If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?
I think a few molecules might be a bit of an over statement. Nitroglycerin has a weight of 227g/mole. A mole is 6.02*10^23. So one molecule of nitroglycerin weighs 3.77 * 10^-22 grams.
A picogram = 1*10^-12 grams.
1*10^-12/(3.77*10^-22)=2.65* 10^9, or 2.65 billion molecules. That's a ways from a few.
I think your point still is valid though. Could someone contaminate an area such that it couldn't be cleaned sufficiently? My guess is it probbably could be. You don't have to get rid of all the material, just enough so that you're below the level of detection.
But what will public perception be the first time it happens in the RRL?
The same as any other dangerous sport. "Boy, I'm sure glad I'm just watching this on TV." If anything a jet crash is probbably harder to connect to on an emotional level because it would never happen in view of a camera or live audience like in say auto racing. I suppose the emotional part might come in with the unknown of potential crashes, i.e. "Joe Schmoe's transponder has stopped transmitting, could he have crashed? Stay tuned as rescue planes rush to his last known location!" Death has to be rare otherwise there's too many newspaper headlines and people start to feel bad about how dangerous the sport is. If deaths are rare (every few years) it will be easily accepted.
No, Classical Music (and music of that general category) is provably more musically complex and sophisticated than almost all popular rock-offshoots (with certain exceptions).
I can't remember the last time I've heard a more ridiculous claimed proof. Why is complexity and "sophistication" an inherent value that everyone should agree makes music "better"? Even if you could measure such an abstract term as "complexity", (and not say complexity of the waveform, complexity in time, or whatever you're defining as "complexity"), there's no more value in complex music than their is in simple music. It's like trying to mathematically define one piece of art work is better than another.
When sales of Britney outstrip sales of the Emperor Concerto something is out of whack.
Could it be your own inflated value of classical music that's out of wack? Britney Spears sucks in more ways than I can count, but I see no intrinsic value in classical music over any other form of music. You really want to know why Britney Spears outsells music that doesn't suck? It's because the music industry thinks its only consumer is the 13-22 crowd. Britney Spears captures probbably half of that age range, so she sells a lot. Base and rank commercialism has overtaken sensibility. Our choices are far less choices and far more subtle (and sometimes otherwise) manipulation of our choices by mass market driven money making machines.
No, the problem is most companies are run so they can't see past say 5 years in the future (and those are the visionary companies). It's all about short term profits and "playing it safe". It's nothing to do with base and rank commercialism and everything to do with short sighteness. For example, the food industry: did you know that one of the most healthy foods you can eat is tuna?
No I didn't, nor do I believe it from some guy repeating it on slashdot. Did you know that some brands of tuna have artificially introduced certain appetite inducing chemicals?
I find this to be a very specious claim. Please provide some kind of reference for this and exactly what you mean by "appetite inducing chemicals". Anything that tastes good could potentially be an "appetite inducing chemical". Now, to relate all of this back to the original article. What percentage of medical breakthroughs and research have anything to do with cumulative knowledge? What percentage is just purely money driven?
I don't even know where to start with this statement. My guess is a lot of research isn't driven by pursuit of money. Just look at the research done at major universities and you'll find most of it isn't profit driven. Research that isn't profit driven is important because companies don't like funding things whose value isn't immediately apparent. When you take on that attitude you get a bit of tunnel vision. There's obviously a lot of research that is profit driven. What's wrong with that? Without it you'd just have less research going on, not more. Unless the profit driven research is somehow threatening the non-profit driven research I fail to see any problem with profit driven research. It's only my opinion, but "we" as a civilization will show true evolution when we take use of true knowledge and think less about everything as "business". Business is an artifact. Truth and knowledge serve more faithfully
I'd agree that this current trend toward looking at everything as "business" is pure insanity. I'm not sure that "truth and knowledge" are the perfect goals we should all be striving for. "truth and knowledge" are abstract ideas and not actual goals to be sought after.
You're right. I always confuse the words mean, median and average. I think the original grandparent post must have been talking about the median, which as I'm sure you know isn't always the same as the mean (arithmetic mean to be more precise).
Except that IQ follows a normal distribution. In a normal distribution the mean is the average.
Re:To the managers out there, 10% is acceptable.
on
Firefox Momentum Slows
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If a web page can't be displayed by 10% of the people, its no biggie.
I guess I'd have to disagree. 10% is somewhere around the time where you need to be concerned about people not being able to see the page. This is especially true in a market with tight profit margins. Losing 10% of your customers is a major hit when you only have say a 5% profit margin anyway. It wouldn't kill the business, but I'd say it's enough to justify the often minor work of making sure your website works on Firefox as well as IE.
If you want to be a complete hack and write a terrible terrible program that sucks monkey dick, yes you can do the things you describe. If you actually want to come up with good solutions to problems instead of terrible ugly hacks that any sane person will throw away as garbage you'll actually learn how to design something properly. Programming isn't just about making it work. It's about making a system that's maintainable. (And sorry, memory management isn't "obscure". It may not be what you're used to but calling it obscure only reveals how incredibly ignorant you are about software engineering).
"I can solve any engineering problem. I simply apply the same principles, be it chemical engineering, mechanics, electrical engineering, whatever. Once I apply basic principles, I can look up any specific equations or methods I may need.
Uhhh, right. Just try that with software engineering and we'll see what kind of code you'll write. I suspect the same thing is true for Electrical engineering (go design a good CPU with some basic principles and "equations"). Not all engineering is that "plug and chug" crap that a certain segment of engineers think it is. It sounds you had a prima donna professor who told you a bunch of lies to try to build egos. I find that a terrible attitude. Some of the biggest problem makers in any job are people who insist they understand something, but completely don't. Why not just encourage students to know their current limits, and to understand how to expand those limits? Being a little afraid of a problem isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you try to tackle problems that are way too difficult for you to solve (and don't kid yourself, they exist) you're only setting yourself up for failure.
As long as money is the motivation for making and reporting discoveries, we will have skewed results (actual and/or reported) and our efforts may, more often than not, be focused in the wrong directions.
I think you're got it a bit wrong. The problem isn't that money is the object, the problem is that the way to get that money (at least for mainstream media) is to get eyes and ears of consumers reading/watching/listening. The facts don't matter to that end, and are hard to discover when they're wrong. There's little motivation to get the story right because the market for science reporting is small. Stories aren't corrected tommorow, tommorow there's another story. Hell, a lot of the time even the mainstream stories are dead wrong, just look at what happened to Dan Rather. Even when the media reports that it's dead wrong, the motivation is still finding eyeballs and ears, not fixing mistakes.
Right, and it's just a co-incicence that the trolly lines were bought up by a bunch of companies that have heavy interest in automobiles. There was even a court case brought against these companies in 1949, though they were't convicted. Despite what The Straight Dope says the controversy isn't so clean cut. We all know Microsoft is guilty of violating anti-trust, and yet they got off with a slap on the wrist after the federal case was dropped.
And what if a country like Iran did the same exact thing? The US would probbably invade Iran on grounds of trying to covertly build up weapons production. Why shouldn't the same concerns be had about the United States?
Let's not be naive here. The United States government and the US Military aren't exactly Mary Poppins. The US military (and any military power in the world) will play the game so they can get around any restrictions placed upon them if they feel it's necessary. Could this be a program to skirt around the biological weapons restrictions placed on them? Of course. George Bush has shown little respect for international agreements. Look no further than his plan for a missile shield that would violate the ABM treaty if you want evidence of this attitude. If you want more proof you could also look at the tariffs imposed on imported steel into the US from 2000-2003. This was later ruled by the WTO to be a violation of free trade, and Bush was forced to remove the tariff.
I was recently in Toronto and the public transit is among the best I've seen. I think a lot of this stems from unlike most American cities, Toronto didn't tear out its streetcar lines in the 50s. At the time General Motors was buying up all the streetcar lines. Streetcars were replaced with busses because General Motors only made busses. Busses are crap. They're smaller, very noisy, and wind up being much harder to navigate the system because there's no permanence to a route.
Re:Naming Worms - Virii's pride
on
Name That Worm
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· Score: 1
So I hope that this naming system the 'Common Malware Enumeration' , makes names that are as exciting as it's own.
It's not a naming scheme, it's an enumeration scheme. The "names" will be CME-123 for instance. There's still need for a common name for a virus to be referred to as.
Good first step, common name still needed though.
on
Name That Worm
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's great that there will be at least one recognized identifier for worms, but when people talk about the worm are they really going to refer to it as CME-123 (for example)? There still needs to be a common name that's accepted. We don't for instance have 15 different names for chicken pox. The virus is called varicella-zoster, or human herpes virus 3. Everyone knows what chicken pox is though.
"well he was clearly suspicious, he should have been stopped, detained, and questioned."
Except this guy wasn't suspicious. You're really trying to tell me that not looking at a cop, looking at the people that go on the train, reading a piece of paper, wearing a raincoat, and checking your cellphone for messages is "suspicious"? This is gotten to be insane. Even added up they amount to normal everyday behaviour. If the police think they're going to stop terrorism like this, they've gone completely bonkers.
Also, it's very easy to find something "suspicious" about someone after they've commited a crime. Before the bombing who would have thought wearing jackets that don't match the season is "suspicious"? Now apparently it is. Next it'll be something like wearing boots in the summer, being fat and having a thin face, or wearing unfashionable clothes.
The other thing you've completely missed is that he wasn't simply stopped, searched for anything suspicious and then let go. No, he was then arrested, put in jail, had his home searched, and will likely have a record of the incident that will forever cast false suspicions on him. This isn't a minor case of the police stopping someone and asking some questions.
Very interesting. I've never heard someone quite put it in those terms, but I think you've got it right on. Blind trust of authorities really does stem from fear and thus cowardice.
This is balance? A man is arrested and thrown in jail for wearing a raincoat, not looking at officers, looking at other people, and checking his phone for messages? His house is then searched on this flimsy evidence after finding him carrying perfectly orginary things. This is not balance, this is anything BUT balance. If you and others think this is balance, I seriously fear for the future of the United States. Fear has driven people insane. so why some of you think it is more important to question the motivations of western authorities and not criticize terrorist's motivations instead is beyond me.
Why is it that a strawman argument is the hallmark of someone who can't construct a decent argument? Who is is that's questioning the "motivations of western authorities" in this case? I don't, and I don't see anyone sane doing so either. I DO however highly question the practices, effectiveness, and the police state that's being created. And what about the record that's been created for this completely innocent guy? How much "suspicion" is now cast upon him with governments around the world because the police were over zealous? The next person to be thrown in jail, possibly be put on some watch list, etc could be YOU. As for "not criticize terrorist's motivations instead" again, who are these people that aren't questioning the terrorists motivations? Or is that the old "If you're not with the police, you're with the terrorists" argument? Sorry, but your post is just the most inflamatory piece of garbage I've seen in many months. i now return you to your regular typical drumbeat of sith lords manipulating the situation for their powerbase and agent smith out to destroy your personal freedoms out of pure meanness and other derivative hollywood paranoid schizophrenic plots which passes for insightful analysis around here of the world we live in. pffffffffft.
Thanks for reducing anyone that disagrees with you down the level of schizophrenic wackos. Why anyone marked your article as insightfull and not Troll is beyond me.
Except that you can only carry a few at a time, and the light source isn't included, and can't put a big one in your pocket. So essentially a PDA will go where books can't because they're more self contained. You have to charge them every four hours or so, but thats a small price to pay considering how self-contained they are.
I rarely need more than one book, so that's just not an advantage to me. There's some reference material that'd be nice to cary around, perhaps an entire encyclopedia and unabridged dictionary, but beyond that increased portability is fairly useless for more stuff I read. Changing batteries "every 4 hours or so" really sucks. I don't want to have to carry around batteries just to be able to read. With text there is a point where no increase in resolution increases the clarity if the dot placement is precise (it is for PDAs, even though it isn't for books). That point is somewhere around 600DPI, which a great many modern PDAs can do.
Some can, but they're either bulky or have small screens, and are all quite expensive. I don't like reading tiny text on a tiny screen, or carrying around a big bulky expensive fragile electronic thing when I could just carry around paper. Maybe you don't mind. PDAs have adjustable contrast; books do not. Books have black against off white, and that's about it. You can read a PDA in total blackness, while a book always requires a great deal of outside light.
And why do I need to adjust the contrast of paper? The contrast between the black and the white for a PDA is nothing compared to print. Yes you can put a backlight on a PDA (and eats up battery), but why wouldn't I just buy a booklight that accomplishes the same thing at a cheaper price?
I think I'm going to stick with my theory that the paper preference is mostly a romantic one.
No, you just value different things than other people. Who wants to keep batteries fresh every 4 hours? Most people don't care about keeping multiple texts with them. An ebook might be a great idea for say students who need to carry multiple textbooks, but for the rest of us there just isn't any advantage.
How about these simple reason: A book is self contained (no batteries to worry about), the print has higher resolution than a PDA/ebook and thus is easier to read and has higher quality pictures, it's not as fragile as electronics (drop a book, you're fine, drop an LCD screen, bye bye $100 or more), books have higher contrast than an LCD screen making them easier to read in vary light conditions. There's a ton more advantages to paper over electronics that I'm not even mentioning.
You seem to assume everyone prefers "dead wood" (which indicates some kind of enviro-wacko bias) to electronics for purely romantic reasons. I prefer it because so far it's a more practical invention to me. Maybe someday ebooks will come of age, but so far I haven't seen it.
That reminds me of two of the great virtues of a programmer. Laziness, and hubris. If your unix admin was missing either one of these he never would have created the current system you now enjoy.
You make it sound like the Burning Man corporation puts up all the art, creates the community etc. This obviously isn't true (which I'm sure you know). BM is created by the people that go to BM. I suspect some of what you say is true, BM tries to protect the BM "brand", but I don't think comparing it to Disneyland is accurate at all. Beyond not permitting the extremely dangerous BM doesn't restrict anyone inside the event. There's no approval process that I know of for art that doesn't involve fire.
The restrictions on taping the event is to prevent for instance a large corporation from trying to take over the event. In other words "Girls Gone Wild does Burning Man!" This same kind of attitude is at the heart of the GPL as well.
I would agree that the boosterism of Larry Harvey is a bit looney. But I don't think the IP agreement or charging for ice+coffee is really unreasonable or hypocritical. The "everything should be free as in beer" meme of the hippies was probbably the most foolish idea they had. The gift culture of BM works great for a week, then you spend the rest of the year earning enough extra money to give something.
Only complain if you cannot fix it - because you lack the knowledge to do so, or because doing so would take too much time for a single person, or because the environment itself is hostile towards fixing attempts.
Isn't that exactly what the parent article is complaining about? He's complaining because the job was too difficult for him, and the environment itself is hostile towards fixing (guy who doesn't want to visit a library). *You* may think that a detailed article on the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't important, but who are you to judge these things? What matters to you may not matter to other people, either.
Ahh yes, realitivism. I think you've missed it a bit. It's not about what one person thinks is important, it's about what the majority of people think is important. I think the vast majority of people don't believe The Flying Spaghetti Monster is important at all. The "problem" though is that the people that DO think it's important are also the people that have nothing to do but write articles on such things. Flying Spaghetti Monster knowledge doesn't really get a lot of job offers knocking on your door. Wikipedia is the only place they can exercise their useless talents at writing about uninteresting topics. People that are knowledgeable about things that other people want to actually know about are already professors at Universities, are busy writing their own books, etc.
It's interesting to hear that people that are disabled don't take offense at the name. I've always found it interesting that the most vocal PC crusaders are rarely the ones that are actually part of the group they're trying to "defend". I've always assumed it's just a reaction to some kind of inner guilt that comes out as being offended.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?
I think a few molecules might be a bit of an over statement. Nitroglycerin has a weight of 227g/mole. A mole is 6.02*10^23. So one molecule of nitroglycerin weighs 3.77 * 10^-22 grams.
A picogram = 1*10^-12 grams.
1*10^-12/(3.77*10^-22)=2.65* 10^9, or 2.65 billion molecules. That's a ways from a few.
I think your point still is valid though. Could someone contaminate an area such that it couldn't be cleaned sufficiently? My guess is it probbably could be. You don't have to get rid of all the material, just enough so that you're below the level of detection.
But what will public perception be the first time it happens in the RRL?
The same as any other dangerous sport. "Boy, I'm sure glad I'm just watching this on TV." If anything a jet crash is probbably harder to connect to on an emotional level because it would never happen in view of a camera or live audience like in say auto racing. I suppose the emotional part might come in with the unknown of potential crashes, i.e. "Joe Schmoe's transponder has stopped transmitting, could he have crashed? Stay tuned as rescue planes rush to his last known location!" Death has to be rare otherwise there's too many newspaper headlines and people start to feel bad about how dangerous the sport is. If deaths are rare (every few years) it will be easily accepted.
No, Classical Music (and music of that general category) is provably more musically complex and sophisticated than almost all popular rock-offshoots (with certain exceptions).
I can't remember the last time I've heard a more ridiculous claimed proof. Why is complexity and "sophistication" an inherent value that everyone should agree makes music "better"? Even if you could measure such an abstract term as "complexity", (and not say complexity of the waveform, complexity in time, or whatever you're defining as "complexity"), there's no more value in complex music than their is in simple music. It's like trying to mathematically define one piece of art work is better than another.
When sales of Britney outstrip sales of the Emperor Concerto something is out of whack.
Could it be your own inflated value of classical music that's out of wack? Britney Spears sucks in more ways than I can count, but I see no intrinsic value in classical music over any other form of music. You really want to know why Britney Spears outsells music that doesn't suck? It's because the music industry thinks its only consumer is the 13-22 crowd. Britney Spears captures probbably half of that age range, so she sells a lot.
Base and rank commercialism has overtaken sensibility. Our choices are far less choices and far more subtle (and sometimes otherwise) manipulation of our choices by mass market driven money making machines.
No, the problem is most companies are run so they can't see past say 5 years in the future (and those are the visionary companies). It's all about short term profits and "playing it safe". It's nothing to do with base and rank commercialism and everything to do with short sighteness.
For example, the food industry: did you know that one of the most healthy foods you can eat is tuna?
No I didn't, nor do I believe it from some guy repeating it on slashdot.
Did you know that some brands of tuna have artificially introduced certain appetite inducing chemicals?
I find this to be a very specious claim. Please provide some kind of reference for this and exactly what you mean by "appetite inducing chemicals". Anything that tastes good could potentially be an "appetite inducing chemical".
Now, to relate all of this back to the original article. What percentage of medical breakthroughs and research have anything to do with cumulative knowledge? What percentage is just purely money driven?
I don't even know where to start with this statement. My guess is a lot of research isn't driven by pursuit of money. Just look at the research done at major universities and you'll find most of it isn't profit driven. Research that isn't profit driven is important because companies don't like funding things whose value isn't immediately apparent. When you take on that attitude you get a bit of tunnel vision. There's obviously a lot of research that is profit driven. What's wrong with that? Without it you'd just have less research going on, not more. Unless the profit driven research is somehow threatening the non-profit driven research I fail to see any problem with profit driven research.
It's only my opinion, but "we" as a civilization will show true evolution when we take use of true knowledge and think less about everything as "business". Business is an artifact. Truth and knowledge serve more faithfully
I'd agree that this current trend toward looking at everything as "business" is pure insanity. I'm not sure that "truth and knowledge" are the perfect goals we should all be striving for. "truth and knowledge" are abstract ideas and not actual goals to be sought after.
You're right. I always confuse the words mean, median and average. I think the original grandparent post must have been talking about the median, which as I'm sure you know isn't always the same as the mean (arithmetic mean to be more precise).
Except that IQ follows a normal distribution. In a normal distribution the mean is the average.
If a web page can't be displayed by 10% of the people, its no biggie.
I guess I'd have to disagree. 10% is somewhere around the time where you need to be concerned about people not being able to see the page. This is especially true in a market with tight profit margins. Losing 10% of your customers is a major hit when you only have say a 5% profit margin anyway. It wouldn't kill the business, but I'd say it's enough to justify the often minor work of making sure your website works on Firefox as well as IE.
If you want to be a complete hack and write a terrible terrible program that sucks monkey dick, yes you can do the things you describe. If you actually want to come up with good solutions to problems instead of terrible ugly hacks that any sane person will throw away as garbage you'll actually learn how to design something properly. Programming isn't just about making it work. It's about making a system that's maintainable. (And sorry, memory management isn't "obscure". It may not be what you're used to but calling it obscure only reveals how incredibly ignorant you are about software engineering).
"I can solve any engineering problem. I simply apply the same principles, be it chemical engineering, mechanics, electrical engineering, whatever.
Once I apply basic principles, I can look up any specific equations or methods I may need.
Uhhh, right. Just try that with software engineering and we'll see what kind of code you'll write. I suspect the same thing is true for Electrical engineering (go design a good CPU with some basic principles and "equations"). Not all engineering is that "plug and chug" crap that a certain segment of engineers think it is. It sounds you had a prima donna professor who told you a bunch of lies to try to build egos. I find that a terrible attitude. Some of the biggest problem makers in any job are people who insist they understand something, but completely don't. Why not just encourage students to know their current limits, and to understand how to expand those limits? Being a little afraid of a problem isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you try to tackle problems that are way too difficult for you to solve (and don't kid yourself, they exist) you're only setting yourself up for failure.
As long as money is the motivation for making and reporting discoveries, we will have skewed results (actual and/or reported) and our efforts may, more often than not, be focused in the wrong directions.
I think you're got it a bit wrong. The problem isn't that money is the object, the problem is that the way to get that money (at least for mainstream media) is to get eyes and ears of consumers reading/watching/listening. The facts don't matter to that end, and are hard to discover when they're wrong. There's little motivation to get the story right because the market for science reporting is small. Stories aren't corrected tommorow, tommorow there's another story. Hell, a lot of the time even the mainstream stories are dead wrong, just look at what happened to Dan Rather. Even when the media reports that it's dead wrong, the motivation is still finding eyeballs and ears, not fixing mistakes.
Right, and it's just a co-incicence that the trolly lines were bought up by a bunch of companies that have heavy interest in automobiles. There was even a court case brought against these companies in 1949, though they were't convicted. Despite what The Straight Dope says the controversy isn't so clean cut. We all know Microsoft is guilty of violating anti-trust, and yet they got off with a slap on the wrist after the federal case was dropped.
And what if a country like Iran did the same exact thing? The US would probbably invade Iran on grounds of trying to covertly build up weapons production. Why shouldn't the same concerns be had about the United States?
Let's not be naive here. The United States government and the US Military aren't exactly Mary Poppins. The US military (and any military power in the world) will play the game so they can get around any restrictions placed upon them if they feel it's necessary. Could this be a program to skirt around the biological weapons restrictions placed on them? Of course. George Bush has shown little respect for international agreements. Look no further than his plan for a missile shield that would violate the ABM treaty if you want evidence of this attitude. If you want more proof you could also look at the tariffs imposed on imported steel into the US from 2000-2003. This was later ruled by the WTO to be a violation of free trade, and Bush was forced to remove the tariff.
I was recently in Toronto and the public transit is among the best I've seen. I think a lot of this stems from unlike most American cities, Toronto didn't tear out its streetcar lines in the 50s. At the time General Motors was buying up all the streetcar lines. Streetcars were replaced with busses because General Motors only made busses. Busses are crap. They're smaller, very noisy, and wind up being much harder to navigate the system because there's no permanence to a route.
So I hope that this naming system the 'Common Malware Enumeration' , makes names that are as exciting as it's own.
It's not a naming scheme, it's an enumeration scheme. The "names" will be CME-123 for instance. There's still need for a common name for a virus to be referred to as.
It's great that there will be at least one recognized identifier for worms, but when people talk about the worm are they really going to refer to it as CME-123 (for example)? There still needs to be a common name that's accepted. We don't for instance have 15 different names for chicken pox. The virus is called varicella-zoster, or human herpes virus 3. Everyone knows what chicken pox is though.
"well he was clearly suspicious, he should have been stopped, detained, and questioned."
Except this guy wasn't suspicious. You're really trying to tell me that not looking at a cop, looking at the people that go on the train, reading a piece of paper, wearing a raincoat, and checking your cellphone for messages is "suspicious"? This is gotten to be insane. Even added up they amount to normal everyday behaviour. If the police think they're going to stop terrorism like this, they've gone completely bonkers.
Also, it's very easy to find something "suspicious" about someone after they've commited a crime. Before the bombing who would have thought wearing jackets that don't match the season is "suspicious"? Now apparently it is. Next it'll be something like wearing boots in the summer, being fat and having a thin face, or wearing unfashionable clothes.
The other thing you've completely missed is that he wasn't simply stopped, searched for anything suspicious and then let go. No, he was then arrested, put in jail, had his home searched, and will likely have a record of the incident that will forever cast false suspicions on him. This isn't a minor case of the police stopping someone and asking some questions.
Very interesting. I've never heard someone quite put it in those terms, but I think you've got it right on. Blind trust of authorities really does stem from fear and thus cowardice.
This is balance? A man is arrested and thrown in jail for wearing a raincoat, not looking at officers, looking at other people, and checking his phone for messages? His house is then searched on this flimsy evidence after finding him carrying perfectly orginary things. This is not balance, this is anything BUT balance. If you and others think this is balance, I seriously fear for the future of the United States. Fear has driven people insane.
so why some of you think it is more important to question the motivations of western authorities and not criticize terrorist's motivations instead is beyond me.
Why is it that a strawman argument is the hallmark of someone who can't construct a decent argument? Who is is that's questioning the "motivations of western authorities" in this case? I don't, and I don't see anyone sane doing so either. I DO however highly question the practices, effectiveness, and the police state that's being created. And what about the record that's been created for this completely innocent guy? How much "suspicion" is now cast upon him with governments around the world because the police were over zealous? The next person to be thrown in jail, possibly be put on some watch list, etc could be YOU. As for "not criticize terrorist's motivations instead" again, who are these people that aren't questioning the terrorists motivations? Or is that the old "If you're not with the police, you're with the terrorists" argument? Sorry, but your post is just the most inflamatory piece of garbage I've seen in many months.
i now return you to your regular typical drumbeat of sith lords manipulating the situation for their powerbase and agent smith out to destroy your personal freedoms out of pure meanness and other derivative hollywood paranoid schizophrenic plots which passes for insightful analysis around here of the world we live in. pffffffffft.
Thanks for reducing anyone that disagrees with you down the level of schizophrenic wackos. Why anyone marked your article as insightfull and not Troll is beyond me.
Except that you can only carry a few at a time, and the light source isn't included, and can't put a big one in your pocket. So essentially a PDA will go where books can't because they're more self contained. You have to charge them every four hours or so, but thats a small price to pay considering how self-contained they are.
I rarely need more than one book, so that's just not an advantage to me. There's some reference material that'd be nice to cary around, perhaps an entire encyclopedia and unabridged dictionary, but beyond that increased portability is fairly useless for more stuff I read. Changing batteries "every 4 hours or so" really sucks. I don't want to have to carry around batteries just to be able to read.
With text there is a point where no increase in resolution increases the clarity if the dot placement is precise (it is for PDAs, even though it isn't for books). That point is somewhere around 600DPI, which a great many modern PDAs can do.
Some can, but they're either bulky or have small screens, and are all quite expensive. I don't like reading tiny text on a tiny screen, or carrying around a big bulky expensive fragile electronic thing when I could just carry around paper. Maybe you don't mind.
PDAs have adjustable contrast; books do not. Books have black against off white, and that's about it. You can read a PDA in total blackness, while a book always requires a great deal of outside light.
And why do I need to adjust the contrast of paper? The contrast between the black and the white for a PDA is nothing compared to print. Yes you can put a backlight on a PDA (and eats up battery), but why wouldn't I just buy a booklight that accomplishes the same thing at a cheaper price?
I think I'm going to stick with my theory that the paper preference is mostly a romantic one.
No, you just value different things than other people. Who wants to keep batteries fresh every 4 hours? Most people don't care about keeping multiple texts with them. An ebook might be a great idea for say students who need to carry multiple textbooks, but for the rest of us there just isn't any advantage.
How about these simple reason: A book is self contained (no batteries to worry about), the print has higher resolution than a PDA/ebook and thus is easier to read and has higher quality pictures, it's not as fragile as electronics (drop a book, you're fine, drop an LCD screen, bye bye $100 or more), books have higher contrast than an LCD screen making them easier to read in vary light conditions. There's a ton more advantages to paper over electronics that I'm not even mentioning.
You seem to assume everyone prefers "dead wood" (which indicates some kind of enviro-wacko bias) to electronics for purely romantic reasons. I prefer it because so far it's a more practical invention to me. Maybe someday ebooks will come of age, but so far I haven't seen it.
Yes, I had completely forgotten about quantum link and it took me a minute or two to figure out what was really going on.
That reminds me of two of the great virtues of a programmer. Laziness, and hubris. If your unix admin was missing either one of these he never would have created the current system you now enjoy.
You make it sound like the Burning Man corporation puts up all the art, creates the community etc. This obviously isn't true (which I'm sure you know). BM is created by the people that go to BM. I suspect some of what you say is true, BM tries to protect the BM "brand", but I don't think comparing it to Disneyland is accurate at all. Beyond not permitting the extremely dangerous BM doesn't restrict anyone inside the event. There's no approval process that I know of for art that doesn't involve fire.
The restrictions on taping the event is to prevent for instance a large corporation from trying to take over the event. In other words "Girls Gone Wild does Burning Man!" This same kind of attitude is at the heart of the GPL as well.
I would agree that the boosterism of Larry Harvey is a bit looney. But I don't think the IP agreement or charging for ice+coffee is really unreasonable or hypocritical. The "everything should be free as in beer" meme of the hippies was probbably the most foolish idea they had. The gift culture of BM works great for a week, then you spend the rest of the year earning enough extra money to give something.
Only complain if you cannot fix it - because you lack the knowledge to do so, or because doing so would take too much time for a single person, or because the environment itself is hostile towards fixing attempts.
Isn't that exactly what the parent article is complaining about? He's complaining because the job was too difficult for him, and the environment itself is hostile towards fixing (guy who doesn't want to visit a library).
*You* may think that a detailed article on the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't important, but who are you to judge these things? What matters to you may not matter to other people, either.
Ahh yes, realitivism. I think you've missed it a bit. It's not about what one person thinks is important, it's about what the majority of people think is important. I think the vast majority of people don't believe The Flying Spaghetti Monster is important at all. The "problem" though is that the people that DO think it's important are also the people that have nothing to do but write articles on such things. Flying Spaghetti Monster knowledge doesn't really get a lot of job offers knocking on your door. Wikipedia is the only place they can exercise their useless talents at writing about uninteresting topics. People that are knowledgeable about things that other people want to actually know about are already professors at Universities, are busy writing their own books, etc.
It's interesting to hear that people that are disabled don't take offense at the name. I've always found it interesting that the most vocal PC crusaders are rarely the ones that are actually part of the group they're trying to "defend". I've always assumed it's just a reaction to some kind of inner guilt that comes out as being offended.