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No No NO! The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All!

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=157199

I just realized how hilarious a statement this is. Not because it doesn't make sense - it does! In fact, an Amiga 2500 (Amiga 2000 with, typically, a 25MHz 68030 accelerator board installed, but sometimes a 68020 IIRC, but I'm talking about the '030 version) with an Emplant board is faster at being a Macintosh IIci than the real thing - and the IIci has, guess what, a 25 MHz 68030. But mostly because Apple didn't have accelerated graphics of any sort until the Macintosh II line, and the 8*24 GC display card, in spite of the fact that it was a purely graphical system without a text mode (or at least, if text mode was a ROM feature, it was only used for the debugger.) Whereas of course anyone who belongs here knows that the Amiga was stuffed with custom chips.

On the other hand, maybe the current "high" in sunspot activities will lead to a dramatic solar flare ("sun burps"), with the resultant high velocity expulsion of partially digested, beryllium-infused, greenish-tinted solar matter ("sun vomit"). This material and the associated cosmic rays will engulf the international space station and cause strange genetic mutations to the inhabitants. When they return to earth they will each have unexplained "super" powers:

• Gates will be able to control most of the computers world wide
• Simonyi will develop a strange way of computer programming that makes the lines of source code much, much, much longer so that they slide out the right edge of the monitor and go on forever and make life more difficult for other programmers.

Frank Zappa tells all.

Well, the best form of political protest is this.

One of the reasons language is so useful is that everyone has the same understanding of words. While those may be your definitions of "morality" and "ethics", they are not the dictionary's definitions; they are not common definitions; and they are not useful.

"Morality: a system of beliefs based in individual motivation that dictate behaviors towards others and self. It is immoral to let bad deeds go unpunished. Ethics: a system of beliefs based in group motivation that dictate the behaviors that would make the group run as smoothly as possible. It is unethical to sell term papers on the internet." - http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=461562

While i was being brief, what i said is based on what i read about Aristotle's, but if he isnt in the dictionary, or common, then i guess hes not useful.

This is akin to saying "Bob Dylan is only associated with music if you like Bob Dylan". Again we're dealing with actual definitions of words here, not your definitions of words.

Strawman argument... its not what i said at all, lrn2read.

If a person has no knowledge of any religion, is it possible for him to understand morality, or be moral ?

I think you can.

"The lysine contingency - it's intended to prevent the spread of the mosquitoes in case they ever got off the continent, but we could use it now. Dr. Wu inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. Mosquitoes can't manufacture the amino acid lysine. Unless they're continually supplied with lysine by us, they'll slip into a coma and die."

That is absolutely correct. Ketosis, of course, should not be compared to ketoacidosis; the latter is what the former does to some people with impaired systems. I actually wrote a fairly long article on the Atkins diet for Everything2 because the writeups under that node were largely incorrect. I got inspired to write it by a NYT article entitled What if it's all Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes. (Especially read that last link if you are still a doubter, although it does not appear the entire article is there.)

This is akin to the old saying : no one was ever fired for buying IBM.

It appeals to the CYA mentality in large corporations, and playing it safe.

If people continue to buy into this, then the status quo will not change.

The vendor, be it IBM or Microsoft spread this FUD around to make buyers, recommenders and approvers more risk averse.

The fact of the matter is : the field of technology is constantly changing, and nothing is a safe buy for ever.

CD-ROM - Eh, no credit, logical advance and Sega did it too

GEOS!

Also, re: that mysterious sig: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=574747

1. Authorship - was it written by who it says it was, and was that person an eye-witness, or close to the events they were describing?
2. Conformity - did the work contradict those already established to be true?
3. Acceptance - did the early church (which was closest to the actual events) accept the work as true? Was it reputable in its own time?

Don't eat the pie.

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=613386

I've seen this happen before with former Slashdot darling Everything2 and its private splinter site Community2. Disillusioned members of E2 went to C2, which became a private E2-bashfest while E2 itself slowly slid into irrelevance.

Sounds like the algorithm he really wants to talk about is the one Highlander names "peer ranking system" on his page at Everything2.com: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=152171 2

I somehow believe that Google is quite aware of this algorithm and has already implemented it.

They seriously need to figure out that, when someone buys a game system, we want to PLAY GAMES ON IT. We don't need to watch movies, listen to MP3s, view images, surf the web, do our dishes, and drive to work using the same machine.

Says you. I mean, aside from the dishes and the driving to work, I want all that in one box. This is in fact why I bought an Xbox. If I couldn't have put a media player on there, I wouldn't have bought it. I held off on buying one, in fact, until they were easily moddable and XBMP (XBMC was only a story told to frustrate XBMP users at the time) had reached something like stability.

Based on your statements though, you might enjoy this (warning: long load times.)

I'm 40 and I don't remember this, other than people talking about it years later on the internet. It may be true he said it; if it is I'm sure someone can dig up a quote. Here are two quotes where he specifically responds to this and claims he never said it. I wouldn't be surprised if he had said it - as he says in one of the quotes, 640k was a lot of memory in 1981 - but he claims he has never said it and I have never seen an actual citation.

The Not For Hire ran on a batacitor charged on the grail stones. According to Phillip Jose Farmer these things were supposed to have been developed in the early 80s. 5th paragraph.

What, allowing them freedom to practice their own religion and protection by the Islamic government? Even Iran lets the Jewish MPs in office, and swear on the torah or bible.

Quit your FUD.

"It's like buying a car with turbo and finding out after buying it that this turbo 'feature' was disabled."

    isn't it more like buying a computer with turbo and finding out that the turbo 'feature' was disabled?

In popular usage, a computer drive is commonly called a disk with the k while the audio and video medium is usually called a disc with the c.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1354224

http://www.stedmans.com/MTFeaturePrint.cfm/1324

The argument over whether it's appropriate to use "already" to refer such an event is clearly a rather pointless, pedantic semantic argument. Colloquial English clearly doesn't differentiate between coordinate time and proper time. All that being said, the GP poster is otherwise correct. According to Special Relativity (SR), the event in question is currently outside our past light cone, so it is not objectively in our past (see for example, here). For someone passing our current position at high spped (greater than 6/7*c) it would lie in the future, so whether the event lies in the past or the future is, at best, subjective. Most relativists would probably say that it lies in either the past nor the future. When the light from the event reaches Earth, the event will lie in the past from that point onward. This does not depend on whether humans observe it, only the fact that it could not possibly have been observed by anyone here until then.

I realise that some poor 100-level physics/relativity courses try to push the idea that events outside the "light cone" (as you like to call it) haven't happened yet but that's baloney.

The view that only events inside our past light cone are really objectively in the past is not confined to, "poor 100-level physics/relativity courses." I can tell you from experience that that is also what you would learn in a graduate level General Relativity class. When you say it's baloney, I can't tell if you're trying to say it's an incorrect interpretation of SR or if you are claiming that SR is incorrect (within it's widely accepted realm of validity). I can say with confidence that the former is incorrect. The latter claim would need some sort of evidence to back it up. Effects of SR like time dillation and length contraction have been observed in particle accelerators and elsewhere. It is the Lorentz transformations (of which these are a manifestation) that supports the claims made above, so if you're going to say they're incorrect you'd better have some evidence to bring to the table.

Intrinsic to a Red Book Audio CD is the ability to extract the audio in its pristine digital form.

(Disclaimer: I am not an audio or CD technology expert. Take the following with a pinch of salt.)

My understanding is that audio CDs can't be copied exactly because the lowest-level information stored on the CD cannot be returned directly by existing recorders.

Bear in mind that the files which *can* be copied exactly to and from CD-ROMs sit on top of several layers of encoding. Even though you can make a copy which is identical at the filesystem level (which is all you care about in most cases), AFAIK the lowest-level bits (i.e. those actually stamped/burned onto the disc) may not be identical. Multiple layers of encoding and corrections mean that this isn't a problem.

IIRC audio CDs include fewer encoding levels, and whilst most players can read and extract the audio information from the raw bits, I believe that some corrections and "fixing" of damaged audio data (*) occur at a lower level than that of any data the CD-ROM is able to return. In other words, the "rawest" audio data you can get your hands on may already have been processed and "fixed" at a lower level.

(*) Not counting mathematical algorithms which exploit clever encoding techniques so that you can still retrieve the uncorrupted info if (e.g.) 3 or fewer out of 10 bits are damaged. (I just made that up, but you get the broad idea...) What I mean is actual unrepairable damage that the CD player interpolates before you ever get it.

See also:-
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=944615 &lastnode_id=918089
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cdrom/cd-recordable/part2 /

Is there some long running Slashdot joke I'm missing

Yes.

And that whooshing sound you hear, is the joke going over your head.

For those who need the (admittedly weak) joke explained, try this.

Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now that is scientific fact. There's no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.

You're absolutely right that warm light is overrated. After all, typical 60-100 watt bulbs use light in these proportions:

50% red
33% green
17% blue

That's almost 3 times as much red light as blue! See here or here for details.

Basically, we're not getting the full range of colours we would otherwise because of the heavy bias towards orange. It's a pain, and I hate it. I also wish they'd make these flourescent bulbs in 40 watt (200 watt equivalent), so we get more light. You'd think that'd be the first thing they'd do now that the power consumption has gone down.

so it's not like we're going to see an Indiana Jones trying to come to terms with teh Intarwebs.

This belongs on e2 ( http://www.everything2.com/ ). Great post, mate.

I would say it to his face. And then when he tries to protest I'll make Rage against the Machine guitar noises with my mouth.

What your company does is worthless.

If your company spontaneously ceased to exist, there is not a single
member of the public who would notice its absence. Nobody depends on
what you do, not even your clients.

The vast majority of what you produce will be instantly forgotten - the
only thing that you can guarantee is that you are lowering the
signal-to-noise ratio of life - filling the environment with yet more
useless lies.
        -- "Why you do not want to work for an Ad Agency",
        http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=134326 5

Please stop the fud.

The woman was not driving, she was in the back seat.
The car was at rest when she was burned.
Given that the car was at rest, I doubt (but have no reference for) your supposed 'fact' that she kept going for 20-30 minutes.

Sites that support my version of events:
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1107089

If you have contradicting sites, I'm all eyes.

This was a joke.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=BSD%20is% 20dying

For that matter...why can't there be a nerdcore ROCK movement?

Didn't Buddy Holly start one way back when? Just ask John Lennon.

I think if you have not already you should read what if it's all been a big fat lie, a NYT article by Gary Taubes. The following paragraph is the choicest bit but the whole thing is important:

These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.''

And this is the other choice piece:

In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,'' Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.''

Basically, the government did some studies trying to prove that eating fat causes heart disease and couldn't do it. Then they had a study that said taking drugs to reduce cholesterol reduced your risk of heart disease and on the basis of that, they issued a food pyramid with carbohydrates at the base and the cap of the pyramid, and fat is relegated off to a minor compartment.

It makes you wonder just what they have against fat. Lobbying, anyone? I haven't found any evidence of that yet... but it is highly suspicious, because this was a time when the packaged food industry was gaining significant steam. After that time, they really took off.

I wrote an article for everything2 after reading the NYT article, entitled How the Government Fattened America. It's kind of an encapsulation of that article and brings in material from few other sources, so you may not feel a need to read it after reading Taubes' piece.

Offtopic, but why does your http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=735553 everything2 page list last seen 1.4 years ago. One is inclined to think you've been "eliminated." If you're still on the web it'd be nice to put a comment there on "I've been mostly active on slashdot, etc.. not coming here much anymore." Just a suggestion.

Unfortunately, nearly the entirety of your post misunderstands nearly the entirety of mine. You were also clearly upset, which may be understandable in light of what you thought I was saying. Hopefully you've had time to chill a bit, perhaps have a nice holiday meal. I will provide a few pointers, and then kindly ask you to reread my post. (Please do not respond to this post; respond instead to what I was actually saying, in my original post.)

How ever there is of course the "gap" between the whole truth of how reality works, and what we understand up to this point. Now, your religion teachs you to fill in this gap with blind faith.

This is not what I was referring to when I said "faith is the unavoidable gap between plausibility and belief." I am not talking about gaps in mankind's total knowledge. I am talking about individual propositions, such as this one: "The Leidenfrost effect allows you to safely plunge your hand into molten lead." No propositions are 100% certain, even in science. So, do I accept this proposition? Of course! So should you. It's physics, after all, and is incredibly likely to be correct. But I will not plunge my hand into molten lead, if I can help it. Frankly, it's not worth the risk. That's the gap I was referring to.

Let's take a more serious example: the proposition "P != NP" There are many good reasons to think this is true, and some good reasons to think it is not. The proposition is quite likely to be correct, but hardly in the same league as a physics theorem. The gap is a little bigger, here. Someday we'll know the truth, but right now I have to decide how to live my life. I choose to believe that P != NP, and therefore trust RSA encryption. Some choose to believe that the NSA already knows that P == NP, and do not trust RSA. Two plausible alternatives; I call this choice faith.

Oh, and incidentally, your statement about what Christianity teaches is entirely incorrect.

So no, your are completely wrong in stating that faith is some how a fundamental requirement in human thinking.

All thinking does require unproven "first principles." Perhaps you dislike the word "faith," but note that the entire first half of my post was not even about religion. This is all just elementary philosophy. I was correcting the OP's philosophical error (a common one).

But since you don't like the way I explained it, please instead read: epistemology, philosophy of science, empiricism, reason, and perhaps philosophical skepticism.

You are sitting at a computer, using it to type a message stating that logic and reason don't always work.

Nope, I certainly think that they do work, all the time. I said that they cannot be proven to work. This is the same fallacy that I was pointing out to the OP: you are equating provability with truth.

Now, you want to try to argue that people of faith some how have better morals, or that morals are derived from faith? That's is absolutely wrong and I find that insulting!

Nope. You are making a common error in responding to this argument. Nowhere do I state or even imply that atheists cannot be moral people. Most of my atheist friends and acquaintances are exceptionally moral people.

I did not state that atheism cannot justify morality (though I could have; I chose not to.)

What I said is this: universal and inalienable human rights that apply to all people in all circumstances and cultures, cannot be justified under atheism. I figured the logic would be obvious.

Communalistic instincts are stronger outside the United States. Europeans accept high taxes as the price for the welfare state. Asians shun individualism, especially if it harms group interests. Some people in the developing world might regard America's high divorce rates as apocalyptical in the same way as Americans might think the world has ended if their local electricity service was cut for more than a week.

Perhaps you should read what a TCB is.

In the TCB concept, all security mechanisms (including hardware) should be trusted and easily auditable. TCB != Trusted OS AND != TC.

Remember, SUN makes money on hardware.
Novell and Microsoft do not.

An interesting sidenote is that Dr. Lecter never uttered his most famous line in the novels. Although he was excellently portratyed by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film version of Silence of the Lambs, the character in the novel never said, "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti". Dr. Lecter was an oenophile with rarefied tastes, and in the novel he ate human liver with "a big amarone". Fearing that audiences would be confused by the more obscure wine, the makers of the movie decided to change the wine to a more mundane but more easily recognizable chianti.

Yeah, and remember when that turned out to be baloney?

But again, this assumes that Pi is a normal number. So far, nobody knows for sure whether or not this is true. I don't know why everyone seems to make this unfounded assumption when dealing with Pi. Attempts to establish the truth of this matter are one of the main reasons why mathematicians are engaged in calculating Pi to billions and billions of digits; there is no other practical use for that many decimal places of accuracy; 39 digits of the number would be enough to calculate the circumference of the known universe given its radius to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

But again, this assumes that Pi is a normal number. So far, nobody knows for sure whether or not this is true. I don't know why everyone seems to make this unfounded assumption when dealing with Pi. Attempts to establish the truth of this matter are one of the main reasons why mathematicians are engaged in calculating Pi to billions and billions of digits; there is no other practical use for that many decimal places of accuracy; 39 digits of the number would be enough to calculate the circumference of the known universe given its radius to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

But again, this assumes that Pi is a normal number. So far, nobody knows for sure whether or not this is true. I don't know why everyone seems to make this unfounded assumption when dealing with Pi. Attempts to establish the truth of this matter are one of the main reasons why mathematicians are engaged in calculating Pi to billions and billions of digits; there is no other practical use for that many decimal places of accuracy; 39 digits of the number would be enough to calculate the circumference of the known universe given its radius to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

"Vint Cerf: I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."