Cell phones, hard drives, smaller and smaller mobos with more intense EMF fields from the processors... You've just opened up entirely new avenues of correlation. I hadn't yet recognized that as being as significant as you've pointed out that it is.
Here, I'll return an idea:
A lottery ball hopper is a random number generator.
Machines which generate lottery tickets have random number generators.
Random number generators in most machines are made up of circuits, usually with transistors, some with software code. Almost all are tuneable or, more correctly, variable in a controlled manner.
Given enough random number generators sitting in convenience stores and enough empirical data it is quite possible that a given random number algorithm can be tuned to most closely approximate the lottery ball hopper. This is not to say that there is any tangible connection between the lottery ball hopper and the best fit lottery ticket machine. This is only to say that, with whatever coincidence, it is very possible to find a ticket machine which will most closely approximate the same results as the lottery ball hopper.
> Got a specific concern? Reply and I'll address it the best I can.
Are the entire databases of collected information publicly available to the people who were responsible for creating the data to collect?
Or is that restricted, priveleged information? I'm not trying to pass judgement on what is "good" or what is "bad" data. I'm only pointing out that when data is collected, en masse, and only certain groups of people are allowed access to it, then those people will tend to make use of their priveleged data. Within any sufficiently large group of individuals with priveleged access to data there will be, statistically, a number of them who misuse that data for their own personal gain first and the gain of their best friends second. Zero day exploits.
That's just human behavior. I don't have any real big issue with collecting the data but, for the same reason why F/OSS is arguably preferable to closed source, it is a Bad Idea (tm) to create artificial priveleges with data sets: especially with large data sets which can be cross-referenced and correlated with real people.
> computer giant PC World has announced it will no longer carry the floppy disk once current supplies run out.
Since '95 the quality control on floppy disks has been so low that it hasn't been worth buying them anyway. At one time a SS/DD 5.25" could be used as a DS/DD reliably for five years or more without errors "just appearing". Maybe a patent ran out or QA began paying more attention to HD and CD manufacturing. Whatever it was, though, after '95 the floppy disks which I've bought have an average lifespan of about three months before random errors begin appearing on the media.
This was my first thought. Aside from the "good" data which they've collected to help support the morale of the Linux movement what "other" (not bad, just other) data have they collected and who gets to look at it, share it, dissect it, analyze it, etc. etc. etc.
On a somewhat related tack: there's a massive increase in the number of employment opportunities for database techs with security clearances. I hope most people here can snap Legos together.
Electrons are areas of probability density for energy.
Photons are discrete packets of energy.
Energy is related to mass, most commonly, as E=mc^2.
In conventional circuits there is a signal passed by energy. That energy is passed in bulk as the movement of electricity, or the flux of the electron fields around the atoms which make up the conducting wire.
If one could deal in smaller amounts of energy--say the quanta required to excite an electron from one energy level to the next--then one is dealing arguably in portions of electrons. Arguably.
It's the same principle as the recent research using fiberobtic materials for processor fabrication. If one uses light, rather than electricity, then friction is minimized, energy lost to heat is minimized, and the bulk signal of photon flux can be modulated more quickly than the bulk signal of electron flux.
E=mc^2. It's all the same. You can pass bowling balls or you can pass bee-bees.
Copyright law approaches the problem (taking without giving proper credit) with greed: it's all ours and the law dictates all terms.
GPL is approaches the problem with freedom: it's all everyone's but, please, try to at least do this, this, this, and this to help ensure that it remains as everyone's.
Find a way to tie an onscreen display to a process.
Start up a few MS-Word docs and begin recursively copying and pasting text, start with an initial block at least 512 bytes long. Try to fill up at least one MS-Word document to the point where the error message indicates that one has reached the maximum number of pages for an MS-Word document. At this point the contents of the buffer should be sufficiently large to keep all future processes well occupied.
Open a few more MS-Word documents and keep pasting.
Open a few PP presentations and keep pasting the contents of the (eventually enormous) buffer anywhere possible.
Make liberal use of the Windows and alt-tab to switch between processes and check to see which ones are alive. Try to single out a Word or PP presentation which are locked and give them an alt-f4 while switching to a (technically) still good process and issuing a few ctrl+n strikes.
Eventually you'll be able to get an onscreen benchmark of how much memory a process currently has protected because, under heavy buffer (copy/paste) load, Windows doesn't draw onscreen all that well anymore.
Not only is the housing bubble worse than you think...
I spent the summer in downtown San Diego. Being homeless I had little better to do than watch the city lights and window curtains. After five months of careful observation I have determined the following: greater than 50% of the apartment/condo units (excepting the SROs and the bug-infested dives which most of the lower income people crowd into like sardines) in downtown San Diego have been unoccupied for longer than two months.
I can see why some of the homeless are forced into homeless recycling programs due to their demonstrated lack of respect for surroundings (trash, vandalism, excessive drinking or hard drug use leading to large parties with any number of people who also leave trash, take part in vandalism, participate in excessive drinking or hard drug use, leading to theft and crime and etc. etc. etc.)...
But there truly is no housing shortage. There isn't a shortage of jobs for people with my qualifications either. It's all just another segment of the social game.
Haven't you read spun's journal? If you don't like the existing social contract you're free to move to another country. According to them you're only hurting the greater good of society by insisting that you have any Constitutionally guaranteed rights, or that the government has any Constitutionally imposed limitations on power.
If one believes spun's journal entry then the US is, by all rights, a socialist state with a Constitution only for the sake of convenient argument when media releases and sound bites are needed.
> cessation of the program, which, as toe gov argues, has ceased anyway
Meaning: "We figured out who leaked it, they've been lynched, and we've determined the most effective way of continuing without letting anyone else know."
If you have a security clearance you get to "know" a lot more about what the government is doing with trillions of dollars in taxpayer money. Has anyone stopped to wonder just what all the new database jockey positions with military contractors requiring security clearances will be doing? I'm guessing the databases are chock full of information gleened from digital transmissions, many financial transactions, cell phones (satellites are in international airspace, therefore, every cell phone call is an international communication), IMs (sent through international servers or international lines), IRC, heck, even web postings...
We're not spying. We're just, uh... collecting and analyzing information trends. Go back to work citizen. You should spend more time paying off the $300 billion in taxes which we're giving to the military contractors to rebuild Iraq and less time wondering why your mortgage is being foreclosed.
> I certainly hope that the judges hearing the appeal (and the Supremes when it gets to them) have the intestinal fortitude to assert their authority
They'll need it, too. Have you seen the food that outreach programs give to homeless people? Because that's exactly what happens to people who ask too many of the proper questions when the Federal Government starts throwing its weight around willy-nilly.
More political hand washing. Nothing new here. Different spin on the same old game. Write laws to subvert the limitations of the Constitution and then get the SCOTUS to affirm that the law is good thus pushing the question of legal authority into the closet.
People: "Hey! You can't do that!" Government: "We wrote a law that said we could." People: "You don't have the power to write that law." SCOTUS: "The law is good." People: "They don't have the power to write that law." Government: "No soup for you!"
> I guess this is further evidence that there are two things one cannot escape - death and taxes
Unless you incorporate yourself for employment purposes. When is anyone going to catch these tax cheats?
Selective enforcement. These tax cheats over here are bad, and they are convenient targets because they are considered sins. Those tax cheats over there are good and they are to be left alone because they help keep the economy scam rolling.
It's not like the smokescreen is that difficult to see through.
> Now it's even easier to pick out nice fat targets
Who gets to pixelate the images and what ensures that they aren't mailing the originals to South American freedom fighters?
I'm sure the person who gets to pixelate the images has a security clearance. That doesn't guarantee anything except that a particular social circle has access to information that the rest of us don't. What they do with that information is, well, best left to the imagination.
I for one know first-hand how easy it is for those with security clearances to abuse their privelege and get away with it.
Writing my papers while playing on my C=64. Often times I found a basic term program to be a more functional (for my purposes) editor than the gargantuan word processor.
> to think that their teachers would relent
They did. You lose. My stories were frequently the ones selected to be read by the teacher for the whole class.
You would make sense if a money map of the industry didn't show that the vast majority of the profit goes to CxOs, VPs, board directors, and career stock investors who have little or no real interest in the actual entertainment content.
When you can separate honest entertainment interest from pure and erated business interest then you may pull your head from your backside.
> Was the fighting worth the time to handwrite it?
Your question makes the implies that I should have relented, buckled, submitted. A more honest question is: Why was I being subject to targetted harassment just because my teachers couldn't accept that I already knew how to compose and write using a computer?
Why focus on me? What have I done wrong? Why not focus on them?
> agendas, how can you be certain all the information/education you have acquired is free of any bias
I can't, that's why I question everything until I have enough empirical data to make my own decision. Most often I find that the world functions quite differently from the way that we're taught that it operates. Acting on this knowledge, though, often leads to more targetted harassment in the vein of "Don't rock the boat--we're making money off of this. Know your place and keep your mouth shut."
I guage ignorance by the number of people around me who sail along in whatever position the manager above them designates (especially when they vocalize their dissent in private). If more people would speak out and back up their words with real action then perhaps all of this would have been solved thousands of years ago.
> There is a quote about evil prevailing because good people do nothing. I am somewhat cognizant of governments limiting individual rights on one hand and corporations extending rights on another - with individual rights in the middle being squeezed at both ends
When squeezed far enough the individual ends up homeless.
Unless you went to a school where the whole point was to make life such a grueling hell that most students drop out or transfer rather than stay. College isn't so much education as it is conditioning: if you can't take this much crap then you probably won't make it in the world at large.
Maybe everyone, absolutely everyone, should be required to be run out of their job and lose all of their possessions and be made homeless. Better than 90% of the people around me in this town would either jump off a cliff or go crawling back to Mommy and Daddy if they were in this position.
Imagine being nearly the only person in your school to have good typing skills and programming knowledge back in the late eighties and early nineties. In seventh and eighth grade I had to fight tooth and nail with my teachers to accept my typewritten essays and original fiction writings in English class because, since nobody else produced such work, they were convinced that, if I was using a computer, I was probably cheating and downloading the material from local BBSs.
Life sucks when you know more than, or have it figured out more thoroughly than, 99.9999% of the people around you. En masse people apply "guilty until proven " to anything which isn't public "knowledge"--even if public knowledge is largely a misconception fed by those who are promoting their own agenda. That sort of thinking is dangerous and can get you run out of town and into homelessness.
> especially when you take into account the ego of rulers in history and their willingness to eliminate any one who disagreed with their version of the truth
In today's society we run them ragged at work, cause them to become overstressed, fire them for being uncooperative or a poor team player (while ignoring that they were deliberately overstressed), deny their unemployment, refuse to provide references to prospective new employers, cause them to become homeless, and then let the trolls and self-righteous in society beat them down. When they've been properly humiliated then we allow them to be recycled through "homeless outreach" programs which are a careful social reconditioning to reinforce their own lack of personal self-worth and allow them to be readmitted into largely ineffectual and useless positions in blue collar or, in the case of those who give good head, the lowest ranks of white collar America and thus cement them as disreputable for the rest of their lives.
When done properly there's no basis for discrimination or defamation lawsuits and the problem is effectively taken care of.
Would anyone like to have coffee with someone who can explain this thoroughly, providing eight years of experience and over three thousand archived online comments in support?
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phones, hard drives, smaller and smaller mobos with more intense EMF fields from the processors... You've just opened up entirely new avenues of correlation. I hadn't yet recognized that as being as significant as you've pointed out that it is.
Here, I'll return an idea:
A lottery ball hopper is a random number generator.
Machines which generate lottery tickets have random number generators.
Random number generators in most machines are made up of circuits, usually with transistors, some with software code. Almost all are tuneable or, more correctly, variable in a controlled manner.
Given enough random number generators sitting in convenience stores and enough empirical data it is quite possible that a given random number algorithm can be tuned to most closely approximate the lottery ball hopper. This is not to say that there is any tangible connection between the lottery ball hopper and the best fit lottery ticket machine. This is only to say that, with whatever coincidence, it is very possible to find a ticket machine which will most closely approximate the same results as the lottery ball hopper.
> Got a specific concern? Reply and I'll address it the best I can.
Are the entire databases of collected information publicly available to the people who were responsible for creating the data to collect?
Or is that restricted, priveleged information? I'm not trying to pass judgement on what is "good" or what is "bad" data. I'm only pointing out that when data is collected, en masse, and only certain groups of people are allowed access to it, then those people will tend to make use of their priveleged data. Within any sufficiently large group of individuals with priveleged access to data there will be, statistically, a number of them who misuse that data for their own personal gain first and the gain of their best friends second. Zero day exploits.
That's just human behavior. I don't have any real big issue with collecting the data but, for the same reason why F/OSS is arguably preferable to closed source, it is a Bad Idea (tm) to create artificial priveleges with data sets: especially with large data sets which can be cross-referenced and correlated with real people.
> computer giant PC World has announced it will no longer carry the floppy disk once current supplies run out.
Since '95 the quality control on floppy disks has been so low that it hasn't been worth buying them anyway. At one time a SS/DD 5.25" could be used as a DS/DD reliably for five years or more without errors "just appearing". Maybe a patent ran out or QA began paying more attention to HD and CD manufacturing. Whatever it was, though, after '95 the floppy disks which I've bought have an average lifespan of about three months before random errors begin appearing on the media.
This was my first thought. Aside from the "good" data which they've collected to help support the morale of the Linux movement what "other" (not bad, just other) data have they collected and who gets to look at it, share it, dissect it, analyze it, etc. etc. etc.
On a somewhat related tack: there's a massive increase in the number of employment opportunities for database techs with security clearances. I hope most people here can snap Legos together.
More physics, more chemistry...
Electrons are areas of probability density for energy.
Photons are discrete packets of energy.
Energy is related to mass, most commonly, as E=mc^2.
In conventional circuits there is a signal passed by energy. That energy is passed in bulk as the movement of electricity, or the flux of the electron fields around the atoms which make up the conducting wire.
If one could deal in smaller amounts of energy--say the quanta required to excite an electron from one energy level to the next--then one is dealing arguably in portions of electrons. Arguably.
It's the same principle as the recent research using fiberobtic materials for processor fabrication. If one uses light, rather than electricity, then friction is minimized, energy lost to heat is minimized, and the bulk signal of photon flux can be modulated more quickly than the bulk signal of electron flux.
E=mc^2. It's all the same. You can pass bowling balls or you can pass bee-bees.
> It's employed when police have obtained a court order
Lacking the very important word "only", and for good reason.
> They have to be
They must only appear to be.
> If you're doing something wrong
If your neighbor is doing something wrong
> and they happen to catch you
(without first obtaining the court order with respect to you)
Then they get to play both sides of the fence.
Selective enforcement and abuse.
At some point one does need to operate within the rules so as to make a good show.
The point is still that the GNU philosophy is very different from the philosophy behind the letter of copyright law.
The problem is in people making use of the ideas/work of others without giving them proper credit/compensation.
Copyright law approaches the problem (taking without giving proper credit) with greed: it's all ours and the law dictates all terms.
GPL is approaches the problem with freedom: it's all everyone's but, please, try to at least do this, this, this, and this to help ensure that it remains as everyone's.
> In fact, there's no way you can prove that the hack itself didn't originate in Redmond
Already been there, got flamed for it, didn't get the mod point that you did.
> Proudly signing your full legal name is what distinguishes researchers from hackers
Except, in today's world, that's also makes the person signing their full name a convenient target for knee-jerkers.
And there are some very wealthy, very bored, and very socially powerful knee-jerkers.
Find a way to tie an onscreen display to a process.
Start up a few MS-Word docs and begin recursively copying and pasting text, start with an initial block at least 512 bytes long. Try to fill up at least one MS-Word document to the point where the error message indicates that one has reached the maximum number of pages for an MS-Word document. At this point the contents of the buffer should be sufficiently large to keep all future processes well occupied.
Open a few more MS-Word documents and keep pasting.
Open a few PP presentations and keep pasting the contents of the (eventually enormous) buffer anywhere possible.
Make liberal use of the Windows and alt-tab to switch between processes and check to see which ones are alive. Try to single out a Word or PP presentation which are locked and give them an alt-f4 while switching to a (technically) still good process and issuing a few ctrl+n strikes.
Eventually you'll be able to get an onscreen benchmark of how much memory a process currently has protected because, under heavy buffer (copy/paste) load, Windows doesn't draw onscreen all that well anymore.
Not only is the housing bubble worse than you think...
I spent the summer in downtown San Diego. Being homeless I had little better to do than watch the city lights and window curtains. After five months of careful observation I have determined the following: greater than 50% of the apartment/condo units (excepting the SROs and the bug-infested dives which most of the lower income people crowd into like sardines) in downtown San Diego have been unoccupied for longer than two months.
I can see why some of the homeless are forced into homeless recycling programs due to their demonstrated lack of respect for surroundings (trash, vandalism, excessive drinking or hard drug use leading to large parties with any number of people who also leave trash, take part in vandalism, participate in excessive drinking or hard drug use, leading to theft and crime and etc. etc. etc.)...
But there truly is no housing shortage. There isn't a shortage of jobs for people with my qualifications either. It's all just another segment of the social game.
> I'm tired of watching my privacy dwindle away
Haven't you read spun's journal? If you don't like the existing social contract you're free to move to another country. According to them you're only hurting the greater good of society by insisting that you have any Constitutionally guaranteed rights, or that the government has any Constitutionally imposed limitations on power.
If one believes spun's journal entry then the US is, by all rights, a socialist state with a Constitution only for the sake of convenient argument when media releases and sound bites are needed.
> cessation of the program, which, as toe gov argues, has ceased anyway
Meaning: "We figured out who leaked it, they've been lynched, and we've determined the most effective way of continuing without letting anyone else know."
If you have a security clearance you get to "know" a lot more about what the government is doing with trillions of dollars in taxpayer money. Has anyone stopped to wonder just what all the new database jockey positions with military contractors requiring security clearances will be doing? I'm guessing the databases are chock full of information gleened from digital transmissions, many financial transactions, cell phones (satellites are in international airspace, therefore, every cell phone call is an international communication), IMs (sent through international servers or international lines), IRC, heck, even web postings...
We're not spying. We're just, uh... collecting and analyzing information trends. Go back to work citizen. You should spend more time paying off the $300 billion in taxes which we're giving to the military contractors to rebuild Iraq and less time wondering why your mortgage is being foreclosed.
> I certainly hope that the judges hearing the appeal (and the Supremes when it gets to them) have the intestinal fortitude to assert their authority
They'll need it, too. Have you seen the food that outreach programs give to homeless people? Because that's exactly what happens to people who ask too many of the proper questions when the Federal Government starts throwing its weight around willy-nilly.
More political hand washing. Nothing new here. Different spin on the same old game. Write laws to subvert the limitations of the Constitution and then get the SCOTUS to affirm that the law is good thus pushing the question of legal authority into the closet.
People: "Hey! You can't do that!"
Government: "We wrote a law that said we could."
People: "You don't have the power to write that law."
SCOTUS: "The law is good."
People: "They don't have the power to write that law."
Government: "No soup for you!"
> I guess this is further evidence that there are two things one cannot escape - death and taxes
Unless you incorporate yourself for employment purposes. When is anyone going to catch these tax cheats?
Selective enforcement. These tax cheats over here are bad, and they are convenient targets because they are considered sins. Those tax cheats over there are good and they are to be left alone because they help keep the economy scam rolling.
It's not like the smokescreen is that difficult to see through.
> Now it's even easier to pick out nice fat targets
Who gets to pixelate the images and what ensures that they aren't mailing the originals to South American freedom fighters?
I'm sure the person who gets to pixelate the images has a security clearance. That doesn't guarantee anything except that a particular social circle has access to information that the rest of us don't. What they do with that information is, well, best left to the imagination.
I for one know first-hand how easy it is for those with security clearances to abuse their privelege and get away with it.
> you took it a little personal
Don't play so naive. That's how you meant it.
> what were you trying to accomplish?
Writing my papers while playing on my C=64. Often times I found a basic term program to be a more functional (for my purposes) editor than the gargantuan word processor.
> to think that their teachers would relent
They did. You lose. My stories were frequently the ones selected to be read by the teacher for the whole class.
> whining
Give it up.
> Wasting money
Are you picking on me?
> help with the job-hunting
Every company in the area has had my resume since August of '05. Multiple times. If they really wanted to hire me they could do so tomorrow.
> You shouldn't even be complaining
I wasn't.
> I'd rather
It's obvious you'd rather pick on a poor defenseless homeless man than actually do anything to solve the problem.
You would make sense if a money map of the industry didn't show that the vast majority of the profit goes to CxOs, VPs, board directors, and career stock investors who have little or no real interest in the actual entertainment content.
When you can separate honest entertainment interest from pure and erated business interest then you may pull your head from your backside.
> Was the fighting worth the time to handwrite it?
Your question makes the implies that I should have relented, buckled, submitted. A more honest question is: Why was I being subject to targetted harassment just because my teachers couldn't accept that I already knew how to compose and write using a computer?
Why focus on me? What have I done wrong? Why not focus on them?
> agendas, how can you be certain all the information/education you have acquired is free of any bias
I can't, that's why I question everything until I have enough empirical data to make my own decision. Most often I find that the world functions quite differently from the way that we're taught that it operates. Acting on this knowledge, though, often leads to more targetted harassment in the vein of "Don't rock the boat--we're making money off of this. Know your place and keep your mouth shut."
I guage ignorance by the number of people around me who sail along in whatever position the manager above them designates (especially when they vocalize their dissent in private). If more people would speak out and back up their words with real action then perhaps all of this would have been solved thousands of years ago.
> There is a quote about evil prevailing because good people do nothing. I am somewhat cognizant of governments limiting individual rights on one hand and corporations extending rights on another - with individual rights in the middle being squeezed at both ends
When squeezed far enough the individual ends up homeless.
> there is no real achievement in graduation
Unless you went to a school where the whole point was to make life such a grueling hell that most students drop out or transfer rather than stay. College isn't so much education as it is conditioning: if you can't take this much crap then you probably won't make it in the world at large.
Maybe everyone, absolutely everyone, should be required to be run out of their job and lose all of their possessions and be made homeless. Better than 90% of the people around me in this town would either jump off a cliff or go crawling back to Mommy and Daddy if they were in this position.
Imagine being nearly the only person in your school to have good typing skills and programming knowledge back in the late eighties and early nineties. In seventh and eighth grade I had to fight tooth and nail with my teachers to accept my typewritten essays and original fiction writings in English class because, since nobody else produced such work, they were convinced that, if I was using a computer, I was probably cheating and downloading the material from local BBSs.
Life sucks when you know more than, or have it figured out more thoroughly than, 99.9999% of the people around you. En masse people apply "guilty until proven " to anything which isn't public "knowledge"--even if public knowledge is largely a misconception fed by those who are promoting their own agenda. That sort of thinking is dangerous and can get you run out of town and into homelessness.
> especially when you take into account the ego of rulers in history and their willingness to eliminate any one who disagreed with their version of the truth
In today's society we run them ragged at work, cause them to become overstressed, fire them for being uncooperative or a poor team player (while ignoring that they were deliberately overstressed), deny their unemployment, refuse to provide references to prospective new employers, cause them to become homeless, and then let the trolls and self-righteous in society beat them down. When they've been properly humiliated then we allow them to be recycled through "homeless outreach" programs which are a careful social reconditioning to reinforce their own lack of personal self-worth and allow them to be readmitted into largely ineffectual and useless positions in blue collar or, in the case of those who give good head, the lowest ranks of white collar America and thus cement them as disreputable for the rest of their lives.
When done properly there's no basis for discrimination or defamation lawsuits and the problem is effectively taken care of.
Would anyone like to have coffee with someone who can explain this thoroughly, providing eight years of experience and over three thousand archived online comments in support?