Paranoids are people who think they are much more important than they really are.
I have no fear of my privacy being violated by Google because I don't see any reason why someone should be particularly interested about me. In Google's eyes I'm just a statistic. My personal data is no more important to anyone than the data about millions of other consumers.
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
And really, that's kind of how it should be. If a small group of people really really cares about something, and the rest of us don't care too much, it's basic social wisdom to compromise in favor of the people who really do care
That's a dangerous attitude. The problem with those groups is that they have no interest in anything else, they have a limited mind.
If someone has a healthy mind, he will have interest in many things, not an obsession with one single issue. There's a difference between caring about something and suffering from a monomania.
Re:Idle's the right place for this...
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Happy Towel Day
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
you invested considerable amounts of time in investigating stamp collecting
No, it's the stamp collectors who invest considerable amounts of time trying to get me to collect stamps
try to find flaws in the activities of stamp collectors
I don't have to try, those flaws are obvious
holding meetings to espouse the value of not collecting stamps
Never done that
constructing straw-man arguments to illustrate the futility of stamp collecting
It's stamp collecting that's totally based on straw man arguments
trying to assert that the bad behaviour of a given stamp collector ought to cause the whole of philately to be outlawed
You are right there, it's only the bad behavior of 99% of the stamp collectors that gives a bad name to the rest
wrote several books asserting that the possibility that a letter could be sent without requiring a stamp 'proves' that stamps do not in fact exist
If no one has ever seen a stamp, it's the existence of stamps that should be proved first, not the other way round
the Hindenburg was a thermite fire, not a hydrogen fire
You have been watching too much MacGyver. Anybody who has ever worked with thermite knows how difficult it is to ignite.
Even the Mythbusters have debunked that old bullshit about the Hindenburg paint. This story was funny once, it stopped being funny about the millionth time it was repeated on the internet.
You mean, like these pages that say "To watch that, you need Flash 10"?
In the Wikipedia article on Pot calling the kettle black there's this alternative interpretation: "the pot is sooty (being placed on a fire), while the kettle is clean and shiny (being placed on coals only), and hence when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it is the pots own sooty reflection that it sees"
This is how I see Adobe's accusation against Firefox. I have yet to see *one* single site that requires Firefox, I have lost count of the sites that require Flash.
It's true that for many people the cable company is the same as the internet company, but at least you get a better choice of programming, besides not being forced to watch ads.
Having to pay to watch advertisements is the worst trick the cable companies have done to us, IMHO. And the worst of them all is the AXN channel, where the commercial breaks grow longer and longer during the film. The last time I tried to watch a film on AXN it started at 9 pm. The first break lasted about three minutes. Around 11:30 pm, when the break had lasted for some twenty minutes, I gave up and downloaded the torrent for that film instead.
These days I seldom watch anything on TV. If I have to pay for all that programming through advertisement I have the right to get it any way I prefer, without having to watch those ads. Since in every product I buy the cost of marketing is in the price I pay and the marketing includes the ads that finance TV I have earned the right to watch those programs without having to pay again to the cable company.
there is no way for traders to gain information on the underlying asset of a stock second-to-second. There is no public source of information that fast! No corporation gets updates internally that quickly
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and had to go through three courses on feedback systems and servomechanisms. What you are proposing may seem sensible, but that's not how nature works.
Feedback control systems can become unstable, but inserting delays into the feedback loop is about the *worst* thing you can do to destabilize them. If you want to stabilize a feedback system you should insert a "low pass" filter in the loop, not a delay.
A delay means that a lot of change will accumulate and suddenly be released. Putting a one day delay would mean that all the buy or sell orders would be stored hidden somewhere and then, all of a sudden, the market would become aware of that trend.
A low pass filter is, more or less, like a moving average. With a low pass filter, the market would get information on the average of the last X hours or days of transactions. That way everybody would be allowed to update instantly, to a microsecond precision if they wanted to, their estimates of the market trends, but those would not be instantaneous trends, they would be longer range.
Instead of limiting how fast market transactions can be done, it would be much better to limit the speed of the information on the system. Do not divulge *every* price for every transaction, but only the average of some period. This average can be updated every nanosecond if people want so, it will make no difference.
It's not some mythical "gift" that people either have or don't. It is a finely honed skill
Sure, tell that to any music teacher. Of course, you need to study and practice to become good at any job, but it's no use if you don't have a natural "gift" for it.
There's a big difference between repetitive and creative tasks. The more you train for a repetitive job the better you perform at it, but there's no way you can become a creative person if you lack the basic talent needed.
You seem to have the typical Slashdot mentality: you don't want to RTFA
Headlines aren't meant to be insightful or informative, that's what the article itself is for. The sole purpose of headlines is to make you curious enough to be willing to read the article. If headlines were too informative then you would have no need to read further.
The weight of a human spirit could be tested in a lab with a sensitive enough scale
The problem is that the changes that happen on the body when a person dies are much larger than the mass associated with the information in the mind. The tiniest exhalation of breath would mask the effects of such a small measurement.
However, there's another concern here that makes such a measurement pointless. When one speaks of a spirit, or a soul, leaving the body at death there's an implicit assumption of the philosophical principle of dualism. If the soul exists independent of the body, one cannot assume that the soul leaving the body will cause any physical change.
On the other hand, if one assumes the materialistic point of view that the spirit is just a manifestation of physical effects, then one must conclude that no spirit leaves the body at death, it just ceases to exist. In any case it wouldn't be possible to measure any change in mass.
The point I was trying to raise in the GP is that information is physical. To postulate dualism, one must implicitly assume that the existence of the soul has no connection at all with the physical world, any manifestation of the soul through its existence in a human body is completely miraculous. The only possible way to believe both in the existence of a soul surviving out of the material body after death and in physics is to assume the existence of miracles that have no connection to physical phenomena.
The resultant implications are such that I'm pretty sure most people who are familiar with information theory are materialists. Otherwise, how to explain the complexity of the human brain? A much simpler brain, consuming less resources, would be enough to control the purely physical needs of the human body.
All you have to do is change your fingerprint to "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)". OK, perhaps this needs updating, but you get the general idea.
You'll be amazed at the information some sites will be willing to give you. Even paysites will let you in for free if they believe you are Google.
Essentially, in order for the extradition to work, the US have to state damages above a certain level. Gary's team contest that the $700k damages alleged were simply concocted to meet this level.
Given that Gary hacked into computers that just had the default windows password set - and that the damage was calculated by figuring the cost to audit and fix this breach, there is at least an argument that this should have been done anyway, and isn't damage caused by Gary.
Not only that, but this whole extradition process must cost a lot. Both the American prosecutors and the British who must analyze the case have more important things to worry about.
it's against the law to gain unauthorized access to a computer system
One definition of being authorized is that you have the correct passwords and those passwords were obtained legally. If the system had the default Windows passwords it's reasonable to assume they were left there for anyone who knew those passwords to access.
If you don't have a fence you can yell "Get off my lawn!!!" at me, but you cannot arrest me for trespassing.
A person is guilty of rape in the first degree when he or she engages in sexual intercourse with another person:
2. Who is incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless;
Let's see one example: you are in bed with your wife, you are both nude and she is holding you in her arms. You had both been drinking wine from a bottle you brought home. Without you realizing it, she has drifted into sleep...
Now replace wife with scheming girlfriend who has an eye for your money. She went straight to the police next morning, your semen in her vagina, alcohol in her blood, the empty bottle of wine with your fingerprints. She says you intentionally got her drunk to rape her. Would you be ready to face death/life without parole for that?
Yes, we do have an approximate idea of how much a human spirit weighs. The answer is 8e-23 g, or eighty trillionths of a trillionth of a gram.
This is calculated by estimating the average number of bits of information in a neuron and multiplying by the number of neurons in a brain. The energy needed for representing a bit of information is kT/6, where k is Boltzmann's constant (1.38e-23 J/K) and T is the absolute temperature of the medium which, in the case of a human brain, is nearly constant at 310 K.
Then energy is converted to mass according to the formula E=m*c**2, where E is the energy, m is the mass, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum.
A few simple calculations will show that, for the same total cabin volume, the twin-cabin solution is sqrt(2) times heavier than the simple cylinder cabin. Plus the weight of the latticework to keep both together.
The aerodynamics need to be *very* efficient to compensate for an added 41%+ to the cabin structural weight.
Slashdot Mirror
Paranoids are people who think they are much more important than they really are.
I have no fear of my privacy being violated by Google because I don't see any reason why someone should be particularly interested about me. In Google's eyes I'm just a statistic. My personal data is no more important to anyone than the data about millions of other consumers.
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
That's a dangerous attitude. The problem with those groups is that they have no interest in anything else, they have a limited mind.
If someone has a healthy mind, he will have interest in many things, not an obsession with one single issue. There's a difference between caring about something and suffering from a monomania.
No, it's the stamp collectors who invest considerable amounts of time trying to get me to collect stamps
I don't have to try, those flaws are obvious
Never done that
It's stamp collecting that's totally based on straw man arguments
You are right there, it's only the bad behavior of 99% of the stamp collectors that gives a bad name to the rest
If no one has ever seen a stamp, it's the existence of stamps that should be proved first, not the other way round
Just call the show "2 Girls 1 Cup". No one could say that name is indecent.
Oh, no, that's the old theory. Haven't you heard? Average Joe can produce stuff so cheaply that large corporations cannot compete.
Look at the media industry: despite mass production, they are completely unable to print CDs and DVDs at a lower cost than Average Joe does at home.
You have been watching too much MacGyver. Anybody who has ever worked with thermite knows how difficult it is to ignite.
Even the Mythbusters have debunked that old bullshit about the Hindenburg paint. This story was funny once, it stopped being funny about the millionth time it was repeated on the internet.
It isn't a satellite either, the proper name for that thing is "balloon"
I don't think so
Ironically, Adobe owes its existence to Apple adopting PostScript as the standard for the Apple LaserWriter printer.
In the Wikipedia article on Pot calling the kettle black there's this alternative interpretation: "the pot is sooty (being placed on a fire), while the kettle is clean and shiny (being placed on coals only), and hence when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it is the pots own sooty reflection that it sees"
This is how I see Adobe's accusation against Firefox. I have yet to see *one* single site that requires Firefox, I have lost count of the sites that require Flash.
It's true that for many people the cable company is the same as the internet company, but at least you get a better choice of programming, besides not being forced to watch ads.
Having to pay to watch advertisements is the worst trick the cable companies have done to us, IMHO. And the worst of them all is the AXN channel, where the commercial breaks grow longer and longer during the film. The last time I tried to watch a film on AXN it started at 9 pm. The first break lasted about three minutes. Around 11:30 pm, when the break had lasted for some twenty minutes, I gave up and downloaded the torrent for that film instead.
These days I seldom watch anything on TV. If I have to pay for all that programming through advertisement I have the right to get it any way I prefer, without having to watch those ads. Since in every product I buy the cost of marketing is in the price I pay and the marketing includes the ads that finance TV I have earned the right to watch those programs without having to pay again to the cable company.
If I hadn't been posting so heavily in the last few days I would have points...
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and had to go through three courses on feedback systems and servomechanisms. What you are proposing may seem sensible, but that's not how nature works.
Feedback control systems can become unstable, but inserting delays into the feedback loop is about the *worst* thing you can do to destabilize them. If you want to stabilize a feedback system you should insert a "low pass" filter in the loop, not a delay.
A delay means that a lot of change will accumulate and suddenly be released. Putting a one day delay would mean that all the buy or sell orders would be stored hidden somewhere and then, all of a sudden, the market would become aware of that trend.
A low pass filter is, more or less, like a moving average. With a low pass filter, the market would get information on the average of the last X hours or days of transactions. That way everybody would be allowed to update instantly, to a microsecond precision if they wanted to, their estimates of the market trends, but those would not be instantaneous trends, they would be longer range.
Instead of limiting how fast market transactions can be done, it would be much better to limit the speed of the information on the system. Do not divulge *every* price for every transaction, but only the average of some period. This average can be updated every nanosecond if people want so, it will make no difference.
Sure, tell that to any music teacher. Of course, you need to study and practice to become good at any job, but it's no use if you don't have a natural "gift" for it.
There's a big difference between repetitive and creative tasks. The more you train for a repetitive job the better you perform at it, but there's no way you can become a creative person if you lack the basic talent needed.
You seem to have the typical Slashdot mentality: you don't want to RTFA
Headlines aren't meant to be insightful or informative, that's what the article itself is for. The sole purpose of headlines is to make you curious enough to be willing to read the article. If headlines were too informative then you would have no need to read further.
Sorry, my mistake, that should be k*T*ln(2)
The problem is that the changes that happen on the body when a person dies are much larger than the mass associated with the information in the mind. The tiniest exhalation of breath would mask the effects of such a small measurement.
However, there's another concern here that makes such a measurement pointless. When one speaks of a spirit, or a soul, leaving the body at death there's an implicit assumption of the philosophical principle of dualism. If the soul exists independent of the body, one cannot assume that the soul leaving the body will cause any physical change.
On the other hand, if one assumes the materialistic point of view that the spirit is just a manifestation of physical effects, then one must conclude that no spirit leaves the body at death, it just ceases to exist. In any case it wouldn't be possible to measure any change in mass.
The point I was trying to raise in the GP is that information is physical. To postulate dualism, one must implicitly assume that the existence of the soul has no connection at all with the physical world, any manifestation of the soul through its existence in a human body is completely miraculous. The only possible way to believe both in the existence of a soul surviving out of the material body after death and in physics is to assume the existence of miracles that have no connection to physical phenomena.
The resultant implications are such that I'm pretty sure most people who are familiar with information theory are materialists. Otherwise, how to explain the complexity of the human brain? A much simpler brain, consuming less resources, would be enough to control the purely physical needs of the human body.
All you have to do is change your fingerprint to "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)". OK, perhaps this needs updating, but you get the general idea.
You'll be amazed at the information some sites will be willing to give you. Even paysites will let you in for free if they believe you are Google.
When encyclopedias were printed in dead trees they usually started with Alvar Aalto.
Not only that, but this whole extradition process must cost a lot. Both the American prosecutors and the British who must analyze the case have more important things to worry about.
One definition of being authorized is that you have the correct passwords and those passwords were obtained legally. If the system had the default Windows passwords it's reasonable to assume they were left there for anyone who knew those passwords to access.
If you don't have a fence you can yell "Get off my lawn!!!" at me, but you cannot arrest me for trespassing.
Let's see one example: you are in bed with your wife, you are both nude and she is holding you in her arms. You had both been drinking wine from a bottle you brought home. Without you realizing it, she has drifted into sleep...
Now replace wife with scheming girlfriend who has an eye for your money. She went straight to the police next morning, your semen in her vagina, alcohol in her blood, the empty bottle of wine with your fingerprints. She says you intentionally got her drunk to rape her. Would you be ready to face death/life without parole for that?
Yes, we do have an approximate idea of how much a human spirit weighs. The answer is 8e-23 g, or eighty trillionths of a trillionth of a gram.
This is calculated by estimating the average number of bits of information in a neuron and multiplying by the number of neurons in a brain. The energy needed for representing a bit of information is kT/6, where k is Boltzmann's constant (1.38e-23 J/K) and T is the absolute temperature of the medium which, in the case of a human brain, is nearly constant at 310 K.
Then energy is converted to mass according to the formula E=m*c**2, where E is the energy, m is the mass, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum.
A few simple calculations will show that, for the same total cabin volume, the twin-cabin solution is sqrt(2) times heavier than the simple cylinder cabin. Plus the weight of the latticework to keep both together.
The aerodynamics need to be *very* efficient to compensate for an added 41%+ to the cabin structural weight.