Way back in the day (2001), I was evaluating ORM solutions to replace the "roll-our-own" orm in our Java app. Took a look at Cocobase, TopLink, JDO (just appearing), and Java Relational Bridge. Hibernate was not ready for prime time (yet).
TopLink was the only offering that ate it's own database on a regular basis. I fell back to hourly saves, and making full copies of the XML text that they were using to save the O-R mapping information. At one point, I accidentally overwrote one of the prior saves and discovered that all saves over the last day had been corrupt anyway, and I gave up on the pretty tool. Then we went to fell back to hand-editing mapping files and modifying our domain objects to fit into the framework. Ouch. Lots of references to *.toplink.* appeared in the import lists. Several relationships didn't have strong support (map of named sets: had to make a new object type for the map, trinary relation: again, make a new kludge class).
Nowadays, if you don't HAVE to use stored procedures, use Hibernate. You'll have to adapt your code to it in a few small ways (cascade delete sequencing, persisting inherited properties), but basically, it just works.
If a PC and OS architecture could be developed that would boot almost instantly, the problem of computers left sitting on "because it takes too long to boot up" could be drastically reduced.
That's where most of the waste is occurring...when they're not in use.
S3/S4 Standby are what you're looking for. I just finished building an HTPC and using S3 Standby drops the power demand from 130-200W (depending on CPU/GPU load) to 5W. Coming back from standby is about 3-4 seconds. Not truly a quick "boot", but not far off.
Only took one power bill to convince my wife to send the computer to standby whenever she walked away. What I need to do next is find some way to have it auto-standby after a short idle period unless one of a list of programs is running. Getting control over that list is the issue that prevents setting the auto-standby to less than 2 hours.
He could have vetoed the DMCA. The Republicans did not have the two-thirds majorities they needed to overrride.
What are you talking about? The DMCA enjoyed so little dissention in the house that it passed with a voice vote and a unanimous vote in the senate. Talk about a veto-proof majority.
The OP was right. The DMCA was a bi-partisan screwing of the general public.
And, given the highly technical nature of the DMCA, I don't think there would have been any general public outcry if that bill had been quietly killed off.
There was a rather large amount of hue-and-cry among all sorts of academics and technology people. I distinctly remember the time around the passage of the DMCA and that the EFF was prominently quoted in the newspaper with their opposition to the law. It's the only time the EFF ever entered a conversation between myself and my grandmother.
Not that this discredits your point, but there was quite a bit of opposition to the bill around me in 1998.
Well, actually, we put our computers on standby on a daily basis. Completely powering down is unusual. Not sure if you're separating these two cases.
Saves a decent amount on power to use standby. We have three laptops and the home theater desktop. The two workstation laptops and the HTPC we standby whenever they're not in active use. The older laptop is a subversion/trac dev server and is always going though it's a fairly low draw with the screen closed and the CPU throttled back (15-20W).
When we first set up the HTPC, it was just running all the time. We paid $18 more for power that month. Pretty noticeable since our typical electric bill is $35/month. Turns out that the HTPC draws between 115W and 140W while idling and only 5W in S3 standby (running folding@home, the HTPC consumes 230W and would have nearly doubled our monthly power bill). Since that little hiccup, we've become religious about putting machines on standby and powering the rest of our entertainment center down with an external switch (power strips).
Regards, Ross
P.S. Living in a house with gas heating and no A/C helps a lot with the power bill. What with both of us commuting on motorcycles (me $4/week on gas, her $2.50/week), we're pretty miserly, energy-wise. We're working on the food distribution costs and product packaging/garbage slowly.
The top security guy rigged a test: He had an arbitrary soldier replace his picture with one of a baboon. He walked past security points at least 6 times a day and was only discovered after 6 months when he dropped his card and people had a really close look at it.
Similar story at Texas Instruments. To get into a TI building, you're supposed to have an electronic or visual inspection of your badge. Where we worked in Sugarland, TX, they used a visual inspection station (you put your badge over a video camera and the security guy in some security office remotely "verifies" your badge). But this happened so quickly, we knew they weren't doing anything more than glancing at the badge.
One of the interns (red badge, meant less than 5 years senority back in the 1990's) thought they probably weren't even doing that. So he taped the front of a small box of Sun-Maid raisins over his badge. And used it like that for six months. Was only caught because we were laughing so hard about it at lunch one day while his boss was walking by, and the cat was out of the bag. The security office actually got in trouble, not the intern, and I don't think they use the visual inspection stations any more.
Anyways, without an objective definition of "socialist", the argument probably rests on semantics.
Yup. When the definitions are so divergent, some effort will have to be made to determine the author's intended usage.
However, I still object to the use of the word in this context, because about half the time some dofus from southern Texas uses it, it's means as an insult, not as a political classification.
Well, just use words with two and three syllables and they'll abandon the discussion as too much work. This won't help with people from Austin, but then they'll likely be on your side anyway.
Um, Socialism has a whole spectrum of definitions. France and Sweden call themselves socialist, aren't too hard for a Belgian to visit, and are very similar in practice to what the gp described (high taxes, large public sector, etc.). Also, I don't know why Russia, Poland, Romania, or the now historical East Germany would have been called socialist in the past. They went right past socialist and straight to dysfunctional communism.
But, like I originally said, I suspect it all depends on your definition... Most of the readers here will accept that Western Europe is mostly socialist and that Eastern European countries are still figuring things out after their experience with communism (not socialism). But I do remember that the USSR stood for "United Soviet Socialist Republics", even though nobody in the West ever really bought the assertion that the USSR was a socialist state... so clearly it isn't only you.
The only thing that might be newsworthy about a Motorola phone is if they decided to license Nokia's interface. Every time I think back to the last (so far only) Motorola phone I had the misfortune of spending a fortune on, I recall the glee and joy when I smeared that phone between a rapidly dropping 20 pound sledgehammer and a large granite boulder at midnight under the full moon...
My rage and fury were all about the absolutely horrific user interface. Yes, it was that bad.
The beer consumed in preparation for the demolition of the hell spawn (Mot 770) was rather tasty, however:)
because it is there doesn't mean the war is about it. But because it is there, it does mean we need to know how to protect it.
You didn't read the BBC article I linked to. I'll bring it to you: there were two plans for the invasion of Iraq presented to Bush Jr. on taking office, more than a year before 9/11. The neocons had one plan, the oil companies had a different plan. In both plans, the reason for the attack was to control Iraqi oil. Much more detail in the article, but better documented: names, sources, papers, that sort of thing. But yeah, the oil "bullshit" not only works, it's reality.
By the way, it appears we followed the oil company's plan for Iraq. Poor downtrodden neocons. First that, and then the mid-term elections.
Go do some more research and look at our invovlment in the first gulf war and the oil industries assistance form there too. Then after all that look at the interactions in tht area between the US, England, France and other western countries. Once you do this, you will see our interactions in the middle east are complexed and date back to almost the begining of the country.
You're preaching to the choir here. I have studied the region's history in some depth and understand quite a bit more than you give me credit for. None of that excludes or contradicts the FACT that the second Iraq war was all about controlling Iraqi oil. According to the people who continue to advise Bush Jr., anyway.
So? Plenty of people breach the letter of the law without doing anything wrong. Morality and legality are only occasionally related.
The only evidence you have put forward of malice was they fact that the law was enforced. Are you proposing that laws should be selectively enforced on an adhoc basis?
I'm just stunned at the abject stupidity displayed by your remarks. What do you think the purpose of judges and juries is? Because it's clear you don't know, I'll answer my own question: judges and juries decide if an action that appears to violate a law actually is a criminal action. It's the difference between the accused and the convicted.
In this particular case, the actions of these kids harmed nobody. Any reasonable interpretation of anti-child-porn laws is that they are intended to protect innocent children from predatory adults. As in: DOESN'T APPLY HERE.
Malice is when the prosecution attempts to prosecute for some justification OTHER than enforcing the law. It isn't malice to lock up these child child-pornographers; its the LAW.
You are a font of unadulterated bullshit. When you've gotten around to removing your head from your rectum and take a look at the real relationships between law and morality and society, let us all know. Then you'll be worthy of discussing the topic with adults.
If you knew that if you screwed up, people could die, would you be as as cavalier about an incident like this?
Let me be sure I understand: you're asking if I would treat lite-brites mounted in visible locations more seriously if I was "the decider"?
Your answer: No.
I would treat them like small signs and take them down if the necessary authorizations had not been filed properly.
I've got a kid. And if a little overreaction means the difference between drawing flowers with him and placing flowers on his grave, then I'm all for a little overreaction.
Oh noes! Think of the children!
For chrissakes, you're arguing like Bush's press secretary here. Stop talking out of your ass and join the conversation.
Here's the big hint: risk is not limited to 0% and 100% probabilities and the outcomes are not limited to "your child is in a pastoral paradise" and "he's dead, Jim". Life has risk. People who don't understand this are doomed to believe the lies of others (because they're unable to apply critical thinking to statements).
Be smarter than those people.
Right now, our response to terrorism is worse than terrorism. This needs to change.
These appear to have the outdoor brightness issue resolved, at the expense of adequate screen resolution. Even the newest and most expensive models only have 1024x768 resolution, a screen resolution I haven't spent money on since 1998.
Then again, after owning multiple laptops with 1600x1200 screens, I find the 1440x900 screen on my shiny new 15" MacBook Pro extremely cramped. Which means that I've become quite spoiled. I wish I knew of a work-around to that.
Um, that thread shows that if you have both the username and password for someone's OpenID, that the OpenID registration page will reassign the email address instead of throwing a "username already exists" error. As in, a significant usability bug and not even slightly a security vulnerability. The "attack" requires that the "attacker" already have enough information to log into the server and just change the registered email address through the regular account information page.
The first phpbb developer mistakenly thought that you didn't need the password to do this, but was contradicted in the second posting of the thread by the other phpbb developer who originally found the error. The rest of the thread is the first developer not understanding what was said.
OpenID has been around long enough that the major kinks have been ironed out. Not to say that bugs can't appear in the future that might compromise an OpenID server, but at the moment, this isn't one of those.
Ross
Re:Agreed. More hypothetical numbers.
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If he removes 20% (optimistic, I would think) of the water vapor in one pass, in a 5 m/s wind (stiff breeze) with a 10 m^2 swept area (about the size of a two car garage...pretty big for any form of compressor) at 25 degrees C with a 40% relative humidity (comfortable conditions), then he'll be getting about 1 gallon per minute. That's actually much better than I expected when I started my calculations, but still only about enough to supply one lawn sprinkler at a time.
What about simply supplying fresh clean water? 4 liters/minute is enough to supply a large village with fresh water, and there are a lot of places in the world where 4 liters/day of clean fresh water per person is desperately needed.
For climate change, one of these things wouldn't do much, but hundreds or thousands spread all over a desert? You could reclaim a lot of desert over time by keeping six or seven tree's roots wet repeated several hundred times. The big problem with desert reclamation is restoring stable green vegetation in an area. Stable green vegetation needs a steady water supply. This could be that supply. The small size isn't a bad thing. It means that you can pick it up and put it down anywhere, you don't need to worry about power, you don't need to worry about a lot of details.
RPN doesn't help the computing side of the calculator be more efficient. RPN organizes the business of calculating better.
It's all about the stack. During complex calculations, you'll solve some part of the problem and have an intermediate result. You write it down and start calculating some other part of the problem. Don't clear that result from the stack though. Later, you'll need both intermediate results, and more often than not, you'll find that previous intermediate result is visible on the stack again, ready to use in the next step of the calculation. No need to re-enter it. No need to take any time saving it into a variable. It's just there.
This happens more often than I can remember. I love RPN/stack calculating because it lets me think about the problem and the calculation takes care of itself.
Should Wikipedia transition to leaf from cut-point, it may have significant and unforeseen effects on internet-topology.
Wikipedia will remain a node-cluster in the larger web. The only difference is that for Google ranking, they no longer contribute to the ranking of outside websites. This will not stop people from putting relevant external links on Wikipedia pages, it just reduces the benefit to the linked site.
In my experience as a forum webmaster, there is simply no other choice. Any place where the unverified public can put up links, spammers will put up links to their crap, which do more than just use your resources for their ends. If Google notices that your site seems to have become a spammer link-farm, you're entire site will very likely be removed from Google, with all of the bad mojo that entails. So, any page where the unverified public can put up links, those links must be "nofollow", or else...
Personally, I'm astonished that Wikipedia hasn't done this from the beginning.
I've had five BSOD's on XP. Ever. All were in 2002. Three were because Age of Empires II didn't like something about my laptop's video driver. The other two were turned out to be because my hard drive was doing a gradual swan dive towards complete failure. Since 2002? Zero BSOD's. A few months ago, I discussed this with several office mates and we all agreed that Microsoft had basically fixed BSOD's in XP.
Come to think of it, all of the kernel panics I've seen over the past five years have also been due to bad hardware or me misconfiguring something...
So, why do you think you get so many BSOD's on XP? Do you use bleeding edge hardware? Or incredibly cheap hardware?
Nobody is saying that you or a company can't put whatever political messages you like on your website/blog. Your ability to say things remains undisputed.
However.
Like most rights, free speech comes with responsibilities. One of the responsibilities of political speech is be very clear about conflicts of interest of the speaker. The most fundamental conflict of interest: are you being paid to publically state an opinion?
This is why newspapers, with full freedom of the press, put editorial content in a specific section, and why any article on MSNBC regarding Microsoft mentions that Microsoft owns part of MSNBC (among many other examples of full disclosure by the professional media).
People who want to hire a staff of people to deceive the public should be revealed for the deceptive people they are. People accepting that money should be revealed for the shills that they are. Transparent access to information is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. The religious right (along with many Republicans, apparently) don't wany any part of that.
Sad, really. I think the non-neo-con, non-religious-right Republican agenda really is best for this country. Smaller government, less police state, fewer market interventions, more privacy. That's the Republican platform that I believe in.
Back to your assertion, that you should be able to say whatever you want under any circumstances you want... You go right on believing that if you like. The fact that you're completely and utterly wrong will probably never matter. Good thing, too.
That's one definition of astroturfing, but I'm sure that politicians may have another definition.
For a pejorative term, I'm not expecting the insulted to agree with the definition. The objection of the astroturfer doesn't serve to dispute the definition, IMNSHO. The original request for "everyone's" agreement, when taken literally, is not a necessary or even desirable condition for discourse.
Be careful, because who is going to be applying the standard? It may seem clear to you, but laws often get applied far differently than their writers intended.
Now that's an entirely different argument, and one that I'm very likely to have some sympathy for. Laws are at best, an approximation of "constraints upon immoral behavior", and the gaps between morality and legality are substantial.
It's quite telling that groups across the spectrum, from the ACLU to various family advocacy groups
Hm. I'm not familiar with the ACLU's website, but I just spent 15 minutes trying to find an ACLU position on this (search for "blog" or "blogging" or "bloggers" with "Free Speech" selected as a constraint) and I can't locate any mention of the bill or the issue. The "family advocacy groups" are religious right groups (the part of the Republican party that I detest, being non-religious myself) and it's supremely unsuprising that they want to hide who is saying what. Their very name is a deception, so why would their advocacy be any different?
So, in your mind places like littlegreenfootballs.com and drudgereport.com are astroturfing?
Nope, and thank goodness they wouldn't have been forced to register under the law.
This is about making sure those who oppose the Democrats can't when the election cycles come around.
You need to adjust your tinfoil hat. It's slipping down on one side and some of the rays are getting in.
Why would anyone want to say that the little guy who's writing a blog is somehow evil
Nobody. It's people being paid $100k to pretend they hold a particular political opinion who are paid lobbiests (sp). Evil? Again: tinfoil hat problems.
Why do you ignore the smell right under your nose? You think the Democrats, POLITICIANS, are somehow pure as the wind driven snow?
Did you work hard to get this clueless? I'm a registered Republican. Further, I don't trust 99% of politicians at all. Actions speak, not rhetoric. On this particular issue, most of the Dems were on the ethical side of the issue. That's all.
Even if you do drink the koolade, this is America. Why not let this great nation handle problems the way we always have? Have we needed laws to run astroturfing blogs out of business?
Political speech, like all freedoms, carries responsibilities. One responsibility of someone making political statements is to be honest about the actual source of those statements. If they're your own, great. If you're being paid by someone else to maintain that position, the reading/listening public should know that.
Conflicts of interest are how things go badly wrong. Enron, Worldcom, etc.
I know it goes against the tenets of the religion of Liberalism
Who, exactly, are you preaching to here? The only way I could be said to be liberal is in the same way that Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. I suspect you'll have to look it up to understand what I mean. Don't worry, it will do you good to read some history.
Sorry, how were the actual grass-roots bloggers not going to be affected by this?
Um. Not one grass-roots blogger is paid $100k/year for their blog. So they aren't affected by the legislation.
And again, I defy anyone to define "astroturfing" in a neutral way that everyone can agree on.
You're joking, right? As a Republican linux user, I haven't heard too many alternative definitions. Seems pretty clear to me...
Astroturfing: fake grass-roots activity. If you're trying to look like you're just a part of the "noisy populace" but you're being paid to maintain your position by the side you apparently agree with, then you're astroturfing.
That definition holds for Microsoft astroturfing, Republican, Democrat, whatever. This bill sets the bar pretty high. $25k/quarter from one client (not from ads) or better than $100k/year from one source, and it calls you a paid political hack. I guess I can see where they're going, since that makes the law more enforceable, but still seems like there will be a lot of two client blogs the next year.
Furthermore, what is ethical about placing bureaucratic red tape around free speech?
Political speech, like all freedoms, brings with it additional responsibilities. One of the most important responsibilities of political speech (compared to your average public griping) is that it's critical that people know exactly who is saying what. If you're just spouting off your opinion, great! Someone being paid > $100k to put up a political blog probably has the time to submit a form explaining who is paying them for "their opinion". And that seems like an excellent balance of responsibility with freedom to me.
It boils down to them not wanting unrestricted Internet criticism of incumbents. Essentially, Democrats are worried about 2008. The election of so many conservative Democrats, the so-called "Blue Dog" caucus, has split the party, and the more liberal leadership is worried about alienating their base.
Your speculation might have some merit if the typical blogger would have had to register under the act. As it turns out, however, the act would have only required bloggers who make and/or spend more than $25,000/year on a politics position blog to register. This article should be titled "Bill to Treat Astroturfing Bloggers as Lobbyists Defeated".
The actual grass-roots bloggers (and whatever their criticism of whoever they wanted to criticize) were never in jeopardy. But the Republicans and some Democrats made sure that astroturfers aren't in jeopardy either. Most of the Democrats were on the ethical side on this one. Sadly, they couldn't get a majority today.
Ross (registered Republican, but not very proud of that association right now)
I get the impression that you think you responded to me, when all you did was repeat the same flawed assertion you made the first time.
Here's what I said: It doesn't matter how good the encryption is if there's an easier way to get the key.
And there is always an easier way to get the key for DRM media. So your assertion is true and, at the same time, utterly irrelevant to the security of DRM'd media. Nobody attempting to attack the encryption of an HD-DVD disk would limit himself to only the data on the disk. So why even mention that case?
You'd prefer base 8 to base 12? The only actual issue I have with base 10 is that it makes it difficult to evenly divide by three, an extremely common situation, certainly more common than the need to divide by five.
Base 8 has a degenerate number of prime factors and is pretty much the worse possible choice for common real-world measurement and rapid calculation. How do you accurately represent 1/3 or 1/5 in a computer again? Right. You don't. The best a computer can do is an approximation of those values.
Slashdot Mirror
Way back in the day (2001), I was evaluating ORM solutions to replace the "roll-our-own" orm in our Java app. Took a look at Cocobase, TopLink, JDO (just appearing), and Java Relational Bridge. Hibernate was not ready for prime time (yet).
TopLink was the only offering that ate it's own database on a regular basis. I fell back to hourly saves, and making full copies of the XML text that they were using to save the O-R mapping information. At one point, I accidentally overwrote one of the prior saves and discovered that all saves over the last day had been corrupt anyway, and I gave up on the pretty tool. Then we went to fell back to hand-editing mapping files and modifying our domain objects to fit into the framework. Ouch. Lots of references to *.toplink.* appeared in the import lists. Several relationships didn't have strong support (map of named sets: had to make a new object type for the map, trinary relation: again, make a new kludge class).
Nowadays, if you don't HAVE to use stored procedures, use Hibernate. You'll have to adapt your code to it in a few small ways (cascade delete sequencing, persisting inherited properties), but basically, it just works.
Ross
Only took one power bill to convince my wife to send the computer to standby whenever she walked away. What I need to do next is find some way to have it auto-standby after a short idle period unless one of a list of programs is running. Getting control over that list is the issue that prevents setting the auto-standby to less than 2 hours.
Regards,
Ross
The OP was right. The DMCA was a bi-partisan screwing of the general public.There was a rather large amount of hue-and-cry among all sorts of academics and technology people. I distinctly remember the time around the passage of the DMCA and that the EFF was prominently quoted in the newspaper with their opposition to the law. It's the only time the EFF ever entered a conversation between myself and my grandmother.
Not that this discredits your point, but there was quite a bit of opposition to the bill around me in 1998.
Regards,
Ross
Saves a decent amount on power to use standby. We have three laptops and the home theater desktop. The two workstation laptops and the HTPC we standby whenever they're not in active use. The older laptop is a subversion/trac dev server and is always going though it's a fairly low draw with the screen closed and the CPU throttled back (15-20W).
When we first set up the HTPC, it was just running all the time. We paid $18 more for power that month. Pretty noticeable since our typical electric bill is $35/month. Turns out that the HTPC draws between 115W and 140W while idling and only 5W in S3 standby (running folding@home, the HTPC consumes 230W and would have nearly doubled our monthly power bill). Since that little hiccup, we've become religious about putting machines on standby and powering the rest of our entertainment center down with an external switch (power strips).
Regards,
Ross
P.S. Living in a house with gas heating and no A/C helps a lot with the power bill. What with both of us commuting on motorcycles (me $4/week on gas, her $2.50/week), we're pretty miserly, energy-wise. We're working on the food distribution costs and product packaging/garbage slowly.
One of the interns (red badge, meant less than 5 years senority back in the 1990's) thought they probably weren't even doing that. So he taped the front of a small box of Sun-Maid raisins over his badge. And used it like that for six months. Was only caught because we were laughing so hard about it at lunch one day while his boss was walking by, and the cat was out of the bag. The security office actually got in trouble, not the intern, and I don't think they use the visual inspection stations any more.
Regards,
Ross
Regards,
Ross
Um, Socialism has a whole spectrum of definitions. France and Sweden call themselves socialist, aren't too hard for a Belgian to visit, and are very similar in practice to what the gp described (high taxes, large public sector, etc.). Also, I don't know why Russia, Poland, Romania, or the now historical East Germany would have been called socialist in the past. They went right past socialist and straight to dysfunctional communism.
But, like I originally said, I suspect it all depends on your definition... Most of the readers here will accept that Western Europe is mostly socialist and that Eastern European countries are still figuring things out after their experience with communism (not socialism). But I do remember that the USSR stood for "United Soviet Socialist Republics", even though nobody in the West ever really bought the assertion that the USSR was a socialist state... so clearly it isn't only you.
Regards,
Ross
The only thing that might be newsworthy about a Motorola phone is if they decided to license Nokia's interface. Every time I think back to the last (so far only) Motorola phone I had the misfortune of spending a fortune on, I recall the glee and joy when I smeared that phone between a rapidly dropping 20 pound sledgehammer and a large granite boulder at midnight under the full moon...
My rage and fury were all about the absolutely horrific user interface. Yes, it was that bad.
The beer consumed in preparation for the demolition of the hell spawn (Mot 770) was rather tasty, however
Ross
By the way, it appears we followed the oil company's plan for Iraq. Poor downtrodden neocons. First that, and then the mid-term elections.You're preaching to the choir here. I have studied the region's history in some depth and understand quite a bit more than you give me credit for. None of that excludes or contradicts the FACT that the second Iraq war was all about controlling Iraqi oil. According to the people who continue to advise Bush Jr., anyway.
Ross
Read up (and read further), and then you can stop believing the official propaganda and start informing others instead of contributing to the problem.
Ross
In this particular case, the actions of these kids harmed nobody. Any reasonable interpretation of anti-child-porn laws is that they are intended to protect innocent children from predatory adults. As in: DOESN'T APPLY HERE.You are a font of unadulterated bullshit. When you've gotten around to removing your head from your rectum and take a look at the real relationships between law and morality and society, let us all know. Then you'll be worthy of discussing the topic with adults.
Regards,
Ross
Your answer: No.
I would treat them like small signs and take them down if the necessary authorizations had not been filed properly.Oh noes! Think of the children!
For chrissakes, you're arguing like Bush's press secretary here. Stop talking out of your ass and join the conversation.
Here's the big hint: risk is not limited to 0% and 100% probabilities and the outcomes are not limited to "your child is in a pastoral paradise" and "he's dead, Jim". Life has risk. People who don't understand this are doomed to believe the lies of others (because they're unable to apply critical thinking to statements).
Be smarter than those people.
Right now, our response to terrorism is worse than terrorism. This needs to change.
Ross
These appear to have the outdoor brightness issue resolved, at the expense of adequate screen resolution. Even the newest and most expensive models only have 1024x768 resolution, a screen resolution I haven't spent money on since 1998.
Then again, after owning multiple laptops with 1600x1200 screens, I find the 1440x900 screen on my shiny new 15" MacBook Pro extremely cramped. Which means that I've become quite spoiled. I wish I knew of a work-around to that.
Ross
Um, that thread shows that if you have both the username and password for someone's OpenID, that the OpenID registration page will reassign the email address instead of throwing a "username already exists" error. As in, a significant usability bug and not even slightly a security vulnerability. The "attack" requires that the "attacker" already have enough information to log into the server and just change the registered email address through the regular account information page.
The first phpbb developer mistakenly thought that you didn't need the password to do this, but was contradicted in the second posting of the thread by the other phpbb developer who originally found the error. The rest of the thread is the first developer not understanding what was said.
OpenID has been around long enough that the major kinks have been ironed out. Not to say that bugs can't appear in the future that might compromise an OpenID server, but at the moment, this isn't one of those.
Ross
For climate change, one of these things wouldn't do much, but hundreds or thousands spread all over a desert? You could reclaim a lot of desert over time by keeping six or seven tree's roots wet repeated several hundred times. The big problem with desert reclamation is restoring stable green vegetation in an area. Stable green vegetation needs a steady water supply. This could be that supply. The small size isn't a bad thing. It means that you can pick it up and put it down anywhere, you don't need to worry about power, you don't need to worry about a lot of details.
Ross
RPN doesn't help the computing side of the calculator be more efficient. RPN organizes the business of calculating better.
It's all about the stack. During complex calculations, you'll solve some part of the problem and have an intermediate result. You write it down and start calculating some other part of the problem. Don't clear that result from the stack though. Later, you'll need both intermediate results, and more often than not, you'll find that previous intermediate result is visible on the stack again, ready to use in the next step of the calculation. No need to re-enter it. No need to take any time saving it into a variable. It's just there.
This happens more often than I can remember. I love RPN/stack calculating because it lets me think about the problem and the calculation takes care of itself.
Ross
In my experience as a forum webmaster, there is simply no other choice. Any place where the unverified public can put up links, spammers will put up links to their crap, which do more than just use your resources for their ends. If Google notices that your site seems to have become a spammer link-farm, you're entire site will very likely be removed from Google, with all of the bad mojo that entails. So, any page where the unverified public can put up links, those links must be "nofollow", or else...
Personally, I'm astonished that Wikipedia hasn't done this from the beginning.
Ross
I've had five BSOD's on XP. Ever. All were in 2002. Three were because Age of Empires II didn't like something about my laptop's video driver. The other two were turned out to be because my hard drive was doing a gradual swan dive towards complete failure. Since 2002? Zero BSOD's. A few months ago, I discussed this with several office mates and we all agreed that Microsoft had basically fixed BSOD's in XP.
Come to think of it, all of the kernel panics I've seen over the past five years have also been due to bad hardware or me misconfiguring something...
So, why do you think you get so many BSOD's on XP? Do you use bleeding edge hardware? Or incredibly cheap hardware?
Ross
An argument without substantiation isn't.
Nobody is saying that you or a company can't put whatever political messages you like on your website/blog. Your ability to say things remains undisputed.
However.
Like most rights, free speech comes with responsibilities. One of the responsibilities of political speech is be very clear about conflicts of interest of the speaker. The most fundamental conflict of interest: are you being paid to publically state an opinion?
This is why newspapers, with full freedom of the press, put editorial content in a specific section, and why any article on MSNBC regarding Microsoft mentions that Microsoft owns part of MSNBC (among many other examples of full disclosure by the professional media).
People who want to hire a staff of people to deceive the public should be revealed for the deceptive people they are. People accepting that money should be revealed for the shills that they are. Transparent access to information is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. The religious right (along with many Republicans, apparently) don't wany any part of that.
Sad, really. I think the non-neo-con, non-religious-right Republican agenda really is best for this country. Smaller government, less police state, fewer market interventions, more privacy. That's the Republican platform that I believe in.
Back to your assertion, that you should be able to say whatever you want under any circumstances you want... You go right on believing that if you like. The fact that you're completely and utterly wrong will probably never matter. Good thing, too.
Ross
Now that's an entirely different argument, and one that I'm very likely to have some sympathy for. Laws are at best, an approximation of "constraints upon immoral behavior", and the gaps between morality and legality are substantial.
Hm. I'm not familiar with the ACLU's website, but I just spent 15 minutes trying to find an ACLU position on this (search for "blog" or "blogging" or "bloggers" with "Free Speech" selected as a constraint) and I can't locate any mention of the bill or the issue. The "family advocacy groups" are religious right groups (the part of the Republican party that I detest, being non-religious myself) and it's supremely unsuprising that they want to hide who is saying what. Their very name is a deception, so why would their advocacy be any different?
Ross
You need to adjust your tinfoil hat. It's slipping down on one side and some of the rays are getting in.
Nobody. It's people being paid $100k to pretend they hold a particular political opinion who are paid lobbiests (sp). Evil? Again: tinfoil hat problems.
Did you work hard to get this clueless? I'm a registered Republican. Further, I don't trust 99% of politicians at all. Actions speak, not rhetoric. On this particular issue, most of the Dems were on the ethical side of the issue. That's all.
Political speech, like all freedoms, carries responsibilities. One responsibility of someone making political statements is to be honest about the actual source of those statements. If they're your own, great. If you're being paid by someone else to maintain that position, the reading/listening public should know that.
Conflicts of interest are how things go badly wrong. Enron, Worldcom, etc.
Who, exactly, are you preaching to here? The only way I could be said to be liberal is in the same way that Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. I suspect you'll have to look it up to understand what I mean. Don't worry, it will do you good to read some history.
Ross
You're joking, right? As a Republican linux user, I haven't heard too many alternative definitions. Seems pretty clear to me...
Astroturfing: fake grass-roots activity. If you're trying to look like you're just a part of the "noisy populace" but you're being paid to maintain your position by the side you apparently agree with, then you're astroturfing.
That definition holds for Microsoft astroturfing, Republican, Democrat, whatever. This bill sets the bar pretty high. $25k/quarter from one client (not from ads) or better than $100k/year from one source, and it calls you a paid political hack. I guess I can see where they're going, since that makes the law more enforceable, but still seems like there will be a lot of two client blogs the next year.
Political speech, like all freedoms, brings with it additional responsibilities. One of the most important responsibilities of political speech (compared to your average public griping) is that it's critical that people know exactly who is saying what. If you're just spouting off your opinion, great! Someone being paid > $100k to put up a political blog probably has the time to submit a form explaining who is paying them for "their opinion". And that seems like an excellent balance of responsibility with freedom to me.
Regards,
Ross
The actual grass-roots bloggers (and whatever their criticism of whoever they wanted to criticize) were never in jeopardy. But the Republicans and some Democrats made sure that astroturfers aren't in jeopardy either. Most of the Democrats were on the ethical side on this one. Sadly, they couldn't get a majority today.
Ross (registered Republican, but not very proud of that association right now)
I get the impression that you think you responded to me, when all you did was repeat the same flawed assertion you made the first time.
Here's what I said: It doesn't matter how good the encryption is if there's an easier way to get the key.
And there is always an easier way to get the key for DRM media. So your assertion is true and, at the same time, utterly irrelevant to the security of DRM'd media. Nobody attempting to attack the encryption of an HD-DVD disk would limit himself to only the data on the disk. So why even mention that case?
Ross
You'd prefer base 8 to base 12? The only actual issue I have with base 10 is that it makes it difficult to evenly divide by three, an extremely common situation, certainly more common than the need to divide by five.
Base 8 has a degenerate number of prime factors and is pretty much the worse possible choice for common real-world measurement and rapid calculation. How do you accurately represent 1/3 or 1/5 in a computer again? Right. You don't. The best a computer can do is an approximation of those values.
Ross