500/295,000,000 is 1.7 *10^-4 % Not only did you get the second significant digit wrong, you were also off by 5 orders of magnitude. Furthermore, I am not surprised that both errors were in the direction that favors your argument.
If you don't know how to use numbers, just leave the result in the raw fractional form. If you don't know how to do a rough order of magnitude check on your results, you should not be posting in scientific notation.
Finally, your argument seems to be that you don't give a rat's ass about the executive branch breaking the law just so long as it doesn't affect you personally. This leads me to wonder if you were personally affected by Clinton's blowjob. But more importantly it indicates that your grasp of history is not much better than your grasp of mathematics. It is precisely the attitude you express in your post that has allowed fascism and dictatorship to grow, thrive, and eventually take over nations that were once democratic.
Eavesdropper wraps a wire around the communication wire, to measure the signal by induction. Would this be detectable? Or would this allow undetectable interception?
Yes, that would be detectable. For the same reason that we need a lot of falling water to turn the generators in hydro power plants. The energy (signal) in your wrapped wire does not come for free. It reduces the energy in the communication wire and is thus detectable.
Another way to see it: if the signal in your induction pickup were truly undetectable then we could wrap billions of similar induction pickups around the communications wire and generate electricity "too cheap to meter".
At first I couldn't understand where Otto Z. Stern's venom was coming from (assuming he was not a payed stooge) then it hit me... this is an obvious case of
Stockholm syndrome.
For those that can't bother to follow the link:
The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response of a hostage, or an individual in a hostage-like situation (e.g. dependent child, battered wife, etc.),
[...]
The main symptom of the syndrome is the individual's seeming loyalty to the more powerful person in spite of the danger (or at least risk) in which they are placed as a result of this loyalty.
One reason the current ways and means may not be working is that people in the Bush administration made public the name of a CIA operative working on WMD's. This put her and all of her associates and the front company they were using out of business.
Some people say that the reason for this outing was not retaliation against her husband but rather that her group was about to find out that the forged Niger documents came from the USA.
Another reason the current ways and means are no longer working is that they relied on cooperation from intelligence agencies from a wide array of other countries. The egregious actions of the current US administration have alienated many other countries and they are less likely to give us the kind of cooperation they once were.
A friend once said he didn't have religion, only a simple set of rules: Don't piss of others and don't get pissed off. I think the current administration has flagrantly violated both these rules and we are all suffering as a result.
Look. I'm on your side too. But rules are rules. If the MA state law says you must declare XYZ then you must. That was my point only.
I agree with you that in order to be lawful, the law must be followed. I disagree with your implication (or perhaps the unstated implication of the Globe article that you latched on to) that the law says you have to list all of the corporate sponsors of a group you get travel money from.
I worked in the state of Massachusetts and was paid from federal grants. We had tons of paperwork. We had to fill out time cards for days we hadn't worked yet. There is no way that any of us was required to list all of the corporate sponsors if we were paid travel money to speak at a conference. The idea is absurd. It is possible that the state of Massachusetts has even more absurd paperwork laws than the federal government but I highly doubt it.
If you still don't believe me, just go back and re-read the Globe article. Clearly they are trying to raise some muck. Clearly the guy did not list the corporate sponsors even after consulting a lawyer. Don't you think if it really was a legal requirement then the article would have said so?
This guy is supposed to list the companies that financed his travel. He apparently didn't. He fscked up and gave Microsoft amunition. Quinn unecessarily caused the general public to question the motivations behind the opendoc initiative. And all over some simple paperwork.
Oh for cryin' out loud. Are you serious?
Nobody lists all the fsckin' companies that sponsor a conference when they are being paid by the conference.
If I got funded by a tv station, I would list the tv station but not all of its sponsors (advertisers). What you say makes no sense and is not how the real world operates.
The guy didn't fsck up at all. The Boston Globe was trying to raise muck where there wasn't any muck to be found. They published this crap and now they are being ridiculed.
Then why do US patients have greater access to
advanced medical technology than do Canadians?
If this is true, the obvious reason is that in Canada everyone has access to the health care system. In the US, if someone is a patient, that presupposes that they are one of the lucky ones who either have health insurance or are fabulously wealthy.
It is a no-brainer that if you exclude a large portion of your population from the health care system, especially the poorer people, then the ones that do have access will have more resources available.
When I was a physics grad student, we had a problem of stray radio interference inside of a large vacuum chamber that was made out of inch thick (or thicker) Aluminum.
After a couple of days of debugging and head scratching, we figured out that some ungrounded, insulated wires that passed through the chamber were acting like antennae. They picked up signals outside the chamber and then rebroadcast them inside the chamber. Grounding all these wires fixed the problem.
The moral of this story is that some care needs to be taken in order to create an effective Faraday cage (a metal enclosure that shields radio signals). In our case, without proper grounding, extra bits of metal acted like antennae instead of like shielding and made things worse, not better.
I will save the story of trying to shield electronic equipment on the top of the Empire State Building (just tens of feet from all sorts of broadcast antennae) for another day.
The issue is not just that SCO got the Linux version number wrong. IMO the issue is that SCO is implying that IBM contributed infringing code to a non-existent version of Linux.
The stunning lack of due diligence displayed here could possibly have serious consequences down the pike. It could help prove that SCO and BSF acted with criminal intent.
Up until now, they might have been able to get away with saying that they were just really, really stupid, didn't understand the law or software, can't read very well, and made a truckful of "honest mistakes". But this incident shows pretty clearly that they're willing to just make things up without a shred of evidence.
Or it could be part of a ploy by IBM. They could have included references to the non-existent Linux 2.7 in privileged communications they sent to SCO "by mistake". There has already been a lot of bruhaha in this case about privilege logs and misuse of privileged information.
It could well be that IBM had already prepped the judges and told them that if SCO brings up questions about Linux 2.7 then it indicates that they have been unlawfully using IBM's privileged information. If so, it's clobberin' time!.
But SCO has filed this information with the court according to
this Groklaw article.
My guess is that it is the same old tired out horse shit that they've been peddling for the past few years. I think they filed it all under seal so that the Linux community can't instantly debunk their claims as we've done in the past every time SCO showed any specific "infringing" code.
On the other hand, I think the 2.7 mess may end up being a big deal. Not that SCO made a mistake on the Linux version numbers, but because they are implicitly claiming IBM contributed infringing code to a non-existent version of Linux. The obvious lack of due diligence may go a long way in proving criminal intent and could be instrumental in putting some of these criminal behind bars.
I think you may already know the answer, but just in case you don't...
The word normal is used in two senses in the original sentence. A normal vector is a vector that is perpendicular to (or normal to) a surface. To normalize a vector is to set its length to one by dividing by its length.
I can believe that you didn't get my joke. I can even believe you would post a response demonstrating that fact, but I can't believe you got modded funny for not understanding that my sentence was a joke.
Oops... wait a sec... this is Slashdot... never mind.
On the other hand if Orwell was alive and and still in his grave, he would be rollin' around somethin' fierce trying to get out.
The title, the summary, and the article linked to were misleading. Many/.ers didn't RTFB or carefully RTFA and posted slightly hysterical comments about the Democrats outlawing blogs.
ifwm said:
If I have unlimited money, and I want to spend my money endorsing a candidate, how is it not a restriction of my speech to put ANY restrictions on how I spend it?
Limiting spending is limiting speech.
I am glad we are now talking about campaign finance and not "the Democrats are stealing our fr33doms!!1".
You are certainly entitled to your opinion that limiting campaign spending and contributions results in limiting free speech. Unfortunately for you, the majority of the American people, the Congress, and the Supreme Court have consistently disagreed with you.
Let's look at why this might be. If there was no limit or regulation of campaign finance then there is no question that the voice of the rich and powerful would increase. It is generally assumed that the increased voice of the rich and powerful comes at the cost of decreasing the voice of everyone else. In fact, without regulation, the voice of the rich and powerful can come disguised as the voice of the common person.
If the bill had passed, there is no question that the Internet would be flooded with soft campaign money. It could easily drown out the voices of individuals. Just as your freedom to move your arm and fist stops at my nose, your freedom of speech stops when it is so loud and pervasive that it drowns out the free speech of others.
If you have to hire a lawyer and an accountant to PROVE to the FEC that you do not recieve too much political funding...
I say whatever I want to on the Internet and I have not ever felt the need to hire a lawyer because of FEC concerns. Have you? The Democrats voted to keep things as they are now. No changes.
I can't tell for sure, but the tone of your post indicates that you might be confused about this.
RexRhino said:
[then]... You do not have freedom of speech, at least if you are an average person.
IMO freedom of speech on the Internet for the average person is just fine right now. If the bill were to pass, which would certainly flood the Internet with totally unregulated soft money, then the freedom of speech of the average person would be less certain. Certainly the voice of the rich and the powerful would increase. It might even drown out the voices of the average persons. It might even come disguised as the voices of average persons. But the idea that unleashing a flood of soft money onto the Internet would increase the voice of the average person is absurd in the extreme.
RexRhino said:
You blindly support the Democrats and are just trying to make some sort of excuse why all political speech needs to be regulated by a handful of people from only two parties.
No. I was not blindly supporting the Democrats. I actually RTFA and RTFB. Did you? The/. page was filling up with rants about the Democrats taking away our right to blog. Those posters had clearly not read TFA nor TFB. They were misled because the summary, the title and the article, were quite frankly -- misleading.
The bill was about putting in a loophole in the current campaign finance regulations so that the Internet could be flooded with political funding.
If you are against the current campaign finance regulations, fine. Let's discuss them on their merits, not on some hysterical arguments that the Democrats are trying to outlaw blogs.
Paragraph (22) of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.'.
Its essence is to prevent campaign finance laws from applying to the Internet.
If it passed then a campaign that has an excess of soft money would no longer need to launder it (what Delay was indicted for), instead they could spend it on paid shills to astro-turf blog sites. These shills could pretend to be average Joes expressing their personal opinions and would not need to divulge their political funding or affiliation.
The soft money funding would not be limited to astro-turfing blogs. Any Internet communication would be fair game for almost unlimited funding with no need for disclaimers such as "this ad was paid for by...".
Does it allow one party or another to spend unlimited amounts of money online?
No.
Bzzt. Wrong. But you do get this case of Turtle Wax. TFB says:
Paragraph (22) of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.'.
The bill is precisely about allowing one party or another to spend unlimited amounts of money online.
This bill had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting free speech. Independent bloggers already have free speech and this amendment would not have enhanced their free speech.
The amendment would have created a loophole in campaign finance reform and allowed unlimited political spending on the web.
The amendment would actually suppress free speech to the extent that independent views could be drowned out with politically financed astro-turfing.
In the fine tradition of many other laws and bills that have surfaced over the past five years, the intent of this amendment was the exact opposite of that implied by its title. If Orwell were alive, he'd be rolling in his grave.
Stanbury Resources Inc. does not mount wind turbines on the sea floor, but deploys them on floating platforms on bodies of water of any depth, from 15 meters to 15,000 feet.
Nothing says bogus quite like changing units in mid-sentence.
This CEO says he "owns" the pipes. Fine, let's get the government all the way out of this venture.
I think you misunderstood his reasoning. He thinks he owns the pipes because he thinks he owns the government that helped his corp to build them.
Having him send a big ass check to his government would be futile. He would just get his legislature to pass, and his president to sign, a law that gives him an even bigger ass tax break to get all of his original money back and then some.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it is likely that every man, woman and child in the US, each spent the equivalent of $100 on Potato Head sets.
Apparently Forbes is maintaining their high standard of journalistic excellence.
500/295,000,000 is 1.7 *10^-4 % Not only did you get the second significant digit wrong, you were also off by 5 orders of magnitude. Furthermore, I am not surprised that both errors were in the direction that favors your argument.
If you don't know how to use numbers, just leave the result in the raw fractional form. If you don't know how to do a rough order of magnitude check on your results, you should not be posting in scientific notation.
Finally, your argument seems to be that you don't give a rat's ass about the executive branch breaking the law just so long as it doesn't affect you personally. This leads me to wonder if you were personally affected by Clinton's blowjob. But more importantly it indicates that your grasp of history is not much better than your grasp of mathematics. It is precisely the attitude you express in your post that has allowed fascism and dictatorship to grow, thrive, and eventually take over nations that were once democratic.
Another way to see it: if the signal in your induction pickup were truly undetectable then we could wrap billions of similar induction pickups around the communications wire and generate electricity "too cheap to meter".
For those that can't bother to follow the link:
Some people say that the reason for this outing was not retaliation against her husband but rather that her group was about to find out that the forged Niger documents came from the USA.
Another reason the current ways and means are no longer working is that they relied on cooperation from intelligence agencies from a wide array of other countries. The egregious actions of the current US administration have alienated many other countries and they are less likely to give us the kind of cooperation they once were.
A friend once said he didn't have religion, only a simple set of rules: Don't piss of others and don't get pissed off. I think the current administration has flagrantly violated both these rules and we are all suffering as a result.
I agree with you that in order to be lawful, the law must be followed. I disagree with your implication (or perhaps the unstated implication of the Globe article that you latched on to) that the law says you have to list all of the corporate sponsors of a group you get travel money from.
I worked in the state of Massachusetts and was paid from federal grants. We had tons of paperwork. We had to fill out time cards for days we hadn't worked yet. There is no way that any of us was required to list all of the corporate sponsors if we were paid travel money to speak at a conference. The idea is absurd. It is possible that the state of Massachusetts has even more absurd paperwork laws than the federal government but I highly doubt it.
If you still don't believe me, just go back and re-read the Globe article. Clearly they are trying to raise some muck. Clearly the guy did not list the corporate sponsors even after consulting a lawyer. Don't you think if it really was a legal requirement then the article would have said so?
It is nonsense. You were duped.
Nobody lists all the fsckin' companies that sponsor a conference when they are being paid by the conference. If I got funded by a tv station, I would list the tv station but not all of its sponsors (advertisers). What you say makes no sense and is not how the real world operates.
The guy didn't fsck up at all. The Boston Globe was trying to raise muck where there wasn't any muck to be found. They published this crap and now they are being ridiculed.
It is a no-brainer that if you exclude a large portion of your population from the health care system, especially the poorer people, then the ones that do have access will have more resources available.
I intended to give you +1 Funny but a slip of the click and it ended up -1 Overrated so I am posting here to remove that negative moderation.
Sort of a P.K. Dick on drugs ... and that's saying a lot.
Since he didn't even make an honorable mention, perhaps he is still obscure enough to be true geek fodder.
After a couple of days of debugging and head scratching, we figured out that some ungrounded, insulated wires that passed through the chamber were acting like antennae. They picked up signals outside the chamber and then rebroadcast them inside the chamber. Grounding all these wires fixed the problem.
The moral of this story is that some care needs to be taken in order to create an effective Faraday cage (a metal enclosure that shields radio signals). In our case, without proper grounding, extra bits of metal acted like antennae instead of like shielding and made things worse, not better.
I will save the story of trying to shield electronic equipment on the top of the Empire State Building (just tens of feet from all sorts of broadcast antennae) for another day.
The stunning lack of due diligence displayed here could possibly have serious consequences down the pike. It could help prove that SCO and BSF acted with criminal intent.
Up until now, they might have been able to get away with saying that they were just really, really stupid, didn't understand the law or software, can't read very well, and made a truckful of "honest mistakes". But this incident shows pretty clearly that they're willing to just make things up without a shred of evidence.
It could well be that IBM had already prepped the judges and told them that if SCO brings up questions about Linux 2.7 then it indicates that they have been unlawfully using IBM's privileged information. If so, it's clobberin' time!.
My guess is that it is the same old tired out horse shit that they've been peddling for the past few years. I think they filed it all under seal so that the Linux community can't instantly debunk their claims as we've done in the past every time SCO showed any specific "infringing" code.
On the other hand, I think the 2.7 mess may end up being a big deal. Not that SCO made a mistake on the Linux version numbers, but because they are implicitly claiming IBM contributed infringing code to a non-existent version of Linux. The obvious lack of due diligence may go a long way in proving criminal intent and could be instrumental in putting some of these criminal behind bars.
The word normal is used in two senses in the original sentence. A normal vector is a vector that is perpendicular to (or normal to) a surface. To normalize a vector is to set its length to one by dividing by its length.
Mathworld explains it here where they say:
Oops ... wait a sec ... this is Slashdot ... never mind.
On the other hand if Orwell was alive and and still in his grave, he would be rollin' around somethin' fierce trying to get out.
ifwm said:
I am glad we are now talking about campaign finance and not "the Democrats are stealing our fr33doms!!1".
You are certainly entitled to your opinion that limiting campaign spending and contributions results in limiting free speech. Unfortunately for you, the majority of the American people, the Congress, and the Supreme Court have consistently disagreed with you.
Let's look at why this might be. If there was no limit or regulation of campaign finance then there is no question that the voice of the rich and powerful would increase. It is generally assumed that the increased voice of the rich and powerful comes at the cost of decreasing the voice of everyone else. In fact, without regulation, the voice of the rich and powerful can come disguised as the voice of the common person.
If the bill had passed, there is no question that the Internet would be flooded with soft campaign money. It could easily drown out the voices of individuals. Just as your freedom to move your arm and fist stops at my nose, your freedom of speech stops when it is so loud and pervasive that it drowns out the free speech of others.
RexRhino said:
IMO freedom of speech on the Internet for the average person is just fine right now. If the bill were to pass, which would certainly flood the Internet with totally unregulated soft money, then the freedom of speech of the average person would be less certain. Certainly the voice of the rich and the powerful would increase. It might even drown out the voices of the average persons. It might even come disguised as the voices of average persons. But the idea that unleashing a flood of soft money onto the Internet would increase the voice of the average person is absurd in the extreme.
RexRhino said:
No. I was not blindly supporting the Democrats. I actually RTFA and RTFB. Did you? TheThe bill was about putting in a loophole in the current campaign finance regulations so that the Internet could be flooded with political funding.
If you are against the current campaign finance regulations, fine. Let's discuss them on their merits, not on some hysterical arguments that the Democrats are trying to outlaw blogs.
Its essence is to prevent campaign finance laws from applying to the Internet.
If it passed then a campaign that has an excess of soft money would no longer need to launder it (what Delay was indicted for), instead they could spend it on paid shills to astro-turf blog sites. These shills could pretend to be average Joes expressing their personal opinions and would not need to divulge their political funding or affiliation.
The soft money funding would not be limited to astro-turfing blogs. Any Internet communication would be fair game for almost unlimited funding with no need for disclaimers such as "this ad was paid for by ...".
Bzzt. Wrong. But you do get this case of Turtle Wax. TFB says:
The bill is precisely about allowing one party or another to spend unlimited amounts of money online.
Sheesh.
The amendment would have created a loophole in campaign finance reform and allowed unlimited political spending on the web. The amendment would actually suppress free speech to the extent that independent views could be drowned out with politically financed astro-turfing.
In the fine tradition of many other laws and bills that have surfaced over the past five years, the intent of this amendment was the exact opposite of that implied by its title. If Orwell were alive, he'd be rolling in his grave.
Slashdot: faux infotainment for nerds.
Nothing says bogus quite like changing units in mid-sentence.
I think you misunderstood his reasoning. He thinks he owns the pipes because he thinks he owns the government that helped his corp to build them.
Having him send a big ass check to his government would be futile. He would just get his legislature to pass, and his president to sign, a law that gives him an even bigger ass tax break to get all of his original money back and then some.