I suppose this is also mimicked by adults with Grand Theft Auto, but then again, adults aren't learning much other than the various ways of killing prostitutes.
Hey, that is very important knowledge. It helps you stay alive in the only job still available once globalization and the outsourcing trend reaches its logical conclusion.
I think OOXML has nothing to do with GNOME and therefor I ignore it completely (in this context).
Of course it does. This is about replacing GConfd with an Excel spreadsheet in OOXML format. The current system is too simple, and doesn't have enough things that can go wrong, so clearly complications need to be introduced.
OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
I can read and produce PDF files on my Linux machine, using free open-source tools. I can't do so for OOXML.
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards.
Since the whole case against OOXML is that it is not open to the point where a competitor could produce a 100% compatible reader/writer, I fail to see your point.
"Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
--- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
US is showing the spirit of brotherhood. Of Kain...
Again, you have no right to comment on the issue if you possess no academic qualifications.
For the record, could you please specify exactly what academic qualifications would have given me the right to clarify a plot detail in Mai-chan's daily life ? My local university doesn't have a course in Gurology:(.
The liberal view that all opinions are equally valid is threatened by the authoritarian arrogance of certain truth.
If all opinions are equally valid, then the opinion that that opinion is bullshit is equally valid, so what are you complaining about ? Or did you mean: "All opinions are equally valid as long as they coincide with mine" ?
I know that is a joke, but wouldn't it's resolution have to be smaller than the 'strings' of string theory in order to be a higher resolution than outside?
This raises an interesting question: given that photons are, according to the string theory, strings, and that light is composed of photons, can the wavelength of light be made arbitrarily small ? And if not, does that mean that there is an upper bound to the amount of energy a single photon can carry ?
Coming to think of it, wouldn't Planck's width have the same effect ?
For that matter, if the universe has a limited size, then there is a lower bound to the energy of a single photon: it's wavelength can't be larger than the entire universe, because it wouldn't fit into it if it was. Does this also mean that a large enough black hole can't emit Hawking's radiation, because the photons would need to have a larger wavelength than can fit into the universe ?
It is indeed quite real. I fondly remember Dr. Booble's lectures, and I would like to take this opportunity to wish him, his 3 wives and 27 children all the best. I hope you guys continue to dominate Claptrappe's basket, soccer and football teams!
Well, from the point of view of evolution, those 27 children already make him 1250% more succesfull than your average man, who has two children.
RTFA. There's no DNA; the fossilization process was fast enough to fossilize soft tissue. It's not organic material.
Yes, but all you have to do is cast Stone to Flesh on the fossil to bring it back to life. Quickly, before they release the Fourth Edition of D&D, for you never know if this particular spell will be removed !
Geothermal energy (heat), makes electricity. In the short term, all geothermal will do is rid us of our dependence on coal and natural gas, it will do nothing to slow the demand of gasoline.
With basically unlimited energy available, couldn't you synthesize gasoline ? It is, after all, just a mixture of carbohydrates - carbon chains with hydrogen atoms attached ?
Its in your bloody constitiution that ID is illegal in schools.
Yet there is a review to see if they should ignore it or not.
As well as there should. The US Constitution is not, after all, a holy book. It can and should be reviewed, questioned, and altered as needed. It is not the least bit rational to grant the US Founding Fathers a de facto divine status and declare their work to be beyond criticism. Yet that's the exact feeling many posts on Slashdot give me.
Then again, the Soviet Union worshipped Marx, Lenin and Stalin, despite being officially an atheist state. I guess humanity will always have religion, in one form or another.
The real question is, what form of religion is less destructive: theism or idealism ?
I wish evolution could hurry up and favour humans who aren't drawn towards superstition, weeding out the delusionists. I'm sure it eventually will, but it won't help me much, cause I'll be long dead by that time.
Why would it ? Do religious people get less children than non-religious ones ? From what I've heard, it's the other way around.
There's not really that big of a difference, only in scale. That's like saying gravity is different when it applies to an apple falling on Newton's head and the planets orbiting the sun.
It might be, actually. I recently read that, if the universe contains extra dimensions as the string theory predicts/requires, gravity could well behave differently in close quarters than it does in large distances; the reason being that gravitons, unlike other interaction-carrying particles, have the string shape of closed loops and can thus leave this world-membrane - no, I didn't really understand that part;(.
Anyway, the point was that, if there's a single extra dimension 10 centimeters in lenght, then gravitons are spreading in four dimensions up to 10 centimeters, and three after that. This in turn means that, at distances less than 10 centimeters, the strength of gravity would be inversely related to a cube, rather than square, of distance.
Look at evolutionary algorithms: there's a reason most of the software you use (web browser, word processor), are not evolved: nobody can get it to work that well.
Of course they are. Firefox, for example, evolved from Mozilla, which in turn evolved from Netscape. X.org evolved from XFree86. Linux kernel has a long evolutionary history. GNU userland is a direct evolutionary descendant of earlier UNIX variants. Inkscape was originally a fork of Sodipodi, which in turn has been out-competed. The various programming languages form a whole evolutionary tree. Warcraft 3 traces its ancestors back to Dune 2. And so on and so on.
Now, it is true that this evolution didn't happen unaided and, in the short therm, it is planned. However, in the long run - years and decades - computer programs respond to selective pressure, and are actual (codebase) or spiritual successors to one another. Every now and then there is revolutionary chance creating whole new niches; the growing complexity of programs gave rise to object-oriented programming, for example, and several new programming languages, which in turn helped programs to grow even more complex.
Culture, as a whole, is evolutionary in nature, as are all its products. The biggest difference between cultural and biological evolution is that it is very easy for cultural entities to exchange and remix ideas from one another (despite the copyright law doing its best to hinder this process), while it is difficult for multicellular biological species to do likewise. That's why cultural evolution is so much faster.
To the best of your or my knowledge, no. Why take a risk that that knowledge is incomplete ? It seems to me that the one common factor in most breaches of security is that someone got overconfident at some point.
As a rule of thumb, a nice oragne-red is enough for allmost all meterials. However melting a drive is a dangerous operation or requires equipment not available in the average hardware store.
Welding equipment is sufficient to melt steel; that's what welding is based on. And making the drive red-hot will cause all flammable parts to catch fire and likely emit unhealthy smoke, and requires a heatproof area, and is nowhere near safe; it's just not that hard to go the extra step and plain destory the thing.
Besides, if were all supposed to be companions to God after we're dead, why the hell would he want to surround himself with stupid people?
Stupid by who's standards ? Remember, we are talking about a being who designed the whole universe here, from the laws of physics to how the neurons in your brains fire in concert so you read this message. I seriously doubt even the smartest humans are much compared to that.
If anything, it's the artists who come closest to God, because they too create, altought not in such a grandiose scale.
People who have to defend their ideas and ideals among their peers are going to be more cultured/open-minded then those who only have said ideas/ideals reinforced by a small populace.
People usually gravitate towards socializing with those who have roughly the same ideas in everything they care about. Since cities have a larger population near you than countryside, the chances of managing to find and surround yourself with like-minded people is greater in cities than outside of them.
The Curie-point is exactly as good or bad as melting a drive.
You can tell with a glance whether or not a drive has been melted. You can't tell with a glance whether or not a drive has been subjected to Curie point temperature on every point of the disk surface, just that it has been subjected to lots of heat. Melting the drive therefore ensures that no un-treated ones get thrown out by accident.
Furthermore, can you guarantee that the magnetic fields are the only mark left to the disk by writing ? Maybe somey three-letter agency might be able to use a scanning electron microscope to read the drive contents from the tiny deformations on the disk surface left by the long-standing magnetic fields. Melting the drive makes it completely unrecoverable for any technology short of reversing entropy.
It is, however, far more easily accomplished and only needs easily obtained equipment.
A spectographer to determine what the drive is made of to determine its Curie point, a thermometer to determine that is has reached that point, and a high-power oven - or a simple oxygen-acetylene torch aimed at the disk full blast until it melts. No, I think that my idea is simpler to implement.
Really, a single wipe with random data would *almost* do it. It would render the system unrecoverable, but my guess as to why the DOD requires 3 wipes is that if you're talking about nuclear launch codes, you'd only need to recover a few bytes of information to get very, very valuable data.
If you're talking about nuclear launch codes or other truly valuable data, don't wipe the disk, destroy it by melting it to slag and get a new one. They only cost $100 dollars apiece, after all.
The one destruction you cannot recover from (besides a simple, complete overwrite) is heating the platters up past the Curie-point. A standard-issue blowtorch does that fine, especially on a notbook platter.
Forget Curie point and just melt the sucker. Find an ironworks and throw the drive to a steel converter. Good luck getting data back from a railroad track which used to be a disk:).
If you don't have ironworks, take a welding equipment over every point of the surface of the disk until it physically deforms. For extra credit, use an electric welder.
Sometimes the surest solution is good old-fashioned brute force.
Unfortunately, the 90% who signed are probably not in a position to protest. I agree in fighting for one's rights, but without a Trade Union to protect them, most folks would be quickly and quietly fired.
The lesson, then, is that no matter how good you are, you are always negotiating from a position of weakness against a large organization, and thus need to unionize to even the situation. It proves that trade unions are still needed at this day, and always will be.
If you're shortsighted, you would think that. There is a benefit to you to not stealing or murdering, because you want others not to steal from or murder you. Its enlightened self-interest.
Not stealing from or murdering others in no keeps them from doing these things to you. If anything, a living person is more capable of killing you than a dead one, so it is to your benefit to kill anyone who has a grudge against you.
Now, of course you could make a pact with your neighbours, and agree that neither will steal from or murder the other; but what if they break it, and kill you ? What incentive do they have against this, since you obviously can't return the favor once dead ? Well, if they defect, the other neighbours will (propably correctly) figure that they'll be next, and kill the offender before he can kill them.
In other words, you now have de facto law against killing, with death as punishment. Of course, this kind of law has some problems: for starters, it doesn't neccessarily protect you if you aren't very popular, nor will it protect you if the guy who killed you can show that he had some reason to kill specifically you, and is thus unlikely to kill others. The punishment might also be a lot lesser (or nonexistent) if the murderer is well-liked. Since there is no formal investigation, the real culprit could easily frame some innocent scapegoat. And so on.
In short, in a society lacking a legal system, one will spontaneously emerge; but it will be completely arbitrary and pass sentences on random people depending on how well-liked they are with not even a pretense of impartiality. Oh, and since there isn't written laws, you can be punished for anything anyone happens to take offense from.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, that is very important knowledge. It helps you stay alive in the only job still available once globalization and the outsourcing trend reaches its logical conclusion.
I think we just found the reason why it takes so long without the fee.
Of course it does. This is about replacing GConfd with an Excel spreadsheet in OOXML format. The current system is too simple, and doesn't have enough things that can go wrong, so clearly complications need to be introduced.
I can read and produce PDF files on my Linux machine, using free open-source tools. I can't do so for OOXML.
Since the whole case against OOXML is that it is not open to the point where a competitor could produce a 100% compatible reader/writer, I fail to see your point.
US is showing the spirit of brotherhood. Of Kain...
For the record, could you please specify exactly what academic qualifications would have given me the right to clarify a plot detail in Mai-chan's daily life ? My local university doesn't have a course in Gurology :(.
If all opinions are equally valid, then the opinion that that opinion is bullshit is equally valid, so what are you complaining about ? Or did you mean: "All opinions are equally valid as long as they coincide with mine" ?
This raises an interesting question: given that photons are, according to the string theory, strings, and that light is composed of photons, can the wavelength of light be made arbitrarily small ? And if not, does that mean that there is an upper bound to the amount of energy a single photon can carry ?
Coming to think of it, wouldn't Planck's width have the same effect ?
For that matter, if the universe has a limited size, then there is a lower bound to the energy of a single photon: it's wavelength can't be larger than the entire universe, because it wouldn't fit into it if it was. Does this also mean that a large enough black hole can't emit Hawking's radiation, because the photons would need to have a larger wavelength than can fit into the universe ?
Well, from the point of view of evolution, those 27 children already make him 1250% more succesfull than your average man, who has two children.
Yes, but all you have to do is cast Stone to Flesh on the fossil to bring it back to life. Quickly, before they release the Fourth Edition of D&D, for you never know if this particular spell will be removed !
With basically unlimited energy available, couldn't you synthesize gasoline ? It is, after all, just a mixture of carbohydrates - carbon chains with hydrogen atoms attached ?
As well as there should. The US Constitution is not, after all, a holy book. It can and should be reviewed, questioned, and altered as needed. It is not the least bit rational to grant the US Founding Fathers a de facto divine status and declare their work to be beyond criticism. Yet that's the exact feeling many posts on Slashdot give me.
Then again, the Soviet Union worshipped Marx, Lenin and Stalin, despite being officially an atheist state. I guess humanity will always have religion, in one form or another.
The real question is, what form of religion is less destructive: theism or idealism ?
Why would it ? Do religious people get less children than non-religious ones ? From what I've heard, it's the other way around.
It might be, actually. I recently read that, if the universe contains extra dimensions as the string theory predicts/requires, gravity could well behave differently in close quarters than it does in large distances; the reason being that gravitons, unlike other interaction-carrying particles, have the string shape of closed loops and can thus leave this world-membrane - no, I didn't really understand that part ;(.
Anyway, the point was that, if there's a single extra dimension 10 centimeters in lenght, then gravitons are spreading in four dimensions up to 10 centimeters, and three after that. This in turn means that, at distances less than 10 centimeters, the strength of gravity would be inversely related to a cube, rather than square, of distance.
So yes, scale does matter.
Of course they are. Firefox, for example, evolved from Mozilla, which in turn evolved from Netscape. X.org evolved from XFree86. Linux kernel has a long evolutionary history. GNU userland is a direct evolutionary descendant of earlier UNIX variants. Inkscape was originally a fork of Sodipodi, which in turn has been out-competed. The various programming languages form a whole evolutionary tree. Warcraft 3 traces its ancestors back to Dune 2. And so on and so on.
Now, it is true that this evolution didn't happen unaided and, in the short therm, it is planned. However, in the long run - years and decades - computer programs respond to selective pressure, and are actual (codebase) or spiritual successors to one another. Every now and then there is revolutionary chance creating whole new niches; the growing complexity of programs gave rise to object-oriented programming, for example, and several new programming languages, which in turn helped programs to grow even more complex.
Culture, as a whole, is evolutionary in nature, as are all its products. The biggest difference between cultural and biological evolution is that it is very easy for cultural entities to exchange and remix ideas from one another (despite the copyright law doing its best to hinder this process), while it is difficult for multicellular biological species to do likewise. That's why cultural evolution is so much faster.
To the best of your or my knowledge, no. Why take a risk that that knowledge is incomplete ? It seems to me that the one common factor in most breaches of security is that someone got overconfident at some point.
Welding equipment is sufficient to melt steel; that's what welding is based on. And making the drive red-hot will cause all flammable parts to catch fire and likely emit unhealthy smoke, and requires a heatproof area, and is nowhere near safe; it's just not that hard to go the extra step and plain destory the thing.
Stupid by who's standards ? Remember, we are talking about a being who designed the whole universe here, from the laws of physics to how the neurons in your brains fire in concert so you read this message. I seriously doubt even the smartest humans are much compared to that.
If anything, it's the artists who come closest to God, because they too create, altought not in such a grandiose scale.
Shouldn't those be tinfoil pants ?
People usually gravitate towards socializing with those who have roughly the same ideas in everything they care about. Since cities have a larger population near you than countryside, the chances of managing to find and surround yourself with like-minded people is greater in cities than outside of them.
You can tell with a glance whether or not a drive has been melted. You can't tell with a glance whether or not a drive has been subjected to Curie point temperature on every point of the disk surface, just that it has been subjected to lots of heat. Melting the drive therefore ensures that no un-treated ones get thrown out by accident.
Furthermore, can you guarantee that the magnetic fields are the only mark left to the disk by writing ? Maybe somey three-letter agency might be able to use a scanning electron microscope to read the drive contents from the tiny deformations on the disk surface left by the long-standing magnetic fields. Melting the drive makes it completely unrecoverable for any technology short of reversing entropy.
A spectographer to determine what the drive is made of to determine its Curie point, a thermometer to determine that is has reached that point, and a high-power oven - or a simple oxygen-acetylene torch aimed at the disk full blast until it melts. No, I think that my idea is simpler to implement.
If you're talking about nuclear launch codes or other truly valuable data, don't wipe the disk, destroy it by melting it to slag and get a new one. They only cost $100 dollars apiece, after all.
Forget Curie point and just melt the sucker. Find an ironworks and throw the drive to a steel converter. Good luck getting data back from a railroad track which used to be a disk :).
If you don't have ironworks, take a welding equipment over every point of the surface of the disk until it physically deforms. For extra credit, use an electric welder.
Sometimes the surest solution is good old-fashioned brute force.
The lesson, then, is that no matter how good you are, you are always negotiating from a position of weakness against a large organization, and thus need to unionize to even the situation. It proves that trade unions are still needed at this day, and always will be.
Assuming you meant Roman circuses, of course there are. They are called "action movies" nowadays.
Not stealing from or murdering others in no keeps them from doing these things to you. If anything, a living person is more capable of killing you than a dead one, so it is to your benefit to kill anyone who has a grudge against you.
Now, of course you could make a pact with your neighbours, and agree that neither will steal from or murder the other; but what if they break it, and kill you ? What incentive do they have against this, since you obviously can't return the favor once dead ? Well, if they defect, the other neighbours will (propably correctly) figure that they'll be next, and kill the offender before he can kill them.
In other words, you now have de facto law against killing, with death as punishment. Of course, this kind of law has some problems: for starters, it doesn't neccessarily protect you if you aren't very popular, nor will it protect you if the guy who killed you can show that he had some reason to kill specifically you, and is thus unlikely to kill others. The punishment might also be a lot lesser (or nonexistent) if the murderer is well-liked. Since there is no formal investigation, the real culprit could easily frame some innocent scapegoat. And so on.
In short, in a society lacking a legal system, one will spontaneously emerge; but it will be completely arbitrary and pass sentences on random people depending on how well-liked they are with not even a pretense of impartiality. Oh, and since there isn't written laws, you can be punished for anything anyone happens to take offense from.