Global Warming is faith based, it's predictions aren't made in anything resembling a controlled scientific environment and the only way to test it's predictions is to do nothing for twenty years and see if the disasters predicted come to pass.
You seem to have NO idea at all about what you are saying. Global warming is based on very exact scientific studies, where "faith" is needed only in that one believes that there exists a reality around us that follows some self-consistent laws.
The studies that present exactly the effects that Dr. Ioannidis mentions are the opposing view, those that pretend to disprove the existence of global warming. Scientist, all over the world, are very strongly in agreement that global warming is an indisputable fact.
are you telling me they can't find an ISP that doesn't have their head up their ass?
To use a Slashdot-approved car analogy, what you are telling us is that if you find a used-car salesman that offers stolen cars for sale that's no big deal because there are plenty of used cars for sale that aren't stolen.
In a way, I think that the cypherpunk ideal fell apart when they built it and nobody came. All sorts of strong crypto are available to everybody, for free, and aren't even all that much trouble to use. Almost nobody bothers, probably so few that those who do just stand out by doing so.
Worse than that, it seems like anyone who knows anything about cryptography is automatically suspect these days. "If you have nothing to hide, then why do you need that"?
You know that you can still get VMS systems from HP right?
Yes, but it's not VAX. When the Alpha came out, they migrated some applications, but the conclusion was that migrating from VAX to Alpha isn't easy enough to justify the trouble of keeping a niche system of dubious future.
I'm always suspicious of systems with very long uptimes: they probably haven't had a kernel update since that last reboot... meaning that they are a highly vulnerable box.
I don't remember when was the last VAX/VMS kernel update, ten years ago perhaps? Where I work we have several VAX machines with uptimes around fifteen years. With NO vulnerabilities at al, they are in their own DECnet, no TCP/IP, no connection to the outside world. They run a satellite control system, several million lines of VAX-Fortran source code.
The only problem with this setup is that there is no replacement hardware being fabricated, luckily it's very reliable hardware, but even so we are now upgrading to a completely new system.
Try end it all. It doesnt affect boot time, you do a normal boot and then run end-it-all, but its great for games, you get more fps and, more important, less crashes.
That doesn't mean that there are no failures, but in general you can at least detect that tampering took place and that it was deliberate.
So, did they find out that the butterfly ballot was deliberate tampering? Or was it just an accident, like a hanging chad?
If you really must use a microscope on a paper ballot to determine the voter's intent, wouldn't it be better to use the same thoroughness in inspecting the electronic voting process to make sure that no tampering was done?
That's actually two words, with a misspelling, if the lack of a space can be called a misspelling.
Seriously, though, I'd take Perl over PowerShell anytime. Reasons: 1) CPAN; 2) Data saved as text instead of binary objects. The Unix Philosophy runs around the use of small scripts which can be used standalone and reused chained together. Perl was designed around this principle, it's perfect for text input.
From a programmers perspective the more the market fragments the more opportunity for specialized knowledge that increases your market value.
You aren't a professional programmer, are you? What you are saying is that it's better to have 10% of a $1 million sector than 1% of a $10 million sector.
But it's worse than that. In *any* job as a programmer, no matter where you work, something will always come up that needs different languages. By restricting your knowledge to a single language, you are limiting your opportunities. The bottom line is, the more languages exist, the worse for programmers.
As for me, I try to push Python as a general purpose language and use nothing else, except for C in some places. Professionally speaking, it's better to know very well a language that's good for most jobs than to know a specialized language.
To give you an example of this principle, there are some people who specialize in databases, they know a lot of SQL. I have some knowledge of SQL, enough to query and update a table. I do all the complex data handling using Python objects, the SQL experts would use joins for this same job. When it comes to accessing an SQL database, we come out even, but when the data must be read from a website, for instance, the SQL experts are lost while I do it in Python without much effort.
the academic who has arguably done more to promote the development of artificial intelligence than anyone else
Well, I suppose someone could argue that. But it would be a pretty weak argument. I could cite at least a hundred researchers who are better known and have done more important contributions. to the field of AI.
the simplest approach is that all rights should be legally bound (non-transferable) to the creator
An interesting idea, but unenforceable. They would just turn the contract around. Instead of the artist selling the rights to the song, he would contract the services of the MAFIAA to distribute it. Instead of getting 0.05% of the sales in royalties, he would pay 99.95% of the sales in fees.
The Second Amendment has a similar preface; does that mean restricting gun ownership is fine as long as it doesn't interfere with a well-regulated militia?
Considering the many laws restricting gun ownership, one would think so. Gun ownership is allowed, or perhaps one should say "tolerated" for other purposes, but subject to a long list of regulations. Having a gun is prohibited under any sort of circumstances where it could possibly cause danger. There are laws stating that guns must be securely stored, may not be carried hidden, may not be carried into many public buildings, etc.
OTOH, there are no similar laws about copy restrictions. What if a company publishes a work under copyright, but encodes it with a secret key? When the copyright term expires, how can you guarantee that it will be available in the public domain?
I think you chose a particularly bad example, there are far more legal restrictions on gun ownership than on copyright ownership.
With media companies, the media is their primary product. Apples and oranges
Hmmm, I see. So, you're saying that when a company creates a film for theatre exhibition, they cannot charge for the by-products? Such as foreign translations? TV versions? DVDs? Sound tracks? Mpeg files?
The Congress shall have power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
Copyright is constitutional only if it promotes the progress of science and useful arts.
Now the question is *ARE* science and useful arts being promoted by copyrights? Would you say that this work is a progress over this one? If a remake was made, is the copyright in the older film still valid? Why?
The only thing that's being promoted by copyrights is the profit of some corporations.
Why do media companies think that any use of media should be paid for?
Suppose farmers acted like that. They grow grain to sell, but their plants create oxygen from carbon dioxide gas as a side effect. Oxygen is a valuable commodity, it's sold in bottles for many uses: hospitals, aviators, steel-cutting, etc. But farmers are sensible enough to know that it would be totally impractical to try to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere.
Media companies should grow up and accept the same fact for their productions. Copyrights should be enforced in movie theatres, someone sneaking into a theatre to watch a movie without paying is somewhat like someone stealing grain from a farmer. But trying to charge for every little use of their media is like a farmer trying to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere the same price industrial gas distributors charge for bottled oxygen.
It's not as if the media were ignorant of the trends. They have seen the future and made fun of it.
The current trends are worrisome, not only in the US, but in the whole world. The easiest way to become a millionaire seems to be in sports or music, and in many countries, including a large part of the USA, being a "scholar" means studying religion.
And don't think that a long-lasting total cultural decadence cannot happen, because it has happened before.
This is no joke, if mankind forgets math, we will suffer a worse fate than global warming, communism, and radical Islamism put together.
There are enough trolls who would vote each others posts up, even if they don't know each other
The troll group would quickly grow to be the largest group in/. Or do you know of any other particular subject that draws so much interest from so many people here?
Material fabrication and shaping is an area that is steadily improving; but nothing points to Apple as having made any revolutionary advances in the area recently. And, barring such revolutionary advances, machining big chunks of material isn't exactly cheap.
Most probably, if the rumor is true, is that some die-cast part will have a small detail cut by a CO2 laser. That's standard industry practice and not so expensive, at least not for a notebook computer.
But at some point a software update and server migration went funny (on their end), and the package manager couldn't find the right site to update itself
Until they got merged into Mandrake, Conectiva was the best distro, IMHO. They had RPM with Apt, the best of both worlds. After the acquisition, they opted to drop that feature, keeping the vastly inferior Mandrake package management. Sorry, guys, I wento to Ubuntu, and never looked back.
The main thing I miss now is the Conectiva keyboard mapping. There are some subtle but significant differences in the way US-style keyboards handle accented characters, and Conectiva had the smartest setup (easiest to use, less keystrokes needed).
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have NO idea at all about what you are saying. Global warming is based on very exact scientific studies, where "faith" is needed only in that one believes that there exists a reality around us that follows some self-consistent laws.
The studies that present exactly the effects that Dr. Ioannidis mentions are the opposing view, those that pretend to disprove the existence of global warming. Scientist, all over the world, are very strongly in agreement that global warming is an indisputable fact.
To use a Slashdot-approved car analogy, what you are telling us is that if you find a used-car salesman that offers stolen cars for sale that's no big deal because there are plenty of used cars for sale that aren't stolen.
Worse than that, it seems like anyone who knows anything about cryptography is automatically suspect these days. "If you have nothing to hide, then why do you need that"?
Yes, but it's not VAX. When the Alpha came out, they migrated some applications, but the conclusion was that migrating from VAX to Alpha isn't easy enough to justify the trouble of keeping a niche system of dubious future.
I don't remember when was the last VAX/VMS kernel update, ten years ago perhaps? Where I work we have several VAX machines with uptimes around fifteen years. With NO vulnerabilities at al, they are in their own DECnet, no TCP/IP, no connection to the outside world. They run a satellite control system, several million lines of VAX-Fortran source code.
The only problem with this setup is that there is no replacement hardware being fabricated, luckily it's very reliable hardware, but even so we are now upgrading to a completely new system.
Try end it all. It doesnt affect boot time, you do a normal boot and then run end-it-all, but its great for games, you get more fps and, more important, less crashes.
How cute, an emoticon of a frowning bald guy with a goatee! What does it mean?
Problem is, Thompson was one lawyer. The RIAA has as many as they want, disbar one, they get another
Look in some large city phone book for "McCain, John *". How many of those have a criminal record? Are any of those about sex crimes?
So, did they find out that the butterfly ballot was deliberate tampering? Or was it just an accident, like a hanging chad?
If you really must use a microscope on a paper ballot to determine the voter's intent, wouldn't it be better to use the same thoroughness in inspecting the electronic voting process to make sure that no tampering was done?
That's actually two words, with a misspelling, if the lack of a space can be called a misspelling.
Seriously, though, I'd take Perl over PowerShell anytime. Reasons: 1) CPAN; 2) Data saved as text instead of binary objects. The Unix Philosophy runs around the use of small scripts which can be used standalone and reused chained together. Perl was designed around this principle, it's perfect for text input.
It seems to be someone who's more "ATHI" than anybody else, but what's exactly an ATHI?
You aren't a professional programmer, are you? What you are saying is that it's better to have 10% of a $1 million sector than 1% of a $10 million sector.
But it's worse than that. In *any* job as a programmer, no matter where you work, something will always come up that needs different languages. By restricting your knowledge to a single language, you are limiting your opportunities. The bottom line is, the more languages exist, the worse for programmers.
As for me, I try to push Python as a general purpose language and use nothing else, except for C in some places. Professionally speaking, it's better to know very well a language that's good for most jobs than to know a specialized language.
To give you an example of this principle, there are some people who specialize in databases, they know a lot of SQL. I have some knowledge of SQL, enough to query and update a table. I do all the complex data handling using Python objects, the SQL experts would use joins for this same job. When it comes to accessing an SQL database, we come out even, but when the data must be read from a website, for instance, the SQL experts are lost while I do it in Python without much effort.
Well, I suppose someone could argue that. But it would be a pretty weak argument. I could cite at least a hundred researchers who are better known and have done more important contributions. to the field of AI.
An interesting idea, but unenforceable. They would just turn the contract around. Instead of the artist selling the rights to the song, he would contract the services of the MAFIAA to distribute it. Instead of getting 0.05% of the sales in royalties, he would pay 99.95% of the sales in fees.
Considering the many laws restricting gun ownership, one would think so. Gun ownership is allowed, or perhaps one should say "tolerated" for other purposes, but subject to a long list of regulations. Having a gun is prohibited under any sort of circumstances where it could possibly cause danger. There are laws stating that guns must be securely stored, may not be carried hidden, may not be carried into many public buildings, etc.
OTOH, there are no similar laws about copy restrictions. What if a company publishes a work under copyright, but encodes it with a secret key? When the copyright term expires, how can you guarantee that it will be available in the public domain?
I think you chose a particularly bad example, there are far more legal restrictions on gun ownership than on copyright ownership.
Hmmm, I see. So, you're saying that when a company creates a film for theatre exhibition, they cannot charge for the by-products? Such as foreign translations? TV versions? DVDs? Sound tracks? Mpeg files?
The US Constitution says:
Copyright is constitutional only if it promotes the progress of science and useful arts.
Now the question is *ARE* science and useful arts being promoted by copyrights? Would you say that this work is a progress over this one? If a remake was made, is the copyright in the older film still valid? Why?
The only thing that's being promoted by copyrights is the profit of some corporations.
Why do media companies think that any use of media should be paid for?
Suppose farmers acted like that. They grow grain to sell, but their plants create oxygen from carbon dioxide gas as a side effect. Oxygen is a valuable commodity, it's sold in bottles for many uses: hospitals, aviators, steel-cutting, etc. But farmers are sensible enough to know that it would be totally impractical to try to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere.
Media companies should grow up and accept the same fact for their productions. Copyrights should be enforced in movie theatres, someone sneaking into a theatre to watch a movie without paying is somewhat like someone stealing grain from a farmer. But trying to charge for every little use of their media is like a farmer trying to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere the same price industrial gas distributors charge for bottled oxygen.
It's not as if the media were ignorant of the trends. They have seen the future and made fun of it.
The current trends are worrisome, not only in the US, but in the whole world. The easiest way to become a millionaire seems to be in sports or music, and in many countries, including a large part of the USA, being a "scholar" means studying religion.
And don't think that a long-lasting total cultural decadence cannot happen, because it has happened before.
This is no joke, if mankind forgets math, we will suffer a worse fate than global warming, communism, and radical Islamism put together.
Did they send an email informing everyone of this?
There are enough trolls who would vote each others posts up, even if they don't know each other
The troll group would quickly grow to be the largest group in /.
Or do you know of any other particular subject that draws so much interest from so many people here?
Most probably, if the rumor is true, is that some die-cast part will have a small detail cut by a CO2 laser. That's standard industry practice and not so expensive, at least not for a notebook computer.
Then take a look at the female version of Goatse and see if it causes the same anxiety.
Until they got merged into Mandrake, Conectiva was the best distro, IMHO. They had RPM with Apt, the best of both worlds. After the acquisition, they opted to drop that feature, keeping the vastly inferior Mandrake package management. Sorry, guys, I wento to Ubuntu, and never looked back.
The main thing I miss now is the Conectiva keyboard mapping. There are some subtle but significant differences in the way US-style keyboards handle accented characters, and Conectiva had the smartest setup (easiest to use, less keystrokes needed).