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If you wanna show off your uber-low SuperPi times you need to be at or below 2.5-3-3-7 T1 ;-)
http://superpi.radeonx.com/

and yes we all know PiFast is much faster than SuperPi:
http://home.istar.ca/~lyster/chart.html

That may be a SuperPi world record, but definitely not the overall record: Steve Pagliarulo's QPi can compute 1 million digits of Pi in 6.68 seconds in a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz box. You read that right.

BTW, the same computer takes 189 seconds to compute 2^20 (~1 million) digits using SuperPi. Among the community of Pi-calculating programmers, it's well known that SuperPi is terribly slow. I don't know why overclockers still hang on to it when most programs out there for calculating Pi are faster than it.

That may be a SuperPi world record, but definitely not the overall record: Steve Pagliarulo's QPi can compute 1 million digits of Pi in 6.68 seconds in a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz box. You read that right.

BTW, the same computer takes 189 seconds to compute 2^20 (~1 million) digits using SuperPi. Among the community of Pi-calculating programmers, it's well known that SuperPi is terribly slow. I don't know why overclockers still hang on to it when most programs out there for calculating Pi are faster than it.

If you are transmitting images the production of which violated someone else's human rights, is that acceptable?

Free communication includes the transmission of state secrets, disclosure of state security vulnerabilities etc.

Yes. If that state doesn't want me to know that the B1024 bomber can easily be disabled by shining a laser pointer at it, it's the state's problem to not let me know that. As I have taken no oath of secrecy, if I stumble on that fact, I am within my free speech rights to disclose it. (The state, oblivious to its own rules, of cource disagrees.)

I'm not trying to flame, but what if online freedom includes child porn? Or people being murdered while being taped and then the movies played out online? If we outlaw these isn't that a "freedom of experssion" also?

Yes, it is.

Sexually abusing children or committing murder are genuine crimes, and people who do such acts need to be removed from our company for everyone's safety.

Distributing images of actual occurances of the sexual abuse of children is an intrusion of the right to privacy of the children in question, and thus a legitimate crime; but the law claims that possessing even fictional depictions of the sexual abuse of children should be punushed. That's thoughtcrime.

(And for the slow-witted: no, I have no desire to view kiddie porn. The thought turns my stomach. But so does the thought of listening to Pat Robertson.)

Similarly, possessing images of people being murdered is not a genuine crime. Should it be a crime to have a picture of the 9/11 mass murder? Or the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald? Or of the security video tapes from Columbine (as seen in Bowling for Columbine)?

(Oh, and snuff films don't exist. Warning: link is not pleasant reading.)

Bill and Gene

you mean like this?

Mr. Luthor

/.'s sexuality.

How about some well hung cat-man/demon porn?

I'd never heard that story so did some searching. Actually the pilot lived:
site 1
site 2

When they find that they're being cut off from huge numbers of websites because MAPS decided to start playing dick size games with web hosting services...

But here you're blaming MAPS for offering the service, not the ISP for using it. It's a voluntary service for the ISP, so if the customers don't LIKE the policy of their ISP (to choose to use the service offered by MAPS), then they can get another ISP. The places where there aren't ISP choices are getting fewer and farther between every day.

I used to work tech. support for iStar a few years ago, and I would have PROUDLY explained the problem to my customers, had iStar had the balls to do the right thing and join MAPS.

What is it with people wanting to take away choices? MAPS offers a SERVICE, they don't force it down anyone's throats. ISPs can choose to use it, OR NOT. Innocent customers of spam-supporting web-sites can choose to move to a new host, OR NOT. There's nothing saying you need to host your web-site in your own city, or even country! Hell, I live in Toronto, and quite happily host my website in Colorado! If Peacefire.org has been caught in the cross-fire, that's unfortunate, but they need to make the moral choice and either stick by their ISP and remain on MAPS, or leave.

Keep up the good work, MAPS!

Before drawing conclusions about the development of open source software from analogies to potlatch society and evolutionary biology, it might be helpful to be more familiar with the actual research sources (in this case, I'd suggest starting with Franz Boas and W. D. Hamilton). Both the original posting and the reply at best superficially refer to the lessons drawn from such research.

The existence of homosexuality and monasteries is not counter to the concepts of kin selection, as research in sociobiology from the mid-1970s, based in good part on Hamilton's kin selection rules and subsequent analysis of r- and K-favoring selection strategies showed.

Likewise, the potlatch economy may have more to do with the growth of repositories of freeware and shareware (think Exec BBS and simtel, to name two early examples) than with the development of such software to begin with.

It's particularly important to know that the "conventional wisdom" about Pacific Northwest potlatch economies is based on a snapshot of Tlingit society about 100 years ago during a period when potlatches themselves were changing dramatically in their character as a result of the influx of manufactured goods and trade systems from newly migrating American settler populations in the region. Boas and others observed Northwest coast tribes during this transition, and only later did research on the nature of potlatch during earlier periods characterized by a quite different and stable arrangement. Here is a good summary.

There are additional layers to the question. For example, here is an interesting paper which has some comments on the relationship between potlatch and the development of class stratification. This brings in another reminder: that economic or cultural phenomena that may have apparently admirable characteristics (the noble and selfless sharing of the potlatch) may also be intimately tied to other less desirable parameters.

By the way, potlatch was suppressed by Canadian authorities from 1884 to 1951 (and thus during the period when all of the "classic" studies were done), although it continued as an "underground" activity throughout that time.

In general, I think it's important to be cautious when borrowing concepts across "kingdoms" and "phyla" of research. Surely the evolution of open source software has a history and a dynamic amenable to analysis from the economic and socio-cultural points of view (and perhaps from sociobiology in a very broad sense), but superficial analysis always runs the risk of misapplying the fundamental findings of any given research area.

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