Actually in the US, the FAA is responsible for creating security policies. The airlines only pay for it.
The reality is that the US economy would shrink dramatically if the airlines were to disappear, as every sector of the economy is somewhat dependant on air travel. (I fly around half the country working for a funeral home company, if that gives you any perspective.) A smaller economy means a smaller tax base, so airline aid will likely actually have a negative associated cost. Although the principle of capitalism is that private industry takes care of its own problems, there come times when pragmatic decisions have to be made.
Why would it make the slightest bit of difference to me, an Average Slashdot Reader, what some suits are paying for imaginary pieces of some Linux company? I don't own any VA stock. If I wanted that kind of information, I'm sure I would know where to find it.
Re:What can be done? Nothing.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
I think you're mistaken. Terrorism is not "to cause change" and these attacks were not designed to cause the US to retaliate.
These people's lives are based on hatred. The purpose of the attacks is simply to hurt people; specifically, to hurt Americans. We have no choice but to destroy such minds. Left alive they will continue to act the same way no matter what our reaction is. That's why it's flawed to ask what the US should be doing differently to demotivate these people. That's like suggesting that there is something a black man could do to avoid the KKK. These terrorists live for hatred, and there is nothing that will change that.
A signed 8-bit type allows values from -128 to 127, if two's-complement notation is used (as it always is these days). That makes 256 total values. (There is no negative zero in two's-complement).
Morning, Bobby. Funny coincidence, catching you here. Congrats on the 5. Am I one of those "stereotypical closed-in scientist" types you've known?:)
To be on-topic, he has in the past made many millions of dollars in chess prizes, so if he's smart with his money he should have an easy retired life. He'll probably be like the chessmaster in Cowboy Bebop before long. If he's not that way already.
I think it's natural for a mind that is highly developed in some area -- say, chess -- to care mostly about that narrow aspect of life and give little thought to the rest. We need minds like that, to give us things like advanced technology and games that we can care about. Even if the rest of us may choose to be more balanced.
Plagairaised from Merriam-Webster:
dogma, noun:
1 a : something held as an established opinion; especially : a definite authoritative tenet b : a code of such tenets c : a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds
2 : a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church
According to the actual dictionary, then, "dogma" is what the church tells you to believe for no reason. "Believe this because we say so." "Dogma" is where a church considers itself to have a monopoly on truth.
Hmm. When I see a comment like this, my first response is to rabidly denounce you as a troll. But if I think about it, I know you aren't trolling. I know that you believe what you say, and in fact, I'd bet that the data you have supports that conclusion.
The truth is, "anime" just means "animated stuff from Japan". It's the same "form" as animated stuff from anywhere else. The only difference is that there is a LOT of it. Which means "anime" is really too big of a word to deal with in any meaningful way.
There are a lot of anime fans who don't understand this, and will happily watch just about anything and claim it is the best in the world. It usually isn't. Animated TV series typically have very low-budget animation and effects, just like any other TV show. An anime movie typically has highly detailed, beautiful imagery and crap for character development.
There are exceptions... but don't judge the entirety of a country's film product based on crap like Akira. Try to get a feel for the scope of what you are saying.
The linked article (also known as, "the subject under discussion") makes no such statement. As for previous statements, if Red Hat discovers flaws in reiserfs, it is important that they say so (as they have done in the past with both reiserfs and ext3). What Oracle chooses to do has absolutely no bearing on the validity of Red Hat's tests or on whether reiserfs has bugs or not.
I am not trying to be insulting. This is Slashdot. By posting you give an implicit license for others to post replies which disagree with you.
If you will recall, Red Hat was flamed extensively for releasing glibc when they did.
Benchmark results are not #1 on the list of important features in a server-class OS.
Red Hat is not claiming that "reiser goes corrupt", but you would have known that, had you read the article.
I see this a lot, and I feel a need to correct it in hopes that the correction meme will spread beyond this page and infect at least a few people. So here goes.
You say that Intel is 100% X86 and AMD is 99.9% compatible. You state it as if obvious, and it sure _sounds_ obvious, but any meaning that can be attached to that statement is either false or irrelevant.
The x86 architecture is documented in technical manuals published by Intel. Actually, I'm going to specify the "ia32 architecture" and thus ignore anything before the 386. Anyway, these manuals detail what the processor is going to do when fed certain instructions. Assemblers are written to these documentations.
The first thing you have to realize is that each Intel processor has a different technical manual, because there are instructions added with every major revision. So if we take any given Intel CPU model (say, an i80386DX), and compare it to any other processor model (Pentium II), we can say with certainty that they are not 100% compatible. The Pentium II will react differently if given certain instructions; for example, it will process MMX instructions instead of objecting to them. You could not say these processors are 100% compatible and retain any meaning in "100%".
Secondly, there are bugs. No Intel chip matches the specifications perfectly, and so every chip would be slightly under 100% compatible even with its own manual. (Yes, you hear about very few bugs, but there are many more that aren't really very important that you can read about on Intel's site if you want).
Now we can say that AMD chips are no different from different Intel chips. Some AMD chips have capabilities like 3dnow! that an i80386DX does not have (and this is admitted by the chip in its processor flags). But that's no different from a Pentium II having MMX. And AMD chips have bugs also, but there's no evidence to show that AMD chips have more bugs or anything.
Intel chips are not "100% X86 compatible" just because Intel makes them. That's like saying that Windows NT is 100% MS-DOS compatible just because Microsoft made it and can define what MS-DOS is. Even Microsoft will admit that certain applications which will run under MS-DOS will not run on Windows NT.
And just as an aside, there are no undocumented instructions of even the most remote practical significance in Intel chips. Undocumented instructions are ignored by assembler and compiler developers.
Cool! Okay, you can have the wealth distribution one, as long as you don't suggest that there should be a minimum wage or minimum welfare that is automatically adjusted to keep pace with inflation. (Hellllo, vicious cycle!) Also, it's fun to experiment with keeping money out of the equation entirely (theoretically it should cancel, and nobody eats money). "Money is the Schroedinger's Cat of economics."
As for Social Security, the reason I don't like it is because it's one of the only government programs that manages to remove value from virtually every American. It removes a very significant amount of (time*capital) from basically everyone... and any bank will tell you that (time*capital) = money. It also equals wealth (by reducing to (time*possession of a producing machine)). Social Security takes that away for no good reason. I just wish everybody knew that it wasn't a fund.
Actually it's very difficult for a person to calculate the amount of taxation they pay. It's easiest for me to explain this by example.
First of all you have your income tax; a certain amount chopped off your check. Easy. Then you have the "social security" portion of your income tax, which is also fairly easy but you have to double the amount you are shown since the other half is designed as a hidden cost of income ("your employer pays half", they say. Hogwash.) Once you have money you still have to pay sales tax on anything you purchase, so that's another chunk right there (goes to the "state", of course, but who cares which portion of a unified government the money is distributed to?)
There's more. When you buy something from a corporation, you as a consumer are going to be paying the cost of the company's income tax for that item (who did you think paid that?) It's also the consumers who pay, for example, the taxes on commercial trucks; it's just added on to the cost of whatever you buy. No tax modifies the optimum profit margin for those in a given industry, so all corporate taxes are paid by consumers.
"Tax the wealthy! Tax the corporations!" These are myths. Wealth distribution is not a product of taxation. The government taxes the economy as a whole, no matter what it tries to do. Governments do not create wealth, any more than corporations do.
Morning! It's sure been a while. I'm not refuting the core of your post, which was a correction of an error its parent made. I do debate the value of the various separate aspects of the "Social Security" brand name, but that's another story.
The reason it's less confusing is because it's little-endian instead of middle-endian. The year (most significant) is first, and the day (least significant) is last. The American system places the least significant datum in the middle.
I have a Personal Static Problem too. I once was nearly knocked out when I touched the metal ungrounded slot of a Blockbuster tape return in December with harsh winds and no humidity. And I get shocked all the time, by everything, in the winter. I have a coat that will shock me even if I DO ground myself before I take it off.
We should start a support group for Static Problems.
Please reference http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Winch ester.html
"Winchester" refers to the entire class of drives that are today referred to as "hard drives", including MFM/RLL, IDE, or SCSI versions.
Hah, amen. I used to know a guy who would always tell people that various government agencies were after him for his uber-hacking. He'd even pretend, like if he was driving his car there was a good chance he'd start skidding down side streets because someone was "tailing him".
Then again, he wasn't anything I'd call a "hacker", in any sense of the word. The best one-word description of him would be "wannabe".
Yes, someone could luck out. But do you realize what you are saying?
As an example, radioactive decay is, at the atomic level, a fairly random process, and the atoms are basically isolated. Any given atom could just pop at any moment, and at any given moment some of them are.
Realize now that, with some "luck", it would be very possible for a whole bunch of atoms to decay at once. There's nothing keeping them going at any certain rate other than probability; it's incredibly unlikely that any large number of atoms will do the same relatively unlikely thing at around the same time.
In this case, I would say that if you use your computer to try some random prime numbers, it's far more likely that you'll explode than find the correct numbers "on accident". Not a good risk, I say.
Re:Fight your techno-geek addiction...
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 1
"MPEG, and almost all audio and video compression is 'lossy', it actually removes part of the signal to compress it."
Although you are an AC I should point out that this statement is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what I said. Also, the max res on a DVD is only very slightly higher than your decades-old NTSC TV.
Re:Fight your techno-geek addiction...
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 2
Sorry man, but they are not better quality. Allow me to explain.
In video or audio, compression is a means of maximizing usage of a given amount of bandwidth. You start here by thinking of the bandwidth as a fixed quality. For example, we all know that uncompressed 44khz/16bit CD audio sounds a lot better than a 128kpbs MP3. However, which sounds better: a 128kbps MP3, or uncompressed audio at 8 bits, 16khz (a 128kbps uncompressed audio stream)? Try it sometime.
So you have to realize that in most cases, a compressed stream will look/sound better than an uncompressed one of the same bandwidth. So your hypothetical 704kb/s MP3 would have the potential to sound better than CD quality. Granted, there are always flaws in the algorithms, and sometimes you will see an artifact. In the case of DVDs, this depends a lot on the amount of computational time spent on the MPEG encoding.
Now granted, an LD, uncompressed, could still look a lot better than a DVD if the LD had a higher image bandwidth. Problem is, it doesn't. A frame of a DVD flatly contains more information than a frame on an LD. So even an uncompressed DVD would still look better than an LD.
The compression on DVD is not so that you can fit a movie into a smaller space. It is so that a movie fit into a given space will look as good as possible.
I hope this clears things up for everyone.
Can you read his post please, dolt? His thesis is that the INCREASED competition which has BROKEN the monopolistic stranglehold has changed Moore's Law.
You are using relative morality ("what is right is defined by what the society says is right"). In a pragmatic sense, any system of morality can be said to have a function; a religious moral system, for example, exists to serve the desires of the god being worshipped, while a humanist morality exists to provide a better life for people. The point is that, of all the moralities that could be designed, relative morality is the most pointless; it can serve no successful purpose, and is in fact the same as no morality at all.
Do not think that you are a better person because you can accept any moral system; this is the refuge of minds that are too weak to have any thoughts of their own.
For example, abusing women is wrong; if you could live with a morality where you abused women regularly, you would be the kind of person that I would be willing to fight a war against. I would personally be willing to kill you, or die trying, to stop you.
Relative morality seems on its face like a way to resolve conflict, but in the end it's philosophical masturbation.
Go ahead and believe in Western morality, but look, and look hard, for the parts of it that are wrong. Build something that you can believe in, so when you see an atrocity you are willing to say "this is _wrong_".
"Civilization is two meals and twenty-four hours away from barbarism." -- Heinlein, I think...
Re:So, you can get a local string quartet for $140
on
Insanely Audiophile
·
· Score: 2
Move to Texas. Half the people who go to a symphony wear a coat and tie and the other half wear jeans and a t-shirt. The orchestra even advertises that casual dress is acceptable. There is no animosity between these groups because they're all there for the music. Especially in Houston, since the Houston Symphony is wonderful.
Mapmakers figured out ways to enforce their copyrights a long time ago. Usually any map will have some very small, mostly irrelevant distortions -- like perhaps the driveway of the cartographer will be shown on the map as "Fred Lane". It's pretty simplistic but if you see "Fred Lane" on any other map, then it must be a pirated map.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually in the US, the FAA is responsible for creating security policies. The airlines only pay for it.
The reality is that the US economy would shrink dramatically if the airlines were to disappear, as every sector of the economy is somewhat dependant on air travel. (I fly around half the country working for a funeral home company, if that gives you any perspective.) A smaller economy means a smaller tax base, so airline aid will likely actually have a negative associated cost. Although the principle of capitalism is that private industry takes care of its own problems, there come times when pragmatic decisions have to be made.
Why would it make the slightest bit of difference to me, an Average Slashdot Reader, what some suits are paying for imaginary pieces of some Linux company? I don't own any VA stock. If I wanted that kind of information, I'm sure I would know where to find it.
I think you're mistaken. Terrorism is not "to cause change" and these attacks were not designed to cause the US to retaliate.
These people's lives are based on hatred. The purpose of the attacks is simply to hurt people; specifically, to hurt Americans. We have no choice but to destroy such minds. Left alive they will continue to act the same way no matter what our reaction is. That's why it's flawed to ask what the US should be doing differently to demotivate these people. That's like suggesting that there is something a black man could do to avoid the KKK. These terrorists live for hatred, and there is nothing that will change that.
A signed 8-bit type allows values from -128 to 127, if two's-complement notation is used (as it always is these days). That makes 256 total values. (There is no negative zero in two's-complement).
Morning, Bobby. Funny coincidence, catching you here. Congrats on the 5. Am I one of those "stereotypical closed-in scientist" types you've known? :)
To be on-topic, he has in the past made many millions of dollars in chess prizes, so if he's smart with his money he should have an easy retired life. He'll probably be like the chessmaster in Cowboy Bebop before long. If he's not that way already.
I think it's natural for a mind that is highly developed in some area -- say, chess -- to care mostly about that narrow aspect of life and give little thought to the rest. We need minds like that, to give us things like advanced technology and games that we can care about. Even if the rest of us may choose to be more balanced.
You're right, and I figured that out later when I saw his other posts. Oh well, IHBT.
Plagairaised from Merriam-Webster:
dogma, noun:
1 a : something held as an established opinion; especially : a definite authoritative tenet b : a code of such tenets c : a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds
2 : a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church
According to the actual dictionary, then, "dogma" is what the church tells you to believe for no reason. "Believe this because we say so." "Dogma" is where a church considers itself to have a monopoly on truth.
Hmm. When I see a comment like this, my first response is to rabidly denounce you as a troll. But if I think about it, I know you aren't trolling. I know that you believe what you say, and in fact, I'd bet that the data you have supports that conclusion.
The truth is, "anime" just means "animated stuff from Japan". It's the same "form" as animated stuff from anywhere else. The only difference is that there is a LOT of it. Which means "anime" is really too big of a word to deal with in any meaningful way.
There are a lot of anime fans who don't understand this, and will happily watch just about anything and claim it is the best in the world. It usually isn't. Animated TV series typically have very low-budget animation and effects, just like any other TV show. An anime movie typically has highly detailed, beautiful imagery and crap for character development.
There are exceptions... but don't judge the entirety of a country's film product based on crap like Akira. Try to get a feel for the scope of what you are saying.
The linked article (also known as, "the subject under discussion") makes no such statement. As for previous statements, if Red Hat discovers flaws in reiserfs, it is important that they say so (as they have done in the past with both reiserfs and ext3). What Oracle chooses to do has absolutely no bearing on the validity of Red Hat's tests or on whether reiserfs has bugs or not.
I am not trying to be insulting. This is Slashdot. By posting you give an implicit license for others to post replies which disagree with you.
If you will recall, Red Hat was flamed extensively for releasing glibc when they did.
Benchmark results are not #1 on the list of important features in a server-class OS.
Red Hat is not claiming that "reiser goes corrupt", but you would have known that, had you read the article.
I see this a lot, and I feel a need to correct it in hopes that the correction meme will spread beyond this page and infect at least a few people. So here goes.
You say that Intel is 100% X86 and AMD is 99.9% compatible. You state it as if obvious, and it sure _sounds_ obvious, but any meaning that can be attached to that statement is either false or irrelevant.
The x86 architecture is documented in technical manuals published by Intel. Actually, I'm going to specify the "ia32 architecture" and thus ignore anything before the 386. Anyway, these manuals detail what the processor is going to do when fed certain instructions. Assemblers are written to these documentations.
The first thing you have to realize is that each Intel processor has a different technical manual, because there are instructions added with every major revision. So if we take any given Intel CPU model (say, an i80386DX), and compare it to any other processor model (Pentium II), we can say with certainty that they are not 100% compatible. The Pentium II will react differently if given certain instructions; for example, it will process MMX instructions instead of objecting to them. You could not say these processors are 100% compatible and retain any meaning in "100%".
Secondly, there are bugs. No Intel chip matches the specifications perfectly, and so every chip would be slightly under 100% compatible even with its own manual. (Yes, you hear about very few bugs, but there are many more that aren't really very important that you can read about on Intel's site if you want).
Now we can say that AMD chips are no different from different Intel chips. Some AMD chips have capabilities like 3dnow! that an i80386DX does not have (and this is admitted by the chip in its processor flags). But that's no different from a Pentium II having MMX. And AMD chips have bugs also, but there's no evidence to show that AMD chips have more bugs or anything.
Intel chips are not "100% X86 compatible" just because Intel makes them. That's like saying that Windows NT is 100% MS-DOS compatible just because Microsoft made it and can define what MS-DOS is. Even Microsoft will admit that certain applications which will run under MS-DOS will not run on Windows NT.
And just as an aside, there are no undocumented instructions of even the most remote practical significance in Intel chips. Undocumented instructions are ignored by assembler and compiler developers.
Cool! Okay, you can have the wealth distribution one, as long as you don't suggest that there should be a minimum wage or minimum welfare that is automatically adjusted to keep pace with inflation. (Hellllo, vicious cycle!) Also, it's fun to experiment with keeping money out of the equation entirely (theoretically it should cancel, and nobody eats money). "Money is the Schroedinger's Cat of economics."
As for Social Security, the reason I don't like it is because it's one of the only government programs that manages to remove value from virtually every American. It removes a very significant amount of (time*capital) from basically everyone... and any bank will tell you that (time*capital) = money. It also equals wealth (by reducing to (time*possession of a producing machine)). Social Security takes that away for no good reason. I just wish everybody knew that it wasn't a fund.
Actually it's very difficult for a person to calculate the amount of taxation they pay. It's easiest for me to explain this by example.
First of all you have your income tax; a certain amount chopped off your check. Easy. Then you have the "social security" portion of your income tax, which is also fairly easy but you have to double the amount you are shown since the other half is designed as a hidden cost of income ("your employer pays half", they say. Hogwash.) Once you have money you still have to pay sales tax on anything you purchase, so that's another chunk right there (goes to the "state", of course, but who cares which portion of a unified government the money is distributed to?)
There's more. When you buy something from a corporation, you as a consumer are going to be paying the cost of the company's income tax for that item (who did you think paid that?) It's also the consumers who pay, for example, the taxes on commercial trucks; it's just added on to the cost of whatever you buy. No tax modifies the optimum profit margin for those in a given industry, so all corporate taxes are paid by consumers.
"Tax the wealthy! Tax the corporations!" These are myths. Wealth distribution is not a product of taxation. The government taxes the economy as a whole, no matter what it tries to do. Governments do not create wealth, any more than corporations do.
Morning! It's sure been a while. I'm not refuting the core of your post, which was a correction of an error its parent made. I do debate the value of the various separate aspects of the "Social Security" brand name, but that's another story.
The reason it's less confusing is because it's little-endian instead of middle-endian. The year (most significant) is first, and the day (least significant) is last. The American system places the least significant datum in the middle.
I have a Personal Static Problem too. I once was nearly knocked out when I touched the metal ungrounded slot of a Blockbuster tape return in December with harsh winds and no humidity. And I get shocked all the time, by everything, in the winter. I have a coat that will shock me even if I DO ground myself before I take it off.
We should start a support group for Static Problems.
Please reference http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Winch ester.html
"Winchester" refers to the entire class of drives that are today referred to as "hard drives", including MFM/RLL, IDE, or SCSI versions.
Hah, amen. I used to know a guy who would always tell people that various government agencies were after him for his uber-hacking. He'd even pretend, like if he was driving his car there was a good chance he'd start skidding down side streets because someone was "tailing him".
Then again, he wasn't anything I'd call a "hacker", in any sense of the word. The best one-word description of him would be "wannabe".
Yes, someone could luck out. But do you realize what you are saying?
As an example, radioactive decay is, at the atomic level, a fairly random process, and the atoms are basically isolated. Any given atom could just pop at any moment, and at any given moment some of them are.
Realize now that, with some "luck", it would be very possible for a whole bunch of atoms to decay at once. There's nothing keeping them going at any certain rate other than probability; it's incredibly unlikely that any large number of atoms will do the same relatively unlikely thing at around the same time.
In this case, I would say that if you use your computer to try some random prime numbers, it's far more likely that you'll explode than find the correct numbers "on accident". Not a good risk, I say.
"MPEG, and almost all audio and video compression is 'lossy', it actually removes part of the signal to compress it."
Although you are an AC I should point out that this statement is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what I said. Also, the max res on a DVD is only very slightly higher than your decades-old NTSC TV.
Sorry man, but they are not better quality. Allow me to explain.
In video or audio, compression is a means of maximizing usage of a given amount of bandwidth. You start here by thinking of the bandwidth as a fixed quality. For example, we all know that uncompressed 44khz/16bit CD audio sounds a lot better than a 128kpbs MP3. However, which sounds better: a 128kbps MP3, or uncompressed audio at 8 bits, 16khz (a 128kbps uncompressed audio stream)? Try it sometime.
So you have to realize that in most cases, a compressed stream will look/sound better than an uncompressed one of the same bandwidth. So your hypothetical 704kb/s MP3 would have the potential to sound better than CD quality. Granted, there are always flaws in the algorithms, and sometimes you will see an artifact. In the case of DVDs, this depends a lot on the amount of computational time spent on the MPEG encoding.
Now granted, an LD, uncompressed, could still look a lot better than a DVD if the LD had a higher image bandwidth. Problem is, it doesn't. A frame of a DVD flatly contains more information than a frame on an LD. So even an uncompressed DVD would still look better than an LD.
The compression on DVD is not so that you can fit a movie into a smaller space. It is so that a movie fit into a given space will look as good as possible.
I hope this clears things up for everyone.
Can you read his post please, dolt? His thesis is that the INCREASED competition which has BROKEN the monopolistic stranglehold has changed Moore's Law.
You are using relative morality ("what is right is defined by what the society says is right"). In a pragmatic sense, any system of morality can be said to have a function; a religious moral system, for example, exists to serve the desires of the god being worshipped, while a humanist morality exists to provide a better life for people. The point is that, of all the moralities that could be designed, relative morality is the most pointless; it can serve no successful purpose, and is in fact the same as no morality at all.
Do not think that you are a better person because you can accept any moral system; this is the refuge of minds that are too weak to have any thoughts of their own.
For example, abusing women is wrong; if you could live with a morality where you abused women regularly, you would be the kind of person that I would be willing to fight a war against. I would personally be willing to kill you, or die trying, to stop you.
Relative morality seems on its face like a way to resolve conflict, but in the end it's philosophical masturbation.
Go ahead and believe in Western morality, but look, and look hard, for the parts of it that are wrong. Build something that you can believe in, so when you see an atrocity you are willing to say "this is _wrong_".
"Civilization is two meals and twenty-four hours away from barbarism." -- Heinlein, I think...
Move to Texas. Half the people who go to a symphony wear a coat and tie and the other half wear jeans and a t-shirt. The orchestra even advertises that casual dress is acceptable. There is no animosity between these groups because they're all there for the music. Especially in Houston, since the Houston Symphony is wonderful.
Mapmakers figured out ways to enforce their copyrights a long time ago. Usually any map will have some very small, mostly irrelevant distortions -- like perhaps the driveway of the cartographer will be shown on the map as "Fred Lane". It's pretty simplistic but if you see "Fred Lane" on any other map, then it must be a pirated map.