So in your sig, you reference a (now archived) journal entry where you blame deaths in Nepal on "aging hippies" from Amnesty International. Your claims are that:
1. The government was, at one point, just about to win 2. AI and others (unidentified) stepped in and negotiated a cease fire 3. Current death toll is 10,000 (second cease fire being negotiated)
Several things weren't discussed in your diatribe (some of which appear in the BBC article that you referenced):
1. The maoists are attempting to overthrow an existing monarchy (constitutional monarchy, established in the early 90s) 2. AI is never mentioned in the BBC article 3. 10,000 people dead does not constitute genocide, no matter how appealing use of that word to support your cause may be. That's hardly even a significant conflict, sad to say
From the CIA world factbook:
Reforms in 1990 established a multiparty democracy within the framework of a constitutional monarchy. A Maoist insurgency, launched in 1996, has gained traction and is threatening to bring down the regime. In 2001, the Crown Prince massacred ten members of the royal family, including the king and queen, and then took his own life. In October 2002, the new king dismissed the prime minister and his cabinet for "incompetence" after they dissolved the parliament and were subsequently unable to hold elections because of the ongoing insurgency. The country is now governed by the king and his appointed cabinet, which has negotiated a cease-fire with the Maoist insurgents until elections can be held at some unspecified future date.
So it really doesn't sound like AI is your culprit here, but rather an amazingly inept job at running a country! I'm thinking that perhaps you want to cite your sources now....
I'm not sure what the grandparent was talking about, but in the case where the sat appears on the horizon, you might not be able to get a good enough signal through that much atmosphere. Worst case, you might need to relay through a satellite that appears in (guess here) the 90 degrees of sky directly above you. This being the case, you might then take substantially longer than 1/3 of a second to get from point A to point B.
Where your original distance was a function of 2R, you're now travelling distances that are a function of 2*pi*R+2R... the other inputs are the distance between the earth's surface and the sat (X), as well as the distance between sats in radians (Y). The final formula, if you are directly below the first sat, and your target is directly below the second, 2X+YRsat (keeping in mind here that Rsat is the Rearth plus X), and that grows a bit if your sat is not, or you are relaying through a sat that is not directly above your target, of course.
In fact games with native Linux support are the only ones I'm playing these days. Neverwinter Nights is pretty nice under Linux, lacking only the video-based cut scenes, which I always find annoying anyway;-)
1. We weren't specificially talking about Debian, but apt-admined systems in general. 2. Ignorance is not at issue. Availability of information before avaiability of fixes is. 3. You mention that I'd want to test, but might use apt anyway (local repository). That's nice, but beside the point. The original poster was saying that he didn't need to "stay on top of security updates" like I do, he just needed to update. That simply won't work in the large-scale-production-systems world. 4. You say "If I need to drop in a different smtp daemon because there is an exploit for my current one"... well, we WERE discussing the kernel specifically, and there's simply no way I could mount an effort to move to a different OS faster than a patch could come out. What's more, given all of the virus and spam filtering and special-case hanlding and so on that our mail servers do, I can't imagine swapping even that out faster than a fix could be provided.
At home, all of this is practical. At work (in any significantly large organization), you layer security so that your slow-to-move internal systems are protected as well as can be from the outside world. You're only going to deploy shotgun until you find that there's some unfortunate interaction with an in-house piece of software, and then there are going to be change control meetings every week that block making that kind of change.
You MUST have an approach to security that takes the needs of your business into account as well as the need to protect your assets.
Luke Palmer is someone that I've always seen giving good, fair answers to people's (sometimes heated) questions. Of course, Luke Palmer is someone no one hears about. There are lots more like him, and sorry Luke, I'm just using you as an example because I saw some mail from you today on p5p;-)
If you want to find more such folks, go to the mailing list archive for any random project and look for the people who answer questions, fuel discussions and provide solutions, but rarely fall for the bait of flames and divisivness. They're out there.
Linus does have one big thing going for him: he has leadership skills. That's seperate from being level headed, and it's (I think) orthoganal. Some leaders are not level-headed at all, and they're still quite effective leaders. Linus, however, by having both attributes is able to not only lead, but to grow his community much faster than most.
It doesn't hurt that Linux was at the right place at the right time, but even given that and good leadership, the calm that he is able to project has sped the snowball down the hill.
"I just run "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" once a day"
Ah, what a nice world you live in.
I do that at home. At work, I would be in a world of hurt if I did that. I have thousands of machines running a mix of in-house and external software which customers rely on for mission-critical stuff. I can't install every little patch just because it might make my frobnitzer go faster, and even when I WANT a fix, it's got to be tested in various production configurations first to see if it breaks something (you'd be surprised how often a security fix breaks something).
So I read security updates from the vendor, and install what needs to be installed as soon as I can. If those security updates are coming to me days, weeks or even months after the script kiddies started playing with the exploit code... ugh.
I worked with the orginal NCS back on Apollos. Wow, what an elegant solution for the time. It makes me mad that Sun beat out Apollo for the workstation market, even though Apollos were generations more capable.
Until very recently with Macs, Apollo's distributed directory was unrivaled for ease integration of new nodes in the network. Plug it in, you're not only on the net, but you have the same account, device, filesystem, etc configuration as every other node on the network. Don't have a disk? Eh, we'll find one for you to swap to! It was just slick, and 4MB of RAM was a heavy-duty version... we even had one with 16MB!
Emacs on an Apollo was pretty impressive as well. It integrated with their very cool windowing system and... well, I could go on for days.
Suffice to say that if DCE is the last vestige of Apollo technology (I don't think HP uses the Prism-based RISC architecture any more), then I'm really glad to see it stay around.
I agree with you partially, but here's where I think you and Linus are missing the bigger picture: Just like Microsoft Windows, the majority of installed Linux systems are not being hovered over by people who read every security advisory. I, for example, watch for mail from my vendor telling me of a patch for a security issue. That's how I find out.
Now, I understand the need to open up the process in order to fuel the power of open source development, but I'm worried about script kiddies having a constant stream of exploit examples to work from long before my vendor even has a patch to inform me of. I think a compromise would make sense here. Create a security list, and invite anyone who's been working on the kernel (contributing code) for more than a year, or who a security firm that has contributed advisories for over a year is willing to vouch for. There, you're done. You have a fairly wide audience, and if the people on that list decide that a given problem is too big for them, and they want to bring it to the LKML, they can always make that call when it comes time to do so.
This is a massive distortion. There are dozens of folks who are just as level-headed as Linus. Linus happens to get the lion's share of attention from the community, which is a bit of a paradox given his personality, but he's not alone by a long shot.
Now, if you're just thinking of the handfull of interview-bait folks like RMS, ESR, etc. then yes Linus does tend to stand out as a non-politico.
Better fire those economists trying to look at the economy, becase if they can't solve for tomorrow's Microsoft share price...
A great example. Economics is a valuable tool. It helps us to understand some of the landscape, but even the best models didn't predict the bubble of the late 1990s (though everyone with a dart board was guessing when it would burst once it existed). This is the case with any large-scale system. You can seek to understand trends, and that helps some, but you can't reasonably make predictions or fully understand the reasons for any large-scale event any more than you can be sure who the next president will be.
Fucking ignorant republican...
This really bothers me. Not because I'm a democrat (which I am, though a moderate one and there are topics on which I disagree with the democratic platform), but because I'm not taking any political stand at all. I'm simply saying that this is a good tool to teach people, but it should be introduced with the understanding that we know it's just as flawed as the guy who shows up on CNN and says his computer tells him that the global economy is going to recover next year.
Why is it that a view cannot be based purely on the science, and that people with a healthy dose of skepticism MUST be both ignorant and of the opposing political leaning? Critical thinking and careful review of details are the cornerstones of the scientific method. Please, remember that.
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Today in P2P
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm a user of Gnutella, so let me take that angle on the article. Gnutella today does not match his historical factoids. The network is quite robust and also possesses the multi-sourced download capabilities of BitTorrent. However, where BT requires a centralized "tracker", any node in the Gnutella universe can be a "tracker" at any time. This is the result of a protocol extension introduced quite some time ago (long enough that it seems to be widely supported by all of the clients that I connect to) where the client that you request a file from informs all of the nodes that it knows about who also have the file that they should contact you. They send you a UDP message indicating that they have the file, and you treat that much like a search result.
Thus, when you search you might see 5 sources, but as you start to download, you immediately see that you're downloading from 50 hosts. It's pretty slick, and amazingly resilient.
I don't even bother using anything else these days, when I can download a multi-gig OS image at the capacity of my connection.
I also use magnet links to share my photography under a creative commons license. See, for example, a tree at my grandfather's house
This is news to me, and if true, I'm glad to see we've made such strides forward. I admit I'm not in the field, so I could be very wrong, but last time I was aware we were only able to come up with models that predicted rather grandious climate changes in the past, and the strongest evidence yet for human-induced global warming is that in the mid-60s those models' prediction of temperature (again, a side-effect of climate as you rightly pointed out) break down.
Now, of course we could take those models and call the difference "human activity", but that ignores the fact that we have a model which matches about 75% of the data and there are probably others that would be at least as accurate.
Please, if you work with climate modeling, I'd love to hear how it's progressed, and I really mean that. I'm all for good science, but I'm very skeptical when it comes to the science surrounding one of the most politicized topics in the world.
Correct. Weather is only one aspect of our planet's climate. What's interesting about the grandparent's point is that the climate as a whole is a vastly more complex system, so if we can't solve for cloud-cover....
Why do people bother with this kind of silliness? Really. We've all witnessed the IOCCC and various other golf-like activities for decades now, so why are we shocked that the definition of a "line of code" is different in this hobbiest sport than it is in the pointy-haired-project-planner world of the LOC?
In code-minimization (golf) and code obfuscation passtimes, a line of code is almost always defined as any source code which is considered valid by the interpreter or compiler, and fits on a standard 80-column green-screen or vt100/ANSI-emulation.
You could argue that there's assault involved (in legal terms assault is the threat of violence), but I would consider shining a medium powered laser in someone's eye to be outright battery.
I think your hyperbolic lead-in was a bit too sarcastic to make your point, but the rest of your points I agree with completely. Good job.
Specifically, making the point that this is a case of the PATRIOT Act being applied to a stupid, inconsiderate and yet entirely non-terrorism-related act is important. This alone vindicates all of the people who were called "tinfoil hat wearers" when they said that the PATRIOT Act was going to be used against citizens of the United States who had nothing to do with terrorism. For the record, I wear a teflon-coated copper mesh to ensure conductivity, not some lame-ass tin foil;-)
you come off looking pretty stupid when you fail to remember that 25 years is the maximum
First off, being condescending doesn't help your case any.
Second, you say "For all your long-winded pretence at knowing about the law (even with IANAL)"... no, you see "IANAL" means, "I am not a lawyer," which in turn is how I tell you that I do not "know about the law". If you find my mode of speech long-winded... well, perhaps you need to get used to people who don't say things like "Oooh look, you went and typed all that stuff..."
As for the specifics, yes I understand that that's the maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, and I'm saying that having a maximum sentence for what amounts to simple battery is not just absurd, but unconstitutionally disproportionate. If you disagree, please speak up, but if you simply think that I hadn't read what I typed then please don't bother.
Incorrect. The definition of irony is whatever someone reading the word irony understands it to be, no more and no less.
If I say IANAL or 1337, are you going to complain that it's not a real word? Why would you be concerned when the 10,000th person uses irony to mean coincidence? Have you not clued in to the Slashdot dialect yet?
Someone please mod me and the parent to which I'm replying off-topic so that others don't have to waste their time.
Calmly and patiently carrying out an act which any reasonable person could foresee would have the potential consequence of bringing down an airplane
Doing anything introduces potential risk, and I'll grant you that this introduced more risk than most actions people take with respect to airplanes. What I will not grant is that any plane has ever been grounded as a result of such an action, much less crashed. Please find a counter-example. This should be treated as a case of battery against the cabin crew, and a violation of aviation safety rules (if you're going to shine a laser up in the sky, the FAA has very strict rules about how you go about clearing it, which active adaptive optics astronomers will know all about). Those two will net you some very serious reprecussions. On the FAA side you could face fines and prison and on the battery side, you can easily face prison.
I'm just saying that this isn't a case of terrorism, and should not be approached in that way.
If you truly believe that you have some sort of God-given/Constitutionally-mandated right to shine a high-powered laser into the cockpit of a 747, then you truly need a reality check.
Well, I truly believe that that's not the true reason that this was truly in the YRO section. Does that count?;-)
Seriously, read the article. Among other things, it states:
"We need to send a clear message to the public that there is no harmless mischief when it comes to airplanes," said Christopher Christie, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
This is the kind of reaction that people feared in September and moreso in October of 2001 as it became clear that the US government would spare no time in taking advantage of the bombing of the WTC and pentagon in order to clamp down on the freedom of its citizens.
So, let's tick off the concerns:
This is a crime, and one which should be considered serious. It is not a crime which compares to the sort for which people spend 25 years in prison. This is a simple matter of applying the wrong laws to the criminal, and violates the criminal's rights under the 8th amendment, IMHO. This is backed up on FindLaw where the annotation suggests:
English history which led to the inclusion of a predecessor provision in the Bill of Rights of 1689 indicates additional concern with arbitrary and disproportionate punishments.
IANAL, but the idea of trying to hold a man to an anti-terrorism law with a 25 year prison-term for painting an airplane with a laser seems to me to be a clear-cut example of disproportionate, which is sad because it gives this guy (who deserves at LEAST a serious fine, if not some amount of prison time), a legitimate reason to get off, though possibly only through appeal.
The quote from the U.S. attorney above is clearly wrong. There certainly is "harmless mischief when it comes to airplanes", but this isn't it. When you endanger the safety of passengers on an airplane or turn the airplane into a danger to others, that is not harmless mischief. When you don't, then it is harmless by definition. I know, for example, that hobbiest and non-commercial pilots are being brought under increasing restrictions and scrutiny for no particular reason of safety these days (restricting airspace around major cities was an unfortunate, but reasonable precaution, and there it should have stayed).
Such an over-reaction serves to muddy an important issue: lasers (especially those that are more powerful than the garden-variety pointers) are not toys, and people who (ab)use them as such should expect to face law enforcement.
Hope that helps to clear up the position of at least some of those who feel that this is most certainly an issue of "rights", though clearly you are correct in that YRO is more "Your Rights, Discussed Online" rather than "Your Rights Online".
I don't know anyone who eats at one of these places more than once every 3-6 months at this point. They also share the market with dozens upon dozens of other national, regional and local chains. Here in the Boston area, I would guess that they Kelly's Roast Beef (a local fast-food roast beef and fried seafood chain) on Rt 1 does more business than any two McDonalds in the area. The place is gigantic, and always packed. Regionally, we tend to have more family-style chains than fast-food chains in New England due to the constraints of weather and the fact that people don't travel as far, and thus congregate in smaller numbers than the rest of the country, but on the national scene, Wendy's and the Pepsi fast-food (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc.) have a strong presence.
Coke and Pepsi for cola.
Cola is a very specific example of all soft-drinks, so it's not shocking that two vendors dominate the market. There are, however, many other varieties which sell in regional and cultural niches and make a good profit as well as many other soft-drink vendors who do the same.
If you did not mean cola, but rather all soft-drinks, Pepsi's and Coke's other brands are still the front-runners, but they are the front-runners in a far more diverse market which includes everything from Snapple to Poland Springs (both of which have carbonated and non-carbonated soft drinks). Fresh juices, flavored waters and iced teas are probably the hottest drink markets right now, and they've taken a big chunk of market share from the colas in the last 10 years.
Nike and Reebok for sneakers.
And New Balance along with many store-brands which are produced by large internation chains.
Microsoft and.... well, Microsoft for operating systems.
And Apple, Red Hat and Novell. All billion-plus dollar companies. Just because one is larger than the others, doesn't make being a billion dollar company a boobie prize.
Dell and HP/Compaq for x86 computers.
I've rarely come across either recently. I'm using a grey-box at work (we have a deal with a Linux hardware vendor from which we get all of our desktops and servers), and several from another grey-box vendor at home. My mother uses a Toshiba and a Sony (both laptops) while my laptop is an IBM.
ATI and nVidia for graphics cards.
These are the primary high-end gaming cards. Other applications use others. On-board graphics for example have a very strong Via and Intel presence.
And... Intel and AMD for x86 CPUs...
Well, you're talking about Intel's CPU and one vendor of a knock-off (a very GOOD knock-off, but still a knock-off).
Other processors include PowerPC, ARM and various highly profitable special-purpose processors (many of which are from one of the above companies).
So it seems to me that on every single point, you're getting at a piece of a truth: people tend to PERCIEVE a polarity in any situation (including markets), even where there is none, by chopping off the top two options and ignoring the rest, regardless of how many other options there are, or how the list was sorted.
There is, however, a point to be made about Transmeta. Having a good product is never enough, and nor should it be. Being able to integrate that product with existing distribution, sales, marketing, and products as well as providing sufficient support and service are key to penetrating an existing industry, and it is these hurdles that technical companies often attempt to treat as afterthoughts. I don't know if that was Transmeta's fatal flaw, or if there were valid technical reasons that their offering wasn't quite ideal, but to say that every competitor with a good product should be expected to overthrow an exisitng market is to ignore the real financial and operational burdens that that would place on a myriad of businesses and markets. You, as a consumer WANT it to be hard, but not quite impossible to penetrate the markets that you depend on.
I've been using Gnutella without problems. Fast, reliable downloads; everything I need from software (downloaded FC3 this way) to music (there are some great magnet links for free music these days that you can download without violating anyone's legal rights).
I've been watching BT with interest. It's a great idea in terms of sharing bandwidth for a signle-source item (like a video clip that a Web site wants to share), but for truly decentralized sharing, BT has always fallen short. People tried for a long time to deny the truth and pretend that BT was a decentralized venue, but it's just not.
If you want to use belief and opinion as interchangable terms, that's fine. I don't, and in contexts that I'm aware of, belief has always held a conotation of particularly strong and/or irrational opinion. I'm simply choosing a screwdriver, nothing more.
Even though 30 years is a drop in the universe's bucket in terms of time, there is a lot that could possibly alter the course.
Other than human interference? No, not really. The chances of its running into some other body are probably far less than its running into the earth, and it's not like there's a lot of commuter traffic to get in the way. Space is rather empty -- pardon the cliché.
Slashdot Mirror
So in your sig, you reference a (now archived) journal entry where you blame deaths in Nepal on "aging hippies" from Amnesty International. Your claims are that:
1. The government was, at one point, just about to win
2. AI and others (unidentified) stepped in and negotiated a cease fire
3. Current death toll is 10,000 (second cease fire being negotiated)
Several things weren't discussed in your diatribe (some of which appear in the BBC article that you referenced):
1. The maoists are attempting to overthrow an existing monarchy (constitutional monarchy, established in the early 90s)
2. AI is never mentioned in the BBC article
3. 10,000 people dead does not constitute genocide, no matter how appealing use of that word to support your cause may be. That's hardly even a significant conflict, sad to say
From the CIA world factbook:So it really doesn't sound like AI is your culprit here, but rather an amazingly inept job at running a country! I'm thinking that perhaps you want to cite your sources now....
I'm not sure what the grandparent was talking about, but in the case where the sat appears on the horizon, you might not be able to get a good enough signal through that much atmosphere. Worst case, you might need to relay through a satellite that appears in (guess here) the 90 degrees of sky directly above you. This being the case, you might then take substantially longer than 1/3 of a second to get from point A to point B.
;-)
Where your original distance was a function of 2R, you're now travelling distances that are a function of 2*pi*R+2R... the other inputs are the distance between the earth's surface and the sat (X), as well as the distance between sats in radians (Y). The final formula, if you are directly below the first sat, and your target is directly below the second, 2X+YRsat (keeping in mind here that Rsat is the Rearth plus X), and that grows a bit if your sat is not, or you are relaying through a sat that is not directly above your target, of course.
Ok, that's enough of that
In fact games with native Linux support are the only ones I'm playing these days. Neverwinter Nights is pretty nice under Linux, lacking only the video-based cut scenes, which I always find annoying anyway ;-)
1. We weren't specificially talking about Debian, but apt-admined systems in general. ... well, we WERE discussing the kernel specifically, and there's simply no way I could mount an effort to move to a different OS faster than a patch could come out. What's more, given all of the virus and spam filtering and special-case hanlding and so on that our mail servers do, I can't imagine swapping even that out faster than a fix could be provided.
2. Ignorance is not at issue. Availability of information before avaiability of fixes is.
3. You mention that I'd want to test, but might use apt anyway (local repository). That's nice, but beside the point. The original poster was saying that he didn't need to "stay on top of security updates" like I do, he just needed to update. That simply won't work in the large-scale-production-systems world.
4. You say "If I need to drop in a different smtp daemon because there is an exploit for my current one"
At home, all of this is practical. At work (in any significantly large organization), you layer security so that your slow-to-move internal systems are protected as well as can be from the outside world. You're only going to deploy shotgun until you find that there's some unfortunate interaction with an in-house piece of software, and then there are going to be change control meetings every week that block making that kind of change.
You MUST have an approach to security that takes the needs of your business into account as well as the need to protect your assets.
Luke Palmer is someone that I've always seen giving good, fair answers to people's (sometimes heated) questions. Of course, Luke Palmer is someone no one hears about. There are lots more like him, and sorry Luke, I'm just using you as an example because I saw some mail from you today on p5p ;-)
If you want to find more such folks, go to the mailing list archive for any random project and look for the people who answer questions, fuel discussions and provide solutions, but rarely fall for the bait of flames and divisivness. They're out there.
Linus does have one big thing going for him: he has leadership skills. That's seperate from being level headed, and it's (I think) orthoganal. Some leaders are not level-headed at all, and they're still quite effective leaders. Linus, however, by having both attributes is able to not only lead, but to grow his community much faster than most.
It doesn't hurt that Linux was at the right place at the right time, but even given that and good leadership, the calm that he is able to project has sped the snowball down the hill.
"I just run "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" once a day"
Ah, what a nice world you live in.
I do that at home. At work, I would be in a world of hurt if I did that. I have thousands of machines running a mix of in-house and external software which customers rely on for mission-critical stuff. I can't install every little patch just because it might make my frobnitzer go faster, and even when I WANT a fix, it's got to be tested in various production configurations first to see if it breaks something (you'd be surprised how often a security fix breaks something).
So I read security updates from the vendor, and install what needs to be installed as soon as I can. If those security updates are coming to me days, weeks or even months after the script kiddies started playing with the exploit code... ugh.
I worked with the orginal NCS back on Apollos. Wow, what an elegant solution for the time. It makes me mad that Sun beat out Apollo for the workstation market, even though Apollos were generations more capable.
Until very recently with Macs, Apollo's distributed directory was unrivaled for ease integration of new nodes in the network. Plug it in, you're not only on the net, but you have the same account, device, filesystem, etc configuration as every other node on the network. Don't have a disk? Eh, we'll find one for you to swap to! It was just slick, and 4MB of RAM was a heavy-duty version... we even had one with 16MB!
Emacs on an Apollo was pretty impressive as well. It integrated with their very cool windowing system and... well, I could go on for days.
Suffice to say that if DCE is the last vestige of Apollo technology (I don't think HP uses the Prism-based RISC architecture any more), then I'm really glad to see it stay around.
I agree with you partially, but here's where I think you and Linus are missing the bigger picture: Just like Microsoft Windows, the majority of installed Linux systems are not being hovered over by people who read every security advisory. I, for example, watch for mail from my vendor telling me of a patch for a security issue. That's how I find out.
Now, I understand the need to open up the process in order to fuel the power of open source development, but I'm worried about script kiddies having a constant stream of exploit examples to work from long before my vendor even has a patch to inform me of. I think a compromise would make sense here. Create a security list, and invite anyone who's been working on the kernel (contributing code) for more than a year, or who a security firm that has contributed advisories for over a year is willing to vouch for. There, you're done. You have a fairly wide audience, and if the people on that list decide that a given problem is too big for them, and they want to bring it to the LKML, they can always make that call when it comes time to do so.
This is a massive distortion. There are dozens of folks who are just as level-headed as Linus. Linus happens to get the lion's share of attention from the community, which is a bit of a paradox given his personality, but he's not alone by a long shot.
Now, if you're just thinking of the handfull of interview-bait folks like RMS, ESR, etc. then yes Linus does tend to stand out as a non-politico.
Better fire those economists trying to look at the economy, becase if they can't solve for tomorrow's Microsoft share price...
A great example. Economics is a valuable tool. It helps us to understand some of the landscape, but even the best models didn't predict the bubble of the late 1990s (though everyone with a dart board was guessing when it would burst once it existed). This is the case with any large-scale system. You can seek to understand trends, and that helps some, but you can't reasonably make predictions or fully understand the reasons for any large-scale event any more than you can be sure who the next president will be.
Fucking ignorant republican...
This really bothers me. Not because I'm a democrat (which I am, though a moderate one and there are topics on which I disagree with the democratic platform), but because I'm not taking any political stand at all. I'm simply saying that this is a good tool to teach people, but it should be introduced with the understanding that we know it's just as flawed as the guy who shows up on CNN and says his computer tells him that the global economy is going to recover next year.
Why is it that a view cannot be based purely on the science, and that people with a healthy dose of skepticism MUST be both ignorant and of the opposing political leaning? Critical thinking and careful review of details are the cornerstones of the scientific method. Please, remember that.
I'm a user of Gnutella, so let me take that angle on the article. Gnutella today does not match his historical factoids. The network is quite robust and also possesses the multi-sourced download capabilities of BitTorrent. However, where BT requires a centralized "tracker", any node in the Gnutella universe can be a "tracker" at any time. This is the result of a protocol extension introduced quite some time ago (long enough that it seems to be widely supported by all of the clients that I connect to) where the client that you request a file from informs all of the nodes that it knows about who also have the file that they should contact you. They send you a UDP message indicating that they have the file, and you treat that much like a search result.
Thus, when you search you might see 5 sources, but as you start to download, you immediately see that you're downloading from 50 hosts. It's pretty slick, and amazingly resilient.
I don't even bother using anything else these days, when I can download a multi-gig OS image at the capacity of my connection.
I also use magnet links to share my photography under a creative commons license. See, for example, a tree at my grandfather's house
This is news to me, and if true, I'm glad to see we've made such strides forward. I admit I'm not in the field, so I could be very wrong, but last time I was aware we were only able to come up with models that predicted rather grandious climate changes in the past, and the strongest evidence yet for human-induced global warming is that in the mid-60s those models' prediction of temperature (again, a side-effect of climate as you rightly pointed out) break down.
Now, of course we could take those models and call the difference "human activity", but that ignores the fact that we have a model which matches about 75% of the data and there are probably others that would be at least as accurate.
Please, if you work with climate modeling, I'd love to hear how it's progressed, and I really mean that. I'm all for good science, but I'm very skeptical when it comes to the science surrounding one of the most politicized topics in the world.
Correct. Weather is only one aspect of our planet's climate. What's interesting about the grandparent's point is that the climate as a whole is a vastly more complex system, so if we can't solve for cloud-cover....
Why do people bother with this kind of silliness? Really. We've all witnessed the IOCCC and various other golf-like activities for decades now, so why are we shocked that the definition of a "line of code" is different in this hobbiest sport than it is in the pointy-haired-project-planner world of the LOC?
In code-minimization (golf) and code obfuscation passtimes, a line of code is almost always defined as any source code which is considered valid by the interpreter or compiler, and fits on a standard 80-column green-screen or vt100/ANSI-emulation.
Thank you, and well put.
:)
Absurdists amuse me
"Battery?" No. Assault.
You could argue that there's assault involved (in legal terms assault is the threat of violence), but I would consider shining a medium powered laser in someone's eye to be outright battery.
I think your hyperbolic lead-in was a bit too sarcastic to make your point, but the rest of your points I agree with completely. Good job.
;-)
Specifically, making the point that this is a case of the PATRIOT Act being applied to a stupid, inconsiderate and yet entirely non-terrorism-related act is important. This alone vindicates all of the people who were called "tinfoil hat wearers" when they said that the PATRIOT Act was going to be used against citizens of the United States who had nothing to do with terrorism. For the record, I wear a teflon-coated copper mesh to ensure conductivity, not some lame-ass tin foil
you come off looking pretty stupid when you fail to remember that 25 years is the maximum
First off, being condescending doesn't help your case any.
Second, you say "For all your long-winded pretence at knowing about the law (even with IANAL)"... no, you see "IANAL" means, "I am not a lawyer," which in turn is how I tell you that I do not "know about the law". If you find my mode of speech long-winded... well, perhaps you need to get used to people who don't say things like "Oooh look, you went and typed all that stuff..."
As for the specifics, yes I understand that that's the maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, and I'm saying that having a maximum sentence for what amounts to simple battery is not just absurd, but unconstitutionally disproportionate. If you disagree, please speak up, but if you simply think that I hadn't read what I typed then please don't bother.
Incorrect. The definition of irony is whatever someone reading the word irony understands it to be, no more and no less.
If I say IANAL or 1337, are you going to complain that it's not a real word? Why would you be concerned when the 10,000th person uses irony to mean coincidence? Have you not clued in to the Slashdot dialect yet?
Someone please mod me and the parent to which I'm replying off-topic so that others don't have to waste their time.
Calmly and patiently carrying out an act which any reasonable person could foresee would have the potential consequence of bringing down an airplane
Doing anything introduces potential risk, and I'll grant you that this introduced more risk than most actions people take with respect to airplanes. What I will not grant is that any plane has ever been grounded as a result of such an action, much less crashed. Please find a counter-example. This should be treated as a case of battery against the cabin crew, and a violation of aviation safety rules (if you're going to shine a laser up in the sky, the FAA has very strict rules about how you go about clearing it, which active adaptive optics astronomers will know all about). Those two will net you some very serious reprecussions. On the FAA side you could face fines and prison and on the battery side, you can easily face prison.
I'm just saying that this isn't a case of terrorism, and should not be approached in that way.
Well, I truly believe that that's not the true reason that this was truly in the YRO section. Does that count?
Seriously, read the article. Among other things, it states:This is the kind of reaction that people feared in September and moreso in October of 2001 as it became clear that the US government would spare no time in taking advantage of the bombing of the WTC and pentagon in order to clamp down on the freedom of its citizens.
So, let's tick off the concerns:
- This is a crime, and one which should be considered serious. It is not a crime which compares to the sort for which people spend 25 years in prison. This is a simple matter of applying the wrong laws to the criminal, and violates the criminal's rights under the 8th amendment, IMHO. This is backed up on FindLaw where the annotation suggests:IANAL, but the idea of trying to hold a man to an anti-terrorism law with a 25 year prison-term for painting an airplane with a laser seems to me to be a clear-cut example of disproportionate, which is sad because it gives this guy (who deserves at LEAST a serious fine, if not some amount of prison time), a legitimate reason to get off, though possibly only through appeal.
- The quote from the U.S. attorney above is clearly wrong. There certainly is "harmless mischief when it comes to airplanes", but this isn't it. When you endanger the safety of passengers on an airplane or turn the airplane into a danger to others, that is not harmless mischief. When you don't, then it is harmless by definition. I know, for example, that hobbiest and non-commercial pilots are being brought under increasing restrictions and scrutiny for no particular reason of safety these days (restricting airspace around major cities was an unfortunate, but reasonable precaution, and there it should have stayed).
- Such an over-reaction serves to muddy an important issue: lasers (especially those that are more powerful than the garden-variety pointers) are not toys, and people who (ab)use them as such should expect to face law enforcement.
Hope that helps to clear up the position of at least some of those who feel that this is most certainly an issue of "rights", though clearly you are correct in that YRO is more "Your Rights, Discussed Online" rather than "Your Rights Online".McDonald's and Burger King for burgers.
.... well, Microsoft for operating systems.
I don't know anyone who eats at one of these places more than once every 3-6 months at this point. They also share the market with dozens upon dozens of other national, regional and local chains. Here in the Boston area, I would guess that they Kelly's Roast Beef (a local fast-food roast beef and fried seafood chain) on Rt 1 does more business than any two McDonalds in the area. The place is gigantic, and always packed. Regionally, we tend to have more family-style chains than fast-food chains in New England due to the constraints of weather and the fact that people don't travel as far, and thus congregate in smaller numbers than the rest of the country, but on the national scene, Wendy's and the Pepsi fast-food (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc.) have a strong presence.
Coke and Pepsi for cola.
Cola is a very specific example of all soft-drinks, so it's not shocking that two vendors dominate the market. There are, however, many other varieties which sell in regional and cultural niches and make a good profit as well as many other soft-drink vendors who do the same.
If you did not mean cola, but rather all soft-drinks, Pepsi's and Coke's other brands are still the front-runners, but they are the front-runners in a far more diverse market which includes everything from Snapple to Poland Springs (both of which have carbonated and non-carbonated soft drinks). Fresh juices, flavored waters and iced teas are probably the hottest drink markets right now, and they've taken a big chunk of market share from the colas in the last 10 years.
Nike and Reebok for sneakers.
And New Balance along with many store-brands which are produced by large internation chains.
Microsoft and
And Apple, Red Hat and Novell. All billion-plus dollar companies. Just because one is larger than the others, doesn't make being a billion dollar company a boobie prize.
Dell and HP/Compaq for x86 computers.
I've rarely come across either recently. I'm using a grey-box at work (we have a deal with a Linux hardware vendor from which we get all of our desktops and servers), and several from another grey-box vendor at home. My mother uses a Toshiba and a Sony (both laptops) while my laptop is an IBM.
ATI and nVidia for graphics cards.
These are the primary high-end gaming cards. Other applications use others. On-board graphics for example have a very strong Via and Intel presence.
And... Intel and AMD for x86 CPUs...
Well, you're talking about Intel's CPU and one vendor of a knock-off (a very GOOD knock-off, but still a knock-off).
Other processors include PowerPC, ARM and various highly profitable special-purpose processors (many of which are from one of the above companies).
So it seems to me that on every single point, you're getting at a piece of a truth: people tend to PERCIEVE a polarity in any situation (including markets), even where there is none, by chopping off the top two options and ignoring the rest, regardless of how many other options there are, or how the list was sorted.
There is, however, a point to be made about Transmeta. Having a good product is never enough, and nor should it be. Being able to integrate that product with existing distribution, sales, marketing, and products as well as providing sufficient support and service are key to penetrating an existing industry, and it is these hurdles that technical companies often attempt to treat as afterthoughts. I don't know if that was Transmeta's fatal flaw, or if there were valid technical reasons that their offering wasn't quite ideal, but to say that every competitor with a good product should be expected to overthrow an exisitng market is to ignore the real financial and operational burdens that that would place on a myriad of businesses and markets. You, as a consumer WANT it to be hard, but not quite impossible to penetrate the markets that you depend on.
I've been using Gnutella without problems. Fast, reliable downloads; everything I need from software (downloaded FC3 this way) to music (there are some great magnet links for free music these days that you can download without violating anyone's legal rights).
I've been watching BT with interest. It's a great idea in terms of sharing bandwidth for a signle-source item (like a video clip that a Web site wants to share), but for truly decentralized sharing, BT has always fallen short. People tried for a long time to deny the truth and pretend that BT was a decentralized venue, but it's just not.
If you want to use belief and opinion as interchangable terms, that's fine. I don't, and in contexts that I'm aware of, belief has always held a conotation of particularly strong and/or irrational opinion. I'm simply choosing a screwdriver, nothing more.
Even though 30 years is a drop in the universe's bucket in terms of time, there is a lot that could possibly alter the course.
Other than human interference? No, not really. The chances of its running into some other body are probably far less than its running into the earth, and it's not like there's a lot of commuter traffic to get in the way. Space is rather empty -- pardon the cliché.