Besides, what about a "less mean" form of torture? Truth serum is still a form of violence and unreliable (in the US, russkies seems to be way ahead) but at least one can keep the pretense of being the good guy.
Anyway I don't think the secret service is interested in obtaining information from these guys. The timing of the bust (just after the meeting between Americans and Russians) is suspect. The fact they have not busted them during an operation is suspect too: if they caught them with a fake passport at the airport, with a bag of money, with industrial secrets - then Russians couldn't whine about the arrest, a perfect victory.
And why bust them at all? Keeping an eye on them would have yielded good information (insight into the russian strategy and the more trivial details like communication techniques), or would have made it possible to foil a plan once the ring gets really important. Now the russians will have to start from scratch with another ring of illegals: it'll cost them some effort but it will cost the USA much more effort to discover it. A net negative.
So my 2c is that the relations between USA and Russia were the real target of the bust.
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." (attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, born 1769 - likely competently poisoned to death in 1812)
The other fact is that an OS9 mac was more stable than a preemptive multitasking and memory protected PC. Pro audio and graphic design was done with macs and not out of fanboyism.
> Microsoft's many things, but they're never a patent troll
Maybe you forgot.
MS claiming linux violates 235 patents without telling which ones, is not patent trolling? It's a textbook example, like the mentioned FAT quarrel with tomtom.
Besides, for the crybabies who keep repeating the "Slashdot hates microsoft" story. Look at the rating parent earned.
I have this feeling that laughter is not unique to humans and is probably based at some level on a physiological/neurological response to a number of mental states such as relief, happiness, perception of incongruity (irony), and a few others (for some people pain which is where we will probably have the best shot at figuring out that actual mechanisms...).
My 2c
Laughter seems the noisy version of smiling. Dogs and cats kind of smile too: they look at you and close their eyes for a brief moment. The meaning seems pretty obvious to me, if the creature closes its eyes in front of you, it trusts you not to do anything hostile, the act represents trust.
When we smile we show teeth, an aggressive stance that contrasts with the rest of the body which stays relaxed or relaxes even more. Showing teeth means we detect our own superiority: intellectual when we understand a joke, concrete when we beat somebody or we see somebody slipping, abstract when something works out the way we expect... By showing the teeth we tell others we are in control of the situation. Being relaxed means we are not in a fit of rage. Back to laughter, our superiority is communicated loudly by a "shout", whose intermittence expresses control, as opposed to a howl of pain or a shout of panic. We smile when we are happy too, happiness defined as "the feeling that I am", so "i feel important", so the sense of superiority kicks in.
Re:making progress
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Whatever the US did earlier, which is interesting in itself, something does not compute right now. When 9/11 attacks happened, the US let terrorists profit from the future they had subscribed in abnormal quantity. Then US come to EU monitoring our activity? Medice, cura te ipsum. We are monitoring ordinary citizens and let corporations make business in fiscal paradises. This is a joke.
Look, the brave guy sneering at a misrepresentation of a religious movement!
Shall we demonstrate instead that gcc is smarter than the average atheist?
everything.c:
#include <stdio.h>
void main() { // possibly some stuff.... void ouruniverse() { // other stuff... char * rule = "A XOR !A is always true"; }
printf(rule);// FAIL!
}
gcc everything.c everything.c: In function 'main': everything.c:11: error: 'rule' undeclared (first use in this function)
As gcc points out we can't safely apply our logic outside our reality, making 99% of arguments by atheists priests and philosophers flawed, 100% of fundamentalists' actions wrong.
> Maybe its because Linux and BSD aren't popular platforms for most home users.
But gnu/linux, unix dominate the server market!!! Would you prefer to own a botnet of laptops and desktops connected part time through adsl or worse, running a bloated OS between game sessions or one made of always available servers with fast connection and a fast OS full of tools for remote admin and networking?
As long as free antivirus and patching exist, there is way less money to be done with viruses. Thats a good thing no matter what you think about the cybersecurity market.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a financial system in which: 1- terrorists* use the stock exchange to make money of 9/11, ***they get paid***, and no scandal ensues. Finance first, people later. Would you have minded if you by pure chance did a put option on A.Airlines stock, 9/11 happened, and the government said: "transaction cancelled, here's your money, we can't afford the risk of financing our enemy"? I friggin' would NOT. Yet they search you at the airport and read your communication, in the name of national security. 2- Food and water and oil are used for financial speculation. High prices of food likely kill people.
* I had found an interesting blog with some data about who profited from 911 in canadian stock exchange.Could be bogus, but then whoever they were, they got paid, that's the scandal.
Often idealism is equivalent to long term pragmatism.
Helping or not opposing bad people, for whatever definition of bad, means that later bad people could use their increased power over you.
A note taking app requirÃng a multiMB framework at danger of submarine patents included by default is completely INSANE. Looks like i gotta tell my "apt" a couple things.
Old age is a feature, not a bug. With less turn-over it would be difficult to life as a whole to adapt to changing environment. It has drawbacks as knowledge lost by the dead individual. Advanced life forms overcome that with culture.
Earlier simpler life forms probably lacked the aging feature, and were superseded by others who had it.
> A man on US soil gets attacked by agents of a foreign government.
He got attacked all right, and kudos for his work. But are you sure they are Iran's agents? It seems a sloppy work to throw stones, not harm him seriously, thus telling the world "we are the bad guys" while accomplishing nothing else. Iran government might have leaked the guy's info on the internet, and let fanatics work for them. But why? They want to stop internet criticism? then they oughta have spied on him, so his actions would have been way easier to counter. instead they created a hero of the revolution, and got a nice wave of the "Streisand effect".
As for poor iranian people, they are screwed. If they protest too much they risk civil war, triggering the US intervention, and that means Iraq all over again with bombs, depleted uranium, civil war afterwards ("best case scenario" of course, worst case is WWIII). If they do not protest and the election was stolen, they have to serve a dictatorship.
> the "rank" system, where those best able to manipulate their managers and stab their co-workers in the back successfully are best enabled for advancement
Funny thing is, that's how the system is supposed to be. There has always been a minority who, having more brains, or desire of control, or means, ruled over the majority of people. Nowadays their preferred medium of control is through money. The rank system ensure that the guys at the top respond to money. Scruples, ideals, would get in the way. If it's also possible to blackmail them for some bad things did in the past, that's perfect.
> the terrorists have already won by getting our governments to take all our freedoms away.
That's an insightful definition of "winning". They let governments get away with anything under the excuse (which might be justified or not) of national security, and that's the only fruit they bear. "By their fruit you will recognize them".
I said it wouldn't be surprising. the fucking proof you require isnt relevant to my post, and it would require a particularly idiot guy getting filmed while he opens a vial.
sometimes you sacrifice something expendable for the result you want; the expendable concept is "vista sucks", which many people believe anyway. The result is "wait and buy win7" instead of "windows isn't dominant anymore, consider the alternatives"
Tinfoil wearing crowd will never be right since some conspiracy plots simply aren't there, which doesn't prove or disprove any theory.
Since a large number of conspiracies happened, conspiracy deniers tout-court are in the same league of tinfoil wearing crowd.
Back in topic: there are wars for oil, there are environmental disasters, a virus released to raise some money isn't surprising at all.
There are other potential uses too: if economy collapses, crowds may gather with pitchforks the old fashioned way, a more virulent strain of H1N1 would force people to stay home instead.
Well there is a difference: google is centralized, a social KDE network would be more of a P2P. But I'd still go through the browser. I hope they go as much as possible with existing protocols.
Bad idea? It implies:
- blogosphere ablaze with reviews. Just add a pinch of astroturfing.
- free beta testing.
- new users get familiar with the interface, it's time to move off xp.
I say this is a good move. Of course it would never have happened if linux weren't good on the desktop. Their management probably panicked seeing a flawless sidux install on hd in under 3 minutes or something like that.
Apache license more widespread implies GPL less widespread. But if there were not the sheer amount of GPL software to fall back to, closing up source by embracing and extending would be surely more effective than it is now. More big firms would be tempted to do it. Apache license would soon become something used by academics and startups to favor the take off of projects before finding some venture capitalists.
GPL and linux have a positive impact on closed source by their mere existence as an alternative. Remember the cost, bloat and incompatibilities between versions, when most of the popular stuff was commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, what about a "less mean" form of torture? Truth serum is still a form of violence and unreliable (in the US, russkies seems to be way ahead) but at least one can keep the pretense of being the good guy.
Anyway I don't think the secret service is interested in obtaining information from these guys. The timing of the bust (just after the meeting between Americans and Russians) is suspect. The fact they have not busted them during an operation is suspect too: if they caught them with a fake passport at the airport, with a bag of money, with industrial secrets - then Russians couldn't whine about the arrest, a perfect victory.
And why bust them at all? Keeping an eye on them would have yielded good information (insight into the russian strategy and the more trivial details like communication techniques), or would have made it possible to foil a plan once the ring gets really important. Now the russians will have to start from scratch with another ring of illegals: it'll cost them some effort but it will cost the USA much more effort to discover it. A net negative.
So my 2c is that the relations between USA and Russia were the real target of the bust.
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
(attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, born 1769 - likely competently poisoned to death in 1812)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_I#Cause_of_death
shields do protect, mainly.
The other fact is that an OS9 mac was more stable than a preemptive multitasking and memory protected PC.
Pro audio and graphic design was done with macs and not out of fanboyism.
> Microsoft's many things, but they're never a patent troll
Maybe you forgot.
MS claiming linux violates 235 patents without telling which ones, is not patent trolling? It's a textbook example, like the mentioned FAT quarrel with tomtom.
Besides, for the crybabies who keep repeating the "Slashdot hates microsoft" story. Look at the rating parent earned.
I have this feeling that laughter is not unique to humans and is probably based at some level on a physiological/neurological response to a number of mental states such as relief, happiness, perception of incongruity (irony), and a few others (for some people pain which is where we will probably have the best shot at figuring out that actual mechanisms...).
My 2c
Laughter seems the noisy version of smiling. Dogs and cats kind of smile too: they look at you and close their eyes for a brief moment. The meaning seems pretty obvious to me, if the creature closes its eyes in front of you, it trusts you not to do anything hostile, the act represents trust.
When we smile we show teeth, an aggressive stance that contrasts with the rest of the body which stays relaxed or relaxes even more. Showing teeth means we detect our own superiority: intellectual when we understand a joke, concrete when we beat somebody or we see somebody slipping, abstract when something works out the way we expect... By showing the teeth we tell others we are in control of the situation. Being relaxed means we are not in a fit of rage.
Back to laughter, our superiority is communicated loudly by a "shout", whose intermittence expresses control, as opposed to a howl of pain or a shout of panic. We smile when we are happy too, happiness defined as "the feeling that I am", so "i feel important", so the sense of superiority kicks in.
sidux has a nice 4.2 release
i meant "futures" :)
Whatever the US did earlier, which is interesting in itself, something does not compute right now.
When 9/11 attacks happened, the US let terrorists profit from the future they had subscribed in abnormal quantity. Then US come to EU monitoring our activity? Medice, cura te ipsum.
We are monitoring ordinary citizens and let corporations make business in fiscal paradises. This is a joke.
Look, the brave guy sneering at a misrepresentation of a religious movement!
// possibly some stuff....
// other stuff...
// FAIL!
Shall we demonstrate instead that gcc is smarter than the average atheist?
everything.c:
#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
void ouruniverse() {
char * rule = "A XOR !A is always true";
}
printf(rule);
}
gcc everything.c
everything.c: In function 'main':
everything.c:11: error: 'rule' undeclared (first use in this function)
As gcc points out we can't safely apply our logic outside our reality, making 99% of arguments by atheists priests and philosophers flawed, 100% of fundamentalists' actions wrong.
And you worry about whether snakes can talk.
> Maybe its because Linux and BSD aren't popular platforms for most home users.
But gnu/linux, unix dominate the server market!!! Would you prefer to own a botnet of laptops and desktops connected part time through adsl or worse, running a bloated OS between game sessions or one made of always available servers with fast connection and a fast OS full of tools for remote admin and networking?
As long as free antivirus and patching exist, there is way less money to be done with viruses. Thats a good thing no matter what you think about the cybersecurity market.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a financial system in which:
1- terrorists* use the stock exchange to make money of 9/11, ***they get paid***, and no scandal ensues. Finance first, people later. Would you have minded if you by pure chance did a put option on A.Airlines stock, 9/11 happened, and the government said: "transaction cancelled, here's your money, we can't afford the risk of financing our enemy"? I friggin' would NOT. Yet they search you at the airport and read your communication, in the name of national security.
2- Food and water and oil are used for financial speculation. High prices of food likely kill people.
* I had found an interesting blog with some data about who profited from 911 in canadian stock exchange.Could be bogus, but then whoever they were, they got paid, that's the scandal.
Often idealism is equivalent to long term pragmatism.
Helping or not opposing bad people, for whatever definition of bad, means that later bad people could use their increased power over you.
A note taking app requirÃng a multiMB framework at danger of submarine patents included by default is completely INSANE. Looks like i gotta tell my "apt" a couple things.
> It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable...
O rly?
Old age is a feature, not a bug. With less turn-over it would be difficult to life as a whole to adapt to changing environment. It has drawbacks as knowledge lost by the dead individual. Advanced life forms overcome that with culture.
Earlier simpler life forms probably lacked the aging feature, and were superseded by others who had it.
> A man on US soil gets attacked by agents of a foreign government.
He got attacked all right, and kudos for his work. But are you sure they are Iran's agents? It seems a sloppy work to throw stones, not harm him seriously, thus telling the world "we are the bad guys" while accomplishing nothing else. Iran government might have leaked the guy's info on the internet, and let fanatics work for them. But why? They want to stop internet criticism? then they oughta have spied on him, so his actions would have been way easier to counter. instead they created a hero of the revolution, and got a nice wave of the "Streisand effect".
As for poor iranian people, they are screwed. If they protest too much they risk civil war, triggering the US intervention, and that means Iraq all over again with bombs, depleted uranium, civil war afterwards ("best case scenario" of course, worst case is WWIII). If they do not protest and the election was stolen, they have to serve a dictatorship.
> the "rank" system, where those best able to manipulate their managers and stab their co-workers in the back successfully are best enabled for advancement
Funny thing is, that's how the system is supposed to be. There has always been a minority who, having more brains, or desire of control, or means, ruled over the majority of people. Nowadays their preferred medium of control is through money. The rank system ensure that the guys at the top respond to money. Scruples, ideals, would get in the way. If it's also possible to blackmail them for some bad things did in the past, that's perfect.
> the terrorists have already won by getting our governments to take all our freedoms away.
That's an insightful definition of "winning". They let governments get away with anything under the excuse (which might be justified or not) of national security, and that's the only fruit they bear. "By their fruit you will recognize them".
joe sixpack doesn`t know what an OS is. All he knows is that win7 is Different from xp just like linux is different.
> how about some fucking proof?
I said it wouldn't be surprising. the fucking proof you require isnt relevant to my post, and it would require a particularly idiot guy getting filmed while he opens a vial.
sometimes you sacrifice something expendable for the result you want; the expendable concept is "vista sucks", which many people believe anyway. The result is "wait and buy win7" instead of "windows isn't dominant anymore, consider the alternatives"
Tinfoil wearing crowd will never be right since some conspiracy plots simply aren't there, which doesn't prove or disprove any theory.
Since a large number of conspiracies happened, conspiracy deniers tout-court are in the same league of tinfoil wearing crowd.
Back in topic: there are wars for oil, there are environmental disasters, a virus released to raise some money isn't surprising at all.
There are other potential uses too: if economy collapses, crowds may gather with pitchforks the old fashioned way, a more virulent strain of H1N1 would force people to stay home instead.
Well there is a difference: google is centralized, a social KDE network would be more of a P2P.
But I'd still go through the browser. I hope they go as much as possible with existing protocols.
Bad idea? It implies:
- blogosphere ablaze with reviews. Just add a pinch of astroturfing.
- free beta testing.
- new users get familiar with the interface, it's time to move off xp.
I say this is a good move. Of course it would never have happened if linux weren't good on the desktop. Their management probably panicked seeing a flawless sidux install on hd in under 3 minutes or something like that.
Apache license more widespread implies GPL less widespread. But if there were not the sheer amount of GPL software to fall back to, closing up source by embracing and extending would be surely more effective than it is now. More big firms would be tempted to do it. Apache license would soon become something used by academics and startups to favor the take off of projects before finding some venture capitalists.
GPL and linux have a positive impact on closed source by their mere existence as an alternative. Remember the cost, bloat and incompatibilities between versions, when most of the popular stuff was commercial.