I believe in a supreme creator and have moral values.
Why do you lump these together? Seriously. There are large differences between American states regarding what proportion of their population considers themselves believers in a supreme creator. Yet by any standard measure of the morality of behavior, the states where the largest proportion believes in a supreme creator are also the states with the highest incidence of immoral behavior, including domestic abuse, divorce, alcoholism, prostitution, and even abortion. While certainly some who profess belief in a supreme creator are moral, given someone at random who does, and someone at random who doesn't, we're more likely to find moral behavior from the person who doesn't. The lowest divorce rates, for instance, are in the disproportionately-athiestic New England states, whereas the highest rates are in the true-believing states of the deep South.
If your argument is from morality, and we look at the true distribution of moral behavior in a dispassionate, scientific way, then we have to at least consider the proposition that causing people to doubt the existence of a supreme creator will lead to an increase in the average level of morality from them. Of course, it may not - it could be that the correlation works the other way around, and that there is something about "naturally" moral people that leads them to doubt a supreme creator, but that doubting a supreme creator, for those who lack this something, fails to result in an increase in morality. As posters here never tire of saying, correlation is not causation.
A professional society I belong to has just gone to set up a website, and discovered that its acronym is being squatted on by a "domainer" - no content at all there except for Google ad links to misc. stuff not even related to the acronym.
We have hundreds of thousands of domain names that could effectively and efficiently be used by real organizations as the most direct and obvious addresses to connect with them, but are instead being subsidized by Google to effectively obfuscate the Net. This means that if you really want to find a firm's or organization's site, you increasingly have to use Google to find the domain name they've settled for, since the obvious ones are taken up by these Google-subsidized squatters.
Google does evil here, and for their own ends. It would be simple for them to set standards as to where their ad links can be placed, and put this whole lecherous horde out of business, freeing up the domain name system to work according to its original design. What are the odds Google'll ever even consider this? Slim to none, because Google does evil. They're stinking rich, but they just want more, by any means, even when those means degrade the quality of much of the Web.
I wonder what our variability is as spam targets. I've seen spam drop markedly with greylisting just on the primary MX. But I can't give a good statistic because I implemented another change at the same time. I'd always set domains up with a catchall that sends unspecified userids to a mailbox, and it's gotten to where for domains that have been around for some years most of the spam coming in is addressed to fake addresses that have been created evidently by other spam faking being from the domain, and then harvested somewhere. Since I've also handed out addresses like amazon@domain.com to track merchants who leak addresses, can't remember them all but still want some of that merchant mail, just sending all this to/dev/null isn't the answer. Ah, but for whatever reason the bulk of the spammed fake userids are addressed to userid@sub.domain.com (legitimate subdomain names from my DNS records). Between tossing all addressed to a subdomain and greylisting, spam has dropped by 90% even with a secondary MX that doesn't greylist.
But the array of spammers that target me and those that target someone else may well differ greatly. Maybe someone else gets heavily spammed by secondary-MX targeters even though I'm not.
Would you want a physician to keep her credentials if she didn't accept the "germ theory" of most of the common diseases which all the other doctors and scientists will claim - on abundant evidence - are caused by germs?
As with doctors, climatologists make diagnoses of complex systems, which are acted on to the benefit or detriment of the health of those systems. Quack doctors should lose their licenses. Quack climatologists should too. License suspension is not "censorship." The quack doctors can make all the quack claims they want - except for the one about their own medical license, once suspended, or claims the fraudulently promote goods or services, such as the fraudulent promotion of the "no climate change from burning oil" stand that some currently-credentialed meteorologists are happy to do in exchange for payola from Exxon.
Your license/credentials as an electrical engineer might be at risk if you started claiming that computers worked not by electricity, but by the vital spirits in them. Taking that license would in no way censure you; it would just keep you from performing certain jobs where your idiocy would be a risk to others.
Lots of testimony here that a language can be learned with some months of immersion - within a year anyway. Yet US troops in Iraq reportedly hardly speak the local language at all, even after repeated tours. This undoubtedly lowers their life expectancy in another way. Why does the US military fail to force troops to spend part of each day learning the language? When the Romans occupied Britain, did they go around barking orders only in Latin?
Libertarians, to do anything effective on the national level, need to acquire power within one or both of the established parties. So far they've tried mostly within the Republican Party - and look where that's gotten us. Although there are inconsistencies among Democrats on IP rights, there would seem at present to be a much stronger basic defense of the Constitution and citizen's freedoms. Arch-blogger Kos has even declared himself a "libertarian Democrat." So might it be more possible to reform the Democratic Party to accord with Libertarian ideals than it's been to make some bargain with the Republicans? Consider, it's the Democrats who generally believe in science and education and reason and the value of the common citizen, while the Republicans believe in creationism and only that education that doesn't incubate "elitist" attitudes and only that reason which follows the leader and only the importance of those citizens who are lucky and rich. Yeah, many Democratic politicians are deeply flawed. But the Libertarians have largely been in bed with those with faith in Creation Science. What kind of backasswards strategy is that?
Just last week I had two incidents with different, generally solid ISPs that I and a client have business T-1 accounts with. In both cases I was dealing with kids with far bigger gaps in their sysadmin knowledge that I have - and I'm the first to admit that even after doing Internet-related sysadmin for 14 years there's lots I don't know. I didn't so much mind their gaps as the amount of trouble I had to take to convince them that no, they didn't know better than I did, and, yes, the problems were real and within their responsibility to fix. In one case I had to actually walk into the ISP's main office and make a stink to get it fixed; in the other fortunately there was a way to work around their incompetence - and that was with Speakeasy who used to be a very good shop. The outfit I made the stink too, though, I'm now getting respect from... finally. But the old "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." attitude has thoroughly infected much of the tech community.
Reporting bugs against Linux distros and free software is also a much more painful process than it was just a few years back. Far too many of the kids involved these days would rather close a bug on a lame excuse than face that there might really be something in the stuff they're maintaining that should be fixed or improved.
When a corporation creates a product that is unsafe not just to its user, but to many thousands of others, and provides instructions for that product which, even if faithfully and fully followed by its user, are insufficient to prevent it from causing damage and suffering to thousands of others, that corporation should be liable for the damage and suffering.
If you sell me a chain saw, and I ignore the instructions and cut off my hand, it's my own damn fault. If I ignore morality and criminality and cut off my spouse's head, it's still my own damn fault. But if the chainsaw goes off on its own power, while I'm sleeping, and slices and dices the whole damn town, it's your fault for selling me such a product, especially if you manufactured it with the knowledge that it could, in certain not-uncommon circumstances, do exactly that.
You don't know jack about science. Scientists get published precisely by questioning present assumptions. But the questions themselves have to be rigorous. Virtually every breakthrough in science was made by someone questioning present assumptions. We've had a long string of major and minor breakthroughs over the last several centuries. The global warming/climate change hypothesis was itself a major challenge to the present assumptions back in 1988, when the first major papers suggesting it got into the journals.
The assumption that Exxon favors - that humankind can't change the climate, because it's just too big for little us to make any difference about - was the prevailing assumption back before all the pioneering work in global warming/climate change was done. You cannot get published by challenging the notion that the world is spheroid by claiming that, no, it's flat. But if you could come up with a plausible model of how the apparent world is really a cross-section of a hyperdimensional whatnot, that's might well see print. Science goes forward, not back. Exxon is claiming the equivalent of that the world is flat.
Of course, it's always easy to sell the public on the old, previously-prevailing assumptions that science, with its constant practice of challenging assumptions, has moved beyond. The stuff is still latent in the cultural background. So there are a whole lot of people in the public who can be sold on the notions that the world is 4000 years old, flat, and not subject to human-triggered climate change. But that's public relations and ignorance, not science - and it's no failure of science to not take this sort of "challenge" seriously.
All the image spam is gifs. I just toss anything incoming with a gif attached - which is easy to do with mimedefang-milter/spamassassin in front of sendmail. I have one relative who occassionally sends funny gifs so I should whitelist her, but what place is there for gifs in business correspondence?
Also, toss anything with "stocknews" as part of the sender e-mail - that's all from a huge botnet. Toss anything where the earliest received line claims it was received by one of my own domains - but without the machine name/subdomain that my actual mail servers list. And toss anything that includes machine names as domains in the To address (i.e. someone@sub.domain.com), since our "from" addresses never include the subdomain, but for some reason spammers like to include it. All that's done without notice. Stuff with high SpamAssassin scores gets bounced with notice. And everyone not on a whitelist gets greylisted.
The spam that gets by all this is only a couple a day.
Bad design? It's a fairly standard-issue blog page at this point. Those blog posts look long to you? They're just the announcement of the campaign; I don't see much wasted verbiage there. You're right that if the campaign wishes to communicate with the core audience for Windows it should include very simple pictures and Powerpoint-style bulleted lists; but that blog at present is a meta page announcing and organizing the campaign.
Think of it as like the text/code that runs all of the pretty, shiny stuff on your beautiful Windows "desktop." And be happy that the people who are organizing the campaign can still work at the level of natural-language codes, and don't depend on visual development tools to organize their campaign by point-and-click methodology. After all you should be happy, whatever OS you like best, that the people coding that still can handle linear uses of complex languages. Same thing.
Look, anytime they want, they can cash in for billions. It's not a flash-in-the-pan, so there's no hurry to do that.
Yet once you have billions, your whole life changes. You have to consult security experts about where you - and your relatives - can travel without fear of kidnapping. Even your oldest, closest friends start hitting you up for investments.
So Craig and crew have the best of both worlds: normal lives for now, with plenty of social standing, in a nice city - and billions available for their retirement.
That's right. But consider: if it can be fully explained by the classical physics approximations, then by the laws of causal closure included there we cannot possibly have free will, and we're left with the falsely-named "Cartesian" split that leaves no explanation for consciousness having any causal powers at all (which leaves the evolution of consciousness rather unexplained). However, if quantum laws are required to explain our brains, then arguably those laws bring in a recognition of consciousness as being fundamentally involved (at least according to the Copenhagen Interpretation). While there would still be much to explain about just how consciouness inheres in (some?) biological systems, there's nothing like the impossible gap which the classical approximations can't resolve.
However, I've asked a few physicists working on quantum theories of mind just why a quantum computer just why algorithms run on a quantum computer should be any closer to consciousness than those run on a classical one, only to discover they had no ready answer. Perhaps I asked the wrong guys; but they were close to the center of that rather-small scene. Certainly not all the guys working on quantum theories of consciousness think it follows that a quantum computer could finally be the actually-conscious machine. (Although, off to the side, philosopher John Searle of the Chinese Room has actually allowed that it might be.)
Then again, you're discussing what it would take to model consciousness, rather than what it would take to instantiate it - no more then same thing than modelling the weather or instantiating it, under most conceptions. It could well be that the brain requires a quantum computer to model it for the same reason that really-tough cryptographic cracking could best be done by a quantum computer: it can do some classes of complex calculations much, much faster. And the brain is nothing if not complex, possibly requiring any computations modelling it to be commensurate.
However, Julian Morris, executive director of the International Policy Network, urged governments to be cautious. "There needs to be better data before billions of pounds are spent on policy measures that may have little impact," he said.
Most often when a reporter puts a quote at the end of the article, that quote presents the conclusion the reporter would like the reader to take away. In this case, it wasn't even worth the reporter's time explaining who in hell the "International Policy Network" is, let alone why an opinion from them should be pertinent here. Note also that the article above that details a lowered prediction of sea level rise precisely because there is now better data. So Mr. Morris's comment is a non sequitor.
They commission third parties to do it. That's plausible deniability.
Enticing a third party to commit a crime should carry heavier penalties than doing the crime yourself. Especially when as in this case multiple third parties are enticed.
And comShare is receiving stolen property - property stolen only because they offered to buy it. But do we need new law in this area to properly jail these fuckers?
"Expected" is the tricky word there. Most people who receive Word docs in the course of work expect their normal, trusted sources to send them documents that are themselves somewhat new, newsworthy, you know, containing information that's worth sending. A doc that's totally expected probably didn't need to be sent.
Let's say you're the editor of a newsletter or magazine. You expect docs from a few score people who occassionally submit stuff. You expect them to show up with e-mails that say, "Hi George, Here it is!" The bad guys can easily fake that stuff - and often do - but you're a normal editor, not a security expert, so you give the normal English reading to "receive unexpected," and this stuff all looks like stuff you expected, so you open it....
What Microsoft should say is, "Don't open any attached docs without phoning the source first and specifically confirming the file." As it is, they're saying just enough to cover their ass ("We warned you!"), without saying enough to enable the typical user to really practice safe Word use.
all good science can withstand attacks from anyone regardless of their motives
All good science can withstand attacks from anyone - if by "withstand" you mean that the concensus among scientists will still stand. But that doesn't mean that the science can withstand attacks in the context not of the circle of fellow scientists but in the larger world - let's say the scientist is Galalleo, and the attackers are with the Inquisition. Sure, in the longer term that science withstood the attacks. But in the shorter term, the advance of science was delayed by many decades because other scientists were scared by the example - including Descartes, who hid many of his more radical ideas behind church-accepted terms precisely to avoid such troubles, and got incensed when some of his followers published more open discussions of his ideas that he thought likely to expose him to persecution. In the case of Descartes, many philosophers today misunderstand him because of the fog of church-approved terms - he wasn't in fact even a "Cartesian dualist" (see Galen Strawson in the latest Journal of Consciousness Studies for details).
Political forces out to derail science can effectively set it back decades (Galalleo), or obscure it for centuries (Descartes). That's why, in the public arena, climate scientists deserve defense. I'd wager that not all the climate scientists in the world together have the collective wealth or political influence of a single Exxon Mobil, which is certainly no less righteous than the Church and Pope in suppressing science not to its liking were in centuries past. Fortunately, even so, Exxon Mobil's proportional power is not equal to what the Church's once was.
And most BIOS's will try to boot from the USB disk before trying to boot off whatever they've been explicitly set to? Why? Is this an intentional back door courtesy of the BIOS manufacturers? BIOS's don't just arbitrarily try to boot from everywhere, they have to be pointed to a particular device. So all/most of the USB-capabable BIOS's go to anything/everything connected by USB first, before the hard drives, before the CD/DVD, before the floppy? Weird.
The DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) were both signed in to law by president Clinton. Not exactly "little guy"-friendly legislation.
Right. Senator Leahy, who was behind Mickey Mouse (Michael Eisner, having grown up in Vermont, has been a regular Leahy contributor for years), is also the senator who is the most concerned about the loss of habeas corpus and the civil liberties infringements in the "Patriot" Act. So while he's centrally concerned with the liberties of the little guy, in the ways they are traditionally most threatened, he's blind to liberty concerns in the "intellectual property" arena. After all, Disney created Mickey Mouse. It's not immediately obvious why Disney shouldn't continue to own Mickey Mouse, or why my or your individual freedom is significantly compromised if we can't start selling our own Mickey Mouse comic books (outside of parody) and the like. It's not nearly as obvious as the right to have the government reveal its case against you after locking you up.
I've been trying to educate Leahy on IP. He may be just too old to get it - he sees it in terms of counterfeit snowboards and the like. But damn does the man ever get the core issues of civil liberties! And we'll be a lot better off now that he's running the Judiciary Committee, precisely for that. There's a reason why Cheney called him "Asshole" on the Senate floor.
I'd like to ask those of us who actually socially know a number of scientists: Are your scientist friends political? Frankly, of the scientists I know (I'm not one, but I attend some pretty hard-core conferences every year), very few concern themselves any more with politics than they do with religion - which is to say, hardly at all. Oh, there may be the "politics" of their standing within their university departments, which they grudgingly pay some attention to, or the "politics" of writing grants that the NSF or DARPA or whoever will actually fund their research; but they really are much less concerned with the circus of party politics and posturing than are most of us out here in the "real" world - a world they by preference have left behind to concentrate within their own disciplines.
One of my friends conducts research in Antartica each year. His research has been misused by CATO and the like, who like that it shows that more snow is falling in certain regions, and ignore that this is consistent with models of overall global warming, instead making happy talk about "more snow!" But even this misappropriation of research doesn't draw my friend into politics. He just accepts that the daily world most of us live in is tainted by trash propaganda, and takes refuge within the circles of his scientific colleagues, for whom truth matters.
The notion that scientists are all primarily political, slanting their findings for political advantage, is promoted only by those who are trying to deny the findings of science - for political advantage. It comes from both the deconstructionists on the far left, and the neocons on the far right. They'd each love to reduce scientists to their level, so that facts can no longer inconvenience the absolutist ideologies they promote.
So why are we entertaining this slander of scientists her on Slashdot. I know there are more engineers than scientists here, but are that many of us, as engineers, that removed from the purer realms of science?
The difference is that climate scientists at the very top of their field - in terms of number of peer-reviewed articles published and positions held - vouch that An Inconvenient Truth is 99%+ accurate in portraying the current state of climate research.
Meanwhile, films that proclaimed the virtues of burning fossil fuels - nothing more than public relations - were distributed in past years under the guise of "science" education.
But I suppose to you a scientist and a Klansman both look the same, what with their white cloths? Except that you figure the Klansman prays to Jesus and the scientist is in league with the Prince of Lies? I'm sure you know your Klansmen; but you don't know jack about scientists. Nor do our students, being raised on crap rather than best data.
Eh, bull. A foot is about the typical length of a male foot - which makes it very easy to pace off a room. An inch is about the length of a segment of your little finger. A yard is about half the height of a typical male (or half the span from outstretched hand to hand). These are natural measures to us.
If you're doing carpentry, using thickness measured as 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8... means that when you build things in layers - as most carpentry is - two 1/4 inch layers plus one 1/2 inch layer come out to an even inch. If you're doing metric you'd have to spec things in measures like.125 cm and worse to get layers to just "naturally" come out even. Since the practical way to measure for carpentry is to successively halve your units down to 16ths or 32nds or even 64ths, rather than to have to translate this into decimal fractions - practical in the sense that it's easy to mark distinctly on a rule for human use - the only sane use for metric is for processes without human execution where there's no inconvenience in calibrating stuff against specs with long tails after the decimal point.
As for the 12 inches in a foot, that allows for easy division by 2, 3 and 4 - whereas 10 would just divide by 2, so that it only works efficiently for doing things by wholes or tenths or halves, lacking facility with thirds and quarters - if you're working from 100 you can do quarters, but still can't handle thirds well. So 12 beats both 10 and 100 for utility.
Celsius on the other hand has it right: freezing and boiling are important relative to human use of the scale, where 32 degrees and 212 degrees are pretty random assignments. My only defense of it would be that the finer gradations of the Fahrenheit scale better fit the temperature sensitivity of humans, so that Celsius (unless you speak in decimals) impoverishes the description.
Resistance heating is 2x to 3x more expensive than heating via a heat pump.
With a standard heat pump, this is only true > 40 degrees. Below that, heat pumps use resistance heating.
6 cents per KWH is very inexpensive. You must live in the heavily government subsidized "hydro country".
It's not a subsidy. Hydro is legitimately that cheap, if you're getting it off, say, the Columbia River dams. Some things, in some places, cost less, even under ideal free trade conditions.
And at 6 cents per KW it will be a bit cheaper to heat with resistance than with gas or oil.
... the thing that hooked me was the illustrations of how media fools the population. Those fake news shows were spot on perfect - maybe even a bit better, more professional, than any of our current newscasts.
It was prophetic. If our government were to ever go evil, this is how we should expect our broadcasters to cover for it. Just as they have these recent years.
Variable Star is structurally and inversion of Citizen of the Galaxy. In both you have an outsider coming to encounter a family of dynastic wealth. In Citizen that outsider travels from the farthest reaches to Earth; in Star from Earth to the farthest reaches. In both there is serious corruption associated with the wealth. In both there is an anthropological interest in the differences of character which go along with differences of occupation.
The other inversion is that where Heinlein wrote some of the best beginnings in the business (e.g. Glory Road or even Number of the Beast) his endings rarely had the same degree of suspensful surprise. Robinson in Star has written an Heinleinesque beginning - really he tries - but it's yet not the equal of the master; on the other hand the ending is one of the best in fiction - as good as any mystery written, and tighter than any RAH pulled off (unless I'm forgetting one - I've only read some of his works thrice).
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I believe in a supreme creator and have moral values.
Why do you lump these together? Seriously. There are large differences between American states regarding what proportion of their population considers themselves believers in a supreme creator. Yet by any standard measure of the morality of behavior, the states where the largest proportion believes in a supreme creator are also the states with the highest incidence of immoral behavior, including domestic abuse, divorce, alcoholism, prostitution, and even abortion. While certainly some who profess belief in a supreme creator are moral, given someone at random who does, and someone at random who doesn't, we're more likely to find moral behavior from the person who doesn't. The lowest divorce rates, for instance, are in the disproportionately-athiestic New England states, whereas the highest rates are in the true-believing states of the deep South.
If your argument is from morality, and we look at the true distribution of moral behavior in a dispassionate, scientific way, then we have to at least consider the proposition that causing people to doubt the existence of a supreme creator will lead to an increase in the average level of morality from them. Of course, it may not - it could be that the correlation works the other way around, and that there is something about "naturally" moral people that leads them to doubt a supreme creator, but that doubting a supreme creator, for those who lack this something, fails to result in an increase in morality. As posters here never tire of saying, correlation is not causation.
A professional society I belong to has just gone to set up a website, and discovered that its acronym is being squatted on by a "domainer" - no content at all there except for Google ad links to misc. stuff not even related to the acronym.
We have hundreds of thousands of domain names that could effectively and efficiently be used by real organizations as the most direct and obvious addresses to connect with them, but are instead being subsidized by Google to effectively obfuscate the Net. This means that if you really want to find a firm's or organization's site, you increasingly have to use Google to find the domain name they've settled for, since the obvious ones are taken up by these Google-subsidized squatters.
Google does evil here, and for their own ends. It would be simple for them to set standards as to where their ad links can be placed, and put this whole lecherous horde out of business, freeing up the domain name system to work according to its original design. What are the odds Google'll ever even consider this? Slim to none, because Google does evil. They're stinking rich, but they just want more, by any means, even when those means degrade the quality of much of the Web.
I wonder what our variability is as spam targets. I've seen spam drop markedly with greylisting just on the primary MX. But I can't give a good statistic because I implemented another change at the same time. I'd always set domains up with a catchall that sends unspecified userids to a mailbox, and it's gotten to where for domains that have been around for some years most of the spam coming in is addressed to fake addresses that have been created evidently by other spam faking being from the domain, and then harvested somewhere. Since I've also handed out addresses like amazon@domain.com to track merchants who leak addresses, can't remember them all but still want some of that merchant mail, just sending all this to /dev/null isn't the answer. Ah, but for whatever reason the bulk of the spammed fake userids are addressed to userid@sub.domain.com (legitimate subdomain names from my DNS records). Between tossing all addressed to a subdomain and greylisting, spam has dropped by 90% even with a secondary MX that doesn't greylist.
But the array of spammers that target me and those that target someone else may well differ greatly. Maybe someone else gets heavily spammed by secondary-MX targeters even though I'm not.
Would you want a physician to keep her credentials if she didn't accept the "germ theory" of most of the common diseases which all the other doctors and scientists will claim - on abundant evidence - are caused by germs?
As with doctors, climatologists make diagnoses of complex systems, which are acted on to the benefit or detriment of the health of those systems. Quack doctors should lose their licenses. Quack climatologists should too. License suspension is not "censorship." The quack doctors can make all the quack claims they want - except for the one about their own medical license, once suspended, or claims the fraudulently promote goods or services, such as the fraudulent promotion of the "no climate change from burning oil" stand that some currently-credentialed meteorologists are happy to do in exchange for payola from Exxon.
Your license/credentials as an electrical engineer might be at risk if you started claiming that computers worked not by electricity, but by the vital spirits in them. Taking that license would in no way censure you; it would just keep you from performing certain jobs where your idiocy would be a risk to others.
Lots of testimony here that a language can be learned with some months of immersion - within a year anyway. Yet US troops in Iraq reportedly hardly speak the local language at all, even after repeated tours. This undoubtedly lowers their life expectancy in another way. Why does the US military fail to force troops to spend part of each day learning the language? When the Romans occupied Britain, did they go around barking orders only in Latin?
Libertarians, to do anything effective on the national level, need to acquire power within one or both of the established parties. So far they've tried mostly within the Republican Party - and look where that's gotten us. Although there are inconsistencies among Democrats on IP rights, there would seem at present to be a much stronger basic defense of the Constitution and citizen's freedoms. Arch-blogger Kos has even declared himself a "libertarian Democrat." So might it be more possible to reform the Democratic Party to accord with Libertarian ideals than it's been to make some bargain with the Republicans? Consider, it's the Democrats who generally believe in science and education and reason and the value of the common citizen, while the Republicans believe in creationism and only that education that doesn't incubate "elitist" attitudes and only that reason which follows the leader and only the importance of those citizens who are lucky and rich. Yeah, many Democratic politicians are deeply flawed. But the Libertarians have largely been in bed with those with faith in Creation Science. What kind of backasswards strategy is that?
Just last week I had two incidents with different, generally solid ISPs that I and a client have business T-1 accounts with. In both cases I was dealing with kids with far bigger gaps in their sysadmin knowledge that I have - and I'm the first to admit that even after doing Internet-related sysadmin for 14 years there's lots I don't know. I didn't so much mind their gaps as the amount of trouble I had to take to convince them that no, they didn't know better than I did, and, yes, the problems were real and within their responsibility to fix. In one case I had to actually walk into the ISP's main office and make a stink to get it fixed; in the other fortunately there was a way to work around their incompetence - and that was with Speakeasy who used to be a very good shop. The outfit I made the stink too, though, I'm now getting respect from ... finally. But the old "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." attitude has thoroughly infected much of the tech community.
Reporting bugs against Linux distros and free software is also a much more painful process than it was just a few years back. Far too many of the kids involved these days would rather close a bug on a lame excuse than face that there might really be something in the stuff they're maintaining that should be fixed or improved.
When a corporation creates a product that is unsafe not just to its user, but to many thousands of others, and provides instructions for that product which, even if faithfully and fully followed by its user, are insufficient to prevent it from causing damage and suffering to thousands of others, that corporation should be liable for the damage and suffering.
If you sell me a chain saw, and I ignore the instructions and cut off my hand, it's my own damn fault. If I ignore morality and criminality and cut off my spouse's head, it's still my own damn fault. But if the chainsaw goes off on its own power, while I'm sleeping, and slices and dices the whole damn town, it's your fault for selling me such a product, especially if you manufactured it with the knowledge that it could, in certain not-uncommon circumstances, do exactly that.
You don't know jack about science. Scientists get published precisely by questioning present assumptions. But the questions themselves have to be rigorous. Virtually every breakthrough in science was made by someone questioning present assumptions. We've had a long string of major and minor breakthroughs over the last several centuries. The global warming/climate change hypothesis was itself a major challenge to the present assumptions back in 1988, when the first major papers suggesting it got into the journals.
The assumption that Exxon favors - that humankind can't change the climate, because it's just too big for little us to make any difference about - was the prevailing assumption back before all the pioneering work in global warming/climate change was done. You cannot get published by challenging the notion that the world is spheroid by claiming that, no, it's flat. But if you could come up with a plausible model of how the apparent world is really a cross-section of a hyperdimensional whatnot, that's might well see print. Science goes forward, not back. Exxon is claiming the equivalent of that the world is flat.
Of course, it's always easy to sell the public on the old, previously-prevailing assumptions that science, with its constant practice of challenging assumptions, has moved beyond. The stuff is still latent in the cultural background. So there are a whole lot of people in the public who can be sold on the notions that the world is 4000 years old, flat, and not subject to human-triggered climate change. But that's public relations and ignorance, not science - and it's no failure of science to not take this sort of "challenge" seriously.
All the image spam is gifs. I just toss anything incoming with a gif attached - which is easy to do with mimedefang-milter/spamassassin in front of sendmail. I have one relative who occassionally sends funny gifs so I should whitelist her, but what place is there for gifs in business correspondence?
Also, toss anything with "stocknews" as part of the sender e-mail - that's all from a huge botnet. Toss anything where the earliest received line claims it was received by one of my own domains - but without the machine name/subdomain that my actual mail servers list. And toss anything that includes machine names as domains in the To address (i.e. someone@sub.domain.com), since our "from" addresses never include the subdomain, but for some reason spammers like to include it. All that's done without notice. Stuff with high SpamAssassin scores gets bounced with notice. And everyone not on a whitelist gets greylisted.
The spam that gets by all this is only a couple a day.
Bad design? It's a fairly standard-issue blog page at this point. Those blog posts look long to you? They're just the announcement of the campaign; I don't see much wasted verbiage there. You're right that if the campaign wishes to communicate with the core audience for Windows it should include very simple pictures and Powerpoint-style bulleted lists; but that blog at present is a meta page announcing and organizing the campaign.
Think of it as like the text/code that runs all of the pretty, shiny stuff on your beautiful Windows "desktop." And be happy that the people who are organizing the campaign can still work at the level of natural-language codes, and don't depend on visual development tools to organize their campaign by point-and-click methodology. After all you should be happy, whatever OS you like best, that the people coding that still can handle linear uses of complex languages. Same thing.
Look, anytime they want, they can cash in for billions. It's not a flash-in-the-pan, so there's no hurry to do that.
Yet once you have billions, your whole life changes. You have to consult security experts about where you - and your relatives - can travel without fear of kidnapping. Even your oldest, closest friends start hitting you up for investments.
So Craig and crew have the best of both worlds: normal lives for now, with plenty of social standing, in a nice city - and billions available for their retirement.
That's right. But consider: if it can be fully explained by the classical physics approximations, then by the laws of causal closure included there we cannot possibly have free will, and we're left with the falsely-named "Cartesian" split that leaves no explanation for consciousness having any causal powers at all (which leaves the evolution of consciousness rather unexplained). However, if quantum laws are required to explain our brains, then arguably those laws bring in a recognition of consciousness as being fundamentally involved (at least according to the Copenhagen Interpretation). While there would still be much to explain about just how consciouness inheres in (some?) biological systems, there's nothing like the impossible gap which the classical approximations can't resolve.
However, I've asked a few physicists working on quantum theories of mind just why a quantum computer just why algorithms run on a quantum computer should be any closer to consciousness than those run on a classical one, only to discover they had no ready answer. Perhaps I asked the wrong guys; but they were close to the center of that rather-small scene. Certainly not all the guys working on quantum theories of consciousness think it follows that a quantum computer could finally be the actually-conscious machine. (Although, off to the side, philosopher John Searle of the Chinese Room has actually allowed that it might be.)
Then again, you're discussing what it would take to model consciousness, rather than what it would take to instantiate it - no more then same thing than modelling the weather or instantiating it, under most conceptions. It could well be that the brain requires a quantum computer to model it for the same reason that really-tough cryptographic cracking could best be done by a quantum computer: it can do some classes of complex calculations much, much faster. And the brain is nothing if not complex, possibly requiring any computations modelling it to be commensurate.
Most often when a reporter puts a quote at the end of the article, that quote presents the conclusion the reporter would like the reader to take away. In this case, it wasn't even worth the reporter's time explaining who in hell the "International Policy Network" is, let alone why an opinion from them should be pertinent here. Note also that the article above that details a lowered prediction of sea level rise precisely because there is now better data. So Mr. Morris's comment is a non sequitor.
They commission third parties to do it. That's plausible deniability.
Enticing a third party to commit a crime should carry heavier penalties than doing the crime yourself. Especially when as in this case multiple third parties are enticed.
And comShare is receiving stolen property - property stolen only because they offered to buy it. But do we need new law in this area to properly jail these fuckers?
"received unexpected from trusted sources"
"Expected" is the tricky word there. Most people who receive Word docs in the course of work expect their normal, trusted sources to send them documents that are themselves somewhat new, newsworthy, you know, containing information that's worth sending. A doc that's totally expected probably didn't need to be sent.
Let's say you're the editor of a newsletter or magazine. You expect docs from a few score people who occassionally submit stuff. You expect them to show up with e-mails that say, "Hi George, Here it is!" The bad guys can easily fake that stuff - and often do - but you're a normal editor, not a security expert, so you give the normal English reading to "receive unexpected," and this stuff all looks like stuff you expected, so you open it....
What Microsoft should say is, "Don't open any attached docs without phoning the source first and specifically confirming the file." As it is, they're saying just enough to cover their ass ("We warned you!"), without saying enough to enable the typical user to really practice safe Word use.
all good science can withstand attacks from anyone regardless of their motives
All good science can withstand attacks from anyone - if by "withstand" you mean that the concensus among scientists will still stand. But that doesn't mean that the science can withstand attacks in the context not of the circle of fellow scientists but in the larger world - let's say the scientist is Galalleo, and the attackers are with the Inquisition. Sure, in the longer term that science withstood the attacks. But in the shorter term, the advance of science was delayed by many decades because other scientists were scared by the example - including Descartes, who hid many of his more radical ideas behind church-accepted terms precisely to avoid such troubles, and got incensed when some of his followers published more open discussions of his ideas that he thought likely to expose him to persecution. In the case of Descartes, many philosophers today misunderstand him because of the fog of church-approved terms - he wasn't in fact even a "Cartesian dualist" (see Galen Strawson in the latest Journal of Consciousness Studies for details).
Political forces out to derail science can effectively set it back decades (Galalleo), or obscure it for centuries (Descartes). That's why, in the public arena, climate scientists deserve defense. I'd wager that not all the climate scientists in the world together have the collective wealth or political influence of a single Exxon Mobil, which is certainly no less righteous than the Church and Pope in suppressing science not to its liking were in centuries past. Fortunately, even so, Exxon Mobil's proportional power is not equal to what the Church's once was.
And most BIOS's will try to boot from the USB disk before trying to boot off whatever they've been explicitly set to? Why? Is this an intentional back door courtesy of the BIOS manufacturers? BIOS's don't just arbitrarily try to boot from everywhere, they have to be pointed to a particular device. So all/most of the USB-capabable BIOS's go to anything/everything connected by USB first, before the hard drives, before the CD/DVD, before the floppy? Weird.
The DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) were both signed in to law by president Clinton. Not exactly "little guy"-friendly legislation.
Right. Senator Leahy, who was behind Mickey Mouse (Michael Eisner, having grown up in Vermont, has been a regular Leahy contributor for years), is also the senator who is the most concerned about the loss of habeas corpus and the civil liberties infringements in the "Patriot" Act. So while he's centrally concerned with the liberties of the little guy, in the ways they are traditionally most threatened, he's blind to liberty concerns in the "intellectual property" arena. After all, Disney created Mickey Mouse. It's not immediately obvious why Disney shouldn't continue to own Mickey Mouse, or why my or your individual freedom is significantly compromised if we can't start selling our own Mickey Mouse comic books (outside of parody) and the like. It's not nearly as obvious as the right to have the government reveal its case against you after locking you up.
I've been trying to educate Leahy on IP. He may be just too old to get it - he sees it in terms of counterfeit snowboards and the like. But damn does the man ever get the core issues of civil liberties! And we'll be a lot better off now that he's running the Judiciary Committee, precisely for that. There's a reason why Cheney called him "Asshole" on the Senate floor.
I'd like to ask those of us who actually socially know a number of scientists: Are your scientist friends political? Frankly, of the scientists I know (I'm not one, but I attend some pretty hard-core conferences every year), very few concern themselves any more with politics than they do with religion - which is to say, hardly at all. Oh, there may be the "politics" of their standing within their university departments, which they grudgingly pay some attention to, or the "politics" of writing grants that the NSF or DARPA or whoever will actually fund their research; but they really are much less concerned with the circus of party politics and posturing than are most of us out here in the "real" world - a world they by preference have left behind to concentrate within their own disciplines.
One of my friends conducts research in Antartica each year. His research has been misused by CATO and the like, who like that it shows that more snow is falling in certain regions, and ignore that this is consistent with models of overall global warming, instead making happy talk about "more snow!" But even this misappropriation of research doesn't draw my friend into politics. He just accepts that the daily world most of us live in is tainted by trash propaganda, and takes refuge within the circles of his scientific colleagues, for whom truth matters.
The notion that scientists are all primarily political, slanting their findings for political advantage, is promoted only by those who are trying to deny the findings of science - for political advantage. It comes from both the deconstructionists on the far left, and the neocons on the far right. They'd each love to reduce scientists to their level, so that facts can no longer inconvenience the absolutist ideologies they promote.
So why are we entertaining this slander of scientists her on Slashdot. I know there are more engineers than scientists here, but are that many of us, as engineers, that removed from the purer realms of science?
The difference is that climate scientists at the very top of their field - in terms of number of peer-reviewed articles published and positions held - vouch that An Inconvenient Truth is 99%+ accurate in portraying the current state of climate research.
Meanwhile, films that proclaimed the virtues of burning fossil fuels - nothing more than public relations - were distributed in past years under the guise of "science" education.
But I suppose to you a scientist and a Klansman both look the same, what with their white cloths? Except that you figure the Klansman prays to Jesus and the scientist is in league with the Prince of Lies? I'm sure you know your Klansmen; but you don't know jack about scientists. Nor do our students, being raised on crap rather than best data.
Eh, bull. A foot is about the typical length of a male foot - which makes it very easy to pace off a room. An inch is about the length of a segment of your little finger. A yard is about half the height of a typical male (or half the span from outstretched hand to hand). These are natural measures to us.
... means that when you build things in layers - as most carpentry is - two 1/4 inch layers plus one 1/2 inch layer come out to an even inch. If you're doing metric you'd have to spec things in measures like .125 cm and worse to get layers to just "naturally" come out even. Since the practical way to measure for carpentry is to successively halve your units down to 16ths or 32nds or even 64ths, rather than to have to translate this into decimal fractions - practical in the sense that it's easy to mark distinctly on a rule for human use - the only sane use for metric is for processes without human execution where there's no inconvenience in calibrating stuff against specs with long tails after the decimal point.
If you're doing carpentry, using thickness measured as 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8
As for the 12 inches in a foot, that allows for easy division by 2, 3 and 4 - whereas 10 would just divide by 2, so that it only works efficiently for doing things by wholes or tenths or halves, lacking facility with thirds and quarters - if you're working from 100 you can do quarters, but still can't handle thirds well. So 12 beats both 10 and 100 for utility.
Celsius on the other hand has it right: freezing and boiling are important relative to human use of the scale, where 32 degrees and 212 degrees are pretty random assignments. My only defense of it would be that the finer gradations of the Fahrenheit scale better fit the temperature sensitivity of humans, so that Celsius (unless you speak in decimals) impoverishes the description.
Resistance heating is 2x to 3x more expensive than heating via a heat pump.
With a standard heat pump, this is only true > 40 degrees. Below that, heat pumps use resistance heating.
6 cents per KWH is very inexpensive. You must live in the heavily government subsidized "hydro country".
It's not a subsidy. Hydro is legitimately that cheap, if you're getting it off, say, the Columbia River dams. Some things, in some places, cost less, even under ideal free trade conditions.
And at 6 cents per KW it will be a bit cheaper to heat with resistance than with gas or oil.
... the thing that hooked me was the illustrations of how media fools the population. Those fake news shows were spot on perfect - maybe even a bit better, more professional, than any of our current newscasts.
It was prophetic. If our government were to ever go evil, this is how we should expect our broadcasters to cover for it. Just as they have these recent years.
Variable Star is structurally and inversion of Citizen of the Galaxy. In both you have an outsider coming to encounter a family of dynastic wealth. In Citizen that outsider travels from the farthest reaches to Earth; in Star from Earth to the farthest reaches. In both there is serious corruption associated with the wealth. In both there is an anthropological interest in the differences of character which go along with differences of occupation.
The other inversion is that where Heinlein wrote some of the best beginnings in the business (e.g. Glory Road or even Number of the Beast) his endings rarely had the same degree of suspensful surprise. Robinson in Star has written an Heinleinesque beginning - really he tries - but it's yet not the equal of the master; on the other hand the ending is one of the best in fiction - as good as any mystery written, and tighter than any RAH pulled off (unless I'm forgetting one - I've only read some of his works thrice).