The article does not go into how old the information is, but if the information is on very old, brittle tapes or some other type of dilapidated media, then simply reading from that media might cause physical damage, in the same way that turning the pages of a very old book might cause the page to crumble to pieces.
Then article does mention (did I mention I'm the same orthogonal who submitted the article?) that the older information is available in hard copy; the data they won't release is the most recently entered data.
So they can enter the data, they just can't extract it or copy it.
Suuure.
I'd love to see the design of that database. Was the database file created on/dev/null?
want my data to be encrypted and accessible from both OSes The only software that I found which can mount the same encrypted disk on both platforms is BestCript, but from Linux I can't store file[s] with long names. Is there a better way to share encrypted data between when I dual-boot?
I understand you want it uh, instantly "to hand" regardless of the OS you boot, but for the love of god, why do you need long names for your porn files?
I mean, I mean, isn't "dnkymdgt.mpg" just as emotional moving as "donkey makes sweet, sweet love to gay midget.mpeg"?
(After all, under civil forfeiture provisions, you don't even have to get a conviction. Some real horror stories here: click this link to learn about the couple who lost a house and two cars on the mere allegation that they stole some inexpensive clothes.)
Hmm, so I guess they don't keep backups of their own data, if making copies of it would cause the data to be lost. I guess we just have to hope (or not) that their computers or hard drives never fail.
There's a back-up bit on each suspect's Department of Justice file. If the backup bit is set (value = 1) for a particular file, it's backed-up, if it's not set (value = 0), then to save space no backups are made of that particular file.
In order to economize even more on space and save government money on the database, in a brilliant bit of design, the backup bit was combined with the bad party affiliation bit: the bad party affiliation bit is unset (value = 0) for Republicans, and set (value = 1) for all other parties.
Without backups, of course, some files are irretrievably lost, and the suspects are never prosecuted. It's mere chance that most of those are Republicans.
All of the links you referenced had to do with history events... and you are correct that we should not forget history since "those who forget are doomed to repeat".
However, pornography has NO redeeming value.
I'm a you missed my point: even if all pornography were removed from the internet -- even from servers outside the United States --, even if you achieved this impossible goal, there would still be plenty of pictures on the web you wouldn't want your five-year old to see.
Among those would be what you call "historical" pictures, which you correctly note should not be suppressed or forgotten, which need to be available on the web for our reminder and instruction.
So, since those pictures should stay on the web, and nevertheless five-year olds shouldn't see them, a parent or guardian needs to monitor a five-year old's net access whether or not pornography is accessible on the web.
Since such a monitor could also shield the child from pornography as well (and since, realistically, no law will result in the removal of all porn from the web), there's no benefit to removing pornography: with or without porn being accessible, you need to monitor five-year olds.
The law provides no shortcut, no possibility of doing without a parent's monitoring, unless the law also bans photos of Holocaust victims and bloody car crashes and surgeries gone wrong and lepers and the casualties of wars.
So if the law doesn't shield children from non-pornographic horrors, and doesn't allow parents the benefit of not spending time monitoring, whom does the law benefit -- other than people who want to crack down on porn just because it's porn
The point of my examples is to impress upon you that even if it were a valid argument (and I don't think it is valid), the argument that this is "for the children" doesn't apply here.
The "for the children" argument is a straw-man -- this legislation is "for" fundamentalists who don't just want to keep porn from children, they want to keep it from adults by banning porn outright. Since they can't ban porn outright thanks to previous Supreme Court decisions, they decided to make it so difficult to put porn on the web, or to view porn on the web, that most people would just give up. That, and not protecting children, is the motivation behind this law.
The law is designed to make it:
onerous and cumbersome to put porn on your website, by requiring you to first install some system of identifying adults,
and onerous and difficult and privacy violating to view that porn, in order to scare away adults who may want to look at porn but who don't want to have their name on a "registered to look at porn" list,
and dangerous even for large porn distributors, by providing for fines and jail time if the system for identifying adults doesn't always work.
Again: the legislation doesn't protect kids from horrors or give parents a pass to not monitor their kids. Since it doesn't accomplish its proponents' ostensible goals, we must ask, what does it really accomplish?
Any time a law is proposed, ask yourself that old, old question, cui bono, "for whose good?" if you want to understand what's really going on. By doing so, we understand the real goals of this law's supporters -- and those goals are to prevent adults from making or posting or viewing free speech the law's supporters don't like.
Its nice to see that the ACLU has decided to protect my 5 year olds right to surf the net and enjoy the pron pop ups the these unethical perverts want to send.
It's nice to see that you prefer to let Witch-finder General Ashcroft into my computer and my bedroom rather than take responsibility to raise your own child.
Are you such a bad parent that you think a nanny-State can do a better job?
Your five year-old daughter might well be shocked by seeing porn on your computer; but I wager she'd be wakened by screaming nightmares for a month if she saw thesepictures of the results of the NaziHolocaust. (Note that two of the pictures, including the one of the emaciated children your daughter's age who were subjected to medical "experiments", are served up by a Florida public school system.)
Should we remove those pictures from the Internet to protect your daughter? Turn the Holocaust survivors' "never again" into "never again seen"?
This has got to rank right up there with the Indiana legislature deliberating whether pi should be declared to be 3, back in 1897. At least they had the wisdom not to do it.
Wait a sec. You're sure pi's does not equal to three?
Certainly when I saw it [the simulated Tyrannosaurus Rex breath] didn't smell all that bad.
Not to you, perhaps.
But since you post of Slashdot, you've no doubt had many more opportunities to build up resistance to much more devastating scents:
unwashed geek with a beard full of Dorito crumbs,
Mountain Dew fermenting in a shag carpet laid down in 1976,
"magic-user" feet after a twelve-hour D&D marathon,
the reek of Mom's basement after that dot-com "opportunity" fell through and an impoverished and dispirited Perl hacker moved home too depressed to shower.
And not to mention the full sensory assault of a GNU/noisome Richard Stallman.
Firefox 0.9 has been quite unstable on my (Win) system compared to earlier relases [sic]. Hopefully this release addresses some of the issues.
Try uninstalling extensions.
When I upgrade to 0.9, it ran like a dog on my W2K box, hitting 100% CPU utilization nearly every time I did anything in the browser, making 0.9 nearly useless. (I'm sure there's a pr0n/masturbation joke to be found in the previous sentence; I leave it as an exercise for the enterprising troll.)
As I was about to revert to Fire$BEAST 0.8, I decided to look at the extensions I'd installed.
I tracked the slow-down to an extension designed to notify of javascript errors. This may not be the extension's fault per se, as I use Proxomitron to filter out ads and (some) javascript; the extension may just have been doing more work than it expected dealing with references to filtered-out javascript.
After removing the extension (and closing and re-starting Fire$VERTEBRATE -- don't skip this step) the ridiculous CPU utilization want away, and 0.9 worked fine.
"And with good reason: human females, almost uniquely among animals, conceal when they're fertile."
Interesting theory, but direct experience and a little recent research [discoveryhealth.co.uk] claim otherwise.
Did you read what I wrote? Did you read the article you linked to?
I made a point that most women don't consciously know when they're fertile, but that (as shown by their tendency to prefer more masculine men when fertile) they are unconsciously aware of it. I wrote
women themselves don't know when they are fertile. At least not consciously: human females do show preferences for different types of males depending on whether or not they're fertile.
Your article bears me out; it reads (emphasis mine):
rather than occurring randomly,
intercourse is more likely to occur on the fertile days - despite the fact the average woman won't know when these days are. Their study showed that the six consecutive days with the highest frequency of intercourse corresponded exactly with the fertile days.
Herman Goldstine, who as a mathematician working at the Ballistic Research Lab convinced the US Army to fund the development of the ENIAC and EDVAC, has died at the age of 90.
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I certainly don't need a lab test to know when my period is coming. Just because women apparently conceal from you when they're menstruating that doesn't mean that we don't know.
Yes, but ovulation is not menstruation (getting one's "period"). Ovulation occurs about fourteen days before menstruation, and the period of fertility is some period of time a up to five days before ovulation and one to two days after ("fertile" days can occur before actual ovulation because sperm can live inside a woman for up to a week).
While menstruation pretty reliably occurs fourteen days after ovulation, the time between menstruation and the next ovulation tends to vary much more.
So while your menstruation is pretty obvious, it gives you little idea of when you'll next be fertile.
And while some women feel a characteristic pain when ovulation occurs ("Mittelschmerz", German for "middle pain"), because of the varying time between menstruation and ovulation and the ability of sperm to live inside the women, it's entirely possible even for that minority of women who experience Mittelschmerz to become pregnant from sex after menstruation but before ovulation and the warning pain of Mittelschmerz.
You do know what the technical medical term for a woman who relies on the "rhythm method" of contraception is?
We [humans] don't need that the female be in estrus.
And with good reason: human females, almost uniquely among animals, conceal when they're fertile.
In fact, they conceal it so well, the women themselves don't know when they are fertile. At least not consciously: human females do show preferences for different types of males depending on whether or not they're fertile. Fortunately or not, depending on whether you're looking to have offspring or just consequence-free sex, human females will tend to prefer the more rotund and nerdy Slashdot-type male when she's not fertile, and very masculine hunks when she is fertile.
(Unlike fertility, there are somewhat obvious signs of how masculine a human male is: higher testosterone produces both dominant behavior and a thinner, more "cut" physical appearance, especially about the face. Female humans may not be able to consciously articulate why some males seem more masculine than others, but unconscious parts of their minds, adapted by evolution, can spot those signs.)
And rather than just be fertile at certain times of the year, human females are fertile all year 'round. This is not in order to allow greater numbers of offspring to be produced, because in our natural hunting and gathering condition, a human female can only support about one offspring every four years. Until the beginnings of agriculture (until recently thought to be about 10,00 years ago, recently pushed back to about 23,000 years ago), natural fertility suppression caused by breast-feeding and, if that failed, infanticide, suppressed additional offspring.
So why be fertile all the time? Well, if a female is fertile all the time, the male must be interested in sex all the time, as the parent poster pointed out, because he never knows when sex will result in progeny. The male may not consciously want offspring; he just wants sex, as those males not wanting sex never had offspring to pass that lack of desire on to. So continual male desire for sex is promoted by the sax evolutionary strategies that also promote non-seasonal but concealed female fertility.
What's the benefit to the female of the male's unrelenting interest in sex? The male's desire for sex keeps him around continuously -- and that aids, not the female, but the offspring. The male will barter for sex by giving the female and her offspring the highly concentrated protein and fat in the meat that the male hunts. By concealing ovulation, the male never knows when he can safely forego the sex, keeping the nutritious meat for himself until the female is fertile and sex will result in the male's progeny.
But there's even more to it: because fertility is concealed, the male cannot safely allow other males to copulate with "his" female -- as those other males might win the lottery of the female's fertile days. So concealed fertility also promotes pair bonding.
But if the female does manage to sneak off and copulate with another male, she can get meat from that other male for herself and her offspring -- giving her an incentive to "cheat". So the same pair bonding that cements a male to "his" female also leads, inevitably, to jealousy, fratricide between males, and even male violence toward his mate, to "keep her in line".
And once again, concealed fertility aids the female -- since the male can never be sure when the female conceives, he can never be sure that a particular child is his; he must take his chances and support all "his" mate's offspring on the hope they are his. (And yet another evolutionary adaptation comes into play, the tendency of newborns to resemble their fathers more than their mothers, to forestall their murder by a father unconvinced of his paternity.)
Which brings us back to the female preference, when fertile, for masculine men. Because that's only one side of the coin: when not fertile, the female actually prefers less masculine men. Now if it's preferable have offspring with a masculine man
That's not being competetive (sic). That's being an ASSHOLE. What kind of pers-- I think I just answered my question.
From the Slashdot post: Some particularly juicy parts are about Anderer: 'He's supercompetitive,' said one. 'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'
Being an aggressive asshole is the way to get ahead! Now move out of my way, you fucking peons! Don't get between me and my yacht!
These wunderkinds don't create anything. They haven't discovered anything. They don't even seem to make particularly astute business decisions.
All they're good at is blundering ahead, kissing the asses of those with power, back-slapping their "friends", and intimidating everyone else.
But we've allowed them to succeed despite the fact that they've never contributed a damn thing.
Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine. Did he ever become as rich as Darl McBride or Mike Anderer?
Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie wrote the Unix Operating System that Darl claims gives him the rights to Linus Torvalds's linux.
Where are Thompson's or Ritchie's or Torvalds's millions?
Well, Thompson and Ritchie got paychecks from AT&T, and AT&T sold Unix to Novell which sold it to Darl's company. So, according to the magic of capitalism -- and the recent additonal idea that corporate CEOs deserve the lion's share of their companies' profits --, the millions belong to Darl.
Torvalds is (according to capitalism) a dumb-ass -- smart enough to write linux, but a dumb-ass nonetheless -- because he gives linux away for free. So no millions for Linus.
Now an good capitalist will tell you that Thompson and Ritchie preferred regular paychecks to working on their own and owning Unix outright. And the capitalist would be right: when all capital is concentrated in the hands of the sons and grandsons of the guys who stole it in the first place, Thompson and Ritchie were free -- to starve.
And a good capitalist will explain to you that the marketplace has determined -- correctly, because the marketplace can't be wrong, that's an axiom of capitalism -- that Darl McBride is socially;y far more valuable than Thompson or Ritchie or Torvalds. Even though without those peons, Darl McBride wouldn't have even a claim to his money.
I'm no socialist., no communist. I see a value to capitalism, to the way the Market allows those with needs to meet those with the means to supply those needs. I think we'd be in deep shit if government tried to "manage" what the market takes care of so handily. And I even see a need to generously pay those CEOs and MBAs whose work makes the Market work so efficiently.
But something is out of kilter when the heroes aren't the innovators, the discovers, the creators, but the MBAstard who can best throw his weight around.
Do I have a solution to propose? Not really.
Maybe we should adjust patent law such that inventors always retain some stake in their invention, even after assigning a patent -- sort of the way European copyright law recognizes creators' rights that can be sold and other rights that can't given up under any contract.
Perhaps we ought to say that after the first ten million in profits to a corporation on a patent, five percent of remaining profits belong to the original inventor, no matter how the patent has been assigned.
Perhaps we ought to establish a national version of the Nobel prizes, and give them to men like Dennis Ritchie.
Or maybe we should just mandate that CEOs can't make more than, say 1000 times what their lowest paid employee makes. If the lowest paid employee makes $20,000 a year, the CEO would be limited to twenty million a year.
I don't have the answers. But I know that something's wrong here.
What if we awaken some age-old form of life that has been lying dormant in the Earth's seabeds for thousands of years, just waiting fot the perfect opportunity to leap out and assimilate us all?
You mean in the sunken city of R'lyeh?
A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings... It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence...
-- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange æons, even death may die"
"NASA officials cited a policy shift toward the International Space Station and the space shuttle program."
Now, I know the Shuttle has been so tremendously successful, and the International Space Station isn't just the leftovers of the lasts gasps of the old Soviet Manned Space Flight Program, both have been so well funded since the "policy shift" three years ago in 2001-- so, if you're going to be intellectually honest, you have to ask yourself, "what occasioned this policy shift?"
Part of the convenience of using GMail -- or any other email service -- is that that service filters spam for you.
But that means you don't get to do your own filtering.
Which is why I don't rely on my ISP to filer, and indeed, asked them explicitly to not filter my mail when they began to do so.
I'm too paranoid about false positives causing me to miss an important email (eventually all those girls who dumped me will wise up and beg my forgiveness, right? Right?), and I figure I can do a better filtering job on the client side. And indeed, I can even use a chain of multiple filters, or roll my own filter.
Currently I'm using SpamBayes, and it works well enough. Could it be better? Sure, it does miss several spams a day. But, it also filters many more than it misses, I'm not worried about false positives, and I can always hack the source if I need to (already did so to work around some MS Outlook stupidity, in fact).
Ah yes, but most people who steal from liquor stores have committed many other crimes, and are likely to commit a lot more, whereas white collar criminals tend to only commit one crime.
Huh, that's funny. I'd have sworn Dennis Koslowski is accused not only of looting his own company, but tax evasion in the millions as well -- and various conspiracies to cover up his alleged crimes.
Not to mention the allegations against Ken Lay and the other alleged Enron conspirators : not only are they alleged to have conned their own investors, they are also alleged to have manufactured fake power shortages in order to over-charge California, according to seized tapes:
"They're fucking taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"
"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"
"Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her asshole for fucking $250 a megawatt hour."
And the tapes appear to link top Enron officials Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling to schemes that fueled the crisis.
"Government Affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," says one trader.
But even if you were correct in claiming that "white collar criminals tend to only commit one crime", if that single crime nets the criminal millions of dollars, well, those ill-gotten gains will last a lifetime longer than the take from knocking over a liqueur store.
I'm sure that if by robbing a liqueur store you could make millions, the hold up men would be happy to retire afterward -- or be driven out of thievery by competition from greedy MBAs.
But tell me one thing: why are you so willing to be sympathetic to those who steal the investments of pensioners and pension plans in order to live it up yachting on the Riviera, and so unsympathetic to the poor junkie from the projects who just wants to steal enough to get by for one more miserable day?
Why do we allow the wealthy to bend us over and rob us, and then fawn all over them at their parole parties? Why do we beleive that a CEO really "earns" a salary plus benefits in the tens of millions of dollars, while the average worker gets his jib outsourced?
Is it because we respect wealth -- earned or stolen -- so much, or just because we respect ourselves so little?
Is this still the country that Jefferson and the Adamses risked their "lives, fortunes, and scared honors" for, or some European-style feudalism with the thieving rich taking the place of an idle aristocracy?
[The satellite's] onboard planner reschedules what to film in conjunction with what the scientific algorithms have detected. This software has already detected floods in Australia and will be adapted to also detect volcano eruptions and changes in ice fields.
John Ashcroft has directed engineers at the National Security Agency to design algorithms to follow, in increasing order of priority, the movements of terrorists, dissidents, persons engaged in the sin of dancing, and calico cats.
Interesting that you left the Second Amendment out of your list at the end.
I don't like guns.
But I'm against gun control precisely because I won't be a hypocrite who fights for the First Amendment and ignores that inconvenient Second one. Indeed, my worries about the injustice of convicting under Federal gun laws recently prevented me from sitting on a jury after I voiced my concerns.
I'd be glad to add to my list however: if you know of an example where Ashcroft or the Bush administration has abrogated Second, Third, or Seventh Amendment rights, please let me know!
Slashdot Mirror
The article does not go into how old the information is, but if the information is on very old, brittle tapes or some other type of dilapidated media, then simply reading from that media might cause physical damage, in the same way that turning the pages of a very old book might cause the page to crumble to pieces.
/dev/null?
Then article does mention (did I mention I'm the same orthogonal who submitted the article?) that the older information is available in hard copy; the data they won't release is the most recently entered data.
So they can enter the data, they just can't extract it or copy it.
Suuure.
I'd love to see the design of that database. Was the database file created on
want my data to be encrypted and accessible from both OSes The only software that I found which can mount the same encrypted disk on both platforms is BestCript, but from Linux I can't store file[s] with long names. Is there a better way to share encrypted data between when I dual-boot?
I understand you want it uh, instantly "to hand" regardless of the OS you boot, but for the love of god, why do you need long names for your porn files?
I mean, I mean, isn't "dnkymdgt.mpg" just as emotional moving as "donkey makes sweet, sweet love to gay midget.mpeg"?
Length isn't everything, man.
Now, I know it might seem contradictory to some, but is there a way to make those computers completely locked down?
A heavy boat anchor?
Seriously, what's to prevent Joe Slashdot reader from rebooting with a Knoppix CD?
I am sure there are pr0n websites with backend databases more relieable [sic] than what the government is using.
Now we understand why John Ashcroft is so hot to shut down those porn sites.
It's not just that he hates porn, he wants to seize their databases!
(After all, under civil forfeiture provisions, you don't even have to get a conviction. Some real horror stories here: click this link to learn about the couple who lost a house and two cars on the mere allegation that they stole some inexpensive clothes.)
Hmm, so I guess they don't keep backups of their own data, if making copies of it would cause the data to be lost. I guess we just have to hope (or not) that their computers or hard drives never fail.
There's a back-up bit on each suspect's Department of Justice file. If the backup bit is set (value = 1) for a particular file, it's backed-up, if it's not set (value = 0), then to save space no backups are made of that particular file.
In order to economize even more on space and save government money on the database, in a brilliant bit of design, the backup bit was combined with the bad party affiliation bit: the bad party affiliation bit is unset (value = 0) for Republicans, and set (value = 1) for all other parties.
Without backups, of course, some files are irretrievably lost, and the suspects are never prosecuted. It's mere chance that most of those are Republicans.
All of the links you referenced had to do with history events... and you are correct that we should not forget history since "those who forget are doomed to repeat".
However, pornography has NO redeeming value.
I'm a you missed my point: even if all pornography were removed from the internet -- even from servers outside the United States --, even if you achieved this impossible goal, there would still be plenty of pictures on the web you wouldn't want your five-year old to see.
Among those would be what you call "historical" pictures, which you correctly note should not be suppressed or forgotten, which need to be available on the web for our reminder and instruction.
So, since those pictures should stay on the web, and nevertheless five-year olds shouldn't see them, a parent or guardian needs to monitor a five-year old's net access whether or not pornography is accessible on the web.
Since such a monitor could also shield the child from pornography as well (and since, realistically, no law will result in the removal of all porn from the web), there's no benefit to removing pornography: with or without porn being accessible, you need to monitor five-year olds.
The law provides no shortcut, no possibility of doing without a parent's monitoring, unless the law also bans photos of Holocaust victims and bloody car crashes and surgeries gone wrong and lepers and the casualties of wars.
So if the law doesn't shield children from non-pornographic horrors, and doesn't allow parents the benefit of not spending time monitoring, whom does the law benefit -- other than people who want to crack down on porn just because it's porn
The point of my examples is to impress upon you that even if it were a valid argument (and I don't think it is valid), the argument that this is "for the children" doesn't apply here.
The "for the children" argument is a straw-man -- this legislation is "for" fundamentalists who don't just want to keep porn from children, they want to keep it from adults by banning porn outright. Since they can't ban porn outright thanks to previous Supreme Court decisions, they decided to make it so difficult to put porn on the web, or to view porn on the web, that most people would just give up. That, and not protecting children, is the motivation behind this law.
The law is designed to make it:
Again: the legislation doesn't protect kids from horrors or give parents a pass to not monitor their kids. Since it doesn't accomplish its proponents' ostensible goals, we must ask, what does it really accomplish?
Any time a law is proposed, ask yourself that old, old question, cui bono, "for whose good?" if you want to understand what's really going on. By doing so, we understand the real goals of this law's supporters -- and those goals are to prevent adults from making or posting or viewing free speech the law's supporters don't like.
Its nice to see that the ACLU has decided to protect my 5 year olds right to surf the net and enjoy the pron pop ups the these unethical perverts want to send.
It's nice to see that you prefer to let Witch-finder General Ashcroft into my computer and my bedroom rather than take responsibility to raise your own child.
Are you such a bad parent that you think a nanny-State can do a better job?
Your five year-old daughter might well be shocked by seeing porn on your computer; but I wager she'd be wakened by screaming nightmares for a month if she saw these pictures of the results of the Nazi Holocaust. (Note that two of the pictures, including the one of the emaciated children your daughter's age who were subjected to medical "experiments", are served up by a Florida public school system.)
Should we remove those pictures from the Internet to protect your daughter? Turn the Holocaust survivors' "never again" into "never again seen"?
What about pictures of Pol Pot's Killing Fields?
Will throwing those pictures down the memory hole make your job as parent any easier?
What about sanitizing inconvenient pictures of America's Iraq War?
Is you daughter too young for those pictures of her country's "accomplishments"? Shall we censor them too?
Or maybe it's a better idea you sit with your five-year old while she browses the internet?
This has got to rank right up there with the Indiana legislature deliberating whether pi should be declared to be 3, back in 1897. At least they had the wisdom not to do it.
Wait a sec. You're sure pi's does not equal to three?
No wonder I can't get this stupid wheel to work!
Damn Indiana legislature technical specifications!
Not to you, perhaps.
But since you post of Slashdot, you've no doubt had many more opportunities to build up resistance to much more devastating scents:
- unwashed geek with a beard full of Dorito crumbs,
- Mountain Dew fermenting in a shag carpet laid down in 1976,
- "magic-user" feet after a twelve-hour D&D marathon,
- the reek of Mom's basement after that dot-com "opportunity" fell through and an impoverished and dispirited Perl hacker moved home too depressed to shower.
And not to mention the full sensory assault of a GNU/noisome Richard Stallman.(I keed, I keed!)
Firefox 0.9 has been quite unstable on my (Win) system compared to earlier relases [sic]. Hopefully this release addresses some of the issues.
Try uninstalling extensions.
When I upgrade to 0.9, it ran like a dog on my W2K box, hitting 100% CPU utilization nearly every time I did anything in the browser, making 0.9 nearly useless. (I'm sure there's a pr0n/masturbation joke to be found in the previous sentence; I leave it as an exercise for the enterprising troll.)
As I was about to revert to Fire$BEAST 0.8, I decided to look at the extensions I'd installed.
I tracked the slow-down to an extension designed to notify of javascript errors. This may not be the extension's fault per se, as I use Proxomitron to filter out ads and (some) javascript; the extension may just have been doing more work than it expected dealing with references to filtered-out javascript.
After removing the extension (and closing and re-starting Fire$VERTEBRATE -- don't skip this step) the ridiculous CPU utilization want away, and 0.9 worked fine.
I'll take my privacy, thank you very much.
Too late. I'm afraid Bush and Reichsminister Ashcroft (and Big Blunkett) are already intent on taking it. Taking your privacy, that is.
Did you read what I wrote? Did you read the article you linked to?
I made a point that most women don't consciously know when they're fertile, but that (as shown by their tendency to prefer more masculine men when fertile) they are unconsciously aware of it. I wrote
Your article bears me out; it reads (emphasis mine):
But I know when I am fertile.... And you really do get more aroused.
:)
No, no, that's incorrect.
I do not get more aroused when the woman is fertile. I get scared of her getting preggers and having my little bastards.
To be completely safe, when the woman's fertile, I don't get aroused, I get a blow-job.
Erm, why is this funny? I note an AC pointed it out and got modded a troll. WTF is up with people today?
It's an inside Slashdot joke, only funny if you're a Slashdot regular.
It plays off a venerable Slashdot troll (which troll I've been making a practice of using for actual deaths).
For an explanation of the troll, see here.
Herman Goldstine, who as a mathematician working at the Ballistic Research Lab convinced the US Army to fund the development of the ENIAC and EDVAC, has died at the age of 90.
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
I certainly don't need a lab test to know when my period is coming. Just because women apparently conceal from you when they're menstruating that doesn't mean that we don't know.
Yes, but ovulation is not menstruation (getting one's "period"). Ovulation occurs about fourteen days before menstruation, and the period of fertility is some period of time a up to five days before ovulation and one to two days after ("fertile" days can occur before actual ovulation because sperm can live inside a woman for up to a week).
While menstruation pretty reliably occurs fourteen days after ovulation, the time between menstruation and the next ovulation tends to vary much more.
So while your menstruation is pretty obvious, it gives you little idea of when you'll next be fertile.
And while some women feel a characteristic pain when ovulation occurs ("Mittelschmerz", German for "middle pain"), because of the varying time between menstruation and ovulation and the ability of sperm to live inside the women, it's entirely possible even for that minority of women who experience Mittelschmerz to become pregnant from sex after menstruation but before ovulation and the warning pain of Mittelschmerz.
You do know what the technical medical term for a woman who relies on the "rhythm method" of contraception is?
"Mother".
We [humans] don't need that the female be in estrus.
And with good reason: human females, almost uniquely among animals, conceal when they're fertile.
In fact, they conceal it so well, the women themselves don't know when they are fertile. At least not consciously: human females do show preferences for different types of males depending on whether or not they're fertile. Fortunately or not, depending on whether you're looking to have offspring or just consequence-free sex, human females will tend to prefer the more rotund and nerdy Slashdot-type male when she's not fertile, and very masculine hunks when she is fertile.
(Unlike fertility, there are somewhat obvious signs of how masculine a human male is: higher testosterone produces both dominant behavior and a thinner, more "cut" physical appearance, especially about the face. Female humans may not be able to consciously articulate why some males seem more masculine than others, but unconscious parts of their minds, adapted by evolution, can spot those signs.)
And rather than just be fertile at certain times of the year, human females are fertile all year 'round. This is not in order to allow greater numbers of offspring to be produced, because in our natural hunting and gathering condition, a human female can only support about one offspring every four years. Until the beginnings of agriculture (until recently thought to be about 10,00 years ago, recently pushed back to about 23,000 years ago), natural fertility suppression caused by breast-feeding and, if that failed, infanticide, suppressed additional offspring.
So why be fertile all the time? Well, if a female is fertile all the time, the male must be interested in sex all the time, as the parent poster pointed out, because he never knows when sex will result in progeny. The male may not consciously want offspring; he just wants sex, as those males not wanting sex never had offspring to pass that lack of desire on to. So continual male desire for sex is promoted by the sax evolutionary strategies that also promote non-seasonal but concealed female fertility.
What's the benefit to the female of the male's unrelenting interest in sex? The male's desire for sex keeps him around continuously -- and that aids, not the female, but the offspring. The male will barter for sex by giving the female and her offspring the highly concentrated protein and fat in the meat that the male hunts. By concealing ovulation, the male never knows when he can safely forego the sex, keeping the nutritious meat for himself until the female is fertile and sex will result in the male's progeny.
But there's even more to it: because fertility is concealed, the male cannot safely allow other males to copulate with "his" female -- as those other males might win the lottery of the female's fertile days. So concealed fertility also promotes pair bonding.
But if the female does manage to sneak off and copulate with another male, she can get meat from that other male for herself and her offspring -- giving her an incentive to "cheat". So the same pair bonding that cements a male to "his" female also leads, inevitably, to jealousy, fratricide between males, and even male violence toward his mate, to "keep her in line".
And once again, concealed fertility aids the female -- since the male can never be sure when the female conceives, he can never be sure that a particular child is his; he must take his chances and support all "his" mate's offspring on the hope they are his. (And yet another evolutionary adaptation comes into play, the tendency of newborns to resemble their fathers more than their mothers, to forestall their murder by a father unconvinced of his paternity.)
Which brings us back to the female preference, when fertile, for masculine men. Because that's only one side of the coin: when not fertile, the female actually prefers less masculine men. Now if it's preferable have offspring with a masculine man
I believe you meant [Darl McBride belongs alongside] Jar Jar [Binks].
Meesa say yousa owe $699. Meesa say "pump and dump".
That's not being competetive (sic). That's being an ASSHOLE. What kind of pers-- I think I just answered my question.
From the Slashdot post: Some particularly juicy parts are about Anderer: 'He's supercompetitive,' said one. 'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'
Being an aggressive asshole is the way to get ahead! Now move out of my way, you fucking peons! Don't get between me and my yacht!
These wunderkinds don't create anything. They haven't discovered anything. They don't even seem to make particularly astute business decisions.
All they're good at is blundering ahead, kissing the asses of those with power, back-slapping their "friends", and intimidating everyone else.
But we've allowed them to succeed despite the fact that they've never contributed a damn thing.
Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine. Did he ever become as rich as Darl McBride or Mike Anderer?
Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie wrote the Unix Operating System that Darl claims gives him the rights to Linus Torvalds's linux.
Where are Thompson's or Ritchie's or Torvalds's millions?
Well, Thompson and Ritchie got paychecks from AT&T, and AT&T sold Unix to Novell which sold it to Darl's company. So, according to the magic of capitalism -- and the recent additonal idea that corporate CEOs deserve the lion's share of their companies' profits --, the millions belong to Darl.
Torvalds is (according to capitalism) a dumb-ass -- smart enough to write linux, but a dumb-ass nonetheless -- because he gives linux away for free. So no millions for Linus.
Now an good capitalist will tell you that Thompson and Ritchie preferred regular paychecks to working on their own and owning Unix outright. And the capitalist would be right: when all capital is concentrated in the hands of the sons and grandsons of the guys who stole it in the first place, Thompson and Ritchie were free -- to starve.
And a good capitalist will explain to you that the marketplace has determined -- correctly, because the marketplace can't be wrong, that's an axiom of capitalism -- that Darl McBride is socially;y far more valuable than Thompson or Ritchie or Torvalds. Even though without those peons, Darl McBride wouldn't have even a claim to his money.
I'm no socialist., no communist. I see a value to capitalism, to the way the Market allows those with needs to meet those with the means to supply those needs. I think we'd be in deep shit if government tried to "manage" what the market takes care of so handily. And I even see a need to generously pay those CEOs and MBAs whose work makes the Market work so efficiently.
But something is out of kilter when the heroes aren't the innovators, the discovers, the creators, but the MBAstard who can best throw his weight around.
Do I have a solution to propose? Not really.
Maybe we should adjust patent law such that inventors always retain some stake in their invention, even after assigning a patent -- sort of the way European copyright law recognizes creators' rights that can be sold and other rights that can't given up under any contract.
Perhaps we ought to say that after the first ten million in profits to a corporation on a patent, five percent of remaining profits belong to the original inventor, no matter how the patent has been assigned.
Perhaps we ought to establish a national version of the Nobel prizes, and give them to men like Dennis Ritchie.
Or maybe we should just mandate that CEOs can't make more than, say 1000 times what their lowest paid employee makes. If the lowest paid employee makes $20,000 a year, the CEO would be limited to twenty million a year.
I don't have the answers. But I know that something's wrong here.
You mean in the sunken city of R'lyeh? -- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange æons, even death may die"
Now maybe a private company can develop it for 2% of the cost and we'll have cheap, environmentally benign power.
Or, now maybe we can continue to be dependent on (mostly foreign) oil, established oil companies with little incentive to develop newer and ultimately cheaper energy sources, and politicians who make sure NASA doesn't undermine those vested interests.
"NASA officials cited a policy shift toward the International Space Station and the space shuttle program."
Now, I know the Shuttle has been so tremendously successful, and the International Space Station isn't just the leftovers of the lasts gasps of the old Soviet Manned Space Flight Program, both have been so well funded since the "policy shift" three years ago in 2001 -- so, if you're going to be intellectually honest, you have to ask yourself, "what occasioned this policy shift?"
I'm not just trying to be annoyingly partisan here; I'm trying to make the point that even when it comes to science, politics takes over, and when politics takes over, you have to follow the money.
How Good is Gmail's Spam Filter?
Who knows?
Will it get better? Will it get worse?
Who knows?
Part of the convenience of using GMail -- or any other email service -- is that that service filters spam for you.
But that means you don't get to do your own filtering.
Which is why I don't rely on my ISP to filer, and indeed, asked them explicitly to not filter my mail when they began to do so.
I'm too paranoid about false positives causing me to miss an important email (eventually all those girls who dumped me will wise up and beg my forgiveness, right? Right?), and I figure I can do a better filtering job on the client side. And indeed, I can even use a chain of multiple filters, or roll my own filter.
Currently I'm using SpamBayes, and it works well enough. Could it be better? Sure, it does miss several spams a day. But, it also filters many more than it misses, I'm not worried about false positives, and I can always hack the source if I need to (already did so to work around some MS Outlook stupidity, in fact).
Huh, that's funny. I'd have sworn Dennis Koslowski is accused not only of looting his own company, but tax evasion in the millions as well -- and various conspiracies to cover up his alleged crimes.
Not to mention the allegations against Ken Lay and the other alleged Enron conspirators : not only are they alleged to have conned their own investors, they are also alleged to have manufactured fake power shortages in order to over-charge California, according to seized tapes:
But even if you were correct in claiming that "white collar criminals tend to only commit one crime", if that single crime nets the criminal millions of dollars, well, those ill-gotten gains will last a lifetime longer than the take from knocking over a liqueur store.
I'm sure that if by robbing a liqueur store you could make millions, the hold up men would be happy to retire afterward -- or be driven out of thievery by competition from greedy MBAs.
But tell me one thing: why are you so willing to be sympathetic to those who steal the investments of pensioners and pension plans in order to live it up yachting on the Riviera, and so unsympathetic to the poor junkie from the projects who just wants to steal enough to get by for one more miserable day?
Why do we allow the wealthy to bend us over and rob us, and then fawn all over them at their parole parties? Why do we beleive that a CEO really "earns" a salary plus benefits in the tens of millions of dollars, while the average worker gets his jib outsourced?
Is it because we respect wealth -- earned or stolen -- so much, or just because we respect ourselves so little?
Is this still the country that Jefferson and the Adamses risked their "lives, fortunes, and scared honors" for, or some European-style feudalism with the thieving rich taking the place of an idle aristocracy?
[The satellite's] onboard planner reschedules what to film in conjunction with what the scientific algorithms have detected. This software has already detected floods in Australia and will be adapted to also detect volcano eruptions and changes in ice fields.
John Ashcroft has directed engineers at the National Security Agency to design algorithms to follow, in increasing order of priority, the movements of terrorists, dissidents, persons engaged in the sin of dancing, and calico cats.
Interesting that you left the Second Amendment out of your list at the end.
I don't like guns.
But I'm against gun control precisely because I won't be a hypocrite who fights for the First Amendment and ignores that inconvenient Second one. Indeed, my worries about the injustice of convicting under Federal gun laws recently prevented me from sitting on a jury after I voiced my concerns.
But I don't know of any case where Ashcroft or the current Administration has eroded Second Amendment rights; indeed, when it came to searching for terrorists after 9-11, Ashcroft told the government to search for terrorist suspects' names on all government lists except lists of gun owners.
I'd be glad to add to my list however: if you know of an example where Ashcroft or the Bush administration has abrogated Second, Third, or Seventh Amendment rights, please let me know!