Re:Great, more censorship
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Bayesian filters are not "nearly perfect."
Really? You mean blocking 995 out of 1000 isn't "nearly perfect"? 99.5% seems pretty damn close to perfect to me...
Great, more censorship
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That's just what the Internet needs. When will ISPs decide, or be forced, to stop playing Big Brother and let the users make their own decisions about what to filter? The technology is out there, in the form of Bayesian filters, and is nearly perfect. So why do we still have to deal with upstream providers knowing what's best for us?
The full verison of Windows XP costs about $300.00. Microsoft could sell it for $45 and still make a profit. The difference between the $45 price and the $300 price is what economists call "monopoly rents".
That's just an outright lie. Do you know what a monopoly is? It is one company selling one product that has absolutely no close alternatives. Is that to say that nobody on Slashdot uses Linux, or MacOS?
Honestly, your inflammatory editorializing and FUD are giving the Open Source community a bad name. Most of the rest of us, as you may have noticed, are not a bunch of whining, ill-informed teenagers.
While it may seem innocent enough, it is immoral and probably illegal to run these things at work. As an IT manager for a large department, I certainly wouldn't let anything of the sort happen. Why?
Every additional processor cycle consumes a lot of power. When we have sales representatives using database clients and email on their Windows workstations, they are actually using very little of their machine's computing capacity. This allows us to save money on power bills when the excess cycles go unused.
However, if you're some rogue employee who has decided to boost his stats through installing unapproved software on company machines, you're costing the company a fortune in power bills. Sure, it doesn't seem like it would be much with one machine. But after a while, economies of scale kick in and you start to see huge losses in increased power usage through the increased workload on the processors and the associated costs, such as computer power consumption, air conditioning costs and medical insurance.
That, and these clients are proprietary, so we cannot review them for possible security risks. It's an incident waiting to happen.
Mathematica is OK, I guess, but if you want to do some real math work (account balancing, mathematical proofs, nuclear simulations), then MS Excel is really the only way to go.
While the US economy struggles, China continues to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. So, yes, they have done particularly well, no matter what your racist opinion may be.
Probably the most telling part of the article was the following:
If it weren't for the plurality system, Abraham Lincoln might never have become president, Tabarrok says. In the four-candidate 1860 election, Lincoln was a polarizing figure, popular with many Northerners but abhorred by many Southerners. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's closest competitor, was more broadly popular, and although he didn't get as many first-place rankings as Lincoln did, he was nearly everyone's second choice, historians hold. In 1999, Tabarrok and Lee Spector, an economist at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., calculated that if almost any other voting system had been used, history books would refer to President Douglas, not President Lincoln. "On paper, Lincoln's victory looks overwhelming, but he actually didn't have broad-based support," Tabarrok says. With Lincoln now a folk hero, the result of that election might seem good in retrospect. But that's a separate matter from whether the voters actually preferred Lincoln on Election Day, 1860.
Obviously, Abraham Lincoln was a pivotal figure in ensuring the freedom of Americans everywhere. But on the other hand, our fundamentally flawed system has also produced such stinkers as Jimmy Carter and Warren G. Harding. What should we do?
Well, of course, every problem has a solution. Here it is rather simple: have a board of qualified experts (preferably university professors in the hard sciences rather than the mushy-minded liberal arts people) go through the qualifications of the best minds in the country, and then select the person that they think is most appropriate. Then do away with Congress and all this other bullshit government elected by the (stupid) majority of Americans. Put the board's selection in the White House, and voila, I assure you we won't have any more doofuses in the White House. When the best minds are on the problem, our country will always make the best decisions.
I think the most interesting thing posted here so far was the AC comment about fair elections being impossible. Obviously, radical changes are needed in today's system for it to work correctly.
First of all, perhaps for USians to improve, they need to look at the superior systems present in Europe. The systems of the 1930's represent the height of European thoughtfulness and ingenuity in election systems. Never since has such decisive, positive action been taken through the true will of the people. Just look at what they accomplished! They were able to work together to nearly bring down the rest of the world! You never see this kind of coalition building with USia today, and if you just take a look at their system of elections, you'll see why.
Now of course, this isn't to say that they're not improving and working towards the ideal of their European betters; the 2000 election and subsequent events have proven that there has been remarkable progress in their system. But they just aren't there yet. And frankly, Europes isn't there any more either.
So, best of luck to all of you. You're almost there!
No, it's not a troll, dipshit. Read the fucking article. With the number of teachers at my school who don't use Macs, we could've gotten enough licenses to upgrade our modestly-sized lab for free. Apple has fucked us over, pure and simple.
Do they fucking realize that my school gave them about $1700 to upgrade all our machines to Jaguar? Those fuckers have ripped us off again!
Not to even mention that they want $500 for their fucking server software, and the tower we purchased for Server was purchased just early enough so they could screw us out of the discount and make us pay full price for their upgrade.
Apple computers, I love. Apple, the company, I fucking despise.
To add insult to injury, not only are their methods totally impractical, but they don't even make a contribution to "science". Intel will release consumer chips that surpass that clockspeed in 6 months, anyway. Without ludicrous cooling systems that require liquid nitrogen.
That's ludicrous. The sheer amount of signal attenuation that would be accrued through solar flares, cell phone traffic and concrete walls would insert enough variability into the time delay of the signals that it would be impossible to position a device within 1 square meter, as these people claim.
They are just spreading FUD, pure and simple. With any luck on their part, they'll sucker a ton of non-EE-informed companies into paying for their crap software before anyone realizes what's wrong.
But don't do something tech-related. You have the rest of your life ahead of you to do that. Do something you've never done before and probably won't have another chance to. Several people here have suggested that you go to a foreign country and teach English; I concur with this sentiment. It seems like an excellent way to see the world.
All in all, it's not unlike college: do it because it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not the beginning of the rest of your life.
Yes, yes, all those are important, certainly. But you are missing the primary distinguishing feature of mplayer: the author swears like a sailor in the documentation for no apparent reason.
He also visits #xine, where he gets some hints.. Maybe configure; make; make install and Xine documentation wasn't enough? I never saw him on #MPlayer or on our mailing lists... Yet, according to him, our documentation is the biggest pile of shit:) Yare-yare, I must be crafting conspiration theories:)
So, these are my (Gabucino) comments on Mr. Barr's article.. My intention was to let the community see the other side of Barr's fuckings. My intention was NOT to disrespect Xine (I think it has nice GUI widgets) or Guenter Barsch, if he feels I did so, I apologize.
Well gee, buddy, thanks a lot for violating her online rights. It's not every day that the government lets a select few take over on spying on people and violating their Constitutional right to privacy. Before you know it, they will be tracking her in a big government database and steal her organs while she is sleeping and then match up all her data and assume her identity!
I hope you can't sleep at night, because I know I don't!
Why would anyone bother overclocking with today's processors? The clock increase gained by it will be surpassed in a few weeks by a new processor release anyway, which is a testament to how ineffective it is these days. It's about % gain, man. Maybe in the days of the old Celeron 300 chips, where you could more than double your clockspeed, at the expense of processor life, this was effective, but I can't see there being any financial reason to do it now.
I'm sorry, but this is just inexcusable! As if it wasn't bad enough that the RIAA was trying to hunt down each and every user of a P2P network, now they want to tie each individual consumer to a unique PIN number!
Does anyone have any idea how evil this is? Let's look at the facts:
Every year, millions of people download music, and the RIAA loses more money (good)
Every year, millions of Americans have their privacy violated when they have their social security number tied to their real identity by identity theives and their whole market valuation is drained from their bank accounts, along with tons of credit.
So, you see, this is only part of an evil RIAA scam to rape consumers even more. The next thing you know, they have all your personal info in a big government database, where they can tie it all together and violate your Constitutional right to privacy! I'm not going to stand for this; I'm not going to buy any more music by Bon Jovi. This is an outrage.
I'd just like to commend the author for an excellent article on how to protect your privacy from spying government eyes on the Internet. Now all my friends can:
Read PGP messages I send them
Encrypt messages they send to me
Sign their messages and
Verify messages that came from me
This is just the first step in the great battle for our Constitutional online rights, but it's a good one. As long as I have something to keep them from tying all my information together in a giant government database and crossreferencing them to steal my organs when I die, I can sleep at night.
Apple is closed, proprietary hardware and software. Aren't we supposed to inherently distrust closed software because we can't audit the code for bugs and security problems?
We shouldn't trust Apple farther than we can throw them, but we're promoting the use of their closed OS (and an overpriced one, at that.). What gives?
I wish that they would opt for a truly Free license, like the GPL or at least the BSD or MIT license. A corporate-created license such as the APSL only works to take away the rights of the users and anyone who contributes to developing the code for free. Doesn't anyone remember when...
Apple sued developers of the KDE and Gnome themes that were "confusingly similar" to their Aqua theme?
Made the decision to keep their window manager closed, in order to keep the community from benefiting?
I would have hoped that the open source community on Slashdot would have a long enough memory to remember the litigious injuries that Apple had inflicted upon us in the past, but I suppose those hopes were misplaced.
This is excellent news! I am sick and tired of RedHat taking away my Constitutional rights and destroying the KDE project, but I lacked a better alternative. This is truly a step ahead for Linux on the desktop.
Has anyone here used it yet? Could you report on your experience? I hope the mirrors aren't Slashdotted...
I can see the sense in promoting our rights to privacy online, as michael and timothy (bless them) are wont to do, but then we see a sudden reversal. Sure, I guess it's a real pain when spammers send hundreds of unwanted messages over the Internet every day, but is offering a bounty to rob them of their right to privacy really the answer? This is just the government turning citizen against fellow citizen in a foul ploy to get us to turn in our rights to online privacy. Let's look at what's happened so far:
Spammers send spam
Geek gets pissed, deletes spam
Now that isn't that terrible, is it? Do we really need to go out and promote a database state and tie together all a person's Constitutionally private information into one big heap of spying and ratting out? I dislike spam as much as the next man, but I draw the line at violating others' online rights. It's a line nobody should be willing to cross.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? You mean blocking 995 out of 1000 isn't "nearly perfect"? 99.5% seems pretty damn close to perfect to me...
That's just what the Internet needs. When will ISPs decide, or be forced, to stop playing Big Brother and let the users make their own decisions about what to filter? The technology is out there, in the form of Bayesian filters, and is nearly perfect. So why do we still have to deal with upstream providers knowing what's best for us?
That's just an outright lie. Do you know what a monopoly is? It is one company selling one product that has absolutely no close alternatives. Is that to say that nobody on Slashdot uses Linux, or MacOS?
Honestly, your inflammatory editorializing and FUD are giving the Open Source community a bad name. Most of the rest of us, as you may have noticed, are not a bunch of whining, ill-informed teenagers.
Every additional processor cycle consumes a lot of power. When we have sales representatives using database clients and email on their Windows workstations, they are actually using very little of their machine's computing capacity. This allows us to save money on power bills when the excess cycles go unused.
However, if you're some rogue employee who has decided to boost his stats through installing unapproved software on company machines, you're costing the company a fortune in power bills. Sure, it doesn't seem like it would be much with one machine. But after a while, economies of scale kick in and you start to see huge losses in increased power usage through the increased workload on the processors and the associated costs, such as computer power consumption, air conditioning costs and medical insurance.
That, and these clients are proprietary, so we cannot review them for possible security risks. It's an incident waiting to happen.
Mathematica is OK, I guess, but if you want to do some real math work (account balancing, mathematical proofs, nuclear simulations), then MS Excel is really the only way to go.
I knew I should've paid more attention in my art class on human body studies!
But then how do they see where they're going?
While the US economy struggles, China continues to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. So, yes, they have done particularly well, no matter what your racist opinion may be.
Well, of course, every problem has a solution. Here it is rather simple: have a board of qualified experts (preferably university professors in the hard sciences rather than the mushy-minded liberal arts people) go through the qualifications of the best minds in the country, and then select the person that they think is most appropriate. Then do away with Congress and all this other bullshit government elected by the (stupid) majority of Americans. Put the board's selection in the White House, and voila, I assure you we won't have any more doofuses in the White House. When the best minds are on the problem, our country will always make the best decisions.
First of all, perhaps for USians to improve, they need to look at the superior systems present in Europe. The systems of the 1930's represent the height of European thoughtfulness and ingenuity in election systems. Never since has such decisive, positive action been taken through the true will of the people. Just look at what they accomplished! They were able to work together to nearly bring down the rest of the world! You never see this kind of coalition building with USia today, and if you just take a look at their system of elections, you'll see why.
Now of course, this isn't to say that they're not improving and working towards the ideal of their European betters; the 2000 election and subsequent events have proven that there has been remarkable progress in their system. But they just aren't there yet. And frankly, Europes isn't there any more either.
So, best of luck to all of you. You're almost there!
No, it's not a troll, dipshit. Read the fucking article. With the number of teachers at my school who don't use Macs, we could've gotten enough licenses to upgrade our modestly-sized lab for free. Apple has fucked us over, pure and simple.
Not to even mention that they want $500 for their fucking server software, and the tower we purchased for Server was purchased just early enough so they could screw us out of the discount and make us pay full price for their upgrade.
Apple computers, I love. Apple, the company, I fucking despise.
To add insult to injury, not only are their methods totally impractical, but they don't even make a contribution to "science". Intel will release consumer chips that surpass that clockspeed in 6 months, anyway. Without ludicrous cooling systems that require liquid nitrogen.
They are just spreading FUD, pure and simple. With any luck on their part, they'll sucker a ton of non-EE-informed companies into paying for their crap software before anyone realizes what's wrong.
College is not for job training. It's for expanding your interests. I can't put it any plainer than that.
All in all, it's not unlike college: do it because it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not the beginning of the rest of your life.
I hope you can't sleep at night, because I know I don't!
Why would anyone bother overclocking with today's processors? The clock increase gained by it will be surpassed in a few weeks by a new processor release anyway, which is a testament to how ineffective it is these days. It's about % gain, man. Maybe in the days of the old Celeron 300 chips, where you could more than double your clockspeed, at the expense of processor life, this was effective, but I can't see there being any financial reason to do it now.
Does anyone have any idea how evil this is? Let's look at the facts:
- Every year, millions of people download music, and the RIAA loses more money (good)
- Every year, millions of Americans have their privacy violated when they have their social security number tied to their real identity by identity theives and their whole market valuation is drained from their bank accounts, along with tons of credit.
So, you see, this is only part of an evil RIAA scam to rape consumers even more. The next thing you know, they have all your personal info in a big government database, where they can tie it all together and violate your Constitutional right to privacy! I'm not going to stand for this; I'm not going to buy any more music by Bon Jovi. This is an outrage.- Read PGP messages I send them
- Encrypt messages they send to me
- Sign their messages and
- Verify messages that came from me
This is just the first step in the great battle for our Constitutional online rights, but it's a good one. As long as I have something to keep them from tying all my information together in a giant government database and crossreferencing them to steal my organs when I die, I can sleep at night.We shouldn't trust Apple farther than we can throw them, but we're promoting the use of their closed OS (and an overpriced one, at that.). What gives?
- Apple sued developers of the KDE and Gnome themes that were "confusingly similar" to their Aqua theme?
- Made the decision to keep their window manager closed, in order to keep the community from benefiting?
I would have hoped that the open source community on Slashdot would have a long enough memory to remember the litigious injuries that Apple had inflicted upon us in the past, but I suppose those hopes were misplaced.Has anyone here used it yet? Could you report on your experience? I hope the mirrors aren't Slashdotted...
I can see the sense in promoting our rights to privacy online, as michael and timothy (bless them) are wont to do, but then we see a sudden reversal. Sure, I guess it's a real pain when spammers send hundreds of unwanted messages over the Internet every day, but is offering a bounty to rob them of their right to privacy really the answer? This is just the government turning citizen against fellow citizen in a foul ploy to get us to turn in our rights to online privacy. Let's look at what's happened so far:
- Spammers send spam
- Geek gets pissed, deletes spam
Now that isn't that terrible, is it? Do we really need to go out and promote a database state and tie together all a person's Constitutionally private information into one big heap of spying and ratting out? I dislike spam as much as the next man, but I draw the line at violating others' online rights. It's a line nobody should be willing to cross.