Re:Not such a good book.
on
F'd Companies
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· Score: 1
Somebody explain to me why salon is still around.
Nice attitude you have.
I sent them $50 for a 2-year Premium subscription sometime in 2001. Maybe that has a little to do with it. Even if they fold tomorrow, I still think I got my money's worth. I view them as a sort of charity.
People have some weird attitudes about Salon. I've seen many people cheering for its destruction, who obviously disagree with it politically, but their major argument against it seems to be that Salon isn't profitable. It's one thing to say that about Salon as a corporate entity, but another as a source of news. Not all of us are stockholders- most of us are members of the general public. Salon is one of the few remaining holdouts in the otherwise corporatized U.S. media. And at least they're shelling out money to produce actual content- it's not like they're a worthless dotcom that was surprised to find that people didn't want to buy 20 lb bags of kitty litter online.
Everyone knows Salon is a little pink, and it does print some stupid crap sometimes, but it does cover a lot of topics that otherwise don't receive any attention from the rest of the U.S. media- DMCA/copyright, the erosion of civil liberties, software patents, globalization, deCSS and freedom of speech, webcasting, etc. etc. A lot of their articles appear here on Slashdot. It will be sad when I have to go to foreign sites to get news about crap that's happening here. When the press is reduced to nothing but corporate whores, you'll be sorry.
I do remember when this review came out back in April though, and naturally there was a quick reaction on fuckedcompany. I don't know if Salon was mentioned in the book itself- Pud didn't mention it so I don't think it was. If you dig through you'll find that the Salon review author (Damien Cave) is one of the posters in that thread.
I am shocked... SHOCKED... to hear that Hollywood movies are not presenting sound legal advice in matters of criminal law! I have a mental image of this guy protesting on his way back to death row. "But... Tommy Lee Jones said I'd be OK!"
The original 2000 conviction and death sentence were overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court when the justices ruled that the older girl's murder and her sister's rape were not parts of the same crime. Under Virginia law, that is a necessary element for capital punishment. The murder has to be "aggravated" by some other crime, like a rape or a robbery, in order to become a capital murder.
According to the authorities, his motive was the fact that the murder victim had been dating a black guy. (To get a feel for the type of genius we're talking about.) In the letter, he explained how he stabbed and killed the older girl after she resisted his attempts to rape her. Then he drank an iced tea, sat down on the couch, and smoked a cigarette, while he waited for her younger sister to come home from school so he could rape her.
In the earlier trial there had apparently been no physical evidence of any attempted rape of the older girl, and she was dead and not talking. So the capital murder conviction was predicated on the younger girl's rape being part of the same crime. By declaring them as being two separate crimes, the court had decoupled them, rendering the capital murder conviction invalid. But the letter blew this logic out of the water, by establishing that there had been an attempted rape of the older girl (a crime for which the defendant had not been tried) and by providing continuity between the crimes inflicted on each of the two sisters. Since there had never been an acquittal, only an overturned conviction, the prosecution was free to try the case again in light of the new evidence.
What's interesting is the intense personal relationship that seems to have developed on both sides between this guy and the prosecutor. This is what apparently incited the stupid letter in the first place.
"Since... the Va. Supreme Court said that I can't be charged with capital murder again, I figured I would tell you the rest of what happened on Jan. 29, 1999 to show you how stupid all of y'all... are.....I can't believe that y'all thought I told you everything. Well it's too late now, nothing you can do about it now... Do you just hate yourself for being so stupid and for [messing] up and saving me?"
One would think that a century after Special Relativity folks would finally have wrapped their brains around the concept of relative. I guess not. Nothing is a good insulator or bad insulator. Things are only good and bad insulators relative to other substances. This is a tautology. It is not open to discussion.
Lightning is a ridiculous example because it has enough energy to induce chemical transitions in materials. Normal air has extremely low conductivity until you ionize it and turn it into ionized air, which is a completely different substance with different electrical properties. You are comparing apples to oranges.
If you are under 17 years old, kindly keep your ignorant high school opinions to yourselves.
Not everyone here is 17. I'm 32 years old and I majored in physics and physical chemistry in college. Although I've certainly met 17 year olds who have given me things to think about.
As for the moron who moderated me as a troll, FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE. If you disagree with me, say so. Don't moderate me to troll because your vocabulary isn't sufficient to make a comprehensible point.
I try to never respond to unfair moderations of my own posts, unless I catch them in the act of replying. Otherwise you sound like a crazy person talking to people who aren't there.:) This thread is what, five or six days old already? You and I are the only ones still here.
Agreed. I was starting a post about freedom of speech, how the website operator should handle things differently, etc. etc. (There have been the usual misconceptions about freedom of speech in this discussion, e.g. how you only have it if you're standing on your own property and other such nonsense.) But then I decided to read the article first before posting, and so narrowly missed making a fool of myself and endangering my precious, precious karma.
The guy's behavior in this case has been so ridiculous as to completely transcend the First Amendment issue. It's really akin to a manually executed denial of service attack on the website. It fits the definition even better than spam, because at least spammers don't carry out their activities with the destruction of the Internet as their primary goal (they don't seem to care about this at all). This person wasn't posting anonymously- he was constantly creating new accounts with fake names. He was clicking through the terms-of-use agreements where you promise to behave yourself. Once inside he was ganging up on people and driving them away, with the clear goal of destroying the forum.
This is particularly disturbing because of the implications for click-through agreements. The courts have never addressed the enforceability of these things. This is a good thing because most of them are so completely draconian and ridiculous, but also a bad thing because the courts might make the decision one day that they are. In this case, the website operator has few other legal instruments at his disposal. So this is not so much a freedom of speech issue. It's a case of some asshole causing so much trouble that a court ends up affirming the enforceability of the click-through agreement. Once this happens we are all screwed. It's the tragedy of the commons once again.
It is not a denial of service. You (as the client) ask for a file. They (as a peer) give you a file. The file is crap. Is that a denial of service?
YES. That is what a denial of service attack is composed of- thousands and thousands of normal interactions that are not programatically distinguishable from legitimate traffic, with the goal of draining resources such as memory or bandwidth.
A DDoS zombie asks Yahoo for a URL. Yahoo (as a web server) serves the document back to the DDoS zombie. The HTTP interaction itself obeys all the rules and is perfectly legitimate when viewed alone. Is that a denial of service? Of course. It's one of millions of similar requests being deliberately sent in great numbers so that Yahoo's server can't find the legitimate requests in the flood and allocate resources to them preferentially.
The mere fact that a bill is in Congress to legalize this behavior strongly implies that it is not legal now.
My problem with evolution being taught as fact is our lack of evidence that micro-evolutionary changes can be extended right back to a single celled common ancestor. The two biggest evidences we have for this are a spotty fossil record and the relative similarity between DNA from different animals.
Well, the fossil record does tell us that for the first 2/3 of life's existence on earth, all life consisted of bacteria. Conjecturing a single-celled common ancestor is not too much of a stretch. And the molecular evidence is pretty compelling. A competing theory (two single celled common ancestors? Three?) will have a lot of explaining to do.
To claim that our current theory is strong enough to be promoted to fact is premature.
Only for a ridiculous standard for "factness". There always exists a standard of truth against which any fact is not known for certain.
Our evidence that micro-evolution is extendable indefinitely really consists of evidences that 'look like it's what happened'.
Yep, that's how life works. Scientific truths aren't brought down on stone tablets from a mountain; you have to work with the evidence available.
Transitionary fossils are assumed to exist
And every time a fossil is discovered, the number of gaps in the fossil record increases by one, to the delight of the foes of evolution. There are now thousands and thousands of (ever tinier) gaps they can talk about in their pamphlets. If you propose that no transitionary forms ever existed in these gaps, you have to explain why not, since that's the most logical conclusion.
a mutation path from all animals back to a common ancestor is assumed to exist, a process by which a single celled creature with DNA came into being is assumed to exist, a process by which a single celled creature with DNA came into being is assumed to exist. We have lots of secondary evidences that we can point to and say, well these make it look like the above are good assumptions.
Yep. We have no direct evidence of abiogenesis, apart from limited success in reproducing chemical reactions in the lab. But we wouldn't expect to get direct evidence of abiogenesis because it leaves no fossil evidence.
But I don't think it is a far stretch to continue to teach our current interpretation of the evidence as theory and not as fact. It is still possible that an alternate theory will fit the evidence better, and people taught as students that our current view is fact will have trouble finding it.
People not taught our current view as students will probably have more trouble with this superior alternative theory, should it ever come out. I'd be willing to bet that it will more resemble evolution than any "competing theory" that the "theory, not fact" crowd like to talk about, like intelligent design. In fact, ID undermines one's ability to understand natural selection, because it teaches you to think in the wrong way. You end up viewing evolution as a weird variant of ID where each individual species is anthropomorphized and planning career decisions for itself over millions of years. People taught ID always ask stupid questions like "how does the tree know it should make fruit?", as if evolution supposes that species make intelligent decisions about how they will evolve.
If you're going to single out evolution as "theory, not fact" you should do it with the other sciences as well.
I'm NOT suggesting creation as this theory, there can very easily be a number of other unthought of explanations that could be missed be people assuming these don't exist.
Usually, when a discussion about the Big Bang turns into one about evolution, it means a creationist is around.
hey now, you can't just go about saying "relativity is wrong," not yet anyway. It has obstinately stood up to every test that scientists have yet devised to test it, thats why it's still around. Relativity still makes the best predictions about the things that it was intended to.
But General Relativity is a classical theory, and is incompatible with quantum theory. They both can't be right. You're correct that it's stood up to every test, because it appears to be correct as a classical theory. The experiments required to develop its quantum version are hard to do, so basically we're clueless and coming up with all sorts of weird stuff.
Can anyone tell my why there has to be numerous random-bit passes when one could do something like this: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 What's wrong with just zeroing out the drive once?
Say the child porn file has a one bit and a zero bit. You overwrite it with two zero bits. The magnetic domains where the one bit was are presumably weaker or smaller because they were flipped, not reinforced like the zero bit domains. Of course the drive's read head itself won't be useful for extracting this information, because it's only designed to determine the last bit written by the write head- a binary zero/one determination. But with special equipment you can measure domain strengths carefully, and pull more information than a single bit out of them. You can tell which domains were flipped by the zero-out process and which were reinforced. (Of course this is a simplification because each bit is composed of multiple domains.)
So there are a few trivially obvious considerations when writing an erasing program-
-Don't write zeroes, write ones and zeroes. -Go in more than one pass. A single pass leaves the bits in 4 possible states- (0,0), (0,1), (1,0), and (1,1) (where (c,r) are the child-porn and random-overwrite bits, respectively). An attacker can in theory tell all four states apart by close physical examination, so he knows c. Two passes (c,r1,r2) leaves 8 possible states- (0,0,0), (0,0,1), (0,1,0), (0,1,1), (1,0,0), (1,0,1), (1,1,0), and (1,1,1). Now the attacker's equipment needs more than twice as much precision, because some of them, like (0,0,1) and (1,0,1), are starting to look physically similar. 10 passes leaves 1024 possible domain states, many of which are indistinguishable. -Writing zeroes over the file ten times is much better than writing zeroes over it once, but still leaves it in one of only four possible states. (Which are admittedly harder to tell apart, but you never know.) -Do not allow the content of the file you're erasing to influence your decision of what bits to overwrite it with. You avoid a whole class of problems this way. -Be aware that when you are writing random numbers, you are actually encrypting, not erasing, the file. The seed you used for your random number generator becomes a key for decrypting the file (given special equipment). -You want to prevent the attacker from knowing what bits you wrote and in what order you wrote them. You will favor erasure over encryption if you can continually introduce entropy into the process. But entropy is scarce in most software environments. The variations in the timings of the drive's mechanical movements, ping responses from remote servers, mouse movements, and keypresses are well-known sources. -Don't use a lousy random number generator. There are many ways for a random number generator to be bad. The simplest type produces numbers where n-tuples fall on a regular lattice when plotted in n dimensions. Generators like that are used a lot in scientific and graphics applications, but have no business being in security applications. If an attacker gains access to a few of the numbers in the generator's sequence, he can predict the rest of the sequence. They also loop after generating 2^N numbers. -If applying this process to a single file, hide the size of the file. -Ideally you should hide all traces of the file's existence. This means clean up after yourself by writing zeroes in the last several passes, so that even the domain randomness is physically removed (its presence implies that something was erased).
This guy is very confused, but his post is not flamebait. Moderators shouldn't moderate people down just for being creationists. It denies the rest of us the opportunity to see them get a good bitch slapping by a biologist who's got his threshold set to +2.
The purpose of science class is not to dispense Ultimate Truth. It is to teach the scientific method, and make students familiar with the body of scientific knowledge as currently understood by mainstream science. Our current theories of gravity are wrong. And we know they're wrong. Does this mean that students shouldn't be taught about gravity? We teach kids Newton's Law of Gravitation and we know for a fact that it's wrong. High schools teach kids the Bohr model of the atom, which is also known to be wrong. I never hear creationists complain about either- probably because Genesis is silent on the subject.
We don't have a satisfactory theory of gravity. That things fall is fact and should be taught as fact. We may not have a complete theory of evolution. This is mostly due to spotty evidence, which is par for the course (fossils are rare). But unlike gravity, our theories of biological evolution are consistent with all of the evidence we've managed to find. That evolution occurs in some form cannot be denied with a straight face, and it should be taught as fact just like anything else is, once our certainty has risen above a certain threshold that is close to 100%. We don't have a continuous surveillance videotape of every biological event that has occurred in the past 12 billion years, but this is a ridiculous thing to ask for.
Maybe the facts we teach might someday turn out to be wrong as new evidence is uncovered. So what? This has never bothered us before in any other scientific field. The secular world makes no claims of infalliblity. Ultimate Truth is not always attainable by humans, and to insist that everything taught in science must be verified to be absolute fact before it can be taught in the classroom is nonsensical. A silly policy like that would put an end to technological and scientific progress within a generation.
Three posts in this thread get moderated as "trolls" for what are obviously political reasons, then two minutes later you post as an AC with a nasty incoherent response.
Hope you enjoyed the last mod points you'll ever get.
Trees are unstable carbon sinks. They eventually fall over and rot, or they burn, and the CO2 is back in the air. The only way to sequester carbon for good is to make coal out of it and bury it.
The standard of recognition still works well enough for submission to a database by an individual researcher, which is all that's really needed. They don't say whether it's going to be curated or not, but if it works like other bioinformatic databases, any individual researcher can upload species data into it after creating an account. Of course there may be some ambiguity about whether a given species is in fact a species deserving a separate database entry in this thing. The working standard they will likely use is, if someone uploads the data and makes an entry for it, it's a species. This will be replaced by another standard- a species is something that has a database entry.
And this will be fine. The people studying oysters (all 6 of them) will have one idea of what a species is, and it will probably differ from the one used by people studying protozoans. So there is ambiguity in the species definition as you go through the database, but biology is full of variation and ambiguity anyway. If ease of classification were a selective pressure on evolution, you would imagine the world would look a lot different.
Species ambiguity is the least of the problems this thing will have. If it turns out like other such projects, with hundreds of contributors from labs all around the world, it will look like an open sewer before long, with redundant entries, overloaded names, overloaded accession numbers, etc. If it's uncurated, writing a program to query it practically becomes an AI project. The ambiguity of species definition isn't an issue when the globally unique identifiers you're using turn out to be ambiguous as well. Biologists aren't very good at populating databases.
Just looking at the physical connectors and sockets, you can tell Firewire is more intelligently designed than USB. I always get the plug orientation wrong when connecting a USB cable.
I had four USB devices (a camera, a TV tuner, an external drive, and a mouse) that worked with 98. Not with XP. The camera is too old (1999) and Logitech isn't writing XP drivers for it. The Hauppauge TV tuner only has a buggy XP driver available that doesn't work. The external drive is plug and play, but XP is confused by it and reports "errors installing your new hardware" (although it does work on another XP system that I tested). But the Microsoft mouse does work with XP! So that's a 75% fatality rate for an OS upgrade. Not bad.
Not going to happen. They would first have to come up with an adequate universal definition of a species, and they haven't done that in the last 150 years (Darwin addressed this issue).
The lack of a definition for "species" is a problem for humans who like definitions, not for nature, which doesn't care if things become hard to define. Some things, like pornography and race, are just not easily definable. Usually people use the standard of recognition (i.e. "I know it when I see it") which works well enough for most purposes.
Say what? Air is an electrical insulator, and only to relatively low voltages. Vide, e.g., lightning. It is most assuredly not a thermal insulator.
Most electrical insulators are also thermal insulators and vice versa. Most thermal conductors are also electrical conductors and vice versa. Air is an excellent thermal insulator which is why a sweater makes you feel warmer.
Air's dielectric strength is pretty high, something like 300kV/m. Lightning is a ridiculous example.
Put your hand near a cold window in Winter and see how much insulation you get.
Then put your hand on the metal window frame. Feels much colder than the air, doesn't it?
Readers of alt.best.of.internet have been dismayed to learn that America Online has (accidentally) designated a.b.o.i as the first stop for all AOL newbies, as they approach netnews for the first time...
The way it's happened is that AOL has pre-subscribed each user to a dozen select netnews groups, presenting them *alphabetically*, with aboi at the top!
So aboi, which has never worked very well as a best-of group, is now chest-deep in messages like "Does anyone know Donelle in Syracuse?" and "Hey, your elbow is in my eye!" (etc etc etc etc etc;^)
Another serious contributor to the problem may be that they're sorting *threads* alphabetically, too, and they apparently have quite a lengthy spool, so *ancient* threads, that were stupid and pointless and unending the first time around, are sprouting back up like medusa's tentacles...
If this is the way it's gonna stay, we may as well evacuate the group, and turn it into an auxilliary newusers.q's, because the tide isn't likely to let up for months.
If we could talk to the responsible parties over there, though, we could probably suggest some other helpful things-- like a pre-post warning:
"Your posting to netnews may tax the attention of hundreds of thousands of busy people. Have you made it worth their whiles, or should you maybe email it as a reply, rather than posting it as a followup? [rfq]"
jes' speckalatin'...
jorn ;^/
Ultimately USENET surived the 600,000 AOL newbies, although the spammers (many of whom also arrived in the AOL tsunami) proved successful in turning it into a wasteland. See here for more details on the ill-orchestrated collision between AOL and USENET.
If it were, they could keep their mouths shut and simply pay an individual to speak on their behalf.
Actually this is a dumb argument I made, and someone will point it out if I don't- companies pay commercial actors all the time and the restrictions on commercial speech remain in force on them as well since they are speaking on the company's behalf.
This is not done as much in the case of political speech. Astroturfing is done by Microsoft all the time, but that's not done for legal reasons, only to fool the public.
I have a little Shuttle SS40G and it came with a good cooling system (nothing even gets very warm) but the FANS ARE LOUD. You do hear them in the next room. A big case doesn't necessarily mean louder fans- in fact you would expect the opposite because now there is more heat in less space.
Something happened to it the other night, right in the middle of reading Slashdot- the video signal suddenly went away and it doesn't reboot anymore. No BIOS screen, nothing. The only things that work anymore are the NumLock light on the keyboard and the noisy fans. Except for one restart attempt when it worked normally for 30 seconds and died again.:( It's only 4 months old, so I'm waiting for a response from Shuttle.
Yes, exactly. You would be saying that Nike is only capable of commercial speech because its "only purpose" is to make a profit. And you would be wrong.
What is commercial speech is determined by the speech, not the speaker. The fact that the speaker is corporate may be legally relevant in the world of your imagination, but it has never been so in this one. If it were, they could keep their mouths shut and simply pay an individual to speak on their behalf.
If Nike lobbies Congress for more globalization and fewer restrictions on free trade, or advocates dumping napalm on the rain forests in South America to make more room for its sweatshops, this is political speech. Its talk about how great its shoes are and why you should buy them is commercial speech.
Suppose a bill were introduced in Congress that would prohibit the use and/or sale of any software not licensed under the GPL. Are you saying that Microsoft's protests would be subject to the restrictions that are applied to commercial speech? "This will put us out of business! (Disclaimer: the above opinion is that of Microsoft Corporation and its veracity has not been proven, etc.)"
This is insightful? Jesus, read the fucking constitution sometime.
"Congress shall make no law..." Does NOT Distinguish between corporations and people.
People here are confusing the two issues (corporations/persons vs. commercial/protected speech). This really has nothing to do with the fact that Nike is a corporation. The same rules apply to an individual selling shoes at a street corner.
The confusion here partially results from the fact that Nike is the most evil of evil corporations, run by penny pinching demons from the underworld that take delight in human misery and suffering. (See? I just made a statement of fact that is most likely incorrect in certain details, but I can do so because it is an example of political speech.) Nike might respond with an assertion that no, Nike was founded by angels descended from heaven who dreamed of bringing exciting new careers to the Third World while putting quality footwear on the tired feet of American consumers everywhere. This would also be a misleading statement, containing factual errors. But would its response be political speech or commercial speech? It's a retort to a political attack I made earlier, so you'd say it's political speech. If anything Nike says could be considered political speech, it is this. However, Nike also has an obvious interest in selling its shoes, and its response will further that interest. So maybe this is commercial speech, right? The court actually bought into that argument. However, the nature of the speech is the real issue, not the nature of the speaker. If you agree with the court that this is commercial speech, you are implicitly saying that Nike is only capable of commercial speech because it makes a profit. The same rules will then apply to the guy selling shoes on the street corner. I'm an honest businessman is no longer protected as political speech according to the court's new standard. (Remember, the distinction between corporations and individuals that keeps coming up here isn't legally relevant.) So this is why you see groups like the ACLU jumping up and down and howling about this.
Typical, a bunch of slashdot posters oppose free speech.
You're painting with a broad brush. None of this is an argument against the restrictions on commercial speech itself. Free speech absolutism is foolish if applied blindly without judgement to all situations involving speech (e.g. spam, etc.). A statement by Nike that wearing Nike shoes has been proven by scientists to lengthen your penis is commercial speech. Nike has a protected right to say this, but they have to include a disclaimer like (results not typical) or something like that. Restrictions on commercial speech are old, older than you are, and you disparage them only because you aren't old enough to remember what life was like without them. Rolling back the restrictions on commercial speech would mean kissing "Results Not Typical" goodbye. The same goes for those fake newspaper ads about wonder diets that say "ADVERTISEMENT" at the top. Freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to lie to people and rip them off. Unless of course, you're in politics.
Here is how you can use relativity and electricity to "explain" magnetism:
Say we have two wires separated by a certain distance, each carrying a parallel current. There will then be a magnetic force between the wires pulling them together. Where does it come from?
The actual current in the wire is traveling at a very low speed- about a few cm/sec. (Wires transmit electrical impulses very quickly, so usually people are surprised to learn that the actual electric current itself moves very slowly, slower than water through a pipe.)
Look at the situation from the perspective of a test charge, a conduction electron in one of the wires. Although individually it is bouncing around in random directions at thermal velocities, its drift velocity is that of the current in the wire- a few cm/sec, or 10^-13 of the speed of light. And of course, we all learn in school that relativity only becomes important at velocities approaching the speed of light!
From the perspective of this test charge, the negative conduction electrons in the other wire are standing still. But the positive charge in the wire is moving, and shrinking in the direction of its motion. What is its Lorentz length contraction? It's absurdly low, 1 part in 10^26. But this means the linear charge density of the positive charges becomes that much larger than that of the negative charges in the wire, and the test charge feels an attraction to it. How much? It must be tiny. But remember, the positive and negative charge densities in the wire are huge even though they are closely balanced. A gram of copper contains 1500 coulombs of conduction electrons. If you do the math you will find that the predicted electrical force expected from the Lorentz contraction is equal to the ordinary magnetic force we would normally expect between the wires! If the currents in the two wires are antiparallel instead of parallel, it turns into a repulsive force. So that is what magnetism "really is". Except not really, because you can also use magnetism to explain away electricity if no charges are present.
You could (recklessly) extend the analogy to gravity, and consider water in two parallel pipes. Running water "shrinks" in the direction of its motion, so the gravitational field surrounding a pipe increases when the water is running. Except here the pipes have to carry water in opposite directions for this force between them to increase. So you would expect gravimagentism to work in a way that's opposite to how magnetism behaves.
Yes, but this is in agreement with the parent post that I wrote- it's an argument for patenting a method (a specific test involving a gene), not for patenting the baldness gene itself.
We were really nervous with the loose wording in the CBDTPA when that was being talked about in Washington last year. We'd have to suppress certain genes from appearing in gene expression profile graphs if someone other than the user held a patent on them.
Imagine that the sun exploded, and formed two equally large fragments each traveling perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. (Similar to what Bruce Willis did to a Texas-sized asteroid in Armageddon.) The earth's orbit would not be affected for another 8 minutes. We would see the explosion at the same time that the gravitational perturbation arrived.
This is also why our perceived direction of the pull of the sun lines up with where it is now instead of where it was 8 minutes ago.
Genes should not be patentable. Patents are for inventions, not discoveries. A specific test involving a gene can be patented, but I've never heard any coherent rationalization as to why a gene itself should be patentable.
I say this as someone who makes his living by writing gene expression analysis software for pharmaceutical companies. Gene patents help me put food on my table but I can't deny that they're ridiculous.
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Somebody explain to me why salon is still around.
Nice attitude you have.
I sent them $50 for a 2-year Premium subscription sometime in 2001. Maybe that has a little to do with it. Even if they fold tomorrow, I still think I got my money's worth. I view them as a sort of charity.
People have some weird attitudes about Salon. I've seen many people cheering for its destruction, who obviously disagree with it politically, but their major argument against it seems to be that Salon isn't profitable. It's one thing to say that about Salon as a corporate entity, but another as a source of news. Not all of us are stockholders- most of us are members of the general public. Salon is one of the few remaining holdouts in the otherwise corporatized U.S. media. And at least they're shelling out money to produce actual content- it's not like they're a worthless dotcom that was surprised to find that people didn't want to buy 20 lb bags of kitty litter online.
Everyone knows Salon is a little pink, and it does print some stupid crap sometimes, but it does cover a lot of topics that otherwise don't receive any attention from the rest of the U.S. media- DMCA/copyright, the erosion of civil liberties, software patents, globalization, deCSS and freedom of speech, webcasting, etc. etc. A lot of their articles appear here on Slashdot. It will be sad when I have to go to foreign sites to get news about crap that's happening here. When the press is reduced to nothing but corporate whores, you'll be sorry.
I do remember when this review came out back in April though, and naturally there was a quick reaction on fuckedcompany. I don't know if Salon was mentioned in the book itself- Pud didn't mention it so I don't think it was. If you dig through you'll find that the Salon review author (Damien Cave) is one of the posters in that thread.
I am shocked... SHOCKED... to hear that Hollywood movies are not presenting sound legal advice in matters of criminal law! I have a mental image of this guy protesting on his way back to death row. "But... Tommy Lee Jones said I'd be OK!"
... the Va. Supreme Court said that I can't be charged with capital murder again, I figured I would tell you the rest of what happened on Jan. 29, 1999 to show you how stupid all of y'all ... are. ....I can't believe that y'all thought I told you everything. Well it's too late now, nothing you can do about it now ... Do you just hate yourself for being so stupid and for [messing] up and saving me?"
The original 2000 conviction and death sentence were overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court when the justices ruled that the older girl's murder and her sister's rape were not parts of the same crime. Under Virginia law, that is a necessary element for capital punishment. The murder has to be "aggravated" by some other crime, like a rape or a robbery, in order to become a capital murder.
According to the authorities, his motive was the fact that the murder victim had been dating a black guy. (To get a feel for the type of genius we're talking about.) In the letter, he explained how he stabbed and killed the older girl after she resisted his attempts to rape her. Then he drank an iced tea, sat down on the couch, and smoked a cigarette, while he waited for her younger sister to come home from school so he could rape her.
In the earlier trial there had apparently been no physical evidence of any attempted rape of the older girl, and she was dead and not talking. So the capital murder conviction was predicated on the younger girl's rape being part of the same crime. By declaring them as being two separate crimes, the court had decoupled them, rendering the capital murder conviction invalid. But the letter blew this logic out of the water, by establishing that there had been an attempted rape of the older girl (a crime for which the defendant had not been tried) and by providing continuity between the crimes inflicted on each of the two sisters. Since there had never been an acquittal, only an overturned conviction, the prosecution was free to try the case again in light of the new evidence.
What's interesting is the intense personal relationship that seems to have developed on both sides between this guy and the prosecutor. This is what apparently incited the stupid letter in the first place.
"Since
What a dumbass!
"Lightning is a ridiculous example."
:) This thread is what, five or six days old already? You and I are the only ones still here.
One would think that a century after Special Relativity folks would finally have wrapped their brains around the concept of relative. I guess not. Nothing is a good insulator or bad insulator. Things are only good and bad insulators relative to other substances. This is a tautology. It is not open to discussion.
Lightning is a ridiculous example because it has enough energy to induce chemical transitions in materials. Normal air has extremely low conductivity until you ionize it and turn it into ionized air, which is a completely different substance with different electrical properties. You are comparing apples to oranges.
If you are under 17 years old, kindly keep your ignorant high school opinions to yourselves.
Not everyone here is 17. I'm 32 years old and I majored in physics and physical chemistry in college. Although I've certainly met 17 year olds who have given me things to think about.
As for the moron who moderated me as a troll, FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE. If you disagree with me, say so. Don't moderate me to troll because your vocabulary isn't sufficient to make a comprehensible point.
I try to never respond to unfair moderations of my own posts, unless I catch them in the act of replying. Otherwise you sound like a crazy person talking to people who aren't there.
Agreed. I was starting a post about freedom of speech, how the website operator should handle things differently, etc. etc. (There have been the usual misconceptions about freedom of speech in this discussion, e.g. how you only have it if you're standing on your own property and other such nonsense.) But then I decided to read the article first before posting, and so narrowly missed making a fool of myself and endangering my precious, precious karma.
The guy's behavior in this case has been so ridiculous as to completely transcend the First Amendment issue. It's really akin to a manually executed denial of service attack on the website. It fits the definition even better than spam, because at least spammers don't carry out their activities with the destruction of the Internet as their primary goal (they don't seem to care about this at all). This person wasn't posting anonymously- he was constantly creating new accounts with fake names. He was clicking through the terms-of-use agreements where you promise to behave yourself. Once inside he was ganging up on people and driving them away, with the clear goal of destroying the forum.
This is particularly disturbing because of the implications for click-through agreements. The courts have never addressed the enforceability of these things. This is a good thing because most of them are so completely draconian and ridiculous, but also a bad thing because the courts might make the decision one day that they are. In this case, the website operator has few other legal instruments at his disposal. So this is not so much a freedom of speech issue. It's a case of some asshole causing so much trouble that a court ends up affirming the enforceability of the click-through agreement. Once this happens we are all screwed. It's the tragedy of the commons once again.
It is not a denial of service. You (as the client) ask for a file. They (as a peer) give you a file. The file is crap. Is that a denial of service?
YES. That is what a denial of service attack is composed of- thousands and thousands of normal interactions that are not programatically distinguishable from legitimate traffic, with the goal of draining resources such as memory or bandwidth.
A DDoS zombie asks Yahoo for a URL. Yahoo (as a web server) serves the document back to the DDoS zombie. The HTTP interaction itself obeys all the rules and is perfectly legitimate when viewed alone. Is that a denial of service? Of course. It's one of millions of similar requests being deliberately sent in great numbers so that Yahoo's server can't find the legitimate requests in the flood and allocate resources to them preferentially.
The mere fact that a bill is in Congress to legalize this behavior strongly implies that it is not legal now.
My problem with evolution being taught as fact is our lack of evidence that micro-evolutionary changes can be extended right back to a single celled common ancestor. The two biggest evidences we have for this are a spotty fossil record and the relative similarity between DNA from different animals.
Well, the fossil record does tell us that for the first 2/3 of life's existence on earth, all life consisted of bacteria. Conjecturing a single-celled common ancestor is not too much of a stretch.
And the molecular evidence is pretty compelling. A competing theory (two single celled common ancestors? Three?) will have a lot of explaining to do.
To claim that our current theory is strong enough to be promoted to fact is premature.
Only for a ridiculous standard for "factness". There always exists a standard of truth against which any fact is not known for certain.
Our evidence that micro-evolution is extendable indefinitely really consists of evidences that 'look like it's what happened'.
Yep, that's how life works. Scientific truths aren't brought down on stone tablets from a mountain; you have to work with the evidence available.
Transitionary fossils are assumed to exist
And every time a fossil is discovered, the number of gaps in the fossil record increases by one, to the delight of the foes of evolution. There are now thousands and thousands of (ever tinier) gaps they can talk about in their pamphlets. If you propose that no transitionary forms ever existed in these gaps, you have to explain why not, since that's the most logical conclusion.
a mutation path from all animals back to a common ancestor is assumed to exist, a process by which a single celled creature with DNA came into being is assumed to exist, a process by which a single celled creature with DNA came into being is assumed to exist. We have lots of secondary evidences that we can point to and say, well these make it look like the above are good assumptions.
Yep. We have no direct evidence of abiogenesis, apart from limited success in reproducing chemical reactions in the lab. But we wouldn't expect to get direct evidence of abiogenesis because it leaves no fossil evidence.
But I don't think it is a far stretch to continue to teach our current interpretation of the evidence as theory and not as fact. It is still possible that an alternate theory will fit the evidence better, and people taught as students that our current view is fact will have trouble finding it.
People not taught our current view as students will probably have more trouble with this superior alternative theory, should it ever come out. I'd be willing to bet that it will more resemble evolution than any "competing theory" that the "theory, not fact" crowd like to talk about, like intelligent design. In fact, ID undermines one's ability to understand natural selection, because it teaches you to think in the wrong way. You end up viewing evolution as a weird variant of ID where each individual species is anthropomorphized and planning career decisions for itself over millions of years. People taught ID always ask stupid questions like "how does the tree know it should make fruit?", as if evolution supposes that species make intelligent decisions about how they will evolve.
If you're going to single out evolution as "theory, not fact" you should do it with the other sciences as well.
I'm NOT suggesting creation as this theory, there can very easily be a number of other unthought of explanations that could be missed be people assuming these don't exist.
Usually, when a discussion about the Big Bang turns into one about evolution, it means a creationist is around.
hey now, you can't just go about saying "relativity is wrong," not yet anyway. It has obstinately stood up to every test that scientists have yet devised to test it, thats why it's still around. Relativity still makes the best predictions about the things that it was intended to.
But General Relativity is a classical theory, and is incompatible with quantum theory. They both can't be right.
You're correct that it's stood up to every test, because it appears to be correct as a classical theory. The experiments required to develop its quantum version are hard to do, so basically we're clueless and coming up with all sorts of weird stuff.
Can anyone tell my why there has to be numerous random-bit passes when one could do something like this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512
What's wrong with just zeroing out the drive once?
Say the child porn file has a one bit and a zero bit. You overwrite it with two zero bits. The magnetic domains where the one bit was are presumably weaker or smaller because they were flipped, not reinforced like the zero bit domains. Of course the drive's read head itself won't be useful for extracting this information, because it's only designed to determine the last bit written by the write head- a binary zero/one determination. But with special equipment you can measure domain strengths carefully, and pull more information than a single bit out of them. You can tell which domains were flipped by the zero-out process and which were reinforced. (Of course this is a simplification because each bit is composed of multiple domains.)
So there are a few trivially obvious considerations when writing an erasing program-
-Don't write zeroes, write ones and zeroes.
-Go in more than one pass. A single pass leaves the bits in 4 possible states- (0,0), (0,1), (1,0), and (1,1) (where (c,r) are the child-porn and random-overwrite bits, respectively). An attacker can in theory tell all four states apart by close physical examination, so he knows c. Two passes (c,r1,r2) leaves 8 possible states- (0,0,0), (0,0,1), (0,1,0), (0,1,1), (1,0,0), (1,0,1), (1,1,0), and (1,1,1). Now the attacker's equipment needs more than twice as much precision, because some of them, like (0,0,1) and (1,0,1), are starting to look physically similar. 10 passes leaves 1024 possible domain states, many of which are indistinguishable.
-Writing zeroes over the file ten times is much better than writing zeroes over it once, but still leaves it in one of only four possible states. (Which are admittedly harder to tell apart, but you never know.)
-Do not allow the content of the file you're erasing to influence your decision of what bits to overwrite it with. You avoid a whole class of problems this way.
-Be aware that when you are writing random numbers, you are actually encrypting, not erasing, the file. The seed you used for your random number generator becomes a key for decrypting the file (given special equipment).
-You want to prevent the attacker from knowing what bits you wrote and in what order you wrote them. You will favor erasure over encryption if you can continually introduce entropy into the process. But entropy is scarce in most software environments. The variations in the timings of the drive's mechanical movements, ping responses from remote servers, mouse movements, and keypresses are well-known sources.
-Don't use a lousy random number generator. There are many ways for a random number generator to be bad. The simplest type produces numbers where n-tuples fall on a regular lattice when plotted in n dimensions. Generators like that are used a lot in scientific and graphics applications, but have no business being in security applications. If an attacker gains access to a few of the numbers in the generator's sequence, he can predict the rest of the sequence. They also loop after generating 2^N numbers.
-If applying this process to a single file, hide the size of the file.
-Ideally you should hide all traces of the file's existence. This means clean up after yourself by writing zeroes in the last several passes, so that even the domain randomness is physically removed (its presence implies that something was erased).
This guy is very confused, but his post is not flamebait. Moderators shouldn't moderate people down just for being creationists. It denies the rest of us the opportunity to see them get a good bitch slapping by a biologist who's got his threshold set to +2.
The purpose of science class is not to dispense Ultimate Truth. It is to teach the scientific method, and make students familiar with the body of scientific knowledge as currently understood by mainstream science. Our current theories of gravity are wrong. And we know they're wrong. Does this mean that students shouldn't be taught about gravity? We teach kids Newton's Law of Gravitation and we know for a fact that it's wrong. High schools teach kids the Bohr model of the atom, which is also known to be wrong. I never hear creationists complain about either- probably because Genesis is silent on the subject.
We don't have a satisfactory theory of gravity. That things fall is fact and should be taught as fact. We may not have a complete theory of evolution. This is mostly due to spotty evidence, which is par for the course (fossils are rare). But unlike gravity, our theories of biological evolution are consistent with all of the evidence we've managed to find. That evolution occurs in some form cannot be denied with a straight face, and it should be taught as fact just like anything else is, once our certainty has risen above a certain threshold that is close to 100%. We don't have a continuous surveillance videotape of every biological event that has occurred in the past 12 billion years, but this is a ridiculous thing to ask for.
Maybe the facts we teach might someday turn out to be wrong as new evidence is uncovered. So what? This has never bothered us before in any other scientific field. The secular world makes no claims of infalliblity. Ultimate Truth is not always attainable by humans, and to insist that everything taught in science must be verified to be absolute fact before it can be taught in the classroom is nonsensical. A silly policy like that would put an end to technological and scientific progress within a generation.
Three posts in this thread get moderated as "trolls" for what are obviously political reasons, then two minutes later you post as an AC with a nasty incoherent response.
Hope you enjoyed the last mod points you'll ever get.
Trees are unstable carbon sinks. They eventually fall over and rot, or they burn, and the CO2 is back in the air.
The only way to sequester carbon for good is to make coal out of it and bury it.
The standard of recognition still works well enough for submission to a database by an individual researcher, which is all that's really needed. They don't say whether it's going to be curated or not, but if it works like other bioinformatic databases, any individual researcher can upload species data into it after creating an account. Of course there may be some ambiguity about whether a given species is in fact a species deserving a separate database entry in this thing. The working standard they will likely use is, if someone uploads the data and makes an entry for it, it's a species. This will be replaced by another standard- a species is something that has a database entry.
And this will be fine. The people studying oysters (all 6 of them) will have one idea of what a species is, and it will probably differ from the one used by people studying protozoans. So there is ambiguity in the species definition as you go through the database, but biology is full of variation and ambiguity anyway. If ease of classification were a selective pressure on evolution, you would imagine the world would look a lot different.
Species ambiguity is the least of the problems this thing will have. If it turns out like other such projects, with hundreds of contributors from labs all around the world, it will look like an open sewer before long, with redundant entries, overloaded names, overloaded accession numbers, etc. If it's uncurated, writing a program to query it practically becomes an AI project. The ambiguity of species definition isn't an issue when the globally unique identifiers you're using turn out to be ambiguous as well. Biologists aren't very good at populating databases.
Just looking at the physical connectors and sockets, you can tell Firewire is more intelligently designed than USB. I always get the plug orientation wrong when connecting a USB cable.
I had four USB devices (a camera, a TV tuner, an external drive, and a mouse) that worked with 98. Not with XP. The camera is too old (1999) and Logitech isn't writing XP drivers for it. The Hauppauge TV tuner only has a buggy XP driver available that doesn't work. The external drive is plug and play, but XP is confused by it and reports "errors installing your new hardware" (although it does work on another XP system that I tested).
But the Microsoft mouse does work with XP! So that's a 75% fatality rate for an OS upgrade. Not bad.
Not going to happen. They would first have to come up with an adequate universal definition of a species, and they haven't done that in the last 150 years (Darwin addressed this issue).
The lack of a definition for "species" is a problem for humans who like definitions, not for nature, which doesn't care if things become hard to define.
Some things, like pornography and race, are just not easily definable. Usually people use the standard of recognition (i.e. "I know it when I see it") which works well enough for most purposes.
Say what? Air is an electrical insulator, and only to relatively low voltages. Vide, e.g., lightning. It is most assuredly not a thermal insulator.
Most electrical insulators are also thermal insulators and vice versa. Most thermal conductors are also electrical conductors and vice versa. Air is an excellent thermal insulator which is why a sweater makes you feel warmer.
Air's dielectric strength is pretty high, something like 300kV/m. Lightning is a ridiculous example.
Put your hand near a cold window in Winter and see how much insulation you get.
Then put your hand on the metal window frame. Feels much colder than the air, doesn't it?
If it were, they could keep their mouths shut and simply pay an individual to speak on their behalf.
Actually this is a dumb argument I made, and someone will point it out if I don't- companies pay commercial actors all the time and the restrictions on commercial speech remain in force on them as well since they are speaking on the company's behalf.
This is not done as much in the case of political speech. Astroturfing is done by Microsoft all the time, but that's not done for legal reasons, only to fool the public.
I have a little Shuttle SS40G and it came with a good cooling system (nothing even gets very warm) but the FANS ARE LOUD. You do hear them in the next room. A big case doesn't necessarily mean louder fans- in fact you would expect the opposite because now there is more heat in less space.
:( It's only 4 months old, so I'm waiting for a response from Shuttle.
Something happened to it the other night, right in the middle of reading Slashdot- the video signal suddenly went away and it doesn't reboot anymore. No BIOS screen, nothing. The only things that work anymore are the NumLock light on the keyboard and the noisy fans. Except for one restart attempt when it worked normally for 30 seconds and died again.
Yes, exactly. You would be saying that Nike is only capable of commercial speech because its "only purpose" is to make a profit. And you would be wrong.
What is commercial speech is determined by the speech, not the speaker. The fact that the speaker is corporate may be legally relevant in the world of your imagination, but it has never been so in this one. If it were, they could keep their mouths shut and simply pay an individual to speak on their behalf.
If Nike lobbies Congress for more globalization and fewer restrictions on free trade, or advocates dumping napalm on the rain forests in South America to make more room for its sweatshops, this is political speech. Its talk about how great its shoes are and why you should buy them is commercial speech.
Suppose a bill were introduced in Congress that would prohibit the use and/or sale of any software not licensed under the GPL. Are you saying that Microsoft's protests would be subject to the restrictions that are applied to commercial speech? "This will put us out of business! (Disclaimer: the above opinion is that of Microsoft Corporation and its veracity has not been proven, etc.)"
This is insightful? Jesus, read the fucking constitution sometime.
"Congress shall make no law..." Does NOT Distinguish between corporations and people.
People here are confusing the two issues (corporations/persons vs. commercial/protected speech). This really has nothing to do with the fact that Nike is a corporation. The same rules apply to an individual selling shoes at a street corner.
The confusion here partially results from the fact that Nike is the most evil of evil corporations, run by penny pinching demons from the underworld that take delight in human misery and suffering. (See? I just made a statement of fact that is most likely incorrect in certain details, but I can do so because it is an example of political speech.) Nike might respond with an assertion that no, Nike was founded by angels descended from heaven who dreamed of bringing exciting new careers to the Third World while putting quality footwear on the tired feet of American consumers everywhere. This would also be a misleading statement, containing factual errors. But would its response be political speech or commercial speech? It's a retort to a political attack I made earlier, so you'd say it's political speech. If anything Nike says could be considered political speech, it is this. However, Nike also has an obvious interest in selling its shoes, and its response will further that interest. So maybe this is commercial speech, right? The court actually bought into that argument. However, the nature of the speech is the real issue, not the nature of the speaker. If you agree with the court that this is commercial speech, you are implicitly saying that Nike is only capable of commercial speech because it makes a profit. The same rules will then apply to the guy selling shoes on the street corner. I'm an honest businessman is no longer protected as political speech according to the court's new standard. (Remember, the distinction between corporations and individuals that keeps coming up here isn't legally relevant.) So this is why you see groups like the ACLU jumping up and down and howling about this.
Typical, a bunch of slashdot posters oppose free speech.
You're painting with a broad brush. None of this is an argument against the restrictions on commercial speech itself. Free speech absolutism is foolish if applied blindly without judgement to all situations involving speech (e.g. spam, etc.). A statement by Nike that wearing Nike shoes has been proven by scientists to lengthen your penis is commercial speech. Nike has a protected right to say this, but they have to include a disclaimer like (results not typical) or something like that. Restrictions on commercial speech are old, older than you are, and you disparage them only because you aren't old enough to remember what life was like without them. Rolling back the restrictions on commercial speech would mean kissing "Results Not Typical" goodbye. The same goes for those fake newspaper ads about wonder diets that say "ADVERTISEMENT" at the top. Freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to lie to people and rip them off. Unless of course, you're in politics.
Here is how you can use relativity and electricity to "explain" magnetism:
Say we have two wires separated by a certain distance, each carrying a parallel current. There will then be a magnetic force between the wires pulling them together. Where does it come from?
The actual current in the wire is traveling at a very low speed- about a few cm/sec. (Wires transmit electrical impulses very quickly, so usually people are surprised to learn that the actual electric current itself moves very slowly, slower than water through a pipe.)
Look at the situation from the perspective of a test charge, a conduction electron in one of the wires. Although individually it is bouncing around in random directions at thermal velocities, its drift velocity is that of the current in the wire- a few cm/sec, or 10^-13 of the speed of light. And of course, we all learn in school that relativity only becomes important at velocities approaching the speed of light!
From the perspective of this test charge, the negative conduction electrons in the other wire are standing still. But the positive charge in the wire is moving, and shrinking in the direction of its motion. What is its Lorentz length contraction? It's absurdly low, 1 part in 10^26. But this means the linear charge density of the positive charges becomes that much larger than that of the negative charges in the wire, and the test charge feels an attraction to it. How much? It must be tiny. But remember, the positive and negative charge densities in the wire are huge even though they are closely balanced. A gram of copper contains 1500 coulombs of conduction electrons. If you do the math you will find that the predicted electrical force expected from the Lorentz contraction is equal to the ordinary magnetic force we would normally expect between the wires! If the currents in the two wires are antiparallel instead of parallel, it turns into a repulsive force. So that is what magnetism "really is". Except not really, because you can also use magnetism to explain away electricity if no charges are present.
You could (recklessly) extend the analogy to gravity, and consider water in two parallel pipes. Running water "shrinks" in the direction of its motion, so the gravitational field surrounding a pipe increases when the water is running. Except here the pipes have to carry water in opposite directions for this force between them to increase. So you would expect gravimagentism to work in a way that's opposite to how magnetism behaves.
Yes, but this is in agreement with the parent post that I wrote- it's an argument for patenting a method (a specific test involving a gene), not for patenting the baldness gene itself.
We were really nervous with the loose wording in the CBDTPA when that was being talked about in Washington last year. We'd have to suppress certain genes from appearing in gene expression profile graphs if someone other than the user held a patent on them.
Just think, that tree will have 95 more rings before Sonny's copyrights expire.
Imagine that the sun exploded, and formed two equally large fragments each traveling perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. (Similar to what Bruce Willis did to a Texas-sized asteroid in Armageddon.) The earth's orbit would not be affected for another 8 minutes. We would see the explosion at the same time that the gravitational perturbation arrived.
This is also why our perceived direction of the pull of the sun lines up with where it is now instead of where it was 8 minutes ago.
Genes should not be patentable. Patents are for inventions, not discoveries. A specific test involving a gene can be patented, but I've never heard any coherent rationalization as to why a gene itself should be patentable.
I say this as someone who makes his living by writing gene expression analysis software for pharmaceutical companies. Gene patents help me put food on my table but I can't deny that they're ridiculous.