You forget the size of the country. The country is around, roughly, the size of one of our states.
How easy would it be for foreigners to find weapons of mass destruction in, say, Illinois, if the country wanted to hide them? That's a lot of space to search.
Keep in mind that saddam had plenty of time and reason to hide them, and no requirement that they be quickly readied for employment. In fact, he would have had every reason to stock them with the idea that they wouldn't be needed until such a time that he had a critical mass of them. (no pun intended.)
I like Bush. I voted for him. I think he's taking us in a bad direction though. I still think we're better off with him than Al Gore or Buchannan however.
Thus, I just became a member of the EFF. (AND I get a free t-shirt, hat, and year long membership to web surfing anonymously!)
I was thinking more along the lines of non-genetic changes such as nanobots that increase the neural connectivity of our brains, resulting in a 1000% increase in intelligence. (thinking of the star trek the next generation episode where one engineer is hit with a virus that does that to him)
Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?
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The Rights of GM Humans
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How about improving on ourselves?
Sure, it's questionable to experiment on children not yet born, but what if we could modify adults with new genes? Would that be ok?
Personally, I'm all for it. I *want* to modify myself, especially since any modifications to me as an adult could be undone if I changed my mind later.
it cast a shade on his life. Between the vigilantes who assumed him guilty, the fact that he lost work, the time and money he spent on defending himself, and the fact that he didn't dare see his kids for two months, he got screwed.
Now, some district attorney (or whatever they call them in England) is saying "he got off scot-free. The system worked."
I used fake info to register on the nyt. The only nice thing about them is that they don't verify the email address you use. This means you can give really weird information.
I certainly didn't give them a valid email address. I think I made one up @ the nyt itself, in fact.
I never installed flash on this machine. I don't miss what I didn't use. I figured I could never trust sites that insist on using it for ads.
It's very annoying to visit a site, and get prompted to install it. But it's more annoying to have to see it.
I started being like this when my cable internet provider insisted on sending me huge graphic emailed newsletters that required me to visit their huge ugly flash-enabled web site in order to turn off receiving their unsolicited crap. This was on my old 120 mhz machine, which may explain why I won't tolerate it even on my current machine.
Some of those damn marketers need a few severe beatings.
Ok. But I have to wonder if it would really solve anything. Any of the "solutions" that involve taxing or charging the end-user for general use without charging for specific songs would mean the money would have to be handling by a non-biased third party.
Care to guess how much they would keep? How hard would they try to apportion the money to the real artists? Would any indie's get anything?
Any of these solutions are at best a socialistic method and smack of government-type taxation. This hasn't worked with the cd-r tax method. I'd like to know of a method like this that has worked anywhere.
For all the complaints about a problem that needs a solution, the columnist fails to account for the fact that the riaa has actually released fewer new records. Of all the groups that have been "pirated" the most, their sales are actually up.
As a previous link on slashdot mentioned, the RIAA actually created the loss in sales themselves, just to try to push legislation to kill off p2p. Their real goal is purely control of the music. If it was purely about sales, they wouldn't mind so much about p2p, but would use it as a marketing tool like many indie's have done.
What about the quantity of people that don't use p2p for music? The majority of broadband users aren't using p2p, and many of the ones using p2p at all aren't doing it for music.
And no, I don't have any actual numbers. Unlike the RIAA, however, I admit it.
I get uncomfortable when people talk about charging everyone like this. It's already done, btw, with cd-r. Every blank cd-r you buy, there is a tax paid to the riaa. I believe Canada charges it, but I'm not sure if the US does.
If I see two products, similar in quality, and both products cost the same before the rebate, I will buy the one without the rebate offer.
The stores out by me never seem to have up to date rebate offers either. I'd purchased a few things with rebates, and eventually got my money. But it took so freaking long, and was so much trouble, that I decided never to buy anything that offered a rebate again.
Of course, sometimes I buy the 50pack cds that offers a rebate anyway, but only because I was going to buy it anyway. When I see that rebate sign, I get tempted to buy something else instead. I throw out the rebate offer.
I like the theory I've read in some books that the laws of physics are mutable, and largely become what people agree on.
Rather than scientists discovering the laws of physics, they rather define them and fix them in place. This could explain quantum physics.;) They simply haven't been defined well enough and agreed upon yet, rather than discovered.
Of course, I know it's not real. But I still like the theory.
I believe one book I read that theory in was "Blood Music". There were others, but I can't remember them at the moment.
Even worse, if this tax was added, how would the pie be divided?
The current method of sales of music at least theoretically means that people get to choose what music they wish to purchase. Taxing everyone on the 'net and giving it to record companies would simply mean that listeners couldn't vote with their dollars anymore. It would actually make the problem worse.
This would ultimately become nothing more than a government sponsored recording industry.
except that all of the code involving dates had to be modified anyway.
But you raise a good point. A packed date might fit within 1 byte. The years from 1900 to 1999 fit within 7 bits, and the leftmost indicating either 1900 or 2000.
Although, leaving it as 8 bits would allow it to be 1800 to 2055. Maybe that's how it was done.
Personally, it will take a lot more reason for me to fly anywhere, and suffer the "security" measures today than before 9/11. The extra time involved, risking losing anything I might be carrying, etc, just so I can feel "secure".
Frankly, it's not my idea of a vacation.
So now the only way I would take a flight is if it involves my job and I have no choice. Fortunately, my job involves no travel.
So the airlines don't get my money, and neither do the places I might go on vacation. Way to go Ashcroft.
What sucks is that I back Bush, and didn't think there would be a problem with Ashcroft. Now I'm hoping Bush will realize what Ashcroft has been doing, and replace him.
Well, I'm not a COBOL programmer. Did it in college, but that was about it.
I helped develop an application that was COBOL on the back end, but I did the front end interface. All I really remember about that system is that all the dates were stored as string values, because COBOL couldn't handle binary data. But then the string versions of the numbers and dates were packed, so they were *sort* of binary data.
Now, according to the article, using it as a string value is better than using the optimization of using it as binary data. But I don't personally agree.
I'm not sure why the string date couldn't just be converted to the binary equivalent and stored that way. 2005, 1902, and 4577 all fit within 2 bytes if stored as binary. I pretty sure that cobol can handle binary stored data. It probably doesn't slow it down anymore than unpacking and checking for century indicators.
What you want is an application that understands people rather than a language that looks like english.
I'm not sure I would want to use a language that was designed to be idiot proof. A computer running a language that understood people would either have to be extremely weak or extremely dangerous.
Now, designing a language that enabled easily designing applications that understood people would be something entirely differently.
On the other hand, a language designed to understand people and had all the restrictions built in for security and safety might be easier to develop applications with, although it might be very difficult to do anything new or unusual.
And they will still be having date issues. Gotta love all those "solutions" that involved compressing the 2 digit character year into a 2 digit year and an indicator that it's the 21's century.
Delaying the problem is *so* much better than actually fixing it.
I did mean logarithmically, but I think you are correct.
1 person infects 10, each of those 10 would infect 10 more, etc. That makes a lot more sense than 1 person infecting 10, and each of those 10 infecting 20 more. So you are right, and it is geometrical.
In fact, it will probably turn into a parabola at the point where most people have already been infected. When that happens, and all who will die from it has, it will just be another cold.
But as we're still on the beginning edge, it looks linear still.
True, a molester could use a chatroom to invite a child to meet.
As bad as that is, I don't believe it is a reason to invade privacy. You might suggest that being on a public terminal means you don't have privacy. Well, fine. I disagree. Obviously the librarians agree with me since they want to delete all logs anyway.
But there won't be any logs on that machine in a chatroom anyway. mIrc, for example, only logs if the user sets it. I doubt if the molester is going to have irc logging turned on while on a library machine.
Now, I'm on shaky ground here. As I don't use library machines for net access, I don't have the facts to back myself up. But I'm betting that libraries don't even log what web sites people visit other than firewall logs. Firewall logs won't show what someone said in a chatroom. They would need either the irc logging enabled, or a network sniffer to record everything. I suspect that a library would be against either.
Even more disturbing is your belief that reading a book on bombmaking can cause harm. True, knowledge enables the malicious to do damage, but the malicious person would find a way anyway. Knowledge itself is not dangerous.
Yes, I belong to the "people kill people, not guns" crowd, although I don't know anyone who would want to kill a defenseless gun.
Or what about the creep who uses the library's Internet connection to download pr0n, then goes into the men's room to masturbate? What do you say to the 8-year-old who walks into the men's room and discovers him? What do you say to the kid's mother when little Johnny tells her about it?
Actually, that sort of thing is happening even with logs not being deleted. Not helping much.
Seems a library is being sued by the librarians for sexual harrassment because they have to see perverts looking at porn and even masturbating right there at the computers. It's not even a matter of it happening in the washrooms. I'd post the link, but I don't remember where I saw it. Either slashdot, fark, or wired last week.
Seems to me that a better method of preventing this sort of thing is to ARREST the guys for public indecency rather than banning them and using week-old log files for proof.
The death threats to the whitehouse is different. But chances are that the fbi is going to trace it that day. They probably won't wait a week. Deleting old logs isn't going to impact that much.
I'm not sure what you mean by "immediate harm can be done via the internet". Death threats by email aren't really immediate harm. There really isn't much difference between emailed death threats and snail-mail death threats. Emailed threats are just faster.
You say what people read is no one's business. Is that not true for what you read on the 'net too?
Slashdot Mirror
You forget the size of the country. The country is around, roughly, the size of one of our states.
How easy would it be for foreigners to find weapons of mass destruction in, say, Illinois, if the country wanted to hide them? That's a lot of space to search.
Keep in mind that saddam had plenty of time and reason to hide them, and no requirement that they be quickly readied for employment. In fact, he would have had every reason to stock them with the idea that they wouldn't be needed until such a time that he had a critical mass of them. (no pun intended.)
This scares the heck out of me.
I like Bush. I voted for him. I think he's taking us in a bad direction though. I still think we're better off with him than Al Gore or Buchannan however.
Thus, I just became a member of the EFF. (AND I get a free t-shirt, hat, and year long membership to web surfing anonymously!)
I was thinking more along the lines of non-genetic changes such as nanobots that increase the neural connectivity of our brains, resulting in a 1000% increase in intelligence. (thinking of the star trek the next generation episode where one engineer is hit with a virus that does that to him)
How about improving on ourselves?
Sure, it's questionable to experiment on children not yet born, but what if we could modify adults with new genes? Would that be ok?
Personally, I'm all for it. I *want* to modify myself, especially since any modifications to me as an adult could be undone if I changed my mind later.
Really? Since when?
The BB by me only charges $2.99. Of course, it's been 3 weeks since last I rented, so maybe it's gone up since then.
it cast a shade on his life. Between the vigilantes who assumed him guilty, the fact that he lost work, the time and money he spent on defending himself, and the fact that he didn't dare see his kids for two months, he got screwed.
Now, some district attorney (or whatever they call them in England) is saying "he got off scot-free. The system worked."
I used fake info to register on the nyt. The only nice thing about them is that they don't verify the email address you use. This means you can give really weird information.
I certainly didn't give them a valid email address. I think I made one up @ the nyt itself, in fact.
I never installed flash on this machine. I don't miss what I didn't use. I figured I could never trust sites that insist on using it for ads.
It's very annoying to visit a site, and get prompted to install it. But it's more annoying to have to see it.
I started being like this when my cable internet provider insisted on sending me huge graphic emailed newsletters that required me to visit their huge ugly flash-enabled web site in order to turn off receiving their unsolicited crap. This was on my old 120 mhz machine, which may explain why I won't tolerate it even on my current machine.
Some of those damn marketers need a few severe beatings.
Ok. But I have to wonder if it would really solve anything. Any of the "solutions" that involve taxing or charging the end-user for general use without charging for specific songs would mean the money would have to be handling by a non-biased third party.
Care to guess how much they would keep? How hard would they try to apportion the money to the real artists? Would any indie's get anything?
Any of these solutions are at best a socialistic method and smack of government-type taxation. This hasn't worked with the cd-r tax method. I'd like to know of a method like this that has worked anywhere.
For all the complaints about a problem that needs a solution, the columnist fails to account for the fact that the riaa has actually released fewer new records. Of all the groups that have been "pirated" the most, their sales are actually up.
As a previous link on slashdot mentioned, the RIAA actually created the loss in sales themselves, just to try to push legislation to kill off p2p. Their real goal is purely control of the music. If it was purely about sales, they wouldn't mind so much about p2p, but would use it as a marketing tool like many indie's have done.
What about the quantity of people that don't use p2p for music? The majority of broadband users aren't using p2p, and many of the ones using p2p at all aren't doing it for music.
And no, I don't have any actual numbers. Unlike the RIAA, however, I admit it.
I get uncomfortable when people talk about charging everyone like this. It's already done, btw, with cd-r. Every blank cd-r you buy, there is a tax paid to the riaa. I believe Canada charges it, but I'm not sure if the US does.
In fact, I make a point of it.
If I see two products, similar in quality, and both products cost the same before the rebate, I will buy the one without the rebate offer.
The stores out by me never seem to have up to date rebate offers either. I'd purchased a few things with rebates, and eventually got my money. But it took so freaking long, and was so much trouble, that I decided never to buy anything that offered a rebate again.
Of course, sometimes I buy the 50pack cds that offers a rebate anyway, but only because I was going to buy it anyway. When I see that rebate sign, I get tempted to buy something else instead. I throw out the rebate offer.
I *really* hate rebates.
Those nanotubes burned when exposed to bright light, but researchers might find an alternate nanotube structure that doesn't absorb light like that.
So the chips and the space elevator might be ok.
We should outlow dihydrogen oxide as well, since breathing it in can cause death within minutes.
It also damages property and the environment.
I like the theory I've read in some books that the laws of physics are mutable, and largely become what people agree on.
;) They simply haven't been defined well enough and agreed upon yet, rather than discovered.
Rather than scientists discovering the laws of physics, they rather define them and fix them in place. This could explain quantum physics.
Of course, I know it's not real. But I still like the theory.
I believe one book I read that theory in was "Blood Music". There were others, but I can't remember them at the moment.
Even worse, if this tax was added, how would the pie be divided?
The current method of sales of music at least theoretically means that people get to choose what music they wish to purchase. Taxing everyone on the 'net and giving it to record companies would simply mean that listeners couldn't vote with their dollars anymore. It would actually make the problem worse.
This would ultimately become nothing more than a government sponsored recording industry.
except that all of the code involving dates had to be modified anyway.
But you raise a good point. A packed date might fit within 1 byte. The years from 1900 to 1999 fit within 7 bits, and the leftmost indicating either 1900 or 2000.
Although, leaving it as 8 bits would allow it to be 1800 to 2055. Maybe that's how it was done.
some airlines might go out of business.
Personally, it will take a lot more reason for me to fly anywhere, and suffer the "security" measures today than before 9/11. The extra time involved, risking losing anything I might be carrying, etc, just so I can feel "secure".
Frankly, it's not my idea of a vacation.
So now the only way I would take a flight is if it involves my job and I have no choice. Fortunately, my job involves no travel.
So the airlines don't get my money, and neither do the places I might go on vacation. Way to go Ashcroft.
What sucks is that I back Bush, and didn't think there would be a problem with Ashcroft. Now I'm hoping Bush will realize what Ashcroft has been doing, and replace him.
Well, I'm not a COBOL programmer. Did it in college, but that was about it.
I helped develop an application that was COBOL on the back end, but I did the front end interface. All I really remember about that system is that all the dates were stored as string values, because COBOL couldn't handle binary data. But then the string versions of the numbers and dates were packed, so they were *sort* of binary data.
Now, according to the article, using it as a string value is better than using the optimization of using it as binary data. But I don't personally agree.
I'm not sure why the string date couldn't just be converted to the binary equivalent and stored that way. 2005, 1902, and 4577 all fit within 2 bytes if stored as binary. I pretty sure that cobol can handle binary stored data. It probably doesn't slow it down anymore than unpacking and checking for century indicators.
You're thinking in the wrong level.
What you want is an application that understands people rather than a language that looks like english.
I'm not sure I would want to use a language that was designed to be idiot proof. A computer running a language that understood people would either have to be extremely weak or extremely dangerous.
Now, designing a language that enabled easily designing applications that understood people would be something entirely differently.
On the other hand, a language designed to understand people and had all the restrictions built in for security and safety might be easier to develop applications with, although it might be very difficult to do anything new or unusual.
And they will still be having date issues. Gotta love all those "solutions" that involved compressing the 2 digit character year into a 2 digit year and an indicator that it's the 21's century.
Delaying the problem is *so* much better than actually fixing it.
I did mean logarithmically, but I think you are correct.
1 person infects 10, each of those 10 would infect 10 more, etc. That makes a lot more sense than 1 person infecting 10, and each of those 10 infecting 20 more. So you are right, and it is geometrical.
In fact, it will probably turn into a parabola at the point where most people have already been infected. When that happens, and all who will die from it has, it will just be another cold.
But as we're still on the beginning edge, it looks linear still.
The figures are just for the first year. Figure on it escalating logarithmically until everyone has been infected, or some kind of solution is found.
1800 the first year, half a million the second year, etc. Fortunately, heart disease doesn't work the same way.
True, a molester could use a chatroom to invite a child to meet.
As bad as that is, I don't believe it is a reason to invade privacy. You might suggest that being on a public terminal means you don't have privacy. Well, fine. I disagree. Obviously the librarians agree with me since they want to delete all logs anyway.
But there won't be any logs on that machine in a chatroom anyway. mIrc, for example, only logs if the user sets it. I doubt if the molester is going to have irc logging turned on while on a library machine.
Now, I'm on shaky ground here. As I don't use library machines for net access, I don't have the facts to back myself up. But I'm betting that libraries don't even log what web sites people visit other than firewall logs. Firewall logs won't show what someone said in a chatroom. They would need either the irc logging enabled, or a network sniffer to record everything. I suspect that a library would be against either.
Even more disturbing is your belief that reading a book on bombmaking can cause harm. True, knowledge enables the malicious to do damage, but the malicious person would find a way anyway. Knowledge itself is not dangerous.
Yes, I belong to the "people kill people, not guns" crowd, although I don't know anyone who would want to kill a defenseless gun.
Or what about the creep who uses the library's Internet connection to download pr0n, then goes into the men's room to masturbate? What do you say to the 8-year-old who walks into the men's room and discovers him? What do you say to the kid's mother when little Johnny tells her about it?
Actually, that sort of thing is happening even with logs not being deleted. Not helping much.
Seems a library is being sued by the librarians for sexual harrassment because they have to see perverts looking at porn and even masturbating right there at the computers. It's not even a matter of it happening in the washrooms. I'd post the link, but I don't remember where I saw it. Either slashdot, fark, or wired last week.
Seems to me that a better method of preventing this sort of thing is to ARREST the guys for public indecency rather than banning them and using week-old log files for proof.
The death threats to the whitehouse is different. But chances are that the fbi is going to trace it that day. They probably won't wait a week. Deleting old logs isn't going to impact that much.
I'm not sure what you mean by "immediate harm can be done via the internet". Death threats by email aren't really immediate harm. There really isn't much difference between emailed death threats and snail-mail death threats. Emailed threats are just faster.
You say what people read is no one's business. Is that not true for what you read on the 'net too?
and run my engine on banana peels and tin cans?