes in our ability to do some basic catch-the-bad-guy stuff, and at least starts treating airports like the actually risky places they are. It also recognizes that there are murderous people using communications technology that's less than 100 years old. You know, the kind of people that say things like "democracy is evil" and "we will behead anyone that votes." It takes some changes to deal with those changes. It also takes some reflection and perspective (and time, and continued congressional changes) to know if and when you've got the recipe right.
It's not that is was fantastic, just that it was better than CSI:Dubuque or what have you. I'll actually miss it, somewhat. Ah, who am I kidding... life's too short. If you have to say "somewhat" it should go away. Like mediocre table wine and my last so-called vacation.
Where is the "nerd" in this news? This is just a marketing ploy.
I disagree. It's a marketing ploy, but it's not just a marketing ploy. For those of us that labor in the e-commerce world, this is just one more step towards the average Joe (you know, the guy that will have Linux on his desktop RSN) thinking Online First, Drive To Mall Second. That's a good thing for every nerd that likes our economy to invest in bandwidth, more 'puters, software, and geeks to run it all. More online business is good for the entire Geekiverse.
Actually, given the sweaty lust that people have for MP3 players and fancy plasma TVs, how about "Digital Intelligence?" It's a little vague, but some of the best labels are.
Perhaps "Manufactured Intelligence" has less connotations?
Or, "Engineered Intelligence" or "Mensability"?
I don't know about "MI," though, because that's also a common acronym for a type of heart attack. You know, "That Dr. Smith is really working on an MI!"
And hence (given popular indigestion over the work "artificial," which was my point, though I didn't make it clearly enough), my gut sense that we need to get that word out of the popular discussion, especially as we start using (what we geeks all more comfortably know to be) AI to do things like fly 600 passenger Airbus A380s. Call it whatever you want (say, "reactive flight control system"), but "AI" has been so tainted by popular entertainment that it's harder to fund, harder to explain, and tends to be polarizing for no useful reason.
also artifice comes from the latin root art and originally meant craftmanship
Yup, I get that. Forgive me if I rely too often on dogs to make a point (but when one owns serious bird dogs, one does these things). So: the two dogs I own are the absolutely unnatural product of human art, and I would say that while their wicked (nay, evil sometimes) intelligence certainly has its roots in wolves, there is no question that certain aspects of their capabilities and firmware are the direct result of human (in this case, German) engineering. Love those Germans and their old-fashioned genetic engineering.
Point is: some of the skills that we've cultivated in these specialized animals (through careful selection of traits, combined in decades-long-term projects to amplify and shape the stuff that works in a certain way) has, without question resulted in greater intelligence. You can even spot it in one bloodline vs. another. While this is not the synthesis of intelligence from the ground up, it is a degree of intelligence that wouldn't (without thousands of generations and shocking luck) otherwise happen. It's artificially enhanced intelligence, but you sure don't sense that when you look them in the eye, or see them know the difference between a real shotgun and a training prop from 30 yards away.
For all of the thousands of times I've read the phrase "artificial intelligence," it's only recently occurred to me to wonder whether there's a point in using "artificial." Certainly the first flavors of this are at best insect-like, or sort of idiot-savant (like chess playing), but when we first experience a system that's as awake as we're all hoping for... then it's just "intelligence," isn't it?
I know - read four thousand sci fi novels and then come back to this conversation... but it seems that the "artificial" of this phrase is increasingly awkward. It makes some people dismissive about the potential, other people feaky about the same, and seems destined to always shortcut the philosophical payload. Not because I fret over the machine's eventual feelings (though if it's Linux-based, I'm sure it will have very warm, friendly, altruistic feelings), but because by boxing code-based intelligence into the "artificial" category, it props up the more mystical perception of our own native smarts.
The very word, from "artiface," suggests that whatever it will be, it won't really count as intelligence. But we're very comfortable (or at least I am) talking about, say, an intelligent dog or primate. So, if we can even approach that with a system that isn't any more fragile than walking, breathing meat... then surely that's not artiface? OK, smack me around now. Thanks.
Guess where all the 2010 dot-whatever venture capital is going to come from! This sounds so familiar - hope they keep it all connected to reality, and hire some financial consultants for their geniuses, who often turn out not to be when it involves things like stocks.
Learn to sing. If bandwidth is a problem, hum or whistle. All three formats go with you from room to room, and the hands-free interface is amazingly intuitive.
Believe me, no one is getting rich at $10/month. I know one of the folks on the inside of this game, and as much as he would like to be rich, $10/month at the player level isn't going to do it. Less may attract a few more players, more may run most of them off... but, really, if you like the game, can't you dig around in your pocket and pay 3 Rings what you'd pay Dominos for the one pizza you eat while you're playing the game, one time that month? And the game lasts all month, unlike that pizza. Wake up! Even people in the Great Wrkers' Paradise of San Francisco have to earn actual cash to pay the rent, though broadband wireless at park benches may soon solve that whole work-from-home thing.
Good for 3 Rings, and good for the players. Haaarrr!
Slashdot Mirror
i download "copyrighted" material
Why put that in quotes? If the person who creates the material wants to assert their ownership of it, is there any ambiguity? No more than there is if AOL asserts ownership of their operational databases.
Not paying for something (which its owner has said he thinks you should pay for) that you none the less take anyway... that's avoiding a cost, and that's profiting. But why split hairs? Just because you want to give away your own musical creations doesn't mean that you've now got the rights to waive someone elses rights. The owner is the owner - period! The owner might be generous, or short sited, or just trying to make a living (or trying to get rich). Doesn't matter... it's the material creator's/owner's call on how is material is disseminated, and at what (if any) price.
If the guy vandalized AOL's office building in a way that cost as many man hours, customer good will, and bad press coverage as this event did... that person would be in hot legal water. If he physically walked off with anything else within those walls, the same. Taking something intrinsically valuable, with the express purpose of using it against the wishes of the people that own it... that's a criminal breach of trust, and damaging to a lot of people, their jobs, and their investments. Not to mention his contribution to even more spam choking our collective networks.
where copies are made of music which would not have been bought anyways? The copyright owner loses nothing in this process.
How about standing in a room with the teenager who claims to really like the music (enough to seek out a way and take the time to download it), and the artist who created the music. The teenager has to say to the artist, in so many words: "I like your stuff enough to go to some trouble to get it, but not enough to pay you to entertain my with it. Oh, and you have no choice in the matter. Now, sing for me for free!"
Because the only thing that would make you right is if the person would not have otherwise obtained the music. Take away the ability to easily steal it, and at least some of those hypocritical fans would see the light and buy it.
The copyright owner loses nothing in this process
Nothing, except the living he/she would have made if the person who just dodged paying for the wares they're now enjoying would have paid for it. That's like saying that concerts by artists you really want to see are worth paying money to go see until you notice someone holding a fire exit door to the arena open for you to slip in... and then, because there was a way to get around paying, that, by definition means that the artist should have to like singing to you for free.
Too clever by half! Of course, the bad guys would have to use an ISP that doesn't filter spam...
That piece of their e-mail operations was run by AT&T. Or, was that SBC? It's all a blur...
This reminds me of a concern that surfaced in the immediate wake of 9/11: that the bad guys were shunning traditional net-based communication (e-mail, forum/newsgroup postings, etc.) and might be using codes or signals embedded in images in common places (eBay, for example).
I seem to recall a distributed screen-saver type app that was being used to crunch through millions of hosted images. Not much to find online about this, but there are articles like this one at NewScientist.com suggesting that the effort was a washout. here are some more stats from a study that came up dry, but there always this reference to "first stenographic image in the wild" as reported by ABC back when.
With the massive quantity of Barry Whiteon gone, cool, heavy dark matter is ruled out, I guess.
Says the author of a -1 post.
What the hell are you talking about?
I'm curious why you would think I'd just make up these incidents
I didn't say that, or mean it. My point is that you're describing lots of bad luck, and seem unaware that all sorts of bad things are not happening to you from one day to the next. Some of those bad things not happening are not happening to you because at least some bad people have been caught in or after the act by a cop, and can't be bad to you any more. But your opinion of hundreds of thousands of people in law enforcement is driven by bad luck (whether or not you've done anything in your driving habits to push that bad luck along somewhat).
And yes, all three are dicks I'd rather not know.
But, I've encountered dozens and dozens of dicks in other places of authority (regulatory, legal, college professors, supervisors, etc.) and of course run into people on the road every day that are complete jackasses. If you know three asses that happen to be cops, you're just in the wrong orbit of humanity (or only looking at a small slice of it). Don't get me wrong - I think that the vast majority of humans are asses. But there's a reason that cops undergo psych reviews all the time... so that the true wack jobs are out of a job. Wish that were true of some college professors, utility workers, and some IT people I've come across, too.
you're forgetting thought that convicting someone of a crime requires PROOF
Actually, the way that most jurisdictions handle traffic violations is to consider them the breaking of a regulation, and the training that the cops go through is considered adequate for them to testify (if it comes to that) about what they saw. It's sort of like you pressing charges if I were to hit you in the head, but without any witnesses. If you tell a judge a convincing enough story (absent anything else to go on), the matter is (legally) considered "proved." Of course, a lot of jurisdicions are getting away from even having to squabble about it by using radar guns that are coupled with video cameras, etc. Pretty hard to argue with the picture of your car in the intersection with the light red.
According to the officer that was unsafe
One of the tickets I got was for "operating the vehicle in an unsafe manner" (weather related, in my case - we had a difference of opinion on whether my 4x4 could handle the snow) - no need for proof beyond his assesment that I wasn't being safe. Sort of like a health code violation in a restaurant. The inspector doesn't like it, and you get cited.
Hmm..not here they don't.
What, give CPR at an accident? Come on, now you're just being dramatic. Cops don't stand there and watch accident victims die. They spend days in EMT training for that reason, and the number of them that have been credited with birthing babies, restarting hearts, pulling kids out of ponds, and so on, is a lot higher than, say, the number of sanitation workers that do the same.
I'd still be subjected to possible abuses of power
Just like you are subject to any government official's whims when no one is looking closely enough. I'll take a cranky cop over an IRS agent any day of the week.
The state has no interest in saving lives, it does have an interest in using fines to pay for more police and traffic court.
Where do you live, China? Any cop that demonstrably saves a life is going to get a huge career boost. The PR that the entire department gains is worth 100 burglary busts, and every department chief knows that. Never mind that decent people are decent people, too. Before people think you've got the tinfoil hat thing going on, you should mix with a few people outside of your normal sphere - not everyone with a badge is perfect, but neither are they, as a group, "fascists." More often, they just reflect the personalities and experiences of the whole town in whihc they live
Your kowtowing to the police is quite frankly, rather amusing. I'm guessing you're either a.) related to a cop or b.) a cop yourself. I know cops, I've seen cops, I've been ticketed by cops, I have friends who are related to cops.
I'm not a cop, I am not related to any cops, and I've been ticketed by cops, more than once. You should really consider yourself lucky that you've never actually needed the police yourself. I've had cars broken into, friends assaulted, or been working in a business that was in the middle of being robbed - all with positive experience when it came to the cops. My last experience was with my seeing two jerks stashing stolen motorcycles in a neighbors' shed while the neighbor was out of town. This involved numerous long interviews with beat cops, detectives, and local sherrif's office staff. Every one of them was professional, while also being haggard and doing too many things at once. I've got a friend who used to be a county copy, then a detective... and is now a US Marshall. His duty with the county kept him working very long hours, saw him dealing day in day out with the most obnoxious, violent, and deceitful people you can imagine, and had him more than once tied up in court with lenghty cases involving everything from illegal immigrants carrying stolen property to stock brokers hiding stolen children. He never had a ticket-writing quota, and how many he did or did not write never had anything to with his pay, his promotions, or his daily activities. That all came down to reviews of his actual performance and his handling of what he ran into every day.
If that man were killed, he'd deserve it, from your point of view? That's funny to you? I'm guessing that you're of the opinion that every street gang uses murder and rape by new members as right of passage, or habitual drunk driver that's on his second manslaughter... screw it, we don't need law enforcement for that!
Cops are a deterrent. They cannot be everywhere to intercept every bad thing that might happen to you (and if they tried, you'd complain about that, too), but to suggest that they've never protected you from anything is complete crap. If you think there aren't violent people more than willing to bash in your brains for your wallet, then you're a naive little girl. If you think that the problem of people like that would go away if we got rid of transit cops on subways, highway cops checking truck stops, and county cops showing their vehicles in dark mall parking lots after closing, then you're completely out of touch with reality.
I'm guessing you've never owned a business, or known anyone that has? Never had the need to get stolen property recovered, or an embezzler stopped?
Aye, 'cause reading a person is exactly the same as reading a computer.
No, because making a quick judgement about a complex set of variables is a skill. I thought you might be sharp enough to understand an analogy, but my mistake on that one.
This disturbs me.
Wow, I bet you get hit by lightning a lot, too.
No, I hate the "pigs" because they let thier power go to their head. You do realize that cops are just the bullies from HS...and now realizing they suddenly have to actually do work but have no real skills, they sign up to be cops.
Know a lot of cops, do you? Personally? I do. I've met one, ever, that was personally abrasive (he talks a lot like you do, actually). They all work unbelievably hard hours, get paid squat, and are universally disliked by people until it's their house that's broken into, or their neighbor that's trashing their yard, or their business that just got ripped off, or their kid that just got killed by a drunk driver.
Yes, I know of someone turned down b/c they scored too high.
Bullshit, and you know it. These people have to have degrees, and when that education is coupled with very high scores, they typically become aware that they can shoot for a fast track towards a detective's job, or work for a state or federal agency (or a DA's office, etc) for better pay. Those people don't work for local police jurisdictions because there isn't the money to pay what they can get. It's the same reason that poor school districts can't get the best teachers.
He said he could technically ticket me anyway, based SOLEY on 'his knowledge and experience' that lead him to believe i was going that fast (never mind that he was much younger then me...).
So, is there anything in your professional life that you can size up at a glance? Do you know, when you see a certain type of server activity, that it's heavy load from a DoS attack? Or, that a certain sluggishness on a web browser is a bloated cache or some malware eating up performance? Are you at least in the neighborhood, making quick observations about things like that? Any chance that someone younger than you could, doing the same things all day, every day, for a few years, also arrive at that sort of observational skill?
Put it this way, if I drove past you at 25, and then did so again at 40, or 55, would you have a pretty good sense of it? I know I can spot it, and patrol cops are in their cars driving in traffic for 30 or 60 hours a week. Every week. Assume thirty, and assume two weeks off a year. That young cop has spent 1500 hours on the clock, watching vehicles, usually on very familiar roads. That's more hours than a lot of pilots have ever spent in the air, and for cops, it's every year. They know what they're looking at, and if they're wrong, it's not by much.
Now, combine that with the fact that some of them are shot dead during traffic stops by people that have something serious to hide, or that one out of a couple dozen stops involves people who aren't licensed correctly, don't have current registrations, are impaired in some way, or actually have warrants out... it's no wonder that bad taillights, obnoxiously loud exhaust, or just crappy driving are what get people pulled over. A traffic stop is what caught Timothy McVeigh after he just killed 300 people. But the same cops that have to look for situations like that are the ones that are called into domestic violence fist-fights in lousy neighborhoods, or that are there to give even cop-hating ingrates CPR at the scene of an accident.
Maybe you should wear a t-shirt or carry a card that says, "Don't look out for me, my family, my property, or my life - I don't like the way a cop treated me." I'm sorry that you don't have a way to avoid paying the taxes that pay for law enforcement, in exchange for getting none of the benefits. Or, would you be willing to pay more in taxes so that 160 IQ PhDs in psychology (who also happen to be in physically good health, can handle a 300 pound angry drunk, and are willing to risk their lives for you) will take jobs as cops?
I don't believe that the plan here is to challenge your use of nice, anonymous cash. It would be interesting to hear, if that's not what you're talking about, how you've managed to preserve your privacy while writing checks and using plastic (um, legally, that is).
Unfortunately, just like any other group of people, it's not the "good cops" that stand out from the crowd and get noticed.
Au contraire. I'd say that, just like any other group of people, there are always some people that are so itching to bitch about everything that the only thing they can see (or talk about) are the grossly distorted (usually, by the media) aberrations that they point to as the source of their discomfort with the entire universe. People like that hate "the pigs" because they hate the hard work of seeing what's good and why to make more of it.
How well does it work on someone that does a lot of physical activity (woodworking/metalworking) who might not have very good ridge detail?
He's probably still got enough texture on his fingers to open his wallet and remove a normal credit/debit card, a check, or (gasp!) actual cash. Come on... retna scanners don't work very well on people with acute corneal disease either... but if we ruled out every technology because of some cases in which it wouldn't work, well, you sure wouldn't be eating up your day looking at slashdot, would you?
We're all getting a little tired of hearing about that bit of legislation.
Well, thanks for at least recognizing that it is legislation (not some edict from the White House or the Justice Department, which can't do such things), and though you don't imply it, that it was supported by both policital parties in a large majority.
It is legislation, and it can and will be altered over time. But it also covers some completely crazy previous loopholes in our ability to do some basic catch-the-bad-guy stuff, and at least starts treating airports like the actually risky places they are. It also recognizes that there are murderous people using communications technology that's less than 100 years old. You know, the kind of people that say things like "democracy is evil" and "we will behead anyone that votes." It takes some changes to deal with those changes. It also takes some reflection and perspective (and time, and continued congressional changes) to know if and when you've got the recipe right.
It's not that is was fantastic, just that it was better than CSI:Dubuque or what have you. I'll actually miss it, somewhat. Ah, who am I kidding... life's too short. If you have to say "somewhat" it should go away. Like mediocre table wine and my last so-called vacation.
Where is the "nerd" in this news? This is just a marketing ploy.
I disagree. It's a marketing ploy, but it's not just a marketing ploy. For those of us that labor in the e-commerce world, this is just one more step towards the average Joe (you know, the guy that will have Linux on his desktop RSN) thinking Online First, Drive To Mall Second. That's a good thing for every nerd that likes our economy to invest in bandwidth, more 'puters, software, and geeks to run it all. More online business is good for the entire Geekiverse.
Actually, given the sweaty lust that people have for MP3 players and fancy plasma TVs, how about "Digital Intelligence?" It's a little vague, but some of the best labels are.
Perhaps "Manufactured Intelligence" has less connotations?
Or, "Engineered Intelligence" or "Mensability"?
I don't know about "MI," though, because that's also a common acronym for a type of heart attack. You know, "That Dr. Smith is really working on an MI!"
And hence (given popular indigestion over the work "artificial," which was my point, though I didn't make it clearly enough), my gut sense that we need to get that word out of the popular discussion, especially as we start using (what we geeks all more comfortably know to be) AI to do things like fly 600 passenger Airbus A380s. Call it whatever you want (say, "reactive flight control system"), but "AI" has been so tainted by popular entertainment that it's harder to fund, harder to explain, and tends to be polarizing for no useful reason.
also artifice comes from the latin root art and originally meant craftmanship
Yup, I get that. Forgive me if I rely too often on dogs to make a point (but when one owns serious bird dogs, one does these things). So: the two dogs I own are the absolutely unnatural product of human art, and I would say that while their wicked (nay, evil sometimes) intelligence certainly has its roots in wolves, there is no question that certain aspects of their capabilities and firmware are the direct result of human (in this case, German) engineering. Love those Germans and their old-fashioned genetic engineering.
Point is: some of the skills that we've cultivated in these specialized animals (through careful selection of traits, combined in decades-long-term projects to amplify and shape the stuff that works in a certain way) has, without question resulted in greater intelligence. You can even spot it in one bloodline vs. another. While this is not the synthesis of intelligence from the ground up, it is a degree of intelligence that wouldn't (without thousands of generations and shocking luck) otherwise happen. It's artificially enhanced intelligence, but you sure don't sense that when you look them in the eye, or see them know the difference between a real shotgun and a training prop from 30 yards away.
Sorry to ramble, but this is a prickly topic!
For all of the thousands of times I've read the phrase "artificial intelligence," it's only recently occurred to me to wonder whether there's a point in using "artificial." Certainly the first flavors of this are at best insect-like, or sort of idiot-savant (like chess playing), but when we first experience a system that's as awake as we're all hoping for... then it's just "intelligence," isn't it?
I know - read four thousand sci fi novels and then come back to this conversation... but it seems that the "artificial" of this phrase is increasingly awkward. It makes some people dismissive about the potential, other people feaky about the same, and seems destined to always shortcut the philosophical payload. Not because I fret over the machine's eventual feelings (though if it's Linux-based, I'm sure it will have very warm, friendly, altruistic feelings), but because by boxing code-based intelligence into the "artificial" category, it props up the more mystical perception of our own native smarts.
The very word, from "artiface," suggests that whatever it will be, it won't really count as intelligence. But we're very comfortable (or at least I am) talking about, say, an intelligent dog or primate. So, if we can even approach that with a system that isn't any more fragile than walking, breathing meat... then surely that's not artiface? OK, smack me around now. Thanks.
Guess where all the 2010 dot-whatever venture capital is going to come from! This sounds so familiar - hope they keep it all connected to reality, and hire some financial consultants for their geniuses, who often turn out not to be when it involves things like stocks.
Learn to sing. If bandwidth is a problem, hum or whistle. All three formats go with you from room to room, and the hands-free interface is amazingly intuitive.
Believe me, no one is getting rich at $10/month. I know one of the folks on the inside of this game, and as much as he would like to be rich, $10/month at the player level isn't going to do it. Less may attract a few more players, more may run most of them off... but, really, if you like the game, can't you dig around in your pocket and pay 3 Rings what you'd pay Dominos for the one pizza you eat while you're playing the game, one time that month? And the game lasts all month, unlike that pizza. Wake up! Even people in the Great Wrkers' Paradise of San Francisco have to earn actual cash to pay the rent, though broadband wireless at park benches may soon solve that whole work-from-home thing.
Good for 3 Rings, and good for the players. Haaarrr!
Thanks, I'll be here all week! Try the chicken, and don't forget to tip your waitress.