The trick in the novel is, the original is *not* destroyed. Instead, the *copy* is (after a time) destroyed. I can recommend it, although I have not read it for about 30 years; Wikipedia says it lost the Hugo to "A Canticle for Leibowitz".
The parent has been rated Troll. I don't see why. The Patriot Act was treasonous as well as being unconstitutional: there have been plenty of laws which were merely unconstitutional, but the Patriot Act allowed the Bush administration to claim it could legally ignore the constitution. Just being the President doesn't mean you can't be a traitor to the United States: it just means you have a much better chance of success.
In a true police state he would never have been allowed to speak at all.
What you see in a true police state is not all the citizens bravely speaking out and getting beaten to death. What you see is almost no dissent at all, because most people decide they don't want to take the risk of getting tasered (and/or beaten to death).
If time travel is ever developed, the universe enters an unstable state. Stability isn't returned until a scenario occurs where time travel is never discovered in the first place. This process takes no time (obviously), so any discovery of time travel is immediately undone. Actually, this happens all the, er, time.
You are correct that this happens all the time. However, what that means is that the probability density of universes where time travel exists is always non-zero, even though their timelines are pinched out. In other words, whatever universe you may be in still may be one with time travel, but watch out for the pinch out.
And the Armenian Genocide.... Actually, Hitler likely viewed it as a successful proof-of-concept.
Indeed he did. In fact one of his most famous quotes was in response to a question about someone who worried that massacring the Jews might cause the Nazis to be criticized; Hitler said after a while nobody would remember it because "who remembers the Armenians?"
The only "radical Christians" that I can think of are abortion-doctor murders.
President Bush is a radical Christian. According to the British Medical Association his aggressive war in Iraq has cost the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqis. And he has weapons of mass destruction RIGHT NOW.
They then set the phone on vibrate, attach the explosives, and call the phone when they want it to detonate
Don't forget to set the phone so that it only vibrates when *you* call it. Otherwise the secret police can just ring every phone they detect in the area, and it goes off prematurely. Man I hate it when that happens.
The really great thing about Google is they realized that web searches are an application for computers where *accuracy is not essential*. If you get four useful links out of fifty -- instead of seven -- do you care? Do you notice? If eight of the links are completely cockamamey, do you get bent outashape? I think not.
We can all complain about some aspects of Microsoft's software (yes, really), but its 'spying' is nothing like the same.
Most people don't really care about spy software. But of the ones that do, they care about as much about Microsoft grabbing their identity as they do about some hacker using their box for a botnet. Maybe more, because Microsoft undoubtedly shares all its data with Fedgov, not just Doubleclick.
Well, the people who speak that language can type in the url, but probably nobody else in the world can. (It would probably lead to all foreign sites having to set up one server with an English domain name and one with a local domain name.) Heck, I'm not even positive I can type in an "accent grave" in this Slashdot message and get it to actually work. As for things like Khmer Unicode, which is poorly supported even inside Cambodia, lotsa luck.
Also, a lot of people don't know how to set up a computer for their own language, so they're stuck if they need to use a computer in a foreign country. (Even if the computer doesn't need admin rights to change the setup.)
I see your point, but Apple may fear that their near-monopoly in music players may not last. That is, they may be planning to phase out plain music players from their product line and phase in multifunction units.Or at least to test the waters.
I could be wrong, but you seem to me to be describing a VP of *Marketing*, not a VP of Engineering. He does not seem to have given any technical responses, and you mentioned that his assistant did the technical side of his presentation.
I am also guessing that the guy next to him later was not a lawyer, because from what you wrote (not quite clear to me) he was the same person who set up the projector. Lawyers don't do menial stuff like that.
I'm guessing that that person was someone in Dilbert's role: he was only there so that the VP could shift blame onto him if the VP made a completely ridiculous technical statement.
Btw, I do know something about magnetic media. I have seen a head picking up the edges of an adjacent track, for instance.
You understand that data recovery companies don't publish charges, right? That they ask you how important your stuff is before they give you a quote? You know what that means?
You forget that you are much more likely to die *per hour* in a plane than a car.
Average people travel by plane perhaps ten hours per year; by car perhaps 700 hours per year. (My numbers, made up on the spot.)
So the lifetime death should be 70 times lower, if the death rate per hour were the same. But it isn't: it's about 20 times lower (via your numbers). So while you're in a plane, you're three or four times more likely to die than while you're in a car.
Also, of course, if you're in a car you seldom have more than a couple of seconds warning to worry before an accident, but in a plane you may be subjected to hours of agonizing fear prior to the impact.
To el_munkie:
I could be wrong on this, but I vaguely feel that since Usenet it has been considered crass to aim a spelling flame at someone unless that person himself has posted a spelling flame.
And by the way, you should have written "people's", not "peoples'". Or were you referring to the Native American, Afro-American, and Caucasian peoples?
Here in Cambodia, almost everybody who buys a new cellphone immediately takes it to a shop where a craftsman painstakingly wraps it in self-adhesive sheet plastic, using a standard disposable butane lighter and an x-acto knife to form the sheet material perfectly to every curve. (I was amazed when I first saw it done -- I had assumed they were applying preformed shells for each case design.)
The effect -- total cost perhaps 0.75 USD -- is a high-gloss finish which completely resists normal scuffs and stains for years (and can easily be replaced if necessary).
I disagree that MS Word has maintained compatibility.
I recently found a MS Word for DOS file in an old backup that I wanted to use.
MS Word did not recognize it as a Word file. However, as usual with Word files, it was impossible to see the text with a text editor.
Eventually I opened it in a binary editor and put the text strings back into a text file. But even then all the non-US-ASCII characters were screwed up.
Additionally, Word used to understand MS Write files, so I created a lot of docs in Write, assuming that since it was provided with most new systems it would be more compatible than Word itself. I now no longer have any app which is natively capable of reading those files.
Furthermore, Word files that have any complexity are often incompatible between dot releases, especially if users have not turned off the quick save feature.
It helps if people who fail to see the "prominently displayed signs" are not immediately taught a lesson by the smirking and allpowerful jackbooted scumbag.
I don't know what the original poster meant by "ethical crimes", but there are certainly criminal offenses which many would find ethical. Such as assassinating Hitler, or George Bush.
think how *you* would feel if Chinese troops marched into the US today, toppled the government, and talked about setting up the most democratic government in the world.
I thought Philip K. Dick already explained why this was a bad idea...
"There, I edited that for you buddy.
"Let's just leave it at that's what you really intended, because otherwise I'll destroy all of my karma in spewing forth a slur of obscenities about how...
I am quite familiar with the situation in Thailand (and Cambodia), and the OP is quite correct.
I would add that to a great extent the entire hierarchy of the education system is a sham: most of the ministers and bureaucrats have literally not opened a book since grade school. They each have several impressive-sounding degrees from Thai and sham-front universities which are utterly bogus: only Chulalongkorn is somewhat respectable, and few western universities accept credit hours from anywhere else. There is no way to reform the system from within.
In the USA only cops have this system, where they get promotions based on paper degrees, and it doesn't matter very much, because cops have never been promoted on merit anyway. But in Thailand it's *everywhere* -- including the surgeon who handles your daughter's appendicitis.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the only post which makes the point that the teleported version is a copy, not the original.
This point was addressed at length in the 1960 sf novel by Algis Budrys, "Rogue Moon":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Moon
The trick in the novel is, the original is *not* destroyed. Instead, the *copy* is (after a time) destroyed. I can recommend it, although I have not read it for about 30 years; Wikipedia says it lost the Hugo to "A Canticle for Leibowitz".
The critical metric for analyzing disasters like Clippy is not so much how long ago it was but how long it lasted before it was fixed.
The parent has been rated Troll. I don't see why. The Patriot Act was treasonous as well as being unconstitutional: there have been plenty of laws which were merely unconstitutional, but the Patriot Act allowed the Bush administration to claim it could legally ignore the constitution. Just being the President doesn't mean you can't be a traitor to the United States: it just means you have a much better chance of success.
What you see in a true police state is not all the citizens bravely speaking out and getting beaten to death. What you see is almost no dissent at all, because most people decide they don't want to take the risk of getting tasered (and/or beaten to death).
You are correct that this happens all the time. However, what that means is that the probability density of universes where time travel exists is always non-zero, even though their timelines are pinched out. In other words, whatever universe you may be in still may be one with time travel, but watch out for the pinch out.
Indeed he did. In fact one of his most famous quotes was in response to a question about someone who worried that massacring the Jews might cause the Nazis to be criticized; Hitler said after a while nobody would remember it because "who remembers the Armenians?"
President Bush is a radical Christian. According to the British Medical Association his aggressive war in Iraq has cost the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqis. And he has weapons of mass destruction RIGHT NOW.
Don't forget to set the phone so that it only vibrates when *you* call it. Otherwise the secret police can just ring every phone they detect in the area, and it goes off prematurely. Man I hate it when that happens.
It's exactly what you need for your Home Office.
The really great thing about Google is they realized that web searches are an application for computers where *accuracy is not essential*. If you get four useful links out of fifty -- instead of seven -- do you care? Do you notice? If eight of the links are completely cockamamey, do you get bent outashape? I think not.
At last, MySQL has found its niche.
The high error rate makes it useless for its *ostensible* purpose, but the fact that it is retained lets one guess what the *actual* purpose is.
But you can with a box cutter, according to the Bush administration.
Most people don't really care about spy software. But of the ones that do, they care about as much about Microsoft grabbing their identity as they do about some hacker using their box for a botnet. Maybe more, because Microsoft undoubtedly shares all its data with Fedgov, not just Doubleclick.
Well, the people who speak that language can type in the url, but probably nobody else in the world can. (It would probably lead to all foreign sites having to set up one server with an English domain name and one with a local domain name.) Heck, I'm not even positive I can type in an "accent grave" in this Slashdot message and get it to actually work. As for things like Khmer Unicode, which is poorly supported even inside Cambodia, lotsa luck.
Also, a lot of people don't know how to set up a computer for their own language, so they're stuck if they need to use a computer in a foreign country. (Even if the computer doesn't need admin rights to change the setup.)
I see your point, but Apple may fear that their near-monopoly in music players may not last. That is, they may be planning to phase out plain music players from their product line and phase in multifunction units.Or at least to test the waters.
I could be wrong, but you seem to me to be describing a VP of *Marketing*, not a VP of Engineering. He does not seem to have given any technical responses, and you mentioned that his assistant did the technical side of his presentation.
I am also guessing that the guy next to him later was not a lawyer, because from what you wrote (not quite clear to me) he was the same person who set up the projector. Lawyers don't do menial stuff like that.
I'm guessing that that person was someone in Dilbert's role: he was only there so that the VP could shift blame onto him if the VP made a completely ridiculous technical statement.
Btw, I do know something about magnetic media. I have seen a head picking up the edges of an adjacent track, for instance.
You understand that data recovery companies don't publish charges, right? That they ask you how important your stuff is before they give you a quote? You know what that means?
To TinBromide re comparing car and plane deaths:
You forget that you are much more likely to die *per hour* in a plane than a car.
Average people travel by plane perhaps ten hours per year; by car perhaps 700 hours per year. (My numbers, made up on the spot.)
So the lifetime death should be 70 times lower, if the death rate per hour were the same. But it isn't: it's about 20 times lower (via your numbers). So while you're in a plane, you're three or four times more likely to die than while you're in a car.
Also, of course, if you're in a car you seldom have more than a couple of seconds warning to worry before an accident, but in a plane you may be subjected to hours of agonizing fear prior to the impact.
Still feel safe?
To el_munkie: I could be wrong on this, but I vaguely feel that since Usenet it has been considered crass to aim a spelling flame at someone unless that person himself has posted a spelling flame. And by the way, you should have written "people's", not "peoples'". Or were you referring to the Native American, Afro-American, and Caucasian peoples?
Here in Cambodia, almost everybody who buys a new cellphone immediately takes it to a shop where a craftsman painstakingly wraps it in self-adhesive sheet plastic, using a standard disposable butane lighter and an x-acto knife to form the sheet material perfectly to every curve. (I was amazed when I first saw it done -- I had assumed they were applying preformed shells for each case design.)
The effect -- total cost perhaps 0.75 USD -- is a high-gloss finish which completely resists normal scuffs and stains for years (and can easily be replaced if necessary).
I disagree that MS Word has maintained compatibility.
I recently found a MS Word for DOS file in an old backup that I wanted to use.
MS Word did not recognize it as a Word file. However, as usual with Word files, it was impossible to see the text with a text editor.
Eventually I opened it in a binary editor and put the text strings back into a text file. But even then all the non-US-ASCII characters were screwed up.
Additionally, Word used to understand MS Write files, so I created a lot of docs in Write, assuming that since it was provided with most new systems it would be more compatible than Word itself. I now no longer have any app which is natively capable of reading those files.
Furthermore, Word files that have any complexity are often incompatible between dot releases, especially if users have not turned off the quick save feature.
I think you know about all these issues already.
It helps if people who fail to see the "prominently displayed signs" are not immediately taught a lesson by the smirking and allpowerful jackbooted scumbag.
I don't know what the original poster meant by "ethical crimes", but there are certainly criminal offenses which many would find ethical. Such as assassinating Hitler, or George Bush.
I think the plan is that we would feel relieved.
"There, I edited that for you buddy.
"Let's just leave it at that's what you really intended, because otherwise I'll destroy all of my karma in spewing forth a slur of obscenities about how...
"...well, let's just leave it at that."
I am quite familiar with the situation in Thailand (and Cambodia), and the OP is quite correct.
I would add that to a great extent the entire hierarchy of the education system is a sham: most of the ministers and bureaucrats have literally not opened a book since grade school. They each have several impressive-sounding degrees from Thai and sham-front universities which are utterly bogus: only Chulalongkorn is somewhat respectable, and few western universities accept credit hours from anywhere else. There is no way to reform the system from within.
In the USA only cops have this system, where they get promotions based on paper degrees, and it doesn't matter very much, because cops have never been promoted on merit anyway. But in Thailand it's *everywhere* -- including the surgeon who handles your daughter's appendicitis.