That logic would be fine if all the OP wanted to buy is just a proprietary Amazon front-end, which means that the value of the device is significantly lower than what would justify the price. But assuming that he wants a "tablet" in the traditional sense of the word, a general-purpose device that he can customize to suit his particular needs that can be obtained from other companies at comparable prices and that can also run the same Amazon-available applications but also other stuff as well, then he is correct in that he should continue to avoid these.
It has grown well past its original mandates and has perveted many of those.
I do have to make a serious response to this, though. You seem to be under the false impression that there were "original mandates" that limited the federal government. This simply isn't true. The current Constitution was written after the dismal failure of the Articles of Confederation, which established a federal government but explicitly denied any enforcement capabilities to it. It basically said that the name of our new country was the United States of America, and each of those states acted like little mini sovereign entities. As a result, when the federal government asked the states to pay their taxes, the states politely told it to go fuck itself, resulting in the Continental Army to fall apart and damn near resulted in the destruction of our new country.
So the founding fathers convened another Constitutional Convention for four months in 1787 to address these problems. They decided that the federal government HAD to have power, and that the new Constitution needs to be fairly open-ended to account for new legal needs to refine our government. That's why they put phrases in such as "promote the general Welfare" and left out phrases such as "and such is an exhaustive list of the only things this governmental entity can do".
While I would never pretend like the "founding fathers" were a monolithic hive mind in complete agreement on all points, and I do recognize that some of them fought to limit the power of government, those people were generally overruled or else had their concerns addressed by enumerating things that are explicitly denied to government, especially in the Bill of Rights ("Congress shall make no law..."). Most of them understood that we would be facing completely new and unforeseen challenges today than we were in 1787, and they deliberately avoided enumerating things that government could only do.
So there was never any kind of set of "original mandates" that government has grown past, other than a handful of don'ts, such as don't trample of free speech, don't establish a state religion, don't inflict cruel or unusual punishment, etc.
When there is only one payer, they control absolutely what things they will choose to pay for.
And you honestly don't think this happens today? Seriously?
Make no mistake: There are death panels in existence right now, this very moment. They work for the private insurance companies, doing their damned best to figure out how to kick people off of insurance rolls and rescind coverage for whatever reason will legally scrape by. Or even illegally, if they think that it would be cheaper to fight the battle until you die than to pay out your claim. The big difference is that today, you frequently don't find out what's not covered until after you're sick and need the coverage.
You don't trust government, I get it, I really do. And to some extent, neither do I. But you know what I trust even less than government? For-profit companies with a perverse incentive to deny you coverage you're paying for using whatever underhanded tactic they can and an historical willingness to do so, especially when the people being denied coverage don't have time or the money for a protracted legal battle and are at a physical or mental disadvantage that directly impacts their ability to fight such battles.
So yeah, I'd take a single-payer system over the crappy system we have today any time. Ultimately, that is the solution to our health care system, not private insurance, not employer-paid insurance, not even Obamacare, although it's a hell of a lot better than what we had. Maybe one of these days if you have the gut-wrenching experience of watching your mother fighting her insurance company for payment of cancer treatments while suffering from the "downtime" effects of chemotherapy, you'll prefer the general incompetence of government over the outright malice of for-profit insurance companies. Personally, I'm nice enough to rather you use common sense to arrive at the conclusion that having for-profit insurance companies responsible for funding your health care is and always has been a dumb idea.
Bosom Buddies was a cute show and he was funny as Michael in Newhart, but he's not even British. What are they thinking! I know he has a little sci-fi experience when he played the dad in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids the television series, but I still think they would have done a lot better if they'd gotten someone who had some experience with British television.
I remember when CD writers were like this, about 25%-33% you tried to burn were coasters because your machine couldn't keep the write buffer full, so you had this delicate balancing act of setting it to burn and OH GOD DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING and hope for the best. They still blew my mind with how handy they were, and now CD/DVD burners are so dirt cheap and reliable that it's hard to imagine the days when they were so sensitive. I figure in a few years, 3D printers will get similarly more reliable and mainstream, and continue to fall in price, until people are churning out all sorts of widgets without giving it much thought or worry.
Modded down? No I do not think you should be modded down for your opinion. I just think you are a sheep reacting to knee jerk ideas that people will perish without this policy. Seriously my actual privacy outweights your irrational fears. You cannot take away my rights cause you got scared. Especially when your fears are warrantless.
So please, explain to me how exactly your privacy is being violated. Because if you think it is, then you really need to actually read the government's explanation of the programs instead of getting it secondhand (you know, like sheep) from people who are grossly hyperbolizing the scope of what is being collected and used. They are not reading your email. They are not poring over your phone records. All they are doing is collecting the information so that, if a warrant is issued and they have probable cause to think that you might be involved in terrorism activities, they can come back later and evaluate the information to try to track down other possible terrorism suspects.
You call me a "sheep", yet it is you who is making baseless assumptions, not me. You're assuming that the people who are in charge of these programs are outright lying about the scope of them and the scrutiny and oversight they're subjected to. If Snowden had come out and said, "...and as proof that this program is being abused, the Slashdot poster Wookact is actually Joe Schmo in Walla Walla, Washington, and here are the contents of some of the private emails he's sent to people and some of the phone numbers he's called, even though I have no reason to suspect that he's involved in anything illegal," then your argument might hold water.
As it is, though, you're just throwing out baseless allegations that some hypothetical evil has been committed based on premises that I do not hold to be true, things like government is always evil, the people in charge of these programs are saying stuff that conflicts with your foregone conclusion therefore they must be lying, that there is no oversight of these programs and/or any oversight of them must be corrupt, etc. And by the way, last time I checked, people have in fact died from terrorist attacks. Also, last time I checked, several plots have been thwarted thanks to the hard work of the intelligence community, and there hasn't been an attack of the scale of 9/11 since, well, 9/11, so I have to think that something must be working pretty well and what you dismiss offhandedly as people being afraid is actually people taking some common sense precautions to not die by the thousands. It is in fact your fears of some hypothetical abuse for which there is no evidence that is warrantless. When you have some actual evidence that the programs are being abused and that their leadership is lying to us, try again and you'll make some more headway.
Is it hypothetically possible that such a program, under certain contrived circumstances, could be abused? Well, yeah, but in the sense that the fact that we have a nuclear arsenal could hypothetically be abused. Yet I don't sit around worrying all day about the possibility that a nuclear bomb might explode in my neighborhood, I have more important things to worry about and better things to do with my time.
So please, again, exactly what rights of yours have been violated? Some imaginary right to not have information about what you're doing collected by the government? If so, then do you drive a car? Then please stop reading these posts and immediately go to your local DMV and express your outrage over having to have a tag number that--gasp!--is actually retained on file that, if you commit a crime, can be used after the fact to track back to you. Have you ever worked? If so, then make sure to express outrage over the government keeping your Social Security Number and W2s on file so that if you commit tax evasion, they can find out about it and prosecute you instead of just sitting around saying, "Gosh,
I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion with the Slashdot crowd, but here goes anyway...
There's been plenty of information about the NSA's program for more than TEN years. U.S. Citizens, however, trusted that their government was doing the right thing when the NSA was constructing its electronic dragnet because it was right after 9/11.
So honest question: What makes you believe that the government is doing "the wrong thing" now? I'm being serious here, because as far as I can tell, nothing that Snowden has said has proving that the NSA is abusing what it's been doing. If he had some documented evidence, for example, that the NSA had used its surveillance capabilities to spy on someone for non-terrorism political purposes, things might be different.
From what I can tell, the programs at the NSA are designed only to collect the data. It's specifically to avoid this situation:
Steve: Ha ha, you capitalist pigs, I've blown up buildings and killed hundreds of your citizens! NSA: Hello, Verizon? We have a warrant, could you please pull Steve's phone records for the past five years so that we can see who he's been hanging out with, to see if maybe there's a mastermind here that we can take down? Verizon: Gee, we wish we could help, but our data retention policy is that we purge those records after a year. Sorry, but here's what we've got, hope it helps. NSA: Well, shit, we think that Steve was radicalized back in 2009, we could really use those records. Hey Google, any chance you've kept his emails? Google: Sorry, nope. We can tell you that he sure does like My Little Pony and prefers Angel Soft brand toilet tissue, though. Dan: Remember Steve? Well, I'm his buddy and now I have blown up buildings and killed hundreds more people, ha ha! NSA: Fuck.
In other words, I don't think this is an inherently evil program, as long as it has proper oversight, assurances that it can't be abused, and that the oversight and legal framework under which it operates is transparent. That is, none of these secret laws that we have currently. There are some Congresscritters that are currently working to make those laws public, which is a Good Thing(tm). Assurances that it can't be abused would come in the form of auditing. This isn't unheard of, it's the same kind of auditing that, for example, holds credit card companies accountable for ensuring that the customer service person you talk to when you call their 800 number doesn't write your card number down and carry it out with them to go shopping with that night.
Of course, oversight is always the sticking point. When George W. Bush was in office, Democrats didn't trust him to carry out proper oversight of these programs, but Republicans simply brushed off criticism saying, "Just trust him, he's a nice guy, he wouldn't do that kind of evil stuff." Now that Barack Obama is in office, Republicans are crying foul. Oversight needs to be in the form of non-partisan courts and subject to multiple levels of scrutiny, and we the public need to be aware of what kind of system is in place to oversee this stuff.
Otherwise, you and everyone else decrying these programs are going to have to accept that without them, people WILL needlessly die, that we could have prevented it and deliberately chose not to. And when they do and there's an outcry over how awful it is that our intelligence organizations failed us so miserably, you're going to have to be on the front lines defending it, explaining to an angry and grieving public that those lives were simply the price we have to pay for freedom and privacy. And if you think that it's a small price to pay for freedom and privacy, then more power to you. But instead of getting all butt-sore about the NSA, PRISM, or the Bush and/or Obama administrations, the actual EFFECTIVE recourse is to lobby your Congresscritters to repeal or amend the USA PATRIOT act. Because for all of the wailing an
Wasn't there some scheme a few years ago someone came up with that used the concept of charging cars by putting magnets under the roads so that as the cars passed over them it would induce an electric current in coils contained in the undercarriage? Seems like that would be a lot safer and cost-effective than rolling out electric rails, and wouldn't require physical contact.
Carraba's:
Tanti auguri a te
Tanti auguri a te
Tanti auguri a te from Carraba's
Tanti auguri a te.
Ever been to a Romano's Macaroni Grill? They sing almost the same thing, but they do it a bit better. I witnessed this in person once while I was eating, this waitress started singing, and it was like a friggin' opera in there, she had some pipes on her. Made me wonder if each restaurant has a singer ringer.
So are we, the public, supposed to now cheer him and and support him not getting arrested? Oh, hell no, I want all of those goodies released. I hope they arrest his ass, and the sooner, the better.
The point of a class action lawsuit isn't, unfortunately, to compensate the members of the class. The point of a class action lawsuit is that there are too many people who suffered minor damages to really be able to logistically handle that.
The primary point of a class action lawsuit isn't to "fight for the little guy," it is to punish companies that do wrong. If lawyers end up making $2 billion off a lawsuit, well, that's $2 billion out of the company's coffers. And before you go spouting off about how ultimately they pass that cost on to customers, maybe they do, but if so, that puts them at a disadvantage compared to other companies. Or put another way, if Domino's is giving their customers good quality pizza while Papa John's is skimping because they are trying to pass a $2 billion lawsuit judgment on to their customers, they'll lose market share. But I digress...
Anyway, I don't necessarily agree that the lawyers should make so much off of a class action lawsuit, although they really should make a lot, since they're handling the details of compensation which costs a lot more than most people think. What I'd like to see is some kind of public fund set up for money like this to go into, such as to build parks or something, so that the end effect of punishing the companies is maintained but the incredible amount of time, effort, and money that goes towards mailing a few people checks for a buck or two isn't wasted. At least that way, you also avoid the problem that class action payouts usually aren't that high since most eligible claimants won't bother to jump through the hoops to get their judgment.
So let's say that some numbers are "missing." Why would someone manipulate the exact same numbers to be missing across all of the exams? I mean, I could see bumping a 32, 33, or 34 (non-passing) up to a 35 to have pity on some poor schmuck who came really close to passing, but why would, say, someone change a 93? I mean, not just for one student, but all the way across the board? What possible motivation could someone have to say "That's got to be either a 92 or a 94, we can't have any 93s"?
I'm inclined to believe what the poster above said. They're simply rounding numbers based on the number of questions on the test to some nearby value in a way such that not necessarily every integer between 1 and 100 is represented. In other words, if there are 40 questions on the test, you'll have scores of 3 (rounded from 2.5), 5, 8 (rounded from 7.5), 10, etc. You will never have a score of 76 or 94 or 61. I strongly suspect that if he knew exactly how the test was scored, the "missing numbers" explanation would be pretty obvious.
What a load of bullshit. The government isn't supposed to fear us, you twit, and to be brutally honest, it's that attitude that has gotten us into such the mess we're in today. After all, how far a leap is it from "government is supposed to fear us" to "if only someone would bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City or an Olympic venue in Atlanta, that would show 'em"?
The government is supposed to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the country. When some dictator stages a military coup d'état against his government, how well is that government able to provide for the common defense and general welfare? It's impossible for a government that fears its citizenry to fulfill that mandate. It's also utterly moronic to espouse rule by physical intimidation, which is exactly what you're supporting when you propagate this idiotic notion that people should have guns to keep government in check.
A little anecdote I like to relate to "government is supposed to fear us" twits:
On April 12, 2009, three Navy SEALs shot and killed three Somali pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama hostage. They had parachuted in two days before, and were set up on the fantail of the U.S.S. Bainbridge, a destroyer dispatched to handle the situation. The pirates were on a lifeboat being towed over 75 feet behind the Bainbridge. The SEALs had been manning their sniper rifles for over 24 hours straight, and both boats were bobbing up and down. Three simultaneous shots were taken, and there were three direct hits in the heads of each of the pirates. Captain Phillips was successfully rescued without injury.
I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First, because Navy SEALs are badass, and you do not want to mess with them. But mostly because you need to understand that if the government wants you dead, you are going to be dead. You will be a red splatter on the wall before you even have the chance to get your military-grade weaponry.
Several times since the Revolutionary War, nutcases have tried to rise up in armed resistance to the U.S. government. The largest such rebellion took place between 1861 and 1865. You would have thought that that would have settled the matter once and for all, but no, even almost 150 years later, we still have people romanticizing revolutions trying to convince others that overthrowing the U.S. government via armed conflict is a good idea, or that the U.S. government is even remotely concerned about the possibility; thus we end up with incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco. So let me break it down to you really simple-like: 1) Armed revolt against the U.S. government by U.S. citizens will never work, and 2) if you try, you will be quickly dispatched with no matter how many guns you own.
And personally, I'm glad. Unlike apparently you, I realize that we need government to maintain our society. If someone burns down my house or murders someone in my family, I don't want the government to be afraid to arrest and prosecute the guy who did it because he has a lot of guns, that's the height of idiocy. If you want a haven where there is little to no government interference, you should move to Somalia. There's practically no government there past the "might makes right" rules imposed by local warlords. If you have a lot of guns, you have a lot of power. If someone commits some perceived injustice against you, there's nothing stopping you from using your resources to carry out justice in whatever way you want. As an added bonus, you wouldn't have to pay taxes. Of course, you do have to worry about your warlord neighbors getting jealous of your stuff and, if they have more guns and mercenaries than you do, coming over and taking it. But hey, at least you can go down in a blaze of glory knowing that you and your family are dying without the benefit of government helping you with your personal protection or interfering with your ability to acquire lots of guns and that the only limit you have on what kind you can buy is how much money you have.
If you watched the video, he specifically addressed this. He says that he's not claiming that supernatural events don't occur. His prize is up for grabs to someone who can prove that they do.
"I don't know" is, in fact a perfectly good answer, but it's not a valid explanation. It's certainly not proof of the contrary. More often than not, it is a cop-out to use "I don't know" as an excuse to not believe what evidence there is or do further research into the matter. This is where religion gets into trouble a lot. I've seen it a lot in the form of statements like, "Scientists don't know such-and-such, therefore God did it."
If you have what seemed to be supernatural occurrences happening in a house you lived in, the scientifically "correct" course of action isn't to simply chalk it up to ghosts and be done with it, it is to try to come up with plausible explanations for what was happening and testing them. Even if you settle on the ghosts answer, you need some way to prove that that's what it is. Who knows? Maybe you could have won Randi's prize.
And I'm not being facetious when I say that. A lot of advancements in science have happened when people didn't just accept seemingly supernatural phenomena at face value, but investigated it. Sometimes you even get really lucky and the actual explanation is more fantastical than any supernatural explanation.
It shouldn't be, but statistically speaking, you're wrong. Don't confuse stereotyping individuals (which may or may not be a factually correct assessment of someone, depending on the individual) with aggregate data collection (which can be proven to be statistically valid). Most people who actively associate themselves with gay rights are gay. That is in no way saying that no straight person does so, or that most straight people aren't for gay rights (which has become the case in only the last decade). It's only saying that those people marching in gay rights parades? They are predominantly gay. If you pull someone out of the parade, they might or might not be gay. But if you want to advertise, for example, a heterosexual dating service, you'd probably be better off targeting a different event demographically.
Are its natural predators still around or will the passenger pigeon take over and push out other species (not to mention causing crop and tree damage)?
People used to ask why desktops would need multiple processors. Most software now takes advantage of multithreading capability, and trying to use a single core process is downright painful.
It may not need to multitask many phone calls at once, but it most certainly may need to multitask a whole bunch of apps at once, especially on a phone that can do things like instantly translate written or spoken text, record and composite two video sources at once and audio in real time, receive notifications such as texts, keep track of calendars, locations, temperatures (?), heart rates (!), etc. while you go about whatever it is you're doing, running a pretty sophisticated operating system with a pretty sophisticated user interface, and oh yeah, take and process telephone calls. And don't forget that it might have to do some of these tasks twice, given that the phone can be configured to be running an entirely separate virtual OS for your work stuff.
Never ask why any electronics device would need more resources, whether it's CPU cores, memory, storage capacity, network bandwidth, or anything else. It's a sure recipe for looking back in five years and say, "Wow, I sure was dumb back then. I never dreamed that devices today would be able to [insert amazing capability due directly to advancement in hardware specifications]!"
I was really hoping that he would call himself Pope Awesome. A little marketing never hurt. If I were Pope, I'd have to go with either taking the name Mobile, or possibly Oree.
Funny, but it does make me wonder. While I'm not gay, I do tend to like statuses and pages that have to do with gay rights, and several of my friends on Facebook are gay, yet I still see ads all the time for single ladies in my area. It makes me wonder: 1) Has Facebook accurately pegged me as straight (or bisexual) even though I haven't given it any direct indication of what I am, 2) has Facebook not made the connection and/or advertisers don't care, just spamming their ads to all males, or 3) is Facebook using some other algorithm that happens to be accurate for me, but generally less accurate for the population as a whole? Personally, I think #2 is correct.
I'd like to see a page about me that says, "Here's the information you've provided, and here's the information we're inferring from what we know about you." I suppose they'd never do that because it might very well creep people out too much, but then, it might get people whose inferences are wrong to directly supply the information to them.
True story: A few years ago I got sick as a dog, running fever, having chills, and relevantly to this story, I had a nasty case of laryngitis. I wasn't just hoarse, I just plain couldn't talk. I called my insurance company to get some information I needed to go to the doctor, and I had one of those damn voice menus. "Please say your social security number!"...
I tried entering it in using touch tones, but it wouldn't work. The damn thing insisted that I say my social security number, and it wouldn't let me talk to anyone until I did. And I tried, too. Oh lord, I did try. I could get enough weird sounds out that a human could probably understand what I was saying, but my voice was breaking up so badly that the IVR couldn't decipher it.
I ended up going to the doctor anyway, and they had someone from the receptionist desk help me out with the insurance stuff because according to that insurance company, if you can't talk, you don't get help.
To this day, I think that any company worth its salt should give you the option of dropping to a human operator to help you. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IVR, and too many problems that are simply unsolvable via automated response systems.
I'd go even further, and say that most of even the best documentation doesn't provide use cases and best practices. Picking on MSDN as an example, there are some really good articles out there about various topics, but there aren't a lot of articles on addressing a specific question or need. If you need to know how to use, for example, a treeview control, MSDN is probably the best place to go. But it doesn't answer the question, should I be using a treeview control to begin with, or are there other solutions that might be better? Or, I'm having a specific problem with a treeview control, such as getting it to work right in a multithreaded application. How do I fix this? For those kinds of issues, you don't particularly need documentation, you need a community that is ready and willing to help you.
Having said that, one problem with StackOverflow is that it's not maintained that well. I've frequently found answers there that were just plain wrong, and answers that might have been applicable in 2005 when the software I'm working with was six versions behind what I'm using now. It would be nice if they had some sort of cleanup mechanism to maintain a bit of freshness to the answers and encourage people to re-answer questions when underlying technologies or software changes.
Slashdot Mirror
We're going to have to start using a new theme. In Olympic Russia, games report on journalists.
That logic would be fine if all the OP wanted to buy is just a proprietary Amazon front-end, which means that the value of the device is significantly lower than what would justify the price. But assuming that he wants a "tablet" in the traditional sense of the word, a general-purpose device that he can customize to suit his particular needs that can be obtained from other companies at comparable prices and that can also run the same Amazon-available applications but also other stuff as well, then he is correct in that he should continue to avoid these.
It has grown well past its original mandates and has perveted many of those.
I do have to make a serious response to this, though. You seem to be under the false impression that there were "original mandates" that limited the federal government. This simply isn't true. The current Constitution was written after the dismal failure of the Articles of Confederation, which established a federal government but explicitly denied any enforcement capabilities to it. It basically said that the name of our new country was the United States of America, and each of those states acted like little mini sovereign entities. As a result, when the federal government asked the states to pay their taxes, the states politely told it to go fuck itself, resulting in the Continental Army to fall apart and damn near resulted in the destruction of our new country.
So the founding fathers convened another Constitutional Convention for four months in 1787 to address these problems. They decided that the federal government HAD to have power, and that the new Constitution needs to be fairly open-ended to account for new legal needs to refine our government. That's why they put phrases in such as "promote the general Welfare" and left out phrases such as "and such is an exhaustive list of the only things this governmental entity can do".
While I would never pretend like the "founding fathers" were a monolithic hive mind in complete agreement on all points, and I do recognize that some of them fought to limit the power of government, those people were generally overruled or else had their concerns addressed by enumerating things that are explicitly denied to government, especially in the Bill of Rights ("Congress shall make no law..."). Most of them understood that we would be facing completely new and unforeseen challenges today than we were in 1787, and they deliberately avoided enumerating things that government could only do.
So there was never any kind of set of "original mandates" that government has grown past, other than a handful of don'ts, such as don't trample of free speech, don't establish a state religion, don't inflict cruel or unusual punishment, etc.
Yep. Working towards doing it on a totally off-grid solar system.
You're building an entire solar system just to power your house? You must go through a LOT of light bulbs.
When there is only one payer, they control absolutely what things they will choose to pay for.
And you honestly don't think this happens today? Seriously?
Make no mistake: There are death panels in existence right now, this very moment. They work for the private insurance companies, doing their damned best to figure out how to kick people off of insurance rolls and rescind coverage for whatever reason will legally scrape by. Or even illegally, if they think that it would be cheaper to fight the battle until you die than to pay out your claim. The big difference is that today, you frequently don't find out what's not covered until after you're sick and need the coverage.
You don't trust government, I get it, I really do. And to some extent, neither do I. But you know what I trust even less than government? For-profit companies with a perverse incentive to deny you coverage you're paying for using whatever underhanded tactic they can and an historical willingness to do so, especially when the people being denied coverage don't have time or the money for a protracted legal battle and are at a physical or mental disadvantage that directly impacts their ability to fight such battles.
So yeah, I'd take a single-payer system over the crappy system we have today any time. Ultimately, that is the solution to our health care system, not private insurance, not employer-paid insurance, not even Obamacare, although it's a hell of a lot better than what we had. Maybe one of these days if you have the gut-wrenching experience of watching your mother fighting her insurance company for payment of cancer treatments while suffering from the "downtime" effects of chemotherapy, you'll prefer the general incompetence of government over the outright malice of for-profit insurance companies. Personally, I'm nice enough to rather you use common sense to arrive at the conclusion that having for-profit insurance companies responsible for funding your health care is and always has been a dumb idea.
Bosom Buddies was a cute show and he was funny as Michael in Newhart, but he's not even British. What are they thinking! I know he has a little sci-fi experience when he played the dad in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids the television series, but I still think they would have done a lot better if they'd gotten someone who had some experience with British television.
I remember when CD writers were like this, about 25%-33% you tried to burn were coasters because your machine couldn't keep the write buffer full, so you had this delicate balancing act of setting it to burn and OH GOD DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING and hope for the best. They still blew my mind with how handy they were, and now CD/DVD burners are so dirt cheap and reliable that it's hard to imagine the days when they were so sensitive. I figure in a few years, 3D printers will get similarly more reliable and mainstream, and continue to fall in price, until people are churning out all sorts of widgets without giving it much thought or worry.
Modded down? No I do not think you should be modded down for your opinion. I just think you are a sheep reacting to knee jerk ideas that people will perish without this policy. Seriously my actual privacy outweights your irrational fears. You cannot take away my rights cause you got scared. Especially when your fears are warrantless.
So please, explain to me how exactly your privacy is being violated. Because if you think it is, then you really need to actually read the government's explanation of the programs instead of getting it secondhand (you know, like sheep) from people who are grossly hyperbolizing the scope of what is being collected and used. They are not reading your email. They are not poring over your phone records. All they are doing is collecting the information so that, if a warrant is issued and they have probable cause to think that you might be involved in terrorism activities, they can come back later and evaluate the information to try to track down other possible terrorism suspects.
You call me a "sheep", yet it is you who is making baseless assumptions, not me. You're assuming that the people who are in charge of these programs are outright lying about the scope of them and the scrutiny and oversight they're subjected to. If Snowden had come out and said, "...and as proof that this program is being abused, the Slashdot poster Wookact is actually Joe Schmo in Walla Walla, Washington, and here are the contents of some of the private emails he's sent to people and some of the phone numbers he's called, even though I have no reason to suspect that he's involved in anything illegal," then your argument might hold water.
As it is, though, you're just throwing out baseless allegations that some hypothetical evil has been committed based on premises that I do not hold to be true, things like government is always evil, the people in charge of these programs are saying stuff that conflicts with your foregone conclusion therefore they must be lying, that there is no oversight of these programs and/or any oversight of them must be corrupt, etc. And by the way, last time I checked, people have in fact died from terrorist attacks. Also, last time I checked, several plots have been thwarted thanks to the hard work of the intelligence community, and there hasn't been an attack of the scale of 9/11 since, well, 9/11, so I have to think that something must be working pretty well and what you dismiss offhandedly as people being afraid is actually people taking some common sense precautions to not die by the thousands. It is in fact your fears of some hypothetical abuse for which there is no evidence that is warrantless. When you have some actual evidence that the programs are being abused and that their leadership is lying to us, try again and you'll make some more headway.
Is it hypothetically possible that such a program, under certain contrived circumstances, could be abused? Well, yeah, but in the sense that the fact that we have a nuclear arsenal could hypothetically be abused. Yet I don't sit around worrying all day about the possibility that a nuclear bomb might explode in my neighborhood, I have more important things to worry about and better things to do with my time.
So please, again, exactly what rights of yours have been violated? Some imaginary right to not have information about what you're doing collected by the government? If so, then do you drive a car? Then please stop reading these posts and immediately go to your local DMV and express your outrage over having to have a tag number that--gasp!--is actually retained on file that, if you commit a crime, can be used after the fact to track back to you. Have you ever worked? If so, then make sure to express outrage over the government keeping your Social Security Number and W2s on file so that if you commit tax evasion, they can find out about it and prosecute you instead of just sitting around saying, "Gosh,
Well, the reason that immediately comes to mind is because you and I might not be going to the same place.
I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion with the Slashdot crowd, but here goes anyway...
There's been plenty of information about the NSA's program for more than TEN years. U.S. Citizens, however, trusted that their government was doing the right thing when the NSA was constructing its electronic dragnet because it was right after 9/11.
So honest question: What makes you believe that the government is doing "the wrong thing" now? I'm being serious here, because as far as I can tell, nothing that Snowden has said has proving that the NSA is abusing what it's been doing. If he had some documented evidence, for example, that the NSA had used its surveillance capabilities to spy on someone for non-terrorism political purposes, things might be different.
From what I can tell, the programs at the NSA are designed only to collect the data. It's specifically to avoid this situation:
Steve: Ha ha, you capitalist pigs, I've blown up buildings and killed hundreds of your citizens!
NSA: Hello, Verizon? We have a warrant, could you please pull Steve's phone records for the past five years so that we can see who he's been hanging out with, to see if maybe there's a mastermind here that we can take down?
Verizon: Gee, we wish we could help, but our data retention policy is that we purge those records after a year. Sorry, but here's what we've got, hope it helps.
NSA: Well, shit, we think that Steve was radicalized back in 2009, we could really use those records. Hey Google, any chance you've kept his emails?
Google: Sorry, nope. We can tell you that he sure does like My Little Pony and prefers Angel Soft brand toilet tissue, though.
Dan: Remember Steve? Well, I'm his buddy and now I have blown up buildings and killed hundreds more people, ha ha!
NSA: Fuck.
In other words, I don't think this is an inherently evil program, as long as it has proper oversight, assurances that it can't be abused, and that the oversight and legal framework under which it operates is transparent. That is, none of these secret laws that we have currently. There are some Congresscritters that are currently working to make those laws public, which is a Good Thing(tm). Assurances that it can't be abused would come in the form of auditing. This isn't unheard of, it's the same kind of auditing that, for example, holds credit card companies accountable for ensuring that the customer service person you talk to when you call their 800 number doesn't write your card number down and carry it out with them to go shopping with that night.
Of course, oversight is always the sticking point. When George W. Bush was in office, Democrats didn't trust him to carry out proper oversight of these programs, but Republicans simply brushed off criticism saying, "Just trust him, he's a nice guy, he wouldn't do that kind of evil stuff." Now that Barack Obama is in office, Republicans are crying foul. Oversight needs to be in the form of non-partisan courts and subject to multiple levels of scrutiny, and we the public need to be aware of what kind of system is in place to oversee this stuff.
Otherwise, you and everyone else decrying these programs are going to have to accept that without them, people WILL needlessly die, that we could have prevented it and deliberately chose not to. And when they do and there's an outcry over how awful it is that our intelligence organizations failed us so miserably, you're going to have to be on the front lines defending it, explaining to an angry and grieving public that those lives were simply the price we have to pay for freedom and privacy. And if you think that it's a small price to pay for freedom and privacy, then more power to you. But instead of getting all butt-sore about the NSA, PRISM, or the Bush and/or Obama administrations, the actual EFFECTIVE recourse is to lobby your Congresscritters to repeal or amend the USA PATRIOT act. Because for all of the wailing an
Wasn't there some scheme a few years ago someone came up with that used the concept of charging cars by putting magnets under the roads so that as the cars passed over them it would induce an electric current in coils contained in the undercarriage? Seems like that would be a lot safer and cost-effective than rolling out electric rails, and wouldn't require physical contact.
Carraba's:
Tanti auguri a te
Tanti auguri a te
Tanti auguri a te from Carraba's
Tanti auguri a te.
Ever been to a Romano's Macaroni Grill? They sing almost the same thing, but they do it a bit better. I witnessed this in person once while I was eating, this waitress started singing, and it was like a friggin' opera in there, she had some pipes on her. Made me wonder if each restaurant has a singer ringer.
So are we, the public, supposed to now cheer him and and support him not getting arrested? Oh, hell no, I want all of those goodies released. I hope they arrest his ass, and the sooner, the better.
The point of a class action lawsuit isn't, unfortunately, to compensate the members of the class. The point of a class action lawsuit is that there are too many people who suffered minor damages to really be able to logistically handle that.
The primary point of a class action lawsuit isn't to "fight for the little guy," it is to punish companies that do wrong. If lawyers end up making $2 billion off a lawsuit, well, that's $2 billion out of the company's coffers. And before you go spouting off about how ultimately they pass that cost on to customers, maybe they do, but if so, that puts them at a disadvantage compared to other companies. Or put another way, if Domino's is giving their customers good quality pizza while Papa John's is skimping because they are trying to pass a $2 billion lawsuit judgment on to their customers, they'll lose market share. But I digress...
Anyway, I don't necessarily agree that the lawyers should make so much off of a class action lawsuit, although they really should make a lot, since they're handling the details of compensation which costs a lot more than most people think. What I'd like to see is some kind of public fund set up for money like this to go into, such as to build parks or something, so that the end effect of punishing the companies is maintained but the incredible amount of time, effort, and money that goes towards mailing a few people checks for a buck or two isn't wasted. At least that way, you also avoid the problem that class action payouts usually aren't that high since most eligible claimants won't bother to jump through the hoops to get their judgment.
So let's say that some numbers are "missing." Why would someone manipulate the exact same numbers to be missing across all of the exams? I mean, I could see bumping a 32, 33, or 34 (non-passing) up to a 35 to have pity on some poor schmuck who came really close to passing, but why would, say, someone change a 93? I mean, not just for one student, but all the way across the board? What possible motivation could someone have to say "That's got to be either a 92 or a 94, we can't have any 93s"?
I'm inclined to believe what the poster above said. They're simply rounding numbers based on the number of questions on the test to some nearby value in a way such that not necessarily every integer between 1 and 100 is represented. In other words, if there are 40 questions on the test, you'll have scores of 3 (rounded from 2.5), 5, 8 (rounded from 7.5), 10, etc. You will never have a score of 76 or 94 or 61. I strongly suspect that if he knew exactly how the test was scored, the "missing numbers" explanation would be pretty obvious.
What a load of bullshit. The government isn't supposed to fear us, you twit, and to be brutally honest, it's that attitude that has gotten us into such the mess we're in today. After all, how far a leap is it from "government is supposed to fear us" to "if only someone would bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City or an Olympic venue in Atlanta, that would show 'em"?
The government is supposed to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the country. When some dictator stages a military coup d'état against his government, how well is that government able to provide for the common defense and general welfare? It's impossible for a government that fears its citizenry to fulfill that mandate. It's also utterly moronic to espouse rule by physical intimidation, which is exactly what you're supporting when you propagate this idiotic notion that people should have guns to keep government in check.
A little anecdote I like to relate to "government is supposed to fear us" twits:
On April 12, 2009, three Navy SEALs shot and killed three Somali pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama hostage. They had parachuted in two days before, and were set up on the fantail of the U.S.S. Bainbridge, a destroyer dispatched to handle the situation. The pirates were on a lifeboat being towed over 75 feet behind the Bainbridge. The SEALs had been manning their sniper rifles for over 24 hours straight, and both boats were bobbing up and down. Three simultaneous shots were taken, and there were three direct hits in the heads of each of the pirates. Captain Phillips was successfully rescued without injury.
I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First, because Navy SEALs are badass, and you do not want to mess with them. But mostly because you need to understand that if the government wants you dead, you are going to be dead. You will be a red splatter on the wall before you even have the chance to get your military-grade weaponry.
Several times since the Revolutionary War, nutcases have tried to rise up in armed resistance to the U.S. government. The largest such rebellion took place between 1861 and 1865. You would have thought that that would have settled the matter once and for all, but no, even almost 150 years later, we still have people romanticizing revolutions trying to convince others that overthrowing the U.S. government via armed conflict is a good idea, or that the U.S. government is even remotely concerned about the possibility; thus we end up with incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco. So let me break it down to you really simple-like: 1) Armed revolt against the U.S. government by U.S. citizens will never work, and 2) if you try, you will be quickly dispatched with no matter how many guns you own.
And personally, I'm glad. Unlike apparently you, I realize that we need government to maintain our society. If someone burns down my house or murders someone in my family, I don't want the government to be afraid to arrest and prosecute the guy who did it because he has a lot of guns, that's the height of idiocy. If you want a haven where there is little to no government interference, you should move to Somalia. There's practically no government there past the "might makes right" rules imposed by local warlords. If you have a lot of guns, you have a lot of power. If someone commits some perceived injustice against you, there's nothing stopping you from using your resources to carry out justice in whatever way you want. As an added bonus, you wouldn't have to pay taxes. Of course, you do have to worry about your warlord neighbors getting jealous of your stuff and, if they have more guns and mercenaries than you do, coming over and taking it. But hey, at least you can go down in a blaze of glory knowing that you and your family are dying without the benefit of government helping you with your personal protection or interfering with your ability to acquire lots of guns and that the only limit you have on what kind you can buy is how much money you have.
P
Hopefully it was obvious that I was referring to the common lay definition of the word, things like ghosts, ESP, clairvoyance, divination, etc.
If you watched the video, he specifically addressed this. He says that he's not claiming that supernatural events don't occur. His prize is up for grabs to someone who can prove that they do.
"I don't know" is, in fact a perfectly good answer, but it's not a valid explanation. It's certainly not proof of the contrary. More often than not, it is a cop-out to use "I don't know" as an excuse to not believe what evidence there is or do further research into the matter. This is where religion gets into trouble a lot. I've seen it a lot in the form of statements like, "Scientists don't know such-and-such, therefore God did it."
If you have what seemed to be supernatural occurrences happening in a house you lived in, the scientifically "correct" course of action isn't to simply chalk it up to ghosts and be done with it, it is to try to come up with plausible explanations for what was happening and testing them. Even if you settle on the ghosts answer, you need some way to prove that that's what it is. Who knows? Maybe you could have won Randi's prize.
And I'm not being facetious when I say that. A lot of advancements in science have happened when people didn't just accept seemingly supernatural phenomena at face value, but investigated it. Sometimes you even get really lucky and the actual explanation is more fantastical than any supernatural explanation.
It shouldn't be, but statistically speaking, you're wrong. Don't confuse stereotyping individuals (which may or may not be a factually correct assessment of someone, depending on the individual) with aggregate data collection (which can be proven to be statistically valid). Most people who actively associate themselves with gay rights are gay. That is in no way saying that no straight person does so, or that most straight people aren't for gay rights (which has become the case in only the last decade). It's only saying that those people marching in gay rights parades? They are predominantly gay. If you pull someone out of the parade, they might or might not be gay. But if you want to advertise, for example, a heterosexual dating service, you'd probably be better off targeting a different event demographically.
Are its natural predators still around or will the passenger pigeon take over and push out other species (not to mention causing crop and tree damage)?
Don't worry, we can bring that stuff back, too!
People used to ask why desktops would need multiple processors. Most software now takes advantage of multithreading capability, and trying to use a single core process is downright painful.
It may not need to multitask many phone calls at once, but it most certainly may need to multitask a whole bunch of apps at once, especially on a phone that can do things like instantly translate written or spoken text, record and composite two video sources at once and audio in real time, receive notifications such as texts, keep track of calendars, locations, temperatures (?), heart rates (!), etc. while you go about whatever it is you're doing, running a pretty sophisticated operating system with a pretty sophisticated user interface, and oh yeah, take and process telephone calls. And don't forget that it might have to do some of these tasks twice, given that the phone can be configured to be running an entirely separate virtual OS for your work stuff.
Never ask why any electronics device would need more resources, whether it's CPU cores, memory, storage capacity, network bandwidth, or anything else. It's a sure recipe for looking back in five years and say, "Wow, I sure was dumb back then. I never dreamed that devices today would be able to [insert amazing capability due directly to advancement in hardware specifications]!"
I was really hoping that he would call himself Pope Awesome. A little marketing never hurt. If I were Pope, I'd have to go with either taking the name Mobile, or possibly Oree.
Funny, but it does make me wonder. While I'm not gay, I do tend to like statuses and pages that have to do with gay rights, and several of my friends on Facebook are gay, yet I still see ads all the time for single ladies in my area. It makes me wonder: 1) Has Facebook accurately pegged me as straight (or bisexual) even though I haven't given it any direct indication of what I am, 2) has Facebook not made the connection and/or advertisers don't care, just spamming their ads to all males, or 3) is Facebook using some other algorithm that happens to be accurate for me, but generally less accurate for the population as a whole? Personally, I think #2 is correct.
I'd like to see a page about me that says, "Here's the information you've provided, and here's the information we're inferring from what we know about you." I suppose they'd never do that because it might very well creep people out too much, but then, it might get people whose inferences are wrong to directly supply the information to them.
True story: A few years ago I got sick as a dog, running fever, having chills, and relevantly to this story, I had a nasty case of laryngitis. I wasn't just hoarse, I just plain couldn't talk. I called my insurance company to get some information I needed to go to the doctor, and I had one of those damn voice menus. "Please say your social security number!"...
I tried entering it in using touch tones, but it wouldn't work. The damn thing insisted that I say my social security number, and it wouldn't let me talk to anyone until I did. And I tried, too. Oh lord, I did try. I could get enough weird sounds out that a human could probably understand what I was saying, but my voice was breaking up so badly that the IVR couldn't decipher it.
I ended up going to the doctor anyway, and they had someone from the receptionist desk help me out with the insurance stuff because according to that insurance company, if you can't talk, you don't get help.
To this day, I think that any company worth its salt should give you the option of dropping to a human operator to help you. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IVR, and too many problems that are simply unsolvable via automated response systems.
I'd go even further, and say that most of even the best documentation doesn't provide use cases and best practices. Picking on MSDN as an example, there are some really good articles out there about various topics, but there aren't a lot of articles on addressing a specific question or need. If you need to know how to use, for example, a treeview control, MSDN is probably the best place to go. But it doesn't answer the question, should I be using a treeview control to begin with, or are there other solutions that might be better? Or, I'm having a specific problem with a treeview control, such as getting it to work right in a multithreaded application. How do I fix this? For those kinds of issues, you don't particularly need documentation, you need a community that is ready and willing to help you.
Having said that, one problem with StackOverflow is that it's not maintained that well. I've frequently found answers there that were just plain wrong, and answers that might have been applicable in 2005 when the software I'm working with was six versions behind what I'm using now. It would be nice if they had some sort of cleanup mechanism to maintain a bit of freshness to the answers and encourage people to re-answer questions when underlying technologies or software changes.