I was about to criticize the argument-from-authority thing going on between you two as a "willy-waving" contest (traditional CMU bboard terminology), but that sort of comment just doesn't work in this context.
The Second Law is a statistical law. It is not required to hold -- it is just the (very, very) common case that it does hold.
Maxwell's Demon is a decent counterexample.
Any argument based on "entropy" that is not simply designed to produce a useful, but not necessarily accurate model, is broken. Entropy is a useful human concept, but it cannot be rigorously defined (it runs into the same problems as "order", "randomness", and "probability"). You cannot say "this is *impossible*, because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics". You *can* say "Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, failure of this system can be considered extremely unlikely, so our firm should build it".
Christianity and Irrationality
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Easter Humor
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Possibly. However, I have to say that in part, I am a Christian not because I was indoctrinated from an early age (I wasn't) but because I am not convinced that a sensible ethical code can be formulated without some kind of teleological (that is, losely speaking, goal-centered) foundation.
Not meta enough. Why do you consider a "sensible" ethical code sensible? Why do you *need* an ethical code?
My guess is that you want something that "feels" good because it allows you to justify the majority of your actions? Christianity is pretty much a big book of decent rules of thumb, along with its own agenda. But you can certainly live by Christian rules of thumb ("it tends to pay off to be civil to people, regardles of how they act toward you", etc) without adding in the extra crap associated with Christianity.
I mean, I can say to you "Don't stick your hand into fire. This is because there's a big fire elemental turtle that lives in all fires and wants to bite your hand. You should be sure to give me some money each week to help me, the only person who can control him, from overrunning the world". I've got a decent rule of thumb there, but you're certainly under no obligation to follow any of the other BS I have attached to it.
And Christianity *does* make people do some irrational things, even if it also has some decent rules.
The influence of Christianity has been in free-fall since the Reformation as more and more of the growing intelligentsia class have seen inconsistencies in it and become irritated with some of its doctrine.
I dunno...I suspect that a well-cooked and seasoned meat rabbit would probably be pretty good.
What's really wrong with dumping a rabbit?
on
Easter Humor
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· Score: 3, Insightful
And how much of a humanitarian, to blame the animal for your own fuckup, and dump it on a shelter?
Okay, I know this will probably offend some people, but...what's the deal here? Really and honestly, if you get a chicken or a duck or a rabbit or whatever, there are people running around who are saying that if you aren't sure you can take care of it, you shouldn't get the thing. What do they have to support their argument? What's *wrong* with getting an animal, deciding that you don't like it, and having it put down?
It isn't on "humanitarian" grounds, as jamie's pointing out, since a humanitarian specificaly values *human* welfare.
Some sort of general ban on killing animals? I kill bugs, like the ants that like to get into my room all the time, and don't have the slightest problem with it. Most people don't. What's the mysterious dividing line between rabbits and ants? They both sense pain, etc, etc.
Some sort of pratical issue? We ban murder in most societies because allowing murder produces severe negative social effects on the society. If you allow it, people get desperate and attack other people back, and the society devolves into violence. Killing a rabbit -- there isn't much of a social impact there. Hitchcock's The Birds was a fantasy -- the critters aren't going to be able to do anything back to you.
The only reason I can think of that we have shelters for rabbits, but not for spiders, is that rabbits and fuzzy animals trigger a deep irrational "It's cute!" response -- the same sort of thing that drives PETA. Then we develop a moral system using these basic, irrational reactions as axioms that we then use to *justify* the reactions and our actions. "But it's *wrong* to keep a rabbit and then let it die!" *Why*, I ask?
Finally, if jamie and PETA and friends succeed, and people run out and buy N - M rabbits one year instead of N rabbits...then what? You have M rabbits that don't even have a chance at *life*. Yeah, maybe those rabbits would have ended up spending their last moments working on an electrical cord...but I'm still glad that *I* exist, even if I happen to die next week getting run over by a car.
I have yet to hit a site that provides (i.e. iso's, databases and etc..) using BitTorrent.
It was pretty much the *only* way to get ahold of Red Hat 9 isos in the first days of it being publically downloadable -- the FTP sites were packed.
And you're right that the majority of content out there on P2P networks is pirated -- but that happens to be because they're the only real way to distribute massive numbers of copies of large files, so they're pretty much a prerequisite for movie piracy. While there are legitimate large files available, aside from isos, usually there isn't such a strong need to transfer so much data.
Frankly, it seems to me that the GNU project would have added the invariant sections only force their political statements to be carried everywhere along the documentation.
The GNU Project is starting to come off more and more like Christianity -- a movement with a few worthy ideas at the core that's designed to suck people in and simply maintain the movement.
For instance, if I write a book with a dedication to Martin Luther King, I don't want someone else to come along and release a version where it appears that I've dedicated it to Adolf Hitler. Duh!
You don't need to even worry about copyright law here -- the re-releaser would be violating libel law.
They *could* attach a tidbit saying "Bob Smith dedicates this to Adolf Hitler", as long as your name isn't "Bob Smith".
Instead of condemning the license outright, a pragmatic approach would therefore be to define a threshold of invariant content (say, 20%), after which a document is no longer considered free.
Your approach can by broken by appending garbage noninvariant content to the end of the documentation.
I have yet to see significant uptake of Gnutella and various other services for legitimate uses.
Because most of them are wildly inefficient. BitTorrent is not uncommonly used for large-scale legitimate large file distribution among the tech-savvy now, and eDonkey is similarly useful.
Given known current flaws in MD5, it is possible to produce bogus data that matches a given MD5, though no constraints can be placed upon the content. A trojan, for instance, cannot be placed in a MD5'd file, but the file can contain random data.
However, one of the fairly obvious ways to use MD5 is with a "tree" of checksums -- one for the whole file, one for each half, one for each quarter, etc, etc, etc. In this case, it is not possible to produce data that will pass validation.
eDonkey uses MD4 hashes -- which is significantly easier to attack than MD5 -- yet I haven't seen problems with forged chunks on eDonkey.
And while SHA-1 is nice -- and it might be just easier if everyone used it -- it is significantly slower. When I tested the md5sum and shasum implementations on my Linux box, I found that shasum ran at about a sixth the speed of md5sum.
Except that radio provides a wildly different service than Napster does. When it can feed you high-quality audio pre-broken up into tracks, where the DJ doesn't speak at the beginning and end of the track with the CD and track information inserted, and gives you whatever specific track you might want on demand *then* radio is comparable to Napster. Napster is far more able than radio to replace a CD purchase.
If people were using Napster to save money, then how come $400 iPods are popular? $400 buys you a pretty good number of CDs.
Not an argument that Napster didn't decrease CD sales:
* You're assuming that a significant percentage of mp3/ogg listeners own iPods. This is, in my experience, false.
* mp3/oggs provide some nice features that CDs don't. Portability, custom mixes, ease of obtaining a given song, etc, which could be worth a portion of those $400. That doesn't legally justify infringement against the copyright owners, and *does* produce lost CD sales.
* Marketing. The iPod had a *lot* more money put into marketing it than a CD does. People make irrational purchasing decisions all the time based on marketing.
* Gift-giving. It's fairly reasonable to assume that a lot of piracy goes on when people don't want to drop another $15 at the store...but people give gifts at birthdays, anniversarys, and Christmas. Since the gifts are going to be given anyway, a $400 iPod at a holiday can be more attractive than a series of $15 CD purchases on ordinary days.
* The psychology of large-ticket item purchasing is very different from that impulse items.
If he's looking for good version control then CVS bites big donkey dick.
Okay, I agree that CVS isn't perfect, but it certainly doesn't "bite big donkey dick". It's fairly straightforward, it's used by many, many folks out there, and there's good integration with lots of *other* development tools.
Frankly, I think that most of the people saying that CVS "sucks" read about how someone else found it lacking, and love having something to sound bitch about. Most people that have used CVS have probably run into the same issue that I've run into: CVS doesn't handle renaming source files.
It seems that more and more, only businesses are allowed to be creators. And "business class" service is really just the regular service but without the artifical limitations. And I should pay twice as much (or more) for that?
Yes. It sucks, but before, people that used their broadband connections only lightly were subsidizing P2P users and people operating high-bandwidth servers. It's not "making things more expensive", it's "making people pay for what they're using".
Granted, your server may not use much bandwidth, but it's difficult to make finely-grained enough pricing tiers for ISPs -- and they want their pricing to be clear to everyone. Until such time as all desktop OSes have easy-to-use total bandwidth usage monitors built in and enabled by default, it's easier for them to just say "Web servers cost N dollars" than "Web servers cost N dollars *up to* for less than one gig outgoing a month".
I like simpler pages, like the old-style GNU page. Why do people always have to try to make websites look like newspapers, with zillions of tiny columns of text?
My best guess so far is Windows users that can't figure out how to use software non-maximized complaining that text doesn't fill their browser window otherwise. Any other explanation seems nuts.
And rollover highlighting? I had thought that had died a long time ago, when people realized that users hated it.
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl
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Foiling Cinema Pirates
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· Score: 1
Probably more like so that they can tie in legacy footage if they want to.
Traditional film looks awful to me...
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
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· Score: 1
With people out there who say they can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, I wonder if people won't complain about this, even if they can't see it.
Drop $70+ on a pair of headphones, and regardless of how "highly trained" your ears are, you'll hear the difference up to at least 160kbps or so.
Most people are listening to music through fairly crummy cheap speakers.
I have a decent pair of headphones, and a cheap pair of speakers. On the speakers, there's no way to tell the difference, but on the headphones, it's very, very obvious.
...you could just watch the thing on DVD, *as the parent poster pointed out*. You are *not* going to get a completely quiet, immersive experience in a theater. That's just the way it is.
Umm...the Forestry Service does require that some land be conserved, but it also manages logging and other natural resources...you name it. It's not just a big clump of tree huggers.
And if someone doesn't care enough to go to the work of writing a letter...
Be fair, though -- AIDS does have its own nastiness. Once it's in a population, you have tons of disease vectors. It can spread, and it doesn't just quickly and cleanly kill off its host.
What a world we live in. People call the IQ tests racist because the black and white averages are different? They didn't bother to complain about the IQ test's as compared to some useful metric (that it doesn't predict success in school, or that it doesn't predict average income)?
I mean, the need to be a victim is *wildly* out of control. Yes, it's not impossible that the IQ tests were designed to produce lower scores for blacks. It's also quite possible that the average black score simply happens to be lower, and that the IQ *is* a useful metric of intellectual functioning.
If you want a fucking scale that ranks everyone the same, get a piece of paper and write "4" or something on it. Then get lots *more* pieces of paper and write "4" on them, and hand them out to people. Didn't feel like much, did it? Possibly because the scale was totally freaking useless in measuring anything in the real world. Just like the IQ test can be if you randomly slant it.
Readjusting the IQ test for the sole purpose of giving more PC results is the most inane thing I've heard of. The test may not be perfect -- but arguments should be made based on relationship to another worthy scale of merit, not on pure PC grounds.
I'll second the Mitnick bit. I can't figure out why people are so interested in Mitnick. He's a not particularly technically talented person, and he was dumb enough to persistently go after the wrong people and get caught.
Slashdot Mirror
I *am* a research psychologist. Heh.
I was about to criticize the argument-from-authority thing going on between you two as a "willy-waving" contest (traditional CMU bboard terminology), but that sort of comment just doesn't work in this context.
The Second Law is a statistical law. It is not required to hold -- it is just the (very, very) common case that it does hold.
Maxwell's Demon is a decent counterexample.
Any argument based on "entropy" that is not simply designed to produce a useful, but not necessarily accurate model, is broken. Entropy is a useful human concept, but it cannot be rigorously defined (it runs into the same problems as "order", "randomness", and "probability"). You cannot say "this is *impossible*, because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics". You *can* say "Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, failure of this system can be considered extremely unlikely, so our firm should build it".
Possibly. However, I have to say that in part, I am a Christian not because I was indoctrinated from an early age (I wasn't) but because I am not convinced that a sensible ethical code can be formulated without some kind of teleological (that is, losely speaking, goal-centered) foundation.
Not meta enough. Why do you consider a "sensible" ethical code sensible? Why do you *need* an ethical code?
My guess is that you want something that "feels" good because it allows you to justify the majority of your actions? Christianity is pretty much a big book of decent rules of thumb, along with its own agenda. But you can certainly live by Christian rules of thumb ("it tends to pay off to be civil to people, regardles of how they act toward you", etc) without adding in the extra crap associated with Christianity.
I mean, I can say to you "Don't stick your hand into fire. This is because there's a big fire elemental turtle that lives in all fires and wants to bite your hand. You should be sure to give me some money each week to help me, the only person who can control him, from overrunning the world". I've got a decent rule of thumb there, but you're certainly under no obligation to follow any of the other BS I have attached to it.
And Christianity *does* make people do some irrational things, even if it also has some decent rules.
The influence of Christianity has been in free-fall since the Reformation as more and more of the growing intelligentsia class have seen inconsistencies in it and become irritated with some of its doctrine.
Anyways the chocolate ones taste better :-)
I dunno...I suspect that a well-cooked and seasoned meat rabbit would probably be pretty good.
And how much of a humanitarian, to blame the animal for your own fuckup, and dump it on a shelter?
Okay, I know this will probably offend some people, but...what's the deal here? Really and honestly, if you get a chicken or a duck or a rabbit or whatever, there are people running around who are saying that if you aren't sure you can take care of it, you shouldn't get the thing. What do they have to support their argument? What's *wrong* with getting an animal, deciding that you don't like it, and having it put down?
It isn't on "humanitarian" grounds, as jamie's pointing out, since a humanitarian specificaly values *human* welfare.
Some sort of general ban on killing animals? I kill bugs, like the ants that like to get into my room all the time, and don't have the slightest problem with it. Most people don't. What's the mysterious dividing line between rabbits and ants? They both sense pain, etc, etc.
Some sort of pratical issue? We ban murder in most societies because allowing murder produces severe negative social effects on the society. If you allow it, people get desperate and attack other people back, and the society devolves into violence. Killing a rabbit -- there isn't much of a social impact there. Hitchcock's The Birds was a fantasy -- the critters aren't going to be able to do anything back to you.
The only reason I can think of that we have shelters for rabbits, but not for spiders, is that rabbits and fuzzy animals trigger a deep irrational "It's cute!" response -- the same sort of thing that drives PETA. Then we develop a moral system using these basic, irrational reactions as axioms that we then use to *justify* the reactions and our actions. "But it's *wrong* to keep a rabbit and then let it die!" *Why*, I ask?
Finally, if jamie and PETA and friends succeed, and people run out and buy N - M rabbits one year instead of N rabbits...then what? You have M rabbits that don't even have a chance at *life*. Yeah, maybe those rabbits would have ended up spending their last moments working on an electrical cord...but I'm still glad that *I* exist, even if I happen to die next week getting run over by a car.
I have yet to hit a site that provides (i.e. iso's, databases and etc..) using BitTorrent.
It was pretty much the *only* way to get ahold of Red Hat 9 isos in the first days of it being publically downloadable -- the FTP sites were packed.
And you're right that the majority of content out there on P2P networks is pirated -- but that happens to be because they're the only real way to distribute massive numbers of copies of large files, so they're pretty much a prerequisite for movie piracy. While there are legitimate large files available, aside from isos, usually there isn't such a strong need to transfer so much data.
Frankly, it seems to me that the GNU project would have added the invariant sections only force their political statements to be carried everywhere along the documentation.
The GNU Project is starting to come off more and more like Christianity -- a movement with a few worthy ideas at the core that's designed to suck people in and simply maintain the movement.
For instance, if I write a book with a dedication to Martin Luther King, I don't want someone else to come along and release a version where it appears that I've dedicated it to Adolf Hitler. Duh!
You don't need to even worry about copyright law here -- the re-releaser would be violating libel law.
They *could* attach a tidbit saying "Bob Smith dedicates this to Adolf Hitler", as long as your name isn't "Bob Smith".
Instead of condemning the license outright, a pragmatic approach would therefore be to define a threshold of invariant content (say, 20%), after which a document is no longer considered free.
Your approach can by broken by appending garbage noninvariant content to the end of the documentation.
I have yet to see significant uptake of Gnutella and various other services for legitimate uses.
Because most of them are wildly inefficient. BitTorrent is not uncommonly used for large-scale legitimate large file distribution among the tech-savvy now, and eDonkey is similarly useful.
Repeat after me: fuck MD5.
MD5 is flawed
Given known current flaws in MD5, it is possible to produce bogus data that matches a given MD5, though no constraints can be placed upon the content. A trojan, for instance, cannot be placed in a MD5'd file, but the file can contain random data.
However, one of the fairly obvious ways to use MD5 is with a "tree" of checksums -- one for the whole file, one for each half, one for each quarter, etc, etc, etc. In this case, it is not possible to produce data that will pass validation.
eDonkey uses MD4 hashes -- which is significantly easier to attack than MD5 -- yet I haven't seen problems with forged chunks on eDonkey.
And while SHA-1 is nice -- and it might be just easier if everyone used it -- it is significantly slower. When I tested the md5sum and shasum implementations on my Linux box, I found that shasum ran at about a sixth the speed of md5sum.
Frankly, Napster was about as harmful as radio.
Except that radio provides a wildly different service than Napster does. When it can feed you high-quality audio pre-broken up into tracks, where the DJ doesn't speak at the beginning and end of the track with the CD and track information inserted, and gives you whatever specific track you might want on demand *then* radio is comparable to Napster. Napster is far more able than radio to replace a CD purchase.
If people were using Napster to save money, then how come $400 iPods are popular? $400 buys you a pretty good number of CDs.
Not an argument that Napster didn't decrease CD sales:
* You're assuming that a significant percentage of mp3/ogg listeners own iPods. This is, in my experience, false.
* mp3/oggs provide some nice features that CDs don't. Portability, custom mixes, ease of obtaining a given song, etc, which could be worth a portion of those $400. That doesn't legally justify infringement against the copyright owners, and *does* produce lost CD sales.
* Marketing. The iPod had a *lot* more money put into marketing it than a CD does. People make irrational purchasing decisions all the time based on marketing.
* Gift-giving. It's fairly reasonable to assume that a lot of piracy goes on when people don't want to drop another $15 at the store...but people give gifts at birthdays, anniversarys, and Christmas. Since the gifts are going to be given anyway, a $400 iPod at a holiday can be more attractive than a series of $15 CD purchases on ordinary days.
* The psychology of large-ticket item purchasing is very different from that impulse items.
The awful Pearl Harbor devoted the second half of its footage to Doolittle's Raid.
If he's looking for good version control then CVS bites big donkey dick.
Okay, I agree that CVS isn't perfect, but it certainly doesn't "bite big donkey dick". It's fairly straightforward, it's used by many, many folks out there, and there's good integration with lots of *other* development tools.
Frankly, I think that most of the people saying that CVS "sucks" read about how someone else found it lacking, and love having something to sound bitch about. Most people that have used CVS have probably run into the same issue that I've run into: CVS doesn't handle renaming source files.
And you hate CVS but recommend *PVCS*?
It seems that more and more, only businesses are allowed to be creators. And "business class" service is really just the regular service but without the artifical limitations. And I should pay twice as much (or more) for that?
Yes. It sucks, but before, people that used their broadband connections only lightly were subsidizing P2P users and people operating high-bandwidth servers. It's not "making things more expensive", it's "making people pay for what they're using".
Granted, your server may not use much bandwidth, but it's difficult to make finely-grained enough pricing tiers for ISPs -- and they want their pricing to be clear to everyone. Until such time as all desktop OSes have easy-to-use total bandwidth usage monitors built in and enabled by default, it's easier for them to just say "Web servers cost N dollars" than "Web servers cost N dollars *up to* for less than one gig outgoing a month".
I like simpler pages, like the old-style GNU page. Why do people always have to try to make websites look like newspapers, with zillions of tiny columns of text?
My best guess so far is Windows users that can't figure out how to use software non-maximized complaining that text doesn't fill their browser window otherwise. Any other explanation seems nuts.
And rollover highlighting? I had thought that had died a long time ago, when people realized that users hated it.
Probably more like so that they can tie in legacy footage if they want to.
Traditional film looks awful to me...
With people out there who say they can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, I wonder if people won't complain about this, even if they can't see it.
Drop $70+ on a pair of headphones, and regardless of how "highly trained" your ears are, you'll hear the difference up to at least 160kbps or so.
Most people are listening to music through fairly crummy cheap speakers.
I have a decent pair of headphones, and a cheap pair of speakers. On the speakers, there's no way to tell the difference, but on the headphones, it's very, very obvious.
...you could just watch the thing on DVD, *as the parent poster pointed out*. You are *not* going to get a completely quiet, immersive experience in a theater. That's just the way it is.
B and G use the same channels. It is quite impossible to run both at full speed.
Systems that do both simultaneously split the channels.
Umm...the Forestry Service does require that some land be conserved, but it also manages logging and other natural resources...you name it. It's not just a big clump of tree huggers.
And if someone doesn't care enough to go to the work of writing a letter...
Be fair, though -- AIDS does have its own nastiness. Once it's in a population, you have tons of disease vectors. It can spread, and it doesn't just quickly and cleanly kill off its host.
What a world we live in. People call the IQ tests racist because the black and white averages are different? They didn't bother to complain about the IQ test's as compared to some useful metric (that it doesn't predict success in school, or that it doesn't predict average income)?
I mean, the need to be a victim is *wildly* out of control. Yes, it's not impossible that the IQ tests were designed to produce lower scores for blacks. It's also quite possible that the average black score simply happens to be lower, and that the IQ *is* a useful metric of intellectual functioning.
If you want a fucking scale that ranks everyone the same, get a piece of paper and write "4" or something on it. Then get lots *more* pieces of paper and write "4" on them, and hand them out to people. Didn't feel like much, did it? Possibly because the scale was totally freaking useless in measuring anything in the real world. Just like the IQ test can be if you randomly slant it.
Readjusting the IQ test for the sole purpose of giving more PC results is the most inane thing I've heard of. The test may not be perfect -- but arguments should be made based on relationship to another worthy scale of merit, not on pure PC grounds.
I'll second the Mitnick bit. I can't figure out why people are so interested in Mitnick. He's a not particularly technically talented person, and he was dumb enough to persistently go after the wrong people and get caught.
Oh. No, I wasn't referring to the style, but to the fact that they write to achive [hard task] you MUST [do equivalently hard task].
It's just not particularly helpful.