Yeah, but I'm not so sure that SCO actually want customers anymore. They know that their market share is falling, acting the bully isn't going to change that. I reckon all this lawsuit stuff is just their dying throes, in which case hurting SCO users won't really have any impact on SCO.
The interesting thing is that since invitro fertilization has a much higher probability of twins (or more), chimeras will become more common.
Um, not sure about this. Invitro embryos are implanted after they've divided a number of times already, it may well be too late for them to merge in this fashion.
So use the same password, change it regularly and use tripwire. For mission critical systems the last thing you want is for an admin to spend 10 minutes figuring out the password before they can even start to fix a problem.
Surely you mean Pi was a great movie only for non-math majors. It was an unmitigated pile of pretentious arty wank. There was nothing in it that was actually about maths or science that I could see. Did the writer actually have any sort of scientific background?
In my opinion it was a poorly done peice of art-student claptrap which the writer tried to give a scientific flavour to in order to appear intellectual.
Well, I thought it was a viable proposition. I bought a bunch of their games. In fact I was going to buy a load more recently, but I couldn't get them to go into my shopping cart on the loki site. I've just realised that it was 'cos junkbuster was blocking their cookies. So if I hadn't forgotten that I was running junkbuster then loki might still be in business. It's all my fault...
1) Men are twice as likely to be in an accident as women.
2) Men drive, per year, 4-5 times the kilometres than women. (Somewhat fewer women in the workforce)
Damn. You've got me there. Yes, you're right. My assertion that the statistics pointed to the fact that women were better drivers was simplistic.
In most countries men probably drive far more than women, making them more prone to accidents.
I wasn't blaming women, just making fun of special rights groups:)
I wouldn't consider feminism to be a special rights group. It's an equal rights movement.
That doesn't give you a reason to doubt what intelligence I may have. You'd be just as guilty of the employer that hires a man over a woman because they doubted the woman's intelligence, albeit provably equal to the man's.
Ok, first off, I didn't intend that comment as a slur on your intelligence, though, looking back at it it's clear that that's how it came out.
As for your second point, you seem to be suggesting that I'm guilty of discrimination by pointing out that an intelligent person would blame the people who are driving unsafely and thus driving up the price instead of those who drive safely and thus bring the overall price down. This seems somewhat flawed to me.
The comparison to work related sexual discrimination is even more flawed. The situation you describe above involves someone doubting someone's intelligence because of outward physical characteristics (gender/appearance).
The current situation however, involves someone doubting someone's intelligence because they say something which is logically flawed (that is, the assertion that women are to blame for the higher cost of insurance for men).
This is a judgement made on the basis of the behaviour of the subject, not merely on their gender (note that I would have made the same comment had you been female).
But if this species is succesful and surpass the original species would it be considered evolution? or maybe just one of those freak occurences that just happens?
Huh? Um, evolution is 'just one of those freak occurences'. That's what evolution is; a series of freak occurences.
You get random changes in the genome all the time. Some of these random changes might occur because a cosmic ray hits a cell and causes mutation, some could just be a copying error, others could be caused by a bacterium. Regardless of their cause all of these contribute to evolution.
This is just another cause of genetic mutation, albeit a rather cool and interesting one.
insurance companies actually commit one of the most basic fallacies associated with statistics
Oh, I agree totally. It's unfair that all young males should have to pay a higher rate just 'cos some of them drive unsafely.
The previous poster seemed to be blaming women for the fact that men paid more though, whereas any intelligent person can see that the fault lies with that portion of the male population which drives unsafely.
Where's the difference? You have no more control over your sex than you do the rest of your genome, so how is it permissible to discriminate for car and life insurance on the basis of sex, but not other genetic factors? Just because it takes some fancy testing to determine those factors doesn't change the situation one bit.
Ok, first off I'd better point out that I actually agree that it's unfair to make young males pay more for insurance just because as a group they have a higher chance of being involved in a serious accident.
However, the insurance companies aren't just discriminating against males because of some inherited trait that they can't change. They are doing it because of a behavioural trait of a lot of young males, that is, the tendency to drive unsafely.
Now, this situation could be changed if young males would collectively decide to drive more sensibly. Of course, that fact offers little comfort to those safe drivers who, due to their gender, get lumped in with the unsafe drivers who are driving up the price.
My point is that the above type of discrimination, while in many ways unfair, isn't really comparable to the idea of upping someone's premium because of a genetic predisposition to a disease that they can't change.
The latter has nothing to do with behaviour. It really can't be changed. The former, while it looks like genetically based discrimination, is in fact behaviourally based. It's just that the best way the insurance companies have come up with of predicting this behaviour is a genetic method. Not very fair.
The important difference is that you can actually change the amount you pay in car insurance by changing your behaviour. Granted you'll also have to encourage a lot of other people to change their behaviour. But if the behavioural statistics change then the price difference between men and women will also eventually disappear (maybe not immediately, but once people know that the proportions of accidents for males and females are equal then the insurance companies will have to modify their pricing to reflect this).
What gets me is that there's an EQUAL number of males and females on the planet, but young males pay much higher rates for car insurance. Of course, they couldn't just make both genders pay the in-between amount, because feminist superiority groups, errr, women's rights groups, would get all pissy.
I'm sorry. I didn't realise that it was my fault that you have to pay more for car insurance. I feel so guilty now...
Oh, hang on, maybe it actually has something to do with the fact that males statistically have much higher car accident rates.
Now, if all the males on the planet other than me were to suddenly all die of unknown causes, and I could prove to them my ability to drive safely, would they lower my rates? Or would they *still* not trust me?
I have an idea. How about you make a start by driving carefully and bitch at any of your male friends who drive in a reckless manner and eventually the proportion of male car accidents might come down to match the proportion of female car accidents and then the insurance companies will have to lower their prices for men.
The reason men pay more for insurance is because men tend to be unsafe drivers. If you're annoyed about the amount you have to pay why not blame all the men out there who are driving unsafely, not the women who are driving safely.
...and in it's wake, a world of far to sexually free women (sluts) and men (just as bad), the AIDS epidemic (did you know that promiscuity is a contributing factor?), and the infantile feminist movement. Don't forget, such a sweeping technology can have its downsides.
I hope this is just a troll, but just in case... Social changes were as big a factor in the behaviour you've described. This was facilitated by the introduction of the pill, but not caused by it.
As for your views on feminism, are you really trying to suggest that equality is one of the downsides of the introduction of the pill? Strange...
The benefits of advances like the introduction of safe contraceptives far outwiegh any adverse affects.
As a physicist, I can question GRT or QM anyday with new discoveries (e.g. the Copenhagen interpretation and Bohmian trajectories) but if I question evolution I'm treated like an idiot. Sigh.
Yeah, it's just terrible that people won't take you seriously. Then again, maybe if you mentioned some of these "very good reasons for NOT accepting" evolution people might be in a position to enter a discussion with you. Without those, all we can do is dismiss you as another nut.
The Turing machine's not a gadget. It's purely hypothetical, can't work in practice except for trivial problems. You'd need a near infinite amount of tape to do anything worthwhile.
The pen didn't bring literacy for the masses! Quills/paintbrushes/whatever were around for bloody ages before any attempt at educating the masses was made. The printing press was far more influential in this domain, as was paper.
Without the plow, there aren't many uses for a can opener. Fruits, vegetables, meats, pastas, etc. don't exist without a plow.
Ah, but he was obviously referring to tins of fish, for which you don't need a plough, just a tin opener.
Anywyay, since when did people plough fields to plant fruit trees? Though I suppose if you consider the tomato to be a fruit then maybe it needs a plough.
Stuck? Well, that's fucking nice. I try to show you a good night out; a shit-fast connection to the world and the possiblity of seeing the world crash and burn, and what do I get? 'Suck in a cyber cafe'.
Oh, bugger, I didn't mean to say 'stuck', it just sort of came out.
Don't worry, I had a great time installing bloody enlightenment on this poxy machine that didn't have any of the right libraries installed even though it kept lying to me about it and claiming that it did.
I can see it now, people will ask "what did you do for the millennium Kathryn?" and I'll tell them I was installing bloody fnlib over and over again...
Anyway, what the hell am I posting this to slashdot for? you're sitting at the next machine...
Well, you'll all be relieved to know that Ireland seems ok so far. Well, at least the cyber cafe that I'm stuck in seems to be fine, as are any other Irish sites I've visited.
Of course, I did hear a couple of cop cars zooming by earlier, so maybe there's looting and pillaging going on in the rest of Dublin. But that's probably unrelated to any computer problems. Just another friday night, really...
Oh, just got a phone call from someone who gets into the spirit of these things and was phoning everyone she knows to say happy new year. Apparently there's a lot of calls being rejected on one of our GSM services, but that's probably just due to the volume of calls since she managed to get through in the end.
Actually, you're wrong on that second point. The bloke who made the calendar for Pope Gregory actually left out the year 0, so Christ was technically born on 1/1/1. I am still in agreement with you on when to celebrate, however, my argument is simply that the first decade was nine years long...
I think the point being made was that the date that the bloke came up with for the birth of christ (ie. 1/1/1) cannot actually be correct as Herod died four years before this (and you may recall he was around for the birth). Therefore, christ must have been born in 4BC or earlier.
As for the choice of when to celebrate, in the past the end of the year xx01 has always been chosen. If you dig up any newspaper from 1st Jan 1901 you'll see that they herald it as the first day of the new century. The same holds for previous centuries.
Of course, in times past it was considered to be primarily a religious celebration, so I suppose it mattered when it was celebrated (ignoring the fact that Jesus wasn't actually born in 1/1/1). Nowadays I think most people are just celebrating a big round number, so who gives a fsck that it's not strictly correct
Personally, I'm not celebrating anything. Bah, humbug...
Or those braids she had before the pink hair, although I have to admit I thought they were quite nice;-)
Ok, who the hell are you people/person? Damned cyber stalkers after me again...
By the way, I got bored over the weekend and dyed it red.
Um, to keep this post from being totally off topic, the talk was excellent, and they aren't exaggerating in the article when they say it was standing room only. Apparently it was the biggest turn-out for a TCD netsock event ever. Wow.
And the idea of an open client means, at least to me, that we'd submit changes to SETI@Home, and they'd release the next approved client
Yes, and that would be fine, except that in order to do this they have to release the code which allows the possiblility of people writing their own versions which interface perfectly with the seti server but don't necessarily give the correct results.
This is a scientific experiment so they simply can't take that risk.
Even if they periodically check results they may not catch all incorrect data, and the one they miss could turn out to be the one that would have revealed something interesting had it been analysed correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but I'm not so sure that SCO actually want customers anymore. They know that their market share is falling, acting the bully isn't going to change that. I reckon all this lawsuit stuff is just their dying throes, in which case hurting SCO users won't really have any impact on SCO.
Um, not sure about this. Invitro embryos are implanted after they've divided a number of times already, it may well be too late for them to merge in this fashion.
So use the same password, change it regularly
and use tripwire. For mission critical systems
the last thing you want is for an admin to
spend 10 minutes figuring out the password
before they can even start to fix a problem.
Surely you mean Pi was a great movie only for non-math majors. It was an unmitigated pile of pretentious arty wank. There was nothing in it that was actually about maths or science that I could see. Did the writer actually have any sort of scientific background?
In my opinion it was a poorly done peice of art-student claptrap which the writer tried to give a scientific flavour to in order to appear intellectual.
Well, I thought it was a viable proposition. I bought a bunch of their games. In fact I was going to buy a load more recently, but I couldn't get them to go into my shopping cart on the loki site. I've just realised that it was 'cos junkbuster was blocking their cookies. So if I hadn't forgotten that I was running junkbuster then loki might still be in business. It's all my fault...
Damn. You've got me there. Yes, you're right. My assertion that the statistics pointed to the fact that women were better drivers was simplistic.
In most countries men probably drive far more than women, making them more prone to accidents.
I wouldn't consider feminism to be a special rights group. It's an equal rights movement.
Ok, first off, I didn't intend that comment as a slur on your intelligence, though, looking back at it it's clear that that's how it came out.
As for your second point, you seem to be suggesting that I'm guilty of discrimination by pointing out that an intelligent person would blame the people who are driving unsafely and thus driving up the price instead of those who drive safely and thus bring the overall price down. This seems somewhat flawed to me.
The comparison to work related sexual discrimination is even more flawed. The situation you describe above involves someone doubting someone's intelligence because of outward physical characteristics (gender/appearance).
The current situation however, involves someone doubting someone's intelligence because they say something which is logically flawed (that is, the assertion that women are to blame for the higher cost of insurance for men).
This is a judgement made on the basis of the behaviour of the subject, not merely on their gender (note that I would have made the same comment had you been female).
If you're using a value-neutral logic like that then you shouldn't be using value-laden terms like 'fault'.
In this case the price differential is due to divergent groups who either drive more or less safely than the average road user.
But this is rediculously off topic, so I'll stop now.
Huh? Um, evolution is 'just one of those freak occurences'. That's what evolution is; a series of freak occurences.
You get random changes in the genome all the time. Some of these random changes might occur because a cosmic ray hits a cell and causes mutation, some could just be a copying error, others could be caused by a bacterium. Regardless of their cause all of these contribute to evolution.
This is just another cause of genetic mutation, albeit a rather cool and interesting one.
Oh, I agree totally. It's unfair that all young males should have to pay a higher rate just 'cos some of them drive unsafely.
The previous poster seemed to be blaming women for the fact that men paid more though, whereas any intelligent person can see that the fault lies with that portion of the male population which drives unsafely.
Ok, first off I'd better point out that I actually agree that it's unfair to make young males pay more for insurance just because as a group they have a higher chance of being involved in a serious accident.
However, the insurance companies aren't just discriminating against males because of some inherited trait that they can't change. They are doing it because of a behavioural trait of a lot of young males, that is, the tendency to drive unsafely.
Now, this situation could be changed if young males would collectively decide to drive more sensibly. Of course, that fact offers little comfort to those safe drivers who, due to their gender, get lumped in with the unsafe drivers who are driving up the price.
My point is that the above type of discrimination, while in many ways unfair, isn't really comparable to the idea of upping someone's premium because of a genetic predisposition to a disease that they can't change.
The latter has nothing to do with behaviour. It really can't be changed. The former, while it looks like genetically based discrimination, is in fact behaviourally based. It's just that the best way the insurance companies have come up with of predicting this behaviour is a genetic method. Not very fair.
The important difference is that you can actually change the amount you pay in car insurance by changing your behaviour. Granted you'll also have to encourage a lot of other people to change their behaviour. But if the behavioural statistics change then the price difference between men and women will also eventually disappear (maybe not immediately, but once people know that the proportions of accidents for males and females are equal then the insurance companies will have to modify their pricing to reflect this).
Troll feeding time:
I'm sorry. I didn't realise that it was my fault that you have to pay more for car insurance. I feel so guilty now...
Oh, hang on, maybe it actually has something to do with the fact that males statistically have much higher car accident rates.
I have an idea. How about you make a start by driving carefully and bitch at any of your male friends who drive in a reckless manner and eventually the proportion of male car accidents might come down to match the proportion of female car accidents and then the insurance companies will have to lower their prices for men.
The reason men pay more for insurance is because men tend to be unsafe drivers. If you're annoyed about the amount you have to pay why not blame all the men out there who are driving unsafely, not the women who are driving safely.
As for your views on feminism, are you really trying to suggest that equality is one of the downsides of the introduction of the pill? Strange...
The benefits of advances like the introduction of safe contraceptives far outwiegh any adverse affects.
Yeah, it's just terrible that people won't take you seriously. Then again, maybe if you mentioned some of these "very good reasons for NOT accepting" evolution people might be in a position to enter a discussion with you. Without those, all we can do is dismiss you as another nut.
Ah, just get a syringe and inject the stuff directly into your testicles. It may hurt a bit, but it's all in the interests of science...
Well, if the only purpose of the research was to find cool new toys or food colourants then that argument might have some validity.
However, their parent company are also researching medical applications for this stuff.
Animal testing is fine when there's some serious scientific benefit to be had.
The Turing machine's not a gadget. It's purely hypothetical, can't work in practice except for trivial problems. You'd need a near infinite amount of tape to do anything worthwhile.
The pen didn't bring literacy for the masses! Quills/paintbrushes/whatever were around for bloody ages before any attempt at educating the masses was made. The printing press was far more influential in this domain, as was paper.
Ah, but he was obviously referring to tins of fish, for which you don't need a plough, just a tin opener.
Anywyay, since when did people plough fields to plant fruit trees? Though I suppose if you consider the tomato to be a fruit then maybe it needs a plough.
Oh, bugger, I didn't mean to say 'stuck', it just sort of came out.
Don't worry, I had a great time installing bloody enlightenment on this poxy machine that didn't have any of the right libraries installed even though it kept lying to me about it and claiming that it did.
I can see it now, people will ask "what did you do for the millennium Kathryn?" and I'll tell them I was installing bloody fnlib over and over again...
Anyway, what the hell am I posting this to slashdot for? you're sitting at the next machine...
Well, you'll all be relieved to know that Ireland seems ok so far. Well, at least the cyber cafe that I'm stuck in seems to be fine, as are any other Irish sites I've visited.
Of course, I did hear a couple of cop cars zooming by earlier, so maybe there's looting and pillaging going on in the rest of Dublin. But that's probably unrelated to any computer problems. Just another friday night, really...
Oh, just got a phone call from someone who gets into the spirit of these things and was phoning everyone she knows to say happy new year. Apparently there's a lot of calls being rejected on one of our GSM services, but that's probably just due to the volume of calls since she managed to get through in the end.
I think the point being made was that the date that the bloke came up with for the birth of christ (ie. 1/1/1) cannot actually be correct as Herod died four years before this (and you may recall he was around for the birth). Therefore, christ must have been born in 4BC or earlier.
As for the choice of when to celebrate, in the past the end of the year xx01 has always been chosen. If you dig up any newspaper from 1st Jan 1901 you'll see that they herald it as the first day of the new century. The same holds for previous centuries.
Of course, in times past it was considered to be primarily a religious celebration, so I suppose it mattered when it was celebrated (ignoring the fact that Jesus wasn't actually born in 1/1/1). Nowadays I think most people are just celebrating a big round number, so who gives a fsck that it's not strictly correct
Personally, I'm not celebrating anything. Bah, humbug...
Ok, who the hell are you people/person? Damned cyber stalkers after me again...
By the way, I got bored over the weekend and dyed it red.
Um, to keep this post from being totally off topic, the talk was excellent, and they aren't exaggerating in the article when they say it was standing room only. Apparently it was the biggest turn-out for a TCD netsock event ever. Wow.
Is it meant to affect you in some way?
If you don't find the story interesting/relevent then just don't read it. You're not the only person who reads /. you know. Nor are we all American...
Yes, and that would be fine, except that in order to do this they have to release the code which allows the possiblility of people writing their own versions which interface perfectly with the seti server but don't necessarily give the correct results.
This is a scientific experiment so they simply can't take that risk.
Even if they periodically check results they may not catch all incorrect data, and the one they miss could turn out to be the one that would have revealed something interesting had it been analysed correctly.