Assuming the post a bit above yours was actually the real essay, the kid already said he was joining the marines! I say "problem solved", if there was even a problem to begin with. If he really is a psychopath he'll be a war hero sooner or later. If not, he'll get his chance at the stab, shoot, kill game and then he'll find out whether he really enjoys it or not. Chances are he'll piss his pants and cower behind the nearest cover, but time will tell. Either way, I doubt a psychologist would deem him mentally unstable or unfit to own a weapon, and I don't think he really wrote enough to even warrant informing anybody, although I suppose the parents should have the opportunity to know about and read the essay.
Nope. I have a full fledged keyboard on my Psion5. It measures about 3x7" and 100WPM+ typing on it is no problem. For you. I have fat fingers. I've tried using those keyboards, and it's nearly impossible for me to type with any accuracy because my fingers have a tendency to hit the neighboring keys. And no, I'm not incredibly fat.
The screen size may be a bit of a limit, but only because people have been convinced they need 17" screens by existing displays. Make a smaller screen, with a higher DPI, and widescreen aspect, and it would be just as easily usable.
The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter. I couldn't disagree more. I don't care if the screen has a billion pixels per inch, if the screen is 5" wide I am going to have trouble reading it while it's sitting on my lap. I don't necessarily need a 15" or 17" screen, but I do need it to be a certain proportion of my field of view in order for me to be able to actually read text on it. I'm not even going to go get into eye strain issues here.
It sounds like you simply use your laptop as a portable DVD burner. That's wonderful for you, but many of us need to be able to write or review documents, code, edit photos, create presentations, take notes, read email, and simply work on their laptop. I've tried to replace my laptop with a PDA, but it's simply too difficult to actually be able to see most of a document at once. I don't know many people who would still prefer a laptop over a portable DVD player if their keyboards were unwieldy and the screens painful to read text on.
Thank you, it is interesting, and it makes me like Wittgenstein a bit more now. It does always sadden me a bit to see someone much more eloquent than I am state what I was trying to say with half the words and twice the meaning.
I thought wikipedia was at about 7GB now without pictures, but apparently wikipedia is already in the TB range. There goes my dream, for now. By the way, can you really get PalmOS to run IIS or Apache and PostgreSQL or MySQL? I thought they were requirements for running mediawiki. If there's a way to do it on PalmOS or any of the other handhelds, can you point me in that direction?
Also, remember that being freely licensed, Wikipedia's content may be copied at will. One CD copy may be enough to a whole internet-less educational institution.
Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, would be much more "''sorta pointless''" if it's contents were only reachable through wikipedia.org. Actually, I'd probably pay $500 for a wifi-enabled, pocket-sized ebook reader that had wikipedia preloaded and could synch to the main database every time I had internet access. I'd take it with me everywhere I traveled, and probably create a lot of language-related entries just for myself.
Wait, is it too late to patent this or does Douglas Adams already own that one?
No, because that's not even remotely funny. There was a valid joke above that showed the concept, so you took the concept and took a shit on it, then stood up and pissed on it. That's not funny. You're not funny. Fuck you. Give the poor aristocrat a break!
Your paranoid beliefs about the _nsakey being some sort of evil back door automatically discredit the rest of your posts. Perhaps if we had reason to believe that it was removed from government systems by default, or placed only in "Export" versions of Windows, but it really makes no sense for them to install such things that could become as much a liability as an asset when there are far more efficient ways of gathering the same intelligence. Or do you think Windows is sufficiently secure without this key, and that there is no other possible use or reason for the key to have been named and created the way it was?
I'm certainly not disagreeing on us being limited by our perceptions of reality, but I think the modern world shows that it can, in fact, change over time. I do feel that we, as a species, can eventually come to understand, or nearly understand, everything through specialization. While no single human can ever possibly understand everything, it's possible that a person could fully understand, say, the gravitational pull of small objects, especially as our brains continue to adapt and evolve to a more complex understanding of the universe.
I like to think of science being done with the primate brain as very similar to colors being measured by a color blind person. Someone who was born color blind would never have even thought of colors existing just as we would never have thought of electromagnetic waves existing, but once a person establishes that it does exist and that it's beyond their direct comprehension, methods can be developed to probe at such things. I'm not very familiar with this type of equipment, but I'd imagine a color blind person could easily end up with some sort of spectrometer that records the wavelengths of the light reflected by objects.
Sorry I didn't get the hyperbole. I had actually heard the "religious edifice" joke before, but never linked it to your post. I thought you were just one of those people predicting the insane notion of future generations looking back and laughing at our scientists. Hopefully they'll be sufficiently versed in the Ancient History of Science to understand how supercolliders got them where they are (or will get them where they will be?), but I imagine they certainly will think many of the things we did were rather goofy.
Is our understanding of meteors very much deeper than that? Might our understanding of the world be seen as no more than "Run away from this, it is bad, eat that, it is good"? God doesn't want you to eat that uncooked food or he'll punish you! You must wear a hat when out in the hot desert sun or he will punish you by burning your head! 'Nuff said? Sadly, probably not. This is the way the majority of the earth's human population views these events.
If we truly viewed meteors and climate change logically as something that is eventually going to happen, we would put more effort into developing cold fusion or another power source that didn't depend on weather conditions, and create massive underground farms with lighting powered by the electric plants. This would allow us to ride out a nuclear winter or a blacking of the sun caused by super volcanoes erupting or a massive meteorite kicking up an atmosphere of dust. Of course if we were really logical, as a species, we would be developing a Meteorite Defense Shield instead of a Missile Defense Shield.
On another Note, based on what I read, this whole thing says that the universe is effectively "not rendering" when we aren't looking/sensing/etc. I think it makes sense, because the universe would totally lag if it were always rendering...:) So does this mean God exists because the universe was clearly rendering when we weren't looking, therefore someone else was, or does this mean that God doesn't exist because it's possible to have something that is not observed and not being rendered because of it?
The idea that any of us might see behind the face of the clock. I think it's worth trying (got to understand the playing field to play the game properly), but I think it's madness to actually believe we'll accomplish some unified, holistic understanding.
I predict a thousand years from now people will regard the quantum physics community as a cult, in much the same way we view Aztecs and their sacrifices. "It's quite mad, but it was their culture at the time." I couldn't disagree more. Unless we go through some real dark ages where our knowledge is lost and science is reset, I think quantum mechanics will be viewed in the same light as we view Newtonian mechanics. It was a good starting point and foundation, even though it wasn't quite right about anything, but it allowed us to more thoroughly investigate the matters and gave us some useful formulas in the mean time. I certainly hope it is replaced with a theory that explains more, and I certainly hope that theory is eventually replaced by a grand unified theory. Even then we'll have some large challenges ahead of us, but at least we'll know how the universe works, unless the universe dislikes that idea and decides to reconfigure itself.
'fewer than a third of teens with profiles use their last names,
And fewer than a third of teens with profiles are actually teens.:) And fewer than a third of non-teens with profiles that say they're teens are actually interested in interacting with teens. Most of them are just police and FBI agents trying to catch other adults doing the same thing.
I found this out the hard way when I was trying to pick up another girl my age in a chat room many years ago. Now how do you handle a situation where an >18 law enforcement officer is attempting to arrange a meeting with an 16 child because he believes the child is really another adult looking for children?
SO? 1 out of 5 dentists still think chewing sugarless gum after meals isn't a good idea... and that's 20 percent. Actually, I'd bet it's somewhere closer to 99.9% of dentists who think that chewing any type of gum isn't a good idea. The truth is that "4 out of 5 dentists circled the sugarless gum answer while they were enjoying their gift basket, the other fifth refused to circle an answer and wrote 'I would not recommend chewing gum because ______' before they returned the survey card". Unfortunately they had to make it a bit less wordy so that it would fit into a 30 second commercial.
So just how hard do you pound the 98% with the sense to look after themselves up the ass to make sure that dipshit and dumbass don't get in trouble? Well, I've never been good at looking after myself up the ass but I am petitioning the government to install toe-level foam padding on all doors, furniture, and refrigerators. I've probably stubbed my toe 1,000 times now and I still keep doing it... it's only a matter of time before this harms the children or causes an abortion!
Democracy is great in most aspects, aside from the fact that it is decided on by the a$$hole with the loudest mouth. Ultimately, laws are voted on by the man who has swindled, lied and faked his way to the top and has the most funding to get there. Actually, you're describing a Republic. Of course pure democracy is tyranny of the majority, so there's really no winning.
The only reason money has a value to start with is because of government. Bzzzzt! WRONG! The only reason government has any value is because of the labors, products, and services of its populace. Money simply allows a better means of exchanging these things. If the government wasn't around, the paper they gave us and called money may or may not be worthless, but something else, like Shrunken Anonymous Coward Heads., would take its place.
Let's take for example your average small business owner. He uses Sunbird or Lightning while in the office, or on his laptop, but suppose he's out at a business club event or visiting a client and needs to add to his calendar. What will he do? "Excuse me while I set up the laptop and bring up my calendar. By the way, do you have Internet access here so I can hook up?". There needs to be an easy way to make the calendar accessible and updatable by portable devices. There are various solutions on the way but none of them are easy to implement. Umm.... Palm Pilot. Synch cable or dock. I mean sure it doesn't update your web-based calendar until you actually get back to your computer/office, but it does do the job...
Well, let's go down this path the whole way, shall we? If I decide to sell my Playstation on ebay, then I should be able to deduct its cost --- just like any other business does. If I do this from my home, then my home is used for business purposes, and I should be able to deduct a portion of my rent, utilities, and phone service. Hell, I'll even deduct my computer, printer, and DSL service --- since it's used for business. And when I drive to the Post Office to mail the package, I can deduct for my transportation. I should also list any furniture used so that I can depreciate it. Better fill out the self-employment tax forms, and get a state sales tax ID number while we're at it.
Ridiculous. If you actually get a business license for your business of selling stuff on eBay, this isn't ridiculous at all. Most home-based and small businesses do exactly that. Hell, my father's business leased his car from him for slightly more than it cost because it allowed him to keep personal ownership of the vehicle and deduct it as a business expense. There's nothing wrong with any of this, and it's certainly the same game everyone else plays, except for large corporations (they just lobby their tax deductions into the law instead of trying to find and use them).
Since I'm not an accountant, I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but there is a threshold for this personal transactions like this. Basically, you can sell your XBox and not owe any taxes on the sale (or even have to report it), but if you sell 10 XBoxes a week you'll owe taxes. Also, if you sell your $10,000 car, you're probably going to have to report that, too.
Exactly. I wouldn't want to be caught writing such a program, but if it became widely spread it could certainly influence media conglomerates like Google and MySpace to use their weight to get these laws changed...
Or what if it specifically didn't target certain types of videos/songs? A Christian organization could write a virus that would send take down requests for Islamic, Jewish, and Atheistic files, for example. Likewise, Sony could include it in their next root kit and have all of their competitors' fan sites and music video uploads removed.
If someone distributes a virus which randomly generates and submits DMCA takedown notices for every video on youtube, then the law says they should follow them all. Does that make sense? That is an absolutely brilliant idea! You don't plan to patent that, do you?
Did you not see the middle sentence? "They should not be exempted from any law, unless there is a compelling argument that exempting them from the law is in the public interest."
And yes, firetrucks or ambulances should not be exempt if they are not responding to an emergency, which was the original poster's point. A police car should not be exempt if its driver is getting more donuts, but should be exempt if it's responding to a call. Firetrucks and ambulances should never be exempt from the law! Nobody should ever be exempt from the law. In most places, the laws were written with these situations in mind. Emergency responders aren't exempt from any laws at all, and never should be. The laws are simply different for them. I know in my city emergency responders were allowed to travel no more than 10 mph over the speed limit when responding, provided their lights and/or sirens were on, and they were allowed to run red lights if they ensured that the path was clear. They can't legally rush through a red light, hit somebody, and say, "Oh, I'm exempt from that law." They have to look, make sure the path is clear, etc.
I can't remember the exact wording on police pursuing suspects, there were some restrictions on that as well, but they were pretty much allowed to go as fast as they needed.
The bottom line is that the laws need to be, and generally are, worded to allow situations like this because some people lack common sense. There needs to be a provision stating that a person taking a seriously injured person to the hospital can reasonably exceed the posted speed limit, that police and ambulances can do the same, etc. because some idiot with authority will go by the letter of the law instead of the intent. But this doesn't mean that anyone should ever be exempt.
Sure. Here are some NHTSA data. A total number of 300 fatal crashes from 1991-2002 killed 275 occupants of other vehicles. Since we're discounting the "one dude in the ambulance," I won't factor in the 82 ambulance occupants killed in those 300 fatal crashes over a 11 year period into my figure. 275 fatalities over 11 years is certainly less than the tens to hundreds of thousands saved by ambulances each year. While that's a good start, it's only a step closer to the real question. How many of these fatalities actually occur because the ambulance was speeding or running red lights? My bet is that it's a small minority, but I don't know where I'd look for numbers. Keep in mind that the ambulances in many places spend a lot of time simply driving around and, as such, are subject to regular accidents, especially icy roads in colder climates as well as other drivers being idiots.
And if we're alone in this galaxy, the nearest one is 2 million lightyears away. Who's going to volunteer to check it out? You'll need more than a packed lunch. And most other galaxies are much further away than that. I can have more than a packed lunch? I'll go! Just give me a large, Explorer Class spaceship and, say, 50 beautiful concubines, and a method to grow food/recycle oxygen and water, and the race will live on!
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Assuming the post a bit above yours was actually the real essay, the kid already said he was joining the marines! I say "problem solved", if there was even a problem to begin with. If he really is a psychopath he'll be a war hero sooner or later. If not, he'll get his chance at the stab, shoot, kill game and then he'll find out whether he really enjoys it or not. Chances are he'll piss his pants and cower behind the nearest cover, but time will tell. Either way, I doubt a psychologist would deem him mentally unstable or unfit to own a weapon, and I don't think he really wrote enough to even warrant informing anybody, although I suppose the parents should have the opportunity to know about and read the essay.
The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter. I couldn't disagree more. I don't care if the screen has a billion pixels per inch, if the screen is 5" wide I am going to have trouble reading it while it's sitting on my lap. I don't necessarily need a 15" or 17" screen, but I do need it to be a certain proportion of my field of view in order for me to be able to actually read text on it. I'm not even going to go get into eye strain issues here.
It sounds like you simply use your laptop as a portable DVD burner. That's wonderful for you, but many of us need to be able to write or review documents, code, edit photos, create presentations, take notes, read email, and simply work on their laptop. I've tried to replace my laptop with a PDA, but it's simply too difficult to actually be able to see most of a document at once. I don't know many people who would still prefer a laptop over a portable DVD player if their keyboards were unwieldy and the screens painful to read text on.
Thank you, it is interesting, and it makes me like Wittgenstein a bit more now. It does always sadden me a bit to see someone much more eloquent than I am state what I was trying to say with half the words and twice the meaning.
I thought wikipedia was at about 7GB now without pictures, but apparently wikipedia is already in the TB range. There goes my dream, for now. By the way, can you really get PalmOS to run IIS or Apache and PostgreSQL or MySQL? I thought they were requirements for running mediawiki. If there's a way to do it on PalmOS or any of the other handhelds, can you point me in that direction?
Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, would be much more "''sorta pointless''" if it's contents were only reachable through wikipedia.org. Actually, I'd probably pay $500 for a wifi-enabled, pocket-sized ebook reader that had wikipedia preloaded and could synch to the main database every time I had internet access. I'd take it with me everywhere I traveled, and probably create a lot of language-related entries just for myself.
Wait, is it too late to patent this or does Douglas Adams already own that one?
Its when you go to sleep. Not always
Your paranoid beliefs about the _nsakey being some sort of evil back door automatically discredit the rest of your posts. Perhaps if we had reason to believe that it was removed from government systems by default, or placed only in "Export" versions of Windows, but it really makes no sense for them to install such things that could become as much a liability as an asset when there are far more efficient ways of gathering the same intelligence. Or do you think Windows is sufficiently secure without this key, and that there is no other possible use or reason for the key to have been named and created the way it was?
I'm certainly not disagreeing on us being limited by our perceptions of reality, but I think the modern world shows that it can, in fact, change over time. I do feel that we, as a species, can eventually come to understand, or nearly understand, everything through specialization. While no single human can ever possibly understand everything, it's possible that a person could fully understand, say, the gravitational pull of small objects, especially as our brains continue to adapt and evolve to a more complex understanding of the universe.
I like to think of science being done with the primate brain as very similar to colors being measured by a color blind person. Someone who was born color blind would never have even thought of colors existing just as we would never have thought of electromagnetic waves existing, but once a person establishes that it does exist and that it's beyond their direct comprehension, methods can be developed to probe at such things. I'm not very familiar with this type of equipment, but I'd imagine a color blind person could easily end up with some sort of spectrometer that records the wavelengths of the light reflected by objects.
Sorry I didn't get the hyperbole. I had actually heard the "religious edifice" joke before, but never linked it to your post. I thought you were just one of those people predicting the insane notion of future generations looking back and laughing at our scientists. Hopefully they'll be sufficiently versed in the Ancient History of Science to understand how supercolliders got them where they are (or will get them where they will be?), but I imagine they certainly will think many of the things we did were rather goofy.
If we truly viewed meteors and climate change logically as something that is eventually going to happen, we would put more effort into developing cold fusion or another power source that didn't depend on weather conditions, and create massive underground farms with lighting powered by the electric plants. This would allow us to ride out a nuclear winter or a blacking of the sun caused by super volcanoes erupting or a massive meteorite kicking up an atmosphere of dust. Of course if we were really logical, as a species, we would be developing a Meteorite Defense Shield instead of a Missile Defense Shield.
I predict a thousand years from now people will regard the quantum physics community as a cult, in much the same way we view Aztecs and their sacrifices. "It's quite mad, but it was their culture at the time." I couldn't disagree more. Unless we go through some real dark ages where our knowledge is lost and science is reset, I think quantum mechanics will be viewed in the same light as we view Newtonian mechanics. It was a good starting point and foundation, even though it wasn't quite right about anything, but it allowed us to more thoroughly investigate the matters and gave us some useful formulas in the mean time. I certainly hope it is replaced with a theory that explains more, and I certainly hope that theory is eventually replaced by a grand unified theory. Even then we'll have some large challenges ahead of us, but at least we'll know how the universe works, unless the universe dislikes that idea and decides to reconfigure itself.
And fewer than a third of teens with profiles are actually teens.
I found this out the hard way when I was trying to pick up another girl my age in a chat room many years ago. Now how do you handle a situation where an >18 law enforcement officer is attempting to arrange a meeting with an 16 child because he believes the child is really another adult looking for children?
Ridiculous. If you actually get a business license for your business of selling stuff on eBay, this isn't ridiculous at all. Most home-based and small businesses do exactly that. Hell, my father's business leased his car from him for slightly more than it cost because it allowed him to keep personal ownership of the vehicle and deduct it as a business expense. There's nothing wrong with any of this, and it's certainly the same game everyone else plays, except for large corporations (they just lobby their tax deductions into the law instead of trying to find and use them).
Since I'm not an accountant, I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but there is a threshold for this personal transactions like this. Basically, you can sell your XBox and not owe any taxes on the sale (or even have to report it), but if you sell 10 XBoxes a week you'll owe taxes. Also, if you sell your $10,000 car, you're probably going to have to report that, too.
Exactly. I wouldn't want to be caught writing such a program, but if it became widely spread it could certainly influence media conglomerates like Google and MySpace to use their weight to get these laws changed...
Or what if it specifically didn't target certain types of videos/songs? A Christian organization could write a virus that would send take down requests for Islamic, Jewish, and Atheistic files, for example. Likewise, Sony could include it in their next root kit and have all of their competitors' fan sites and music video uploads removed.
And yes, firetrucks or ambulances should not be exempt if they are not responding to an emergency, which was the original poster's point. A police car should not be exempt if its driver is getting more donuts, but should be exempt if it's responding to a call. Firetrucks and ambulances should never be exempt from the law! Nobody should ever be exempt from the law. In most places, the laws were written with these situations in mind. Emergency responders aren't exempt from any laws at all, and never should be. The laws are simply different for them. I know in my city emergency responders were allowed to travel no more than 10 mph over the speed limit when responding, provided their lights and/or sirens were on, and they were allowed to run red lights if they ensured that the path was clear. They can't legally rush through a red light, hit somebody, and say, "Oh, I'm exempt from that law." They have to look, make sure the path is clear, etc.
I can't remember the exact wording on police pursuing suspects, there were some restrictions on that as well, but they were pretty much allowed to go as fast as they needed.
The bottom line is that the laws need to be, and generally are, worded to allow situations like this because some people lack common sense. There needs to be a provision stating that a person taking a seriously injured person to the hospital can reasonably exceed the posted speed limit, that police and ambulances can do the same, etc. because some idiot with authority will go by the letter of the law instead of the intent. But this doesn't mean that anyone should ever be exempt.