Not to mention the fact that as private companies, the Airlines can certainly impose a wide range of security restrictions on their customers. Nothing in the Constitution prevents someone from saying "I'll gladly do business with anyone who willingly submits to a full cavity body search".
Hell, there's whole subsets of prostitution with that exact business model!
Congratulations. You've put your dev server on the Internet, freely available to the ENTIRE WORLD. Next thing you know, you might put some data on that server that the ENTIRE WORLD might be interested in. If you don't watch out, guess who's gonna come to your server to look at that data? Wheee!
One problem with making this data accessible via the Internet is that it is now available to non-citizens as well. I'm all for British citizens (for example) having free access to certain information about their own judges, elected officials, gov't functionaries, and next-door neighbors. I'm not sure it's appropriate for French citizens to have the same level of access - if any at all.
I mean, the Americans gave the French free access to stuff, and now they've taken over Jerry Lewis!
Anyhow, you could either implement regional restrictions on Internet access (a bad thing), or you could keep the records offline and require some "proof of citizenship"-style validation before releasing the info to qualified parties.
Actually, I find the pr0n sites to be the most trustworthy of all:
You always get a warning on the front page, followed by a number of links to other sites, followed by a tiny "click here to enter" link.
You always get a ton of annoying pop-ups.
You always get a few teasers, followed by an AVS form.
You always get charged for the good stuff.
The pr0n sites can always be relied upon to deliver their product in a consistent manner. And they generally can handle high traffic &c., so they can always be trusted to have good uptime.
Try this on for size: Pharmaceutical companies seek to profit from the suffering of others. What if, instead of leaving medical research in the private sector, the government itself invested in improving the quality of life of its citizens? Sure, nobody would be making money off the AIDS medicine patent, but surely all those extra healthy taxpayers would result in more money for medical research, neh?
Unless this idea is too socialistic for you. Would it help if I substituted "taxes" for something more libertarian, like "voluntary community improvement donations"?
There's a time and a place for all this profit-minded patent shite. AIDS ain't it!
Indeed. Let's see now:
1. Brazilian pharmaceutical companies are aware of a market for AIDS medicine.
2. Brazilian pharmaceutical companies hold no patents for AIDS medicine.
3. Brazilina pharmaceutical companies don't want to pay the patent license fees (probably because their potential customers wouldn't be able to afford the markup, [and|or] the fee payments would cut too far into their profit margin).
4. Brazilian pharmaceutical companies cheaply manufacture AIDS medicine in violation of patent law, and sell it at whatever price the local market will bear.
5. Conveniently, cashing in on the AIDS market has clear and laudable humanitarian side effects, greatly boosting the Brazilian pharmaceutical companies' popular approval rating and providing much-needed rationalization for the actions of the anti-WTO cartel.
6. In fact, the actions of the Brazilian pharmaceutical companies will have repurcussions which will generally be viewed as beneficial by those who oppose the WTO.
Don't kid yourself. The Brazilian pharamaceutical companies are doing this for the money.
I'm not saying the strategy isn't common - or even that the artists' choice is incomprehensible - I'm saying that the original poster's wish that the lawsuit succeed is strikingly shortsighted and thoughtless. Of course, that's just my opinion.
Bzzzt. Wrong! If your wish comes true, these hapless artists will set a precedent for the legal validity of "viral criminal activity" claims.
How will you feel when the lawyers come after you, simply because you committed a lawful act that allowed someone else to commit a lawful act that in turn allowed someone else to commit an unlawful act?
You better hope that cowering under the covers in your bedroom doesn't enable one of your employer's subsidiary's employees to embezzle from the company!
"But the artists were robbed!" you say. "They deserve to get some money back!" Sure thing, pal. It doesn't justify them beating it out of me with a stick, though. Let them sue Napster, or some other actual "criminal". Getting robbed is no excuse for breaking the system. Unless they're anarchists, of course - in which case, they probably shouldn't have been sucking up to MP3.com in the first place. Posers.
I guess it all depends on your idea of a "good scientific theory".
Obviously, you can't mean "any theory that was later proved to be incorrect or inadequate". I'm guessing that you mean something along the lines of "theories that were developed before the advent of - or without recourse to - the modern idea of the 'scientific method'".
Personally, I think the "phlogiston" theory was pretty good for its time - it explained a certain phenomena in a way that agreed with the current paradigm.
Oh. I get it. The phlogiston theory was bad because the "scientist" who proposed it was not visionary enough to first propose a paradigm shift that would allow a different, correct theory to become evident. By the same token, Fred Hoyle was a good scientist because his theories were almost always preceded by a paradigm shift that was not adopted by the rest of the scientific community.
I guess that in order to properly judge Newtonian physics, we should first determine if that theory required a sufficiently radical paradigm shift before it could be proposed.
The same principle applies to creationism, I suppose.
Undoubtedly I'm wrong for using Mozilla 0.9, but why the fuck does everybody insist on using plugins for which there is no universal support? And why the fuck/doesn't/ Mozilla have any goddam plugin support?
I'm getting pretty fucking tired of "click here to get plugin" messages - when there's no goddamn plugin that works.
Giving credit where credit is due
Changing a few words doesn't make it original.
Indeed. Originality was never my intention here. Sadly, "Team Criticize" does not win, coming in second (by 13 minutes) to "Team Playful Critique".
Nevertheless, I consider myself properly chastened. Rather than making up my own commentary, I merely renumbered some choice entries from The Evil Overlord List, and adapted them to the subject at hand. I hereby repudiate any and all positive moderation done with the mistaken understanding that my original post was original and therefore worthwhile.
1. Make sure your ventilation ducts are too small to crawl through.
2. Don't interrogate your co-workers in your cube. Use a small conference room outside your department.
3. Keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train yourself in their use. That way -- even if management manags to neutralize your power generator and/or render your energy weapon (you/do/ have an energy weapon, right?) useless -- you will not be overrun by a handful of savages^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing consultants armed with spears and rocks.
4. Keep your pet monster in a secure cage from which it cannot escape and into which you could not accidentally stumble.
5. Dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw your manager into confusion.
6. Shave off your goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.
7. Make sure your main computers have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.
8. Hire a team of board-certified architects and surveyors to examine your cubicle and inform you of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that you might not know about.
9. Don't install a sentient computer smarter than you are.
10. No matter how many shorts you have in the system, treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.
11. If all your co-workers are standing together around a strange device and begin to taunt you, pull out a conventional weapon instead of using your unstoppable superweapon on them.
12. Do not shoot at any of your co-workers if they are standing in front of the crucial support beam to a heavy, dangerous, unbalanced structure.
13. Make sure that your doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.
14. Cover your vats of hazardous materials when not in use. Also, do not construct walkways over them.
15. Do not design your Main Control Room so that every workstation is facing away from the door.
16. If you ever talk to HR on the phone, do not taunt them. Instead say that their dogged perseverance has given you new insight on the futility of your evil ways and that if they leave you alone for a few months of quiet contemplation you will likely return to the path of righteousness. (HR is incredibly gullible in this regard.)
17. Design your door mechanisms so that blasting the control panel on the outside seals the door and blasting the control panel on the inside opens the door, not vice versa.
18. Pad any data file of crucial importance to 1.45MB.
So let me see if I understand this: "world hunger" is not due to any shortage of resources, but instead is caused by resource-allocation decisions made by those in power. Most of those who can influence these decisions are too apathetic, uninformed, or distracted to do so.
Therefore, no new technology needs to be developed to solve world hunger. Rather, a new ethic, or value-set must be developed. It is the philosophers, the ethicists, the gurus who will solve world hunger - by developing and disseminating new social paradigms. This leaves us free to spend our surplus material resources on space exploration.
Of course, it could be argued that this NASA-thingy is one of the many distractions that impede us from seriously considering the humanitarian problems (such as world hunger) that plague us today. In that sense, it probably should be abandoned as proposed.
Re:Why is this then worthy...
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
If it has now been shown, then Nature (Ma Nature, not the journal) has given us the proverbial infinite monkeys, and I'm going to look for Shakespearean sonnets in that number.
What gets me is that everybody seems to get hung up on this whole (infinite monkeys)+(infinite typewriters)+(infinite time)=complete works of shakespeare equation.
The fact is, a finite number of "monkeys", with a finite amount of time, and no typewriters whatsoever, have already produced the entire works of Shakespeare - a much more unlikely occurence, if you ask me.
You want to see "Hamlet" encoded in the very fabric of the universe? Go down to your nearest library.
Yes, libraries do serve some useful purpose today, but for how much longer will that be true?
I propose that libraries are obsolete. Soon, they will serve the same function as museums. They will serve as repositories for such physical specimens as have historic or scientific value by virtue of their physicality.
When all the world is online, when all the content can be had in digital form, what then would you have in a library?
I've got lots of shampoo, but my TV is too small, I have no DVD player, and I'm all out of chili sauce. On the third hand, I don't interact with any Russians, so there's no compatibility issues there.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the fact that as private companies, the Airlines can certainly impose a wide range of security restrictions on their customers. Nothing in the Constitution prevents someone from saying "I'll gladly do business with anyone who willingly submits to a full cavity body search".
Hell, there's whole subsets of prostitution with that exact business model!
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Interrupting Slashdot.
Inter-
FP!
This is an excellent idea! Pretty soon, corporations will stop putting any content at all on the net. Way to go!
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Interrupting Cow.
Inter-
MOO!
Congratulations. You've put your dev server on the Internet, freely available to the ENTIRE WORLD. Next thing you know, you might put some data on that server that the ENTIRE WORLD might be interested in. If you don't watch out, guess who's gonna come to your server to look at that data? Wheee!
Well maybe because they are not useing it to admin a box. But to have a meeting.
Clearly you haven't been paying attention to The Great Katz. Just use email.
Or the telephone.
One problem with making this data accessible via the Internet is that it is now available to non-citizens as well. I'm all for British citizens (for example) having free access to certain information about their own judges, elected officials, gov't functionaries, and next-door neighbors. I'm not sure it's appropriate for French citizens to have the same level of access - if any at all.
I mean, the Americans gave the French free access to stuff, and now they've taken over Jerry Lewis!
Anyhow, you could either implement regional restrictions on Internet access (a bad thing), or you could keep the records offline and require some "proof of citizenship"-style validation before releasing the info to qualified parties.
Actually, I find the pr0n sites to be the most trustworthy of all:
You always get a warning on the front page, followed by a number of links to other sites, followed by a tiny "click here to enter" link.
You always get a ton of annoying pop-ups.
You always get a few teasers, followed by an AVS form.
You always get charged for the good stuff.
The pr0n sites can always be relied upon to deliver their product in a consistent manner. And they generally can handle high traffic &c., so they can always be trusted to have good uptime.
Try this on for size: Pharmaceutical companies seek to profit from the suffering of others. What if, instead of leaving medical research in the private sector, the government itself invested in improving the quality of life of its citizens? Sure, nobody would be making money off the AIDS medicine patent, but surely all those extra healthy taxpayers would result in more money for medical research, neh?
Unless this idea is too socialistic for you. Would it help if I substituted "taxes" for something more libertarian, like "voluntary community improvement donations"?
There's a time and a place for all this profit-minded patent shite. AIDS ain't it!
Indeed. Let's see now:
2. Brazilian pharmaceutical companies hold no patents for AIDS medicine.
3. Brazilina pharmaceutical companies don't want to pay the patent license fees (probably because their potential customers wouldn't be able to afford the markup, [and|or] the fee payments would cut too far into their profit margin).
4. Brazilian pharmaceutical companies cheaply manufacture AIDS medicine in violation of patent law, and sell it at whatever price the local market will bear.
5. Conveniently, cashing in on the AIDS market has clear and laudable humanitarian side effects, greatly boosting the Brazilian pharmaceutical companies' popular approval rating and providing much-needed rationalization for the actions of the anti-WTO cartel.
6. In fact, the actions of the Brazilian pharmaceutical companies will have repurcussions which will generally be viewed as beneficial by those who oppose the WTO.
Don't kid yourself. The Brazilian pharamaceutical companies are doing this for the money.
I'm not saying the strategy isn't common - or even that the artists' choice is incomprehensible - I'm saying that the original poster's wish that the lawsuit succeed is strikingly shortsighted and thoughtless. Of course, that's just my opinion.
Bzzzt. Wrong! If your wish comes true, these hapless artists will set a precedent for the legal validity of "viral criminal activity" claims.
How will you feel when the lawyers come after you, simply because you committed a lawful act that allowed someone else to commit a lawful act that in turn allowed someone else to commit an unlawful act?
You better hope that cowering under the covers in your bedroom doesn't enable one of your employer's subsidiary's employees to embezzle from the company!
"But the artists were robbed!" you say. "They deserve to get some money back!" Sure thing, pal. It doesn't justify them beating it out of me with a stick, though. Let them sue Napster, or some other actual "criminal". Getting robbed is no excuse for breaking the system. Unless they're anarchists, of course - in which case, they probably shouldn't have been sucking up to MP3.com in the first place. Posers.
I guess it all depends on your idea of a "good scientific theory".
Obviously, you can't mean "any theory that was later proved to be incorrect or inadequate". I'm guessing that you mean something along the lines of "theories that were developed before the advent of - or without recourse to - the modern idea of the 'scientific method'".
Personally, I think the "phlogiston" theory was pretty good for its time - it explained a certain phenomena in a way that agreed with the current paradigm.
Oh. I get it. The phlogiston theory was bad because the "scientist" who proposed it was not visionary enough to first propose a paradigm shift that would allow a different, correct theory to become evident. By the same token, Fred Hoyle was a good scientist because his theories were almost always preceded by a paradigm shift that was not adopted by the rest of the scientific community.
I guess that in order to properly judge Newtonian physics, we should first determine if that theory required a sufficiently radical paradigm shift before it could be proposed.
The same principle applies to creationism, I suppose.
Undoubtedly I'm wrong for using Mozilla 0.9, but why the fuck does everybody insist on using plugins for which there is no universal support? And why the fuck /doesn't/ Mozilla have any goddam plugin support?
I'm getting pretty fucking tired of "click here to get plugin" messages - when there's no goddamn plugin that works.
Fuck.
Choose One:
Cheap $3.00 Crack
The Good Shizzit(TM)
Giving credit where credit is due Changing a few words doesn't make it original.
Indeed. Originality was never my intention here. Sadly, "Team Criticize" does not win, coming in second (by 13 minutes) to "Team Playful Critique".
Nevertheless, I consider myself properly chastened. Rather than making up my own commentary, I merely renumbered some choice entries from The Evil Overlord List, and adapted them to the subject at hand. I hereby repudiate any and all positive moderation done with the mistaken understanding that my original post was original and therefore worthwhile.
Feel better now?
1. Make sure your ventilation ducts are too small to crawl through.
/do/ have an energy weapon, right?) useless -- you will not be overrun by a handful of savages^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing consultants armed with spears and rocks.
2. Don't interrogate your co-workers in your cube. Use a small conference room outside your department.
3. Keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train yourself in their use. That way -- even if management manags to neutralize your power generator and/or render your energy weapon (you
4. Keep your pet monster in a secure cage from which it cannot escape and into which you could not accidentally stumble.
5. Dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw your manager into confusion.
6. Shave off your goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.
7. Make sure your main computers have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.
8. Hire a team of board-certified architects and surveyors to examine your cubicle and inform you of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that you might not know about.
9. Don't install a sentient computer smarter than you are.
10. No matter how many shorts you have in the system, treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.
11. If all your co-workers are standing together around a strange device and begin to taunt you, pull out a conventional weapon instead of using your unstoppable superweapon on them.
12. Do not shoot at any of your co-workers if they are standing in front of the crucial support beam to a heavy, dangerous, unbalanced structure.
13. Make sure that your doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.
14. Cover your vats of hazardous materials when not in use. Also, do not construct walkways over them.
15. Do not design your Main Control Room so that every workstation is facing away from the door.
16. If you ever talk to HR on the phone, do not taunt them. Instead say that their dogged perseverance has given you new insight on the futility of your evil ways and that if they leave you alone for a few months of quiet contemplation you will likely return to the path of righteousness. (HR is incredibly gullible in this regard.)
17. Design your door mechanisms so that blasting the control panel on the outside seals the door and blasting the control panel on the inside opens the door, not vice versa.
18. Pad any data file of crucial importance to 1.45MB.
So let me see if I understand this: "world hunger" is not due to any shortage of resources, but instead is caused by resource-allocation decisions made by those in power. Most of those who can influence these decisions are too apathetic, uninformed, or distracted to do so.
Therefore, no new technology needs to be developed to solve world hunger. Rather, a new ethic, or value-set must be developed. It is the philosophers, the ethicists, the gurus who will solve world hunger - by developing and disseminating new social paradigms. This leaves us free to spend our surplus material resources on space exploration.
Of course, it could be argued that this NASA-thingy is one of the many distractions that impede us from seriously considering the humanitarian problems (such as world hunger) that plague us today. In that sense, it probably should be abandoned as proposed.
Absence of any form of interstellar communication doesn't mean there's no intelligent life where we're looking.
What's the old saying? "We know there's intelligent life out there because it's not talking to us."
It's all about the messenger bag.
I don't go anywhere without mine.
If it has now been shown, then Nature (Ma Nature, not the journal) has given us the proverbial infinite monkeys, and I'm going to look for Shakespearean sonnets in that number.
What gets me is that everybody seems to get hung up on this whole (infinite monkeys)+(infinite typewriters)+(infinite time)=complete works of shakespeare equation.
The fact is, a finite number of "monkeys", with a finite amount of time, and no typewriters whatsoever, have already produced the entire works of Shakespeare - a much more unlikely occurence, if you ask me.
You want to see "Hamlet" encoded in the very fabric of the universe? Go down to your nearest library.
Yes, libraries do serve some useful purpose today, but for how much longer will that be true?
I propose that libraries are obsolete. Soon, they will serve the same function as museums. They will serve as repositories for such physical specimens as have historic or scientific value by virtue of their physicality.
When all the world is online, when all the content can be had in digital form, what then would you have in a library?
Woohoo! You're new here, aren't you?
Here's a hint: adjust your thresholds.
Also, try to have some basic understanding of why the code is the way it is. Fail to be so completely inane when you whine.
As opposed to the much more common "quiet" boom?
I've got lots of shampoo, but my TV is too small, I have no DVD player, and I'm all out of chili sauce. On the third hand, I don't interact with any Russians, so there's no compatibility issues there.
Oh, and I have duct tape.