Comment Re:Silk Road down? (Score 1) 222
Obligatory comic for conversations about entrapment:
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-was-entrapped
Personally the law should step in and make this illegal.
How do you know if someone is tracking you illegally or not? There's huge financial incentive to do so and many ways of doing it without getting caught. So you put that idea into Washington and you'll get back some twisted, ineffective legislation that puts a huge compliance risk on normal companies/webmasters while paving a giant exemption for law enforcement. Welcome to the land of unintended consequences.
it basically shut down the city of san francisco for at least two weeks. they held the guy in jail, but he refused to divulge. the mayor even went to the jail to ask him personally. he deserves prison.
Your understanding misses the essentials. Ultimately, Childs was too ideological/paranoid/stubborn for his own good; however, the city's prosecution of him was malicious and unnecessary. The jury had to convict based on legal specifics, but judge and jury alike felt that this was an unfortunate usage of the system.
Autonomous cars will more than likely drive at exactly the speed limit.
On the plus side, you'll be able to use that time reading, eating, or working on a laptop (assuming it's fully-autonomous and not some sort of supervised thing). The potential for road trips is awesome: get off work Friday night, pack your bags, and depart before midnight... you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination 8 hour later and have--essentially--an extra day of vacation to work with. Even the refueling (whether gas or electric) will be automatic someday.
call me when your injured and they want one of these to drive you to the hospital. then tell me how you think of these "autonomous" cars. i'm alive because someone put me in their car as kid and drove me to the hospital as a kid doing 80 the entire drive.
Eventually, I'd expect these self-driving cars to provide a big red "help me" button that dials an emergency responder and puts them on in-car speakerphone while simultaneously offering to drive you to the nearest ER or police station in a special "emergency transit mode". New laws will permit the car to violate some traffic laws while in this mode. Other self-driving cars will receive advanced notice of your passage and intelligently get out of the way.
Like any technology, version 1 will suck. But even with version 1, you're going to be safer overall: the drawback of not being able to drive 10-20MPH to the hospital (on the extremely rare occasions where that's truly needed) will be outweighed by the benefit of having an always safe, always alert AI driver.
Where I come from, that's called "gross negligence" and "endangering lives". If you need to be taken to a hospital ASAP, call the police or an ambulance.
Where I'm from, 80 MPH is "cruising speed", at least on the interstate.
"Those running [nuclear reactors]" are generally tied to the plant and don't travel around much. Operator experience is not really tied to the number of reactors in a given area.
But organizational experience is geographically clustered. When something goes bad wrong at one unit in a big fleet (like Entergy's or Exelon's), the whole organization is stimulated to respond (with new processes, best practices, safety culture, etc.). Western fleets are smaller and their operators have less cumulative organizational experience (though they are apparently trying to compensate by starting a new industry group).
Democracy can handle the monitoring of everything, if protection and regulations are in place and enforced.
False. Policies and procedures are paper-thin. They do not reflect social reality; they do not reflect organizational reality; and they do not reflect technical reality. And tomorrow--when the next witch hunt, the next red scare, the next 9/11 happens--all those high and mighty policies will be changed with the stroke of a pen or (more likely) no pen at all... just silent, expectant pressure from the top.
The only policy that prevents misuse of data is that of not collecting it in the first place. Even a great policy embedded into the heart and soul of a nation will be circumvented, diluted, compromised, and re-interpreted with the passage of time, despite every government agent swearing to defend it.
The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater [boston.com] than a household headed by someone under 35. This wealth gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago.
Isn't that as it should be, after working and saving all your life? Net worth includes possessions, house, savings for retirement, etc. Also, take the aging one-percenters (or the 0.1%) out of the numbers (or use median instead of mean) and I bet the disparity growth is a lot flatter. Fundamentally, there's a difference b/t being well off because you worked hard all your life and being well off because you (1) owned the means of productions, (2) bought off legislators, and (3) found a way to exploit others.
It would imply that the NSA is decades ahead of academia in not only cryptography but almost every area of computer science. Considering how inefficient and incompetent the rest of the government is (even the DoD, i.e. unencrypted drones) I just cannot believe that is the case.
In 1995, NSA added a single bit-rotation to SHA that made it considerably stronger, but they didn't explain their reasoning at the time. It took several more years before academia found significance weaknesses, with 2004 being the year that SHA-0 (as the original, non-rotated version is now called) was really cracked wide open. That (arguably) puts them about a decade ahead (in a situation where they willingly tipped their hand). These folks employee the most math PhD's in the world and have their own chip fabs... it's not hard to imagine them being two decades ahead on some important cryptographic questions.
The canonical example is pollution.... individuals would have legal standing to sue in court.
Would this work? You decide.
I want to be support libertarians, but these just-so stories do nothing to advance their credibility. In your example, being big gives you resources that you can use to cover up the problem (for decades), bribe public officials, corrupt scientific debate, conduct media blitzes, create shell corporations, intimidate witnesses, and [in some cases] force consumers to contractually relinquish their right to legal redress. Good luck trying to fight that on lower-middle class wage. It happens, but with such rarity and friction that this game-theoretic scenario is not going to unfold in the way you describe.
I don't really get the point of adding such a major syntax-changing feature to the language for the sole purpose of syntactic convenience.
While there are definitely a lot of judgement calls and tradeoffs to consider when designing a language, syntactic convenience is a big part of why we use programming languages to begin with.
I mean.... wasn't that their whole main argument against operator overloading? (the other argument, that operator overloading makes for unreadable code can be shown to be a red herring).
As you indicate, the operator overloading argument was/is bogus. I suspect that everyone tried to misuse the feature when it was introduced with C++, in much the same way that everybody used a dozen different fonts the first time they ran a WYSIWYG word processor. The people who got bit by this bad code went on to write best practices and coding standards that breathlessly prohibited operator overloading and Java followed suit. So you have dumb things like == testing for reference equality of strings, Vec3D classes that you must
"Yeah, hey guys... I actually came here on the 'death to america' ticket, but it turns out I like jeans, scantily clad girls, beer, and decent-paying jobs and, you know, I'd be grateful if you could, I don't know, keep me?"
Yeah... I always thought we should be "bombing" them (the Islamic states) with girly mags and Britney Spears CD's.
Secularization is a solution.
Courts mistake an informed jury for a partial jury. By allowing courts to manage the information a jury hears, they in fact create partial juries. The correct solution to a jury that is swayed by speech is more speech that counters the first speech. Whoever runs out of valid arguments first is the loser.
Whoever gets tarred with the biggest stigma would be the loser. The justice system you imagine would decide cases based on gossip and innuendo, on ill-researched half-truths spouted by loud mouths and anonymous forum posters, on the popular passions of the current moment, on who voted for the wrong party or liked the wrong vices or joined the wrong religion (or the wrong sub-sub-denomination of a religion). Seriously, where did you get those rose-colored glasses of human nature? If we worked like that, we wouldn't need a justice system: mobs and vigilantes would dispassionately confront the accused, gather witness statements, and determine the appropriate judgement.
Can you imagine if we held scientists, who are also supposed to be impartial judges of evidence, to the standards of a jury? Instead of submitting papers for peer review by experts, we'd be submitting them to people who are prohibited from knowing anything about the field.
No, you'd be submitting them to people who mostly don't know anything about the field and are prohibited from researching outside the curated environment of a courtroom. And yeah, that would suck for science. But there's a difference: science produces extremely technical descriptions of the real world. Law, by contrast, should (in theory, and sometimes in fact) be executable by laypersons... you could replace juries with panels of lawyers or judges versed in the technical aspect of the law and probably get better "technical" outcomes. But too much technicality and the law becomes divorced from the day-to-day real world wisdom of the people who are subject to it. The operations of law require a balance b/t technical and human factors that's not required in the sciences.
"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention.
