But if you're going to say that consciousness determines whether or not something is 'dead', then we would have to say that bacteria and plants are not alive, because they have no nervous system, and thus no consciousness. That's why I go with putrefaction -- the cessation of metabolic activity that keeps the organism going.
But both plants and bacteria react to external stimuli, so while they have no nervous system, they do have something similar.
Besides, several organisms - including mostly bacteria, but AFAIR also some small animals with central nervous system - can completely suspend their metabolic activity and then resume it at a later date. In fact I seem to recall about recently reading about some seeds which had produced a plant after hundreds of years of sitting between the pages of a logbook or something.
Maybe cliniically dead =/ dead? Is there a metaphysicist in the house?
No, but I'll make do with splitting hairs:).
My heart beats regularly, with a small pause between each contraction. During this pause the heart isn't beating, it's resting. Consequently, if lack of heartbeat equals death, I die around 80 times per minute.
What's wrong with a little gravity? You'd probably end up spending a lot of resources trying to recreate it on a long term space colony, might as well take advantage of the natural gravity of Mars.
In a large space colony, you can easily recreate Earth-magnitude gravity. In Mars, you're stuck with the inferior natural one.
Mmmm, weightless sex. Sounds fun.
Devote most of your attention to avoid hitting your head while trashing and floating around, and do so anyway as soon as you get distracted. Sticky bits of protein-rich (means it'll mold for sure) goo floating around. Doesnt' sound fun.
If it does, how come that the RIAA's lawyers bringing meritless suits based on an almost total absence of evidence against a sizeable proportion of the young population has not yet irked any judge, and sent their lawyers packing?
Aren't most judges pretty old ? If so, why should they care if RIAA bullies kids - they're propably happy that someone is putting the brats in their place.
Why do people keep on assuming that while the police propably are corrupt people who abuse their power for kicks, and the lawmakers certainly are corrupt people who abuse their power for money and kicks, but judges are above such petty things ? Judges aren't shining pillars of ethical perfection and impartial fairness; they are people who wield the power of life and death - at least in some states - over others, so why wouldn't the pee rise to their heads ?
The linux kernel beats the beos kernel in threading benchmarks, but the entire Be OS GUI stack (kernel, display, windowing, controls) were designed with multithreading in mind. X/KDE/GTK et al are relics based on 1986 era computing.
As I've understood it, X is simply a protocol, and the X server itself could be single- or multithreaded. That the current ones aren't (?) is simply an implementation deficiency.
As soon as your program starts down the path of calling free(), or, hey, even malloc(), if it can reasonably avoid them, it gets much more complicated and bug-prone, something you don't want in a system as crucial to have working correctly with no exploitable bugs as an email server.
You know, you could just code the thing in Java and eliminate this issue outright, as well as all possibility of buffer overruns... C is the worst possible language for Internet-facing servers.
According to the summary, it isn't; it is about making a certain company exempt from laws. All are equal before law, but some are more equal than others.
agreed. i'm 27 soon and i've only just grown a brain in the last few years. before age 24, I just had no fucking clue, and worse yet i THOUGHT i did just like others my age.
I've only just grown a brain last night. Yesterday, I just had no fucking clue, and worse yet I THOUGHT I did just like others my age.
Wait - I just made a conclusion concerning the entire population based on my own anecdotal experience. I guess I still don't have a fucking clue. Oh well, maybe tomorrow ?
Anyway, you seem to be confused about the purpose of voting. It is not there to let people exercise the tyranny of majority, but to allow people to remove unpopular or abusive leaders from power without resorting to bloodshed.
The administration's duty is to execute the laws, and the article outlines a failure of that duty.
Failure ? If the law isn't enforced then it's good as dead. The only thing remaining is disposing the metaphorical corpse from the lawbooks. "Off with his head!", as some other ruler said. Gassed, electrocuted, hanged and torn apart by horses; this law is as good as executed.
I'm not sure about the beryllium, but radium is certainly not easy to get, unless you get lucky like he did.
Radium is naturally emitted from the ground here in Finland, and, since our winters tend to be cold and our houses thus well insulated, tends to pool in the air in said houses. Lucky us;(.
Or, to put it in other words: Near Soviet Russia radium gets you !
Of course, if the cash cows are supplying decent amounts of milk, then you can argue that the formula is just giving the customers what they want.
Although if that were the case, why the shake up at EA? Why this call for "innovation?"
Because the shareholders want the share price to grow. For it to grow, the profits must grow, which in turn requires either cutting the spending (read: employees and wages) or increasing the income. Wages can't go under zero, neither can the amount of employees; consequently, in the long run, the only way to increase profits is to increase income. That, in turn, is very very difficult for a company which already dominates the markets: there's simply no more disposable income to get.
It isn't enough to have a cash cow supplying a decent (or even humongous) amount of milk, it has to deliver more milk each year; the company must keep on surpassing the exceptions to drive the stock price up. That is an impossible task to achieve (because, no matter how skilled you are, people will eventually start taking those skills into account in their expectations), so the CEO needs to make it look like he's doing something to avoid being fired.
Then at last my gaze was held: character upon character, sentence upon sentence, black, impenetrably dense, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, I saw it: Slashdot Comment #19831049, posted by Bin Naden. All hope left me.
I've researched the topic of global warming
Next you might want to research arranging your writings to paragraphs, so they don't end up as impenetrable piles of textual vomit. Unless, of course, your intend was to intimidate any opposition with this floating textberg; in that case you were succesfull, for I admit to being scared off of reading it for fear of metaphorically sharing the fate of Titanic.
As an example, this sentence is in another paragraph than the previous one. See how easy it is ? And see how much easier it is for the reader to make sense of my ramblings when there's some structure to the text arrangement ?
It's in the 3rd chapter of evil genius for dummies:
Actually it sounds more like "Sociopathy for dummies". Taking advantage of people not on their guard doesn't require genius, just lack of conscience.
Dunno if it was what happened between Kolivas and Molnar, I haven't been paying enough attention to say for certain. A pity about the -ck patchset though, it has been in use in my desktop from the summer of 2005 now:(.
The scheduler will quickly learn that most of the time it asks the taskbar application if it needs to do anything, it doesnt, and that most of the time it asks the cd writing software to do anything, it neeeds cpu. So very quickly it will start checking on the cd writing process more frequently than the taskbar process. This will give you a very noticable performance increase in your system.
How did this rubbish get modded informative ? Is it someone's idea of a joke ? Or do people simply apply the "informative" mod on things they know nothing about ?
The scheduler doesn't "ask" the processes anything. It goes through the list of runnable tasks - the tasks which aren't currently blocked waiting for data to arrive from the network, the user to press a key, some time to elapese, or something else - and decides which one should run next, and for how long. After it has run, it picks the next task, and so on.
The "taskbar processes" are inactive because they are blocking on a socket (which connects to the X server), waiting for message from X server, which might carry user input or whatever. They aren't in the runqueue so the shceduler doesn't have anything to do with them. Only once they receive the message they've been waiting for do they become runnable again, and thus subject to scheduling.
4/ Parent suggests that Con has since stopped contributing to the kernel. I don't see any indication of this in the kernel thread - in fact Con's post gives every indication that he'll continue to contribute.
No, Kolivas has definitely withdrawn from kernel development. From his -ck mailing list post:
All interest I have in kernel development, even out of the mainline
spotlight, has been... abolished (I had nastier words but decided not to use
them.)
It is clear that I cannot develop code for the linux kernel intended only to
be used out of mainline and not have mainline get involved somewhere along
the line. Whether it be the users or even other developers repeatedly
asking "when will this be merged". This forever gets me into a cycle of
actually trying to merge the stuff and... well you all know what happens at
that point (again I had nastier words but decided not to use them.)
So, I've had enough. I'm out of here forever. I want to leave before I get so
disgruntled that I end up using windows. I may play occasionally with
userspace code but for me the kernel is a black hole that I don't want to
enter the event horizon of again.
Is this a mis-parented comment, or did Hitler really complain about a 23 page pdf in 1942?
Yes. That's why he didn't let Field Marshal Paulus to retreat from Stalingrad: the Acrobat Reader kept hanging halfway through, until Hitler lost his temper. I think the whole world owes Adobe a hearthy thanks for their role in sabotaging Nazi Germany's war effort; now, if they only would understand that the war is over and stop sabotaging peacetime efforts as well;(.
There isn't. That is not what is being argued here. The quote the OP showed claimed that you alone are responsible for your choices; I simply pointed out that they have more influences than just you.
If someone threw a banana peal on the ground, and I slipped on it, I'm responsible for my pain and humiliation and for not looking where I step. If I'm the one throwing banana peals around, I'm responsible for your pain just as much as you (or the banana) are.
In other words, the neither the banana peel terrorist or the poor victim are alone responsible for the incident. Which, if you read my post, was my point:).
its a pathetic moral defence to say "I'm not actually physically hosting the bytes in this case", its a bit like saying "I just told them how to bypass the locks, I didn't actually physically break in, officer"
Yeah, it would be just as wrong as publishing an article about.
TPB exists so that geeks can get hollywood movies for free, while its owners rake in advertising cash. It's a business model based upon copyright infringement and leeching.
I assure you, I haven't been tempted to download Hollywood movies or RIAA music for ages. I can't imagine why anyone would be.
These laws seem to presuppose that the robot will have a human-like mind that is capable of understanding concepts like "injure", "inaction", "human being" and "harm". Asimov was being optimistic about the ease of making an AI that was even capable of understanding these ideas, let alone applying them to the real world.
And the end results of the robot following these laws, even in Asimov's universe, was that the robots ended up destroying the world; and even before that Daneel imprisoned that detective guy on a number of occasions for his own protection. Not a huge success, I'd say.
Either make the things smart enough to be capable of actual moral judgement, or make them follow instructions to the letter; but do not make them second-guess humans based on mechanical rules. It won't end well.
Ah Wikipedia that bastion of truth. Attraction solely to children or very young adults is an illness and is no more a sexual preference than anorexia nervosa is a diet preference.
Of course. I shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source but rather have unquestioning faith in the assertions of random Slashdot posters. After all, you made an unrelated analogy, so you must be right.
Slashdot Mirror
But both plants and bacteria react to external stimuli, so while they have no nervous system, they do have something similar.
Besides, several organisms - including mostly bacteria, but AFAIR also some small animals with central nervous system - can completely suspend their metabolic activity and then resume it at a later date. In fact I seem to recall about recently reading about some seeds which had produced a plant after hundreds of years of sitting between the pages of a logbook or something.
No, but I'll make do with splitting hairs :).
My heart beats regularly, with a small pause between each contraction. During this pause the heart isn't beating, it's resting. Consequently, if lack of heartbeat equals death, I die around 80 times per minute.
Death is an endless wet dream ? Shame on you, posting such things on the Internet will make suicide ratings go way up ;(...
In a large space colony, you can easily recreate Earth-magnitude gravity. In Mars, you're stuck with the inferior natural one.
Devote most of your attention to avoid hitting your head while trashing and floating around, and do so anyway as soon as you get distracted. Sticky bits of protein-rich (means it'll mold for sure) goo floating around. Doesnt' sound fun.
Aren't most judges pretty old ? If so, why should they care if RIAA bullies kids - they're propably happy that someone is putting the brats in their place.
Why do people keep on assuming that while the police propably are corrupt people who abuse their power for kicks, and the lawmakers certainly are corrupt people who abuse their power for money and kicks, but judges are above such petty things ? Judges aren't shining pillars of ethical perfection and impartial fairness; they are people who wield the power of life and death - at least in some states - over others, so why wouldn't the pee rise to their heads ?
Criticizing it
the Haiku of BeOS
is just not nice.
As I've understood it, X is simply a protocol, and the X server itself could be single- or multithreaded. That the current ones aren't (?) is simply an implementation deficiency.
You know, you could just code the thing in Java and eliminate this issue outright, as well as all possibility of buffer overruns... C is the worst possible language for Internet-facing servers.
According to the summary, it isn't; it is about making a certain company exempt from laws. All are equal before law, but some are more equal than others.
I've only just grown a brain last night. Yesterday, I just had no fucking clue, and worse yet I THOUGHT I did just like others my age.
Wait - I just made a conclusion concerning the entire population based on my own anecdotal experience. I guess I still don't have a fucking clue. Oh well, maybe tomorrow ?
Anyway, you seem to be confused about the purpose of voting. It is not there to let people exercise the tyranny of majority, but to allow people to remove unpopular or abusive leaders from power without resorting to bloodshed.
Failure ? If the law isn't enforced then it's good as dead. The only thing remaining is disposing the metaphorical corpse from the lawbooks. "Off with his head!", as some other ruler said. Gassed, electrocuted, hanged and torn apart by horses; this law is as good as executed.
Radium is naturally emitted from the ground here in Finland, and, since our winters tend to be cold and our houses thus well insulated, tends to pool in the air in said houses. Lucky us ;(.
Or, to put it in other words: Near Soviet Russia radium gets you !
Of course, if the cash cows are supplying decent amounts of milk, then you can argue that the formula is just giving the customers what they want.
Although if that were the case, why the shake up at EA? Why this call for "innovation?"
Because the shareholders want the share price to grow. For it to grow, the profits must grow, which in turn requires either cutting the spending (read: employees and wages) or increasing the income. Wages can't go under zero, neither can the amount of employees; consequently, in the long run, the only way to increase profits is to increase income. That, in turn, is very very difficult for a company which already dominates the markets: there's simply no more disposable income to get.
It isn't enough to have a cash cow supplying a decent (or even humongous) amount of milk, it has to deliver more milk each year; the company must keep on surpassing the exceptions to drive the stock price up. That is an impossible task to achieve (because, no matter how skilled you are, people will eventually start taking those skills into account in their expectations), so the CEO needs to make it look like he's doing something to avoid being fired.
In short, it's dilberisque bullshit.
Then at last my gaze was held: character upon character, sentence upon sentence, black, impenetrably dense, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, I saw it: Slashdot Comment #19831049, posted by Bin Naden. All hope left me.
Next you might want to research arranging your writings to paragraphs, so they don't end up as impenetrable piles of textual vomit. Unless, of course, your intend was to intimidate any opposition with this floating textberg; in that case you were succesfull, for I admit to being scared off of reading it for fear of metaphorically sharing the fate of Titanic.
As an example, this sentence is in another paragraph than the previous one. See how easy it is ? And see how much easier it is for the reader to make sense of my ramblings when there's some structure to the text arrangement ?
Actually it sounds more like "Sociopathy for dummies". Taking advantage of people not on their guard doesn't require genius, just lack of conscience.
Dunno if it was what happened between Kolivas and Molnar, I haven't been paying enough attention to say for certain. A pity about the -ck patchset though, it has been in use in my desktop from the summer of 2005 now :(.
How did this rubbish get modded informative ? Is it someone's idea of a joke ? Or do people simply apply the "informative" mod on things they know nothing about ?
The scheduler doesn't "ask" the processes anything. It goes through the list of runnable tasks - the tasks which aren't currently blocked waiting for data to arrive from the network, the user to press a key, some time to elapese, or something else - and decides which one should run next, and for how long. After it has run, it picks the next task, and so on.
The "taskbar processes" are inactive because they are blocking on a socket (which connects to the X server), waiting for message from X server, which might carry user input or whatever. They aren't in the runqueue so the shceduler doesn't have anything to do with them. Only once they receive the message they've been waiting for do they become runnable again, and thus subject to scheduling.
No, Kolivas has definitely withdrawn from kernel development. From his -ck mailing list post:
In Soviet Russia, the beautiful girl woos you! It's the homeland of Vodka after all...
Yes. That's why he didn't let Field Marshal Paulus to retreat from Stalingrad: the Acrobat Reader kept hanging halfway through, until Hitler lost his temper. I think the whole world owes Adobe a hearthy thanks for their role in sabotaging Nazi Germany's war effort; now, if they only would understand that the war is over and stop sabotaging peacetime efforts as well ;(.
There isn't. That is not what is being argued here. The quote the OP showed claimed that you alone are responsible for your choices; I simply pointed out that they have more influences than just you.
In other words, the neither the banana peel terrorist or the poor victim are alone responsible for the incident. Which, if you read my post, was my point :).
Yeah, it would be just as wrong as publishing an article about .
I assure you, I haven't been tempted to download Hollywood movies or RIAA music for ages. I can't imagine why anyone would be.
Because you don't get paid by the hour to shit at home ?-)
Shit in space still stinks bad but sticks to your face instead of your shoes.
In Soviet Space Toilet the waste analyzes you !
And the end results of the robot following these laws, even in Asimov's universe, was that the robots ended up destroying the world; and even before that Daneel imprisoned that detective guy on a number of occasions for his own protection. Not a huge success, I'd say.
Either make the things smart enough to be capable of actual moral judgement, or make them follow instructions to the letter; but do not make them second-guess humans based on mechanical rules. It won't end well.
Of course. I shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source but rather have unquestioning faith in the assertions of random Slashdot posters. After all, you made an unrelated analogy, so you must be right.