The worst affected countries are the winner-takes-all dual-party countries. It's much easier for the companies to buy off and/or take over the parties with only two candidates, and/or work out a powersharing scheme, and the population wont vote for anyone else in quantities large enough to overthrow the defacto ruling class.
Proportional representation is somewhat less susceptible to the same form of abuse, but hardly immune.
"As international trade barriers fall, wealth everywhere increases."
That would be true if the other factors were globalized at the same time, the way they are in the US. Education, labour rights, workplace environment, worker protection, social development, freedom of movement, etc.
For the moment, it's hardly as if people can move to a place where there's a lot lower cost of living and follow the jobs. Instead they have to wait for equilibrium to be reached, and those other countries to evolve, until they lose the jobs in question, whereupon another labour pool gets exploited for a certain period.
Wealth everywhere does not increase from that. Wealth gets concentrated to the abusers of the situation, and a miniscule amount (as small as is possible to maximize profits) gets redistributed to the exploited labour pool.
The problem with globalization is that it's not going far enough. Opening markets should be accompanied with freedom of movement and balancing social systems.
Otherwise we end up with the current exploitation system that ultimately will benefit only a few individuals.
I fail to see how the enormous payouts to the CEOs benefit the average shareholder in the corporations.
I can see how it benefits the CEOs, I can see how it benefits their board buddies, but the shareholders? The shareholders are the ones who get the worthless paper left when the CEOs go 'Oops, our salaries and incompetence appear to have emptied the corporation of assets. Oh, well, time to go for a cushy job with the current administration'.
"I have considered making a "DO NOT DISTURB" sign and putting it on the top edge of the cube wall."
People who just dont even get it when you're turning headphones up and pointedly ignore taps on the shoulder sometimes actually do pause for a second when you put up a sign.
But I'm starting to consider electrified concertina wire.
Oh, I agree. But I think the reason for the difficulty of predicting human behaviour is more in the nature of incomplete data and immense complexity rather than quantum effects.
It's similar to weather prediction. You can make forecasts, but accuracy will be horrendously difficult to achieve.
Human behaviour is not based on any specific single electron, but just like most other physical and chemical reactions it's based on an average of a huge numbers of interactions. Quantum mechanics become irrelevant for such a scale and do not affect the predictability of the system itself.
"To use "breeder" techniques you need to have a full scale nuclear power plant"
Um, no, to generate electricity, guarantee containment, run a safe reactor type, store fissile material securely _and_ use breeder techniques you need to have a full scale nuclear power plant. Practical if you already have one around, but not necessary for the process.
To just use breeder techniques you need a core. And to kickstart a breeder core you need fissile material (like du) and a neutron source. Once kickstarted it will make its own fuel. Not quite the same size or difficulty.
But please, if you know some technical reason that would make it impossible, I'd love to hear it. Because I cant think of one that would be impossible to do some creative engineering around, which makes the level of stupidity in spreading du around quite astounding.
"Radical Islam as a movement must be destroyed and that means destroying the carriers of the disease."
And someone appears to have forgotten that they reproduce by the death of civilians, so the coalition is doing a damn good job at spreading the disease rather than containing and eliminating it.
Radical Islam sure has seen a lovely upsurge in Iraq. The coalitions current fight against the very same radical islamists that Saddam was oppressing is ironic.
Radical religion will die out on its own when it runs out of minds susceptible to it. We hardly defeated the radical religion in the western world by military means. It was done through the long process of enlightening people, raising standards of living and creating social networks that were not dependent on religion.
Even tho many parts of the islamic world is not quite as far along, most of it would resist the radicals... unless the west gives the radicals the power of fear and injustice they need to thrive. If they can show Islam under indescriminate attack, they can gain recruits. And as long as they can gain recruits, new incurable psychotics, it will be impossible to get rid of them and bury that chapter of human history.
We can only win against the fundamentalists by refusing to help them. We can only win by innoculating the minds of people against their type of insanity.
We will win when people like Osama, Omar and al-Sadr walk the streets of Mecca with 'The End is Nigh' signs, like any other religious crazy.
A fundamentalist without the ability to recruit followers is nothing more than someone who needs his medication adjusted when he starts talking about killing people in the name of some god of his.
"Fortunately they are well outside the capabilities of terrorist groups. "
With the current spreading around of depleted uranium in unstable regions, and the possibility of using breeding techniques to turn DU into plutonium, I dont feel as confident these days that the difficulty of creating large quantities of fission grade material is beyond a dedicated group.
Yah, so many lawyers working defence against patent litigation on contigency. They really love that 'we'll pay half if we lose' strategy of making money.
"...I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
The 'little guy' who doesnt have the resources to produce a product doesnt have the resources to litigate patent infringement anyway.
The 'little guy' in such a situation is screwed with or without patents, so patents only cause increased risk for him, as he can get sued for patent infringement without the ability to defend, wether or not the patent is valid.
If it's unusable with a normal projector it'll still be unusable with projection technologies like this.
If it's usable with a normal projector you'll get a better quality image with a projector like this.
It isnt magic. It can compensate for color shifts that would cause distortion, but you still pay in image quality by losing contrast and color range. For an extreme example, take a black and white striped wall. As you're unlikely to have an entirely unreflective surface on a wall, you could create a compensated picture by strongly increasing illumination on the black parts and decreasing it on the white part. However, the maximum brightness of the image becomes the maximum brightness reflectable by the black parts, which decreases the contrast range. Same thing with any other surface, you'll lose quality, you just wont lose as much, or in such a visually disturbing fashion as you would with an ordinary projector.
So if you care enough about image quality to bother getting an expensive projector you'd probably want to get a projection screen anyway.
Still, it would be quite useful when you either dont care that much about the image quality, or in situations where you have to project on a not quite suitable surface and cant use a screen.
You appear to think that what the party machine is saying is what Kerry actually believes. While Kerry might well be in favour of gay marriage, actually saying so would cost him more votes than it would give him. You would 'like' it if he did say it, but you wont change candidate over the difference, nor would anyone else with an interest in the issue, when the alternative winner is someone who opposes gay anything.
Therefore, Kerrys position is carefully crafted to maximize his vote count, and it's hardly as if he'd express any other view in public, should he think differently.
"The question is which candidate is best for the *country*."
Yes. Well. Except you dont get to choose from the 'best for the country' list. You get to choose from the 'best for the groups in control of the parties and their sponsors' list.
"How does one go about making use of those finger prints"
Photoetching can be used to create molds, for example, either to fake fingers or finger covers.
Of course, you can defend against such forgeries by measuring things like skin conductivity and temperature, but those are even easier to fake than the actual print.
Fingerprints, like most biometrics, are just not that difficult to copy. Compare it the protection against forgery we have in currency, and the protection of being a pattern of ridges on a leathery material appears to be woefully insufficient.
I got hit by the nforce2 APIC/CPU bus disconnect problem causing total lockups on heavy IDE access, so it's not entirely free from problems.
Turning off apic, local apic and acpi and the board runs solid as a rock tho.
They're nice boards, but like many others there appear to be some features that dont quite work as well as they should (of course, as in most of these cases, where the actual bug is is debatable, as these types of bugs can easily be given the blame-game go around between CPU, bios, chipset and OS, and any combination thereof).
Mmm, nah. NForce isnt much of an improvement, I've found it as buggy as other AMD chipsets. Of course, I've had the same experience with Intel chipsets as well.
It seems like it's impossible to find any chipset that does not freeze solid under some normal operations.
Usually it's just a matter of finding the damn bug and disabling the feature in question and you've got a rock solid board tho.
It is, however, damn annoying to go through the same shit for every board you buy.
"In time, nations that do not have these silly laws will surpass those that do in terms of innovation."
Unless those nations get coerced/cajoled/tricked/bribed into adjusting and adopting the same or similar laws.
"Legislation slows progress."
Progress is not necessarily in the interest of the entrenched powers. Progress leads to change and change might not be a good thing if you're among the priviliged.
And guess who's doing the legislation...
Re:"stupid conspiracy theory" moderation option?
on
Sun Rays For Linux
·
· Score: 1
Any indemnification by buying a license from SCO is worthless as you'd be in violation of the GPL by limiting redistribution.
SCO claims that as IBM licensed Unix from SCO, and AIX can be considered a form of Unix, and JFS was written for/ported to AIX, JFS is the intellectual property of SCO. And as IBM contributed JFS to Linux, Linux is now infringing on SCO's copyrights.
Yes, it's quite utterly insane, and no, it has no basis in any form of copyright law outside la-la land. But that's the history, and pretty much what they claim.
Slashdot Mirror
The worst affected countries are the winner-takes-all dual-party countries. It's much easier for the companies to buy off and/or take over the parties with only two candidates, and/or work out a powersharing scheme, and the population wont vote for anyone else in quantities large enough to overthrow the defacto ruling class.
Proportional representation is somewhat less susceptible to the same form of abuse, but hardly immune.
"As international trade barriers fall, wealth everywhere increases."
That would be true if the other factors were globalized at the same time, the way they are in the US. Education, labour rights, workplace environment, worker protection, social development, freedom of movement, etc.
For the moment, it's hardly as if people can move to a place where there's a lot lower cost of living and follow the jobs. Instead they have to wait for equilibrium to be reached, and those other countries to evolve, until they lose the jobs in question, whereupon another labour pool gets exploited for a certain period.
Wealth everywhere does not increase from that. Wealth gets concentrated to the abusers of the situation, and a miniscule amount (as small as is possible to maximize profits) gets redistributed to the exploited labour pool.
The problem with globalization is that it's not going far enough. Opening markets should be accompanied with freedom of movement and balancing social systems.
Otherwise we end up with the current exploitation system that ultimately will benefit only a few individuals.
I fail to see how the enormous payouts to the CEOs benefit the average shareholder in the corporations.
I can see how it benefits the CEOs, I can see how it benefits their board buddies, but the shareholders? The shareholders are the ones who get the worthless paper left when the CEOs go 'Oops, our salaries and incompetence appear to have emptied the corporation of assets. Oh, well, time to go for a cushy job with the current administration'.
"Are they likely to do so?"
If they get paid for it?
Sadly, I can see certain interest groups engaging in some severe creative warping of truth.
Considering their success in ordinary media, one can only hope wikis are more resistant to that type of coordinated destruction of reality.
"I would say that 90% of the average people think that TV news are authoritative."
Except when you read an article about something within your own areas of expertize when they are almost always more or less wrong.
But hey, maybe they're just having a bad streak with things I know something about and they're right the rest of the time...
"I have considered making a "DO NOT DISTURB" sign and putting it on the top edge of the cube wall."
People who just dont even get it when you're turning headphones up and pointedly ignore taps on the shoulder sometimes actually do pause for a second when you put up a sign.
But I'm starting to consider electrified concertina wire.
"you've got to have a very feature-rich application."
No. You need to have a very stable application with a very good plugin architecture.
Of course, that might not be as profitable...
Oh, I agree. But I think the reason for the difficulty of predicting human behaviour is more in the nature of incomplete data and immense complexity rather than quantum effects.
It's similar to weather prediction. You can make forecasts, but accuracy will be horrendously difficult to achieve.
Human behaviour is not based on any specific single electron, but just like most other physical and chemical reactions it's based on an average of a huge numbers of interactions. Quantum mechanics become irrelevant for such a scale and do not affect the predictability of the system itself.
"To use "breeder" techniques you need to have a full scale nuclear power plant"
Um, no, to generate electricity, guarantee containment, run a safe reactor type, store fissile material securely _and_ use breeder techniques you need to have a full scale nuclear power plant. Practical if you already have one around, but not necessary for the process.
To just use breeder techniques you need a core. And to kickstart a breeder core you need fissile material (like du) and a neutron source. Once kickstarted it will make its own fuel. Not quite the same size or difficulty.
But please, if you know some technical reason that would make it impossible, I'd love to hear it. Because I cant think of one that would be impossible to do some creative engineering around, which makes the level of stupidity in spreading du around quite astounding.
"They are psychotic, and cannot be helped."
Indeed.
"Radical Islam as a movement must be destroyed and that means destroying the carriers of the disease."
And someone appears to have forgotten that they reproduce by the death of civilians, so the coalition is doing a damn good job at spreading the disease rather than containing and eliminating it.
Radical Islam sure has seen a lovely upsurge in Iraq. The coalitions current fight against the very same radical islamists that Saddam was oppressing is ironic.
Radical religion will die out on its own when it runs out of minds susceptible to it. We hardly defeated the radical religion in the western world by military means. It was done through the long process of enlightening people, raising standards of living and creating social networks that were not dependent on religion.
Even tho many parts of the islamic world is not quite as far along, most of it would resist the radicals... unless the west gives the radicals the power of fear and injustice they need to thrive. If they can show Islam under indescriminate attack, they can gain recruits. And as long as they can gain recruits, new incurable psychotics, it will be impossible to get rid of them and bury that chapter of human history.
We can only win against the fundamentalists by refusing to help them. We can only win by innoculating the minds of people against their type of insanity.
We will win when people like Osama, Omar and al-Sadr walk the streets of Mecca with 'The End is Nigh' signs, like any other religious crazy.
A fundamentalist without the ability to recruit followers is nothing more than someone who needs his medication adjusted when he starts talking about killing people in the name of some god of his.
"Fortunately they are well outside the capabilities of terrorist groups. "
With the current spreading around of depleted uranium in unstable regions, and the possibility of using breeding techniques to turn DU into plutonium, I dont feel as confident these days that the difficulty of creating large quantities of fission grade material is beyond a dedicated group.
Yah, so many lawyers working defence against patent litigation on contigency. They really love that 'we'll pay half if we lose' strategy of making money.
"...I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
- Benjamin Franklin on the Constitution.
The 'little guy' who doesnt have the resources to produce a product doesnt have the resources to litigate patent infringement anyway.
The 'little guy' in such a situation is screwed with or without patents, so patents only cause increased risk for him, as he can get sued for patent infringement without the ability to defend, wether or not the patent is valid.
If it's unusable with a normal projector it'll still be unusable with projection technologies like this.
If it's usable with a normal projector you'll get a better quality image with a projector like this.
It isnt magic. It can compensate for color shifts that would cause distortion, but you still pay in image quality by losing contrast and color range. For an extreme example, take a black and white striped wall. As you're unlikely to have an entirely unreflective surface on a wall, you could create a compensated picture by strongly increasing illumination on the black parts and decreasing it on the white part. However, the maximum brightness of the image becomes the maximum brightness reflectable by the black parts, which decreases the contrast range. Same thing with any other surface, you'll lose quality, you just wont lose as much, or in such a visually disturbing fashion as you would with an ordinary projector.
So if you care enough about image quality to bother getting an expensive projector you'd probably want to get a projection screen anyway.
Still, it would be quite useful when you either dont care that much about the image quality, or in situations where you have to project on a not quite suitable surface and cant use a screen.
You appear to think that what the party machine is saying is what Kerry actually believes. While Kerry might well be in favour of gay marriage, actually saying so would cost him more votes than it would give him. You would 'like' it if he did say it, but you wont change candidate over the difference, nor would anyone else with an interest in the issue, when the alternative winner is someone who opposes gay anything.
Therefore, Kerrys position is carefully crafted to maximize his vote count, and it's hardly as if he'd express any other view in public, should he think differently.
"The question is which candidate is best for the *country*."
Yes. Well. Except you dont get to choose from the 'best for the country' list. You get to choose from the 'best for the groups in control of the parties and their sponsors' list.
Nice of you to think of the country tho.
"How does one go about making use of those finger prints"
Photoetching can be used to create molds, for example, either to fake fingers or finger covers.
Of course, you can defend against such forgeries by measuring things like skin conductivity and temperature, but those are even easier to fake than the actual print.
Fingerprints, like most biometrics, are just not that difficult to copy. Compare it the protection against forgery we have in currency, and the protection of being a pattern of ridges on a leathery material appears to be woefully insufficient.
"I for instance have a finger print reader on both my palmtop and my desktop."
And everyone else, for instance, has access to your fingerprints on every object you've touched in recent time.
Or are you using gloves?
I got hit by the nforce2 APIC/CPU bus disconnect problem causing total lockups on heavy IDE access, so it's not entirely free from problems.
Turning off apic, local apic and acpi and the board runs solid as a rock tho.
They're nice boards, but like many others there appear to be some features that dont quite work as well as they should (of course, as in most of these cases, where the actual bug is is debatable, as these types of bugs can easily be given the blame-game go around between CPU, bios, chipset and OS, and any combination thereof).
Mmm, nah. NForce isnt much of an improvement, I've found it as buggy as other AMD chipsets. Of course, I've had the same experience with Intel chipsets as well.
It seems like it's impossible to find any chipset that does not freeze solid under some normal operations.
Usually it's just a matter of finding the damn bug and disabling the feature in question and you've got a rock solid board tho.
It is, however, damn annoying to go through the same shit for every board you buy.
"In time, nations that do not have these silly laws will surpass those that do in terms of innovation."
Unless those nations get coerced/cajoled/tricked/bribed into adjusting and adopting the same or similar laws.
"Legislation slows progress."
Progress is not necessarily in the interest of the entrenched powers. Progress leads to change and change might not be a good thing if you're among the priviliged.
And guess who's doing the legislation...
Any indemnification by buying a license from SCO is worthless as you'd be in violation of the GPL by limiting redistribution.
Fortunately, the GPL will also follow suit, offering pre-core freedom.
SCO claims that as IBM licensed Unix from SCO, and AIX can be considered a form of Unix, and JFS was written for/ported to AIX, JFS is the intellectual property of SCO. And as IBM contributed JFS to Linux, Linux is now infringing on SCO's copyrights.
Yes, it's quite utterly insane, and no, it has no basis in any form of copyright law outside la-la land. But that's the history, and pretty much what they claim.