They do have some form of accountability though. In the past few food scandals, the previous food safety chief was executed for corruption, and the current one has resigned.
It's not like they got USD20 million bucks for screwing up.
They most certainly don't execute people for corruption in my country.
As for censorship, the best form of mind control is to give citizens something else to think about.
I think most chinese citizens spend a fair bit of time thinking about getting rich (or at least richer).
I doubt the infamous MMORPG gold farmers would really care about Tibet, Tiananmen, Falun Gong etc, even if they knew about them.
As long as the money and food is satisfactory most people won't care.
Do the US citizens really care either? Bush was reelected, and his party still has a good chance. The Two Parties have a far better chance than the other parties (which got less than 1% of the total votes in the prev elections).
But waiting for my app to be swapped back in is more annoying to me than waiting for a disk cache miss - since usually if there's disk access (copying files etc), I'd probably be expecting it, and I expect it to be slow.
Whereas I want my apps in RAM, that's the reason why I started those apps in the first place, and that's why I bought that much RAM.
Other people might not mind their apps being swapped in and out, but I personally don't really want to live in the 1950s;).
Quote: "I planned on hitting the wall, but I didn't plan on the wall slowing me down that much," Edwards said. "In video games, you can just run into the wall and run it wide open. That's what I did, but it didn't quite work out the same as the video game."
I agree with you. The baby is long dead and rotting if it was ever around.
The real innovators never get rewarded by the patent system since they're usually more than 20 years ahead of their time. Douglas Engelbart, Hedy Lamarr.
Whereas idiocy like "One click" and "Cracking eggs to make an omelette" patents gets rewarded.
So there will be no great loss if inventive patents were abolished.
I also think some of my ideas are brilliant, big deal. People who invent "Cracking eggs to make an omelette" also think their ideas are brilliant too.
Perhaps there should be Prizes for Innovation. You pay a fee and register your invention, and years later you might win a prize if people decide in hindsight your invention is worth something.
You could have two groups of prizes - one by "the people" and one by "experts in the field".
You could also allow for anonymity - the prize goes to inventor hashed ID = 0x10bd8c648ce1f2bd5aba4453938b406e .
If you're using ADSL, sometimes what you end up with is TCP/IP over PPPoE over ATM over DSL (whoopee).
Your DSL could be 6144kbps but since ATM cells are 48 byte payload with 5 byte header, your theoretical max TCP/IP speeds would be significantly less than 6144kbps. PPPoE also has some overheads but it does allow for larger packets.
So what do you set your postgresql limits to? Firefox often uses more than 256MB.
With 256MB process limits, 20 fat apache processes with the same php app bug and you could still hit gigs of swap and the very problem I mention - unresponsive machine - "swap death".
My way doesn't take as much guessing (how much will this ever use reasonably etc) and works well enough.
NOTE: I also turn vm overcommit off- because I prefer apps to run out of mem, rather than the Linux oom killer killing them (I believe freebsd also overcommits by default).
I prefer putting up with a theoretically slightly lower performance (less disk cache) as a trade off for a more graceful failure mode where the system continues to stay up. The machine may get sluggish (to a controlled degree), but it doesn't become unresponsive.
Maybe I don't trust "modern" kernels as much as you do. FreeBSD, Linux, Windows whatever, they're all buggy.
You can call it poor configuration if you want. So far it has worked well enough for me.
If they didn't mind hard they'd have got a job or started their own companies, or stolen something more challenging and rewarding;).
So what you do on your laptop is to create an account specially for thieves to use. Call it Honey if you like - with no password, or the password hint = instructions on how to get in.
Then your own account has a password, to keep the thief out, from deleting your encrypted stuff etc.
This way when the thief steals the laptop, they turn it on, click on "Your Account", get password prompt, click on Honey, get in straight - whoopee.
Immediately the stuff is launched to log data about the thief and his surroundings - webcam, microphone set to record, and then the data is uploaded.
What this might mean is if you set a password you are less likely to recover your computer from the typical idiot thief.
Perhaps what you could do is create a special account and provide an obvious password hint.
This way the thief might not be able to get into your normal account, but if he figures out he can easily get into the Thief account (which is clearly visible in the Logon screen - and probably not called thief;) ), he uses that instead.
You set the Thief account up to make it easier to catch the thief, gather evidence and also reduce the exposure of your personal data (harder to delete your encrypted partition).
Homosexuality is not lethal (if you manage to keep it a secret in some countries;) ), nor does it prevent you from breeding.
Many homosexuals have children, some even from consensual sex.
BTW I've a female friend who claims that "all the cute guys are gay!".
So maybe the genes that make human males prone to homosexuality could also make them attractive to some girls, which may increase their chance of reproductive success way beyond typical slashdotters, esp with the addition of drugs like alcohol etc;).
In short a cute gay guy might have a higher chance of having children than I do:).
Benefits of an artificial nose over a dog 1) It probably doesn't get bored as fast. 2) you can buy a replacement without having to train it for months. 3) the original and replacement work within known specs.
"indicates that homosexuality MUST have some beneficial effect for close relatives and perhaps for society"
Incorrect. All it needs to stay in the gene pool is for it to not have a huge negative effect.
I'm not saying homosexuality does not have a beneficial effect or not, just that your statement is incorrect.
As long as your gene line still manages to reproduce successfully, it doesn't matter how crappy the genes are:).
There are tons of species that are just this close to extinction. As long as they live in a "friendly" or suitable environment, they can be and do silly stuff all they want.
Just introduce a bunch of polar bears to the Antarctic and see how long the penguins last.
The fact is quarantine is one of the methods to control diseases with no cure.
Quarantines aren't 100%, neither are condoms.
To me, as long as people are informed about the risks and consequences, they can fuck around and die if they want. Then it'll just be a matter of "natural selection" - already some groups appear to have immunity.
It'll be a bigger problem if the disease becomes more contagious than it is now.
Lastly, the typical virgin slashdotter living in the basement is unlikely to get AIDS;).
It does hurt to allocate a couple of gigs of swap.
I use swap only to tell me that I'm low on RAM. Basically once the machine starts using swap and getting slightly slow- it means I'm low, then I can try to shut down stuff (without it behaving otherwise strangely, or dying abruptly).
Here's how I suggest you figure out _roughly_ how much swap you need.
1) Figure out the amount of Virtual Memory your programs and services _allocate_ without really _using_ - call this F. There are some programs that allocate hundreds of MB of memory but never use it. But note that there are some programs that allocate lots of memory and may use it:). If you have lots of RAM and are too lazy to guess, set F=0.
2) Figure out your drive throughput for swap access (swap in + swap out)- this is often related to random access throughput - and for a typical hard drive it could be in the order of magnitude of 10MB/sec - call this M. Note that many flash drives have pathetic random write speeds of 4MB/sec (or even less!).
3) Figure out the time you are willing to wait for stuff to swap in and out (e.g. time to get an ssh prompt- call this T.
Swap = F + T * M.
So for example, if you have programs that allocate a total of 100MB and never use it, and your drive swap throughput is 10MB/sec and the amount of time you're willing to wait is 15 seconds.
Swap = 100MB + 15 sec * 10MB/sec = 250MB.
As you can see allocating gigabytes can hurt - since it'll take days to swap in and out processes that are using gigabytes of swap. You'll run out of time before you run out of swap, and when that happens somebody will do a hard shutdown of the machine - and that means ALL processes will be abnormally terminated, rather than just one.
Yes, there are cases where the offending program might not keep accessing all of that swap, but when a program misbehaves like that, you'd rather find out sooner rather than have to shutdown the whole computer (because it takes ages to respond).
Running programs from swap is best reserved for those who wish to experience the 1950s drum memory days. If you want to do retrocomputing keep in mind that memory speeds are now much faster than disk speeds, whereas in the 1950s memory speed = drum speed, and most modern programs assume modern memory speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW in theory the chinese citizens have votes too and can even stand for elections (in theory :) ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China
http://www.china.org.cn/english/Political/26325.htm
They only have one party though.
They do have some form of accountability though. In the past few food scandals, the previous food safety chief was executed for corruption, and the current one has resigned.
It's not like they got USD20 million bucks for screwing up.
They most certainly don't execute people for corruption in my country.
As for censorship, the best form of mind control is to give citizens something else to think about.
I think most chinese citizens spend a fair bit of time thinking about getting rich (or at least richer).
I doubt the infamous MMORPG gold farmers would really care about Tibet, Tiananmen, Falun Gong etc, even if they knew about them.
As long as the money and food is satisfactory most people won't care.
Do the US citizens really care either? Bush was reelected, and his party still has a good chance.
The Two Parties have a far better chance than the other parties (which got less than 1% of the total votes in the prev elections).
"But hey, what's that RAM for anyway?"
;).
People keep telling me it's for cache.
But waiting for my app to be swapped back in is more annoying to me than waiting for a disk cache miss - since usually if there's disk access (copying files etc), I'd probably be expecting it, and I expect it to be slow.
Whereas I want my apps in RAM, that's the reason why I started those apps in the first place, and that's why I bought that much RAM.
Other people might not mind their apps being swapped in and out, but I personally don't really want to live in the 1950s
I was thinking of this guy actually:
http://hamptonroads.com/2008/09/johnson-wins-edwards-hits-wall-purpose
Quote:
"I planned on hitting the wall, but I didn't plan on the wall slowing me down that much," Edwards said. "In video games, you can just run into the wall and run it wide open. That's what I did, but it didn't quite work out the same as the video game."
If you end up in jail you're doing it wrong.
What you do is make LOTs of 120k loans even if you know they will never be repaid.
Then you get a big bonus etc for doing so well. The bonus could be 120K?
When stuff goes bad, you say "But everyone was doing it too". And everyone else nods their head in agreement.
It's not dead, it's just resting!
I agree with you. The baby is long dead and rotting if it was ever around.
The real innovators never get rewarded by the patent system since they're usually more than 20 years ahead of their time. Douglas Engelbart, Hedy Lamarr.
Whereas idiocy like "One click" and "Cracking eggs to make an omelette" patents gets rewarded.
So there will be no great loss if inventive patents were abolished.
I also think some of my ideas are brilliant, big deal. People who invent "Cracking eggs to make an omelette" also think their ideas are brilliant too.
Perhaps there should be Prizes for Innovation. You pay a fee and register your invention, and years later you might win a prize if people decide in hindsight your invention is worth something.
You could have two groups of prizes - one by "the people" and one by "experts in the field".
You could also allow for anonymity - the prize goes to inventor hashed ID = 0x10bd8c648ce1f2bd5aba4453938b406e .
Obi Wan: That's no ham. It's a...
If you're using ADSL, sometimes what you end up with is TCP/IP over PPPoE over ATM over DSL (whoopee).
Your DSL could be 6144kbps but since ATM cells are 48 byte payload with 5 byte header, your theoretical max TCP/IP speeds would be significantly less than 6144kbps. PPPoE also has some overheads but it does allow for larger packets.
"taking a properly configured machine down"
So what do you set your postgresql limits to? Firefox often uses more than 256MB.
With 256MB process limits, 20 fat apache processes with the same php app bug and you could still hit gigs of swap and the very problem I mention - unresponsive machine - "swap death".
My way doesn't take as much guessing (how much will this ever use reasonably etc) and works well enough.
NOTE: I also turn vm overcommit off- because I prefer apps to run out of mem, rather than the Linux oom killer killing them (I believe freebsd also overcommits by default).
I prefer putting up with a theoretically slightly lower performance (less disk cache) as a trade off for a more graceful failure mode where the system continues to stay up. The machine may get sluggish (to a controlled degree), but it doesn't become unresponsive.
Maybe I don't trust "modern" kernels as much as you do. FreeBSD, Linux, Windows whatever, they're all buggy.
You can call it poor configuration if you want. So far it has worked well enough for me.
Yeah. Thieves who steal laptops want _easy_.
;).
If they didn't mind hard they'd have got a job or started their own companies, or stolen something more challenging and rewarding
So what you do on your laptop is to create an account specially for thieves to use. Call it Honey if you like - with no password, or the password hint = instructions on how to get in.
Then your own account has a password, to keep the thief out, from deleting your encrypted stuff etc.
This way when the thief steals the laptop, they turn it on, click on "Your Account", get password prompt, click on Honey, get in straight - whoopee.
Immediately the stuff is launched to log data about the thief and his surroundings - webcam, microphone set to record, and then the data is uploaded.
They'll get it reformatted or get someone to.
;) ), he uses that instead.
What this might mean is if you set a password you are less likely to recover your computer from the typical idiot thief.
Perhaps what you could do is create a special account and provide an obvious password hint.
This way the thief might not be able to get into your normal account, but if he figures out he can easily get into the Thief account (which is clearly visible in the Logon screen - and probably not called thief
You set the Thief account up to make it easier to catch the thief, gather evidence and also reduce the exposure of your personal data (harder to delete your encrypted partition).
Strange, why the difference between 110v and 220v?
What's the charging voltage?
Homosexuality is not lethal (if you manage to keep it a secret in some countries ;) ), nor does it prevent you from breeding.
;).
:).
Many homosexuals have children, some even from consensual sex.
BTW I've a female friend who claims that "all the cute guys are gay!".
So maybe the genes that make human males prone to homosexuality could also make them attractive to some girls, which may increase their chance of reproductive success way beyond typical slashdotters, esp with the addition of drugs like alcohol etc
In short a cute gay guy might have a higher chance of having children than I do
Apparently post-coital prolactin is linked with the growth of new brain cells that move to the olfactory bulb.
e.g. more orgasms might help improve your sense of smell faster.
The latter has not been scientifically verified, YMMV etc.
There's also being able to sense the position where your limbs are.
That's pretty important. Some people without that sense can still learn to walk, but if you switch the lights off, they could collapse.
Then there's the sense of hunger and fullness, thirst vs too much water.
Plenty of other important senses.
Benefits of an artificial nose over a dog
:).
1) It probably doesn't get bored as fast.
2) you can buy a replacement without having to train it for months.
3) the original and replacement work within known specs.
Dogs are probably more fun to play with though
"where some of the sales guys are just a little too fond of aftershave "
:).
They might be hygiene challenged college boys who became sales guys
"indicates that homosexuality MUST have some beneficial effect for close relatives and perhaps for society"
:).
Incorrect. All it needs to stay in the gene pool is for it to not have a huge negative effect.
I'm not saying homosexuality does not have a beneficial effect or not, just that your statement is incorrect.
As long as your gene line still manages to reproduce successfully, it doesn't matter how crappy the genes are
There are tons of species that are just this close to extinction. As long as they live in a "friendly" or suitable environment, they can be and do silly stuff all they want.
Just introduce a bunch of polar bears to the Antarctic and see how long the penguins last.
Something else kills you, like your own malfunctioning cells.
When your immune system gets defeated, your odds of getting many cancers go up too.
Some (all?) of these cancers are due to viruses and bacteria.
But there's hardly any practical way to avoid exposure to those. Babies could be "inheriting" those viruses from their mothers.
The fact is quarantine is one of the methods to control diseases with no cure.
;).
Quarantines aren't 100%, neither are condoms.
To me, as long as people are informed about the risks and consequences, they can fuck around and die if they want. Then it'll just be a matter of "natural selection" - already some groups appear to have immunity.
It'll be a bigger problem if the disease becomes more contagious than it is now.
Lastly, the typical virgin slashdotter living in the basement is unlikely to get AIDS
It's not the submitter - the phrase is in the article.
Guardian is pretty tabloidish.
"TFA wants to avoid having these things built into the entire internet from end to end"
In a way it's already built in, you might only start to notice it once we run out of IPv4 addresses. Only an elite 4+ billion are peers.
Then you'll see who really gets to distribute media.
It does hurt to allocate a couple of gigs of swap.
:). If you have lots of RAM and are too lazy to guess, set F=0.
I use swap only to tell me that I'm low on RAM. Basically once the machine starts using swap and getting slightly slow- it means I'm low, then I can try to shut down stuff (without it behaving otherwise strangely, or dying abruptly).
Here's how I suggest you figure out _roughly_ how much swap you need.
1) Figure out the amount of Virtual Memory your programs and services _allocate_ without really _using_ - call this F. There are some programs that allocate hundreds of MB of memory but never use it. But note that there are some programs that allocate lots of memory and may use it
2) Figure out your drive throughput for swap access (swap in + swap out)- this is often related to random access throughput - and for a typical hard drive it could be in the order of magnitude of 10MB/sec - call this M. Note that many flash drives have pathetic random write speeds of 4MB/sec (or even less!).
3) Figure out the time you are willing to wait for stuff to swap in and out (e.g. time to get an ssh prompt- call this T.
Swap = F + T * M.
So for example, if you have programs that allocate a total of 100MB and never use it, and your drive swap throughput is 10MB/sec and the amount of time you're willing to wait is 15 seconds.
Swap = 100MB + 15 sec * 10MB/sec = 250MB.
As you can see allocating gigabytes can hurt - since it'll take days to swap in and out processes that are using gigabytes of swap. You'll run out of time before you run out of swap, and when that happens somebody will do a hard shutdown of the machine - and that means ALL processes will be abnormally terminated, rather than just one.
Yes, there are cases where the offending program might not keep accessing all of that swap, but when a program misbehaves like that, you'd rather find out sooner rather than have to shutdown the whole computer (because it takes ages to respond).
Running programs from swap is best reserved for those who wish to experience the 1950s drum memory days. If you want to do retrocomputing keep in mind that memory speeds are now much faster than disk speeds, whereas in the 1950s memory speed = drum speed, and most modern programs assume modern memory speeds.
They could have used it to rev at other restaurants except that Blizzard sued those restaurants as well ;)
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. If people use guns to do bad stuff, you shouldn't get rid of guns, or sue gun manufacturers.
;).
Oh wait, wrong topic.
I think