"Before people start posting in panic, even if all the ice at the north pole melted it wouldn't cause sea level to rise... now if the glaciers of Greenland and the south pole all melted, then you can worry"
Thats short-sighted. Perhaps you don't think you have to worry about the north pole ice melting... but I would seriously worry, because if the NP ice is melting, it definitely implies that there is an extremely good chance that the SP, and the glaciers of greenland, are going to start melting very soon after.
The United States appears to have a large propaganda campaign going in an attempt to make believe that global warming is not happening, I can only guess that this may be because of the potential cost to the US economy to do something about it. This is an incredibly short sighted and dangerous view.
The global warming debate should shift its focus from political/economic arguments to scientific arguments. Focus relentlessly on the science - determine to what extent we are modifying the earth's climate, determine what we should do about it, etc. In other words, stop bickering about *if* and focus on *what to do about it*.. before it is too late to do anything about it.
"If anything, this is part of the earth's natural climate change. Everyone knows that the earth's climate changes over the centuries"
Maybe it is just natural climate change. Or maybe it isn't. I don't want to be the one to explain to my children or grandchildren why they are doomed to perish on a desert wasteland, because we made the mistake of complacently assuming that the radical, sharp increase in global temperature and temperature increase rates was "probably just normal climatic changes". The fact is, temperatures are rising, and we don't know why. As much as you would like to believe that it is natural, you have absolutely no way of knowing that (burden of proof etc etc.. please point us to the proof of your argument.. if anything, the evidence we have suggests your argument is wrong.)
What matters is that there are plenty of rumours floating around that they are or might be; what better way to scare off anyone who was considering writing, say, the killer Office app for Linux? They kill two birds with one stone with just one rumour; firstly they scare off any potential OfficeApp competition (who would risk developing an Office suite for Linux if there was a chance that it would be squashed instantly when Microsoft Office for Linux is released?), and secondly, they keep Linux from competing with them - since a real (decent) Office Suite for Linux would make Linux more a viable competitor for Windows, then as long as there isn't a killer Office Suite for Linux, this potential competition is lessened.
And they can do all that just be spreading a few rumours. It could well be that they do have a secret group writing the Linux port of Office 2000 - but only if Linux does become a real competitor to Windows on the desktop will we ever find out for sure, since MS would only ever admit it if Windows sales were falling so badly that they instead try to use Office as their main revenue generator. But whether or not they are, the effect on competition is the same.
"But in the interview with the Microsoft C# guys, one of the guys said that Microsoft will be submitting the C# language definition to a standards body"
Sure they are, on the surface. But lets be honest about this: how cross-platform do you realistically expect C# to be? Do you expect that there will always (for example) be a C# for Linux, Mac and BeOS? Do you expect that that version will be the latest, or will it always trail months or years behind Microsoft's version?
This is a well-worn path by MS, don't be fooled by what you see on the surface. They're old hands at doing this. You can expect that they will aggressively push out new versions of C# and it's libs as often as possible, regardless of whether or not those new versions are actually stable. You can also expect that MS's version will have a number of "subtle differences" between the published standard and their version, which will give software developers a hard time when they discover that they can't just copy their source files over to Linux and recompile (remember the differences MS pushed into their Java? Expect the same sort of thing, but now that the language is theirs, they don't have to worry about litigation. And MS has never claimed that their implementation is going to stick exactly with the open version.)
It sounds like you actually somewhat trust what MS says about C#. This is strange, considering their track record, particularly when it comes to compatibility and interopability. "Maybe this time it'll be different".. "maybe this time they really do care about standards".. "maybe this time it'll be stable".. yeah right, every single time MS releases something new we all say the same things, hoping it "will be different this time". But it never is. And we'll be saying that when Windows 2005 comes out. And we'll be saying it when Windows 2010 comes out, and so on. Strange what short memory spans we have.. the moment MS starts promising us their next new and wonderful thing, we've all forgotten all about the last time they screwed us over. Like the wife who won't leave her cheating husband because each time he gets caught he promises that he won't cheat on her again, and she believes him.
There probably won't be a technical advantage, but MS seldom creates things because they'll have a technical advantage; MS creates things that give MS a strategical advantage. In this case, MS needed something of their own to tie into application development for their.NET "vision"..NET has the potential to make vast amounts of money for MS (that will make their current revenues look like small change) but they need as much lock-in as possible. If a whole generation of programmers learns C# instead of C++ and Java (just wait for the deals that MS makes with Universities, it'll happen soon enough: "we'll donate hardware to your university if you teach C# in the courses") then those developers are primed for.NET development.
Sure, MS could use C++ or Java for.NET, but then developer skills are general enough for those developers to use anywhere.
Of course, it could be I don't know what I'm talking about, because it's difficult to really tell what C# will be about, what with all the hype surrounding it.
I keep hearing people criticizing NC's, saying that they'll never catch on, blah blah blah.
But the concept is not at all new, it's basically the "dumb terminal" revisited, and in one form or another, this method of network computing has been used for decades, and used a lot - people just don't seem to notice it, because they don't explicitly get called NC's when they're used. For example when I was studying Comp Sci our sys admin set up a lab of 50 PC's running slackware with X, using NFS to mount home dirs off the server. In concept, that's basically a lab of NC's. This sort of thing has been in common practice for about the last 20 years, and will continue to be.
"No more legacy 8 and 16 bit processes should mean more stability"
No, WindowsME is still the same unstable, not-quite-32bit core. Artificially not making DOS mode available doesn't make any difference to the lack of protection within Windows while running. You can expect Windows ME to still spend just as much time switching to 16-bit mode while running as it currently does (about 10% of time is spent in real mode on my PC, according to the Intel profiler...) so don't hold your breath for more stability until MS really throws away this line of kernels. The cash cow still has quite a bit of milk in it.
"Even then she makes the concious decision to take a chance and drink from the punch bowl"
It seems likely to me that she would still be able to taste that the punch was spiked. If it's heavily spiked, she'll taste it, and if it's not heavily spiked, then she'd anyway have to drink a lot to get drunk - and during the few hours (at least) that that would take, she'd notice she was getting dizzy/drunk, while she's still in control.
Of course, I've never drank anything that was spiked unbeknownst to me, so perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about - but it just seems unlikely to me that nobody would notice.
So did you actually see all this law-breaking with your own eyes, or were you just fed propaganda by the police and media?
Nowhere in the history of police brutality and civil rights abuses have the offenders stood up and said "yes we abused these people". Rather, every single time the reports from the offenders are basically that their victims were dangerous and breaking the law and that their actions were justified. Why do you think that this case might be different? Of course the police are going to be feeding the media stories about the terrible things these people were doing. Actions like jogging and walking with a cellphone, BTW, do not qualify as vandalism or assault of police. And you don't think there is anything strange about protesters being held on bail for unprecedented amounts like $1000000, for misdemeanours, before they had even done anything wrong?
Please, try to look at all possibilities here, not just the one they're feeding the sheeple on the TV.
Moderators, heres a hint: If somebody says something that you don't like to hear, that does not automatically make it a "troll" post. Repeat 100 times.
"alcohol is still the most popular "date rape" drug"
Uh.. not actually.. see, women who drink alcohol do so voluntarily, they're adults who know the consequences, they know full well that they will not have full self-control if they drink, yet they do it anyway.
Date-rape drugs, on the other hand, are slipped into womens' drinks unbeknownst to them.
I'm not saying its OK to rape drunk women, I'm just saying that there is a huge difference between alcohol and date rape drugs. Any woman who feels herself starting to get drunk, and suspecting that they are losing self-control, can at that point choose to get up, walk out, and go home. For all intents and purposes it is impossible in a social situation to force somebody to drink alcohol. Anybody who gets drunk does so by their own choice.
The problem is that if the Carnivore system was only doing what the FBI says it is doing, then there would be no reason to be so secretive about how the system works. There would be no advantage in hiding how it works if it only did what they said; it wouldn't help people circumvent the system as we already know that the only ways to circumvent it are to not use internet routers, or to encrypt your data - that we know without having to know how it works.
So why the secrecy?
I'm afraid I don't share your naive trust in the government.
While I fully agree with everything you say, I'd like to add that I fail to see how revealing the details of how carnivore works can help people circumvent it anyway.
Best case scenario is that Carnivore really does only do what the FBI says it does (unlikely, but lets go with that). So then it runs all traffic under "wiretap" through some sort of semi-intelligent filters, and/or just saves it all for bored FBI agents to read through while they're not entrapping child-molesters on irc. In this case the only ways to circumvent the system are (a) don't use internet routes that have Carnivore installed (e.g. don't use the internet), and/or (b) use encryption. But hey, we already know that, without knowing how Carnivore works inside. (Remember, it's not supposed to sniff *all* traffic, according to them it behaves like wiretaps currently do - that they may only analyze traffic that they have an authorized wiretap for.)
So why the secrecy then? Why hide the details? Far more likely is that Carnivore does a whole lot more than the FBI claims it does.
Oh please, of course the astronauts knew the risks. They weren't stupid, they were intelligent and well-trained and their lives probably revolved around millions of safety procedures. They weren't just strapped in and told "don't worry it'll all be fine". They knew the risks. Anyway, you would have to have an IQ of below 50 to not realise that there are serious risks involved in pioneering space travel (as in any sort of travel pioneering actually.)
Try to remember who funded Columbus's explorations that led to the discover of the America's... or are you saying that Columbus should never have been allowed to even set sail, because he couldn't (at that time) provide enough value to the world to pay his own bills?
I guess you don't really understand the concept of investment in the future. Such investment almost never reaps immediate rewards, and much of it never reaps any rewards - but the long-term rewards are always worth the expense, and the same applies to space travel. I'm sorry for you if it means that you don't get to see the immediate effects in your lifetime, but future generations will most certainly.
Hmm.. you have a short memory. Remember, the development of the Internet itself was funded by tax dollars - it was unable to "pay its own bills" for probably the first 20 years of its existence. By your arguments, it should never have been allowed to exist at all.
Frankly, I hope mankind never sacrifices it's desire for exploration and discover in the name of capitalist "pay for its own bills" economics - if we ever do, it will mark the beginning of the decline of mankind.
Slashdot Mirror
"Before people start posting in panic, even if all the ice at the north pole melted it wouldn't cause sea level to rise... now if the glaciers of Greenland and the south pole all melted, then you can worry"
Thats short-sighted. Perhaps you don't think you have to worry about the north pole ice melting ... but I would seriously worry, because if the NP ice is melting, it definitely implies that there is an extremely good chance that the SP, and the glaciers of greenland, are going to start melting very soon after.
The United States appears to have a large propaganda campaign going in an attempt to make believe that global warming is not happening, I can only guess that this may be because of the potential cost to the US economy to do something about it. This is an incredibly short sighted and dangerous view.
The global warming debate should shift its focus from political/economic arguments to scientific arguments. Focus relentlessly on the science - determine to what extent we are modifying the earth's climate, determine what we should do about it, etc. In other words, stop bickering about *if* and focus on *what to do about it* .. before it is too late to do anything about it.
"If anything, this is part of the earth's natural climate change. Everyone knows that the earth's climate changes over the centuries"
Maybe it is just natural climate change. Or maybe it isn't. I don't want to be the one to explain to my children or grandchildren why they are doomed to perish on a desert wasteland, because we made the mistake of complacently assuming that the radical, sharp increase in global temperature and temperature increase rates was "probably just normal climatic changes". The fact is, temperatures are rising, and we don't know why. As much as you would like to believe that it is natural, you have absolutely no way of knowing that (burden of proof etc etc .. please point us to the proof of your argument .. if anything, the evidence we have suggests your argument is wrong.)
My boss says, never believe anything until a member of the government officially denies it.
Taking that a little further, now that Microsoft has officially denied the rumours, I know they must be true ..
What matters is that there are plenty of rumours floating around that they are or might be; what better way to scare off anyone who was considering writing, say, the killer Office app for Linux? They kill two birds with one stone with just one rumour; firstly they scare off any potential OfficeApp competition (who would risk developing an Office suite for Linux if there was a chance that it would be squashed instantly when Microsoft Office for Linux is released?), and secondly, they keep Linux from competing with them - since a real (decent) Office Suite for Linux would make Linux more a viable competitor for Windows, then as long as there isn't a killer Office Suite for Linux, this potential competition is lessened.
And they can do all that just be spreading a few rumours. It could well be that they do have a secret group writing the Linux port of Office 2000 - but only if Linux does become a real competitor to Windows on the desktop will we ever find out for sure, since MS would only ever admit it if Windows sales were falling so badly that they instead try to use Office as their main revenue generator. But whether or not they are, the effect on competition is the same.
"But in the interview with the Microsoft C# guys, one of the guys said that Microsoft will be submitting the C# language definition to a standards body"
Sure they are, on the surface. But lets be honest about this: how cross-platform do you realistically expect C# to be? Do you expect that there will always (for example) be a C# for Linux, Mac and BeOS? Do you expect that that version will be the latest, or will it always trail months or years behind Microsoft's version?
This is a well-worn path by MS, don't be fooled by what you see on the surface. They're old hands at doing this. You can expect that they will aggressively push out new versions of C# and it's libs as often as possible, regardless of whether or not those new versions are actually stable. You can also expect that MS's version will have a number of "subtle differences" between the published standard and their version, which will give software developers a hard time when they discover that they can't just copy their source files over to Linux and recompile (remember the differences MS pushed into their Java? Expect the same sort of thing, but now that the language is theirs, they don't have to worry about litigation. And MS has never claimed that their implementation is going to stick exactly with the open version.)
It sounds like you actually somewhat trust what MS says about C#. This is strange, considering their track record, particularly when it comes to compatibility and interopability. "Maybe this time it'll be different" .. "maybe this time they really do care about standards" .. "maybe this time it'll be stable" .. yeah right, every single time MS releases something new we all say the same things, hoping it "will be different this time". But it never is. And we'll be saying that when Windows 2005 comes out. And we'll be saying it when Windows 2010 comes out, and so on. Strange what short memory spans we have .. the moment MS starts promising us their next new and wonderful thing, we've all forgotten all about the last time they screwed us over. Like the wife who won't leave her cheating husband because each time he gets caught he promises that he won't cheat on her again, and she believes him.
"I mean, what would be the advantage??"
There probably won't be a technical advantage, but MS seldom creates things because they'll have a technical advantage; MS creates things that give MS a strategical advantage. In this case, MS needed something of their own to tie into application development for their .NET "vision". .NET has the potential to make vast amounts of money for MS (that will make their current revenues look like small change) but they need as much lock-in as possible. If a whole generation of programmers learns C# instead of C++ and Java (just wait for the deals that MS makes with Universities, it'll happen soon enough: "we'll donate hardware to your university if you teach C# in the courses") then those developers are primed for .NET development.
Sure, MS could use C++ or Java for .NET, but then developer skills are general enough for those developers to use anywhere.
Of course, it could be I don't know what I'm talking about, because it's difficult to really tell what C# will be about, what with all the hype surrounding it.
I keep hearing people criticizing NC's, saying that they'll never catch on, blah blah blah.
But the concept is not at all new, it's basically the "dumb terminal" revisited, and in one form or another, this method of network computing has been used for decades, and used a lot - people just don't seem to notice it, because they don't explicitly get called NC's when they're used. For example when I was studying Comp Sci our sys admin set up a lab of 50 PC's running slackware with X, using NFS to mount home dirs off the server. In concept, that's basically a lab of NC's. This sort of thing has been in common practice for about the last 20 years, and will continue to be.
"No more legacy 8 and 16 bit processes should mean more stability"
No, WindowsME is still the same unstable, not-quite-32bit core. Artificially not making DOS mode available doesn't make any difference to the lack of protection within Windows while running. You can expect Windows ME to still spend just as much time switching to 16-bit mode while running as it currently does (about 10% of time is spent in real mode on my PC, according to the Intel profiler ...) so don't hold your breath for more stability until MS really throws away this line of kernels. The cash cow still has quite a bit of milk in it.
"Even then she makes the concious decision to take a chance and drink from the punch bowl"
It seems likely to me that she would still be able to taste that the punch was spiked. If it's heavily spiked, she'll taste it, and if it's not heavily spiked, then she'd anyway have to drink a lot to get drunk - and during the few hours (at least) that that would take, she'd notice she was getting dizzy/drunk, while she's still in control.
Of course, I've never drank anything that was spiked unbeknownst to me, so perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about - but it just seems unlikely to me that nobody would notice.
So did you actually see all this law-breaking with your own eyes, or were you just fed propaganda by the police and media?
Nowhere in the history of police brutality and civil rights abuses have the offenders stood up and said "yes we abused these people". Rather, every single time the reports from the offenders are basically that their victims were dangerous and breaking the law and that their actions were justified. Why do you think that this case might be different? Of course the police are going to be feeding the media stories about the terrible things these people were doing. Actions like jogging and walking with a cellphone, BTW, do not qualify as vandalism or assault of police. And you don't think there is anything strange about protesters being held on bail for unprecedented amounts like $1000000, for misdemeanours, before they had even done anything wrong?
Please, try to look at all possibilities here, not just the one they're feeding the sheeple on the TV.
It's his site. He can do whatever he wants on it. Who are you to tell him what Slashdot is all about, when it's his site, not yours?
Moderators, heres a hint: If somebody says something that you don't like to hear, that does not automatically make it a "troll" post. Repeat 100 times.
"alcohol is still the most popular "date rape" drug"
Uh .. not actually .. see, women who drink alcohol do so voluntarily, they're adults who know the consequences, they know full well that they will not have full self-control if they drink, yet they do it anyway.
Date-rape drugs, on the other hand, are slipped into womens' drinks unbeknownst to them.
I'm not saying its OK to rape drunk women, I'm just saying that there is a huge difference between alcohol and date rape drugs. Any woman who feels herself starting to get drunk, and suspecting that they are losing self-control, can at that point choose to get up, walk out, and go home. For all intents and purposes it is impossible in a social situation to force somebody to drink alcohol. Anybody who gets drunk does so by their own choice.
The problem is that if the Carnivore system was only doing what the FBI says it is doing, then there would be no reason to be so secretive about how the system works. There would be no advantage in hiding how it works if it only did what they said; it wouldn't help people circumvent the system as we already know that the only ways to circumvent it are to not use internet routers, or to encrypt your data - that we know without having to know how it works.
So why the secrecy?
I'm afraid I don't share your naive trust in the government.
While I fully agree with everything you say, I'd like to add that I fail to see how revealing the details of how carnivore works can help people circumvent it anyway.
Best case scenario is that Carnivore really does only do what the FBI says it does (unlikely, but lets go with that). So then it runs all traffic under "wiretap" through some sort of semi-intelligent filters, and/or just saves it all for bored FBI agents to read through while they're not entrapping child-molesters on irc. In this case the only ways to circumvent the system are (a) don't use internet routes that have Carnivore installed (e.g. don't use the internet), and/or (b) use encryption. But hey, we already know that, without knowing how Carnivore works inside. (Remember, it's not supposed to sniff *all* traffic, according to them it behaves like wiretaps currently do - that they may only analyze traffic that they have an authorized wiretap for.)
So why the secrecy then? Why hide the details? Far more likely is that Carnivore does a whole lot more than the FBI claims it does.
Oh please, of course the astronauts knew the risks. They weren't stupid, they were intelligent and well-trained and their lives probably revolved around millions of safety procedures. They weren't just strapped in and told "don't worry it'll all be fine". They knew the risks. Anyway, you would have to have an IQ of below 50 to not realise that there are serious risks involved in pioneering space travel (as in any sort of travel pioneering actually.)
Try to remember who funded Columbus's explorations that led to the discover of the America's ... or are you saying that Columbus should never have been allowed to even set sail, because he couldn't (at that time) provide enough value to the world to pay his own bills?
I guess you don't really understand the concept of investment in the future. Such investment almost never reaps immediate rewards, and much of it never reaps any rewards - but the long-term rewards are always worth the expense, and the same applies to space travel. I'm sorry for you if it means that you don't get to see the immediate effects in your lifetime, but future generations will most certainly.
Hmm .. you have a short memory. Remember, the development of the Internet itself was funded by tax dollars - it was unable to "pay its own bills" for probably the first 20 years of its existence. By your arguments, it should never have been allowed to exist at all.
Frankly, I hope mankind never sacrifices it's desire for exploration and discover in the name of capitalist "pay for its own bills" economics - if we ever do, it will mark the beginning of the decline of mankind.