All the wiretapping in the World isn't going to help you
It's even worse than that. All the wiretapping in the World is going to hurt you if the problem is that it's already too hard to pick signal out of noise in the intelligence we currently gather. If you start also sifting through conversations between people so unsuspicious that you can't even get an after-the-fact FISA warrant to spy on either of them, does that add to the signal or does it add to the noise?
if the courts are allowed to proceed with civil lawsuits, angry mobs of disaffected citizens will storm the corporate headquarters of AT&T and Verizon
Well, to be fair, the only proven way to stop a horde of radicals with pitchforks and torches is to calmly explain to them that the criminals spying on them paid millions of dollars to politicians who then let them off the hook. "You mean we have no legal recourse against those who wronged us?" the mob will say. "Well, there's hardly any point to physical retaliation unless it can be accompanied by lengthy judicial review of an accompanying civil lawsuit!"
I think you're asking for elaboration on why Symantec is crap and/or a recommendation for non-crap AV.
Well, I was hoping to be informed that Microsoft had eventually figured out not to run unsandboxed executable content in a document editor, thus making anti-virus scans of Office files unnecessary, but "a recommendation for non-crap AV" is almost as good. Thank you very much.
That may be true for values of "we" that are Windows power users, but what about those of us whose solution to avoiding Windows viruses is "open all files in a different OS"? We've got clueless relatives to support too, you know, and that's hard when we're equally clueless. My dad's job requires him to open Office documents from "high virus risk" senders (so a book that educated him alone would be insufficient), yet the Norton virus scan on those documents is so slow that he's looking at upgrading the (otherwise still speedy) computer. Surely "we" know more than "Symantec is crap" - could that perhaps be elaborated to "Symantec is crap; Office hasn't been susceptible to macroviruses since 200X" or "Symantec is crap; Antivirus software Y won't bog down your computer"?
There are no rules in war. If there were, then there would be a third party far more powerful than either side who could enforce said rules.
There often is a third party far more powerful than either side: it's called "everybody else".
If there was, then that power could enforce a solution to the conflict that started the war, and there would be no need for war.
The missing distinction here is between "that power could enforce a solution" and "that power would enforce a solution". To continue to speak pragmatically, the most important "rule of war" is "don't do anything that will anger the rest of the world enough to gain your opponent additional allies", and we periodically see the results of rule 1's violation. The second "rule of war" is a little more subtle; it's "don't do anything that will anger the rest of the world enough to lose your own allies". It's hard to judge "what would have happened if they hadn't done that", but I'd say rule 2 has been broken by several groups in the last decade to greater or lesser degrees, with subsequent negative consequences.
Said power would also not need answer to anyone, and would be exempt from said rules (having no one capable of enforcing them).
That makes the assumption that "said power" is monolithic, which doesn't apply to "everybody else". Just because you might have a billion citizens of industrialized countries supporting your country when you want to try to enforce rules of war doesn't mean you'll enjoy that level of support when you want to break those rules.
SpaceX is starting with designs that already have enough performance to reach orbit, with a goal of later incrementally improving the reusability and turnaround time/cost in order to make those designs more reliable and affordable. Scaled Composites is starting with designs that are already completely cheaply reusable and easy to test, with the possibility of incrementally improving their performance until they can reach orbit. Coming at the design space from more than one direction makes it more likely that at least one of them will succeed.
On the other hand, I agree with you that SpaceX probably has the better plan. Suborbital spaceship R&D is the sort of thing NASA should have done more of but it's not an attractive place for a private company to be. If Scaled Composites only succeeds at suborbital rockets, at best they'll have a tourist attraction / research prototype. If SpaceX only succeeds at expendable rockets, they'll still have a good shot at taking over the whole launch market.
It took 30 years for Jet technology to appear, I wonder if it will be a similar amount of time before we get private orbital cabability.
Jet technology was also originally a military technology, but got pushed out to the private sector pretty enthusiastically.
Orbital rocket technology isn't going to see the same level of cooperation. Where you or I might be interested in "cheap access to space" leading in the longer term to "colonizing the solar system", governments tend to reasonably focus on the more short-term consequences of "cheap access to intercontinental ballistic missiles" leading to "we're all screwed".
It's unfortunate, but intercontinental missiles are by nature simpler to build than orbital spacecraft, and nuclear warheads are simpler to build than nuclear rockets. On my more pessimistic days I think those two facts are enough to explain the Fermi Paradox.
A back of the eyelide calculation would suggest the paper airplane would decelerate at around.05 m/s and drop about 2 meter a year taking it some 60 years to deorbit.
This can't be right. I'll admit it's not easy to find air density figures for those altitudes, but look at the decay rates of other small satellites. The SNOE reentered from a higher altitude than ISS after only 6 years, and it's mass/surface area ratio (the important factor here) was around 100 kg/m^2, much heavier (and thus likely to orbit much longer) than a paper airplane even if the plane doesn't tumble.
Because physiologically we just don't do so hot in low/zero gravity. That's why.
Well, how we do in low gravity is an open question. What's our data, a half dozen experiments for a few days a piece surrounded by longer stretches of free fall?
But making the assumption that we don't do well in low gravity, the Moon is as bad as it gets. One sixth gravity is low enough that any negative physiological effects are sure to arise, but high enough that you can't trivially use centripetal force to simulate higher gravity. Getting high gravity in open space near an asteroid requires a tether and a short rocket burn. Getting high gravity on the moon would require serious investment in anchoring and bearings for a centrifuge.
But if we want to expand out into the solar system permanently we're stuck living in gravity wells for the long term.
In the long term you just dispense with the tethers and build whole space stations large enough to rotate.
Although the conversation feels like a bait-and-switch, "Consumers can't make a choice in an emergency" is a much more serious market problem than "Consumers are choosing products whose lack would kill them". We'll just pretend that you made the former argument from the outset, and that you hadn't been so rude when I provided a counterexample to the latter argument. Stick with the former argument and you'll get lots more support; it's much easier to argue that the emergency ambulance should be as regulated than the emergency fire engine than it is to argue that life-saving thyroid pills are somehow a fundamentally different purchase than life-saving sustenance.
The new AI game playing routines can handle Ms. Pacman, Tetris, and Baldur's Gate. Can their mathematics routines find sums of integers, roots of quadratics, and proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem?
Matters of life and death are not ruled by bargain-seeking behavior
By this reasoning, the price of food should be nearly infinite. Without good food and healthcare you die, after all.
But in fact, as long as a competitive market allows more suppliers to enter, the profit margins in the long term should be similar to every other investment. It doesn't matter that a diseased man would pay a million dollars for a pill or that a starving man would pay a million dollars for an apple; if someone can supply that pill for $5 or that apple for $1, suppliers will compete on price and won't stop competing until the market stops being excessively attractive to additional investment.
Perhaps your future study of economics should include fewer insults about who "understands free market capitalism", and more, you know, study. Economics professors are not typically champions of central planning, and that's not a coincidence.
You want to know what the real problem is? For-profit health care serves two masters: the patent and the stockholders.
Replace "patient" with "customer" and you've also just described for-profit auto manufacturing, for-profit grocery stores, for-profit electronics... I'm pretty happy with all of the above, in both customer and stockholder capacities. The conflict of interest is such that both "masters" can win. So if you're looking for the real problem, you need to keep looking.
Their interests are mutely exclusive.
Their interests are only mutually exclusive to the extent that a player in the health care industry can hurt the patient without the patient deciding to take legal action or take their business to a competitor (depending on whether "screw" involves violating an existing business agreement or just offering bad terms in future agreements), thereby hurting the stockholders. If you want to find out what's wrong with health care, start by asking what factors are in place to prevent fair legal recourse and competition.
It doesn't necessarily mean the original idea was a bad one,
Oh, don't worry, nobody's accusing the world's central planners and micromanaging regulators of lacking good intentions. I'm sure they've got enough good intentions to pave a road.
they have a graph that very clearly shows raytracing at a performance advantage as complexity increases.
No, they have a graph that very clearly shows that raytracing while using a binary tree to cull non-visible surfaces has a performance advantage over rasterizing while using nothing to cull non-visible surfaces. Perhaps someday a raster engine will regain that advantage by using these "BSP Trees" as well.
"Can anyone point me to a simple tutorial on cracking a WEP password?"
1. Ask your neighbors for permission to connect to their WiFi. 2. If you get permission, use the password they give you. 3. If you don't get permission, don't be a dick.
If someone has their WiFi configured to allow public access, I don't see much problem in making limited (e.g. no hogging bandwidth, nothing that might get them in trouble) use of it. The internet is built on the idea that people set up unattended computers to give automatic electronic permission for total strangers to use them; Slashdot would suck if everyone had to call Rob before they felt they were allowed to use his web server. But finding a hole in someone's security isn't permission, it's just intrusion.
Even when you see an open access point asking permission isn't a bad idea. It shouldn't be a legal requirement, but it's a nice thing to do, despite involving the frightening prospects of going outside and meeting someone in real life.
You seem to have reached that awkward transitional stage where you're smarter than the government, but not yet smart enough to realize that yes, you really are smarter than the government.
Don't panic. The transition doesn't take very long, and when it's complete you'll be amazed to discover how much else starts making sense too.
No? And he's still got all the money he made via his pump-and-dump, too?
Then the bad guys won. The fact that they managed to hurt stupid greedy investors more than honest innocent competitors does little to mitigate their victory.
"Disaster" is a pretty hypy label for an event which led to no known loss of human life or property
When an asteroid travels millions of miles to avoid flattening Moscow by a few thousand, "phenomenon" seems as understated as "disaster" is overstated. How about the "Tunguska Warning Shot"?
What does "threading between tab sessions and within tabs" mean, exactly? What operations do you want to see performed in separate threads?
"Threading between tab sessions" should be obvious - you use one thread for the abominably slow rendering job (yes, I browse Digg and Salon, why do you ask?) in one tab so that it doesn't prevent the user from interacting with the already rendered pages in other tabs. It seems like Firefox is at least trying to do some cooperative multitasking here, but that never worked very well in Windows 3.1 and it hasn't gotten any better since.
I don't know what the original poster meant by "Threading within tab sessions" (using multiple cores for rendering?), but I'd at least like to see a separate process (not just thread, but process, communicating over sanity-checked IPC) used for every plugin. You never know when Adobe's going to screw up Flash again, for instance, and it's just unnecessary for Firefox to be so closely tied internally to its plugins that a crash in one of the latter can bring down the whole web browser.
Unfortunately, making a serial code multithreaded is not just a matter of forking off a new thread or two. Separate plugin processes can probably be handled with "shim" code, but handling concurrent memory access within the browser core would at least require a total code review, albeit not a total rewrite.
On the one hand, you have to make and receive all your phone calls from the same place, but on the other hand you get to decide elections. They say one vote can't make a difference, but that doesn't apply to election polls where there's only five landline-owners left to poll and the other four are 90 year olds planning on voting for Roosevelt.
Slashdot Mirror
All the wiretapping in the World isn't going to help you
It's even worse than that. All the wiretapping in the World is going to hurt you if the problem is that it's already too hard to pick signal out of noise in the intelligence we currently gather. If you start also sifting through conversations between people so unsuspicious that you can't even get an after-the-fact FISA warrant to spy on either of them, does that add to the signal or does it add to the noise?
if the courts are allowed to proceed with civil lawsuits, angry mobs of disaffected citizens will storm the corporate headquarters of AT&T and Verizon
Well, to be fair, the only proven way to stop a horde of radicals with pitchforks and torches is to calmly explain to them that the criminals spying on them paid millions of dollars to politicians who then let them off the hook. "You mean we have no legal recourse against those who wronged us?" the mob will say. "Well, there's hardly any point to physical retaliation unless it can be accompanied by lengthy judicial review of an accompanying civil lawsuit!"
I think you're asking for elaboration on why Symantec is crap and/or a recommendation for non-crap AV.
Well, I was hoping to be informed that Microsoft had eventually figured out not to run unsandboxed executable content in a document editor, thus making anti-virus scans of Office files unnecessary, but "a recommendation for non-crap AV" is almost as good. Thank you very much.
We know Symantec is crap
That may be true for values of "we" that are Windows power users, but what about those of us whose solution to avoiding Windows viruses is "open all files in a different OS"? We've got clueless relatives to support too, you know, and that's hard when we're equally clueless. My dad's job requires him to open Office documents from "high virus risk" senders (so a book that educated him alone would be insufficient), yet the Norton virus scan on those documents is so slow that he's looking at upgrading the (otherwise still speedy) computer. Surely "we" know more than "Symantec is crap" - could that perhaps be elaborated to "Symantec is crap; Office hasn't been susceptible to macroviruses since 200X" or "Symantec is crap; Antivirus software Y won't bog down your computer"?
There are no rules in war. If there were, then there would be a third party far more powerful than either side who could enforce said rules.
There often is a third party far more powerful than either side: it's called "everybody else".
If there was, then that power could enforce a solution to the conflict that started the war, and there would be no need for war.
The missing distinction here is between "that power could enforce a solution" and "that power would enforce a solution". To continue to speak pragmatically, the most important "rule of war" is "don't do anything that will anger the rest of the world enough to gain your opponent additional allies", and we periodically see the results of rule 1's violation. The second "rule of war" is a little more subtle; it's "don't do anything that will anger the rest of the world enough to lose your own allies". It's hard to judge "what would have happened if they hadn't done that", but I'd say rule 2 has been broken by several groups in the last decade to greater or lesser degrees, with subsequent negative consequences.
Said power would also not need answer to anyone, and would be exempt from said rules (having no one capable of enforcing them).
That makes the assumption that "said power" is monolithic, which doesn't apply to "everybody else". Just because you might have a billion citizens of industrialized countries supporting your country when you want to try to enforce rules of war doesn't mean you'll enjoy that level of support when you want to break those rules.
It's the rocket engineering making them possible.
SpaceX is starting with designs that already have enough performance to reach orbit, with a goal of later incrementally improving the reusability and turnaround time/cost in order to make those designs more reliable and affordable. Scaled Composites is starting with designs that are already completely cheaply reusable and easy to test, with the possibility of incrementally improving their performance until they can reach orbit. Coming at the design space from more than one direction makes it more likely that at least one of them will succeed.
On the other hand, I agree with you that SpaceX probably has the better plan. Suborbital spaceship R&D is the sort of thing NASA should have done more of but it's not an attractive place for a private company to be. If Scaled Composites only succeeds at suborbital rockets, at best they'll have a tourist attraction / research prototype. If SpaceX only succeeds at expendable rockets, they'll still have a good shot at taking over the whole launch market.
It took 30 years for Jet technology to appear, I wonder if it will be a similar amount of time before we get private orbital cabability.
Jet technology was also originally a military technology, but got pushed out to the private sector pretty enthusiastically.
Orbital rocket technology isn't going to see the same level of cooperation. Where you or I might be interested in "cheap access to space" leading in the longer term to "colonizing the solar system", governments tend to reasonably focus on the more short-term consequences of "cheap access to intercontinental ballistic missiles" leading to "we're all screwed".
It's unfortunate, but intercontinental missiles are by nature simpler to build than orbital spacecraft, and nuclear warheads are simpler to build than nuclear rockets. On my more pessimistic days I think those two facts are enough to explain the Fermi Paradox.
A back of the eyelide calculation would suggest the paper airplane would decelerate at around .05 m/s and drop about 2 meter a year taking it some 60 years to deorbit.
This can't be right. I'll admit it's not easy to find air density figures for those altitudes, but look at the decay rates of other small satellites. The SNOE reentered from a higher altitude than ISS after only 6 years, and it's mass/surface area ratio (the important factor here) was around 100 kg/m^2, much heavier (and thus likely to orbit much longer) than a paper airplane even if the plane doesn't tumble.
Because physiologically we just don't do so hot in low/zero gravity. That's why.
Well, how we do in low gravity is an open question. What's our data, a half dozen experiments for a few days a piece surrounded by longer stretches of free fall?
But making the assumption that we don't do well in low gravity, the Moon is as bad as it gets. One sixth gravity is low enough that any negative physiological effects are sure to arise, but high enough that you can't trivially use centripetal force to simulate higher gravity. Getting high gravity in open space near an asteroid requires a tether and a short rocket burn. Getting high gravity on the moon would require serious investment in anchoring and bearings for a centrifuge.
But if we want to expand out into the solar system permanently we're stuck living in gravity wells for the long term.
In the long term you just dispense with the tethers and build whole space stations large enough to rotate.
Although the conversation feels like a bait-and-switch, "Consumers can't make a choice in an emergency" is a much more serious market problem than "Consumers are choosing products whose lack would kill them". We'll just pretend that you made the former argument from the outset, and that you hadn't been so rude when I provided a counterexample to the latter argument. Stick with the former argument and you'll get lots more support; it's much easier to argue that the emergency ambulance should be as regulated than the emergency fire engine than it is to argue that life-saving thyroid pills are somehow a fundamentally different purchase than life-saving sustenance.
The new AI game playing routines can handle Ms. Pacman, Tetris, and Baldur's Gate. Can their mathematics routines find sums of integers, roots of quadratics, and proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem?
Matters of life and death are not ruled by bargain-seeking behavior
By this reasoning, the price of food should be nearly infinite. Without good food and healthcare you die, after all.
But in fact, as long as a competitive market allows more suppliers to enter, the profit margins in the long term should be similar to every other investment. It doesn't matter that a diseased man would pay a million dollars for a pill or that a starving man would pay a million dollars for an apple; if someone can supply that pill for $5 or that apple for $1, suppliers will compete on price and won't stop competing until the market stops being excessively attractive to additional investment.
Perhaps your future study of economics should include fewer insults about who "understands free market capitalism", and more, you know, study. Economics professors are not typically champions of central planning, and that's not a coincidence.
You want to know what the real problem is? For-profit health care serves two masters: the patent and the stockholders.
Replace "patient" with "customer" and you've also just described for-profit auto manufacturing, for-profit grocery stores, for-profit electronics... I'm pretty happy with all of the above, in both customer and stockholder capacities. The conflict of interest is such that both "masters" can win. So if you're looking for the real problem, you need to keep looking.
Their interests are mutely exclusive.
Their interests are only mutually exclusive to the extent that a player in the health care industry can hurt the patient without the patient deciding to take legal action or take their business to a competitor (depending on whether "screw" involves violating an existing business agreement or just offering bad terms in future agreements), thereby hurting the stockholders. If you want to find out what's wrong with health care, start by asking what factors are in place to prevent fair legal recourse and competition.
Whatever you do, do not let that "flower-spike" catch fire.
It doesn't necessarily mean the original idea was a bad one,
Oh, don't worry, nobody's accusing the world's central planners and micromanaging regulators of lacking good intentions. I'm sure they've got enough good intentions to pave a road.
the theory being that if all books are sold by the supermarkets rather than proper book stores you would only be able to buy the most profitable books
Dieu merci! Now the French are safely protected from the limited selection of Amazon.com.
they have a graph that very clearly shows raytracing at a performance advantage as complexity increases.
No, they have a graph that very clearly shows that raytracing while using a binary tree to cull non-visible surfaces has a performance advantage over rasterizing while using nothing to cull non-visible surfaces. Perhaps someday a raster engine will regain that advantage by using these "BSP Trees" as well.
I mean, think about it, if you write code to store a document, do you sit down and write the byte-layout of that file?
Yes, of course. Is there any other industry where this attitude would be accepted?
"Blueprints? No, we just hammer some wood together until we think it won't fall down, or until we run out of nails."
"Can anyone point me to a simple tutorial on cracking a WEP password?"
1. Ask your neighbors for permission to connect to their WiFi.
2. If you get permission, use the password they give you.
3. If you don't get permission, don't be a dick.
If someone has their WiFi configured to allow public access, I don't see much problem in making limited (e.g. no hogging bandwidth, nothing that might get them in trouble) use of it. The internet is built on the idea that people set up unattended computers to give automatic electronic permission for total strangers to use them; Slashdot would suck if everyone had to call Rob before they felt they were allowed to use his web server. But finding a hole in someone's security isn't permission, it's just intrusion.
Even when you see an open access point asking permission isn't a bad idea. It shouldn't be a legal requirement, but it's a nice thing to do, despite involving the frightening prospects of going outside and meeting someone in real life.
You seem to have reached that awkward transitional stage where you're smarter than the government, but not yet smart enough to realize that yes, you really are smarter than the government.
Don't panic. The transition doesn't take very long, and when it's complete you'll be amazed to discover how much else starts making sense too.
No? And he's still got all the money he made via his pump-and-dump, too?
Then the bad guys won. The fact that they managed to hurt stupid greedy investors more than honest innocent competitors does little to mitigate their victory.
"Disaster" is a pretty hypy label for an event which led to no known loss of human life or property
When an asteroid travels millions of miles to avoid flattening Moscow by a few thousand, "phenomenon" seems as understated as "disaster" is overstated. How about the "Tunguska Warning Shot"?
What does "threading between tab sessions and within tabs" mean, exactly? What operations do you want to see performed in separate threads?
"Threading between tab sessions" should be obvious - you use one thread for the abominably slow rendering job (yes, I browse Digg and Salon, why do you ask?) in one tab so that it doesn't prevent the user from interacting with the already rendered pages in other tabs. It seems like Firefox is at least trying to do some cooperative multitasking here, but that never worked very well in Windows 3.1 and it hasn't gotten any better since.
I don't know what the original poster meant by "Threading within tab sessions" (using multiple cores for rendering?), but I'd at least like to see a separate process (not just thread, but process, communicating over sanity-checked IPC) used for every plugin. You never know when Adobe's going to screw up Flash again, for instance, and it's just unnecessary for Firefox to be so closely tied internally to its plugins that a crash in one of the latter can bring down the whole web browser.
Unfortunately, making a serial code multithreaded is not just a matter of forking off a new thread or two. Separate plugin processes can probably be handled with "shim" code, but handling concurrent memory access within the browser core would at least require a total code review, albeit not a total rewrite.
On the one hand, you have to make and receive all your phone calls from the same place, but on the other hand you get to decide elections. They say one vote can't make a difference, but that doesn't apply to election polls where there's only five landline-owners left to poll and the other four are 90 year olds planning on voting for Roosevelt.
If people like you had their way, Wikipedia would run out of electrons in no time.