"What I find just as disturbing is how people who claim to be scientific feel so personally harmed, offended or scared by persons of alternate beliefs."
Then here's a bit of insight for you -
We get scared when we figure out that most of the population believe this crap. We get personally harmed when they use it to either -
decide their behaviour legislate
The former is more applicable to the "alternative spirituality" types, or just people who believe in spirits, atstrology etc. They do things that are batshit insane because some psychic/astrologer/medium told them that "spirit"/uranus/old uncle fred wanted them to.
The latter is more app;licable to the maintstream religions that will try to dictate the way we all live our lives, based on their superstitions.
I went out with a wiccan girl for a while. She was great, but we'd get into arguments over this stuff all the time. I could see her group leaders were petty powermongers keeping control of their "coven" by bitchiness, betrayal and the encouragem,ent of infighting. I just waited for the day she came home to tell me that herne the hunter thinks we should split up. Especially when some of her "psychic" friends were espousing views like "if you are in a position in which you think you need to split up with your other half, and are giving psychic advice to other people, and your mind is stuck on splitting up and the end of relationships, don't hesitate to advise your clients that they need to split up. Spirit will see to it that only people that need that advice will come to you that day".
The best one was when they were out at a ritual in the woods at night, and she saw something sparkle in the darkness. After being told it was fairies and not to disturb them, she went to look anyway and found a cd tied to a branch by a piece of string. Not only was she told off for not just believing, but also for disturbing the fairies...
Thankfully that day never came and she saw how idiotic those people were and how bad she was getting. We still argued every so often until the end of the relationship, and I'd always try to avoid people that believe that sort of stuff now.
Basically it's lunacy, and it's lunacy that affects the rest of us in real ways. I have to share a democracy with these people.
Your link, it goes to a page containing nothing but unmitigated bullshit. Go read talk origins, all of those points have been shown for the crap that they are.
If humans were created by god then what good are morals? If the only reason you don't kill and lie are that you're afraid of some skybeard with a thunderbolt then it's you that's utterly deficient.
"And I remember seeing Ernst Haeckel's faked drawings of embryonic development and hearing how we looked no different from any other animal in early development."
We do look very similar, it's how things work.
"Not to mention that chart those of us from the 1960's and previous remember of ancient man to modern going from something chimp-like looking less and less ape-like as we "progressed." When in fact, with modern techniques, it's been shown there was little difference."
What are you on about?
Firstly, that's a neanderthal which is not an ancestor of modern man but a cousin on an evolutionary dead end. Secondly, as time goes on that progression is confirmed over and over again.
"The only thing about this that is different is that you see a website which potentially has millions of users (how big is the UK again?) all of whom are downloading large amounts."
60 ish million folks in the UK.
This sort of thing will only get more common as time goes on a people use the net for ever more and bigger media. Personally I think ISPs need to do more to bite the bullet and price their services honestly, rather than pricing them cheap and then coming up with a million and one reasons you can't have what you thought you'd paid for.
The BBC pay their ISP, the consumers pay theirs, everyone in between negotiates traffic prices between themselves. Where exactly is the problem?
The only issue I can see is that dishonest ISPs want to keep charging their customers the "Unlimted* Fast** internet for the low low price of $X a month!", whilst either denying them the service being advertised by throttling some traffic, or charging the server side twice, once for the real cost and once for "access to consumers".
It's greed and weaseling out of advertised services, pure and simple.
"SO what you're saying is, if a police officer is on patrol, and sees a crime occuring, he should back off and await armed backup? Or tap the criminal on the shoulder and ask them nicely to stop? What if the officer is being attacked? They could explain to the criminal that they should await the arrival of armed officers before continuing the attack?"
And obviously the UK and other routinely unarmed police have never EVER dealt with an armed criminal successfully.
Fucking idiot. There are better ways than just throwing guns to everyone with enough coordination to point one in the right direction 2 times out of 5.
"All I am saying is that there's no reason for the USA to have a military ally in Europe"
You don't know what a military allie is.
It's one that comes to your aid when you're under threat, not one that goes on little invasion adventures with you. Just because others haven't sent their troops to Iraq doesn't mean they aren't your allies, it means they (like most other people) didn't see how they were responding to a threat.
It's like if you're in a bar and some dude starts a fight with your friend, you back them up, you defend them, you lend your strength to them and put the beatdown on the asshole that started the fight.
OTOH, when you're friend's drunk and shouts "that asshole looked at me funny!" and proceeds to go off and beat up the slimy looking guy in the corner, it's more usual to try and restrain them or just give up and let them go. Doesn't make you any less of a friend.
Wheeler-dealer types are precisely why we are where we are now.
One compromise after another, until eventually we're in this mess. What we *need* are people who actually have some ideals and well thought out principles and are willing to stick to them or go down in flames trying. Then we might actually see some change, rather than continued appeasement of the entrenched interests.
Hello! We're there with you. Not that we want to be, damned Blair.
Bein allied with someone doesn't mean "invaeds the same places despite advice", it means mutual defence and giving consideration to any other military actions.
Frankly I've more respect for those that didn't go than those that did.
And I admit that I am the only person I know that writes with a fountain pen.
Things that are not broadly necessary are not the same as obsolete though. Intimate knowledge of kernel programming is quite esoteric, but one could hardly call it obsolete.
Oh sure, when it's a touch more complex than "XOR with predictable data", I'm sure it's far better to be able to use a low-level dump of the instructions used to create the ciphertext.
As I cracked something very similar recently, using known input and output and two devices called eyes.
I then wrote a decoder in C.
That's not to say knowledge of assembly isn't useful. It is, it gives you a much better insight into what's going on on the hardware level than any other language (though C isn't too bad either). This is essential to take into consideration when doing anything that is performance critical, be it a large server app or a small embedded system.
There are too many people these days that just think "The compiler/web platform/vm does that all for me, besides which, processor power and memory are cheap these days".
That's fine for consumer grade desktop apps and web "apps". It's not so good for all the stuff going on underneath that it seems most coders these days have no idea about.
Well, the RIAA's actions are very borderline in terms of legality, and IMHO it would make a good law school project.
Also, universities ought to be complying with the law and I was pretty sure that, in a couple of cases, it had been demonstrated that names did not have to be handed over by ISPs...
Yes, I realise very well what I'm saying, thankyou. I do not want the government, or ISPs, or anyone else to be able to routinely monitor every bit of my communications to try and detect:
Piracy Drug Dealing Terrorism Anything
They have no right to. I have no faith in humans' ability to do this without abusing it. And that's what the government is, not some magical perfect machine or god which is always benevolent and always enlightened. It's a group of fallable, small minded, tribalistic, populist, attention whores. And that's only the ones who aren't actively malicious. If we look around the world and at the history of the last century you'll find plenty of leaders who ARE actively evil.
I don't want to hand them the ability to monitor me.
Neither do I trust that legislation is always enlightened or in the best interests of society. In many instnces it is demonstrably against popular interest and firmly to the advantage of some corporation, religious group or other special interest.
The only thing that makes British or US society worth living is is the fact that the legal apparatus are not 100% efficient. Tighten the grip of the law and you would have a restrictive police state. That's not somewhere I want to live.
Whether I copy games or not (I don't) is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll realise it's not worth the hassle.
"What I find just as disturbing is how people who claim to be scientific feel so personally harmed, offended or scared by persons of alternate beliefs."
Then here's a bit of insight for you -
We get scared when we figure out that most of the population believe this crap. We get personally harmed when they use it to either -
decide their behaviour
legislate
The former is more applicable to the "alternative spirituality" types, or just people who believe in spirits, atstrology etc. They do things that are batshit insane because some psychic/astrologer/medium told them that "spirit"/uranus/old uncle fred wanted them to.
The latter is more app;licable to the maintstream religions that will try to dictate the way we all live our lives, based on their superstitions.
I went out with a wiccan girl for a while. She was great, but we'd get into arguments over this stuff all the time. I could see her group leaders were petty powermongers keeping control of their "coven" by bitchiness, betrayal and the encouragem,ent of infighting. I just waited for the day she came home to tell me that herne the hunter thinks we should split up. Especially when some of her "psychic" friends were espousing views like "if you are in a position in which you think you need to split up with your other half, and are giving psychic advice to other people, and your mind is stuck on splitting up and the end of relationships, don't hesitate to advise your clients that they need to split up. Spirit will see to it that only people that need that advice will come to you that day".
The best one was when they were out at a ritual in the woods at night, and she saw something sparkle in the darkness. After being told it was fairies and not to disturb them, she went to look anyway and found a cd tied to a branch by a piece of string. Not only was she told off for not just believing, but also for disturbing the fairies...
Thankfully that day never came and she saw how idiotic those people were and how bad she was getting. We still argued every so often until the end of the relationship, and I'd always try to avoid people that believe that sort of stuff now.
Basically it's lunacy, and it's lunacy that affects the rest of us in real ways. I have to share a democracy with these people.
Then you're insane. It's based on the Darwin kernel, which itself was based of BSD. Its not Linux.
Your link, it goes to a page containing nothing but unmitigated bullshit. Go read talk origins, all of those points have been shown for the crap that they are.
If humans were created by god then what good are morals? If the only reason you don't kill and lie are that you're afraid of some skybeard with a thunderbolt then it's you that's utterly deficient.
"And I remember seeing Ernst Haeckel's faked drawings of embryonic development and hearing how we looked no different from any other animal in early development."
We do look very similar, it's how things work.
"Not to mention that chart those of us from the 1960's and previous remember of ancient man to modern going from something chimp-like looking less and less ape-like as we "progressed." When in fact, with modern techniques, it's been shown there was little difference."
What are you on about?
Firstly, that's a neanderthal which is not an ancestor of modern man but a cousin on an evolutionary dead end.
Secondly, as time goes on that progression is confirmed over and over again.
"The only thing about this that is different is that you see a website which potentially has millions of users (how big is the UK again?) all of whom are downloading large amounts."
60 ish million folks in the UK.
This sort of thing will only get more common as time goes on a people use the net for ever more and bigger media. Personally I think ISPs need to do more to bite the bullet and price their services honestly, rather than pricing them cheap and then coming up with a million and one reasons you can't have what you thought you'd paid for.
The BBC pay their ISP, the consumers pay theirs, everyone in between negotiates traffic prices between themselves. Where exactly is the problem?
The only issue I can see is that dishonest ISPs want to keep charging their customers the "Unlimted* Fast** internet for the low low price of $X a month!", whilst either denying them the service being advertised by throttling some traffic, or charging the server side twice, once for the real cost and once for "access to consumers".
It's greed and weaseling out of advertised services, pure and simple.
"I don't know why someone would buy a cramped Vaio"
Are you talking about the TZ range?
Because the SZ is a thing of beauty. It's light, powerful, has (switchable) nvidia graphics and a far beeter keyboard than any comparably sized mac.
I can't wait to see what Sony do with the tech that has allowed Apple and Lenovo to come up with these little devices.
"SO what you're saying is, if a police officer is on patrol, and sees a crime occuring, he should back off and await armed backup? Or tap the criminal on the shoulder and ask them nicely to stop? What if the officer is being attacked? They could explain to the criminal that they should await the arrival of armed officers before continuing the attack?"
And obviously the UK and other routinely unarmed police have never EVER dealt with an armed criminal successfully.
Fucking idiot. There are better ways than just throwing guns to everyone with enough coordination to point one in the right direction 2 times out of 5.
having all police routinely armed is a bad idea.
If the people who saw him trying to light his shoe just thought he was trying to light a fart instead...
Stop the ridiculous liquid thing for a start.
Yes, there WAS a plot to do that. It was an epic fail from the start and there's no reasons to keep the restrictions in place.
Hey, I have a good one, everyone checks in *everything* and flies naked. Then we'll finally be safe.
"All I am saying is that there's no reason for the USA to have a military ally in Europe"
You don't know what a military allie is.
It's one that comes to your aid when you're under threat, not one that goes on little invasion adventures with you.
Just because others haven't sent their troops to Iraq doesn't mean they aren't your allies, it means they (like most other people) didn't see how they were responding to a threat.
It's like if you're in a bar and some dude starts a fight with your friend, you back them up, you defend them, you lend your strength to them and put the beatdown on the asshole that started the fight.
OTOH, when you're friend's drunk and shouts "that asshole looked at me funny!" and proceeds to go off and beat up the slimy looking guy in the corner, it's more usual to try and restrain them or just give up and let them go. Doesn't make you any less of a friend.
Wheeler-dealer types are precisely why we are where we are now.
One compromise after another, until eventually we're in this mess. What we *need* are people who actually have some ideals and well thought out principles and are willing to stick to them or go down in flames trying. Then we might actually see some change, rather than continued appeasement of the entrenched interests.
Hello! We're there with you. Not that we want to be, damned Blair.
Bein allied with someone doesn't mean "invaeds the same places despite advice", it means mutual defence and giving consideration to any other military actions.
Frankly I've more respect for those that didn't go than those that did.
And I admit that I am the only person I know that writes with a fountain pen.
Things that are not broadly necessary are not the same as obsolete though. Intimate knowledge of kernel programming is quite esoteric, but one could hardly call it obsolete.
Oh sure, when it's a touch more complex than "XOR with predictable data", I'm sure it's far better to be able to use a low-level dump of the instructions used to create the ciphertext.
But for the example given, well, it was trivial.
Threading a Needle ...
Using a Fountain Pen
Coins on the machine to reserve next go
Memory Management
There are many many useful and relevant skills on there.
As I cracked something very similar recently, using known input and output and two devices called eyes.
I then wrote a decoder in C.
That's not to say knowledge of assembly isn't useful. It is, it gives you a much better insight into what's going on on the hardware level than any other language (though C isn't too bad either). This is essential to take into consideration when doing anything that is performance critical, be it a large server app or a small embedded system.
There are too many people these days that just think "The compiler/web platform/vm does that all for me, besides which, processor power and memory are cheap these days".
That's fine for consumer grade desktop apps and web "apps". It's not so good for all the stuff going on underneath that it seems most coders these days have no idea about.
Do you approve of the legal and allowable status of surveillance outside the US?
'cos you know we brits do it to and then swap notes, right?
Ain't it a great world?
Real winners dd the mouse to the CD.
Now that's music!
But even outside of London, you can get Be Broadband.
Owned by 02, so not some fly by night, unlimited 24Mbps (max).
I get 12-17, depending on whether BT are screwing with my line. Give them a try.
Well, the RIAA's actions are very borderline in terms of legality, and IMHO it would make a good law school project.
Also, universities ought to be complying with the law and I was pretty sure that, in a couple of cases, it had been demonstrated that names did not have to be handed over by ISPs...
"Do some of you even realize what you're saying?"
Yes, I realise very well what I'm saying, thankyou. I do not want the government, or ISPs, or anyone else to be able to routinely monitor every bit of my communications to try and detect:
Piracy
Drug Dealing
Terrorism
Anything
They have no right to. I have no faith in humans' ability to do this without abusing it. And that's what the government is, not some magical perfect machine or god which is always benevolent and always enlightened. It's a group of fallable, small minded, tribalistic, populist, attention whores. And that's only the ones who aren't actively malicious. If we look around the world and at the history of the last century you'll find plenty of leaders who ARE actively evil.
I don't want to hand them the ability to monitor me.
Neither do I trust that legislation is always enlightened or in the best interests of society. In many instnces it is demonstrably against popular interest and firmly to the advantage of some corporation, religious group or other special interest.
The only thing that makes British or US society worth living is is the fact that the legal apparatus are not 100% efficient. Tighten the grip of the law and you would have a restrictive police state. That's not somewhere I want to live.
Whether I copy games or not (I don't) is irrelevant.