You have then robbed society of 48 man-years of time, an equivalent loss to a murder.
My God, I hate this "logic."
No person was robbed of 48 years of lifetime. Our collective life experiences do not somehow pool together into one "uber-experience" which exists on its own. The fact is, no single person suffered for more than 15 seconds. A hundred people in a room with papercuts is not equivalent to a single person with his arm blown off.
I remember hearing about a state lottery that had gone for so long with nobody winning, the prize had grown so large that the expected payout (from a statistical viewpoint) was greater than the price of a ticket! However, the fact remains that only one person can win the lottery. That one person winning is not equivalent to everybody else receiving a reduced payout. And yet people were using this as a justification for buying hundreds of lottery tickets.
It's the same damn stupid logic in action in both cases. Not everything in the universe is simple addition.
The human mind has trouble imagining truly horrible events, unless it has experienced them in a direct way before. The sudden death of 70,000 people is simply unimaginable to most people, no matter what scientists say.
It's human nature, not stupidity. Human wisdom comes only from experience (except in the case of "genius" but that's another topic) and there's nothing we can do to change that.
The tragedy on 9/11 is similar. Most people don't really comprehend it because their only experience of it was television coverage.
Look at the movie of the fan that hasn't been corrected for CCD shutter trigger sequence. It's caused by the particular order in which the shutters are triggered in the array. If you trigger in a raster pattern (top to bottom, left to right) this distortion can crop up. As the triggered raster lines move down the shutter array, one side of the fan is moving up and one side is moving down. The side which is moving down is moving more slowly in relation to the triggering array than the side which moves up. Thus, the side moving in the same direction as the raster scan will appear elongated, and the side moving in opposition to it will appear compressed.
If you have a CRT monitor and a toy gyroscope, you can demonstrate this yourself. Give the gyro a good spin and hold it up in front of the CRT. Look at the CRT through the spinning spokes of the gyro. You will see a strobe effect, and on one side the gyro spokes will appear compressed, and elongated on the other side. If the gyro is spinning clockwise, it will be the left side which appears compressed, and vice versa.
This happens for the same reason: the screen is illuminated by a downward-scanning raster, and one side of the gyro is rotating with this motion, while the other side rotates against it.
A condition variable is only useful if the recipient of the condition is waiting on the variable. Condition variables are intrinsically different than signals. If you aren't inside a pthread_cond_wait(), it doesn't matter how much the other thread tries to signal the condition -- you won't see it until you call pthread_cond_wait(). In contrast, a signal is delivered immediately no matter what context you are currently in.
Not to mention the total uselessness of condition variables if you intend to communicate between unrelated processes.
Why can't you gracefully recover from a lost mmap? Set a handler for SIGSEGV. If you get a fault, check the faulting address. If the address is within an mmap'd region, longjmp() to a recovery point. This can be made quite clean.
I don't think the solution is to start removing functionality. The solution is to use that functionality in the correct way. A program can receive a signal at any time. This is a cold, hard fact. If your program uses operating system features that could lead to exception conditions and signals, you should handle those signals appropriately.
My point was, why protect against somebody "deleting" a file when they can just overwrite it with zeros? It's the same thing, right?
If you really want the kind of behavior you are talking about (although I can't imagine why), you can do it by making a hard link to the file in question into a directory which is "safe" from the user you are protecting against. They are still able to move the file around, modify it, etc. But if they delete it, the second hard link still remains, so the file is not actually deleted.
If someone is only looking for a single application, it is hard to shove such a versitile system down their throat.
And yet Linux is becoming an increasingly common choice for all sorts of embedded, special-purpose devices.
A lot of people don't really understand what UNIX is. At its heart, it is just a philosophy, not a system. A way of thinking about and solving problems which has remained relevant and useful for decades. All real-world UNIX systems have lots of crap bolted on, out of necessity, but the inherent "UNIX-ness" of the system emanates from the design philosophy, not the implementation or application.
I really like the idea from the article - what's wrong with UNIX is that it's great stand-alone system but once you connect lot of UNIX machines, it's hard to get "all-over-network" filesystem/accounts/desktop enviroment/SW distribution & update/etc.
Isn't that a good thing? Super-homogeneous systems with lots of communication channels are easy for worms and other malicious programs to spread through. The heterogeneity of UNIX is what has kept it relatively free of such exploits for so many years.
How do we know that just by removing this little one, some far-off solar system doesn't just collapse?
Suppose that tomorrow I oversleep by 15 minutes. As I bike to work, 15 minutes later than I normally would, I run into a bank robber attempting to make his getaway. The robber's partner gets spooked, and fires his weapon at me, but misses and ends up killing an innocent bystander.
Is the death of the bystander my fault because I slept in? If I had only woken up at the normal time, I wouldn't have been in the area at the precise moment the robber ran out into the street, and he wouldn't have fallen, and therefore never would have fired his gun. When I missed my alarm clock I certainly became a part of a chain of events which lead to somebody's death, but it hardly means that I caused it.
Similarly, if we manipulated an asteroid and that eventually lead to some catastrophe elsewhere, it's hardly correct to say that our manipulations caused that event, even though it might not have happened had we not done so. It is pointless from both a scientific and moral perspective to even attempt to assign responsibility in such a case.
Maybe something about the more recent observations causes the orbital solver to run really slowly. They may have just pruned the data set a little bit in order to get it to execute and get some results.
Having a lot of data to work with is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you've got many more observations and presumably there is useful information in those observations. On the other hand, the data also contain noise, and more data usually implies longer runtimes. It's also common for particular algorithms to run fast on certain data sets and slow on others.
In between the extremes is where you want to be, with enough data to have sufficient information about the problem you are trying to solve, but not so much that you are swamped by noise and algorithmic complexity.
"Joe Schmoe" bought duct tape and rope the day before Suzy was murdered, we ran his card! Is this the world we wish to live in?
I'm not sure I see your point. That we should not be able to carry out criminal investigations? Certainly it would take more evidence to convict somebody of murder than the simple fact that he bought certain items on a certain day, especially if he has no social connections to the victim. The police already have ways of obtaining this kind of information anyway (just walk into the shop and ask the owner who bought something on a certain day).
If somebody were ever actually indicted, tried, and convicted of murder just because he bought some rope and duct tape, I'd say the problem lies in the justice system, not the particular technology used to conduct the investigation.
As to putting things close by on shelves using this tracking - why exactly do they need a coupon card for this? They pull the sales records from the registers to stock shelves, surely they must know that two items were sold on the same ticket without having to know WHO made the purchase right?
It's more complicated than that. Yes, they could work directly from the information on the receipts, but that still doesn't let them track buying behaviors across multiple visits to the store. Let me give a contrived example.
Suppose a particular customer (their identity is not important, to either the store or this discussion) has a habit of purchasing a lot of beer on Friday night. This customer also has a habit of coming in the next day to buy Tylenol (to cure the hangover). Clearly, there is some kind of relationship between beer and Tylenol, but it could not have been discovered simply by looking at anonymized receipts. There needs to be a common link, or thread, among the purchases. This is done by assigning each customer an identifier.
This can all be done anonymously, as I said.
BTW, your "data poisoning" method is ineffectual. If you use the cashier's card, the transaction can be flagged since we know which cards are cashier cards. And if you use the card of the person behind you in line, then the record will show the same card used twice in a row on the same cash register and both transactions can be flagged.
Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly
Probably not. The "best" way I can imagine landing would be to land in a standing position, with your knees locked. You are hoping that the impact energy will be absorbed in your lower body instead of your internal organs, spine, and brain.
Upon landing, the bones in your legs would shatter, the flesh of your legs would be pulverized, and your lower body would basically explode like a blood-filled water balloon. Even if this all happened correctly, there is still the matter of decelerating your upper body.
The equation we need here is v^2=2ax. We are solving for a. Suppose v is 120 mph, and x is three feet (the typical length of a person's legs). The acceleration would be about 1600 m/s^2: 163 G's. This would turn your brain to mush.
Now, some people theorize that instead of just impacting into the ground, you could land at an angle and "roll" in order to transfer the kinetic energy into a harmless direction. Except that if you think about this physically, it's even worse than just impacting directly into the ground. Now, instead of removing your momentum of fall, you have to redirect it to a perpendicular direction. This takes 40% more force than simply stopping the motion, and would probably result in your entire body exploding like a water balloon, not just your legs.
Without something to substantially cushion the fall, I do not believe it is possible for a human to survive an impact on a hard surface at terminal velocity.
Except that if Earth's surface was completely destroyed, there would be nothing for us to purchase with our precious money, whether we believe it to have value or not.
This is funny, but it also raises an important point that many people seem to miss.
Last time I took part in a discussion about asteroid impacts, it was suggested that people who are rich enough would be able to simply buy their way off the planet before the disaster strikes. As in buy with money.
Think about it. There's a gigantic rock hurtling toward Earth. There are only enough spaceships (let's say) to take 1,000 people off the surface. All life as we know it on Earth is about to be destroyed. Do you: A) Get on your spaceship and get the hell out of there, or B) Accept pieces of paper with dead presidents printed on them in return for allowing other people to get off the planet?
Even if you survived the ensuing destruction, what good would those little pieces of paper be?
The rich sometimes seem to think they can buy their way out of any problem, but the total destruction of Earth isn't something that money will save you from.
Diesel engines are more expensive for a given efficiency, and they are "dirty" in the sense that they produce lots of soot when under heavy load. I fully agree with you that they make sense from a greenhouse-gas emissions standpoint, but most people (for some reason) do not consider CO2 to be "air pollution" and instead focus strictly on NOx and particulate emmissions.
I think it's basically the tail wagging the dog, but the reality is that people care more about local smoggy conditions than they care for the global environment. Diesel is a globally more responsible choice, but at the price of having increased particulates in the local environment.
Wow, a bunch of people are submitting "improvements" on the time*effort*material expression. Let me argue why I think it's perfect the way it is.
If Property=Time*Effort*Material, then if you double time, the property doubles (this makes sense). If you double effort, the property doubles (this makes sense). If you double material, the property doubles (this makes sense).
Basically, if you want to combine different quantities in such a way that each one is equally important regardless of its relative scale, you multiply them.
That's why I trade supermarket "coupon" cards whenever I get a chance. It is better than avoiding the cards because trading has the potential to poison the data collection. If I simply refuse, they have a valid data set on those who use the cards (most people). But poisoned data can be dangerous if used as the basis for financial decisions. I'd love it if people made card trading a regular process.
The card is optional. Basically, what you are doing is pissing all over somebody else's campfire. Don't try to spin this into some kind of noble effort.
And don't give me any lip about "improving customer service by stocking the right items"
As you point out, that's not why they do it. Yes, there are customer-targetted reasons behind these cards. The main reason is for optimizing coupon mailings. Tell me, do you not want coupons? You like turning down discounts? Tell me another thing, do you not want coupons which are actually relevant to the kinds of items you buy?
The other reason for these cards, which might not be immediately clear to you, is to optimize the placement of items on store shelves. They can do this without tracking you personally, by just assigning you an anonymous numbered account. Albertson's, for example, gives you the option of having an anonymous account.
Think, why would these companies offer anonymous discount cards if their only purpose was to track your personal buying habits? There are other factors at work here. It doesn't seem like you've actually thought out your reasons for objecting to these things, and on top of that you are acting to intentionally damage the system for other people, when you have the option of simply not participating. I think that's really immature.
Whenever a/. article is posted about some nifty little DIY project that can save you from spending a few hundred dollars on a consumer model or whatever, the value of one's time always comes into question. How much money are you saving if the project takes X hours of your time?
Wow dude. Do you really measure the moments of your life in dollars? That's sad.
We had a kid get arrested for this, changed his modems mac everyday but never changed his nic's. Pretty trivial to track him down.
How does an ethernet MAC address get exposed on the Internet side of a cable modem? Are you making this up?
Re:Cool science, pathetic people
on
Re-Pet a Reality
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· Score: 1
Death is a part of the life cycle - deal with it you loser. Death is nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be mourned for too long.
You're making a big fucking leap from "person wants to have another animal like the one she used to have," and "person cannot deal with death."
I, for one, would love to have a clone of my dog when she passes away. My dog has a particular demeanor which I love. It was partially influenced by her genetics (half Border Collie, so she's really excitable) and also influenced by the way we raised her. And I think she's a pretty dog.
Chances are, a clone of my dog would turn out quite a bit like the dog I have now, because of strong genetic influences and the similar environment she would grow up in.
I fully realize that a clone of my dog would not be the same dog. Simply wanting another dog which is as similar as possible doesn't make me a fucking loser who can't "deal with death."
Having said that, I probably wouldn't choose to clone an animal as a pet, while there are thousands of poor animals in shelters waiting to be adopted or euthanised.
Animals do not have a soul. Humans do. You cannot clone the soul, and without it a human cannot live.
This would imply that there is something about human physiology which ties the body to the soul. After all, you've just asserted that animals can live without a soul, but humans cannot. Thus, there must be something biologically "special" about humans. Something about our physical makeup that causes us to die when some nonphysical element of our being is removed.
All we have to do, then, is study the process of human death, and we will eventually discover the nature of the soul.
I suspect that Google employs better lawyers than the ones Slashdotters are stuck using.
Lawyers may know the law but do they know the technology? "filetype:torrent moviename" may be obvious to the technically "elite" but I really doubt the thought would occur to a lawyer, working for Google or otherwise, without some prompting.
Slashdot Mirror
My God, I hate this "logic."
No person was robbed of 48 years of lifetime. Our collective life experiences do not somehow pool together into one "uber-experience" which exists on its own. The fact is, no single person suffered for more than 15 seconds. A hundred people in a room with papercuts is not equivalent to a single person with his arm blown off.
I remember hearing about a state lottery that had gone for so long with nobody winning, the prize had grown so large that the expected payout (from a statistical viewpoint) was greater than the price of a ticket! However, the fact remains that only one person can win the lottery. That one person winning is not equivalent to everybody else receiving a reduced payout. And yet people were using this as a justification for buying hundreds of lottery tickets.
It's the same damn stupid logic in action in both cases. Not everything in the universe is simple addition.
It's human nature, not stupidity. Human wisdom comes only from experience (except in the case of "genius" but that's another topic) and there's nothing we can do to change that.
The tragedy on 9/11 is similar. Most people don't really comprehend it because their only experience of it was television coverage.
If you have a CRT monitor and a toy gyroscope, you can demonstrate this yourself. Give the gyro a good spin and hold it up in front of the CRT. Look at the CRT through the spinning spokes of the gyro. You will see a strobe effect, and on one side the gyro spokes will appear compressed, and elongated on the other side. If the gyro is spinning clockwise, it will be the left side which appears compressed, and vice versa.
This happens for the same reason: the screen is illuminated by a downward-scanning raster, and one side of the gyro is rotating with this motion, while the other side rotates against it.
A condition variable is only useful if the recipient of the condition is waiting on the variable. Condition variables are intrinsically different than signals. If you aren't inside a pthread_cond_wait(), it doesn't matter how much the other thread tries to signal the condition -- you won't see it until you call pthread_cond_wait(). In contrast, a signal is delivered immediately no matter what context you are currently in.
Not to mention the total uselessness of condition variables if you intend to communicate between unrelated processes.
I don't think the solution is to start removing functionality. The solution is to use that functionality in the correct way. A program can receive a signal at any time. This is a cold, hard fact. If your program uses operating system features that could lead to exception conditions and signals, you should handle those signals appropriately.
If you really want the kind of behavior you are talking about (although I can't imagine why), you can do it by making a hard link to the file in question into a directory which is "safe" from the user you are protecting against. They are still able to move the file around, modify it, etc. But if they delete it, the second hard link still remains, so the file is not actually deleted.
And yet Linux is becoming an increasingly common choice for all sorts of embedded, special-purpose devices.
A lot of people don't really understand what UNIX is. At its heart, it is just a philosophy, not a system. A way of thinking about and solving problems which has remained relevant and useful for decades. All real-world UNIX systems have lots of crap bolted on, out of necessity, but the inherent "UNIX-ness" of the system emanates from the design philosophy, not the implementation or application.
UNIX is a How, not a What.
Isn't that a good thing? Super-homogeneous systems with lots of communication channels are easy for worms and other malicious programs to spread through. The heterogeneity of UNIX is what has kept it relatively free of such exploits for so many years.
So your argument is that if people are allowed to overwrite stuff, then they can overwrite stuff? I don't get it.
Suppose that tomorrow I oversleep by 15 minutes. As I bike to work, 15 minutes later than I normally would, I run into a bank robber attempting to make his getaway. The robber's partner gets spooked, and fires his weapon at me, but misses and ends up killing an innocent bystander.
Is the death of the bystander my fault because I slept in? If I had only woken up at the normal time, I wouldn't have been in the area at the precise moment the robber ran out into the street, and he wouldn't have fallen, and therefore never would have fired his gun. When I missed my alarm clock I certainly became a part of a chain of events which lead to somebody's death, but it hardly means that I caused it.
Similarly, if we manipulated an asteroid and that eventually lead to some catastrophe elsewhere, it's hardly correct to say that our manipulations caused that event, even though it might not have happened had we not done so. It is pointless from both a scientific and moral perspective to even attempt to assign responsibility in such a case.
Having a lot of data to work with is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you've got many more observations and presumably there is useful information in those observations. On the other hand, the data also contain noise, and more data usually implies longer runtimes. It's also common for particular algorithms to run fast on certain data sets and slow on others.
In between the extremes is where you want to be, with enough data to have sufficient information about the problem you are trying to solve, but not so much that you are swamped by noise and algorithmic complexity.
I'm not sure I see your point. That we should not be able to carry out criminal investigations? Certainly it would take more evidence to convict somebody of murder than the simple fact that he bought certain items on a certain day, especially if he has no social connections to the victim. The police already have ways of obtaining this kind of information anyway (just walk into the shop and ask the owner who bought something on a certain day).
If somebody were ever actually indicted, tried, and convicted of murder just because he bought some rope and duct tape, I'd say the problem lies in the justice system, not the particular technology used to conduct the investigation.
It's more complicated than that. Yes, they could work directly from the information on the receipts, but that still doesn't let them track buying behaviors across multiple visits to the store. Let me give a contrived example.
Suppose a particular customer (their identity is not important, to either the store or this discussion) has a habit of purchasing a lot of beer on Friday night. This customer also has a habit of coming in the next day to buy Tylenol (to cure the hangover). Clearly, there is some kind of relationship between beer and Tylenol, but it could not have been discovered simply by looking at anonymized receipts. There needs to be a common link, or thread, among the purchases. This is done by assigning each customer an identifier.
This can all be done anonymously, as I said.
BTW, your "data poisoning" method is ineffectual. If you use the cashier's card, the transaction can be flagged since we know which cards are cashier cards. And if you use the card of the person behind you in line, then the record will show the same card used twice in a row on the same cash register and both transactions can be flagged.
Probably not. The "best" way I can imagine landing would be to land in a standing position, with your knees locked. You are hoping that the impact energy will be absorbed in your lower body instead of your internal organs, spine, and brain.
Upon landing, the bones in your legs would shatter, the flesh of your legs would be pulverized, and your lower body would basically explode like a blood-filled water balloon. Even if this all happened correctly, there is still the matter of decelerating your upper body.
The equation we need here is v^2=2ax. We are solving for a. Suppose v is 120 mph, and x is three feet (the typical length of a person's legs). The acceleration would be about 1600 m/s^2: 163 G's. This would turn your brain to mush.
Now, some people theorize that instead of just impacting into the ground, you could land at an angle and "roll" in order to transfer the kinetic energy into a harmless direction. Except that if you think about this physically, it's even worse than just impacting directly into the ground. Now, instead of removing your momentum of fall, you have to redirect it to a perpendicular direction. This takes 40% more force than simply stopping the motion, and would probably result in your entire body exploding like a water balloon, not just your legs.
Without something to substantially cushion the fall, I do not believe it is possible for a human to survive an impact on a hard surface at terminal velocity.
Except that if Earth's surface was completely destroyed, there would be nothing for us to purchase with our precious money, whether we believe it to have value or not.
Last time I took part in a discussion about asteroid impacts, it was suggested that people who are rich enough would be able to simply buy their way off the planet before the disaster strikes. As in buy with money.
Think about it. There's a gigantic rock hurtling toward Earth. There are only enough spaceships (let's say) to take 1,000 people off the surface. All life as we know it on Earth is about to be destroyed. Do you: A) Get on your spaceship and get the hell out of there, or B) Accept pieces of paper with dead presidents printed on them in return for allowing other people to get off the planet?
Even if you survived the ensuing destruction, what good would those little pieces of paper be?
The rich sometimes seem to think they can buy their way out of any problem, but the total destruction of Earth isn't something that money will save you from.
Uhh, this is Slashdot. Our orders of magnitude come in factors of 2, not 10 :-)
I think it's basically the tail wagging the dog, but the reality is that people care more about local smoggy conditions than they care for the global environment. Diesel is a globally more responsible choice, but at the price of having increased particulates in the local environment.
If Property=Time*Effort*Material, then if you double time, the property doubles (this makes sense). If you double effort, the property doubles (this makes sense). If you double material, the property doubles (this makes sense).
Basically, if you want to combine different quantities in such a way that each one is equally important regardless of its relative scale, you multiply them.
The card is optional. Basically, what you are doing is pissing all over somebody else's campfire. Don't try to spin this into some kind of noble effort.
And don't give me any lip about "improving customer service by stocking the right items"
As you point out, that's not why they do it. Yes, there are customer-targetted reasons behind these cards. The main reason is for optimizing coupon mailings. Tell me, do you not want coupons? You like turning down discounts? Tell me another thing, do you not want coupons which are actually relevant to the kinds of items you buy?
The other reason for these cards, which might not be immediately clear to you, is to optimize the placement of items on store shelves. They can do this without tracking you personally, by just assigning you an anonymous numbered account. Albertson's, for example, gives you the option of having an anonymous account.
Think, why would these companies offer anonymous discount cards if their only purpose was to track your personal buying habits? There are other factors at work here. It doesn't seem like you've actually thought out your reasons for objecting to these things, and on top of that you are acting to intentionally damage the system for other people, when you have the option of simply not participating. I think that's really immature.
Wow dude. Do you really measure the moments of your life in dollars? That's sad.
How does an ethernet MAC address get exposed on the Internet side of a cable modem? Are you making this up?
You're making a big fucking leap from "person wants to have another animal like the one she used to have," and "person cannot deal with death."
I, for one, would love to have a clone of my dog when she passes away. My dog has a particular demeanor which I love. It was partially influenced by her genetics (half Border Collie, so she's really excitable) and also influenced by the way we raised her. And I think she's a pretty dog.
Chances are, a clone of my dog would turn out quite a bit like the dog I have now, because of strong genetic influences and the similar environment she would grow up in.
I fully realize that a clone of my dog would not be the same dog. Simply wanting another dog which is as similar as possible doesn't make me a fucking loser who can't "deal with death."
Having said that, I probably wouldn't choose to clone an animal as a pet, while there are thousands of poor animals in shelters waiting to be adopted or euthanised.
This would imply that there is something about human physiology which ties the body to the soul. After all, you've just asserted that animals can live without a soul, but humans cannot. Thus, there must be something biologically "special" about humans. Something about our physical makeup that causes us to die when some nonphysical element of our being is removed.
All we have to do, then, is study the process of human death, and we will eventually discover the nature of the soul.
Anyway, your claims are stupid.
Lawyers may know the law but do they know the technology? "filetype:torrent moviename" may be obvious to the technically "elite" but I really doubt the thought would occur to a lawyer, working for Google or otherwise, without some prompting.