Any study like this one must be based on a database, which puts the main restriction to its scope. In this case, the database we have used is the Marvel Chronology Project (MCP), which, according to its creator, R. Chappell [7], catalogs every canonical appearance by every significant Marvel character. Thus, the "significant characters" represented by nodes in our network and the "significant appearances" that yield the links in it are, actually, nothing but those characters and appearances currently included in the MCP database.
So, yeah, it was cheap; the database already existed, and no money was spent on comic books. Also, since the study was done by the department of mathematics and information at a university, with "partial" funding by DGES(?), I assume that the spanish state was not paying for it up the arse:D ( From the study: "Departament de Matem atiques i Inform atica, Universitat de les Illes Balears", and "This work has been partly supported by the DGES, grant BFM2000-1113-C02-01.")
Your post says (in case this gets up-modded, so it makes sense....)
If the authors of this paper did this without public funds, then that is wonderful. If they did it with tax dollars, then a lot of Spainards would be quite justified in being angry that food is being taken out of their mouths by their gov't to fund such illegitimate gov't activity.
On further thought, I agree with your position wholeheartedly. If it's a privately financed study, well, that's just cool!:)
If it's government funded, then it's kinda stupid. AFAIK, and I could be very wrong, Spain hasn't been producing any form of entertainment which would recieve significant help from this study. Of course, I'm kinda biased; I live in the US, an entertainment-crazed society, and so my standards are all shot to hell. ( Feel free to flame, i've got an asbestos suit.:P )
However, I think the thing we both missed, along with all the other posters in this story, is that the researchers DID NOT BUY ALL THOSE COMICS.
From the article...
The narrative threads have been mapped out in a database called the Marvel Chronology Project.
The Marvel Chronology Project (ala google) is located at http://www.chronologyproject.com/ , and is not run by the afore-mentioned spanish researchers. Hence, they did not actually buy a-zillion-and-one comic books; Russ Chappell maintains the site. In fact, the data is already nicely formatted, so it's simple to analyze via computer! Here's a sample:
Given that the study was relatively cheap to do (download the web pages, pipe it through some computerized statistic programs), its cost shouldn't be an issue. In fact, the only cost I can see is bandwidth (Ha! I could download it all on my 56k in an hour...), and the researchers time, which is also negligible since they need only run the data through a computer to generate and analyze the statistics.
Of course, I have no way of knowing, but I bet this little research project was done out of the researcher's own pockets, on their own time. No government would authorize something like this, and what measely research funding exists is fought over by scientists like crazed minks.;)
In this case, I applaud them. Economically usefull (see parent's parent), essentially free, and fun. It's amusing to show that the research community isn't a bunch of stiffnecks.:D
You're right, though. How about putting that money into real research. Organizations like NASA get budget cuts while projects studying the Marvel Universe go on?
Well, first off, the study was done in Spain. Last I checked, NASA funding from Spain wasn't getting cut;P
Actually, though, all the outrage here seems kinda silly to me. What happened to the "Science for the sake of Science" mantra? This is exactly that.
Yes, it doesn't have on-the-surface real-world applications. Reading comic books isn't gonna make a cure for cancer. However, it -does- have some economic value.
Think entertainment. TV shows, computer games, books, comics. If I were creating one of these, I could benefit from this study, a LOT. Marvel comics are extremely successful, and they have a "clustring level" of about 1.5. I wonder what some of the failures have? Probably, a lot less. This is valuable, because gives me hard figures correlating success or failure of a venture with the reality level of its social networks.
Even if it only increases the "reality index" of my entertainment products by 3%, that's significant. A universe which can be related to by my readers in inherently more interesting. If it's more interesting, then more people will buy my product, increasing my revenue, potentially by a lot.
Plus, a bunch of scientists got to sit around reading comics:)
( unless, of course, the study was done by computer OCR of the comics, but still... gotta do something with them once they're scanned:D )
It looks to me like the server's date is all wonky. All of the stories have the date "January 14, 2002" above them. I'm thinking that someone managed to screw up the date somehow. Maybe they hacked into the NTP (Network Time Protocol) server that timecanada uses, and set it a week ahead? Anyways, by telling their server it was the 14th, it automatically placed the articles for the 14th on its front page.
I doubt that anyone on timecanada's staff could be stupid enough to do this. As other posters have commented, Jobs is gonna blow up like Hiroshima when he sees this...
Nobody in their right mind would want to abuse my program, of course. However, I wasn't responding to the black hole comment, I was responding to the "Nothing is unhackable" comment. When nothing you feed a program can possibly cause it trouble, can it be hacked? Nope. Of course, if you're a modern purist you'll use the term "Cracked" instead, but it's the same thing.
Also, I doubt there is a direct relationship between hackability and useability; Rather, H=kU/T where H=hackability, U=useability, T=time spent securing, and k is some constant. I expect that one could, with sufficient effort, make a provably secure yet very usefull program. Such a feat would involve tracing all possible data and that which it affects, and take a crapload of time, but it doesn't mean its impossible.
In my example, the only possible effect the data could have on the program is to have it stop reading new data when it reaches an EOF. The only possible bad data would be past an EOF. There is no possible problem with the program, then. Granted, mine isn't very usefull, but it's just an example to dis-prove a point.
"Everything is hackable", much as it sounds good, and for all practical purposes is truth, just simply doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Similarities include Newtonian orbits of the planets~ In nearly every situation you could want, Newtonian works great. But on very close inspection, General Relativity starts playing an important role.
If you spend enough time securing a program, it can be provable secure. That this isn't feasible does not mean its not possible.
Bah, I defy you to hack into this program, when it's connected to inetd with some load balancing and forking limits:
int main(void)
{
int i;
for(i=0; i10; putchar(getchar())!=EOF);
return 0;
}
Care to hack it? Har. Can't be done. Why?
A hack requires an exploitable flaw in a program. The above program does one thing: Reads ten characters from STDIN (stopping at EOF if it shows up early), and puts them on STDOUT. Nothing to exploit. Nada. Zilch.
Sorry to blast the myth, but sometimes slashdot (and its moderators) need a whacking with the clue stick.
I rather expect the author of this comment intended it as humor. It's damn funny:)
And by the way, has anyone else noticed that slashdot's lameness filters are lamer than the trollings themselves? It seems that I forgot to put a subject when I had it only as "Score:3, Interesting ?!?".
Admittedly, I can see the lameness filters coming in as usefull when battling trolling scripts. However, I think slashdot should get some sort of human-verification system (like hotmail uses), so those of us who are actually posting legit comments can do so unhindered.
Gah! This is like the third time this comment has been rejected, and subsequently appended to. WTF?
Okay, fourth try, maybe this new subject will work...
I give up. After six tries, it seems that slashdot is completely rejecting any subject containing "Score:3, Interesting". Of course, my comment makes no sense without it. Maybe the filters are a bit excessive, Rob?
If the USA is stupid enough to do this, I won't stop them. I'm a citizen of the states, but as of late, I've been getting fed up with all the stupid shit happening.
I'm willing to bet that nearly all of the USA's best and brightest are getting fed up, too.
If something like this is implemented, do you know what I'll do? I'll move to some nice liberal socialist country in Europe, that respects my rights. I'll take my expertise and ability with me. I won't be the only one.
It's never a good idea to chase out your elite citizenry. Spain tried with their inquisition, and all chasing the Jews out did was crash their economy and end their empire. I see a similar future for the USA if they try this.
If I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth, then it makes no difference whether the ISP expects me not to use it. It's mine, I paid for it.
The whole concept of "stealing" bandwidth is just plain ludicrous. When my ISP makes a bet that I won't cost them as much as they're charging me, it's not stealing when they lose the bet. It would be stealing if I were somehow tapping into their pipe illegally, but I'm not.
When an airline sells tickets, they always oversell, betting that not enough people will actually show up, and their "person bandwidth" will not be saturated. If everyone shows up for the flight, do they whine about stealing? No, the give you another flight, or refund your ticket.
Suppose I owned a business where customers would pay me $100 per month, and I would give them a 2liter of Coca-Cola whenever they asked. Just because I'm betting that nobody is going to ask for a truckload of cola doesn't mean that they're stealing if they do. I AGREED TO IT. I sold a Coca-Cola service, and they used it exactly as was said in the contract. I didn't sell them a maximum cola limit. I sold them unlimited cola, and they have a perfect right to collect.
The same holds true for bandwidth, and anybody who thinks that it's stealing when I get what I pay for, however seemingly unreasonable, is deluding themselves. If an ISP sells me a connection with a maximum bandwidth worth $300 per month for $40, well, sucks to be them. They sold it, and I'll use it.
Just imagine this glove with force feedback. I'm not sure how it could be done, but that'd be freakin cool. An actual tactile ability to feel virtual objects.
Of course, the first industry to adopt this will be pornogrophy. Imagine the new possibilities for cybersex!
Yeargh! A space elevator WILL NOT COLLAPSE AND FALL ONTO THE EARTH!
The entire rope assembly needs to be super-strong because it is holding a massive swinging weight that normally would be flung off into space, but isn't because it is attached by (in this case) the carbon nanotube rope.
If the rope were cut at the bottom, the whole assembly would be shot into space and never seen again. If it were cut at the top, the weight would fly out, and the rope, although no longer able to lift objects, would continue to stay aloft because it also has outward momentum.
The only potential problem is if it were cut in the middle. Even in this case, only half of the rope would come back to earth. The rest would fly out into space. And as for the rope falling back to earth, well, it's a rope. Presumably the people making it are smart enough not to make a rope which frays easily, so the only effect would be a few miles of super-strong rope falling down on whatever remote location they build this thing at.
Consider this scenario: The owners of the ISP are strongly against kiddie orn, or hacking, or whatever else their objectionable content is. However, they don't want to look like they're consoring things, because the ISP market is very tight, and margins are small. Censorship would give them a bad image that could kill them.
How do you end [kiddie] porn/hacking/etc on your system, and even possibly on/other/ people's systems, without looking like you did it on purpose? Get yourself arrested and plea guilty!
Now, all of a sudden, there is a precedent set that says ISP's must regulate "objectionable" content. The ISP in question takes down their [kiddie]porn/hacking/etc stuff without getting a bad wrap because "The Law Made Me Do It." No customers lost.
Now, however, owners of this nefarious(?) ISP can run around suing other ISP's to take down what they don't like, and there's already a precedent set.
I'm 16. When I look for porn, I prefer porn of teenage girls around my age. For me, older women don't do anything, and in this case older women means women of a legal age for pornography.
The girls I look at are all well within the age of consent, however.
Essentially, if I am legally allowed to have sex with someone, can it be deemed illegal for me to have a picture of them naked?
Actually, there is almost scientific justification for religeon, wierd as that sounds.
Godel's incompleteness theorem states that for any mathematical system which is sufficiently powerfull, there are truths which can not be proved, and false statements that can be proved. This sounds kinda odd, until you start to think of reality as a really really complicated and powerfull system of mathematics.
Here's the fuzzy part I don't understand too well; it still blows my mind. Essentially, some of the ramifications of Godel's incompleteness theorem are that any sufficiently self-referential system causes unpredictable behavior in the system. Presumably, a human brain is sufficiently self-referential to qualify for it to qualify for unpredictability.
This means that even if we had, for example, a Grand Unification Theory, applying it to a human body would result in something that is unpredictable. As in, run it two times and it will come out different.
Something has got to be calling the shots for that unpredictability. Maybe you call it quantum chance, maybe you call it a soul. Soul seems good enough to me. So, there's a scientific explanation for the existence of something resembling a soul. I think that should mix science & religeon quite well;)
PS: I'm a pretty devout athiest, but this is just too nifty a set of ideas to not spread around.
PPS: Read the book "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglass R Hofstadter. It's a discussion of intelligence, and gets around to showing (with full logic and stuff) essentially what I said here. Of course, it says it better than I do, and provides all sorts of baclkground info.
Re:Negative people on slashdot.
on
IRC Improvements
·
· Score: 3
Much as you may not like it, you can't set limits on free speech without it becoming un-free. I've seen a lot of jabbering about kiddie porn in the comments. So what? If some people, for their own reasons, like trading that stuff, who are you to tell them they can't, just because you don't like it?
What if they said that the picture of your kids at the beach, building a sand castle constituted kiddie porn?
My point is that you can't draw a fuzzy line in an issue like this. Just saying 'Kiddie Porn Is Bad' won't get you anywhere. Sure, it'll make you look better in your community, because the majority of people will agree with you. But that leaves the door open for too much abuse. Where does porn start? Where does your picture at the beach fit into this?
A hard line, like "Kiddie Porn is when Nipples Are Showing On Children Under 18" is also ridiculous. Ever seen a Huggies commercial? Would you call it porn? This also leaves room for they people you are trying to stop to maneuver around the law. ("See? She's not showing her nipples!")
If you support an encrypted IRC network, then great. If you don't support an encrypted IRC network, then great. If you support a specially monitored, only 'nice' channels allowed, Absolutely No Kiddie Porn network, you're in for a tough time. How are you going to regulate it? Are -You- going to do it? Who would come to your network, anyways?
Comments like 'Encryption makes spreading kiddie porn' easier are pretty silly. Of course it does. Does that mean I shouldn't use encryption? Does that mean there should be a trusted IRCop in every channel, watching for any kiddie porn? Much as it's nice to have morals, whining won't solve your problem.
PS- If you really want help your kiddie porn crusade, I suggest you contribute to developments in AI. If you accept the idea that people will eventually create a self-aware computer program, you can accept the idea that it will probably be used to monitor internet traffic.
[Repost, I forgot to preview]
I've been wondering to myself lately if maybe all the pollution, etc that
humans have been doing to the earth will actually help natural selection?
My point is this: Since the advent of antibiotics (pennicillain, etc) humans
no longer evolve for their ability to withstand diseases. Instead, we have
poeple evolving for horniness alone; There is no longer survival of the
fittest. It has become survival of whoever has the most children t go on
welfare.
So what impact does pollution have? It's mixing up the gene pool. It makes
more mutants. This is a Good Thing, because it allows for the possibility of
further human evolution.
It's kinda offtopic, but this can be taken one step further, to reach this
conclusion: The collapse of the human race in a nuclear catastrophe would
be, in the long run, good for the earth. Presumably there would be some poor
miserable wretches who survive such trauma. They would:
() be immune to all our pollutants, as would all the species they live
with. This allows them to have a non-damaging industrial revolution, and
therefore pursue scientific goals which we would consider too harmfull to
the environment.
() have a large pool of data from which to work. At our present state of
civilization, I would be highly surprised if our industrial and
technological processes didn't survive -at all- a catastrophe. Hopefully
books would survive, explaining how to do many things to jumpstart a
civilization.
Though these creatures would (probably) be no longer human, it would be a
step up in the evolutionary ladder. Of course, there would be problems, as
in all societies, but by being more physically (and hopefully mentally)
advanced than humans, this race could get farther with less.
I've been wondering to myself lately if maybe all the pollution, etc that humans have been doing to the earth will actually help natural selection?
My point is this: Since the advent of antibiotics (pennicillain, etc) humans no longer evolve for their ability to withstand diseases. Instead, we have poeple evolving for horniness alone; There is no longer survival of the fittest. It has become survival of whoever has the most children t go on welfare.
So what impact does pollution have? It's mixing up the gene pool. It makes more mutants. This is a Good Thing, because it allows for the possibility of further human evolution.
It's kinda offtopic, but this can be taken one step further, to reach this conclusion: The collapse of the human race in a nuclear catastrophe would be, in the long run, good for the earth. Presumably there would be some poor miserable wretches who survive such trauma. They would:
() be immune to all our pollutants, as would all the species they live with. This allows them to have a non-damaging industrial revolution, and therefore pursue scientific goals which we would consider too harmfull to the environment.
() have a large pool of data from which to work. At our present state of civilization, I would be highly surprised if our industrial and technological processes didn't survive -at all- a catastrophe. Hopefully books would survive, explaining how to do many things to jumpstart a civilization.
Though these creatures would (probably) be no longer human, it would be a step up in the evolutionary ladder. Of course, there would be problems, as in all societies, but by being more physically (and hopefully mentally) advanced than humans, this race could get farther with less.
Just something to think about...
There's a simple reason that this poor old lady got way too much money: If they didn't give her some horrendous sum, McDonalds would not have noticed it, and the problem would not have improved.
What's a measely few thousand dollars in medical bills to a worldwide corporation like McDonalds? Then, what's a few percentage points of their income? Which one is going to make them flinch, and have better safety?
and on a more serious note, i find it horrendous that, rather than keeping companies out of an employees email, you now just have to tell them that you read it. Admittedly, this is better than it used to be, but still...
I suppose a few companies are going to be like "We're allowed to read email! Whaoo!" and then all hell is gonna break loose.:(
Slashdot Mirror
From the study:
So, yeah, it was cheap; the database already existed, and no money was spent on comic books. Also, since the study was done by the department of mathematics and information at a university, with "partial" funding by DGES(?), I assume that the spanish state was not paying for it up the arse
On further thought, I agree with your position wholeheartedly. If it's a privately financed study, well, that's just cool!
If it's government funded, then it's kinda stupid. AFAIK, and I could be very wrong, Spain hasn't been producing any form of entertainment which would recieve significant help from this study. Of course, I'm kinda biased; I live in the US, an entertainment-crazed society, and so my standards are all shot to hell. ( Feel free to flame, i've got an asbestos suit.
However, I think the thing we both missed, along with all the other posters in this story, is that the researchers DID NOT BUY ALL THOSE COMICS.
From the article...
The Marvel Chronology Project (ala google) is located at http://www.chronologyproject.com/ , and is not run by the afore-mentioned spanish researchers. Hence, they did not actually buy a-zillion-and-one comic books; Russ Chappell maintains the site. In fact, the data is already nicely formatted, so it's simple to analyze via computer! Here's a sample:
From the Marvel Chronology Project...
Given that the study was relatively cheap to do (download the web pages, pipe it through some computerized statistic programs), its cost shouldn't be an issue. In fact, the only cost I can see is bandwidth (Ha! I could download it all on my 56k in an hour...), and the researchers time, which is also negligible since they need only run the data through a computer to generate and analyze the statistics.
Of course, I have no way of knowing, but I bet this little research project was done out of the researcher's own pockets, on their own time. No government would authorize something like this, and what measely research funding exists is fought over by scientists like crazed minks.
In this case, I applaud them. Economically usefull (see parent's parent), essentially free, and fun. It's amusing to show that the research community isn't a bunch of stiffnecks.
Well, first off, the study was done in Spain. Last I checked, NASA funding from Spain wasn't getting cut
Actually, though, all the outrage here seems kinda silly to me. What happened to the "Science for the sake of Science" mantra? This is exactly that.
Yes, it doesn't have on-the-surface real-world applications. Reading comic books isn't gonna make a cure for cancer. However, it -does- have some economic value.
Think entertainment. TV shows, computer games, books, comics. If I were creating one of these, I could benefit from this study, a LOT. Marvel comics are extremely successful, and they have a "clustring level" of about 1.5. I wonder what some of the failures have? Probably, a lot less. This is valuable, because gives me hard figures correlating success or failure of a venture with the reality level of its social networks.
Even if it only increases the "reality index" of my entertainment products by 3%, that's significant. A universe which can be related to by my readers in inherently more interesting. If it's more interesting, then more people will buy my product, increasing my revenue, potentially by a lot.
Plus, a bunch of scientists got to sit around reading comics
( unless, of course, the study was done by computer OCR of the comics, but still... gotta do something with them once they're scanned
It looks to me like the server's date is all wonky. All of the stories have the date "January 14, 2002" above them. I'm thinking that someone managed to screw up the date somehow. Maybe they hacked into the NTP (Network Time Protocol) server that timecanada uses, and set it a week ahead? Anyways, by telling their server it was the 14th, it automatically placed the articles for the 14th on its front page.
I doubt that anyone on timecanada's staff could be stupid enough to do this. As other posters have commented, Jobs is gonna blow up like Hiroshima when he sees this...
Nobody in their right mind would want to abuse my program, of course. However, I wasn't responding to the black hole comment, I was responding to the "Nothing is unhackable" comment. When nothing you feed a program can possibly cause it trouble, can it be hacked? Nope. Of course, if you're a modern purist you'll use the term "Cracked" instead, but it's the same thing.
Also, I doubt there is a direct relationship between hackability and useability; Rather, H=kU/T where H=hackability, U=useability, T=time spent securing, and k is some constant. I expect that one could, with sufficient effort, make a provably secure yet very usefull program. Such a feat would involve tracing all possible data and that which it affects, and take a crapload of time, but it doesn't mean its impossible.
In my example, the only possible effect the data could have on the program is to have it stop reading new data when it reaches an EOF. The only possible bad data would be past an EOF. There is no possible problem with the program, then. Granted, mine isn't very usefull, but it's just an example to dis-prove a point.
"Everything is hackable", much as it sounds good, and for all practical purposes is truth, just simply doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Similarities include Newtonian orbits of the planets~ In nearly every situation you could want, Newtonian works great. But on very close inspection, General Relativity starts playing an important role.
If you spend enough time securing a program, it can be provable secure. That this isn't feasible does not mean its not possible.
for(i=0; i10; putchar(getchar())!=EOF);
should read
for(i=0; i < 10; putchar(getchar())!=EOF);
Sorry, but I figured that Plain Text mode wouldn't filter out my less than's.
Bah, I defy you to hack into this program, when it's connected to inetd with some load balancing and forking limits:
int main(void)
{
int i;
for(i=0; i10; putchar(getchar())!=EOF);
return 0;
}
Care to hack it? Har. Can't be done. Why?
A hack requires an exploitable flaw in a program. The above program does one thing: Reads ten characters from STDIN (stopping at EOF if it shows up early), and puts them on STDOUT. Nothing to exploit. Nada. Zilch.
Sorry to blast the myth, but sometimes slashdot (and its moderators) need a whacking with the clue stick.
I rather expect the author of this comment intended it as humor. It's damn funny :)
And by the way, has anyone else noticed that slashdot's lameness filters are lamer than the trollings themselves? It seems that I forgot to put a subject when I had it only as "Score:3, Interesting ?!?".
Admittedly, I can see the lameness filters coming in as usefull when battling trolling scripts. However, I think slashdot should get some sort of human-verification system (like hotmail uses), so those of us who are actually posting legit comments can do so unhindered.
Gah! This is like the third time this comment has been rejected, and subsequently appended to. WTF?
Okay, fourth try, maybe this new subject will work...
I give up. After six tries, it seems that slashdot is completely rejecting any subject containing "Score:3, Interesting". Of course, my comment makes no sense without it. Maybe the filters are a bit excessive, Rob?
If the USA is stupid enough to do this, I won't stop them. I'm a citizen of the states, but as of late, I've been getting fed up with all the stupid shit happening.
I'm willing to bet that nearly all of the USA's best and brightest are getting fed up, too.
If something like this is implemented, do you know what I'll do? I'll move to some nice liberal socialist country in Europe, that respects my rights. I'll take my expertise and ability with me. I won't be the only one.
It's never a good idea to chase out your elite citizenry. Spain tried with their inquisition, and all chasing the Jews out did was crash their economy and end their empire. I see a similar future for the USA if they try this.
If I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth, then it makes no difference whether the ISP expects me not to use it. It's mine, I paid for it.
The whole concept of "stealing" bandwidth is just plain ludicrous. When my ISP makes a bet that I won't cost them as much as they're charging me, it's not stealing when they lose the bet. It would be stealing if I were somehow tapping into their pipe illegally, but I'm not.
When an airline sells tickets, they always oversell, betting that not enough people will actually show up, and their "person bandwidth" will not be saturated. If everyone shows up for the flight, do they whine about stealing? No, the give you another flight, or refund your ticket.
Suppose I owned a business where customers would pay me $100 per month, and I would give them a 2liter of Coca-Cola whenever they asked. Just because I'm betting that nobody is going to ask for a truckload of cola doesn't mean that they're stealing if they do. I AGREED TO IT. I sold a Coca-Cola service, and they used it exactly as was said in the contract. I didn't sell them a maximum cola limit. I sold them unlimited cola, and they have a perfect right to collect.
The same holds true for bandwidth, and anybody who thinks that it's stealing when I get what I pay for, however seemingly unreasonable, is deluding themselves. If an ISP sells me a connection with a maximum bandwidth worth $300 per month for $40, well, sucks to be them. They sold it, and I'll use it.
Just imagine this glove with force feedback. I'm not sure how it could be done, but that'd be freakin cool. An actual tactile ability to feel virtual objects.
Of course, the first industry to adopt this will be pornogrophy. Imagine the new possibilities for cybersex!
Think of nano-suits that exert force on the wearer.
The field of tele-dildonics can finally come!
Yeargh! A space elevator WILL NOT COLLAPSE AND FALL ONTO THE EARTH!
The entire rope assembly needs to be super-strong because it is holding a massive swinging weight that normally would be flung off into space, but isn't because it is attached by (in this case) the carbon nanotube rope.
If the rope were cut at the bottom, the whole assembly would be shot into space and never seen again. If it were cut at the top, the weight would fly out, and the rope, although no longer able to lift objects, would continue to stay aloft because it also has outward momentum.
The only potential problem is if it were cut in the middle. Even in this case, only half of the rope would come back to earth. The rest would fly out into space. And as for the rope falling back to earth, well, it's a rope. Presumably the people making it are smart enough not to make a rope which frays easily, so the only effect would be a few miles of super-strong rope falling down on whatever remote location they build this thing at.
No worries.
that maybe the ISP intended to set a precedent?
/other/ people's systems, without looking like you did it on purpose? Get yourself arrested and plea guilty!
Consider this scenario: The owners of the ISP are strongly against kiddie orn, or hacking, or whatever else their objectionable content is. However, they don't want to look like they're consoring things, because the ISP market is very tight, and margins are small. Censorship would give them a bad image that could kill them.
How do you end [kiddie] porn/hacking/etc on your system, and even possibly on
Now, all of a sudden, there is a precedent set that says ISP's must regulate "objectionable" content. The ISP in question takes down their [kiddie]porn/hacking/etc stuff without getting a bad wrap because "The Law Made Me Do It." No customers lost.
Now, however, owners of this nefarious(?) ISP can run around suing other ISP's to take down what they don't like, and there's already a precedent set.
Kinda scary, Eh?
Why do I see no mention of POV-Ray?
... a minor was looking at pornography of minors?
I'm 16. When I look for porn, I prefer porn of teenage girls around my age. For me, older women don't do anything, and in this case older women means women of a legal age for pornography.
The girls I look at are all well within the age of consent, however.
Essentially, if I am legally allowed to have sex with someone, can it be deemed illegal for me to have a picture of them naked?
Actually, there is almost scientific justification for religeon, wierd as that sounds.
;)
Godel's incompleteness theorem states that for any mathematical system which is sufficiently powerfull, there are truths which can not be proved, and false statements that can be proved. This sounds kinda odd, until you start to think of reality as a really really complicated and powerfull system of mathematics.
Here's the fuzzy part I don't understand too well; it still blows my mind. Essentially, some of the ramifications of Godel's incompleteness theorem are that any sufficiently self-referential system causes unpredictable behavior in the system. Presumably, a human brain is sufficiently self-referential to qualify for it to qualify for unpredictability.
This means that even if we had, for example, a Grand Unification Theory, applying it to a human body would result in something that is unpredictable. As in, run it two times and it will come out different.
Something has got to be calling the shots for that unpredictability. Maybe you call it quantum chance, maybe you call it a soul. Soul seems good enough to me. So, there's a scientific explanation for the existence of something resembling a soul. I think that should mix science & religeon quite well
PS: I'm a pretty devout athiest, but this is just too nifty a set of ideas to not spread around.
PPS: Read the book "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglass R Hofstadter. It's a discussion of intelligence, and gets around to showing (with full logic and stuff) essentially what I said here. Of course, it says it better than I do, and provides all sorts of baclkground info.
Much as you may not like it, you can't set limits on free speech without it becoming un-free. I've seen a lot of jabbering about kiddie porn in the comments. So what? If some people, for their own reasons, like trading that stuff, who are you to tell them they can't, just because you don't like it?
What if they said that the picture of your kids at the beach, building a sand castle constituted kiddie porn?
My point is that you can't draw a fuzzy line in an issue like this. Just saying 'Kiddie Porn Is Bad' won't get you anywhere. Sure, it'll make you look better in your community, because the majority of people will agree with you. But that leaves the door open for too much abuse. Where does porn start? Where does your picture at the beach fit into this?
A hard line, like "Kiddie Porn is when Nipples Are Showing On Children Under 18" is also ridiculous. Ever seen a Huggies commercial? Would you call it porn? This also leaves room for they people you are trying to stop to maneuver around the law. ("See? She's not showing her nipples!")
If you support an encrypted IRC network, then great. If you don't support an encrypted IRC network, then great. If you support a specially monitored, only 'nice' channels allowed, Absolutely No Kiddie Porn network, you're in for a tough time. How are you going to regulate it? Are -You- going to do it? Who would come to your network, anyways?
Comments like 'Encryption makes spreading kiddie porn' easier are pretty silly. Of course it does. Does that mean I shouldn't use encryption? Does that mean there should be a trusted IRCop in every channel, watching for any kiddie porn? Much as it's nice to have morals, whining won't solve your problem.
PS- If you really want help your kiddie porn crusade, I suggest you contribute to developments in AI. If you accept the idea that people will eventually create a self-aware computer program, you can accept the idea that it will probably be used to monitor internet traffic.
www.caasd.org
Specifically, this is Safe Flight 21, which is a MITRE CAASD project.
A similar article appears in the Washington post today, as well:
3 0786-2000Sep18.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
My dad used to work with agencies that worked with the NSA. As of 15 years ago, the NSA had all their network cables in pressurized pipes.
What's the advantage of a pressurized pipe? It was pressurized with nerve gas!
Try tapping that, mister 133t h4x0r...
[Repost, I forgot to preview]
I've been wondering to myself lately if maybe all the pollution, etc that
humans have been doing to the earth will actually help natural selection?
My point is this: Since the advent of antibiotics (pennicillain, etc) humans
no longer evolve for their ability to withstand diseases. Instead, we have
poeple evolving for horniness alone; There is no longer survival of the
fittest. It has become survival of whoever has the most children t go on
welfare.
So what impact does pollution have? It's mixing up the gene pool. It makes
more mutants. This is a Good Thing, because it allows for the possibility of
further human evolution.
It's kinda offtopic, but this can be taken one step further, to reach this
conclusion: The collapse of the human race in a nuclear catastrophe would
be, in the long run, good for the earth. Presumably there would be some poor
miserable wretches who survive such trauma. They would:
() be immune to all our pollutants, as would all the species they live
with. This allows them to have a non-damaging industrial revolution, and
therefore pursue scientific goals which we would consider too harmfull to
the environment.
() have a large pool of data from which to work. At our present state of
civilization, I would be highly surprised if our industrial and
technological processes didn't survive -at all- a catastrophe. Hopefully
books would survive, explaining how to do many things to jumpstart a
civilization.
Though these creatures would (probably) be no longer human, it would be a
step up in the evolutionary ladder. Of course, there would be problems, as
in all societies, but by being more physically (and hopefully mentally)
advanced than humans, this race could get farther with less.
Just something to think about...
I've been wondering to myself lately if maybe all the pollution, etc that humans have been doing to the earth will actually help natural selection? My point is this: Since the advent of antibiotics (pennicillain, etc) humans no longer evolve for their ability to withstand diseases. Instead, we have poeple evolving for horniness alone; There is no longer survival of the fittest. It has become survival of whoever has the most children t go on welfare. So what impact does pollution have? It's mixing up the gene pool. It makes more mutants. This is a Good Thing, because it allows for the possibility of further human evolution. It's kinda offtopic, but this can be taken one step further, to reach this conclusion: The collapse of the human race in a nuclear catastrophe would be, in the long run, good for the earth. Presumably there would be some poor miserable wretches who survive such trauma. They would: () be immune to all our pollutants, as would all the species they live with. This allows them to have a non-damaging industrial revolution, and therefore pursue scientific goals which we would consider too harmfull to the environment. () have a large pool of data from which to work. At our present state of civilization, I would be highly surprised if our industrial and technological processes didn't survive -at all- a catastrophe. Hopefully books would survive, explaining how to do many things to jumpstart a civilization. Though these creatures would (probably) be no longer human, it would be a step up in the evolutionary ladder. Of course, there would be problems, as in all societies, but by being more physically (and hopefully mentally) advanced than humans, this race could get farther with less. Just something to think about...
There's a simple reason that this poor old lady got way too much money: If they didn't give her some horrendous sum, McDonalds would not have noticed it, and the problem would not have improved.
What's a measely few thousand dollars in medical bills to a worldwide corporation like McDonalds? Then, what's a few percentage points of their income? Which one is going to make them flinch, and have better safety?
I rest my case.
1st post, i tihnk
:(
and on a more serious note, i find it horrendous that, rather than keeping companies out of an employees email, you now just have to tell them that you read it. Admittedly, this is better than it used to be, but still...
I suppose a few companies are going to be like "We're allowed to read email! Whaoo!" and then all hell is gonna break loose.
grr.. i'm considering moving offshore these days.