Don't laugh. If you incorporate a company in Canada and you don't want to bother with a name, the company is automatically assigned a number, along with the province in which it was incorporated (for example, 3617824 Nova Scotia Inc.). In fact, all companies must have unique names, so using the number avoids the fee you incur to check the database to make sure your name hasn't been taken.
This is why, whenever you hear of shady dealings in Canada, often they have to do with "numbered companies" that are just empty shells that exist only for accounting games.
As a cool riff on this, there is a trendy Italian restaurant in Toronto that the owners decided to name after the numbered company they set up to administer it: 1447582. Everybody just calls it "seven numbers".
Did it occur to you that this helps parents do their jobs without constantly spying on their children? Or would you have appreciated having your parents monitor your activities 24 hours a day? Is that what you consider good parenting?
If Mom and Dad say no Grand Theft Auto, their word alone will most emphatically not stop a clever kid. This kind of technology is pretty reasonable in helping parents set boundaries. The kids and the parents can then talk about the boundaries that are established.
This isn't government censorship -- it's parental censorship.
Finally I must remark, while you call Mann a cynic you are utterly wrong. He is the most outrageous kind of idealist. To think that a mall guard could care about privacy rights.
On this point I disagree. Professor Mann is intelligent enough to know exactly what kind of response he would get from the guard.
I have not seen the footage in question, but I have seen one of his other documentaries, and he seems to be from the Michael Moore school of filmmaking. Average people, not necessarily stupid, are ambushed with whatever complicated question that is the theme of the film, and come up with boorish or stupid responses. The audience then sees that those who agree with Professor Mann are smart, and those who oppose him are stupid. This is not debate; it is manipulation, and it is indeed a form of cynicism.
If you want to waste your life, courtrooms are normally open, so you're perfectly free to sit in the courtroom and make as many hand-written or -drawn recordings as you like. If you were good at shorthand, you could make your own transcript, then go home and type it out.
A quick google search revealed this. The reasoning seems to be to reduce the level of public spectacle and enhance the fairness of the trial. For example, if evidence is thrown out, the media will not refrain from reporting on the tainted evidence.
What I find odd is the frequent conflict between fair trials and the public's right to know. It implicitly acknowledges that the media is biased, and that people can be driven to bad conclusions by a mob mentality.
For one thing, if you visit the site, the paper that got accepted was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper.
Even so, before you go off the deep end on this, in my field (which is EE, not CS) it is generally accepted that the conferences are for preliminary results, and the journals are for final results. As a result, conference submissions tend to receive cursory reviews, and journal submissions receive highly rigorous reviews.
At many (but not all) conferences, authors tend to be given the benefit of the doubt, so long as the paper is not obviously ridiculous or plagiarized.
I attended a recent conference at a major university where, rumor had it, 200 papers were accepted and only four were rejected. In spite of this, I found the quality of the conference quite high. You have to go into such things realizing that some crap is going to get through the filter. However, it's nice to hear what everyone is working on, even if the ideas are not completely finished and some of the work might not be going anywhere.
You give the author the benefit of the doubt in a conference submission. The time to be rigorous is at the point of submission to a journal, and in my field, acceptance to a journal is normally crucial to having an idea accepted by the entire community.
I still think the analogy is shallow at best. Many people have observed that the open source software community is similar to a religion, but as far as comparing it to specific religions, I think that takes it a bit far. There are certainly elements of missionary zeal and righteous anger in the open source community -- just look at the furore over SCO; I'm sure Darl McBride would not characterize Linux advocates as passive or pacifistic, given that he has received death threats.
And closed source is like Christianity only in the sense that any large heirarchical organization, be it government, business, or religion, resembles another. Furthermore, there is plenty of money (in the billions) riding on Linux, from giant companies such as IBM and Novell. Large-scale users sign support agreements that are similar in nature to licensing agreements from Microsoft. The individual home user is still small potatoes to Linux, and my personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with the fact that Linux is non-proprietary.
To digress, you seem to confuse Christianity with Catholicism, whereas the latter is a subset of the former. One may as well argue that Buddhism is a violent religion because of the actions of the Shinto Japanese in WW2. In fact, my religion allows priests to marry, ordains women, and blesses gay unions. And let's not forget that Christianity has given the world some of its greatest freedom fighters and poverty advocates, from St Francis of Assisi, to Martin Luther King Jr, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to Mother Teresa.
Anyone who thinks open source is free of encumberances such as "wars", "missionaries", zealotry, intrigue, turmoil, strife, etc. etc. need only read any thread on Slashdot that mentions RMS.
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling.
You have an odd definition of neutral. In fact it would appear that your definition of neutral is almost synonymous with "GPL-compatible". The GPL places restrictions on downstream developers, and it's well known by now that GPL code is not usable in large code bases, unless that base is already GPL to begin with.
A better choice for a truly neutral default license, that imposes as few restrictions as possible on the end user, would be the BSD license.
I'm going to write to my elected representative and demand that we implement personal time zones! That way, I can always come to work at 9 AM, s20451 standard time (sST), regardless of what the time is in "new york" or "shanghai". This proposal will lead to energy savings by eliminating the need for alarm clocks and wristwatches.
My next project will be to change the length of the workday to three units of time.
When they were first testing nuclear bombs, scientist and Govt decided to go ahead, even though people as distinguished as Fermi at that time wondered whether a nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere
To nitpick, it's pretty well known that almost every physicist who worked on the Manhattan project encountered the "atmospheric ignition" problem. Apparently it was considered a good exercise for the newbies to prove that it was not possible given what was known about the nuclear cross-sections and energies of atmospheric atoms. For example, see "The making of the atomic bomb" by Richard Rhodes.
So the debate can be phrased better in terms of: what if there are unknown phenomena that could still lead to atmospheric ignition? This is not a trivial question. For example, the "Castle Bravo" nuclear test had a design yield of 6 megatons, but actually yielded 15 megatons due to an unforeseen fusion reaction involving lithium in the core. It ended up being the largest nuclear test ever performed by the United States, and ended up sickening and killing Japanese fishermen who accidentally saied through the fallout.
Another problem is that it's very hard to put a percentage on the risk of an event which is by nature unknown, or that by nature is either true or false. We now know that the atmosphere didn't ignite (and that micro-organisms didn't come back from the moon, etc.), so to say there is a 1% chance is somewhat meaningless. It's like saying there is a 1% chance that God exists.
Great thinking. Let's take the debate out of the hands of the people who know what they're talking about, and put it firmly in the hands of John Q. Public.
You're missing the point. The debate is already in the hands of the masses, and is always in their hands. The largest source of funding for research is the government, and the government answers to the people, at least nominally. Furthermore, the public is ultimately going to pass judgement by either buying nanotech goods or boycotting them.
People respond not to reason, but to intuition and impression. Just take the example of genetically modified foods. There are plenty of reasons to be both for and against these foods, but the lasting impression that most people have is of "frankenfoods", the label attached to them by environmental organizations. This is the first and only exposure that most people have with the debate, and simply by dominating the sound bites, the environmental movement has succeeded in making people queasy about it. (I won't say whether I think that's a good thing or not.)
The main lesson here is that having good public relations matters more than winning debates and having sound science on your side. Nanotech scientists should learn this lesson well if they hope to have wide adoption of their products.
However, you do need a relatively expensive device, plus relatively expensive insurance, to access most public roads, rest stops, and so on..
But absolutely everyone benefits from them, whether they own a car or not. Everything you buy, including essentials such as food, arrived by truck. And, although I don't own a car, the roads are a nice place to ride my (inexpensive) bike or take transit.
On the other hand, it's hard to see how a person who can't afford a laptop will benefit from civic wifi -- they will still get their "data" from newspapers, TV, and radio.
Long term, it would be nice to have high speed wireless access everywhere and have this be a public services paid for through taxes. Similar to public restrooms, drinking fountains, parks, etc.
Yes, except you don't need a relatively expensive device to access public restrooms, parks, and so on. Providing wifi only benefits those who can afford laptops or similar devices, which means the middle class and up.
Free wifi sounds nice, but like any luxury it should be left to the private sector, who will probably do a better job over the long term -- at a guaranteed cost of zero to taxpayers.
I'm not aware of any physical laws that would prevent "the enemy" from building a cruise missile, nor am I aware of any physical laws in smuggling and launching them from anywhere within the US.
I love this argument. So in your opinion, an enemy will either:
- smuggle nuclear weapons -- not just one, but dozens -- into the United States during peacetime, knowing that the discovery of even one will be tantamount to a declaration of war; and somehow maintain secret absolute command and control over those weapons within the territory of the United States; or - somehow smuggle dozens of nuclear weapons into the United States during a crisis or during wartime.
Furthermore, with existing technology, we know how to knock down subsonic, low-altitude aircraft (which is what cruise missiles are). We don't yet know how to take out ballistic missiles, which is why BMD research is compelling.
I hate to say it but anyone who is willing to have his tax money spent on a missile shield defence, of which it has been demonstrated that it will NEVER work, has to be considered low on intelligence...hence the term "idiot".
You should tell that to the US navy, which has been largely successful in its trials: five hits in (I think) six attempts. See here for example. I agree that the USAF's program, which has received more press, has been dismal.
I don't get why people keep saying it will "never" work. It's a hard problem, but I'm aware of no physical laws that are violated by BMD.
But more generally, the way things are now, the only thing defending you from nuclear attack is that the USA is prepared to commit an act of genocide to avenge your death, which incidentally conveys no protection from insanity, error, or equipment failure. As a first line of defence, I would much rather be protected by a system that could destroy the incoming warhead -- even if it had a certain percentage chance of failure.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm strangely tempted to mod you informative.
Don't laugh. If you incorporate a company in Canada and you don't want to bother with a name, the company is automatically assigned a number, along with the province in which it was incorporated (for example, 3617824 Nova Scotia Inc.). In fact, all companies must have unique names, so using the number avoids the fee you incur to check the database to make sure your name hasn't been taken.
This is why, whenever you hear of shady dealings in Canada, often they have to do with "numbered companies" that are just empty shells that exist only for accounting games.
As a cool riff on this, there is a trendy Italian restaurant in Toronto that the owners decided to name after the numbered company they set up to administer it: 1447582. Everybody just calls it "seven numbers".
And it ends with "Look, this is a movie I was genetically predisposed to love." Not really an objective review. But worth reading nonetheless.
No, he means this. The moral is, don't fuck with the justice department!
Did it occur to you that this helps parents do their jobs without constantly spying on their children? Or would you have appreciated having your parents monitor your activities 24 hours a day? Is that what you consider good parenting?
If Mom and Dad say no Grand Theft Auto, their word alone will most emphatically not stop a clever kid. This kind of technology is pretty reasonable in helping parents set boundaries. The kids and the parents can then talk about the boundaries that are established.
This isn't government censorship -- it's parental censorship.
I'll tell you what would be cool, ultralights with automatic paintball guns, heat seeking nerf missiles, and a HUD. Then have a dogfight
I'd like to see the dude who tries to do an Immelman in an ultralight. Or his next of kin.
Why do all people in software seem to fall into one of two sides?
... as I believe it gets more accomplished in the long run.
It's not just software. Most people find raving ideologues more compelling than compromising centerists. See here or here for example.
I say this as one of the wishy-washy compromising centerists
There I was, walking down the street, minding my own business, when .... BONK! Black box to the head.
Don't forget the exhibit at the Olympic stadium in Rimouski [sic].
Quit your job and start a 3rd party security consulting company.
Finally I must remark, while you call Mann a cynic you are utterly wrong. He is the most outrageous kind of idealist. To think that a mall guard could care about privacy rights.
On this point I disagree. Professor Mann is intelligent enough to know exactly what kind of response he would get from the guard.
I have not seen the footage in question, but I have seen one of his other documentaries, and he seems to be from the Michael Moore school of filmmaking. Average people, not necessarily stupid, are ambushed with whatever complicated question that is the theme of the film, and come up with boorish or stupid responses. The audience then sees that those who agree with Professor Mann are smart, and those who oppose him are stupid. This is not debate; it is manipulation, and it is indeed a form of cynicism.
If you want to waste your life, courtrooms are normally open, so you're perfectly free to sit in the courtroom and make as many hand-written or -drawn recordings as you like. If you were good at shorthand, you could make your own transcript, then go home and type it out.
A quick google search revealed this. The reasoning seems to be to reduce the level of public spectacle and enhance the fairness of the trial. For example, if evidence is thrown out, the media will not refrain from reporting on the tainted evidence.
What I find odd is the frequent conflict between fair trials and the public's right to know. It implicitly acknowledges that the media is biased, and that people can be driven to bad conclusions by a mob mentality.
For one thing, if you visit the site, the paper that got accepted was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper.
Even so, before you go off the deep end on this, in my field (which is EE, not CS) it is generally accepted that the conferences are for preliminary results, and the journals are for final results. As a result, conference submissions tend to receive cursory reviews, and journal submissions receive highly rigorous reviews.
At many (but not all) conferences, authors tend to be given the benefit of the doubt, so long as the paper is not obviously ridiculous or plagiarized.
I attended a recent conference at a major university where, rumor had it, 200 papers were accepted and only four were rejected. In spite of this, I found the quality of the conference quite high. You have to go into such things realizing that some crap is going to get through the filter. However, it's nice to hear what everyone is working on, even if the ideas are not completely finished and some of the work might not be going anywhere.
You give the author the benefit of the doubt in a conference submission. The time to be rigorous is at the point of submission to a journal, and in my field, acceptance to a journal is normally crucial to having an idea accepted by the entire community.
I still think the analogy is shallow at best. Many people have observed that the open source software community is similar to a religion, but as far as comparing it to specific religions, I think that takes it a bit far. There are certainly elements of missionary zeal and righteous anger in the open source community -- just look at the furore over SCO; I'm sure Darl McBride would not characterize Linux advocates as passive or pacifistic, given that he has received death threats.
And closed source is like Christianity only in the sense that any large heirarchical organization, be it government, business, or religion, resembles another. Furthermore, there is plenty of money (in the billions) riding on Linux, from giant companies such as IBM and Novell. Large-scale users sign support agreements that are similar in nature to licensing agreements from Microsoft. The individual home user is still small potatoes to Linux, and my personal opinion is that this has nothing to do with the fact that Linux is non-proprietary.
To digress, you seem to confuse Christianity with Catholicism, whereas the latter is a subset of the former. One may as well argue that Buddhism is a violent religion because of the actions of the Shinto Japanese in WW2. In fact, my religion allows priests to marry, ordains women, and blesses gay unions. And let's not forget that Christianity has given the world some of its greatest freedom fighters and poverty advocates, from St Francis of Assisi, to Martin Luther King Jr, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to Mother Teresa.
Anyone who thinks open source is free of encumberances such as "wars", "missionaries", zealotry, intrigue, turmoil, strife, etc. etc. need only read any thread on Slashdot that mentions RMS.
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling.
You have an odd definition of neutral. In fact it would appear that your definition of neutral is almost synonymous with "GPL-compatible". The GPL places restrictions on downstream developers, and it's well known by now that GPL code is not usable in large code bases, unless that base is already GPL to begin with.
A better choice for a truly neutral default license, that imposes as few restrictions as possible on the end user, would be the BSD license.
I'm going to write to my elected representative and demand that we implement personal time zones! That way, I can always come to work at 9 AM, s20451 standard time (sST), regardless of what the time is in "new york" or "shanghai". This proposal will lead to energy savings by eliminating the need for alarm clocks and wristwatches.
My next project will be to change the length of the workday to three units of time.
When they were first testing nuclear bombs, scientist and Govt decided to go ahead, even though people as distinguished as Fermi at that time wondered whether a nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere
To nitpick, it's pretty well known that almost every physicist who worked on the Manhattan project encountered the "atmospheric ignition" problem. Apparently it was considered a good exercise for the newbies to prove that it was not possible given what was known about the nuclear cross-sections and energies of atmospheric atoms. For example, see "The making of the atomic bomb" by Richard Rhodes.
So the debate can be phrased better in terms of: what if there are unknown phenomena that could still lead to atmospheric ignition? This is not a trivial question. For example, the "Castle Bravo" nuclear test had a design yield of 6 megatons, but actually yielded 15 megatons due to an unforeseen fusion reaction involving lithium in the core. It ended up being the largest nuclear test ever performed by the United States, and ended up sickening and killing Japanese fishermen who accidentally saied through the fallout.
Another problem is that it's very hard to put a percentage on the risk of an event which is by nature unknown, or that by nature is either true or false. We now know that the atmosphere didn't ignite (and that micro-organisms didn't come back from the moon, etc.), so to say there is a 1% chance is somewhat meaningless. It's like saying there is a 1% chance that God exists.
Great thinking. Let's take the debate out of the hands of the people who know what they're talking about, and put it firmly in the hands of John Q. Public.
You're missing the point. The debate is already in the hands of the masses, and is always in their hands. The largest source of funding for research is the government, and the government answers to the people, at least nominally. Furthermore, the public is ultimately going to pass judgement by either buying nanotech goods or boycotting them.
People respond not to reason, but to intuition and impression. Just take the example of genetically modified foods. There are plenty of reasons to be both for and against these foods, but the lasting impression that most people have is of "frankenfoods", the label attached to them by environmental organizations. This is the first and only exposure that most people have with the debate, and simply by dominating the sound bites, the environmental movement has succeeded in making people queasy about it. (I won't say whether I think that's a good thing or not.)
The main lesson here is that having good public relations matters more than winning debates and having sound science on your side. Nanotech scientists should learn this lesson well if they hope to have wide adoption of their products.
and how many tax breaks, rezoning exemptions, eminent domain actions and anti-competitive laws will it take to provide this "zero cost" service?
... none?
Given that Starbucks and others are providing the service right now
However, you do need a relatively expensive device, plus relatively expensive insurance, to access most public roads, rest stops, and so on..
But absolutely everyone benefits from them, whether they own a car or not. Everything you buy, including essentials such as food, arrived by truck. And, although I don't own a car, the roads are a nice place to ride my (inexpensive) bike or take transit.
On the other hand, it's hard to see how a person who can't afford a laptop will benefit from civic wifi -- they will still get their "data" from newspapers, TV, and radio.
You need to pay a fortune to access the stadium that was built with public funds. And then you have to pay even more for the beer.
The fact that governments have spent money unwisely in the past does not justify them spending it unwisely in the future.
Long term, it would be nice to have high speed wireless access everywhere and have this be a public services paid for through taxes. Similar to public restrooms, drinking fountains, parks, etc.
Yes, except you don't need a relatively expensive device to access public restrooms, parks, and so on. Providing wifi only benefits those who can afford laptops or similar devices, which means the middle class and up.
Free wifi sounds nice, but like any luxury it should be left to the private sector, who will probably do a better job over the long term -- at a guaranteed cost of zero to taxpayers.
I'm not aware of any physical laws that would prevent "the enemy" from building a cruise missile, nor am I aware of any physical laws in smuggling and launching them from anywhere within the US.
I love this argument. So in your opinion, an enemy will either:
- smuggle nuclear weapons -- not just one, but dozens -- into the United States during peacetime, knowing that the discovery of even one will be tantamount to a declaration of war; and somehow maintain secret absolute command and control over those weapons within the territory of the United States; or
- somehow smuggle dozens of nuclear weapons into the United States during a crisis or during wartime.
Furthermore, with existing technology, we know how to knock down subsonic, low-altitude aircraft (which is what cruise missiles are). We don't yet know how to take out ballistic missiles, which is why BMD research is compelling.
I hate to say it but anyone who is willing to have his tax money spent on a missile shield defence, of which it has been demonstrated that it will NEVER work, has to be considered low on intelligence...hence the term "idiot".
You should tell that to the US navy, which has been largely successful in its trials: five hits in (I think) six attempts. See here for example. I agree that the USAF's program, which has received more press, has been dismal.
I don't get why people keep saying it will "never" work. It's a hard problem, but I'm aware of no physical laws that are violated by BMD.
But more generally, the way things are now, the only thing defending you from nuclear attack is that the USA is prepared to commit an act of genocide to avenge your death, which incidentally conveys no protection from insanity, error, or equipment failure. As a first line of defence, I would much rather be protected by a system that could destroy the incoming warhead -- even if it had a certain percentage chance of failure.