It seems to me that democracy results in a sort of populistic legalism where you have thousands and thousands of little laws trying to create the perfect existence. But you can't make a perfect existence by putting strings on everyone and letting everyone else play everyone else's puppet master. Nobody can know even a fraction of the laws, yet break one that gets enforced and you're fined or jailed or forced into temporary involuntary servitude. Democracy may be freedom of the masses, but it's not freedom of the individual. The machine may be free to operate but the cogs are not free to turn. Is that really how you envision a free society?
I think the problem with your view is that you think there's supposed to be some kind of idealized "free society" where we're all, you know, free. The problem is that no two people define "free society" in exactly the same way.
I've thought about this exact issue; the proliferation of thousands and thousands of laws, governing finer and finer aspects of life. The reason this happens, and is unavoidable in a democracy, is because the population of the society exceeds the size at which everyone can trust everyone else.
Now, do we REALLY need these sections? What good are they? Well, they help ensure that the state's population of elk and antelope don't get wiped out by hunters. The state game commission can set regulations limiting or prohibiting how many elk hunters are allowed to shoot each year, to make sure that those populations endure. Why is that important? Well, we as a society have come to the conclusion that it's good to preserve native animal populations, because of all the detrimental effects on the ecosystems and environment that unfettered hunting has caused in the past. It's not feasible for individuals to make and enforce rules about elk and antelope hunting, so we have the government do it. And probably every single other regulation in that title of California state law is (ostensibly) there for the same reasons: society has deemed it important, we need to have public rules that everyone can be aware of if they need to be, and so we write regulations.
But why so many? Well, mostly because the world is complicated! There's thousands of animal species that might need protection, and sometimes we need separate regulations for each one. We need regulations about all the different ways it's possible to run a commercial fishing operation, or all the ways it's possible to use public lands. If we don't, then they'll get abused or destroyed by small, powerful groups or individuals, to the detriment of society as a whole. We cannot trust that everyone will behave properly all the time.
It's obviously necessary (and important) that we be able to look at any PARTICULAR law and say, This law is bad, let's change it -- but you can't say there's some artificial line where now we have too many laws, and we should just cut back by 20% or so. There are three hundred million people in the United States, and hoping that they'll all behave without having a set of laws to work with is naive in the extreme.
I used to feel the same way, but it's become clear to me that there's really no way around having a huge number of laws, if you want an orderly, peaceful society (and don't kid yourself -- even the most crime-ridden parts of the USA still don't have machete-wielding death squads running around wiping out entire towns, like has happened in Rwanda or the
It isn't telling anybody what they can and cannot do, it is simply a labeling requirement giving additional information to consumers.
I hate to nitpick, but it is telling someone what they cannot do. Specifically, you cannot publish images that have been altered in a certain way unless you include a statement about the alteration.
(Note that I'm not stating whether I agree with the law.)
Heck, how about diamonds? They're not that rare or valuable (compared to say emeralds or rubies), but DeBeers made a very successful campaign at the turn of the last century to create a market for their product by convincing women (and men) that diamonds were the only jewel worth giving as a betrothal ring.
Amen to that. My wife finds diamonds dull (as well as yellow gold) and prefers sapphires and white gold. Saves me a fortune.
(Of course, it also helps that she's just about the least materialistic woman I've ever met. She doesn't even wear makeup, and I'm so used to it that I find that women who DO wear makeup -- including my mother -- now look strange.)
Forgive me if I have little sympathy for holding up standardization because you don't like new words (see: your sig), but you'll get used to it. Suck it up.
Because they have been referred to as KB, MB, and GB since the '60s.
And they were using those terms incorrectly all along. We might as well start using the right terminology now; there's really no reason we need to continue using the old terms. (And any technical specification can easily have a prologue explaining that it uses GB and GiB correctly.) It's been 40+ years since the '60s; that 40-year span will eventually be a blip in the history of computing. There's no time like the present.
You're totally right. People shouldn't buy products from companies that advertise those products.
What I'm curious about is how they're going to find out about the products they DO end up buying.;-)
In many cities, it isn't legal to park at a meter that has time on it without putting in some more time. Obviously this is nearly impossible to enforce, but it's been the law in Los Angeles since time immemorial.
Can somebody please give a solid answer as to why these meters are a problem?
I haven't looked into the details of the Chicago or Portland meters, but... there's more than one company that makes these meters, and maybe the Portland ones are good and the Chicago ones suck? Or maybe the Chicago ones are too sparse and the Portland ones are placed frequently enough?
I work in Glendale, CA (just north of downtown Los Angeles) and they recently installed smart meters on the main drag. Basically you go to the meter, type in your space number (each space has a number printed on it, pretty easy to read), and put in money, and it prints out a receipt. You do NOT need to put the receipt in the car, since the system knows which spaces have money still on them. You never have to walk more than about 50 yards to one of the kiosks, they're spaced pretty frequently.
I don't know whether it's really an economic benefit overall for the people of Glendale, but they're pretty innocuous. Alas, I don't know what company makes them, but I can't really complain.
I always liked the theory that the galaxy Star Wars takes place in is permeated with dense (but relatively transparent) gas, which explains sound effects and why starships slow down when they turn off their engines;-)
As long as we're nitpicking lore... turbolasers are just really big blasters. The "laser" part of the name is just a linguistic holdover. They still fire packets of ionized gas.
It wouldn't be Slashdot without fictional pedantry, so:
In Star Wars, "blaster" refers to a handheld (or, at best, man-portable) energy weapon. "Laser cannon" usually refers to vehicle-mounted energy weapons, and larger laser cannons (like those found on starships and Death Stars) were called "turbolasers."
Han Solo wielded a blaster, Luke's X-wing had laser cannons, and Star Destroyers field turbolasers.
You need to take into account-- at least in the US-- that biofuels compete with food production.
Only when the biofuel is made from food crops like corn. (Even when it is, the cultivars they use are different; the cultivars of corn used for biofuel production are not the same ones you buy in the grocery store to eat.) Yes, they can still compete in that a grower who might grow edible corn could switch to fuel corn, but the most promising biofuel source is non-food algae, which can be farmed in the desert using seawater, which has basically no impact on food production. It's not using potable water, it's not competing with food crops for resources.
There's a whole other issue where we eat way too many grains (we didn't evolve for the mass consumption of grains), but that's another story;)
When will they ever learn that DRM just means defective by design?
Amazon is quite aware of this, which is why the DRM on Kindle AZW books is trivial to defeat. It's only there as a sop to the publishers, who are too backward to really understand how easy it is to get rid of the DRM, and without any DRM would refuse to let their books be made available for Kindle. But Amazon knows that anyone who wants to can strip the DRM off. They also know that very few Kindle users will ever want to bother.
The end result is they get to produce a neat device with a small amount of easily-removable DRM, and everyone's happy except anti-DRM fundamentalists. I hate DRM too, but I also know it's always ultimately futile, and eventually it'll go the way of the dodo, just like music DRM is.
So just because something has a lot of CPUs and can crunch a lot of numbers, doesn't make it a supercomputer.
There's no reason "supercomputer" needs to only refer to monolithic machines with high-speed interprocess communication, merely because it has primarily meant that in the past.
Man, you better hope that doesn't come true, or they're going to send you to the prison that they send federal pound-me-in-the-ass prisons to when they go bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem with your view is that you think there's supposed to be some kind of idealized "free society" where we're all, you know, free. The problem is that no two people define "free society" in exactly the same way.
I've thought about this exact issue; the proliferation of thousands and thousands of laws, governing finer and finer aspects of life. The reason this happens, and is unavoidable in a democracy, is because the population of the society exceeds the size at which everyone can trust everyone else.
Take, for example, California's state laws about fish and game, found here: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/calawquery?codesection=fgc&codebody=&hits=20
That's a lot of laws. Take, for example, sections 331-332, Antelope and Elk: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fgc&group=00001-01000&file=331-332
Now, do we REALLY need these sections? What good are they? Well, they help ensure that the state's population of elk and antelope don't get wiped out by hunters. The state game commission can set regulations limiting or prohibiting how many elk hunters are allowed to shoot each year, to make sure that those populations endure. Why is that important? Well, we as a society have come to the conclusion that it's good to preserve native animal populations, because of all the detrimental effects on the ecosystems and environment that unfettered hunting has caused in the past. It's not feasible for individuals to make and enforce rules about elk and antelope hunting, so we have the government do it. And probably every single other regulation in that title of California state law is (ostensibly) there for the same reasons: society has deemed it important, we need to have public rules that everyone can be aware of if they need to be, and so we write regulations.
But why so many? Well, mostly because the world is complicated! There's thousands of animal species that might need protection, and sometimes we need separate regulations for each one. We need regulations about all the different ways it's possible to run a commercial fishing operation, or all the ways it's possible to use public lands. If we don't, then they'll get abused or destroyed by small, powerful groups or individuals, to the detriment of society as a whole. We cannot trust that everyone will behave properly all the time.
It's obviously necessary (and important) that we be able to look at any PARTICULAR law and say, This law is bad, let's change it -- but you can't say there's some artificial line where now we have too many laws, and we should just cut back by 20% or so. There are three hundred million people in the United States, and hoping that they'll all behave without having a set of laws to work with is naive in the extreme.
I used to feel the same way, but it's become clear to me that there's really no way around having a huge number of laws, if you want an orderly, peaceful society (and don't kid yourself -- even the most crime-ridden parts of the USA still don't have machete-wielding death squads running around wiping out entire towns, like has happened in Rwanda or the
I hate to nitpick, but it is telling someone what they cannot do. Specifically, you cannot publish images that have been altered in a certain way unless you include a statement about the alteration.
(Note that I'm not stating whether I agree with the law.)
Amen to that. My wife finds diamonds dull (as well as yellow gold) and prefers sapphires and white gold. Saves me a fortune.
(Of course, it also helps that she's just about the least materialistic woman I've ever met. She doesn't even wear makeup, and I'm so used to it that I find that women who DO wear makeup -- including my mother -- now look strange.)
Don't you mean OMMMMMMMMINOUS HUMMMMMMMMMM?
Slashdot says: "Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING." Thanks, Slashdot! I'll make sure I tell Sergeant Schlock that.
Forgive me if I have little sympathy for holding up standardization because you don't like new words (see: your sig), but you'll get used to it. Suck it up.
And they were using those terms incorrectly all along. We might as well start using the right terminology now; there's really no reason we need to continue using the old terms. (And any technical specification can easily have a prologue explaining that it uses GB and GiB correctly.) It's been 40+ years since the '60s; that 40-year span will eventually be a blip in the history of computing. There's no time like the present.
You're totally right. People shouldn't buy products from companies that advertise those products. What I'm curious about is how they're going to find out about the products they DO end up buying. ;-)
I've entrusted all my money with the good folks at citibenk.se, so I'm completely safe!
In many cities, it isn't legal to park at a meter that has time on it without putting in some more time. Obviously this is nearly impossible to enforce, but it's been the law in Los Angeles since time immemorial.
Can somebody please give a solid answer as to why these meters are a problem?
I haven't looked into the details of the Chicago or Portland meters, but... there's more than one company that makes these meters, and maybe the Portland ones are good and the Chicago ones suck? Or maybe the Chicago ones are too sparse and the Portland ones are placed frequently enough?
I work in Glendale, CA (just north of downtown Los Angeles) and they recently installed smart meters on the main drag. Basically you go to the meter, type in your space number (each space has a number printed on it, pretty easy to read), and put in money, and it prints out a receipt. You do NOT need to put the receipt in the car, since the system knows which spaces have money still on them. You never have to walk more than about 50 yards to one of the kiosks, they're spaced pretty frequently. I don't know whether it's really an economic benefit overall for the people of Glendale, but they're pretty innocuous. Alas, I don't know what company makes them, but I can't really complain.
I always liked the theory that the galaxy Star Wars takes place in is permeated with dense (but relatively transparent) gas, which explains sound effects and why starships slow down when they turn off their engines ;-)
As long as we're nitpicking lore... turbolasers are just really big blasters. The "laser" part of the name is just a linguistic holdover. They still fire packets of ionized gas.
Take this as an object lesson in why the statistical mean is not always a useful value.
More like "partialoutbreakofcommonsense".
That is the dumbest... Damn! Can I get a license to finish this, AP?
Thanks, as a father of two kids I'm glad you reminded me of the first few days dealing with meconium. Jerk. ;-)
...and also so that it's easier to break the door down from the outside in case of fire or police emergency. This is not a coincidence.
It wouldn't be Slashdot without fictional pedantry, so:
In Star Wars, "blaster" refers to a handheld (or, at best, man-portable) energy weapon. "Laser cannon" usually refers to vehicle-mounted energy weapons, and larger laser cannons (like those found on starships and Death Stars) were called "turbolasers."
Han Solo wielded a blaster, Luke's X-wing had laser cannons, and Star Destroyers field turbolasers.
It's really just a matter of scale, mostly.
Only when the biofuel is made from food crops like corn. (Even when it is, the cultivars they use are different; the cultivars of corn used for biofuel production are not the same ones you buy in the grocery store to eat.) Yes, they can still compete in that a grower who might grow edible corn could switch to fuel corn, but the most promising biofuel source is non-food algae, which can be farmed in the desert using seawater, which has basically no impact on food production. It's not using potable water, it's not competing with food crops for resources. There's a whole other issue where we eat way too many grains (we didn't evolve for the mass consumption of grains), but that's another story ;)
Amazon is quite aware of this, which is why the DRM on Kindle AZW books is trivial to defeat. It's only there as a sop to the publishers, who are too backward to really understand how easy it is to get rid of the DRM, and without any DRM would refuse to let their books be made available for Kindle. But Amazon knows that anyone who wants to can strip the DRM off. They also know that very few Kindle users will ever want to bother. The end result is they get to produce a neat device with a small amount of easily-removable DRM, and everyone's happy except anti-DRM fundamentalists. I hate DRM too, but I also know it's always ultimately futile, and eventually it'll go the way of the dodo, just like music DRM is.
Have you ever talked to an Irishman? Nobody can understand the Irish Inquisition.
Earthquake Invisibility Cloak
Enchantment
{1}{R}
All creatures have flying.
There's no reason "supercomputer" needs to only refer to monolithic machines with high-speed interprocess communication, merely because it has primarily meant that in the past.
Man, you better hope that doesn't come true, or they're going to send you to the prison that they send federal pound-me-in-the-ass prisons to when they go bad.