Perhaps one of the finest and most clear cut examples Slashdot has ever seen of the fact that fanboys actually read one thing and interpret it in their minds as something entirely different and directly the opposite.
No wonder you're having a hard time understanding why you were wrong. If you can't even interpret basic English in the way it's written and instead interpret it in the direct opposite manner then you really are fucked.
If ever there was direct evidence that fanboys are incapable of seeing anything other than what they want to see then your post is it.
Bless, it must be hard being a fanboy. It seems to demand a lot of mental anguish to deny everything right in front of your eyes with all these rapid posts your making everywhere trying your damned hardest to remove any suggestion that maybe Samsung isn't actually doing much wrong here.
At the end of the day the device was being quoted at 533mhz way back in March and it's capable of performing at that now. There's no getting away from that as much as you kick, scream, and throw your teddy out the pram.
I'm sorry it upsets you that much but I guess that's the price you pay for being so desperate to refuse to accept reality.
A wrong article is still wrong. Samsung themselves have quoted a number of their apps that run at 533mhz. You'll have to let other vendors tell us whether they use the same optimisations or not.
Realistically the biggest problem is that most people don't bother to optimise specifically for the GS4 because it's extra work for not really any worthwhile benefit (an extra 53mhz isn't going to change that much, especially at the expense of higher power consumption) so not many apps will run at the full 533mhz and I agree that's an issue, but it doesn't change the fact that 533mhz is the correct clock speed to benchmark the phones optimum capability at.
So what's your next excuse? That Samsung paid the whole internet to retrospectively doctor their old news articles and Google to update their indexes and caches?
You could just admit you were wrong instead you know? You'd look a whole lot less stupid than scraping about desperately for excuses to try and prop up your already crumbled argument.
Or are you just being a fanboy and not actually interested in the facts? Because the comment you just posted is a complete lie which suggests that maybe that's the real problem you have.
Except they're not overclocking anything because the GPU is rated for 533mhz.
They're just making sure that even if the benchmark apps don't tell it to work in it's most high performance profile that it does, because the whole point in benchmarks is to give a benchmark of the optimal performance of a device.
The danger is that if they don't do this then the benchmark programs will give a misleading view of the performance capabilities of the device because they'll only be running it in the more power saving oriented default mode.
What's the alternative, they don't do this and shitty benchmark apps that take no advantage of the optimisation options for the device suggest it's not as powerful as it really is and so they get slated for it being underpowered even if that's not true?
That's because the app has to tell the phone to stop saving battery and start performing at it's most optimal speed and the danger is that if the benchmark apps aren't built to do this then the benchmark apps will only give a benchmark for the phones power saving mode rather than at it's optimal performance.
There's no overclocking going on, the GPU is rated for 533mhz so running at 532mhz in that configuration isn't any kind of fudge but a genuine representation of how the phone can perform at peak.
That's such a cop out and it's not true. Most the managers making these decisions are technical managers who come from development backgrounds themselves.
There is a problem at a more fundamental level, even outside of determining what buzzwords to use for a product and it's prominent even in some of the higher echelons of web society. The most obvious I'm going to point out is that of HTML5 - it's a braindead spec full of utterly amateur mistakes that could've been avoided if only Ian Hickson had spent 5 seconds understanding why existing things were the way they were and why that mattered.
An obvious example is that of HTML5's semantic tags, using a study to determine a static set of tags that would be used to define semantic capabilities in a spec that was out of date before the ink had even dried was just plain stupid. The complaint that we needed more readable markup rather than div soup to make writing HTML was naive, firstly because amateurs just don't write HTML anymore, they all publish via Facebook, Wordpress and so forth, and secondly because there's a good reason markup had descended into div soup - because genericness is necessary for future-proofing. Divs don't care if they're ID is menu, or their class is comment, they're content neutral, they don't give a fuck what they are, but they'll be whatever you want them to be which means they're always fit for the future. In contrast HTML5 tried to replace divs with tags such as aside, header, footer and so forth which would be great except when you have a finite number of elements you end up with people arguing about what to do when an element doesn't fit. Do you just go back to using divs for that bit anyway or do you fudge one of the new tags in because it's kinda-loosely related which means you bastardise the semantics in the first place because we now don't really know what each semantic tag is referring to because it's been fudged in where it doesn't make a lot of sense?
The real solution was to provide a semantic definition language, the ability to apply semantics to classes and IDs externally. Does that concept sound familiar? It should because we had the exact same problem with applying designs to HTML in the past and created CSS. We allowed design to be separate from markup with external stylesheets because this had many benefits, a few obvious ones:
1) Designers could focus on CSS without getting in the way of those dealing with markup making development easier
2) We could provide external stylesheets for no longer maintained sites and have the browser apply them meaning there is a method to retrofit unmaintained sites with new features
3) Our markup is just markup, it just defines document structure, it does one thing and one thing well without being a complete mess of other concepts.
Consider that these could've been benefits for building a semantic web if HTML5 had been done properly too. The fact that Ian Hickson failed to recognise this with HTML5 highlights what the article is talking about exactly. He's completely and utterly failed to learn the lessons before him as to why inline styling was bad but on a more fundamental level demonstrates a failure to understand the importance of the concept of separation of concerns and the immense benefits that provides that was already learnt the hard way by those who came before him. His solution? Oh just make HTML5 a "living spec" - what? Specs are meant to be static for a reason, so that you can actually become compliant with them and remain compliant with them. Spec compliance once you've achieved it shouldn't ever be a moving target. That's when you know you need to release a new spec.
It's a worrying trend because it's not just him, I see it amongst the Javascript community as they grow in their ambition to make ever bigger software but insist that Javascript is all they need to do it. The horrendously ugly fudges they implement to try and fudge faux-namespaces into the language in a desperate attempt to alleviate the fact the Javascript was just neve
Spending that much time checking each one would've left him more likely to get caught and the risk is hence that he wouldn't have been able to release anything.
He had to make the conscious decision as to whether releasing everything was better than the risk of potentially being able to release nothing and getting silenced.
You have to be pragmatic with this sort of thing and he clearly was. Given that there's still to date no verifiable harm or danger or damage to life that has come from the leaks it seems the decision he made was right.
At the end of the day the data he released was only of a certain relatively low clearance and IIRC a couple of years old too so that alone would've been informative enough to him that nothing too immediately harmful would be contained within. Certainly he'll have known it contained nothing about ongoing or future military operations that could've put his colleagues lives in danger.
In this context I think it made sense to release the lot because the net benefit was always going to be better than the potential downsides.
"(Also, are you aware that "slippery slope" is the name of a fallacy? Not an argument?)"
Something is only a slippery slope fallacy if it's actually a fallacy. The fact that there is a slippery slope fallacy does not mean that all slippery slope arguments are fallacies, merely that they can be.
Saying that anti-terrorism laws for seizing financial assets that may fund terrorism shouldn't be passed because it's a slippery slope in that first they will take it from terrorists but then they will take money from everyone's accounts is a slippery slope fallacy because that'll almost certainly never happen. Saying however that they shouldn't be passed because first they'll be used for terrorists but then they'll be used for select non-terrorists isn't a fallacy because that's exactly what happened here in the UK when our government used anti-terrorism laws to seize the UK assets of failing Icelandic banks.
"No, "ends justifies the means" doesn't justify torture and here's why.
1) It doesn't work."
I don't know why this keeps getting repeated so much here on Slashdot because it's a fallacy. The fact is that sometimes torture does actually work. It doesn't always work and the uncertainty as to whether it's worked or just given you false information makes it unreliable and potentially dangerous, but the failure rate of torture is absolutely not 100%. It's not 100% reliable, it may not even be 10% reliable but you can guarantee that even if it's only 1% reliable there will be congressmen and so forth who will in fact argue that even if it's only a 1% chance of getting valid information that could stop another 9/11 then that 1% is enough to justify the means and that's the problem.
Your second point on torture is valid in theory but it's clear successive US governments do not care about the moral high ground anymore. From trying to get everyone tied into the WTO whilst ignoring WTO rulings against it, through to claiming to be the global pinnacle of justice whilst running Guantanamo bay the US lost the moral high ground on most issues a long long time ago and yet it still pretends it has it and whilst it has all resulted in a drop in opinion of the US across the globe it's not done enough to make US politicians change their ways and start acting in a more moral manner.
Regardless, I do completely agree with you with regards to Manning. You're absolutely right, there's been a net good from his actions such as us now knowing that the US military's rules of engagement are utterly deficient given that the collateral damage gun-cam range finder made it clear the pilots were well outside RPG range let alone effective RPG range and that Apache gunners are given permission to fire on anyone regardless of whether they're a verified threat or not. Even simple things like that help us recognise problems that need solving, even if they've not been solved yet and that's better than where we were before - where problems were just swept under the carpet.
I'm going to every "Web 2.0" government site with user submitted content and submitting "offensive" material and reporting it too, starting with the blogs of every Tory MP!
Right, so because it's all over Western media it's obviously true despite the fact the only sources are US politicians/DoD sources themselves? Don't tell me, you're a big fan of Fox News and you like to swallow hook line and sinker everything they say?
I've had Chinese IPs hit my firewall but I've also had US, Colombian, Ukrainian and many others hit my firewall. It doesn't mean we're being spied on it just means we're being attacked by some script kiddies either in these nations or merely proxying through them.
I'm sorry this obviously upsets you greatly, you seem immensely disturbed by the suggestion that you could be being lied to. I guess the truth hurts.
It's okay little sheep, you go back to feeding on every little bit of propaganda your government feeds you and don't bother questioning whether it's true or not despite there being zero evidence for their claims. You're obviously much happier that way in your little "America, Fuck Yeah!" bubble.
That was 16 years ago. Did you miss the rise of China, and the growth of India in the meantime? Even Indonesia's economy makes Thailand look irrelevant now.
That's still $11.5 per disc of data which I'm not convinced is that cheap given that with current BD-Rs you can store the same data for about half that though it's more of a pain to prat around with that many discs. It'll be even less with some other forms of backup media though. As such I'd say that's probably actually one of the more expensive options.
Oh no, however will BitCoin cope with the inability to convert into Thai WhateverTheFucks.
Yes, Thai WhateverTheFucks, because although I know many currencies in the world off the top of my head, Thailand's is that unimportant I really can't even remember what their currency is called, if it was ever relevant enough for me to have ever known in the first place.
Call me when it can no longer be switched to US dollars, Euros, Pound Sterling or whatever and maybe then I'll care because whilst it can still be converted to one of those currencies it can then still then be trivially converted on to any other currency in the world including Thai WhateverTheFucks.
"There's interesting observations and reflections on family interaction too. At the most basic level, it seems that parents will never cease to be an embarrassment to teenage children and vice versa."
This is the problem with English literature as a discipline and why it's often bollocks. People make stuff up and read into it more than is actually there.
There is absolutely no way that Jane Austen could've predicted in the 18th century that families would always be the same and wrote what she did so that people 200+ years down the road could say "Wow, things haven't changed much". She didn't do that, she merely wrote a novel and now with hindsight we look back and say "Wow, things haven't changed much". You're making the implication that she's somehow special in pointing this out to us but the reality is she did no such thing, we only realise it precisely because things haven't changed much in this respect and we're looking back on her writing and applying what we know now.
But we could've also realised this from any historic documents detailing such things, it's not about her writing in the slightest it's just a fact that people like you attribute to some mystical power of her to be timeless when the only thing that's really timeless is certain unchanging traits of human nature itself. It's the surprise of recognising said human traits in documents from even 200 years ago and trying to justify it to ourselves as being something more rather than simply recognising it is what it is.
I've seen so many analysis of what Shakespeare, Wordsworth and so forth "really meant" with their writings but it's complete and utter idiocy - it's just speculation, he didn't mean anything other than what he wrote and if you wish to apply your own interpretation to that then that's okay but realise this - you can do that to ANY book no matter the quality of the author. It's like saying JK Rowling was really writing about how hard life is for a fostered child and how they have to slip away in their minds to fantasy worlds to cope with the difficulties of fostered life - bollocks, she wrote an entertaining story about a fucking fictional boy wizard and that's that.
English literature like high art is almost an entirely manufactured industry full of made up shit to justify it's own existence. It's no different to fortune telling - an industry designed to mostly make shit up and convince people it's true to justify it's own continued existence.
It's also no better than the faux scientists you sometimes see, like when the story about how full moons effect sleeping patterns come about the other day and they got a guy to "explain" why that's the case on TV and he came up with the most absurd story about how humans always threw parties on full moons and so we'd evolved to sleep less on full moons because of those parties. Seriously? What. The. Fuck. Correlation is not causation and the most pathetic theory ever invented for the scenario does not suddenly prove causation either. Where do they even find these "scientists"?
I'm not saying there aren't books out there that were written with hidden meanings, an example off the top of my head would probably be of course Alice in Wonderland, but to apply that mindset to every famous historical book written is taking it to the extreme and completely wrong, just as doing the same for every famous book today is absurd - as in my Harry Potter example. Similarly Game of Thrones isn't a commentary on medieval European history with the likes of the great wall referring to Hadrian's wall, King's Landing and London and so forth - no, it's just a fictional storyline where the author took a few ideas from European medieval history as a basis for that story. It says nothing about how things really were, where they were or how they actually happened.
I'm not an English lit major but I was top of my class in the top class in the school at GCSE despite having felt it was bollocks then, and still feeling little different now. A large part of believing it was bollocks then
"If you pick the anti-NSA side you get geek donations, grassroots buzz from Civil Libertarians, and a little defense industry cash (Honeywell et al. want to maintain a relationship with you, so you do get that $18k)."
In 2008 wasn't there a bunch of buzz about how Obama's campaign was funded far and away by individual donations over corporate donations? It was the little guy that funded Obama's campaign IIRC. Shame it doesn't seem to help much but I'd wager it's because Obama told people what they wanted to hear which at least suggests that the average joe donation is an under-exploited market for a candidate that wants to support the people not corporations.
Actually that's the problem, the law isn't very clear. That's why a guy had to lose his job and suffer years of appeals over what was very clearly to anyone with even a couple of braincells a joke about bombing Doncaster airport.
I agree that mental abuse isn't always entirely harmless and I agree that you can push someone to suicide through it and that there's basically something wrong with the idea of being able to get away with that but I think there's something to be said for the idea that many of those people who do commit suicide do so because they already had much deeper issues such as depression which goes back to your point about improving awareness of mental illness. If these people were treated for their depression in the first place then they probably wouldn't commit suicide over some mind games.
What a lot of these people don't realise is that what people are saying to them offensively online is only what other people have always said about them behind their backs in real life. Chances are if someone thinks you're an idiot online and calls you out on it there will be plenty of people saying the exact same thing about you in real life.
In this particular case this person was campaigning to impose her will on the population (and the will of others) without any democratic examination of the issue. In this respect it's not surprising that those on the other side of the debate felt marginalised by use of populism and so due to having lack of a voice against said populism decided to lash out instead. I'm not saying this girl's particular special interest group is wrong in what they are seeking, but you have to accept that if you're a special interest group lobbying for some special interest "thing" rather than let it be decided in a more democratic manner then you're going to really piss some people off who don't have the same lobbying power as you.
Do we all not get pissed off at the RIAA/MPAA lobbying to have fundamental rights such as the right to fair trial removed from our justice systems? Do some of us not think the world would be a better place if the RIAA/MPAA execs/lobbyists behind this died horribly? would we shed a tear if something happened to them?
It's the same thing and it's not a question of right or wrong, I think women on bank notes is fine (though I'd not have chosen Jane Austen - seems like a poor choice out of the many successful women through history in the UK) but the point is simply that lobbying for change on a special interest item and bypassing democratic process leaving some people voiceless is going to make those voiceless people lash out, whether they're in the right or the wrong and again, it's the price you pay for lobbying. You have to accept that - you can't lobby as a special interest and expect your opponents if they feel disenfranchised and deprived of a voice to just lie down and take it.
If Apple genuinely gave even the slightest fuck about improving working conditions in China they'd take some of that $100billion cash pile and produce their own or buy out a manufacturing plant and show how it should be done.
The fact is that despite with their massive cash pile and their gigantic profit margins they're still going for the lowest bidder highlights how much of a fuck they give about workers rights compared to turning the biggest profit imaginable.
In fact, part the reason Apple has such high profit margins is precisely because it doesn't give a fuck about the environment or workers rights, and because they go out their way to avoid paying taxes and have simply not bothered to pay for patents on legitimately patented things. Your attempts to try and justify to yourself that you're somehow being ethical by buying Apple are laughably desperate.
And it's all apparently okay anyway because we're told that's what companies do, they just have to turn the biggest profit for their shareholder and if that means making up a bit of documentation about how they do care to try and turn away accusations of worker abuse then so be it, but that's simply about balancing the cost of said PR against the profit increase in using such a low bidder.
Again, if they really genuinely cared, they wouldn't keep using the lowest bidder that has to carry out such abuses to turn a profit at the price it bidded for the contract with Apple at. If they keep using these factories rather than cut their margins to actually deal with the root cause of the problem then they don't care, no matter how many reports they churn out, it's that simple. Stop trying to pretend otherwise, you're just deluding yourself and as much as you think otherwise you're no better than anyone else by buying Apple - in fact, even your original premise is true, most other companies have also done the same bare minimum Apple has, you've obviously just not realised this because you are as usual so far up Apple's ass you can't see anything else. See here for example:
They're all doing the same bare minimum - audits every once in a while where the employees are treated normally for a day then back to sweatshop conditions when the auditors have fucked off, Apple is no better and no worse than any of the others and the fact people like you like to pretend it is is precisely why Apple gets singled out - because if you want to be known for being better you actually have to be and Apple has the money to do so, simply pretending and continuing to sit on a cash pile that could resolve the problem tomorrow doesn't exactly cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the problem, some other apps do run at 533mhz, hence why it's not fraud.
Perhaps one of the finest and most clear cut examples Slashdot has ever seen of the fact that fanboys actually read one thing and interpret it in their minds as something entirely different and directly the opposite.
No wonder you're having a hard time understanding why you were wrong. If you can't even interpret basic English in the way it's written and instead interpret it in the direct opposite manner then you really are fucked.
If ever there was direct evidence that fanboys are incapable of seeing anything other than what they want to see then your post is it.
Bless, it must be hard being a fanboy. It seems to demand a lot of mental anguish to deny everything right in front of your eyes with all these rapid posts your making everywhere trying your damned hardest to remove any suggestion that maybe Samsung isn't actually doing much wrong here.
At the end of the day the device was being quoted at 533mhz way back in March and it's capable of performing at that now. There's no getting away from that as much as you kick, scream, and throw your teddy out the pram.
I'm sorry it upsets you that much but I guess that's the price you pay for being so desperate to refuse to accept reality.
"No. They can't. Please try reading the article."
A wrong article is still wrong. Samsung themselves have quoted a number of their apps that run at 533mhz. You'll have to let other vendors tell us whether they use the same optimisations or not.
Realistically the biggest problem is that most people don't bother to optimise specifically for the GS4 because it's extra work for not really any worthwhile benefit (an extra 53mhz isn't going to change that much, especially at the expense of higher power consumption) so not many apps will run at the full 533mhz and I agree that's an issue, but it doesn't change the fact that 533mhz is the correct clock speed to benchmark the phones optimum capability at.
Right and you think that figure was just pulled out of thin ever even though it turn out to be completely correct?
But here you go, have some more links to get upset over:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/150686-samsung-galaxy-s4-dimensions-weight-battery-size-and-hardware-specs-confirmed-ahead-of-launch
http://mobileandphone.com/samsung-galaxy-s4-vs-galaxy-note-2/
So what's your next excuse? That Samsung paid the whole internet to retrospectively doctor their old news articles and Google to update their indexes and caches?
You could just admit you were wrong instead you know? You'd look a whole lot less stupid than scraping about desperately for excuses to try and prop up your already crumbled argument.
"But the device doesn't do 533MHz for the GPU in any other use case"
Yes it does, and given that the rest of your post is based on that incorrect premise then you are simply wrong.
It doesn't. Other applications can run at 533mhz, it's just that that's not usually necessary and hence preferable to save power.
Did you read the comment or was it just too much for you to face the truth?
Maybe you should learn to use Google. There's plenty of quotes of 533mhz for the GPU from long before this article and Samsung's response.
One example in the comments section of this article from March which a very quick simple search dug up:
http://www.sammobile.com/2013/03/03/galaxy-s-ivs-specifications-leak-confirm-exynos-octa-powervr-sgx-544mp/
Or are you just being a fanboy and not actually interested in the facts? Because the comment you just posted is a complete lie which suggests that maybe that's the real problem you have.
Except they're not overclocking anything because the GPU is rated for 533mhz.
They're just making sure that even if the benchmark apps don't tell it to work in it's most high performance profile that it does, because the whole point in benchmarks is to give a benchmark of the optimal performance of a device.
The danger is that if they don't do this then the benchmark programs will give a misleading view of the performance capabilities of the device because they'll only be running it in the more power saving oriented default mode.
What's the alternative, they don't do this and shitty benchmark apps that take no advantage of the optimisation options for the device suggest it's not as powerful as it really is and so they get slated for it being underpowered even if that's not true?
That's because the app has to tell the phone to stop saving battery and start performing at it's most optimal speed and the danger is that if the benchmark apps aren't built to do this then the benchmark apps will only give a benchmark for the phones power saving mode rather than at it's optimal performance.
There's no overclocking going on, the GPU is rated for 533mhz so running at 532mhz in that configuration isn't any kind of fudge but a genuine representation of how the phone can perform at peak.
That's such a cop out and it's not true. Most the managers making these decisions are technical managers who come from development backgrounds themselves.
There is a problem at a more fundamental level, even outside of determining what buzzwords to use for a product and it's prominent even in some of the higher echelons of web society. The most obvious I'm going to point out is that of HTML5 - it's a braindead spec full of utterly amateur mistakes that could've been avoided if only Ian Hickson had spent 5 seconds understanding why existing things were the way they were and why that mattered.
An obvious example is that of HTML5's semantic tags, using a study to determine a static set of tags that would be used to define semantic capabilities in a spec that was out of date before the ink had even dried was just plain stupid. The complaint that we needed more readable markup rather than div soup to make writing HTML was naive, firstly because amateurs just don't write HTML anymore, they all publish via Facebook, Wordpress and so forth, and secondly because there's a good reason markup had descended into div soup - because genericness is necessary for future-proofing. Divs don't care if they're ID is menu, or their class is comment, they're content neutral, they don't give a fuck what they are, but they'll be whatever you want them to be which means they're always fit for the future. In contrast HTML5 tried to replace divs with tags such as aside, header, footer and so forth which would be great except when you have a finite number of elements you end up with people arguing about what to do when an element doesn't fit. Do you just go back to using divs for that bit anyway or do you fudge one of the new tags in because it's kinda-loosely related which means you bastardise the semantics in the first place because we now don't really know what each semantic tag is referring to because it's been fudged in where it doesn't make a lot of sense?
The real solution was to provide a semantic definition language, the ability to apply semantics to classes and IDs externally. Does that concept sound familiar? It should because we had the exact same problem with applying designs to HTML in the past and created CSS. We allowed design to be separate from markup with external stylesheets because this had many benefits, a few obvious ones:
1) Designers could focus on CSS without getting in the way of those dealing with markup making development easier
2) We could provide external stylesheets for no longer maintained sites and have the browser apply them meaning there is a method to retrofit unmaintained sites with new features
3) Our markup is just markup, it just defines document structure, it does one thing and one thing well without being a complete mess of other concepts.
Consider that these could've been benefits for building a semantic web if HTML5 had been done properly too. The fact that Ian Hickson failed to recognise this with HTML5 highlights what the article is talking about exactly. He's completely and utterly failed to learn the lessons before him as to why inline styling was bad but on a more fundamental level demonstrates a failure to understand the importance of the concept of separation of concerns and the immense benefits that provides that was already learnt the hard way by those who came before him. His solution? Oh just make HTML5 a "living spec" - what? Specs are meant to be static for a reason, so that you can actually become compliant with them and remain compliant with them. Spec compliance once you've achieved it shouldn't ever be a moving target. That's when you know you need to release a new spec.
It's a worrying trend because it's not just him, I see it amongst the Javascript community as they grow in their ambition to make ever bigger software but insist that Javascript is all they need to do it. The horrendously ugly fudges they implement to try and fudge faux-namespaces into the language in a desperate attempt to alleviate the fact the Javascript was just neve
Do you have an equation to back that law up?
Spending that much time checking each one would've left him more likely to get caught and the risk is hence that he wouldn't have been able to release anything.
He had to make the conscious decision as to whether releasing everything was better than the risk of potentially being able to release nothing and getting silenced.
You have to be pragmatic with this sort of thing and he clearly was. Given that there's still to date no verifiable harm or danger or damage to life that has come from the leaks it seems the decision he made was right.
At the end of the day the data he released was only of a certain relatively low clearance and IIRC a couple of years old too so that alone would've been informative enough to him that nothing too immediately harmful would be contained within. Certainly he'll have known it contained nothing about ongoing or future military operations that could've put his colleagues lives in danger.
In this context I think it made sense to release the lot because the net benefit was always going to be better than the potential downsides.
"(Also, are you aware that "slippery slope" is the name of a fallacy? Not an argument?)"
Something is only a slippery slope fallacy if it's actually a fallacy. The fact that there is a slippery slope fallacy does not mean that all slippery slope arguments are fallacies, merely that they can be.
Saying that anti-terrorism laws for seizing financial assets that may fund terrorism shouldn't be passed because it's a slippery slope in that first they will take it from terrorists but then they will take money from everyone's accounts is a slippery slope fallacy because that'll almost certainly never happen. Saying however that they shouldn't be passed because first they'll be used for terrorists but then they'll be used for select non-terrorists isn't a fallacy because that's exactly what happened here in the UK when our government used anti-terrorism laws to seize the UK assets of failing Icelandic banks.
"No, "ends justifies the means" doesn't justify torture and here's why.
1) It doesn't work."
I don't know why this keeps getting repeated so much here on Slashdot because it's a fallacy. The fact is that sometimes torture does actually work. It doesn't always work and the uncertainty as to whether it's worked or just given you false information makes it unreliable and potentially dangerous, but the failure rate of torture is absolutely not 100%. It's not 100% reliable, it may not even be 10% reliable but you can guarantee that even if it's only 1% reliable there will be congressmen and so forth who will in fact argue that even if it's only a 1% chance of getting valid information that could stop another 9/11 then that 1% is enough to justify the means and that's the problem.
Your second point on torture is valid in theory but it's clear successive US governments do not care about the moral high ground anymore. From trying to get everyone tied into the WTO whilst ignoring WTO rulings against it, through to claiming to be the global pinnacle of justice whilst running Guantanamo bay the US lost the moral high ground on most issues a long long time ago and yet it still pretends it has it and whilst it has all resulted in a drop in opinion of the US across the globe it's not done enough to make US politicians change their ways and start acting in a more moral manner.
Regardless, I do completely agree with you with regards to Manning. You're absolutely right, there's been a net good from his actions such as us now knowing that the US military's rules of engagement are utterly deficient given that the collateral damage gun-cam range finder made it clear the pilots were well outside RPG range let alone effective RPG range and that Apache gunners are given permission to fire on anyone regardless of whether they're a verified threat or not. Even simple things like that help us recognise problems that need solving, even if they've not been solved yet and that's better than where we were before - where problems were just swept under the carpet.
I'm going to every "Web 2.0" government site with user submitted content and submitting "offensive" material and reporting it too, starting with the blogs of every Tory MP!
Right, so because it's all over Western media it's obviously true despite the fact the only sources are US politicians/DoD sources themselves? Don't tell me, you're a big fan of Fox News and you like to swallow hook line and sinker everything they say?
I've had Chinese IPs hit my firewall but I've also had US, Colombian, Ukrainian and many others hit my firewall. It doesn't mean we're being spied on it just means we're being attacked by some script kiddies either in these nations or merely proxying through them.
I'm sorry this obviously upsets you greatly, you seem immensely disturbed by the suggestion that you could be being lied to. I guess the truth hurts.
It's okay little sheep, you go back to feeding on every little bit of propaganda your government feeds you and don't bother questioning whether it's true or not despite there being zero evidence for their claims. You're obviously much happier that way in your little "America, Fuck Yeah!" bubble.
That was 16 years ago. Did you miss the rise of China, and the growth of India in the meantime? Even Indonesia's economy makes Thailand look irrelevant now.
"You can get 3TB drives for $115."
That's still $11.5 per disc of data which I'm not convinced is that cheap given that with current BD-Rs you can store the same data for about half that though it's more of a pain to prat around with that many discs. It'll be even less with some other forms of backup media though. As such I'd say that's probably actually one of the more expensive options.
Oh no, however will BitCoin cope with the inability to convert into Thai WhateverTheFucks.
Yes, Thai WhateverTheFucks, because although I know many currencies in the world off the top of my head, Thailand's is that unimportant I really can't even remember what their currency is called, if it was ever relevant enough for me to have ever known in the first place.
Call me when it can no longer be switched to US dollars, Euros, Pound Sterling or whatever and maybe then I'll care because whilst it can still be converted to one of those currencies it can then still then be trivially converted on to any other currency in the world including Thai WhateverTheFucks.
"The key question is how do we get these particular trolls to make their threats against somebody like the queen"
Get her to start a campaign about getting a famous female on banknotes perhaps?
Oh wait...
"There's interesting observations and reflections on family interaction too. At the most basic level, it seems that parents will never cease to be an embarrassment to teenage children and vice versa."
This is the problem with English literature as a discipline and why it's often bollocks. People make stuff up and read into it more than is actually there.
There is absolutely no way that Jane Austen could've predicted in the 18th century that families would always be the same and wrote what she did so that people 200+ years down the road could say "Wow, things haven't changed much". She didn't do that, she merely wrote a novel and now with hindsight we look back and say "Wow, things haven't changed much". You're making the implication that she's somehow special in pointing this out to us but the reality is she did no such thing, we only realise it precisely because things haven't changed much in this respect and we're looking back on her writing and applying what we know now.
But we could've also realised this from any historic documents detailing such things, it's not about her writing in the slightest it's just a fact that people like you attribute to some mystical power of her to be timeless when the only thing that's really timeless is certain unchanging traits of human nature itself. It's the surprise of recognising said human traits in documents from even 200 years ago and trying to justify it to ourselves as being something more rather than simply recognising it is what it is.
I've seen so many analysis of what Shakespeare, Wordsworth and so forth "really meant" with their writings but it's complete and utter idiocy - it's just speculation, he didn't mean anything other than what he wrote and if you wish to apply your own interpretation to that then that's okay but realise this - you can do that to ANY book no matter the quality of the author. It's like saying JK Rowling was really writing about how hard life is for a fostered child and how they have to slip away in their minds to fantasy worlds to cope with the difficulties of fostered life - bollocks, she wrote an entertaining story about a fucking fictional boy wizard and that's that.
English literature like high art is almost an entirely manufactured industry full of made up shit to justify it's own existence. It's no different to fortune telling - an industry designed to mostly make shit up and convince people it's true to justify it's own continued existence.
It's also no better than the faux scientists you sometimes see, like when the story about how full moons effect sleeping patterns come about the other day and they got a guy to "explain" why that's the case on TV and he came up with the most absurd story about how humans always threw parties on full moons and so we'd evolved to sleep less on full moons because of those parties. Seriously? What. The. Fuck. Correlation is not causation and the most pathetic theory ever invented for the scenario does not suddenly prove causation either. Where do they even find these "scientists"?
I'm not saying there aren't books out there that were written with hidden meanings, an example off the top of my head would probably be of course Alice in Wonderland, but to apply that mindset to every famous historical book written is taking it to the extreme and completely wrong, just as doing the same for every famous book today is absurd - as in my Harry Potter example. Similarly Game of Thrones isn't a commentary on medieval European history with the likes of the great wall referring to Hadrian's wall, King's Landing and London and so forth - no, it's just a fictional storyline where the author took a few ideas from European medieval history as a basis for that story. It says nothing about how things really were, where they were or how they actually happened.
I'm not an English lit major but I was top of my class in the top class in the school at GCSE despite having felt it was bollocks then, and still feeling little different now. A large part of believing it was bollocks then
"If you pick the anti-NSA side you get geek donations, grassroots buzz from Civil Libertarians, and a little defense industry cash (Honeywell et al. want to maintain a relationship with you, so you do get that $18k)."
In 2008 wasn't there a bunch of buzz about how Obama's campaign was funded far and away by individual donations over corporate donations? It was the little guy that funded Obama's campaign IIRC. Shame it doesn't seem to help much but I'd wager it's because Obama told people what they wanted to hear which at least suggests that the average joe donation is an under-exploited market for a candidate that wants to support the people not corporations.
"The law is fairly clear."
Actually that's the problem, the law isn't very clear. That's why a guy had to lose his job and suffer years of appeals over what was very clearly to anyone with even a couple of braincells a joke about bombing Doncaster airport.
I agree that mental abuse isn't always entirely harmless and I agree that you can push someone to suicide through it and that there's basically something wrong with the idea of being able to get away with that but I think there's something to be said for the idea that many of those people who do commit suicide do so because they already had much deeper issues such as depression which goes back to your point about improving awareness of mental illness. If these people were treated for their depression in the first place then they probably wouldn't commit suicide over some mind games.
What a lot of these people don't realise is that what people are saying to them offensively online is only what other people have always said about them behind their backs in real life. Chances are if someone thinks you're an idiot online and calls you out on it there will be plenty of people saying the exact same thing about you in real life.
In this particular case this person was campaigning to impose her will on the population (and the will of others) without any democratic examination of the issue. In this respect it's not surprising that those on the other side of the debate felt marginalised by use of populism and so due to having lack of a voice against said populism decided to lash out instead. I'm not saying this girl's particular special interest group is wrong in what they are seeking, but you have to accept that if you're a special interest group lobbying for some special interest "thing" rather than let it be decided in a more democratic manner then you're going to really piss some people off who don't have the same lobbying power as you.
Do we all not get pissed off at the RIAA/MPAA lobbying to have fundamental rights such as the right to fair trial removed from our justice systems? Do some of us not think the world would be a better place if the RIAA/MPAA execs/lobbyists behind this died horribly? would we shed a tear if something happened to them?
It's the same thing and it's not a question of right or wrong, I think women on bank notes is fine (though I'd not have chosen Jane Austen - seems like a poor choice out of the many successful women through history in the UK) but the point is simply that lobbying for change on a special interest item and bypassing democratic process leaving some people voiceless is going to make those voiceless people lash out, whether they're in the right or the wrong and again, it's the price you pay for lobbying. You have to accept that - you can't lobby as a special interest and expect your opponents if they feel disenfranchised and deprived of a voice to just lie down and take it.
If Apple genuinely gave even the slightest fuck about improving working conditions in China they'd take some of that $100billion cash pile and produce their own or buy out a manufacturing plant and show how it should be done.
The fact is that despite with their massive cash pile and their gigantic profit margins they're still going for the lowest bidder highlights how much of a fuck they give about workers rights compared to turning the biggest profit imaginable.
In fact, part the reason Apple has such high profit margins is precisely because it doesn't give a fuck about the environment or workers rights, and because they go out their way to avoid paying taxes and have simply not bothered to pay for patents on legitimately patented things. Your attempts to try and justify to yourself that you're somehow being ethical by buying Apple are laughably desperate.
And it's all apparently okay anyway because we're told that's what companies do, they just have to turn the biggest profit for their shareholder and if that means making up a bit of documentation about how they do care to try and turn away accusations of worker abuse then so be it, but that's simply about balancing the cost of said PR against the profit increase in using such a low bidder.
Again, if they really genuinely cared, they wouldn't keep using the lowest bidder that has to carry out such abuses to turn a profit at the price it bidded for the contract with Apple at. If they keep using these factories rather than cut their margins to actually deal with the root cause of the problem then they don't care, no matter how many reports they churn out, it's that simple. Stop trying to pretend otherwise, you're just deluding yourself and as much as you think otherwise you're no better than anyone else by buying Apple - in fact, even your original premise is true, most other companies have also done the same bare minimum Apple has, you've obviously just not realised this because you are as usual so far up Apple's ass you can't see anything else. See here for example:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19475556
http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/about-us/sustainability/health-safety-and-labor-conditions/labor-conditions
They're all doing the same bare minimum - audits every once in a while where the employees are treated normally for a day then back to sweatshop conditions when the auditors have fucked off, Apple is no better and no worse than any of the others and the fact people like you like to pretend it is is precisely why Apple gets singled out - because if you want to be known for being better you actually have to be and Apple has the money to do so, simply pretending and continuing to sit on a cash pile that could resolve the problem tomorrow doesn't exactly cut it.