I know it's been a while, but anybody who read the Snowden disclosures should be well aware that Apple were (and I assume are) part of the NSA's "Prism" program. Apple have been sending their users data wholesale to the US government for years.
Why only call out practices in China here? Is it acceptable for Apple to aid the US government in repressing people, but not the Chinese government?
Apple's business model is different from that of wholly advertising/data focused companies such as Facebook/Google and as such their surveillance can afford to be less intrusive than that of those organisations, but is anybody seriously under the delusion that their commitment to privacy is anything more than marketing at this point?
There's a lot of misunderstanding here of how location and tracking on Android actually works.
First of all, google play store has nothing to do with it. It's google play services that provides location services and implements location tracking in Android. That's the service that is used to retrieve AGPS data from the net, to correlate nearby wifi and mobile masts with lists held on google's servers to give location without GPS, and yes to provide tracking data on your location to google. Setting the location mode to "GPS Only" or similar is supposed to disable much of the tracking, but I'm not sure how much I'd trust that.
Play services is a pretty core component of Android, and an awful lot of things will cease to function if you manage to remove it. You can block play services from accessing your location using 3rd party tools like XPrivacy, but location for most apps will cease to function without a complex set of workarounds.
If you genuinely don't want your Android phone calling home with your location while still being able to use GPS, you need:
Root access
Xposed framework installed
XPrivacy installed and set to block location access for google play services
No, the French government doesn't deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Nor does the US, China, or indeed virtually any major government or multinational corporation. Despite that fact, global CO2 emissions are still rising on an exponential curve. And all of these organisations are actively searching for more sources of fossil fuels at a time when science tells us we need to keep ~80% of known fossil reserves in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change
Climate denial-ism is a sideshow intended to keep you distracted. The media loudly promote a debate that doesn't really exist any more so that people can feel good they aren't a part of the evil climate deniers causing the problem. Liberals who loudly proclaim the importance of fighting climate change while doing everything they can to increase emissions have been far more of a threat to our climate than deniers for at least 20 years. When Obama gives another inspirational speech about preserving the environment for future generations everybody claps, and nobody bothers to mention the fact that the man has authorised an unprecedented increase in US domestic oil and gas production.
The COP conference in Paris will be little more than another sideshow intended to keep you distracted. We already know that there will be no legally binding agreements to reduce emissions and that the voluntary pledges countries are prepared to sign up to will likely lead to some 3-4C of warming even if implemented fully.
The reality is we live in a world that is gearing up for more, not less, fossil fuel use. Despite the loud proclamations of governments and media corporations to the contrary.
That is why protest is necessary and why the French government is actively suppressing dissent with these measures.
The slave trade, for example, ran for hundreds of years across those parts of the world under Islamic control, until Europe came within a hair's breadth of eradicating the practice from the world. Now it is back.
If we're going to compare architectures on a tech site, can we at least acknowledge the fact that we're not using a credible benchmarking methodology? And linking to Which? Really?
Geekbench is basically useless for comparing different architectures. It's barely even useful for comparing systems on the same architecture. There's a big emphasis on crypto routines that are usually hardware accelerated and already orders of magnitude faster than IO on any system you care to name. A lot of their other tests are small enough to fit into L1 cache, totally hiding things like Intel's vastly superior branch prediction and memory pipe.
Comparing A8X and x86 performance is difficult, and I can't find any credible numbers out there at all. Browser benchmarks aren't a useful way to do this either, but they tend to show the surface pro as being at least twice as quick as the A8X. I'd expect an even bigger gap in anything with a heavy emphasis on floating point operations or memory bandwidth. ARM simply don't have anything that plays in the I5s league yet in terms of pure performance.
If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered.
IQ != intelligence. If you want to study variations in IQ score, fine. Not saying it can't yeild interesting results. But can we please stop pretending that there is anything approaching a useful scientific definition of intelligence, nevermind one that reduces to a single number. That ways lies the kind of idiocy that will end up with people fucking up their kids genetic structure trying to engineer "intelligence" without even understanding what that is.
Nobody here is mocking women. They are mocking feminists. That kind of argument is exactly why.
Feminism: Noun - "the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes"
Men mocking feminists is by definition pretty close to men mocking women. If you actually read some of the contents of this github project...
among (person p : Unique_person):
if(p.gender==male && p.orentation==het_cis_scum):
yell('RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE!!!!!');
crush(p);//Use the function crush in Dworkin.Xir to discard the oppressor
It's exactly the sort of shallow, adolescant caricature of feminist thought that should offend feminists. Feminism is probably the most important social movement of the 20th century and has a serious body of work behind it. This project may have started as a satire on somebody's blog post, but it clearly isn't merely geeks mocking somebody's attempts to apply social theory to a programing language. Or written by anyone actually familiar with feminist thought beyond parodies they read on the internet.
Ok. That's 4chan. Shallow and adolescant caricature is what they do. But when I come on slashdot and read shit like "feminists have invaded the programming community, and then demanded that the community change its character" I can't help but wince.
Can the techie comminity please lose the ridiculous overblown hostility to any woman who dares to suggest that there are real problems in our society stemming from a history of thousands of years of male domaination of it. It actually just makes us look fucking stupid.
The N900 browser used to have a feature where you could swipe your finger over the left edge of the screen and get a mouse cursor that would follow your finger. Not massively convenient, but it actually made it possible to use a lot of sites with the kinds of problems you describe.
I'm surprised no other touchscreen systems have copied this feature
The expected behaviour for any corporation is to maximise profits at the expense of nearly anything else. Certainly corporations are not expected to show empathy or compassion (except as PR exercises in the service of greater profit). In a person such complete narcissism and lack of empathy would be indicative of tendendcies towards sociopathic personality disorder.
Is it any wonder then, that psychopaths are drawn to, and probably well suited to, senior positions in corporations, where their natural tendencies towards such behavior are rewarded rather than punished.
It's somehow indicative of our complete lack of self-awareness as a society that we create these psychopathic institutions, and are then suprised and appalled when psycopaths end up running them. The problem isn't individual psycopaths as such, it goes far deeper than that, and testing managers for psychopathic tendencies will change nothing.
Yes, MAD is probably the only reason there hasn't to this point been a world war III. But you need to zoom out and judge this on a slightly longer timescale than 65 odd years
I think it's pretty obvious that the probability of a nuclear armed state entering into a confilct with another in any given year is non zero. In fact, if you look at the cuban missiles crisis, or the able archer incident, it's pretty obvious that that probability can be fairly high.
It's also pretty obvious that any major power nuclear conflict would result in the deaths of most of the worlds population, quite concieveably all of it.
Therefore, the probability of an absolutely catostrophic nuclear incident will asymptotically approach 1 the longer we have nuclear armed states. In my view our annilihation is assured if we keep these weapons around long enough.
Being willing to contemplate the destruction of the entire human race, rather than contemplate the destruction of your particlar political power base/ideology is to my mind the purest expression of human insanity.
A big of the reason for doing this was cost, but not the only one. The Conservatives have been opposed to this scheme since forever. Middle England Tories tend to get very hot under the collar about ID card schemes for some reason, though they don't seem to have any problem with CCTV, repressive "anti-terrorism" legislation, or any of the dozens of other ways in which British civil liberties are being curtailed.
As to the current Con/Dem government doing anything about these wider abuses, I remain very sceptical. Previous Tory governments have been equally as big on repressive legislation as the last Labour government was. And as everybody knows, politicians are generally loathe to give up any powers unless forced to by the population.
The quality of "serious" journalism has always been terrible and is getting worse. People turn away from this because it is mostly an attempt to actually marginalise them from serious discussion.
Look at it this way, doing serious investigative work into systematic government lies, corporate malfeasance or issues of actual importance to people's lives inevitably pisses off a bunch of very rich and powerful people.
Given the ownership structure of the media these people are quite likely to either directly control your newspaper through ownership, or indirectly through advertising. Pissing them off is very bad for your career.
Therefore serious investigative work and reporting is rarely done. Ninety-Nine percent of the time journalists do little more than echo the words of some "offical" govenment or PR source. And the news media that is supposedly meant to protect us from the powerfull actually ends up being just a mouthpice for them.
The thing is, people aren't (quite) as stupid as is commonly assumed, they know that what is presented to them as serious journalism is mostly bullshit. But they are lazy, so rather than work harder, read between the lines and try and find out what's really going on behind the headlines; they tune out the bullshit and end up ignoring the news entirely.
The introduction of entertainment into forms that were formerly reserved for "serious" journalism is an effect of this apathy rather than a primary cause. It's an attempt to win back the viewers that were previously lost. It also has the advantage of continuing to give the appearance of "doing" the news, without the inherent cost and risk associated with serious news gathering.
Just as the war on drugs is only tangentially related to actual drug abuse, the war on copyright infringement will only be tangentially related to piracy.
The "failed" drug policy of the last 50 years only makes sense to me when seen as a war waged against the underprivileged in our societies. Drug use is high in all sections of society but the poor and ethnic minority groups are the ones that end up in prison.
Equally, I think the real reason behind slime-balls like Mandelson signing up to legislation that targets downloaders is to restrict freedom of speech on the internet.
New Labour, and Mandelson in particular, have waged a vicious war on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and habeas corpus in Britain over the last 12 years. This legislation is the first step to widening that war to the internet. It gives unaccountable bureaucrats and corporate officials powers that were previously only available to the judiciary, just as New Labour is doing in other areas of British life. It will lead to (ab)use of these powers to curtail fundamental human rights, just as is happening with those other powers.
As much as our politicians are in the pockets of various corporations, I don't believe that's sufficient explanation for the assault on due process we see here. If there's one thing that terrifies politicians more than falling profits it's democracy. And large scale copyright infringement is just the excuse our politicians need to go after that on the internet with a vengeance.
Banning certain gadgets that are judged by the powers that be to have "unreasonable" energy consumption is as pointless as it is wrong headed.
Firstly, as long as demand for consumer products continues to grow exponentially any efficiency savings will just be eaten up by increased demand. Secondly, while society has a right to limit the amount of carbon each individual pumps into the atmosphere in an act of collective self-preservation, it has no right to tell individuals how to use their carbon allocation.
What we need is carbon rationing, and a massive program of alternative energy research and construction. This kind of crap is just an attempt to make people feel like the climate crisis is being handled and provide a talking point without doing anything so politically dangerous as actually addressing it.
The consumerist faux environmentalism backed by mainstream politicians like Gore is little more than fraud intended to enrich them personally.
The last thing a sports car, any sports car, can be is green. Sports cars are toys for the rich that consume massive amounts of energy both in their production and their use. Whether that energy is elecric or fossil fuel is almost secondary at this point. As a species we need to both make massive cuts in our energy use and change the way we generate that energy if we are to have any hope of survival.
If you take environmentalism seriously it means no more cars full stop. At least for the forseeable future. Putting a 50-100kg person inside a ton of steel is simply not an energy efficient method of transportation.
If you think AGW is some kind of fraud, why build electic cars at all? if you take the predictions of climate scientists remotely seriously you need to realise that the infinite growth demanded by consumerism is an insane pipe dream that will desroy us.
How could we have missed the similarities....
on
Botnets As "eWMDs"
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· Score: 1
It's all so clear to me now, because subverting somebody's computer and causing them inconvenience or financial damage is almost uncannily similar to heating their component molecules to thousands of degrees Kelvin and scattering them over a several mile radius. The threat from having a few computers go wrong is on almost exactly the same scale as the threat from thousands of multi-megaton nuclear warheads raining death on our cities from orbit. Thank you so much for clearing that up for us Mr. John J. Kelly, your genius will not be forgotten.
Ben Goldacre is actually an excellent journalist, a phrase that is increasingly becoming oxymoronic. He's happy exposing the BS of the big pharma companies, the alternative medicine quacks, and most importantly the media themselves.
In a media filled with "science correspondents" who either mindlessly reprint press releases or scaremonger to drive sales this is a breath of fresh air.
I really wish I could attribute the ignorant scaremongering of the media on issues like the MMR vaccine to the fact that most journalists have never even seen the inside of a science textbook. But I think the malaise runs far deeper.
The simple fact is that fear sells papers. Print a headline that strikes fear into the hearts of parents and they're likely to buy the paper to read the article. Printing a headline stating the opposite ( new study finds vaccines reduce asthma deaths ) just doesn't have the same emotional impact.
This extends beyond reporting on science to a wide range of topics. Look at the coverage given to vanishingly rare child abduction/murder cases for example. If you can generate fear you can shift product.
In a wider sense I'd also say that the atmosphere of fear this kind of media coverage generates is tolerated and even encouraged by owners and advertisers because it doesn't threaten their interests, and in many cases aligns with them.
If a paper was to start scaremongering to the same extent(i.e. fearmongering multi-page spreads several times a week) about the (very real) threats to it's readers from global warming, foreign wars or lax regulations, it would be branded as a crazy left wing rag and rapidly ditched by advertisers, assuming the owners didn't fire the journo's responsible first.
Frankly, about the only sinister thing about this is that there are people in officialdom who are so fundamentally brain-dead they actually believe the claims of whatever idiot is trying to sell this.
Even when interrogators have the time and money to hook people up to the most sensitive equipment available there is no technology that can determine to reasonable accuracy whether a person is lying in answer to a given question, nevermind their exact mindset or intentions in the next few hours.
Now we are supposed to believe that some gadget can automagically determine whether or not somebody wants to blow up a plane when they walk past it and are flashed a "subliminal image" of osama bin-laden?
I could go on about the sheer idiocy of assuming that somebody's reaction to a popular hate figure defines their politics or intentions. I could start about how peoples wildly varying mental states and physiologies make such simplistic measurements useless. But frankly it's not even worth deconstructing an idea this stupid in detail. Anybody dumb enough to believe in this fairy story clearly either suffers from paranoid psychosis or is so mentally deficient as to be beyond any form of rational argument.
It really pisses me off that even supposedly "quality" newspapers like the Guardian just reprint some PR's press releases with marginal editing rather than doing even the most basic of reasarch or even, god forbid, any thinking.
TFA answers none of the pertinent questions about this device. But reading between the lines and doing a little thinking it's pretty easy to determine this device is going to be useless as anything but a gimmik.
Firstly, how much power does it use? "Three lightbulbs" says TFA, now as far as I'm aware the lightbulb is not a standard measurement for power consumption. But let's be generous and assume they're taling about standard 60-80W bulbs, that about 200W, give or take.
How much water does it produce? The article doesn't say, their website claims "up to" 12L per day, which I'd imagine is operating under optimium conditions (i.e hot air at close to 100% humidity). That's actually not a lot of water, and i'd imagine operating in any real conditions you could halve or quater that amount.
So adding up the numbers, that's 4.8kWh of electicty to produce about 6L of water. Or 800kwh/m^3. This is a ridiculously, hideously energy intensive way to make water, even desalination, which is seen as ecologically unfreindly, uses about 3kwh/m^3, or is about 250 times more efficient.
TFA also states this device is useless below 30% humidity, which removes the last reason one might consider using it, providing water where no other method is possible.
My point in all this is that doing about 2 minutes thinking, and exactly one google search, I have been able to determine that this thing is anything but ecologically friendly, and anything but economic. The journo writing this article for the Guardian, which for those of you who don't know it prides itself on being a "green" newspaper, couldn't even be bothered to do that and reprinted some PR's words wholesale, giving people the impression that what is in fact a toy for rich consumers who want to feel good about being "green" is some kind of ecological miracle device. It should be a source of lasting shame to any newspaper to allow their editorial content to be used by some idiot for marketing purposes, sadly it's all too common and nobody even seems to notice the extent to which PR is taking over journalism.
Two articles, 50 posts, and nary a mention of the total gibbering insanity of this move.
Our species is burning oil at such a rate that it's actually causing the polar ice caps to melt. Instead of turning around and thinking about just what the hell we're doing to ourselves we actually use this as an excuse to start a competition for oil rights under the ice that we're about to melt. Just take a step back and think about that for a minute, the lunacy of it just absolutely blows my mind.
This is like a crack addict scraping the dead tissue out of their lungs and putting that shit back into their pipe and smoking it. Doesn't there come a point at which people think our energy consumption might be costing us too fucking much and we need to just cut down a tad? Seriously, if this talk about drilling for oil in the Arctic isn't meant as a joke then satire is dead, and our species is headed the same way.
Why does this kind of tendentious fearmongering regularly make the front page at slashdot?
Every week there's some story about evil Chinese hackers or evil Russian hackers stealing others' secrets. The equivalent stories about evil US/UK/French government hackers doing this are mysteriously absent though. That despite the fact that these countries have larger and much longer established electronic intelligence programs than the Chinese could hope to (Echelon anyone?).
I'll go along with the idea that the electronic intelligence gathering programs of major Governments are a worrying development, though calling this "cyber warfare" and pretending it's somehow qualitatively different from traditional spying seems a little silly. But why is there the pretense that other major governments are somehow less keen to exploit electronic intelligence than the Chinese? The American foriegn policy bias on this site is worrying. If this level of paranoia was directed at the US government there'd be a hundred posts complaining of "anti-americanism", yet I see no posts decrying the "anti-chinese" or "anti-russian" bias of these types of articles. Funny that...
First off, the summary reads like a press release, as does TFA, is slashdot that desperate for cash these days? Secondly, the PC itself seems like a pretty useless gimmick.
I don't understand who is supposed to be buying this thing at $4k-$11k.
Hardcore overclockers? OK the thing has excellent cooling, but not much better than you could achieve with a decent watercooling rig at a fraction of the price. This group will be put off by the proprietry(and probably overpriced)upgrades and the difficulty of actually opening the thing, not to mention the pricetag.
Gamers? Why would they pay this much over the odds for a system that's at best 10% faster than a commodity system? Again, this group will be put off by the lack of a decent upgrade path.
Silent PC enthusiasts? This group might be interested at first, the one thing an oil filled PC might arguably be useful for is silence. But at $4000+, you've got to be joking, there are already very good solutions at a fraction of that price.
Ultimately I just don't see any need for this kind of cooling system, PC's just don't run hot enough that it's worth dealing with the hassle.
You seem to have a very dangerous misunderstanding of evolutionary theory there.
Firstly it's the height of arrogance to assume that you know the genetic characteristics that will best equip future humans for survival. Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the tallest, strongest or even most intelligent( if that trait can even be defined), it in fact just means survival of those that end up having the right mix to survive in whatever their environment happens to become.
Secondly it's the height of stupidity to assume that because somebody obtains social status in today's society they are actually genetically more intelligent than somebody who does not. There's no evidence to suggest that poor people are, as you claim, genetically predisposed to stupidity or laziness.
It's really philosophically not that far from the lazy social Darwinism that says the poor are genetically inferior to the far more extreme horrors this kind of thinking has been used to justify in the past. I'm not implying you approve of any such horrors, but social Darwinism is a dangerous misunderstanding of the real thing that some extremely nasty groups have used to justify some of the basest crimes in history and it needs to die.
If this thing is meant to be going into space doesn't it need to be using radiation hardened components? TFA states the cost is likely to be around GBP1500, that along with the size and specs of it makes me wonder if they're using commercial grade components in there. Aren't radiation hardened componentes generally around 10 years behind standard PC's? In other words is this thing actually going to be of any use in space or is is just some wierd marketing gimmick?
This isn't about police confiscating some stupid board game, which TFA practically reads like an advert for.
This is about far more widespread use of police powers to harass and intimidate demonstrators protesting the planned construction of a new coal fired power station near Kingsnorth in Kent.
There was a large, week long "climate camp" attended by around 1000-2000 people near the site. Police used intimidatory tactics such as blanket stop and search of anyone approaching the site (with confiscation of such dangerous items as penknives, children's crayons, and apparently board games) there were night-time raids on the camp, confiscation of food supplies and bicycles, low flying helicopters over the camp at night, etc. etc.
On the final day of the "camp" there was a march to the gates of the existing power station, after about an hour at the gates the police announced via megaphone from a helicopter that the march would be over at 1 pm; and threatened the use of dogs and riot batons against anyone who remained, as well as arrest under section 14 of the public order act.
Some people did break into the power station in an attempt to make their point, I don't want to pretend that no laws were broken, but the protest was entirely non-violent. The police response was disproportionate, and designed to intimidate protesters rather than uphold the law.
All in all the police spent some £3 million intimidating a group of entirely peaceful, and largely law abiding people exercising their democratic right to protest.
The powers granted to the police under recent criminal justice and terrorism legislation passed by the Labour government are sweeping, and disturbing for anyone who believes in little things like freedom of assembly. Most people don't really realise the extent of it until they do something the government disapproves of, the media don't really make a fuss, and so public protest is practically non-existent. Given the total lack of public awareness of or response to these incidents I think it's likely things are going to get far worse for anyone who dares challenge authority in Britain. That's what we should be talking about, not making light of the situation by focusing on some inane story about a board game.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's been a while, but anybody who read the Snowden disclosures should be well aware that Apple were (and I assume are) part of the NSA's "Prism" program. Apple have been sending their users data wholesale to the US government for years.
Why only call out practices in China here? Is it acceptable for Apple to aid the US government in repressing people, but not the Chinese government?
Apple's business model is different from that of wholly advertising/data focused companies such as Facebook/Google and as such their surveillance can afford to be less intrusive than that of those organisations, but is anybody seriously under the delusion that their commitment to privacy is anything more than marketing at this point?
There's a lot of misunderstanding here of how location and tracking on Android actually works.
First of all, google play store has nothing to do with it. It's google play services that provides location services and implements location tracking in Android. That's the service that is used to retrieve AGPS data from the net, to correlate nearby wifi and mobile masts with lists held on google's servers to give location without GPS, and yes to provide tracking data on your location to google. Setting the location mode to "GPS Only" or similar is supposed to disable much of the tracking, but I'm not sure how much I'd trust that.
Play services is a pretty core component of Android, and an awful lot of things will cease to function if you manage to remove it. You can block play services from accessing your location using 3rd party tools like XPrivacy, but location for most apps will cease to function without a complex set of workarounds.
If you genuinely don't want your Android phone calling home with your location while still being able to use GPS, you need:
Thanks google...
No, the French government doesn't deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Nor does the US, China, or indeed virtually any major government or multinational corporation. Despite that fact, global CO2 emissions are still rising on an exponential curve. And all of these organisations are actively searching for more sources of fossil fuels at a time when science tells us we need to keep ~80% of known fossil reserves in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change
Climate denial-ism is a sideshow intended to keep you distracted. The media loudly promote a debate that doesn't really exist any more so that people can feel good they aren't a part of the evil climate deniers causing the problem. Liberals who loudly proclaim the importance of fighting climate change while doing everything they can to increase emissions have been far more of a threat to our climate than deniers for at least 20 years. When Obama gives another inspirational speech about preserving the environment for future generations everybody claps, and nobody bothers to mention the fact that the man has authorised an unprecedented increase in US domestic oil and gas production.
The COP conference in Paris will be little more than another sideshow intended to keep you distracted. We already know that there will be no legally binding agreements to reduce emissions and that the voluntary pledges countries are prepared to sign up to will likely lead to some 3-4C of warming even if implemented fully.
The reality is we live in a world that is gearing up for more, not less, fossil fuel use. Despite the loud proclamations of governments and media corporations to the contrary.
That is why protest is necessary and why the French government is actively suppressing dissent with these measures.
The slave trade, for example, ran for hundreds of years across those parts of the world under Islamic control, until Europe came within a hair's breadth of eradicating the practice from the world. Now it is back.
Wow. Just... Wow.
If we're going to compare architectures on a tech site, can we at least acknowledge the fact that we're not using a credible benchmarking methodology? And linking to Which? Really?
Geekbench is basically useless for comparing different architectures. It's barely even useful for comparing systems on the same architecture. There's a big emphasis on crypto routines that are usually hardware accelerated and already orders of magnitude faster than IO on any system you care to name. A lot of their other tests are small enough to fit into L1 cache, totally hiding things like Intel's vastly superior branch prediction and memory pipe.
Comparing A8X and x86 performance is difficult, and I can't find any credible numbers out there at all. Browser benchmarks aren't a useful way to do this either, but they tend to show the surface pro as being at least twice as quick as the A8X. I'd expect an even bigger gap in anything with a heavy emphasis on floating point operations or memory bandwidth. ARM simply don't have anything that plays in the I5s league yet in terms of pure performance.
If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered.
IQ != intelligence. If you want to study variations in IQ score, fine. Not saying it can't yeild interesting results. But can we please stop pretending that there is anything approaching a useful scientific definition of intelligence, nevermind one that reduces to a single number. That ways lies the kind of idiocy that will end up with people fucking up their kids genetic structure trying to engineer "intelligence" without even understanding what that is.
Nobody here is mocking women. They are mocking feminists. That kind of argument is exactly why.
Feminism: Noun - "the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes"
Men mocking feminists is by definition pretty close to men mocking women. If you actually read some of the contents of this github project...
among (person p : Unique_person): //Use the function crush in Dworkin.Xir to discard the oppressor
if(p.gender==male && p.orentation==het_cis_scum):
yell('RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE!!!!!');
crush(p);
It's exactly the sort of shallow, adolescant caricature of feminist thought that should offend feminists. Feminism is probably the most important social movement of the 20th century and has a serious body of work behind it. This project may have started as a satire on somebody's blog post, but it clearly isn't merely geeks mocking somebody's attempts to apply social theory to a programing language. Or written by anyone actually familiar with feminist thought beyond parodies they read on the internet.
Ok. That's 4chan. Shallow and adolescant caricature is what they do. But when I come on slashdot and read shit like "feminists have invaded the programming community, and then demanded that the community change its character" I can't help but wince.
Can the techie comminity please lose the ridiculous overblown hostility to any woman who dares to suggest that there are real problems in our society stemming from a history of thousands of years of male domaination of it. It actually just makes us look fucking stupid.
The N900 browser used to have a feature where you could swipe your finger over the left edge of the screen and get a mouse cursor that would follow your finger. Not massively convenient, but it actually made it possible to use a lot of sites with the kinds of problems you describe.
I'm surprised no other touchscreen systems have copied this feature
The expected behaviour for any corporation is to maximise profits at the expense of nearly anything else. Certainly corporations are not expected to show empathy or compassion (except as PR exercises in the service of greater profit). In a person such complete narcissism and lack of empathy would be indicative of tendendcies towards sociopathic personality disorder.
Is it any wonder then, that psychopaths are drawn to, and probably well suited to, senior positions in corporations, where their natural tendencies towards such behavior are rewarded rather than punished.
It's somehow indicative of our complete lack of self-awareness as a society that we create these psychopathic institutions, and are then suprised and appalled when psycopaths end up running them. The problem isn't individual psycopaths as such, it goes far deeper than that, and testing managers for psychopathic tendencies will change nothing.
Kenneth Waltz's argument is entirely specious.
Yes, MAD is probably the only reason there hasn't to this point been a world war III. But you need to zoom out and judge this on a slightly longer timescale than 65 odd years
I think it's pretty obvious that the probability of a nuclear armed state entering into a confilct with another in any given year is non zero. In fact, if you look at the cuban missiles crisis, or the able archer incident, it's pretty obvious that that probability can be fairly high.
It's also pretty obvious that any major power nuclear conflict would result in the deaths of most of the worlds population, quite concieveably all of it.
Therefore, the probability of an absolutely catostrophic nuclear incident will asymptotically approach 1 the longer we have nuclear armed states. In my view our annilihation is assured if we keep these weapons around long enough.
Being willing to contemplate the destruction of the entire human race, rather than contemplate the destruction of your particlar political power base/ideology is to my mind the purest expression of human insanity.
A big of the reason for doing this was cost, but not the only one. The Conservatives have been opposed to this scheme since forever. Middle England Tories tend to get very hot under the collar about ID card schemes for some reason, though they don't seem to have any problem with CCTV, repressive "anti-terrorism" legislation, or any of the dozens of other ways in which British civil liberties are being curtailed.
As to the current Con/Dem government doing anything about these wider abuses, I remain very sceptical. Previous Tory governments have been equally as big on repressive legislation as the last Labour government was. And as everybody knows, politicians are generally loathe to give up any powers unless forced to by the population.
The quality of "serious" journalism has always been terrible and is getting worse. People turn away from this because it is mostly an attempt to actually marginalise them from serious discussion.
Look at it this way, doing serious investigative work into systematic government lies, corporate malfeasance or issues of actual importance to people's lives inevitably pisses off a bunch of very rich and powerful people.
Given the ownership structure of the media these people are quite likely to either directly control your newspaper through ownership, or indirectly through advertising. Pissing them off is very bad for your career.
Therefore serious investigative work and reporting is rarely done. Ninety-Nine percent of the time journalists do little more than echo the words of some "offical" govenment or PR source. And the news media that is supposedly meant to protect us from the powerfull actually ends up being just a mouthpice for them. The thing is, people aren't (quite) as stupid as is commonly assumed, they know that what is presented to them as serious journalism is mostly bullshit. But they are lazy, so rather than work harder, read between the lines and try and find out what's really going on behind the headlines; they tune out the bullshit and end up ignoring the news entirely.
The introduction of entertainment into forms that were formerly reserved for "serious" journalism is an effect of this apathy rather than a primary cause. It's an attempt to win back the viewers that were previously lost. It also has the advantage of continuing to give the appearance of "doing" the news, without the inherent cost and risk associated with serious news gathering.
Just as the war on drugs is only tangentially related to actual drug abuse, the war on copyright infringement will only be tangentially related to piracy.
The "failed" drug policy of the last 50 years only makes sense to me when seen as a war waged against the underprivileged in our societies. Drug use is high in all sections of society but the poor and ethnic minority groups are the ones that end up in prison.
Equally, I think the real reason behind slime-balls like Mandelson signing up to legislation that targets downloaders is to restrict freedom of speech on the internet.
New Labour, and Mandelson in particular, have waged a vicious war on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and habeas corpus in Britain over the last 12 years. This legislation is the first step to widening that war to the internet. It gives unaccountable bureaucrats and corporate officials powers that were previously only available to the judiciary, just as New Labour is doing in other areas of British life. It will lead to (ab)use of these powers to curtail fundamental human rights, just as is happening with those other powers.
As much as our politicians are in the pockets of various corporations, I don't believe that's sufficient explanation for the assault on due process we see here. If there's one thing that terrifies politicians more than falling profits it's democracy. And large scale copyright infringement is just the excuse our politicians need to go after that on the internet with a vengeance.
Banning certain gadgets that are judged by the powers that be to have "unreasonable" energy consumption is as pointless as it is wrong headed.
Firstly, as long as demand for consumer products continues to grow exponentially any efficiency savings will just be eaten up by increased demand.
Secondly, while society has a right to limit the amount of carbon each individual pumps into the atmosphere in an act of collective self-preservation, it has no right to tell individuals how to use their carbon allocation.
What we need is carbon rationing, and a massive program of alternative energy research and construction. This kind of crap is just an attempt to make people feel like the climate crisis is being handled and provide a talking point without doing anything so politically dangerous as actually addressing it.
The consumerist faux environmentalism backed by mainstream politicians like Gore is little more than fraud intended to enrich them personally.
The last thing a sports car, any sports car, can be is green. Sports cars are toys for the rich that consume massive amounts of energy both in their production and their use. Whether that energy is elecric or fossil fuel is almost secondary at this point. As a species we need to both make massive cuts in our energy use and change the way we generate that energy if we are to have any hope of survival.
If you take environmentalism seriously it means no more cars full stop. At least for the forseeable future. Putting a 50-100kg person inside a ton of steel is simply not an energy efficient method of transportation.
If you think AGW is some kind of fraud, why build electic cars at all? if you take the predictions of climate scientists remotely seriously you need to realise that the infinite growth demanded by consumerism is an insane pipe dream that will desroy us.
It's all so clear to me now, because subverting somebody's computer and causing them inconvenience or financial damage is almost uncannily similar to heating their component molecules to thousands of degrees Kelvin and scattering them over a several mile radius. The threat from having a few computers go wrong is on almost exactly the same scale as the threat from thousands of multi-megaton nuclear warheads raining death on our cities from orbit. Thank you so much for clearing that up for us Mr. John J. Kelly, your genius will not be forgotten.
Ben Goldacre is actually an excellent journalist, a phrase that is increasingly becoming oxymoronic. He's happy exposing the BS of the big pharma companies, the alternative medicine quacks, and most importantly the media themselves.
In a media filled with "science correspondents" who either mindlessly reprint press releases or scaremonger to drive sales this is a breath of fresh air.
I really wish I could attribute the ignorant scaremongering of the media on issues like the MMR vaccine to the fact that most journalists have never even seen the inside of a science textbook. But I think the malaise runs far deeper.
The simple fact is that fear sells papers. Print a headline that strikes fear into the hearts of parents and they're likely to buy the paper to read the article. Printing a headline stating the opposite ( new study finds vaccines reduce asthma deaths ) just doesn't have the same emotional impact.
This extends beyond reporting on science to a wide range of topics. Look at the coverage given to vanishingly rare child abduction/murder cases for example. If you can generate fear you can shift product.
In a wider sense I'd also say that the atmosphere of fear this kind of media coverage generates is tolerated and even encouraged by owners and advertisers because it doesn't threaten their interests, and in many cases aligns with them.
If a paper was to start scaremongering to the same extent(i.e. fearmongering multi-page spreads several times a week) about the (very real) threats to it's readers from global warming, foreign wars or lax regulations, it would be branded as a crazy left wing rag and rapidly ditched by advertisers, assuming the owners didn't fire the journo's responsible first.
Frankly, about the only sinister thing about this is that there are people in officialdom who are so fundamentally brain-dead they actually believe the claims of whatever idiot is trying to sell this.
Even when interrogators have the time and money to hook people up to the most sensitive equipment available there is no technology that can determine to reasonable accuracy whether a person is lying in answer to a given question, nevermind their exact mindset or intentions in the next few hours.
Now we are supposed to believe that some gadget can automagically determine whether or not somebody wants to blow up a plane when they walk past it and are flashed a "subliminal image" of osama bin-laden?
I could go on about the sheer idiocy of assuming that somebody's reaction to a popular hate figure defines their politics or intentions. I could start about how peoples wildly varying mental states and physiologies make such simplistic measurements useless. But frankly it's not even worth deconstructing an idea this stupid in detail. Anybody dumb enough to believe in this fairy story clearly either suffers from paranoid psychosis or is so mentally deficient as to be beyond any form of rational argument.
It really pisses me off that even supposedly "quality" newspapers like the Guardian just reprint some PR's press releases with marginal editing rather than doing even the most basic of reasarch or even, god forbid, any thinking.
TFA answers none of the pertinent questions about this device. But reading between the lines and doing a little thinking it's pretty easy to determine this device is going to be useless as anything but a gimmik.
Firstly, how much power does it use? "Three lightbulbs" says TFA, now as far as I'm aware the lightbulb is not a standard measurement for power consumption. But let's be generous and assume they're taling about standard 60-80W bulbs, that about 200W, give or take.
How much water does it produce? The article doesn't say, their website claims "up to" 12L per day, which I'd imagine is operating under optimium conditions (i.e hot air at close to 100% humidity). That's actually not a lot of water, and i'd imagine operating in any real conditions you could halve or quater that amount.
So adding up the numbers, that's 4.8kWh of electicty to produce about 6L of water. Or 800kwh/m^3. This is a ridiculously, hideously energy intensive way to make water, even desalination, which is seen as ecologically unfreindly, uses about 3kwh/m^3, or is about 250 times more efficient.
TFA also states this device is useless below 30% humidity, which removes the last reason one might consider using it, providing water where no other method is possible.
My point in all this is that doing about 2 minutes thinking, and exactly one google search, I have been able to determine that this thing is anything but ecologically friendly, and anything but economic. The journo writing this article for the Guardian, which for those of you who don't know it prides itself on being a "green" newspaper, couldn't even be bothered to do that and reprinted some PR's words wholesale, giving people the impression that what is in fact a toy for rich consumers who want to feel good about being "green" is some kind of ecological miracle device.
It should be a source of lasting shame to any newspaper to allow their editorial content to be used by some idiot for marketing purposes, sadly it's all too common and nobody even seems to notice the extent to which PR is taking over journalism.
Two articles, 50 posts, and nary a mention of the total gibbering insanity of this move.
Our species is burning oil at such a rate that it's actually causing the polar ice caps to melt. Instead of turning around and thinking about just what the hell we're doing to ourselves we actually use this as an excuse to start a competition for oil rights under the ice that we're about to melt. Just take a step back and think about that for a minute, the lunacy of it just absolutely blows my mind.
This is like a crack addict scraping the dead tissue out of their lungs and putting that shit back into their pipe and smoking it. Doesn't there come a point at which people think our energy consumption might be costing us too fucking much and we need to just cut down a tad? Seriously, if this talk about drilling for oil in the Arctic isn't meant as a joke then satire is dead, and our species is headed the same way.
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Why does this kind of tendentious fearmongering regularly make the front page at slashdot?
Every week there's some story about evil Chinese hackers or evil Russian hackers stealing others' secrets. The equivalent stories about evil US/UK/French government hackers doing this are mysteriously absent though. That despite the fact that these countries have larger and much longer established electronic intelligence programs than the Chinese could hope to (Echelon anyone?).
I'll go along with the idea that the electronic intelligence gathering programs of major Governments are a worrying development, though calling this "cyber warfare" and pretending it's somehow qualitatively different from traditional spying seems a little silly. But why is there the pretense that other major governments are somehow less keen to exploit electronic intelligence than the Chinese? The American foriegn policy bias on this site is worrying. If this level of paranoia was directed at the US government there'd be a hundred posts complaining of "anti-americanism", yet I see no posts decrying the "anti-chinese" or "anti-russian" bias of these types of articles. Funny that...
First off, the summary reads like a press release, as does TFA, is slashdot that desperate for cash these days? Secondly, the PC itself seems like a pretty useless gimmick.
I don't understand who is supposed to be buying this thing at $4k-$11k.
Hardcore overclockers? OK the thing has excellent cooling, but not much better than you could achieve with a decent watercooling rig at a fraction of the price. This group will be put off by the proprietry(and probably overpriced)upgrades and the difficulty of actually opening the thing, not to mention the pricetag.
Gamers? Why would they pay this much over the odds for a system that's at best 10% faster than a commodity system? Again, this group will be put off by the lack of a decent upgrade path.
Silent PC enthusiasts? This group might be interested at first, the one thing an oil filled PC might arguably be useful for is silence. But at $4000+, you've got to be joking, there are already very good solutions at a fraction of that price.
Ultimately I just don't see any need for this kind of cooling system, PC's just don't run hot enough that it's worth dealing with the hassle.
You seem to have a very dangerous misunderstanding of evolutionary theory there.
Firstly it's the height of arrogance to assume that you know the genetic characteristics that will best equip future humans for survival. Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the tallest, strongest or even most intelligent( if that trait can even be defined), it in fact just means survival of those that end up having the right mix to survive in whatever their environment happens to become.
Secondly it's the height of stupidity to assume that because somebody obtains social status in today's society they are actually genetically more intelligent than somebody who does not. There's no evidence to suggest that poor people are, as you claim, genetically predisposed to stupidity or laziness.
It's really philosophically not that far from the lazy social Darwinism that says the poor are genetically inferior to the far more extreme horrors this kind of thinking has been used to justify in the past. I'm not implying you approve of any such horrors, but social Darwinism is a dangerous misunderstanding of the real thing that some extremely nasty groups have used to justify some of the basest crimes in history and it needs to die.
If this thing is meant to be going into space doesn't it need to be using radiation hardened components?
TFA states the cost is likely to be around GBP1500, that along with the size and specs of it makes me wonder if they're using commercial grade components in there. Aren't radiation hardened componentes generally around 10 years behind standard PC's? In other words is this thing actually going to be of any use in space or is is just some wierd marketing gimmick?
This isn't about police confiscating some stupid board game, which TFA practically reads like an advert for.
This is about far more widespread use of police powers to harass and intimidate demonstrators protesting the planned construction of a new coal fired power station near Kingsnorth in Kent.
There was a large, week long "climate camp" attended by around 1000-2000 people near the site. Police used intimidatory tactics such as blanket stop and search of anyone approaching the site (with confiscation of such dangerous items as penknives, children's crayons, and apparently board games) there were night-time raids on the camp, confiscation of food supplies and bicycles, low flying helicopters over the camp at night, etc. etc.
On the final day of the "camp" there was a march to the gates of the existing power station, after about an hour at the gates the police announced via megaphone from a helicopter that the march would be over at 1 pm; and threatened the use of dogs and riot batons against anyone who remained, as well as arrest under section 14 of the public order act.
Some people did break into the power station in an attempt to make their point, I don't want to pretend that no laws were broken, but the protest was entirely non-violent. The police response was disproportionate, and designed to intimidate protesters rather than uphold the law.
All in all the police spent some £3 million intimidating a group of entirely peaceful, and largely law abiding people exercising their democratic right to protest.
The powers granted to the police under recent criminal justice and terrorism legislation passed by the Labour government are sweeping, and disturbing for anyone who believes in little things like freedom of assembly. Most people don't really realise the extent of it until they do something the government disapproves of, the media don't really make a fuss, and so public protest is practically non-existent. Given the total lack of public awareness of or response to these incidents I think it's likely things are going to get far worse for anyone who dares challenge authority in Britain. That's what we should be talking about, not making light of the situation by focusing on some inane story about a board game.