The points already made about engineers being specifically recruited for their skills, being the ones most likely to be successful (or nearly so), and engineering being a very dominant field of study among educated middle-easterners are all well-taken, as are the jokes about antisocial engineers who can't get laid, but I wonder if there's not another element.
Engineers are, by aptitude and by training, problem solvers. We tend to look at the world as a series of problems to be solved, and to be fairly realistic about the materials and capabilities available to us. We also have a tendency to focus on approaches that involved hardware and technology rather than social processes. I think those factors may lead an intelligent young engineer who is extremely unhappy with perceived injustice and sufficiently fanatical about it to be willing to resort to violence to consider terrorism.
If, for example, you really felt you wanted to get the USA out of the middle east, you would immediately realize that economic forces are working against you. The US really wants middle-eastern oil. That makes political protests unlikely to succeed at anything, particularly protests of the scale and in the places you can manage. Conventional military options are clearly infeasible, even if you could manage to apply the full power of your nation's military, and even fully mobilize your country on a war footing, the US military is just too advanced, too powerful. You have to find something you can do to make the US want to leave. You can't make the oil go away, but maybe you can make it too costly to obtain.
In that situation, asymmetric warfare, AKA terrorism, is the logical choice. It requires little resources, is made vastly more effective with technical skill and detailed planning, and allows you to strike an actual blow against your perceived "oppressors". Of course, it's only one small blow, and won't by itself accomplish anything. Still, it's all you can do, and it's something substantial.
I can see that. Lack of actual experience with violence and the messy, complicated ways things go wrong may actually help as well.
The GPL very explicitly states that you must include the source code or an offer to produce source code on demand.
Did they provide a written offer to produce source code on demand? If not, they were out of compliance. If they did include the written offer, but didn't actually provide the source on demand, then they were out of compliance.
If they were out of compliance, then they were infringing on the Linux copyrights.
Interesting. Google turns up a lot of articles that indicate that Wrangham's hypothesis is not widely accepted by other anthropologists, but perhaps that's because it's a new idea. I'm not completely convinced, though it bears watching.
I should mention, because some of the responses to my posts seem to make some incorrect assumptions about me, that I'm not a "raw foodist", nor do I have any inclination that way. My argument wasn't that cooking is bad, or that raw foods are healthier, just that cooking may not be necessary for survival.
Finally, cooking meat can render it safer by killing bacteria; the digestibility of the tissues is not of much concern to someone dying from trichinosis.
Certainly. I mentioned in my original post that some foods need to be cooked in order to be safe to eat.
One argument the author makes repeatedly which makes no sense to me is the notion that cooking provides an "external stomach" which pre-digests our food.
To put it simply, it makes no sense to you because you hold false beliefs and it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that you just might be wrong.
AFAIK, cooked meat actually is a lot easier to digest.
Cite? I can't find any support for that idea, and can find some apparently-respectable arguments that say the opposite, that heating meat decreases digestibility.
See how long you can live on raw potato if you don't believe me. I imagine you'd give up pretty quick. (Even ignoring the taste.) OTOH, a human can live for a decent amount of time on cooked potatoes.
Again, do you have any reference for this? I can't find any sources that indicate that raw potatoes don't provide the same nutrients as cooked. Plenty that talk about how most of the nutrients are in the skin, of course.
Go out into the woods and drink some spring water. You're at risk of getting some nasty bacteria.
If it's actually spring water, come directly from being filtered through hundreds of feet of rock, you'll be just fine. If it's flowed on the surface for any distance at all, then you should purify it.
I often drink from mountain springs when backpacking. I carry a filter and/or purification tablets for drinking water from streams and rivers, but I don't bother to purify spring water.
Exhibit A being the indigenous population that survives just fine drinking the water there.
No, they don't. I lived in Mexico for two years, and except in locations where the water is purified (or from a spring), Mexicans do not drink their water without boiling or otherwise purifying it. That's the reason that Mexicans drink so much water with fruit juice in it -- the flavoring from the fruit covers the flat taste of water that has been boiled.
That said, that doesn't mean there is no naturally-occurring pure water in Mexico or elsewhere. There's quite a bit. Not enough to support our needs, but plenty for a much smaller population.
The idea is interesting, and it's certainly true that if all technology were removed, including stone and bone implements, humans would have a much tougher time surviving. But there are areas of the world where we could survive without handmade weapons or fire. We're not very well-equipped for such an existence, but we're not completely helpless.
One argument the author makes repeatedly which makes no sense to me is the notion that cooking provides an "external stomach" which pre-digests our food. There are some foods that are unsafe to eat without being cooked, because of disease that they could be carrying, but in general very little of what we eat MUST be cooked, or is even harder to digest without cooking. Raw meat is just as nutritious and as easily digestible as cooked meat, it just doesn't taste as good (with some exceptions). Raw vegetables are often more nutritious than cooked vegetables.
There's no argument that if we were to have all technology/tools removed and even lose our ability to create primitive tools the human carrying capacity of the earth would be at most a few million, maybe only a few hundred thousand. So I guess you could say that 99.99% of us are "cyborgs".
If all you want is information on philosophy. I'd like to see similar encyclopedias on other disciplines, like physics or engineering.
But if you want a track listing for Led Zeppelin IV, or just want to do some personal research like I did before my eye surgeries, or for a slashdot argument, Wikipedia is the place to go.
Or if you want information on philosophy, Wikipedia is the place to go, to find articles that will cite/quote this encyclopedia of philosophy.
Simple answer? Say 'No' a few times. Design it with one mission, secure critical systems for us. Screw the researchers, college students, thats what the public internet playground is for.
The US military already has numerous networks like the one you describe. If the NSA director was talking about those, he'd say so. He's talking about the public Internet playground, and the need to "secure" it (whatever that means).
then I started making references in passing to El Salvador (since I lived there), and when they didn't know where it was, I would say, "Yeah, Europeans aren't very good at geography." That really annoys them and makes me laugh.
That would be a more compelling counterexample, except that hardly any Americans know where El Salvador is, either, other than "In South America somewhere, like Mexico". In spite of the fact that neither El Salvador nor Mexico are in South America.
While the reputation of Oracle might mean something to yourself, myself or others on slashdot, the average joe on the streets of the world do not give a rats backend as to the "reputation" of Oracle.
All they care about is how well their phones work. Ergo, Oracle has very little to lose, since they already have inhouse lawyers anyway, and potentially something nice to gain; a nice chunk of leverage to be used in discussions with Google.
It's not the risk of pissing of slashdotters that Oracle should be concerned about. It's the possibility of pissing off other major players in the enterprise Java space. Should Google decide to move forward with going their own way with a new Java-like language, that's of moderate concern to Oracle. Should folks like IBM decide to collaborate with Google on that, and should some of the major open source projects that are Java-heavy (e.g. Apache) decide to move as well, Oracle may find itself holding rights in a language that no one else cares about.
All of that assumes that Google et al can work around or invalidate the patents Oracle holds. I'll bet that's not too hard, though. There's very little in Java that's actually novel, so I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to find prior art to invalidate Oracle's patents. Also, if IBM pitches in and brings its patent arsenal into play, Oracle could be forced into giving up its patent claims even without Google having to go to the effort of invalidating them.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
I would argue that a B&W, 8MB-RAM, 25Mhz '040 wouldn't have run NeXTSTEP particularly well...
It ran quite well, actually. Very smooth and responsive -- which was yet another way it was superior to OS/2. Win95 was snappy, of course, but that's because it didn't do anything.
About the only thing that was a problem with the stock NeXTstation was the 110 MB HDD, since the base system (including the (awesome) dev tools, WP, Lotus Improv, Mathematica, the dictionary and Shakespeare stuff, etc.) consumed about 95 MB. I upgraded to a 340 MB drive not long after I bought it.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
Of course, you could probably have bought somewhere between 5 and 10 PCs running OS/2 or Windows 95 for the same cost as a NeXTStation capable of running NeXT well...
Absolutely wrong. My NeXTstation cost slightly less than the best deal I could find on a comparable 486... and the comparable 486 included a dot matrix printer rather than the laser printer I got with the NeXTstation. The total cost for the computer and laser printer was around $3500, IIRC. That's a very expensive computer these days, but it was a very competitive price in 1991.
That was with an educational discount of course. Without that, it would have been closer to $5K. But that still only gets you to at most 1.5 PCs.
The video isn't accurate for my state (Utah). It says the age of consent is 16, but that's only true if you're less then 10 years older. The true age of consent in Utah is 18. I suspect lots of states have similar caveats.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
I had a buddy back in 94/95 who was constantly throwing OS/2 in my face. Hey, look at all the Windows I can have open, look at my clean interface, look at how much faster and more stable this runs that your Win 3.11, look at all these DOS sessions open simultaneously!
If I'd been around this conversation, I'd have shown you both my NeXTstation. OS/2 was a dog compared to that, and Win95 wasn't even comparable.
I was writing DOS and Windows software at the time, and the contrast between the NeXTstep OS I used at home and what I had to use at work made me sad every morning. Then I went to work for IBM and started using OS/2... and promptly switched to Linux. As of yet, I still haven't found a reason to switch again, although I suspect I'd also be perfectly happy with NeXTstep's successor, OS X.
Of course, one of the reasons people might be relunctant to buy a new book in a series is that they haven't read the prior books, and often its very hard to find prior books in the series in stores. So packaging ebooks of the rest of the series with the hardback may well be a good way to increase hardback sales.
Not only that, Baen explicitly encourages sharing of all of those free e-books, and has made no move whatsoever to discourage people who have put those CD images/a> on-line.
Book sales haven't increased over the last decade, and profits are being squeezed even lower by ebooks
That makes no sense at all. Ebooks cost the same as paper books, yet there's no transportation, storage, inventory, or other costs associated with publishing them. How could ebooks be bringing profits down?
Baen, a publishing house that specializes in fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a militaristic bent, says that they've found that e-books significantly increase profits, even though they sell their (DRM-free) e-books for substantially less than they sell dead-tree versions.
That, obviously, is exactly what logic would tell you. Nice to see there are some publishers who are honest.
Slashdot Mirror
The points already made about engineers being specifically recruited for their skills, being the ones most likely to be successful (or nearly so), and engineering being a very dominant field of study among educated middle-easterners are all well-taken, as are the jokes about antisocial engineers who can't get laid, but I wonder if there's not another element.
Engineers are, by aptitude and by training, problem solvers. We tend to look at the world as a series of problems to be solved, and to be fairly realistic about the materials and capabilities available to us. We also have a tendency to focus on approaches that involved hardware and technology rather than social processes. I think those factors may lead an intelligent young engineer who is extremely unhappy with perceived injustice and sufficiently fanatical about it to be willing to resort to violence to consider terrorism.
If, for example, you really felt you wanted to get the USA out of the middle east, you would immediately realize that economic forces are working against you. The US really wants middle-eastern oil. That makes political protests unlikely to succeed at anything, particularly protests of the scale and in the places you can manage. Conventional military options are clearly infeasible, even if you could manage to apply the full power of your nation's military, and even fully mobilize your country on a war footing, the US military is just too advanced, too powerful. You have to find something you can do to make the US want to leave. You can't make the oil go away, but maybe you can make it too costly to obtain.
In that situation, asymmetric warfare, AKA terrorism, is the logical choice. It requires little resources, is made vastly more effective with technical skill and detailed planning, and allows you to strike an actual blow against your perceived "oppressors". Of course, it's only one small blow, and won't by itself accomplish anything. Still, it's all you can do, and it's something substantial.
I can see that. Lack of actual experience with violence and the messy, complicated ways things go wrong may actually help as well.
No, but there's an implicit assumption of delivery in a reasonable time frame. As for the phrase "on demand", I was just repeating what bieber said.
The GPL very explicitly states that you must include the source code or an offer to produce source code on demand.
Did they provide a written offer to produce source code on demand? If not, they were out of compliance. If they did include the written offer, but didn't actually provide the source on demand, then they were out of compliance.
If they were out of compliance, then they were infringing on the Linux copyrights.
Interesting. Google turns up a lot of articles that indicate that Wrangham's hypothesis is not widely accepted by other anthropologists, but perhaps that's because it's a new idea. I'm not completely convinced, though it bears watching.
I should mention, because some of the responses to my posts seem to make some incorrect assumptions about me, that I'm not a "raw foodist", nor do I have any inclination that way. My argument wasn't that cooking is bad, or that raw foods are healthier, just that cooking may not be necessary for survival.
Thanks.
Finally, cooking meat can render it safer by killing bacteria; the digestibility of the tissues is not of much concern to someone dying from trichinosis.
Certainly. I mentioned in my original post that some foods need to be cooked in order to be safe to eat.
To put it simply, it makes no sense to you because you hold false beliefs and it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that you just might be wrong.
That's a very content-free rebuttal.
AFAIK, cooked meat actually is a lot easier to digest.
Cite? I can't find any support for that idea, and can find some apparently-respectable arguments that say the opposite, that heating meat decreases digestibility.
See how long you can live on raw potato if you don't believe me. I imagine you'd give up pretty quick. (Even ignoring the taste.) OTOH, a human can live for a decent amount of time on cooked potatoes.
Again, do you have any reference for this? I can't find any sources that indicate that raw potatoes don't provide the same nutrients as cooked. Plenty that talk about how most of the nutrients are in the skin, of course.
Go out into the woods and drink some spring water. You're at risk of getting some nasty bacteria.
If it's actually spring water, come directly from being filtered through hundreds of feet of rock, you'll be just fine. If it's flowed on the surface for any distance at all, then you should purify it.
I often drink from mountain springs when backpacking. I carry a filter and/or purification tablets for drinking water from streams and rivers, but I don't bother to purify spring water.
Exhibit A being the indigenous population that survives just fine drinking the water there.
No, they don't. I lived in Mexico for two years, and except in locations where the water is purified (or from a spring), Mexicans do not drink their water without boiling or otherwise purifying it. That's the reason that Mexicans drink so much water with fruit juice in it -- the flavoring from the fruit covers the flat taste of water that has been boiled.
That said, that doesn't mean there is no naturally-occurring pure water in Mexico or elsewhere. There's quite a bit. Not enough to support our needs, but plenty for a much smaller population.
The idea is interesting, and it's certainly true that if all technology were removed, including stone and bone implements, humans would have a much tougher time surviving. But there are areas of the world where we could survive without handmade weapons or fire. We're not very well-equipped for such an existence, but we're not completely helpless.
One argument the author makes repeatedly which makes no sense to me is the notion that cooking provides an "external stomach" which pre-digests our food. There are some foods that are unsafe to eat without being cooked, because of disease that they could be carrying, but in general very little of what we eat MUST be cooked, or is even harder to digest without cooking. Raw meat is just as nutritious and as easily digestible as cooked meat, it just doesn't taste as good (with some exceptions). Raw vegetables are often more nutritious than cooked vegetables.
There's no argument that if we were to have all technology/tools removed and even lose our ability to create primitive tools the human carrying capacity of the earth would be at most a few million, maybe only a few hundred thousand. So I guess you could say that 99.99% of us are "cyborgs".
This is real proof of correctness
Proof? Really? Someone should tell Turing!
But they can be cited from Wikipedia, and the information within them reproduced in Wikipedia.
If all you want is information on philosophy. I'd like to see similar encyclopedias on other disciplines, like physics or engineering.
But if you want a track listing for Led Zeppelin IV, or just want to do some personal research like I did before my eye surgeries, or for a slashdot argument, Wikipedia is the place to go.
Or if you want information on philosophy, Wikipedia is the place to go, to find articles that will cite/quote this encyclopedia of philosophy.
Simple answer? Say 'No' a few times. Design it with one mission, secure critical systems for us. Screw the researchers, college students, thats what the public internet playground is for.
The US military already has numerous networks like the one you describe. If the NSA director was talking about those, he'd say so. He's talking about the public Internet playground, and the need to "secure" it (whatever that means).
I believe they controlled for income and other relevant demographic factors.
OTOH, many, many studies show that people who are married live longer and report being happier.
then I started making references in passing to El Salvador (since I lived there), and when they didn't know where it was, I would say, "Yeah, Europeans aren't very good at geography." That really annoys them and makes me laugh.
That would be a more compelling counterexample, except that hardly any Americans know where El Salvador is, either, other than "In South America somewhere, like Mexico". In spite of the fact that neither El Salvador nor Mexico are in South America.
While the reputation of Oracle might mean something to yourself, myself or others on slashdot, the average joe on the streets of the world do not give a rats backend as to the "reputation" of Oracle.
All they care about is how well their phones work. Ergo, Oracle has very little to lose, since they already have inhouse lawyers anyway, and potentially something nice to gain; a nice chunk of leverage to be used in discussions with Google.
It's not the risk of pissing of slashdotters that Oracle should be concerned about. It's the possibility of pissing off other major players in the enterprise Java space. Should Google decide to move forward with going their own way with a new Java-like language, that's of moderate concern to Oracle. Should folks like IBM decide to collaborate with Google on that, and should some of the major open source projects that are Java-heavy (e.g. Apache) decide to move as well, Oracle may find itself holding rights in a language that no one else cares about.
All of that assumes that Google et al can work around or invalidate the patents Oracle holds. I'll bet that's not too hard, though. There's very little in Java that's actually novel, so I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to find prior art to invalidate Oracle's patents. Also, if IBM pitches in and brings its patent arsenal into play, Oracle could be forced into giving up its patent claims even without Google having to go to the effort of invalidating them.
I would argue that a B&W, 8MB-RAM, 25Mhz '040 wouldn't have run NeXTSTEP particularly well...
It ran quite well, actually. Very smooth and responsive -- which was yet another way it was superior to OS/2. Win95 was snappy, of course, but that's because it didn't do anything.
About the only thing that was a problem with the stock NeXTstation was the 110 MB HDD, since the base system (including the (awesome) dev tools, WP, Lotus Improv, Mathematica, the dictionary and Shakespeare stuff, etc.) consumed about 95 MB. I upgraded to a 340 MB drive not long after I bought it.
Of course, you could probably have bought somewhere between 5 and 10 PCs running OS/2 or Windows 95 for the same cost as a NeXTStation capable of running NeXT well...
Absolutely wrong. My NeXTstation cost slightly less than the best deal I could find on a comparable 486... and the comparable 486 included a dot matrix printer rather than the laser printer I got with the NeXTstation. The total cost for the computer and laser printer was around $3500, IIRC. That's a very expensive computer these days, but it was a very competitive price in 1991.
That was with an educational discount of course. Without that, it would have been closer to $5K. But that still only gets you to at most 1.5 PCs.
The video isn't accurate for my state (Utah). It says the age of consent is 16, but that's only true if you're less then 10 years older. The true age of consent in Utah is 18. I suspect lots of states have similar caveats.
I had a buddy back in 94/95 who was constantly throwing OS/2 in my face. Hey, look at all the Windows I can have open, look at my clean interface, look at how much faster and more stable this runs that your Win 3.11, look at all these DOS sessions open simultaneously!
If I'd been around this conversation, I'd have shown you both my NeXTstation. OS/2 was a dog compared to that, and Win95 wasn't even comparable.
I was writing DOS and Windows software at the time, and the contrast between the NeXTstep OS I used at home and what I had to use at work made me sad every morning. Then I went to work for IBM and started using OS/2... and promptly switched to Linux. As of yet, I still haven't found a reason to switch again, although I suspect I'd also be perfectly happy with NeXTstep's successor, OS X.
Of course, one of the reasons people might be relunctant to buy a new book in a series is that they haven't read the prior books, and often its very hard to find prior books in the series in stores. So packaging ebooks of the rest of the series with the hardback may well be a good way to increase hardback sales.
Not only that, Baen explicitly encourages sharing of all of those free e-books, and has made no move whatsoever to discourage people who have put those CD images/a> on-line.
Book sales haven't increased over the last decade, and profits are being squeezed even lower by ebooks
That makes no sense at all. Ebooks cost the same as paper books, yet there's no transportation, storage, inventory, or other costs associated with publishing them. How could ebooks be bringing profits down?
Baen, a publishing house that specializes in fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a militaristic bent, says that they've found that e-books significantly increase profits, even though they sell their (DRM-free) e-books for substantially less than they sell dead-tree versions.
That, obviously, is exactly what logic would tell you. Nice to see there are some publishers who are honest.