The example of racism is not a failure of the jury, of jury nullification, or of the court system. It is an overall failure of the justice system, where by the prosecution and the defense are in collusion and packing the jury to acquit. And that's a failure of the community
Yes, people will get away with murder when the community allows it. Tyranny of the majority is a problem inherent in democracy, especially direct democracies.
Unlike other endeavours that are featured here, this is rocket science. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that rocket science is as challenging today as it was 40 years ago.
Rising standard of living reduces the amount of children born (as stated above).
Rising standard of living stabilizes the region, which in turn reduces regional conflicts. It's not conducive to the overall human population, but such considerations become academic when your neighbor's war spills over into your country and you find yourself facing the wrong end of an AK-47.
Thus it is in everybody's interest to raise the standard of living everywhere. Although, to be honest (as said above by the same person), there's no real need to actively help because people will do raise their own standard of living just fine on their own.
Books last centuries. We're able to read Da Vinci's journal and Fermat's copy of Mathematica where he wrote down his famous last theorem. How long will an e-book last? Will notes and remarks remain for the life of the e-book?
Your assetion that digital is forever, which is the entire basis of your statement, is simply and completely false. Digital data has not and will not withstand the test of time. Most sites from the early 90's, just two decades ago no longer exist, even if you're only looking at contents and not layout or design. Even the Wayback Machine doesn't have every page of every site, not to mention that there are sites that existed before the Wayback Machine. Even if a site was archived, the chances of the Wayback Machine and archive.org no longer being present within the next 100 years is much greater than the chances of all copies of any book degrading to the point of illegibility in the same timespan. The only information stored digitally that has even a chance of being perpetually propogated for more than a few years are the things that remain popular throughout. Historically, the only thing that remotely qualifies are religious and philosophical texts. And even then, most of those texts are often passed down to modernity having gone through translation, modification, and pieces have been outright lost.
You need to snap out of the "technology is humanity's savior" and "newer is always better" attitude. Technology is an enabler. That's all it is. It doesn't replace what exists already, it makes certain trade-offs to enable other things and open up other doors.
Books can be read with no electrical infrastructure, no equipment except your eyes, and can survive any environment. Your e-book reader needs a power source and the maintenance thereof, and can only operate under normal conditions. The contents of a damaged book can be partially recovered, in particular, the parts that aren't damaged. The contents of a damanged e-reader may not be recoverable at all. And I'm not even talking about DRM, which makes it even worse. Books can be buried underground for ages during times of turmoil. Your e-book reader's battery will be unable to hold charge after a few decades. Books are relatively easy to print and copy, difficult to retroactively modify, and impossible to completely remove from the face of the planet, short of burning every last copy. Electronic books, especially on a DRM'ed medium, can not only be removed from your perpetually-connected reader without your consent, but the contents can be subtly or otherwise changed en mass. Books cost $7-$10 for a mass market paperback, $20-$30 for a hardcover. E-books cost the same, plus the cost of the reader and the electricity the reader uses.
Besides which, I'd like to see you try to recover your e-book reader after you've dropped it into your pool or the ocean or even the toilet (in fact, you might not care to recover your book while you'll probably be more motivated to recover your reader, which is a huge plus for books right there).
There's a reason why certain aspects of life have remained the same for centuries, and it's not necessarily because people are incapable of or resistant to change. Some things have already met the ideal or are so close to them that any further attempts at improvement will require more time and effort than the improvement is worth. Books are one of them.
short of piracy, don't count on finding low cost channels for content from the studios to last forever.
I get my dose of consumption through legal means: I don't consume what I don't think is worthwhile.
Which basically means, yeah, if I get into a free movie screening somewhere, I'll go, but if not, I'll pass. I won't even bother to watch it on TV when it comes out later. It's not that important in my social life, which is dominated more by alcohol and the consumption thereof, sports, and where to eat cheap and good food, than something in the movies or on TV.
I find that quite saddening how such a higher-quality animal is always the one on the bench.
The priority of every single living organism is to survive long enough to propagate. It doesn't matter if it's 3 weeks or 3 years or 300 years, as long as it happens within the time it is alive.
The bees who live longer and produce more honey probably have too much genetic makeup dedicated to doing those two things than to actually surviving long enough to propagate. It's not like we have an infinite amount of room for genetic material. There's a limit, and beyond that certain limit, an entirely more sophisticated system is needed to sustain it.
Which is why scavengers like rats and cockroaches are probably the most abundant animals out there.
That's untrue. Android isn't a race to the bottom. Android is leveling the playing field. Where before, it was Apple's iPhone/iOS at the very top, and everyone else fighting for the rest of the market, the advent of Android lets all those everyone else's fight at Apple's iOS level.
Because of Android, the competition shifts from being over the operating system and its closed ecosystem to over the actual physical phone itself. If they were to develop their own platform, it would have to compete with both Android and iOS for ecosystem marketshare before even competing with them on the physical phone's features.
They could (and maybe should) have gone with MeeGo, but with Nokia's self-destruction, that's not terribly appealing at the moment. Intel is still backing the project, but any progress there is pretty much moot without support from a major phone manufacturer.
It sounds like it's still in the research phase, which means it's not a viable commercial product yet. All the things you describe would need to be solved in order for it to be commercially viable. But the concept is novel, and deserves credit for what it is.
Whether this will ultimately end up being a replacement or a competitor in the current cooling systems market will be a matter of whether these problems can or need to ultimately be solved. Since this phase of the research deals only with the viability of the new design, I suspect it will be.
It's all about perspective. When Apple was small and the underdog, nobody cared how they actually attained their victories, only that they did. Now that they're no longer the underdogs, they don't get that free pass anymore. They're expected to act responsibly just like every other market leader. The only thing that offsets this attitude is Apple marketing.
Yes, it's a double standard, but that's how the human psyche works. We'll always be looking for that champion to stand against an oppressor, and will attach ourselves to the one that's most likely to succeed, even if that champion is innately flawed in much the same manner or worse than the current oppressor.
You will note that according to TFA, the researchers didn't know it was targeted to sabotage an Iranian nuclear facility until the very end. And by the time anyone realized it was, the cat was out of the bag. Towards the end, it was only a matter of figuring out what specific facility was being targeted.
It is true these guys were suspicious the entire time that it was a government black ops operation. But that suspicion in and of itself says nothing. It could have been attacking anything, like Russian natural gas pipelines again, for all they knew. What they did know was that it was a virus designed to sabotage a controller used in industrial manufacturing. And as the Russian pipeline incident illustrates, that can have very serious consequences.
Imagine if someone sabotaged a manufacturing plant used to build commercial planes that would shorten its maintenance cycle or lifespan from the engineered specifications. Or one that sabotaged a vehicle tire manufacturing facility. Or high speed railway brakes. That would have been disastrous.
What their attitudes told me was that at the very real risk of personal health and safety, they did the entire civilized world a huge service by making their findings public. They revealed to the world the method by which a very real act of industrial sabotage happened, all the while knowing that it could land them dead. They put the duty of warning the entire world of such an attack vector before their own selves.
Sure, TFA says they were doing it for their customers. But that's a disingenuous way of looking at it. Because the customers who benefit the most from their disclosure are the same ones who manufacture physical equipment that must be within established guidelines, many of which are safety guidelines. And that means we, the people who operate the equipment or rely on such equipment to not fail unexpectedly are the ultimate beneficiaries.
To me, it puts them among the very few noble and honorable individuals left in the world. You may not care for such attributes in people, but I think there are still a few in the world who do. At the very least, I think most people wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone was petty and underhanded, as you seem to advocate by your comment. And I think they by their actions are greater believers of freedom than you by your weasel words.
While we might not be designing our next generation, we do check for genetic defects, and then potentially aborting when they are detected.
Now that's a slippery slope.
Imagine if people tested what could've been the next Stephen Hawking and found that because he has some kind of disposition for ALS, they aborted him. Or Einstein, who had a disorder that rendered him unable to read until 3.
I fully support abortion for the safety and well-being of the woman. Aborting a child because of some chance of a genetic problem is beyond my tolerance. I suspect most people would agree. Now, Gattaca-style selective-conception is something different altogether, and I have mixed feelings about that. I might not look too highly on anyone who does that, but it's not outright abominable.
It probably isn't unwise to be cautious about things that are poorly understood. But that caution should be backed by a desire to understand further, rather than unchecked, stiffling panic. The former is what truly distinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom, while the latter is merely more of the same.
The latest and greatest example of this is how we're handing cell phones versus how we handle autism. There are a lot of experiments into whether cell phones cause cancer or not. And people are cautious about carrying it near their crotch or holding it up to their heads when talking. But nobody refuses to use a cell phone for solely this reason, or demands that cell phone towers near them be taken down.
On the other hand, it's been shown vaccines are not linked to autism, yet there's still plenty of people panicking and refusing to vaccinate their children. Instead of doing research on what causes autism and why its incidence is on the rise, people find something, anything to emotionally latch onto to alleviate their fears.
For everything else, code review is critical. People also tend to think minor changes don't need to be reviewed, but that's often untrue unless several developers independently decide on the same change and the change is very, very minor.
Now, the things to say during a code review, questions to ask, mistakes to point out, things to ignore, these are what widom and experience are for.
Agreed. Discovering your own faults is probably the most difficult thing to do. It's easy to see the faults in other people though.
This inability practically is the definition of an egomaniac. Egomaniacs probably need code reviews the most. They also probably do it the least. The idea that doing a code review is a way to show off one's code is probably the only thing that would convince an egomaniac to do one. Getting them to answer the questions and accept criticism is a different story.
I consider code review the same as peer review in science and mathematics. If it's not checked by other people, it's not good enough to be "right."
For someone truly dedicated to serving the community, the answer is obvious: you want to do both.
Deterrents are great. They usually keep people from doing stupid things. To see an example of the lack of a deterrent, just look at have anonymity affects people online. Suddenly, because there's no deterrent, everybody becomes douchebags.
Likewise, many crimes are crimes of opportunity. If there is sufficient deterrent, people won't commit said crimes. At the minimum, they will do some rudimentary form of cost-benefit analysis and usually come to the conclusion that the cost is probably not worth the benefit.
But you also want to catch criminals after the crime has happened. And for some, they will commit the crime, deterrent or not. In those cases, you have to use unmarked cars, because a marked car will allow the criminal to respond to it, and only serve to move the time or location of the crime.
This technology would be great if it's used properly (and it works). But chances are, we'll just see more innocent people getting arrested only because they fit the profile of other known criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
What'd be more exciting is if they couldn't find it. Then there'd be something worthwhile to talk about.
That works until you make too much noise and nobody can distinguish them apart, or care to anymore.
Now let's put these criminals who've stolen trillions from the American people behind bars.
Oh wait.
The example of racism is not a failure of the jury, of jury nullification, or of the court system. It is an overall failure of the justice system, where by the prosecution and the defense are in collusion and packing the jury to acquit. And that's a failure of the community
Yes, people will get away with murder when the community allows it. Tyranny of the majority is a problem inherent in democracy, especially direct democracies.
We'll find out when Pluto is suddenly replaced by an asteroid field, or when this new moon suddenly disappears.
Unlike other endeavours that are featured here, this is rocket science. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that rocket science is as challenging today as it was 40 years ago.
Two reasons:
Rising standard of living reduces the amount of children born (as stated above).
Rising standard of living stabilizes the region, which in turn reduces regional conflicts. It's not conducive to the overall human population, but such considerations become academic when your neighbor's war spills over into your country and you find yourself facing the wrong end of an AK-47.
Thus it is in everybody's interest to raise the standard of living everywhere. Although, to be honest (as said above by the same person), there's no real need to actively help because people will do raise their own standard of living just fine on their own.
Books last centuries. We're able to read Da Vinci's journal and Fermat's copy of Mathematica where he wrote down his famous last theorem. How long will an e-book last? Will notes and remarks remain for the life of the e-book?
Your assetion that digital is forever, which is the entire basis of your statement, is simply and completely false. Digital data has not and will not withstand the test of time. Most sites from the early 90's, just two decades ago no longer exist, even if you're only looking at contents and not layout or design. Even the Wayback Machine doesn't have every page of every site, not to mention that there are sites that existed before the Wayback Machine. Even if a site was archived, the chances of the Wayback Machine and archive.org no longer being present within the next 100 years is much greater than the chances of all copies of any book degrading to the point of illegibility in the same timespan. The only information stored digitally that has even a chance of being perpetually propogated for more than a few years are the things that remain popular throughout. Historically, the only thing that remotely qualifies are religious and philosophical texts. And even then, most of those texts are often passed down to modernity having gone through translation, modification, and pieces have been outright lost.
You need to snap out of the "technology is humanity's savior" and "newer is always better" attitude. Technology is an enabler. That's all it is. It doesn't replace what exists already, it makes certain trade-offs to enable other things and open up other doors.
Books can be read with no electrical infrastructure, no equipment except your eyes, and can survive any environment. Your e-book reader needs a power source and the maintenance thereof, and can only operate under normal conditions. The contents of a damaged book can be partially recovered, in particular, the parts that aren't damaged. The contents of a damanged e-reader may not be recoverable at all. And I'm not even talking about DRM, which makes it even worse. Books can be buried underground for ages during times of turmoil. Your e-book reader's battery will be unable to hold charge after a few decades. Books are relatively easy to print and copy, difficult to retroactively modify, and impossible to completely remove from the face of the planet, short of burning every last copy. Electronic books, especially on a DRM'ed medium, can not only be removed from your perpetually-connected reader without your consent, but the contents can be subtly or otherwise changed en mass. Books cost $7-$10 for a mass market paperback, $20-$30 for a hardcover. E-books cost the same, plus the cost of the reader and the electricity the reader uses.
Besides which, I'd like to see you try to recover your e-book reader after you've dropped it into your pool or the ocean or even the toilet (in fact, you might not care to recover your book while you'll probably be more motivated to recover your reader, which is a huge plus for books right there).
There's a reason why certain aspects of life have remained the same for centuries, and it's not necessarily because people are incapable of or resistant to change. Some things have already met the ideal or are so close to them that any further attempts at improvement will require more time and effort than the improvement is worth. Books are one of them.
By "less," I meant more objective. Their everyday reporting isn't any more objective.
I fail to see how this is different from their usual "news". It's not as if their normal every-day reporting is any less objective.
Perhaps not, but IT is certainly a good place to start fixing the problem.
trust(china + social networking site) = floor(trust(china),trust(social networking site))
short of piracy, don't count on finding low cost channels for content from the studios to last forever.
I get my dose of consumption through legal means: I don't consume what I don't think is worthwhile.
Which basically means, yeah, if I get into a free movie screening somewhere, I'll go, but if not, I'll pass. I won't even bother to watch it on TV when it comes out later. It's not that important in my social life, which is dominated more by alcohol and the consumption thereof, sports, and where to eat cheap and good food, than something in the movies or on TV.
Yeah, let them eat cake.
I find that quite saddening how such a higher-quality animal is always the one on the bench.
The priority of every single living organism is to survive long enough to propagate. It doesn't matter if it's 3 weeks or 3 years or 300 years, as long as it happens within the time it is alive.
The bees who live longer and produce more honey probably have too much genetic makeup dedicated to doing those two things than to actually surviving long enough to propagate. It's not like we have an infinite amount of room for genetic material. There's a limit, and beyond that certain limit, an entirely more sophisticated system is needed to sustain it.
Which is why scavengers like rats and cockroaches are probably the most abundant animals out there.
That's untrue. Android isn't a race to the bottom. Android is leveling the playing field. Where before, it was Apple's iPhone/iOS at the very top, and everyone else fighting for the rest of the market, the advent of Android lets all those everyone else's fight at Apple's iOS level.
Because of Android, the competition shifts from being over the operating system and its closed ecosystem to over the actual physical phone itself. If they were to develop their own platform, it would have to compete with both Android and iOS for ecosystem marketshare before even competing with them on the physical phone's features.
They could (and maybe should) have gone with MeeGo, but with Nokia's self-destruction, that's not terribly appealing at the moment. Intel is still backing the project, but any progress there is pretty much moot without support from a major phone manufacturer.
Because arrogance makes the fat lady look like a size-zero supermodel until you walk right up to her. And by then, it's all over.
It sounds like it's still in the research phase, which means it's not a viable commercial product yet. All the things you describe would need to be solved in order for it to be commercially viable. But the concept is novel, and deserves credit for what it is.
Whether this will ultimately end up being a replacement or a competitor in the current cooling systems market will be a matter of whether these problems can or need to ultimately be solved. Since this phase of the research deals only with the viability of the new design, I suspect it will be.
It's all about perspective. When Apple was small and the underdog, nobody cared how they actually attained their victories, only that they did. Now that they're no longer the underdogs, they don't get that free pass anymore. They're expected to act responsibly just like every other market leader. The only thing that offsets this attitude is Apple marketing.
Yes, it's a double standard, but that's how the human psyche works. We'll always be looking for that champion to stand against an oppressor, and will attach ourselves to the one that's most likely to succeed, even if that champion is innately flawed in much the same manner or worse than the current oppressor.
You're a troll.
You will note that according to TFA, the researchers didn't know it was targeted to sabotage an Iranian nuclear facility until the very end. And by the time anyone realized it was, the cat was out of the bag. Towards the end, it was only a matter of figuring out what specific facility was being targeted.
It is true these guys were suspicious the entire time that it was a government black ops operation. But that suspicion in and of itself says nothing. It could have been attacking anything, like Russian natural gas pipelines again, for all they knew. What they did know was that it was a virus designed to sabotage a controller used in industrial manufacturing. And as the Russian pipeline incident illustrates, that can have very serious consequences.
Imagine if someone sabotaged a manufacturing plant used to build commercial planes that would shorten its maintenance cycle or lifespan from the engineered specifications. Or one that sabotaged a vehicle tire manufacturing facility. Or high speed railway brakes. That would have been disastrous.
What their attitudes told me was that at the very real risk of personal health and safety, they did the entire civilized world a huge service by making their findings public. They revealed to the world the method by which a very real act of industrial sabotage happened, all the while knowing that it could land them dead. They put the duty of warning the entire world of such an attack vector before their own selves.
Sure, TFA says they were doing it for their customers. But that's a disingenuous way of looking at it. Because the customers who benefit the most from their disclosure are the same ones who manufacture physical equipment that must be within established guidelines, many of which are safety guidelines. And that means we, the people who operate the equipment or rely on such equipment to not fail unexpectedly are the ultimate beneficiaries.
To me, it puts them among the very few noble and honorable individuals left in the world. You may not care for such attributes in people, but I think there are still a few in the world who do. At the very least, I think most people wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone was petty and underhanded, as you seem to advocate by your comment. And I think they by their actions are greater believers of freedom than you by your weasel words.
While we might not be designing our next generation, we do check for genetic defects, and then potentially aborting when they are detected.
Now that's a slippery slope.
Imagine if people tested what could've been the next Stephen Hawking and found that because he has some kind of disposition for ALS, they aborted him. Or Einstein, who had a disorder that rendered him unable to read until 3.
I fully support abortion for the safety and well-being of the woman. Aborting a child because of some chance of a genetic problem is beyond my tolerance. I suspect most people would agree. Now, Gattaca-style selective-conception is something different altogether, and I have mixed feelings about that. I might not look too highly on anyone who does that, but it's not outright abominable.
It probably isn't unwise to be cautious about things that are poorly understood. But that caution should be backed by a desire to understand further, rather than unchecked, stiffling panic. The former is what truly distinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom, while the latter is merely more of the same.
The latest and greatest example of this is how we're handing cell phones versus how we handle autism. There are a lot of experiments into whether cell phones cause cancer or not. And people are cautious about carrying it near their crotch or holding it up to their heads when talking. But nobody refuses to use a cell phone for solely this reason, or demands that cell phone towers near them be taken down.
On the other hand, it's been shown vaccines are not linked to autism, yet there's still plenty of people panicking and refusing to vaccinate their children. Instead of doing research on what causes autism and why its incidence is on the rise, people find something, anything to emotionally latch onto to alleviate their fears.
The only time code reviews don't make sense:
* 1-off programs
* single-purpose simple programs
* non-critical, non-production programs (e.g. proof of concepts)
For everything else, code review is critical. People also tend to think minor changes don't need to be reviewed, but that's often untrue unless several developers independently decide on the same change and the change is very, very minor.
Now, the things to say during a code review, questions to ask, mistakes to point out, things to ignore, these are what widom and experience are for.
Agreed. Discovering your own faults is probably the most difficult thing to do. It's easy to see the faults in other people though.
This inability practically is the definition of an egomaniac. Egomaniacs probably need code reviews the most. They also probably do it the least. The idea that doing a code review is a way to show off one's code is probably the only thing that would convince an egomaniac to do one. Getting them to answer the questions and accept criticism is a different story.
I consider code review the same as peer review in science and mathematics. If it's not checked by other people, it's not good enough to be "right."
For someone truly dedicated to serving the community, the answer is obvious: you want to do both.
Deterrents are great. They usually keep people from doing stupid things. To see an example of the lack of a deterrent, just look at have anonymity affects people online. Suddenly, because there's no deterrent, everybody becomes douchebags.
Likewise, many crimes are crimes of opportunity. If there is sufficient deterrent, people won't commit said crimes. At the minimum, they will do some rudimentary form of cost-benefit analysis and usually come to the conclusion that the cost is probably not worth the benefit.
But you also want to catch criminals after the crime has happened. And for some, they will commit the crime, deterrent or not. In those cases, you have to use unmarked cars, because a marked car will allow the criminal to respond to it, and only serve to move the time or location of the crime.
This technology would be great if it's used properly (and it works). But chances are, we'll just see more innocent people getting arrested only because they fit the profile of other known criminals.