The GPL is all legalese that I don't understand...I guess I'm too stupid to use GPL software.
Perhaps you are. But then, you'd be too stupid to use any software with an EULA. Or to purchase any service that involved a contract or agreement.
You'd surely be too stupid to sign off on that big bunch of legalize necessary to buy a house, and probably too stupid to sign the legalize on an apartment lease.
So if you're too stupid to use GPL software, you're basically too stupid to function in this society. I'm sorry to hear that.
How can POSIX account for all the leap seconds the government decides to make up?
How can DNS account for all the top-level domains that the government decides to make up?
POSIX could account for leap seconds the same way NTP does: it gets a copy of the leap seconds file and knows ahead of time to count it off. Yes, the algorithm needs a look-up table. Deal with it.:-)
When a leap second occurs, all clocks are moved forwards or backwards by a second
No, when a leap second occurs, all clocks (in theory) count an extra second for that minute. 18:59:58, 18:59:59, 18:59:60, 19:00:01 (depending on your time zone). Of course our cheap wall clocks and wrist watches don't do that, but that's they way "real" clocks count off a leap second.
Today we have lighting that assures you can rise at 6pm and do anything you could have done having risen at 6am and we have air conditioning and heating. Bottom line is that we simply don't need clocks based around sunlight and calendars centered around seasons anymore.
If you want to live a life that's completely out of touch with the natural world, feel free to give it a shot.
However, most humans who actually pay attention to their bodies - rather than to technofetish fantasies of "dominating" nature - find that their stress levels decrease and their satisfaction with their lives increases, the more attention they give to natural cycles.
Measurements of time are made for human beings, not human beings for units of time. Human beings live in a world that rotates and revolves, experiences day and night and seasons; and those cycles are built into our biology well below the conscious level.
The overpopulation scare turned out to be stupid scaremongering.
The planet is over its sustainable carrying capacity. The fact that we've been able to use unsustainable technologies to support too damn many people for a few years, doesn't mean we're not overpopulated - any more that the fact that you can still use your credit cards doesn't mean you're not broke.
The Global Cooling crisis also turned out to be more stupid scaremongering.
There never was a "Global Cooling" crisis. Never. There were a few extra-cold winters on the East Coast of the U.S. in the mid 1970s which got the popular press all chattering about a returning ice age, but there was never any scientific consensus, or even suspicion, of near-term global cooling. It's a talking point with no basis in reality, and you show your ignorance when you attempt to invoke it.
I think they tried something about a "silent spring" a little before that, but all that did was cause first-world nations to stop selling effective pesticides to the third-world nations who still needed them
You need to stop getting your science news from idiots like Michael Crichton, ok? DDT is still available for mosquito control, but indiscriminate use of insecticides fails for the same reason as indiscriminate use of antibiotics: species adapt.
It takes some dedicated anti-intellectualism to call Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, the document that inspired King and Gandhi, sophomoric nonsense.
you need police in order for civilization to function. this is a nonnegotiable fact of the reality you live in.
Presuming that by "police" you mean "full time professional government agents", it's an arguable presumption.
Sure, some people have to take action against people who threaten the safety and rights of others. But the idea that there must be be a large force of people with special authority, as opposed to a truly democratic "militia-like" approach in which we are all prepared to do a little bit (perhaps supplemented with specialist officers), or to a free-market system of private security forces as some radical "libertarian capitalists" would have, is debatable.
I again point out to you that police, as we know them, are a recent innovation. If they were necessary for civilization, civilization would not have existed for the several thousand years that it did before modern police forces.
how do you fight police abuse? answer: with more police. internal affairs
No. With fewer police with fewer laws to enforce; and with those police given high levels of education and training, high pay - and held to high standards of behavior.
Stop having cops chase hookers and junkies, and stop creating the violent black market that drives so much of our criminal activity. Bring drugs and prostitution and other "consensual crimes" within the system, and leave police to go after people who are a threat to other's safety or rights.
Set high educational standards. The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice recommended by in 1967 that "all police personnel with general enforcement powers have baccalaureate degrees," but forty years later it's a rare jurisdiction that's implemented that. I know that neither the Baltimore County nor Baltimore City forces, nor the Maryland State Police, requires this. (Heck, you need at least 30 college credits to be a Licensed Massage Therapist, but zero to be a cop.)
A lot of people bash the environment as being bad. But I doubt they use it.
I don't use it because it's bad. I tried, but Sugar is a bad idea dreamed up by theorists attached to their ideas of how children should learn, not on any actual observation or testing.
You get finger/foot printed at birth. The FBI recommends it. Not sure if it is mandated by law, but it could be on a state/local level - if not on a fed level. Great if your kid gets kidnapped.
This reference is over 20 years old, but at that time only New York state required footprinting for newborns. Hospitals often take footprints so they can identify babies if they get mixed up, but the efficacy is questionable. If you have a new source showing that finger- or foot-printing of newborns is required in any other state, please, present it.
Certainly if a permanent record of an infant's fingerprints is made and given to the police or FBI, that would be a significant incentive toward home birth.
As long as the police are not giving this to my insurance company so they can deny me insurance then I am down for it. I don't break the law.
You never break the speed limit? Never had a beer before the age of 21? Never made love in an unsanctioned way (better check your local laws on that!)? Never made a copy of a CD for a friend? Never "forgot" to mention that $20 gift on your income tax forms?
We all break the law.
And the law can change tomorrow. If a law were passed that required all Americans of Iraqi ancestry to report to concentration camps tomorrow - as it did for Japanese Americans in the 1940s - I hope that you would resist it in every way that you could.
Never, never, never, never confuse following that law with doing what's right.
the lawlessness of the 1980s made the city unliveable...in the 1990s and 2000s, new york city is liveable again. crime is way down, murders are way down. how is this anything but a good thing?
Crime rates fell across the nation during the 1990s.
no, the real world is an environment that is unliveable and dangerous, and the police come in and make it safe and liveable... for you
Ah, you've bought the "thin blue line" propaganda.
You do know that full-time professional police are a relatively recent invention in human society, right?
you seem to believe police are the enemy. no, lawlessness is the enemy.
No, lawlessness is the goal - that is, the development of a social order that doesn't need to be constantly re-enforced at gunpoint. As Thoreau put it:
I heartily accept the motto, -- "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, -- "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. [emphasis added]
It's an asymptotic goal, of course.
police abuse IS real. and when it happens, it gets punished.
No, police abuse is SOP throughout the United States, and is rarely punished.
Police brutality cases increased: monetary damage settlements doubled from $13 million to over $26 million per year, and the number of persons shot to death by cops and the number who died in custody both doubled. Meanwhile public resentment of police increased, making it difficult for any good cops to catch actual bad guys.
Are the new owners being compensated for the delay?
Let's be clear: the owners of the wireless spectrum used for broadcast in the U.S. are the people of the United States.
The coupons for free converters are part of the compensation being given us by broadcasters in return for changes in the lease granted them by our representative, the United States Congress.
However, you have to balance that with the inevitable 2-3 crashes per year because of drunk or otherwise hotheaded passengers who just didn't think about pulling triggers etc.
Pardon me, but WTF?
First, unjustified shootings by people with carry permits are extremely rare. Second, why would one passenger shooting another on board an airplane cause a crash? Planes are not fragile - and no, "explosive decompression" will not cause a plane to tear apart if it's hull is pierced by a bullet.
I suspect if people were less cowed by authorities and were allowed to carry self-defensive equipment, 9/11 would never have happened.
It's not that the folks on the planes lacked the ability to thwart the hijackers - see Flight 93. But those on the first three planes were expecting a standard hijacking.
Back in the good old days a hijacking meant a hostage situation where, if all goes well, everybody gets out alive. In that situation, even if you've got a weapon, your best bet is usually to shut the fsck up and don't try to be a hero and get everybody blown up.
But now, in these modern times, we assume a hijacker intends to kill us anyway, so, go for it.
The other option was to make Japan a state. Something the US rarely has done after defeating someone in a war.
Except, you know, all that territory we took from Indian nations. And from Mexico. And from the Kingdom of Hawaii, though that was covert activity backed up by U.S. military forces rather than all-out war.
But you don't have to make an area a state: you can make it a U.S. territory, like we did in the Philippines, though we decided they were more trouble then they were worth. We still have the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Mariana Islands.
Generally, though, we're preferred the neocolonial approach: you can run your own affairs so long as your governance is compatible with U.S. economic interests. You get in the way, you get toppled. A lot less trouble than running things directly.
No army before WW2 eh? So how did we fight world war one? How did we fight the civil war? How did we fight all those wars before then?
We raised temporary armies. After hostilities were done, we pretty much let them dissolve. See the graph here.
That was the founder's vision: no standing armies, which are a sure temptation to use them in foreign wars, but rather a citizen militia capable of defensing the home front.
We had a policy to stay out of European affairs but we damn sure had an army. We changed that policy after being dragged into two world wars and seeing the tragic loss of life they caused.
"Dragged into," my ass. We went into WWI quite voluntarily to protect the interests of the American ruling class, as American capital was more closely allied with British than with German interests; and the attack on Pearl Harbor which got us into WWII was the culmination of a long period of colonial expansion. How do you think we came to have a naval base on Hawaii, or troops in the Philippines, in the first place?
Also, a lot of them are holdovers from the cold war in which we prevented the soviets from taking over Europe.
Wow, you're still suckling from the tit of that cold war propaganda about how the Soviets were just waiting with bated breath to roll through Europe?
And you do know that the Cold War ended back in the last century, right? So that if those bases were there solely for Cold War purposes, we'd have abandoned them by now?
Why they'd want to be on the U.S. and Soviet target list is beyond me though. Being a nuclear power today (even a nuclear superpower) is risky business, no matter how you slice it.
No. Not being a nuclear power is risky business.
If you don't have nukes and you piss us off, you get invaded: see Iraq and Afghanistan. If you piss us off but you have nukes, we have to talk to you, maybe even make a deal and send you money: see Pakistan and North Korea.
I've had to explain to both math and CS majors that, for instance, pages 13-24 is actually not eleven pages. I've had to count on my fingers for several people....Actually, I find it most strange that the CS-guy didn't recognise the off-by-one error:)
The specific name for this sort of off-by-one error is a "fencepost error" - as in, "I want to put up 50 feet of fence. I need a fencepost every ten feet. How many posts do I need?"
the only thing that really works in education - parental involvement.
Sure, parental involvement is key. But...
It's not about wealth, equality, social justice, or any of that. It's about parents who care enough to push their kids to do well in school.
Parents who care don't have much opportunity to become involved when equality, social justice, and all of that is lacking. When both parents have to work to pay for housing and food, there's not a lot of time left over to help Johnny with with homework or to volunteer to chaperone field trips.
Insult to them? What does that even mean? You think they're in doggy heaven looking down feeling mournful over your desire to play god?
What, you're unfamiliar with the concept of "insult to memory"?
I don't believe in any sort of direct psychological continuity after death. But if you start cutting on, say, my grandfather, I'm going to get pissed.
Maybe when I die, one of my grand-kids might want to raise a clone of me... dunno. Might be what they want... might make them feel I was there again.
And what of the rights and welfare of the clone? Rather than being permitted to develop into its own person in a healthy and normal fashion, it will be pressured to conform to very specific notions of behavior and personality.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up. If you haven't read "The Right to Read" yet, let me repeat that link for you. Go read it. Now.
Perhaps you are. But then, you'd be too stupid to use any software with an EULA. Or to purchase any service that involved a contract or agreement.
You'd surely be too stupid to sign off on that big bunch of legalize necessary to buy a house, and probably too stupid to sign the legalize on an apartment lease.
So if you're too stupid to use GPL software, you're basically too stupid to function in this society. I'm sorry to hear that.
Well, a lot of religions started as hero worship...
How can DNS account for all the top-level domains that the government decides to make up?
POSIX could account for leap seconds the same way NTP does: it gets a copy of the leap seconds file and knows ahead of time to count it off. Yes, the algorithm needs a look-up table. Deal with it. :-)
No, when a leap second occurs, all clocks (in theory) count an extra second for that minute. 18:59:58, 18:59:59, 18:59:60, 19:00:01 (depending on your time zone). Of course our cheap wall clocks and wrist watches don't do that, but that's they way "real" clocks count off a leap second.
If you want to live a life that's completely out of touch with the natural world, feel free to give it a shot.
However, most humans who actually pay attention to their bodies - rather than to technofetish fantasies of "dominating" nature - find that their stress levels decrease and their satisfaction with their lives increases, the more attention they give to natural cycles.
Measurements of time are made for human beings, not human beings for units of time. Human beings live in a world that rotates and revolves, experiences day and night and seasons; and those cycles are built into our biology well below the conscious level.
The planet is over its sustainable carrying capacity. The fact that we've been able to use unsustainable technologies to support too damn many people for a few years, doesn't mean we're not overpopulated - any more that the fact that you can still use your credit cards doesn't mean you're not broke.
There never was a "Global Cooling" crisis. Never. There were a few extra-cold winters on the East Coast of the U.S. in the mid 1970s which got the popular press all chattering about a returning ice age, but there was never any scientific consensus, or even suspicion, of near-term global cooling. It's a talking point with no basis in reality, and you show your ignorance when you attempt to invoke it.
You need to stop getting your science news from idiots like Michael Crichton, ok? DDT is still available for mosquito control, but indiscriminate use of insecticides fails for the same reason as indiscriminate use of antibiotics: species adapt.
It takes some dedicated anti-intellectualism to call Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, the document that inspired King and Gandhi, sophomoric nonsense.
Presuming that by "police" you mean "full time professional government agents", it's an arguable presumption.
Sure, some people have to take action against people who threaten the safety and rights of others. But the idea that there must be be a large force of people with special authority, as opposed to a truly democratic "militia-like" approach in which we are all prepared to do a little bit (perhaps supplemented with specialist officers), or to a free-market system of private security forces as some radical "libertarian capitalists" would have, is debatable.
I again point out to you that police, as we know them, are a recent innovation. If they were necessary for civilization, civilization would not have existed for the several thousand years that it did before modern police forces.
No. With fewer police with fewer laws to enforce; and with those police given high levels of education and training, high pay - and held to high standards of behavior.
Stop having cops chase hookers and junkies, and stop creating the violent black market that drives so much of our criminal activity. Bring drugs and prostitution and other "consensual crimes" within the system, and leave police to go after people who are a threat to other's safety or rights.
Set high educational standards. The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice recommended by in 1967 that "all police personnel with general enforcement powers have baccalaureate degrees," but forty years later it's a rare jurisdiction that's implemented that. I know that neither the Baltimore County nor Baltimore City forces, nor the Maryland State Police, requires this. (Heck, you need at least 30 college credits to be a Licensed Massage Therapist, but zero to be a cop.)
And set high standards of review - not by "internal affairs" but by citizens and civilian government. In Baltimore a few weeks ago, the city council's public safety committee chairman was denied entry to a meeting of police commanders - if he can't "watch the watchmen", who can?
I don't use it because it's bad. I tried, but Sugar is a bad idea dreamed up by theorists attached to their ideas of how children should learn, not on any actual observation or testing.
This reference is over 20 years old, but at that time only New York state required footprinting for newborns. Hospitals often take footprints so they can identify babies if they get mixed up, but the efficacy is questionable. If you have a new source showing that finger- or foot-printing of newborns is required in any other state, please, present it.
Certainly if a permanent record of an infant's fingerprints is made and given to the police or FBI, that would be a significant incentive toward home birth.
You never break the speed limit? Never had a beer before the age of 21? Never made love in an unsanctioned way (better check your local laws on that!)? Never made a copy of a CD for a friend? Never "forgot" to mention that $20 gift on your income tax forms?
We all break the law.
And the law can change tomorrow. If a law were passed that required all Americans of Iraqi ancestry to report to concentration camps tomorrow - as it did for Japanese Americans in the 1940s - I hope that you would resist it in every way that you could.
Never, never, never, never confuse following that law with doing what's right.
You ought to familiarize yourself with the fallacy of "post hoc ergo prompter hoc".
Crime rates fell across the nation during the 1990s.
Ah, you've bought the "thin blue line" propaganda.
You do know that full-time professional police are a relatively recent invention in human society, right?
No, lawlessness is the goal - that is, the development of a social order that doesn't need to be constantly re-enforced at gunpoint. As Thoreau put it:
It's an asymptotic goal, of course.
No, police abuse is SOP throughout the United States, and is rarely punished.
If I am leaving it everywhere I go, then they don't need to violate my body by sticking a swab into my bodily orifices to collect some.
Well, no, it works in zero ways, since the reduction in crime seems to have had little to do with these "zero tolerance" policies. Meanwhile these policies were very expensive in both dollars and liberties. Between 1992 and 1998, NYC's police budget nearly doubled. The number of arrestees went from 6,000 to 21,000, causing costs to rise from $150 million to $800 million - and consider that one third of these were drug arrests, nothing less than unjustified acts of kidnapping by the state.
Police brutality cases increased: monetary damage settlements doubled from $13 million to over $26 million per year, and the number of persons shot to death by cops and the number who died in custody both doubled. Meanwhile public resentment of police increased, making it difficult for any good cops to catch actual bad guys.
Of course there is - DNA collection involves the government taking a piece of my living flesh. That's a rather bright line for them to try to cross.
Then there's the problem that DNA isn't so reliable after all - but then, neither are fingerprints.
Citation, please. I've heard of schools setting up programs where kids can be fingerprinted if the parents wish, but none where it is mandatory.
There is everything wrong with a government that thinks it is entitled to take flesh - no matter how small the amount - from its citizens.
The sovereignty of the state ends at my surface of skin. That's a boundary I am willing to protect with force if necessary.
Let's be clear: the owners of the wireless spectrum used for broadcast in the U.S. are the people of the United States.
The coupons for free converters are part of the compensation being given us by broadcasters in return for changes in the lease granted them by our representative, the United States Congress.
Pardon me, but WTF?
First, unjustified shootings by people with carry permits are extremely rare. Second, why would one passenger shooting another on board an airplane cause a crash? Planes are not fragile - and no, "explosive decompression" will not cause a plane to tear apart if it's hull is pierced by a bullet.
It's not that the folks on the planes lacked the ability to thwart the hijackers - see Flight 93. But those on the first three planes were expecting a standard hijacking.
Back in the good old days a hijacking meant a hostage situation where, if all goes well, everybody gets out alive. In that situation, even if you've got a weapon, your best bet is usually to shut the fsck up and don't try to be a hero and get everybody blown up.
But now, in these modern times, we assume a hijacker intends to kill us anyway, so, go for it.
I'll sign on to that!
Except, you know, all that territory we took from Indian nations. And from Mexico. And from the Kingdom of Hawaii, though that was covert activity backed up by U.S. military forces rather than all-out war.
But you don't have to make an area a state: you can make it a U.S. territory, like we did in the Philippines, though we decided they were more trouble then they were worth. We still have the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Mariana Islands.
Generally, though, we're preferred the neocolonial approach: you can run your own affairs so long as your governance is compatible with U.S. economic interests. You get in the way, you get toppled. A lot less trouble than running things directly.
We raised temporary armies. After hostilities were done, we pretty much let them dissolve. See the graph here.
That was the founder's vision: no standing armies, which are a sure temptation to use them in foreign wars, but rather a citizen militia capable of defensing the home front.
"Dragged into," my ass. We went into WWI quite voluntarily to protect the interests of the American ruling class, as American capital was more closely allied with British than with German interests; and the attack on Pearl Harbor which got us into WWII was the culmination of a long period of colonial expansion. How do you think we came to have a naval base on Hawaii, or troops in the Philippines, in the first place?
Wow, you're still suckling from the tit of that cold war propaganda about how the Soviets were just waiting with bated breath to roll through Europe?
And you do know that the Cold War ended back in the last century, right? So that if those bases were there solely for Cold War purposes, we'd have abandoned them by now?
No. Not being a nuclear power is risky business.
If you don't have nukes and you piss us off, you get invaded: see Iraq and Afghanistan. If you piss us off but you have nukes, we have to talk to you, maybe even make a deal and send you money: see Pakistan and North Korea.
The specific name for this sort of off-by-one error is a "fencepost error" - as in, "I want to put up 50 feet of fence. I need a fencepost every ten feet. How many posts do I need?"
Sure, parental involvement is key. But...
Parents who care don't have much opportunity to become involved when equality, social justice, and all of that is lacking. When both parents have to work to pay for housing and food, there's not a lot of time left over to help Johnny with with homework or to volunteer to chaperone field trips.
Only if it's the only power plant around. There's this idea of a "grid", you see.
What, you're unfamiliar with the concept of "insult to memory"?
I don't believe in any sort of direct psychological continuity after death. But if you start cutting on, say, my grandfather, I'm going to get pissed.
And what of the rights and welfare of the clone? Rather than being permitted to develop into its own person in a healthy and normal fashion, it will be pressured to conform to very specific notions of behavior and personality.