she created a whole false persona, befriended and seduced the girl with it over a period of months, then revealed herself and ripped the piss out of her. THAT is harassment
Compared to other forms of harassment, that was pretty mild. Consider THIS, for instance. Or THIS. Or THIS. There are many forms of psychological pressure that might lead a person to suicide, but a computer is one of the weakest.
All in all, the persons who did most harm and had the greatest influence in that young girl's unfortunate death, were those who had the responsibility to prevent it: her own parents. If every heartbroken thirteen-year-old girl committed suicide, our species would have become extinct long ago.
If an irrational person seems me talking quietly and assumes I'm talking about her and kills herself, how am I guilty of involuntary manslaughter? On the other hand, if I pretend to be the peer of a teenager and repeatedly send harassing and abusive speech, I've done something quite different.
So, it's one thing to make fun of an irrational person and a different thing to make fun of an irrational person? I certainly would classify as "irrational" a person who commits suicide based on something someone wrote in a website.
I remember the case of a guy I knew many years ago. He was a drunk who could never hold a job, but people bought him drinks because he told funny stories in the bar. One night he was walking home and took a shortcut across a garden when it was raining. He fell face down in a pool of rainwater and drowned. Would you say the people who bought him drinks were guilty of manslaughter?
Both cases are more or less the same, people who are basically unfit for life causing their own death. Normal people would need much more than reading an abusive webpage or walking through a garden in the rain to die. The teenage girl could have suicided because her favorite pop star got married, the drunk could have electrocuted himself in the bathtub.
It may seem callous, but people with such a distorted personality are living on borrowed time, no one can predict which act will cause their death. Of course, it's wrong to make fun of a neurotic teen or giving drinks to an alcoholic, but I don't think these should be classified as homicidal acts, because death couldn't be predicted, it wasn't even the most likely probability, it just happened.
every page in the forum is headed by an orange banner, that not only references the AVG problem and suggests users uninstall the software, but also recommends and has direct links to "superior alternatives" such as Avast and Avira.
That's a good one, but there's also this suggestion from TFA:
one web master advocates redirecting AVG scans back to AVG's site. "Many webmasters simply tell LinkScanner to scan AVG's site instead, so their site gets marked as malware free every time - while AVG gets handed the extra bandwidth cost," says the webmaster of TheSilhouettes.org.
Pirates are considered divine beings and the decrease in the number of pirates in the word (acording to followers of the FSM) id the true cause of global warming
It's hard enough just to tell whether a hole is really round, never mind whether there's a minute flat spot on a sphere.
Yes, but the question is not to detect a minute flat spot on a sphere, just as it is not to detect a minute non-flat spot on a cube. The problem is to detect an overall deviation from a desired shape. To detect if a sphere isn't spherical it's enough to check if any spot deviates from the desired radius, but to detect if a cube isn't cubical you have to check for *THREE* different parameters for each spot.
you want an album to keep in your collection you should buy it instead of downloading or borrowing
I used to think like that, it's a theoretical principle that I admire. But then I got thinking, how much of the money I pay will go to the lawyers? How much of it will go to bribe the politicians that vote for those laws?
Today, when I find artists I like, I try to support them by going to their live presentations whenever possible. And I feel no shame at all in downloading an album or film that I wouldn't pay to get if I didn't have the option of an unauthorized copy. I'm paying null instead of zero, what's the difference? Oh, sure, I'm getting something for nothing, but it's not harming anyone. It's like standing on the sidewalk to listen to music that comes from an open window.
I think the reason why they made it a sphere is because a sphere is defined by one parameter only, its diameter. To make a perfect sphere all you need is to make sure it has exactly the same curvature everywhere. Now, let's see what it takes to make a perfect cube:
1) each of its six faces must be perfectly plane
2) each of its twelve edges must have exactly the same length
3) each of its twelve angles must be exactly ninety degrees
Just to illustrate how difficult this is, I once read this anecdote about Wernher von Braun: when going through his mechanical engineering course in Germany, one of the professors gave each student an irregular lump of iron. The assignment would be to create a cube, as perfect as possible, from that lump. The size of the resulting cube didn't matter but, naturally, if it was a very small cube it meant the student had a tough job getting it right.
Atanasoff simply re-created Babbage's Difference Engine in electronics
Well, if you think Babbage predated Atanasoff, then certainly the Antikythera mechanism predated Babbage -- by 2000 years -- with one difference: it was actually built. What Babbage invented the technology of his age couldn't build.
Can Windows move forward with a completely new, fast, and secure OS and still keep legacy application support?
As someone who started developing applications for Windows in 1991 and stopped around 1999, I doubt it. Better let legacy applications (and the whole x86 mess too, BTW) fade away, they have gone far beyond their useful life.
Why do Americans have this urge to claim the credit for everything?
People in most nations seem to have this urge. Brazilians claim the airplane was invented by a Brazilian and Italians claim the telephone was invented by an Italian.
When you consider a "computer" as a generic machine capable of performing calculations, maybe it could be claimed the Greeks did it, but if you limit your definition to an electronic equipment doing calculations by binary logic, then it's true, an American has the earliest claim.
if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing... that shouldn't really be a concern for people looking for something to hang in their room/mansion/compound
For most people that's exactly what they want. That's why most people buy printed copies and not originals of famous paintings.
But if you have a real serious interest in art, nothing but the original will do. Yes, a chemical analysis of the painting is needed. For instance, perhaps the artist used that particular color for some reason that's not obvious from the painting itself, it could be that the pigment had some association with the place where he lived.
Or maybe he used some particular technique to get the effects he obtained. A lot can be learned by a detailed analysis of a painting that's not possible to learn from a copy.
Isn't it funny how TFA mentions that "producers use ultralight Sony Vaio laptops and top-end video cameras"? I wonder why the make and model of the cameras aren't mentioned. They got close enough to know which laptops those guys use, but have no idea of where they are hiding...
What about a device that puts the phone on vibrate or something
Why couldn't she put the phone on vibrate herself? Anyhow, it's not just the phone ringing, people talking in the theatre or getting up to take the call outside also disturb the show.
Why is it that so many people come with these extremely contrived arguments when there is talk of using cell phones in theatres? Think about it in the sense of individual vs. collective harm. One person will disturb a hundred others when using a cell phone, cannot this one person adjust his or her life to prevent this?
If it's so important for your grandmother, if her life is at stake, why must she go to the theater? Can't she stay at home and rent a DVD or read a book during that period when it is so vital for her to be near a phone? Wait till she gets her transplant, the inconvenience caused by such a major surgery will be much, much worse than having to watch a DVD instead of a theatre show.
How about a kill switch to prevent a First Post? Of course, the problem is how to get posts starting from second if there's no first. Always unanticipated problems when one tries to implement those security measures some politicians seem to want so much.
I'd love to see "digital manners" enforcement in theaters, restaurants, buses, etc. If mobile phones are so important that people cannot turn them off, then how did people live thirty years ago? Haven't you seen those old movies, where the detective had to stop at a public phone to send instructions to his associates? Yes, I'd love to see a way to enforce manners in public places.
However, a kill switch is no answer. If people abuse cell phones by using them in obnoxious ways, how long would it take them to abuse the kill switch? History has shown us, and it should be clear by now, that any sort of digital key is subjected to abuse.
Even assuming a perfect implementation, that mythical unbreakable code, there's still social engineering. A criminal could buy an old theatre just to get the phone kill switch installed there, if it were necessary for him to silence a phone. And there's always the risk that terrorists could find ways to crack a plane's kill switch in mid-air. When the plane is approaching JFK, wait until it is headed towards Manhattan and then immobilize the pilot's controls.
Like many medicines of old that have been abandoned because of their side-effects, kill switches are a solution that's much worse than the problem they are trying to solve.
Which kind? The open-core, spewing radioactive gas into the atmosphere kind? Or, the closed-core, made of unobtainium that is transparent and physically stable at all temperatures even under the influence of heavy radiation.
There's at least one alternative that's at the same time highly efficient, being able to be throttled in a wide range of power, has all the radioactive material contained, and needs no exotic materials. It was called the "DUmbo" project (a rather dumb name, IMHO), a top-secret development started in 1958.
A Google search gave me this document, the best description I could find online, but the December 1975 Analog magazine has a good article by Donald Kingsbury called "Atomic Rockets" (page 38) with an excellent description of the basic principles involved, with simple but good calculations of the thermodynamic effects involved.
what's wrong with teaching children to discuss and god forbid, question popular *and* unpopular ideas. Isn't the real goal that children learn to think for themselves and make up their own minds?
Nothing wrong with that. But since *critical* thinking is to be encouraged, then the thoughts that must be encouraged are those that question the usually established "truths" in the child's community.
In the case of Louisiana, and other southern USA states, this means questioning religion, not science. In the case of the USA as a whole, this would also include questioning the idea that global warming might not exist or might not be caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
Critical thinking questioning science should only be encouraged in the scientific community itself, because that seems to be the only community where the scientific method is implicitly assumed to be correct. If the child has no idea of what the words "scientific theory" mean, to present arguments questioning any scientific theory will NOT cause any development of the child's critical thinking.
market forces have already relegated that individuals have no need for unique IP space and NAT is good enough for the unwashed masses.
With BitTorrent, no it isn't. At least not without some cooperation from the ISP. In my case, for instance, I've never been able to set up the UDP port for DHT.
Wow, finally I found someone here in/. that understands how the AMD marketroids calculate their numbers...
There are at least four sacred cows here: AMD, Apple, Java, and Ruby, that no one can criticize, lest they lose mod points. That's why I always criticize them. Got karma to spare, so let's make those dumbasses to waste their modpoints, right? Otherwise, they might downmod some really important post...
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to other forms of harassment, that was pretty mild. Consider THIS, for instance. Or THIS. Or THIS. There are many forms of psychological pressure that might lead a person to suicide, but a computer is one of the weakest.
All in all, the persons who did most harm and had the greatest influence in that young girl's unfortunate death, were those who had the responsibility to prevent it: her own parents. If every heartbroken thirteen-year-old girl committed suicide, our species would have become extinct long ago.
My boss has a wife and two daughters, and his side of telephone conversations goes like this:
"Yes ... oh, but ... okay, okay ... yes, dear ... yes ... yes ... all right"
So, it's one thing to make fun of an irrational person and a different thing to make fun of an irrational person? I certainly would classify as "irrational" a person who commits suicide based on something someone wrote in a website.
I remember the case of a guy I knew many years ago. He was a drunk who could never hold a job, but people bought him drinks because he told funny stories in the bar. One night he was walking home and took a shortcut across a garden when it was raining. He fell face down in a pool of rainwater and drowned. Would you say the people who bought him drinks were guilty of manslaughter?
Both cases are more or less the same, people who are basically unfit for life causing their own death. Normal people would need much more than reading an abusive webpage or walking through a garden in the rain to die. The teenage girl could have suicided because her favorite pop star got married, the drunk could have electrocuted himself in the bathtub.
It may seem callous, but people with such a distorted personality are living on borrowed time, no one can predict which act will cause their death. Of course, it's wrong to make fun of a neurotic teen or giving drinks to an alcoholic, but I don't think these should be classified as homicidal acts, because death couldn't be predicted, it wasn't even the most likely probability, it just happened.
That nation's name is enough to make trolls drool. But, of course, you should have misspelled it with an extra "g"...
That's a good one, but there's also this suggestion from TFA:
More appropriate terms for describing this would be "survival instinct" or "darwinism". It's certainly not "irony".
I had no idea the Smart had such a shitty performance. I used to get 36 mpg from my Chevette, about 25 years ago.
How about a wikipedia article?
Avast, ye scurvy scallywag! Who did tell ye our numbers be decreasing?
If it were done forwards, that would be burping, not farting
Yes, but the question is not to detect a minute flat spot on a sphere, just as it is not to detect a minute non-flat spot on a cube. The problem is to detect an overall deviation from a desired shape. To detect if a sphere isn't spherical it's enough to check if any spot deviates from the desired radius, but to detect if a cube isn't cubical you have to check for *THREE* different parameters for each spot.
I used to think like that, it's a theoretical principle that I admire. But then I got thinking, how much of the money I pay will go to the lawyers? How much of it will go to bribe the politicians that vote for those laws?
Today, when I find artists I like, I try to support them by going to their live presentations whenever possible. And I feel no shame at all in downloading an album or film that I wouldn't pay to get if I didn't have the option of an unauthorized copy. I'm paying null instead of zero, what's the difference? Oh, sure, I'm getting something for nothing, but it's not harming anyone. It's like standing on the sidewalk to listen to music that comes from an open window.
I think the reason why they made it a sphere is because a sphere is defined by one parameter only, its diameter. To make a perfect sphere all you need is to make sure it has exactly the same curvature everywhere. Now, let's see what it takes to make a perfect cube:
1) each of its six faces must be perfectly plane
2) each of its twelve edges must have exactly the same length
3) each of its twelve angles must be exactly ninety degrees
Just to illustrate how difficult this is, I once read this anecdote about Wernher von Braun: when going through his mechanical engineering course in Germany, one of the professors gave each student an irregular lump of iron. The assignment would be to create a cube, as perfect as possible, from that lump. The size of the resulting cube didn't matter but, naturally, if it was a very small cube it meant the student had a tough job getting it right.
One sentence from TFA tells it all:
Well, I guess then Microsoft is not for me...
Well, if you think Babbage predated Atanasoff, then certainly the Antikythera mechanism predated Babbage -- by 2000 years -- with one difference: it was actually built. What Babbage invented the technology of his age couldn't build.
As someone who started developing applications for Windows in 1991 and stopped around 1999, I doubt it. Better let legacy applications (and the whole x86 mess too, BTW) fade away, they have gone far beyond their useful life.
People in most nations seem to have this urge. Brazilians claim the airplane was invented by a Brazilian and Italians claim the telephone was invented by an Italian.
When you consider a "computer" as a generic machine capable of performing calculations, maybe it could be claimed the Greeks did it, but if you limit your definition to an electronic equipment doing calculations by binary logic, then it's true, an American has the earliest claim.
For most people that's exactly what they want. That's why most people buy printed copies and not originals of famous paintings.
But if you have a real serious interest in art, nothing but the original will do. Yes, a chemical analysis of the painting is needed. For instance, perhaps the artist used that particular color for some reason that's not obvious from the painting itself, it could be that the pigment had some association with the place where he lived.
Or maybe he used some particular technique to get the effects he obtained. A lot can be learned by a detailed analysis of a painting that's not possible to learn from a copy.
Isn't it funny how TFA mentions that "producers use ultralight Sony Vaio laptops and top-end video cameras"? I wonder why the make and model of the cameras aren't mentioned. They got close enough to know which laptops those guys use, but have no idea of where they are hiding...
Why couldn't she put the phone on vibrate herself? Anyhow, it's not just the phone ringing, people talking in the theatre or getting up to take the call outside also disturb the show.
Why is it that so many people come with these extremely contrived arguments when there is talk of using cell phones in theatres? Think about it in the sense of individual vs. collective harm. One person will disturb a hundred others when using a cell phone, cannot this one person adjust his or her life to prevent this?
If it's so important for your grandmother, if her life is at stake, why must she go to the theater? Can't she stay at home and rent a DVD or read a book during that period when it is so vital for her to be near a phone? Wait till she gets her transplant, the inconvenience caused by such a major surgery will be much, much worse than having to watch a DVD instead of a theatre show.
How about a kill switch to prevent a First Post? Of course, the problem is how to get posts starting from second if there's no first. Always unanticipated problems when one tries to implement those security measures some politicians seem to want so much.
I'd love to see "digital manners" enforcement in theaters, restaurants, buses, etc. If mobile phones are so important that people cannot turn them off, then how did people live thirty years ago? Haven't you seen those old movies, where the detective had to stop at a public phone to send instructions to his associates? Yes, I'd love to see a way to enforce manners in public places.
However, a kill switch is no answer. If people abuse cell phones by using them in obnoxious ways, how long would it take them to abuse the kill switch? History has shown us, and it should be clear by now, that any sort of digital key is subjected to abuse.
Even assuming a perfect implementation, that mythical unbreakable code, there's still social engineering. A criminal could buy an old theatre just to get the phone kill switch installed there, if it were necessary for him to silence a phone. And there's always the risk that terrorists could find ways to crack a plane's kill switch in mid-air. When the plane is approaching JFK, wait until it is headed towards Manhattan and then immobilize the pilot's controls.
Like many medicines of old that have been abandoned because of their side-effects, kill switches are a solution that's much worse than the problem they are trying to solve.
There's at least one alternative that's at the same time highly efficient, being able to be throttled in a wide range of power, has all the radioactive material contained, and needs no exotic materials. It was called the "DUmbo" project (a rather dumb name, IMHO), a top-secret development started in 1958.
A Google search gave me this document, the best description I could find online, but the December 1975 Analog magazine has a good article by Donald Kingsbury called "Atomic Rockets" (page 38) with an excellent description of the basic principles involved, with simple but good calculations of the thermodynamic effects involved.
Nothing wrong with that. But since *critical* thinking is to be encouraged, then the thoughts that must be encouraged are those that question the usually established "truths" in the child's community.
In the case of Louisiana, and other southern USA states, this means questioning religion, not science. In the case of the USA as a whole, this would also include questioning the idea that global warming might not exist or might not be caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
Critical thinking questioning science should only be encouraged in the scientific community itself, because that seems to be the only community where the scientific method is implicitly assumed to be correct. If the child has no idea of what the words "scientific theory" mean, to present arguments questioning any scientific theory will NOT cause any development of the child's critical thinking.
With BitTorrent, no it isn't. At least not without some cooperation from the ISP. In my case, for instance, I've never been able to set up the UDP port for DHT.
Wow, finally I found someone here in /. that understands how the AMD marketroids calculate their numbers...
There are at least four sacred cows here: AMD, Apple, Java, and Ruby, that no one can criticize, lest they lose mod points. That's why I always criticize them. Got karma to spare, so let's make those dumbasses to waste their modpoints, right? Otherwise, they might downmod some really important post...