Oh, come on. While I agree that this example isn't nearly sufficient to be quoting 1984, the book didn't just apply to leftist governments - it clearly applies to authoritarian governments of any stripe. All of the examples you've cited there have counterparts in rightist authoritarian governments, and because of the nature of the current US administration, those examples are much more common and immediate, so it's really no wonder that people apply the book primarily to rightist actions currently. That it can happen on the left as well in no way means that it can't happen on the right. As they say, when the boot is laid in it's difficult to tell whether it's from the left or right foot.
It's this kind of stupid blindness which sent me to the centre in the first place, while around me people switch from one extreme to another like a fricking metronome. Both sides seem to prefer shutting their eyes and screaming that all the world's problems are the opposition's fault, without daring to question their own policies for fear of being ostracised by their peers. With so much stupid being poured into the discourse from both sides of the aisle, it's no wonder that it's rare to see serious policy making as opposed to idealogical, realism-deficient bullshit.
It's crazy. The police walking up to you on the street and asking, "Papers, please" used to be a ham-fisted technique for scriptwriters to illustrate precisely the difference between the Good Free Capitalist Peoples and the Evil Menace That Oppresses The World.
Here's the thing. Have you been keeping track of whether or not Rudd has been keeping his election promises. I have, for the most part. And you know what's really, really scary? He's actually following through on them. Seriously. And this is one of the promises he made, so if history is any guide, he's going to do everything in his power to make it happen.
I don't think anyone knows how to handle this new breed of politician that seems to have ended up PM this time around. I seriously am not sure whether or not I like it yet - on the plus side you can predict what they're going to do once elected, on the minus side stupid promises are made every election that most people don't expect to be followed through on, so having those stupid promises actually realised is fairly disturbing.
Oh, come on, fiscal policy is the biggest field where they do agree, federally - think of the ridiculous level of cost-cutting that was going on for their first budget. Yeah, they've let that go this year now, but given that practically every country on Earth is doing the same thing, I think that they can be forgiven. No, the main difference is in social policy and levels of economic regulation.
Not even RTFS these days? There's going to be a second filter that you can't opt-out of. Theoretically it's only for actual criminal content (child-porn, etc.), but given the rate of false positives you will be cut off from a significant number of perfectly decent sites if this is put in place.
Meh, this sort of crap is why we have minor parties controlling the balance of power in the Senate. I'm quite certain that the Greens won't go for it, if nothing else.
Unfortunately, this case is just the sort of bullshit populism that can get support from both major parties, so it may well be that the minor parties can't give it the smack-down that it so richly deserves. Our only hope is that the Liberal party takes the position that diminishing our internet access like this is too likely to be damaging to business (it is, after all), allowing it to be shot down.
Internet censorship in Australia is largely the province of the Federal Government and its laws on Internet censorship are, theoretically, amongst the most restrictive in the Western world. However, the restrictive nature of the laws has been combined with almost complete disinterest in enforcement from the agencies responsible for doing so.
Yeah, I do find it pretty easy to dismiss most witnesses - it's pretty easy to put it down to either hallucination or attention-seeking.
The ones I find a little harder to immediately dismiss are the ones where the witness actually disappears. I mean, maybe hallucination caused him to crash the plane, but that is a fairly interesting story.
Uh, wow, right up until your last sentence I thought that you were making a very good point as to why Nine Network should be allowed to copyright the guide. After all, the guide is a written down version of a completely invented schedule - shouldn't it, therefore, fall under standard understandings of copyright? It's not like they're writing things that exist independently of themselves - it's entirely their own creation.
I actually was against being able to copyright something like this before I read your post, but now I'm finding that I'm tentatively for it.
No, it's sensible when you take into account the 'flipping' of time and space (radius) dimensions. Within an event horizon, the radius between the object and the centre of the mass becomes time-like - it can only ever increase, and doing so is pretty much inevitable. Time becomes vaguely space-like, although it's unclear if you can move in both directions along that axis, even in singularity conditions. In these conditions, the only way to move is to decrease radius (analogous to moving forward through time) - stopping is like taking a snapshot in time, and this is why you can't move tangentially to the centre of mass, as it would be like moving in space but not in time (instantaneous teleportation).
Disclaimer: IANAP, just studied it a little during my university career, which has been a while now, so the science may have moved on or I may be remembering the physics wrong.
A good point, and one which significantly increases the likelihood that this isn't actually to do a catch-all monitoring of the public, but rather to allow them to monitor communications between specific people without needing a warrent. Like suspected home-grown terrorists, perhaps. Or members of the opposition party.
Given that the traditional definition of a first world country is based on quality of life, per capita measurements really seem to be the appropriate measure. Raw measurements are more for measuring a country's economic power when compared to other countries, which is a quite different measurement. In this field, I'll freely agree that Australia is, at best, a middle power.
The collective delusion of Australians that we're a first world country is the problem here.
OK, now that's an interesting position. Could you back it up, please? By most traditional measures (GDP per capita, GNI per capita, etc.), Australia is one of the most well-off in the world. By which measure do you assert that it's not a first world country?
Perhaps. But Apple are taking a 'planned economy' approach to the marketplace by limiting what can and cannot be done on their hardware. If they ever are too slow to act or misjudge the importance of a major app - something we've seen again and again in this industry - then the faster adapter(/adopter) will win.
Well who knows... the hype with apple products is the reason why so many people like it. Usually it's not the "best" technology who gets approval but the one who is used by most people see Windows, we all know that it's relatively crappy but so many people use it that finally it doesn't count that much.
And it will continue to not count that much...right up until a killer app is released for the Android platform which can't be ported to the iPhone because of the restrictions.
People are complaining about not being able to fiddle around with the iPod and iPhone, but that's not what's going to be the main difference. Phones and mobile devices have just started to come into the area where third-party applications can really start taking off, and as always happens with this sort of situation they'll soon be more important than first-party developed applications. Google's framework is entirely geared towards that supporting that sort of innovation, whereas Apples products are decidedly not.
85% of the people are geeky enough to want to figure it out (and likely in multiple font sizes so that they can pick an answer that relates to pi or e or the Planck constant or some obscure prime or, well, you get the idea). However, 65% of all Slashdot readers are rather lazy (as evidenced by their lack of reading any posted article, and in many cases, even bothering to read the summary). So, using those numbers, we can extrapolate that clearly 55% of the people would attempt to find the answer.
It seems that the internet adage that you can't correct a spelling mistake without one of your own extends to maths as well;)
In your haste to be the first (which places you in the 10% Frosty Piss crowd)
Actually, I was just going for a funny moderation, but hey, if informative is what the people want, informative is what they get.
you merely estimated and rounded and didn't show your work.
Well, the estimation was on the basis that many different fonts have different widths, so I took a ball-park figure of 2mm and worked from there. Obviously, that doesn't supply a lot of significant figures, and I was sort of cheating by allowing 2 in the answer, but I'm not exactly seeking peer review here. The didn't show my work charge I'll plead guilty to - that was a common refrain of just about every maths and physics teacher, demonstator and lecturer I had in my student career. Forgive a bad habit.
(All math performed using Google calculator, because Google knows everything.)
Including all math in the grandparent post. Because it really does.
Try to think of fun facts to keep them entertained--don't say petabyte, figure out how many times around the world one string of text will go that a petabyte can store.
About 55,000, with a size ~8 font size (depending on font).
(Bastard, you knew that half the people here wouldn't be able to help themselves.)
Uh, if they needed to minimise the risk of a copy of the files being left behind, what exactly should the police have done? If I reported something like this to the police, the next thing I'd do is open the doors and put on a pot of tea for the special ops chaps who'd likely be calling by momentarily. Just because they came by and siezed the relevent equipment doesn't mean they treated him like a criminal - they simply did the best they could in a bad situation, and were probably rather apologetic to him and his family. They could well have returned the computer within 48 hours - we really don't have enough information to be passing judgement about this.
Eh, perhaps. Or maybe they will bring it under $1M - and keep it there. For 30 years. In 30 years, $1M is not going to be a lot of money - if inflation stays consistent with historical data, it'd be roughly the equivalent of about $150,000 now. At that price, buying a place on an orbital station and moving to space independently of any government starts becoming plausible.
Meh, the big advantage of an elevator is that if you've got something to climb up, you only need energy - not reaction mass. Have the counterweight at the top that the elevator is tethered to include a solar energy collector of some kind and use an EM beam to transmit power to the climber. Then you only need the extra mass of the receiver.
RTFAmendment. Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
It says nothing about the courts. Congress could remove the courts' ability to make gag orders, but the courts don't need Congress' approval for rulings pertaining to the fair application of justice. IANAL - this is just my understanding of the system, so more knowledgable folk should feel free to raise an objection.
I have to ask: Under which solar formation model was this conclusion drawn? Because from what I understand, there are a number of competing theories, none of which have come anywhere near being conclusively proven. I actually studied under the creator of one of the models, Andrew Prentice, and was in a position to watch as the predictions of various hypotheses were proven true or false. We've got a long way to go in the field, from what I understand.
why can't you condemn the usa, AND condemn russia?
Uh, duh? What do you expect us to say, 'We wouldn't stand for a journalist to be murdered by the USA government, but this is Russia - it's just part of their culture'?
No. Killing journalists for reporting on your corruption is IMO worse than anything that has happened in the USA under Bush. Yes, even worse than Guantanamo, although they're pretty close in terms of nastiness. The press-slaying tops simply because even though it's only one person compared to hundreds, it's a pre-mediated effort to remove the ability to do anything about the cancer that's reclaiming Russia by its opponents. Guantanamo is bad, but at least there's hope at the end of the tunnel, of things being put right some time in the future - Putin's administration (and it still is Putin's) is doing its level best to make sure there's no hope at all for decades to come.
And for the record, yes, Russia invading Georgia is just as bad as the USA and allies invading Iraq. What pleasant company we keep.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on. While I agree that this example isn't nearly sufficient to be quoting 1984, the book didn't just apply to leftist governments - it clearly applies to authoritarian governments of any stripe. All of the examples you've cited there have counterparts in rightist authoritarian governments, and because of the nature of the current US administration, those examples are much more common and immediate, so it's really no wonder that people apply the book primarily to rightist actions currently. That it can happen on the left as well in no way means that it can't happen on the right. As they say, when the boot is laid in it's difficult to tell whether it's from the left or right foot.
It's this kind of stupid blindness which sent me to the centre in the first place, while around me people switch from one extreme to another like a fricking metronome. Both sides seem to prefer shutting their eyes and screaming that all the world's problems are the opposition's fault, without daring to question their own policies for fear of being ostracised by their peers. With so much stupid being poured into the discourse from both sides of the aisle, it's no wonder that it's rare to see serious policy making as opposed to idealogical, realism-deficient bullshit.
Then again, so was the use of torture.
Here's the thing. Have you been keeping track of whether or not Rudd has been keeping his election promises. I have, for the most part. And you know what's really, really scary? He's actually following through on them . Seriously. And this is one of the promises he made, so if history is any guide, he's going to do everything in his power to make it happen.
I don't think anyone knows how to handle this new breed of politician that seems to have ended up PM this time around. I seriously am not sure whether or not I like it yet - on the plus side you can predict what they're going to do once elected, on the minus side stupid promises are made every election that most people don't expect to be followed through on, so having those stupid promises actually realised is fairly disturbing.
From the summary:
Note capital on the 'Conservative'. Has someone replaced Labor with the British Tories while we weren't looking?
Oh, come on, fiscal policy is the biggest field where they do agree, federally - think of the ridiculous level of cost-cutting that was going on for their first budget. Yeah, they've let that go this year now, but given that practically every country on Earth is doing the same thing, I think that they can be forgiven. No, the main difference is in social policy and levels of economic regulation.
Not even RTFS these days? There's going to be a second filter that you can't opt-out of. Theoretically it's only for actual criminal content (child-porn, etc.), but given the rate of false positives you will be cut off from a significant number of perfectly decent sites if this is put in place.
Meh, this sort of crap is why we have minor parties controlling the balance of power in the Senate. I'm quite certain that the Greens won't go for it, if nothing else.
Unfortunately, this case is just the sort of bullshit populism that can get support from both major parties, so it may well be that the minor parties can't give it the smack-down that it so richly deserves. Our only hope is that the Liberal party takes the position that diminishing our internet access like this is too likely to be damaging to business (it is, after all), allowing it to be shot down.
An amusing quote from the relevent Wikipedia article:
Yeah, I do find it pretty easy to dismiss most witnesses - it's pretty easy to put it down to either hallucination or attention-seeking.
The ones I find a little harder to immediately dismiss are the ones where the witness actually disappears. I mean, maybe hallucination caused him to crash the plane, but that is a fairly interesting story.
Uh, wow, right up until your last sentence I thought that you were making a very good point as to why Nine Network should be allowed to copyright the guide. After all, the guide is a written down version of a completely invented schedule - shouldn't it, therefore, fall under standard understandings of copyright? It's not like they're writing things that exist independently of themselves - it's entirely their own creation.
I actually was against being able to copyright something like this before I read your post, but now I'm finding that I'm tentatively for it.
No, it's sensible when you take into account the 'flipping' of time and space (radius) dimensions. Within an event horizon, the radius between the object and the centre of the mass becomes time-like - it can only ever increase, and doing so is pretty much inevitable. Time becomes vaguely space-like, although it's unclear if you can move in both directions along that axis, even in singularity conditions. In these conditions, the only way to move is to decrease radius (analogous to moving forward through time) - stopping is like taking a snapshot in time, and this is why you can't move tangentially to the centre of mass, as it would be like moving in space but not in time (instantaneous teleportation).
Disclaimer: IANAP, just studied it a little during my university career, which has been a while now, so the science may have moved on or I may be remembering the physics wrong.
A good point, and one which significantly increases the likelihood that this isn't actually to do a catch-all monitoring of the public, but rather to allow them to monitor communications between specific people without needing a warrent. Like suspected home-grown terrorists, perhaps. Or members of the opposition party.
Given that the traditional definition of a first world country is based on quality of life, per capita measurements really seem to be the appropriate measure. Raw measurements are more for measuring a country's economic power when compared to other countries, which is a quite different measurement. In this field, I'll freely agree that Australia is, at best, a middle power.
OK, now that's an interesting position. Could you back it up, please? By most traditional measures (GDP per capita, GNI per capita, etc.), Australia is one of the most well-off in the world. By which measure do you assert that it's not a first world country?
Perhaps. But Apple are taking a 'planned economy' approach to the marketplace by limiting what can and cannot be done on their hardware. If they ever are too slow to act or misjudge the importance of a major app - something we've seen again and again in this industry - then the faster adapter(/adopter) will win.
And it will continue to not count that much...right up until a killer app is released for the Android platform which can't be ported to the iPhone because of the restrictions.
People are complaining about not being able to fiddle around with the iPod and iPhone, but that's not what's going to be the main difference. Phones and mobile devices have just started to come into the area where third-party applications can really start taking off, and as always happens with this sort of situation they'll soon be more important than first-party developed applications. Google's framework is entirely geared towards that supporting that sort of innovation, whereas Apples products are decidedly not.
It seems that the internet adage that you can't correct a spelling mistake without one of your own extends to maths as well ;)
Actually, I was just going for a funny moderation, but hey, if informative is what the people want, informative is what they get.
Well, the estimation was on the basis that many different fonts have different widths, so I took a ball-park figure of 2mm and worked from there. Obviously, that doesn't supply a lot of significant figures, and I was sort of cheating by allowing 2 in the answer, but I'm not exactly seeking peer review here. The didn't show my work charge I'll plead guilty to - that was a common refrain of just about every maths and physics teacher, demonstator and lecturer I had in my student career. Forgive a bad habit.
Including all math in the grandparent post. Because it really does.
Thanks for the more accurate figures :)
About 55,000, with a size ~8 font size (depending on font).
(Bastard, you knew that half the people here wouldn't be able to help themselves.)
Uh, if they needed to minimise the risk of a copy of the files being left behind, what exactly should the police have done? If I reported something like this to the police, the next thing I'd do is open the doors and put on a pot of tea for the special ops chaps who'd likely be calling by momentarily. Just because they came by and siezed the relevent equipment doesn't mean they treated him like a criminal - they simply did the best they could in a bad situation, and were probably rather apologetic to him and his family. They could well have returned the computer within 48 hours - we really don't have enough information to be passing judgement about this.
Eh, perhaps. Or maybe they will bring it under $1M - and keep it there. For 30 years. In 30 years, $1M is not going to be a lot of money - if inflation stays consistent with historical data, it'd be roughly the equivalent of about $150,000 now. At that price, buying a place on an orbital station and moving to space independently of any government starts becoming plausible.
Meh, the big advantage of an elevator is that if you've got something to climb up, you only need energy - not reaction mass. Have the counterweight at the top that the elevator is tethered to include a solar energy collector of some kind and use an EM beam to transmit power to the climber. Then you only need the extra mass of the receiver.
RTFAmendment. Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
It says nothing about the courts. Congress could remove the courts' ability to make gag orders, but the courts don't need Congress' approval for rulings pertaining to the fair application of justice. IANAL - this is just my understanding of the system, so more knowledgable folk should feel free to raise an objection.
I have to ask: Under which solar formation model was this conclusion drawn? Because from what I understand, there are a number of competing theories, none of which have come anywhere near being conclusively proven. I actually studied under the creator of one of the models, Andrew Prentice, and was in a position to watch as the predictions of various hypotheses were proven true or false. We've got a long way to go in the field, from what I understand.
Yeah, and the Americans started the war whereas the Georgians attacked the Russians first. Swings and roundabouts.
Uh, duh? What do you expect us to say, 'We wouldn't stand for a journalist to be murdered by the USA government, but this is Russia - it's just part of their culture'?
No. Killing journalists for reporting on your corruption is IMO worse than anything that has happened in the USA under Bush. Yes, even worse than Guantanamo, although they're pretty close in terms of nastiness. The press-slaying tops simply because even though it's only one person compared to hundreds, it's a pre-mediated effort to remove the ability to do anything about the cancer that's reclaiming Russia by its opponents. Guantanamo is bad, but at least there's hope at the end of the tunnel, of things being put right some time in the future - Putin's administration (and it still is Putin's) is doing its level best to make sure there's no hope at all for decades to come.
And for the record, yes, Russia invading Georgia is just as bad as the USA and allies invading Iraq. What pleasant company we keep.