But with DRM, what's to prevent you digitally securing the binaries and having a system on which only "trusted" binaries are allowed to run. The source is all but useless now, as anyone compiling it will need to get their binaries signed to run on Vista++ or OSXII.
I bolded the real problem, which the GPL v3 does nothing to solve. All it does it say that the GPLed software cannot be an "effective technological protection measure", meaning it can't invoke the DMCA clauses that make circumventing such a thing illegal. That still won't let you get your modified binary signed by Microsoft to run on Vista++, so the source is still useless.
It's all the content producers need to make it official that they will not be supporting Linux. No music, no movies, and what most Slashdotters will notice most, no games.
Why would this be the case? What difference would GPLv3 make on any of these things? They aren't GPL v2 today, so they aren't going to be GPL v3 tomorrow. You don't need to release a program under the GPL for it to run in Linux, as the ample supply of proprietary software for the operating system shows.
Unless you mean the anti-DRM sentiment in the GPL v3 will cause the writers of DRM to cease supporting Linux as some kind of protest? Or because they are too ignorant to know that you don't need to comply with the GPL to write software that merely runs under linux?
Or do you mean all these things will only run under a (You Can't Be) Trusted Computing environment, and this would require kernel support that GPL v3 would make inneffective? Well, guess what, it's already inneffective if you have to give the users the source code. Trusted Computing as the media empires imagine it will never exist in Linux. So what are we losing?
First, a quick point about GPL v2: You can't make effective DRM software with it. How could you? Since GPL grants users the rights to gain the source code and to modify it, then as soon as you distribute your DRM app you have given the user the right to modify that app so that, after decrypting whatever it is that the program is designed to decrypt it writes it to disk in a non-protected format. They could modify it so that whatever keys it uses to decrypt the media are also written to disk.
The only way you could prevent this is if your country has a law that would trump the permission-to-modify-and-use-for-any-purpose provisions of the GPL v2. Specifically we're talking the DMCA. Since your DRM software is a "protection measure", bypassing it is illegal, and thus modifying the software to write out un-restricted files would be illegal even though the license you got the software under gave you explicit permission to do this and more. This is where GPL v3 comes in:
From http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft: "No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other software capable of accessing the same data."
I understand that the term "effective technological protection measure" is to specifically address the DMCA, which makes it illegal to bypass said measures. It's basically stating that no GPL v3 software can ever invoke those clauses of the DMCA.
Which is moot for several reasons. First, there will never be DRM software released under any GPL license at all since they'd have to be nuts to give out the source code and rely on DMCA enforcement to protect the content, especially since the DMCA is U.S.-only. Second, because the DMCA is U.S.-only, this clause is only effective in the U.S. to begin with.
The other clause in the same section, which references spyware as "works that illegally invade users' privacy" is similarly useless because "illegal" varies from country to country and if it was illegal then you could get them for that illegal act and don't need to resort to copyright infringement to stop them.
I think the entire Section 3 of the draft license could be removed and not change the resulting impact of the license one iota.
It's called the confirmation bias, and it happens to everyone. Even me.
But it doesn't happen to me! I'm different, and always view things based solely on logic. Mmm... It doesn't happen to me. It doesn't happen to me. I'm purely rational, never emotional. Oh yeah, that's the stuff. Right in the pleasure centers... It doesn't happen to me...
Then that's a nonsensical caveat. You might as well have said "True, but only in an alternate reality in which the abuse of power is not a fundamental constant of human societies".
Thus, any door you pick has a 1/100 chance of being right.
Monte then opens 98 doors. The original door you chose now has a 1/2 chance of being right. So does the other, unpicked door. Originally, both had a 1/100 chance of being right, now both have a 1/2 chance of being right.
Your statement that the probability of your initial pick being correct has suddenly and inexplicably changed should be your first clue that you are doing something wrong.
If you still think switching is the right choice, answer this question: After you've switched, is it a good idea to switch again? You originally made your 'switching is better' argument after gaining some new information. After the switch, though, you're in the exact same position, with the exact same information. Thus, the argument still holds, and switching back is better than taking the one you have.
Yes, you have the exact same information -- that the first door you picked had a 1/3rd chance of being right. Since you still have this information, you know that switching back to that door is not the same as switching away from that door.
To look at it a slightly different way - You pick a door. Monte then switches around all the doors randomly, so you don't know which door was yours.
In that case, you don't know anything, so you have to guess. But that isn't the case, now is it? You do know what door you picked, so you know that if you were wrong initially switching will get you the right door.
The fact is that if your initial guess is wrong, switching will win. This has nothing to do with probability; it comes directly from the description of the problem -- Monte will only open a door that does not have the prize in it, so if your initial pick did not have the prize, the other door remaining will have the prize. If your initial guess was wrong, switching will win. If your initial guess is right, staying will win.
The probability is then simple. Your initial guess is right 1/3rd of the time, so staying wins 1/3rd of the time. Your initial guess is wrong 2/3rd of the time, so switching wins 2/3rd of the time.
I fling my poo at the d20 system and especially D&D 3E with its new fangled, computer-artsy books and "prestige" classes. No good DM should be letting his players live past level 10 anyway.
Okay, your poo-fling attack uses a base of 6 dice. Would you like to invoke your Simian Ancestry skill for an additional 2 dice? The d20 handbook has a base defense of 4 dice, with a bonus 2 for it's high-gloss low-stick cover.
The most carpul tunnel-inducing game I ever played was Shadowrun (though I'm sure others can name worse). Every attack took at least ten dice rolls with most seeming to add up to nothing. The funny thing is that at an age where I was still all about the hack-and-slash, we quickly developed a style of trying to solve problems without resorting to violence, since violence meant at least 45 minutes of dice rolling.
I'm personally boggled by the fact that they were playing D&D. D&D (particularly 3.0/3.5) is much more geared towards fast, kick-in-the-door style play than drama. There are other systems that aren't so crunchy and filled with combat-oriented mechanics that would suit them better.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why you need any "mechanics" to handle anything but the combat. Why do I need "rules" to govern anything other than what happens when I try to stab someone with a pointy stick? To me role-playing is about all the things you need a human gamemaster for, the things no rule system can encompass anyway.
Uh, no. The only information you have is: There are two doors left. One of which is bad, one of which is good.
Wrong, you do have more information. You know which door you picked initially. You know that this pick had a 2/3rd chance of being wrong, and you know that if you were wrong the remaining door is the correct one. Based on this knowledge, the probability is greater for switching.
If you walked in off the street after Monty had opened one door, and not told you which the original one was, then your assumption of no knowledge holds and it would be 50%.
You know, I remember hearing about the mystery of the flying bumble bee and how it went against what we knew of aerodynamics... and then I remember hearing how we figured it out. Years ago. From memory, does it have to do with vortices created off the tips of the wings? Okay, now I've looked at the article. No mention of vortices, just that they flap their wings 15% faster than a smaller fruit fly. Huh, okay.
As long as there is something we do not know, there will be room for a god or a designer.
And the sad thing to me is that many religious people feel that the only place for our God is in the holes left by our ignorance of the physical world, that there needs to be "room" for God. For them, a non-divine explanation for physical events is a blow to their faith, and to me this means their faith is weak.
For me, I love to learn about how the universe works -- it's infinitely fascinating -- and the maxim "God did it" is just a statement of faith, not a paltry excuse to avoid figuring out how He chose to do it.
Learning Euler's Formula was practically a religious experience for me.
Knowledge is not the enemy of faith; indeed they should support one another. However knowledge is the enemy of dogma and of authority; and since authority makes no effort to separate faith and dogma, we end up seeing the knowledgeable and faithful in conflict. As our knowledge increases this is a losing battle for authority, and thus we get ID as the desperate counter-attack. In the long run, though, authority will only end up sacrificing faith and knowledge, leaving only dogma./rant off, I guess.
That's funny. This is the quote I think of when I think of SCO:
"I see dead lawsuits. Submitting briefs like regular lawsuits. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead."
LOTR approach: Ok, this one is difficult as it involves convincing the people with the PSP, that it is in fact an evil artifact that must be thrown into Mount Doom, and that you are the only one who can perform such a task. [Do not actually throw the PSP into Mount Doom]
Well I wasn't going to throw my precious PSP into Mount Doom, but then some crazy green midget bit my fscking finger off and I dropped him and the PSP into the crag!
Again, that works in theory. But not always in reality.
the spammer is taking the time to submit many many stories to get a couple through. The casual user only submits the stories he thinks are the absolute best. If we pick a dozen stories, they can't all be the very very best. There will be a few stories that are not as great... and a few that simply are of interest to a different subset of readers. A spammer submits 10... if i order them in terms of how widely known they are, #1-5 are submitted 20-30 times... but number 8 and 9 maybe only once or twice.
Okay, so you're saying that when the only person to submit an interesting yet slightly obscure story is a queue spammer, that queue spammer is going to get their submission posted. This makes sense except...
The queue spammers are getting their submissions accepted on stories that are not obscure, when there are 20-30 submissions, and a casual perusal of the comments shows half a dozen irritated submitters who had at least comparable if not plainly superior submissions on the same story which were rejected. Yet the queue spammer not only wins, but wins several times in a row. Clearly there is more going on here, and your explanation sounds more like "theory" than "reality".
I'm not going to claim that the spammers are being deliberately picked or given preference due to some unknown deal. I am going to claim that, consciously or not, certain submitters are being accepted more readily than others irrespective of the relative merits of the submissions, and I don't think this claim lacks ample support. At the very least, the fact that a story that links to a blog is frequently picked over a similarly well-worded submission with links to primary sources shows that the system is not working even for those most popular stories.
I think part of the problem here (meaning this very story) is that the problem is not you, yet you have to come to defend the editorial process as you exercise it. Frankly, it was the moment/. editorial staff expanded beyond you and Hemos that/. started to noticeably dive in quality. I don't know what the answer is, I don't know what the relationship between editors is. You might try suggesting they stop going with the easy, safe submissions of known submitters versus others that include better links and equal if not better text.
There are a few famous movies out there "floating" around (someone linked one elsewhere of a living frog) demonstrating this. A large enough magnet with a powerful enough field gets you antigravitiy.
Um... Like I said, I'm no physicist, but diamagnetic levitation isn't "antigravity" any more than counteracting the gravitational force on a frog with the normal force exerted by your palm is "antigravity".
Gravity exhibits none of the interference properties of waves nor any behaviors of particles. We may yet discover that we've already unified all of the fields there are to unify (I do believe that strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces have been unified already), the rubber-sheet view of gravity may be correct after all and gravity may just be a property of space.
I thought it might, but the last physics class I took only referred to the "electro-weak" force. I do suspect that gravity is a different thing altogether than the other forces; I think that's pretty strongly implied by GR. And of course I'll accept at face value the claim that we will learn things we don't expect today about gravity (and all of physics). To think otherwise would smack of hubris.:)
I already have a robot for washing my dishes, it's called a "dish washer". I admit it doesn't look or sound very robot-y, so I instead call mine The Wash-o-tron 9000.
Well in THEORY if you get high enough in energy the gravitational and electromagnetic forces would be indistinguishable.
That theory, were it to exist, would be the TOE I was talking about. It is only at extremely high energies that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces merge, at lower energies they are distinct. When this was discovered, it was suspected/hoped that the other forces (strong nuclear, gravitational) could also be unified (thus "Grand Unified Theory" or "Theory of Everything"), but to my knowledge this has not happened. Please correct me if I am wrong and such a theory exists.
It's also, and this gets into opnion here, not really competing with Unix.
I don't think that's true. Linux seems to be eating proprietary Unix for lunch. Data center servers and engineering workstations that would have before run Solaris or AIX or some other Unix are now running Linux. Linux is offered by major vendors -- IBM, Sun, and HP -- on big proprietary hardware solutions than would even five years ago assuredly had those vendors' own Unix solutions. Crays run Linux. Z-series run linux. SGI workstations run Linux. Even some big banks run their servers on Linux (I saw this on/.!). Granted the proprietary Unices still exist, but their days are likely numbered. The writing is already on the wall for AIX.
Although in the bigger picture, what is happening is that commodity is winning over specialty. Both Linux and Windows are eating Unix for lunch in the server room, because both OSes run on commodity x86 hardware. In this sense Linux is competing strongly with Windows, but in either case it would be a commodity box running one or the other replacing a proprietary box running proprietary UNIX. However at the same time open is beginning to win out over proprietary for largely the same reasons (which are all about utility:cost ratios).
Case in point that makes me chuckle whenever I think about it (because I'm a huge geek): I'm writing this post on a Sun workstation with AMD64 processors running Red Hat Linux.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.
OK - so far, so good.
Um, what?! Granted I'm not a physicist or even a wanna-be, but if they had discovered (in the 50s!) the GUT/TOE that combines the gravitational force with the already unified electric, magnetic, and weak nuclear forces, I think I would have heard about it! Actually, I have heard of attempts, all of them recent and still in development (like string theory), and all of them lacking experimental verification.
If you're going to accept as 'so far, so good' the concept of a magnetically-induced gravitational field I don't see why you won't accept the multi-dimensional part.
What's funny is that he started asking what the students needed their SUVs for and then quickly stopped when three of the first four students he asked actually needed their SUV for summer jobs (towing a large landscaping trailer, carrying tools and saw horses for decking, and carpooling six people to an internship an hour away).
His problem was that he was surprised that some people needed their SUV (or a vehicle like it; for hauling jobs a pickup truck is likely to be superior so there probably was some non-practical aspect to the choice). If he had been aware that some people need the cars like I am, he could have made his rant into an even more devastating case of duck-duck-goose. As you said, three of the first four had a reason, so that 4th person could have easily had an example made of them.
Duck - "You drive an SUV because you need it. Good for you." Duck - "Oh, you need yours to haul a trailer, that's nice." Goose! "What?! All you do is drive to school and back?! What do you need an SUV for, other than helping yourself be killed in a rollover accident?! Do you like wasting gas just so people might mistake you for these other guys that need such a vehicle?" And so on.
To me, it's like semis. Do truckers need to drive semi-trucks? Yes, nothing else will do the job. Would anyone else driving a semi-truck be the biggest retard imagineable? Yes. Such a person would have ridicule heaped upon them at every turn, and they would be scorned by members of the opposite sex.
I believe this is the solution to the SUV problem. Those who buy them without having any practical use for them should be humiliated and outed as the posers they are.
So you've made your case that SUV's are more likely to sustain MORE damage than a typical passenger vehicle. Then why the complaining?
Because even though I think you're foolish for believing SUVs are safer, I don't actually want you to be less safe. Oh, and you do make things more dangerous for others too.
In reality I suppose it all depends on the driver.
In the sense that the #1 method of improving safety is to be more aware and drive safer, yes. This does not mean that superior driving skill can eliminate the safety disadvantage of SUVs, because even with the best driving ever you would still be more safe in a safer car.
Just because I chose to have a tank doesn't mean I plan to use it like one.
Just because you don't drive your tank like a tank that doesn't make it anything other than a tank (with a rollover problem).
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But with DRM, what's to prevent you digitally securing the binaries and having a system on which only "trusted" binaries are allowed to run. The source is all but useless now, as anyone compiling it will need to get their binaries signed to run on Vista++ or OSXII.
I bolded the real problem, which the GPL v3 does nothing to solve. All it does it say that the GPLed software cannot be an "effective technological protection measure", meaning it can't invoke the DMCA clauses that make circumventing such a thing illegal. That still won't let you get your modified binary signed by Microsoft to run on Vista++, so the source is still useless.
It's all the content producers need to make it official that they will not be supporting Linux. No music, no movies, and what most Slashdotters will notice most, no games.
Why would this be the case? What difference would GPLv3 make on any of these things? They aren't GPL v2 today, so they aren't going to be GPL v3 tomorrow. You don't need to release a program under the GPL for it to run in Linux, as the ample supply of proprietary software for the operating system shows.
Unless you mean the anti-DRM sentiment in the GPL v3 will cause the writers of DRM to cease supporting Linux as some kind of protest? Or because they are too ignorant to know that you don't need to comply with the GPL to write software that merely runs under linux?
Or do you mean all these things will only run under a (You Can't Be) Trusted Computing environment, and this would require kernel support that GPL v3 would make inneffective? Well, guess what, it's already inneffective if you have to give the users the source code. Trusted Computing as the media empires imagine it will never exist in Linux. So what are we losing?
First, a quick point about GPL v2: You can't make effective DRM software with it. How could you? Since GPL grants users the rights to gain the source code and to modify it, then as soon as you distribute your DRM app you have given the user the right to modify that app so that, after decrypting whatever it is that the program is designed to decrypt it writes it to disk in a non-protected format. They could modify it so that whatever keys it uses to decrypt the media are also written to disk.
The only way you could prevent this is if your country has a law that would trump the permission-to-modify-and-use-for-any-purpose provisions of the GPL v2. Specifically we're talking the DMCA. Since your DRM software is a "protection measure", bypassing it is illegal, and thus modifying the software to write out un-restricted files would be illegal even though the license you got the software under gave you explicit permission to do this and more. This is where GPL v3 comes in:
From http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft: "No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other software capable of accessing the same data."
I understand that the term "effective technological protection measure" is to specifically address the DMCA, which makes it illegal to bypass said measures. It's basically stating that no GPL v3 software can ever invoke those clauses of the DMCA.
Which is moot for several reasons. First, there will never be DRM software released under any GPL license at all since they'd have to be nuts to give out the source code and rely on DMCA enforcement to protect the content, especially since the DMCA is U.S.-only. Second, because the DMCA is U.S.-only, this clause is only effective in the U.S. to begin with.
The other clause in the same section, which references spyware as "works that illegally invade users' privacy" is similarly useless because "illegal" varies from country to country and if it was illegal then you could get them for that illegal act and don't need to resort to copyright infringement to stop them.
I think the entire Section 3 of the draft license could be removed and not change the resulting impact of the license one iota.
It's called the confirmation bias, and it happens to everyone. Even me.
But it doesn't happen to me! I'm different, and always view things based solely on logic. Mmm... It doesn't happen to me. It doesn't happen to me. I'm purely rational, never emotional. Oh yeah, that's the stuff. Right in the pleasure centers... It doesn't happen to me...
Then that's a nonsensical caveat. You might as well have said "True, but only in an alternate reality in which the abuse of power is not a fundamental constant of human societies".
Thus, any door you pick has a 1/100 chance of being right.
Monte then opens 98 doors. The original door you chose now has a 1/2 chance of being right. So does the other, unpicked door. Originally, both had a 1/100 chance of being right, now both have a 1/2 chance of being right.
Your statement that the probability of your initial pick being correct has suddenly and inexplicably changed should be your first clue that you are doing something wrong.
If you still think switching is the right choice, answer this question: After you've switched, is it a good idea to switch again? You originally made your 'switching is better' argument after gaining some new information. After the switch, though, you're in the exact same position, with the exact same information. Thus, the argument still holds, and switching back is better than taking the one you have.
Yes, you have the exact same information -- that the first door you picked had a 1/3rd chance of being right. Since you still have this information, you know that switching back to that door is not the same as switching away from that door.
To look at it a slightly different way - You pick a door. Monte then switches around all the doors randomly, so you don't know which door was yours.
In that case, you don't know anything, so you have to guess. But that isn't the case, now is it? You do know what door you picked, so you know that if you were wrong initially switching will get you the right door.
The fact is that if your initial guess is wrong, switching will win. This has nothing to do with probability; it comes directly from the description of the problem -- Monte will only open a door that does not have the prize in it, so if your initial pick did not have the prize, the other door remaining will have the prize. If your initial guess was wrong, switching will win. If your initial guess is right, staying will win.
The probability is then simple. Your initial guess is right 1/3rd of the time, so staying wins 1/3rd of the time. Your initial guess is wrong 2/3rd of the time, so switching wins 2/3rd of the time.
I fling my poo at the d20 system and especially D&D 3E with its new fangled, computer-artsy books and "prestige" classes. No good DM should be letting his players live past level 10 anyway.
Okay, your poo-fling attack uses a base of 6 dice. Would you like to invoke your Simian Ancestry skill for an additional 2 dice? The d20 handbook has a base defense of 4 dice, with a bonus 2 for it's high-gloss low-stick cover.
The most carpul tunnel-inducing game I ever played was Shadowrun (though I'm sure others can name worse). Every attack took at least ten dice rolls with most seeming to add up to nothing. The funny thing is that at an age where I was still all about the hack-and-slash, we quickly developed a style of trying to solve problems without resorting to violence, since violence meant at least 45 minutes of dice rolling.
I'm personally boggled by the fact that they were playing D&D. D&D (particularly 3.0/3.5) is much more geared towards fast, kick-in-the-door style play than drama. There are other systems that aren't so crunchy and filled with combat-oriented mechanics that would suit them better.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why you need any "mechanics" to handle anything but the combat. Why do I need "rules" to govern anything other than what happens when I try to stab someone with a pointy stick? To me role-playing is about all the things you need a human gamemaster for, the things no rule system can encompass anyway.
Uh, no. The only information you have is: There are two doors left. One of which is bad, one of which is good.
Wrong, you do have more information. You know which door you picked initially. You know that this pick had a 2/3rd chance of being wrong, and you know that if you were wrong the remaining door is the correct one. Based on this knowledge, the probability is greater for switching.
If you walked in off the street after Monty had opened one door, and not told you which the original one was, then your assumption of no knowledge holds and it would be 50%.
"Privacy" is just the affirmative way of saying "Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures".
Listening to my phone conversations is a search. Being free of such listening without a court authorized warrant is privacy.
And this right is absolutely fundamental.
Hey, nice find. Thanks.
You know, I remember hearing about the mystery of the flying bumble bee and how it went against what we knew of aerodynamics... and then I remember hearing how we figured it out. Years ago. From memory, does it have to do with vortices created off the tips of the wings? Okay, now I've looked at the article. No mention of vortices, just that they flap their wings 15% faster than a smaller fruit fly. Huh, okay.
As long as there is something we do not know, there will be room for a god or a designer.
/rant off, I guess.
And the sad thing to me is that many religious people feel that the only place for our God is in the holes left by our ignorance of the physical world, that there needs to be "room" for God. For them, a non-divine explanation for physical events is a blow to their faith, and to me this means their faith is weak.
For me, I love to learn about how the universe works -- it's infinitely fascinating -- and the maxim "God did it" is just a statement of faith, not a paltry excuse to avoid figuring out how He chose to do it.
Learning Euler's Formula was practically a religious experience for me.
Knowledge is not the enemy of faith; indeed they should support one another. However knowledge is the enemy of dogma and of authority; and since authority makes no effort to separate faith and dogma, we end up seeing the knowledgeable and faithful in conflict. As our knowledge increases this is a losing battle for authority, and thus we get ID as the desperate counter-attack. In the long run, though, authority will only end up sacrificing faith and knowledge, leaving only dogma.
That's funny. This is the quote I think of when I think of SCO:
"I see dead lawsuits. Submitting briefs like regular lawsuits. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead."
LOTR approach: Ok, this one is difficult as it involves convincing the people with the PSP, that it is in fact an evil artifact that must be thrown into Mount Doom, and that you are the only one who can perform such a task. [Do not actually throw the PSP into Mount Doom]
Well I wasn't going to throw my precious PSP into Mount Doom, but then some crazy green midget bit my fscking finger off and I dropped him and the PSP into the crag!
Before you say it, the subject line was designed to accurately reflect the fact that all such inquisitions are rife with corruption and hypocrisy.
Again, that works in theory. But not always in reality.
/. editorial staff expanded beyond you and Hemos that /. started to noticeably dive in quality. I don't know what the answer is, I don't know what the relationship between editors is. You might try suggesting they stop going with the easy, safe submissions of known submitters versus others that include better links and equal if not better text.
the spammer is taking the time to submit many many stories to get a couple through. The casual user only submits the stories he thinks are the absolute best. If we pick a dozen stories, they can't all be the very very best. There will be a few stories that are not as great... and a few that simply are of interest to a different subset of readers. A spammer submits 10... if i order them in terms of how widely known they are, #1-5 are submitted 20-30 times... but number 8 and 9 maybe only once or twice.
Okay, so you're saying that when the only person to submit an interesting yet slightly obscure story is a queue spammer, that queue spammer is going to get their submission posted. This makes sense except...
The queue spammers are getting their submissions accepted on stories that are not obscure, when there are 20-30 submissions, and a casual perusal of the comments shows half a dozen irritated submitters who had at least comparable if not plainly superior submissions on the same story which were rejected. Yet the queue spammer not only wins, but wins several times in a row. Clearly there is more going on here, and your explanation sounds more like "theory" than "reality".
I'm not going to claim that the spammers are being deliberately picked or given preference due to some unknown deal. I am going to claim that, consciously or not, certain submitters are being accepted more readily than others irrespective of the relative merits of the submissions, and I don't think this claim lacks ample support. At the very least, the fact that a story that links to a blog is frequently picked over a similarly well-worded submission with links to primary sources shows that the system is not working even for those most popular stories.
I think part of the problem here (meaning this very story) is that the problem is not you, yet you have to come to defend the editorial process as you exercise it. Frankly, it was the moment
There are a few famous movies out there "floating" around (someone linked one elsewhere of a living frog) demonstrating this. A large enough magnet with a powerful enough field gets you antigravitiy.
:)
Um... Like I said, I'm no physicist, but diamagnetic levitation isn't "antigravity" any more than counteracting the gravitational force on a frog with the normal force exerted by your palm is "antigravity".
Gravity exhibits none of the interference properties of waves nor any behaviors of particles. We may yet discover that we've already unified all of the fields there are to unify (I do believe that strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces have been unified already), the rubber-sheet view of gravity may be correct after all and gravity may just be a property of space.
I thought it might, but the last physics class I took only referred to the "electro-weak" force. I do suspect that gravity is a different thing altogether than the other forces; I think that's pretty strongly implied by GR. And of course I'll accept at face value the claim that we will learn things we don't expect today about gravity (and all of physics). To think otherwise would smack of hubris.
and dishwashing robots.
I already have a robot for washing my dishes, it's called a "dish washer". I admit it doesn't look or sound very robot-y, so I instead call mine The Wash-o-tron 9000.
My foodstuff-blending robot is named Maximillian.
Well in THEORY if you get high enough in energy the gravitational and electromagnetic forces would be indistinguishable.
That theory, were it to exist, would be the TOE I was talking about. It is only at extremely high energies that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces merge, at lower energies they are distinct. When this was discovered, it was suspected/hoped that the other forces (strong nuclear, gravitational) could also be unified (thus "Grand Unified Theory" or "Theory of Everything"), but to my knowledge this has not happened. Please correct me if I am wrong and such a theory exists.
Naw, nothing cool like that. All that happens is if they get enough Judge-karma, then their rulings automatically start with a Justice rating of 2.
It's also, and this gets into opnion here, not really competing with Unix.
/.!). Granted the proprietary Unices still exist, but their days are likely numbered. The writing is already on the wall for AIX.
I don't think that's true. Linux seems to be eating proprietary Unix for lunch. Data center servers and engineering workstations that would have before run Solaris or AIX or some other Unix are now running Linux. Linux is offered by major vendors -- IBM, Sun, and HP -- on big proprietary hardware solutions than would even five years ago assuredly had those vendors' own Unix solutions. Crays run Linux. Z-series run linux. SGI workstations run Linux. Even some big banks run their servers on Linux (I saw this on
Although in the bigger picture, what is happening is that commodity is winning over specialty. Both Linux and Windows are eating Unix for lunch in the server room, because both OSes run on commodity x86 hardware. In this sense Linux is competing strongly with Windows, but in either case it would be a commodity box running one or the other replacing a proprietary box running proprietary UNIX. However at the same time open is beginning to win out over proprietary for largely the same reasons (which are all about utility:cost ratios).
Case in point that makes me chuckle whenever I think about it (because I'm a huge geek): I'm writing this post on a Sun workstation with AMD64 processors running Red Hat Linux.
The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.
OK - so far, so good.
Um, what?! Granted I'm not a physicist or even a wanna-be, but if they had discovered (in the 50s!) the GUT/TOE that combines the gravitational force with the already unified electric, magnetic, and weak nuclear forces, I think I would have heard about it! Actually, I have heard of attempts, all of them recent and still in development (like string theory), and all of them lacking experimental verification.
If you're going to accept as 'so far, so good' the concept of a magnetically-induced gravitational field I don't see why you won't accept the multi-dimensional part.
What's funny is that he started asking what the students needed their SUVs for and then quickly stopped when three of the first four students he asked actually needed their SUV for summer jobs (towing a large landscaping trailer, carrying tools and saw horses for decking, and carpooling six people to an internship an hour away).
His problem was that he was surprised that some people needed their SUV (or a vehicle like it; for hauling jobs a pickup truck is likely to be superior so there probably was some non-practical aspect to the choice). If he had been aware that some people need the cars like I am, he could have made his rant into an even more devastating case of duck-duck-goose. As you said, three of the first four had a reason, so that 4th person could have easily had an example made of them.
Duck - "You drive an SUV because you need it. Good for you." Duck - "Oh, you need yours to haul a trailer, that's nice." Goose! "What?! All you do is drive to school and back?! What do you need an SUV for, other than helping yourself be killed in a rollover accident?! Do you like wasting gas just so people might mistake you for these other guys that need such a vehicle?" And so on.
To me, it's like semis. Do truckers need to drive semi-trucks? Yes, nothing else will do the job. Would anyone else driving a semi-truck be the biggest retard imagineable? Yes. Such a person would have ridicule heaped upon them at every turn, and they would be scorned by members of the opposite sex.
I believe this is the solution to the SUV problem. Those who buy them without having any practical use for them should be humiliated and outed as the posers they are.
So you've made your case that SUV's are more likely to sustain MORE damage than a typical passenger vehicle. Then why the complaining?
Because even though I think you're foolish for believing SUVs are safer, I don't actually want you to be less safe. Oh, and you do make things more dangerous for others too.
In reality I suppose it all depends on the driver.
In the sense that the #1 method of improving safety is to be more aware and drive safer, yes. This does not mean that superior driving skill can eliminate the safety disadvantage of SUVs, because even with the best driving ever you would still be more safe in a safer car.
Just because I chose to have a tank doesn't mean I plan to use it like one.
Just because you don't drive your tank like a tank that doesn't make it anything other than a tank (with a rollover problem).