Alternatively, educate everyone, lift them out of poverty, and population increase flat-lines. This can be achieved with technological advancement.
Oh, absolutely. I actually don't think we'll have a serious problem, because I figure that will happen naturally.
I was merely making a point that if you're an environmentalist and you want to make a big impact, the best thing you can do is limit the number of kids you have. You don't even need to be kid-free. Limit yourself to one child. Want to raise more? Adopt.
I'm all for limiting population growth though. If the above doesn't solve the population explosion, then we *will* need to prevent growth at some future stage, or exponential growth will devolve into something nasty, akin to bacteria fighting over an agar dish with nuclear weapons (i.e., anti-biotics.)
As with any population, if it grows over what the environment can sustain it, a correction will happen. I'd rather not have humanity fighting it out for resources on that scale, but I'm pretty optimistic that we won't get to that point.
From the article it is evident that she made precise measurements with lab equipment and presented them in court. Any of her colleagues could have repeated those measurements.
But would they be willing to testify in court to confirm those same measurements, after what happened to her?
The only problem with the "stop having kids" argument is that is will soon descend into a "let's kill all the poor/undeserving/not as worthy as us" argument.
No, it does not. Because even the "stop having kids" comment I made was a voluntary action. If you want to do something for the environment, stop having kids. If you don't, then don't. Just know that nothing else you do is effective in turning the tide.
After all, if there are too many people on Earth now, why not take immediate action?
Because the immediate action you propose is unethical? That's like saying, "I need money now, why not take immediate action and steal yours?"
The point is, your argument is bullshit. There's enough room for everyone. There's just not enough room for everyone living like Americans.
Is there really? Let's say all of us in the first world cut our energy usage by half, which is pretty much unreasonable. The population now is 7 billion. In the 60's the population was 3 billion. How long before the population doubles and we're back where we started? You've just bought yourself 20 years, maybe. At the cost of cutting our energy usage by half
And that's not even considering that the developing world is going to catch up to the first world in energy usage very soon.
If you want to safeguard your egoistical way of life, then indeed you will have to kill a lot of people. Definitely. But those people are as worth of being alive as you are.
I don't know where you got that idea that we need to start murdering people, but you need to chill, dude.
But in a world with much more present and pressing issues like war, hunger, unemployment, recession, etc. you can't very well expect every newspaper to lead with a "Average Global Temps Expected to Rise By 1-2 Degrees Celsius Over the Next 50-100 years" headline.
Or in short "people can't be bothered about long-term problems."
And it's really too bad because an individual has far more power to do something about global warming than any of those problems you listed.
Yes, but nobody wants to do the one and only thing that we can do to help the situation.
Because the solution is NOT to use less energy. The solution is to have less kids and lower the population. Individually, I hope that we're all using twice more energy than we use now in the future. Because it'd be great to have that flying car and robot maids. That's the nature of technology, we use more energy to increase our quality of life.
Environmentally, that's not a problem if the population has decreased to 10% of the current population. Total energy usage will be down.
Do you want to help the environment and lower your carbon footprint? Stop having kids.
On the contrary, the results show that many people actually read the altered questions to their answers correctly, and then still stand by their given answer, even though the meaning of the answer was effectively changed 180 degrees by changing the question.
"Is censorship bad?". You answer "Yes"
They then change the question to read "Is censorship good?" and ask you to read back the altered question and your answer..
The problem with that test is that it doesn't take into account the moral beliefs someone might hold which is not in the statement. They're trying to get people to reverse their position on censorship, but if their position on what is justifiable to stop terrorism is set, then they can switch their position while maintaining logical consistency.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government censorship makes it difficult to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship must be stopped.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government surveillance is necessary to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship is justifiable.
If the reader came in to the test believing in the first premise, then you provide him with the second premise, he'll change his conclusion to remain logically consistent, and it makes perfect sense for him to do so.
"The online post on ESPN said that a shooting would be like the one in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people were killed and 58 were injured in July, authorities said."
That's pretty explicit. There's a line between, "Man I just want to kill someone!" and "Here's how I'm going to do it." We act on these things because they've happened before.
Without the actual quote, I still don't know.
I've seen people joke using disasters as references before. In bad taste? Maybe. Were they dangerous and actually considering hurting anyone? No.
As one designer I follow thinks, we need to get rid of the idea of "Save" altogether, and just have some sort of "Undo everything I did in this whole entire session" button.
And that is why I firmly believe that anyone hiring UI designers is an idiot. They take everything that works perfectly fine, and they turn it into unusable crap based on a belief that it would increase effectiveness, but backed by absolutely no evidence.
Construction workers don't "save" a building while they're working. Your changes are effective as soon as you make them.
Mechanical typewriters don't "save" documents. The changes are effective as soon as you type them. You can backspace using the eraser tape. And it still sucks. Computers have made typing documents better. The concept of saving something was introduced with computers, and it made things better.
Yes, you should be automatically saving everything in the background. On a file to be recovered in case your computer shuts down on you. It shouldn't save the file you are working on.
It's not like you need to softmod it more than once.
Unless you have a bunch of real life friends who also own Wii consoles. Or unless you happen not to subscribe to a video game rental service. (Redbox had only movies at first.)
I had 2 friends with Wii consoles, and I didn't subscribe to a video game rental service, and I had no interest in Zelda. This wasn't a problem, as I just walked inside a blockbuster store, got the game, then went home and softmodded 3 consoles in one day.
Back in the days when the Twilight Hack still worked they still had a blockbuster every 2 blocks. Did Redbox for movies even exist back then?
people with existing traumas are something else, of course, but the TSA doesn't have any systems to deal with that properly
That's the case that people are talking about. And the TSA does have the system to deal with it properly. It's called respect our civil rights and don't search people without a warrant or probable cause.
Star Trek communicators work even when the spaceship is on the other side of the planet, or at least you never hear anybody say "we have to wait 20 minutes until we have line of sight."
No, they don't. They just keep the ship within communications range of the away team. There are quite a few episodes in which traveling to sufficiently deep underground caves blocked the signal, so clearly if the ship is on the other side of the planet, the signal isn't capable of traveling through the entire diameter of the planet.
I don't know why would make assumptions about the ship's orbit. Pretty much the only thing you know about it is that the captain tends to call for a "standard" orbit fairly often, but you don't know what a standard orbit is, or even if it varies depending on the situation.
Nope, many colleges mandate you take them anyways...fun fun fun.
Heh. When I was selecting between universities I was accepted into, one of my criteria was how much of my AP credit they would take. I wasn't about to let all that go to waste.
Seriously. If your school mandates you take the intro courses even when you've got a 5 in an AP exam...go somewhere else. They can require you still take a certain amount of hours to graduate, but you're much better off getting a minor in something or just taking some fun classes than being in a class learning the same shit you've already learned before.
Is everyone here forgetting the driving course they had to take?
I mean, I don't know what they scenario is if a 30 year old man whose never driven suddenly decides to apply for his first license, but when I was a kid in Texas we had to take a course totaling some number of hours in a classroom environment, with another X hours of instructor-supervised time on the road. The only alternative I knew of was to apply to take the exact same course from your parents, which sounds like a good idea until you take into account fees, material, and paperwork.
Is it really that different in other states?
When I was a kid in South Carolina, I showed up at the DMV, and picked up the booklet that described the traffic laws that would be on the written test with the intention of reading through it while there than taking the test. I didn't really bother to read through it, thought it was all common sense for anyone who had seen their parents driving it. Took the written exam, composed of 30 multiple choice questions in about 15 minutes and got a driver's permit that allowed me to drive with a licensed driver at the passenger seat for training purposes. After a few* months driving my mom to get groceries whenever the opportunity arose, I came back and took a 20 minute driver's exam where I drove in roads with pretty much no traffic, then came back to the DMV and parallel parked in their training area. Then I left with a license in hand. I never took a driver's ed course (felt like a waste of time, there were always so many electives I wanted to take in high school).
I was an absolutely horrible driver for many years. I never got into an accident, but that's because I've been lucky, and never been particularly aggressive. I wouldn't say I'm a great driver now, but compared to my skills as a 15 year-old, I'm great. And no, that's not an argument for raising the driving age. If I had started as a 30 year-old, I'd be a horrible driver as a 30 year-old. What made me get better was experience, something that you can only get by driving (either after you get a license, or through a structured course, which I would strongly support).
*I said a few months because apparently now you need to hold a permit for at least 6 months before you get a license. I could have sworn I had my permit for only 3 months, but don't feel like looking it up to see if they changed the law or if I'm remembering it incorrectly, and actually had the permit for a full 6 months. I also got my license (not permit) at 15 years old, and I know they've changed the law such that now you have to be 16 (but can get your permit at 15).
Hey, by your reasoning I could build an engine without the crank because i didn't know what it was for and it would still run....try again.
I think a lot of the problems people have accepting evolution would go away if people understood it a little better. What you've stated is not how evolution works.
There are many problems with your scenario. The most obvious one is that if the engine and the crank evolved separately, they wouldn't have to have functioned as an engine without a crank and a crank without an engine. Hell, the intelligently designed engine wasn't created that way. Rods, cylinders, pistons, gears...these were all known and had uses outside of an engine long before the steam engine was invented.
Take an actual evolutionary example: fish developed swim bladders as a way to help them move in the water. Holds gas, which allows the fish to modify their buoyancy. This has nothing to do with breathing, but once a mechanism was available to hold and release air, it was a precursor to lungs. You probably don't believe there's a connection, but it's obvious once you examine lungfish.
Your crank / engine argument is akin to saying, "by your reasoning I could build a sac to hold air without the mechanism to extract the oxygen from the air and oxygenate the blood and it'd still work as a lung." Well, no. But it's useful as something other than a lung. At which point, all you really need is for blood vessels to form along the walls. Even if they are not drawing the oxygen from the gas, if it' s not disadvantageous, it's not a mutation that will go away. Once you have enough vascularization that it does oxygenate the blood, you've provided an advantage to that mutation. Now you have inefficient vascularized gas bladders that the organism can use to breathe, and a clear advantage to increased surface area of the gas bladder. Lungs easily follow, given enough time, which is another thing people who don't believe in evolution have a hard grasping. We're talking about millions of years here. Very, very small changes, things of the sort that don't provide any advantage or disadvantage, mutations you wouldn't even notice...well, they add up to very big changes given that amount of time.
Question: if the people of Sodom were going to rape the strangers as punishment for having invaded their city, why did Lot think that offering up his daughters quell the mob? That's the main reason I always thought that, in the context of the day, the motivation from the mob was sexual. Also why I could never understand how Lot could possibly be the righteous man of the city.
You want ridiculous? I work at a school. A couple of months ago I had to delete a copy of MLK's "I have a dream" speech from a teacher's area on the server and inform her that the video is copyrighted and I cannot determine that we have a license that covers playing it, therefore I cannot permit the use of school IT facilities for infringeing purposes.
Yeah, that's another level of ridiculousness. Not only did it happen long enough ago that it should no longer be under copyright, but it's a historically significant event. It doesn't make sense to deny us the ability to view and copy at will something which has literally helped shape the society we live under today.
I pirate like crazy in personal life, but when at work I am the Copyright Nazi. One problem with knowing anything at all about copyright law is you start to see infringement everywhere.
I used to do some pirating back in my younger days, but honestly pretty much quit altogether once I graduated from college, got a job, and had some spending cash. If there's one thing that would make me go back to the pirating days was if I still had to time to play lots computer games. I refuse to buy games with the DRM that is standard in modern games. As it is, I don't have that much time, and when I do play, I'll either get something cool from a Humble Bundle I've learned about, or take a trip down nostalgia lane and dig out an adventure game from the 90's, so honestly, I'm perfectly fine with doing without and have no need to pirate.
Sometimes the cynic in me thinks that's the reason for the modern DRM. "You mean people can play games they bought two decades ago and be satisfied? What can we do to ensure they won't be able to? I know, let's make them log in to a server every time they start the game. In two decades, that server address won't exist."
Only 1 % choose not to live forever, until the moment they about to die, then they change their mind.
Most people who die at an advanced age really, really want to die. Each of my grandparents, when they were getting to that point, voiced the opinion that they just wished their lives were done with.
Being sick and in pain all the time is not fun. Which, as others have pointed out, is really the problem with the question as worded. It's now, "how long do you want to live while getting increasingly frail?" Nobody wants that. The question is, "how long do you want to live while looking and feeling like a 20-year-old?" The answer to that, universally, should be "forever."
A dollar not earned is in many ways equivilent to a dollar lost: The effect on a company bottom line is the same.
In many ways it is equivalent. In many ways it is not. I am completely that punish people who steal, for example, a macbook instead of buying one. I'm not for punishing people who choose to not buy a macbook. The effect on Apple is mostly the same (mostly because in the second case, they can sell the macbook you chose not to buy to somebody else, but let's assume we're talking about them having a surplus of macbooks and having to get rid of them Atari E.T. style, which would make the effect on their bottom line the same).
Things get a little more iffy with data. You can download a song / movie / game / whatever without paying for it. So you choose not to buy it without actually having to do without. But the point is that you're still not stealing something from the company. The company can still sell the music / movie / game you didn't buy to somebody else. Assuming that the piracy actually cost them a sale (which is a big, provably incorrect assumption. From another widely-accepted concept in economics, demand is going to be higher when the price is zero than when it is higher), it might affect the company bottom line the same way as stealing, but it also affects the company's bottom line in the exact same way as someone who simply chose not to buy it and go without, which we all agree is behavior that should not be punishable. That makes the argument of "how does this affect the company's profits" irrelevant. We either decide the behavior is acceptable or it is not. The company doesn't have a right to make money.
My personal opinion is that copyright law is important, but it is currently ridiculous. How many people are still using Windows 2000 today? It's obsolete, and it should have already reverted to the public domain. If you can't profit in 10-15 years, it's not our responsibility to help you out any more. The whole intellectual property movement is about conflating something that is not property with property. The creators don't have any intrinsic rights to their creations precisely because they can't be deprived of anything that is not physical. It's simply that society agrees to give up our rights to those creations for a limited time in exchange for encouraging further contributions to society. So if we don't get it back in a reasonable time, we're not getting what we bargained for.
Don't know much about higher mathematics, but based on the post and the explanation of Shor's Algorithm from wikipedia, its not an issue of how easy it is to factor a small number or how practical. Its more of a benchmark for quantum computing. If the ideal success rate is 50%, then 48% is an indicator of how well the system is operating.
And besides, the quantum computer got a higher score on that math problem than the average American student. That's got to count for something.
Not really. 48% is plenty good enough, if you have a solid state quantum computing device that can use Shor's algorithm on larger numbers.
As mentioned above by other people, the way you'd use Shor's algorithm is use it to get the factors, then multiply them together using a conventional computer and see if you get the original number back. Multiplication is a pretty fast operation, compared to factorization, so the verification isn't really very costly. With a 50% success rate for Shor's algorithm, on average you'd expect to have to run it twice for every number you want to factor. With 48%, that average doesn't change much.
Why isn't getting the correct answer 48% of the time impractical?
It's not the 48% that is not good enough, it's factoring a number such as 15, which is easy enough to do already without going through all the trouble of using a quantum computer. Basically, this is a very significant stepping stone, but we're not living in a world of quantum computing yet.
Cryptocat has two major weaknesses against its current implementation
I wasn't arguing for the security of cryptocat. I hadn't even heard of it before I saw the article. I was merely commenting on the irony that the same (in my opinion, very valid arguments) against cryptocat in the wired article linked in the Ars Technica article would also apply to Smart Screen.
Also, it's not "no more secure than using no crypto at all"
Right, I doubt that would be the case too, but from the article I'm talking about, "More generally, your security in a host-based encryption system is no better than having no crypto at all."
Basically, that article really slams cryptocat for the host security issue, or as you've worded it yourself:
Cryptocat relies on the server being trusted, because it gets its code from the server.
I think this is a good point, but you try to argue against it when talking about Smart Screen by following it through with a logical fallacy:
Smartscreen relies on the server being trusted, because that's where the authoritative version of the blacklist is. This is true whether the blacklist is local or remote, so from the perspective of SmartScreen's functionality, it makes no difference. As for privacy, if somebody (government, etc.) wants to spy on you... don't use Windows. Microsoft doesn't need SmartScreen to be able to tell a lot more info about your PC than "anonymous user #1403947 executed the following downloaded programs". If you don't trust them, why the fuck are you running their OS in the first place? [emphasis mine]
There are levels of trust. I trust that the guy changing my oil isn't going to cut my brakes just because he'd like to see me burn. I don't trust him enough to leave $500 in cash lying around in the car when I hand it over to him. Similarly, I trust Microsoft enough to feel comfortable using their OS, and I may even trust them that they don't plan on doing anything with the Smart Screen data NOW. I don't trust that in the future some company exec isn't going to go, "you know, we have all this data coming in...let's monetize it!" in a way I wouldn't approve of, and by then it's too late.
I see/. is in for another round of anti-Windows 8 sensationalism. Please read the Ars Technica article talking about this before commentating.
Ah, sweet irony. Your Ars Technica article links to a wired article that argues cryptocat is no more secure than using no crypto at all, because it relies on host security, and then proceeds to defend Smart Screen using a host-security argument.
If you don't care Microsoft gets access to which programs you run / trust that they will keep the data anonymized and periodically delete the logs as you claim, by all means, don't turn off Smart Screen. That said, they have all the data they need to keep a record if every program you run, and I'd rather not take them at their word that they won't do anything bad with it.
I find it hard to take anyone seriously that uses the word "retarded" as a synonym of "dumb".
Since I doubt he meant to observe that slashdot can't speak...
I find it hard to take anyone seriously that uses the word "dumb" as a synonym of "stupid", while getting butthurt about "retarded". Clinically correct language: take it or leave it, but you can't have it both ways.
The irony does not stop there. His nickname is also MickyTheIdiot. Idiot used to be a psychology term for a particular level of mental retardation.
Developing software, like any product, is a very time consuming and expensive effort. What incentive does a company have in developing a product if it will be copied out of the gate?
What alternative do they have? If they don't develop a product, they've got nothing to sell.
It takes time to copy other people's work. If you're the one who developed it, you're ahead. By the time they come out with the copycat product, you've learned more about the subject and are doing it better. Unless you're stagnating because you've been hiding behind a patent and your strategy is to scream, "don't do that! I did it first!"
In a word, don't. Unlike adults, teenagers won't have any qualms about bypassing your filtering. They'll use proxies. Tor. Thumb drives with other operating systems on it. Mobile phones. Secret non-broadcasting wifi networks.
Honestly, that's almost a good argument for implementing filtering. It challenges bright people to come up with clever solutions. Then they'll grow up with an interest in computers and networking, as well as a healthy distaste for censorship.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, educate everyone, lift them out of poverty, and population increase flat-lines. This can be achieved with technological advancement.
Oh, absolutely. I actually don't think we'll have a serious problem, because I figure that will happen naturally.
I was merely making a point that if you're an environmentalist and you want to make a big impact, the best thing you can do is limit the number of kids you have. You don't even need to be kid-free. Limit yourself to one child. Want to raise more? Adopt.
I'm all for limiting population growth though. If the above doesn't solve the population explosion, then we *will* need to prevent growth at some future stage, or exponential growth will devolve into something nasty, akin to bacteria fighting over an agar dish with nuclear weapons (i.e., anti-biotics.)
As with any population, if it grows over what the environment can sustain it, a correction will happen. I'd rather not have humanity fighting it out for resources on that scale, but I'm pretty optimistic that we won't get to that point.
From the article it is evident that she made precise measurements with lab equipment and presented them in court.
Any of her colleagues could have repeated those measurements.
But would they be willing to testify in court to confirm those same measurements, after what happened to her?
The only problem with the "stop having kids" argument is that is will soon descend into a "let's kill all the poor/undeserving/not as worthy as us" argument.
No, it does not. Because even the "stop having kids" comment I made was a voluntary action. If you want to do something for the environment, stop having kids. If you don't, then don't. Just know that nothing else you do is effective in turning the tide.
After all, if there are too many people on Earth now, why not take immediate action?
Because the immediate action you propose is unethical? That's like saying, "I need money now, why not take immediate action and steal yours?"
The point is, your argument is bullshit. There's enough room for everyone. There's just not enough room for everyone living like Americans.
Is there really? Let's say all of us in the first world cut our energy usage by half, which is pretty much unreasonable. The population now is 7 billion. In the 60's the population was 3 billion. How long before the population doubles and we're back where we started? You've just bought yourself 20 years, maybe. At the cost of cutting our energy usage by half
And that's not even considering that the developing world is going to catch up to the first world in energy usage very soon.
If you want to safeguard your egoistical way of life, then indeed you will have to kill a lot of people. Definitely. But those people are as worth of being alive as you are.
I don't know where you got that idea that we need to start murdering people, but you need to chill, dude.
But in a world with much more present and pressing issues like war, hunger, unemployment, recession, etc. you can't very well expect every newspaper to lead with a "Average Global Temps Expected to Rise By 1-2 Degrees Celsius Over the Next 50-100 years" headline.
Or in short "people can't be bothered about long-term problems."
And it's really too bad because an individual has far more power to do something about global warming than any of those problems you listed.
Yes, but nobody wants to do the one and only thing that we can do to help the situation.
Because the solution is NOT to use less energy. The solution is to have less kids and lower the population. Individually, I hope that we're all using twice more energy than we use now in the future. Because it'd be great to have that flying car and robot maids. That's the nature of technology, we use more energy to increase our quality of life.
Environmentally, that's not a problem if the population has decreased to 10% of the current population. Total energy usage will be down.
Do you want to help the environment and lower your carbon footprint? Stop having kids.
On the contrary, the results show that many people actually read the altered questions to their answers correctly, and then still stand by their given answer, even though the meaning of the answer was effectively changed 180 degrees by changing the question.
"Is censorship bad?". You answer "Yes"
They then change the question to read "Is censorship good?" and ask you to read back the altered question and your answer..
The problem with that test is that it doesn't take into account the moral beliefs someone might hold which is not in the statement. They're trying to get people to reverse their position on censorship, but if their position on what is justifiable to stop terrorism is set, then they can switch their position while maintaining logical consistency.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government censorship makes it difficult to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship must be stopped.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government surveillance is necessary to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship is justifiable.
If the reader came in to the test believing in the first premise, then you provide him with the second premise, he'll change his conclusion to remain logically consistent, and it makes perfect sense for him to do so.
Really? Have you actually RTFA?
"The online post on ESPN said that a shooting would be like the one in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people were killed and 58 were injured in July, authorities said."
That's pretty explicit. There's a line between, "Man I just want to kill someone!" and "Here's how I'm going to do it." We act on these things because they've happened before.
Without the actual quote, I still don't know.
I've seen people joke using disasters as references before. In bad taste? Maybe. Were they dangerous and actually considering hurting anyone? No.
As one designer I follow thinks, we need to get rid of the idea of "Save" altogether, and just have some sort of "Undo everything I did in this whole entire session" button.
And that is why I firmly believe that anyone hiring UI designers is an idiot. They take everything that works perfectly fine, and they turn it into unusable crap based on a belief that it would increase effectiveness, but backed by absolutely no evidence.
Construction workers don't "save" a building while they're working. Your changes are effective as soon as you make them.
Mechanical typewriters don't "save" documents. The changes are effective as soon as you type them. You can backspace using the eraser tape. And it still sucks. Computers have made typing documents better. The concept of saving something was introduced with computers, and it made things better.
Yes, you should be automatically saving everything in the background. On a file to be recovered in case your computer shuts down on you. It shouldn't save the file you are working on.
It's not like you need to softmod it more than once.
Unless you have a bunch of real life friends who also own Wii consoles. Or unless you happen not to subscribe to a video game rental service. (Redbox had only movies at first.)
I had 2 friends with Wii consoles, and I didn't subscribe to a video game rental service, and I had no interest in Zelda. This wasn't a problem, as I just walked inside a blockbuster store, got the game, then went home and softmodded 3 consoles in one day.
Back in the days when the Twilight Hack still worked they still had a blockbuster every 2 blocks. Did Redbox for movies even exist back then?
"Real gamers need zelda or mario. Everything else is trash."
How many people bought The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess just for Twilight Hack?
None. Because if that's the only thing you want the game for, you'd have rented it. It's not like you need to softmod it more than once.
people with existing traumas are something else, of course, but the TSA doesn't have any systems to deal with that properly
That's the case that people are talking about. And the TSA does have the system to deal with it properly. It's called respect our civil rights and don't search people without a warrant or probable cause.
Star Trek communicators work even when the spaceship is on the other side of the planet, or at least you never hear anybody say "we have to wait 20 minutes until we have line of sight."
No, they don't. They just keep the ship within communications range of the away team. There are quite a few episodes in which traveling to sufficiently deep underground caves blocked the signal, so clearly if the ship is on the other side of the planet, the signal isn't capable of traveling through the entire diameter of the planet.
I don't know why would make assumptions about the ship's orbit. Pretty much the only thing you know about it is that the captain tends to call for a "standard" orbit fairly often, but you don't know what a standard orbit is, or even if it varies depending on the situation.
Nope, many colleges mandate you take them anyways...fun fun fun.
Heh. When I was selecting between universities I was accepted into, one of my criteria was how much of my AP credit they would take. I wasn't about to let all that go to waste.
Seriously. If your school mandates you take the intro courses even when you've got a 5 in an AP exam...go somewhere else. They can require you still take a certain amount of hours to graduate, but you're much better off getting a minor in something or just taking some fun classes than being in a class learning the same shit you've already learned before.
This varies by state, but...
Is everyone here forgetting the driving course they had to take?
I mean, I don't know what they scenario is if a 30 year old man whose never driven suddenly decides to apply for his first license, but when I was a kid in Texas we had to take a course totaling some number of hours in a classroom environment, with another X hours of instructor-supervised time on the road. The only alternative I knew of was to apply to take the exact same course from your parents, which sounds like a good idea until you take into account fees, material, and paperwork.
Is it really that different in other states?
When I was a kid in South Carolina, I showed up at the DMV, and picked up the booklet that described the traffic laws that would be on the written test with the intention of reading through it while there than taking the test. I didn't really bother to read through it, thought it was all common sense for anyone who had seen their parents driving it. Took the written exam, composed of 30 multiple choice questions in about 15 minutes and got a driver's permit that allowed me to drive with a licensed driver at the passenger seat for training purposes. After a few* months driving my mom to get groceries whenever the opportunity arose, I came back and took a 20 minute driver's exam where I drove in roads with pretty much no traffic, then came back to the DMV and parallel parked in their training area. Then I left with a license in hand. I never took a driver's ed course (felt like a waste of time, there were always so many electives I wanted to take in high school).
I was an absolutely horrible driver for many years. I never got into an accident, but that's because I've been lucky, and never been particularly aggressive. I wouldn't say I'm a great driver now, but compared to my skills as a 15 year-old, I'm great. And no, that's not an argument for raising the driving age. If I had started as a 30 year-old, I'd be a horrible driver as a 30 year-old. What made me get better was experience, something that you can only get by driving (either after you get a license, or through a structured course, which I would strongly support).
*I said a few months because apparently now you need to hold a permit for at least 6 months before you get a license. I could have sworn I had my permit for only 3 months, but don't feel like looking it up to see if they changed the law or if I'm remembering it incorrectly, and actually had the permit for a full 6 months. I also got my license (not permit) at 15 years old, and I know they've changed the law such that now you have to be 16 (but can get your permit at 15).
Hey, by your reasoning I could build an engine without the crank because i didn't know what it was for and it would still run....try again.
I think a lot of the problems people have accepting evolution would go away if people understood it a little better. What you've stated is not how evolution works.
There are many problems with your scenario. The most obvious one is that if the engine and the crank evolved separately, they wouldn't have to have functioned as an engine without a crank and a crank without an engine. Hell, the intelligently designed engine wasn't created that way. Rods, cylinders, pistons, gears...these were all known and had uses outside of an engine long before the steam engine was invented.
Take an actual evolutionary example: fish developed swim bladders as a way to help them move in the water. Holds gas, which allows the fish to modify their buoyancy. This has nothing to do with breathing, but once a mechanism was available to hold and release air, it was a precursor to lungs. You probably don't believe there's a connection, but it's obvious once you examine lungfish.
Your crank / engine argument is akin to saying, "by your reasoning I could build a sac to hold air without the mechanism to extract the oxygen from the air and oxygenate the blood and it'd still work as a lung." Well, no. But it's useful as something other than a lung. At which point, all you really need is for blood vessels to form along the walls. Even if they are not drawing the oxygen from the gas, if it' s not disadvantageous, it's not a mutation that will go away. Once you have enough vascularization that it does oxygenate the blood, you've provided an advantage to that mutation. Now you have inefficient vascularized gas bladders that the organism can use to breathe, and a clear advantage to increased surface area of the gas bladder. Lungs easily follow, given enough time, which is another thing people who don't believe in evolution have a hard grasping. We're talking about millions of years here. Very, very small changes, things of the sort that don't provide any advantage or disadvantage, mutations you wouldn't even notice...well, they add up to very big changes given that amount of time.
Question: if the people of Sodom were going to rape the strangers as punishment for having invaded their city, why did Lot think that offering up his daughters quell the mob? That's the main reason I always thought that, in the context of the day, the motivation from the mob was sexual. Also why I could never understand how Lot could possibly be the righteous man of the city.
You want ridiculous? I work at a school. A couple of months ago I had to delete a copy of MLK's "I have a dream" speech from a teacher's area on the server and inform her that the video is copyrighted and I cannot determine that we have a license that covers playing it, therefore I cannot permit the use of school IT facilities for infringeing purposes.
Yeah, that's another level of ridiculousness. Not only did it happen long enough ago that it should no longer be under copyright, but it's a historically significant event. It doesn't make sense to deny us the ability to view and copy at will something which has literally helped shape the society we live under today.
I pirate like crazy in personal life, but when at work I am the Copyright Nazi. One problem with knowing anything at all about copyright law is you start to see infringement everywhere.
I used to do some pirating back in my younger days, but honestly pretty much quit altogether once I graduated from college, got a job, and had some spending cash. If there's one thing that would make me go back to the pirating days was if I still had to time to play lots computer games. I refuse to buy games with the DRM that is standard in modern games. As it is, I don't have that much time, and when I do play, I'll either get something cool from a Humble Bundle I've learned about, or take a trip down nostalgia lane and dig out an adventure game from the 90's, so honestly, I'm perfectly fine with doing without and have no need to pirate.
Sometimes the cynic in me thinks that's the reason for the modern DRM. "You mean people can play games they bought two decades ago and be satisfied? What can we do to ensure they won't be able to? I know, let's make them log in to a server every time they start the game. In two decades, that server address won't exist."
Only 1 % choose not to live forever, until the moment they about to die, then they change their mind.
Most people who die at an advanced age really, really want to die. Each of my grandparents, when they were getting to that point, voiced the opinion that they just wished their lives were done with.
Being sick and in pain all the time is not fun. Which, as others have pointed out, is really the problem with the question as worded. It's now, "how long do you want to live while getting increasingly frail?" Nobody wants that. The question is, "how long do you want to live while looking and feeling like a 20-year-old?" The answer to that, universally, should be "forever."
A dollar not earned is in many ways equivilent to a dollar lost: The effect on a company bottom line is the same.
In many ways it is equivalent. In many ways it is not. I am completely that punish people who steal, for example, a macbook instead of buying one. I'm not for punishing people who choose to not buy a macbook. The effect on Apple is mostly the same (mostly because in the second case, they can sell the macbook you chose not to buy to somebody else, but let's assume we're talking about them having a surplus of macbooks and having to get rid of them Atari E.T. style, which would make the effect on their bottom line the same).
Things get a little more iffy with data. You can download a song / movie / game / whatever without paying for it. So you choose not to buy it without actually having to do without. But the point is that you're still not stealing something from the company. The company can still sell the music / movie / game you didn't buy to somebody else. Assuming that the piracy actually cost them a sale (which is a big, provably incorrect assumption. From another widely-accepted concept in economics, demand is going to be higher when the price is zero than when it is higher), it might affect the company bottom line the same way as stealing, but it also affects the company's bottom line in the exact same way as someone who simply chose not to buy it and go without, which we all agree is behavior that should not be punishable. That makes the argument of "how does this affect the company's profits" irrelevant. We either decide the behavior is acceptable or it is not. The company doesn't have a right to make money.
My personal opinion is that copyright law is important, but it is currently ridiculous. How many people are still using Windows 2000 today? It's obsolete, and it should have already reverted to the public domain. If you can't profit in 10-15 years, it's not our responsibility to help you out any more. The whole intellectual property movement is about conflating something that is not property with property. The creators don't have any intrinsic rights to their creations precisely because they can't be deprived of anything that is not physical. It's simply that society agrees to give up our rights to those creations for a limited time in exchange for encouraging further contributions to society. So if we don't get it back in a reasonable time, we're not getting what we bargained for.
Don't know much about higher mathematics, but based on the post and the explanation of Shor's Algorithm from wikipedia, its not an issue of how easy it is to factor a small number or how practical. Its more of a benchmark for quantum computing. If the ideal success rate is 50%, then 48% is an indicator of how well the system is operating.
And besides, the quantum computer got a higher score on that math problem than the average American student. That's got to count for something.
Not really. 48% is plenty good enough, if you have a solid state quantum computing device that can use Shor's algorithm on larger numbers.
As mentioned above by other people, the way you'd use Shor's algorithm is use it to get the factors, then multiply them together using a conventional computer and see if you get the original number back. Multiplication is a pretty fast operation, compared to factorization, so the verification isn't really very costly. With a 50% success rate for Shor's algorithm, on average you'd expect to have to run it twice for every number you want to factor. With 48%, that average doesn't change much.
Why isn't getting the correct answer 48% of the time impractical?
It's not the 48% that is not good enough, it's factoring a number such as 15, which is easy enough to do already without going through all the trouble of using a quantum computer. Basically, this is a very significant stepping stone, but we're not living in a world of quantum computing yet.
Cryptocat has two major weaknesses against its current implementation
I wasn't arguing for the security of cryptocat. I hadn't even heard of it before I saw the article. I was merely commenting on the irony that the same (in my opinion, very valid arguments) against cryptocat in the wired article linked in the Ars Technica article would also apply to Smart Screen.
Also, it's not "no more secure than using no crypto at all"
Right, I doubt that would be the case too, but from the article I'm talking about, "More generally, your security in a host-based encryption system is no better than having no crypto at all."
Basically, that article really slams cryptocat for the host security issue, or as you've worded it yourself:
Cryptocat relies on the server being trusted, because it gets its code from the server.
I think this is a good point, but you try to argue against it when talking about Smart Screen by following it through with a logical fallacy:
Smartscreen relies on the server being trusted, because that's where the authoritative version of the blacklist is. This is true whether the blacklist is local or remote, so from the perspective of SmartScreen's functionality, it makes no difference. As for privacy, if somebody (government, etc.) wants to spy on you... don't use Windows. Microsoft doesn't need SmartScreen to be able to tell a lot more info about your PC than "anonymous user #1403947 executed the following downloaded programs". If you don't trust them, why the fuck are you running their OS in the first place? [emphasis mine]
There are levels of trust. I trust that the guy changing my oil isn't going to cut my brakes just because he'd like to see me burn. I don't trust him enough to leave $500 in cash lying around in the car when I hand it over to him. Similarly, I trust Microsoft enough to feel comfortable using their OS, and I may even trust them that they don't plan on doing anything with the Smart Screen data NOW. I don't trust that in the future some company exec isn't going to go, "you know, we have all this data coming in...let's monetize it!" in a way I wouldn't approve of, and by then it's too late.
I see /. is in for another round of anti-Windows 8 sensationalism. Please read the Ars Technica article talking about this before commentating.
Ah, sweet irony. Your Ars Technica article links to a wired article that argues cryptocat is no more secure than using no crypto at all, because it relies on host security, and then proceeds to defend Smart Screen using a host-security argument.
If you don't care Microsoft gets access to which programs you run / trust that they will keep the data anonymized and periodically delete the logs as you claim, by all means, don't turn off Smart Screen. That said, they have all the data they need to keep a record if every program you run, and I'd rather not take them at their word that they won't do anything bad with it.
I find it hard to take anyone seriously that uses the word "retarded" as a synonym of "dumb".
Since I doubt he meant to observe that slashdot can't speak...
I find it hard to take anyone seriously that uses the word "dumb" as a synonym of "stupid", while getting butthurt about "retarded". Clinically correct language: take it or leave it, but you can't have it both ways.
The irony does not stop there. His nickname is also MickyTheIdiot. Idiot used to be a psychology term for a particular level of mental retardation.
Developing software, like any product, is a very time consuming and expensive effort. What incentive does a company have in developing a product if it will be copied out of the gate?
What alternative do they have? If they don't develop a product, they've got nothing to sell.
It takes time to copy other people's work. If you're the one who developed it, you're ahead. By the time they come out with the copycat product, you've learned more about the subject and are doing it better. Unless you're stagnating because you've been hiding behind a patent and your strategy is to scream, "don't do that! I did it first!"
In a word, don't. Unlike adults, teenagers won't have any qualms about bypassing your filtering. They'll use proxies. Tor. Thumb drives with other operating systems on it. Mobile phones. Secret non-broadcasting wifi networks.
Honestly, that's almost a good argument for implementing filtering. It challenges bright people to come up with clever solutions. Then they'll grow up with an interest in computers and networking, as well as a healthy distaste for censorship.