I rather agree with this - maybe all of the really important desktop innovations exist already, except for ones that require huge processing power to be useful at all (which is why there are always innovations to be had in areas like 3d). But that doesn't mean that OSS developers shouldn't make their own versions.
Really, MS ran into this problem years ago. Office got pretty much as good as it was going to get around version 6.0 - everything added since has been mostly bloat.
It is rather annoying, isn't it? Seeing 'she' in the context of O'Reilly guides and engineering texts always trips me up a bit; I begin to cringingly imagine the writer congratulating herself (and now I've done it too!) for the great blow she's struck for gender equity, or whatever.
But picking 'he' or 'she', and alternating in the name of political correctness, is infinitely better than the disgusting 'he or she'. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of your singular 'they' either, as it tends to cause confusion and frequently violates parallelism - your example sentence just sounds wrong to me.
And let's not even get into those fake-o-la neutral pronouns. Ou? Thon? HERM? That's just silly.
He didn't say we should monopolize the drug (or the computer) industry, merely that we should liberalize the market and let it decide the best organization. Anyway, how exactly does one "monopolize" any market? Would it be like seizing the assets and nationalizing the industry? It think it would... and find that this is exactly what you propose!
_I_ find it funny that lefties like you consider monopolies evil, while endorsing the worst monopoly of all - the state. Seriously, at least an oligopoly has more than ONE producer!
I think you might be on to something there... At least it would be a way to fund space commercialization. Come to think of it, I remember reading a book about space tourism as a kid that had some rather pointed references to "re-entry" and "docking maneuvers".
There is a slight confusion here. The width of the band does not specify how spread out the effects are in space - 'band' here refers to frequency, which affects the damage yielded by the weapon in different ways. A narrowband device, of course, will radiate at a small range of frequencies. The weapon designer can choose what these frequencies are, and maybe with a specific kind of target in mind. If you are looking to attack some kind of communications apparatus, great, just look at the antenna installed there, and choose wavelengths similar to those the antenna was designed to work in. If you want to fry printed circuit boards, you'll probably need higher frequencies or the short traces won't be affected.
One way to get around this specificity is to design a weapon that works over a wide band of frequencies, thus attacking a wider variety of devices (there is a bit more to it than that, of course, as electronic devices could be susceptible over broad ranges themselves, but that's a rough understanding). Unfortunately, a wider band also spreads out the power you put into the weapon, making it less destructive at each frequency than the narrowband bomb.
Probably the most important component determining the frequency range is the antenna. A narrowband weapon might drive something as simple as a dipole (two pieces of wire, basically), while a wideband antenna would have to use more complex designs, depending on the specific freq. ranges desired.
Directivity is what you are interested in - loosely, the property of how focused spatially the radiation is, which is also inherent to the antenna. I believe the major difference between HERF guns and EMP bombs is the method of energy release (high voltage from electrical tricks vs. high voltage from chemical explosions), which doesn't necessarily give either one an edge in directivity - it depends on what antenna you connect to it. It is true, however, that many amateur HERF guns work at microwave frequencies with horn antennas, which are fairly directional.
Don't be an idiot. Do you honestly think that out of the entire Bill of Rights, out of that listing of nothing but rights guaranteed to the people, the framers inserted one stupid amendment which has no effect but to guarantee the GOVERNMENT the right to keep military weapons?!? Why do that? Why write such an guarantee, and why place it smack in the middle of a list of individual rights? What government has ever felt the need for such an amendment? What government has ever wanted weapons, but felt constrained by the lack of constitutional authorization? The idea is simply absurd.
If you don't like guns, fine, suggest that the founders had it wrong, and that a new amendment is necessary. At least be honest about the fact that you think in a way completely unlike the American revolutionaries. But don't try to distort history, language, and logic so far as to completely reverse the real meaning of the constitution. Of course, you'll then have to advance real arguments against guns, which will be hard work, and we will just see through them anyway...
Bah! You yourself are playing the game of INTERPRETING the constitution, not judging it for yourself. Therefore it doesn't matter whether or not you believe in natural rights, because the framers most certainly did, as made explicit in the ninth amendment:
"The enumeration in this constitution of certain rights shall not be construed as to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Ergo your flawed interpretation of the 2nd amendment has no effect, even if correct (which it most certainly is NOT). I doubt if even you could twist the language so far (180 degrees!) as to imply that the right of the people to keep and bear arms MUST be infringed!
And you have to admit that SCOTUS is hardly infallible - unless you believe that Black people are indeed less than citizens. I prefer not to listen to such elite councils, and instead read the thing myself, and "witness the truth thereof", as P.J. O'Rourke suggested.
You ought to consider also that the Bill of Rights does NOT grant rights to the people (in fact, the founders clearly believed that rights were innate to human beings, and that the state can only take them away). The ninth amendment states this principle explicitly. Therefore, even if #2 says that the right to bear arms is granted to people that are part of a militia (which it DOES NOT), all citizens still retain the right as part of their God-given rights.
Furthermore, it was a widespread belief of the time that ALL citizens were automatically part of the "militia". Even more damning for the anti-gun crowd, "well-regulated" was generally taken to mean, not regulation by the government, but regulation from within. Substitute "well-behaved" and you will have a better modern-day translation.
Exactly my problem - of course, I don't like to complain about it; it helps with the heat down here in Florida, and it's better than being fat in any event. But suffice it to say, if I lost the hundred pounds mentioned by the creator of this thread, I'd be long dead!
And I already eat like a pig, it just doesn't help!
"Well, to be honest, I never expected you to accept any evidence that I put forward. It's a trait among large numbers of Americans -- and particularly so those who lean towards the right. My country right or wrong, and if anyone tries to tell me anything that I don't want to hear, then there's clearly some problem with the messenger because we could never, ever, under any circumstances, possibly be wrong!!!!"
Ahh, bullshit. The problem is you didn't put any evidence forward - just the vague ranking of a kinda leftist organization. I will stick to my original request: give me some specific incidents of press freedom infringed in the United States (something Reporters Without Borders also disdains to do). And before you get too excited at meeting an honest to god ugly American ignorant cowboy, you ought to know who you're speaking to. I'm hardly right wing, and not even really American. I come from Estonia, and speak the language. I did NOT vote for Bush. And I can think of plenty of examples of US actions that I deplore in the extreme - such "security"-minded nonsense like the Patriot act and TIA, criminalization of drugs (I give much respect to the Netherlands on this score), among much else. But, if you'll recall, the thread started by someone asking if, in effect, there was ANYTHING AT ALL good about the US. If somebody can ask THAT, it means that those who advocate your kind of message are succeding, and too well!
So I will reverse your post - it is you who say "There must be something wrong with the messenger because America could never, ever, under any circumstances, possibly be RIGHT!!!"
Actually, my post referred to more than government actions against reporters - you still have to reconcile yourself with the fact that a prominent right politician was murdered for political reasons. Maybe the Netherlands simply has no "problem" with dissent because all of its press thinks alike, eh?
I also don't have the most respect for any of the "without borders" organizations as being scrupulously honest and without some lefty bias (Spawning an execrable movie is probably the least of their sins!). Anyway, the site seems to suggest that their major problem with the US is the fact that some reporters died during the Iraq war - which seems an unfair criticism to me. I'd like to see just how these rankings are created, what specific incidents they have in mind. Nobody in this thread has yet advanced a single case of the US government violating the rights of a reporter.
Nah, I don't think so. MS can never go down that road out of sheer arrogance - adopting a unix kernel would only prove that unix had it right all along, and everybody else has been wanking for 30 years. We could then ask why MS didn't build on top of unix from the very beginning and spare us all these past decades of pain? Probably their OS's will just keep evolving slowly in the unix direction, but this will be accompanied with plenty of misdirection and trivial differences, as with the "Single Instance Store", MS's invention of symbolic links in the late date of 2000! No, Microsoft has to keep doing its own thing, no matter how inferior it might be, just for the sake of being different than unix.
We should not be surprised when corporations seek to use the power of the state to their advantage, since business are about nothing more than self advantage. So are many individuals - and that is perfectly fine. The problem lies with the government that holds enough power to make such abuses possible, not with the corporations that try to benefit. And yet many think that we can get rid of "big business", or limit its activities somehow, and thereby solve this problem.
In communist countries, where no corporations exist but the power of the state is unlimited, private citizens always attempt to "work the system" at the cost of their neighbors - but nobody claims to be "anti-human" as a result. That would be ridiculous, of course. But it is also ridiculous to be anti-"a large group of humans that have joined together for business purposes", which is all that corporations are.
Unfortunately, any intelligent understanding of this topic has long since been drowned in a flood of thoroughly conventional leftist talk of the "oligarchy" and the "plutocracy" trampling on the "people". But is this old Marxist dichotomy useful? I think not. The division of society into private and public sectors - now that makes more sense, as do these simple rules:
1) Always expect private entities to act in self-interest. To do otherwise is the worst kind of utopianism.
2) Design the government in such a way as to never benefit private entity A at the expense of private entity B.
3) If your goal is to end abuses of intellectual property legislation, then enlist the aid of libertarians - but stop scaring them away with talk of the big bad corporations. It is, after all, reasonable that those who seek to do away with intellectual property will move on to get rid of property of all kinds, resulting in fascism or socialism (which are really the same thing anyway). And try to remember that at least SOME people really did invent some new idea, and deserve to profit by it. Many slashdotters will probably find themselves in this position sooner or later, and it won't do to cry about it then!
Of course, maybe it is worthwhile to be a bit extreme when the opponents are so extreme on the other side - but remember to tone it down when you actually start winning.
"if you vote next year you do NOT vote for your president, you vote for a person to vote for president."
Let's not get into that old shit. Do you honestly think the electoral college system matters at all in that? Has an elector ever NOT voted for the man he was supposed to vote for? And even more importantly, do you honestly think anybody's wishes are being accurately represented anyway?
"Hell, you want to see change in Govt? figure out how to get only 50% of the minorities to vote. they would outnumber the 'majority' voters 2 to 1." What the hell kind of "change" is that going to be? A democrat for a president? You want a positive change, stop agitating for more virulent identity politics and start pushing for a condorcet vote or something else to replace plurality voting.
Bah. Buchanan has nothing at all to do with Bush - he opposed the war as some kind of elaborate Jewish conspiracy from the very beginning. At any rate, the claim was that the Netherlands tolerates dissent more than the United States. As you point out, Limbaugh is a right wing figure - but this proves nothing. That line of reasoning will only work if you can also prove that extreme lefties are NOT free in the U.S. And with Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, and Noam Chomsky running around, very much free, and hardly inconvenienced at all, you'll have a hard time of it.
Secondly, you'll have to prove that the Netherlands are any better. Remember that this is the country in which, a few years ago, a radical SHOT DEAD a leading, moderately-conservative politician (Pim Fortuyn), who even happened to be gay but was simply not left enough for the taste of some.
Maybe YOU ought to keep trying - pick a better example next time.
Indeed, as one commentator noted, this device was imagined, if not implemented, by the phone phreaks, and was named the "Chrome Box" - just a bit of a tidbit from my misspent youth!
I recently rode on the new Mission Space ride at Epcot, and I can report that the rather small centrifuges there do an excellent job of simulating accelerations higher than 1g. Of course, the larger the wheel, the better the effect.
So we must become more like machines in order to survive space, but the machines must become more like us... in order to survive space?
Anyway, this sounds like an admission that we are too lazy to solve the real problems of space travel. Maybe instead of improving ourselves, we ought to improve the pathetic state of space technology. It takes too long? Make the ship faster. Brittle bones? Build a really huge centrifuge (and make the ship faster).
And do these modifications even make sense? Radiation monitoring?! Why do you have to implant that into a human?
That IS too bad. I ran that thing through the washing machine once when I left it in the pocket of my pants. Took it apart, dried it out, replaced the battery for good measure - no problem!
It was finally done in by some kind of display problem - two horizontal lines missing, which made it pretty hard to decipher the results.
Let's not get into trying to square Knight Rider with reality - from KITT's laser that didn't require a line of sight to that 18-wheeler that suddenly got a lot wider when you cut to the inside, it's not going to happen!
Heh, I always soldiered on with a dinky ti-68, and when it died a glorious death on the field of battle, I picked up a ti-30x. One line of raster display and I'm happy.
It is remarkable how many population bomb wonks end up talking this way. Ehrlich himself was mostly concerned with third world countries - and if you read his book, it seems that his whole fear sprung from aesthetic revulsion at being surrounded by kind of a lot of brown people in India. Anyway, this is typical pompous leftism: "Stop having kids, unless you're OUR kind of person!"
It's worth noting that Mr. Earth in the Balance Al Gore has four children - he must be carrying out your plan!
Slashdot Mirror
I rather agree with this - maybe all of the really important desktop innovations exist already, except for ones that require huge processing power to be useful at all (which is why there are always innovations to be had in areas like 3d). But that doesn't mean that OSS developers shouldn't make their own versions.
Really, MS ran into this problem years ago. Office got pretty much as good as it was going to get around version 6.0 - everything added since has been mostly bloat.
It is rather annoying, isn't it? Seeing 'she' in the context of O'Reilly guides and engineering texts always trips me up a bit; I begin to cringingly imagine the writer congratulating herself (and now I've done it too!) for the great blow she's struck for gender equity, or whatever.
But picking 'he' or 'she', and alternating in the name of political correctness, is infinitely better than the disgusting 'he or she'. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of your singular 'they' either, as it tends to cause confusion and frequently violates parallelism - your example sentence just sounds wrong to me.
And let's not even get into those fake-o-la neutral pronouns. Ou? Thon? HERM? That's just silly.
_I_ find it funny that lefties like you consider monopolies evil, while endorsing the worst monopoly of all - the state. Seriously, at least an oligopoly has more than ONE producer!
Has it ever occured to you that thinking you can just replace the state with your own guys and everything will be all right is naive utopianism?
I think you might be on to something there... At least it would be a way to fund space commercialization. Come to think of it, I remember reading a book about space tourism as a kid that had some rather pointed references to "re-entry" and "docking maneuvers".
http://www.thehelixnevertobeloaded.com
There is a slight confusion here. The width of the band does not specify how spread out the effects are in space - 'band' here refers to frequency, which affects the damage yielded by the weapon in different ways. A narrowband device, of course, will radiate at a small range of frequencies. The weapon designer can choose what these frequencies are, and maybe with a specific kind of target in mind. If you are looking to attack some kind of communications apparatus, great, just look at the antenna installed there, and choose wavelengths similar to those the antenna was designed to work in. If you want to fry printed circuit boards, you'll probably need higher frequencies or the short traces won't be affected.
One way to get around this specificity is to design a weapon that works over a wide band of frequencies, thus attacking a wider variety of devices (there is a bit more to it than that, of course, as electronic devices could be susceptible over broad ranges themselves, but that's a rough understanding). Unfortunately, a wider band also spreads out the power you put into the weapon, making it less destructive at each frequency than the narrowband bomb.
Probably the most important component determining the frequency range is the antenna. A narrowband weapon might drive something as simple as a dipole (two pieces of wire, basically), while a wideband antenna would have to use more complex designs, depending on the specific freq. ranges desired.
Directivity is what you are interested in - loosely, the property of how focused spatially the radiation is, which is also inherent to the antenna. I believe the major difference between HERF guns and EMP bombs is the method of energy release (high voltage from electrical tricks vs. high voltage from chemical explosions), which doesn't necessarily give either one an edge in directivity - it depends on what antenna you connect to it. It is true, however, that many amateur HERF guns work at microwave frequencies with horn antennas, which are fairly directional.
Don't be an idiot. Do you honestly think that out of the entire Bill of Rights, out of that listing of nothing but rights guaranteed to the people, the framers inserted one stupid amendment which has no effect but to guarantee the GOVERNMENT the right to keep military weapons?!? Why do that? Why write such an guarantee, and why place it smack in the middle of a list of individual rights? What government has ever felt the need for such an amendment? What government has ever wanted weapons, but felt constrained by the lack of constitutional authorization? The idea is simply absurd.
If you don't like guns, fine, suggest that the founders had it wrong, and that a new amendment is necessary. At least be honest about the fact that you think in a way completely unlike the American revolutionaries. But don't try to distort history, language, and logic so far as to completely reverse the real meaning of the constitution. Of course, you'll then have to advance real arguments against guns, which will be hard work, and we will just see through them anyway...
Bah! You yourself are playing the game of INTERPRETING the constitution, not judging it for yourself. Therefore it doesn't matter whether or not you believe in natural rights, because the framers most certainly did, as made explicit in the ninth amendment:
"The enumeration in this constitution of certain rights shall not be construed as to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Ergo your flawed interpretation of the 2nd amendment has no effect, even if correct (which it most certainly is NOT). I doubt if even you could twist the language so far (180 degrees!) as to imply that the right of the people to keep and bear arms MUST be infringed!
And you have to admit that SCOTUS is hardly infallible - unless you believe that Black people are indeed less than citizens. I prefer not to listen to such elite councils, and instead read the thing myself, and "witness the truth thereof", as P.J. O'Rourke suggested.
You ought to consider also that the Bill of Rights does NOT grant rights to the people (in fact, the founders clearly believed that rights were innate to human beings, and that the state can only take them away). The ninth amendment states this principle explicitly. Therefore, even if #2 says that the right to bear arms is granted to people that are part of a militia (which it DOES NOT), all citizens still retain the right as part of their God-given rights.
Furthermore, it was a widespread belief of the time that ALL citizens were automatically part of the "militia". Even more damning for the anti-gun crowd, "well-regulated" was generally taken to mean, not regulation by the government, but regulation from within. Substitute "well-behaved" and you will have a better modern-day translation.
Exactly my problem - of course, I don't like to complain about it; it helps with the heat down here in Florida, and it's better than being fat in any event. But suffice it to say, if I lost the hundred pounds mentioned by the creator of this thread, I'd be long dead!
And I already eat like a pig, it just doesn't help!
Ahh, bullshit. The problem is you didn't put any evidence forward - just the vague ranking of a kinda leftist organization. I will stick to my original request: give me some specific incidents of press freedom infringed in the United States (something Reporters Without Borders also disdains to do). And before you get too excited at meeting an honest to god ugly American ignorant cowboy, you ought to know who you're speaking to. I'm hardly right wing, and not even really American. I come from Estonia, and speak the language. I did NOT vote for Bush. And I can think of plenty of examples of US actions that I deplore in the extreme - such "security"-minded nonsense like the Patriot act and TIA, criminalization of drugs (I give much respect to the Netherlands on this score), among much else. But, if you'll recall, the thread started by someone asking if, in effect, there was ANYTHING AT ALL good about the US. If somebody can ask THAT, it means that those who advocate your kind of message are succeding, and too well!
So I will reverse your post - it is you who say "There must be something wrong with the messenger because America could never, ever, under any circumstances, possibly be RIGHT!!!"
I also don't have the most respect for any of the "without borders" organizations as being scrupulously honest and without some lefty bias (Spawning an execrable movie is probably the least of their sins!). Anyway, the site seems to suggest that their major problem with the US is the fact that some reporters died during the Iraq war - which seems an unfair criticism to me. I'd like to see just how these rankings are created, what specific incidents they have in mind. Nobody in this thread has yet advanced a single case of the US government violating the rights of a reporter.
Nah, I don't think so. MS can never go down that road out of sheer arrogance - adopting a unix kernel would only prove that unix had it right all along, and everybody else has been wanking for 30 years. We could then ask why MS didn't build on top of unix from the very beginning and spare us all these past decades of pain? Probably their OS's will just keep evolving slowly in the unix direction, but this will be accompanied with plenty of misdirection and trivial differences, as with the "Single Instance Store", MS's invention of symbolic links in the late date of 2000! No, Microsoft has to keep doing its own thing, no matter how inferior it might be, just for the sake of being different than unix.
We should not be surprised when corporations seek to use the power of the state to their advantage, since business are about nothing more than self advantage. So are many individuals - and that is perfectly fine. The problem lies with the government that holds enough power to make such abuses possible, not with the corporations that try to benefit. And yet many think that we can get rid of "big business", or limit its activities somehow, and thereby solve this problem.
In communist countries, where no corporations exist but the power of the state is unlimited, private citizens always attempt to "work the system" at the cost of their neighbors - but nobody claims to be "anti-human" as a result. That would be ridiculous, of course. But it is also ridiculous to be anti-"a large group of humans that have joined together for business purposes", which is all that corporations are.
Unfortunately, any intelligent understanding of this topic has long since been drowned in a flood of thoroughly conventional leftist talk of the "oligarchy" and the "plutocracy" trampling on the "people". But is this old Marxist dichotomy useful? I think not. The division of society into private and public sectors - now that makes more sense, as do these simple rules:1) Always expect private entities to act in self-interest. To do otherwise is the worst kind of utopianism.
2) Design the government in such a way as to never benefit private entity A at the expense of private entity B.
3) If your goal is to end abuses of intellectual property legislation, then enlist the aid of libertarians - but stop scaring them away with talk of the big bad corporations. It is, after all, reasonable that those who seek to do away with intellectual property will move on to get rid of property of all kinds, resulting in fascism or socialism (which are really the same thing anyway). And try to remember that at least SOME people really did invent some new idea, and deserve to profit by it. Many slashdotters will probably find themselves in this position sooner or later, and it won't do to cry about it then!
Of course, maybe it is worthwhile to be a bit extreme when the opponents are so extreme on the other side - but remember to tone it down when you actually start winning.
What exactly do you have in mind?
"if you vote next year you do NOT vote for your president, you vote for a person to vote for president." Let's not get into that old shit. Do you honestly think the electoral college system matters at all in that? Has an elector ever NOT voted for the man he was supposed to vote for? And even more importantly, do you honestly think anybody's wishes are being accurately represented anyway?
"Hell, you want to see change in Govt? figure out how to get only 50% of the minorities to vote. they would outnumber the 'majority' voters 2 to 1." What the hell kind of "change" is that going to be? A democrat for a president? You want a positive change, stop agitating for more virulent identity politics and start pushing for a condorcet vote or something else to replace plurality voting.Bah. Buchanan has nothing at all to do with Bush - he opposed the war as some kind of elaborate Jewish conspiracy from the very beginning. At any rate, the claim was that the Netherlands tolerates dissent more than the United States. As you point out, Limbaugh is a right wing figure - but this proves nothing. That line of reasoning will only work if you can also prove that extreme lefties are NOT free in the U.S. And with Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, and Noam Chomsky running around, very much free, and hardly inconvenienced at all, you'll have a hard time of it.
Secondly, you'll have to prove that the Netherlands are any better. Remember that this is the country in which, a few years ago, a radical SHOT DEAD a leading, moderately-conservative politician (Pim Fortuyn), who even happened to be gay but was simply not left enough for the taste of some.
Maybe YOU ought to keep trying - pick a better example next time.
Indeed, as one commentator noted, this device was imagined, if not implemented, by the phone phreaks, and was named the "Chrome Box" - just a bit of a tidbit from my misspent youth!
I recently rode on the new Mission Space ride at Epcot, and I can report that the rather small centrifuges there do an excellent job of simulating accelerations higher than 1g. Of course, the larger the wheel, the better the effect.
So we must become more like machines in order to survive space, but the machines must become more like us ... in order to survive space?
Anyway, this sounds like an admission that we are too lazy to solve the real problems of space travel. Maybe instead of improving ourselves, we ought to improve the pathetic state of space technology. It takes too long? Make the ship faster. Brittle bones? Build a really huge centrifuge (and make the ship faster).
And do these modifications even make sense? Radiation monitoring?! Why do you have to implant that into a human?
That IS too bad. I ran that thing through the washing machine once when I left it in the pocket of my pants. Took it apart, dried it out, replaced the battery for good measure - no problem!
It was finally done in by some kind of display problem - two horizontal lines missing, which made it pretty hard to decipher the results.
Let's not get into trying to square Knight Rider with reality - from KITT's laser that didn't require a line of sight to that 18-wheeler that suddenly got a lot wider when you cut to the inside, it's not going to happen!
Heh, I always soldiered on with a dinky ti-68, and when it died a glorious death on the field of battle, I picked up a ti-30x. One line of raster display and I'm happy.
It is remarkable how many population bomb wonks end up talking this way. Ehrlich himself was mostly concerned with third world countries - and if you read his book, it seems that his whole fear sprung from aesthetic revulsion at being surrounded by kind of a lot of brown people in India. Anyway, this is typical pompous leftism: "Stop having kids, unless you're OUR kind of person!"
It's worth noting that Mr. Earth in the Balance Al Gore has four children - he must be carrying out your plan!