Re:In Germany?
on
Baby Dictators
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The urban legend is that a censorship law with exceptions "for educational, satirical and so on purposes" actually gives you any safety except when you're precisely toeing the Party line. Your education is their propaganda, and vice versa.
Like you and many geeks (hence your moderation), you appear to exhibit OCD in the form of toilet paper usage. Let's do a quick back of the toilet paper calculation:
A popular search engine search for +sheets +toilet +paper reveals around five hundred (500) sheets per roll. Multiplied by four rolls, this comes to two thousand (2,000) sheets.
Now, reputable journal Toilet Paper World quotes Charmin's figure of 8.6 sheets per trip, "a total of 57 sheets per day". This figure is unlikely to refer to male usage unless the man has bowels demonstrating activity more excessive than Vista with a fresh Norton 360 install (57/8.6 > 6). When push comes to shove, a man pushes and shoves his penis to clean it - he doesn't use paper.
We'll be generous and divide this figure by only two, approximating 25 sheets per day or three trains leaving the station.
In the UK, our electrons need to go round in a circle of life rather than rising up to Heaven once they've completed their task (yes, yes, I know, conventional current, flow the other way, etc.). This is one of the negatives (ba dum tss) of living in a mostly atheist state.
As long as it's "correct" speech, you are free to utter it as loudly as you please.
I'm sorry but your attempt to vilify the German people
Wait, what? I love a German as much as the next man, but your government's censorship 65 years after the fall of Nazism is harmful and immoral. If I didn't care, I wouldn't "passionately" point it out.
why would anyone in their right mind want to falsify history or march with Nazi symbols is beyond me
It doesn't matter. That's the censors fallacy: to assume that he has the right to declare what it is good for another man to hear. I could give you a million bad reasons and one or two good reasons for "marching with Nazi symbols" - a parody protest being an obvious one - but it doesn't matter. The Nazi has as much right to express bullshit as you do, and you have the right to explain why he is wrong. This latter method enables the majority to learn: censorship does not.
Ask yourself: what will happen when there is no-one left with a living experience of Nazism? Do you think that we will preserve an appropriate record of what it really feels like to experience Nazi sentiment, 100 years on? Don't you think that it's necessary to experience a fascist first hand to know what they're really like, devoid of the romance of history? See Griffin of the UK British National Party: his being given a platform in the media here (I'm British, not American) is a great thing, as young people who only know about the far right from text books can now hear what it's like to have one speak in their own country. The response was not praise and support, as some Germans fear, but a mixture of well-reasoned criticism, laughter, pity and anger. Less extreme Parties struggled to address the issues which might have otherwise given him support. Freedom of speech worked.
I remember there was a time when the mere accusation of being a communist in the United States would ruin entire lives
This was wrong, and fortunately is no longer the case. The US has a new bogeyman now.
it is still a social sin to be in any way affiliated with Communism even if there are no laws against it
This is silly, but a social sin is not the same as a crime. The state should not make its people love or hate communists or Nazis, and it must certainly not invent laws to promote such feelings.
Germany appears to be running up the aforementioned slippery slope here.
Producing Der Untergang was a great (and unique) leap forward for Germany. Well done, seriously. But you have a long way to go before you'll be regarded as free. The film might represent the bold, progressive elements of German culture, but it does not represent the enlightenment of the German government, unfortunately.
As a citizen of Europe, I'm going to have to point out passionately how full of neutering all such "Constitutions" are.
For example, in Germany I cannot freely:
- State that only 1,000,000 Jews died in the Holocaust: utter bullshit, but if the above clause has any effect, I must be allowed to do this, lest the principle leading to the exception is used to restrict me from legitimate review and criticism of policy based on established scholarship;
- Parade with swastikas: fairly stupid, but if the above clause has any effect, I must be allowed to do this, lest I am restricted from parodying a government going where it's gone before ("we're not like Nazis - we ban the swastika!").
Indeed: on the smallest block size, your machine is about 1/3 faster, probably thanks to overhead of support code, memory speed, etc. On every other size, my VIA is faster - approaching an order of magnitude at 8192 byte.
Considering that my motherboard+CPU combination cost $68 new, there's an obvious potential.
They have donated by giving credibility to the project by choosing to use it; this in turn increases the number of eyes testing and contributing towards bug fixes and improvements. This is precisely the way that BSD-derived licenses work: the only thing you can expect is acknowledgement, and the only thing you can hope for is patches. To release under a licence which makes no accommodation whatever for financial compensation then write what comes down to a complaint that people aren't paying you is quite unreasonable.
If it bothers you that Apple, Red Hat, Cisco, Juniper, and Novell aren't sending you a check in the mail, how about you change your license to make them pay: if it is cheaper for them than forking your code, they'll do it.
I, for one, would much prefer to contribute toward effort on security at the lower levels rather than a single big tunnel. ssh it is almost as obnoxious as nat in this respect. I also got a bad taste from openssh ever since they disabled the "none" encryption - the amateur radio bands do not allow message encryption, but authentication/signing remains acceptable and useful.
No sale. If my system breaks in the next minute I want to be up and running again in 5 minutes. I don't want to have to diagnose, wait until opening hours, purchase at high cost from a local store (if your local PC shop sells precisely the motherboard/CPU/whatever you need, you're more urban than I am), skip testing and install, just because I'm too anal to have to "look at" a couple of small boxes under my opaque desk.
And I don't have to look at all that old crap, which I give away on Craigslist.
Ah, I remember when/. was a geek site. Now a perfectly usable (assuming average use case) testing rig, spare desktop and spare laptop are "old crap which I give away"! I wonder what proportion of/.ers today haven't even touched a soldering iron.
The Intel Core i5 and i7 have AES crypto extensions with the AES-NI; I've not yet experimented with them. The AMD Geode's support is limited to 128 bit. The VIA is ideal for low usage NAS, e.g. for a home server or small office backup - it's a cheap way of poking people to protect their data with full disk encryption. I was countering your "pathetic" rather than attempting to claim that a VIA could outpace an Intel $ for $ under general usage - although people could ride on the back of Intel's name to sell an Atom device which isn't.
Lying about CPU is not impossible - just add a driver/hack to the OS you ship it with. Anyway, aren't all such operations about selling to the clueless 95%, not the enthusiasts/professionals who will identify a discrepancy (before they've left +ve eBay feedback to the HK/China outfit)?
OK, name me your Intel/AMD CPU and post your output for openssl speed -evp aes-256-cbc, a critical benchmark if you're using AES full disk encryption (is anyone not?).
For comparison, my Via C7:
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed. type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-256-cbc 74460.94k 232735.57k 492246.70k 689808.04k 780957.01k
I needed a new monitor immediately as at that moment not having my computer available would have cost me quite a bit of money.
People who are careful to back up data still seem to think that the the rest of their hardware is invincible.
Whyyyy does anyone who uses a computer for business not have a backup of every piece of equipment? Even if it's just a 6 year old FleBay PC and CRT. Glancing under my desk I have a pIII-550 system for testing parts in, a Celeron 700MHz CPU+mobo which formed my previous home server, a ready-to-go 1.6GHz P4 desktop, a 1.5GHz Althon XP laptop and a PSU. I have, by merely requesting what is other people's garbage, paid about $15 for all this. I also have too many CRTs to be healthy. Mind you, some selling/giving away/recycling of these is in order over the next month!
(Don't forget to turn it on every few weeks to make sure it's working.)
ACTA was never a list of what anyone would expect to come into force. The EU Parliament will stage their objections; a "compromise" will be reached at precisely the level ACTA sponsors had been hoping for in the first place.
The only "assurance" I need from the European parliament is an outright refusal of ACTA. Actually, I'd prefer that from the UK parliament, but principle is a privilege of youth and only one of the two parliaments is young.
On the contrary, it is for you to prove that crimes in general are reported or discovered, or at the very least to provide studies confirming the soundness of the methodology used in and/or independent statistics confirming the accuracy of the govt-sponsored BCS.
As for the most serious of crimes, I have no idea why you using a worst case to argue an average case assertion. I would also be keen to understand why you think it is "unlikely" that violent rape and assault goes unreported: perhaps you are making assumptions about the mental state of the victim, or even projecting your own trust of authority on them?
That's a fantastic strawman you have there. You see, if a kid accidentally slips a metallic screwdriver into a power supply while he is holding a grounded American flag in the other hand, he risks at worst killing himself and the flag. But when the guy with several years of training, environmental conditioning and a huge paycheque drags in some kid who could just as well shout "Mayday!" for kicks, several hundred people's lives may be affected. Even if the kid is perfectly competent, how can we rule out airwave piracy? A pilot who might have something far more important to do may feel it necessary to double check the origin of the instructions.
Yes, children are mollycoddled too much. But the appropriate correction is to give them appropriate safety guidance so that they may do whatever they want safely, not to complain about the existence of safety procedures which stop people enjoying death/injury, nor to complain that children are not given the same privileges as air traffic controllers, policemen, surgeons, and so on.
FWIW, when I was around 10 years of age I got to take a tour of the cockpit of the commercial jet I was flying home from a family holiday in. The pilot let me enter a bearing to steer the plane (perhaps... maybe he had preprogrammed something and got me to type a number at just the right moment). Should he have done this? I'm not sure. The impact is very different from the ATC pirate transmission. Was that experience wondrous for me? No, all I was doing was typing in a number, just as at school I would, in the amateur radio club, start off by sending a greetings message across the world using a kit I knew nothing about. The learning and the growing is in being able to prepare/train/build for yourself, not in having a privileged or lucky connection which enables you to make something happen by following a script prepared by someone with more ability and power than you.
Orrrrr trust for authority and the competence of the police has reduced, so people stop discovering or reporting crime. As for all those independent crime surveys: how many kids are going to say, "Why, yes, I have been subjected to a beating, and that is a crime - must answer this honestly!"? If I receive any sort of survey claiming to be anonymous, the first thing I do is assume that it is not.
It is like surveys which ask teenagers whether they are sexually active. Here's a clue: almost all males overstate their sexual prowess.
OK, but you are presenting me with a false dichotomy. Other options are not limited to:
voluntary donations/subscriptions;
membership offering extra benefits, such as early access to content, discounts, printed material, meet-ups, etc.;
State funding: e.g. the BBC in the UK, or various culture/arts councils;
affiliate programs, possibly.
HTML is precisely designed so and successful because I get to choose how to render it; all you can do is give me recommendations. The moment you suggest that a CSS file is some sort of moral contract, you change the spirit of the Internet. Some ads annoy me and some don't, but I have no use for any of them, and am not wasting bandwidth or potential attention on them.
On a practical note, I make a point of never clicking on adverts. The only way I interact with an advert is to make a little mental note to reduce my opinion of the advertiser and to make it less likely for me to recommend them. It is more helpful for you if I block your adverts entirely.
On an Internet's note, if you don't want something rendered as I please, don't send it via unauthenticated HTTP. As a reasonably technically competent magazine, you should know better.
On a personal note, I owe you nothing. If you think your content is worth charging for, charge for it. If you provide your content, I will take it, just as I am happy with people taking the fruits of my labour as published on the Internet (and sharing it). Change your business model and try voluntary donations or subscriptions if you want, but don't ask me to be dishonest with your advertisers.
On a general note, paid advertising is not a good way of raising awareness, and I will take no part in the cycle -- enough essays have been written about this already.
289 *days* of constant 24/7 writing to use of the flash.
This assumes the case of repeated sequential write to blocks 1 to n, where no wear levelling occurs. Consider that I first write once to 100% of the disk, then repeatedly: write sequentially to the first 25% of the disk n times, then write to the remaining 75% of the disk once. Dynamic wear levelling is out. How is a typical static wear levelling algorithm likely to kick in in a way which prevents an unacceptable slowdown during one pass, while at the same time squeezing out max writes to all physical blocks?
Now.. and this is the key point.. will a platter drive survive 289 days of constant max-throughput writing? The answer is no.
According to whom? Where are the independent test results for various specified duty cycles, performed in real time?
(Although perhaps all that matters is whether, at any time before m years is up, I will get a warranty replacement for my drive.)
Do SSDs really have a lower failure rate than HDDs? I mean, how many times can it be assumed that I can write to a specific sector on each? I'd be interested in a report in which this has been tested by writing various devices to destruction, rather than by quoting manufacturer predictions.
Don't give me wear levelling arguments, as they assume that I'm not frequently changing all the data on the medium.
I have worked with cows and chickens. I grew up on a ranch, worked on a dairy, and occasionally helped out a friend who worked on a chicken ranch.
I've stayed on a croft (small farm) with sheep, chickens, etc., and I find you to be full of the sort of hand-waving nonsense of someone with suppressed guilt. Now, on to the arguments:-).
Cattle are not very bright beasts. The calves will drink their mothers' milk until their innards burst
Humans are not very bright beasts. They will eat until they become so obese their hearts give up. Also, have you seen baby humanlings? You have to take care of them for almost a whole decade before they are able to do things on their own!
As for chickens... I just cannot feel remorse for any alleged suffering that has been applied to a creature whose behavior does not change, after its head has been removed, leaving only a portion of its brain stem.
That couldn't be more irrational. A lot of your behaviour won't change if you remove portions of your body, including portions of your brain. The fact that the body is a distributed multitasking system, and that the distribution occurs differently in different species, is no justification for anything. For example, a cat "without a brain" (the "spinal cat" lab preparation) can walk, showing that walking is an autonomous act in a way that it isn't with humans. Cats are also far more agile than humans. You might say they have a discrete balance CPU. This is an advantage.
In my experience with these creatures, I have not seen any evidence of sentience.
Really? Did you ever keep chickens inside your house? Did you spend time treating various chickens as you might a pet? Did you do anything at all even approaching scientific to come to this conclusion? To me, it is evident that different chickens have different characters, respond differently to different people/animals, are content with warmth and protection, run away from danger, squawk like shit at what we would find painful, etc. They respond to pain and pleasure as men do, which means they are sentient.
Whether you "should" care about whether your mother, your neighbour, the negro in Africa or the chicken on a farm are experiencing pain is not a question which can be answered by science alone. As Bentham said of blacks and chickens, "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but, 'Can they suffer?'"
They have no ability to behave outside of instinct,
Humans have little ability to behave outside of instinct. The detail can change, but they're all driven by the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure is created in the most part by fulfilling the same roles as any other beast: survive; reproduce.
and insofar as I can tell, memory is only established through repetition.
Insofar as I can tell, rehearsal is the best way for humans to memorise. What is your point?
Now, I can understand the concept of a "Sex Offenders" registry. Victims of rape or pedophilia experience a lasting and significant impact on...
A human/and/ an animal psychologist on/., and his conclusion is: justice is best served by the mob. Why is Joe SexOffender less likely to rape my kid just because I know he's living in the next block? What evidence do you have that Jane AnimalAbuser is fueled by "the adolescent human cocktail" (what?), rather than psychopathy? I guess, since there's no "murder registry", it's better to kill the victim so there's no evidence of sexual abuse. Also has the advantage that any pictures taken/distributed can be argued to be of only a fairly naughty murder, rather than the completely horrific CP.
And that is the wrong way of doing it: your testing method shouldn't be a separate channel targeted to teens and otherwise showing a lot of tat.
The classical BBC didn't have a problem with using good talent to identify good talent, giving writers a chance and letting a programme develop an audience. It boldly offered new shows straight to mainstream, and didn't panic if it wasn't seeing huge viewing figures by the second episode.
As for BBC4, I wouldn't say that the audience is "very specific", merely that it requires an audience willing to learn. It comes much closer to providing an educational/cultural service than BBC3, but so did BBC2 Open University programming.
other options that exist were mind-numbingly expensive.
I am confused. Erased firmware+metadata should be one of the least problematic things, unless that firmware happens to contain your only copy of some decryption key (yes, sector reallocation tables might be lost, but that accounts for a small proportion of data loss). In the generic case, attach a device in the middle which sends the software to the drive when it tries to read the initial sectors, and sends reads to the hard drive directly otherwise. This might not be practical for the home hobbyist, unless perhaps he is an electronics engineer, but a non-cowboy data recovery company would already use such equipment. Was it explained to you why it would be so expensive?
Also, which drive is only keeping a single copy of firmware?
(1) I applaud the decision to reduce expenditure on US television shows. Some of them are brilliant, but it is not really the BBC's place to broadcast them.
(2) The BBC needs to go back to a principle of quality over quantity. Output from such channels as BBC Three would not pass for a mediocre school production. "Hole in the Wall" might not pretend to be anything but light entertainment, but it is not adding to the knowledge or the culture of Britain. Digital radio is in general a failure, and it is good that they have tacitly acknowledged this. Meanwhile, the BBC News Internet site is excellent, and should not be the first choice for cuts despite evident political pressure for those who do not like the balance provided by the BBC.
(3) The BBC needs to stop privatising or outsourcing its research and development, so it can go back to long-term efforts in improving the state-of-the-art in broadcasting. It needs to go back to a technical-driven culture: for example, it needs to cooperate in efforts to prevent pollution to the shortwave spectrum, and it needs to reverse all efforts to introduce Digital Restrictions Management. We've already paid for what you produce, and you are our public broadcasting service: you don't get to dictate how we enjoy your productions.
Slashdot Mirror
The urban legend is that a censorship law with exceptions "for educational, satirical and so on purposes" actually gives you any safety except when you're precisely toeing the Party line. Your education is their propaganda, and vice versa.
Sir,
Like you and many geeks (hence your moderation), you appear to exhibit OCD in the form of toilet paper usage. Let's do a quick back of the toilet paper calculation:
A popular search engine search for +sheets +toilet +paper reveals around five hundred (500) sheets per roll. Multiplied by four rolls, this comes to two thousand (2,000) sheets.
Now, reputable journal Toilet Paper World quotes Charmin's figure of 8.6 sheets per trip, "a total of 57 sheets per day". This figure is unlikely to refer to male usage unless the man has bowels demonstrating activity more excessive than Vista with a fresh Norton 360 install (57/8.6 > 6). When push comes to shove, a man pushes and shoves his penis to clean it - he doesn't use paper.
We'll be generous and divide this figure by only two, approximating 25 sheets per day or three trains leaving the station.
2000 / 25 = 80 > 62.
QED.
Hillier? Hillier? So officials under Hillier will be asking for our papers?
Hail Meg...!
including neutral.
In the UK, our electrons need to go round in a circle of life rather than rising up to Heaven once they've completed their task (yes, yes, I know, conventional current, flow the other way, etc.). This is one of the negatives (ba dum tss) of living in a mostly atheist state.
Use Nazi images in the correct historical context
As long as it's "correct" speech, you are free to utter it as loudly as you please.
I'm sorry but your attempt to vilify the German people
Wait, what? I love a German as much as the next man, but your government's censorship 65 years after the fall of Nazism is harmful and immoral. If I didn't care, I wouldn't "passionately" point it out.
why would anyone in their right mind want to falsify history or march with Nazi symbols is beyond me
It doesn't matter. That's the censors fallacy: to assume that he has the right to declare what it is good for another man to hear. I could give you a million bad reasons and one or two good reasons for "marching with Nazi symbols" - a parody protest being an obvious one - but it doesn't matter. The Nazi has as much right to express bullshit as you do, and you have the right to explain why he is wrong. This latter method enables the majority to learn: censorship does not.
Ask yourself: what will happen when there is no-one left with a living experience of Nazism? Do you think that we will preserve an appropriate record of what it really feels like to experience Nazi sentiment, 100 years on? Don't you think that it's necessary to experience a fascist first hand to know what they're really like, devoid of the romance of history? See Griffin of the UK British National Party: his being given a platform in the media here (I'm British, not American) is a great thing, as young people who only know about the far right from text books can now hear what it's like to have one speak in their own country. The response was not praise and support, as some Germans fear, but a mixture of well-reasoned criticism, laughter, pity and anger. Less extreme Parties struggled to address the issues which might have otherwise given him support. Freedom of speech worked.
I remember there was a time when the mere accusation of being a communist in the United States would ruin entire lives
This was wrong, and fortunately is no longer the case. The US has a new bogeyman now.
it is still a social sin to be in any way affiliated with Communism even if there are no laws against it
This is silly, but a social sin is not the same as a crime. The state should not make its people love or hate communists or Nazis, and it must certainly not invent laws to promote such feelings.
Germany appears to be running up the aforementioned slippery slope here.
Producing Der Untergang was a great (and unique) leap forward for Germany. Well done, seriously. But you have a long way to go before you'll be regarded as free. The film might represent the bold, progressive elements of German culture, but it does not represent the enlightenment of the German government, unfortunately.
As a citizen of Europe, I'm going to have to point out passionately how full of neutering all such "Constitutions" are.
For example, in Germany I cannot freely:
- State that only 1,000,000 Jews died in the Holocaust: utter bullshit, but if the above clause has any effect, I must be allowed to do this, lest the principle leading to the exception is used to restrict me from legitimate review and criticism of policy based on established scholarship;
- Parade with swastikas: fairly stupid, but if the above clause has any effect, I must be allowed to do this, lest I am restricted from parodying a government going where it's gone before ("we're not like Nazis - we ban the swastika!").
Also, such exceptions inevitably ride the slippery slope to encompass the restriction of far more freedoms. I'm sure the CoS will explain why their detractors are "like Nazis" oppressing religious freedom, their speech thus outlawed - enjoy that hurdle.
Indeed: on the smallest block size, your machine is about 1/3 faster, probably thanks to overhead of support code, memory speed, etc. On every other size, my VIA is faster - approaching an order of magnitude at 8192 byte.
Considering that my motherboard+CPU combination cost $68 new, there's an obvious potential.
They have donated by giving credibility to the project by choosing to use it; this in turn increases the number of eyes testing and contributing towards bug fixes and improvements. This is precisely the way that BSD-derived licenses work: the only thing you can expect is acknowledgement, and the only thing you can hope for is patches. To release under a licence which makes no accommodation whatever for financial compensation then write what comes down to a complaint that people aren't paying you is quite unreasonable.
If it bothers you that Apple, Red Hat, Cisco, Juniper, and Novell aren't sending you a check in the mail, how about you change your license to make them pay: if it is cheaper for them than forking your code, they'll do it.
I, for one, would much prefer to contribute toward effort on security at the lower levels rather than a single big tunnel. ssh it is almost as obnoxious as nat in this respect. I also got a bad taste from openssh ever since they disabled the "none" encryption - the amateur radio bands do not allow message encryption, but authentication/signing remains acceptable and useful.
If one spare of everything so I never experience downtime (except precisely when I want to) makes me a pretentious fuck, I wear the label proudly.
Microcenter is half an hour away.
No sale. If my system breaks in the next minute I want to be up and running again in 5 minutes. I don't want to have to diagnose, wait until opening hours, purchase at high cost from a local store (if your local PC shop sells precisely the motherboard/CPU/whatever you need, you're more urban than I am), skip testing and install, just because I'm too anal to have to "look at" a couple of small boxes under my opaque desk.
And I don't have to look at all that old crap, which I give away on Craigslist.
Ah, I remember when /. was a geek site. Now a perfectly usable (assuming average use case) testing rig, spare desktop and spare laptop are "old crap which I give away"! I wonder what proportion of /.ers today haven't even touched a soldering iron.
The Intel Core i5 and i7 have AES crypto extensions with the AES-NI; I've not yet experimented with them. The AMD Geode's support is limited to 128 bit. The VIA is ideal for low usage NAS, e.g. for a home server or small office backup - it's a cheap way of poking people to protect their data with full disk encryption. I was countering your "pathetic" rather than attempting to claim that a VIA could outpace an Intel $ for $ under general usage - although people could ride on the back of Intel's name to sell an Atom device which isn't.
Lying about CPU is not impossible - just add a driver/hack to the OS you ship it with. Anyway, aren't all such operations about selling to the clueless 95%, not the enthusiasts/professionals who will identify a discrepancy (before they've left +ve eBay feedback to the HK/China outfit)?
OK, name me your Intel/AMD CPU and post your output for openssl speed -evp aes-256-cbc, a critical benchmark if you're using AES full disk encryption (is anyone not?).
For comparison, my Via C7:
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-256-cbc 74460.94k 232735.57k 492246.70k 689808.04k 780957.01k
I needed a new monitor immediately as at that moment not having my computer available would have cost me quite a bit of money.
People who are careful to back up data still seem to think that the the rest of their hardware is invincible.
Whyyyy does anyone who uses a computer for business not have a backup of every piece of equipment? Even if it's just a 6 year old FleBay PC and CRT. Glancing under my desk I have a pIII-550 system for testing parts in, a Celeron 700MHz CPU+mobo which formed my previous home server, a ready-to-go 1.6GHz P4 desktop, a 1.5GHz Althon XP laptop and a PSU. I have, by merely requesting what is other people's garbage, paid about $15 for all this. I also have too many CRTs to be healthy. Mind you, some selling/giving away/recycling of these is in order over the next month!
(Don't forget to turn it on every few weeks to make sure it's working.)
ACTA was never a list of what anyone would expect to come into force. The EU Parliament will stage their objections; a "compromise" will be reached at precisely the level ACTA sponsors had been hoping for in the first place.
The only "assurance" I need from the European parliament is an outright refusal of ACTA. Actually, I'd prefer that from the UK parliament, but principle is a privilege of youth and only one of the two parliaments is young.
On the contrary, it is for you to prove that crimes in general are reported or discovered, or at the very least to provide studies confirming the soundness of the methodology used in and/or independent statistics confirming the accuracy of the govt-sponsored BCS.
As for the most serious of crimes, I have no idea why you using a worst case to argue an average case assertion. I would also be keen to understand why you think it is "unlikely" that violent rape and assault goes unreported: perhaps you are making assumptions about the mental state of the victim, or even projecting your own trust of authority on them?
That's a fantastic strawman you have there. You see, if a kid accidentally slips a metallic screwdriver into a power supply while he is holding a grounded American flag in the other hand, he risks at worst killing himself and the flag. But when the guy with several years of training, environmental conditioning and a huge paycheque drags in some kid who could just as well shout "Mayday!" for kicks, several hundred people's lives may be affected. Even if the kid is perfectly competent, how can we rule out airwave piracy? A pilot who might have something far more important to do may feel it necessary to double check the origin of the instructions.
Yes, children are mollycoddled too much. But the appropriate correction is to give them appropriate safety guidance so that they may do whatever they want safely, not to complain about the existence of safety procedures which stop people enjoying death/injury, nor to complain that children are not given the same privileges as air traffic controllers, policemen, surgeons, and so on.
FWIW, when I was around 10 years of age I got to take a tour of the cockpit of the commercial jet I was flying home from a family holiday in. The pilot let me enter a bearing to steer the plane (perhaps... maybe he had preprogrammed something and got me to type a number at just the right moment). Should he have done this? I'm not sure. The impact is very different from the ATC pirate transmission. Was that experience wondrous for me? No, all I was doing was typing in a number, just as at school I would, in the amateur radio club, start off by sending a greetings message across the world using a kit I knew nothing about. The learning and the growing is in being able to prepare/train/build for yourself, not in having a privileged or lucky connection which enables you to make something happen by following a script prepared by someone with more ability and power than you.
That's the job of presidents.
Orrrrr trust for authority and the competence of the police has reduced, so people stop discovering or reporting crime. As for all those independent crime surveys: how many kids are going to say, "Why, yes, I have been subjected to a beating, and that is a crime - must answer this honestly!"? If I receive any sort of survey claiming to be anonymous, the first thing I do is assume that it is not.
It is like surveys which ask teenagers whether they are sexually active. Here's a clue: almost all males overstate their sexual prowess.
OK, but you are presenting me with a false dichotomy. Other options are not limited to:
HTML is precisely designed so and successful because I get to choose how to render it; all you can do is give me recommendations. The moment you suggest that a CSS file is some sort of moral contract, you change the spirit of the Internet. Some ads annoy me and some don't, but I have no use for any of them, and am not wasting bandwidth or potential attention on them.
On a practical note, I make a point of never clicking on adverts. The only way I interact with an advert is to make a little mental note to reduce my opinion of the advertiser and to make it less likely for me to recommend them. It is more helpful for you if I block your adverts entirely.
On an Internet's note, if you don't want something rendered as I please, don't send it via unauthenticated HTTP. As a reasonably technically competent magazine, you should know better.
On a personal note, I owe you nothing. If you think your content is worth charging for, charge for it. If you provide your content, I will take it, just as I am happy with people taking the fruits of my labour as published on the Internet (and sharing it). Change your business model and try voluntary donations or subscriptions if you want, but don't ask me to be dishonest with your advertisers.
On a general note, paid advertising is not a good way of raising awareness, and I will take no part in the cycle -- enough essays have been written about this already.
289 *days* of constant 24/7 writing to use of the flash.
This assumes the case of repeated sequential write to blocks 1 to n, where no wear levelling occurs. Consider that I first write once to 100% of the disk, then repeatedly: write sequentially to the first 25% of the disk n times, then write to the remaining 75% of the disk once. Dynamic wear levelling is out. How is a typical static wear levelling algorithm likely to kick in in a way which prevents an unacceptable slowdown during one pass, while at the same time squeezing out max writes to all physical blocks?
Now.. and this is the key point.. will a platter drive survive 289 days of constant max-throughput writing? The answer is no.
According to whom? Where are the independent test results for various specified duty cycles, performed in real time?
(Although perhaps all that matters is whether, at any time before m years is up, I will get a warranty replacement for my drive.)
Do SSDs really have a lower failure rate than HDDs? I mean, how many times can it be assumed that I can write to a specific sector on each? I'd be interested in a report in which this has been tested by writing various devices to destruction, rather than by quoting manufacturer predictions.
Don't give me wear levelling arguments, as they assume that I'm not frequently changing all the data on the medium.
I have worked with cows and chickens. I grew up on a ranch, worked on a dairy, and occasionally helped out a friend who worked on a chicken ranch.
I've stayed on a croft (small farm) with sheep, chickens, etc., and I find you to be full of the sort of hand-waving nonsense of someone with suppressed guilt. Now, on to the arguments :-).
Cattle are not very bright beasts. The calves will drink their mothers' milk until their innards burst
Humans are not very bright beasts. They will eat until they become so obese their hearts give up. Also, have you seen baby humanlings? You have to take care of them for almost a whole decade before they are able to do things on their own!
As for chickens... I just cannot feel remorse for any alleged suffering that has been applied to a creature whose behavior does not change, after its head has been removed, leaving only a portion of its brain stem.
That couldn't be more irrational. A lot of your behaviour won't change if you remove portions of your body, including portions of your brain. The fact that the body is a distributed multitasking system, and that the distribution occurs differently in different species, is no justification for anything. For example, a cat "without a brain" (the "spinal cat" lab preparation) can walk, showing that walking is an autonomous act in a way that it isn't with humans. Cats are also far more agile than humans. You might say they have a discrete balance CPU. This is an advantage.
In my experience with these creatures, I have not seen any evidence of sentience.
Really? Did you ever keep chickens inside your house? Did you spend time treating various chickens as you might a pet? Did you do anything at all even approaching scientific to come to this conclusion? To me, it is evident that different chickens have different characters, respond differently to different people/animals, are content with warmth and protection, run away from danger, squawk like shit at what we would find painful, etc. They respond to pain and pleasure as men do, which means they are sentient.
Whether you "should" care about whether your mother, your neighbour, the negro in Africa or the chicken on a farm are experiencing pain is not a question which can be answered by science alone. As Bentham said of blacks and chickens, "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but, 'Can they suffer?'"
They have no ability to behave outside of instinct,
Humans have little ability to behave outside of instinct. The detail can change, but they're all driven by the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure is created in the most part by fulfilling the same roles as any other beast: survive; reproduce.
and insofar as I can tell, memory is only established through repetition.
Insofar as I can tell, rehearsal is the best way for humans to memorise. What is your point?
Now, I can understand the concept of a "Sex Offenders" registry. Victims of rape or pedophilia experience a lasting and significant impact on...
A human /and/ an animal psychologist on /., and his conclusion is: justice is best served by the mob. Why is Joe SexOffender less likely to rape my kid just because I know he's living in the next block? What evidence do you have that Jane AnimalAbuser is fueled by "the adolescent human cocktail" (what?), rather than psychopathy? I guess, since there's no "murder registry", it's better to kill the victim so there's no evidence of sexual abuse. Also has the advantage that any pictures taken/distributed can be argued to be of only a fairly naughty murder, rather than the completely horrific CP.
And that is the wrong way of doing it: your testing method shouldn't be a separate channel targeted to teens and otherwise showing a lot of tat.
The classical BBC didn't have a problem with using good talent to identify good talent, giving writers a chance and letting a programme develop an audience. It boldly offered new shows straight to mainstream, and didn't panic if it wasn't seeing huge viewing figures by the second episode.
As for BBC4, I wouldn't say that the audience is "very specific", merely that it requires an audience willing to learn. It comes much closer to providing an educational/cultural service than BBC3, but so did BBC2 Open University programming.
other options that exist were mind-numbingly expensive.
I am confused. Erased firmware+metadata should be one of the least problematic things, unless that firmware happens to contain your only copy of some decryption key (yes, sector reallocation tables might be lost, but that accounts for a small proportion of data loss). In the generic case, attach a device in the middle which sends the software to the drive when it tries to read the initial sectors, and sends reads to the hard drive directly otherwise. This might not be practical for the home hobbyist, unless perhaps he is an electronics engineer, but a non-cowboy data recovery company would already use such equipment. Was it explained to you why it would be so expensive?
Also, which drive is only keeping a single copy of firmware?
(1) I applaud the decision to reduce expenditure on US television shows. Some of them are brilliant, but it is not really the BBC's place to broadcast them.
(2) The BBC needs to go back to a principle of quality over quantity. Output from such channels as BBC Three would not pass for a mediocre school production. "Hole in the Wall" might not pretend to be anything but light entertainment, but it is not adding to the knowledge or the culture of Britain. Digital radio is in general a failure, and it is good that they have tacitly acknowledged this. Meanwhile, the BBC News Internet site is excellent, and should not be the first choice for cuts despite evident political pressure for those who do not like the balance provided by the BBC.
(3) The BBC needs to stop privatising or outsourcing its research and development, so it can go back to long-term efforts in improving the state-of-the-art in broadcasting. It needs to go back to a technical-driven culture: for example, it needs to cooperate in efforts to prevent pollution to the shortwave spectrum, and it needs to reverse all efforts to introduce Digital Restrictions Management. We've already paid for what you produce, and you are our public broadcasting service: you don't get to dictate how we enjoy your productions.