Your package deal has a problem: sweatshop bashing is not like the others.
Have you ever asked why anyone would choose to work in a sweatshop? Could it be because any employment at all is better than roaming the streets looking for coins and bits of food?
I am going to go out on a limb and state that the Segway has almost no real legitimate use.
[..."we need more exercise" rant...]
Unless, of course, one happens to be handicapped. Depending on one's ailment, the Segway is a godsend.
Interestingly, the Segway company was very very careful to avoid any mention of this obvious application for the Segway, probably because they wanted to give it a "cool hip yuppie" image.
This is no free market. If you want a textbook example of barriers to entry, use the airline industry.
Do you know how many airlines are now operating? There are 18 major carriers, and dozens of regionals and commuters. Many of them are young, so whatever barriers you think there are, they aren't disproportionate to the number of players that the market needs in order to be efficient. In fact there are probably too many -- think about the cost of duplicating the maintenance, luggage, and ticketing infrastructure eighteen times.
And besides, do you know how hard it would be to orchestrate any sort of monopolistic action between 18+ players, when any single player could then jump the fence and spoil it?
The lack of lead in solder is a technological issue and as such is solved by more advanced technology. Certainly there are few people here who are opposed to higher technology?
Sure we can whine about the extra work we are forced to do, or the fact that we have to pay for higher technology, but what good does that do. As technologically savvy people we live for the chance to advance the technology.
Christened "EVE" in honor of Sir Richard's mother, who performed the official naming ceremony, WK2 is both visually remarkable and represents ground-breaking aerospace technology. It is the world's largest all carbon composite aircraft and many of its component parts have been built using composite materials for the very first time. At 140 ft, the wing spar is the longest single carbon composite aviation component ever manufactured.
"Eve"?! Not only is that a boring name, but it overlooks some important aviation history that preceded this enormous aircraft. They should've named it "The Glass Goose" instead.
They probably realized there will be no such prosecution, because prosecution would draw attention to how easily Tor activity can be monitored and conclusions drawn from it. That kind of attention is a Bad Thing: any government would instead prefer that citizens believe that they have access to something which is secret and anonymous (but which is actually not).
It's good to disrupt enemy communications. It's better to intercept enemy communications. It's best to eavesdrop on enemy communications when the enemy thinks eavesdropping is impossible.
I would also note to damburger that the petty despots and terrorists only have power because of state sponsored nuclear terror was practiced live and in action on civilians by the USA (viz Nagasaki and Hiroshima) and held the world hostage in the fear mongering practice of the Cold War by the USA and CCCP.
Just because it involves fear, doesn't mean it is a net negative move. I think it's great that the world now (finally!) fears the prospect of a major war. There has not been a WWIII even though there were plenty of times in the twentieth century that someone was tempted and had the conventional capability.
If you think the past fifty years of fear of nuclear war has empowered terrorists, I request you reconsider which terrorist acts actual people actually fear. The suicide bomber seems particularly able to hold our attention.
I agree with damburger that it is sad that a small group of asshats is making life exceptionally difficult for the rest of humanity. Remember when you could go to Mexico or Canada and use your Driver's License as ID? Remember a time before the DHS? I do.
Are you sure that's the doing of a small group? I am starting to look at society as a pattern, with random individuals rising to play roles that are demanded of them. Our pattern is presently still reverberating from 09/11, and probably won't calm down again until we've had a decade of quiet. Israel is in a similar situation. In this environment, a paranoid leader is demanded, and so one will arise no matter what any person or group does or doesn't.
This is expected, though. Since when do projects half this scale go as planned? I just hope the Americans get their shit together and give Orion the funding it needs.
Actually this kind of cost overrun is absolutely planned.
You'd do it too, if faced with this alternative:
Propose to congress a project which will cost $40B, be truthful about the cost, and be rejected; or
Propose to congress a project which will cost $40B, lie and say it will cost $15B, and be approved. Later the cost will rise but Congress will not care, or will commit the "sunk cost fallacy".
If you cared *nothing* for your country but just wanted to run a big project, then you would lie, get the money, and do the project. On the other hand, if you cared *dearly* for your country, and knew it needed a space program, then you would lie, get the money, and do the project.
Ah well.
I am finally at peace with this. What I will never be at peace with, however, is the fact that the space program is a mere drop in the bucket of market-distorting federal transfer payments.
This sounds like a play by the Secretary of State to win some political points than anything else.
Yeah, good call.
I was thinking: you only see this kind of frantic throwing-the-book-at-him, in this case well before any crime was actually consummated, if the person is drawing our attention to a dangerous idea. The idea, in this case, might be any of:
your one vote doesn't matter
if an election were so close that your vote did matter, then there would be a recount and it would stop mattering again
political leaders sell their votes as a matter of course
the two dominant political parties are not actually opposed to each other
Our current social pattern has some spots which, if they became widely known, would cause a collapse. You can tell you've found one when people jump your case just for broaching the subject.
It's not the data that's protected by copyright, it's what the data represents.
No matter how you mangle the data when storing it or transferring it from one location to another, the end result is the same. They're trying to use semantics and technical voodoo to get around copyright law. It won't work.
Defense: I didn't do it.
Prosecution: We found the body in your apartment, hidden under your bed.
Defense: It is true that I placed a fast-moving bullet into the air adjacent to his chest, but if there happened to be any later consequences, those were not clearly visible from the location of the trigger.
Jury: Hang him.
So yeah, this is no legal defense. But perhaps it wasn't meant to be one. It seems like subterfuge, countersurveillance, and plausible deniability than anything else. But that plausibility won't hold up long, because the courts will soon say "If we find a bunch of random files on your drive, the burden is on *you* to prove that they aren't naughty bits." They'd make you extract the original content from the blocks, which hopefully haven't later disappeared off the internet, and if you couldn't do it then you'd be in hot water.
Yeah, but according to the study, this probably means that she decided it long before she told you.... This is why dating sucks. The guy is always the last one to know that the girl he likes is just screwing with his head, has no interest in him whatsoever, and is just using him to piss off her parents, get free home repairs, make her ex jealous, etc.
You can make peace with the dating game once you seriously grok it from the woman's point of view.
Sperm is cheap, but womb space is expensive. Therefore, every woman must fight an information war against dozens of suitors, who have devoted a lifetime to masking their intentions.
Woman therefore resort to jamming: they must give off so many conflicting signals about their needs and desires, about what they admire in a man, that nobody can deceive them because nobody is exactly sure what the right answer is. After a time of keeping him confused, his confused reactions reveal the underlying pattern of *his* personality, which is the vital information that she needs to make the decision.
And furthermore copyright law has been subverted by corporate interests and is just a shadow of what the found fathers wanted it to be. Copyright is OUR rights not theirs it makes sure WE get the copyrightable content but it has been changed around to give CORPORATIONS all the control.
Guess what? The CORPORATIONS that own this stuff are composed of people and owned by people. You can become one of those people for about $50 a share. A corporation is the modern expression of the Right of Free Assembly, and is used to administer cooperative division-of-labor and ownership of property.
Would you prefer that property can only be owned whole, by single individuals? Do you realize that it would be impossible to undertake any large, capital-intensive project in that environment?
Life, my eyesight, both of my legs, etc. Some things can't be priced b/c they are irreplaceable and vital to my happiness.
On the contrary, we can and do price those things every day. The price can be measured by studying what salary is demanded of people to bear what percent risk of loss. See "Changes in the Value of Life, 1940-1980", at http://web.mit.edu/costa/www/risk10.pdf, and "Present Value of Expected Lifetime Productivity, by Age, Gender, and Discount Rate, 1992", at http://www.nida.nih.gov/EconomicCosts/AppendixB_1.html. They crunched the numbers and built an equation showing the risk-versus-wage-demanded curve for average people.
A "100% risk of loss of life" is a special case where the price curve goes to infinity, because money loses its value at the time of death... although in the Middle East we do observe suicide bombers being incented by large (for them) financial benefits awarded to their families. And it's easy to imagine a parent selling (if it were possible) their remaining life in exchange for the money needed to cure a loved one of some terrible ailment.
It would also be possible to get the price for consensual loss of eyesight, if our society allowed people to sell their eyes as donor organs. You too would consider it if the price was right -- say, ten billion dollars cool cash. It's easy to sit in your armchair now and insist that "no price is too high", but it would be a different story if a truckful of cash actually pulled up in your driveway.
Of course, you should be suspicious of me anyway; I'm over 30:-)
Opinions may vary from person to person, but we have the capacity to make judgement as to the degree of harm. Now you shifted your statement to it being "very difficult to quantify in an adversarial system" and that's something else. My original statement stands.
Who "has the capacity to make judgments as to the degree of harm"? That's the point, that's the problem.
Yes every individual has that capacity, but there is no objective criteria with which to hammer out agreement between adversarial parties. They both "have the capacity" to guesstimate the harm, but what do you do when their answers differ by an order of magnitude?
Answering "the judge or jury will decide" doesn't solve the problem, it simply admits that the problem can't be solved and so must be heard by the King for an arbitrary ruling.
Whereas economic damages are worlds easier to prove to a reasonable man. I can assign an exact dollar value to five days' lost wages. But what if I say that your argumentative posts on slashdot caused me oodles of pain and suffering that I feel is worth ten million?
Bulls***. Tell us, how much would you charge to let me lock you in a cupboard for 24 hours? How much would you charge to let me stalk you for x days and beat you y times? You can very easily fix a price for those abuses.
I would not accept payment for you for these things. There are things that matter to me more than money. That is what I mean when I say that some of us do not believe that everything has a price. And you can't fit these people into your system where you can assign a price. There's no exchange rate to be found.
You're dreaming if you think you'd turn down a suitcase filled with 100-dollar bills in exchange for being locked in a cupboard for 24 hours. Or a duffel bag full for a week's worth of stalking and beatings. What's that, $100,000 an hour in exchange for serious distress?
I know it causes you dissonance to think that everything has a price. If you consider that you trade your time (your ultimate finite resource) for money, and then later trade that money (to others for their time) in exchange for safety and comfort, you'll see that money is a perfectly fine tool for denominating everything. Indeed, you should be suspicious of anyone who protests that something can't be priced.
Nonsense. If somenone is raped, is that not agreed upon that harm has been done? Or do you measure it merely as a cost of a few therapy sessions? If I lock someone up in a cupboard for 24 hours do you just assess it as loss of income from a days work and reimburse accordingly? If someone is stalked or beaten, is it not possible to prove harm or agree that there is harm?
Where do you get the idea that there is disagreement whether harm was done?
The disagreement is over how much harm was done. And the intangible emotional issues are very very difficult to quantify in an adversarial system.
Trying to set everything in terms of money doesn't work for those of us who do not believe everything has a price.
Bulls***. Tell us, how much would you charge to let me lock you in a cupboard for 24 hours? How much would you charge to let me stalk you for x days and beat you y times? You can very easily fix a price for those abuses.
The hard part is fixing a price afterward, when those things were done to you without your consent. The lack of control causes people to wildly overestimate their price.
Being monitored creates stress. Now imagine putting people permanently under stress. I could see a few flipping before long.
Yes, and more. Privacy lets you behave morally (as judged by your own moral code) in a world of people who would wrongly criticize you. For example, right now I need privacy in order to spank my children in a world that is presently running a perilous anti-spanking experiment.
As social creatures, disapproval and disenfranchisement cause us physical pain. Privacy shields our proper actions from that.
Shall I tag this 'badsummary', or do we have an 'oxymoron' tag we can use?
"...have released a report that summarizes what they've found after looking through 500 forensic investigations involving 230 million records, and analyzes hundreds of corporate breaches including three of the five largest ones ever reported. What did they find? How about (1) Nearly nine in 10 corporate data breaches could have been prevented had reasonable security measures been in place,
As well, nearly nine in 10 corporate assholes could have been prevented had reasonable security measures been in place at the time of conception.
[...] while defacements frequently originate from the Middle East."
[People these days, who drive big dangerous SUVs, only care about their own self-interest.]
Sadly you can remove "these days" from that claim. Your point would still be accurate and as a bonus it wouldn't come out as "Get of my lawn!".
Yes, it's always been that way, and it will always be that way. Ideology (including religion) can somewhat encourage altruistic behavior, but that's a constant and uphill battle. So, assuming this big-car/small-car situation is a problem (and I'm not sure we should assume that), we need a solution that appeals to self-interest.
The lowest-hanging, most-efficient fruit to pick along that path, is the elimination of externalities. That will probably require state intervention, which is tricky and perilous but still do-able.
While I love this version of events, according to Wikipedia that whole bit of it that you've just described is filed under conspiracy theory.
I read that too. That's a different theory from a different book. Read up on Craven's book instead -- he's one of the guys who actually worked on the Glomar project.
The U.S. government has used false pretenses to cover up secret submarine recovery operations before. In Project Jennifer, the CIA got Howard Hughes to build the Glomar Explorer, ostensibly to mine undersea minerals but actually to try and recover a sunken Russian submarine. The project failed to recover much of the submarine, which broke apart as it was being pulled to the surface. However, two Russian nuclear missiles were recoverd.
Probably the most interesting thing about that mission was the real reason behind it...
The Russian sub had left its assigned patrol area without leave. It surfaced and may have attempted a rogue missile launch against Hawaii. A failsafe or tamper-proofing or other failure caused the missile to self-destruct inside the launch tube. The sub then sank.
In the salvage effort the Americans weren't aiming to learn anything about Soviet nuclear sub construction. Rather, they wanted to prove (to the Russians) the suspicion that the sub's officers had gone rogue. This information was a powerfully upsetting revelation to the Russian military command, because it meant they did not have reliable control over their boomers.
John Craven, one of the guys who worked on the salvage project eventually wrote a tell-some book about it. Fascinating stuff.
Your reasoning though, with all due respect, is wonky. Is being a little bit more attractive FEELING at home really that important? Do you only go to pubs, and only hold jobs, that use old-fashioned light bulbs? I generally don't really care what I look like at home, the people there already know that I really am an ugly cuss, as I know this. What are you going to do when incandescent lights are illegal, or phased out, which seems to be the way things are going?
If you introspect your own algorithm for finding a partner, you may gain new respect for the concern women have for even small things like color tone. Women care because men care -- often unknowingly, often in flat denial... and every increase in our own 'score' means we'll win a better partner on the open market.
Such FEELINGs would be unimportant if we humans were the rational robots that we fancy ourselves to be. But we're still half animal, and a daily feeling of efficaciousness (of which attractiveness is a major component, no matter what your gender) is seriously valuable.
As for as the coming demise of incandescence, you watch. People, probably mostly women, will demand warmer tones in their CFLs and LEDs, and whoever delivers will win the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Abrasives, bah. Just wave a propane flame gently and quickly over it. The heat will slightly melt the plastic and smooth out the scratches.
Your package deal has a problem: sweatshop bashing is not like the others.
Have you ever asked why anyone would choose to work in a sweatshop? Could it be because any employment at all is better than roaming the streets looking for coins and bits of food?
Unless, of course, one happens to be handicapped. Depending on one's ailment, the Segway is a godsend.
Interestingly, the Segway company was very very careful to avoid any mention of this obvious application for the Segway, probably because they wanted to give it a "cool hip yuppie" image.
Do you know how many airlines are now operating? There are 18 major carriers, and dozens of regionals and commuters. Many of them are young, so whatever barriers you think there are, they aren't disproportionate to the number of players that the market needs in order to be efficient. In fact there are probably too many -- think about the cost of duplicating the maintenance, luggage, and ticketing infrastructure eighteen times.
And besides, do you know how hard it would be to orchestrate any sort of monopolistic action between 18+ players, when any single player could then jump the fence and spoil it?
You are talking through your hat.
Specifically, you are committing the broken window fallacy.
RoHS is a serious problem, so much so that military equipment is exempt from it.
"Eve"?! Not only is that a boring name, but it overlooks some important aviation history that preceded this enormous aircraft. They should've named it "The Glass Goose" instead.
They probably realized there will be no such prosecution, because prosecution would draw attention to how easily Tor activity can be monitored and conclusions drawn from it. That kind of attention is a Bad Thing: any government would instead prefer that citizens believe that they have access to something which is secret and anonymous (but which is actually not).
It's good to disrupt enemy communications. It's better to intercept enemy communications. It's best to eavesdrop on enemy communications when the enemy thinks eavesdropping is impossible.
Just because it involves fear, doesn't mean it is a net negative move. I think it's great that the world now (finally!) fears the prospect of a major war. There has not been a WWIII even though there were plenty of times in the twentieth century that someone was tempted and had the conventional capability.
If you think the past fifty years of fear of nuclear war has empowered terrorists, I request you reconsider which terrorist acts actual people actually fear. The suicide bomber seems particularly able to hold our attention.
Are you sure that's the doing of a small group? I am starting to look at society as a pattern, with random individuals rising to play roles that are demanded of them. Our pattern is presently still reverberating from 09/11, and probably won't calm down again until we've had a decade of quiet. Israel is in a similar situation. In this environment, a paranoid leader is demanded, and so one will arise no matter what any person or group does or doesn't.
Actually this kind of cost overrun is absolutely planned.
You'd do it too, if faced with this alternative:
If you cared *nothing* for your country but just wanted to run a big project, then you would lie, get the money, and do the project. On the other hand, if you cared *dearly* for your country, and knew it needed a space program, then you would lie, get the money, and do the project.
Ah well.
I am finally at peace with this. What I will never be at peace with, however, is the fact that the space program is a mere drop in the bucket of market-distorting federal transfer payments.
64Kbps ought to be enough for anyone!
Yeah, good call.
I was thinking: you only see this kind of frantic throwing-the-book-at-him, in this case well before any crime was actually consummated, if the person is drawing our attention to a dangerous idea. The idea, in this case, might be any of:
Our current social pattern has some spots which, if they became widely known, would cause a collapse. You can tell you've found one when people jump your case just for broaching the subject.
Defense: I didn't do it.
Prosecution: We found the body in your apartment, hidden under your bed.
Defense: It is true that I placed a fast-moving bullet into the air adjacent to his chest, but if there happened to be any later consequences, those were not clearly visible from the location of the trigger.
Jury: Hang him.
So yeah, this is no legal defense. But perhaps it wasn't meant to be one. It seems like subterfuge, countersurveillance, and plausible deniability than anything else. But that plausibility won't hold up long, because the courts will soon say "If we find a bunch of random files on your drive, the burden is on *you* to prove that they aren't naughty bits." They'd make you extract the original content from the blocks, which hopefully haven't later disappeared off the internet, and if you couldn't do it then you'd be in hot water.
You can make peace with the dating game once you seriously grok it from the woman's point of view.
Sperm is cheap, but womb space is expensive. Therefore, every woman must fight an information war against dozens of suitors, who have devoted a lifetime to masking their intentions.
Woman therefore resort to jamming: they must give off so many conflicting signals about their needs and desires, about what they admire in a man, that nobody can deceive them because nobody is exactly sure what the right answer is. After a time of keeping him confused, his confused reactions reveal the underlying pattern of *his* personality, which is the vital information that she needs to make the decision.
If you're reading it in the news, then it's an exception, not the rule.
Guess what? The CORPORATIONS that own this stuff are composed of people and owned by people. You can become one of those people for about $50 a share. A corporation is the modern expression of the Right of Free Assembly, and is used to administer cooperative division-of-labor and ownership of property.
Would you prefer that property can only be owned whole, by single individuals? Do you realize that it would be impossible to undertake any large, capital-intensive project in that environment?
On the contrary, we can and do price those things every day. The price can be measured by studying what salary is demanded of people to bear what percent risk of loss. See "Changes in the Value of Life, 1940-1980", at http://web.mit.edu/costa/www/risk10.pdf, and "Present Value of Expected Lifetime Productivity, by Age, Gender, and Discount Rate, 1992", at http://www.nida.nih.gov/EconomicCosts/AppendixB_1.html. They crunched the numbers and built an equation showing the risk-versus-wage-demanded curve for average people.
A "100% risk of loss of life" is a special case where the price curve goes to infinity, because money loses its value at the time of death... although in the Middle East we do observe suicide bombers being incented by large (for them) financial benefits awarded to their families. And it's easy to imagine a parent selling (if it were possible) their remaining life in exchange for the money needed to cure a loved one of some terrible ailment.
It would also be possible to get the price for consensual loss of eyesight, if our society allowed people to sell their eyes as donor organs. You too would consider it if the price was right -- say, ten billion dollars cool cash. It's easy to sit in your armchair now and insist that "no price is too high", but it would be a different story if a truckful of cash actually pulled up in your driveway.
So am I. :P
Who "has the capacity to make judgments as to the degree of harm"? That's the point, that's the problem.
Yes every individual has that capacity, but there is no objective criteria with which to hammer out agreement between adversarial parties. They both "have the capacity" to guesstimate the harm, but what do you do when their answers differ by an order of magnitude?
Answering "the judge or jury will decide" doesn't solve the problem, it simply admits that the problem can't be solved and so must be heard by the King for an arbitrary ruling.
Whereas economic damages are worlds easier to prove to a reasonable man. I can assign an exact dollar value to five days' lost wages. But what if I say that your argumentative posts on slashdot caused me oodles of pain and suffering that I feel is worth ten million?
You're dreaming if you think you'd turn down a suitcase filled with 100-dollar bills in exchange for being locked in a cupboard for 24 hours. Or a duffel bag full for a week's worth of stalking and beatings. What's that, $100,000 an hour in exchange for serious distress?
I know it causes you dissonance to think that everything has a price. If you consider that you trade your time (your ultimate finite resource) for money, and then later trade that money (to others for their time) in exchange for safety and comfort, you'll see that money is a perfectly fine tool for denominating everything. Indeed, you should be suspicious of anyone who protests that something can't be priced.
Where do you get the idea that there is disagreement whether harm was done?
The disagreement is over how much harm was done. And the intangible emotional issues are very very difficult to quantify in an adversarial system.
Bulls***. Tell us, how much would you charge to let me lock you in a cupboard for 24 hours? How much would you charge to let me stalk you for x days and beat you y times? You can very easily fix a price for those abuses.
The hard part is fixing a price afterward, when those things were done to you without your consent. The lack of control causes people to wildly overestimate their price.
It's the only sort of harm that can be measured, proven, agreed upon.
Yes, and more. Privacy lets you behave morally (as judged by your own moral code) in a world of people who would wrongly criticize you. For example, right now I need privacy in order to spank my children in a world that is presently running a perilous anti-spanking experiment.
As social creatures, disapproval and disenfranchisement cause us physical pain. Privacy shields our proper actions from that.
Shall I tag this 'badsummary', or do we have an 'oxymoron' tag we can use?
As well, nearly nine in 10 corporate assholes could have been prevented had reasonable security measures been in place at the time of conception.
Also dehandments and deheadments.
Yes, it's always been that way, and it will always be that way. Ideology (including religion) can somewhat encourage altruistic behavior, but that's a constant and uphill battle. So, assuming this big-car/small-car situation is a problem (and I'm not sure we should assume that), we need a solution that appeals to self-interest.
The lowest-hanging, most-efficient fruit to pick along that path, is the elimination of externalities. That will probably require state intervention, which is tricky and perilous but still do-able.
I read that too. That's a different theory from a different book. Read up on Craven's book instead -- he's one of the guys who actually worked on the Glomar project.
Probably the most interesting thing about that mission was the real reason behind it...
The Russian sub had left its assigned patrol area without leave. It surfaced and may have attempted a rogue missile launch against Hawaii. A failsafe or tamper-proofing or other failure caused the missile to self-destruct inside the launch tube. The sub then sank.
In the salvage effort the Americans weren't aiming to learn anything about Soviet nuclear sub construction. Rather, they wanted to prove (to the Russians) the suspicion that the sub's officers had gone rogue. This information was a powerfully upsetting revelation to the Russian military command, because it meant they did not have reliable control over their boomers.
John Craven, one of the guys who worked on the salvage project eventually wrote a tell-some book about it. Fascinating stuff.
If you introspect your own algorithm for finding a partner, you may gain new respect for the concern women have for even small things like color tone. Women care because men care -- often unknowingly, often in flat denial... and every increase in our own 'score' means we'll win a better partner on the open market.
Such FEELINGs would be unimportant if we humans were the rational robots that we fancy ourselves to be. But we're still half animal, and a daily feeling of efficaciousness (of which attractiveness is a major component, no matter what your gender) is seriously valuable.
As for as the coming demise of incandescence, you watch. People, probably mostly women, will demand warmer tones in their CFLs and LEDs, and whoever delivers will win the market.