The majority of people won't use a foreign language? Guess what, for most of the world English is a foreign language. So many things in the world are in English that by not knowing even the basics of the language a person would miss out on an enormous amount of useful information.
As for geography, as a participant in a democracy you get to influence the (foreign) policy of your country by voting. I don't think knowing where a couple of countries are is too much to ask from someone who can influence war.
You can't have a working democracy without an educated populace.
The point of the blackout seems to be to raise awareness. Since it's quite likely most/. readers will be aware of SOPA and PIPA (if only because there have been so many articles about them already, there is very little awareness to gain by having a blackout.
Java bytecode supports goto. Not having goto in the language is just a design decision. Goto is a reserved keyword in java, so you could actually modify a compiler to support goto, and that compiler would be perfectly backwards compatible with other compilers and code (because code not written for your compiler would never use goto as a variable, class, or method name).
As for the bytecode thing, there are plenty of tools that can compile assembly for the JVM.
> Voting should be mandatory IMO, even if you just tick 'no vote'
Why? How exactly is just ticking the 'no vote' superior to not voting at all? Not voting doesn't have to mean "I'm too apathetic to vote", it can also mean "I don't approve of any of the candidates" or similar stuff.
Besides, what do you want to do to those who don't show up for your mandatory elections? Fine them? Throw them in jail?
I'm not sure about your country, but in mine voting is supposed to be anonymous. Suppose someone counts after every n votes. As n approaches 1, anonymity decreases, until it disappears completely for n=1. Why sacrifice (some) anonymity to save 45 minutes? The savings of counting early seem rather negligible to me.
> Using the f-word is crude And using the term "f-word" just makes you look like a prude.
> and only lessens your arguments. It most certainly does not.
> Some people have children that actually read these forums. And this is relevant how? This site is not aimed at children (although some of the comments might make one suspect otherwise). Are you suggesting on the internet we should at all times behave as if observed by a bunch of 5-year olds? I refuse. If you think reading the word "fuck" is unacceptable for children, don't let them use the internet.
Interesting fact: searching for "fuck site:slashdot.org" on google reveals about 75k results. You've lost the battle against profanity years ago.
> and kill the session if a single out-of-order packet is received.
Isn't that a relatively common and normal occurrence with TCP/IP? I fail to see how this would help as the packets will be presented in the right order to the application anyway.
We seem to have different definitions of 'fairly long' and complex. According to Wikipedia the Oxford English Dictionary contains descriptions of over 600000 words, randomly picking six of those words will 4.6e34 possible combinations, which would take quite a lot longer to crack than your 10 random characters, and would (for many people) be easier to remember. If you're feeling particularly paranoid you could include a few numbers and symbols in the passphrase, but that's probably overkill. Of course you may want to skip words of only 2 or 3 letters. While this will make the number of combinations slightly smaller, at least you'll be protected against someone who brute-forces all alphabetic characters...
And yet you said 'Personally I think that all Doctors should be legally bound to "Do No Harm".' On one hand you acknowledge that doctors MUST inflict some harm to do their jobs, and on the other you're advocating a law that would force doctors to do no harm. Perhaps you could rephrase to "Doctors must at all times minimize expected harm to their patients" but that's so incredibly vague it's mostly meaningless, and it still leaves harm undefined. It does seem to imply that all forms of cosmetic surgery should be banned. Getting your ears (or any other part of the body) pierced is physical harm (with a risk of infection and death), should that be illegal for doctors to perform? How about restoring the face of a burn victim beyond what is minimally required to declare them physically healthy?
Let's just stick to requiring doctors to make a reasonable effort to work towards what the doctor and the patient have decided is in the patient's best interest. Surely existing laws already cover this reasonably well?
Doesn't all surgery involve physical injury and damage? The appendix is rather hard to reach without injuring the skin. Most treatments inflict some form of damage on the body.
> At least, they do if they're actively being attacked. If you assume that someone is trying to brute force your password, even a fairly long, complex password is only likely to stand up for a few months.
A fairly long, complex password is likely to stand up for millennia against brute force.
If "Criminals enter your house, murder you, and rape your wife and children" is a likely scenario where you live, perhaps you shouldn't be raising your children there.
What's the problem? Encryption tends to be pretty damn reliable, as long as you don't leave the keys lying around there isn't really any objection to having the encrypted data in the cloud.
> If just 5% of the American public wanted to overthrow the government, an armed revolution would be possible. You do not need overwhelming support, you need enough angry people with guns.
Wouldn't that mean that 95% of the public does not want to overthrow the government, so the overthrowing people are essentially a minority oppressing the majority, making them no better than the system they aim to overthrow?
Neither. As the sun gets older, it gets brighter (according to wikipedia, about an 10% increase in luminosity every billion years). At some point there will be no more liquid water available because the surface of our planet is too hot. This will happen long before the sun turns into an actual red giant, which in turn will happen long before it runs out of fuel.
> Sociopaths are, literally, the source of all the evil in the world.
[Citation needed]. Sociopathy is now seen as a subset of antisocial personality disorder. According to wikipedia,
"A 2002 literature review of studies on mental disorders in prisoners stated that 47% of male prisoners and 21% of female prisoners had anti-social personality disorder." Even assuming all of the prisoners with that disorder did belong to the sociopath-subset, this still means 53% of male prisoners and 79% of female prisoners are *not* sociopaths, while (depending on their crimes) they can still be seen as a source of 'evil'.
It's very tempting to call 'bad' people names to distance yourself from them, fact remains that most of us are capable of terrible things under the right circumstances. While denying this may make you feel better about yourself, you're just sticking your head in the sand.
> I bring up all those other diseases because I believe we've either found a cure for them, or we've come a LOT farther than we are today,
On what basis do you believe this (not that the cure is being suppressed, but that the cure has already been invented)?
> Those are also most of the diseases that keep the population numbers from exploding.
Really? Very few people die of the common cold, and herpes tends to not kill at all, nor does it have a chance to make you infertile like some other STDs. MS is not infectious and quite rare (much too rare to have a significant impact on population growth), and the first symptoms start showing in the late thirties/early forties, by which time many people already have children. Cancer also mostly affects old people who have already had a chance to reproduce, so once again population growth is largely unaffected. As for HIV, with modern treatment life expectancy is between 20 to 50 years for newly diagnosed patients, and with proper treatment there is only a 1% or 2% chance of passing it on from mother to child. Furthermore HIV is more prevalent amongst homosexual males, who were quite unlikely to make a significant contribution to population growth anyway. While HIV is very common in some parts of Africa, in the rest of the world it's very uncommon.
In short, none of these diseases result in a significant decrease in population growth, because they're either not dangerous, too rare, or primarily affect people who already have children. In addition, individuals who are affected by some of these diseases have to take treatment that is very expensive compared to letting them live a few years longer and die of other causes, so there is not even a financial incentive for 'the government' to suppress a cure.
As for Burzynski, it appears nobody has been able to reproduce his results. How do you explain this? Perhaps everybody who isn't a layman is involved in this grand conspiracy of yours?
Stop being paranoid. Any drug company that would invent a cure for HIV or cancer would make a fortune. Any competitors who rely on treating those diseases instead of curing them would go out of business.
Of those diseases you mentioned, only HIV, herpes, and the common cold are caused by a virus and can therefor be compared to Ebola. HIV and herpes are retroviruses, which can insert themselves in a cell's DNA and thus lie dormant (and undetectable) for a long time, and both target cell-types that can live for years/decades. Neither is as deadly as Ebola, but both are much more persistent. HIV also mutates rapidly, making it even harder to fight.
The common cold is not a single disease, virus, it's actually hundreds of different ones (caused by as many different viruses) that have very similar symptoms. Curing any single one is not that hard. Curing every single one is a challenge.
As for cancer, all cancers are different (after all, they tend to result from damaged DNA, which can happen in any number of ways). Fighting cancer cells without damaging the rest of the body is very hard because they're so closely related.
Surely none of the above is too 'complex' for a layman like you to understand?
> I see little point in such a debate because I do believe that suppression is going on.
Good for you, but in that case why even bring up those other diseases, as by your own admission the complexity of curing such diseases is irrelevant to your belief that cures for those diseases are being suppressed?
Except of course that porn sites are under no obligation to use the.xxx domain, so you can't rely on those 'baseline conditions' in the url, and many ordinary companies have registered their names on there, so you can't even assume that everything on.xxx is 'adult only'.
> You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
I think the answer to this one is 'jump out'.
Assume you are 190cm. The diameter of a nickel is about 19mm, so you are now 0.01 your original height. Since you shrink in all dimensions, this means your volume is reduced to 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01 = 1 millionth of what it was. That is, relative to your height you now weight has decreased by a factor of 10000 to what it was before.:)
Slashdot Mirror
> The Declaration of Independence is a good read if you want to understand some of different philosophies....
Do elaborate.
The majority of people won't use a foreign language? Guess what, for most of the world English is a foreign language. So many things in the world are in English that by not knowing even the basics of the language a person would miss out on an enormous amount of useful information.
As for geography, as a participant in a democracy you get to influence the (foreign) policy of your country by voting. I don't think knowing where a couple of countries are is too much to ask from someone who can influence war.
You can't have a working democracy without an educated populace.
Ah, I see you've found my right parenthesis. If you would kindly use it to replace the comma in my previous post I would be much obliged :p
The point of the blackout seems to be to raise awareness. Since it's quite likely most /. readers will be aware of SOPA and PIPA (if only because there have been so many articles about them already, there is very little awareness to gain by having a blackout.
Java bytecode supports goto. Not having goto in the language is just a design decision. Goto is a reserved keyword in java, so you could actually modify a compiler to support goto, and that compiler would be perfectly backwards compatible with other compilers and code (because code not written for your compiler would never use goto as a variable, class, or method name).
As for the bytecode thing, there are plenty of tools that can compile assembly for the JVM.
> Voting should be mandatory IMO, even if you just tick 'no vote'
Why? How exactly is just ticking the 'no vote' superior to not voting at all? Not voting doesn't have to mean "I'm too apathetic to vote", it can also mean "I don't approve of any of the candidates" or similar stuff.
Besides, what do you want to do to those who don't show up for your mandatory elections? Fine them? Throw them in jail?
I'm not sure about your country, but in mine voting is supposed to be anonymous. Suppose someone counts after every n votes. As n approaches 1, anonymity decreases, until it disappears completely for n=1. Why sacrifice (some) anonymity to save 45 minutes? The savings of counting early seem rather negligible to me.
> Using the f-word is crude
And using the term "f-word" just makes you look like a prude.
> and only lessens your arguments.
It most certainly does not.
> Some people have children that actually read these forums.
And this is relevant how? This site is not aimed at children (although some of the comments might make one suspect otherwise). Are you suggesting on the internet we should at all times behave as if observed by a bunch of 5-year olds? I refuse. If you think reading the word "fuck" is unacceptable for children, don't let them use the internet.
Interesting fact: searching for "fuck site:slashdot.org" on google reveals about 75k results. You've lost the battle against profanity years ago.
> and kill the session if a single out-of-order packet is received.
Isn't that a relatively common and normal occurrence with TCP/IP? I fail to see how this would help as the packets will be presented in the right order to the application anyway.
We seem to have different definitions of 'fairly long' and complex. According to Wikipedia the Oxford English Dictionary contains descriptions of over 600000 words, randomly picking six of those words will 4.6e34 possible combinations, which would take quite a lot longer to crack than your 10 random characters, and would (for many people) be easier to remember. If you're feeling particularly paranoid you could include a few numbers and symbols in the passphrase, but that's probably overkill. Of course you may want to skip words of only 2 or 3 letters. While this will make the number of combinations slightly smaller, at least you'll be protected against someone who brute-forces all alphabetic characters...
And yet you said 'Personally I think that all Doctors should be legally bound to "Do No Harm".' On one hand you acknowledge that doctors MUST inflict some harm to do their jobs, and on the other you're advocating a law that would force doctors to do no harm. Perhaps you could rephrase to "Doctors must at all times minimize expected harm to their patients" but that's so incredibly vague it's mostly meaningless, and it still leaves harm undefined. It does seem to imply that all forms of cosmetic surgery should be banned. Getting your ears (or any other part of the body) pierced is physical harm (with a risk of infection and death), should that be illegal for doctors to perform? How about restoring the face of a burn victim beyond what is minimally required to declare them physically healthy?
Let's just stick to requiring doctors to make a reasonable effort to work towards what the doctor and the patient have decided is in the patient's best interest. Surely existing laws already cover this reasonably well?
> "Physical or psychological injury or damage."
Doesn't all surgery involve physical injury and damage? The appendix is rather hard to reach without injuring the skin. Most treatments inflict some form of damage on the body.
> At least, they do if they're actively being attacked. If you assume that someone is trying to brute force your password, even a fairly long, complex password is only likely to stand up for a few months.
A fairly long, complex password is likely to stand up for millennia against brute force.
If "Criminals enter your house, murder you, and rape your wife and children" is a likely scenario where you live, perhaps you shouldn't be raising your children there.
Are you seriously suggesting 94% of the population wouldn't mind having their country plunged into civil war?
Yes. What is your point?
What's the problem? Encryption tends to be pretty damn reliable, as long as you don't leave the keys lying around there isn't really any objection to having the encrypted data in the cloud.
> If just 5% of the American public wanted to overthrow the government, an armed revolution would be possible. You do not need overwhelming support, you need enough angry people with guns.
Wouldn't that mean that 95% of the public does not want to overthrow the government, so the overthrowing people are essentially a minority oppressing the majority, making them no better than the system they aim to overthrow?
Neither. As the sun gets older, it gets brighter (according to wikipedia, about an 10% increase in luminosity every billion years). At some point there will be no more liquid water available because the surface of our planet is too hot. This will happen long before the sun turns into an actual red giant, which in turn will happen long before it runs out of fuel.
> Sociopaths are, literally, the source of all the evil in the world.
[Citation needed]. Sociopathy is now seen as a subset of antisocial personality disorder. According to wikipedia,
"A 2002 literature review of studies on mental disorders in prisoners stated that 47% of male prisoners and 21% of female prisoners had anti-social personality disorder."
Even assuming all of the prisoners with that disorder did belong to the sociopath-subset, this still means 53% of male prisoners and 79% of female prisoners are *not* sociopaths, while (depending on their crimes) they can still be seen as a source of 'evil'.
It's very tempting to call 'bad' people names to distance yourself from them, fact remains that most of us are capable of terrible things under the right circumstances. While denying this may make you feel better about yourself, you're just sticking your head in the sand.
If you're interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_disengagement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
> I bring up all those other diseases because I believe we've either found a cure for them, or we've come a LOT farther than we are today,
On what basis do you believe this (not that the cure is being suppressed, but that the cure has already been invented)?
> Those are also most of the diseases that keep the population numbers from exploding.
Really? Very few people die of the common cold, and herpes tends to not kill at all, nor does it have a chance to make you infertile like some other STDs. MS is not infectious and quite rare (much too rare to have a significant impact on population growth), and the first symptoms start showing in the late thirties/early forties, by which time many people already have children. Cancer also mostly affects old people who have already had a chance to reproduce, so once again population growth is largely unaffected. As for HIV, with modern treatment life expectancy is between 20 to 50 years for newly diagnosed patients, and with proper treatment there is only a 1% or 2% chance of passing it on from mother to child. Furthermore HIV is more prevalent amongst homosexual males, who were quite unlikely to make a significant contribution to population growth anyway. While HIV is very common in some parts of Africa, in the rest of the world it's very uncommon.
In short, none of these diseases result in a significant decrease in population growth, because they're either not dangerous, too rare, or primarily affect people who already have children. In addition, individuals who are affected by some of these diseases have to take treatment that is very expensive compared to letting them live a few years longer and die of other causes, so there is not even a financial incentive for 'the government' to suppress a cure.
As for Burzynski, it appears nobody has been able to reproduce his results. How do you explain this? Perhaps everybody who isn't a layman is involved in this grand conspiracy of yours?
Stop being paranoid. Any drug company that would invent a cure for HIV or cancer would make a fortune. Any competitors who rely on treating those diseases instead of curing them would go out of business.
Of those diseases you mentioned, only HIV, herpes, and the common cold are caused by a virus and can therefor be compared to Ebola. HIV and herpes are retroviruses, which can insert themselves in a cell's DNA and thus lie dormant (and undetectable) for a long time, and both target cell-types that can live for years/decades. Neither is as deadly as Ebola, but both are much more persistent. HIV also mutates rapidly, making it even harder to fight.
The common cold is not a single disease, virus, it's actually hundreds of different ones (caused by as many different viruses) that have very similar symptoms. Curing any single one is not that hard. Curing every single one is a challenge.
As for cancer, all cancers are different (after all, they tend to result from damaged DNA, which can happen in any number of ways). Fighting cancer cells without damaging the rest of the body is very hard because they're so closely related.
Surely none of the above is too 'complex' for a layman like you to understand?
> I see little point in such a debate because I do believe that suppression is going on.
Good for you, but in that case why even bring up those other diseases, as by your own admission the complexity of curing such diseases is irrelevant to your belief that cures for those diseases are being suppressed?
> If we look at the sequences of non-human species the storage needed expands exponentially.
Actually that would merely be a linear expansion.
Except of course that porn sites are under no obligation to use the .xxx domain, so you can't rely on those 'baseline conditions' in the url, and many ordinary companies have registered their names on there, so you can't even assume that everything on .xxx is 'adult only'.
> You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
I think the answer to this one is 'jump out'.
Assume you are 190cm. The diameter of a nickel is about 19mm, so you are now 0.01 your original height. Since you shrink in all dimensions, this means your volume is reduced to 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01 = 1 millionth of what it was. That is, relative to your height you now weight has decreased by a factor of 10000 to what it was before. :)