Not to dis the quality of your company and their warranties -- it is quite possible that they were good -- in general, my experience is that warranties are worth slightly less than mail-in rebates.
Take, for example, when I purchased a ZAP electric bike conversion kit. The thing worked nicely for a week; then the cheap plastic latch that held the motor to the tire broke. So I came up with a temporary fix, and filed for warranty repair with the address included.
The filing came back "Addressee unknown". So then I called the number I had ordered it from. I was forwarded to "Customer Service", which from all scientific experiments appears to be a black hole.
Finally, I gave up and went with my temp fix.
But that is my typical experience with warrantee repair. It just isn't worth anything. So I refuse to consider it.
Product customer support I value only in retrospect. It won't affect my initial purchase, but if I need it and they are good, then I feel bound to recommend the product highly to others, on that basis.
Okay, let's take as an example a certain top-selling general physics text (including Principles of Physics, Physics for Scientists and Engineers, etc.) A new version came out every 4 years, and there were different titles. The cost of each book was around $150. There was, as you note, lots of eye candy.
Now, this best-selling physics textbook also had a top-profit-earning study guide. The authors were indeed good. One was an expert and writing problems and solutions so that students could understand them. One was extremely good at writing summaries of the chapters, and so on. But these guys were only writing part time, and teaching full time. They also would make mistakes. Finally, they were not good at making a good presentation. Another big factor is that they had the credentials and all that.
In the end, they did need some help with phrasing. They needed someone to make good, useful figures. They needed a good, useful page layout that would aid in understanding.
That was my job. Originally, it was just me. For $2000, then $4000, later $17000, and then at last $25000 when I had 3 employees helping, we prepared these books, instructor's manuals, and (unrelated) Chemistry lab manuals.
I should note that these products had sales in the millions, with about $35-$50 per study guide (about a million dollars per year total, I guestimate as a lower estimate. I base that guess on housing purchases made by the main author.) A major factor in these sales was the quality of the books we produced, spending essentially between 1 and 3 man years of labor making it right and good. But they would not countenance paying a just wage, or even a living wage. That is after ten years of it, and producing top profit-makers year after year (according to the people I worked for).
I'm done with that stage now. I now work in concrete production, and do barely make a living wage -- $30,000. But there is no part of the publisher's equation that requires high prices.
I have a different theory as to why the prices are so high. You see, the publishers don't do any part of the production. They are the financiers, and they subcontract out all the labor. As such, they are a financial institution. Their job is to take finances from A, move them to B, and pocket a part of the money as their earnings.
But in so doing, they are really paid for the last part of the job: pocketing a part as their earnings. The rest is "waste", according to just-in-time production theory. Therefore, the more effective they are at this part of the job, the better they succeed.
In this way, financial institutions progress from providing a valid service, to a con game. Which is possibly where textbook publishers are, today.
Typically, the thing that holds back the $1.50 price from being worldwide is that there are laws against parallel importing (especially for pharmacuticals under the Free Trade agreements).
That means that there isn't free trade, and there isn't a true open market.
However, for DVDs I wouldn't even expect the price to be $1.50 worldwide if there were no laws against parallel importing.
I would expect the price to be about $2.00 worldwide for DVDs with all the language in the Cantonese dialect of Chinese. You want $2.00 DVDs, you'd have to learn Chinese.
For me, a moralist is a person who attempts to identify all actions as right and wrong, good and evil, or a specific combination thereof. It isn't to say that there is no gray, but rather to say, "if I see gray, it is because I do not yet see clearly. Let me try to focus more."
Now as to what I meant regarding the theft:
I mean that a person who justifies the taking of another's property on the basis of some percieved good, is still breaking the law of ownership. That law of ownership is a natural law -- what is posessed by one creature (a nest, a nesting stone) the creature attempts to defend.
When you compromise your understanding of the natural laws, you compromise your ability to see clearly.
To that extent, the person who steals and yet says I know it is stealing; I know it is breaking the law, is not as damaged as the person who steals and no longer recognizes that he is stealing.
I suppose that that is meant by the phrase "sin blinds a person". Eventually, the thief no longer recognizes what theft is.
I would also indeed say that the person who steals and yet recognizes that it is theft, is -- aaah, I hate to use the word morally superior -- but he is quite possibly on the way out of his evil. Just as the way to stop an infection can be to lance the would and expose the wound to air, the way to stop an evil can be to first recognize the evil and declare that evil for what it is.
Okay, you were talking about justifying copyright by the public good. A lot of people would agree with you. Most libertarians wouldn't. For them, if it involves force, it is wrong, and any perceptions of public good are wrong too. Most moralists, myself included, wouldn't. For me, theft is taking that which is not yours and is someone else's.
That *does* include piracy. Going on the high seas, taking a ship (or causing it to break up on a reef with false lighthouses) is taking that which is not yours.
Likewise, going around the law to copy a DVD which is named as someone else's is also theft. It is taking for yourself that which belongs to someone else.
But so, too, is trying to extend one's copyright, even through use of the law. That product belongs to the public domain as of year X, and to try to attempt to seize it for one's exclusive ownership is to steal it from others.
Let me take it a step further: the original attempt at legislating copyright was also theft. God did give to us the ability to intellectually reporoduce ideas, and to manufacture products, including copies. That did originally belong to each and every person, and was a major factor in the renaissance of Europe, the philosophy of Greece, the Library of Alexandria. To take that gift of God away from the populace, and hand it over to a single person, was also an act of theft. To justify it in the name of public good is no better or worse than to say "I'm stealing it because I need/want it " (or because my wife wants it.
But one theft does not justify another theft. If someone steals something from you, you should not just steal it back, or join the thieves and start stealing whatever you need. That destroys the common trust of society. In the end, it means that all who are honest will be hurt the worst. Rather, if someone steals something from you, you should either get the theft rectified by going to a proper authority over the both of you -- or you should simply accept and forgive the theft, lest your response cause even worse evil and damage.
Does this mean that thieves will thrive? Yes, for a time -- but they will also make enemies, and when disaster strikes them, they will find few friends to help them out. Wouldn't this gall honest people? To some extent, yes. The "galling" is an internal protest at one's lack of power to enact justice. But remember that we are in fact unable to defend ourselves as much as we need, so "galling" means that we are seeing things clearly.
But it does seem to me wrong to ask if there is a benefit to piracy. I would say no. There is definitely an apparent benefit to piracy -- that is unmistakable. But the appearance and the reality do not always agree. I would contend that piracy also destroys the fabric of society. It may not seem significant, but I would contend that it is real and important, and will add up in the end.
... as far as I can tell, Heinlein's later books were literally dedicated to the concept of the free lunch.
Not only that, but his style of free lunch is exactly the thing that drives our wasteful energy usage.
watches reader's heads spin "Say what?"
Heinlien was writing all about a libertine hypersexual society; indeed his later books seemed to be almost indecently personal.
Quite simply, us humans are pretty much designed to require our *partners* to be monagamous. Trying to violate that builds rage. Rage brings violence, which causes people to want to live farther away from each other. We want to spread out in the presence of violence. That drives suburbanism.
The soviets, for all their evils and environmental disasters, managed to avoid suburbanism. You could do all your business within 3 square miles, and you lived like sardines in a cinderblock apartment in the middle of a bunch of cinderblock apartments. Weekends, you went out to the country to your garden house, and gardened. They managed it by "planning" it. I don't advise that method.
But that type of community would be practical here *if* we could get along. As time progresses though, we are more and more unable to. Our society is falling apart, and one of the ways this happens is through suburbanism.
The article pointed out that the radiation has kept humans out, and allowed wildlife to thrive.
...He went on: "I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers".
Let me assure you, this is no protection against greedy developers. In our own city (Chesapeake), there is a section called Deep Creek that had a dump. Said greedy developers wanted to develop said dump; local residents fought it on the basis of contamination and danger to homeowners. Said developer waited twenty years until said homeowners no longer had the strength or will to say said statements before the zoning board. Then the City Council quietly gave permission, after which a housing development was built upon said dump, and after that homeowners discovered trash and contamination under their houses. Said houses had to be destroyed, said developer profited and moved on, said city council bided their time, and in the end only the purchasers were hurt, as far as I know. Said greedy developers will not be stopped by so minor a thing as radiation in the way of their profit.
Ummm, my point was not that he had developed anything stunning and new. Rather, he had developed a way of using a One Time Pad (and there are many large one time pads -- go to your local library: every book there can be an OTP.)
As an OTP, a book is not quite random, nor is it secure -- but your automobile probably isn't secure either.
But his OTP also allowed him to obscure the encrypted text. As such, it becomes more secure: secure, in specific from most people randomly stumbling upon the encrypted message and then devoting time to its solution.
His point was to look at the overall engineering problem -- why do you want to encrypt? If your purpose is to conduct financial transactions, then RSA128 is probably just fine for you. On the other hand, you aren't going to encode RSA with a pencil and paper.
But if your purpose is to have hidden wartime field communications, then the encryption + obscurity + use of an OTP that *might* just put the enemy decryption agents on your side... then his method is perhaps a little better.
My brother developed a 2-document crypto version: you use one document to encode or decode the other. That is relatively easy to encode, and is probably more immune to frequency analysis (though I'm sure it isn't completely immune to it.) However, its other characteristic was that you could write a normal looking letter, and yet have a hidden message inside it.
Even that would be better than a simple substitution.
However, he says that in terms of increasing effectiveness, crypto should:
(1) Make it difficult to read (writing in mirror images).
(2) Make it difficult to break (cryptoquotes on up to PGP)
(3) Make it difficult to detect that communication is even going on (watermarking a photo with encrypted text, or photocopiers printing copy information in very light yellow ink)
(4) Convert the decryption agents to your own side.
His double-text document has the capability of doing #3 and #4, provided that your source document *is* your manifesto.
I don't know if someone disagrees with the parent post. Indeed, they may have reason to disagree with it, and good reason.
Moreover, the parent post did not go into much detail. So I can even see where an ignorant modder might think that the post is a troll.
However, there have been *tons* of people cheated by Paypal in combination with real thieves. I am one of them. That is, Paypal showed that they have no incentive to either use the insurance that they advertised they had; and they showed that they had no incentive to fight or even try to determine the real thieves. So in the end, the ended up supporting the thieves against honest businesspeople.
Moreover, this issue has been rehashed much on Slashdot. There really was no need to go into detail. Indeed, there are others on this website who went into better detail.
But it is by no means a troll. So in general, I would have left this one as it was, at a score of 2. If there is a moderator around who is willing to spend a mod point in bring this back to honorable obscurity, I think it would be well spent.
You know, your joke about thumb cancer seems pretty funny. But I have one of those radios that we use at work. Same microwave frequency. It's part of my job, so I stick it on my belt; I have to take it off to talk. But some of my coworkers have the attachable shirt-clip speakers, so they can leave it on their belt as they talk, and microwave their liver.
Isn't liver cancer also up nowadays? I wonder if it is related. And like brain cancer, liver cancer is particularly deadly, even *if* you get a liver transplant.
Hey, there's no scientific proof that finding the truth will be hard when there is a billion dollar industry against it.
That's just like those who say global warming is occurring, just because the greenhouse gases have driven a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H seem to be way out of con^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H are present, and the summers seem warmer.
Or like saying that just because Texas and Georgia construction companies have documents saying that they know their silica dust is killing their workers, and are going to keep on doing the same, and their workers all have terribly low lung capacity, that one must cause the other. THERE'S NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF THAT, since of course , ahem, you'd have to have taken lung capacity tests before that, and these same companies also neglected to do that...
I love that phrase THERE'S NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF.
It displays a real lack of understanding of the words "scientific", "proof", "no", and "there".
Oh, and it also depends on what the definition of "is" is.
Aaah. Truth is seriously lacking in our culture of death.
And yes, predictable entropy is an oxymoron (except for God).
Try this: Flip a coin 50 times, and record it. You should have a fairly even distribution. Now, XOR each one with the answer before. You should still get an even distribution. That's XORing random with random.
Now, try XORing the first 50 flips with 1, and the second with zero. The result should still come out random. It would, wouldn't it?
Then try XORing it with alternating 1s and zeros (1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1). That case is no different than the one in the paragraph before. So it should still come out random.
Now, no matter how more complicated you make your predictable pattern, it's not going to be essentially any different than XORing with 111111 000000.
Let's see... I think lossy compression would be just fine.
!Wrksht1.xls > Microsoft Excel file: First one. Run Huffman compression algorithm with Excel- > base modified compression tree....78% compression.
!Johnsales.xls > Microsoft Excel file... we already have one of those, mark as redundant and delete. >
! Lovelettr.doc > Microsoft Word file: Part of office. Make a note Excel-> Word, and delete. >
That said, I'm used to using Word98, which was famous for grinding up longer documents, chewing them up, and spitting them out (recursively!) in infinite loops. So I'm already used to this.
! Word.EXE > Hmmm. Inherently redundant. Delete with prejudice. >
Sorry. I'm displaying my prejudice. But their failure to follow through on purchased customer support, claiming that nothing was happening, literally cost me thousands in direct losses, and more in lost contracts. Total loss, tens of thousands.
> Burp! All files compressed, for a total loss of: 96%.
I once used a Huffman data compression algorithm, recursively, in order to see just how much compression I could get. The first round, I got maybe 75% compression on the data I was using. The second round, I got 10%. The third round, I got 3%. The fourth, I got 1%; and after that, I'd typically actually increase the size of the data slightly. Let's not forget that I am including the size of the initial data table.
So then I tried it with LZW compression, and it still eventually grew in size.
The neat thing about doing this, though, is that it taught me something about the mathematical basis for entropy. You see, I couldn't believe that I was getting the diminishing returns, so I wrote some algorithms to output the histogram curves.
What I saw was that the best Huffman compression came when the Histogram was farthest from what I'll call a "perfect bell curve". I don't know if that is the same curve or not, but it looks a lot like one half of a perfect bell; or maybe like the radiation output of a blackbody in physics.
Anyhow, as I successively compressed the data, the data moved towards a tighter bell curve in general, and always towards that perfect bell, in specific (so long as the data would compress, that is.) I didn't do the calculation, but it would be interesting to calculate what the closest bell curve was, and then do a standard deviation of the histogram from the bell curve, and correlate it to compression.
So then I thought "well, I'll compress only a portion of the data, the part that is compressible". But any typical portion of the data still seemed to follow that pesky bell curve. So then I thought to intercept the data, and see if I could visually spot any patterns.
Indeed, I could. Wow -- look at that string of zeros here; and that repeated series 1001001001001, *four times*, there. Surely I could get compression out of that. Funny thing, though. Every time I tried, I could get compression for that data set, but then lousy compression for anything else. When I tried to generalize the compression to include every possibility, I again couldn't get compression. In other words, truly entropic data does have repetition. It does have some item that shows up more commonly than others. It does have patterns. But the patterns are no more than what you would expect, (or actually, if you want to be correct but confusing, only an expectable percentage of the patterns are more than what you would expect, by any given amount.) And when you include all the patterns of length n, including patterns of length n=1, then there just isn't any more entropy possible for the data.
And just as it takes an increase in entropy to drive a heat engine (2nd law of thermo), it also takes an increase in data entropy to get compression.
Yeah, I know that the dynamics of running -- one leap after another -- are possibly more complicated than, and definitely different than the dynamics for walking.
Nonetheless, I always used to like our cross-country club races (when I did run CC, and later when I'd watch my brother run) in the Shenandoah Valley. There were a few "English walkers" who would outwalk quite a few runners. That includes me.
It's just a little embarassing to be struggling along, still leaping from leg to leg in that slow hobble that we call "long distance running", and have somebody breezily walk past you (same direction) and offer a little how-do-you-do.
Let me preface this by saying that I would almost agree, except that zero-sum is too high an estimation of job reviews. At the place where I work, the managers are told to give reviews on a score of 1-5; and not 5, because that score is reserved only for the company president's boss; and not 4 -- that's reserved for the president. And 3 really would imply that the person should be the manager. So mostly, 1 and 2 are all that can be given out, and the manager should feel free to give a single "3" score wherever he feels that the person is performing especially well. 1 and 2, of course, are "not acceptable" and "barely acceptable."
Point being, that the job reviews have no basis in reality. They are a specific lie, for the specific purpose of denying raises.
So let me propose a number of scenarios, and the specific response:
(1) Benefits turn out to be of negligible value. Response: Factor in benefits as a slight negative value -- the cost of the time that it's going to waste. Pick a job with a higher salary.
(2) Job reviews are nonsense. Response: Pick a job with a higher initial salary, and change jobs as often as you can get a better wage.
(3) Employers start pushing for more unpaid overtime. Response: As much time as you give to the employer under pressure, spend that much time applying for other positions elsewhere.
In the end, the employment game itself is probably a worse-than-zero sum game, for the reason that the employers seem to view their employees as their primary enemy, followed only by their own boss and their customers. When that happens, things are going to break down. To be honest, the person who trusts in other people is headed for disappointment.
That said, I've found that trusting in God has not disappointed. The job I have, I have because He wants me there, not because it's a good place to work. But the work that He has me doing is among those who have no better options. And that's different from the work my employer has me doing. I accept the second as being the cost of the first. Meanwhile, by the grace of God I can be loyal and faithful at my work, and for the most part, not rebel. To me, the sum situation is worth more than salary, job reviews, benefits, or whatnot. But I can definitely understand that the current situation is untenable for most other people. At least, though, there is a response for those who need to move on.
I used to program, and I consider myself fairly decent at it. Having only seen the computer game Tetris, and in 1988 using an IBM PS/2 30 (with a MCGA and no known interface to it), I managed to hack the interface in a week or so, and in a little over a weekend I programmed a tetris game using it. I also wrote my own vector drawing program, my own ASM operating system... converted Debug to a more full=fledged assembler... and I really loved having the Borland Ref. Manual to help me use all those handy little functions.
So I don't consider myself a beginner.
But I never figured out how to get a hold of, and use, all of these libraries. I sit here with Linux running, writing my own C code. Yeah, I know there are lots of useful functions out there. But I need a good reference to use the libraries; and I just never learned how.
I notice that olivine is one of the lunar minerals, from the Apollo/luna lunar program. But that was from the surface. Considering that Serpentine, a hydrate of olivine, is an asteroidal mineral, I wouldn't be surprised to find Serpentine under the surface. In such a case, one would have access to water by simply baking it out of the Serpentine.
So now instead of chunking rocks towards the viewer to keep him engaged, you get an upclose shot at a lineman coming up from a surprising direction -- the hit -- the sky -- then switching to another cameraman as they discuss the unexpected development...
I was just to a 3D Imax. They use perpendicularly oriented polarized lenses, and I assume polarized metallic strips on the screen, with active projector targeting.
That's all very nice, and very immersive. However, there was something a bit disquieting about it for my vision -- as if my retina had to be out of sync with my focus (which indeed is the case).
I'm not sure that's a bad thing -- maybe it would help my nearsightedness, or maybe not. But I can say it bothered me just slightly, and my 1.5-year-old son prefered no glasses (though I held them on him) for half the show, and then simply ignored the screen for the second half of the show.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to dis the quality of your company and their warranties -- it is quite possible that they were good -- in general, my experience is that warranties are worth slightly less than mail-in rebates.
Take, for example, when I purchased a ZAP electric bike conversion kit. The thing worked nicely for a week; then the cheap plastic latch that held the motor to the tire broke. So I came up with a temporary fix, and filed for warranty repair with the address included.
The filing came back "Addressee unknown". So then I called the number I had ordered it from. I was forwarded to "Customer Service", which from all scientific experiments appears to be a black hole.
Finally, I gave up and went with my temp fix.
But that is my typical experience with warrantee repair. It just isn't worth anything. So I refuse to consider it.
Product customer support I value only in retrospect. It won't affect my initial purchase, but if I need it and they are good, then I feel bound to recommend the product highly to others, on that basis.
Yes, I'd like a baked off with my steak. A little sour cream and chives on the side, too, if you don't mind.
Okay, let's take as an example a certain top-selling general physics text (including Principles of Physics, Physics for Scientists and Engineers, etc.) A new version came out every 4 years, and there were different titles. The cost of each book was around $150. There was, as you note, lots of eye candy.
Now, this best-selling physics textbook also had a top-profit-earning study guide. The authors were indeed good. One was an expert and writing problems and solutions so that students could understand them. One was extremely good at writing summaries of the chapters, and so on. But these guys were only writing part time, and teaching full time. They also would make mistakes. Finally, they were not good at making a good presentation. Another big factor is that they had the credentials and all that.
In the end, they did need some help with phrasing. They needed someone to make good, useful figures. They needed a good, useful page layout that would aid in understanding.
That was my job. Originally, it was just me. For $2000, then $4000, later $17000, and then at last $25000 when I had 3 employees helping, we prepared these books, instructor's manuals, and (unrelated) Chemistry lab manuals.
I should note that these products had sales in the millions, with about $35-$50 per study guide (about a million dollars per year total, I guestimate as a lower estimate. I base that guess on housing purchases made by the main author.) A major factor in these sales was the quality of the books we produced, spending essentially between 1 and 3 man years of labor making it right and good. But they would not countenance paying a just wage, or even a living wage. That is after ten years of it, and producing top profit-makers year after year (according to the people I worked for).
I'm done with that stage now. I now work in concrete production, and do barely make a living wage -- $30,000. But there is no part of the publisher's equation that requires high prices.
I have a different theory as to why the prices are so high. You see, the publishers don't do any part of the production. They are the financiers, and they subcontract out all the labor. As such, they are a financial institution. Their job is to take finances from A, move them to B, and pocket a part of the money as their earnings.
But in so doing, they are really paid for the last part of the job: pocketing a part as their earnings. The rest is "waste", according to just-in-time production theory. Therefore, the more effective they are at this part of the job, the better they succeed.
In this way, financial institutions progress from providing a valid service, to a con game. Which is possibly where textbook publishers are, today.
In a true open market... ... we are not.
Typically, the thing that holds back the $1.50 price from being worldwide is that there are laws against parallel importing (especially for pharmacuticals under the Free Trade agreements).
That means that there isn't free trade, and there isn't a true open market.
However, for DVDs I wouldn't even expect the price to be $1.50 worldwide if there were no laws against parallel importing.
I would expect the price to be about $2.00 worldwide for DVDs with all the language in the Cantonese dialect of Chinese. You want $2.00 DVDs, you'd have to learn Chinese.
Just a thought...
For me, a moralist is a person who attempts to identify all actions as right and wrong, good and evil, or a specific combination thereof. It isn't to say that there is no gray, but rather to say, "if I see gray, it is because I do not yet see clearly. Let me try to focus more."
Now as to what I meant regarding the theft:
I mean that a person who justifies the taking of another's property on the basis of some percieved good, is still breaking the law of ownership. That law of ownership is a natural law -- what is posessed by one creature (a nest, a nesting stone) the creature attempts to defend.
When you compromise your understanding of the natural laws, you compromise your ability to see clearly.
To that extent, the person who steals and yet says I know it is stealing; I know it is breaking the law, is not as damaged as the person who steals and no longer recognizes that he is stealing.
I suppose that that is meant by the phrase "sin blinds a person". Eventually, the thief no longer recognizes what theft is.
I would also indeed say that the person who steals and yet recognizes that it is theft, is -- aaah, I hate to use the word morally superior -- but he is quite possibly on the way out of his evil. Just as the way to stop an infection can be to lance the would and expose the wound to air, the way to stop an evil can be to first recognize the evil and declare that evil for what it is.
Okay, you were talking about justifying copyright by the public good. A lot of people would agree with you. Most libertarians wouldn't. For them, if it involves force, it is wrong, and any perceptions of public good are wrong too. Most moralists, myself included, wouldn't. For me, theft is taking that which is not yours and is someone else's.
That *does* include piracy. Going on the high seas, taking a ship (or causing it to break up on a reef with false lighthouses) is taking that which is not yours.
Likewise, going around the law to copy a DVD which is named as someone else's is also theft. It is taking for yourself that which belongs to someone else.
But so, too, is trying to extend one's copyright, even through use of the law. That product belongs to the public domain as of year X, and to try to attempt to seize it for one's exclusive ownership is to steal it from others.
Let me take it a step further: the original attempt at legislating copyright was also theft. God did give to us the ability to intellectually reporoduce ideas, and to manufacture products, including copies. That did originally belong to each and every person, and was a major factor in the renaissance of Europe, the philosophy of Greece, the Library of Alexandria. To take that gift of God away from the populace, and hand it over to a single person, was also an act of theft. To justify it in the name of public good is no better or worse than to say "I'm stealing it because I need/want it " (or because my wife wants it.
But one theft does not justify another theft. If someone steals something from you, you should not just steal it back, or join the thieves and start stealing whatever you need. That destroys the common trust of society. In the end, it means that all who are honest will be hurt the worst. Rather, if someone steals something from you, you should either get the theft rectified by going to a proper authority over the both of you -- or you should simply accept and forgive the theft, lest your response cause even worse evil and damage.
Does this mean that thieves will thrive? Yes, for a time -- but they will also make enemies, and when disaster strikes them, they will find few friends to help them out.
Wouldn't this gall honest people? To some extent, yes. The "galling" is an internal protest at one's lack of power to enact justice. But remember that we are in fact unable to defend ourselves as much as we need, so "galling" means that we are seeing things clearly.
But it does seem to me wrong to ask if there is a benefit to piracy. I would say no. There is definitely an apparent benefit to piracy -- that is unmistakable. But the appearance and the reality do not always agree. I would contend that piracy also destroys the fabric of society. It may not seem significant, but I would contend that it is real and important, and will add up in the end.
... as far as I can tell, Heinlein's later books were literally dedicated to the concept of the free lunch.
Not only that, but his style of free lunch is exactly the thing that drives our wasteful energy usage.
watches reader's heads spin "Say what?"
Heinlien was writing all about a libertine hypersexual society; indeed his later books seemed to be almost indecently personal.
Quite simply, us humans are pretty much designed to require our *partners* to be monagamous. Trying to violate that builds rage. Rage brings violence, which causes people to want to live farther away from each other. We want to spread out in the presence of violence. That drives suburbanism.
The soviets, for all their evils and environmental disasters, managed to avoid suburbanism. You could do all your business within 3 square miles, and you lived like sardines in a cinderblock apartment in the middle of a bunch of cinderblock apartments. Weekends, you went out to the country to your garden house, and gardened. They managed it by "planning" it. I don't advise that method.
But that type of community would be practical here *if* we could get along. As time progresses though, we are more and more unable to. Our society is falling apart, and one of the ways this happens is through suburbanism.
Let me assure you, this is no protection against greedy developers. In our own city (Chesapeake), there is a section called Deep Creek that had a dump. Said greedy developers wanted to develop said dump; local residents fought it on the basis of contamination and danger to homeowners. Said developer waited twenty years until said homeowners no longer had the strength or will to say said statements before the zoning board. Then the City Council quietly gave permission, after which a housing development was built upon said dump, and after that homeowners discovered trash and contamination under their houses. Said houses had to be destroyed, said developer profited and moved on, said city council bided their time, and in the end only the purchasers were hurt, as far as I know. Said greedy developers will not be stopped by so minor a thing as radiation in the way of their profit.
Enough said.
Ummm, my point was not that he had developed anything stunning and new. Rather, he had developed a way of using a One Time Pad (and there are many large one time pads -- go to your local library: every book there can be an OTP.)
... then his method is perhaps a little better.
As an OTP, a book is not quite random, nor is it secure -- but your automobile probably isn't secure either.
But his OTP also allowed him to obscure the encrypted text. As such, it becomes more secure: secure, in specific from most people randomly stumbling upon the encrypted message and then devoting time to its solution.
His point was to look at the overall engineering problem -- why do you want to encrypt? If your purpose is to conduct financial transactions, then RSA128 is probably just fine for you. On the other hand, you aren't going to encode RSA with a pencil and paper.
But if your purpose is to have hidden wartime field communications, then the encryption + obscurity + use of an OTP that *might* just put the enemy decryption agents on your side
My brother developed a 2-document crypto version: you use one document to encode or decode the other. That is relatively easy to encode, and is probably more immune to frequency analysis (though I'm sure it isn't completely immune to it.) However, its other characteristic was that you could write a normal looking letter, and yet have a hidden message inside it. Even that would be better than a simple substitution. However, he says that in terms of increasing effectiveness, crypto should: (1) Make it difficult to read (writing in mirror images). (2) Make it difficult to break (cryptoquotes on up to PGP) (3) Make it difficult to detect that communication is even going on (watermarking a photo with encrypted text, or photocopiers printing copy information in very light yellow ink) (4) Convert the decryption agents to your own side. His double-text document has the capability of doing #3 and #4, provided that your source document *is* your manifesto.
I don't know if someone disagrees with the parent post. Indeed, they may have reason to disagree with it, and good reason.
Moreover, the parent post did not go into much detail. So I can even see where an ignorant modder might think that the post is a troll.
However, there have been *tons* of people cheated by Paypal in combination with real thieves. I am one of them. That is, Paypal showed that they have no incentive to either use the insurance that they advertised they had; and they showed that they had no incentive to fight or even try to determine the real thieves. So in the end, the ended up supporting the thieves against honest businesspeople.
Moreover, this issue has been rehashed much on Slashdot. There really was no need to go into detail. Indeed, there are others on this website who went into better detail.
But it is by no means a troll. So in general, I would have left this one as it was, at a score of 2. If there is a moderator around who is willing to spend a mod point in bring this back to honorable obscurity, I think it would be well spent.
You know, your joke about thumb cancer seems pretty funny. But I have one of those radios that we use at work. Same microwave frequency. It's part of my job, so I stick it on my belt; I have to take it off to talk. But some of my coworkers have the attachable shirt-clip speakers, so they can leave it on their belt as they talk, and microwave their liver.
Isn't liver cancer also up nowadays? I wonder if it is related. And like brain cancer, liver cancer is particularly deadly, even *if* you get a liver transplant.
Hey, there's no scientific proof that finding the truth will be hard when there is a billion dollar industry against it.
That's just like those who say global warming is occurring, just because the greenhouse gases have driven a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H seem to be way out of con^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H are present, and the summers seem warmer.
Or like saying that just because Texas and Georgia construction companies have documents saying that they know their silica dust is killing their workers, and are going to keep on doing the same, and their workers all have terribly low lung capacity, that one must cause the other. THERE'S NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF THAT, since of course , ahem, you'd have to have taken lung capacity tests before that, and these same companies also neglected to do that...
I love that phrase THERE'S NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF.
It displays a real lack of understanding of the words "scientific", "proof", "no", and "there".
Oh, and it also depends on what the definition of "is" is.
Aaah. Truth is seriously lacking in our culture of death.
And yes, predictable entropy is an oxymoron (except for God).
Try this: Flip a coin 50 times, and record it. You should have a fairly even distribution. Now, XOR each one with the answer before. You should still get an even distribution. That's XORing random with random.
Now, try XORing the first 50 flips with 1, and the second with zero. The result should still come out random. It would, wouldn't it?
Then try XORing it with alternating 1s and zeros (1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1). That case is no different than the one in the paragraph before. So it should still come out random.
Now, no matter how more complicated you make your predictable pattern, it's not going to be essentially any different than XORing with 111111 000000.
If it's truly entropic, then the xor will still come out entropic. In other words, you won't get anything useful.
Let's see... I think lossy compression would be just fine.
...78% compression.
!Wrksht1.xls
> Microsoft Excel file: First one. Run Huffman compression algorithm with Excel-
> base modified compression tree.
!Johnsales.xls
> Microsoft Excel file... we already have one of those, mark as redundant and delete.
>
! Lovelettr.doc
> Microsoft Word file: Part of office. Make a note Excel-> Word, and delete.
>
That said, I'm used to using Word98, which was famous for grinding up longer documents, chewing them up, and spitting them out (recursively!) in infinite loops. So I'm already used to this.
! Word.EXE
> Hmmm. Inherently redundant. Delete with prejudice.
>
Sorry. I'm displaying my prejudice. But their failure to follow through on purchased customer support, claiming that nothing was happening, literally cost me thousands in direct losses, and more in lost contracts. Total loss, tens of thousands.
> Burp! All files compressed, for a total loss of: 96%.
I once used a Huffman data compression algorithm, recursively, in order to see just how much compression I could get. The first round, I got maybe 75% compression on the data I was using. The second round, I got 10%. The third round, I got 3%. The fourth, I got 1%; and after that, I'd typically actually increase the size of the data slightly. Let's not forget that I am including the size of the initial data table.
So then I tried it with LZW compression, and it still eventually grew in size.
The neat thing about doing this, though, is that it taught me something about the mathematical basis for entropy. You see, I couldn't believe that I was getting the diminishing returns, so I wrote some algorithms to output the histogram curves.
What I saw was that the best Huffman compression came when the Histogram was farthest from what I'll call a "perfect bell curve". I don't know if that is the same curve or not, but it looks a lot like one half of a perfect bell; or maybe like the radiation output of a blackbody in physics.
Anyhow, as I successively compressed the data, the data moved towards a tighter bell curve in general, and always towards that perfect bell, in specific (so long as the data would compress, that is.) I didn't do the calculation, but it would be interesting to calculate what the closest bell curve was, and then do a standard deviation of the histogram from the bell curve, and correlate it to compression.
So then I thought "well, I'll compress only a portion of the data, the part that is compressible". But any typical portion of the data still seemed to follow that pesky bell curve. So then I thought to intercept the data, and see if I could visually spot any patterns.
Indeed, I could. Wow -- look at that string of zeros here; and that repeated series 1001001001001, *four times*, there. Surely I could get compression out of that. Funny thing, though. Every time I tried, I could get compression for that data set, but then lousy compression for anything else. When I tried to generalize the compression to include every possibility, I again couldn't get compression. In other words, truly entropic data does have repetition. It does have some item that shows up more commonly than others. It does have patterns. But the patterns are no more than what you would expect, (or actually, if you want to be correct but confusing, only an expectable percentage of the patterns are more than what you would expect, by any given amount.) And when you include all the patterns of length n, including patterns of length n=1, then there just isn't any more entropy possible for the data.
And just as it takes an increase in entropy to drive a heat engine (2nd law of thermo), it also takes an increase in data entropy to get compression.
Yeah, I know that the dynamics of running -- one leap after another -- are possibly more complicated than, and definitely different than the dynamics for walking. Nonetheless, I always used to like our cross-country club races (when I did run CC, and later when I'd watch my brother run) in the Shenandoah Valley. There were a few "English walkers" who would outwalk quite a few runners. That includes me. It's just a little embarassing to be struggling along, still leaping from leg to leg in that slow hobble that we call "long distance running", and have somebody breezily walk past you (same direction) and offer a little how-do-you-do.
We need to put you in for a job at the NYTimes.
Let me preface this by saying that I would almost agree, except that zero-sum is too high an estimation of job reviews. At the place where I work, the managers are told to give reviews on a score of 1-5; and not 5, because that score is reserved only for the company president's boss; and not 4 -- that's reserved for the president. And 3 really would imply that the person should be the manager. So mostly, 1 and 2 are all that can be given out, and the manager should feel free to give a single "3" score wherever he feels that the person is performing especially well. 1 and 2, of course, are "not acceptable" and "barely acceptable."
Point being, that the job reviews have no basis in reality. They are a specific lie, for the specific purpose of denying raises.
So let me propose a number of scenarios, and the specific response:
(1) Benefits turn out to be of negligible value. Response: Factor in benefits as a slight negative value -- the cost of the time that it's going to waste. Pick a job with a higher salary.
(2) Job reviews are nonsense. Response: Pick a job with a higher initial salary, and change jobs as often as you can get a better wage.
(3) Employers start pushing for more unpaid overtime. Response: As much time as you give to the employer under pressure, spend that much time applying for other positions elsewhere.
In the end, the employment game itself is probably a worse-than-zero sum game, for the reason that the employers seem to view their employees as their primary enemy, followed only by their own boss and their customers. When that happens, things are going to break down. To be honest, the person who trusts in other people is headed for disappointment.
That said, I've found that trusting in God has not disappointed. The job I have, I have because He wants me there, not because it's a good place to work. But the work that He has me doing is among those who have no better options. And that's different from the work my employer has me doing. I accept the second as being the cost of the first. Meanwhile, by the grace of God I can be loyal and faithful at my work, and for the most part, not rebel. To me, the sum situation is worth more than salary, job reviews, benefits, or whatnot. But I can definitely understand that the current situation is untenable for most other people. At least, though, there is a response for those who need to move on.
I used to program, and I consider myself fairly decent at it. Having only seen the computer game Tetris, and in 1988 using an IBM PS/2 30 (with a MCGA and no known interface to it), I managed to hack the interface in a week or so, and in a little over a weekend I programmed a tetris game using it. I also wrote my own vector drawing program, my own ASM operating system... converted Debug to a more full=fledged assembler... and I really loved having the Borland Ref. Manual to help me use all those handy little functions.
So I don't consider myself a beginner.
But I never figured out how to get a hold of, and use, all of these libraries. I sit here with Linux running, writing my own C code. Yeah, I know there are lots of useful functions out there. But I need a good reference to use the libraries; and I just never learned how.
Would you or someone like to clue me in?
I notice that olivine is one of the lunar minerals, from the Apollo/luna lunar program. But that was from the surface. Considering that Serpentine, a hydrate of olivine, is an asteroidal mineral, I wouldn't be surprised to find Serpentine under the surface. In such a case, one would have access to water by simply baking it out of the Serpentine.
So now instead of chunking rocks towards the viewer to keep him engaged, you get an upclose shot at a lineman coming up from a surprising direction -- the hit -- the sky -- then switching to another cameraman as they discuss the unexpected development...
I was just to a 3D Imax. They use perpendicularly oriented polarized lenses, and I assume polarized metallic strips on the screen, with active projector targeting.
That's all very nice, and very immersive. However, there was something a bit disquieting about it for my vision -- as if my retina had to be out of sync with my focus (which indeed is the case).
I'm not sure that's a bad thing -- maybe it would help my nearsightedness, or maybe not. But I can say it bothered me just slightly, and my 1.5-year-old son prefered no glasses (though I held them on him) for half the show, and then simply ignored the screen for the second half of the show.
Supposedly this is the first rocket to rely on ethernet...
Are you implying that the slashdotting DOS'd the inertial active control system, resulting in a pulse thruster jamming open?
Or do you think that this was more the result of WinCE, or our good friend Ralsky attempting to push SEND on the next million spams?