Correlations, the proof usually cited for this argument, aren't enough. Everyone who smokes weed first drank milk. This does not prove that milk is a gateway drug. (Doesn't prove it isn't either.)
A more reasonable argument is that using marijuana causes you to hang out with criminals and become like them. This unfortunately is circular: If marijuana is illegal, you have to get it from criminals, so it should be illegal to prevent this.
Historical Note: my parents argued very strenuously about pinball machines being a gateway to criminal behavior, a waste of time, brain rotting etc., but neither suggested outlawing them.
Here's a URL for a wired story that discusses ENIAC's programmers.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/3711.htm l
I think we can rule out "brains are wired wrong". I'd like to hear a good explanation because computer science seems rather gender independent to me. I'd certainly do whatever I can (probably very little) to make the field friendlier to women.
They seem to bear out the fact that low levels of marijuana are not remarkably harmful to driving ability. I've seen other tests that suggest that these results may not hold in the presence of other drugs like alcohol or nicotine however.
I'm strongly for legalization of weed, but I don't object to laws against use of dangerous equipment under the influence of drugs, ignorance, or stupidity.
I think a functional test would be far better than legislated blood levels, simply because people vary widely in reaction to drugs, and it also means the government can get out of the business of policing what you put into your body. If someone can't pass a functional driving test stone cold sober, should they drive? L.A. implemented such a test for their bus drivers some years ago, so I think it possible.
How long have small shareware vendors who don't cripple their programs been getting abused? Estimates of registration usually come out like 1/6 of the users.
Maybe like me, you don't like the shareware model much, but why hasn't the government been all over this? The money they failed to get has stifled a market for small independent software vendors who don't wish to use classic distribution channels.
If you think soldiers should vote on whether to take cover or advance I'm glad you aren't interested in a military career.:)
I think you're joking, but you bring up a good point anyway.
Many probably aren't interested in a career in waste disposal or processing either, but that's no excuse for dissing those that are. There's this weird thing called "service" that some folks actually believe in, and that helps get the unpleasant tasks of society accomplished. More politicians should believe - they are the real cause of misapplications of military force.
Yeah, I do. I also remember Baratz taking a shot at Mozilla, suggesting it would be better under their "community source" license. That license bothers me some too.
But, being hopeful, a Linux server is direct competition for their own servers. I don't really think they expect to take over the PC desktop. Ditching linux support for Star Office buys little and would definitely ignite a firestorm.
Yes, I agree that if we want to call it a justice system, not a justice lottery, laws should be enforced uniformly. Mete out punishment proportional to the crime - not what's "best for the state".
The practice of "making examples" is an implicit admission that the law is nearly unenforceable. If it can't be enforced, its generally a bad law. Not that what it prohibits is good, but that it weakens respect for law in general when laws are commonly disobeyed.
I think there is still value to be had in both working on OSS software for free, and doing it for money.
In the paid case the value is obvious.
In the free case, you still have the advantage of lack of deadlines and a much more relaxed working environment, plus more control over features. Basically, its still fun. I don't see how deadlines or PHB-management techniques can be enforced without compensation.
One question is whether the corporate Linux entities will continue to mainline programs from free contributors in their distributions, since it won't be as possible to use them in marketing or control their nature. If they don't, it seems to me Debian can only get more popular by doing so.
Another is whether commercialization will affect the way kernel development occurs. There is a danger of buggy releases from trying to meet shipment schedules for commercial entities. With Linus not working for a commercial Linux entity (by his choice) I'm fairly confident that his style will continue to drive development style. We may see some rushed releases initially, but I can't see Linus not putting his foot down on commercially driven schedules if it becomes a problem.
If Linux wants to dream of world domination it will have to account for the fact that most users are "stuck" in a one computer home environment, and worse, the majority of them are interested in playing games.
I'm not arguing against X, I don't know enough to make a case. Speed and bandwidth issues are probably going to be less important fairly soon anyway. I do think that there is a lot of interest in high performance graphics in the worldwide computing community, both by home users and scientists.
Don't computers primarily help information workers like managers and R&D departments? How much do they help assembly floor workers? Which contributes more directly to the amount of product out the door? Management and R&D are crucial to a company, but not directly related to the rate of products manufactured.
Consider a large assembly line. A lot of the machines are run by embedded processors. If one becomes faster it's impossible to speed up just those parts of the line using it. How often is it worth retooling the whole line to take advantage of improvements? Judging by how slow American car manufacturers have been to adopt the level of automation found in Japanese plants, not too often.
You can more easily implement improvements to the process locally, and I think computers are helping there, but not as much with the speed of production.
I think another reason some like Fortran is a large body of publically available, well-tested, and highly optimised fortran code to perform common algorithms like FFTs. They can all be done with C++ just as efficiently I'm sure, but then you often have to write them, test them, and optimize them, which takes time.
Your skin is being bombarded by antimatter particles all the time. Single particles don't matter all that much to macroscopic structures like balloons and skin though. Unless it hits something real small like a DNA site. In that case you might have a mutant cell but it will probably just keep on working or die, the odds of it being cancerous are very low. Balloons don't have to worry.
I think it would be pretty rare that big chunks of matter and antimatter actually collided, unless maybe their centers collided -- galaxies are pretty sparse collections of matter. You'd probably get a lot of dust colliding though, and the few actual star collisions would be quite impressive I'm sure. E = 2*m*c*c = a whole hell of a lot when m is a stellar mass.
You could, for example, move a ship by letting it fall towards a small charged black hole that you accelerated with electromagnetic force. (Yes, this is very unrealistic due to the mass necessary in the black hole to produce large gravitational accelerations.)
Since gravity works on all parts of the spaceship and its occupants equally no acceleration would be felt in the ship, any more than in a falling elevator. (Except from the hole's tidal forces.)
You could survive as much acceleration as the tidal forces would allow this way, probably some hundreds of g's at least.
"Obvious, except that you would have to compensate for anywhere from several years to several centuries travel time *and* you have to know where the reciever is. In the case of ships, esp. exploration vehicles, there is no way of knowing exactly where they'll be. (Unless you just shoot them in straight line; not very good exploration, though.)"
I doubt radio would be chosen by a species with the ability to travel interstellar distances practically. That much improvement over our technology would almost require improved communication technologies we can't imagine.
My comments are more reasonable in terms of planet to planet communications by species unable to transit the distance physically, such as SETI is now trying to accomplish. For communications on any one planet I think broadcast is probably going die fairly early.
The other issue is that there very well may be predatory species in the galaxy that make broadcasting about as smart as making noise in the jungle at night. Maybe some just don't like noise interfering with their astronomy and have their ways of letting others know.
"Which begs the question, why conserve the energy? We'll be able to produce more than enough energy to do cost effective omnidirectional broadcasts within a few centuries, let alone ten."
Use of energy produces unrecoverable waste heat which shortens the usable lifetime of the universe -- it may be considered unneighborly:). It also produces undesirable effects on the planet using the energy (dams, fuel combustion, more expensive energy, global warming). Our technology is working on decreasing the power required to do things, I think it reasonable most sentient species would. Engineers hate waste no matter how many eyes they have -- what can I say?
If you are TRYING to communicate with other unknown species then an omnidirectional low-tech broadcast IS probably your best bet, I admit. Just not sure what percentage of species would be trying, or what happens to those that do (if anything).
"No, but unless we're missing something increadibly obvious[3], they'd be using *some* kind of EM waves, which we should be able to detect. (Perhaps not via radio telescope, but somehow.) "
One pretty obvious thing is that line-of-sight communication by radio or laser, e.g. is far more power efficient and secure than spherical broadcast waves. Even if you want to broadcast to all stations it might be more efficient or desirable to network on a set of line-of-sight transmitters (or cables on one planet).
Here on earth, our electromagnetic spectrum from afar was much brighter before cable and satellite TV started replacing broadcast stations, and this is in very few years since the inception of the technology. It's not to hard to imagine all our media being on fibreoptic cable (or better) within a century.
Ok, assume within 1000 years of the invention of radio, civilizations stop wasting energy by sending information in all directions. Assume there have been 1000 planets with technological civilizations within the last 5 billion years. The probability that one of those 1000 year periods overlaps our current time is less than 1 in 5000. It's not that unreasonable to say we have only shown that life off earth is rare, not that it doesn't exist.
It might be that most aliens start encrypting their transmissions early in their development, thereby looking like random noise to the rest of the universe.
Then there's the somewhat ominous theory that something bad happens to any planet that spams the galaxy with tripe... we probably DON'T want to be RBL'ed.:) Hopefully they have a tolerant policy towards newbies.
I think the poster agrees that the school is within its rights to consider selling drugs undesirable behavior, its more a matter of balance.
If the crime had been selling cigarettes or alcohol, would you still feel the same? These are both crimes too, when the purchaser is a minor, and both are well documented hazards to health.
If so, then fine. I suspect the penalty would have been less severe in these cases, and I agree with the poster that isn't right.
California has a very high asshole quotient, I wouldn't argue that. I don't know, but I'd guess some of the stupidity you experienced was from the politically correct (but otherwise completely wrong) knee-jerk liberals who think being 1/16 southerner means you must be prejudiced.
I have a friend from Missouri who has a coupla Phds and some MA's and he got the same "you must be a hick" reaction. I'm relieved to hear that its only California with this problem, I had thought it more widespread because my friend has had trouble finding work across the country.
I realize you're angry and rightfully so, but not everyone in California is the complete idiot you portray either. Way too many though... I agree.
Slashdot Mirror
What an interesting mechanism to get the truth out, eh? I think politicians call these "deniable leaks".
The whole gateway issue is propaganda.
Correlations, the proof usually cited for this argument, aren't enough. Everyone who smokes weed first drank milk. This does not prove that milk is a gateway drug. (Doesn't prove it isn't either.)
A more reasonable argument is that using marijuana causes you to hang out with criminals and become like them. This unfortunately is circular: If marijuana is illegal, you have to get it from criminals, so it should be illegal to prevent this.
Historical Note: my parents argued very strenuously about pinball machines being a gateway to criminal behavior, a waste of time, brain rotting etc., but neither suggested outlawing them.
Here's a URL for a wired story that discusses ENIAC's programmers.
m l
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/3711.ht
I think we can rule out "brains are wired wrong". I'd like to hear a good explanation because computer science seems rather gender independent to me. I'd certainly do whatever I can (probably very little) to make the field friendlier to women.
Jim
There have been studies on this subject, e.g:
2 06.html
http://www.commonlink.com/~olsen/HEMP/IHA/iha01
They seem to bear out the fact that low levels of marijuana are not remarkably harmful to driving ability. I've seen other tests that suggest that these results may not hold in the presence of other drugs like alcohol or nicotine however.
I'm strongly for legalization of weed, but I don't object to laws against use of dangerous equipment under the influence of drugs, ignorance, or stupidity.
I think a functional test would be far better than legislated blood levels, simply because people vary widely in reaction to drugs, and it also means the government can get out of the business of policing what you put into your body. If someone can't pass a functional driving test stone cold sober, should they drive? L.A. implemented such a test for their bus drivers some years ago, so I think it possible.
Jim
Try to be thankful it's no longer necessary to bite the head off a live chicken!
:)
I feel sorry for those that feel a need to police other people's English, yet can't avoid three errors and a redundancy in their own post.
Humans are gregarious, use slang, and often make mistakes. Why not join the club?
Absolutely.
How long have small shareware vendors who don't cripple their programs been getting abused? Estimates of registration usually come out like 1/6 of the users.
Maybe like me, you don't like the shareware model much, but why hasn't the government been all over this? The money they failed to get has stifled a market for small independent software vendors who don't wish to use classic distribution channels.
Clue: large corporations don't market shareware.
Jim
The same could be said for joining a corporation.
:)
If you think soldiers should vote on whether to take cover or advance I'm glad you aren't interested in a military career.
I think you're joking, but you bring up a good point anyway.
Many probably aren't interested in a career in waste disposal or processing either, but that's no excuse for dissing those that are. There's this weird thing called "service" that some folks actually believe in, and that helps get the unpleasant tasks of society accomplished. More politicians should believe - they are the real cause of misapplications of military force.
"thorougly"? Now that's annoying.
Committee for the Re-education of Anal People
Yeah, I do. I also remember Baratz taking a shot at Mozilla, suggesting it would be better under their "community source" license. That license bothers me some too.
But, being hopeful, a Linux server is direct competition for their own servers. I don't really think they expect to take over the PC desktop. Ditching linux support for Star Office buys little and would definitely ignite a firestorm.
Yes, I agree that if we want to call it a justice system, not a justice lottery, laws should be enforced uniformly. Mete out punishment proportional to the crime - not what's "best for the state".
The practice of "making examples" is an implicit admission that the law is nearly unenforceable. If it can't be enforced, its generally a bad law. Not that what it prohibits is good, but that it weakens respect for law in general when laws are commonly disobeyed.
I think there is still value to be had in both working on OSS software for free, and doing it for money.
In the paid case the value is obvious.
In the free case, you still have the advantage of lack of deadlines and a much more relaxed working environment, plus more control over features. Basically, its still fun. I don't see how deadlines or PHB-management techniques can be enforced without compensation.
One question is whether the corporate Linux entities will continue to mainline programs from free contributors in their distributions, since it won't be as possible to use them in marketing or control their nature. If they don't, it seems to me Debian can only get more popular by doing so.
Another is whether commercialization will affect the way kernel development occurs. There is a danger of buggy releases from trying to meet shipment schedules for commercial entities. With Linus not working for a commercial Linux entity (by his choice) I'm fairly confident that his style will continue to drive development style. We may see some rushed releases initially, but I can't see Linus not putting his foot down on commercially driven schedules if it becomes a problem.
If Linux wants to dream of world domination it will have to account for the fact that most users
are "stuck" in a one computer home environment, and worse, the majority of them are interested in playing games.
I'm not arguing against X, I don't know enough to make a case. Speed and bandwidth issues are probably going to be less important fairly soon anyway. I do think that there is a lot of interest in high performance graphics in the worldwide computing community, both by home users and scientists.
Don't computers primarily help information workers like managers and R&D departments? How much do they help assembly floor workers? Which contributes more directly to the amount of product out the door? Management and R&D are crucial to a company, but not directly related to the rate of products manufactured.
Consider a large assembly line. A lot of the machines are run by embedded processors. If one becomes faster it's impossible to speed up just those parts of the line using it. How often is it worth retooling the whole line to take advantage of improvements? Judging by how slow American car manufacturers have been to adopt the level of automation found in Japanese plants, not too often.
You can more easily implement improvements to the process locally, and I think computers are helping there, but not as much with the speed of production.
Jim
There is a story of a malicious attack on the kernel mailing list over on Linux Today as well.
URL:
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/8912.html
Jim
FAQ says to mail bug reports to malda@slashdot.org
I think another reason some like Fortran is a large body of publically available, well-tested, and highly optimised fortran code to perform common algorithms like FFTs. They can all be done with C++ just as efficiently I'm sure, but then you often have to write them, test them, and optimize them, which takes time.
Your skin is being bombarded by antimatter particles all the time. Single particles don't matter all that much to macroscopic structures like balloons and skin though. Unless it hits something real small like a DNA site. In that case you might have a mutant cell but it will probably just keep on working or die, the odds of it being cancerous are very low. Balloons don't have to worry.
I think it would be pretty rare that big chunks of matter and antimatter actually collided, unless maybe their centers collided -- galaxies are pretty sparse collections of matter. You'd probably get a lot of dust colliding though, and the few actual star collisions would be quite impressive I'm sure. E = 2*m*c*c = a whole hell of a lot when m is a stellar mass.
You could, for example, move a ship by letting it fall towards a small charged black hole that you accelerated with electromagnetic force. (Yes, this is very unrealistic due to the mass necessary in the black hole to produce large gravitational accelerations.)
Since gravity works on all parts of the spaceship and its occupants equally no acceleration would be felt in the ship, any more than in a falling elevator. (Except from the hole's tidal forces.)
You could survive as much acceleration as the tidal forces would allow this way, probably some hundreds of g's at least.
Jim
"[0]: Including the NSA, which I actually like quite a bit. IMO, it's all but harmless. "
:)
I have no data. But if there is any government agency composed mostly of geeks, NSA has got to be it. Wonder how many read slashdot?
Nay, its their political masters I fear. Pretty much the same way I feel about the military for that matter.
Jim
"Obvious, except that you would have to compensate for anywhere from several years to several centuries travel time *and* you have to know where the reciever is. In the case of ships, esp. exploration vehicles, there is no way of knowing exactly where they'll be. (Unless you just shoot them in straight line; not very good exploration, though.)"
:). It also produces undesirable effects on the planet using the energy (dams, fuel combustion, more expensive energy, global warming). Our technology is working on decreasing the power required to do things, I think it reasonable most sentient species would. Engineers hate waste no matter how many eyes they have -- what can I say?
I doubt radio would be chosen by a species with the ability to travel interstellar distances practically. That much improvement over our technology would almost require improved communication technologies we can't imagine.
My comments are more reasonable in terms of planet to planet communications by species unable to transit the distance physically, such as SETI is now trying to accomplish. For communications on any one planet I think broadcast is probably going die fairly early.
The other issue is that there very well may be predatory species in the galaxy that make broadcasting about as smart as making noise in the jungle at night. Maybe some just don't like noise interfering with their astronomy and have their ways of letting others know.
"Which begs the question, why conserve the energy? We'll be able to produce more than enough energy to do cost effective omnidirectional broadcasts within a few centuries, let alone ten."
Use of energy produces unrecoverable waste heat which shortens the usable lifetime of the universe -- it may be considered unneighborly
If you are TRYING to communicate with other unknown species then an omnidirectional low-tech broadcast IS probably your best bet, I admit. Just not sure what percentage of species would be trying, or what happens to those that do (if anything).
Jim
"No, but unless we're missing something increadibly obvious[3], they'd be using *some* kind of EM waves, which we should be able to detect. (Perhaps not via radio telescope, but somehow.) "
One pretty obvious thing is that line-of-sight communication by radio or laser, e.g. is far more power efficient and secure than spherical broadcast waves. Even if you want to broadcast to all stations it might be more efficient or desirable to network on a set of line-of-sight transmitters (or cables on one planet).
Here on earth, our electromagnetic spectrum from afar was much brighter before cable and satellite TV started replacing broadcast stations, and this is in very few years since the inception of the technology. It's not to hard to imagine all our media being on fibreoptic cable (or better) within a century.
Ok, assume within 1000 years of the invention of radio, civilizations stop wasting energy by sending information in all directions. Assume there have been 1000 planets with technological civilizations within the last 5 billion years. The probability that one of those 1000 year periods overlaps our current time is less than 1 in 5000. It's not that unreasonable to say we have only shown that life off earth is rare, not that it doesn't exist.
Jim
It might be that most aliens start encrypting their transmissions early in their development, thereby looking like random noise to the rest of the universe.
Then there's the somewhat ominous theory that something bad happens to any planet that spams the galaxy with tripe... we probably DON'T want to be RBL'ed.
Jim
I think the poster agrees that the school is within its rights to consider selling drugs undesirable behavior, its more a matter of balance.
If the crime had been selling cigarettes or alcohol, would you still feel the same? These are both crimes too, when the purchaser is a minor, and both are well documented hazards to health.
If so, then fine. I suspect the penalty would have been less severe in these cases, and I agree with the poster that isn't right.
Jim
California has a very high asshole quotient, I wouldn't argue that. I don't know, but I'd guess some of the stupidity you experienced was from the politically correct (but otherwise completely wrong) knee-jerk liberals who think being 1/16 southerner means you must be prejudiced.
I have a friend from Missouri who has a coupla Phds and some MA's and he got the same "you must be a hick" reaction. I'm relieved to hear that its only California with this problem, I had thought it more widespread because my friend has had trouble finding work across the country.
I realize you're angry and rightfully so, but not everyone in California is the complete idiot you portray either. Way too many though... I agree.
Jim