Anon is trying to use an extreme exception to prove a rule. IPv6 NAT would also be "useful" in the case where a government implemented a law requiring everyone to deploy IPv6 NAT just because, or in the case where a weekly lottery was held only for those people deploying IPv6 NAT. But it is intellectually dishonest to justify a rant that IPv6 NAT is therefore sometimes useful.
IPv6 involves giving each network a/64 and there are enough of those for everyone. Conscious effort is required to do otherwise. If some ISP makes the effort to create an artificial scarcity by limiting routing of IPv6 IP addresses then it might as well just stick with IPv4 and IPv4 NAT. The main advantage of IPv6 is the opportunity for end-to-end connectivity.
Anything can be argued useful if given the right context. So you have to limit the definition of "useful" to reasonable (technically, socially) scenarios. Finally, if you're not the type to bend over and take anything coming, encountering an absurd re-definition of "useful" should be taken as an opportunity to voice a loud objection and refuse to participate in the nonsense. Consider: Airport body scanners are useful. Random stop-and-search laws are useful. Censorship is useful.
People shouldn't be so easily influenced (emotionally or otherwise) by mere words.
Alternative reality fallacy. People are easily influenced by words. You're essentially saying that the problem is that we've evolved wrongly and that our brains should be perfectly rational (and by your definition of rational). Who will strike the first blow to eliminate this imperfect species and all similarly behaving primates, and replace it with yours?
Anyway, the influence may benefit the influenced. Many people have a better life at school thanks to being one of the bully grunts. Perhaps the "weak-minded" guy is the one who stands alone and has to constantly fight the group? Not every lonely nerd ends up being a superhero after graduation.
Giving them a voice cut down on the violence, the exact opposite of your insane claims.
That was precisely my point. The problem of violence is not solved by taking out the symptoms (violent footsoldiers), but by dealing with the cause (the smarter guy who can exert influence). To say that nothing needs to be done except with those who throw a punch is nonsense.
You respond to hitler by not supporting him and by speaking out against him, not by shooting him. that just creates a martyr to his cause and a replacement arises out of the cesspool that pushed someone like that into power.
No-one's arguing for "shooting him", are they? And a cause doesn't emerge out of nowhere: it needs clever individuals to weave a framework. It is these individuals who need neutering. In the early stages, you might be able to debate with them, just as you might reason with or speak out against the nascent bully. But once they're commanding an army, whether at school or in war, they become directly responsible for the suffering of their victims. Their loss of freedom is moral unless they choose to give up arms - the very choice given to IRA and ETA.
Would you punish only the footsoldier and let Hitler go free? The former did the killing; the latter was only giving orders.
A bully isn't just someone with a "grudge" to settle with another individual, is he? A bit of competitive physical sport may help temper certain rivalries if both individuals are suited to it and reasonably well matched, but it's not a general solution - and doesn't seem to be a particular solution to bullying. Speaking personally as someone with a head injury, boxing is never going to be my first choice anyway, though I used to enjoy a bit of fencing:-).
I'm not sure why you think a bully victim is necessarily either passive-aggressive or a coward. It's not the physically stronger person who is the successful bully (see link above - the bullies there seemed to be the guys behind the camera egging on the little kid), but the one who is able to exert the most influence. Destruction of one of the bully's minions is just going to teach the bully to choose stronger minions.
What does that have to do with not being offended by mere words and responding to the situation logically?
How do you logically respond to Hitler? Do you note that he has not killed anyone with his own hands and ask him nicely to step aside for a friendly chat? If he ignores you, do you just shrug and let him carry on? Do you tell his victims that he's an insane little man and that, if you're not standing up to him, you're just weak?
Most verbal bullies aren't powerful because they call you names. They're powerful because they influence others' behaviour toward their victim. If you take aside the grunt who throws the punch, you're not solving the problem - you're removing a symptom.
The US seems to fail to understand this in foreign policy, too. Contrast how the IRA has been neutered and ETA more recently tackled.
Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me?"
I want to put an early Godwin in this thread: Hitler happened. The nastiest people don't hurt anyone directly. They merely influence people's opinion.
The US has the most powerful propaganda machine on the planet. Do you discount this entirely? Is the brain not just another organ which can be trained in a particular direction?
What ever happened to "hey - here's two pairs of boxing gloves - go behind the gym and work it out?"
Are you serious? The solution to bullies is to get physically fit and beat them up? Self-defence is entirely acceptable, but corporal punishment is not justice.
You also have the freedom to prostrate yourself on a prayer mat facing some arbitrary direction five times a day. And you have the freedom to get as angry as you want about your detractors, reprimanding them for discounting "any possible scenario where inventing a supernatural being might be useful".
Unfortunately, to engage anyone other than the choir in discussion you have to provide a supporting argument for your position. A market deals with scarcity, both by restricting use (some sense of right to control property) and by innovating more efficient uses. This is why people have meagre allocations of IPv4 addresses and why IPv4 NAT exists. The same does not apply when you have 128 bit addresses.
It's an excellent indicator. A public health service is a prerequisite of a social democracy, and even a social democracy is not left wing. The US is to the right of that.
As for authoritarianism, a good indicator is whether capital punishment exists. In general, like Churchill said, we can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners.
The US is right-wing and authoritarian. The usual retort to that is comparison with Third World or degenerate regimes, which in turn indicates the low standards to which much of the American public hold themselves. Compare yourself only with the very best, but most importantly of all: compare yourself today with yourself yesterday.
(a) No, it's proof of an undergraduate level of learning a year or two early. I don't know about the US, but in the UK it does not seem too unusual to be a year or two ahead: this was the case for me and some of my circle of friends. Up to my early teens I recall taking advantage of this to gain wins in some minor competitions, but then I saw that it was not really productive and stopped engaging in that sort of thing.
As for "hard work", there is this mistaken belief by sycophants that clever people have to work hard to achieve impressive things. In my experience, that is not true at all: clever people can set themselves difficult challenges, but the majority coast along at a high level of achievement without having to put in much effort. People don't like to acknowledge this because people do not like to acknowledge that the world simply isn't fair, so instead they imagine that the main difference between them and the genius is hard work. This sets an impossible goal for them and their naivete makes them ripe for exploitation.
(b) Neither hard work nor achievements are necessarily good: it depends entirely on the intention and the outcome. A man's value can only be measured in a particular context, so to simply say "everyone is not equally valuable" is fairly meaningless. For example, from the point of view of reducing the sum of human suffering, it is clear from simple demographic information that the bright are more likely to engage in harmful than productive pursuits. (This may be the bit where you argue that the higher echelons of civil service, casino banking, corporate lawyering, etc are of benefit to society. If so, our conversation is over.) At best they can get bogged down collecting trinkets or in meaningless rambling, which is the stage I hope this man matures out of. Very few perform research with the aim of improving humanity's lot.
in what way does the quote show him to be mathematically naive?
Let's break it down:
"Math is neat: A statement is either true or false,” O’Dorney says.
Depending on the axiom system preceding it. Or is undecidable. Or may simply be badly formed.
“In science, any theory can be overturned by experiment because science is founded on experiment.
Is it? Historically, it certainly hasn't been: the foundations of science are in mathematics and philosophical induction aka expecting the expected. Kids today are seduced by Popper's ramblings on falsifiability (and much else) and forget the previous 3 millennia of science.
But in math, there are theorems that can never be overturned because they have been proved with logic.”
Within a particular axiom system. Which science also uses to derive its theorems - it's just that science deprecates those systems which do not model reality sufficiently well.
I don't think I'll ever enjoy this man's raw mathematical power, but I do recall being a precocious little shit. The kind of bold, absolute statements he is making about mathematics vs science were those I'd make as an 11 year old and grew out of by my early teens.
we are getting to the point where the aggregate value of fairly, but not very, intelligent people is diminishing quickly.
I hear that a lot. Are you sure it's not just that we're at the point where "everyone gets an A and everyone gets a university education", so it appears that there are lots of fairly intelligent people but they're all mysteriously unable to compete for highly challenging work?
Since Thatcher turned polytechnics into universities in the UK, the cynic's view here has been that pushing people into meaningless higher education has just been a way to keep unemployment figures down and make it harder for anyone but the very best to shine (aka erosion of middle class).
“Math is neat: A statement is either true or false,” O’Dorney says. “In science, any theory can be overturned by experiment because science is founded on experiment. But in math, there are theorems that can never be overturned because they have been proved with logic.”
I don't really see much value in celebrating geniuses of this sort - clearly mentally (or physically) gifted winners of prize X, Y, Z. It's like celebrating a particular race - you were born that way, and you can either rejoice that you're like that and have the opportunity for fame and fortune, or you can get depressed that you're not.
I prefer celebrating the love of learning and hard work for the sake of advancement of humanity. There are lots of people who fit this goal, and maybe O'Dorney will reach that status. But he's not there yet.
Many deployments of the IWF censorship list in the UK use a 404 Not Found rather than 403. I've never found any official explanation for this, though I've read suggestions that it's to make people just assume that censored content isn't available rather than tip them off that it's being hidden from them.
I don't know what US military policy is, but it gives you an idea of how censors in the Western world think.
Probably the best example is the Sistine Chapel. It wasn't done as some work of vision and love by Michelangelo. Michelangelo was good at painting, to be sure, but he considered it an inferior art form and he preferred sculpture. He only did that epic fresco because he was offered a shitload of money to do something he didn't like. I.e., he sold out. And even then he hid various FU-s at the pope's expense in it, sorta the renaissance painter's version of hiding a "fuck the pointy haired boss" comment in some obscure source file.
I think you're missing the point entirely. He was paid "a shitload of money to do something he didn't like" - and he could have done something he didn't like. Instead, he produced something incorporating his own passion, manifested in "various FU-s at the pope's expense". It was sufficiently subtle that he wasn't beaten over the head for it, but sufficiently grand that everyone today can admire it.
On a smaller and less subtle scale, the trololo video is doing the same thing. You write a jolly song full of subversive lyrics and the censors censor it. So you hum the song with such over-the-top enthusiasm that you carry the spirit without uttering any words. Much later, we appreciate the feel-good sentiment.
Just because you're paid to jump through a hoop, it doesn't mean you can't take the opportunity to do something much greater.
I would do none of those jobs if it meant having to be interruptible 24/7, except perhaps doctor. Even then I'd only be contacted if I were sufficiently senior in some specialisation that someone might die if I wasn't there. In other cases, it's just some corporation saving money by not employing shift workers.
Might it not be that all these interruptions are unhealthy and damaging to productivity? When people complain constantly about a world full of idiots, might it be because there is so much stimulation that no-one wants to promote sitting down, shutting up and concentrating?
Are huge packages of iPhone games/apps available on bittorrent? I have wondered whether this is a low risk area for torrents because many apps are built by smaller developers who won't have the money to chase after every/any seeder.
From there it's only a step up to some enterprising pirate creating a tool which automates the process of finding, downloading and installing any app - accessible from an extra button added to the app store, or something.
the current law was written 20 years ago when such informal modes of communication as text messaging and e-mail were not widely used.
Did people just meet in person instead? A quick 'phone call? The first problem with recording official communication is that anything devious is communicated off the record.
Slashdot Mirror
And, for those not in Japan, a frequently updated plot of earthquakes around the island and their magnitudes.
Anon is trying to use an extreme exception to prove a rule. IPv6 NAT would also be "useful" in the case where a government implemented a law requiring everyone to deploy IPv6 NAT just because, or in the case where a weekly lottery was held only for those people deploying IPv6 NAT. But it is intellectually dishonest to justify a rant that IPv6 NAT is therefore sometimes useful.
IPv6 involves giving each network a /64 and there are enough of those for everyone. Conscious effort is required to do otherwise. If some ISP makes the effort to create an artificial scarcity by limiting routing of IPv6 IP addresses then it might as well just stick with IPv4 and IPv4 NAT. The main advantage of IPv6 is the opportunity for end-to-end connectivity.
Anything can be argued useful if given the right context. So you have to limit the definition of "useful" to reasonable (technically, socially) scenarios. Finally, if you're not the type to bend over and take anything coming, encountering an absurd re-definition of "useful" should be taken as an opportunity to voice a loud objection and refuse to participate in the nonsense. Consider: Airport body scanners are useful. Random stop-and-search laws are useful. Censorship is useful.
People shouldn't be so easily influenced (emotionally or otherwise) by mere words.
Alternative reality fallacy. People are easily influenced by words. You're essentially saying that the problem is that we've evolved wrongly and that our brains should be perfectly rational (and by your definition of rational). Who will strike the first blow to eliminate this imperfect species and all similarly behaving primates, and replace it with yours?
Anyway, the influence may benefit the influenced. Many people have a better life at school thanks to being one of the bully grunts. Perhaps the "weak-minded" guy is the one who stands alone and has to constantly fight the group? Not every lonely nerd ends up being a superhero after graduation.
Giving them a voice cut down on the violence, the exact opposite of your insane claims.
That was precisely my point. The problem of violence is not solved by taking out the symptoms (violent footsoldiers), but by dealing with the cause (the smarter guy who can exert influence). To say that nothing needs to be done except with those who throw a punch is nonsense.
You respond to hitler by not supporting him and by speaking out against him, not by shooting him.
that just creates a martyr to his cause and a replacement arises out of the cesspool that pushed someone like that into power.
No-one's arguing for "shooting him", are they? And a cause doesn't emerge out of nowhere: it needs clever individuals to weave a framework. It is these individuals who need neutering. In the early stages, you might be able to debate with them, just as you might reason with or speak out against the nascent bully. But once they're commanding an army, whether at school or in war, they become directly responsible for the suffering of their victims. Their loss of freedom is moral unless they choose to give up arms - the very choice given to IRA and ETA.
Would you punish only the footsoldier and let Hitler go free? The former did the killing; the latter was only giving orders.
A bully isn't just someone with a "grudge" to settle with another individual, is he? A bit of competitive physical sport may help temper certain rivalries if both individuals are suited to it and reasonably well matched, but it's not a general solution - and doesn't seem to be a particular solution to bullying. Speaking personally as someone with a head injury, boxing is never going to be my first choice anyway, though I used to enjoy a bit of fencing :-).
I'm not sure why you think a bully victim is necessarily either passive-aggressive or a coward. It's not the physically stronger person who is the successful bully (see link above - the bullies there seemed to be the guys behind the camera egging on the little kid), but the one who is able to exert the most influence. Destruction of one of the bully's minions is just going to teach the bully to choose stronger minions.
What does that have to do with not being offended by mere words and responding to the situation logically?
How do you logically respond to Hitler? Do you note that he has not killed anyone with his own hands and ask him nicely to step aside for a friendly chat? If he ignores you, do you just shrug and let him carry on? Do you tell his victims that he's an insane little man and that, if you're not standing up to him, you're just weak?
Most verbal bullies aren't powerful because they call you names. They're powerful because they influence others' behaviour toward their victim. If you take aside the grunt who throws the punch, you're not solving the problem - you're removing a symptom.
The US seems to fail to understand this in foreign policy, too. Contrast how the IRA has been neutered and ETA more recently tackled.
Straw man. I never said that "two kids boxing always involves one beating the other up".
The suggestion in context was getting the victim and the bully to box each other as a solution to bullying. This remains absurd.
Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me?"
I want to put an early Godwin in this thread: Hitler happened. The nastiest people don't hurt anyone directly. They merely influence people's opinion.
The US has the most powerful propaganda machine on the planet. Do you discount this entirely? Is the brain not just another organ which can be trained in a particular direction?
What ever happened to "hey - here's two pairs of boxing gloves - go behind the gym and work it out?"
Are you serious? The solution to bullies is to get physically fit and beat them up? Self-defence is entirely acceptable, but corporal punishment is not justice.
You also have the freedom to prostrate yourself on a prayer mat facing some arbitrary direction five times a day. And you have the freedom to get as angry as you want about your detractors, reprimanding them for discounting "any possible scenario where inventing a supernatural being might be useful".
Unfortunately, to engage anyone other than the choir in discussion you have to provide a supporting argument for your position. A market deals with scarcity, both by restricting use (some sense of right to control property) and by innovating more efficient uses. This is why people have meagre allocations of IPv4 addresses and why IPv4 NAT exists. The same does not apply when you have 128 bit addresses.
It's an excellent indicator. A public health service is a prerequisite of a social democracy, and even a social democracy is not left wing. The US is to the right of that.
As for authoritarianism, a good indicator is whether capital punishment exists. In general, like Churchill said, we can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners.
The US is right-wing and authoritarian. The usual retort to that is comparison with Third World or degenerate regimes, which in turn indicates the low standards to which much of the American public hold themselves. Compare yourself only with the very best, but most importantly of all: compare yourself today with yourself yesterday.
(a) No, it's proof of an undergraduate level of learning a year or two early. I don't know about the US, but in the UK it does not seem too unusual to be a year or two ahead: this was the case for me and some of my circle of friends. Up to my early teens I recall taking advantage of this to gain wins in some minor competitions, but then I saw that it was not really productive and stopped engaging in that sort of thing.
As for "hard work", there is this mistaken belief by sycophants that clever people have to work hard to achieve impressive things. In my experience, that is not true at all: clever people can set themselves difficult challenges, but the majority coast along at a high level of achievement without having to put in much effort. People don't like to acknowledge this because people do not like to acknowledge that the world simply isn't fair, so instead they imagine that the main difference between them and the genius is hard work. This sets an impossible goal for them and their naivete makes them ripe for exploitation.
(b) Neither hard work nor achievements are necessarily good: it depends entirely on the intention and the outcome. A man's value can only be measured in a particular context, so to simply say "everyone is not equally valuable" is fairly meaningless. For example, from the point of view of reducing the sum of human suffering, it is clear from simple demographic information that the bright are more likely to engage in harmful than productive pursuits. (This may be the bit where you argue that the higher echelons of civil service, casino banking, corporate lawyering, etc are of benefit to society. If so, our conversation is over.) At best they can get bogged down collecting trinkets or in meaningless rambling, which is the stage I hope this man matures out of. Very few perform research with the aim of improving humanity's lot.
in what way does the quote show him to be mathematically naive?
Let's break it down:
"Math is neat: A statement is either true or false,” O’Dorney says.
Depending on the axiom system preceding it. Or is undecidable. Or may simply be badly formed.
“In science, any theory can be overturned by experiment because science is founded on experiment.
Is it? Historically, it certainly hasn't been: the foundations of science are in mathematics and philosophical induction aka expecting the expected. Kids today are seduced by Popper's ramblings on falsifiability (and much else) and forget the previous 3 millennia of science.
But in math, there are theorems that can never be overturned because they have been proved with logic.”
Within a particular axiom system. Which science also uses to derive its theorems - it's just that science deprecates those systems which do not model reality sufficiently well.
I don't think I'll ever enjoy this man's raw mathematical power, but I do recall being a precocious little shit. The kind of bold, absolute statements he is making about mathematics vs science were those I'd make as an 11 year old and grew out of by my early teens.
we are getting to the point where the aggregate value of fairly, but not very, intelligent people is diminishing quickly.
I hear that a lot. Are you sure it's not just that we're at the point where "everyone gets an A and everyone gets a university education", so it appears that there are lots of fairly intelligent people but they're all mysteriously unable to compete for highly challenging work?
Since Thatcher turned polytechnics into universities in the UK, the cynic's view here has been that pushing people into meaningless higher education has just been a way to keep unemployment figures down and make it harder for anyone but the very best to shine (aka erosion of middle class).
I'm sure his raw mathematical talent exceeds mine, but he's still mathematically naive. From the Mathematical Association of America:
I don't really see much value in celebrating geniuses of this sort - clearly mentally (or physically) gifted winners of prize X, Y, Z. It's like celebrating a particular race - you were born that way, and you can either rejoice that you're like that and have the opportunity for fame and fortune, or you can get depressed that you're not.
I prefer celebrating the love of learning and hard work for the sake of advancement of humanity. There are lots of people who fit this goal, and maybe O'Dorney will reach that status. But he's not there yet.
I hereby propose the Mark Zuckerberg emoticon: i-$
The little i represents your information in Zuckerberg's eyes.
The smiley dollar face repesents the amount of money Zuckerberg enjoys through access to your information.
Many deployments of the IWF censorship list in the UK use a 404 Not Found rather than 403. I've never found any official explanation for this, though I've read suggestions that it's to make people just assume that censored content isn't available rather than tip them off that it's being hidden from them.
I don't know what US military policy is, but it gives you an idea of how censors in the Western world think.
Probably the best example is the Sistine Chapel. It wasn't done as some work of vision and love by Michelangelo. Michelangelo was good at painting, to be sure, but he considered it an inferior art form and he preferred sculpture. He only did that epic fresco because he was offered a shitload of money to do something he didn't like. I.e., he sold out. And even then he hid various FU-s at the pope's expense in it, sorta the renaissance painter's version of hiding a "fuck the pointy haired boss" comment in some obscure source file.
I think you're missing the point entirely. He was paid "a shitload of money to do something he didn't like" - and he could have done something he didn't like. Instead, he produced something incorporating his own passion, manifested in "various FU-s at the pope's expense". It was sufficiently subtle that he wasn't beaten over the head for it, but sufficiently grand that everyone today can admire it.
On a smaller and less subtle scale, the trololo video is doing the same thing. You write a jolly song full of subversive lyrics and the censors censor it. So you hum the song with such over-the-top enthusiasm that you carry the spirit without uttering any words. Much later, we appreciate the feel-good sentiment.
Just because you're paid to jump through a hoop, it doesn't mean you can't take the opportunity to do something much greater.
forcing people to post with their real names will cut down on trolling.
How does Facebook force people to post with their real names?
I once created a Facebook account using a completely random name-sounding pair of words.
I've let someone else use my real name on Facebook, partly to prove a point and partly to muddy the waters.
I would do none of those jobs if it meant having to be interruptible 24/7, except perhaps doctor. Even then I'd only be contacted if I were sufficiently senior in some specialisation that someone might die if I wasn't there. In other cases, it's just some corporation saving money by not employing shift workers.
Might it not be that all these interruptions are unhealthy and damaging to productivity? When people complain constantly about a world full of idiots, might it be because there is so much stimulation that no-one wants to promote sitting down, shutting up and concentrating?
What are the scientific/"practical" aims of this exercise, if any in particular? What is the type of camera used?
Are huge packages of iPhone games/apps available on bittorrent? I have wondered whether this is a low risk area for torrents because many apps are built by smaller developers who won't have the money to chase after every/any seeder.
From there it's only a step up to some enterprising pirate creating a tool which automates the process of finding, downloading and installing any app - accessible from an extra button added to the app store, or something.
the current law was written 20 years ago when such informal modes of communication as text messaging and e-mail were not widely used.
Did people just meet in person instead? A quick 'phone call? The first problem with recording official communication is that anything devious is communicated off the record.
Kristopeit, have you considered turning your anger into creativity?
For example, I looked at, "Slashdot = stagnated," and I noticed the anagram, "That LAN SSD goatse'd."
I thought this amusing because LANs, SSDs and goatse are frequent topics of Slashdot.
I transformed hate into a smile.
*places a flower in your musket*
All of life is a, "Hey, look at me!"
Or, "Hey, look at my stuff!" But that's just look-at-me by proxy.
The BBC appear to be challenging everyone right now with the double entendre "Radiation falls at Japanese plant".