"Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms!"
That's the whole point, these cameras are being used to combat the wave of horse-and-buggy jackings and Amish drive-by shootings that have now reached epidemic proportions in Lancaster.
I know when the neighborhood watch is watching. If the neighborhood watch reports me, than I can easily track them down and retaliate. If it is a camera, I am never sure when they are watching or which observer narced me out, so I have to bust a cap in ALL their asses.
I too was against seatbelt laws, but after being busted and attending a seatbelt education class, I have modified my position. If you are alone in your car, then you should have every right to endanger yourselves. However, if there are any other people in your car, then you may become a projectile that can harm the other occupants of the vehicle in a collision. Therefore, you should be required to be belted to avoid the possibility of hurting others.
As far as the "no expectation of privacy in a public place" argument, I would say it is now, "If a passerby with a cell phone could have recorded the same video, then it is the same thing." One should never assume their actions outside of their own home are private. The addition of a few cameras doesn't change that principle. That being said, the video from public cameras should be available for everyone's use; they should not be able to suppress video of official wrongdoing while using other video to prosecute less powerful civilians. I also believe all interactions between police and civilians should be recorded, because an unbiased recording of events protects the police and the civilians equally. Granted, police would quickly learn how to do things "off camera", but if both the police and the suspect are recording, then it becomes much more difficult to hide wrongdoing.
The problem is not monitoring itself, it is selective monitoring. If these cameras make the video available over the 'net for anyone to see and record, than it cannot be used to persecute some people while protecting others. I also firmly believe that whenever a politician advocates the installation of monitoring cameras, the first camera installed should be aimed at their bedroom window and the video made freely available to everyone. If they don't have a problem with being treated that way themselves, then nobody else should either.
Americans have voted with their wallets. And they've overwhelmingly decided that they prefer cheap, inferior quality Chinese made goods sold at Walmart to more expensive domestic goods. What makes you think they wouldn't apply the same criteria they use in deciding which toilet seat to buy to software as well?
Competence knows no nationality. Some of the best and brightest coders I have ever met have come from India, as well as some of the least competent. Middle class Indians have an advantage in that they come from a culture that places a very high value on education, and therefore tend to be very highly educated. They have a disadvantage in that they come from a culture where you never contradict your superiors. If your manager says the project can be done in 3 weeks, you don't dare contradict him, you just fake it as best you can.
One of the main drawbacks of outsourcing overseas is that the company you are outsourcing to is free to lie about the qualifications of it's workers; you have no way of verifying their claims. What we currently have is a situation where they've gone from having 10,000 programmers to 1 million in a few years, yet they are still claiming that all their programmers have 10 years experience, when clearly this is not possible. It takes about 3 years experience to become an effective programmer, which means that the first companies to outsource to a given contractor are effectively paying to educate the foreign employees to be better skilled at future projects, not for results on the current project. Eventually, through experience gained from enough failed or marginal projects, the huge influx of new programmers will become skilled enough so that outsourcing will make good economic sense. But currently, in my experience, it is barely a break-even proposition. Getting more workers for less money isn't such a great bargain when they never successfully complete a project. There are thousands of highly skilled programmers in India, but they are already fully utilized. If you are writing a new outsourcing contract today, guess what -- you are NOT going to get the highly skilled programmers working on your project!
One must remember that a nation and its government is there to serve the betterment of its citizens, and not corporations.
One must remember that a government exists to serve the betterment of those that donate the most in campaign contributions. If you want the government to server citizen, not corporate interests, then you need to ensure that citizens spend more than corporations on lobbying.
It helps drive the economy forward. It helps people keep in touch. It allows people to access resources they otherwise wouldn't be able to. And of course, let's not forget the free porn!
AT&T claimed 'consumers benefit from exclusive deals in three ways: innovation, lower cost and more choice,' While guaranteeing monopoly rents to AT&T for anyone that wants an iPhone may actually provide more funding for innovation, economies of scale dictate that more iPhones could be sold if they were allowed on any network, thus lowering unit cost. The contention that less choice = more choice is truly Orwellian. Perhaps AT&T should use as their new slogan, "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."
You would think that eventually they would figure out that the chicks that insist on referring to females as "womyn" also prefer dating... womyn. Being the only male in a crowd of thousands here doesn't significantly increase your chances of getting laid either.
Here's a cookie. Tomorrow I'll give you twice as many as I did today. How many will you have in a week?
The answer is, of course zero; they will have eaten them all! They will, however, have a stomach ache from eating 128 cookies the last day, and quite possibly have diabetes from eating 255 cookies within a week.
Why aren't all textbooks open sourced already? Allowing teachers to take educational texts, modify them for their own needs, and distribute the changes makes even more sense than open source software does. And yet it rarely happens. Case in point: Beaverton School District wants to start a new math curiculum; with 32,000 students they will be spending $70,000/year on new text books for the next 12 years... I want to know the name of the teacher they are firing so that they can afford this!
Every group has its extremist nutjobs.
When was the last time you heard of an extremist Agnostic fundamentalist? A man willing to give his life for the proposition that there may or may not be a god?
So it probably wasn't ordered attack, just people who sees current democratical movement with Mousavi as leader as real threat for the regime. I suppose you believe the Shah of Iran didn't have agents in the US spying on Iranian students here either. Oh, you poor naive little nerd... The current protests will accomplish nothing since there is no chance in hell the ruling elite will reverse themselves on this, but bringing their society to the brink of revolution might just convince them to have much better monitoring and checks and balances for the next election. But no matter who wins an election, Khameini still calls the shots.
Google and Facebook are supporting Persian before they release support for Klingon?!? WTF?!? Man, there is one set of geeks with really misplaced priorities!
The truth is that all disciplines are both artistic and technical in nature, and that society would do well to discover this and promote this duality through education.
Very well put. Although proofs are more like an art or even a game (how to get from A to B in the most elegant fashion while following a strictly formalized set of rules), much of math does require a lot of groundwork in establishing a common language for the communication of ideas. Confusing the necessary common structure for expressing ideas is like confusing the Oxford English Dictionary with the collected works of Shakespeare, but that doesn't change the fact that wrote learning of much of the contents of the OED is still necessary to fully appreciate the genius of Shakespeare. Every specialized field develops it's own jargon. K-12 education specializes in teaching the jargon of math. Finally, I remember actually having to do geometry proofs in high school, and I hated it with a passion, precisely because it was so open-ended. It required intuitive leaps and lots of back-tracking to prove any non-trivial theorems, and there was no one correct way of doing it. Art it was, but since we weren't proving anything that wasn't proved 3000 years ago, it was more akin to copying an ancient sculpture by iterative guesswork than it was to the creation of a unique new artwork.
Creativity can neither be taught nor guided. The analogy with painting and music is flawed; there are an infinite number of ways to create a painting or musical composition, but relatively few ways to create a logically consistent mathematical system. While discovering mathematical truths on your own may be fun for the author (it was for me as a child), allowing everybody to write their own Principia Mathematica is simply unpractical and would result in mathematicians being unable to communicate their precious ideas to each other. Learning math is more like learning english; while the author is correct that we shouldn't confuse the language with the beautiful ideas the language is intended to express, it is also true that we can't discuss Shakespeare without a common language for communicating the abstract ideas contained within. I feel the same way about software that this guy feels about math (some programs are much more aesthetically pleasing than others), but his worst mistake is assuming that everybody else should feel the same way about math he does. Unlike art where you can just fake it until you make it, math actually does consist of many layers that build upon each other and must be learned in progression. (There are some notable exceptions to this, e.g. Set Theory has been successfully taught to 5 year olds. Binary Arithmetic is really just a trivial case of Set Theory where only null set and unity set exist; it could be taught more easily to children BEFORE they learn decimal arithmetic, but our culture has a decimal-centric bias (in The Simpsons cartoon universe, do they count in base 8?)) Where was I? Most of us can't even make it all the way through Godel, Escher, Bach. Just because you enjoyed it is no reason to assume everyone else in the world thinks the same way you do.
If you don't understand the fact that Kazaa makes available for distribution to other people every file that you yourself download, then your actions are not morally reprehensible. Downloading is not infringement; unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is.
Downloading is not a violation of copyright. Making copyrighted material available for others to download is unauthorized distribution, and thus is a violation of copyright. If you confuse the two and think you have no right to download, then the RIAA has succeeded.
Funny how people that are so ready to believe that the RIAA can buy whatever laws it needs to support it's flawed business model can't conceive of the notion that it might also pay someone to "throw" a court case in order to set a favorable legal precedent. I'm pretty sure file sharers are a lot easier to bribe than congressmen. Unlike congress-critters there are a lot more of them, and most of them don't already have a lot of money. If I had a plan for profiting from copyright, I would make buying a patsy to argue badly and lose all the way up to the supreme court to set a legal precedent #2 on my list:
1. Buy draconian laws protecting my "intellectual property".
2. People people to fight those new laws and lose badly, thus establishing legal precedent.
3. Sue everyone.
4. Profit!
Besides, there was no one like Brittany: no one had her mix of innocence and sexual confidence. She was popular for a reason. So she was popular because she was sexually appealing to pedophiles? Speaking strictly for myself, I'd prefer that musicians become popular based on their singing abilities, not their booty-shaking abilities. Brittany made a great stripper, but a lousy singer.
Slashdot Mirror
"Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms!"
That's the whole point, these cameras are being used to combat the wave of horse-and-buggy jackings and Amish drive-by shootings that have now reached epidemic proportions in Lancaster.
I know when the neighborhood watch is watching. If the neighborhood watch reports me, than I can easily track them down and retaliate. If it is a camera, I am never sure when they are watching or which observer narced me out, so I have to bust a cap in ALL their asses.
I too was against seatbelt laws, but after being busted and attending a seatbelt education class, I have modified my position. If you are alone in your car, then you should have every right to endanger yourselves. However, if there are any other people in your car, then you may become a projectile that can harm the other occupants of the vehicle in a collision. Therefore, you should be required to be belted to avoid the possibility of hurting others.
As far as the "no expectation of privacy in a public place" argument, I would say it is now, "If a passerby with a cell phone could have recorded the same video, then it is the same thing." One should never assume their actions outside of their own home are private. The addition of a few cameras doesn't change that principle. That being said, the video from public cameras should be available for everyone's use; they should not be able to suppress video of official wrongdoing while using other video to prosecute less powerful civilians. I also believe all interactions between police and civilians should be recorded, because an unbiased recording of events protects the police and the civilians equally. Granted, police would quickly learn how to do things "off camera", but if both the police and the suspect are recording, then it becomes much more difficult to hide wrongdoing.
The problem is not monitoring itself, it is selective monitoring. If these cameras make the video available over the 'net for anyone to see and record, than it cannot be used to persecute some people while protecting others. I also firmly believe that whenever a politician advocates the installation of monitoring cameras, the first camera installed should be aimed at their bedroom window and the video made freely available to everyone. If they don't have a problem with being treated that way themselves, then nobody else should either.
Americans have voted with their wallets. And they've overwhelmingly decided that they prefer cheap, inferior quality Chinese made goods sold at Walmart to more expensive domestic goods. What makes you think they wouldn't apply the same criteria they use in deciding which toilet seat to buy to software as well?
Competence knows no nationality. Some of the best and brightest coders I have ever met have come from India, as well as some of the least competent. Middle class Indians have an advantage in that they come from a culture that places a very high value on education, and therefore tend to be very highly educated. They have a disadvantage in that they come from a culture where you never contradict your superiors. If your manager says the project can be done in 3 weeks, you don't dare contradict him, you just fake it as best you can.
One of the main drawbacks of outsourcing overseas is that the company you are outsourcing to is free to lie about the qualifications of it's workers; you have no way of verifying their claims. What we currently have is a situation where they've gone from having 10,000 programmers to 1 million in a few years, yet they are still claiming that all their programmers have 10 years experience, when clearly this is not possible. It takes about 3 years experience to become an effective programmer, which means that the first companies to outsource to a given contractor are effectively paying to educate the foreign employees to be better skilled at future projects, not for results on the current project. Eventually, through experience gained from enough failed or marginal projects, the huge influx of new programmers will become skilled enough so that outsourcing will make good economic sense. But currently, in my experience, it is barely a break-even proposition. Getting more workers for less money isn't such a great bargain when they never successfully complete a project. There are thousands of highly skilled programmers in India, but they are already fully utilized. If you are writing a new outsourcing contract today, guess what -- you are NOT going to get the highly skilled programmers working on your project!
One must remember that a nation and its government is there to serve the betterment of its citizens, and not corporations.
One must remember that a government exists to serve the betterment of those that donate the most in campaign contributions. If you want the government to server citizen, not corporate interests, then you need to ensure that citizens spend more than corporations on lobbying.
Hand in your geek credentials immediately. You obviously don't belong here. ;-)
It helps drive the economy forward. It helps people keep in touch. It allows people to access resources they otherwise wouldn't be able to. And of course, let's not forget the free porn!
AT&T claimed 'consumers benefit from exclusive deals in three ways: innovation, lower cost and more choice,' While guaranteeing monopoly rents to AT&T for anyone that wants an iPhone may actually provide more funding for innovation, economies of scale dictate that more iPhones could be sold if they were allowed on any network, thus lowering unit cost. The contention that less choice = more choice is truly Orwellian. Perhaps AT&T should use as their new slogan, "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."
You would think that eventually they would figure out that the chicks that insist on referring to females as "womyn" also prefer dating... womyn. Being the only male in a crowd of thousands here doesn't significantly increase your chances of getting laid either.
At least it will make this Wiki page a lot more interesting!
Here's a cookie. Tomorrow I'll give you twice as many as I did today. How many will you have in a week?
The answer is, of course zero; they will have eaten them all! They will, however, have a stomach ache from eating 128 cookies the last day, and quite possibly have diabetes from eating 255 cookies within a week.
Why aren't all textbooks open sourced already? Allowing teachers to take educational texts, modify them for their own needs, and distribute the changes makes even more sense than open source software does. And yet it rarely happens. Case in point: Beaverton School District wants to start a new math curiculum; with 32,000 students they will be spending $70,000/year on new text books for the next 12 years... I want to know the name of the teacher they are firing so that they can afford this!
Every group has its extremist nutjobs.
When was the last time you heard of an extremist Agnostic fundamentalist? A man willing to give his life for the proposition that there may or may not be a god?
So it probably wasn't ordered attack, just people who sees current democratical movement with Mousavi as leader as real threat for the regime. I suppose you believe the Shah of Iran didn't have agents in the US spying on Iranian students here either. Oh, you poor naive little nerd... The current protests will accomplish nothing since there is no chance in hell the ruling elite will reverse themselves on this, but bringing their society to the brink of revolution might just convince them to have much better monitoring and checks and balances for the next election. But no matter who wins an election, Khameini still calls the shots.
Google and Facebook are supporting Persian before they release support for Klingon?!? WTF?!? Man, there is one set of geeks with really misplaced priorities!
The truth is that all disciplines are both artistic and technical in nature, and that society would do well to discover this and promote this duality through education.
Very well put. Although proofs are more like an art or even a game (how to get from A to B in the most elegant fashion while following a strictly formalized set of rules), much of math does require a lot of groundwork in establishing a common language for the communication of ideas. Confusing the necessary common structure for expressing ideas is like confusing the Oxford English Dictionary with the collected works of Shakespeare, but that doesn't change the fact that wrote learning of much of the contents of the OED is still necessary to fully appreciate the genius of Shakespeare. Every specialized field develops it's own jargon. K-12 education specializes in teaching the jargon of math. Finally, I remember actually having to do geometry proofs in high school, and I hated it with a passion, precisely because it was so open-ended. It required intuitive leaps and lots of back-tracking to prove any non-trivial theorems, and there was no one correct way of doing it. Art it was, but since we weren't proving anything that wasn't proved 3000 years ago, it was more akin to copying an ancient sculpture by iterative guesswork than it was to the creation of a unique new artwork.
Creativity can neither be taught nor guided. The analogy with painting and music is flawed; there are an infinite number of ways to create a painting or musical composition, but relatively few ways to create a logically consistent mathematical system. While discovering mathematical truths on your own may be fun for the author (it was for me as a child), allowing everybody to write their own Principia Mathematica is simply unpractical and would result in mathematicians being unable to communicate their precious ideas to each other. Learning math is more like learning english; while the author is correct that we shouldn't confuse the language with the beautiful ideas the language is intended to express, it is also true that we can't discuss Shakespeare without a common language for communicating the abstract ideas contained within. I feel the same way about software that this guy feels about math (some programs are much more aesthetically pleasing than others), but his worst mistake is assuming that everybody else should feel the same way about math he does. Unlike art where you can just fake it until you make it, math actually does consist of many layers that build upon each other and must be learned in progression. (There are some notable exceptions to this, e.g. Set Theory has been successfully taught to 5 year olds. Binary Arithmetic is really just a trivial case of Set Theory where only null set and unity set exist; it could be taught more easily to children BEFORE they learn decimal arithmetic, but our culture has a decimal-centric bias (in The Simpsons cartoon universe, do they count in base 8?)) Where was I? Most of us can't even make it all the way through Godel, Escher, Bach. Just because you enjoyed it is no reason to assume everyone else in the world thinks the same way you do.
If you don't understand the fact that Kazaa makes available for distribution to other people every file that you yourself download, then your actions are not morally reprehensible. Downloading is not infringement; unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is.
Downloading is not a violation of copyright. Making copyrighted material available for others to download is unauthorized distribution, and thus is a violation of copyright. If you confuse the two and think you have no right to download, then the RIAA has succeeded.
Funny how people that are so ready to believe that the RIAA can buy whatever laws it needs to support it's flawed business model can't conceive of the notion that it might also pay someone to "throw" a court case in order to set a favorable legal precedent. I'm pretty sure file sharers are a lot easier to bribe than congressmen. Unlike congress-critters there are a lot more of them, and most of them don't already have a lot of money. If I had a plan for profiting from copyright, I would make buying a patsy to argue badly and lose all the way up to the supreme court to set a legal precedent #2 on my list:
1. Buy draconian laws protecting my "intellectual property".
2. People people to fight those new laws and lose badly, thus establishing legal precedent.
3. Sue everyone.
4. Profit!
Besides, there was no one like Brittany: no one had her mix of innocence and sexual confidence. She was popular for a reason. So she was popular because she was sexually appealing to pedophiles? Speaking strictly for myself, I'd prefer that musicians become popular based on their singing abilities, not their booty-shaking abilities. Brittany made a great stripper, but a lousy singer.