"It's yet another slashdotter who has no humility, no respect for other's views"
If I told you the world was flat, would you have respect for my views? What if I said that since this "round earth" thing was just a theory, my flat earth theory should be given equal time in public schools?
"doesn't want to do anything but insult others." Actually, I though I posed a couple questions first.
"This kind of crap is getting extremely annoying." Kind of like creationists who post stupid stuff, then post anonymously about why their critcs should be silenced.
"If I leave my doors unlocked and the key in the car my insurance won't pay out, it's called negligance" But if I take your car, it's still called Grand Theft.
"If they could have stopped the hacker after a few hackes (or attempts) but didn't because they wanted to watch the attacks then that's aiding and abetting" No, it's not. Buying him a better computer would be aiding and abetting. Telling him he should try to hack you a bunch more times would be entrapment. Watching and taking notes, even though you could stop him is neither.
"I think that Genesis is a creation story for the easily satisfied, not God's How-to for creation. Genesis tells us that God made the world, and God made us. Those are the important points, and they are True. The details about how just aren't there."
How about taking Adam's rib to make Eve? Sounds like a detail to me. Is it True with a capital "T"? The bible is full of details, many of them contradictory.
On a different note, I love the whole bit about all that matters for going to heaven is accepting Jesus, not whether you're a good person. Is Gandi burning in hell?
That is not true. All the vitaim D deficiency in the world will not give you a 40% larger cranium, or any of the other distinguishing features of Neanderthals.
But we're talking about the issue of contamination, in which case they are quite comparable. Having read any copywrited code contaminates you regarding writing similar code yourself. I'm not arguing that proprietary licenses are equivalent to the GPL on any other grounds.
So basically, you have no understanding of the theory of evolution, since you keep talking about technology development.
"there is actually a large amount of scientific study in the realm of creationism" HaHaHaHaHa! Seriously though, what the hell would you study? Do you just go around doing random experiments, then whatever the result, say "God did it."?
"What evidence is actually available to make the claims that hunting/gathering predated agriculture... especially by the thousands of years proposed?" Uhh, besides the extensive fossil & human artifact record?
"Personally, I find it highly unlikely that it took 25,000 years... for people to figure out that agriculture might be a good idea." That's because agriculture isn't a particularly good idea below a certain population density. Simple foraging is a lot easier if the environment provides enough food. Agriculture is really only a good idea when you want to force the land to produce more food than it does by itself. If you don't need to do it, agriculture is a real pain in the ass.
Hell, why am I bothering. If you really believe Creationism, then either you haven't looked at the evidence, you don't understand the meaning of the word "science" or your a complete idiot. Probably all three.
My point is that if you've looked at a map of DC, and then see it from the air, the time to locate the whitehouse is significantly less than a second. The hijackers obviously spent quite a bit of time preparing, it seems unlikely that they couldn't find the whitehouse. A little research (driving past) would have told them which side of the pentagon had a big fuel tank next to it, but not which sections were occupied. If they'd hit a residential neighborhood, or the Lincoln memorial, I'd buy that they missed their intended target. Given that they hit the headquarters of the US Military, in what they might well have concluded was the most damaging way possible, I'm inclined to beleive that was their intent.
Well, we're defiintely getting OT here, but what the hey...
"The plane that went down in Pennsylvania was probably headed to the White House."
How can this statement be anything but a wild guess?
"I've also heard conjecture that the plane that hit the Pentagon was headed for the White House or the Capitol, but the terrorists got lost"
Have you ever seen DC from the air? It's not exactly hard to find the big landmarks. Quite the oposite really. Given that they crashed into the one side of the Pentagon where there was a big fuel tank next to the building, I think it's a good guess they hit exactly what they wanted to.
Several thousand people won't keep a secret for over 30 years without any particular reason to do so.
Seriously, what possible reason for keeping the secret about faked moon landings would satisfy those tens of thousands? The people who knew the Allies had broken enigma had a very good reason to keep the secret. (I also think your "several thousand" estimate of the number in on the secret is a bit high. Quite a number of people involved in the info gathering/decrypting/disseminating process didn't actually know the big picture of what they were doing)
moving them from 500 to 50 bajillion-zillion-zillion times too expensive for this.
Seriously, the neodium magnets whose expense people worry about, and who's reduction in price excites people are the ones used in hard drives; they're about the size of your thumb, and they move HD arms about quite smartly. This project is talking magnets many MILES long, SUSPENDING a TRAIN. Even if you could afford it, you probably run into the problem of "Is there enough of it on the whole planet?"
Dunno about Hogan. The first thing I thought of was Heinlen in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Of course, that tube was on the moon, making the "maintain a vacuum" part a bit simpler...
It's been said a lot of times in this discussion but: In almost all states you are required to pay the tax regardless of who you buy from. The vendor is not responsible for collecting the tax if they don't have a presence in the state, but you are still supposed to pay it. Since tax collection based on the honor system works about as well as you'd expect, we have the initiative in question. It's not really about new taxes, it's about trying to actually collect existing taxes. The "resource use" in question is not the stores, but yours.
"I haven't the foggiest idea if switches are still coded in assembler, but they still were at the time of the failure."
No, actually, they weren't. The bug was miswritten C code.
As for things being inherently faster in assembler, a good optomizing compiler should be able to write better assembler than you. By good, I mean it should definitely catch really obvious things like the example you mention. I've no idea if good optomizers exist or existed for GMAP, but they certainly do for x86
All of the following is "IIRC": It's hard to fault the designers of the Tacoma Narows bridge. By all available data at the time, the design was brilliant. The narrows were famous for their insanley gusty winds, going from 20 to 80 knots at the drop of a hat, and the bridge was designed with this in mind. It was designed to handle severely high winds, as well as dramatic sudden changes in wind speed. And it performed brilliantly. Someone might have wondered, what will happen if there is a strong, unusually steady wind, in particular ~40 knots for several hours? But it would be quite a stretch to expect them to figure out that air vortices off the cables would then cause them to occillate at a frequency that happened to be resonant with a particular harmonic of the roadbed, and that this would cause self-reinforcing torsion waves, leading to the bridges collapse. I learned harmonic motion from a rather distinguished physics prof who told a story about a grad student who came to him wanting to switch programs from engineering to theoretical physics. When he asked him why, the student explained the for the previous week he had the same nightmare every night: that he designed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. To come somewhat back on topic, here's what I have learned from famous examples of programing gone awry: I am not interested in a job where anyones life depends on my code working correctly. I respect those who do write such code, and while I hope they are as smart as me, I pray they are willing to pay more attention to detail!
Since the article makes no mention whatsoever of who's server room it is, and since the photo on Ziemann's site is quite plainley labeled "This is a joke! We received this unattributed photo in an e-mail.", no one is lying. So who's an idiot?
I could read it, but if it's not worth you effort to summarize it, why should I?
Oh hell, what am I goin to do instead, work?
OK, read it, here's my summary (may be less flattering than yours)
There are all sorts of problems with low-income housing. The author thinks they are all due to the damn gummint. He extensively quotes Herbert Spencer, who wrote some stuff that supports his position. Since he wrote it a hundred years ago, it must be true. My favorite bit:
"The extent of government involvement in our housing markets has been mind-boggling. Slum clearance, urban renewal and redevelopment programs, rent controls, permit fees, development limits, density requirements, low-income housing mandates, open space and green belt set-asides, zoning, regulations for everything from earthquake standards to low-flow toilet mandates, to bans on using PVC pipe for plumbing, indecipherable and interminable environmental rules"
Clearly all these damn gummint regulations were put in place for no purpose but to make things difficult for the everyday hardworking slumlord. If only the gummint would butt out we could get back to providing crappy, overly dense, carcinogen-plumbed, environmentally disatorous, unlivable, fire-trap housing. After all, if the poor want to live in buildings that don't randomly collapse killing hundreds, the market will reflect that. Damn meddlers with their building codes!
Hmm... maybe next time you'l want to do your own summary. If you really want to go out on a limb, you could have an original thought.
How does funding fire protection through taxes prevent competition? If you think you can provide a better fire department for less money, go for it. Make your pitch and get the town contract. Note that most firefighters are volunteers, and are unwilling to donate their time to a for-profit venture. That fact may well hurt your competitive chances, but I don't think you can argue it is unfair. A great deal of tax funded government efforts are pursued via contracting with private industry. Tax funding does not prevent competition, it just ensures that everyone pays. The fire department is not, and in my opinion should not, going to pause to consult their client list when you yell "Fire!". Nor do I think poor neighborhoods should be allowed to burn. Companies compete for tax dollars all the time, and save taxpayers money in the process. I'm certainly not arguing tax-paid services are free, just that they eliminate freeloaders where services everyone uses are concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's yet another slashdotter who has no humility, no respect for other's views"
If I told you the world was flat, would you have respect for my views? What if I said that since this "round earth" thing was just a theory, my flat earth theory should be given equal time in public schools?
"doesn't want to do anything but insult others."
Actually, I though I posed a couple questions first.
"This kind of crap is getting extremely annoying."
Kind of like creationists who post stupid stuff, then post anonymously about why their critcs should be silenced.
"If I leave my doors unlocked and the key in the car my insurance won't pay out, it's called negligance"
But if I take your car, it's still called Grand Theft.
"If they could have stopped the hacker after a few hackes (or attempts) but didn't because they wanted to watch the attacks then that's aiding and abetting"
No, it's not. Buying him a better computer would be aiding and abetting. Telling him he should try to hack you a bunch more times would be entrapment. Watching and taking notes, even though you could stop him is neither.
"I think that Genesis is a creation story for the easily satisfied, not God's How-to for creation. Genesis tells us that God made the world, and God made us. Those are the important points, and they are True. The details about how just aren't there."
How about taking Adam's rib to make Eve? Sounds like a detail to me. Is it True with a capital "T"? The bible is full of details, many of them contradictory.
On a different note, I love the whole bit about all that matters for going to heaven is accepting Jesus, not whether you're a good person. Is Gandi burning in hell?
That is not true. All the vitaim D deficiency in the world will not give you a 40% larger cranium, or any of the other distinguishing features of Neanderthals.
"unless simply a bigger brain gave us more capability"
Just to nit-pick a bit: Neanderthals had bigger brains than us. (Or at least a bigger cranial capacity)
But we're talking about the issue of contamination, in which case they are quite comparable. Having read any copywrited code contaminates you regarding writing similar code yourself. I'm not arguing that proprietary licenses are equivalent to the GPL on any other grounds.
So basically, you have no understanding of the theory of evolution, since you keep talking about technology development.
... for people to figure out that agriculture might be a good idea."
"there is actually a large amount of scientific study in the realm of creationism"
HaHaHaHaHa! Seriously though, what the hell would you study? Do you just go around doing random experiments, then whatever the result, say "God did it."?
"What evidence is actually available to make the claims that hunting/gathering predated agriculture... especially by the thousands of years proposed?"
Uhh, besides the extensive fossil & human artifact record?
"Personally, I find it highly unlikely that it took 25,000 years
That's because agriculture isn't a particularly good idea below a certain population density. Simple foraging is a lot easier if the environment provides enough food. Agriculture is really only a good idea when you want to force the land to produce more food than it does by itself. If you don't need to do it, agriculture is a real pain in the ass.
Hell, why am I bothering. If you really believe Creationism, then either you haven't looked at the evidence, you don't understand the meaning of the word "science" or your a complete idiot. Probably all three.
What part of "under a different license" did you fail to understand?
Yeah, that would be a witty rejoinder, except that you are wrong. Go drain the water out of ten different sinks and actually check for yourself.
I love this urban legend. Everyone believes it without checking, despite the fact that checking would be really easy.
My point is that if you've looked at a map of DC, and then see it from the air, the time to locate the whitehouse is significantly less than a second. The hijackers obviously spent quite a bit of time preparing, it seems unlikely that they couldn't find the whitehouse. A little research (driving past) would have told them which side of the pentagon had a big fuel tank next to it, but not which sections were occupied. If they'd hit a residential neighborhood, or the Lincoln memorial, I'd buy that they missed their intended target. Given that they hit the headquarters of the US Military, in what they might well have concluded was the most damaging way possible, I'm inclined to beleive that was their intent.
Well, we're defiintely getting OT here, but what the hey...
"The plane that went down in Pennsylvania was probably headed to the White House."
How can this statement be anything but a wild guess?
"I've also heard conjecture that the plane that hit the Pentagon was headed for the White House or the Capitol, but the terrorists got lost"
Have you ever seen DC from the air? It's not exactly hard to find the big landmarks. Quite the oposite really. Given that they crashed into the one side of the Pentagon where there was a big fuel tank next to the building, I think it's a good guess they hit exactly what they wanted to.
So you need to ammend your argument slightly:
Several thousand people won't keep a secret for over 30 years without any particular reason to do so.
Seriously, what possible reason for keeping the secret about faked moon landings would satisfy those tens of thousands? The people who knew the Allies had broken enigma had a very good reason to keep the secret. (I also think your "several thousand" estimate of the number in on the secret is a bit high. Quite a number of people involved in the info gathering/decrypting/disseminating process didn't actually know the big picture of what they were doing)
moving them from 500 to 50 bajillion-zillion-zillion times too expensive for this.
Seriously, the neodium magnets whose expense people worry about, and who's reduction in price excites people are the ones used in hard drives; they're about the size of your thumb, and they move HD arms about quite smartly. This project is talking magnets many MILES long, SUSPENDING a TRAIN. Even if you could afford it, you probably run into the problem of "Is there enough of it on the whole planet?"
Dunno about Hogan. The first thing I thought of was Heinlen in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Of course, that tube was on the moon, making the "maintain a vacuum" part a bit simpler...
"Ask yourself: How would you decelerate without friction?"
Uh, use a generator to turn kinetic energy into electric power maybe? Well, that's what my Prius does anyway.
Reverend Chick cited non-ironically?!?! The sky is falling!
It's been said a lot of times in this discussion but:
In almost all states you are required to pay the tax regardless of who you buy from. The vendor is not responsible for collecting the tax if they don't have a presence in the state, but you are still supposed to pay it. Since tax collection based on the honor system works about as well as you'd expect, we have the initiative in question. It's not really about new taxes, it's about trying to actually collect existing taxes. The "resource use" in question is not the stores, but yours.
"when you don't spend money and your holdings increase in value, and when you die and haven't spent all your money yet."
Just for the record, that would be you and your heirs making money respectively. Well maybe "making" is the wrong word; certainly "getting" though.
"I haven't the foggiest idea if switches are still coded in assembler, but they still were at the time of the failure."
No, actually, they weren't. The bug was miswritten C code.
As for things being inherently faster in assembler, a good optomizing compiler should be able to write better assembler than you. By good, I mean it should definitely catch really obvious things like the example you mention. I've no idea if good optomizers exist or existed for GMAP, but they certainly do for x86
All of the following is "IIRC":
It's hard to fault the designers of the Tacoma Narows bridge. By all available data at the time, the design was brilliant. The narrows were famous for their insanley gusty winds, going from 20 to 80 knots at the drop of a hat, and the bridge was designed with this in mind. It was designed to handle severely high winds, as well as dramatic sudden changes in wind speed. And it performed brilliantly. Someone might have wondered, what will happen if there is a strong, unusually steady wind, in particular ~40 knots for several hours? But it would be quite a stretch to expect them to figure out that air vortices off the cables would then cause them to occillate at a frequency that happened to be resonant with a particular harmonic of the roadbed, and that this would cause self-reinforcing torsion waves, leading to the bridges collapse.
I learned harmonic motion from a rather distinguished physics prof who told a story about a grad student who came to him wanting to switch programs from engineering to theoretical physics. When he asked him why, the student explained the for the previous week he had the same nightmare every night: that he designed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
To come somewhat back on topic, here's what I have learned from famous examples of programing gone awry: I am not interested in a job where anyones life depends on my code working correctly. I respect those who do write such code, and while I hope they are as smart as me, I pray they are willing to pay more attention to detail!
Since the article makes no mention whatsoever of who's server room it is, and since the photo on Ziemann's site is quite plainley labeled "This is a joke! We received this unattributed photo in an e-mail.", no one is lying. So who's an idiot?
"Any tax you pay as a business is pushed through to your product's price"
And the taxes I pay as an individual are pushed through to the salary I demand.
"multi-level greenhouses"
Think for a bit and see if you can figure out the problem with that idea.
I could read it, but if it's not worth you effort to summarize it, why should I?
Oh hell, what am I goin to do instead, work?
OK, read it, here's my summary (may be less flattering than yours)
There are all sorts of problems with low-income housing. The author thinks they are all due to the damn gummint. He extensively quotes Herbert Spencer, who wrote some stuff that supports his position. Since he wrote it a hundred years ago, it must be true. My favorite bit:
"The extent of government involvement in our housing markets has been mind-boggling. Slum clearance, urban renewal and redevelopment programs, rent controls, permit fees, development limits, density requirements, low-income housing mandates, open space and green belt set-asides, zoning, regulations for everything from earthquake standards to low-flow toilet mandates, to bans on using PVC pipe for plumbing, indecipherable and interminable environmental rules"
Clearly all these damn gummint regulations were put in place for no purpose but to make things difficult for the everyday hardworking slumlord. If only the gummint would butt out we could get back to providing crappy, overly dense, carcinogen-plumbed, environmentally disatorous, unlivable, fire-trap housing. After all, if the poor want to live in buildings that don't randomly collapse killing hundreds, the market will reflect that. Damn meddlers with their building codes!
Hmm... maybe next time you'l want to do your own summary. If you really want to go out on a limb, you could have an original thought.
How does funding fire protection through taxes prevent competition? If you think you can provide a better fire department for less money, go for it. Make your pitch and get the town contract. Note that most firefighters are volunteers, and are unwilling to donate their time to a for-profit venture. That fact may well hurt your competitive chances, but I don't think you can argue it is unfair. A great deal of tax funded government efforts are pursued via contracting with private industry. Tax funding does not prevent competition, it just ensures that everyone pays. The fire department is not, and in my opinion should not, going to pause to consult their client list when you yell "Fire!". Nor do I think poor neighborhoods should be allowed to burn. Companies compete for tax dollars all the time, and save taxpayers money in the process. I'm certainly not arguing tax-paid services are free, just that they eliminate freeloaders where services everyone uses are concerned.