Describes a fair amount about the way a cell works as if it was a car engine. It's actually quite funny, but also a bit worrying, because how long will it be until people try to patent stuff like this?
So the fact that software installed on Linux will do what it is programmed to do is a reason to migrate away from Linux? I will consider migrating to something else when there are known and exploited holes in the security which allow websites to arbitrarily install software without user permission. Until that, you just have to research what software does to stay safe, or only install software from known and trusted sources. But if you really want to migrate away, don't claim that you are doing it to stay secure: you are doing it because you cannot understand the details of problems, or because you can but just want to move away from Linux, since it is too popular for you.
And please, whatever you do, don't claim that "spyware and other malware" is beginning to show up on Linux - or, if you do want to tell people that, please remember to say that it is stuff which the user has to choose to install, not something which can be installed just be going to an infected website.
The thing about people talking to you, or yelling things, is that it is clear where it is coming from. When you cannot tell where something is coming from, you begin to think that you are going insane - especially if you are in a group and only you are targeted. In fact, if you want to take it a bit further, this fits the definition of torture: "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as... coercing him or a third person,... when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." I would think that this would have to be approved by some sort of public official or committee, and the executive who approves this would certainly be acting in an official capacity.
And, if you believe in the statement that the government has technology between 10 and 20 years ahead of what is popular knowledge, it is fairly certain that they have such a computer, at least considering all of the articles about quantum computing that have been around recently.
Why is it that I keep on seeing things where I think that it should be painfully obvious to everyone involved that models will reflect the views of the people making the models, but no one seems to realize it? Studying robots to discover how children learn falls to that, and now this? It's like everyone thinks that, just because it has computers in it, it isn't being manipulated by the people programing it so that it is nudged towards a certain point of view!
I may have managed to completely miss it, but what happened to GDDR4? All I've seen is GDDR2 and GDDR3, at least on the higher-end GPUs. So when did GDDR4 come out? Did they decide that only prime numbers are good enough to be used as GDDR version numbers?
I hate to defend Microsoft, but Amazon is not the only place people buy stuff from. It's like going to a single bookstore, asking for their sales figures, and deciding which books are best-sellers based on only that. While it might be good for finding out what the people who go to that bookstore like to read, it's not going to tell you about the entire country.
I have a friend who uses Leopard. Once, shortly after he got it, it crashed, for no apparent reason. This is opposed to no crashes I have seen on Linux, no crashes on whatever version came before Leopard (which I've used, and seen used, a lot more frequently), and no crashes in the maybe three hours which I have been able to observe a Vista system. Anecdotal evidence may be useless, but my opinion is that no OS other than Linux is stable enough for me, and I will act on that opinion.
That's really what matters: the opinions of the users. It doesn't matter if an opinion is false, or not entirely accurate. What matters is that someone has that opinion.
It only has one of Shakespear's works - a Midsummer Night's Dream - in addition to a few biographies and translations. Seems like a pretty big omission.
As I said when this was posted on Techdirt, this system could encourage customers not to shop at amazon, because when you start shopping there the shipping takes longer. Appeasing a small group of users who make up the majority of purchases and irritating a larger group who make only occasional purchases is not the way to go.
Could the same logic be applied to why high-end phones (the iPhone is the only one that comes to mind) don't have user-removable batteries? After all, if you can't cut the power to the phone, the only way to stop being tracked is to throw it away.
Install Linux on the same hardware, and configure it as you like. Does it run faster than Vista? If so, Vista has performance issues, as far as most of the people here are concerned.
While this is impressive (especially it being controlled by an off-the-self controller), I would be much more impressed if they rigged up the interior with a lot of HDTVs so that the walls seemed to be transparent to anyone inside.
You didn't even read the summary, did you? The issue is that services such as TinyURL might start doing bad things, such as pop-ups, malware, and so on, or that they might be taken offline for a bit, causing many links to stop working properly. Who cares if there is a preview option when the service itself is compromised?
Ah, so we're arguing over the phrasing of a statement, not over the meaning of a statement. Sorry, I'm used to interpreting most things as they are meant (or as I think they are meant), not as they are said.
I'm still going to argue about it, however: If one considers the phrase "you" to refer to a human's habitat (a rather large stretch of the term), it is, indeed, possible to reduce that habitat's net carbon emissions to zero, by completely negating all of the Carbon Dioxide emissions of the animals in that habitat with the Carbon Dioxide intake of the plants in the habitat. That leads to carbon neutrality of a habitat. From that, it would not be a stretch to make a habitat carbon-negative -- that is, the plants in the habitat would consume more Carbon Dioxide than the animals in the habitat produce (as a side note, I really don't see why people keep on going on about carbon neutrality. If they really wanted to help the environment, they would try to go carbon negative).
Of course, this all relies on the assumption that the term "you" can be stretched to refer to a habitat, which I doubt most people would think it could be.
Yes, but only accidentally: The amount of CPU power and Memory that Vista's interface takes up makes it almost impossible for the botnet programs to find any space on the computers to run, hence preventing them from running botnet software.
Also, I was wondering... Do you think that the storm botnet could run Vista with all the settings enabled? My bet is that it couldn't.
I am saying that by simply saying something, without proving it in any way, does not make it true.
[Citation Needed] primarily refers to the fact that most assertions in wikipedia are required to be citied in a source - no original research or opinions.
I never said that exhaling does not release Carbon Dioxide, or that it is possible to survive without inhaling Oxygen.
I simply said that saying that "The real "Inconvenient Truth" is that following Gore's advice will kill you within minutes" may not be true, and I would like to see a proof of that.
If you wish to claim that the only way to become carbon neutral is by not breathing, that claim is easy to refute: surround yourself with plants. That can negate the carbon dioxide produced by your exhaling. Also, even if you stop breathing, your corpse's decomposition will release Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere, so death doesn't really create carbon neutrality; it only does if you die in a forest, or perhaps an ocean (a place with a lot of plants, anyways).
So, prove it. Explain why. Of course, this being slashdot, I don't really expect a well-thought out response. While it would be nice to hope for a few paragraphs of logic explanations of why Al Gore's advice will get you killed, I would be perfectly happy with something along the lines of "Because I said so," or "Go prove it yourself if you want a proof." Either of those would be much more funny, certainly.
I am unfamiliar with the term Pederast (this is, in fact, the first time I have heard it), and hence looked it up on wikipedia, and it doesn't seem to mean what you think it does. From the first paragraph of the article:
"Pederasty or paederasty (literally 'boy-love', see Etymology below) refers to an intimate or erotic relationship between an adolescent boy and an adult male outside his immediate family. It has found expression from earliest times through a variety of customs and practices within different cultures."
Considering that the children were female (teenage girls), and that the "creepy teacher" was male, Pederast is certainly not the correct word to use, unless you want to argue with wikipedia (which I would understand, as wikipedia is often... inaccurate, I suppose one could say, or not a perfect source).
A better term to use might be Ephebophilia or Lolita Complex, as both of those refer to an attraction to adolescents, and one of those might be the term that you were thinking of -- but it is certainly not Pederast.
A directional jammer, possibly one that automatically adjusts its direction to bounce off a wall or something similar, thereby disrupting signals without revealing the location of the jammer?
(Note: I have no idea how viable this would be. I am not a... whatever one would have to be to understand how this would work).
"... overwhelming statistical evidence that predicts Reiser would in fact kill his wife."
The thing about statistics is that they do not model the real world; they model a world in which almost everything works according to logic, and patterns actually make sense. So (for example) there is a 99% statistical probability that, in the situation Reiser was in, any given person would murder his Wife. That just means that 99% of the time his wife would have been murdered. When you start using statistics to determine guilt, you are beginning to move into the world of the Minority Report, where people are locked up for crimes that they would probably have committed.
"REISER, wife abusing bastard who is guilty of first degree premeditated murder..."
That's another problem with basing things on statistics: you move from "he probably did it, based on the knowledge we have of what other people in a similar situation have done" to "he did it, because the computer/expert/math says so. All hail the computer/expert/math!"
I will admit that all of the things you are saying make a bit of sense - enough to confuse an average American into killing someone who is not technically guilty (guilty until proven innocent, remember?), and that it would all make sense in a perfect and logical world. But humans do not act logically most of the time - or, for some people, any of the time.
Lesson: Keep local backups. Also, I hope that the students only needed to print out the article as it appeared once they had edited it, not simply direct the teacher to the article...
Slashdot Mirror
Describes a fair amount about the way a cell works as if it was a car engine. It's actually quite funny, but also a bit worrying, because how long will it be until people try to patent stuff like this?
So the fact that software installed on Linux will do what it is programmed to do is a reason to migrate away from Linux? I will consider migrating to something else when there are known and exploited holes in the security which allow websites to arbitrarily install software without user permission. Until that, you just have to research what software does to stay safe, or only install software from known and trusted sources. But if you really want to migrate away, don't claim that you are doing it to stay secure: you are doing it because you cannot understand the details of problems, or because you can but just want to move away from Linux, since it is too popular for you.
And please, whatever you do, don't claim that "spyware and other malware" is beginning to show up on Linux - or, if you do want to tell people that, please remember to say that it is stuff which the user has to choose to install, not something which can be installed just be going to an infected website.
The thing about people talking to you, or yelling things, is that it is clear where it is coming from. When you cannot tell where something is coming from, you begin to think that you are going insane - especially if you are in a group and only you are targeted. In fact, if you want to take it a bit further, this fits the definition of torture: "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as ... coercing him or a third person, ... when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." I would think that this would have to be approved by some sort of public official or committee, and the executive who approves this would certainly be acting in an official capacity.
And, if you believe in the statement that the government has technology between 10 and 20 years ahead of what is popular knowledge, it is fairly certain that they have such a computer, at least considering all of the articles about quantum computing that have been around recently.
Why is it that I keep on seeing things where I think that it should be painfully obvious to everyone involved that models will reflect the views of the people making the models, but no one seems to realize it? Studying robots to discover how children learn falls to that, and now this? It's like everyone thinks that, just because it has computers in it, it isn't being manipulated by the people programing it so that it is nudged towards a certain point of view!
Picture-sorting Humans show Dog-like thought. Who are we to claim that dogs behave like humans? Humans behaving like dogs makes just as much sense.
I may have managed to completely miss it, but what happened to GDDR4? All I've seen is GDDR2 and GDDR3, at least on the higher-end GPUs. So when did GDDR4 come out? Did they decide that only prime numbers are good enough to be used as GDDR version numbers?
I hate to defend Microsoft, but Amazon is not the only place people buy stuff from. It's like going to a single bookstore, asking for their sales figures, and deciding which books are best-sellers based on only that. While it might be good for finding out what the people who go to that bookstore like to read, it's not going to tell you about the entire country.
I have a friend who uses Leopard. Once, shortly after he got it, it crashed, for no apparent reason. This is opposed to no crashes I have seen on Linux, no crashes on whatever version came before Leopard (which I've used, and seen used, a lot more frequently), and no crashes in the maybe three hours which I have been able to observe a Vista system. Anecdotal evidence may be useless, but my opinion is that no OS other than Linux is stable enough for me, and I will act on that opinion.
That's really what matters: the opinions of the users. It doesn't matter if an opinion is false, or not entirely accurate. What matters is that someone has that opinion.
It only has one of Shakespear's works - a Midsummer Night's Dream - in addition to a few biographies and translations. Seems like a pretty big omission.
As I said when this was posted on Techdirt, this system could encourage customers not to shop at amazon, because when you start shopping there the shipping takes longer. Appeasing a small group of users who make up the majority of purchases and irritating a larger group who make only occasional purchases is not the way to go.
Could the same logic be applied to why high-end phones (the iPhone is the only one that comes to mind) don't have user-removable batteries? After all, if you can't cut the power to the phone, the only way to stop being tracked is to throw it away.
Install Linux on the same hardware, and configure it as you like. Does it run faster than Vista? If so, Vista has performance issues, as far as most of the people here are concerned.
Maybe some people or organizations use more than one version?
While this is impressive (especially it being controlled by an off-the-self controller), I would be much more impressed if they rigged up the interior with a lot of HDTVs so that the walls seemed to be transparent to anyone inside.
You didn't even read the summary, did you? The issue is that services such as TinyURL might start doing bad things, such as pop-ups, malware, and so on, or that they might be taken offline for a bit, causing many links to stop working properly. Who cares if there is a preview option when the service itself is compromised?
Ah, so we're arguing over the phrasing of a statement, not over the meaning of a statement. Sorry, I'm used to interpreting most things as they are meant (or as I think they are meant), not as they are said.
I'm still going to argue about it, however: If one considers the phrase "you" to refer to a human's habitat (a rather large stretch of the term), it is, indeed, possible to reduce that habitat's net carbon emissions to zero, by completely negating all of the Carbon Dioxide emissions of the animals in that habitat with the Carbon Dioxide intake of the plants in the habitat. That leads to carbon neutrality of a habitat. From that, it would not be a stretch to make a habitat carbon-negative -- that is, the plants in the habitat would consume more Carbon Dioxide than the animals in the habitat produce (as a side note, I really don't see why people keep on going on about carbon neutrality. If they really wanted to help the environment, they would try to go carbon negative).
Of course, this all relies on the assumption that the term "you" can be stretched to refer to a habitat, which I doubt most people would think it could be.
You need a sense of humor, or at least the ability to recognize it. The resources that Vista takes up is a somewhat common joke here.
Yes, but only accidentally: The amount of CPU power and Memory that Vista's interface takes up makes it almost impossible for the botnet programs to find any space on the computers to run, hence preventing them from running botnet software. Also, I was wondering ... Do you think that the storm botnet could run Vista with all the settings enabled? My bet is that it couldn't.
I am saying that by simply saying something, without proving it in any way, does not make it true.
[Citation Needed] primarily refers to the fact that most assertions in wikipedia are required to be citied in a source - no original research or opinions.
I never said that exhaling does not release Carbon Dioxide, or that it is possible to survive without inhaling Oxygen.
I simply said that saying that "The real "Inconvenient Truth" is that following Gore's advice will kill you within minutes" may not be true, and I would like to see a proof of that.
If you wish to claim that the only way to become carbon neutral is by not breathing, that claim is easy to refute: surround yourself with plants. That can negate the carbon dioxide produced by your exhaling. Also, even if you stop breathing, your corpse's decomposition will release Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere, so death doesn't really create carbon neutrality; it only does if you die in a forest, or perhaps an ocean (a place with a lot of plants, anyways).
So, prove it. Explain why. Of course, this being slashdot, I don't really expect a well-thought out response. While it would be nice to hope for a few paragraphs of logic explanations of why Al Gore's advice will get you killed, I would be perfectly happy with something along the lines of "Because I said so," or "Go prove it yourself if you want a proof." Either of those would be much more funny, certainly.
[Citation Needed] Prove it. Simply saying something which you consider to be obvious does not make it obvious to other people, or even true.
I am unfamiliar with the term Pederast (this is, in fact, the first time I have heard it), and hence looked it up on wikipedia, and it doesn't seem to mean what you think it does. From the first paragraph of the article: "Pederasty or paederasty (literally 'boy-love', see Etymology below) refers to an intimate or erotic relationship between an adolescent boy and an adult male outside his immediate family. It has found expression from earliest times through a variety of customs and practices within different cultures." Considering that the children were female (teenage girls), and that the "creepy teacher" was male, Pederast is certainly not the correct word to use, unless you want to argue with wikipedia (which I would understand, as wikipedia is often ... inaccurate, I suppose one could say, or not a perfect source).
A better term to use might be Ephebophilia or Lolita Complex, as both of those refer to an attraction to adolescents, and one of those might be the term that you were thinking of -- but it is certainly not Pederast.
A directional jammer, possibly one that automatically adjusts its direction to bounce off a wall or something similar, thereby disrupting signals without revealing the location of the jammer? (Note: I have no idea how viable this would be. I am not a ... whatever one would have to be to understand how this would work).
"... overwhelming statistical evidence that predicts Reiser would in fact kill his wife." The thing about statistics is that they do not model the real world; they model a world in which almost everything works according to logic, and patterns actually make sense. So (for example) there is a 99% statistical probability that, in the situation Reiser was in, any given person would murder his Wife. That just means that 99% of the time his wife would have been murdered. When you start using statistics to determine guilt, you are beginning to move into the world of the Minority Report, where people are locked up for crimes that they would probably have committed. "REISER, wife abusing bastard who is guilty of first degree premeditated murder ..."
That's another problem with basing things on statistics: you move from "he probably did it, based on the knowledge we have of what other people in a similar situation have done" to "he did it, because the computer/expert/math says so. All hail the computer/expert/math!"
I will admit that all of the things you are saying make a bit of sense - enough to confuse an average American into killing someone who is not technically guilty (guilty until proven innocent, remember?), and that it would all make sense in a perfect and logical world. But humans do not act logically most of the time - or, for some people, any of the time.
Lesson: Keep local backups. Also, I hope that the students only needed to print out the article as it appeared once they had edited it, not simply direct the teacher to the article ...