And englishman Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW while paid by a french research centre located in Switzerland.
Let's stop the pissing contest, Internet is a lot more than DARPAnet, the cooperation between the national networks is a basis, if not the very definition of Internet.
It is not about free speech, it is about the $3B that the domain name business makes. Today china blocks IP addresses, it probably also blocks outgoing DNS requests to a blacklist of sites, having it manage the.cn suffix would probably not change anything for the chinese people's freedom of speech.
If anything, a distributed management could ensure that even sites that violates some US law could be accessed as long as it is hosted in some other country. I don't think that a judge can today request that a certain domain should be erased from the root DNS servers, but who knows what could happen in the strange reality distorsion of the courthouse ?
The point is, the main cost is in the purchase of a new vehicle, that is, to say the least, overpriced (they counted 20k$ in TFA) That means that today the main target is the eco-friendly richs. Anyway, as soon as a second-hand hybrid vehicle market exist, it may very well become a more viable economic option. I am just afraid that batteries may have too short a lifespan to give a long enough life to the vehicle.
Immediatly, a large range of blindness can be cured by implants, either by putting a CCD array inside the retina or, in case of damage in the optic nerve, a camera can be wired to the visual cortex. Right now, some blind people see ( with a low res, b&w image but see nonetheless) thanks to implants.
"It is formally forbidden to any Muslim seeking divine grace and satisfaction to participate in any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone's life," the fatwa said.
"Contributing to such exactions is an illicit act," declared the edict, which said it was applicable to "any Muslim living in France, whether a citizen or a guest of France."
Speech is just speech until someone acts on it. Can it be any more clear? I know we can't all be people who think for themselves, but it's sad and even offensive when law is written presuming that we can't, in fact, think for ourselves... further, it might not be too far to say that such law even attempts to make illegal independant thought.
France is a democracy. We voted to have this law, to be able to put people who says that jews should be burnt in jail and to prevent them from shouting that in the front of high schools. If these laws become abused, the parliamant will change them. I don't think that these laws serve specific interest. Here when some big guy want to prevent some small guy from expressing themselves, they either use laws on trademarks (on brand names or logos) or diffamation laws (slandering ? in english ?) From what I know, these laws were always used in their original intent.
The official islamic body in France has published a fatwa that condemns the rioters. It basically said that a good muslim should not participate in the riots and that several passages of Islam forbid to blindly destroy property.
Remember, the Bible and the Coran (not sure of the english sp.) have the same roots, you can find heinous passages in both of them. But both of them have proven to be able to be the basis of a viable morality.
Destroying property Correct, thousands of cars and tens of buildings were set afire Raping None reported. And god knows that if there were only rumors, far-right would cry it out loud killing people Zero rioters killed. Zero policemen killed. One (and probably two soon) innocent bystanders killed (which is in the average criminality for a quiet week)
Number of shots fired during the first week : 4. (I didn't followed the events during the second week where I knew there has been shotgun shots in one suburb, without killing people btw)
I believe that what is called "riots" here would be called "life as usual" in America.
The only spectacular events are the arsons, which are inacceptables, I agree.
The interesting question is : Will my passport still work if I put it on top of my microwave oven and under my cell phone ? Are these residual radiations enough to get it fried ?
I hope this has been carefully studied, but from what I have read/heard in the past, RFID main target was the low-cost and short lifespan labelling market. Can it last the ten years of validity of my passport ?
From what I have read of the various affairs where he was implicated, he never was found guilty of anything in his homeland. So his record should be blank. I don't think he can be prosecuted in US if he is cautious. I believe the same was true for Skylarov and that they only could charge him when he made a presentation about circumvention techniques on US soil. I hope Jon checked his status and the US regulation with a lawyer before immigrating anyway.
In fact, one member of the team explained in a conference that they aimed to finish the race. Which was already a great achievement. DARPA has put a time limit on the race and Stanford chose a speed which was the lowest possible (to lower risks of accidents) while still providing a secure margin for unexpected events. (From what I remember, they planed to have an average of 30 mph so they race must have been thougher than they thought)
If there is a Grand Challenge in 2006, it will probably look more like a race, now that everyone knows it is possible.
In fact one of the characters in the philosophical (and scientific) book of Galileo explaining his heliocentric theories was supposed (allegedly or not, no one knows) to be caricaturing the pope. The character was the one asking simple question, as it is often the fact in a philosophical dialog (He was called Simplifio IIRC) So, a trial was made to forbid his book and every theory it contains. So, it is true that the trial wasn't intented just for theological questions, but only for vatican's politics and that it happened to forbid the propagation of a valid political theory, which makes the grand parent insightful even if slightly biaised if you don't know the facts.
I would add to this comment that the main advantage of a democracy or a republic is that revolutions are useless or unfair. If you can convince a majority of people into electing you and your party, you will have the ability to change the type of government in any way you want. After all, dictators like Napoleon or Hitler were constitutionnaly elected. If you think you have a better vision of what needs to be done in politics, rally as many people as you can and make a political party but there is no such things as "freedom fighters" in a democracy.
This was modded funny, but it is a fundamental point. If you learn an AI to program and teach it the basics of AI why would it be incapable of improving its own code. After all, you can recompile gcc using itself with more optimised flags. This wouldn't be so different.
More important, if it has a sufficient highly abstracted level of thinking it would be able to improve the code at the architecture level and really achieve what Vinge called the Singularity...
I would say that this is simply the price of tickets with was unbearable for most. A simple Paris-New-York was at about 20,000 francs (~3,300 $) and was less than half that price if you accepted to go on a regular plane. I think it may be simple capitalism. At the time the concorde was made, it was believed that some people would live in Paris and work in New-York (no kidding!) it was a false assumption and so it wasn't able to economically survive.
You can't seriously pretend to be wanting to limit casualties when you don't even _count_ them.
Saddam was a bastard, he killed many people. He was never elected democratically, he used brute force to obtain power, to oppress people. He and his government will now have to assume the responsability for this in a trial.
GWB was (hopefully) democratically elected by the people of USA. They may kill a lot less, but the responsability is shared among every american (that probably won't ever have to assume this responsability).
This is for the ethical ground. I don't think it is worthwhile to describe the practical reasons to keep count of causalties and trying to lower them in a four days old thread that has 'troll' in the original post.
Well, if you want to build a fusion reactor on the moon, you should put the money in the R&D to actually make a working fusion reactor. Going to the moon, we already made it. Harnessing the power of a fusion reaction ? Well there was a good idea about doing just this (ITER project) but it is estimated that 30 years at least will be necessary to have a working prototype, so don't hold your breath to build a fusion reactor on the moon...
Am I the only one to see it ?
It speaks about nuclear FUSION fuel. The hard part is not to find the fuel (the needed deuterium can be easily extracted in ocean water) it is to make a working power plant. Optimistic expectations are at about 40 years for the first fusion reactor and that doesn't include the one-year bitching about the location of the prototype.
Don't waste your time considering the moon as a fuel mine before a working fusion reactor exists. There must be other interesting minerals on the moon, let's send an orbiter with a spectrometer like the one used to find high hydrogen concentration under mars soil and let's map moon's ressources. If we find enough precious or semi-precious minerals there, exploiting it and bringing them back to earth should be easy (with no atmosphere and such a weak gravitation, a gauss-gun or even a catapult could work)
Ok, I don't have the exact quote, I am not a specialist of the domain but here is what I learned, in France, about the expression "Tiers-Monde" (Third World):
It would have been coined by a french journalist who made a parallel between the poor countries of the World and the "Tiers-Etat" (Third state) which were the official representation of the french people before the revolution (the 1st state was nobility and the 2nd was the Church) it was under-represented (1/3 of the voices in debates but it represented 98% of population) mainly poor people (peasants for the most) and almost starving to death due to large taxes. The problematic the journalist was raising was : For how long will this "Third World" undergo its poverty and injustice ? Will it revolt like the "third state" did ?
So here it is. From this definition, I would say that the characteristics of a third world country would be that it is under-representated in global negociations and that there is a certain level of wealth to be attained.
Each criterion is very subjective, India has clearly a great weight in world decisions but it has also a very important poor population, less than most african countries though...
I tend to use more the words "under-developed" countries and "emerging (or emergent, how do you say that in english ?) countries" if most of the population is poor, it is under-developed or emerging. If it has a strong economic growth (like china or india), it is emergent and, if we have faith in capitalism, it means the poverty will finally fade away.
Third world seems to have a strong "under-developed" connotation. Or maybe it is just me...
There has always been pressures from political groups. That is the norm. I must confess that I haven't followed the whole issue about Sonia Gandhi but from what I understand, her party won the elections and they chose someone else than Sonia (who had the disadvantage to be communist IIRC) and that was unexpected but hoped by businessman. I don't think there have been any irregularities, constitution-wise.
... to be a nuclear power, a spatial power, to be the biggest democracy in the world and still be considered a 'third world country'...
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 1
I am not american, but from what I understand, the average US soldier would have an ethic problem shooting at american civilians. Wouldn't the equation be
1 civilian==1 policeman ?
Slashdot Mirror
And englishman Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW while paid by a french research centre located in Switzerland.
Let's stop the pissing contest, Internet is a lot more than DARPAnet, the cooperation between the national networks is a basis, if not the very definition of Internet.
It is not about free speech, it is about the $3B that the domain name business makes. Today china blocks IP addresses, it probably also blocks outgoing DNS requests to a blacklist of sites, having it manage the .cn suffix would probably not change anything for the chinese people's freedom of speech.
If anything, a distributed management could ensure that even sites that violates some US law could be accessed as long as it is hosted in some other country. I don't think that a judge can today request that a certain domain should be erased from the root DNS servers, but who knows what could happen in the strange reality distorsion of the courthouse ?
The point is, the main cost is in the purchase of a new vehicle, that is, to say the least, overpriced (they counted 20k$ in TFA) That means that today the main target is the eco-friendly richs. Anyway, as soon as a second-hand hybrid vehicle market exist, it may very well become a more viable economic option. I am just afraid that batteries may have too short a lifespan to give a long enough life to the vehicle.
Immediatly, a large range of blindness can be cured by implants, either by putting a CCD array inside the retina or, in case of damage in the optic nerve, a camera can be wired to the visual cortex. Right now, some blind people see ( with a low res, b&w image but see nonetheless) thanks to implants.
link
other link
But yes, with the technology presented in the article, I suppose one could even cure blinds that have a damaged visual cortex.
"It is formally forbidden to any Muslim seeking divine grace and satisfaction to participate in any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone's life," the fatwa said.
. riots.fatwa.reut/
"Contributing to such exactions is an illicit act," declared the edict, which said it was applicable to "any Muslim living in France, whether a citizen or a guest of France."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/11/06/france
Speech is just speech until someone acts on it. Can it be any more clear? I know we can't all be people who think for themselves, but it's sad and even offensive when law is written presuming that we can't, in fact, think for ourselves... further, it might not be too far to say that such law even attempts to make illegal independant thought.
France is a democracy. We voted to have this law, to be able to put people who says that jews should be burnt in jail and to prevent them from shouting that in the front of high schools. If these laws become abused, the parliamant will change them. I don't think that these laws serve specific interest. Here when some big guy want to prevent some small guy from expressing themselves, they either use laws on trademarks (on brand names or logos) or diffamation laws (slandering ? in english ?) From what I know, these laws were always used in their original intent.
The official islamic body in France has published a fatwa that condemns the rioters. It basically said that a good muslim should not participate in the riots and that several passages of Islam forbid to blindly destroy property.
Remember, the Bible and the Coran (not sure of the english sp.) have the same roots, you can find heinous passages in both of them. But both of them have proven to be able to be the basis of a viable morality.
We share more than most think.
Destroying property Correct, thousands of cars and tens of buildings were set afire
Raping None reported. And god knows that if there were only rumors, far-right would cry it out loud
killing people Zero rioters killed. Zero policemen killed. One (and probably two soon) innocent bystanders killed (which is in the average criminality for a quiet week)
Number of shots fired during the first week : 4. (I didn't followed the events during the second week where I knew there has been shotgun shots in one suburb, without killing people btw)
I believe that what is called "riots" here would be called "life as usual" in America. The only spectacular events are the arsons, which are inacceptables, I agree.
The interesting question is : Will my passport still work if I put it on top of my microwave oven and under my cell phone ? Are these residual radiations enough to get it fried ? I hope this has been carefully studied, but from what I have read/heard in the past, RFID main target was the low-cost and short lifespan labelling market. Can it last the ten years of validity of my passport ?
From what I have read of the various affairs where he was implicated, he never was found guilty of anything in his homeland. So his record should be blank. I don't think he can be prosecuted in US if he is cautious. I believe the same was true for Skylarov and that they only could charge him when he made a presentation about circumvention techniques on US soil. I hope Jon checked his status and the US regulation with a lawyer before immigrating anyway.
... or against !
In fact, one member of the team explained in a conference that they aimed to finish the race. Which was already a great achievement. DARPA has put a time limit on the race and Stanford chose a speed which was the lowest possible (to lower risks of accidents) while still providing a secure margin for unexpected events. (From what I remember, they planed to have an average of 30 mph so they race must have been thougher than they thought)
If there is a Grand Challenge in 2006, it will probably look more like a race, now that everyone knows it is possible.
In fact one of the characters in the philosophical (and scientific) book of Galileo explaining his heliocentric theories was supposed (allegedly or not, no one knows) to be caricaturing the pope. The character was the one asking simple question, as it is often the fact in a philosophical dialog (He was called Simplifio IIRC) So, a trial was made to forbid his book and every theory it contains. So, it is true that the trial wasn't intented just for theological questions, but only for vatican's politics and that it happened to forbid the propagation of a valid political theory, which makes the grand parent insightful even if slightly biaised if you don't know the facts.
I would add to this comment that the main advantage of a democracy or a republic is that revolutions are useless or unfair. If you can convince a majority of people into electing you and your party, you will have the ability to change the type of government in any way you want. After all, dictators like Napoleon or Hitler were constitutionnaly elected. If you think you have a better vision of what needs to be done in politics, rally as many people as you can and make a political party but there is no such things as "freedom fighters" in a democracy.
This was modded funny, but it is a fundamental point. If you learn an AI to program and teach it the basics of AI why would it be incapable of improving its own code. After all, you can recompile gcc using itself with more optimised flags. This wouldn't be so different. More important, if it has a sufficient highly abstracted level of thinking it would be able to improve the code at the architecture level and really achieve what Vinge called the Singularity...
I would say that this is simply the price of tickets with was unbearable for most. A simple Paris-New-York was at about 20,000 francs (~3,300 $) and was less than half that price if you accepted to go on a regular plane. I think it may be simple capitalism. At the time the concorde was made, it was believed that some people would live in Paris and work in New-York (no kidding!) it was a false assumption and so it wasn't able to economically survive.
You can't seriously pretend to be wanting to limit casualties when you don't even _count_ them. Saddam was a bastard, he killed many people. He was never elected democratically, he used brute force to obtain power, to oppress people. He and his government will now have to assume the responsability for this in a trial.
GWB was (hopefully) democratically elected by the people of USA. They may kill a lot less, but the responsability is shared among every american (that probably won't ever have to assume this responsability).
This is for the ethical ground. I don't think it is worthwhile to describe the practical reasons to keep count of causalties and trying to lower them in a four days old thread that has 'troll' in the original post.
But Anonymous Coward IS way famous, at least on slashdot...
Well, if you want to build a fusion reactor on the moon, you should put the money in the R&D to actually make a working fusion reactor. Going to the moon, we already made it. Harnessing the power of a fusion reaction ? Well there was a good idea about doing just this (ITER project) but it is estimated that 30 years at least will be necessary to have a working prototype, so don't hold your breath to build a fusion reactor on the moon...
Too bad he is not counting the civil causalties his army causes. Bah, t'was 10 years old terrorists, case cleared...
Am I the only one to see it ? It speaks about nuclear FUSION fuel. The hard part is not to find the fuel (the needed deuterium can be easily extracted in ocean water) it is to make a working power plant. Optimistic expectations are at about 40 years for the first fusion reactor and that doesn't include the one-year bitching about the location of the prototype. Don't waste your time considering the moon as a fuel mine before a working fusion reactor exists. There must be other interesting minerals on the moon, let's send an orbiter with a spectrometer like the one used to find high hydrogen concentration under mars soil and let's map moon's ressources. If we find enough precious or semi-precious minerals there, exploiting it and bringing them back to earth should be easy (with no atmosphere and such a weak gravitation, a gauss-gun or even a catapult could work)
Ok, I don't have the exact quote, I am not a specialist of the domain but here is what I learned, in France, about the expression "Tiers-Monde" (Third World) :
It would have been coined by a french journalist who made a parallel between the poor countries of the World and the "Tiers-Etat" (Third state) which were the official representation of the french people before the revolution (the 1st state was nobility and the 2nd was the Church) it was under-represented (1/3 of the voices in debates but it represented 98% of population) mainly poor people (peasants for the most) and almost starving to death due to large taxes. The problematic the journalist was raising was : For how long will this "Third World" undergo its poverty and injustice ? Will it revolt like the "third state" did ?
So here it is. From this definition, I would say that the characteristics of a third world country would be that it is under-representated in global negociations and that there is a certain level of wealth to be attained. Each criterion is very subjective, India has clearly a great weight in world decisions but it has also a very important poor population, less than most african countries though...
I tend to use more the words "under-developed" countries and "emerging (or emergent, how do you say that in english ?) countries" if most of the population is poor, it is under-developed or emerging. If it has a strong economic growth (like china or india), it is emergent and, if we have faith in capitalism, it means the poverty will finally fade away.
Third world seems to have a strong "under-developed" connotation. Or maybe it is just me...
There has always been pressures from political groups. That is the norm. I must confess that I haven't followed the whole issue about Sonia Gandhi but from what I understand, her party won the elections and they chose someone else than Sonia (who had the disadvantage to be communist IIRC) and that was unexpected but hoped by businessman. I don't think there have been any irregularities, constitution-wise.
... to be a nuclear power, a spatial power, to be the biggest democracy in the world and still be considered a 'third world country'...
I am not american, but from what I understand, the average US soldier would have an ethic problem shooting at american civilians. Wouldn't the equation be 1 civilian==1 policeman ?