Land? Who needs land? According to The Omnivore's Dilemma, industrial beef production doesn't use all that much land itself. You have complexes in which cattle are stocked at high density. Corn is brought in and fed to the cows, and excrement is concentrated and either sold or disposed of. Cows are slaughtered young, before their diet and conditions can make them sick.
This results in great-tasting beef. Yes, it's not the most sustainable or environmentally sound method of producing beef. I'd rather buy grass-fed (or better yet, kobe) beef myself.
But it does work. And it doesn't require all that much land, and grain is easier to import than meat.
You'd be right, except that GM crops are a good thing. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. Why not do it faster and more effectively? The problem with GM crops isn't the technology, it's the way corporations have built a power structure out of patents surrounding that technology.
Instead of trying to fight the technology, why not fight its abuse? After all, we don't ban debuggers because you can use them to crack programs! We don't ban knives because you can stick them in people!
When will people learn that decrying TCP and IP isn't going to accomplish anything? It's very easy to blame the entrenched protocols, and much harder to propose solutions that might actually work. If you say that it'll all go away once we get rid of TCP and IP, nobody can prove you wrong, since we'll never get rid of them!
In reality, TCP and IP are damn good. SCTP and DCCP are evolutionary improvements of TCP and UDP, respectively. We should use them, but TCP, UDP, and IP practically come naturally out of the problem of worldwide networking as naturally as the Pythagorean Theorem comes out of geometry.
I propose a rule:
When blaming TCP and IP for a problem, you must explain how your replacement would be different. Don't forget to explain your replacement protocol's effect on scalability, privacy, portability, and availability.
And then there's stuff like medieval transcriptions. How can I post a good transcription of a Middle English romance without the characters thorn, eth, yogh, and wynn? Some of those are available in standard fonts, especially thorn and eth, but yogh and wynn are a lot harder to come by
You're doing it wrong. Both yogh and wynn have unicode code points. They work just fine here.
That's why outline fonts were created. They're traditionally hinted by hand: it's doable, if tedious. Autohinters have made a lot of progress though, and the results look decent, especially with antialiasing.
All right: load the font (not a violation of copyright, as per USC 17.101). Examine its outlines and re-encode them separately. For bonus points, use a different outline format (say, Type 1).
You'll end up with a file that shares none of its bytes with the original file, but that still describes the same font. (Sans hinting, but who needs that these days?) I don't think the new "font program" would qualify as a derivative work because the only commonality between it and the old file is the geometry of the font itself, which cannot be copyrighted.
If we allow people to use custom fonts, they'll just start using weird fonts for internationalization instead of unicode. They'll lie and claim to be 8859-1, and in the end, we'll just return a web of babel.
Hijack paypal/bank MX traffic using this. Ask startcom for a cert for paypal/bank (trusted by FF and they only check email). Hijack paypal/bank https traffic without alerting end users. Profit!
CA signed cert defeated in minutes.
If Startcom supplies certs for Paypal without verifying that you own Paypal, Startcom needs to be removed from the list of trusted CAs. However, I doubt Smartcom actually does this. Firefox's CA inclusion policy, while not perfect, does ask CAs to state how they plan to counteract exactly this kind of attack.
Startcom being corrupt is not an indication of the vulnerability of X509 as a whole. We need aggressive monitoring of CAs, and it'd be nice for a site to be signed by more than one CA. But the current system is still a lot better than nothing.
As others have mentioned, this "technology" (how I loathe that word) is still vulnerable to MitM attacks. It doesn't matter what you ask Alice and Bob when Eve controls all the responses. As for "biased and for-profit": there's no evidence they're biased. If you don't like one CA, see another. And as for being for-profit: unfortunately, money changing hands is by far the best authenticators available today.
The start of Eternal September was easy to pin down; on the other hand, the current popularization of the internet has been a long, continuous fall in sophistication. It's just like history: you can't pin down when Rome decayed, but you know that in 100 AD it was strong and sophisticated, and in 400 AD, it was weak and insipid.
How is buying a yacht running the economy? Buying a yacht creates jobs.
Trickle-down economics has been widely debunked. The gist is that creating luxury goods does less to help the economy than Keynesian projects.
Taxing progressively is one of the major goals of Communism.
I think Godwin's Law ought to apply to all oppressive leaders, not just Hitler. Yes, my ideals, executed naively, lead to communism. Your ideals, executed naively, lead to fascism.
The key is to create a workable system for the benefit of all while still providing incentive for individual achievement. Neither extreme achieves that goal. Today, however, we are still too far to the right.
First of all, I never mentioned moderation. The OP did that.
Second, thank you for the graphs. They're interesting, but the document you cite is from 2002, before our disastrous expedition to Iraq. Also, I must consider both the FBO of 2002 and Perot both as partisan sources, however. In opposition stands this more recent chart, in which pink represents military spending. It paints a different picture. (It's terribly sad that I'm forced to lump the CBO into the "partisan" category.)
As for my sources: for an analysis of our agricultural subsidies, see "The Omnivore's Dilemma". (Though I'm sure there are more technical primary sources available.)
As for the argument that wealth concentration leads to power concentration, well, just look at Rome, pre-revolution France, and the gilded age in America.
The terms in this discussion are great! "Water ice is a rock." - "Water lava". When you put ideas like that, the geology of Titan becomes much more intuitive.
Personally, I visualize the fourth dimension in a figure as a kind of color, and the fifth as a variation (say, blinking) of that color; but I rarely need to go that high. This is weird stuff.
Sorry, but game theory tells us that we'll have two dominant parties until we change the system. If we adopted, say, approval voting with proportional representation, we'd see a diversity in parties that would put the Cambrian explosion to shame.
I think you're just permanently daft. The words in the constitution are absurd the way you interpret them. The founders realized, just as we do, that perfection is inattainable, but that we should strive for it anyway. The idea that they intended that we strive for something short of perfection and stop there is ludicrous.
And as for prayer in public: your superstition does not belong in our secular society. If you want to practice it on your own, that's your business. But you have no right to force it on others in the public sphere.
So you're saying we should strive not for perfection, but just to improve our nation up to a certain threshold of imperfection? That's nonsense. Of course our goal is perfection.
And I was educated in the United States, and in public school, no less. But if my only education had been what I was told there, I would be a far more ignorant person today. Read the Federalist Papers sometime.
And as for prayer - name one liberal who proposes abolishing the right of individuals to pray. (How would you even go about doing that?) Now, if you want to blast that prayer over a school's PA system, we're going to have to talk.
Slashdot Mirror
Land? Who needs land? According to The Omnivore's Dilemma, industrial beef production doesn't use all that much land itself. You have complexes in which cattle are stocked at high density. Corn is brought in and fed to the cows, and excrement is concentrated and either sold or disposed of. Cows are slaughtered young, before their diet and conditions can make them sick.
This results in great-tasting beef. Yes, it's not the most sustainable or environmentally sound method of producing beef. I'd rather buy grass-fed (or better yet, kobe) beef myself.
But it does work. And it doesn't require all that much land, and grain is easier to import than meat.
You'd be right, except that GM crops are a good thing. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. Why not do it faster and more effectively? The problem with GM crops isn't the technology, it's the way corporations have built a power structure out of patents surrounding that technology.
Instead of trying to fight the technology, why not fight its abuse? After all, we don't ban debuggers because you can use them to crack programs! We don't ban knives because you can stick them in people!
Nice observation!
RTGs run down because the thermocouples go bad, not because the plutonium cools off.
In my experience, "light" hinting is a good compromise between the two hinting styles.
When will people learn that decrying TCP and IP isn't going to accomplish anything? It's very easy to blame the entrenched protocols, and much harder to propose solutions that might actually work. If you say that it'll all go away once we get rid of TCP and IP, nobody can prove you wrong, since we'll never get rid of them!
In reality, TCP and IP are damn good. SCTP and DCCP are evolutionary improvements of TCP and UDP, respectively. We should use them, but TCP, UDP, and IP practically come naturally out of the problem of worldwide networking as naturally as the Pythagorean Theorem comes out of geometry.
I propose a rule:
When blaming TCP and IP for a problem, you must explain how your replacement would be different. Don't forget to explain your replacement protocol's effect on scalability, privacy, portability, and availability.
You're doing it wrong. Both yogh and wynn have unicode code points. They work just fine here.
That's why outline fonts were created. They're traditionally hinted by hand: it's doable, if tedious. Autohinters have made a lot of progress though, and the results look decent, especially with antialiasing.
All right: load the font (not a violation of copyright, as per USC 17.101). Examine its outlines and re-encode them separately. For bonus points, use a different outline format (say, Type 1).
You'll end up with a file that shares none of its bytes with the original file, but that still describes the same font. (Sans hinting, but who needs that these days?) I don't think the new "font program" would qualify as a derivative work because the only commonality between it and the old file is the geometry of the font itself, which cannot be copyrighted.
If we allow people to use custom fonts, they'll just start using weird fonts for internationalization instead of unicode. They'll lie and claim to be 8859-1, and in the end, we'll just return a web of babel.
If that's true, Smartcom needs to be removed from Firefox's CA registry. Have you filed a bug?
If Startcom supplies certs for Paypal without verifying that you own Paypal, Startcom needs to be removed from the list of trusted CAs. However, I doubt Smartcom actually does this. Firefox's CA inclusion policy, while not perfect, does ask CAs to state how they plan to counteract exactly this kind of attack.
Startcom being corrupt is not an indication of the vulnerability of X509 as a whole. We need aggressive monitoring of CAs, and it'd be nice for a site to be signed by more than one CA. But the current system is still a lot better than nothing.
You're a kook.
Really? On what grounds?
Books used to work this way before the Supreme Court ruled the practice illegal in 1908. Precisely the same logic applies today to software.
As others have mentioned, this "technology" (how I loathe that word) is still vulnerable to MitM attacks. It doesn't matter what you ask Alice and Bob when Eve controls all the responses. As for "biased and for-profit": there's no evidence they're biased. If you don't like one CA, see another. And as for being for-profit: unfortunately, money changing hands is by far the best authenticators available today.
The start of Eternal September was easy to pin down; on the other hand, the current popularization of the internet has been a long, continuous fall in sophistication. It's just like history: you can't pin down when Rome decayed, but you know that in 100 AD it was strong and sophisticated, and in 400 AD, it was weak and insipid.
Ah, Alpha Centauri: still the best Civ game ever made.
Trickle-down economics has been widely debunked. The gist is that creating luxury goods does less to help the economy than Keynesian projects.
I think Godwin's Law ought to apply to all oppressive leaders, not just Hitler. Yes, my ideals, executed naively, lead to communism. Your ideals, executed naively, lead to fascism.
The key is to create a workable system for the benefit of all while still providing incentive for individual achievement. Neither extreme achieves that goal. Today, however, we are still too far to the right.
First of all, I never mentioned moderation. The OP did that.
Second, thank you for the graphs. They're interesting, but the document you cite is from 2002, before our disastrous expedition to Iraq. Also, I must consider both the FBO of 2002 and Perot both as partisan sources, however. In opposition stands this more recent chart, in which pink represents military spending. It paints a different picture. (It's terribly sad that I'm forced to lump the CBO into the "partisan" category.)
As for my sources: for an analysis of our agricultural subsidies, see "The Omnivore's Dilemma". (Though I'm sure there are more technical primary sources available.)
As for the argument that wealth concentration leads to power concentration, well, just look at Rome, pre-revolution France, and the gilded age in America.
Abiogensis is fascinating. I hope to live one day to see life created from scratch. Right now, the best we have is interesting speculation.
One workable hypothesis for the natural origin of life is the RNA World Hypothesis. Another is the Iron-Sulfer World Theory.
The terms in this discussion are great! "Water ice is a rock." - "Water lava". When you put ideas like that, the geology of Titan becomes much more intuitive.
Personally, I visualize the fourth dimension in a figure as a kind of color, and the fifth as a variation (say, blinking) of that color; but I rarely need to go that high. This is weird stuff.
Sorry, but game theory tells us that we'll have two dominant parties until we change the system. If we adopted, say, approval voting with proportional representation, we'd see a diversity in parties that would put the Cambrian explosion to shame.
I think you're just permanently daft. The words in the constitution are absurd the way you interpret them. The founders realized, just as we do, that perfection is inattainable, but that we should strive for it anyway. The idea that they intended that we strive for something short of perfection and stop there is ludicrous.
And as for prayer in public: your superstition does not belong in our secular society. If you want to practice it on your own, that's your business. But you have no right to force it on others in the public sphere.
So you're saying we should strive not for perfection, but just to improve our nation up to a certain threshold of imperfection? That's nonsense. Of course our goal is perfection.
And I was educated in the United States, and in public school, no less. But if my only education had been what I was told there, I would be a far more ignorant person today. Read the Federalist Papers sometime.
And as for prayer - name one liberal who proposes abolishing the right of individuals to pray. (How would you even go about doing that?) Now, if you want to blast that prayer over a school's PA system, we're going to have to talk.