What the hell is up with people always having such a strong knee-jerk reaction to argue in favor of death? No less a figure than Leonard Hayflick, who surely ought to know better, makes this exact argument. The human body is *not* an isolated system. Sure, if you mean immortality in the sense of a literal eternity then you may have a point, but as long as there's energy available to run the system on, there's nofundamental physical reason it can't continue indefinitely. I'll settle for the next trillion years and worry about it then, I think.
I don't think prosecuting a username would be a particularly effective means of enforcement, and with the hosting outside their jurisdiction it's hard to see how they could force Italian Wikipedia to reveal anyone's IP address.
Ugh. The redirect option is perfectly sensible, but putting the other thing just plain does violence to the conceptual integrity of the domain name system and I shudder at the thought that there are no people in the world who would consider one 'unprofessional' for not doing it. There are protocols that aren't HTTP, you know.
Do a Fourier transform of the desired waveform; the frequency-domain components are the weight of the photon state with the corresponding momentum (and polarization).
Not true; all the field observables always commute at spacelike separations, so you can't ever send information faster than light. The propagators *do* have a non-zero amplitude at spacelike separations - it exponentially decays outside the light cone - but remember that particles are indistinguishable - you can't tell the difference between emitting a photon and absorbing it somewhere slightly off the light cone, and absorbing *some other photon*. The spacelike part of the propagator just represents correlated vacuum fluctuations.
That's not a nuclear reactor, that's an RTG, and the power-to-weight ratio is a couple orders of magnitude too low to power a usable car.
On the other hand, something like the SAFE-400 would be viable, if a bit heavy. Good luck shielding one well enough that it wouldn't release fission waste products in a worst-case accident, though.
Hmmm, you must have the double secret annex to the constitution or something. The only provisions I see relating to government debt are that Congress has the power 'to borrow money on the credit of the United States' and that the newly formed federal government assumed the existing debt accrued under the Articles of Confederation.
If a federal government default is so impossible, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and start selling credit default swaps? By your theory they're free money, and it sure looks like there's an upward trend.
Option 1: They default on paying Treasury bonds as they mature, with apocalyptic economic consequences. Those bonds have long been regarded as essentially risk-free assets, and financial institutions hold them on that assumption. You know, like the senior tranches of mortgage-backed securities a few years ago, only on a scale an order of magnitude or more larger.
Option 2: They manage to lean on the Federal Reserve hard enough to get them to collude in printing money to pay the debt. Hyperinflation ensues. Possibly it doesn't even work, if the market has anticipated the possibility and driven up interest rates on long-term bonds, forcing them into issuing only short-term debt and hence having to pay rapidly rising interest rates to roll it over on maturity in a hyperinflationary environment. See Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, 3rd century Roman Empire, etc.
With Bill Gates involved, we're sure to discover the joys of the Gamma Screen of Death soon.
... or maybe: "Your Microsoft Nuclear Reactor is experiencing a prompt criticality incident. Please remove all the fuel rods, reinstall them, and restart the reactor."
I'm not implying that you are a fascist or totalitarian thug. I'm directly accusing you of it based on immediately obvious observations. Your willingness to do violence to random third parties for consuming substances you dislike in private is clearest, but the real clincher is the law-worshipping mentality evident in your original post: you regard law as defining ethics, and identify yourself with its enforcers. It's the classic authoritarian submission trait identified by Theodor Adorno.
This is, of course, a complementary to the authoritarian aggression trait: you assuage your psychological insecurities by identifying with established power, and express your sadistic tendencies vicariously through its violent enforcement, which is why you find criticism of that structure so threatening. Really, people like you are the slime of humanity; merely pathetic when encountered singly in a context like this, but lethally dangerous in sufficient numbers.
Oh, and for the record: I'm more of an LSD sort of girl.
You don't need to keep the commands to the lights secret; you just need to authenticate them. Each light having a copy of a single signing key and digital signatures on the messages will suffice.
I don't see why you couldn't do the same with DNA without understanding all the physics and chemistry that makes it work.
Because software is designed by humans who only have enough attention and memory capacity for a bit of it at a time and use layered abstractions to manage complexity. Evolution faces no such cognitive constraint, and so is less prone to building systems with easily comprehensible structure. It's perfectly happy to exploit whatever awkward wart or weird side effect it left in by accident ten million years earlier if it's what happens to work.
Human beings are made of nothing but random hacks that happened to work crufted together for eons, The Story of Mel repeated endlessly for a billion years.
Somehow I suspect that someone whose job description contains the phrase 'BDSM porn star' would be even less worried about visibility of bruises than I am.
I didn't say they were in *visible* places, mind you. I wouldn't especially worry about it if they were, though. I semi-regularly do show up to work in outfits I would also show up to my local goth club in.
Even consentual abuse is not exactly healthy and could be disturbing to some people.
I'll decide for myself what constitutes 'abuse' and 'healthy', thank you very much.
No one in role playing ever wants a real black eye... If its convincing enough to seem like real abuse, it's disturbing.
Oh, bullshit. I've had way worse than a black eye from perfectly consensual BDSM activities. I've been pierced dozens of times at once, taken beatings that left bruises still visible months later, had an electro-shock baton that could throw a spark centimeters long (allegedly of a type favored by Apartheid-era South African riot police) used on me, and enjoyed it all. I wasn't being filmed at the time, but it seems very likely that if I had been, it would look like 'real abuse' to you. To me, it was just fun. Real, intense masochists *do* exist, and 'disturbing' is always in the eye of the beholder.
Yes. The foul morningoids have rigged the world in their favor. Of course they're happy. At least, until the revolution comes and anyone found awake between 6 AM and noon is liable to be shot.
Agreed. Just because something is innately easy for some people doesn't mean it isn't difficult or impossible for others. To fail to appreciate that different people are, well, different as in geekoid's seems to suggest - dare I say it? - a certain lack of social skills.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell is up with people always having such a strong knee-jerk reaction to argue in favor of death? No less a figure than Leonard Hayflick, who surely ought to know better, makes this exact argument. The human body is *not* an isolated system. Sure, if you mean immortality in the sense of a literal eternity then you may have a point, but as long as there's energy available to run the system on, there's nofundamental physical reason it can't continue indefinitely. I'll settle for the next trillion years and worry about it then, I think.
I don't think prosecuting a username would be a particularly effective means of enforcement, and with the hosting outside their jurisdiction it's hard to see how they could force Italian Wikipedia to reveal anyone's IP address.
Ugh. The redirect option is perfectly sensible, but putting the other thing just plain does violence to the conceptual integrity of the domain name system and I shudder at the thought that there are no people in the world who would consider one 'unprofessional' for not doing it. There are protocols that aren't HTTP, you know.
That only counts as a flaw if you've bought into the delusion that NAT constitutes a functioning network.
Do a Fourier transform of the desired waveform; the frequency-domain components are the weight of the photon state with the corresponding momentum (and polarization).
Not true; all the field observables always commute at spacelike separations, so you can't ever send information faster than light. The propagators *do* have a non-zero amplitude at spacelike separations - it exponentially decays outside the light cone - but remember that particles are indistinguishable - you can't tell the difference between emitting a photon and absorbing it somewhere slightly off the light cone, and absorbing *some other photon*. The spacelike part of the propagator just represents correlated vacuum fluctuations.
That's not a nuclear reactor, that's an RTG, and the power-to-weight ratio is a couple orders of magnitude too low to power a usable car.
On the other hand, something like the SAFE-400 would be viable, if a bit heavy. Good luck shielding one well enough that it wouldn't release fission waste products in a worst-case accident, though.
Hmmm, you must have the double secret annex to the constitution or something. The only provisions I see relating to government debt are that Congress has the power 'to borrow money on the credit of the United States' and that the newly formed federal government assumed the existing debt accrued under the Articles of Confederation.
If a federal government default is so impossible, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and start selling credit default swaps? By your theory they're free money, and it sure looks like there's an upward trend.
Option 1: They default on paying Treasury bonds as they mature, with apocalyptic economic consequences. Those bonds have long been regarded as essentially risk-free assets, and financial institutions hold them on that assumption. You know, like the senior tranches of mortgage-backed securities a few years ago, only on a scale an order of magnitude or more larger.
Option 2: They manage to lean on the Federal Reserve hard enough to get them to collude in printing money to pay the debt. Hyperinflation ensues. Possibly it doesn't even work, if the market has anticipated the possibility and driven up interest rates on long-term bonds, forcing them into issuing only short-term debt and hence having to pay rapidly rising interest rates to roll it over on maturity in a hyperinflationary environment. See Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, 3rd century Roman Empire, etc.
With Bill Gates involved, we're sure to discover the joys of the Gamma Screen of Death soon.
... or maybe: "Your Microsoft Nuclear Reactor is experiencing a prompt criticality incident. Please remove all the fuel rods, reinstall them, and restart the reactor."
I'm not implying that you are a fascist or totalitarian thug. I'm directly accusing you of it based on immediately obvious observations. Your willingness to do violence to random third parties for consuming substances you dislike in private is clearest, but the real clincher is the law-worshipping mentality evident in your original post: you regard law as defining ethics, and identify yourself with its enforcers. It's the classic authoritarian submission trait identified by Theodor Adorno.
This is, of course, a complementary to the authoritarian aggression trait: you assuage your psychological insecurities by identifying with established power, and express your sadistic tendencies vicariously through its violent enforcement, which is why you find criticism of that structure so threatening. Really, people like you are the slime of humanity; merely pathetic when encountered singly in a context like this, but lethally dangerous in sufficient numbers.
Oh, and for the record: I'm more of an LSD sort of girl.
Well, I see the laces on someone's jack-boots are just a bit too tight...
You don't need to keep the commands to the lights secret; you just need to authenticate them. Each light having a copy of a single signing key and digital signatures on the messages will suffice.
Damn it, finally an SC2 reference on the first day in weeks I don't have mod points...
I know he is against gay marriage but that doesn't even necessarily make him a homophobe, ...
Except, yeah, it pretty much does.
And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line.
Nope, sorry, I only log on from my System/360 so I can troll with JCL.
However, my girlfriend hand...
Would that be Lisa Left or Rachel Right?
You must be where all the stereotypes about heterosexual male Slashdotters and virginity come from.
Quantum computers only provide a quadratic speedup for search problems like brute-forcing cryptography. Current secret key algorithms are safe.
I don't see why you couldn't do the same with DNA without understanding all the physics and chemistry that makes it work.
Because software is designed by humans who only have enough attention and memory capacity for a bit of it at a time and use layered abstractions to manage complexity. Evolution faces no such cognitive constraint, and so is less prone to building systems with easily comprehensible structure. It's perfectly happy to exploit whatever awkward wart or weird side effect it left in by accident ten million years earlier if it's what happens to work.
Human beings are made of nothing but random hacks that happened to work crufted together for eons, The Story of Mel repeated endlessly for a billion years.
Can I just have a 'Dislike' button for all of Facebook, please?
Actually, I think I'll take a 'Tactical Nuclear Strike' button instead, now that I think of it.
Somehow I suspect that someone whose job description contains the phrase 'BDSM porn star' would be even less worried about visibility of bruises than I am.
So where do you work where coming in with visible bruises regularily is genuinely accepted and not questioned?
Linden Lab
I didn't say they were in *visible* places, mind you. I wouldn't especially worry about it if they were, though. I semi-regularly do show up to work in outfits I would also show up to my local goth club in.
Even consentual abuse is not exactly healthy and could be disturbing to some people.
I'll decide for myself what constitutes 'abuse' and 'healthy', thank you very much.
No one in role playing ever wants a real black eye ... If its convincing enough to seem like real abuse, it's disturbing.
Oh, bullshit. I've had way worse than a black eye from perfectly consensual BDSM activities. I've been pierced dozens of times at once, taken beatings that left bruises still visible months later, had an electro-shock baton that could throw a spark centimeters long (allegedly of a type favored by Apartheid-era South African riot police) used on me, and enjoyed it all. I wasn't being filmed at the time, but it seems very likely that if I had been, it would look like 'real abuse' to you. To me, it was just fun. Real, intense masochists *do* exist, and 'disturbing' is always in the eye of the beholder.
Yes. The foul morningoids have rigged the world in their favor. Of course they're happy. At least, until the revolution comes and anyone found awake between 6 AM and noon is liable to be shot.
Agreed. Just because something is innately easy for some people doesn't mean it isn't difficult or impossible for others. To fail to appreciate that different people are, well, different as in geekoid's seems to suggest - dare I say it? - a certain lack of social skills.