As others have said, the fingerprint is much like a checksum -- it's calculated based on the tones produced by the song itself. They're right in saying that the fingerprint will be consistent for compression, etc. so long as the song is not changed significantly. How long would it take for geeks to work around this if it were implemented to restrict the distribution of copyrighted material? Less than a day. Consider the following: I write a program that prepends X seconds of random noise to a sound file, thus skewing its fingerprint to render it unrecognizable. On the other end someone else clips out that bit of junk and has the original sound file again. Writing an app to do this would be dead simple. Further, just compressing or encrypting the sound file would be enough to wreck its signature. Bottom line: cool idea but it won't even slow us down if people try using it to control us.
Personally, I find it hard to beleive that even Steve Jobs would be foolish enough to so compromise the quality of his demo by replacing a Radeon with a Rage 128. Apple is hardly in a prominent position in the industry and IMO their achilles heel right now is their graphics capability.
The Apple Insider report says: "Mr. Jobs ripped all MENTION of ATI and their products from his keynote presentation this morning." Fine, he didn't go on about the cool ATI card they were going to use, but I find no mention of him pulling out a Radeon and slapping in a Rage 128 Pro. If Mr. Jobs DID do this then I must assume one of the following is true:
1. The demo did not include a live demo of the cube's graphics capability
2. Jobs is an idiot
For Jobs to replace a Radeon with a Rage 128 for a live demo, he would be stealing his OWN thunder. It's like ripping out a GeForce and swapping in an original TNT right before your cool demo of Quake 3 Arena. "Just pretend this game is running at 100 fps, 1024x768x32 with volumetric shadows and multiple movable lightsources instead of the 2fps at 640x480x16 like you're seeing now. That's what it would be like if I hadn't ripped the video card we plan to ship this machine with out of a sense of ill-inspired spite. Amazing? That's why we're #1!" Ummm.... no.
If the card was pulled it was most likely because of last-minute technical issues. More likely is that the card was never intented to be demoed in the first place.
Well, right off the bat, you've already mentioned some of my top picks: Lain: TSE and Perfect Blue are both phenomenal. Battle Angel is quite good as well. As for the rest...
Akira A mainstay of the anime genre. A classic neo-tokyo tale with a metaphysical bent, musing on topics such as evolution through scenes of phychedelic weirdness and rampant destruction. Decent story-writing and very good art. I think most of the people that dislike this one do so because they're comparing it to the manga of the same name.
Ghost in the Shell Another big film by the same director (I beleive) as Akira. This one is a lot more philosophical and a lot less over-the-top violent. In what appears to be a neo-hong kong, this one deals with AI-related topics such as sentience, and again, evolution.
The Dagger of Kamui / Kamui No Ken This is one I don't hear mentioned a lot and don't understand why. It takes place in feudal Japan and has the usual assortment of Samurai, Ninja, etc. It's over 2 hours long and the story is typically incredibly involved and convoluted, and excellent. The art sets it apart from most other anime as it has an almost comic book-like quality to it. The characters have more of a hand-drawn look to them that I find incredibly cool.
Fist of the North Star This isn't one of my favorites but it's popular enough that I thought I should mention it. Themed like a post-apocalyptic kung fu theatre, the art is poor, the story is weak, and the characters' power is totally over the top. There's one scene where a guy walks through a building as if it were made of tissue paper. All that aside, it has some classic one-liners and is quite entertaining. It's also pretty darn violent.
Grave of the Fireflies Its astounding story more than makes up for its rather simplistic art. Following the life of two Japanese children left homeless near the end of WW2, it's both poignant and gut-wrenching. If you don't at least appreciate this one you're either insane or dead.
Vampire Hunter D I wasn't sure whether to mention this one, but I do like it. It's fairly violent, the art is bad, and the story is a bit weak, but it still manages to be verry entertaining. Definately at least worth renting.
Princess Mononoke Already out of the theatres and not to be released on DVD until at least this fall, it's quite good but you're going to have to wait to find it.
As for others... I purposefully didn't mention any anime series. I've seen a few, but going that direction can be darn expensive asn you'll end up spending hundreds of dollars just pursuing one. Of the ones I've seen, Lodoss War is good.
Someone also mentioned Urotsukidoji... there is a subgenre of Anime termed "tentacle porn" and this is far worse than those. If you're titillated by period german propoganda footage and such things as the "Nazi Death Rape Machine" be sure to pick this one up. Otherwise, stay well away and be glad you didn't have to subject yourself to this tripe. Far too disturbing to allow me to appreciate the fairly good art.
Fire and Ice Not anime but animated, this film has the best animation I've ever seen. I'm certain they filmed actual people and then drew over them. The art is fairly basic but the story is decent and it's worth watching once just to appreciate the animation. If I could find it on DVD I'd be quite happy.
I'm sure I missed a bunch... perhaps when i get home from work todan and check my collection I'll come up with a few more to mention.
Whether or not the animals in their cages resent being held captive, zoos do serve an important purpose. They are there to make people aware that we're not the only animals on the planet and perhaps encourage us to think a bit more on how our actions might impact species besides our own when we act. Now extend this to Columbine and Mr. Katz' book. Perhaps "Voices from the Hellmouth" could be said to serve the same purpose. It's an attempt to make people aware of others differences and perhaps encourage them to think a bit before acting out against the weirdos. It could be argued that Columbine may never have happened had the kids involved been more accepted among their peers. The post-Columbine backlash was just more of the anti-geek mentality on a much wider, and more official scale. This may all be common sense to you and me, but it may not be to other people. Sure, his actions may not be perfectly conceived, but IMO they're better than no action at all.
"Doesn't he realize that we're human beings too? And maybe, just maybe, we just want to be left alone to do our thing?"
"Don't people realize animals can suffer, etc just like we can? And maybe, just maybe, they just want to be left alone and do their own thing?"
I think Mr. Katz is well aware of this. In fact, I think that's the entire aim of his book -- to hopefully make life a little easier for someone out there by attempting to make others realize that geeks are people too.
I was out somewhere and pretty busy and my cellphone beeped. I jumped to check it and discovered it was a spam message advertising some cellphone accessory store. If I get another unsolicited message I'm complaining to my provider and if I get a third I'm cancelling the service. Why? I carry my cellphone for calls I either need or want to get. I expect an infinite signal to noise ratio. This is why I pay for the service.
Someone has already mentioned that we pay for unsolicited email while the sender pays for snail mail. This extends beyond the purely financial, however. I read email in my leisure time and deleting a few messages that my filters missed isn't a very big deal. It beats killing trees to annoy me. But cellphones and pagers are carried to make an individual accessible during non-leisure time. In a sense, they are a doorway through which we allow our privacy to be invaded in exchange for very specific benefits. While I might find junk email annoying, getting junk messages while I'm eating dinner at a restaurant, in a meeting, at a movie, or driving my car, makes me downright hostile. It violates the very purpose of the device by introducing noise into a stream that should be all signal, and disrupts our private time in the process.
Another person replied to this thread by saying that no spam would be sent if it didn't generate any sales, so we should all boycott spam. I think that we all probably already boycott spam. I can truthfully say that unsolicited email, telephone calls, and web banners have never solicited so much as an instant of my attention. There are, however, and will always be a percentage of the population that DO respond to this type of marketing. Since it's free to do, even a 1% response rate makes it a worthwhile pursuit, especially since a single email can be sent to millions of people.
Do I favor anti-spam legislation? You bet. Say whatever you want, just don't force me to listen. In the short-term, telco's should become aware of this problem and install filtering software. If they don't and I continue to get spam pages I WILL cancel my service. It's that important to me. I don't want to adjust, I want my privacy.
and that is that there's no way to tell if an online vote is made under coercion, while it's fairly reasonable to assume that votes made in person are not (as the 'evil' party would have no way of knowing which way the vote was actually cast).
There is also the possibility of a loss of anonymity with online voting, as you could have 20 people in the room with you at the time or the protocol/whatever could be snooped if not done properly.
If they do this I hope they consult the more knowledgeable crypto people in the field and work out a solution everyone is happy with. Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD. Though I agree that it would get people voting more frequently.
original. The entire basis of the plot is a variation on Descartes' "Malevolent Demon" idea. They also play with a bunch of other classic philosophic ideas. Seems to me that it would be a good way to present an example of some of those concepts to new students in a way they would find engaging and easy to grasp. You've got to start somewhere.
and that is that this is the code for Quake *1*. The game itself has been around for years, and Id has long since stopped actively supporting it.
Id released the source to the community so that people could learn from it. They never claimed that the client or protocol was unhackable and should not be expected to take any responsibility for the hacking that's occurring now. If people have a problem with the way the code is implemented, they should take it upon themselves to change it. After all, that is why it's in the public domain now.
which was reprinted recently. It was obviously written either while Neil Stephenson was in college or not long after he graduated and while I found it entertaining, it was obvious that he still hadn't crystallized the writing style evident in his current works.
I'm sure Zodiac was reprinted because the publisher wanted to make a bit of money off an older book now that NS had gained a bit of popularity, and while I may sound critical, it really was a fun book -- especially knowing the boston area.
I would treat this book the same. It is one of his first works and, while entertaining, probably isn't the best-written novel in the world. I would understand why NS wouldn't wholeheartedly endorse a reprinting -- he obviously feels that it doesn't warrant it. While I'd read it if I could find a copy for the cover price, only a collector should want to pay more for it.
there are two separate types of Euthanasia -- active and passive. The latter is the "allow to die" method and is already legal in many cases. The former, which is the issue in this case, is when a person is actually killed.
I'm going to skip past the issue of what criteria qualifies something/someone as a person (which is often an issue with abortion and has bearings on whether euthanasia constitutes murder) and deal only with the issue at hand -- active vs. passive euthanasia.
Often, infants born with downs syndrome also have a digestive tract problem which is easily fixed by a simple medical procedure. Without it, the children can't digest food and will die. In the case of passive euthanasia, someone (generally the parents) decides that the child should be allowed to die (ie. that the operation should not be performed). Now, the nurses (and doctors) have to watch this child suffer and waste away over a course of weeks until it starves to death. You can imagine how hard it must be on the nurses and doctors who are forced to witness this, not to mention the starving child.
Now, the issue at stake is, once it has been determined that the person should die, whether it might make more sense to end things quickly and painlessly rather than allow the suffering to continue unnecessarily. The issue of murder certainly comes up, but might you say that making the choice to refuse an operation or life support which is necessary for a person to live is the same as actively killing them?
There are other issues at stake here as well. What conditions are necessary to justify euthanasia? Is it sufficient that the parents not want to deal with raising the child? Perhaps they won't be able to manage it either financially or emotionally. Or perhaps it should only be when it is determined that the child will suffer so much in their life that death would be preferable? How do we know that someone with down's syndrome is actually miserable? What about people with other disorders? We are forced to look at this issue from the outside and are actually comparing our concept of life in that state to our perception of a normal life. The potential euthanasia victim will never have the benefit of this perspective and our perception of their situation is certainly skewed.
I would say that in cases where passive euthanasia was approved then active should be as well. Certainly, it cuts short any sort of window where the patient is allowed a chance to recover on their own, but at the same time it reduces both the suffering of the patient as well as the doctors, nurses, and (possibly) the family. By the way, families are not required to visit a patient who is being allowed to die. Once the decision has been made, the weight is really on the shoulders of the hospital staff. This is why I put the "possibly" before family in the previous sentence.
while it's true that in an ideal world, xDSL would be more secure than cable, in practice it still often not. Reason being that the DSL companies are often still fairly incompetent and end up bridging traffic instead of routing it. end result -- a lot like cable. Other people in your subnet end up seeing your traffic. With any luck this will change in the near future, but for now... don't count of the fact that your xDSL-connected PC is as safe as you think it is.
should not be considered private. If the company has this in its acceptable use policy then that's that. No one says you have to report any hits to the powers that be, but if you're supposed to scan, you should at least have scanning software in place. Someone might bring a lawsuit against the company that requires scanning of email.
It's a nice piece of hardware. It's pretty, well-designed, and has a fast CPU. It's also a closed architecture. Apple is making the same mistake it made back in the 80's. I won't buy a new computer that can only run MacOS just because it looks nice. Good luck Apple.
One of the wonderful things about NT is how they have to be different than everybody else. The optimal solution for sockets programming under NT isn't the standard berkeley sockets stuff but IOCP. No idea if Apache is implemented this way now, but if not it would mean quite a bit of work to do the coding... for a substantial performance boost.
Some people would get nothing out of a PDA. I stuck to the pen&paper method for a long time but it had problems: you can't erase/edit anything, pages fall out or get lost, it's bulky, if alarms are needed you have to use a watch or other device, etc.
Moving to a pilot was a huge boon. Aside from the fact that I could install all sorts of other useful software on it that I then didn't need to duplicate with other devices (sci. calculator, etc.), what it came with out of the box was a small, editable, readable-in-the-dark, unified method to keep track of everything and then some.
Paper methods never worked in my quest for some semblance of organization -- this has.
Perhaps the author of the CNN article wouldn't benefit from a PDA, but I do. I could care less about the geek glamour associated with the thing.
is that it's unreliable. If you live in a *new house* then you can expect everything to be fine&dandy. If you live in an *old* house or (far worse) an apartment, you can kiss your X10 reliability goodbye. As X10 uses the AC wiring to transmit signals, it's reliant on every wall socket being ultimately connected to every other wall socket via a reasonably clean power system. Many apartments and old homes have either multiple circut breakers or a bizarre power setup that doesn't work well with X10. Where I live now X10 doesn't work at all basically. That said, I've heard of farmers using X10 to control stuff out in fields from their home, so YMMV.
no one has ever complained that MS bundled notepad with their OS -- the only reason IE became an issue was because bundling IE killed Netscape -- an up and coming company relying on their browser as pretty much their only product.
MS should never have said that IE was an integral part of their OS -- it's not, any more than notepad is. Heck, all a web-browser is is a fancy text-viewer. You can't argue that an OS won't boot or run without one, unless you include "read HTML" in the definition of "run."
My understanding was the reasons they didn't use it was because it was *very* short-haul. They'd have to install some kind of repeaters on the order of >1 per mile. for in-home I can see how it might be useful but I'd be surprised to see the power companies shell out tons of $$ to build the infrastructure necessary to carry data over their grid, not to mention managing the business end of things, and it's really not very hard to run wire/fibre in a home. There's also wireless.
the REGISTER. Plus, these tests conflict with all other test results I've seen, as well as Intel's take on the K7 (see various articles saying how AMD 'worries' Intel). There's another absurd article on the REGISTER mocking AMD. If they want to be Intel stooges, let them. Those of us with a clue will make an informed decision about what CPU we buy.
They're jumping on the bandwagon and trying to perpetuate the image of a roguish geek-version of James Bond, and by linking their bags to this image they hope that people will think that if they buy the bags they'll be a part of some mythical cultural elite.
It's a load of bollocks designed to sway some percentage of the brainless masses to make a buck -- I don't see why people are so worked up about this. If Kipling made better bags I might even get one but their designs are lame Kiplinged versions (dumbass visible zippers, poor worksmanship, cheap materials and a stupid logo) of bags designed by other companies. Their version of Manhattan Portage's J-Pack is the worst -- I beleive they call it the "firewall". I wonder if I jacked in through it if it would keep the bad people out. I think the best part is the giant rubber block-print "HACKER" label stitched to each bag.
See it as another failed attempt at success from a company with no sense of style and pity them.
Slashdot Mirror
what about digital cable? I would be surprised if the viewing habits of digital cable users was not monitored...
As others have said, the fingerprint is much like a checksum -- it's calculated based on the tones produced by the song itself. They're right in saying that the fingerprint will be consistent for compression, etc. so long as the song is not changed significantly. How long would it take for geeks to work around this if it were implemented to restrict the distribution of copyrighted material? Less than a day. Consider the following: I write a program that prepends X seconds of random noise to a sound file, thus skewing its fingerprint to render it unrecognizable. On the other end someone else clips out that bit of junk and has the original sound file again. Writing an app to do this would be dead simple. Further, just compressing or encrypting the sound file would be enough to wreck its signature. Bottom line: cool idea but it won't even slow us down if people try using it to control us.
I would love to see the MPAA use this as grounds to go after sites like Altavista :)
-----
"So what are we going to do now, Brain?"
"The same thing we do every day Pinky, attempt to take over the world!"
Personally, I find it hard to beleive that even Steve Jobs would be foolish enough to so compromise the quality of his demo by replacing a Radeon with a Rage 128. Apple is hardly in a prominent position in the industry and IMO their achilles heel right now is their graphics capability.
The Apple Insider report says: "Mr. Jobs ripped all MENTION of ATI and their products from his keynote presentation this morning." Fine, he didn't go on about the cool ATI card they were going to use, but I find no mention of him pulling out a Radeon and slapping in a Rage 128 Pro. If Mr. Jobs DID do this then I must assume one of the following is true:
1. The demo did not include a live demo of the cube's graphics capability
2. Jobs is an idiot
For Jobs to replace a Radeon with a Rage 128 for a live demo, he would be stealing his OWN thunder. It's like ripping out a GeForce and swapping in an original TNT right before your cool demo of Quake 3 Arena. "Just pretend this game is running at 100 fps, 1024x768x32 with volumetric shadows and multiple movable lightsources instead of the 2fps at 640x480x16 like you're seeing now. That's what it would be like if I hadn't ripped the video card we plan to ship this machine with out of a sense of ill-inspired spite. Amazing? That's why we're #1!" Ummm.... no.
If the card was pulled it was most likely because of last-minute technical issues. More likely is that the card was never intented to be demoed in the first place.
Akira A mainstay of the anime genre. A classic neo-tokyo tale with a metaphysical bent, musing on topics such as evolution through scenes of phychedelic weirdness and rampant destruction. Decent story-writing and very good art. I think most of the people that dislike this one do so because they're comparing it to the manga of the same name.
Ghost in the Shell Another big film by the same director (I beleive) as Akira. This one is a lot more philosophical and a lot less over-the-top violent. In what appears to be a neo-hong kong, this one deals with AI-related topics such as sentience, and again, evolution.
The Dagger of Kamui / Kamui No Ken This is one I don't hear mentioned a lot and don't understand why. It takes place in feudal Japan and has the usual assortment of Samurai, Ninja, etc. It's over 2 hours long and the story is typically incredibly involved and convoluted, and excellent. The art sets it apart from most other anime as it has an almost comic book-like quality to it. The characters have more of a hand-drawn look to them that I find incredibly cool.
Fist of the North Star This isn't one of my favorites but it's popular enough that I thought I should mention it. Themed like a post-apocalyptic kung fu theatre, the art is poor, the story is weak, and the characters' power is totally over the top. There's one scene where a guy walks through a building as if it were made of tissue paper. All that aside, it has some classic one-liners and is quite entertaining. It's also pretty darn violent.
Grave of the Fireflies Its astounding story more than makes up for its rather simplistic art. Following the life of two Japanese children left homeless near the end of WW2, it's both poignant and gut-wrenching. If you don't at least appreciate this one you're either insane or dead.
Vampire Hunter D I wasn't sure whether to mention this one, but I do like it. It's fairly violent, the art is bad, and the story is a bit weak, but it still manages to be verry entertaining. Definately at least worth renting.
Princess Mononoke Already out of the theatres and not to be released on DVD until at least this fall, it's quite good but you're going to have to wait to find it.
As for others... I purposefully didn't mention any anime series. I've seen a few, but going that direction can be darn expensive asn you'll end up spending hundreds of dollars just pursuing one. Of the ones I've seen, Lodoss War is good.
Someone also mentioned Urotsukidoji... there is a subgenre of Anime termed "tentacle porn" and this is far worse than those. If you're titillated by period german propoganda footage and such things as the "Nazi Death Rape Machine" be sure to pick this one up. Otherwise, stay well away and be glad you didn't have to subject yourself to this tripe. Far too disturbing to allow me to appreciate the fairly good art.
Fire and Ice Not anime but animated, this film has the best animation I've ever seen. I'm certain they filmed actual people and then drew over them. The art is fairly basic but the story is decent and it's worth watching once just to appreciate the animation. If I could find it on DVD I'd be quite happy.
I'm sure I missed a bunch... perhaps when i get home from work todan and check my collection I'll come up with a few more to mention.
Whether or not the animals in their cages resent being held captive, zoos do serve an important purpose. They are there to make people aware that we're not the only animals on the planet and perhaps encourage us to think a bit more on how our actions might impact species besides our own when we act. Now extend this to Columbine and Mr. Katz' book. Perhaps "Voices from the Hellmouth" could be said to serve the same purpose. It's an attempt to make people aware of others differences and perhaps encourage them to think a bit before acting out against the weirdos. It could be argued that Columbine may never have happened had the kids involved been more accepted among their peers. The post-Columbine backlash was just more of the anti-geek mentality on a much wider, and more official scale. This may all be common sense to you and me, but it may not be to other people. Sure, his actions may not be perfectly conceived, but IMO they're better than no action at all.
"Doesn't he realize that we're human beings too? And maybe, just maybe, we just want to be left alone to do our thing?"
"Don't people realize animals can suffer, etc just like we can? And maybe, just maybe, they just want to be left alone and do their own thing?"
I think Mr. Katz is well aware of this. In fact, I think that's the entire aim of his book -- to hopefully make life a little easier for someone out there by attempting to make others realize that geeks are people too.
I was out somewhere and pretty busy and my cellphone beeped. I jumped to check it and discovered it was a spam message advertising some cellphone accessory store. If I get another unsolicited message I'm complaining to my provider and if I get a third I'm cancelling the service. Why? I carry my cellphone for calls I either need or want to get. I expect an infinite signal to noise ratio. This is why I pay for the service.
Someone has already mentioned that we pay for unsolicited email while the sender pays for snail mail. This extends beyond the purely financial, however. I read email in my leisure time and deleting a few messages that my filters missed isn't a very big deal. It beats killing trees to annoy me. But cellphones and pagers are carried to make an individual accessible during non-leisure time. In a sense, they are a doorway through which we allow our privacy to be invaded in exchange for very specific benefits. While I might find junk email annoying, getting junk messages while I'm eating dinner at a restaurant, in a meeting, at a movie, or driving my car, makes me downright hostile. It violates the very purpose of the device by introducing noise into a stream that should be all signal, and disrupts our private time in the process.
Another person replied to this thread by saying that no spam would be sent if it didn't generate any sales, so we should all boycott spam. I think that we all probably already boycott spam. I can truthfully say that unsolicited email, telephone calls, and web banners have never solicited so much as an instant of my attention. There are, however, and will always be a percentage of the population that DO respond to this type of marketing. Since it's free to do, even a 1% response rate makes it a worthwhile pursuit, especially since a single email can be sent to millions of people.
Do I favor anti-spam legislation? You bet. Say whatever you want, just don't force me to listen. In the short-term, telco's should become aware of this problem and install filtering software. If they don't and I continue to get spam pages I WILL cancel my service. It's that important to me. I don't want to adjust, I want my privacy.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet...
and that is that there's no way to tell if an online vote is made under coercion, while it's fairly reasonable to assume that votes made in person are not (as the 'evil' party would have no way of knowing which way the vote was actually cast).
There is also the possibility of a loss of anonymity with online voting, as you could have 20 people in the room with you at the time or the protocol/whatever could be snooped if not done properly.
If they do this I hope they consult the more knowledgeable crypto people in the field and work out a solution everyone is happy with. Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD. Though I agree that it would get people voting more frequently.
original. The entire basis of the plot is a variation on Descartes' "Malevolent Demon" idea. They also play with a bunch of other classic philosophic ideas. Seems to me that it would be a good way to present an example of some of those concepts to new students in a way they would find engaging and easy to grasp. You've got to start somewhere.
and that is that this is the code for Quake *1*. The game itself has been around for years, and Id has long since stopped actively supporting it.
Id released the source to the community so that people could learn from it. They never claimed that the client or protocol was unhackable and should not be expected to take any responsibility for the hacking that's occurring now. If people have a problem with the way the code is implemented, they should take it upon themselves to change it. After all, that is why it's in the public domain now.
which was reprinted recently. It was obviously written either while Neil Stephenson was in college or not long after he graduated and while I found it entertaining, it was obvious that he still hadn't crystallized the writing style evident in his current works.
I'm sure Zodiac was reprinted because the publisher wanted to make a bit of money off an older book now that NS had gained a bit of popularity, and while I may sound critical, it really was a fun book -- especially knowing the boston area.
I would treat this book the same. It is one of his first works and, while entertaining, probably isn't the best-written novel in the world. I would understand why NS wouldn't wholeheartedly endorse a reprinting -- he obviously feels that it doesn't warrant it. While I'd read it if I could find a copy for the cover price, only a collector should want to pay more for it.
there are two separate types of Euthanasia -- active and passive. The latter is the "allow to die" method and is already legal in many cases. The former, which is the issue in this case, is when a person is actually killed.
I'm going to skip past the issue of what criteria qualifies something/someone as a person (which is often an issue with abortion and has bearings on whether euthanasia constitutes murder) and deal only with the issue at hand -- active vs. passive euthanasia.
Often, infants born with downs syndrome also have a digestive tract problem which is easily fixed by a simple medical procedure. Without it, the children can't digest food and will die. In the case of passive euthanasia, someone (generally the parents) decides that the child should be allowed to die (ie. that the operation should not be performed). Now, the nurses (and doctors) have to watch this child suffer and waste away over a course of weeks until it starves to death. You can imagine how hard it must be on the nurses and doctors who are forced to witness this, not to mention the starving child.
Now, the issue at stake is, once it has been determined that the person should die, whether it might make more sense to end things quickly and painlessly rather than allow the suffering to continue unnecessarily. The issue of murder certainly comes up, but might you say that making the choice to refuse an operation or life support which is necessary for a person to live is the same as actively killing them?
There are other issues at stake here as well. What conditions are necessary to justify euthanasia? Is it sufficient that the parents not want to deal with raising the child? Perhaps they won't be able to manage it either financially or emotionally. Or perhaps it should only be when it is determined that the child will suffer so much in their life that death would be preferable? How do we know that someone with down's syndrome is actually miserable? What about people with other disorders? We are forced to look at this issue from the outside and are actually comparing our concept of life in that state to our perception of a normal life. The potential euthanasia victim will never have the benefit of this perspective and our perception of their situation is certainly skewed.
I would say that in cases where passive euthanasia was approved then active should be as well. Certainly, it cuts short any sort of window where the patient is allowed a chance to recover on their own, but at the same time it reduces both the suffering of the patient as well as the doctors, nurses, and (possibly) the family. By the way, families are not required to visit a patient who is being allowed to die. Once the decision has been made, the weight is really on the shoulders of the hospital staff. This is why I put the "possibly" before family in the previous sentence.
while it's true that in an ideal world, xDSL would be more secure than cable, in practice it still often not. Reason being that the DSL companies are often still fairly incompetent and end up bridging traffic instead of routing it. end result -- a lot like cable. Other people in your subnet end up seeing your traffic. With any luck this will change in the near future, but for now... don't count of the fact that your xDSL-connected PC is as safe as you think it is.
should not be considered private. If the company has this in its acceptable use policy then that's that. No one says you have to report any hits to the powers that be, but if you're supposed to scan, you should at least have scanning software in place. Someone might bring a lawsuit against the company that requires scanning of email.
It's a nice piece of hardware. It's pretty, well-designed, and has a fast CPU. It's also a closed architecture. Apple is making the same mistake it made back in the 80's. I won't buy a new computer that can only run MacOS just because it looks nice. Good luck Apple.
One of the wonderful things about NT is how they have to be different than everybody else. The optimal solution for sockets programming under NT isn't the standard berkeley sockets stuff but IOCP. No idea if Apache is implemented this way now, but if not it would mean quite a bit of work to do the coding... for a substantial performance boost.
Some people would get nothing out of a PDA. I stuck to the pen&paper method for a long time but it had problems: you can't erase/edit anything, pages fall out or get lost, it's bulky, if alarms are needed you have to use a watch or other device, etc.
Moving to a pilot was a huge boon. Aside from the fact that I could install all sorts of other useful software on it that I then didn't need to duplicate with other devices (sci. calculator, etc.), what it came with out of the box was a small, editable, readable-in-the-dark, unified method to keep track of everything and then some.
Paper methods never worked in my quest for some semblance of organization -- this has.
Perhaps the author of the CNN article wouldn't benefit from a PDA, but I do. I could care less about the geek glamour associated with the thing.
is that it's unreliable. If you live in a *new house* then you can expect everything to be fine&dandy. If you live in an *old* house or (far worse) an apartment, you can kiss your X10 reliability goodbye. As X10 uses the AC wiring to transmit signals, it's reliant on every wall socket being ultimately connected to every other wall socket via a reasonably clean power system. Many apartments and old homes have either multiple circut breakers or a bizarre power setup that doesn't work well with X10. Where I live now X10 doesn't work at all basically. That said, I've heard of farmers using X10 to control stuff out in fields from their home, so YMMV.
no one has ever complained that MS bundled notepad with their OS -- the only reason IE became an issue was because bundling IE killed Netscape -- an up and coming company relying on their browser as pretty much their only product.
MS should never have said that IE was an integral part of their OS -- it's not, any more than notepad is. Heck, all a web-browser is is a fancy text-viewer. You can't argue that an OS won't boot or run without one, unless you include "read HTML" in the definition of "run."
My understanding was the reasons they didn't use it was because it was *very* short-haul. They'd have to install some kind of repeaters on the order of >1 per mile. for in-home I can see how it might be useful but I'd be surprised to see the power companies shell out tons of $$ to build the infrastructure necessary to carry data over their grid, not to mention managing the business end of things, and it's really not very hard to run wire/fibre in a home. There's also wireless.
my grandmother still uses her PC Junior and we have an XT in use also.
the REGISTER. Plus, these tests conflict with all other test results I've seen, as well as Intel's take on the K7 (see various articles saying how AMD 'worries' Intel). There's another absurd article on the REGISTER mocking AMD. If they want to be Intel stooges, let them. Those of us with a clue will make an informed decision about what CPU we buy.
that linus is heading to russia to develop a version of linux for?
They're jumping on the bandwagon and trying to perpetuate the image of a roguish geek-version of James Bond, and by linking their bags to this image they hope that people will think that if they buy the bags they'll be a part of some mythical cultural elite.
It's a load of bollocks designed to sway some percentage of the brainless masses to make a buck -- I don't see why people are so worked up about this. If Kipling made better bags I might even get one but their designs are lame Kiplinged versions (dumbass visible zippers, poor worksmanship, cheap materials and a stupid logo) of bags designed by other companies. Their version of Manhattan Portage's J-Pack is the worst -- I beleive they call it the "firewall". I wonder if I jacked in through it if it would keep the bad people out. I think the best part is the giant rubber block-print "HACKER" label stitched to each bag.
See it as another failed attempt at success from a company with no sense of style and pity them.