Yeah,
My wife just went to Mexico. She said you can buy ANYTHING you want there with no prescription for a couple bucks. There are obviously problems caused by such a loose system (some regulation is good). But they don't have the same problem of poor families and elderly not being able to afford the medicine to keep them alive and healthy.
You're right, of course. I was just poking fun at what seems to me a comic ability of the government to intervene at the wrong times on the wrong side.
Undoubtedly they usually get it right. And only the bad outcomes stick in our minds.
What do freedoms have to do with it? It really is fairly simple: cap campaign finance contributions.
To my understanding, campaign contributions are already capped. An individual can only give a certain amount, and an organization can only give a certain amount.
Soft money IS the problem. That is where the freedoms come in. The courts consider using your money to influence a campaign freedom of speech. So groups of businesses and labor unions spend money for their own commercials and such, effectively donating money without it technically changing hands. The soft money contributions make up a HUGE percentage of all the money spent during an election. And that's where most of the corruption starts.
pork and kickbacks are now driving policy in the US under the current administration
This has been a problem for quite some time, with administrations and legislators alike - any elected official really. Even if you don't like Bush, you can't saddle all this on him. This is a large problem, and has been for a while.
The worst part of it is it's self-supportive nature. Those who oppose this unscrupulous model have a much harder time being elected because they don't get money. That's the problem. But it is very difficult to fix due to freedoms guaranteed in the constitution.
If enough apparently intelligent, well-meaning people believe in it, then it must be true!.. right?
My sig is not intended as proof of God. It is meant as a counterexample to the idea that religion is for the weak-minded (which you seem to agree with).
I just thought you should know that you are calling James Clerk Maxwell weak-minded.
What is the belief in God, if not the cowardly submission that we are too weak-minded to believe in and act upon literal truths only.
Your confidence in your own knowledge of literal truths is quite profound! Perhaps you are overconfident. I would direct your attention to Goldbach's conjecture. Could you prove it for me? Of course not! Not even the best mathematical minds to date have been able to do that. So it is outside the realm of proven, literal truthes. However, everyone just knows that it's correct. How do we know if we can't prove it? Well, it's hard to explain except for that when you look at it, it seems right. It's a human judgement call. In this case, our human understanding rises head and shoulders above the cold, hard facts approach.
Do you honestly go through life acting only on information that has been proven? I think not.
I agree that many people try to prove the existance/non-existance of God, and that it won't really go anywhere. It is ultimately a matter of faith. Even when we look to scientific matters, we often draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. (The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Wave Particle Duality) So we certainly will have little luck trying to prove or disprove God.
That's pretty bold. And you rarely meet an enlightened person who asks you not to argue your point - even if they disagree with you.
Also, I never said Einstein was a Christian. You assumed that yourself. I said he beleived in God/had a spiritual side. Your quote is a nice one, but only backs up what I said before. Einstein didn't beleive in a personal God. And he qualifies his statement with "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest," meaning from the most extreme viewpoint he is an atheist.
In his life he also made several other statements expounding his spiritual fascination. For instance:
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
"I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research."
"I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details."
"The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat."
And the list goes on.
You might say that these quotes are quite abstract... and I would agree. Which is why I repeat that he did not beleive in the personal Christian God that I do.
please take your offense to them, and not pick a fight with the entire world by putting flame bate in your sig.
I didn't pick a fight with the world. I put a statement that I feel is funny or important in my sig... just like a lot of other people do. That is what its for after all. Furthermore, its not flamebait just because you take offense to it. How you react is entirely a matter of your control.
You are right that Einstein did not beleive in a personal God. He did however have a spiritual side that grew as he aged and a beleif in something larger than himself.
In general if you want to offer service you have to pay through the nose to get a server grade connection. Asynchronous lines are obviously to "encourage" people to purchase a better connection if they want to do anything intersting.
Interesting... they may be brilliant, but they are also responsible for coming up with a bunch of approximations that don't match reality completely. Therefore I propose that the concept of god is a mathematical approximation to reality.... something I'd be willing to accept as an agnostic.
They're also responsible for coming up with some of the most accurate theories we have to date - meaning that they have the best understanding of the universe.
Still not fast enough to beam my body from my bedroom to the office to hooters to the office to the bedroom. piggyback.
I think what you're looking for is a very large version of those sucking tube things at the bank drive through. That should get the job done.
Good luck getting it approved though, I tried to get one put in at my college so I wouldn't have to walk outside in the winter. They told me no and made up some crap about 'fiscal responsibility.'
Until the pipes coming into the homes are a lot faster (i.e. fiber-to-the-home, or fiber-to-the-neighbourhood), most consumers will not have a use even for 1Gbps Ethernet.
Well, sometimes when I'm bored I send large files back and forth between computers on my home network. And I'm always looking for ways to be more efficient...
But Kazaa doesn't allow you to look up IP addresses. (I don't think so anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong.) Anyway, it could easily be made so that the client application was not usable as a tracking tool.
You would have to dot your i's and cross your t's. But you could make it illegal to browse your network for tracking purposes using the RIAA's own pet law.
(heck, Gigabit switches are only just now getting home-use priced)
I agree, we won't see them for awhile. But I always cheer the newest and greatest being released, because that means whatever used to be the newest and greatest (Gigabit switches in this case) will experience a nice price drop. The product hasn't lost any value. In fact, it probably getting better. But since it isn't the best you can get any more it doesn't have the extra price hop that comes with top-of-the-line status.
There are a ton of applications out there (some good, some bad) that require high band width to operate. I'm personally intersted in piping virtual reality environments to other computers over the internet. But most of these new ideas never come to full fruition because few people have high bandwidth.
When I make a webpage, I make it for someone with dialup so everyone can see it. I even have dialup.
I know many people are changing to DSL/Cable. But the adoption of new bandwidth-hungry applications is really lagging because most people can't handle them.
We would sure get a big boost if we could impliment much higher speeds over already existing infrastructure. That would allow a lot of applications that are already out there to be used.
Hey thanks,
I think you summed up exactly the kind of offtopic replies I get. (And I HAVE GOTTEN A LOT.) I saw someones sig deriding God and religious people. No one seemed to mind that one. I didn't want to post about his sig, so I changed my own as a form of response.
My point was, exactly as you said, to show that some brilliant people were not atheists or agnostics. (It seems the current mood is that if you are smart you can't beleive in God.)
I'm happy to hear from you. It was most encouraging.
If you think their copyrights are inherently wrong, then you can't back use of the DMCA - unless you're a complete hypocrite.
The idea here is to poison the DMCA so that it is no longer desirable to those who forced it through to begin with. It just so happens to be in a situation where either outcome has at least some benefit.
If you can handle them, please do, and share your methods with the rest of us.
Well most of them around here are in the form of a small sticker. So when I have extra time, I open/unscrew the back of whatever I bought and peel out the tags. That works for now. If they started embedding them in the plastic or something, that could get more difficult. On the upside, they would be very difficult to hide, seeing as they respond to a radio ping and all. I'll just clear out one room of my house and set up several radio receivers and a ping transceiver to triangulate the position of the tag. Then remove it.
Wait this is already getting difficult...
In a related note, I have a friend who removes the security stickers and puts them in his pants while in the store. Then he walks out and is accosted several times - each time proving that he has nothing stolen from the store. That is his small way of fighting back.
Just don't think of implanting these in my body any time soon.
They do that in dogs and cats now. We checked at an animal adoption agency. Every dog or cat that goes through that place gets a little radio tag the size and shape of a grain of rice injected under its skin.
The technology is there. It could easily be done to you (technology wise I mean).
Oh yes, and did I mention it injects poison and expodes if you try to remove it...
Yeah, you just include the tag in your PHP or Asp document and you have access to all personal information pertaining to the person reading your web page. The marketers and virus writers are having a hayday with this one.
Over here in the US of A, I think the situation will be a little different. Walmart likes RFID. Their investment will be plenty to get the whole industry up and running pretty quickly. And that will also lower costs for smaller businesses to implement them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah,
My wife just went to Mexico. She said you can buy ANYTHING you want there with no prescription for a couple bucks. There are obviously problems caused by such a loose system (some regulation is good). But they don't have the same problem of poor families and elderly not being able to afford the medicine to keep them alive and healthy.
You're right, of course. I was just poking fun at what seems to me a comic ability of the government to intervene at the wrong times on the wrong side.
Undoubtedly they usually get it right. And only the bad outcomes stick in our minds.
Among the industries taken over or overregulated by the Gov:
Rail Trains
Pharmacies
Telecom
Current status:
Rail Trains - all but dead
Pharmacy - corrupt and overpriced
Telecom - sucks oh so bad
If only there were a pattern so we could learn something from this.
What do freedoms have to do with it? It really is fairly simple: cap campaign finance contributions.
To my understanding, campaign contributions are already capped. An individual can only give a certain amount, and an organization can only give a certain amount.
Soft money IS the problem. That is where the freedoms come in. The courts consider using your money to influence a campaign freedom of speech. So groups of businesses and labor unions spend money for their own commercials and such, effectively donating money without it technically changing hands. The soft money contributions make up a HUGE percentage of all the money spent during an election. And that's where most of the corruption starts.
pork and kickbacks are now driving policy in the US under the current administration
This has been a problem for quite some time, with administrations and legislators alike - any elected official really. Even if you don't like Bush, you can't saddle all this on him. This is a large problem, and has been for a while.
The worst part of it is it's self-supportive nature. Those who oppose this unscrupulous model have a much harder time being elected because they don't get money. That's the problem. But it is very difficult to fix due to freedoms guaranteed in the constitution.
Sounds like a mob boss doesn't it?
Sort of ominous, but not so threatening as to be considered out and out illegal.
I haven't heard of it. Perhaps you'd like to tell me more about it. This thread is already horribly off-topic already.
If enough apparently intelligent, well-meaning people believe in it, then it must be true! .. right?
My sig is not intended as proof of God. It is meant as a counterexample to the idea that religion is for the weak-minded (which you seem to agree with).
I just thought you should know that you are calling James Clerk Maxwell weak-minded.
What is the belief in God, if not the cowardly submission that we are too weak-minded to believe in and act upon literal truths only.
Your confidence in your own knowledge of literal truths is quite profound! Perhaps you are overconfident. I would direct your attention to Goldbach's conjecture. Could you prove it for me? Of course not! Not even the best mathematical minds to date have been able to do that. So it is outside the realm of proven, literal truthes. However, everyone just knows that it's correct. How do we know if we can't prove it? Well, it's hard to explain except for that when you look at it, it seems right. It's a human judgement call. In this case, our human understanding rises head and shoulders above the cold, hard facts approach.
Do you honestly go through life acting only on information that has been proven? I think not.
I agree that many people try to prove the existance/non-existance of God, and that it won't really go anywhere. It is ultimately a matter of faith. Even when we look to scientific matters, we often draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. (The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Wave Particle Duality) So we certainly will have little luck trying to prove or disprove God.
Please don't argue this point any farther.
That's pretty bold. And you rarely meet an enlightened person who asks you not to argue your point - even if they disagree with you.
Also, I never said Einstein was a Christian. You assumed that yourself. I said he beleived in God/had a spiritual side. Your quote is a nice one, but only backs up what I said before. Einstein didn't beleive in a personal God. And he qualifies his statement with "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest," meaning from the most extreme viewpoint he is an atheist.
In his life he also made several other statements expounding his spiritual fascination. For instance:
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
"I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research."
"I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details."
"The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat."
And the list goes on.
You might say that these quotes are quite abstract... and I would agree. Which is why I repeat that he did not beleive in the personal Christian God that I do.
please take your offense to them, and not pick a fight with the entire world by putting flame bate in your sig.
I didn't pick a fight with the world. I put a statement that I feel is funny or important in my sig... just like a lot of other people do. That is what its for after all. Furthermore, its not flamebait just because you take offense to it. How you react is entirely a matter of your control.
You are right that Einstein did not beleive in a personal God. He did however have a spiritual side that grew as he aged and a beleif in something larger than himself.
That's a big problem, not only with VR.
In general if you want to offer service you have to pay through the nose to get a server grade connection. Asynchronous lines are obviously to "encourage" people to purchase a better connection if they want to do anything intersting.
Exactly!
Some of the stuff can even be desirable:
Fewer out-of-stock products
Lower overhead -> lower price
Targetted advertising is better than being innundated... and you may even save some money on the sale price of something you were already going to buy
Convenience
Just like a steak knife or dynomite - depends how you use it.
Interesting... they may be brilliant, but they are also responsible for coming up with a bunch of approximations that don't match reality completely. Therefore I propose that the concept of god is a mathematical approximation to reality.... something I'd be willing to accept as an agnostic.
They're also responsible for coming up with some of the most accurate theories we have to date - meaning that they have the best understanding of the universe.
Still not fast enough to beam my body from my bedroom to the office to hooters to the office to the bedroom. piggyback.
I think what you're looking for is a very large version of those sucking tube things at the bank drive through. That should get the job done.
Good luck getting it approved though, I tried to get one put in at my college so I wouldn't have to walk outside in the winter. They told me no and made up some crap about 'fiscal responsibility.'
Until the pipes coming into the homes are a lot faster (i.e. fiber-to-the-home, or fiber-to-the-neighbourhood), most consumers will not have a use even for 1Gbps Ethernet.
Well, sometimes when I'm bored I send large files back and forth between computers on my home network. And I'm always looking for ways to be more efficient...
But Kazaa doesn't allow you to look up IP addresses. (I don't think so anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong.) Anyway, it could easily be made so that the client application was not usable as a tracking tool.
You would have to dot your i's and cross your t's. But you could make it illegal to browse your network for tracking purposes using the RIAA's own pet law.
(heck, Gigabit switches are only just now getting home-use priced)
I agree, we won't see them for awhile. But I always cheer the newest and greatest being released, because that means whatever used to be the newest and greatest (Gigabit switches in this case) will experience a nice price drop. The product hasn't lost any value. In fact, it probably getting better. But since it isn't the best you can get any more it doesn't have the extra price hop that comes with top-of-the-line status.
There are a ton of applications out there (some good, some bad) that require high band width to operate. I'm personally intersted in piping virtual reality environments to other computers over the internet. But most of these new ideas never come to full fruition because few people have high bandwidth.
When I make a webpage, I make it for someone with dialup so everyone can see it. I even have dialup.
I know many people are changing to DSL/Cable. But the adoption of new bandwidth-hungry applications is really lagging because most people can't handle them.
We would sure get a big boost if we could impliment much higher speeds over already existing infrastructure. That would allow a lot of applications that are already out there to be used.
Hey thanks,
I think you summed up exactly the kind of offtopic replies I get. (And I HAVE GOTTEN A LOT.) I saw someones sig deriding God and religious people. No one seemed to mind that one. I didn't want to post about his sig, so I changed my own as a form of response.
My point was, exactly as you said, to show that some brilliant people were not atheists or agnostics. (It seems the current mood is that if you are smart you can't beleive in God.)
I'm happy to hear from you. It was most encouraging.
If you think their copyrights are inherently wrong, then you can't back use of the DMCA - unless you're a complete hypocrite.
The idea here is to poison the DMCA so that it is no longer desirable to those who forced it through to begin with. It just so happens to be in a situation where either outcome has at least some benefit.
If you can handle them, please do, and share your methods with the rest of us.
Well most of them around here are in the form of a small sticker. So when I have extra time, I open/unscrew the back of whatever I bought and peel out the tags. That works for now. If they started embedding them in the plastic or something, that could get more difficult. On the upside, they would be very difficult to hide, seeing as they respond to a radio ping and all. I'll just clear out one room of my house and set up several radio receivers and a ping transceiver to triangulate the position of the tag. Then remove it.
Wait this is already getting difficult...
In a related note, I have a friend who removes the security stickers and puts them in his pants while in the store. Then he walks out and is accosted several times - each time proving that he has nothing stolen from the store. That is his small way of fighting back.
Just don't think of implanting these in my body any time soon.
They do that in dogs and cats now. We checked at an animal adoption agency. Every dog or cat that goes through that place gets a little radio tag the size and shape of a grain of rice injected under its skin.
The technology is there. It could easily be done to you (technology wise I mean).
Oh yes, and did I mention it injects poison and expodes if you try to remove it...
Yeah, you just include the tag in your PHP or Asp document and you have access to all personal information pertaining to the person reading your web page. The marketers and virus writers are having a hayday with this one.
<RFID>
$Name = RF_NAME;
$SSN = RF_SSN;
$Age = RF_AGE;
$Eyes = RF_EYE_COLOR;
$MMN = RF_MOTHER_MAIDEN;
$CCN = RF_CREDIT_CARD_NUM;
$CCE = RF_CREDIT_CARD_EXP;
</RFID>
Over here in the US of A, I think the situation will be a little different. Walmart likes RFID. Their investment will be plenty to get the whole industry up and running pretty quickly. And that will also lower costs for smaller businesses to implement them.