The Chinese don't invade countries, going all against the UN, without a single thread of evidence for the alleged cause, like it happened in Iraq ("Weapons of mass destruction") and has it happened in Vietnam.
I honestly believe that this entire topic has been blown out of proportion - congress is not interested in promoting free speech, they just want to spread democracy to the rest of the world.
They don't give a damn about democracy. They want to spread free market capitalism to the rest of the world.
Remember, Congressmen do the bidding not of the voters but of the corporations that contributed to their campaign funds. These corporations don't care whether a country is a democracy or a dictatorship, as long as it lets them do more or less as they please and make an awful lot of money at it.
Indeed, a free-market dictatorship might be even better than a democracy. In a dictatorship, you need only bribe the dictator and all regulations and obstacles to the greater profit melt away. In a democracy, you have do bribe a majority of the representatives, and that costs a lot more.
I listened to some of this on the Today programme (Radio 4) in the UK and the Microsoft guy sounded *really* nervous when they bought up the IBM/Germany analogy. It sounded like the similarity really hadn't occurred to him before.
Nah, it had occurred to him. He would have been briefed by P.R. and legal teams before being allowed anywhere near an interview team. They will have explained to him all about IBM and Nazi Germany and how their consultants had helped put together the advanced filing systems to organise the Final Solution. And they will have explained to him that under no circumstances is he to admit that Microsoft's position is even remotely similar to that, or he personally is in deep, deep shit.
So of course he got nervous when the subject came up. Say the wrong thing here, and he's fired...
They were asked if they would have done the same if the Nazi's asked them the location of Anne frank.
Of course they would have, if there was a profit in it. What Anne Frank was doing was illegal (Reich Criminal Code section 1775B: Breathing while Jewish), and if Yahoo wanted to do business in Germany at the time then they would certainly have had to comply with the demands of the lawfully appointed Gestapo. Not to do so would require them to forego the potential revenues to be had in Germany, which would clearly mean a failure to maximise shareholder value.
They're corporations. They're pure Lawful Evil by definition.
Ironic how MS is doing everything not to have to comply with the EU's antitrust rulings.
Look, it's quite simple.
Complying with China's demands may: cost some pro-democracy activists their lives
Complying with the EU's demands may: cost some Microsoft shareholders some of their money
You aren't suggesting that Microsoft should deliberately make less money than the maximum theoretically possible, are you? That's Communism! That goes against all the principles of liberty, justice and shameless gouging that America was founded on!
We have the EUCD, which is suspiciously similar to the DMCA. However, like all European directives it has been implemented to the letter in some states, to the letter and beyond in others, patchily in still others and totally ignored in the rest.
Precisely what the law about cracking copy restriction actually is now is anybody's guess.
My wife was on a murder jury a couple of years ago, where they all agreed that they had no idea what really happened, and everyone from both sides, except the pathologist, was probably lying. She was able to talk the rest of the jury down to second-degree murder, but the guy was still convicted.
Interesting. How does your wife sleep at night?
Seriously. To convict someone of murder takes a unanimous vote, doesn't it? Then, regardless of what the other eleven think, if you truly have no idea whether the guy did it or not, and you reckon both sides are lying through their teeth, then you say Not Guilty.
At worst, you have a hung jury and it goes for a re-trial. Maybe the guy has a better lawyer next time around.
You do not say 'oh, we're never going to agree on this... I tell you what, meet you halfway and call it second degree, OK?' You stand up and do the full Twelve Angry Men bit. It's your duty.
Have you ever considered that it's a bit ethnocentric to try to "save" Chinese from their own conservative culture? Christ, you may as well be invading them! The fact is that most Chinese support censorship.
Very well, if that's so, and good luck to them, and I hope they're happy behind their firewall. For those few who don't support censorship, this project exists. It's not as if anybody's forcing them to use it, after all.
Han Solo steps on Jabba's tail without getting killed.
I think that's actually worse than Greedo shooting first. Sure, the Greedo scene undermines Han as cold-blooded-badass-and-not-necessarily-a-good-guy , but on the plus side it does emphasise his leet smuggler's reflexes: Greedo fires, Han gets his head out of the way of the bolt so fast even a Jedi could hardly follow it, and next thing you know Greedo's toast. Han's a dangerous guy to cross. Very Clint Eastwood.
The scene with Jabba, though... he's trying to talk his way out of a deep, deep hole. Han owes Jabba money. Jabba's already sent murderous bounty hunters after him. Han needs to talk Jabba around. We're talking edgy diplomacy here.
And then he steps on Jabba's tail. This we might not have noticed, it could have been fudged away, but Lucas has Jabba clearly react to it. Han's already in considerable trouble, and he's just flagrantly disrespected the biggest syndicate boss on the outer rim in front of his henchmen. Han is dead. Very, very dead. Eventually dead, after an extremely nasty interlude involving hot sharp things. His head's going up on a spike in front of Jabba's palace, and the rest of him's getting fed to the banthas.
That scene made Star Wars just... silly. Absurd. From there on, it's downhill all the way to Jar Jar Binks.
In the Russian space program, a person becomes a cosmonaut upon having had a successful space flight.
Sure, the guy's a cosmonaut; he flew in orbit on a Russian spacecraft, that's pretty much the definition.
But to call him a retired cosmonaut implies that at some time he was a professional cosmonaut. This is not the case; as the previous post said, he paid the Russians for a passenger ticket. If someone's a retired cosmonaut, they're not a retired person who happens to also be a cosmonaut - they're someone who has retired from a job as a cosmonaut with the Russian space agency.
Much of The Matrix owes debts to an anime film called Ghost in the Shell.
Something about this amuses me. The prefix 'an anime film called...' as if GitS is obscure or little-known, not a name that would be instantly recognised by SF geeks.
As opposed to being possibly the best known anime film in the West (I'd guess that only Akira and Spirited Away compete). We know about Ghost in the Shell. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, the wall poster, the manga, the original soundtrack album, the TV spinoff boxset, the poseable action figures, the radio-controlled Tachikoma toy and the Major Kusanagi body pillow.
It feels a bit like hearing someone say 'well, of course it owes a great deal to a 1960s TV series called Star Trek...'
Neal Stephenson's novels are central texts of modern hacker culture. We feel understood in a way we rarely do in normal life, so we love every damn thing he writes.
But look at the works of hackers. Do we ever finish? How many projects on Sourceforge have actually reached 'Stable' status? How many of Google's toys aren't Beta? How many programs on your computer, that you rely on every day, have a version number looking like 0.99.997, just because of the hacker's fear of declaring something finished?
We never finish. We always keep the lid off the case, we tinker on the fly, we reconfigure at the drop of a hat to suit ourselves.
But Neal Stephenson has publishers. Publishers insist that sooner or later the book must end so that it can go to print. And so after a certain point, he begins looking for an opportunity to bail out, and leaves the story at the next exit.
By their very nature geeks (true geeks) will shovel every bell and whistle into a device they can get away with because that is what they do.
Only if that device is not a true Device.
A true Device does one thing and does that one thing well; it has clearly defined inputs and does not mind what the input comes from, and it has clearly defined outputs and does not mind what the output goes to.
Then the Geek is happy, for with many such Devices and an assortment of cables the Geek can assemble a composite System that meets his needs exactly. It is the True Way. It is the UNIX Way.
Thus it is that my TV aerial cable goes into the back of the digibox, whose output then goes into the back of the VCR, whose output then goes into the TV card, whose output then goes to mplayer, whose output goes to the screen.
But if a device tries to thwart a Geek in this fine pursuit? Then it is that the Geek takes it up as a challenge to force that device to do his own bidding, to mod it to suit himself, to make it act as a Device and not as a mere device.
Its like of like measuring gravity and all you have is magnets to work worth (or rather everything in your locality is made of magnets including you). Seeing that magnets have a more powerful force than mass gravity, you can't really see the affects of said gravity. However, after you get out of the locality, the less powerful but more long range power takes over (like light). Otherwise our earth bound magnets would be pulling other magnets from all over the universe.
Not quite right. It's not that gravity is more long-range - both electromagnetism and gravitation have theoretically infinite range. The chief reason why the Universe is dominated by gravity and not by electromagnetism is because there's no such thing as a South Gravitational Pole, or a Negative Gravitational Charge.
Electromagnetic forces, taken as a whole, tend to cancel out because of this - although electromagnetism is enormously stronger than gravity, the attraction of one charge tends to cancel out the repulsion of the other, for a net force of pretty near sod all. Gravitational forces add up, because gravity is always attractive.
Does that mean every non-creationist here thinks that killing an enemy soldier is murder?
Not necessarily, but God's orders to the Israelites when they invaded the Promised Land went far, far beyond the killing of enemy soldiers. God wanted everyone killed - although ISTR that on one occasion he relented a little and allowed the Israeli troops to take some of the young women of the cities they were destroying for themselves. For the Lord is a merciful god.
Actually, I think "drastic enough" measures will increase terrorism. The harder a government clamps down, e.g. subjecting individuals to racial profiling, etc. the greater the pool of discontented and potential terrorists become.
And there'll come a point, the way we're going, when they won't be Muslim extremists. Anyone got a Guy Fawkes mask?
I guess all those times when I think the chick was interested at me was only a 50-50 guess...
50-50? Pah. I can tell with very nearly 100% accuracy whether a girl's interested in me - and the accuracy is the same whether it's by email, IM, or face to face.
The decision method?
if 1=1(
girl_is_interested = false
)
It's been running for many years and has yet to throw a false positive that I've been aware of.
It's a video surveillance company. You work in the data center, you become Big Brother.
Remember what our hero did for a living in Nineteen Eighty-Four? He worked at the Ministry of Truth, editing old news articles and throwing inconvenient facts about the past down the memory hole.
i'd suspect it'd just be a graphics card mod, so closer to $300 for most...
You won't need a high-end graphics card to play a movie. Indeed, given the size of the fans on some of those things, you'd actively want to downgrade to get a quieter machine (I have a GeForce FX5200, which is appalling for games but perfect for DVD because it's fanless).
Your friendly local dodgy computer dealer will likely have a bunch of modded Cheapass Geforce MX Luser Edition cards in the back room before long. No sense taking a soldering iron to a card that's worth something, after all:)
I didn't realize the US DoD was a British organization... Maybe you guys did networking first, but the Internet was american.
Oh dear. Hand in your geek card. The parent said 'computers and the web', not 'computers and the internet'. You think 'web' and 'internet' are synonymous? What are you doing on Slashdot?
For the record, it's certainly true that a Briton invented the Web: specifically it was Tim Berners Lee, while working at CERN. As for computers, that's probably also true, but depending on what you call a computer it might have been American.
What exactly is it with the inflexible attitude of some employers and prospective employees?
They asked for plain text or PDF. Open, standard formats. If you send in your CV in some bizarre incompatible unreadable proprietary format, you're implicitly requiring the company to
1) get hold of whatever weird software reads that format
2) if necessary, get hold of the OS required to run that software
3) convert your CV into a usable format
4) and then read it
You think you're going to be looked on favourably after you caused all that hassle? No. Word format CVs go to/dev/null unread and quite rightly so. What, you expect the company recruiters to dual-boot just in case some really wonderfully qualified candidate just couldn't comprehend the idea of 'plain text'?
Presumably, relative to the other masses being repelled.
So why isn't the Earth emitting such an antigravity beam, repelling masses in its path?
This might actually give us a test of this effect. Earth ought to deflect cosmic rays, neutrinos etc. if this theory is correct, because relative to them we're moving at a good deal more than.577c. It would probably be hard to detect, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell it to the Dalai Lama.
They don't give a damn about democracy. They want to spread free market capitalism to the rest of the world.
Remember, Congressmen do the bidding not of the voters but of the corporations that contributed to their campaign funds. These corporations don't care whether a country is a democracy or a dictatorship, as long as it lets them do more or less as they please and make an awful lot of money at it.
Indeed, a free-market dictatorship might be even better than a democracy. In a dictatorship, you need only bribe the dictator and all regulations and obstacles to the greater profit melt away. In a democracy, you have do bribe a majority of the representatives, and that costs a lot more.
Nah, it had occurred to him. He would have been briefed by P.R. and legal teams before being allowed anywhere near an interview team. They will have explained to him all about IBM and Nazi Germany and how their consultants had helped put together the advanced filing systems to organise the Final Solution. And they will have explained to him that under no circumstances is he to admit that Microsoft's position is even remotely similar to that, or he personally is in deep, deep shit.
So of course he got nervous when the subject came up. Say the wrong thing here, and he's fired...
Of course they would have, if there was a profit in it. What Anne Frank was doing was illegal (Reich Criminal Code section 1775B: Breathing while Jewish), and if Yahoo wanted to do business in Germany at the time then they would certainly have had to comply with the demands of the lawfully appointed Gestapo. Not to do so would require them to forego the potential revenues to be had in Germany, which would clearly mean a failure to maximise shareholder value.
They're corporations. They're pure Lawful Evil by definition.
Look, it's quite simple.
Complying with China's demands may: cost some pro-democracy activists their lives
Complying with the EU's demands may: cost some Microsoft shareholders some of their money
You aren't suggesting that Microsoft should deliberately make less money than the maximum theoretically possible, are you? That's Communism! That goes against all the principles of liberty, justice and shameless gouging that America was founded on!
We have the EUCD, which is suspiciously similar to the DMCA. However, like all European directives it has been implemented to the letter in some states, to the letter and beyond in others, patchily in still others and totally ignored in the rest.
Precisely what the law about cracking copy restriction actually is now is anybody's guess.
Interesting. How does your wife sleep at night?
Seriously. To convict someone of murder takes a unanimous vote, doesn't it? Then, regardless of what the other eleven think, if you truly have no idea whether the guy did it or not, and you reckon both sides are lying through their teeth, then you say Not Guilty.
At worst, you have a hung jury and it goes for a re-trial. Maybe the guy has a better lawyer next time around.
You do not say 'oh, we're never going to agree on this... I tell you what, meet you halfway and call it second degree, OK?' You stand up and do the full Twelve Angry Men bit. It's your duty.
Very well, if that's so, and good luck to them, and I hope they're happy behind their firewall. For those few who don't support censorship, this project exists. It's not as if anybody's forcing them to use it, after all.
"Underwater ocean currents used to power Bermuda, but these days they prefer oil."
I think that's actually worse than Greedo shooting first. Sure, the Greedo scene undermines Han as cold-blooded-badass-and-not-necessarily-a-good-guy , but on the plus side it does emphasise his leet smuggler's reflexes: Greedo fires, Han gets his head out of the way of the bolt so fast even a Jedi could hardly follow it, and next thing you know Greedo's toast. Han's a dangerous guy to cross. Very Clint Eastwood.
The scene with Jabba, though... he's trying to talk his way out of a deep, deep hole. Han owes Jabba money. Jabba's already sent murderous bounty hunters after him. Han needs to talk Jabba around. We're talking edgy diplomacy here.
And then he steps on Jabba's tail. This we might not have noticed, it could have been fudged away, but Lucas has Jabba clearly react to it. Han's already in considerable trouble, and he's just flagrantly disrespected the biggest syndicate boss on the outer rim in front of his henchmen. Han is dead. Very, very dead. Eventually dead, after an extremely nasty interlude involving hot sharp things. His head's going up on a spike in front of Jabba's palace, and the rest of him's getting fed to the banthas.
That scene made Star Wars just... silly. Absurd. From there on, it's downhill all the way to Jar Jar Binks.
Sure, the guy's a cosmonaut; he flew in orbit on a Russian spacecraft, that's pretty much the definition.
But to call him a retired cosmonaut implies that at some time he was a professional cosmonaut. This is not the case; as the previous post said, he paid the Russians for a passenger ticket. If someone's a retired cosmonaut, they're not a retired person who happens to also be a cosmonaut - they're someone who has retired from a job as a cosmonaut with the Russian space agency.
Something about this amuses me. The prefix 'an anime film called...' as if GitS is obscure or little-known, not a name that would be instantly recognised by SF geeks.
As opposed to being possibly the best known anime film in the West (I'd guess that only Akira and Spirited Away compete). We know about Ghost in the Shell. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, the wall poster, the manga, the original soundtrack album, the TV spinoff boxset, the poseable action figures, the radio-controlled Tachikoma toy and the Major Kusanagi body pillow.
It feels a bit like hearing someone say 'well, of course it owes a great deal to a 1960s TV series called Star Trek...'
Clearly, it means that somebody's been screwing with the gas chromatograph.
But look at the works of hackers. Do we ever finish? How many projects on Sourceforge have actually reached 'Stable' status? How many of Google's toys aren't Beta? How many programs on your computer, that you rely on every day, have a version number looking like 0.99.997, just because of the hacker's fear of declaring something finished?
We never finish. We always keep the lid off the case, we tinker on the fly, we reconfigure at the drop of a hat to suit ourselves.
But Neal Stephenson has publishers. Publishers insist that sooner or later the book must end so that it can go to print. And so after a certain point, he begins looking for an opportunity to bail out, and leaves the story at the next exit.
Only if that device is not a true Device.
A true Device does one thing and does that one thing well; it has clearly defined inputs and does not mind what the input comes from, and it has clearly defined outputs and does not mind what the output goes to.
Then the Geek is happy, for with many such Devices and an assortment of cables the Geek can assemble a composite System that meets his needs exactly. It is the True Way. It is the UNIX Way.
Thus it is that my TV aerial cable goes into the back of the digibox, whose output then goes into the back of the VCR, whose output then goes into the TV card, whose output then goes to mplayer, whose output goes to the screen.
But if a device tries to thwart a Geek in this fine pursuit? Then it is that the Geek takes it up as a challenge to force that device to do his own bidding, to mod it to suit himself, to make it act as a Device and not as a mere device.
Not quite right. It's not that gravity is more long-range - both electromagnetism and gravitation have theoretically infinite range. The chief reason why the Universe is dominated by gravity and not by electromagnetism is because there's no such thing as a South Gravitational Pole, or a Negative Gravitational Charge.
Electromagnetic forces, taken as a whole, tend to cancel out because of this - although electromagnetism is enormously stronger than gravity, the attraction of one charge tends to cancel out the repulsion of the other, for a net force of pretty near sod all. Gravitational forces add up, because gravity is always attractive.
Not necessarily, but God's orders to the Israelites when they invaded the Promised Land went far, far beyond the killing of enemy soldiers. God wanted everyone killed - although ISTR that on one occasion he relented a little and allowed the Israeli troops to take some of the young women of the cities they were destroying for themselves. For the Lord is a merciful god.
And there'll come a point, the way we're going, when they won't be Muslim extremists. Anyone got a Guy Fawkes mask?
What? Grues use currency these days, do they?
50-50? Pah. I can tell with very nearly 100% accuracy whether a girl's interested in me - and the accuracy is the same whether it's by email, IM, or face to face.
The decision method?
if 1=1(
girl_is_interested = false
)
It's been running for many years and has yet to throw a false positive that I've been aware of.
Remember what our hero did for a living in Nineteen Eighty-Four? He worked at the Ministry of Truth, editing old news articles and throwing inconvenient facts about the past down the memory hole.
You won't need a high-end graphics card to play a movie. Indeed, given the size of the fans on some of those things, you'd actively want to downgrade to get a quieter machine (I have a GeForce FX5200, which is appalling for games but perfect for DVD because it's fanless).
Your friendly local dodgy computer dealer will likely have a bunch of modded Cheapass Geforce MX Luser Edition cards in the back room before long. No sense taking a soldering iron to a card that's worth something, after all :)
Oh dear. Hand in your geek card. The parent said 'computers and the web', not 'computers and the internet'. You think 'web' and 'internet' are synonymous? What are you doing on Slashdot?
For the record, it's certainly true that a Briton invented the Web: specifically it was Tim Berners Lee, while working at CERN. As for computers, that's probably also true, but depending on what you call a computer it might have been American.
They asked for plain text or PDF. Open, standard formats. If you send in your CV in some bizarre incompatible unreadable proprietary format, you're implicitly requiring the company to
1) get hold of whatever weird software reads that format
2) if necessary, get hold of the OS required to run that software
3) convert your CV into a usable format
4) and then read it
You think you're going to be looked on favourably after you caused all that hassle? No. Word format CVs go to /dev/null unread and quite rightly so. What, you expect the company recruiters to dual-boot just in case some really wonderfully qualified candidate just couldn't comprehend the idea of 'plain text'?
Presumably, relative to the other masses being repelled.
So why isn't the Earth emitting such an antigravity beam, repelling masses in its path?
This might actually give us a test of this effect. Earth ought to deflect cosmic rays, neutrinos etc. if this theory is correct, because relative to them we're moving at a good deal more than .577c. It would probably be hard to detect, though.