But it was a big part of their past and they deserve to celebrate it if they so choose.
Gee, I hope Germany follows with plates commemorating gas chambers and crematoriums. Or what about a plate depicting people burning in the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombings? People with limbs shot off by guns or blown off by landmines? People dying of secondary nuclear effects? Maybe some black slaves whipped bloody.
I think that's the stuff we should remember, the innocent people who suffered and died horrible deaths so we could have minivans, wall to wall carpeting, and a corporate-run government to build roads for us to drive around with cartoon pictures of nuclear blasts. Kaboom!
Sorry, my dry sense of humor doesn't always come across well.
The first part of my reply was just moving the thread from your abstract discussion of laws based on morality back to the story topic. Laws against slavery aren't like part b) of the proposed bill that moves "non-child-safe sites" (whatever the hell that is) to their own top-level domain. I think abolishing slavery creates freedom and controlling access to information removes freedom.
I was sort of teasing you for the way your abstract discussion seemed to equate pro-freedom and anti-freedom. Ha ha. Well, it was amusing at the time...
Love looking at the history of technology and all that, but what about looking into the future?
Did you even read the article?
When conventional disk technology finally tops out, several more-exotic alternatives await. A perennial candidate is called perpendicular recording. All present disks are written longitudinally, with bit cells lying in the plane of the disk; the hope is that bit cells perpendicular to the disk surface could be packed tighter. Another possibility is patterned media, where the bit cells are predefined as isolated magnetic domains in a nonmagnetic matrix. Other schemes propose thermally or optically assisted magnetic recording, or adapt the atomic-force microscope to store information at the scale of individual atoms.
That is patently ridiculous. Plenty of societies survived and thrived with slavery, so should we not have laws against slavery? Or child labor, or universal suffrage, etc.
Yeah, and just because societies survived and thrived with free speech doesn't mean we shouldn't make more laws against it like this bill.
Or, wait, are you trying to argue that limiting freedom is like ensuring freedom? I'm confused.
I don't believe in not allowing some words to be broadcast because some people don't like them or not allowing some stuff to be seen because some people don't want to see it. I don't think some people should decide what other people can or cannot see, hear, or read, or control access to what people see, hear, or read. That's oppression and tyranny.
Why do people want to throw freedom away? Please don't destroy my freedom.
It's a bad precedent to allow improper license use. If they are violating the license, they should be sued. I believe they are at least violating the spirit of the GPL and should be chastised. The social strength of the law and contracts depend on enforcement. The strength of a community depends on their willingness to stop tyranny and abuse by a minority.
You may find my language strong, but there are any number of licenses that could have been used instead of the GPL.
Lindows should use another license if they want to jerk people around.
What is wrong with not releasing the source right away?
It obviously violates the spirit of the GPL, if not the letter. Have you never read a word Stallman has written? And if they're using other GPL software, it's illegal.
Companies are free to fuck people over using a non-GPL license. When you use the GPL, I think you have a moral obligation to not fuck people over. If a country claims to be a democracy, but all the elections are rigged, it is not, in fact, a democracy and they are immorally fucking people over.
Deciding not to release the source is fucking people over. Trying to justify fucking people over because they did "good" doesn't excuse it any more than a rape can be excused because someone donated money to a charity.
He is an editor and not a venture capitalist. His job is sensationalism to sell JDJ, not predicting the computer industry.
People are giving him way too much notice on this issue. It's an opinion of a magazine editor you probably never even heard of before this, fer chrissakes.
There will always be a way around that kind of stuff (besides moving to a better company). Imagine encoding your request and sending it through a proxy decoder outside your firewall. Surf the web using email? Or get a wireless carrier? The persistent hackers will never be stopped, because they have more knowledge and interest than a network admin who's just working their 40.
Now this kind of response is why I generally don't post to slashdot. Whiny little nothing posts criticizing you for something not even relevant. (400 instead of 40? Does it really matter?) Jeez.
I was obviously not being serious, Beavis. And it was 255 instead of 400.
Make sure your browser is using HTTPS before you click the form submit button and send your credit card across 400 unsecured routers.
Silly -- the TTL field in TCP has a maximum value of
255, so you could only send insecure credit card data through 254 routers. And the default TTL is usually 64 on Linux and FreeBSD, though it is higher on Solaris and Windows.
Realistically and conservatively you should only expect to be able to send your insecure data through about 60 routers. You'd need multiple routes or multicast to exceed 255 routers, so you may want to consider mass email or mass Usenet posting instead.
Yeah, "obviousally". I posted real kidnapping numbers in the U.S. which are miniscule and you're arguing against the real numbers based on what you personally think the abduction rate is. Tell me, what do you feel the homicide rate is? What do your old wise bones tell you about car thefts this year? Looking up or down?
Can you divine stock market trends, because maybe you should be my investment advisor. You clearly have a gift, an innate ability, to come up with a perception of reality that deviates far from actual reality. Some might call that delusion, but maybe you, AC, are the second coming of Christ.
Anecdotal evidence is statistically irrelevant and an appeal to emotion instead of rational thought. Irrational appeals to emotion are exactly what I was talking about.
I'm sorry you feel the need to froth at the mouth and suggest that I leave the country because I don't share your opinion. I'm not sure what is bothering you, but your personal attack is not
appreciated and seems out of proportion to my comments.
There is a difference between possible and probable. If you have limited resources (time and money, for example), you'd like to prioritize the use of those resources so that you cause the best outcome. At least I would. Using limited resources to support preventative measures for things which are improbable is irrational.
A fool and his money are soon parted. You are free to be irrational and wasteful, just don't expect me to subsidize your foolishness.
Yes, that happens all the time...not. Why do you think that stuff makes big news? It's extremely rare. Your child will not be safe with this watch or the shock collar or the leash, or... There is just no 100% safety and you have to accept that.
Statistically, children are most often abducted by
someone they know. Kidnapping is very very rare according to crime statistics:
1,214 kidnapping cases in the U.S. in 1997. That is a miniscule number and if you think big brother wrist watches are going to prevent them, you're deluding yourself into a false sense of safety.
I understand that parents want to protect their children, but in "the real world", abductions are
exceedingly rare. "One tenth of one percent of all the crimes against individuals".
There are real problems that affect children and imiginary problems borne of paranoia. I believe that children are better served by targetting
more statistically significant problems like
poverty, drug abuse, parental abuse, and so on.
And finally, don't forget that it's my neighborhood too when you whip out the "if
it was your child!!!" bullshit. It's not that
I don't care; I care very much. It's just that
I'm realistic and concerned with more important problems that can actually be addressed. I find
it ridiculous that I have to shoulder the burden of child paranoia by funding TV controls, CD
labelling, and all that stuff, that does nothing. Get those kids
out of that dysfunctional family with the alcoholic father
that beats them or the drug-addicted mother that can barely afford food. I mean, really, _that_ is more reality than the kidnapping silliness.
I did actually get separated from my mother at a store once when I was very young. I found an employee and they paged my mom over the intercom.
I didn't like that and presumably I paid more attention in the future so that I didn't get lost.
Parents today operate under a media-fueled safety paranoia frenzy. More to the point, there's too much irrational worrying about children. It's rather sad to me because I think it _harms_ the children psychologically and propagates the paranoia.
Even though I don't have or want children, I don't want to live in a paranoid society where irrational laws are enacted "to protect the children" that don't actually do any good. This watch is a symptom of the paranoia, and of the oppression of the nanny state. "you can't afford
$400 to protect your child????" Yeah, whatever. Put it in a college fund and your child will reap greater rewards.
When I was a child, I didn't need a pager for my parents to locate me. I never got kidnapped and thrown into a trunk without an internal release.
I didn't get corrupted by our TV's lack of "parental control" (what an oxymoron).
My family never got crushed because we weren't driving around the mall in an armored SUV. Hell, I got through my childhood without a bicycle helmet and I didn't even crack my head open once!
-Kevin
Re:Theoretically interesting/Practically irrelevan
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 1
I disagree. Like the other guy in a second level post said, you need to know -when- to apply various common algorithms. Beyond that, programmers write algorithms all the time to carry out particular tasks. Just because I didn't write quick sort, doesn't make my algorithm unnecessary. Maybe there isn't a common algorithm for doing my task.
Suppose I knew binary search was a fast way to find something in a sorted array, in O(log n). Of course I'd put all my strings in an array and use binary search, right? No, a better solution is probably to use a hash table, which is O(1). But by not understanding data structures and algorithms, you're not going to realize that problems can be transformed like that. It's the when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem.
I really believe that the world does not need more ignorant programmers producing junk code because they don't understand basic CS principles. And you don't need a CS degree either, just some fairly basic knowledge of algorithms, complexity, data structures, and when they apply.
Bubble Sort retains the initial ordering of equally ranked items. Most other sorting algorithms don't.
Merge sort does, and it is much more efficient. That is to say it's a "stable" sort. That is one reason why the C library qsort() is often implemented as a merge sort!
All sort algorithms can be made stable by putting the original positions into the keys you are sorting.
Slashdot Mirror
Something about a bad Scrabble draw.
-Kevin
Ugh! I am so -stupid-!
I wish I'd thought of forgery. WTF am I going to do with this hand?
-Kevin
Gee, I hope Germany follows with plates commemorating gas chambers and crematoriums. Or what about a plate depicting people burning in the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombings? People with limbs shot off by guns or blown off by landmines? People dying of secondary nuclear effects? Maybe some black slaves whipped bloody.
I think that's the stuff we should remember, the innocent people who suffered and died horrible deaths so we could have minivans, wall to wall carpeting, and a corporate-run government to build roads for us to drive around with cartoon pictures of nuclear blasts. Kaboom!
-Kevin
-Kevin
Sorry, my dry sense of humor doesn't always come across well.
The first part of my reply was just moving the thread from your abstract discussion of laws based on morality back to the story topic. Laws against slavery aren't like part b) of the proposed bill that moves "non-child-safe sites" (whatever the hell that is) to their own top-level domain. I think abolishing slavery creates freedom and controlling access to information removes freedom.
I was sort of teasing you for the way your abstract discussion seemed to equate pro-freedom and anti-freedom. Ha ha. Well, it was amusing at the time...
-Kevin
Did you even read the article?
When conventional disk technology finally tops out, several more-exotic alternatives await. A perennial candidate is called perpendicular recording. All present disks are written longitudinally, with bit cells lying in the plane of the disk; the hope is that bit cells perpendicular to the disk surface could be packed tighter. Another possibility is patterned media, where the bit cells are predefined as isolated magnetic domains in a nonmagnetic matrix. Other schemes propose thermally or optically assisted magnetic recording, or adapt the atomic-force microscope to store information at the scale of individual atoms.
-Kevin
Yeah, and just because societies survived and thrived with free speech doesn't mean we shouldn't make more laws against it like this bill.
Or, wait, are you trying to argue that limiting freedom is like ensuring freedom? I'm confused.
I don't believe in not allowing some words to be broadcast because some people don't like them or not allowing some stuff to be seen because some people don't want to see it. I don't think some people should decide what other people can or cannot see, hear, or read, or control access to what people see, hear, or read. That's oppression and tyranny.
Why do people want to throw freedom away? Please don't destroy my freedom.
-Kevin
You may find my language strong, but there are any number of licenses that could have been used instead of the GPL.
Lindows should use another license if they want to jerk people around.
-Kevin
It obviously violates the spirit of the GPL, if not the letter. Have you never read a word Stallman has written? And if they're using other GPL software, it's illegal.
Companies are free to fuck people over using a non-GPL license. When you use the GPL, I think you have a moral obligation to not fuck people over. If a country claims to be a democracy, but all the elections are rigged, it is not, in fact, a democracy and they are immorally fucking people over.
Deciding not to release the source is fucking people over. Trying to justify fucking people over because they did "good" doesn't excuse it any more than a rape can be excused because someone donated money to a charity.
-Kevin
You're right - Williamson is a dipshit.
He is an editor and not a venture capitalist. His job is sensationalism to sell JDJ, not predicting the computer industry.
People are giving him way too much notice on this issue. It's an opinion of a magazine editor you probably never even heard of before this, fer chrissakes.
-Kevin
There will always be a way around that kind of stuff (besides moving to a better company). Imagine encoding your request and sending it through a proxy decoder outside your firewall. Surf the web using email? Or get a wireless carrier? The persistent hackers will never be stopped, because they have more knowledge and interest than a network admin who's just working their 40.
-Kevin
Where's the mod option for "eye roller"?
-Kevin
http://www.math.princeton.edu/jfnj/texts_and_graph ics/erratum.txt
-Kevin
I was obviously not being serious, Beavis. And it was 255 instead of 400.
-Kevin
No, that should be reason to "mess with these things". You make it sound like this is some hack mixing DNA in pails in his garage.
Progress in medicine depends on experimentation. We'd still have shamans if people weren't willing to take risks and explore the unknown.
-Kevin
Silly -- the TTL field in TCP has a maximum value of 255, so you could only send insecure credit card data through 254 routers. And the default TTL is usually 64 on Linux and FreeBSD, though it is higher on Solaris and Windows.
Realistically and conservatively you should only expect to be able to send your insecure data through about 60 routers. You'd need multiple routes or multicast to exceed 255 routers, so you may want to consider mass email or mass Usenet posting instead.
-Kevin
Yeah, "obviousally". I posted real kidnapping numbers in the U.S. which are miniscule and you're arguing against the real numbers based on what you personally think the abduction rate is. Tell me, what do you feel the homicide rate is? What do your old wise bones tell you about car thefts this year? Looking up or down?
Can you divine stock market trends, because maybe you should be my investment advisor. You clearly have a gift, an innate ability, to come up with a perception of reality that deviates far from actual reality. Some might call that delusion, but maybe you, AC, are the second coming of Christ.
Yeah, I'm the stupid one.
-Kevin
-Kevin
There is a difference between possible and probable. If you have limited resources (time and money, for example), you'd like to prioritize the use of those resources so that you cause the best outcome. At least I would. Using limited resources to support preventative measures for things which are improbable is irrational.
A fool and his money are soon parted. You are free to be irrational and wasteful, just don't expect me to subsidize your foolishness.
-Kevin
One method of having a computer program generate truly random numbers is to sample a user's keyboard/mouse input delay, using microphones, and so on.
This doesn't at all contradict your good point about PRGs of course.
-Kevin
Yes, that happens all the time...not. Why do you think that stuff makes big news? It's extremely rare. Your child will not be safe with this watch or the shock collar or the leash, or ... There is just no 100% safety and you have to accept that.
Statistically, children are most often abducted by someone they know. Kidnapping is very very rare according to crime statistics:
2000 Juvenile Justice report on kidnapping
1,214 kidnapping cases in the U.S. in 1997. That is a miniscule number and if you think big brother wrist watches are going to prevent them, you're deluding yourself into a false sense of safety.
I understand that parents want to protect their children, but in "the real world", abductions are exceedingly rare. "One tenth of one percent of all the crimes against individuals".
There are real problems that affect children and imiginary problems borne of paranoia. I believe that children are better served by targetting more statistically significant problems like poverty, drug abuse, parental abuse, and so on. And finally, don't forget that it's my neighborhood too when you whip out the "if it was your child!!!" bullshit. It's not that I don't care; I care very much. It's just that I'm realistic and concerned with more important problems that can actually be addressed. I find it ridiculous that I have to shoulder the burden of child paranoia by funding TV controls, CD labelling, and all that stuff, that does nothing. Get those kids out of that dysfunctional family with the alcoholic father that beats them or the drug-addicted mother that can barely afford food. I mean, really, _that_ is more reality than the kidnapping silliness.
-Kevin
Parents today operate under a media-fueled safety paranoia frenzy. More to the point, there's too much irrational worrying about children. It's rather sad to me because I think it _harms_ the children psychologically and propagates the paranoia.
Even though I don't have or want children, I don't want to live in a paranoid society where irrational laws are enacted "to protect the children" that don't actually do any good. This watch is a symptom of the paranoia, and of the oppression of the nanny state. "you can't afford $400 to protect your child????" Yeah, whatever. Put it in a college fund and your child will reap greater rewards.
When I was a child, I didn't need a pager for my parents to locate me. I never got kidnapped and thrown into a trunk without an internal release. I didn't get corrupted by our TV's lack of "parental control" (what an oxymoron). My family never got crushed because we weren't driving around the mall in an armored SUV. Hell, I got through my childhood without a bicycle helmet and I didn't even crack my head open once!
-Kevin
Suppose I knew binary search was a fast way to find something in a sorted array, in O(log n). Of course I'd put all my strings in an array and use binary search, right? No, a better solution is probably to use a hash table, which is O(1). But by not understanding data structures and algorithms, you're not going to realize that problems can be transformed like that. It's the when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem.
I really believe that the world does not need more ignorant programmers producing junk code because they don't understand basic CS principles. And you don't need a CS degree either, just some fairly basic knowledge of algorithms, complexity, data structures, and when they apply.
-Kevin
Merge sort does, and it is much more efficient. That is to say it's a "stable" sort. That is one reason why the C library qsort() is often implemented as a merge sort!
All sort algorithms can be made stable by putting the original positions into the keys you are sorting.
-Kevin
No shit. Why don't they just go commercial if it's the only viable business model?
I can use Outlook through its own web interface. I don't want to pay $70 for the privilege of turning Linux into yet another commercial OS. Whoopee.
-Kevin