Ahh the palm! I'm buying defective palm OS devices on ebay from time to time. It's easy to build fully functional palms (m100/m105) from several scrap ones, at about 10EUR (incl. shipping). Not that you should start buying broken palms on ebay, though:-)
I was just beginning to moderate this thread but I feel it is better to reply:
First of all, you too (like many/.ers) overuse 'Ethics. But you're talking about Morality here.
What you're essentially saying is that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (e.g. Article 1,3 [BTW, china is a member of the UN]) should not be universal. That is ok. Ironically, it's is a human right to post your opinion on slashdot (article 19).
But please be honest! If you think "fsck human rights", say that in your posts. Please, don't hide your thoughts behind cloudy "freedom for all, they have the right to choose their ethics etc.pp.". WHO CHOOSES?
This is the thing I really dislike about many right-wing libertarians (you seem to belong to this group). Essentially promoting social darwinism/economical exploitation/etc, but hiding this all behind the nice word "freedom". Freedom, i.e. economical freedom for those who have money or freedom to suppress others for those who have power (not suprisingly, being rich and being mighty correlates strongly).
Sorry, but I have to point out that the 2,756,234th floor is about 5500km above ground, i.e. out of the earth's atmosphere, certainly not in the troposphere:-)
Heh, and please post it here (die deutsche Übersetzung). The grandparent is one of those rare slashdot gems... i'm thinking about printing and pinning it onto my wall:)
IMHO, this is not a good idea. OpenMosix works by migrating processes to equalize the work load on a cluster. This is great for programs which are already splitted into several processes which do not communicate very much - you can avoid the hassle of writing PVM/MPI message passing code. But on workstations? They fail sometimes. People go home and switch the computers off. People reset them accidentally. Not good if your vi/emacs process sits on one of those computers.
OpenMosix would help if there is a pool of computers acting as terminal servers, but in the hands of experienced system administrators.
This seems to be a problem everywhere. The "drift to the center" also occurs here in germany. Actually, there is now a movement to form a new party left to one of germany's two big parties (SPD) because some people are annoyed. It's probably a matter of time before the other end of the political spectrum will be extended, too...
I don't really know how election campaigns are fought in the U.S. (But US foreign policy is an important issue worldwide, i.e. many people here are very interested in your november elections); But in our political system, I see at least one problem in a too "cost/benefit"-worried campaign. It seems that political agendas are mainly formed as follows:
1. Parties order polls about controversial issues. 2. The polls are evaluated and costs are associated to each issue, with mainly the following factors taken into the equation:
a) importance of the issue for the general public (i.e. number of votes lost/gained for yes/no to the particular issue)
b) importance of the issue to the members of the party (a political party can't bear with a massive member loss) 3. The political agenda will be written according to the scores given by the evaluation of the polls.
Especially a) leads to a equalization of political agendas. And it seems that b) gets less and less important if one iterates this process because party members are gradually replaced with new ones from the public (which is preconditioned by very similar agendas). At the same time, many people get frustated about politics.
IMHO, this is what you get if you run a political party like you should run a company, only with votes instead of money.
I heard other things. If you read TFA, you'll notice that they are talking about a force acting equally on *both* probes. Claims that this is a new effect are a bit too early, though.
Occam's razor doesn't mean that scientists should stop investigating because there _may be_ a simple explanation. If there are interesting, unexplained things, one has to go down and calculate every traditional force(/space time curvature) which may act on the spacecraft; numerical simulations of the radiation pressure of the RTGs, taking the geometry of the space craft into account. Other external electromagnetic forces. Etc.pp.
Then, there will probably be a traditional explanation of the effect. If not send some probes out too further investigate the effect. After all, experimental physics is not only about testing the theory's POV, it is also about exploring the world and finding new effects. You can have wrong calculations by theoreticians even in such fields where there is a fundamental theory capable of explaining everything. (This includes nearly every field of physics today - except nuclear/particle physics and astrophysics).
If you can see and hear it, you can copy it. If you can make a raw copy of the media, you can pirate it without loss of quality, even if you can only play the copies in an SVP device.
Hey, here are my (maybe not so) tin-foil hat ideas about how they'll try to block these paths:
1. Every decoder chip does individual watermarking on the produced output. 2. Consumer units are only sold if you register them with your ID. Similar to the methods already in place to prevent misuse of cellular phones. In my country (germany), you have to show your ID upon buying a cellular. You can even hide this player to ID mapping if you only allow electronic cash in the stores where the units are sold... 3. Water marking/individual creation of the media. If you (legally) download it from the net, this is easy. Music stores with individual "secure burners" will follow in the next step. Individually burned ROMs (maybe even semiconductor based and with own DRM on chip). Plus: Can be advertised as a benefit: "The next step in _individuality_ after your colored phone cover - 10 out of the 100 top hits on your _individual_ secure card. Only 9.99EUR. Buy it now at xyz.com."
Considering the first scenario, the analog hole, you'll think twice before copying the output of your player because "they" know it was you player which has been used for playback because of 1. and 2.
Step 3. to prevent the second scenario will take a bit longer to implement, but the development started already.
And canada hasn't the death penalty. All EU members havn't also. I think this is even more important issue.
Even if you take all the other (very important!) arguments aside and only consider the "detterence efficiency": Criminals get really nihilistic if they know their goverment is also.
(Don't confuse ozone generators with negative ion generators. Ozone causes permanent lung damage, over time. Ozone generators also produce ions, but so what?.) Ion generators also produce ozone. They are usually just a small HV generator with electrodes attached. And you have corona discharges there. Ion generators also produce nitrous oxides and other similarly nasty compounds.
AFAIK, what they do not produce is what they are advertised for, negative ions. Ok, they do, but the average lifetime of single ions in air is below the msec range.
People are scared about free radicals in food, but with an ion/ozone generator, you're producing them in mass quantities of them and suck them right into your lungs.
As I'm building DIY N2 lasers and tesla coils, I like the fine ozone smell, though:-) You just have to know where the dangers lie...
There are sometimes capacitors on circuit boards. Sure. Wait a week. Or, if you are in a hurry, discharge the high voltage ones (power supply) with a resistor which you hold with an isolated gripper. Be careful, though, they're really dangerous.
Also make sure that you have discharged all capacitors which store >=15V in them. Probably only the power supply filtering caps have this property. This is important because sparks easily ignite alcohol and other solvents...
There are sometimes batteries on circuit boards - for example to keep track of the wall clock time when the machine is off.
Take them out if you are overly cautious. Or ignore them: As another poster said, they single-cells or max. two chained single cells (older equipment), i.e. only 3V are present. That is not much and the mix of dust and alcohol will probably not so conductive that the batteries will explode or overheat or components fail because of wrong voltages applied to them.
The biggest problem is probably the fire hazard. I would do this outside, one part after each other, the alcohol-soaked parts immediately removed off the scene and with direct access to water and no obstacles if you need to run a way in an emergency!
However the theoritical future has nothing to do with now. At this point, precomiled code is more efficient (in some cases quite a lot) and Java does not provide access to accelerated features. There is a REASON that Doom 3, UT 2004, etc are written in a language that precomiles to native code. Both seek to be cross platform (and UT 2004 is to an amazing extent) however Java is NOT the right tool for them at this time. Thanks ALOT! This is what I try to say here all the time, problem is that/. is overrun by java nuts.
I would also like to add:
1. JVM != Java. See gcj. Or mips2java. Of course, because the JVM architecture is optimized for Java code, C/C++ code doesn't get as efficiently compiled into JVM code. This is no advantage of Java, it is a poor design of the JVM. 2. Check out LLVM. These people are essentially trying to do (they are not yet there but it is one of their essential goals and no marketing blurb) what Java promised for years. Front-end language independent.
I didn't want to start a thread about religion. Apparently, there are quite a few religious nuts on/. . What a pity. To the grandparent:
I'm personally agnostic and not atheist because that would be another "anti-faith" faith for me. So you can't argue about whether god exists with me:) Look for girls which are like you but *please* learn a bit more about the findings of other people using the scientific method. The evidence is really overwhelming.
Using religion to explain things which are easily explained by science is thinking to a certain extent logically and reasonable, but stopping suddenly if there is an explanation in the bible/quran/wherever. Why do you do that? BTW, esoteric "paranormal" reasoning is the same, but you only stop even earlier in your process of thinking (Maybe as soon as such 'scientifically sounding' things as "energy pendulums" are mentioned). This is pretty incoherent. It does not neccessarily say something about the intellectual capabilities of people like you but it does express that your are not using your brain to think about philosophical issues at all. And no, I do not want to insult yo, be a smart-ass here or like to sound intellectual, but *please* think about such things. Maybe it helps you (it can't hurt or do you believe in wrong thoughts?!), it surely helps humanity(*).
IMHO, the 'only' area left for religious belief is about questions "why do we exist at", "why are the laws in this universum the way they are", "are we at all/are I am what I see (can I be the objective observer)", "why logic".
Therefore I said "very religious" in my post. There are many mathematicians and physicists who believe in some kind of god, but see absolutely no reason to stop thinking about something too early.
--- (*) - Yes, pessimistic as I am in this regard, you'll probably say now: "No, only the belief in my god is good for humanity. Convert!". This brings the whole issue about the existence of different religions up. Intolerance. All that. But I do not want to go that far here. It would be pointless.
For example, I couldn't have a long-term relationship with my girlfriend if she is pro death-penalty or very religious.
But only these fundamental philosophical issues are important for me. Disagreement on other topics is good because you have things to discuss endlessly:) Of course, few philosophical premisses already lead to consent on many daily political topics.
OTOH, if all you want is sex, it probably doesn't really matter.
Right! OTOH, that's the only flaw I also see in his post. You have to rehabilitate this guy someday. "Lock him up and throw the key away" would be just silly.
Having absolute law is the only kind of law possible in a system run by imperfect beings. C'mon, that's ridiculous. Following your path of argumentation, you'd need perfect laws first.
They do not exist. Can imperfect beings invent these perfect laws at all? I doubt so. Humans can invent/discover mathematical equations, but you're not a living equation.
IANAL and I don't want to be one (because being a lawyer/judge IS messy and I'd like to stick with physics, which is hardly deterministic nowadays, too!). If YAAL, you should have spotted such fuzzy words as "inadequate", "clear" etc. in law texts many, many times already. I'm sure the appropiate laws contain them. Not only in germany (where I live and where the whole spectacle takes place), but also in the US. Can you give me an exact definition for them?
Or, if you can't, post at least a mathematically sound definition of what constitutes "computer sabotage" here. Good luck:-)
You're an idiot. If you could only sue to recover losses, the company that wronged you would have no incentive to reform. They could do the same thing to everybody, and maybe only 5% of the wronged will sue, so they will be even on those 5% but profiting by their wrongdoing on the other 95%. No. This is incorrect. Although IANAL, I can assure you that the CxOs of the company in question would be charged with commiting fraud if they knowingly repeat their unlawful way of profiteering.
Not civil law for repairing damages, but criminal law for the people doing such stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh the palm! :-)
I'm buying defective palm OS devices on ebay from time to time. It's easy to build fully functional palms (m100/m105) from several scrap ones, at about 10EUR (incl. shipping). Not that you should start buying broken palms on ebay, though
And uCLinux runs on them!
And if you can read german (or look at the pictures, sometimes it's obvious), you'll will have much fun with this site:
Fingers elektrische Welt.
Heh and don't forget the stable isotopes with infinite half time! How do we contain them?? :-)
[Actually nearly infinite, but there is argument about that...]
No, *BSD would be a level 10.000001 to be able to say Linux is not even as half as good as BSD! ;)
[Discl.: I'm an avid linux user and have never seen the need for BSD (besides coolness).]
I was just beginning to moderate this thread but I feel it is better to reply:
/.ers) overuse 'Ethics. But you're talking about Morality here.
First of all, you too (like many
What you're essentially saying is that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (e.g. Article 1,3 [BTW, china is a member of the UN]) should not be universal.
That is ok. Ironically, it's is a human right to post your opinion on slashdot (article 19).
But please be honest!
If you think "fsck human rights", say that in your posts. Please, don't hide your thoughts behind cloudy "freedom for all, they have the right to choose their ethics etc.pp.". WHO CHOOSES?
This is the thing I really dislike about many right-wing libertarians (you seem to belong to this group). Essentially promoting social darwinism/economical exploitation/etc, but hiding this all behind the nice word "freedom".
Freedom, i.e. economical freedom for those who have money or freedom to suppress others for those who have power (not suprisingly, being rich and being mighty correlates strongly).
Sorry, but I have to point out that the 2,756,234th floor is about 5500km above ground, i.e. out of the earth's atmosphere, certainly not in the troposphere :-)
Heh, and please post it here (die deutsche Übersetzung). :)
The grandparent is one of those rare slashdot gems... i'm thinking about printing and pinning it onto my wall
IMHO, this is not a good idea.
OpenMosix works by migrating processes to equalize the work load on a cluster.
This is great for programs which are already splitted into several processes which do not communicate very much - you can avoid the hassle of writing PVM/MPI message passing code.
But on workstations?
They fail sometimes. People go home and switch the computers off. People reset them accidentally. Not good if your vi/emacs process sits on one of those computers.
OpenMosix would help if there is a pool of computers acting as terminal servers, but in the hands of experienced system administrators.
This seems to be a problem everywhere.
The "drift to the center" also occurs here in germany. Actually, there is now a movement to form a new party left to one of germany's two big parties (SPD) because some people are annoyed. It's probably a matter of time before the other end of the political spectrum will be extended, too...
I don't really know how election campaigns are fought in the U.S. (But US foreign policy is an important issue worldwide, i.e.
many people here are very interested in your november elections); But in our political system, I see at least one problem in a too "cost/benefit"-worried campaign. It seems that political agendas are mainly formed as follows:
1. Parties order polls about controversial issues.
2. The polls are evaluated and costs are associated to each issue, with mainly the following factors taken into the equation:
a) importance of the issue for the general public (i.e. number of votes lost/gained for yes/no to the particular issue)
b) importance of the issue to the members of the party (a political party can't bear with a massive member loss)
3. The political agenda will be written according to the scores given by the evaluation of the polls.
Especially a) leads to a equalization of political agendas. And it seems that b) gets less and less important if one iterates this process because party members are gradually replaced with new ones from the public (which is preconditioned by very similar agendas). At the same time, many people get frustated about politics.
IMHO, this is what you get if you run a political party like you should run a company, only with votes instead of money.
I heard other things.
If you read TFA, you'll notice that they are talking about a force acting equally on *both* probes.
Claims that this is a new effect are a bit too early, though.
Occam's razor doesn't mean that scientists should stop investigating because there _may be_ a simple explanation. If there are interesting, unexplained things, one has to go down and calculate every traditional force(/space time curvature) which may act on the spacecraft; numerical simulations of the radiation pressure of the RTGs, taking the geometry of the space craft into account. Other external electromagnetic forces. Etc.pp.
Then, there will probably be a traditional explanation of the effect. If not send some probes out too further investigate the effect. After all, experimental physics is not only about testing the theory's POV, it is also about exploring the world and finding new effects.
You can have wrong calculations by theoreticians even in such fields where there is a fundamental theory capable of explaining everything. (This includes nearly every field of physics today - except nuclear/particle physics and astrophysics).
If you can see and hear it, you can copy it.
If you can make a raw copy of the media, you can pirate it without loss of quality, even if you can only play the copies in an SVP device.
Hey, here are my (maybe not so) tin-foil hat ideas about how they'll try to block these paths:
1. Every decoder chip does individual watermarking on the produced output.
2. Consumer units are only sold if you register them with your ID. Similar to the methods already in place to prevent misuse of cellular phones. In my country (germany), you have to show your ID upon buying a cellular. You can even hide this player to ID mapping if you only allow electronic cash in the stores where the units are sold...
3. Water marking/individual creation of the media. If you (legally) download it from the net, this is easy. Music stores with individual "secure burners" will follow in the next step. Individually burned ROMs (maybe even semiconductor based and with own DRM on chip). Plus: Can be advertised as a benefit: "The next step in _individuality_ after your colored phone cover - 10 out of the 100 top hits on your _individual_ secure card. Only 9.99EUR. Buy it now at xyz.com."
Considering the first scenario, the analog hole, you'll think twice before copying the output of your player because "they" know it was you player which has been used for playback because of 1. and 2.
Step 3. to prevent the second scenario will take a bit longer to implement, but the development started already.
Consumers, submit!
And canada hasn't the death penalty. All EU members havn't also. I think this is even more important issue.
Even if you take all the other (very important!) arguments aside and only consider the "detterence efficiency":
Criminals get really nihilistic if they know their goverment is also.
(Don't confuse ozone generators with negative ion generators. Ozone causes permanent lung damage, over time. Ozone generators also produce ions, but so what?.)
Ion generators also produce ozone. They are usually just a small HV generator with electrodes attached. And you have corona discharges there.
Ion generators also produce nitrous oxides and other similarly nasty compounds.
AFAIK, what they do not produce is what they are advertised for, negative ions. Ok, they do, but the average lifetime of single ions in air is below the msec range.
Heh, ozone corrodes nearly all organic materials. Rubber included. Skin included. Lungs included!
:-) You just have to know where the dangers lie...
People are scared about free radicals in food, but with an ion/ozone generator, you're producing them in mass quantities of them and suck them right into your lungs.
As I'm building DIY N2 lasers and tesla coils, I like the fine ozone smell, though
There are sometimes capacitors on circuit boards.
Sure. Wait a week. Or, if you are in a hurry, discharge the high voltage ones (power supply) with a resistor which you hold with an isolated gripper. Be careful, though, they're really dangerous.
Also make sure that you have discharged all capacitors which store >=15V in them. Probably only the power supply filtering caps have this property. This is important because sparks easily ignite alcohol and other solvents...
There are sometimes batteries on circuit boards - for example to keep track of the wall clock time when the machine is off.
Take them out if you are overly cautious. Or ignore them:
As another poster said, they single-cells or max. two chained single cells (older equipment), i.e. only 3V are present. That is not much and the mix of dust and alcohol will probably not so conductive that the batteries will explode or overheat or components fail because of wrong voltages applied to them.
The biggest problem is probably the fire hazard. I would do this outside, one part after each other, the alcohol-soaked parts immediately removed off the scene and with direct access to water and no obstacles if you need to run a way in an emergency!
However the theoritical future has nothing to do with now. At this point, precomiled code is more efficient (in some cases quite a lot) and Java does not provide access to accelerated features. There is a REASON that Doom 3, UT 2004, etc are written in a language that precomiles to native code. Both seek to be cross platform (and UT 2004 is to an amazing extent) however Java is NOT the right tool for them at this time. /. is overrun by java nuts.
Thanks ALOT!
This is what I try to say here all the time, problem is that
I would also like to add:
1. JVM != Java. See gcj. Or mips2java. Of course, because the JVM architecture is optimized for Java code, C/C++ code doesn't get as efficiently compiled into JVM code. This is no advantage of Java, it is a poor design of the JVM.
2. Check out LLVM. These people are essentially trying to do (they are not yet there but it is one of their essential goals and no marketing blurb) what Java promised for years. Front-end language independent.
Hey this was a _personal_ _example_.
You could equally say that you don't want a relationship with non-christian girls.
I didn't want to start a thread about religion. Apparently, there are quite a few religious nuts on /. . What a pity. To the grandparent:
:)
I'm personally agnostic and not atheist because that would be another "anti-faith" faith for me. So you can't argue about whether god exists with me
Look for girls which are like you but *please* learn a bit more about the findings of other people using the scientific method. The evidence is really overwhelming.
Using religion to explain things which are easily explained by science is thinking to a certain extent logically and reasonable, but stopping suddenly if there is an explanation in the bible/quran/wherever. Why do you do that?
BTW, esoteric "paranormal" reasoning is the same, but you only stop even earlier in your process of thinking (Maybe as soon as such 'scientifically sounding' things as "energy pendulums" are mentioned).
This is pretty incoherent. It does not neccessarily say something about the intellectual capabilities of people like you but it does express that your are not using your brain to think about philosophical issues at all. And no, I do not want to insult yo, be a smart-ass here or like to sound intellectual, but *please* think about such things. Maybe it helps you (it can't hurt or do you believe in wrong thoughts?!), it surely helps humanity(*).
IMHO, the 'only' area left for religious belief is about questions "why do we exist at", "why are the laws in this universum the way they are", "are we at all/are I am what I see (can I be the objective observer)", "why logic".
Therefore I said "very religious" in my post. There are many mathematicians and physicists who believe in some kind of god, but see absolutely no reason to stop thinking about something too early.
---
(*) - Yes, pessimistic as I am in this regard, you'll probably say now: "No, only the belief in my god is good for humanity. Convert!". This brings the whole issue about the existence of different religions up. Intolerance. All that. But I do not want to go that far here. It would be pointless.
As shy as every /.er is, do not stutter too much while dating or else you will have a discordian date :-)
For example, I couldn't have a long-term relationship with my girlfriend if she is pro death-penalty or very religious.
:)
But only these fundamental philosophical issues are important for me. Disagreement on other topics is good because you have things to discuss endlessly
Of course, few philosophical premisses already lead to consent on many daily political topics.
OTOH, if all you want is sex, it probably doesn't really matter.
Sorry for the formatting, but somehow i forgot the bracket-i-bracket tag.
Right!
OTOH, that's the only flaw I also see in his post. You have to rehabilitate this guy someday. "Lock him up and throw the key away" would be just silly.
Huh? Did your balls get lost?
Having absolute law is the only kind of law possible in a system run by imperfect beings.
:-)
C'mon, that's ridiculous. Following your path of argumentation, you'd need perfect laws first.
They do not exist. Can imperfect beings invent these perfect laws at all? I doubt so. Humans can invent/discover mathematical equations, but you're not a living equation.
IANAL and I don't want to be one (because being a lawyer/judge IS messy and I'd like to stick with physics, which is hardly deterministic nowadays, too!). If YAAL, you should have spotted such fuzzy words as "inadequate", "clear" etc. in law texts many, many times already. I'm sure the appropiate laws contain them. Not only in germany (where I live and where the whole spectacle takes place), but also in the US. Can you give me an exact definition for them?
Or, if you can't, post at least a mathematically sound definition of what constitutes "computer sabotage" here. Good luck
You're an idiot. If you could only sue to recover losses, the company that wronged you would have no incentive to reform. They could do the same thing to everybody, and maybe only 5% of the wronged will sue, so they will be even on those 5% but profiting by their wrongdoing on the other 95%.
No. This is incorrect. Although IANAL, I can assure you that the CxOs of the company in question would be charged with commiting fraud if they knowingly repeat their unlawful way of profiteering.
Not civil law for repairing damages, but criminal law for the people doing such stuff.