So you'd say I'm the idiot for figuring that the safe speed is well above 55 if I'm on the highway at midnight and I'm quite literally the only one on it?
The maximum safe speed is not necessarily the speed limit. Sort of like this four-lane, one-way road we've got that's set to 30 mph (and everyone does 40). Or there's this part of the I-5 that's got about ten thousand cows right by it - I remember going just shy of 100mph and being passed. We all richly deserved huge tickets for that, we were going insanely over the speed limit.
Once we manage to replace meat machines with metal and silicon ones, it'll be great.
Robotic soldiers will go and kill whoever you tell them to kill, terrorists or American citizens.
They'll never snitch about the crimes they commit.
They don't create flag-draped caskets or teary funerals.
There will never be a memorial for the unknown killbot.
The warmongers won't have to justify sending our finest men and women to go die.
No more recruiting shortages.
No complaints from robots about having not seen their families in 3 years.
No more field medics, or wounded, or veteran's administration.
The promise of war being a nasty, ugly, fucking horrible affair is the best way to prevent it.
Me slamming on the brakes because the law enforcement^W^Wrevenue enhancement camera is watching is much more dangerous, especially during the northwest's shitty winters, than gliding through on the end of a yellow. And I want to do 80 or 90 on the freeway when I'm coming home from work at midnight (while in the left lane, and watching closely for anyone else merging onto the freeway), who am I endangering?
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt." -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Not citing anything, but: Which is more likely to cause an accident, taking that left on a yellow arrow, or slamming your brakes because the speed camera will ticket you if you don't?
Just kidding, this is truly awesome. With any luck, this will improve the efficiency of document handling in the Norwegian government and help set off a domino effect. Unfortunately, I think it's likely that us poor Americans would be the last such domino to fall, given the unbelievable amount of data that would require conversion (much of it possibly by hand) and our government's overt support of big business (i.e. Microsoft).
But the idea of thomas.loc.gov all being in PDF... wow...
With solar power, the $/Watt is unit cost per (maximum) unit power output. It's related to how long a solar power system takes to pay for itself; The lower the $/watt, the fewer watt-hours needed for the system to pay itself off. At 4$/Watt, a big panel outputting 120 watts costs about $480 and (before tax breaks) will probably take 20-odd years to pay for itself. Since 20 years is an unreasonably long time for an investment to break even, not many people are doing this. At $1/Watt, it costs $120 and will pay for itself in 5 years (2 or 3 after tax breaks), which is much more economical.
For example, say a given panel costs $N/Watt. The income is (power * time * rate), and it pays for itself when that equals the original cost. Assuming 275 days/year with 8 hours (on average) of full sun each, then for $N, you get $(1 * 8 * 275 *.0002) per year, or $.44. Then it takes N/.44 years to pay for itself. So at the cost of silicon, it takes 9 years to pay for the panel, but at $1/Watt only 2.3 years. Keep in mind that panels are about half the cost of the system (+batteries, inverter & installation), and that's where 20 vs 5 years comes in.
For purposes of this analysis, I have assumed that the NSA intercepts electronic messages (phone calls and emails); that when the agency learns of a foreign cell phone or email address that is being used by a terrorist, it inputs that phone number or address into its surveillance system and is then able to intercept all incoming and outgoing communications; that the intent of the program is to intercept only international communications, i.e., those where at least one of the parties is located outside the United States; but on relatively rare occasions, communications between two people who are both located in the U.S. are intercepted.
This is significantly inconsistent with what has been described by experts with decades of experience in the telecom industry. The systems which have sparked the scandals and lawsuits are built for dragnet surveillance, and were deployed to intercept largely or almost entirely domestic calls. If you take as a premise that the system was about targeted surveillance of communications with a foreign terminus, then of course it seems legal. The problem is that this premise is false with high probability, extraordinarily high probability after considering the universal law that any system which can be abused will be and the Bush administration's unprecedented corruption and contempt for the law.
But more importantly than the true nature of the system, whatever that may be, which do you think it's for? Is it for targeted surveillance of foreign communications as Powerline assumes, or is it for domestic surveillance as your post implies that it's helped with? You can't have it both ways.
As regards domestic surveillance, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is very explicit that there are no exceptions to the Fourth Amendment. If local calls are going to be monitored, there has to be a warrant signed by a judge - end of debate. If the Dept. of Justice can't get a warrant from a court that had signed 18756 out of 18761 (and partly granted 4 of the other 5) warrants as of 2004, then inductive logic implies that they have no case. Senator Dodd was absolutely correct: If we start disregarding the rule of law and our most treasured legal documents, we will have handed Osama bin Laden and the Jihadis a greater victory than they could ever have dreamed of. Nothing they can do would ever destroy America, ever. That privilege is reserved exclusively for us.
It was quite refreshing to listen to Dodd describe in fair detail the crap that's been going on:
The installation of systems poorly suited to specific taps but ideally suited to dragnet surveillance. In major fiber exchanges that aren't where the main foreign fiber trunks or satellite dishes are (i.e. the San Fransisco case that started it). And now we learn that Qwest balked because they wanted to put a dragnet on a switch center that handled almost entirely local traffic.
Then Orrin "destroy their computers" Hatch started speaking. About how the American government didn't do {the bombings in Beruit, the Bali nightclub bombing, the bombings in Kenya, the London tube bombings, the Madrid train bombings, and (of course) 9/11}, the Turrists did. And I'm sitting here trying hard not to scream "And how would dragnet surveillance of domestic calls have stopped a single damn one of those things!?!?"
Konqueror rendered it perfectly. I love Konqueror.
But my point is, we got into the situation you correctly describe (broken shit everywhere that mostly-works when fed through certain rendering engines and nothing complying with the standard) because browsers enabled it by making correctness optional, though in fairness (as the original poster said) it's also in part because the w3c never put out a reference implementation to compare things to.
I mean, do Photoshop or the GIMP doggedly try to open a broken jpeg? Does Word desperately attempt to render corrupted.docs as they were meant to be seen? Do movie players spend half an hour trying to figure out how to play a bad file? No, they say "this file is broken" and stop processing it. Why shouldn't web browsers say "this page is broken" and stop rendering at that point (perhaps after putting in anything from the address tag)?
The sad thing about broken web code is that it's browsers that enable it.
If people know they can be lazy and write crap code that the browser will somehow manage to render anyway, they will since it's easier than writing correct code.
Would you rather your rights to privacy and liberty mostly-disappear the moment anyone suspects drugs might be involved, as they do presently? My proposal might not be optimal, but it's one hell of a lot better than what we're trying to do now.
On the other hand, this whole thing is arguably null: Psuedoephedrine's optical isomer is just as effective at relieving congestion, can't be turned into meth, and has fewer side-effects to boot. You have three guesses which bunch of dickbags are sitting on the patent.
Are you suprised? As long as 41 Republicans remain in mindless lock-step with Dear Leader, anything and everything will be filibustered. As long as 34 Republicans remain in lock-step with Dear Leader, anything and everything that isn't exactly what Dear Leader wants will be vetoed.
Nice false dichotomy, asshat. No one's implying that drugs are good. There's an extremely pertinent quote from Charles Stross' Singularity Sky, but since I'm not going to take the time to search a 350 page book for you, here's the paraphrased version: "It's not that this is particularly good, it's that the alternatives are unspeakably worse." That is to say, drugs suck, but the ever-growing invasions of liberty and privacy call for to fight them (justified because the last ones didn't work) are even worse.
And while we're on the topic of meth, do you want to know how this small aspect of the war could actually be won? Stop the twelve factories in the world that make pseudoephedrine. Of course, while there is probably no invasion of privacy and freedom so insane it hasn't been proposed in the War On Some Drugs, don't you dare suggest that Phizer & co make a sacrifice for the cause by using something that's possibly a bit less effective or profitable.
The stuff you hear about has something to do with playing HD content from their computer over HDMI -- or something -- and nobody does that.
If there were no black people in America, would segregation laws be a non-issue because no one was affected? How many people have to be screwed by an arbitrary, bullshit restriction on technologically sufficient hardware? The whole point of new hardware and software is that it's supposed to be more capable, not less. My monitor is capable of playing video at 1920x1080, and my CPU is capable of reconstructing a compressed video stream fast enough; the fact that it's a 13w3 cable in between is irrelevant.
Dear sir, please complete the following before posting on Slashdot again:
1. Finish your drug bender.
2. Look into grouping sentences which share a theme into seperate blocks (commonly called "paragraphs"), why this is a good idea, and how to do this on Slashdot.
3. Try to focus on one or a few topics when writing your post; Incoherently stumbling through a dozen or so makes for a poor reception.
Although without a basic understanding of geology, thermodynamics, and governance your post will still be devoid of meaningful content, at least it can be devoid in style. Okay? Cheers!
I've sometimes thought of trying to model aggregate human behavior as a collection of gas molecules in containers, or as harmonic oscillators. Think of eg. masses of people trying to move as viscous fluids, or of the stock market as driven by a vast number of superimposed oscillators.
Bullshit. After you hit "play," there is exactly one non-error condition where the player will overlay a menu on your video stream: You hit a menu button, which means you requested it. This is equivalent to having a cochlear implant whose audio processor inserts "obey your corporate masters" underneath everything your hear: Data you don't want, being forced on you by someone between the data source and you.
Whatever I may think about the rest of his rant, I agree with one thing: I can't stand Gnome's file select dialog. Most of it boils down to, "how can I change this dialog?" How can I change the way files & directories are sorted? Display them as a tree or icons instead of a flat list? Jump to the last few directories I used? KDE's file-select has a little wrench that has all the configuration options - display style, sorting, shown/not shown, etc. Where is the Gnome configuration button? I found the KDE one after a few seconds of looking (I've never had cause to use it before).
No, it has a theoretical float-point performance of 520GFlops for algorithms that are easily expressed in terms of parallel multiply and add. CPUs vastly outclass video cards on applications that do not trivially parallelize, such as those for which state(n+1) of component x depends on something other than state(n) of x, or that involve a lot of choices and branching.
Slashdot Mirror
NT
So you'd say I'm the idiot for figuring that the safe speed is well above 55 if I'm on the highway at midnight and I'm quite literally the only one on it?
The maximum safe speed is not necessarily the speed limit. Sort of like this four-lane, one-way road we've got that's set to 30 mph (and everyone does 40). Or there's this part of the I-5 that's got about ten thousand cows right by it - I remember going just shy of 100mph and being passed. We all richly deserved huge tickets for that, we were going insanely over the speed limit.
Once we manage to replace meat machines with metal and silicon ones, it'll be great.
Robotic soldiers will go and kill whoever you tell them to kill, terrorists or American citizens.
They'll never snitch about the crimes they commit.
They don't create flag-draped caskets or teary funerals.
There will never be a memorial for the unknown killbot.
The warmongers won't have to justify sending our finest men and women to go die.
No more recruiting shortages.
No complaints from robots about having not seen their families in 3 years.
No more field medics, or wounded, or veteran's administration.
The promise of war being a nasty, ugly, fucking horrible affair is the best way to prevent it.
Me slamming on the brakes because the law enforcement^W^Wrevenue enhancement camera is watching is much more dangerous, especially during the northwest's shitty winters, than gliding through on the end of a yellow. And I want to do 80 or 90 on the freeway when I'm coming home from work at midnight (while in the left lane, and watching closely for anyone else merging onto the freeway), who am I endangering?
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt." -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Not citing anything, but: Which is more likely to cause an accident, taking that left on a yellow arrow, or slamming your brakes because the speed camera will ticket you if you don't?
Just kidding, this is truly awesome. With any luck, this will improve the efficiency of document handling in the Norwegian government and help set off a domino effect. Unfortunately, I think it's likely that us poor Americans would be the last such domino to fall, given the unbelievable amount of data that would require conversion (much of it possibly by hand) and our government's overt support of big business (i.e. Microsoft).
But the idea of thomas.loc.gov all being in PDF... wow...
With solar power, the $/Watt is unit cost per (maximum) unit power output. It's related to how long a solar power system takes to pay for itself; The lower the $/watt, the fewer watt-hours needed for the system to pay itself off. At 4$/Watt, a big panel outputting 120 watts costs about $480 and (before tax breaks) will probably take 20-odd years to pay for itself. Since 20 years is an unreasonably long time for an investment to break even, not many people are doing this. At $1/Watt, it costs $120 and will pay for itself in 5 years (2 or 3 after tax breaks), which is much more economical.
.0002) per year, or $.44. Then it takes N/.44 years to pay for itself. So at the cost of silicon, it takes 9 years to pay for the panel, but at $1/Watt only 2.3 years. Keep in mind that panels are about half the cost of the system (+batteries, inverter & installation), and that's where 20 vs 5 years comes in.
:)
For example, say a given panel costs $N/Watt. The income is (power * time * rate), and it pays for itself when that equals the original cost. Assuming 275 days/year with 8 hours (on average) of full sun each, then for $N, you get $(1 * 8 * 275 *
Hope this helps
This is significantly inconsistent with what has been described by experts with decades of experience in the telecom industry. The systems which have sparked the scandals and lawsuits are built for dragnet surveillance, and were deployed to intercept largely or almost entirely domestic calls. If you take as a premise that the system was about targeted surveillance of communications with a foreign terminus, then of course it seems legal. The problem is that this premise is false with high probability, extraordinarily high probability after considering the universal law that any system which can be abused will be and the Bush administration's unprecedented corruption and contempt for the law.
But more importantly than the true nature of the system, whatever that may be, which do you think it's for? Is it for targeted surveillance of foreign communications as Powerline assumes, or is it for domestic surveillance as your post implies that it's helped with? You can't have it both ways.
As regards domestic surveillance, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is very explicit that there are no exceptions to the Fourth Amendment. If local calls are going to be monitored, there has to be a warrant signed by a judge - end of debate. If the Dept. of Justice can't get a warrant from a court that had signed 18756 out of 18761 (and partly granted 4 of the other 5) warrants as of 2004, then inductive logic implies that they have no case. Senator Dodd was absolutely correct: If we start disregarding the rule of law and our most treasured legal documents, we will have handed Osama bin Laden and the Jihadis a greater victory than they could ever have dreamed of. Nothing they can do would ever destroy America, ever. That privilege is reserved exclusively for us.
What OS are they not showing? All the stats add to 94.4 percent for Nov 07; The missing information is greater than 5 of the 7 columns shown.
At any rate, my own site gets roughly 10% each Linux, Mac and Vista, and 50% non-MSIE browsers... so what?
It was quite refreshing to listen to Dodd describe in fair detail the crap that's been going on:
The installation of systems poorly suited to specific taps but ideally suited to dragnet surveillance. In major fiber exchanges that aren't where the main foreign fiber trunks or satellite dishes are (i.e. the San Fransisco case that started it). And now we learn that Qwest balked because they wanted to put a dragnet on a switch center that handled almost entirely local traffic.
Then Orrin "destroy their computers" Hatch started speaking. About how the American government didn't do {the bombings in Beruit, the Bali nightclub bombing, the bombings in Kenya, the London tube bombings, the Madrid train bombings, and (of course) 9/11}, the Turrists did. And I'm sitting here trying hard not to scream "And how would dragnet surveillance of domestic calls have stopped a single damn one of those things!?!?"
Konqueror rendered it perfectly. I love Konqueror.
.docs as they were meant to be seen? Do movie players spend half an hour trying to figure out how to play a bad file? No, they say "this file is broken" and stop processing it. Why shouldn't web browsers say "this page is broken" and stop rendering at that point (perhaps after putting in anything from the address tag)?
But my point is, we got into the situation you correctly describe (broken shit everywhere that mostly-works when fed through certain rendering engines and nothing complying with the standard) because browsers enabled it by making correctness optional, though in fairness (as the original poster said) it's also in part because the w3c never put out a reference implementation to compare things to.
I mean, do Photoshop or the GIMP doggedly try to open a broken jpeg? Does Word desperately attempt to render corrupted
The sad thing about broken web code is that it's browsers that enable it.
If people know they can be lazy and write crap code that the browser will somehow manage to render anyway, they will since it's easier than writing correct code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psuedoephedrine - Read under chemistry.
Would you rather your rights to privacy and liberty mostly-disappear the moment anyone suspects drugs might be involved, as they do presently? My proposal might not be optimal, but it's one hell of a lot better than what we're trying to do now.
On the other hand, this whole thing is arguably null: Psuedoephedrine's optical isomer is just as effective at relieving congestion, can't be turned into meth, and has fewer side-effects to boot. You have three guesses which bunch of dickbags are sitting on the patent.
Are you suprised? As long as 41 Republicans remain in mindless lock-step with Dear Leader, anything and everything will be filibustered. As long as 34 Republicans remain in lock-step with Dear Leader, anything and everything that isn't exactly what Dear Leader wants will be vetoed.
Nice false dichotomy, asshat. No one's implying that drugs are good. There's an extremely pertinent quote from Charles Stross' Singularity Sky, but since I'm not going to take the time to search a 350 page book for you, here's the paraphrased version: "It's not that this is particularly good, it's that the alternatives are unspeakably worse." That is to say, drugs suck, but the ever-growing invasions of liberty and privacy call for to fight them (justified because the last ones didn't work) are even worse.
And while we're on the topic of meth, do you want to know how this small aspect of the war could actually be won? Stop the twelve factories in the world that make pseudoephedrine. Of course, while there is probably no invasion of privacy and freedom so insane it hasn't been proposed in the War On Some Drugs, don't you dare suggest that Phizer & co make a sacrifice for the cause by using something that's possibly a bit less effective or profitable.
Dear sir, please complete the following before posting on Slashdot again:
1. Finish your drug bender.
2. Look into grouping sentences which share a theme into seperate blocks (commonly called "paragraphs"), why this is a good idea, and how to do this on Slashdot.
3. Try to focus on one or a few topics when writing your post; Incoherently stumbling through a dozen or so makes for a poor reception.
Although without a basic understanding of geology, thermodynamics, and governance your post will still be devoid of meaningful content, at least it can be devoid in style. Okay? Cheers!
I've sometimes thought of trying to model aggregate human behavior as a collection of gas molecules in containers, or as harmonic oscillators. Think of eg. masses of people trying to move as viscous fluids, or of the stock market as driven by a vast number of superimposed oscillators.
Oh, and +1 for the Foundation reference.
Now that was one of the most informative damn things I've read in a long time, and I'm only up to page 22. This should be required reading.
Um, what? Two Hundred clock cycles for my 2.4Ghz CPU to start getting data from my ram over a 400Mhz data bus? Permit me to doubt.
Bullshit. After you hit "play," there is exactly one non-error condition where the player will overlay a menu on your video stream: You hit a menu button, which means you requested it. This is equivalent to having a cochlear implant whose audio processor inserts "obey your corporate masters" underneath everything your hear: Data you don't want, being forced on you by someone between the data source and you.
"Hey, man, is something wrong with your server?"
"Roger, roger!"
Whatever I may think about the rest of his rant, I agree with one thing: I can't stand Gnome's file select dialog. Most of it boils down to, "how can I change this dialog?" How can I change the way files & directories are sorted? Display them as a tree or icons instead of a flat list? Jump to the last few directories I used? KDE's file-select has a little wrench that has all the configuration options - display style, sorting, shown/not shown, etc. Where is the Gnome configuration button? I found the KDE one after a few seconds of looking (I've never had cause to use it before).
No, it has a theoretical float-point performance of 520GFlops for algorithms that are easily expressed in terms of parallel multiply and add. CPUs vastly outclass video cards on applications that do not trivially parallelize, such as those for which state(n+1) of component x depends on something other than state(n) of x, or that involve a lot of choices and branching.