Please consider that people who support censorship are, usually, God-fearing Christians. And God-fearing Christians always respect the Law. As our good Lord Jesus Christ Himself obeyed the Law:
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pBUTT, one jot or one BREASTtle shall in no wise pBUTT from the law, till all be fulfilled.
Because honestly I have had child porn come up on the internet while searching for other things. I immediately close the site, but if you look at the logs I accessed the site. Also in some newsgroups there are tons of child porn pictures.
That's weird, in the 15 years or so that I've been using the Web, I have never, ever, seen one single photograph that could be classified as "child porn".
I have seen some pictures of nude children in nudist camps and beaches, there are many beaches in Europe where whole families go totally nude. There are many so-called "teen" sites, which show nude women with small breasts and shaved pubic region, who could be of any age between 15 and 30.
But I never found one single picture of a child engaged in sex. This must be some different "internets" we are talking about. That, or people have extended the meaning of "child porn" to "any image I don't like".
Unfortunately, brute force is the best tool we have for certain "hard" problems.
Fortunately we do have more and more powerful brute force systems these days.
I don't agree with the definition that any brute force tool is "inelegant", or lacks "mathematical beauty". In those cases, one should try to find elegant brute force algorithms. For instance, I think the fast Fourier transform is a very elegant algorithm, because it's rather simple yet ingenuous and can bring a lot of acceleration in computing.
In the end, what is simpler, more elegant, and easier to verify: a few pages of computer program that find some result by computation, or several hundred pages of theoretical analysis proving that same result?
I followed the link you posted, those are truly interesting ideas they are raising.
The most interesting point someone raised was this: if religion gets so many subsidies and tax breaks, shouldn't atheist organizations be entitled to the same treatment?
The point, you reactionary retard, is not to turn the world from somewhere where everyone dies into somewhere where no-one dies, but to make life easier and to save the occasional soul.
I think no one is advocating that cell phones be eliminated, only that they need an occasional control. We have automobiles, but we also have safety belts, driving licenses, traffic lights, etc, etc. Every technology needs a set of safety guards to make sure they will be used properly.
To say that people have an absolute right to use a cell phone anywhere because in some extremely rare cases a missed emergency call could endanger someone is a straw man, a ridiculous argument. That would be like saying firefighters and doctors should have the right to park their cars inside the theater lobby, because the time wasted by running to the parking could have fatal consequences.
If you are in a situation where it is imperative that you don't miss any calls, then don't go to a theater. Watch a DVD at home, instead. Don't like that limitation? Get another job!
And, if you manage an installation, like a hospital or fire station, where it is a matter of life and death to have people responding quickly, don't give your staff cell phones, HIRE ENOUGH PEOPLE instead!
I was an election judge for Boulder County in 2004
And I was an election judge for Itatiaia, in Brazil, in 1998. I had more or less the same duties as you had. It was an electronic box.
I inserted a flash card with the software, including the operating system, which was given to me by an officer of the electoral court minutes before the election started.
If you can corrupt a representative of the judge who is responsible for declaring if the vote is correct, does it matter if the box is electronic or paper?
From that time until I handed the box to the county officials
You are ready to swear for the honesty of those county officials, yet you don't trust the people who handled the electronic box before the election?
The machines were left in publicly accessible areas for days before the election.
That's *WRONG*, no matter if the ballots were paper or electronic. No part of an electoral process should be left unattended at any time at all.
To sum up, you have absolute trust in the paper voting system, because you have absolute trust in the way the paper ballot was handled *AFTER* the election, but you mistrust the electronic vote because you mistrust the way the electronic box is handled *BEFORE* the election.
For me, both systems can be corrupted, but the electronic system is better because, given the same level of precaution before and after the election, the electronic system gives faster results. To cheat, you need physical access to the system, so the quickest system is safer.
Yeah, right! NO ONE can cheat in an election with paper ballots! The concept of a corrupt government did not exist before the invention of electronic voting.
*BULLSHIT*
Reading TFA: This is done by prying just one ROM chip from its socket and pushing a new one in, or by replacement of the Z80 processor chip. We have demonstrated that this ``hack'' takes just 7 minutes to perform.
Do you want to make a bet? Let's see how many paper ballots I can stuff in 7 minutes, given the same level of physical access one needs to change a chip in a computer. This means I can open a box, right? It doesn't matter if the box is electronic or not, it should have a padlock. If I can open the box, with no one noticing, it doesn't matter if the content is electronic or paper.
The intrinsic safety of electronic voting comes from the agility in counting. Counting a paper ballot box takes much longer than it takes to fill that box with a totally different set of votes. By the time you have counted, recounted, and counted again those paper votes, they could have been substituted a dozen times.
If you read a bit of recent history, you would realize that Iraq was armed by the Soviet Union. The US offered some gestures of conciliation to Iraq after Iran suffered the Islamic revolution, but Saddam was always a Soviet puppet.
Iran demonstrated the capability to make similar weapons but emphasized that use of WMDs even in retaliation to enemy's action is against religious principals.
(I suppose you mean religious principles). Muslim religious principles are very mixed, they don't have a Pope to declare what is acceptable or not. The Quran has both commandments that can be interpreted as "death to Israel" and commandments that say that Jews and Christians should be respected because they worship the same God as Muslims. There are political leaders, religious leaders, and generals in Iran that would be happy to make peace with Israel and the USA, there are others that would be happy to annihilate Israel and the USA.
Now you are suggesting that Iran would nuke the second most sacred Islamic religious site after Mecca in a suicidal mission?!!
Actually, the second most sacred Islamic religious site is Medina, but I guess you are right, they wouldn't bomb Jerusalem, their third holiest site. Can't say the same about Tel Aviv and a number of other Israeli cities, though...
Also ask this: How many nuclear weapons have accidentally gone off?
Zero.
Now, how many nuclear reactors have had serious problems?
One.
The fact is, you are thousands of times safer living right next to a nuke weapons storage facility than you are living right next to a nuclear reactor, regardless of what his calculations show.
Technically, according to your argument and looking only from a mathematical standpoint, you are infinitely safer next to a nuke weapons storage. But I guess you've never heard of something called statistical significance, have you? Please take a look at some of those five million pages, to get a cue of why BIG numbers mean more than small numbers like one or zero.
To make a better, more coherent, argument, you'd have to ask: how many people will likely die from an accident in a nuclear power plant? How many people will likely die from a nuclear weapon explosion? And remember this simple fact: engineers design power plants to be as safe as possible. Engineers design nuclear weapons to be as deadly as possible.
most of the items that git 'claims' to be better on is something IDE plugins fix
Funny, but I've never got the IDE plugin for *any* version control system working well. Since I always have at least one command window open, typing "git commit -a" is faster and easier than locating the corresponding menu, clicking on it, and praying that it will do exactly what I want.
Disclaimer: Of course, this doesn't mean I don't use the many other functions that work better on an IDE than in a text command. I can use vi occasionally for a quick edit, but development of a large code base is much easier and quicker on a good IDE. It's just that version control is quicker on the command line.
To make a long story short, if we gave autonomy to the Middle east (Oil supplies be damned!), meaning pull out completely. I think terrorism would stop or at the very least, decrease dramatically.
So, abandoning Israel would be a solution, in your point of view? Well, this might come as a surprise to you, but the Jews in Israel had armed groups defending themselves *before* the state of Israel came into existence.
If, in your words, "Terrorism is a symptom of very desperate people who feel that they're being shit on by someone", then if you shit on Israelis they will automatically become terrorists.
A simple look at Google Earth will show the Arab-Israel border by the color of the land, Israel is greener than its Arab neighbors. If I were given the power to decide who should live on that land, I would give it to the people who treat the land better. The Arab Muslims won the biggest lottery on earth, in the form of a few trillion dollars in oil. If they cannot separate the tiniest amount of that enormous wealth to help a few million Palestinians, while Jews around the world have contributed so generously to Israel, let the Israelis have that land, they have earned it.
No, your solution to the terrorist problem is both unjust and ineffective.
I once saw something exactly like you describe and your pictures show. I got my telescope and saw an aluminum foil balloon. It was much smaller and nearer than it seemed before I recognized it. It's really funny, how something that seemed like a huge metallic spacecraft flying extremely fast miles away was suddenly diminished to a small child's toy floating at a hundred yards distance.
But if you're afraid of big, monolithic governments as much as I am, then you'll be deathly afraid of any international police body, as Internet Police isn't just a bad idea, it's also a very dangerous slippery slope to be treading on.
I think the wisest words ever written in a code of law were when the US Constitution stated that anything not specifically allowed by that Constitution was not allowed for the Government to legislate upon.
Government is much more powerful than an individual citizen, therefore it needs many more restrictions than citizens do.
It's not like those special-interest reps will get to make policy without having to win over the rest of them, right?
Wrong. The railway workers representative will gladly vote for the project granting special tax benefits for churches in exchange for special retirement rules for railway workers. Just remember one small fact: there are no ideological differences between different special interests.
If "None of the Above" wins, you either start over or let the seat go unfilled
But, when you start over, what makes you think there will be a better option? Given the choice of voting "none of the above", or voting on a guy who looks like this and says everything can be solved by nuclear weapons, how do you think the Homer Simpsons will vote?
The voting system we have in Brazil isn't totally proportional, but still it raises more problems than it solves. Each party must have a minimum percentage of the vote to elect representatives. The total vote for the party is computed, a candidate for a popular party needs less votes to get elected.
A sad example of how this, very complex, voting system works is that this clown got elected and got three other representatives in his party elected when he ran as a "protest" candidate, i.e. people voted for him because they thought no one was a worthy candidate. His motto was "my name is Eneas" and his main political project was that Brazil should detonate the nuclear weapon that reportedly was developed here in the early 1980s.
Your system seems to be much better than the one we have in Brazil, where the results are computed for the whole state, instead of by district.
The result of a proportional voting system is that *every* special interest politician is elected. We have dozens of representatives elected by different churches, and they all vote in a block on religious issues. We have dozens of trade union representatives. We have the "ruralist bench", representatives elected on farming issues. We have representatives for individual *issues*, rather than for the population as a whole.
As they say, politics make strange bedfellows, and when everyone represents a very narrow special interest, the strangest laws get approved by the congress in Brazil, no wonder this is a "third world" country...
The district voting that's used in Western Europe and North America seems to be a much better system, although it magnifies small differences in the popular vote. It's better to have 70% of the representatives elected by 50% of the people than to have 70% of the representatives each elected by a very small slice of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
Please consider that people who support censorship are, usually, God-fearing Christians. And God-fearing Christians always respect the Law. As our good Lord Jesus Christ Himself obeyed the Law:
That's weird, in the 15 years or so that I've been using the Web, I have never, ever, seen one single photograph that could be classified as "child porn".
I have seen some pictures of nude children in nudist camps and beaches, there are many beaches in Europe where whole families go totally nude. There are many so-called "teen" sites, which show nude women with small breasts and shaved pubic region, who could be of any age between 15 and 30.
But I never found one single picture of a child engaged in sex. This must be some different "internets" we are talking about. That, or people have extended the meaning of "child porn" to "any image I don't like".
The Einstein portrait caption reads "1870-1955". Einstein was born in 1879, the same year when Maxwell died.
Let's hope their theoretical physicists are more careful than their webdesigners.
Define "elegant".
Fortunately we do have more and more powerful brute force systems these days.
I don't agree with the definition that any brute force tool is "inelegant", or lacks "mathematical beauty". In those cases, one should try to find elegant brute force algorithms. For instance, I think the fast Fourier transform is a very elegant algorithm, because it's rather simple yet ingenuous and can bring a lot of acceleration in computing.
In the end, what is simpler, more elegant, and easier to verify: a few pages of computer program that find some result by computation, or several hundred pages of theoretical analysis proving that same result?
I followed the link you posted, those are truly interesting ideas they are raising.
The most interesting point someone raised was this: if religion gets so many subsidies and tax breaks, shouldn't atheist organizations be entitled to the same treatment?
Hey, they are hunting down "uncooperative" humans! Wouldn't the presence of a robots.txt be interpreted as evidence of non-cooperation?
After all, who am I to disagree with a three-digit /. id?
Take a look at the bottom on TFA, in "Related Articles"
I think no one is advocating that cell phones be eliminated, only that they need an occasional control. We have automobiles, but we also have safety belts, driving licenses, traffic lights, etc, etc. Every technology needs a set of safety guards to make sure they will be used properly.
To say that people have an absolute right to use a cell phone anywhere because in some extremely rare cases a missed emergency call could endanger someone is a straw man, a ridiculous argument. That would be like saying firefighters and doctors should have the right to park their cars inside the theater lobby, because the time wasted by running to the parking could have fatal consequences.
If you are in a situation where it is imperative that you don't miss any calls, then don't go to a theater. Watch a DVD at home, instead. Don't like that limitation? Get another job!
And, if you manage an installation, like a hospital or fire station, where it is a matter of life and death to have people responding quickly, don't give your staff cell phones, HIRE ENOUGH PEOPLE instead!
Here it is
What do you expect? A game that removes an eardrum, an eyeball, and two fingers of the player when that happens?
There's no need to imagine that
And I was an election judge for Itatiaia, in Brazil, in 1998. I had more or less the same duties as you had. It was an electronic box.
I inserted a flash card with the software, including the operating system, which was given to me by an officer of the electoral court minutes before the election started.
If you can corrupt a representative of the judge who is responsible for declaring if the vote is correct, does it matter if the box is electronic or paper?
You are ready to swear for the honesty of those county officials, yet you don't trust the people who handled the electronic box before the election?
That's *WRONG*, no matter if the ballots were paper or electronic. No part of an electoral process should be left unattended at any time at all.
To sum up, you have absolute trust in the paper voting system, because you have absolute trust in the way the paper ballot was handled *AFTER* the election, but you mistrust the electronic vote because you mistrust the way the electronic box is handled *BEFORE* the election.
For me, both systems can be corrupted, but the electronic system is better because, given the same level of precaution before and after the election, the electronic system gives faster results. To cheat, you need physical access to the system, so the quickest system is safer.
Yeah, right! NO ONE can cheat in an election with paper ballots! The concept of a corrupt government did not exist before the invention of electronic voting.
*BULLSHIT*
Reading TFA: This is done by prying just one ROM chip from its socket and pushing a new one in, or by replacement of the Z80 processor chip. We have demonstrated that this ``hack'' takes just 7 minutes to perform.
Do you want to make a bet? Let's see how many paper ballots I can stuff in 7 minutes, given the same level of physical access one needs to change a chip in a computer. This means I can open a box, right? It doesn't matter if the box is electronic or not, it should have a padlock. If I can open the box, with no one noticing, it doesn't matter if the content is electronic or paper.
The intrinsic safety of electronic voting comes from the agility in counting. Counting a paper ballot box takes much longer than it takes to fill that box with a totally different set of votes. By the time you have counted, recounted, and counted again those paper votes, they could have been substituted a dozen times.
A recent poll found that 7.23% of Mexicans want the US to give back the Mexican territory they invaded in the 1800s.
And 92.77% want the US to take over the rest of Mexico.
To use a car analogy, that's like comparing a head-on crash with a dead battery.
Yes, and China is threatening the USA with weapons handed to them by Nixon, right?
If you read a bit of recent history, you would realize that Iraq was armed by the Soviet Union. The US offered some gestures of conciliation to Iraq after Iran suffered the Islamic revolution, but Saddam was always a Soviet puppet.
(I suppose you mean religious principles). Muslim religious principles are very mixed, they don't have a Pope to declare what is acceptable or not. The Quran has both commandments that can be interpreted as "death to Israel" and commandments that say that Jews and Christians should be respected because they worship the same God as Muslims. There are political leaders, religious leaders, and generals in Iran that would be happy to make peace with Israel and the USA, there are others that would be happy to annihilate Israel and the USA.
Actually, the second most sacred Islamic religious site is Medina, but I guess you are right, they wouldn't bomb Jerusalem, their third holiest site. Can't say the same about Tel Aviv and a number of other Israeli cities, though...
Zero.
One.
Technically, according to your argument and looking only from a mathematical standpoint, you are infinitely safer next to a nuke weapons storage. But I guess you've never heard of something called statistical significance, have you? Please take a look at some of those five million pages, to get a cue of why BIG numbers mean more than small numbers like one or zero.
To make a better, more coherent, argument, you'd have to ask: how many people will likely die from an accident in a nuclear power plant? How many people will likely die from a nuclear weapon explosion? And remember this simple fact: engineers design power plants to be as safe as possible. Engineers design nuclear weapons to be as deadly as possible.
Funny, but I've never got the IDE plugin for *any* version control system working well. Since I always have at least one command window open, typing "git commit -a" is faster and easier than locating the corresponding menu, clicking on it, and praying that it will do exactly what I want.
Disclaimer: Of course, this doesn't mean I don't use the many other functions that work better on an IDE than in a text command. I can use vi occasionally for a quick edit, but development of a large code base is much easier and quicker on a good IDE. It's just that version control is quicker on the command line.
So, abandoning Israel would be a solution, in your point of view? Well, this might come as a surprise to you, but the Jews in Israel had armed groups defending themselves *before* the state of Israel came into existence.
If, in your words, "Terrorism is a symptom of very desperate people who feel that they're being shit on by someone", then if you shit on Israelis they will automatically become terrorists.
A simple look at Google Earth will show the Arab-Israel border by the color of the land, Israel is greener than its Arab neighbors. If I were given the power to decide who should live on that land, I would give it to the people who treat the land better. The Arab Muslims won the biggest lottery on earth, in the form of a few trillion dollars in oil. If they cannot separate the tiniest amount of that enormous wealth to help a few million Palestinians, while Jews around the world have contributed so generously to Israel, let the Israelis have that land, they have earned it.
No, your solution to the terrorist problem is both unjust and ineffective.
I once saw something exactly like you describe and your pictures show. I got my telescope and saw an aluminum foil balloon. It was much smaller and nearer than it seemed before I recognized it. It's really funny, how something that seemed like a huge metallic spacecraft flying extremely fast miles away was suddenly diminished to a small child's toy floating at a hundred yards distance.
I think the wisest words ever written in a code of law were when the US Constitution stated that anything not specifically allowed by that Constitution was not allowed for the Government to legislate upon.
Government is much more powerful than an individual citizen, therefore it needs many more restrictions than citizens do.
Wrong. The railway workers representative will gladly vote for the project granting special tax benefits for churches in exchange for special retirement rules for railway workers. Just remember one small fact: there are no ideological differences between different special interests.
But, when you start over, what makes you think there will be a better option? Given the choice of voting "none of the above", or voting on a guy who looks like this and says everything can be solved by nuclear weapons, how do you think the Homer Simpsons will vote?
The voting system we have in Brazil isn't totally proportional, but still it raises more problems than it solves. Each party must have a minimum percentage of the vote to elect representatives. The total vote for the party is computed, a candidate for a popular party needs less votes to get elected.
A sad example of how this, very complex, voting system works is that this clown got elected and got three other representatives in his party elected when he ran as a "protest" candidate, i.e. people voted for him because they thought no one was a worthy candidate. His motto was "my name is Eneas" and his main political project was that Brazil should detonate the nuclear weapon that reportedly was developed here in the early 1980s.
Your system seems to be much better than the one we have in Brazil, where the results are computed for the whole state, instead of by district.
The result of a proportional voting system is that *every* special interest politician is elected. We have dozens of representatives elected by different churches, and they all vote in a block on religious issues. We have dozens of trade union representatives. We have the "ruralist bench", representatives elected on farming issues. We have representatives for individual *issues*, rather than for the population as a whole.
As they say, politics make strange bedfellows, and when everyone represents a very narrow special interest, the strangest laws get approved by the congress in Brazil, no wonder this is a "third world" country...
The district voting that's used in Western Europe and North America seems to be a much better system, although it magnifies small differences in the popular vote. It's better to have 70% of the representatives elected by 50% of the people than to have 70% of the representatives each elected by a very small slice of the population.