Oh, but it's "fast"... I'm getting so tired of that. I remember when Sawfish came out and everyone loved it because it was so "fast"... then it added support for all of the desktop features everyone wanted and it was deemed too slow. There was a new "fast" window manager called Metacity. Gnome adopted Metacity as its primary window manager because they didn't want something that was that heavy-weight, but Metacity needed some additional features to be fully Gnomish.
Today's Metacity is as heavy-weight as Sawfish.
E has always been "fast", but fast in a different way. There are true optimizations that aren't just a result of feature incompleteness (mostly the rendering model which allows for greater hardware acceleration). Still, it's frustrating to see this process of the new toy being compared to a mature tool with a modern feature set. I love Gnome (and I'm sure I'd love KDE too) because it provides a deep and rich integration between applications. It doesn't really matter if the Window manager is Sawfish, Metacity, E or whatever comes out tomorrow, I'll still demand strong support for internationalization; multiple desktops; interaction with the session and desktop managers, panel and applications; configuration through the same configuration system as the rest of my apps; etc.
If your window manager can do all of this, THEN I'll look at how fast it is. Same for a mailer or terminal or web browser, etc, etc.
We have so many misinformed or misleading replies here, that I had to simply post a bulk refutation rather than suffer Slashdot's filtering of multiple posts (their advertising loss, not mine):
This compares in no way to bringing charges against groups that post the addresses of doctors along with the suggestion that they should be punished. Even had the man directly posted a political rant about the plight of the Kurds, the difference between saying "abortion is wrong, and we should stand against people who do it" and "abortion, which John Smith of 1 Main St practices (bastard should pay for what he's done (wink, wink)) is wrong," is monumental under the laws of any civilized nation.
We're talking about editing links and summary descriptions, people, please try to keep that in mind when replying.
The Kurds are, according to Wikipedia, "an ethnic group of Iranian origin (itself a branch of the larger Indo-European family), comprised of (according to some sources) about 25 million people, primarily in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria [...] Kurdish guerillas launched attacks on Turkish targets in 1984, and since then they have fought against the Turkish government for independence and the right to be educated in Kurdish schools, with little success." You can see why the Turks are not particularly fond of the Kurds, but at the same time that in no way excuses this behavior.
Speaking of Wikipedia, no this doesn't bode ill for Wikipedia and other Wikis. Revision histories and revision editing are an increasingly sophisticated area of Wiki development and Wikipedia does a very good job of reverting changes that are motivated by non-factual concerns. In fact, it's generally easier for honest innacuracy (e.g. what the ex-Brittanica editor pointed out previously on Slashdot) to sneak in than deliberate mistruths in a controvercial subject (exactly because it IS controvercial).
No, to be a DoS attack, they must attempt to deny service.
And attempting flood someone with so much traffic that they can't afford their Internet connection is, in fact, attempting to deny them services.
Your narrow view of what a denial of service attack is is moot however. This is clearly an attempt to cause financial hardship and Lycos will most certainly be held accountable for it in a court of law. If Lycos is so eager to go to court, why didn't they just sue the spammer in question?!
as long as my mom, who can be called a computer idiot but still manages to do her work with MS Office, tells me "what's that K icon where START should be"
Welcome to "culture shock" associated with leaving a software monoculture. Someday, I hope to see someone stare in incredulity when told that all desktops used to have the same icon for the desktop main menu.
This has nothing to do with ease of use, and if such first impressions were a guideline, the PARC/Apple/Windows/CDE desktop UI gestalt would have died in its infancy. Typewriter users were railing against it for ages because it emphasized removing your hands from the keyboard (a major taboo), using backspace (just plain anti-social), and many other modes of interaction that were foreign to the typewriter age.
Your mother will eventually either have to learn to get along without the word "start" or be phased out, just as typewriter users were, sorry.
The same goes for the "my document is in Office 97 format, can you re-save, export, decrypt and send yours again?" office of the past. People are learning to use new tools and adapting to the future. Some won't... oh well.
What truly limits Linux desktop acceptance in a wider context is the lack of some key legacy application interoperability like Peachtree, but that's a much higher bar than Linux was attempting to measure up to 3 years ago, and the bar isn't moving down!
"I doubt it'll change much from all the previous such attempts."
You misunderstand. There are no previous attempts. This is it. What I'm running on my desktop at work and at home is what I've been running for years. Nothing new here, just incremental improvements that will go on for centuries to come, I'm sure (though at some point so many components may have been re-built or replaced that we would not recognize it).
What do you say to the folks who grow up with Linux today and encounter Windows for the first time... what happens when they say, "what's that start thing where the Fedora should be?"
Why do people insist on modding up spoilers like this? Please, if you're going to post about the story, speak in somewhat more general terms, don't just blurt out the ending.
Watchmen is a whole other matter. This isn't a case of "Hollywood won't adapt it right because Hollywood likes to shit on our dreams" like LOTR. A Watchmen would be really, really _hard_ to do. This book is full of very twisted subtleties and undercurrents. If you just did a slavish reproduction of the comic like the first two Harry Potter films or the Dune miniseries - which is the best we can hope for - it would be a failure
I disagree.
I think Watchmen is a fairly simple story on the surface, and you can tell that surface story on film with enough of a nod to the rest of the story to wink at the folks who have read the material and enough of a draw to get a large chunk of the audience to read the original.
To give a sense of this, here's a rough synopsis of the story along the lines of what I'd expect in a movie (some spoilers, but I'm going to skip the ending, so not too bad):
Credits open with a montage of historical trivia. Newspaper headlines proclaiming Dr Manhatten; some of the exploits of the heroes; Viet Nam; the outlawing of the heroes; Nixon; etc.
A long pan over the city ala Blade Runner ends in the crime scene with the death of Commedian. Everything that was done visually in the comic with this scene can be done on film.
The story progresses through the introductions of each of the major characters. Rorschach is our primary point of view character, but in a semi-omnicient PoV we move around to Dr. Manhatten and Veidt at times.
Once introductions are done it becomes mostly the twin stories of Dr. Manhatten and Rorschach as they fight their individual demons... Manhatten trying to work out his relationship with humanity and Rorschach trying to solve the crime at hand while getting plunged deeper into his own personal crisis.
Before the mid-point, Rorschach goes to jail, Manhatten goes to Mars and the story changes... we now follow Laurie. Hollis and Rorschach and later Mars take up a good third of the movie, removing us from the barrage of clues that have been dropped in the first third.
In the last third, you wrap up the story, bringing all of the primary characters together and eventually telling the story as it was written in the final book. Most of the lead-up to the main events in the end will have to be expository, possibly coming from Manhatten or Veidt, but equally easily from Rorschach or a combination of the above.
Is it the whole story? No. Would it present all of the reasons that your average Watchman fan loves the book? Of course not. Would it be a good movie and a decent into to the story? I think so.
Well, the risk of a well known simple combustion process that has been used for a couple of hundred years igniting the atmosphere can be considered low.
This statement and the rest of your post are fairly well thought out. I'll just assume we had a simple misunderstanding. Good to hear from someone with a level head.
Now I see where you are coming from. Get out your magnetic water, healing crystals and rabbits feet where we can see them. We obey the laws of physics on this planet.
Sorry, don't have any. Physics is at the heart of risk management, and while in any risk management scenario you have to acknowledge the extreme unknowns, you also assign them minimal risk for which observation is sufficient defense.
My problem with this kind of debate is that most people don't understand risk management, and argue in terms of absolutes only. If we lived our lives that way, we would never leave our homes.
There's a great deal of guesswork involved in the hydrogeology and materials science of predicting the effects of ten thousand years
Of course there is! This is exactly why it's critical to design in multiple levels of failsafes and testing that can be performed over the course of the installations life.
If someone proposed putting it all in some drum of "we think it won't decay"ium, throwing it in a dirt hole and forgetting about it, I'd either laugh at them or have them brought up on charges, depending on how far they got. That's NOT what's going on. This is a very carefully planned out series of failsafe measures each of which is carefully monitored over time.
Hence my analogy with current buildings. We design in as much failsafe as we feel is called for, given our understanding of the materials and environment. If you think we can't do that risk management, then you shouldn't go into these buildings. Just because there's larger risks over a greater horizon doesn't mean that Yucca's risk management is substantially different.
Here's the thing that has always confused me. I don't understand how patents are applied. This patent, for example, specifically claims coverage over BASIC-derived programming langauges where the operator is called IsNot. So, am I to understand that a C version does not infringe? What about a Basic version that calls the operator Isnt? How does this work? Lawyers?
I disagree that this means people shouldn't be pedantic about this [...] "decimate" generally, today, means the same thing as "massacre". But its original meaning, it meant to brutally kill 10% (hence "dec-imate") of a group as punishment for that group's actions. [...] What's the point in the modern definition? All we've done is destroy a perfectly good word.
Well, for starters, I'd say the word was decimated;-)
Seriously, you're talking about the mutability of language. I understand your point, but you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that language has been mutating this way (in terms of words, phrases, syntax and grammar) for as long as we are able to measure (i.e. recorded history).
We can attempt to fight back against the changes we think are particularly hurtful (e.g. "hacking" becoming a term for electronic vandalism rather than the application of curiousity and creativity), but we have to choose those battles closely.
I used to rail against the use of the word "issue" to mean problem, not because it's a bad series of letters to use, but because it was being used to soften the emotional weight of the word. After a few years I began to realize that it was actually a useful change. When people said, "we have a problem," I automatically assigned it more weight... this additional payload of information was a benefit that I'd not considered.
Now, with "begging the question", there's some reasonable concern that you lose the ability to say, "you were begging the question," unambiguously. That's a valid concern, but I've never come across the need. In conversation, I would always say, "that's circular logic." In formal debate contexts, I would use the original phrase, and there would be no ambiguity.
Well, thats growth. What would you expect if you invested in a company, and then they turned around and said "We're done innovating. We have all the money we're happy with", what would you say or respond? I'd sue them for misleading the prublic.
That is entirely a matter of looking over their S-1. It's not a judgement call at all.
If their S-1 said, "we plan to produce widgets for sale in the United states," and they announce that they're a) not going to get into selling wudgets, which are now all the rage, and b) not going to start selling over-seas, then their stock price might drop because there's an expectation that that limits their growth, but that IS what you signed up for according to the S-1. If they decide to go affield and get into new things, they need stockholder approval, but they'll probably get it. To decide to stick with the existing plan, they need much less (if any) approval of the stock holders or even the board.
Now, we can get into the fact that no one reads S-1s any more and that stockholders expect the board to force growth, but that's not the company's fault and I don't think it's legitimate to apply a growth-oriented business plan to every company by default. Simply providing dividend returns and maintaining your position in the market was a valid plan for most of last century, and it technically (if not practically) still is.
There were never really any old rules
The SEC has volumes and volumes of rules, and surprisingly most of the "sense" that the modern investor has of what it means to be a public company has no grounding in those rules. That disconnect is what I'm refering to.
Frank Gorshin was the black-and-white faced alien (or was taht the white-and-black... hmmm) in "Let This Be Your Battlefield", and an old-series episode, but was better known as The Riddler from the old Batman series.
I saw him on stage once in a play whose name I don't recall. He obviously was not feeling well, and I was left underwhelmed, but I still think he's great.
The multiply redundant materials involved need to remain safe
Ok, part 1 I'm willing to blow off. For those who think 10,000 years is "coming up sooner than you think," consider this: If one significant scientific discovery is made in terms of engineering such containment every lifetime (about 80 years, not every generation which would be about 20 years), then 125 such discoveries separate us from the time where we'd better have a decent solution. It's also 5 times the length of time since the fall of the Roman Empire. I'm sure I'm incapable of imagining what we'll be capable of by then.
That said, the second problem is a serious one, but the poster I'm replying to is over-stating. If ALL of the materials used fail to perform exactly as expected, we still have a decent chance of containment. But that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that some of those materials will do something unexpected and failsafe materials will stand between us and a rather difficult national emergency. How can I know this? I can't, of course, any more than I can know that the next launch of the space shuttle won't start some strange chain reaction that will ignite the atmosphere. I am, however, satisfactorilly encouraged that our current state of materials engineering, combined with redundancy in planning is capable of measuring up to the job.
If you don't think that's the case, then you should never step into a building made of concrete and steel again. I can assure you that the tolerances employed in designing such structures (even when accounting for the difference in planning horizon) are much less strict than those employed in planning Yucca Mountain.
I, for one, would happily live near the site, as it's probably the area least likely to suffer any sort of man-made disaster in the US.
The post you refer to IS a bit extreme, but the viewpoint is valid. The dispute you (and the author of the article) cite is a good example. No one actually knows the correct date. The goal then is not "truth" (there is none to be had), the goal is information. Wikipedia has provided a subset of information and will continue to always be a subset.
Traditional dead-tree tomes will continue to have a different sub-set of information than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is influenced by the mix of cultures involved and the media in which it exists. This creates a fundamentally different result than the dead-tree approach (which is also valid).
The idea that the truth is impossible to find, and that information must be tainted by the point of view of the observer is clearly accurate to some extent given that almost no topic is not challenged and re-challenged with varying degrees of success by experts in a given topic's field of study. The nature of light, the size of the earth, the time and place of important historical events, the behavior of a type of animal... all of these are called into question over and over as we understand more and more about them.
The question of truth is simply the question of how much more there is to understand.
Any Public company has a FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION to make money in the interest of the stockholders
Random side point: is that the correct use of fiduciary obligation? I thought that only refered to the obligation of a broker, agent or accountant to their client.
None the less, I get what you mean, and you're right.
What I think we've lost sight of in recent years, and Microsoft is guilty of having lost sight of it too, is that that is not the only responsibility that they have. They have a responsibility to their employees (in fact many responsibilities, some of which are enforced by law, and some of which are just part of our culture). They also have a responsibility to the law, including anti-trust laws.
Another important point: where do you draw the line? Do they have a responsibility to increase their stock value forever? There's an expectation that they do, but in reality a company that simply maintains their market and produces dividends SHOULD (and used to) be considered to have met their obligation. Remember that stock is not an interest-bearing instrument.
We've become a culture obsessed with the idea that companies grow without bounds, and we punish harshly any company that fails to do so. The result is that companies have to either lie (Enron, MCI) or cheat (Microsoft, Walmart) in order to match our unrealistic expectations. Companies that play by the old rules are simply crushed.
The directors at SCO still have that fiduciary responsibility. If making lawsuits and collecting are how they do it, they satisfy that responsibility, even if they no longer "create" a product.
No. For several reasons no. First off, "SCO" as it exists today is a fiction. The company was dying and was purchased by people who had no interest in the product, only in the value of the litigation that they could initiate. I submit to you that starting a business based on the concept that you can sue for profit is unethical (not illegal) and SHOULD result in your being viewed as the "Bad Guy".
Second, risk is part of a business plan. If you execute your business plan as stated in your filing with the SEC and it fails, you are NOT under any obligation to invent a new plan by any means necessary to save the business. That means that there is no counter-weight to the law or even ethics that says you must find a way, any way out. Now, you probably should for the aforementioned reasons of obligation to employees, etc, but that's no reason to start abusing the legal system.
Third, SCO is acting as a strong-man, absuing the Linux communtiy for those who would rather not get their hands dirty. There is no better definition of "Bad Guy".
All of that aside, I was simply responding to correct a mistake in a post. It wasn't Microsoft that was being called a "Bad Guy".
Your reading it wrong. That statement was in reference to SCO, and yes, Slashdot as a community is generally of the opinion that SCO are "Bad Guys". I'm not sure I 100% agree with that, but I certainly am more willing to accept that characterization than I am to accept it refering to Microsoft, the way you seem to have taken it. Microsoft is motivated by profits and little else, but they do continue to produce some things which benefit the public at large to some (perhaps insufficient for the impact they have) degree.
SCO on the other hand really isn't doing enough for the world to merit sucking up my air.
Re:Social engineering RFID into the children
on
Students Tracked By RFID
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I've always wondered how we can expect our kids to fight for liberty later when we gave them none.
If you mean "fight" in the sense of soldiering, don't worry that's the easy part. The mental conditioning that is employed in the military (any military) is designed to enhance the bonds that men (mostly men, though women take to it, the bonds are different, as they provoke more of a defensive than offensive FoF reflex) form in small social groups. The end result is that to a soldier "freedom" is like a team name. You might as well say "Red Sox". If you think that can't be the case because soldiers are willing to die "for freedom", think about what would happen if you killed a member of a baseball team. The other players would be willing to kill and/or die to either prevent or avenge that killing, even though they probably never knew each other before joining the team. Such is the power of the team instinct in humans.
So, you could call an opressive dictatorship "freedom", just as long as your soldiers are indoctrinated to defend it.
The real question is a much more frightening one: how can we expect our kids to defend freedom as our future leaders when we didn't given them any as children? To what depths will our future judges, congresspersons and presidents sink when they have been treated like this growing up?
It is important to note for all of the "don't go to Slashdot for medical advice" shouters, that Patrick HAS gone down the medical community route. He's asking for additional input and anyone who can help his doctor grease the treatment skids. This is a *good thing*, and it's just too bad that everyone doesn't have access to the Slashdot pulpit for such dire needs (e.g. when a friend of mine almost lost a leg over a mystery infection).
You can now download this program in a pre-alpha state. You will have to use your own word-list until I have a place to upload the wordlist without too much pain.
Not quite, though you're right that this math is much more in favor of punctuation than I made it seem, sorry.
Many of those characters aren't valid in passwords generically because there are systems on which you might have to use the password that don't allow for them (e.g. SysV UNIX will interpret "@" as "kill-line", not the character "@").
I used to use a sub-set of 13 relatively safe punctuation, but I have recently expanded that to 22, so you're math is much closer for my program now.
The bottom line, though, is that saying "one character must be punctuation" (13-32 character set) is more limiting than saying "one character must be an alphanum" (62 character set) by quite a significant margin! I should have just said that and left it there. Thanks for fact-checking me.
He was 'quibbling' over a disputed birthdate because that heppened to be one of the inaccuracies he found in the article he used as an example
No, that's incorrect.
He was 'quibbling' over a disputed birthdate because it happened to be a pet topic of his that he sought out in Wikipedia as a measure of its worth. The problem with that line of logic is that he has set a very arbitrary bar, and while that might be the right bar for a hundred+ year old tome, for a <10 year old reference, it's an amazingly strict bar to set.
If his point had been, Wikipedia brings several strengths to the table (such as rapid adoption of current events and modern culture), but it will be a decade or two before it begins to measure up to the accademic standards of dead-tree encylopedias with respect to historical minutia, then I would have agreed. That's not, however, what he said and I think he has demonstrated clearly that Wikipedia is more valuable than many would have given it credit for.
And yet, the usage that you are responding to is so pervasive in coloquial english usage that you know exactly what the person posting means.
This is a perfect example of what Wikipedia is useful for, as it has an excellent article on Begging the question that covers the usage that you cite AND the more coloquially popular:
"Begging the question, in modern popular usage, is almost always synonymous with raising the question."
This is a bit like correcting someone for saying, "the lass' ring." Common usage allows for it while a college english teacher would mark you down for it. Slashdot is not your college english teacher, and if we can live with "teh win" and "133td00dz", then we can live with some colloquial english that's been in popular usage for far longer.
Slashdot Mirror
fvwm is a window manager, not a desktop environment. If you don't know the difference, then this is not going to be a very productive discussion.
Oh, but it's "fast"... I'm getting so tired of that. I remember when Sawfish came out and everyone loved it because it was so "fast"... then it added support for all of the desktop features everyone wanted and it was deemed too slow. There was a new "fast" window manager called Metacity. Gnome adopted Metacity as its primary window manager because they didn't want something that was that heavy-weight, but Metacity needed some additional features to be fully Gnomish.
Today's Metacity is as heavy-weight as Sawfish.
E has always been "fast", but fast in a different way. There are true optimizations that aren't just a result of feature incompleteness (mostly the rendering model which allows for greater hardware acceleration). Still, it's frustrating to see this process of the new toy being compared to a mature tool with a modern feature set. I love Gnome (and I'm sure I'd love KDE too) because it provides a deep and rich integration between applications. It doesn't really matter if the Window manager is Sawfish, Metacity, E or whatever comes out tomorrow, I'll still demand strong support for internationalization; multiple desktops; interaction with the session and desktop managers, panel and applications; configuration through the same configuration system as the rest of my apps; etc.
If your window manager can do all of this, THEN I'll look at how fast it is. Same for a mailer or terminal or web browser, etc, etc.
- This compares in no way to bringing charges against groups that post the addresses of doctors along with the suggestion that they should be punished. Even had the man directly posted a political rant about the plight of the Kurds, the difference between saying "abortion is wrong, and we should stand against people who do it" and "abortion, which John Smith of 1 Main St practices (bastard should pay for what he's done (wink, wink)) is wrong," is monumental under the laws of any civilized nation.
- We're talking about editing links and summary descriptions, people, please try to keep that in mind when replying.
- The Kurds are, according to Wikipedia, "an ethnic group of Iranian origin (itself a branch of the larger Indo-European family), comprised of (according to some sources) about 25 million people, primarily in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria [...] Kurdish guerillas launched attacks on Turkish targets in 1984, and since then they have fought against the Turkish government for independence and the right to be educated in Kurdish schools, with little success." You can see why the Turks are not particularly fond of the Kurds, but at the same time that in no way excuses this behavior.
- Speaking of Wikipedia, no this doesn't bode ill for Wikipedia and other Wikis. Revision histories and revision editing are an increasingly sophisticated area of Wiki development and Wikipedia does a very good job of reverting changes that are motivated by non-factual concerns. In fact, it's generally easier for honest innacuracy (e.g. what the ex-Brittanica editor pointed out previously on Slashdot) to sneak in than deliberate mistruths in a controvercial subject (exactly because it IS controvercial).
Thanks and carry on.No, to be a DoS attack, they must attempt to deny service.
And attempting flood someone with so much traffic that they can't afford their Internet connection is, in fact, attempting to deny them services.
Your narrow view of what a denial of service attack is is moot however. This is clearly an attempt to cause financial hardship and Lycos will most certainly be held accountable for it in a court of law. If Lycos is so eager to go to court, why didn't they just sue the spammer in question?!
as long as my mom, who can be called a computer idiot but still manages to do her work with MS Office, tells me "what's that K icon where START should be"
Welcome to "culture shock" associated with leaving a software monoculture. Someday, I hope to see someone stare in incredulity when told that all desktops used to have the same icon for the desktop main menu.
This has nothing to do with ease of use, and if such first impressions were a guideline, the PARC/Apple/Windows/CDE desktop UI gestalt would have died in its infancy. Typewriter users were railing against it for ages because it emphasized removing your hands from the keyboard (a major taboo), using backspace (just plain anti-social), and many other modes of interaction that were foreign to the typewriter age.
Your mother will eventually either have to learn to get along without the word "start" or be phased out, just as typewriter users were, sorry.
The same goes for the "my document is in Office 97 format, can you re-save, export, decrypt and send yours again?" office of the past. People are learning to use new tools and adapting to the future. Some won't... oh well.
What truly limits Linux desktop acceptance in a wider context is the lack of some key legacy application interoperability like Peachtree, but that's a much higher bar than Linux was attempting to measure up to 3 years ago, and the bar isn't moving down!
"I doubt it'll change much from all the previous such attempts."
You misunderstand. There are no previous attempts. This is it. What I'm running on my desktop at work and at home is what I've been running for years. Nothing new here, just incremental improvements that will go on for centuries to come, I'm sure (though at some point so many components may have been re-built or replaced that we would not recognize it).
What do you say to the folks who grow up with Linux today and encounter Windows for the first time... what happens when they say, "what's that start thing where the Fedora should be?"
Why do people insist on modding up spoilers like this? Please, if you're going to post about the story, speak in somewhat more general terms, don't just blurt out the ending.
Oh and Rosebud is a... well, you know.
I think Watchmen is a fairly simple story on the surface, and you can tell that surface story on film with enough of a nod to the rest of the story to wink at the folks who have read the material and enough of a draw to get a large chunk of the audience to read the original.
To give a sense of this, here's a rough synopsis of the story along the lines of what I'd expect in a movie (some spoilers, but I'm going to skip the ending, so not too bad):
Is it the whole story? No. Would it present all of the reasons that your average Watchman fan loves the book? Of course not. Would it be a good movie and a decent into to the story? I think so.
Well, the risk of a well known simple combustion process that has been used for a couple of hundred years igniting the atmosphere can be considered low.
This statement and the rest of your post are fairly well thought out. I'll just assume we had a simple misunderstanding. Good to hear from someone with a level head.
So, three non-lawyers later we have disagreement. Any lawyers out there?
My problem with this kind of debate is that most people don't understand risk management, and argue in terms of absolutes only. If we lived our lives that way, we would never leave our homes.
There's a great deal of guesswork involved in the hydrogeology and materials science of predicting the effects of ten thousand years
Of course there is! This is exactly why it's critical to design in multiple levels of failsafes and testing that can be performed over the course of the installations life.
If someone proposed putting it all in some drum of "we think it won't decay"ium, throwing it in a dirt hole and forgetting about it, I'd either laugh at them or have them brought up on charges, depending on how far they got. That's NOT what's going on. This is a very carefully planned out series of failsafe measures each of which is carefully monitored over time.
Hence my analogy with current buildings. We design in as much failsafe as we feel is called for, given our understanding of the materials and environment. If you think we can't do that risk management, then you shouldn't go into these buildings. Just because there's larger risks over a greater horizon doesn't mean that Yucca's risk management is substantially different.
Here's the thing that has always confused me. I don't understand how patents are applied. This patent, for example, specifically claims coverage over BASIC-derived programming langauges where the operator is called IsNot. So, am I to understand that a C version does not infringe? What about a Basic version that calls the operator Isnt? How does this work? Lawyers?
Well, for starters, I'd say the word was decimated
Seriously, you're talking about the mutability of language. I understand your point, but you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that language has been mutating this way (in terms of words, phrases, syntax and grammar) for as long as we are able to measure (i.e. recorded history).
We can attempt to fight back against the changes we think are particularly hurtful (e.g. "hacking" becoming a term for electronic vandalism rather than the application of curiousity and creativity), but we have to choose those battles closely.
I used to rail against the use of the word "issue" to mean problem, not because it's a bad series of letters to use, but because it was being used to soften the emotional weight of the word. After a few years I began to realize that it was actually a useful change. When people said, "we have a problem," I automatically assigned it more weight... this additional payload of information was a benefit that I'd not considered.
Now, with "begging the question", there's some reasonable concern that you lose the ability to say, "you were begging the question," unambiguously. That's a valid concern, but I've never come across the need. In conversation, I would always say, "that's circular logic." In formal debate contexts, I would use the original phrase, and there would be no ambiguity.
Well, thats growth. What would you expect if you invested in a company, and then they turned around and said "We're done innovating. We have all the money we're happy with", what would you say or respond? I'd sue them for misleading the prublic.
That is entirely a matter of looking over their S-1. It's not a judgement call at all.
If their S-1 said, "we plan to produce widgets for sale in the United states," and they announce that they're a) not going to get into selling wudgets, which are now all the rage, and b) not going to start selling over-seas, then their stock price might drop because there's an expectation that that limits their growth, but that IS what you signed up for according to the S-1. If they decide to go affield and get into new things, they need stockholder approval, but they'll probably get it. To decide to stick with the existing plan, they need much less (if any) approval of the stock holders or even the board.
Now, we can get into the fact that no one reads S-1s any more and that stockholders expect the board to force growth, but that's not the company's fault and I don't think it's legitimate to apply a growth-oriented business plan to every company by default. Simply providing dividend returns and maintaining your position in the market was a valid plan for most of last century, and it technically (if not practically) still is.
There were never really any old rules
The SEC has volumes and volumes of rules, and surprisingly most of the "sense" that the modern investor has of what it means to be a public company has no grounding in those rules. That disconnect is what I'm refering to.
Frank Gorshin was the black-and-white faced alien (or was taht the white-and-black... hmmm) in "Let This Be Your Battlefield", and an old-series episode, but was better known as The Riddler from the old Batman series.
I saw him on stage once in a play whose name I don't recall. He obviously was not feeling well, and I was left underwhelmed, but I still think he's great.
- After 10,000 years, Yucca becomes unpredictable
- The multiply redundant materials involved need to remain safe
Ok, part 1 I'm willing to blow off. For those who think 10,000 years is "coming up sooner than you think," consider this: If one significant scientific discovery is made in terms of engineering such containment every lifetime (about 80 years, not every generation which would be about 20 years), then 125 such discoveries separate us from the time where we'd better have a decent solution. It's also 5 times the length of time since the fall of the Roman Empire. I'm sure I'm incapable of imagining what we'll be capable of by then.That said, the second problem is a serious one, but the poster I'm replying to is over-stating. If ALL of the materials used fail to perform exactly as expected, we still have a decent chance of containment. But that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that some of those materials will do something unexpected and failsafe materials will stand between us and a rather difficult national emergency. How can I know this? I can't, of course, any more than I can know that the next launch of the space shuttle won't start some strange chain reaction that will ignite the atmosphere. I am, however, satisfactorilly encouraged that our current state of materials engineering, combined with redundancy in planning is capable of measuring up to the job.
If you don't think that's the case, then you should never step into a building made of concrete and steel again. I can assure you that the tolerances employed in designing such structures (even when accounting for the difference in planning horizon) are much less strict than those employed in planning Yucca Mountain.
I, for one, would happily live near the site, as it's probably the area least likely to suffer any sort of man-made disaster in the US.
The post you refer to IS a bit extreme, but the viewpoint is valid. The dispute you (and the author of the article) cite is a good example. No one actually knows the correct date. The goal then is not "truth" (there is none to be had), the goal is information. Wikipedia has provided a subset of information and will continue to always be a subset.
Traditional dead-tree tomes will continue to have a different sub-set of information than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is influenced by the mix of cultures involved and the media in which it exists. This creates a fundamentally different result than the dead-tree approach (which is also valid).
The idea that the truth is impossible to find, and that information must be tainted by the point of view of the observer is clearly accurate to some extent given that almost no topic is not challenged and re-challenged with varying degrees of success by experts in a given topic's field of study. The nature of light, the size of the earth, the time and place of important historical events, the behavior of a type of animal... all of these are called into question over and over as we understand more and more about them.
The question of truth is simply the question of how much more there is to understand.
Any Public company has a FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION to make money in the interest of the stockholders
Random side point: is that the correct use of fiduciary obligation? I thought that only refered to the obligation of a broker, agent or accountant to their client.
None the less, I get what you mean, and you're right.
What I think we've lost sight of in recent years, and Microsoft is guilty of having lost sight of it too, is that that is not the only responsibility that they have. They have a responsibility to their employees (in fact many responsibilities, some of which are enforced by law, and some of which are just part of our culture). They also have a responsibility to the law, including anti-trust laws.
Another important point: where do you draw the line? Do they have a responsibility to increase their stock value forever? There's an expectation that they do, but in reality a company that simply maintains their market and produces dividends SHOULD (and used to) be considered to have met their obligation. Remember that stock is not an interest-bearing instrument.
We've become a culture obsessed with the idea that companies grow without bounds, and we punish harshly any company that fails to do so. The result is that companies have to either lie (Enron, MCI) or cheat (Microsoft, Walmart) in order to match our unrealistic expectations. Companies that play by the old rules are simply crushed.
The directors at SCO still have that fiduciary responsibility. If making lawsuits and collecting are how they do it, they satisfy that responsibility, even if they no longer "create" a product.
No. For several reasons no. First off, "SCO" as it exists today is a fiction. The company was dying and was purchased by people who had no interest in the product, only in the value of the litigation that they could initiate. I submit to you that starting a business based on the concept that you can sue for profit is unethical (not illegal) and SHOULD result in your being viewed as the "Bad Guy".
Second, risk is part of a business plan. If you execute your business plan as stated in your filing with the SEC and it fails, you are NOT under any obligation to invent a new plan by any means necessary to save the business. That means that there is no counter-weight to the law or even ethics that says you must find a way, any way out. Now, you probably should for the aforementioned reasons of obligation to employees, etc, but that's no reason to start abusing the legal system.
Third, SCO is acting as a strong-man, absuing the Linux communtiy for those who would rather not get their hands dirty. There is no better definition of "Bad Guy".
All of that aside, I was simply responding to correct a mistake in a post. It wasn't Microsoft that was being called a "Bad Guy".
Your reading it wrong. That statement was in reference to SCO, and yes, Slashdot as a community is generally of the opinion that SCO are "Bad Guys". I'm not sure I 100% agree with that, but I certainly am more willing to accept that characterization than I am to accept it refering to Microsoft, the way you seem to have taken it. Microsoft is motivated by profits and little else, but they do continue to produce some things which benefit the public at large to some (perhaps insufficient for the impact they have) degree.
SCO on the other hand really isn't doing enough for the world to merit sucking up my air.
I've always wondered how we can expect our kids to fight for liberty later when we gave them none.
If you mean "fight" in the sense of soldiering, don't worry that's the easy part. The mental conditioning that is employed in the military (any military) is designed to enhance the bonds that men (mostly men, though women take to it, the bonds are different, as they provoke more of a defensive than offensive FoF reflex) form in small social groups. The end result is that to a soldier "freedom" is like a team name. You might as well say "Red Sox". If you think that can't be the case because soldiers are willing to die "for freedom", think about what would happen if you killed a member of a baseball team. The other players would be willing to kill and/or die to either prevent or avenge that killing, even though they probably never knew each other before joining the team. Such is the power of the team instinct in humans.
So, you could call an opressive dictatorship "freedom", just as long as your soldiers are indoctrinated to defend it.
The real question is a much more frightening one: how can we expect our kids to defend freedom as our future leaders when we didn't given them any as children? To what depths will our future judges, congresspersons and presidents sink when they have been treated like this growing up?
That one keeps me up at night.
It is important to note for all of the "don't go to Slashdot for medical advice" shouters, that Patrick HAS gone down the medical community route. He's asking for additional input and anyone who can help his doctor grease the treatment skids. This is a *good thing*, and it's just too bad that everyone doesn't have access to the Slashdot pulpit for such dire needs (e.g. when a friend of mine almost lost a leg over a mystery infection).
You can now download this program in a pre-alpha state. You will have to use your own word-list until I have a place to upload the wordlist without too much pain.
Here's the link to mkpasswd.
Not quite, though you're right that this math is much more in favor of punctuation than I made it seem, sorry.
Many of those characters aren't valid in passwords generically because there are systems on which you might have to use the password that don't allow for them (e.g. SysV UNIX will interpret "@" as "kill-line", not the character "@").
I used to use a sub-set of 13 relatively safe punctuation, but I have recently expanded that to 22, so you're math is much closer for my program now.
The bottom line, though, is that saying "one character must be punctuation" (13-32 character set) is more limiting than saying "one character must be an alphanum" (62 character set) by quite a significant margin! I should have just said that and left it there. Thanks for fact-checking me.
He was 'quibbling' over a disputed birthdate because that heppened to be one of the inaccuracies he found in the article he used as an example
No, that's incorrect.
He was 'quibbling' over a disputed birthdate because it happened to be a pet topic of his that he sought out in Wikipedia as a measure of its worth. The problem with that line of logic is that he has set a very arbitrary bar, and while that might be the right bar for a hundred+ year old tome, for a <10 year old reference, it's an amazingly strict bar to set.
If his point had been, Wikipedia brings several strengths to the table (such as rapid adoption of current events and modern culture), but it will be a decade or two before it begins to measure up to the accademic standards of dead-tree encylopedias with respect to historical minutia, then I would have agreed. That's not, however, what he said and I think he has demonstrated clearly that Wikipedia is more valuable than many would have given it credit for.
This is a perfect example of what Wikipedia is useful for, as it has an excellent article on Begging the question that covers the usage that you cite AND the more coloquially popular:This is a bit like correcting someone for saying, "the lass' ring." Common usage allows for it while a college english teacher would mark you down for it. Slashdot is not your college english teacher, and if we can live with "teh win" and "133td00dz", then we can live with some colloquial english that's been in popular usage for far longer.