Posts by User McUser 703 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2011
probably best known for co-writing the 1968 book Population Bomb, which in early editions stated that basically everyone in India would inevitably starve to death due to overpopulation in the 1970s and the same fate would overtake the USA in the 1980s.
In Professor Ehrlich's defense, had it not been for the efforts of Norman Borlaug et al., he would have been absolutely right!
So two homosexual individuals could, theoretically, now have their own children (that is, genetically related to both parents)? Just have to flip the fox13 switch to the opposite for one of them, (and in the case of two males, find a surrogate womb) do some in vitro fertilization, and they're good to go.
Probably won't be that easy in practice partly because the experiment was on fish and mammals are probably just different enough, but mostly because people don't like change. After all, look how insane everyone acts about gay *marriage*, and that's just a legal status. The religious wack-jobs are going to completely lose their shit when gay people want to start making their own children.
Hmm, it sure puts the wind up the supposedly impregnable US military.
Obligatory XKCD link: http://xkcd.com/932/
Huh, I figured a BitCoin robbery would go something like this:
https://thenib.com/give-me-all-your-bitcoins-1a1d9f5e630 (scroll down for comic)
decades of experience tells them the ONLY way to get the attention of a jaded audience [...] is to do something that gets their attention.
Newspapers have had advertisements for CENTURIES* and none of them had dancing cowboys hawking low mortgage rates, or played loud inappropriate noises, or flashed distractingly at me while I'm trying to read.
Mostly it's the last one (animated ads) that irritate me. I have a low tolerance for motion in my peripheral vision and it is *really* fucking distracting to have animated ads jiggling and slide-scrolling over and over and over.
*Since 1704, apparently. Source: http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/ad-age-advertising-century-timeline/143661/
Remember when Craigslist ended their "Escort" listings and then there weren't any prostitutes any longer?
Yeah, me neither.
If you want to end underage prostitution, or at least make it more difficult, then the better solution IMO is to legalize adult prostitution. Legalizing adult prostitution means prostitutes of any age can go to the police for help if they are being coerced or abused without fear of being arrested. It also opens brothels/pimps to government inspection of both their facilities and employees which would be far more effective in locating underage prostitutes than moderating or shutting down a website. (Not to mention numerous public health and tax benefits, but that's unrelated.)
Would legal prostitution end this kind of child abuse? No, of course not - underage prostitution has been around since prostitutes have, it hasn't always been illegal or even scorned, and there are plenty of awful people out there willing to facilitate it. But legal adult prostitution will make it more difficult for paedophile pimps to exist and easier for the authorities to find them for two reasons. First, if the Vice Squad isn't spending all their time finding and arresting adult prostitutes, they can work instead on locating and rescuing underage prostitutes. Second, without adult prostitution to mask their presence, paedophile pimps will have a harder time concealing their activities. After all, if you're looking for needles in haystacks it's much easier without all that hay getting in the way.
There's a much easier way - just look at the maintenance logs. Any pilot worth their salt who is flying a plane where one of the engines just throttles up all by itself enough to supposedly yaw the plane is going to log it and ask maintenance to inspect the thing. If they're paranoid enough they might even shut it down completely.
Also, IIRC, the "black box" records the position of the various controls directly so if this hack really did occur then it would not be logged in the flight data recorder.
DNA is the answer.
Oh good Lord no. No no no. Do you know how easy it is to get a DNA sample from someone? We *continually* shed our DNA all over the place; you'd hardly have to even try! Just need a few skin cells or a bit of saliva, and you can use cheap and easy PCR methods to amplify your sample into something more usable.
Though using the DNA in a strand of hair to gain full administrative access to a computer would give a whole new meaning to "getting root access."
When the authors considered the likely sharing of political positions among friends, they found “24% of the hard content shared by liberals’ friends are cross-cutting, compared to 35% for conservatives.”
So now the question becomes, *why* did they share it? Is it a case of mocking the opposition (eg: "Look at what [opponent] said about [contentious issue]!") or actual interest in an opposing viewpoint?
the BBC would need to introduce an EU-wide authentication scheme to implement portability. This means that you’d need to login whenever iPlayer detected you were accessing the service from a non-UK network, which would then run your details against the TV Licensing database to check you’d pay the telly tax back at home.
Doesn't iPlayer do that already? Or can just anybody with an IP address in the UK watch all the BBC TV they like for free?
Archives and Libraries are exempted from many (but not all) copyright restrictions, so in theory they may be well within their rights.
If not, then I'm sure a hoard of lawyers will be dispatched to crush their bones and enslave their offspring and spouses (as required by the Berne Convention.)
I've always disliked Blackberry because they used to be RIM who, in the early 2000s, sued a lot of people over some ridiculous keyboard and email patents. And as a Handspring shareholder at the time, I was especially upset by their antics.
That's what some people call "procedurally generated content" and there are games that do this now; Din's Curse, a Diablo clone, for example.
Another way to put this is that consumers benefit by 50 cents from every dollar they spend at Walmart. Without Walmart, prices would be twice what they are. And what's the benefit that the Walton family get from this? Well, on a 3 per cent profit margin and they own 50 per cent of the company then it looks to me like they get 1.5 cents out of every dollar. And consumers getting 50 cents on the dollar, the entrepreneurs getting 1.5 cents looks pretty close to our Schumpeterian result of the entrepreneurs getting 3 per cent or less of the total value created.
Surely the Waltons enjoy 51.5¢ of savings for every hypothetical-pre-walmart-dollar (HPWD) they spend? They too benefit from the downward pressure on prices, plus they still get their half of the 3% profit margin.
I'd like to see the supposed benefits of Walmart to the US economy graphed against a hypothetical one that existed without Walmart's influence. For example, without Walmart the resources it now uses would have beeen spread out over a wider group of companies and individuals rather than being concentrated in Walmart and the Walton family. Spreading those dollars out amongst more people's pockets (eg: that is, whatever businesses that would have sold the things and stuff had Walmart not existed) would have meant more people would have had more to spend. And by your own assertion they would have been spending twice the money which would generate 2x more tax revenue for the State and local communities leading to better public services (roads, schools, etc.) Higher prices can also support higher wages which could have created more jobs in the US manufacturing sector in a virtuous cycle, with wages linked more closely to productivity.
There's probably some bit of economics knowledge that refutes everything I just wrote; I am keen to hear it if so.
Virtualizing some ancient machine will only bring forward all the stupid software issues that exist in the old version of whatever OS it was running, meaning you'll still need the longest-toothed IT gal/guy to stay on and manage the damned thing.
Better instead to migrate the service to a new platform than to keep dragging along 20 years of legacy BS and unpatched vulnerabilities.
true-life account of Sam Houser, and his fight with a Miami lawyer who wanted to ban video game violence
Please stop insulting lawyers by including this person in their ranks; he was disbarred in 2008.
Setting a record for what may be the most unreasonable jail sentence ever handed down over a Facebook post, a Thailand citizen has started a 25-year stretch behind bars for five pictures deemed insulting to the country's monarchy.
Didn't that one guy in Saudi Arabia get 10 years, fined a million Riyals, and 1000 public lashes for a FB post? I think having the flesh ripped from your buttocks a thousand times by a bamboo cane beats 25 years in prison in the "no me gusta" contest.
Also, he might be facing death by beheading which is arguably even worse.
I'd gladly write "God hates fags" on a cake if cake writing was my job; it's just a fucking CAKE, not a binding endorsement of someone's ideology.
I'd suggest that if you don't want to write things on cakes that you don't agree with to get out of the writing-on-cakes business or only offer a set selection of generic wishes.
PS: Please don't bring up UK law when arguing on this matter; those laws haven't applied here since July 4th, 1776.
After all, [the United States' Constitution] didn't say: "all men are created equal, but some more equal than others" last time I looked
A lot of people confuse the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution but the line you referred to exists only in the former, not the latter. The Fourteenth Amendment does codify the "all men are created equal" sentiment with the guarantee that all people have "the equal protection of the laws."
Comment: As someone who lives and works in Indiana, for as long as I have lived here there has not been, nor is there now, any discrimination based on religion in this State - unless you count the overwhelming levels of casual prejudice against Muslims, which they (they being the legislators who wrote and passed this law) don't. This law was crafted for the singular purpose of letting bigoted Christians discriminate against whomever they pleased (you know, like Jesus did), especially homosexuals, without having to deal with the legal consequences. I'd say that its an embarrassment to our State, but at one time our Governor was the Grand Dragon of the KKK who basically raped a girl to death. (And we were a Union state in the Civil War!)
The Palo Alto Networks senior engineer says legitimate Google Play apps can establish a kind of beachhead on devices that can be invaded by a second app installed from legitimate third party stores like Amazon.
The above quoted line from the article incorrectly asserts that this vulnerability affects the Google Play app store where as the actual report says:
[Android Installer Hijacking] only affects applications downloaded from third-party app stores.
and goes on to explain that this is because:
Google Play downloads Android packages (APKs) to a protected space of the file system. Third party app stores and mobile advertisement libraries usually download APK files to unprotected local storage (e.g. /sdcard/) and install the APK files directly.
Pretending that it's something you would wear at the shops [...]
To be absolutely clear, wearing one's Google Glass in shops (well, everywhere really) was explicitly part of Google's own marketing material. Like they showed in the very first video for Glass (specifically around the 1min mark for wearing it in shops.)
I don't think the government should be able to casually satisfy their curiosity about my acquaintances just because I took a trip and came home. If I am a known or suspected threat, drug dealer, or whatever, then they can detain me and get a warrant to search the phone. Besides, they can get the same information by subpoenaing my phone records (or in my case as an American the NSA already has them) and they don't need your phone to do that, only your phone number.
A visitor to a country is different than a citizen returning (which was the case here) so different rules may apply, though I personally don't think their phones should be subject to warrantless searches either for pretty much the same reasons.
What could possibly be on a smart-phone that a border agent needs to see? What's the scenario for which the only protection is searching a person's phone?
This is a serious question; I'm drawing a complete blank as to why a border agent would ever, under any circumstances, need to look at my phone's contents.
Siri et al. record and transmit your voice only when you're actively using that feature.
The Samsung TVs record and transmit your voice *continuously.* Ostensibly this to detect and respond to your commands but that also means it potentially records and transmits *everything* you say outloud while in range of the thing to a 3rd party whether you wanted it to or not.
They also do it unencrypted which means that anyone poking around your Internet connection now has a free microphone right there in your house.
The sad fact is that we will probably never find out.
But we already got a response to the Arecibo message!
In case you were too busy to read it, here's my summary of Commissioner Pai's 6 objections to the proposed rules:
1. The plan includes possible rate regulation.
2. It prevents per-unit charges for service, transfer caps, and other ways to monetize the end user.
3. Lets the FCC make ISPs do things they might not want to do.
4. Lawyers still exist and these rules don't stop them from maybe taking the ISP's money[*].
5. ISPs will have to file more paperwork and can't do whatever they want to "just because."
6. Taxes still exist and new ones might be applied to ISPs.
[*] Because up until now lawyers have shown so much restraint.
Here's how French ISPs can milk this program:
Step 1. Register a bunch of domain names all over the world.
Step 2. Put "terrorism material" on websites at those domains.
Step 3. Report the sites to the French Government and wait for the ban order.
Step 4. Cash the check for your "expenses."
The satellite, originally called "Triana", was a project begun in 1998 to provide a stream of images of the Earth from L1 (Lagrangian Point #1), as proposed by then Vice President Al Gore. Before it it could be launched, Mr. Gore lost the 2000 election and the incoming Republican majority scoffed at the idea, referring to it mockingly as "GoreSat"; the project was mothballed.
Then in 2009 they pulled it back out, added some new instruments, and rechristened it "DSCOVR." Now it will produce both the images of Earth as well as monitoring space weather for CMEs. (see also: http://www.npr.org/2015/02/06/383618359/satellite-set-to-stream-daily-images-of-earth-from-space)
To a greater extent than your standard apartment/house/flat long term rental the hotel retains significant rights including letting the police in.
Stoner v. California disagrees - the hotel cannot let the police in to search your room without a warrant or exigent circumstances/probable cause.
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