I really wanted a linux laptop, but I couldn't find anything affordable, powerful and complete (meaning it has drivers to support everything the laptop has).
No, but in this instance they are right....Hit glass and the glass will shatter and suck everything out of it.
No, they're not. The glass (plastic actually) doesn't shatter. The TV show Mythbusters did a nice demostration of this. The "explosive decompression from a puncture" myth goes back to a James Bond movie, not to any actual event.
The crew compartments of fighter and bomber aircraft are pressurized. The whole plane doesn't rip to sheds if it takes a bullet.
The case you mention of a misinstalled cockpit window is completely different and has no bearing on this.
It's not your "right" to get on the plane. It's very simple.
It's not my right to get on a plane, but getting on a plane doesn't mean that I surrender any of my rights. And it's not the "right" of the government to make me show an agent of the state my genitals before boarding a plane.
Glock was building a plastic gun 'for law enforcement' that specifically could go concealed though normal metal detectors and it got into the publics mind that glocks are plastic.
Handguns are heavy. To make it easier to carry one around all day, Glock designed a line with some parts made of plastic rather than metal to make them a little lighter. It worked so well that now many handguns from other manufacturers have plastic frames.
I haven't eaten breakfast in years. I don't wake up early enough for it.
So shift your meals. Is there some rule that 11am is too late for breakfast?
I'm a late sleeper (and late-to-bedder) myself, often have breakfast around 10:30am, lunch around 2 or 3 pm, and dinner around 7 or 8 - or even as late as 10pm, if I know I'm going to be up until 2 am or so.
Diners serve breakfast all day, you know...
I just eat a big lunch and dinner and snack during the whole day. Am I missing out on something here?
It's generally thought that more and smaller meals are better than two large ones. Depending on how much of your intake is in those "snacks", you might be on your way to this.
You, like the original poster seem to be making the same (incorrect) assumption that making something available means making it free.
How in the world do you come to conclusion that I am making such an assumption? I spoke only of the converse case.
Just because its available, doesn't mean it is free.
True, but totally irrevelvant.
(and please don't think you know what I "meant" to say).
I'm assuming that you said what you meant to say. If that's not the case, I don't think I'm to blame.:-)
Your statement was: 'You said it was "open-source", so I asked where it was...where is this mystery project of yours?' I can't read this in any way that doesn't reflect an assumption that "If software is open-source, then it must be at a location to which I could be pointed."
There is no mandate under the GPL to release the sotware to the public or make it generally available, only to make the source open to those to whom you distribute binaries.
By your "where is it?" question, you seem to be assuming that open source software must be publically available. This is not the case.
An authentication token that when used leaves behind all the information you need to construct a conterfeit - this is not something I want to rely on.
Biometrics is a fundamentally flawed scheme. A biometric is just a token that you can't replace (a scar on your finger? too bad), repudiate if stolen (I can lift your prints but you can't change them without pain), or use to separate priviledges (difficult to use a different thumbprint at the bank, at the library, and to open your car, unless you have interesting anatomy).
As for passwords, yeah, I've gotten to the point of having to write them down. I used to use only a few passwords - my login and root password, one common for low security sites, one shared one for a few sites I cared more about, and my on-line banking. But as sites put various non-sensical restrictions on password selection ("your password must contain two digits", "your password must not use any non-alphanumeric characters", etcetera), I've had to start writing them down.
"Something you are" reduces to "something you have". "Something you know", as you have to remember more and more things to deal with dozens of systems, reduces to "something you have" (that piece of paper with all the password written on it). It's all about the authentication tokens.
Since bodies change on the cellular level from moment to moment, can you ever said to be "you"?
Right-o. There is no permanent unchanging self; our bodies, our thoughts, are constantly changing.
This is a core teaching or Buddhism - "anatman" (or "anatta" in Pali).
"You" are just a character in a the story your brain is telling.
Every now and then individuals get a clue: the Buddha, various monks in following in his footsteps, Jesus, etc. We've seen a rash of people in 20th century america who came to understand what it means to be human: Edgar Cayce, Jose Silva, etc.
If you're mentioning the Buddha in the same paragraph as Edgar Cayce, you're confused about the teachings of one or the other. (Jesus, it's hard to say through all the conflicting historical bullshit - it's hard to separate the political from the spiritual.)
The Buddha was concerned with the problem of human suffering, and offered a program of mental exercise and discipline to help allieviate it. While Sidhartha was a product of his times and soaked up some cultural beliefs, and various metaphysics were added in by some of the Mahayana sects to make things more palitable to the peasants, the core teachings are pretty metaphysically agnostic. Consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.
Cayce beleived in psychic powers and the existance of Atlantis, and made a bunch of failed prophecies.
The Buddha used meditation and intuition to explore the subjective world of his own consciousness, a method that works pretty well. Cayce used meditation and intuition to try to determine facts about the "objective" universe, which just doesn't work.
The first thing it will probably say is, "What the... Oh shit, I'm the copy!"
How would he/I know which was the copy?
If you're going to investigate personal identity via gedankenexperiments involving copying "minds", you have to consider cases where someone might be unknowingly copied.
Consider: some dark stormy night, a stranger who looks a lot like you shows up at your front door, explaining how while you were under general anaesthesia getting your wisdom teeth out a few years ago, they made a copy - you - and sent the original off on a top-secret mission...
(This would be especially interesting if you were someone who held the belief that a "copy" isn't really a person, or is not personally-identical to the person before the copy.)
we and all other animals are just machines.
Your use of the word "just" reflects an unwarranted value judgement. If I am a machine, it follows that machines can be pretty damn wonderful. (I'm sure that using the word "machine" in that sense of "something that follows the `laws' of physics" is useful or informative - there would be nothing material that wasn't a machine.)
I've never seen ST:TAS, and I don't know anyone who has.
Hi Mikito. I'm Tom. Pleased to meet you.
Now you know someone who saw ST:TAS. On TV in the 1970s, not on tape or disk. I was but a lad, and the memories are hazy these decades later, but I saw it.
With the number-sequence that this system creates, I cannot reconstruct your fingerprint at all.
That's not the problem. The problem comes when my bank installs the same fingerprint scanner - now the library record and my bank record have the same database key, the same "account number" if you will.
they can even print a fake barcode on any old library card since barcode techology is open and freely available to anyone and everyone. Then, they can surf for child porn on your account.
I went through a period of fascination with detective-stuff when I was a kid (too many Hardy Boys books) and learned how to lift latent prints using nothing more complicated than Scotch Tape. Getting ahold of someone else's prints is child's play.
today with tools like PET Scans and Functional MNR we are actualy beginning to see the chemical/physiological differences between healthy brains and mentally ill brains, drugs are increasingly targeting the chemical disturbances in the mentally ill brain.
Except we're not. SSRIs are no more effective - maybe less so - than older antidepressants, have horrible side-effects, have been implicated in suicides among young adults (including murder-suicide school shootings), yet are heavily pushed.
Our understanding of the physiological and biochemical correlates of mental health is primitive, and steps neatly into the trap of mistaking correlation with causation.
We've only just gotten past lobotomy; more "refined" brain cutting is still in use, as is electroshock treatment. (Meanwhile safe and effective cognative/behavioral therapies are often bypassed because they are not profitable enough.)
Sorry, but I've watched too many friends spend year being forced to play the game of pharmaceutical roulette that passes for mental health care in our society to have a rosy view.
So life would somehow be magically better if employers were forced to pay workers more than the market dictates?
Workers organizing for better wages and working conditions no more goes against "what the market dictates" (as if the market were a king or a god) than customers getting together to pool their buying power for a better price. It's the market in action.
Obviously some people have diseases or injuries of the brain or nervous system, but the very concept of "mental illness" is questioned by some very intelligent people. Even many who think the concept of "mental illness" has validity are concerned about overdiagnosis, overmedication, and the civil liberies of those labelled "mentally ill".
My point is absolutely not to say "suck it up!"
Some people have very serious problems in their lives, and may be helped by therapy or medication.
But perhaps we should be asking more often if these problems are symptoms of "life out of balance", of a social rather than individual pathology. Sometimes depression may just be a natural symptom of living in a society that's poisoning the environment, screwing the poor and working class, and rolling back social and economic progress. And like all symptoms, it can act as a prompt to action - whereas if supressed by medication and ignored, the underlying problem can only get worse.
They are almost never looking to contribute to or modify the project....which is fine, but lets say i knew of a free alternative to blackboard that wasn't open sourced...you're probably still interested right?
One may not be "looking to" make modifications, but still want the ability to make them if cause arises.
I'm not "looking to" do any serious repairs on my car, but I would certainly take any sort of vendor lock on repairs as a negative feature when next I buy.
addictiveness has nothing to do with the physical effects of withdrawl.
Classically, addiction is defined by withdrawl, tolerance, continued use in the face of health problems, and repeated failed attempted to quit.
When the drug warriors noticed that the usage of some of the drugs they wanted to demonize (especially cannabis) didn't fit this pattern, they invented "psychological addiction", which means nothing more than "I like doing this so much it's hard to stop".
So that we now have the ridiculous situation of people using the same word to describe having trouble turning off the TV as to describe a (potentially fatal, in some cases) neurological dependancy that can result from the long-term use of certain drugs.
People might get into unhealthy relationships with TV, or with non-physicially-addicting drugs, or with sex, or gambling, or whatever. Using the term "addiction" to describe all these relationships is not just non-informative but actively misleading, and has more to do with politics than anything else.
prisoners gave up many of their rights when they commited a crime against society - theft - murder - etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "crime against society"; any rational concept of crime can only include acts against actual people, not abstract nouns.
I've got no problem with segregating violent people from the rest of us. But many people are in jail for acts which did not violate or credibly threaten to violate the rights of anyone else (drug possession, prostitution, et cetera).
The U.S. has far and away the highest prison population in the world (both in raw numbers and per capita). It's likely that the easier it get to bring people "within the system", the more of us will be brought in.
That's my goal in life. To pick up someone else's project and write the documentation for it and do the support. That's what I live for. Oh, and fix the bugs in it, too.
Guess what? If you take a job as a professional software developer, a great deal of your time will be spent supporting, fixing, and documenting code written by someone else.
Luckily, alcohol is much less addictive than cocaine.
Not really. Alcohol withdrawal can kill you, cocaine withdrawal can't. (In fact, some say there are no physical withdrawal symptoms and that cocaine should not be considered addictive, at least not in the same sense as opiates or alcohol.)
It's difficult to judge which is more likely to addict a user, since alcohol is available in a variety of strengths in our culture while cocaine is available only in purified extract form; but I'll note that native cultures in South America who chew coca leaf seem to have few problems with addiction.
After 5 years, and the thankful death of NS4 and IE5 (for the most part)
NS4, maybe (though I still see occasional hits). But I see plenty of hits from IE5 in my logs - in fact, I see more IE5.x hits than I do Netscape (all versions) hits.
Slashdot Mirror
Easiest to buy preinstalled:
The crew compartments of fighter and bomber aircraft are pressurized. The whole plane doesn't rip to sheds if it takes a bullet.
The case you mention of a misinstalled cockpit window is completely different and has no bearing on this.
It's not my right to get on a plane, but getting on a plane doesn't mean that I surrender any of my rights. And it's not the "right" of the government to make me show an agent of the state my genitals before boarding a plane.
Handguns are heavy. To make it easier to carry one around all day, Glock designed a line with some parts made of plastic rather than metal to make them a little lighter. It worked so well that now many handguns from other manufacturers have plastic frames.
There's still plenty of metal in them and they will set off detectors.
The "undetectable plastic gun" thing was FUD, pure and simple.
So shift your meals. Is there some rule that 11am is too late for breakfast?
I'm a late sleeper (and late-to-bedder) myself, often have breakfast around 10:30am, lunch around 2 or 3 pm, and dinner around 7 or 8 - or even as late as 10pm, if I know I'm going to be up until 2 am or so.
Diners serve breakfast all day, you know...
I just eat a big lunch and dinner and snack during the whole day. Am I missing out on something here?
It's generally thought that more and smaller meals are better than two large ones. Depending on how much of your intake is in those "snacks", you might be on your way to this.
How in the world do you come to conclusion that I am making such an assumption? I spoke only of the converse case.
True, but totally irrevelvant.I'm assuming that you said what you meant to say. If that's not the case, I don't think I'm to blame. :-)
Your statement was: 'You said it was "open-source", so I asked where it was...where is this mystery project of yours?' I can't read this in any way that doesn't reflect an assumption that "If software is open-source, then it must be at a location to which I could be pointed."
Software that is GPLed is, by defintion, open source.
There is no mandate under the GPL to release the sotware to the public or make it generally available, only to make the source open to those to whom you distribute binaries.
By your "where is it?" question, you seem to be assuming that open source software must be publically available. This is not the case.
The problem is not remembering a password. The problem is remembering twenty of them, some of them used daily, some only a few times a year.
Which is quite easy.
But you don't even need to do that - some scanners can be fooled into accepting the latent print you leave on it. D'oh!
An authentication token that when used leaves behind all the information you need to construct a conterfeit - this is not something I want to rely on.
Biometrics is a fundamentally flawed scheme. A biometric is just a token that you can't replace (a scar on your finger? too bad), repudiate if stolen (I can lift your prints but you can't change them without pain), or use to separate priviledges (difficult to use a different thumbprint at the bank, at the library, and to open your car, unless you have interesting anatomy).
As for passwords, yeah, I've gotten to the point of having to write them down. I used to use only a few passwords - my login and root password, one common for low security sites, one shared one for a few sites I cared more about, and my on-line banking. But as sites put various non-sensical restrictions on password selection ("your password must contain two digits", "your password must not use any non-alphanumeric characters", etcetera), I've had to start writing them down.
"Something you are" reduces to "something you have". "Something you know", as you have to remember more and more things to deal with dozens of systems, reduces to "something you have" (that piece of paper with all the password written on it). It's all about the authentication tokens.
Right-o. There is no permanent unchanging self; our bodies, our thoughts, are constantly changing. This is a core teaching or Buddhism - "anatman" (or "anatta" in Pali).
"You" are just a character in a the story your brain is telling.
If you're mentioning the Buddha in the same paragraph as Edgar Cayce, you're confused about the teachings of one or the other. (Jesus, it's hard to say through all the conflicting historical bullshit - it's hard to separate the political from the spiritual.)
The Buddha was concerned with the problem of human suffering, and offered a program of mental exercise and discipline to help allieviate it. While Sidhartha was a product of his times and soaked up some cultural beliefs, and various metaphysics were added in by some of the Mahayana sects to make things more palitable to the peasants, the core teachings are pretty metaphysically agnostic. Consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.
Cayce beleived in psychic powers and the existance of Atlantis, and made a bunch of failed prophecies.
The Buddha used meditation and intuition to explore the subjective world of his own consciousness, a method that works pretty well. Cayce used meditation and intuition to try to determine facts about the "objective" universe, which just doesn't work.
How would he/I know which was the copy?
If you're going to investigate personal identity via gedankenexperiments involving copying "minds", you have to consider cases where someone might be unknowingly copied.
Consider: some dark stormy night, a stranger who looks a lot like you shows up at your front door, explaining how while you were under general anaesthesia getting your wisdom teeth out a few years ago, they made a copy - you - and sent the original off on a top-secret mission...
(This would be especially interesting if you were someone who held the belief that a "copy" isn't really a person, or is not personally-identical to the person before the copy.)
Your use of the word "just" reflects an unwarranted value judgement. If I am a machine, it follows that machines can be pretty damn wonderful. (I'm sure that using the word "machine" in that sense of "something that follows the `laws' of physics" is useful or informative - there would be nothing material that wasn't a machine.)
Hi Mikito. I'm Tom. Pleased to meet you.
Now you know someone who saw ST:TAS. On TV in the 1970s, not on tape or disk. I was but a lad, and the memories are hazy these decades later, but I saw it.
A card could be replaced if damaged or lost. That's a little tougher to do with a fingerprint, don'tcha think?
You can give me a different card to use at the library than at the bank. That's a little tougher to do with a fingerprint, don'tcha think?
That's not the problem. The problem comes when my bank installs the same fingerprint scanner - now the library record and my bank record have the same database key, the same "account number" if you will.
And how long do you think it will be before fake fingerprints are available to anyone and everyone?
I went through a period of fascination with detective-stuff when I was a kid (too many Hardy Boys books) and learned how to lift latent prints using nothing more complicated than Scotch Tape. Getting ahold of someone else's prints is child's play.
Except we're not. SSRIs are no more effective - maybe less so - than older antidepressants, have horrible side-effects, have been implicated in suicides among young adults (including murder-suicide school shootings), yet are heavily pushed.
Our understanding of the physiological and biochemical correlates of mental health is primitive, and steps neatly into the trap of mistaking correlation with causation.
We've only just gotten past lobotomy; more "refined" brain cutting is still in use, as is electroshock treatment. (Meanwhile safe and effective cognative/behavioral therapies are often bypassed because they are not profitable enough.)
Sorry, but I've watched too many friends spend year being forced to play the game of pharmaceutical roulette that passes for mental health care in our society to have a rosy view.
Workers organizing for better wages and working conditions no more goes against "what the market dictates" (as if the market were a king or a god) than customers getting together to pool their buying power for a better price. It's the market in action.
Don't take this the wrong way, but only a few decades ago, homosexuality was a "known medical illness." So was female sexual desire.
Perhaps a "diagnostic and statisical" manual with its origins in the military's quest to figure out who was too crazy (or not crazy enough) to be made a soldier is not the best way to define who's "ill" and who's "healthy". I have little doubt that we are in the midst of what people centuries from now will regard as a dark age in clinical psychology.
Obviously some people have diseases or injuries of the brain or nervous system, but the very concept of "mental illness" is questioned by some very intelligent people. Even many who think the concept of "mental illness" has validity are concerned about overdiagnosis, overmedication, and the civil liberies of those labelled "mentally ill".
My point is absolutely not to say "suck it up!" Some people have very serious problems in their lives, and may be helped by therapy or medication.
But perhaps we should be asking more often if these problems are symptoms of "life out of balance", of a social rather than individual pathology. Sometimes depression may just be a natural symptom of living in a society that's poisoning the environment, screwing the poor and working class, and rolling back social and economic progress. And like all symptoms, it can act as a prompt to action - whereas if supressed by medication and ignored, the underlying problem can only get worse.
One may not be "looking to" make modifications, but still want the ability to make them if cause arises.
I'm not "looking to" do any serious repairs on my car, but I would certainly take any sort of vendor lock on repairs as a negative feature when next I buy.
Classically, addiction is defined by withdrawl, tolerance, continued use in the face of health problems, and repeated failed attempted to quit.
When the drug warriors noticed that the usage of some of the drugs they wanted to demonize (especially cannabis) didn't fit this pattern, they invented "psychological addiction", which means nothing more than "I like doing this so much it's hard to stop".
So that we now have the ridiculous situation of people using the same word to describe having trouble turning off the TV as to describe a (potentially fatal, in some cases) neurological dependancy that can result from the long-term use of certain drugs.
People might get into unhealthy relationships with TV, or with non-physicially-addicting drugs, or with sex, or gambling, or whatever. Using the term "addiction" to describe all these relationships is not just non-informative but actively misleading, and has more to do with politics than anything else.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "crime against society"; any rational concept of crime can only include acts against actual people, not abstract nouns.
I've got no problem with segregating violent people from the rest of us. But many people are in jail for acts which did not violate or credibly threaten to violate the rights of anyone else (drug possession, prostitution, et cetera).
The U.S. has far and away the highest prison population in the world (both in raw numbers and per capita). It's likely that the easier it get to bring people "within the system", the more of us will be brought in.
Guess what? If you take a job as a professional software developer, a great deal of your time will be spent supporting, fixing, and documenting code written by someone else.
RTFA. They gave a placebo for a control group.
"Quack medicine" better decribes what managed care dishes out than it describes the clinical use of traditional medicinal herbs.
If you're interested in the scientific and reductionist research into herbal preparations rather than spouting FUD, I suggest you search PubMed.
Not really. Alcohol withdrawal can kill you, cocaine withdrawal can't. (In fact, some say there are no physical withdrawal symptoms and that cocaine should not be considered addictive, at least not in the same sense as opiates or alcohol.)
It's difficult to judge which is more likely to addict a user, since alcohol is available in a variety of strengths in our culture while cocaine is available only in purified extract form; but I'll note that native cultures in South America who chew coca leaf seem to have few problems with addiction.
NS4, maybe (though I still see occasional hits). But I see plenty of hits from IE5 in my logs - in fact, I see more IE5.x hits than I do Netscape (all versions) hits.