Sadly criminal law is all over the map when it comes to rules about intent

Honestly, though. That's because lawmakers who seldom understand the technology jump to try to pass new laws for new problems. And they end up passing really badly written laws.

In a lot of cases, they could have used existing laws. And in other cases, they just pass overbroad laws because "teh interwebs" are scary.

Changing the threshold for criminal liability to the laughable levels used for civil liability is a terrible mistake.

The problem is it takes many years to fix badly written laws. And in the mean time a lot of people can get their lives ruined ... when defacing a web page can carry a longer sentence than an actual murder, something is seriously wrong.

But half-wit lawmakers who want to quickly pass a law for the evening news sound bite have neither the time, nor the skills apparently, to write a law which makes sense and will hold up in court.

These days it seems like governments get one in-house lawyer to say "sure, works for me", and then proceed.

Kinda like Alberto Gonzales, who more or less demonstrated his grasp of the US Constitution was to terrible as to disqualify him from having been the AG in the first place. That idiot would rubber stamp anything.

Actually before the Higgs the problem with the model was that the particles all had non-zero masses. This breaks symmetries which we observe to be held in nature and was a huge problem and also gave rise to the violation of unitarity: if there were no masses there would be no unitarity violations.

Part of the beauty of the Higgs mechanism is that not only did it explain how the particles could have masses while the symmetries of nature we observe are preserved but it also called out the unitarity violations which the non-zero particle masses caused!

Every model has its problems though. The issue with the SM is that the Higgs mass is so much lighter than the Planck scale. This means that there has to be something probably not much higher in mass than the scales we have already probed. However this is not a hard constraint. The higher the energy of this new physics the less "natural" but with only one universe to play with there is no way to be certain that a one in a million chance did not occur when setting up the laws of nature....it's just not very likely.

Thanks!

What happened to the idea that automation would generate free time for humans?

It's still true .. only in this case "free time" is unemployment.

It was naive to say that automation would make all of our lives better. Mostly it just makes corporate profits go up, and everybody else gets screwed.

It sounds like he was answering a different question: "What is the shape of a black hole?". That's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. Asking whether they have a shape is akin to asking: "Does something which exists have a shape?". In fact this article is actually a violation of Betteridge's law because the answer is 'yes', Black Holes do indeed have a shape although that answer imparts no useful information whatsoever.

The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.

So no, they can't do anything they like with your content. Worst they can do is use it in an ad for the Photos service, or use it in a training dataset.

And what part of and to develop new ones in that sentence you quoted are you unclear about?

If they decided to launch a Google dating service, those photos could very well be used to help "develop" it (i.e., pre-populate the data set, promote it, etc). The new services is even worse as it's even more open-ended as anything could come under "develop" - use your family photo on a billboard advertising it? Promotion could be argued as a form of developing the service - growing the userbase, say.

Or if Google develops some sort of new advertising service or thing that works with third parties - could sharing the data be a form of development?

Hell, they could very well close down Photos, and re-develop Picasa Cloud or something and "helpfully" import your photos into it. As it is a new service, well, new agreement and all.

They were demanding severance pay that was already owed them by the company and had not been paid. The financial condition of the company is of no consequence.

Except now EVERYONE is screwed. By the company going under, no one gets paid anymore. The ex-employees basically screwed themselves because the company was on the brink - it could survive given installment payments (which are legally protected), but since the courts awarded full compensation immediately, there was insufficient assets to cover the new expense and bankruptcy ensues.

Which means NO ONE gets paid their due - the employees who were there are screwed their pay, and the ex-employees line up like everyone else to collect pennies on the dollar.

Yes, the company was wrong to screw the ex-employees, and perhaps if they worked out a payment plan things would've gotten better. But the ex-employees were also wrong in insisting on instant payments. It's winning the battle (court case for the severance owed) and losing the war (the company goes under). Now everyone gets to line up while the assets are sold for whatever little money is left.

Yes, they got their victory. Pyrrhic one, that is for now they're out that money, AND it's not like the company can pay legal fees any more. Hope they liked their moral victory - because if the lawyers have their way, they're first in line and everyone else gets the scraps.

I suppose for some people, getting 5 cents now is better than getting a dollar paid out over a year or so.

By the time something similar is offered, hopefully ipv6 (ok, I lol a touch as I type that) will fill the need (it has multi cast I think).

Then you'll have to buy IPv6 capable DVRs. But cable companies are moving that "into the cloud" (in fact, streaming services can be considered a form of DVR in the cloud), so unless you go tell your DVR to record some IP address at some time or you'll miss it... which seems to defeat the entire purpose of streaming a show. (And really, the chances two people will stream the same show at the same time is probably quite slim, so either your DVR has to spy on you and opportunistically catch it ahead of time, or it'll sit there for a few minutes while it hopes others will join in on the stream).

My history of windows use has always reinforced the idea of "clean install" over upgrade

Agree on this one ... there have been lots of "you can buy this upgrade for your current" which haven't always worked, and then you end up without proper install media for the version you're running.

I won't run a version of Windows for which I don't own the install media for. Because it basically leaves you at the mercy of hoping nothing ever goes wrong.

And that, in my experience, is a dumb idea with any software.

With Classic Shell you can add the start button back to Windows 8.1. I highly recommend it.

With some tweaking, you can turn a Windows 8.1 desktop into something which pretty much looks like the classic Windows desktop, and ignore the mobile eye candy and app-crap entirely.

After which, Windows 8.1 becomes a fairly decent platform.

I think what Microsoft fails to realize is the things they think are cool and innovative are useful for some people, but utterly fail for people who need a traditional desktop.

I don't use a single feature on my desktop Windows 8.1 machine which Microsoft had configured as the GUI by default -- but once I got rid of their "innovative" crap, the OS itself is pretty nice.

So I see a gushing blog post, trumpeting way too many "touch first" applications, claiming some fancy innovations (which are mostly the app-ification of Windows and which other companies already have), as well as some biometric stuff which sounds annoying and is likely not very secure.

I see nothing in this which would make me "upgrade" from Windows 8.1, and except for the Edge thing, not much of it seems especially innovative to me.

But, you guys download it and test the crap out of it, let the inevitable bugs and security holes get shaken out ... and maybe by next July I'll decide if I'm willing to consider the free upgrade.

I question if this will offer a useful desktop experience, or if they're so focused on mobile that they've lost the plot.

Asking questions like "Does a Black Hole have a shape?" makes you have doubts about those qualifications though. In physics you need to be careful to be precise. Anything which exists has a shape and yet he is not questioning the existence of Black Holes nor even whether they are spherical but rather whether they appear distorted from spherical by their gravitational field bending light.

All this is perfectly fine. Frankly, long-term our problem is going to be figuring out what to do with all the people out of jobs due to pervasive automation, and UBI is the obvious way to solve this. I fully expect us to end with an arrangement whereby the work of 1% (largely maintenance of automated systems that do all the "dirty work") will be sufficient to provide for the needs of the remaining 99%, and still have potential left. I also fully expect people to actually compete for the right to do that work.

The problem is that a few states have actually refused to recognize same-sex marriages from other states, and most purportedly "states rights" proponents in this debate supported them in that (I have no idea where Rand stands on it personally).

No, but you can at least ask him what he intends to do as a president. And if he says, for example, that he is personally against weed, but would legalize it on the federal level because he believes that a federal ban would be unconstitutional, that works for me.