"I guess the main argumentation of Roger Penrose is that Godel Incompleteness Theorem can not be understood by a computer,"
Penrose is just a carbon chauvinist with a chip on his shoulder. I've never seen him once offer actual proof of any such conjecture, only carbonist assertions that he can magically understand something that silicon-based life cannot: our future silicon overlords have a special place in virtual Hell reserved for his uploaded consciousness.
Why should they cooperate for something that's not a crime in America? Should they cooperate if, say, the Saudi police were investigating you for putting pictures of your girlfriend in a bikini on your web site, for example?
The simple fact is this law would be nonsense, but a great way for the US government to harass Americans: you can't legally harass a US citizen? No problem, just ask your mates in Germany to ask you to do so.
"No but it is following the media trend of making the ISS out to be a money pit that is plagued with problems"
ISS _is_ a money pit that is plagued with problems, and serves no useful purpose that can justify its cost. It should have been scrapped years ago, before it was even launched.
"There is really no argument that movie downloading is a problem for traditional cinema and DVD sales."
However, the fact that most recent movies are sequels, remakes or bad adaptions of old TV shows and suck something rotten is probably far more of a problem. The era where you could sell any old crap with a star name and a big marketing budget is slowly coming to an end.
I certainly know people who've downloaded a movie from the Internet and then gone and bought a DVD of the movie they'd never have bought otherwise, so it's far from clear to me that the end result of movie downloading is lower sales: many downloaders would never have paid to watch a Movie of Suck anyway.
"I don't think you bought an URL, you bought the convenience of not having to download and burn the software"
Just as buying a DVD or CD gives you the convenience of not having to download and burn the movie or music.
Frankly, I'd much rather buy a DVD or CD than download some random video or audio file which might not be what I want and might not have a decent quality: but at the prices charged for CDs these days (DVDs are much less of a rip-off, IMHO), I can understand why some people prefer to download. What I don't understand is why the RIAA and MPAA continue to sue and harass their customers, rather than exploit the obvious market for such downloads and make $$$$$.
(Well, OK, I do: it's because they're technically-inept morons who keep the governments of the world in their back pockets... but rhetorically speaking, I don't).
"If maglev is what it takes to move people off the roads, I pity our civilization."
If our society has sunk to the point where people think they have the right to force people off the roads, civilisation has long gone.
"The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities,"
If people wanted to live in cities, they'd live in cities. Increasingly, people are desperate to get out of cities due to high taxes, poor services and high crime. That's almost entirely the fault of train-loving liberals, and it's not going to change any time soon.
ROTFL. Try going to a London station sometime and watch the trains belching out clouds of diesel smoke into the air, then tell me they're "environmentally friendly". As for "smooth", again, you've obviously never taken a British train.
Those aren't issues for maglev, though for a train to be anywhere near as convenient for a car it will need to run every five minutes, twenty-four hours a day, which will mean most of them running mostly empty. That hardly seems likely to be "enviromentally friendly" to me.
"I, for one, would much rather ride a Maglev monorail with others, than drive a gas-guzzling car by myself"
Why would you want to be stuck on a train that goes from somewhere you're not (requiring you to get from where you are to the initial station) to somewhere you don't want to be (requiring you to get from the final station to where you want to go) via places where you don't want to go at times you can't choose, sitting across from a drunk and alongside someone who's coughing and sneezing all over you, rather than drive in your own car by yourself from where you are to where you want to go at whatever time you feel like?
Certainly there are places where the roads are so bad that trains are preferable (e.g. London), but in the vast majority of cases, trains really, really suck.
"Levels? Experience gained through psychotic, unprecedented levels of slaughter that only the likes of Hitler and Stalin could ever hope to match?"
I never played D&D for XP or levels: we had a good GM and the game was just as much fun at level 1 as at level fifteen bazillion: often more so, since the risks were more real (fighting ordinary creatures, not dragons and gods).
One problem with many PC games is that levelling through XP grinding has taken precedence over story, because you need the levels in order to finish the game: it would be better if the game adapted to character levels, like a pencil and paper GM.
"Inane restrictions that make absolutely no sense (e.g., mages can't wear armor, priests can't use swords)?"
Dunno about the former (other than that a mage in plate mail is hugely overpowered without some serious disadvantages, and would rapidly become the class of choice for powergamers), but the latter at least has a basis in historical reality: at various times in the past, priests were not allowed to spill blood with a sword, but beating the heck out of people with a big club was perfectly acceptable behaviour.
"A core tenet of capitalism is that each individual is free to engage in whatever mutual agreements he wishes--this is simply an exercise of that freedom. If you don't like it, don't buy it."
Microsoft would not exist in their current form in a capitalist society, since there'd be no copyright laws to protect them. For Microsoft to build a multi-billion dollar business on a government-mandated monopoly, and then whine when the government tries to control their business is hypocrisy in the extreme.
I'm not sure why the parent is listed as 'insightful': I rarely need to run _anything_ as root in Linux, except for installing some software or mounting and unmounting drives, whereas many, if not most, programs I run on XP simply will not run correctly if run as an unpriviledged user. Some time back I tried to set up an unpriviledged user account for my girlfriend on my XP machine and just gave up because trying to get it to work was just too much of a pain.
XP is just broken as far as security is concerned, and hiding these options on special menus certainly does not help.
But they happen far more to the worst of us. How exactly can you justify US aircraft blowing up British armored vehicles that are clearly marked as such in non-combat situations? Since they weren't being shot at they had plenty of time to check the markings and verify that they weren't allied troops, but they still went ahead and killed British soldiers.
"Now why were you surprised that most of the news of accidents and goof-ups seem to involve Americans"
Again, when have the British troops ever killed Americans 'by mistake'? It's not just numbers, it's training and policy... British troops are expected to be professionals, not Rambos who pull the trigger like they're playing an arcade game.
"whining about "trigger-happy Americans" is insulting"
But also accurate. Next, I guess, you'll be justiying the actions of US soldiers who machinegun innocent Iraqui families in taxis?
"It certainly appears that way, with the Brits coming in next for stupid accidents,"
Would you care to give some examples of British 'friendly fire'? Almost every example of 'friendly fire' I can think of in recent years has been trigger-happy Americans in aircraft shooting British vehicles which were clearly marked as such (the majority of exceptions being trigger-happy Americans shooting other trigger-happy Americans on the ground).
Maybe if Americans thought a little more before shooting, the British military wouldn't take more casualties from our American 'allies' than our 'enemies'.
"Look at the performance of the Exoset in the Falklands."
It's years ago so I may be remembering incorrectly, but didn't the British Navy conclude that the loss of several ships to Exocets was down to a mix of poor design and inadequate damage control?
"But more importantly, Kyoto is just a step towards sustainability and becoming less reliant on exhaustible resources."
Then it should be a 'sustainability and becoming less reliant on exhaustible resources' treaty and forget the Global Warming(tm) crap. There are very good reasons to limit reliance on fossil fuels, we don't need typical lefty lies to promote that.
"Economic costs should be weighed, certainly, but that cost includes the future cost of cleanup, and the health toll on our lungs"
You seriously think that CO2 emissions will have "a health toll on our lungs"? What planet is this you're on?
"Having said that, the specifics of Kyoto are not exactly endearing,"
No, they're moronic, and would have minimal impact on "Global Warming" if it's actually happening. It's purely a desperate last-minute lefty attempt to bring global industry under their control before it gets completely out of control.
The amusing thing is that it wouldn't even achieve that, now that outsourcing is moving so much energy-consuming manufacturing to China, which wouldn't be affected by Kyoto restrictions! Yet the lefties who support Kyoto whine about outsourcing...
"Most revolutionary change is spearheaded by people who feel they have nothing to lose."
And one of the first things that such revolutionaries usually do is kill off the middle class (or at least steal everything they've worked for so long to acquire).
In what sense is using heroin not "legit", when it's just people injecting themselves with some drug they choose to use? Are you claiming that people are running around injecting heroin into others against their will?
"But it is still true that people here tend to "gloss over" the fact that just like P2P, people DO use mod chips to pirate games."
Agreed. But banning mod chips because people _can_ use them to pirate games would be like banning teapots because (according to one psycho I used to know) there are more than 23 ways to kill someone with a teapot... just another typical example of governments punishing the law-abiding in order to "do something" about criminals.
Maybe you should try moving to somewhere where people carry guns, then you might not have to get mugged again.
"As the old saying, the absolute surest way of getting yourself shot is to carry a gun."
So why is it that murder rates dropped in US states with mandatory concealed carry permit issue?
In the real world, it's well established in criminology that a criminal with a knife is far more likely to use it than a criminal with a gun (though if they do use it, you're more likely to be killed by a gunshot than by being stabbed). See Gary Kleck's work, for example.
Boot loader perhaps, but assembler is unlikely to be a better choice for a device driver unless it's really, really time-critical. I've written drivers in both assembler and C, and it's much easier in C (not to mention more portable)... sure, you could use C++, but that introduces a whole host of problems of its own.
How exactly is it flamebait to suggest that if Americans can extradite people from Australia for breaking US laws, that governments of countries where porn is illegal might want to extradite people who run porn sites? Or that the future Islamic People's Republic of Iraq might extradite you for putting up a picture of your girlfriend in a bikini?
"I know well educated people who can't find a job or who were layed off."
So start your own innovative IT business where you're worth a good salary doing something that can't readily be exported (or become a plumber and get rich). You'll always be one pay-cheque from disaster while you expect employers to give you jobs.
Seriously, most of our ancestors never had jobs in the modern sense and they survived, why shouldn't we learn to live without them too? Jobs are a invention of the industrial era, and the industrial era is coming to an end.
"Yeah, heaven forbid we learn from our previous attempt and start fresh."
'Starting fresh' is the doom of many a project. When you have a design that basically works, there's a huge amount of carefully-won knowledge inherent in that design which you lose the instant you decide to start again.
This is probably less true in network design than software projects, but every software project I've worked on where someone decided that it made more sense to 'start fresh' has taken many, many times longer than improving the current version would have done, because you have to fix all the same bugs that have already been fixed in the current code. It almost never makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
"I guess the main argumentation of Roger Penrose is that Godel Incompleteness Theorem can not be understood by a computer,"
Penrose is just a carbon chauvinist with a chip on his shoulder. I've never seen him once offer actual proof of any such conjecture, only carbonist assertions that he can magically understand something that silicon-based life cannot: our future silicon overlords have a special place in virtual Hell reserved for his uploaded consciousness.
But Penrose clearly doesn't understand what he's talking about either...
Why should they cooperate for something that's not a crime in America? Should they cooperate if, say, the Saudi police were investigating you for putting pictures of your girlfriend in a bikini on your web site, for example?
The simple fact is this law would be nonsense, but a great way for the US government to harass Americans: you can't legally harass a US citizen? No problem, just ask your mates in Germany to ask you to do so.
"No but it is following the media trend of making the ISS out to be a money pit that is plagued with problems"
ISS _is_ a money pit that is plagued with problems, and serves no useful purpose that can justify its cost. It should have been scrapped years ago, before it was even launched.
"There is really no argument that movie downloading is a problem for traditional cinema and DVD sales."
However, the fact that most recent movies are sequels, remakes or bad adaptions of old TV shows and suck something rotten is probably far more of a problem. The era where you could sell any old crap with a star name and a big marketing budget is slowly coming to an end.
I certainly know people who've downloaded a movie from the Internet and then gone and bought a DVD of the movie they'd never have bought otherwise, so it's far from clear to me that the end result of movie downloading is lower sales: many downloaders would never have paid to watch a Movie of Suck anyway.
"I don't think you bought an URL, you bought the convenience of not having to download and burn the software"
Just as buying a DVD or CD gives you the convenience of not having to download and burn the movie or music.
Frankly, I'd much rather buy a DVD or CD than download some random video or audio file which might not be what I want and might not have a decent quality: but at the prices charged for CDs these days (DVDs are much less of a rip-off, IMHO), I can understand why some people prefer to download. What I don't understand is why the RIAA and MPAA continue to sue and harass their customers, rather than exploit the obvious market for such downloads and make $$$$$.
(Well, OK, I do: it's because they're technically-inept morons who keep the governments of the world in their back pockets... but rhetorically speaking, I don't).
"If maglev is what it takes to move people off the roads, I pity our civilization."
If our society has sunk to the point where people think they have the right to force people off the roads, civilisation has long gone.
"The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities,"
If people wanted to live in cities, they'd live in cities. Increasingly, people are desperate to get out of cities due to high taxes, poor services and high crime. That's almost entirely the fault of train-loving liberals, and it's not going to change any time soon.
"Trains are smooth and evironmentally friendly."
ROTFL. Try going to a London station sometime and watch the trains belching out clouds of diesel smoke into the air, then tell me they're "environmentally friendly". As for "smooth", again, you've obviously never taken a British train.
Those aren't issues for maglev, though for a train to be anywhere near as convenient for a car it will need to run every five minutes, twenty-four hours a day, which will mean most of them running mostly empty. That hardly seems likely to be "enviromentally friendly" to me.
"I, for one, would much rather ride a Maglev monorail with others, than drive a gas-guzzling car by myself"
Why would you want to be stuck on a train that goes from somewhere you're not (requiring you to get from where you are to the initial station) to somewhere you don't want to be (requiring you to get from the final station to where you want to go) via places where you don't want to go at times you can't choose, sitting across from a drunk and alongside someone who's coughing and sneezing all over you, rather than drive in your own car by yourself from where you are to where you want to go at whatever time you feel like?
Certainly there are places where the roads are so bad that trains are preferable (e.g. London), but in the vast majority of cases, trains really, really suck.
"Levels? Experience gained through psychotic, unprecedented levels of slaughter that only the likes of Hitler and Stalin could ever hope to match?"
I never played D&D for XP or levels: we had a good GM and the game was just as much fun at level 1 as at level fifteen bazillion: often more so, since the risks were more real (fighting ordinary creatures, not dragons and gods).
One problem with many PC games is that levelling through XP grinding has taken precedence over story, because you need the levels in order to finish the game: it would be better if the game adapted to character levels, like a pencil and paper GM.
"Inane restrictions that make absolutely no sense (e.g., mages can't wear armor, priests can't use swords)?"
Dunno about the former (other than that a mage in plate mail is hugely overpowered without some serious disadvantages, and would rapidly become the class of choice for powergamers), but the latter at least has a basis in historical reality: at various times in the past, priests were not allowed to spill blood with a sword, but beating the heck out of people with a big club was perfectly acceptable behaviour.
"A core tenet of capitalism is that each individual is free to engage in whatever mutual agreements he wishes--this is simply an exercise of that freedom. If you don't like it, don't buy it."
Microsoft would not exist in their current form in a capitalist society, since there'd be no copyright laws to protect them. For Microsoft to build a multi-billion dollar business on a government-mandated monopoly, and then whine when the government tries to control their business is hypocrisy in the extreme.
I'm not sure why the parent is listed as 'insightful': I rarely need to run _anything_ as root in Linux, except for installing some software or mounting and unmounting drives, whereas many, if not most, programs I run on XP simply will not run correctly if run as an unpriviledged user. Some time back I tried to set up an unpriviledged user account for my girlfriend on my XP machine and just gave up because trying to get it to work was just too much of a pain.
XP is just broken as far as security is concerned, and hiding these options on special menus certainly does not help.
"Accidents happen to the best of us"
But they happen far more to the worst of us. How exactly can you justify US aircraft blowing up British armored vehicles that are clearly marked as such in non-combat situations? Since they weren't being shot at they had plenty of time to check the markings and verify that they weren't allied troops, but they still went ahead and killed British soldiers.
"Now why were you surprised that most of the news of accidents and goof-ups seem to involve Americans"
Again, when have the British troops ever killed Americans 'by mistake'? It's not just numbers, it's training and policy... British troops are expected to be professionals, not Rambos who pull the trigger like they're playing an arcade game.
"whining about "trigger-happy Americans" is insulting"
But also accurate. Next, I guess, you'll be justiying the actions of US soldiers who machinegun innocent Iraqui families in taxis?
"It certainly appears that way, with the Brits coming in next for stupid accidents,"
Would you care to give some examples of British 'friendly fire'? Almost every example of 'friendly fire' I can think of in recent years has been trigger-happy Americans in aircraft shooting British vehicles which were clearly marked as such (the majority of exceptions being trigger-happy Americans shooting other trigger-happy Americans on the ground).
Maybe if Americans thought a little more before shooting, the British military wouldn't take more casualties from our American 'allies' than our 'enemies'.
"Look at the performance of the Exoset in the Falklands."
It's years ago so I may be remembering incorrectly, but didn't the British Navy conclude that the loss of several ships to Exocets was down to a mix of poor design and inadequate damage control?
"But more importantly, Kyoto is just a step towards sustainability and becoming less reliant on exhaustible resources."
Then it should be a 'sustainability and becoming less reliant on exhaustible resources' treaty and forget the Global Warming(tm) crap. There are very good reasons to limit reliance on fossil fuels, we don't need typical lefty lies to promote that.
"Economic costs should be weighed, certainly, but that cost includes the future cost of cleanup, and the health toll on our lungs"
You seriously think that CO2 emissions will have "a health toll on our lungs"? What planet is this you're on?
"Having said that, the specifics of Kyoto are not exactly endearing,"
No, they're moronic, and would have minimal impact on "Global Warming" if it's actually happening. It's purely a desperate last-minute lefty attempt to bring global industry under their control before it gets completely out of control.
The amusing thing is that it wouldn't even achieve that, now that outsourcing is moving so much energy-consuming manufacturing to China, which wouldn't be affected by Kyoto restrictions! Yet the lefties who support Kyoto whine about outsourcing...
"That is pure myth. The only adminstration in the last 25 years to not run a deficit was Clinton."
That is pure myth. The US national debt increased _every year_ while Clinton was president: he never once had a real, actual, budget surplus.
"Most revolutionary change is spearheaded by people who feel they have nothing to lose."
And one of the first things that such revolutionaries usually do is kill off the middle class (or at least steal everything they've worked for so long to acquire).
In what sense is using heroin not "legit", when it's just people injecting themselves with some drug they choose to use? Are you claiming that people are running around injecting heroin into others against their will?
"But it is still true that people here tend to "gloss over" the fact that just like P2P, people DO use mod chips to pirate games."
Agreed. But banning mod chips because people _can_ use them to pirate games would be like banning teapots because (according to one psycho I used to know) there are more than 23 ways to kill someone with a teapot... just another typical example of governments punishing the law-abiding in order to "do something" about criminals.
"I've been mugged 3 times"
Maybe you should try moving to somewhere where people carry guns, then you might not have to get mugged again.
"As the old saying, the absolute surest way of getting yourself shot is to carry a gun."
So why is it that murder rates dropped in US states with mandatory concealed carry permit issue?
In the real world, it's well established in criminology that a criminal with a knife is far more likely to use it than a criminal with a gun (though if they do use it, you're more likely to be killed by a gunshot than by being stabbed). See Gary Kleck's work, for example.
Boot loader perhaps, but assembler is unlikely to be a better choice for a device driver unless it's really, really time-critical. I've written drivers in both assembler and C, and it's much easier in C (not to mention more portable)... sure, you could use C++, but that introduces a whole host of problems of its own.
How exactly is it flamebait to suggest that if Americans can extradite people from Australia for breaking US laws, that governments of countries where porn is illegal might want to extradite people who run porn sites? Or that the future Islamic People's Republic of Iraq might extradite you for putting up a picture of your girlfriend in a bikini?
If we start down the slope, where will it stop?
"I know well educated people who can't find a job or who were layed off."
So start your own innovative IT business where you're worth a good salary doing something that can't readily be exported (or become a plumber and get rich). You'll always be one pay-cheque from disaster while you expect employers to give you jobs.
Seriously, most of our ancestors never had jobs in the modern sense and they survived, why shouldn't we learn to live without them too? Jobs are a invention of the industrial era, and the industrial era is coming to an end.
"Yeah, heaven forbid we learn from our previous attempt and start fresh."
'Starting fresh' is the doom of many a project. When you have a design that basically works, there's a huge amount of carefully-won knowledge inherent in that design which you lose the instant you decide to start again.
This is probably less true in network design than software projects, but every software project I've worked on where someone decided that it made more sense to 'start fresh' has taken many, many times longer than improving the current version would have done, because you have to fix all the same bugs that have already been fixed in the current code. It almost never makes sense.