Just a thought, but I wonder if it could be possible that humans are genetically disposed to loving cannabis?
Loving is not a very scientific term, but yes, at least a subset of humans are genetically disposed to the effects of THC, just like nicotine, alcohol, etc.
Humans are not genetically disposed to the effects of nitrogen, and tons of other chemicals found in the world.
My bet is that if MJ were legal today, basically the same number of people would use it. The ones that are into it only because its illegal (I'm gansta!) would quit. Some "normal" people would take it up, but a vast majority of the people that use it today illegally would use it legally. Society as a whole would be so much better off.
It sucks that when you get a little older, you have to spend time with people that you really don't want to associate with in order to buy what I consider a commodity product. You have to stay in touch, and be in the know, so you get the good stuff. The amount of time it takes to buy the crap and all of the extra BS just pisses me off because I would like to go to the convenience store and buy it just the same as a 6 pack of beer.
Add in the equasion that I have issues with depression, I'm now on probation for possession of MJ, I'm a guy with a white collar job that works for the government, and I'm basically a law abiding citizen.
Oh, and I prefer high THC MJ over those with CBN and CBD, but I guess its nice that they halt cancer.
I believe they are impractical. I've flown a plane, been in planes, and known people that own planes, and for almost all transportation needs, planes simply suck.
Planes are great for long distance travel (today). Going from say New York City, to London, I would take a plane over walking, swimming, boating, cycling, or anything. A plane is a no brainer for that travel with today's technology.
But traveling by plane 1/4 to 1/2 of the distance across the US, is not as clearly a winner as going from NY to London. Timewise, it takes at least 1/2 to one full day to fly. When you fly, you have to leave behind lots of materials that you might want to take with you. Flying costs go up basically linearly with each passenger (loading up a car actually goes down in cost). Flying is not really that fun. You spend lots of time in overpriced airports with silly things to occupy your time until your connecting flight arrives.
Flying cars? (Didn't read article:) But I'm guessing that the thought here is instead of these ground hugging vehicles, that putting them off the ground would add some value. Well, I guess you would not be bound to the existing roads, you could travel a straight line or a more scenic route, or something, but every day I hear about traffic accidents, traffic jams, road construction, and all of this.
To me, a better way of expending ones efforts is in some kind of mass transit or people mover kind of thing. I'm American, so I have little experience with these things. Cabs, busses, trains, moving sidewalks, trollies, all of these things simply do not exist in much of the US. We drive cars. Many of us now drive unarmored tanks to get to work and to buy things at the store.
I believe that the answers for this is in the educated/research community along with government regulations and forethought. Left up to individuals, if the gas prices here would not keep going up, I would guess that people would be picking up their kids from school and driving to work in M1 tanks or something.
I do not have an answer, but I can speak the question. The question is: What is the best way in terms of cost, speed, and environmental factors to move people and goods from place to place that works well at high volume times (rush hour) AND for those occasional times (like moving, new construction, or whatnot)?
As it stands now, people suck at answering this question, probably because nobody has actually asked it.
Housing insurance is annually lower than car insurance - even with extremely inexpensive car insurance - everywhere I've seen.
And car insurance on very exotic collector cars are on order of $100-200/yr. Insurance on valuables like rare paintings and the like are very inexpensive, and the "insured" value is often at least 2x the actual value.
Fact of the matter is that people wreck mustangs and civics. They don't wreck $400k Mercedes 300 SL. They don't wreck houses either. Most of the time a house is wrecked its from electrical fire (#1 thing they worry about, because its preventable), and then natural disasters and whatnot, and then its rare that the house is totaled. You also have to pay more if you are on flood area, extra for hail insurance, etc.
Also, cars are not designed for wrecks. Sure, some stuff has been put into place for preventing passenger injuries like dropping motors and accordion collapsing of the body. But a simple 3 mpg collision into a static object often yields 2-4k in damage, which is a lot of money.
I mean, here you have a congress, whose ratings are lower than Bush's, trying to get Bush's VP thrown out. At this rate I think Gallup will have a historical first - negative numbers for job approval ratings.
I'm not a government geek, but I believe in parliamentary systems, this is called a failed government, and they give up and start again.
I can't find the word for it, but there I believe that in the parliamentary system, there is a point where they say, lets try this again.
I thought of a bumper sticker to day.
In small letters (imprison)
Bush Cheney 08
80% of the bush/cheney people will cheer, the rest will laugh.
That seems to be a common answer to things, but I don't believe this lives up to the spirit of the patent system.
The spirit is that it is there so that average joe can come up with an idea with protection, and not get squashed by BIG CORP or even the other average joe.
The reality is that I believe that patents are already beyond average joes, and only institutions can afford to apply and _defend_ said patents. The system places the defense of a patent on the patent holder. There are no state, local, or federal patent detectives.
I'm of the opinion that debating about patents is a mute point. The battle has been lost, and its now just a waste of time to worry about. Its a game of lawyers and money now.
When I first read the headline, I thought "Gentleman, start your lawyers!".
I know NetApps and I know ZFS. All in all, I think NetApps are OK, but over expensive for what they are. When someone buys a NetApp and their expensive support, they are buying something that "works", and they don't care about WAFL, the CPUs in the box, how much RAM it has, or any of that.
ZFS is an open source software product, and its great. At this time, AFAIK, its used for the x4500 file servers as an optional features. Many people run Linux on the x4500s as part of a Lustre filesystem (which Sun just bought as well).
I've used both NetApps and ZFS and they are not competing products. Well, _maybe_ they would be competing products if they were in the same price range, but I see NetApps as a black box NAS, and ZFS as a software option.
These decisions are complex. Power, staff requirements, taxes, the local bar scene, where the boss's mistress lives, etc. All of these are real variables when making a decision like this. Some are openly discussed, some are not.
This mantra is repeated all the time, but I can tell you from people who live in the suburbs that do not drive in the US in 2007 -- well they are essentially handicapped.
I don't want to drive. I would rather teleport or be driven around with other people so that I could socialize with them while traveling, or I would like to have a driver on my staff drive me to work in my limo.
Driving is basically a necessity. Not a privilege, nor a right.
Why does the government spend so much time on infrastructure and regulations for driving? Do they go out of their way for my other priviledges?
To put it in perspective, the government does other things like provide a police force and fire department. They also provide sanitation and sewer. Are all of these things priveledges too?
they'll figure out how important PCs are once they want to start designing those video games, cell phones, PDAs, etc.
None of those could exist without the PC.
I think the days of home PCs are numbered. Considering that cell phones and PDAs are now more powerful than "supercomputers" from 30 years ago, I see a dedicated box called a "PC" will dissolve, and instead the functionality will evolved into other devices.
I have a powerful computer at my house that I rent from my cable TV company. It has something like a 120 GB harddrive, a RISC processor, a clock that automatically changes with DST rules. It records audio and video. Has a GUI that is easy to navigate from my couch with about 10 buttons on a remote control. Anyway, my point is that its a computer, but nobody calls it a computer they call it a digital recorder, a cable box, a PVR or a DVR.
Video game consoles, cell phones, PDAs are computers, but people don't call those computers.
I see this trend increasing, where standalone computers will simply be a thing of the past, and their functionality will just be integrated into other things.
Actually, what is a "computer" anyway? A home PC seems to be some kind of box with video and audio for output to the human, and a keyboard and pointing device for the human to input to the computer. My DVR is not perceived as a "computer" because it does not have a keyboard or pointing device.
So, once we figure out how to get rid of this archaic technology called a keyboard and a mouse for input from a human into the device, then the computer as we know it is gone.
Because most rational and intelligent people understand the difference between killing and murder. Sorry you don't have the intellectual capacity to fit into the rational and intelligent category.
If I terminate your life while you are attempting to shoot children on a playground, that is killing in defense of others.
OK, but odds are if you were found by the police with a gun around a playground with that intent, you would probably end up in jail.
If I terminate your life because you are suffering horribly from terminal cancer, that is killing for mercy.
That is illegal in 48 or 49 states in the US.
If I terminate your life after buying a big life insurance policy on you, that is murder.
That is also a very small minority of murders.
Yes, there is a difference between killing and murder. Also, most presidents are at most guilty of conspiracy to commit murder or similar, not direct murder.
I'm a little strange in that I kinda think murder should be legal. There are too many people on the planet, so why is culling the herd a bad thing?
Bear with me. Most murders are dumb. Its usually one lowlife knocking off another. I say make it legal to knock off the surviving lowlife and get on with it.
Serial murders are very rare, and no law is going to stop a serial murderer. I say knock them off and get on with it.
Many other murders are within families. That one is more difficult, but again, no law is going to stop such a thing.
Keep in mind that all murders are not created equal as it stands. Murdering a policeman or an elected government official is a different crime than your standard killing and ditching of a prostitute. There is also manslaughter, where it was not the intent to kill someone, but it happens.
Personally, I would not feel any less safe if murder was not illegal. Would you? If so, maybe you should change your lifestyle.
you still only stole 24 candybars. Your penalty should be based on what you actually did, not the defence strategy.
To make this a little more parallel, its worth mentioning that the store that sold the candy bars also was found liable in a class action lawsuit for price fixing of said candy bars for years.
Here is a PDF for the filing where 29 states and territories took the likes of record companies and retail outlets to court for "under the laws of the United States and of the States to recover damages suffered by the States' consumers resulting from illegal price-fixing agreements between each of the defendant labels and distributors of prerecorded music (including compact discs ("CDs"), cassettes and albums) and certain traditional retailers."
The companies did not win in the case.
Kinda reminds me of the Cops episode where someone called the cops because they got ripped off in a crack deal and the buyer only got plaster instead of crack.
So it's a rip off, so don't buy it. That doesn't give you the right to break the law by copying it without permission.
Everyone in the US is breaking the law to some degree. Breaking the law is orthogonal to rights, morals, etc. OK, it may not be completely orthogonal, but they are not the same thing. In my area, exotic pets like rabbits, snakes, etc, are illegal, but they sell them in the stores. Nobody cares, but if the police get bored one day, they might start busting people for it. In most of the states in the US, sex is practically illegal. I've even heard where a husband sued his wife because she never had sex with him, and she was found guilty of something.
The thing is that there is supply and demand and a free market, and using things like extortion and racketeering and whatnot used to be things that "bad guys" like the mafia used to do, but today this is a new business model, and I think its in our right to pick and choose the most affordable and convenient way to obtain music.
Look at television. Its subsidized by ads _AND_ people are willing to pay extra to have a wire installed in their house to get extra stuff. Today, that is a viable business model, and it works. Sure people "steal" stuff that is broadcast for free over the air and redistribute it for free, but its not their agenda to make their business model by fear and lawsuits.
The music industry simply has not established a good or a service in over a decade. I guess there is satellite radio, but compared to TV/movies where I can choose between renting, on demand, some internet streaming/downloads, over the air, cable or satellite. What kinds of options are there for music?
Music is slightly different than TV/movies, but the thing is that its a commodity item that can be sold at a market price just like anything else, and the industry simply has not come up with a way to make money off of the stuff, and its their job as business people to come up with a viable business model or they simply go out of business. There is no right to make money.
I've known a person who owned a retail outlet in a college town for selling music, and they went out of business. They said it was OK. They said it was due to downloads, and it was OK, and that times have changed. I don't know any blacksmiths or coppersmiths today either. Nor have I heard of them gathering together and suing for their right to work with iron or copper.
Times change. People want music, that is clear. These people simply need to figure out a method of distribution that works today, or else they simply need to find a new job.
At first, I thought WTF???? Why would someone break into a data center.
Then, I thought about it, and being that a datacenter has more supposedly valuable stuff that you can pick up and leave with _and_ you have an easy time to sell it, well, I'm only surprised that this is not a daily occurrence.
In the "information age", what is more valuable than information? And the price/pound or volume makes information orders of magnitude more valuable than gold, art or even money itself.
It almost makes sense when you think about it, but there is a rational side of me that says that this makes no sense.
I wonder how many users will just end up drawing Stars, Hearts, and Smiley Faces?
Then we well end up with the draconian rules like passwords are today.
A "good" password is long, not an easy pattern on a keyboard, uses mixed case with numbers and special characters, and not based on anything else in existence like a name or word.
For one of these pictionary passwords would have to be "secure" they would have to be something as complex as a Salvador Dali painting.
The strokes could be stored e.g. as an xml file, and then we would get a hash of that file. So storing is not a problem, we can do it pretty much the same way passwords are stored.
I don't think that would be possible. When dealing with authentication techniques like this, there is an algorithm and a score that the human gets on a test with some kind of threshold for pass or fail.
When I sign something, its never really the same twice. Storing an absolute hash of my signature would not work.
I think its amazing that for years nobody has come up with a way to easily and reliably see who a person is with respect to a computer. Some of it is due to human nature in that people want it to be a challenge for privacy reasons. Its absolutely nuts. What is really nuts is that there is no way to keep oneself credentailized.
I'm with the billions of people before me, and I don't have an answer.
TJ: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Slashdot guy: This tends to be the eventual result when a government goes down the path of tyranny (or at least what a significant portion of the population believes is tyranny).
I know this is controversial, but I believe that McVeigh to be a patriot/tyrant who actually was better for the people than its popularly believed. Kinda like how parasites/plagues are good for a population. Its complicated.
With the Oklahoma bombing thing, its interesting that there are absolutely zero changes in anything that specifically led to that bombing. Its just as easy today to get rental vans, diesel and fertilizer than it was before this incident.
However, today, its much more difficult to travel on a plane or to buy a chemistry kit.
Now, lets think about what is different here. The government can implant tyrany and fear into more people via travel restrictions and chemistry kits than they could ever do with rental vans, dieslel, and fertilizer.
So, in summary, the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks were a net gain for the government, and the Oklahoma terrorist attack was a net gain for the people.
i think probing monkeys is what maths all about, seems to be populur among the human populos
Actually, this seems to be popular with European based human monkeys. Psychology does not seem that interesting with say Asians and Africans like it does with these Europeans. But then again, I'm a european based monkey and I like psychology.
From the summary:
For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one.
One thing that I like about psychology is that it is a _very_ hard subject to do scientifically. Variation within and among subjects. Confounding variables due to biology and social learning. The list goes on and on.
Now, of course I didn't read the real article here, but brain cells that respond to the number 3 but not the number one could be due to the fact that 3 looks more like an edible bug than a 1 does.
I also read about a society of human monkeys that simply suck at math. Even very basic math. This society has no language for basic math terms like few or many. Math was such a non-issue in their society which altered their brains as they developed, that chimpanzees on average are better at math than these humans. Chimps can do basic math on quantities less than 10.
One of my favorite quotes by a psychologist goes something like "We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully". I think that sums up most of psychological research to date. Until we have more advanced simulations and whatnot, psychology is still at its infancy in terms of a science much like biology was until recently.
Speak for yourself. I use whois every day. It's invaluable.
Really? Can someone elaborate on its usefulness? I gave up on it years ago. (also, I simply don't need to know this info anymore)
When I was a SPAM vigalante, I would do whois lookups, and usually the information was clearly bogus. Often, if the info was not bogus, it was outdated. And I've heard from many people that are legitimate people doing legitimate things with their hostnames that would never give real information for whois lookups because they simply don't want to be the target of SPAMers or whatever else could come from having any personal information laying around for some random person to have fun with.
I would never put accurate or relavant info into a whois lookup, and I don't expect anyone else to do so either. Nothing good can come from it, unless maybe you hold the killer domain and you hope someone will try to buy it from you.
I also lie about any personal info to protect my privacy, unless there is something explicity beneficial for me for someone else to have relevant info. I also tell all of the door to door sales people trying to sell me some crap for my house that I rent. They immediately say "Oh", and walk away. I also pay extra to have my phone number unlisted.
I'm still on some lists, but not that many. And the fewer the better.
These are big companies, what if one of the competitors slips them a few thousand grand under the table for a peek at your customer database which is conveniently hosted on the website. Companies did this in the old days between each other to compile junk mailing lists and telemarketer calling numbers.
I understand the point, but today most companies openly sell their data to each other.
I had some people visiting from another country living in my house, and they did something wrong when they lived with me, because years later they still get offers for credit cards. They worked at the same place and had the same bank, but one gets 2x the mail that the other one does, so he must have done something different.
No. Supercomputer is a specific term with a specific speed attached, and has been since the word was coined in the 1970s. The word is backed by law, because of export restrictions. A supercomputer can perform a trillion floating point operations per second (one teraflop,) which was a goal that was difficult at government scale in the 1970s, and is now not all that big a deal.
2007, October: about $0.20 per GFLOPS with the cheapest retail Sony PS3 console, at US$400, that runs at a claimed 2 teraFLOPS; these figures represent the processing power of the GPU. The seven CPUs run collectively at a lower 218 GFLOPS.
I don't understand the play by play of each sale of Vista. The above is a fairly relevant question. Along with the summary "they brag about how much money they made last quarter". That is the bottom line. Most computers come with Microsoft software, even if the user does not intend to use the software. At work, most of the desktop and laptops PCs come with windows preinstalled (~90+%), and we either put Linux on them or a site licensed version of Windows XP.
Where I work, like 70 or more percent of the users prefer Linux as the OS. So, today in 2007, regardless of whether we use Windows or Linux, Microsoft gets a cut. How does Vista even come into the picture?
Another thing is that desktop OSes have stagnated. AFAIK, there is nothing significantly different between Windows 2000 and Vista (I'm not a Windows person, so give me some leeway here). That is 7 years of supposed progress. Sure there may be driver updates, and I believe that directX for games is limited on 2k, but the core features are about the same.
My point is that MS has to keep doing _something_ to stay somewhat current, but when it comes down to it, they have established themselves almost like the government in that they simply get a cut of everything anyone does. So Vista might be like Bob or ME. They are still in business.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a thought, but I wonder if it could be possible that humans are genetically disposed to loving cannabis?
Loving is not a very scientific term, but yes, at least a subset of humans are genetically disposed to the effects of THC, just like nicotine, alcohol, etc.
Humans are not genetically disposed to the effects of nitrogen, and tons of other chemicals found in the world.
My bet is that if MJ were legal today, basically the same number of people would use it. The ones that are into it only because its illegal (I'm gansta!) would quit. Some "normal" people would take it up, but a vast majority of the people that use it today illegally would use it legally. Society as a whole would be so much better off.
It sucks that when you get a little older, you have to spend time with people that you really don't want to associate with in order to buy what I consider a commodity product. You have to stay in touch, and be in the know, so you get the good stuff. The amount of time it takes to buy the crap and all of the extra BS just pisses me off because I would like to go to the convenience store and buy it just the same as a 6 pack of beer.
Add in the equasion that I have issues with depression, I'm now on probation for possession of MJ, I'm a guy with a white collar job that works for the government, and I'm basically a law abiding citizen.
Oh, and I prefer high THC MJ over those with CBN and CBD, but I guess its nice that they halt cancer.
You don't have those users?
I tell those users to use the shredder to get rid of those things.
Flying cars aren't really impractical
:) But I'm guessing that the thought here is instead of these ground hugging vehicles, that putting them off the ground would add some value. Well, I guess you would not be bound to the existing roads, you could travel a straight line or a more scenic route, or something, but every day I hear about traffic accidents, traffic jams, road construction, and all of this.
I believe they are impractical. I've flown a plane, been in planes, and known people that own planes, and for almost all transportation needs, planes simply suck.
Planes are great for long distance travel (today). Going from say New York City, to London, I would take a plane over walking, swimming, boating, cycling, or anything. A plane is a no brainer for that travel with today's technology.
But traveling by plane 1/4 to 1/2 of the distance across the US, is not as clearly a winner as going from NY to London. Timewise, it takes at least 1/2 to one full day to fly. When you fly, you have to leave behind lots of materials that you might want to take with you. Flying costs go up basically linearly with each passenger (loading up a car actually goes down in cost). Flying is not really that fun. You spend lots of time in overpriced airports with silly things to occupy your time until your connecting flight arrives.
Flying cars? (Didn't read article
To me, a better way of expending ones efforts is in some kind of mass transit or people mover kind of thing. I'm American, so I have little experience with these things. Cabs, busses, trains, moving sidewalks, trollies, all of these things simply do not exist in much of the US. We drive cars. Many of us now drive unarmored tanks to get to work and to buy things at the store.
I believe that the answers for this is in the educated/research community along with government regulations and forethought. Left up to individuals, if the gas prices here would not keep going up, I would guess that people would be picking up their kids from school and driving to work in M1 tanks or something.
I do not have an answer, but I can speak the question. The question is: What is the best way in terms of cost, speed, and environmental factors to move people and goods from place to place that works well at high volume times (rush hour) AND for those occasional times (like moving, new construction, or whatnot)?
As it stands now, people suck at answering this question, probably because nobody has actually asked it.
Housing insurance is annually lower than car insurance - even with extremely inexpensive car insurance - everywhere I've seen.
And car insurance on very exotic collector cars are on order of $100-200/yr. Insurance on valuables like rare paintings and the like are very inexpensive, and the "insured" value is often at least 2x the actual value.
Fact of the matter is that people wreck mustangs and civics. They don't wreck $400k Mercedes 300 SL. They don't wreck houses either. Most of the time a house is wrecked its from electrical fire (#1 thing they worry about, because its preventable), and then natural disasters and whatnot, and then its rare that the house is totaled. You also have to pay more if you are on flood area, extra for hail insurance, etc.
Also, cars are not designed for wrecks. Sure, some stuff has been put into place for preventing passenger injuries like dropping motors and accordion collapsing of the body. But a simple 3 mpg collision into a static object often yields 2-4k in damage, which is a lot of money.
I mean, here you have a congress, whose ratings are lower than Bush's, trying to get Bush's VP thrown out.
At this rate I think Gallup will have a historical first - negative numbers for job approval ratings.
I'm not a government geek, but I believe in parliamentary systems, this is called a failed government, and they give up and start again.
I can't find the word for it, but there I believe that in the parliamentary system, there is a point where they say, lets try this again.
I thought of a bumper sticker to day.
In small letters (imprison)
Bush Cheney 08
80% of the bush/cheney people will cheer, the rest will laugh.
Or, raise patent fees
That seems to be a common answer to things, but I don't believe this lives up to the spirit of the patent system.
The spirit is that it is there so that average joe can come up with an idea with protection, and not get squashed by BIG CORP or even the other average joe.
The reality is that I believe that patents are already beyond average joes, and only institutions can afford to apply and _defend_ said patents. The system places the defense of a patent on the patent holder. There are no state, local, or federal patent detectives.
I'm of the opinion that debating about patents is a mute point. The battle has been lost, and its now just a waste of time to worry about. Its a game of lawyers and money now.
When I first read the headline, I thought "Gentleman, start your lawyers!".
I know NetApps and I know ZFS. All in all, I think NetApps are OK, but over expensive for what they are. When someone buys a NetApp and their expensive support, they are buying something that "works", and they don't care about WAFL, the CPUs in the box, how much RAM it has, or any of that.
ZFS is an open source software product, and its great. At this time, AFAIK, its used for the x4500 file servers as an optional features. Many people run Linux on the x4500s as part of a Lustre filesystem (which Sun just bought as well).
I've used both NetApps and ZFS and they are not competing products. Well, _maybe_ they would be competing products if they were in the same price range, but I see NetApps as a black box NAS, and ZFS as a software option.
Insightful? Please, RTFA.
I second that.
These decisions are complex. Power, staff requirements, taxes, the local bar scene, where the boss's mistress lives, etc. All of these are real variables when making a decision like this. Some are openly discussed, some are not.
Driving is a privilage, not a right.
This mantra is repeated all the time, but I can tell you from people who live in the suburbs that do not drive in the US in 2007 -- well they are essentially handicapped.
I don't want to drive. I would rather teleport or be driven around with other people so that I could socialize with them while traveling, or I would like to have a driver on my staff drive me to work in my limo.
Driving is basically a necessity. Not a privilege, nor a right.
Why does the government spend so much time on infrastructure and regulations for driving? Do they go out of their way for my other priviledges?
To put it in perspective, the government does other things like provide a police force and fire department. They also provide sanitation and sewer. Are all of these things priveledges too?
they'll figure out how important PCs are once they want to start designing those video games, cell phones, PDAs, etc.
None of those could exist without the PC.
I think the days of home PCs are numbered. Considering that cell phones and PDAs are now more powerful than "supercomputers" from 30 years ago, I see a dedicated box called a "PC" will dissolve, and instead the functionality will evolved into other devices.
I have a powerful computer at my house that I rent from my cable TV company. It has something like a 120 GB harddrive, a RISC processor, a clock that automatically changes with DST rules. It records audio and video. Has a GUI that is easy to navigate from my couch with about 10 buttons on a remote control. Anyway, my point is that its a computer, but nobody calls it a computer they call it a digital recorder, a cable box, a PVR or a DVR.
Video game consoles, cell phones, PDAs are computers, but people don't call those computers.
I see this trend increasing, where standalone computers will simply be a thing of the past, and their functionality will just be integrated into other things.
Actually, what is a "computer" anyway? A home PC seems to be some kind of box with video and audio for output to the human, and a keyboard and pointing device for the human to input to the computer. My DVR is not perceived as a "computer" because it does not have a keyboard or pointing device.
So, once we figure out how to get rid of this archaic technology called a keyboard and a mouse for input from a human into the device, then the computer as we know it is gone.
The NY Times is free where you live? We have to pay for it around here.
Around here the NY times is in the library. For free, if you don't pay taxes.
We live in a funny world. The better you are at stuff, the less stuff you have to do, and the more you get paid for it.
Most of the highest paying people I know of do things like sending emails and talking to people either in person or on the phone all day long.
Because most rational and intelligent people understand the difference between killing and murder. Sorry you don't have the intellectual capacity to fit into the rational and intelligent category.
If I terminate your life while you are attempting to shoot children on a playground, that is killing in defense of others.
OK, but odds are if you were found by the police with a gun around a playground with that intent, you would probably end up in jail.
If I terminate your life because you are suffering horribly from terminal cancer, that is killing for mercy.
That is illegal in 48 or 49 states in the US.
If I terminate your life after buying a big life insurance policy on you, that is murder.
That is also a very small minority of murders.
Yes, there is a difference between killing and murder. Also, most presidents are at most guilty of conspiracy to commit murder or similar, not direct murder.
I'm a little strange in that I kinda think murder should be legal. There are too many people on the planet, so why is culling the herd a bad thing?
Bear with me. Most murders are dumb. Its usually one lowlife knocking off another. I say make it legal to knock off the surviving lowlife and get on with it.
Serial murders are very rare, and no law is going to stop a serial murderer. I say knock them off and get on with it.
Many other murders are within families. That one is more difficult, but again, no law is going to stop such a thing.
Keep in mind that all murders are not created equal as it stands. Murdering a policeman or an elected government official is a different crime than your standard killing and ditching of a prostitute. There is also manslaughter, where it was not the intent to kill someone, but it happens.
Personally, I would not feel any less safe if murder was not illegal. Would you? If so, maybe you should change your lifestyle.
Google is *NOT* a search company, they are an advertising company.
Just like NBC, the NY Times, and radio stations.
Got it.
$200,000 is way excessive.
But for those who would say that she's not guilty - too late for that. Legally, she is.
You now owe $400,000 for mistaking the difference between guilt and liability.
you still only stole 24 candybars. Your penalty should be based on what you actually did, not the defence strategy.
To make this a little more parallel, its worth mentioning that the store that sold the candy bars also was found liable in a class action lawsuit for price fixing of said candy bars for years.
Here is a PDF for the filing where 29 states and territories took the likes of record companies and retail outlets to court for "under the laws of the United States and of the States to recover damages suffered by the States'
consumers resulting from illegal price-fixing agreements between each of the defendant labels and distributors of prerecorded music (including compact discs ("CDs"), cassettes and albums) and certain traditional retailers."
The companies did not win in the case.
Kinda reminds me of the Cops episode where someone called the cops because they got ripped off in a crack deal and the buyer only got plaster instead of crack.
So it's a rip off, so don't buy it. That doesn't give you the right to break the law by copying it without permission.
Everyone in the US is breaking the law to some degree. Breaking the law is orthogonal to rights, morals, etc. OK, it may not be completely orthogonal, but they are not the same thing. In my area, exotic pets like rabbits, snakes, etc, are illegal, but they sell them in the stores. Nobody cares, but if the police get bored one day, they might start busting people for it. In most of the states in the US, sex is practically illegal. I've even heard where a husband sued his wife because she never had sex with him, and she was found guilty of something.
The thing is that there is supply and demand and a free market, and using things like extortion and racketeering and whatnot used to be things that "bad guys" like the mafia used to do, but today this is a new business model, and I think its in our right to pick and choose the most affordable and convenient way to obtain music.
Look at television. Its subsidized by ads _AND_ people are willing to pay extra to have a wire installed in their house to get extra stuff. Today, that is a viable business model, and it works. Sure people "steal" stuff that is broadcast for free over the air and redistribute it for free, but its not their agenda to make their business model by fear and lawsuits.
The music industry simply has not established a good or a service in over a decade. I guess there is satellite radio, but compared to TV/movies where I can choose between renting, on demand, some internet streaming/downloads, over the air, cable or satellite. What kinds of options are there for music?
Music is slightly different than TV/movies, but the thing is that its a commodity item that can be sold at a market price just like anything else, and the industry simply has not come up with a way to make money off of the stuff, and its their job as business people to come up with a viable business model or they simply go out of business. There is no right to make money.
I've known a person who owned a retail outlet in a college town for selling music, and they went out of business. They said it was OK. They said it was due to downloads, and it was OK, and that times have changed. I don't know any blacksmiths or coppersmiths today either. Nor have I heard of them gathering together and suing for their right to work with iron or copper.
Times change. People want music, that is clear. These people simply need to figure out a method of distribution that works today, or else they simply need to find a new job.
At first, I thought WTF???? Why would someone break into a data center.
Then, I thought about it, and being that a datacenter has more supposedly valuable stuff that you can pick up and leave with _and_ you have an easy time to sell it, well, I'm only surprised that this is not a daily occurrence.
In the "information age", what is more valuable than information? And the price/pound or volume makes information orders of magnitude more valuable than gold, art or even money itself.
It almost makes sense when you think about it, but there is a rational side of me that says that this makes no sense.
My head is about to explode.
I wonder how many users will just end up drawing Stars, Hearts, and Smiley Faces?
Then we well end up with the draconian rules like passwords are today.
A "good" password is long, not an easy pattern on a keyboard, uses mixed case with numbers and special characters, and not based on anything else in existence like a name or word.
For one of these pictionary passwords would have to be "secure" they would have to be something as complex as a Salvador Dali painting.
The strokes could be stored e.g. as an xml file, and then we would get a hash of that file. So storing is not a problem, we can do it pretty much the same way passwords are stored.
I don't think that would be possible. When dealing with authentication techniques like this, there is an algorithm and a score that the human gets on a test with some kind of threshold for pass or fail.
When I sign something, its never really the same twice. Storing an absolute hash of my signature would not work.
I think its amazing that for years nobody has come up with a way to easily and reliably see who a person is with respect to a computer. Some of it is due to human nature in that people want it to be a challenge for privacy reasons. Its absolutely nuts. What is really nuts is that there is no way to keep oneself credentailized.
I'm with the billions of people before me, and I don't have an answer.
TJ: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Slashdot guy: This tends to be the eventual result when a government goes down the path of tyranny (or at least what a significant portion of the population believes is tyranny).
I know this is controversial, but I believe that McVeigh to be a patriot/tyrant who actually was better for the people than its popularly believed. Kinda like how parasites/plagues are good for a population. Its complicated.
With the Oklahoma bombing thing, its interesting that there are absolutely zero changes in anything that specifically led to that bombing. Its just as easy today to get rental vans, diesel and fertilizer than it was before this incident.
However, today, its much more difficult to travel on a plane or to buy a chemistry kit.
Now, lets think about what is different here. The government can implant tyrany and fear into more people via travel restrictions and chemistry kits than they could ever do with rental vans, dieslel, and fertilizer.
So, in summary, the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks were a net gain for the government, and the Oklahoma terrorist attack was a net gain for the people.
Kinda screwed up, now isn't it?
i think probing monkeys is what maths all about, seems to be populur among the human populos
Actually, this seems to be popular with European based human monkeys. Psychology does not seem that interesting with say Asians and Africans like it does with these Europeans. But then again, I'm a european based monkey and I like psychology.
From the summary:
For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one.
One thing that I like about psychology is that it is a _very_ hard subject to do scientifically. Variation within and among subjects. Confounding variables due to biology and social learning. The list goes on and on.
Now, of course I didn't read the real article here, but brain cells that respond to the number 3 but not the number one could be due to the fact that 3 looks more like an edible bug than a 1 does.
I also read about a society of human monkeys that simply suck at math. Even very basic math. This society has no language for basic math terms like few or many. Math was such a non-issue in their society which altered their brains as they developed, that chimpanzees on average are better at math than these humans. Chimps can do basic math on quantities less than 10.
One of my favorite quotes by a psychologist goes something like "We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully". I think that sums up most of psychological research to date. Until we have more advanced simulations and whatnot, psychology is still at its infancy in terms of a science much like biology was until recently.
Speak for yourself. I use whois every day. It's invaluable.
Really? Can someone elaborate on its usefulness? I gave up on it years ago. (also, I simply don't need to know this info anymore)
When I was a SPAM vigalante, I would do whois lookups, and usually the information was clearly bogus. Often, if the info was not bogus, it was outdated. And I've heard from many people that are legitimate people doing legitimate things with their hostnames that would never give real information for whois lookups because they simply don't want to be the target of SPAMers or whatever else could come from having any personal information laying around for some random person to have fun with.
I would never put accurate or relavant info into a whois lookup, and I don't expect anyone else to do so either. Nothing good can come from it, unless maybe you hold the killer domain and you hope someone will try to buy it from you.
I also lie about any personal info to protect my privacy, unless there is something explicity beneficial for me for someone else to have relevant info. I also tell all of the door to door sales people trying to sell me some crap for my house that I rent. They immediately say "Oh", and walk away. I also pay extra to have my phone number unlisted.
I'm still on some lists, but not that many. And the fewer the better.
These are big companies, what if one of the competitors slips them a few thousand grand under the table for a peek at your customer database which is conveniently hosted on the website. Companies did this in the old days between each other to compile junk mailing lists and telemarketer calling numbers.
I understand the point, but today most companies openly sell their data to each other.
I had some people visiting from another country living in my house, and they did something wrong when they lived with me, because years later they still get offers for credit cards. They worked at the same place and had the same bank, but one gets 2x the mail that the other one does, so he must have done something different.
No. Supercomputer is a specific term with a specific speed attached, and has been since the word was coined in the 1970s. The word is backed by law, because of export restrictions. A supercomputer can perform a trillion floating point operations per second (one teraflop,) which was a goal that was difficult at government scale in the 1970s, and is now not all that big a deal.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS :
2007, October: about $0.20 per GFLOPS with the cheapest retail Sony PS3 console, at US$400, that runs at a claimed 2 teraFLOPS; these figures represent the processing power of the GPU. The seven CPUs run collectively at a lower 218 GFLOPS.
Supercomputing is a relative thing.
You know what the best way to accelerate Vista is? 9.8 meters per second per second.
Throwing things on the floor go much faster than 9.8 m/s^2.
With respect to the story at hand. We already have handheld supercomputers.
The Cray 1 was about 100 MFLOPS. Most all cell phones and PDAs CPUs can outperform that.
I work with "supercomputers", and all I see them as are new, expensive, unreliable, and energy inefficient versions of laptops and things.
In the same spirit, some people in the biz call these things time machines. They are just previews of things to come.
What about sales of Windows XP?
I don't understand the play by play of each sale of Vista. The above is a fairly relevant question. Along with the summary "they brag about how much money they made last quarter". That is the bottom line. Most computers come with Microsoft software, even if the user does not intend to use the software. At work, most of the desktop and laptops PCs come with windows preinstalled (~90+%), and we either put Linux on them or a site licensed version of Windows XP.
Where I work, like 70 or more percent of the users prefer Linux as the OS. So, today in 2007, regardless of whether we use Windows or Linux, Microsoft gets a cut. How does Vista even come into the picture?
Another thing is that desktop OSes have stagnated. AFAIK, there is nothing significantly different between Windows 2000 and Vista (I'm not a Windows person, so give me some leeway here). That is 7 years of supposed progress. Sure there may be driver updates, and I believe that directX for games is limited on 2k, but the core features are about the same.
My point is that MS has to keep doing _something_ to stay somewhat current, but when it comes down to it, they have established themselves almost like the government in that they simply get a cut of everything anyone does. So Vista might be like Bob or ME. They are still in business.