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Comment Re:Welcome back Do Not Track header (Score 2) 85

Microsoft famously poisoned-pilled their implementation to kill it by making it the default, which gave advertisers an excuse to claim people didn't really mean to set it, and ignore it.

This is bullshit.

First, do you realize what a ridiculous kind of "standard" DNT is? Advertisers promise to honor it, as long as users promise not to use it. This is a real life Catch 22, and nobody should defend it.

The issue is worse though: the DNT "standard" wasn't ever intended to stop tracking. It was intended to sabotage other proposals submitted to the W3C who would have had an impact on Google's bottom line. From this point of view it succeeded brilliantly.

At the time tracking was considered an important issue and some reasonably effective solutions were submitted for standardization. One of them, for example, boiled down to embedding functionality equivalent to AdBlock directly in browsers. That was a customer-facing design, because it would have left the choice to customers, and stopped browsers from contacting malicious tracing sites completely.

Google realized the danger and invented DNT. DNT is a terrible technical solution, and its problems were well understood at the time. Here are some issues:
  - there is no way to enforce DNT against a non-cooperating site
  - there is no way to find out in advance whether some site honors DNT or not
  - there is no way to even find out whether some particular request resulted in your being tracked
  - the feature is opt-out for tracking - an underhanded ploy to take advantage of less knowledgeable users, thus favoring the ad sellers. A standard intended to protect customers should default to more protection, not less.

Google bulldozed the alleged standard through the W3C with great fanfare, leveraging its membership in the Digital Advertising Alliance and requesting Mozilla to support the proposal (Mozilla was getting good money from Google at the time, so they embraced the DNT scam, principles be damned). Of course, DNT was a failure in the market place, as expected. But it did succeed at its real goal, which was to bury all competing standard proposals which would have benefited customers.

As a proof of the deep duplicity of Google in regards to DNT, consider that Google never honored it, even though it was their own proposal.

Comment Re:working (Score 1) 24

I do consider taxation theft, there is no purpose to it except for controlling the population. The fact that people accept different *levels* of theft depending on how much money they make just proves how much of theft it is, because they more money someone makes, the fewer people there are in that category of people, given that, it is easier to structure theft in such a way as to convince the majority that they don't suffer as much as the other people, who are hit with a much bigger crime.

Comment Re:Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1, Interesting) 215

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

Comment Re:Cryo-embalming (Score 1) 80

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Comment Re:Good use. (Score 4, Interesting) 71

The main question is if the plant is still safe. It hasn't been used in years. Is it still in good maintenance? Was the design meant to be idled for years? What are the risks of restarting that particular design of reactor after all those years? Is the land there safe for workers of the plant after reactor 2's accident all those years ago? And what plans are in place to prevent what happened at reactor 2 from happening at reactor 1?

I actually don't know the answer to any of those questions. But I hope experts are actively asking those.

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