All I have to do is stimulate the right part of your brain with the right electromagnetic field. It was an interesting experiment, as everyone knew that something was being done to their brain, yet most people still felt that the experience indicated the actual presence of the divine.
Given the right stimuli to the right part of your brain, it should be possible to make you see/hear/feel anything you normally could (since that's how your senses normally report the info to your brain, with nerves acting as the source of stimulation). Does this mean you should consider any sensory data you get to be of zero value ?
Try this thought experiment: Think of any good movie set any time 15 years ago or more. Say The Godfather, The Graduate, heck even Ghostbusters (since I seem to be stuck on movies starting with 'G' ), it doesn't matter. You could add amazing materials science, advanced robotics, intelligent toasters, whatever, most mechanization won't change the movie that much. Want to completely ruin the movie? Give everybody in it a cell phone.
The guys in Ghostbusters did have cell phones (or equivalents), as well as beam weapons, backpack nuclear reactors and even a giant combat robot (or equivalent).
I am not advocating that everyone fight and die whenever you get robbed, I am mourning the loss of spirit, and decrying the society and politics that makes out those of courage to be nothing but fools for standing up for what was right, when they used to be known as our heroes.
Maybe that's because all those heroes died for their ideals, leaving us sheep to inherit the Earth ?-) Evolution in action.
My answer to you, on everything, is that I would prefer fighting and dying in freedom, than survival by slavery, or any form of it. If you prefer to live at any cost, that is your choice. But do not make out those that chose to defend themselves and their property, even if it is for something that you think is inconsequential and meaningless, to be fools. They Are Heroes.
It takes more than just defending yourself to be a hero. And you really don't have much moral high ground to complain about calling disagreeing people names, Mr. People-Are-Sheep.
If you do not like the concept, and your employer decides to implement it, then get as many people together as you can, and boycott. Don't come into work until they change their minds.
Better yet, get enough people together to pass laws that force your will.
If you won't (do not say can't, this is a voluntary choice) then you either A) Care more about the comfort of the moment than the consequences, or are B) already as good as a slave, so why not make it even more abundantly clear?
C) Realize that you can't eat principles, and must therefore sacrifice either them or your children, to social services or starvation. And of course you'll die of starvation too.
But as Americans we have become sheep, to the point where it is barely legal to defend yourself, where we are encouraged to "just give up the money, it's not worth as much as your life". It's the mentality that lets a couple of fanatics hijack planes filled with dozens of people.
It's stupid to die for money. And remember, prior to WTC strikes most hijackers were simply trying to get somewhere; fighting them and endangering everyone in the plane just to avoid a few hours inconvenience would be just plain stupid.
Besides, the living sheep can get the money back in court, while the dead hero can't. And wool is warm at winter.
Having said this, I am sad to say that I would support the bill (I live in SoCal), because I no longer believe our people have the courage to stand firm and do what is right for themselves, if they but knew it.
They do, they've just outsourced that function to the government:). And, like most outsourcing projects, it doesn't work too well; but in rare occasions, like this, it does work.
The "market" will migrate towards all the companies requiring it, and then you don't get to choose anymore.
Bollocks. If that were true, we would all be tattoo'd with barcodes by now.
Barcodes on uneven, randomly curving surfaces (such as skin) aren't machine-readable, at least not at first try, and in any case a barcode tattoo is easy to fake. It's less more efficient to have barcode on your driver's license (or other ID card) as well as identifying data, usually your picture.
An implantable RFID chip, on the other hand, can be made very difficult to fake, and could potentially be read from several meters away. Unlike the barcode, it can be used to monitor your every move in a completely automated way.
I, for one, don't want some creep stalking me 24 hours a day, and am glad about every law which makes it harder for the creep to do so.
One can go on and on about this. Love the section of the DIA's pocket guide to playing spy entitled "Why We Hesitate to Take Action" which lists "Fear of Being Paranoid" as a character flaw to be overcome. Funny, I thought paranoia was a mental illness. Does that mean mental illness is now a preq for working at the FBI?
If your job is finding threats, paranoia is a virtue. It doesn't mean that you should arrest people for having Canadian girlfriends, but it certainly means you should investigate quietly such suspicious characters.
Besides, if you happen to find any home videos showuing erotic uses for maple syrup, the Gnutella users are going to love you:).
This risks flames, perhaps literally, but considering Catholic Church's past and current activities - I'm referring to its anti-condom campaign which is killing millions in Africa, as well as the sadly famous pedophilic priest cover-ups, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch trials, the crusades, etc. - I'd say that Vatican is amongst the worst currently existing nations in this regard.
slim? my understanding is that the DRM is already cracked badly enough that it would be technically possible to transparently decode the DVDs on Linux, it's just that nobody has bothered to make it that simple yet.
I can watch DVD's on Linux by writing "xine dvd://" or, if I have the DVD image ripped, by writing "xine dvd:///path/to/dvd/image.iso". Is that what you meant ?
The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself.
You could simply capture only the portion of the screen which is "protected" from capture by the guest OS. That's where the interesting stuff is going to be.
I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).
Why would you need to do this in real time ? Just pipe the video stream to the encoding process using blocking IO. After all, the real-time clock the guest OS sees is just as virtual as every other device in the emulated environment.
Re:That's all very well...
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 1
But of course, Win3.x and Mac OS 7 would blow away today's Windows and Mac on today's hardware (once those old OSes went through any necessary recompilation), and DOS would, in turn, blow away Win 3.x and Mac OS 7, so who cares?
Would it ? Remember that DOS is 16-bit code running in Real Mode. It is entirely possible - likely even - that 32-bit Protected Mode code (and possibly 64-bit code) will run far faster in today's processors, maybe even enough so to give Windows the speed advantage; or would if Win 3.x didn't run on top of DOS.
You don't have any "software freedoms" that anyone needs to respect.
Maybe, but the FSF, Apache guys, BSD guys and other free software providers respect them nonetheless, so I for one would rather do business with them than with the guys who won't.
Some developers just let you mess around in their code. Labeling it a "freedom" with all the connotations that word has is just a cheap marketing ploy.
Seems to me that I have the freedom to mess around with the code of these programs, then. The word fits perfectly, with all the connotations it has.
Don't fool yourself into delusions of entitlement just because a group of people with unrealistic ideologies want to force theirs onto others by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
First of all, the freedom to tinker with your possessions is the natural state of affairs. It is the copyright lobby with their "do not reverse engineer or modify" EULAs, CD checks, invasive installation programs - which may attempt to disable legitimate software, such as Daemon Tools, in your computer - and sometimes outright malware distribution - I'm referring to Sony, of course - who have delusions of entitlement.
Second, since the GNU project - as well as numerous other free software providers - not only still exists but is in fact gaining popularity all the time, it seems to me that the ideologue works perfectly fine in reality, so please explain what makes them "unrealistic" ?
Third, please explain your statement concerning force - has Stallman sent hit squads to break peoples kneecaps if they don't release under the GPL ? Or is this another case of someone thinking they should be able to use GPL'd code without adhering to the licensing terms of the GPL ?
Fourth, if you truly think that freedom is the lowest common denominator... You are in for a very rude awakening;(.
Well I guess it all depends on what you are using as your basis for the definition of murder. In the USA killing your would be legal executioner would be classified as first or second degree murder, depending on premeditation.
I was talking from the moral perspective, not legal one. Legally speaking, stepping on ants could be classified as murder if the proper laws are passed. Similarly, even the most blodthirsty tyrants in history are likely to have been within their legal rights while killing their opponents, real or imaginary.
Just because you disagree with the laws of a nation does not free your from being held to those laws.
Perhaps, but why should someone who already has a death sentence care ? For that matter, why should I care; I'm not acting in official capacity in the US or any other legal system, and am therefore free to not consider killing in self-defense someone who is trying to kill you - even an official of the state acting in official capacity - to not be murder.
Not being immediately shut down when some troll posts necro-pedo-beastility images as part of some SA vs. Fark vs. 4chan contest to find the most simultaneously illegal and offense image to post.
Since even some D&D sourcebooks contain necrophilia (a pic of a skeleton groping the breasts of a scantily clad necromancer), and necro-pedo is quite common in 7chan's Guro board, I'd say that you'll have to do a lot worse than that to win.
And wouldn't you know it, my imagination went to work. Gaah.
I would also think that agreeing to kill people in exchange for release from death row qualifies as murder. I mean saying it's not murder is like saying that a death row inmate who kills the Dr that tried to put the needle in his arm did not murder him because after all the Dr. was trying to kill him.
Killing innocent (to the danger you are in) people to spare your life is murder. Killing someone who is trying to poison you to death is not, if you did it in self-defense and not out of vengeance.
Why on Earth should you be expected to just lay down and die just because the guy killing you is doing it with the backing and approval of the government ?
Eventually, this will be a non-issue, as distribution moves more online and there is less dependence on large stores like Wal-Mart to make moral decisions for you, but until these distribution networks are established and carry content of all types, we have to deal with whatever moral values the big boxes have.
They already are. Isohunt, for example, carries Manhunt. And an improved version for that, one that doesn't require CD to be kept in the drive during operation.
Better-than-retail quality and lower price - gotta love the Internet:).
It's just there in an attempt to make every libertarian reading this story goes into a screaming rage about evil government controls, and starts posting flamebaits like crazy. Slashdot needs discussion to generate ad revenue, you know. Besides, political discussions provide the most insightful comments and the creationism-bashimg flamebaits provide the most amusing perversions of science and logic (on both sides).
I agree with your point, but I think using the terms "packs" and "herds" for human groupings usually have some negative connotations- i.e. "herd mentality" and the like.
True. However, those negative sides of herd-forming should be kept in mind, not be considered taboo subjects; for if you don't, you won't understand your own motivations - your reasons for making the choices you do - and will have serious difficulties controlling your behavior.
Human organization in a "natural state" (I hate that term, but I think it somewhat conveys what I'm trying to say here) would be a tribe. We weren't born civilization-builders... that only came a few thousand years ago in a few locations. Before that, it was all tribes, for the other 99.9% of human history. So we do have biological instincts towards tribal organization.
Yes, we were build civilization-builders. We share knowledge and pass it on to future generations; this naturally gives raise to civilization. And we still live in tribes, we just don't call them such. Republicans, Democrats etc. are nothing but large tribes. That was my whole point.
Why is anyone a "card-carrying" anything? Why don't they assess each issue and position as it arises regardless of which party is presenting it?
Two reasons.
First, human are pack animals and form and identify with herds instinctively. Some such packs are known as "Democrats", "Republicans", "USA", "Catholic Church", "Salvation Army", "Al Qaeda", "Nintendo fanboys", etc. The need to belong is no lesser in humans than in, say, dogs; we will do almost anything to get accepted into a pack.
Second, actually thinking through everything which comes up in politics is just plain impossible - new situations arise faster than you can analyze them, even if you spent all your time doing so, which isn't possible even for career politicians. There simply isn't enough time, so it makes sense to find like-minded individuals and team up with them; each only handles a subset of total situations, and the rest accept her judgement in that subset. This is what a politicial party does, amongst other thing.
If you have any stuff in your house that's outlasted its warranty, that's pretty much the same thing, except for the difference in price between when your toaster breaks, and when the satellite stops working.
If your toaster breaks and you don't have a new one in store, the worst that can happen is that you eat cold bread for breakfast. If your weather satellite breaks and you don't have another one at orbit, the worst that can happen is that a hurricane strikes without warning, demolishes a city and kills thousands.
"Could fail at any time" is an alarmist way of stating things, intended to drive people away from rational decision-making, and give emotions a greater pull.
When someone says that about a safety-critical system, you may have some reason for alarm.
You could die at any time. There could be an unknown aneurysm in your brain that just lets go from the stress of reading this. This looks more like some doom-sayer whose boss is trying to keep him from spreading FUD.
I am a healthy young man. I have no reason to believe there's anything wrong in my body. The satellite, on the other hand, is past its designate lifetime, so there's a reason to believe it may fail soon.
+1 for right (patient lives)
0 for no answer (she knows she doesn't know and maybe consults with a colleague),
-1e38 for wrong (patient dies)
be more appropriate weightings?
No. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes; a doctor who concentrates all his efforts into avoiding them will end up sending all his patients to see one expert or another. Not only does this overload the experts (who are supposed to see only a tiny subset of the patients, after all), but it also means it takes longer to get diagnosed. And in the long run, it means that only risk-takers will become doctors in the first place, shich is not good for anyone.
The worst case is if the experts will also start doing this: trying to offload the patient - and therefore the risk - to someone else as soon as possible. That will lead to the people with actual serious illnesses dying, since no one will actually diagnose them in their hurry to send them to someone else before they have a chance to die on them.
So no, your weightings are not appropriate. You can't assign virtually infinite negative weight to failure and expect anyone to try - at least anyone you want performing medicine.
Both systems need to use force to take from productive people and give to people who are not productive.
Also known as taxes. Something any government must collect, if it wishes to defend its people from other governments.
And I, for one, really like the concept of welfare - makes life a lot less stressing when I know that financial difficulties don't lead to starvation.
They also need to restrict what people can produce so that they do not compete with the inefficient state provided service.
Please explain why a state-provided - and therefore tax-funded - service would need to compete with anything ? Furthermore, please explain how a state-provided - and therefore tax-funded - service could possibly lose any competition when it can be provided for free ?
We also have democratically elected communist regimes in India in 2 states - both of those states (Kerala and WB) are economic basket cases which depend on other productive states for aid.
Is communism cause or effect there ? Because, historically, it have been bad conditions for people which have spawned communistic regimes; in fact it were the intolerable conditions for industrial workers during industrialization which spawned communism itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the right stimuli to the right part of your brain, it should be possible to make you see/hear/feel anything you normally could (since that's how your senses normally report the info to your brain, with nerves acting as the source of stimulation). Does this mean you should consider any sensory data you get to be of zero value ?
Actually, according to quantum physics, given conditions give a given result with a given propability.
The guys in Ghostbusters did have cell phones (or equivalents), as well as beam weapons, backpack nuclear reactors and even a giant combat robot (or equivalent).
Maybe that's because all those heroes died for their ideals, leaving us sheep to inherit the Earth ?-) Evolution in action.
It takes more than just defending yourself to be a hero. And you really don't have much moral high ground to complain about calling disagreeing people names, Mr. People-Are-Sheep.
What happens when the scum realize that they can also find your troops by tracking the signal ?-)
Better yet, get enough people together to pass laws that force your will.
C) Realize that you can't eat principles, and must therefore sacrifice either them or your children, to social services or starvation. And of course you'll die of starvation too.
It's stupid to die for money. And remember, prior to WTC strikes most hijackers were simply trying to get somewhere; fighting them and endangering everyone in the plane just to avoid a few hours inconvenience would be just plain stupid.
Besides, the living sheep can get the money back in court, while the dead hero can't. And wool is warm at winter.
They do, they've just outsourced that function to the government :). And, like most outsourcing projects, it doesn't work too well; but in rare occasions, like this, it does work.
Barcodes on uneven, randomly curving surfaces (such as skin) aren't machine-readable, at least not at first try, and in any case a barcode tattoo is easy to fake. It's less more efficient to have barcode on your driver's license (or other ID card) as well as identifying data, usually your picture.
An implantable RFID chip, on the other hand, can be made very difficult to fake, and could potentially be read from several meters away. Unlike the barcode, it can be used to monitor your every move in a completely automated way.
I, for one, don't want some creep stalking me 24 hours a day, and am glad about every law which makes it harder for the creep to do so.
If your job is finding threats, paranoia is a virtue. It doesn't mean that you should arrest people for having Canadian girlfriends, but it certainly means you should investigate quietly such suspicious characters.
Besides, if you happen to find any home videos showuing erotic uses for maple syrup, the Gnutella users are going to love you :).
This risks flames, perhaps literally, but considering Catholic Church's past and current activities - I'm referring to its anti-condom campaign which is killing millions in Africa, as well as the sadly famous pedophilic priest cover-ups, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch trials, the crusades, etc. - I'd say that Vatican is amongst the worst currently existing nations in this regard.
I can watch DVD's on Linux by writing "xine dvd://" or, if I have the DVD image ripped, by writing "xine dvd:///path/to/dvd/image.iso". Is that what you meant ?
You could simply capture only the portion of the screen which is "protected" from capture by the guest OS. That's where the interesting stuff is going to be.
Why would you need to do this in real time ? Just pipe the video stream to the encoding process using blocking IO. After all, the real-time clock the guest OS sees is just as virtual as every other device in the emulated environment.
Would it ? Remember that DOS is 16-bit code running in Real Mode. It is entirely possible - likely even - that 32-bit Protected Mode code (and possibly 64-bit code) will run far faster in today's processors, maybe even enough so to give Windows the speed advantage; or would if Win 3.x didn't run on top of DOS.
Of course you could simply run Linux without X.
Maybe, but the FSF, Apache guys, BSD guys and other free software providers respect them nonetheless, so I for one would rather do business with them than with the guys who won't.
Seems to me that I have the freedom to mess around with the code of these programs, then. The word fits perfectly, with all the connotations it has.
First of all, the freedom to tinker with your possessions is the natural state of affairs. It is the copyright lobby with their "do not reverse engineer or modify" EULAs, CD checks, invasive installation programs - which may attempt to disable legitimate software, such as Daemon Tools, in your computer - and sometimes outright malware distribution - I'm referring to Sony, of course - who have delusions of entitlement.
Second, since the GNU project - as well as numerous other free software providers - not only still exists but is in fact gaining popularity all the time, it seems to me that the ideologue works perfectly fine in reality, so please explain what makes them "unrealistic" ?
Third, please explain your statement concerning force - has Stallman sent hit squads to break peoples kneecaps if they don't release under the GPL ? Or is this another case of someone thinking they should be able to use GPL'd code without adhering to the licensing terms of the GPL ?
Fourth, if you truly think that freedom is the lowest common denominator... You are in for a very rude awakening ;(.
I was talking from the moral perspective, not legal one. Legally speaking, stepping on ants could be classified as murder if the proper laws are passed. Similarly, even the most blodthirsty tyrants in history are likely to have been within their legal rights while killing their opponents, real or imaginary.
Perhaps, but why should someone who already has a death sentence care ? For that matter, why should I care; I'm not acting in official capacity in the US or any other legal system, and am therefore free to not consider killing in self-defense someone who is trying to kill you - even an official of the state acting in official capacity - to not be murder.
Since even some D&D sourcebooks contain necrophilia (a pic of a skeleton groping the breasts of a scantily clad necromancer), and necro-pedo is quite common in 7chan's Guro board, I'd say that you'll have to do a lot worse than that to win.
And wouldn't you know it, my imagination went to work. Gaah.
Actually, you'll want the "Guro" board. But a word of warning: it's not pretty.
Or maybe they are just trying to manipulate the books or the stock price, trying to push the expected profits into the next fiscal year.
Killing innocent (to the danger you are in) people to spare your life is murder. Killing someone who is trying to poison you to death is not, if you did it in self-defense and not out of vengeance.
Why on Earth should you be expected to just lay down and die just because the guy killing you is doing it with the backing and approval of the government ?
They already are. Isohunt, for example, carries Manhunt. And an improved version for that, one that doesn't require CD to be kept in the drive during operation.
Better-than-retail quality and lower price - gotta love the Internet :).
It's just there in an attempt to make every libertarian reading this story goes into a screaming rage about evil government controls, and starts posting flamebaits like crazy. Slashdot needs discussion to generate ad revenue, you know. Besides, political discussions provide the most insightful comments and the creationism-bashimg flamebaits provide the most amusing perversions of science and logic (on both sides).
That said, it is a pretty sad attempt.
True. However, those negative sides of herd-forming should be kept in mind, not be considered taboo subjects; for if you don't, you won't understand your own motivations - your reasons for making the choices you do - and will have serious difficulties controlling your behavior.
Yes, we were build civilization-builders. We share knowledge and pass it on to future generations; this naturally gives raise to civilization. And we still live in tribes, we just don't call them such. Republicans, Democrats etc. are nothing but large tribes. That was my whole point.
Two reasons.
First, human are pack animals and form and identify with herds instinctively. Some such packs are known as "Democrats", "Republicans", "USA", "Catholic Church", "Salvation Army", "Al Qaeda", "Nintendo fanboys", etc. The need to belong is no lesser in humans than in, say, dogs; we will do almost anything to get accepted into a pack.
Second, actually thinking through everything which comes up in politics is just plain impossible - new situations arise faster than you can analyze them, even if you spent all your time doing so, which isn't possible even for career politicians. There simply isn't enough time, so it makes sense to find like-minded individuals and team up with them; each only handles a subset of total situations, and the rest accept her judgement in that subset. This is what a politicial party does, amongst other thing.
If your toaster breaks and you don't have a new one in store, the worst that can happen is that you eat cold bread for breakfast. If your weather satellite breaks and you don't have another one at orbit, the worst that can happen is that a hurricane strikes without warning, demolishes a city and kills thousands.
When someone says that about a safety-critical system, you may have some reason for alarm.
I am a healthy young man. I have no reason to believe there's anything wrong in my body. The satellite, on the other hand, is past its designate lifetime, so there's a reason to believe it may fail soon.
No. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes; a doctor who concentrates all his efforts into avoiding them will end up sending all his patients to see one expert or another. Not only does this overload the experts (who are supposed to see only a tiny subset of the patients, after all), but it also means it takes longer to get diagnosed. And in the long run, it means that only risk-takers will become doctors in the first place, shich is not good for anyone.
The worst case is if the experts will also start doing this: trying to offload the patient - and therefore the risk - to someone else as soon as possible. That will lead to the people with actual serious illnesses dying, since no one will actually diagnose them in their hurry to send them to someone else before they have a chance to die on them.
So no, your weightings are not appropriate. You can't assign virtually infinite negative weight to failure and expect anyone to try - at least anyone you want performing medicine.
Also known as taxes. Something any government must collect, if it wishes to defend its people from other governments.
And I, for one, really like the concept of welfare - makes life a lot less stressing when I know that financial difficulties don't lead to starvation.
Please explain why a state-provided - and therefore tax-funded - service would need to compete with anything ? Furthermore, please explain how a state-provided - and therefore tax-funded - service could possibly lose any competition when it can be provided for free ?
Is communism cause or effect there ? Because, historically, it have been bad conditions for people which have spawned communistic regimes; in fact it were the intolerable conditions for industrial workers during industrialization which spawned communism itself.