I use an old Amstrad NC100 "notebook computer" from 1992 to write on sometimes. If all you want is to produce text while sitting on the subway, it rules. It starts instantly, you never need to "save" anything (the working memory is the permanent storage memory), and it starts up exactly where you shut it off. You got to love solid state solutions. It stores the text on a battery-powered 1MB PCMCIA. Serial modem is used to transfer files to the PC. Best of all, it runs on 4 AA batteries for 40 hours.:-)
P.S. Why are there tags like "idiot" and "lame"?? Must Slashdot serve to the flamer community?
This has obviously failed to explain anything whatever to you.
* There is not an increasing number of gay men "out there."
* Evolution will not eventually wipe out the species. Evolution selects for reproductive qualities, and can not select against them.
* There is no such thing as "the top of the evolutionary chain." Maybe you're thinking of the food chain. Even if there was such a thing, it would not imply that man "must always exist." That is a nonsense conclusion.
* If "lower animals" "surpassed us" in 1,000 years, it would indeed be a problem for evolutionary theory, but not in any way you are aware of.
"[B]ecause women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger..." LOL Yes, everyone who is not a suicidal, gun-tooting idiot does that. What a muppet.
MS owns the OS market because it owns the office applications market. It's the exchange of documents that forces corporations and institutions to standardize on MS Windows and MS Office, not the Windows operating system. MS's control of the office applications market depends on that everyone (that matters) uses MS Office. It's a vicious circle. That's why forcing people to pay up or switch may hurt MS, as it may actually create groups of users of alternative software suits large enough to give those solutions momentum and turn them into more valid choices for organizations. It might become so that compatibility with non-MS office software becomes an actual business demand, and then the MS monopoly is fried, as it must mean the end of their user lock-in strategy. MS may not make money from pirate copies of MS Office, but as long as everyone uses it, everyone has to use it, whether everyone pays for it or not.
I agree that they should provide details, but they are not actually blasting any governments. They are measuring the freedom of the press in a nation--a low rating doesn't necessarily have to do with the government (except to the extent that the government should protect the press, of course). It's simply not a measurement of governments.
I'm tired of hearing people say '5 blades is the physical/mechanical limit'. It's not. Think about increasing density for a second. I can forsee a quantum razor with 2.99 billion blades, built using 45 nm technology that not only removes all traces of hair from your skin, it also removes any hair that is to grow in the next 12 years using time-dependant quantum cutting.
And with the EPR-bridge option you can shave in two locations at once.
Okay, but I'm fairly sure they're not paying $.02 per email. The principle that would make this work is that there is a proportional cost for sending emails. That's when it stops making economic sense.
I don't quite understand. 1 million emails will cost $20,000, so they would have to make +$20,000 for it to make sense to use that marketing channel. It doesn't matter who they pay, the ISP or the computer owner, or if they send all emails from one computer or from several.
The one real problem I can see is using hijacking software to send the emails from other peoples' accounts. But if that meant the computer owner got a bill for $20,000, that would be enough incentive (for both users and ISPs) to find new security solutions in a great hurry.
It shouldn't bankrupt anyone. $0.02 per email (I made a typo in the first post) means you can include 5 or 10 emails in the hourly fee at an Internet café. For normal use, it wouldn't add up to anything significant. (As I said, 50 emails is $1.)
That those things can't be solved off the top of one's head doesn't mean they can't be solved. There are other taxes, such as for air travel, that accumulate across nations and are paid in one place. And there is no better solution, because it exploits the one constant and real difference between spam and other email. Spam is the only email that is sent to 1 million addresses at a time. You could send 50 emails for $1, and that goes a long way to cover the monthly needs of normal people. But 1,000,000 emails costs $20,000. I believe it would kill spam overnight.
I know people are going to love this... but after much thought I really only know one solid way to get rid of spam. That is by changing the system so spamming doesn't make any economic sense. Yes, what we need is a $0.2 tax on each email sent. As soon as bulk emailing has cost/benefit implications, spam is gone. Then, marketing has to work. The tax money could also be used for something good, like infrastructure development and upkeep.
Namely, I believe that intelligence and success should be measured in terms of real, humanistic achievement in the real world, and not by corny metrics that determine whether or not a person should be admitted to a shamelessly self-promotional smarty-pants club.
Hear, hear! Spending ones days at the philosophy department of a university (even as a student) quickly teaches you that intellectual progress is all about actually reading, learning, developing methods, and spending time understanding what others have said and done. Maybe "talent" and "IQ" enters into that somewhere, I don't know, and no one seems to really care, but it's obvious that MENSA is a secret tree house club for people who for some reason don't get proper satisfaction from their real-life accomplishments.
Plain reality is enough. This reminds me of when that group of Christian loons claimed to hear subversive messages in Stairway To Heaven when played backwards. Obviously they never took the time to listen to the lyrics played forwards...
What should scare the shit out of you is that after the 9/11 attacks Bush told the world that they either agree with US international policies in the future or they would be treated as terrorists. (That may mean being "bombed back to the stone age," especially if you are Pakistan.) Then the Bush administration made stuff up each and every day about why Iraq needed to be invaded, and did it in such a lax and transparent manner that it was obvious that they didn't consider it important whether people believed them or not. Try this: Bush is standing on the steps to the UN building in late 2003 with Annan standing right next to him, and Bush says that Saddam Hussein "refused to let the UN weapons inspectors in, and that's why we invaded." The man is, especially with the help of Dick Cheney, capable of lies of any magnitude, and he doesn't give a freck if people believe him. Not important. His power, after all, does not come from consensus, and he doesn't feel like he needs anyone's permission to do anything.
Five years later, Iraq is in flames, Afghanistan is in flames, southern Lebanon is in ashes, and US weapons have in a few years killed tens of times more innocent civilians than all the terrorists in modern history. Bush and the neocons are on a crusade to "fix the world." No amount of havoc, no number of dead women and children can ever convince them that they are wrong, because they don't belong to the "reality-based crowd." They will just keep going, and people will keep burning.
Meanwhile, US citizens approve and disapprove of the president mostly based on the price of gasoline. As always throughout history, burning brown people on the other side of the ocean carry little weight. People are burning, US citizens don't care, and freedum and democracy have been reduced to patriotic flags to wave in feverish support of a leader who couldn't understand less or care less about those concepts. That is what should scare the shit out of you.
That was SO funny! Especially the final shot with the artist doing something close to a Nazi greeting, and then the quick cut to all the Nazi girls hailing. Hahaha! Again for clarification, the song is not about Hitler but about some slimy pickup artist, but every inserted clip of Hitler illustrates a line in the lyrics that could be interpreted that way. Way too funny.
The idea that I can set aside some human need, such as curiosity, for an animal's right to not suffer needlessly is not "self-destructive." I'm not destroyed by putting my curiosity on hold.
Your capacity for non sequiturs is so enormous that your opinions about "reason" and other people's incapacity for it lack all relevance, as far as I can tell. That's not an attack, by the way, it's just an observation of fact.
I don't see how the U.S. declaration of independence has any particular authority with regards to the origin of rights, it too consists of blunt assertions. I'm aware of the philosophical school from which it takes its cue, but it is just one of many such schools, and a rather dated one at that.
So, these are pretty much your choices: either you can demonstrate that rights come from somewhere outside the human social context, or you concede that they are in fact things that we agree on and extend, or you must be subscribing to some theory of knowledge where facts about the world do not need to be discovered or demonstrated, but can simply be intuited a priori by sufficiently "mature" and "deep-thinking" individuals. That last option puts you around 300 B.C., philosophically speaking.
"No. Rights aren't a gift from humans that can be given and taken away based on someone's feelings."
I realize that you think rights are things that come from somewhere else than human minds, but you are not really giving anyone any reason to agree with you. You are just assserting. Even cartoon-like arguments are better than no argument at all, even when combined with a few ad hominem attacks (like "people refuse to grow up"). I'm going to take a wild leap and guess that you're an Ayn Rand fan. Well, Rand and her supporters never have developed a good grasp on the whole argument thing, which is one reason they are not paid much attention to in pilosophy. Hmm...
"Animals can't make such an agreement. They aren't entitled to burden the society to give them the benefits of a pact they can't agree to."
So in essence, they deserve to be punished for their inabilities? As rational beings, humans are free to extend and enforce rights to anyone or anything we very well please, so it seems that's not an argument about either what we could do or what we should do. No argument at all, then.
Slashdot Mirror
The Singularity refers to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence beyond which the future becomes unpredictable.
As opposed to right now, when the future is really predictable...
There is no problem in the world that can't be solved with a sufficient number of bombs, right?
I use an old Amstrad NC100 "notebook computer" from 1992 to write on sometimes. If all you want is to produce text while sitting on the subway, it rules. It starts instantly, you never need to "save" anything (the working memory is the permanent storage memory), and it starts up exactly where you shut it off. You got to love solid state solutions. It stores the text on a battery-powered 1MB PCMCIA. Serial modem is used to transfer files to the PC. Best of all, it runs on 4 AA batteries for 40 hours. :-)
P.S.
Why are there tags like "idiot" and "lame"?? Must Slashdot serve to the flamer community?
It's true, I saw that episode of Powerpuff Girls too.
This has obviously failed to explain anything whatever to you.
* There is not an increasing number of gay men "out there."
* Evolution will not eventually wipe out the species. Evolution selects for reproductive qualities, and can not select against them.
* There is no such thing as "the top of the evolutionary chain." Maybe you're thinking of the food chain. Even if there was such a thing, it would not imply that man "must always exist." That is a nonsense conclusion.
* If "lower animals" "surpassed us" in 1,000 years, it would indeed be a problem for evolutionary theory, but not in any way you are aware of.
Hear hear!
"[B]ecause women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger..." LOL Yes, everyone who is not a suicidal, gun-tooting idiot does that. What a muppet.
MS owns the OS market because it owns the office applications market. It's the exchange of documents that forces corporations and institutions to standardize on MS Windows and MS Office, not the Windows operating system. MS's control of the office applications market depends on that everyone (that matters) uses MS Office. It's a vicious circle. That's why forcing people to pay up or switch may hurt MS, as it may actually create groups of users of alternative software suits large enough to give those solutions momentum and turn them into more valid choices for organizations. It might become so that compatibility with non-MS office software becomes an actual business demand, and then the MS monopoly is fried, as it must mean the end of their user lock-in strategy. MS may not make money from pirate copies of MS Office, but as long as everyone uses it, everyone has to use it, whether everyone pays for it or not.
I agree that they should provide details, but they are not actually blasting any governments. They are measuring the freedom of the press in a nation--a low rating doesn't necessarily have to do with the government (except to the extent that the government should protect the press, of course). It's simply not a measurement of governments.
I'm tired of hearing people say '5 blades is the physical/mechanical limit'. It's not. Think about increasing density for a second. I can forsee a quantum razor with 2.99 billion blades, built using 45 nm technology that not only removes all traces of hair from your skin, it also removes any hair that is to grow in the next 12 years using time-dependant quantum cutting.
And with the EPR-bridge option you can shave in two locations at once.
I guess that by freedom of the press they mean freedom from every sort of threat, not just the government.
You are quite right, except by elaborating on this you have now helped the terrorists. Nice job, you hater.
Okay, but I'm fairly sure they're not paying $.02 per email. The principle that would make this work is that there is a proportional cost for sending emails. That's when it stops making economic sense.
I don't quite understand. 1 million emails will cost $20,000, so they would have to make +$20,000 for it to make sense to use that marketing channel. It doesn't matter who they pay, the ISP or the computer owner, or if they send all emails from one computer or from several.
The one real problem I can see is using hijacking software to send the emails from other peoples' accounts. But if that meant the computer owner got a bill for $20,000, that would be enough incentive (for both users and ISPs) to find new security solutions in a great hurry.
It shouldn't bankrupt anyone. $0.02 per email (I made a typo in the first post) means you can include 5 or 10 emails in the hourly fee at an Internet café. For normal use, it wouldn't add up to anything significant. (As I said, 50 emails is $1.)
That those things can't be solved off the top of one's head doesn't mean they can't be solved. There are other taxes, such as for air travel, that accumulate across nations and are paid in one place. And there is no better solution, because it exploits the one constant and real difference between spam and other email. Spam is the only email that is sent to 1 million addresses at a time. You could send 50 emails for $1, and that goes a long way to cover the monthly needs of normal people. But 1,000,000 emails costs $20,000. I believe it would kill spam overnight.
I meant to say $0.02...
I know people are going to love this... but after much thought I really only know one solid way to get rid of spam. That is by changing the system so spamming doesn't make any economic sense. Yes, what we need is a $0.2 tax on each email sent. As soon as bulk emailing has cost/benefit implications, spam is gone. Then, marketing has to work. The tax money could also be used for something good, like infrastructure development and upkeep.
Namely, I believe that intelligence and success should be measured in terms of real, humanistic achievement in the real world, and not by corny metrics that determine whether or not a person should be admitted to a shamelessly self-promotional smarty-pants club.
Hear, hear! Spending ones days at the philosophy department of a university (even as a student) quickly teaches you that intellectual progress is all about actually reading, learning, developing methods, and spending time understanding what others have said and done. Maybe "talent" and "IQ" enters into that somewhere, I don't know, and no one seems to really care, but it's obvious that MENSA is a secret tree house club for people who for some reason don't get proper satisfaction from their real-life accomplishments.
I'm not a typical Mensan. I don't go to the meetings...
:-)
"Hi. I'm Barry, and I'm a nerd."
Oh, not that kind of meeting?
Plain reality is enough. This reminds me of when that group of Christian loons claimed to hear subversive messages in Stairway To Heaven when played backwards. Obviously they never took the time to listen to the lyrics played forwards...
What should scare the shit out of you is that after the 9/11 attacks Bush told the world that they either agree with US international policies in the future or they would be treated as terrorists. (That may mean being "bombed back to the stone age," especially if you are Pakistan.) Then the Bush administration made stuff up each and every day about why Iraq needed to be invaded, and did it in such a lax and transparent manner that it was obvious that they didn't consider it important whether people believed them or not. Try this: Bush is standing on the steps to the UN building in late 2003 with Annan standing right next to him, and Bush says that Saddam Hussein "refused to let the UN weapons inspectors in, and that's why we invaded." The man is, especially with the help of Dick Cheney, capable of lies of any magnitude, and he doesn't give a freck if people believe him. Not important. His power, after all, does not come from consensus, and he doesn't feel like he needs anyone's permission to do anything.
Five years later, Iraq is in flames, Afghanistan is in flames, southern Lebanon is in ashes, and US weapons have in a few years killed tens of times more innocent civilians than all the terrorists in modern history. Bush and the neocons are on a crusade to "fix the world." No amount of havoc, no number of dead women and children can ever convince them that they are wrong, because they don't belong to the "reality-based crowd." They will just keep going, and people will keep burning.
Meanwhile, US citizens approve and disapprove of the president mostly based on the price of gasoline. As always throughout history, burning brown people on the other side of the ocean carry little weight. People are burning, US citizens don't care, and freedum and democracy have been reduced to patriotic flags to wave in feverish support of a leader who couldn't understand less or care less about those concepts. That is what should scare the shit out of you.
That was SO funny! Especially the final shot with the artist doing something close to a Nazi greeting, and then the quick cut to all the Nazi girls hailing. Hahaha!
Again for clarification, the song is not about Hitler but about some slimy pickup artist, but every inserted clip of Hitler illustrates a line in the lyrics that could be interpreted that way. Way too funny.
The idea that I can set aside some human need, such as curiosity, for an animal's right to not suffer needlessly is not "self-destructive." I'm not destroyed by putting my curiosity on hold.
Your capacity for non sequiturs is so enormous that your opinions about "reason" and other people's incapacity for it lack all relevance, as far as I can tell. That's not an attack, by the way, it's just an observation of fact.
I don't see how the U.S. declaration of independence has any particular authority with regards to the origin of rights, it too consists of blunt assertions. I'm aware of the philosophical school from which it takes its cue, but it is just one of many such schools, and a rather dated one at that.
So, these are pretty much your choices: either you can demonstrate that rights come from somewhere outside the human social context, or you concede that they are in fact things that we agree on and extend, or you must be subscribing to some theory of knowledge where facts about the world do not need to be discovered or demonstrated, but can simply be intuited a priori by sufficiently "mature" and "deep-thinking" individuals. That last option puts you around 300 B.C., philosophically speaking.
"No. Rights aren't a gift from humans that can be given and taken away based on someone's feelings."
I realize that you think rights are things that come from somewhere else than human minds, but you are not really giving anyone any reason to agree with you. You are just assserting. Even cartoon-like arguments are better than no argument at all, even when combined with a few ad hominem attacks (like "people refuse to grow up"). I'm going to take a wild leap and guess that you're an Ayn Rand fan. Well, Rand and her supporters never have developed a good grasp on the whole argument thing, which is one reason they are not paid much attention to in pilosophy.
Hmm...
"Animals can't make such an agreement. They aren't entitled to burden the society to give them the benefits of a pact they can't agree to."
So in essence, they deserve to be punished for their inabilities?
As rational beings, humans are free to extend and enforce rights to anyone or anything we very well please, so it seems that's not an argument about either what we could do or what we should do. No argument at all, then.