And dammit, why does Linus Torvalds have to have 'S' at the end of his first and last name? I can't figure out where the apostrophy goes.
I'd stick it on the end: Torvalds'.
As to the origin, here is my guess:
Torvalds seems quite closely related to the Latvian construction of names, such as Jons (John).
The Latvian construction, in turn, is actually of Samogitian origin (Samogitian, a bastardization of "Zematiskas", meaning "lowlander", a group of Baltic farmers and fishermen who were feared by the Swedes and Danes/Norwegions for their violent raids and pirating in the 1100s.)
The Zematiskas endings on words are probably more like Latvian than Lithuanian, but I know the Lithuanian, so that's what I'll give you. Also, note that where you see a * symbol, that indicates saying the letter just before, nasally.
(sing)-as (pl)-ai : Subject of the sentence (sing)-o (pl)-u : indicates origin/posession (sing)-ui (pl)-iams : indicates the reciever (sing)-a* (pl)-os : indicates the direct object (sing) -e (pl)-ose : indicates location (sing)-ai : indicates that you're talking to the person
Note that where Lithuanian has -as, Latvian has -s; so I'd suspect that in most cases you strip the vowels off to get Latvian (but I don't know):
(sing)-s (pl)-i : Subject of the sentence (sing)-o (pl)-u : indicates origin/posession (sing)-i (pl)-ams : indicates the reciever (sing)-a* (pl)-s : indicates the direct object (sing) -e (pl)-se : indicates location (sing)-i : indicates that you're talking to the person
But since Linus is Norwegian, you won't see all those particular endings on his name. Rather, you'll see Norwegian construction applied to his name. That means that you'll see a language that looks a ton like old English, and that you might actually be barely able to read. At least, that's my experience: I could take the correct meaning from a Norwegian "I'll be out; please update your email addresses" email that was accidentally sent to me.
Let me suggest a different book.
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Masters of Doom
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· Score: 1
Let me suggest the IEEE graphics and animation conference proceedings, which were published back in 1985, if I remember correctly (or was it 1983?)
It was in this book that there was published a chapter (an article, really) that dealt with a new mathematical device, the binary spatial partition.
When I read that, I perked up. I was alert enough to realize that this was a major breakthrough, and if realtime animation would ever be possible, that this was how to do it. I even went so far to learn how to do it, but, alas, my 8 Mhz IBM PS-2/80 was just too slow. Note that I read this in 1987, not 1983 or 1985. Nonetheless, if you want a really good read, that book is worth buying, if you can figure out which one it is.
Anyone want to pipe up and say what it is, I'd appreciate it. I was motivated to go out and buy it, but then another programmer borrowed it, and never returned it *sigh*.
Re:W32.Blaster the cause of the blackout?
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Network Blackout
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· Score: 1
In line with that, it seems that one of the first sites to go down, is right along the Michigan/Canada border. It's unclear whether it goes down before or after the power outage. Now, I'm willing to bet that 1300MW flows from the Canada side of Niagra falls into Detroit.
And if that 1300 MW can't get there by the direct route, why then the automatic system is going to reroute it around Lake Erie, resulting in a sudden swap of direction as the current goes the other way. That's what is known to have taken down the whole system.
So this very well could be a computer problem / virus problem.
How about here. T. This is actually my own intended implementation of a plan that was referenced on Slashdot, proposed by a Nobel prize winning economist... but I can't find the reference any more.
Anyhow, the way patenting goes, I figured that if I ever wanted to have a chance of doing this, I'd better post my idea in specific. So that's what I did.
If you want to implement it, great! That's what Public Domain is all about. But if you do, I'd really appreciate a piece of the action, because I'm sitting here in a music production center, where people are too poor to pay to write/mix/market CDs, with CD making capability.
But no good marketing capability, and no taste for joining the RIAA either.
I'd not only be interested in talking about it, I'd be interested in doing something about it.
Are you a perl/PHP coder? Do you have time to develop a web sales system?
Check out my journal here. I specifically public-domained this idea so that I could do it someday.
Let me be more specific: we could begin this the day that we have such a website, by: 1) putting online any public domain sheet-music arrangements for bands. (2) Listing public domain tunes, that can be rearranged. (3) referencing a GPL-like content license that includes all broadcast rights
Anyhow, if you're interested in working with me on this, let me know, by all means. I'm not a coder, but I do have access (at least at the moment) to recording capabilities, and some mixing, and there are some very good music schools around here. I see no reason why performances of PD work couldn't be recorded, and we couldn't start selling them.
To give you an idea of what I'm thinking of, a typical CD has about 12-18 songs. Each song usually is mixed from about 5-6 tracks. The cost of making a CD, here where I live, is $500, which is too high for most locals. So my thought is that they would be happy to make a CD for free as in speech, free to copy, one copy to them, one copy to us, and we split any of our profits over $500/15=$33 per song. Start the songs out at $10, 80% price drop with each sale, completely free, and you're bound to have people who will want to buy it.
No. I do not advise you to buy farmland to make money. I advise untaxed farmland in order to wait out the storm. And learn to farm, while you're at it. Do other things to make money, by all means.
When it comes down to it, the same people, with the same morals, run both the Casinos and the stock market.
That is one of the mafia's big money makers, too. And if you get on their wrong side, you die. Let's face it -- nowadays, the best thing you can probably do with your money, is buy cheap, low tax (W. Va) land, and put it into production. Start farming it. Or invest in your own business, if yo u have one.
... Just so you know, about half a year ago, over Easter Weekend, we were in Jelgava, Latvia. I picked up a copy of the Baltic Times (Riga, Latvia: English newspaper), and there was an article about this very thing. So you can trace down this article yourself, if you wish: I've given the source and the date.
Also, I'm going to say "Norway" here, but it was either Norway or Denmark. I get those two countries confused, and I didn't save the article.
Just to drive the point home to you techies, their showcase story that week was about a young Latvian professional web developer who answered an advertisement for web development work with a Norwegian company. She was asked to come down and meet with the boss, in order to have a final interview before they signed the contracts.
Anyhow, she got there, immediately got locked in a room and raped by the "boss", and told she'd be a prostitute. She refused; she got beaten. So after 3 weeks of abuse and rape, she managed to break out of her room into one with a phone. She called the police -- no help. Police are corrupt. She called the Latvian police; they laughed. They were corrupt too. She called a friend, and then the friend worked around the clock to finally get to some police who weren't corrupt. Finally she got taken back.
But this story is just too typical nowadays. This wasn't a case of illegal employment, even, though that is often enough the case. Two people from our building went through that, but apparently managed to avoid the forced prostitution. I guess.
Their consensual crime was illegal employment: first one went to the Czech Republic, worked for three months with pay at the end; then just got turned into the authorities. Man, that's a low rate of pay. $0 for 3 months of work. So her daughter and son-in-law went to Spain to work illegally for 2 months. They decided that they'd ask for their pay as they worked. Of course, they had to keep the money with them, since as illegals they couldn't have a bank account. [I should note that both times we advised against it, both on principle, and on knowledge of statistics.] They came back after the 2 months; but on the way back, highway robbers knew exactly which car to hit -- as it passed through Germany. Highway robbery is typical in Spain, but this was an international ring. Anyhow, they had their money and their car stolen. Net: -$1000 for 4 person-months of work.
These are not consensual crimes.
These are typical mafia-style crimes, and they are the result of people with an evil mentality. Those people have their desires, and they know that their desires (including pay-by-the-hour sex) are at odds with the physical, mental, emotional, and familial health of others, but they want it anyways. Those people form the customer and the pusher departments. The last group is people who are oppressed, and see others around them behaving illegally and profiting, and sometimes have a desperate hope that "if I just get slightly illegal, somehow it will all be okay". If so, they're wrong, and what they do is wrong, but to some extent it is also forced. There is not legal place for them on this planet. Really.
(rant)
Now, let me also throw out one other major source of blame: the governments. I do not say "the governments you elect". If you are in the government, you know that your job really doesn't depend on the will of the people. It might depend on the will of some "elected" representative somewhere. Or if you're elected, it might depend on your membership in a civic club; or it might depend on which advertising agents you hire. But it doesn't depend on the will of the poeople. So you bear your own responsibility.
Here goes: the opening for these mafias comes directly out of your laws that violate natural law. Natural law is the natural rights, which cannot effectively be taken away from people. The right to speech (who controls your mouth?); the right to work to better your condition; the right to travel. There are other rights, granted rights, but
Let me make this clear: on Lithuanian National Radio, yesterday, it was pointed out that 2000 Lithuanian women each year are kidnapped and sold for prostitutes in other countries. Since Lithuania is a country of about 2.5 million people, that means that 1.2% of its women each year are kidnapped. If you want to say what percentage of its young women are kidnapped, you'd probably have to multiply by 3: 3.6%. Each year.
Mostly, as far as I can tell, those other countries include Norway, Holland, France, Germany, and occasionally other ex-Soviet Satellites like the Czech Republic or Ukraine.
This is not the Russian mafia doing this: the Russian mafia has been kept out of Lithuania by other mafias. But, according to an article I read back in 1999, the Russian mafia *does* operate rings that offer nominally legitimate employment to young Russian women. Then they start charging all kinds of new "fees", and threatening to beat/kill their families back home, to force them into prostitution. They are operating in New York. Young women can't go to the police, because the police are on the Russian mafia's payroll. That, according to the article. I cannot say for sure if it is true or not.
Nonetheless, these are not consensual crimes. Young women do not normally, voluntarily, go into abusive multiple-partner AIDS-transmitting sexual relationships willingly.
You can buy all the illegal drugs you want, and they can sell all the illegal drugs you want.
They just cannot *deliver* them, or have them delivered, and you cannot take posession.
It's kindof like the gold mines: you don't buy gold; you delay your taxes by buying stock in gold mines. They dig it out, they refine it; they never actually sell it. You take the tax writeoff (loss), and the ownership of the gold, both.
Cocaine has lots of legitimate uses (umm, do they use it in making Novacaine? If not, it still is legally used to weight down the DOJ buildings in Miami, and keep them from blowing away in Tornados) if I could only think of one.
Okay... I'm done with my daily Schozophrenic Thought For the Day.
Conservation of Energy limits Ohm's law. If you will, as soon as you draw any appreciable current on a capacitor or battery that's too small, the voltage drops.
As long as their 220 volt system is powered by monkeys rubbing their hair on a dry day, I don't think he'll be just fine.
Considering the style of wiring, I'd say there's a good chance that's exactly how they're powered.
What is the spoofing source? Is it possible that the spoofing source results in bounces that flood the site of a little-known Michigan site, possibly one belonging to a power company relay station along the 1500-MW lines from Toronto to Detroit?
You don't seem to be paying attention to the news.
(1) Patents *decrease* security for investors that actually produce products. That is because patents are a legal minefield that nobody can be sure of navigating safely. Not only that, but there are huge costs associated just with being innocent of patent infringement. There are larger costs associated with being guilty.
(2) The one group of investors that are not at risk from patents are those who invest in patent holding companies. But patent holding companies don't produce anything. They patent ideas, sometimes after they have been invented, or just after the technology to invent them has been developed, and then specifically do not invent it, but wait for it to be invented, and then mug the inventors.
(3) No, the investors do not earn it. The inventors are the ones who earn it. You seem to have drifted from the concept "it can take money to earn money" to "anyone without money must be prevented from earning money." Very occasionally, investors actually have their own idea, start their own business, and pay people to invent. More often, the investor just throws money at an already existing invention. Having money to throw is not something that I consider "inventing."
In line with this, I should note that you seem to have a flawed concept of business. Business is a reaction chamber for many ingredients: workers, idea people, investors, customers, managers... just to name a few. If it is not profitable to any of those groups, business should not happen, period. But consistent with our country's slide into fascism, people (including, it seems, you) are beginning to forget any group except the investor and sometimes the customer.
To sum up, I find your vision of business to be almost completely blind. Sorry for being harsh, but you just performed the all-too-common distillation of real capitalism down into a non-sequitor.
Okay, how small can you make a PDE? If it was small enough, could you cycle them so that the net shock wave effect canceled out, and the shock per pulse was tiny?
You said, "Already Mosquitos and flies started showing up in various places where they were never seen before."
Really. I'd like to know what place that is. Mosquitos are up in Alaska, and boy are they vicious. Mosquitos are in Belize, and rock around the clock. Washington DC was known as "Malarial city" when it was first built. Malaria, indeed, stretched into New York and beyond. Mosquitos are standard in the Baltic region. Mosquitos are about as hardy as any air-breathing animal I can think of.
You want to get concerned about animals, and fish... fine. It's often justified. But as for the spread of Mosquitos, my list only leaves underwater, and up in the stratosphere. Pray tell, which?
First of all, Sahara was at one time reasonably fertile. Or at least parts of it were. In a similar way, we could point out that the America's Midwest is potentially a desert: those are sand dunes we're farming on, and we'd better take care of it if we want to keep on farming it.
And yes, political strife makes it so people, desperate to eat today, don't take care of tomorrow. And the Saharan region *did* go through political strife: the conquest by Islam. [and no, not all religions are equal, or as you seem to think, equally bad. Some shed more blood, some less. Some have peaceful periods, some don't.]
You're also wrong that there were no dictatorships. Some of the dunes have completely covered old Roman forts. Rome was definitely a dictatorship.
But I don't think it was politics or religion that did the Sahara in. I think it was the introduction of grazing animals. You see, the earlier (Christian) and primitive (animist) cultures that existed in the region before that were mostly farmers. But grazing animals represented wealth to the incoming Islamic "missionaries". So they brought that in with them (but not because of their religion; just because of their culture.)
The grazing animals overgrazed the land, and destroyed the plant life, freeing up the dunes. Further, plants tend to regulate the water; so the Sahara then had no further regulation.
But no, this also isn't Western capitalism that did it. This is an extension, if you will, of the Mongol invasion, and the imposition of a new culture upon a region that was not suited to it.
Here's why: water absorbs greenhouse gases -- but gives them up all at once, in large hiccups, when jolted. The Mexican volcano "Chichon" (chicken) had a lake that did this, if I remember correctly, and gased an entire town to death.
Yeah, the amount of greenhouse gases that the water can hold are tremendous -- but we're putting tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Okay, sometimes I have to log in at the local internet cafe, and I *assume* that there will be keyloggers. That said, my process was to bring up MS Word, type a whole sentence or two, then delete (using mouse swipes) everything except my password, cut that, then return to IE, and paste that in.
Oh, yes: I also cleared the cookies and removed the "Autocomplete" functions that were (of course) set to "remember logins / remember passwords". And cleared history.
But assuming that there was a keylogger, did my efforts give me any protection at all? Or are the key loggers actually key - and - mouse - logger - and - replay?
Hey, look at me. I'm not posting as anonymous coward, but only because I don't have an identity crisis yet. But if you do have one; if you're wondering how schizophrenic you must be to be racking up credit card bills on the same day in Chicago, Maryland, Nevada, and Florida, why fret?
Just shed your identity and be done with it.
Identity theft is a problem because our government identically is holding people responsible for their identity, and at the same time actively destroying the infrastructure, which results in theft, and puts a premium on the sale of identities.
The solution, it would seem, is simple: don't have an identity!
Listen to yourself: "It's easy, low-risk, and quite lucrative." Is it illegal? If so, then that means that the government is deliberately not enforcing those laws. Which means that the government actually wants identity theft to be happening. Which means that anything you do is not going to work:
Pass laws: Oh. Riiight. Do you know how many laws we have? Do you know how many laws just your state has? Do you know what they say? Do you know what percentage make sense, grammatically speaking? This is an answer that our government loves.
Hold companies accountable Stop the world... that isn't America any more, and America has conquered the world. Companies are there specifically to avoid accountability.
No. Sorry, but the answer is just to shed your identity. Once your identity has been stolen, take advantage of it. Give up your three names -- who needs them anyway? -- and just call yourself "Bill" (or whatever your first name is). Make it official. Then go out, and start dropping your social security number out there to as many illegal immigrant rings as you can. Why, even SELL the information. Make sure that you all are "Bill", and take control of the world's largest voting block.
Note to the unaware: This is parody, but as with all humor, there is a touch of truth somewhere here....
Quite simply, if we gain the ability to pop a pill every 100 years and extend our lifespan by 100 years, those pills will become extremely valuable, and all the more valuable if one person can keep his, while keeping them away from others.
Meanwhile, body parts are still going to be wearing out -- you don't think that someone who can afford an immortality pill will stop drinking alcohol, when he can just go to China, do you?
So what's going to happen if this becomes a reality is that the powerful will find another way to eat the weak.
Meanwhile, the poor who aren't happy about the situation will be fighting on the other side, taking pot shots at the wealthy...... so I rather figure that if immortality becomes available, the average (and maybe maximum) lifespan will decrease significantly.
Personally, I'm quite happy to have everybody limited to 100 years. It's more pro-life.
Most people can't name one patented thing if their life depended on it...
I strongly suspect that the gallows is *not* patented at the current time. I can't think of anything else, offhand, that could be possibly patented that people's lives depend on. Maybe the climber's "friend" or some kind of piton or the dynamic rope is patented.
However, things that are patented include:
Toys:
The Slinky.
The little springy press-down pop-up suction cup toy.
Computer algorithms:
The GIF (I guess that just expired, though).
Arithmentic encryption.
The one-click checkout.
"Buy it now" on Ebay (but patented by someone else).
Weaponry tech:
The nuclear submarine (Feynmann/US government).
A nuclear airplane (never actually invented at the time Feynmann named it.)
Medical:
Substitute skin.
Many methods for determining cancer.
Almost definitely patented (but I do not know for sure offhand) the self-disolving stitch.
There's a few.
In that case, take advantage of your strengths.
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The "Techie" Vote?
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# Techies are damned good with technology. We tend to have significant problems in dealing with people, though. Some of us are working to overcome that shortcoming.
Mmhmmm... So you're saying that techies will never win an election, because politics is about interfacing with people? Not any more...... welcome to the brave new world of electronic voting machines and internet voting!
Techies, get out there, take advantage of your newfound political power, and go vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Count for something!
I, for one, do not support patents at all. That is, I would favor getting rid of them entirely.
As pointed out elsewhere on this same topic, the patent system never did help encourage invention, as is given as the one authorization for patents in the US Constitution.
Nor does the patent system encourage justice: it actually prevents true inventors without deep pockets from profiting from their work (read the link above... it's pointed out often enough).
And the major effect of the patent system is to just give more sales (and thus money) to companies that did not earn it, by preventing those who *did* earn it from entering business.
So I completely do not support patents. I am well aware that there are others like me on slashdot (I suspect the grandparent post is one); I am also well aware that for some reason I am in the minority. Why that is, is beyond me, but that's okay. That's life: other peoples' logic seldom makes sense to me.
Just a thought here... if you use Quantum Bits to make a standard NOT switch, then it seems to me that the NOT switch is going to behave as a NOT switch, and nothing is going to be any better than a CMOS NOT gate.
To me, the advantage of going quantum is when you multiplex zillions of gates together to set up (if you will) a programmable analog computer that can calculate potential possibilities based upon your model.
To do that, it seems to me that we shouldn't be thinking "...duh, how do I program a not gate with this?..." to which the obvious answer is any existing NOT Gate already makes use of all our Quantum physics (that is does not violate the laws of Quantum physics)".
We should instead be thinking "what totally new sorts of gates can I be making with quantum physics, in order to properly multiplex these things together?"
When someone does that, and gives me a programmable laser on-and-in-and-interfere-and-answer-out coprocessor, then I'm going to be impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
And dammit, why does Linus Torvalds have to have 'S' at the end of his first and last name? I can't figure out where the apostrophy goes.
I'd stick it on the end: Torvalds'.
As to the origin, here is my guess:
Torvalds seems quite closely related to the Latvian construction of names, such as Jons (John).
The Latvian construction, in turn, is actually of Samogitian origin (Samogitian, a bastardization of "Zematiskas", meaning "lowlander", a group of Baltic farmers and fishermen who were feared by the Swedes and Danes/Norwegions for their violent raids and pirating in the 1100s.)
The Zematiskas endings on words are probably more like Latvian than Lithuanian, but I know the Lithuanian, so that's what I'll give you. Also, note that where you see a * symbol, that indicates saying the letter just before, nasally.
(sing)-as (pl)-ai : Subject of the sentence
(sing)-o (pl)-u : indicates origin/posession
(sing)-ui (pl)-iams : indicates the reciever
(sing)-a* (pl)-os : indicates the direct object
(sing) -e (pl)-ose : indicates location
(sing)-ai : indicates that you're talking to the person
Note that where Lithuanian has -as, Latvian has -s; so I'd suspect that in most cases you strip the vowels off to get Latvian (but I don't know):
(sing)-s (pl)-i : Subject of the sentence
(sing)-o (pl)-u : indicates origin/posession
(sing)-i (pl)-ams : indicates the reciever
(sing)-a* (pl)-s : indicates the direct object
(sing) -e (pl)-se : indicates location
(sing)-i : indicates that you're talking to the person
But since Linus is Norwegian, you won't see all those particular endings on his name. Rather, you'll see Norwegian construction applied to his name. That means that you'll see a language that looks a ton like old English, and that you might actually be barely able to read. At least, that's my experience: I could take the correct meaning from a Norwegian "I'll be out; please update your email addresses" email that was accidentally sent to me.
Let me suggest the IEEE graphics and animation conference proceedings, which were published back in 1985, if I remember correctly (or was it 1983?)
It was in this book that there was published a chapter (an article, really) that dealt with a new mathematical device, the binary spatial partition.
When I read that, I perked up. I was alert enough to realize that this was a major breakthrough, and if realtime animation would ever be possible, that this was how to do it. I even went so far to learn how to do it, but, alas, my 8 Mhz IBM PS-2/80 was just too slow. Note that I read this in 1987, not 1983 or 1985. Nonetheless, if you want a really good read, that book is worth buying, if you can figure out which one it is.
Anyone want to pipe up and say what it is, I'd appreciate it. I was motivated to go out and buy it, but then another programmer borrowed it, and never returned it *sigh*.
In line with that, it seems that one of the first sites to go down, is right along the Michigan/Canada border. It's unclear whether it goes down before or after the power outage. Now, I'm willing to bet that 1300MW flows from the Canada side of Niagra falls into Detroit.
And if that 1300 MW can't get there by the direct route, why then the automatic system is going to reroute it around Lake Erie, resulting in a sudden swap of direction as the current goes the other way. That's what is known to have taken down the whole system.
So this very well could be a computer problem / virus problem.
How about here. T. This is actually my own intended implementation of a plan that was referenced on Slashdot, proposed by a Nobel prize winning economist... but I can't find the reference any more.
Anyhow, the way patenting goes, I figured that if I ever wanted to have a chance of doing this, I'd better post my idea in specific. So that's what I did.
If you want to implement it, great! That's what Public Domain is all about. But if you do, I'd really appreciate a piece of the action, because I'm sitting here in a music production center, where people are too poor to pay to write/mix/market CDs, with CD making capability.
But no good marketing capability, and no taste for joining the RIAA either.
I'd not only be interested in talking about it, I'd be interested in doing something about it.
Are you a perl/PHP coder? Do you have time to develop a web sales system?
Check out my journal here. I specifically public-domained this idea so that I could do it someday.
Let me be more specific: we could begin this the day that we have such a website, by: 1) putting online any public domain sheet-music arrangements for bands. (2) Listing public domain tunes, that can be rearranged. (3) referencing a GPL-like content license that includes all broadcast rights
Anyhow, if you're interested in working with me on this, let me know, by all means. I'm not a coder, but I do have access (at least at the moment) to recording capabilities, and some mixing, and there are some very good music schools around here. I see no reason why performances of PD work couldn't be recorded, and we couldn't start selling them.
To give you an idea of what I'm thinking of, a typical CD has about 12-18 songs. Each song usually is mixed from about 5-6 tracks. The cost of making a CD, here where I live, is $500, which is too high for most locals. So my thought is that they would be happy to make a CD for free as in speech, free to copy, one copy to them, one copy to us, and we split any of our profits over $500/15=$33 per song. Start the songs out at $10, 80% price drop with each sale, completely free, and you're bound to have people who will want to buy it.
No. I do not advise you to buy farmland to make money. I advise untaxed farmland in order to wait out the storm. And learn to farm, while you're at it. Do other things to make money, by all means.
http://financiallisting.com/Investing/Stock/Stock_ Fraud/more5.html
When it comes down to it, the same people, with the same morals, run both the Casinos and the stock market.
That is one of the mafia's big money makers, too. And if you get on their wrong side, you die. Let's face it -- nowadays, the best thing you can probably do with your money, is buy cheap, low tax (W. Va) land, and put it into production. Start farming it. Or invest in your own business, if yo u have one.
(rant)
Now, let me also throw out one other major source of blame: the governments. I do not say "the governments you elect". If you are in the government, you know that your job really doesn't depend on the will of the people. It might depend on the will of some "elected" representative somewhere. Or if you're elected, it might depend on your membership in a civic club; or it might depend on which advertising agents you hire. But it doesn't depend on the will of the poeople. So you bear your own responsibility.
Here goes: the opening for these mafias comes directly out of your laws that violate natural law. Natural law is the natural rights, which cannot effectively be taken away from people. The right to speech (who controls your mouth?); the right to work to better your condition; the right to travel. There are other rights, granted rights, but
Mostly, as far as I can tell, those other countries include Norway, Holland, France, Germany, and occasionally other ex-Soviet Satellites like the Czech Republic or Ukraine.
This is not the Russian mafia doing this: the Russian mafia has been kept out of Lithuania by other mafias. But, according to an article I read back in 1999, the Russian mafia *does* operate rings that offer nominally legitimate employment to young Russian women. Then they start charging all kinds of new "fees", and threatening to beat/kill their families back home, to force them into prostitution. They are operating in New York. Young women can't go to the police, because the police are on the Russian mafia's payroll. That, according to the article. I cannot say for sure if it is true or not.
Nonetheless, these are not consensual crimes. Young women do not normally, voluntarily, go into abusive multiple-partner AIDS-transmitting sexual relationships willingly.
You can buy all the illegal drugs you want, and they can sell all the illegal drugs you want.
They just cannot *deliver* them, or have them delivered, and you cannot take posession.
It's kindof like the gold mines: you don't buy gold; you delay your taxes by buying stock in gold mines. They dig it out, they refine it; they never actually sell it. You take the tax writeoff (loss), and the ownership of the gold, both.
Cocaine has lots of legitimate uses (umm, do they use it in making Novacaine? If not, it still is legally used to weight down the DOJ buildings in Miami, and keep them from blowing away in Tornados) if I could only think of one.
Okay... I'm done with my daily Schozophrenic Thought For the Day.
Conservation of Energy limits Ohm's law. If you will, as soon as you draw any appreciable current on a capacitor or battery that's too small, the voltage drops.
As long as their 220 volt system is powered by monkeys rubbing their hair on a dry day, I don't think he'll be just fine.
Considering the style of wiring, I'd say there's a good chance that's exactly how they're powered.
In Siberia, apparently there were whole underground nuclear cities. One of them blew (sabotage, it is believed, but I doubt anyone will ever know.)
That's not Chernobyl -- that's a whole different thing.
At least, that's what ex Soviets in the Baltic say. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. But I suspect it is possible.
What is the spoofing source? Is it possible that the spoofing source results in bounces that flood the site of a little-known Michigan site, possibly one belonging to a power company relay station along the 1500-MW lines from Toronto to Detroit?
Do you see what I'm getting at here?
You don't seem to be paying attention to the news.
(1) Patents *decrease* security for investors that actually produce products. That is because patents are a legal minefield that nobody can be sure of navigating safely. Not only that, but there are huge costs associated just with being innocent of patent infringement. There are larger costs associated with being guilty.
(2) The one group of investors that are not at risk from patents are those who invest in patent holding companies. But patent holding companies don't produce anything. They patent ideas, sometimes after they have been invented, or just after the technology to invent them has been developed, and then specifically do not invent it, but wait for it to be invented, and then mug the inventors.
(3) No, the investors do not earn it. The inventors are the ones who earn it. You seem to have drifted from the concept "it can take money to earn money" to "anyone without money must be prevented from earning money." Very occasionally, investors actually have their own idea, start their own business, and pay people to invent. More often, the investor just throws money at an already existing invention. Having money to throw is not something that I consider "inventing."
In line with this, I should note that you seem to have a flawed concept of business. Business is a reaction chamber for many ingredients: workers, idea people, investors, customers, managers... just to name a few. If it is not profitable to any of those groups, business should not happen, period. But consistent with our country's slide into fascism, people (including, it seems, you) are beginning to forget any group except the investor and sometimes the customer.
To sum up, I find your vision of business to be almost completely blind. Sorry for being harsh, but you just performed the all-too-common distillation of real capitalism down into a non-sequitor.
Okay, how small can you make a PDE? If it was small enough, could you cycle them so that the net shock wave effect canceled out, and the shock per pulse was tiny?
You said, "Already Mosquitos and flies started showing up in various places where they were never seen before."
Really. I'd like to know what place that is. Mosquitos are up in Alaska, and boy are they vicious. Mosquitos are in Belize, and rock around the clock. Washington DC was known as "Malarial city" when it was first built. Malaria, indeed, stretched into New York and beyond. Mosquitos are standard in the Baltic region. Mosquitos are about as hardy as any air-breathing animal I can think of.
You want to get concerned about animals, and fish... fine. It's often justified. But as for the spread of Mosquitos, my list only leaves underwater, and up in the stratosphere. Pray tell, which?
First of all, Sahara was at one time reasonably fertile. Or at least parts of it were. In a similar way, we could point out that the America's Midwest is potentially a desert: those are sand dunes we're farming on, and we'd better take care of it if we want to keep on farming it.
And yes, political strife makes it so people, desperate to eat today, don't take care of tomorrow. And the Saharan region *did* go through political strife: the conquest by Islam. [and no, not all religions are equal, or as you seem to think, equally bad. Some shed more blood, some less. Some have peaceful periods, some don't.]
You're also wrong that there were no dictatorships. Some of the dunes have completely covered old Roman forts. Rome was definitely a dictatorship.
But I don't think it was politics or religion that did the Sahara in. I think it was the introduction of grazing animals. You see, the earlier (Christian) and primitive (animist) cultures that existed in the region before that were mostly farmers. But grazing animals represented wealth to the incoming Islamic "missionaries". So they brought that in with them (but not because of their religion; just because of their culture.)
The grazing animals overgrazed the land, and destroyed the plant life, freeing up the dunes.
Further, plants tend to regulate the water; so the Sahara then had no further regulation.
But no, this also isn't Western capitalism that did it. This is an extension, if you will, of the Mongol invasion, and the imposition of a new culture upon a region that was not suited to it.
Here's why: water absorbs greenhouse gases -- but gives them up all at once, in large hiccups, when jolted. The Mexican volcano "Chichon" (chicken) had a lake that did this, if I remember correctly, and gased an entire town to death.
Yeah, the amount of greenhouse gases that the water can hold are tremendous -- but we're putting tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Okay, sometimes I have to log in at the local internet cafe, and I *assume* that there will be keyloggers. That said, my process was to bring up MS Word, type a whole sentence or two, then delete (using mouse swipes) everything except my password, cut that, then return to IE, and paste that in.
Oh, yes: I also cleared the cookies and removed the "Autocomplete" functions that were (of course) set to "remember logins / remember passwords". And cleared history.
But assuming that there was a keylogger, did my efforts give me any protection at all? Or are the key loggers actually key - and - mouse - logger - and - replay?
Just shed your identity and be done with it.
Identity theft is a problem because our government identically is holding people responsible for their identity, and at the same time actively destroying the infrastructure, which results in theft, and puts a premium on the sale of identities.
The solution, it would seem, is simple: don't have an identity!
Listen to yourself: "It's easy, low-risk, and quite lucrative." Is it illegal? If so, then that means that the government is deliberately not enforcing those laws. Which means that the government actually wants identity theft to be happening. Which means that anything you do is not going to work:
Pass laws: Oh. Riiight. Do you know how many laws we have? Do you know how many laws just your state has? Do you know what they say? Do you know what percentage make sense, grammatically speaking? This is an answer that our government loves.
Hold companies accountable Stop the world... that isn't America any more, and America has conquered the world. Companies are there specifically to avoid accountability.
No. Sorry, but the answer is just to shed your identity. Once your identity has been stolen, take advantage of it. Give up your three names -- who needs them anyway? -- and just call yourself "Bill" (or whatever your first name is). Make it official. Then go out, and start dropping your social security number out there to as many illegal immigrant rings as you can. Why, even SELL the information. Make sure that you all are "Bill", and take control of the world's largest voting block.
Note to the unaware: This is parody, but as with all humor, there is a touch of truth somewhere here....
Quite simply, if we gain the ability to pop a pill every 100 years and extend our lifespan by 100 years, those pills will become extremely valuable, and all the more valuable if one person can keep his, while keeping them away from others.
... so I rather figure that if immortality becomes available, the average (and maybe maximum) lifespan will decrease significantly.
Meanwhile, body parts are still going to be wearing out -- you don't think that someone who can afford an immortality pill will stop drinking alcohol, when he can just go to China, do you?
So what's going to happen if this becomes a reality is that the powerful will find another way to eat the weak.
Meanwhile, the poor who aren't happy about the situation will be fighting on the other side, taking pot shots at the wealthy...
Personally, I'm quite happy to have everybody limited to 100 years. It's more pro-life.
Umm... check out my journal sometime. Okay?
Also, I also do not support copyright.
Also,
Most people can't name one patented thing if their life depended on it...
I strongly suspect that the gallows is *not* patented at the current time. I can't think of anything else, offhand, that could be possibly patented that people's lives depend on. Maybe the climber's "friend" or some kind of piton or the dynamic rope is patented.
However, things that are patented include:
Toys:
The Slinky.
The little springy press-down pop-up suction cup toy.
Computer algorithms:
The GIF (I guess that just expired, though).
Arithmentic encryption.
The one-click checkout.
"Buy it now" on Ebay (but patented by someone else).
Weaponry tech:
The nuclear submarine (Feynmann/US government).
A nuclear airplane (never actually invented at the time Feynmann named it.)
Medical:
Substitute skin.
Many methods for determining cancer.
Almost definitely patented (but I do not know for sure offhand) the self-disolving stitch.
There's a few.
# Techies are damned good with technology. We tend to have significant problems in dealing with people, though. Some of us are working to overcome that shortcoming.
... welcome to the brave new world of electronic voting machines and internet voting!
Mmhmmm... So you're saying that techies will never win an election, because politics is about interfacing with people? Not any more...
Techies, get out there, take advantage of your newfound political power, and go vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Count for something!
1... 2... 2... 2... 2... 4... 5... 6...
1... 12... 13... 14... 248... 249...
(okay, I'm just kidding. Don't do that.)
As pointed out elsewhere on this same topic, the patent system never did help encourage invention, as is given as the one authorization for patents in the US Constitution.
Nor does the patent system encourage justice: it actually prevents true inventors without deep pockets from profiting from their work (read the link above... it's pointed out often enough).
And the major effect of the patent system is to just give more sales (and thus money) to companies that did not earn it, by preventing those who *did* earn it from entering business.
So I completely do not support patents. I am well aware that there are others like me on slashdot (I suspect the grandparent post is one); I am also well aware that for some reason I am in the minority. Why that is, is beyond me, but that's okay. That's life: other peoples' logic seldom makes sense to me.
Just a thought here... if you use Quantum Bits to make a standard NOT switch, then it seems to me that the NOT switch is going to behave as a NOT switch, and nothing is going to be any better than a CMOS NOT gate.
To me, the advantage of going quantum is when you multiplex zillions of gates together to set up (if you will) a programmable analog computer that can calculate potential possibilities based upon your model.
To do that, it seems to me that we shouldn't be thinking "...duh, how do I program a not gate with this?..." to which the obvious answer is any existing NOT Gate already makes use of all our Quantum physics (that is does not violate the laws of Quantum physics)".
We should instead be thinking "what totally new sorts of gates can I be making with quantum physics, in order to properly multiplex these things together?"
When someone does that, and gives me a programmable laser on-and-in-and-interfere-and-answer-out coprocessor, then I'm going to be impressed.