I only said that that was the original, and philosophical purpose of the law.
Bands of fringe militants may not be able to
overthow a consensus goverment, but a majority popular revolution is something else.
In the latter case, a disarmed populace would not be as able or willing to revolt. If they were totally weaponless, then a few elites with a relatively small police/army could hold them off.
In the modern age however, our military is so staggeringly powerful, that without significant support among the soldiers, there could not likely be any successful rebellion.
Our warriors are extensively "psychologically conditioned" and screened for disloyal tendancies, moreso the higher in rank you look- so an armed revolution is unlikely is all but the worst of situations.
Ive always questioned Quantum Computing in this light:
The idea is that you set of a string of qbits to work on a given problem. Then they will try each possible answer impossibly fast, and the interference waves will cancel out all the wrong answers so that your system converges on the "right" answer. Once it has converged you halt it by checking its state, spending a little energy, and getting your answer.
Even if the above is all true, the problem then becomes setting up a quantum computer for a given problem. Everyone assumes that these will be just like general purpose computers, which I think they will not be. Posing problems to a Quantum machine so that it could answer them may be as tough as solving NP-complete problems themselves.
(Not all difficult problems are known to be NP-complete per se.)
So even if they do work in that sense, they may only be suitable for a limited subset of problems, or perhaps none at all.
However, I dont even believe the basic premise that these machines will necesarrily converge upon the "right" answer.
NO! Properly and carefully expressed, rights are just that, right. That is, it is ethically wrong to infringe upon them. Now if you want to be a crass utilitarian, and allow your society to "limit rights" and do other ethically questionable things because of some concept of greater good, then you can do that. I will oppose you.
They are not that obvious. All societies except anarchies limit "rights" to an extent. What is to decide is which to limit and by how much.
Then what about raising it for those 18 and older?
or 21 and older? those who are heads of their families? Maybe the kids cant move out because they cannot afford it. And the misconception that increasing the minimum wage will hurt the economy is totally wrong. People who make very little have to spend all of it. Giving them more lets them spend more- pumping all they make back into the economy. Whereas a rich person getting another million will save/invest it, thereby keeping it out of the economy. (obviously the companies they invest in cannot make a profit unless someone is buying their product/service)
You mentioned Hollywood glamorizing criminal activity. Do you really think that Hollywood influences otherwise good people to go bad?
So you are saying that people are naturally bad, and the present situation is the best we can ever hope for?
Individuals must still shoulder their own responsiblility, but as a society, there are things we can do to reduce the chance that someone becomes a criminal.
Keeping families together, and giving them to opportunity to escape poverty is a good start.
Allowing every child with the grades to get a college education is another. (college tuitions need not be the overpriced monstrositious they commonly are either) Increasing respect/requirements for educators is a good change. Right now they are treated like scum.
Crime in the US is a lot higher than it should be, I agree with you. Also, a firearm wielded responsible can be an effective self defense.
In a more idealized society, where such crime was less likely, there would be little use for defensive firearms. When the "founders" of the US constitution envisioned the right to bear arms, they were not thinking of criminals swarming the streets that civials would need to fend off with guns. What they were concerned with was Big Brother and Co.
As a solution for the abundance of crime, increasing police numbers, or toughening penalties wont do anything(short of becomeing China). So the individual is left to fend for himself until the Government finds out how to make legal life more attractive. (legalizing drugs? Raising the minimum wage to the living wage?)
So there is an argument based upon the current crime situation for personal firearms. Its a secondary argument to the political one though. (If the system were doing its job, etc)
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, police have no obligation to protect you from anything. As a practical matter, they have no ability to do so. To be effective protection, they have to be with you.
Flat out wrong. Study adj., or criminal justice. By far the main power of the police is deterrent, which does not require them to be physically present everywhere all the time. And as for obligation, do you really think that a police officer is allowed to calmly ignore that your donut shop is being robbed while he is on duty?
Unless those foreigners invade the USA. Then citizens are obliged to help protect their homeland
This is an aspect of conscription, it has nothing to do with civlian firearms ownership. If the government enlists you to fight, they will issue you a weapon.
Again, unless he goes hiking with you, a park service employee is going to be little protection against the occasional cougar or bear.
They have practically eliminated any sub-species of animal which is willing to prey upon man. Those that survive have a built in fear of us. Many people with guns are easily killed by bears. Many people without guns, avoid being killed without need of them. (A ten year old girl fended off a predatory black with a pot of boiling water). The parklands you are allowed to camp in are domesticated- nothing will try to eat you, normally. There is no strong argument for gun ownership here.
The best reason to preserve the freedom to keep and bear arms is that each person has an innate right to keep and bear arms, a right that springs from his right to life.
What people have a right to do or not do is not always obvious. Perhaps in 100 or so years, the tech for building thermonuclear devices will be accesible to high school students. Should anyone have the right to bear enough firepower to end life on a planet at a whim? The argument clearly doesnt scale as clearly as freedom of speech for example.
What is obvoius is that in order to have a strong functioning society, you need to limit people rights in certain ways. Conversly to have a productive and vibrant one, you need to give individuals as many rights and freedoms as possible. Anarchies work no better than Utopias.
The police dont protect you necesarily by arriving in time to physically stop you from ever getting hurt. But knowing that they will eventually catch you if you are a law-breaker is supposed to be a deterrent.
In all practicality, you can say that since in this coutry that deterent is non-effective, you can have to your guns to be a pseudo vigilante.
And there is nothing wrong with that if you are strictly defensive in your use of them. But protection from ciriminals et al is a weak argument for the possesion of individual firearms, especially in coutries that have less obnoxious crime rates.
However, the argument that rifles are the people's freedom's teeth, should be valid in any coutry. Its their insurance against bad government.
the argument that guns are to protect you from other citizens is mistaken. The police and FBI do that. They are not to protect you from foreigners. The DoD and CIA do that. They are not to protect you from animals or natural disasters, the park service and national guard handle that.
Well, what are guns for? They are to protect you from the police, the DoD, the CIA, etc... in short the freedom to bear arms was created as insurance against bad goverment. Its basically to help enable revolution more easily, should it be needed.
Using the GPL does not obligate you in any way to the FSF. Many people choose to assign their rights to the FSF for safe keeping, but most users of the GPL give nothing to the FSF.
Why dont you just be honest and say that your business plan requires commercial licensing, its preferable to the patronizing lie about rights.
And about business plans- it is true the old manufacturing paradigm has much more profit potential. But that may be what kills it.
There are plenty of techies, but they have to prerequisites to talking about the tech involved:
they have to be able to hack it. this means a license they can use, not this crappy "well show you 1/3 of the code so you can contribute to our proprietary product".
It actually has to be what it claims. if you went to the sawmill projects thinking you would be working on a new OS, you might be dissapointed.
you paid a 25$ install fee for shipping? i didnt have to pay anything to get my telocity setup. The connection is good most of the time (IP over ATM) but their name servers go down alot (they use tons of windows boxen) Overall I thinks its the best deal around: a static IP address for $50 a month, a 6 PC masq'd LAN running an old P90 with a non-functional CPU-fan as a NAT router, and it works like a charm.
My only problem with the linux router is that ipchains in linux 2.2.X doesnt remasq packets, so its kindof hard to get starcraft to work right without an ugly patch that breaks serveral other aspects of ipchains (security).
I am not familiar with bsd, and dont have the time to look into it, so i'll wait until 2.4 is out to upgrade that. (fingers still crossed for late december)
Word to the wise: save the box they shipped your telocity hub to you with: if you ever end your service with them, they will ask for the original shipping container back. Too bad for me Ive already lost it. (Hope they wont pound my credit card for a stupid box+foam container if i quit them)
1024 bytes will suck for carrying an IP packet that is just a TCP ACK (and about 30% of TCP traffic is dataless ACKs).
Thats just it though- I did not mean to use TCP over ATM, I was meaning to use ATM's reliable transport features so TCP would be redundant.
It also sucks for carrying interactave voice traffic (i.e. phones)
Actually thats what it was originally designed to do, and it is very good at it. IP is what sucks at carrying real time streams.
ATM and Frame Relay don't give anywhere close to light speed switching. Lambda switching will/should do that, but it will be more closely related to MPLS then the other schemes!!!
I know that current ATM converts to electric signals to switch, what I meant was an optically switched ATMlike protocol would propagate at the speed of light. Signalling will still be far slower, but an established connection will be full speed.
MPLS is really a stright forward attempt to get the advantages of IP over Frame Relay without all that complex Frame Relay stuff. And it is simpler then Frame Relay, and ATM, at least if you compair them fairly.
reading about MPLS from
hereand here It looks basically like a way to do IP over X, where X is Frame relay or ATM. It cannot be simpler than them if it requires them to work. Its just an extra layer. What I was talking about was getting rid of IP altogether, and using a switched protocol more directly. thats all. If that were the case MPLS would be unnecessary.
I was waiting for someone to bring that up-
ATM does indeed have a horrendous header to payload ratio. That is why it wont replace IP as it is.
About variable vs fixed sized packets: well that is one of the main tenets of ATM. When you have a fixed size packet you can make a whole lot of assumptions in your network stack, which can seriously speed up performance. The problem is picking a packet size which is small enough for all hosts to handle quickly, and large enough to move reduce overhead. I think something in the neighborhood of 1024 bytes would be appropriate.
You will notice I said something like ATM, not something that is ATM.
MPLS seems to be an attempt to get IP over ATM. I dont think that will work- sounds like the worst of both worlds in terms of complexity. What I would advocate is something more along the lines of straight improved ATM.
The advantage of such a system are essentially these two: low latency- in an established connection packets propagate at the speed of light, reliable transport - tcp style virtual circuits are the normal mode of communication rather than a datagram oriented method with a virtual circuit built on top of it.
we wont even get the full deal on the player half of the codec either. The version they are going to "Open Source" is a crippled version without "encryption" support (read "fair use prevention" support).
I'd rather not see this format become popular. I'm sure it will have plenty of attack dog laywer's guarding its patents and what-not. Lets just keep waiting for Ogg Video.
Moreover the codec will be supported on all platforms (Windows, Macintosh, BeOS, *nix (inlcuding Linux), Amiga...). To accomplish this the code of the player will become an open source.
They say nothing about opening their codec, just the player. Moreover, they already have investors, IPO plans, and an NDA. They arent going to release their necoder if their investors are worried about a guaranteed profit angle.
Pretty much more of the same. Even if it works its not anything Free enough to displace WMP. Nothing to see here, move along everyone...
I would argue for ANSI C over pascal, and also require knowledge of the command line before doing any programming, but basically I agree with you.
I'm disappointed when I see compsci students who dont even know about the file system heirachy, or how a process is invoked. (Probably has to do with being spoilt by the GUI) I say you just cannot program without knowing those.
In the article, and from listening to all the networking types I know, it seems that everybody thinks the future lies within IP.
IP however is really not a high performance protocol. It is routed rather than switched, it has variable size packets, It has a relativly high header to payload ratio, and its dependant on the concept of packet broadcast. It was originally designed as a way to tie together a bunch of ethernet LAN's, and its really not suitable for a low latency, full planet network.
I think something similiar to ATM would make a real 'information superhighway', in contrast to the information dirt trail we have now. I mean video on demand, streaming virtual reality, video conferencing, etc.
One problem is that IP is so deeply embedded into all unix variants. Another is creating a switched optical fiber protocol that would also be suitable for use over a home LAN. With the rise of 100megabit and gigabit LAN's however hubs are essentially gone and replaced by switches anyway- so having one's home network use a switched protocol instead of IP is the logical extension to that.
Taking into account optical packet switching of an asynchronous fixed size packet WAN, contious signal amplification (with erbium or something similiar), and bluetooth wireless gadgets; then we would have our futuristic network.
I can only hope that people realize that IP as it is today, or even IPv6 with its complexity is just not up to the task we have in mind for it. It will be a long process of rewriting, and I would like to see a clear standard for a new non-proprietary protocol emerge.
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and inventiveness found in "third world" countries. Some of them are building out their telecommunications by skipping the 19th (copper) and 20th (fiber) century and jumping straight to the 21st (wireless).
Problems: Wireless is not the panacea you think it is. First of all the connection is subject to interference, weather, variable but usually high latency, etc. Plus it is of limited bandwidth. It can be considered a form of pollution if overdone.(see cell phone subject)
Fiber is the only way were going to get to the 21st century, it just takes longer to get it installed. These countries are going for whats economical and fast.
Yikes, I knew someone who had to learn Eiffel whilst studying at Rochester University in NY, and I can only say that I pitied him.
And slashdot posters are hardly anti-java. For the most part I believe that Ive noticed more pro java sentiment than not. That also goes for the Free programming comunity as a whole.
If they wanted, they could get software for C++, java, or any language they want quite for free.
That include quite mature development environments such as bash, tcsh, vim, emacs, gcc, etc.
Why schools arent using more Free unix surprises me still, considering how big of a concern budgeting is for them.
I resisted learing perl for a long time. Its an ugly language with some serious semantic difficulties. The syntax (at least a subset of it) is nice though. You dont have that over rigid formatting of python, or the mega-quirkiness of tcl wherin even blocks of scope are a kludge. Perl has lots of libraries, but that doesnt mean much- because so do other not so good languages.
Perl is so pervasive within the free software community and used so often as a sysadmin lingua-franca for scripting that I ended up learning it anyway. I dont regret it, but I would never use it for any large system if I could avoid it.
As to failing the AP test, not likely. Even without knowing a lick of perl, any decent programmer who knows any C syntax family language could probably pass that.
Considering that for pre-compiled applications, the C/C++ duopoly is a given as the language regnant,
it seems so weird that the search for the ideal interpreted language goes on. I'm pretty sure its not Perl, Tcl, python, basic, nor Java. I dont know scheme, but I doubt that it or any lisp family language will become the dominant script.
Java is a whole lot more than interpreted C++, and thats probably whats wrong with it. The AP board is annointing it solely because of hype and popularity. I would predict that more people will be able to pass the test though.
For the curious bruce, what scripting/interpreted language do you prefer at the moment?
Slashdot Mirror
Bands of fringe militants may not be able to overthow a consensus goverment, but a majority popular revolution is something else.
In the latter case, a disarmed populace would not be as able or willing to revolt. If they were totally weaponless, then a few elites with a relatively small police/army could hold them off.
In the modern age however, our military is so staggeringly powerful, that without significant support among the soldiers, there could not likely be any successful rebellion. Our warriors are extensively "psychologically conditioned" and screened for disloyal tendancies, moreso the higher in rank you look- so an armed revolution is unlikely is all but the worst of situations.
The idea is that you set of a string of qbits to work on a given problem. Then they will try each possible answer impossibly fast, and the interference waves will cancel out all the wrong answers so that your system converges on the "right" answer. Once it has converged you halt it by checking its state, spending a little energy, and getting your answer.
Even if the above is all true, the problem then becomes setting up a quantum computer for a given problem. Everyone assumes that these will be just like general purpose computers, which I think they will not be. Posing problems to a Quantum machine so that it could answer them may be as tough as solving NP-complete problems themselves. (Not all difficult problems are known to be NP-complete per se.)
So even if they do work in that sense, they may only be suitable for a limited subset of problems, or perhaps none at all.
However, I dont even believe the basic premise that these machines will necesarrily converge upon the "right" answer.
Rather than blindly believing it one should remember what came of the big hype surrounding: AI -"we're only a few years away ©1967", COBOL -"the programming language for managers and non-techies", 4GL -"Natural Language Processing", The "paperless office", National missile defense, 100% portable java code, MULTICS, the "New Economy", the "Information Super Highway", and just about every CASE tool ever.
I might have mentioned cold fusion, except that I believe that cold fusion is more likely than quantum computing.
In order to actually get that much, after lawyers fees et al, you have to sue for around $5 billion...
They are not that obvious. All societies except anarchies limit "rights" to an extent. What is to decide is which to limit and by how much.
You mentioned Hollywood glamorizing criminal activity. Do you really think that Hollywood influences otherwise good people to go bad?
So you are saying that people are naturally bad, and the present situation is the best we can ever hope for?
Individuals must still shoulder their own responsiblility, but as a society, there are things we can do to reduce the chance that someone becomes a criminal.
Keeping families together, and giving them to opportunity to escape poverty is a good start. Allowing every child with the grades to get a college education is another. (college tuitions need not be the overpriced monstrositious they commonly are either) Increasing respect/requirements for educators is a good change. Right now they are treated like scum.
Anyway, i think weve strayed too far...
In a more idealized society, where such crime was less likely, there would be little use for defensive firearms. When the "founders" of the US constitution envisioned the right to bear arms, they were not thinking of criminals swarming the streets that civials would need to fend off with guns. What they were concerned with was Big Brother and Co.
As a solution for the abundance of crime, increasing police numbers, or toughening penalties wont do anything(short of becomeing China). So the individual is left to fend for himself until the Government finds out how to make legal life more attractive. (legalizing drugs? Raising the minimum wage to the living wage?)
So there is an argument based upon the current crime situation for personal firearms. Its a secondary argument to the political one though. (If the system were doing its job, etc)
Flat out wrong. Study adj., or criminal justice. By far the main power of the police is deterrent, which does not require them to be physically present everywhere all the time. And as for obligation, do you really think that a police officer is allowed to calmly ignore that your donut shop is being robbed while he is on duty?
Unless those foreigners invade the USA. Then citizens are obliged to help protect their homeland
This is an aspect of conscription, it has nothing to do with civlian firearms ownership. If the government enlists you to fight, they will issue you a weapon.
Again, unless he goes hiking with you, a park service employee is going to be little protection against the occasional cougar or bear.
They have practically eliminated any sub-species of animal which is willing to prey upon man. Those that survive have a built in fear of us. Many people with guns are easily killed by bears. Many people without guns, avoid being killed without need of them. (A ten year old girl fended off a predatory black with a pot of boiling water). The parklands you are allowed to camp in are domesticated- nothing will try to eat you, normally. There is no strong argument for gun ownership here.
The best reason to preserve the freedom to keep and bear arms is that each person has an innate right to keep and bear arms, a right that springs from his right to life.
What people have a right to do or not do is not always obvious. Perhaps in 100 or so years, the tech for building thermonuclear devices will be accesible to high school students. Should anyone have the right to bear enough firepower to end life on a planet at a whim? The argument clearly doesnt scale as clearly as freedom of speech for example.
What is obvoius is that in order to have a strong functioning society, you need to limit people rights in certain ways. Conversly to have a productive and vibrant one, you need to give individuals as many rights and freedoms as possible. Anarchies work no better than Utopias.
In all practicality, you can say that since in this coutry that deterent is non-effective, you can have to your guns to be a pseudo vigilante. And there is nothing wrong with that if you are strictly defensive in your use of them. But protection from ciriminals et al is a weak argument for the possesion of individual firearms, especially in coutries that have less obnoxious crime rates.
However, the argument that rifles are the people's freedom's teeth, should be valid in any coutry. Its their insurance against bad government.
Well, what are guns for? They are to protect you from the police, the DoD, the CIA, etc... in short the freedom to bear arms was created as insurance against bad goverment. Its basically to help enable revolution more easily, should it be needed.
That will solve all our problems, lets ignore them!
Why dont you just be honest and say that your business plan requires commercial licensing, its preferable to the patronizing lie about rights.
And about business plans- it is true the old manufacturing paradigm has much more profit potential. But that may be what kills it.
My only problem with the linux router is that ipchains in linux 2.2.X doesnt remasq packets, so its kindof hard to get starcraft to work right without an ugly patch that breaks serveral other aspects of ipchains (security).
I am not familiar with bsd, and dont have the time to look into it, so i'll wait until 2.4 is out to upgrade that. (fingers still crossed for late december)
Word to the wise: save the box they shipped your telocity hub to you with: if you ever end your service with them, they will ask for the original shipping container back. Too bad for me Ive already lost it. (Hope they wont pound my credit card for a stupid box+foam container if i quit them)
Thats just it though- I did not mean to use TCP over ATM, I was meaning to use ATM's reliable transport features so TCP would be redundant.
It also sucks for carrying interactave voice traffic (i.e. phones)
Actually thats what it was originally designed to do, and it is very good at it. IP is what sucks at carrying real time streams.
ATM and Frame Relay don't give anywhere close to light speed switching. Lambda switching will/should do that, but it will be more closely related to MPLS then the other schemes!!!
I know that current ATM converts to electric signals to switch, what I meant was an optically switched ATMlike protocol would propagate at the speed of light. Signalling will still be far slower, but an established connection will be full speed.
MPLS is really a stright forward attempt to get the advantages of IP over Frame Relay without all that complex Frame Relay stuff. And it is simpler then Frame Relay, and ATM, at least if you compair them fairly. reading about MPLS from here and here It looks basically like a way to do IP over X, where X is Frame relay or ATM. It cannot be simpler than them if it requires them to work. Its just an extra layer. What I was talking about was getting rid of IP altogether, and using a switched protocol more directly. thats all. If that were the case MPLS would be unnecessary.
About variable vs fixed sized packets: well that is one of the main tenets of ATM. When you have a fixed size packet you can make a whole lot of assumptions in your network stack, which can seriously speed up performance. The problem is picking a packet size which is small enough for all hosts to handle quickly, and large enough to move reduce overhead. I think something in the neighborhood of 1024 bytes would be appropriate.
You will notice I said something like ATM, not something that is ATM.
MPLS seems to be an attempt to get IP over ATM. I dont think that will work- sounds like the worst of both worlds in terms of complexity. What I would advocate is something more along the lines of straight improved ATM.
The advantage of such a system are essentially these two: low latency- in an established connection packets propagate at the speed of light, reliable transport - tcp style virtual circuits are the normal mode of communication rather than a datagram oriented method with a virtual circuit built on top of it.
I'd rather not see this format become popular. I'm sure it will have plenty of attack dog laywer's guarding its patents and what-not. Lets just keep waiting for Ogg Video.
They say nothing about opening their codec, just the player. Moreover, they already have investors, IPO plans, and an NDA. They arent going to release their necoder if their investors are worried about a guaranteed profit angle.
Pretty much more of the same. Even if it works its not anything Free enough to displace WMP. Nothing to see here, move along everyone...
I'm disappointed when I see compsci students who dont even know about the file system heirachy, or how a process is invoked. (Probably has to do with being spoilt by the GUI) I say you just cannot program without knowing those.
IP however is really not a high performance protocol. It is routed rather than switched, it has variable size packets, It has a relativly high header to payload ratio, and its dependant on the concept of packet broadcast. It was originally designed as a way to tie together a bunch of ethernet LAN's, and its really not suitable for a low latency, full planet network.
I think something similiar to ATM would make a real 'information superhighway', in contrast to the information dirt trail we have now. I mean video on demand, streaming virtual reality, video conferencing, etc.
One problem is that IP is so deeply embedded into all unix variants. Another is creating a switched optical fiber protocol that would also be suitable for use over a home LAN. With the rise of 100megabit and gigabit LAN's however hubs are essentially gone and replaced by switches anyway- so having one's home network use a switched protocol instead of IP is the logical extension to that.
Taking into account optical packet switching of an asynchronous fixed size packet WAN, contious signal amplification (with erbium or something similiar), and bluetooth wireless gadgets; then we would have our futuristic network.
I can only hope that people realize that IP as it is today, or even IPv6 with its complexity is just not up to the task we have in mind for it. It will be a long process of rewriting, and I would like to see a clear standard for a new non-proprietary protocol emerge.
Fiber is the only way were going to get to the 21st century, it just takes longer to get it installed. These countries are going for whats economical and fast.
And slashdot posters are hardly anti-java. For the most part I believe that Ive noticed more pro java sentiment than not. That also goes for the Free programming comunity as a whole.
and btw C++ is not that bad, really now.
Why schools arent using more Free unix surprises me still, considering how big of a concern budgeting is for them.
Perl is so pervasive within the free software community and used so often as a sysadmin lingua-franca for scripting that I ended up learning it anyway. I dont regret it, but I would never use it for any large system if I could avoid it.
As to failing the AP test, not likely. Even without knowing a lick of perl, any decent programmer who knows any C syntax family language could probably pass that.
Considering that for pre-compiled applications, the C/C++ duopoly is a given as the language regnant, it seems so weird that the search for the ideal interpreted language goes on. I'm pretty sure its not Perl, Tcl, python, basic, nor Java. I dont know scheme, but I doubt that it or any lisp family language will become the dominant script.
Java is a whole lot more than interpreted C++, and thats probably whats wrong with it. The AP board is annointing it solely because of hype and popularity. I would predict that more people will be able to pass the test though.
For the curious bruce, what scripting/interpreted language do you prefer at the moment?
Its amazing what hype can do. In the court of opinion, java is indeed taking C++'s old spot.