I don't know if it happened, but France and the UK were slated to eliminate leaded gasoline as recently as 2000. Italy is supposed to eliminate lead in gasoline in 2003. If you want to point to lead in gasoline making people stupid you should look toward Europe before the US.
No, I don't think this is the case. But I'm a little tired of the US always taking flak for being behind the times on everything, when the reality is we're quite a bit ahead on many issues. As an example, The US is ahead of many European countries on smoking. (I'm not familiar with the specifics of each country on smoking, so I can only speak in generalities). Maybe the anti-smoking movement has gone too far here, but my point is that European countries certainly aren't perfect.
Sorry, but I think the tone of the original article is just a bit too far in the realm of bashing US citizens. People are dumb all over the world, not just in the United States. No, I'm not a USA! USA! type, but neither am I an anti-American American.
Indeed. I think it's pretty obvious that Slashdot has gone in the crapper when dupes are a daily occurance, and obviously innacurate (and weeks old) stories like "timetraveler busted for insider trading" gets posted as if it's truth.
Slashdot desperately needs somewhere to discuss problems about itself. The editors have this "it's your sight" attitude, but then don't listen when just about everyone screams about the major problems. For lack of a better place to discuss problems, and solutions, I elect any and all dupe posts. Here's some of the problems, as I see them. (Sorry, I don't have many good solutions).
1. Dupes. It makes it pretty obvious the editors aren't make the least bit of effort in approving stories. It's gotten quite bad in the last year, and this makes it look like slashdot is in decline.
2. Innacurate stories, and/or misleading or sensational headlines. I'm really tired of these, as the conversation starts from untruth. Casting the story in the wrong light has a major impact on discussion. It makes slashdot into an unreliable news source which I think is just bad in general. Yes, the editors say "it's the job of the readers to verify stories" but it's pretty ridiculous when the headline is obviously sensational and innacurate after reading the actual article.
3. As I mentioned above, nowhere for a meta discussion. If slashdot is supposed to be partially run by the readers, we need a common place to discuss slashdot itself.
4. I don't have a four. I could list deeper problems with slashdot, but they're mostly just a matter of taste. The three listed above I think apply to everyone, no matter what you think slashdot should be.
Well he's not a violent criminal, and I truly don't think he had malicious intent or theft in mind perpetuating his crimes. Your post sounds like he's a serial killer or stole millions of dollars.
I guess he's kind of a dope for continueing to commit felonies, but he hardly seems to be an evil guy. At worst he's guilty of theft of service, and intellectual property. Crimes to be sure, but not the mark of someone that's inherently evil.
Assuming it's not just used as an excuse to stop anyone and harass them, this seems like it's fairly harmless. It's fairly simple to screen anyone stopped by the system for symptoms of SARS, which obviously is not really true when screening for terrorists.
I just wonder how effective it would be. It only takes a few people entering the country to start spreading the disease. If you've got one person with SARS coming into the country ever, and your system has a 90% chance of stopping that one person, then it's pretty effective. If however, you've got one person a day coming through with SARS, well after a week there's a 50% chance you've let an infected person through.
In other words the detection rate of your system has to be in line with the incoming rate of infected people, otherwise it's fairly useless.
At this point I'm sure there's nowhere near one person a day coming through any airport with SARS. But I also doubt the airport will only have one person ever come through.
I guess I do. Titles don't impress me, only what people say or produce. Just because he's the astronomer royal doesn't mean he can't say stupid things.
Pornography? Settle down Beavis. It's a satire site. The parent post was obviously intended as a joke. Children don't usually understand satire, so no, they aren't the intended audience.
You don't have to agree with the politics of the website, but it's hardly something harmfull to children, and it's not pornography.
I can't wait for the distributed Palladium cracking project!
Forget about it. The XBox key is 2048 bit RSA key. You can expect that to be the minimum key length Paladium will use. Last I heard 512 bit RSA keys could be brute forced, but 2048 bit keys are far too difficult to even attempt. I'm sure people will try (as they foolishly have with the X-Box), but it's highly unlikely it'll be broken in any amount of time where the key would still be useable. Think about it for just a minute. Do you really think MS is dumb enough to chose a key length that has any chance of being broken anytime soon?
So, if I'm reading this correctly, this guy is worried about things we imagine are possible? Of course, we don't really know very much about these areas, so the imagined fears stem primarily from our ignorance, and not any real knowledge.
In other words, anything you don't know about has a much larger set of imagined possibilities. If you know absolutely nothing about something, then you can imagine the worst possibility, since you aren't limited in your imagination by your knowledge.
This reminds me a little of the kid who's afraid to look under his bed because he imagines there's a monster under it. The kid doesn't posess enough maturity, or experience, or whatever to temper his imagination.
People get very particular about their space. We're territorial creatures by nature. Of course no one is going to respect someone who's invaded their space. The phone system doesn't have any physicallity for people to feel invaded by, so I think your anology is deeply flawed.
A more apt analogy is if you had an always on television locked up in a public place. Someone finds a flaw in the lock, and goes and watches your TV when you aren't using it. The person never does any harm to the TV, and locks it back up after he's done with it. Are you really going to get upset at this person? Has anything really been stolen from you?
Your response does smell of a troll, but I'm responding anyway.
I think perhaps it's you that can't read. I didn't say believing UFOs are alien spacecraft is a nutty belief, I said nutty people tend to believe that sort of thing. As far as your implication goes, nutty people also breath air. Does that mean breathing air is really nutty?
I don't really have the time or interest to read through all the articles on your super-duper-UFO-guy website, but I guess I don't find the musings of a "professional astronomer" to be any real proof that UFOs are alien craft. I guess this makes me a loony escapist in your eyes, Which I sleep happily knowing.
Buddhism is fairly varied in its various forms, more so than the major western religions. Some forms of Buddhism believe in some form of afterlife, others say nothing about it. I personally think Buddhism is more apt to be called a philosophy, but even that's problematic, since there's a more dogmatic form of buddhism that feels more like a religion than a philosphy. The more cynical version of myself in some other parallel universe would say that Buddihism is at it's best a philosophy, and at its worst a religion;).
I suppose the reason so many people find Buddhism and science compatible is that Buddhism tries to avoid any distinct beliefs about the outside world. Most other religions have tended not to do this, and offer up explanations of things (and later conflict with what we learn through science).
My guess is that it has nothing to do with the plausibility of either theory, but has everything to do with what nutty people are attracted to believing. No, I'm not defining people as nutty simply because they believe in strange things (this would be a circular argument). What I am saying is that beliefs in aliens visiting earth is a belief that fills some extreme form of escapism that the more.. uh... loony people have.
No, I don't think believing there might be intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is an inherently crazy belief, just that the nuts of the world tend to get attracted to this kind of thing. Parallel universes, multiple dimensions, strings, etc aren't as sexy or escapist as aliens, plus it's a bit more difficult to understand, so it's less attractive to the nutjobs.
I think what you're missing is that "good" genes are a moving target. Nature is really a battle between species, and if something else finds a chink in your armour, you're dead. If all members of a species have the same genetic makeup, they're all vulnerable to the same things. For instance, a disease might take out the entire population since the species wouldn't have enough genetic diversity for enough members to survive.
Farmers that raise mono-crops see this all the time. There's a certain species of Apple (I think it's the Golden Delicious) that originates from a single plant found in the US many years ago. All current trees are genetically identical to that first tree. New trees are produced from cuttings, not from seed. Anyway, these trees are problematic because of their lack of genetic diversity. A blight could wipe them all out.
Call me a skeptic, but I think it takes longer than 42 days (and the limited audience of blogs) to coin the meaning of a new term. I've never heard this term used before I read this article. It seems to me new word definitions come about because of a need for them, not some strange, perverted miss-use of google.
I guess I'm a little confused by the article. Is the author saying there is some causation of this new word meaning stemming from Google? If so, that is their any apreciable percentage of the populace doing google searches each time they encounter a new word? If Google is merely a tool to tell us the more accepted definition of a word, then is google really an accurate tool for this?
Sorry, but I see this a very weakly supported theory, and don't think it deserves enough attention to have been posted to slashdot.
A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Mozilla since it's finally become 1.0, and having switched from IE I wouldn't go back. But (and here's the catch) it still crashes on me a few times a week. After 5 years you'd think they could make a program that's actually stable.
I keep hoping the bugs will be fixed in the next release, but so far no joy. The biggest feature I'd like to see is stability. Type ahead find is a really cool feature, but I'd trade it in a minute if the damn program didn't crash every couple days.
But a firewall generally only solves the problem for external attacks. Anyone inside the firewall can still attack the machine. If you're a bank, that's a big problem. You could put a firewall directly in front of the NT4 machine, or on the NT4 machine itself, but that presents its own set of additional support, and/or potential software conflicts.
I can easily see why people would be upset with MS for not fixing a vulnerability for an important product like NT4 while it's still well within the support lifetime. It's stuff like this that make open source software far more attractive. Redhat may not offer patches for old products, but you can always go in and patch the products yourself.
Sorry, I misconstrued your statement. I have an inherent fear of the four letter states, so I thought your comments stemmed from shock that someone admitted they've watched porn. Forgive me.
heh, I think it's more surprising someone would think that's such a shocking thing to say. Maybe you should get out of rural Ohio a bit more often, hmmm?
I don't really know anything about number theory, but I I get a little suspicious when anyone announces a discovery in a field unrelated to their area of expertise. Utah chemists did this in 89 or 90 with Cold Fusion, and it was quickly shown to be bad science by physicists.
Can anyone out their study number theory give us a heads up if they may be on to something, or this is simply just crazy?
I just installed 1.3 for Win32, and it seems faster to me. At the very least it's not slower than 1.2. The new panel for type-ahead find is a sweet feature . Mostly I'll be happy if they've managed to fix more of the crash bugs, which seems to happen to me
about twice a week.
I guess that's you're own personal bias speaking then. You're implying meaning based upon very little evidence, trying to extrapolate based upon... Umm.. I don't know, the traditional arguments of others? This is a dangerous way of reasoning, and can easily lead to false impressions.
I was expecting a bunch of posts written by zealots who thought this was just a wonderful idea. Instead the high rated ones make good arguments why being a MS free school would be a Bad Thing.
I guess what frightens me most about this gift is that it's an attempt to control the curriculum of the school by an outside force. I think this is the major point you grandfather should bring up. Teachers should be allowed to use the software they think is best for the job, and not controlled by some outside political interest with a lot of money. Would the school even be considering this if an doner would give money to the school if they didn't teach any courses about Islam? The analogy is a bit heavy handed, but I hope it serves a point.
What the board needs to understand is that at least in computer science, the software used is part of the curriculum. Letting someone with loads of cash set curriculum is just a bad precedent.
Hmm.. I'll try to work around your obvious anti-abortion bias.
1. How do you know that the sole purpose of having this kid was to save their other kid? I think that's a bit of a stretch to make this so cut and dry. Even if it is, does it really matter? You seem to assume that the sole purpose of having the kid automatically translates into the value of the kid after its born. Is your value tied to your parents intent in having you? What about all the children that are conceived from "accidents"?
2. I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. The technique they're using wouldn't cause any health problems, it only prevents them.
3. I don't really understand this argument either. You seem to be stringing us along for a bit toward your goal suggesting that these people would just have an abortion after they harvested the fetal blood. This couple isn't going to have an abortion, so your "what if" scenario doesn't apply.
4. huh? While this is maybe an interesting legal question, I don't see how it applies to the ethics of this situation.
5. Making a reference to "scary book about genetics gone mad books" is a scare tactic, not an actual argument. No one is creating genetically enhanced super-men here, and no one is creating three different classes of people.
6. We've been playing god by saving peoples lives who shouldn't due to evolution ever since we figured out how to bandage a wound. Are you suggesting we not treat anyone so that the people with the "wrong" genes will die? To use your argument, that sounds pretty close to the theme of Gattaca or Brave New World to me.
7. Maybe this is an alternate treatment, I really don't know. Even if it is, the existance of an alternate treatment isn't an argument that what they're doing is wrong.
8. What does it teach him? Maybe that his parents will do anything to save him? That his parents value life? Sorry, the answers to this question seem pretty open ended to me. It all depends on what his parents teach him, which is really no different than anyone else.
Based on many years of paying attention to this movement. I've seen to many people that are overly concerned about "not being a bad person", and not really concerned about actually solving the problem.
Anyway, I intended the last comment as an interesting point to my story, not the serious theory with data points to support it that you seem to be assuming.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if it happened, but France and the UK were slated to eliminate leaded gasoline as recently as 2000. Italy is supposed to eliminate lead in gasoline in 2003. If you want to point to lead in gasoline making people stupid you should look toward Europe before the US.
No, I don't think this is the case. But I'm a little tired of the US always taking flak for being behind the times on everything, when the reality is we're quite a bit ahead on many issues. As an example, The US is ahead of many European countries on smoking. (I'm not familiar with the specifics of each country on smoking, so I can only speak in generalities). Maybe the anti-smoking movement has gone too far here, but my point is that European countries certainly aren't perfect.
Sorry, but I think the tone of the original article is just a bit too far in the realm of bashing US citizens. People are dumb all over the world, not just in the United States. No, I'm not a USA! USA! type, but neither am I an anti-American American.
Indeed. I think it's pretty obvious that Slashdot has gone in the crapper when dupes are a daily occurance, and obviously innacurate (and weeks old) stories like "timetraveler busted for insider trading" gets posted as if it's truth.
Slashdot desperately needs somewhere to discuss problems about itself. The editors have this "it's your sight" attitude, but then don't listen when just about everyone screams about the major problems. For lack of a better place to discuss problems, and solutions, I elect any and all dupe posts. Here's some of the problems, as I see them. (Sorry, I don't have many good solutions).
1. Dupes. It makes it pretty obvious the editors aren't make the least bit of effort in approving stories. It's gotten quite bad in the last year, and this makes it look like slashdot is in decline.
2. Innacurate stories, and/or misleading or sensational headlines. I'm really tired of these, as the conversation starts from untruth. Casting the story in the wrong light has a major impact on discussion. It makes slashdot into an unreliable news source which I think is just bad in general. Yes, the editors say "it's the job of the readers to verify stories" but it's pretty ridiculous when the headline is obviously sensational and innacurate after reading the actual article.
3. As I mentioned above, nowhere for a meta discussion. If slashdot is supposed to be partially run by the readers, we need a common place to discuss slashdot itself.
4. I don't have a four. I could list deeper problems with slashdot, but they're mostly just a matter of taste. The three listed above I think apply to everyone, no matter what you think slashdot should be.
Well he's not a violent criminal, and I truly don't think he had malicious intent or theft in mind perpetuating his crimes. Your post sounds like he's a serial killer or stole millions of dollars.
I guess he's kind of a dope for continueing to commit felonies, but he hardly seems to be an evil guy. At worst he's guilty of theft of service, and intellectual property. Crimes to be sure, but not the mark of someone that's inherently evil.
Assuming it's not just used as an excuse to stop anyone and harass them, this seems like it's fairly harmless. It's fairly simple to screen anyone stopped by the system for symptoms of SARS, which obviously is not really true when screening for terrorists.
I just wonder how effective it would be. It only takes a few people entering the country to start spreading the disease. If you've got one person with SARS coming into the country ever, and your system has a 90% chance of stopping that one person, then it's pretty effective. If however, you've got one person a day coming through with SARS, well after a week there's a 50% chance you've let an infected person through.
In other words the detection rate of your system has to be in line with the incoming rate of infected people, otherwise it's fairly useless.
At this point I'm sure there's nowhere near one person a day coming through any airport with SARS. But I also doubt the airport will only have one person ever come through.
I guess I do. Titles don't impress me, only what people say or produce. Just because he's the astronomer royal doesn't mean he can't say stupid things.
Pornography? Settle down Beavis. It's a satire
site. The parent post was obviously intended as
a joke. Children don't usually understand satire, so no, they aren't the intended audience.
You don't have to agree with the politics of the website, but it's hardly something harmfull to children, and it's not pornography.
I can't wait for the distributed Palladium cracking project!
Forget about it. The XBox key is 2048 bit RSA key. You can expect that to be the minimum key length Paladium will use. Last I heard 512 bit RSA keys could be brute forced, but 2048 bit keys are far too difficult to even attempt. I'm sure people will try (as they foolishly have with the X-Box), but it's highly unlikely it'll be broken in any amount of time where the key would still be useable. Think about it for just a minute. Do you really think MS is dumb enough to chose a key length that has any chance of being broken anytime soon?
So, if I'm reading this correctly, this guy is worried about things we imagine are possible? Of course, we don't really know very much about these areas, so the imagined fears stem primarily from our ignorance, and not any real knowledge.
In other words, anything you don't know about has a much larger set of imagined possibilities. If you know absolutely nothing about something, then you can imagine the worst possibility, since you aren't limited in your imagination by your knowledge.
This reminds me a little of the kid who's afraid to look under his bed because he imagines there's a monster under it. The kid doesn't posess enough maturity, or experience, or whatever to temper his imagination.
People get very particular about their space. We're territorial creatures by nature. Of course no one is going to respect someone who's invaded their space. The phone system doesn't have any physicallity for people to feel invaded by, so I think your anology is deeply flawed.
A more apt analogy is if you had an always on television locked up in a public place. Someone finds a flaw in the lock, and goes and watches your TV when you aren't using it. The person never does any harm to the TV, and locks it back up after he's done with it. Are you really going to get upset at this person? Has anything really been stolen from you?
Your response does smell of a troll, but I'm responding anyway. I think perhaps it's you that can't read. I didn't say believing UFOs are alien spacecraft is a nutty belief, I said nutty people tend to believe that sort of thing. As far as your implication goes, nutty people also breath air. Does that mean breathing air is really nutty? I don't really have the time or interest to read through all the articles on your super-duper-UFO-guy website, but I guess I don't find the musings of a "professional astronomer" to be any real proof that UFOs are alien craft. I guess this makes me a loony escapist in your eyes, Which I sleep happily knowing.
Buddhism is fairly varied in its various forms, more so than the major western religions. Some forms of Buddhism believe in some form of afterlife, others say nothing about it. I personally think Buddhism is more apt to be called a philosophy, but even that's problematic, since there's a more dogmatic form of buddhism that feels more like a religion than a philosphy. The more cynical version of myself in some other parallel universe would say that Buddihism is at it's best a philosophy, and at its worst a religion ;).
I suppose the reason so many people find Buddhism and science compatible is that Buddhism tries to avoid any distinct beliefs about the outside world. Most other religions have tended not to do this, and offer up explanations of things (and later conflict with what we learn through science).
My guess is that it has nothing to do with the plausibility of either theory, but has everything to do with what nutty people are attracted to believing. No, I'm not defining people as nutty simply because they believe in strange things (this would be a circular argument). What I am saying is that beliefs in aliens visiting earth is a belief that fills some extreme form of escapism that the more.. uh... loony people have.
No, I don't think believing there might be intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is an inherently crazy belief, just that the nuts of the world tend to get attracted to this kind of thing. Parallel universes, multiple dimensions, strings, etc aren't as sexy or escapist as aliens, plus it's a bit more difficult to understand, so it's less attractive to the nutjobs.
I think what you're missing is that "good" genes are a moving target. Nature is really a battle between species, and if something else finds a chink in your armour, you're dead. If all members of a species have the same genetic makeup, they're all vulnerable to the same things. For instance, a disease might take out the entire population since the species wouldn't have enough genetic diversity for enough members to survive. Farmers that raise mono-crops see this all the time. There's a certain species of Apple (I think it's the Golden Delicious) that originates from a single plant found in the US many years ago. All current trees are genetically identical to that first tree. New trees are produced from cuttings, not from seed. Anyway, these trees are problematic because of their lack of genetic diversity. A blight could wipe them all out.
Call me a skeptic, but I think it takes longer than 42 days (and the limited audience of blogs) to coin the meaning of a new term. I've never heard this term used before I read this article. It seems to me new word definitions come about because of a need for them, not some strange, perverted miss-use of google.
I guess I'm a little confused by the article. Is the author saying there is some causation of this new word meaning stemming from Google? If so, that is their any apreciable percentage of the populace doing google searches each time they encounter a new word? If Google is merely a tool to tell us the more accepted definition of a word, then is google really an accurate tool for this?
Sorry, but I see this a very weakly supported theory, and don't think it deserves enough attention to have been posted to slashdot.
I keep hoping the bugs will be fixed in the next release, but so far no joy. The biggest feature I'd like to see is stability. Type ahead find is a really cool feature, but I'd trade it in a minute if the damn program didn't crash every couple days.
But a firewall generally only solves the problem for external attacks. Anyone inside the firewall can still attack the machine. If you're a bank, that's a big problem. You could put a firewall directly in front of the NT4 machine, or on the NT4 machine itself, but that presents its own set of additional support, and/or potential software conflicts.
I can easily see why people would be upset with MS for not fixing a vulnerability for an important product like NT4 while it's still well within the support lifetime. It's stuff like this that make open source software far more attractive. Redhat may not offer patches for old products, but you can always go in and patch the products yourself.
Sorry, I misconstrued your statement. I have an inherent fear of the four letter states, so I thought your comments stemmed from shock that someone admitted they've watched porn. Forgive me.
heh, I think it's more surprising someone would think that's such a shocking thing to say. Maybe you should get out of rural Ohio a bit more often, hmmm?
Weird... I actually just got finished watching Repo Man a few hours ago for the first time in years.
I don't really know anything about number theory, but I I get a little suspicious when anyone announces a discovery in a field unrelated to their area of expertise. Utah chemists did this in 89 or 90 with Cold Fusion, and it was quickly shown to be bad science by physicists.
Can anyone out their study number theory give us a heads up if they may be on to something, or this is simply just crazy?
I just installed 1.3 for Win32, and it seems faster to me. At the very least it's not slower than 1.2. The new panel for type-ahead find is a sweet feature . Mostly I'll be happy if they've managed to fix more of the crash bugs, which seems to happen to me about twice a week.
I guess that's you're own personal bias speaking then. You're implying meaning based upon very little evidence, trying to extrapolate based upon... Umm.. I don't know, the traditional arguments of others? This is a dangerous way of reasoning, and can easily lead to false impressions.
I was expecting a bunch of posts written by zealots who thought this was just a wonderful idea. Instead the high rated ones make good arguments why being a MS free school would be a Bad Thing.
I guess what frightens me most about this gift is that it's an attempt to control the curriculum of the school by an outside force. I think this is the major point you grandfather should bring up. Teachers should be allowed to use the software they think is best for the job, and not controlled by some outside political interest with a lot of money. Would the school even be considering this if an doner would give money to the school if they didn't teach any courses about Islam? The analogy is a bit heavy handed, but I hope it serves a point.
What the board needs to understand is that at least in computer science, the software used is part of the curriculum. Letting someone with loads of cash set curriculum is just a bad precedent.
Hmm.. I'll try to work around your obvious anti-abortion bias.
1. How do you know that the sole purpose of having this kid was to save their other kid? I think that's a bit of a stretch to make this so cut and dry. Even if it is, does it really matter? You seem to assume that the sole purpose of having the kid automatically translates into the value of the kid after its born. Is your value tied to your parents intent in having you? What about all the children that are conceived from "accidents"?
2. I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue here. The technique they're using wouldn't cause any health problems, it only prevents them.
3. I don't really understand this argument either. You seem to be stringing us along for a bit toward your goal suggesting that these people would just have an abortion after they harvested the fetal blood. This couple isn't going to have an abortion, so your "what if" scenario doesn't apply.
4. huh? While this is maybe an interesting legal question, I don't see how it applies to the ethics of this situation.
5. Making a reference to "scary book about genetics gone mad books" is a scare tactic, not an actual argument. No one is creating genetically enhanced super-men here, and no one is creating three different classes of people.
6. We've been playing god by saving peoples lives who shouldn't due to evolution ever since we figured out how to bandage a wound. Are you suggesting we not treat anyone so that the people with the "wrong" genes will die? To use your argument, that sounds pretty close to the theme of Gattaca or Brave New World to me.
7. Maybe this is an alternate treatment, I really don't know. Even if it is, the existance of an alternate treatment isn't an argument that what they're doing is wrong.
8. What does it teach him? Maybe that his parents will do anything to save him? That his parents value life? Sorry, the answers to this question seem pretty open ended to me. It all depends on what his parents teach him, which is really no different than anyone else.
Based on many years of paying attention to this movement. I've seen to many people that are overly concerned about "not being a bad person", and not really concerned about actually solving the problem.
Anyway, I intended the last comment as an interesting point to my story, not the serious theory with data points to support it that you seem to be assuming.