Nah, the heads of the committees realized it would end that way, got together with their four competing logos for a game of darts - last one hit wins. They started to put them on the bulletin board, with a colored sheet behind each, in the teams' colors. Once they got the colored sheets up, the committee heads said, "Wait a minute..." and here we are.
Come now, doing even something as simple as this "logo" in Paint is far too self-abusive. It would probably take half an hour just to get the squares equal.
Also, I'm curious how this would look to a colorblind person. At least before, the design was distinctive. Now it's like looking at stoplights.
It's already illegal to shoot someone, it's illegal in most places (even many places in the US) to own a gun without a permit. So we already made laws to deal with the 'dangerous' part of this. Now we have two options to deal with 3D printing of guns. First, we can make distributing these files illegal. Sure, it's a plausible idea. After all, it worked great for movies. Second, we can make distributing 3d printers a regulated process. This is more practical, but not when we have 3d printers what can make most of the components, and the rest are pretty standard. This genie is very nearly out of the bottle, and I don't expect we can hold it in much longer.
There is a famous argument by Judith Jarvis Thomson that suggests that even GRANTING that a fetus is a full-fledged person with the same rights as everyone else, that STILL they do not have the right to infringe on the rights of the mother:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
Do you have a moral obligation to spend nine months hooked up to this person to keep them alive because you were selected to loan out your kidneys by a third party?
Now, what if it was your actions that made the violinist require the use of your body for 9 months (let's say you poisoned him and damaged his kidneys)? Do you then have some obligation to make reparations for the act you committed?
One could call any adult whose resource usage is more than his output a parasite. By that logic, which is a single step from your statement, we can euthanize homeless people, the unemployed, some CEOs. The difference is that the fetus has the potential to be much more, whereas the groups listed above are generally stratified. Oh, and those groups can object to the treatment.
One could equally say that all people are parasites on this planet, and it has been said before. After all, take us off of this planet and the resources it provides, and we live about 30 seconds.
Maybe we need to acknowledge that fetuses are more than a collection of cells, and the responsibility those adults involved had in creating it (granted, in rape, only one person has any responsibility).
The litigation strategy is just one more parallel, and it seems destined to fail.
"Fail" would mean the amount they spend on litigation is less than the extra profit they make if the tactic prolongs the iPhone/iPad's fat margins - even by a few days, given how profitable it is. Lawyers are expensive, but the taxpayer eats most of the cost of the trial. So why not?
I think he means fail as as similar to failing to stay afloat. If you are going to drown in 3 minutes, and you put it off to 6 minutes, how excited are you about where you're going to be in 10 minutes? Maybe a different strategy is needed so that drowning isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
I think EVERYONE has a right to say something, because everyone who has had sufficient power to cause widespread misery has. The only thing that Europe has more of than the US is a greater history in which to cause misery. But then, they've been around as somewhat cohesive civilizations for between 700 and 1600 years (more if you count Rome and Greece), depending on the country and your definition of 'cohesive civilization'. That leaves a lot of room for abuse, compared to America's paltry 235 years or so.
His isn't the first to suggest something similar. The one I read was about a symbiote between some creature vaguely human and an algae-like substance. I read this in the 80's, and the book was from the 60's or earlier, and titled "Green Man from Space" or something similar. Given that genetic engineering wasn't very well-known at the time, I think it counts as a valid precursor to the techniques described in "Old Man's War".
All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.
The more I observe people, the more I believe this isn't true for the vast majority of them.
If only scientists were paid to review other scientists' work, replicate it, and maybe build upon it. But that doesn't get you grant money, usually. That's more often reserved for new work or application, it seems.
I suppose if you postulate one person in an SUV then you've got something. Most of the world doesn't drive things the size of SUVs with only one person in them.
It is possible we could make an efficient aircraft, given incentive though.
I had a former coworker who drove an SUV to work daily. As far as I know, most, if not all, of that trip was solo. At another workplace, 4 of 6 people in my office drove SUVs or trucks to work on a regular basis, if not daily. I don't think these 5 people are that unusual.
The problem the US keeps having is that its opponents aren't regular armies but guerilla fighters.
No, the problem the US keeps having is that it keeps trying to win the war rather than occupying the nation or winning the hearts of the nation. Certainly there are other problems, but the trick to defeating guerrillas is to make them the enemy in the average countryman's eyes, and make that countryman feel secure in not supporting the guerrillas. This could also be described as achieving peace.
Winning wars is simple. Achieving peace is much more complicated. Also, know your goals. If the US's goal was to defeat the Iraqi army, they accomplished that a long time ago. If the goal was to create a new democratic ally in the Middle East, they apparently have yet to come close.
I, or he, may not be an island, but that doesn't mean he can't do what he likes with his life. Where I live, and probably where he lives, too, there currently aren't laws against 'anti-social behaviour', so being a dick is also allowed.
One of the better ways to think of freedom is the ability to do things that other people don't agree with. You can worship a god of your choice, or not. You can drink in excess, or not. You can exercise, or not. You can hang out with the people of your choosing. You can say, or write, what you like (note that where I live there are hate-crime laws - yes, I feel my freedom is being infringed while still thinking that denying the Holocaust is absurd). And you are certainly within your rights to vilify him for doing those things you don't agree with, because you have freedom, too. Note that you don't have a right to not be offended, which is why pornography is legal (it might not be a problem for you, but it certainly is for someone within 100 km of where you live).
There are limitations to speech in America, but those tend to be where your speech threatens another's freedoms, the classic example being shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
There was a female professor in Canada who did a study on female initiated violence against men, and found it is about as prevalent as male violence against women. The result? She didn't get published and lost tenure. This was a while ago. Google violence against men, read a few links, and perhaps accept that men and women are more equal than you might like.
If this is all about some drunk kid asking someone to show your tits, well those kids are everywhere there is alcohol.
Sure, but this was reportedly an item on a scavenger hunt run by a member of the security staff. That crosses the line from stupid drunks to actual systematic harassment.
No, that would be crossing the line from stupid drunks to actual systematic sexual assault. The difference is vast.
You are not a god. You are not an island. You are a sack of mostly water. No one cares about your little Slashdot manifesto. Learn to function in this society, or be removed from it.
This is backwards, controlling thinking, and is the opposite of the freedom that America pretends to support (assuming you're American because most Slashdotter's are). He can do whatever he wants, and he can be as unconcerned about society in general as much as he wants, so long as he doesn't impinge on others' freedoms. This includes hurting other people's feelings, or being a dick.
Frankly, 'learn to function in this society' sounds dangerously close to 'learn how to game the system we call society', and I personally am not impressed with those who do that, no matter how 'successful' they are.
The problem with 9/11 wasn't in what the hijackers brought on board, but that they changed the rules of airplane hijacking. Prior to 9/11, if your plane was hijacked, you cooperated. That was the best way to ensure that you would survive.
Correction, the best way that you individually survived, and also guaranteed that further hijackings would continue. The list is impressive, notably that Israel seems to get attention about once per decade. The last successful attempt was in 1958, but the 'terrorists' keep trying. I parenthesized terrorists because the one in 2000, for instance, was a rather disturbed individual that needed psychiatric help, and not someone working towards an agenda or terror. As has been said before, Israel has a model that is worth emulating, and is very different from the US's.
There are 3 major limiting factors: Distance from the sun; mass of the asteroid; and time. What you're forgetting about is the value of compounding effects of small numbers over time. Currently, the best system we have for making spaceships reach a significant fraction of c is a solar sail, a propulsion system with one of the lower accelerations, but with the benefit of being able to run for years. This is just a much smaller, much simpler solar sail (which has none of the problems current designs have suffered from). So the controlling factors to focus on are: Is the asteroid small enough for it to work; and do we have enough time for it to work? If you're planning on using this system, one or two years is a woefully short time span.
It's a little-known fact that once you get far enough from the sun, the photons just disappear! The effect may be less, but the requirements are also less. And the effect doesn't just last an instant - trajectory changes would continue to happen for the duration of its flight (or until the paint wore off).
This reminds me of a sig here on slashdot (can't remember whose). "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." The problem with the analogy is that for most of these 'catastrophic' software errors, you're back up and running in 5 minutes with little or no data loss. Since each incident costs almost nothing, if it doesn't happen enough (that being a sufficient amount for the decision-makers to notice) the corrections won't get made.
If you want a better idea of the true cost of quality software, take a look at the cost of software for things like a space module - things that are mission critical, technically correct, and unmaintainable. People are surprised by the costs of these things, but, besides redundancy, these are the costs of very high quality software. And so they decide that they'll just restart the software when the occasional command freezes...
This is the mantra that always drives me crazy when dealing with software. "It's good enough. Deliver."
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, the heads of the committees realized it would end that way, got together with their four competing logos for a game of darts - last one hit wins. They started to put them on the bulletin board, with a colored sheet behind each, in the teams' colors. Once they got the colored sheets up, the committee heads said, "Wait a minute..." and here we are.
Come now, doing even something as simple as this "logo" in Paint is far too self-abusive. It would probably take half an hour just to get the squares equal.
Also, I'm curious how this would look to a colorblind person. At least before, the design was distinctive. Now it's like looking at stoplights.
It's already illegal to shoot someone, it's illegal in most places (even many places in the US) to own a gun without a permit. So we already made laws to deal with the 'dangerous' part of this. Now we have two options to deal with 3D printing of guns. First, we can make distributing these files illegal. Sure, it's a plausible idea. After all, it worked great for movies. Second, we can make distributing 3d printers a regulated process. This is more practical, but not when we have 3d printers what can make most of the components, and the rest are pretty standard. This genie is very nearly out of the bottle, and I don't expect we can hold it in much longer.
Note that this is the first, and apparently hardest, step of anything that includes the word secret.
I've been saying for years, "The first step in keeping a secret is to not tell anyone." I'm no longer surprised at how many fail at doing so.
Totally offtopic, but just how much did you pay for that /. ID?
Sorry, it must be an old joke for you.
There is a famous argument by Judith Jarvis Thomson that suggests that even GRANTING that a fetus is a full-fledged person with the same rights as everyone else, that STILL they do not have the right to infringe on the rights of the mother:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
Do you have a moral obligation to spend nine months hooked up to this person to keep them alive because you were selected to loan out your kidneys by a third party?
Now, what if it was your actions that made the violinist require the use of your body for 9 months (let's say you poisoned him and damaged his kidneys)? Do you then have some obligation to make reparations for the act you committed?
One could call any adult whose resource usage is more than his output a parasite. By that logic, which is a single step from your statement, we can euthanize homeless people, the unemployed, some CEOs. The difference is that the fetus has the potential to be much more, whereas the groups listed above are generally stratified. Oh, and those groups can object to the treatment.
One could equally say that all people are parasites on this planet, and it has been said before. After all, take us off of this planet and the resources it provides, and we live about 30 seconds.
Maybe we need to acknowledge that fetuses are more than a collection of cells, and the responsibility those adults involved had in creating it (granted, in rape, only one person has any responsibility).
"Fail" would mean the amount they spend on litigation is less than the extra profit they make if the tactic prolongs the iPhone/iPad's fat margins - even by a few days, given how profitable it is. Lawyers are expensive, but the taxpayer eats most of the cost of the trial. So why not?
I think he means fail as as similar to failing to stay afloat. If you are going to drown in 3 minutes, and you put it off to 6 minutes, how excited are you about where you're going to be in 10 minutes? Maybe a different strategy is needed so that drowning isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
I think EVERYONE has a right to say something, because everyone who has had sufficient power to cause widespread misery has. The only thing that Europe has more of than the US is a greater history in which to cause misery. But then, they've been around as somewhat cohesive civilizations for between 700 and 1600 years (more if you count Rome and Greece), depending on the country and your definition of 'cohesive civilization'. That leaves a lot of room for abuse, compared to America's paltry 235 years or so.
His isn't the first to suggest something similar. The one I read was about a symbiote between some creature vaguely human and an algae-like substance. I read this in the 80's, and the book was from the 60's or earlier, and titled "Green Man from Space" or something similar. Given that genetic engineering wasn't very well-known at the time, I think it counts as a valid precursor to the techniques described in "Old Man's War".
All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.
The more I observe people, the more I believe this isn't true for the vast majority of them.
If only scientists were paid to review other scientists' work, replicate it, and maybe build upon it. But that doesn't get you grant money, usually. That's more often reserved for new work or application, it seems.
I suppose if you postulate one person in an SUV then you've got something. Most of the world doesn't drive things the size of SUVs with only one person in them.
It is possible we could make an efficient aircraft, given incentive though.
I had a former coworker who drove an SUV to work daily. As far as I know, most, if not all, of that trip was solo. At another workplace, 4 of 6 people in my office drove SUVs or trucks to work on a regular basis, if not daily. I don't think these 5 people are that unusual.
The problem the US keeps having is that its opponents aren't regular armies but guerilla fighters.
No, the problem the US keeps having is that it keeps trying to win the war rather than occupying the nation or winning the hearts of the nation. Certainly there are other problems, but the trick to defeating guerrillas is to make them the enemy in the average countryman's eyes, and make that countryman feel secure in not supporting the guerrillas. This could also be described as achieving peace.
Winning wars is simple. Achieving peace is much more complicated. Also, know your goals. If the US's goal was to defeat the Iraqi army, they accomplished that a long time ago. If the goal was to create a new democratic ally in the Middle East, they apparently have yet to come close.
If it's encrypted (and there isnt a conveniently unencrypted version lying around) then they have one choice
The have another choice, surprisingly supported by the current government and the PATRIOT Act.
I, or he, may not be an island, but that doesn't mean he can't do what he likes with his life. Where I live, and probably where he lives, too, there currently aren't laws against 'anti-social behaviour', so being a dick is also allowed.
One of the better ways to think of freedom is the ability to do things that other people don't agree with. You can worship a god of your choice, or not. You can drink in excess, or not. You can exercise, or not. You can hang out with the people of your choosing. You can say, or write, what you like (note that where I live there are hate-crime laws - yes, I feel my freedom is being infringed while still thinking that denying the Holocaust is absurd). And you are certainly within your rights to vilify him for doing those things you don't agree with, because you have freedom, too. Note that you don't have a right to not be offended, which is why pornography is legal (it might not be a problem for you, but it certainly is for someone within 100 km of where you live).
There are limitations to speech in America, but those tend to be where your speech threatens another's freedoms, the classic example being shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
There was a female professor in Canada who did a study on female initiated violence against men, and found it is about as prevalent as male violence against women. The result? She didn't get published and lost tenure. This was a while ago. Google violence against men, read a few links, and perhaps accept that men and women are more equal than you might like.
If this is all about some drunk kid asking someone to show your tits, well those kids are everywhere there is alcohol.
Sure, but this was reportedly an item on a scavenger hunt run by a member of the security staff. That crosses the line from stupid drunks to actual systematic harassment.
No, that would be crossing the line from stupid drunks to actual systematic sexual assault. The difference is vast.
You are not a god. You are not an island. You are a sack of mostly water. No one cares about your little Slashdot manifesto. Learn to function in this society, or be removed from it.
This is backwards, controlling thinking, and is the opposite of the freedom that America pretends to support (assuming you're American because most Slashdotter's are). He can do whatever he wants, and he can be as unconcerned about society in general as much as he wants, so long as he doesn't impinge on others' freedoms. This includes hurting other people's feelings, or being a dick.
Frankly, 'learn to function in this society' sounds dangerously close to 'learn how to game the system we call society', and I personally am not impressed with those who do that, no matter how 'successful' they are.
The problem with 9/11 wasn't in what the hijackers brought on board, but that they changed the rules of airplane hijacking. Prior to 9/11, if your plane was hijacked, you cooperated. That was the best way to ensure that you would survive.
Correction, the best way that you individually survived, and also guaranteed that further hijackings would continue. The list is impressive, notably that Israel seems to get attention about once per decade. The last successful attempt was in 1958, but the 'terrorists' keep trying. I parenthesized terrorists because the one in 2000, for instance, was a rather disturbed individual that needed psychiatric help, and not someone working towards an agenda or terror. As has been said before, Israel has a model that is worth emulating, and is very different from the US's.
To be pedantic, you only need the tar files that contain part of the file being extracted. This could be one or more (even all).
There are 3 major limiting factors: Distance from the sun; mass of the asteroid; and time. What you're forgetting about is the value of compounding effects of small numbers over time. Currently, the best system we have for making spaceships reach a significant fraction of c is a solar sail, a propulsion system with one of the lower accelerations, but with the benefit of being able to run for years. This is just a much smaller, much simpler solar sail (which has none of the problems current designs have suffered from). So the controlling factors to focus on are: Is the asteroid small enough for it to work; and do we have enough time for it to work? If you're planning on using this system, one or two years is a woefully short time span.
Besides, the effect has already been observed.
It's a little-known fact that once you get far enough from the sun, the photons just disappear! The effect may be less, but the requirements are also less. And the effect doesn't just last an instant - trajectory changes would continue to happen for the duration of its flight (or until the paint wore off).
This reminds me of a sig here on slashdot (can't remember whose). "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." The problem with the analogy is that for most of these 'catastrophic' software errors, you're back up and running in 5 minutes with little or no data loss. Since each incident costs almost nothing, if it doesn't happen enough (that being a sufficient amount for the decision-makers to notice) the corrections won't get made.
If you want a better idea of the true cost of quality software, take a look at the cost of software for things like a space module - things that are mission critical, technically correct, and unmaintainable. People are surprised by the costs of these things, but, besides redundancy, these are the costs of very high quality software. And so they decide that they'll just restart the software when the occasional command freezes...
This is the mantra that always drives me crazy when dealing with software. "It's good enough. Deliver."
Well, I'm sure your contributions, like most people's, will still be talked about 2000 years after your death. Enjoy your life of meaning. /sarcasm