Only my close friends know about this. All of the "norms" that I know of do not even have the slightest clue any of this is going on. How can they be outraged if they do not have the chance to know?
You are a class act moron. The government can imprison us, take our children, house, or lives away, in essence affect us in the most deep down personal ways imaginable. Google and Apple can... sell us more shit? Refuse to sell us shit?
I dunno man. It is easy for me to see how one is outrageous and the other is just odious. I am unsure why it is so difficult for you to see that. Perhaps you honestly believe that the government is only there to help you... Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and thousands of other government agents would just love to educate you about what the nature of government really is: power.
By grabbing and storing all of this information, the government is gaining power over you and anyone who could possibly help you. This is the ultimate power grab since with this information, they can control everything.
But yeah, keep on wondering why other folks see a difference and you do not...
Fuck off. As a non-American, you have zero expectation of privacy from an American agency. I fully expect all foreign intelligence services to spy on me if they are able to do so... and guess what, it does not bother in me the least. I am not subject to their fucked up laws so I could care less what they see me do.
Now, you may legitimately point out that some of those foreign intelligence services are sharing the data they gather with American agencies, and my response to that is not that the foreign agencies should stop spying on me. No, my response is that the American agencies are doing something illegal by receiving that data. In this case, you should be mad at your government for doing something unethical (possibly illegal under your laws) and not at the Americans for spying on you.
The only way to stop surveillance of civilians is to have a clear and unequivocal constitutional amendment that strictly enshrines the right to privacy and limits surveillance of US civilians by our government.
There already *IS* such a constitutional amendment. It is the fourth and it is quite clear.
What you really need is an entirely secondary constitutional amendment that spells out in plain language
And when you create that, over the years, twisted interpretations will eventually aggregate enough to where some bright bulb pops up and says we need a new constitutional amendment that is unambiguously clear and the process repeats.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights is crystal clear on these issues. The federal government of the United States of America is clearly operating outside of the Constitution. Just because certain laws have been passed which allows legal gymnastics to be performed which say it is legal, it is still illegal. Unfortunately, there is nobody around to say that these laws are illegal with respect to the Constitution. Yeah, the Supreme Court is supposed to be doing these kinds of judgements but for whatever reason, they are not. Our government has clearly been "hacked" and is no longer functional. The only reason it is not utter chaos or a rigid police state right now is from the inertia of good people.
It's a website that needs to be able to handle 3million visitors per day...
This is a problem handled by numerous websites already. The knowledge is out there. Not knowing is not an excuse when $400m is being discussed.
...with the majority of them being signups, or at least hitting the calculator. That's a lot of deep hits that can't be cached.
Normal use is not expected to be this high; however, you could limit the number of "deep hits" by just returning a,"the website is overloaded by new users, please return in a a few hours", or just delay the request and inform the user that due to heavy processing, the website will be slow.
Then, add on a back-end that has to talk to insurance companies. These guys still have a tonne of Cobol code running around.
Who cares? This is not the website's problem. The website will return a "Insurance company system not responding. Please call the insurance company and ask them to improve their systems if you would like a quote from them to be displayed here."
Look, the bottom line is that $400m was spent and it surely does not act like a $400m website should act. Excuses can be made about how hard it all is but nobody should believe it. The money was pissed away.
I normally do not complain but you are killing me here bro:
You must me invested in the means of production
I doubt people would but precious metals
Perhaps I am getting old but fitting several words into the sentences to ensure which exact word is correct is getting to be painful for me. I assume the words are, "be" and "buy" but with so many people making the same mistakes, I am getting to the point where I just do not care to decipher the meaning any more.
I guess what I am saying is proofread or have your comment, no matter how insightful, ignored. Thank you.
The fact is modern automobiles are incredibly reliable...
You mean modern non-American automobiles are incredibly reliable. I suppose you can rely on American automobiles to start having severe problems as soon as the warranty has expired. I have some "high mileage" vehicles, one with over 200k and another with over 130k, and I figure they are not even halfway through their useful life. Obviously, they are not American; otherwise, they would both be non-functional at this point.
To be fair, there are a few lines of American built trucks that have that kind of reliability but I could never figure out which ones they were. I think they rotate which lines are reliable. If you buy the same model of truck that you see on the road for 30 years, it is now the unreliable version or something like that.
The only thing you ripped out of your car was the portions of OnStar that are for the consumers. The government portion of OnStar is embedded in the ECU and can not be removed without providing an entirely different Engine Control Unit. Just do not ever buy GM products to avoid any of this government tracking nonsense.
If you think that's too much compensation for somebody working in a factory, you don't believe that the United States should have a middle class.
The problem is they design cars that do not support such wages. I would never willingly buy a car designed or made in the United States. I would, and do, pay extra for a vehicle that performs well, is reliable, and is fun to drive. Their view appears to be that a car is just a transport device; just throw a few amenities in and you can jack up the price.
No. A thousand times no. What does GM offer that competes with the Mercedes Benz E63 AMG 4-matic? Nothing from ANY American automaker can even compare. Cadillac? ROFLMAO.
Okay, let's try something not German, the Nissan GTR. What American auto company makes anything that competes with it? Oh, yeah. That is right. A turbo charged all wheel drive car is not something Americans would buy... according to GM.
Oh right, all those vehicles are near $100k. Let's try something around $30-$40k... a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution or a Subaru Impreza WRX STI. This should be a slam dunk. What does any American Automaker create that is even semi-close? Ummm... Buehler? Buehler? Buehler?
Hey GM, remove OnStar (FBI snooping device), build something reliable, and make it fun to drive and I will give you money. Lot's of money. Until then, you will have to rely on the uninformed masses to get suckered into buying your shit...
Until then, you really can not afford your workers. Fire them all and send production to China. It is what your management earns. You have to have a product worth buying and you refuse to make it. Honestly, you should just be out of business entirely rather than relying on slave labor.
Hydroelectric - captures energy stored from gravitational potential energy and converts it using a turbine into electricity. Fine, conversion again.
Actually, that is more than one conversion. Water goes "uphill" because of sunlight providing energy for the water to evaporate and become clouds. Again, the wind is powered by the sun. So it is fair to say that hydro is essentially solar energy.
Are you suggesting that a nuclear power plant would be a scenic tourist attraction, right at home inside Yellowstone?
Perhaps not inside of Yellowstone (Jellystone, "Eh Boo Boo") National Park but honestly, I think a lot of nuke plants look pretty damned cool. Coal plants, not so much.
We have always known that the NSA has been spying us as well as everyone else. Everything was just fine until the NSA started sharing this data with the domestic agencies. THAT is where the line was crossed. It is fine if the NSA watches me jacking off to ultraporn. It is NOT okay if the FBI does so.
In other words, in the name of National Defense, I am cool with whatever spying goes on. It is when that data is used to catch mobsters, drug dealers, and other normal typical crime that it becomes a problem.
If you want to catch a State actor planting a nuclear device in New York city, fine. If you want to catch a pedophile or murderer, fuck off. I would rather a thousand people die from random murder than to give up the fourth and fifth amendments.
Now that YOU have pushed it to this level, fuck it, I am not okay with ANY domestic spying at all for ANY reason. You lost the trust. You have abused it and you WILL abuse it. Fuck off.
You should have only shared national security shit with the domestic agencies.
The only things the working poor in America have over, say the Philippines, is that poor Americans have electricity and running water. The accommodations are better too I suppose but the medical care is worse and the food is more expensive. You also have a much better chance of ending up in jail in America and you have much less family support.
All in all, painting being poor in America as living better than, "you live better that 95% of people who have ever lived", is being a little too optimistic.
For most of recorded history, where huge empires were not involved, people lived a pastoral satisfying life. Gathering wood, fishing, hunting, perhaps even some light farming. Life was good. It was empire building and the industrial revolution that turned the average person's life into an utter living hell of debt and bondage. This hell is completely unavoidable today.
This is good news. It'll be awesome to see what humans can do post-scarcity. But the transition will be awkward.
Awkward? That is an understatement if I have ever heard one. People will be dying. It will be apocalyptic without the nuclear bombs.
The end game of this is a few thousand people living on the planet with robots taking care of all of those people's needs. There will not be stores and other such quaint and archaic remnants of the "old economy".
Even still, there may be war over resources or locations. Jim wants the vacation island that Sung Ye has. Eventually, there will be only one... and the human race goes entirely extinct with great amounts of screaming, yelling, and general pain.
An alien civilization might happen upon the ruins left behind and conjure up stories like archeologists tend to do and it will be sad and tragic tale: A species that never stopped focusing entirely on their animal instincts.
You are likely more right than you know. You have to actually understand what you are working with. You have to be able to communicate with others to give them some understanding. You have to be able to influence other peoples behaviors effectively. Most folks who do security end up just being jackasses.
Security is expensive.
Hm. It can be but this is not necessarily true. Converting an organization from one that is insecure to one that is secure will take time and time is money. It will also take manpower which is money too. If you start with security in mind, it is not really expensive and it is not very difficult.
Security does not improve profits
But security DOES improve profits. In a properly secured organization, everything works smoothly and when reality inevitably rears its ugly head and Eris tosses her golden apple at you, there are already plans and methods ready to deal with it all and business goes on as normal whereas the competitors are caught with their pants down. Not just profitable but potentially game changing.
If your company is not secure, you are moments away from having someone else eat your lunch.
It can be done, but none of the moments of opportunity are here for Valve to make it the way you suggest.
I do not think this will be a factor. To begin with, there is a HUGE opening right now. The XBox One was initially going to be this huge spygin platform in your living room and Sony.... *shiver* their motives are almost as hostile as Microsoft's. Seriously, there is a huge opening for a new player that is at least semi-ethical.
A lot of the secret to Nintendo's success in the west was distancing itself from existing video game systems that plug into a tv and billing itself as a toy you plug into the tv.
Absolutely wrong. Are you in management or something? The reason for Nintendo's rise to domination was fun games and the possibility for much deeper gameplay than any other systems had offered up to that point. As examples, I give you Super Mario Brothers and Zelda. Both games were fun and both games were far deeper than anything you could get on any other system at the time.
Eventually there was an explosion of high quality games for the NES that grabbed people's imagination and sucked them in for hours on end. Some were more casual that you could play for a short time like Tetris or Thunder and Lightning and some required hours just to fully move around a small part of the entire world like Wizardry or Adventure of Link.
In the end, it was the high quality games made possible by the capabilities of the system itself that vaulted the NES into history as the game console that saved gaming. It had nothing to do with how expectations were managed. Managing expectations might have opened the door but had zero effect on the apocalyptic sales.
You can look at illegal child porn images and instantly know that they're illegal...
No you can not.
The age at which it becomes legal is less than a millisecond away from when it is illegal. An example using 18 as the cutoff age: When a male or female is half a second away from turning 18, it is child porn. A mere one second later, it is legal porn.
You say this is easy to determine? Meh. You have not considered this closely enough to speak authoritatively. It would seem as though you are considering child porn as porn that is done with pre-pubescent children and that is definitely correct, but that is not all that child porn is actually defined as.
It gets even worse. They are images of nude children that you can find fairly easily on the net. Many jurisdictions say they are legal. The main requirement is that they are not in lewd and lascivious poses.
Now, how is it so simple for Google to participate in this? It is not so simple, as you point out with the mp3 example.
Slashdot Mirror
It is widely accepted that the people of the US are unable to consume more than two or three news stories at a time.
Fuck off. Read this again: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4340653&cid=45138237
Only my close friends know about this. All of the "norms" that I know of do not even have the slightest clue any of this is going on. How can they be outraged if they do not have the chance to know?
You are a class act moron. The government can imprison us, take our children, house, or lives away, in essence affect us in the most deep down personal ways imaginable. Google and Apple can... sell us more shit? Refuse to sell us shit?
I dunno man. It is easy for me to see how one is outrageous and the other is just odious. I am unsure why it is so difficult for you to see that. Perhaps you honestly believe that the government is only there to help you... Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and thousands of other government agents would just love to educate you about what the nature of government really is: power.
By grabbing and storing all of this information, the government is gaining power over you and anyone who could possibly help you. This is the ultimate power grab since with this information, they can control everything.
But yeah, keep on wondering why other folks see a difference and you do not...
Why in God's name are you defending them? You should be aware that this was a political decision, not an engineering decision.
Fuck off. As a non-American, you have zero expectation of privacy from an American agency. I fully expect all foreign intelligence services to spy on me if they are able to do so... and guess what, it does not bother in me the least. I am not subject to their fucked up laws so I could care less what they see me do.
Now, you may legitimately point out that some of those foreign intelligence services are sharing the data they gather with American agencies, and my response to that is not that the foreign agencies should stop spying on me. No, my response is that the American agencies are doing something illegal by receiving that data. In this case, you should be mad at your government for doing something unethical (possibly illegal under your laws) and not at the Americans for spying on you.
The only way to stop surveillance of civilians is to have a clear and unequivocal constitutional amendment that strictly enshrines the right to privacy and limits surveillance of US civilians by our government.
There already *IS* such a constitutional amendment. It is the fourth and it is quite clear.
What you really need is an entirely secondary constitutional amendment that spells out in plain language
And when you create that, over the years, twisted interpretations will eventually aggregate enough to where some bright bulb pops up and says we need a new constitutional amendment that is unambiguously clear and the process repeats.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights is crystal clear on these issues. The federal government of the United States of America is clearly operating outside of the Constitution. Just because certain laws have been passed which allows legal gymnastics to be performed which say it is legal, it is still illegal. Unfortunately, there is nobody around to say that these laws are illegal with respect to the Constitution. Yeah, the Supreme Court is supposed to be doing these kinds of judgements but for whatever reason, they are not. Our government has clearly been "hacked" and is no longer functional. The only reason it is not utter chaos or a rigid police state right now is from the inertia of good people.
It's a website that needs to be able to handle 3million visitors per day...
This is a problem handled by numerous websites already. The knowledge is out there. Not knowing is not an excuse when $400m is being discussed.
...with the majority of them being signups, or at least hitting the calculator. That's a lot of deep hits that can't be cached.
Normal use is not expected to be this high; however, you could limit the number of "deep hits" by just returning a ,"the website is overloaded by new users, please return in a a few hours", or just delay the request and inform the user that due to heavy processing, the website will be slow.
Then, add on a back-end that has to talk to insurance companies. These guys still have a tonne of Cobol code running around.
Who cares? This is not the website's problem. The website will return a "Insurance company system not responding. Please call the insurance company and ask them to improve their systems if you would like a quote from them to be displayed here."
Look, the bottom line is that $400m was spent and it surely does not act like a $400m website should act. Excuses can be made about how hard it all is but nobody should believe it. The money was pissed away.
I normally do not complain but you are killing me here bro:
You must me invested in the means of production
I doubt people would but precious metals
Perhaps I am getting old but fitting several words into the sentences to ensure which exact word is correct is getting to be painful for me. I assume the words are, "be" and "buy" but with so many people making the same mistakes, I am getting to the point where I just do not care to decipher the meaning any more.
I guess what I am saying is proofread or have your comment, no matter how insightful, ignored. Thank you.
The fact is modern automobiles are incredibly reliable...
You mean modern non-American automobiles are incredibly reliable. I suppose you can rely on American automobiles to start having severe problems as soon as the warranty has expired. I have some "high mileage" vehicles, one with over 200k and another with over 130k, and I figure they are not even halfway through their useful life. Obviously, they are not American; otherwise, they would both be non-functional at this point.
To be fair, there are a few lines of American built trucks that have that kind of reliability but I could never figure out which ones they were. I think they rotate which lines are reliable. If you buy the same model of truck that you see on the road for 30 years, it is now the unreliable version or something like that.
I ripped my OnStar box out of my car...
The only thing you ripped out of your car was the portions of OnStar that are for the consumers. The government portion of OnStar is embedded in the ECU and can not be removed without providing an entirely different Engine Control Unit. Just do not ever buy GM products to avoid any of this government tracking nonsense.
If you think that's too much compensation for somebody working in a factory, you don't believe that the United States should have a middle class.
The problem is they design cars that do not support such wages. I would never willingly buy a car designed or made in the United States. I would, and do, pay extra for a vehicle that performs well, is reliable, and is fun to drive. Their view appears to be that a car is just a transport device; just throw a few amenities in and you can jack up the price.
No. A thousand times no. What does GM offer that competes with the Mercedes Benz E63 AMG 4-matic? Nothing from ANY American automaker can even compare. Cadillac? ROFLMAO.
Okay, let's try something not German, the Nissan GTR. What American auto company makes anything that competes with it? Oh, yeah. That is right. A turbo charged all wheel drive car is not something Americans would buy... according to GM.
Oh right, all those vehicles are near $100k. Let's try something around $30-$40k... a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution or a Subaru Impreza WRX STI. This should be a slam dunk. What does any American Automaker create that is even semi-close? Ummm... Buehler? Buehler? Buehler?
Hey GM, remove OnStar (FBI snooping device), build something reliable, and make it fun to drive and I will give you money. Lot's of money. Until then, you will have to rely on the uninformed masses to get suckered into buying your shit...
Until then, you really can not afford your workers. Fire them all and send production to China. It is what your management earns. You have to have a product worth buying and you refuse to make it. Honestly, you should just be out of business entirely rather than relying on slave labor.
Imagine if all information in the universe had to pass through a single point just to be processed into the Next frame?!
You mean like the NSA and GCHQ? Fun times.
Hydroelectric - captures energy stored from gravitational potential energy and converts it using a turbine into electricity. Fine, conversion again.
Actually, that is more than one conversion. Water goes "uphill" because of sunlight providing energy for the water to evaporate and become clouds. Again, the wind is powered by the sun. So it is fair to say that hydro is essentially solar energy.
Are you suggesting that a nuclear power plant would be a scenic tourist attraction, right at home inside Yellowstone?
Perhaps not inside of Yellowstone (Jellystone, "Eh Boo Boo") National Park but honestly, I think a lot of nuke plants look pretty damned cool. Coal plants, not so much.
We have always known that the NSA has been spying us as well as everyone else. Everything was just fine until the NSA started sharing this data with the domestic agencies. THAT is where the line was crossed. It is fine if the NSA watches me jacking off to ultraporn. It is NOT okay if the FBI does so.
In other words, in the name of National Defense, I am cool with whatever spying goes on. It is when that data is used to catch mobsters, drug dealers, and other normal typical crime that it becomes a problem.
If you want to catch a State actor planting a nuclear device in New York city, fine. If you want to catch a pedophile or murderer, fuck off. I would rather a thousand people die from random murder than to give up the fourth and fifth amendments.
Now that YOU have pushed it to this level, fuck it, I am not okay with ANY domestic spying at all for ANY reason. You lost the trust. You have abused it and you WILL abuse it. Fuck off.
You should have only shared national security shit with the domestic agencies.
(Clue: Try reading the article before posting...it works wonders)
Erm, I hate to say this... but you must be new here. ;)
But it took a good 25 years or so from the first laptops for someone to think of it.
Keep on believing that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagSafe
The only things the working poor in America have over, say the Philippines, is that poor Americans have electricity and running water. The accommodations are better too I suppose but the medical care is worse and the food is more expensive. You also have a much better chance of ending up in jail in America and you have much less family support.
All in all, painting being poor in America as living better than, "you live better that 95% of people who have ever lived", is being a little too optimistic.
For most of recorded history, where huge empires were not involved, people lived a pastoral satisfying life. Gathering wood, fishing, hunting, perhaps even some light farming. Life was good. It was empire building and the industrial revolution that turned the average person's life into an utter living hell of debt and bondage. This hell is completely unavoidable today.
+8 insightful. They should put you on national news so the public can hear some reality. Cheers.
This is good news. It'll be awesome to see what humans can do post-scarcity. But the transition will be awkward.
Awkward? That is an understatement if I have ever heard one. People will be dying. It will be apocalyptic without the nuclear bombs.
The end game of this is a few thousand people living on the planet with robots taking care of all of those people's needs. There will not be stores and other such quaint and archaic remnants of the "old economy".
Even still, there may be war over resources or locations. Jim wants the vacation island that Sung Ye has. Eventually, there will be only one... and the human race goes entirely extinct with great amounts of screaming, yelling, and general pain.
An alien civilization might happen upon the ruins left behind and conjure up stories like archeologists tend to do and it will be sad and tragic tale: A species that never stopped focusing entirely on their animal instincts.
The irony here is that corporate IT is even more into surveillance and CYA than the former NSA guy is.
They may call that the security department but that is not what security is or does.
Security is hard.
You are likely more right than you know. You have to actually understand what you are working with. You have to be able to communicate with others to give them some understanding. You have to be able to influence other peoples behaviors effectively. Most folks who do security end up just being jackasses.
Security is expensive.
Hm. It can be but this is not necessarily true. Converting an organization from one that is insecure to one that is secure will take time and time is money. It will also take manpower which is money too. If you start with security in mind, it is not really expensive and it is not very difficult.
Security does not improve profits
But security DOES improve profits. In a properly secured organization, everything works smoothly and when reality inevitably rears its ugly head and Eris tosses her golden apple at you, there are already plans and methods ready to deal with it all and business goes on as normal whereas the competitors are caught with their pants down. Not just profitable but potentially game changing.
If your company is not secure, you are moments away from having someone else eat your lunch.
strike
It can be done, but none of the moments of opportunity are here for Valve to make it the way you suggest.
I do not think this will be a factor. To begin with, there is a HUGE opening right now. The XBox One was initially going to be this huge spygin platform in your living room and Sony.... *shiver* their motives are almost as hostile as Microsoft's. Seriously, there is a huge opening for a new player that is at least semi-ethical.
A lot of the secret to Nintendo's success in the west was distancing itself from existing video game systems that plug into a tv and billing itself as a toy you plug into the tv.
Absolutely wrong. Are you in management or something? The reason for Nintendo's rise to domination was fun games and the possibility for much deeper gameplay than any other systems had offered up to that point. As examples, I give you Super Mario Brothers and Zelda. Both games were fun and both games were far deeper than anything you could get on any other system at the time.
Eventually there was an explosion of high quality games for the NES that grabbed people's imagination and sucked them in for hours on end. Some were more casual that you could play for a short time like Tetris or Thunder and Lightning and some required hours just to fully move around a small part of the entire world like Wizardry or Adventure of Link.
In the end, it was the high quality games made possible by the capabilities of the system itself that vaulted the NES into history as the game console that saved gaming. It had nothing to do with how expectations were managed. Managing expectations might have opened the door but had zero effect on the apocalyptic sales.
He didn't create shit; he is just in charge of it currently. Congress and the President created this.
You can look at illegal child porn images and instantly know that they're illegal...
No you can not.
The age at which it becomes legal is less than a millisecond away from when it is illegal. An example using 18 as the cutoff age: When a male or female is half a second away from turning 18, it is child porn. A mere one second later, it is legal porn.
You say this is easy to determine? Meh. You have not considered this closely enough to speak authoritatively. It would seem as though you are considering child porn as porn that is done with pre-pubescent children and that is definitely correct, but that is not all that child porn is actually defined as.
It gets even worse. They are images of nude children that you can find fairly easily on the net. Many jurisdictions say they are legal. The main requirement is that they are not in lewd and lascivious poses.
Now, how is it so simple for Google to participate in this? It is not so simple, as you point out with the mp3 example.
I would assert that High frequency trading is simply parasitic. Many people have suggested a transaction tax could fix this.
Pardon my ignorance here, but wouldn't a tax also be considered a parasitic loss? And it would not even be as democratic of a loss as HFT. Hm.