The majority of cops (like 95% or more) are very good people. Just like any other industry you get a few bad apples who ruin it for everyone else. Just like any unionized shop they are practically forced to keep them. There are only so many desk jobs to go around to place truly bad ones in. You can get them if they do something truly illegal and get caught doing so. Still the reason why cop abuse stories hit the news so hard is because it isn't common place; well it might be more so in some areas but overall it isn't.
Blah, blah blah. We're not talking about janitors here. We're talking about the very people who are given the legal capacity to arrest us, detain us, interrogate us, and jail us. A 5% rate of "bad apples" is ridiculously huge for such a class of people. If they have "zero tolerance" of crime in the general population, then we should have zero tolerance of ethical deficiency on their part.
So now we have courts ruling that being gay is something to be ashamed of, something inherently damaging to one's reputation? I was not aware that the government held that opinion.
PC has not meant "personal computer" for a long, long time. If every "personal computer" is a PC, then your iPhone is a PC. Your freaking wristwatch is a PC. I think we can all agree that this usage is dead. "PC" means an Intel architecture computer capable of running Windows. It stands for nothing. Let's call it an "obsolete-cronym"
I have some friends who build these. Notice I said "build," not "buy." I really don't think you can buy P-size motors. The people who are flying these things are making them themselves.
Computer security by law is worse than security by obscurity, or security by Symantec product.
"Security by user" is even worse. Why on earth do some people believe that one should have to be an expert in security in order to be allowed to use a computer? Your argument basically amounts to saying that some people are just too dumb to be allowed to use a computer. That might have made sense when computers were a new thing. But asking that every computer user (a fairly large fraction of all people on earth) should be a security expert is like saying that everyone should know how to remove their own appendix. It's stupid. We should not have to be experts to safely use computers. This is idiotic. The vendors need to fix their shit.
Theoretically, any officer of the company who was complicit in the criminal behavior can be held criminally liable as an individual. For some reason, this doesn't always happen. What the hell does it mean to "convict" a company, anyway?
True, but if some kind of RAM-drive market takes off, all of a sudden it might still be profitable to continue producing RAM using technologies that are 12-18 months old... I won't hold my breath, though.
I watched Burn After Reading last night, so this article is kind of funny. Sounds like a bunch of interesting-looking but ultimately useless information. Just don't let George Clooney shoot you in the face as you hide in John Malkovitch's closet, okay?
Ahh, good old IIFS. Instead of storing a 512-byte block, we store a 128-bit hash. To read the block you just generate random data until you get a block of data that matches the hash. It's foolproof I tell you, as well as speedy.
Right, because the people who pose the biggest risk to national security are those who go to Whitehouse.gov. Anybody trying to learn about the executive branch is clearly a terrorist and must be executed.
I've written code that deals with PDF, both in terms of parsing and rendering it, as well as generating it. PDF is a great format. It certainly doesn't have the difficulties associated with, for instance, PostScript. Adobe's products might have poor performance but this is not due to the file format, which is NOT proprietary but actually quite well-documented.
I have no idea what sorts of crazy things happen inside Adobe's code. Suffice it to say, none of that is mandated by the PDF format.
And I bet that if I give you the simplest instructions in the world, but I give them in Latin instead of English, you might have a hard time following as well. People aren't as good at using CLIs because they aren't used to using CLIs. A list of instructions that begins, "Open a command prompt," is not going to get far if people don't know what that means. I'm fairly certain that even your dumbest user can at least type a line of text into a window if you at least explain how to get there.
That's not what I want. I don't want to have to buy the fastest, most expensive RAM available just to use as a RAM disk. I'd prefer cheaper RAM, maybe two or three generations old, that I can get in massive quantities. Sure, put it on the motherboard, but don't put it on the main memory bus -- that's not its purpose, and I don't want it eating up gobs of the normal address space. It's for storage only.
It doesn't have to be as fast as main memory, just faster than your typical disk interface. Make up an entirely new interface if you want. Call it RID -- RAM integrated drive.
You're talking about something that was lost in 1951, not 2003. The Cold War wasn't even fully fired up yet. Speaking of hindsight, yes, this kind of thing should probably have been recorded. Maybe it was, somewhere on some piece of paper that was lost or burned or simply misplaced. It seems easy to forget how much computers help us organize information now.
Scary picture of the rusty unearthed safe & dirty glass bottle full of 99.96% pure plutomium here:
How can it be 99.96% pure when the half-life of plutonium-239 is 24100 years? Even if it started out 100% pure, it would take only 14 years to decay to 99.96% purity. This stuff is supposedly older than that.
I think you missed my point, was that the switch from typewriters to computers wasn't done because users were too "dumb" to use typewriters, it was done because the computer is a better technology. Similarly, we didn't go from CLI to GUI because people were too "dumb" to use a CLI -- the GUI is simply superior for many tasks.
Besides, I don't understand why people try to correlate the level of knowledge required to use a system with general intelligence. These are computers we're talking about. The whole point is to require less understanding. We would be unintelligent not to use their facilities to make our experience simpler.
For example, those persons who were jailed by the D.C. Anti-gun Ownershipship Law which was eventually declared unconstitutional. They lost a big chunk of their lives to imprisonment, for a law that should have never existed.
Those people had a choice. They could comply with the law until it was overturned. Or they could choose civil disobedience, which necessarily comes along with jail time. There is no realistic third choice where you get to break the law and not be punished.
In the 1980s everyone used a CLI even on home systems. What do you think has happened since then has caused people to lose so much intelligence?
You're right, of course. As I sit here typing this note on my vintage typewriter, listening to the cheerful "Ding" of the bell as the carriage return hits its furthest stop, I can't help but wonder -- what has happened in the past decades that has made people so stupid that they can no longer handle applying some light pressure to the return arm in order to move the carriage back to the left side of the page?
Now, it's off to scan this page, do a little OCR, then copy and paste the result to Slashdot.
However, I am not at all giving Obama any slack on his bigotry about gay marriage and his choice of Rick Warren as a pastor during the inauguration.
Gay marriage is an issue this country is still struggling with deeply. No man, even one who fervently believes that gays should be allowed to marry, is going to come within 1000 yards of the White House. Obama spoke extremely carefully about this topic, when he spoke about it at all. He was campaigning. Let's see now what his true stance as Executive will be on the matter.
Or, to think of it another way, there were only two realistic choices for who would become President today. Would the other choice have suited you better?
Science doesn't investigate only those things which seem "likely." If we operated that way we'd be nowhere by now.
Coming from a background of ignorance, how "likely" would you think it was that a lump of some rare metal could be made to explode with the force of thousands of tons of TNT?
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of cops (like 95% or more) are very good people. Just like any other industry you get a few bad apples who ruin it for everyone else. Just like any unionized shop they are practically forced to keep them. There are only so many desk jobs to go around to place truly bad ones in. You can get them if they do something truly illegal and get caught doing so. Still the reason why cop abuse stories hit the news so hard is because it isn't common place; well it might be more so in some areas but overall it isn't.
Blah, blah blah. We're not talking about janitors here. We're talking about the very people who are given the legal capacity to arrest us, detain us, interrogate us, and jail us. A 5% rate of "bad apples" is ridiculously huge for such a class of people. If they have "zero tolerance" of crime in the general population, then we should have zero tolerance of ethical deficiency on their part.
When it's libelous or slanderous?
So now we have courts ruling that being gay is something to be ashamed of, something inherently damaging to one's reputation? I was not aware that the government held that opinion.
And thankfully, you don't use the Internet -- imagine what they could learn that way!
PC has not meant "personal computer" for a long, long time. If every "personal computer" is a PC, then your iPhone is a PC. Your freaking wristwatch is a PC. I think we can all agree that this usage is dead. "PC" means an Intel architecture computer capable of running Windows. It stands for nothing. Let's call it an "obsolete-cronym"
The NX bit should have always been there, and the fact that it wasn't is incomprehensibly stupid.
I have some friends who build these. Notice I said "build," not "buy." I really don't think you can buy P-size motors. The people who are flying these things are making them themselves.
Computer security by law is worse than security by obscurity, or security by Symantec product.
"Security by user" is even worse. Why on earth do some people believe that one should have to be an expert in security in order to be allowed to use a computer? Your argument basically amounts to saying that some people are just too dumb to be allowed to use a computer. That might have made sense when computers were a new thing. But asking that every computer user (a fairly large fraction of all people on earth) should be a security expert is like saying that everyone should know how to remove their own appendix. It's stupid. We should not have to be experts to safely use computers. This is idiotic. The vendors need to fix their shit.
It does happen, just not nearly as often as you'd expect from the way the law is written.
Theoretically, any officer of the company who was complicit in the criminal behavior can be held criminally liable as an individual. For some reason, this doesn't always happen. What the hell does it mean to "convict" a company, anyway?
Because the guy surely gave his name, and made sure he was easily recognized?
It's not hard to make yourself look nondescript.
Some homeless person who some random dude paid $20 to slap a bunch of fliers on cars is going to help you how?
True, but if some kind of RAM-drive market takes off, all of a sudden it might still be profitable to continue producing RAM using technologies that are 12-18 months old... I won't hold my breath, though.
I watched Burn After Reading last night, so this article is kind of funny. Sounds like a bunch of interesting-looking but ultimately useless information. Just don't let George Clooney shoot you in the face as you hide in John Malkovitch's closet, okay?
Ahh, good old IIFS. Instead of storing a 512-byte block, we store a 128-bit hash. To read the block you just generate random data until you get a block of data that matches the hash. It's foolproof I tell you, as well as speedy.
Right, because the people who pose the biggest risk to national security are those who go to Whitehouse.gov. Anybody trying to learn about the executive branch is clearly a terrorist and must be executed.
I've written code that deals with PDF, both in terms of parsing and rendering it, as well as generating it. PDF is a great format. It certainly doesn't have the difficulties associated with, for instance, PostScript. Adobe's products might have poor performance but this is not due to the file format, which is NOT proprietary but actually quite well-documented.
I have no idea what sorts of crazy things happen inside Adobe's code. Suffice it to say, none of that is mandated by the PDF format.
And I bet that if I give you the simplest instructions in the world, but I give them in Latin instead of English, you might have a hard time following as well. People aren't as good at using CLIs because they aren't used to using CLIs. A list of instructions that begins, "Open a command prompt," is not going to get far if people don't know what that means. I'm fairly certain that even your dumbest user can at least type a line of text into a window if you at least explain how to get there.
That's not what I want. I don't want to have to buy the fastest, most expensive RAM available just to use as a RAM disk. I'd prefer cheaper RAM, maybe two or three generations old, that I can get in massive quantities. Sure, put it on the motherboard, but don't put it on the main memory bus -- that's not its purpose, and I don't want it eating up gobs of the normal address space. It's for storage only.
It doesn't have to be as fast as main memory, just faster than your typical disk interface. Make up an entirely new interface if you want. Call it RID -- RAM integrated drive.
You're talking about something that was lost in 1951, not 2003. The Cold War wasn't even fully fired up yet. Speaking of hindsight, yes, this kind of thing should probably have been recorded. Maybe it was, somewhere on some piece of paper that was lost or burned or simply misplaced. It seems easy to forget how much computers help us organize information now.
Scary picture of the rusty unearthed safe & dirty glass bottle full of 99.96% pure plutomium here:
How can it be 99.96% pure when the half-life of plutonium-239 is 24100 years? Even if it started out 100% pure, it would take only 14 years to decay to 99.96% purity. This stuff is supposedly older than that.
0.5 ^ (n / 24100) = 0.9996
(n / 24100) * log 0.5 = log 0.9996
n / 24100 = log 0.9996 / log 0.5 = 0.000577193463
n = 24100 * 0.000577193463 ~= 13.9
I think you missed my point, was that the switch from typewriters to computers wasn't done because users were too "dumb" to use typewriters, it was done because the computer is a better technology. Similarly, we didn't go from CLI to GUI because people were too "dumb" to use a CLI -- the GUI is simply superior for many tasks.
Besides, I don't understand why people try to correlate the level of knowledge required to use a system with general intelligence. These are computers we're talking about. The whole point is to require less understanding. We would be unintelligent not to use their facilities to make our experience simpler.
For example, those persons who were jailed by the D.C. Anti-gun Ownershipship Law which was eventually declared unconstitutional. They lost a big chunk of their lives to imprisonment, for a law that should have never existed.
Those people had a choice. They could comply with the law until it was overturned. Or they could choose civil disobedience, which necessarily comes along with jail time. There is no realistic third choice where you get to break the law and not be punished.
In the 1980s everyone used a CLI even on home systems. What do you think has happened since then has caused people to lose so much intelligence?
You're right, of course. As I sit here typing this note on my vintage typewriter, listening to the cheerful "Ding" of the bell as the carriage return hits its furthest stop, I can't help but wonder -- what has happened in the past decades that has made people so stupid that they can no longer handle applying some light pressure to the return arm in order to move the carriage back to the left side of the page?
Now, it's off to scan this page, do a little OCR, then copy and paste the result to Slashdot.
However, I am not at all giving Obama any slack on his bigotry about gay marriage and his choice of Rick Warren as a pastor during the inauguration.
Gay marriage is an issue this country is still struggling with deeply. No man, even one who fervently believes that gays should be allowed to marry, is going to come within 1000 yards of the White House. Obama spoke extremely carefully about this topic, when he spoke about it at all. He was campaigning. Let's see now what his true stance as Executive will be on the matter.
Or, to think of it another way, there were only two realistic choices for who would become President today. Would the other choice have suited you better?
Science doesn't investigate only those things which seem "likely." If we operated that way we'd be nowhere by now.
Coming from a background of ignorance, how "likely" would you think it was that a lump of some rare metal could be made to explode with the force of thousands of tons of TNT?