A right is something that cannot be taken from you, not an obligation on someone else to provide something to you.
If your rights are an imposition on someone else you're doing it wrong.
This sounds like a nice theoretical distinction, but people in many countries consider health care, education and other basic "impositions on others" to be the rights of all individuals. I know where I'd prefer to live.
Vaccination is often all or nothing. Call it tyranny of the majority if you like-- most of us want to live. Deal with it.
Vaccination is NEVER "all or nothing".
If the vaccination works, you won't get sick, no matter what the rest of the world does. So why do you believe forcing it on everyone is a good idea?
You misunderstand vaccination's main benefit as protecting the vaccinated individual, when it is instead protecting those who would otherwise have been made sick by the now vaccinated individual. If most people get the appropriate vaccinations, all of society is better off, since even if non-vaccinated individuals get sick the illness will have a more difficult time propagating. In other words, vaccination as a society-wide strategy is only effective if a high-enough proportion of people get vaccinated. That's why, if we're vaccinating at all, it's fair enough to force it on everybody who would reasonably find it effective. If you want to be the exception, then you're putting not just yourself but also other people at risk.
This could be very interesting for computer vision researchers, who are already trying to automatically detect "suspicious behaviour". If they added a few more rewards, they could have many eyes, many competing algorithms, all automatically trying to detect crimes. Very interesting times...
Damn those Americans and their freedom! Let's get them. Seriously though, freedom is too abstract an idea to hate. I find this type of language somewhat confusing. If instead of "freedom" you used "western culture", "scientific enquiry", "christianity", "atheism" or "colonialism" I would understand. If instead of "hate", you said "envy", "feel threatened by", "can't understand", then I would get it. Maybe it's just me, but when you say someone hates freedom, I can't help but think that you're radically oversimplifying them.
The randomness of not getting to choose is probably a good thing for some choices. Think of cultures where one gender is preferred in children. You really don't want people to have a choice in such a matter, lest population-wide gender ratios get skewed. Eye and hair colour really doesn't matter at all in comparison, unless choosing these has far-reaching and poorly understood consequences into other aspects of the child's make-up. We could probably estimate these consequences by cataloguing people who already have these traits.
As someone who's been managing RSI for some time, and still needs to be careful to avoid overdoing it, I'd be very happy for a way to supplement keyboarding and mousing with even limited additional input methods, preferably methods which used a different paradigm altogether.
I've been checking out neural impulse actuators, like the one by OCZ, but it looks like they only provide 2-3 buttons, need recalibrating every time, and are only really supported for gaming. Does anyone know of similarly commercially available hardware? I'm aware of research systems which can control a mouse this way noninvasively, but surely it's time they came out of the labs.
I'm also curious about the long-term effects of devices which detect muscle action. People who migrate to voice recognition can damage their voice from the new strain. Would your face start creasing or cramping after a long time using a device which relies on facial muscles? It seems like some form of non-muscular neural interface is the way to go.
I've heard the expression "a poor craftsman blames his tools", and to some extent that's true. But let's not pretend that the tools have no effect on how we tackle problems. I'd prefer a language which restricted my thinking in beneficial ways to one which left me entirely my own devices.
Although they now do end-to-end speed checks over long distances, and fine you if your average speed between the two endpoints is above the legal threshold. Pretty hard to fake that.
I suppose you could still speed crazily until you almost reach the second checkpoint, rest up until your average speed has decreased, then speed crazily on your way again. Most rest time for you.
used to denote a paradoxical, unexpected, or coincidental situation
"Ironically, the rescue craft that saved her was the boat she was helping to pay for."
Seems like an unexpected coincidence to me that this depressive disorder should spell SAD.
My US geography is pretty shakey, but the reference to Hawaii makes me wonder if this is related to the relative amount of sunlight people get in different places. People who don't get enough can suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (ironically spelling SAD), which I understand is a kind of depression typically during winter months. Perhaps all year around the variation in sunlight between places, based on latitude and weather patterns, makes a difference...
Folks from the states, is this one possible interpretation of the data?
But, see, there's a big, big problem with the winning ad.
Unless you already know what Linux is, which many, many people do not, it is utterly meaningless.
Meaningless? How about mysterious. All it has to do is get attention. A short ad can't convince anyone to switch, but it can make them curious enough to find more information. I think this ad succeeds.
"OMG but you can apt-get stuff". Who gives a shit. pkg_add -r does basically the same thing anyway, and "cd/usr/ports/xxx/foobarport && make package" makes a lot more sense to me than the commands required on linux to build packages...
My experiences with FreeBSD give me the impression that apt is worlds ahead of pkg_add, in the same way that Gentoo's portange is worlds ahead of BSD ports, both in terms of robustness and usability.
Without knowing the details, I get the impression that both apt and portage both came later and benefited from starting from scratch, whereas the BSD experience is perhaps too difficult for maintainers to improve now.
This is actually a big deal; the main reason I choose one distro over another is package support.
Defense has additional and different concerns than other areas of government. They need to make sure that even if a war broke out with a country that you and I buy components from, the military can still source the components to build what they need. If that means keeping a less efficient industry in business in the States, consider it an expensive insurance policy.
It makes perfect sense, but it's also a bit funny when you consider that DOD itself is just an enormous insurance policy. Or at least, it should be...
I read the article, and the redacted transcript, and there's no sign of them issuing her with a detention, or a suspension. Besides which, when a child is suspended you call their parents and request for them to pick them up, not kick them off the grounds (duty of care).
In the end it's the parents you escalate to in a situation like this, not police. There's a whole process beyond that, including a school pscyh councilor, more suspension and then expulsion before you anything like this should happen.
In the ProCD v. Zeidenberg case, the court ruled in favor of the EULA, but said that the ability and opportunity to return goods was important under the Uniform Commercial Code used for the decision.
They'd be on much shakier ground if they didn't let you return the software. That said, you'd have to try to return the software and be denied refund, perhaps even by the software company themselves, before you'd have a case.
I completely agree with you on the EULA outside box idea.
Alright. South Korea and Japan already have average connections around 20 times faster than the U.S. or EU average (~100 Mbit/s versus ~5 Mbit/s). What new types of services have these superspeeds provided Korea and Japan which we Americans/Europeans do not have? If the answer is "nothing" then the upgrade is not necessary, because their superspeeds have not produced anything to justify the expense.
Good question. I tried to do some quick research just now. All I came up with was this interesting report on South Korea's development of broadband. Although investment in ICT had taken place for years, it looks like some crucial investment was designed to pull them out of the Asian financial crisis, and succeeded in doing so.
I've been guestimating that the growth due to this infrastructure is due to new services and opportunities. Perhaps the bulk of the benefit is more mundane than that. Google staffers say that the number of hits for the search site is directly and significantly affected by response time (including latency). Improve response times by a few ms on average, and hits go up. Could it be that removing a second or two of load time on every site that you visit, for the entire web-enabled population, actually makes everyone more productive?
I'm stabbing in the dark here, but I'm sure there are tangible economic benefits. I just have no idea how you would begin predicting them, which would seem to be an important precursor for investment in the infrastructure.
The $90 USB is probably less fault tolerant, needs to be actually carried around. No matter how much you might want to go with the USB drive, there's cases when you wouldn't, if you had the option.
I'm not advocating that everything needs to be on the cloud, but just saying let's not underestimate the types of services and business opportunities which would become feasible with those sort of connections. One result of such infrastructure could be yet a further reduction in the need to travel for work, which over a large population would have significant environmental benefits.
The proposed 1,000,000k per home connection is overkill, and just as silly as providing 1000 mph travel on roads.
Look at the size of the US. If you had cars that could cheaply and safely travel that fast, then roads which could take such cars would be very useful. It would usher in a new age of transport convenience and hyperconnectivity. You could go coast-to-coast in, say, two and a half hours.
Maybe there is a large range of government services which can be more efficiently provided over such connections. Maybe the newly available private business opportunities and subsequent growth fills everyone's coffers. Surely that's the argument.
Here's a simple immediate non-entertainment example right here. I could be using Amazon S3 as a time machine drive for backing up my Mac, but my connection doesn't cut it. This sort of connectivity would enable it, and all sorts of new possibilities.
I can see how the contoured keyboards would be comfortable for normal typing but I imagine they make it nearly impossible to type one handed. Which I often find myself doing when logging into websites or typing something brief while holding a phone (or sandwich) in the other hand.
Oh yeah, they are worse for one handed typing, which occasionally means I need to put my sandwich down;) They're a lot faster for two handed typing though, and the relative angles of the keys are slightly different so that the numbers are easier and less error-prone to type.
On the other hand, the f-keys and escape are smaller and harder to hit. Being a vim user, I've remapped escape to where the \ key normally is, which is also then much better than on a standard keyboard.
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers. And to have an ergonomic layout of the surrounding keys (cursor movement, backspace, etc.)...
Take a look at the contoured keyboards by Kinesis, which position all the useful keys around your thumbs, although shift is still in the same spot. I can very comfortably mash CTRL-ALT with one thumb (either) and press another key with my free hand. They're reprogrammable too.
That, or finally introduce foot pedals....
Same company makes foot pedals which integrate into the keyboard and are similarly programmable.
Slashdot Mirror
A right is something that cannot be taken from you, not an obligation on someone else to provide something to you.
If your rights are an imposition on someone else you're doing it wrong.
This sounds like a nice theoretical distinction, but people in many countries consider health care, education and other basic "impositions on others" to be the rights of all individuals. I know where I'd prefer to live.
Vaccination is NEVER "all or nothing".
If the vaccination works, you won't get sick, no matter what the rest of the world does. So why do you believe forcing it on everyone is a good idea?
You misunderstand vaccination's main benefit as protecting the vaccinated individual, when it is instead protecting those who would otherwise have been made sick by the now vaccinated individual. If most people get the appropriate vaccinations, all of society is better off, since even if non-vaccinated individuals get sick the illness will have a more difficult time propagating. In other words, vaccination as a society-wide strategy is only effective if a high-enough proportion of people get vaccinated. That's why, if we're vaccinating at all, it's fair enough to force it on everybody who would reasonably find it effective. If you want to be the exception, then you're putting not just yourself but also other people at risk.
This could be very interesting for computer vision researchers, who are already trying to automatically detect "suspicious behaviour". If they added a few more rewards, they could have many eyes, many competing algorithms, all automatically trying to detect crimes. Very interesting times...
They attacked us because they hate our freedom.
Damn those Americans and their freedom! Let's get them. Seriously though, freedom is too abstract an idea to hate. I find this type of language somewhat confusing. If instead of "freedom" you used "western culture", "scientific enquiry", "christianity", "atheism" or "colonialism" I would understand. If instead of "hate", you said "envy", "feel threatened by", "can't understand", then I would get it. Maybe it's just me, but when you say someone hates freedom, I can't help but think that you're radically oversimplifying them.
The randomness of not getting to choose is probably a good thing for some choices. Think of cultures where one gender is preferred in children. You really don't want people to have a choice in such a matter, lest population-wide gender ratios get skewed. Eye and hair colour really doesn't matter at all in comparison, unless choosing these has far-reaching and poorly understood consequences into other aspects of the child's make-up. We could probably estimate these consequences by cataloguing people who already have these traits.
As someone who's been managing RSI for some time, and still needs to be careful to avoid overdoing it, I'd be very happy for a way to supplement keyboarding and mousing with even limited additional input methods, preferably methods which used a different paradigm altogether.
I've been checking out neural impulse actuators, like the one by OCZ, but it looks like they only provide 2-3 buttons, need recalibrating every time, and are only really supported for gaming. Does anyone know of similarly commercially available hardware? I'm aware of research systems which can control a mouse this way noninvasively, but surely it's time they came out of the labs.
I'm also curious about the long-term effects of devices which detect muscle action. People who migrate to voice recognition can damage their voice from the new strain. Would your face start creasing or cramping after a long time using a device which relies on facial muscles? It seems like some form of non-muscular neural interface is the way to go.
I've heard the expression "a poor craftsman blames his tools", and to some extent that's true. But let's not pretend that the tools have no effect on how we tackle problems. I'd prefer a language which restricted my thinking in beneficial ways to one which left me entirely my own devices.
Although they now do end-to-end speed checks over long distances, and fine you if your average speed between the two endpoints is above the legal threshold. Pretty hard to fake that.
I suppose you could still speed crazily until you almost reach the second checkpoint, rest up until your average speed has decreased, then speed crazily on your way again. Most rest time for you.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (ironically spelling SAD)
I'm pretty sure the acronym was intentional...
Yeah, the right word was probably "appropriately".
My dictionary gives me:
ironically
adverb
Seems like an unexpected coincidence to me that this depressive disorder should spell SAD.
Got a better word to use in place? =)
My US geography is pretty shakey, but the reference to Hawaii makes me wonder if this is related to the relative amount of sunlight people get in different places. People who don't get enough can suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (ironically spelling SAD), which I understand is a kind of depression typically during winter months. Perhaps all year around the variation in sunlight between places, based on latitude and weather patterns, makes a difference...
Folks from the states, is this one possible interpretation of the data?
But, see, there's a big, big problem with the winning ad.
Unless you already know what Linux is, which many, many people do not, it is utterly meaningless.
Meaningless? How about mysterious. All it has to do is get attention. A short ad can't convince anyone to switch, but it can make them curious enough to find more information. I think this ad succeeds.
"OMG but you can apt-get stuff". Who gives a shit. pkg_add -r does basically the same thing anyway, and "cd /usr/ports/xxx/foobarport && make package" makes a lot more sense to me than the commands required on linux to build packages...
My experiences with FreeBSD give me the impression that apt is worlds ahead of pkg_add, in the same way that Gentoo's portange is worlds ahead of BSD ports, both in terms of robustness and usability.
Without knowing the details, I get the impression that both apt and portage both came later and benefited from starting from scratch, whereas the BSD experience is perhaps too difficult for maintainers to improve now.
This is actually a big deal; the main reason I choose one distro over another is package support.
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
Sounds a bit like Haskell =)
Defense has additional and different concerns than other areas of government. They need to make sure that even if a war broke out with a country that you and I buy components from, the military can still source the components to build what they need. If that means keeping a less efficient industry in business in the States, consider it an expensive insurance policy.
It makes perfect sense, but it's also a bit funny when you consider that DOD itself is just an enormous insurance policy. Or at least, it should be...
I read the article, and the redacted transcript, and there's no sign of them issuing her with a detention, or a suspension. Besides which, when a child is suspended you call their parents and request for them to pick them up, not kick them off the grounds (duty of care).
In the end it's the parents you escalate to in a situation like this, not police. There's a whole process beyond that, including a school pscyh councilor, more suspension and then expulsion before you anything like this should happen.
In the ProCD v. Zeidenberg case, the court ruled in favor of the EULA, but said that the ability and opportunity to return goods was important under the Uniform Commercial Code used for the decision.
They'd be on much shakier ground if they didn't let you return the software. That said, you'd have to try to return the software and be denied refund, perhaps even by the software company themselves, before you'd have a case.
I completely agree with you on the EULA outside box idea.
Even the extrapolation fails. The limit from one side appears to be +infinity, from the other side -infinity, so the limit itself doesn't exist.
>
Alright. South Korea and Japan already have average connections around 20 times faster than the U.S. or EU average (~100 Mbit/s versus ~5 Mbit/s). What new types of services have these superspeeds provided Korea and Japan which we Americans/Europeans do not have? If the answer is "nothing" then the upgrade is not necessary, because their superspeeds have not produced anything to justify the expense.
Good question. I tried to do some quick research just now. All I came up with was this interesting report on South Korea's development of broadband. Although investment in ICT had taken place for years, it looks like some crucial investment was designed to pull them out of the Asian financial crisis, and succeeded in doing so.
I've been guestimating that the growth due to this infrastructure is due to new services and opportunities. Perhaps the bulk of the benefit is more mundane than that. Google staffers say that the number of hits for the search site is directly and significantly affected by response time (including latency). Improve response times by a few ms on average, and hits go up. Could it be that removing a second or two of load time on every site that you visit, for the entire web-enabled population, actually makes everyone more productive?
I'm stabbing in the dark here, but I'm sure there are tangible economic benefits. I just have no idea how you would begin predicting them, which would seem to be an important precursor for investment in the infrastructure.
The $90 USB is probably less fault tolerant, needs to be actually carried around. No matter how much you might want to go with the USB drive, there's cases when you wouldn't, if you had the option.
I'm not advocating that everything needs to be on the cloud, but just saying let's not underestimate the types of services and business opportunities which would become feasible with those sort of connections. One result of such infrastructure could be yet a further reduction in the need to travel for work, which over a large population would have significant environmental benefits.
The proposed 1,000,000k per home connection is overkill, and just as silly as providing 1000 mph travel on roads.
Look at the size of the US. If you had cars that could cheaply and safely travel that fast, then roads which could take such cars would be very useful. It would usher in a new age of transport convenience and hyperconnectivity. You could go coast-to-coast in, say, two and a half hours.
Maybe there is a large range of government services which can be more efficiently provided over such connections. Maybe the newly available private business opportunities and subsequent growth fills everyone's coffers. Surely that's the argument.
Here's a simple immediate non-entertainment example right here. I could be using Amazon S3 as a time machine drive for backing up my Mac, but my connection doesn't cut it. This sort of connectivity would enable it, and all sorts of new possibilities.
...as measured by lines of code
(ducks)
I can see how the contoured keyboards would be comfortable for normal typing but I imagine they make it nearly impossible to type one handed. Which I often find myself doing when logging into websites or typing something brief while holding a phone (or sandwich) in the other hand.
Oh yeah, they are worse for one handed typing, which occasionally means I need to put my sandwich down ;) They're a lot faster for two handed typing though, and the relative angles of the keys are slightly different so that the numbers are easier and less error-prone to type.
On the other hand, the f-keys and escape are smaller and harder to hit. Being a vim user, I've remapped escape to where the \ key normally is, which is also then much better than on a standard keyboard.
I'll take C++ over Java any day when it comes to avoiding verbosity. I do miss garbage collection though.
Really? Interesting. Is this because of lack of first class functions? (The whole Kingdom of Nouns thing?)
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers. And to have an ergonomic layout of the surrounding keys (cursor movement, backspace, etc.)...
Take a look at the contoured keyboards by Kinesis, which position all the useful keys around your thumbs, although shift is still in the same spot. I can very comfortably mash CTRL-ALT with one thumb (either) and press another key with my free hand. They're reprogrammable too.
That, or finally introduce foot pedals....
Same company makes foot pedals which integrate into the keyboard and are similarly programmable.