Paranoid? I grew up in a communist state. I hate to think I've escaped to one, too....
Not communist dude, fascist. There's a difference, right? Wait a minute, whose in charge of government and whose in charge of commerce again? I guess as long as there the same people its just semantics.
Back to the topic at hand though, the point isn't to build any cases, i seriously doubt they would have trouble legally getting email in a real case where it would be warrented. The point is to build a culture of fear, where every citizen is a criminal.
I wonder how this model can compensate for cultural differences. I was recently in China, where outside of major cities (Shanghai, Beijing) closer to the country (even in very large cities) there is no concept of waiting in line. It takes some getting used to, even after a month of acclimatizing I couldn't help but try to form a line, like i'm the one westerner who's going to show the 4 million people of Wuxi China how to wait in a line. How would crowds with that sort of cultural leaning move vs. say a very polite crowd where everyone tries to let other people go in front? How might these factors get paramaterized?
On another note the mall designed to get people to shop to death is about the scariest thing Ive ever heard of. After hearing of that I'm pretty sure this will end up being used for evil.
It's no wonder that creationists lash back with ill-conceived regulations prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution - this is really just balance when you look at how much flack the "intelligent design" group has been getting recently.
Science shouldn't worry so damn much about what people think, it should be about the truth, finding it and offering it, not making people believe it. Same goes for religion. The rest is just name calling and childishness. 1) The ID group deserves all of the flack it gets. It has no scientific basis. You can neither prove nor disprove what they say, it isn't science. 2)Science isn't about finding absolute truth and making people believe it, that would probably be closer religion's job. Science is about describing the world around us. Evolution offers us a much deeper understanding of biology in a way which some open minded investigation may just lead you to change your position.
I've never really seen evolution demonstrated. I encourage you to do a little research on antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Microevolution, along with genuine changes in the genetic code of bacteria has been directly observed. This is easily explainable in the scientific construct of evolutionary biology (with the antibiotic acting as a selective pressure, causing any bacteria with some resistance to have more reproductive success, eventually causing the new trait to spread through the population). However, when ID is invoked to describe this phenomenon, one imposes the additional requirement of an omnipresent force imposing will upon the bacteria to change their presumably designed genetic code. As this force is not necessary, nor a particularly useful scientific construct, it should not be taught in science classes. While I think it is just fantastic that you have the beliefs that you have, and you certainly have every right to believe in this sort of "absolute relativism" in which can put two contradictory ideas up, and say they are equally correct because ultimately all human knowledge is accrued through direct experience, and no human had direct experience of the creation of life on our planet, ultimately this view is probably not a good starting point for how we should educate the children of our country.
Can Floridian school boards really claim to not understand why 40% of their 8th grade students lack even just a "basic" understanding of science?Or why they can't retain/get enough qualified science teachers? They know science education is important, they know that without it, the won't be competitive in the global economy. With evolution framing all of our knowledge of biology, do you really expect these kids to be taken seriously when they enter the job market? How the hell are they going to get through an evolutionary biology class in college if they are taught to believe the mumbo jumbo ID BS? On a related topic, does anyone have any thoughts on how the US in general can start to retain more of the science talent that we have? Any thoughts from those of you in other countries as to how you retain teachers? As much as I would like to say the problem is just located on America's Wang, its not, we have a science education brain drain all over this country. There isn't nearly enough emphasis on science/engineering throughout our school system, and adding to the problem, we wont give work visas to the foreign students who get graduate degrees here. We know the whole US cant just switch to a service economy with everyone ironing each others shirts for money, we have to drive/design new tech to maintain our leadership. How can we reverse this trend?
So I believe its fairly clear at this point that there is a general distrust of voting machines in the US. Its also become fairly clear that it would be relatively simple to rig an election where a voter verifiable paper trail isn't present. While I in no way condone the rigging of an election, I think a good solution to this problem would be to rig an election in a way which would make it obvious that there was a problem. I.E. everyone using a diebold machine wrote in candidate Cowboy Neal for president. The problem is, that most people with the technical expertise, and the motive to rig an election would do so in a way which would make it extremely difficult to track (and probably walk away with a good chunk of change for their effort). Since its virtually impossible to discredit an election where its "pretty close" the only way to show the errors in the system is to exploit them such that it is obvious to the public that they have been hosed. By the way I live in Colorado, where several voting machines have recently been decertified by our Secretary of State. Interestingly, it wasn't just one manufacturer (in fact only one manufacturer had all their machines successfully recertified), nor one type of machine (both the machines you can vote on, and scantron type vote counters were decertified). Perhaps other states would be well suited to follow?
My beverage is not a national security threat. But thats just what the terrorist want you to think.... as soon as you are let through with your diet squirt or double half caf mocha your going to use the lid as a shield whilst dousing the crew with your beverage, causing them to become sticky! Then, as they search desperately for a wetnap to clean up... you'll use the cup/bottle to store some sort of fluid! As the passengers become enraged as the crew is busy cleaning your sticky beverage up instead of passing out peanuts, they will surely riot. In the ensuing crazyness, you will be free to enjoy the fluid you have since put in your bottle, which is clearly a crime against humanity.
That or the Starbucks on the other side of the security check told TSA that they should make everyone throw their drinks away so they will be forced to buy a new one once through security... nah, its definitely the first one.
I work in the hard drive industry and end up traveling to China quite a bit. We have to take our gear (laptop, scope, everything down to pens and pencils and paper). While customs is a pain in the ass (it took me 6 months to get my scope back), its much less expensive than dropping 80 G's to buy a new scope + laptop for me while I'm there. Luckily, there is a really simple way to avoid any issues with giving up sensitive data, leave it all on the company intranet, while the customs officials/border folks might have a legitimate interest in seeing whats on my hard drive, they certainly have no business making me SSL into a private network.
Backwards indeed. The source of the problem is over-exposure to common antibiotics. Instead of looking at everyone who enters a hospital as a potential harbinger of antibiotic resistant bugs, its much much easier to simply reduce the number of people who are exposed to the antibiotics these bugs have become resistant to in the first place. Without selection pressure due to the presence of these antibiotics, the problem naturally goes away. Additionally, it is much cheaper to not prescribe antibiotics as often.
I don't care if Nicole Ritchie had a loose bowel movement today. I had Nicole Ritchie IN a loose bowel movement today you insensitive clod! Which raises the question, what the hell happened new years eve?
This isn't even true! I knew before the war, for example, that it was all premised on bullshit, maybe because I had an Internet connection? I forget how I knew; I just remember knowing a long time. I knew for at least a year beforehand. What am I, Nostradamus?
Interesting, I recall a very similar feeling leading up to the war. I recall something along the lines of... how is it that everyone appears to be scared shitless of a 3rd world country whose infrastructure was still mostly in shambles due to a war more than 10 years ago. And there aren't that many of them only ~ 30 million people? Additionally, the UN Weapons inspectors were pretty firm that there was almost zero chance that any of the fiction we were fed from these "intelligence sources" was true. I recall thinking - "Hey wait, were the fucking US. There is zero chance of any country really engaging in direct military confrontation with us. Why should we be scared?" Then I recall thinking - "Extended presence in the middle east probably isn't a good idea. It didn't work to well for the Brits when they tried with Iraq, why would anyone think that this time it's going to be roses and candy?" Am I the only one who got the distinct impression that most of the coverage leading up to the war was meant to keep us from thinking, and not to actively engage us in the discussion of just what we were about to send our young men and women to die for?
Anyone know what sort of incentive system M$ offers for employees to get patents? What sort of limitations there are (i.e. does it have to be a patent that has merit)? If i had to venture a guess, I would say that M$ employees probably get slightly better incentives than IBM (runner up) or at least a little more time to work on them. I can't back that up at all, can anyone else?
but their term papers were only marginally better. Whats worse, Gunther failed his exam, only turning in a piece of paper smeared with feces. He tied with Fry.
Then again I'm one of those people who only accepts invitations from people I know in the flesh Did you mean that in the biblical sense? No wonder I have been rejected so much! (maybe thats cause i'm always on/. instead of out trying to get some Don't be a fool, wrap your tool!
While I like your idea, and certainly think that such an effort would prove at least sort of fruitful, there are issues in Iraq which cannot be solved with a laptop. For instance, infrastructure. Iraq barely had a functional infrastructure when we invaded (something we knew, but chose to ignore, because its a lot easier to start a war when you don't have to think about what you are getting into), the ensuing chaos and destruction inherent to war devastated what was already there. We are left with the cause of rebuilding the bulk of the country from scratch. Health care, power grids, military, social safety nets etc. Unfortunately for the Iraqi civilians, the U.S. doesn't care for the pottery barn rule, and we will probably just leave Iraq a broken nation-state rife with Islamo-fascists and terrorists to breed the next generation of suicide bombers. Now, if we left a broken nation-state with Laptops.... at least they could blog about how broken we left their country.
While you do make a couple valid points, I'm not going to take anything seriously in an article which states
The findings hardly jive with the popular image of the atom as evil incarnate. There is clearly a significant bias here (just as there is an opposite bias in Greenpeace publications). Most people are intelligent enough to understand the issue from both sides, the atom isn't evil, but switching to nuclear isn't a particularly viable option either (public concern about it is only part of the problem here). And as for
nuclear waste being impossible to deal with If you have any real good ideas I'm sure everyone would be very happy to hear them. Keeping in mind that it probably isn't a good idea to dispose of it in a way where it could leach into groundwater, and we should probably try to keep it away people for as long as its reasonable to believe humans are going to be around (which is apparently ~ 10K more years if you buy the US Government's standard for nuclear waste disposal). On a different note entirely, their conclusion isn't terribly surprising as the article focused on the effects of prolonged exposure in adults, and children are much more likely to bear the brunt of the assault from prolonged exposure to radiation.
These sorts of "Genetic" algorithm creating programs have been used previously. I have no link, but i do recall a guy writing one such program (i believe the intent was to create a checkers playing program) which would randomly 'inherit' traits from previous generations of the program, then the population of programs competes (by playing checkers), winners live, losers die, and the winners go on to 'breed' (in the way that the next generation will 'inherit' some of the traits of the winners. After thousands of generations i believe he actually succeeded in getting a pretty good program.
This is indeed an interesting ruling. I don't think seagate is going to see any measurable fallout from this as i don't see many people backing up everything on their hard drive, pulling it out, sending it in for a refund, waiting for a check, then going out to buy a replacement labled 1 GiB instead of 1GB. Perhaps its indicative of our society when you can litigate something like (2^3) * 10 ^9 (8000000000 bits) != (2^3)(2^30) (8589934592 bits). Hey, maybe they'll just start putting the specs in engineering notation. There could be little room for litigation there.
Have you considered the possibility that there isn't an organized conspiracy, but instead perhaps it is merely that our little/. community has a bias, just as many other communities do? Perhaps thats what he was trying to get at. Rather than accept that any group is going to have a bais, and slashdot, having a disproportionate number of college graduates, Techies, and the like is not representative of the overall population you choose to believe that there is a mysterious conspiracy out to get you and suppress your opinions. I'm gonna have to go with "you are a nutter". Additionally:
You seem to distract from the important issues quite well. BTW, I think I heard your mom calling you. I hope in time you come to discover what an ass you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Not communist dude, fascist. There's a difference, right? Wait a minute, whose in charge of government and whose in charge of commerce again? I guess as long as there the same people its just semantics.
Back to the topic at hand though, the point isn't to build any cases, i seriously doubt they would have trouble legally getting email in a real case where it would be warrented. The point is to build a culture of fear, where every citizen is a criminal.
I wonder how this model can compensate for cultural differences. I was recently in China, where outside of major cities (Shanghai, Beijing) closer to the country (even in very large cities) there is no concept of waiting in line. It takes some getting used to, even after a month of acclimatizing I couldn't help but try to form a line, like i'm the one westerner who's going to show the 4 million people of Wuxi China how to wait in a line. How would crowds with that sort of cultural leaning move vs. say a very polite crowd where everyone tries to let other people go in front? How might these factors get paramaterized?
On another note the mall designed to get people to shop to death is about the scariest thing Ive ever heard of. After hearing of that I'm pretty sure this will end up being used for evil.
1) The ID group deserves all of the flack it gets. It has no scientific basis. You can neither prove nor disprove what they say, it isn't science.
2)Science isn't about finding absolute truth and making people believe it, that would probably be closer religion's job. Science is about describing the world around us. Evolution offers us a much deeper understanding of biology in a way which some open minded investigation may just lead you to change your position.
I've never really seen evolution demonstrated.
I encourage you to do a little research on antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Microevolution, along with genuine changes in the genetic code of bacteria has been directly observed. This is easily explainable in the scientific construct of evolutionary biology (with the antibiotic acting as a selective pressure, causing any bacteria with some resistance to have more reproductive success, eventually causing the new trait to spread through the population). However, when ID is invoked to describe this phenomenon, one imposes the additional requirement of an omnipresent force imposing will upon the bacteria to change their presumably designed genetic code. As this force is not necessary, nor a particularly useful scientific construct, it should not be taught in science classes. While I think it is just fantastic that you have the beliefs that you have, and you certainly have every right to believe in this sort of "absolute relativism" in which can put two contradictory ideas up, and say they are equally correct because ultimately all human knowledge is accrued through direct experience, and no human had direct experience of the creation of life on our planet, ultimately this view is probably not a good starting point for how we should educate the children of our country.
Can Floridian school boards really claim to not understand why 40% of their 8th grade students lack even just a "basic" understanding of science? Or why they can't retain/get enough qualified science teachers?
They know science education is important, they know that without it, the won't be competitive in the global economy. With evolution framing all of our knowledge of biology, do you really expect these kids to be taken seriously when they enter the job market? How the hell are they going to get through an evolutionary biology class in college if they are taught to believe the mumbo jumbo ID BS?
On a related topic, does anyone have any thoughts on how the US in general can start to retain more of the science talent that we have? Any thoughts from those of you in other countries as to how you retain teachers?
As much as I would like to say the problem is just located on America's Wang, its not, we have a science education brain drain all over this country. There isn't nearly enough emphasis on science/engineering throughout our school system, and adding to the problem, we wont give work visas to the foreign students who get graduate degrees here.
We know the whole US cant just switch to a service economy with everyone ironing each others shirts for money, we have to drive/design new tech to maintain our leadership.
How can we reverse this trend?
So I believe its fairly clear at this point that there is a general distrust of voting machines in the US. Its also become fairly clear that it would be relatively simple to rig an election where a voter verifiable paper trail isn't present.
While I in no way condone the rigging of an election, I think a good solution to this problem would be to rig an election in a way which would make it obvious that there was a problem. I.E. everyone using a diebold machine wrote in candidate Cowboy Neal for president. The problem is, that most people with the technical expertise, and the motive to rig an election would do so in a way which would make it extremely difficult to track (and probably walk away with a good chunk of change for their effort). Since its virtually impossible to discredit an election where its "pretty close" the only way to show the errors in the system is to exploit them such that it is obvious to the public that they have been hosed.
By the way I live in Colorado, where several voting machines have recently been decertified by our Secretary of State. Interestingly, it wasn't just one manufacturer (in fact only one manufacturer had all their machines successfully recertified), nor one type of machine (both the machines you can vote on, and scantron type vote counters were decertified).
Perhaps other states would be well suited to follow?
But thats just what the terrorist want you to think.... as soon as you are let through with your diet squirt or double half caf mocha your going to use the lid as a shield whilst dousing the crew with your beverage, causing them to become sticky! Then, as they search desperately for a wetnap to clean up... you'll use the cup/bottle to store some sort of fluid! As the passengers become enraged as the crew is busy cleaning your sticky beverage up instead of passing out peanuts, they will surely riot. In the ensuing crazyness, you will be free to enjoy the fluid you have since put in your bottle, which is clearly a crime against humanity.
That or the Starbucks on the other side of the security check told TSA that they should make everyone throw their drinks away so they will be forced to buy a new one once through security... nah, its definitely the first one.
you think anyone at TSA bought some starbucks stock just before the ban on liquids? Wouldn't have been a bad idea at all
I work in the hard drive industry and end up traveling to China quite a bit. We have to take our gear (laptop, scope, everything down to pens and pencils and paper). While customs is a pain in the ass (it took me 6 months to get my scope back), its much less expensive than dropping 80 G's to buy a new scope + laptop for me while I'm there. Luckily, there is a really simple way to avoid any issues with giving up sensitive data, leave it all on the company intranet, while the customs officials/border folks might have a legitimate interest in seeing whats on my hard drive, they certainly have no business making me SSL into a private network.
Backwards indeed. The source of the problem is over-exposure to common antibiotics. Instead of looking at everyone who enters a hospital as a potential harbinger of antibiotic resistant bugs, its much much easier to simply reduce the number of people who are exposed to the antibiotics these bugs have become resistant to in the first place. Without selection pressure due to the presence of these antibiotics, the problem naturally goes away.
Additionally, it is much cheaper to not prescribe antibiotics as often.
I had Nicole Ritchie IN a loose bowel movement today you insensitive clod!
Which raises the question, what the hell happened new years eve?
I feel I need to point out the juxtiposition of your comment and your signature, though somehow I know it is lost.... Oh well.
Interesting, I recall a very similar feeling leading up to the war. I recall something along the lines of... how is it that everyone appears to be scared shitless of a 3rd world country whose infrastructure was still mostly in shambles due to a war more than 10 years ago. And there aren't that many of them only ~ 30 million people? Additionally, the UN Weapons inspectors were pretty firm that there was almost zero chance that any of the fiction we were fed from these "intelligence sources" was true. I recall thinking - "Hey wait, were the fucking US. There is zero chance of any country really engaging in direct military confrontation with us. Why should we be scared?" Then I recall thinking - "Extended presence in the middle east probably isn't a good idea. It didn't work to well for the Brits when they tried with Iraq, why would anyone think that this time it's going to be roses and candy?"
Am I the only one who got the distinct impression that most of the coverage leading up to the war was meant to keep us from thinking, and not to actively engage us in the discussion of just what we were about to send our young men and women to die for?
Anyone know what sort of incentive system M$ offers for employees to get patents? What sort of limitations there are (i.e. does it have to be a patent that has merit)?
If i had to venture a guess, I would say that M$ employees probably get slightly better incentives than IBM (runner up) or at least a little more time to work on them. I can't back that up at all, can anyone else?
Nobody could get the freaking game to run w/o new graphics cards and an extra couple gigs of RAM, were all hoping to get these for Christmas.
I think you are referring to the hit series "Just the tip baby, please?". The home version is great if i may be so bold as to recommend it.
Namely, sloppy drunk in front of a crowd of Japanese businessmen at 3 AM.
Whats worse, Gunther failed his exam, only turning in a piece of paper smeared with feces. He tied with Fry.
Did you mean that in the biblical sense?
No wonder I have been rejected so much! (maybe thats cause i'm always on
Don't be a fool, wrap your tool!
While I like your idea, and certainly think that such an effort would prove at least sort of fruitful, there are issues in Iraq which cannot be solved with a laptop. For instance, infrastructure. Iraq barely had a functional infrastructure when we invaded (something we knew, but chose to ignore, because its a lot easier to start a war when you don't have to think about what you are getting into), the ensuing chaos and destruction inherent to war devastated what was already there. We are left with the cause of rebuilding the bulk of the country from scratch. Health care, power grids, military, social safety nets etc. Unfortunately for the Iraqi civilians, the U.S. doesn't care for the pottery barn rule, and we will probably just leave Iraq a broken nation-state rife with Islamo-fascists and terrorists to breed the next generation of suicide bombers.
Now, if we left a broken nation-state with Laptops.... at least they could blog about how broken we left their country.
The findings hardly jive with the popular image of the atom as evil incarnate.
There is clearly a significant bias here (just as there is an opposite bias in Greenpeace publications). Most people are intelligent enough to understand the issue from both sides, the atom isn't evil, but switching to nuclear isn't a particularly viable option either (public concern about it is only part of the problem here). And as for
nuclear waste being impossible to deal with
If you have any real good ideas I'm sure everyone would be very happy to hear them. Keeping in mind that it probably isn't a good idea to dispose of it in a way where it could leach into groundwater, and we should probably try to keep it away people for as long as its reasonable to believe humans are going to be around (which is apparently ~ 10K more years if you buy the US Government's standard for nuclear waste disposal).
On a different note entirely, their conclusion isn't terribly surprising as the article focused on the effects of prolonged exposure in adults, and children are much more likely to bear the brunt of the assault from prolonged exposure to radiation.
These sorts of "Genetic" algorithm creating programs have been used previously. I have no link, but i do recall a guy writing one such program (i believe the intent was to create a checkers playing program) which would randomly 'inherit' traits from previous generations of the program, then the population of programs competes (by playing checkers), winners live, losers die, and the winners go on to 'breed' (in the way that the next generation will 'inherit' some of the traits of the winners. After thousands of generations i believe he actually succeeded in getting a pretty good program.
Screw it, I'm gonna have my own hashing algorithm competition, with strippers, and booze. Ah, forget the competition.
This is indeed an interesting ruling.
I don't think seagate is going to see any measurable fallout from this as i don't see many people backing up everything on their hard drive, pulling it out, sending it in for a refund, waiting for a check, then going out to buy a replacement labled 1 GiB instead of 1GB.
Perhaps its indicative of our society when you can litigate something like (2^3) * 10 ^9 (8000000000 bits) != (2^3)(2^30) (8589934592 bits).
Hey, maybe they'll just start putting the specs in engineering notation. There could be little room for litigation there.
Perhaps thats what he was trying to get at. Rather than accept that any group is going to have a bais, and slashdot, having a disproportionate number of college graduates, Techies, and the like is not representative of the overall population you choose to believe that there is a mysterious conspiracy out to get you and suppress your opinions. I'm gonna have to go with "you are a nutter".
Additionally: You seem to distract from the important issues quite well. BTW, I think I heard your mom calling you.
I hope in time you come to discover what an ass you are.
Indeed, but its a lot smaller than the empty half of the universe.
I'm not modding you anything until i'm sure your right... See you in 2012!