Christianity, with its history of inquisitions, crusades, witch burnings, pogroms, blood libel, financial parasitism, subjugation of women, repression of science, burning of scientists at the stake, abandonment of adherents, and general pillage... isn't a dangerous cult? Really?
Yeah! And white people, with their history of colonialism, slavery, pillage, and rape of minorities need to be locked away as well. Because the sins of ones ancestors are exactly the same as acts committed today!
Christianity is no different from any other major religion in the horrors it has created, and it's no different from modern, secular, state-scale cultural/political forces like state communism or nationalism. It turns out that when we humans band together in large groups around a shared system of beliefs and cultural identity, we have an overwhelming tendency to act like murderous, condescending assholes to everyone else. Religion is just the form we're most familiar with due to the short time-period that widespread secularism has been in existence.
Personally, while I think Scientology is a pretty dangerous organization today, I'm not too worried about their future. Scientology today is just kind of like LDS church was 100 years ago -- feeling persecuted and justified in lashing out at its critics. They don't face the same kind of (often violent) persecution the LDS church did, and their ways are really out of touch with modern society's opinions on "asshatery in the name of faith," but give it a century, and they may well turn into model citizens. Doesn't really mean that they're not a group to watch out for in the meantime, though.
...that they provide services that the market wants. (I mean, who ever made a profit pleasing customers?) I hope that anti-trust law isn't too eviscerated to go after them for this BS.
Except that "[]" is commonly used in writing to denote a change from the original word (whatever it was was) to "drecent," not "decent or recent". Using {} makes more sense because it denotes that you're doing something unusual that's not supported in normal English writing. Personally, I would've gone with "{d,r}" as the AC suggests or "(d|r)."
Either someone's having a bizarre laugh at my expense, or the standards for positive moderation near the top of the thread are just really, really low.
Whilst your point is valid, intel was the wrong target to pick. Linux supports it better than pretty much anything else, and I'm pretty sure a fair number of intel Macs have had intel graphics too.
Oh, I wasn't trying to say that I thought Linux has poor support for Intel video (though my experience with Intel audio, particularly headphone jack detection, has been less stellar).
But I was apparently wrong on Macs having Intel video, though. Hell, it turns out that the MacBook I'm using right now has a GMA 950 in it. Egg on my face.
Yeah, no kidding. Has there ever *been* Intel graphics support for Mac OS X? It's hard enough getting *Linux* to support all the chipsets in a modern laptop, much less an OS designed for a very limited hardware ecosystem.
Of course, not being able to support random, off-the-shelf, cheapo PC hardware largely defeats the purpose of such a tool, so I'm interested in how they plan to work around it. New drivers for the OS or some kind of virtualization layer?
Actually, even if the world does end on the predicted date, the prophesies are still not true. There's no basis for their claims, so they're arbitrary.
That's not true. If the world ends exactly as they predicted, then there's a strong sign that their prophesies have a basis. Occam's Razor only points to a naturalistic world as long as nothing overtly miraculous occurs, and a sufficiently bizarre end of the world would point to someone's crazy voice in the head actually being something real as the simplest explanation.
Godwin's Law is simply that any discussion that goes on long enough will invoke the Nazis. While this is frequently a sign that the discussion has long since past its useful life, it is not a statement that any mention of the Nazis is an automatic loss in a debate as some people take it. Godwin himself noted that sometimes Nazis are on-topic; he was just making a joke about how often they came up.
Hah, owned. I even did a Google search for "goggles nothing" to make sure I had the right phrase, but I didn't scroll down or follow any of the links. Sloppy.
Naturally, there are a few considerable limitations compared to more traditional displays, but the company's as yet unnamed goggles do promise to beam an 800 x 600 image directly into your retina that'll appear as a 10-centimeter wide image floating about one meter in front of them -- which is certainly no small feat, even if it may not be the most practical one.
I would've pointed out that this is currently vaporware. In other words: THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!
Let's get this straight. Windex typically reeks of ammonia. And so do public elevators where winos have urinated.
A coincidence? A paradox? Or, are the guys at Brigham Young sniffing gold spraypaint trying to come up with new ideas? Hmmmmm...?
As bad as the rigor of this study seems to be, your counter-point doesn't actually defeat what it says. Windex, urine, and urine covered up by Windex don't all smell the same, and elevators that are likely to be soiled are very different social settings from rooms at a graduate research center. The social triggers differ with all of these things.
The results of the study don't particularly surprise me. Think of how people act in clean v. dirty bathrooms or how vandalism that isn't cleaned up invites further vandalism. I'm just worried that idiots will think that ALL you need is the *smell* of Windex and not *actual* efforts at cleaning up a cesspit. Or that we'll be assaulted with overbearing smells of cleaning products at banks and stores (which would eventually wear away the mental association and make it *doubly* futile).
We have not even realized swarm stupidity yet, how can they claim swarm intelligence?
"Stupidity" can't exist without intelligence. "Stupidity" is what you call it when one intelligence rates the performance of another intelligence, and it's usually measured against a background of the subject species' average intelligence. (i.e. A "smart dog" is "smart for a dog," not smart compared to a human.)
Until the robot swarm has identifiable intelligence to begin with, there's no more point in claiming stupidity than there is to claim stupidity for an amoeba or a chair. Therefore, it's not putting the cart in front of the horse, because we can't call them stupid until some of them are intelligent first.
"Prey" is a pretty good scifi novel about this. It follows the tired cautionary-tale forumla, but like all of Crichton's novels has (some) basis in real research.
Not it's not; the formula is just scaremongering; and it's about as based in real research as Congo's gorilla hybrids, as Andromeda Strain's magical, energy-eating, crystal viruses, as Jurassic Park's spontaneous evolution of lysine synthesis genes in less generations than you can count on one hand, as State of Fear's wide-eyed acceptance of junk science that challenges the "religion" of global warming, and as Sphere's... whatever the f--- Sphere was supposed to be.
Crichton is a hack that you stop being impressed by once you're out of middle/high school. He can't write an ending to save his life, and the science in his stories is an interesting backdrop for stories that ultimately subvert or ignore science to create dramatic tension and/or provide an escape hatch to the situation.
Also, there's absolutely nothing to fear from these robots as they don't actually eat anything. They just seek out objects marked as "food" and avoid others marked as "poison."
Every business and organization SHOULD know, from experience, that their computer system could go belly up at any time, and have backup methods and redundancies ready to go.
A serious zero day threat, such as Blaster doesn't need any kind of user intervention, nothing open, no configuration faults. It just works.
And then what harm does it do to your own system if the VM is sandboxed?
It is not like they will browse with IE and let me tell one reason why most installs a VM, to actually BROWSE with IE under Windows. Web designers, people who does business with companies infested with MS and even some Intranet users.
Ah, well that is a good, valid use of a VM to use the internet, but I doubt that it's "most installs." In that use case, there's no need to allow the VM to write any changes to its state to disk when you're done. If it gets a virus, who cares?
Also when I talk about OS X users, I talk about the general community. You know, same guys double click DMG files and happily give their passwords to have some "codec" installed (trojan).
And while that is a problem -- a totally separate problem -- what does that have to do with using a VM? I doubt very seriously that most Mac OS X users use VMs to go online. Few of us are big enough IE lovers go through that kind of hassle and expense when you could just use native Safari or Firefox. Web developers are not representative of the community.
That irritated me too. And the other guy was not as much gushing about Windows 7 as trying desperately to cover up some Mac envy that he hopes is far more deeply repressed than it seems to be. "Oh, sure Mac OS X has been doing this for years, but Windows 7 is better I SWEAR--DON'T GIVE ME ANOTHER SHOT, GLORIOUS LEADER!"
BTW I love the really pathetic spin in the submission - "things don't work correctly, and that's a plus!"
Yeah, that got me too. Have you ever had the "fun" of trying to get an app working on Wine that their website claims works just perfectly with it? I've had only a 30% success rate at getting games to run under Wine, and I'm not really surprised to see some Wine user with Stockholm syndrome deeply impressed by just how far a virus could stubble, stutter, and limp its way through Wine.
When you talk about how evil things can be done while their virtual machine up and what kind of trouble they may get into if they have bad luck, they install a free AV to Windows.
What kind of fool surfs the web through the VM when they have perfectly good native tools to use instead? It's not like this kind of web-downloaded trojan is going to affect someone using a VM unless they're trying to hurt themselves. Also, if you don't give your VM any sort of access to your local system outside of its sandbox, then no worries.
Of course, the only thing I use a VM to do is to play old DOS games, so maybe I'd be more vulnerable if I was the type of person who used it to run MS Office and *had* to give it access to the local system to be useful.
The plural of virus is viruses. In reference to a computer virus, the plural is often believed to be virii or, less commonly, viri, but both forms are neologistic folk etymology and no major dictionary recognizes them as alternative forms.
(emphasis added)
The article then goes on to mention that virus was a mass noun that *had* no plural in Latin and then goes through every single way to pluralize a Latin word ending in -us, showing that -ii is never an appropriate way, and it mentions that as an English adopted word, there would be no obligation to use a Latin conjugation instead of adding -es for an English word.
In other words, "viruses" is the only valid pluralization because it's the only conjugation is can have in the absence of proper Latin pluralization.
There's nothing crazy about having the freedom to live your life however you want. That's what liberty means. Besides I can not lay my hand on any part of the U.S. Constitution that granted the Congress power to ban a natural plant from existing. Can you? ----- QED the tenth amendment comes into effect - that power is reserved to the 50 states.
Welcome to the interstate commerce clause.
Congress has the power to regulate any commerce that crosses state lines. This includes commerce that is local and serves interstate travelers (Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964)), commerce that uses inputs that cross state lines (Katzenbach v. McClung (1964)), and even entirely intrastate commerce that can have an effect on the interstate market and which makes regulation of interstate commerce difficult (Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) and Gonzales v. Raich (2005)).
Of particular notes are the last two cases. The first involved a farmer growing wheat on his own land for his own use in violation of laws intended to prevent wheat surpluses (in a New Deal time period where the government was trying to control wheat prices to avoid bankrupting farmers). The second involved medical marijuana grown for personal use. Drawing on the former case in deciding the latter, the court pointed out:
"The parallel concern making it appropriate to include marijuana grown for home consumption in the [Controlled Substances Act] is the likelihood that the high demand in the interstate market will draw such marijuana into that market. While the diversion of homegrown wheat tended to frustrate the federal interest in stabilizing prices by regulating the volume of commercial transactions in the interstate market, the diversion of homegrown marijuana tends to frustrate the federal interest in eliminating commercial transactions in the interstate market in their entirety. In both cases, the regulation is squarely within Congress' commerce power because production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity."
People boggle me all the time when they say, "The Constitution doesn't say the government can do [insert very specific thing here]!" and miss the broad and sweeping powers of the Interstate Commerce Clause and the Spending Clause. People need to quit thinking they've noticed some AMAZING oversight that SCOTUS has missed for 200+ years.
You need to present voters with options of which candidates to vote for. This should be reconfigurable from election to election, and from voting place to voting place -- after all, I need to be able to vote for this year's governor's race, my local state senate / legislature district, all the other county seats, and all of the ballot initiatives. I need not to see anything outside of my district. If this is a primary, I only need to see the candidates for my party and not the others. The interface needs to be user-friendly and adaptable to people who don't speak English or who have disabilities. You need to store the results in a way that preserves the integrity of the data and the anonymity of the voter.
You need to store the vote tallies in a secure way that cannot be tampered with from the outside. The storage of that data needs to be secure against both malicious attempts to mess with it and machine failure. You also need to be able to transmit it to a central elections office without being tampered with in route, without being dropped or lost, and without allowing fake results to be submitted by third parties.
None of these are trivial problems. I'm not saying that Sequoia Systems has solved all of the them nor that they haven't created anything with bloat or inefficient solutions -- especially if they're relying on MS SQL -- but it's not a job for under 100 lines of perl either. A good voting system is HARD.
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Christianity, with its history of inquisitions, crusades, witch burnings, pogroms, blood libel, financial parasitism, subjugation of women, repression of science, burning of scientists at the stake, abandonment of adherents, and general pillage... isn't a dangerous cult? Really?
Yeah! And white people, with their history of colonialism, slavery, pillage, and rape of minorities need to be locked away as well. Because the sins of ones ancestors are exactly the same as acts committed today!
Christianity is no different from any other major religion in the horrors it has created, and it's no different from modern, secular, state-scale cultural/political forces like state communism or nationalism. It turns out that when we humans band together in large groups around a shared system of beliefs and cultural identity, we have an overwhelming tendency to act like murderous, condescending assholes to everyone else. Religion is just the form we're most familiar with due to the short time-period that widespread secularism has been in existence.
Personally, while I think Scientology is a pretty dangerous organization today, I'm not too worried about their future. Scientology today is just kind of like LDS church was 100 years ago -- feeling persecuted and justified in lashing out at its critics. They don't face the same kind of (often violent) persecution the LDS church did, and their ways are really out of touch with modern society's opinions on "asshatery in the name of faith," but give it a century, and they may well turn into model citizens. Doesn't really mean that they're not a group to watch out for in the meantime, though.
...that they provide services that the market wants. (I mean, who ever made a profit pleasing customers?) I hope that anti-trust law isn't too eviscerated to go after them for this BS.
Fair point.
Except that "[]" is commonly used in writing to denote a change from the original word (whatever it was was) to "drecent," not "decent or recent". Using {} makes more sense because it denotes that you're doing something unusual that's not supported in normal English writing. Personally, I would've gone with "{d,r}" as the AC suggests or "(d|r)."
Either someone's having a bizarre laugh at my expense, or the standards for positive moderation near the top of the thread are just really, really low.
Sadly, including the MacBook I wrote the above post on. Just not my day today.
Whilst your point is valid, intel was the wrong target to pick. Linux supports it better than pretty much anything else, and I'm pretty sure a fair number of intel Macs have had intel graphics too.
Oh, I wasn't trying to say that I thought Linux has poor support for Intel video (though my experience with Intel audio, particularly headphone jack detection, has been less stellar).
But I was apparently wrong on Macs having Intel video, though. Hell, it turns out that the MacBook I'm using right now has a GMA 950 in it. Egg on my face.
Yeah, no kidding. Has there ever *been* Intel graphics support for Mac OS X? It's hard enough getting *Linux* to support all the chipsets in a modern laptop, much less an OS designed for a very limited hardware ecosystem.
Of course, not being able to support random, off-the-shelf, cheapo PC hardware largely defeats the purpose of such a tool, so I'm interested in how they plan to work around it. New drivers for the OS or some kind of virtualization layer?
Actually, even if the world does end on the predicted date, the prophesies are still not true. There's no basis for their claims, so they're arbitrary.
That's not true. If the world ends exactly as they predicted, then there's a strong sign that their prophesies have a basis. Occam's Razor only points to a naturalistic world as long as nothing overtly miraculous occurs, and a sufficiently bizarre end of the world would point to someone's crazy voice in the head actually being something real as the simplest explanation.
Godwin's Law is simply that any discussion that goes on long enough will invoke the Nazis. While this is frequently a sign that the discussion has long since past its useful life, it is not a statement that any mention of the Nazis is an automatic loss in a debate as some people take it. Godwin himself noted that sometimes Nazis are on-topic; he was just making a joke about how often they came up.
Hah, owned. I even did a Google search for "goggles nothing" to make sure I had the right phrase, but I didn't scroll down or follow any of the links. Sloppy.
Naturally, there are a few considerable limitations compared to more traditional displays, but the company's as yet unnamed goggles do promise to beam an 800 x 600 image directly into your retina that'll appear as a 10-centimeter wide image floating about one meter in front of them -- which is certainly no small feat, even if it may not be the most practical one.
I would've pointed out that this is currently vaporware.
In other words: THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!
Let's get this straight. Windex typically reeks of ammonia. And so do public elevators where winos have urinated.
A coincidence? A paradox? Or, are the guys at Brigham Young sniffing gold spraypaint trying to come up with new ideas? Hmmmmm...?
As bad as the rigor of this study seems to be, your counter-point doesn't actually defeat what it says. Windex, urine, and urine covered up by Windex don't all smell the same, and elevators that are likely to be soiled are very different social settings from rooms at a graduate research center. The social triggers differ with all of these things.
The results of the study don't particularly surprise me. Think of how people act in clean v. dirty bathrooms or how vandalism that isn't cleaned up invites further vandalism. I'm just worried that idiots will think that ALL you need is the *smell* of Windex and not *actual* efforts at cleaning up a cesspit. Or that we'll be assaulted with overbearing smells of cleaning products at banks and stores (which would eventually wear away the mental association and make it *doubly* futile).
We have not even realized swarm stupidity yet, how can they claim swarm intelligence?
"Stupidity" can't exist without intelligence. "Stupidity" is what you call it when one intelligence rates the performance of another intelligence, and it's usually measured against a background of the subject species' average intelligence. (i.e. A "smart dog" is "smart for a dog," not smart compared to a human.)
Until the robot swarm has identifiable intelligence to begin with, there's no more point in claiming stupidity than there is to claim stupidity for an amoeba or a chair. Therefore, it's not putting the cart in front of the horse, because we can't call them stupid until some of them are intelligent first.
"Prey" is a pretty good scifi novel about this. It follows the tired cautionary-tale forumla, but like all of Crichton's novels has (some) basis in real research.
Not it's not; the formula is just scaremongering; and it's about as based in real research as Congo's gorilla hybrids, as Andromeda Strain's magical, energy-eating, crystal viruses, as Jurassic Park's spontaneous evolution of lysine synthesis genes in less generations than you can count on one hand, as State of Fear's wide-eyed acceptance of junk science that challenges the "religion" of global warming, and as Sphere's... whatever the f--- Sphere was supposed to be.
Crichton is a hack that you stop being impressed by once you're out of middle/high school. He can't write an ending to save his life, and the science in his stories is an interesting backdrop for stories that ultimately subvert or ignore science to create dramatic tension and/or provide an escape hatch to the situation.
Also, there's absolutely nothing to fear from these robots as they don't actually eat anything. They just seek out objects marked as "food" and avoid others marked as "poison."
Every business and organization SHOULD know, from experience, that their computer system could go belly up at any time, and have backup methods and redundancies ready to go.
Fixed that for you. Unfortunately, many don't.
A serious zero day threat, such as Blaster doesn't need any kind of user intervention, nothing open, no configuration faults. It just works.
And then what harm does it do to your own system if the VM is sandboxed?
It is not like they will browse with IE and let me tell one reason why most installs a VM, to actually BROWSE with IE under Windows. Web designers, people who does business with companies infested with MS and even some Intranet users.
Ah, well that is a good, valid use of a VM to use the internet, but I doubt that it's "most installs." In that use case, there's no need to allow the VM to write any changes to its state to disk when you're done. If it gets a virus, who cares?
Also when I talk about OS X users, I talk about the general community. You know, same guys double click DMG files and happily give their passwords to have some "codec" installed (trojan).
And while that is a problem -- a totally separate problem -- what does that have to do with using a VM? I doubt very seriously that most Mac OS X users use VMs to go online. Few of us are big enough IE lovers go through that kind of hassle and expense when you could just use native Safari or Firefox. Web developers are not representative of the community.
The moon isn't like a truck...
But my love for you is.
BERSERKER!
That irritated me too. And the other guy was not as much gushing about Windows 7 as trying desperately to cover up some Mac envy that he hopes is far more deeply repressed than it seems to be. "Oh, sure Mac OS X has been doing this for years, but Windows 7 is better I SWEAR--DON'T GIVE ME ANOTHER SHOT, GLORIOUS LEADER!"
Both of these articles were awful.
Oh, how our memories fail us....
BTW I love the really pathetic spin in the submission - "things don't work correctly, and that's a plus!"
Yeah, that got me too. Have you ever had the "fun" of trying to get an app working on Wine that their website claims works just perfectly with it? I've had only a 30% success rate at getting games to run under Wine, and I'm not really surprised to see some Wine user with Stockholm syndrome deeply impressed by just how far a virus could stubble, stutter, and limp its way through Wine.
Wine still sucks as far as I'm concerned.
When you talk about how evil things can be done while their virtual machine up and what kind of trouble they may get into if they have bad luck, they install a free AV to Windows.
What kind of fool surfs the web through the VM when they have perfectly good native tools to use instead? It's not like this kind of web-downloaded trojan is going to affect someone using a VM unless they're trying to hurt themselves. Also, if you don't give your VM any sort of access to your local system outside of its sandbox, then no worries.
Of course, the only thing I use a VM to do is to play old DOS games, so maybe I'd be more vulnerable if I was the type of person who used it to run MS Office and *had* to give it access to the local system to be useful.
Did you actually read the links you provided?
The plural of virus is viruses. In reference to a computer virus, the plural is often believed to be virii or, less commonly, viri, but both forms are neologistic folk etymology and no major dictionary recognizes them as alternative forms.
(emphasis added)
The article then goes on to mention that virus was a mass noun that *had* no plural in Latin and then goes through every single way to pluralize a Latin word ending in -us, showing that -ii is never an appropriate way, and it mentions that as an English adopted word, there would be no obligation to use a Latin conjugation instead of adding -es for an English word.
In other words, "viruses" is the only valid pluralization because it's the only conjugation is can have in the absence of proper Latin pluralization.
There's nothing crazy about having the freedom to live your life however you want. That's what liberty means. Besides I can not lay my hand on any part of the U.S. Constitution that granted the Congress power to ban a natural plant from existing. Can you? ----- QED the tenth amendment comes into effect - that power is reserved to the 50 states.
Welcome to the interstate commerce clause.
Congress has the power to regulate any commerce that crosses state lines. This includes commerce that is local and serves interstate travelers (Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964)), commerce that uses inputs that cross state lines (Katzenbach v. McClung (1964)), and even entirely intrastate commerce that can have an effect on the interstate market and which makes regulation of interstate commerce difficult (Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) and Gonzales v. Raich (2005)).
Of particular notes are the last two cases. The first involved a farmer growing wheat on his own land for his own use in violation of laws intended to prevent wheat surpluses (in a New Deal time period where the government was trying to control wheat prices to avoid bankrupting farmers). The second involved medical marijuana grown for personal use. Drawing on the former case in deciding the latter, the court pointed out:
"The parallel concern making it appropriate to include marijuana grown for home consumption in the [Controlled Substances Act] is the likelihood that the high demand in the interstate market will draw such marijuana into that market. While the diversion of homegrown wheat tended to frustrate the federal interest in stabilizing prices by regulating the volume of commercial transactions in the interstate market, the diversion of homegrown marijuana tends to frustrate the federal interest in eliminating commercial transactions in the interstate market in their entirety. In both cases, the regulation is squarely within Congress' commerce power because production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity."
People boggle me all the time when they say, "The Constitution doesn't say the government can do [insert very specific thing here]!" and miss the broad and sweeping powers of the Interstate Commerce Clause and the Spending Clause. People need to quit thinking they've noticed some AMAZING oversight that SCOTUS has missed for 200+ years.
The problem is much more complex than that.
You need to present voters with options of which candidates to vote for. This should be reconfigurable from election to election, and from voting place to voting place -- after all, I need to be able to vote for this year's governor's race, my local state senate / legislature district, all the other county seats, and all of the ballot initiatives. I need not to see anything outside of my district. If this is a primary, I only need to see the candidates for my party and not the others. The interface needs to be user-friendly and adaptable to people who don't speak English or who have disabilities. You need to store the results in a way that preserves the integrity of the data and the anonymity of the voter.
You need to store the vote tallies in a secure way that cannot be tampered with from the outside. The storage of that data needs to be secure against both malicious attempts to mess with it and machine failure. You also need to be able to transmit it to a central elections office without being tampered with in route, without being dropped or lost, and without allowing fake results to be submitted by third parties.
None of these are trivial problems. I'm not saying that Sequoia Systems has solved all of the them nor that they haven't created anything with bloat or inefficient solutions -- especially if they're relying on MS SQL -- but it's not a job for under 100 lines of perl either. A good voting system is HARD.