Civil disobedience means breaking the law to protest the injustice of the law. Since the "cyber" part is not in question with hacktivism, it is either:
Cybercrime and also civil disobedience, or
Cybercrime but not civil disobedience, or
Neither cybercrime nor civil disobedience
The "civil disobedience or cybercrime" dichotomy demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what "civil disobedience" means.
Did it REALLY need to be specified that it's the most popular in North America AND the world?
Yes.
They DO realize that North America is part of the planet, right?
And yet, its quite possible for something to be the most popular in North America but not the most popular in the world, or vice versa. So, inasmuch as both "North America" and "the world" are interesting scopes of analysis, it is meaningful to identify that MSSE is the most popular in each of those scopes.
The US was set up as a non-democratic republic, with voting.
The US was not set up as "a non-democratic republic, with voting". It was set up as a system which is both a representative democracy and a federal republic.
From Dell's point of view, it would be fantastic if monitor makers incorporated the functionality of the widget into their devices.
Not if the built-in terminal functionality in the monitors wasn't dedicated to Dell's back-end services. Its hardly as if Dell is the only company that's selling access to cloud-hosted virtual machines.
The course you describe does much to blame "the world" for the problems which only affect the two in a relationship.
It doesn't blame "the world" for anything. It places responsibility on specific actors in a position to know that a course of action will cause harm, who undertake that course of action intending to cause harm, and who, in fact, cause the intended harm by that course of action.
If both are dedicated to each other, no amount of interference would matter.
Like most things in the real world, "dedication" isn't a binary quality. And responsibility isn't exclusive (or even fixed-sum) -- acknowledging that a third-party can, under certain circusmatnce, have some responsibility in the case of a breach (as we do in the world of economic relationships by way of tortious interference) doesn't reduce the responsibility of the breaching party (as it doesn't in the case of tortious interference).
Further, it can't happen without a member of a couple breaking the agreement. That should be the extent of the harmed party's concern.
Clearly, that opinion is far from universal regarding relationships in general, otherwise we wouldn't have tortious interference.
Does every women whose man cheats blame him or "all those other women on the planet?"
IME, while individual people vary considerably, people (of either sex) in that circumstance tend to be quite likely to not view responsibility as exclusive or limited, and tend to be quite capable of viewing both the offending partner and the specific involved third party (not all the other people on the planet; don't know where this, like your reference to "the world", came from) as responsible, without the responsibility of either one reducing the degree of responsibility of the other.
Why is it not reasonable when the roles are reversed?
No one has been arguing that the responsibility differs based on that.
Are you suggesting that a third party, outside of a relationship can breech said relationship and neither party of the same relationship is responsible?
What I am saying, explicitly, is that your claim in GGP that only the direct parties to a relationship can have responsibility for a breach (and, at that, only one of them) is incorrect, and that third parties can bear some responsibility. This is separate from the question of whether all breaches must involve a direct party to the relationship bearing some responsibility.
Whether there can ever be a case where only the third party was responsible is a question I wasn't addressing in GP, either explicitly or by implication. I can certainly see an argument for that in cases where there is outright compulsion, rather than mere inducement or cooperation, by a third party to act inconsistently with a commitment that was part of a relationship, though whether that is a breach where only the third party has responsibility for the breach, or not a breach at all, or a breach where despite lack of choice the compelled party has responsibility probably depends on the exact sense of "responsibility" being addressed--as that term can mean multiple different things that don't always rest in the same person--and the precise nature of the relationship at issue.
For the price of a single worker, (if he was a manager, this wouldn't even be considered for news), they get an entire company's worth of coding.
You mean, for the price of a single worker, they got privileged access into the corporate network handed to unknown parties who were willing to spend an entire company's worth of coding effort for very small return in order to secure that access.
I wonder why someone would be willing to exchange that kind of effort for that kind of access?
There's outsourcing, and there's outsourcing with getting clean code back and getting it on time. There's a difference.
Oh, I'm sure there is enough profit motive in getting backdoor access into major corporation's networks (especially if you are getting an monetary subsidy through an employee of the target corporation) to subsidize finding a coder (or team of coders) that can actually provide quality work on the workload assigned to a single developer in that corporation.
Yes, he just proved his own job could be outsourced to China
Or, he found a way to become the man on the inside for a ring of corporate spies, and instead of getting paid by the spies he was fronting for, he paid them.
When a couple are in a 'relationship' it is an agreement of sorts that does not extend to the world. And if that agreement is breeched, only one of the two parties can be responsible for it.
In the world of bilateral economic relationships (contracts and otherwise), we recognize that a third party can share liability for a breach despite not being a party to the relationship (e.g., tortious interference.) I don't see any reason why we shouldn't recognize shared third-party responsibility, on a moral level, in the case of non-economic relationships where parallel circumstances apply (knowledge of the relationship by the third party, intent of the third party to induce breach, lack of special privilege justifying the third party inducing the breach, and actual success in inducing the breach).
Burglary requires the building to be a dwelling-house, i.e. and habitation. People need to live there.
Under most modern statutory codes, rather than the old common law definition, either the burglary statute or a similar felony covers buildings that aren't habitations as well; its not going to be bare trespass.
"Trying to use 'todays' internet with Java disabled is not a viable option. A realistic estimate is that over 70% of all common websites require Java to function correctly.
The only way that number is within an order of magnitude of being correct is if it is a reference server-side Java, which isn't the issue. In-browser Java is the issue, and very few common websites require in-browser Java to function correctly (in-browser JavaScript, perhaps, but aside from artifacts of early-90s marketing in the naming, the two have nothing in common.)
If your kid swallows something nasty it would be good to have this handy. There are certain things that should not be vomited up and this could be a useful application for the device (more useful than what they are marketing it for anyway).
Its a device that needs to be surgically implanted that goes from the stomach through the abdominal wall; unless you have it implanted in your child in advance, its not going to be of any use if they swallow something they shouldn't.
Caloric intake control (which is ultimately all this does) can be done with less invasive and risky means.
Yeah, I mean, this is pretty much equivalent to replacing consumption of calorie-bearing foods with consumption of water, which can be done much less invasively at the front end.
BS is BS, or at least claims-without-tests-to-back-them.
No, there is a significant difference in kind between claims that are not adequately supported and claims that demonstrably impossible.
I agree that sometimes the BS in physics is easier to detect.
Its not a matter of "easier to detect".
The peddle maker could
Yes, in principle something different than what actually happened could have happened, and maybe if something different happened here, it might be a good analogy to the IT claims you tried to draw an analogy to. But that just is another way of saying that what actually was at issue isn't analogous.
More importantly, it deceives the citizen into believing that the White House is the primary and appropriate channel, and perhaps the very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters.
I don't think there is any reason to believe that it does that at all, and plenty of reasons to believe that it does the opposite. It certainly redirects the existing and long-standing tendency of people to direct requests on matters of policy to the White House individually and in a mechanism that is not publicly visible into a manner which draws more attention to the issues and responses while requiring less total government effort to address, but it doesn't do anything to "deceive the citizen" into believing the White House is more central than it is (if anything, by making the responses which underline why this is not the case more public than would have been the case with traditional model of request-response to an elected officials office, it does the opposite.
The responses often involve explanations of exactly why the issue is one on which the White House is not the "very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters". See, for instance, the response on marijuana, which quotes the President saying:
...this is a tough problem because Congress has not yet changed the law. I head up the executive branch; we're supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we're going to need to have is a conversation about how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it's legal.
It has been seen as standard practice now by the U.S. Congress to simply ignore the fact that a budget really should be "balanced" at the end of each year
That thing your calling a "fact", is not a fact, its a preference, and a fairly ludicrous one.
There's probably a fairly decent argument to be made that there are economically-desirable consequence if the debt:GDP ratio is kept constant in years of average conditions, allowed to expand in years of relative need (resulting from disaster, recession, etc.), and contracted in years of relative plenty, but for the proposition you make there isn't even a decent argument.
Frankly spending is so completely out of control now that it is laughably a joke that money needs to be spent for any program
Federal spending as share of GDP is slightly higher than it was in 1983 (less than 1% higher), and down almost a full percent of GDP from its recent peak in 2009. Its much higher than it was at the peak of the dot-com boom at the end of the 1990s, but that's to be expected -- when the private economy is doing well, the need for government spending is at its nadir, while when the private economy is weak, that need is at its zenith.
Ultimately the real problem is trying to balance the budget
No, the real problem is trying to restore economic growth, which isn't just a matter of the level of spending (or taxation), but appropriately directing spending and taxes.
The current serious proposal being debated in Washington is to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin. You'd need a whole Senate of Christine O'Donnel's to come up with something crazier and dumber than that.
The crazy/stupid thing is the combination of:
1. The appropriations Congress has passed mandating the executive branch to spend money, and
2. The taxes Congress has raised that are insufficient to pay for the appropriations Congress has passed , and
3. The debt limit Congress has imposed and refuses to lift which prohibits the executive branch from borrowing money to meet the spending mandate.
The trillion dollar platinum coin is just the one mechanism that has been identified which Congress which resolves the conflicting mandates. As the President is bound to faithfully execute the laws, if it is the only legal mechanism to meet the spending mandate Congress has imposed without also violating the debt limit mandate Congress has imposed (presuming that the debt limit is itself Constitutional, which is a matter of some debate), then it is legally mandatory. Its not crazy or stupid to do it, its crazy and stupid to impose the requirements which would require doing it.
How is this different from alleged gurus claiming that foo-oriented programming is a silver bullet and selling books, seminars, special languages, methodology consultants, and so forth without first having objective evidence?
Because this is physically impossible, whereas a new programming paradigm that provides across-the-board improvements in productivity is possible, even if most things for which that claim is made are, at best, greatly oversold.
but post a story about "warp drive" and "FTL starships" and the Space Nutters will come slobbering out of the woodwork.
Right. The differences are:
This simply not possible even in principle, whereas warp drives are possible in principle, though impractical for all kinds of reasons
Warp drives, if practical, would allow things that are fundamentally different than what is available now, while this, ignoring the fact that its claims are impossible, offers slightly easier-to-pedal bikes -- well, I mean, if you squint at some of the claims of how it works right, it might offer a way to make a perpetual motion machine and provide infinite free energy, but if you get to that implication its harder to ignore the impossibility.
What happens with this design if the pedals are at TDC and BDC, with a weight hanging off the top pedal? It should go forward as that is the direction of the "Z" arm.
I suppose. If you could magically have a weight appear only off the top pedal's Z-arm when the pedal was at TDC. (Note that such a magical weight would also give you a perpetual motion machine, since you could set the pedals at TDC/BDC, and they would start accelerating on their own and continue to provide power with no effort.)
Of course, if you had such a weight only off the bottom pedal's Z arm, it would go backwards.
Or, if you just had the weight from each pedals Z-arms, without magical weights that appeared on one or the arm in a given position to help or hinder, they'd cancel each other out, and you'd have dead spots, which brings us to:
By my understanding that is one of his design goals, to eliminate the dead spots as with regular straight arms in the same situation nothing happens (you would need forward motion to move the arm).
Even the inventor's website expressly acknowledges that the Z-torque crank has the exact same dead spots as any other crank (of course, he doesn't mention that this exactly the same as any other crank), saying:
Except for top dead center and bottom dead center, this crank had no dead spots.
So, no, even the crank making the crank doesn't claim that the crank eliminates the TDC/BDC dead spots inherent in any crank.
Biomechanics doesn't always follow the rules of simple static analysis. It's possible that by moving the pedal so the cyclist's legs are in a different position during the pedal cycle, it's possible that his muscles could more effectively power the pedals.
That might be relevant, if this design had any effect of moving the pedal so the cyclist's legs are in a different position during the pedal cycle. But all an angled crank arm does is give you a heavy crank that takes up more space to put your legs in the same position as they would be in with a straight arm that had the same length as the straight-line (rather than along-the-bent-crank) distance between the ends of the crank.
Jazelle doesn't even exist on the latest ARM architectures
Technically, it does, but in a form that doesn't actually do anything (the way Jazelle is defined, you can't actually count on it doing anything, you need a full software JVM and when Jazelle is invoked it will directly executed the bytecodes it implements and defer back to the software JVM for anything else -- it remains required for ARM processors, but current versions defer everything back to the software JVM.)
Some ARM processors used in Android devices include Jazelle which is an implementation of the Java VM in silicone.
No, its not.
Silicone is not the same thing as silicon.
And Jazelle isn't really an implementation of the JVM since it requires a software JVM, and only directly implements a subset of Java bytecodes and defers back to the software JVM for the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
The "civil disobedience or cybercrime" dichotomy demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what "civil disobedience" means.
Yes.
And yet, its quite possible for something to be the most popular in North America but not the most popular in the world, or vice versa. So, inasmuch as both "North America" and "the world" are interesting scopes of analysis, it is meaningful to identify that MSSE is the most popular in each of those scopes.
The US was not set up as "a non-democratic republic, with voting". It was set up as a system which is both a representative democracy and a federal republic.
Not if the built-in terminal functionality in the monitors wasn't dedicated to Dell's back-end services. Its hardly as if Dell is the only company that's selling access to cloud-hosted virtual machines.
It doesn't blame "the world" for anything. It places responsibility on specific actors in a position to know that a course of action will cause harm, who undertake that course of action intending to cause harm, and who, in fact, cause the intended harm by that course of action.
Like most things in the real world, "dedication" isn't a binary quality. And responsibility isn't exclusive (or even fixed-sum) -- acknowledging that a third-party can, under certain circusmatnce, have some responsibility in the case of a breach (as we do in the world of economic relationships by way of tortious interference) doesn't reduce the responsibility of the breaching party (as it doesn't in the case of tortious interference).
Clearly, that opinion is far from universal regarding relationships in general, otherwise we wouldn't have tortious interference.
IME, while individual people vary considerably, people (of either sex) in that circumstance tend to be quite likely to not view responsibility as exclusive or limited, and tend to be quite capable of viewing both the offending partner and the specific involved third party (not all the other people on the planet; don't know where this, like your reference to "the world", came from) as responsible, without the responsibility of either one reducing the degree of responsibility of the other.
No one has been arguing that the responsibility differs based on that.
What I am saying, explicitly, is that your claim in GGP that only the direct parties to a relationship can have responsibility for a breach (and, at that, only one of them) is incorrect, and that third parties can bear some responsibility. This is separate from the question of whether all breaches must involve a direct party to the relationship bearing some responsibility.
Whether there can ever be a case where only the third party was responsible is a question I wasn't addressing in GP, either explicitly or by implication. I can certainly see an argument for that in cases where there is outright compulsion, rather than mere inducement or cooperation, by a third party to act inconsistently with a commitment that was part of a relationship, though whether that is a breach where only the third party has responsibility for the breach, or not a breach at all, or a breach where despite lack of choice the compelled party has responsibility probably depends on the exact sense of "responsibility" being addressed--as that term can mean multiple different things that don't always rest in the same person--and the precise nature of the relationship at issue.
You mean, for the price of a single worker, they got privileged access into the corporate network handed to unknown parties who were willing to spend an entire company's worth of coding effort for very small return in order to secure that access. I wonder why someone would be willing to exchange that kind of effort for that kind of access?
Oh, I'm sure there is enough profit motive in getting backdoor access into major corporation's networks (especially if you are getting an monetary subsidy through an employee of the target corporation) to subsidize finding a coder (or team of coders) that can actually provide quality work on the workload assigned to a single developer in that corporation.
Or, he found a way to become the man on the inside for a ring of corporate spies, and instead of getting paid by the spies he was fronting for, he paid them.
In the world of bilateral economic relationships (contracts and otherwise), we recognize that a third party can share liability for a breach despite not being a party to the relationship (e.g., tortious interference.) I don't see any reason why we shouldn't recognize shared third-party responsibility, on a moral level, in the case of non-economic relationships where parallel circumstances apply (knowledge of the relationship by the third party, intent of the third party to induce breach, lack of special privilege justifying the third party inducing the breach, and actual success in inducing the breach).
Under most modern statutory codes, rather than the old common law definition, either the burglary statute or a similar felony covers buildings that aren't habitations as well; its not going to be bare trespass.
The only way that number is within an order of magnitude of being correct is if it is a reference server-side Java, which isn't the issue. In-browser Java is the issue, and very few common websites require in-browser Java to function correctly (in-browser JavaScript, perhaps, but aside from artifacts of early-90s marketing in the naming, the two have nothing in common.)
Its a device that needs to be surgically implanted that goes from the stomach through the abdominal wall; unless you have it implanted in your child in advance, its not going to be of any use if they swallow something they shouldn't.
Yeah, I mean, this is pretty much equivalent to replacing consumption of calorie-bearing foods with consumption of water, which can be done much less invasively at the front end.
Yeah, but what was described was burglary, not mere trespass.
No, there is a significant difference in kind between claims that are not adequately supported and claims that demonstrably impossible.
Its not a matter of "easier to detect".
Yes, in principle something different than what actually happened could have happened, and maybe if something different happened here, it might be a good analogy to the IT claims you tried to draw an analogy to. But that just is another way of saying that what actually was at issue isn't analogous.
I don't think there is any reason to believe that it does that at all, and plenty of reasons to believe that it does the opposite. It certainly redirects the existing and long-standing tendency of people to direct requests on matters of policy to the White House individually and in a mechanism that is not publicly visible into a manner which draws more attention to the issues and responses while requiring less total government effort to address, but it doesn't do anything to "deceive the citizen" into believing the White House is more central than it is (if anything, by making the responses which underline why this is not the case more public than would have been the case with traditional model of request-response to an elected officials office, it does the opposite.
The responses often involve explanations of exactly why the issue is one on which the White House is not the "very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters". See, for instance, the response on marijuana, which quotes the President saying:
That thing your calling a "fact", is not a fact, its a preference, and a fairly ludicrous one. There's probably a fairly decent argument to be made that there are economically-desirable consequence if the debt:GDP ratio is kept constant in years of average conditions, allowed to expand in years of relative need (resulting from disaster, recession, etc.), and contracted in years of relative plenty, but for the proposition you make there isn't even a decent argument.
Federal spending as share of GDP is slightly higher than it was in 1983 (less than 1% higher), and down almost a full percent of GDP from its recent peak in 2009. Its much higher than it was at the peak of the dot-com boom at the end of the 1990s, but that's to be expected -- when the private economy is doing well, the need for government spending is at its nadir, while when the private economy is weak, that need is at its zenith.
No, the real problem is trying to restore economic growth, which isn't just a matter of the level of spending (or taxation), but appropriately directing spending and taxes.
The crazy/stupid thing is the combination of: 1. The appropriations Congress has passed mandating the executive branch to spend money, and 2. The taxes Congress has raised that are insufficient to pay for the appropriations Congress has passed , and 3. The debt limit Congress has imposed and refuses to lift which prohibits the executive branch from borrowing money to meet the spending mandate. The trillion dollar platinum coin is just the one mechanism that has been identified which Congress which resolves the conflicting mandates. As the President is bound to faithfully execute the laws, if it is the only legal mechanism to meet the spending mandate Congress has imposed without also violating the debt limit mandate Congress has imposed (presuming that the debt limit is itself Constitutional, which is a matter of some debate), then it is legally mandatory. Its not crazy or stupid to do it, its crazy and stupid to impose the requirements which would require doing it.
Because this is physically impossible, whereas a new programming paradigm that provides across-the-board improvements in productivity is possible, even if most things for which that claim is made are, at best, greatly oversold.
Right, exactly, its not.
Right. The differences are:
I suppose. If you could magically have a weight appear only off the top pedal's Z-arm when the pedal was at TDC. (Note that such a magical weight would also give you a perpetual motion machine, since you could set the pedals at TDC/BDC, and they would start accelerating on their own and continue to provide power with no effort.) Of course, if you had such a weight only off the bottom pedal's Z arm, it would go backwards. Or, if you just had the weight from each pedals Z-arms, without magical weights that appeared on one or the arm in a given position to help or hinder, they'd cancel each other out, and you'd have dead spots, which brings us to:
Even the inventor's website expressly acknowledges that the Z-torque crank has the exact same dead spots as any other crank (of course, he doesn't mention that this exactly the same as any other crank), saying:
So, no, even the crank making the crank doesn't claim that the crank eliminates the TDC/BDC dead spots inherent in any crank.
That might be relevant, if this design had any effect of moving the pedal so the cyclist's legs are in a different position during the pedal cycle. But all an angled crank arm does is give you a heavy crank that takes up more space to put your legs in the same position as they would be in with a straight arm that had the same length as the straight-line (rather than along-the-bent-crank) distance between the ends of the crank.
A bunch of people. So, not so novel.
Technically, it does, but in a form that doesn't actually do anything (the way Jazelle is defined, you can't actually count on it doing anything, you need a full software JVM and when Jazelle is invoked it will directly executed the bytecodes it implements and defer back to the software JVM for anything else -- it remains required for ARM processors, but current versions defer everything back to the software JVM.)
No, its not. Silicone is not the same thing as silicon. And Jazelle isn't really an implementation of the JVM since it requires a software JVM, and only directly implements a subset of Java bytecodes and defers back to the software JVM for the rest.