Well, that would depend on who's phone and finger it is... I can imagine several persons who I wouldn't mind holding their hand to my cheeck, and rubbing my ear with their finger...:-)
What about that bastard Lincoln who said I couldn't own slaves? There was some massive asset forfeiture going on there. And then there was something in 1776 that said I can't take action against people because of their speech and religion. And what about my self-perceived right to kill whoever I want?
Those are all things that take away the rights of other people.
You taking drugs does not at first glance hurt other people, and it would not be outlawed if this was the whole story. Drugs are basically outlawed because of the secondary very negative effects of their use to the society. Though not all (alcohol, tobacco) are outlawed.
But you can easily argue that some/most drugs do not hurt other people and should not be illegal (and you can counter-argue that they do, and thus should be outlawed).
You'll have much harder time arguing that enslaving or killing other people does not hurt them or their rights...
What I've found is that I don't mind spam when I'm expecting it... what's annoying about spam is when you think 'hey, I've got mail!' and it turns out to be advertising...
Solution to that is simple. Don't block spam. That way you should always have new mail, so you never get to think 'hey, I've got mail!', since you always do;-)
Actually, it isn't. In Linux there's no real ability to block internet access from individual programs on case-by-case basis. You know, in the style of Win "personal firewalls, where you get a pop-up whenever something, anything (including stuff like OS doing DNS query) accesses internet. And then you get to choose if you'll allow or deny, and of course if you want, it will remember your choice and not ask again about that program (unless the binary is changed). Nice to know that now spyware program (including the OS itself;) makes outbound connections or listens on a port without user being prompted.
Granted, this doesn't prevent user stupidity, and there's less need for this kind of stuff in Unix than in Windows anyway. But it's still a feature that's totally missing from every mainstream distro.
I'm also sure it can be done with relatively little hacking, maybe even without patching kernel, but it's far from trivial to do stuff like, allow Mozilla Firebird to access the web, but any other program trying that is denied.
It's also enlightening to notice how many programs (in Windows) actually try to access the 'net...
Uh, maybe I used wrong terminology, but I meant 64bit flat address space. A 32bit OS can not address more than 32bits worth of address (well, I guess x86 can address something like 4 times that if I remember the number of segment registers correctly, but that's still 34 bits, not 64). To address more, you have to have more bits.
Having an OS designed for 64 bit virtual address space would allow some nifty optimizations, such as putting every running program in a different address space, thus allowing slightly faster process switching.
Then of course there's this thing called hard disk, which can be over 4GB in size these days... So even the swap space could easily be over 4GB in size, and then of course individual files could be that too.
Of course you're right. A ruling that the GPL was unenforceable would be as legally absurd as... a ruling that shrink-wrap EULAs are binding contracts, for instance. It's silly, and frivolous, and unfortunately the way the US Justice system seems to be going it just might happen if someone with enough money and connections wanted it to happen.
So, if GPL was decreed unenforceable, what would it actually mean?
...known to NSA I mean. Why would they license it if they knew of some weakness in it...
Hmm...
Or maybe there *is* a suble weakness, leading to an "easy" way to break ECC. And NSA is licensing this to give it undue creidibility, so more people start using it, while NSA can easily (compared to RSA or whatnot) read everything encrypted with it...
I think the posters suggestion actually was to lower some other taxes and pay that with increasing petrol tax.
Of course this neglects the fact that with normal semi-democratic political system of US that'd be next to impossible to implement, since it certainly would not go down well with oil industry, they have enough money to make a difference.
Excellent idea. Let us know when you've implemented it and we'll come along and poke holes in it.
I don't claim to belong to the group of people who could design it. I'm in the same group as you, just able to poke holes into the design;-)
However, I'm not vain enough to think that if I can't do it (with my relatively limited knowledge of the e-mail system as a whole), then nobody can. E-mail is approaching some degree of uselessness. It's getting more unreliable as we speak, spam wastes bigger and bigger part of total internet bandwidth as we speak, new and improved worms keep using it to propagate... So don't tell me it doesn't need a total overhaul.
This is the problem with "sentience" in an AI Someone had to program in the bits and bytes. A *PERSON* or group of people came up with formulas and algorythms to describe the AI.
I think it's more like, a person has to come up with the algorithms describing the neural net (or whatever technology is used in AI construction in future). The logic itself would be learned exactly in the same sense as a human child learns while growing up. Or perhaps more in the sense that a prisoner that is being brainwashed is "programmed" with a new thinking, but anyway;-)
So it would not be the hardware, perhaps not even the particular implementation of the neural net software (well, in the future it probably would be Skyn^H^H^H^H some kind of parallel neural net hardware). It's the logic it has learned that would be real AI, that's the part that could be considered to have or not have something related to human rights.
You haven't read the treaty. Read it and you will see how messed up it is.
So, are you saying we'll have less greenhouse gasses without the treaty?
What exactly is so messed up about it? That it requires "3rd world nations" to stay at significantly lower per capita CO2 emissions than "1st world" nations?
Perhaps that reaty was the best this messed up world could come up with... But if not, there should be much more effot to come up with a new treaty, before we have a billion more CO2-producing (be it gasoline, or electricity from coal&gas) cars driving around in China and India...
Hmm, this is clearly a threat to the American way of life... US should invade before it's too late!
Intelligent filtering can only go so far... a false positive where you miss email could be increasingly damaging to you/your company. Why continue to try to tech computers complex recognition when there are simple 101 ways to greatly reduce this to a mere trickle now?
But it's also very easy to lose important e-mails if your inbox is filled with spam.
Block all email that contains HTML.. I mean how exciting can a text email be:)... Kills the marketing BS.
Except the important e-mail might well be in HTML format...
Institute a block all email except where you have whitelisted the sender...
Except when you forget to whitelist somebody, or when somebody responds from a different address then the one where you sent a message earlier.
Allow the sender to get prioritized by requiring them the first time to respond to an email and identify who they are and why they are contacting you.
Except then some important e-mail sender (say, a new potential customer for you company) might not bother to go through the hoops to contact you...
Personally I think the entire current e-mail system should be just scrapped totally, and a completely new system should be devised. Something that would interface well with mobile phones, mobile computers, IM software, web... Something that has strong security and authentication built into it, making it impossible to make a hacked home PC into a spam relay. Something that would allow smart and easy delivery/distribution of attachments. Yet something that would be easy to implement and easy (addresses especially) for end-users.
# The United States Senate (including its Democrats) have blocked the treaty, not George W Bush GWB had a big influence here though. If he had promised in his campaign "we will not let Manhattan get flooded", it's unlikely the Senate would have decided the same way.
# The Kyoto Treaty increases greenhouse gas emissions (please check section about China) Eh? You are seriously saying that if that treaty went into effect, we would have more greenhouse gasses than without it? You need to check your logic, I think it may be broken and needs replacing...
# There is no evidence of human impact on global warming anyway Yes, it must all be a co-incidence... It's just stupid to think that increased amount of these so called "greenhouse gasses" could somehow magically affect the temperature...
But wouldn't you have to have some special designation for elements up to iron, and other for elements after iron? I mean, the first group can be produced in stars while producing energy, while the 2nd group needs extra energy (such as a supernova) to be produced. I'd think that's quite an important disticntion for an astronomer...
eventually you'll reach a point where there is no answer to be found.
Ah, but this isn't so. We seem to be coming up with all kinds of answers quite rapidly. They then of course open new questions too, but I don't see there being any questions without answer to be found.
But feel free to suggest meaningful questions where the only possible answer you can imagine we ever come up with is "God"... Not that a persons lack of imagination is any proof, but anyway;-)
Note, I'm not critizising anyones faith, I'm just saying that looking for questions without answers isn't going to be very fruitful.
So basically any server would benefit greatly as they have multiple processes in execution at one time, even with existing software. But most desktop applications would only be slower without major re-design of entire software to heavily utilize multpile threads all the time and for everything.
Well, usually fridges don't have thermometers, or at least people don't check that very often if they have one. And anyway fridges stay a few degrees above freezing point, while freezers stay well below freezing point, so there's never actually any need to measure temperatures around freezing point, other than outside temperatures in the north.
Though maybe that PBR is a good reason, but I've got no idea what it is, 'cos your link didn't work:-)
If you want to call me from a cell phone anywhere on the world, no matter where in the world I am (except backwater North America of course), you dial +xxx yy zzzzzzz (xxx is country code, yy is operator prefix, zzzzzzz is number).
If calling from a phone (especially a fixed phone with no '+' key) in my own country, you can just dial 0yy zzzzzzz
In some bigger countries I imagine the y- and z-parts are longer, otherwise same principle works in the entire GSM-compatible world.
That's the nasty thing about capitalistic systems. Your own problems are no excuse, only thing that matters is if you have better offer than your competitor.
Just as an example of what could be, if China (or Russia or India or California) is able to offer orbital microgravity manufacturing facilites to companies in 10 years when nobody else can, there's no question that US companies will be very busy investing a lot of their capital to China, and leaving a lot of the profits to China as well.
And who has most money, rules the world. There is no room for "let's work on making world a better place".
Ah, but it's still very polite to tell what kind of temperatures you are talking about, so entire Celcius-using world doesn't need to go to google...
Not to mention, I would not be surprised if a lot of (non-geek) people in southern US for example don't even remember what is freezing point of water in Fahrenheit, any more than I remember what is the freezing point of quicksilver in Celsius... After all it has no bearing in their daily lives in the south where temperature never goes below 0C, so it's just an obscure "random" number for them.
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Nah. If he wrote about copyright issue (in this case open source licensing), then he should be well aware of copyright issues...
Well, that would depend on who's phone and finger it is... I can imagine several persons who I wouldn't mind holding their hand to my cheeck, and rubbing my ear with their finger... :-)
Those are all things that take away the rights of other people.
You taking drugs does not at first glance hurt other people, and it would not be outlawed if this was the whole story. Drugs are basically outlawed because of the secondary very negative effects of their use to the society. Though not all (alcohol, tobacco) are outlawed.
But you can easily argue that some/most drugs do not hurt other people and should not be illegal (and you can counter-argue that they do, and thus should be outlawed).
You'll have much harder time arguing that enslaving or killing other people does not hurt them or their rights...
Solution to that is simple. Don't block spam. That way you should always have new mail, so you never get to think 'hey, I've got mail!', since you always do
Actually, it isn't. In Linux there's no real ability to block internet access from individual programs on case-by-case basis. You know, in the style of Win "personal firewalls, where you get a pop-up whenever something, anything (including stuff like OS doing DNS query) accesses internet. And then you get to choose if you'll allow or deny, and of course if you want, it will remember your choice and not ask again about that program (unless the binary is changed). Nice to know that now spyware program (including the OS itself
Granted, this doesn't prevent user stupidity, and there's less need for this kind of stuff in Unix than in Windows anyway. But it's still a feature that's totally missing from every mainstream distro.
I'm also sure it can be done with relatively little hacking, maybe even without patching kernel, but it's far from trivial to do stuff like, allow Mozilla Firebird to access the web, but any other program trying that is denied.
It's also enlightening to notice how many programs (in Windows) actually try to access the 'net...
Or, you could move to a country that doesn't allow such anti-competitive practices as lock-in ;-)
Uh, maybe I used wrong terminology, but I meant 64bit flat address space. A 32bit OS can not address more than 32bits worth of address (well, I guess x86 can address something like 4 times that if I remember the number of segment registers correctly, but that's still 34 bits, not 64). To address more, you have to have more bits.
Having an OS designed for 64 bit virtual address space would allow some nifty optimizations, such as putting every running program in a different address space, thus allowing slightly faster process switching.
Then of course there's this thing called hard disk, which can be over 4GB in size these days... So even the swap space could easily be over 4GB in size, and then of course individual files could be that too.
So, if GPL was decreed unenforceable, what would it actually mean?
...known to NSA I mean. Why would they license it if they knew of some weakness in it...
Hmm...
Or maybe there *is* a suble weakness, leading to an "easy" way to break ECC. And NSA is licensing this to give it undue creidibility, so more people start using it, while NSA can easily (compared to RSA or whatnot) read everything encrypted with it...
I think the posters suggestion actually was to lower some other taxes and pay that with increasing petrol tax.
Of course this neglects the fact that with normal semi-democratic political system of US that'd be next to impossible to implement, since it certainly would not go down well with oil industry, they have enough money to make a difference.
I don't claim to belong to the group of people who could design it. I'm in the same group as you, just able to poke holes into the design
However, I'm not vain enough to think that if I can't do it (with my relatively limited knowledge of the e-mail system as a whole), then nobody can. E-mail is approaching some degree of uselessness. It's getting more unreliable as we speak, spam wastes bigger and bigger part of total internet bandwidth as we speak, new and improved worms keep using it to propagate... So don't tell me it doesn't need a total overhaul.
I think it's more like, a person has to come up with the algorithms describing the neural net (or whatever technology is used in AI construction in future). The logic itself would be learned exactly in the same sense as a human child learns while growing up. Or perhaps more in the sense that a prisoner that is being brainwashed is "programmed" with a new thinking, but anyway
So it would not be the hardware, perhaps not even the particular implementation of the neural net software (well, in the future it probably would be Skyn^H^H^H^H some kind of parallel neural net hardware). It's the logic it has learned that would be real AI, that's the part that could be considered to have or not have something related to human rights.
So, are you saying we'll have less greenhouse gasses without the treaty?
What exactly is so messed up about it? That it requires "3rd world nations" to stay at significantly lower per capita CO2 emissions than "1st world" nations?
Perhaps that reaty was the best this messed up world could come up with... But if not, there should be much more effot to come up with a new treaty, before we have a billion more CO2-producing (be it gasoline, or electricity from coal&gas) cars driving around in China and India...
Hmm, this is clearly a threat to the American way of life... US should invade before it's too late!
But it's also very easy to lose important e-mails if your inbox is filled with spam.
Except the important e-mail might well be in HTML format...
Except when you forget to whitelist somebody, or when somebody responds from a different address then the one where you sent a message earlier.
Except then some important e-mail sender (say, a new potential customer for you company) might not bother to go through the hoops to contact you...
Personally I think the entire current e-mail system should be just scrapped totally, and a completely new system should be devised. Something that would interface well with mobile phones, mobile computers, IM software, web... Something that has strong security and authentication built into it, making it impossible to make a hacked home PC into a spam relay. Something that would allow smart and easy delivery/distribution of attachments. Yet something that would be easy to implement and easy (addresses especially) for end-users.
# The United States Senate (including its Democrats) have blocked the treaty, not George W Bush
GWB had a big influence here though. If he had promised in his campaign "we will not let Manhattan get flooded", it's unlikely the Senate would have decided the same way.
# The Kyoto Treaty increases greenhouse gas emissions (please check section about China)
Eh? You are seriously saying that if that treaty went into effect, we would have more greenhouse gasses than without it? You need to check your logic, I think it may be broken and needs replacing...
# There is no evidence of human impact on global warming anyway
Yes, it must all be a co-incidence... It's just stupid to think that increased amount of these so called "greenhouse gasses" could somehow magically affect the temperature...
But wouldn't you have to have some special designation for elements up to iron, and other for elements after iron? I mean, the first group can be produced in stars while producing energy, while the 2nd group needs extra energy (such as a supernova) to be produced. I'd think that's quite an important disticntion for an astronomer...
Ah, but this isn't so. We seem to be coming up with all kinds of answers quite rapidly. They then of course open new questions too, but I don't see there being any questions without answer to be found.
But feel free to suggest meaningful questions where the only possible answer you can imagine we ever come up with is "God"... Not that a persons lack of imagination is any proof, but anyway
Note, I'm not critizising anyones faith, I'm just saying that looking for questions without answers isn't going to be very fruitful.
So basically any server would benefit greatly as they have multiple processes in execution at one time, even with existing software. But most desktop applications would only be slower without major re-design of entire software to heavily utilize multpile threads all the time and for everything.
Well, usually fridges don't have thermometers, or at least people don't check that very often if they have one. And anyway fridges stay a few degrees above freezing point, while freezers stay well below freezing point, so there's never actually any need to measure temperatures around freezing point, other than outside temperatures in the north.
:-)
Though maybe that PBR is a good reason, but I've got no idea what it is, 'cos your link didn't work
It can get messy
If you aren't careful, you end up with a little monster you wish you had aborted before it got too big
Wait. You can't use Kazaa for this! It's legal to distribute it almost any way you want, so any P2P software is clearly wrong way here.
Needlessly complicated, total mess-up even.
If you want to call me from a cell phone anywhere on the world, no matter where in the world I am (except backwater North America of course), you dial
+xxx yy zzzzzzz
(xxx is country code, yy is operator prefix, zzzzzzz is number).
If calling from a phone (especially a fixed phone with no '+' key) in my own country, you can just dial
0yy zzzzzzz
In some bigger countries I imagine the y- and z-parts are longer, otherwise same principle works in the entire GSM-compatible world.
That's the nasty thing about capitalistic systems. Your own problems are no excuse, only thing that matters is if you have better offer than your competitor.
Just as an example of what could be, if China (or Russia or India or California) is able to offer orbital microgravity manufacturing facilites to companies in 10 years when nobody else can, there's no question that US companies will be very busy investing a lot of their capital to China, and leaving a lot of the profits to China as well.
And who has most money, rules the world. There is no room for "let's work on making world a better place".
Ah, but it's still very polite to tell what kind of temperatures you are talking about, so entire Celcius-using world doesn't need to go to google...
Not to mention, I would not be surprised if a lot of (non-geek) people in southern US for example don't even remember what is freezing point of water in Fahrenheit, any more than I remember what is the freezing point of quicksilver in Celsius... After all it has no bearing in their daily lives in the south where temperature never goes below 0C, so it's just an obscure "random" number for them.