90% of shots fired in gun fights miss, even when the shooter is a cop, and even when they aren't supposed to miss.
These are guys who are trained, have to qualify at various distances at a pistol range, etc.
But it turns out that putting your shots on target when - the lighting/visibility is poor - the target is trying not to get shot - you aren't under ideal cover - you may be shooting off-handed or without proper time to posture/setup the shots - you weren't expecting to shoot anyone today and now you're in a firefight - THEY ARE SHOOTING BACK [!!]... is really difficult in real life.
So I'm not defending variable-grade shooting in the movie, but in the real world, _good_ marksmen who train constantly often do not make good shots in the heat of the moment.
if the work came out of MSR, they have a very high degree of platform & technology autonomy.
MSR is basically academia, without classroom requirements. There are some product unit partnership projects where obviously a focus on shipping/evolutionary MS platforms or technologies make sense for the problem domain, but more abstract problems are often solved entirely with non-MS tools.
I use a prepaid cell phone. I bought the SIM and the phone off ebay. The number isn't even in my local area code, and as far as I know, "my" cell operator has no idea who I am.
This also is extremely cheap if you are an infrequent cell user and don't require a data plan.
My household has largely reverted back to cash-only for our commerce. It is easier to stick to a reasonable budget, the terms of a cash transaction are perfectly clear -- there are no double-jeopardy fee problems ["they stopped the check, then you were overdrawn. You lose"], and with the recent tightening on credit card companies, some of those companies are going to go after customers like me -- who _never_ carried a balance -- with annual fees or shorter repayment periods or day-0 interest assessment or other silly tricks. Not interested.
But the #1 reason to revert to cash is that it is relatively anonymous -- or rather, it is moreso than any other face to face currency exchange we can easily perform. I think it will become increasingly important that Americans can conduct basic commerce in a way that is difficult to tie back to individuals. The cost to gather, store, and analyze data will approach zero, as will the public's ability to prevent the government from doing so and doing so for questionable reasons. Thus, not contributing data is the most workable mitigation.
Seems like the face of evil ought to look like a distorted reflection of the observer, thus different for every observer.
And the definition of Evil is somewhat vague. The example given [about giving the boy a gun] seems quite simplistic. Is that _pure_ evil? Was there no virtue or motivation for doing it that didn't have some positive benefit? And was there truly no _more_ evil way of acting in that scenario? Why didn't the AI shoot the boy, then cut the boys face of and sew it onto his own head, then shoot the boys family, so that his parents died thinking they had been killed by their own child? Or why not manipulate all the family members into shooting each other under false assumptions, only to later realize the folly of their actions? Would that not be more evil still?
It is said that the opposite of love is indifference, whereas most people assume it is hatred. But to hate it is often to know, and know passionately. Where one man sees hate, another can see passion, and defensible outrage, and a moral course of action. Christians learn that God hates sin, God hates divorce; Jesus got angry and ransacked the temple. The roots of the western judeo-christian world are described as able to become angry and to act with violent passion.
But what about an indifferent evil?
What about an entity that simply executes people at random. Suppose that you had a list of all the people on earth, and you chose one at random and erased them, once per second. No malice, no interaction, no judgement, no execution any more righteous or less righteous than any other. Is this less evil than a crime of passion, revenge, or justice for some perceived wrong? What would the effect be on the populace? If there is any algorithm at all for behavior, someone will find that it is basically just, basically moral, or otherwise commendable.
Come to think of it, some might find the "kill any person at random" method the most justifiable, if one presumes that the earth is overpopulated and population decrease must occur, and that the algorithm for accomplishing this is uncontemplatable for a man, the machine-at-random approach might be the only "just" one.
Monopoly and collusion do not exist apart from where government enables either. I'd be happy to start a wireless provider tomorrow except that I am legally disallowed from doing so. Google tried to buy some wireless spectrum and not even they pulled it off.
That said, i've been very happy with my low-priced low-use cell phones. I use T-mobile 2 go, i put $100 on the account, and then my minutes last for a year. If i add another $10 at the endof the year, i retain any unused minutes.
You can say that in the zero-use case, phone service costs $8.95/mo and then 0.89/mo for subsequent years.
In my actual usage, I beleive I spend somewhat more than $10 and somewhat less than $100 per year. I have budgeted it at $20/mo for the two cell-phones in my family and simply bank that money until we need to refill either of the phones.
My phones were chosen solely based on what i wanted out of a handset and have nothing to do with what Tmobile sells or supports. Unlocked GSM ftw.
Apple is already happy to deny warranties based on any circumstancial evidence.
They denied a warranty claim on my wife's iBook when its hard drive got click-of-death and simply gave up. They claimed that we had spilled coffee into the laptop, and attemped to document this via "brown dots" on the metal shield on the bottom of the laptop's inner-metal liner [i.e. the exterior side, not the logic board side].
I asked them how they figured one could spill coffee against the forces of gravity from the bottom up into a laptop, and furthermore how this would prevent a hard drive from spinning up properly.
The apple store employee was livid that I would dare to question his judgement, but no matter how I pressed the issue, he simply responded with "our warranty doesn't cover your mistakes.". Never mind that hard drives are a known failure item on computers; it just happens sometimes and you get a replacement and life goes on. Not so with apple.
The actual convesration was considerably more demeaning towards me. I was reasonably tempted to commit physical assault against the guy, and it was only the fact that the conversation transpired over a phone that probably kept me out of jail.
OSX is clearly stamped down the side "Desert Eagle point five oh"
That's certainly an apt comparison, since most people that have or want DE50's think they look cool and work really awesome, but have no fucking idea what they're doing when using a gun. They feel this strange sense of smugness about the elite status their choice in firearm has afforded them, perhaps not having any idea that a boring old Casull 454 has more muzzle energy, or that the DE50 is utterly impractical for essentially any worhtwhile endeavour. They know that they spent way more money than other guns cost, but they don't realize that there's always something cheaper that does a better job.
Yet nothing else seems to have caught and held the affection of hollywood so effectively, so nothing else will suffice for the discriminating individuals that know nothing about firearms or marksmanship --- except that they are better than everyone else at both by virtue of their wise purchase.
I'm not sure you had any idea how good of an analogy you were making. Bravo!:)
But IMO, Buzz Aldrin (iirc) has the right point of view: from Kittyhawk to Apollo 11 was 66 years. It is an embarassment that we may not be able to put boots on Mars by 2035 --- which would be 66 years after Apollo 11. Human Flight -> Man on Moon shouldn't take less time than Moon->Mars.
If you want to argue that science doesn't concern itself with putting boots on Mars, fine, lots stop funding space science and get back to funding space engineering.
Any human being can understand these words: "the human race has set foot on a different planet". I look forward to the changes that will take longer to understand: what it will mean to the world pscyhe to know that we have demonstrated the possibility of escape, to know that there is a new world to explore, a new adventure to be had, etc. The re-colonization of the Americas by europeans co-incided with the beginning of the greatest leaps forward in technology, prosperity, and freedom (as long as you weren't brown at the time...) in world history. I am looking forward to seeing what shape the "discovery" of Mars will have on all of us.
Short of discovering God or alien life, no unmanned mission will ever get every single human being around the world simultaneously watching their TVs. That's the power of putting boots on Mars. There will be plenty of hard science and engineering to get us there. But having a single goal that any idiot can understand in just 1 statement: that's powerful, and it's worth working towards.
Step 1: find a peice of F/OSS software that you are interested in, use, or would like to use Step 2: use it to do real work Step 3: notice something in the product that appears to be a bug or a limitation related to your real-world use or desired real-world use Step 4: grab the code and start looking through it. Determine where in the code the problem seems to exist. If this is a segfault or something, fire up GDB, get a stack trace, grab the correct variable state to show the data conditions leading to the problem Step 5: construct a repro case for the bug that shows it is a problem with the code and makes the problem portable out of your environment into the maintainers environment
At this point, you can contact the maintainers of the project if you want to. They'll appreciate the detailed research you've done and usually it won't take them long to come up with a good fix.
Or, you could keep going
Step 6: construct a hypothesis about what the problem is. If you have a repro-scenario and know where in the code the problem is surfacing, work backwards to understand the data and instruction flow that gets you from reading the repro state to the code blowing up. Based on your understanding, form a hypothesis as to what the specific defect is.
Step 7: begin working on a local fix (i.e. don't do a world-visible checkout to a version control repository) to the problem. Continue iterating on your fix until the repro-case you identified earlier appears to have been repaired. Now test the program on cases that used to work prior to your fix to do some sanity checking that you've not introduced regressions.
Step 8: once you have a fix that appears to work, check your fix against any coding styles or other conventions that appear to be in use in the project. You may want to look at past respository commits and comments in the file(s) you've worked into infer as much as possible about this.
Step 9: wrap it all up. Compose an email describing the problem, the repro case, your understanding of the the solution, your patch, and the tests you did on the patch. Email the maintainers of the project and ask them if your problem and solution make sense.
Step 10: based on what the maintainers say, your work may be done or you may need to iterate on your patch to improve its quality or conformance to the projects expectations. Your goal is to get a developer to accept any part of your work -- ideally, they'd commit your patch as-is, but if nothing else, the investigation you've done thus far will be helpful to them if they want to do a "better" fix in the future. And the tests/repros you've documented will be helpful for you (and them) to try when evaluating future fixes.
This is the easiest way to get your feet wet in _any_ F/OSS project. I've contributed small fixes to a few different projects, and all of them were because I was trying to do something with the software that didn't work for me and my scenarios, and I investigated the problem to resolution and then submitted my findings to the real maintainers. In no case have I asked to become "part of the project" or any other such thing. If you find yourself drawn to a particular project on a regular basis, doing what I've described on a frequent basis will show the existing maintainers that you are serious, you are committed, and that you do good quality work. They'll ask YOU to start looking at stuff above and beyond what you've already done, and the involvement and sense of inclusiveness will happen naturally.
Most people love to get free work done on their projects. Most have open repositories, email lists, and IRC channels. Just get to work:)
Guess who stops more power plants from being built?
If you and people like you who thought goverment was their tool to exert their preferences on others via the threat of violence were all dead, then we'd live in a utopia.
even though it seems wrong to side with someone who whacks off to that type of shit
Suppose that I am _imagining_ the face of a little kid super imposed on to the body of a naked adult [or a tentacale rape monster, or whatever upsets the largest number of people]. Suppose that in the near future, technology can read my thoughts through the walls of my home, and further suppose that I am not wearing my tin foil hat.
If I am thinking about little-kid/adult hybrid mutants and jacking off, and somebody catches me thinking about it, should that be a crime?
The court case here is essentially isomorphic to the situation I have described -- this case suggests that it is a thought crime to think about a kids face posted onto an adults body in a sexual way.
Here is what the US supreme court decided:
Cases like Campbell's present a unique legal issue. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that "virtual child pornography," in which no children were actually harmed, is protected speech and does not constitute a crime.
But the TN law says this:
For instance, Tennessee's laws state that in prosecuting the offense of sexual exploitation of a minor, "the state is not required to prove the actual identity or age of the minor."
Actually, I think the answer is "yes" on both counts.
The entire security process around both of those entities should assume that the "attacker" has - the complete resources of a modern government at its disposal - the experience and wherewithal to murder anyone necessary to obtain secrets - the ability to plant multiple human spies inside the organizations in each scheme
As such, any process should be resistant to attackers who know all of the information in excruciating detail.
Certainly security through obscurity can help, but it is not sufficient. I expect my government to spend the resources necessary to build a process (a human and information machine) that is resistent to tampering, infiltration, and information disclosure, in the sense that it doesn't guarantee that these never happen, it instead guarantees that the system/process continues to function properly while sustaining a certan amount of all of these defects.
IOW: understand the threats; have mitigations for each.
I'd be a lot more concerned if wikileaks was posting the home address, SSN, and home alarm de-arming instructions of doctors that performed abortions, or people who had bad things to say about the prophet muhammed. Those people typically do _not_ have the experience, time, money, or sanity to protect themselves from even 1 agitated nutcase.
Wolfram says that the milky way galaxy weighs around 6e45 grams.
assuming 1 mol of electrons in 1 gram of galaxy, you're talking about 3e69 electrons in the whole galaxy.
I suppose it might be possible within the confines of our galaxy to do something 2^119 times. We do have enough electrons. That's an important upper bound to not violate.
Mine too. Apparently, the people behind this don't think my trash bill is high enough, because the "Actual costs" of throwing stuff away are higher than what I am paying.
Never mind that I am not normally allowed to throw away computer parts in my weekly garbage anyhow.
Because that way companies would have absolutely zero incentives to produce easily/cheaply recyclable goods. To put it in other words, everything would stay the same with the sole exception that the people (i.e., you and me) would be forced to pay for a service that they do not have any influence on
This is garbage. [ha ha].
Customers will produce easy to recycle / not-containing-too-much-material-that-needs-to-be-recycled goods as soon as customers start demanding them, via abstaining from buying existing goods, or by flocking to competitive products as they appear.
Activist Environmentalists are rarely able to effect widespread individual change when individuals don't beleive those changes are warranted. This is why they invariably go towards government to get changes they want.
The fact of the matter is, when customers want a low-toxic or easy-to-recycle peice of equipment, they'll vote with their wallets. Producers will follow with blinding haste, so long as there isn't a govenrment-created barrier to marketplace entry [like an expensive recycling certification process].
If customers DONT care about throwing this stuff away, it is the environmentalist's job to make them. The most obvious way to do that is to simply make it expensive to dispose of this stuff using public resources. People can then choose to do one of a few things: - buy easy to recycle products [what you want] - not ever throw away things that are hard to recycle [something even better, from a conservation standpoint] - let a private recycling company deal with the equipment
Notice how none of these require any law at all? It could simply be a policy change at whatever landfill this stuff currnetly goes to. Infact, if the local (publicly owned) landfill came up with this policy, i might buy a big peice of land, lay down a hazmat blanket over it, and offer to dispose of peoples stuff cheaper than the public landfill would. The toxins would be kept out of the ground water, kept out of public property, and everyone would be happier. No stupid laws, no massive cost increases to anybody.
Oh, and if the business/recycling envrionment ever changed, I could go through all my stuff and start recycling it, rather than digging down into a mountain of banana peels and used diapers to find it, like I would at a landfill.
The disposal costs of this stuff aren't an "externality" -- they're just low, plain and simple. It has become very fashionable for environmentalists to try and pull one over on people using the power of government, and this smells like the same tactic. Companies have lots of money, nobody will get mad if "we" make them plan to recycle stuff they make later.
Well, I'll get mad. I don't want to pay more for it up front, I don't want the government to mandate that every product be planned for a 3 year obsolescence, and I don't think any of this crap is the government's job to begin with.
If there truly is some cost of disposing of electronics, rather than trying to tie it back to the original manufacturer (who will wisely go out of business once they have a looming mountain of garbage they are on the hook for... thereby getting a double windfall, since they over-charged you for the goods originally, and will not be around when its time to recycle it), make customers bear that cost, and make it clear what the composition of the item is at purchase time.
This is statist/environmentalist activism, not economically sound action.
As I've got a co-worker here who's very concerned about his Iranian family members back home, I was looking into this a bit.
VSAT or any of the small dishes of course work great technologically. Except he tells me that satellite internet hardware is completely illegal in Iran.
Sorry - they already thought of it.
The interesting thing is that Iran has not shut down its internet egress/ingree entirely -- must be too dependant on it. This has allowed clever people to make holes in the existing rules and communication _is_ happening.
It did get me thinking alot about satellite internet here in the US though.
I also thought a bit about amateur radio or radio packet relay approaches. Here in the US there are a ton of HAMs that can get any message anywhere in the US no matter how much of the rest of American society has collapsed. But i could find no evidence of amateur radio or repeaters or anything else in Iran.
People in the US should start thinking about no-point-of-failure, not-subject-to-US-rules ways of accessing the internet, even here in the US. Not to download torrents, but to send emails like "we are still alive" or "the strange helicopters you can see but not hear are still hovering near the intersectino of 8th and Grand ave." Packet radio seems like a good mechanism for this.
The constitution should really do nothing more than restrict the powers of government to a well defined, minimum set.
Please see wikipedia articles on negative liberties vs. positive liberties (sometimes also called negative/positive "rights").
Negative liberties make sense to put into a national constitution. Positive liberties are a recipie for disaster and servitude.
So to the extent that you feel that a "right to privacy" should exist, in terms of how to express it in the constitution, it would place clear boundaries and limits on what the government can do to violate the intrinsic privacy of citizens. This may manifest itself along the lines of proposed data retention or national traffic filteirng laws being found unconstitutional, assuming you have created a good consitution.
A more tricky angle to look at is what involvement, if any, the government would have when there is a privacy "dispute" between two non-government entities. Would someone's "right to privacy", as you see it, make paparazzi illegal? Would someone's right to privacy make it illegal for e-commerce websites to have web logs? Cookies? credit card info? Musn't individuals retain their privacy by not engaging in these activities, and isn't that a reasonable standard?
At it's core, a government being legally barred from violating the "privacy" of its citizens is unheard of anywhere in the world. Governments require you to have and present identification. What could be a more obvious and fundamental violation of privacy? In this context what does it mean for the government to even seriously consider some murky "right" to privacy?
I hope you are able to write an excellent constitution. The US may be shopping for a new one soon, as it hasn't really been using the one it has inherited.
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
economic man and political man are the same man. If you must dictate a man's economics to him, you've dictated his life and his politics as well.
Challenge: implement economic planning without the coercive power of government. a plan is useless if people won't carry it out.
the real issue is statism vs. individualism. communism and socialism, to the extent that they are different, both lead to suppression of the individual.
These days, physical link layers seem to be pretty stinking good. How common are TCP retransmits for reasons of corruption?
Why do this at the TCP layer? Why not the application layer? Consider all of the covert channels that might exist with the ability of POST, PUT, and even method=GET.
I've thought off and on about botnets that use spamblogs or google search + zeitgeist queries to coordinate their activities. The web is the largest visible surface area of the internet, so if I wanted to hide something in plain sight, that's one avenue to look into.
It's a good question for university students because they've been thinking about sorting problems "recently". So asking someone how to implement a given sort is a fair question. This has the upside of not being one they've had to implement, and it doesn't work like anything they have done. Of course the implementation is trivial; that's not the point. The solution is just the gateway into the rest of the conversation. The follow up questions are
"is it guaranteed to return? Why or why not?"
"what is the time complexity?"
You get a wider spectrum of answers than you might imagine when you start picking into the follow up questions.
So it's a question that scales well -- there are people that can't get the implementation, there are people that can't decide what they mean about its completion, etc. And no, its not a "serious" technical question, but i do find it useful.
I've asked lots of interview candidates to implement randomSort. They've never heard of it, so then I describe the algorithm.
Watching their eyes go wide is the highlight of the interview, typically.
Occasionally some person who has overcome their interview nervousness will, with eager honesty, try to implore to me that this is not a very good sort algorithm, and that much better ones are taught in universities these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's something interesting:
90% of shots fired in gun fights miss, even when the shooter is a cop, and even when they aren't supposed to miss.
These are guys who are trained, have to qualify at various distances at a pistol range, etc.
But it turns out that putting your shots on target when ... is really difficult in real life.
- the lighting/visibility is poor
- the target is trying not to get shot
- you aren't under ideal cover
- you may be shooting off-handed or without proper time to posture/setup the shots
- you weren't expecting to shoot anyone today and now you're in a firefight
- THEY ARE SHOOTING BACK [!!]
So I'm not defending variable-grade shooting in the movie, but in the real world, _good_ marksmen who train constantly often do not make good shots in the heat of the moment.
if the work came out of MSR, they have a very high degree of platform & technology autonomy.
MSR is basically academia, without classroom requirements. There are some product unit partnership projects where obviously a focus on shipping/evolutionary MS platforms or technologies make sense for the problem domain, but more abstract problems are often solved entirely with non-MS tools.
I use a prepaid cell phone. I bought the SIM and the phone off ebay. The number isn't even in my local area code, and as far as I know, "my" cell operator has no idea who I am.
This also is extremely cheap if you are an infrequent cell user and don't require a data plan.
My household has largely reverted back to cash-only for our commerce. It is easier to stick to a reasonable budget, the terms of a cash transaction are perfectly clear -- there are no double-jeopardy fee problems ["they stopped the check, then you were overdrawn. You lose"], and with the recent tightening on credit card companies, some of those companies are going to go after customers like me -- who _never_ carried a balance -- with annual fees or shorter repayment periods or day-0 interest assessment or other silly tricks. Not interested.
But the #1 reason to revert to cash is that it is relatively anonymous -- or rather, it is moreso than any other face to face currency exchange we can easily perform. I think it will become increasingly important that Americans can conduct basic commerce in a way that is difficult to tie back to individuals. The cost to gather, store, and analyze data will approach zero, as will the public's ability to prevent the government from doing so and doing so for questionable reasons. Thus, not contributing data is the most workable mitigation.
Seems like the face of evil ought to look like a distorted reflection of the observer, thus different for every observer.
And the definition of Evil is somewhat vague. The example given [about giving the boy a gun] seems quite simplistic. Is that _pure_ evil? Was there no virtue or motivation for doing it that didn't have some positive benefit? And was there truly no _more_ evil way of acting in that scenario? Why didn't the AI shoot the boy, then cut the boys face of and sew it onto his own head, then shoot the boys family, so that his parents died thinking they had been killed by their own child? Or why not manipulate all the family members into shooting each other under false assumptions, only to later realize the folly of their actions? Would that not be more evil still?
It is said that the opposite of love is indifference, whereas most people assume it is hatred. But to hate it is often to know, and know passionately. Where one man sees hate, another can see passion, and defensible outrage, and a moral course of action. Christians learn that God hates sin, God hates divorce; Jesus got angry and ransacked the temple. The roots of the western judeo-christian world are described as able to become angry and to act with violent passion.
But what about an indifferent evil?
What about an entity that simply executes people at random. Suppose that you had a list of all the people on earth, and you chose one at random and erased them, once per second. No malice, no interaction, no judgement, no execution any more righteous or less righteous than any other. Is this less evil than a crime of passion, revenge, or justice for some perceived wrong? What would the effect be on the populace? If there is any algorithm at all for behavior, someone will find that it is basically just, basically moral, or otherwise commendable.
Come to think of it, some might find the "kill any person at random" method the most justifiable, if one presumes that the earth is overpopulated and population decrease must occur, and that the algorithm for accomplishing this is uncontemplatable for a man, the machine-at-random approach might be the only "just" one.
Monopoly and collusion do not exist apart from where government enables either. I'd be happy to start a wireless provider tomorrow except that I am legally disallowed from doing so. Google tried to buy some wireless spectrum and not even they pulled it off.
That said, i've been very happy with my low-priced low-use cell phones. I use T-mobile 2 go, i put $100 on the account, and then my minutes last for a year. If i add another $10 at the endof the year, i retain any unused minutes.
You can say that in the zero-use case, phone service costs $8.95/mo and then 0.89/mo for subsequent years.
In my actual usage, I beleive I spend somewhat more than $10 and somewhat less than $100 per year. I have budgeted it at $20/mo for the two cell-phones in my family and simply bank that money until we need to refill either of the phones.
My phones were chosen solely based on what i wanted out of a handset and have nothing to do with what Tmobile sells or supports. Unlocked GSM ftw.
Apple is already happy to deny warranties based on any circumstancial evidence.
They denied a warranty claim on my wife's iBook when its hard drive got click-of-death and simply gave up. They claimed that we had spilled coffee into the laptop, and attemped to document this via "brown dots" on the metal shield on the bottom of the laptop's inner-metal liner [i.e. the exterior side, not the logic board side].
I asked them how they figured one could spill coffee against the forces of gravity from the bottom up into a laptop, and furthermore how this would prevent a hard drive from spinning up properly.
The apple store employee was livid that I would dare to question his judgement, but no matter how I pressed the issue, he simply responded with "our warranty doesn't cover your mistakes.". Never mind that hard drives are a known failure item on computers; it just happens sometimes and you get a replacement and life goes on. Not so with apple.
The actual convesration was considerably more demeaning towards me. I was reasonably tempted to commit physical assault against the guy, and it was only the fact that the conversation transpired over a phone that probably kept me out of jail.
Essentially, fuck apple.
That's certainly an apt comparison, since most people that have or want DE50's think they look cool and work really awesome, but have no fucking idea what they're doing when using a gun. They feel this strange sense of smugness about the elite status their choice in firearm has afforded them, perhaps not having any idea that a boring old Casull 454 has more muzzle energy, or that the DE50 is utterly impractical for essentially any worhtwhile endeavour. They know that they spent way more money than other guns cost, but they don't realize that there's always something cheaper that does a better job.
Yet nothing else seems to have caught and held the affection of hollywood so effectively, so nothing else will suffice for the discriminating individuals that know nothing about firearms or marksmanship --- except that they are better than everyone else at both by virtue of their wise purchase.
I'm not sure you had any idea how good of an analogy you were making. Bravo! :)
is nice and many scientists seem to enjoy it.
But IMO, Buzz Aldrin (iirc) has the right point of view: from Kittyhawk to Apollo 11 was 66 years. It is an embarassment that we may not be able to put boots on Mars by 2035 --- which would be 66 years after Apollo 11. Human Flight -> Man on Moon shouldn't take less time than Moon->Mars.
If you want to argue that science doesn't concern itself with putting boots on Mars, fine, lots stop funding space science and get back to funding space engineering.
Any human being can understand these words: "the human race has set foot on a different planet". I look forward to the changes that will take longer to understand: what it will mean to the world pscyhe to know that we have demonstrated the possibility of escape, to know that there is a new world to explore, a new adventure to be had, etc. The re-colonization of the Americas by europeans co-incided with the beginning of the greatest leaps forward in technology, prosperity, and freedom (as long as you weren't brown at the time...) in world history. I am looking forward to seeing what shape the "discovery" of Mars will have on all of us.
Short of discovering God or alien life, no unmanned mission will ever get every single human being around the world simultaneously watching their TVs. That's the power of putting boots on Mars. There will be plenty of hard science and engineering to get us there. But having a single goal that any idiot can understand in just 1 statement: that's powerful, and it's worth working towards.
Step 1: find a peice of F/OSS software that you are interested in, use, or would like to use
Step 2: use it to do real work
Step 3: notice something in the product that appears to be a bug or a limitation related to your real-world use or desired real-world use
Step 4: grab the code and start looking through it. Determine where in the code the problem seems to exist. If this is a segfault or something, fire up GDB, get a stack trace, grab the correct variable state to show the data conditions leading to the problem
Step 5: construct a repro case for the bug that shows it is a problem with the code and makes the problem portable out of your environment into the maintainers environment
At this point, you can contact the maintainers of the project if you want to. They'll appreciate the detailed research you've done and usually it won't take them long to come up with a good fix.
Or, you could keep going
Step 6: construct a hypothesis about what the problem is. If you have a repro-scenario and know where in the code the problem is surfacing, work backwards to understand the data and instruction flow that gets you from reading the repro state to the code blowing up. Based on your understanding, form a hypothesis as to what the specific defect is.
Step 7: begin working on a local fix (i.e. don't do a world-visible checkout to a version control repository) to the problem. Continue iterating on your fix until the repro-case you identified earlier appears to have been repaired. Now test the program on cases that used to work prior to your fix to do some sanity checking that you've not introduced regressions.
Step 8: once you have a fix that appears to work, check your fix against any coding styles or other conventions that appear to be in use in the project. You may want to look at past respository commits and comments in the file(s) you've worked into infer as much as possible about this.
Step 9: wrap it all up. Compose an email describing the problem, the repro case, your understanding of the the solution, your patch, and the tests you did on the patch. Email the maintainers of the project and ask them if your problem and solution make sense.
Step 10: based on what the maintainers say, your work may be done or you may need to iterate on your patch to improve its quality or conformance to the projects expectations. Your goal is to get a developer to accept any part of your work -- ideally, they'd commit your patch as-is, but if nothing else, the investigation you've done thus far will be helpful to them if they want to do a "better" fix in the future. And the tests/repros you've documented will be helpful for you (and them) to try when evaluating future fixes.
This is the easiest way to get your feet wet in _any_ F/OSS project. I've contributed small fixes to a few different projects, and all of them were because I was trying to do something with the software that didn't work for me and my scenarios, and I investigated the problem to resolution and then submitted my findings to the real maintainers. In no case have I asked to become "part of the project" or any other such thing. If you find yourself drawn to a particular project on a regular basis, doing what I've described on a frequent basis will show the existing maintainers that you are serious, you are committed, and that you do good quality work. They'll ask YOU to start looking at stuff above and beyond what you've already done, and the involvement and sense of inclusiveness will happen naturally.
Most people love to get free work done on their projects. Most have open repositories, email lists, and IRC channels. Just get to work :)
Guess who stops more power plants from being built?
If you and people like you who thought goverment was their tool to exert their preferences on others via the threat of violence were all dead, then we'd live in a utopia.
So please, FOAD already :)
Suppose that I am _imagining_ the face of a little kid super imposed on to the body of a naked adult [or a tentacale rape monster, or whatever upsets the largest number of people]. Suppose that in the near future, technology can read my thoughts through the walls of my home, and further suppose that I am not wearing my tin foil hat.
If I am thinking about little-kid/adult hybrid mutants and jacking off, and somebody catches me thinking about it, should that be a crime?
The court case here is essentially isomorphic to the situation I have described -- this case suggests that it is a thought crime to think about a kids face posted onto an adults body in a sexual way.
Here is what the US supreme court decided:
But the TN law says this:
Scary stuff.
Actually, I think the answer is "yes" on both counts.
The entire security process around both of those entities should assume that the "attacker" has
- the complete resources of a modern government at its disposal
- the experience and wherewithal to murder anyone necessary to obtain secrets
- the ability to plant multiple human spies inside the organizations in each scheme
As such, any process should be resistant to attackers who know all of the information in excruciating detail.
Certainly security through obscurity can help, but it is not sufficient. I expect my government to spend the resources necessary to build a process (a human and information machine) that is resistent to tampering, infiltration, and information disclosure, in the sense that it doesn't guarantee that these never happen, it instead guarantees that the system/process continues to function properly while sustaining a certan amount of all of these defects.
IOW: understand the threats; have mitigations for each.
I'd be a lot more concerned if wikileaks was posting the home address, SSN, and home alarm de-arming instructions of doctors that performed abortions, or people who had bad things to say about the prophet muhammed. Those people typically do _not_ have the experience, time, money, or sanity to protect themselves from even 1 agitated nutcase.
Not only is 2^119 a big number...its around 6e35.
Wolfram says that the milky way galaxy weighs around 6e45 grams.
assuming 1 mol of electrons in 1 gram of galaxy, you're talking about 3e69 electrons in the whole galaxy.
I suppose it might be possible within the confines of our galaxy to do something 2^119 times. We do have enough electrons. That's an important upper bound to not violate.
Mine too. Apparently, the people behind this don't think my trash bill is high enough, because the "Actual costs" of throwing stuff away are higher than what I am paying.
Never mind that I am not normally allowed to throw away computer parts in my weekly garbage anyhow.
This is garbage. [ha ha].
Customers will produce easy to recycle / not-containing-too-much-material-that-needs-to-be-recycled goods as soon as customers start demanding them, via abstaining from buying existing goods, or by flocking to competitive products as they appear.
Activist Environmentalists are rarely able to effect widespread individual change when individuals don't beleive those changes are warranted. This is why they invariably go towards government to get changes they want.
The fact of the matter is, when customers want a low-toxic or easy-to-recycle peice of equipment, they'll vote with their wallets. Producers will follow with blinding haste, so long as there isn't a govenrment-created barrier to marketplace entry [like an expensive recycling certification process].
If customers DONT care about throwing this stuff away, it is the environmentalist's job to make them. The most obvious way to do that is to simply make it expensive to dispose of this stuff using public resources. People can then choose to do one of a few things:
- buy easy to recycle products [what you want]
- not ever throw away things that are hard to recycle [something even better, from a conservation standpoint]
- let a private recycling company deal with the equipment
Notice how none of these require any law at all? It could simply be a policy change at whatever landfill this stuff currnetly goes to. Infact, if the local (publicly owned) landfill came up with this policy, i might buy a big peice of land, lay down a hazmat blanket over it, and offer to dispose of peoples stuff cheaper than the public landfill would. The toxins would be kept out of the ground water, kept out of public property, and everyone would be happier. No stupid laws, no massive cost increases to anybody.
Oh, and if the business/recycling envrionment ever changed, I could go through all my stuff and start recycling it, rather than digging down into a mountain of banana peels and used diapers to find it, like I would at a landfill.
Why not just bill people for their garbage?
The disposal costs of this stuff aren't an "externality" -- they're just low, plain and simple. It has become very fashionable for environmentalists to try and pull one over on people using the power of government, and this smells like the same tactic. Companies have lots of money, nobody will get mad if "we" make them plan to recycle stuff they make later.
Well, I'll get mad. I don't want to pay more for it up front, I don't want the government to mandate that every product be planned for a 3 year obsolescence, and I don't think any of this crap is the government's job to begin with.
If there truly is some cost of disposing of electronics, rather than trying to tie it back to the original manufacturer (who will wisely go out of business once they have a looming mountain of garbage they are on the hook for... thereby getting a double windfall, since they over-charged you for the goods originally, and will not be around when its time to recycle it), make customers bear that cost, and make it clear what the composition of the item is at purchase time.
This is statist/environmentalist activism, not economically sound action.
As I've got a co-worker here who's very concerned about his Iranian family members back home, I was looking into this a bit.
VSAT or any of the small dishes of course work great technologically. Except he tells me that satellite internet hardware is completely illegal in Iran.
Sorry - they already thought of it.
The interesting thing is that Iran has not shut down its internet egress/ingree entirely -- must be too dependant on it. This has allowed clever people to make holes in the existing rules and communication _is_ happening.
It did get me thinking alot about satellite internet here in the US though.
I also thought a bit about amateur radio or radio packet relay approaches. Here in the US there are a ton of HAMs that can get any message anywhere in the US no matter how much of the rest of American society has collapsed. But i could find no evidence of amateur radio or repeaters or anything else in Iran.
People in the US should start thinking about no-point-of-failure, not-subject-to-US-rules ways of accessing the internet, even here in the US. Not to download torrents, but to send emails like "we are still alive" or "the strange helicopters you can see but not hear are still hovering near the intersectino of 8th and Grand ave." Packet radio seems like a good mechanism for this.
The constitution should really do nothing more than restrict the powers of government to a well defined, minimum set.
Please see wikipedia articles on negative liberties vs. positive liberties (sometimes also called negative/positive "rights").
Negative liberties make sense to put into a national constitution. Positive liberties are a recipie for disaster and servitude.
So to the extent that you feel that a "right to privacy" should exist, in terms of how to express it in the constitution, it would place clear boundaries and limits on what the government can do to violate the intrinsic privacy of citizens. This may manifest itself along the lines of proposed data retention or national traffic filteirng laws being found unconstitutional, assuming you have created a good consitution.
A more tricky angle to look at is what involvement, if any, the government would have when there is a privacy "dispute" between two non-government entities. Would someone's "right to privacy", as you see it, make paparazzi illegal? Would someone's right to privacy make it illegal for e-commerce websites to have web logs? Cookies? credit card info? Musn't individuals retain their privacy by not engaging in these activities, and isn't that a reasonable standard?
At it's core, a government being legally barred from violating the "privacy" of its citizens is unheard of anywhere in the world. Governments require you to have and present identification. What could be a more obvious and fundamental violation of privacy? In this context what does it mean for the government to even seriously consider some murky "right" to privacy?
I hope you are able to write an excellent constitution. The US may be shopping for a new one soon, as it hasn't really been using the one it has inherited.
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1826
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take
economic man and political man are the same man. If you must dictate a man's economics to him, you've dictated his life and his politics as well.
Challenge: implement economic planning without the coercive power of government. a plan is useless if people won't carry it out.
the real issue is statism vs. individualism. communism and socialism, to the extent that they are different, both lead to suppression of the individual.
These days, physical link layers seem to be pretty stinking good. How common are TCP retransmits for reasons of corruption?
Why do this at the TCP layer? Why not the application layer? Consider all of the covert channels that might exist with the ability of POST, PUT, and even method=GET.
I've thought off and on about botnets that use spamblogs or google search + zeitgeist queries to coordinate their activities. The web is the largest visible surface area of the internet, so if I wanted to hide something in plain sight, that's one avenue to look into.
The Future May Involve Blood, Watermelons, and Hookers.
It's a good question for university students because they've been thinking about sorting problems "recently". So asking someone how to implement a given sort is a fair question. This has the upside of not being one they've had to implement, and it doesn't work like anything they have done. Of course the implementation is trivial; that's not the point. The solution is just the gateway into the rest of the conversation. The follow up questions are
"is it guaranteed to return? Why or why not?"
"what is the time complexity?"
You get a wider spectrum of answers than you might imagine when you start picking into the follow up questions.
So it's a question that scales well -- there are people that can't get the implementation, there are people that can't decide what they mean about its completion, etc. And no, its not a "serious" technical question, but i do find it useful.
I've asked lots of interview candidates to implement randomSort. They've never heard of it, so then I describe the algorithm.
Watching their eyes go wide is the highlight of the interview, typically.
Occasionally some person who has overcome their interview nervousness will, with eager honesty, try to implore to me that this is not a very good sort algorithm, and that much better ones are taught in universities these days.
Good Times.