People like Al Gore fill your minds with this propaganda so that you'll go out and buy their *green* light bulbs
so you prefer the propaganda from people like exon who want you to go out and buy their gasoline?
1. Volcano's and things alike emit more C02 gas then the entire human race.
sure do. and for a long time, before the advent of industrialization, the climate has experienced only moderate fluctuations even with all that volcanic co2. then along came escalades and coal plants and massive human-engineer deforestation projects that when added to all that volcanic co2, it tipped the balance to a general warming trend.
2. The Earth heats up on a cycle. It just so happens that in this point in time were on the warming part.
of course the earth heats and cools on a cycle. no one is claiming otherwise. the concern currently is the amplitude of the cycle and the speed at which the general warming trend is expected to occur... not the existence of the cycle itself.
If we were going into an ice age, I'm sure Al Gore would be saying "Save the dingos from the ice" instead of "Save the polar bears from the heat".
uh, yes, of course he would. people who are opposed to climate change, which so many here seem to call "global warming", are not by extension in favour of global cooling. they're in favour of a global climate that is stable within the normal and natural rates of fluctuations.
Because it also encourages the lack of accountability that goes along with it.
it's only been six weeks since the u.s. election -- and already people are forgetting the importance of anonymity.
in the united states, indeed in every western democracy, ballots are secret. no one questions this anonymity -- indeed, it's mandated by law.
the reason we have secret ballots is simple: the framers of the constitution (any western constitution) realized that people could only truly vote their conscience, express their political preference, if they could do so without fear of reprisal or ridicule. anonymity is a cornerstone of a free and democratic society.
it's kind of a shame that ms. dyson doesn't realize that.
witness my band. we suck. people hate us. no one comes to our shows. so, we release a cd. since we're not big enough to be granted an exemption, we pay the cd-r tax on all the blanks we use (and, yes, we used a legit duplication plant). of course, our cd sells miserably and we get nowhere near the beak-even point.
which means.... we lose $300 putting out our cd, and the tax we paid on the blanks goes straight into the pockets of a big-name canadian act. perhaps avril levign. that's right: levign makes more money off my artistic creation than i do.
When the actual returns came, the left was shocked. They will be again.
waitaminnit? there's a left-wing candidate?
maybe we all should take a look at the political compass' left/right analysis of the candidates before we start throwing around phrases like "left wing".
bottom line: the american election is a contest between two versions of right-wing politics.
except noone can ever seem to be able to point to an instance when Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Joseph Smith, of even L.Ron Hubbard sending out murderers to advance their religion
and no one can point to where Ahmad ibn Ajiba, Baha-ud-Din Naqshband Bukhari or Amadou Bamba sent "out murders to advance their religion".
lesson: just because you can name some non-violent non-muslims and can't (or won't) name any non-violent muslims, doesn't mean all muslims are violent.
If they choose to store the contents of your hard drive for later analysis, not at all. Nor will it protect you against minimally-clever forensics tools.
of course there's always deniable encryption, ie rubberhose.
It's called TrueCrypt and is available for Windows, Linux and to some degree for OS X.
the important thing about truecrypt is the concept of 'deniable encryption' -- that encrypted data is indistinguishable from garbage on disk, and the number of encrypted 'aspects' on a disk are indeterminable. what this means is that you can give up the password to the aspect that contains your collection of chickpea recipes and still keep the password to the apsect that holds your other data to yourself. this is nice since, you know, if you get waterboarded it's nice to have something to tell your inquisitors.
in the same vein as truecrypt, there is also rubberhose which, according to the site, "deniably encrypts disk data, minimising the effectiveness of warrants, coersive interrogations and other compulsive mechanims, such as U.K RIP legislation". the theory, as the name implies, is that the only way anyone is going to get all the passwords to all the crypted aspects on your disk is by hitting you with the aforementioned length of tubing. rubberhose, however, is still only in alpha and the project appears to be abandoned so it's a 'use at your own risk' kinda deal.
lastly, of course, there's always steganography -- the art of hiding the data, often in conjunction with crypting it.
now, if you steg up your precious data, throw it on a deniably crypted filesystem and then write the whole thing to a series of 5" floppies that no border guard is reasonably going to have the equipment to read... well, you should be okay.
When I first read this article my only thought was "goodbye college radio"
well, we have college radio stations up in canada and up here broadcasters have to pay royalties to composers for play.
canada has an organization call 'socan' that collects royalties from radio stations (among other places) and distributes them to artists. from socan's web page:
"[we collect] licence fees, as set by the Copyright Board of Canada, from anyone playing or broadcasting live or recorded music."
how those royalties get disbursed is a bit trickier, but i do know folks in local bands who have gotten cheques (usually in the sub-ten-dollar range, but hey, they're pretty much unknown local acts).
Re:I prefer EMACS!
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
the non-intuitive (if short) command syntax of vi.
okay... i hear this a lot, and not just on this thread, that the vim syntax is 'non-intuitive', and i'm starting to wonder why people say that.
i mean, most people here are users of some sort of *nix, an interface where 'resolv.conf' is missing an 'e' for no apparent reason and cp uses a capital R for recursive, but scp demands a lowercase one. even those of us who use the allegedly 'easy' windows operating system are confronted with a shut down command located under a menu labeled 'start'. and we all speak english, perhaps the least intuitive syntax yet developed, where 'slaughter' does not, for some reason, rhyme with 'laughter' and words like 'cleave' and 'table' can have two meanings which are diametrically opposed to each other.
we are, all of us, confronted every day with systems of syntax that are grossly complex, inane and massively counterintuitive.
All work -- emails, spreadsheets, and Google searches -- will be performed by mind control
they're already performed by mind control... of your fingers!
computer use is the fine art of taking data stored in a chemical analog format (your brain) transferring it to an electronic digital format (your computer) via a mechanical method (typing).
If it is illegal to translate, the Polish police was right in arresting the guilty.
to a certain degree, this makes sense. witness the 2003 illegal translation of harry potter and the order of the phoenix. it was so bad that the quality of the content was dramatically reduced... at one point the translator even wrote "Here comes something that I'm unable to translate, sorry."
so, the idea of having 'approved' translators can be necessary to preserve the integrity of the content.
However, to compare the Bible with Dianetics is a bit of a joke. Is there any historical evidence of ancient, interplanetary 747's around?
about as much proof as there is of the red sea parting. or manna from heaven. or the instantaneous destruction of soddom and gommorah... or a flood that covered the entire earth.
so, yeah, if evidence is your hallmark of a valid religion, i think both camps are in trouble.
I don't quite remember (sorry, I don't live in the USA). Isn't Texas one of the state where you can't work as a government official if you're a bloody atheist?
i don't know about the 'bloody' part, but article 1 section 4 of the bill of 'rights' of the texas constitution states that people may not hold office if they don't "acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being".
the full text is:
"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being."
I suppose you never carried a weapon around for more than 200feet, right? Nobody would choose the AK over the M16 for any foot-based combat.
to be fair, the ak is 9.5lb to the m16's 7.8lb. not a massive difference, and the ak's shorter length compensates for its weight in fast-aim situations.
now, having said that, the m16 has gotten an unfair reputation as a reliability disaster. much of this rep comes from vietnam-era experiences that are 40 years old. the problems with the m16 during vietnam were basically caused by manufacturer's lies and the army's inability to actually read the manual. notably:
the m-16 was billed as being 'self-cleaning'. sounds patently ridiculous today, but that was the advertising buzz at the time.
as a result, the army did not issue cleaning kits to ground troops and provided little or no cleaning instruction. this, of course, resulted in total disaster.
the m16 was tested and spec'd for ammunition made with a particular clean-burning powder (manufactured by dupont i think). production ammunition for vietnam did not meet this spec and was, in fact, significantly more dirty.
the original m16 spec called for chrome lining of the barrel. production m16's in vietnam didn't have this resulting in some pretty spectacular corrosion
add to this the fact that the finniky m16 was being used in an environment that was humid, hot and dirty and... well, failure was inevitable.
Taking Sweden as an example, there they tax all storage media (not just "removable" media) with this levy. Actually it's not really a tax (taxing illegal activities is illegal itself), but a state protected fee which a private organization is allowed to collect and without insight into how, distribute parts of the sum to a secret list of copyright holders.
canada has a similar law, although it only applies to removable media such as blank cds. now, normally i like the levy, since it helps keep the copyright rottweilers at bay, but consider this...
i'm in this rock band. we are, as one local journalist stated, "startlingly unsuccessful". so, we record and release a compact disc. it's a run of 500 and we sell, maybe, ten (thanks mom!) and lose a tonne of money. this is not an unusual scenario.
but the kicker is this: we pay the levy on the blank cd's we use for our release. this means that some major-label canadian artist (ms. levign perhaps) is actually making money off of my band's record while my band is losing money.
Anyone can make that sort of an edit. If they can back it up, they're golden.
thank you for actually understanding one of the core principles of wikipedia!
it's pretty simple, actually. wikipedia is an encyclopedia and as a result all material must be properly referenced (WP:CITE for the wikinerds out there). it doesn't matter if you have a.edu email address or a phd or if you're hang drywall for a living. if you can cite your contribution and the cites meed the standards then the material is fit. people, both readers and contributors, need to realize that the material on wikipedia is only as good as its references... all other material should be treated as suspect.
actually, it sounds suspiciously like xul (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/) with some flash thrown in. mind you, i've not read the article or played with any of the apps so i'm just guessing wildly.
We tried CFLs in my household and we hated them. We found some random buzzing issues, hated the color of our walls and furniture...
and how long ago was this? the state of cfl tech has advanced dramatically in the last couple of years.
when i bought my first cfl in 1988, it cost me $30, was the size of a football and was about as loud as a washing machine. furthermore, in order not to totally destroy the bulb's longevity, it needed to run for at least 15 or 20 minutes at a time and took over a minute to 'warm up'. i had to mail-order it and the bulb came with a 30-page manual.
six months ago i bought a box of 8 cfls at the local hardware store for just over $20... about 10% of that original bulb. they start instantaneously, have a minimum run time of a few seconds and are perfectly silent. and there's no manual.
the big difference between that first bulb (and even a lot of cfls from two or three years ago) and the new ones is that ballast. basically, the ballast is responsible for building up the charge to get the phosphors in the bulb emitting light and regulating the charge. older ballasts tend to be of the "magnetic type"... the run the bulb at lower frequencies, take much longer to warm up and generate a lot of heat. modern "electronic" ballasts, by comparison can run a bulb at a very high, flicker-free, frequency, produce far less heat and get the phosphors up to full excitement very quickly (usually less than a second).
Slashdot Mirror
People like Al Gore fill your minds with this propaganda so that you'll go out and buy their *green* light bulbs
so you prefer the propaganda from people like exon who want you to go out and buy their gasoline?
1. Volcano's and things alike emit more C02 gas then the entire human race.
sure do. and for a long time, before the advent of industrialization, the climate has experienced only moderate fluctuations even with all that volcanic co2. then along came escalades and coal plants and massive human-engineer deforestation projects that when added to all that volcanic co2, it tipped the balance to a general warming trend.
2. The Earth heats up on a cycle. It just so happens that in this point in time were on the warming part.
of course the earth heats and cools on a cycle. no one is claiming otherwise. the concern currently is the amplitude of the cycle and the speed at which the general warming trend is expected to occur... not the existence of the cycle itself.
If we were going into an ice age, I'm sure Al Gore would be saying "Save the dingos from the ice" instead of "Save the polar bears from the heat".
uh, yes, of course he would. people who are opposed to climate change, which so many here seem to call "global warming", are not by extension in favour of global cooling. they're in favour of a global climate that is stable within the normal and natural rates of fluctuations.
Just my two cents.
and fair value at that price.
Why not encourage anonymity?
Because it also encourages the lack of accountability that goes along with it.
it's only been six weeks since the u.s. election -- and already people are forgetting the importance of anonymity.
in the united states, indeed in every western democracy, ballots are secret. no one questions this anonymity -- indeed, it's mandated by law.
the reason we have secret ballots is simple: the framers of the constitution (any western constitution) realized that people could only truly vote their conscience, express their political preference, if they could do so without fear of reprisal or ridicule. anonymity is a cornerstone of a free and democratic society.
it's kind of a shame that ms. dyson doesn't realize that.
witness my band. we suck. people hate us. no one comes to our shows. so, we release a cd. since we're not big enough to be granted an exemption, we pay the cd-r tax on all the blanks we use (and, yes, we used a legit duplication plant). of course, our cd sells miserably and we get nowhere near the beak-even point.
which means.... we lose $300 putting out our cd, and the tax we paid on the blanks goes straight into the pockets of a big-name canadian act. perhaps avril levign. that's right: levign makes more money off my artistic creation than i do.
thank you socan!
This process will NOT "create" energy.
seriously. at best this sounds like a marginally novel take on cogeneration.
or the "unix koan" grep "" /dev/null
When the actual returns came, the left was shocked. They will be again.
waitaminnit? there's a left-wing candidate?
maybe we all should take a look at the political compass' left/right analysis of the candidates before we start throwing around phrases like "left wing".
bottom line: the american election is a contest between two versions of right-wing politics.
As this one is still going on and not yet accepted on /. as a hoax, I'll be modded down and pilloried for this.
Just saying.
from the above link:
"who am I? I'm Dr. William Campbell Douglass, and I've been called the greatest mythbuster in modern medicine."
hm. i think maybe dr douglass is thinking of "global fever".
and no one can point to where Ahmad ibn Ajiba, Baha-ud-Din Naqshband Bukhari or Amadou Bamba sent "out murders to advance their religion". lesson: just because you can name some non-violent non-muslims and can't (or won't) name any non-violent muslims, doesn't mean all muslims are violent.
of course there's always deniable encryption, ie rubberhose.
It's called TrueCrypt and is available for Windows, Linux and to some degree for OS X.
the important thing about truecrypt is the concept of 'deniable encryption' -- that encrypted data is indistinguishable from garbage on disk, and the number of encrypted 'aspects' on a disk are indeterminable. what this means is that you can give up the password to the aspect that contains your collection of chickpea recipes and still keep the password to the apsect that holds your other data to yourself. this is nice since, you know, if you get waterboarded it's nice to have something to tell your inquisitors.
in the same vein as truecrypt, there is also rubberhose which, according to the site, "deniably encrypts disk data, minimising the effectiveness of warrants, coersive interrogations and other compulsive mechanims, such as U.K RIP legislation". the theory, as the name implies, is that the only way anyone is going to get all the passwords to all the crypted aspects on your disk is by hitting you with the aforementioned length of tubing. rubberhose, however, is still only in alpha and the project appears to be abandoned so it's a 'use at your own risk' kinda deal.
lastly, of course, there's always steganography -- the art of hiding the data, often in conjunction with crypting it.
now, if you steg up your precious data, throw it on a deniably crypted filesystem and then write the whole thing to a series of 5" floppies that no border guard is reasonably going to have the equipment to read... well, you should be okay.
well, we have college radio stations up in canada and up here broadcasters have to pay royalties to composers for play.
canada has an organization call 'socan' that collects royalties from radio stations (among other places) and distributes them to artists. from socan's web page:
"[we collect] licence fees, as set by the Copyright Board of Canada, from anyone playing or broadcasting live or recorded music."
how those royalties get disbursed is a bit trickier, but i do know folks in local bands who have gotten cheques (usually in the sub-ten-dollar range, but hey, they're pretty much unknown local acts).
and college radio does just fine up here.
okay... i hear this a lot, and not just on this thread, that the vim syntax is 'non-intuitive', and i'm starting to wonder why people say that.
i mean, most people here are users of some sort of *nix, an interface where 'resolv.conf' is missing an 'e' for no apparent reason and cp uses a capital R for recursive, but scp demands a lowercase one. even those of us who use the allegedly 'easy' windows operating system are confronted with a shut down command located under a menu labeled 'start'. and we all speak english, perhaps the least intuitive syntax yet developed, where 'slaughter' does not, for some reason, rhyme with 'laughter' and words like 'cleave' and 'table' can have two meanings which are diametrically opposed to each other.
we are, all of us, confronted every day with systems of syntax that are grossly complex, inane and massively counterintuitive.
so why are you all picking on vim?
so, what, then, has the arabic world contributed to science?
zero!
On /. there is no such thing as a true "anonymous" post.
how about with:
the cloak
tor
those who don't and think they do, post on slashdot.
they're already performed by mind control... of your fingers!
computer use is the fine art of taking data stored in a chemical analog format (your brain) transferring it to an electronic digital format (your computer) via a mechanical method (typing).
to a certain degree, this makes sense. witness the 2003 illegal translation of harry potter and the order of the phoenix. it was so bad that the quality of the content was dramatically reduced... at one point the translator even wrote "Here comes something that I'm unable to translate, sorry."
so, the idea of having 'approved' translators can be necessary to preserve the integrity of the content.
my source for this is here
However, to compare the Bible with Dianetics is a bit of a joke. Is there any historical evidence of ancient, interplanetary 747's around?
about as much proof as there is of the red sea parting. or manna from heaven. or the instantaneous destruction of soddom and gommorah... or a flood that covered the entire earth.
so, yeah, if evidence is your hallmark of a valid religion, i think both camps are in trouble.
I don't quite remember (sorry, I don't live in the USA). Isn't Texas one of the state where you can't work as a government official if you're a bloody atheist?
i don't know about the 'bloody' part, but article 1 section 4 of the bill of 'rights' of the texas constitution states that people may not hold office if they don't "acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being".
the full text is:
"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being."
my source is here.
to be fair, the ak is 9.5lb to the m16's 7.8lb. not a massive difference, and the ak's shorter length compensates for its weight in fast-aim situations.
now, having said that, the m16 has gotten an unfair reputation as a reliability disaster. much of this rep comes from vietnam-era experiences that are 40 years old. the problems with the m16 during vietnam were basically caused by manufacturer's lies and the army's inability to actually read the manual. notably:
- the m-16 was billed as being 'self-cleaning'. sounds patently ridiculous today, but that was the advertising buzz at the time.
- as a result, the army did not issue cleaning kits to ground troops and provided little or no cleaning instruction. this, of course, resulted in total disaster.
- the m16 was tested and spec'd for ammunition made with a particular clean-burning powder (manufactured by dupont i think). production ammunition for vietnam did not meet this spec and was, in fact, significantly more dirty.
- the original m16 spec called for chrome lining of the barrel. production m16's in vietnam didn't have this resulting in some pretty spectacular corrosion
add to this the fact that the finniky m16 was being used in an environment that was humid, hot and dirty and... well, failure was inevitable.Taking Sweden as an example, there they tax all storage media (not just "removable" media) with this levy. Actually it's not really a tax (taxing illegal activities is illegal itself), but a state protected fee which a private organization is allowed to collect and without insight into how, distribute parts of the sum to a secret list of copyright holders.
canada has a similar law, although it only applies to removable media such as blank cds. now, normally i like the levy, since it helps keep the copyright rottweilers at bay, but consider this...
i'm in this rock band. we are, as one local journalist stated, "startlingly unsuccessful". so, we record and release a compact disc. it's a run of 500 and we sell, maybe, ten (thanks mom!) and lose a tonne of money. this is not an unusual scenario.
but the kicker is this: we pay the levy on the blank cd's we use for our release. this means that some major-label canadian artist (ms. levign perhaps) is actually making money off of my band's record while my band is losing money.
amazing stuff.
Anyone can make that sort of an edit. If they can back it up, they're golden.
.edu email address or a phd or if you're hang drywall for a living. if you can cite your contribution and the cites meed the standards then the material is fit. people, both readers and contributors, need to realize that the material on wikipedia is only as good as its references... all other material should be treated as suspect.
thank you for actually understanding one of the core principles of wikipedia!
it's pretty simple, actually. wikipedia is an encyclopedia and as a result all material must be properly referenced (WP:CITE for the wikinerds out there). it doesn't matter if you have a
Hey, you just need a successful domestic tax rebellion, and then you can complain about it all you want.
and what, exactly, was this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_Tax_Riots
actually, it sounds suspiciously like xul (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/) with some flash thrown in. mind you, i've not read the article or played with any of the apps so i'm just guessing wildly.
and how long ago was this? the state of cfl tech has advanced dramatically in the last couple of years.
when i bought my first cfl in 1988, it cost me $30, was the size of a football and was about as loud as a washing machine. furthermore, in order not to totally destroy the bulb's longevity, it needed to run for at least 15 or 20 minutes at a time and took over a minute to 'warm up'. i had to mail-order it and the bulb came with a 30-page manual.
six months ago i bought a box of 8 cfls at the local hardware store for just over $20... about 10% of that original bulb. they start instantaneously, have a minimum run time of a few seconds and are perfectly silent. and there's no manual.
the big difference between that first bulb (and even a lot of cfls from two or three years ago) and the new ones is that ballast. basically, the ballast is responsible for building up the charge to get the phosphors in the bulb emitting light and regulating the charge. older ballasts tend to be of the "magnetic type"... the run the bulb at lower frequencies, take much longer to warm up and generate a lot of heat. modern "electronic" ballasts, by comparison can run a bulb at a very high, flicker-free, frequency, produce far less heat and get the phosphors up to full excitement very quickly (usually less than a second).
so... don't write off the cfls yet.