ADS-B is basically having each plane send it's own GPS signal to the aircraft controllers.
Because of the security risks involved with having each plane report their own position, rather than aircraft control finding all the positions for planes, I highly doubt that old fashioned radar is going anywhere soon.
Also, while this will be more accurate in areas where radar doesn't reach, I don't remember hearing about many planes crashing in midair too often....
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein.
Great book about a computer that becomes self aware and then tries to help its creator rule the colonized moon. The specs in the book weren't as good as what this will have though, but the results were better!
I apologize for writing in all caps, here, but let me just say WHAT THE FUCK.
Each question has between 4 and 5 options, some questions, like 19, show elected officials at about 10%.
That means if they picked a random answer, they would be correct twice as often.
I'll conceed that it wasn't the easiest question there, and I can understand low scores, but.... seriously?
Liquid hydrogen is about 16 degrees warmer than helium, and is usually used as a fuel, not a cryogen so I don't know why you would use it over liquid helium...
This software isn't really aimed for individuals or students, it's made for researchers and big businesses to whom $2,495 is nothing.
For any normal person who wants to try it, just wait a couple weeks, I'm sure it'll be on the Pirate Bay...
(And before you intellectual property activists jump on here, I'm not supporting pirating it, I'm just saying that there is no way in hell they expect your average user to pay for it, and any company that would need it would never pirate it, so I don't think they care)
To start, having my infected computer crash yours is not even close to having my car crash into yours. I'm sorry but that just makes no sense whatsoever...
Besides that incredibly flawed analogy, I have some questions, such as:
*Who would administer these exams?
*How does one go about getting internet access enabled again?
*Is this controlled at the government level or by the ISPs?
*What happens if a country or ISP doesn't comply, do we not allow them on the internet?
*How do you verify that your license is valid?
*Who pays for the tests/how much does a license cost?
*How does this work if, say, I go to my friends house and use his/her internet connection?
*How does one verify that your computer has been compromised, and not that you are just doing something slightly out of the ordinary?
There are dozens if not hundreds more but I'm going to stop there. I really hope you weren't being serious...
I think a better analogy to this would be if your landlord rented out a special space where people could sell things (kind of like a mall) and many of the tenants used their rented space to sell drugs, or child pornography, or guns, or other illegal things.
Now for some reason, it turns out that the people renting out space to do illegal things are foreign ambassadors, and the government can't directly touch them.
I don't know about you, but I think it makes sense for the government to go after who they can, and take down the landlord, even with the legitimate tenants.
On a more direct note, I don't think that a lot of commercial enterprises were using McColo. I am quite sure that McColo's unique stance on legal matters made the cost of it far more than a normal provider, and there certainly is no lack of commercial hosting providers. Further, McColo was very well known for questionably legal activities. If you were using their hosting services, even if it was for legal things, chances are you were well aware what everyone else was doing.
I really don't see what the problem is, it's not like the government did this without warning. You can bet McColo has gotten numerous notices requesting that they stop helping spammers and bot-net controllers, but they simply chose to ignore them. They were knowingly participating in illegal activities, so the government shut them down. Seems pretty simple, really.
Nothing can actually rule out the existence of an intelligent creator, as you said supernatural beings defy scientific explanation by definition. Even if there was some possible way to disprove the existence of God, I'm sure we would just have people saying that the proof was created by God to test people's faith or something like that.
But the point is: why should a God (or multiple gods, but I'll stick to one for the sake of simplicity) exist? It's impossible to prove or disprove that there is a watermelon sitting just outside the edge of our universe doing nothing. However, I think anyone could agree that to assume that the watermelon is there, simply because it can't be disproved, is just stupid.
The case is basically the same with a God. It explains no more answers, makes no predictions, and offers no testable evidence... so what is the reason for believing it?
Defining something to be unprovable by science is not an explanation, or a reason for a belief. It's just a bunch of hand-waving that will convince people who don't analyze things logically to lose their trust in science and facts.
Books may not "fail" but they are certainly more cumbersome.
For instance, storing your page on an ebook takes literally no effort, with a real book you need a bookmark (which always manages to fall out when you're carrying books around) or bending the pages (which I hate to do because it hurts the book)
You also can't use your book to read other books. If I am bored in the middle of a week long power failure, and I just had a couple books, I'll likely have nothing left to do. With an ebook reader, you can keep keep dozens of books on so there are always at least a half dozen or so you haven't read yet.
You also can't easily carry a large paperback in your pocket (I have big pockets, so the Sony reader fits in mine alright, but a long novel won't)
Most of what you're saying seems unfounded. I have never had my ebook "suddenly and without warning not have any text" when I open it up. I suppose dropping one might damage it, but unless you are reading while going for a jog or something, I don't see why it would be hard to hold onto a book.
While you can't resell books from the Kindle, most ebook readers let you use open formats, such as PDF, RTF, plain text, etc. So you could either find copies of books for free (from places like Gutenberg, or some of the very progressive authors that put their books online for free, or through less legal means), or buy an open formatted book (I'm sure there is somewhere to do that) and then resell the file if you really want.
As for having a real library... that is addressing a different problem than ebook readers. The idea is to make something that allows you to replace things like novels or books that you read on the go. They aren't made to replace books, but really to present another form of textual media.
If I want to sit down and read a nice novel, I want to focus on the words themselves, not the way they are presented to me, and I think that is how it should be.
I don't have any more of a problem with crack-heads breaking into cars and homes, or meth-heads driving into people, or coke-heads going on murderous rampage than I do if they weren't drug users.
Do you think anything that makes crime more likely shouldn't be allowed? If people of a specific ethnic background are convicted of crimes more often, does that mean we should arrest them all?
If there was a gene that made people more likely to steal things, or makes them more violent and therefore more likely to commit assault, should we arrest them all?
If people that do drugs are convicted of crimes more often, does that mean we should arrest them all?
It seems to me we should arrest anyone who breaks into cars or homes, runs over people in a car, or goes on murderous rampages, not just people who might be slightly more predisposed to do so.
They had some problems shipping laptops to everyone that ordered one, with a whole lot of people complaining about not getting their shipment. It wouldn't surprise me if they stopped shipment because they couldn't keep up with the demand.
The safety of those in the same living space, or for the personnel helping to rescue them is also put in jeopardy by a fire, but no one would suggest requiring a license to buy a stove, matches, lighter, candles, etc.
I don't disagree with regulation all together, but just more regulation isn't the answer. If someone is trying to make explosives with chemicals they found in something sold at a hardware store, they are far more likely to release toxic gas or start unpredicted side reactions than if they were able to easily buy what they needed at a higher purity from a local chemistry shop.
The kind of regulations we have now don't help protect anyone, they just make working safely harder to do. If someone can't legally buy the right chemicals or equipment to do something the right way, chances are they'll just end up doing it the wrong way.
Sorry I was a bit ambiguous, in "Statement A" when I said 'someone', I meant someone that was not directly involved in the experiment/synthesis.
My point was that while direct harm may come to the one doing the experiment, it isn't really plausible that a home experimenter will accidentally blow up their neighbor's house.
Experimenting is trying to discover new things, but what an experimenter does should be up to their own discretion, and not that of the government. Unless their experiment involves antimatter or they are doing experiments by mixing hundreds of pounds of chemicals at a time, they most likely will not be posing a threat to anyone but themselves, and that should be up to them.
Sorry for my ambiguous statement, I need to work on my pronoun usage I guess.
It's sad but true, the only one these laws really stop is experimenters. If I wanted to buy a three neck flask (not the most common lab equipment, but still used in a whole lot of syntheses) I can't legally in some states. Is outlawing a piece of glass going to stop drug makers from getting it?
The thing to remember about people making drugs, is that chemistry isn't a hobby for them. If they need something, and it'll cost them $50 extra so that they can smuggle it into their state, or set up a fake business to get something shipped to, that isn't a problem for them.
But for the hobbyist, unless they want to become a criminal to do their chemistry a little more safely, there's no way they're going to be able to get what they need.
In a lot of ways it's cyclical. Ban the tools people need to do chemistry safely, someone gets harmed doing chemistry because they can't get what they need, ban more chemistry equipment from hobbyists.
I'm not sure if you realize how difficult it is to harm someone accidentally from experimenting with chemistry.
While there are a lot of ways to harm yourself if you are trying to make explosives or other chemicals that involve dangerous reactions, this wouldn't harm anyone else.
I suppose there can be some extreme circumstances where a neighbor gets accidentally hurt, but really, unless someone is setting off explosives with shrapnel or intentionally trying to do harm, it would be damn near impossible to harm anyone else.
So if people were taught how to do practical chemistry and not just experimental (so, making things for the sake of the resulting product, rather than to just make observations) then we can assume the harm done to oneself would go down. As for harm to others, well, if someone is making high explosives and packing nails around it and setting it off at their neighbors house, I think they have much more serious problems than being able to access dangerous chemicals.
I don't think most users would mind dealing with the ads, as long as you can do something like pause the actual movie.
Then they can just get up and walk away with the sound muted on their computer as the ads load, go grab some popcorn or something, then come back and start the movie from the beginning, right after the ads.
If the videos weren't crappy quality, I don't think I would mind waiting a couple extra minutes for the ads to end, when downloading it from bittorrent or going out to the movies would take (for most users) longer than the few minutes of ads they may throw in.
Sure, that system is far from perfect, but you get the idea--there are ways to implement electronic voting systems that, if one was to take the time to sit down and think about, as a company who makes voting machines should, it really isn't that hard to make a proper voting machine.
And with an open source project, it wouldn't be hard to end up with enough ideas to do this right.
It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but it really shouldn't be that hard.
It seems to me a lot of the problems with accountability and anonymity could be dealt with by cryptographic hashes.
It could go something like this:
1. Each person gets an ID number when they register to vote(a hash of something like driver's license number) and a hash of their ID and name gets stored in a computer, with no ties to their name.
2. On election day they have the polling people enter the voter's name and driver's license number through a computer to generate their unique hash from when they registered, if it matches they get a little sheet with their hash printed out and a barcode of their hash to access it into a computer.
3. The voter scans the barcode at the voting machine, which displays the hash on the screen. The voter double checks this is the hash on their card. Then the voter will enter their vote (using tactile buttons, damnit!).
4. After a confirmation screen, the machine will print out a ticket with their hash code and their votes clearly written in scantron style. They verify that this is who they voted for, put this in a box, and leave.
I am sure this idea isn't close to perfect, but it would allow:
An anonomyous paper trail, and paranoid people could even go back and ask who "a839f937e93c8d92103df12" voted for, to double check their vote was counted. And, unless you know someone's driver's license number(this could use something else, but you get the idea) and full name, you can't find out who they voted for.
Quick and easy counting because it is stored on the computer, and if the votes don't seem to match up, one can just double check the paper votes, which can be scanned easily by a machine, or counted by hand, and again have the same verifiability from the hashes.
Accountability in some senses, as you can make sure the number of voters that hashes were printed for matches the number of votes, and the people in charge of polling can't print out tickets without the correct driver's license number and full name of someone registered to vote.
An interesting project would be to make some sort of distributed screen saver (think Folding@home or whatever) that sends data to other users and a central server encrypted, or just random bits.
The idea isn't to communicate anything useful, but it could just pump up the signal:noise ratio for the government, making it very difficult to pick out what is an encrypted message worth trying to decode, and what they shouldn't bother with.
Of course, this requires bandwidth on the users part, but it's for a good cause, and I'm sure some people would be willing to do it.
Well, if we define "everything" in terms of past Presidents, we can assume it means all the past Presidents and their traits. Now we have a President with a new trait, he is black. Therefore, "everything" has changed.
You do have a valid point, that in a completely "color-free" world, this wouldn't change a thing, but the fact that he will be the first black President really changes things, much like JFK changed things as the first Catholic President.
Racism would be saying that simply because he is black he will be a better or worse president. The parent is just saying that he is black and others have not been.
Slashdot Mirror
ADS-B is basically having each plane send it's own GPS signal to the aircraft controllers.
Because of the security risks involved with having each plane report their own position, rather than aircraft control finding all the positions for planes, I highly doubt that old fashioned radar is going anywhere soon.
Also, while this will be more accurate in areas where radar doesn't reach, I don't remember hearing about many planes crashing in midair too often....
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein.
Great book about a computer that becomes self aware and then tries to help its creator rule the colonized moon. The specs in the book weren't as good as what this will have though, but the results were better!
I apologize for writing in all caps, here, but let me just say WHAT THE FUCK.
Each question has between 4 and 5 options, some questions, like 19, show elected officials at about 10%.
That means if they picked a random answer, they would be correct twice as often.
I'll conceed that it wasn't the easiest question there, and I can understand low scores, but.... seriously?
Liquid hydrogen is about 16 degrees warmer than helium, and is usually used as a fuel, not a cryogen so I don't know why you would use it over liquid helium...
Oh that was a joke?
I see... carry on.
This software isn't really aimed for individuals or students, it's made for researchers and big businesses to whom $2,495 is nothing.
For any normal person who wants to try it, just wait a couple weeks, I'm sure it'll be on the Pirate Bay...
(And before you intellectual property activists jump on here, I'm not supporting pirating it, I'm just saying that there is no way in hell they expect your average user to pay for it, and any company that would need it would never pirate it, so I don't think they care)
To start, having my infected computer crash yours is not even close to having my car crash into yours. I'm sorry but that just makes no sense whatsoever...
Besides that incredibly flawed analogy, I have some questions, such as:
*Who would administer these exams?
*How does one go about getting internet access enabled again?
*Is this controlled at the government level or by the ISPs?
*What happens if a country or ISP doesn't comply, do we not allow them on the internet?
*How do you verify that your license is valid?
*Who pays for the tests/how much does a license cost?
*How does this work if, say, I go to my friends house and use his/her internet connection?
*How does one verify that your computer has been compromised, and not that you are just doing something slightly out of the ordinary?
There are dozens if not hundreds more but I'm going to stop there. I really hope you weren't being serious...
I think a better analogy to this would be if your landlord rented out a special space where people could sell things (kind of like a mall) and many of the tenants used their rented space to sell drugs, or child pornography, or guns, or other illegal things.
Now for some reason, it turns out that the people renting out space to do illegal things are foreign ambassadors, and the government can't directly touch them.
I don't know about you, but I think it makes sense for the government to go after who they can, and take down the landlord, even with the legitimate tenants.
On a more direct note, I don't think that a lot of commercial enterprises were using McColo. I am quite sure that McColo's unique stance on legal matters made the cost of it far more than a normal provider, and there certainly is no lack of commercial hosting providers. Further, McColo was very well known for questionably legal activities. If you were using their hosting services, even if it was for legal things, chances are you were well aware what everyone else was doing.
I really don't see what the problem is, it's not like the government did this without warning. You can bet McColo has gotten numerous notices requesting that they stop helping spammers and bot-net controllers, but they simply chose to ignore them. They were knowingly participating in illegal activities, so the government shut them down. Seems pretty simple, really.
No one actually knows what EAL11+ does, because no one has ever been crazy enough to try to attack an EAL11+ system.
Bug #3129 in Windows Adobe Flash Player (64bit)
Affects: My computer
Importance: Extremely High
Description: can u release a update 4 this!?!? it doesnt work rite on my computer!!
Nothing can actually rule out the existence of an intelligent creator, as you said supernatural beings defy scientific explanation by definition. Even if there was some possible way to disprove the existence of God, I'm sure we would just have people saying that the proof was created by God to test people's faith or something like that.
But the point is: why should a God (or multiple gods, but I'll stick to one for the sake of simplicity) exist? It's impossible to prove or disprove that there is a watermelon sitting just outside the edge of our universe doing nothing. However, I think anyone could agree that to assume that the watermelon is there, simply because it can't be disproved, is just stupid.
The case is basically the same with a God. It explains no more answers, makes no predictions, and offers no testable evidence... so what is the reason for believing it?
Defining something to be unprovable by science is not an explanation, or a reason for a belief. It's just a bunch of hand-waving that will convince people who don't analyze things logically to lose their trust in science and facts.
Books may not "fail" but they are certainly more cumbersome.
For instance, storing your page on an ebook takes literally no effort, with a real book you need a bookmark (which always manages to fall out when you're carrying books around) or bending the pages (which I hate to do because it hurts the book)
You also can't use your book to read other books. If I am bored in the middle of a week long power failure, and I just had a couple books, I'll likely have nothing left to do. With an ebook reader, you can keep keep dozens of books on so there are always at least a half dozen or so you haven't read yet.
You also can't easily carry a large paperback in your pocket (I have big pockets, so the Sony reader fits in mine alright, but a long novel won't)
Most of what you're saying seems unfounded. I have never had my ebook "suddenly and without warning not have any text" when I open it up. I suppose dropping one might damage it, but unless you are reading while going for a jog or something, I don't see why it would be hard to hold onto a book.
While you can't resell books from the Kindle, most ebook readers let you use open formats, such as PDF, RTF, plain text, etc. So you could either find copies of books for free (from places like Gutenberg, or some of the very progressive authors that put their books online for free, or through less legal means), or buy an open formatted book (I'm sure there is somewhere to do that) and then resell the file if you really want.
As for having a real library... that is addressing a different problem than ebook readers. The idea is to make something that allows you to replace things like novels or books that you read on the go. They aren't made to replace books, but really to present another form of textual media.
If I want to sit down and read a nice novel, I want to focus on the words themselves, not the way they are presented to me, and I think that is how it should be.
I don't have any more of a problem with crack-heads breaking into cars and homes, or meth-heads driving into people, or coke-heads going on murderous rampage than I do if they weren't drug users.
Do you think anything that makes crime more likely shouldn't be allowed? If people of a specific ethnic background are convicted of crimes more often, does that mean we should arrest them all?
If there was a gene that made people more likely to steal things, or makes them more violent and therefore more likely to commit assault, should we arrest them all?
If people that do drugs are convicted of crimes more often, does that mean we should arrest them all?
It seems to me we should arrest anyone who breaks into cars or homes, runs over people in a car, or goes on murderous rampages, not just people who might be slightly more predisposed to do so.
They had some problems shipping laptops to everyone that ordered one, with a whole lot of people complaining about not getting their shipment. It wouldn't surprise me if they stopped shipment because they couldn't keep up with the demand.
The safety of those in the same living space, or for the personnel helping to rescue them is also put in jeopardy by a fire, but no one would suggest requiring a license to buy a stove, matches, lighter, candles, etc.
I don't disagree with regulation all together, but just more regulation isn't the answer. If someone is trying to make explosives with chemicals they found in something sold at a hardware store, they are far more likely to release toxic gas or start unpredicted side reactions than if they were able to easily buy what they needed at a higher purity from a local chemistry shop.
The kind of regulations we have now don't help protect anyone, they just make working safely harder to do. If someone can't legally buy the right chemicals or equipment to do something the right way, chances are they'll just end up doing it the wrong way.
Sorry I was a bit ambiguous, in "Statement A" when I said 'someone', I meant someone that was not directly involved in the experiment/synthesis.
My point was that while direct harm may come to the one doing the experiment, it isn't really plausible that a home experimenter will accidentally blow up their neighbor's house.
Experimenting is trying to discover new things, but what an experimenter does should be up to their own discretion, and not that of the government. Unless their experiment involves antimatter or they are doing experiments by mixing hundreds of pounds of chemicals at a time, they most likely will not be posing a threat to anyone but themselves, and that should be up to them.
Sorry for my ambiguous statement, I need to work on my pronoun usage I guess.
It's sad but true, the only one these laws really stop is experimenters. If I wanted to buy a three neck flask (not the most common lab equipment, but still used in a whole lot of syntheses) I can't legally in some states. Is outlawing a piece of glass going to stop drug makers from getting it?
The thing to remember about people making drugs, is that chemistry isn't a hobby for them. If they need something, and it'll cost them $50 extra so that they can smuggle it into their state, or set up a fake business to get something shipped to, that isn't a problem for them.
But for the hobbyist, unless they want to become a criminal to do their chemistry a little more safely, there's no way they're going to be able to get what they need.
In a lot of ways it's cyclical. Ban the tools people need to do chemistry safely, someone gets harmed doing chemistry because they can't get what they need, ban more chemistry equipment from hobbyists.
I'm not sure if you realize how difficult it is to harm someone accidentally from experimenting with chemistry.
While there are a lot of ways to harm yourself if you are trying to make explosives or other chemicals that involve dangerous reactions, this wouldn't harm anyone else.
I suppose there can be some extreme circumstances where a neighbor gets accidentally hurt, but really, unless someone is setting off explosives with shrapnel or intentionally trying to do harm, it would be damn near impossible to harm anyone else.
So if people were taught how to do practical chemistry and not just experimental (so, making things for the sake of the resulting product, rather than to just make observations) then we can assume the harm done to oneself would go down. As for harm to others, well, if someone is making high explosives and packing nails around it and setting it off at their neighbors house, I think they have much more serious problems than being able to access dangerous chemicals.
I don't think most users would mind dealing with the ads, as long as you can do something like pause the actual movie.
Then they can just get up and walk away with the sound muted on their computer as the ads load, go grab some popcorn or something, then come back and start the movie from the beginning, right after the ads.
If the videos weren't crappy quality, I don't think I would mind waiting a couple extra minutes for the ads to end, when downloading it from bittorrent or going out to the movies would take (for most users) longer than the few minutes of ads they may throw in.
(Useful) Stupid Tricks
Sure, that system is far from perfect, but you get the idea--there are ways to implement electronic voting systems that, if one was to take the time to sit down and think about, as a company who makes voting machines should, it really isn't that hard to make a proper voting machine.
And with an open source project, it wouldn't be hard to end up with enough ideas to do this right.
It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but it really shouldn't be that hard.
It seems to me a lot of the problems with accountability and anonymity could be dealt with by cryptographic hashes.
It could go something like this:
1. Each person gets an ID number when they register to vote(a hash of something like driver's license number) and a hash of their ID and name gets stored in a computer, with no ties to their name.
2. On election day they have the polling people enter the voter's name and driver's license number through a computer to generate their unique hash from when they registered, if it matches they get a little sheet with their hash printed out and a barcode of their hash to access it into a computer.
3. The voter scans the barcode at the voting machine, which displays the hash on the screen. The voter double checks this is the hash on their card. Then the voter will enter their vote (using tactile buttons, damnit!).
4. After a confirmation screen, the machine will print out a ticket with their hash code and their votes clearly written in scantron style. They verify that this is who they voted for, put this in a box, and leave.
I am sure this idea isn't close to perfect, but it would allow:
An anonomyous paper trail, and paranoid people could even go back and ask who "a839f937e93c8d92103df12" voted for, to double check their vote was counted. And, unless you know someone's driver's license number(this could use something else, but you get the idea) and full name, you can't find out who they voted for.
Quick and easy counting because it is stored on the computer, and if the votes don't seem to match up, one can just double check the paper votes, which can be scanned easily by a machine, or counted by hand, and again have the same verifiability from the hashes.
Accountability in some senses, as you can make sure the number of voters that hashes were printed for matches the number of votes, and the people in charge of polling can't print out tickets without the correct driver's license number and full name of someone registered to vote.
I, for one, welcome our new human overlords!
An interesting project would be to make some sort of distributed screen saver (think Folding@home or whatever) that sends data to other users and a central server encrypted, or just random bits.
The idea isn't to communicate anything useful, but it could just pump up the signal:noise ratio for the government, making it very difficult to pick out what is an encrypted message worth trying to decode, and what they shouldn't bother with.
Of course, this requires bandwidth on the users part, but it's for a good cause, and I'm sure some people would be willing to do it.
Well, if we define "everything" in terms of past Presidents, we can assume it means all the past Presidents and their traits. Now we have a President with a new trait, he is black. Therefore, "everything" has changed.
You do have a valid point, that in a completely "color-free" world, this wouldn't change a thing, but the fact that he will be the first black President really changes things, much like JFK changed things as the first Catholic President.
Racism would be saying that simply because he is black he will be a better or worse president. The parent is just saying that he is black and others have not been.