To respond a bit out of order, the most powerful weapons that men had available to them at the time of the Constitution was an armed merchant ship, which would have been quite devastating against a shoreline town (and may have been, I simply don't know of any examples offhand). I do know that the wealthier smugglers were often as well armed as the naval vessels tasked with finding them. Apparently, full equality with the navy was not something that fazed the founders, since they included no exception in the 2nd Amendment for multiple big guns mounted on a big ship.
I do agree, however, with your characterization that firearms ownership is a responsibility as much as it is a right.
As for Timothy McVeigh and 9/11 being the example as to why arms need regulating, that strikes me as a non-sequiter. I think that those are lessons that we should learn as electors: you can't go around destroying other people's lives for your own monetary gain and not expect some of those people to come after you some day. The US manufactures terrorists through some of the worst foreign policy on record. Are we really so suprised that some of our friends and neighbors got killed? How many hundreds or thousands of deaths for each 9/11 death has the US been behind when supporting the Shah?, Pinochet?, Hussein?
In your response to my posting you stated that the justification for the 2nd Amendment is not self-defense, but is clearly laid out so that the people have the power to handle an oppressive government. But what is a revolution against an oppressor, if not simply a somewhat extraordinary (in modern times) example of acting in self-defense? This may be a matter of semantics, and that's okay, but I see the right of self-defense being the support for the stated "security of a free state".
BTW, nice to have an actual discussion on/. instead of the usual pissing match that these things usually dissolve into...
In the book, Frodo turned 30 on the same day Bilbo turned 111. He was just entering his majority by leaving his "tweens" (twenties) behind. The film accurately portrays Frodo as looking like a human teenager.
As a theory, a 50 year old hobbit might have about the same wear and tear on his face and body as a 30 year old human. As a 31 year old man, there are a few lines in the face that weren't there twelve years ago, I'm beginning to find grey hairs with some regularity, I can put on much more muscle mass than I could when 19, I need to watch my diet to make sure I don't also gain fatty mass (didn't matter in the past), and my knees and ankles aren't as forgiving as they used to be. Other than that, I'm the same young kid I used to be!:-/
Quite clearly, you have successfully argued that "gun rights" are not derivative of property rights and that it makes no sense to argue that particular derivation. It may be time to try alternative theories as to why so many people are so vehement about the issue.
Perhaps a self-defense argument? Is the right to defend yourself against an attacker a basic human right?
I believe it to be, though I don't have space or time to satisfy all who might question that assertion.
If you do have a right to defend yourself, then having legal access to the most useful means for that defense (a handgun or short-barreled shotgun for defending yourself in a home) should become a great deal more plausible. IMHO, compellingly so.
The right to own a gun as stated in the 2nd Amendment is an affirmation of the larger right to self-defense, which is a consequent of our right to life, affirmed in the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" list of basic human rights.
As a completely different example, if you have an ocean-going boat and you live in Southeast Asia, I personally believe that you ought to be able to pintle mount a tri-barrel.50-cal on either end of your boat to allow you to defend yourself against pirates that run rampant in that part of the world. But few countries are amenable to a private citizen owning such firepower. And then,.50-cal will only deter the 90% in unarmored speedboats. You'll need greater firepower to keep the more serious entrants at bay.
If a government passes laws which prevent law-abiding citizens from obtaining equivalence of force with plausible attackers (the tools for defending themselves), that government has overstepped its bounds. IMHO, of course.
I do exactly this, however, in contradiction of your remarks, I personally find that the laptop display is superior to the 20" trinitron monitor it sits beside.
Subpixel antialiasing (ClearType to Windows folks) allows the LCD to absolutely stomp the phosphor technology in readability. As long as I'm looking at a high-res LCD using subpixel antialiasing, I now prefer reading text on a screen to reading it on paper (a first for me).
It doesn't hurt that I insist on a 1600x1200 display in any laptop I'm using... (IBM Thinkpad A21p at home, Dell Latitude 8xxx at work)
I bring a sheet of paper that looks similar to a ballot into a voting station (similar enough to fool the human watching the lockbox, who will usually only see the outside of a folded ballot to ensure the secrecy of my vote).
The voting machine hands me my ballot.
I tuck my ballot into my jacket, walk out of the enclosure, and drop the faker into the ballot box.
I walk outside and hand the real ballot to Luigi, who verifies that I voted the way I was supposed to, puts the baseball bat away, pays me $10, and takes the ballot.
The next person that Luigi has asked to "do him a favor" takes my ballot from Luigi and goes into the voting station.
He drops my ballot into the ballot box and brings out his own ballot to give to Luigi to verify.
Repeat for the rest of the day. The only indication of the problem is a single bad sheet of paper in the ballot box.
Oddly, Luigi's friend wins the election, even though the anonymous polls said that the other guy had much better support...
Voters should never touch their ballots, though they should have real assurance that a physical record of that vote has been produced and stored.
Ah, you're right. You just wrote "stuff" that the Wachowski brothers copied. Sophia wrote the never-published (but definitely stolen) story, possibly available on the internet, while you just wrote stuff on the internet which was stolen.
He rooted the system after being resurrected from the dead by True Love.
Actually, my take on it was that he rooted the system in order to get around the rule that if your body dies in the matrix, you also die in the real world. The fact that his mind was capable of interfacing with the matrix at a different level (The Gift) was what made him "The One". True Love was his kick in the pants (a better reason than just his own survival, perhaps). Once he rooted the matrix, he was "in like Flynn".
He didn't have "supernatural powers". He had the ability to ignore the rules of the Matrix (including the death rule) and make up a few rules of his own.
The only actual absurdity I can find in the first screenplay was the human == power source equation. The only reason to use a human instead of any other animal for energy is the big brain on the human. A cow is a much less troublesome animal for converting food calories into heat, if that's your actual goal, though a furnace is even less trouble and much higher efficiency. They should have stayed with the fusion concept and had the human brains controlling the unstable fusion reactions. But, they didn't ask me, so we got to be duracells instead... *sigh*
First of all, Matrix is derivative of tens of thousands of hero-myths, each originally created by someone trying to relate a lesson to others about the nature of the world and their place in it. The assertion that any story you (or anyone else) wrote is similar to the Matrix is therefore completely unsuprising. The Matrix is derivative of just about one quarter of all of the stories ever written. What are the odds that you were so original to avoid being in the same category as the Matrix (and that you're both derivative of the same source)? Given the style of the writing you presented in the parent post (i.e. juvenile): the odds do not look good.
Second, you appear to have read and believed something published by the Zonpower group of charlatans. If you have any independent thought left, read again, but with a skeptical eye this time. The leader of that organization has none of the advanced degrees he claims, can't actually assemble a logical argument to substantiate his highly astonishing assertions, and near as I can tell without meeting him, is a raving lunatic who lost his lease on reality many years before. I had a run-in with several zon-people on alt.philosophy.objectivism a few years back (I'm not an Objectivist, but our philosophies are similar enough that I enjoy a good debate with the Rand crowd). However, I eventually came ro realize that I was in a mental battle with unarmed opponents and the argument lost much of its appeal. *sigh*
The neo-tech writings on neocheating are so hysterically badly written, I'm not even certain the author has a high school diploma. The neo-tech web page is just too funny for words (though I'll bet that you don't find it funny right now, you will later). The thing I like best is the constant barrage of "neo-tech is not mysticism" immediately followed by multiple mystical claims. After some saturation level, I can guess that the weak minded would lose any ability to actually differentiate mysticism (neo-tech) from not (reality)... Looks like this is where you are right now.
Hanging chads, falling chads, dimpled chads. There are already frightening bugs in the voting process, that the voter's intention has to be determined by counters heavily involved in the political process.
These expose some fraction of votes to an interpratation bias. That's a little scary.
When every vote is potentially completely fabricated... That's terrifying.
Probably. There's a fairly lucrative market out there for someone quickly to come up with a voting machine that you can sell to every polling-place in a state.
But it's the secure hardware that's difficult to make, not the software...
And there's a certain set of well-defined problems that need somewhat clever solutions (making sure the right people vote, making sure all the votes get counted, leaving the correct auditing information... in a way that doesn't lead to a massive data explosion) that will be common across most platforms.
This is the simplest of data-corralling problems around. You have to deal with at most one record every few seconds and your total data stored is in the hundreds of kilobytes per machine. You'd have to work pretty hard to turn that into a "massive data explosion".
Further, all of these well-defined problems should have their solutions provided to the public in detail. They need to know how you're solving all of this so that they can verify that you're doing it properly.
keep my code to myself (closed source with audit under NDA) so that my super-smart engineers can beat the competition to market and we can all make money and retire
I sincerely hope that you just forgot to add a smiley here. Building a company to make voting machines ought to be about building a company that lasts, not one that sells a bunch of stuff and closes the doors to keep the money in.
post the source code somewhere where my competition can see it and steal/re-purpose the work of my team, so they get to market quicker with different code from mine, so they get rich and we don't
Again, the hardware and services are where you make the money on these machines. Tamper evident boxes, highly reliable ballot printers, touch screen, secure ballot storage, etc. Few people are building a box like this nowadays and your fancy vote counting software isn't going to do anyone any good if the hardware it's running on can't be trusted.
post the source code somewhere where every idiot with an axe to grind can crawl through it and figure out cheat codes ("hey, if I do UP-DOWN-LEFT-LEFT-LEFT-UP-DOWN-RIGHT, I see Lara topless") or places where the system can be rendered useless to make a point.
If your software can allow this to happen, then you deserve to have the world know that your "super smart engineers" don't have the first clue about how to build a decent voting machine. And if you've sold any of that product that was used in an election then then you also deserve to be jailed for your criminal incompetence.
If nothing else, what do you do when someone sends you a "fix" -- who validates it and puts it in the system, who supports it once it is in place, who fixes the seven other things it breaks?
If I was doing this, I would invite interested people to tell my company about problems they find and even propose possible solutions, but the code going out to the actual voting stations should follow a protocol similar to how slot-machine software is managed.
A set of firmware sources vetted by my staff, other interested parties and several inspectors (at least half of which are not paid by me) are then digitally signed by a bonded third party as "the official release". These sources are then compiled, encrypted, and digitally signed by a different bonded third party. The encrypted firmware image and the public key used for encryption and signing are available for anyone to validate against the similarly available source image. The latest such image+key is installed on all voting machines before election day. During the election, voting inspectors can either be provided with an interactive challenge/response UI that will validate a checksum against the running code and the active decryption key, or they can access a port that allows a download of the running firmware image for verification against an expected configuration. Neither operation should take more than a minute
One could argue that the American Indians had no concept of land ownership, and that they didn't realize what it meant to buy and sell land.
Only if you know nothing about American Indians. Native Americans as a group actually exhibited highly sophisticated concepts of land ownership, including negotiating rights connected to the land (hunting, farming, etc.). Do you think it's a coincidence that so many towns in New England are "Springfield", or some other "...field"? The european settlers didn't come ashore to virgin wilderness. They came ashore and found thriving agricultural communities, towns and even cities.
Happily for those settlers, the germs they carried resulted in mortality rates of 95% or more in the native communities, which meant free farms, often already planted. Unhappily for us, that mortality rate and the european position on natives at the time means that we don't get to hear about the history of those groups before that time.
As for the Manhattan purchase, those who "bought" Manhattan actually bought hunting rights for one season from a group not local to Manhattan. When the actual residents objected to being moved out, and requested a hearing, most were killed. The Louisana purchase is similarly troubling, since the US apparently bought the territory of more than a hundred native nations from the French without consulting with any of the Indian nations involved. The fact that many of those nations had gone to all the trouble of sending ambassadors to europe was of little inconvenience to the US or the French.
This is not to present Indians as universally noble, many groups allied with european settlers to gain an advantage over competing groups, and were often quite brutal when they had the upper hand. Still other groups picked up the european habit of scalping with a vengance (used by europeans to establish headcounts for any of several bounties on indian lives).
But don't pretend that they didn't have sophisticated concepts of land ownership. They most definitely did. What they didn't have was resistance to european germs and the firearms and organization to balance the military might of the european settlers. During the US expansion to the west coast, the US signed literally hundreds of treaties with native american nations. And broke every single treaty. Every one. Since then, the US has done just a little better. After all, they still have the casinos...
read the timeline of what's gone on in her case. Her husband really seems suspicious to me.
After reading the timeline posted by the advocacy group fighting against the husband, he seems like a saint to me. Here's the big hint: their timeline doesn't tell you 1) which doctors were sued in the malpractice suits and 2) what has happened to the money (the kind of medical support that her body requires is extremely pricey, I'm amazed that $1M+ has lasted this long).
This whole sordid thing is a crying shame, and her mistake of not making her wishes clearly known (along with a few other cases more personal) caused me to create a living will so that my family will have my clear and unambiguous instructions as to how I wish to be treated in those circumstances where I am unable to tell them directly.
I will never be one of those people who wakes up from a ten year coma. I would never consent to put my family and loved ones through that kind of horrific torture. I've experienced (and continue to experience) a wonderful, joy-filled existence. If that can't continue for whatever reason and it's my time to die... well... darn.
But you can burn a few holes later into a special region on the disk where the rules are slightly different.
Disk fabrication then might look like: apply metallic base to master, flow resin over base, harden, separate disk half from master, flow resin over other side, harden, burn serial number and inspect for data integrity.
This isn't active noise cancellation, but active vibrational damping. Similar, but not the same. Usually, you're damping out lower frequency vibrations in structures, using multiple vibration inducers and a large pile of accelerometers which measure the magnitude of the unwanted vibrations all over the structure. These are tied together through a computer doing some matrix processing on the accelerometer inputs to generate outputs used by the inducers to create their own movements, which then counter the unwanted vibrations, leaving the structure appearing to damp out any vibrations very quickly.
I would guess that in this case, there are vibrations induced by the engine/drivetrain/propellor into the hull when running at speed. You don't describe the effect of waves on a boat at "rattling the plates". Usually that's more like "bouncing me out of my seat", or, "making me not look at the plates".
So anyway, these guys came up with a more effective way to isolate the engine/prop vibration from the rest of the hull. There is already passive damping in the engine mounts and the stuffing box, but I can easily see how a few strategically placed accelerometers and some high speed/high realiability vibrational inducers could almost completely eliminate those vibrations. Depending on some other details (insert an inducer into the propellor shaft) you could have a self-balancing drive shaft, or...
Hmmm... That's actually a good idea. I wonder if that's what GM is working on...
Sexual reproduction has bloody little to do with parasites, who thrive just fine thank you on sexually reproducing mammals.
And which do even better on axesual animals (which have correspondingly shorter lifespans, but read on...)
If you're interested in the subject, I would suggest you check out a copy of "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley from your local library (or Amazon, if your local library isn't up to scratch). In it, you'll find multiple discussions which consider many possible reasons for sex, heavily referencing the enormous diversity of sexual strategies available.
The big problem for two parent reproduction is that it results in half as many offspring as single parent reproduction, so how could it possibly have been successful in the face of faster breeding parthenogenetic competitors?
Currently, the strongest theory is that the longer the lifespan, the more certain the eventual susceptibility to pathogens. They evolve faster than you can adapt and will eventually catch up to you (historically recent medicines nonwithstanding). If your children have the same defenses you do, they start this race at a distinct disadvantage (the parthenogenetic problem). If, however, your children have a whole new set of defenses, then the battle begins anew.
Bacteria don't need sex because individual lifespans are so short that there is no advantage over the parthenogenetic parent. Bacteria do, however, occasionally exchange genetic material, though you'll have to read the book to find out the reasons why that happens...
The motorcycles that motorcycle magazines get for review are nothing like the motorcycle you'd actually find on a showroom floor. I have yet to see a manufacturer send an actual stock motorcycle for review at the local motorcycle magazine (which lets me help out occasionally)
But you'd never know any of that from a photograph with all of the plastic in place...
I am just one example of someone who has an SUV for practical reasons, although I don't really need any to justify my purchase.
Anecdotal evidence, isn't.
People buy SUVs because they can pretty much do it all.
Even if the buyer doesn't need to do it all. Thanks for setting that up. You'd make a great straight man.
SUVs are versatile, and that is why many people buy them.
Unsubstantiated assertion and it ignores the argument made: that if you don't use the capabilities of an SUV, buying one is merely an impulsive response to a fad. Most of the SUV's bought this year will never leave the smooth comfortable safety of asphalt and concrete. Wouldn't want to get a scratch in the beautiful paint job of your $100,000 Porsche SUV, now...
Actually, a lottery ticket can not simply be valued as a pure gamble. The entertainment value of thinking about what you might do if you won must also be included. It is fairly easy to argue that the entertainment value of 10 lottery tickets is substantially more valuable than the three hours of mindless drivel that you would obtain in exchange for most $10 movie tickets.
BTW, I haven't bought a lottery ticket in years, but I do remember the excitement of thinking about what I might do with the money if I was to win...
Now, to contradict myself, there certainly are people who are actually trying to "win" and these people are simply bad at math (my relatives in Pennsylvania quickly come to mind). However, I don't know which group dominates lottery ticket purchases.
Just to make sure we're clear, please don't confuse my argument. I'm not saying that people aren't starving, because it's certainly true that people are starving. I'm arguing that people are not starving because people like hamburgers, but instead, that poverty along with the policies of wealthy countries prevent those people from having any access to the surplus of calories that are produced (or could be produced in fields which intentionally lie fallow, which some studies include in the wastage numbers) each year.
I suspect that you and I are in rather close agreement in being angry about the issue of global mass starvation. My take on the vegetarian argument (that beef is to blame and that if we all stopped eating beef, there would be no starvation) is that it's a red herring that distracts from much more important issues of economic globalization that prevent local populations from being able to produce their own food while living on arable land.
Plenty of referenced numbers:
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/research/FSRDTC-paper.pdf (paper) http://aic.ucdavis.edu/research/FSRDTC-sl ides.pdf (slides, see p10 for increased per-capita calorie production and lowered per-capita price to contrast with increased starvation over the same period from other sources)
Some recent references:
http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/newsnviews/2002/sm 02 v25n86.html http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/x0262e/x026 2e07.htm http://www.mcknight.org/hotissues/overvi ew_food.as p
Some older references:
http://dieoff.org/page115.htm
Quotes from this article:
"Due to advances in agriculture of many countries, there is now a substantial world surplus of food"
Abelson, P.H. (1987). World Food. Science, 236,9.
An argument that simultaneously with the above statement, more people than ever are undernourished or malnourished.
Wortman, S. (1980). World food and nutrition: The scientific and technological base. Science, 209, 157- 164.
As we over populate the planet and move from grain based diets to animal based diets, we are starving billions of people. The evidence is staggering.
And that "evidence" is complete and utter bovine feces. The problem is one of distribution, not of production. The world produces 10-20% more calories than would be needed to feed everyone.
There is an implication you'd like to make: that people who eat meat are out-consuming and starving the people who just need to get a little grain. The problem is that we as a planet throw away more grain each year than would be necessary to feed every hungry man, woman, and child. Who cares if it takes 15 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. If we traded all of the meat we eat for grain at 15 to 1, those people who were hungry would still go hungry because the grain still wouldn't get to them.
However, for living beings, how does one explain the transportation of the SOUL, the consciousness of the person or being which is transported? Even one single lepton out of place in the reassembly and you've materially changed that person's psychic makeup.
Your problems are 1) believing that the soul can be separated from the body and 2) believing that your body is so fragile that your conciousness wouldn't survive the occasional dropped atom. Fundamentally, you've complicated the concept of self with several incompletely explained and unnecessary concepts.
As for the mechanics of transportation, your conciousness handles the loss of neurons without flinching and many other people's minds have survived the loss of brain tissue through stroke or trauma with only minor changes to personality. Unless there was a systemic corruption of the transported material, occasional bit errors that result in the loss of cells won't change all that much. Your body doesn't place much value in any single cell as individual cells die all the time. There are almost always other cells nearby to take up the slack and continue on.
Biological systems don't rely on perfect accuracy. Your body (along with your conciousness) certainly doesn't. I suggest going to the library and reading about the "embodied mind" concept. "In the Flesh" is one of the best works on the subject for Western readers.
Now, I do appreciate that this position (that the "soul" is simply and wonderfully an emergent property of our bodies) threatens a number of Western philosophical assumptions, but that's often the way of being honest with yourself...
Regards, Ross
Prevayler solves a very specific kind of problem.
on
Bitter EJB
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Prevayler is a persistence golden hammer to those who have been converted. Here's an essay I wrote to add to the Prevayler wiki (but didn't have the permissions to add):
Without a more effective query semantic, prevalence will be limited to a very small subset of the problem space currently solved with O/R solutions.
The knowledge gap appears to be in the analysis of the value of SQL queries in programming and computational problem solving. My assertion: relational programming is actually different from object oriented programming and is more
useful than OO for a number of problem types, including asking ad-hoc questions of the data set (very common for reporting, etc.).
This feeling, that SQL and RDBMS's are somehow a "throwback" or an "obsolete" technology reveals a lack of understanding of the relational programming model. This feeling has also led to a lot of "trips around the block" (Yet another OO database, etc.). OO databases don't really catch on for anything because they don't solve real world problems better than relational DB's. Yet time and time again, OO databases are trotted
out as the "road to freedom from SQL". SQL, appropriately applied, isn't any more confining than Java or any other programming language, appropriately applied. Unless you take a close look at one of the problems that SQL solves elegantly, however, this statement will not make any sense to you.
Based on my experience, the biggest differences between the OO model and the Relational model include:
The relational model is not encapsulated, which allows even unanticipated
questions to be answered after the system is complete without substantial/any
modification to the system.
Relational optimizations (a.k.a. indexing) are the key to performant
queries and the ability to simultaneously use more than one index (actually N)
for query optimization has no useable analog in OO query programming (yes, you can maintain lists of lists on a per-query basis, but ouch!)
Once you have several dozen indices speeding things up, index maintenance
in RAM in OO is harder than for a well-designed RDBMS (PostgreSQL, etc.). Both
slow down the creation of new objects, but:
RDBMS's use a number of "tricks"
to minimize the cost of row insertion and effectively minimize the code
development cost of that insertion from the developer.
The OO developer, on the other hand, must take the time to insert each new
object into each sorted collection of objects, complicating code and consuming
lots of time.
Basically, I accept the prevaylance performance numbers, simply because I can make any decent RDBMS perform queries 3000x to 9000x slower than nominal on a sufficiently large dataset by screwing around with the indices. What I don't accept is the claimed significance of your numbers. Who cares if your system is 9000x faster than Oracle + O/R for your carefully chosen example problem if my real world problem is 5x faster but requires 100% more java code and can't easily handle new report types? Most of the time, performance is one of the last aspects of a new system to get any attention, and IMHO, that's exactly the right emphasis for performance in system development.
Let's propose a real business application with dozens of objects in a complex model and then throw a few million instances at it. Now let's start adding queries to the system and let's see who does better? I'll bet that I don't have
to try very hard to get the queries 1) written faster and 2) executing faster against the O/R layer than you do against the objects in RAM, but then since I'm choosing the dataset, you know that's not going to be too difficult:)
I'll freely admit that you guys have some really cool ideas, and I *really* like the idea for small apps that already use files for persistent state. Only problem is that none of the products I've worked on in the last ten years fit a mold that prevalence would make easier. If anything, your approach mak
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To respond a bit out of order, the most powerful weapons that men had available to them at the time of the Constitution was an armed merchant ship, which would have been quite devastating against a shoreline town (and may have been, I simply don't know of any examples offhand). I do know that the wealthier smugglers were often as well armed as the naval vessels tasked with finding them. Apparently, full equality with the navy was not something that fazed the founders, since they included no exception in the 2nd Amendment for multiple big guns mounted on a big ship.
/. instead of the usual pissing match that these things usually dissolve into...
I do agree, however, with your characterization that firearms ownership is a responsibility as much as it is a right.
As for Timothy McVeigh and 9/11 being the example as to why arms need regulating, that strikes me as a non-sequiter. I think that those are lessons that we should learn as electors: you can't go around destroying other people's lives for your own monetary gain and not expect some of those people to come after you some day. The US manufactures terrorists through some of the worst foreign policy on record. Are we really so suprised that some of our friends and neighbors got killed? How many hundreds or thousands of deaths for each 9/11 death has the US been behind when supporting the Shah?, Pinochet?, Hussein?
In your response to my posting you stated that the justification for the 2nd Amendment is not self-defense, but is clearly laid out so that the people have the power to handle an oppressive government. But what is a revolution against an oppressor, if not simply a somewhat extraordinary (in modern times) example of acting in self-defense? This may be a matter of semantics, and that's okay, but I see the right of self-defense being the support for the stated "security of a free state".
BTW, nice to have an actual discussion on
Regards,
Ross
In the book, Frodo turned 30 on the same day Bilbo turned 111. He was just entering his majority by leaving his "tweens" (twenties) behind. The film accurately portrays Frodo as looking like a human teenager.
:-/
As a theory, a 50 year old hobbit might have about the same wear and tear on his face and body as a 30 year old human. As a 31 year old man, there are a few lines in the face that weren't there twelve years ago, I'm beginning to find grey hairs with some regularity, I can put on much more muscle mass than I could when 19, I need to watch my diet to make sure I don't also gain fatty mass (didn't matter in the past), and my knees and ankles aren't as forgiving as they used to be. Other than that, I'm the same young kid I used to be!
Regards,
Ross
Quite clearly, you have successfully argued that "gun rights" are not derivative of property rights and that it makes no sense to argue that particular derivation. It may be time to try alternative theories as to why so many people are so vehement about the issue.
.50-cal on either end of your boat to allow you to defend yourself against pirates that run rampant in that part of the world. But few countries are amenable to a private citizen owning such firepower. And then, .50-cal will only deter the 90% in unarmored speedboats. You'll need greater firepower to keep the more serious entrants at bay.
Perhaps a self-defense argument? Is the right to defend yourself against an attacker a basic human right?
I believe it to be, though I don't have space or time to satisfy all who might question that assertion.
If you do have a right to defend yourself, then having legal access to the most useful means for that defense (a handgun or short-barreled shotgun for defending yourself in a home) should become a great deal more plausible. IMHO, compellingly so.
The right to own a gun as stated in the 2nd Amendment is an affirmation of the larger right to self-defense, which is a consequent of our right to life, affirmed in the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" list of basic human rights.
As a completely different example, if you have an ocean-going boat and you live in Southeast Asia, I personally believe that you ought to be able to pintle mount a tri-barrel
If a government passes laws which prevent law-abiding citizens from obtaining equivalence of force with plausible attackers (the tools for defending themselves), that government has overstepped its bounds. IMHO, of course.
Regards,
Ross
Your suggestion doesn't protect against card remarking, card stealing, or card-invalidating, which are all forms of tampering with the paper trail.
This proposal catches all of those potential problems and makes them visible, though not correctable.
Regards,
Ross
I do exactly this, however, in contradiction of your remarks, I personally find that the laptop display is superior to the 20" trinitron monitor it sits beside.
Subpixel antialiasing (ClearType to Windows folks) allows the LCD to absolutely stomp the phosphor technology in readability. As long as I'm looking at a high-res LCD using subpixel antialiasing, I now prefer reading text on a screen to reading it on paper (a first for me).
It doesn't hurt that I insist on a 1600x1200 display in any laptop I'm using... (IBM Thinkpad A21p at home, Dell Latitude 8xxx at work)
Regards,
Ross
I bring a sheet of paper that looks similar to a ballot into a voting station (similar enough to fool the human watching the lockbox, who will usually only see the outside of a folded ballot to ensure the secrecy of my vote).
The voting machine hands me my ballot.
I tuck my ballot into my jacket, walk out of the enclosure, and drop the faker into the ballot box.
I walk outside and hand the real ballot to Luigi, who verifies that I voted the way I was supposed to, puts the baseball bat away, pays me $10, and takes the ballot.
The next person that Luigi has asked to "do him a favor" takes my ballot from Luigi and goes into the voting station.
He drops my ballot into the ballot box and brings out his own ballot to give to Luigi to verify.
Repeat for the rest of the day. The only indication of the problem is a single bad sheet of paper in the ballot box.
Oddly, Luigi's friend wins the election, even though the anonymous polls said that the other guy had much better support...
Voters should never touch their ballots, though they should have real assurance that a physical record of that vote has been produced and stored.
Regards,
Ross
Ah, you're right. You just wrote "stuff" that the Wachowski brothers copied. Sophia wrote the never-published (but definitely stolen) story, possibly available on the internet, while you just wrote stuff on the internet which was stolen.
:)
How silly of me to get those confused.
Regards,
Ross
He rooted the system after being resurrected from the dead by True Love.
Actually, my take on it was that he rooted the system in order to get around the rule that if your body dies in the matrix, you also die in the real world. The fact that his mind was capable of interfacing with the matrix at a different level (The Gift) was what made him "The One". True Love was his kick in the pants (a better reason than just his own survival, perhaps). Once he rooted the matrix, he was "in like Flynn".
He didn't have "supernatural powers". He had the ability to ignore the rules of the Matrix (including the death rule) and make up a few rules of his own.
The only actual absurdity I can find in the first screenplay was the human == power source equation. The only reason to use a human instead of any other animal for energy is the big brain on the human. A cow is a much less troublesome animal for converting food calories into heat, if that's your actual goal, though a furnace is even less trouble and much higher efficiency. They should have stayed with the fusion concept and had the human brains controlling the unstable fusion reactions. But, they didn't ask me, so we got to be duracells instead... *sigh*
Regards,
Ross
First of all, Matrix is derivative of tens of thousands of hero-myths, each originally created by someone trying to relate a lesson to others about the nature of the world and their place in it. The assertion that any story you (or anyone else) wrote is similar to the Matrix is therefore completely unsuprising. The Matrix is derivative of just about one quarter of all of the stories ever written. What are the odds that you were so original to avoid being in the same category as the Matrix (and that you're both derivative of the same source)? Given the style of the writing you presented in the parent post (i.e. juvenile): the odds do not look good.
Second, you appear to have read and believed something published by the Zonpower group of charlatans. If you have any independent thought left, read again, but with a skeptical eye this time. The leader of that organization has none of the advanced degrees he claims, can't actually assemble a logical argument to substantiate his highly astonishing assertions, and near as I can tell without meeting him, is a raving lunatic who lost his lease on reality many years before. I had a run-in with several zon-people on alt.philosophy.objectivism a few years back (I'm not an Objectivist, but our philosophies are similar enough that I enjoy a good debate with the Rand crowd). However, I eventually came ro realize that I was in a mental battle with unarmed opponents and the argument lost much of its appeal. *sigh*
The neo-tech writings on neocheating are so hysterically badly written, I'm not even certain the author has a high school diploma. The neo-tech web page is just too funny for words (though I'll bet that you don't find it funny right now, you will later). The thing I like best is the constant barrage of "neo-tech is not mysticism" immediately followed by multiple mystical claims. After some saturation level, I can guess that the weak minded would lose any ability to actually differentiate mysticism (neo-tech) from not (reality)... Looks like this is where you are right now.
Good luck to you, sir.
Regards,
Ross
Hanging chads, falling chads, dimpled chads. There are already frightening bugs in the voting process, that the voter's intention has to be determined by counters heavily involved in the political process.
These expose some fraction of votes to an interpratation bias. That's a little scary.
When every vote is potentially completely fabricated... That's terrifying.
Regards,
ross
Probably. There's a fairly lucrative market out there for someone quickly to come up with a voting machine that you can sell to every polling-place in a state.
But it's the secure hardware that's difficult to make, not the software...
And there's a certain set of well-defined problems that need somewhat clever solutions (making sure the right people vote, making sure all the votes get counted, leaving the correct auditing information... in a way that doesn't lead to a massive data explosion) that will be common across most platforms.
This is the simplest of data-corralling problems around. You have to deal with at most one record every few seconds and your total data stored is in the hundreds of kilobytes per machine. You'd have to work pretty hard to turn that into a "massive data explosion".
Further, all of these well-defined problems should have their solutions provided to the public in detail. They need to know how you're solving all of this so that they can verify that you're doing it properly.
keep my code to myself (closed source with audit under NDA) so that my super-smart engineers can beat the competition to market and we can all make money and retire
I sincerely hope that you just forgot to add a smiley here. Building a company to make voting machines ought to be about building a company that lasts, not one that sells a bunch of stuff and closes the doors to keep the money in.
post the source code somewhere where my competition can see it and steal/re-purpose the work of my team, so they get to market quicker with different code from mine, so they get rich and we don't
Again, the hardware and services are where you make the money on these machines. Tamper evident boxes, highly reliable ballot printers, touch screen, secure ballot storage, etc. Few people are building a box like this nowadays and your fancy vote counting software isn't going to do anyone any good if the hardware it's running on can't be trusted.
post the source code somewhere where every idiot with an axe to grind can crawl through it and figure out cheat codes ("hey, if I do UP-DOWN-LEFT-LEFT-LEFT-UP-DOWN-RIGHT, I see Lara topless") or places where the system can be rendered useless to make a point.
If your software can allow this to happen, then you deserve to have the world know that your "super smart engineers" don't have the first clue about how to build a decent voting machine. And if you've sold any of that product that was used in an election then then you also deserve to be jailed for your criminal incompetence.
If nothing else, what do you do when someone sends you a "fix" -- who validates it and puts it in the system, who supports it once it is in place, who fixes the seven other things it breaks?
If I was doing this, I would invite interested people to tell my company about problems they find and even propose possible solutions, but the code going out to the actual voting stations should follow a protocol similar to how slot-machine software is managed.
A set of firmware sources vetted by my staff, other interested parties and several inspectors (at least half of which are not paid by me) are then digitally signed by a bonded third party as "the official release". These sources are then compiled, encrypted, and digitally signed by a different bonded third party. The encrypted firmware image and the public key used for encryption and signing are available for anyone to validate against the similarly available source image. The latest such image+key is installed on all voting machines before election day. During the election, voting inspectors can either be provided with an interactive challenge/response UI that will validate a checksum against the running code and the active decryption key, or they can access a port that allows a download of the running firmware image for verification against an expected configuration. Neither operation should take more than a minute
One could argue that the American Indians had no concept of land ownership, and that they didn't realize what it meant to buy and sell land.
Only if you know nothing about American Indians. Native Americans as a group actually exhibited highly sophisticated concepts of land ownership, including negotiating rights connected to the land (hunting, farming, etc.). Do you think it's a coincidence that so many towns in New England are "Springfield", or some other "...field"? The european settlers didn't come ashore to virgin wilderness. They came ashore and found thriving agricultural communities, towns and even cities.
Happily for those settlers, the germs they carried resulted in mortality rates of 95% or more in the native communities, which meant free farms, often already planted. Unhappily for us, that mortality rate and the european position on natives at the time means that we don't get to hear about the history of those groups before that time.
As for the Manhattan purchase, those who "bought" Manhattan actually bought hunting rights for one season from a group not local to Manhattan. When the actual residents objected to being moved out, and requested a hearing, most were killed. The Louisana purchase is similarly troubling, since the US apparently bought the territory of more than a hundred native nations from the French without consulting with any of the Indian nations involved. The fact that many of those nations had gone to all the trouble of sending ambassadors to europe was of little inconvenience to the US or the French.
This is not to present Indians as universally noble, many groups allied with european settlers to gain an advantage over competing groups, and were often quite brutal when they had the upper hand. Still other groups picked up the european habit of scalping with a vengance (used by europeans to establish headcounts for any of several bounties on indian lives).
But don't pretend that they didn't have sophisticated concepts of land ownership. They most definitely did. What they didn't have was resistance to european germs and the firearms and organization to balance the military might of the european settlers. During the US expansion to the west coast, the US signed literally hundreds of treaties with native american nations. And broke every single treaty. Every one. Since then, the US has done just a little better. After all, they still have the casinos...
Regards,
Ross
read the timeline of what's gone on in her case. Her husband really seems suspicious to me.
After reading the timeline posted by the advocacy group fighting against the husband, he seems like a saint to me. Here's the big hint: their timeline doesn't tell you 1) which doctors were sued in the malpractice suits and 2) what has happened to the money (the kind of medical support that her body requires is extremely pricey, I'm amazed that $1M+ has lasted this long).
This whole sordid thing is a crying shame, and her mistake of not making her wishes clearly known (along with a few other cases more personal) caused me to create a living will so that my family will have my clear and unambiguous instructions as to how I wish to be treated in those circumstances where I am unable to tell them directly.
I will never be one of those people who wakes up from a ten year coma. I would never consent to put my family and loved ones through that kind of horrific torture. I've experienced (and continue to experience) a wonderful, joy-filled existence. If that can't continue for whatever reason and it's my time to die... well... darn.
Regards,
Ross
But you can burn a few holes later into a special region on the disk where the rules are slightly different.
Disk fabrication then might look like: apply metallic base to master, flow resin over base, harden, separate disk half from master, flow resin over other side, harden, burn serial number and inspect for data integrity.
Regards,
Ross
Never, never, allow people to verify their vote after getting out of the booth. To do so invites "vote buying" abuses of the system.
If I can verify my vote, so can Guido. And I don't really want Guido to verify my vote.
Regards,
Ross
The author you're referring to confused his antecedants (which "this" does "this" refer to?).
The MySQL behavior described is not ACID compliant (it alters an input without notification).
The PostgreSQL behavior described is ACID compliant.
Regards,
Ross
This isn't active noise cancellation, but active vibrational damping. Similar, but not the same. Usually, you're damping out lower frequency vibrations in structures, using multiple vibration inducers and a large pile of accelerometers which measure the magnitude of the unwanted vibrations all over the structure. These are tied together through a computer doing some matrix processing on the accelerometer inputs to generate outputs used by the inducers to create their own movements, which then counter the unwanted vibrations, leaving the structure appearing to damp out any vibrations very quickly.
I would guess that in this case, there are vibrations induced by the engine/drivetrain/propellor into the hull when running at speed. You don't describe the effect of waves on a boat at "rattling the plates". Usually that's more like "bouncing me out of my seat", or, "making me not look at the plates".
So anyway, these guys came up with a more effective way to isolate the engine/prop vibration from the rest of the hull. There is already passive damping in the engine mounts and the stuffing box, but I can easily see how a few strategically placed accelerometers and some high speed/high realiability vibrational inducers could almost completely eliminate those vibrations. Depending on some other details (insert an inducer into the propellor shaft) you could have a self-balancing drive shaft, or...
Hmmm... That's actually a good idea. I wonder if that's what GM is working on...
Regards,
Ross
Sexual reproduction has bloody little to do with parasites, who thrive just fine thank you on sexually reproducing mammals.
And which do even better on axesual animals (which have correspondingly shorter lifespans, but read on...)
If you're interested in the subject, I would suggest you check out a copy of "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley from your local library (or Amazon, if your local library isn't up to scratch). In it, you'll find multiple discussions which consider many possible reasons for sex, heavily referencing the enormous diversity of sexual strategies available.
The big problem for two parent reproduction is that it results in half as many offspring as single parent reproduction, so how could it possibly have been successful in the face of faster breeding parthenogenetic competitors?
Currently, the strongest theory is that the longer the lifespan, the more certain the eventual susceptibility to pathogens. They evolve faster than you can adapt and will eventually catch up to you (historically recent medicines nonwithstanding). If your children have the same defenses you do, they start this race at a distinct disadvantage (the parthenogenetic problem). If, however, your children have a whole new set of defenses, then the battle begins anew.
Bacteria don't need sex because individual lifespans are so short that there is no advantage over the parthenogenetic parent. Bacteria do, however, occasionally exchange genetic material, though you'll have to read the book to find out the reasons why that happens...
Regards,
Ross
The motorcycles that motorcycle magazines get for review are nothing like the motorcycle you'd actually find on a showroom floor. I have yet to see a manufacturer send an actual stock motorcycle for review at the local motorcycle magazine (which lets me help out occasionally)
But you'd never know any of that from a photograph with all of the plastic in place...
Regards,
Ross
I am just one example of someone who has an SUV for practical reasons, although I don't really need any to justify my purchase.
Anecdotal evidence, isn't.
People buy SUVs because they can pretty much do it all.
Even if the buyer doesn't need to do it all. Thanks for setting that up. You'd make a great straight man.
SUVs are versatile, and that is why many people buy them.
Unsubstantiated assertion and it ignores the argument made: that if you don't use the capabilities of an SUV, buying one is merely an impulsive response to a fad. Most of the SUV's bought this year will never leave the smooth comfortable safety of asphalt and concrete. Wouldn't want to get a scratch in the beautiful paint job of your $100,000 Porsche SUV, now...
Regards,
Ross
Actually, a lottery ticket can not simply be valued as a pure gamble. The entertainment value of thinking about what you might do if you won must also be included. It is fairly easy to argue that the entertainment value of 10 lottery tickets is substantially more valuable than the three hours of mindless drivel that you would obtain in exchange for most $10 movie tickets.
BTW, I haven't bought a lottery ticket in years, but I do remember the excitement of thinking about what I might do with the money if I was to win...
Now, to contradict myself, there certainly are people who are actually trying to "win" and these people are simply bad at math (my relatives in Pennsylvania quickly come to mind). However, I don't know which group dominates lottery ticket purchases.
Regards,
Ross
Just to make sure we're clear, please don't confuse my argument. I'm not saying that people aren't starving, because it's certainly true that people are starving. I'm arguing that people are not starving because people like hamburgers, but instead, that poverty along with the policies of wealthy countries prevent those people from having any access to the surplus of calories that are produced (or could be produced in fields which intentionally lie fallow, which some studies include in the wastage numbers) each year.
f (paper)l ides.pdf (slides, see p10 for increased per-capita calorie production and lowered per-capita price to contrast with increased starvation over the same period from other sources)
m 02 v25n86.html6 2e07.htmi ew_food.as p
I suspect that you and I are in rather close agreement in being angry about the issue of global mass starvation. My take on the vegetarian argument (that beef is to blame and that if we all stopped eating beef, there would be no starvation) is that it's a red herring that distracts from much more important issues of economic globalization that prevent local populations from being able to produce their own food while living on arable land.
Plenty of referenced numbers:
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/research/FSRDTC-paper.pd
http://aic.ucdavis.edu/research/FSRDTC-s
Some recent references:
http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/newsnviews/2002/s
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/x0262e/x02
http://www.mcknight.org/hotissues/overv
Some older references:
http://dieoff.org/page115.htm
Quotes from this article:
"Due to advances in agriculture of many countries, there is now a substantial world surplus of food"
Abelson, P.H. (1987). World Food. Science, 236,9.
An argument that simultaneously with the above statement, more people than ever are undernourished or malnourished.
Wortman, S. (1980). World food and nutrition: The scientific and technological base. Science, 209, 157- 164.
Regards,
Ross
As we over populate the planet and move from grain based diets to animal based diets, we are starving billions of people. The evidence is staggering.
And that "evidence" is complete and utter bovine feces. The problem is one of distribution, not of production. The world produces 10-20% more calories than would be needed to feed everyone.
There is an implication you'd like to make: that people who eat meat are out-consuming and starving the people who just need to get a little grain. The problem is that we as a planet throw away more grain each year than would be necessary to feed every hungry man, woman, and child. Who cares if it takes 15 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. If we traded all of the meat we eat for grain at 15 to 1, those people who were hungry would still go hungry because the grain still wouldn't get to them.
Regards,
Ross
However, for living beings, how does one explain the transportation of the SOUL, the consciousness of the person or being which is transported? Even one single lepton out of place in the reassembly and you've materially changed that person's psychic makeup.
Your problems are 1) believing that the soul can be separated from the body and 2) believing that your body is so fragile that your conciousness wouldn't survive the occasional dropped atom. Fundamentally, you've complicated the concept of self with several incompletely explained and unnecessary concepts.
As for the mechanics of transportation, your conciousness handles the loss of neurons without flinching and many other people's minds have survived the loss of brain tissue through stroke or trauma with only minor changes to personality. Unless there was a systemic corruption of the transported material, occasional bit errors that result in the loss of cells won't change all that much. Your body doesn't place much value in any single cell as individual cells die all the time. There are almost always other cells nearby to take up the slack and continue on.
Biological systems don't rely on perfect accuracy. Your body (along with your conciousness) certainly doesn't. I suggest going to the library and reading about the "embodied mind" concept. "In the Flesh" is one of the best works on the subject for Western readers.
Now, I do appreciate that this position (that the "soul" is simply and wonderfully an emergent property of our bodies) threatens a number of Western philosophical assumptions, but that's often the way of being honest with yourself...
Regards,
Ross
Without a more effective query semantic, prevalence will be limited to a very small subset of the problem space currently solved with O/R solutions.
The knowledge gap appears to be in the analysis of the value of SQL queries in programming and computational problem solving. My assertion: relational programming is actually different from object oriented programming and is more useful than OO for a number of problem types, including asking ad-hoc questions of the data set (very common for reporting, etc.).
This feeling, that SQL and RDBMS's are somehow a "throwback" or an "obsolete" technology reveals a lack of understanding of the relational programming model. This feeling has also led to a lot of "trips around the block" (Yet another OO database, etc.). OO databases don't really catch on for anything because they don't solve real world problems better than relational DB's. Yet time and time again, OO databases are trotted out as the "road to freedom from SQL". SQL, appropriately applied, isn't any more confining than Java or any other programming language, appropriately applied. Unless you take a close look at one of the problems that SQL solves elegantly, however, this statement will not make any sense to you.
Based on my experience, the biggest differences between the OO model and the Relational model include:
Basically, I accept the prevaylance performance numbers, simply because I can make any decent RDBMS perform queries 3000x to 9000x slower than nominal on a sufficiently large dataset by screwing around with the indices. What I don't accept is the claimed significance of your numbers. Who cares if your system is 9000x faster than Oracle + O/R for your carefully chosen example problem if my real world problem is 5x faster but requires 100% more java code and can't easily handle new report types? Most of the time, performance is one of the last aspects of a new system to get any attention, and IMHO, that's exactly the right emphasis for performance in system development.
Let's propose a real business application with dozens of objects in a complex model and then throw a few million instances at it. Now let's start adding queries to the system and let's see who does better? I'll bet that I don't have to try very hard to get the queries 1) written faster and 2) executing faster against the O/R layer than you do against the objects in RAM, but then since I'm choosing the dataset, you know that's not going to be too difficult :)
I'll freely admit that you guys have some really cool ideas, and I *really* like the idea for small apps that already use files for persistent state. Only problem is that none of the products I've worked on in the last ten years fit a mold that prevalence would make easier. If anything, your approach mak