I can not really comment on superiority of capitalism and democracy, because neither is practiced in the modern world. When capitalism was tried in the past, it brought 18 hour/day child labor, people dying from hunger, extreme environmental pollution and bloody revolts of angry mobs. You can see a bit of it in China today, bringing you those pretty looking toys laden with lead and date rape drugs. When democracy was tried in the past, people promptly elected a "Great Leader", Hitler being one of the relatively recent examples.
What we have now is highly regulated economical and political relationships between people. You can not make someone work for below the minimum wage or in hazardous conditions and you can not vote to kill off your least favorite minority. Superior systems compared to what we have in US are certainly possible and evident in many places in the world. But they sure can not be called capitalism or democracy.
We discovered an old Pentium 133, running Slackware Linux. It was located in a sealed off janitor's closet that everybody had forgotten about. All of the fans had died a long time ago. It was covered in dirt and dust. But, by god, it was still running;)
So do you want a dusty, overheating logic board controlling your fuel injection? An anecdotal case doesn't justify a design where one of 100K units failing is too high of a risk.
I'd be leery of a car that was completely controlled by microprocessors/fly-by-wire, but even in the most advanced car you are still going to have manual control over your brakes and steering, even if everything else fails. That should be enough to bring the vehicle to a stop without killing yourself or anybody else.
I guess you don't drive a Prius. Regenerative breaking can by definition only by controlled by wire, there is no mechanical way to put the car in neutral or park and there is only an electrical power switch instead of the key that could be used to physically turn off the ignition. I hope I will never be a bystander caught up in this particular police technology.
Books, music and movies play a huge role in defining popular culture and currently US government and big companies have a virtual monopoly on shaping it. Some day Michael Moore's film studio will receive a call from Homeland security office to remove his films from circulation as they help terrorists and communists by undermining war effort and encouraging americans to visit Cuba. With all popular formats - DVD, HD, digital downloads - now covered by DRM, there will be no legal way for supporters to continue spreading the message. Activists will be jailed for breaking DMCA to spread popular "free speech" and public will be assured that all our freedoms are safe. It's only that pretty much any speech can be considered a derivative work of something in popular culture and as such belongs to some big company. Oh yes, and all the land is privately owned as well and as such the owners can impose restrictions on the speech within. It's too bad your homeowner's association has a policy against controversial public speech on the premises.
Universities are obligated to record attendance and appearance of every meeting of two or more students and give RIAA an identity of someone seen handing out pirated CDs based on his/her dress style. Just because our means of communication changed, does not mean our human nature is fundamentally altered in respect to need for privacy, or tendency for abuse of power. What's so hard to understand?
The author of this piece seems to be unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. No, we do not have to invent new intentionally sexist/racist generic terms like schoolpenis. However, we do not have to break our existing language just because some words, which are not discriminatory in actual modern usage, can be misunderstood just because of their sound. It would be niggardly to make children refer to their favorite fairy tale hero as snow or coal black or white.
... that most children's lives would be ruined if they are allowed unsupervised, not talked about with parents, interactions with outside world and Internet in particular? Go ahead and send your 13 year old daughter in the bar with your ID and then blame the owner if she spends the night with a patron. Now read your whole spam folder and imagine what will happen to someone who lacks critical thinking and believes in claims in every message. Are you going to go after gmail, Facebook or whatever neutral service provider?
This doesn't mean you have to stand over your childrens' shoulders all the time. Just ask them how they spent their day and make it a point to discuss, not punish things you don't agree with.
Well, for once people are paying attention to what you say and not who you are. Most slashdot posters do not look at usernames, especially since they may be replying to a quoted discussion between two different people.
Besides, go ahead and tell me how you are going to address Siddhartha, Sabine or Kim? Are we obligated to learn all names from all languages and in the last case first ask if the poster is American or Korean?
Do you prefer to break the entire language to get rid of a anachronism that nobody takes seriously everyday? How do you propose to do that in our native language where every word in the sentence, including inanimate nouns, has a gender? Personally I would rather adopt she as a generic pronoun and be done with it. Ladies first and all...
He also used this against other such noteable figures as Martin Luther King whom he blackmailed with secretly recorded audio of his marital infidelity. Ironically some people regard this as King's fault not Hoover's.
Well, a point can be made that all leaders are responsible for living a moral life. At least moral by their own standards - they would not be ashamed to admit it - and possibly confirming to society in all the areas which are not related to their agenda. Otherwise their mission gets lost in the scandal and all their supporters hard work, financial support and sometimes even imprisonment and torture goes to waste. Bill Clinton screwed more than hundred million voters when he received oral sex from Monica. As a result, we had to put up with 8 years of G.W.Bush and an unnecessary war. Likewise, MLK should have put his moral authority in jeopardy.
I am not sure this would be very common, as Internet provides a great deal of anonymity. There is no way to find and eliminate competition and therefore no need to choose a don for protection. Likewise, if you are caught you are not able to rat out your friends besides the nicknames that they use to connect to IRC from hijacked machines. Maybe there is an agreement to perform hacking and DDOS hits on companies that cooperate with authorities to catch someone. But in general, cyber criminals are a bunch of independent agents that are not very organized.
Nope, it's the absolutely worst use of solar panels. They could just draw mains power for one second every 6 hours. As it is, there is pollution created by manufacturing the panels, added cost for a component that does not add functionality and serious cases of remote control rage. And let's not get started on ceiling-mounted TVs.
Re:Oh, come on, you're missing the big one.
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
Similar information could be obtained by airplanes or buoys with scientific instruments.
Nobody has enough resources to monitor everyone, all the time. Cracking down on public P2P networks resulted in encrypted, invitation-only networks. If the pressure is still on, pretty soon we'll have office "potlucks" where everyone brings their music and movies to swap. Once people get completely pissed off about DRM, they will not mind analog copying with microphones and camcorders to get around it. If nothing else, it is possible to simply exchange movie discs or even portable players without even necessarily breaking the law. The end result is the same though - only one person in 10 will actually pay for the content they are viewing.
The solution? Unencumbered, reasonably priced, possibly watermarked legal product. Even Radiohead strategy yields 1/3 of the downloaders paying.
If you want to further natural selection, fuck a lot and have as many children as possible. Make lots of money to distribute to the most smart/healthy/ambitious of your sons so that they can also get lots of women. But don't stop there - there is always a chance and, in our society, a probability that others will be taken care by someone else and live to reproduce. Make frequent sperm donations to clinics as well. Why not?
The most stupid thing you can do is go on a mass shooting and then kill yourself. You are only eliminating a statistically insignificant number of competitors for your children and other relatives. If you could take over the whole country and do a proper genocide of people, especially men, with different nationality from yours and then setup a huge harem it might be different. But even then, you will plunge the country into chaos that will not be good even for your decentdents' survival and reproduction.
This guy should definitely make a Darwin award, if only because he mentioned evolution before eliminating himself from the gene pool.
What's going to happen to all the well-digging companies? After all, just like with a wireless base station, one pipe can be shared by at least a dozen users.
What makes you so sure there was a more humane way to send dogs into space in 1957? We have burned up quite a few humans in probably more painful fashion trying to land shuttles lately. At that time, scientists were not even sure if living creatures from Earth could survive in orbit or weather they ate going to immediately die of weightlessness, radiation, cold or heat. The last problem indeed killed Laika after unexpected cabin heating.Further successful return flight of animals and ultimately humans could only happened when we understood how to keep the cabine at survivable temperature.
How would you like medicines that make you overheat and go up in smoke if you don't wear proper water cooling? Psychiatric medications that make you repeat the Pentium FDIV bug when balancing your checkbook? A defect rate that sends 10% of people from hospital right into garbage can and forces many more to be retested for lower brain clock frequency?
True, things that have to work change much slower than our entertainment equipment and office accessories. Cars, airplanes and medicines take a looong time to develop and test for safety. But there is a damn good reason for that.
On the other hand, I believe informed adults should be able to do whatever case modding and overclocking they want to do on themselves. The rest of us will watch and see how it affects their clock frequency and mean time to failure.
I take it that you never eat hamburgers, release species-destroying greenhouse gases, wear leather shoes, feed regular cat food to your cat..? Because otherwise, how can you condemn death of a single animal not much more intelligent than a cow that opened way for humans and other species on the Earth to perhaps someday survive our planet's demise?
Slashdot Mirror
I can not really comment on superiority of capitalism and democracy, because neither is practiced in the modern world. When capitalism was tried in the past, it brought 18 hour/day child labor, people dying from hunger, extreme environmental pollution and bloody revolts of angry mobs. You can see a bit of it in China today, bringing you those pretty looking toys laden with lead and date rape drugs. When democracy was tried in the past, people promptly elected a "Great Leader", Hitler being one of the relatively recent examples.
What we have now is highly regulated economical and political relationships between people. You can not make someone work for below the minimum wage or in hazardous conditions and you can not vote to kill off your least favorite minority. Superior systems compared to what we have in US are certainly possible and evident in many places in the world. But they sure can not be called capitalism or democracy.
We discovered an old Pentium 133, running Slackware Linux. It was located in a sealed off janitor's closet that everybody had forgotten about. All of the fans had died a long time ago. It was covered in dirt and dust. But, by god, it was still running ;)
So do you want a dusty, overheating logic board controlling your fuel injection? An anecdotal case doesn't justify a design where one of 100K units failing is too high of a risk.
I'd be leery of a car that was completely controlled by microprocessors/fly-by-wire, but even in the most advanced car you are still going to have manual control over your brakes and steering, even if everything else fails. That should be enough to bring the vehicle to a stop without killing yourself or anybody else.
I guess you don't drive a Prius. Regenerative breaking can by definition only by controlled by wire, there is no mechanical way to put the car in neutral or park and there is only an electrical power switch instead of the key that could be used to physically turn off the ignition. I hope I will never be a bystander caught up in this particular police technology.
Books, music and movies play a huge role in defining popular culture and currently US government and big companies have a virtual monopoly on shaping it. Some day Michael Moore's film studio will receive a call from Homeland security office to remove his films from circulation as they help terrorists and communists by undermining war effort and encouraging americans to visit Cuba. With all popular formats - DVD, HD, digital downloads - now covered by DRM, there will be no legal way for supporters to continue spreading the message. Activists will be jailed for breaking DMCA to spread popular "free speech" and public will be assured that all our freedoms are safe. It's only that pretty much any speech can be considered a derivative work of something in popular culture and as such belongs to some big company. Oh yes, and all the land is privately owned as well and as such the owners can impose restrictions on the speech within. It's too bad your homeowner's association has a policy against controversial public speech on the premises.
Universities are obligated to record attendance and appearance of every meeting of two or more students and give RIAA an identity of someone seen handing out pirated CDs based on his/her dress style. Just because our means of communication changed, does not mean our human nature is fundamentally altered in respect to need for privacy, or tendency for abuse of power. What's so hard to understand?
The author of this piece seems to be unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. No, we do not have to invent new intentionally sexist/racist generic terms like schoolpenis. However, we do not have to break our existing language just because some words, which are not discriminatory in actual modern usage, can be misunderstood just because of their sound. It would be niggardly to make children refer to their favorite fairy tale hero as snow or coal black or white.
So it is definitely she.
Oh the irony.
If your statement is correct if taken as gender-neutral, you are perfectly justified in using "man", "he" and "his".
Man is an unusual mammal because his brain is much larger in proportion to his size than other mammals.
Just try to rephrase this in a politically correct way without using Latin species names.
... that most children's lives would be ruined if they are allowed unsupervised, not talked about with parents, interactions with outside world and Internet in particular? Go ahead and send your 13 year old daughter in the bar with your ID and then blame the owner if she spends the night with a patron. Now read your whole spam folder and imagine what will happen to someone who lacks critical thinking and believes in claims in every message. Are you going to go after gmail, Facebook or whatever neutral service provider?
This doesn't mean you have to stand over your childrens' shoulders all the time. Just ask them how they spent their day and make it a point to discuss, not punish things you don't agree with.
Well, for me it's usually more important to know if I am dealing with more than one person than weather that person is male or female.
"Is it Ok if they share your office for a week?"
"They wrote this whole code in only one month"
"They are coming here right now to beat you up!"
Well, for once people are paying attention to what you say and not who you are. Most slashdot posters do not look at usernames, especially since they may be replying to a quoted discussion between two different people.
Besides, go ahead and tell me how you are going to address Siddhartha, Sabine or Kim? Are we obligated to learn all names from all languages and in the last case first ask if the poster is American or Korean?
Sorry for the typo.
God, I hate that. It's she.
Do you prefer to break the entire language to get rid of a anachronism that nobody takes seriously everyday? How do you propose to do that in our native language where every word in the sentence, including inanimate nouns, has a gender? Personally I would rather adopt she as a generic pronoun and be done with it. Ladies first and all...
In which areas is Russia unintentionally competitive exactly?
He also used this against other such noteable figures as Martin Luther King whom he blackmailed with secretly recorded audio of his marital infidelity. Ironically some people regard this as King's fault not Hoover's.
Well, a point can be made that all leaders are responsible for living a moral life. At least moral by their own standards - they would not be ashamed to admit it - and possibly confirming to society in all the areas which are not related to their agenda. Otherwise their mission gets lost in the scandal and all their supporters hard work, financial support and sometimes even imprisonment and torture goes to waste. Bill Clinton screwed more than hundred million voters when he received oral sex from Monica. As a result, we had to put up with 8 years of G.W.Bush and an unnecessary war. Likewise, MLK should have put his moral authority in jeopardy.
I am not sure this would be very common, as Internet provides a great deal of anonymity. There is no way to find and eliminate competition and therefore no need to choose a don for protection. Likewise, if you are caught you are not able to rat out your friends besides the nicknames that they use to connect to IRC from hijacked machines. Maybe there is an agreement to perform hacking and DDOS hits on companies that cooperate with authorities to catch someone. But in general, cyber criminals are a bunch of independent agents that are not very organized.
Nope, it's the absolutely worst use of solar panels. They could just draw mains power for one second every 6 hours. As it is, there is pollution created by manufacturing the panels, added cost for a component that does not add functionality and serious cases of remote control rage. And let's not get started on ceiling-mounted TVs.
Similar information could be obtained by airplanes or buoys with scientific instruments.
Nobody has enough resources to monitor everyone, all the time. Cracking down on public P2P networks resulted in encrypted, invitation-only networks. If the pressure is still on, pretty soon we'll have office "potlucks" where everyone brings their music and movies to swap. Once people get completely pissed off about DRM, they will not mind analog copying with microphones and camcorders to get around it. If nothing else, it is possible to simply exchange movie discs or even portable players without even necessarily breaking the law. The end result is the same though - only one person in 10 will actually pay for the content they are viewing.
The solution? Unencumbered, reasonably priced, possibly watermarked legal product. Even Radiohead strategy yields 1/3 of the downloaders paying.
If you want to further natural selection, fuck a lot and have as many children as possible. Make lots of money to distribute to the most smart/healthy/ambitious of your sons so that they can also get lots of women. But don't stop there - there is always a chance and, in our society, a probability that others will be taken care by someone else and live to reproduce. Make frequent sperm donations to clinics as well. Why not?
The most stupid thing you can do is go on a mass shooting and then kill yourself. You are only eliminating a statistically insignificant number of competitors for your children and other relatives. If you could take over the whole country and do a proper genocide of people, especially men, with different nationality from yours and then setup a huge harem it might be different. But even then, you will plunge the country into chaos that will not be good even for your decentdents' survival and reproduction.
This guy should definitely make a Darwin award, if only because he mentioned evolution before eliminating himself from the gene pool.
What's going to happen to all the well-digging companies? After all, just like with a wireless base station, one pipe can be shared by at least a dozen users.
What makes you so sure there was a more humane way to send dogs into space in 1957? We have burned up quite a few humans in probably more painful fashion trying to land shuttles lately. At that time, scientists were not even sure if living creatures from Earth could survive in orbit or weather they ate going to immediately die of weightlessness, radiation, cold or heat. The last problem indeed killed Laika after unexpected cabin heating.Further successful return flight of animals and ultimately humans could only happened when we understood how to keep the cabine at survivable temperature.
How would you like medicines that make you overheat and go up in smoke if you don't wear proper water cooling? Psychiatric medications that make you repeat the Pentium FDIV bug when balancing your checkbook? A defect rate that sends 10% of people from hospital right into garbage can and forces many more to be retested for lower brain clock frequency?
True, things that have to work change much slower than our entertainment equipment and office accessories. Cars, airplanes and medicines take a looong time to develop and test for safety. But there is a damn good reason for that.
On the other hand, I believe informed adults should be able to do whatever case modding and overclocking they want to do on themselves. The rest of us will watch and see how it affects their clock frequency and mean time to failure.
Why can't you just call the doctor if you have access to the phone already?
I take it that you never eat hamburgers, release species-destroying greenhouse gases, wear leather shoes, feed regular cat food to your cat..? Because otherwise, how can you condemn death of a single animal not much more intelligent than a cow that opened way for humans and other species on the Earth to perhaps someday survive our planet's demise?
Those dead cells don't accumulate on eyes much though, huh?