People who vote for third party candidates are people who don't give a shit who will run the country.
What a bunch of hyperbolic bullshit. There are many of good reasons to vote third party, and many circumstances where doing so is not a waste of your vote. If a certain candidate has a significant lead in my voting area, then my vote doesn't matter in determining who wins the election anyway. So why shouldn't I for my favorite candidate, regardless of their party?
"Reps and Dems are the same for all intents and purposes." I think the last election proved once and for all just exactly how misguided and wrong this sentiment is.
You are right that they are very different, but that doesn't mean that either of them is good. If I think that both candidates are equally bad, even if they are bad in different manners, then it doesn't really make any sense to vote for either of them.
If you look through history, you will see that both major parties have changed substantially as societal views changed, and voting third party is a very effective way of letting them know that they no longer are in sync with my viewpoints. In past situations where the major parties did not change, third parties indeed replaced them. Furthermore, it is not unheard of to have third party candidates elected in state government today.
In fact, the only time that it makes sense to vote for the lesser of two evils rather than my favorite candidate is when A) one of the two leading candidates is significantly worse than the other B) I live in a voting district which has a chance of casting it's vote for the lesser of the two evils C) the overall race is close enough that the result of my voting district could make a difference in the overal results. All other times I vote for my favorite candidate, which is sometimes third party, sometime major party.
In my particular situation, all three do apply so I do plan on voting for a major party in this presidential election. But saying that I don't give a shit about my country because I vote third party most of the time is pure garbage.
I have registered for NYT about a dozen times now, and I don't plan on ever doing it again. Everytime I have to pick an increasingly random username which I will never remember, and which will be lost as soon as I clear my cookies, not to mention that I use 5 computers, with a total of 11 browsers, which each keeps it own cookies. And don't even try to talk me into using a full blown password management system just for something as stupid as this. It's not worth the damn hassle just to read something that is likely just a paraphrase of reuters anyway.
But I agree the jokes are stupid. The submitter should spend 2 minutes and find a news source that doesn't require the registration, it's not like they don't exist, and aren't covering the exact same stories.
Unless, of course, they propose to make the level designation open-ended, which means that in 10 years, level 22 would be the midrange.
That never stopped Dragonball Z ! I am all for this idea if it brings the turbo button is back! I can see it now: "Behold my computer powering up to super-sayan... anytime now... it's getting there... talk smack at it will go faster... wait where are you going, it's almost ready... hey why did the whole city go black".
I don't think that this is just the fault of the patent system, it is a flaw in the legal system, and it is a flaw in the community. Where patents are demonstratedly wrong, it should be easier for small companies or individuals to challenge that bad patent
I strongly disagree. This is a problem with the patent system, because there is no acceptable method for determining when a patent is "wrong". The qualification that they patent office uses now whether there is prior art. But it truely is difficult to determine whether something qualifies as prior art because it is valid to build off of prior art to create a patentable work. This is necissary because everything is built upon older ideas, but makes the patent system difficult because you can argue that any idea you have is an extention of the prior art, not a duplicate of it, and thus your patent is valid. Besides even if we did get rid of all the patents that had prior art, we would still be left with a bunch of stupid ones.
Everyone on slashdot keeps arguing that we should use a different qualification whcih only allows "non-trivial", or "meaningfull" advances to be patented. But those are subjective terms and what one person thinks is genious is obvious to another, especially given the differences between foresight and hindsight. People say we should create a "non-baised" panel of industry experts to advise the patent office, but as soon as these people have the power to decide the fate of a patent - which will have huge financial impacts for the companies filing them - the panel will quickly become highly political and biased.
Copyright works because every creative work is unique, and copyright only gives control of that specific creative work, so you can hand out copyrights to everyone without impeding everyone else. Patents, on the other hand restrict ideas which by their very nature are not unique. Handing them out to everyone who asks is intollerable as it greatly restricts the ability of others to independently develop thier own ideas and products. Therefore, the success of the patent system is dependant on a beurocracy to determine what is a "good" patent and what is a "bad" patent. IMHO, this makes it inherently flawed and unfixable.
In theory I think the emissions are supposed to be mostly cold water.
That is not correct at all. What you are burning are hydrocarbons. Since this is just a chemical reaction, you must have carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (plus whatever other additives/impurities are in the fuel/air) in the output. I suppose it might be theoretically possible to end up with just carbon dioxide and water if you had completely pure fuel, pumped in pure oxygen instead of air (mostly nitrogen), and had 100% complete combustion.
The exhaust from modern low-emission cars is already clean enough for health purposes. Production of the main environmental concern, carbon dioxide, is impossible to prevent, although I suppose you could develop something to capture and convert it (like a synthetic plant).
Lastly IC engines look vastly inefficient when compared to a mythical 100% efficient machine, but they are certainly the most efficent ones capable of doing the job that needs to be done.
Graphic proccessing is one of the places where the speed is needed. Yes computers have gotten 1000 times faster but modern GUIs do 1000 times more graphics computations than they use to. Concider the fact that every single gtk/gnome widget drawn on your screen uses this library (yay themes) and it becomes apparrent that it has to be written for speed, so going to a high level language is not an option. There are many other reasons that GTK uses C, the main one being that while everyone is moving to high level languages, they are all moving to different ones. Therefore, GTK has to be written in C since that is what all the other languages can link against.
Second, it likely wasn't that they intentionally left out checks on purpose for speed, but just missed one - probably weren't think about someone attempting to DOS thier graphics library. It happens when you write code. I am a decent programmer and have never found an integer overflow or memory access error in any C code I wrote (after shipping it), but I am not arrogant enough to think that there are not any in there waiting to be discovered. It isn't insightfull to say that if everyone programmmed perfectly then we wouldn't have any bugs - it is unrealistic.
Lastly, even if you did use a high level language, the programmer that overlooked thisp problem in C would still overlook it in the higher level lanugage as well. It would likely result in an uncaught exception, and the program would likely terminate. So this would still be a bug - just not a security hole, since it couldn't result in executing arbitrary code.
Higher level lanugagues can help make a program more secure, and are a good idea for that reason. But as long as human beings are the ones writting code, mistakes and oversights will happen, and patches are something you will have to learn to live with.
Since the YRO section was originally created it has been posting stories about "technology and your rights". Every story I have read fits that qualification. Every story I have read has met the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" qualification. Every story that I have read has generated interesting discussion among readers of this site who do care about these issues.
So basically what your entire complaint boils down to is the pedantic fact that they could have chosen a better title than YRO. Give it a rest - if you're not interested don't read it. Until then, I will continue to mod down any posts complaining about "relevence" of a story. I don't care whether the poster is intentionally karma-whoring, trolling, or just being off-topic, these posts increase the signal/noise ratio for those who are interested in the story, and thus should be moderated down.
Uhm, they have gone down. Of course that is completely unrealated, and the real answer to your question is that these settlements are a drop in the bucket compared to the budget of the federal government.
But where's my money? You remember me, the guy that got ripped off?
So how do you propose effectively redistributing that money to thousands of people? Challenges: You don't know who they are or how to contact them. The amount that each person was overchared is fairly inconcequential (what $20 per stick of RAM), and the settlement was for far less than that. Unless the amount owed to each person is in the hundreds or thousands, administrating the claim procedure would end up costing more than the settlement itself.
The US government has more than a bit of conflict of interest in its role as protector of the public from price-fixing and monopolies, yet recipient of huge settlements when they are allowed to grow and blossom.
This I agree with. It is my opinion that the best thing to do with this money is to simply have it cease to exist. Stay with me here:) The government already regulates the total supply of money by how much it prints, and how much banks borrow from it (depending on FED interest rates). So there is no reason that we can't simply have this money disappear, and if it is an amount that will have any influence at all on the total economy (unlikely) then the FED can simply adjust to account for that.
But yeah, the government should not be allowed to keep money from fines, nor should taxes be used to modify the behavior of companies - fines should.
I am very interested in hearing his response to this question. The section concerning monopolies from their Party Platform:
6. Monopolies
The Issue: We recognize that government is the source of monopoly, through its grants of legal privilege to special interests in the economy.
The Principle: Anti-trust laws do not prevent monopoly, but foster it by limiting competition. We defend the right of individuals to form corporations, cooperatives and other types of companies based on voluntary association.
Solutions: We condemn all coercive monopolies. In order to abolish them, we advocate a strict separation of business and State. Laws of incorporation should not include grants of monopoly privilege. In particular, we would eliminate special limits on the liability of corporations for damages caused in non-contractual transactions. We also oppose state or federal limits on the size of private companies and on the right of companies to merge. We further oppose efforts, in the name of social responsibility or any other reason, to expand federal chartering of corporations into a pretext for government control of business.
Transitional Solutions: We call for the repeal of all anti-trust laws, including the Robinson-Patman Act, which restricts price discounts, and the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust acts. We further call for the abolition of both the Federal Trade Commission and the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice.
So basically, the way I read this is that the Libertarian Party opposes monopolies, but thinks that if they just turn their head the problem will go away. This follows a consistent pattern in the Libertarian philosophy - all monopolies are caused by the government and if we get rid of the government interference, there will be no problem. Which is absolute rubbish - An unregulated market won't result in a free market any more than a lawless society will result in free society. The reason is that the threat to freedom isn't just our government in particular, but all insufficiently checked power structures in general. When the church was large and unchecked it became corrupt and liberty was lost. When feudal lords became too powerful to be checked, or colluded amongst themselves, liberty was lost. When the corporate "communistic" states were left unchecked liberty was lost. And here in the US, when large corporations were left unchecked, they treated their workers as near slaves, and liberty was lost. Throughout the entire history of mankind, every unchecked source of power eventually became corrupted and attacked the freedoms of mankind. The entire reasoning behind a democratic or republican style of government is that we decide it is better to give authority to a body which we have some control over, and which will respect and protect our freedoms, than to have an authority imposed upon us which cares only for its own interests.
The market is the same. Collusion among oligopolies has nothing to do with government interference, and yet it restrict the freedom of the market. There are certain markets (utilities, etc) which by their very nature tend to monopolistic situations. And there are occasions where a company is simply lucky and talented enought that it monopolizes a market on its own. These situations occur naturally, and once a monopoly has been created, it is exceedingly difficult for potential competitors to break it, just like it is hard for peasants to overthrow a king - because all the cards are in the king's hand.
I strongly sympathize with the Libertarian desire to decrease the government's impact, and want to be a supporter of theirs. I don't like the socialistic leaning policies that the Democrats are pushing. I don't like the way the Republicans have been pushing through "National Security" bills that are eroding our rights (and which the Democrats are too spineless to oppose). I don't like the way
First, the developers need to learn how to package their software. If you are making a package for a distro (and all rpms are specific to a single distro), you should statically link any libraries which are not included in the base install of that disto. You should avoid using development libraries and if you must use them, statically link them. You should learn how to make RPMs that don't demand a specific version of the library if your software will work with any of the minor releases of a major version. This is what it means to package your application, and you have to do it for each distro. Releasing rpms is saying that you want to make it simple for people to install you application. If you don't want to make it simple then you might as well just release tar balls of the source because a shitty package is just as hard to install.
But since no one in the devlopment community seems to care about that, then the only option that users have is to use debian. It solves the hassle by having a much nicer dependancy system and by only letting people who know how to build packages commit them.
So those are the options for a user: Use Debian and wait a little longer to get software while someone polishes it for you. Use Gentoo, and have bleeding edge software at the cost of long install times. Or use an RPM based distro and deal with DLL hell. Myself, I would rather compile everything myself from tarballs then go back to using rpm.
Why would a spammer want to deal with the increased complexity and labor involved in infecting and managing a heterogeneous zombie herd when it would increase its size by less than 10%? It's a waste of time and money.
and is it just me or does QoS on the backbone seam like a bad idea?
Out of curiosity, why do you think this is a bad idea? It is impossible to layer QoS on top of something which treats all packets equally, and there are legitimate uses for QoS, like VoIP and video conferencing. Furthermore, when the bandwidth is saturated it is better for somethings to work and some not then to have everything jammed up.
I read the text of the bill (linked from the article), and I don't see anything in there about about banning privately owned satellites from selling their images to whomever they want. All this bill says is that the government does not have to release images that it has to the public. So no this will have zero effect on the private market of satellite imagery whatsover, unless every satalite owner decides out of their own free will to sign an exclusive agreement with the government. I don't know where the submitter or article got that from.
The important questions are how this affects our rights, whether it will improve security, and which outweighs the other. I'm still thinking about that.
Could Microsoft be considering an Open Source license for Sender ID?
Well, looks like a good time to clarify the difference between patents and copyright for the benefit of the new blood here on slashdot. They are very different things, and you must understand what the law says before you can develop educated opinions on the law. Copyright is a government issued monopoly on the distribution, and public performance of a specific work and derivatives of that work. Patents on the other hand are a government issued monopoly on the commercial application of an idea. A book is a specific creative act, and thus falls under copyright. A method of building a tractor is an idea, and is thus patentable. You can't have copyright on an idea, and you can't patent a specific work.
Now onto this specific situation.
When you talk about open source licenses, you are dealing with copyright. A copyright license grants you specific (often limited) rights to distribute, perform, or modify the authors work. Without a copyright license you do not have the right to do any of these things. Open source software gives people the right to redistribute the work, created derivative works, and redistribute those works (possibly with the restriction that the derivative work must also be open source). However, it requires that if a work is distributed it must be available in a useful form - the original source code.
Now Caller-ID is not a piece of software - it is a protocol, a standard, an idea, and thus falls into the realm of patent law. A patent license gives you permission to use an idea in your own works. Without a patent license you do not have a right to use the idea in your own work, even if you thought of it by yourself. Microsoft has patented some of the ideas in Caller-ID, so anyone who wants to create an implementation of Caller-ID must get a patent license from Microsoft. The patent license which Microsoft is currently offering for Caller-ID has several issues that make it impossible to use the patented ideas in Open Source software without violating one of the licenses.
By now you can see what was wrong with the text I quoted - Sender ID is not a piece of software - it is a patented idea, and so it is nonsensical to talk about releasing it under an Open Source (copyright) license. What the submitter should have asked is "Could Microsoft be considering an Open Source friendly patent license for Sender ID".
That said you can read this post if you want to know more about why the current patent license for Caller ID is incompatible with Open Source software.
Here is the deal with Sender ID. Caller ID is patented (Sender ID = SPF + Caller ID), and thus everyone who uses in must get a patent from MS. If something is patented, you must license it to use it. It doesn't matter if you got the ideas from copying, white-room reverse engineering, or if you independently discovered the idea - the patent holder still has a monopoly on the use of the ideas and you must license them. As far as I know ASP and SMB are not patent encumbered. MS didn't have a policy of patenting their software until several years ago (about the same time as the Halloween papers were written, IIRC).
MS has licensed the Caller ID patent(s?) under what, on the surface, appears to be a very fair and open royalty free license. You don't have to pay any fees to MS to get a license to include Caller ID in your software. You can distribute the software to anyone you want, and your users are also free to redistribute this software. You can even distribute the source. For more information, read this article. However there is one issue that makes it incompatible with open source software - the patent license is non-transferable and non-sublicenseable.
What that means is that each developer who creates or modifies Caller ID code must sign and mail their own license from MS. The OSI definition of Open Source Software, and FSF definition of Free Software both state that the user must be free to modify and redistribute the software. This puts FLOSS licenses at odds with the Caller-ID license. If your software license meet the terms of the Caller-ID license then the software isn't FLOSS, and if you use a FLOSS license, then you are not meeting the terms of the Caller-ID license. The best lawyers on the subject agree that it is impossible to make these two agree. They also do a good job of explaining why redistribute of modified works is critical to FLOSS software, and why we should refuse to use a license that would be compatible.
So thats where things stand. It would be possible to write a non-FLOSS plugin for FLOSS software, but it is impossible to write a FLOSS implementation. Debian has a long history of not accepting non-free software into their main branch. But even among those that are more tolerant of combining proprietary software with FLOSS, there are many who disagree with proprietary standards and are thus opposed to the Caller ID license.
Going against basic instincts can eventually cause insanity or at least mental instability.
It doesn't have to. Repression (what I assume you are referring to) is basically a brute force resistance against our emotions and I'm sure most slashdotters have figured out that it doesn't work. It just feeds two conflicting emotions which creates internal turmoil and - like you said - at it's extreme will drive someone to a breakdown. But repression isn't the only way to go against your basic instincts.
I've found that I have to deal with these things on two levels. First is learning how to deal with basic instincts at the heat of the moment. It seems that once I get into a certain train of thought (or emotion?) that it becomes self reinforcing. I end up getting tunnel vision on that one dominating emotion, and the brute-force approach of "no I won't do that", or "I'm not going to think that", just makes thing worse. What I really need to do in those situations is find someway to break the train of thought, to get a wider view of the picture. Humor works well for me. When I catch myself getting caught in an undesirable train of thought I just laugh at myself ("You drama queen", etc:), and get on with my life. When I pull it off (nothing works 100%), it has the added advantage of coming out of the train of thought in a better mood then when I started. Contrast this with the brute-force confrontation where I usually end up feeling tired or down at the end.
The other thing I have to remind myself of is that these emotions are coming for a reason, and that if I keep having a recurring thought, just laughing it off will only work for so long. I eventually need to deal with it at a deeper level. Maybe I need to hash a problem out with a friend, maybe I need to come to terms with something on my own. Maybe I haven't even put my finger on what the problem is, and just need to let my mind drift over some long walks, till I figure out what's going on. You mentioned finding an outlet, and maybe that works for some people or some vices, but every time I have tried it it ends up just reinforcing the desires and makes the problem more frequent.
One of the things I learned during my time with a genuine christian church was how important it was to get into a daily routine - to have a constant reminder of what is important so I don't get caught up in stupid stuff, and remember to involve myself in things that I wouldn't if I just drifted by day by day. When I was in that habit my life genuinely was more fulfilling than it's ever been. Since I've left the church (another story) I haven't really found any equivalent practice. All of the secular "devotionals" I've seen are just feel-good crap (well then again, so are most christian ones, I was with a rare church), and simply telling myself to sit down and reflect on things just doesn't work. Any ideas anyone?
Anywho, I'm still figuring this stuff out, but the simplistic extremes of "just do what's right" or "I can't deny my emotions", are both unsatisfactory to me, and thankfully, unnecessary.
Are you sure about that? All of the studies I have seen show that reprocessing Uranium is no more or less expensive than mining and purifying it. The US report which Carter based his decision on in the 70's definately said that reprocessing is a draw economically, and I'm pretty sure that the actuall reprocessing that the French are doing right now by and large is consistant with the findings in that report.
So it is really a matter of the what is best for security and what is best for the environment with economics kindly bowing out of the arguement.
The reason why this isn't done (save for some allowance for the second case I listed), is that the government considers it a threat to national security. Their problem with these options is that evil terrorists may intercept nuclear materials shipments, then use them for evil deeds. So their solution is to pile it all in a big cave somewhere.
To be fair it wasn't banned because the US government was concerned about reprocessed fuel being stollen and used for weapons.
The reason is because we wanted to sign treaties that prohibited creation of weapons grade nuclear materials. While reprocessed fuel itself is not very usefull for creating bombs, the processes and equipment that are used to reprocess the spent fuel is simular enough to those used to process it into weapons grade material, that it would be quite easy to pass off a weapons producing plant for a reprocessing plant to inspectors. Furthermore, Jimmy Carter was one of those presidents that believed that treaties should be a fair deal, so if we wanted other countries to refrain from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, then the US should agree to do the same.
Now you can certainly argue that these treaties were not effective, or are no longer relevent. I just wanted to make sure other people fully understood the original reasoning behind them.
I really like thinking and talking about that idea, but one of the most important conclusions I have come to in doing so, is that we should live as though we have free will. If we don't have free will, then it is all a mute point since that "decision" was an illusion anyway, and whatever we do was bound to happen. But if do have free will, and we don't take the opportunity to make the best decisions we can, and to be held responsible for those actions, then we loose out on having a better society.
Another thing that I find to be odd is the reaction that people have when finding out that our physical actions have lower level physical causes. For example, everyone one agrees that we have emotions that drive us to actions, and our free will (if we have one) is something that we would employ to override those emotions, if we think that acting on them is not the right (or benificial, or wise) thing to do. The point being that free will is distinct from emotion.
So why is it that everytime we find that there are biological aspects to our emotions our initial conculsion is that we don't have any control over what we do? Wouldn't a more appropriate conclusion be that we need to employ the principles of conditioning when raising our children and dealing with adults - to reinforce behavior which is good for themselves and society, and deinforce behavior which is detrimental? And to a rough approximation, isn't this what we have already been doing for decades under the names of accountability and personal responsibility?
Why is it that everytime we learn that there are biological components to our behavior that it is suddenly spinned as an excuse for our behavior, rather than an improved understanding of how to control it? Not putting anything on you, just making an observation of society in general.
Ironic that you should link to a charity in a post which infers that government spending is the solution to our problems, because everytime I hear someone saying that we could improve the world if only everyone in the country gave so much more in taxes, I wonder "Then why aren't you"? If progressives were to give just a small portion of thier income to charity they could achieve all the things that they want the government to do.
And don't tell me you don't have the money. Growing up in a family of seven, living off of less than $70k in the 90's, my parents always gave at least 10% to charity. We weren't poor but I'm sure most slashdotters are much better off than we were. From the very first allowence I recieved, I have given at least 10% of my income to charity. When I was only getting $10/month as a high schooler in 1997, when I was living off ramen in college, I still gave. Because my parents taught me that no matter how bad off you are, there is someone who needs the money more than you. A church here has managed to put on a huge outreach event once a year, in addition to their normal day to day support. This is only a medium size church, and it is one of the less wealth churches in the city, and yet it manages to achieve things that the huge mega churches wouldn't dream of doing.
I am not saying any of this to brag, but to point out that you can make a difference, even if you aren't rich. So to all progressive that want to improve people's lives, before you impose your morals on the entire country, before you create another inept government beurocracy - ask yourself what you are doing to improve the world yourself. I know some of you are already, but I know just as many who are not. Worse, some are even being a drain on society - of thier own choice, not because of the evils of society, as much as they would like to think otherwise. There are some things that are systematic problems and need a change of policy to improve the dynamics of our economic system. But social programs are do not fall into this catagory, and if you are not giving money to these programs yourself already, then you have no right to force your fellow countrymen to do so instead.
Reverse-engineer is the wrong word. Nothing about this process is hidden, so there is nothing to reverse engineer. This simply hashes or "encrypts" the data using a one way function called a bloom filter. One way functions are easy to compute in one direction, but are extremely computationally intensive to compute in the other direction, for example multiplying c=a*b is easy, factoring c into a and b is hard. They are a cornerstone of cryptography, and all of the important, widely used types of one-way functions have been studied extensively by the some of the most brilliant mathmaticians in the world so we have a pretty good handle on how long it will take to break anything encrypted with them. However, they are not loth, and occasionally do suprise us with new findings.
However, this is quite different than DeCSS, which was fundamentally insecure, as they distributed the key with every single DVD player in existence, and relied on people just not looking. I don't know much about Bloom filters in specific, so I can't comment on this implementation, but methods like it are employed everyday to keep password secure, when sending across the internet, or storing it in the server.
I don't know exactly what you are thinking of, but I'm pretty sure the answer is no. "Splitting with a prism" is called Wave Division Multiplexing in fiber terminology. The number of frequencies that a single fiber can carry is partial dependant on the quality of the fiber, but mostly dependant on the devices transmitting and recieving the light. Regardless, there are a finite number of frequencies that can be utilized.
If you are suggesting to give each IP in the world it's own frequency - well, there are far to many address even in IP4 to do that with current technology. Even if we could it would be a huge waste of bandwidth, since most of the frequencies will be going unused most of the time.
Alternately, if you dynamically assign the N frequencies to N IP's that currently are sending data, then that will make efficient use of the available bandwidth, but when you get to the end of the fiber, the switch there doesn't know what IP corresponds to what frequency, so it would have to look at the data itself to do the switching. That is what this is doing and it is quite impressive.
After you take out enough biodiesel to run your agriculture and make your biodiesel from your produce, how much biodiesel of your output do you have left?
A good deal. I can't seem to find any thorough studies to reference righ now, but for a rough idea - if all of the US farmers grew biodiesel crops inplace of what they are growing now, we could replace 50% of the US oil usage, and the agriculture industry account for anywhere near 50% of the petroleum use, so it does indeed produce far more energy than in requires (not counting solar input - for all you 2nd law trolls). So biodiesel is a great supplement to our current uses.
Energy efficiency isn't really a problem with biodiesel - the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is no way we could produce enough biodiesel to completely replace all of the worlds petroleum use, and still have room to grow food without detroying most of the natural habitats in the world - assuming we traditional crops. There has been some work with algae that looks very promising, but for now it is just that - promising.
Slashdot Mirror
People who vote for third party candidates are people who don't give a shit who will run the country.
What a bunch of hyperbolic bullshit. There are many of good reasons to vote third party, and many circumstances where doing so is not a waste of your vote. If a certain candidate has a significant lead in my voting area, then my vote doesn't matter in determining who wins the election anyway. So why shouldn't I for my favorite candidate, regardless of their party?
"Reps and Dems are the same for all intents and purposes."
I think the last election proved once and for all just exactly how misguided and wrong this sentiment is.
You are right that they are very different, but that doesn't mean that either of them is good. If I think that both candidates are equally bad, even if they are bad in different manners, then it doesn't really make any sense to vote for either of them.
If you look through history, you will see that both major parties have changed substantially as societal views changed, and voting third party is a very effective way of letting them know that they no longer are in sync with my viewpoints. In past situations where the major parties did not change, third parties indeed replaced them. Furthermore, it is not unheard of to have third party candidates elected in state government today.
In fact, the only time that it makes sense to vote for the lesser of two evils rather than my favorite candidate is when A) one of the two leading candidates is significantly worse than the other B) I live in a voting district which has a chance of casting it's vote for the lesser of the two evils C) the overall race is close enough that the result of my voting district could make a difference in the overal results. All other times I vote for my favorite candidate, which is sometimes third party, sometime major party.
In my particular situation, all three do apply so I do plan on voting for a major party in this presidential election. But saying that I don't give a shit about my country because I vote third party most of the time is pure garbage.
I have registered for NYT about a dozen times now, and I don't plan on ever doing it again. Everytime I have to pick an increasingly random username which I will never remember, and which will be lost as soon as I clear my cookies, not to mention that I use 5 computers, with a total of 11 browsers, which each keeps it own cookies. And don't even try to talk me into using a full blown password management system just for something as stupid as this. It's not worth the damn hassle just to read something that is likely just a paraphrase of reuters anyway.
But I agree the jokes are stupid. The submitter should spend 2 minutes and find a news source that doesn't require the registration, it's not like they don't exist, and aren't covering the exact same stories.
Unless, of course, they propose to make the level designation open-ended, which means that in 10 years, level 22 would be the midrange.
... anytime now ... it's getting there ... talk smack at it will go faster ... wait where are you going, it's almost ready ... hey why did the whole city go black".
That never stopped Dragonball Z ! I am all for this idea if it brings the turbo button is back! I can see it now: "Behold my computer powering up to super-sayan
I don't think that this is just the fault of the patent system, it is a flaw in the legal system, and it is a flaw in the community. Where patents are demonstratedly wrong, it should be easier for small companies or individuals to challenge that bad patent
I strongly disagree. This is a problem with the patent system, because there is no acceptable method for determining when a patent is "wrong". The qualification that they patent office uses now whether there is prior art. But it truely is difficult to determine whether something qualifies as prior art because it is valid to build off of prior art to create a patentable work. This is necissary because everything is built upon older ideas, but makes the patent system difficult because you can argue that any idea you have is an extention of the prior art, not a duplicate of it, and thus your patent is valid. Besides even if we did get rid of all the patents that had prior art, we would still be left with a bunch of stupid ones.
Everyone on slashdot keeps arguing that we should use a different qualification whcih only allows "non-trivial", or "meaningfull" advances to be patented. But those are subjective terms and what one person thinks is genious is obvious to another, especially given the differences between foresight and hindsight. People say we should create a "non-baised" panel of industry experts to advise the patent office, but as soon as these people have the power to decide the fate of a patent - which will have huge financial impacts for the companies filing them - the panel will quickly become highly political and biased.
Copyright works because every creative work is unique, and copyright only gives control of that specific creative work, so you can hand out copyrights to everyone without impeding everyone else. Patents, on the other hand restrict ideas which by their very nature are not unique. Handing them out to everyone who asks is intollerable as it greatly restricts the ability of others to independently develop thier own ideas and products. Therefore, the success of the patent system is dependant on a beurocracy to determine what is a "good" patent and what is a "bad" patent. IMHO, this makes it inherently flawed and unfixable.
In theory I think the emissions are supposed to be mostly cold water.
That is not correct at all. What you are burning are hydrocarbons. Since this is just a chemical reaction, you must have carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (plus whatever other additives/impurities are in the fuel/air) in the output. I suppose it might be theoretically possible to end up with just carbon dioxide and water if you had completely pure fuel, pumped in pure oxygen instead of air (mostly nitrogen), and had 100% complete combustion.
The exhaust from modern low-emission cars is already clean enough for health purposes. Production of the main environmental concern, carbon dioxide, is impossible to prevent, although I suppose you could develop something to capture and convert it (like a synthetic plant).
Lastly IC engines look vastly inefficient when compared to a mythical 100% efficient machine, but they are certainly the most efficent ones capable of doing the job that needs to be done.
Graphic proccessing is one of the places where the speed is needed. Yes computers have gotten 1000 times faster but modern GUIs do 1000 times more graphics computations than they use to. Concider the fact that every single gtk/gnome widget drawn on your screen uses this library (yay themes) and it becomes apparrent that it has to be written for speed, so going to a high level language is not an option. There are many other reasons that GTK uses C, the main one being that while everyone is moving to high level languages, they are all moving to different ones. Therefore, GTK has to be written in C since that is what all the other languages can link against.
Second, it likely wasn't that they intentionally left out checks on purpose for speed, but just missed one - probably weren't think about someone attempting to DOS thier graphics library. It happens when you write code. I am a decent programmer and have never found an integer overflow or memory access error in any C code I wrote (after shipping it), but I am not arrogant enough to think that there are not any in there waiting to be discovered. It isn't insightfull to say that if everyone programmmed perfectly then we wouldn't have any bugs - it is unrealistic.
Lastly, even if you did use a high level language, the programmer that overlooked thisp problem in C would still overlook it in the higher level lanugage as well. It would likely result in an uncaught exception, and the program would likely terminate. So this would still be a bug - just not a security hole, since it couldn't result in executing arbitrary code.
Higher level lanugagues can help make a program more secure, and are a good idea for that reason. But as long as human beings are the ones writting code, mistakes and oversights will happen, and patches are something you will have to learn to live with.
Since the YRO section was originally created it has been posting stories about "technology and your rights". Every story I have read fits that qualification. Every story I have read has met the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" qualification. Every story that I have read has generated interesting discussion among readers of this site who do care about these issues.
So basically what your entire complaint boils down to is the pedantic fact that they could have chosen a better title than YRO. Give it a rest - if you're not interested don't read it. Until then, I will continue to mod down any posts complaining about "relevence" of a story. I don't care whether the poster is intentionally karma-whoring, trolling, or just being off-topic, these posts increase the signal/noise ratio for those who are interested in the story, and thus should be moderated down.
...why aren't our taxes going down?
:) The government already regulates the total supply of money by how much it prints, and how much banks borrow from it (depending on FED interest rates). So there is no reason that we can't simply have this money disappear, and if it is an amount that will have any influence at all on the total economy (unlikely) then the FED can simply adjust to account for that.
Uhm, they have gone down. Of course that is completely unrealated, and the real answer to your question is that these settlements are a drop in the bucket compared to the budget of the federal government.
But where's my money? You remember me, the guy that got ripped off?
So how do you propose effectively redistributing that money to thousands of people? Challenges: You don't know who they are or how to contact them. The amount that each person was overchared is fairly inconcequential (what $20 per stick of RAM), and the settlement was for far less than that. Unless the amount owed to each person is in the hundreds or thousands, administrating the claim procedure would end up costing more than the settlement itself.
The US government has more than a bit of conflict of interest in its role as protector of the public from price-fixing and monopolies, yet recipient of huge settlements when they are allowed to grow and blossom.
This I agree with. It is my opinion that the best thing to do with this money is to simply have it cease to exist. Stay with me here
But yeah, the government should not be allowed to keep money from fines, nor should taxes be used to modify the behavior of companies - fines should.
But doesn't Jabber allow P2P connections where you have an SSL connection directly between you and the person you are chatting with?
So basically, the way I read this is that the Libertarian Party opposes monopolies, but thinks that if they just turn their head the problem will go away. This follows a consistent pattern in the Libertarian philosophy - all monopolies are caused by the government and if we get rid of the government interference, there will be no problem. Which is absolute rubbish - An unregulated market won't result in a free market any more than a lawless society will result in free society. The reason is that the threat to freedom isn't just our government in particular, but all insufficiently checked power structures in general. When the church was large and unchecked it became corrupt and liberty was lost. When feudal lords became too powerful to be checked, or colluded amongst themselves, liberty was lost. When the corporate "communistic" states were left unchecked liberty was lost. And here in the US, when large corporations were left unchecked, they treated their workers as near slaves, and liberty was lost. Throughout the entire history of mankind, every unchecked source of power eventually became corrupted and attacked the freedoms of mankind. The entire reasoning behind a democratic or republican style of government is that we decide it is better to give authority to a body which we have some control over, and which will respect and protect our freedoms, than to have an authority imposed upon us which cares only for its own interests.
The market is the same. Collusion among oligopolies has nothing to do with government interference, and yet it restrict the freedom of the market. There are certain markets (utilities, etc) which by their very nature tend to monopolistic situations. And there are occasions where a company is simply lucky and talented enought that it monopolizes a market on its own. These situations occur naturally, and once a monopoly has been created, it is exceedingly difficult for potential competitors to break it, just like it is hard for peasants to overthrow a king - because all the cards are in the king's hand.
I strongly sympathize with the Libertarian desire to decrease the government's impact, and want to be a supporter of theirs. I don't like the socialistic leaning policies that the Democrats are pushing. I don't like the way the Republicans have been pushing through "National Security" bills that are eroding our rights (and which the Democrats are too spineless to oppose). I don't like the way
There are really two solutions to this.
First, the developers need to learn how to package their software. If you are making a package for a distro (and all rpms are specific to a single distro), you should statically link any libraries which are not included in the base install of that disto. You should avoid using development libraries and if you must use them, statically link them. You should learn how to make RPMs that don't demand a specific version of the library if your software will work with any of the minor releases of a major version. This is what it means to package your application, and you have to do it for each distro. Releasing rpms is saying that you want to make it simple for people to install you application. If you don't want to make it simple then you might as well just release tar balls of the source because a shitty package is just as hard to install.
But since no one in the devlopment community seems to care about that, then the only option that users have is to use debian. It solves the hassle by having a much nicer dependancy system and by only letting people who know how to build packages commit them.
So those are the options for a user: Use Debian and wait a little longer to get software while someone polishes it for you. Use Gentoo, and have bleeding edge software at the cost of long install times. Or use an RPM based distro and deal with DLL hell. Myself, I would rather compile everything myself from tarballs then go back to using rpm.
Why would a spammer want to deal with the increased complexity and labor involved in infecting and managing a heterogeneous zombie herd when it would increase its size by less than 10%? It's a waste of time and money.
and is it just me or does QoS on the backbone seam like a bad idea?
Out of curiosity, why do you think this is a bad idea? It is impossible to layer QoS on top of something which treats all packets equally, and there are legitimate uses for QoS, like VoIP and video conferencing. Furthermore, when the bandwidth is saturated it is better for somethings to work and some not then to have everything jammed up.
I read the text of the bill (linked from the article), and I don't see anything in there about about banning privately owned satellites from selling their images to whomever they want. All this bill says is that the government does not have to release images that it has to the public. So no this will have zero effect on the private market of satellite imagery whatsover, unless every satalite owner decides out of their own free will to sign an exclusive agreement with the government. I don't know where the submitter or article got that from.
The important questions are how this affects our rights, whether it will improve security, and which outweighs the other. I'm still thinking about that.
Could Microsoft be considering an Open Source license for Sender ID?
Well, looks like a good time to clarify the difference between patents and copyright for the benefit of the new blood here on slashdot. They are very different things, and you must understand what the law says before you can develop educated opinions on the law. Copyright is a government issued monopoly on the distribution, and public performance of a specific work and derivatives of that work. Patents on the other hand are a government issued monopoly on the commercial application of an idea. A book is a specific creative act, and thus falls under copyright. A method of building a tractor is an idea, and is thus patentable. You can't have copyright on an idea, and you can't patent a specific work.
Now onto this specific situation.
When you talk about open source licenses, you are dealing with copyright. A copyright license grants you specific (often limited) rights to distribute, perform, or modify the authors work. Without a copyright license you do not have the right to do any of these things. Open source software gives people the right to redistribute the work, created derivative works, and redistribute those works (possibly with the restriction that the derivative work must also be open source). However, it requires that if a work is distributed it must be available in a useful form - the original source code.
Now Caller-ID is not a piece of software - it is a protocol, a standard, an idea, and thus falls into the realm of patent law. A patent license gives you permission to use an idea in your own works. Without a patent license you do not have a right to use the idea in your own work, even if you thought of it by yourself. Microsoft has patented some of the ideas in Caller-ID, so anyone who wants to create an implementation of Caller-ID must get a patent license from Microsoft. The patent license which Microsoft is currently offering for Caller-ID has several issues that make it impossible to use the patented ideas in Open Source software without violating one of the licenses.
By now you can see what was wrong with the text I quoted - Sender ID is not a piece of software - it is a patented idea, and so it is nonsensical to talk about releasing it under an Open Source (copyright) license. What the submitter should have asked is "Could Microsoft be considering an Open Source friendly patent license for Sender ID".
That said you can read this post if you want to know more about why the current patent license for Caller ID is incompatible with Open Source software.
Here is the deal with Sender ID. Caller ID is patented (Sender ID = SPF + Caller ID), and thus everyone who uses in must get a patent from MS. If something is patented, you must license it to use it. It doesn't matter if you got the ideas from copying, white-room reverse engineering, or if you independently discovered the idea - the patent holder still has a monopoly on the use of the ideas and you must license them. As far as I know ASP and SMB are not patent encumbered. MS didn't have a policy of patenting their software until several years ago (about the same time as the Halloween papers were written, IIRC).
MS has licensed the Caller ID patent(s?) under what, on the surface, appears to be a very fair and open royalty free license. You don't have to pay any fees to MS to get a license to include Caller ID in your software. You can distribute the software to anyone you want, and your users are also free to redistribute this software. You can even distribute the source. For more information, read this article. However there is one issue that makes it incompatible with open source software - the patent license is non-transferable and non-sublicenseable.
What that means is that each developer who creates or modifies Caller ID code must sign and mail their own license from MS. The OSI definition of Open Source Software, and FSF definition of Free Software both state that the user must be free to modify and redistribute the software. This puts FLOSS licenses at odds with the Caller-ID license. If your software license meet the terms of the Caller-ID license then the software isn't FLOSS, and if you use a FLOSS license, then you are not meeting the terms of the Caller-ID license. The best lawyers on the subject agree that it is impossible to make these two agree. They also do a good job of explaining why redistribute of modified works is critical to FLOSS software, and why we should refuse to use a license that would be compatible.
So thats where things stand. It would be possible to write a non-FLOSS plugin for FLOSS software, but it is impossible to write a FLOSS implementation. Debian has a long history of not accepting non-free software into their main branch. But even among those that are more tolerant of combining proprietary software with FLOSS, there are many who disagree with proprietary standards and are thus opposed to the Caller ID license.
Going against basic instincts can eventually cause insanity or at least mental instability.
:), and get on with my life. When I pull it off (nothing works 100%), it has the added advantage of coming out of the train of thought in a better mood then when I started. Contrast this with the brute-force confrontation where I usually end up feeling tired or down at the end.
It doesn't have to. Repression (what I assume you are referring to) is basically a brute force resistance against our emotions and I'm sure most slashdotters have figured out that it doesn't work. It just feeds two conflicting emotions which creates internal turmoil and - like you said - at it's extreme will drive someone to a breakdown. But repression isn't the only way to go against your basic instincts.
I've found that I have to deal with these things on two levels. First is learning how to deal with basic instincts at the heat of the moment. It seems that once I get into a certain train of thought (or emotion?) that it becomes self reinforcing. I end up getting tunnel vision on that one dominating emotion, and the brute-force approach of "no I won't do that", or "I'm not going to think that", just makes thing worse. What I really need to do in those situations is find someway to break the train of thought, to get a wider view of the picture. Humor works well for me. When I catch myself getting caught in an undesirable train of thought I just laugh at myself ("You drama queen", etc
The other thing I have to remind myself of is that these emotions are coming for a reason, and that if I keep having a recurring thought, just laughing it off will only work for so long. I eventually need to deal with it at a deeper level. Maybe I need to hash a problem out with a friend, maybe I need to come to terms with something on my own. Maybe I haven't even put my finger on what the problem is, and just need to let my mind drift over some long walks, till I figure out what's going on. You mentioned finding an outlet, and maybe that works for some people or some vices, but every time I have tried it it ends up just reinforcing the desires and makes the problem more frequent.
One of the things I learned during my time with a genuine christian church was how important it was to get into a daily routine - to have a constant reminder of what is important so I don't get caught up in stupid stuff, and remember to involve myself in things that I wouldn't if I just drifted by day by day. When I was in that habit my life genuinely was more fulfilling than it's ever been. Since I've left the church (another story) I haven't really found any equivalent practice. All of the secular "devotionals" I've seen are just feel-good crap (well then again, so are most christian ones, I was with a rare church), and simply telling myself to sit down and reflect on things just doesn't work. Any ideas anyone?
Anywho, I'm still figuring this stuff out, but the simplistic extremes of "just do what's right" or "I can't deny my emotions", are both unsatisfactory to me, and thankfully, unnecessary.
NO THANK YOU. I DO NOT WANT A FREE IPOD!
Would you like one in your house?
Would you like it with a one button mouse?
Are you sure about that? All of the studies I have seen show that reprocessing Uranium is no more or less expensive than mining and purifying it. The US report which Carter based his decision on in the 70's definately said that reprocessing is a draw economically, and I'm pretty sure that the actuall reprocessing that the French are doing right now by and large is consistant with the findings in that report.
So it is really a matter of the what is best for security and what is best for the environment with economics kindly bowing out of the arguement.
The reason why this isn't done (save for some allowance for the second case I listed), is that the government considers it a threat to national security. Their problem with these options is that evil terrorists may intercept nuclear materials shipments, then use them for evil deeds. So their solution is to pile it all in a big cave somewhere.
To be fair it wasn't banned because the US government was concerned about reprocessed fuel being stollen and used for weapons.
The reason is because we wanted to sign treaties that prohibited creation of weapons grade nuclear materials. While reprocessed fuel itself is not very usefull for creating bombs, the processes and equipment that are used to reprocess the spent fuel is simular enough to those used to process it into weapons grade material, that it would be quite easy to pass off a weapons producing plant for a reprocessing plant to inspectors. Furthermore, Jimmy Carter was one of those presidents that believed that treaties should be a fair deal, so if we wanted other countries to refrain from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, then the US should agree to do the same.
Now you can certainly argue that these treaties were not effective, or are no longer relevent. I just wanted to make sure other people fully understood the original reasoning behind them.
I really like thinking and talking about that idea, but one of the most important conclusions I have come to in doing so, is that we should live as though we have free will. If we don't have free will, then it is all a mute point since that "decision" was an illusion anyway, and whatever we do was bound to happen. But if do have free will, and we don't take the opportunity to make the best decisions we can, and to be held responsible for those actions, then we loose out on having a better society.
Another thing that I find to be odd is the reaction that people have when finding out that our physical actions have lower level physical causes. For example, everyone one agrees that we have emotions that drive us to actions, and our free will (if we have one) is something that we would employ to override those emotions, if we think that acting on them is not the right (or benificial, or wise) thing to do. The point being that free will is distinct from emotion.
So why is it that everytime we find that there are biological aspects to our emotions our initial conculsion is that we don't have any control over what we do? Wouldn't a more appropriate conclusion be that we need to employ the principles of conditioning when raising our children and dealing with adults - to reinforce behavior which is good for themselves and society, and deinforce behavior which is detrimental? And to a rough approximation, isn't this what we have already been doing for decades under the names of accountability and personal responsibility?
Why is it that everytime we learn that there are biological components to our behavior that it is suddenly spinned as an excuse for our behavior, rather than an improved understanding of how to control it? Not putting anything on you, just making an observation of society in general.
Ironic that you should link to a charity in a post which infers that government spending is the solution to our problems, because everytime I hear someone saying that we could improve the world if only everyone in the country gave so much more in taxes, I wonder "Then why aren't you"? If progressives were to give just a small portion of thier income to charity they could achieve all the things that they want the government to do.
And don't tell me you don't have the money. Growing up in a family of seven, living off of less than $70k in the 90's, my parents always gave at least 10% to charity. We weren't poor but I'm sure most slashdotters are much better off than we were. From the very first allowence I recieved, I have given at least 10% of my income to charity. When I was only getting $10/month as a high schooler in 1997, when I was living off ramen in college, I still gave. Because my parents taught me that no matter how bad off you are, there is someone who needs the money more than you. A church here has managed to put on a huge outreach event once a year, in addition to their normal day to day support. This is only a medium size church, and it is one of the less wealth churches in the city, and yet it manages to achieve things that the huge mega churches wouldn't dream of doing.
I am not saying any of this to brag, but to point out that you can make a difference, even if you aren't rich. So to all progressive that want to improve people's lives, before you impose your morals on the entire country, before you create another inept government beurocracy - ask yourself what you are doing to improve the world yourself. I know some of you are already, but I know just as many who are not. Worse, some are even being a drain on society - of thier own choice, not because of the evils of society, as much as they would like to think otherwise. There are some things that are systematic problems and need a change of policy to improve the dynamics of our economic system. But social programs are do not fall into this catagory, and if you are not giving money to these programs yourself already, then you have no right to force your fellow countrymen to do so instead.
Reverse-engineer is the wrong word. Nothing about this process is hidden, so there is nothing to reverse engineer. This simply hashes or "encrypts" the data using a one way function called a bloom filter. One way functions are easy to compute in one direction, but are extremely computationally intensive to compute in the other direction, for example multiplying c=a*b is easy, factoring c into a and b is hard. They are a cornerstone of cryptography, and all of the important, widely used types of one-way functions have been studied extensively by the some of the most brilliant mathmaticians in the world so we have a pretty good handle on how long it will take to break anything encrypted with them. However, they are not loth, and occasionally do suprise us with new findings.
However, this is quite different than DeCSS, which was fundamentally insecure, as they distributed the key with every single DVD player in existence, and relied on people just not looking. I don't know much about Bloom filters in specific, so I can't comment on this implementation, but methods like it are employed everyday to keep password secure, when sending across the internet, or storing it in the server.
I don't know exactly what you are thinking of, but I'm pretty sure the answer is no. "Splitting with a prism" is called Wave Division Multiplexing in fiber terminology. The number of frequencies that a single fiber can carry is partial dependant on the quality of the fiber, but mostly dependant on the devices transmitting and recieving the light. Regardless, there are a finite number of frequencies that can be utilized.
If you are suggesting to give each IP in the world it's own frequency - well, there are far to many address even in IP4 to do that with current technology. Even if we could it would be a huge waste of bandwidth, since most of the frequencies will be going unused most of the time.
Alternately, if you dynamically assign the N frequencies to N IP's that currently are sending data, then that will make efficient use of the available bandwidth, but when you get to the end of the fiber, the switch there doesn't know what IP corresponds to what frequency, so it would have to look at the data itself to do the switching. That is what this is doing and it is quite impressive.
After you take out enough biodiesel to run your agriculture and make your biodiesel from your produce, how much biodiesel of your output do you have left?
A good deal. I can't seem to find any thorough studies to reference righ now, but for a rough idea - if all of the US farmers grew biodiesel crops inplace of what they are growing now, we could replace 50% of the US oil usage, and the agriculture industry account for anywhere near 50% of the petroleum use, so it does indeed produce far more energy than in requires (not counting solar input - for all you 2nd law trolls). So biodiesel is a great supplement to our current uses.
Energy efficiency isn't really a problem with biodiesel - the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is no way we could produce enough biodiesel to completely replace all of the worlds petroleum use, and still have room to grow food without detroying most of the natural habitats in the world - assuming we traditional crops. There has been some work with algae that looks very promising, but for now it is just that - promising.