Yeah I read that a few months back. It seemed to have some flaws though. For example, the author basically argues "if there are an infinite number of universes, and a finite number of possible configurations, there must be repeats". But this is not so. Consider the sequence of numbers 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4,... which is infinite but never contains (for example) the subsequence 2, 1. Maybe he has some way of showing that each possible universe has a nonzero probability of existing, but he doesn't mention that in the article.
Because it would leak. Let's face it: after they've given out a dozen copies of the full "build this and burn it and install it yourself" source to certain countries, there'll be copies all over the net. It won't be OSS people either; it will be crackers. I mean, why bother cracking the latest copy prevention in an MS product when you can simply comment out a few lines and recompile?
I agree with most of what you said. As I imagine you'd agree, there are different categories of crimes that require different categories of response. Violent crimes, as they are being committed, usually require a violent response. This scales from a punch to a war; when you are physically attacked, you almost always need a physical defense.
On the other hand, non-violent crimes almost never warrant a violent response. Spamming is not a violent crime; it is an economic crime in the same sense as shoplifting or tax fraud. It does not deserve a violent response.
I can't believe this goes on in every spam story without anyone having the shred of maturity it takes to say "this is wrong". Physically assaulting other people is wrong. I don't care if they're spammers. I don't care if they're child molesters or genocidal dictators. We're living in the year 2003, and we've seen what happens when we use violence as a solution to our problems. We've built countries with laws and courts and all that other good stuff so we wouldn't feel a need to engage in such vigilante barbarism. Everyone deserves a fair trial and a fair punishment. If you don't like what someone does, work to change it but work under the rule of law. Don't encourage people to beat up other people. It's not civilized.
Anglo-Saxon for the sake of Anglo-Saxon is stupid. Anglo-Saxon for the sake of using the "simpler" part of the English language is worthwhile. Looking up etymologies is a waste of time if you're a fluent English speaker; you have an intuitive sense of which words are simpler, regardless of their origins.
English speakers should stick to short Anglo-Saxon words. You can't always avoid Latin and French words, but try to use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary where you can. The words are shorter, simpler, and easier to understand. They won't make you sound as sophisticated, but they will make you a better speaker.
Look at those pictures of him before being shaved. It's no wonder it took the US so long to find him--he was hiding on the set of Planet of the Apes.
Seriously though, this is great news. Not so much for Iraqis, who were already rid of his rule, but for people living under other dictators elsewhere in the world, even ones the US is currently propping up. It will remind them that even if the US is currently supporting their dictator (e.g. Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), one day there might be a US president in a political bind who invades their country and allows them to form a democratic government.
Seriously though, it will be a great day when Hussein stands before an international tribunal and is tried for his innumerable crimes.
Guan Yu never had to deal with the US Seventh Fleet, which would effectively prevent any invasion of Taiwan by sea or air. PRC modernization aside, the US is still decades ahead in military technology and power. The PLA may have 10 million troops waiting to cross, but they won't be able to get any of them across. Illogical thinking or not, it would take many years of mainland military advancement and US military stagnation before an invasion would really be feasible.
Now, the PRC does have the missiles and nukes necessary to reduce Taiwan to ash, but I haven't read a convincing scenario in which they would do that.
All those benefits you list of reunification would also come with a normalization of relations. Whether you call Taiwan independent or not, (a) it is and has been and (b) it's about time ROC and PRC acted towards each other as nations at peace. Taiwan won't agree to reunification until the mainland catches up economically, and an economically strong China would be a huge boost for Taiwan's economy. So both countries have interests in strengthening each other's economies and promoting trade and investment.
I agree with other posters here that we shouldn't need to invoke economics to justify peace, but if economics prevent a war, more power to them.
it would have done exactly nothing to prevent 9/11, since the hijackers entered the US and traveled as themselves
Perhaps some did, but not all. Apparently at least 2 of them were alive a couple weeks after the attacks. One of them, for example, says he "lost his passport while studying in Denver". Presumably the real hijacker used that passport, or one based on it but with a new picture, when he entered the country.
Whether the owner of the "lost passport" actually helped the hijacker by faking a lost passport to give one to the terrorists doesn't matter. If the Saudis had a database that the INS could have used at the airport to look up the passport holder by name or passport number, they would have been able to get his picture (and whatever other biometric information) and make sure it checked against both the passport and the person, that hijacker would never have made it into the US.
Passports that have lots of information on them are yesterday's solution. Nowadays, at least when traveling around the modern world, there's no reason a smart card wouldn't work just as well. The immigration bureau swipes it and pulls your information from your home country. That includes your picture and other biometric information so they can verify your identity. It would also tell them if you have any outstanding warrants you're trying to flee. Best of all, it would be completely useless for identity theft. You'd only need to carry an old-style passport when you travel to places like Angola. (Why a smart-card instead of a normal magnetic strip or barcode? You'd want a long identifier number, so a country can't just pull another country's passport database and use it for whatever nefarious ends.) There'd be all sorts of other advantages; for example, your embassy could automatically know that you're in the country, so they'd know to contact you in a local emergency.
We probably don't have any great plan for this waste. It doesn't matter; the total amount of it is small enough that we can just bury it for now. Maybe in the future when space technology has become reliable enough we can launch it, bit by bit, towards the sun.
Of course they know where things are going. But only if things all go according to plan. What if the rocket explodes before it reaches escape velocity? Until a certain point in the mission, the position and momentum of the probe will be such that if the rocket exploded (or just shut off), it would fall back to Earth. These rockets do have a failure rate, however low, and they have to plan for that.
That's why they design the radioactive parts of the craft to survive such an event with minimal collateral damage. This, and not some crap about "they know where things are going", is the real thrust of their nuclear safety planning.
I've always wondered about this. Why is it that environmentalists are so afraid of the only economical way we have of attaining safe, clean power. Burning organics for our power--whether petroleum or ethanol or what have you--releases CO2, and we don't know how much of that we can have in the atmosphere before bad things start happening. Plus, fossil fuels have all sorts of political problems associated with them, such as being found in places like Saudi Arabia that are backwards and sponsor nasty people to do nasty things. Natural "renewable energy" sources like wind and sunlight just aren't affordable yet, at least not on the massive scale we need.
But no, rather than try to work towards making nuclear power safer, they want to eliminate it completely. It saddens me to say this, but there's a huge base of ignorant, uneducated people in the environmental movement. (It's the emotional appeal that draws them in.) That doesn't mean that all environmentalists are idiots. It just means they get suckered in to the wrong battles.
Mandrake users should try PLF, which has all those binary codecs packaged. If you like urpmi or the graphical Mandrake package tools, use Easy Urpmi to add the PLF package tree.
New York and Washington in time of high alert might be able to respond in time, but off the top of my head i can't think of another city in the world (baghdad?) that would be protected.
I was about to say Moscow, but then I remembered that in 1987 some German dude flew a Cessna right into Red Square. (Well technically he landed nearby and taxied to Red Square.)
No, that's a terrible idea. I'd wager 99% of the {From,Reply-To,Return-Path} email addresses in spam are fake. I know this because my address has been used as the From: address in several spam mailings. I typically find out about it when I get a deluge of NDNs from yahoo.co.kr or something. Encouraging bounces like this would only increase the proportion of SMTP bandwidth used up in relation to spam. It's far better to just/dev/null the spam than to bounce it.
I agree with you that there are lots of good arguments against free trade. But you have to remember that there's another huge advantage to free trade that no one talks about: peace. One of the benefits of the Marshall Plan, the EEC, and all that was that [Western] European economies were integrated by trade, and this made war between them untenable--their economies would collapse the moment the shooting started, because trade would be cut off. For all their tensions, the US will not go to war with China, because our economies are increasingly interdependent. Free trade is not just about economics; it's about creating a world in which war is unthinkable. That does not automatically make free trade good; as you pointed out, it has many issues. But for all the real evils of Wal-Mart in China, consider the security both countries enjoy from each other, and the secondary savings like not spending as much money on defense.
The US economy has been so good over the last 20 years (even with the current troubles) that it's full of waste and inefficiency. Sooner or later it will collapse in a serious way and it will have to painfully cut away the fat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I read that a few months back. It seemed to have some flaws though. For example, the author basically argues "if there are an infinite number of universes, and a finite number of possible configurations, there must be repeats". But this is not so. Consider the sequence of numbers 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, ... which is infinite but never contains (for example) the subsequence 2, 1. Maybe he has some way of showing that each possible universe has a nonzero probability of existing, but he doesn't mention that in the article.
Are any of those worlds "duplicates" of other worlds?
Because it would leak. Let's face it: after they've given out a dozen copies of the full "build this and burn it and install it yourself" source to certain countries, there'll be copies all over the net. It won't be OSS people either; it will be crackers. I mean, why bother cracking the latest copy prevention in an MS product when you can simply comment out a few lines and recompile?
What about Bush's DUI? Wasn't there something weird with the records being "routinely destroyed"? Or were those the records of his desertion?
I agree with most of what you said. As I imagine you'd agree, there are different categories of crimes that require different categories of response. Violent crimes, as they are being committed, usually require a violent response. This scales from a punch to a war; when you are physically attacked, you almost always need a physical defense.
On the other hand, non-violent crimes almost never warrant a violent response. Spamming is not a violent crime; it is an economic crime in the same sense as shoplifting or tax fraud. It does not deserve a violent response.
I can't believe this goes on in every spam story without anyone having the shred of maturity it takes to say "this is wrong". Physically assaulting other people is wrong. I don't care if they're spammers. I don't care if they're child molesters or genocidal dictators. We're living in the year 2003, and we've seen what happens when we use violence as a solution to our problems. We've built countries with laws and courts and all that other good stuff so we wouldn't feel a need to engage in such vigilante barbarism. Everyone deserves a fair trial and a fair punishment. If you don't like what someone does, work to change it but work under the rule of law. Don't encourage people to beat up other people. It's not civilized.
Anglo-Saxon for the sake of Anglo-Saxon is stupid. Anglo-Saxon for the sake of using the "simpler" part of the English language is worthwhile. Looking up etymologies is a waste of time if you're a fluent English speaker; you have an intuitive sense of which words are simpler, regardless of their origins.
English speakers should stick to short Anglo-Saxon words. You can't always avoid Latin and French words, but try to use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary where you can. The words are shorter, simpler, and easier to understand. They won't make you sound as sophisticated, but they will make you a better speaker.
Look at those pictures of him before being shaved. It's no wonder it took the US so long to find him--he was hiding on the set of Planet of the Apes.
Seriously though, this is great news. Not so much for Iraqis, who were already rid of his rule, but for people living under other dictators elsewhere in the world, even ones the US is currently propping up. It will remind them that even if the US is currently supporting their dictator (e.g. Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), one day there might be a US president in a political bind who invades their country and allows them to form a democratic government.
Seriously though, it will be a great day when Hussein stands before an international tribunal and is tried for his innumerable crimes.
Guan Yu never had to deal with the US Seventh Fleet, which would effectively prevent any invasion of Taiwan by sea or air. PRC modernization aside, the US is still decades ahead in military technology and power. The PLA may have 10 million troops waiting to cross, but they won't be able to get any of them across. Illogical thinking or not, it would take many years of mainland military advancement and US military stagnation before an invasion would really be feasible.
Now, the PRC does have the missiles and nukes necessary to reduce Taiwan to ash, but I haven't read a convincing scenario in which they would do that.
All those benefits you list of reunification would also come with a normalization of relations. Whether you call Taiwan independent or not, (a) it is and has been and (b) it's about time ROC and PRC acted towards each other as nations at peace. Taiwan won't agree to reunification until the mainland catches up economically, and an economically strong China would be a huge boost for Taiwan's economy. So both countries have interests in strengthening each other's economies and promoting trade and investment.
I agree with other posters here that we shouldn't need to invoke economics to justify peace, but if economics prevent a war, more power to them.
Perhaps some did, but not all. Apparently at least 2 of them were alive a couple weeks after the attacks. One of them, for example, says he "lost his passport while studying in Denver". Presumably the real hijacker used that passport, or one based on it but with a new picture, when he entered the country.
Whether the owner of the "lost passport" actually helped the hijacker by faking a lost passport to give one to the terrorists doesn't matter. If the Saudis had a database that the INS could have used at the airport to look up the passport holder by name or passport number, they would have been able to get his picture (and whatever other biometric information) and make sure it checked against both the passport and the person, that hijacker would never have made it into the US.
Passports that have lots of information on them are yesterday's solution. Nowadays, at least when traveling around the modern world, there's no reason a smart card wouldn't work just as well. The immigration bureau swipes it and pulls your information from your home country. That includes your picture and other biometric information so they can verify your identity. It would also tell them if you have any outstanding warrants you're trying to flee. Best of all, it would be completely useless for identity theft. You'd only need to carry an old-style passport when you travel to places like Angola. (Why a smart-card instead of a normal magnetic strip or barcode? You'd want a long identifier number, so a country can't just pull another country's passport database and use it for whatever nefarious ends.) There'd be all sorts of other advantages; for example, your embassy could automatically know that you're in the country, so they'd know to contact you in a local emergency.
Don't forget that the Bush administration has a great reputation for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Yeah, it would be hard for anyone else to break in to the market.
...
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week.
If IBM were really to launch a denial of service attack at SCO, the whole state of Utah would be offline for a week.
We probably don't have any great plan for this waste. It doesn't matter; the total amount of it is small enough that we can just bury it for now. Maybe in the future when space technology has become reliable enough we can launch it, bit by bit, towards the sun.
Of course they know where things are going. But only if things all go according to plan. What if the rocket explodes before it reaches escape velocity? Until a certain point in the mission, the position and momentum of the probe will be such that if the rocket exploded (or just shut off), it would fall back to Earth. These rockets do have a failure rate, however low, and they have to plan for that.
That's why they design the radioactive parts of the craft to survive such an event with minimal collateral damage. This, and not some crap about "they know where things are going", is the real thrust of their nuclear safety planning.
I've always wondered about this. Why is it that environmentalists are so afraid of the only economical way we have of attaining safe, clean power. Burning organics for our power--whether petroleum or ethanol or what have you--releases CO2, and we don't know how much of that we can have in the atmosphere before bad things start happening. Plus, fossil fuels have all sorts of political problems associated with them, such as being found in places like Saudi Arabia that are backwards and sponsor nasty people to do nasty things. Natural "renewable energy" sources like wind and sunlight just aren't affordable yet, at least not on the massive scale we need.
But no, rather than try to work towards making nuclear power safer, they want to eliminate it completely. It saddens me to say this, but there's a huge base of ignorant, uneducated people in the environmental movement. (It's the emotional appeal that draws them in.) That doesn't mean that all environmentalists are idiots. It just means they get suckered in to the wrong battles.
Mandrake users should try PLF, which has all those binary codecs packaged. If you like urpmi or the graphical Mandrake package tools, use Easy Urpmi to add the PLF package tree.
I was about to say Moscow, but then I remembered that in 1987 some German dude flew a Cessna right into Red Square. (Well technically he landed nearby and taxied to Red Square.)
No, that's a terrible idea. I'd wager 99% of the {From,Reply-To,Return-Path} email addresses in spam are fake. I know this because my address has been used as the From: address in several spam mailings. I typically find out about it when I get a deluge of NDNs from yahoo.co.kr or something. Encouraging bounces like this would only increase the proportion of SMTP bandwidth used up in relation to spam. It's far better to just /dev/null the spam than to bounce it.
I agree with you that there are lots of good arguments against free trade. But you have to remember that there's another huge advantage to free trade that no one talks about: peace. One of the benefits of the Marshall Plan, the EEC, and all that was that [Western] European economies were integrated by trade, and this made war between them untenable--their economies would collapse the moment the shooting started, because trade would be cut off. For all their tensions, the US will not go to war with China, because our economies are increasingly interdependent. Free trade is not just about economics; it's about creating a world in which war is unthinkable. That does not automatically make free trade good; as you pointed out, it has many issues. But for all the real evils of Wal-Mart in China, consider the security both countries enjoy from each other, and the secondary savings like not spending as much money on defense.
Let he whose country is without spam throw...
The US economy has been so good over the last 20 years (even with the current troubles) that it's full of waste and inefficiency. Sooner or later it will collapse in a serious way and it will have to painfully cut away the fat.