This isn't about "justice". It's about being glad when good things happen, or bad things stop happening. I could be sorry the guy is dead and happy that he's not going to be wasting any more of my time.
And he's only dead once. The time he's not wasting belongs to billions. That doesn't sound disproportionate to me.
I still wouldn't recommend it. But neither would I feel guilty celebrating if it did happen.
Nope, not joking, and not sure which part you find humorous.
Expedited prosecution for somebody who has already been proven guilty once doesn't seem unreasonable. I explicitly said that I wasn't talking about violating due process, simply ensuring that the FBI was keeping an eye out (through legal means) rather than waiting for spam complaints to be traced back to him. We know that takes a very long time, and is hard to trace from that end. But if you know where it starts, it may be easier.
As for the violence against him, I admitted that it's an awful thing to wish violence on somebody. But I also know that I'm not causing that violence by wishing, and my life got noticeably better when this spammer stopped spamming. The perspective by which the world is a better place without him is perfectly reasonable. The means would still be deplorable and I don't condone them, but the celebration of his no longer plaguing me is sincere.
I sure hope you're right. It's just that somebody who starts from such a clearly bent perspective (i.e. willing to aggravate literally a billion people to the point of violent rage, or at least talking that way) seems unlikely to learn the intended lesson of the suffering.
But for everybody's sake, I hope you're right. The actual damage is comparatively small, in the scheme of things, but the collective irritation seems to add up to a heavy emotional toll.
Ya know, I really, really want to agree with you. Everything you say makes absolute sense.
And yet, spamming is such a massively and prolifically antisocial thing to do that it's hard to imagine anybody ever recovering from it. He couldn't possibly have been unaware of the fact that, had he accidentally taken a shiv to the ribs while in jail, there would have been widespread cheering. Perhaps guilt-ridden cheering, but cheering nonetheless. Clearly, he didn't care then, and I really don't see how four years in prison would make him care now.
At the very least, it seems as if there should be some sort of expedited process for prosecution should he return to spamming. Not to deny him due process, but just to place him on a high priority list for investigating. Call it "spammer profiling".
Big movie stars and Oscar-winning directors get to charge more than minimum wage for their work. Not because the work is better, necessarily, but because their imprimatur on a film helps draw audiences.
127 hours grossed $16,845,896, plus another $10.7 million in the UK (and probably at least as much in the rest of the world). Primer draw a whopping $424,760.
Mind you, that makes Primer a far, far better _investment_ than 127 hours, but you have to make 1,000 of them before you find one with that kind of profitability. The vast majority of indie films manage to lose money despite costing practically nothing to make.
By contrast, an established star draw will make money fairly reliably, and the studio knew it before they handed Boyle $18m to make a movie. Not always; they still manage to screw up spectacularly, especially when they're making vanity projects. But the movie studios are generally wise investors and turn good profits every year.
(On an unrelated note, I see that I watched Primer via Netflix and gave it two stars out of five, and I recall that I thought I was being generous.)
Not to imply that the work isn't interesting. I'm sure it's got all sorts of implications with respect to the way economists analyze the algorithms. But commenters so far seem to want to jump from "no closed form exists" to "Wall Street is fundamentally unsound", which seems, uh, unsound.
OK, so there is no exact solution to the formula. Do you need one? Or will a Monte Carlo simulation be good enough, the way it is for (say) the physicists building nuclear bombs or the engineers designing airplanes?
Closed-form solutions are nice for proving things with arbitrary precision, but they're often not necessary in the real world, where a few decimal places often suffice.
There's nothing here you haven't seen before. It's the usual Microsoft Surface things, drawing Fantasia-y colors by waving your hands and rotating 3D objects, which you've seen before. Add to that a lot of vagueness about how everything is going to change and a soundtrack that could easily have come from any HR video on sensitivity training or proper timecard procedure.
Maybe these features will be nifty when we get them. But this video is the worst kind of marketing speak.
Oh, that "tiniest amounts" comment was from the same place, and it's really not fair to contrast the two. I just don't doubt he'd use it if it occurred to him. The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 14% rating, and I'm surprised it's that high. Something must have gotten to him: from 1999 to 2004 he scored 0%.
I really don't see Enzi as the kind of guy who's worried about the environment in China or anywhere else. He's a climate-change denier (note that I don't say "skeptic") who reliably votes against environmental issues. Including regulating mercury out of smokestacks, kind of odd for a man who's suddenly terrified of mercury "in the tiniest amounts".
You're right to ding me for making use of TFS rather than the actual article; TFS mistakenly attributes the quote to Enzi. Shame on me for not digging into TFA. But Enzi's still an idiot, and I don't doubt that he agrees with it.
Enzi's an idiot, and his reasoning specious. ("Oh, no, Chinee right burbs!") But I agree with his goal.
Banning incandescents is unhelpful and unnecessary. There are places where they're the only solution. Not many, but a few.
As people install CFLs, demand for incandescents will fall, because they last for a years. (Except in those situations I mentioned in the past paragraph.) It would be nice to push people to do that just once, and finally get them over the "the color wash is slightly different from the one I grew up with so I hate it" excuse. I know I haven't bought a light bulb in years, and probably won't for some time.
Still, I don't like forcing people. While light bulbs are a contributor to climate change, they're not the biggest part. It was just an easy, visible one, leading to an easy, ham-handed attempt to force people rather than persuade them.
Mind you, if I'm right, we should already be seeing demand for incandescents fall, at least if not for the confounding factor of hoarders. (Many of whom are doing so because anything a liberal tells them is good must, by definition, be bad. Which is precisely what Mike Enzi has been telling them for years.)
I see the global warming situation to be the same as the recession.
There is one key difference: the recession is a datum observed and then explained after the fact. Global warming was predicted before there was the ability to measure it, as far back as the 19th century.
It was based on a very simple, reasonably obvious model: CO2 absorbs infrared. Burning fossil fuels increases CO2. That the climate would warm up is a single step in reasoning.
The details of it are governed by many, many more variables, and as such can be compared to the economy, but it's very important not to be misled by the comparison. This is not a model constructed after the fact, explaining only the data in the past. It is a model which was constructed over a century ago and for which a century of experiment corresponds well with the prediction.
Seems to me the first thing you'd want is a control game. Convert a game played by two amateurs to music. Or two computers making random legal moves. Do they sound any less listenable?
Or have you just rediscovered basic music theory that random notes in the same key end up sounding like music?
It's pretty clear from listening that it's not following any time pattern; it's got no beat.
It's a nice way to punch up a news article or info piece. I think they may teach it in journalism school: people are really interested in death, and the apocalypse is a great way to attract eyeballs.
Scientists usually don't say such things, and the Nature article doesn't. But apparently the person who submitted it figured that a one-sentence answer "Scientists do an experiment and come up with a slightly different number from last time" didn't quite cut it.
Usually, it's the press who adds such things before it gets to Slashdot, and I suspect that the submitter got to the Nature link from some blog or news page, but decided that linking straight to Nature would be more authentic. Or maybe the submitter does read Nature and went to j-school, so knew how to add the mandatory "apocalypse" part of the story.
Jeopardy does seem an odd demonstration here. The remarkable thing is not how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all. If it had taken 15 seconds to find the answer I'd have been just as impressed. An order of magnitude in performance is just a matter of waiting a few years.
Certainly, it gets a lot more attention this way, which is presumably the point. But I'm not quite sure about attention for what, since it's not a product you can buy. I'm not aware of any productization plans.
It's good marketing for IBM in general, I suppose, but I'm not sure what Ken Jennings and Alex Trebek are getting out of it besides announcing their pending obsolescence.
I found LibreOffice to open faster than the previous version of OpenOffice. But like I said, anecdotal.
Summary of the article: On a feature basis, they're practically identical. Lots of small changes that matter if you care about that particular bug/tiny feature but no dramatic reason to switch.
The main thing I've seen is that it seems to open a lot faster. That's just anecdotal; I haven't used a stopwatch and I only have a limited set of machines. But I'm used to downloaded Excel spreadsheets taking tens-of-seconds to open, especially the first time. (I don't like fast-starters because they make the already interminable Windows startup even slower.)
It means all sorts of things. It means, and I quote, "promote the general welfare". All kinds of things promote the general welfare, and some of 'em include handouts.
How much handouts promote the general welfare without harming it? I dunno. Maybe much, much less than we have right now. It's the kind of thing we can debate. But I can't debate it when people pick and choose the parts of the constitution they remember. If your reading of it stops at "provide for the common defense" then we're literally not talking about the same document.
Come on, sing it with me. You all know the words.....Provide for the common defense, promote the GENERAL WELFARE, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity... do ordain and esta-a-a-blish this Constitution for the, uh, United States o-o-of A-me-ri-caaaaa
Ah, Schoolhouse Rock. Helping people remember the ENTIRE preamble to the Constitution since 1975. Or some people, at any rate.
Do you think we could get Lynn Ahrens to sing the rest of it for us? I think Article I Section 9 is pretty catchy:
No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.
OK, the last line kinda runs on a bit, but I'll work on it.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't about "justice". It's about being glad when good things happen, or bad things stop happening. I could be sorry the guy is dead and happy that he's not going to be wasting any more of my time.
And he's only dead once. The time he's not wasting belongs to billions. That doesn't sound disproportionate to me.
I still wouldn't recommend it. But neither would I feel guilty celebrating if it did happen.
I'd settle for 11 trillion millisecond sentences, served consecutively.
Nope, not joking, and not sure which part you find humorous.
Expedited prosecution for somebody who has already been proven guilty once doesn't seem unreasonable. I explicitly said that I wasn't talking about violating due process, simply ensuring that the FBI was keeping an eye out (through legal means) rather than waiting for spam complaints to be traced back to him. We know that takes a very long time, and is hard to trace from that end. But if you know where it starts, it may be easier.
As for the violence against him, I admitted that it's an awful thing to wish violence on somebody. But I also know that I'm not causing that violence by wishing, and my life got noticeably better when this spammer stopped spamming. The perspective by which the world is a better place without him is perfectly reasonable. The means would still be deplorable and I don't condone them, but the celebration of his no longer plaguing me is sincere.
I sure hope you're right. It's just that somebody who starts from such a clearly bent perspective (i.e. willing to aggravate literally a billion people to the point of violent rage, or at least talking that way) seems unlikely to learn the intended lesson of the suffering.
But for everybody's sake, I hope you're right. The actual damage is comparatively small, in the scheme of things, but the collective irritation seems to add up to a heavy emotional toll.
Ya know, I really, really want to agree with you. Everything you say makes absolute sense.
And yet, spamming is such a massively and prolifically antisocial thing to do that it's hard to imagine anybody ever recovering from it. He couldn't possibly have been unaware of the fact that, had he accidentally taken a shiv to the ribs while in jail, there would have been widespread cheering. Perhaps guilt-ridden cheering, but cheering nonetheless. Clearly, he didn't care then, and I really don't see how four years in prison would make him care now.
At the very least, it seems as if there should be some sort of expedited process for prosecution should he return to spamming. Not to deny him due process, but just to place him on a high priority list for investigating. Call it "spammer profiling".
Big movie stars and Oscar-winning directors get to charge more than minimum wage for their work. Not because the work is better, necessarily, but because their imprimatur on a film helps draw audiences.
127 hours grossed $16,845,896, plus another $10.7 million in the UK (and probably at least as much in the rest of the world). Primer draw a whopping $424,760.
Mind you, that makes Primer a far, far better _investment_ than 127 hours, but you have to make 1,000 of them before you find one with that kind of profitability. The vast majority of indie films manage to lose money despite costing practically nothing to make.
By contrast, an established star draw will make money fairly reliably, and the studio knew it before they handed Boyle $18m to make a movie. Not always; they still manage to screw up spectacularly, especially when they're making vanity projects. But the movie studios are generally wise investors and turn good profits every year.
(On an unrelated note, I see that I watched Primer via Netflix and gave it two stars out of five, and I recall that I thought I was being generous.)
Sure. But the lack of a closed form for this formula doesn't go to demonstrate that.
Not to imply that the work isn't interesting. I'm sure it's got all sorts of implications with respect to the way economists analyze the algorithms. But commenters so far seem to want to jump from "no closed form exists" to "Wall Street is fundamentally unsound", which seems, uh, unsound.
OK, so there is no exact solution to the formula. Do you need one? Or will a Monte Carlo simulation be good enough, the way it is for (say) the physicists building nuclear bombs or the engineers designing airplanes?
Closed-form solutions are nice for proving things with arbitrary precision, but they're often not necessary in the real world, where a few decimal places often suffice.
There's nothing here you haven't seen before. It's the usual Microsoft Surface things, drawing Fantasia-y colors by waving your hands and rotating 3D objects, which you've seen before. Add to that a lot of vagueness about how everything is going to change and a soundtrack that could easily have come from any HR video on sensitivity training or proper timecard procedure.
Maybe these features will be nifty when we get them. But this video is the worst kind of marketing speak.
Oh, that "tiniest amounts" comment was from the same place, and it's really not fair to contrast the two. I just don't doubt he'd use it if it occurred to him. The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 14% rating, and I'm surprised it's that high. Something must have gotten to him: from 1999 to 2004 he scored 0%.
http://capwiz.com/lcv/bio/keyvotes/?id=641&congress=1121&lvl=C
(It has to do with opposition to biodiesel, something environmentalists can't seem to get on the same page on.)
I really don't see Enzi as the kind of guy who's worried about the environment in China or anywhere else. He's a climate-change denier (note that I don't say "skeptic") who reliably votes against environmental issues. Including regulating mercury out of smokestacks, kind of odd for a man who's suddenly terrified of mercury "in the tiniest amounts".
You're right to ding me for making use of TFS rather than the actual article; TFS mistakenly attributes the quote to Enzi. Shame on me for not digging into TFA. But Enzi's still an idiot, and I don't doubt that he agrees with it.
Enzi's an idiot, and his reasoning specious. ("Oh, no, Chinee right burbs!") But I agree with his goal.
Banning incandescents is unhelpful and unnecessary. There are places where they're the only solution. Not many, but a few.
As people install CFLs, demand for incandescents will fall, because they last for a years. (Except in those situations I mentioned in the past paragraph.) It would be nice to push people to do that just once, and finally get them over the "the color wash is slightly different from the one I grew up with so I hate it" excuse. I know I haven't bought a light bulb in years, and probably won't for some time.
Still, I don't like forcing people. While light bulbs are a contributor to climate change, they're not the biggest part. It was just an easy, visible one, leading to an easy, ham-handed attempt to force people rather than persuade them.
Mind you, if I'm right, we should already be seeing demand for incandescents fall, at least if not for the confounding factor of hoarders. (Many of whom are doing so because anything a liberal tells them is good must, by definition, be bad. Which is precisely what Mike Enzi has been telling them for years.)
I see the global warming situation to be the same as the recession.
There is one key difference: the recession is a datum observed and then explained after the fact. Global warming was predicted before there was the ability to measure it, as far back as the 19th century.
It was based on a very simple, reasonably obvious model: CO2 absorbs infrared. Burning fossil fuels increases CO2. That the climate would warm up is a single step in reasoning.
The details of it are governed by many, many more variables, and as such can be compared to the economy, but it's very important not to be misled by the comparison. This is not a model constructed after the fact, explaining only the data in the past. It is a model which was constructed over a century ago and for which a century of experiment corresponds well with the prediction.
Seems to me the first thing you'd want is a control game. Convert a game played by two amateurs to music. Or two computers making random legal moves. Do they sound any less listenable?
Or have you just rediscovered basic music theory that random notes in the same key end up sounding like music?
It's pretty clear from listening that it's not following any time pattern; it's got no beat.
It's a nice way to punch up a news article or info piece. I think they may teach it in journalism school: people are really interested in death, and the apocalypse is a great way to attract eyeballs.
Scientists usually don't say such things, and the Nature article doesn't. But apparently the person who submitted it figured that a one-sentence answer "Scientists do an experiment and come up with a slightly different number from last time" didn't quite cut it.
Usually, it's the press who adds such things before it gets to Slashdot, and I suspect that the submitter got to the Nature link from some blog or news page, but decided that linking straight to Nature would be more authentic. Or maybe the submitter does read Nature and went to j-school, so knew how to add the mandatory "apocalypse" part of the story.
Great, it absorbs photons and emits different photons. This is news?
What happens to other frequencies? Are they transmitted? Absorbed? Reflected?
If they're absorbed, what's special about this frequency? Is the heat radiated from it in some other way than as a standard blackbody radiation?
Heat... what? Infrared radiation? Molecular motion?
I'm sure this is an important and interesting advance, but I found that description singularly uninformative.
Jeopardy does seem an odd demonstration here. The remarkable thing is not how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all. If it had taken 15 seconds to find the answer I'd have been just as impressed. An order of magnitude in performance is just a matter of waiting a few years.
Certainly, it gets a lot more attention this way, which is presumably the point. But I'm not quite sure about attention for what, since it's not a product you can buy. I'm not aware of any productization plans.
It's good marketing for IBM in general, I suppose, but I'm not sure what Ken Jennings and Alex Trebek are getting out of it besides announcing their pending obsolescence.
Yes, my computers are considerably more elderly and clunky, so I notice it more.
Actually, it's mostly telling me it's time for a new computer.
I found LibreOffice to open faster than the previous version of OpenOffice. But like I said, anecdotal.
Summary of the article: On a feature basis, they're practically identical. Lots of small changes that matter if you care about that particular bug/tiny feature but no dramatic reason to switch.
The main thing I've seen is that it seems to open a lot faster. That's just anecdotal; I haven't used a stopwatch and I only have a limited set of machines. But I'm used to downloaded Excel spreadsheets taking tens-of-seconds to open, especially the first time. (I don't like fast-starters because they make the already interminable Windows startup even slower.)
It means all sorts of things. It means, and I quote, "promote the general welfare". All kinds of things promote the general welfare, and some of 'em include handouts.
How much handouts promote the general welfare without harming it? I dunno. Maybe much, much less than we have right now. It's the kind of thing we can debate. But I can't debate it when people pick and choose the parts of the constitution they remember. If your reading of it stops at "provide for the common defense" then we're literally not talking about the same document.
Come on, sing it with me. You all know the words. ....Provide for the common defense, promote the GENERAL WELFARE, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity... do ordain and esta-a-a-blish this Constitution for the, uh, United States o-o-of A-me-ri-caaaaa
Ah, Schoolhouse Rock. Helping people remember the ENTIRE preamble to the Constitution since 1975. Or some people, at any rate.
Do you think we could get Lynn Ahrens to sing the rest of it for us? I think Article I Section 9 is pretty catchy:
No Preference shall be given by any
Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the
Ports of one State over those of another:
nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.
OK, the last line kinda runs on a bit, but I'll work on it.