And you know what? We are crazy, if we've forgotten that 20-year-old theater technology thoroughly enjoyable--so long as you weren't in a theater full of dolts. I'd have more fun watching The Matrix in a 1980s theater full of well-behaved adults than I would watching it in Lucas's wet dream venue full of the kind of people who go to movies these days.
It's funny how one talkative person on a cell phone can make that $100k sound system seem like a complete waste of money.
Actually, it was called the "512k" because--like every other personal computer of its time--it would process about 512k instructions before becoming obsolete.
If the information inside the event horizon cannot be communicated to the outside of the event horizon, then none of your statements about what goes on inside the event horizon are empirically provable. You may want to consider using qualifiers such as "may" and "might" to indicate the conjectural--and ultimately unprovable--nature of your claims.
By all means, let us embrace the transformation of our language by the young, since they have so much to gain by being (or appearing) different.
Change for the sake of change is generally the best reason to reject the old in favor of the new, after all.
Oh... wait a minute. How about this, instead: Let those who have made a study of communication propose changes to our methods of communication, and let those who have had long training and experience, and who desire nothing more than clear communication in their daily lives, consider these proposals and implement them as they see fit. Let the young, who often discard things of value simply for the sake of being different, be restrained from taking the lead in changing how we communicate.
"That's the way it works, deal with it", is strikingly unsatisfying, and incomplete, as a solution.
You should do what I do: put your karma where your keyboard is, and use the account you've got. Why are you getting so upset over something you don't even think is worth putting your name against?
Ack! I didn't mean to make such a big deal of of your use of "fundamental" (which I agree with, by the way), except to address your argument that "contravention of treaty" = "violation of rights". If the rights are indeed fundamental, as you and I seem to agree they are, then they can be upheld or violated independently of the law.
To determine whether or not the rights of these prisoners are truly being violated, we'd have to look outside the law and discover what makes these rights a reality, and what universal principles govern these rights.
...the U.S. is violating fundamental human rights at the moment.
You've assumed that human rights are fundamental, but what makes them fundamental? Are these rights fundamental because the law says they are? This can't be the case, since the laws of some nations recognize these rights, while the laws of other nations do not. So clearly law alone does not have the power to transform these rights from a theory into a reality. It seems much more likely that laws merely recognize a preexisting condition of fundamental human rights, that exists independently of the laws that recognize it.
Now if the rights themselves are real, and exist independently of the laws that recognize them, then it follows that no law is necessary to address issues relating to these rights. Furthermore, it follows that breaking a law is different from violating these rights. So the U.S. could very well be in contravention of every treaty on the planet, and still not be violating the rights of these prisoners.
In fact, the U.S. could be in compliance with these treaties, and still be violating the rights of the prisoners.
And we still haven't really looked at what makes these things "fundamental" human rights, and what--exactly--makes it a violation to detain one person, but makes it perfectly acceptable to detain another.
In high school, I was taught that the U.S. Government was designed from the very beginning to be bloated and inefficient. That a government ponderous and slow to act was a government whose tyranny would founder in bureaucracy. That the source of our current woes is the failure of the founders to predict and account for the political influence of corporations.
Considering what Valenti can do under the current system, do you really want to give him an optimized, streamlined, super-efficient government to play with?
Perhaps there is a solution to the slashdot effect?
What on earth makes you think that a problem as obvious as the Slashdot effect hasn't been addressed in the FAQ?
Imagine your embarassment when you discover that instead of extending the discussion beyond its current state, you've simply restated the opening remarks!
Starbucks may sell "awful coffee", but either you're not much older than I am, or you're very discriminating indeed when it comes to coffee quality.
My father remarked the other day that when he first came to America from Brazil, almost 40 years ago, America had no tradition of fine coffee at all. Everywhere you went, the best coffee you could find was still ass, by Brazilian standards.
Nowadays, even Denny's serves drinkable coffee, and places like Starbucks serve beverages to satisfy all but the most demanding connoisseur.
American coffee is several orders of magnitude better than it was a generation ago, according to the anecdotal evidence at my disposal. So cheer up! At least Starbucks is fronting its empire-building agenda with a real product. Having fried my share of McNuggets, I can't say the same thing for McDonald's.
Any time our datacenter does a major change, we convene a change management board consisting of sysadmins who will be doing or supervising the work, and our customer entities who will be affected by the work. Before the board meets, we hold a pre-board that is open to all sysadmins only, where those sysadmins who are not involved in the work hand out a brutal technical beating to the sysadmins who are involved.
In this way, we ensure that the guys doing the work have already fielded all the hard questions the customers are likely to ask; we have all our ducks in a row, all our research done, and we sound prepared, competent, and damn smoov, if I say so myself, in front of our customers. It sounds like MS marketing could stand to try something similar.
Unless, of course, they're using Slashdot for this purpose, in which case my suggestion is redundant.
Perhaps the Apple ads are intended to increase cognitive dissonance--make people feel more uncomfortable about using Windows, thus driving them to make the "Switch" for peace of mind.
This would actually be more compatible with my own experience of advertising: that it's intended to make you more and more unhappy, until you give in and buy product foo just so you can sleep at night.
You might want to read the article. It doesn't seem likely that it's a real story in any sense of the word ("real" or "story"). Massive chunks of it were obviously written by professional marketers, and much of the last few paragraphs appear to be the work of MS support personnel.
Advertisements may be obvious, but they can still have a kind of life to them. Judging from the responses (both positive and negative), the Apple "Switch" campaign seems to be pretty lively.
Even a cursory reading of the MS article shows that while they've downplayed the obviousness of the advertisement (and not very well, after all), they've also failed to imbue it with any sort of liveliness. It reads like a second-rate brochure for life insurance policies.
Ever heard of Core Wars? That was one of the first popular bot vs. bot games. You wrote a program, and your opponent wrote a program...
Saying Core Wars is about two bots is like saying that a debate is about two speeches. The real contest is between two human minds, in a specially defined arena.
Others have already pointed out that the current discussion is about scripted play vs. realtime play, and how people who signed up for realtime play are unpleasantly surprised to discover that they're at a disadvantage vs. scripted players. Games that allow for both modes of play are probably a Bad Thing.
Perhaps there are two kinds of games: roleplaying games, and competitive games. Playing either kind of game as if it was the other kind will probably take the fun out of it for both you and your fellow gamers.
I hate playing an RPG, and suddenly finding myself in competition with a munchkin who can't get over the fact that his character is "cooler" than mine.
I also hate playing a fighting game and finding myself bitched at for being "cheap", because my opponent is a scrub who insists on imposing personal rules on his gameplay and mine, rather than trying to master the available techniques and outwit me.
My skill level and enjoyment went up in VF4 because my best friend never once complained about my cheap tactics. He just kept coming back until he discovered the devastating counterattacks. Nowadays, I never rely on cheap tactics, because I get my ass handed to me if I do. Playing against a truly competitive opponent becomes a mental game that is enjoyable in ways that noncompetitive gamers will never comprehend.
...rather than design aircraft to be resistant to things (interference, via proper shielding; terrorism, via a separate cockpit cabin), people feel the need to legislate problems away.
What's cheaper?
Retrofitting your older models with comprehensive RF shielding, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters during operation of the equipment?
Redesigning your current product line to include comprehensive RF shielding, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters?
Retooling your fabs to build equipment with comprehensive RF shielding, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters?
Risking the possibility that your testing hasn't revealed a gap in your comprehensive RF shielding that can be exploited by a current or future RF emitter, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters?
Keep in mind that planes have been around a lot longer than passenger-operated RF emitters, so there was originally no problem to solve. For many years the problem could only be solved by legislation, because the post-PDA planes hadn't even been built yet.
[Disclaimers]
Yes, I'm aware of the theory that the whole question might be moot, since passenger-operated RF emitters may not actually pose a threat to aircraft electronics.
Yes, I'm aware of the theory that cell phones are banned because of some sort of deal between the phone companies and the airlines, rather than because of any threat cell phones might pose.
No, neither of these theories is relevant to the quote-and-response above.
All evolution needs to kick off is a fertile playground, a pattern that can replicate itself with a degree of variation, and a lucky roll of dice.
[Ob.Disclaimer: IANA Smarty Man] Technically, we really have no idea what conditions are necessary to "kick off" evolution. We've deduced that evolution is in effect, based on observable phenomena, but that's about as far as we've gotten. We're still not sure exactly what conditions got it started on Earth, where we actually have the thing to work with. Making statements about how likely Venus is to meet these conditions is laughably premature. We don't know enough about evolution or Venus to do more than gather data and look for patterns.
If there indeed *is* bacteria discovered on Venus it would suggest the dice of the universe are heavily loaded with a bias towards generating life.
Another alternative is that the "dice of the universe" are biased against life, and the presence of life in our solar system is a statistical anomaly produced by some other effect. Certainly the universe in general is extremely hostile to life as we know it.
There could be life in half the star systems in our galaxy, and the dice would still be heavily biased against life in general. If there were life in half the star systems in the universe, that would still only suggest--to me, anyway--that the dice have no particular bias one way or the other, everything else being equal. But I admit that these things are nowhere near my area of expertise.
If you're using secure software, perhaps it's better to let people know so that they don't waste your bandwith trying to break in.
There are apparently lots of people out there who prefer DOS attacks. Telling them your server is unhackable is telling them to go ahead and waste your bandwidth instead.
If you have a secure server, an attacker *cannot* break in. In this case, obscurity only increases the attack rate. If you're running OpenBSD 3.2 default install, and you let everyone know that you are running it, people won't bother trying to attack it.
The script kiddies won't be able to find any hacking scripts for OpenBSD, so they'll deploy their DOS scripts instead. The expert intruders will gratefully skip over the tedium of trying to hack your server, and move straight on to social engineering, dumpster diving, and other forms of attack. Your bandwidth still gets wasted, and you've given the experts a head start on their planning and preparation.
Finally, the Internet isn't some magical place where the normal rules of security don't apply: it's simply an example of why obscurity is an important component of security. The moment you connect to a publicly-accessible network, you've already given away too much information about your security methods and components. Any hope you had of full security is now gone, and you must make do with whatever scraps you have left.
It's like the NSA says: the only truly secure system is the one locked in a room, with no I/O devices, a locked case, no access to the drives, and no network connection. Anything else is the useless posturing of amateurs. Real life is a compromise between security and accessibilty. We all compromise on obscurity; some software developers compromise on robust code, and try to make up for it by increased obscurity in the wrong context.
Slashdot Mirror
And you know what? We are crazy, if we've forgotten that 20-year-old theater technology thoroughly enjoyable--so long as you weren't in a theater full of dolts. I'd have more fun watching The Matrix in a 1980s theater full of well-behaved adults than I would watching it in Lucas's wet dream venue full of the kind of people who go to movies these days.
It's funny how one talkative person on a cell phone can make that $100k sound system seem like a complete waste of money.
It's good to hear that losing a kidney doesn't mean I can't participate in Slashdot discussions.
But the cell phone thing is not a myth. It happens to me all the time. You are a very lucky person (except for the whole kidney thing, of course).
Actually, it was called the "512k" because--like every other personal computer of its time--it would process about 512k instructions before becoming obsolete.
If the information inside the event horizon cannot be communicated to the outside of the event horizon, then none of your statements about what goes on inside the event horizon are empirically provable. You may want to consider using qualifiers such as "may" and "might" to indicate the conjectural--and ultimately unprovable--nature of your claims.
By all means, let us embrace the transformation of our language by the young, since they have so much to gain by being (or appearing) different.
Change for the sake of change is generally the best reason to reject the old in favor of the new, after all.
Oh... wait a minute. How about this, instead: Let those who have made a study of communication propose changes to our methods of communication, and let those who have had long training and experience, and who desire nothing more than clear communication in their daily lives, consider these proposals and implement them as they see fit. Let the young, who often discard things of value simply for the sake of being different, be restrained from taking the lead in changing how we communicate.
"That's the way it works, deal with it", is strikingly unsatisfying, and incomplete, as a solution.
You should do what I do: put your karma where your keyboard is, and use the account you've got. Why are you getting so upset over something you don't even think is worth putting your name against?
Bwahahaha! Snerk.
I'm sure that the corporations themselves can provide many examples of the kind you're looking for ;P
HTH. HAND!
Ack! I didn't mean to make such a big deal of of your use of "fundamental" (which I agree with, by the way), except to address your argument that "contravention of treaty" = "violation of rights". If the rights are indeed fundamental, as you and I seem to agree they are, then they can be upheld or violated independently of the law.
To determine whether or not the rights of these prisoners are truly being violated, we'd have to look outside the law and discover what makes these rights a reality, and what universal principles govern these rights.
You've assumed that human rights are fundamental, but what makes them fundamental? Are these rights fundamental because the law says they are? This can't be the case, since the laws of some nations recognize these rights, while the laws of other nations do not. So clearly law alone does not have the power to transform these rights from a theory into a reality. It seems much more likely that laws merely recognize a preexisting condition of fundamental human rights, that exists independently of the laws that recognize it.
Now if the rights themselves are real, and exist independently of the laws that recognize them, then it follows that no law is necessary to address issues relating to these rights. Furthermore, it follows that breaking a law is different from violating these rights. So the U.S. could very well be in contravention of every treaty on the planet, and still not be violating the rights of these prisoners.
In fact, the U.S. could be in compliance with these treaties, and still be violating the rights of the prisoners.
And we still haven't really looked at what makes these things "fundamental" human rights, and what--exactly--makes it a violation to detain one person, but makes it perfectly acceptable to detain another.
No it just means that the vote-spoiling is implemented in software, instead of hardware.
Considering what Valenti can do under the current system, do you really want to give him an optimized, streamlined, super-efficient government to play with?
What on earth makes you think that a problem as obvious as the Slashdot effect hasn't been addressed in the FAQ?
Imagine your embarassment when you discover that instead of extending the discussion beyond its current state, you've simply restated the opening remarks!
If you were here on or about Wednesday October 09, you certainly did encounter an AOL user. Right here on a moderated web board.
Starbucks may sell "awful coffee", but either you're not much older than I am, or you're very discriminating indeed when it comes to coffee quality.
My father remarked the other day that when he first came to America from Brazil, almost 40 years ago, America had no tradition of fine coffee at all. Everywhere you went, the best coffee you could find was still ass, by Brazilian standards.
Nowadays, even Denny's serves drinkable coffee, and places like Starbucks serve beverages to satisfy all but the most demanding connoisseur.
American coffee is several orders of magnitude better than it was a generation ago, according to the anecdotal evidence at my disposal. So cheer up! At least Starbucks is fronting its empire-building agenda with a real product. Having fried my share of McNuggets, I can't say the same thing for McDonald's.
In this way, we ensure that the guys doing the work have already fielded all the hard questions the customers are likely to ask; we have all our ducks in a row, all our research done, and we sound prepared, competent, and damn smoov, if I say so myself, in front of our customers. It sounds like MS marketing could stand to try something similar.
Unless, of course, they're using Slashdot for this purpose, in which case my suggestion is redundant.
Have you seen his last two movies? He's obsolete already!
If that's the true definition of "capitalism", why is it kept so quiet that even bringing it up makes you sound like some sort of fringe nutjob?
This would actually be more compatible with my own experience of advertising: that it's intended to make you more and more unhappy, until you give in and buy product foo just so you can sleep at night.
You might want to read the article. It doesn't seem likely that it's a real story in any sense of the word ("real" or "story"). Massive chunks of it were obviously written by professional marketers, and much of the last few paragraphs appear to be the work of MS support personnel.
Advertisements may be obvious, but they can still have a kind of life to them. Judging from the responses (both positive and negative), the Apple "Switch" campaign seems to be pretty lively.
Even a cursory reading of the MS article shows that while they've downplayed the obviousness of the advertisement (and not very well, after all), they've also failed to imbue it with any sort of liveliness. It reads like a second-rate brochure for life insurance policies.
I've been told it's a lot like my posts.
Saying Core Wars is about two bots is like saying that a debate is about two speeches. The real contest is between two human minds, in a specially defined arena.
Others have already pointed out that the current discussion is about scripted play vs. realtime play, and how people who signed up for realtime play are unpleasantly surprised to discover that they're at a disadvantage vs. scripted players. Games that allow for both modes of play are probably a Bad Thing.
Perhaps there are two kinds of games: roleplaying games, and competitive games. Playing either kind of game as if it was the other kind will probably take the fun out of it for both you and your fellow gamers.
I hate playing an RPG, and suddenly finding myself in competition with a munchkin who can't get over the fact that his character is "cooler" than mine.
I also hate playing a fighting game and finding myself bitched at for being "cheap", because my opponent is a scrub who insists on imposing personal rules on his gameplay and mine, rather than trying to master the available techniques and outwit me.
My skill level and enjoyment went up in VF4 because my best friend never once complained about my cheap tactics. He just kept coming back until he discovered the devastating counterattacks. Nowadays, I never rely on cheap tactics, because I get my ass handed to me if I do. Playing against a truly competitive opponent becomes a mental game that is enjoyable in ways that noncompetitive gamers will never comprehend.
What's cheaper?
Retrofitting your older models with comprehensive RF shielding, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters during operation of the equipment?
Redesigning your current product line to include comprehensive RF shielding, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters?
Retooling your fabs to build equipment with comprehensive RF shielding, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters?
Risking the possibility that your testing hasn't revealed a gap in your comprehensive RF shielding that can be exploited by a current or future RF emitter, or asking passengers not to use RF emitters?
Keep in mind that planes have been around a lot longer than passenger-operated RF emitters, so there was originally no problem to solve. For many years the problem could only be solved by legislation, because the post-PDA planes hadn't even been built yet.
[Disclaimers]
Yes, I'm aware of the theory that the whole question might be moot, since passenger-operated RF emitters may not actually pose a threat to aircraft electronics.
Yes, I'm aware of the theory that cell phones are banned because of some sort of deal between the phone companies and the airlines, rather than because of any threat cell phones might pose.
No, neither of these theories is relevant to the quote-and-response above.
[Ob.Disclaimer: IANA Smarty Man] Technically, we really have no idea what conditions are necessary to "kick off" evolution. We've deduced that evolution is in effect, based on observable phenomena, but that's about as far as we've gotten. We're still not sure exactly what conditions got it started on Earth, where we actually have the thing to work with. Making statements about how likely Venus is to meet these conditions is laughably premature. We don't know enough about evolution or Venus to do more than gather data and look for patterns.
If there indeed *is* bacteria discovered on Venus it would suggest the dice of the universe are heavily loaded with a bias towards generating life.
Another alternative is that the "dice of the universe" are biased against life, and the presence of life in our solar system is a statistical anomaly produced by some other effect. Certainly the universe in general is extremely hostile to life as we know it.
There could be life in half the star systems in our galaxy, and the dice would still be heavily biased against life in general. If there were life in half the star systems in the universe, that would still only suggest--to me, anyway--that the dice have no particular bias one way or the other, everything else being equal. But I admit that these things are nowhere near my area of expertise.
There are apparently lots of people out there who prefer DOS attacks. Telling them your server is unhackable is telling them to go ahead and waste your bandwidth instead.
If you have a secure server, an attacker *cannot* break in. In this case, obscurity only increases the attack rate. If you're running OpenBSD 3.2 default install, and you let everyone know that you are running it, people won't bother trying to attack it.
The script kiddies won't be able to find any hacking scripts for OpenBSD, so they'll deploy their DOS scripts instead. The expert intruders will gratefully skip over the tedium of trying to hack your server, and move straight on to social engineering, dumpster diving, and other forms of attack. Your bandwidth still gets wasted, and you've given the experts a head start on their planning and preparation.
Finally, the Internet isn't some magical place where the normal rules of security don't apply: it's simply an example of why obscurity is an important component of security. The moment you connect to a publicly-accessible network, you've already given away too much information about your security methods and components. Any hope you had of full security is now gone, and you must make do with whatever scraps you have left.
It's like the NSA says: the only truly secure system is the one locked in a room, with no I/O devices, a locked case, no access to the drives, and no network connection. Anything else is the useless posturing of amateurs. Real life is a compromise between security and accessibilty. We all compromise on obscurity; some software developers compromise on robust code, and try to make up for it by increased obscurity in the wrong context.