The argument is not that CO2 is causing global warming, it's that the increase in the amount of CO2 in the air is driving global warming. Yes, water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, but the amount of water vapor in the air hasn't been steadily increasing over the past hundred years, while the amount of CO2 in the air has been. I suppose it's possible that a mass conversion from hydrocarbon fuel to hydrogen which emits water vapor as waste could end up being just as bad for the global climate as the CO2 it replaces, but I don't know of any studies that have been undertaken in that regard.
Ah, hell. I didn't even notice that, and I'm one of the biggest they're/there/their Nazis I know. I'm going to go shoot myself now. Please don't donate my organs to any SCO executives.
They're business plan isn't ONLY suing IBM. From what I can gather from the article, it's a brilliant and guaranteed to succeed three-pronged approach involving suing IBM, suing Novell, and selling a product no one has used for 15 years. They can't lose!
Doh, you're right. For some reason I made the erroneous connection in my mind that ISP == common carrier, which of course is not right. Guess I should stop sniffing all that glue.
I think you are, but I'm sure the telcos will have the laws changed to suit them. In my mind, once you start paying attention to the content going over the line in ANY way, you lose your common carrier status and all of the immunities that go with it. Of course, I'm not a billion dollar corporation with lots of powerful lobbyists in Washington, so my opinion on the matter doesn't mean anything.
Personally, I can deal with spam a lot easier than I can deal with junk mail, telemarketers, or door to door salesmen.
As for eventually getting the spam problem licked, I doubt we'll ever be able to get rid of it completely. Right now, for most people it's basically reduced to the status of background noise, and I'm fine with it being there. My bulk mail folder gets hundreds of messages a day, but I only see 2 or 3 a day in my main Inbox, and that's on a Yahoo account that I've had for like 9 or 10 years and used on countless websites. If I could eliminate telemarketers and especially door to door salesmen in exchange for double the amount of email spam, I'd take that deal in a heartbeat.
Because, there is a government agency called the WCGI (Wicked Cool Gadgets Initiative) which is responsible for developing kickass technology for the military. The charter of this agency is simply to "develop the most awesome, wicked cool gadgets possible". If they can come up with something that sounds really sweet, they'll put money into developing it regardless of whether or not anyone needs it. If the tech is cool enough, the military will find some way to use it.
Sure, it means that competition is present at the moment, but it also means they're attempting to eliminate the competition. A larger company will sell below cost because they know a smaller company will go bankrupt trying to compete on price well before they will. If this sort of thing goes unchecked, the larger company will jack up its prices after the competition is eliminated, and the end result will be no choice and high prices for consumers.
I see, it seems like you may have had one of the rare good juries (although I hope they aren't as rare as they seem sometimes). My one and only experience on a jury was a civil trial where the plaintiff was awarded damages almost entirely because a.) she cried on the stand (seemed to be obviously crocodile tears to me, but apparently others felt otherwise) and b.) it was getting late and nobody wanted to come back the next day. In my opinion, her case had absolutely no merit, but there was more discussion about what the court would bring in for dinner than there was about the actual merits of the case. The whole experience was pretty disparaging. In hindsight, I should have been more forceful about my own thoughts on the matter, but I was very young and did not possess a nearly strong enough personality to be heard over the "leaders" in the room.
Sure, it may not be easy to convict without ANY evidence, but as you yourself point out, it's not hard to come up with enough evidence to convict when the jury, in your words, is reviewing "everything to see if we could find -any- reason to find him guilty."
The jury is supposed to convict only if they are sure of guilt *beyond a reasonable doubt*. However, most people tend to think that if someone was indicted for a crime, they must be guilty, so we should just look for any reasonable evidence to hang them with rather than trying to find cause for reasonable doubt. The very idea that "Everything screamed 'guilty' except the lack of -any- evidence" suggests that you and the rest of the jury were itching to find this guy guilty for whatever reason (he looked like a scumbag? You assume people must be guilty or they wouldn't be on trial?). In your particular case, the guy was lucky that the prosecution had nothing going for them, but there have been plenty of other cases where people are convicted on very thin circumstantial evidence just because the jury was trying to "find -any- reason to find him guilty."
I really don't think you should be talking about Bruce Schneier like that when you clearly know nothing about the man. For example, did you know that Bruce Schneier once decrypted a box of Alpha Bits? Or that he knows the state of Schroedinger's cat? It's true!
Does anyone have a link to some resources on how one might build one's own processor? How much does it cost to do that sort of thing? Well, it depends on how fast you want it to be. For my home computer, I used the instructions here. It's a little slow for less advanced users, but I find I can surf the web at a pretty good clip once I get going. Of course, splinters can be a problem.
I think it's very likely that they're at least mostly fanatics. Much of the Islamic world is mired in poverty, violence and oppression these days, all of which provide fertile breeding grounds for extremism.
You're painting both Christians and Muslims with a very broad brush. Moderate Muslims have no particular objection to these images. It's the crazy fundamentalist Muslims that kill people over stuff like this and try to get laws passed requiring women to wear burquas all the time, just like it's the crazy fundamentalist Christians that bomb abortion clinics and try to force school boards to include religious indoctrination into the curriculum.
Every religion has its crazy wing, and every religion inspires certain people to be violent. The only difference these days is that the crazy wing of Islam is very well funded and better organized than the crazy wing of Christianity. In times past (Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, etc) that situation was reversed.
I scrupulously avoid knowing anyone's password. If they try to give it to me, I attempt to stop them from doing so before they can. Basically, if someone gives you their password, and something later happens to their account, you automatically become a suspect. If someone does give me their password, I'll often have them change it right then, as in I'll bring up the change password dialog of whatever program it is, and then turn my back while they type in a new password. That way, not only do I not know their password, but they know that I don't know it, and hopefully they get a better sense that passwords shouldn't be shared.
Of course, then I see the same person with their password on a Post-It on their monitor, and all hope of them ever learning the lesson is dashed.
I care. These days, a consumer can reasonably have a terabyte of storage on his PC. With that kind of storage, I should be able to have hundreds of games sitting on my hard drive waiting to be played on demand. However, because of this stupid "CD required" garbage, I have to maintain a stack of CDs that have no purpose other than to verify I actually bought the game (never mind that in most cases, I also have to enter a license key during the install phase anyway).
Requiring a CD may not be a big deal if you only ever play one or two games, but if you're like me and have a varied taste in games, and may play even 5 or 10 different games in a week, having to switch around CDs is a major pain.
Your analysis of the true state of the Internet in Iran is not only accurate, but also dooms my own shorter analysis down the page to a -1, Redundant, so thanks for that.
Anyway, I agree with you that saying this is a government conspiracy is silly. I think we all know what's really going on here: the dolphins are chewing through the cables in order to take down our communications in advance of their planned invasion to take back the land. We'll all be living in the ocean within the week.
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It's actually very similar to ours, except the planets are all out of order and all the people there have, for some unknown reason, goatees.
The argument is not that CO2 is causing global warming, it's that the increase in the amount of CO2 in the air is driving global warming. Yes, water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, but the amount of water vapor in the air hasn't been steadily increasing over the past hundred years, while the amount of CO2 in the air has been. I suppose it's possible that a mass conversion from hydrocarbon fuel to hydrogen which emits water vapor as waste could end up being just as bad for the global climate as the CO2 it replaces, but I don't know of any studies that have been undertaken in that regard.
Ah, hell. I didn't even notice that, and I'm one of the biggest they're/there/their Nazis I know. I'm going to go shoot myself now. Please don't donate my organs to any SCO executives.
They're business plan isn't ONLY suing IBM. From what I can gather from the article, it's a brilliant and guaranteed to succeed three-pronged approach involving suing IBM, suing Novell, and selling a product no one has used for 15 years. They can't lose!
Actually, my plumber makes me pay him a royalty every time water flows through a pipe that he installed. He said it was standard in the industry.
Doh, you're right. For some reason I made the erroneous connection in my mind that ISP == common carrier, which of course is not right. Guess I should stop sniffing all that glue.
I think you are, but I'm sure the telcos will have the laws changed to suit them. In my mind, once you start paying attention to the content going over the line in ANY way, you lose your common carrier status and all of the immunities that go with it. Of course, I'm not a billion dollar corporation with lots of powerful lobbyists in Washington, so my opinion on the matter doesn't mean anything.
Personally, I can deal with spam a lot easier than I can deal with junk mail, telemarketers, or door to door salesmen.
As for eventually getting the spam problem licked, I doubt we'll ever be able to get rid of it completely. Right now, for most people it's basically reduced to the status of background noise, and I'm fine with it being there. My bulk mail folder gets hundreds of messages a day, but I only see 2 or 3 a day in my main Inbox, and that's on a Yahoo account that I've had for like 9 or 10 years and used on countless websites. If I could eliminate telemarketers and especially door to door salesmen in exchange for double the amount of email spam, I'd take that deal in a heartbeat.
I demand federal funding to study this issue! Heck, screw the federal funding, I'll run the study for free.
Because, there is a government agency called the WCGI (Wicked Cool Gadgets Initiative) which is responsible for developing kickass technology for the military. The charter of this agency is simply to "develop the most awesome, wicked cool gadgets possible". If they can come up with something that sounds really sweet, they'll put money into developing it regardless of whether or not anyone needs it. If the tech is cool enough, the military will find some way to use it.
Sure, it means that competition is present at the moment, but it also means they're attempting to eliminate the competition. A larger company will sell below cost because they know a smaller company will go bankrupt trying to compete on price well before they will. If this sort of thing goes unchecked, the larger company will jack up its prices after the competition is eliminated, and the end result will be no choice and high prices for consumers.
Don't be absurd, your wife hasn't given up sex. ...oh, you mean with YOU.
Are you trying to suggest that different sites on the Internet may cover the same stories? Madness, I say!
I see, it seems like you may have had one of the rare good juries (although I hope they aren't as rare as they seem sometimes). My one and only experience on a jury was a civil trial where the plaintiff was awarded damages almost entirely because a.) she cried on the stand (seemed to be obviously crocodile tears to me, but apparently others felt otherwise) and b.) it was getting late and nobody wanted to come back the next day. In my opinion, her case had absolutely no merit, but there was more discussion about what the court would bring in for dinner than there was about the actual merits of the case. The whole experience was pretty disparaging. In hindsight, I should have been more forceful about my own thoughts on the matter, but I was very young and did not possess a nearly strong enough personality to be heard over the "leaders" in the room.
Sure, it may not be easy to convict without ANY evidence, but as you yourself point out, it's not hard to come up with enough evidence to convict when the jury, in your words, is reviewing "everything to see if we could find -any- reason to find him guilty."
The jury is supposed to convict only if they are sure of guilt *beyond a reasonable doubt*. However, most people tend to think that if someone was indicted for a crime, they must be guilty, so we should just look for any reasonable evidence to hang them with rather than trying to find cause for reasonable doubt. The very idea that "Everything screamed 'guilty' except the lack of -any- evidence" suggests that you and the rest of the jury were itching to find this guy guilty for whatever reason (he looked like a scumbag? You assume people must be guilty or they wouldn't be on trial?). In your particular case, the guy was lucky that the prosecution had nothing going for them, but there have been plenty of other cases where people are convicted on very thin circumstantial evidence just because the jury was trying to "find -any- reason to find him guilty."
More accurately the "Open Source Initiative", which is the effort to water down the Free Software philosophy until it appeals to business types.
Possibly, but Letterman has writers, so he didn't need to get involved in the fight.
I really don't think you should be talking about Bruce Schneier like that when you clearly know nothing about the man. For example, did you know that Bruce Schneier once decrypted a box of Alpha Bits? Or that he knows the state of Schroedinger's cat? It's true!
I think it's very likely that they're at least mostly fanatics. Much of the Islamic world is mired in poverty, violence and oppression these days, all of which provide fertile breeding grounds for extremism.
You're painting both Christians and Muslims with a very broad brush. Moderate Muslims have no particular objection to these images. It's the crazy fundamentalist Muslims that kill people over stuff like this and try to get laws passed requiring women to wear burquas all the time, just like it's the crazy fundamentalist Christians that bomb abortion clinics and try to force school boards to include religious indoctrination into the curriculum.
Every religion has its crazy wing, and every religion inspires certain people to be violent. The only difference these days is that the crazy wing of Islam is very well funded and better organized than the crazy wing of Christianity. In times past (Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, etc) that situation was reversed.
I scrupulously avoid knowing anyone's password. If they try to give it to me, I attempt to stop them from doing so before they can. Basically, if someone gives you their password, and something later happens to their account, you automatically become a suspect. If someone does give me their password, I'll often have them change it right then, as in I'll bring up the change password dialog of whatever program it is, and then turn my back while they type in a new password. That way, not only do I not know their password, but they know that I don't know it, and hopefully they get a better sense that passwords shouldn't be shared.
Of course, then I see the same person with their password on a Post-It on their monitor, and all hope of them ever learning the lesson is dashed.
I care. These days, a consumer can reasonably have a terabyte of storage on his PC. With that kind of storage, I should be able to have hundreds of games sitting on my hard drive waiting to be played on demand. However, because of this stupid "CD required" garbage, I have to maintain a stack of CDs that have no purpose other than to verify I actually bought the game (never mind that in most cases, I also have to enter a license key during the install phase anyway).
Requiring a CD may not be a big deal if you only ever play one or two games, but if you're like me and have a varied taste in games, and may play even 5 or 10 different games in a week, having to switch around CDs is a major pain.
Your analysis of the true state of the Internet in Iran is not only accurate, but also dooms my own shorter analysis down the page to a -1, Redundant, so thanks for that.
Anyway, I agree with you that saying this is a government conspiracy is silly. I think we all know what's really going on here: the dolphins are chewing through the cables in order to take down our communications in advance of their planned invasion to take back the land. We'll all be living in the ocean within the week.