So my mini BTE ears (Rexton Cobalts) are about the size of a pinto bean, feature wireless bluetooth audio, house a battery that lasts for a week at 14 hours per day, is made to withstand being in a moist environment 14 hours per day for about 5 years, has a speaker that can generate crystal clear audio from about 400Hz to about 5kHz, amplified about 90dB (yeah, I am basically stone deaf), and the speaker is about the size of the tip of a pen. It has enough DSP power to dwarf a laptop from 10 years ago.
Some of the recent bluetooth headsets aren't all that much different from that. A little bit larger yes, but not terribly so. I bet there are a lot of people who would be happy to pay $200 for something as bulky as the smallest bluetooth headset rather than not be able to afford a $1K unit.
I'm just not sure that Google, or we at/., should be the ones deciding that some of the Chinese people should start dying for this. I'm pretty sure that it should be their decision.
I don't think anyone here is capable of making any decisions for someone in China. But we certainly are capable of providing moral support for those who do make the decision and some of us may actually go one step further and join amensty international and 'adopt' the cause of some of those individuals who do end up paying the price for their principles.
I'm sure there are some exceptions to my experience, naturally. But these niche applications generally seem to be very expensive and primitive.
Back before beowulf clusters were common and most all supercomputers were priced in the 9 digits there was a phrase well known in the community - "Supercomputing is a synonym for unreliable computing."
In other words, if the market is small you suffer from all kinds of problems because there aren't enough users to generate enough bug reports and despite the high per unit pricing, volume is so low that there isn't enough money to pay for all the Q&A beyond the core functionality.
I don't have a facespacester account, but I've been thinking that I probably need to sign up sooner or later. So, in order to mitigate the privacy threats, I'm looking at creating domain-specific accounts. One for my high-school friends, another for 'professional' use, another for family, another for hookups, etc.
Anyone know if there is a plugin for firefox (or any other browser actually) that facilitates this approach? I think I saw an app a few days ago that was designed to amalgamate different accounts (one friendster, one myspace, one facebook, etc, kind of like pidgin does for chat systems). Something like that plus going the extra steps to spoof the user-agent so that any automated correlation system on those sites would at least think I was a bunch of different users behind a firewall rather than probably the same guy with a bunch of accounts.
But c'mon, what balls on EMI. Because they signed a contract that said EMI could only sell the records if they were intact, EMI tried to weasel out by saying they weren't selling records. But then I remember this is one of the labels behind the RIAA extortion scheme, so I shouldn't be surprised.
It's just business as usual for the MAFIAA.
Remember the hollywood writers strike 3-4 years ago? The main issue there was getting paid for web-broadcasts and DVDs. Prior to the strike the studios' standard approach to web-broadcasts was to pay no royalties because they weren't charging anything for the downloads. Obviously the advertisements on the webpage and the streaming ads before and during the web-broadcast were generating revenue but because they weren't charging for the broadcast itself (unlike the way they charge affiliates for the right to broadcast over the air) they were paying the writers bupkiss.
The BSG writers even swore off "webisodes" after the first set because Sci-Fi/NBC pulled that shit on them.
This served a few purposes. First of all, to minimize the threat that someone could give himself a nice "severance package" and take a few infos with him to pass on to some newspapers who would pay handsomely to have some banks financial reports a few months before some shit hits fans.
That's a two-edged sword. The fact that you instantly terminate people is going to be well known to all employees. It only takes half a brain to prepare for it - if the guy is crappy at his job to begin with, he probably expects to be fired at any time; if the company isn't doing so good - maybe there has been a previous round of layoffs - then everyone will consider themselves a candidate for the axe. So you end up in a situation where the crafty people pre-arrange things - maybe they leave a timebomb in the code that they routinely disable as long as they are on the job - maybe they set up cron job to mail a "few infos" to some anonymous email drop point unless they manually abort the job, etc, etc.
My point being that instantly terminating access provokes your less trustworthy employees to take proactive measures while they still have maximum trust. It may even increase risk because one of these guys might get hit by a bus and the corp would get hit by the automated sabotage even though they didn't fire the guy.
I'm saying the law is fucked up and ought to be revoked. In the meantime, I don't have a problem with people breaking fucked up laws. That's the way laws get changed in the USA - people break them and go to court and they are overturned.
If you have a problem with defining citizenship as paying your taxes - then what do you propose that is more honest? The only thing a citizen owes the state is to contribute his fair share to the maintenance of the state. Anything else is to presume that the state is more important than the people.
Wooooosh #1: The point is not whether a frat is legal residence or not (what a totally random disassociation to pick) it is the fact that you had to suffer and now you want everyone else to suffer too - including native born citizens who have to put up with this verification system. And you seem to be the type to think that suffering is justified because "that's the law" rather than consider that the law is wrong.
I think by 'citizen' you mean 'legal resident and legally eligible for employment'
Wooooosh #2: Yeah, that's exactly what I meant, where "legal" is defined as paying their taxes, full stop. You clearly think that all the additional laws are undeserving of criticism.
If you don't like that Company XYZ requires drug screens or background checks - then take your application elsewhere.
Wooooosh #3: Again with "the rules are OK because they are the rules" and undeserving of criticism. I threw that drug-test bit out there as bait to see if you were of a fascist bent, you certainly seem to be. You might as well argue that requiring that all applicants pass an STD test. After all, its important to the safety and integrity of the workplace that no one need fear catching cooties from their fellow employees.
Here's something you will be unable to rationally justify - companies like blockbuster requires their employees pass a drug test. In what way does smoking a joint at home on the weekends risk the integrity/safety of their workplace?
My wife and I jumped through all the fucking hoops proving she was who she was...we were a legit marriage...she was not a terrorist...that I could "support her" if she could not work...all that shit.
So, because you had to go through absolutely fucking ridiculous lengths to live a normal life with your wife you think everybody should have to go through the same sort of gauntlet? Its like you are a frat boy who got hazed and as result thinks that anyone else who didn't go through the torture he did is not worthy.
Personally, I don't give a shit if someone is a 'citizen' or not - as long they pay their taxes there shouldn't be any other requirements. It's bad enough that so many employers accuse you of being a drug abuser just because you want to work for them, having to please one more massive beauracracy just for the privilege of earning a living is beyond the pale.
And yes, I married a girl from another country too.
Traffic shaping based on protocol is a losing battle. My bittorent client already has the capability of encoding the packet headers to prevent casual probing or the entire packet if necessary.
Think of it the other way around - by default, everything is 'bulk' - specifically identified protocols get their priorities increased.
I knew javascript was used on a lot more pages lately, but I had no idea just how much it is used until I installed noscript. Now I find myself constantly re-enabling various webpages when I need that functionality.
I've had the exact reverse experience. There are a handful of pages that I've had to enable javascript for, almost all the others don't need it - although they might look prettier with it (slashdot being one such example). Occasionally I will run into a page that won't work right, but unless it is really important, I just move on to another similar page rather than enable javascript.
Due to Net Neutrality, ISPs are not able to implement priority routing.
Baloney. For one thing, in the USA there is no requirement for net neutrality, that was stripped away in FCC vs Brand X.
For another thing, the concept of Net Neutrality does not care about protocols only end-points. So priority routing based on the protocol (i.e. bittorrent vs voip) is A-OK. But priority based on the end-point (i.e. ESPN vs Google) is where the problem starts.
No, you are. You want to laser in on one point out of many in a larger argument and you've only been able to partially dispute that single point anyway. You are claiming that because SOME survive that domestication plays NO part in the deaths of others. That's a leap of logic you have not provided any substantive support for.
Man, you clearly haven't thought this through very well.
Your first two links are a case of an imported species overwhelming the native species, same with the last link -- "These fish outcompete native fish for food, and they consume the various species that keep our endangered coral reefs clean." - that isn't even remotely ethical.
That example of the ferrets and the rest of your links either reinforce ("most escaped or abandoned ferrets either are re-caught or will die from dehydration if there is not a water supply available, or starvation if they can't find food right away." -- "The feral cats I encountered at feeding stations at Kapiolani Community College and Ala Moana Park, also in Honolulu, looked sick and sad") or don't even address the fact that just because some animals survive doesn't mean all of them will, nor that they will even thrive - the feral cats continuing to be dependent on humans.
Wouldn't setting those animals free be the ethical choice here.
No. First of all, animals raised in human company are pretty much permanently stuck in a juvenile state. They have not been taught to fend for themselves and the urban and suburban environments aren't the same thing as "the wild" - available resources are far more restricted. Don't think that because your cat occasional brings a bird to the stoop that it could live a healthy life without any human support. It is certainly not humane to release an animal only to have it starve or be maimed by a car. For another thing feral animals are a lot more than "untidy" - they can be a significant danger to people - I can personally attest to that having been bitten by a feral dog at the age of 6. Only a fool would think that being ethical requires the risking of human lives in favor of animal lives.
don't use the "ethical" tag unless you know what it means.
Right back at you.
Ask any vet - you know the people who based their entire career on a love of animals, euthanasia of unwanted pets is almost always the most humane choice available.
Slashdot Mirror
So my mini BTE ears (Rexton Cobalts) are about the size of a pinto bean, feature wireless bluetooth audio, house a battery that lasts for a week at 14 hours per day, is made to withstand being in a moist environment 14 hours per day for about 5 years, has a speaker that can generate crystal clear audio from about 400Hz to about 5kHz, amplified about 90dB (yeah, I am basically stone deaf), and the speaker is about the size of the tip of a pen. It has enough DSP power to dwarf a laptop from 10 years ago.
Some of the recent bluetooth headsets aren't all that much different from that. A little bit larger yes, but not terribly so. I bet there are a lot of people who would be happy to pay $200 for something as bulky as the smallest bluetooth headset rather than not be able to afford a $1K unit.
I'm just not sure that Google, or we at /., should be the ones deciding that some of the Chinese people should start dying for this. I'm pretty sure that it should be their decision.
I don't think anyone here is capable of making any decisions for someone in China.
But we certainly are capable of providing moral support for those who do make the decision and some of us may actually go one step further and join amensty international and 'adopt' the cause of some of those individuals who do end up paying the price for their principles.
I'm sure there are some exceptions to my experience, naturally. But these niche applications generally seem to be very expensive and primitive.
Back before beowulf clusters were common and most all supercomputers were priced in the 9 digits there was a phrase well known in the community - "Supercomputing is a synonym for unreliable computing."
In other words, if the market is small you suffer from all kinds of problems because there aren't enough users to generate enough bug reports and despite the high per unit pricing, volume is so low that there isn't enough money to pay for all the Q&A beyond the core functionality.
I don't have a facespacester account, but I've been thinking that I probably need to sign up sooner or later. So, in order to mitigate the privacy threats, I'm looking at creating domain-specific accounts. One for my high-school friends, another for 'professional' use, another for family, another for hookups, etc.
Anyone know if there is a plugin for firefox (or any other browser actually) that facilitates this approach? I think I saw an app a few days ago that was designed to amalgamate different accounts (one friendster, one myspace, one facebook, etc, kind of like pidgin does for chat systems). Something like that plus going the extra steps to spoof the user-agent so that any automated correlation system on those sites would at least think I was a bunch of different users behind a firewall rather than probably the same guy with a bunch of accounts.
But c'mon, what balls on EMI. Because they signed a contract that said EMI could only sell the records if they were intact, EMI tried to weasel out by saying they weren't selling records. But then I remember this is one of the labels behind the RIAA extortion scheme, so I shouldn't be surprised.
It's just business as usual for the MAFIAA.
Remember the hollywood writers strike 3-4 years ago? The main issue there was getting paid for web-broadcasts and DVDs. Prior to the strike the studios' standard approach to web-broadcasts was to pay no royalties because they weren't charging anything for the downloads. Obviously the advertisements on the webpage and the streaming ads before and during the web-broadcast were generating revenue but because they weren't charging for the broadcast itself (unlike the way they charge affiliates for the right to broadcast over the air) they were paying the writers bupkiss.
The BSG writers even swore off "webisodes" after the first set because Sci-Fi/NBC pulled that shit on them.
Here's what Chuck Lorre (creator of The Big Bang Theory) said about the strike:
http://www.chucklorre.com/index-2hm.php?p=197
Forest and trees dude. Those were superficially simplified examples meant to demonstrate the concepts, not describe the specifics.
And, bluntly, if someone expects to be fired, he should either be better at his job or he shouldn't be there in the first place.
Irrelevant from a risk reduction standpoint.
You don't think that you do anything unsupervised in this environment, do you?
It certainly can't be any more supervised than after an employee is given notice.
This served a few purposes. First of all, to minimize the threat that someone could give himself a nice "severance package" and take a few infos with him to pass on to some newspapers who would pay handsomely to have some banks financial reports a few months before some shit hits fans.
That's a two-edged sword. The fact that you instantly terminate people is going to be well known to all employees. It only takes half a brain to prepare for it - if the guy is crappy at his job to begin with, he probably expects to be fired at any time; if the company isn't doing so good - maybe there has been a previous round of layoffs - then everyone will consider themselves a candidate for the axe. So you end up in a situation where the crafty people pre-arrange things - maybe they leave a timebomb in the code that they routinely disable as long as they are on the job - maybe they set up cron job to mail a "few infos" to some anonymous email drop point unless they manually abort the job, etc, etc.
My point being that instantly terminating access provokes your less trustworthy employees to take proactive measures while they still have maximum trust. It may even increase risk because one of these guys might get hit by a bus and the corp would get hit by the automated sabotage even though they didn't fire the guy.
I'm saying the law is fucked up and ought to be revoked. In the meantime, I don't have a problem with people breaking fucked up laws. That's the way laws get changed in the USA - people break them and go to court and they are overturned.
If you have a problem with defining citizenship as paying your taxes - then what do you propose that is more honest? The only thing a citizen owes the state is to contribute his fair share to the maintenance of the state. Anything else is to presume that the state is more important than the people.
Your response is one great big woooooosh!
Frat and legal residence is hardly apples/apples
Wooooosh #1: The point is not whether a frat is legal residence or not (what a totally random disassociation to pick) it is the fact that you had to suffer and now you want everyone else to suffer too - including native born citizens who have to put up with this verification system. And you seem to be the type to think that suffering is justified because "that's the law" rather than consider that the law is wrong.
I think by 'citizen' you mean 'legal resident and legally eligible for employment'
Wooooosh #2: Yeah, that's exactly what I meant, where "legal" is defined as paying their taxes, full stop. You clearly think that all the additional laws are undeserving of criticism.
If you don't like that Company XYZ requires drug screens or background checks - then take your application elsewhere.
Wooooosh #3: Again with "the rules are OK because they are the rules" and undeserving of criticism. I threw that drug-test bit out there as bait to see if you were of a fascist bent, you certainly seem to be. You might as well argue that requiring that all applicants pass an STD test. After all, its important to the safety and integrity of the workplace that no one need fear catching cooties from their fellow employees.
Here's something you will be unable to rationally justify - companies like blockbuster requires their employees pass a drug test. In what way does smoking a joint at home on the weekends risk the integrity/safety of their workplace?
My wife and I jumped through all the fucking hoops proving she was who she was...we were a legit marriage...she was not a terrorist...that I could "support her" if she could not work...all that shit.
So, because you had to go through absolutely fucking ridiculous lengths to live a normal life with your wife you think everybody should have to go through the same sort of gauntlet? Its like you are a frat boy who got hazed and as result thinks that anyone else who didn't go through the torture he did is not worthy.
Personally, I don't give a shit if someone is a 'citizen' or not - as long they pay their taxes there shouldn't be any other requirements. It's bad enough that so many employers accuse you of being a drug abuser just because you want to work for them, having to please one more massive beauracracy just for the privilege of earning a living is beyond the pale.
And yes, I married a girl from another country too.
Traffic shaping based on protocol is a losing battle. My bittorent client already has the capability of encoding the packet headers to prevent casual probing or the entire packet if necessary.
Think of it the other way around - by default, everything is 'bulk' - specifically identified protocols get their priorities increased.
Apple had a cash heap of over $15Billion at the time and no debt.
Seems you are off by at least an order of magnitude.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html
I doubt that Apple was debt free either, I'm just too lazy to google it.
They did. But then Microsoft owns them at least partially.
I'm too lazy to google it up, but I'm pretty sure they unwound that a couple of years ago.
Once you start with MS your paths close up until the only remaining one is: they own you.
Apple did pretty well with that 'investment' by MS a decade or so ago.
I knew javascript was used on a lot more pages lately, but I had no idea just how much it is used until I installed noscript. Now I find myself constantly re-enabling various webpages when I need that functionality.
I've had the exact reverse experience. There are a handful of pages that I've had to enable javascript for, almost all the others don't need it - although they might look prettier with it (slashdot being one such example). Occasionally I will run into a page that won't work right, but unless it is really important, I just move on to another similar page rather than enable javascript.
Due to Net Neutrality, ISPs are not able to implement priority routing.
Baloney. For one thing, in the USA there is no requirement for net neutrality, that was stripped away in FCC vs Brand X.
For another thing, the concept of Net Neutrality does not care about protocols only end-points. So priority routing based on the protocol (i.e. bittorrent vs voip) is A-OK. But priority based on the end-point (i.e. ESPN vs Google) is where the problem starts.
His opinion(s) trump any of my arguments because he's said so....?
Correction: His facile and overly-simplified opinions.
Certainly read that way to me.
Probably because you were looking to pick a fight and chose to read it in the least reasonable fashion.
I said that it doesn't make their chances zero
And I never claimed that it does, so quit it with the strawmen already.
You're dodging the issue, though.
No, you are. You want to laser in on one point out of many in a larger argument and you've only been able to partially dispute that single point anyway. You are claiming that because SOME survive that domestication plays NO part in the deaths of others. That's a leap of logic you have not provided any substantive support for.
Yes, animals die if they can't find food or water.
For the purposes of discussing whether or not euthanasia or release to the wild is ethical, that's all that matters.
Man, you clearly haven't thought this through very well.
Your first two links are a case of an imported species overwhelming the native species, same with the last link -- "These fish outcompete native fish for food, and they consume the various species that keep our endangered coral reefs clean." - that isn't even remotely ethical.
That example of the ferrets and the rest of your links either reinforce ("most escaped or abandoned ferrets either are re-caught or will die from dehydration if there is not a water supply available, or starvation if they can't find food right away." -- "The feral cats I encountered at feeding stations at Kapiolani Community College and Ala Moana Park, also in Honolulu, looked sick and sad") or don't even address the fact that just because some animals survive doesn't mean all of them will, nor that they will even thrive - the feral cats continuing to be dependent on humans.
Fucking crackpots!
Right back at you - your crazy is off the charts, way beyond even the most extreme peta member.
Wouldn't setting those animals free be the ethical choice here.
No. First of all, animals raised in human company are pretty much permanently stuck in a juvenile state. They have not been taught to fend for themselves and the urban and suburban environments aren't the same thing as "the wild" - available resources are far more restricted. Don't think that because your cat occasional brings a bird to the stoop that it could live a healthy life without any human support. It is certainly not humane to release an animal only to have it starve or be maimed by a car. For another thing feral animals are a lot more than "untidy" - they can be a significant danger to people - I can personally attest to that having been bitten by a feral dog at the age of 6. Only a fool would think that being ethical requires the risking of human lives in favor of animal lives.
don't use the "ethical" tag unless you know what it means.
Right back at you.
Ask any vet - you know the people who based their entire career on a love of animals, euthanasia of unwanted pets is almost always the most humane choice available.