I'd like to point out that this article is probably true -- almost completely true -- and it's stuff that matters, and it's for us nerds alright, and it's appropriate for slashdot, but it isn't news.
More than that, the same thing happened in the opposite direction under the Clinton administration. It is one of the reasons that Ayn Rand (and no, I'm not a Randian; I think her books are lousy) claimed that government-sponsored science cannot be science.
That said, this problem is everywhere. Take a look at science news this week, for example. Every week, at least two of their articles are directly politically topics, mostly on the liberal end.
Or try Scientific American. Just in time for a big Democrat Party gun-control push, they came out with a whole issue complete devoted to the source of terrorist and revolutionary-army weaponry.
I have no inherent reason to believe the latest results any less or any more than the results that came out of the Clinton Administration, "proving" that condom use reduced the incidence of STDs, or anything else of a political nature, for that matter. The real benefit (if you want to call it that) of all this pseudo-scientific politics is that it allows anyone to believe whatever they want, and draws all of society away from reality into a fantasy land.
I'll go one step farther and personalize the statement: if this is the first time that you noticed anything, or if this is the first time you complained -- then you need to rethink whether what you call "science" really is science.
So are you saying that you'd favor a matched fusion/fission pair of reactors, designed to limit the radioactive elements produced?
BTW... I, for one, am convinced that fusion will never be practical until we can achieve cold fusion with normal hydrogen nuclei. There just isn't enough D- and T- to make it economically practical, otherwise.
However, I think that with some very careful chemical engineering, it could be possible to do cold fusion. None of this University of Utah stuff... the stuff I'm thinking of would practically require another 50 or 100 years of advances before we could have the technology to produce such molecules safely. (Biomolecular production of fusion-type molecules would *not* be safe, unless you consider the possibility of turning the Earth into a brown dwarf "safe".)
Ummm.... we're over here in Lithuania. I might mention that your "Halloween" is an *American* custom, not some mixture of paganism and Christianity and whatnot.
That said, you might check your other facts. Who knows? Maybe you'll find that Ebeneezer Scrooge was right on the money, after all. [Okay, just kidding].
But if your impressions of facts are defining your opinions, and they are wrong, then maybe your opinions are wrong too.
Ummm... I think there is a serious set of misplaced priorities here. The toys are not more important than Christmas. Nor are they more important than one's daughter. Here are some alternatives:
(1) Post a notice on the side of the box: "Our employees enjoy Christmas too. We will be available for tech support on Dec. 26th, bright and early."
(2) Be available for tech support for setup *before* Christmas, for those who have the foresight to test it. Make one optional box a decorated box that only needs a ribbon added. Necessary info is on the bottom.
(3) Make something that really works out of the box.
(4) Sell only working units.
(5) Be more diverse: hire more Jews, Islamic, and Buddhist people. They'll be happy to work on Christmas day. But also have Christians who can work on the Jewish, Islamic (etc.) holy days.
That's just a few. The overall message? Have a backbone. Be decent to your employees AND their families. Your employment practices do not exist in a vacuum; they help create the world you live in next year.
[Faith] 2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence
Which is yet entirely different from the religious meaning of faith in the Bible, which is always tied to obedience (that which you have faith in, you also believe enough to follow. That which you follow, you obey.)
I have known as many religiously fanatic people who had Definition-2 faith in mass-media or government published "science" alone, as religiously fanatic people who had Definition-2 faith in religion alone. That said, I have a ton more contacts in religion -- so I wonder if that means that, percentage-wise, science has as many fanatic followers as, say, Islam?
[Followup] Interesting thought: After writing this, I immediately thought "well, at least they aren't as destructive..." Of course, then I thought of enough examples to make me take that back as well...
It's rare that I see sarcasm skillfully used. This one was perfect!
Nonetheless, I can understand slashdot letting TROLL posts fall off. For every successful use of sarcasm, satire, and irony, there are a thousand points of 5#it that can utterly destroy a news/forum site.
Nonetheless, as your troll post disappears off the radar, perhaps people will see the light, and click on it out of interest.
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Hmmm... it sounds like what we really need is a mail transsender that strips the header, adds one of a number of randomly selected "please stop paying spammers" messages, and then mails the spam back to the spammer... or to the company that did it. The way to properly do this would be to only check out domain first, though.
Then just automatically forward all spam to the anti-spam-bot, and let it go from there. 4000 emails to symantec? No problem.
I purchased a "complete" copy of Quark Xpress, that happened to not include the license or installation key. I paid a normal price for it -- about $550 for 4.0 -- and got burned. Fraud was provable in several ways.
(1) Ebay came through on their bargain: They insure for $200 minus a $25 deductable (read $175) which -- after all the paperwork -- is about $150.
(2) Paypal makes victims go through about $50 of paperwork, then doesn't pay on their "insurance". To date as of the time this happened, they had never submitted a SINGLE insurance claim, according to several web sources I read. I don't know if that is true. I do know that although I had several proofs of fraud, some involving their own system which they could check, and found another victim of the same guy, they still said "well, he shipped *something*, so we don't pay nuthin."
This is system run by the guy who, if I remember, wants to start up a space hotel with the money he got from selling Paypal. My advice? Don't trust the windows of that space hotel: they'll be made from sugar, just like in the movies.
Anyhow, your statement isn't quite accurate. It should read, "Do business for more than $175, get burned." That said, one other time since then, I purchased a Mac on Ebay, and got it without a hitch. But it was a PowerBook 190 parts computer, so I kept it cheap and my risk small.
"The world would be a much better place if God had left us a tarball".
Hmmm.... and you thought all that underground oil came from the dinosaurs. In a moment of supreme irony, I shall point you to a news website which shows a 25-km asteroid on a collision course with earth; initial spectroscopy indicates that it is composed of a mixture of sodium chloride, water, and petroleum (solidified, of course)...
I just remember programming in Xenix. It was such a pain, because you couldn't predict what the computer programs would do. One time, they'd run. Another time, they'd crash -- it had more to do with the cycle the operating system was in, it seemed, than anything else.
Eventually, the company I was working for went out of business. I guess they owed me about $100-$300, unpaid. Their main business, at the time, was transporting medical database software to Xenix. Great idea, and it was back in 1985, too, and the program was already written for the IBM PC. (***sigh*** on _so_ many levels.) Their other project which they were considering at the time was developing hardware to allow satellite phones to work on cruise liners. But the problem was that doctors wanted something for a Xenix mainframe, something professional, not something on a whole bunch of silly PCs that were linked together. And Xenix couldn't handle anything at all, because its programs crashed everywhere.
*sigh* *sigh* *sigh*
And, of course, they decided that the shipboard satellite idea was 50 years away at least, although it did have vision.
*sigh*. There's so much irony here, it hurts to think.
It seems to me that the thing to do with this is either (1) refute it (2) prove it (3) explain it.
As a possible answer to #3, just suppose:
As I remember, you can apply any charge that is a fraction of e to a "Electron Tunnelling Microscope" by adjusting the pattern of the electrons. That is, the electrons interact together, and give you any charge you want at the tip.
Now, that being the case, I note that their "plasma" is a *low* density plasma, probably low energy too. Therefore, one would expect large waveforms. If they are large waveforms, then they at least partially correspond to that "new" state of matter, in which you lower the temperature of the hydrogen gas down towards absolute zero, and you start to see interesting things with the Pauli exclusion principle. And the gas ceases to behave like atoms, but starts to behave like a network.
In other words, this could indeed be a fractional shell level per atom, in the network system only.
But on the other hand, if this is so, this will never yield useful energy, because it is necessarily a low-energy phenonemon.
That should still be good enough, based on the physics definition of simultaneity: that you can't have simultaneous events at two different locations.
For that reason, going from computers 1 to N, you simply define computer 1 to be 1 femtosecond ahead of computer 2, and computer 2 to be 1 femtosecond ahead of computer 3. As of that point, no two transactions are simultaneous.
Of course, it may be that you execute transaction 454, lowering the account value to $10, then discover transaction 452 (which arrived later at the computer, but is stamped earlier) wants to withdraw $15. So you then undo transaction 454, carry out transaction 452, and then attempt to carry out transaction 454 (unless transaction 453 put in an extra $100, in which case 452 gets undone again).
It's not a huge problem: it can be programmed.
Ummm... learn about different filing systems, especially the numerical system.
You give each computer a unique ID number. You also give it a synchronized clock. It doesn't even have to be good to the microsecond, although it can be, because all you have to check is that each sequential transaction is delayed by one second. That's actually easy to do: pull a pending transaction off the stack, check if its time is previous to yours, and recycle if it isn't.
But then you give the transaction the following ID, made of concatenated strings:
[Galactic location] + [Company ID] +[Computer ID] + [date] + [time] + [Process Order number]. As input transactions, you use the IDs of the previous transactions that they depend on.
Greenwich time will do; really, you just need a planet-normalized time stamp. Naturally, you don't use a Julian date; rather, you use a numerical date [day 0000001=January 1, year -20000 BC] that is 32 bits long. Worry about the year 10^242 rollover when we get to it. To maintain forward compatibility into the space age, assign as the galactic ID [Sun = 00001]+[Planet = 00003], 64 bits for the star, each, 32 bits for the planet (to allow for space stations and what not).
Now, when writing the number on checks and stuff, be sure to recode that number from base 10 or base 2 into base 36 (26 chars+10 digits) or even base 128. That way, instead of having about 200 chars; you will have 16 chars; something short enough to read and stick on any bill.
*THAT* is the techie's way of doing numerical filing, in my opinion. But you gotta be a techie *secretary* to understand it.;->
Okay, let me preface this by saying I read the other comments, and these are different enough that I thing I need to post at the top.
Prediction 1
My pre-prediction: His predictions assume that the Nasdaq investment boom continues. I don't think so. I think that we are going to have a slow-slide recession, as businesses are raided for taxes to support war after war, and the IMF, having drained the third world, ceases to bring in "investment" and cheap goods. Here's what I think instead:
Prediction 2
Much colder winters in Europe and America, and drought. Our fuel usage *increases* for winter. But the harder conditions result in reduced expenditures for luxuries, including automobiles. A corresponding shift is *beginning*, either into the cities or into the country, away from suburbs. So fuel usage peaks about this time.
Prediction 3
We see more and more obvious problems associated with overpopulation, but it becomes apparent that it will not continue: the population crests and starts to fall. AIDS, with still no true wonderdrug, begins to take its toll, as does starvation and (especially) war.
Prediction 4
The fall of the technology information sector in America, just as industry fell to foreign competition. Essentially, we remain uncompetitive in America, due to the high taxes and continual war, and other peaceful countries eat our cake. That doesn't mean our programmers disappear; they just start to do other things. Some emmigrate; others redirect their efforts towards...
Prediction 5
single-application networkable computers. Essentially, the day of the PC is not over, but it is only useful for entertainment and typing. You want to get something printed? Plug your data card through the smart printer. It handles the rest. Step by step, smart "labor saving devices" are designed and built -- true labor saving devices. Those bread machines were just ahead of their time, and more gadget than useful. But automobile computers, for example, will improve, and tell you when and where a new, unusual noise is coming from *before* the car breaks down. You go to the automechanic, pay $500, and he installs it on your *old* car, too. But they won't be powered on pentiums. They'll be powered on cheap RISC computers, or 8051-XAs, or something else like that. Cheap, slow, but specialized enough that you'll never know it's slow.
Clearly, the poster in the above topic wasn't talking about Microsoft, he was talking about the Justice Department in the Jose Padilla case, ignoring the Federal Courts.
Or was he? I'm not really sure anymore.
Maybe he was just talking about the general state of affairs in America, where the powerful are not beholden to the law, be they Congressmen, Senators, Presidents, or corporations, or corporate bigwigs.
In my opinion, peoples' attitudes in America need a major overhaul: for the powerful, newfound respect for right and wrong, and the law. For the law, respect for natural law. For the weak, a respect for right and wrong that will force them to empower good people, not bad people.
These contraditions are in fact errors, and there are a great many errors in the bible at that. If you accept that these errors(contradicions) exist then you have to resonably believe that other facts presented might also be incorrect. Without the bible as a source of truth Christianity becomes arbitrary, something that people believe in because they were told they should(not that this excludes all other religions though).
Actually, no. You are ignoring the fact that if that were all there were to it, it would go away in about one generation. Rather, there is a ton of personal experience that supports it, in every generation. Some of that experience -- a lot of it -- is mundane: the confirmation of Biblical truths in our everyday lives. Other is supernatural: God does work miracles in our lives, sometimes: just read "The Cross and the Switchblade."
For contrast, consider how the WWII generation often either got married in less-than-perfect circumstances, or concieved before they were actually married. They then told their kids "well, don't do it before you get married, just because it looks bad." Their kids, the baby boomers, took that for what it was -- hypocrisy -- and ignored it. Thus we got the sexual revolution (yeah, I'm oversimplifying, but it's approximately correct. The seeds of the sexual revolution were spawned in the WWII generation's personal choices).
In the same way, if it were just "we were told that it was good to believe" Christianity would not last more than a generation. Christianity lasts because it has truth, and because God reinforces it continually.
As far as the errors go, yes: some of the contridictions are errors, and some are not even contradictions, just an individual's misunderstanding. But it is an item of faith the God will not let the vital parts be wiped out.
(1) Esther is in both. The books that are not in both include Tobit (an excellent novel, worth reading, and amusing at some points. Did you know you get cataracts from sleeping outdoors with your eyes open? Birds poop in them, you see...), Maccabbees (an excellent documentary), Daniel and Susannah, maybe Wisdom.
(2) Martin Luther, if I understand correctly, picked the Hebrew Bible because he liked the feeling he got that he'd understand things better in the original Hebrew. The RC Church picked the Septuagint, which was archived in Greek in the Library of Alexandria, because this was archived *before* the time of Christ, and was generally accepted as scripture at the time of Christ. The Hebrew Bible was written by Sadducees after Masada, and does include some significant changes. Sadducces did not believe in the Resurrection, for example, and thus did not include books that pointed heavily towards the Resurrection. Also, "virgin" was changed to "maid" (neanis) at the part where the prophet says to the king "is it not enough that you should weary the ears of men? Must you weary God as well? But since you do not ask for a sign, this shall be a sign unto you: a virgin shall concieve, and shall bear a son..." One can only guess the reason for such a change.
There is something to be said for both sides. I prefer the RC side, though.
(3) Then you get to books like the Gospel of Thomas. This is a case where you especially have to look at the source. The paper is quite old, and indeed would be one of the earliest gospels based upon the age of the paper. However, the ink dates back to the time of the Saracen invasion of Spain, and the pollens in the ink seem to place the writing in Italy. So it would appear, especially since that book supports Islam more than Christianity, that it was a work of fiction written at that time. Perhaps it was written on very old paper to try to support Islam -- perhaps not.
Your post highlights another problem with Intellectual Property: the issue of transferability.
As you stated, "A license is a *right* to do something. You can't sell a right."
Actually, there are two possible cases: either a particular right is transferrable [say, using the property on which your house rests] or it is not transferrable [an inherent right]. If it is transferrable, it may be partially transferrable [a lein] or only transferrable as a unit [that piece of gum you're chewing].
Those are all the logical possibilities that I can see.
Now, the question is, is an IP license inherently transferrable or not? If not, then you can't sell it, period. Typically, that is because there is something inherent about it that makes it impossible to sell (right to life: nobody else can live my life for me. Right to speech: nobody else can move my mouth.)
Here's one that isn't transferrable: the Hewlett Packard printer driver. It won't work, as a unit, on any other printer. It isn't designed to work on any other printer; its algorithms are specific to the HP hardware. Oh, pieces of the algorithms may work elsewhere, but you can also get those pieces elsewhere. As a result, although they had (previously) a clause that it could only be used on HP printers, they quickly saw that they didn't need such a clause -- the right was inherently non-transferrable. So they removed it, and made it open source.
But if there is nothing inherent about it that is non-transferrable, then it can be sold.
When laws try to say that a dog has five legs, they just make a fool of the law. In this case, a license is easily transferrable. Since the law is upholding the idea that it is not transferrable, then the law is essentially upholding a form of robbery. That being the case, business becomes riskier for businesses in countries that do this, and the economies head south, and some other country eventually will become dominant. Eventually, for example, America may become no more than the puppet-dictatorship that Iraq (once the shining star of the Western World) is today.
Something to think about, eh? The best that the law can do is to mimic real life, and provide false, non-damaging barriers for people before they hit real, damaging barriers.
For those who want to know the story line...
on
Superhero Smackdown
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This link tells about the battle between an aging Batman, and a superman weakened by a nuclear winter.
In a way, Batman has gone crazy; crazy with doubt and violence.
Anyhow, you can read it for yourself.
For me, my cheesy poofs do reflect on my suit.
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 1
From the sounds of what I have read, the OS can normally handle a divide by zero. However, in this case, it sounds like the OS didn't handle the divide by zero. The only case where I know of that happening is the case of a double-fault.
And a double-fault is caused by a divide-by-zero, followed immediately by some kind of a service request interrupt (such as could be generated by an I/O card). But if that is the case, since the double-fault results in a processor halt, then you have to fault only four groups of engineers:
(1) those who developed the intel chip, for not providing a way for the software to handle a double fault (triple-fault halt might have been safer) (2) those who designed the motherboard, since they should have included some kind of a watchdog timer to handle the double-fault case and reboot the system. (3) those who designed the entire system networks, for not designing in a backup so that a single computer can go down, but the system stay up and running in a redundant mode. (4) the people who drove the tugboat that pulled the Yorktown back in, since everything is their fault, anyhow.
I think I can summarize some problems that others have seen, with no real good answer. More than that, I think I can point out the source of the problems.
As some slashdotters have pointed out, NASA doesn't fulfill its plans. As others have pointed out, government agencies can't stay on budget.
These problems are inherent with an agency that seizes its assets: nothing is real to them; therefore they get nothing real done.
Well, what about companies? Unfortunately, as yet other slashdotters have pointed out, companies won't see the short-term returns, and therefore won't do this.
Hold on!!! I think we can now see the problem in a better light.
There are tons of companies, some with lots of free assets (like M$), and some with an interest in space (like Gates). Then WHY won't companies invest in this?
Companies look for the short term profits, because the long term profits are by no means guaranteed. More specifically, if they do invest a huge amount for a sudden advancement, they have the following to look forward to: even if they make the long term profits, they care likely to have those long-term profits taken away, either through governmental seizure, or revolution, or theft.
Considering this, one might realize that we are being held back by our own individual and collective lack of character. We steal (in oh so many ways, both as companies and as individuals against companies, and as governmental aid recipients, and as software pirates, and as ebay thieves), and then expect the government to mitigate those losses through.... stealing! Then we expect to make progress, and when those with assets are more concerned about protecting their money from theft, we look to another solution: tax-supported programs (stealing!). Then, when those agencies, devoted to living off theft, turn out to be inefficient, we think that there is another answer?!??
It was for this reason that I did not mind too much to leave aerospace engineering, and become involved in prepublishing technical books. At least that way, I was sure that I wasn't stealing or benefitting from theft. My market is real. But more than that, I started to realize that the answers to the technology problems are not always within technology.
In this case, I would argue that the answers lie in Christian faith. The more -- Christians first -- we start to actually obey those commandments (like, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not steal thy neighbor's wife, thou shalt not want to steal thy neighbor's cow or wife, thou shalt not steal another man's life, etc., etc., etc.,) completely, the sooner we will actually get into space.
Of course, if we start to do that, the nature of our need to get into space changes; doesn't it? Because part of that "thou shalt not steal" also involves such things as taking care of the environment, not committing mass-murder (by either terrorist or government action), having respect for life, and so on.
If you used some kind of a time-stamped public key on 10% of the frames (to be downloaded live), and those frames used as the source frames, couldn't you make it so that the decryption would have to be done live?
I don't think that such an idea would be impossible -- but I'm inclined to agree that practically, we probably won't see that happen.
Slashdot Mirror
More than that, the same thing happened in the opposite direction under the Clinton administration. It is one of the reasons that Ayn Rand (and no, I'm not a Randian; I think her books are lousy) claimed that government-sponsored science cannot be science.
That said, this problem is everywhere. Take a look at science news this week, for example. Every week, at least two of their articles are directly politically topics, mostly on the liberal end.
Or try Scientific American. Just in time for a big Democrat Party gun-control push, they came out with a whole issue complete devoted to the source of terrorist and revolutionary-army weaponry.
I have no inherent reason to believe the latest results any less or any more than the results that came out of the Clinton Administration, "proving" that condom use reduced the incidence of STDs, or anything else of a political nature, for that matter. The real benefit (if you want to call it that) of all this pseudo-scientific politics is that it allows anyone to believe whatever they want, and draws all of society away from reality into a fantasy land.
I'll go one step farther and personalize the statement: if this is the first time that you noticed anything, or if this is the first time you complained -- then you need to rethink whether what you call "science" really is science.
So are you saying that you'd favor a matched fusion/fission pair of reactors, designed to limit the radioactive elements produced?
BTW... I, for one, am convinced that fusion will never be practical until we can achieve cold fusion with normal hydrogen nuclei. There just isn't enough D- and T- to make it economically practical, otherwise.
However, I think that with some very careful chemical engineering, it could be possible to do cold fusion. None of this University of Utah stuff... the stuff I'm thinking of would practically require another 50 or 100 years of advances before we could have the technology to produce such molecules safely. (Biomolecular production of fusion-type molecules would *not* be safe, unless you consider the possibility of turning the Earth into a brown dwarf "safe".)
Ummm.... we're over here in Lithuania. I might mention that your "Halloween" is an *American* custom, not some mixture of paganism and Christianity and whatnot.
That said, you might check your other facts. Who knows? Maybe you'll find that Ebeneezer Scrooge was right on the money, after all. [Okay, just kidding].
But if your impressions of facts are defining your opinions, and they are wrong, then maybe your opinions are wrong too.
(1) Post a notice on the side of the box: "Our employees enjoy Christmas too. We will be available for tech support on Dec. 26th, bright and early."
(2) Be available for tech support for setup *before* Christmas, for those who have the foresight to test it. Make one optional box a decorated box that only needs a ribbon added. Necessary info is on the bottom.
(3) Make something that really works out of the box.
(4) Sell only working units.
(5) Be more diverse: hire more Jews, Islamic, and Buddhist people. They'll be happy to work on Christmas day. But also have Christians who can work on the Jewish, Islamic (etc.) holy days.
That's just a few. The overall message? Have a backbone. Be decent to your employees AND their families. Your employment practices do not exist in a vacuum; they help create the world you live in next year.
Which is yet entirely different from the religious meaning of faith in the Bible, which is always tied to obedience (that which you have faith in, you also believe enough to follow. That which you follow, you obey.)
I have known as many religiously fanatic people who had Definition-2 faith in mass-media or government published "science" alone, as religiously fanatic people who had Definition-2 faith in religion alone. That said, I have a ton more contacts in religion -- so I wonder if that means that, percentage-wise, science has as many fanatic followers as, say, Islam?
[Followup] Interesting thought: After writing this, I immediately thought "well, at least they aren't as destructive..." Of course, then I thought of enough examples to make me take that back as well...
It's rare that I see sarcasm skillfully used. This one was perfect!
Nonetheless, I can understand slashdot letting TROLL posts fall off. For every successful use of sarcasm, satire, and irony, there are a thousand points of 5#it that can utterly destroy a news/forum site.
Nonetheless, as your troll post disappears off the radar, perhaps people will see the light, and click on it out of interest.
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> onto my whitelist, please hit "reply", with
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MAILER DAEMON -- COULD NOT PROCESS MAIL -- USER "SERVICES" DOES NOT EXIST. If YOU WISH TO SEND AN EMAIL TO THE WEBMASTER, REPLY TO THIS EMAIL WITH
THE SUBJECT "WEBMASTER REQUEST".
Hmmm... it sounds like what we really need is
a mail transsender that strips the header, adds one of a number of randomly selected "please stop paying spammers" messages, and then mails the spam back to the spammer... or to the company that did it. The way to properly do this would be to only check out domain first, though.
Then just automatically forward all spam to the anti-spam-bot, and let it go from there. 4000 emails to symantec? No problem.
Aaah.
ROR
LDA #$40
STA $66C0
aaah. For the good old days when Assembly language was Assembly language, men were men, and us computer geeks were unknown.
Actually, I didn't know the CALL for the miniassembler, so I memorized opcodes.
I purchased a "complete" copy of Quark Xpress, that happened to not include the license or installation key. I paid a normal price for it -- about $550 for 4.0 -- and got burned. Fraud was provable in several ways.
(1) Ebay came through on their bargain: They insure for $200 minus a $25 deductable (read $175) which -- after all the paperwork -- is about $150.
(2) Paypal makes victims go through about $50 of paperwork, then doesn't pay on their "insurance". To date as of the time this happened, they had never submitted a SINGLE insurance claim, according to several web sources I read. I don't know if that is true. I do know that although I had several proofs of fraud, some involving their own system which they could check, and found another victim of the same guy, they still said "well, he shipped *something*, so we don't pay nuthin."
This is system run by the guy who, if I remember, wants to start up a space hotel with the money he got from selling Paypal. My advice? Don't trust the windows of that space hotel: they'll be made from sugar, just like in the movies.
Anyhow, your statement isn't quite accurate. It should read, "Do business for more than $175, get burned." That said, one other time since then, I purchased a Mac on Ebay, and got it without a hitch. But it was a PowerBook 190 parts computer, so I kept it cheap and my risk small.
"The world would be a much better place if God had left us a tarball". Hmmm.... and you thought all that underground oil came from the dinosaurs. In a moment of supreme irony, I shall point you to a news website which shows a 25-km asteroid on a collision course with earth; initial spectroscopy indicates that it is composed of a mixture of sodium chloride, water, and petroleum (solidified, of course)...
I just remember programming in Xenix. It was such a pain, because you couldn't predict what the computer programs would do. One time, they'd run. Another time, they'd crash -- it had more to do with the cycle the operating system was in, it seemed, than anything else.
Eventually, the company I was working for went out of business. I guess they owed me about $100-$300, unpaid. Their main business, at the time, was transporting medical database software to Xenix. Great idea, and it was back in 1985, too, and the program was already written for the IBM PC. (***sigh*** on _so_ many levels.) Their other project which they were considering at the time was developing hardware to allow satellite phones to work on cruise liners. But the problem was that doctors wanted something for a Xenix mainframe, something professional, not something on a whole bunch of silly PCs that were linked together. And Xenix couldn't handle anything at all, because its programs crashed everywhere.
*sigh* *sigh* *sigh*
And, of course, they decided that the shipboard satellite idea was 50 years away at least, although it did have vision.
*sigh*. There's so much irony here, it hurts to think.
It seems to me that the thing to do with this is either (1) refute it (2) prove it (3) explain it.
As a possible answer to #3, just suppose:
As I remember, you can apply any charge that is a fraction of e to a "Electron Tunnelling Microscope" by adjusting the pattern of the electrons. That is, the electrons interact together, and give you any charge you want at the tip.
Now, that being the case, I note that their "plasma" is a *low* density plasma, probably low energy too. Therefore, one would expect large waveforms. If they are large waveforms, then they at least partially correspond to that "new" state of matter, in which you lower the temperature of the hydrogen gas down towards absolute zero, and you start to see interesting things with the Pauli exclusion principle. And the gas ceases to behave like atoms, but starts to behave like a network.
In other words, this could indeed be a fractional shell level per atom, in the network system only.
But on the other hand, if this is so, this will never yield useful energy, because it is necessarily a low-energy phenonemon.
That should still be good enough, based on the physics definition of simultaneity: that you can't have simultaneous events at two different locations. For that reason, going from computers 1 to N, you simply define computer 1 to be 1 femtosecond ahead of computer 2, and computer 2 to be 1 femtosecond ahead of computer 3. As of that point, no two transactions are simultaneous. Of course, it may be that you execute transaction 454, lowering the account value to $10, then discover transaction 452 (which arrived later at the computer, but is stamped earlier) wants to withdraw $15. So you then undo transaction 454, carry out transaction 452, and then attempt to carry out transaction 454 (unless transaction 453 put in an extra $100, in which case 452 gets undone again). It's not a huge problem: it can be programmed.
Ummm... learn about different filing systems, especially the numerical system.
;->
You give each computer a unique ID number. You also give it a synchronized clock. It doesn't even have to be good to the microsecond, although it can be, because all you have to check is that each sequential transaction is delayed by one second. That's actually easy to do: pull a pending transaction off the stack, check if its time is previous to yours, and recycle if it isn't.
But then you give the transaction the following ID, made of concatenated strings:
[Galactic location] + [Company ID] +[Computer ID] + [date] + [time] + [Process Order number]. As input transactions, you use the IDs of the previous transactions that they depend on.
Greenwich time will do; really, you just need a planet-normalized time stamp. Naturally, you don't use a Julian date; rather, you use a numerical date [day 0000001=January 1, year -20000 BC] that is 32 bits long. Worry about the year 10^242 rollover when we get to it. To maintain forward compatibility into the space age, assign as the galactic ID [Sun = 00001]+[Planet = 00003], 64 bits for the star, each, 32 bits for the planet (to allow for space stations and what not).
Now, when writing the number on checks and stuff, be sure to recode that number from base 10 or base 2 into base 36 (26 chars+10 digits) or even base 128. That way, instead of having about 200 chars; you will have 16 chars; something short enough to read and stick on any bill.
*THAT* is the techie's way of doing numerical filing, in my opinion. But you gotta be a techie *secretary* to understand it.
Prediction 1
My pre-prediction: His predictions assume that the Nasdaq investment boom continues. I don't think so. I think that we are going to have a slow-slide recession, as businesses are raided for taxes to support war after war, and the IMF, having drained the third world, ceases to bring in "investment" and cheap goods. Here's what I think instead:
Prediction 2
Much colder winters in Europe and America, and drought. Our fuel usage *increases* for winter. But the harder conditions result in reduced expenditures for luxuries, including automobiles. A corresponding shift is *beginning*, either into the cities or into the country, away from suburbs. So fuel usage peaks about this time.
Prediction 3
We see more and more obvious problems associated with overpopulation, but it becomes apparent that it will not continue: the population crests and starts to fall. AIDS, with still no true wonderdrug, begins to take its toll, as does starvation and (especially) war.
Prediction 4
The fall of the technology information sector in America, just as industry fell to foreign competition. Essentially, we remain uncompetitive in America, due to the high taxes and continual war, and other peaceful countries eat our cake. That doesn't mean our programmers disappear; they just start to do other things. Some emmigrate; others redirect their efforts towards...
Prediction 5
single-application networkable computers. Essentially, the day of the PC is not over, but it is only useful for entertainment and typing. You want to get something printed? Plug your data card through the smart printer. It handles the rest. Step by step, smart "labor saving devices" are designed and built -- true labor saving devices. Those bread machines were just ahead of their time, and more gadget than useful. But automobile computers, for example, will improve, and tell you when and where a new, unusual noise is coming from *before* the car breaks down. You go to the automechanic, pay $500, and he installs it on your *old* car, too. But they won't be powered on pentiums. They'll be powered on cheap RISC computers, or 8051-XAs, or something else like that. Cheap, slow, but specialized enough that you'll never know it's slow.
Clearly, the poster in the above topic wasn't talking about Microsoft, he was talking about the Justice Department in the Jose Padilla case, ignoring the Federal Courts.
Or was he? I'm not really sure anymore.
Maybe he was just talking about the general state of affairs in America, where the powerful are not beholden to the law, be they Congressmen, Senators, Presidents, or corporations, or corporate bigwigs.
In my opinion, peoples' attitudes in America need a major overhaul: for the powerful, newfound respect for right and wrong, and the law. For the law, respect for natural law. For the weak, a respect for right and wrong that will force them to empower good people, not bad people.
Actually, no. You are ignoring the fact that if that were all there were to it, it would go away in about one generation. Rather, there is a ton of personal experience that supports it, in every generation. Some of that experience -- a lot of it -- is mundane: the confirmation of Biblical truths in our everyday lives. Other is supernatural: God does work miracles in our lives, sometimes: just read "The Cross and the Switchblade."
For contrast, consider how the WWII generation often either got married in less-than-perfect circumstances, or concieved before they were actually married. They then told their kids "well, don't do it before you get married, just because it looks bad." Their kids, the baby boomers, took that for what it was -- hypocrisy -- and ignored it. Thus we got the sexual revolution (yeah, I'm oversimplifying, but it's approximately correct. The seeds of the sexual revolution were spawned in the WWII generation's personal choices).
In the same way, if it were just "we were told that it was good to believe" Christianity would not last more than a generation. Christianity lasts because it has truth, and because God reinforces it continually.
As far as the errors go, yes: some of the contridictions are errors, and some are not even contradictions, just an individual's misunderstanding. But it is an item of faith the God will not let the vital parts be wiped out.
Couple of points:
(1) Esther is in both. The books that are not in both include Tobit (an excellent novel, worth reading, and amusing at some points. Did you know you get cataracts from sleeping outdoors with your eyes open? Birds poop in them, you see...), Maccabbees (an excellent documentary), Daniel and Susannah, maybe Wisdom.
(2) Martin Luther, if I understand correctly, picked the Hebrew Bible because he liked the feeling he got that he'd understand things better in the original Hebrew. The RC Church picked the Septuagint, which was archived in Greek in the Library of Alexandria, because this was archived *before* the time of Christ, and was generally accepted as scripture at the time of Christ. The Hebrew Bible was written by Sadducees after Masada, and does include some significant changes. Sadducces did not believe in the Resurrection, for example, and thus did not include books that pointed heavily towards the Resurrection. Also, "virgin" was changed to "maid" (neanis) at the part where the prophet says to the king "is it not enough that you should weary the ears of men? Must you weary God as well? But since you do not ask for a sign, this shall be a sign unto you: a virgin shall concieve, and shall bear a son..." One can only guess the reason for such a change.
There is something to be said for both sides. I prefer the RC side, though.
(3) Then you get to books like the Gospel of Thomas. This is a case where you especially have to look at the source. The paper is quite old, and indeed would be one of the earliest gospels based upon the age of the paper. However, the ink dates back to the time of the Saracen invasion of Spain, and the pollens in the ink seem to place the writing in Italy. So it would appear, especially since that book supports Islam more than Christianity, that it was a work of fiction written at that time. Perhaps it was written on very old paper to try to support Islam -- perhaps not.
Your post highlights another problem with Intellectual Property: the issue of transferability.
As you stated, "A license is a *right* to do something. You can't sell a right."
Actually, there are two possible cases: either a particular right is transferrable [say, using the property on which your house rests] or it is not transferrable [an inherent right]. If it is transferrable, it may be partially transferrable [a lein] or only transferrable as a unit [that piece of gum you're chewing].
Those are all the logical possibilities that I can see.
Now, the question is, is an IP license inherently transferrable or not? If not, then you can't sell it, period. Typically, that is because there is something inherent about it that makes it impossible to sell (right to life: nobody else can live my life for me. Right to speech: nobody else can move my mouth.)
Here's one that isn't transferrable: the Hewlett Packard printer driver. It won't work, as a unit, on any other printer. It isn't designed to work on any other printer; its algorithms are specific to the HP hardware. Oh, pieces of the algorithms may work elsewhere, but you can also get those pieces elsewhere. As a result, although they had (previously) a clause that it could only be used on HP printers, they quickly saw that they didn't need such a clause -- the right was inherently non-transferrable. So they removed it, and made it open source.
But if there is nothing inherent about it that is non-transferrable, then it can be sold.
When laws try to say that a dog has five legs, they just make a fool of the law. In this case, a license is easily transferrable. Since the law is upholding the idea that it is not transferrable, then the law is essentially upholding a form of robbery. That being the case, business becomes riskier for businesses in countries that do this, and the economies head south, and some other country eventually will become dominant. Eventually, for example, America may become no more than the puppet-dictatorship that Iraq (once the shining star of the Western World) is today.
Something to think about, eh? The best that the law can do is to mimic real life, and provide false, non-damaging barriers for people before they hit real, damaging barriers.
This link tells about the battle between an aging Batman, and a superman weakened by a nuclear winter.
In a way, Batman has gone crazy; crazy with doubt and violence.
Anyhow, you can read it for yourself.
n/t
From the sounds of what I have read, the OS can normally handle a divide by zero. However, in this case, it sounds like the OS didn't handle the divide by zero. The only case where I know of that happening is the case of a double-fault.
And a double-fault is caused by a divide-by-zero, followed immediately by some kind of a service request interrupt (such as could be generated by an I/O card). But if that is the case, since the double-fault results in a processor halt, then you have to fault only four groups of engineers:
(1) those who developed the intel chip, for not providing a way for the software to handle a double fault (triple-fault halt might have been safer)
(2) those who designed the motherboard, since they should have included some kind of a watchdog timer to handle the double-fault case and reboot the system.
(3) those who designed the entire system networks, for not designing in a backup so that a single computer can go down, but the system stay up and running in a redundant mode.
(4) the people who drove the tugboat that pulled the Yorktown back in, since everything is their fault, anyhow.
I think I can summarize some problems that others have seen, with no real good answer.
.... stealing! Then we expect to make progress, and when those with assets are more concerned about protecting their money from theft, we look to another solution: tax-supported programs (stealing!). Then, when those agencies, devoted to living off theft, turn out to be inefficient, we think that there is another answer?!??
More than that, I think I can point out the source of the problems.
As some slashdotters have pointed out, NASA doesn't fulfill its plans.
As others have pointed out, government agencies can't stay on budget.
These problems are inherent with an agency that seizes its assets: nothing is real to them; therefore they get nothing real done.
Well, what about companies? Unfortunately, as yet other slashdotters have pointed out, companies won't see the short-term returns, and therefore won't do this.
Hold on!!! I think we can now see the problem in a better light.
There are tons of companies, some with lots of free assets (like M$), and some with an interest in space (like Gates). Then WHY won't companies invest in this?
Companies look for the short term profits, because the long term profits are by no means guaranteed. More specifically, if they do invest a huge amount for a sudden advancement, they have the following to look forward to: even if they make the long term profits, they care likely to have those long-term profits taken away, either through governmental seizure, or revolution, or theft.
Considering this, one might realize that we are being held back by our own individual and collective lack of character. We steal (in oh so many ways, both as companies and as individuals against companies, and as governmental aid recipients, and as software pirates, and as ebay thieves), and then expect the government to mitigate those losses through
It was for this reason that I did not mind too much to leave aerospace engineering, and become involved in prepublishing technical books. At least that way, I was sure that I wasn't stealing or benefitting from theft. My market is real. But more than that, I started to realize that the answers to the technology problems are not always within technology.
In this case, I would argue that the answers lie in Christian faith. The more -- Christians first -- we start to actually obey those commandments (like, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not steal thy neighbor's wife, thou shalt not want to steal thy neighbor's cow or wife, thou shalt not steal another man's life, etc., etc., etc.,) completely, the sooner we will actually get into space.
Of course, if we start to do that, the nature of our need to get into space changes; doesn't it? Because part of that "thou shalt not steal" also involves such things as taking care of the environment, not committing mass-murder (by either terrorist or government action), having respect for life, and so on.
If you used some kind of a time-stamped public key on 10% of the frames (to be downloaded live), and those frames used as the source frames, couldn't you make it so that the decryption would have to be done live?
I don't think that such an idea would be impossible -- but I'm inclined to agree that practically, we probably won't see that happen.