Comment Re:The bigger test is coming (Score 1) 158
That's OK. We are both guessing.
That's OK. We are both guessing.
I find the notion that somewhere near 10% of all cops are waiting in the wings with bags of drugs and spare guns waiting to plant them on people, and the idea that LEO's perjuring themselves is "routine" to be almost tinfoil-hat worthy.
It's simply Pascal's Wager.
It's not fashionable to say here, but Io think the overwhelming majority of police are honest, hard-working people looking to serve the public interest.
I have met very few police officers in my life, and they all appear to be good people. However this is not relevant. You cannot predict what kind of an LEO will stop you on the freeway for $something. You can only estimate your chances. Many things may go wrong. The LEOs may have heard a broadcast about a dangerous criminal, who looks like you, who is driving a car, just like yours. This will make the encounter very tense. You may overreact... and it goes downhill pretty fast. As I said, only one of the officers at the scene may have a bag, but he can throw it into your car just in case, without telling anyone else. This will create a good, solid reason for holding you for a while... and then they may release you, and you will be happy like a clam. You likely know the probability theory, so go ahead and calculate the numbers. What is the chance that you get a bag planted if there are 10 officers at the scene, and each has a p=0.1 of planting it? P=(1-0.9^10), or 0.65 !!!
Here is my view on it. I am not a CPA, so do not take this to IRS.
Goods cannot be taxed before they are sold. Your rocks with silver are safe. You may have them registered as inventory, or as raw product, or anything in between, but until your business sells them for MONEY you do not owe tax.
That would be the same case with BTC. However recently the US Government acknowledged that BTC is MONEY. This means that once you receive a Bitcoin in your possession, you may owe tax on the profits (if there are any) from the transaction. A BTC is not a potential money anymore, it is money now.
This means that when the USA acknowledged that BTC is money it was a setup intended to bury BTC in regulations and taxation (that is nearly impossible to do.)
Yep. I'm so stupid to increase my money by 4X in less than a year...
You can always trade stocks and foreign currencies. BTC is just one kind of foreign currency. However this trading is just speculation; you do not produce anything new in the process, you do not enrich the planet with results of your labor. All that you do is you transfer money from pockets of less lucky (or less wise) people into your pockets (assuming that you are more lucky or more wise.)
Humanity would thank you far more if you instead use the time to review the existing SlashCode and figure out how it can be served from thousands of mini-servers that Slashdot readers run on their fast connections (fiber, cable etc. are quite common in cities.) BitTorrent could be a starting point for that. One way to do that is to simply mirror the database. The new articles and comments are not posted all that often - maybe one every 10 seconds, and they are small in size. The catch is in ensuring integrity of the content. One way to do that is by signing all comments and posts, and checking for the signature in the browser... using JS. That would be probably one of few, rare as hen's teeth, useful applications of JS.
The edit window should be configurable in Preferences. Once you click "Submit" the comment is posted
This would be a function that is available ony to logged in users, since it's much easier to follow the identity with a cookie. AC comments are published instantly, and they cannot edit them (because they cannot be easily linked to their comments.)
This would be a great example of an improvement that can be done within the Classic UI.
Maybe 10% ? There is no way to find out. Even 10% is too many if the encounter means your conviction. Some departments are 100% honest; other are 100% corrupted. LEOs are routinely lying in court; from that it's one small step to planting evidence.
It doesn't always mean that they are rotten to the core. They simply may want to have an insurance against an error in judgement. (For example, after a chase a cop shoots a drug dealer; then he discovers that the dealer was unarmed. Well, not anymore...) Even a theoretically honest cop may want to carry something that will save his $behind if the circumstances turn ugly. A cop who is already power-mad will be happily carrying a wide selection of evidence. And once that bag, or that gun, is available among one of the dozen cops... it will end up near your body, or in your car. Those items are freebies among the police.
I will gladly grant you that I do not expect an honest, law-abiding cop to carry or plant evidence. From that I can turn this table and ask you: what percentage of cops YOU think are crystal clear honest?
I look forward to the day when the police confiscate my phone so I can get back 40k or so
I hope this will be enough to cover new front teeth, and the discomfort that you will experience when a JBT kicks them out for you. The city may pay you $40K later, if you are lucky. However the "officer" on steroids will not be punished; he will be free to continue his "activities."
The dental chair is not the worst that can happen to you. Police can charge you with any number of imaginary violations, such as "obstructing the officer" or "disturbing the peace." Many of them carry bags with drugs and "spare" drop guns. If need arises, those items will be "found" on you.
If you cannot defend yourself against those charges you will become a criminal, and then your life in the USA, as you know it, will be pretty much over. The police have too much power today. Your absolute best plan of action is to never, ever deal with a police officer in your life. Many of them are good people; but you cannot take the risk.
With regard to Beta, I will be avoiding
When the other 90% of websites out there turn off JS then I guess that argument will hold up
At least 90% of the Web sites that I visit do not require JS, and are perfectly usable without it. The few that insist on JS are never revisited. There are many Web sites out there, and so little time.
Would everybody have preferred them to write it using asp.net?
They are free to internally use whatever they want, as long as they send standard HTML to the browser. I do not want to permit random Web sites to run random scripts on my computer. It may be in a sandbox, but even the permitted actions may be undesirable. A small piece of JS code can run DDoS, for example, without you knowing it.
I'm not seeing anything bad coming from the Beta site.
Malicious code is often distributed through ad servers.
Well I haven't seen any security warnings or people beating down the door claiming that there PII was stolen from Slashdot, but I'll keep my eyes open.
That's a good plan. Besides, you have other things to lose than just the PII. It's a good thing that JS sandbox cannot be breached, ever, and that the code of all browsers is going through mathematical proof of correctness before release. It also helps that Firefox's code is secret, and nobody can look for bugs in it.
You don't have to lock the front door of your house. Most likely your neighbors won't be entering. However most of us still lock our doors - just because it's a good idea. I want my computer locked. Most of the JS out there is trying to sell me things and to sell me to others. JS rarely has a value to me. HTML alone is functional enough. I can understand that if you are building a complex piece of software in browser (like Gmail or Google Docs) then you need JS. But most web sites are not that advanced; nor should they be, because it requires a lot of trust. I do not trust any Web site simply because there is no reason for me to do so. With nothing to gain and something to lose, the ratio of those two numbers gets very simple to calculate.
Some of us are here for the
Sorry, Sir, but this is a shared Web site. The cause that those "petulant whining (not whinnying, actually, unless you are into ponies
This situation is comparable with a war against powerful alien invaders. Soldiers of your country's army are shooting at the enemy and get killed by a thousand in return, but you, a farmer, are upset that defenders' dead bodies are all over your garden.
What's amazing to me is that there's soooooo much animosity towards the changes in the new website
Just about as much animosity as you'd have toward an idea to hack your leg off because marketroids at some faraway corporation think they get a few dollars off of your misery.
It may not be the prettiest thing on the block but can somebody point out some functional deficiencies?
It does not work without JavaScript. Most people here know well why JS should be disabled.
It's not like this is the Healthcare.gov site is it?
It's getting there, though, and pretty fast.
I would not give a dime to extortionists. They can have their domain and their archives - and especially the site code.
The old SlashCode was published long ago, and I don't think that it was much improved since then. All the effort went into JS sliders and whatnot, which I cannot even see. None of that is needed. Slashdot's value is in comments, not in how shiny they are rendered.
Heavily greasemonkey script the
That's about as useful as buying Windows 8 and then modding the hell out of it so that it resembles something usable.
You may do that, but MS will shout from rooftops that they sold you a copy and you just LOVED it. Millions of other people will hear it and buy Win8 themselves, even though they are unable to transform it into a usable OS.
Believe me, there's no confusion about the immensity of the community's contribution to the site.
The community's contribution *is* the site. Who would need a blog with ten articles per day and no discussion?
Unfortunately, lack of confusion does not mean "correct understanding of the lay of the land." The business development people may be totally wrong and at the same time not confused about what they perceive as truth. Is the Pope confused about his religion?
If the classic "just the bytes, ma'am" mode disappears, contributors who care about such things will instantly migrate elsewhere. Hell, 90% of people around here can whip up a new Slashdot-like discussion board out of existing bits and pieces in under 24 hours. What would be the value of the JS monstrocity that the new owners of
It will take some serious bandwidth to serve the new Slashdot. A central server will not be sufficient. A distributed design is needed, one that is both scalable and secure. Perhaps some BitTorrent foundation can be used. Ideally, the new Slashdot would exist "in the network," but not on any one server. Such schemes were proposed in FreeNet.
But if the Classic mode is officially killed, Slashdot will be forked; I have no doubt about that. I am reading
It's always a great idea to question architectural plans once you bulldozed the entire neighborhood
The problem is that old policies are dead and buried. Any new policy that is issued under the "old" system would cost twice as much, simply because (a) insurers lost a ton of money already on all those changes, and (b) it's a good time to raise the prices across the board (now that all insurers are in a similar position.)
The only winning move was to not play. Leave the sleeping dogs alone. A change in healthcare should have started with one simple question: where is the money going to come from? Right now a government goon just puts a gun to your head and orders you to pay up - even if you, as a free person, may elect to not have an insurance. Maybe you are young and healthy; maybe you are rich; maybe you are a fatalist; maybe you are a gambler; maybe you just need the money.
The problem is very simple: (a) healthcare is expensive, and (b) many people are poor. Obamacare does not change anything here. Costs go even higher, and people do not get new jobs and new income. All that happens is that a small group of people gets the privilege to pay for healthcare of a much larger group.
One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis
