But just because the Discordian religion probably appeared first in a fictional novel doesn't mean that the beliefs are not valid, even if a bit loony.
There are also 40,000 deaths per year in the US cdc.gov], not through terrorism, but through automobile accidents. Would you also suggest that for safeties sake we ban the automobile?
About 2.4-million Americans die each year of other various causes. Aging should be banned as well.
I bragged about the fact that I was employed by a company that had, in the 1970s, decided to give everyone an across-the-board pay cut rather than go through the ordeal of layoffs.
That's something to be proud about? Laying people off is a good opportunity to get rid of the weakest employees across the board and the least productive (middle management specifically).
An across-the-board pay cut is mostly a strategy to get rid of the best and most-productive employees who can get a full-paying job elsewhere.
Product-labelling regulations need to be applied to this industry in a similar way to the tobacco industry. All CDs which have copy protection should be required to carry a label occupying the top 1/3 of the CD package warning the consumer that he will not be happy if he purchases the product and that his constituitional rights have been violated. Pictures of sparks flying out of a CD-ROM drive might be helpful too.
One the plus side, the license for registrars to print money probably ran out with ".com". Hopefully, businesses will shun them the new TLDs will cost registrars more money than they take in.
The right thing to do seems fairly obvious. Films whose time frames are before 2001-09-11 should include the WTC towers; ones set a year or two after that date should not include the two towers, and onces set more than a couple of years later might speculate on replacement buildings.
My guess for replacements would be a few 60-story towers of a similar design. These would be less tempting targets while replacing the lost office space. There would, of course, be a memorial, but it wouldn't be visible in the skyline.
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
'any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies' illegal in the U.S.
Just think of the massive boom that this would cause in the economy as everyone who owns any digital device will need to throw it out and buy a new one. This would cure the current economic climate and the NASDAQ would hit 8,000 within a week.
Of course, you'd be pretty screwed after about six months as anyone with a brain in his head would have flown the country.
Standard operating procedure for corportations that don't want all of their trade secrets handed over to their competitors will be: PGP/GPG --> bitwise obfuscation --> ascii-ization/steganographization --> government-approved encryption.
I'm thinking something more along the lines that the "official" status of a person being under investigation would be akin to the current wire-tapping or search requirement of a court order.
Something that I think might be helpful to the problem is a point-based system, not unlike driver's-license systems in many places, where individuals are given rights depending on their deeds and circumstances. I think that it's problematic to be granting criminals and unverified refugees the same rights as other people. Status numbers might be assigned something like the following:
10 = full, free citizen; full rights
9 = fresh immigrant (%lt;2 yrs) or foreign national
8 = officially under investigation for minor crime
7 = officially under investigation for serious crime
6 = refugee being processed
5 = convicted of minor crime in last 5 years
4 = convicted of major crime in last 15 years, or a mean drunk
3 = imprisoned or wanted on arrest warrant
2 =...
1 = dangerous, perpetual offender - imprisioned
0 = executed or on death row
A citizen with a status of 10 would have full rights granted by national constitutions, including the right to privacy, and this would be the default status for non-criminals. Serious penalties would be imposed for the tracking of citizens of status 10 by government agencies or corporations.
When you get lower in the scale, you start losing your rights to privacy, firearms, search and seizure, assembly, vote, consume alcohol, to be out after a curfew, to be at large, and to live.
There would be many details to be worked out, of course.
Furthermore, ten times as many people died from normal causes than from war-related causes during WWII (300-million). Also, 10,000 people died from normal non-terrorist causes in the U.S. last Tuesday.
[The average person lives 28,000 days, so every day, one on 28,000 people dies, under slightly simplified assumptions.]
Ironically, air travel is probably much safer today than it was two weeks ago because of increased security and the likelihood that terrorists will use a different means of attack next time.
2. Fundamental Rights
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
One of the main issues with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is that pretty much every right granted has an escape clause that allows it to be taken away. You have a right to free speech... unless you offend someone. You have a right to communicate in whatever language you want... unless a province overrides your rights (like Quebec). You have the right not to be discriminated against... unless you are a white male.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
This is referred to by some as "The Mack Truck Clause". It's not truly clear whether "reasonable limits" are a strength or a weakness, but it is definitely subject to abuse.
Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 1
Several people in my office including me think they've decided to use a nuke and Bush is getting shook up about how HE is the one who is going to go down in history for authorizing it.
A nuke is not a practical weapon to use. The U.S. would instantly lose all support from NATO and the free world, and any mid-east country that has nukes would be sorely tempted to nuke something American, and Russia and its tens of thousands of nukes would become more than a little irritated as well.
Nukes are a lose-lose proposition, and are neither necessary nor militarily sensible to the situation. If the U.S. really wanted to, I don't think it would have any major military problem in seizing the entire middle east with conventional weapons. But the real target is much more light and elusive than the static infrastructures of nations or militaries.
I think that the U.S. government will have a very difficult time convincing the terrorists that they should be using the government-crackable encryption rather than the easily available hard-to-crack kind. I guess the U.S. is determined not to be a relevant player in cryptography research or commerce.
If you make a mistake in a proof, then you will go over both the proof and the program, which means that you will discover that the proof is faulty, and correct the proof. If you have no proof at all, then you can't say with 100% certainty whether or not the program works (unless it's "Hello world").
Formal proofs of programs increase the probability of noticing a mistake since you're essentially implementing the program twice, but they don't guarantee 100% certainty of correctness, since there is always the possibility of an error in the proof. Computer-system theory is littered with published papers containing incorrect proofs.
It all boils down to redundancy, similar to N-version programming, where you implement N (N>=3) version of a program (implementation techniques should differ as much as possible).
Triple-modular redundancy also has difficulty when applied to software systems because systems have some parts are easy and some that are hard, and the implementors of all three systems are most likely to make most of their mistakes in the harder parts.
If only software systems were as trivial to build as bridges and airplanes!
{now if you'll pardon me, I have a flight to catch...}
Slashdot Mirror
But just because the Discordian religion probably appeared first in a fictional novel doesn't mean that the beliefs are not valid, even if a bit loony.
And this differs from Christianity how...?
There are also 40,000 deaths per year in the US cdc.gov], not through terrorism, but through automobile accidents. Would you also suggest that for safeties sake we ban the automobile?
About 2.4-million Americans die each year of other various causes. Aging should be banned as well.
I bragged about the fact that I was employed by a company that had, in the 1970s, decided to give everyone an across-the-board pay cut rather than go through the ordeal of layoffs.
That's something to be proud about? Laying people off is a good opportunity to get rid of the weakest employees across the board and the least productive (middle management specifically).
An across-the-board pay cut is mostly a strategy to get rid of the best and most-productive employees who can get a full-paying job elsewhere.
Product-labelling regulations need to be applied to this industry in a similar way to the tobacco industry. All CDs which have copy protection should be required to carry a label occupying the top 1/3 of the CD package warning the consumer that he will not be happy if he purchases the product and that his constituitional rights have been violated. Pictures of sparks flying out of a CD-ROM drive might be helpful too.
Once you get the 'dot' TLD, you can finally move slashdot to slashdot.dot.
You could simplify that to "slash.dot".
One the plus side, the license for registrars to print money probably ran out with ".com". Hopefully, businesses will shun them the new TLDs will cost registrars more money than they take in.
The right thing to do seems fairly obvious. Films whose time frames are before 2001-09-11 should include the WTC towers; ones set a year or two after that date should not include the two towers, and onces set more than a couple of years later might speculate on replacement buildings.
My guess for replacements would be a few 60-story towers of a similar design. These would be less tempting targets while replacing the lost office space. There would, of course, be a memorial, but it wouldn't be visible in the skyline.
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
'any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies' illegal in the U.S.
Just think of the massive boom that this would cause in the economy as everyone who owns any digital device will need to throw it out and buy a new one. This would cure the current economic climate and the NASDAQ would hit 8,000 within a week.
Of course, you'd be pretty screwed after about six months as anyone with a brain in his head would have flown the country.
Standard operating procedure for corportations that don't want all of their trade secrets handed over to their competitors will be: PGP/GPG --> bitwise obfuscation --> ascii-ization/steganographization --> government-approved encryption.
Is that factoring in the unavoidable trillion-dollar losses from the resulting easy espionage of corporate secrets?
"innocent until proven guilty"
I'm thinking something more along the lines that the "official" status of a person being under investigation would be akin to the current wire-tapping or search requirement of a court order.
Things that a person isn't arrested for, like jaywalking, speeding, parking violations, wouldn't count as "crimes".
Dogs aren't people.
The song is obviously a warning about the growing US-military reliance on Microsoft software:
Back at base
Bugs in the software
Flash the message
Something's out there
Unbelievable. Seriously; this whole list, and the thinking of the people who came up with it, just absolutely boggles the mind.
On the plus side, they'll be facing a massive backlash and PR disaster.
Are they distributing this list in .pls format?...
Something that I think might be helpful to the problem is a point-based system, not unlike driver's-license systems in many places, where individuals are given rights depending on their deeds and circumstances. I think that it's problematic to be granting criminals and unverified refugees the same rights as other people. Status numbers might be assigned something like the following:
...
10 = full, free citizen; full rights
9 = fresh immigrant (%lt;2 yrs) or foreign national
8 = officially under investigation for minor crime
7 = officially under investigation for serious crime
6 = refugee being processed
5 = convicted of minor crime in last 5 years
4 = convicted of major crime in last 15 years, or a mean drunk
3 = imprisoned or wanted on arrest warrant
2 =
1 = dangerous, perpetual offender - imprisioned
0 = executed or on death row
A citizen with a status of 10 would have full rights granted by national constitutions, including the right to privacy, and this would be the default status for non-criminals. Serious penalties would be imposed for the tracking of citizens of status 10 by government agencies or corporations.
When you get lower in the scale, you start losing your rights to privacy, firearms, search and seizure, assembly, vote, consume alcohol, to be out after a curfew, to be at large, and to live.
There would be many details to be worked out, of course.
Furthermore, ten times as many people died from normal causes than from war-related causes during WWII (300-million). Also, 10,000 people died from normal non-terrorist causes in the U.S. last Tuesday.
[The average person lives 28,000 days, so every day, one on 28,000 people dies, under slightly simplified assumptions.]
Ironically, air travel is probably much safer today than it was two weeks ago because of increased security and the likelihood that terrorists will use a different means of attack next time.
2. Fundamental Rights
... unless you offend someone. You have a right to communicate in whatever language you want ... unless a province overrides your rights (like Quebec). You have the right not to be discriminated against ... unless you are a white male.
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
One of the main issues with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is that pretty much every right granted has an escape clause that allows it to be taken away. You have a right to free speech
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
This is referred to by some as "The Mack Truck Clause". It's not truly clear whether "reasonable limits" are a strength or a weakness, but it is definitely subject to abuse.
Several people in my office including me think they've decided to use a nuke and Bush is getting shook up about how HE is the one who is going to go down in history for authorizing it.
A nuke is not a practical weapon to use. The U.S. would instantly lose all support from NATO and the free world, and any mid-east country that has nukes would be sorely tempted to nuke something American, and Russia and its tens of thousands of nukes would become more than a little irritated as well.
Nukes are a lose-lose proposition, and are neither necessary nor militarily sensible to the situation. If the U.S. really wanted to, I don't think it would have any major military problem in seizing the entire middle east with conventional weapons. But the real target is much more light and elusive than the static infrastructures of nations or militaries.
I think that the U.S. government will have a very difficult time convincing the terrorists that they should be using the government-crackable encryption rather than the easily available hard-to-crack kind. I guess the U.S. is determined not to be a relevant player in cryptography research or commerce.
If Japan had a military, it was the kind of issue that might start a ware.
I thought that wares were the result of outrageous prices or consumers who are too cheap...
Oh, you mean "war"...
About to be shrunk to the size of a pea.
This is offtopic, but I wish you luck on that flight...
Cancelled.
If you make a mistake in a proof, then you will go over both the proof and the program, which means that you will discover that the proof is faulty, and correct the proof. If you have no proof at all, then you can't say with 100% certainty whether or not the program works (unless it's "Hello world").
Formal proofs of programs increase the probability of noticing a mistake since you're essentially implementing the program twice, but they don't guarantee 100% certainty of correctness, since there is always the possibility of an error in the proof. Computer-system theory is littered with published papers containing incorrect proofs.
It all boils down to redundancy, similar to N-version programming, where you implement N (N>=3) version of a program (implementation techniques should differ as much as possible).
Triple-modular redundancy also has difficulty when applied to software systems because systems have some parts are easy and some that are hard, and the implementors of all three systems are most likely to make most of their mistakes in the harder parts.
If only software systems were as trivial to build as bridges and airplanes!
{now if you'll pardon me, I have a flight to catch...}