I don't know what I said to imply that it was the primary key. I just meant that the database is a convoluted mess, and I don't think I could be confident that any value was gone if I deleted it (though that would be easy enough.)
As someone currently working on a database that contains SSNs, I can tell you I couldn't get rid of every instance of yours if I tried. The entire architecture is based around not losing your data no matter how stupid I am. It's a nice thought, but the reality is that you're only increasing the number of people looking at your SSN by trying to get rid of it.
But the age of spam has soured everyone against junk mailings. There are laws against unsolicited bulk email, which should easily extend to centmail. And if they are paying, it's pretty clear where the bank account is in which the government should levy the fine (which is not as clear with normal spam.)
If someone is paying for the spam, then it's impossible for them to avoid anti-spam legislation. They've signed a document saying they've sent spam (or at least money has changed hands.)
This is a really good idea, because it creates potential for government oversight. The Gmail model is inherently flawed. Not only does it let spam slip through, it creates false positives. Authenticated email needs to start coming along, and this is the best way to do it. The problem with spam is that it's untraceable. If someone is paying, then you trace to the payer, and payers have incentive to stop, because we can levy hefty 5 cent per message fines on top of that if abuse is proven.
It's an affront to fair use. The courts however, have acted in the obviously correct manner. The DMCA is very clear, and leaves no wiggle room. It was designed very carefully to ensure it would prevent people from using any unauthorized software with DVDs.
Fortunately, this does not yet affect my ability to read DVDs under Linux.
Re:Yup, beware of fascists... they are over THERE!
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 1
It's just a Death Camp. All the GNU yahoos did was put together some basic tools that help you put it together. If they had actually put the effort into making the chain-link fence, razor wire, etc. no one would have had to put a death camp together. But unfortunately, 20 years since Stallman started building the first one, and all we have is the Hurd Hut. The thing doesn't even have a furnace. I mean, really, how can you kill anyone with that?
Stop this nonsense, and just call them death camps. Those idiots over at the FSF don't deserve one tiny bit of credit for this. Anyone can put one together, it's actually building the materials that's the real work.
The problem with that is that Facebook has what is really the most compelling version of the semantic web in existence. Many of the photos are tagged, and from one set of tags on a photo you can follow it around and see a variety of people in your circle of friends. Such functionality is certainly possible outside of Facebook, but even if I were to spend the weeks it would take to implement it, it would only be valuable if a lot of my friends started using it.
They need common libraries. Tying the system to one OS or language will only hurt innovation. Though obviously getting bindings into a variety of languages will not be seamless. C with good libraries is probably ideal.
I'm getting really tired of my social interactions carrying on in a walled garden outside of my control.
Really, I'd be satisfied if they'd just start charging money and quit trying to do data mining on my social life.
Also quit trying to innovate. I want an easily configurable messaging utility that only allows trusted contacts, and some photo upload and publishing ability (with comments) that piggybacks on the trusted communication. Anything above that is just burning CPU cycles. (Honestly, Facebook is as bad as Slashdot, and if they're making the news feed dynamic, it's going to be even worse.)
Yes, I'm fairly sure I understood him correctly. I was comparing Palin's speeches to YouTube comments, and noting that Shatner's reading of them was hilarious.
However, taking a merely mediocre speech and making anything interesting out of it would be much more difficult.
The first part is subjective. I consider easy access to purified tap water necessary to maintain anything resembling a reasonable standard of living. Wikipedia puts the number of people with piped water at a little over half.
This WHO report puts the total with good sanitation at 60% (They have a very technical and probably better metric than piped water.)
All I'm saying is that we only have reasonable infrastructure to serve around 60% of the people on the planet. That's too many people in my book. The flipside of course is not enough infrastructure, but given the population expansion, we're fighting a losing battle. Thus, at the very least maintaining current population is important. Personally, I'd like to see it shrink to enable even more expensive infrastructure improvements like electricity and internet access, which I don't think I need a citation to tell you are much lower than sanitation levels.
Both of these place the average cost per pound of getting something into orbit at about $4,000 USD. Now, if we discount that getting people anywhere they could live without Earth-based support would be far more, and go with the best-case number of $2000 USD/pound, and assume that the average person weighs 130 lbs (we'll only send skinny people)... that's $260,000 USD per person.
Given that the total yearly GDP of the Earth is 46 Trillion, if we expended 100% of our resources to getting people off the planet, we could send 10^12 / 26*10^4 is a little under 40 million people offworld per year. Thus, it would take 50 years to reduce the global population by one half in a very generous fairytale scenario where everyone works in concert to move people offworld and GDP remains constant despite losing people to colonies (possibly by keeping population constant, thus negating the benefit.)
The numbers are so literally astronomical that I didn't feel a citation was necessary, but there you go, even in fairytale world, it's a very difficult undertaking. In the real world, it's not a reasonable suggestion.
The infrastructure we have is insufficient to give everyone a reasonable quality of life. Obviously, our planet could sustain 9-10 billion if we really tried. But they'd all be living in conditions looking roughly like modern India - crowded, dirty, cities where no one has enough.
If we backtrack a bit, reduce the population by about half, the infrastructure we have in place would be sufficient to give everyone a decent (yes, by which I mean like the United States) quality of life. At that point, maybe we can talk about increasing the population.
You are arrogant and elitist to suggest that people should take up all the space they can, because they'll deal with it just fine. The fact that you have a computer suggests that you haven't had to deal with it.
And by 'it' I mean no paved roads, roads that wash out in the rainy season cutting you off from important supplies, lack of flush toilets or outright lack of running water. I don't want the steady state, I want true equilibrium, with people having, on the whole, enough to sustain themselves without working day and night.
China is their model. Our model I dare say. Modern population growth is preposterous. Unsustainable doesn't even begin to describe it.
We have too many people on this planet as it is, and there's no good way to get them off the planet, the energy requirements are simply too great. If we're going to colonize, we won't be sending more than a few thousand to start the colony, and then it will not be able to support any significant migrants from a Terran perspective. Population control is essential.
As far as internet passwords go, this is really bad advice. If you re-use a password regularly, it will eventually be compromised. This is just as true for so-called power users as anyone else, largely because we think we know better.
With a 3-strikes then 15 minute cooldown, 8-10 characters alphanumeric is more than sufficient to stop any brute force attack. Suggesting anything more than that will just cause headaches, and not seriously increase security. Past that point, social engineering or keyloggers are going to get the password long before a brute force attack even has a chance.
BS. If it were a free market, people would purchase the good parts of GM, and the rest would sit and languish, eventually petering out. If you had to purchase the good with the bad, no one would do it. That's a recipe for a loss, not a gain. The only way that would work is if they could be paid to take on GM's responsibilities. No one will buy something they know will be a loss.
1) This is the default browser, and Ubuntu shipped it with modifications for years. That they would change the nature of those modifications in an update is hardly surprising. 2) The summary says the only way to disable it is by using the add-ons dialog, as if that were some onerous distinction..NET was unremovable through the add-ons dialog, which was the primary reason people were pissed. Ubuntu's really done nothing to break the user trust here. You don't like it, remove it, it will take all of 10 seconds, and be completely gone.
Also, it's clear this won't make it into the release candidate. That is the value of an open source OS with a public bug tracker, in which the most minor problems (and the most vitriolic responses) are archived and freely available on the internet.
Don't run chkdsk before patching. If you need to run chkdsk before a patch comes out for this, I think you should take a look at your hardware, and then reinstall Windows.
Though if you were planning on using the beta until you can no longer handle the random shutdowns, this might be an issue. But then, that's probably a feature.
God gave us the capacity to create life. That's pretty evident. There's nothing in the Bible to suggest that we are restricted to standard procreation.
God really doesn't address anything beyond the human, and until we're handed a set of instructions on the subject, I will continue to strive to create better and less evil intelligence. If that proves not to be human... then that's what it takes.
MS interfaces are just the most horrible things - stuff hidden in illogical places, five or six mouse clicks to do things...
Sounds like Photoshop to me (one of Apple's main selling points.) Although I've mostly used the intentionally crippled Elements.
Word is tops for a reason. I don't like the ribbon, but only because it replaces things that should be handled by hotkeys with enormous buttons taking up screen real estate. Yes, early users need them. But people shouldn't be given excuses to avoid learning basic keyboard shortcuts. I understand those who don't want Emacs. However, not using the basic CUA commands for copy+paste and print wastes a lot of time.
But, if you want people to use these things regularly, I can see why the ribbon makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what I said to imply that it was the primary key. I just meant that the database is a convoluted mess, and I don't think I could be confident that any value was gone if I deleted it (though that would be easy enough.)
As someone currently working on a database that contains SSNs, I can tell you I couldn't get rid of every instance of yours if I tried. The entire architecture is based around not losing your data no matter how stupid I am. It's a nice thought, but the reality is that you're only increasing the number of people looking at your SSN by trying to get rid of it.
But the age of spam has soured everyone against junk mailings. There are laws against unsolicited bulk email, which should easily extend to centmail. And if they are paying, it's pretty clear where the bank account is in which the government should levy the fine (which is not as clear with normal spam.)
If someone is paying for the spam, then it's impossible for them to avoid anti-spam legislation. They've signed a document saying they've sent spam (or at least money has changed hands.)
This is a really good idea, because it creates potential for government oversight. The Gmail model is inherently flawed. Not only does it let spam slip through, it creates false positives. Authenticated email needs to start coming along, and this is the best way to do it. The problem with spam is that it's untraceable. If someone is paying, then you trace to the payer, and payers have incentive to stop, because we can levy hefty 5 cent per message fines on top of that if abuse is proven.
Innovation == dll hell.
It's an affront to fair use. The courts however, have acted in the obviously correct manner. The DMCA is very clear, and leaves no wiggle room. It was designed very carefully to ensure it would prevent people from using any unauthorized software with DVDs.
Fortunately, this does not yet affect my ability to read DVDs under Linux.
It's just a Death Camp. All the GNU yahoos did was put together some basic tools that help you put it together. If they had actually put the effort into making the chain-link fence, razor wire, etc. no one would have had to put a death camp together. But unfortunately, 20 years since Stallman started building the first one, and all we have is the Hurd Hut. The thing doesn't even have a furnace. I mean, really, how can you kill anyone with that?
Stop this nonsense, and just call them death camps. Those idiots over at the FSF don't deserve one tiny bit of credit for this. Anyone can put one together, it's actually building the materials that's the real work.
The problem with that is that Facebook has what is really the most compelling version of the semantic web in existence. Many of the photos are tagged, and from one set of tags on a photo you can follow it around and see a variety of people in your circle of friends. Such functionality is certainly possible outside of Facebook, but even if I were to spend the weeks it would take to implement it, it would only be valuable if a lot of my friends started using it.
They need common libraries. Tying the system to one OS or language will only hurt innovation. Though obviously getting bindings into a variety of languages will not be seamless. C with good libraries is probably ideal.
I'm getting really tired of my social interactions carrying on in a walled garden outside of my control.
Really, I'd be satisfied if they'd just start charging money and quit trying to do data mining on my social life.
Also quit trying to innovate. I want an easily configurable messaging utility that only allows trusted contacts, and some photo upload and publishing ability (with comments) that piggybacks on the trusted communication. Anything above that is just burning CPU cycles. (Honestly, Facebook is as bad as Slashdot, and if they're making the news feed dynamic, it's going to be even worse.)
Yes, I'm fairly sure I understood him correctly. I was comparing Palin's speeches to YouTube comments, and noting that Shatner's reading of them was hilarious.
However, taking a merely mediocre speech and making anything interesting out of it would be much more difficult.
How is that worse? The mediocrity that is Twitter will only produce mediocre opera.
YouTube comments, much like Sarah Palin's speeches, have the capacity to be truly inspiring in the hands of the right performer.
The first part is subjective. I consider easy access to purified tap water necessary to maintain anything resembling a reasonable standard of living. Wikipedia puts the number of people with piped water at a little over half.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply
This WHO report puts the total with good sanitation at 60% (They have a very technical and probably better metric than piped water.)
All I'm saying is that we only have reasonable infrastructure to serve around 60% of the people on the planet. That's too many people in my book. The flipside of course is not enough infrastructure, but given the population expansion, we're fighting a losing battle. Thus, at the very least maintaining current population is important. Personally, I'd like to see it shrink to enable even more expensive infrastructure improvements like electricity and internet access, which I don't think I need a citation to tell you are much lower than sanitation levels.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.futron.com%2Fpdf%2Fresource_center%2Fwhite_papers%2FFutronLaunchCostWP.pdf&ei=x41_SrKENIiOMfr1wfQC&usg=AFQjCNGWxyLcQ6kz0fkpoeZYV1Rvxy3LVw&sig2=VbrRLcMg4Jx_lykdc2xgqA
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301
Both of these place the average cost per pound of getting something into orbit at about $4,000 USD. Now, if we discount that getting people anywhere they could live without Earth-based support would be far more, and go with the best-case number of $2000 USD /pound, and assume that the average person weighs 130 lbs (we'll only send skinny people) ... that's $260,000 USD per person.
Given that the total yearly GDP of the Earth is 46 Trillion, if we expended 100% of our resources to getting people off the planet, we could send 10^12 / 26*10^4 is a little under 40 million people offworld per year. Thus, it would take 50 years to reduce the global population by one half in a very generous fairytale scenario where everyone works in concert to move people offworld and GDP remains constant despite losing people to colonies (possibly by keeping population constant, thus negating the benefit.)
The numbers are so literally astronomical that I didn't feel a citation was necessary, but there you go, even in fairytale world, it's a very difficult undertaking. In the real world, it's not a reasonable suggestion.
The infrastructure we have is insufficient to give everyone a reasonable quality of life. Obviously, our planet could sustain 9-10 billion if we really tried. But they'd all be living in conditions looking roughly like modern India - crowded, dirty, cities where no one has enough.
If we backtrack a bit, reduce the population by about half, the infrastructure we have in place would be sufficient to give everyone a decent (yes, by which I mean like the United States) quality of life. At that point, maybe we can talk about increasing the population.
You are arrogant and elitist to suggest that people should take up all the space they can, because they'll deal with it just fine. The fact that you have a computer suggests that you haven't had to deal with it.
And by 'it' I mean no paved roads, roads that wash out in the rainy season cutting you off from important supplies, lack of flush toilets or outright lack of running water. I don't want the steady state, I want true equilibrium, with people having, on the whole, enough to sustain themselves without working day and night.
China is their model. Our model I dare say. Modern population growth is preposterous. Unsustainable doesn't even begin to describe it.
We have too many people on this planet as it is, and there's no good way to get them off the planet, the energy requirements are simply too great. If we're going to colonize, we won't be sending more than a few thousand to start the colony, and then it will not be able to support any significant migrants from a Terran perspective. Population control is essential.
I don't think the number of victims has decreased, just the payouts.
As far as internet passwords go, this is really bad advice. If you re-use a password regularly, it will eventually be compromised. This is just as true for so-called power users as anyone else, largely because we think we know better.
With a 3-strikes then 15 minute cooldown, 8-10 characters alphanumeric is more than sufficient to stop any brute force attack. Suggesting anything more than that will just cause headaches, and not seriously increase security. Past that point, social engineering or keyloggers are going to get the password long before a brute force attack even has a chance.
BS. If it were a free market, people would purchase the good parts of GM, and the rest would sit and languish, eventually petering out. If you had to purchase the good with the bad, no one would do it. That's a recipe for a loss, not a gain. The only way that would work is if they could be paid to take on GM's responsibilities. No one will buy something they know will be a loss.
Yeah, it's high time our government stood up and made impossible demands of industry. That'll show 'em!
Try HTML'ing. The Web has always been the biggest game in town on the standards watch.
1) This is the default browser, and Ubuntu shipped it with modifications for years. That they would change the nature of those modifications in an update is hardly surprising. .NET was unremovable through the add-ons dialog, which was the primary reason people were pissed. Ubuntu's really done nothing to break the user trust here. You don't like it, remove it, it will take all of 10 seconds, and be completely gone.
2) The summary says the only way to disable it is by using the add-ons dialog, as if that were some onerous distinction.
Also, it's clear this won't make it into the release candidate. That is the value of an open source OS with a public bug tracker, in which the most minor problems (and the most vitriolic responses) are archived and freely available on the internet.
Don't run chkdsk before patching. If you need to run chkdsk before a patch comes out for this, I think you should take a look at your hardware, and then reinstall Windows.
Though if you were planning on using the beta until you can no longer handle the random shutdowns, this might be an issue. But then, that's probably a feature.
God gave us the capacity to create life. That's pretty evident. There's nothing in the Bible to suggest that we are restricted to standard procreation.
God really doesn't address anything beyond the human, and until we're handed a set of instructions on the subject, I will continue to strive to create better and less evil intelligence. If that proves not to be human... then that's what it takes.
Sounds like Photoshop to me (one of Apple's main selling points.) Although I've mostly used the intentionally crippled Elements.
Word is tops for a reason. I don't like the ribbon, but only because it replaces things that should be handled by hotkeys with enormous buttons taking up screen real estate. Yes, early users need them. But people shouldn't be given excuses to avoid learning basic keyboard shortcuts. I understand those who don't want Emacs. However, not using the basic CUA commands for copy+paste and print wastes a lot of time.
But, if you want people to use these things regularly, I can see why the ribbon makes sense.