Get a life bozo. Porn is an industry just like any other industry. Maybe you don't like Sexually Oriented Businesses - that is fine - your choice; but you still don't know squat about them.
By the way, do you know why doormen at clubs are called bouncers? Its because when they throw troublemakers like you out of clubs and onto the asphault in the parking lots, sometimes they bounce like rubber balls.
Flaimbait? Where did that come from? I never cease to be amazed at some of the moderation here.
Everything I said in that post is simple fact. I have several years experience working in S.O.B's, (Sexually Oriented Businesses.) People who haven't worked in that industry know about as much about it as people who haven't worked in the computer industry know about building and programming computers. (And yes, I realize that you can study the computer industry in college. I count that as generally 'working in the business'. There aren't any degrees offered in the S.O.B. field; the only practical way to know about that business is to work in it.)
Most people who have worked in the business would agree with most of what I had to say. I've seen women light up when they realized that they were good looking enough to be dancers. I've also had women (plural) admit to me that the sort of feminist rhetoric I talked about is just a power game designed to make men feel guilty. A lot of what women say and do is just to get a reaction out of us. Sorry, that is the way the world works.
Most likely I am the only person in this forum who is qualified to write on the subject. Of course - this being Slashdot - a truth like that won't keep people from expressing clueless opinions.
Yes, I have to agree with you on this: I am sure that having a wife is a much better way for you to exploit women.
I have worked as a body guard for several porn actresses and they were about as exploited as any other very wealthy person. Not one of them had any trouble depositing their large paychecks. Women in porn know and understand exactly what they are doing; which is taking advantage of the fact that men are turned on by visual stimuli.
If anyone is being exploited in porn it is the lonely guys who buy it. That 'porn exploits women' line is just a bunch of unattractive, jealous, women trying to make men feel guilty for being men. It is a power game and nothing else. Any men who buy into that guff are viewed with contempt by the women who spout it. If those feminists thought they were good looking enough to be topless dancers or work in porn they would do it in a flash; they don't have any 'moral' problems with it - mostly they're just angry that they don't look like porn stars. Women's brains don't work the same way male brains do. What women say and what they do are two different things. Women do a lot of things they don't want to talk about.
Because Rambus is a vaporware company which has very low costs (an office is their main expense) it is very difficult to get rid of these people. The main business model of Rambus is depositing checks. Remember that several large companies have signed extortio^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H 'agreements' with Rambus - they have a large enough income to hang around essentially forever. Plaintiff's attorneys work on speculation so Rambus legal fees are small.
Don't count on these birds of woe disappearing anytime soon. Even if all of their patents are held invalid they are still going to collect a lot of money from people. Remember - they don't even have to advertise - which is a major expense for most companies. The advertising and promoting bills go to their 'clients'. What a scam these guys have going.
Pipelines speed up a processor by overlapping execution times; an actual instruction might take 12 clock cycles to execute if the pipeline is 12 stages deep - but the effective throughput is one instruction per clock cycle - once the pipeline is filled.
An over clocked micro-sequencer could have the same effect without the problems of pipeline refilling at a branch. Overall, I suspect the over clocked sequencer approach might offer comparable performance with a much quicker design cycle - and or - lower design cost.
Not if you do the decode in the over clocked microprogram. The rom "knows" how long an instruction is, and thus where the next instruction after it starts.
There is one other way to raise the effective work done per clock cycle; raise the amount done by each instruction. While the idea fueling RISC in the beginning was to make simpler - and thus faster - chips - a modern RISC chip is anything but simple.
I have to wonder if an over clocked microprogram unit with a CISC instruction set couldn't be made competitive again. Ultimately that might be a simpler design - and thus potentially faster than a modern RISC chip.
One of the ultimate limits on processor performance is how fast you can get instructions into the processor. If you think of CISC as a compressed (Huffman encoded) version of RISC it is easy to see that CISC does have a theoretical advantage there.
I know this is heresy, and that the modern religion is RISC == GOOD, CISC == BAD; but it might at least be worth someone spending some time thinking about it. If nothing else, the reduced transistor count could do something about the spiraling power consumption problems in processors. Or you could integrate multiple processors on one die and do the SMP on chip with the much smaller cores this would make possible.
Sorry i didn't see your post earlier. The reason that other people don't enter the market to compete with the scam is that the barrier to entry into the insurance industry is enormously high. If you try to enter the competition you will quickly discover that it is an 'extremely rich people are the only ones who get to play' game.
It is a little bit like trying to start a new auto company to compete with GM - good luck on trying to raise venture capital; call us when you do. Nobody even tries to compete with insurance companies; what could you sell the Venture Capitalists on? "We'll run our insurance company honestly and pay our claims quickly? " I think you can see there is little chance of that raising the big bucks. To raise venture capital it is necessary to show that you can do a particular job better than those already in an industry - so that you will have a competitive advantage against them. That is a very difficult thing to do in insurance; all the companies in the industry are already very efficient.
Nobody in the industry wants to upset their scam - they all profit from it - so nobody rocks the boat. They just count on nobody noticing what is going on.
You seem to want to win some sort of argument. Arguments are intellectual fights. As I have said in other posts - because I am a certified expert in fighting I understand that winning a fight has nothing to do with being right or wrong - the winner of a fight is the winner of the fight and nothing else. A point which many intelligent people fail to understand.
Fights are destructive to both parties involved - I seek to avoid them wherever possible. The idea of arriving at something as fragile beautiful, precise and delicate as the truth by means of something as crude and destructive as a fight is ludicrous.
For many years the intellectually strong have wielded the power of science as though it were a weapon to bludgeon lesser minds into submission. I won't put up with that sort of behavior - the scientific method is an intellectual tool - not a weapon to be used to establish some ego gratifying pseudo superiority with.
As i said - I don't want to fight. But fighting is what I do for recreation - and I am really good at it. If you want a fight - I'll give you a fight you will never forget. It won't be some namby pamby debate - with rules and a referee. It will be an all out street fight where you don't get to whine about ad hominem or anything else forbidden under the dainty Marquis of Queensberry rules of using logic for intellectual sparring.
In your post you behave as though you believe that winning a fight is proof that you are right - it is not.
If you wish to have a civil discussion of the proper use of the scientific method I would be happy to join in; there is a good chance I could learn something important in such a discussion.
If on the other hand you want to establish your dominance - score points, count coup, and ring buzzers of humiliation in my face, then I will do my best to rip your know-it-all head off of your shoulders and shove it up your arrogant ass - the choice is yours.
I have to wonder why the story says that the asteroid impact theory is so hard to take seriously? About 35 million years ago there was an impact in Russia that left a crater about 100 Km in diameter. That would be about a one Teraton explosion. (Call it roughly a million 1 megaton H bombs). Such a strike would kill virtually anything within 1000 miles of ground zero and have a global devastation effect. Some scientists credit the strike with the end of the Eocene era; another of earth's mass extinctions.
Unlike passing black holes or vacuum changes, asteroid impacts are known proven events. All of the nuclear weapons ever built don't hold a candle to the power of such an event. Has everybody already forgotten the comet impact on Jupiter a few years ago? If that had hit us we'd all be toast.
The next asteroid strike is coming, it is just a matter of when. If I remember correctly there was an asteroid in the 1930's that passed earth well within the orbit of the moon. I don't find this a difficult scenario to believe at all.
True, there are no studies which support the 'cell phones could be dangerous' proposition - however there are also no statistically valid studies which support the 'being punched in the nose hurts' proposition either.
Just because there aren't any valid studies doesn't mean that something isn't true. A point which 'cynics' often conveniently ignore.
As I have pointed out before the key word in the phrase 'anecdotal evidence' is 'evidence', 'anecdotal' is a modifier which tells what type of evidence it is. A wise person understands this and judges how much weight to give the evidence. It is just as bad a mistake to always assign a value of zero to anecdotal evidence as it is to always assign a value of 100% to it. Sometimes anecdotal evidence is the only evidence there is. If the early people in the nuclear radiation field hadn't paid attention to the anecdotal stories of health problems of people dealing with radioactive materials why would anyone have ever done any studies on the subject?
We have never subjected large quantities of people to close up microwave transmitters. Any time you do new things you discover things you didn't know before.
The claim that microwaves can't do anything because they are not ionizing radiation is at best doubtful. How do we know that there isn't a chemical substance in the brain which resonates at the frequencies of these transmitters and which will selectively absorb energy from them causing a breakdown of the chemical from selective heating?
To say "Its safe because I don't see any way it could be dangerous" is pretty arrogant.
I think the more important question is how will technology influence the law. As law has an increasing effect on technology - more and more technologically savvy people will begin to look at the law. If they do so critically - they will begin to realize that we have been sold a pile of rotting dingo's kidneys by the Dogbert types who created the structure of the law in the first place.
The fact that the law functions as an immune system for society means that it is susceptible to the work of people who are the societal equivalent of the AIDS virus; people who corrupt the structure of the legal system to their own destructive ends.
Because the law is uniquely devoted to the control of evil in society - it is the one societal system which evil feels, and has always felt, a pressing need to control and shape.
Does anyone seriously believe that holding red hot pokers to someone's tongue was the idea of good people? Ancient legal systems were - from our perspective - obviously the work of evil. Modern ones still are, they are just packaged so as to make that evil influence blend in invisibly.
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
What authority was I citing in my statement? Where was I making an argument? I don't make the intellectual error of assuming that the winner of a fight is the one who is right, which you do.
I said in my post that I was a pretty bright guy, which means that I know that I am able to learn things at a rate which is high enough that no one in the world is able to learn fast enough to make up a 27 year head start on me. If a person can bench press 500 lbs he knows for a fact that there is no one in the world who is able to bench press 2 times as much as he can.
I am not the most intelligent man in the world, nor am I the fastest learner, but I am intelligent enough and fast enough a learner to know that given the head start that I had that there is no way anyone half my age knows as much as I do. That is not arrogance or hubris - that is a simple statement of fact.
How much have I learned? Well I know that all of logic is based on a demonstrably false postulate. That when you attempt to use logic to win a fight, that you make a false assumption that you have a firm base from which to argue. Aristotle was wrong about everything else, what makes you think that he was right about the thought process that led him to all of those erroneous conclusions?
I have learned enough to know that the phrase "The truth hurts" means that the truth is being used as a weapon to damage someone.
Stop and think for a second: if this were a completely logical universe it would not be possible to make an illogical statement; such a statement would be incompatible with the nature of a completely logical universe. There are other truths than logic at work in the universe.
I don't like to fight - I consider it a massive waste of time for the most part, and one in which both sides get hurt. It is because I am a certified expert in fighting that I see little point in it. Be very careful before you start a fight with me. Don't make the intellectual error of mistaking "doesn't want to fight" for "can't fight".
The problem with all digital recording methods is the DAC - the digital to analog converter. The real virtue of a higher sampling rate is that it makes the DAC job much easier to do accurately.
CD's do a great job on s/n ratio - they don't do such a great job of accurately reproducing a wave form. There is a clearly audible difference between CD's and Analog records on top quality audio equipment.
Even the best audio equipment does a really poor job of reproducing sounds. The proof is to make a recording in an anechoic chamber of a speakers output and then compare that signal with a synched up input signal on an oscilloscope set up in differential mode. If the two were identical the output would look like a straight line, instead it looks like a bowl of spaghetti; the phase and amplitude distortions are terrible.
I know that there are tests that 'show' that the ear is not sensitive to phase differences, but those tests were badly flawed; the phase distortion of the reproducing equipment was so bad that of course no one could hear differences. One phase distortion sounded just as bad as another. Most of the differences in speaker sounds have to do with the phase response of the speakers.
The ear is basically a Fourier analyzer, and phase does matter when you do Fourier transforms.
I'm willing to make you a small wager. I'll bet that in 10 or 15 years you will have learned enough to have a different opinion of the situation. At that time you'll be talking to a young turk and you'll remember how self righteous you were when you were young and inexperienced, and you'll think to yourself "Boy, was I this arrogant when I was young?"
Of course, I could be wrong, some people keep their youthful arrogance as they grow older; they are the ones who never learn anything worth knowing.
Age gives you the opportunity to gain some wisdom. Whether you choose to take advantage of that opportunity is up to you.
Ok, lets take a little quiz to put things into perspective for you: When you were born I was oh say 27. I'm a pretty bright guy, and I've never stopped learning, and doing it at an ever increasing rate; I've learned how to learn more efficiently over the years. I think that even you will admit that when you were born I knew more than you did. So the question is: "Exactly when do you think that your level of knowledge passed mine, when you were 12, 18, 22, last week maybe?"
Does it occur to you that there is no way you could know as much as I do, simply because you haven't been around long enough to pass me up yet? Congratulations, that would be the beginning of wisdom on your part.
I've been thinking about my question and I think I may have a reasonable answer. Most IT workers are incompetent, I am sure that is also true of most HR workers. Most likely resumes aren't read because most HR workers can barely read - in the sense that they can't understand technical qualifications.
Are there competent HR people? Of course there are, the ones who read Slashdot probably fall into the competent range. So I won't get an answer to my question from them - as the competent minority they do read resumes and hire good people. I was looking for an answer from the people who would never answer.
Everybody take note: an example of Veteran properly using Hanlon's razor; I only see malice involved when it actually is at work.
Here is a suggestion: send resumes - but with a fictitious name, age, less experience, and see if you get a reply. I haven't tried this yet but I think I will. This will answer the question.
I think it is more of a problem than just age. The problem is that most resumes are not even read. Nobody gets to the age part of resumes because nobody looks at them. In my experience the only time anyone reads a resume is when you are sitting there in front of them. I suspect this is because most people lie on resumes - if you have done a lot most people assume what you've written is a pack of lies.
I do know resumes aren't read: when or if I do get in front of someone it is obvious they are reading my resume for the first time.
22 years ago I got a job from a newspaper ad - it was from a rapidly growing firm who was looking for anyone who knew anything about digital. Other than that I have never had any luck from classified positions. Every job I have had since has come from a personal contact: I knew someone at the company or I was recommended by someone who knew someone at the company.
Could someone who has worked in an HR department explain why nobody seems to read resumes?
In order to say why Carnivore is unreasonable we would have to know what it does. By your argument since we don't know what it does we can't say that it is unreasonable, and thus we can have no 4th amendment argument against it.
Pretty clever, if the government wants to violate the 4th amendment all they have to do is keep the technique they use a secret and they are home free.
I think that a counter argument is "Any surveillance technique which is kept a secret is an unreasonable search technique - how can you reason against something when you don't know what it is?
Edward's law is correct: any technical person can solve the population crisis easily. Simply line everybody up and shoot every other person. Repeat until crisis is solved.
However, the opposite of Edward's law is also true: you can't supply a sociological solution to a technical problem. When you do you get something like the Challenger. "See there is no formal specification on how cold the o-rings can be, therefore it is safe for us to launch."
People - people rule the world - always have, always will. However People - people are for the most part evasive, dishonest, untrustworthy, weasels.
By his answers the person reviewing Carnivore is a People - person. He gives answers which appear to be straight forward and forthright. They are actually evasive and weasel worded. Of course most people are swayed by surface appearances - so his answers will be adequate for most people.
If he actually gave straight forward correct answers he would be a technical person, and he wouldn't be in a position to be answering the questions; he would be one of us asking them.
One of the cleverest scams that Insurance companies run is Fire Safety, Car crash testing etc.
Why is this a scam? An example will show you the trick. Suppose fire works are legal in your area. The "Fire Safety Institute" or some similar insurance industry backed group starts a big push to outlaw fireworks. "Look how much fire works cost you in extra fire insurance premiums" is one of their main arguments. The Push is successful - fire works get outlawed. So your fire insurance premiums drop - right? Somehow the Insurance companies 'forget' to pass on the savings to you that came from their risk being lowered.
Nice scam, and one that people have been falling for repeatedly for 70 years or so. Cars today are far safer than they were in the 1950's.
Your chance of being injured in an accident in a 2000 model car is a lot lower than it was in one from 50 years ago, but your insurance rates are a lot higher. (That is not all scam, there are a lot more cars on the roads than there were in 1950, and like chemical reactions, accident rates go as the square of the density of the reactants. double the number of cars and the number of accidents goes up by a factor of four - given nothing else changes.)
In any case the basic scam is: "Make things safer by pointing out that X costs you money in higher insurance premiums, forget to lower the premiums when X disappears". Quick test, did anybody have their insurance rates drop when helmets for kids on bicycles got mandated? How about helmets on motorcycle drivers, did anybody get lowered premiums for that? How about when mandatory seat belt laws went into effect, did your auto insurance costs decline? No, but you can bet insurance company costs went down when those laws went into effect.
I once heard someone say "One more time through and the banks and the insurance companies will own everything." He wasn't very far wrong.
Not to point out the obvious, but from the comments I have read - something many people fail to understand, that the pioneers in any field never have degrees in the field. How could they, who would teach them?
The reason that progress is slow at the start of a new field is that the pioneers have to teach themselves. Once a field is established by those people then a university can start 'professing' what the pioneers discovered and grant degrees in the subject.
This greatly expands the quantity of people available to work in the field, and allows the graduates to look down their noses at the pioneers and say: "We don't hire people without degrees." This has the benefit of allowing less talented people to work without having to compete with the rare people who can teach themselves to do something at a Ph.D. level without formal instruction.
Redmond WA Microsoft (msft) today announced that the number of people working on Appeal (V2.0) had been doubled due to production problems.
Although the original spec for the project called for 150 pages, Microsoft announced that they had decided to delay release by an additional 3 months to allow the increased staff to deliver a 450 page product. The new projected release date for Appeal (v2.0) would be February 27th 2001.
A Microsoft spokesman said "We didn't feel that we could do a very good job on the product in only 150 pages, so we decided to push the release date back from the original end of November target to the end of February next year. We believe that we can include considerably more functionality in Appeal (V2.0) in 450 pages than we could if we limited ourselves to the original target."
Microsoft also pre announced Appeal (V3.0) which spokesman said "would be over 3000 pages - a considerable increase." One source close to the Appeal (v3.0) team said that over 1000 pages of Appeal (V3.0) would be a reprint of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged with the "John Galt" character name being changed to "Bill Gates".
Mr. Gates said he was pleased with the progress on Appeal (V3.0), which he said could "revolutionize the legal industry". He strongly hinted that Appeal (V2.0) was a "stopgap" release, and that Appeal (V3.0) would be the release everyone should wait for.
Because many of the people who lost out on the trade are regular Slashdot readers. Can you think of a better way of notifying them that there might be something they can do about their loss?
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, do you know why doormen at clubs are called bouncers? Its because when they throw troublemakers like you out of clubs and onto the asphault in the parking lots, sometimes they bounce like rubber balls.
Everything I said in that post is simple fact. I have several years experience working in S.O.B's, (Sexually Oriented Businesses.) People who haven't worked in that industry know about as much about it as people who haven't worked in the computer industry know about building and programming computers. (And yes, I realize that you can study the computer industry in college. I count that as generally 'working in the business'. There aren't any degrees offered in the S.O.B. field; the only practical way to know about that business is to work in it.)
Most people who have worked in the business would agree with most of what I had to say. I've seen women light up when they realized that they were good looking enough to be dancers. I've also had women (plural) admit to me that the sort of feminist rhetoric I talked about is just a power game designed to make men feel guilty. A lot of what women say and do is just to get a reaction out of us. Sorry, that is the way the world works.
Most likely I am the only person in this forum who is qualified to write on the subject. Of course - this being Slashdot - a truth like that won't keep people from expressing clueless opinions.
I have worked as a body guard for several porn actresses and they were about as exploited as any other very wealthy person. Not one of them had any trouble depositing their large paychecks. Women in porn know and understand exactly what they are doing; which is taking advantage of the fact that men are turned on by visual stimuli.
If anyone is being exploited in porn it is the lonely guys who buy it. That 'porn exploits women' line is just a bunch of unattractive, jealous, women trying to make men feel guilty for being men. It is a power game and nothing else. Any men who buy into that guff are viewed with contempt by the women who spout it. If those feminists thought they were good looking enough to be topless dancers or work in porn they would do it in a flash; they don't have any 'moral' problems with it - mostly they're just angry that they don't look like porn stars. Women's brains don't work the same way male brains do. What women say and what they do are two different things. Women do a lot of things they don't want to talk about.
Don't count on these birds of woe disappearing anytime soon. Even if all of their patents are held invalid they are still going to collect a lot of money from people. Remember - they don't even have to advertise - which is a major expense for most companies. The advertising and promoting bills go to their 'clients'. What a scam these guys have going.
An over clocked micro-sequencer could have the same effect without the problems of pipeline refilling at a branch. Overall, I suspect the over clocked sequencer approach might offer comparable performance with a much quicker design cycle - and or - lower design cost.
Sadly, i have to go offline for a while, Not ignoring anybody, just not here. Sorry.
Not if you do the decode in the over clocked microprogram. The rom "knows" how long an instruction is, and thus where the next instruction after it starts.
I have to wonder if an over clocked microprogram unit with a CISC instruction set couldn't be made competitive again. Ultimately that might be a simpler design - and thus potentially faster than a modern RISC chip.
One of the ultimate limits on processor performance is how fast you can get instructions into the processor. If you think of CISC as a compressed (Huffman encoded) version of RISC it is easy to see that CISC does have a theoretical advantage there.
I know this is heresy, and that the modern religion is RISC == GOOD, CISC == BAD; but it might at least be worth someone spending some time thinking about it. If nothing else, the reduced transistor count could do something about the spiraling power consumption problems in processors. Or you could integrate multiple processors on one die and do the SMP on chip with the much smaller cores this would make possible.
It is a little bit like trying to start a new auto company to compete with GM - good luck on trying to raise venture capital; call us when you do. Nobody even tries to compete with insurance companies; what could you sell the Venture Capitalists on? "We'll run our insurance company honestly and pay our claims quickly? " I think you can see there is little chance of that raising the big bucks. To raise venture capital it is necessary to show that you can do a particular job better than those already in an industry - so that you will have a competitive advantage against them. That is a very difficult thing to do in insurance; all the companies in the industry are already very efficient.
Nobody in the industry wants to upset their scam - they all profit from it - so nobody rocks the boat. They just count on nobody noticing what is going on.
You seem to want to win some sort of argument. Arguments are intellectual fights. As I have said in other posts - because I am a certified expert in fighting I understand that winning a fight has nothing to do with being right or wrong - the winner of a fight is the winner of the fight and nothing else. A point which many intelligent people fail to understand.
Fights are destructive to both parties involved - I seek to avoid them wherever possible. The idea of arriving at something as fragile beautiful, precise and delicate as the truth by means of something as crude and destructive as a fight is ludicrous.
For many years the intellectually strong have wielded the power of science as though it were a weapon to bludgeon lesser minds into submission. I won't put up with that sort of behavior - the scientific method is an intellectual tool - not a weapon to be used to establish some ego gratifying pseudo superiority with.
As i said - I don't want to fight. But fighting is what I do for recreation - and I am really good at it. If you want a fight - I'll give you a fight you will never forget. It won't be some namby pamby debate - with rules and a referee. It will be an all out street fight where you don't get to whine about ad hominem or anything else forbidden under the dainty Marquis of Queensberry rules of using logic for intellectual sparring.
In your post you behave as though you believe that winning a fight is proof that you are right - it is not.
If you wish to have a civil discussion of the proper use of the scientific method I would be happy to join in; there is a good chance I could learn something important in such a discussion.
If on the other hand you want to establish your dominance - score points, count coup, and ring buzzers of humiliation in my face, then I will do my best to rip your know-it-all head off of your shoulders and shove it up your arrogant ass - the choice is yours.
Unlike passing black holes or vacuum changes, asteroid impacts are known proven events. All of the nuclear weapons ever built don't hold a candle to the power of such an event. Has everybody already forgotten the comet impact on Jupiter a few years ago? If that had hit us we'd all be toast.
The next asteroid strike is coming, it is just a matter of when. If I remember correctly there was an asteroid in the 1930's that passed earth well within the orbit of the moon. I don't find this a difficult scenario to believe at all.
Just because there aren't any valid studies doesn't mean that something isn't true. A point which 'cynics' often conveniently ignore.
As I have pointed out before the key word in the phrase 'anecdotal evidence' is 'evidence', 'anecdotal' is a modifier which tells what type of evidence it is. A wise person understands this and judges how much weight to give the evidence. It is just as bad a mistake to always assign a value of zero to anecdotal evidence as it is to always assign a value of 100% to it. Sometimes anecdotal evidence is the only evidence there is. If the early people in the nuclear radiation field hadn't paid attention to the anecdotal stories of health problems of people dealing with radioactive materials why would anyone have ever done any studies on the subject?
We have never subjected large quantities of people to close up microwave transmitters. Any time you do new things you discover things you didn't know before.
The claim that microwaves can't do anything because they are not ionizing radiation is at best doubtful. How do we know that there isn't a chemical substance in the brain which resonates at the frequencies of these transmitters and which will selectively absorb energy from them causing a breakdown of the chemical from selective heating?
To say "Its safe because I don't see any way it could be dangerous" is pretty arrogant.
The fact that the law functions as an immune system for society means that it is susceptible to the work of people who are the societal equivalent of the AIDS virus; people who corrupt the structure of the legal system to their own destructive ends.
Because the law is uniquely devoted to the control of evil in society - it is the one societal system which evil feels, and has always felt, a pressing need to control and shape.
Does anyone seriously believe that holding red hot pokers to someone's tongue was the idea of good people? Ancient legal systems were - from our perspective - obviously the work of evil. Modern ones still are, they are just packaged so as to make that evil influence blend in invisibly.
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The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
That was a rhetorical question, I didn't expect an answer.
I said in my post that I was a pretty bright guy, which means that I know that I am able to learn things at a rate which is high enough that no one in the world is able to learn fast enough to make up a 27 year head start on me. If a person can bench press 500 lbs he knows for a fact that there is no one in the world who is able to bench press 2 times as much as he can.
I am not the most intelligent man in the world, nor am I the fastest learner, but I am intelligent enough and fast enough a learner to know that given the head start that I had that there is no way anyone half my age knows as much as I do. That is not arrogance or hubris - that is a simple statement of fact.
How much have I learned? Well I know that all of logic is based on a demonstrably false postulate. That when you attempt to use logic to win a fight, that you make a false assumption that you have a firm base from which to argue. Aristotle was wrong about everything else, what makes you think that he was right about the thought process that led him to all of those erroneous conclusions?
I have learned enough to know that the phrase "The truth hurts" means that the truth is being used as a weapon to damage someone.
Stop and think for a second: if this were a completely logical universe it would not be possible to make an illogical statement; such a statement would be incompatible with the nature of a completely logical universe. There are other truths than logic at work in the universe.
I don't like to fight - I consider it a massive waste of time for the most part, and one in which both sides get hurt. It is because I am a certified expert in fighting that I see little point in it. Be very careful before you start a fight with me. Don't make the intellectual error of mistaking "doesn't want to fight" for "can't fight".
CD's do a great job on s/n ratio - they don't do such a great job of accurately reproducing a wave form. There is a clearly audible difference between CD's and Analog records on top quality audio equipment.
Even the best audio equipment does a really poor job of reproducing sounds. The proof is to make a recording in an anechoic chamber of a speakers output and then compare that signal with a synched up input signal on an oscilloscope set up in differential mode. If the two were identical the output would look like a straight line, instead it looks like a bowl of spaghetti; the phase and amplitude distortions are terrible.
I know that there are tests that 'show' that the ear is not sensitive to phase differences, but those tests were badly flawed; the phase distortion of the reproducing equipment was so bad that of course no one could hear differences. One phase distortion sounded just as bad as another. Most of the differences in speaker sounds have to do with the phase response of the speakers.
The ear is basically a Fourier analyzer, and phase does matter when you do Fourier transforms.
Of course, I could be wrong, some people keep their youthful arrogance as they grow older; they are the ones who never learn anything worth knowing.
Age gives you the opportunity to gain some wisdom. Whether you choose to take advantage of that opportunity is up to you.
Ok, lets take a little quiz to put things into perspective for you: When you were born I was oh say 27. I'm a pretty bright guy, and I've never stopped learning, and doing it at an ever increasing rate; I've learned how to learn more efficiently over the years. I think that even you will admit that when you were born I knew more than you did. So the question is: "Exactly when do you think that your level of knowledge passed mine, when you were 12, 18, 22, last week maybe?" Does it occur to you that there is no way you could know as much as I do, simply because you haven't been around long enough to pass me up yet? Congratulations, that would be the beginning of wisdom on your part.
Are there competent HR people? Of course there are, the ones who read Slashdot probably fall into the competent range. So I won't get an answer to my question from them - as the competent minority they do read resumes and hire good people. I was looking for an answer from the people who would never answer.
Everybody take note: an example of Veteran properly using Hanlon's razor; I only see malice involved when it actually is at work.
Here is a suggestion: send resumes - but with a fictitious name, age, less experience, and see if you get a reply. I haven't tried this yet but I think I will. This will answer the question.
I think it is more of a problem than just age. The problem is that most resumes are not even read. Nobody gets to the age part of resumes because nobody looks at them. In my experience the only time anyone reads a resume is when you are sitting there in front of them. I suspect this is because most people lie on resumes - if you have done a lot most people assume what you've written is a pack of lies.
I do know resumes aren't read: when or if I do get in front of someone it is obvious they are reading my resume for the first time.
22 years ago I got a job from a newspaper ad - it was from a rapidly growing firm who was looking for anyone who knew anything about digital. Other than that I have never had any luck from classified positions. Every job I have had since has come from a personal contact: I knew someone at the company or I was recommended by someone who knew someone at the company.
Could someone who has worked in an HR department explain why nobody seems to read resumes?
Pretty clever, if the government wants to violate the 4th amendment all they have to do is keep the technique they use a secret and they are home free.
I think that a counter argument is "Any surveillance technique which is kept a secret is an unreasonable search technique - how can you reason against something when you don't know what it is?
However, the opposite of Edward's law is also true: you can't supply a sociological solution to a technical problem. When you do you get something like the Challenger. "See there is no formal specification on how cold the o-rings can be, therefore it is safe for us to launch."
People - people rule the world - always have, always will. However People - people are for the most part evasive, dishonest, untrustworthy, weasels.
By his answers the person reviewing Carnivore is a People - person. He gives answers which appear to be straight forward and forthright. They are actually evasive and weasel worded. Of course most people are swayed by surface appearances - so his answers will be adequate for most people.
If he actually gave straight forward correct answers he would be a technical person, and he wouldn't be in a position to be answering the questions; he would be one of us asking them.
Why is this a scam? An example will show you the trick. Suppose fire works are legal in your area. The "Fire Safety Institute" or some similar insurance industry backed group starts a big push to outlaw fireworks. "Look how much fire works cost you in extra fire insurance premiums" is one of their main arguments. The Push is successful - fire works get outlawed. So your fire insurance premiums drop - right? Somehow the Insurance companies 'forget' to pass on the savings to you that came from their risk being lowered.
Nice scam, and one that people have been falling for repeatedly for 70 years or so. Cars today are far safer than they were in the 1950's. Your chance of being injured in an accident in a 2000 model car is a lot lower than it was in one from 50 years ago, but your insurance rates are a lot higher. (That is not all scam, there are a lot more cars on the roads than there were in 1950, and like chemical reactions, accident rates go as the square of the density of the reactants. double the number of cars and the number of accidents goes up by a factor of four - given nothing else changes.)
In any case the basic scam is: "Make things safer by pointing out that X costs you money in higher insurance premiums, forget to lower the premiums when X disappears". Quick test, did anybody have their insurance rates drop when helmets for kids on bicycles got mandated? How about helmets on motorcycle drivers, did anybody get lowered premiums for that? How about when mandatory seat belt laws went into effect, did your auto insurance costs decline? No, but you can bet insurance company costs went down when those laws went into effect.
I once heard someone say "One more time through and the banks and the insurance companies will own everything." He wasn't very far wrong.
The reason that progress is slow at the start of a new field is that the pioneers have to teach themselves. Once a field is established by those people then a university can start 'professing' what the pioneers discovered and grant degrees in the subject.
This greatly expands the quantity of people available to work in the field, and allows the graduates to look down their noses at the pioneers and say: "We don't hire people without degrees." This has the benefit of allowing less talented people to work without having to compete with the rare people who can teach themselves to do something at a Ph.D. level without formal instruction.
Although the original spec for the project called for 150 pages, Microsoft announced that they had decided to delay release by an additional 3 months to allow the increased staff to deliver a 450 page product. The new projected release date for Appeal (v2.0) would be February 27th 2001.
A Microsoft spokesman said "We didn't feel that we could do a very good job on the product in only 150 pages, so we decided to push the release date back from the original end of November target to the end of February next year. We believe that we can include considerably more functionality in Appeal (V2.0) in 450 pages than we could if we limited ourselves to the original target."
Microsoft also pre announced Appeal (V3.0) which spokesman said "would be over 3000 pages - a considerable increase." One source close to the Appeal (v3.0) team said that over 1000 pages of Appeal (V3.0) would be a reprint of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged with the "John Galt" character name being changed to "Bill Gates".
Mr. Gates said he was pleased with the progress on Appeal (V3.0), which he said could "revolutionize the legal industry". He strongly hinted that Appeal (V2.0) was a "stopgap" release, and that Appeal (V3.0) would be the release everyone should wait for.
Because many of the people who lost out on the trade are regular Slashdot readers. Can you think of a better way of notifying them that there might be something they can do about their loss?