Tell that to those climatologists and other proponents of global warming who place death threats upon and question the credentials of those who oppose them, whether by opinion or direct fact. Maybe they don't mind being wrong as long as it is in private so they can come up with a twist (i.e. spin) of their original statement to make it semi-true to save face. For that matter, if science doesn't mind being wrong I'd like to know why evolution isn't allowed to be countered (with whatever theory you want to use as a counter-argument, scientific or not). In summary: your statement is too broad. I'm going against the grain of the liberals on this site but I have a few karma points to burn still so flame on.
Faith is believing in something without having complete evidence thereof. Faith, by that definition, is always illogical. So we go back to the original question that got marked as troll just because I stated a fact that someone didn't like.
Does the community here accept that blocking funding to something is the same thing as blocking something? Or does blocking something require creating laws making some such or another illegal at the federal level (this probably being unconstitutional on the face of it).
No it isn't the same. Just because tax money isn't collected to fund research by the gov't doesn't mean it is totally blocked. If it is still legal then private firms would be responsible at that point to fund their own research. Capitalism at its best. Quit being so close-minded and so quick to blame the gov't and religious folk for not allowing something to happen when it would still be possible as long as it is still legal. If it is illegal then go to a country where it is, just like thousands of people do who run websites featuring warez, gambling, and other similar content.
Apparently *educated* guesses (i.e. theories based on data) are not allowed either, or have the same status as mythological hooey.
Gosh, I feel more secure about the countries future and future science policies.
Scientists put as much faith into many of their theories as do people of religion. What's wrong with the religious faith that makes you not like it but deem the scientific faith as okay?
in Linux Journal a couple issues ago. It's in the August issue but it is only available online to subscribers currently because it is still new content.
You may want to check this out. Not sure if it would meet your needs or what all it provides (I haven't tried it yet). It's a repackaged Firefox which works with GPOs by FrontMotion.
Many of those who speak English fail to do so properly, both verbally and written. I'm sure this happens with people of all languages. I'm bad at punctuation when writing English but I'm a very good speller. My grammar isn't always the best but when I catch myself I correct myself. It is also useful to be able to distinguish between a typo and a mistake. It is very possible the OP just mistyped and left off the 'a' in 'an' w/o realizing it. Only he knows.
But they don't NEED to put it in the stupid registry! Just build a nice pretty GUI that'll integrate in Server 2003 and 2008 that'll make a file that will alter the "about:config" would do wonders for enterprise adoption. Hell,just making it easy to lock it down so users aren't installing every extension they come across would be good too.
They need to put the settings in the registery to integrate with Group Policy.
What really surprises me though is why haven't a couple of programmers come along and taken the Firefox browser and cooked up some nice to use Group Policy controls for it,maybe with some easy to deploy extensions packages that would appeal to the business markets?
Group Policy uses.adm files which specify values which are stored in a machine's registry. What other mechanism are you referring to when you say "group policy control"? Yeah it is possible some MMC snap-in could be created to handle the generation of a prefs.js however handling this at logon time on a user by user basis involves either Firefox moving the values into the registry instead and thereby integrating with GPOs very nicely (an ADM file would be easy to create) or creating custom script(s) that would download a prefs.js during logon and place it into a user's Firefox profile folder.
I'm sure a good chunk of them would be happy to ditch IE if they had a way of controlling it on the network.
The thing about storing data in the registry is that it is easy to block access to the registry for regular users, just by preventing them from running regedit.exe or regedt32.exe. It would be difficult, if not impossible currently, to prevent users from modifying their prefs.js to customize it further than what company policy states while still retaining the company policy-based settings that must be enforced. Firefox would need to be modified so that the prefs.js file was divided into policy-based settings and user-customized settings and for them both to work properly when deploying a prefs.js using a logon script (or GPO-specific settings using an ADM). Maybe it provides some primitive support for this already. I don't know. I don't use Firefox at home because of issues with saving tabs with FF3 (on OS X). I prefer Opera on Windows even though I've been told tabs in FF3 supposedly are saved in the Windows version.
Personally seeing how quick Firefox has been spreading I kind of doubt that by the time IE9 comes out anyone that isn't on a corporate Intranet will really care. And the reason why I haven't seen Firefox taking off in business is because the Mozilla Corp hasn't put out good Group policy controls that would allow admins to easily deploy and manage it. If someone at Mozilla would put out some really good Group Policy controls I doubt that even businesses would care about IE anymore.
Good point. By Group Policy controls I assume you mean registry keys since that's really what group policies modify. They define values that are configured either at startup or login. Those values are all within the registry however. So until Firefox starts putting configuration settings into the registry this won't happen. I don't have Firefox 3 installed on Windows (only 2.0.0.14) so maybe they already started doing this and I just don't know it.
So what would you do with a murderer? I'm honestly curious, because I've heard a lot of ideas, most of which are terrible, but occasionally something that is interesting and possibly even feasible.
I don't know for sure to tell you the truth. In another post I mentioned that I purposely left out the death penalty from my original message. I was already treading a fine line with what I said because the death penalty is basically advocating the murder of someone as well. However, my point was that one person should not wish, at the very least, some person who is not acting an official capacity for the gov't (an executioner) to kill someone else. That, at the very least, would probably be considered an unjustified. If a fellow inmate killed Reiser it probably wouldn't be provoked so self-defense wouldn't apply. Of course we may not care because some would say Reiser deserved it since he killed someone too.
But that begs 2 questions: 1) Did he really deserve death? and 2) Should we really be advocating a non-official gov't executioner to handle those responsibilities for us? I can't answer #1 definitively but if I had to answer I'd say no; all life is sacred and allowing an executioner leeway in that regard is just like the pro-choice people using any loophole they can to kill a baby. As far as #2 is concerned, we already have enough civilians killing other civilians (in and out of prison) so we shouldn't be advocating it. In summary, advocating murder is not good but advocating an execution is questionable just based on the connotations those words possess.
He killed his wife in a rage because she was leaving with the kids, and he had no shot at getting custody. That's nowhere near as bad as someone who kills out of greed, or out of pleasure. Plus, he has skills that can be put to use. Fifteen years of slavery doesn't seem too lenient.
Really? Too lenient? I'm not saying you are wrong but based on what standard are you saying that the reason for him murdering his wife isn't as bad as someone who kills out of greed or pleasure? Who makes that call and based on what standards? That's like saying a person's life isn't worth saving so we should take them off life support. Who determines quality of life? Many people consider life itself sacred no matter what "quality" it possesses. Destroying that is murder, no gray area exists until humans prefer to insert some. Now that was just an example I used that happened to involve life/death but my point being is that saying someone is better than someone is or not as bad as someone else is subjective.
Killing him would be a waste, and out of proportion.
Well, based on other similar situations many would consider capital punishment to be well worth it here. The question is do we wish to have a fellow inmate take care of the situation for us (whether bribed or not) or make it official by executing him? I purposely left out the execution topic in my original message.
But, what you've said doesn't make sense either. If someone kills because they're sadistic, or as part of a theft, off them before they kill someone else. It's silly to say "no, all human lives have equal worth, even in extreme cases, so we have to let everyone live".
So we should place more weight on someone's life as opposed to another? Who determines how much someone's life is worth and the actual value? Does the gov't need to devise a table of worth for human life? It may be useful if it saves millions of babies every year from being murdered before they take a breath of oxygen but it is still subjective.
My original post's intent was treading a fine line, half of which I was leaving out of the message, that being execution. The fine line was not wishing someone dead, especially not wishing some fellow inmate (as opposed to an executioner) would kill Reiser. Wishing someone dead, especially by way of someone fellow inmate to commit yet another murder, is not the way to be human. Of course, on the surface, the only difference between that situation and an official execution is very small. Is an executioner's soul sent to Hell for murder when he/she dies or is it spared because the person was operating in an official capacity for the gov't and not just some joe who commited a murder?
how fast is your cable connection? with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby.
Cable last I checked is shared on a circuit common to at least a few households, so your mileage may vary depending on neighbours. still, if you can get faster than 24mbit on cable consistently I may consider switching from dsl to cable myself.
My connection through TimeWarner has been a steady 5mbps for 6 years now. No slowdowns. Not 24mbit mind you but it is consistent and I'm in a (small) college town. To get higher than 6mbps with cable you usually have to get a business account or go with Comcast who, I believe, provide 7 or 8mbps currently. TW does offer a "turbo" account for $5 extra I believe which provides 6mbps.
automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser;
You'd think they would make the browser capable of not being corrupt to the point of crashing due to malformed source code for a webpage. How about being proactive and not allow it to crash in the first place instead of implementing crash recovery (a la Office crash recovery) which can be imperfect as well? They have a long history of this though: safe mode for Windows anyone?
People should keep this kinda stuff in mind when bashing scientists (like intelligent design supporters, anti-vaccination people, and other alternative medicine supporters.) The experts in a field really are experts. The argument from authority fallacy only applies to people talking outside of their field.
Just because you can document and build something worth billions of dollars doesn't mean you are smart enough to research and don't make mistakes about something that you never built (the universe, mankind, etc.). We're all human. We have biases and we also make mistakes. Almost everyday there is a new scientific journal article released where eminent researchers discover they were wrong about some aspect of this world and release their latest discoveries showing they were wrong. Those are the scientists I trust. They may not always be right but when they are wrong they admit it. It also helps to be able to question existing theories w/o being labeled as a crackpot or a heretic or a religious fanatic. Theories are meant to be questioned, except for those theories whose apparent accuracy are used to prop up the careers of scientists and researchers. Those have to be kept sacred for some reason, no matter how wrong or right they may be. That's when science turns into propaganda to push agendas.
The infinitesimal chance of finding traces of life on Moon makes it a very, very bad target for a search for life. And a very expensive one, too, for the less likely it is that you can find life over there, the more likely you have to search looonger and dig deeeper. Titan, or Mars, for that matter, are relatively straight forward.
A trip to Titan is not cheap. Just because it may provide better results does not make it worth the billions it will take to get there and get those results. How long does it take to get to Titan and get results back? A long time (I don't care to look it up). We could be doing a lot more in that timespan with the money allocated somewhere else instead. I believe looking for life off this planet is a waste of time and money. As far as religion is concerned, I don't believe in ETL because God only made the life on this planet and no others, not because ETL is or is not a religion. Something doesn't have to be a religion to believe in it.
why not hypothesize that there could be life on the Moon? If we're going to think wild thoughts about where an extremophile can live compared to Earth then let's hypothesize they are right in a "back yard". They could survive on Moon dirt. Why not, right? Who says they need water? We keep thinking too much along the lines of what extremophiles on Earth need to survive. Off this Earth another organism no longer abides by the rules of this planet. Using the Moon as our target to find other life will save money when we try to allocate millions (for the Moon) instead of billions (for Titan) trying to find the new organisms, plus traveling to the Moon is much quicker than Titan. Disclaimer: I don't believe in ETL and, no, that isn't extract-transform-load.
Let's just get this out of the way first. BULLSHIT!
The rest of the world knows something suspicious went on, but America has their head in the sand. Not long after this shit, there was a building in Europe, where the fire was so intense, it burned everything off. The steel structure was still standing but oxidizing flame was enough to melt or buckle steel in the trade center? The sheer ignorance of the American populace astounds me.
Let's just get this out of the way first. BULLSHIT!
The rest of the world knows something evil went on, but America has been the target of fundamentalists for a long time. Not long after this shit, there was a building in Europe, where the fire was so intense, it burned everything off. The steel structure was still standing but oxidizing flame was enough to melt or buckle steel in the trade center? The sheer paranoia of the non-Americans populace astounds me.
Now to be a little more creative with my response. Do you care to give a reason that you think the U.S. gov't (or whoever you think actually did it) caused these buildings to collapse? By the way, let me remind you that 2 of these buildings were over 2x bigger than WTC7 and were hit by commercial airliners prior to their collapse. Also, do you have evidence that the building in Europe you speak of was built exactly the same way as WTC7 to use it as a fair comparison in showing off your....um...structural engineering prowess?
Sudoku can be solved by trying values in cells until a conflict is reached and backtracking to try other assignments. That's the brute-force approach.
Sometimes brute-force is necessary.
Most sudoku puzzles can be solved via implication, however. There is no need to "try" anything. Certain configurations of values in some cells can imply values in other cells. As a very simple example, consider a row that has all cells filled but one. The value of that unfilled cell is implied and can be filled in without having to try any other values. This is a basic example, but clearly more complex ones exist. This is essentially how people solve the puzzles, and I believe it is what the grandparent was describing.
Yes, most can be solved via implication. There is a minimum number of values which must be present in a puzzle to even have a chance of solving it. I've heard the minimum is somewhere around 15-17 for a 9x9. There is a minimum number which must exist in order to solve it by implication otherwise backtracking must be implemented. This makes the logic to solve the puzzle more complicated since a snapshot of the puzzle must be stored multiple times in order to try every possible value placement until the right branch in the logic is found which solves the puzzle. There is no need to try anything for the easier puzzles (although those who don't understand the logic that well or who can't keep track of possibilities in their head will insert a number in pencil to see if it works out later on) but more difficult ones (where you have approx.
And don't forget that many towns do have local artists. Using the utility boxes for nice art (work-safe imagery only please!) would be something that can take the edge of people and make them forget to be annoyed by the item itself.
Yes many towns have local artists. They are the teenagers better known as graffiti artists. Given enough time they will discover these new canvases and cover them with what *they* want rather than what the townspeople want.
1) Keep costs down by not over buying or locking into any vendor. Using appliances where ever possible for file, web, mail and print servers etc.
I have 2 points to bring up regarding this. The first is that at my current job as a gov't contractor, we've been told to use appliances as much as possible for various services. We have done that and becaue of the different services we had to deploy we ended up with a diverse set of vendors and a diverse set of appliances. Some appliances are full blown servers that contain a Windows or Linux OS that provide a full suite of utilities and shell access while others include a custom OS with no traditional shell but a locked down CLI. Backup/restore flexiblity also varies across these appliances. My point being is that you have to be careful when you dictate using appliances. In some cases you may as well just use standard commodity servers and build it yourself depending on what you need. This leads me to my second point.
Because I and my team are contractors for the U.S. gov't we have certain security requirements to abide by. In many cases we have found that given the nature of an appliance we can't always comply with security requirements. Many times they have their own identification, authentication, and authorization mechanisms and can't be tied to a central repository. Not all of them support the same level of SNMP (v1 is insecure as opposed to v2c/3 which are at least more secure). You are at the mercy of those vendors to provide sufficient compatibility with the rest of your monitoring and management infrastructure. This may not be an issue for a corporation; it depends on security requirements and existing infrastructure (security and non-security) as to whether an appliance really does give you ease of use.
Appliances are supposed to make life easier and they can if you don't have any existing requirements (especially security) that the appliances must meet. Also remember that the more appliances you get from different vendors, you really could be making your life more difficult instead of easier because of the vast difference in the implementation of the definition of "appliance".
For those who don't get Wired but are interested, in the latest issue of Wired is an article about Stephenson. The online version is here. The story of how Anathem came to be is included in the article.
A few customers would pay more, like the dvd collectors and file sharing fanatics. The majority who use the internet normally would have significantly lower cable bills. I'm sure the cable companies love the people who pay 39.95 to check email and watch the occasional youtube video, most people don't even know what a torrent is, much less have half a dozen dvd's downloading at any given moment.
Exactly, with tiered pricing, most people would pay less than they do now with the current pricing scheme. Unless Comcast can make up that lack of revenue by not having to pay for the large amount of bandwidth used by the biggest customers I don't see why Comcast would do such a thing since their revenue stream is slowed down. If they can make up the revenue by gouging the biggest users then those biggest users must really be using a lot of bandwidth, or Comcast is themselves gouged by their backbone provider and want to pass the buck. I've heard that the they consider excessive use to be above 250-300 gigabytes per month. I've never gone above 250GB/mo but every month I am above 100GB/mo transfer (up/down). I don't download more than 5 DVDs a month (some months no DVDs are downloaded) but I'd still be hurt my the tiered pricing that TW is piloting in Beaumont, TX. It will cost me more (I'd have to get the top tier which is about $30 more than what I pay now) and, by Comcast's standards at least, I'm not an excessive user.
First, we had global warming which was supposed to obviously describe the global increase in temperatures affecting climate everywhere and was supposed to already be in effect. When evidence of that was few and far between and the PhDs, who had to do something about their soiled reputation espousing the issues that global warming would bring and denouncing other PhDs who didn't agree with them, realized they were wrong they renamed global warming to climate change. This way no matter whether temperatures increased or decreased they could still maintain their large egos and be considered correct all along. Now, we are told that the current year will be the coldest in a long time and this:
However, another natural cycle, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, is predicted to hold global temperatures steady for the next decade before global warming takes our planet into new warmth.
Now with this it seems global warming isn't actually supposed to be here, yet. So now the PhDs are trying once again to maintain their oversized egos by stating that what they predicted and have pushed on us layman really is real but not every place will get warmer, some places will get colder, but not yet. Not until things get warmer or colder will they actually say (using 20/20 hindsight of course) that we definitely have global climate change. Hmmm, maybe I should be a climatologist.
Of course, the big difference between the 21st century global climate change and the pre-Ice Age global climate change is that somehow the humans are at fault for the present predicament...ahh, but not yet. We're still in the clear it seems, until CO2 levels cause some places to get warmer while others get colder. And here I thought warming and cooling were just normal climate changes which have occurred irregardless of human existence.
Can someone point me, with no magical PhD to set me straight, where I've gone wrong? I'm a lowly crackpot until I get my PhD and subscribe to the GW (global warming) bandwagon.
I'm not certain I agree with you. While I don't disagree that MS tends to have loads of bloatware, I am confused about why so many people rag on Vista. The reason that MS added so much to Vista was because people were downloading and using 3rd party applications to do this on Microsoft's previous OS versions. I know several people who installed apps to allow a usable calendar as the desktop. And Windows Blinds was somewhat of a popular download for a very long time. The problem with Microsoft is that they are so large and own such a large portion of the market that they are bound to piss off people no matter what action they take.
Tons of other applications are installed with Linux but Linux and X windows (with the desktop environment) don't seem bogged down by it unlike Windows. This goes for XP as well as Vista but the bloated effect feels worse with Vista. Microsoft's code just isn't efficient. I don't know where the problem is but the end result is that Windows isn't as responsive as Linux is especially after a year of use involving add/removing applications. It's great to add stuff to the product so that the end user has as much out of the box as they need to be content with their purchase (or download) but it is another thing altogether to integrate those applications into a system and just have those features/applications bog down the system because they were not developed correctly. I remember installing the add-on for multiple desktops on XP and it was slower having 4 desktops in XP than it was having 8 desktops in Linux. It shouldn't be like that: 1) it shouldn't have to be an add-on and 2) it shouldn't be slower than something better on Linux.
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In a nutshell, science doesn't mind being wrong.
Tell that to those climatologists and other proponents of global warming who place death threats upon and question the credentials of those who oppose them, whether by opinion or direct fact. Maybe they don't mind being wrong as long as it is in private so they can come up with a twist (i.e. spin) of their original statement to make it semi-true to save face. For that matter, if science doesn't mind being wrong I'd like to know why evolution isn't allowed to be countered (with whatever theory you want to use as a counter-argument, scientific or not). In summary: your statement is too broad. I'm going against the grain of the liberals on this site but I have a few karma points to burn still so flame on.
Faith is believing in something without having complete evidence thereof. Faith, by that definition, is always illogical. So we go back to the original question that got marked as troll just because I stated a fact that someone didn't like.
Does the community here accept that blocking funding to something is the same thing as blocking something? Or does blocking something require creating laws making some such or another illegal at the federal level (this probably being unconstitutional on the face of it).
No it isn't the same. Just because tax money isn't collected to fund research by the gov't doesn't mean it is totally blocked. If it is still legal then private firms would be responsible at that point to fund their own research. Capitalism at its best. Quit being so close-minded and so quick to blame the gov't and religious folk for not allowing something to happen when it would still be possible as long as it is still legal. If it is illegal then go to a country where it is, just like thousands of people do who run websites featuring warez, gambling, and other similar content.
Apparently *educated* guesses (i.e. theories based on data) are not allowed either, or have the same status as mythological hooey. Gosh, I feel more secure about the countries future and future science policies.
Scientists put as much faith into many of their theories as do people of religion. What's wrong with the religious faith that makes you not like it but deem the scientific faith as okay?
in Linux Journal a couple issues ago. It's in the August issue but it is only available online to subscribers currently because it is still new content.
You may want to check this out. Not sure if it would meet your needs or what all it provides (I haven't tried it yet). It's a repackaged Firefox which works with GPOs by FrontMotion.
Are you sure you speak English?
Many of those who speak English fail to do so properly, both verbally and written. I'm sure this happens with people of all languages. I'm bad at punctuation when writing English but I'm a very good speller. My grammar isn't always the best but when I catch myself I correct myself. It is also useful to be able to distinguish between a typo and a mistake. It is very possible the OP just mistyped and left off the 'a' in 'an' w/o realizing it. Only he knows.
But they don't NEED to put it in the stupid registry! Just build a nice pretty GUI that'll integrate in Server 2003 and 2008 that'll make a file that will alter the "about:config" would do wonders for enterprise adoption. Hell,just making it easy to lock it down so users aren't installing every extension they come across would be good too.
They need to put the settings in the registery to integrate with Group Policy.
What really surprises me though is why haven't a couple of programmers come along and taken the Firefox browser and cooked up some nice to use Group Policy controls for it,maybe with some easy to deploy extensions packages that would appeal to the business markets?
Group Policy uses .adm files which specify values which are stored in a machine's registry. What other mechanism are you referring to when you say "group policy control"? Yeah it is possible some MMC snap-in could be created to handle the generation of a prefs.js however handling this at logon time on a user by user basis involves either Firefox moving the values into the registry instead and thereby integrating with GPOs very nicely (an ADM file would be easy to create) or creating custom script(s) that would download a prefs.js during logon and place it into a user's Firefox profile folder.
I'm sure a good chunk of them would be happy to ditch IE if they had a way of controlling it on the network.
The thing about storing data in the registry is that it is easy to block access to the registry for regular users, just by preventing them from running regedit.exe or regedt32.exe. It would be difficult, if not impossible currently, to prevent users from modifying their prefs.js to customize it further than what company policy states while still retaining the company policy-based settings that must be enforced. Firefox would need to be modified so that the prefs.js file was divided into policy-based settings and user-customized settings and for them both to work properly when deploying a prefs.js using a logon script (or GPO-specific settings using an ADM). Maybe it provides some primitive support for this already. I don't know. I don't use Firefox at home because of issues with saving tabs with FF3 (on OS X). I prefer Opera on Windows even though I've been told tabs in FF3 supposedly are saved in the Windows version.
Personally seeing how quick Firefox has been spreading I kind of doubt that by the time IE9 comes out anyone that isn't on a corporate Intranet will really care. And the reason why I haven't seen Firefox taking off in business is because the Mozilla Corp hasn't put out good Group policy controls that would allow admins to easily deploy and manage it. If someone at Mozilla would put out some really good Group Policy controls I doubt that even businesses would care about IE anymore.
Good point. By Group Policy controls I assume you mean registry keys since that's really what group policies modify. They define values that are configured either at startup or login. Those values are all within the registry however. So until Firefox starts putting configuration settings into the registry this won't happen. I don't have Firefox 3 installed on Windows (only 2.0.0.14) so maybe they already started doing this and I just don't know it.
So what would you do with a murderer? I'm honestly curious, because I've heard a lot of ideas, most of which are terrible, but occasionally something that is interesting and possibly even feasible.
I don't know for sure to tell you the truth. In another post I mentioned that I purposely left out the death penalty from my original message. I was already treading a fine line with what I said because the death penalty is basically advocating the murder of someone as well. However, my point was that one person should not wish, at the very least, some person who is not acting an official capacity for the gov't (an executioner) to kill someone else. That, at the very least, would probably be considered an unjustified. If a fellow inmate killed Reiser it probably wouldn't be provoked so self-defense wouldn't apply. Of course we may not care because some would say Reiser deserved it since he killed someone too.
But that begs 2 questions: 1) Did he really deserve death? and 2) Should we really be advocating a non-official gov't executioner to handle those responsibilities for us? I can't answer #1 definitively but if I had to answer I'd say no; all life is sacred and allowing an executioner leeway in that regard is just like the pro-choice people using any loophole they can to kill a baby. As far as #2 is concerned, we already have enough civilians killing other civilians (in and out of prison) so we shouldn't be advocating it. In summary, advocating murder is not good but advocating an execution is questionable just based on the connotations those words possess.
He killed his wife in a rage because she was leaving with the kids, and he had no shot at getting custody. That's nowhere near as bad as someone who kills out of greed, or out of pleasure. Plus, he has skills that can be put to use. Fifteen years of slavery doesn't seem too lenient.
Really? Too lenient? I'm not saying you are wrong but based on what standard are you saying that the reason for him murdering his wife isn't as bad as someone who kills out of greed or pleasure? Who makes that call and based on what standards? That's like saying a person's life isn't worth saving so we should take them off life support. Who determines quality of life? Many people consider life itself sacred no matter what "quality" it possesses. Destroying that is murder, no gray area exists until humans prefer to insert some. Now that was just an example I used that happened to involve life/death but my point being is that saying someone is better than someone is or not as bad as someone else is subjective.
Killing him would be a waste, and out of proportion.
Well, based on other similar situations many would consider capital punishment to be well worth it here. The question is do we wish to have a fellow inmate take care of the situation for us (whether bribed or not) or make it official by executing him? I purposely left out the execution topic in my original message.
But, what you've said doesn't make sense either. If someone kills because they're sadistic, or as part of a theft, off them before they kill someone else. It's silly to say "no, all human lives have equal worth, even in extreme cases, so we have to let everyone live".
So we should place more weight on someone's life as opposed to another? Who determines how much someone's life is worth and the actual value? Does the gov't need to devise a table of worth for human life? It may be useful if it saves millions of babies every year from being murdered before they take a breath of oxygen but it is still subjective.
My original post's intent was treading a fine line, half of which I was leaving out of the message, that being execution. The fine line was not wishing someone dead, especially not wishing some fellow inmate (as opposed to an executioner) would kill Reiser. Wishing someone dead, especially by way of someone fellow inmate to commit yet another murder, is not the way to be human. Of course, on the surface, the only difference between that situation and an official execution is very small. Is an executioner's soul sent to Hell for murder when he/she dies or is it spared because the person was operating in an official capacity for the gov't and not just some joe who commited a murder?
Now let's hope some fellow inmate does what needs to be done, and puts an end to this vile piece of garbage.
You are no better than him if you are advocating someone murder him. One murder does not justify another.
how fast is your cable connection? with adsl every person can have a 24mbps connection, to themselves which doesn't matter how much anyone else is using it nearby. Cable last I checked is shared on a circuit common to at least a few households, so your mileage may vary depending on neighbours. still, if you can get faster than 24mbit on cable consistently I may consider switching from dsl to cable myself.
My connection through TimeWarner has been a steady 5mbps for 6 years now. No slowdowns. Not 24mbit mind you but it is consistent and I'm in a (small) college town. To get higher than 6mbps with cable you usually have to get a business account or go with Comcast who, I believe, provide 7 or 8mbps currently. TW does offer a "turbo" account for $5 extra I believe which provides 6mbps.
automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser;
You'd think they would make the browser capable of not being corrupt to the point of crashing due to malformed source code for a webpage. How about being proactive and not allow it to crash in the first place instead of implementing crash recovery (a la Office crash recovery) which can be imperfect as well? They have a long history of this though: safe mode for Windows anyone?
People should keep this kinda stuff in mind when bashing scientists (like intelligent design supporters, anti-vaccination people, and other alternative medicine supporters.) The experts in a field really are experts. The argument from authority fallacy only applies to people talking outside of their field.
Just because you can document and build something worth billions of dollars doesn't mean you are smart enough to research and don't make mistakes about something that you never built (the universe, mankind, etc.). We're all human. We have biases and we also make mistakes. Almost everyday there is a new scientific journal article released where eminent researchers discover they were wrong about some aspect of this world and release their latest discoveries showing they were wrong. Those are the scientists I trust. They may not always be right but when they are wrong they admit it. It also helps to be able to question existing theories w/o being labeled as a crackpot or a heretic or a religious fanatic. Theories are meant to be questioned, except for those theories whose apparent accuracy are used to prop up the careers of scientists and researchers. Those have to be kept sacred for some reason, no matter how wrong or right they may be. That's when science turns into propaganda to push agendas.
The infinitesimal chance of finding traces of life on Moon makes it a very, very bad target for a search for life. And a very expensive one, too, for the less likely it is that you can find life over there, the more likely you have to search looonger and dig deeeper. Titan, or Mars, for that matter, are relatively straight forward.
A trip to Titan is not cheap. Just because it may provide better results does not make it worth the billions it will take to get there and get those results. How long does it take to get to Titan and get results back? A long time (I don't care to look it up). We could be doing a lot more in that timespan with the money allocated somewhere else instead. I believe looking for life off this planet is a waste of time and money. As far as religion is concerned, I don't believe in ETL because God only made the life on this planet and no others, not because ETL is or is not a religion. Something doesn't have to be a religion to believe in it.
why not hypothesize that there could be life on the Moon? If we're going to think wild thoughts about where an extremophile can live compared to Earth then let's hypothesize they are right in a "back yard". They could survive on Moon dirt. Why not, right? Who says they need water? We keep thinking too much along the lines of what extremophiles on Earth need to survive. Off this Earth another organism no longer abides by the rules of this planet. Using the Moon as our target to find other life will save money when we try to allocate millions (for the Moon) instead of billions (for Titan) trying to find the new organisms, plus traveling to the Moon is much quicker than Titan. Disclaimer: I don't believe in ETL and, no, that isn't extract-transform-load.
Let's just get this out of the way first. BULLSHIT!
The rest of the world knows something suspicious went on, but America has their head in the sand. Not long after this shit, there was a building in Europe, where the fire was so intense, it burned everything off. The steel structure was still standing but oxidizing flame was enough to melt or buckle steel in the trade center? The sheer ignorance of the American populace astounds me.
Let's just get this out of the way first. BULLSHIT!
The rest of the world knows something evil went on, but America has been the target of fundamentalists for a long time. Not long after this shit, there was a building in Europe, where the fire was so intense, it burned everything off. The steel structure was still standing but oxidizing flame was enough to melt or buckle steel in the trade center? The sheer paranoia of the non-Americans populace astounds me.
Now to be a little more creative with my response. Do you care to give a reason that you think the U.S. gov't (or whoever you think actually did it) caused these buildings to collapse? By the way, let me remind you that 2 of these buildings were over 2x bigger than WTC7 and were hit by commercial airliners prior to their collapse. Also, do you have evidence that the building in Europe you speak of was built exactly the same way as WTC7 to use it as a fair comparison in showing off your....um...structural engineering prowess?
Sudoku can be solved by trying values in cells until a conflict is reached and backtracking to try other assignments. That's the brute-force approach.
Sometimes brute-force is necessary.
Most sudoku puzzles can be solved via implication, however. There is no need to "try" anything. Certain configurations of values in some cells can imply values in other cells. As a very simple example, consider a row that has all cells filled but one. The value of that unfilled cell is implied and can be filled in without having to try any other values. This is a basic example, but clearly more complex ones exist. This is essentially how people solve the puzzles, and I believe it is what the grandparent was describing.
Yes, most can be solved via implication. There is a minimum number of values which must be present in a puzzle to even have a chance of solving it. I've heard the minimum is somewhere around 15-17 for a 9x9. There is a minimum number which must exist in order to solve it by implication otherwise backtracking must be implemented. This makes the logic to solve the puzzle more complicated since a snapshot of the puzzle must be stored multiple times in order to try every possible value placement until the right branch in the logic is found which solves the puzzle. There is no need to try anything for the easier puzzles (although those who don't understand the logic that well or who can't keep track of possibilities in their head will insert a number in pencil to see if it works out later on) but more difficult ones (where you have approx.
And don't forget that many towns do have local artists. Using the utility boxes for nice art (work-safe imagery only please!) would be something that can take the edge of people and make them forget to be annoyed by the item itself.
Yes many towns have local artists. They are the teenagers better known as graffiti artists. Given enough time they will discover these new canvases and cover them with what *they* want rather than what the townspeople want.
1) Keep costs down by not over buying or locking into any vendor. Using appliances where ever possible for file, web, mail and print servers etc.
I have 2 points to bring up regarding this. The first is that at my current job as a gov't contractor, we've been told to use appliances as much as possible for various services. We have done that and becaue of the different services we had to deploy we ended up with a diverse set of vendors and a diverse set of appliances. Some appliances are full blown servers that contain a Windows or Linux OS that provide a full suite of utilities and shell access while others include a custom OS with no traditional shell but a locked down CLI. Backup/restore flexiblity also varies across these appliances. My point being is that you have to be careful when you dictate using appliances. In some cases you may as well just use standard commodity servers and build it yourself depending on what you need. This leads me to my second point.
Because I and my team are contractors for the U.S. gov't we have certain security requirements to abide by. In many cases we have found that given the nature of an appliance we can't always comply with security requirements. Many times they have their own identification, authentication, and authorization mechanisms and can't be tied to a central repository. Not all of them support the same level of SNMP (v1 is insecure as opposed to v2c/3 which are at least more secure). You are at the mercy of those vendors to provide sufficient compatibility with the rest of your monitoring and management infrastructure. This may not be an issue for a corporation; it depends on security requirements and existing infrastructure (security and non-security) as to whether an appliance really does give you ease of use.
Appliances are supposed to make life easier and they can if you don't have any existing requirements (especially security) that the appliances must meet. Also remember that the more appliances you get from different vendors, you really could be making your life more difficult instead of easier because of the vast difference in the implementation of the definition of "appliance".
For those who don't get Wired but are interested, in the latest issue of Wired is an article about Stephenson. The online version is here. The story of how Anathem came to be is included in the article.
A few customers would pay more, like the dvd collectors and file sharing fanatics. The majority who use the internet normally would have significantly lower cable bills. I'm sure the cable companies love the people who pay 39.95 to check email and watch the occasional youtube video, most people don't even know what a torrent is, much less have half a dozen dvd's downloading at any given moment.
Exactly, with tiered pricing, most people would pay less than they do now with the current pricing scheme. Unless Comcast can make up that lack of revenue by not having to pay for the large amount of bandwidth used by the biggest customers I don't see why Comcast would do such a thing since their revenue stream is slowed down. If they can make up the revenue by gouging the biggest users then those biggest users must really be using a lot of bandwidth, or Comcast is themselves gouged by their backbone provider and want to pass the buck. I've heard that the they consider excessive use to be above 250-300 gigabytes per month. I've never gone above 250GB/mo but every month I am above 100GB/mo transfer (up/down). I don't download more than 5 DVDs a month (some months no DVDs are downloaded) but I'd still be hurt my the tiered pricing that TW is piloting in Beaumont, TX. It will cost me more (I'd have to get the top tier which is about $30 more than what I pay now) and, by Comcast's standards at least, I'm not an excessive user.
First, we had global warming which was supposed to obviously describe the global increase in temperatures affecting climate everywhere and was supposed to already be in effect. When evidence of that was few and far between and the PhDs, who had to do something about their soiled reputation espousing the issues that global warming would bring and denouncing other PhDs who didn't agree with them, realized they were wrong they renamed global warming to climate change. This way no matter whether temperatures increased or decreased they could still maintain their large egos and be considered correct all along. Now, we are told that the current year will be the coldest in a long time and this:
However, another natural cycle, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, is predicted to hold global temperatures steady for the next decade before global warming takes our planet into new warmth.
Now with this it seems global warming isn't actually supposed to be here, yet. So now the PhDs are trying once again to maintain their oversized egos by stating that what they predicted and have pushed on us layman really is real but not every place will get warmer, some places will get colder, but not yet. Not until things get warmer or colder will they actually say (using 20/20 hindsight of course) that we definitely have global climate change. Hmmm, maybe I should be a climatologist.
Of course, the big difference between the 21st century global climate change and the pre-Ice Age global climate change is that somehow the humans are at fault for the present predicament...ahh, but not yet. We're still in the clear it seems, until CO2 levels cause some places to get warmer while others get colder. And here I thought warming and cooling were just normal climate changes which have occurred irregardless of human existence.
Can someone point me, with no magical PhD to set me straight, where I've gone wrong? I'm a lowly crackpot until I get my PhD and subscribe to the GW (global warming) bandwagon.
I'm not certain I agree with you. While I don't disagree that MS tends to have loads of bloatware, I am confused about why so many people rag on Vista. The reason that MS added so much to Vista was because people were downloading and using 3rd party applications to do this on Microsoft's previous OS versions. I know several people who installed apps to allow a usable calendar as the desktop. And Windows Blinds was somewhat of a popular download for a very long time. The problem with Microsoft is that they are so large and own such a large portion of the market that they are bound to piss off people no matter what action they take.
Tons of other applications are installed with Linux but Linux and X windows (with the desktop environment) don't seem bogged down by it unlike Windows. This goes for XP as well as Vista but the bloated effect feels worse with Vista. Microsoft's code just isn't efficient. I don't know where the problem is but the end result is that Windows isn't as responsive as Linux is especially after a year of use involving add/removing applications. It's great to add stuff to the product so that the end user has as much out of the box as they need to be content with their purchase (or download) but it is another thing altogether to integrate those applications into a system and just have those features/applications bog down the system because they were not developed correctly. I remember installing the add-on for multiple desktops on XP and it was slower having 4 desktops in XP than it was having 8 desktops in Linux. It shouldn't be like that: 1) it shouldn't have to be an add-on and 2) it shouldn't be slower than something better on Linux.