Many employers interview 20 people for one job. Do you really want me to tell you that "we're just hoping to find someone better than you." Or, "you smelled really bad and the stench lingered for a day." Or, "you just seemed to be full of shit."
Yes. Isn't it better to know what you have to fix than to just stumble around applying again and again, trying to guess why you aren't getting any offers?
It's technically true that it can be quite hard to separate online life and real life well enough that nobody could ever connect the two, no matter how deep they dug. But who would or could actually dig as deeply as you describe except for a Government agency with a pretty major axe to grind? Your potential employer might google search your name, and maybe e-mail address and any obvious pseudonyms they find on any other pages about you. How are they going to figure out to look at a specific slashdot user in the first place? And are they really going to take the time to try and connect it to a WOW group and search down anything anyone else on the group ever said until they can connect that to a real person and then somehow get your real name from that real person or his information? Sounds like days or weeks of work by a competent investigator, not something that a prospective employer is likely to finance.
Do we really want to change how memory works in this kind of way, though? Take a long-standing conflict like, say, Israel and Palestine. Do we really want it to be possible to pre-program the next generation with vivid memories of all of the perceived injustices and wrongs committed over the last 50/100/1000 years? Pretty much every nation and culture has some sort of old feud against someone or other that has long since been forgotten about. I think that part of what makes peace possible is that the next generation will always feel somewhat detached from the problems of the past. How can there ever be even a chance at peace anywhere if the next generation feels every problem that happened to the last as if it happened to them?
I don't know how much these things actually cost to make, but I do know that I find it kinda suspicious that they're all about $10-20 more than the Government coupon amount. Why bother trying to make a sub-$40 device if everyone has Government coupons for that much? I also know that making a bazillion identical devices has a way of driving costs down no matter how impressive the specs are. Ever read about how complex modern digital cellular protocols are? It's pretty amazing - and yet they make pocket-sized devices that obey these protocols and have a bunch of extra features besides while running on battery power for days and give them away for free (albeit usually with a contract for overpriced services...). I think it's a good bet that someone will make a $30 or less converter box if the whole coupon program ever expires.
What tuner are you using? I have noticed pretty large differences in ability to demodulate a watchable signal from the same antenna in the same position between the two tuners that I have now. My flat-screen TV has an internal digital tuner which picks up about 80-90% of the digital stations in the area no matter what the antenna position is, and can get the others if I fiddle with the antenna position a little. Almost any station with a watchable signal in analog will come in with better overall quality on digital. My antenna BTW is the cheapest set of rabbit-ears they had at Fry's, no amplification or anything. I also have satellite TV, and the satellite tuner supports OTA TV, which is handy because you can use its DVR functions. The trouble is, the receiver's OTA tuner is terrible - I can get reception on maybe half of the channels, and almost all of the channels drop out constantly (the TV's tuner seems to respond better to poor signal quality than the sat receiver's tuner as well). I kinda suspect that the conversion boxes they're selling everywhere don't have the best tuners around, but it hasn't been worth the money for me to find out. Still, if you have a friend with a small tv with a built-in tuner, or maybe can buy something cheap and then return it, it might be worth a try to see if it gets better results than what you're using now.
You would have a rather big problem if anyone else ever found out about it, which I expect would be pretty hard to avoid. Ignoring what the Government would do for the moment, what are you gonna do when someone tries to steal it? There have to be hundreds of assorted terrorist groups and nutjobs that would love to be able to go after a nuke sitting in some guy's basement instead of a heavily fortified military compound. How many gunmen do you think that you can fend off? Are you willing to pay for and live under enough security to keep them out for the rest of your life?
That's the tricky thing about the generic "fast-growing" statement. Usually, a choice which is "growing fast" is doing so because it is many times smaller than the alternatives to begin with. It's very easy to grow fast when you are less than 1% of the market. If they can still grow at those rates when they hit 10% (if they ever do), then they might have something.
Incidentally, isn't the LHC expected to cost 3-6 Billion euros, mostly for huge piles of the very latest high-tech gear? How much will it cost to buy all of that stuff and then move it to Mars, with it still working right when it gets there? And to build and support a habitat for however many people it takes to run the thing, and the power plant to generate the power it needs, etc. And if anything breaks, it will take something like a year to ship a new part, unless you either ship a ton of extra parts ($$$) or build a high-tech infrastructure on Mars ($$$$). Yeah, I think we can deal with keeping it on Earth.
I'm pretty sure that was a joke... that was somehow modded insightful. Methinks a few people need to go to that social skills class that was posted about a few days ago.
Sounds nice in theory, but in reality, both types of ideas are very troublesome.
If we want to repeal laws that "fail to deliver the results that were promised", we first have to decide what the goal/promised results actually are, which is a political question in and of itself, and figure out some sort of objective metric for measuring what the results are, which is often somewhere between difficult and impossible. For example, should taxes go up or down right now? Say we pass a bill to cut taxes across the board. What is the goal? Is it to stimulate the economy? Is it a ideological goal to see people keep more of what they earn? Is it to increase the deficit in hopes of forcing the Government to cut spending? What if all of the above arguments must be put forth to get such a bill passed? Do we have to disprove all of them? How about the stimulating the economy part? Obviously, a tax cut will tend to stimulate the economy somewhat, but how do you prove the objective results of that - was there going to be a boom or a recession anyways? And should you prove that it is the best possible economic stimulation for that amount of money? Would it stimulate the economy more or less to keep taxes the same or higher and use any extra money to pay down the national debt or to undertake large infrastructure projects or do something else altogether? Then there's ideological goals. How can you prove that an ideological goal failed? What if someone else's ideological goal is to reduce the gap between rich people and poor people as much as possible? How can you objectively prove that one is right and the other wrong? What if forcing the Government to cut spending failed? Should getting them to cut spending be abandoned as an essentially ideological goal, or should we cut taxes more to try harder?
That's just as many issues as I could think of in 10 minutes or so. I'm sure that any significant law will have just as many or more problems with trying to determine whether they have "failed to deliver the results that were promised".
A civics test sounds nice in theory, but who gets to write it? Me? You? The DNC? The RNC? Libertarians? Socialists? What kind of politically loaded questions are going to end up on it? "True or false: The Constitution forbids the Federal Government from regulating education", "True or false: The Federal Government has no legal authority to regulate the individual use of drugs", "True or false: Abortion is a constitutional right", "True or false: The Government has the right to legally restrict CO2 emissions to prevent Global Warming". And on and on and on. Sure, you want a strict letter-of-the-law basic civics, but it'll take about 10 seconds for all of the driven ideologues out there to get into the process and start twisting it around. And what about all of the poor people out there who have a lousy education - are they just screwed until they can find the time/money to get a Government book from somewhere? It may not be the goal to disenfranchise black people, say, but AFAIK black people are still disproportionately poor and uneducated so your proposal would in practice do exactly that.
The political process as we have it now may be screwed up in a variety of ways, but it is the best that we have been able to come up with (and convince people to adopt) over several hundred years, and it really isn't all that bad compared to the alternatives. The real goal is to represent the will of the people as well as possible, so it can be frustrating when the people do not agree with you or don't care about your pet issue much. There no basically democratic system that I can think of where you don't need to convince lots and lots of people to support your position enthusiastically to get anything done about it.
I am also Jew. While the Israelis may be too hard-headed sometimes, saying that their position is to exterminate the Palestinians is a bit over the top. If they really wanted to do that, they could have done it already. They do have the technical capability to do that, though not the desire. And if there is any Israeli group with at least a moderate level of public support whose position is to exterminate the Palestinians, I have yet to hear of them.
Meanwhile, it seems that the publicly stated position of Hamas is to kill all of the Jews everywhere - even Hitler was not so ambitious. And it seems that the people of Gaza, with full knowledge of this position and as free of an election as can be arranged in the area, elected Hamas to lead them. What are they do to with these people? I sure don't know. How do you have meaningful negotiations with an opponent who seeks nothing less than the death of your entire race? I can't think of anything better to do than pretty much what the Israelis are doing now.
But I can think of lots of better things for the Palestinians to do. Abandon the goal of killing all of the Jews and set up as reasonable and prosperous of a community as they can with what they have right now. If you must fight, make every possible effort to fight only against the soldiers of the other side. If they demonstrate the ability to have some sort of stable society somewhere, I think there'd be much greater sympathy for their desire to have a legitimate homeland. I think that Israel itself has shown that having just living as your primary goal leads to a much better life and a better ability to fight than having slaughtering the other side no matter what happens to you and your side as your primary goal.
And this is completely different from accidentally bombing a friendly force that isn't anywhere near the enemy. If the enemy sets up a mortar in a school while forcing the kids to stay there surrounding them and uses that mortar to attack civilians far away, what do you do? Sending in soldiers to try and shoot only the mortar crew takes time and puts them at risk, while every minute that you don't take out that mortar may result in dozens more of your own civilians dead. (And if the mortar crew is any good, they'll have hidden or moved to another firing position with another pile of civilians around by the time you get enough soldiers ready to attack without it being a suicide mission) If you are set up to hit them with bombs or artillery or your own mortars, you damm well do it. It isn't your fault that your enemy did everything in their power to make it impossible to stop their attack without harming their civilians. And there's a big difference between what you do when faced with that situation, and what you do when you do have the ability to avoid hitting civilians or friendly forces and you don't do it.
It kind of annoys me to hear people say that Americans are ignorant of geography and other cultures. In my experience, my fellow Americans are no more ignorant than Europeans are. Yeah, Europeans tend to know more about Europe (gee, imagine that), but how many US States and South American countries could the average European name and find on a map? The last time I was in Europe, I spoke to a guy in Norway who didn't know where Florida was, which kind of surprised me. I could understand if they couldn't find, say, Kansas on a map, but Florida is a pretty big vacation destination; you would think the average European would at least know which coast it's on.
I would say that, in general, most people only know about the geography and cultures that are around them and which affect their lives. For most Americans, Europe has no more influence on their lives than China, Japan, India, the countries of Africa and the Middle East, etc, so they have no more knowledge about it than most Europeans know about the US cornbelt.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that article was kinda meaningless? Really, what's the point? "Hey guys, you know, having all of these nukes pointed at each other is pretty dangerous. Maybe we should do something about it?" Gosh, how insightful - I'm sure that nobody has ever thought of that before.
If you want to actually do something meaningful, figure out a way to reduce the risk that doesn't involve surrendering to the whims of any nutcase that has some nukes. We'll be waiting...
Something they don't seem to mention... how many bits are their hashes, and how many files do they intend to look for? God knows there have to be tens of millions of kiddie porn images out there, and the numbers just get higher if they want to track music and movies too. Set that against the billions and billions of files sent over the internet. I hope they have a really long hash, or they just might get some unintentional collisions.
That's my biggest complaint as well. It feels slick and fast and has a couple of cool features, like the default new tab screen. But after actually using it for a couple of days, I realized that the web is really full of ugly ads and annoying scripts. The fine-grained script control of NoScript is especially nice.
I use Camino on my Mac at home, and while it doesn't support the FF plugins, it at least has some partial ad and script blocking functionality, which is generally enough for me. I think Chrome should have at least that much functionality to be a serious browser for the geek crowd.
What's really strange to think about is the possibility for mobile browsers. AFAIK, none of the mobile browsers support blocking ads and scripts as well as these browsers do, so they're actually doing more work than the full computer browsers on a platform less suited to it.
Sadly, it seems that strict interpretation of civil liberties, stands against corruption, and stands in favor of reducing waste are more of a hobbyhorse of whichever party is out of power at the moment then an actual principled position of either party. If we're lucky, the party in power at least loses a good deal of support when it becomes clear that they weren't serious about all of that ethics stuff.
I don't think that there's much of a difference, but if there's going to be a line in how high resolution they can distribute, they have to draw it somewhere. They can't let things go by just because it's "only a little bit better" than what's allowed, or else there might as well not be a line there at all.
You want to know who I'd like to sue? The idiot who designed the webcam. They all have a light that is supposed to let you know when it is on. But of course it is just software in the windows driver and can be disabled by any idiot with a hex editor. THAT is the crime here.
You should be able to trust that light. That mofo should be hard wired to go on whenever the CCD is charged or when data is actually being sent. And it should have a delay (a simple capacitor would do) to make sure it stays lit for at least 1.0 seconds anytime it is triggered to stop single frame caps being hard to spot.
And any idiot with a soldering iron can disable a hardwired LED as well.
And as I recall, the engine design in the book was based on using a laser to start a fusion reaction in pellets of fuel, and somehow directing the resulting energy output along an axis to provide thrust. Sounds cool, but I would expect we'd figure out how to get electricity out of a fusion reaction first.
You have a few good points there, but you also have to keep in mind that personal cars aren't a perfect solution either. Yeah, it's nice to be able to customize your car to your liking (including level of cleanliness), carry around a lot more junk than you could comfortably carry, make long trips continuously in one vehicle, etc. But you also have disadvantages like finding parking spots, avoiding minor and major accidents and dealing with the results when they happen, dealing with routine maintainence, having thousands to tens of thousands of dollars invested in a vehicle that wears out fairly rapidly and is damaged easily, etc. Both robocars, as described in TFA, and regular cars have flaws. It's a matter of which flaws are more important to which people.
The one thing that I like about the ideas in this article is that it is a fairly smooth transition to the proposed robocar world from what we have right now. There are lots of ideas for changing how people get around, but most of them are some variation of mass-transit and require multi-billion dollar investments per city, building the whole system from scratch, before they can do any work at all. Robocars have a potential end result that's just as good, but we can get there gradually with each step carefully examined and voluntarily financed by private individuals and companies. If some particular step in the proposed progression doesn't turn out to be practical or doesn't go the way we planned, then most of the infrastructure invested in so far is still worthwhile, and the whole thing can go a different way without anyone losing massive amounts of money. This is much more likely to work out than trying to get the Government to spend billions (trillions?) of dollars on building some particular system that may turn out to be a massive failure and can't be changed without even more massive amounts of money.
Also, I'd say that it can be argued that the UN and the European community were founded on the principle of avoiding the situation that allowed Hitler to grab power in Germany with significant public support.
Yes, now they're going to make it so that you no longer need significant public support to grab power...
Agreed. It may be true that Mr. Dun Malg and his buddies deserve better close air support than they're getting, but we also have to keep in mind that this is unlikely to be the last war we ever have to fight, and the next war won't necessarily be the same as this one. Given that the world-class B2/F22 aircraft take decades to develop and any future major war is likely to be a matter of months or maybe weeks, I'd rather have the high-end stuff around now, in case we need it later. Not to discount the courage and sacrifice of our current soldiers in this war, but it'll all look like pocket change if another major war happens, especially if we don't have the right gear to fight it when it starts.
I think that you should be skeptical of everybody, not just some list of people. IMHO, having a list implies that you should not be skeptical of people you haven't on the list, and no man is so scrupulous as to be above skepticism. Every serious issue that I know of has plenty of con men on both sides. IMHO, the best way to deal with them is to put their (alleged?) cons in the spotlight and debunk them for everyone to see. Having a list kind of implies that they should be ignored, which makes them more powerful - if people read their arguments and can't find any good rebuttals, they will believe that they're right.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Isn't it better to know what you have to fix than to just stumble around applying again and again, trying to guess why you aren't getting any offers?
It's technically true that it can be quite hard to separate online life and real life well enough that nobody could ever connect the two, no matter how deep they dug. But who would or could actually dig as deeply as you describe except for a Government agency with a pretty major axe to grind? Your potential employer might google search your name, and maybe e-mail address and any obvious pseudonyms they find on any other pages about you. How are they going to figure out to look at a specific slashdot user in the first place? And are they really going to take the time to try and connect it to a WOW group and search down anything anyone else on the group ever said until they can connect that to a real person and then somehow get your real name from that real person or his information? Sounds like days or weeks of work by a competent investigator, not something that a prospective employer is likely to finance.
Do we really want to change how memory works in this kind of way, though? Take a long-standing conflict like, say, Israel and Palestine. Do we really want it to be possible to pre-program the next generation with vivid memories of all of the perceived injustices and wrongs committed over the last 50/100/1000 years? Pretty much every nation and culture has some sort of old feud against someone or other that has long since been forgotten about. I think that part of what makes peace possible is that the next generation will always feel somewhat detached from the problems of the past. How can there ever be even a chance at peace anywhere if the next generation feels every problem that happened to the last as if it happened to them?
I don't know how much these things actually cost to make, but I do know that I find it kinda suspicious that they're all about $10-20 more than the Government coupon amount. Why bother trying to make a sub-$40 device if everyone has Government coupons for that much? I also know that making a bazillion identical devices has a way of driving costs down no matter how impressive the specs are. Ever read about how complex modern digital cellular protocols are? It's pretty amazing - and yet they make pocket-sized devices that obey these protocols and have a bunch of extra features besides while running on battery power for days and give them away for free (albeit usually with a contract for overpriced services...). I think it's a good bet that someone will make a $30 or less converter box if the whole coupon program ever expires.
What tuner are you using? I have noticed pretty large differences in ability to demodulate a watchable signal from the same antenna in the same position between the two tuners that I have now. My flat-screen TV has an internal digital tuner which picks up about 80-90% of the digital stations in the area no matter what the antenna position is, and can get the others if I fiddle with the antenna position a little. Almost any station with a watchable signal in analog will come in with better overall quality on digital. My antenna BTW is the cheapest set of rabbit-ears they had at Fry's, no amplification or anything. I also have satellite TV, and the satellite tuner supports OTA TV, which is handy because you can use its DVR functions. The trouble is, the receiver's OTA tuner is terrible - I can get reception on maybe half of the channels, and almost all of the channels drop out constantly (the TV's tuner seems to respond better to poor signal quality than the sat receiver's tuner as well). I kinda suspect that the conversion boxes they're selling everywhere don't have the best tuners around, but it hasn't been worth the money for me to find out. Still, if you have a friend with a small tv with a built-in tuner, or maybe can buy something cheap and then return it, it might be worth a try to see if it gets better results than what you're using now.
You would have a rather big problem if anyone else ever found out about it, which I expect would be pretty hard to avoid. Ignoring what the Government would do for the moment, what are you gonna do when someone tries to steal it? There have to be hundreds of assorted terrorist groups and nutjobs that would love to be able to go after a nuke sitting in some guy's basement instead of a heavily fortified military compound. How many gunmen do you think that you can fend off? Are you willing to pay for and live under enough security to keep them out for the rest of your life?
That's the tricky thing about the generic "fast-growing" statement. Usually, a choice which is "growing fast" is doing so because it is many times smaller than the alternatives to begin with. It's very easy to grow fast when you are less than 1% of the market. If they can still grow at those rates when they hit 10% (if they ever do), then they might have something.
Incidentally, isn't the LHC expected to cost 3-6 Billion euros, mostly for huge piles of the very latest high-tech gear? How much will it cost to buy all of that stuff and then move it to Mars, with it still working right when it gets there? And to build and support a habitat for however many people it takes to run the thing, and the power plant to generate the power it needs, etc. And if anything breaks, it will take something like a year to ship a new part, unless you either ship a ton of extra parts ($$$) or build a high-tech infrastructure on Mars ($$$$). Yeah, I think we can deal with keeping it on Earth.
I'm pretty sure that was a joke... that was somehow modded insightful. Methinks a few people need to go to that social skills class that was posted about a few days ago.
Sounds nice in theory, but in reality, both types of ideas are very troublesome.
If we want to repeal laws that "fail to deliver the results that were promised", we first have to decide what the goal/promised results actually are, which is a political question in and of itself, and figure out some sort of objective metric for measuring what the results are, which is often somewhere between difficult and impossible. For example, should taxes go up or down right now? Say we pass a bill to cut taxes across the board. What is the goal? Is it to stimulate the economy? Is it a ideological goal to see people keep more of what they earn? Is it to increase the deficit in hopes of forcing the Government to cut spending? What if all of the above arguments must be put forth to get such a bill passed? Do we have to disprove all of them? How about the stimulating the economy part? Obviously, a tax cut will tend to stimulate the economy somewhat, but how do you prove the objective results of that - was there going to be a boom or a recession anyways? And should you prove that it is the best possible economic stimulation for that amount of money? Would it stimulate the economy more or less to keep taxes the same or higher and use any extra money to pay down the national debt or to undertake large infrastructure projects or do something else altogether? Then there's ideological goals. How can you prove that an ideological goal failed? What if someone else's ideological goal is to reduce the gap between rich people and poor people as much as possible? How can you objectively prove that one is right and the other wrong? What if forcing the Government to cut spending failed? Should getting them to cut spending be abandoned as an essentially ideological goal, or should we cut taxes more to try harder?
That's just as many issues as I could think of in 10 minutes or so. I'm sure that any significant law will have just as many or more problems with trying to determine whether they have "failed to deliver the results that were promised".
A civics test sounds nice in theory, but who gets to write it? Me? You? The DNC? The RNC? Libertarians? Socialists? What kind of politically loaded questions are going to end up on it? "True or false: The Constitution forbids the Federal Government from regulating education", "True or false: The Federal Government has no legal authority to regulate the individual use of drugs", "True or false: Abortion is a constitutional right", "True or false: The Government has the right to legally restrict CO2 emissions to prevent Global Warming". And on and on and on. Sure, you want a strict letter-of-the-law basic civics, but it'll take about 10 seconds for all of the driven ideologues out there to get into the process and start twisting it around. And what about all of the poor people out there who have a lousy education - are they just screwed until they can find the time/money to get a Government book from somewhere? It may not be the goal to disenfranchise black people, say, but AFAIK black people are still disproportionately poor and uneducated so your proposal would in practice do exactly that.
The political process as we have it now may be screwed up in a variety of ways, but it is the best that we have been able to come up with (and convince people to adopt) over several hundred years, and it really isn't all that bad compared to the alternatives. The real goal is to represent the will of the people as well as possible, so it can be frustrating when the people do not agree with you or don't care about your pet issue much. There no basically democratic system that I can think of where you don't need to convince lots and lots of people to support your position enthusiastically to get anything done about it.
I am also Jew. While the Israelis may be too hard-headed sometimes, saying that their position is to exterminate the Palestinians is a bit over the top. If they really wanted to do that, they could have done it already. They do have the technical capability to do that, though not the desire. And if there is any Israeli group with at least a moderate level of public support whose position is to exterminate the Palestinians, I have yet to hear of them.
Meanwhile, it seems that the publicly stated position of Hamas is to kill all of the Jews everywhere - even Hitler was not so ambitious. And it seems that the people of Gaza, with full knowledge of this position and as free of an election as can be arranged in the area, elected Hamas to lead them. What are they do to with these people? I sure don't know. How do you have meaningful negotiations with an opponent who seeks nothing less than the death of your entire race? I can't think of anything better to do than pretty much what the Israelis are doing now.
But I can think of lots of better things for the Palestinians to do. Abandon the goal of killing all of the Jews and set up as reasonable and prosperous of a community as they can with what they have right now. If you must fight, make every possible effort to fight only against the soldiers of the other side. If they demonstrate the ability to have some sort of stable society somewhere, I think there'd be much greater sympathy for their desire to have a legitimate homeland. I think that Israel itself has shown that having just living as your primary goal leads to a much better life and a better ability to fight than having slaughtering the other side no matter what happens to you and your side as your primary goal.
And this is completely different from accidentally bombing a friendly force that isn't anywhere near the enemy. If the enemy sets up a mortar in a school while forcing the kids to stay there surrounding them and uses that mortar to attack civilians far away, what do you do? Sending in soldiers to try and shoot only the mortar crew takes time and puts them at risk, while every minute that you don't take out that mortar may result in dozens more of your own civilians dead. (And if the mortar crew is any good, they'll have hidden or moved to another firing position with another pile of civilians around by the time you get enough soldiers ready to attack without it being a suicide mission) If you are set up to hit them with bombs or artillery or your own mortars, you damm well do it. It isn't your fault that your enemy did everything in their power to make it impossible to stop their attack without harming their civilians. And there's a big difference between what you do when faced with that situation, and what you do when you do have the ability to avoid hitting civilians or friendly forces and you don't do it.
It kind of annoys me to hear people say that Americans are ignorant of geography and other cultures. In my experience, my fellow Americans are no more ignorant than Europeans are. Yeah, Europeans tend to know more about Europe (gee, imagine that), but how many US States and South American countries could the average European name and find on a map? The last time I was in Europe, I spoke to a guy in Norway who didn't know where Florida was, which kind of surprised me. I could understand if they couldn't find, say, Kansas on a map, but Florida is a pretty big vacation destination; you would think the average European would at least know which coast it's on.
I would say that, in general, most people only know about the geography and cultures that are around them and which affect their lives. For most Americans, Europe has no more influence on their lives than China, Japan, India, the countries of Africa and the Middle East, etc, so they have no more knowledge about it than most Europeans know about the US cornbelt.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that article was kinda meaningless? Really, what's the point? "Hey guys, you know, having all of these nukes pointed at each other is pretty dangerous. Maybe we should do something about it?" Gosh, how insightful - I'm sure that nobody has ever thought of that before.
If you want to actually do something meaningful, figure out a way to reduce the risk that doesn't involve surrendering to the whims of any nutcase that has some nukes. We'll be waiting...
Something they don't seem to mention... how many bits are their hashes, and how many files do they intend to look for? God knows there have to be tens of millions of kiddie porn images out there, and the numbers just get higher if they want to track music and movies too. Set that against the billions and billions of files sent over the internet. I hope they have a really long hash, or they just might get some unintentional collisions.
That's my biggest complaint as well. It feels slick and fast and has a couple of cool features, like the default new tab screen. But after actually using it for a couple of days, I realized that the web is really full of ugly ads and annoying scripts. The fine-grained script control of NoScript is especially nice.
I use Camino on my Mac at home, and while it doesn't support the FF plugins, it at least has some partial ad and script blocking functionality, which is generally enough for me. I think Chrome should have at least that much functionality to be a serious browser for the geek crowd.
What's really strange to think about is the possibility for mobile browsers. AFAIK, none of the mobile browsers support blocking ads and scripts as well as these browsers do, so they're actually doing more work than the full computer browsers on a platform less suited to it.
Sadly, it seems that strict interpretation of civil liberties, stands against corruption, and stands in favor of reducing waste are more of a hobbyhorse of whichever party is out of power at the moment then an actual principled position of either party. If we're lucky, the party in power at least loses a good deal of support when it becomes clear that they weren't serious about all of that ethics stuff.
I don't think that there's much of a difference, but if there's going to be a line in how high resolution they can distribute, they have to draw it somewhere. They can't let things go by just because it's "only a little bit better" than what's allowed, or else there might as well not be a line there at all.
And any idiot with a soldering iron can disable a hardwired LED as well.
That might work, if we ever got articles that we could make long, well thought out, and insightful comments about.
And as I recall, the engine design in the book was based on using a laser to start a fusion reaction in pellets of fuel, and somehow directing the resulting energy output along an axis to provide thrust. Sounds cool, but I would expect we'd figure out how to get electricity out of a fusion reaction first.
You have a few good points there, but you also have to keep in mind that personal cars aren't a perfect solution either. Yeah, it's nice to be able to customize your car to your liking (including level of cleanliness), carry around a lot more junk than you could comfortably carry, make long trips continuously in one vehicle, etc. But you also have disadvantages like finding parking spots, avoiding minor and major accidents and dealing with the results when they happen, dealing with routine maintainence, having thousands to tens of thousands of dollars invested in a vehicle that wears out fairly rapidly and is damaged easily, etc. Both robocars, as described in TFA, and regular cars have flaws. It's a matter of which flaws are more important to which people.
The one thing that I like about the ideas in this article is that it is a fairly smooth transition to the proposed robocar world from what we have right now. There are lots of ideas for changing how people get around, but most of them are some variation of mass-transit and require multi-billion dollar investments per city, building the whole system from scratch, before they can do any work at all. Robocars have a potential end result that's just as good, but we can get there gradually with each step carefully examined and voluntarily financed by private individuals and companies. If some particular step in the proposed progression doesn't turn out to be practical or doesn't go the way we planned, then most of the infrastructure invested in so far is still worthwhile, and the whole thing can go a different way without anyone losing massive amounts of money. This is much more likely to work out than trying to get the Government to spend billions (trillions?) of dollars on building some particular system that may turn out to be a massive failure and can't be changed without even more massive amounts of money.
Yes, now they're going to make it so that you no longer need significant public support to grab power...
Agreed. It may be true that Mr. Dun Malg and his buddies deserve better close air support than they're getting, but we also have to keep in mind that this is unlikely to be the last war we ever have to fight, and the next war won't necessarily be the same as this one. Given that the world-class B2/F22 aircraft take decades to develop and any future major war is likely to be a matter of months or maybe weeks, I'd rather have the high-end stuff around now, in case we need it later. Not to discount the courage and sacrifice of our current soldiers in this war, but it'll all look like pocket change if another major war happens, especially if we don't have the right gear to fight it when it starts.
I think that you should be skeptical of everybody, not just some list of people. IMHO, having a list implies that you should not be skeptical of people you haven't on the list, and no man is so scrupulous as to be above skepticism. Every serious issue that I know of has plenty of con men on both sides. IMHO, the best way to deal with them is to put their (alleged?) cons in the spotlight and debunk them for everyone to see. Having a list kind of implies that they should be ignored, which makes them more powerful - if people read their arguments and can't find any good rebuttals, they will believe that they're right.