I'm going to have to disagree with your first point. Without any evidence (since this can't be measured) I believe that more evil has been done by religious organizations in the name of "God(s)" than for any other single reason. Money would probably be a close second. You know, stuff like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the creation of the Islamic Caliphates, the holocaust (if you consider Hitler to be a cult leader), or suicide bombings. There are too many examples to name.
(Definitions for the purpose of this post: Logic and reason are the tools that allow us to understand the world. Skepticism lets us know when to apply these tools to scrutinize beliefs and ideas.)
My main objection to organized religion is that it encourages people to abandon reason. Since religious teachings cannot survive logical scrutiny (using the scientific method, etc.), they must discourage logic and skepticism. And this effect is total, since skepticism is an all or nothing thing. If you only question some beliefs and not others, then you are only going through the motions. And that creates serious side-effects that are invariably lethal for people who do not follow that same faith (and many that do). And if your are not skeptical, then you are likely to be suckered by one or more unrelated scams to the further detriment of yourself and society.
I tend to think of religion itself as a kind of memetic virus. It is infectious, can (and usually is) transmitted to offspring, it affects behavior, it resists attempts to remove it, and it mutates over time. I liken its discouragement of reason to the mechanism that HIV uses to prevent its removal by the immune system. A person who lacks the ability to accurately reason will not be able to reject the influence of religion, just as a disabled immune system cannot resist HIV (and eventually any other virus that comes along). I consider religious memes to be distinct from cultural memes, although historically they have been (and often still are) closely linked. I consider organized religion to be a quasi-political organization that preys upon religious people and is symbiotic with religion as a whole. It tends to magnify the negative effects (war, persecution, etc.) of religion while also helping it to spread and compete against other religions. Religion can and often does exist independently of organized practice.
I also disagree with your assertion that people will only act altruistically if their moral code is buried in religious cruft. There are many ways in which moral values and cultural norms can be communicated to a member of society that do not involve religious indoctrination or the deprecation of [reason|skepticism].
Your second point is an example of the inevitable fact that everybody has some beliefs that they do not question. Nobody is completely objective, and everybody has been indoctrinated in somebody else's moral code and cultural norms. Sometimes it is good - society could not function otherwise. After all, many people describe society as a shared consensus. The degree to which you share (or mimic) a culture's values controls the degree to which you can participate in the society. Sometimes it is bad - when you condemn something simply because it runs counter to your own values and not because you have objectively evaluated it.
(As I look over the post, I find that I really don't think I have explained this very well. The virus analogy needs work. So I certainly won't be offended if you reject my reasoning. Indeed, I would be interested in reading a response)
cough cough... Thirty Years' War... cough cough (and since it was the continuation of a conflict that started in 1546, its more like the 102 years war...but whatever).
The problem is not Islam, the problem is organized religion that encourages fundamentalist teachings and the abandonment of reason. Islam is not really more vulnerable to this than any other religion, it just seems that way because the fundamentalists' cause is buoyed by moderates who resent political persecution of 'the Islamic world' by 'the West'. A perfect current events example of this is happening right now in Gaza. Before the 'truce' expired Hamas was largely considered a failed govt. by Gazans. A average terrorist group but a failure at running a state. If a new (and fair!) election had been held before the truce expired, Fatah would probably have won. But now, many Palestinians who despise hamas will still support them, because they hate the israelis far more and want to deny them a perceived victory. I am not talking about morality or what the israelis should be doing, and I don't want this example to become fuel for a flamewar. I'm just trying to point out a universal human characteristic: nothing brings disparate people together like a common enemy. The perceived strength of fundamentalist muslims is not a religious phenomenon, it is a political one. This is a distinction that many people miss, IME.
While using a pigovian tax (aka 'sin' tax) is technically the right solution for this, care must be taken to plan for lost tax revenue when the tax works as intended. i.e. more tax = less gas sold = tax revenue drops just when the gov has gotten used to it. Since governments rarely plan for this properly (if at all), there will be a budget disruption with tax hikes (or borrowing, which is just a deferred tax) elsewhere. This happens unless the tax is spent solely on reducing the harm caused by the taxed activity. For ex. cigarette taxes that go to hospitals and lung cancer research. When people smoke less, hospitals need less money to treat uninsured smokers. Its also a regressive tax, which presents its own problems.
While it sounds like a great idea in theory, it would basically be an unenforceable law criminalizing a victimless activity between two consenting people. It would be like prohibition (any type: drug, alcohol, literature, religious, etc.): totally ineffectual while simultaneously producing a vast amount of collateral damage.
Not that I haven't wished for similar tests (voting, political office, procreation, a real test for driving) in weaker moments... They all fail for the same reasons, unfortunately.
What model did you have? I own a sony c1 picturebook with a first-gen crusoe. Very slow, but it got impressive battery life (at the time) and ran very cool. The entire unit had one fan about the size of a quarter which only ran when the cpu was maxed out. The rest of the time you could barely hear it idling. Of course the horrible hard drive (10x louder than the fan, slow, unreliable) more than made up for it...
And PII@233 sounds about right speed-wise. I consider crusoe the perfect example of an idea that looks wonderful on paper and utterly fails in execution.
In the U.S., the speed limit is supposed to be set to the 85th percentile of drivers as measured over a period of several months. So if 85% of drivers travel a road segment at 80mph or less (a typical highway speed if traffic is not heavy), then the speed limit is supposed to be set at 80mph. Statistics buffs will notice that 85% is about one standard deviation. However, since the federal government will withhold highway maintenance funds for any state with a speed limit not equal to 70mph, the highway speed limit is unchanged. The 85th percentile speed is significantly above the posted limit in nearly every state in the U.S., and modern cars are far safer st these speeds than older vehicles. In practice, local and interstate speed limits are set by politics only. This goes doubly true for any area with speed cameras.
under Sec. 1702.104. INVESTIGATIONS COMPANY, occurring immediately after 1702.104 (a) "(b) For purposes of Subsection (a)(1), obtaining or furnishing information includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public."
This is a very broad definition, potentially applying to a broad number of pc repair tasks. When combined with:
"SECTION 8. Section 1702.133(b), Occupations Code, is amended to read as follows:
(b) A license holder or an officer, director, partner, or manager of a license holder shall disclose to a law enforcement officer or a district attorney, or that individual's representative, information the person obtains that relates to a criminal offense. "...then the law's scope become disturbing.
Actually, they never used magnetic power to launch anything in that series. They used a ram accelerator powered by a fuel air mixture (can't remember the exact fuel details). Basically a multi-kilometer-long pipe bomb. Even in a straight line, the g forces were so high (50+, iirc) that they only used it to send fuel tanks to LEO (although we know that some satellites could survive that if carefully constructed, apparently Flynn didn't). I also don't recall how he dealt with the problem of aiming, since a fixed installation like that can only reach a narrow range of orbits.
As far as his politics go, show me an author whose politics don't influence their writing... Politics in writing is usually easy to see through and read around, especially in an author whose prose is as weak as Flynn's.
Still wont work. Google "rubberhose" or "truecrypt hidden volume" sometime. There are many cryptographic systems that support plausible deniability to n levels.
IIRC, they were able to do this because the entire soundtrack was in MIDI (with really good samples, of course). This let them make dynamic changes to the music like tempo and pitch shifting (major to minor, etc.). cool stuff
the air transport was such a fun unit. After you loaded up the enemy commander, just self-destruct the aircraft for an instant win. Even cooler was the flying bomb strat. Load the crawling bomb (called "roach" I think) onto an air tran, then fly over the enemy base and watch the fireworks when it gets shot down. Good Times.
I use a Nokia 6820, and I love it. I was getting 20+ wpm on it within a couple days, and since its a cell phone, I can move data off of it through bluetooth, irda, usb, email, or sms. I usually get a week on standby or 8 hours of semi-continuous typing.
I've had problems with serveral comsumer-level routers (incl. a wrt54g and an smc7004vwbr) crashing when they are forced to handle too many simultaneous connections (like 500-1200 from say, 20 bt clients). My solution? a $2 24-hour light timer, the one you use to start a coffeemaker or make your home look occupied while you are on vacation. Set it to go off at 5am and turn on at 501am. Makes the routers appear rock solid while keeping 99% uptime. Obviously not for a high-avail. solution, but why would you be using a $50 router in that situation anyway?
That's brilliant! Just get a shirt that says "This shirt will trigger anti-theft alarms" front and back with a little picture of an induction tag. When the alarm goes off, just point at the shirt and keep walkin'. If even 1% of customers wore them...
Umm, the concept of peer-to-peer is way older than 1987. It dates back to 1961-2 with some papers by Kleinrock, Licklider, and Clark. The entire APRAnet was based on this concept.
If you max out your upstream bandwidth, your downstream will crawl, because the tcp ack packets are not getting through. Most people set their upload to about 80-90% of their upstream. If you have multiple users on your network or latency-sensitive apps (VoIP, internet games, etc) you might want to use a lower percentage or invest in a packet/traffic shaper (even a wrt54g with sveasoft firmware would work).
Hrmm, you're right. For some reason I was under the impression the the 5600/5400 series came after the 5500/5800-probably b/c 55005600. Its not as though there is a huge performance difference between the 5x00 series stuff anyway (not compared to the jump between crusoe and efficeon.
I do. I take my laptop/subnotebook to all of my college classes. Its a sony c1vp picturebook, with the 2st-gen crusoe proc. it weighs about 2 pounds, and is not much larger than this notebook. If it wieghed any more, I wouldn't get around to taking it to classes. But since I don't even notice when it is in my backpack, I've taken it to just about every class in the past 3 years, to great benefit.
After I got my sony picturebook back from repairs, I noticed that the battery was someone else's. It even still had their name on it! I didn't bother complaining, though, since the returned battery had fewer charge cycles on it.
Another option would be to use a program like Alcohol 120% that lets you use cd images as virtual drives. Create a new drive, load it with an image from your hard drive, and go. This has the added benefit of canceling that annoying wait while the drive spins up.
hrmmm...the xserve raid uses ATA -> 2Gb/s fibre channel, has redundant power supplies, hotswap drives and power, and better raid management software than a single nice raid card. I am by no means an apple fanboy, but you are ignoring some of apple value-adds (or sun, or ibm, or emc, etc.). While this may not be an ideal solution for the asker, it works well for any biz that values reliability over initial cost. After all, the actual hardware cost is only about 25% of TCO. Personally, I don't think the one of the requirements for RAID should be "as cheap as possible"- I cut corners on hardware I build for myself all the time, but if I was going to the trouble of using RAID, I'd want to make sure that it is very reliable.
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I'm going to have to disagree with your first point. Without any evidence (since this can't be measured) I believe that more evil has been done by religious organizations in the name of "God(s)" than for any other single reason. Money would probably be a close second. You know, stuff like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the creation of the Islamic Caliphates, the holocaust (if you consider Hitler to be a cult leader), or suicide bombings. There are too many examples to name.
(Definitions for the purpose of this post: Logic and reason are the tools that allow us to understand the world. Skepticism lets us know when to apply these tools to scrutinize beliefs and ideas.)
My main objection to organized religion is that it encourages people to abandon reason. Since religious teachings cannot survive logical scrutiny (using the scientific method, etc.), they must discourage logic and skepticism. And this effect is total, since skepticism is an all or nothing thing. If you only question some beliefs and not others, then you are only going through the motions. And that creates serious side-effects that are invariably lethal for people who do not follow that same faith (and many that do). And if your are not skeptical, then you are likely to be suckered by one or more unrelated scams to the further detriment of yourself and society.
I tend to think of religion itself as a kind of memetic virus. It is infectious, can (and usually is) transmitted to offspring, it affects behavior, it resists attempts to remove it, and it mutates over time. I liken its discouragement of reason to the mechanism that HIV uses to prevent its removal by the immune system. A person who lacks the ability to accurately reason will not be able to reject the influence of religion, just as a disabled immune system cannot resist HIV (and eventually any other virus that comes along). I consider religious memes to be distinct from cultural memes, although historically they have been (and often still are) closely linked.
I consider organized religion to be a quasi-political organization that preys upon religious people and is symbiotic with religion as a whole. It tends to magnify the negative effects (war, persecution, etc.) of religion while also helping it to spread and compete against other religions. Religion can and often does exist independently of organized practice.
I also disagree with your assertion that people will only act altruistically if their moral code is buried in religious cruft. There are many ways in which moral values and cultural norms can be communicated to a member of society that do not involve religious indoctrination or the deprecation of [reason|skepticism].
Your second point is an example of the inevitable fact that everybody has some beliefs that they do not question. Nobody is completely objective, and everybody has been indoctrinated in somebody else's moral code and cultural norms.
Sometimes it is good - society could not function otherwise. After all, many people describe society as a shared consensus. The degree to which you share (or mimic) a culture's values controls the degree to which you can participate in the society.
Sometimes it is bad - when you condemn something simply because it runs counter to your own values and not because you have objectively evaluated it.
(As I look over the post, I find that I really don't think I have explained this very well. The virus analogy needs work. So I certainly won't be offended if you reject my reasoning. Indeed, I would be interested in reading a response)
cough cough ... Thirty Years' War... cough cough (and since it was the continuation of a conflict that started in 1546, its more like the 102 years war...but whatever).
The problem is not Islam, the problem is organized religion that encourages fundamentalist teachings and the abandonment of reason. Islam is not really more vulnerable to this than any other religion, it just seems that way because the fundamentalists' cause is buoyed by moderates who resent political persecution of 'the Islamic world' by 'the West'.
A perfect current events example of this is happening right now in Gaza. Before the 'truce' expired Hamas was largely considered a failed govt. by Gazans. A average terrorist group but a failure at running a state. If a new (and fair!) election had been held before the truce expired, Fatah would probably have won. But now, many Palestinians who despise hamas will still support them, because they hate the israelis far more and want to deny them a perceived victory.
I am not talking about morality or what the israelis should be doing, and I don't want this example to become fuel for a flamewar.
I'm just trying to point out a universal human characteristic: nothing brings disparate people together like a common enemy.
The perceived strength of fundamentalist muslims is not a religious phenomenon, it is a political one. This is a distinction that many people miss, IME.
While using a pigovian tax (aka 'sin' tax) is technically the right solution for this, care must be taken to plan for lost tax revenue when the tax works as intended. i.e. more tax = less gas sold = tax revenue drops just when the gov has gotten used to it. Since governments rarely plan for this properly (if at all), there will be a budget disruption with tax hikes (or borrowing, which is just a deferred tax) elsewhere. This happens unless the tax is spent solely on reducing the harm caused by the taxed activity. For ex. cigarette taxes that go to hospitals and lung cancer research. When people smoke less, hospitals need less money to treat uninsured smokers.
Its also a regressive tax, which presents its own problems.
While it sounds like a great idea in theory, it would basically be an unenforceable law criminalizing a victimless activity between two consenting people. It would be like prohibition (any type: drug, alcohol, literature, religious, etc.): totally ineffectual while simultaneously producing a vast amount of collateral damage.
Not that I haven't wished for similar tests (voting, political office, procreation, a real test for driving) in weaker moments... They all fail for the same reasons, unfortunately.
What model did you have? I own a sony c1 picturebook with a first-gen crusoe. Very slow, but it got impressive battery life (at the time) and ran very cool. The entire unit had one fan about the size of a quarter which only ran when the cpu was maxed out. The rest of the time you could barely hear it idling. Of course the horrible hard drive (10x louder than the fan, slow, unreliable) more than made up for it...
And PII@233 sounds about right speed-wise.
I consider crusoe the perfect example of an idea that looks wonderful on paper and utterly fails in execution.
In the U.S., the speed limit is supposed to be set to the 85th percentile of drivers as measured over a period of several months. So if 85% of drivers travel a road segment at 80mph or less (a typical highway speed if traffic is not heavy), then the speed limit is supposed to be set at 80mph. Statistics buffs will notice that 85% is about one standard deviation.
However, since the federal government will withhold highway maintenance funds for any state with a speed limit not equal to 70mph, the highway speed limit is unchanged. The 85th percentile speed is significantly above the posted limit in nearly every state in the U.S., and modern cars are far safer st these speeds than older vehicles.
In practice, local and interstate speed limits are set by politics only. This goes doubly true for any area with speed cameras.
under Sec. 1702.104. INVESTIGATIONS COMPANY, occurring immediately after 1702.104 (a)
"(b) For purposes of Subsection (a)(1), obtaining or furnishing information includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public."
This is a very broad definition, potentially applying to a broad number of pc repair tasks. When combined with:
"SECTION 8. Section 1702.133(b), Occupations Code, is amended to read as follows: ...then the law's scope become disturbing.
(b) A license holder or an officer, director, partner, or manager of a license holder shall disclose to a law enforcement officer or a district attorney, or that individual's representative, information the person obtains that relates to a criminal offense. "
Actually, they never used magnetic power to launch anything in that series. They used a ram accelerator powered by a fuel air mixture (can't remember the exact fuel details). Basically a multi-kilometer-long pipe bomb. Even in a straight line, the g forces were so high (50+, iirc) that they only used it to send fuel tanks to LEO (although we know that some satellites could survive that if carefully constructed, apparently Flynn didn't). I also don't recall how he dealt with the problem of aiming, since a fixed installation like that can only reach a narrow range of orbits.
As far as his politics go, show me an author whose politics don't influence their writing...
Politics in writing is usually easy to see through and read around, especially in an author whose prose is as weak as Flynn's.
Still wont work. Google "rubberhose" or "truecrypt hidden volume" sometime. There are many cryptographic systems that support plausible deniability to n levels.
ALL of T-Mo's data plans are unmetered. the downside of course is that their coverage is terrible.
IIRC, they were able to do this because the entire soundtrack was in MIDI (with really good samples, of course). This let them make dynamic changes to the music like tempo and pitch shifting (major to minor, etc.). cool stuff
the air transport was such a fun unit. After you loaded up the enemy commander, just self-destruct the aircraft for an instant win. Even cooler was the flying bomb strat. Load the crawling bomb (called "roach" I think) onto an air tran, then fly over the enemy base and watch the fireworks when it gets shot down. Good Times.
IIRC, TA was actually the first 3-d rts.
I use a Nokia 6820, and I love it. I was getting 20+ wpm on it within a couple days, and since its a cell phone, I can move data off of it through bluetooth, irda, usb, email, or sms. I usually get a week on standby or 8 hours of semi-continuous typing.
I've had problems with serveral comsumer-level routers (incl. a wrt54g and an smc7004vwbr) crashing when they are forced to handle too many simultaneous connections (like 500-1200 from say, 20 bt clients). My solution? a $2 24-hour light timer, the one you use to start a coffeemaker or make your home look occupied while you are on vacation. Set it to go off at 5am and turn on at 501am. Makes the routers appear rock solid while keeping 99% uptime. Obviously not for a high-avail. solution, but why would you be using a $50 router in that situation anyway?
That's brilliant! Just get a shirt that says "This shirt will trigger anti-theft alarms" front and back with a little picture of an induction tag. When the alarm goes off, just point at the shirt and keep walkin'. If even 1% of customers wore them...
Umm, the concept of peer-to-peer is way older than 1987. It dates back to 1961-2 with some papers by Kleinrock, Licklider, and Clark. The entire APRAnet was based on this concept.
If you max out your upstream bandwidth, your downstream will crawl, because the tcp ack packets are not getting through. Most people set their upload to about 80-90% of their upstream. If you have multiple users on your network or latency-sensitive apps (VoIP, internet games, etc) you might want to use a lower percentage or invest in a packet/traffic shaper (even a wrt54g with sveasoft firmware would work).
A lot of ISPs are throttling ports 6881-9 (default BT ports) Just change your port range to something random, and you may see a big speed jump.
Fanless mini-itx computer
Hrmm, you're right. For some reason I was under the impression the the 5600/5400 series came after the 5500/5800-probably b/c 55005600. Its not as though there is a huge performance difference between the 5x00 series stuff anyway (not compared to the jump between crusoe and efficeon.
I do. I take my laptop/subnotebook to all of my college classes. Its a sony c1vp picturebook, with the 2st-gen crusoe proc. it weighs about 2 pounds, and is not much larger than this notebook. If it wieghed any more, I wouldn't get around to taking it to classes. But since I don't even notice when it is in my backpack, I've taken it to just about every class in the past 3 years, to great benefit.
After I got my sony picturebook back from repairs, I noticed that the battery was someone else's. It even still had their name on it! I didn't bother complaining, though, since the returned battery had fewer charge cycles on it.
Another option would be to use a program like Alcohol 120% that lets you use cd images as virtual drives. Create a new drive, load it with an image from your hard drive, and go. This has the added benefit of canceling that annoying wait while the drive spins up.
hrmmm...the xserve raid uses ATA -> 2Gb/s fibre channel, has redundant power supplies, hotswap drives and power, and better raid management software than a single nice raid card. I am by no means an apple fanboy, but you are ignoring some of apple value-adds (or sun, or ibm, or emc, etc.). While this may not be an ideal solution for the asker, it works well for any biz that values reliability over initial cost. After all, the actual hardware cost is only about 25% of TCO. Personally, I don't think the one of the requirements for RAID should be "as cheap as possible"- I cut corners on hardware I build for myself all the time, but if I was going to the trouble of using RAID, I'd want to make sure that it is very reliable.