Nonsense. Any router that can be crashed by anything that a computer connected to it does has a critical bug and should be recalled immediately.
Most home routers are configured through a web interface. That web interface has a reboot button. In other words, a home router can be made to reboot by sending it a proper HTTP request. This is not a bug, it's a feature:). It is also likely indistinguishable from a crash-and-reboot, since the reboot clears the crashed state. For all we know, Windows could be flooding the router with reboot commands...
The cost of fuel isn't going to overcome the inherent disadvantages of trains: the can't go everywhere, and they go on their schedule, not mine.
Actually, I read about a fascinating concept a few years ago: read/rail car. The idea was that you'd drive your car normally to the railway station and onto the track. Once there, the railway computer (and railway power system) would take over, getting your car into its destination via the railway, combining and decombining it into a train with other cars as practical. Once there, you would again resume driving normally. This way you'd get all the benefits of the train and a car combined. While this concept would require special cars, it shouldn't be too difficult to make train cars sized for a single car.
Or simply add a few car-carriers to the end of a passenger train.
The fuel efficiency of these rail lines is staggering. One or two locomotives pull trains that can be two miles long!
Well, of course: they don't need to worry about traffick jams and the associated break-idle-gas-break routine, and steel tires on steel track don't generate much rolling resistance either.
Ah, yes. Scalability in a client-side scripting environment. For the times when a browser has to be able to handle requests from thousands of users at once!
For the times when you want to have multiple tabs/browser windows open at once, and each one absolutely must run their own multiple scripts, not to mention all the extensions adding their own.
Having thousands of scripts running at once is a prefectly plausible scenario. Not being able to handle it gracefully should disqualify a scripting engine from being used in a browser.
The only "power" anyone has in a free-market society is that others have to persuade you to give them things rather than simply taking them.
The way to wield power in a free-market system is to have control over resources. This not only allows you to use the threat of starvation as a persuasion tool, but also allows efficient promotion of whatever candidates you desire, as well as outright bribery.
There's simply no need for any sort of check on that kind of "power".
Yes there is. He who controls the nation's food supply controls the nation. Slashdot constantly has articles about powerful economic entities using their resources to blackmail individuals into obedience - the RIAA is particularly notorious about this. Microsoft's anti-competitive practices - the misuse of monopoly power - are legendary.
If you don't have a check on economic power, then you will soon have a king. And lesser nobles too, of course.
As for keeping things that way, that's what the education and critical-thinking skills are for.
The problem for libertarians is that there's still enough critical thinking skills in America to reveal the flaws in their ideology. That's why the party is considered part of the lunatic fringe by most voters.
Does a plumber do electrical work? No? Then why does anyone but a programmer do programming in a professional environment?
Plumbers do, in fact, do some electric work, such as connecting pumps to a power source. This makes sense, because the task is so simple it doesn't require professional electricians skill, so he can use the time to do more difficult tasks instead. Plumbing also involves welding, despite a plumber not being a professional welder, and hauling stuff around in a car, despite not being a professional trucker.
Manpower is a limited resource, even in a professional environment. Passing tasks from one person to another will inevitably waste time, since it takes a while to explain what you want done, even if that other person doesn't need to be physically present. Simply because someone isn't a professional programmer doesn't mean he can't program, possibly very well; it simply means that it isn't the focus of his work. And of course smaller companies don't neccessarily have a professional programmer.
Would it make sense for a manager to call a professional typist to type a one-page memo, or to type it himself, even thought he isn't as good at typing that a typist would be ?
Well in that case getting fired should be a positive, now shouldn't it ?-)
But why make things unclear by saying "disturbing" when words like "pornographic" and "nudity" are far more clear and specific?
The 10zenmonkeys link contains neither. While the blog is currently unaccessible, according to some other posts in this discussion, it contains a single picture of a sleeping (clothed) baby. So it appears that the links contain neither pornographic nor nude images, and as such shouldn't be described as such.
Except there's a difference between "NSFW" and "potentially illegal". If there's potentially illegal content in the link then it shouldn't even appear on/.
Why ? Does Slashdot have a duty to uphold the law (of the US, presumably) ? I thought that was the police's work.
Or are the people who read Slashdot at work like children, so that all of Internet must be made suitable - for some definition of "suitable" - for them ? "Please think of the people who read Slashdot at work !"
My point is that I'm at work and don't want to, you know, get fired.
Then perhaps you should stop reading Slashdot and start working:p.
Pornography does not disturb me, but looking at it at work--unintentionally or otherwise--is prohibited. As I already stated above, calling the images "disturbing" was a little too ambiguous, and that was my point.
If the images are "disturbing", they might get you fired. That's a good rule of thumb. Doubly so if they're "distubing" in a sense that involves the FBI.
He's asserting that the consumption of cg child porn increases the market for child porn as a whole, which includes both cg and non-cg. If the cg and non-cg child porn markets were independent, sales of cg child porn would have no effect on the harming of children.
If you can't tell CG and real images apart - which is the very point of this article - then they are the same market. And since making CG images is a lot less risky and gets you the same end product than photographing real children, I'd say that real child pornography is going to die off.
I don't want to get into an argument about religion here but... well, fuck it. The above above is a rant? It reads to me like a mildly humorous but factually correct discription of Christian beliefs. It didn't even mention invisible friends or ritual cannibalism. I'm surprised at your strong reaction to it.
My reaction is against people who insult religious folk every chance they get, and then whine when those same religious folk don't vote for them. And the quote was neither humorous nor factual, but a mixture of unproven claims, extremely distorted summary of christianity, and a snide remark against the practitioners of said religion.
I'm starting to get really tired of Slashdot atheists turning every story into another chance to whine how they are being persecuted by evil and stupid people, defined as everyone except them.
If the US currency was still backed by gold, it would be worth nearly 100x what it is today, not only that but the value of the dollar wouldn't blow around based on the fear and greed of investors. The currency we have in the US now is worth about as much as an IOU signed by the politicians.
So basically, if you have extra money, you should invest it rather than hoard it, because hoarding it pretty much guarantees that you'll lose it. A property of the monetary system which encourages investment seems a feature rather than a bug to me:).
But well, for the rest of the world it is actually a good thing that USA goes down - too long the big brother has watched and intervened rest of the world.
Unless, of course, China or Russia steps in to claim that role. US is far from perfect, but it's better than either of those.
Personally, I would not vote for a Thuggee or Satanist.
Which exactly proves my point. You are basing your decision on a person's religious views, not on what they have actually done.
If these differ, then the person is acting contrary to his stated views, making him either a liar, hypocrite, or delusional. I think that's a good reason not to vote him.
A person's religious views are not something separate from him; quite the contrary, they are usually at the very core of his worldview in general, on which he bases all his decisions and actions on - after all, what else could he base them on ? When someone claims to be a Thuggee, Satanist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or whatever, they are making a statement about themselves and their fundamental views about the nature of reality and their place in it. Why should this information be discarded by the voter ?
Compare this to someone claiming to be a Nazi. Would you vote him ? Would you claim that he hasn't started a second Holocaust yet, so you can't judge him merely on his views ? The central tenets of Nazism - especially the Master Race stuff - certainly have religious overtones.
He supports giving our interrogators the tools they need to extract information, but he does NOT support torture, even as he refuses to allow to U.N. to define torture for us.
In other words, he's pro-torture but doesn't want to admit it, so he redefines "torture" to exclude the methods he uses. Kinda reminds me of Clinton.
Apparently, people believe that if you believe in some man-made myth of a supreme being who sits high in the sky watching everything you do, who tells you you must follow a set of rules they have set down or else you will be condemned to an eternity of pain and torture yet, who still cares and loves you*, you are somehow more worthy of an elected office than the atheistic heathens who do not believe in a supreme being.
Or they could simply judge all atheists by the most visible ones, who tend to be visible because they engage in rants containing a semi-coherent mix of strawmen, arguments from ridicule, and outright insults directed at religious people - in other words, a pretty good Jack Chick/Thompson impression, except that Chick's comics are funny (altought propably unintentionally).
Don't blame the religious people for associating atheism with loudmouthed zealots. That was accomplished by atheists themselves. Not posting rants like the above whenever the subject comes up would be a good way to start changing that.
If in the fall Bayer aspirin kills a bunch of schoolkids and in the spring their vaseline causes an outbreak of excema, will you ever buy the products from that company again in your lifetime?
No, but I will buy from Bertham, which is Bayer after a name change, or perhaps a new corporation which the people who owned Bayer set up and transferred all personnel and business to, since there's no way in Hell I can keep track of all of those. And even if I could, the schoolkids would still be dead.
What if they were also decertified by a consumer organization that has a good track record of rating product safety?
How do I know that the consumer organization hasn't been paid to give this certification without whatever requirements are usually required being met ? In other words, what makes it any different than a government agency ?
Shooting dear in the forest without taking proper precautions to make sure the area is deserted carries some probability that you will hit someone in the stomach or worse. The shooter should be punished, and much harsher if someone actually dies. He should not however be executed since he didn't deliberately try to take a life.
No, he didn't try to take a life; he just didn't care if someone died as the result of his actions. He deliberately and needlessly endangered people's lives for his own profit (actually comfort in the hunter's case); why shouldn't he be considered a murderer if someone dies ? They are dead because of his actions, the possibility and significantly high propability of that outcome was perfectly obvious to anyone having sufficient IQ to operate a gun, and the reason for taking that path of action was pure laziness on the hunter's part, as opposed to, say, shooting a charging bear.
How are a hunter who shoots wildly around in the forest because he wants the deer and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process and a mafia hitman who kills for money because he wants money and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process really any different from one another ?
Knowledge that if you don't take a life, yours will not be taken and you even likely to see sunshine again after a fair term in prison, keeps crooks from becoming murderers.
That is an argument against death penalty, and a valid one too. However, we are talking about people who already went over that line.
Perhaps you have "verbed" the noun "rune", in which case I expect that someone should explain to you that politics doesn't work like Diablo II, and you can't add runes to objects to make them more effective in real life.
Now if only we could convince the idiots who stick brand stickers everywhere of that...
You have a better way of choosing elected officials? Do share.
Survivor-style: vote one out each round until only one remains. That way you could use the first few (dozen;) rounds to vote against people you really dislike, instead of the current "a vote to third party is a vote wasted because it doesn't keep Hillary/McCain out of office" crap, and the remain would likely be the best compromise.
The wild banana has genetic variation aplenty, but it's also disgusting.
that's genetic variation to prevent the fruit from being eaten by two-legged straight-walking simians who do not spread the seeds/pollen.:-)
If all the Cavendish bananas are clones of each other, then they must all be clones of some original Cavendish plant, and thus descendants of it. I find it likely that Cavendish banana plants - the descendants of a single banana plant - outnumber all the wild banana plants combined.
Getting domesticated by humans is pretty much the evolutionary equivalent of winning the main prize in lottery.
There are many steps between what he did and someone's life or health actually being harmed, the biggest being consumers blindly buying medicines from a company that has not yearned their trust.
A company cannot earn worthy of anyone's trust, because a previously well-behaved company could start behaving in a completely psychotic manner after a change in management. A company is legal fiction, it doesn't have morals or a mind; every action the company takes is actually taken by an individual within that company, and the same goes for all decisions. Consequently, it is not sufficient to only keep track fo the company - which would be a nigh-impossible task in itself, since companies have entire PR departments to spin tall tales, often masked as grassroot opinions - you'd need to track every individual who worked for the company since the earliest states of the development of that particular drug.
"Buyer beware" might or might not have worked well for Romans, but it is simply impossible to excersize sufficient caution with modern medicine, foodstuff and other items to make everyone solely responsible for the safety of their purchases.
Especially american consumers buying drugs or children toys made in China, when they know full well the prevailing business ethics in that part of the world.
The prevailing business ethics in China are the exact same as in every other part of the world: everything which increases profit is fine as long as you don't get caught.
I have trouble with executing someone who did not know that his action would result in overwhelming probability of deaths.
Shooting someone in the stomach doesn't result in death with "overwhelming" propability. So, if the victim dies from that, should the shooter be let free ?
The company chiefs probably told him that the medicines are extensively tested internally and they are simply trying to cut through. beurocracy.
And he knew that they might be telling the truth, or they might be lying. He also knew that in the latter case, people could die. He chose that option, because it got him money.
Why on Earth should a treaseonous asshole who endangered thousands, if not millions, of people for his personal profit get away with it ?
As far as I'm concerned, some industries have gone way too far and are in gross violation of the constitution.
Since the US Constitution (which I assume you're talking about) only concerns itself with the US Government, it is impossible for any industry to violate it.
The oil companies are all in collusion to fix prices. Since all we know about market economies says competition should be driving prices lower at some point.
Yes; but only when there's no natural limiting factors to the supply. Oil is running out, which is a natural limitation, and is causing it's price to rise ever higher.
The trend will reverse itself as soon as we get working fusion power or something similar, at which point we can produce all the oil we want artificially. It is, after all, a relatively safe and compact energy source for cars and other mobile appliances.
If you saddle corporations with high taxes, and high regulations...they will leave. And that is what they did. They went to a country that has a more free economy that the USA - China. CEOs are smart. Why stick around in a country that punishes them for success?
Production went to China. CEOs are still hanging around in the US. This arrangement lets them get the benefit of living in a country with relative freedom and high standard of living, while reaping the profits of slave labor and pathetic standard of living of the country where the production is based. In other words, they are parasites who get their profits by bleeding their host dry and channeling the blood to help the dictatorship of China.
I am sick and damn tired of Marxists in this country telling us how corporations are evil. They are not evil. A powerful government that tells us what to do is evil.
A government, just like a company, is a fictional entity: it doesn't exist in the physical sense. There is little difference between a powerful government and a rich corporation. Both wield tremendous power, and are quite capable of crushing you like an insect. The only difference is that in a democracy, you hold some power over the government in the form of your vote, and the government exist - at least in theory - to protect your interests; while you hold no power whatsoever over most companies, and they don't have to even pretend to care about the consequences their actions cause you.
Given this, it is idiotic to claim that corporations are not evil while governments are. Just typical libertarian propaganda, wich is starting to get really tired...
Slashdot Mirror
Most home routers are configured through a web interface. That web interface has a reboot button. In other words, a home router can be made to reboot by sending it a proper HTTP request. This is not a bug, it's a feature :). It is also likely indistinguishable from a crash-and-reboot, since the reboot clears the crashed state. For all we know, Windows could be flooding the router with reboot commands...
Actually, I read about a fascinating concept a few years ago: read/rail car. The idea was that you'd drive your car normally to the railway station and onto the track. Once there, the railway computer (and railway power system) would take over, getting your car into its destination via the railway, combining and decombining it into a train with other cars as practical. Once there, you would again resume driving normally. This way you'd get all the benefits of the train and a car combined. While this concept would require special cars, it shouldn't be too difficult to make train cars sized for a single car.
Or simply add a few car-carriers to the end of a passenger train.
Well, of course: they don't need to worry about traffick jams and the associated break-idle-gas-break routine, and steel tires on steel track don't generate much rolling resistance either.
For the times when you want to have multiple tabs/browser windows open at once, and each one absolutely must run their own multiple scripts, not to mention all the extensions adding their own.
Having thousands of scripts running at once is a prefectly plausible scenario. Not being able to handle it gracefully should disqualify a scripting engine from being used in a browser.
The way to wield power in a free-market system is to have control over resources. This not only allows you to use the threat of starvation as a persuasion tool, but also allows efficient promotion of whatever candidates you desire, as well as outright bribery.
Yes there is. He who controls the nation's food supply controls the nation. Slashdot constantly has articles about powerful economic entities using their resources to blackmail individuals into obedience - the RIAA is particularly notorious about this. Microsoft's anti-competitive practices - the misuse of monopoly power - are legendary.
If you don't have a check on economic power, then you will soon have a king. And lesser nobles too, of course.
The problem for libertarians is that there's still enough critical thinking skills in America to reveal the flaws in their ideology. That's why the party is considered part of the lunatic fringe by most voters.
Plumbers do, in fact, do some electric work, such as connecting pumps to a power source. This makes sense, because the task is so simple it doesn't require professional electricians skill, so he can use the time to do more difficult tasks instead. Plumbing also involves welding, despite a plumber not being a professional welder, and hauling stuff around in a car, despite not being a professional trucker.
Manpower is a limited resource, even in a professional environment. Passing tasks from one person to another will inevitably waste time, since it takes a while to explain what you want done, even if that other person doesn't need to be physically present. Simply because someone isn't a professional programmer doesn't mean he can't program, possibly very well; it simply means that it isn't the focus of his work. And of course smaller companies don't neccessarily have a professional programmer.
Would it make sense for a manager to call a professional typist to type a one-page memo, or to type it himself, even thought he isn't as good at typing that a typist would be ?
Well in that case getting fired should be a positive, now shouldn't it ?-)
The 10zenmonkeys link contains neither. While the blog is currently unaccessible, according to some other posts in this discussion, it contains a single picture of a sleeping (clothed) baby. So it appears that the links contain neither pornographic nor nude images, and as such shouldn't be described as such.
Why ? Does Slashdot have a duty to uphold the law (of the US, presumably) ? I thought that was the police's work.
Or are the people who read Slashdot at work like children, so that all of Internet must be made suitable - for some definition of "suitable" - for them ? "Please think of the people who read Slashdot at work !"
Then perhaps you should stop reading Slashdot and start working :p.
If the images are "disturbing", they might get you fired. That's a good rule of thumb. Doubly so if they're "distubing" in a sense that involves the FBI.
If you can't tell CG and real images apart - which is the very point of this article - then they are the same market. And since making CG images is a lot less risky and gets you the same end product than photographing real children, I'd say that real child pornography is going to die off.
My reaction is against people who insult religious folk every chance they get, and then whine when those same religious folk don't vote for them. And the quote was neither humorous nor factual, but a mixture of unproven claims, extremely distorted summary of christianity, and a snide remark against the practitioners of said religion.
I'm starting to get really tired of Slashdot atheists turning every story into another chance to whine how they are being persecuted by evil and stupid people, defined as everyone except them.
So basically, if you have extra money, you should invest it rather than hoard it, because hoarding it pretty much guarantees that you'll lose it. A property of the monetary system which encourages investment seems a feature rather than a bug to me :).
Unless, of course, China or Russia steps in to claim that role. US is far from perfect, but it's better than either of those.
If these differ, then the person is acting contrary to his stated views, making him either a liar, hypocrite, or delusional. I think that's a good reason not to vote him.
A person's religious views are not something separate from him; quite the contrary, they are usually at the very core of his worldview in general, on which he bases all his decisions and actions on - after all, what else could he base them on ? When someone claims to be a Thuggee, Satanist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or whatever, they are making a statement about themselves and their fundamental views about the nature of reality and their place in it. Why should this information be discarded by the voter ?
Compare this to someone claiming to be a Nazi. Would you vote him ? Would you claim that he hasn't started a second Holocaust yet, so you can't judge him merely on his views ? The central tenets of Nazism - especially the Master Race stuff - certainly have religious overtones.
In other words, he's pro-torture but doesn't want to admit it, so he redefines "torture" to exclude the methods he uses. Kinda reminds me of Clinton.
Or they could simply judge all atheists by the most visible ones, who tend to be visible because they engage in rants containing a semi-coherent mix of strawmen, arguments from ridicule, and outright insults directed at religious people - in other words, a pretty good Jack Chick/Thompson impression, except that Chick's comics are funny (altought propably unintentionally).
Don't blame the religious people for associating atheism with loudmouthed zealots. That was accomplished by atheists themselves. Not posting rants like the above whenever the subject comes up would be a good way to start changing that.
No, but I will buy from Bertham, which is Bayer after a name change, or perhaps a new corporation which the people who owned Bayer set up and transferred all personnel and business to, since there's no way in Hell I can keep track of all of those. And even if I could, the schoolkids would still be dead.
How do I know that the consumer organization hasn't been paid to give this certification without whatever requirements are usually required being met ? In other words, what makes it any different than a government agency ?
No, he didn't try to take a life; he just didn't care if someone died as the result of his actions. He deliberately and needlessly endangered people's lives for his own profit (actually comfort in the hunter's case); why shouldn't he be considered a murderer if someone dies ? They are dead because of his actions, the possibility and significantly high propability of that outcome was perfectly obvious to anyone having sufficient IQ to operate a gun, and the reason for taking that path of action was pure laziness on the hunter's part, as opposed to, say, shooting a charging bear.
How are a hunter who shoots wildly around in the forest because he wants the deer and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process and a mafia hitman who kills for money because he wants money and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process really any different from one another ?
That is an argument against death penalty, and a valid one too. However, we are talking about people who already went over that line.
Why ? You need a heat source for the whole thing to be authentic, right ?
Now if only we could convince the idiots who stick brand stickers everywhere of that...
Survivor-style: vote one out each round until only one remains. That way you could use the first few (dozen ;) rounds to vote against people you really dislike, instead of the current "a vote to third party is a vote wasted because it doesn't keep Hillary/McCain out of office" crap, and the remain would likely be the best compromise.
And it explains why it wants to wipe out the human race. You would too, if the **AA were your main sample...
If all the Cavendish bananas are clones of each other, then they must all be clones of some original Cavendish plant, and thus descendants of it. I find it likely that Cavendish banana plants - the descendants of a single banana plant - outnumber all the wild banana plants combined.
Getting domesticated by humans is pretty much the evolutionary equivalent of winning the main prize in lottery.
A company cannot earn worthy of anyone's trust, because a previously well-behaved company could start behaving in a completely psychotic manner after a change in management. A company is legal fiction, it doesn't have morals or a mind; every action the company takes is actually taken by an individual within that company, and the same goes for all decisions. Consequently, it is not sufficient to only keep track fo the company - which would be a nigh-impossible task in itself, since companies have entire PR departments to spin tall tales, often masked as grassroot opinions - you'd need to track every individual who worked for the company since the earliest states of the development of that particular drug.
"Buyer beware" might or might not have worked well for Romans, but it is simply impossible to excersize sufficient caution with modern medicine, foodstuff and other items to make everyone solely responsible for the safety of their purchases.
The prevailing business ethics in China are the exact same as in every other part of the world: everything which increases profit is fine as long as you don't get caught.
Shooting someone in the stomach doesn't result in death with "overwhelming" propability. So, if the victim dies from that, should the shooter be let free ?
And he knew that they might be telling the truth, or they might be lying. He also knew that in the latter case, people could die. He chose that option, because it got him money.
Why on Earth should a treaseonous asshole who endangered thousands, if not millions, of people for his personal profit get away with it ?
Since the US Constitution (which I assume you're talking about) only concerns itself with the US Government, it is impossible for any industry to violate it.
Yes; but only when there's no natural limiting factors to the supply. Oil is running out, which is a natural limitation, and is causing it's price to rise ever higher.
The trend will reverse itself as soon as we get working fusion power or something similar, at which point we can produce all the oil we want artificially. It is, after all, a relatively safe and compact energy source for cars and other mobile appliances.
Production went to China. CEOs are still hanging around in the US. This arrangement lets them get the benefit of living in a country with relative freedom and high standard of living, while reaping the profits of slave labor and pathetic standard of living of the country where the production is based. In other words, they are parasites who get their profits by bleeding their host dry and channeling the blood to help the dictatorship of China.
A government, just like a company, is a fictional entity: it doesn't exist in the physical sense. There is little difference between a powerful government and a rich corporation. Both wield tremendous power, and are quite capable of crushing you like an insect. The only difference is that in a democracy, you hold some power over the government in the form of your vote, and the government exist - at least in theory - to protect your interests; while you hold no power whatsoever over most companies, and they don't have to even pretend to care about the consequences their actions cause you.
Given this, it is idiotic to claim that corporations are not evil while governments are. Just typical libertarian propaganda, wich is starting to get really tired...