Nor do you about manners, apparently. But in addition, your knowledge of the law is quite weak as well.
They cant "overturn" the constitution, but they can "interept" it any way they wish.
No, they can't. If Congress (and the states) passes an amendment that says "Congress has the power to remove a judge from the Supreme Court", and then promptly does so, the Supreme Court cannot rule that portion of the Constitution invalid. Their power extends only so far as the Constitution allows.
And that's the key behind the limitation of tyranny of the judiciary - the Supreme Court can't change the Constitution. And if they start clearly expressing their power (by specifically ignoring things in the Constitution) then Congress has the ability to amend the Constitution to remove them from the Court. This hasn't happened yet, and won't likely happen, because it can happen.
Freedom of speech: not transferrable through: calls to violence, conspiracy, or flase calls for help or warning.
Yah. So? Read the decision on clear & present danger. The problem is semantics - you're defining speech to include those things. The Court does not. Language can be clarified by the Court - that's what it's there for. If not, someone who holds up a convenience store with a gun could simply say that he was expressing himself, and that the law against armed robbery is unconstitutional.
All the rest of your arguments are because you have a different definition of the words than they do - and regardless of what you think, your interpretation of the words is not absolute. This is perfectly reasonable, and the entire point of the Supreme Court.
Only way to stop their power is to take away the case law history...
Or pass a new law (or amendment) with clarified wording. The Supreme Court doesn't make law. They just interpret it. If the Courts start abusing their power, Congress will take action to limit it. That's why the Court hasn't done so. All of its actions (speifically the ones you've listed) are perfectly reasonable interpretations of the law.
They are biased, they poke alot of incessant fun at the news.
How are they biased? Bias would imply that they have a preferred viewpoint that they choose over the facts, regularly.
Stewart's got a liberal viewpoint - that's fairly obvious. But he blasts Democrats just as much as Republicans, and he has people from both parties on the show, and he's equally kind to both of them.
One of the best Daily Show episodes was when Stewart interviewed the author of a book about a connection between 9/11 and Iraq. This happened right after the 9/11 Commission put out their statement that no, there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. So Stewart was interviewing someone with an opposite political viewpoint from his, who had written something that was publicly opposed by a nonpartisan committee. Stewart could've skewered him. But he didn't. He let him have his say, and he was very polite in asking each of his questions. It was a terrific example of how you do unbiased reporting.
Stewart's one of the best news reporters on TV. Leaps and bounds ahead of O'Reilly - who doesn't even try to be objective.
One thing to consider, however, is that with judicial oversight, you can have another form of tyrany, where an overzealous judge prevents an Executive from doing his job to protect the People. We only have an appeals process for this, which hopefully results in a well-reasoned balance of rights. However, as the judicial confirmation process becomes more and more politicized, you can expect more and more partisans being placed in lifetime-tenured posts.
You forget one thing - the only thing that allows judges to have a lifetime-tenured post is the Constitution.
Congress (plus the states) - and only Congress - can amend the Constitution.
"Tyranny of the judiciary" is definitely a concern - at first glance, the judiciary (with the inclusion of judicial review, which was a *brilliant* act of politics by the judges at the time) has a significant amount of power. The Supreme Court can overturn any law it wants, essentially, by interpreting it in the way that it wants.
Except that a Supreme Court abusing its power would tick off Congress. Enough abuse and Congress would amend the Constitution to allow the removal of judges, and promptly remove the judge.
The other thing is that a case has to get to the Supreme Court at all, and that's all they can rule on. So their ability to review law is limited by the system itself, as well - unlike the President, where every law passes by him, not all laws pass by the Supreme Court. You can believe that partisans may enter the Supreme Court, but you can't believe that partisans will populate the entire judicial system.
(Interestingly enough, this check on the Supreme Court's power is why Bush was pushing for an amendment to the Constitution for the marriage thing - the Supreme Court can't override an amendment to the Constitution)
That's true for the universe in general, but that doesn't mean it's always true on every place that could possibly bear life. Let's take the only place we know for certain life exists in, yup, that's Earth. Guess what? Silicon is orders of magnitude more abundant than carbon on/in this ball of rock.
If Earth sat in a vacuum, you'd be right. It doesn't.
Carbon outdoes silicon when the whole solar system is considered by an order of magnitude. (log(C)=8.55, log(Si)=7.55)
The chance of a planet of silicon forming in a void of carbon is virtually nil. Pointing out that carbon always outdoes silicon wasn't intended to say that life formed because Earth has more carbon than silicon - of course it has more silicon than carbon. It was to point out that wherever you find silicon, you will have carbon. And lots of it. This is just because the solar system that the planet formed from had more carbon than silicon!
Silicon based life is probably quite unlikely but that's mostly because of the long chain instability others keep mentioning
The long chain instability simply means that silicon would be very difficult to develop complex chemistry out of, not impossible. Silicon life would develop much, much slower - much harder to develop new combinations without the chain breaking down.
However, life's choice on Earth of carbon over silicon was no accident. My point was you are never going to find a planet with silicon and not enough carbon for life, because wherever you find silicon, you'll find carbon. And if by some freak chance the planet forms with no carbon, it will get carbon in a relatively short time frame. So again, silicon life will never form because the evolution of carbon life will always outdo it, and you'll never "not find" carbon for carbon-based life.
And unfortunately, unlike issues the choice between ammonia and water (you might have ammonia-based life if water isn't liquid on the planet), there's no way that silicon-based life would be "more resilient" than carbon-based - the chains would be weak, and easily broken, and thus very susceptible to damage.
More specifically, how do you feel about the electoral college system, which is the underlying cause of only having two parties?
This is wrong. The electoral college system makes us more of a republic than a democracy - a democracy based on community, rather than a democracy based purely on number of people. It prevents the tyranny of the majority by increasing the voice of sparsely populated areas.
The underlying cause of having only two parties is the Australian ballot voting scheme, not the electoral college. The main protection that this provides is that it protects against polluting the ballot, and allows focusing on candidates that have popular support - that is, it prevents tyranny of the minority.
There are other ways to do what both of those do, though.
While NAT doesn't filter anything, it does achieve the same result as blocking connections by default, because people will either be trying to access your external IP which will not result in a connection without an appropriate forwarded port, or they will be trying to access your internal IP which is not routable, and backbone routers drop source routed frames. In fact, so does linux, by default, IIRC.
This isn't quite true. NAT doesn't require you to use a private IP - you could use a routeable IP, and set your gateway to the NAT-ing box. Then your outbound connections will be masqueraded, but the boxes will still be "live" to connections from the outside world. Thus, it wouldn't be a firewall at all.
Of course, no one would do something as stupid as this. But the fact that NAT acts as a firewall relies on one thing - that private IPs are not routable. There are bizarre instances where NAT-ing can be quite dangerous compared to a properly routed firewall.
The other point is...
Hence, while it's not filtering, it might as well be.
Not really, because filtering is better than NAT. If a port is open on NAT, it only forwards to one machine. If a port is open on a firewall, it forwards to all machines.
As multiple computers become more common in houses, the limitations of NAT will start to become apparent - only 1 computer can play network games at a time, for instance. Then IPv6 will be necessary - the only problem is that might be a while away. I really agree that it's better to fix the problem earlier rather than later.
I love wikipedia too, but what's wrong with a site that basically mirrors wikipedia adding ads? By going to an ad-filled site, you are taking load off from wikipedias servers?
There's nothing wrong with it (if they're *mirroring*, rather than just doing a CGI pull, which I'm not sure they're doing) but I don't think Wikipedia is so overloaded it needs the help, but it does need the attention.
Plus the idea of Wikipedia is that it's supported by users - people add content to it. Using one of the mirrors doesn't allow you to see the fact that you can add/fix articles on Wikipedia, so it won't grow as fast.
What keeps the elevator up if I were to tug on it? To lift a 1-ton satellite into orbit, the elevator must exert 1-ton of force opposite to the pull of the satellite, if my understanding of physics is correct. So what keeps it up?
The simple answer is "centrifugal force". It's simply the fact that the elevator is *that* long, and it's rotating very quickly for something *that* big.
For people who are smart enough to realize that centrifugal force is artificially caused by a frame-of-reference issue, this may seem a little fake. Then you have to realize that when you say "pulling it down", you're talking about speeding its rotation up, due to conservation of angular momentum. (The force you're exerting is radial - therefore, no torque, as torque is force cross the radius, and since the two vectors are colinear, the cross product is zero).
So you pulling on it causes it to speed up (causes it to lean westward) but it does it so slow that you'd barely notice it. Of course, if it stays static, that force has to come from somewhere - and it comes from the anchor, pulling eastward on it (and slowing the Earth down).
So the grandparent is correct, in that the elevator is anchored to keep it from moving around, but that's only true when it doesn't have a load. If it has a significant load, then the anchor is keeping the elevator in place. If the elevator is struck then, it would move quickly. Of course, the payload could be jettisoned, and the elevator would then be safe again.
You never fly? Flying is when I use my GBA the most. God, it's wonderful for passing time in airports. They even market it to people in airports, so I imagine I'm not the only one...
I'm pretty postive that there is no verified example of silicon based life. Rather, due to the chemical similarities between carbon and silicon it is speculated that life (as we know it) could have or could in the future evolve based on silicon rather than carbon.
Silicon's unstable on long chains. Carbon is not, as evidenced by proteins, DNA, and other "let's make a molecule out of a few thousand atoms!" gigantic molecules that make chemists hide underneath their blankets shuddering, whimpering about pi bonds.
OK, OK, that was a bit severe.:) But looking to silicon to replace carbon is a bit silly - carbon will always exceed silicon in abundance by orders of magnitude, as it's one of the end products of the triple-alpha process (hence the reason that CNO are roughly tied for the third-most abundant elements in the Universe, after hydrogen and helium). So silicon-based life will, quite simply, never exist.
As for why you need water - that's also pretty easy. Water's the simplest strong dipole you can make out of hydrogen, and you need a dipole to make very very weird chemicals like life needs. Ammonia might be possible, but the full dynamics would need to be worked out.
Just a little background info, blatantly ripped off of this website: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/mycobact erium
Just a note that thefreedictionary.com just takes its info from Wikipedia and adds advertising. So please refer back to the original Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is the sum total of human knowledge. It rules.
When they start to pass on, they will leave behind more money and jobs than you can possibly imagine.
The cohort replacing the Baby Boomers is larger than the baby boomers were. It's only when you get to the most recent generations (i.e. - probably *now*) that the cohorts (age groups) are the same size (adjusted for death rates).
That is, they will not leave behind more jobs than we can imagine. The incoming work force is much larger than the Baby Boomers were.
At one bit per sample (the most power-efficient encoding), you get a minimum power for an intelligeable signal of about 0.7 mW (1e15 samples of 4 photons at about 1 eV each).
Yah, but that gives a bandwidth of the frequency of the light. Given the fact that it's optical, that's gi-normous - 1E15 bps, or 1000 Tb/s (or 1 Pb/s, but terabits are at least thinkable currently).
Couldn't you just modulate the signal much slower and transmit at a lower bandwidth to lower the power requirements? If you reduced the power by a factor of 10 (so 1 photon/10 sampling periods) and lowered the amplitude modulation by a factor of 100, you still should be able to resolve the modulation.
The original poster still has many other problems, of course - not the least of which is the fact that optical is probably the worst frequency to transmit at, because just about everything absorbs it. Hence the reason we evolved to see it.
The FCC could not prevent a private landlord from prohibiting WiFi devices in a lease.
Actually, yes it can. Go back to the original Slashdot article, and read the memo linked.
Landlords can't prevent people from using satellite dishes (though they can prevent them from attaching them to the building, because the people don't have exclusive rights to the building itself). This is specifically addressed in the memo.
Really. I'm serious - it's very specifically stated that landlords, community organizations (condo associations), etc. cannot restrict usage of the unlicensed bands in the leases. So if your lease says "you can't have wireless routers" you can specifically point them to that memo and say "yes I can." They do not have authority to prevent you from using the 2.4 GHz band.
Don't try to use the "they can do anything they want" or "they can prevent you from using a hotplate" arguments - read the memo. There are many portions of leases which can be rendered invalid - you can't say "you can't have visitors over" in a lease in Pennsylvania, for instance. And there is no Federal Hot Plate Commission which states they are the sole authority on the licensing of hot plates. There is an FCC, and they have the only word on restriction of equipment to access unlicensed bands.
Furthermore, how closely does the point at which these tools fail to detect a match coincide with the legal Abstraction, Filtration, and Comparison test?
Um. Dr. Davis is the guy who first came up with the abstraction, filtration, comparison test - he was the expert witness in Computer Associates vs. Altai. Check his credentials in the first section.
He actually addresses the point you're asking - the code actually finds looser matches than would be found with abstraction, filtration, comparison. So he just ran them through that, said "well, no matches" - since it's a looser comparison, a stricter comparison would be of no benefit.
I think the court will give him the benefit of the doubt that he knows how to do something that he was the first one to do.
Since Dr. Randall Davis is an expert witness for IBM, I am guessing that SCO will say, "ain't so!" and then they will ask for time to refute Randall's findings and perhaps come up with an expert witness of their own that finds thousands of "matches." Hopefully the judge in this case will recognize Randall for the expert that he is and accept his findings. However, that just doesn't seem likely to me. This is just another round in a case that will continue like this ad nauseum.
Dr. Davis is the person who first elucidated how you compare code (the "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test - Computer Associates vs. Aitai) to see if it violates copyright. SCO will have a hard time trying to argue that its depositions (which are from non-experts, though they claim 'unnamed' experts performed the work) are from people more qualified than Dr. Davis.
So I guess what I'm saying is that SCO will have a hard time finding an expert witness more qualified than Dr. Davis. (Please note that if they try to present a deposition from one, that will likely be stricken - as SCO has been ordered by the court to present such a deposition, and has not - thus indicating it doesn't have one) And I highly doubt that the court will value any other expert over Dr. Davis anyway.
SCO has two of its own employees (Dr. Davis is not an IBM employee, though he is being retained by IBM). IBM has the expert witness who first defined how you compare code. Hmm, I wonder which the judge will believe...
We live in a republic, not a democracy. Our government has a constitution and judicial system that protect the rights of the minority against the tyrany of the majority (at least most of the time). It takes an extrodinary majority over a long period of time to change the constitution - if you will an extraordinary consensus.
A democratic republic, or a republican democracy. Care to get more picky? You can have republics that aren't democratic. We do live in a democracy - a republican one. And the government is designed so that the laws represent the majority, though not the majority of people - the majority of communities. If the majority of states want an amendment to the constitution, it would happen rather fast.
Immorality != Ability of me to leave if I don't like it.
A government that is immoral, generally does cause citizens to leave. But it does not have to.
I never said it was. What I said was that a government can't be immoral unless it forces you to remain in its borders. There's an odd loophole there for prisoners, but that's simply because they broke the law while they were in the country. They knew this would put them in jail, and did it anyway, so it can't be immoral to put them in jail, because they agreed to it.
What Williams was refering to is the redistribution of wealth where the governement plays robin hood and takes from the rich and gives to the poor.
How the hell is this different than taxation for anything? Police are more of a benefit for the poor in many places, as the crime is definitely higher there. So it's exactly identical. And this is why it's retarded. Taxation for government-decided programs can't be immoral. It's a consequence of the society.
The problem is many laws do force actions. Taxes are one such example. You MUST pay them.
No, you don't. You could move to a place that doesn't have taxes. There are several in the world. Go out and live on an uncharted island if you really don't want to pay taxes. Then, of course, you won't get the benefit of taxes - namely the infrastructure, protection, or the job market that results from the infrastructure and protection.
I hope this changes before my kids grow up because it is unjust to expect my daughter's kids to pay 33% of their income to pay me some kind of saftey net payment. I will have had a lifetime to set myself up for retirement.
Good for you. Other people weren't quite so lucky. It's important to remember the main reason Social Security exists is because your daughter's children will be able to work to pay 33% of their income so that a person who is 80 who cannot work will still be alive.
I find it hilarious that I'm discussing morality with someone who's saying that a law that establishes a society that believes that old people should never have to die in the street is wrong simply so that young people can have more money.
In any case, the original reason for replying was that the quote was saying that socialist states must be sinful which is, quite possibly, the most retarded thing I've ever heard. Governments naturally start off with "rights that must be protected for all citizens that the citizens are willing to pay taxes for".
We believe, as a society, that it's unacceptable for people to be killed by other people. So we have laws to protect that. All that socialism does is add new beliefs to that list - specifically, saying "we believe, as a society, that it's unacceptable for the elderly to die because they are unable to work to support themselves." There's no possible way that the first belief can be moral but the second one cannot.
No. The wind turbines should pump water in a storage tank uphill when capacity exceeds demand, and when the demand exceeds the capacity, you let the water go through a hydroelectric generator.
Hydroelectric generators are incredibly efficient - 80% or greater. Pumping uphill, then downhill, therefore results in about a 20% loss or so, which is extremely minor for energy storage.
They are? And here I thought I preferred the sharpness and perfect geometry of LCDs.
You can get perfect geometry on an LCD (Trinitrons are a simple example, but there are others) and you can get the same sharpness of LCDs as well (but only with much, much more expensive models).
You can't fix the fundamental problems of LCDs at all (pixel response times, low brightness, low contrast ratio).
Hence why CRTs are the standard. An expensive CRT is still the "perfect" way to display an image. Amazing how correct people got it the first time they tried to do it.
"If someone can recognize an act of unjust aggression when it is perpetrated by one individual against another, but not when the same act is perpetrated by an organized group of individuals, such a person must be confused about right and wrong."
There needs to be a name for the logical fallacy where you just quote smarter people who are saying something profound about something completely unrelated. What you said has no bearing on what we're talking about.
Taking money from one person and giving it to another without their consent is wrong. However, anyone who lives in this country has given their consent to pay Social Security simply by living here. They know the laws - and if they don't, ignorance is no defense against the law. They have no right to live here and experience the benefits everyone else receives without paying the same price.
How is the Mafia example any different than the police?
Couldn't have said it better myself.:)
Sigh. Yah, this is offtopic, but... the belief that anarchism is the only moral state is long outdated. It mainly has to do with the misconception that if an act can be construed as having an ulterior motive, it must not be a purely altruistic motive, and thus is not moral. In order for anarchism to be consistent, you need to also have a complete lack of property (paying for goods and services is exactly akin to paying taxes to the government) and the only way that can be justified is if one believes that the only moral actions are actions given freely without payment. Just because someone asks for payment doesn't mean that what they did wasn't moral.
Are condominiums immoral? You pay money to live somewhere, and the condominiums provide service. If you don't want to pay it, move. And if you don't pay, is it immoral for them to evict you?
Yet the government will beat up tax resistors (who haven't left the country). Does that make its offer immoral?
Actually, if the government did try to beat them up, it would be brutality, and I'm pretty sure that the people would then win lots of money in courts.
In the case of tax evaders, they just send them to jail, or confiscate assets, etc. This is fine - those people were trying to reap the benefits of a society without paying the cost. Is it immoral when a restaurant owner asks you to pay the bill? You agreed to the prices when you ordered the food.
Living in a country is like living in a community. You pay for services rendered, and the right to live there. If you don't want to pay, move. There are countries in the world where there are no taxes whatsoever. Go live there, though I doubt you'll find it more moral than any other country.
When the Mafioso offers to "protect" your store, he may also give you the option of moving. Does that make his offer moral?
Yes.
The fact that he will beat you up if you refuse is the immoral part, not the offer.
Dictatorships by themselves aren't immoral, though they have a lot more potential for abuse than democracies.
How is the Mafia example any different than the police? The police extract money from you (via taxes) for "protection". The difference is that the Mafia organization is significantly more corrupt than the police (presumedly!). The offer is perfectly moral.
The point that the quote addressed was whether or not taking money from everyone (taxes) and redistributing it to the poor could be moral. This is a moronic question - of course it is. In order to gain the benefits of a community, you need to pay certain prices. Those prices, inasmuch as they are simply prices for living in the community, are moral, because they're not actions - they're not forced upon people, they're just questions - they're just asked of people.
What if Real wanted Apple's drm for free or basicly for free?
Real is a company, not a human being. They care about making money. If they look at Apple's DRM, and decide it will cost $500K to reverse engineer it, then they'll go and talk to Apple about licensing it for less than $500K. Apple will likely agree, and then Real saves money. They're not going to say "we'll only license it for zero!" if Apple says "we'll license it for $400K" because then they'd have to explain to stockholders why they just wasted $100,000.
If Apple thinks that its software is worth more than $500K, then they might try to ask more for it. The problem is that if Real can do it for less (as they obviously did), then Apple is wrong - their software is not worth as much.
But really neither one of us knows what happend behind the doors do we?
I can presume that Real acted like any other company. Apple thought that its technology was worth more than it was - either they asked for too much money, or they thought that Real couldn't duplicate it. They were wrong.
When I say Apple is being a 'jerk', I meant they were being a stupid company. If Real went into negotiations, they obviously knew they could reverse engineer it. And they probably had a guess as to how much it would cost. Apple turning them down was a stupid business move.
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You dont know shit about politics.
Nor do you about manners, apparently. But in addition, your knowledge of the law is quite weak as well.
They cant "overturn" the constitution, but they can "interept" it any way they wish.
No, they can't. If Congress (and the states) passes an amendment that says "Congress has the power to remove a judge from the Supreme Court", and then promptly does so, the Supreme Court cannot rule that portion of the Constitution invalid. Their power extends only so far as the Constitution allows.
And that's the key behind the limitation of tyranny of the judiciary - the Supreme Court can't change the Constitution. And if they start clearly expressing their power (by specifically ignoring things in the Constitution) then Congress has the ability to amend the Constitution to remove them from the Court. This hasn't happened yet, and won't likely happen, because it can happen.
Freedom of speech: not transferrable through: calls to violence, conspiracy, or flase calls for help or warning.
Yah. So? Read the decision on clear & present danger. The problem is semantics - you're defining speech to include those things. The Court does not. Language can be clarified by the Court - that's what it's there for. If not, someone who holds up a convenience store with a gun could simply say that he was expressing himself, and that the law against armed robbery is unconstitutional.
All the rest of your arguments are because you have a different definition of the words than they do - and regardless of what you think, your interpretation of the words is not absolute. This is perfectly reasonable, and the entire point of the Supreme Court.
Only way to stop their power is to take away the case law history...
Or pass a new law (or amendment) with clarified wording. The Supreme Court doesn't make law. They just interpret it. If the Courts start abusing their power, Congress will take action to limit it. That's why the Court hasn't done so. All of its actions (speifically the ones you've listed) are perfectly reasonable interpretations of the law.
They are biased, they poke alot of incessant fun at the news.
How are they biased? Bias would imply that they have a preferred viewpoint that they choose over the facts, regularly.
Stewart's got a liberal viewpoint - that's fairly obvious. But he blasts Democrats just as much as Republicans, and he has people from both parties on the show, and he's equally kind to both of them.
One of the best Daily Show episodes was when Stewart interviewed the author of a book about a connection between 9/11 and Iraq. This happened right after the 9/11 Commission put out their statement that no, there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. So Stewart was interviewing someone with an opposite political viewpoint from his, who had written something that was publicly opposed by a nonpartisan committee. Stewart could've skewered him. But he didn't. He let him have his say, and he was very polite in asking each of his questions. It was a terrific example of how you do unbiased reporting.
Stewart's one of the best news reporters on TV. Leaps and bounds ahead of O'Reilly - who doesn't even try to be objective.
One thing to consider, however, is that with judicial oversight, you can have another form of tyrany, where an overzealous judge prevents an Executive from doing his job to protect the People. We only have an appeals process for this, which hopefully results in a well-reasoned balance of rights. However, as the judicial confirmation process becomes more and more politicized, you can expect more and more partisans being placed in lifetime-tenured posts.
You forget one thing - the only thing that allows judges to have a lifetime-tenured post is the Constitution.
Congress (plus the states) - and only Congress - can amend the Constitution.
"Tyranny of the judiciary" is definitely a concern - at first glance, the judiciary (with the inclusion of judicial review, which was a *brilliant* act of politics by the judges at the time) has a significant amount of power. The Supreme Court can overturn any law it wants, essentially, by interpreting it in the way that it wants.
Except that a Supreme Court abusing its power would tick off Congress. Enough abuse and Congress would amend the Constitution to allow the removal of judges, and promptly remove the judge.
The other thing is that a case has to get to the Supreme Court at all, and that's all they can rule on. So their ability to review law is limited by the system itself, as well - unlike the President, where every law passes by him, not all laws pass by the Supreme Court. You can believe that partisans may enter the Supreme Court, but you can't believe that partisans will populate the entire judicial system.
(Interestingly enough, this check on the Supreme Court's power is why Bush was pushing for an amendment to the Constitution for the marriage thing - the Supreme Court can't override an amendment to the Constitution)
That's true for the universe in general, but that doesn't mean it's always true on every place that could possibly bear life. Let's take the only place we know for certain life exists in, yup, that's Earth. Guess what? Silicon is orders of magnitude more abundant than carbon on/in this ball of rock.
If Earth sat in a vacuum, you'd be right. It doesn't.
Carbon outdoes silicon when the whole solar system is considered by an order of magnitude. (log(C)=8.55, log(Si)=7.55)
The chance of a planet of silicon forming in a void of carbon is virtually nil. Pointing out that carbon always outdoes silicon wasn't intended to say that life formed because Earth has more carbon than silicon - of course it has more silicon than carbon. It was to point out that wherever you find silicon, you will have carbon. And lots of it. This is just because the solar system that the planet formed from had more carbon than silicon!
Silicon based life is probably quite unlikely but that's mostly because of the long chain instability others keep mentioning
The long chain instability simply means that silicon would be very difficult to develop complex chemistry out of, not impossible. Silicon life would develop much, much slower - much harder to develop new combinations without the chain breaking down.
However, life's choice on Earth of carbon over silicon was no accident. My point was you are never going to find a planet with silicon and not enough carbon for life, because wherever you find silicon, you'll find carbon. And if by some freak chance the planet forms with no carbon, it will get carbon in a relatively short time frame. So again, silicon life will never form because the evolution of carbon life will always outdo it, and you'll never "not find" carbon for carbon-based life.
And unfortunately, unlike issues the choice between ammonia and water (you might have ammonia-based life if water isn't liquid on the planet), there's no way that silicon-based life would be "more resilient" than carbon-based - the chains would be weak, and easily broken, and thus very susceptible to damage.
More specifically, how do you feel about the electoral college system, which is the underlying cause of only having two parties?
This is wrong. The electoral college system makes us more of a republic than a democracy - a democracy based on community, rather than a democracy based purely on number of people. It prevents the tyranny of the majority by increasing the voice of sparsely populated areas.
The underlying cause of having only two parties is the Australian ballot voting scheme, not the electoral college. The main protection that this provides is that it protects against polluting the ballot, and allows focusing on candidates that have popular support - that is, it prevents tyranny of the minority.
There are other ways to do what both of those do, though.
While NAT doesn't filter anything, it does achieve the same result as blocking connections by default, because people will either be trying to access your external IP which will not result in a connection without an appropriate forwarded port, or they will be trying to access your internal IP which is not routable, and backbone routers drop source routed frames. In fact, so does linux, by default, IIRC.
This isn't quite true. NAT doesn't require you to use a private IP - you could use a routeable IP, and set your gateway to the NAT-ing box. Then your outbound connections will be masqueraded, but the boxes will still be "live" to connections from the outside world. Thus, it wouldn't be a firewall at all.
Of course, no one would do something as stupid as this. But the fact that NAT acts as a firewall relies on one thing - that private IPs are not routable. There are bizarre instances where NAT-ing can be quite dangerous compared to a properly routed firewall.
The other point is...
Hence, while it's not filtering, it might as well be.
Not really, because filtering is better than NAT. If a port is open on NAT, it only forwards to one machine. If a port is open on a firewall, it forwards to all machines.
As multiple computers become more common in houses, the limitations of NAT will start to become apparent - only 1 computer can play network games at a time, for instance. Then IPv6 will be necessary - the only problem is that might be a while away. I really agree that it's better to fix the problem earlier rather than later.
I love wikipedia too, but what's wrong with a site that basically mirrors wikipedia adding ads? By going to an ad-filled site, you are taking load off from wikipedias servers?
There's nothing wrong with it (if they're *mirroring*, rather than just doing a CGI pull, which I'm not sure they're doing) but I don't think Wikipedia is so overloaded it needs the help, but it does need the attention.
Plus the idea of Wikipedia is that it's supported by users - people add content to it. Using one of the mirrors doesn't allow you to see the fact that you can add/fix articles on Wikipedia, so it won't grow as fast.
What keeps the elevator up if I were to tug on it? To lift a 1-ton satellite into orbit, the elevator must exert 1-ton of force opposite to the pull of the satellite, if my understanding of physics is correct. So what keeps it up?
The simple answer is "centrifugal force". It's simply the fact that the elevator is *that* long, and it's rotating very quickly for something *that* big.
For people who are smart enough to realize that centrifugal force is artificially caused by a frame-of-reference issue, this may seem a little fake. Then you have to realize that when you say "pulling it down", you're talking about speeding its rotation up, due to conservation of angular momentum. (The force you're exerting is radial - therefore, no torque, as torque is force cross the radius, and since the two vectors are colinear, the cross product is zero).
So you pulling on it causes it to speed up (causes it to lean westward) but it does it so slow that you'd barely notice it. Of course, if it stays static, that force has to come from somewhere - and it comes from the anchor, pulling eastward on it (and slowing the Earth down).
So the grandparent is correct, in that the elevator is anchored to keep it from moving around, but that's only true when it doesn't have a load. If it has a significant load, then the anchor is keeping the elevator in place. If the elevator is struck then, it would move quickly. Of course, the payload could be jettisoned, and the elevator would then be safe again.
Now I drive myself places.
You never fly? Flying is when I use my GBA the most. God, it's wonderful for passing time in airports. They even market it to people in airports, so I imagine I'm not the only one...
I'm pretty postive that there is no verified example of silicon based life. Rather, due to the chemical similarities between carbon and silicon it is speculated that life (as we know it) could have or could in the future evolve based on silicon rather than carbon.
:) But looking to silicon to replace carbon is a bit silly - carbon will always exceed silicon in abundance by orders of magnitude, as it's one of the end products of the triple-alpha process (hence the reason that CNO are roughly tied for the third-most abundant elements in the Universe, after hydrogen and helium). So silicon-based life will, quite simply, never exist.
Silicon's unstable on long chains. Carbon is not, as evidenced by proteins, DNA, and other "let's make a molecule out of a few thousand atoms!" gigantic molecules that make chemists hide underneath their blankets shuddering, whimpering about pi bonds.
OK, OK, that was a bit severe.
As for why you need water - that's also pretty easy. Water's the simplest strong dipole you can make out of hydrogen, and you need a dipole to make very very weird chemicals like life needs. Ammonia might be possible, but the full dynamics would need to be worked out.
Mozilla/Firefox had similar vulnerabilities in BMP and PNG in the last couple of weeks. Linux isn't going to help that much.
Yeah it does. Firefox doesn't run as root.
Just a little background info, blatantly ripped off of this website: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/mycobac
Just a note that thefreedictionary.com just takes its info from Wikipedia and adds advertising. So please refer back to the original Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is the sum total of human knowledge. It rules.
When they start to pass on, they will leave behind more money and jobs than you can possibly imagine.
The cohort replacing the Baby Boomers is larger than the baby boomers were. It's only when you get to the most recent generations (i.e. - probably *now*) that the cohorts (age groups) are the same size (adjusted for death rates).
That is, they will not leave behind more jobs than we can imagine. The incoming work force is much larger than the Baby Boomers were.
At one bit per sample (the most power-efficient encoding), you get a minimum power for an intelligeable signal of about 0.7 mW (1e15 samples of 4 photons at about 1 eV each).
Yah, but that gives a bandwidth of the frequency of the light. Given the fact that it's optical, that's gi-normous - 1E15 bps, or 1000 Tb/s (or 1 Pb/s, but terabits are at least thinkable currently).
Couldn't you just modulate the signal much slower and transmit at a lower bandwidth to lower the power requirements? If you reduced the power by a factor of 10 (so 1 photon/10 sampling periods) and lowered the amplitude modulation by a factor of 100, you still should be able to resolve the modulation.
The original poster still has many other problems, of course - not the least of which is the fact that optical is probably the worst frequency to transmit at, because just about everything absorbs it. Hence the reason we evolved to see it.
That's in the FCC regs, which, BTW, are not law.
Yes they are. Specifically, the Communications Act of 1934. All regulations that the FCC gives out could be viewed as natural extensions to that law.
So anyone who violates an FCC reg is violating the Communications Act of 1934.
The FCC could not prevent a private landlord from prohibiting WiFi devices in a lease.
Actually, yes it can. Go back to the original Slashdot article, and read the memo linked.
Landlords can't prevent people from using satellite dishes (though they can prevent them from attaching them to the building, because the people don't have exclusive rights to the building itself). This is specifically addressed in the memo.
Really. I'm serious - it's very specifically stated that landlords, community organizations (condo associations), etc. cannot restrict usage of the unlicensed bands in the leases. So if your lease says "you can't have wireless routers" you can specifically point them to that memo and say "yes I can." They do not have authority to prevent you from using the 2.4 GHz band.
Don't try to use the "they can do anything they want" or "they can prevent you from using a hotplate" arguments - read the memo. There are many portions of leases which can be rendered invalid - you can't say "you can't have visitors over" in a lease in Pennsylvania, for instance. And there is no Federal Hot Plate Commission which states they are the sole authority on the licensing of hot plates. There is an FCC, and they have the only word on restriction of equipment to access unlicensed bands.
Furthermore, how closely does the point at which these tools fail to detect a match coincide with the legal Abstraction, Filtration, and Comparison test?
Um. Dr. Davis is the guy who first came up with the abstraction, filtration, comparison test - he was the expert witness in Computer Associates vs. Altai. Check his credentials in the first section.
He actually addresses the point you're asking - the code actually finds looser matches than would be found with abstraction, filtration, comparison. So he just ran them through that, said "well, no matches" - since it's a looser comparison, a stricter comparison would be of no benefit.
I think the court will give him the benefit of the doubt that he knows how to do something that he was the first one to do.
Since Dr. Randall Davis is an expert witness for IBM, I am guessing that SCO will say, "ain't so!" and then they will ask for time to refute Randall's findings and perhaps come up with an expert witness of their own that finds thousands of "matches." Hopefully the judge in this case will recognize Randall for the expert that he is and accept his findings. However, that just doesn't seem likely to me. This is just another round in a case that will continue like this ad nauseum.
Dr. Davis is the person who first elucidated how you compare code (the "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test - Computer Associates vs. Aitai) to see if it violates copyright. SCO will have a hard time trying to argue that its depositions (which are from non-experts, though they claim 'unnamed' experts performed the work) are from people more qualified than Dr. Davis.
So I guess what I'm saying is that SCO will have a hard time finding an expert witness more qualified than Dr. Davis. (Please note that if they try to present a deposition from one, that will likely be stricken - as SCO has been ordered by the court to present such a deposition, and has not - thus indicating it doesn't have one) And I highly doubt that the court will value any other expert over Dr. Davis anyway.
SCO has two of its own employees (Dr. Davis is not an IBM employee, though he is being retained by IBM). IBM has the expert witness who first defined how you compare code. Hmm, I wonder which the judge will believe...
We live in a republic, not a democracy. Our government has a constitution and judicial system that protect the rights of the minority against the tyrany of the majority (at least most of the time). It takes an extrodinary majority over a long period of time to change the constitution - if you will an extraordinary consensus.
A democratic republic, or a republican democracy. Care to get more picky? You can have republics that aren't democratic. We do live in a democracy - a republican one. And the government is designed so that the laws represent the majority, though not the majority of people - the majority of communities. If the majority of states want an amendment to the constitution, it would happen rather fast.
Immorality != Ability of me to leave if I don't like it.
A government that is immoral, generally does cause citizens to leave. But it does not have to.
I never said it was. What I said was that a government can't be immoral unless it forces you to remain in its borders. There's an odd loophole there for prisoners, but that's simply because they broke the law while they were in the country. They knew this would put them in jail, and did it anyway, so it can't be immoral to put them in jail, because they agreed to it.
What Williams was refering to is the redistribution of wealth where the governement plays robin hood and takes from the rich and gives to the poor.
How the hell is this different than taxation for anything ? Police are more of a benefit for the poor in many places, as the crime is definitely higher there. So it's exactly identical. And this is why it's retarded. Taxation for government-decided programs can't be immoral. It's a consequence of the society.
The problem is many laws do force actions. Taxes are one such example. You MUST pay them.
No, you don't. You could move to a place that doesn't have taxes. There are several in the world. Go out and live on an uncharted island if you really don't want to pay taxes. Then, of course, you won't get the benefit of taxes - namely the infrastructure, protection, or the job market that results from the infrastructure and protection.
I hope this changes before my kids grow up because it is unjust to expect my daughter's kids to pay 33% of their income to pay me some kind of saftey net payment. I will have had a lifetime to set myself up for retirement.
Good for you. Other people weren't quite so lucky. It's important to remember the main reason Social Security exists is because your daughter's children will be able to work to pay 33% of their income so that a person who is 80 who cannot work will still be alive.
I find it hilarious that I'm discussing morality with someone who's saying that a law that establishes a society that believes that old people should never have to die in the street is wrong simply so that young people can have more money.
In any case, the original reason for replying was that the quote was saying that socialist states must be sinful which is, quite possibly, the most retarded thing I've ever heard. Governments naturally start off with "rights that must be protected for all citizens that the citizens are willing to pay taxes for".
We believe, as a society, that it's unacceptable for people to be killed by other people. So we have laws to protect that. All that socialism does is add new beliefs to that list - specifically, saying "we believe, as a society, that it's unacceptable for the elderly to die because they are unable to work to support themselves." There's no possible way that the first belief can be moral but the second one cannot.
No. The wind turbines should pump water in a storage tank uphill when capacity exceeds demand, and when the demand exceeds the capacity, you let the water go through a hydroelectric generator.
Hydroelectric generators are incredibly efficient - 80% or greater. Pumping uphill, then downhill, therefore results in about a 20% loss or so, which is extremely minor for energy storage.
They are? And here I thought I preferred the sharpness and perfect geometry of LCDs.
You can get perfect geometry on an LCD (Trinitrons are a simple example, but there are others) and you can get the same sharpness of LCDs as well (but only with much, much more expensive models).
You can't fix the fundamental problems of LCDs at all (pixel response times, low brightness, low contrast ratio).
Hence why CRTs are the standard. An expensive CRT is still the "perfect" way to display an image. Amazing how correct people got it the first time they tried to do it.
"If someone can recognize an act of unjust aggression when it is perpetrated by one individual against another, but not when the same act is perpetrated by an organized group of individuals, such a person must be confused about right and wrong."
:)
There needs to be a name for the logical fallacy where you just quote smarter people who are saying something profound about something completely unrelated. What you said has no bearing on what we're talking about.
Taking money from one person and giving it to another without their consent is wrong. However, anyone who lives in this country has given their consent to pay Social Security simply by living here. They know the laws - and if they don't, ignorance is no defense against the law. They have no right to live here and experience the benefits everyone else receives without paying the same price.
How is the Mafia example any different than the police?
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Sigh. Yah, this is offtopic, but... the belief that anarchism is the only moral state is long outdated. It mainly has to do with the misconception that if an act can be construed as having an ulterior motive, it must not be a purely altruistic motive, and thus is not moral. In order for anarchism to be consistent, you need to also have a complete lack of property (paying for goods and services is exactly akin to paying taxes to the government) and the only way that can be justified is if one believes that the only moral actions are actions given freely without payment. Just because someone asks for payment doesn't mean that what they did wasn't moral.
Are condominiums immoral? You pay money to live somewhere, and the condominiums provide service. If you don't want to pay it, move. And if you don't pay, is it immoral for them to evict you?
Yet the government will beat up tax resistors (who haven't left the country). Does that make its offer immoral?
Actually, if the government did try to beat them up, it would be brutality, and I'm pretty sure that the people would then win lots of money in courts.
In the case of tax evaders, they just send them to jail, or confiscate assets, etc. This is fine - those people were trying to reap the benefits of a society without paying the cost. Is it immoral when a restaurant owner asks you to pay the bill? You agreed to the prices when you ordered the food.
Living in a country is like living in a community. You pay for services rendered, and the right to live there. If you don't want to pay, move. There are countries in the world where there are no taxes whatsoever. Go live there, though I doubt you'll find it more moral than any other country.
When the Mafioso offers to "protect" your store, he may also give you the option of moving. Does that make his offer moral?
Yes.
The fact that he will beat you up if you refuse is the immoral part, not the offer.
Dictatorships by themselves aren't immoral, though they have a lot more potential for abuse than democracies.
How is the Mafia example any different than the police? The police extract money from you (via taxes) for "protection". The difference is that the Mafia organization is significantly more corrupt than the police (presumedly!). The offer is perfectly moral.
The point that the quote addressed was whether or not taking money from everyone (taxes) and redistributing it to the poor could be moral. This is a moronic question - of course it is. In order to gain the benefits of a community, you need to pay certain prices. Those prices, inasmuch as they are simply prices for living in the community, are moral, because they're not actions - they're not forced upon people, they're just questions - they're just asked of people.
If he thought it was legal, he would not have offered to license it in the first place.
Licensing is cheaper than reverse engineering. Any sane company with a bottom line will always choose licensing over reverse engineering.
What if Real wanted Apple's drm for free or basicly for free?
Real is a company, not a human being. They care about making money. If they look at Apple's DRM, and decide it will cost $500K to reverse engineer it, then they'll go and talk to Apple about licensing it for less than $500K. Apple will likely agree, and then Real saves money. They're not going to say "we'll only license it for zero!" if Apple says "we'll license it for $400K" because then they'd have to explain to stockholders why they just wasted $100,000.
If Apple thinks that its software is worth more than $500K, then they might try to ask more for it. The problem is that if Real can do it for less (as they obviously did), then Apple is wrong - their software is not worth as much.
But really neither one of us knows what happend behind the doors do we?
I can presume that Real acted like any other company. Apple thought that its technology was worth more than it was - either they asked for too much money, or they thought that Real couldn't duplicate it. They were wrong.
When I say Apple is being a 'jerk', I meant they were being a stupid company. If Real went into negotiations, they obviously knew they could reverse engineer it. And they probably had a guess as to how much it would cost. Apple turning them down was a stupid business move.