The actual context of "Mission Accomplished" had as much to do with proper military terminology as Warcraft 3 has to do with proper military tactics... essentially none.
You win the war by outproducing your opponent and destroying his capacity of producing more troops. Zerg rush with endless hordes of expendable ghouls or use a few high-tech units of supreme power. Gold runs everything, and the industry needed to support a prolonged conflict leads to environmental catastrophe as the forests get cut down and spent to fuel your war machine. Technology rapidly advances during the conflict, giving units better equipment and new abilities. Civilian population labours in your mines and factories, and is the favourite target of any raids, being a soft target with huge disruptions on economy. And just when you think that the mission has been accomplished and the evil enemy leader killed, the real conflict is just beginning.
Speaking of expenses, simply shutting down this crazy war will give Obama more money than he could hope to raise through taxation, if all the money destroyed in Iraq would have been used for good the USA would be in a completely different position right now.
The problem is that if there's a lot of surplus money that can be spent on the US, there's a temptation to use it for social programs, such as providing publicly funded medical care for all, which is against the ideology of many Americans. You'd think that Social Darwinism would had died a long time ago, but it still seems to be going strong...
by flipping the least significant bit in each channel, you can alter up to 1/8th (12.5%) of the file without creating any perceptible changes (to human eyes at least) to the displayed image.
Or just alter the EXIF metadata a little. It isn't noticeable at all, since it isn't part of actual image data, and will result in a completely different hash.
Somebody has to pay the electric bill to keep the server running. Who does that?
The way Freenet is built, every node also acts as a content cache. There is no separate servers and clients, even more so than in your average P2P network. The network as a whole is the server. Files are broken into chunks, which are sent to nodes determined best by the routing algorithm (currently based on the hash of chunk contents), which have a probabilistic chance of sending them further away. Upon request, the request is similarly routed into the best node, which either answers it, routes it further, or decides to end the request chain. If the chunk is found, it is propagated back along the request route, with each node along the way possibly storing it into the local datastore, and if necessary dropping some other data chunk to make room for it. This means that often-requested chunks have lots of copies floating around, and also naturally converges chunks to nodes deemed best by the routing algorithm, leading to it being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So the answer is: every user of Freenet pays a part of Freenet's operating costs.
You want George Bush to win the election in Finland?
Sure, why not ? The man was a disaster in the helm of the United States, since it has a sizeable military and nuclear weapons, but Finland has neither and we could use someone who pushed a little harder for Finland's interests against the EU - the current crop is all too willing to roll over to appear as "team players".
I guess having the fate of your country decided by people who can't read directions is really important.
You do realize that we aren't talking about the candidates, but the general voting population, right ? And yes, it is important that they too get to have their say. We have tried various forms of meritocracy, and they simply don't work well, because being smart or rich doesn't imply that you're also nice.
Finland, specifically, got a taste of what happens when people feel disenfranchised right after it gained independence.
There should be somewhat of a means test to allow voting. Maybe not money or materials but something like the ability to answer a few questions or read a newspaper or maybe just being able to recite the name of the current president and vice president or whatever they call them in the finnish land.
Perhaps we should disqualify people who prefer enlightened dictatorship to democracy, since letting such people vote has led to some rather undesirable leadership choices in the past ?
Really, if you prefer to live in a place where dumbasses can't vote, there's no shortage of dictatorships to chose from.
I am in favor of neither a Corporate Oligarchy nor a Government Daddy controlling my internet. I like the current model where anybody, anywhere may publish a website, even with something as simple as a Commodore 64. That's true distribution of power. (Power to the People.)
Personally, I like the Freenet model even more: anyone can publish data, it can't be traced back to you, downloaders can't be traced, it doesn't cost you anything to host once published, and any attempt to DoS it will simply result in more copies floating around.
TOR is pretty good too, but is weak against DoS attacks, as demonstrated by the recent attacks against child porn sites as discussed on core.onion. TOR assumes at least some level of cooperation from node owners, while Freenet assumes they are hostile, so it'll probably result in a better network eventually, while TOR will fail as soon as Chinese governments, Save the Children Inc, The Church of Scientology, or any other powerful and ethically challenged organization decides to take it down.
Of course both TOR and Freenet run on top of the Internet, so I guess it doesn't really make sense to contrast them against the Net itself, rather than just the Web.
No. There was an attempt, admittedly a poor one, to keep out unauthorized people. The share had security on it. It was just very poor security, otherwise the individual in question would not have been required to enter a username and password.
So, in other words:
The server was closed to public. It could only be accessed by people who had been given a username and a password by the server operator.
The server operator had given this person the username and password needed to access this file in the server.
Nonetheless, you claim that this person was not authorized to do so.
One is given permission to access a certain server, A. One is not given permission to access another server, B. If one access B, which one does not have permission to access, even if one's password will work to provide access, one has still accessed a system or server without permission.
One is not given permission to access a "certain server". One is given permission to access the "network", "network shares" or "servers", without more specific qualifiers. Or so it has been in any organization I've ever been at.
Given this, it is reasonable to assume that anything you can access is meant for you to access. In fact you can't access anything if you don't assume this.
It was never the students privilege to access or examine that drive or share. He had no permission and no authority to do so. Moreover, he did not have the authority to determine if a drive is supposed to be public or not. It is not his place to make the determination.
Tell me: did the owners of slashdot.org give you a specific permission to access this website and this discussion within it ? Or did you simply assume you had implicit permission because the server fulfilled your page request ?
Your top speed isn't limited to the exhaust velocity. Regardless of your current speed, energy is conserved if you tip mass overboard. For the force used to displace the exhaust, the reaction force is applied to your vehicle.
Actually, the relevant thing here is the conservation of momentum. Assuming that you are ejecting mass straight back - a reasonable assumption, since that's the most efficient way - vm=VM, V=vm/M, where V=velocity (actually delta-v) of rocket, M the mass of same, and v and m the same for the propellant.
The problem is that, in order to double the delta-v you get from the same amount of propellant, you need to throw it twice as fast; but doing so requires four times as much energy (not taking relativity into account). In other words, the more reaction mass efficient a rocket is, the less energy efficient it is, and vice versus. That's why all high-impulse rockets are necessarily low-thrust, unless equipped with a fantastically powerful energy source. Even a nuclear plant would be hard pressed to supply all the power a truly efficient thruster needs to rise from Earth's surface.
At this point, I think that the future of space travel depends on finding some better carrier for momentum than ordinary matter, or by building an actual space cruiser with lots of room to spare and associated recreational areas - a de facto mobile village in space, or a generation ship. Otherwise, the sheer monotony of interplanetary travel will drive most attempters insane.
If you think back further, apple orchards started silicon valley.
When we get right down to it, it was an expedition funded by the King of Spain which made Silicon Valley possible. And since the King of Spain ruled by the divine right of kings, backed by the catholic church, the Pope should get half the credit.
So, it was an absolute monarch and a leader of a state religion who began Silicon Valley - and in fact, all of American corporations. Chew on that, libertarians:).
In an economy where knowledge, software, and creative work is paid for, you do have to have some legal protection for those works. Despite what some may wish, this isn't a Brave GNU World where everything is free as in give it all away.
The question is: if such protections didn't exist, and every piece of "intellectual property" would thus be created either because someone wanted to or someone wanted it to exist enough to pay someone else to make it, would the world be better or worse off ?
People want paychecks.
At this point, I wonder if we'd be better off by repealing the copyright laws and simply paying the MAFIAA an annual "protection" cost equal to its current profits. The MAFIAA would get its paycheck, we'd end up paying less money overall due to less waste, and get rid of the perverting effects the copyright cartels have on our society and technology (such as DRM). It would be a net win for everyone.
That, or we could simply point out that people wanting to be paid doesn't mean that they should be. Unless, of course, I'm entitled to be paid every time someone views this comment.
I've got no problem with people pushing technologies but this one sounds more like a soap opera than anything. Has the Semantic Web changed anything for anyone on Slashdot? I haven't seen anything directly if it has...
/blockquote>
Semantic Web hasn't and won't happen because it would require the content producers to include accurate machine-readable semantic information in the webpages they create, but it's in their best interests to include everything imaginable to get maximum viewership, assuming they even bother at all.
However, as soon as we get general AI on our desktop computers, it can generate the semantic information from ordinary web pages - and any other piece of data we may have laying around as well.
I only sought to call into question the belief that society benefits by including the maximum number of political opinions. This belief is a recent fad, historically speaking, and it may not give good long-term results. America implemented it in stages during the preceding century, giving votes to non-landowners, then to women, then to blacks, and it's not clear that it is driving or legislation in a good direction.
Certainly not if you're a white male landowner, certainly yes if you aren't. Since the latter class includes most people, I'd say that there has been a net benefit to the society.
At the very least, I would prefer that only net-positive-taxpayers get to vote. That at least prevents the more egregious incentives.
The rule by land-owning class - commonly known as aristocracy - didn't work so well for the majority of people. It was sweet for the aristocrats thought. Not being amongst the peers, I'm opposed to it; your situation or delusions of grandeur might be different.
No. I'm assuming they ARE employed, and about to get laid-off due to the recession. Therefore they might not be able to pay their bills, and their priority will be survival, not opensource programming.
Participating in open source projects is a great way of keeping your skills up to date, honing them, having something to point to in a job interview, and creating connections with people in the software business. It is a good survival strategy for a programmer.
I am a mathematician, and I do not find the attempts at squaring the circle that took place before it was proved it was impossible silly at all. Those that came afterwards, on the other hand, I find mostly silly.
The side of a square which is equal in area to a circle with a radius of 1 is sqrt(pi). I've once had double entry bookkeeping explained to me, so I guess that makes me an economist;).
Word and PowerPoint are of course simple enough for the basics, but you can use VBA to do some clever and difficult stuff with them. Excel spreadsheets can be monstrously complex and getting the best out of Excel for analysing scientific data or doing complex accounting involves a damn sight more than "point and click".
So Excel spreadsheets start out small and simple and grow to monstrously large and difficult ? Seems a perfect match for game developers:).
If you can't see the difference between blocking blogspot and blocking thepiratebay, you have some serious issues in my opinion.
I disagree with you, therefore I must have "serious issues". Well that is certainly a convincing and logical argument.
They aren't in the same category, and calling blocking thepiratebay censorship is a way to rape the word and twist it into something its not so you can ride a buzzword that gets people up in arms.
They are both websites which allow their users to distribute content. That is a category which includes them both, therefore you are wrong.
No sane person can look at thepiratebay and not understand why it can be/is blocked.
Certainly. It is blocked in some jurisdictions, because it's content breaks the law in said jurisdictions. The same is true of Blogger.com.
You will on the other hand find a lot more people that are upset about blocking blogs that aren't helping to steal other peoples work.
I seem to recall the various stories about the Pirate Bay being blocked got quite a few upset comments, actually.
The Pirate Bay is most certainly just as guilty of infringment as those people who are part of the torrents. They condon what they are used for, its not like they are against it and are being targeted for something they can't help, they WANT to help distribute things illegally.
The Pirate Bay is guilty of helping it's users break the law in some jurisdictions. The same is true of Blogger.com, or so the Turkish court seems to think anyway.
Don't pull that crap up into a discussion about things like blogs censorship, all you do is make the whole thing look bad. You make everyone on slashdot look less like intelligent people with serious contributions to the debate and more like theifs who are just using the the word censorship to forward their own 'everything should be free', hippie agenda.
Name calling doesn't really do anything to help that quality of discussion, you know.
You want to fight censorship with the rest of us, fine, just don't act like a nutjob and drag us down with you. Most of us would like to make a sensable arguement, not a silly one.
So I should "know my place, shut my face" and stop posting opinions you don't approve of, on a discussion on censorship ironically enough ? Request denied.
Besides, all I'm saying is that it's somewhat hypocritical to complain when one website gets blocked because its contents break the law somewhere, and not when another website suffers the same fate for breaking another law. Either it's okay to block communication of illegal content or it isn't. Which one is it ?
Well, we really agree. This is the crucial part. Do they work? Almost certainly yes. Are they proven beyond any doubt? No.
It is impossible to prove anything beyond any doubt. Failing all else, I can simply claim that all experiments conducted this far weren't actually conducted, but were merely hallucinations, and thus don't prove anything; I can also claim the same for any and all logical proofs you'd care to make, demanding that they are re-examined, and then simply repeating the same when they have been.
X-Treme Scepticism makes for a pretty efficient trolling technique:).
No. A file system could be hierarchical -- it must not.
I believe you meant "doesn't have to be". Assuming so, I quite agree, it doesn't have to be; in fact I described a non-hierarchical file system in the very post you replied to. However, all file systems in common use nowadays are hierarchical.
Look at WinFS et al.
I would, if Microsoft were to actually release it.
And I personally don't use my Unix FS in a hierarchical way, I use links whenever I want to. This totally breaks the tree-model.
"Hierarchical" isn't synonymous with "tree-model", nor does tree-model require that there can't be multiple paths to a particular leaf or branch. Think of it as "tree-model with rope bridges":).
How would you watch Heroes HD without broadcast television? Could you watch it via NBC.com? No, not really. 30 million people watch that show on Monday night, and it streams at 15 megabit/second over the airwaves. That's approximately 500,000 gigabit of bandwidth in total. No way could NBC.com or any other website handle that load.
Upload it to the Pirate Bay and let the Vikings worry about it:).
Besides, do all those 30 million people watch it simultaneously ? One would think that different timezones would create a natural levelling factor in the load.
Alternative, get multicasting and associated technologies - such as proxies - working properly. There's no reason why everyone watching the same show needs to have their own stream straight up to the website. Everyone watching Heroes on the same ISP should get a single stream up to the ISP's router/proxy, rather than having the same data sent over the same wires a thousand or million times over.
As an added bonus, this would let anyone to create their own broadcasts without tremendously costly broadcasting equipment and associated permissions or equally costly datacenters. But then again, that would lower the barriers of entry to the market, and that is the last thing broadcasting corporations want.
You can 'defend' the pirate bay all day long using legal loopholes and bullshit to talk your way around the facts, but the reality of it is that thepiratebay.org is used to facilitate the distribtution of content illegally.
And apparently, so is Blogger.com, and every other censored website for that matter. That's why a particular government blocks a particular website: it breaks said government's rules on what is and is not allowed.
Protecting some company's profits is hardly a nobler goal than protecting some politician's power.
Personally I'd love to see blogger/blogspot go away because there is nothing of value on them, just a bunch of online diaries by people who can't get jobs writing because they aren't actually any good at it.
So, you read through it all despite finding none of it being valuable in the least, which you'd have to have done in order to know this ?
Perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to call the grandparent an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
You win the war by outproducing your opponent and destroying his capacity of producing more troops. Zerg rush with endless hordes of expendable ghouls or use a few high-tech units of supreme power. Gold runs everything, and the industry needed to support a prolonged conflict leads to environmental catastrophe as the forests get cut down and spent to fuel your war machine. Technology rapidly advances during the conflict, giving units better equipment and new abilities. Civilian population labours in your mines and factories, and is the favourite target of any raids, being a soft target with huge disruptions on economy. And just when you think that the mission has been accomplished and the evil enemy leader killed, the real conflict is just beginning.
Sounds like real war to me.
The problem is that if there's a lot of surplus money that can be spent on the US, there's a temptation to use it for social programs, such as providing publicly funded medical care for all, which is against the ideology of many Americans. You'd think that Social Darwinism would had died a long time ago, but it still seems to be going strong...
It isn't, actually. It's a consequence of a law.
Or just alter the EXIF metadata a little. It isn't noticeable at all, since it isn't part of actual image data, and will result in a completely different hash.
The way Freenet is built, every node also acts as a content cache. There is no separate servers and clients, even more so than in your average P2P network. The network as a whole is the server. Files are broken into chunks, which are sent to nodes determined best by the routing algorithm (currently based on the hash of chunk contents), which have a probabilistic chance of sending them further away. Upon request, the request is similarly routed into the best node, which either answers it, routes it further, or decides to end the request chain. If the chunk is found, it is propagated back along the request route, with each node along the way possibly storing it into the local datastore, and if necessary dropping some other data chunk to make room for it. This means that often-requested chunks have lots of copies floating around, and also naturally converges chunks to nodes deemed best by the routing algorithm, leading to it being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So the answer is: every user of Freenet pays a part of Freenet's operating costs.
Sure, why not ? The man was a disaster in the helm of the United States, since it has a sizeable military and nuclear weapons, but Finland has neither and we could use someone who pushed a little harder for Finland's interests against the EU - the current crop is all too willing to roll over to appear as "team players".
You do realize that we aren't talking about the candidates, but the general voting population, right ? And yes, it is important that they too get to have their say. We have tried various forms of meritocracy, and they simply don't work well, because being smart or rich doesn't imply that you're also nice.
Finland, specifically, got a taste of what happens when people feel disenfranchised right after it gained independence.
Perhaps we should disqualify people who prefer enlightened dictatorship to democracy, since letting such people vote has led to some rather undesirable leadership choices in the past ?
Really, if you prefer to live in a place where dumbasses can't vote, there's no shortage of dictatorships to chose from.
Personally, I like the Freenet model even more: anyone can publish data, it can't be traced back to you, downloaders can't be traced, it doesn't cost you anything to host once published, and any attempt to DoS it will simply result in more copies floating around.
TOR is pretty good too, but is weak against DoS attacks, as demonstrated by the recent attacks against child porn sites as discussed on core.onion. TOR assumes at least some level of cooperation from node owners, while Freenet assumes they are hostile, so it'll probably result in a better network eventually, while TOR will fail as soon as Chinese governments, Save the Children Inc, The Church of Scientology, or any other powerful and ethically challenged organization decides to take it down.
Of course both TOR and Freenet run on top of the Internet, so I guess it doesn't really make sense to contrast them against the Net itself, rather than just the Web.
So, in other words:
Srlsy, WTF ?
One is not given permission to access a "certain server". One is given permission to access the "network", "network shares" or "servers", without more specific qualifiers. Or so it has been in any organization I've ever been at.
Given this, it is reasonable to assume that anything you can access is meant for you to access. In fact you can't access anything if you don't assume this.
Tell me: did the owners of slashdot.org give you a specific permission to access this website and this discussion within it ? Or did you simply assume you had implicit permission because the server fulfilled your page request ?
Actually, the relevant thing here is the conservation of momentum. Assuming that you are ejecting mass straight back - a reasonable assumption, since that's the most efficient way - vm=VM, V=vm/M, where V=velocity (actually delta-v) of rocket, M the mass of same, and v and m the same for the propellant.
The problem is that, in order to double the delta-v you get from the same amount of propellant, you need to throw it twice as fast; but doing so requires four times as much energy (not taking relativity into account). In other words, the more reaction mass efficient a rocket is, the less energy efficient it is, and vice versus. That's why all high-impulse rockets are necessarily low-thrust, unless equipped with a fantastically powerful energy source. Even a nuclear plant would be hard pressed to supply all the power a truly efficient thruster needs to rise from Earth's surface.
At this point, I think that the future of space travel depends on finding some better carrier for momentum than ordinary matter, or by building an actual space cruiser with lots of room to spare and associated recreational areas - a de facto mobile village in space, or a generation ship. Otherwise, the sheer monotony of interplanetary travel will drive most attempters insane.
When we get right down to it, it was an expedition funded by the King of Spain which made Silicon Valley possible. And since the King of Spain ruled by the divine right of kings, backed by the catholic church, the Pope should get half the credit.
So, it was an absolute monarch and a leader of a state religion who began Silicon Valley - and in fact, all of American corporations. Chew on that, libertarians :).
Actually, it was; "government" was simply known as Ogg the Chieftain back then.
The question is: if such protections didn't exist, and every piece of "intellectual property" would thus be created either because someone wanted to or someone wanted it to exist enough to pay someone else to make it, would the world be better or worse off ?
At this point, I wonder if we'd be better off by repealing the copyright laws and simply paying the MAFIAA an annual "protection" cost equal to its current profits. The MAFIAA would get its paycheck, we'd end up paying less money overall due to less waste, and get rid of the perverting effects the copyright cartels have on our society and technology (such as DRM). It would be a net win for everyone.
That, or we could simply point out that people wanting to be paid doesn't mean that they should be. Unless, of course, I'm entitled to be paid every time someone views this comment.
Probably has something to do with being stuck on a small metal coffin for several months.
How much do you think a video recording of someone speaking costs ?
Certainly not if you're a white male landowner, certainly yes if you aren't. Since the latter class includes most people, I'd say that there has been a net benefit to the society.
The rule by land-owning class - commonly known as aristocracy - didn't work so well for the majority of people. It was sweet for the aristocrats thought. Not being amongst the peers, I'm opposed to it; your situation or delusions of grandeur might be different.
Participating in open source projects is a great way of keeping your skills up to date, honing them, having something to point to in a job interview, and creating connections with people in the software business. It is a good survival strategy for a programmer.
The side of a square which is equal in area to a circle with a radius of 1 is sqrt(pi). I've once had double entry bookkeeping explained to me, so I guess that makes me an economist ;).
So Excel spreadsheets start out small and simple and grow to monstrously large and difficult ? Seems a perfect match for game developers :).
I disagree with you, therefore I must have "serious issues". Well that is certainly a convincing and logical argument.
They are both websites which allow their users to distribute content. That is a category which includes them both, therefore you are wrong.
Certainly. It is blocked in some jurisdictions, because it's content breaks the law in said jurisdictions. The same is true of Blogger.com.
I seem to recall the various stories about the Pirate Bay being blocked got quite a few upset comments, actually.
The Pirate Bay is guilty of helping it's users break the law in some jurisdictions. The same is true of Blogger.com, or so the Turkish court seems to think anyway.
Name calling doesn't really do anything to help that quality of discussion, you know.
So I should "know my place, shut my face" and stop posting opinions you don't approve of, on a discussion on censorship ironically enough ? Request denied.
Besides, all I'm saying is that it's somewhat hypocritical to complain when one website gets blocked because its contents break the law somewhere, and not when another website suffers the same fate for breaking another law. Either it's okay to block communication of illegal content or it isn't. Which one is it ?
It is impossible to prove anything beyond any doubt. Failing all else, I can simply claim that all experiments conducted this far weren't actually conducted, but were merely hallucinations, and thus don't prove anything; I can also claim the same for any and all logical proofs you'd care to make, demanding that they are re-examined, and then simply repeating the same when they have been.
X-Treme Scepticism makes for a pretty efficient trolling technique :).
I believe you meant "doesn't have to be". Assuming so, I quite agree, it doesn't have to be; in fact I described a non-hierarchical file system in the very post you replied to. However, all file systems in common use nowadays are hierarchical.
I would, if Microsoft were to actually release it.
"Hierarchical" isn't synonymous with "tree-model", nor does tree-model require that there can't be multiple paths to a particular leaf or branch. Think of it as "tree-model with rope bridges" :).
Upload it to the Pirate Bay and let the Vikings worry about it :).
Besides, do all those 30 million people watch it simultaneously ? One would think that different timezones would create a natural levelling factor in the load.
Alternative, get multicasting and associated technologies - such as proxies - working properly. There's no reason why everyone watching the same show needs to have their own stream straight up to the website. Everyone watching Heroes on the same ISP should get a single stream up to the ISP's router/proxy, rather than having the same data sent over the same wires a thousand or million times over.
As an added bonus, this would let anyone to create their own broadcasts without tremendously costly broadcasting equipment and associated permissions or equally costly datacenters. But then again, that would lower the barriers of entry to the market, and that is the last thing broadcasting corporations want.
And apparently, so is Blogger.com, and every other censored website for that matter. That's why a particular government blocks a particular website: it breaks said government's rules on what is and is not allowed.
Protecting some company's profits is hardly a nobler goal than protecting some politician's power.
So, you read through it all despite finding none of it being valuable in the least, which you'd have to have done in order to know this ?
Perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to call the grandparent an idiot.