The whole point of insurance is spreading risk throughout a large pool. If you tailor everybody's premium to precisely how much of a risk he is, the whole point of insurance vanishes and you're better off just putting money in a bank account.
There's no way you can proxy SSL undetected, as a previous poster explained. Sure, if the user is an idiot, you can get him to install a custom CA certificate, or to ignore the warnings, but those don't count. If you think you can transparently snoop SSL connections, I have a wonderful bridge over the east river to sell you.
It's hard to take you seriously when your post is so rife with spelling errors. The grammar and spelling of a document are good proxies for the quality of its argument.
Our thinking seems to be devolved from "what kind of society do we want to live in?" to "what's in it for me, right now?" If doing X makes you "safer" or "happier" right now, it doesn't matter what the consequences are. It's just that we don't seem to be able to reason past the next couple weeks anymore! The lack of outrage over over-prescribed medication, random drug testing, schools spying on students, the sex offender registry, and warrantless wiretaps points to a huge "it doesn't affect me right now, so I don't give a shit" attitude. It's the moral reasoning of a two year old.
A, ah, friend of mine works for a company that's thinking about hiring an SEO company. What's the best way to distinguish the black hat from the white hat ones?
If incandescent bulbs aren't so expensive that they're dying out on their own, they aren't consuming enough energy to make it worth banning them. If phasing in CFLs really will save that much energy, it would have happened on its own by now; energy is money, and people love saving money.
The lack of CFL adoption is telling us that the difference in energy consumption just isn't enough to offset CFL's various costs. I'm no libertarian, but this is one example of a situation that would have been perfect for the free market to arbitrate. If energy rates rise enough to make the difference noticeable, we'll begin phasing out incandescent bulbs on our own.
Until then, this is just another arbitrary edict that further erodes my personal liberty and (marginally) my quality of life.
Just replace the destination URL with the one you get after following 301 redirects. That shouldn't break anything (301s are meant to be cached, and legitimate URL compression services should be using 301s anyway.)
Nuclear fuel is abundant and clean enough that it ought to count as renewable. Even if, in a thousand years, we run out of thorium and uranium on land, we can extract the stuff from seawater.
I had a hard time deciding whether to reply to your comment or moderate it "interesting." I emphatically disagree with your post, but you make a good point. True, forcing defendants to give up their encryption keys would result in more convictions.
But as a society, we place a higher priority in personal liberty than on catching the maximum number of criminals. There are states that invert these two concepts: we call them "police states". I, for one, would rather live in a society where a few guilty people walk free because we can't crack their encryption than live in one where I can hide nothing from the government. It's a question of priorities.
What are you are missing here is that creationists cannot be "right" in any scientific sense because it's not science. And what useful way of knowing about the world is there other than science?
And frankly, even if creationism were the "truth", that wouldn't matter. Science doesn't purport to deal in "truth." Science exists to come up with reasonable, useful explanations for real-world phenomena. Creationism is unreasonable because it makes too many assumptions, and it's useless because it makes no predictions.
What do you want us to do? Shall we throw up our hands, say "god did it", and shut down our universities?
Dead wrong, huh? I think we're in agreement, actually. Efficiency is sexy. I'm all for it. All I'm saying is that it's not a solution in itself. Efficiency will be (and has been) a response to higher energy prices. That's what's supposed to happen.
Granted, I'm not an economist. But decreasing supply with increasing demand will increase prices without bound. Eventually, increases in efficiency will run out, and our standard of living will be impacted. Eventually, civilization collapses back into the pre-industrial age (probably less than gracefully, if we look at history.)
This is the future to which people who oppose everything but conservation condemn us. It'd be a lot better for everyone to agree to build new, clean capacity, and accept that a degree of conservation will happen naturally as prices rise.
Speaking of which, thanks for telling me about the geothermal heat pump. I'll have to take a look at that, if it really saves me money. It's good for me and good for everyone.
Look: giving up our way of life is not an option. And I don't care about your agrarian fantasies, and neither does anyone else. All these people crying "conserve, conserve, conserve!" are wasting their breath.
If you truly care more about the environment than dismantling modern civilization because you just don't like it, then advocate solutions that the average person can live with. Like renewables, and yes, Virginia, like nuclear power.
FUD. First of all, if you obtain a piece of code under the GPLv2, the author can't retroactively revoke your license and force you to comply with the GPLv3.
Second, even with GPLv2 or v3 code on the bread-making machine, the software is not monolithic. You can comply with the terms on the GPL-licensed portions and retain your own proprietary code. How else could non-GPL software ship with a Linux distribution?
You have a point. I'm not advocating mob rule. A representative government should act like a shock absorber for democracy and prevent sudden fits of passion from leading to bad decisions. Arguably, Prohibition was a failure of that damping mechanism.
But what you're missing here is that society itself defines right and wrong. We think slavery is wrong today, but when it was popular, it wasn't considered wrong. When public opinion changed hard enough, for long enough, slavery ended. (Granted, a little less elegantly than we would have liked.)
You can't judge a past society by our own morals. What are we supposed to do, live our lives based on what people 200 years from now will think? What if we guess wrong?
I don't know why you brought the holocaust into this discussion. That program was a secret project concocted by an insane, totalitarian government. It was not a popular movement.
Also, copyright is not property. At best, it's a pragmatic bargain between artists and the public, and it terms are no more fixed, and no more sacred, than the income tax rate.
If the terms of this contract really did constitute a "fundamental" right, what would give Disney, err, Congress the authority to extend copyright by 20 years, every 20 years?
Point is, like you like it or not, we live a representative democracy. And public opinion is rapidly shifting in favor of weakening copyright. If those in power continue to ignore that shift, they will not long remain in power.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of insurance is spreading risk throughout a large pool. If you tailor everybody's premium to precisely how much of a risk he is, the whole point of insurance vanishes and you're better off just putting money in a bank account.
There's no way you can proxy SSL undetected, as a previous poster explained. Sure, if the user is an idiot, you can get him to install a custom CA certificate, or to ignore the warnings, but those don't count. If you think you can transparently snoop SSL connections, I have a wonderful bridge over the east river to sell you.
You can't use even a legitimate SSL certificate to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. That's the friggin' POINT.
WHY are the extra pins necessary for USB 3.0?
It's hard to take you seriously when your post is so rife with spelling errors. The grammar and spelling of a document are good proxies for the quality of its argument.
Our thinking seems to be devolved from "what kind of society do we want to live in?" to "what's in it for me, right now?" If doing X makes you "safer" or "happier" right now, it doesn't matter what the consequences are. It's just that we don't seem to be able to reason past the next couple weeks anymore! The lack of outrage over over-prescribed medication, random drug testing, schools spying on students, the sex offender registry, and warrantless wiretaps points to a huge "it doesn't affect me right now, so I don't give a shit" attitude. It's the moral reasoning of a two year old.
A, ah, friend of mine works for a company that's thinking about hiring an SEO company. What's the best way to distinguish the black hat from the white hat ones?
True, but this blocks their entire netblock. It'd be slightly more difficult for them to change /that/. Blackholing the DNS is on the list though.
# Block access to Omniture -- spyware vendors
block from any to 216.52.17.0/24
If incandescent bulbs aren't so expensive that they're dying out on their own, they aren't consuming enough energy to make it worth banning them. If phasing in CFLs really will save that much energy, it would have happened on its own by now; energy is money, and people love saving money.
The lack of CFL adoption is telling us that the difference in energy consumption just isn't enough to offset CFL's various costs. I'm no libertarian, but this is one example of a situation that would have been perfect for the free market to arbitrate. If energy rates rise enough to make the difference noticeable, we'll begin phasing out incandescent bulbs on our own.
Until then, this is just another arbitrary edict that further erodes my personal liberty and (marginally) my quality of life.
Dammit. They really should be using 301s.
Just replace the destination URL with the one you get after following 301 redirects. That shouldn't break anything (301s are meant to be cached, and legitimate URL compression services should be using 301s anyway.)
Gah, I should have listened to my technobabble detector. The link above points to one of those stupid grow-my-city things.
It'd be nice if slashdot followed all 301 redirects for a page, then used the resulting URL in the comment.
Nuclear fuel is abundant and clean enough that it ought to count as renewable. Even if, in a thousand years, we run out of thorium and uranium on land, we can extract the stuff from seawater.
I had a hard time deciding whether to reply to your comment or moderate it "interesting." I emphatically disagree with your post, but you make a good point. True, forcing defendants to give up their encryption keys would result in more convictions.
But as a society, we place a higher priority in personal liberty than on catching the maximum number of criminals. There are states that invert these two concepts: we call them "police states". I, for one, would rather live in a society where a few guilty people walk free because we can't crack their encryption than live in one where I can hide nothing from the government. It's a question of priorities.
What are you are missing here is that creationists cannot be "right" in any scientific sense because it's not science. And what useful way of knowing about the world is there other than science?
And frankly, even if creationism were the "truth", that wouldn't matter. Science doesn't purport to deal in "truth." Science exists to come up with reasonable, useful explanations for real-world phenomena. Creationism is unreasonable because it makes too many assumptions, and it's useless because it makes no predictions.
What do you want us to do? Shall we throw up our hands, say "god did it", and shut down our universities?
Cool!
Keep in mind that it's kind of hard to do R&D when you're hamstrung by not actually being allowed to build any of the things.
Also, people in the 70s weren't exactly stupid. TMI wasn't a disaster -- it was a success. The containment worked. No radiation escaped.
What more do you want?
What exactly changed your mind?
Pumped hydroelectric is great where it's available, sure, but what would, say, New York City do? Pump out New Your Harbor?
Dead wrong, huh? I think we're in agreement, actually. Efficiency is sexy. I'm all for it. All I'm saying is that it's not a solution in itself. Efficiency will be (and has been) a response to higher energy prices. That's what's supposed to happen.
Granted, I'm not an economist. But decreasing supply with increasing demand will increase prices without bound. Eventually, increases in efficiency will run out, and our standard of living will be impacted. Eventually, civilization collapses back into the pre-industrial age (probably less than gracefully, if we look at history.)
This is the future to which people who oppose everything but conservation condemn us. It'd be a lot better for everyone to agree to build new, clean capacity, and accept that a degree of conservation will happen naturally as prices rise.
Speaking of which, thanks for telling me about the geothermal heat pump. I'll have to take a look at that, if it really saves me money. It's good for me and good for everyone.
Look: giving up our way of life is not an option. And I don't care about your agrarian fantasies, and neither does anyone else. All these people crying "conserve, conserve, conserve!" are wasting their breath.
If you truly care more about the environment than dismantling modern civilization because you just don't like it, then advocate solutions that the average person can live with. Like renewables, and yes, Virginia, like nuclear power.
FUD. First of all, if you obtain a piece of code under the GPLv2, the author can't retroactively revoke your license and force you to comply with the GPLv3.
Second, even with GPLv2 or v3 code on the bread-making machine, the software is not monolithic. You can comply with the terms on the GPL-licensed portions and retain your own proprietary code. How else could non-GPL software ship with a Linux distribution?
You have a point. I'm not advocating mob rule. A representative government should act like a shock absorber for democracy and prevent sudden fits of passion from leading to bad decisions. Arguably, Prohibition was a failure of that damping mechanism.
But what you're missing here is that society itself defines right and wrong. We think slavery is wrong today, but when it was popular, it wasn't considered wrong. When public opinion changed hard enough, for long enough, slavery ended. (Granted, a little less elegantly than we would have liked.)
You can't judge a past society by our own morals. What are we supposed to do, live our lives based on what people 200 years from now will think? What if we guess wrong?
I don't know why you brought the holocaust into this discussion. That program was a secret project concocted by an insane, totalitarian government. It was not a popular movement.
Also, copyright is not property. At best, it's a pragmatic bargain between artists and the public, and it terms are no more fixed, and no more sacred, than the income tax rate.
If the terms of this contract really did constitute a "fundamental" right, what would give Disney, err, Congress the authority to extend copyright by 20 years, every 20 years?
Point is, like you like it or not, we live a representative democracy. And public opinion is rapidly shifting in favor of weakening copyright. If those in power continue to ignore that shift, they will not long remain in power.
Some people also care about being credited for their work.