That whole banned list is too general to be of any use. No Russians? So I couldn't make a murder mystery based in Tsarist Russia? No bards or knights? Say goodbye to a game set in a thoroughly realistic, researched medieval world. No carnivorous aliens? So if I make an alien world all the native organisms have to be vegetarian? What if that doesn't fit into the ecology Î have in mind? All you're doing is replacing one cookie-cutter system for creating games with another. --
I wouldn't. I think the idea of privacy laws is fine, but I see a danger: since the laws exist, people will believe that technological solutions are unnecessary.
The two methods aren't mutually exclusive; privacy laws simply provide a legal foundation you can use to protect your freedom.
Ultimately, laws only work if you catch the lawbreakers, and if you can prove that they broke the law.
That's true, and it's why we have law-enforcement agencies and a criminal court system. Lawbreakers are caught, prosecuted, and convicted every day, just because it's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Technological solutions also have the advantage that they work against abusive authorities as well as private abusers.
This is one of the reasons why I think we should go so far as to make it a Constitutional amendment. The amendments to the Constitution tend to be limits on governmental authority, and legal history is full of rulings against the government based on the Constitution.
--
Rumors are that it'll take place during the early days of the Federation
Good, maybe we'll have characters with some backbone, rather than a bunch of conflict resolution counselors who let their ships be mostly destroyed before they return fire. Whatever faults the old series had, at least they had a little bit of testosterone. --
flickers noticably when refresh rate is set too low
I've always been a little curious about this; I know the brain can subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) see the image refreshing if the refresh rate is too low, but does it really get that much better if the refresh rate is set really high? Does the eye ever get physiologically incapable of seeing it refresh?
Personally I like my flatscreen at work, simply because I have to look at it for 12 hour stretches at a time, and it's a lot easier on the eyes. A good crt has much better image quality I think though.
--
Wired (yes, I know it doesn't have a sterling reputation at slashdot at the moment) had a pretty interesting article on cloning last month. You can find the text here. It points out that not only has cloning become so accessible that a moderately skilled scientist could do it by themselves, but it's quite possible it has been done already because of this. --
First of all, I think you're overestimating the influence of academic postmodernism on non-academic society. I don't think the people who buy into these paranoid delusions are on the cutting edge of metaphysical theory here, and I think even most of those who do subscribe to postmodernism do so only in the abstract, and don't really subscribe to the notion of subjective reality (who was it who said "There are no cultural relativists in a plane at 20,000 feet"?)
I think one of the reasons we're seeing so much of this drivel lately is because of a few reasons. One, we just ended a 50 year cold war where the government encouraged paranoia. Two, the presentation of entertainment as news has been shown to be commercially succesful. This doesn't mean everyone's believing in it, just that they find it entertaining. Three, the wretched state of scientific knowledge in the general population (at least in the US). This isn't a result of some philosophical movement in the universities, and it's not simply the fault of the schools. Most adults don't really seem to give a damn about acquiring any real scientific knowledge; this has actually gotten somewhat better in recent years I think (witness the popularity of scientist-writers such as Hawking and Gould). The combination of paranoia, desire for entertainment, and scientific illiteracy is driving most of this pseudoscience I think, not just because they read a little too much Foucault. --
While I'm glad that privacy protection has become a thriving business, I'd rather see some more thorough privacy laws go into place. I know it might be heretical to say this on slashdot, but the free market isn't a solution to everything; sure privacy protection might make good business sense now, but what if it doesn't in the future?
Do we suddenly lose our rights to privacy (and I do think it is a basic right) just because a few companies file for chapter 11? I'd rather see maybe a Constitutional amendment to ensure individual privacy, with maybe criminal charges brought against executives of companies that break the law. --
Thank you . We will get back to you as soon as possible. Right now, let's look at the situation in where is on the scene. Is anything new happening there ?
Better that than having the entire sequence of events compressed into a one-minute news bite, then sandwiched between a 10 minute "news" piece on a new sitcom that network is producing and a 10 minute scare piece based on pseudoscientific drivel ("is something in cereal HURTING YOUR CHILDREN?!")
--
I'm no roboticist (though few of us are), but is there a way for the robot to tell what kind of terrain it's on? Tell it to move around randomly, but if it hits asphalt turn back. This could make for a messy lawn, but the only reason you're doing this is to freak out the neighbors I assume.
Another thing might just be to program very precise geometrical measurements into the bot. Go forward 10 feet, make a left turn, go forward 1 foot, left turn, forward 10 feet, etc. --
One thing that the article makes clear and the everyone should keep in mind is the range of these things is extremely limited. We're talking 1 cm, right now, maybe a couple of feet when the tech is perfected, and even then the devices don't continually broadcast, they only respond to speciall readers. So no, companies can't follow their produts to your home.
Well the slashdot strategy is to argue about it amongst ourselves, detailing the moral implications, and loudly denouncing them for thinking of it. We like to call it the "Preaching to the Choir" defense.
We could just write our legislators, then use our vote to indicate our disapproval, but that would just be crazy.
--
Together we can make the web accessible to everyone.
So by convincing designers and sites to prohibit everyone not using the latest browser from viewing their pages, they're making it accessible to everyone.
Not that I'm against standards per se, but if you just throw off these trite slogans you just turn them into gibberish.
--
Um . . . . Procmail ?
If you are thinking about this from the ISP's point of view, and want to avoid having to stuff all the spam in people's mailboxes only to have it piped to/dev/null, why not write something that would suck in all user's.procmailrc files and do the filtering up stream (only for the/dev/null rules). Then all you have to do is educate your customers. (Oh no. Now that's a concept!)
But I want it so it never reaches me in the first place. The burden should lie with the spammers, not me, and I don't see how making them put ADVERTISEMENT: in the subject line would be an overbearing thing for the government to do.
And do you REALLY trust the procmail rules of people you don't know. They could use that account as a junkmail catcher, and send everything to/dev/null...
--
Why should public universities even have admissions standards at all? (hear me out)
They were meant to provide educational opportunities to those people who wanted an education, but weren't the scions of some inbred Bostonian merchant family. Does allowing someone who may not have the ability really hurt the school that much?
So they can't handle it, they get bad grades, they drop out. It's not like incompetence is contagious, and those who can handle it will do just fine. --
All it's doing is giving ISPs and users the right to set what's allowed into their inboxes. As far as I'm concerned spam has reduced the usefulness of email by an amazing amount; I for one would like the option to put a no solicitation sign in front of my email account. --
When I started this sub-thread (way up the tree from here) I wasn't saying I didn't get it; I was saying that it was pointless and unnecessary, and I was attempting to explain why.
Alright; the post that started all these threads said that the bash language contains good string manipulation utilities in the form of sed and awk. Someone pointed out that these were not part of bash. You said UNIX apps weren't meant to run as stand-alones. Nobody disputed this; we're just saying that from a strictly technical point bash, sed, and awk are all different programs, not that they should be run alone. --
It's even more important to have a somewhat balanced view. I think Bill Joy has a good point in defining the limitations of the nerd view, where if you do something because it's "neat" without understanding all its affects, the whole process can become self-defeating. --
Unfourtantley, Orrin Hatch is too honest of a man to be taken seriously by congress. He's one of the few (only?) congressmen I have respect for.
I disagree with almost everything he believes in; that said, I think you're way off base when you say he isn't taken "seriously". He's the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is one of the most powerful seats in the Senate.
--
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't really play the original, but I can tell you the Dreamcast Ecco game is ludicrously hard. I mean, I like hard games, but damn...
--
That whole banned list is too general to be of any use. No Russians? So I couldn't make a murder mystery based in Tsarist Russia? No bards or knights? Say goodbye to a game set in a thoroughly realistic, researched medieval world. No carnivorous aliens? So if I make an alien world all the native organisms have to be vegetarian? What if that doesn't fit into the ecology Î have in mind? All you're doing is replacing one cookie-cutter system for creating games with another.
--
I wouldn't. I think the idea of privacy laws is fine, but I see a danger: since the laws exist, people will believe that technological solutions are unnecessary.
The two methods aren't mutually exclusive; privacy laws simply provide a legal foundation you can use to protect your freedom.
Ultimately, laws only work if you catch the lawbreakers, and if you can prove that they broke the law.
That's true, and it's why we have law-enforcement agencies and a criminal court system. Lawbreakers are caught, prosecuted, and convicted every day, just because it's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Technological solutions also have the advantage that they work against abusive authorities as well as private abusers.
This is one of the reasons why I think we should go so far as to make it a Constitutional amendment. The amendments to the Constitution tend to be limits on governmental authority, and legal history is full of rulings against the government based on the Constitution.
--
Rumors are that it'll take place during the early days of the Federation
Good, maybe we'll have characters with some backbone, rather than a bunch of conflict resolution counselors who let their ships be mostly destroyed before they return fire. Whatever faults the old series had, at least they had a little bit of testosterone.
--
flickers noticably when refresh rate is set too low
I've always been a little curious about this; I know the brain can subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) see the image refreshing if the refresh rate is too low, but does it really get that much better if the refresh rate is set really high? Does the eye ever get physiologically incapable of seeing it refresh?
Personally I like my flatscreen at work, simply because I have to look at it for 12 hour stretches at a time, and it's a lot easier on the eyes. A good crt has much better image quality I think though.
--
Wired (yes, I know it doesn't have a sterling reputation at slashdot at the moment) had a pretty interesting article on cloning last month. You can find the text here. It points out that not only has cloning become so accessible that a moderately skilled scientist could do it by themselves, but it's quite possible it has been done already because of this.
--
First of all, I think you're overestimating the influence of academic postmodernism on non-academic society. I don't think the people who buy into these paranoid delusions are on the cutting edge of metaphysical theory here, and I think even most of those who do subscribe to postmodernism do so only in the abstract, and don't really subscribe to the notion of subjective reality (who was it who said "There are no cultural relativists in a plane at 20,000 feet"?)
I think one of the reasons we're seeing so much of this drivel lately is because of a few reasons. One, we just ended a 50 year cold war where the government encouraged paranoia. Two, the presentation of entertainment as news has been shown to be commercially succesful. This doesn't mean everyone's believing in it, just that they find it entertaining. Three, the wretched state of scientific knowledge in the general population (at least in the US). This isn't a result of some philosophical movement in the universities, and it's not simply the fault of the schools. Most adults don't really seem to give a damn about acquiring any real scientific knowledge; this has actually gotten somewhat better in recent years I think (witness the popularity of scientist-writers such as Hawking and Gould). The combination of paranoia, desire for entertainment, and scientific illiteracy is driving most of this pseudoscience I think, not just because they read a little too much Foucault.
--
While I'm glad that privacy protection has become a thriving business, I'd rather see some more thorough privacy laws go into place. I know it might be heretical to say this on slashdot, but the free market isn't a solution to everything; sure privacy protection might make good business sense now, but what if it doesn't in the future? Do we suddenly lose our rights to privacy (and I do think it is a basic right) just because a few companies file for chapter 11? I'd rather see maybe a Constitutional amendment to ensure individual privacy, with maybe criminal charges brought against executives of companies that break the law.
--
Thank you . We will get back to you as soon as possible. Right now, let's look at the situation in where is on the scene. Is anything new happening there ?
Better that than having the entire sequence of events compressed into a one-minute news bite, then sandwiched between a 10 minute "news" piece on a new sitcom that network is producing and a 10 minute scare piece based on pseudoscientific drivel ("is something in cereal HURTING YOUR CHILDREN?!")
--
I'm no roboticist (though few of us are), but is there a way for the robot to tell what kind of terrain it's on? Tell it to move around randomly, but if it hits asphalt turn back. This could make for a messy lawn, but the only reason you're doing this is to freak out the neighbors I assume.
Another thing might just be to program very precise geometrical measurements into the bot. Go forward 10 feet, make a left turn, go forward 1 foot, left turn, forward 10 feet, etc.
--
One thing that the article makes clear and the everyone should keep in mind is the range of these things is extremely limited. We're talking 1 cm, right now, maybe a couple of feet when the tech is perfected, and even then the devices don't continually broadcast, they only respond to speciall readers. So no, companies can't follow their produts to your home.
No fair using facts, I wanted to have a fit...
--
Well the slashdot strategy is to argue about it amongst ourselves, detailing the moral implications, and loudly denouncing them for thinking of it. We like to call it the "Preaching to the Choir" defense.
We could just write our legislators, then use our vote to indicate our disapproval, but that would just be crazy.
--
Just nod your head and say sure, when I have some free time I'll definitely do that.
--
From their web page:
Together we can make the web accessible to everyone.
So by convincing designers and sites to prohibit everyone not using the latest browser from viewing their pages, they're making it accessible to everyone.
Not that I'm against standards per se, but if you just throw off these trite slogans you just turn them into gibberish.
--
Um . . . . Procmail ? If you are thinking about this from the ISP's point of view, and want to avoid having to stuff all the spam in people's mailboxes only to have it piped to /dev/null, why not write something that would suck in all user's .procmailrc files and do the filtering up stream (only for the /dev/null rules). Then all you have to do is educate your customers. (Oh no. Now that's a concept!)
/dev/null...
But I want it so it never reaches me in the first place. The burden should lie with the spammers, not me, and I don't see how making them put ADVERTISEMENT: in the subject line would be an overbearing thing for the government to do.
And do you REALLY trust the procmail rules of people you don't know. They could use that account as a junkmail catcher, and send everything to
--
Why should public universities even have admissions standards at all? (hear me out)
They were meant to provide educational opportunities to those people who wanted an education, but weren't the scions of some inbred Bostonian merchant family. Does allowing someone who may not have the ability really hurt the school that much?
So they can't handle it, they get bad grades, they drop out. It's not like incompetence is contagious, and those who can handle it will do just fine.
--
Do we really want to determine people's options largely based on whether they didn't give a damn when they were 15 years old?
Good point. When I was 15 I thought high school was pointless. I still think that.
College on the other hand, was great; you'd actually learn real subjects, not watered-down, sanitized propaganda.
--
You're telling me that there are public schools prepping kids for the SAT's four years before they'd take the test?!? Are you kidding me?
My school didn't prepare us for SATs at anytime; I got the impression that it was entirely our business to prepare for it.
--
Wait, if they're not replicated, how could you get data from a machine that's been brought offline?
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Even identical twins have slightly different DNA, due to changes during development.
--
All it's doing is giving ISPs and users the right to set what's allowed into their inboxes. As far as I'm concerned spam has reduced the usefulness of email by an amazing amount; I for one would like the option to put a no solicitation sign in front of my email account.
--
When I started this sub-thread (way up the tree from here) I wasn't saying I didn't get it; I was saying that it was pointless and unnecessary, and I was attempting to explain why.
Alright; the post that started all these threads said that the bash language contains good string manipulation utilities in the form of sed and awk. Someone pointed out that these were not part of bash. You said UNIX apps weren't meant to run as stand-alones. Nobody disputed this; we're just saying that from a strictly technical point bash, sed, and awk are all different programs, not that they should be run alone.
--
It's even more important to have a somewhat balanced view. I think Bill Joy has a good point in defining the limitations of the nerd view, where if you do something because it's "neat" without understanding all its affects, the whole process can become self-defeating.
--
Face it. Every president lies. Bill Clinton's only fault was that he lied about something really stupid and got caught while he was still in office.
Reagan was caught too; just nobody seemed to believe he was competent enough to have orchestrated anything that devious.
--
Unfourtantley, Orrin Hatch is too honest of a man to be taken seriously by congress. He's one of the few (only?) congressmen I have respect for.
I disagree with almost everything he believes in; that said, I think you're way off base when you say he isn't taken "seriously". He's the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is one of the most powerful seats in the Senate.
--