I'm afraid that I'm completely serious. Fortunately, I had the card come up in a few classes and only got that response once, but it really blew me away. Even with a questionable conception or birth, a guy who's in the French army, then rules France, then tries to have France take over the world is French, no matter what.
I was playing Taboo in English class in a French high school. A card with "Napoleon" came up. The student was trying to explain who he was. One of the other students asked, "Was he French?"
It's not that ironic. It's just like everybody getting upset when the high school valedictorian is caught shoplifting, but when a football jock is caught driving drunk it barely gets noticed. Everybody has much higher expectations and higher hopes for the valedictorian, so it's that much worse when he does something bad.
I'm sure I'll get flamed to a crisp for that opinion, though.:-)
I have the right to answer the door to my house with a angry look, holding an extremely sharp butcher knife covered with blood, saying "What the fuck do you want?" too, but that doesn't mean that I should.
I went to China last summer, and the worst thing they did to me was take my temperature as I left. No, it wasn't with an anal probe; they had an infrared camera pointed at the line and a computer hooked up to it that figured out everybody's body temperature so that they could keep people with SARS from leaving the country. Coming into the country was dead simple; write down where you're staying (as far as I know never verified), get your bags, leave.
So, you have two countries; one of them does a bit of paperwork and takes your temperature with an infrared camera. The other one fingerprints you, takes a mugshot, and puts it all into a big database. Remind me, which one is the totalitarian dictatorship again?
In all honesty, the US remains a lot more free than China, but the situation at the border sure doesn't help my perception.
Right now the third largest employer of armed forces in Iraq (after the US and Britain)are private corporations
I saw this statement in a news story the other day and it still strikes me as highly bizarre. What else would be number 3? The US and Britain are the only countries with any significant troop presence. You have to have a number 3 somewhere, were you expecting it to be "Iraqi gun nuts"?
First of all, I have no problem with any country who wants to restrict entry to their country. I have a work permit for the U.S., but if they revoked it tomorrow, I wouldn't whine. I realize that as a non-citizen, I'm not protected by that country's constitution, and I'm not counting on it.
It's been a while since I've read through the Constitution, but I doubt if it has anything in it that says that the various protections within (free speech, unreasonable search and seizure, etc.) only apply to citizens. But apparently the border is some special no-Constitution zone; I mean, if some government guys stopped me on the street and asked to look through my suitcase, I'd tell them to fuck off and there's nothing they could do about it. But if I'm in the middle of the country but I happen to be in an international arrivals hall and I try the same tactic, I'll be searched anyway and (probably, I've never actually tried) get hauled off to jail or at least treated to a pretty rough time.
Come to think of it, airports in general seem to be no-Constitution zones. If a police officer asks to search your trunk at an airport and you refuse, will they simply deny entry? That's all they have the right to do according to the good ol' Bill of Rights.
In theory, you may be right, but in practice the ability to track all of the foreigners in the country implies a massive police state apparatus, and once that's in place it's only natural to turn it on the citizenry as well. At the moment you can legally live in the US with basically no 'papers' or documentation of any kind, if you were born there. If you're poor enough to not pay income tax, use cash, don't drive a car, and don't travel internationally you can basically exist 'off the grid', and I think that's a good thing. (Not that I would, I like what my passport lets me do far too much, but it's nice to know the option is there.)
FUD. "If you don't vote for candidate X, you'll either get candidate Y, who has no chance of defeating the enemy, or you'll get candidate Z who is Satan's incarnation on Earth."
I have a cron job that runs every few hours and grabs a web page from my web server. This is already a good start, because my logs will show the IP that grabbed the page, and nothing else even knows the page exists. But I went one better, and wrote a small program to parse the page for commands. So for now, the page is blank, and nothing happens. If I should need to, I can change the contents of the page to have my computer e-mail me the output of 'ifconfig' (which would also give me juicy headers to look through), open an ssh connection to my web server with a tunnel allowing me to connect back the other way, or just run an arbitrary command on the shell. I have no idea how useful it might be, but it was a fun little project.
You gotta hand it to the slashdot crowd, they certainly don't let something minor like understanding the meaning of a post get in the way of their rabid anti-Americanism. The guy parses the date correctly, mentions the absurd possibility that it might be "the American way" (and in the future), and gets jumped on by half a dozen people saying, "no you idiot, in the rest of the world we write dates properly. To the sibling posters: your rants are more interesting if they actually make sense in context.
This is nicely covered by Rice's Theorem. In short, Rice's Theorem says that it's impossible to write a program to determine with 100% accuracy any property of another program's behavior or output.
Rice's Theorem is basically a generalized version of Turing's proof that the halting problem can't be solved, and it uses exactly the argument you outline.
There's a store near my house. Well, there are several, but one in particular is interesting. Half of the stuff they sell is self-replicating! Some of it even comes with everything you need to begin the replication process in the package. The rest has been deactivated, but they're only kidding themselves; you can buy the basics needed to begin replication in a lot of places. Can you imagine; they're trying to sell tomatoes when any fool can get some seeds and stick them in the ground and grow them?
They do offer a few items that don't self-replicate. I can only imagine their business plan is to get people in the store with the self-replicating items, and then convince people to buy the other stuff. A weird sort of advertising. But didn't anybody learn anything from the dot-com era?
11. Feel free to break rules 1-10 when appropriate, because, you know, not all women are the same. Although, if your goal is to get laid rather than form something meaningful, learning to fake 1-10 is probably a good approach.
To summarize; there was a big paradox in the 19th century, because the thermodynamicists were coming up with numbers for the age of the Earth that were far too short for what the geologists and biologists were coming up with. The paradox was finally resolved with the discovery of radioactivity, which gave the Earth a heat source beyond that of its initial heat and compression. A relevant quote:
By the turn of the 20th century, Thomson had been made Lord Kelvin in appreciation of his many scientific accomplishments. He had reason to feel confident of himself, and the fact that multiple attempts to determine the age of the Earth seemed to show that it was about 100 million years old led him to feel very certain that his estimates were correct. The geologists could only suggest that Kelvin didn't have all the facts, and they still believed that the Earth was far older than 100 million years.
The breakthrough that would ultimately resolve the conflict took place in 1896, when the French chemist A. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity.
There was a hydrogen explosion at one point in the reactor. It wasn't the major thing which went wrong, but it probably rose some hairs anyway. To quote from this page:
The first warning of the presence of hydrogen in the system was quite violent, but thanks to the heavily overengineered containment structure, it was almost anticlimactic save for its implications. A poorly shielded relay sparked, detonating the hydrogen in the containment. The instrument measuring containment pressure zoomed to a frightening 28 pounds per square inch before starting down again. Later analysis showed that this instrument's response was quite slow, and the real peak pressure was probably closer to 80 PSI!
While the explosion was a non-event, that was probably only true because of the containment structure.
They more or less do build them under "ground", where the "ground" in this case is a great thickness of steel-reinforced concrete, which is exactly what did stop the radiation leak at TMI.
You have a long chain of horrible coincidences which should have been stopped earlier. At TMI, it was finally stopped. What stopped it? The last-ditch measure that every sanely-designed reactor has; the giant, meters-thick steel-reinforced concrete containment dome. This is the reason why the explosion at TMI never went anywhere. The bright sparks behind the design of Chernobyl (and most other Soviet reactors) decided that their reactor didn't need such a safety measure. If Chernobyl had had a decent containment structure, it would have been a footnote in the list of nuclear accidents just like TMI is.
The Earth's core is all melted. You know why it's so hot? It's because of the enormous quantities of uranium within it that is undergoing radioactive decay. Yes, the Earth is a big radioisotope heater.
The big difference is in reactor design, that is for sure.
Every civilian reactor built in sane countries has a containment dome which is several feet of very strong steel-reinforced concrete.
Chernobyl just had a reactor in a building. A regular old building, like where you might put an expensive computer or something. When the reactor exploded, there was nothing substantial to stop it. If a similar incident happened in a Western reactor, there would be a lot of really alarmed people scurrying around, but nothing would breach the containment dome.
I'm not sure if I'm responding to a troll or not, but on the off chance that I'm not, this really needs a response.
I am not in the military, but I have friends and family who are. One of them is in Iraq as we speak. There are many reasons why a person might join the military. Maybe they actually believe in their country and that it's worth defending. If absolutely nobody joined up, the US wouldn't be around for very long, that's for sure.
You're being a total idiot/ass about another thing; when did they join up? Nobody who volunteered in the time from when the Iraq war was inevitable until the time it started actually went there. It takes quite a while to get a soldier trained to the point where he's worth sending to fight and die. A very large portion of the soldiers in Iraq joined before Bush was even President. Stick that one in your pipe and smoke it.
Even for the ones who joined after Bush was elected, consider the philosophy of service. Without a military, you don't have a country. Without a strong tradition of absolute civilian control of that military, you're just another banana republic military dictatorship. As soon as the military as a whole starts questioning orders just because they came from a (hypothetically speaking) corrupt, stupid, or crazy President, the system starts to fall apart. The job of stopping corrupt, stupid, and crazy Presidents is up to the voters and the civilian population.
But don't let cold, hard facts get in the way of your hysteria. You go right on believing that everyone in a uniform joined up for the sole purpose of going to third-world countries and killing people.
Your entire post would make a lot of sense if it weren't for the fact that Apple doesn't own nor control AAC. They have no choice in deciding the license terms for AAC, so it's not their call to make. I don't see what their opportunity is when they don't call the shots.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid that I'm completely serious. Fortunately, I had the card come up in a few classes and only got that response once, but it really blew me away. Even with a questionable conception or birth, a guy who's in the French army, then rules France, then tries to have France take over the world is French, no matter what.
I was playing Taboo in English class in a French high school. A card with "Napoleon" came up. The student was trying to explain who he was. One of the other students asked, "Was he French?"
Um...
"I don't know."
It's not that ironic. It's just like everybody getting upset when the high school valedictorian is caught shoplifting, but when a football jock is caught driving drunk it barely gets noticed. Everybody has much higher expectations and higher hopes for the valedictorian, so it's that much worse when he does something bad.
:-)
I'm sure I'll get flamed to a crisp for that opinion, though.
I have the right to answer the door to my house with a angry look, holding an extremely sharp butcher knife covered with blood, saying "What the fuck do you want?" too, but that doesn't mean that I should.
I went to China last summer, and the worst thing they did to me was take my temperature as I left. No, it wasn't with an anal probe; they had an infrared camera pointed at the line and a computer hooked up to it that figured out everybody's body temperature so that they could keep people with SARS from leaving the country. Coming into the country was dead simple; write down where you're staying (as far as I know never verified), get your bags, leave.
So, you have two countries; one of them does a bit of paperwork and takes your temperature with an infrared camera. The other one fingerprints you, takes a mugshot, and puts it all into a big database. Remind me, which one is the totalitarian dictatorship again?
In all honesty, the US remains a lot more free than China, but the situation at the border sure doesn't help my perception.
Right now the third largest employer of armed forces in Iraq (after the US and Britain)are private corporations
I saw this statement in a news story the other day and it still strikes me as highly bizarre. What else would be number 3? The US and Britain are the only countries with any significant troop presence. You have to have a number 3 somewhere, were you expecting it to be "Iraqi gun nuts"?
First of all, I have no problem with any country who wants to restrict entry to their country. I have a work permit for the U.S., but if they revoked it tomorrow, I wouldn't whine. I realize that as a non-citizen, I'm not protected by that country's constitution, and I'm not counting on it.
It's been a while since I've read through the Constitution, but I doubt if it has anything in it that says that the various protections within (free speech, unreasonable search and seizure, etc.) only apply to citizens. But apparently the border is some special no-Constitution zone; I mean, if some government guys stopped me on the street and asked to look through my suitcase, I'd tell them to fuck off and there's nothing they could do about it. But if I'm in the middle of the country but I happen to be in an international arrivals hall and I try the same tactic, I'll be searched anyway and (probably, I've never actually tried) get hauled off to jail or at least treated to a pretty rough time.
Come to think of it, airports in general seem to be no-Constitution zones. If a police officer asks to search your trunk at an airport and you refuse, will they simply deny entry? That's all they have the right to do according to the good ol' Bill of Rights.
In theory, you may be right, but in practice the ability to track all of the foreigners in the country implies a massive police state apparatus, and once that's in place it's only natural to turn it on the citizenry as well. At the moment you can legally live in the US with basically no 'papers' or documentation of any kind, if you were born there. If you're poor enough to not pay income tax, use cash, don't drive a car, and don't travel internationally you can basically exist 'off the grid', and I think that's a good thing. (Not that I would, I like what my passport lets me do far too much, but it's nice to know the option is there.)
FUD. "If you don't vote for candidate X, you'll either get candidate Y, who has no chance of defeating the enemy, or you'll get candidate Z who is Satan's incarnation on Earth."
but we can't stand allowing the ones who aren't so harmless being allowed to go untracked.
Er, why not? I don't think earning a reputation of being total jackasses to everybody who isn't a citizen is worth a miniscule increase in security.
I have a cron job that runs every few hours and grabs a web page from my web server. This is already a good start, because my logs will show the IP that grabbed the page, and nothing else even knows the page exists. But I went one better, and wrote a small program to parse the page for commands. So for now, the page is blank, and nothing happens. If I should need to, I can change the contents of the page to have my computer e-mail me the output of 'ifconfig' (which would also give me juicy headers to look through), open an ssh connection to my web server with a tunnel allowing me to connect back the other way, or just run an arbitrary command on the shell. I have no idea how useful it might be, but it was a fun little project.
You gotta hand it to the slashdot crowd, they certainly don't let something minor like understanding the meaning of a post get in the way of their rabid anti-Americanism. The guy parses the date correctly, mentions the absurd possibility that it might be "the American way" (and in the future), and gets jumped on by half a dozen people saying, "no you idiot, in the rest of the world we write dates properly. To the sibling posters: your rants are more interesting if they actually make sense in context.
This is nicely covered by Rice's Theorem. In short, Rice's Theorem says that it's impossible to write a program to determine with 100% accuracy any property of another program's behavior or output.
Rice's Theorem is basically a generalized version of Turing's proof that the halting problem can't be solved, and it uses exactly the argument you outline.
I agree, it's getting completely ridiculous.
There's a store near my house. Well, there are several, but one in particular is interesting. Half of the stuff they sell is self-replicating! Some of it even comes with everything you need to begin the replication process in the package. The rest has been deactivated, but they're only kidding themselves; you can buy the basics needed to begin replication in a lot of places. Can you imagine; they're trying to sell tomatoes when any fool can get some seeds and stick them in the ground and grow them?
They do offer a few items that don't self-replicate. I can only imagine their business plan is to get people in the store with the self-replicating items, and then convince people to buy the other stuff. A weird sort of advertising. But didn't anybody learn anything from the dot-com era?
I give them another six months, tops.
11. Feel free to break rules 1-10 when appropriate, because, you know, not all women are the same. Although, if your goal is to get laid rather than form something meaningful, learning to fake 1-10 is probably a good approach.
And you could be feeding a starving third-word kid with just forty-two cents a day. Are you? If you are, couldn't you afford another one?
Age of the Earth.
To summarize; there was a big paradox in the 19th century, because the thermodynamicists were coming up with numbers for the age of the Earth that were far too short for what the geologists and biologists were coming up with. The paradox was finally resolved with the discovery of radioactivity, which gave the Earth a heat source beyond that of its initial heat and compression. A relevant quote:
OT, but one of my favorites:
Russian tanks steamrolling across New Jersey!
Details at 11!
While the explosion was a non-event, that was probably only true because of the containment structure.
They more or less do build them under "ground", where the "ground" in this case is a great thickness of steel-reinforced concrete, which is exactly what did stop the radiation leak at TMI.
You have a long chain of horrible coincidences which should have been stopped earlier. At TMI, it was finally stopped. What stopped it? The last-ditch measure that every sanely-designed reactor has; the giant, meters-thick steel-reinforced concrete containment dome. This is the reason why the explosion at TMI never went anywhere. The bright sparks behind the design of Chernobyl (and most other Soviet reactors) decided that their reactor didn't need such a safety measure. If Chernobyl had had a decent containment structure, it would have been a footnote in the list of nuclear accidents just like TMI is.
The Earth's core is all melted. You know why it's so hot? It's because of the enormous quantities of uranium within it that is undergoing radioactive decay. Yes, the Earth is a big radioisotope heater.
The big difference is in reactor design, that is for sure.
Every civilian reactor built in sane countries has a containment dome which is several feet of very strong steel-reinforced concrete.
Chernobyl just had a reactor in a building. A regular old building, like where you might put an expensive computer or something. When the reactor exploded, there was nothing substantial to stop it. If a similar incident happened in a Western reactor, there would be a lot of really alarmed people scurrying around, but nothing would breach the containment dome.
I'm not sure if I'm responding to a troll or not, but on the off chance that I'm not, this really needs a response.
I am not in the military, but I have friends and family who are. One of them is in Iraq as we speak. There are many reasons why a person might join the military. Maybe they actually believe in their country and that it's worth defending. If absolutely nobody joined up, the US wouldn't be around for very long, that's for sure.
You're being a total idiot/ass about another thing; when did they join up? Nobody who volunteered in the time from when the Iraq war was inevitable until the time it started actually went there. It takes quite a while to get a soldier trained to the point where he's worth sending to fight and die. A very large portion of the soldiers in Iraq joined before Bush was even President. Stick that one in your pipe and smoke it.
Even for the ones who joined after Bush was elected, consider the philosophy of service. Without a military, you don't have a country. Without a strong tradition of absolute civilian control of that military, you're just another banana republic military dictatorship. As soon as the military as a whole starts questioning orders just because they came from a (hypothetically speaking) corrupt, stupid, or crazy President, the system starts to fall apart. The job of stopping corrupt, stupid, and crazy Presidents is up to the voters and the civilian population.
But don't let cold, hard facts get in the way of your hysteria. You go right on believing that everyone in a uniform joined up for the sole purpose of going to third-world countries and killing people.
Your entire post would make a lot of sense if it weren't for the fact that Apple doesn't own nor control AAC. They have no choice in deciding the license terms for AAC, so it's not their call to make. I don't see what their opportunity is when they don't call the shots.