Don't be an idiot. They shoot down UAV's because they don't want to kill people while testing (hence the unmanned part). I'm sure they would be equally effective at shooting down manned planes, care to be the first volunteer?
Mind you, if the laser can target you in the first place, then that same targetting mechanism can be used to guide a missle to you, so the entire conversation is moot. If the aircraft is actually stealth, the laser won't be able to target it either.
You're right, smart is better. We should just let the intellectuals make all the decisions for us so that we are less likely to screw up our own lives.
Now, can you find a bonified intellectual who can tell me what health insurance I should buy (or maybe what to eat for dinner tonight)?
And this a surprise? Even audio nerds are under the illusion that vinyl records sound better than CD's. Some people just get it in their heads that the distorted sound is closer to what it should really sound like.
It shouldn't be any worse for you than real-life is. I mean, when you look down the street and see a car approaching, does it look like a 3D scene to you? Probably. The eye with bad vision doesn't have to be able to focus clearly on the image for the brain to process the 3D aspects properly. The good eye provides the focus and the bad eye (even though the image is blury) is used as a crutch by the brain to provide the sense of depth. The image your brain ultimately composites will appear to be in-focus and in 3D.
The same would be true of these shutter glasses. It doesn't matter if the one eye is getting a blury picture, your brain is already trained to combine that blury picture with the in-focus picture to get a nicely composited 3D image.
If the entire real-world seems flat to you, then yeah, maybe you are screwed, but otherwise you should be fine.
Having written protocol stacks on top of UDP before, I can tell you that original poster is spot on. The reason the internet works is because the vast majority of the traffic is all sharing a common protocol (in this case TCP) for the reliable transport. TCP as a protocol is well proven to be fair to other TCP connections on the network. I wrote a TCP Reno like algorithm on top of UDP once that had a few enhancements over TCP to make it even better. TCP can't do these enhancements because it needs to remain compatible. Once I had that proprietary protocol stack in place, it was super-easy for me to tweak the parameters to the protocol to make it as friendly or unfriendly to TCP as I wanted.
The basis for sharing bandwidth is that if both connections employ the same algorithm for exploring and scaling to available bandwidth, then the competing connections will each settle in on a fair-share of the bandwidth. If however, one of the connections is using a different algorithm, then it's entirely possible that it will either get starved out by the other connections, or squash the other connections, taking more than its fair share. For example, if I simply change my protocol to tolerate moderate packetloss without scaling back the flow-control window size, I can effectively starve out any TCP connections on the same pipe in favor of me stealing all the bandwdith.
No matter how careful they are with their proprietary protocol, it is quite unlikely that they are going to be able to continue to be fair relative to TCP connections. And that reality is what is going to mess up the internet.
Now, the truth is that they are probably actually doing themselves a disservice. When routers get busy, they have a tendency to drop UDP traffic instead of TCP traffic. The reason for this is dropping TCP traffic does them little good, since they know for a fact that the packet will just get sent again. Dropping UDP traffic on the other hand often doesn't follow this rule, since UDP is often used for unreliable transfers, whereby the lost data is not resent (usually because it would be too out of date to have value by the time it is resent). If they switch these file-sharing networks to UDP, while it may seem to work well in the short term, it makes it very easy for the ISP's to simply dump UDP traffic in bulk if the pipe is getting full.
Short term the UDP may force out the TCP connections, but the ISP's won't tolerate that for long and it is really quite easy to just prioritize TCP over all UDP.
Where's its owned doesn't matter. What matters is where authority for the ownership resides. If somebody in a foreign country owns a car that resides in California, that car is still subject to US laws, even though it is owned by somebody outside the country. The same goes for domain names. Authority over the.com root domain name resides under US authority, so it is subject to US law. They should have registered their names under a root domain name that is not controlled by US law (assuming they could find some other country they trusted more).
Each country has a country-code domain name that is controlled by their respective countries. Those ending in.uk are controlled by UK law. Similarly, those ending in.us are controlled by US law.
The crux of the problem is which country has the rights to.com,.edu,.gov, and.mil? The answer is the country that invented them obviously, the US. If you don't want your domain name subject to US law, then you better find a root domain not controlled by the US in which to register it.
People just need to realize that the original root domain names are basically in the.us domain and are going to be treated as such.
The telco's should NOT be responsible for policing the government. Everybody is complaining that the government is doing illegal wiretaps, and then blaming the telco's for letting it happen. The ones guilty of the illegal activity here is the government for ordering the illegal wiretaps, not the telco's for providing the means for them to accomplish it.
Who wants the telco's deciding who they should allow wiretaps on and who they shouldn't? That's not their job. If they government has a legal reason to wiretap somebody, I don't want the telco's turning down the request because they might politically disagree with what the government is up to. If you have an issue with the wiretapping that the government is doing, then take the government to court. The telco's should provide the means for the government to do any wiretapping that they want. If the government abuses that access, then the government should be held responsible. The telco's should have immunity, otherwise you are just making them responsible for the governments bad actions.
The real problem here is the greedy lawyers think the telco's have deeper and easier to pick pockets than the government. Shameful really. This aspect of the bill is fine, which is why so the vast majority of people from both sides of the isle voted for it. This is why we need a representative democracy, because you need representatives who can spend the time to look at a what a bill actually means instead of having the typical knee-jerk reaction that we see right here in this slashdot thread.
The moderators should just take the comments from people who are not lazy and give them to all the lazy people, that way everybody will have a fair chance of getting modded up. Whose idea was it that only smart people should get modded up anyways, America err, I mean Slashdot can do better than that.
99.9% of us don't have any data on our laptops that a customs agent is going to care about anyways. They are welcome to read all my emails...lots of private stuff in there sure, but nothing they are going to give a crap about. What is it that makes people assume that information they consider private is inherently information everybody else wants to look at? Oh yeah, it's called paranoia.
I guess Microsoft is screwed no matter what with this crowd. Seems like it was only last year that all the complaining was Microsoft using proprietary formats. Now they open up their formats by turning control of them over to ISO and the exact same crowd complains that Microsoft is trying to open-up their document format and make it the defacto standard.
ISO isn't the authority for what format is best, they are merely an organization that serves to definitively establish what the format is in an open manner. It's not at all unusual for ISO to approval many standards that all serve the same basic purpose. It's not an endorsement of the merits of the format.
Quite frankly, you sound like a bunch of cry-babies because now ODF is screwed. The desktop software on 95% of computers won't read ODF and never will. Now that OOXML has ISO approval, govenment agencies and others will be able to adopt it wholesale, leaving ODF with little to nothing.
The fact is the open-source community is competing with Microsoft over which format will become the most widely used. It isn't ISO's job to decide which format should win. It's merely their job to outline exactly what the standards are. Maybe if the open-source community would quit bringing pocket-knives to a gun-fight, they would make some headway.
Mod away...I know slashdot doesn't like opinions being seen that don't tow the party line.
This has nothing to do with privacy, this has everything to do with the Democrats protecting their greedy lawyer constituency. The Democrats are pretty much universally against any bill that in any way limits the ability of lawyers to rape you or corporations. We can debate the merits of whether eaves dropping is a good idea or not, but Congress has passed more liberal laws in recent years allowing for broader monitoring. The telephone companies should not be able to be held liable for complying with lawful government requests. If you have a beef with whether a request is lawful or not, you need to take that up with Congress or the administration. Law enforcement can be held liable for violating civil rights beyond what congress has authorized, but it is not the telecoms job to ejudicate that. I don't want the telecoms deciding what they want to allow or not.
What should happen, is the telecoms should receive indemnity if they keep logs of all monitor requests and forward them to a congressional oversight committee for review. About half the people against this immunity thing look at it as a back door to get the telecom companies not to cooperate with the law for fear of possible prosecution. The other half simply want to protect the greedy lawyers.
The Bill of Rights exists for the primary purpose of protecting individual rights. I really doubt the founders thought it necessary to make the 2nd amendment such that people could join the army and carry a gun. It's clearly intended as an individual right. The Bill of Rights intent was to protect against the kinds of things that they didn't like in England. If I recall correctly, they had a military in England at the time, and I hear they had guns.
I suppose you wouldn't have a problem with an able-bodied man outfitting himself with a spring-system on their feet either then, right? It takes skill to learn how to run with those things on after all... I've seen some people where things on their feet that allow them to run around hopping 10ft high...I suppose if the guy wearing such a thing were handicapped, we should allow him to compete in the high jump as well?
Bottom line, those springy artifical legs who uses are no different than the stuff I talk about above. Where do you draw the line? If you let him compete, then surely some handicapped guy will come along and fit him with something even more insane. It's simply not fair...the IAAF did the right thing.
Universities are about learning, not necessarily about science. Most major universities have entire departments devoted to the study of religion and history. I wouldn't expect a religious leader to speak to the physics departments per se, but for the physics department to try to ban him from coming to the University at all is ridiculous.
There is no reason to refactor code that works and requires little to no maintenance. However, if you are working on a living code base, refactoring is critical to keeping things sane. I am not a fan of rewriting something just because it is ugly, but if ugly code requires significant modifications to support new functionality that is being added, then refactoring should be highly considered as part of the process. Hacking features into existing systems can be very time efficient in the short term, but almost without fail, the price paid is more difficult maintenance down the road, particularly if additional new features are to be added.
Obviously refactoring needs to be carefully considered on a case by case basis. How ugly will hacking in the new feature make the code? How likely is it that other new features will also be added to this code down the road? How many other programmers have to deal with this portion of the code? How much time do you have to make the change? How much work is it to refactor the code and do it the right way, versus just hack in the feature? These and many other questions need to be answered before one determines whether refactoring is a worthwhile effort.
As somebody who works primarily on server-software that is in a continuous state of changing and adding features, where stability is critical and expected lifetime is measured in decades, I personally have found that refactoring is almost always worthwhile in the end. I think the biggest problem with refactoring is not whether there is a need, but whether there is competence to get it done. Often times programmers will refactor something to work differently to their liking, but in reality will not have actually improved the flexibility of maintainability of the code at all.
Yeah, much better to get an inferior solution shoved down our throats by Toshiba (who btw, are all alone in their support of HD DVD, unlike Blu-ray which has support from almost every CE company)
Most aspects of the Geneva convention should be followed, but some of them don't apply because these guys are not part of a state. Geneva conventions only allow us to do things like ask for Name, Rank, and Serial Number, which makes no sense in this case. We need to get more out of these guys than that.
When the guy is firing a gun at our soldiers and we take him prisoner, I am not inclined to give the guy a trial by jury. This isn't a criminal matter, why do you insist on treating it as such? You can't win a war if you have hold a trial before you fire any bullets lest you accidentally hit the wrong person. Personally, I am fine with their current designation as unlawful enemy combatants. The extent of the proof I need is they were captured hanging around with guys who had guns firing at American soldiers, and I'll just take the American soldiers word for it. We do not owe a foreign enemy entity the same legal rights that are afforded to us by our constitution. It has never been that way and it shouldn't be that way. We do own them humane treatment during their imprisonment and nothing more.
I doubt every German we threw in prison voted for Hitler either. Unlike criminal law, when you are at war by nature you are going to be far less selective about who you put in prison and who you don't. It's the nature of the beast.
Trials are for criminals. These guys aren't criminals, they are soldiers in a new kind of war. I don't recall putting all the German soldiers that were captured on trial before tossing them in prisoner camps. The only difference here is that the enemy is not represented by a well defined country, but rather a more loosely defined movement. We need to adapt to this change in reality to defeat them. You are naive to think that you can treat these people in a traditional criminal manner.
Wow, according to the wiki page, they now punish them by cutting their hair. These American's must be stopped, I have never heard of anything so inhumane.
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Don't be an idiot. They shoot down UAV's because they don't want to kill people while testing (hence the unmanned part). I'm sure they would be equally effective at shooting down manned planes, care to be the first volunteer?
Mind you, if the laser can target you in the first place, then that same targetting mechanism can be used to guide a missle to you, so the entire conversation is moot. If the aircraft is actually stealth, the laser won't be able to target it either.
You're right, smart is better. We should just let the intellectuals make all the decisions for us so that we are less likely to screw up our own lives.
Now, can you find a bonified intellectual who can tell me what health insurance I should buy (or maybe what to eat for dinner tonight)?
And this a surprise? Even audio nerds are under the illusion that vinyl records sound better than CD's. Some people just get it in their heads that the distorted sound is closer to what it should really sound like.
It shouldn't be any worse for you than real-life is. I mean, when you look down the street and see a car approaching, does it look like a 3D scene to you? Probably. The eye with bad vision doesn't have to be able to focus clearly on the image for the brain to process the 3D aspects properly. The good eye provides the focus and the bad eye (even though the image is blury) is used as a crutch by the brain to provide the sense of depth. The image your brain ultimately composites will appear to be in-focus and in 3D.
The same would be true of these shutter glasses. It doesn't matter if the one eye is getting a blury picture, your brain is already trained to combine that blury picture with the in-focus picture to get a nicely composited 3D image.
If the entire real-world seems flat to you, then yeah, maybe you are screwed, but otherwise you should be fine.
Not really a book, but I like the 'technical' writings at eternallyconfuzzled.com.
Having written protocol stacks on top of UDP before, I can tell you that original poster is spot on. The reason the internet works is because the vast majority of the traffic is all sharing a common protocol (in this case TCP) for the reliable transport. TCP as a protocol is well proven to be fair to other TCP connections on the network. I wrote a TCP Reno like algorithm on top of UDP once that had a few enhancements over TCP to make it even better. TCP can't do these enhancements because it needs to remain compatible. Once I had that proprietary protocol stack in place, it was super-easy for me to tweak the parameters to the protocol to make it as friendly or unfriendly to TCP as I wanted.
The basis for sharing bandwidth is that if both connections employ the same algorithm for exploring and scaling to available bandwidth, then the competing connections will each settle in on a fair-share of the bandwidth. If however, one of the connections is using a different algorithm, then it's entirely possible that it will either get starved out by the other connections, or squash the other connections, taking more than its fair share. For example, if I simply change my protocol to tolerate moderate packetloss without scaling back the flow-control window size, I can effectively starve out any TCP connections on the same pipe in favor of me stealing all the bandwdith.
No matter how careful they are with their proprietary protocol, it is quite unlikely that they are going to be able to continue to be fair relative to TCP connections. And that reality is what is going to mess up the internet.
Now, the truth is that they are probably actually doing themselves a disservice. When routers get busy, they have a tendency to drop UDP traffic instead of TCP traffic. The reason for this is dropping TCP traffic does them little good, since they know for a fact that the packet will just get sent again. Dropping UDP traffic on the other hand often doesn't follow this rule, since UDP is often used for unreliable transfers, whereby the lost data is not resent (usually because it would be too out of date to have value by the time it is resent). If they switch these file-sharing networks to UDP, while it may seem to work well in the short term, it makes it very easy for the ISP's to simply dump UDP traffic in bulk if the pipe is getting full.
Short term the UDP may force out the TCP connections, but the ISP's won't tolerate that for long and it is really quite easy to just prioritize TCP over all UDP.
Previous record was 40.79%
Where's its owned doesn't matter. What matters is where authority for the ownership resides. If somebody in a foreign country owns a car that resides in California, that car is still subject to US laws, even though it is owned by somebody outside the country. The same goes for domain names. Authority over the .com root domain name resides under US authority, so it is subject to US law. They should have registered their names under a root domain name that is not controlled by US law (assuming they could find some other country they trusted more).
Each country has a country-code domain name that is controlled by their respective countries. Those ending in .uk are controlled by UK law. Similarly, those ending in .us are controlled by US law.
The crux of the problem is which country has the rights to .com, .edu, .gov, and .mil? The answer is the country that invented them obviously, the US. If you don't want your domain name subject to US law, then you better find a root domain not controlled by the US in which to register it.
People just need to realize that the original root domain names are basically in the .us domain and are going to be treated as such.
The telco's should NOT be responsible for policing the government. Everybody is complaining that the government is doing illegal wiretaps, and then blaming the telco's for letting it happen. The ones guilty of the illegal activity here is the government for ordering the illegal wiretaps, not the telco's for providing the means for them to accomplish it.
Who wants the telco's deciding who they should allow wiretaps on and who they shouldn't? That's not their job. If they government has a legal reason to wiretap somebody, I don't want the telco's turning down the request because they might politically disagree with what the government is up to. If you have an issue with the wiretapping that the government is doing, then take the government to court. The telco's should provide the means for the government to do any wiretapping that they want. If the government abuses that access, then the government should be held responsible. The telco's should have immunity, otherwise you are just making them responsible for the governments bad actions.
The real problem here is the greedy lawyers think the telco's have deeper and easier to pick pockets than the government. Shameful really. This aspect of the bill is fine, which is why so the vast majority of people from both sides of the isle voted for it. This is why we need a representative democracy, because you need representatives who can spend the time to look at a what a bill actually means instead of having the typical knee-jerk reaction that we see right here in this slashdot thread.
The moderators should just take the comments from people who are not lazy and give them to all the lazy people, that way everybody will have a fair chance of getting modded up. Whose idea was it that only smart people should get modded up anyways, America err, I mean Slashdot can do better than that.
99.9% of us don't have any data on our laptops that a customs agent is going to care about anyways. They are welcome to read all my emails...lots of private stuff in there sure, but nothing they are going to give a crap about. What is it that makes people assume that information they consider private is inherently information everybody else wants to look at? Oh yeah, it's called paranoia.
I guess Microsoft is screwed no matter what with this crowd. Seems like it was only last year that all the complaining was Microsoft using proprietary formats. Now they open up their formats by turning control of them over to ISO and the exact same crowd complains that Microsoft is trying to open-up their document format and make it the defacto standard.
ISO isn't the authority for what format is best, they are merely an organization that serves to definitively establish what the format is in an open manner. It's not at all unusual for ISO to approval many standards that all serve the same basic purpose. It's not an endorsement of the merits of the format.
Quite frankly, you sound like a bunch of cry-babies because now ODF is screwed. The desktop software on 95% of computers won't read ODF and never will. Now that OOXML has ISO approval, govenment agencies and others will be able to adopt it wholesale, leaving ODF with little to nothing.
The fact is the open-source community is competing with Microsoft over which format will become the most widely used. It isn't ISO's job to decide which format should win. It's merely their job to outline exactly what the standards are. Maybe if the open-source community would quit bringing pocket-knives to a gun-fight, they would make some headway.
Mod away...I know slashdot doesn't like opinions being seen that don't tow the party line.
This has nothing to do with privacy, this has everything to do with the Democrats protecting their greedy lawyer constituency. The Democrats are pretty much universally against any bill that in any way limits the ability of lawyers to rape you or corporations. We can debate the merits of whether eaves dropping is a good idea or not, but Congress has passed more liberal laws in recent years allowing for broader monitoring. The telephone companies should not be able to be held liable for complying with lawful government requests. If you have a beef with whether a request is lawful or not, you need to take that up with Congress or the administration. Law enforcement can be held liable for violating civil rights beyond what congress has authorized, but it is not the telecoms job to ejudicate that. I don't want the telecoms deciding what they want to allow or not.
What should happen, is the telecoms should receive indemnity if they keep logs of all monitor requests and forward them to a congressional oversight committee for review. About half the people against this immunity thing look at it as a back door to get the telecom companies not to cooperate with the law for fear of possible prosecution. The other half simply want to protect the greedy lawyers.
The Bill of Rights exists for the primary purpose of protecting individual rights. I really doubt the founders thought it necessary to make the 2nd amendment such that people could join the army and carry a gun. It's clearly intended as an individual right. The Bill of Rights intent was to protect against the kinds of things that they didn't like in England. If I recall correctly, they had a military in England at the time, and I hear they had guns.
I suppose you wouldn't have a problem with an able-bodied man outfitting himself with a spring-system on their feet either then, right? It takes skill to learn how to run with those things on after all... I've seen some people where things on their feet that allow them to run around hopping 10ft high...I suppose if the guy wearing such a thing were handicapped, we should allow him to compete in the high jump as well?
Bottom line, those springy artifical legs who uses are no different than the stuff I talk about above. Where do you draw the line? If you let him compete, then surely some handicapped guy will come along and fit him with something even more insane. It's simply not fair...the IAAF did the right thing.
Universities are about learning, not necessarily about science. Most major universities have entire departments devoted to the study of religion and history. I wouldn't expect a religious leader to speak to the physics departments per se, but for the physics department to try to ban him from coming to the University at all is ridiculous.
There is no reason to refactor code that works and requires little to no maintenance. However, if you are working on a living code base, refactoring is critical to keeping things sane. I am not a fan of rewriting something just because it is ugly, but if ugly code requires significant modifications to support new functionality that is being added, then refactoring should be highly considered as part of the process. Hacking features into existing systems can be very time efficient in the short term, but almost without fail, the price paid is more difficult maintenance down the road, particularly if additional new features are to be added.
Obviously refactoring needs to be carefully considered on a case by case basis. How ugly will hacking in the new feature make the code? How likely is it that other new features will also be added to this code down the road? How many other programmers have to deal with this portion of the code? How much time do you have to make the change? How much work is it to refactor the code and do it the right way, versus just hack in the feature? These and many other questions need to be answered before one determines whether refactoring is a worthwhile effort.
As somebody who works primarily on server-software that is in a continuous state of changing and adding features, where stability is critical and expected lifetime is measured in decades, I personally have found that refactoring is almost always worthwhile in the end. I think the biggest problem with refactoring is not whether there is a need, but whether there is competence to get it done. Often times programmers will refactor something to work differently to their liking, but in reality will not have actually improved the flexibility of maintainability of the code at all.
Yeah, much better to get an inferior solution shoved down our throats by Toshiba (who btw, are all alone in their support of HD DVD, unlike Blu-ray which has support from almost every CE company)
Most aspects of the Geneva convention should be followed, but some of them don't apply because these guys are not part of a state. Geneva conventions only allow us to do things like ask for Name, Rank, and Serial Number, which makes no sense in this case. We need to get more out of these guys than that.
When the guy is firing a gun at our soldiers and we take him prisoner, I am not inclined to give the guy a trial by jury. This isn't a criminal matter, why do you insist on treating it as such? You can't win a war if you have hold a trial before you fire any bullets lest you accidentally hit the wrong person. Personally, I am fine with their current designation as unlawful enemy combatants. The extent of the proof I need is they were captured hanging around with guys who had guns firing at American soldiers, and I'll just take the American soldiers word for it. We do not owe a foreign enemy entity the same legal rights that are afforded to us by our constitution. It has never been that way and it shouldn't be that way. We do own them humane treatment during their imprisonment and nothing more.
I doubt every German we threw in prison voted for Hitler either. Unlike criminal law, when you are at war by nature you are going to be far less selective about who you put in prison and who you don't. It's the nature of the beast.
Trials are for criminals. These guys aren't criminals, they are soldiers in a new kind of war. I don't recall putting all the German soldiers that were captured on trial before tossing them in prisoner camps. The only difference here is that the enemy is not represented by a well defined country, but rather a more loosely defined movement. We need to adapt to this change in reality to defeat them. You are naive to think that you can treat these people in a traditional criminal manner.
Wow, according to the wiki page, they now punish them by cutting their hair. These American's must be stopped, I have never heard of anything so inhumane.