Jesus yeah. After Newton, Savery, Gallileo, the Apollo program, the microchip, electricity, penicillin, and crop rotation you'd really think they'd have got the message:
don't fuck with nature
I wonder what happens if the Chinese government subpoenas them for the Gmail accounts of pro-democracy protesters, or when the lawyers prosecuting the next Enron ask for the records of what the accused searched for. I think this is a big problem for Google. Shame that America's legal system is trying quite so hard to fuck up America's business interests, for so little benefit.
It has been looked at, and will definitely be "looked at" again iff someone were to come up with a new idea. It's been looked at by a climatology blog with a history of slagging off anyone who disagrees with them. I think he meant serious, peer reviewed investigation.
From the blog:
At RealClimate, we've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work and lead to confused, and sometimes erroneous, headlines, but this example is by far the most blatant The most blatant press release - probably since the last ice age?
It's as though Svensmark and co. want to enhance the field of solar-terrestrial research's bad reputation for agenda-driven science. In case the writers didn't know - environmentalists are also widely regarded as having a bad reputation for agenda-driven science, hence the title "the cult of global warming". They may be right, but blogs like this don't help.
I take your point that Skype is a closed protocol - but how are skype a monopoly? They're competing with vonage, SIP, Wengo, Tesco and landline and mobile providers too. One of the best things about Skype is that they are an alternative to monopolistic providers - and one of the ways they safeguard this is by having a protocol that is difficult to detect and block.
So yes, I'd prefer them to have an open protocol, but I can see some benefits to them having a closed one. And if they read the bios? I guess that's why I could only get it running as root...
What about the poor pedo who goes for HotLuv1949 when he meant to go for HotLuv1994... Sorry I think I may be slightly twisted...
By the way - here's the link to a story on Chris Morris's BrassEye special on PEDOGEDDON. The show was released during a UK-wide paedophile media-witchhunt, shortly after a Paediatrician in Newport had her house vandalised by idiots. Dirty Paedo.
That link is poor. So "Wayne Madsen"s "Intel" is that the Police (a public service) have fucked up an IT system. That is not news - this was reported on Radio 4 (a government broadcasting body) - and it doesn't suggest "fox in hen house" - it suggests he's can't come through on his threats. The other thing which is particularly amusing about Wayne's attempt to talk down to American youth is the way he calls Reid a "neo-con" - when Reids party is more accurately called "New Labour" - the left wing (if there is one) in British politics. And "History of Rock and Roll part III" is still a brilliant song, so he can STFU about Glitter, and maybe dig up some "intel" on Stubbs, Reynolds, Ted Kennedy, and of course, Mr Hillary Clinton.
For anyone who doesn't know, John Reid thinks he can be next Prime Minister of the UK. His odds according to the betting exchanges are 1 in 20, and recently he has fucked things up by not building enough prisons. He's currently playing the "bash paedophiles" card, because he can't play the "leave the convicts to rot" card due to the fact that his party, err... forgot to build enough prisons, and he can't play the "keep the foreigners out" card because the country needs immigrants to keep the economy going.
That's because you're assuming you're not ever going to be in that database or one like it. Depends what sense he means "having" in. If he means it in the sense of "Billie Piper? I've had 'er..." he really should seek help, and perhaps he recognises that he is evil, and wants to be stopped.
On the other hand I really pity CowboyNeal if this legislation comes in...
I think it's great to see a media company making a $2m grant for the benefit of the mentally disabled. My apologies to anyone reading this who is genuinely mentally disabled, I can understand your annoyance at being compared with these clowns.
...council for the organization said that 'the community wants to interfere any way it can' with the Novell business arrangement. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft' Ballmer described patent problems in Linux as an "undisclosed balance sheet liability", in an interview on the deal. I am not a risk manager, but from what I know of Sarbannes-Oxeley it may make it very difficult for company officers (who can go to jail for 25 years for mis-stating liabilities) to adopt non-Novell linux.
I don't know if this is the best way to fight Microsoft, but bear in mind this is a battle against FUD, and if giving Novell/Microsoft a bit of FUD could kill this deal, maybe it would be a good thing.
The reason the wiki article goes on about the second law (entropy increases) is because the first law (energy is conserved) is seen as being fairly obvious, e.g. a ball will never bounce higher than the level it was dropped from, and the first law applies both forwards and backwards in time. The second law is weird, since it is time inhomogeneous (entropy increases when time goes forward, and therefore would decrease as time goes backwards), and it seems to be more a statistical result than a scientific one.
It's interesting to note that the first law, conservation of energy, is not true within General Relativity within any bounded region, due to the existence of gravitational waves. Here's an article about it http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/G R/energy_gr.html/. I provide only this as evidence that I'm not talking out of my arse - I could understand GR once, many years ago, but not now.
The police apparently learned what bombs look like from hollywood movies and comic books. Modded funny but it should be modded insightful. Homeland and other security types appear to have understood the least important 5% of how to deal with risk - look out for the obvious. This should be a last chance precaution to make sure something awful isn't happening. Unfortunately they appear to have made it 50% of their strategy.
The other lesson they seem to have learnt is how to avoid the precise event that just happened - so airport security bans knives (despite the high probability that a terrorist with just a knife would get beaten to death on an airplane now). They ban lighters and check the soles of your shoes (in case like Richard Reid, you choose to have an explosive, detonated via a burning fuse, in the bottom of your shoes). They ban liquids, but not malleable plasticised materials, on the grounds that people once planned to use liquid explosives.
The parrot like nature of the security services is frankly embarassing. I can see two reasons why they do this - 1) fear of getting fired - if a terrorist does something exactly the same way and succeeds a second time then you look grossly incompetent, and will get fired, and 2) security does not attract the brightest sparks. The better wages and conditions in the private sector, IT, meds, energy etc. attract away the intelligent people we need running this stuff.
This ad campaign won't do anything to fix it, didn't even try, but the ad geek who came up with it deserves massive respect. Exposing publicly funded stupidity like this deserves an award. I just hope that many many heads roll.
I think that desktop linux is not ready because it still plagued by a problem of text configuration files. I'm perfectly OK configuring my debian box from various files in/etc directory, however most of the users e.g. normal people aren't, and as long as proper GUI configuration tools, like Control Panel in windows, are absent from KDE/GNOME desktop environments I don't think that majority of people would like to use it. I think you're wrong. I had to know what autoexec.ini was on windows 95, and Control Panel is not usable by most users, anyone who can use it can use a text file just as easily. Most users are quite content with a "I can't make it work, it's broken, but I can live without it" attitude, so the key thing is that the computer (mostly) configure itself - which on Ubuntu, it seems to do. Thank god.
> Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS
More like a magnitude of 10... AOS4 iso = ~50 MB... XP Pro iso = ~500-600 MB, IIRC.
Err... sorry but 10* larger is what "order of magnitude" means. Commonly abbreviated O(n), O(3) means in the thousands, O(2) means in the hundreds etc. Of course there's nothing you can do now you've posted, but this is slashdot so pedantry is it's own reward:) Good info about XP though... I'd like it if linux booted so quick, but given you never need to reboot, why bother...
That's a git if you're running a mailing list... I guess that if you're running a mailing list to more than 1000 people, and you send out mail every day, there's a chance your ISP would misidentify you as a spammer yes. I'd imagine that you could explain this to them over the telephone, and if it really upset you you could take your business to someone else. The current situation is a bit of "a git" for people that don't run mailing lists, but are not terribly tech literate, and I think their needs outweigh yours. I hope more ISPs follow NTL's example.
How long until the State Department decides this is considered a terrorist activity and finds a way to make it law/international treaty that this is abolished? Honestly, I can see the out-of-whack State security thugs deciding that this is an act of war. So you're putting words into the State Department's mouth, then criticising them for being out of whack, and deciding that they would use this to provoke an international dispute with China - which, aside from being a nuclear power, security council member, and owning enough T-bonds to screw the dollar into the floor, is also keeping US wages down and allowing American corporations to have the best earnings figures in history. With a grasp of political reality like yours you should really run for office - you're made for the presidency.
I'm pro business. I don't know about American law on corporations, etc. I think the reason why "liberals" (I take it to mean people who believe the state should intervene to a larger extent, directly and also by restricting private enterprise, to increase equality between the rich and poor) are not sympathetic to business is because it's difficult to see the benefit if you've never lived without it. If you've never been in a situation where you have to queue for food, where you have to be nice to the official so you can get a sharp razorblade, where you can only watch dull as dishwater government documentaries because there is no one making films or music videos etc, then you don't see how commerce benefits the individual. The reason I think the "libertarian" group can't see the downside of corporations is that I guess they're too busy working in them to worry much about the tramps on the pavement. And of course both sides become polarised because they wind each other up - and that's what we're here for:)
We really went wrong when we (or the SCOTUS, really) decided that corporations had "rights" just as if they were real people... at least we'd control the inhuman sociopaths that we call corporations. Spin lesson 1: Don't answer the question, or address the issue - control the question. They are asking you a question about political funding. That has negative connotations for politicians - how can politics be fair when politicians need funding to get elected? It's particularly bad if you're a big-government democrat and your own party is making a huge faux-pas. So divert the reader. You remember the film "The Corporation" - all that stuff about "psychoanalysing the corporation" and it being an inhuman sociopath? That's the question you want to answer - so give that answer...
Ignore the fact that this has nothing to do with corporate funding, that unions, the NRA, governments themselves are far more likely to try to control behaviour (since that's what they do) than businesses (since they just want to make money). Ignore the fact that the film "The Corporation" was actually made by a corporation, called "Big Picture Media Corporation", and did what corporations do best - helped people part with their dollars and gave them something they enjoyed... Corporations play badly in populations of slashdot readers, so that's the best way to dig your democrat friends out of the hole.
With a bit of luck no one will remember that it's governments that take away free speech (see Cambodia, Cuba, China, North Korea, USSR, Hungary, Romania etc. etc.) and not corporations (see Google, Ford, AT&T, Reuters, GE etc. etc.)
Gotta love it haven't you? The earnest student moaning about how awful Exxon is for selling oil, while he drinks his espresso (coffee beans flown from south america), and shows off the tan from his round the world trip (7 individual flights of an average 3000 miles, using 600 gallons of aviation fuel). I think someone once said choice begins with the individual.
This had me stumped. An orderly market? According to investopedia this means supply and demand are reasonably matched - there is no sudden swing of prices. Efficient economic transactions mean that the transactions maximise the net benefit to everyone - an example of an inefficient transaction is where I see that bananas are mispriced at the supermarket so that if I buy 100 it's cheaper than buying the single banana I want to eat. So I buy 100 and throw away 99 - inefficiency.
Efficiency is increased by better understanding the needs of the consumer and supplier. Since DRM only gives the supplier power over the actions of the consumer, and seems to be done with complete disregard for the needs of the consumer (c.f. Sony DRM rootkit), it seems to me that Glickman's argument is spurious, and he's just trying to justify what he wants to do by throwing around economic buzzwords. What unusual behaviour for a senior manager.
The reference to an orderly market presumably means that dropping the price of his product from $20 to $3 scares him, so he's trying to convince us it's not economically beneficial. Thanks for the quote, it's interesting to get a glimpse inside a stereotypical hollywood suit's head.
Yes. Always the same shit from the environmentalists - "humans going to blow up the planet". Greenpeace actually said, in one of their 90s pamphlets "humans about to destroy all life on earth"... Idiots. We may be able to take care of small flightless birds, we may be pretty good at wiping out most of the fish stocks, but humans could never destroy life on earth.
It's kind of instructive to think what we would have to do - start with the hard to reach - we need to kill all the life around the "smokers" at the bottom of the ocean, at the same time as carpet bombing the earth with nukes - but you've really got to cook every square mile of the entire planet. That means raising the temperature above boiling point (there's life at temperatures everywhere up to there) for long enough to kill every spore, bacterium. The important thing to bear in mind is that to kill life you have to kill every single bacterium, because one bacterium can mutate. In short it's not going to happen, it's probably technically infeasible, and no one wants to do it (not even George Bush)
I like to think this sums up two things - one the horrible grandiosity of environmental pressure groups - starting with their assumption that humans are powerful enough to do something that is virtually impossible, then assuming that they are more important than the people that can do this, that they are only people who understand the big picture. The other is that they know fuck all about any actual science (i.e. physics, chemistry, microbiology), and they don't seem to care to learn more.
Real climate scientists I salute - they do something virtually impossible. Environmental politicians (for that is what Greenpeace, and this crowd are) are just republicans who found a different issue first. Look at Al Gore - when he's not trying to ban music with obscene lyrics (PMRC) he's saving the environment with glossy hollywood films. Bless.
So what you're saying is there's a rich, powerful overclass and a depressed poor underclass. To keep this system in place (call it hegemony) the overclass create methods to subjugate the underclass (e.g. pop music - or so Adorno thought). But for some reason teachers are not a part of this system - they're part of a philanthropic class to themselves, and they are aiming to disrupt the class system. I think there's some truth in this - people do form clubs to keep benefits to themselves and exclude others.
The only problem is if people have the idea that there's only one club. There are lots - the labor unions, the American Medical Association, local government, social cliques and communist revolutionary governments are all groups that disenfranchise others for the benefit of the members. Democracy and capitalism are systems that should allow power to be distributed freely, and help to break up these groups. Unfortunately America seems to be getting worse at using both of these systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it is unfortunate for greenpeace.
I wonder what happens if the Chinese government subpoenas them for the Gmail accounts of pro-democracy protesters, or when the lawyers prosecuting the next Enron ask for the records of what the accused searched for. I think this is a big problem for Google. Shame that America's legal system is trying quite so hard to fuck up America's business interests, for so little benefit.
From the blog:
At RealClimate, we've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work and lead to confused, and sometimes erroneous, headlines, but this example is by far the most blatant The most blatant press release - probably since the last ice age? It's as though Svensmark and co. want to enhance the field of solar-terrestrial research's bad reputation for agenda-driven science. In case the writers didn't know - environmentalists are also widely regarded as having a bad reputation for agenda-driven science, hence the title "the cult of global warming". They may be right, but blogs like this don't help.So essentially it's a bit like hanging around with dealers and wearing a sign saying "I buy and sell crack cocaine".
I take your point that Skype is a closed protocol - but how are skype a monopoly? They're competing with vonage, SIP, Wengo, Tesco and landline and mobile providers too. One of the best things about Skype is that they are an alternative to monopolistic providers - and one of the ways they safeguard this is by having a protocol that is difficult to detect and block.
So yes, I'd prefer them to have an open protocol, but I can see some benefits to them having a closed one. And if they read the bios? I guess that's why I could only get it running as root...
What about the poor pedo who goes for HotLuv1949 when he meant to go for HotLuv1994... Sorry I think I may be slightly twisted...
By the way - here's the link to a story on Chris Morris's BrassEye special on PEDOGEDDON. The show was released during a UK-wide paedophile media-witchhunt, shortly after a Paediatrician in Newport had her house vandalised by idiots. Dirty Paedo.
That link is poor. So "Wayne Madsen"s "Intel" is that the Police (a public service) have fucked up an IT system. That is not news - this was reported on Radio 4 (a government broadcasting body) - and it doesn't suggest "fox in hen house" - it suggests he's can't come through on his threats. The other thing which is particularly amusing about Wayne's attempt to talk down to American youth is the way he calls Reid a "neo-con" - when Reids party is more accurately called "New Labour" - the left wing (if there is one) in British politics. And "History of Rock and Roll part III" is still a brilliant song, so he can STFU about Glitter, and maybe dig up some "intel" on Stubbs, Reynolds, Ted Kennedy, and of course, Mr Hillary Clinton.
For anyone who doesn't know, John Reid thinks he can be next Prime Minister of the UK. His odds according to the betting exchanges are 1 in 20, and recently he has fucked things up by not building enough prisons. He's currently playing the "bash paedophiles" card, because he can't play the "leave the convicts to rot" card due to the fact that his party, err... forgot to build enough prisons, and he can't play the "keep the foreigners out" card because the country needs immigrants to keep the economy going.
That's because you're assuming you're not ever going to be in that database or one like it. Depends what sense he means "having" in. If he means it in the sense of "Billie Piper? I've had 'er..." he really should seek help, and perhaps he recognises that he is evil, and wants to be stopped.
On the other hand I really pity CowboyNeal if this legislation comes in...
I think it's great to see a media company making a $2m grant for the benefit of the mentally disabled. My apologies to anyone reading this who is genuinely mentally disabled, I can understand your annoyance at being compared with these clowns.
...council for the organization said that 'the community wants to interfere any way it can' with the Novell business arrangement. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft' Ballmer described patent problems in Linux as an "undisclosed balance sheet liability", in an interview on the deal. I am not a risk manager, but from what I know of Sarbannes-Oxeley it may make it very difficult for company officers (who can go to jail for 25 years for mis-stating liabilities) to adopt non-Novell linux.I don't know if this is the best way to fight Microsoft, but bear in mind this is a battle against FUD, and if giving Novell/Microsoft a bit of FUD could kill this deal, maybe it would be a good thing.
The reason the wiki article goes on about the second law (entropy increases) is because the first law (energy is conserved) is seen as being fairly obvious, e.g. a ball will never bounce higher than the level it was dropped from, and the first law applies both forwards and backwards in time. The second law is weird, since it is time inhomogeneous (entropy increases when time goes forward, and therefore would decrease as time goes backwards), and it seems to be more a statistical result than a scientific one.
G R/energy_gr.html/. I provide only this as evidence that I'm not talking out of my arse - I could understand GR once, many years ago, but not now.
It's interesting to note that the first law, conservation of energy, is not true within General Relativity within any bounded region, due to the existence of gravitational waves. Here's an article about it http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/
The other lesson they seem to have learnt is how to avoid the precise event that just happened - so airport security bans knives (despite the high probability that a terrorist with just a knife would get beaten to death on an airplane now).
They ban lighters and check the soles of your shoes (in case like Richard Reid, you choose to have an explosive, detonated via a burning fuse, in the bottom of your shoes).
They ban liquids, but not malleable plasticised materials, on the grounds that people once planned to use liquid explosives.
The parrot like nature of the security services is frankly embarassing. I can see two reasons why they do this - 1) fear of getting fired - if a terrorist does something exactly the same way and succeeds a second time then you look grossly incompetent, and will get fired, and 2) security does not attract the brightest sparks. The better wages and conditions in the private sector, IT, meds, energy etc. attract away the intelligent people we need running this stuff.
This ad campaign won't do anything to fix it, didn't even try, but the ad geek who came up with it deserves massive respect. Exposing publicly funded stupidity like this deserves an award. I just hope that many many heads roll.
Love it... Even better since it's a verbatim quote FTA...
More like a magnitude of 10... AOS4 iso = ~50 MB... XP Pro iso = ~500-600 MB, IIRC.
Err... sorry but 10* larger is what "order of magnitude" means. Commonly abbreviated O(n), O(3) means in the thousands, O(2) means in the hundreds etc. Of course there's nothing you can do now you've posted, but this is slashdot so pedantry is it's own reward
Good info about XP though... I'd like it if linux booted so quick, but given you never need to reboot, why bother...
I guess that if you're running a mailing list to more than 1000 people, and you send out mail every day, there's a chance your ISP would misidentify you as a spammer yes. I'd imagine that you could explain this to them over the telephone, and if it really upset you you could take your business to someone else. The current situation is a bit of "a git" for people that don't run mailing lists, but are not terribly tech literate, and I think their needs outweigh yours. I hope more ISPs follow NTL's example.
I'm pro business. I don't know about American law on corporations, etc. I think the reason why "liberals" (I take it to mean people who believe the state should intervene to a larger extent, directly and also by restricting private enterprise, to increase equality between the rich and poor) are not sympathetic to business is because it's difficult to see the benefit if you've never lived without it. If you've never been in a situation where you have to queue for food, where you have to be nice to the official so you can get a sharp razorblade, where you can only watch dull as dishwater government documentaries because there is no one making films or music videos etc, then you don't see how commerce benefits the individual. The reason I think the "libertarian" group can't see the downside of corporations is that I guess they're too busy working in them to worry much about the tramps on the pavement. And of course both sides become polarised because they wind each other up - and that's what we're here for :)
Ignore the fact that this has nothing to do with corporate funding, that unions, the NRA, governments themselves are far more likely to try to control behaviour (since that's what they do) than businesses (since they just want to make money). Ignore the fact that the film "The Corporation" was actually made by a corporation, called "Big Picture Media Corporation", and did what corporations do best - helped people part with their dollars and gave them something they enjoyed... Corporations play badly in populations of slashdot readers, so that's the best way to dig your democrat friends out of the hole.
With a bit of luck no one will remember that it's governments that take away free speech (see Cambodia, Cuba, China, North Korea, USSR, Hungary, Romania etc. etc.) and not corporations (see Google, Ford, AT&T, Reuters, GE etc. etc.)
Gotta love it haven't you? The earnest student moaning about how awful Exxon is for selling oil, while he drinks his espresso (coffee beans flown from south america), and shows off the tan from his round the world trip (7 individual flights of an average 3000 miles, using 600 gallons of aviation fuel). I think someone once said choice begins with the individual.
Efficiency is increased by better understanding the needs of the consumer and supplier. Since DRM only gives the supplier power over the actions of the consumer, and seems to be done with complete disregard for the needs of the consumer (c.f. Sony DRM rootkit), it seems to me that Glickman's argument is spurious, and he's just trying to justify what he wants to do by throwing around economic buzzwords. What unusual behaviour for a senior manager.
The reference to an orderly market presumably means that dropping the price of his product from $20 to $3 scares him, so he's trying to convince us it's not economically beneficial. Thanks for the quote, it's interesting to get a glimpse inside a stereotypical hollywood suit's head.
It's kind of instructive to think what we would have to do - start with the hard to reach - we need to kill all the life around the "smokers" at the bottom of the ocean, at the same time as carpet bombing the earth with nukes - but you've really got to cook every square mile of the entire planet. That means raising the temperature above boiling point (there's life at temperatures everywhere up to there) for long enough to kill every spore, bacterium. The important thing to bear in mind is that to kill life you have to kill every single bacterium, because one bacterium can mutate. In short it's not going to happen, it's probably technically infeasible, and no one wants to do it (not even George Bush)
I like to think this sums up two things - one the horrible grandiosity of environmental pressure groups - starting with their assumption that humans are powerful enough to do something that is virtually impossible, then assuming that they are more important than the people that can do this, that they are only people who understand the big picture. The other is that they know fuck all about any actual science (i.e. physics, chemistry, microbiology), and they don't seem to care to learn more.
Real climate scientists I salute - they do something virtually impossible. Environmental politicians (for that is what Greenpeace, and this crowd are) are just republicans who found a different issue first. Look at Al Gore - when he's not trying to ban music with obscene lyrics (PMRC) he's saving the environment with glossy hollywood films. Bless.
The only problem is if people have the idea that there's only one club. There are lots - the labor unions, the American Medical Association, local government, social cliques and communist revolutionary governments are all groups that disenfranchise others for the benefit of the members. Democracy and capitalism are systems that should allow power to be distributed freely, and help to break up these groups. Unfortunately America seems to be getting worse at using both of these systems.