Authoritarians are not simplistic 1 dimensional or binary extremes. Given how important the Anarchy to Authoritarian scale are to human existence you would think we would study and educate people on this aspect of life/politics/economics etc.

Gates is an Authoritarian, he is not a dictator but he is not in the middle either. It is understandable that Gates would take authoritarian positions given his bias; he can identify with and agree with similar reasoning to his own in other areas.

Privatized MRI means way more machines that we need, my city has a dozen of the things; to the point where they have to advertize on TV trying to bring in customers. That drives up the price considerably. Plus MRI machines waste a lot of Helium; probably more than party balloons - the tech itself is horribly expensive! I know an MRI operator and it costs 10s of thousands of dollars every time they dump coolant- the shutdown and startup costs are crazy.

The cost of the MRI machine and it's operation don't matter; the profit margins will be the same either way and a competing market adds advertizing overhead, profit overhead, additional facilities overhead, additional staff and management overhead. Clearly tech like MRI can't be efficiently managed in the free market and it's religious dogma and greed that defends it...

The ACA isn't really about fixing medical care it addressed some of the insurance issues; the cost savings will be temporary.

Employer indentured servitude NEEDS TO END. It started to attract labor in the 1940s but it became a double edged sword, either trapping employees or the overhead cost of those shackles becoming a bargaining chip or a theft (cutting it after breaking past deals etc.)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Few people ever really think about how they would have acted if they were German citizens around the 1930s. Most people would do nothing but move with the crowd and many would get caught up in the propaganda.

Few resisted or ran away, because it was easier to fall in line. Same situation today. The parallels exist for those who can think about it without being too influenced by the herd. We are encouraged to vilify the people who oppose the authority and to dogmatically (and thoughtlessly) adhere to authority. Orwell said it, in times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. We are at that point, most people can see that both parties are functionally dead and it's all one big scam - with the people pointing it out being marginalized and the people making REAL impact are treated as insurgents (because truth alone is not enough in the information overload age, it has to have bite to get noticed.)

Godwin's law is for simpletons and Nazi sympathizers; prohibiting learning from history more than it stops the ignorant name calling rants (while true that the trolls seem hopeless to educate should we give up all chances to apply history because of them?)

EXACTLY. Such information is incredibly hazardous to the system and needs more protections than the security clearance system itself!

In the hands of the wrong managers, politicians, appointees... this information could be used to target the honest and promote the corrupt. Somebody cheating on their wife could be let go while another selling out their country to a multinational gets ignored.

The trick to MODERN spying is to do it for a multinational corporation who can indirectly give it to their government. Nobody seems to care about corporate ties. Look at the CIA and Valerie Plame, she did her work thru a corporation and her contacts could just appear as doing legitimate business (which can be quite illegitimate, because it's just business as usual.)

It is easy to see how the phone companies were upset with cell phones and how it cost less than a wired grid combined with a history of new cheaper technology maintaining similar profits drove prices down and hurt the old businesses.

But then they realized it was an opportunity and they embraced the change and exploited it as opposed to fighting or ignoring it (like the power companies are doing.)

Now they have people paying MORE for service that costs them less to maintain; their profits have gone up significantly the whole transition period. Naturally, due to the stock market they will never let go of these profits despite the competition, all the players have publicly traded stock value to maintain.

HA! I knew somebody would bite. "Tough on crime" politicians brag about how many minor laws they elevate into becoming felonies. Felony doesn't mean what it used to, every time you elevate something it weakens the meaning. Felony doesn't really make it major, the classification is legal and political not based upon actual severity.

We don't punish rape that harshly - if it was not a minor crime why do we treat it like one (other than the felony labeling games.) We punish hackers exposing crimes like rape more than the people they expose.

Well I can't expect everybody to understand what I'm trying to say. Whether or not I am to blame doesn't matter, you don't understand and I don't have the time to spend on a minority. If you are just playing a academic style definition game then just go to hell; I deal with enough of that crap.

1) Why do we need a machine as foolish as an adult human? Duplicating the downsides to that level of "intelligence" might take centuries. Self aware? Why is that intelligent or even desirable? 99% might happen soon but the pointless last 1% could take forever.

2) Once computers can do jobs on par with an 8 year old the whole economy will collapse as nearly every job can be learned and performed by a child if you remove the immaturity factor. Robotics already out performs humans it just needs the brain power.

3) Human brain simulations that are accurate will exist by that time but it is not fair to call it smarter simply because it can execute the simulation faster than real time. Brain scans already have been done back in 2011. An open source java simulator for a child brain was what? last year?

The problem with prediction is the process, part way down the path the impact of the results CHANGE the nature of the environment. What the resources will be put into developing this super human AI after we've got 75% of what we wanted from the pursuit? Not much.

Parent is correct. The general rule has been that public places are fair game. This is how Paparazzi can stand on public land with a telephoto lens and legally photo almost anything - or rent a helicopter and do fly in public air space.

The wrong laws were used in this case which is why they couldn't win. As far as using some of the anti-freedom laws like disorderly conduct, I'm against those simply because they exist to abuse and rob people of their rights; always defended using edge cases where the public is bias (like how pedophiles or terrorists are politically exploited.)

The history and psychology of clothing would be an interesting read and perhaps that science should be applied to these situations (since people are pretty mindless in choosing their clothing, anything to get them thinking is ok by me.) I've read a book on the topic - it didn't say much; could use more research.

I would think if the identities of the victims were disclosed in the images there would be some laws that could be applied here... But surely they must have laws on the books ALREADY about placing cameras into public restrooms that could be interpreted here... Just because a judge or a DA fucks up doesn't mean we need ANOTHER law to add to the 1000s nobody can remember and everybody is in violation of something if they want to dig. Mistakes happen and people are all too often quick to rush to patches to try to fix naturally occurring human error - resulting in almost no changes long term; if not diminishing returns (that is, until we replace humans with machines... since the problem is ultimately people.)

Something people SHOULD think about is how future technology will come into play and how to address that in a general way - when naked scanners like the air ports have become add-ons to smart phones. Or perhaps nothing should be done, Americans are sick in the head when it comes to nudity. It's not like people don't know what is under those clothes already and to fetishize it seems unhealthy (but fairly normal in the culture, which has to be related to the history of skirts in the 1st place.)

0) JPEG is past, present, and near future. Well supported everywhere.

1) JPEG optimization could be better. Mozilla is doing more of that.

2) Patents on enhancements to JPEG from minor obvious ones to significant compatibility breakers prohibit improvements. JPEG's final compression step was poor from the beginning and the better stuff was patented and unused. At least a decade ago StuffIt used modern binary compression to replace the final phase, which was exempt from existing patents; however, StuffIt patented this idea... it increased compression by 20-30% with no loss.

3) JPEG 2000 used a more modern encoding process probably similar to VP8 as far as the quantization and color space handling. Nobody uses JPEG2000 even though the smarter encoding makes compression artifacts less noticeable. The file size was not much smaller for all that extra RAM and CPU it took over JPEG - plus incompatibility. probably patents involved with it's demise as well.

4) Yet another JPEG replacement by a big corp... When everybody has MORE bandwidth, faster computers, and unimaginably more storage space on their smart phones than their desktops had in the late 90s. Why limit yourself with an obscure format to gain 30% more space when the storage you buy on sale at the end of this year will easily be 30% bigger than last year.

How much more CPU / watts will WebP cost you over JPEG?

I don't care how good it is; it has to be patent free, widespread, and proven.

For a minor crime like rape big fancy defense lawyers are not getting involved unless you are somebody important.

MOST cases are settled !! If suspects hardly ever go to trial because people settle, they only need to scare the shit out of the suspect to confess or make a plea bargain. If you are unlikely to go to trial and fight for your rights (and BE a defendant) then why should they care about violating your rights??

Seriously, with all this settling and success measured by simple conviction rates they can violate rights by the numbers and succeed. It is done all the time; this is just another area.

Multics was too complex so we got Unix which eventually ended up being more complex than the winning argument being made at the time. For HURD / microkernels, the argument is that it is too much overhead for the added stability and security it provides; but now we are running VMs with more total overhead to get SOME similar benefits. VM's add features beyond those obviously...

The point being made is that microkernels are attacked on overhead but here we are adding tons of overhead in various places that leave those complaints coming up empty... Hypervisors make me think of microkernels, in a general sense; obviously they are not the same.

On the topic of VMs being a sign OS have failed to do their job. The leads into a direction GNU/Hurd should be moving towards and my comments along those lines are to try to open eyes and bring up ideas. More than most OS, Hurd is situated to do some big actually innovative things to address the short comings of modern OS which fuel the desire for VMs. There isn't a feature that VMs provide that an OS couldn't do.. and I think they should be doing them instead of obsessing within the same problem space.

Books on a shelf. A loose binary search then a linear search for a tiny subset of 3-4 books and finally insertion of the book.

I suppose you could call it a hash table- where the whole book is hashed down into a short string... called the TITLE...

How about relating how OS have failed to the point where users are running virtual machines. (We all know restricted software makes this worse, but it is not exclusively their fault.)

GNU/Hurd does not seem like so much overhead today given the huge amount of waste a VM creates. Perhaps GNU/Hurd is better suited to address where things have been progressing?

Multics doesn't seem so "bloated" anymore either.