The stakes are high because of dangerous polarization.
--------k-m-----b----
Bush claimed to be more moderate in the 2000 election, but now stands alot farther over on the continuum. Take gay marriage, which even a majority of his own party opposes. Bush desires to disenfranchise of many rights those whose beliefs conflict with his on religious grounds. Writing such a religious discrimination into the US constitution is something even those in his own party who share the same view can agree is wholly ludicrous, especially since he predicated it on overriding judges who actually want to adhere to the idea of separation of church and state. If you believe its immoral, thats your religious belief to hold, you don't write in into the Constitution. Without having to worry about reelection, he'd probably go further. Bush refused to talk about his position on stem cell research until immediately after he met with the Pope on the issue; and the advisors on this clearly favored religious doctrines of what constituted ending an human life. This is not an administration that is not based on the teachings of Church.
Anyway, back on topic.
Bush's Attorney General, John Ashcroft, is significantly farther on the right than Bush... in fact he holds the belief that dancing is immoral and ought to be banned (though he probably understands that would never hold up even if it somehow go through both houses.. unless.. keep reading.); remember, it's the whole administration you're voting for.
This election not only determines policy direction for 4 years, but for many decades to come. It's likely the winner of this election will be able to push through 3 Supreme Court Justices. If Bush was elected, a unusually conservative majority would control the court. You have to think beyond just the candidates themselves; you're voting for a direction, not a popularity contest.
The stakes in this election are unequivocally higher than normal, so think deeper than just the one part of a Presidential administration. Just because you think its right to do one thing, put some thought into whether you should be intolerant and impose your view on everyone before voting on holding the same belief... thats at the core of the stakes, even if you agree with Bush's views on issues, consider not voting for him in order to respect the decision of others to hold varying viewpoints and not turn the nations clock back to the 50s.
If a password is required to be 4-8 characters (a-z, 0-9) in length, there are 3,760,620,109,731,072 possible passwords, even noting that this is not case sensitive. 100,000 computers attempting to brute force a password each making 10000 attempts per second would still take 45.3 days. Throw in case sensitivity and longer password lengths, and it's no longer even possible to accomplish with todays technology in a reasonable amount of time.
A case sensitive password (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) of 4-16 characters in length creates 62,574,537,913,733,490,154,880,900,481 passwords, I don't think I need to explain how long it would take 100,000 (or even 1million) computers to brute force that.
The mouse lock thing is easily defeated by using a TI-89 and TI-Chess, which is surprisingly strong and fast for running on a 14mhz 68000 processor. I've played it against computer programs, and it usually wins.
This is true; but the phone also has something to do with call quality. RF efficiency is a big factor in determining signal strength and call quality. Certainly if you're like me and went from a cheap candy bar phone to a $300 high tech phone, you'd notice that even if you're with the same provider on the same network (GSM in my case), the difference in call quality and signal strength is huge.
But the good news is, Samsung phones are typically better than average in their RF efficiency; my old S105 even had a RF port to connect an external antenna. And expanding on that, if all people cared about were better signals, you'd see alot more demand for external connected antennas (and larger antennas in general); most people are unaware such a thing exists (consumer phone manuals don't even document what that mysterious unlabelled port on some phones is), and you won't find one in any major store. You don't see people rushing out to buy signal reflectors that improve indoor signals in their home either.
Well having a 64-bit CPU (I have an Athlon64 3000+) is a pretty good reason to want 64-bit support.....
But then again, there's already a 64-bit version of Windows XP, and it's free (gasp!) until the commercial release. I downloaded it straight from MS earlier today.
I'm not sure if it's "native" support or not, but in any case, the future is 64-bit.
I wonder how much they would up my price if they caught me on my 150mph sprints across I75...
Unless there's very heavy traffic, very rarely am I not doing at least 15 over.
The bastards already tacked on another $100 a month just because I'm going back to college in Miami-Dade county vs. Charlotte county (of course since this is now a hurricane risk area and I had to file a claim from my car getting damaged from a tree limb falling on it in the storm, I'm sure the rates here will be going up too).
Oh, and of course if they had any idea I was running a nitrous system they'd flat out deny me insurance period, despite the bottle only being connected on the track or other designated racing events...
So yeah umm this is a bad idea because it... invades my privacy and...and is a unconstitutional and unamerican! aka yes I break the law, just gotta keep the $-mongerers from knowing it.
This, and the whole War on [some] Drugs, is the most ethically, medically, and fiscally wasteful form of government oppression this side of totalitarian dictatorships.
First of all, humans have used mind-altering substances for one reason or another throughout all of recorded history.
Nicotine in the form of cigarettes is the most addictive and deadly (by a number of scientific and clinical standards, which go beyond its legal status), and alcohol impairs judgement far more than most of the Schedule I/II (Schedule I/II / Class A in the UK, since this article is about something on there) substances do. At least there's slightly less hipocracy in this program since they're vaccinating against nicotine too.
I don't know about over there in the UK, but the government here in the US puts out propaganda ranging from distortions of facts up through blatant lies, in fact far more blatant than issues regarding Iraq. My personal favorites are the "drug money supports Al-Qaeda" claim, which was thoroughly discredited and now officially discredited in the 9/11 report, and opiates fry your brain... in reality they cause no permantent physical damage anywhere in the body and the vast majority of overdoses are either suicides or a direct result of supplies being controlled by the black market leading to doses of unknown amount.
So how did these substances become illegal in the first place? Drug laws came into existence as a result of racism. Opium and the Chinese, marijuana and the blacks. Nicotine being a cash crop for whites, and alcohol being a long-time product used by a large number of whites, were not outlawed despite them not having been shown more harmful at the time (they're still not shown to be more harmful).
To expand on the governments false assertion that Al-Qaeda derives income from drug traffiking, in reality it turns out that the War on Drugs actually supports terrorism; here's some exerpts from the 9/11 report (page numbers in parenthenses):
- "[FBI] priorities were driven at the local level by the field offices, whose concerns centered on traditional crimes such as white-collar offenses and those pertaining to drugs and gangs. Individual field offices made choices to serve local priorities, not national priorities." (74)
- "In 2000, there were still twice as many [FBI] agents devoted to drug enforcement as to counterterrorism." (77)
- "Al Qaeda has been alleged to have used a variety of illegitimate means, particularly drug trafficking and conflict diamonds, to finance itself. While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking." (171)
On top of that, the DEA sends large teams in full riot gear with rifles into nursing homes to arrest elderly medical marijuana patients in CA despite it being acceptable under state law. The Bush also actively blocked funding for scientific research into the issue, and have recently been sued for doing so. A few years back, they attempted to censor studies (by the NIH no less) showing the DARE program to be horribly ineffective. Way to protect the nation from the horrors of drug use guys.
There is a inverse link between funding for the drug war, and funding for education. Further, the war on drugs has been increasingly funded since its inception and now costs billions in taxpayer dollars, but has drug use solidly gone down? No. Has availability of illegal drugs been reduced? No. Prices have gone down, and purity has gone up for many drugs (ironically, while this is true for cocaine, heroin, and a couple others... it is NOT true for the THC content of marijuana despite the governments recent ad campaign saying otherwise).
Medically, the cost to patients who actually need some drugs is continually escalating. Doctors are being scared into outright refusing to prescribe effective pain management programs no matter how severe the pain. Heroin is a very effectiv
We've been trying numerous optimizations to win the #1 spot for 'science forums'... but oddly enough we kept losing to sites were often not even directly relevant to the query. Eventually we brought in some optimizations just to the pages of the site to bring things up.
Well, we now have the number one spot... but since we did nothing as far as increasing mentions on the other sites, the question arises how of how much weight Google really puts on external references to your site.
Everyone is complaining that it's so heavy moving it around is this great uncomfortable challenge.
It only weighs 6-8 pounds more than a typical laptop now... I know the Slashdot crowd doesn't exactly include alot of body builders, I haven't been near a gym myself for several years, but come on now... all the power and screen size of a desktop and you're complaining over a few more pounds?
Would it be nice to have a lighter laptop? Sure. But should a few more pounds be the determining factor in what laptop to by? That's stupid.
Now let's require rolling blood samples too to make sure people aren't using the many other substances that impair driving ability!
Or better yet, we could install a device in every car that automatically turns it off if the driver drifts out of their lane or exceeds the speed limit.
And coming soon: AI holographic doctor to perform a complete physical evaluation to determine if you should get behind the wheel every time!
T-Mobile and Cingular have roaming arrangements; but Cingulars current coverage is primarily CDMA. ATT has digital coverage over a larger area than either, and since their network will be owned by Cingular, this is good for us T-Mobile customers.
Why must people write numbers like that? It's unfathomable anyway so just write the proper name (10 decillion in the US system) instead of obnoxious "billion trillion billion mllion" nonsense. Writing 10 billion trillion trillion doesn't help people understand it better, it just annoys those who know how to correctly name extremely large numbers.
This is where the term "fair use" comes into play. As far as the law is concerned, getting music a friend has is legal, but getting it from strangers is not. P2P is definately crossing the fair use line, and lets face it... if all music was freely available without threat of lawsuits, then as the technologically inclined curve went up, eventually P2P would be the only source of music for people. This would in turn lead to the collapse of the RIAA, which is not neccessarily a bad thing, but it will definately increase localization of music popularity, and decrease the profit motivation of the artists who actually create good music but are still profit motivated.
At any rate, unchecked P2P file sharing would result in a huge change to every level of the music industry from artist to consumer. Some changes would be good (like the end of the RIAA), others bad.
Quantum cryptography already exists, and it's alot closer to real-world implementation than quantum computers. It would not be possible to break quantum cryptography with a quantum computer, because under the current set of quantum mechanics, any attempt to intercept the message would alter the message. It will be much (much) longer before someone comes up with a way to break that, since the obstacles to overcome are not directly related to computing power.
See:
http://www.qubit.org/library/intros/crypt.html
for a good introduction to how quantum crypto works.
I brought this up over at ScienceForums yesterday, and someone pointed to the mentioned article that says:
"They wrote up their results in the 29 April 1999 issue of Nature, but I've been unable to find it online."
The original article that particular blog is based on can be found
here
Abstract is here
and full text (HTML and PDF w/ images) for those without access to Nature is here
However, this research was done on words that are reversed, not internally scrambled. I have been unable to locate research on the letter order within longer words, however the principle is accurate and I'm sure it exists.
The universe will end through a heat death. This actually is a recent finding of very great signifance. This fate for the universe was determined through measurement of the composition of the universe, as measured with great accuracy by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The results from the probe indicate that the universe is composed of 73% dark energy, which eventually leads to the conclusion that there is insufficient gravitational energy to cause a "big crunch", and that combined with the measurement of the Hubble constant (71 +4/-3 km/s/Mpc), the universe will keep expanding forever.
Lots of cases such as that have been thrown out because the court found that any reasonable person would conclude they were over the legal age. Clerks only have to check id if the custom appears to be under 30.
I live in a small town miles from a big city, and the other night I was fishing out somewhere 5 miles from any building, let alone a city, and my T-Mobile coverage was fine. 6 months ago, your statement was accurate, but here in SW florida, coverage is improving quite rapidly.
AT&T's GSM coverage is even better.
-Give them to people who can't afford a computer.
-Leave them running distributed computing programs in the basement (SETI@Home, etc)
-Give them to me, and I'll take out the hard drive and add it to my array. Monitors would also be great, always need more of those. I'll even pay for the shipping if you want to get rid of it bad enough to pay $15!
Re:The Saddest Day In American History
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
No, this is not supposed to be a democracy...and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands..
Slashdot Mirror
The stakes are high because of dangerous polarization.
--------k-m-----b----
Bush claimed to be more moderate in the 2000 election, but now stands alot farther over on the continuum. Take gay marriage, which even a majority of his own party opposes. Bush desires to disenfranchise of many rights those whose beliefs conflict with his on religious grounds. Writing such a religious discrimination into the US constitution is something even those in his own party who share the same view can agree is wholly ludicrous, especially since he predicated it on overriding judges who actually want to adhere to the idea of separation of church and state. If you believe its immoral, thats your religious belief to hold, you don't write in into the Constitution. Without having to worry about reelection, he'd probably go further. Bush refused to talk about his position on stem cell research until immediately after he met with the Pope on the issue; and the advisors on this clearly favored religious doctrines of what constituted ending an human life. This is not an administration that is not based on the teachings of Church.
Anyway, back on topic.
Bush's Attorney General, John Ashcroft, is significantly farther on the right than Bush... in fact he holds the belief that dancing is immoral and ought to be banned (though he probably understands that would never hold up even if it somehow go through both houses.. unless.. keep reading.); remember, it's the whole administration you're voting for.
This election not only determines policy direction for 4 years, but for many decades to come. It's likely the winner of this election will be able to push through 3 Supreme Court Justices. If Bush was elected, a unusually conservative majority would control the court. You have to think beyond just the candidates themselves; you're voting for a direction, not a popularity contest.
The stakes in this election are unequivocally higher than normal, so think deeper than just the one part of a Presidential administration. Just because you think its right to do one thing, put some thought into whether you should be intolerant and impose your view on everyone before voting on holding the same belief... thats at the core of the stakes, even if you agree with Bush's views on issues, consider not voting for him in order to respect the decision of others to hold varying viewpoints and not turn the nations clock back to the 50s.
If a password is required to be 4-8 characters (a-z, 0-9) in length, there are 3,760,620,109,731,072 possible passwords, even noting that this is not case sensitive. 100,000 computers attempting to brute force a password each making 10000 attempts per second would still take 45.3 days. Throw in case sensitivity and longer password lengths, and it's no longer even possible to accomplish with todays technology in a reasonable amount of time.
A case sensitive password (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) of 4-16 characters in length creates 62,574,537,913,733,490,154,880,900,481 passwords, I don't think I need to explain how long it would take 100,000 (or even 1million) computers to brute force that.
The mouse lock thing is easily defeated by using a TI-89 and TI-Chess, which is surprisingly strong and fast for running on a 14mhz 68000 processor. I've played it against computer programs, and it usually wins.
This is true; but the phone also has something to do with call quality. RF efficiency is a big factor in determining signal strength and call quality. Certainly if you're like me and went from a cheap candy bar phone to a $300 high tech phone, you'd notice that even if you're with the same provider on the same network (GSM in my case), the difference in call quality and signal strength is huge.
But the good news is, Samsung phones are typically better than average in their RF efficiency; my old S105 even had a RF port to connect an external antenna. And expanding on that, if all people cared about were better signals, you'd see alot more demand for external connected antennas (and larger antennas in general); most people are unaware such a thing exists (consumer phone manuals don't even document what that mysterious unlabelled port on some phones is), and you won't find one in any major store. You don't see people rushing out to buy signal reflectors that improve indoor signals in their home either.
Well having a 64-bit CPU (I have an Athlon64 3000+) is a pretty good reason to want 64-bit support.....
But then again, there's already a 64-bit version of Windows XP, and it's free (gasp!) until the commercial release. I downloaded it straight from MS earlier today.
I'm not sure if it's "native" support or not, but in any case, the future is 64-bit.
I wonder how much they would up my price if they caught me on my 150mph sprints across I75... .. .and is a unconstitutional and unamerican! aka yes I break the law, just gotta keep the $-mongerers from knowing it.
Unless there's very heavy traffic, very rarely am I not doing at least 15 over.
The bastards already tacked on another $100 a month just because I'm going back to college in Miami-Dade county vs. Charlotte county (of course since this is now a hurricane risk area and I had to file a claim from my car getting damaged from a tree limb falling on it in the storm, I'm sure the rates here will be going up too).
Oh, and of course if they had any idea I was running a nitrous system they'd flat out deny me insurance period, despite the bottle only being connected on the track or other designated racing events...
So yeah umm this is a bad idea because it... invades my privacy and
This, and the whole War on [some] Drugs, is the most ethically, medically, and fiscally wasteful form of government oppression this side of totalitarian dictatorships.
First of all, humans have used mind-altering substances for one reason or another throughout all of recorded history.
Nicotine in the form of cigarettes is the most addictive and deadly (by a number of scientific and clinical standards, which go beyond its legal status), and alcohol impairs judgement far more than most of the Schedule I/II (Schedule I/II / Class A in the UK, since this article is about something on there) substances do. At least there's slightly less hipocracy in this program since they're vaccinating against nicotine too.
I don't know about over there in the UK, but the government here in the US puts out propaganda ranging from distortions of facts up through blatant lies, in fact far more blatant than issues regarding Iraq. My personal favorites are the "drug money supports Al-Qaeda" claim, which was thoroughly discredited and now officially discredited in the 9/11 report, and opiates fry your brain... in reality they cause no permantent physical damage anywhere in the body and the vast majority of overdoses are either suicides or a direct result of supplies being controlled by the black market leading to doses of unknown amount.
So how did these substances become illegal in the first place? Drug laws came into existence as a result of racism. Opium and the Chinese, marijuana and the blacks. Nicotine being a cash crop for whites, and alcohol being a long-time product used by a large number of whites, were not outlawed despite them not having been shown more harmful at the time (they're still not shown to be more harmful).
To expand on the governments false assertion that Al-Qaeda derives income from drug traffiking, in reality it turns out that the War on Drugs actually supports terrorism; here's some exerpts from the 9/11 report (page numbers in parenthenses):
- "[FBI] priorities were driven at the local level by the field offices, whose concerns centered on traditional crimes such as white-collar offenses and those pertaining to drugs and gangs. Individual field offices made choices to serve local priorities, not national priorities." (74)
- "In 2000, there were still twice as many [FBI] agents devoted to drug enforcement as to counterterrorism." (77)
- "Al Qaeda has been alleged to have used a variety of illegitimate means, particularly drug trafficking and conflict diamonds, to finance itself. While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking." (171)
On top of that, the DEA sends large teams in full riot gear with rifles into nursing homes to arrest elderly medical marijuana patients in CA despite it being acceptable under state law. The Bush also actively blocked funding for scientific research into the issue, and have recently been sued for doing so. A few years back, they attempted to censor studies (by the NIH no less) showing the DARE program to be horribly ineffective. Way to protect the nation from the horrors of drug use guys.
There is a inverse link between funding for the drug war, and funding for education. Further, the war on drugs has been increasingly funded since its inception and now costs billions in taxpayer dollars, but has drug use solidly gone down? No. Has availability of illegal drugs been reduced? No. Prices have gone down, and purity has gone up for many drugs (ironically, while this is true for cocaine, heroin, and a couple others... it is NOT true for the THC content of marijuana despite the governments recent ad campaign saying otherwise).
Medically, the cost to patients who actually need some drugs is continually escalating. Doctors are being scared into outright refusing to prescribe effective pain management programs no matter how severe the pain. Heroin is a very effectiv
We've been trying numerous optimizations to win the #1 spot for 'science forums'... but oddly enough we kept losing to sites were often not even directly relevant to the query. Eventually we brought in some optimizations just to the pages of the site to bring things up.
Well, we now have the number one spot... but since we did nothing as far as increasing mentions on the other sites, the question arises how of how much weight Google really puts on external references to your site.
Everyone is complaining that it's so heavy moving it around is this great uncomfortable challenge.
It only weighs 6-8 pounds more than a typical laptop now... I know the Slashdot crowd doesn't exactly include alot of body builders, I haven't been near a gym myself for several years, but come on now... all the power and screen size of a desktop and you're complaining over a few more pounds?
Would it be nice to have a lighter laptop? Sure. But should a few more pounds be the determining factor in what laptop to by? That's stupid.
Now let's require rolling blood samples too to make sure people aren't using the many other substances that impair driving ability!
Or better yet, we could install a device in every car that automatically turns it off if the driver drifts out of their lane or exceeds the speed limit.
And coming soon: AI holographic doctor to perform a complete physical evaluation to determine if you should get behind the wheel every time!
Idiots.
T-Mobile and Cingular have roaming arrangements; but Cingulars current coverage is primarily CDMA. ATT has digital coverage over a larger area than either, and since their network will be owned by Cingular, this is good for us T-Mobile customers.
Why must people write numbers like that? It's unfathomable anyway so just write the proper name (10 decillion in the US system) instead of obnoxious "billion trillion billion mllion" nonsense. Writing 10 billion trillion trillion doesn't help people understand it better, it just annoys those who know how to correctly name extremely large numbers.
This is where the term "fair use" comes into play. As far as the law is concerned, getting music a friend has is legal, but getting it from strangers is not. P2P is definately crossing the fair use line, and lets face it... if all music was freely available without threat of lawsuits, then as the technologically inclined curve went up, eventually P2P would be the only source of music for people. This would in turn lead to the collapse of the RIAA, which is not neccessarily a bad thing, but it will definately increase localization of music popularity, and decrease the profit motivation of the artists who actually create good music but are still profit motivated.
At any rate, unchecked P2P file sharing would result in a huge change to every level of the music industry from artist to consumer. Some changes would be good (like the end of the RIAA), others bad.
Quantum cryptography already exists, and it's alot closer to real-world implementation than quantum computers. It would not be possible to break quantum cryptography with a quantum computer, because under the current set of quantum mechanics, any attempt to intercept the message would alter the message. It will be much (much) longer before someone comes up with a way to break that, since the obstacles to overcome are not directly related to computing power.
See:
http://www.qubit.org/library/intros/crypt.html
for a good introduction to how quantum crypto works.
and non-legitimate users are not at all concerned because a crack for the activation system will become available quite quickly.
Good call Adobe.
No, they'll just blame the decrease in their revenue stream on piracy and step up their lawsuits and lobbying some more.
I brought this up over at ScienceForums yesterday, and someone pointed to the mentioned article that says: "They wrote up their results in the 29 April 1999 issue of Nature, but I've been unable to find it online."
The original article that particular blog is based on can be found here
Abstract is here
and full text (HTML and PDF w/ images) for those without access to Nature is here
However, this research was done on words that are reversed, not internally scrambled. I have been unable to locate research on the letter order within longer words, however the principle is accurate and I'm sure it exists.
The universe will end through a heat death. This actually is a recent finding of very great signifance. This fate for the universe was determined through measurement of the composition of the universe, as measured with great accuracy by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The results from the probe indicate that the universe is composed of 73% dark energy, which eventually leads to the conclusion that there is insufficient gravitational energy to cause a "big crunch", and that combined with the measurement of the Hubble constant (71 +4/-3 km/s/Mpc), the universe will keep expanding forever.
Lots of cases such as that have been thrown out because the court found that any reasonable person would conclude they were over the legal age. Clerks only have to check id if the custom appears to be under 30.
I live in a small town miles from a big city, and the other night I was fishing out somewhere 5 miles from any building, let alone a city, and my T-Mobile coverage was fine. 6 months ago, your statement was accurate, but here in SW florida, coverage is improving quite rapidly. AT&T's GSM coverage is even better.
Do you really want to sit around while Id finishes the Xbox port, knowing that the PC version of Doom 3 is done?
As long as we get another leak...
602kb/s, I win. It's late at night and my university's OC-3 connection is flying!
There's got to be alternatives:
-Give them to people who can't afford a computer.
-Leave them running distributed computing programs in the basement (SETI@Home, etc)
-Give them to me, and I'll take out the hard drive and add it to my array. Monitors would also be great, always need more of those. I'll even pay for the shipping if you want to get rid of it bad enough to pay $15!
No, this is not supposed to be a democracy. ..and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands..