Re:Why do you think we have the 2nd Amendment?
on
Assault Weapons Ban
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· Score: 1
Take a look at Switzerland -- they have almost no limitations on the weapons civilians can have. You want a howitzer, you can have one. And if you're a male and above a certain age, you *must* own a rifle -- you're considered part of the militia.
Only partly correct. Yes you can own pretty much what you want in Switzerland, but if you even as much as target practice fire one round your arse is roasted in a slow fire... and yes the government does count how many bullets you have at the end of the year to make sure you didn't fire a single shot.
Unless someone wants to add more, I think this is a pretty clear cut-and-dry case of the democrats getting tired of democracy.
Actually the system has worked the filibuster in as a way to let a small but substantial minority stop the dictatorship of a small majority. Republicans withheld most of Clinton's nominations using the exact same rule, as many other congresses have done.
What it would be unprecedented is to declare a 250 year old practice not valid. Because of this I suspect the Supreme Court would overrule in all of five minutes.
Does nobody here on Slashdot even remember the Mythical Man Month any more? The section on estimation and back of the envelope calculations was quite enlightening.
Clearly you don't. That section is in Programming Pearls by Bentley, not the Mythical Man Month.
What about the impact of Walmarts demands on suppliers to provide those "everyday low prices".
Higher productivity: the only known way to increase the standard of living across the board.
What about lost jobs in numerous local economies when Walmart comes to town?
That's a canard. Sure, a mom and pop operation that had paltry selection at sky high prices closes down. Whopty-do. In exchange a massive, thriving commercial opeartion appears with ancilliary business to serve those Walmart customers. There is a reason why people drive 70 miles to the closest Walmart in the midWest.
In other words, he's claiming that lowering the prices of basic consumer goods for 280 million Americans do not justify the wage losses of the million people that work for WalMart.
Kerckhoffs might have been the first to say it, but in practice nobody paid attention until PKC became a reality. Don't believe me? Look at the Enigma and DES, both of which used security through obscurity (in the case of the enigma, the entire encrypting device was secret, in DES the content of the S-boxes was classified).
The RSA company created the "security through obscurity is useless" meme as a way to sell their product (public key cryptosystems).
However, in reality all security is through obscurity. For one you need to keep the (private) key secret.
In practice, good security is composed of several layers, one of which should be obscurity. For example, you might RSA/ssh restrict access to a host, but it still pays to (a) not advertise its existence (b) make it insconpicuous (c) close logins to an account after more than three failed attempts (d) keep the communication protocol secret (e) place a good lock on the door to the computer room (f) not write the password on a post it note and place it in your drawer (g)... you get the idea.
Notice how many of those listed above derive security from obscurity in practical, effective ways.
I generally agree. Keep in mind though that Reagan's initial campaign was relatively lacklustre. It was only late into the campaign that he came into his own.
Did you see the "reporting for duty" speech by Kerry? Two or three more performances like that to a broad audience near the election and he could take this home.
So far, he's looked more like Gore, as you point out.
Your prediction of higher turnout for the democrats seems quite plausible.
You conveniently forgot to mention the millions of "Reagan Democrats" who are planning on pulling the lever for another Republican President, out of outrage at their party's choice to play political games with their national security.
Actually, those Reagan democrats haven't voted republican since Bush Sr., and they won't vote GOP this time either. In fact it is more likely that the fiscally conservative wing of the republican party will vote for Kerry. The numbers can potentially be large enough for them to be termed Kerry Republicans (this will depend on how well Kerry can push his message out).
This election will stand out as one in which the statistics were nearly useless. For all practical purposes the two candidates are tied. This means that a very small random event could tilt the balance towards either candidate. Say, a simple slip of the tongue near election day and the candidate takes the day.
Furhtermore enough things have gone wrong with the current incumbent (no WMDs found, bin Laden still on the lam, Iraq is a quagmire, the ballooning deficit) that a sudden shift in favor of Kerry could well take place. Don't believe me? Look at the election polls for Carter-Reagan. Then just like now, things were not going well for the incumbent (inflation, Iran hostages, Nicaragua contras) but the polls had Reagan and Carter tied until just a few weeks before the election, when the gipper gave a masterful performance during one of the debates. Reagan ended up wining the electoral college with ease.
Obviously, in both cases it would have been impossible to reach such great results if the authors had had to keep a steady pace of lesser publications.
Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem while employed as a professor at Princeton University. In other words, it is possible to engage in such reclusive work while in academia (see Louis de Brange work on the Bieberbach conjecture, for another similar data point).
The discount over the original predicted price of $105-135 is larger than what the $85 price suggest. The original plan was to offer twice as many shares in a dutch auction. In this type of auction the price is bid down instead of up until the entire lot of shares is sold.
If the original amount of shares had been offered to the public, bidding would have continued well down past $85 to a range of $50-65 per share or so. In other words, for all practical purposes Google went public at half the price they had predicted. Interestingly, at that price Google's valuation is more in line with its competitors (overture, yahoo).
Keep in mind that most companies that go public aim for a $10-20 per share initial price. This suggests that when the Google IPO process got started, Google was expecting to get a lot less per share than they got, so in the end they should be more than happy.
The right way to add generics to Java is a radical modification of JVM (Java Virtual Machine), but Sun didn't want to it.
Designerd are loath to make changes that create incompatibilities, lest they inconvenience the existing user base. This ignores the fact that the current user base is already inconvenienced by existing deficiencies in the language, and, moreover, in young languages such as java the existing user base is but a negligible percentage of the total users of the language through its life time.
Of course, one should avoid unnecessary incompatibilites, but once a glaring deficiency such as lack of generics has been identified it is better to bite the bullet and fix the problem once and for all, incompatibilities be damned.
(plus there is a way to avoid incompatibilities too, using version headers a la xml).
but you're underinformed if you think that outsourcing "is not high enouth to make a dent"
The numbers don't lie. Average hiring salary went up last year. If outsourcing were having an impact the average salary would have gone down last year, as it did, for example, right after the bubble burst.
with the outsourcing thing going on shouldn't we be expecting this?
Actually, no. The number of outsourced jobs is not high enough to make a dent. In fact average entering salary last year went up for people with a CS degree. Furthermore, by the time this stream makes it through, three/four years from now, the economy will likely be in full boom yet again.
There are several answers to this about why most OSes are Unix derivatives.
For one, Unix got a lot of things right, right from the beginning. Second, some of those that it missed became the standard when added later (tcp/ip, threads). Third, writing an OS is a major undertaking, somewhere in the order of thousands of man-years. "Borrowing" ideas from another OS can help reduce this start up time. Lastly, lack of imagination. We teach our young geeks that linux/unix is the end-all and be-all and guess what? they cannot come up with anything else new. Rather we should adopt a philosophy among the OS and OSS communities that "Unix is very good, but by all means suggest something better if you think you can".
If we did this, X would have been fixed long ago (fixed in the Burroughs Algol version 1 sense if you know what I mean). KDE and Gnome would be a lot closer to prime time than they are, and we would have many more innovative concepts originating in the OSS comunity.
Re:Wishful thinking
on
TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
DRM ain't gonna help if no one wants the music.
Last time I checked peer-to-peer download stats, they reflected pretty much the junk ridden top ten billboard: mostly requests for Britney Spears songs and American Pie(?) by Maddona.
When are record companies going to realize that DRM isn't going to help them sell more of the bad music that dominates the airwaves?"
So far record companies seem pretty successful at foistering their bad music upon us (Cristina Aguilera any one?), I fail to see why they won't continue doing the same over the Internet, if DRM allows them to....
I doubt there are few if any other scientists who could so influence his peers.
Edward Witten is equally influential, with the distinction that he holds such influence both in the physics and the mathematics community.
Sir Michael Atiyah on Witten:
... [Witten] has made a profound impact on contemporary mathematics. In his hands physics is once again providing a rich source of inspiration and insight in mathematics. Of course physical insight does not always lead to immediately rigorous mathematical proofs but it frequently leads one in the right direction, and technically correct proofs can then hopefully be found. This is the case with Witten's work. So far the insight has never let him down and rigorous proofs, of the standard we mathematicians rightly expect, have always been forthcoming.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at Switzerland -- they have almost no limitations on the weapons civilians can have. You want a howitzer, you can have one. And if you're a male and above a certain age, you *must* own a rifle -- you're considered part of the militia.
Only partly correct. Yes you can own pretty much what you want in Switzerland, but if you even as much as target practice fire one round your arse is roasted in a slow fire... and yes the government does count how many bullets you have at the end of the year to make sure you didn't fire a single shot.
Unless someone wants to add more, I think this is a pretty clear cut-and-dry case of the democrats getting tired of democracy.
Actually the system has worked the filibuster in as a way to let a small but substantial minority stop the dictatorship of a small majority. Republicans withheld most of Clinton's nominations using the exact same rule, as many other congresses have done.
What it would be unprecedented is to declare a 250 year old practice not valid. Because of this I suspect the Supreme Court would overrule in all of five minutes.
Does nobody here on Slashdot even remember the Mythical Man Month any more? The section on estimation and back of the envelope calculations was quite enlightening.
Clearly you don't. That section is in Programming Pearls by Bentley, not the Mythical Man Month.
What about the impact of Walmarts demands on suppliers to provide those "everyday low prices".
Higher productivity: the only known way to increase the standard of living across the board.
What about lost jobs in numerous local economies when Walmart comes to town?
That's a canard. Sure, a mom and pop operation that had paltry selection at sky high prices closes down. Whopty-do. In exchange a massive, thriving commercial opeartion appears with ancilliary business to serve those Walmart customers. There is a reason why people drive 70 miles to the closest Walmart in the midWest.
In other words, he's claiming that lowering the prices of basic consumer goods for 280 million Americans do not justify the wage losses of the million people that work for WalMart.
Call me skeptic, but I tend to disagree.
The point is that the Germans were paying close attention to Kerckhoffs principles in the design of the Enigma.
Do you have a reference for this? The Germans certainly went to great lengths trying to prevent the capture of enigma machines by the allies.
The capture of the enigmas was a big step towards breaking them, both by the Polish cryptographers before WWII as well as by Blechtley Park in the UK.
Kerckhoffs might have been the first to say it, but in practice nobody paid attention until PKC became a reality. Don't believe me? Look at the Enigma and DES, both of which used security through obscurity (in the case of the enigma, the entire encrypting device was secret, in DES the content of the S-boxes was classified).
The RSA company created the "security through obscurity is useless" meme as a way to sell their product (public key cryptosystems).
... you get the idea.
However, in reality all security is through obscurity. For one you need to keep the (private) key secret.
In practice, good security is composed of several layers, one of which should be obscurity. For example, you might RSA/ssh restrict access to a host, but it still pays to (a) not advertise its existence (b) make it insconpicuous (c) close logins to an account after more than three failed attempts (d) keep the communication protocol secret (e) place a good lock on the door to the computer room (f) not write the password on a post it note and place it in your drawer (g)
Notice how many of those listed above derive security from obscurity in practical, effective ways.
But I don't buy the Reagan-Kerry parallel.
I generally agree. Keep in mind though that Reagan's initial campaign was relatively lacklustre. It was only late into the campaign that he came into his own.
Did you see the "reporting for duty" speech by Kerry? Two or three more performances like that to a broad audience near the election and he could take this home.
So far, he's looked more like Gore, as you point out.
Your prediction of higher turnout for the democrats seems quite plausible.
You conveniently forgot to mention the millions of "Reagan Democrats" who are planning on pulling the lever for another Republican President, out of outrage at their party's choice to play political games with their national security.
Actually, those Reagan democrats haven't voted republican since Bush Sr., and they won't vote GOP this time either. In fact it is more likely that the fiscally conservative wing of the republican party will vote for Kerry. The numbers can potentially be large enough for them to be termed Kerry Republicans (this will depend on how well Kerry can push his message out).
This election will stand out as one in which the statistics were nearly useless. For all practical purposes the two candidates are tied. This means that a very small random event could tilt the balance towards either candidate. Say, a simple slip of the tongue near election day and the candidate takes the day.
Furhtermore enough things have gone wrong with the current incumbent (no WMDs found, bin Laden still on the lam, Iraq is a quagmire, the ballooning deficit) that a sudden shift in favor of Kerry could well take place. Don't believe me? Look at the election polls for Carter-Reagan. Then just like now, things were not going well for the incumbent (inflation, Iran hostages, Nicaragua contras) but the polls had Reagan and Carter tied until just a few weeks before the election, when the gipper gave a masterful performance during one of the debates. Reagan ended up wining the electoral college with ease.
Obviously, in both cases it would have been impossible to reach such great results if the authors had had to keep a steady pace of lesser publications.
Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem while employed as a professor at Princeton University. In other words, it is possible to engage in such reclusive work while in academia (see Louis de Brange work on the Bieberbach conjecture, for another similar data point).
No. Google's valuation is $23.1 billion and Yahoo's is $38.7 billion. I wouldn't call that "more in line",
It's nonsensical to compare market caps like that. Look at the ratios P/E and P/S for meaningful comparisons (apples to apples).
when you refuse to pony up the cash to defend your own borders.
Defend them from whom? which countries are lining up to invade Canada, dare I ask.
The discount over the original predicted price of $105-135 is larger than what the $85 price suggest. The original plan was to offer twice as many shares in a dutch auction. In this type of auction the price is bid down instead of up until the entire lot of shares is sold.
If the original amount of shares had been offered to the public, bidding would have continued well down past $85 to a range of $50-65 per share or so. In other words, for all practical purposes Google went public at half the price they had predicted. Interestingly, at that price Google's valuation is more in line with its competitors (overture, yahoo).
Keep in mind that most companies that go public aim for a $10-20 per share initial price. This suggests that when the Google IPO process got started, Google was expecting to get a lot less per share than they got, so in the end they should be more than happy.
This gives the competitor an edge without any benefit to google, if they didn't IPO.
While this regulation exist, I think the reasoning is completely bogus. It has been put forth by the press before, with little proof behind it.
100km long colony of Argentine Ants in Melbourne.
100km long???? That isn't an ant colony, that's the mother ship.
The right way to add generics to Java is a radical modification of JVM (Java Virtual Machine), but Sun didn't want to it.
Designerd are loath to make changes that create incompatibilities, lest they inconvenience the existing user base. This ignores the fact that the current user base is already inconvenienced by existing deficiencies in the language, and, moreover, in young languages such as java the existing user base is but a negligible percentage of the total users of the language through its life time.
Of course, one should avoid unnecessary incompatibilites, but once a glaring deficiency such as lack of generics has been identified it is better to bite the bullet and fix the problem once and for all, incompatibilities be damned.
(plus there is a way to avoid incompatibilities too, using version headers a la xml).
but you're underinformed if you think that outsourcing "is not high enouth to make a dent"
The numbers don't lie. Average hiring salary went up last year. If outsourcing were having an impact the average salary would have gone down last year, as it did, for example, right after the bubble burst.
with the outsourcing thing going on shouldn't we be expecting this?
Actually, no. The number of outsourced jobs is not high enough to make a dent. In fact average entering salary last year went up for people with a CS degree. Furthermore, by the time this stream makes it through, three/four years from now, the economy will likely be in full boom yet again.
There are several answers to this about why most OSes are Unix derivatives.
For one, Unix got a lot of things right, right from the beginning. Second, some of those that it missed became the standard when added later (tcp/ip, threads). Third, writing an OS is a major undertaking, somewhere in the order of thousands of man-years. "Borrowing" ideas from another OS can help reduce this start up time. Lastly, lack of imagination. We teach our young geeks that linux/unix is the end-all and be-all and guess what? they cannot come up with anything else new. Rather we should adopt a philosophy among the OS and OSS communities that "Unix is very good, but by all means suggest something better if you think you can".
If we did this, X would have been fixed long ago (fixed in the Burroughs Algol version 1 sense if you know what I mean). KDE and Gnome would be a lot closer to prime time than they are, and we would have many more innovative concepts originating in the OSS comunity.
DRM ain't gonna help if no one wants the music.
Last time I checked peer-to-peer download stats, they reflected pretty much the junk ridden top ten billboard: mostly requests for Britney Spears songs and American Pie(?) by Maddona.
When are record companies going to realize that DRM isn't going to help them sell more of the bad music that dominates the airwaves?"
So far record companies seem pretty successful at foistering their bad music upon us (Cristina Aguilera any one?), I fail to see why they won't continue doing the same over the Internet, if DRM allows them to....
Edward Witten is equally influential, with the distinction that he holds such influence both in the physics and the mathematics community.
Sir Michael Atiyah on Witten: