Thanks a lot. You just made me cry into my morning coffee. Now, why don't you make us all feel really bad and describe all on the 6 foot blond models who hang around your town. Or the universal health care. Or the eight weeks of vacation.
That's actually pretty insightful in a bumper-sticker kind of way. I think the hidden truth, however, is that the tools that help protect the struggling technology and the inventive individual can be abused. Or, to rephrase it, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
The copyright that protects a musician should not, also, be used to allow the RIAA to dictate technology policy throughout the U.S.. In the same way, specific patents that protect the start up biomedical company are good while overly broad, obvious patents in the hands of huge companies should not be used to bury competitors under a mountain of lawsuits.
What are you talking about? This is great! This gives the C.S. students of the university a challenge.. I expect U of Kansas to be a new center for achievement in user-friendly encryption, anonymizing software, anonymous p2p tools, and network cracking tools.
It's a free market, start your own damn web site. How about "CrossNetwork.com:: News for Christian, Republican Nerds. Stuff that Matters to Haliburton." You can talk about how many angels can dance on a Intel Core 2 Dual and whether Moore's Law was foretold in Isaiah.
That may be true. But should the taxpayers of the rest of the country be paying $500million for a bridge or a town relocation? Heavily Republican Alaska is already the biggest welfare state in the union. And, in any case, it's not like a lack of a bridge was a surprise to the people living on the island. Or maybe it was...
"Honey, I was just driving to the airport and I was halfway down the beach before I realized there's no bridge. Why didn't the real estate agent tell us about this? I guess we should call Senator "Tubes" Stevens to get us a new bridge."
Looking at the numbers this looks like it's about on target for the usual resources/space tradeoff. It's a bit smaller than other algorithms, but much, much more resource intensive. It's almost as if there's an asymptotic curve as you approach the absolute-minimum theoretical compression ratio, where resources just climb ridiculously. Shall we call it the Compression Event Horizon: the point where an infinite amount of processing is required to remove last extraneous bit from the compressed file?
Exactly. Also, it's not like I needed some researcher to tell me that nicotine helps prevent anger, depression, and anxiety. Oh well, quit after about 12 years and I'm guessing that the "modified nicotine in a pill" is going to be more expensive than my old pack of Camels.
I don't own an iPhone but from a quick glance at the forum, the iPhone doesn't work with Vista 64-bit. This isn't a case of the new phone not working with some creaky old box, this is a case of the iPhone not working with the latest box.
Read the editorial in today's NYT. They've already downsized. Most of the people working there aren't government employees anymore. A majority are government contractors. This, my friend, is the triumph of Republican-lead privatization.
This is an issue because the subtext of all the stories is this: if you are a Democrat up for election you WILL be investigated, if you are a Republican you WILL NOT be investigated, if you are a Democrat at the DoJ you will be fired, if you are a Republican you will be promoted. Do you understand? The Department of Justice is a supposed to be a non-political department because no citizen who cares about this country wants a Soviet style DoJ where criminal investigations are based on political affiliation.
If you don't care about this now, you better not be bitching when a Democrat is President and the tides turn...
As much as I love my MacBook I have to agree. Remember, Apple isn't "good" they just make a good OS; innovative, cool, and artistic do not equal nice. I'm pretty sure Jobs would run over his grandmother with a bulldozer for 1% more market share and there's no question he'd do the same to see all RedHat and SuSe enterprise boxes replaced with shiny new XServes and all Gentoo boxes replaced with an iMac.
Full agreement. I'd even say that service quality in cell phones has been getting worse. I dropped my land line for a few years, but I eventually went crawling back since I was so tired of deteriorating battery life and dropped calls. I still have a cell phone, of course, but I almost never use it at home.
I may be expecting too much, but it seems like none of the service providers are any good:
cell phone - crappy phones where the battery dies a year before the contract expires (so buy a new phone and get a new 2 year contract or suffer) and service that keeps getting worse land line - Verizon seems to have the worst billing department I have ever seen; so I switched to Cavalier Telephone (see dsl rant) cable - Comcast billing gives Verizon a run for it's money in the "we'll take three months and a half-dozen calls to fix the billing issues" department. dsl - Cavalier DSL is so damn slow where I am that I feel like I'm back on dial up.
It could just reflect a realization that releasing a patch is as likely to introduce new bugs as it is to fix an existing bug. And, the patch identifies existing bugs which means that customers that don't install the patch are more vulnerable than they were before. Instead, you save up your fixes and your new features and your release new versions as a "dot release" and you reduce the number of versions out there in the wild. From a psychological standpoint your customers get new features and "updated security" instead of a never-ending series of security patches. Prioritization should go on behind the scenes, of course, so that the more critical fixes always make it into the latest release.
Now I'm off to read the article and see if my theories match up with their logic...
I gotta disagree. (Okay I don't disagree about what SciFi cares about; they lean, like any public company, towards cheap shows with higher profit margins rather than shows like BSG which are well-regarded but not as profitable.)
But to play devil's advocate. I think all good shows should run on a no more than four or five year arc... Allow closure, allow popular characters to be killed off (or even happily get married and retire somewhere), and most imporantly end before the proverbial shark is jumped.
I may be mistaken but I don't think any of the cars you mentioned as "good" (other than the various Subarus) are available here in the U.S.. I think the 4motion is only available in the Passat level VW and the other two aren't available at all.
It's a sad feedback loop: 1. U.S. dealers don't think we want useful cars, 2. Useful cars aren't available, 3. We buy crap cars, 4. Goto 1
Just curious. What's the lifetime storage and/or handling costs of the waste?
These comparisons of various power generation techniques -- coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind -- do a good job of comparing current operating cost and construction costs but generally seem to ignore the lifetime costs.
Is coal still a good economic decision if you figure in the cost to restore the open pit mine, remove the carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxides from the air, and remove the silt and pollution from the local streams and rivers? How about nuclear? If you figure in the lifetime monitoring of Yucca mountain is nuclear still a viable option? On the other side of the equation, what's the disposal cost of a silicon-based solar array?
These are serious questions and I honestly don't know the answer.
The last company I worked for has some sort of crappy Enterprise web mail for those of us sitting off site. It used Active X controls and seemed to require IE. I didn't research it too much. It was basically an excuse for me to not check my work email...;-)
Think of it, not as a consumer, but as a artist with a new tool to play with. I was thinking of the 2010 Henry Moore who decides to work in plastic instead of bronze because it suits his vision. Of course, he'll be keeping that CAD file under lock and key or anyone with a 3D printer will be able to make a million copies.
Artwork. Long before we're printing out engine blocks and door hinges on our home 3D printer the next generation Jonathan Adler or Henry Moore (or more likely, knockoff artists of the next generation Jonathan Adler or Henry Moore) will be making custom statues in shapes and styles that probably can't be done currently.
There will be, of course, a huge argument (just like there was when computer graphics where new) about whether or not this is "art".
the rights if animals are not zero. but the rights of animals also do not rise to the rights of your fellow human beings
A = rights of chimpanzee individual H = rights of human individual
0 < A < H
I can go with that. You are on a lifeboat with four humans and four chimps. No land in sight. Who gets eaten first?
Now, how about issues that affect a species?
C = population of chimps in the world = ~100,000 P = population of humans in the world = ~7,000,000,000
The ratio of chimp population to human population is roughly.0000143
New hypothetical question. Gold is discovered under a national park housing 1000 chimpanzees. Exploiting that resource will result in the death of those chimpanzees. Should that resource be recovered if it results in less than a life and death benefit to 70,000 humans? If so, why? If the "rights" of a chimpanzee are non-zero are they also less than 1/70,000 the rights of a human being?
If you said "yes" to getting the gold. Would you still say yes when human population is 10 billion and chimpanzee population is 50,000? How about 12 billion and 5,000? Is there a point where you believe chimpanzee rights are actually greater than zero?
Just because some animals display some emotions and behaviors does not mean that they are anywhere even close to being human or deserving human rights.
As with most of these conversations, the terms we used are so amorphous as to make the threads on/. nearly pointless. I agree, your dog does and should not have "human rights". But what does that mean? Does that mean he has no rights at all? Or, does he have some sort of intermediary "dog rights" that falls on a spectrum above "mouse rights" but below "chimp rights"?
It's a fundamental question. Do you not torture and starve your dog because: 1. you feel protective of your "property" and would not torture your dog any more than you would install Microsoft ME on your computer because it would decrease the value of your property or 2. your dog has some "rights" that you recognize (and presumably you would try to enforce even after you sold your dog).
I for one, if I sold my computer I wouldn't care is someone decided to install Microsoft ME on it. However, if circumstances were such that I had to sell or give away a pet I would make sure that my pets went to a "good home". I wouldn't sell them to a medical experimentation lab under the logic that, "well, I guess they're not my property any more."
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks a lot. You just made me cry into my morning coffee. Now, why don't you make us all feel really bad and describe all on the 6 foot blond models who hang around your town. Or the universal health care. Or the eight weeks of vacation.
At least we have lots of aircraft carriers.
That's actually pretty insightful in a bumper-sticker kind of way. I think the hidden truth, however, is that the tools that help protect the struggling technology and the inventive individual can be abused. Or, to rephrase it, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
The copyright that protects a musician should not, also, be used to allow the RIAA to dictate technology policy throughout the U.S.. In the same way, specific patents that protect the start up biomedical company are good while overly broad, obvious patents in the hands of huge companies should not be used to bury competitors under a mountain of lawsuits.
What are you talking about? This is great! This gives the C.S. students of the university a challenge.. I expect U of Kansas to be a new center for achievement in user-friendly encryption, anonymizing software, anonymous p2p tools, and network cracking tools.
It's a free market, start your own damn web site. How about "CrossNetwork.com :: News for Christian, Republican Nerds. Stuff that Matters to Haliburton." You can talk about how many angels can dance on a Intel Core 2 Dual and whether Moore's Law was foretold in Isaiah.
She doesn't yet look too bad, but if children suffered for the sins of their fathers she'd be serving 20 to life for corruption.
That may be true. But should the taxpayers of the rest of the country be paying $500million for a bridge or a town relocation? Heavily Republican Alaska is already the biggest welfare state in the union. And, in any case, it's not like a lack of a bridge was a surprise to the people living on the island. Or maybe it was...
"Honey, I was just driving to the airport and I was halfway down the beach before I realized there's no bridge. Why didn't the real estate agent tell us about this? I guess we should call Senator "Tubes" Stevens to get us a new bridge."
Exactly. Also, it's not like I needed some researcher to tell me that nicotine helps prevent anger, depression, and anxiety. Oh well, quit after about 12 years and I'm guessing that the "modified nicotine in a pill" is going to be more expensive than my old pack of Camels.
I don't own an iPhone but from a quick glance at the forum, the iPhone doesn't work with Vista 64-bit. This isn't a case of the new phone not working with some creaky old box, this is a case of the iPhone not working with the latest box.
Read the editorial in today's NYT. They've already downsized. Most of the people working there aren't government employees anymore. A majority are government contractors. This, my friend, is the triumph of Republican-lead privatization.
Do you remember back when everyone was friends?
5 .jpg
http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/Newsweek/p01
My dad still has a copy of BYTE with this advertisement (or one very like it). In my memory it also had Steve Jobs, but I guess I was mistaken.
This is an issue because the subtext of all the stories is this: if you are a Democrat up for election you WILL be investigated, if you are a Republican you WILL NOT be investigated, if you are a Democrat at the DoJ you will be fired, if you are a Republican you will be promoted. Do you understand? The Department of Justice is a supposed to be a non-political department because no citizen who cares about this country wants a Soviet style DoJ where criminal investigations are based on political affiliation.
If you don't care about this now, you better not be bitching when a Democrat is President and the tides turn...
I hit submit on the previous post and my MacBook froze! I think it was a warning...
I'm sorry Steve. It won't happen again.
As much as I love my MacBook I have to agree. Remember, Apple isn't "good" they just make a good OS; innovative, cool, and artistic do not equal nice. I'm pretty sure Jobs would run over his grandmother with a bulldozer for 1% more market share and there's no question he'd do the same to see all RedHat and SuSe enterprise boxes replaced with shiny new XServes and all Gentoo boxes replaced with an iMac.
Full agreement. I'd even say that service quality in cell phones has been getting worse. I dropped my land line for a few years, but I eventually went crawling back since I was so tired of deteriorating battery life and dropped calls. I still have a cell phone, of course, but I almost never use it at home.
I may be expecting too much, but it seems like none of the service providers are any good:
cell phone - crappy phones where the battery dies a year before the contract expires (so buy a new phone and get a new 2 year contract or suffer) and service that keeps getting worse
land line - Verizon seems to have the worst billing department I have ever seen; so I switched to Cavalier Telephone (see dsl rant)
cable - Comcast billing gives Verizon a run for it's money in the "we'll take three months and a half-dozen calls to fix the billing issues" department.
dsl - Cavalier DSL is so damn slow where I am that I feel like I'm back on dial up.
Thank you all for listening. I feel better now.
It could just reflect a realization that releasing a patch is as likely to introduce new bugs as it is to fix an existing bug. And, the patch identifies existing bugs which means that customers that don't install the patch are more vulnerable than they were before. Instead, you save up your fixes and your new features and your release new versions as a "dot release" and you reduce the number of versions out there in the wild. From a psychological standpoint your customers get new features and "updated security" instead of a never-ending series of security patches. Prioritization should go on behind the scenes, of course, so that the more critical fixes always make it into the latest release.
Now I'm off to read the article and see if my theories match up with their logic...
I gotta disagree. (Okay I don't disagree about what SciFi cares about; they lean, like any public company, towards cheap shows with higher profit margins rather than shows like BSG which are well-regarded but not as profitable.)
But to play devil's advocate. I think all good shows should run on a no more than four or five year arc... Allow closure, allow popular characters to be killed off (or even happily get married and retire somewhere), and most imporantly end before the proverbial shark is jumped.
I may be mistaken but I don't think any of the cars you mentioned as "good" (other than the various Subarus) are available here in the U.S.. I think the 4motion is only available in the Passat level VW and the other two aren't available at all.
It's a sad feedback loop:
1. U.S. dealers don't think we want useful cars,
2. Useful cars aren't available,
3. We buy crap cars,
4. Goto 1
Just curious. What's the lifetime storage and/or handling costs of the waste?
These comparisons of various power generation techniques -- coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind -- do a good job of comparing current operating cost and construction costs but generally seem to ignore the lifetime costs.
Is coal still a good economic decision if you figure in the cost to restore the open pit mine, remove the carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxides from the air, and remove the silt and pollution from the local streams and rivers? How about nuclear? If you figure in the lifetime monitoring of Yucca mountain is nuclear still a viable option? On the other side of the equation, what's the disposal cost of a silicon-based solar array?
These are serious questions and I honestly don't know the answer.
The last company I worked for has some sort of crappy Enterprise web mail for those of us sitting off site. It used Active X controls and seemed to require IE. I didn't research it too much. It was basically an excuse for me to not check my work email... ;-)
Think of it, not as a consumer, but as a artist with a new tool to play with. I was thinking of the 2010 Henry Moore who decides to work in plastic instead of bronze because it suits his vision. Of course, he'll be keeping that CAD file under lock and key or anyone with a 3D printer will be able to make a million copies.
Artwork. Long before we're printing out engine blocks and door hinges on our home 3D printer the next generation Jonathan Adler or Henry Moore (or more likely, knockoff artists of the next generation Jonathan Adler or Henry Moore) will be making custom statues in shapes and styles that probably can't be done currently.
There will be, of course, a huge argument (just like there was when computer graphics where new) about whether or not this is "art".
So they are kind of like a poster on Slashdot?
A = rights of chimpanzee individual
H = rights of human individual
0 < A < H
I can go with that. You are on a lifeboat with four humans and four chimps. No land in sight. Who gets eaten first?
Now, how about issues that affect a species?
C = population of chimps in the world = ~100,000
P = population of humans in the world = ~7,000,000,000
The ratio of chimp population to human population is roughly
New hypothetical question. Gold is discovered under a national park housing 1000 chimpanzees. Exploiting that resource will result in the death of those chimpanzees. Should that resource be recovered if it results in less than a life and death benefit to 70,000 humans? If so, why? If the "rights" of a chimpanzee are non-zero are they also less than 1/70,000 the rights of a human being?
If you said "yes" to getting the gold. Would you still say yes when human population is 10 billion and chimpanzee population is 50,000? How about 12 billion and 5,000? Is there a point where you believe chimpanzee rights are actually greater than zero?
As with most of these conversations, the terms we used are so amorphous as to make the threads on
It's a fundamental question. Do you not torture and starve your dog because: 1. you feel protective of your "property" and would not torture your dog any more than you would install Microsoft ME on your computer because it would decrease the value of your property or 2. your dog has some "rights" that you recognize (and presumably you would try to enforce even after you sold your dog).
I for one, if I sold my computer I wouldn't care is someone decided to install Microsoft ME on it. However, if circumstances were such that I had to sell or give away a pet I would make sure that my pets went to a "good home". I wouldn't sell them to a medical experimentation lab under the logic that, "well, I guess they're not my property any more."