> You don't really need the Stealth's paint to make a stealth car. Car & Driver magazine found out several years ago that a Black Car, with no trim & pop up headlamps is practically invisible to radar.
> I don't know if i'm the only one, but has anyone else who doesn't filter their e-mail noticed a drop off in the amount of spam they recieve? For about the past 2 weeks, the amount of spam in my hotmail inbox has dropped from about 40 to around 15 a day. Anyone else had something similar to this happen?
Actually, I think the 'net has finally become so spam-saturated that the world's mail servers are having trouble delivering it on time. You may be seeing a delay, not a cutback.
> For another related site about creating weird sounds, check out the CAITLIN project [unn.ac.uk]...it creates music out of code. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of their code, it'd be interesting to see what happened when I ran my programs through it...
My "Hello, world!" blew up, but I'm still famous for my "Concerto in C# for two strings and a segfault".
> > I would propose making monsterously huge speakers and blasting this into Iraq, but in my oppinion it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.
> Actually, we've done stuff like that before [psywarrior.com]
Heh. I do it to my neighbors every Saturday night. It's not my fault that not everyone things The Who at 120db is good music.
I haven't tried it yet, but a couple of days ago a message went out on guile-user saying that the Common Music composition language has been ported to GUILE. (It is a Lisp-based program that already worked with several varieties of Lisp; see the link for more info.)
It supports ordinary composition, but its toolbox supports stuff like random selection and interpolation into envelopes, which ought to make exploitation of the mathematical properties of objects pretty easy.
> I mean, the idea on its face is absurd. How can something be "post-modern" Wouldn't the newly post-modern become modern, and the old modern simply old?
Postmodernism is already déclassé. (I'm neo-futuristic, myself.)
> (it's a bit more complex then this, as Modernism was an attempt to break from "classicalism" in the middle of the century. To build great new things. Post-modernism basically gives up on the great new things and says "fuck it")
I think Postmodernism was basically a result of the fact that everyone was out of ideas for interpreting Homer and Hemingway, and shortly after running out of new ideas they got tired of writing their (n+1)th essay interpreting them as "man's inhumanity to man" or whatever, so they decided to kick down the whole edifice of bullshit that they had built up over the centuries.
But don't let my cynicism fool you: though I called it an "edifice of bullshit", I don't exactly find Postmodernism more edifying. It's more like a three year old throwing his blocks around the room because he got frustrated with his failed attempts to stack them higher.
> On the other hand, modern consumer lawsuits are so random in application and award that rather than causing good behavior in large corporations, they instead create a climate of uncertainty which serves to sieze up the gears of capitalism through what amounts to a government mandated legal tax across the board, accomplishing little public good except the certain enrichment of the legal class and a lottery type system of enrichment of certain citizens through chance rather than meritorious conduct; structural reform may be impossible, therefore proposed tort reforms seek mainly to reduce the magnitude of the legal tax.
Unfortunately, the only tort cases you ever hear about are the ones with apparently unfair verdicts and/or extreme penalties. Yeah, there are abuses, but I'm not convinced that they amount to more than a small fraction of all cases. Based on my experience with being called out for jury duty, there must be hundreds or even thousands of tort cases in court every day. And most of them are the result of one company suing another, not of some deadbeat playing the courtroom lottery.
Also IMO there is a grave risk associated with capping tort payouts. If we put a cap of, say, $1,000,000 on wrongful deaths we'll end up with corporate accountants trading lives for profits in the most direct manner imaginable. (I suspect this already happens, but the uncertainty of the tort system presumably encourages companies to lean a bit toward caution in the calculation of the profits/lives ratio.)
For instance, I was formerly associated with the petrochemical industry. OSHA had rules for red-tagging valves on pipes when someone's life would be forfeit if the valve were opened. There were still too many accidents, so OSHA wanted to insitute a lock-out on top of the tag-out, to make it physically impossible to open the valve when someone's life depended on it staying closed. The petrochemical industry fought the new rule tooth and nail. Ask yourself why the owners of a $500,000,000 plant wouldn't want a chain on a valve even to protect a human life.
Tort reform is simply a way of saying "your life is worth less than our investment". IMO the reform we need is to institute criminal liability, not to reduce financial liability.
> Tourt reform is sponsored by the mega corps to reduce consumers right to sue. ITs all about profit for them.
Also, tort reform is the issue where I first heard about astroturfing. Way back 10-15 years ago a consortium of big companies hired a law firm in Florida to play middle man and piled zillions of dollars into small businesses' coffers in exchange for getting them to speak up in favor of a tort reform bill written by and for the biggest corporations. When the story broke the law firm didn't even try to deny it, though they did decline to name the players.
> OK, Amazon.com, Buy.com, bn.com, and anyone else who wants in should set up a fund to hire someone to club the kneecaps of everyone involved in this stupid, stupid lawsuit....
> I'm ready to put in $20 for the hitman. Who is with me?
I tried, but the lawyers already had www.breakakneecap.com shut down due to the patent violation.
> And how precisely are they going to save money ? And save money relative to what ? The old system ? (I kind of doubt it) The same hardware system with a proprietay OS ? Maintenance costs ?
See the links modded up to (5, informative) elsewhere. The general idea is that these days you buy a Linux CoW or Beowulf cluster instead of upgrading the ageing Cray. And for some reason it's still newsworthy, though people have been doing it for the better part of a decade now.
Not that I mind the good PR for Linux, but it is a curious phenomenon that this kind of detail of a big corporation's IT affairs is considered newsworthy.
> Of course, 20,000 votes goes a long way in any state with close elections. Maybe they should all move to Florida, instead... more electoral votes, anyway.
Somehow I don't think 20,000 immigrants voting Libertarian would have solved Florida's voting problems.
> You know the world is going to hell when Libertarians start stealing ideas from 19th century socialists and passing them off as original.
Do you mean that literally, or merely as "in a handbasket"?
Re: Haven't you overlooked something?
on
The Free State Project
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> I wonder if they will get it figured out before the tanks roll into their compound.
By the time the tanks roll in they'll already be in an advanced stage of shooting each other over differences of detail in their ideology.
Heh. I liked the blurb at their site about how the two previous leaders resigned due to time pressures. Must be nice to be stu^w naive enough to think you can found a Utopia in your spare time.
And then there's the "Buy FSP Stuff" link on the sidebar. Methinks the con artists will outnumber the idealists long before the Great Migration begins.
> So my question is, is this totally a patent issue?
What part of
Myriad now wants $3,500 US for the blood test, three times what it used to cost the province.
didn't you understand?
> Instead, is this problem a little bit of both. A jacked-up patent royalties to recoup R&D, and a brand of health care system stressed because of its communal nature?
Slashdot Mirror
> You don't really need the Stealth's paint to make a stealth car. Car & Driver magazine found out several years ago that a Black Car, with no trim & pop up headlamps is practically invisible to radar.
Ah, so that's what the Black Bumper Mennonites are all about, eh?
> I don't know if i'm the only one, but has anyone else who doesn't filter their e-mail noticed a drop off in the amount of spam they recieve? For about the past 2 weeks, the amount of spam in my hotmail inbox has dropped from about 40 to around 15 a day. Anyone else had something similar to this happen?
Actually, I think the 'net has finally become so spam-saturated that the world's mail servers are having trouble delivering it on time. You may be seeing a delay, not a cutback.
> For another related site about creating weird sounds, check out the CAITLIN project [unn.ac.uk]...it creates music out of code. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of their code, it'd be interesting to see what happened when I ran my programs through it...
My "Hello, world!" blew up, but I'm still famous for my "Concerto in C# for two strings and a segfault".
> > I would propose making monsterously huge speakers and blasting this into Iraq, but in my oppinion it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.
> Actually, we've done stuff like that before [psywarrior.com]
Heh. I do it to my neighbors every Saturday night. It's not my fault that not everyone things The Who at 120db is good music.
> Mozilla 1.1 works just fine at my little Credit Union (Only 2 offices).
FWIW, Galeon 1.2.5 works at my slightly larger credit union. I never tried earlier versions.
I confess I was very surprised when I tried it and it worked (to say nothing of being glad to ditch my last Netscape dependency).
I haven't tried it yet, but a couple of days ago a message went out on guile-user saying that the Common Music composition language has been ported to GUILE. (It is a Lisp-based program that already worked with several varieties of Lisp; see the link for more info.)
It supports ordinary composition, but its toolbox supports stuff like random selection and interpolation into envelopes, which ought to make exploitation of the mathematical properties of objects pretty easy.
> Anuses retentive
What? Not ani retenti ???
> If you go to webster [webster.com] you'll easily find that plural from virus is viruses...
What does it say about the plural for "anal retentive"?
> Maybe there's a new law on the internet: Everything will be free if you wait long enough.
Excepting Steamboat Willie.
> I mean, the idea on its face is absurd. How can something be "post-modern" Wouldn't the newly post-modern become modern, and the old modern simply old?
Postmodernism is already déclassé. (I'm neo-futuristic, myself.)
> (it's a bit more complex then this, as Modernism was an attempt to break from "classicalism" in the middle of the century. To build great new things. Post-modernism basically gives up on the great new things and says "fuck it")
I think Postmodernism was basically a result of the fact that everyone was out of ideas for interpreting Homer and Hemingway, and shortly after running out of new ideas they got tired of writing their (n+1)th essay interpreting them as "man's inhumanity to man" or whatever, so they decided to kick down the whole edifice of bullshit that they had built up over the centuries.
But don't let my cynicism fool you: though I called it an "edifice of bullshit", I don't exactly find Postmodernism more edifying. It's more like a three year old throwing his blocks around the room because he got frustrated with his failed attempts to stack them higher.
> On the other hand, modern consumer lawsuits are so random in application and award that rather than causing good behavior in large corporations, they instead create a climate of uncertainty which serves to sieze up the gears of capitalism through what amounts to a government mandated legal tax across the board, accomplishing little public good except the certain enrichment of the legal class and a lottery type system of enrichment of certain citizens through chance rather than meritorious conduct; structural reform may be impossible, therefore proposed tort reforms seek mainly to reduce the magnitude of the legal tax.
Unfortunately, the only tort cases you ever hear about are the ones with apparently unfair verdicts and/or extreme penalties. Yeah, there are abuses, but I'm not convinced that they amount to more than a small fraction of all cases. Based on my experience with being called out for jury duty, there must be hundreds or even thousands of tort cases in court every day. And most of them are the result of one company suing another, not of some deadbeat playing the courtroom lottery.
Also IMO there is a grave risk associated with capping tort payouts. If we put a cap of, say, $1,000,000 on wrongful deaths we'll end up with corporate accountants trading lives for profits in the most direct manner imaginable. (I suspect this already happens, but the uncertainty of the tort system presumably encourages companies to lean a bit toward caution in the calculation of the profits/lives ratio.)
For instance, I was formerly associated with the petrochemical industry. OSHA had rules for red-tagging valves on pipes when someone's life would be forfeit if the valve were opened. There were still too many accidents, so OSHA wanted to insitute a lock-out on top of the tag-out, to make it physically impossible to open the valve when someone's life depended on it staying closed. The petrochemical industry fought the new rule tooth and nail. Ask yourself why the owners of a $500,000,000 plant wouldn't want a chain on a valve even to protect a human life.
Tort reform is simply a way of saying "your life is worth less than our investment". IMO the reform we need is to institute criminal liability, not to reduce financial liability.
> Tourt reform is sponsored by the mega corps to reduce consumers right to sue. ITs all about profit for them.
Also, tort reform is the issue where I first heard about astroturfing. Way back 10-15 years ago a consortium of big companies hired a law firm in Florida to play middle man and piled zillions of dollars into small businesses' coffers in exchange for getting them to speak up in favor of a tort reform bill written by and for the biggest corporations. When the story broke the law firm didn't even try to deny it, though they did decline to name the players.
> OK, Amazon.com, Buy.com, bn.com, and anyone else who wants in should set up a fund to hire someone to club the kneecaps of everyone involved in this stupid, stupid lawsuit.
> I'm ready to put in $20 for the hitman. Who is with me?
I tried, but the lawyers already had www.breakakneecap.com shut down due to the patent violation.
> > Don't let Mr. Ashcroft hear you say that.
> Why, is it his secret asteroid base?
No, it's where he hides statues with tits.
> And how precisely are they going to save money ? And save money relative to what ? The old system ? (I kind of doubt it) The same hardware system with a proprietay OS ? Maintenance costs ?
See the links modded up to (5, informative) elsewhere. The general idea is that these days you buy a Linux CoW or Beowulf cluster instead of upgrading the ageing Cray. And for some reason it's still newsworthy, though people have been doing it for the better part of a decade now.
Not that I mind the good PR for Linux, but it is a curious phenomenon that this kind of detail of a big corporation's IT affairs is considered newsworthy.
> Well I guess using Linux makes sense for crash simulation testing. While Linux can simulate a crash, Windows will ACTUALLY crash.
Yeah, the hired help turned on the BSOD xscreensaver and thought they were testing a crash.
> We've faught wars to protect these territories.
You hippie peaceniks faugh every war that comes along. You've faught them in the past, and I'm sure you'll continue to faugh them in the future too.
> Of course, 20,000 votes goes a long way in any state with close elections. Maybe they should all move to Florida, instead... more electoral votes, anyway.
Somehow I don't think 20,000 immigrants voting Libertarian would have solved Florida's voting problems.
> I can't convince my parents, and my wife's parents to pick up and move.
He who would give up freedom for in-laws deserves neither freedom nor in-laws.
> You know the world is going to hell when Libertarians start stealing ideas from 19th century socialists and passing them off as original.
Do you mean that literally, or merely as "in a handbasket"?
> I wonder if they will get it figured out before the tanks roll into their compound.
By the time the tanks roll in they'll already be in an advanced stage of shooting each other over differences of detail in their ideology.
Heh. I liked the blurb at their site about how the two previous leaders resigned due to time pressures. Must be nice to be stu^w naive enough to think you can found a Utopia in your spare time.
And then there's the "Buy FSP Stuff" link on the sidebar. Methinks the con artists will outnumber the idealists long before the Great Migration begins.
Shouldn't these guys just move to Pennsylvania and go Amish?
> Since they already seem to be in the financial doldrums, it is a good time for them to change their name. I suggest: Suc King.
didn't you understand?> So my question is, is this totally a patent issue?
What part of
> Instead, is this problem a little bit of both. A jacked-up patent royalties to recoup R&D, and a brand of health care system stressed because of its communal nature?
That's it, blame it on the socialists.