To be fair, unless you are posting to slashdot from a net cafe or such you are only getting infected with your own germs. Of course, your other points are good.
I am more than a little surprised to see that there is no or very little images of people that have shown up in public. I would surely think by now, given the likely IQ and motivation of someone joining the TSA, you'd have "best of TSA nudie scan" torrents available now for every possible fetish. Even if they are going to get traced back to the originator of the torrent and leading to their dismissal. But so far nothing. What is wrong with you people?!?
But seriously, this whole charade must be about one picture of a VIP's micro-tool away from being permanently canned.
When it comes to deciding between facebook and google, google is clearly the lesser evil in my mind. Google at least appears to respect privacy, though they know everything you do. They also attempt to do some stuff that benefits the greater good of humanity with their wealth. This is a good thing.
(Now, if you could just bring back the "page previews" that you could select under "more search tools" that has been absent for a day or two now, I'd be a lot happier.)
There's an old saying: "You can't con an honest man."
I always thought that was said by cons to honest men so that the mark would start to let their guard down. People who are too trusting (usually honest) tend to fall prey to cons. If you constantly analyze every which way a person can screw you over, you tend not to get conned very often. Honesty (a tendency not to screw over others, especially by deceit) should be orthogonal to cautiousness (or paranoia, if you prefer).
You pick an article about... porn production to try and give slashdot readers a guilt trip over piracy? Let's me get this straight, you want me to feel sorry for those who would convince someone's impressionable young daughter into having sex for money (aka prostitution), which is bad enough in and of itself, but also involves publishing almost certainly embarrassing images of herself onto the net where it shall live forever more.
So what is more ethical? Refusing to put money into the hands of porn producers but supposedly stealing, or legally funding a pimp?
The one(and seemingly only) solution that I have found is to change your entire attitude towards your life.
I look at things a bit differently, and it mostly works for me. I see the set of things that I could do as each having a different level of addictiveness. Together they arrange themselves in a pecking order. Whatever is available at the top of the list I tend to do. At the same time, deep down, I KNOW exactly what I should be doing.
The key for me is to remove the activities from contention that have addictiveness above the level of what I know I should be doing. As long as it takes X amount of time to get a particular fix, I don't get instant gratification. Instant gratification works best to increase addictiveness - increase the minimum delay and work necessary to get the payoff and that effort becomes something that can itself be procrastinated (coupled with the fact that you KNOW you shouldn't be doing that). And after a while the things you were addicted to don't have the same pull.
Which leads me to another observation: there is a different pecking order in terms of the potential maximum level of addictiveness versus the current level of addictiveness. e.g. If I haven't played $GAME in a month, there is virtually no pull. But I know that if I were to play $GAME now for a few hours, I would feel more compelled to do that than say, post to slashdot. This will last for a few days. If I play $GAME for a week, I will suffer withdrawal symptoms and be prone to relapses for weeks after. I've come to realize that there are certain activities that are like crack to me in terms of out-prioritizing other things, and they need to be out of my life.
Some things I don't even have to try in order to know how addictive they are. From everything that I can see, MMORPGs are the opium dens of the 21st century. They are only cheap if money is your only metric of how much they cost you. I will never try them for the same reasons I will never try any cocaine, meth or heroin.
I can find pretty much anything I want to on google. I still bookmark things and save links from time to time, but the fact is that search makes finding the right bit of information in an essentially unorganized morass doable, even easy. The same principle can be applied to your own information - worry less about organizing it, more about how to search it.
I remember using google desktop search once. It was awesome. However, in order to work it had to phone home, which is a deal breaker. Something that will not attempt to contact the outside world, and still searches pretty good would work well for most information that you want to keep.
How do you determine the quality of a particular component independent of price?
Newegg reviews (note how many 1 and 2 star reviews there are, and what for). This will give you a good idea as to reliability.
SilentPCReview to find out what to get that will run cool, low power and quiet, as a bonus. If parts are cool, they should last longer. Often SPCR cover reliability issues as well. Another note: I would not be surprised that with the vibration damping in something like the P183, the HDDs last longer for that reason as well as the fact that they will run cool.
Anandtech to figure out what performs, especially for the price.
Saying he "may or may not have been personable," doesn't seem relevant when you're talking about a death sentence for what should be at most a slap on the wrist.
IIRC, he was a fairly prickly character, that's what I was referring to more than anything with the comment about him not being personable. And I suspect that Ratner was understating things when he talked about "trying" to scrape gold off coins. I'd be willing to bet that they did more than "try".
We are also judging Newton from our 21st century standards of respect for life, which is just a tad rich. These days we don't even have the death penalty in a lot of the western world, but back in those days a simple death by hanging was more lenient than sentences involving torture before death.
Interesting how true geniuses are frequently true eccentrics.
What else is eccentricity but deviation from the norm? There are loads of things the average person would probably do differently if he was smart enough to be in the top 0.1% of people, because the better way to do a particular task would then be obvious. Of course, his compatriots are doomed to never understand why his ways are better, because they aren't smart enough to do so. Thus, they label him eccentric.
If you are a genius, even the conventional wisdom of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" can be flouted, because then you would be smart enough to figure out exactly what sort of un-Romanlike things you can get away with. The extent to which you do the un-Roman things depends on how much you value social approval. The thing is, someone recognized as a genius will care more about implementing a better way of doing whatever it is they want to do, than social approval. When that better way catches on, that is how they get recognized as a genius. So it is no accident that perceived geniuses are eccentrics, some just hide it better than others.
"He was brutal," said Mark Ratner, a materials chemist at Northwestern University. "He sentenced people to death for trying to scrape the gold off of coins." Newton may have been a Merlin, a Zeus, the finest scientist of all time. But make no mistake about it, said Mr. Ratner. "He was not a nice guy."
There is no civilization as we know it without currency. If people start debasing the currency, they are robbing from the rest of the populace - everyone has to work that bit harder to support them. Make enough to never have to work again, and you have effectively caused the rest of the society to chip in a lifetime worth of slavery just so you can sit on your ass. The crime is not really any different to counterfeiting, and every country takes that very seriously for that reason. So meh.
Newton may or may not have been personable, but it is difficult to argue that he contributed far more to the world than he took from it, and from that perspective he was one of the nicest guys to have ever lived.
How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
Until it is wasted. After that we will be buying it as cans of Perri-air and living off that.
Are you familiar with the already large and growing air purifier market? Many people already effectively DO pay for clean air. It's kind of cool that now the air in China is so polluted, they have created their own market for air purifiers and have some extra incentive to do the job right.
Ultimately, source control is the best fix. Why should everyone else be forced to pay for the negative externality introduced by creators of air pollution? It's not like the pollution just magically appeared in the air. Catalytic converters have been on gasoline powered cars since the 1960s. Diesels now have to have particulate filters in Europe. I hope the idea of cleaning pollution emissions at the source spreads to other often overlooked sources of air pollution such as wood fired boilers, wood stoves/heaters, and those who have large fields full (or would produce seed for, e.g. grass seed mix) of plants that produce pollen that people are allergic to. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some class action suits that could force the issue.
Whereas in a planned economy, the planners must find the person who can make it happen. Like finding a needle in a haystack.
Finding a needle in a haystack is only hard if you have to sort through it by hand. If you have a really large magnet, or a lit match, it's not so hard. That is because needles have fundamentally different properties to hay.
In much the same way, geniuses have certain abilities that enable them to do what the rank and file can't. With a decent testing regime, identifying a subset of likely geniuses in the population is not that difficult. A centrally planned economy can find these people in much the same way as a private company successfully searches for employees.
Hopefully, this won't turn out to be true. Brag in the short term, you bourgeois pig, but I'm still among the idealistic holdouts, with thousands of dollars in my hand waiting in line to sign up, who believe in Virgin Galactic and economies of scale.
At the point where you will be in space for a few minutes, they will be in orbit. At the point where you are in orbit, they will be doing a flyby of the moon. When you are doing a flyby of the moon, they will be spending some time on a moon base...
(Well, not true exactly. There has to be some minimum practical level of fuel use that you just can't get below, and some cost to the energy that will bring about an affordability floor. And in all likelihood, energy will only be a part of such costs. For each of these steps, the fuel bill rises.)
It's for these sort of reasons that I'm very sceptical about making large scale use of geothermal energy. If we eventually start solidifying magma as a result of the heat extraction and the earth loses its magnetic field as a result, say goodbye to the nice atmosphere and radiation protection we have now.
What company would kill a $2 Billion+ project at the 11th hour when they are about to deliver product, and start all over spending 2 or 3 billion more to another company to produce a different but more-or-less equivalent product?
That's a lot of money on an absolute scale, but it needs to be compared to GDP for it to be relevant. Compared to US GDP (I assume trillions, even in those days), $2 billion dollars is not a lot of money. As a percentage of company net sales, I've seen examples of far worse waste in the private sector. This is not to say that there is more waste or corruption there, only that we should be a bit wary of being overawed by the absolute figures.
Opaque by definition means that it blocks light from passing through it, but I just figured it was some kind of quantum mechanical thing, just like all the other physics I don't understand.
So in other words, quantum mechanics is opaque to you. Or at best, translucent.
Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous. The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it. This is no good if you have 2 monitors.
I do this with more than 2 monitors. (They are actually 16:10, but still a TN panel.) I love it. I would not go back to having less than 1920 vertical pixels unless I was going to stop coding or reading websites. i.e. never.
It is true that most monitors have a small vertical viewing angle. You just have to sit each monitor so that you that it is nearly perpendicular to you. Nearly, because you want to be viewing it from just slightly above from the monitor's perspective as it would be conventionally rotated. This will allow you some head movement to either side while staying within the prime vertical viewing angle of the monitor.
For taking these small pains, I have more screen real estate than I could get through any other method, and at half the cost of 2560x1600 monitors. I get more vertical screen real estate than with the 2560x1600 monitors, unless they are rotated sideways.
2560 x anything would be a logical upgrade it if didn't cost more than 4 times the price, didn't take up more horizontal screen real estate per screen than I want to give up, and was able to be pivoted without buying expensive stands. For ~$400 you can get a 24" 1920x1200 that will pivot without having to buy stands. More than 1200 horizontal pixels in a portrait setting is wasted AFAIC, which means you can have more monitors side by side without having to turn your head. Additionally, you can drive them with a standard DVI or HDMI cable and video cards with those outputs.
I am sad for you, if you always expect the worst to happen.
Maybe he's just an engineer or in a field of that nature. If you have years of experience chaining together a string of related components, calculations, arguments (e.g. legal), security precautions, etc. it only takes the worst to happen in one component, calculation, argument, security precaution etc. for whatever you were building to come tumbling down. The guy who triple checks everything for stupid and unwarranted assumptions, for errors in calculations, for miscomprehensions by contractors, for precedents in legal cases... odds are, he will have eliminated every potential screw-up. He will be a good engineer, lawyer, security professional, coder, whatever.
I am specifically avoiding calling that sort of behavior pessimism. That is because even though that behavior may appear pessimistic at first glance, how could anyone but an optimist seek to create something completely new by piecing together a complex chain of components, and staking their reputation on that new creation.
Even when you cross the road, do you think what someone might do to you?
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, unless you are posting to slashdot from a net cafe or such you are only getting infected with your own germs. Of course, your other points are good.
But seriously, this whole charade must be about one picture of a VIP's micro-tool away from being permanently canned.
My cats love shoving things into pipes. They've even won awards for it.
(Now, if you could just bring back the "page previews" that you could select under "more search tools" that has been absent for a day or two now, I'd be a lot happier.)
I always thought that was said by cons to honest men so that the mark would start to let their guard down. People who are too trusting (usually honest) tend to fall prey to cons. If you constantly analyze every which way a person can screw you over, you tend not to get conned very often. Honesty (a tendency not to screw over others, especially by deceit) should be orthogonal to cautiousness (or paranoia, if you prefer).
So what is more ethical? Refusing to put money into the hands of porn producers but supposedly stealing, or legally funding a pimp?
I look at things a bit differently, and it mostly works for me. I see the set of things that I could do as each having a different level of addictiveness. Together they arrange themselves in a pecking order. Whatever is available at the top of the list I tend to do. At the same time, deep down, I KNOW exactly what I should be doing.
The key for me is to remove the activities from contention that have addictiveness above the level of what I know I should be doing. As long as it takes X amount of time to get a particular fix, I don't get instant gratification. Instant gratification works best to increase addictiveness - increase the minimum delay and work necessary to get the payoff and that effort becomes something that can itself be procrastinated (coupled with the fact that you KNOW you shouldn't be doing that). And after a while the things you were addicted to don't have the same pull.
Which leads me to another observation: there is a different pecking order in terms of the potential maximum level of addictiveness versus the current level of addictiveness. e.g. If I haven't played $GAME in a month, there is virtually no pull. But I know that if I were to play $GAME now for a few hours, I would feel more compelled to do that than say, post to slashdot. This will last for a few days. If I play $GAME for a week, I will suffer withdrawal symptoms and be prone to relapses for weeks after. I've come to realize that there are certain activities that are like crack to me in terms of out-prioritizing other things, and they need to be out of my life.
Some things I don't even have to try in order to know how addictive they are. From everything that I can see, MMORPGs are the opium dens of the 21st century. They are only cheap if money is your only metric of how much they cost you. I will never try them for the same reasons I will never try any cocaine, meth or heroin.
I remember using google desktop search once. It was awesome. However, in order to work it had to phone home, which is a deal breaker. Something that will not attempt to contact the outside world, and still searches pretty good would work well for most information that you want to keep.
Newegg reviews (note how many 1 and 2 star reviews there are, and what for). This will give you a good idea as to reliability.
SilentPCReview to find out what to get that will run cool, low power and quiet, as a bonus. If parts are cool, they should last longer. Often SPCR cover reliability issues as well. Another note: I would not be surprised that with the vibration damping in something like the P183, the HDDs last longer for that reason as well as the fact that they will run cool.
Anandtech to figure out what performs, especially for the price.
I'm a firm believer in Homoeopathy. I don't believe in all of it though, just a homoeopathic proportion of its principles.
IIRC, he was a fairly prickly character, that's what I was referring to more than anything with the comment about him not being personable. And I suspect that Ratner was understating things when he talked about "trying" to scrape gold off coins. I'd be willing to bet that they did more than "try".
We are also judging Newton from our 21st century standards of respect for life, which is just a tad rich. These days we don't even have the death penalty in a lot of the western world, but back in those days a simple death by hanging was more lenient than sentences involving torture before death.
What else is eccentricity but deviation from the norm? There are loads of things the average person would probably do differently if he was smart enough to be in the top 0.1% of people, because the better way to do a particular task would then be obvious. Of course, his compatriots are doomed to never understand why his ways are better, because they aren't smart enough to do so. Thus, they label him eccentric.
If you are a genius, even the conventional wisdom of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" can be flouted, because then you would be smart enough to figure out exactly what sort of un-Romanlike things you can get away with. The extent to which you do the un-Roman things depends on how much you value social approval. The thing is, someone recognized as a genius will care more about implementing a better way of doing whatever it is they want to do, than social approval. When that better way catches on, that is how they get recognized as a genius. So it is no accident that perceived geniuses are eccentrics, some just hide it better than others.
There is no civilization as we know it without currency. If people start debasing the currency, they are robbing from the rest of the populace - everyone has to work that bit harder to support them. Make enough to never have to work again, and you have effectively caused the rest of the society to chip in a lifetime worth of slavery just so you can sit on your ass. The crime is not really any different to counterfeiting, and every country takes that very seriously for that reason. So meh.
Newton may or may not have been personable, but it is difficult to argue that he contributed far more to the world than he took from it, and from that perspective he was one of the nicest guys to have ever lived.
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
Missing option: the inductive way. Requires land under high tension power lines. AFAIK, there is still a good chance that you will get caught.
Are you familiar with the already large and growing air purifier market? Many people already effectively DO pay for clean air. It's kind of cool that now the air in China is so polluted, they have created their own market for air purifiers and have some extra incentive to do the job right.
Ultimately, source control is the best fix. Why should everyone else be forced to pay for the negative externality introduced by creators of air pollution? It's not like the pollution just magically appeared in the air. Catalytic converters have been on gasoline powered cars since the 1960s. Diesels now have to have particulate filters in Europe. I hope the idea of cleaning pollution emissions at the source spreads to other often overlooked sources of air pollution such as wood fired boilers, wood stoves/heaters, and those who have large fields full (or would produce seed for, e.g. grass seed mix) of plants that produce pollen that people are allergic to. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some class action suits that could force the issue.
Finding a needle in a haystack is only hard if you have to sort through it by hand. If you have a really large magnet, or a lit match, it's not so hard. That is because needles have fundamentally different properties to hay.
In much the same way, geniuses have certain abilities that enable them to do what the rank and file can't. With a decent testing regime, identifying a subset of likely geniuses in the population is not that difficult. A centrally planned economy can find these people in much the same way as a private company successfully searches for employees.
gollygOS
At the point where you will be in space for a few minutes, they will be in orbit. At the point where you are in orbit, they will be doing a flyby of the moon. When you are doing a flyby of the moon, they will be spending some time on a moon base...
(Well, not true exactly. There has to be some minimum practical level of fuel use that you just can't get below, and some cost to the energy that will bring about an affordability floor. And in all likelihood, energy will only be a part of such costs. For each of these steps, the fuel bill rises.)
It's for these sort of reasons that I'm very sceptical about making large scale use of geothermal energy. If we eventually start solidifying magma as a result of the heat extraction and the earth loses its magnetic field as a result, say goodbye to the nice atmosphere and radiation protection we have now.
That's a lot of money on an absolute scale, but it needs to be compared to GDP for it to be relevant. Compared to US GDP (I assume trillions, even in those days), $2 billion dollars is not a lot of money. As a percentage of company net sales, I've seen examples of far worse waste in the private sector. This is not to say that there is more waste or corruption there, only that we should be a bit wary of being overawed by the absolute figures.
So in other words, quantum mechanics is opaque to you. Or at best, translucent.
I do this with more than 2 monitors. (They are actually 16:10, but still a TN panel.) I love it. I would not go back to having less than 1920 vertical pixels unless I was going to stop coding or reading websites. i.e. never.
It is true that most monitors have a small vertical viewing angle. You just have to sit each monitor so that you that it is nearly perpendicular to you. Nearly, because you want to be viewing it from just slightly above from the monitor's perspective as it would be conventionally rotated. This will allow you some head movement to either side while staying within the prime vertical viewing angle of the monitor.
For taking these small pains, I have more screen real estate than I could get through any other method, and at half the cost of 2560x1600 monitors. I get more vertical screen real estate than with the 2560x1600 monitors, unless they are rotated sideways.
2560 x anything would be a logical upgrade it if didn't cost more than 4 times the price, didn't take up more horizontal screen real estate per screen than I want to give up, and was able to be pivoted without buying expensive stands. For ~$400 you can get a 24" 1920x1200 that will pivot without having to buy stands. More than 1200 horizontal pixels in a portrait setting is wasted AFAIC, which means you can have more monitors side by side without having to turn your head. Additionally, you can drive them with a standard DVI or HDMI cable and video cards with those outputs.
More likely, it's just pi in the sky.
Maybe he's just an engineer or in a field of that nature. If you have years of experience chaining together a string of related components, calculations, arguments (e.g. legal), security precautions, etc. it only takes the worst to happen in one component, calculation, argument, security precaution etc. for whatever you were building to come tumbling down. The guy who triple checks everything for stupid and unwarranted assumptions, for errors in calculations, for miscomprehensions by contractors, for precedents in legal cases... odds are, he will have eliminated every potential screw-up. He will be a good engineer, lawyer, security professional, coder, whatever.
I am specifically avoiding calling that sort of behavior pessimism. That is because even though that behavior may appear pessimistic at first glance, how could anyone but an optimist seek to create something completely new by piecing together a complex chain of components, and staking their reputation on that new creation.
That's why I look both ways before I cross.