Don't be normal. If you think being aspie is bad, neurotypicals are infinitely worse off. They even believe their own crud, half the time, believe it or not.
For those curious about whether they have Asperger's Syndrome, there are three simple ways to self-diagnose:
This is a superb online test. If you score 150 or more for being Aspie and less than 100 on being neurotypical, you're aspie. On the other hand, Slashdot is going to primarily be of interest to aspies, so constitutes a test in its own right:
Do you post geeky stuff on Slashdot?
Do people with a UID of 4 digits or less understand your jokes?
Do you submit articles that turn out to be too nerdy for the Slashdot readership? If you have answered Y to two or more of these, you're aspie.
Alternately, you could just look at the two "classic" symptoms:
If you're highly stressed, does your voice go flat rather than show any of the stereotypical signs of stress?
If you're highly focussed, does anything else in the universe exist to you? If you answered Y to either of these, you're aspie.
First off, Asperger's Syndrome is generally recognized as being on the Autistic Spectrum, not as an independently-classified condition. Second, MRI shows the two to be tightly-coupled, that there can be no serious question that Asperger's Syndrome is merely a specific subset of Autism.
Now we've got that out the way, I strongly object to the whole mental concept of absolute diminished responsibility. It's a sliding scale, not an on/off switch, and ALL people will have some area in which some diminished responsibility will exist.
The only sane, rational, logical approach is to forget about the notion of whether a person is legally culpable because of such a defect, because it's simply not useful, but rather to approach the issue as a case of how to divide the consequences of the action between treatment for the defect and punishment for the action.
Although I can see the UK legal system someday making such a switch, the US is legally very primitive. So much so that they still think the death penalty and digital watches are pretty neat ideas. I'd argue against extradition, less on the grounds of diminished responsibility of the guy and more on the grounds of diminished responsibility on the part of the US.
Asperger's Syndrome has already been established as being a defect in the mirror neurons in the brain, and it is unquestionably a form of autism (which is caused by those parts of the brain designed to filter information being malformed).
If a malformed brain is an "excuse", I'd LOVE to see ringbarer's sick notes. What the hell is real, if great big chunks of the brain being missing is fake?
But it wouldn't be a straight fight between ARM and Intel. It would be a fight between ARM, StrongARM, Asynchronous ARM (yes, there really is an asynchronous CPU based on the ARM core), and every other ARM variant out there.
Arguably, since Pandora defined their own algorithm for organizing the music and since databases and collections CAN be copyrighted, they do hold the copyright to the specific permutations resulting. I think they'd have a hard time getting the courts to agree, but the legal framework certainly exists for collections.
The problem is that the collection is transitory, as is indeed Wolfram Alpha's. And transitory collections are NOT considered copyrightable. There was a case covering that not too long ago, if I remember rightly, in which that was the decision, which means there's case law out there for that interpretation.
There are indeed some compilers sold with licenses that claim certain rights over the binaries compiled. This, apparently, used to be common practice, and for quite some time in the 80s and 90s, it was actually a selling-point for compilers to specifically permit people rights to do what they wanted with the binaries resulting from a compiled program.
As I've noted elsewhere, I have an old WW2-vintage R1155. It's not the classiest of receivers, but it does have some very nice features and has a wide enough range that it can even do some radio astronomy.
I'd never thought of using it just as an amplifier, but I suppose it could be used that way. Since it's designed to operate with three aerials and supports bias between them, that might be quite a neat hack. Not sure how I could get 3 outputs from the guitar though.
(Semi-aside: I did consider, at one point, making my own guitar using 2-directional magnetic field sensors, since the strings have essentially two degrees of freedom. You can certainly get sensors that would be far, far more sensitive and far less damping than the induction coils normally used. This could have some interesting properties, particularly if you wire it through an old-style valve amplifier.)
All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.
BTW, if asdf7890 is sad enough to shoot themselves for their posting, what would be sufficiently geeky for me to use for having worked out a solution to the continuity problem?
In the same way the Russians still use thermionic valves for aircraft and spacecraft, and indeed high-end audiophiles use them for sound systems, there may be contexts in 25th century engineering where a mechanical keyboard is safer/superior to a touchscreen panel. In that case, Scotty would certainly have needed to be proficient with them.
The short answer is that I used to do this all the time. Back in the days of MCC and SLS, I would use those as construction platforms and then rebuild everything from source. These days, it's easier than it was back then - I don't have to edit all those damnable configuration files for X for a start, and thankfully most configuration systems are relatively automated. I hate compiling Perl.
I switched to distros that used packages because they were supposed to be easier, but frankly I've not found that to be true. Kernels are a bigger pain than ever, dependency hell reigns in a way I never suffered from source, and I routinely have to rebuild the database from the ground up because the package managers always corrupt it.
Sure, source is slower, but it is infinitely more robust. I speaketh from having used Linux from 0.1 to the present day, having used 386BSD (long before the existing BSDs were out) and having seen admin after admin blow up Solaris and other Unixes by relying on the package manager to do the right thing.
Military grade, according to ITAR, means the key is more than 56 bits (used to be 40 bits). Which, you're right, means nothing.
Now, if I use the term "military-grade" for crypto, I would mean an algorithm that is certified NIST/NESSIE-approved for Secret or above (for mundane usage) or NIST/NESSIE-approved for Top Secret (for information that is commercially sensitive). That is still arguably market-babble, but at least it has a measure of respectability because NIST and NESSIE are reasonably trustworthy organizations for evaluating crypto.
One of my favourites (Blue Midnight Wish) made it through, and one of the others with a really cool name (SandSTORM) wasn't broken in the 1st round.
Yes, I know, that's NOT how to pick hash functions, but you've got to admit that cryptography isn't capturing the popular imagination at the present time, leaving data dangerously insecure. I believe that part of this is because most popular crypto-related functions (and cryptographic hashing is definitely one) have names that are a turnoff.
Once upon a time, computing was for "the Egg Heads" and anyone daring to mention computers was automatically One Of Them. The Apple made computing sexy and it became fashionable.
Cryptography has to do the same thing, if security is to be meaningful. Otherwise, it will remain for "Egg Heads Only" and we will continue to see horrific losses from naive and pathetic practices by people trying to avoid being tarred as geeky.
If you look at the phases of, say, computing, radio, or other technologies, you see oscillations between the purist and the pragmatic. The theorists are invariably purist, the inventors pragmatic, the experimenters purist, the developers pragmatic, and so on, back and forth.
Let's indeed look at the history of Unix, which was kicked off because MULTICS was just too complicated an idea (ie: more purist than pragmatic). The BSD line got back into the hands of researchers looking for new ways to do things (back to the purist) and then started getting commercialized (back to the pragmatic). The modern ix86 BSDs are back to the purists, though arguably OpenBSD's tough stance on new code is back to the pragmatic in a way.
These oscillations damp down after a while - neither radio enthusiasts nor radio vendors have added much in the way of new innovations in a while. The wind-up radio for third-world countries and disaster zones being one of the more recent, and as revolutionary as it was, it was more of an incremental improvement than a radical shift.
A technology dies when the oscillations fail to keep the technology in competition with whatever replaces it. If nothing replace it, the technology eventually flat-lines but hangs around in undead form until something new does come along.
Essentially, yes. It's a variant of the Portage system that rolls RPMs and DEBs suitable for other distros, but really that's all it is. It is possible you could adapt RPM-building and DEB-building scripts, along with Portage, to do everything needed.
(Oh, you also need each of the distros in a virtual machine, so that you can build the package to the requirements of each.)
I'd agree with you, but I've identified quite a few packages where the source used is over two years old. (ATLAS springs to mind.)
The mix of old source and new source is likely one big reason for stability problems. Another is that dependency trees are often not properly regenerated, so what you end up with is binaries linking to stuff that no longer exists or has a different ABI.
I'd be happy to use Debian Unstable, or for that matter, most distributions, but I'm becoming very tired of the seriously broken package management strategies and am considering scrapping the distro I currently use and replacing it will a personally-rolled one.
Trust me, it won't be worse than Debian Unstable. It may take me longer to apply updates, and it will certainly be harder work, but I know that I know what I'm doing, whereas I do NOT know that any distro out there knows what it is doing, and I have seen nothing that gives me confidence.
The problem as stated is somewhat different to my situation, but runs into the same underlying problem. They cannot rely on a given distro using up-to-date sources, and in fact know that distros routinely won't. Since this violates the DoD criteria, they have to find an alternative.
Since you will NEVER convince people to move away from package managers in those environments, an internal distro is the only way to go.
Scientific Linux is precisely this sort of internal distro, with the sole difference that it was eventually released for others to use. So it has been done, and has been done Very Well. Thus, it is provably not necessarily "for the worse".
Slashdot Mirror
Since the days of Maggie Hilda Thatcher and Ronnie Ray Gun, the highest authority in the UK has always been the US Supreme Court.
Don't be normal. If you think being aspie is bad, neurotypicals are infinitely worse off. They even believe their own crud, half the time, believe it or not.
For those curious about whether they have Asperger's Syndrome, there are three simple ways to self-diagnose:
On the other hand, Slashdot is going to primarily be of interest to aspies, so constitutes a test in its own right:
If you have answered Y to two or more of these, you're aspie.
Alternately, you could just look at the two "classic" symptoms:
If you answered Y to either of these, you're aspie.
First off, Asperger's Syndrome is generally recognized as being on the Autistic Spectrum, not as an independently-classified condition. Second, MRI shows the two to be tightly-coupled, that there can be no serious question that Asperger's Syndrome is merely a specific subset of Autism.
Now we've got that out the way, I strongly object to the whole mental concept of absolute diminished responsibility. It's a sliding scale, not an on/off switch, and ALL people will have some area in which some diminished responsibility will exist.
The only sane, rational, logical approach is to forget about the notion of whether a person is legally culpable because of such a defect, because it's simply not useful, but rather to approach the issue as a case of how to divide the consequences of the action between treatment for the defect and punishment for the action.
Although I can see the UK legal system someday making such a switch, the US is legally very primitive. So much so that they still think the death penalty and digital watches are pretty neat ideas. I'd argue against extradition, less on the grounds of diminished responsibility of the guy and more on the grounds of diminished responsibility on the part of the US.
Asperger's Syndrome has already been established as being a defect in the mirror neurons in the brain, and it is unquestionably a form of autism (which is caused by those parts of the brain designed to filter information being malformed).
If a malformed brain is an "excuse", I'd LOVE to see ringbarer's sick notes. What the hell is real, if great big chunks of the brain being missing is fake?
Probably Netcraft. It's where Slashdotters find out where everything else is dead.
But it wouldn't be a straight fight between ARM and Intel. It would be a fight between ARM, StrongARM, Asynchronous ARM (yes, there really is an asynchronous CPU based on the ARM core), and every other ARM variant out there.
Well, what did you expect for the output of something labeled Alpha? Wait for the Beta release at least.
Arguably, since Pandora defined their own algorithm for organizing the music and since databases and collections CAN be copyrighted, they do hold the copyright to the specific permutations resulting. I think they'd have a hard time getting the courts to agree, but the legal framework certainly exists for collections.
The problem is that the collection is transitory, as is indeed Wolfram Alpha's. And transitory collections are NOT considered copyrightable. There was a case covering that not too long ago, if I remember rightly, in which that was the decision, which means there's case law out there for that interpretation.
There are indeed some compilers sold with licenses that claim certain rights over the binaries compiled. This, apparently, used to be common practice, and for quite some time in the 80s and 90s, it was actually a selling-point for compilers to specifically permit people rights to do what they wanted with the binaries resulting from a compiled program.
Don't you know by now that geeks don't know any women?
As I've noted elsewhere, I have an old WW2-vintage R1155. It's not the classiest of receivers, but it does have some very nice features and has a wide enough range that it can even do some radio astronomy.
I'd never thought of using it just as an amplifier, but I suppose it could be used that way. Since it's designed to operate with three aerials and supports bias between them, that might be quite a neat hack. Not sure how I could get 3 outputs from the guitar though.
(Semi-aside: I did consider, at one point, making my own guitar using 2-directional magnetic field sensors, since the strings have essentially two degrees of freedom. You can certainly get sensors that would be far, far more sensitive and far less damping than the induction coils normally used. This could have some interesting properties, particularly if you wire it through an old-style valve amplifier.)
Blame it on maintaining an old Marconi R1155 WW2-vintage receiver. (Haven't got the radio direction finder re-wired yet.)
All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.
So, Arthur C Clarke's diamond at the centre of Jupiter is actually made of transparent carbon...?
It requires a [CENSORED BY NSA] number of alternating layers to be effective.
BTW, if asdf7890 is sad enough to shoot themselves for their posting, what would be sufficiently geeky for me to use for having worked out a solution to the continuity problem?
In the same way the Russians still use thermionic valves for aircraft and spacecraft, and indeed high-end audiophiles use them for sound systems, there may be contexts in 25th century engineering where a mechanical keyboard is safer/superior to a touchscreen panel. In that case, Scotty would certainly have needed to be proficient with them.
The short answer is that I used to do this all the time. Back in the days of MCC and SLS, I would use those as construction platforms and then rebuild everything from source. These days, it's easier than it was back then - I don't have to edit all those damnable configuration files for X for a start, and thankfully most configuration systems are relatively automated. I hate compiling Perl.
I switched to distros that used packages because they were supposed to be easier, but frankly I've not found that to be true. Kernels are a bigger pain than ever, dependency hell reigns in a way I never suffered from source, and I routinely have to rebuild the database from the ground up because the package managers always corrupt it.
Sure, source is slower, but it is infinitely more robust. I speaketh from having used Linux from 0.1 to the present day, having used 386BSD (long before the existing BSDs were out) and having seen admin after admin blow up Solaris and other Unixes by relying on the package manager to do the right thing.
Military grade, according to ITAR, means the key is more than 56 bits (used to be 40 bits). Which, you're right, means nothing.
Now, if I use the term "military-grade" for crypto, I would mean an algorithm that is certified NIST/NESSIE-approved for Secret or above (for mundane usage) or NIST/NESSIE-approved for Top Secret (for information that is commercially sensitive). That is still arguably market-babble, but at least it has a measure of respectability because NIST and NESSIE are reasonably trustworthy organizations for evaluating crypto.
One of my favourites (Blue Midnight Wish) made it through, and one of the others with a really cool name (SandSTORM) wasn't broken in the 1st round.
Yes, I know, that's NOT how to pick hash functions, but you've got to admit that cryptography isn't capturing the popular imagination at the present time, leaving data dangerously insecure. I believe that part of this is because most popular crypto-related functions (and cryptographic hashing is definitely one) have names that are a turnoff.
Once upon a time, computing was for "the Egg Heads" and anyone daring to mention computers was automatically One Of Them. The Apple made computing sexy and it became fashionable.
Cryptography has to do the same thing, if security is to be meaningful. Otherwise, it will remain for "Egg Heads Only" and we will continue to see horrific losses from naive and pathetic practices by people trying to avoid being tarred as geeky.
If you look at the phases of, say, computing, radio, or other technologies, you see oscillations between the purist and the pragmatic. The theorists are invariably purist, the inventors pragmatic, the experimenters purist, the developers pragmatic, and so on, back and forth.
Let's indeed look at the history of Unix, which was kicked off because MULTICS was just too complicated an idea (ie: more purist than pragmatic). The BSD line got back into the hands of researchers looking for new ways to do things (back to the purist) and then started getting commercialized (back to the pragmatic). The modern ix86 BSDs are back to the purists, though arguably OpenBSD's tough stance on new code is back to the pragmatic in a way.
These oscillations damp down after a while - neither radio enthusiasts nor radio vendors have added much in the way of new innovations in a while. The wind-up radio for third-world countries and disaster zones being one of the more recent, and as revolutionary as it was, it was more of an incremental improvement than a radical shift.
A technology dies when the oscillations fail to keep the technology in competition with whatever replaces it. If nothing replace it, the technology eventually flat-lines but hangs around in undead form until something new does come along.
Would you regard this re-enactment guy to be pragmatic, purist or very, very optimistic?
The only Evil Dentist I know of, from The Avengers (From Venus With Love), was more into lasers. No sharks, though.
Essentially, yes. It's a variant of the Portage system that rolls RPMs and DEBs suitable for other distros, but really that's all it is. It is possible you could adapt RPM-building and DEB-building scripts, along with Portage, to do everything needed.
(Oh, you also need each of the distros in a virtual machine, so that you can build the package to the requirements of each.)
I'd agree with you, but I've identified quite a few packages where the source used is over two years old. (ATLAS springs to mind.)
The mix of old source and new source is likely one big reason for stability problems. Another is that dependency trees are often not properly regenerated, so what you end up with is binaries linking to stuff that no longer exists or has a different ABI.
I'd be happy to use Debian Unstable, or for that matter, most distributions, but I'm becoming very tired of the seriously broken package management strategies and am considering scrapping the distro I currently use and replacing it will a personally-rolled one.
Trust me, it won't be worse than Debian Unstable. It may take me longer to apply updates, and it will certainly be harder work, but I know that I know what I'm doing, whereas I do NOT know that any distro out there knows what it is doing, and I have seen nothing that gives me confidence.
The problem as stated is somewhat different to my situation, but runs into the same underlying problem. They cannot rely on a given distro using up-to-date sources, and in fact know that distros routinely won't. Since this violates the DoD criteria, they have to find an alternative.
Since you will NEVER convince people to move away from package managers in those environments, an internal distro is the only way to go.
Scientific Linux is precisely this sort of internal distro, with the sole difference that it was eventually released for others to use. So it has been done, and has been done Very Well. Thus, it is provably not necessarily "for the worse".