But the supreme court can and will strike down one that violates our rights under the constitution.
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
on
X On OSX Now Free
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· Score: 1
A 7500 is a bloody ancient machine. I own an 8500 that will be G3-400 ugraded soon. I think one of the things that PC people miss is the longevity of Macs: time to obsolescence is incredibly long. I was running a 7100/G3 215 until a few months ago when its *really* old memory hardware caught up with it.
Here, here. An open-source medicine that I could just pop down to the druggist and acquire the drugs I believe I need based on my investigation of my symptoms would really improve my life.
I would have *killed* for the internet in grade school. I was so bloody *bored*. I think there is a very real missed opportunity with the head/sand guys here, especially with gifted(?) children who regular teachers can't relate to. A lot of these kids would simply learn all by themselves if left in a room with an internet link. Yes, some of the stuff they learn might be porn, but that will happen sooner or later anyway. We have no real trust in our children anymore. Part of the problems facing schools these days is the us vs. them attitude. The children aren't trusted and aren't included. They are managed, and this doesn't work really well. Imagine a school where a 162 IQ kid actually learns something other than how to hit the minimum required of him so people will leave him alone and he can just be bored instead of bored *and* annoyed.
Geez, these are supposed to be intelligent people teaching our kids yet they wish to restrict access to information for the very kids that would otherwise gain that information like a sponge. I would have.
About NPR. They have the biggest liberal bias in the industry, when they actually report news, that is. How many 'hippy culture is dying' pieces did it take for them to get a solid reputation for penetrating reporting?
Ok, maybe it's been a while since I listened to NPR, but the bias was unmistakeable to my little conservative mind.
Objectivity won't ever be reached. Bias is always a problem. On/., you can yell when you see a bias.
I matched up in the high 80% with Harry Browne. That's who I was going to vote for, anyway. Some odd little facts, though: I matched better with Pat Buchanan, who I'd rather see shot than elected president, then I did with George W., who I was going to vote for until I found out about Harry Browne. Guess it's not 100% accurate...
Actually, on the first fold, the numbers are ridiculous:
assume a square 6 units on an edge.
First fold is at the mid-point of height and width; it essentially removes 6 units of perimeter while adding back sq(18) ~ 4.24. Then, fold back so that a triangle that is 1 unit on a side is revealed(trust me; math is simpler).
Now, we have two unit triangles whose hypotenuse is exposed and one whose sides are exposed. This adds up to 2*sq(2) + 2, or 4.83, which, wile larger than the diagonal, is certainly smaller than the original 6.
Premise:
any part of the subdivided segment can be treated independantly.
Any fold that further subdivides affects a localized segment in the same way as the first fold affected the whole segment; it shortens it. Therefore, by the principle of inductance, you will always shorten the perimeter.
Unfortunately, this proof only holds for equilateral triangles. My brain hurts too much to figure one out for any other kind, but I doubt you will find any situation that is significantly different.
I realise that an infinite number of edges is often assumed to give an infinite perimeter, but that breaks down here, as the length of each individual edge decreases faster then the number of edges increases.
This is a bit like the infinite area, finite volume problem, which is easily dealt with on the basis of the fact that the inverse function multiplied against d, the derivative of the area, will approach some constant if you take its limit, whereas the volume function of the same function is constantly decreasing.
Ok, I'll bite. The concept of God is flawed because it only takes all the questions of existence and puts them in a little box and calls it God. It doesn't answer them. Where do we come from? God. Where does he come from? See? Adding an extra layer fools the average person who doesn't really care but won't fool the person, philosophical or scientific, who is really looking for answers. After you reject the concept of God as an explanation, you discover that he's not really all that convenient anymore. There's no physical evidence. So, Zarathustra(?) comes running down from the mountain shouting "God is dead" and Christians entirely miss the point and try to hang Nietsche.
It has settled into Creationism vs. Evolution, when, in reality, there's no way to be certain the whole thing wasn't made yesterday.
Existence exists because non-existence doesn't.
Well, I've been a conservative Christian, and quit because of exactly this kind of reasoning. See, God created the earth and sees and all that in them is, etc., but in fact, all you've done is move the complexity into the person of God. Even an amateur engineer acknowledges that complexity generated can't be greater then the complexity in the generator, and if the universe is "wonderfully and marvelously made", then God is a very complex entity indeed. Problem comes when you try to figure out where God came from. Fine, so he's been around forever. Let's just look at the thing systemically then: as compares to non-existance, why does he exist? His odds of existence are vastly worse than the entire universe, so the situation is actually worse: not only have you not really answered the fundamental question of where we came from, but by transferring all your random chance into the being of God, you've created something that is even *less* likely than that which you wished to explain.
Christians make something infinite so that they can hang a lot of things off of it. Bad things happen? Mysterious ways of God. Evil in the world? Titanic struggle of good vs. evil.
But, their convenient box for improbable events breaks down if you examine it closely, which, trust me, they encourage you *not* to do.
It's the necessity of believing in a God that did nothing for me and failed to answer fundamental philosophical questions that caused me to become an agnostic.
The actual duties of a president
on
Should You Vote?
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· Score: 1
I don't believe it is our right nor our duty to enact 'shuttle diplomacy'. I was raised overseas, and believe me, they hate the fact that the US feels it has to meddle because they are somehow incapable of solving their own problems. This causes the rest of the world to become dependant on us and then we have to continue doing it or risk disrupting the world. It is dangerous for us and for them: for us because we have to spend an ever-increasing amount on this shuttle diplomacy; for them because they are dependant on us and if we quit, they can't solve their own problems.
The only compelling reason for US intervention is direct affront to any of our concerns in the area. Kuwait being attacked is a clear case of vested interest because of the oil situation. Kuwait could have certainly afforded to buy a better army, but they did not. We rescued them because the spectre of an Iraqi controlled oilflow was terrible indeed. George Bush enlisted the support of the UN first, scoring big points.
Since then, Clinton has been all over the place dealing with issues the US shouldn't deal with and doing it unilaterally for the most part, sometimes in direct opposition to the UN.
As a person who was abroad at the time Clinton got elected, I can't convey the total shock felt by people overseas at George Bush's loss. He was clearly the best foreign policy president since Jimmy Carter.
As to Al Gore being adept at foreign policy, I seriously doubt it. I don't think GW would be very good, either, but GW has Dick Cheney, part of his dad's team. If you're going to vote foreign policy, Dick Cheney is your man, and I'm certain GW would have no problem taking his advice.
There is a bit both ways. Europe has attempted to ram many things through the UN and elsewhere that restrict freedoms here in the States. I'm thinking specifically of the anti-cracker treaty and the UN's well known stance on gun control.
Geez. They really want to cheat, don't they? I can make some static maps on a z80 that can accomplish that. If I know exactly where I am and exactly what the status of my tires are and have a nice Bosch motronic control system with a Ferrari F1 manumatic and some simple shifting pattern maps, then all I need after that is some simple lines to *always* take, depending on the track conditions, and there's no way any human could beat it.
As to handling wet track and skids, my 1996 Camaro can do that...
I immediately thought this, but then remembered cursing driving simulators. I race a bit on the side, and the feeling in the seat is almost as important to knowing how far you can push a car or the state of the car as what you could see.
This is partly a violation of the fourth and fifth amendments. International treaty does not supercede the US constitution.
Essentially, if an ISP maintains data that could cause it to be convicted under this thing, the fifth amendment would not require it to deliver such information.
The fourth amendment should stop an ISP from doing the spying in the first place because it is at the behest of the government and without probable cause and therefore dose constitute unlawful search and seisure.
It is amazing to me that despite a long history of legal tradition to the contrary, we could sign a treaty, and all of the sudden, ISPs could become liable for content for which they have no control.
That is a scary spectre.
Seems that nobody remembers Harry Browne, the Libertarian party candidate, who has unbelievably managed to stick to the issues.
Nader's entire career has been an attempt to assassinate whoever is in power. He's made all his political capital through the failures of others. He insists that big corporations are the problem with America without compellingly proving that there is a problem with America.
The Republicans and Democrats have been tearing at each other for quite some time. Fact is that there isn't much difference between the two. One supports gun control, the other wants to reduce abortions. That's about it. Yes, I know there's a large difference in their budgets, but that gets passed through congress, and they'll only be able to change the percentages a bit.
So, what's left? Character assassination. If they truly had anything new or anything different, they'd be able to say, 'look at this issue', but instead, they are reduced to ribbing each other. It's pathetic, really.
(Shameless plug) Harry Browne and the libertarians have a platform that is neither radical nor new; it is what the constitution originally was intended to do. Jefferson is the origination of the Libertarian philosophy; he wrote the constitution. Although this isn't new, it does get back to the idea of only fixing problems where they actually exist and allowing the greatest personal freedom otherwise, which is what allows the giant strides in technology this country has seen. (/Shameless plug)
I am voting libertarian this election most likely. Second choice: GW Bush. The reason is simple: I'm paying the equivalent of someone's salary in taxes. I know people who make less per month than I pay in taxes. The tax situation in this country is ridiculous. I know a lot of people say that it's because I make a lot, but I really don't. Also, people say that I shouldn't complain because others don't make so much. That may be true, but it doesn't cover the fact that *my* money is being used for things I don't approve of and things I don't need.
I've got government doing an awful lot of things I don't want and ignoring the things I do and the net result is that I pay an entire person's salary in taxes.
How about roads? National defense? Instead, several million dollars of my money was used to buy back guns in poor neighborhoods, something which I'm emphatically against.
The fact is that our current society is a result of our development into a more technical and knowledge-based economy. Tax apportionment isn't going to modify the fundamental situation of the economy, but it is unfair to me and many like me.
The Libertarians want to spend less of my money doing things I don't want. I'm all for that.
Of course, days of yore, we were concerned with reading a block from tape that was close to a convenient memory size, so often wasted tape space rather than deal with the overlap.
People keep attributing crime to one thing or another willy-nilly, but the only thing that crime has ever been reliably attributed to is the ratio of the median income for the majority of the population to the median income of the rich. When this gets too wide, crime goes up. When it narrows, crime goes down. It's been narrowing. Crime has been going down. It was very narrow in the fifties. Crime was low. In the eighties, with inner-city blight and practically no means of employment for inner-city youths, crime went sky-high.
Crime isn't caused by guns; it isn't caused by violence in the media; it isn't caused by bad parenting; it isn't caused by lack of government or increase in police patrol; it isn't caused by war or peace. There are criminal tendencies in all of us, and when desparation gets high enough, the crime line on the bell curve moves and we get more criminals. When there is readily available employment everywhere, the line moves away from the center, and fewer and fewer people excersize their criminal tendencies.
That is the only reason anyone has ever been able to prove. The correlation between personal wealth and crime is extremely easy to demonstrate, whereas even parenting is hard. In Columbine, it is obvious that bad parenting had something to do with it, but there are plenty of situations where good people come from bad homes. Statistically, bad parenting isn't significant anymore than violent movies and games are. And availability of guns has nothing at all to do with crime rates except to act as a deterrant to petty crime, so a high saturation of guns in a society will reduce the instances of burglary and robbery and a certain decrease in homicide, but will certainly not increase these things unless they are in the hands of criminals only.
It doesn't really matter. People keep assuming that administration wants to know or cares if their pet server OS is secure. They don't decide on technical merits or fitness for purpose; they decide on what the salesmen tell them and what everyone is doing. They're just going to think, 'well, everyone gets hacked', and forget about it. This doesn't change any thought process at all because everyone in the server rooms knows whats going on and everyone out of it doesn't care.
Slashdot Mirror
But the supreme court can and will strike down one that violates our rights under the constitution.
A 7500 is a bloody ancient machine. I own an 8500 that will be G3-400 ugraded soon. I think one of the things that PC people miss is the longevity of Macs: time to obsolescence is incredibly long. I was running a 7100/G3 215 until a few months ago when its *really* old memory hardware caught up with it.
Here, here. An open-source medicine that I could just pop down to the druggist and acquire the drugs I believe I need based on my investigation of my symptoms would really improve my life.
But it's those same stupid people who vote and make the government that has been unbelievably stupid of late. What's your point?
I would have *killed* for the internet in grade school. I was so bloody *bored*. I think there is a very real missed opportunity with the head/sand guys here, especially with gifted(?) children who regular teachers can't relate to. A lot of these kids would simply learn all by themselves if left in a room with an internet link. Yes, some of the stuff they learn might be porn, but that will happen sooner or later anyway. We have no real trust in our children anymore. Part of the problems facing schools these days is the us vs. them attitude. The children aren't trusted and aren't included. They are managed, and this doesn't work really well. Imagine a school where a 162 IQ kid actually learns something other than how to hit the minimum required of him so people will leave him alone and he can just be bored instead of bored *and* annoyed.
Geez, these are supposed to be intelligent people teaching our kids yet they wish to restrict access to information for the very kids that would otherwise gain that information like a sponge. I would have.
About NPR. They have the biggest liberal bias in the industry, when they actually report news, that is. How many 'hippy culture is dying' pieces did it take for them to get a solid reputation for penetrating reporting? /., you can yell when you see a bias.
Ok, maybe it's been a while since I listened to NPR, but the bias was unmistakeable to my little conservative mind.
Objectivity won't ever be reached. Bias is always a problem. On
But, on /., you can *disagree* if you like. Geez, how often I've longed to do that to a newspaper...
How can you insist this? The lead off story today was about Harry Browne, a libertarian, who's only getting press on slashdot and PBS pretty much...
I matched up in the high 80% with Harry Browne. That's who I was going to vote for, anyway. Some odd little facts, though: I matched better with Pat Buchanan, who I'd rather see shot than elected president, then I did with George W., who I was going to vote for until I found out about Harry Browne. Guess it's not 100% accurate...
Actually, on the first fold, the numbers are ridiculous:
assume a square 6 units on an edge.
First fold is at the mid-point of height and width; it essentially removes 6 units of perimeter while adding back sq(18) ~ 4.24. Then, fold back so that a triangle that is 1 unit on a side is revealed(trust me; math is simpler).
Now, we have two unit triangles whose hypotenuse is exposed and one whose sides are exposed. This adds up to 2*sq(2) + 2, or 4.83, which, wile larger than the diagonal, is certainly smaller than the original 6.
Premise:
any part of the subdivided segment can be treated independantly.
Any fold that further subdivides affects a localized segment in the same way as the first fold affected the whole segment; it shortens it. Therefore, by the principle of inductance, you will always shorten the perimeter.
Unfortunately, this proof only holds for equilateral triangles. My brain hurts too much to figure one out for any other kind, but I doubt you will find any situation that is significantly different.
I realise that an infinite number of edges is often assumed to give an infinite perimeter, but that breaks down here, as the length of each individual edge decreases faster then the number of edges increases.
This is a bit like the infinite area, finite volume problem, which is easily dealt with on the basis of the fact that the inverse function multiplied against d, the derivative of the area, will approach some constant if you take its limit, whereas the volume function of the same function is constantly decreasing.
Ok, I'll bite. The concept of God is flawed because it only takes all the questions of existence and puts them in a little box and calls it God. It doesn't answer them. Where do we come from? God. Where does he come from? See? Adding an extra layer fools the average person who doesn't really care but won't fool the person, philosophical or scientific, who is really looking for answers. After you reject the concept of God as an explanation, you discover that he's not really all that convenient anymore. There's no physical evidence. So, Zarathustra(?) comes running down from the mountain shouting "God is dead" and Christians entirely miss the point and try to hang Nietsche.
It has settled into Creationism vs. Evolution, when, in reality, there's no way to be certain the whole thing wasn't made yesterday.
Existence exists because non-existence doesn't.
Well, I've been a conservative Christian, and quit because of exactly this kind of reasoning. See, God created the earth and sees and all that in them is, etc., but in fact, all you've done is move the complexity into the person of God. Even an amateur engineer acknowledges that complexity generated can't be greater then the complexity in the generator, and if the universe is "wonderfully and marvelously made", then God is a very complex entity indeed. Problem comes when you try to figure out where God came from. Fine, so he's been around forever. Let's just look at the thing systemically then: as compares to non-existance, why does he exist? His odds of existence are vastly worse than the entire universe, so the situation is actually worse: not only have you not really answered the fundamental question of where we came from, but by transferring all your random chance into the being of God, you've created something that is even *less* likely than that which you wished to explain.
Christians make something infinite so that they can hang a lot of things off of it. Bad things happen? Mysterious ways of God. Evil in the world? Titanic struggle of good vs. evil.
But, their convenient box for improbable events breaks down if you examine it closely, which, trust me, they encourage you *not* to do.
It's the necessity of believing in a God that did nothing for me and failed to answer fundamental philosophical questions that caused me to become an agnostic.
I don't believe it is our right nor our duty to enact 'shuttle diplomacy'. I was raised overseas, and believe me, they hate the fact that the US feels it has to meddle because they are somehow incapable of solving their own problems. This causes the rest of the world to become dependant on us and then we have to continue doing it or risk disrupting the world. It is dangerous for us and for them: for us because we have to spend an ever-increasing amount on this shuttle diplomacy; for them because they are dependant on us and if we quit, they can't solve their own problems.
The only compelling reason for US intervention is direct affront to any of our concerns in the area. Kuwait being attacked is a clear case of vested interest because of the oil situation. Kuwait could have certainly afforded to buy a better army, but they did not. We rescued them because the spectre of an Iraqi controlled oilflow was terrible indeed. George Bush enlisted the support of the UN first, scoring big points.
Since then, Clinton has been all over the place dealing with issues the US shouldn't deal with and doing it unilaterally for the most part, sometimes in direct opposition to the UN.
As a person who was abroad at the time Clinton got elected, I can't convey the total shock felt by people overseas at George Bush's loss. He was clearly the best foreign policy president since Jimmy Carter.
As to Al Gore being adept at foreign policy, I seriously doubt it. I don't think GW would be very good, either, but GW has Dick Cheney, part of his dad's team. If you're going to vote foreign policy, Dick Cheney is your man, and I'm certain GW would have no problem taking his advice.
There is a bit both ways. Europe has attempted to ram many things through the UN and elsewhere that restrict freedoms here in the States. I'm thinking specifically of the anti-cracker treaty and the UN's well known stance on gun control.
Geez. They really want to cheat, don't they? I can make some static maps on a z80 that can accomplish that. If I know exactly where I am and exactly what the status of my tires are and have a nice Bosch motronic control system with a Ferrari F1 manumatic and some simple shifting pattern maps, then all I need after that is some simple lines to *always* take, depending on the track conditions, and there's no way any human could beat it.
As to handling wet track and skids, my 1996 Camaro can do that...
I immediately thought this, but then remembered cursing driving simulators. I race a bit on the side, and the feeling in the seat is almost as important to knowing how far you can push a car or the state of the car as what you could see.
This is partly a violation of the fourth and fifth amendments. International treaty does not supercede the US constitution.
Essentially, if an ISP maintains data that could cause it to be convicted under this thing, the fifth amendment would not require it to deliver such information.
The fourth amendment should stop an ISP from doing the spying in the first place because it is at the behest of the government and without probable cause and therefore dose constitute unlawful search and seisure.
It is amazing to me that despite a long history of legal tradition to the contrary, we could sign a treaty, and all of the sudden, ISPs could become liable for content for which they have no control.
That is a scary spectre.
Seems that nobody remembers Harry Browne, the Libertarian party candidate, who has unbelievably managed to stick to the issues.
Nader's entire career has been an attempt to assassinate whoever is in power. He's made all his political capital through the failures of others. He insists that big corporations are the problem with America without compellingly proving that there is a problem with America.
The Republicans and Democrats have been tearing at each other for quite some time. Fact is that there isn't much difference between the two. One supports gun control, the other wants to reduce abortions. That's about it. Yes, I know there's a large difference in their budgets, but that gets passed through congress, and they'll only be able to change the percentages a bit.
So, what's left? Character assassination. If they truly had anything new or anything different, they'd be able to say, 'look at this issue', but instead, they are reduced to ribbing each other. It's pathetic, really.
(Shameless plug) Harry Browne and the libertarians have a platform that is neither radical nor new; it is what the constitution originally was intended to do. Jefferson is the origination of the Libertarian philosophy; he wrote the constitution. Although this isn't new, it does get back to the idea of only fixing problems where they actually exist and allowing the greatest personal freedom otherwise, which is what allows the giant strides in technology this country has seen. (/Shameless plug)
Ok, this assertion is goofy. It's not as if the DNC isn't trying to smear GW!
Pick your smear. Personally, I believe Gore is worse.
I am voting libertarian this election most likely. Second choice: GW Bush. The reason is simple: I'm paying the equivalent of someone's salary in taxes. I know people who make less per month than I pay in taxes. The tax situation in this country is ridiculous. I know a lot of people say that it's because I make a lot, but I really don't. Also, people say that I shouldn't complain because others don't make so much. That may be true, but it doesn't cover the fact that *my* money is being used for things I don't approve of and things I don't need.
I've got government doing an awful lot of things I don't want and ignoring the things I do and the net result is that I pay an entire person's salary in taxes.
How about roads? National defense? Instead, several million dollars of my money was used to buy back guns in poor neighborhoods, something which I'm emphatically against.
The fact is that our current society is a result of our development into a more technical and knowledge-based economy. Tax apportionment isn't going to modify the fundamental situation of the economy, but it is unfair to me and many like me.
The Libertarians want to spend less of my money doing things I don't want. I'm all for that.
Of course, days of yore, we were concerned with reading a block from tape that was close to a convenient memory size, so often wasted tape space rather than deal with the overlap.
People keep attributing crime to one thing or another willy-nilly, but the only thing that crime has ever been reliably attributed to is the ratio of the median income for the majority of the population to the median income of the rich. When this gets too wide, crime goes up. When it narrows, crime goes down. It's been narrowing. Crime has been going down. It was very narrow in the fifties. Crime was low. In the eighties, with inner-city blight and practically no means of employment for inner-city youths, crime went sky-high.
Crime isn't caused by guns; it isn't caused by violence in the media; it isn't caused by bad parenting; it isn't caused by lack of government or increase in police patrol; it isn't caused by war or peace. There are criminal tendencies in all of us, and when desparation gets high enough, the crime line on the bell curve moves and we get more criminals. When there is readily available employment everywhere, the line moves away from the center, and fewer and fewer people excersize their criminal tendencies.
That is the only reason anyone has ever been able to prove. The correlation between personal wealth and crime is extremely easy to demonstrate, whereas even parenting is hard. In Columbine, it is obvious that bad parenting had something to do with it, but there are plenty of situations where good people come from bad homes. Statistically, bad parenting isn't significant anymore than violent movies and games are. And availability of guns has nothing at all to do with crime rates except to act as a deterrant to petty crime, so a high saturation of guns in a society will reduce the instances of burglary and robbery and a certain decrease in homicide, but will certainly not increase these things unless they are in the hands of criminals only.
They called me at nine pm to ask if I was happy with their service. How annoying.
It doesn't really matter. People keep assuming that administration wants to know or cares if their pet server OS is secure. They don't decide on technical merits or fitness for purpose; they decide on what the salesmen tell them and what everyone is doing. They're just going to think, 'well, everyone gets hacked', and forget about it. This doesn't change any thought process at all because everyone in the server rooms knows whats going on and everyone out of it doesn't care.