The only thing special in regard to the government there is that they can create the debts for you to pay (i.e. taxes).
Yes, and that's the key difference! You pretty much shot the rest of your argument down by pointing this out. By having the ability to levy taxes, and the power to force the sale of property to recover those taxes, the government ultimately has effective ownership of your "property". Ownership is a matter of control, and if you don't control something you really don't own it.
No, the government can't take *your* property by raising *your* taxes. They have to raise taxes of everybody, and unless you're among the poorest land owners, they'll never get the access to your land before there's a revolt (be it through elections or through fighting). In other words, they do not have effective ownership of your property, they can only harass you with taxes up to a point.
No..you don't own your land. Think I'm wrong? Don't pay your property taxes and we'll see who really owns the land. The government simply lets you use their land until they think they need to take it back.
But that's okay, because by the same logic, you don't really own the money you would use to pay the property tax, either. So you give up something that is not yours, so you can keep something that is not yours. Sounds like a fair deal to me.
Are you seriously so retarded that you can't think of a single scenario where someone might oppose the construction of a specific building in a specific location, and not have some deep-seeded bigotry against the entire group of people who use such building?
When pretty much 99.9999% of the people against it are because "those durn muslims attacked us!!!" your bullshit excuses ring very, very hollow.
Well, wasn't it muslims who attacked? At least they themselves believed that so deeply that they were ready to die for it, so who has the authority to say that no, they were false muslims, doing the attack in the name of false islam? No, it's accurate to say that the attack was done in the name of islam, by a group of devout muslims. If a group of christians did an attack at Mecca in the name of Christianity, do you think many muslims would like to have a church built near the site of the attack, in the name of reconciliation or whatever?
So you don't see how building a place of worship for a foreign (from the point of view of average US people) religion at the site of an act of extreme aggression made in the name of that same religion can be offending to some? Look up this thing called "empathy", it might help you understand. Also note how this paragraph doesn't spell out the name of this particular religion. It is intentional, meant to highlight that it's not about the religion itself, it's about how things are connected to each others.
But actively practising not collecting stamps is a hobby, like actively doing just about anything like that. Except I don't know how you'd go about practising not collecting stamps, while you can actively practice atheism. Actively practising atheism usually means trying to convert rest of the world to conform to atheist world view, among other things. Negative emotional reaction to religious stuff (symbols, praying, etc) is also a sign of actively practising atheist. Fundamentalist atheists can even have rituals of destroying religious books and other symbols, and in that case atheism has clearly turned into a religion for them (yes, that's very very rare, and is usually linked to other emotional turmoil, such as teenage).
Of course, that stamp collecting example being crap doesn't mean that atheism is a religion! Just saying that it's a bad example which shouldn't be used...
It is silly to get all overly pedantic about it because it accomplishes nothing. You have to accept that languages are living things, and usages change.
Will you accept that he can do all he wants to change it back, then?
It'd be better if he just kept on hacking (in the meaning of the word he prefers), rather than fight windmills.
(It's a well know fact that people can't do two things at the same time, so doing both is clearly not an option;-)
Nope. People are still hacking the Linux kernel - including Linux Thorvalds.
I sure hope not... Wouldn't that be illegal;-)
But seriously, doing "standard" software development work isn't "hacking" as far as I'm concerned. A hack is by it's nature something ad-hoc, usually non-general, a quick (and preferably brilliant) solution to a particular problem. I sure hope that does not describe how Linux kernel is developed these days...:-)
The theory itself predicts a gradual rise in price. Think of a bell curve.
I think that prediction is certainly false. Even common sense states, that there would be wild fluctuations of prices. Demand growing, prices spike, there's depression, demand crashes, prices go down, low prices drive growth in demand... I can't name a theory, but I'd think that's pretty standard behaviour of any similar system.
The peak oil predicts gradual, bell-curve decrease of oil supply, and perhaps increase the average production price, but the market price is a different thing.
Not on earth. Earth will be fried to a crisp long before peak solar, possibly as soon as in a billion years or so, while peak solar is predicted to happen in about 5 billion years.
If anything, peak solar may be a time of celebration, marking the start of migration back to inner solar system, in case there's anything left here that can or cares to migrate anywhere.
Also please remember that this won't be a wall, as in suddenly we can't turn the lights on one morning. It'll be a gradual thing, an increase in prices as supplies dwindle and/or harder to reach deposits are tapped.
The moment supply does not meet essential demand, the price will pretty much skyrocket to a more realistic value of the limited oil supply. Only way it can be made gradual is to tax oil heavily now, and then as the price of crude goes up, taxes could come down (in a theoretical world where the oil tax money would be put into a fund, and not in increased spending which can't be cut back when it'd be time to lower that tax).
How does xargs replace hadoop, even in trivial examples?
Unless you are talking about running hadoop in a single machine, which is just waaay too trivial an example.
I think it was meant the other way around. You can (probably) replace xargs with hadoop, ie. just use hadoop if you don't know about xargs, but the result will probably be a minor WTF.
Have you noticed how, since the advent of the Internet as a massive information medium, there are suddenly all classes of strange, unexplained stuff out there?
Maybe, but I don't know how that relates to TFA, since this is not unexplained stuff?
Actually there isn't that much unexplained stuff, compared to all the cool and pretty, yet easily explained stuff like this.
...are trying to figure out what has happened and how stuff works......and, sometimes, are defending their pet paradigm, or protecting their tenure, or claiming whatever results will get their company's product past the FDA...
Ah, but there is a difference.
If even the most stubborn supporter of some theory that will be proven wrong were to taken to future and shown the evidence, he'd readily agree, and praise the future scientists for coming up with the proof to overturn his false belief.
But if the most stubborn believer of some religious dogma were taken to the future, where the church allowed what he thought was a grave sin, he'd be appalled and disgusted, and claim his future "brothers in faith" were doing the work of the devil.
Over the generations that attitude difference cumulates, as can be seen in creationists being stuck in the 19th century debate, while 21st century scientists are starting to look at what the things we discover now about genetics will allow us to do by the end of the century.
Why assume that matter is the basis of all that is, when the latest scientific evidence is heavily in favor of Energy being the first cause?
Eh? I'd say that modern science clearly says that matter is a form of energy. E=mc^2, but E=[lot of other things] too.
And in the "beginning" of the Big Bang (meaning the earliest time we have theories about), there indeed was no matter as we know it, no "baryonic matter", because it was way too hot for baryons to exist.
So what do you mean by "assume that matter is the basis of all that is"?
Software that accepts external inputs is secure if it rejects invalid or malicious input. That's all there is to it. And it's perfectly possible to write a program that does just that. It doesn't even have to be 100% bug-free.
That doesn't cover valid input which triggers a bug.
Even defining "invalid or malicious input" to include "otherwise valid input that just happens to expose a bug in the code" doesn't help, because you don't know what you'd need to filter out (or if you did, better fix the bug).
Also, security is not just input, it's also output. All kinds of output. For example, there's a class of security exploits which depend on timing (mostly cryptography and authentication related). It's not enough that input is validated and code is 100% bug free, it also has to be coded so that processing time (and even power consumption) doesn't depend on validity or content of input.
There *may* be 100% secure complex programs, but there is no way to know which they are, or if there really are any.
I see no reason why software can't be 100% secure.
Well, the reason is two-pronged.
First, software can be 100% secure only if it is 100% bug-free. And the only software you can be sure is absolutely bug free is a "hello world" running on an embedded device without operating system. Except, hardware/FPGA/microcode/firmware bug might be exposed through your "hello world", leading to potential security exploit, so scratch that.
Second, whenever you manage to make the software idiot-proof, nature develops a better idiot, who'll work around your puny artificial software security. So another requirement for security is, that the system is 100% isolated from idiots. And all people are idiots, some just hide it better than others.
The GPL prevents redistribution of more free combinations as well.
...more free combinations which allow further redistribution of less free combinations, to be more exact.
Without this, GPL would be rather pointless. If somebody wants to keep their code free, and by extension, allow all future users of the code have certain freedoms that come with having the source code (what freedoms exactly, depends on GPL version, due to tivoization), then that's what is needed.
Freedom (of any kind) is not black and white thing, nor is it one-dimensional scale.
Freedom to take freedom away sure is a freedom, but I can see why some would want to restrict that freedom when it's about something they've created and want to remain free.
Stupid people said that. Intelligent people knew it wasn't so, and did it.
Reaching other star systems in a reasonable amount of time is actually impossible, given current and foreseeable tech.
This, of course, depends on definition of "reasonable". And that depends on motivation and physical form (mind in machine or extreme genetic modification) and state (hibernation) of the travellers.
Fusion reactor for energy, and inevitable destruction of solar system in the horizion for motivation (for example calculated head-on collision with currently undiscovered nearby brown dwarf in a few centuries). I'm confident that under this kind of threat and timescale, humanity would get into other stars.
And if it can be done in that scenario, it can happen without such an extreme threat as well, just not as quickly.
I somehow feel like I'm repeating myself, governments have better things to do than track everybody and everything.
If/when there is an automatic tracking system in place, which gathers for example just location updated (RFID, cell phone, credit card use, car register plate on OCR traffic cameras, in a few years face recognition on security cameras...), it's very easy to just store everything. Once the system is set up, tracking only some individuals is more work everywhere (except at the data-centres holding the data, where more disks need to be installed).
If they want to track somebody or a certain group of people they'll do it no matter what, tracking 100 people or tracking 1000 won't raise the costs of their operation that much. If they're so poised on tracking you, they can already track your mobile phone everywhere you go anyway actually; yet I'm sure you're constantly using it.
Yeah, but I'm talking about retroactive tracking. They can certainly start to track my cell phone (hopefully for a legally valid reasons only), which is very different for doing a database search for all locations my cell phone has been, and even more different from database actually having combined information from many sources.
You probably have a digital tv that could keep track of everything you watch and they could have filled your computer's HD with trojans through a backdoor the manufacturer was forced to install and the microwave oven could keep track of how much times you eat per day and kill you if it deems you're not an economical asset by using the RFID tag in your identity card to target you and boil you from the inside out. Really, where does the paranoia stop, but yes the government is out to get all of us!
Eh. Paranoia would be believing that it's already being done. Wisdom is trying to make sure it will not start being done.
Not to mention the technical challenge of reading a near field RFID tag from a distance of over 1m. You might think it's easy but guess what, it isn't.
So any doorway or turnstile could be a place to read and store RFIDs of everybody passing through? That's a trivial amount of information per sensor to store and index when it's only the RFID, (relative) timestamp and sensor ID.
Additionally why is it people automatically make the assumption the government only has evil intentions?
Yeah, sounds silly, except for stored surveillance data, it's enough to assume that some future government has some evil intentions. Now do you honestly believe that no future government will have any evil intentions?
It's still fine if you only care about yourself, but consider that these "evil intentions" affect just 0.1% of the population. That's bad stuff happening for quite a many people, because of the original whatever "good" reasons the storage of tracking info was started.
There is more than one kind and degree of depression.
But I'm sure your internet diagnosis of GP is fully accurate and sie just needs to suck it up and do work.
Well, yeah, that's what is needed, suck it up and do work. Complain about (that kind of) depression only after you consistently fail at sucking it up and doing work. I don't know if the previous poster is succeeding or failing at it, I'm just saying that if he/she is usually succeeding, then complaining about "depression" is a bit unfair at those who usually fail. That makes it sound like depression is something you can just suck up and get over by sheer willpower.
Yes, and the government is out on tracking everybody! Really if they want to track you they will no matter what. If I have to choose between a RFID chip in my ID card or a tinfoil hat and wallet. I'll take the RFID chip cause the chance of it being useful exceeds the chance of the government bothering to track everything I do.
No, the thing is, without this kind of technology, they can choose a number of individuals they have resources to track at the same time. With this type of technology, they can track everybody at the same time. With modern storage capacities, a future government can retroactively check what you have been doing through your life.
And it becomes a slippery slope. It starts with tracking terrorist suspects, proceeds to solving other crimes, and ends with tracking people who disagree with the current party in power and threaten their next election win, and after that all bets are off. Just hope you never visited a house where some opposition activist lived back then...
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing special in regard to the government there is that they can create the debts for you to pay (i.e. taxes).
Yes, and that's the key difference! You pretty much shot the rest of your argument down by pointing this out. By having the ability to levy taxes, and the power to force the sale of property to recover those taxes, the government ultimately has effective ownership of your "property". Ownership is a matter of control, and if you don't control something you really don't own it.
No, the government can't take *your* property by raising *your* taxes. They have to raise taxes of everybody, and unless you're among the poorest land owners, they'll never get the access to your land before there's a revolt (be it through elections or through fighting). In other words, they do not have effective ownership of your property, they can only harass you with taxes up to a point.
No..you don't own your land.
Think I'm wrong? Don't pay your property taxes and we'll see who really owns the land. The government simply lets you use their land until they think they need to take it back.
But that's okay, because by the same logic, you don't really own the money you would use to pay the property tax, either. So you give up something that is not yours, so you can keep something that is not yours. Sounds like a fair deal to me.
Are you seriously so retarded that you can't think of a single scenario where someone might oppose the construction of a specific building in a specific location, and not have some deep-seeded bigotry against the entire group of people who use such building?
When pretty much 99.9999% of the people against it are because "those durn muslims attacked us!!!" your bullshit excuses ring very, very hollow.
Well, wasn't it muslims who attacked? At least they themselves believed that so deeply that they were ready to die for it, so who has the authority to say that no, they were false muslims, doing the attack in the name of false islam? No, it's accurate to say that the attack was done in the name of islam, by a group of devout muslims. If a group of christians did an attack at Mecca in the name of Christianity, do you think many muslims would like to have a church built near the site of the attack, in the name of reconciliation or whatever?
What is it if not anti-Islamic?
So you don't see how building a place of worship for a foreign (from the point of view of average US people) religion at the site of an act of extreme aggression made in the name of that same religion can be offending to some? Look up this thing called "empathy", it might help you understand. Also note how this paragraph doesn't spell out the name of this particular religion. It is intentional, meant to highlight that it's not about the religion itself, it's about how things are connected to each others.
Because not collecting stamps is not a hobby?
But actively practising not collecting stamps is a hobby, like actively doing just about anything like that. Except I don't know how you'd go about practising not collecting stamps, while you can actively practice atheism. Actively practising atheism usually means trying to convert rest of the world to conform to atheist world view, among other things. Negative emotional reaction to religious stuff (symbols, praying, etc) is also a sign of actively practising atheist. Fundamentalist atheists can even have rituals of destroying religious books and other symbols, and in that case atheism has clearly turned into a religion for them (yes, that's very very rare, and is usually linked to other emotional turmoil, such as teenage).
Of course, that stamp collecting example being crap doesn't mean that atheism is a religion! Just saying that it's a bad example which shouldn't be used...
Haven't you heard? Stem cells == Dead Babies. And don't bother trying to convince them otherwise - they know better!
Wait, does this mean that... pulling wisdom teeth out == Dead Babies? And I did it completely voluntarily, so I'm a murderer! Aargh.
Oh well, better go make some more babies to compensate.
Will you accept that he can do all he wants to change it back, then?
It'd be better if he just kept on hacking (in the meaning of the word he prefers), rather than fight windmills.
(It's a well know fact that people can't do two things at the same time, so doing both is clearly not an option ;-)
Nope. People are still hacking the Linux kernel - including Linux Thorvalds.
I sure hope not... Wouldn't that be illegal ;-)
But seriously, doing "standard" software development work isn't "hacking" as far as I'm concerned. A hack is by it's nature something ad-hoc, usually non-general, a quick (and preferably brilliant) solution to a particular problem. I sure hope that does not describe how Linux kernel is developed these days... :-)
The theory itself predicts a gradual rise in price. Think of a bell curve.
I think that prediction is certainly false. Even common sense states, that there would be wild fluctuations of prices. Demand growing, prices spike, there's depression, demand crashes, prices go down, low prices drive growth in demand... I can't name a theory, but I'd think that's pretty standard behaviour of any similar system.
The peak oil predicts gradual, bell-curve decrease of oil supply, and perhaps increase the average production price, but the market price is a different thing.
Peak solar, that might be a problem.
Not on earth. Earth will be fried to a crisp long before peak solar, possibly as soon as in a billion years or so, while peak solar is predicted to happen in about 5 billion years.
If anything, peak solar may be a time of celebration, marking the start of migration back to inner solar system, in case there's anything left here that can or cares to migrate anywhere.
When I took geology in college (~1987) they were predicting that oil was going to run out by early 2000.
"Peak oil" in the subject, and "oil going to run out" in the body text. I think you didn't quite grasp the concept of "peak oil"...
Also please remember that this won't be a wall, as in suddenly we can't turn the lights on one morning. It'll be a gradual thing, an increase in prices as supplies dwindle and/or harder to reach deposits are tapped.
The moment supply does not meet essential demand, the price will pretty much skyrocket to a more realistic value of the limited oil supply. Only way it can be made gradual is to tax oil heavily now, and then as the price of crude goes up, taxes could come down (in a theoretical world where the oil tax money would be put into a fund, and not in increased spending which can't be cut back when it'd be time to lower that tax).
How does xargs replace hadoop, even in trivial examples?
Unless you are talking about running hadoop in a single machine, which is just waaay too trivial an example.
I think it was meant the other way around. You can (probably) replace xargs with hadoop, ie. just use hadoop if you don't know about xargs, but the result will probably be a minor WTF.
Have you noticed how, since the advent of the Internet as a massive information medium, there are suddenly all classes of strange, unexplained stuff out there?
Maybe, but I don't know how that relates to TFA, since this is not unexplained stuff?
Actually there isn't that much unexplained stuff, compared to all the cool and pretty, yet easily explained stuff like this.
Ah, but there is a difference.
If even the most stubborn supporter of some theory that will be proven wrong were to taken to future and shown the evidence, he'd readily agree, and praise the future scientists for coming up with the proof to overturn his false belief.
But if the most stubborn believer of some religious dogma were taken to the future, where the church allowed what he thought was a grave sin, he'd be appalled and disgusted, and claim his future "brothers in faith" were doing the work of the devil.
Over the generations that attitude difference cumulates, as can be seen in creationists being stuck in the 19th century debate, while 21st century scientists are starting to look at what the things we discover now about genetics will allow us to do by the end of the century.
Why assume that matter is the basis of all that is, when the latest scientific evidence is heavily in favor of Energy being the first cause?
Eh? I'd say that modern science clearly says that matter is a form of energy. E=mc^2, but E=[lot of other things] too.
And in the "beginning" of the Big Bang (meaning the earliest time we have theories about), there indeed was no matter as we know it, no "baryonic matter", because it was way too hot for baryons to exist.
So what do you mean by "assume that matter is the basis of all that is"?
Where on Earth do you get this nonsense about the sun having no effect on Earth's climate? It's bunk!
No it's not bunk, not any more. I can't believe anybody reading slashdot doesn't know that oracle bought sun.
To be fair, there must be some residual effect still on earth's climate, but I'm sure that's negligible.
Software that accepts external inputs is secure if it rejects invalid or malicious input. That's all there is to it. And it's perfectly possible to write a program that does just that. It doesn't even have to be 100% bug-free.
That doesn't cover valid input which triggers a bug.
Even defining "invalid or malicious input" to include "otherwise valid input that just happens to expose a bug in the code" doesn't help, because you don't know what you'd need to filter out (or if you did, better fix the bug).
Also, security is not just input, it's also output. All kinds of output. For example, there's a class of security exploits which depend on timing (mostly cryptography and authentication related). It's not enough that input is validated and code is 100% bug free, it also has to be coded so that processing time (and even power consumption) doesn't depend on validity or content of input.
There *may* be 100% secure complex programs, but there is no way to know which they are, or if there really are any.
I see no reason why software can't be 100% secure.
Well, the reason is two-pronged.
First, software can be 100% secure only if it is 100% bug-free. And the only software you can be sure is absolutely bug free is a "hello world" running on an embedded device without operating system. Except, hardware/FPGA/microcode/firmware bug might be exposed through your "hello world", leading to potential security exploit, so scratch that.
Second, whenever you manage to make the software idiot-proof, nature develops a better idiot, who'll work around your puny artificial software security. So another requirement for security is, that the system is 100% isolated from idiots. And all people are idiots, some just hide it better than others.
The GPL prevents redistribution of more free combinations as well.
...more free combinations which allow further redistribution of less free combinations, to be more exact.
Without this, GPL would be rather pointless. If somebody wants to keep their code free, and by extension, allow all future users of the code have certain freedoms that come with having the source code (what freedoms exactly, depends on GPL version, due to tivoization), then that's what is needed.
Freedom (of any kind) is not black and white thing, nor is it one-dimensional scale.
Freedom to take freedom away sure is a freedom, but I can see why some would want to restrict that freedom when it's about something they've created and want to remain free.
Stupid people said that. Intelligent people knew it wasn't so, and did it.
Reaching other star systems in a reasonable amount of time is actually impossible, given current and foreseeable tech.
This, of course, depends on definition of "reasonable". And that depends on motivation and physical form (mind in machine or extreme genetic modification) and state (hibernation) of the travellers.
Fusion reactor for energy, and inevitable destruction of solar system in the horizion for motivation (for example calculated head-on collision with currently undiscovered nearby brown dwarf in a few centuries). I'm confident that under this kind of threat and timescale, humanity would get into other stars.
And if it can be done in that scenario, it can happen without such an extreme threat as well, just not as quickly.
I somehow feel like I'm repeating myself, governments have better things to do than track everybody and everything.
If/when there is an automatic tracking system in place, which gathers for example just location updated (RFID, cell phone, credit card use, car register plate on OCR traffic cameras, in a few years face recognition on security cameras...), it's very easy to just store everything. Once the system is set up, tracking only some individuals is more work everywhere (except at the data-centres holding the data, where more disks need to be installed).
If they want to track somebody or a certain group of people they'll do it no matter what, tracking 100 people or tracking 1000 won't raise the costs of their operation that much. If they're so poised on tracking you, they can already track your mobile phone everywhere you go anyway actually; yet I'm sure you're constantly using it.
Yeah, but I'm talking about retroactive tracking. They can certainly start to track my cell phone (hopefully for a legally valid reasons only), which is very different for doing a database search for all locations my cell phone has been, and even more different from database actually having combined information from many sources.
You probably have a digital tv that could keep track of everything you watch and they could have filled your computer's HD with trojans through a backdoor the manufacturer was forced to install and the microwave oven could keep track of how much times you eat per day and kill you if it deems you're not an economical asset by using the RFID tag in your identity card to target you and boil you from the inside out. Really, where does the paranoia stop, but yes the government is out to get all of us!
Eh. Paranoia would be believing that it's already being done. Wisdom is trying to make sure it will not start being done.
Not to mention the technical challenge of reading a near field RFID tag from a distance of over 1m. You might think it's easy but guess what, it isn't.
So any doorway or turnstile could be a place to read and store RFIDs of everybody passing through? That's a trivial amount of information per sensor to store and index when it's only the RFID, (relative) timestamp and sensor ID.
Additionally why is it people automatically make the assumption the government only has evil intentions?
Yeah, sounds silly, except for stored surveillance data, it's enough to assume that some future government has some evil intentions. Now do you honestly believe that no future government will have any evil intentions?
It's still fine if you only care about yourself, but consider that these "evil intentions" affect just 0.1% of the population. That's bad stuff happening for quite a many people, because of the original whatever "good" reasons the storage of tracking info was started.
There is more than one kind and degree of depression.
But I'm sure your internet diagnosis of GP is fully accurate and sie just needs to suck it up and do work.
Well, yeah, that's what is needed, suck it up and do work. Complain about (that kind of) depression only after you consistently fail at sucking it up and doing work. I don't know if the previous poster is succeeding or failing at it, I'm just saying that if he/she is usually succeeding, then complaining about "depression" is a bit unfair at those who usually fail. That makes it sound like depression is something you can just suck up and get over by sheer willpower.
Wooosh... (And same for the mods who modded GP troll).
Yes, and the government is out on tracking everybody! Really if they want to track you they will no matter what. If I have to choose between a RFID chip in my ID card or a tinfoil hat and wallet. I'll take the RFID chip cause the chance of it being useful exceeds the chance of the government bothering to track everything I do.
No, the thing is, without this kind of technology, they can choose a number of individuals they have resources to track at the same time. With this type of technology, they can track everybody at the same time. With modern storage capacities, a future government can retroactively check what you have been doing through your life.
And it becomes a slippery slope. It starts with tracking terrorist suspects, proceeds to solving other crimes, and ends with tracking people who disagree with the current party in power and threaten their next election win, and after that all bets are off. Just hope you never visited a house where some opposition activist lived back then...