Some meats require special preparation,like mountain oyster or tongue.
That's probbably true, but I'd attribute this more to generations of aquired knowledge about how to make these meats edible than anything else. The cook might have been very skilled, but that doesn't mean you can figure out how to cook a penguin properly, or hide the taste with marinades, spices, etc.
Penguins, long considered to be inedible by even the most hardiest of sailors, have recently been discovered to taste a lot like veal, if cooked for long enough.
Even duck or goose require one to know a bit of something more about cooking than throw it in to roast.
Well, it also comes down to personal preference, and if the animal was wild or farm raised. I've had wild duck before, and found it to be far too gamey (yuck). My girlfriend on the other hand enjoyed it. Supposedly farm raised duck is far less gamey. I've never had goose, but I'm never heard it's much different from preparing other poultry. Anyway, the point is that farm raised foods are either bred to taste better, fed foods that don't make them taste disagreeable, etc.
Hmm I agree with your professor - but, and that is a big but - for people other than math majors, the number is the most important thing.
Well, I think that's true once you actually know how to solve the problem. You can then concentrate on arriving at the answer. But when you have no clue on how to solve the problem you're never going to arrive at the answer.
What I'm getting at is that inside a math class they're trying to teach you how to solve the problem, not find the answer. Sure, by understanding the problem you'll be able to find the answer, but that's not the point. In a math class no one really cares when the two trains from New York and LA meet, knowing it means nothing. But if you studied hard and knew how to solve those kinds of problems, once you leave school and people start wanting the answers you'll be able to give them because you know how the process works. If you only concentrated on "getting the answer" in math class and not solving the problem, you'll be useless. That's why the GP's prof. was trying to de-emphasize the answer, and emphasize the method.
I can't say this is terribly surprising. There's a belief out there that computers are just one big interface, and if you can crack the interface then you understand the thing that underlies the interface. Kids these days have all mastered the art of understanding computer interfaces. Since they can remember they've been the family "computer expert" when Mom needs to find a recipe for chicken soup. "geezz mom!.. just type in google.com up in that address bar, type in "chicken soup recipe" down in that other bar, and click on those blue things". Mom thinks Jr. is some kind of frickin geniuous because he knew some small thing SHE didn't know.
Of course just because you can click the right buttons doesn't mean you know what the hell is going on. I've seen a guy that calls himself a "computer consultant" re-configure TCP/IP and not know a lick about what a router was, what an IP address is, what DNS is, what a netmask means, etc. And that'd be fine if there wasn't an assumption that you really knew what was going on. We all start out at that level, it's just most people never get any farther than being what I call a "interface jockey".
So I don't find it really surprising that this principle translates into the entire generation (and no, I don't think previous generations have been any better at the same skills). I think the lesson here is that we need to stop concentrating on the interface, and start concentrating on how to use the tool. Teaching a guy how to swing a hammer is nice and all, but it doesn't mean you know anything about building a fence. Similarly knowing how to do a web search is useless unless you know how to seperate good sources from bad, narrow your search, define your problem, learn how to refine your search through what you've learned, etc.
Reiser may end up on death row because he was unable to raise enough funds to hire a good enough attorney.
Some would say he might wind up on death row because he murdered his wife. Hard to say if that's true or not, but finding spatters of blood on his car and inside his home aren't really good signs.
As far as defense, Riser has nowhere near the money to put up a brillant OJ style defense that can get you out of anything. Plus he's a white guy, so the race card won't play very well.
Suppose it was similar to postal mail (federal felony) for messing with it. You'd want a situation where cating the wrong file could be a felony?
I don't see how making e-mail regulations similar to postal regulations would mean that cating the wrong file would be a federal felony. I assume that postal regulations allow mail to be read for normal post office operations. If a letter is torn open and some guy reads a few sentences by accident, I'm pretty sure the guy who read the few lines of it isn't going to jail.
On a similar note, I'm pretty sure it's illegal for a postal employee to open up your mail and start reading it without a valid reason. It should be a similar deal for you to read your friends email without sufficient administrative reason.
Any message sent across it unencrypted is just as much fair game for prosecutuion as taking a picture of you mooning other cars on the freeway.
And exactly how is the transmission medium of the internet any different in terms of expectations of privacy than my phone line? Yes, I DO understand how the internet works, but that doesn't mean that it's legal for ISPs or internet providers to tap into my communications. A data line coming into my house, and all the data lines connecting the internet are inherently private forms of communication. It's no different than the telephone network where voice traffic can cross multiple providers on its way to the destination. It's nothing like going outside onto public land and mooning cars.
The drinking age was raised to 21 because of an increased risk from young people drinking and driving. For some reason Congress decided to raise the drinking age to 21, and do nothing with the driving age. (Yes I know it was state legislatures that did it, but it was essentially a MAJOR push by the US Congress by removing highway funds if they didn't).
Frankly I think this was backwards. Peoples first experience with alcohol tends to be underage drinking (away from the protection of parents), or after they're adults (same deal). A lot of people tend to go overboard when they either first start drinking, legal age or otherwise. They also tend to have drivers licenses at the time, since the driving age is 16, and even lower at 14 in some states. That combination is not particularly smart.
Personally I think we should lower the drinking age to 16, so first drinking experiences can be under the protection of parents, and raise the driving age to 18. I doubt it'll ever happen since the religious right will cry foul about letting children drink (even beer and wine let's say), and middle america will cry foul because they don't want to drive their kids around because they can't get a license.
Re:The electromagnetic spectrum has limits, people
on
Companies Betting on WiMAX
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· Score: 2, Informative
The article mentions the 2.5 GHz specturm. It isn't all that much different than the 2.4 we know and love today, except that the spectrum is licensed.
Yah, but with a license it's likely that devices and access points can transmit at higher powers. That can provide either higher bits/second, or longer distances. Also, does the WiMax standard provide for a larger spectrum allocation than the WiFi does? I don't know, but if it does that would certainly be a boost to available bandwidth. There is already sufficient suspicion that cellular transmissions aren't good for you. I can't imagine WiMax is going to fare much better here, but that has yet to be seen.
In fact it's exactly the opposite. There's a lot of evidence that cellular transmissions have no harmful effect at all. There was at least one study done in Finland that was discussed on Slashdot not long ago.
A bigger problem is that we are basing all of this conversation on an article about a study, rather than the paper itself. If you have ever been involved with anything involving the press, you would probably be a lot less doubtful of the researchers methods assuming that the reporter simply flubbed some details and completely made up some lines.
Oh I absolutely agree. I've love to actually read the paper This article is a lot better than most science stories, probbably because it's from Science News, and not the AP or local newspaper. I've also had similar experiences where I knew something about the story and the reporter completely flubbed the details.
The article also says the following: Unlike the negatively inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.
So what's going on here? It's pretty impossible to say from the article itself. You'd need to read the actual paper.
Each person was quarantined in a separate room and monitored for 5 or 6 days.
Monitored for what? The article doesn't say. However it DOES say this: Unlike the negatively inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.
So the only result was that the people with "positive" outlooks reported less than were actually detected. Isn't that exactly what I said might be a problem with this study? Mood has a great deal to do with morbidity. Physicians have known for YEARS that the mortality and morbidity rate for an individual will skyrocket in the first year after a divorce, bereavement of a loved one, or some other major stress factor.
And I suspect these are all correlation studies. See correlation doesn't imply causation.
That's the first, and probbably most glaring problem with this study. The second is that according t o the article the cold symptoms were self-reported. How do we know that people with "positive" emotions aren't just more willing to ignore any symptoms they have, or rate them lower? In other words attitude might affect how people interpret, or report symptoms.
I'd have been more impressed if the researchers had chosen an objective method of measuring symptoms rather than a subjective one.
Why in the world can't I plug my USB keyboard in it and type?
WHY, GOD, WHY???
Maybe because not enough people are interested in that feature to justify developing it, and there's not really any apps out right now that it'd be usefull?
I agree that Kasparov's knowledge of the game of chess won't help him in politics. But Kasparov has a great deal of experience in self promotion, which is a large part of getting elected. How many chess masters has anyone heard of (aside from Bobby Fisher) before Kasparov? He's used some of his fame in recent years promoting himself in politics as an opponent to Putin. It's also possible that the energy, discipline, and self-drivenness of anyone that's been the at the top of a field might help him in politics.
With that said, it's difficult for anyone in the US to know if he stands any chance against Putin. Everyone in the US knew that Donald Trump had no chance to be elected US President several years ago, but he might have looked like a valid candidate to someone outside the US.
Ok, I can accept that definition of "liberal", (though I'd really call it more libertarian). So how about a Texas law banning gay sex, that was only struck down by the US Supreme Court 4 years ago? Is that liberal by your definition?
In the context of the United States, Texas was only one of four states that sodomy laws against gays hadn't been struck down by state courts, or repealed by the legislature. There's plenty of states ready to legalize marijuana. Nevada almost passed a referendum to allow its sale in the open. I don't believe Texas is among those states. Massachusets has legalized gay marriage, New Jersey is likely to do so quite soon. How's Texas doing on that front?
Those are the things I'd look at to define liberties, and sorry, but I just can't see calling Texas liberal, at least within the context of the United States. Sure, Texas isn't as crazy reactionary as Bavaria.. but then Bavaria is probbably the craziest part of Germany.
1) The authentication only needs to be secure for a second or two. I just use it foil a man-in-the-middle-attack or authenticate part of the protocol. So, if I use public key authentication, and the public key is then cracked, no problem, I've already used it to authenticate.
err.. OK. And when you need to generate a new public key (because your original one was cracked) how do you transmit it to the other party? How did the other party get the original public key?
It's true that he could then hijack ALL communication channels between Alice and Bob, decrypt messages using one key and then re-encrypt them using the othe
I thought this is EXACTLY what a man-in-the-middle attack was. If you have another communication channel that doesn't have an attacker between Alice and Bob, Alice and Bob are always going to figure out that they aren't sharing the same key. but... it would probably be easier just to bribe the people doing the transmitting and receiving to tell him what the messages were
Well sure.. but it's also easier to do that than crack conventional cryptography. So given this, what advantage does quantum cryptography have?
We ARE talking about the state that wants to make it legal for the blind to hunt, right?
I'm not sure I'd call Texas "liberal", but maybe it is compared to some of the other southern states. If you're looking for an extremely conservative state, I'd probbably pick Utah.
Germany has a complex over the whole Third Reich thing - it's understandable, but let's face it, if you weren't involved or responsible somehow, you need to build a bridge and get over it.
Eh, the way I've always looked at it is the Germans are Nazi's about being Nazi's. They don't like to talk about it, but there HAS to be something about German culture that allowed the Nazi's to be so successfull. Now they've just re-assigned that same behaviour towards other forms of control.
you took no time to consider my proposition that theories of punishment are ultimately rationalizations.
I think that's ultimately an impossible thing to prove or disprove, so why consider it? The only thing you can do is find an action that's not in the best interest of the actor and call that irrational. I don't see anything that can't be explained about punishment that can't be explained through rational means. Do people have emotional reactions to crimes? Of course. Do some judges act emotionally when handing out sentences? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean punishment is a form of revenge or some kind of payback. If you could know with certainty that someone committed a crime, wholly without regard to consequences, and further that his punishment or lack thereof would never effect another persons decision to commit any crime, should that person be punished?
I never argued that the only justification for locking someone up is deterrence. I fully acknowledge that it's often times a means to protect society.
Anyway, your thought experiment is invalid. We don't live in a world where you can get perfect knowledge of peoples motivations, and the effect of actions. Our brains our geared towards predicting the future and understanding the past and present based on our limited knowledge and experience, not perfect knowledge of the past, present, and future. Thus our entire world view is shaped by that. I can't give you an answer to that question, since it's beyond anyones experience. You might as well come up with a thought experiment asking what life would be like if there were 6 spacial dimensions. Maybe you could even come up with an answer based upon a purely mathematical model, but that doesn't mean it has any bearing on this world.
I don't know where you get that idea, but many thinkers smarter than you or I have thought about punishment for centuries.
I guess I don't subscribe to the theory that when someone "smarter" than me has already said something about a subject, that makes what I think totally invalid, or at least less valid. I also don't subscribe to the theory that what people believed in the past is what's true right now. If you really think that the only worthwhile aspect of prison is deterrence, we should probably release anyone who commits a crime of passion. A crime of passion is essentially something that is done illegally without thought of consequences (which is why the death penalty as a deterrent argument is bunk.)
That's assuming we could somehow determine, with 100% accuracy whether a crime was a crime of passion, or pre-meditated in some way. YOu can't trust the perpetrator. How do you know the person isn't lying, or just simply wrong about what would or wouldn't have affected their actions?
It's also assuming there IS such a thing as a crime of passion where the consequences or lack thereof don't play into person commiting, or not commiting the crime.
The third assumption is that all people are equally likely of crimes of passion, so removing anyone that commits crimes of passion would have no effect on protecting society.
The first assumtion is obviously incorrect. The second assumption I'm not really sure about, and probbably isn't even something you could really prove one way or another with any certainty. The third assumption you could probbably show statistically one way or the other, buy I know of no such statistics.
In any case, it's pretty obvious to err on the side of caution, and lock people up who commit a "crime of passion".
I would call that "fundamental feature" a security hole.
I wouldn't call it so much of a security hole (though that's certainly true), but really more of a maintenance and stability problem.
Right now Windows installations essentially "rot" because users continually need (or at least want to) install new software. I know I wind up having to re-install windows every few years for exactly this reason.
As long as you stick within your distribution, Linux doesn't really have this problem. The downside of course is that after a couple years the linux world mostly abandons you and you can't install new packages because they no longer supported. Sure, you can try to compile the thing yourself.. but be prepared for multiple hours of tracking down different dependencies. So you wind up re-installing Linux every couple years too. The upside of linux is that you re-installed because you want newer/better software, not because something is broken.
I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but maybe this comparison is usefull to someone.
Thanks for the explanation. I've noticed this problem for years, but I've never actively filed it away as an inherent problem with RPM. People just seem to say "RPM Sucks", and leave it at that with the assumption that we all know exactly what they're talking about.
My point is that punishment is just a form of deterrence. We don't put people in jail to "pay" for what they've done, nor do we put people in jail as a form of revenge.
Yes, but we didn't send the Enron guys to jail because they're dangerous. We sent them to jail because they were bad (among other reasons.)
I'm not sure I understand what "bad" means within the context of jail. The reason why the Enron boys should (and did) go to jail was to deter other people from doing the same thing. We could make Enron execs effectively harmless in the future by banning them from certain business positions.
Which would have little or no deterrance to stop anyone else from doing it again. Why not try the same thing if the only consequence is being banned from that practice? This is another way in which sending the Enron boys to jail protects society. If we didn't, society would be threatened by others who want to get away with the same thing. When we talk about sending someone to jail because they're dangerous it usually means preventing them from physically harming people in society at large.
I disagree. We send plenty of people to jail to prevent them from commiting non-violent crimes. The guy commiting check-fraud sure isn't a violent criminal, but he's still hurting society. A spammer hasn't physically hurt anyone, but most everyone on slashdot is harmed in some small way every day by these people. Locking them up in jail is often the ONLY way we can prevent them from harming others.
Slashdot Mirror
Some meats require special preparation,like mountain oyster or tongue.
That's probbably true, but I'd attribute this more to generations of aquired knowledge about how to make these meats edible than anything else. The cook might have been very skilled, but that doesn't mean you can figure out how to cook a penguin properly, or hide the taste with marinades, spices, etc.
In fact, as further evidence for this theory I present to following: http://www.goliathcorp.com/penguin.html
Even duck or goose require one to know a bit of something more about cooking than throw it in to roast.
Well, it also comes down to personal preference, and if the animal was wild or farm raised. I've had wild duck before, and found it to be far too gamey (yuck). My girlfriend on the other hand enjoyed it. Supposedly farm raised duck is far less gamey. I've never had goose, but I'm never heard it's much different from preparing other poultry. Anyway, the point is that farm raised foods are either bred to taste better, fed foods that don't make them taste disagreeable, etc.
Hmm I agree with your professor - but, and that is a big but - for people other than math majors, the number is the most important thing.
Well, I think that's true once you actually know how to solve the problem. You can then concentrate on arriving at the answer. But when you have no clue on how to solve the problem you're never going to arrive at the answer.
What I'm getting at is that inside a math class they're trying to teach you how to solve the problem, not find the answer. Sure, by understanding the problem you'll be able to find the answer, but that's not the point. In a math class no one really cares when the two trains from New York and LA meet, knowing it means nothing. But if you studied hard and knew how to solve those kinds of problems, once you leave school and people start wanting the answers you'll be able to give them because you know how the process works. If you only concentrated on "getting the answer" in math class and not solving the problem, you'll be useless. That's why the GP's prof. was trying to de-emphasize the answer, and emphasize the method.
I can't say this is terribly surprising. There's a belief out there that computers are just one big interface, and if you can crack the interface then you understand the thing that underlies the interface. Kids these days have all mastered the art of understanding computer interfaces. Since they can remember they've been the family "computer expert" when Mom needs to find a recipe for chicken soup. "geezz mom!.. just type in google.com up in that address bar, type in "chicken soup recipe" down in that other bar, and click on those blue things". Mom thinks Jr. is some kind of frickin geniuous because he knew some small thing SHE didn't know.
Of course just because you can click the right buttons doesn't mean you know what the hell is going on. I've seen a guy that calls himself a "computer consultant" re-configure TCP/IP and not know a lick about what a router was, what an IP address is, what DNS is, what a netmask means, etc. And that'd be fine if there wasn't an assumption that you really knew what was going on. We all start out at that level, it's just most people never get any farther than being what I call a "interface jockey".
So I don't find it really surprising that this principle translates into the entire generation (and no, I don't think previous generations have been any better at the same skills). I think the lesson here is that we need to stop concentrating on the interface, and start concentrating on how to use the tool. Teaching a guy how to swing a hammer is nice and all, but it doesn't mean you know anything about building a fence. Similarly knowing how to do a web search is useless unless you know how to seperate good sources from bad, narrow your search, define your problem, learn how to refine your search through what you've learned, etc.
Reiser may end up on death row because he was unable to raise enough funds to hire a good enough attorney.
Some would say he might wind up on death row because he murdered his wife. Hard to say if that's true or not, but finding spatters of blood on his car and inside his home aren't really good signs.
As far as defense, Riser has nowhere near the money to put up a brillant OJ style defense that can get you out of anything. Plus he's a white guy, so the race card won't play very well.
Suppose it was similar to postal mail (federal felony) for messing with it. You'd want a situation where cating the wrong file could be a felony?
I don't see how making e-mail regulations similar to postal regulations would mean that cating the wrong file would be a federal felony. I assume that postal regulations allow mail to be read for normal post office operations. If a letter is torn open and some guy reads a few sentences by accident, I'm pretty sure the guy who read the few lines of it isn't going to jail.
On a similar note, I'm pretty sure it's illegal for a postal employee to open up your mail and start reading it without a valid reason. It should be a similar deal for you to read your friends email without sufficient administrative reason.
Any message sent across it unencrypted is just as much fair game for prosecutuion as taking a picture of you mooning other cars on the freeway.
And exactly how is the transmission medium of the internet any different in terms of expectations of privacy than my phone line? Yes, I DO understand how the internet works, but that doesn't mean that it's legal for ISPs or internet providers to tap into my communications. A data line coming into my house, and all the data lines connecting the internet are inherently private forms of communication. It's no different than the telephone network where voice traffic can cross multiple providers on its way to the destination. It's nothing like going outside onto public land and mooning cars.
The drinking age was raised to 21 because of an increased risk from young people drinking and driving. For
some reason Congress decided to raise the drinking age to 21, and do nothing with the driving age. (Yes I know it was state legislatures that did it, but it was essentially a MAJOR push by the US Congress by removing highway funds if they didn't).
Frankly I think this was backwards. Peoples first experience with alcohol tends to be underage drinking (away from the protection of parents), or after they're adults (same deal). A lot of people tend to go overboard when they either first start drinking, legal age or otherwise. They also tend to have drivers licenses at the time, since the driving age is 16, and even lower at 14 in some states. That combination is not particularly smart.
Personally I think we should lower the drinking age to 16, so first drinking experiences can be under the protection of parents, and raise the driving age to 18. I doubt it'll ever happen since the religious right will cry foul about letting children drink (even beer and wine let's say), and middle america will cry foul because they don't want to drive their kids around because they can't get a license.
The article mentions the 2.5 GHz specturm. It isn't all that much different than the 2.4 we know and love today, except that the spectrum is licensed.
Yah, but with a license it's likely that devices and access points can transmit at higher powers. That can provide either higher bits/second, or longer distances. Also, does the WiMax standard provide for a larger spectrum allocation than the WiFi does? I don't know, but if it does that would certainly be a boost to available bandwidth.
There is already sufficient suspicion that cellular transmissions aren't good for you. I can't imagine WiMax is going to fare much better here, but that has yet to be seen.
In fact it's exactly the opposite. There's a lot of evidence that cellular transmissions have no harmful effect at all. There was at least one study done in Finland that was discussed on Slashdot not long ago.
A bigger problem is that we are basing all of this conversation on an article about a study, rather than the paper itself. If you have ever been involved with anything involving the press, you would probably be a lot less doubtful of the researchers methods assuming that the reporter simply flubbed some details and completely made up some lines.
Oh I absolutely agree. I've love to actually read the paper This article is a lot better than most science stories, probbably because it's from Science News, and not the AP or local newspaper. I've also had similar experiences where I knew something about the story and the reporter completely flubbed the details.
The article also says the following:
Unlike the negatively inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.
So what's going on here? It's pretty impossible to say from the article itself. You'd need to read the actual paper.
Each person was quarantined in a separate room and monitored for 5 or 6 days.
Monitored for what? The article doesn't say. However it DOES say this:
Unlike the negatively inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.
So the only result was that the people with "positive" outlooks reported less than were actually detected. Isn't that exactly what I said might be a problem with this study?
Mood has a great deal to do with morbidity. Physicians have known for YEARS that the mortality and morbidity rate for an individual will skyrocket in the first year after a divorce, bereavement of a loved one, or some other major stress factor.
And I suspect these are all correlation studies. See correlation doesn't imply causation.
That's the first, and probbably most glaring problem with this study. The second is that according t o the article the cold symptoms were self-reported. How do we know that people with "positive" emotions aren't just more willing to ignore any symptoms they have, or rate them lower? In other words attitude might affect how people interpret, or report symptoms.
I'd have been more impressed if the researchers had chosen an objective method of measuring symptoms rather than a subjective one.
Why in the world can't I plug my USB keyboard in it and type?
WHY, GOD, WHY???
Maybe because not enough people are interested in that feature to justify developing it, and there's not really any apps out right now that it'd be usefull?
I agree that Kasparov's knowledge of the game of chess won't help him in politics. But Kasparov has a great deal of experience in self promotion, which is a large part of getting elected. How many chess masters has anyone heard of (aside from Bobby Fisher) before Kasparov? He's used some of his fame in recent years promoting himself in politics as an opponent to Putin. It's also possible that the energy, discipline, and self-drivenness of anyone that's been the at the top of a field might help him in politics.
With that said, it's difficult for anyone in the US to know if he stands any chance against Putin. Everyone in the US knew that Donald Trump had no chance to be elected US President several years ago, but he might have looked like a valid candidate to someone outside the US.
Ok, I can accept that definition of "liberal", (though I'd really call it more libertarian). So how about a Texas law banning gay sex, that was only struck down by the US Supreme Court 4 years ago? Is that liberal by your definition?
In the context of the United States, Texas was only one of four states that sodomy laws against gays hadn't been struck down by state courts, or repealed by the legislature. There's plenty of states ready to legalize marijuana. Nevada almost passed a referendum to allow its sale in the open. I don't believe Texas is among those states. Massachusets has legalized gay marriage, New Jersey is likely to do so quite soon. How's Texas doing on that front?
Those are the things I'd look at to define liberties, and sorry, but I just can't see calling Texas liberal, at least within the context of the United States. Sure, Texas isn't as crazy reactionary as Bavaria.. but then Bavaria is probbably the craziest part of Germany.
1) The authentication only needs to be secure for a second or two. I just use it foil a man-in-the-middle-attack or authenticate part of the protocol. So, if I use public key authentication, and the public key is then cracked, no problem, I've already used it to authenticate.
err.. OK. And when you need to generate a new public key (because your original one was cracked) how do you transmit it to the other party? How did the other party get the original public key?
It's true that he could then hijack ALL communication channels between Alice and Bob, decrypt messages using one key and then re-encrypt them using the othe
I thought this is EXACTLY what a man-in-the-middle attack was. If you have another communication channel that doesn't have an attacker between Alice and Bob, Alice and Bob are always going to figure out that they aren't sharing the same key.
but... it would probably be easier just to bribe the people doing the transmitting and receiving to tell him what the messages were
Well sure.. but it's also easier to do that than crack conventional cryptography. So given this, what advantage does quantum cryptography have?
Texas is pretty damn socially liberal.
We ARE talking about the state that wants to make it legal for the blind to hunt, right?
I'm not sure I'd call Texas "liberal", but maybe it is compared to some of the other southern states. If you're looking for an extremely conservative state, I'd probbably pick Utah.
Germany has a complex over the whole Third Reich thing - it's understandable, but let's face it, if you weren't involved or responsible somehow, you need to build a bridge and get over it.
Eh, the way I've always looked at it is the Germans are Nazi's about being Nazi's. They don't like to talk about it, but there HAS to be something about German culture that allowed the Nazi's to be so successfull. Now they've just re-assigned that same behaviour towards other forms of control.
you took no time to consider my proposition that theories of punishment are ultimately rationalizations.
I think that's ultimately an impossible thing to prove or disprove, so why consider it? The only thing you can do is find an action that's not in the best interest of the actor and call that irrational. I don't see anything that can't be explained about punishment that can't be explained through rational means. Do people have emotional reactions to crimes? Of course. Do some judges act emotionally when handing out sentences? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean punishment is a form of revenge or some kind of payback.
If you could know with certainty that someone committed a crime, wholly without regard to consequences, and further that his punishment or lack thereof would never effect another persons decision to commit any crime, should that person be punished?
I never argued that the only justification for locking someone up is deterrence. I fully acknowledge that it's often times a means to protect society.
Anyway, your thought experiment is invalid. We don't live in a world where you can get perfect knowledge of peoples motivations, and the effect of actions. Our brains our geared towards predicting the future and understanding the past and present based on our limited knowledge and experience, not perfect knowledge of the past, present, and future. Thus our entire world view is shaped by that. I can't give you an answer to that question, since it's beyond anyones experience. You might as well come up with a thought experiment asking what life would be like if there were 6 spacial dimensions. Maybe you could even come up with an answer based upon a purely mathematical model, but that doesn't mean it has any bearing on this world.
I don't know where you get that idea, but many thinkers smarter than you or I have thought about punishment for centuries.
I guess I don't subscribe to the theory that when someone "smarter" than me has already said something about a subject, that makes what I think totally invalid, or at least less valid. I also don't subscribe to the theory that what people believed in the past is what's true right now.
If you really think that the only worthwhile aspect of prison is deterrence, we should probably release anyone who commits a crime of passion. A crime of passion is essentially something that is done illegally without thought of consequences (which is why the death penalty as a deterrent argument is bunk.)
That's assuming we could somehow determine, with 100% accuracy whether a crime was a crime of passion, or pre-meditated in some way. YOu can't trust the perpetrator. How do you know the person isn't lying, or just simply wrong about what would or wouldn't have affected their actions?
It's also assuming there IS such a thing as a crime of passion where the consequences or lack thereof don't play into person commiting, or not commiting the crime.
The third assumption is that all people are equally likely of crimes of passion, so removing anyone that commits crimes of passion would have no effect on protecting society.
The first assumtion is obviously incorrect. The second assumption I'm not really sure about, and probbably isn't even something you could really prove one way or another with any certainty. The third assumption you could probbably show statistically one way or the other, buy I know of no such statistics.
In any case, it's pretty obvious to err on the side of caution, and lock people up who commit a "crime of passion".
I would call that "fundamental feature" a security hole.
I wouldn't call it so much of a security hole (though that's certainly true), but really more of a maintenance and stability problem.
Right now Windows installations essentially "rot" because users continually need (or at least want to) install new software. I know I wind up having to re-install windows every few years for exactly this reason.
As long as you stick within your distribution, Linux doesn't really have this problem. The downside of course is that after a couple years the linux world mostly abandons you and you can't install new packages because they no longer supported. Sure, you can try to compile the thing yourself.. but be prepared for multiple hours of tracking down different dependencies. So you wind up re-installing Linux every couple years too. The upside of linux is that you re-installed because you want newer/better software, not because something is broken.
I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but maybe this comparison is usefull to someone.
Thanks for the explanation. I've noticed this problem for years, but I've never actively filed it away as an inherent problem with RPM. People just seem to say "RPM Sucks", and leave it at that with the assumption that we all know exactly what they're talking about.
My point is that punishment is just a form of deterrence. We don't put people in jail to "pay" for what they've done, nor do we put people in jail as a form of revenge.
Yes, but we didn't send the Enron guys to jail because they're dangerous. We sent them to jail because they were bad (among other reasons.)
I'm not sure I understand what "bad" means within the context of jail. The reason why the Enron boys should (and did) go to jail was to deter other people from doing the same thing.
We could make Enron execs effectively harmless in the future by banning them from certain business positions.
Which would have little or no deterrance to stop anyone else from doing it again. Why not try the same thing if the only consequence is being banned from that practice? This is another way in which sending the Enron boys to jail protects society. If we didn't, society would be threatened by others who want to get away with the same thing.
When we talk about sending someone to jail because they're dangerous it usually means preventing them from physically harming people in society at large.
I disagree. We send plenty of people to jail to prevent them from commiting non-violent crimes. The guy commiting check-fraud sure isn't a violent criminal, but he's still hurting society. A spammer hasn't physically hurt anyone, but most everyone on slashdot is harmed in some small way every day by these people. Locking them up in jail is often the ONLY way we can prevent them from harming others.