Who says coffee has to be so cold that you can drink the whole cup instantly without getting burns?
Who says french fries have to edible at the time of purchase and can't be coated with a volatile poison that's going to evaporate in a few minutes?
When you sell a prepared food product, the implied warranty is that it is fit for immediate human consumption. For hot beverages, that may not imply "that you can drink the whole cup instantly", but it does imply that it won't give you third degree burns!
(A friend of mine is currently involved in a lawsuit after she was poisoned by coffee containing toxic cleaning chemicals. I suppose your response is that she should have had it checked by a toxicologist before drinking it - who says coffee can't contain poison? Consumers have a choice, after all...)
And finally... It's pretty dumb to hold HOT coffee cup between your legs.
Which is probably why the jury reduced the award for contributory negligence on the part of the burn victim.
Oh, not the damn McDonalds coffee lawsuit again. Look, the woman recieived third degree burns, and required skin grafts. They had previous complaints - hundreds of them - that their coffee was dangerously hot. They sold a product that was unfit for human consumption; it would have seriously burned your mouth if you tried to drink it at the temperature offered. And the woman orginally only tried to recover medical costs, but McDonald's wouldn't even negotiate.
There are plenty of bogus personal injury lawsuits out there. (I was hit by one myself after a fender bender a few years back, and despite the utter lack of any real case on the plaintif's part my insurance company decided it was cheaper to settle than go to court.) But the McDonalds coffee lawsuit wasn't one of them.
Rack up $70,000 in debt gambling illegally over the 'net? Stick the credit card company with the bill!
Visa's not stuck with the bill - according to the article, they're going to collect from the casinos.
I'd have to say this is a case of "there is no honor amoung con men" - casinos though they could cleverly get around the law by going online and offshore, and this woman turned out to be more clever at getting around the law.
Learning from other's mistakes is much less painful than learning fro other peoples, so/.ers might all take this as a reminder to check their basic fire safety - batteries in smoke detectors, extinguishers charged, outlets not overloaded by plugging six boxen and monitors into one outlet, and so on...reminds me that I've been wanting to set a fire safe to put backup tapes in. (Yeah, if I was doing really important stuff I'd have offsite backups, but like most of us I'm in good shape if I remember to have backups at all.)
What if an additional subdomain under.us were created, say.tm. Items trademarked at the national level would have reserved domain names amounting like "microsoft.tm.us."
The UK already does this. You get sites like www.demon.co.uk - which actually then points you to www.demon.net. Arrrgghh.
One can easily imagine RMS having gotten bent over not being allowed to record and distribute his own cover version of some song, instead of a printer driver.
While there are problems with the IP regulation of music (see what happened to OLGA) things are much worse with software.
You are allowed to play covers, and even copy existing recordings, if it's not a commercial endeavor. If you're making money at it, you have to give BMI or ASCAP their cut to pass along to the songwriter.
There's no practical way to prevent a song from being reverse-engineered.
No one sticks end-listener license agreements on audio CDs. ("You are prohibited from singing, humming, or whistling any tune, melody, or song contained therein. Your hearing of the music on this disk indicates your acceptance of the terms of this License.")
No one has tried to patent the twelve-bar blues. ("A method for the combination of audio tones to induce within the listener certain changes of mental and physical state, including but not limited to emotional changes, rhythmic body movements, and the Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu.")
I prefer a more pragmatic approach: intellectual property is a construct we invented for the betterment of society as a whole. Does it work? Which parts help more than they hurt?
As a creator of software (at which I make my living) as well as songs, poems, essays, and stories (at which I might hope to make my living in the future), I pretty much want the same thing for all of my work: use and enjoyment of it by a significant audience, credit for it, and a cut of the money that anyone using it for profit makes. (I suppose that boils down to admiration, recognition, and respect.) So far as I'm concerned you can copy, perform, and redistribute my stuff all you want (helping me meet the first goal) so long as you credit me appropriately (the second goal) and give me an appropriate cut of any money you make from selling, copying, performing, redistributing, etcerta, my stuff (the third goal).
There is a group of musicians following the Free Music Philosophy, which is interesting. I will probably do something like that with my own music when I get enough good stuff together to make it worthwhile. (That may take a while. B-) )
To allow the USA to have a truely 'free market' economy, the antitrust laws would have to be repealed.
Fine. Just so long as you eliminate all those other artificial market restritions, too - you know, state creations like intellectual propery, corporations as legal individuals with full rights but lessened responsibility, absentee ownership, the banking system, the common currency, and all the other acts of government that make capitalism possible.
In the meanwhile, though, if the state is going to allow the creation of corporations like Microsoft, and support them by artificial intellectual property rights, I see no problem with antitrust laws that keep the state's creation from getting too far out of line.
The Supreme Court has several times ruled that money is speech. They are right...
No, they're not.
If I slip the cop who pulls me over for speeding a twenty dollar bill when I hand him my licence, hoping to get out of a hundred dollar ticket, that's bribery. Why is it any different if I slip the mayor (or a mayoral candidate) twenty thousand dollars in campain contributions in hopes that he'll veto a law that's going to fine my factory a hundred thousand dollars for pollution violations?
How's this for an idea - if I want to make a large contribution to a candiate, I have to go through an anonymizing proxy. I can say "I endorse Candidate X, and contributed to his (or her) campain," but telling the candidate how much I gave is recognized as bribery and I go to jail. Propositions of the form "(Support/veto) bill foobar and I'll make a large but unspecified contribution to your campain" are also recognized as bribery. That allows me to support the candidate of my choice, but elminates my ability to dangle cash in front of his (or her) nose to lead him (or her) in about.
There's also the problem of coporate control of the media determining who gets to get their message out, but that's another issue - and one that, with a bit of luck, the decentralized nature of the net will take care of.
I end up with it crashing on me about 5-6 times a day,
I've had very few problems with Netscape on my Linux box - but I run only the standalone browser, and an older version (4.05, IIRC).
Although Netscape did just cause my my Worst Linux Crash Ever yesterday - after running for a few weeks (yes, weeks), it ate all all my memory and took down my X server and my login shell. Still didn't crash the OS, though. Meanwhile, at work my PowerMac gets completely hosed by Netscape on a regular basis. (Well, it's got to be either Netscape or Apple's CD player...)
Too bad the Chimera browser isn't in development anymore. I used to run it on NetBSD about three years ago - basic browsing functionality, small, fast, stable, extensible.
Keeps PHBs and marketroids busy creating slide shows for each other. The only up side to this is that they then have less time to bother us hackers.
Other than that, it's Concentrated Evil. I'm thinking about writing a commentary called "PowerPoint Considered Harmful":
yet another proprietary data format
elevates style over substance
makes presentations dependent on unreliable software and hardware, instead of simple and reliable projectors and slides
can mostly be replaced with the much more simple and clueful WimpyPoint
worst of all, encourages the creation of documentation that doesn't document. Anyone who hands me a set of slides as documentation for their project, instead of an actual document - you know, sentances, paragraphs, not a damn set of presentation notes - is asking for a sharp kick to the groin. (PowerPoint didn't create this problem, but it's fed it much fuel.)
And it's also nonsense to say that privately-funded art will only sing the praises of Bill Gates and Coca-Cola... this is pure populist windbaggery.
I do believe that's the first time I'm been called "populist" - I've heard "anarchist", "statist", "socialist", "libertarian", "liberal"... I almost want someone to call me "conservative", "authoritarian", or "fascist" just so I can have a complete set of labels. Anyway...
Wanna see what corporate-funded art looks like? Turn on the TV, my friend. Megacorps would no more sponor controvertial, challenging art than they would support controvertial, challenging television.
Where the hell do you think the Sistine Chapel ceiling came from? Who sponsored Donatello, Rubens, Vermeer? That's right, merchant banks and wealthy patrons.
Most of these patrons were either clergy or noblemen, the rulers - i.e., the government - of the time. And it was common practice for artists to pander to their patrons; poets wrote them odes, painters created flattering portraits, etcetera.
There is a market for good, original, non-pandering art, and Americans spend almost $1.5 billion on it each year.
Let's see, at a population of 270 million, that works out to a staggering $5.56 per American per year. If one quarter of one percent - 1 out of 400 - of Americans are artists, that means each artist gets an annual income of about $2200. Minus materials, of course. And rent for studio space. Leaves pretty much - well, nothing, really.
(Off-topic; if anyone wants to argue this further, e-mail me - remove "spambefuddler-" from the above address.)
Firstly, just because you can't see the cliff, doesn't mean it isn't there.
Just because I can't see the invisible miniature Elvis clones that live in my walls and steal my socks doesn't mean they're not there either. But while absense of evidence isn't evidence of absense, it's surely not evidence of presence!
Second, last time I checked my metaphysics aren't any more improbable than yours. Saying that the 'Big Bang' is a logical beginning for the universe seems delusional to me.
Christian metaphysics involves a proliferation of unobserved and unobservable entities (gods, angels, souls, etcetera) for which there is no evidence. The Big Bang theory is an attempt to correlate our existing observational evidence, without introducing other entities.
Third, no one is stopping you from going door to door handing out tracts and spreading the belief that there is no God.
No, but I have the good manners not to annoy my neighbors by doing so. I simply ask you Xians to do the same.
Hitler wanted to kill Jews, saying they were less than human. Singer wants to kill handicapped kids, saying that they are less than human.
That's just not correct.
Hitler's idea was that existing Jews (and gays and Pollacks, and...) were less than real persons (those of the "master race") and should be eliminated. Singer's idea is that a newborn is not yet a person, and that perhaps in some circumstances we should not allow it to develop into a person.
If I have a human sperm and ovum, and I say "If I bring these together, emplant the zygote, and bring it to term, the resulting organism will have a short and painful life," I think we're almost all agreed that I shouldn't do so.
If I've already made the zygote, then ask if I should implant it, we can ask the same question. And in the absense of some metaphysical belief about zygotes having souls, we again conclude that we shouldn't develop the zygote into a person.
We can continure the process, asking at various stages, "Should we allow this pre-person to develop into a person?", up until it is a person. When's that? Singer's proposing that the answer may be some point after birth, as the brain begins to form pathways and a mind begins to develop. (Which is an idea I had been independently considering myself. The main problem is objective quantification of the inherently subjective phenomenon of mind - in English, it's easier to make a rule like "at conception", "at six months of fetal development", or "at birth" than "when non-verbal concepts of self and other begin to form resulting in a mind posessesed of a subjectivity.")
But you are (ahem) reality-challenged if you believe that this is not even being discussed
As it typical of these matters, there is much screaming at each other, but little discussion.
Almost all of the people who are counted as "poor" own at least one color TV
So what? Color TVs are cheap in this country. You can pick up a used one for a few bucks - or free. The color TV is no longer a luxury item.
I'm far from poor, but I paid for neither of my color TVs. One was a gift from my parents over fifteen years ago, one was my grandfather's and no ones else in the family had a use for it when he passed on.
One friend who is genuinely poor (she's disabled by severe OCD and receives SSI and food stamps) has both a color TV (12 inch or so) and a computer (486 with Win3.1). Both were cast-offs from middle-class friends who had upgraded to bigger screens and faster processors. Neither one helps her out when the landlord raises the rent, or her food stamps are cut.
But the computer (or, rather AOL) does help her stay in touch with friends, and find information and support for her mental illness. Her biggest worry on the tech front is that AOL keeps upgrading - or bloating - their software, and she can't upgrade her hardware to keep up.
"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" is a Zen Buddhist saying. There are other similar expressions in Zen teaching: one Zen master says "I do not understand Buddhism", another burns statues of the Buddha, and so on. I think Zen teachers would wholeheartedly approve of a statue of the Buddha made from dung.
The idea is not to get attached to the idea of the Buddha, or indeed the idea of anything - the thing's the thing. Don't make good and bad, holy and profane, Buddha and not-Buddha. Just this!
Anyway, on the flag thing - personally, I think the flag should be burned whenever some slimeball politician wraps himself up in it.
He simply said that the taxpayers don't have to pay for it.
The state may choose to fund the arts, or not to fund the arts. But if it decides to fund, it cannot decide which works of art to fund based on ideology - especially in the case of religion.
Would it be better not to have public funding at all? In a system with some economic justice, perhaps; but where wealth is controled by a handful of wealthy persons and large corporations, you'll just get art singing the praises of Bill Gates or Coca-Cola.
Would you be this offended if I were trying to stop you from running full speed off of a cliff, just because you didn't know it was there?
Well, I would be highly annoyed if you kept screaming about how, according to some ancient book of Middle Eastern folk tales there was a cliff around here somewhere and I had better watch out, when in I was standing on solid ground, flat clear out to the horizon. Especially so if I'd been hearing about this damn fictional cliff all my life and you were telling me nothing I hadn't heard before.
I don't like the idea that you live your life in a delusional state, holding to an inconsistent and illogical system of metaphysics. But I don't go around knocking on doors telling people "There is no god!" (or better yet, "You are god!") and handing out free brouchures detailing the contradictions and inconsistencies of the Bible and Christianity, or saying the Christians shouldn't be considered citizens because this is a nation not founded upon the Christian faith. Please do me the same courtesy.
Re:One Time Pads and cypher technology
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 2
You've missed the point. The main problem with the OTP is not storing the pad, or even generating it (diode noise or some other physical random event will do); it's the fact that you have to get a copy of the pad to both the sender and the receiver.
You also can't reuse a pad between two people you want to talk to. (Unless you're only doing broadcasts.) Therefore, I have to arrange a secure line of communication (classically, a trusted courier) to send them a copy of the "I-them" pad, for every value of "them" with whom I want to exchange messages. I then have to mangage and keep secret all these different pads.
Increased storage density or faster processors won't help with these problems.
Of all the comments on here, there was only one other that questioned why privacy is needed here.
Sorry? Since when is it necessary to justify privacy?
I don't see why privacy is "needed" about who you sleep with, how often, and what positions you employ. There's no legal way for anyone to exploit it, so please post this information on the web for all to see.
Choosing what information we divulge about ourselves is a basic right.
The IETF should provide technological leadership to the global community, not follow the shortsighted whims of backwards national governments. If some group of religious fundamentalists came to power and decided that packets containing "666" were evil, or that no data stream should even coincidently contain the ASCII encoding for "Jehovah" or the UniCode for a Koran verse, would the IETF change standards to fit their wishes?
Set standards for the best technical reasons. Explain to governments why they shouldn't block adoption of those standards. Wave "bye-bye" in your rear-view mirror to those nations who choose to block them, as the rest of the world speeds off into the future.
(Don't take this as doom-saying about the work at Brookhaven or any specific project, it's meant as a general discussion.)
As we begin to control greater energies, we seem to be entering a time when some scientific experiments will entail small, but non-zero, risk to people in the area, maybe even to humanity at large.
How small of a probability of disaster does it take before we can justify a certain amount of risk, and how do we estimate the probability of disaster without a large number of trials?
For instance: IIRC, pre-Challenger the official estimates on the Space Shuttle having a fatal accident were supposed to be something like one in a million. (My copy of What Do You Care What Other People Think? is at home, feel free to correct me on the real number.) How do you get that estimate? Best way would be to launch a million times and see what happens, but that's hardly practical. Instead it was based on engineering knowledge of well-understood physical principals, materials, and techniques. But it was completely wrong, extrapolation on top of extrapolation without even a propagation of errors. How much worse are our chances of predicting the risks of new techniques, new materials, even new physics?
Of course, the fine and noble folks onboard the shuttle knew that there was a risk, and volunteered to take it. What about "innocent" bystanders? The probability of a fatal accident during the Cassini launch or flyby may have been one in a million (or, it may have been much greater - NASA's "Cassini Mission False and True" says "the navigation accuracy of NASA spacecraft is better than 20 km." Or is that 20 miles?), but it was never non-zero. No launch has a non-zero risk - there's some small chance of a chain of malfunctions that crashes the thing into someone's house. How small do we have to get the risk to justify the experiment?
I'm not going to lose any sleep over the Brookhaven work - given what we know about cosmic rays, I'd say the risk is greater that I'll be hit by a metorite than that there will be any problems there. But the questions of risk to the public will remain.
Have they redefined basic terms since I had chemistry back in high school? Different sized buckyballs wouldn't be different isotopes (different atomic weights of same element due to different neutron count), or even different isomers (different structures made of same set of atoms), they'd be different molecules. Or did someone sneak crack into my rootbeer?
This isn't exactly the type of civil disobedience that you associate with civil rights movements and such. There are some seriously powerful people who have a vested interest in seeing that the law remains as is - the NSA and FBI being just a couple of them.
That's the way civil disobedience works, my friend. The USAmerican civil rights marchers in the 60's weren't out for a lovely day in the fresh air; they were risking beatings, imprisonment, and assassination.
Civil disobedience means putting your ass on the line against the power of the state. By doing so, you hope to shame the state into behaving better; or, failing that, let it know that there are people willing to put themselves at risk to oppose it - and let them figure out that said opposition may not be restricted to nonviolent means.
You can also get real work done with emacs, and faster than you can with vi - if, and only if, you're willing to work at a slower rate for a month or two as you learn the ins and outs of emacs.
It's also a question of environment - don't even try to use emacs over a slow link. I became a master or vi-ness when I had a 2400-baud modem link to a VAX on campus - forget about emacs. But when I was sitting in front of a Sun 3 every day, it was worth it to learn emacs - its customability and X support will reward the patient seeker.
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When you sell a prepared food product, the implied warranty is that it is fit for immediate human consumption. For hot beverages, that may not imply "that you can drink the whole cup instantly", but it does imply that it won't give you third degree burns!
(A friend of mine is currently involved in a lawsuit after she was poisoned by coffee containing toxic cleaning chemicals. I suppose your response is that she should have had it checked by a toxicologist before drinking it - who says coffee can't contain poison? Consumers have a choice, after all...)
Which is probably why the jury reduced the award for contributory negligence on the part of the burn victim.There are plenty of bogus personal injury lawsuits out there. (I was hit by one myself after a fender bender a few years back, and despite the utter lack of any real case on the plaintif's part my insurance company decided it was cheaper to settle than go to court.) But the McDonalds coffee lawsuit wasn't one of them.
I'd have to say this is a case of "there is no honor amoung con men" - casinos though they could cleverly get around the law by going online and offshore, and this woman turned out to be more clever at getting around the law.
Learning from other's mistakes is much less painful than learning fro other peoples, so /.ers might all take this as a reminder to check their basic fire safety - batteries in smoke detectors, extinguishers charged, outlets not overloaded by plugging six boxen and monitors into one outlet, and so on...reminds me that I've been wanting to set a fire safe to put backup tapes in. (Yeah, if I was doing really important stuff I'd have offsite backups, but like most of us I'm in good shape if I remember to have backups at all.)
- You are allowed to play covers, and even copy existing recordings, if it's not a commercial endeavor. If you're making money at it, you have to give BMI or ASCAP their cut to pass along to the songwriter.
- There's no practical way to prevent a song from being reverse-engineered.
- No one sticks end-listener license agreements on audio CDs. ("You are prohibited from singing, humming, or whistling any tune, melody, or song contained therein. Your hearing of the music on this disk indicates your acceptance of the terms of this License.")
- No one has tried to patent the twelve-bar blues. ("A method for the combination of audio tones to induce within the listener certain changes of mental and physical state, including but not limited to emotional changes, rhythmic body movements, and the Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu.")
As a creator of software (at which I make my living) as well as songs, poems, essays, and stories (at which I might hope to make my living in the future), I pretty much want the same thing for all of my work: use and enjoyment of it by a significant audience, credit for it, and a cut of the money that anyone using it for profit makes. (I suppose that boils down to admiration, recognition, and respect.) So far as I'm concerned you can copy, perform, and redistribute my stuff all you want (helping me meet the first goal) so long as you credit me appropriately (the second goal) and give me an appropriate cut of any money you make from selling, copying, performing, redistributing, etcerta, my stuff (the third goal).There is a group of musicians following the Free Music Philosophy, which is interesting. I will probably do something like that with my own music when I get enough good stuff together to make it worthwhile. (That may take a while. B-) )
In the meanwhile, though, if the state is going to allow the creation of corporations like Microsoft, and support them by artificial intellectual property rights, I see no problem with antitrust laws that keep the state's creation from getting too far out of line.
If I slip the cop who pulls me over for speeding a twenty dollar bill when I hand him my licence, hoping to get out of a hundred dollar ticket, that's bribery. Why is it any different if I slip the mayor (or a mayoral candidate) twenty thousand dollars in campain contributions in hopes that he'll veto a law that's going to fine my factory a hundred thousand dollars for pollution violations?
How's this for an idea - if I want to make a large contribution to a candiate, I have to go through an anonymizing proxy. I can say "I endorse Candidate X, and contributed to his (or her) campain," but telling the candidate how much I gave is recognized as bribery and I go to jail. Propositions of the form "(Support/veto) bill foobar and I'll make a large but unspecified contribution to your campain" are also recognized as bribery. That allows me to support the candidate of my choice, but elminates my ability to dangle cash in front of his (or her) nose to lead him (or her) in about.
There's also the problem of coporate control of the media determining who gets to get their message out, but that's another issue - and one that, with a bit of luck, the decentralized nature of the net will take care of.
One man, one vote. Not one dollar, one vote.
Although Netscape did just cause my my Worst Linux Crash Ever yesterday - after running for a few weeks (yes, weeks), it ate all all my memory and took down my X server and my login shell. Still didn't crash the OS, though. Meanwhile, at work my PowerMac gets completely hosed by Netscape on a regular basis. (Well, it's got to be either Netscape or Apple's CD player...)
Too bad the Chimera browser isn't in development anymore. I used to run it on NetBSD about three years ago - basic browsing functionality, small, fast, stable, extensible.
Other than that, it's Concentrated Evil. I'm thinking about writing a commentary called "PowerPoint Considered Harmful":
Wanna see what corporate-funded art looks like? Turn on the TV, my friend. Megacorps would no more sponor controvertial, challenging art than they would support controvertial, challenging television.
Most of these patrons were either clergy or noblemen, the rulers - i.e., the government - of the time. And it was common practice for artists to pander to their patrons; poets wrote them odes, painters created flattering portraits, etcetera. Let's see, at a population of 270 million, that works out to a staggering $5.56 per American per year. If one quarter of one percent - 1 out of 400 - of Americans are artists, that means each artist gets an annual income of about $2200. Minus materials, of course. And rent for studio space. Leaves pretty much - well, nothing, really.Hitler's idea was that existing Jews (and gays and Pollacks, and...) were less than real persons (those of the "master race") and should be eliminated. Singer's idea is that a newborn is not yet a person, and that perhaps in some circumstances we should not allow it to develop into a person.
If I have a human sperm and ovum, and I say "If I bring these together, emplant the zygote, and bring it to term, the resulting organism will have a short and painful life," I think we're almost all agreed that I shouldn't do so.
If I've already made the zygote, then ask if I should implant it, we can ask the same question. And in the absense of some metaphysical belief about zygotes having souls, we again conclude that we shouldn't develop the zygote into a person.
We can continure the process, asking at various stages, "Should we allow this pre-person to develop into a person?", up until it is a person. When's that? Singer's proposing that the answer may be some point after birth, as the brain begins to form pathways and a mind begins to develop. (Which is an idea I had been independently considering myself. The main problem is objective quantification of the inherently subjective phenomenon of mind - in English, it's easier to make a rule like "at conception", "at six months of fetal development", or "at birth" than "when non-verbal concepts of self and other begin to form resulting in a mind posessesed of a subjectivity.")
As it typical of these matters, there is much screaming at each other, but little discussion.I'm far from poor, but I paid for neither of my color TVs. One was a gift from my parents over fifteen years ago, one was my grandfather's and no ones else in the family had a use for it when he passed on.
One friend who is genuinely poor (she's disabled by severe OCD and receives SSI and food stamps) has both a color TV (12 inch or so) and a computer (486 with Win3.1). Both were cast-offs from middle-class friends who had upgraded to bigger screens and faster processors. Neither one helps her out when the landlord raises the rent, or her food stamps are cut.
But the computer (or, rather AOL) does help her stay in touch with friends, and find information and support for her mental illness. Her biggest worry on the tech front is that AOL keeps upgrading - or bloating - their software, and she can't upgrade her hardware to keep up.
The idea is not to get attached to the idea of the Buddha, or indeed the idea of anything - the thing's the thing. Don't make good and bad, holy and profane, Buddha and not-Buddha. Just this!
Anyway, on the flag thing - personally, I think the flag should be burned whenever some slimeball politician wraps himself up in it.
Would it be better not to have public funding at all? In a system with some economic justice, perhaps; but where wealth is controled by a handful of wealthy persons and large corporations, you'll just get art singing the praises of Bill Gates or Coca-Cola.
I don't like the idea that you live your life in a delusional state, holding to an inconsistent and illogical system of metaphysics. But I don't go around knocking on doors telling people "There is no god!" (or better yet, "You are god!") and handing out free brouchures detailing the contradictions and inconsistencies of the Bible and Christianity, or saying the Christians shouldn't be considered citizens because this is a nation not founded upon the Christian faith. Please do me the same courtesy.
You also can't reuse a pad between two people you want to talk to. (Unless you're only doing broadcasts.) Therefore, I have to arrange a secure line of communication (classically, a trusted courier) to send them a copy of the "I-them" pad, for every value of "them" with whom I want to exchange messages. I then have to mangage and keep secret all these different pads.
Increased storage density or faster processors won't help with these problems.
I don't see why privacy is "needed" about who you sleep with, how often, and what positions you employ. There's no legal way for anyone to exploit it, so please post this information on the web for all to see.
Choosing what information we divulge about ourselves is a basic right.
Set standards for the best technical reasons. Explain to governments why they shouldn't block adoption of those standards. Wave "bye-bye" in your rear-view mirror to those nations who choose to block them, as the rest of the world speeds off into the future.
As we begin to control greater energies, we seem to be entering a time when some scientific experiments will entail small, but non-zero, risk to people in the area, maybe even to humanity at large.
How small of a probability of disaster does it take before we can justify a certain amount of risk, and how do we estimate the probability of disaster without a large number of trials?
For instance: IIRC, pre-Challenger the official estimates on the Space Shuttle having a fatal accident were supposed to be something like one in a million. (My copy of What Do You Care What Other People Think? is at home, feel free to correct me on the real number.) How do you get that estimate? Best way would be to launch a million times and see what happens, but that's hardly practical. Instead it was based on engineering knowledge of well-understood physical principals, materials, and techniques. But it was completely wrong, extrapolation on top of extrapolation without even a propagation of errors. How much worse are our chances of predicting the risks of new techniques, new materials, even new physics?
Of course, the fine and noble folks onboard the shuttle knew that there was a risk, and volunteered to take it. What about "innocent" bystanders? The probability of a fatal accident during the Cassini launch or flyby may have been one in a million (or, it may have been much greater - NASA's "Cassini Mission False and True" says "the navigation accuracy of NASA spacecraft is better than 20 km." Or is that 20 miles?), but it was never non-zero. No launch has a non-zero risk - there's some small chance of a chain of malfunctions that crashes the thing into someone's house. How small do we have to get the risk to justify the experiment?
I'm not going to lose any sleep over the Brookhaven work - given what we know about cosmic rays, I'd say the risk is greater that I'll be hit by a metorite than that there will be any problems there. But the questions of risk to the public will remain.
Have they redefined basic terms since I had chemistry back in high school? Different sized buckyballs wouldn't be different isotopes (different atomic weights of same element due to different neutron count), or even different isomers (different structures made of same set of atoms), they'd be different molecules. Or did someone sneak crack into my rootbeer?
Civil disobedience means putting your ass on the line against the power of the state. By doing so, you hope to shame the state into behaving better; or, failing that, let it know that there are people willing to put themselves at risk to oppose it - and let them figure out that said opposition may not be restricted to nonviolent means.
It's also a question of environment - don't even try to use emacs over a slow link. I became a master or vi-ness when I had a 2400-baud modem link to a VAX on campus - forget about emacs. But when I was sitting in front of a Sun 3 every day, it was worth it to learn emacs - its customability and X support will reward the patient seeker.
India was a British colony for many years. Most Indians who come to the U.S. speak excellent English, in addition to an Indian language.