This is Big Brother. They will try to sell it to you in a thousand different ways, safety, security, convenience... but make no mistake, the government will be able to record, monitor, and control at any time that they choose.

Erm... who says it will reverse? Perhaps it is growing warmer regardless and humans are merely accelerating it?

Or... consider this: Perhaps it is supposed to be going back into an ice age with all of the landmasses covered with glaciers. Perhaps a small amount of human caused global warming is a good thing and we are just overdoing it right now.

Regardless of any of this, we need to stop polluting. I like breathing clean air and I like drinking clean water and I like walking in clean environments.

ROFLMAO

I will be right there next to you... erm, maybe. I will be right there next to someone anyways.

It is kind of pointless to say, "rah rah rah! go civil disobedience" and then hide behind Anonymous Coward. I am sure the NSA already knows that strikethree is me.

But yeah. You go with your bad self. Stand up (well, hide behind a keyboard and a hundred proxies) and tell The Man, "No more! I (whoever I might be) will not stand for this!"

You just gotta love it. I could not even invent this shit.

Yes. So... what?

Do you really expect everyone to care about everyone? Yes, we should all treat each other decently; however, I (and nobody else that I know) could possibly care for someone they have not met. Millions of people are suffering incredibly or dying all of the time. I would be a spiritual and emotional mess if I were to actually care directly.

Otherwise, they are not fundamentally different. "I do not care" directly translates to "I will not try to force".

Once every couple of years, I see a post that needs to be +6 or higher. This was one of them.

Your words are calm, clear, rational, logical, and point out the real issue.

Thank you for sharing.

Funny. I tried the same thing with the IRS for a "business" that I run. Well, it is really a group of shareholders. They actually own everything.

The IRS still taxed my personal income and still taxed each of the individual entities in proportion to what they owned vs the income of this "strange" new legal entity.

You can not just shrug off your responsibilities by saying that there is no law concerning this new type of entity that you created. Each individual organization, department, or whatever, is responsible in the ratio of their ownership in the absence of existing laws to cover this unique entity.

On the subject of the FOIA requests being made here, all of the entities are clearly subject to FOIA requests. Creating an entity between them that performs work for all of them does not negate any of the FOIA requirements placed upon the original entities.

This violates the letter and the spirit of the law at the same time. The person authorized to make the statement that they are not subject to FOIA should be subject to the full penalties of the law as well as the individual entities (police departments) which "own" or created the entity (SWAT) under discussion.

What is it with all of this bizarre new "legal theory" bullshit that is being thrown about relatively recently to try and break the letter and/or spirit of the law? I strongly suspect that it is emanating from the highest levels of government. Possibly from seeing Dick Cheney and friends using the Department of Justice to get away with it in the run-up to the Iraq war. Regardless, this kind of bullshit needs to be stamped out and HARD. If not, we will soon see anarchy again.

This is not an entertainment device so an E-Ink display would be great. Can they be made touchscreen?
Another reason for the E-Ink display would be great battery life.

I want one of the models to be fairly large; almost like strapping a Nexus 5 to my wrist.
It must be thin. The batteries can be in the wrist strap (which should allow for very long batter life (24 hours minimum)).
The wrist strap must not absorb anything, must not be coated with hard metal, and must let my skin breathe.

Applications that I would use/need:
GPS/Maps (navigation is not needed! I am perfectly capable of finding my own way, just show me where I am.)
Time (of course)
Text messaging (possibly with a removable handheld keyboard type thing for when having long conversations via Hangouts or whatever).
Phone capabilities with a hardwired earpiece that can be pulled from the device and automatically retracted. Speakerphone optional.
Built in microphone and camera with LEDs hardwired (can not be surreptitiously turned on in software!) to show if they are active. May as well have an LED to show if the earpiece is active as well.

If other neat things like body and air sensors can be implemented, then great. Air pressure, blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels, sugar levels, body temp, air temp, etc etc. Magnetic compass. You get the idea about sensors. Ability to turn them individually and as a group.

A hardware switch that turns off all data collection and transmission (making it essentially a digital watch for the duration) that can not be bypassed by software.

I would pay large sums of money for such a device. I would be afraid to have such a device without the hardware switches described.

Honestly, to me, it seems that all of those are really algorithms. Granted, a lot of human activities can be considered algorithmic, but activities are not central to human nature. They are the results of human nature.

Be careful with that one. Words like "understand" mean a lot more than you seem to be implying with your glib repartee. Algorithmically determining the "proper" response to a series of words is not in any way a form of "understanding"; however, it is a prerequisite.

Ultimately, truly defining the Turing Test appears to be impossible with our current level of understanding of consciousness. Am I a human or an AI? It would seem to me that an AI is nowhere near the level that can respond to you like I have.

This is the bar that people expect an AI to pass. It is not merely fancy behaviors. I do believe those fancy behaviors are going to be useful to AI so I am not belittling them in any way. Some very amazing things have been achieved.

How does spacetime know how fast something is going through it? If there is nothing else other than spacetime and a single photon, what regulates the photon's speed? What is the speed relative to?

Hm. For several years in Colorado Springs, I shared out my internet access to any and all. The SSID was PublicDontAbuse (just in case anyone here on Slashdot saw it.) I did not monitor or log anything that happened on it.

Normally, I would notice police cars and real estate agents parked on the street behind my house for a half hour or so. I felt good knowing that I was helping random people and making their lives just a bit better.

It has been a few years now since I have done it (long story) so I am sure if there were to be any negative repercussions, I would have seen them by now. Honestly, if anything had happened, my only plan was to look at the judge and say, "The police tore apart everything I owned and found no evidence that I personally did anything of the things I am accused of. It has been established that I left my access point wide open to anyone. If you feel that the State is improved by penalizing me, then so be it. We both know I am not actually guilty of anything other than kindness to my fellow man."

Would that stop me from going to jail? Not bloody likely... but possible. I just don't care. I have lived a good life. While I do not relish dying in prison, fear can fuck right off. I am doing what I will.

Because negative facts dominate?

Administration is "control". There is a severe control freak fetish going on right now. Ultimately, it is a losing proposition. It is impossible to control every last bit of everything. People need to learn to relax and observe rather try to force the outcome.

I suspect that one of the pillars of this control freakery is fear. I am unsure how many pillars there are or what the others may be, but there is surely more than just fear at play. Perhaps one of the other pillars is linked with our need to make sense of the world.

How useful is that lightning fast coding going to be when you do not know where you are going?

You were saying?

Then, you went to:

Yes, you do want to mix the more experienced people with the less experienced people. There are other attributes you will want to mix on as well; however..

Your stereotypes are inaccurate. I have seen a 24 year old (recently) wipe the floor with a bunch of older "more experienced" people in cleaning up and restoring the network that their supposed better experience created.

I have, again recently, seen an older person come in to a project that was a product of a younger, faster, fresh person and do more in a month than the younger person did in a year.

It is all about the people. Perhaps the older person appears to be slower because they are actually thinking instead of just slinging code. Perhaps the younger person appears to be making mistakes because you are not seeing the whole picture, just shims to hold up what the final architecture will look like. Not everyone thinks the same. There are lots of valid solutions to a problem, not just the one solution that you see.

Wow. That has not been my experience at all. New ideas and paradigms come from people who can think and are not fearful. Sure, some young people have less fear due to inexperience but that does not align along the axis of intelligence. There may even be a negative correlation there.

In short, you are not being insightful in any way. You are... stereotyping. Stereotyping is the basis of incompetent and ultimately destructive discrimination.

In the world that I have seen, you have to actually look at a person to be able to ascertain their qualities. Discrimination based on surface attributes can be useful if there is too much data to parse through, but you risk missing the real gems.